Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “You know what irks me…Not that they’re lying; lying can always be forgiven; lying is a fine thing, because it leads to the truth. No, what irks me is when they lie and then worship their own lies.”
• “There are all sorts of traffickers hanging onto this common cause who in their own interest have so distorted everything that they have decidedly befouled the whole cause.”
• “He’s an intelligent man, but it takes more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
  • What exactly does it require? Honesty? Compassion? Rightness?
• Mention of socialists, who believe that everyone is a “victim of the environment”, and that if only society is properly set up then all crimes and protest will cease to exist.
  • General disregard for history and a belief that some social system will at once organize the whole of mankind, making it righteous and sinless
  • Reductionist ideology that posits an easy solution to a complex problem, so that there’s no reason to think.
  • Dostoevsky is a disillusioned socialist, this is likely his way of taking a dig at his younger self.
• Like a moth to a flame.
  • Modern addictions like processed foods, social media
  • Hatred and anger (honey-tipped arrow with a poison root)
• Raskolnikov, upon recounting the thesis of his paper on crime, states that people can be divided into two classes. An ordinary material class, in which people play their roles, submit to authority, and preserve tradition. And the extraordinary, who transgress law to progress towards greater pastures, and are thus “criminals” in a way, disturbing the existing system. The first preserves the world and increases it via reproduction, the second leads the world towards a goal.
• Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad conscience and a deep heart
• “The cleverer the man, the less he suspects that he can be thrown off with the simplest thing.”
• “Reason is the slave of passion”
  • System 1 (passion) serves system 2 (reason) [Daniel Kahneman] or the elephant (passion) and the rider (reason) [Jon Haidt]
• In reference to progressivists, nihilists, and exposers, Pyotr Petrovich (the insecure pompous asshole) had “like many others…exaggerated and distorted the meaning and significance of these names to the point of absurdity”
  • This is precisely what happens these days, when people reference with disdain and fear the alt-right or the woke-left
• “She was naturally of an easily amused, cheerful, and peaceable character, but continual misfortunes and failures had made her wish and demand so fiercely that everyone live in peace and joy, and not dare to live otherwise, that the slightest dissonance in life, the [smallest] failure, would at once set her almost into a frenzy, and in the space of an instant, after the brightest hopes and fantasies, she would begin cursing her fate, ranting and raving, throwing things around, and beating her head against the wall.”
  • Showcase of the rotting nature of resentment, how it eats away at people and provokes vicious defensive tactics to protect the rotten foundation that remains. Also showcases the consequence of an untrained mind. A spark causes the mind to come ablaze like it’s a pool of gasoline.
• “There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor (frankness, honesty), and nothing easier than flattery. If there is only the hundredth part a false note in candor, there is immediately a dissonance…but with flattery, even if everything is false down to the last little note, it is still agreeable and is listened to [with] pleasure; crude though the pleasure may be, it is still a pleasure.”
• “The people are drinking, the educated youth are burning themselves up in idleness, in unrealizable dreams and fancies, crippling themselves with theories.”
  • When we don’t use our hands and interact with the common, we lose sight of the physical and get lost in the metaphysical—the realm of ideas and theories.
• “They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”