"The most effective tactic for female stalinist interrogators was to unzip a man's trousers slowly with a smile, like fellatio was about to be performed, and then all of the sudden she would throw him on the ground and have two burly chekists hold him down while she donned stilettos and proceeded to crush his testicles until he would tell her anything she wanted to know."
- Alexander Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago II
well, just another shitty work week. how 'bout we uplift ourselves with a semi-decent pint of amber and some talk on free will. i mean more free will of the earthly, political sort. i was reading the brothers karamazov and i came upon a passage that gave me a jolt, and then realizing its implications depressed the shit out of me. dostoyevsky's character ivan karamazov rails on about how if mankind ever achieved the humanistic concept of freedom set forth by "godless socialists" the masses would kill and betray each other so much that at last they would run babbling to any despot willing to feed them, subjugate them, save them from themselves. given knowledge of good and evil, man and woman forsake their decisions on those matters to a higher authority, one who claims to know "the spiritual bread" issues of existence - and to mete out punishment for trangressions on their opinions of those issues. humans have free will, and they choose to be obedient to religious and secular authority. even the christian church, god influencing the world through man, doesn't need god anymore. the fact that christ wanted man to accept him freely was a joke, that ultimately man would need a mortal structure to subjugate them in the name of spirituality.... anyway, i didn't say it, ivan did. he did, interestingly enough, predict the advent of stalinist socialism in russia by venturing that socialism would not itself succeed, for the above reasons, but a powerful autocracy under the sweet-smelling guise of social democracy, or communism. props to him for calling most of christianity what it was before it was hip - "the opiate of the masses." of course, for dostoyevsky, the greek orthodoxy was untouchable, of course he belonged to it and of course he thought it should take over the world, literally.
is that true, though? what a bummer. even if i wasn't the lackey of some government (no really, as an american it seems difficult to differentiate between the power structure and any sense of "national identity" - they always seem to be cultivated so closely together) i would still be begging for some old white man to squeeze my testicles between the heel of his jackboot and the ground. anarchy, the "leaderful, not leaderless" society comes along, and all of the sudden we're thrust back into kindergarten, this time with no cute young teacher with no last name to stop you from beating the shit out of someone because he should be done playing with the train and he won't give it to you (okay, maybe it's just me). we're not very good at sharing, and civilization, as ayn rand puts it (and i swear this is the only thing ayn rand ever said that i agree with. i once joked with tamara about how wonderful ayn rand was, and she got this look of disgust because she thought she was going to have to clean her shoe after she shoved it up my ass), is the progression of people learning how to isolate from one another. only she thought that was a good thing, i guess. so we're not good at sharing, in fact we're getting worse at it, and ultimate free will (i'm not even going to discuss philosophical arguments here, what a fucking waste of time that would be) would force us to share, force us to make bread and divide bread together, without anybody doleing it out to us. could we deal with that? where's that jackboot? well, i know laura bush can wear some pretty mean heels. and she's a librarian, right? kinky. well, until i can think of something more interesting to add, "stay tuned for part II of 'laura bush just can't crush enough balls!'"
