Over the weekend, I read pieces by two Substack writers who both highlighted something at the heart of an issue that many of us are faced with in modern society.
, who I mentioned in a recent article about self improvement, wrote about the increasingly false nature of reality as it is presented to us. Whether it’s our food supply, our entertainment, our information sources, or our institutions, every aspect of modernity is built on a foundation of lies and deception. Spiff's prescription for this is to starve the machine of attention and thus starve it of its ability to influence. We have to learn how to assert our agency in the world and give no quarter to those who would convince us otherwise.The other piece that I read was by
. The Librarian shares his struggles as a teacher dealing with the bureaucracy of public education and the ever-diminishing standards that students and teachers are being held to.Students are increasingly disinterested in learning. An overwhelming majority of them are now simply using AI tools to complete assignments. When caught using these tools, the students show no sign of contrition, shame, or even an understanding that this is not acceptable.
The students, the teachers, and the entire public education system simply ask:
"Can we just check this box and move on?"
This pervasive attitude is understandably a source of frustration and demoralization for The Librarian. He goes on to describe similar attitudes taking hold in virtually every other institution in our society. Appearances Over Everything seems to be the creed of the 21st century. Ability, knowledge, curiosity, dignity...these are archaic and laughable goals in a world that has placed all its chips on box-checking credentialism. A title or a grade is what matters, never mind if anything was done to earn it.
What Now?
Anyone who is paying attention feels the downward trajectory of our institutions and has noticed the gradual deterioration of standards across the board. We can all see how pervasive the rot has become in our institutions. While many of our fellow citizens are still blind to that rot or in denial of it, those who can see the degradation, see it everywhere.
This puts us in an interesting place.
How do you proceed when you understand that almost every element influencing the world around you is entirely fraudulent?
If the only thing you know for sure about society at large is that you're being lied to on all fronts, what move can you make with any confidence?
The timing of these two articles was fortunate, as they both complemented something else I have been reading recently that sheds some light on this issue.
Going in Circles
I have been re-reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, In the First Circle. Many of you will be familiar with Solzhenitsyn from his most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, In which he published an encyclopedic history of the soviet prison camp system under Stalin. The book exhaustively documents every aspect of the camps and the system that led to and sustained them.
These labor camps were legendarily brutal and inhuman. Prisoners were usually shipped off to remote, frozen outposts in Siberia to be worked to death in mines or other construction operations. Occasionally, a prisoner would have a skillset useful to the regime, and would be plucked from the general labor pool for more specialized work.
Solzhenitsyn was one such specialist who was reassigned from a remote labor camp to a research facility near Moscow. Though the men in these institutions were still prisoners, their quality of life was vastly improved over those in the camps. Solzhenitsyn's experiences in the research institute were the basis for his novel, In the First Circle.
The title is a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy, in which hell is depicted as having many levels, with each successive layer, or circle, entailing worse punishments. The First Circle is still hell, but not nearly the worst version of it.
“Do you know, Lev Grigorievich, this rush of impressions, this change of scenery is making my head spin. I’ve lived fifty-two years, recovered twice from fatal illnesses, been married twice to rather pretty women, fathered sons, been published in seven languages, received academic prizes, and never have I been so blissfully happy as today! What a place! To think that tomorrow I won’t be driven into icy water! I’ll get forty grams of butter! There’ll be black bread on the tables! Books aren’t forbidden! You can shave yourself! Guards don’t beat zeks! [prisoners] What a great day! What radiant heights! Maybe I’m dead? Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!”
“No, my dear sir, you are still in hell, only you’ve ascended to its highest and best circle—the first.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
The novel takes place in 1949 and follows the residents of the institution as they each grapple with their lives as prisoners of the soviet state, veterans of the second world war, and humans caught beneath the wheels of circumstance and history. Solzhenitsyn uses the character of Gleb Nerzhin, a prisoner and engineer, as a stand-in for himself.
Late at night, Nerzhin struggles to sleep. He notices that Ruska, the prisoner in the bunk beside him, is also awake. Ruska is a young and energetic man who has been handed a 25 year sentence. He is bitter and cynical about his lot in life and about the nature of humanity. Ruska shares his outlook with Nerzhin:
“Read enough history, and you’ll want to be a villain yourself. It pays better. If it hadn’t been for the great Hannibal, we would never have heard of Carthage, but the wretched place banished him, confiscated his property, and razed his dwelling to the ground! There’s nothing new under the sun. All that time ago, Gnaeus Naevius was put in the stocks for writing daring plays. The Aetolians, long before we thought of it, proclaimed a false amnesty to entice émigrés back home and put them to death. The Romans had already arrived at a truth that the Gulag keeps forgetting: It’s uneconomic to let a slave go hungry; you must feed him. The whole of history is one unmitigated fuck-up. It’s every man for himself and the devil takes the hindmost. There’s neither truth nor error, no progress, no future.”
The ghastly blue light made the disillusionment trembling on those young lips more painful to see. It was partly Nerzhin’s doing that Ruska had begun to think this way, but hearing it from Ruska now made him want to protest. Among his older friends Gleb’s role was destructive criticism, but he felt some responsibility toward this young prisoner.
“A word to the wise, Rostislav,” he replied very quietly, leaning over so that he was almost speaking into his neighbor’s ear. “However clever and un-gainsayable such philosophical systems as skepticism or agnosticism or pessimism may be, you must remember that they are in their very nature condemned to impotence. They cannot govern human activity, because people cannot stand still and so cannot do without systems that affirm something, that point to some destination.”
“Even if the goal is a quagmire? Anywhere, just as long as we press on?” Ruska retorted.
“Even if . . .” Gleb hesitated. “Hell, I don’t know. Look, I myself think that mankind has a great need of skepticism. We need it to crack open rock-hard heads, to choke fanatical throats. It is needed here more than anywhere, yet it establishes itself on Russian soil with more than usual difficulty. But skepticism cannot give a man a firm footing. And that is something he must have.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Nerzhin hits on an important point for any dissenting voice to keep in mind. However disillusioned or cynical we may become about the decline of society or the state of the world around us, we must not accept the ensuing cynicism and despair as an end-state. These reactions are natural, but if we remain mired in them for too long they turn to nihilism and depression.
Which Reality?
Instead of losing hope, we need to focus on turning inward and elevating ourselves and those around us as best we can. Spaceman Spiff approaches the problem by reclaiming his agency in the face of those external pressures that push us all toward destruction. Tuning out the messaging/programming and rejecting the poisonous foods and harmful lifestyles that are promoted by those who hate us. As the title of his article states: "Everything is a Psyop...but so what?". By pushing back and living well on our own terms, the sirens of destruction have increasingly less pull. The more people who join in ignoring the noise, the less powerful the machines become.
The Librarian of Celaeno also takes a positive approach to the falling standards he observes. He gives the example of a weekly enrichment activity that teachers at his school offer to the students. In keeping with the trend of declining standards, most teachers offer frivolous activities and waste this time. The Librarian, however, offers a weekly course in Biblical Greek. While most students don't attend, the ones that do are getting a lot out of it. This is the attitude we all need to adopt.
The last thing we read is the Parable of the Sower. The sower scattered seeds even knowing some would land on barren rocks, while others would get choked by weeds. That didn’t matter; the sower’s efforts were for those few shoots that would mature and bear fruit. Everything else was worth putting up for for the sake of that end
-Librarian of Celaeno
Looking around us at all of the chaos and evil that run rampant in our society, it can be hard not to become depressed and hopeless about the current and future state of the world. We need to remember that the power to create positive change for both ourselves and those around us is still squarely within our grasp.
If the world is truly intent on reducing itself to a garbage heap, there is little any of us can do to stop it. What we can do is assert agency over our own lives, and at least pull ourselves out of that garbage. After we’ve done that, we should look for others trying to escape and help them to their feet.
We can sit and look out at the garbage in despair, or we can find meaning and strength in pressing forward, salvaging what we can along the way.
Excellent stuff!
All around is in decline, and it is easy to despair. But as the Librarian suggests, you do it anyway in the hope of a few green shoots taking root. And we cannot know who those fresh green shoots will inspire in time.
Some will always be lost, however good the system they live in. Others, like Solzhenitsyn, are probably unloseable no matter how bad it gets. But I think if we soldier on and do our best we in time can inspire others.
During Covid I learned to brazenly walk around shops without a mask in the hope it might give others a little courage. I definitely saw one or two lower their masks when they saw me go unchallenged. That taught me that most people are not bad, and most are only mildly conformist. Give them one decent example and they can throw off the shackles.
There is much to hope for. Our world is amazing, and we ourselves exist. That is a good start. Plus it helps our enemies are clowns with unrealistic plans that we already see unravelling before us.