Discussing "We" By Yevgeny Zamyatin

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "We," which was written by Yevgeny Zamyatin and first published in 1924. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Zamyatin's Education, Bolshevik Activity, Participation In The Revolution, Writing, Publication Of "We," And Censorship
• 10:19 The World Of "We"
• 14:21 Frederick Winslow Taylor As Prophet And Philosopher
• 16:45 Children And Spouses In "We" And A Connection To Vico
• 18:50 The Individual Internalizing The Messages Of His Environment
• 23:37 Removing Envy And Originality To Increase Happiness
• 26:58 D-503 Gets A Soul
• 30:14 Dreams And Imagination As Illness, "The Insanity Of Thinking," And "Gnawing Worm-Like Torturing Question Marks"
• 32:01 D-503's Tone In His Writing
• 35:47 A Man Whose Being Is Shaped By A Sick Environment
• 36:55 How People Would Submit To The Rhetoric Of The "United State"
• 45:15 Moral Inversions
• 46:39 AI-Generated Music

Transcript

Amid the Red Terror and the founding of the Soviet Union, 25 years before George Orwell published 1984, and eight years before Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, the man who would later be considered the first Soviet dissident wrote and published a novel that, despite immediately becoming the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, is the origin of many of our ideas about dystopia, and today we're going to get into it. Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884 in the town of Libidyon in the Russian Empire. Though his father was an Orthodox priest, Zamyatin would abandon Christianity and become a Bolshevik relatively early in this revolutionary process. He would have been about 16 in 1900, so he was just the right age to spend his teen years and his 20s getting arrested and exiled for revolutionary activity. He studied naval engineering from 1902 to 1908 and at some point during that period joined the Bolsheviks and amid the 1905 revolution, he apparently had some explosive material in his house that he and other party members were going to use for something, and they were raided and arrested and the explosives weren't found, which lines up with some of what Solzhenitsyn says about the Tsarist police being a little bit loose. And while Zamyatin was in prison, he was, of course, very concerned that they were gonna find this material because that would have been a much more serious crime. But he was released in 1906 and sent into what they call exile, except that he was still in the Russian Empire. He was sent to the Tambov Governorate and along the way he started writing fiction as a hobby and by 1913 he was granted amnesty, ironically, as part of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the rule of the Romanov family in Russia. As part of those celebrations, they apparently thought it was a good idea to grant amnesty to Bolshevik bomb makers, among other things, and we know now how such lenient policies ended for the Romanovs. Maybe he wouldn't have been granted amnesty if that explosive material had been discovered, but in general what I've read about this period seems to reflect that the Tsarist policy toward the Bolsheviks was gentle in comparison with the Bolshevik policies of repression once they got in power. And also in 1913, Zamyatin published a book called A Provincial Tale, which was a satire about small-town life in Russia and that gained him a little bit of notoriety. So he was writing and publishing during this time also. Then in 1916, he was sent to the UK to supervise the production of icebreakers, of these big ships that can cut through the ice. And so that's where he was when the second revolution kicked off, the one that fully succeeded in its aims, where the 1905 Revolution accomplished certain things for its advocates, but not everything. And though it's of course to Zamyatin's credit that he was a very early critic of the new Soviet system, it's worth keeping his exact position oriented as much as we can. And in the foreword to the translation of We that I read, Zamyatin is quoted as saying, quote, I regret immensely that I did not witness the Russian Revolution in February and know only the October Revolution, because it was in October, a life preserver around my body and all the lights out, passing German submarines, that I returned to Petrograd. Because of this, I felt like one who never having been in love gets up one morning and finds himself married about ten years, end quote. And there he's of course talking about the two major events of 1917. In February you have the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, and in October you have the Petrograd Uprising, in which the Soviets occupied a bunch of government buildings. And this is generally taken to be the event that started the civil war that would envelop the country for the next six years. And Zamyatin is there saying that he was not in Russia in February, but he was there in October, and the major events happened later in the month. So presumably he somehow got back into Russia from England, where he was at the time, earlier in the month. But he describes it in terms of a romance, that he had never been in love, and then he was suddenly married for ten years. He missed the events of February, but he participated in, or was somewhere in or around, Petrograd for the events of October. And this is the foreword of the English translation that was published in 1924, but I don't know from exactly where the person who wrote the foreword got that quote. The translator wrote the foreword and he quotes Zamyatin, but the quote might be from a year earlier or two years earlier. It would have to be after 1924.1917 of course, but it could have presumably I think been said at any time between 1917 and 1924 so we don't know that that's exactly what he was thinking in 1924 but rather in 1924 at the latest and he was apparently writing we in 1920 and 1921 and in 1921 it became the first work that the Soviet censorship board banned So they viewed it as a criticism of the new system and presumably Zamyatin was writing it as such so even by then his views had probably cooled significantly figuring out a very precise Ideological timeline for Zamyatin would require a closer look at his writing and correspondence during that period But those are some general points we can take from it. But so in 1921, it's banned in 1923 Zamyatin smuggles the manuscript out of the newly formed Soviet Union to the publisher EP Dutton and Company in New York where it is translated into English and first published in 1924 So it was written in Russian, but first published in English not in Russian then in 1927 Zamyatin again smuggles the original Russian text to a Anti-communist and Russian emigre magazine and publishing house in Prague which at that time was the capital of Czechoslovakia a country that was established after World War one and there an edition was printed But there's no language called Czechoslovakian There's a Czech language and a Slovak language and I don't know which of the two or into some other language It was translated but it was translated into some language and then copies of that edition were then smuggled back Into the country where apparently some people who were able to read that language read it and passed it from hand to hand so on the one hand even in 1924 the translation into English by a publishing house in New York would have granted the novel a certain International reach it seems that it was this second edition and the fact that the copies then were Making their way back into the Soviet Union that really provoked a kind of coordinated state response Against Zamyatin the book, of course had already been banned But it seems that the state press turning its guns on him in a big way Happened after the publication of this second edition among other things apparently Trotsky called Zamyatin an internal emigre and an emigre is an an emigrant somebody who leaves and In this context maybe then turns around and criticizes the country that they left Maybe these are Russians who left the Soviet Union lived in Western Europe and they opened up publishing houses like the one in Prague to criticize the new system But an internal emigre is somebody who does something kind of like that from within the system I wasn't able to find the exact quote where Trotsky says that so I don't know the exact context But I think that that's a pretty safe understanding of what that meant So that's something to Zamyatin's credit is that Trotsky didn't like him But so the situation inside the Soviet Union became so difficult for Zamyatin that he Decided he needed to leave and he initially appealed to Stalin directly and then he asked Maxim Gorky the major Russian novelist from that period who apparently had some influence with Stalin to Intercede on his behalf and it wasn't exactly clear from what I read whether Gorky did that or not But either way in 1931 Zamyatin was able to leave the Soviet Union and he moved to Paris where he died in poverty six years later in 1937 at the age of 53 and we was not published in the original Russian until 1952 15 years after his death. The Russian text was also published in New York So it still wasn't published in the Soviet Union and there was some story about a Russian edition having been published in 1927 but it was translated back into Russian from either English or Czech or the language of that other edition, so I'm not as confident about that but there was a Russian edition published in 1952 and it wasn't published in the Soviet Union until 1988 by which time things were winding down anyway, but after Zamyatin died in 1937 his writings continued to circulate in the form of samizdat this Underground self-publishing within the Soviet Union and to be passed around So it's probably safe to imagine that we would have had some influence on later generations of Soviet dissidents in that capacity and reading Solzhenitsyn and now Yevgeny Zamyatin and I also picked up some stories by Varlam Sholomov though haven't read him yet Hopefully we'll get to him soon. You have in these three men esteemed Russian writers and critics of the Soviet system who initially Supported it and they supported it to varying degrees and at different times and Zamyatin didn't spend any time in the gulag So he definitely got off the easiest but their support for thethe system did not protect them from it. Once the machine got running, they got swept up in it like everybody else did. So there's a cautionary message to learn from that as well. And I'll pause here briefly for a quick reminder that if this kind of long form discussion of important books is your style, go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. In the foreword to We, Zamyatin calls the novel, quote, the funniest and most earnest thing I have written, end quote. And there are certainly some things in this book that are funny, but there are other things in it that maybe would have been funny at the time, but a hundred years later, they're not so much funny anymore as they are plausible. And the novel is set about a thousand years in the future and a United State governs the whole world. There's one government ruling the whole planet, or at least that's what the narrator thinks is going on. It wouldn't be a spoiler to say that in the text, there's no reason to think that that's not actually the case. The narrator talks about a United State, but the narrator is not at all in a position to have complete information about what's going on in the world. And so it might be that he's misinformed, but that's generally the setting of the book is that there's one government ruling the whole world. And under this United State, everyone lives in glass boxes. They're apartments that are all made out of glass. So everyone can see into them. And more importantly, the state can see into them. At one point, the narrator writes, quote, we live surrounded by transparent walls, which seem to be knitted of sparkling air. We live beneath the eye of everyone, always bathed in light. We have nothing to conceal from one another. Besides, this mode of living makes the difficult and exalted task of the guardians much easier. Without it, many bad things might happen. It is possible that the strange opaque dwellings of the ancients were responsible for their pitiful, cellish psychology. My home is a fortress. How did they manage to think of such things? End quote. I was just going to use that quote to describe the setting that they're in, but there's already a few interesting and characteristic things going on there. One is that right from the beginning of 1984, Winston Smith is a critic of the system that he's living under. He knows that it's bad. This narrator, at least at the beginning of the story, loves the system that he lives under and sings its praises at every opportunity that he gets. And maybe that's in part because he's a relatively high status guy. They're building this thing called the integral, which is a kind of a spaceship, and he is the master builder. He's the guy at the head of the project. He's a mathematician, engineer, designer. But so in that quote, he's already giving the explanation of the system. He has totally internalized how it explains itself, and now he's conveying it to us. This mode of living makes the difficult and exalted task of the guardians, those are the police, basically, much easier. Without it, many bad things would happen. And he also talks about the ancients, which are basically us, the people from the past, and their strange way of living. They would say, my home is my fortress. And he also touches on how the mode of living affects the psychology. The strange, opaque dwellings of the ancients were responsible for their pitiful, cellish psychology. Cellish being like a cell. People thought that way because they lived a certain way, he says, and that's certainly true. The question is, is it a good way to live and think? But continuing with how people live and we, everyone wakes up at the same time, they go through the same motions. At one point, the narrator says, to the right and to the left, as in mirrors, to the right and to the left through the glass walls, I see others like myself, other rooms like my own, other clothes like my own, movements like mine duplicated thousands of times. This invigorates me. I see myself as a part of an enormous, vigorous, united body. And what precise beauty, not a single superfluous gesture or bow, end quote. And everybody wears the same uniform. They have a personal hour where they can walk around the street or sit in their rooms. But other than that, all of their time is regimented. It says at one point, quote, 50 is the number of chewing movements required by the law of the state for every piece of food, end quote. So the number of times you're supposed to chew a piece of food is legislated. There are no storms anymore because they've tamed the skies. They walk in columns of four when they're going somewhere. People don't have names anymore. They just have numbers. And at one point talking about the ancients, about us, he says, quote, how could they write whole libraries about some Kant and take notice only slightly of Taylor, of this prophet who saw 10 centuries ahead, end quote. So in terms of significance, he's putting somebody named Taylor above Kant or above other philosophers. He calls him a prophet who sees 10 centuries ahead. So who is this Taylor? He's talking about Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was an American mechanical engineer who published a book in 1909 called The Principles of Scientific Management that laid out a theory and methods of improving industrial efficiency. So on some level, this world that Zamyatin describes is, he might argue, the logical outcome of the proliferation and permeation of these ideas of industrial efficiency to every aspect of life. The whole society has been mechanized. It's been made very efficient. So here we have very early in dystopian writing, this connection of the dystopia with technology, with industrialization. And we might agree with that or not, but Zamyatin views this terrible future as being, in part, a result of an effort to impose perfect order on the society. Now, you might argue that somewhere along the way, somebody who wanted political control noticed that this was a very convincing way of framing their control, that it was never really about efficiency. It was always about some group taking over, and this was just a veneer for that. That might be the case also. But this is one of the pillars of the propaganda of the United States, which we can see in detail because the narrator is continuously articulating it. It's the argument for efficiency. And the translation I read used the phrase, United State, singular. For the government in the book, apparently a different translation uses one state as one word. I don't know what the Russian was, so I don't know which would be better. United States in English has the obvious drawback of sounding kind of like the United States, but I don't think that this book was criticizing the United States. It would, of course, been fine if it was, but I think this was just a coincidence of translation. But the ruler is called the well-doer. Another translation calls him the benefactor. And the guardians, as I mentioned, are the security force. The children are all raised collectively, and nothing is thought of as mine. At one point, the narrator says, what a strange concept, mine, including spouses and children. And that's something that's similar in Brave New World is everyone belongs to everyone else. That's one of the slogans of the state there. And the children are raised collectively there as well. And I'm now landing on this concept again for the first time after reading Vico, who, as we saw in looking at the new science, viewed marriage as a significant step toward civilization and out of a kind of primordial darkness of prehistory, that the mechanism of having a concept of exclusivity with a spouse leads to that similar exclusivity of ownership or stewardship, whatever it might be over children, and that these relationships are the basis of civilization or are part of its foundation. And it's often a trope in these kind of futuristic dystopias that the children are raised collectively. And maybe that's in part because of this very early, perhaps the first dystopian novel, having that as part of the society, that in we, the children are raised collectively. But now I'm wondering, could that actually function? We imagine that as being more futuristic or something or more efficient in some Taylor sense, or Zamyatin imagines that it might be. But considering how Vico viewed those relationships, could a state have so much power that it could hold some semblance of order together, however dystopian that order might be, without those relationships? That now looks to me like a bigger task after reading Vico than it did before. I'd be curious how Zamyatin might have imagined or explained that particular dynamic, since he clearly thought about a lot of this stuff in a lot more detail than perhaps anyone else did. He likely would have had something to say about that as well. And the place where the children are raised is called the child educational refinery. So even the raising of children is viewed from an industrial perspective. And another very interesting psychological aspect of this novel is how Zamyatin shows how the narrator has internalized the message of the environment. I don't want to say culture, but somebody might that he's living in, which is a highly mechanized culture, to the extent that even his view of himself and his inner world and the metaphor and the imagery that he uses to describe what he's feeling are mechanical metaphors. At one point he says, quote, I'm like a motor set in motion at a speed of too many revolutions per second. The bearings have become too hot. And in one more minute, the molten metal will begin to drip and everything will go to the devil. Cold water, quick, some logic. I pour pailfuls of it, but my logic merely sizzles on the hot metal and disappears in the air in the form of vapor. End quote. So he's describing how he's getting carried away by something. And the image that he uses is that of a motor that's spinning too hot. And even when he pours the water of logic on it, it just evaporates. And if you saw a metaphor like that, if you saw that exact passage in a book published in 2025, it might not be that out of place. And it's possible that in.1924 it wouldn't have been terribly out of place either but the fact that there are other examples like this Makes me think that this is one of the things that he maybe thought would have been a little bit funny Look at this guy describing himself like a machine. I'd be curious about how Contemporary readers would have interpreted that passage how they would have reacted to it Because if they would have laughed at it or thought it was strange That's much worse because it actually doesn't look that strange to us. We maybe have already started going down this path of Internalizing these ideas about machinery How often do you hear people talk about the software in their mind or not having enough? Bandwidth to keep track of things in the metaphorical sense not in the literal sense we view ourselves to a certain extent if we don't actively oppose it through the lens of the Dominant elements in the culture that we live in and with a book like we you can see Somebody doing that in the context of a radically different environment And so it's easier to see it's less like the fish trying to see the water But what's interesting about that is the degree to which we do it ourselves today He says at one point quote the phonograph within me performed the prescribed 50 chewing movements for every bite and quote That's an example that I think definitely would have been funny Phonograph is a piece of technology that many people don't even know what it is anymore It's one of those record players that has the big bell on it from the early 20th century that Amplifies the sound and he says the phonograph within me He describes something going on in his mind as a phonograph and making this point a little more Directly and remember in this next one that a number in this book is like a person He says there were many numbers over there and what he means is there are many people over there But he says quote in each number of the United State There is an unseen metronome which tick-tock silently without looking at the clock We know exactly the time of day within five minutes But now my metronome had stopped and I did not know how much time had passed end quote So again, there's several interesting things going on there The first is that again? He's using technological or mechanical metaphors to describe a sense of what's going on inside of him or inside of people Generally, he uses in this case the example of a metronome which musicians use a lot I think most people know what a metronome is It's this little triangular thing that ticks very regularly and makes a very regular ticking sound and it can go at different speeds But he uses this device to describe how the people in this world have an internalized sense of time That's very precise and you can imagine that people in an environment like that would develop that over time Habitually, you wouldn't have to use a mechanical metaphor to describe it But people would I think it's reasonable to expect that many people would develop that inner sense of time passing if everything were very highly regulated like that and the other point that's worth emphasizing here is that this is another example of the environment Penetrating deeply into the people in it and some yet in having a sense of how these systems will affect The people that are under them and the world in this story is very distant from nature It seems to be a pretty built up urban environment and there's a green wall that surrounds the outside of the city where they live That's part of why I was a little curious whether the United State had really taken over the whole world Because then why is there this wall what's outside of the wall? And my impression when I was reading the relevant passage is that the green wall is basically a very thick Kind of glass they can see through it and animals come up to the edge of it and there's trees there But you can't move through it. That's how I remember that part And at one point he's talking about how the state has removed the need for envy which divides Happiness that you have happiness as the numerator and envy is the denominator that however much envy there is That's how much happiness is divided So therefore if you can reduce Envy to zero then you're dividing happiness by zero and then the happiness becomes infinite and this is one of these weird Passages that are an example of how a kind of pseudo mathematical logic combined with political speech or sloganing and a lack of Examination can get you very quickly to what otherwise would just be called madness He uses this mathematical explanation that I guess makes sense as an equation If you divide something by zero then something strange happens It becomes infinite it becomes very large because it's completely undivided and it sort of makes sense to say that envy divides happiness I mean you could just as easily say that envy subtracts from happiness or something So that's already getting a little bit shaky but you could kind of smuggle in these weird political ideas under the guise of this kind of Very certain reasoning and then you get to something totally bonkers and there's a passage of dialogue That's kind of hard to quote. So I'll read it, but I'll have to explain it a little bit He says quote yes noses this time I almost shouted since there is still a reason no matter what for envy since my nose is button-like andSomeone else's is, end quote, and it cuts off in the middle. But he's talking to somebody about how they have not quite perfected the removal of envy because some people still have nicer noses than others. They haven't made everybody's face totally the same. And so there is still a reason for envy and so they have not yet perfected their happiness. And that's another creepy thing about this environment is that they're optimizing for happiness and they're talking about the importance of happiness all the time. And it's this weird, dismal place. But that passage reminded me of a short story called Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1961, so much later. But it's kind of an elaboration of this particular dynamic and it's not very long and it's certainly worth reading and interesting. So if you like this kind of thing, you can check that one out as well. Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut. And along similar lines, at one point somebody says, quote, to be original means to stand out among others. Consequently, to be original means to violate the law of equality. What was called in the language of the ancients to be common is with us only the fulfilling of one's duty. End quote. So to be original is standing out among others and that's illegal. You're not allowed to stand out because it violates the law of equality. And what we would today call being ordinary or being common is for this future state, the fulfillment of duty. It's your duty to be unoriginal. It's no longer that everyone is equal before the law or everybody has the same rights or something like that. It's now that it has become illegal to be other than equal in your traits and in your capabilities to other people. Being exceptional is forbidden. And that one's interesting to me because it's easy to imagine how over the course of a thousand years, a concept that we have today or that some people hold their interpretation of equal before the law or however you want to articulate it could gradually morph and mutate in that way over the course of a thousand years, especially if you had political actors seeking to manipulate it for their own benefit. And the story is in part about this guy whose name or number is D-503. And at some point we learned that he's 32 years old, is gradually becoming aware of himself as an individual. And at some point he goes to a doctor because he's acting a little weird and the doctor gives him some bad news. And this next passage is a little longer but there are a few things in it that are interesting. Here it starts with the doctor talking. Yes, it is too bad. Apparently a soul has formed in you. A soul? That strange ancient word that was forgotten long ago. Is it very dangerous? I stuttered. Incurable was the cut of the scissors. But more specifically, what is it? Somehow I cannot imagine. You see, how shall I put it? Are you a mathematician? Yes. Then you see, imagine a plane. Let us say this mirror. You and I are on its surface. You see, there we are, squinting our eyes to protect ourselves from the sunlight. Or here is the bluish electric spark in that tube. There, the shadow of that arrow that just passed. All this on the surface is momentary only. Now imagine this very same surface softened by a flame so that nothing can any longer glide over it. So everything instead will penetrate into that mirror world which excites such curiosity in children. I assure you, children are not so foolish as we think they are. The surface becomes a volume, a body, a world. And inside the mirror, within you, there is the sunshine and the whirlwind caused by the arrow propeller and your trembling lips and someone else's lips also. You see, the cold mirror reflects, throws out, while this one absorbs. It keeps forever a trace of everything that touches it. Once you saw an imperceptible wrinkle on someone's face, and this wrinkle is forever preserved within you, you may happen to hear in the silence a drop of water falling and you will hear it forever. Yes, yes, that is it. I grasped his hand. I could hear drops of water dripping in the silence from the faucet of a wash stand and at once I knew it was forever. But tell me please, why suddenly, suddenly a soul? There was none, yet suddenly, why is it that no one has it, yet I, I pressed the thin hand, I was afraid to loosen the safety belt. Why? Well, why don't we grow feathers or wings but only shoulder blades, bases for wings? We have arrows, wings would only be in the way. Wings are needed in order to fly but we don't need to fly anywhere. We have arrived at the terminus. We have found what we wanted. Is that not so? End quote. So the diagnosis that the doctor gives him is that he has a soul growing in him and he talks about it like he has cancer. It's too bad, you've got a soul. And he explains it as this thing that instead of reflecting what touches it the way that a mirror does, it absorbs traces of everything that it experiences. And that I guess is Zamyatin's idea of a soul and that's not a terrible one. But the narrator, D503, asks the doctor, why me? Why is this soul growing in me? And he gives an explanation there at the end that's a little bit hard to understand but it sounds like what he's saying is that the soul is kind of like wings that you would get.use the soul or wings to fly somewhere, to go somewhere, but we don't need to go anywhere anymore because we've arrived at the point. Everything is perfected or it's on its way to being perfected. So we don't have wings and we don't need souls. And throughout the book, dreams are also described as a symptom of disease, of sickness. And at one point, Zamyatin says, quote, they're mirror-like foreheads, not clouded by the insanity of thinking, end quote. So thinking is described as an insanity and the ideal is described as a situation in which nothing happens. Or in another spot, it's said as nothing is unexpected. So everything is predictable. Everything is again, regulated. And at one point, the narrator says, quote, foolish people, don't you realize that they want to liberate you from these gnawing worm-like torturing question marks, end quote. And later along similar lines, quote, moreover, the unknown is naturally the enemy of man. And Homo sapiens only then becomes man in the complete sense of the word when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas, and periods, end quote. So questions and uncertainty are what this environment is trying to erase. Imagination is also at one point described like a kind of illness. At one point, the narrator is talking about another character and he says, quote, he took offense if one even hinted that he might possess imagination. Well, a week ago, I too should have taken offense at such a hint. Not so now, for I know that I have imagination. That is what my illness consists in. And more than that, I know that it is a wonderful illness. One does not want to be cured, simply does not want to, end quote. And that's not much of a spoiler, but part of the book is the narrator oscillating in this way. There will be a passage like that, but then he later flees back to the state ideology and says, no, I'm sick. I need to be cured. He says, quote, I still insist that I have before is the real one. My eye of late is certainly only an illness, end quote. And the narrator is writing this document. It's a journal to bring on the integral, on the spaceship to show to the beings that they're going to encounter on other planets. So like Winston Smith in 1984, the narrator is basically writing for the first time or writing privately for the first time he's not used to it. And he has to explain things in the world that they're living in. And there's one thing about the text that I thought maybe was a little bit of a contradiction, which is the tone of the journal actually feels very emotional. It's often breaking off. It's often swinging up and down. He's feeling very good. He's feeling very bad. Whereas this is supposedly a very unemotional environment, though, up to now, we haven't said very much about emotion. We've talked about imagination. We've talked about soul. We've talked about dreams, but emotion is something different. So maybe Zamyatin would say, no, the people in this environment are very emotional and that's part of how they're kept under control. Actually, that's cultivated so that there'll be very excited about the hymn to the United States and very odd by the execution ceremonies. And despite all this guy's talk about logic, he maybe has a kind of childish inner world because he hasn't done all of this self-reflection. The journal seems a little bit childish in its tone, even though this guy is 32. But if somebody were keeping a notebook of their own thoughts for the first time ever and had been mostly cut off from their own inner world, maybe this is exactly what that notebook would look like. Even if they purport to be super logical and hold logic in very high esteem, as the political ideology of the system purports to do. And maybe illuminating that question a little bit and explaining the title of the book, the narrator says relatively early on, quote, my pen, which is accustomed to figures, is unable to express the march and rhythm of consonants. Therefore, I shall try to record only the things I see, the things I think, or to be more exact, the things we think. Yes, we. That is exactly what I mean. And we shall therefore be the title of my records, end quote. So he's saying that all of the people in this environment would think like him. And that might be true to a certain extent, if for so long, so much effort has been put into trying to erase individuality and make them into machines, essentially. If I remember correctly, Winston Smith, keeping his private journal or starting to write things down at his house is a very serious crime. And so he has to do it secretly. Whereas in we, it seems that people generally have access to pen and paper. And if in their free hour, they want to write something praising the United States, they can do that. There are means of surveillance. And so if they write certain things, they'll certainly be in trouble, but private writing itself isn't forbidden. And as I was reading this book, I would sometimes set it aside and feel a strong sense of gratitude for the time that we live in because it'sIt's not quote-unquote optimized in this nightmarish way, and instead it includes human imperfection and freedom and life and nature. Not that there aren't problems in the time that we're living in now, and that we aren't possibly inching towards something like what Zamyatin describes in this novel. But even though the tone of the novel is not exactly oppressive, the guy is often in a pretty good mood, there's something a little bit suffocating about it, and it's a really great short novel that's definitely worth reading, but part of the benefit that you feel from it, and maybe this is to its credit, is how good you feel when you set it down and just look out the window and say to yourself, thank goodness I don't live in an environment like that, where poetry is only a commodity for the state, for example. And this book stands perfectly well on its own, but I can't help continuing to compare it to 1984. Another thing is that Winston Smith is somebody who is under siege and captured later. He's not totally captured by the system at the beginning of 1984, but by the end he is. Whereas this character that we're reading about has been captured since birth. He was born into this system, and he basically never even looked at what might possibly be outside of it until some of the events that we see in the novel. And there's something eerie about reading this kind of an account, because we see a man whose entire thinking, his being, is shaped by his surroundings and his environment, and the environment is sick. The environment is not good. It is unwell. And his constitution is formed by it, and he doesn't know it. And so we have to wonder, to what extent are we in the same position? It resembles the problem of not being able to tell if you're dreaming or not being able to tell if you're in a simulation. If you're dreaming or if you're in a simulation, it doesn't seem that that's the case. And if you've been shaped entirely or in part by a sick system, it would be very hard to tell that that was the case also. Another sort of spooky aspect of the book is how the rhetoric of the system could be convincing to somebody who's not really paying attention. That you could imagine how somebody could hear these slogans, and if there was a system that was encouraging you to repeat them, and it was very severely discouraging you from opposing them, most people would just go along with it. In fact, probably pretty much everybody, because there was a sort of supposed reasoning that was enough for people to repeat to each other and repeat to themselves if they ever were in doubt about the system. And seeing people today very zealous about certain ideological points convinces me at least that there is a section of the population that is hungry to repeat the slogans of authority along those lines. The narrator says at one point, quote, thorns. This is a classical image. The guardians are the thorns about a rose. Thorns that guard our tender state flower from coarse hands, end quote. Or in this next passage, he goes down to the dock where they're building the integral. And I'm just now noticing that Zamyatin had this experience in shipbuilding, and the main character of this story is building a spaceship. So he would have had experience in this kind of environment, not building spaceships, of course, but going down to a place where people are building a big vessel and keeping track of things. That's the job that he did for a while. And I just now noticed that. But that's not the point. We're going to see here another example of the kind of rhetoric. Or in this case, it's more of an example of how the principles that the propaganda promotes causes him to find a new example of it. So this is another level of internalization. You learn the things that the system teaches you. And if you're a thoughtful person, you can even find ways to expand on it that the system didn't teach you. He says, quote, this morning I was on the dock where the integral is being built. And I saw the lathes blindly with abandon. The balls of the regulators were rotating. The cranks were swinging from side to side with a glimmer. The working beam proudly swung its shoulder and the mechanical chisels were dancing to the melody of an unheard tarantella. I suddenly perceived all the music, all the beauty of this colossal, of this mechanical ballet illumined by light blue rays of sunshine. Then the thought came, why beautiful? Why is a dance beautiful? The answer, because it is an unfree movement, because the deep meaning of the dance is contained in its absolute ecstatic submission in the ideal non-freedom. If it is true that our ancestors would abandon themselves in dancing at the most inspired moments of their lives, religious mysteries, military parades, then it means only one thing. The instinct of non-freedom has been characteristic of human nature from ancient times. When we in our life of today, we are only consciously, I was interrupted. The switchboard clicked." And that's something that comes up throughout the book is the centrality of freedom as a bad thing. And there you have an example of a very plausible explanation of why that's a good thing to hold in your head. And it might indeed be the case that a lot of art is the result ofvery close control of a certain kind of movement. A painter has very good control of his paintbrush and knows exactly how to use it in a very precise way. And a musician and a ballerina are similar. The flawed inference comes when you say that if something is good in one context, it is good in all contexts, for example. But this is the problem with metaphors, is that people will often use a metaphor and say, since this applies here, it must apply over there. But when somebody does that and you're not sure about it, or even if you feel like you are sure about it, you want to remember examples of metaphors like this, D503 would use that logic to tell you that because we like certain kinds of art, we should like a highly controlled society where the state even determines how many times you chew your food. And the reason that's invalid, moving from one to the other, is because something can be good in a certain quantity and terrible in another quantity. In the winter, you need some kind of fire in your house to cook your food and to keep you warm. If you don't have enough fire in your house, you'll die either by the cold or by starvation. But if you have too much fire in your house, that will kill you also. You need a very precise amount of fire in your house. So if one unit of something gets you one unit of goodness, it does not follow that 100 units of something gets you 100 units of goodness. That's one of the central logical flaws of this whole ideology that's articulated in this book. But to show some other examples of how the guy defends it, he says at another time, quote, I'm sure that the primitive man would look at a coat and think, what is this for? It is only a burden, an unnecessary burden. I'm sure that you will feel the same if I tell you that not one of us has ever stepped beyond the green wall since the 200 years war, end quote. So again, he uses this metaphor. He says that a primitive man wouldn't know what a coat was for or he wouldn't know what clothing was. And he would say, that's only a burden, I don't need that. And the narrator says, we have the green wall around our city or around our state, that thing that separates them from nature, as I mentioned. And he says that a primitive person wouldn't understand the value of that either, just the way that they wouldn't understand the value of a coat. So again, this is a misuse of metaphor. Because something applies in one context does not necessarily mean that it applies in every context, but this is a very good way that you can trick people. And later he says, quote, it is clear that the history of mankind as far as our knowledge goes is a history of the transition from nomadic forms to more sedentary ones. Does it not follow that the most sedentary form of life, ours, is at the same time, the most perfect one. There was a time when people were rushing from one end of the earth to another, but this was the prehistoric time when such things as nations, wars, commerce, different discoveries of different Americas still existed. Who has need of these things now, end quote. So to look at the logic there, he says that history is the transition from nomadic societies to settled ones. He says sedentary ones. And since our society is so sedentary, we never leave it, it must be the most advanced one. So again, this falls into the category of having fire in your house. Some of it's good, too much of it is bad. Or at least that's what our current ideology says. Being nomadic would be bad and also being completely stuck in one place without the choice to leave would be bad. But maybe that's just our bias for the time that we're living in. And we are arguing on behalf of our system in the same way that he's arguing on behalf of his. And really, we've just been saturated in this way of thinking from birth, the same way that he has. And in another similar passage, he uses aero, A-E-R-O. This came up earlier, but now it matters more in this section. This is the word that they use for some kind of aircraft that they go around in. Quote, liberation. It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts are. I use deliberately the word criminal for freedom and crime are as closely related as, well, as the movement of an arrow and its speed. If the speed of an arrow equals zero, the arrow is motionless. If human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom, end quote. So just imagine that this kind of thinking had been evolving over a thousand years, or even it's just the natural continuation of a lot of our thinking today. And that for generations and generations, people had been talking like this and writing books like this and gradually pushing the needle in this direction to the extent that it eventually reached the level of a kind of political religion, that it was so deep in everybody's thinking that it was hard to even see it and to get around it in your thoughts. This is just how everybody would be talking. And it actually makes me wonder how distant we are from, for example, medieval literature. I like medieval literature and a lot of it is very universal. We can still relate to it, but some of it sometimes seems a little bit foreign. And I wonder to what extent that's because our thinking has just changed little by little over the last.thousand years, such that things that were good to them are bad to us, and things that are good to us would have been bad to them. And there are other examples of him explaining the logic of the system that they live under, but if you wanna see them, you'll have to read the book for yourself, because this also gets into this other theme that runs throughout the book of the inversion of morality. Words like freedom are used for something that they view as bad, whereas we view freedom as a very sacred good, or the imagination is generally viewed as something good, or the soul, and they view those as bad things. So to show some other examples of this kind of inversion, we can look at a few passages. At one point they say, quote, yes, yes, precisely. All must become insane. We must become insane as soon as possible. We must, I know it, end quote. And that will make more sense in context if you read this book, if you haven't already, but it shows how to break through the ideology that they live under. They have to be willing to go into mental territory that that ideology completely rejects. All must become insane. We must become insane as soon as possible. And at one point he's talking to a woman who's another main character in the story. He says, quote, in absurd, confused, overflowing words, I attempted to tell her that I was a crystal, and that there was a door in me, and that I felt how happy the armchair was, but something nonsensical came out of the attempt and I stopped. I was ashamed, and suddenly, dear, I, forgive me, I understand nothing, I talk so foolishly. And she says, and why should you think that foolishness is not fine? If we had taken pains to educate human foolishness through centuries, as we have done with our intelligence, it might perhaps have been transformed into something very precious, end quote. And at one point, Zamyatin anticipates what we would now call AI-generated music. He writes, quote, the phonolecturer began the description of the recently invented music-o-meter. By merely rotating this handle, anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music? They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to strokes of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy, end quote. So again, their inspiration is viewed as a sickness, and this machine that can write three sonatas per hour is so superior to people writing with only their imagination. Zamyatin is imagining something going on a thousand years in the future, but we have literally something more powerful than that only a hundred years in the future. And of course, it's only limited to this one particular technology of the ability of technology to generate music. But now we have machines that you don't have to crank a handle. He says, by merely rotating this handle, so somebody had to stand there and rotate this handle for an hour, you could get three sonatas. Now, probably with a certain kind of AI, you can click with a mouse and you will get, I don't know how many sonatas per hour. So at least in that very specific case, Zamyatin's imagined future was not outlandish, but actually not nearly outlandish enough. Those are some of the passages that I wanted to show you from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. As usual, there's a lot more that I would have liked to have shown you, but that's enough as a sample. So I guess we can leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.