The Conquest of Happiness

by Russell, Bertrand, 1872-1970

Publication date 2013

Topics Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Happiness

Publisher New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation

Language English

“Should be read by every parent, teacher, minister, and Congressman in the land.”—The Atlantic In The Conquest of Happiness, first published by Liveright in 1930, iconoclastic philosopher Bertrand Russell attempted to diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise so prevalent even in safe and prosperous Western societies. More than eighty years later, Russell’s wisdom remains as true as it was on its initial release. Eschewing guilt-based morality, Russell lays out a rationalist prescription for living a happy life, including the importance of cultivating interests outside oneself and the dangers of passive pleasure. In this new edition, best-selling philosopher Daniel C. Dennett reintroduces Russell to a new generation, stating that Conquest is both “a fascinating time capsule” and “a prototype of the flood of self-help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book.”

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owing things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. —Walt Whitman 

Contents 
Introduction by Daniel C. Dennett 
Preface
 I Causes of Unhappiness 
1. What Makes People Unhappy?
 2. Byronic Unhappiness 
3. Competition 
4. Boredom and Excitement 
5. Fatigue
 6. Envy
 7. The Sense of Sin 
8. Persecution Mania 
9. Fear of Public Opinion

 II Causes of Happiness 
10. Is Happiness Still Possible? 
11. Zest 12. 
Affection 13. 
The Family 14. 
Work 15. 
Impersonal Interests 16. 
Effort and Resignation 17. 

The Happy Man 
Introduction 
What do you think a philosopher is? There are two quite different stereotypes in the popular imagination: the ivory tower theoretician who frets over abstract question so removed from everyday concerns that their answers could matter only to other philosophers, such as “Do numbers exist, and if so, what are they?” or “Is time an illusion?”; or on the other hand the thoughtful counselor whose wise advice is sought on the most pressing of human issues: “How should I live?” and “Why is it important to be good?” 

The first kind of philosopher resides in a philosophy department at a university and talks only to other philosophers. The second can be found in a public park, engaging a throng of laypeople in a discussion that will change their lives. Socrates, who died in Athens in 399 BC, is the major source of both stereotypes: he was condemned by the authorities to drink the fatal cup of hemlock for being too dangerous a philosopher of the second sort, but he also inaugurated the style of questioning that fills academic philosophy departments with “professional philosophers” of the first type, conceptual technicians whose disputes are largely inaccessible to anybody outside the field.

 Bertrand Russell, who died in Wales in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, is the best example ever of a philosopher who not only lived up to both stereotypes but enlarged the difference between them. His technical work in logic created the field of mathematical logic (laying the foundations on which Alan Turing and others created the computer) and posed the central issues that have preoccupied analytic philosophers in universities ever since. His three-volume work with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, consists of hundreds of pages of formal proofs designed to establish all of mathematics on a firm logical foundation, and is one of the most unreadable great books ever written.

 But he was also a passionate antiwar activist in the public square, who went to prison during World War I for his pacifism, was deeply critical of Communism (since a meeting with Lenin in 1920, when he visited Russia to investigate the revolution), supported the war against Hitler, an evil greater than war itself, but later was an ardent antinuclear polemicist and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. His appointment to a professorship at City College of New York was reversed by the college administration, which declared him “morally unfit” because of his boldly expressed views on sexual morality. He never was ordered to drink the hemlock, but he seems to have done whatever he could to provoke that wish in authorities wherever he confronted them. 

Russell published more than one book a year for over seventy years, often publishing as many as three or four in a single year. The Conquest of Happiness, appearing in 1930, falls roughly in the middle—it’s hard to count—and is a good example of his “popular” writing, less extreme than some of his other polemics. (In 1950 he anthologized some of his most controversial short pieces in a volume entitled Unpopular Essays, a witty acknowledgment of his eagerness to provoke.) 

The Conquest of Happiness is a fascinating time capsule, a mixture including perennial observations that speak as clearly to us today as they did to its initial readers, and antiquated issues and attitudes that by today’s standards are offensive when they are not amusing. A good way to read this book is to consider it a temporal telescope that allows us to see how far we’ve come. Russell himself deserves some of the credit for moving our moral imagination out of obsolete orthodoxies into better territory, but here we see a journey in progress, still oblivious to biases that cramp his vision. Perhaps the moral to draw from this confrontation is that we should probably expect our grandchildren to be as uncomfortable with some of our attitudes as we are with some of Russell’s.

 Russell was born into the British aristocracy, with an inherited title (the Right Honorable Earl Russell) and considerable wealth. His circumstances were always comfortable, but he never basked in luxury, choosing instead to use his inherited resources to support a life of intense activity on all fronts, in logic, philosophy, and public morality, and vigorously investigating controversial topics from the rise of Bolshevism in Russia to criticism of the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

Still, his position in the aristocracy shines through, as when he supposes the typical man “arrives home, tired, just in time to dress for dinner,” or, in his chapter on envy, he lets this drop: Take, for example, maid servants: I remember when one of our maids, who was a married woman, became pregnant, and we said that she was not to be expected to lift heavy weights, the instant result was that none of the others would lift heavy weights, and any work of that sort that needed doing we had to do ourselves. 

His position on women shows serious stains of sexism by today’s standard— though he was in his day a champion of women’s rights—and unlike many other books of the era, there are only faint hints of racism in his choice of words, as when he repeats the legend of the “Chinaman” saying “Me no drinkee for drinkee, me drinkee for drunkee,” or describes a “carload of colored people” as the only folks in a traffic jam who are actually enjoying themselves, as he recommends. 

One of the most striking patterns in the book is Russell’s willingness to extrapolate from his own highly unusual life experience to generalizations about life in general. One of the advantages of an aristocracy, he notes (and what are the others, one wonders?) is that “where status depended upon birth behavior was allowed to be erratic.” Ah, thank goodness for all the nonconformist earls and duchesses whose eccentric enthusiasms have so wonderfully expanded our horizons! 

In addition to Lord Russell, how many can we count? Aside from Lord Byron’s brilliant daughter Ada, Countess Lovelace (who was the first to articulate the concept of a computer program in her work with Charles Babbage), and a few landed aristocrats who investigated novel methods of farming, the field is rather deserted. These historical curiosities are sprinkled engagingly among the reflections of timeless wisdom that make up most of the book, a prototype of the flood of self help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book. 
—Daniel C. Dennett, 2012

Roads to freedom : 

socialism, anarchism,

 and syndicalism

by Russell, Bertrand, 1872-1970

Publication date 1918

Topics Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Guild socialism

Publisher London : Allen & Unwin

(Also published as Roads to Freedom)

INTRODUCTION 

The attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind have hitherto existed is by no means modern : it is at least as old as Plato, whose " Republic " set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers. Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an ideal—whether what he seeks be intellect, or art, or love, or simple happiness, or all together—must feel a great sorrow in the evils that men needlessly allow to continue, and—if he be a man of force and vital energy—an urgent desire to lead men to the realization of the good which in- spires his creative vision. It is this desire which has been the primary force moving the pioneers of Socialism and Anarchism, as it moved the inventors of ideal commonwealths in the past. In this there is nothing new. 

What is new in Socialism and Anarchism is that close relation of the ideal to the present sufferings of men which has enabled powerful political movements to grow out of the hopes of solitary thinkers. It is this that makes Socialism and Anarchism important, and it is this that makes them dangerous to those who batten, consciously or unconsciously, upon the evils of our present order of society. io Roads to Freedom 

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticizing, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large. They find themselves born into a certain place in society, and they accept what each day brings forth, without any effort of thought beyond what the immediate present requires. Almost as instinctively as the beasts of the field, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed. 

A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community ; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love towards mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives. 

These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape, some new system of society by which life may become richer, more full of joy and less full of preventable evils than it is at present. But in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest the very victims of the injustices which they wished to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and weariness,  timorous through the imminent danger of immediate punishment by the holders of power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To create among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort after general amelioration might have seemed a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has generally proved so. 

But the modern world, by the increase of education and the rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners, has produced new conditions, more favourable than ever before to the demand for radical reconstruction. It is above all the Socialists, and in a lesser degree the Anarchists (chiefly as the inspirers of Syndicalism), who have become the exponents of this demand. 

What is perhaps most remarkable in regard to both -Socialism and Anarchism is the association of a widespread popular movement with ideals for a better world. The ideals have been elaborated, in the first instance, by solitary writers of books, and yet powerful sections of the wage-earning classes have accepted them as their guide in the practical affairs of the world. In regard to Socialism this is evident ; but in regard to Anarchism it is only true with some qualification. Anarchism as such has never been a widespread creed ; it is only in the modified form of Syndicalism that it has achieved popularity. 

Unlike Socialism and Anarchism, Syndicalism is primarily the outcome, not of an idea, but of an organization : the fact of Trade Union organization came first, and the ideas of Syndicalism are those which seemed appropriate to this organization in the opinion of 12 Roads to Freedom the more advanced French Trade Unions. But the ideas are, in the main, derived from Anarchism, and the men who gained acceptance for them were, for the most part, Anarchists. Thus we may regard Syndicalism as the Anarchism of the market-place, as opposed to the Anarchism of isolated individuals which had preserved a precarious life throughout the previous decades. Taking this view, we find in Anarchist-Syndicalism the same combination of ideal and organization as we find in Socialist political parties. It is from this standpoint that our study of these movements will be undertaken. 

Socialism and Anarchism, in their modern form, spring respectively from two protagonists, Marx and Bakunin, who fought a lifelong battle, culminating in a split in the first International. We shall begin our study with these two men first their teaching, and then the organizations which they founded or inspired. This will lead us to the spread of Socialism in more recent years, and thence to the Syndicalist revolt against Socialist emphasis on the State and political action, and to certain movements outside France which have some affinity with Syndicalism— notably the I.W.W. in America and Guild Socialism in England. From this historical survey we shall pass to the consideration of some of the more pressing problems of the future, and shall try to decide in what - respects the world would be happier if the aims of Socialists or Syndicalists were achieved. 

My own opinion—which I may as well indicate at the outset—is that pure Anarchism, though it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is for the present impossible, and would not survive more than a year or two at most if it were adopted. On the other hand, both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem to me calculated to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not, however, regard either of them as the best practicable system. Marxian Socialism, I fear, would give far too much power to the State, while Syndicalism, which aims at abolishing the State, would, I believe, find itself forced to reconstruct a central authority in order to put an end to the rivalries of different groups of producers. 

The best practicable system, to my mind, is that of Guild Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and in the Syndicalist fear of the State by adopting a system of federalism among trades for reasons similar to those which have recommended federalism among nations. The grounds for these conclusions will appear as we proceed. Before embarking upon the history of recent movements in favour of radical reconstruction, it will be worthwhile to consider some traits of character which distinguish most political idealists, and are much misunderstood by the general public for other reasons besides mere prejudice. I wish to do full justice to these reasons, in order to show the more effectually why they ought not to be operative. 

The leaders of the more advanced movements are, in general, men of quite unusual disinterestedness,  as is evident from a consideration o*f their careers. Although they have obviously quite as much ability as many men who rise to positions of great power, they do not themselves become the arbiters of contemporary events, nor do they achieve wealth or the applause of the mass of their contemporaries. Men who have the capacity for winning these prizes, and who work at least as hard as those who win them, but deliberately adopt a line which makes the winning of them impossible, must be judged to have an aim , in life other than personal advancement ; whatever admixture of self-seeking may enter into the detail of their lives, their" fundamental motive must be outside Self. 

The pioneers of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism have, for the most part, experienced prison, exile, and poverty, deliberately incurred because they would not abandon their propaganda ; and by this conduct they have shown that the hope which inspired them was not for themselves, but for mankind. Nevertheless, though the desire for human welfare is what at bottom determines the broad lines of such men's lives, it often happens that, in the detail of their speech and writing, hatred is far more visible than love.

 The impatient idealist—and without some impatience a man will hardly prove effective—is almost sure to be led into hatred by the oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his endeavours to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more indignant he will become when  his teaching is rejected. Often he will successfully achieve an attitude of philosophic tolerance as regards the apathy of the masses, and even as regards the whole-hearted opposition of professed defenders of the status quo. But the men whom he finds it impossible to forgive are those who profess the same desire for the amelioration of society as he feels himself, but who do not accept his method of achieving this end. The intense faith which enables him - to withstand persecution for the sake of his beliefs makes him consider these beliefs so luminously obvious that any thinking man who rejects them must be dishonest, and must be actuated by some sinister motive of treachery to the cause. Hence arises the spirit of the sect, that bitter, narrow orthodoxy which is the bane of those who hold strongly to an unpopular creed. 

So many real temptations to treachery exist that suspicion is natural. And among leaders, ambition, which they mortify in their choice of a career, is sure to return in a new form : in the desire for intellectual mastery and for despotic pow r er within their own sect. Frorn these causes it results that the advocates of drastic reform divide themselves into opposing schools, hating each other with a bitter hatred, accusing each other often of such crimes as being in the pay of the police, and demanding, of any speaker or writer whom they are to admire, that he shall conform exactly to their prejudices, and '•make all his teaching minister to their belief that the exact truth is to be found within the limits of their creed. The result of this state of mind is that, to a casual and unimaginative attention, the men who have sacrificed most through the wish to benefit mankind appear to be actuated far more by hatred than by love. And the demand for orthodoxy is stifling to any free exercise of intellect, producing an atmosphere in which a man of wide culture and detached thought finds it impossible to breathe. 

This cause, as well as economic prejudice, has made it difficult for the " intellectuals ' to co-operate practically with the more extreme reformers, however they may sympathize with their main purposes and even with nine-tenths of their programme. Another reason why radical reformers are misjudged by ordinary men is that they view existing society from outside, with hostility towards its institutions. Although, for the most part, they have more belief than their neighbours in human nature's inherent capacity for a good life, they are so conscious of the cruelty and oppression resulting from existing institutions that they make a wholly misleading impression of cynicism.

 Most men have instinctively two entirely different codes of behaviour : one towards those whom they regard as companions or colleagues or friends, or in some way members of the same " herd " ; the other towards those whom they regard as enemies or outcasts or a danger to society. Radical reformers are apt to concentrate their attention upon the behaviour of society towards the latter class, the class of those towards whom the " herd ' feels ill-will. This class includes, of course, enemies in war, and criminals ; in the minds of those who consider the preservation of the existing order essential to their own safety or privileges, it includes all who advocate any great political or economic change, and all classes which, through their poverty or through any other cause, are likely to feel a dangerous degree of discontent. 

The ordinary citizen probably seldom thinks about such individuals or classes, and goes through life believing that he and his friends are kindly people; because they have no wish to injure those towards whom they entertain no group-hostility. But the man whose attention is fastened upon the relations of a group with those whom it hates or fears will judge quite differently. In these relations, a surprising ferocity is apt to be developed, and a very ugly side of human nature comes to the fore. The opponents of capitalism have learnt, through the study of certain historical facts, that this ferocity has often been shown by the capitalists and by the State towards the wage earning classes, particularly when they have ventured to protest against the unspeakable suffering to which industrialism has usually condemned them. 

Hence arises a quite different attitude towards existing society from that of the ordinary well-to-do citizen : an attitude as true as his, perhaps also as untrue, but equally based on facts, facts concerning his relations to his enemies instead of to his friends. The class-war, like wars between nations, produces two opposing views, each equally true and equally untrue. The citizen of a nation at war, when he thinks of his own countrymen, thinks of them primarily as he has experienced them, in dealings with their  friends, in their family relations, and so on. They seem to him on the whole kindly, decent folk. But a nation with which his country is at war views his compatriots through the medium of a quite different set of experiences : as they appear in the ferocity of battle, in the invasion and subjugation of a hostile territory, or in the chicanery of a juggling diplomacy. 

The men of whom these facts are true are the very same as the men whom their compatriots know as husbands or fathers or friends, but they are judged differently because they are judged on different data And so it is with those who view the capitalist from the standpoint of the revolutionary wage-earner : they appear inconceivably cynical and misjudging to the capitalist, because the facts upon which their view is based are facts which he either does not know or habitually ignores.

 Yet the view from the outside is just as true as the view from the inside. Both are necessary to the complete truth ; and the Socialist, who emphasizes the outside view, is not a cynic, but merely the friend of the wage-earners, maddened by the spectacle of the needless misery which capitalism inflicts upon them.

 I have placed these general reflections at the beginning of our study, in order to make it clear to the reader that, whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. 

Though difficult, it is not impossible ; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents ; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism 
By Bertrand Russell
 LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE, 
40 MUSEUM STREET, W.G. 1 
First published November 1920 Reprinted . . 
February 1921 (All rights reserved) 

PREFACE 

THE Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events of the world s history. It is natural to compare it to the French Revolution, but it is in fact something of even more importance. It does more to change daily life and the structure of society : it also does more to change men s beliefs. The difference is exemplified by the difference between Marx and Rousseau : the latter sentimental and soft, appealing to emotion, obliterating sharp out lines ; the former systematic like Hegel, full of hard intellectual content, appealing to historic necessity and the technical development of industry, suggestir3n, a view of human beings as puppets in the grip _ omnipotent material forces. Bolshevism combines the < characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam ; and the result is something radically new, which can only be understood by a patient and passionate effort of imagination. Before entering upon any detail, I wish to state, as clearly and unambiguously as I can, my own attitude towards this new thing. 

By far the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is as an attempt to realize Communism. I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men s hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of Communism in the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind. But the method by which Moscow aims at establishing Communism is a pioneer method, rough and dangerous, too heroic to count the cost of the opposition it arouses. I do not believe that by this method a stable or desirable form of Communism can be established.

 Three issues seem to me possible ?rom the present situation. The first is the ultimate feat of Bolshevism by the forces of capitalism. ne second is the victory of the Bolshevists accompanied by a complete loss of their ideals and a regime of Napoleonic imperialism. The third is a prolonged world-war, in which civilization will go under, and all its manifestations (including Communism) will be forgotten. It is because I do not believe that the methods of the Third International can lead to the desired goal that I have thought it worth while to point out what seem to me undesirable features in the present state of Russia. I think there are lessons to be learnt which must be learnt if the world is ever to achieve what is desired by those in the West who have sympathy with the original aims of the Bolsheviks.

 I do not think these lessons can be learnt except by facing frankly and fully whatever elements of failure there are in Russia. I think these elements of failure are less attributable to faults of detail than to an impatient philosophy, which aims at creating a new world without sufficient preparation in the opinions and feelings of ordinary men and women. But although I do not believe that Communism can be realized immediately by the spread of Bolshevism, I do believe that, if Bolshevism falls, it will have contributed a legend and a heroic attempt without which ultimate success might never have come. A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy and art and private relations, seems absolutely necessary if industrialism is to become the servant of man instead of his master. In all this, I am at one with the Bolsheviks ; politically, I criticize them only when their methods seem to involve a departure from their own ideals. 

There is, however, another aspect of Bolshevism from which I differ more fundamentally. Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine ; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. A full-fledged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible. He is a man .M ^ who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs such as philosophic materialism, for example / which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty. This habit, of militant certainty about objectively doubtful matters, is one from which, since the Renaissance, the world has been gradually emerging, into that temper of constructive and fruitful scepticism which constitutes the scientific outlook. I believe the scientific outlook to be immeasurably important to the human race. If a more just economic system were only attainable by closing men s minds against free inquiry, and plunging them back into the intellectual prison of the middle ages, I should consider the price too high. It cannot be denied that, over any short period of time, dogmatic belief is a help in fighting. 

If all Communists become religious fanatics, while supporters of capitalism retain a sceptical temper, it may be assumed that the Communists will win, while in the contrary case the capitalists would win. It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the Central Empires, and of Eng land to Ireland and India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or brutality from which the present holders of power will shrink when they feel themselves threatened. If, in order to oust them, nothing short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are the prime sources of the resultant evil. And it is permissible to hope that, when they have been dis possessed, fanaticism will fade, as other fanaticisms have faded in the past. The present holders of power are evil men, and the present manner of life is doomed. To make the transition with a minimum of bloodshed, with a maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our existing civilization, is a difficult problem. It is this problem which has chiefly occupied my mind in writing the following pages. I wish I could think that its solution would be facilitated by some slight degree of moderation and humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy unjust privileges in the world as it is. 

The present work is the outcome of a visit to Russia, supplemented by much reading and discussion both before and after. I have thought it best to record what I saw separately from theoretical considerations, and I have endeavoured to state my impressions without any bias for or against the Bolsheviks. I received at their hands the greatest kindness and courtesy, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for the perfect freedom which they allowed me in my investigations. I am conscious that I was too short a time in Russia to be able to form really reliable judgments ; however, I share this drawback with most other westerners who have written on Russia since the October Revolution. I feel that Bolshevism is a matter of such importance that it is necessary, for almost every political question, to define one s attitude in regard to it ; and I have hopes that I may help others to define their attitude, even if only by way of opposition to what I have written. I have received invaluable assistance from my secretary, Miss D. W. Black, who was in Russia shortly after I had left. The chapter on Art and Education is written by her throughout. Neither is responsible for the other s opinions. 

BERTRAND RUSSELL 

September, 1920. 

CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PREFACE ....... 5

 PART I THE PRESENT CONDITION OF RUSSIA 

I. WHAT IS HOPED FROM BOLSHEVISM . . 15 

II. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS . . .24 

III. LENIN, TROTSKY AND GORKY . . .36

 IV. ART AND EDUCATION . . . .45 

V. COMMUNISM AND THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION . 72

 VI. THE FAILURE OF RUSSIAN INDUSTRY . .81 

VII. DAILY LIFE IN MOSCOW . . . .92 

VIII. TOWN AND COUNTRY . . . .09

 IX. INTERNATIONAL POLICY .... 106

 PART II BOLSHEVIK THEORY 

I. THE MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF HISTORY . 119

 II. DECIDING FORCES IN POLITICS . . . 128 

III. BOLSHEVIK CRITICISM OF DEMOCRACY . .134 

IV. REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP . . . 146  

V. MECHANISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL . . 157

 VI. WHY RUSSIAN COMMUNISM HAS FAILED . . 165

 VII. CONDITIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF COMMUNISM . 178

Listen to the first marsquake ever recorded: NASA's InSight lander detects likely tremor on the red planet in what could finally be 'proof that Mars is still seismically active'

• InSight team says the lander measured and recorded a seismic signal on April 6
• While it was too small to gather 'solid data,' it likely originated from the interior
• Previous signals detected by InSight were caused by wind and other factors 

By CHEYENNE MACDONALD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 23 April 2019

A robot stationed on the red planet has, for the first time, detected what’s thought to be a ‘marsquake.’

NASA’s InSight lander has been listening for faint rumbles beneath the surface since December, when it placed its seismometer down to begin the groundbreaking mission.

In what scientists have hailed an 'exciting' milestone, the InSight team says the lander measured and recorded a seismic signal on April 6, its 128th Martian day, using its Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument.

Scroll over for video
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6952111/Listen-marsquake-detected-NASAs-InSight-records-likely-tremors-red-planet.html#v-8378870496453477311


NASA's InSight lander makes first recording of likely 'Marsquake'
https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2019/04/23/8378870496453477311/1024x576_MP4_8378870496453477311.mp4


According to NASA, the sounds in the video were created from the ground vibrations measured by InSight’s SEIS instrument on April 6, 2019

WHAT DOES INSIGHT'S SEISMOMETER DO?

The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.

Each marsquake acts as a kind of flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior.

By analyzing how seismic waves pass through the layers of the planet, scientists can deduce the depth and composition of these layers.

While other disturbances have been recorded, previous signals are thought to have been caused by activity above the surface, such as wind.

The suspected marsquake, however, dubbed the Martian sol 128 event, appears to have originated from within the depths.

InSight’s efforts build upon work laid by the Apollo astronauts on the moon during the late 1960s and 70s, which first revealed clues on lunar seismic activity and the interior of the moon.

Similarly, it’s hoped that the seismometer measurements will help to improve our understanding of the happenings deep inside Mars.

The team says the first seismic event was too small to glean any solid data on this front, but they expect it’s just the first of many.

‘InSight's first readings carry on the science that began with NASA's Apollo missions,’ said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

‘We've been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!’







A robot stationed on the red planet has, for the first time, detected what’s thought to be a ‘marsquake’

‘The Martian Sol 128 event is exciting because its size and longer duration fit the profile of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions,’ added Lori Glaze, Planetary Science Division director at NASA Headquarters.

According to the scientists, InSight also detected seismic signals on March 14 (Sol 105), April 10 (Sol 132) and April 11 (Sol 133).

These were smaller and picked up by its more sensitive Very Broad Band sensors, NASA says, and scientists are still working to determine their causes.

But, the larger Sol 128 event so far seems promising.

‘We've been waiting months for a signal like this,’ said Philippe Lognonné, SEIS team lead at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) in France.

+2



NASA ’s InSight lander has been listening for faint rumbles beneath the surface since December, when it placed its seismometer down to begin the groundbreaking mission

+2



While other disturbances have been recorded, previous signals are thought to have been caused by activity above the surface, such as wind. The lander is pictured above in December

‘It's so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active,' the researcher says.

'We're looking forward to sharing detailed results once we've had a chance to analyze them.’

Within days of arriving to the red planet back in December, the InSight lander captured the sound of a Martian 'dust devil'.

It marked the first time we've ever heard Martian winds.

The low rumble detected by InSight's sensors were estimated to be blowing between 10 to 15 mph (5 to 7 meters a second) from northwest to southeast.

To make it clearer, NASA boosted the pitch by two octaves, making it audible on laptops and mobile devices.
NASA records wind and air pressure sounds on Mars

https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/preview/mol/2018/12/07/6827674815396626156/636x382_MP4_6827674815396626156.mp4

INSIGHT'S THREE KEY INSTRUMENTS


The lander that could reveal how Earth was formed: InSight lander set for Mars landing on november 26th

Three key instruments will allow the InSight lander to 'take the pulse' of the red planet:

Seismometer: The InSight lander carries a seismometer, SEIS, that listens to the pulse of Mars.

The seismometer records the waves traveling through the interior structure of a planet.

Studying seismic waves tells us what might be creating the waves.

On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes, or meteorites striking the surface.

Heat probe: InSight's heat flow probe, HP3, burrows deeper than any other scoops, drills or probes on Mars before it.

It will investigate how much heat is still flowing out of Mars.

Radio antennas: Like Earth, Mars wobbles a little as it rotates around its axis.

To study this, two radio antennas, part of the RISE instrument, track the location of the lander very precisely.

This helps scientists test the planet's reflexes and tells them how the deep interior structure affects the planet's motion around the Sun.

Researchers calculate decades of 'scary' Greenland ice melting



(File pix) Researchers have recalculated the amount of ice lost in Greenland since 1972, the year the first Landsat satellites entered orbit to regularly photograph the Danish territory. AFP/Getty Photo

By AFP - April 23, 2019 @ 2:00pm


WASHINGTON: Measuring melting ice is a fairly precise business in 2019 – thanks to satellites, weather stations and sophisticated climate models.

By the 1990s and 2000s, scientists were able to make pretty good estimates, although work from previous decades was unreliable due to less advanced technology.

Now, researchers have recalculated the amount of ice lost in Greenland since 1972, the year the first Landsat satellites entered orbit to regularly photograph the Danish territory.

“When you look at several decades, it is best to sit back in your chair before looking at the results, because it is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing,” said French glaciologist Eric Rignot, of the University of California at Irvine.

Rignot co-authored the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS),with colleagues in California, Grenoble, Utrecht and Copenhagen.

“It’s also something that affects the four corners of Greenland, not just the warmer parts in the south,” he said.

Glaciologists use three methods to measure ice melting.

Firstly, satellites measure altitude with a laser: if a glacier melts, the satellite picks up its reduced height.

A second technique involves measuring variations in gravity, as ice loss can be detected through a decrease in gravitational pull. This method has been available since 2002 using NASA satellites.

Thirdly, scientists have developed so-called mass balance models, which compare mass accumulated (rain and snow) with mass lost (ice river discharges) to calculate what is left.

These models, confirmed with field measurements, have become very reliable since the 2000s, according to Rignot – boasting a five to seven percent margin of error, compared to 100 percent a few decades ago.

The research team used these models to “go back in time” and reconstruct Greenland’s ice levels in the 1970s and 1980s.

The limited data available for this period – medium-quality satellite photos, aerial photos, ice cores and other observations – helped refine them.

“We added a little bit of history that did not exist,” said Rignot.

The results: during the 1970s, Greenland accumulated 47 gigatonnes of ice per year, on average. Then, it lost an equivalent volume in the 1980s.

The melting continued at that rate in the 1990s, before a sharp acceleration in the 2000s (187 Gt/year) and even more since 2010 (286 Gt/year).

Ice is melting six times faster than in the 1980s, researchers estimate – and Greenland’s glaciers alone have contributed to a 13.7 millimeter rise in sea levels since 1972, they believe.

“This is an excellent piece of work by a well-established research group using novel methods to extract more information from the available data“, said Colin Summerhayes, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

As with a similar study carried out by the same team on Antarctica, the new study affords a longer term view of the rapid ice melt being observed in Greenland in recent years.

“This new data better enables us to put recent, dramatic, changes to Greenland’s contribution to global sea level rise into a longer-term context – the ice loss we’ve seen in the last eight years is as much as was lost in the preceding four decades,” said Amber Leeson, a lecturer in Environmental Data Science at Lancaster University. -- AFP




SCIENCE

Greenland Is Falling Apart

Since 1972, the giant island’s ice sheet has lost 11 quadrillion pounds of water.

ROBINSON MEYER

APR 23, 2019



NASA researchers burn leftover wood on the Helheim Glacier, 
which is one of the fastest-moving ice floes in Greenland.
LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS


The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the world’s largest island. It is almost mind-bogglingly huge.

If Greenland were suddenly transported to the central United States, it would be a very bad day for about 65 million people, who would be crushed instantly. But for the sake of science journalism, imagine that Greenland’s southernmost tip displaced Brownsville, Texas—the state’s southernmost city—so that its icy glaciers kissed mainland Mexico and the Gulf thereof. Even then, Greenland would stretch all the way north, clear across the United States, its northern tenth crossing the Canadian border into Ontario and Manitoba. Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Iowa City would all be goners. So too would San Antonio, Memphis, and Minneapolis. Its easternmost peaks would slam St. Louis and play in Peoria; its northwestern glaciers would rout Rapid City, South Dakota, and meander into Montana. At its center point, near Des Moines, roughly two miles of ice would rise from the surface.

Suffice it to say: The Greenland Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to refill the Great Lakes 115 times over, is very large. And it is also falling apart.

A new study finds that the Greenland Ice Sheet added a quarter inch of water to global sea levels in just the past eight years. The research, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, covers nearly 20 years previously not included in our detailed understanding of the troubled Greenland Ice Sheet. It finds that climate change has already bled trillions of tons of ice from the island reservoir, with more loss than expected coming from its unstable northern half.

“The glaciers are still being pushed out of balance,” Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA and an author of the paper, told me. “Even though the ice sheet has [sometimes] been extremely cold and had low surface melt in the last year, the glaciers are still speeding up, and the ice sheet is still losing mass.”

The paper casts the transformation of the Greenland Ice Sheet as one of the profound geological shifts of our time. Scientists measure the mass of ice sheets in “gigatons”—each unit equal to 1 billion metric tons, or roughly the same amount of water that New York or Los Angeles uses in a year. Greenland, according to the study, has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. That’s enough water to fill 16 trillion bathtubs or 1.3 quadrillion gallon jugs. That much water weighs about 11 quadrillion pounds. (A quadrillion is 1 with 15 zeros after it.)

More worryingly, the paper finds that Greenland lost about half of that ice—roughly 2,200 gigatons—in the years between 2010 and 2018. The ice sheet has also failed to gain mass in any year since 1998.

This melting isn’t happening at a steady pace, in other words. Greenland’s demise seems to be accelerating. Think of Greenland as a huge inland ice sea, surrounded by faster-moving ice rivers (which are glaciers) that empty the sea and carry ice to the ocean. The paper finds that those rivers are speeding up, carrying ice out of the island’s core nearly twice as fast now as they did in the 1990s or 2000s.


Read: Ancient Rome’s collapse is written into Arctic ice

That’s an alarming result, because it means glaciers might now be shrinking Greenland from the bottom faster than hot weather can melt it from the top. And researchers believe that bottom-melting glaciers are less stable and more prone to rapid collapse. “If there’s a risk of rapid sea-level rise in the future, it will be associated with glaciers speeding up, and not anything happening at the surface,” Rignot said.

The paper’s findings are stirring in part because they go much further back in time. “A lot of the publications [about Greenland’s mass] start in 2000 or 2002, some go back to 1992, but this is the first time we go back another 20 years,” Rignot said. Historically, most studies of Greenland combine data from radar flybys, GPS beacons, and laser or gravity-sensing satellites. But there’s not enough data from before 1992 to be useful, so that’s when estimates usually stop.

Rignot and his colleagues helped hit upon a new resource. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat satellites have circled the planet nonstop since 1972, imaging every speck of land on Earth every 16 days. This archive—which is a kind of Earth-science version of taking a photo of yourself every day for years—includes hundreds of images of Greenland. Rignot and his team taught a computer how to read those pictures of its icy surface, zooming in especially on the dozens of glaciers that connect the interior ice sheet to the sea.

“It’s looking at two different pictures of a glacier, before and after. [In each frame,] the rocks don’t move but the glacier moves, so it can compare and cross-correlate image points,” Rignot said. “Then the algorithm searches around the window for where the pixel might have gone.”

Read: Studying Greenland’s ice to understand climate change

The team ultimately used this technique to calculate the speed of Greenland’s glaciers from 1972 to 1992. Then they combined that data with modern observations of the ice sheet to estimate its historical mass. (They used a similar method to estimate Antarctica’s ice loss in a paper published earlier this year.)

Rignot and his colleagues relied on another new resource too: OMG!

As in, literally, the project is named OMG, short for Oceans Melting Greenland. OMG is a five-year NASA mission, started in 2016, to study how warmer oceans are eroding Greenland’s waterfront glaciers. Rignot helps lead it. “Thanks to OMG, we’ve been able to construct a [bedrock] model of Greenland that is pretty good under the ice, and is very, very good underneath the ocean,” he said.


Brad Lipovsky, a glaciologist at Harvard who was not connected to the research, said in an email that the results “seem plausible at first glance,” but that scientists would need to carefully check some of the team’s methodology. The overall story of Greenland, he said, is that the ice sheet’s flow is slowly accelerating. This “makes sense,” he said, “because it takes the slowly flowing ice sheet a lot longer to respond than the rapidly evolving atmosphere.”

Rignot believes that the new study should make glaciologists look anew at the speed with which Greenland could collapse. The ice sheet’s bleeding-out could eventually raise global sea levels by as much as 25 feet. So the key question, Rignot said, is “How fast can you make these entities fall apart?” The answer will matter to all of us. The surface of Greenland doesn’t have to move through magic to other parts of the world—already, today, its deluge is on its way.

Greenland Ice Sheet Losing Ice at Alarming Rate

The sheer amount of water ice lost by the Greenland Ice Sheet since 1972 is staggering.

By John LoefflerApril, 24th 2019


Pixabay

Since 1972, the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost the equivalent of trillions of tons of fresh water from its ice stores, raising global sea levels by a quarter of an inch in just eight years, and the rate of its ice loss is accelerating.

Trillions of Tons of Ice Lost from Threatened Greenland Ice Sheet

According to research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the rate of ice sheet loss from Greenland’s main ice sheet is even worse and more terrifying than previously understood.

RELATED: GLOBAL REPORT WARNS THERE IS LESS THAN 12 YEARS TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Using data going back an additional 20 years than is included in our current models, the amount of fresh water ice lost by the Greenland Ice Sheet since 1972 amounts to trillions of tons of ice melt added to the ocean.

Specifically, it has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons, which means that on average enough water has melted out of the Greenland Ice Sheet every year that it could supply the current water needs of New York City or Los Angeles for a century.

Unfortunately, the ice loss has not been spread evenly over this period. Instead, the rate of loss has been accelerating, with half of its ice loss occurring in just the last decade. The speed at which glaciers are moving the mass of the ice sheet out into the oceans is almost twice what it was in the 2000s.

Size of the Greenland Ice Sheet Shows the Severity of the Crisis We Face

Robinson Meyer’s recent report in The Atlantic about the newly released research gives an appropriate understanding of the size of the Greenland Ice Sheet and what we risk unleashing if we do not reverse the rate of ice loss.

If the Greenland Ice Sheet’s southernmost tip covered the southernmost city in the state of Texas, Brownsville, the ice sheet’s northern tenth would reach all the way into the province of Manitoba, Canada, with its easternmost reach extending to St. Louis, Missouri, and its northwestern extent reaching into Montana.

The center point would be near Des Moines, Iowa and would be nearly two miles thick. 65 million people would be crushed underneath, about a fifth of the US population, though that is largely a function of the inner regions of the state being less populated than the coastal cities, where large population centers reside.

With enough fresh water to fill the North American Great Lakes more than 100 times, the entire melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would add 24 feet to the global sea level. Even ten feet of sea level rise directly threatens New York City, much of Florida, and hundreds of other cities in the US alone.

Miami Provides a Preview of Our Climate Future

Here in the US, there is a growing awareness that the city of Miami might have to be abandoned within the century. Sitting on a bedrock of limestone, efforts to build sea walls around threatened areas will do nothing to stop the water, which will simply soak through the limestone underneath like a sponge and come up on the other side.

Right now, Miami is already experiencing flooding any time it experiences a heavy rain and the city is racing to lift the roads at least two feet above the high tide line, as well as require new construction to rest at least a foot above this line. Existing construction will need to connect to a pump network to control the flooding that crests over these higher bulwarks against the seas. All of this is coming at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars for the city of Miami Beach alone.

"There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level," said Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and an expert in rising sea levels and its implications. “With sea levels rising at over a foot per decade, it’s over.” By the end of the century, the entire county encompassing the city of Miami will be functionally uninhabitable, and they are not alone.

Of the 40 large cities where more than half of its area is at ten feet above sea level or less, 27 of them are in Florida alone. In New York City, 700,000 current residents will be underwater at a ten foot sea level rise. Hundreds of cities in the US alone will be directly impacted by a rise in sea level of ten feet, which is now guaranteed because of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The only question now is how quickly will we experience that rise.

With the acceleration found in Greenland, the same is likely happening in the Antarctic, which together holds about 200 feet of sea level rise between them. As the rate of melting in these two threatened stores of water ice accelerates, it ensures that the consequences of human caused climate change will no longer be a crisis for the distant future but places that crisis squarely within the lifetimes of those who are currently living. That makes it a problem only the current generation can solve

CULTURE

By Jordan Foisy

Apr 23 2019, 1:04pm

What I Learned at the 'Debate' Between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek

Žižek was less a cognizant thinker and more a pathological sacred cow tipper while Peterson was emo as hell, a bard for the reactionary elite.


Screenshots via YouTube.


It was 8 PM and I was at Toronto’s Sony Center waiting for the start of what was being called the “debate of the century” between Slavoj “I found this shirt” Žižek and Jordan “Why would I leave a good tip if the service was bad” Peterson when I overheard some terrible news.

“Excuse me,” I asked a kindly usher, "did you just say the debate is going to last two hours and 40 minutes?” He nodded.

As a look of horror washed over my face he tried to comfort me, “Since it’s starting late, they might skip some parts so it’s done by 10:15, but it is scheduled for 2 hours and 40 minutes.”

Two hours and 40 minutes! Was this a Ken Burns documentary about ruining parties? There were people in the audience of this thing who have had sex for less cumulative time than this talk would take. Specifically, I am talking about the young guy a few rows back from me dressed in a MAGA hat and a Joy Division t-shirt who was giving off serious “I got kicked off of Reddit” vibes.

Damnit, I had a plan. I wanted to catch Žižek/Peterson Mind Derby 2019 (officially titled “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism”) because I wanted to see Peterson fandom in its element. Who are these guys? What do they get out of listening to the aggrieved meanderings of the dark prince of YouTube? Are their sideburns wild and untamed or curt and efficient? At the same time, my brother was in town visiting and my beloved Raptors, whose playoff run is currently my emotional ballast, were playing. I was thinking the talk would be like an hour. I could swoop in, do a brief character sketch of somebody who spends his days playing Axis & Allies, make fun of Žižek’s slovenliness, and rejoin my brother for the end of Raptors game and grow our familial bond by screaming at lanky millionaires.

Discovering this talk was going to be longer than Infinity War (but thankfully shorter than Endgame) was not my first disappointment of the evening. I had been expecting freaks in attendance; squirrelly-eyed weirdos sporting t-shirts emblazoned with right-wing manifestos and deluded loners with wispy chin-straps and embarrassing necklaces. And sure, there were a couple of delightfully cargo-panted, amateur magician-types roaming the venue, but the actual makeup of the crowd was distressing for a different reason: they were completely normal.

As an acquaintance I ran into described it, “Everyone here just looks like us.” This was a hip, young crowd dress for a goddamn night out. Clear-framed glasses, nice haircuts, shiny shoes, baristas I recognize; this could have been a War On Drugs concert. There was also a surprising amount of dates. I listened to one as I waited in line; him imploring her to at least keep an open mind. There were fancy old couples, moneyed vampires recharging their cultural cache. This was not a gathering of scuzzy commies or crazed alt-righters, no, this was what passed for the Toronto elite: the beautiful, the educated, the privileged.

This isn’t to say there wasn’t something sinister in the air. As I was entering, a group of beefy dudes started wondering if there were going to be any agitators. One of them kept taking quick glances to see what I was writing in my notebook. While a fair chunk of the audience was there due to intellectual or, at least, ironic curiosity, the Peterson fans began to stand out. A huge tell, a friend noticed, was of course posture: ramrod straight as if they had just been rapped across the knuckles by a grumpy nun. A strange phenomenon is how many dressed like him; tie and a blazer, skinny dress pants or dark-washed jeans ending in nice shoes, pointy shoes. Peterson and his flock all dressed like I did the first time I went to a wedding after making a little bit of money, like, “Look at me, I can dress nice now, look at my point shoes.”

While many people were laughing and jovial, there was also a troubling seriousness amongst the Petersonhead. It was in the eyes, equal parts flat but vulnerable. A hollow anticipation, a readiness to be filled with purpose and action. Maybe they unnerved me because it was the first time I was witnessing what a believer looked like.

I took my seat. I had to ask a duo of men, the most common arrangement of people I see tonight to let me through. The were polite. In front of me there was a couple, his arm draped around her in an almost violent fashion, as if he was trying to absorb her. An announcement went over the loudspeaker informing us that any hecklers will be removed immediately. It was met with a roar of approval from the audience, the polite duo beside me bellowing along. I could only imagine the beefy dudes I met earlier cracked their knuckles at the thought of removing the agitators.

A man named Stephen Blackwood, a philosopher, defender of the private sphere and potentially an aristocratic werewolf came out to introduce the pair. Calling them, “towering figures,” Blackwood promised us, “Real thinking about hard questions,” and that’s exactly what we got, if by “real thinking” you mean “ego-driven meanderings” and by “hard questions” you mean Peterson not knowing what books Žižek was talking about. Throughout the debate, Peterson seemed like the kind of guy who purchases many an impressive tome, lies about reading them, and actually rereads Game of Thrones.

Outside of the reference gap, the contrast between the two could not have been more stark. Dressed like a John Wick cosplayer, Jordan Peterson sat in front of an open laptop and a field of San Pellegrino bottles, his legs crossed and fingers splayed across his chin, in a pose that seemed to say, “I’m thinking so hard right now.” When he spoke, he paced and bounded around his podium, his fingers constantly poking at and prodding at the air, or he would hunch over, his face pained with torment as if the marvels of his ideas were just too much for a man to bear.

Žižek meanwhile had all the grace and style of a 90s sitcom dad. Grouchy and slouched, a pale white calf permanently exposed at the bottom of his pants, I would bet money that there was a toothpaste stain somewhere on his person. He was also undeniably charismatic and charming in a way that Peterson is not (Peterson admitted as much, fawning over him at one point, by saying, “You are a character…it’s what makes you attractive” to titters from the audience around me). As his tongue darted from his mouth like some sort of mad ferret, Žižek won over the audience thanks a wily combination of Slovenian dad jokes, self-deprecation, and irreverence. The largest applause breaks and laughs belonged to him throughout the night.

There wasn’t really a debate. That would require points being made. Instead Žižek free-wheeled and riffed around a variety of hazily related ideas: the Chinese social model as a synthesis of tyranny and capitalism; how belief in God or a higher project or morality allow for men to do the most evil things; the occasional Himmler quote; how happiness should never be a goal; the coming ecological crisis that may also not happen because Europe has more forest than ever now; the scourge of political correctness as a sign of the weakness on the left; the cowardice of optimism and insurmountable inner evil of man. Žižek was less a cognizant thinker and more a pathological sacred cow tipper. His main goals seemed to be to provoke and get applause breaks.

But at least he said things that were interesting. Peterson, meanwhile, was completely vacuous. He played his greatest hits: hierarchies are natural; Judeo-Christian values and myths represent fundamental truths; capitalism is making things better for poor people; one of the West’s biggest obstacles is divorce rates going up. It was like getting a Economics 101 lesson from a man who tried peyote exactly once. He made ludicrous claims like no one has ever gotten power through exploiting people (this after boasting about tickets for the event being scalped for higher than Leafs tickets). He lightly denied climate change by saying the crisis, “...is dismal but not as dismal as the people saying it is.” He said profit is an excellent motivator because it discourages people from acting stupid, to a room of people that had paid for tickets (I saw some resale tix that were over four hundred dollars) to hear him speak. He excoriated Marx for ignoring the glorious labor that managers do. At one point he said, 100 percent sincerely: “To reassure the sheep, you invited the dragon into the house.” Will somebody get this guy a sword collection so he will leave us alone?

The biggest thing I took from Peterson, though, is that this guy is emo as hell. For Peterson, human suffering is not a product of society or economics. No, it is our inherited state of being. We are born into it; to be human is to constantly be warring with the evil that resides within us all and the pain that exists outside of us. Again and again he brought up the evil we must overcome. He continually reiterated a vision of life as a slog of sadness and misery. It was all very My Chemical Romance, I would not be surprised if he had a “Life Is Pain” tattoo somewhere.

Beyond everything, I think it is this Bert McCracken-approved theory of life that draws people to Peterson—why he has become the bard of the reactionary elite. If you are one of the privileged, Peterson is here to protect your glorious suffering from any agitators that would question it. He values your pain, it is as valid as anybody else’s. For Peterson, the only political struggle that matters is against your own personal demons. This view of life flattens everything and scrubs out injustice. Oppressor or oppressed, poor or rich; these are meaningless categories. All that matters is your reckoning with your beautiful, mythic suffering. It’s the most important thing, certainly more important than asking if you are part of the problem.

I guess this is all to say, I should’ve just hung out with my brother and yelled at sports. If I’m going to suffer it might as well be fun.