Mollie Hemingway: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin | Book Club | PragerU

Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles. This month we will be discussing We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a book that I had not only never read, I had never even heard of. But it's a very, very important novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and lots of other dystopian literature. And I am joined by someone much less philistine than I am, a serious person. That would be the editor-in-chief of The Federalist and the author of an upcoming book on Justice Alito. That would be Mollie Hemingway. Mollie, thank you for being here. Great to be here with you. So this book. One, thank you for picking a short book. Neil Ferguson had me do War and Peace. It kept me up many nights. Marvelous book, like all Russian literature, kind of difficult at times to follow, weird names and structures. What's the book about? So you mentioned 1984 here. A lot of people are familiar with dystopic fiction, 1984, Brave New World. But before those were ever dreamed of, We was the first dystopic novel. And so it's set 500 years in the future in a society that is completely mechanized, has destroyed any concept of the individual, and has everybody operating as cogs in a machine. And how this is designed, the novel explains, this is designed for the utmost happiness and peacefulness in society. And so as you might imagine, as the book goes through the journals of one of the cogs, one of the parts of the machine, things break down when outside influences start to help people see themselves as individuals. So the protagonist, D-503, he is building the integral. This is going to bring the dystopia of the world state, which is demarcated by a green wall, to the entire cosmos. And it's going to enslave basically the whole cosmos, but it will be for their own happiness. He has these tickets for weird sex stuff. Basically all sex is regulated by the state. And one of the rules is any of the numbers, that is to say the people, have the right to have sex with anyone really that they want. But it's all heavily regulated. And so he's got this girlfriend who's really sweet and kind of chubby, and he seems to like her, but he's not madly in love with her. That's O-9. And they have a nice little love affair. But then he meets I-330. And I-330 is a hot tramp, to put it bluntly. She smokes, she drinks, she tells jokes. She tells jokes. She in a way enslaves him with her feminine wiles. And she is a rebel. She's part of the MEPI organization that seeks to subvert the world state. And he goes along with this for a while, but eventually he is brought in by the big brother character, the autocrat of the world state. And he recognizes that he might be duped. That maybe she was actually, it was a honeypot. Maybe she was targeting him because he's the engineer working on the rocket ship that's going to bring the totalitarianism to the whole cosmos. And he undergoes an operation, which is to remove his imagination. The sickness that is set in, which is described as his developing a soul, he's got to get rid of it. He has to excise it. And in the end, the rebels are caught. The trollop is tortured and killed. And he's rooting for the state to win in the end. It is, in a way, a similar ending, though maybe more satisfying than you would get in 1984, which is, you know, at the end, he's essentially lobotomized and he doesn't know or care about the distinction between truth and falsehood. And he's rooting. And that's the end of the story, which is told in these journal entries. Okay. Why we? So he explains why he calls it we in his own writings. So he's building this spaceship that's going to take this beautiful society they've created and share it with other planets. Whatever advanced life forms they find, they're going to teach this mechanized way of existing with everybody. And because there's no individual, he's explaining that we're all a we. We all think the same thing. We look the same. The whole point is like everyone shaves their heads. They wear uniforms. Nobody is supposed to look different from anyone else. Their sacred text is a timetable of at this hour we do this, at this hour we do this. They haven't yet extirpated the two or so hours of private time that they have, but they're going to work it out. They're going to find the perfect, rational, mathematically satisfactory way to use those hours eventually, too. But yeah, everything is scheduled. The work is scheduled. The eating is scheduled. The recreation is scheduled. The education is scheduled. And he keeps on referencing how the greatest of the ancients is this guy Taylor, the very first management consultant who was very popular in the Soviet Union or the pre-Soviet Union in the Russian revolutionary times because he had figured out how to treat management of labor as like an actual science, that you could maximize the efficiency of what was going on. And he's like, that was a great ancient. The poets, the philosophers, they were just a jumbled mess. The composers, they all made music that sounded so chaotic relative to what we do, which is this perfect mathematical musical compositions. And in fact, I think his first time that he sees I-330, this woman who captures his imagination, she's playing piano. And it stirs something in him. And it's the beginnings of his imagination and his creativity. Even on the music point, he says, back in the olden days, people would just spend all this time, all this energy to come up with some composition. But now, we can do it in a heartbeat. The machines can just make it and it's perfect and it's wonderful. And it is eerie reading that a hundred years after it was written, because that is how people talk about AI. Someday, oh, you just type in a prompt, you're going to spit out something that's better than Beethoven. So the first time I read this book, I was in college. And you're thinking about things differently at that point. Rereading it before now, all I could think about was AI, which wasn't even something that seemed relevant to that. But yeah, he talks a lot about separating humans from nature. So one of the things they've done, there was a war that destroyed all but two-tenths of 1% of the human population. And they figured they solved hunger. So- It turns out when you get rid of most people, you solve hunger. Yeah, they did it. They did it the old-fashioned Russian way of solving hunger by killing the mouse. And they have nature separated from their world by that green wall. Everything outside the green wall is nature. There are apparently birds and animals and- Hairy people. Growing things. But inside, there's no natural component. They've figured out how to solve weather so that it doesn't impact them negatively. And it's just interesting to think about how nature relates to humans and how important it is to our flourishing. There were two dystopian novels that we've covered on this show that come to mind, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. And they take opposite approaches. Orwell says that the totalitarian regime is going to be very oppressive and it's going to keep pleasure away from you. And Huxley says you're going to be saturated with pleasure and drugs and sex all the time. And our friend Mr. Zamyatin seems to cut a middle ground where nicotine is forbidden. Can you imagine? Horrifying dystopia. Where alcohol is forbidden, ditto. But sex is promiscuous and encouraged, albeit regulated. An acknowledgment may be that booze and drugs and stuff, that's really extrinsic to our nature. People like them, but it's not. Whereas sex is really part of our nature. And so any serious totalitarian system is going to make sense of that. Any perfectly rationalist utopia is going to have to account for that in some way. And the way they account for it is they assign you a polycule on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the rest of the time, you're sitting by yourself. But it's so interesting how it works out there. We all know that privacy is so important to your understanding of yourself. There are no private children. There's no bond between mother and child that is strictly forbidden. There are also no bonds between sexual partners because of the way they've arranged it so that it's just machines taking care of themselves. Once he develops feelings, that's when things become problematic for that relationship. But I was thinking, when I was rereading at this time, Frederick Douglass, when he's talking about how dehumanizing the life of a slave was, one of the things that just struck me so much was how he talked about how he was kept from his mother and how he had basically no relationship with her at some point. But he was nursed by someone else. His mother played no role. And how important that is to oppression of people, to not let them have little privacies. And that begins with that mother-child bond, but then it continues through relationships. It makes me think back to the BLM movement. I remember when that erupted, going to the BLM website, and they had a list of what they believed in. And one of the first things they said that they believed in was the destruction of the family unit. In fact, I have the line here. This is in the Penguin edition, 185. You have our protagonist saying, if only I had a mother the way the ancients had. I mean my own mother. And if for her, I could be not the builder of the integral and not number D503 and not a molecule of one state, but just a piece of humanity, a piece of her own self, trampled, crushed, outcast. And suppose I do the nailing or they nail me. Maybe that's all the same, but she would hear me and she would hear what no one else hears. And her old lips, her old wrinkled lips of the whole novel, that line really struck me, really resonated with me. I thought, my goodness, we're living in an age today where people will cry out and are crying out, in fact, to say, well, if only I had a mother the way the ancients had. There's so much application here. He's saying this in the context, too, of having gone through these 40 chapters. He's writing these epistles to these foreigners about the beauty of the system that he lives in. And then, of course, 10 chapters in, he starts realizing he has an imagination, he has a soul, and it's deeply disturbing to him. And he's tortured by this. He wants an escape from these feelings, but he also doesn't want an escape from them. And in the context where he's talking about this, they have come up with a solution to the sickness of having an imagination or being an individual, which is like a frontal lobotomy to remove that portion of your brain so that you won't be subjected to these torturous thoughts. And he's wanting that. He wants to be relieved of all this pressure that comes with freedom, and he wants someone else to exert some kind of authority. And in the absence of a loving, functional family, you do seek out these authoritarian situations. And I think that's why, so often, totalitarian systems work to destroy the family, because they know that they can so much more easily control you if you don't have a loving family. Yes, that's right. There's a part that really struck me, too. I think it's I-330 who says this, you know, the little vixen who's leading him into the rebel alliance. They're referring to Mephi. It's the name of the rebel alliance. And he says, Mephi, it's an old name. It's one who, you remember there on the stone, there was an image of youth. Oh, no. Look, there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful tranquility, to happy equilibrium. The other leads to the disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement, the sort of thing that's bothering him in his imagination and soul. Our, or rather, your ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy as they worshipped God. But we, anti-Christians, we, and then there's a knock at the door. And this raises one's eyebrows because she, who is a, the representative of the rebels trying to overthrow the tyranny, she's saying, we're anti-Christians. You guys come from Christianity. Your totalitarian state is actually a derivation of Christianity, which I think is going to strike readers as very shocking. We think of Christianity as the opposition to tyranny. But here, the rebel, in a book written by a former Bolshevik in the context of 1920s Russia, is saying, no, actually, the tyranny is coming out of Christianity and the independence and the freedom, that's in opposition maybe to modern rationalism, but also to Christianity, which I don't like very much. I didn't like that. I didn't like that line either. It's kind of unfortunate. I mean, Zamyatin was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He very much had a problem with organized religion that he was brought up with. He apparently had a rough childhood too and was very lonely. And that definitely comes out in the book, his opposition to organized religion. There aren't a ton of references to the before times, but there are, you know, he references Adam and Eve and this perfection in the Garden of Eden and how stupid Adam and Eve were to choose freedom. And yeah, it's a definite part of this book and reflects his own views on religion. When I'm finally clued into the fact that the Rebel Alliance is anti-Christian in their own words, now I say, hold on, now I need to approach the book a little differently. I need a more of a contrarian perspective. It's like I read Fahrenheit 451. And I have to tell you, when he talked about burning Walt Whitman, I sympathized a little bit, but that's a conversation for another time. And so I thought, okay, if the rebels are anti-Christian, well, what is this woman doing? She is seducing him. She's using him because he's useful to her. He's the engineer, you know, working on the project that she wants to take over. And then there's a curious little line here, says when she's kind of torturing him, seducing him, luring him in, he doesn't know what to do. They're in this ancient house, you know, there's one house in the world state that, you know, is like the way things used to be with an old lady out there. Says, why did you torture me? Why didn't you come? Why did you send your tickets? Why did you make me? But maybe I had to test you. Maybe I had to find out whether you'd do everything I wanted, that you were completely mine. Yes, completely. And it's kind of, you know, it's a little kinky. I don't know, you get this view of her as like some kind of dominatrix or something, you know, smoking cigarettes and being mean to him. And it also shows you the subtlety of the conversation about freedom here. Because, and I think we especially see this in our own time, freedom sounds all nice in the abstract, but there is a kind of freedom that does enslave. Not true liberty, but licentiousness. The notion that if freedom is just doing whatever you want to do and pursuing your base's passions, you're going to end up a slave. So yeah, maybe D-503 doesn't want to end up a slave to the benefactor autocrat of the totalitarian state. But is it really any better to be a slave of this, you know, terrifying whore? So this was another one of those things that upon rereading, it hits you differently. When you're in college and you read this book, you're thinking, oh yeah, we need to do whatever we can to fight against totalitarian systems wherever we encounter them. Rereading it more recently, I was thinking it's really more about balance and how prudent people figure out how to balance freedom and systems that are good for organizing people. Yes. I'm glad sometimes when the filming is about to happen, I've got 20 pages left. I'm going to skim the 20 pages. I'm really glad that I paid attention to the last pages because I'm dog-earing almost every single page. D-503 is called in to the benefactories. He gets, you know, he gets a meeting with Stalin and here is what the benefactor says as he's luring him in with his kind of logical arguments. He says, if this means you agree with me, then let's talk like grown-ups after the children have gone to bed holding nothing back. I ask this question, what is it that people beg for, dream about, torment themselves for from the time they leave swaddling clothes? They want someone to tell them once and for all what happiness is. Sure, Aristotle tells us that. We've known this forever. And then to bind them to that happiness with a chain. What is it that we're doing right now? If not that, the ancient dream of paradise. Remember in paradise, they've lost all knowledge of desires, pity, love. They are blessed with their imagination surgically removed. The only reason why they are blessed, angels, the slaves of God. Okay. And now at the very moment when we've achieved this dream, when we have seized it like this, when all that remained was to dress the kill and divide it into portions, at this very moment, you are going to ruin everything. And when you hear his description of paradise, he's not so far off the mark, is it? In paradise, it's not like we're all going to be smoking cigs and drinking and having sex with I-330. We're going to be singing the Sanctus in choirs, looking at the beatific vision. We will be in a certain sense slaves to God. So it's interesting here how they're talking about children, how they have imagination. And I keep thinking also about how in our culture, the way that a lot of parents give children just complete freedom. And how when you're young, in fact, you shouldn't have complete freedom. You do need boundaries on your world. You shouldn't have that much roaming ability. As you age and as you're able to handle life and make your own decisions and assess risk better, then you get more freedom that comes with it. This system seems to treat people as just ever children who never develop. And that's kind of what I took out of that situation there. But we also seem to have inverted it ourselves, where we give complete freedom to young people, and then we get more controlling as they grow older, again, through our technological systems, where we are suppressing what people can say, policing the contours of their debate. But back to your point about the way he presents heaven as having no freedom. And it struck me as weird because he was raised Eastern Orthodox, that he had such a childish conception of what heaven is. And it was seemed like so limited to human understanding in a way that usually the Eastern Orthodox are much better at having like a mystical. And it seemed just like he didn't understand at all the complexity of what it means to be a full human or what bondage of the will means on earth. Yes, of course. Because look, it sounds well and good if I say, Michael, you have the freedom to go do a bunch of crack and go to a brothel and drunk drive a car down the highway or something. It sounds like I have a lot of freedom, but not really. I'm actually a slave to my passions and appetites. Whereas sitting, not even with a book, if I just sit in a chair and pray, so contemplate God, if I have the discipline of will to do that, it's, yes, it's the highest freedom you can imagine on earth. What role does the fact that this guy comes out of the Bolshevik revolution play in his conception of freedom and revolution? So it's, this is to me so interesting about his background that he was involved in revolutionary efforts in 1905, gets arrested, gets exiled, is a total Bolshevik and follower of Lenin, and then writes this book, which predicts, because again, this is being written in 1921, predicts what's going to happen with the totalitarian system that ends up happening in the Soviet Union, in Russia. And it's weird to see that someone who was a participant in this could so easily see the downsides of it. I'll tell you how it happens. You've just made it dawn on me. It's because he's a neocon. He's a neocon, because the neocons in America, they were Trotskyites. I'm talking about the original. They were Trotskyites who got mugged by reality. And so they became kind of conservative, but they still had a little bit of that revolutionary fervor in them. You know, they liked the idea of toppling regimes and everything. I think it's kind of like him. He realized that the Bolshevik revolution didn't work at all, but he still had that inclination. Very prominent passage when he's speaking to, he being D-503, is speaking to I-330. And she says, my dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more. You're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me. Tell me the final number. What? I don't understand. What final number? You know, the last one, the top, the absolute biggest. But I-330, that's stupid. Since the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final one? And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite. The last one, that's for children. Infinity frightens children. And it's essential that children get a good night's sleep. I had not thought about this at all. And I love this. Like you think about what's happening in the left in America, right? They really love the revolution that they accomplished in the 1960s. And they want to have it keep happening and happening and happening. Like there will never be an end. No. Because they have a hunger to have that feeling that they or their parents had. Yes. In the 1960s. Everything's the new civil rights movement. We're always on the dawn of the age of Aquarius. And it can, it sometimes is farcical and it sometimes is tragic to see this impulse play out. When I read that, I thought, you know, I already, look, I-330, she's kind of sexy and she kind of, you know, she's alluring, but you don't want to take her home to mom. And when I read that, I said, I don't want anything to do with it. This is the kind of woman who ruins people's lives. Because reading this, especially as a Christian, as a conservative, I don't like revolution. I'm basically the opinion that all change is bad and progress is perverse. Okay, but revolution I don't really like. And I'm with Thomas Aquinas on this. I think that bad leaders are sent to us to chastise us. And, you know, I'm with St. Paul. Leadership is anointed by God. And St. Thomas says there might be a role for revolution, but it has to be carried out in an orderly way, not these anarcho-terrorists. So you're telling us that you would not have supported the American revolution. Well, I was just coming to that because the American revolution was different from the French revolution. French revolution was a bunch of complete lunatics, destroying society, glopping off people's heads, taking over cathedrals and statues. And the American revolution was a little different. It wasn't upending the society. It was in the understanding of Edmund Burke, member of parliament at the time in the UK. It was the Americans asserting their rights as Englishmen. And it was really conducted in a way that seems to be more in accord with the Christian understanding, with Thomas Aquinas, where it was through subsidiarity. It was elites who were really running it. You know, the Continental Congress was a bunch of like rich, powerful people who were saying, no, we're sorry, we're doing something new now. And so that's my defense of the American revolution is a little bit different. It ain't what I-330 is doing. So one of the things that I think is great about reading this book is to think about it less in terms of completely totalitarian government systems, and more about how we inoculate our own minds against groupthink and mob hysteria. And so there is value in thinking through when everyone is freaking out about a given movement or a certain approach, a way of thinking, of making sure you're protecting your own ability to rebel against that groupthink. And we live in such a system. I mean, we love to think of America as being such a free country, and in many ways it is, but we can still get carried away by these post-totalitarian waves of hysteria where everybody says you have to think about things a certain way. You have to train your mind to resist that and not get bullied into agreeing with what everybody else says. I think of this also in association with Václav Havel's Green Grocer essay, The Power of the Powerless. And he says, you know, in that, that like, it's not just communist systems. It's not just overtly totalitarian systems where you might be pressured into conformity that is not good for you or for your neighbors. And so we have to think about that too, about how we resist, and it's something you have to practice. Yes, because think of, one, by the time he gets his lobotomy, his imagination surgery, he wants it. He wants to get rid of his imagination. This isn't, you know, he's not being strapped down to a gurney exactly. And then you think of all these parallels with our modern, liberal, enlightened society. How many people, especially women, but men too, lobotomize themselves every day with a fistful of psychiatric drugs? Or even more simply, like, there was a period of time where social media would launch these campaigns where you were supposed to show solidarity with other people. The square. You have to post the square. The blackout square, or like putting rainbows on things, and everybody's like, I must signal that I am no threat to the one state. I have to do this right now, and they do it without any, they just have not put any thought into it at all. I remember when everyone was posting the rainbow square. It was about gay marriage, I guess. I posted, it was the rainbow, but it was with the leprechaun from Lucky Charms in it too. And I said, am I doing this right? You know, and people were very angry, because you could even post, if you were in any way, even joking about the phenomenon of every, everybody, you know, all of a sudden pledging fealty to this state religion. Oh, you were an enemy. You were an enemy. And we, again, think about like perfecting happiness. At first, it's a rainbow flag. And by the way, I love the rainbows. This has always kind of made me sad that this became such a politicized symbol. But then that wasn't sufficient. Then you had to add aspects of transsexuality into the rainbow flag. But it seems very similar to what they're doing here. Every year, they have to perfect and control more and more and add to the system of oppression. Then what about, obviously, it's very tempting to read this as just, you know, liberalism versus totalitarianism. Or, you know, probably the way to read it in the 20th century is liberal Western democracy versus communist tyranny. But what about the classical conservative critique of this, which is, yeah, we do strive for happiness. And Aristotle tells us what is happiness, eudaimonia, it's excellent rational activity in accord with virtue. And there is a kind of reason to its rational activity. This is a state based on rationality. In fact, a lot of the ideas of this totalitarian state come, maybe not from Aristotle, but from Plato. The notion that, you know, parents shouldn't raise their own kids. I mean, this is a side plot where the state assigned paramour 09, she feels jilted because now he's with the trollop. But all she wants, she says, okay, you can leave me forever. Please impregnate me. I'm not considered physically worthy to have a child and I really just want a child. And he does it. He impregnates her. And the state's going to take the kid and it's good. And he ends up smuggling her out of the state. But that desire, you know, that kind of natural desire is there. Is there a critique of this kind of world that's not quite liberal? Certainly. Actually, when you were talking about 090, as she is in my translation, there are lots of feminist critiques of her character because how ridiculous that he writes only two women into this story and one of them, all she wants is to have a baby. But of course there are conservative critiques of this. This is in some ways a juvenile piece of work, a way of thinking about the oppression of systems without thinking about the balance that needs to be in play for ordered society with a certain level of liberty for people and how to practice that liberty in the best possible way. You know, We the Living by Ayn Rand is another book that clearly seems inspired by this. And I always think about how people joke that there are no children in Ayn Rand novels. I remember one libertarian said some could argue there are no adults in Ayn Rand novels either. But again, it almost seems like this perpetual adolescence of thinking in the way this is written to not understand the challenge of having a society that flourishes and is best for people and how there might be constraints in play. Yes. The other aspect that is a little implausible, I think, about Ayn Rand is she always has an Ayn Rand character and all the men want to sleep with her. Like all the really rich giga chads just are desperate to sleep with Ayn Rand. That's a little self-serving. I don't know. That reminds me again of the I-330 versus O-90. So all the women and all the men are supposed to be identical. Yes. They're not supposed to be individuals in any way. And one of the ways you can tell that he starts to have an imagination is that he describes O-90. He thinks that she is well-named or numbered because she's so plump and round and she has round features. And I-330 is more independent and he feels that the number or cipher better represents her. Or there are characters that are kind of snibbly and serpentine and are associated with the letter S. But he starts seeing that they are, in fact, individuals even as the state has tried to remove all of them. And there is one more woman that we forgot. She's really a side character. You. There's you who's this kind of matronly character. She's a little bit older. She's protective of D-503. But there's clearly some jealousy going on with his fascination with the other women. And there's one actually hilarious scene where they end up in a room and the plot is rushing to the end. And there's this misunderstanding and she thinks he wants to sleep with her because he closes the blinds. And he wants to kill her. Yes. She strips off all her clothes and there's this really kind of grotesque description of her body. You can read it yourself as a family show. But it's kind of things are sagging everywhere. And he bursts out laughing. He says, you know, maybe I can murder with a laugh. I think that's the line, right? I murdered with a laugh. So also interesting is how the way that the state is set up, everything is glass. You can see into everybody's work and home life because it's glass. But they do lower the curtains when they're redeeming their pink tickets. And even that, I was thinking through how a few years ago during the Me Too craze, there were these consent apps and how mechanized everything had become even for illicit sexual relations. But that they closed the curtains, I find so interesting. And how so often now you go into a work environment and there used to be these offices with actual doors you could close. And now everything is glass. I know, I hate it. Yeah, but it's, and it's probably a natural result of this. I mean, partly it's lighting, partly it's to make things feel more open. And partly it's because they want to make sure nobody's doing anything inappropriate. That's no, that is my office, all of our offices, maybe I'm telling too many tales out of school, but all of our offices are glass because we don't want anyone to be able to make a false accusation that anyone was harassed or anything like that. So it's really out of self-protection. I hate the fact that people can look in at me like I'm in a fishbowl, but you know, you never know it's a bad actor. Because zones of privacy are actually important, like moments of solitude are important for people to develop their thoughts, to develop relationships and shows how sin or violations of proper norms can ruin things for everybody. Yes, that's the Me Too aspect. I hadn't, I mean, it was satirized on South Park when the PC principal went around with the consent forms at the frat. Okay, you all get your consent forms in, but that did happen for just like promiscuous hookups. It's very eerie how many of these predictions came true. So how does it all end? So, you know, it has a very dark ending, as you already said. He gets his lobotomy and he feels much better that he doesn't have this wild imagination. He betrays everybody in the resistance movement and his former lover is killed. And it's a, you know, it's a very sad ending in one way. And then also there's that hopeful ending, particularly related to O-90 and her pregnancy. So he starts to feel weird feelings of even care for her, which he'd never really felt. And she desperately wants to be able to stay united to her child, which would not be allowed if she stays within the walls. And so he helps her escape to this outside zone that is so free and natural that the humans have begun to grow hair on their bodies. That's how free and outside of state control they are, which is kind of weird and funny. But there's a hopefulness about it, that there is this future, that the state has been breached, that the wall has been breached, that they will not be able to completely control and terrorize their people through this authoritarian system. And so it's dark, but with a glimmer of hope. Yes, because that's an aspect of the fall too. You know, these dystopias derived because of original sin. But an aspect of the fall is, you know, even the benefactor autocrat, even he is imperfect. You know, these systems don't really work because they're part of humanity too. However, there might be those fleeting remnant who go out and they want to take care of their kids and they want to live in a way that it's in accord with reality and natural law. Most people are probably just going to go along with it. And maybe the final resonance to modern times, I am reminded of COVID. You know, Americans talked a real good game. You come for our rights, you better come scream and I got 300 guns and my porch and a big Mack truck and I'm gonna, I'm standing up for my rights. And COVID hit and they locked the country down. 99% of people rolled over. So I don't actually think it was 99% of people. And I think there's something about this book that relates to that, which is like you, I'm thinking there is no way that the America I know will tolerate this level of repression just because, you know, we don't listen to the CDC about whether to eat cookie dough that hasn't been baked. Why would we listen to them about shutting down our entire lives and destroying years of our productivity and killing our businesses and keeping us from worshiping? And then to see it happen was horrifying. But I think part of the way that they controlled things was by making people feel that they were alone when they were not alone. They controlled debate. They horrifically censored any expression of skepticism about what they were doing. They would say, you are not allowed to share this information on public channels, on social media, if you disagree with the CDC, which was horrible and also kept people from understanding just how many people didn't agree with them. We kind of later realized, oh, there were far more of us than we realized. We felt alone because everything we were being fed reinforced the narrative of the one state. And so again, why books like this can help you resist that and think through whether you're getting accurate information or whether authoritarian systems are keeping you from knowing, for instance, the perspectives of your colleagues. Like remember, oh, I love this part. They have elections each year. They have an election to re-institute the great benefactor as the leader of them. And he talks so glowingly about how this is all public voting. He's like, can you believe they used to vote in private? And we don't have any need to do that. We all just proudly affirm how much we love this guy. And he says, it's the best day of the year. It's a celebration. He says it's like their Easter, their highest holy day. And so we get to this great day, and not only does I-330 not vote to affirm the benefactor, but in fact, there are a ton of people. And it's so disorienting to him to realize that there's this huge resistance movement. And the power that they had was in part by making people think that nobody would ever deviate, realizing that in fact, a huge percentage do. That's what helps topple the system or begin to potentially topple the system. And one way you can plug yourself in to all of those people who want to resist the total state is by reading this book with a long dead Russian writer who published it actually in New York first, even before it went out in Russia. The book is We. My guest is Mollie Hemingway. Mollie, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. We will see you next time on The Book Club. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on PragerU. PragerU is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.