o5D1g5HjAtk.txt

Speaker 1:          00:01          See, in the Soviet Union when soldier knits and wrote about the Soviet Union and its pathologies, it, it sort of peaked in terms of it's pathological authoritarianism when it became illegal to complain that your life wasn't going well and you just think about how horrible that is say because, because you know, lots of times your life isn't going well. I mean, and I don't mean this in some casual way. I mean maybe, I don't know. Maybe you have diabetes in your year and Oh, maybe you're gonna lose your feet or something. It's really not. It's nothing trivial that's going on here. Something is not good or maybe it's economic or maybe you're unemployed or, and, but you see the idea and the Soviet Union was, well, we already have all the answers. Everything is perfect already. That's what totalitarians think. Well, if everything's perfect and you're suffering, then well, maybe there's something wrong with you because everything is perfect after all.

Speaker 1:          01:00          And if you're suffering, then what are you gonna come out and say, well, I'm suffering. It's like, well then your evidence that things aren't perfect, right? You're like a widow or an orphan in an old testament story, you know when the Kings got too high and mighty, then they wouldn't pay enough attention to the widows and the orphans and then the profit would come along and say, you know those widows and orphans a lot more important than you think they are, and if you don't pay attention to them property, then things are going to fall apart around you in a way that you just can't even imagine and so well then you're sort of like your own widow in your own orphan, but you don't get to say, Hey, look, you know things aren't perfect yet because I'm actually having still quite a rough time here.

Speaker 1:          01:37          You don't get to admit to your own suffering. If you can't admit to your own suffering, then you certainly see the suffering, especially the additional suffering. The excess suffering should be treated as evidence that you're not doing something quite right yet. It should be treated as evidence that you're wrong. There's something important that you're doing that's wrong. I understand how harsh that is and I'm not saying that everyone who is suffering is suffering because they're doing something in some simple way that's wrong. I was in an elevator once in a hospital. It was a very terrifying thing and this person got on who was just in an absolute state of shock, you know, I mean, it was really not good and I don't remember how this happened, but I engaged the person in conversation and they just said that they had just been diagnosed with what looked to be terminal cancer.

Speaker 1:          02:31          And uh, what was horrifying about it was that what they were doing was going over their life in the elevator trying to figure out what they had done in order to deserve such a fate. You know, they immediately taken it on themselves as a moral failing. And that's not what I'm saying. You can't come up to someone who has cancer and say, well, if you weren't such a bloody idiot throughout your whole life, you wouldn't have cancer. And believe me, that happens a lot more than you think. And people who have diseases like that get blamed for it. That's not what I'm saying. It's not like it's, it's, it's, it's a more generalized attitude. That is that if life isn't yet what it should be, then you have a response. You have a primary responsibility to do something about it and the place to start looking is to your own errors and to fix them. And that's. And that's, that's, that's a safe bet, man, because you're probably doing some things that you would, wouldn't have to be doing that if you fixed would make things better. So it's time to let go and to sacrifice who you are for who you could become.