Crime and Punishment

It's been a couple weeks since I put down Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I have been meaning to write more about what I got from the book but it’s hard to unpack it all; some of the ideas are still taking shape. There are a lot of avenues for analysis and someday I will explore them all because I will most certainly be reading it again. For now, these are the main ideas that I have gained from the book:

The human heart is as evil as it is good and the lack of awareness of one’s own malice is dangerous.

“The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness . . . it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle! So I killed the principle…”

When Raskolnikov (the protagonist) was trying to justify murdering the old woman, he tried to identify everything that was wrong with her: abusive, greedy, and harmful to the poor. He veiled his own malice and selfish interests behind his contempt of the old woman’s moral failings. Righteous indignation, if you will, and if not checked, a good excuse to forever locate ‘evil’ in the ‘other’ and never in ourselves.

An example of ignorance towards the malice in our own hearts is when we look at history. I think it’s unfortunate how some people, with certainty, think they could have been more ‘virtuous’ than their ancestors in any given time period. Everyone thinks they would be the ones freeing the slaves; neither buyer nor seller, not even the bystander! Or one of the good guys in Nazi Germany. The bias of hindsight can veil our own malice too.

Life is full of suffering. It's a truism that sometimes lacks appreciation when life is going smoothly.

In the truest sense of the word, I have not suffered, and I do not make this acknowledgement to aggrandize suffering but just as a matter of fact. I have been reminded what true suffering is and more importantly, how it forever lurks in the background. Acute awareness of this reality is necessary so as to prevent an egocentric reaction to its eventuality.

In the book, Raskolnikov is a destitute and it is in this destitute state that he tries to justify murdering the old pawnbroker and robbing her of only the amount he needed. The ego here was the failure to recognize that even someone of his intellect and stature could be impoverished, and that was life, no one is above its woes. The crime that Raskolnikov committed is not one many would, but the ego and potential lies in all of us. At the first sight of tragedy we say: Why me? Well, why not you?

When life doesn’t go our way it’s a human reaction to feel like a great injustice has been committed against us, but failure to temper the ego can convince us our victimhood is terminally unique. A possible consequence of this is a bargain with oneself which can go like this: my current tenancy in hell is unjustified, therefore anything I can do to claw out of this pit ought to be right, right? This statement might feel far removed from everyday life, but that's only because you have imagined hell to be grand. Hell is anything that can or has gone wrong; it is the recent earthquakes in Venezuela, not knowing where the rent money will come from or failing to pay a loan. The question then becomes: What is acceptable to escape whatever hell you have found yourself in? I believe whatever the answer is, the precondition is accepting that life is full of suffering and no situation is terminally unique.

The commitment to life cannot be rational because suffering is devoid of any rationality and that can only be overcome by an equally irrational commitment to finding the good.

There was a motor accident in Zimbabwe earlier this year where a husband lost his wife, and four kids. I remember talking to my dad after trying to figure out if it was possible to come up with a sufficient reason that could sustain this man’s life at his darkest hour. There are many examples like this, where the loss or pain is so grand it eclipses any sense of meaning or purpose that might have existed.

I have a friend who has experienced real suffering, and one day as he was telling me his life story I couldn’t believe how he was not bitter or just a mess really. He is the most put together guy I know and someone who refuses to surrender the agency of his life no matter what. I have nothing but admiration for him; he inspires me to be a better person. Therein lies the reason my father and I were trying to find, it rests in our admiration of people like my friend.

Our heroes are built on top of the archetype that refuses to be corrupted by the injustices of the world and that’s why they are popular. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the list goes on… We are drawn to this archetype like moths to a lamp because we know, even if the weight of life is soul crushing, we should shoulder it and keep moving forward; deep down we are aware, it is an ideal worth striving for.

A parting quote:

“Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ...How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment