meowzician
Takes the Internet Very Seriously
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 4w5
I wasn’t sure which forum to put this. Although we are talking about an author, the Entertainment forum seemed too fun and lighthearted for thread this dark. I also thought about Relationships and Sociology, but that forum is heavy on relationships and light on sociology. I finally settled on the connection that ethics often has to Religion. And so, here we are.
For those unfamiliar with this greatest of authors, he was very likely fellow INFJ (INFP is also a possibility), and hence my writing this essay. I think of myself as a very good person: living a life of virtue, kindness and compassion and justice, is right at the top of my list of musts.
But sometimes I look within myself and see a capacity for evil that is just downright scary. If I ever decided to harm someone, the damage would be deep. This is in so many ways my relentless reflection on “Where are my weak spots? What is there in my thoughts and in my heart that has the potential to be twisted?”
Dostoyevsky not only had great intuition into the suffering of the world, and the evil that inflicts it, but he assaults the reader with it, painting detailed visceral descriptions not only of the sort of intense suffering that people try to avoid thinking about, but also about evil and how the evil person convinces themselves that they are good.
For Dostoyevsky it doesn’t cut it to say that people do evil things because they are evil, or hateful things because they are haters. Instead, he looks deep into the heart of those who are evil and shows us the chilling reality that he finds there.
He is known for his great compassion, believing that compassion was the core of his Russian Orthodox version of Christianity.
His books are so difficult to read—I suspect his audience is largely made up only of college students forced to read his novels and people with such a strong desire to contemplate what makes people tick that they are willing to endure the pain of reading his books.
But there is a moral dilemma for all of us who love Dostoyevsky. When he was younger, he championed the cause of Jews for all the reasons that a compassionate person would, arguing for Jews to be given equal rights. Yet in his later years he became viciously antisemitic.
He denied that he was an antisemite, ironically filling his objections with the very sort of antisemitic comments that shock people—he was completely deaf to what was coming out of his mouth, lacking any insight whatsoever.
It is such a disturbing turn that no one wants to talk about it. People are told about it, of course, but who has tried to explain it?
How? How could that possibly happen? How could someone so compassionate, the greatest of advocates for the oppressed and dispossessed, turn on a dime and embrace hate and evil? For those who are compassionate, it’s an extremely scary question, and a warning that I am certainly taking to heart.
The superficial explanation is that as Dostoyevsky became increasingly contemplative of foreign policy, he singled out Disraeli (the Jewish prime minister of the UK who allowed the Turks to commit unthinkable atrocities) as the object of his vitriol, and generalized that anger to all Jews.
To me, that is just begging the question. It DESCRIBES the antisemitism. It doesn’t explain its evolution. It doesn’t answer our question.
I don’t think I have the complete answer either. But I do have at least the beginnings of an idea, beginning with confirmation bias, that plague of plagues in human thinking. As the protagonist of Notes from the Underground observes: “Man is so fond of systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to deny the truth intentionally; he is ready to deny what he can see and hear just to justify his logic.”
The second flaw I see in his thinking is the all to common logical fallacy that we call the appeal to popularity: if everyone is saying the Jews are guilty, it must be true.
Don’t we see this all the time today? People create an echo chamber, reading only those articles and having only those friends who embrace their politics. And if all your friends are saying “It’s those Jews,” if you hear it from your news sources and the ICC and human rights organizations and see it all over social media, it becomes exceedingly difficult to resist.
I’m not excusing it. I’m pointing out the reality. I’m admitting that this logical fallacy is something that no human being is entirely free form, including me.
Make no mistake. His hatred was deep and frightening. In one essay, he reflects on how he thinks it would be if the demographics were reversed and the majority were Jews and the minority Russians: “Would they allow them to become their equal in rights?...Would they not turn them directly into slaves? Even worse: would they not strip them utterly bare? Would they not massacre them altogether, exterminate them completely, as they did more than once with alien peoples in times of old in their ancient history?”
So we return to our question. How could such compassion for humanity and such a deep hatred for Jews exist in the same heart and mind? How? How could he say something so frighteningly filled with hate and not even see it in himself? I fear that if I remain unable to answer this question I risk doing similar.
And this brings us to his greatest rationalization of all. In his mind there was a difference between hating a race simply because you just do, and hating them because of what they do. He has gone from “I have no hatred in my heart” to “I have no preconceived hatred in my heart.”
It is hatred disguised as virtue. And I see this kind of virtue signaling on the internet every day. I am DAILY assaulted verbally by people who think calling me a baby killer is the righteous thing to do. (OMG couldn’t they even come up with something original? Do they really have to resurrect the Blood Libel?) They pat themselves on the back because they are good people for doing so.
It is what in science is called generalizing from too small a sample. I was gang raped by men, so all men are not to be trusted. My brother was mugged by a Black, so Blacks are dangerous and violent. Epstein was a pedophile, so Jews are all pedophiles.
As INFJ’s we need to particularly cognizant of our potential for this. We are not linear thinkers. We see patterns. THIS is what happens when someone sees a pattern when no pattern exists. We are not immune from making mistakes. *I* am not immune.
What can I do to guard against this potential in myself? Here is what I think is a good checkpoint: am I willing to listen to, think about, and adjust my conclusions to evidence contrary to my thinking? If I find myself angrily tuning out data because it doesn’t fit my view, that’s a clear sign that I have entered the danger zone. Watch for the anger! It indicates we are experiencing something threatening.
And so we have come full circle: confirmation bias. No one spots confirmation bias in themselves unless they spend a lot of time reflecting and possess the capacity to admit their own fallibility. And that, AT LAST, is something very good that we INFJ’s are good at.
For those unfamiliar with this greatest of authors, he was very likely fellow INFJ (INFP is also a possibility), and hence my writing this essay. I think of myself as a very good person: living a life of virtue, kindness and compassion and justice, is right at the top of my list of musts.
But sometimes I look within myself and see a capacity for evil that is just downright scary. If I ever decided to harm someone, the damage would be deep. This is in so many ways my relentless reflection on “Where are my weak spots? What is there in my thoughts and in my heart that has the potential to be twisted?”
Dostoyevsky not only had great intuition into the suffering of the world, and the evil that inflicts it, but he assaults the reader with it, painting detailed visceral descriptions not only of the sort of intense suffering that people try to avoid thinking about, but also about evil and how the evil person convinces themselves that they are good.
For Dostoyevsky it doesn’t cut it to say that people do evil things because they are evil, or hateful things because they are haters. Instead, he looks deep into the heart of those who are evil and shows us the chilling reality that he finds there.
He is known for his great compassion, believing that compassion was the core of his Russian Orthodox version of Christianity.
His books are so difficult to read—I suspect his audience is largely made up only of college students forced to read his novels and people with such a strong desire to contemplate what makes people tick that they are willing to endure the pain of reading his books.
But there is a moral dilemma for all of us who love Dostoyevsky. When he was younger, he championed the cause of Jews for all the reasons that a compassionate person would, arguing for Jews to be given equal rights. Yet in his later years he became viciously antisemitic.
He denied that he was an antisemite, ironically filling his objections with the very sort of antisemitic comments that shock people—he was completely deaf to what was coming out of his mouth, lacking any insight whatsoever.
It is such a disturbing turn that no one wants to talk about it. People are told about it, of course, but who has tried to explain it?
How? How could that possibly happen? How could someone so compassionate, the greatest of advocates for the oppressed and dispossessed, turn on a dime and embrace hate and evil? For those who are compassionate, it’s an extremely scary question, and a warning that I am certainly taking to heart.
The superficial explanation is that as Dostoyevsky became increasingly contemplative of foreign policy, he singled out Disraeli (the Jewish prime minister of the UK who allowed the Turks to commit unthinkable atrocities) as the object of his vitriol, and generalized that anger to all Jews.
To me, that is just begging the question. It DESCRIBES the antisemitism. It doesn’t explain its evolution. It doesn’t answer our question.
I don’t think I have the complete answer either. But I do have at least the beginnings of an idea, beginning with confirmation bias, that plague of plagues in human thinking. As the protagonist of Notes from the Underground observes: “Man is so fond of systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to deny the truth intentionally; he is ready to deny what he can see and hear just to justify his logic.”
The second flaw I see in his thinking is the all to common logical fallacy that we call the appeal to popularity: if everyone is saying the Jews are guilty, it must be true.
Don’t we see this all the time today? People create an echo chamber, reading only those articles and having only those friends who embrace their politics. And if all your friends are saying “It’s those Jews,” if you hear it from your news sources and the ICC and human rights organizations and see it all over social media, it becomes exceedingly difficult to resist.
I’m not excusing it. I’m pointing out the reality. I’m admitting that this logical fallacy is something that no human being is entirely free form, including me.
Make no mistake. His hatred was deep and frightening. In one essay, he reflects on how he thinks it would be if the demographics were reversed and the majority were Jews and the minority Russians: “Would they allow them to become their equal in rights?...Would they not turn them directly into slaves? Even worse: would they not strip them utterly bare? Would they not massacre them altogether, exterminate them completely, as they did more than once with alien peoples in times of old in their ancient history?”
So we return to our question. How could such compassion for humanity and such a deep hatred for Jews exist in the same heart and mind? How? How could he say something so frighteningly filled with hate and not even see it in himself? I fear that if I remain unable to answer this question I risk doing similar.
And this brings us to his greatest rationalization of all. In his mind there was a difference between hating a race simply because you just do, and hating them because of what they do. He has gone from “I have no hatred in my heart” to “I have no preconceived hatred in my heart.”
It is hatred disguised as virtue. And I see this kind of virtue signaling on the internet every day. I am DAILY assaulted verbally by people who think calling me a baby killer is the righteous thing to do. (OMG couldn’t they even come up with something original? Do they really have to resurrect the Blood Libel?) They pat themselves on the back because they are good people for doing so.
It is what in science is called generalizing from too small a sample. I was gang raped by men, so all men are not to be trusted. My brother was mugged by a Black, so Blacks are dangerous and violent. Epstein was a pedophile, so Jews are all pedophiles.
As INFJ’s we need to particularly cognizant of our potential for this. We are not linear thinkers. We see patterns. THIS is what happens when someone sees a pattern when no pattern exists. We are not immune from making mistakes. *I* am not immune.
What can I do to guard against this potential in myself? Here is what I think is a good checkpoint: am I willing to listen to, think about, and adjust my conclusions to evidence contrary to my thinking? If I find myself angrily tuning out data because it doesn’t fit my view, that’s a clear sign that I have entered the danger zone. Watch for the anger! It indicates we are experiencing something threatening.
And so we have come full circle: confirmation bias. No one spots confirmation bias in themselves unless they spend a lot of time reflecting and possess the capacity to admit their own fallibility. And that, AT LAST, is something very good that we INFJ’s are good at.
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