My Actifit Report Card: March 4 2022
Today has a little bit of bad news, because I’m feeling kind of under the weather again. I don’t know if I managed to stress something out by having more physical activity recently, if I’m just maybe the lucky recipient of some passing thing, or if I’ve just been pushing myself too hard to hit my work goals this week, but I haven’t been feeling great.
Long story short, that’s why I have so little physical activity today, because I’m just not feeling like I should be up and moving about after my previous issues.
That’s annoying, because one part of things is that rest can have a paradoxical effect. If I sit around, the joints in my legs get really unhappy. I don’t know why; it could be a consequence of a massive growth spurt I had as a kid, or maybe this is just something that happens to everyone that I’m very conscious of.
It’s not like they go out or anything, and the solution is just to get more exercise until they start working normally again, but it’s best if I can make as much of an effort to stay on my feet as possible.
Writing-wise, I’ve been in a bit of a slump. I’m just tired right now, which makes sense given how hard I’ve been burning the candle to get Consoles and Controllers, two podcast episodes (posted a new one today), and all my other stuff done.
Unfortunately, I’m not really great at giving myself a vacation, especially when I’ve got so much project stuff left to do.
One upside is that I’ve actually had the most success as far as getting feedback about my work and it being well-received as I’ve had at any point so far in my writing/game stuff, though since I haven’t had as much luck with the freelancing side of things that’s not exactly a massive win financially.
I’ve been listening to Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin again, which is interesting. It’s a lot of stuff, but that’s what makes it so worth returning to, especially as you get more of a context for the events around his life.
It’s interesting to see how such a person got into a position of power, which he obviously used for great evil. However, the more I think about Stalin the more it’s clear to me that he wasn’t particularly wicked by nature.
That may sound controversial, especially from someone with an explicit burning hatred of communism, but I didn’t start out thinking that way so I had to get there through exploration.
The thing is that I think that people really do get a choice in how moral they want to be. You can choose whether to do the best possible thing, or choose to do less morally correct but more “efficient” things.
And it’s not clear to me that Stalin was strictly a pragmatic efficiency-first type. Compare him to lots of people and you can make a case that he’s not some unhinged psychopath, though there’s some paranoia and crazy on the fringes.
But paranoia and lunacy were the defining traits of the totalitarian 20th century. It’s not coincidental that the Soviet Union created a massive machine that valued them highly enough to create a supreme leader who embodied them, but it’s also not clear to me that Stalin didn’t earn his position through cleverness and decisions.
In fact, while he probably had to have some psychological traits we’d view as dysfunctional (many of which are common in our own leaders), he was almost certainly not so far off the charts that you’d be able to diagnose him as dysfunctional, at least before he was fully in charge.
Another scary thing that people don’t like to think about is that he may have actually been such a committed believer to the things that he said that he was capable of making decisions that killed millions of people without actually exercising the things we think of as moral failings.
Culture probably played some role in his life, since I get the impression that the Georgians and Russians of his day were not particularly renowned for holding Western liberal values, but obviously the culture itself doesn’t produce a Stalin.
Rather, it’s a mixture of a bunch of things that lead to what is perhaps one of the least moral people in history, but also someone who you could sit down and have lunch with without realizing you were sitting next to a mass-murderer.
Of course, I’m armchair psychoanalyzing someone who’s been dead for decades, but I think there’s a lesson to be had here.
You can be a monster without realizing it, and that’s a really bad place to be. An unconscious monster doesn’t guide its harms, it simply inflicts them on people around them. Now, do I think Stalin was fully unconscious?
No. I think he was an ideologue, and that’s a different thing. When you’re far enough into an ideology, you replace your values with the ones from what you’re orienting yourself toward, and that makes things very dangerous. If people in general don’t tend to be good, bear in mind that we still generally have some universal connections that bias us toward pro-social setups. They’re not perfect, and there’s a lot of dysfunction, but they’re at least not actively harmful.
When you add man-made ideas into the mix, you can actually have things that are overtly and explicitly negative that form the core of an ideology, and if you’re good enough at packaging it you might even be able to pass those off as good. For instance, it’s not rocket science to know that choosing a course of violence very rarely improves life for people. You might be able to play the winners and losers game, but that’s the sort of thinking that gives you Hitler if you go deep enough down that path and get a lot of people really into that.
And I think that’s really how we got Stalin. A bunch of people got around and read Marx and Rousseau and all those philosophers and came up with the idea that there was a problem with the bourgeoisie class consciousness. Now, I’m a person with humble family origins and a strong intellectual bent to my own life (which might be one reason why Stalin is such an interesting subject for me), so I’m not exactly comfortably bourgeois.
I sure don’t fit in at the opera, is what I’m saying, though I’m still a four-eyed neurotic so I can fit in with certain types of the intelligentsia.
What I’m trying to get at and failing is that there’s a good reason for tradition, and as much as we scorn it we’re only choosing what tradition we want, not to live truly without it.
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
