Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 187.

Picking up from our book today

we're going to open up with

a series of vignettes that will

sort of set the table for where we're about to go

today. In accordance with the

law, the death sentence was announced to

Cincinnatus C. In a whisper. All rose,

exchanging smiles. The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted

for a moment, made the announcement, and slowly moved away

as though ungluing himself. Thereupon,

Cincinnatus was taken back to the fortress. The road wound around its

rocky base and disappeared under the gate like a snake in a crevice.

He was calm, however, he had to be supported during the journey

through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily like a child

who has just learned to walk, or as if he were about to

fall through, like a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water,

only to have a sudden doubt. But is this possible?

Then another vignette. Sometime later, Rodion the jailer

came in and offered to dance a waltz with him. Cincinnatus agreed.

They began to whirl. The keys on Rodion's leather belt jangled.

He smelled of sweat, tobacco, and garlic. He hummed, puffing into his red

beard, and his rusty joints creaked. He was not what he used to be, alas,

he now he was fat and short of breath. The dance

carried them into the corridor. Since Natus was much smaller than his

partner, Cincinnatus was light as a leaf. The wind of the waltz made the

tips of his long but thin mustache flutter, and his big limpid eyes looked

askance, as is always the case with timorous dancers.

He was indeed very small for a full grown man. Martha

used to say that his shoes were too tight for her. At the bend of

the corridor stood another guard, nameless with a rifle and wearing a dog like mask

with a gauze mouthpiece. They described a circle near him and glided back

into the cell. And now Cincinnatus regretted that the swoon's friendly embrace

had been so brief. And then another

piece here, and I quote Prisoner,

in this solemn hour, when all eyes are upon thee and thy judges are

jubilant, and thou art preparing for those involuntary bodily

movements that directly follow severance of the head, I address to thee a parting

word. It is my lot, and this I will never forget, to provide

thy surgeon in gaol with all that multitude of comforts which the

law allow allows. I shall therefore be glad to devote all possible

attention to any expression of thy gratitude, preferably, however,

in written form. And on one side of the sheet.

Close quote.

Those are some sections,

some polls from our book

today, and we're going to jump around in it, and I think Nabokov would

actually appreciate this. We're going to jump around in this book

because, well, this book represents something

that we, we, we kind of sort of

touch on the edges of on this show. But now we're going to

fully embrace it. And so I'm going to open

up my thoughts with this. I think one day,

looking back, probably two or 300 years from now,

historians in the future will write that we now

have lived, quote, in a long, absurd and dangerous 20th century

that began in the killing fields of World War I in Europe and ended

with individuals staring at their phones searching for meaning early

in the 21st century. Close quote.

And they will be correct. It has been a long

and ridiculously absurd century, from the collapse of empires

to the launching of people to the moon. And of course, we're doing

this in 2026. So not only to the moon, but around the

moon and back. And culture,

culturally, politically, and socially, the systems that were supposed

to provide us meaning have failed woefully in

our long and absurd century.

But. And here's the but. Because of our

technology, we are too arrogant and prideful to admit cultural,

political, and social defeat. Instead, we're going to double down on ideas

and approaches that don't work. We're. We're going to go whole hog into

that. Now, today's book that we're reading

actually sort of challenges this a little bit in a weird

kind of way. And I think it should be required reading for

high school and college students, but mostly for high school

students, right alongside Alice in Wonderland, Brave New World,

and the book, I think that is closest to it, in parallel

1984. 4. It describes the triumph of

totalizing absurdity in a world where little makes logical

sense because it's not supposed to.

And to recapture meaning and to commit the crime

of Gnostical turpitude, we're going to have to reinsert meaning first into

ourselves and then deeply into our institutions and back into

our systems. And I do think that will be part of the mission of the

next 75 years of this century.

So with that being said, today on the show,

we are going to cover a book whose fictional narrative,

like I said, links to the book we covered in episode number 184, where we

talked about G.K. chesterton's the man who Was Thursday. You should

go check that book out and listen to that episode with ideas

we talked about in episode number 183 where we talked about, once

again, unreliable narrators like Harry

Lime in the Third man by Graham Greene.

Today we are going to glean what we can

from a very perplexing book on its face and

try to apply it to our real lived leadership lives

in this book. And you should be able to catch the COVID right there on

the video. And there it is.

Invitation to a Beheading by

Vladimir Nabokov.

Leaders, here's a caution for you.

Just illustrating absurdity is no longer enough

to jolt people out of their absurd behavior. We

need stronger medicine to match the disease

of the era we are in now.

And back for this episode today

from episode number 152 where we discussed the

Orwellian state of affairs laid out so brilliantly by George Orwell in

1984, is our co host today, Claire

Chandler. How you doing, Claire? How's it going?

I'm doing great. It's so great to be back here and

chatting with you about some of the great, the great literature of our

history. So I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.

So let's talk about Nabokov because we've, I mean we've, we've

discussed. This is the only time I'll mention it. We've discussed Lolita.

Sorry, not sorry. Right, right. And we'll, we're going to skip over that. You can

go listen to that episode. Like to hear that discussion there. And, and we've

discussed in 1884. I like to

kind of delve in a little bit to, to Nabokov here, kind of poke at

him a little bit in reading Invitation to

a Beheading. It's clearly not Lolita.

Right. And so what are some of the.

And we'll kind of talk about Nabokov as a writer. There's some ideas I have

about him. We don't need to go into his background. If you want to find

out more about that, you can either go listen to our introduction at Lolita where

we sort of did a deep dive into him, or you can go listen to

the shorts episode. I think it's number 217 from this

year where we talked about Tim Scholes and Gnostical turpitude,

tying ideas from east of Eden into Invitation to a

Beheading and laying the foundation

for the next episode. That where we're going to cover Fyodor Dostoevsky's

notes for Underground. Oh, yeah, we're doing all the heavy duties

in the end of the quarter here, folks, so

step right up.

So, yeah, Nabokov. Back to Nabokov. Invitation to bang. Like I said, it's

not Lolita. So what are some substantive differences

between the two texts? And what is. What is. What are the substantive ideas you

think, do you think, Claire, that Navikov is wrestling with. Wrestling

with here? Well, there's. There's

a lot, certainly. And I know you're going to get into a little bit of.

Of the background, the time in which he wrote this

book and his other novels. There are

a couple of themes that bubble up to the top

for me. One of which, of course, is

in this sort of theater of the absurd that he has built for us in

this prison. Is it real, is it imagined?

Is really why he is there in the first place, right?

This. This sort of made up crime of

gnostical turpitude, which I still don't quite grasp,

nor are we expected to, but there's this

wrestling between how do we maintain our own individuality

while the world rewards conformity. Right?

Or maybe says, you need to bring in your individual

personality because otherwise you are boring, you're not entertaining.

Would say, monsieur Pierre. And yet if I,

you know, if he demonstrates too much of that individual personality, it

veers off of this totalitarian idea of

what is proper. Right.

Reminiscent to me a little bit of the Stranger,

right? Camus, the Stranger, where he does not mourn.

It was that book, right, where he does not mourn the death of his mother

the way that society would have expected him

to. So there's a little bit of that. And then there's also, of course, the.

How do we truly discern between what is real and what is

imagined? How much of the prison, the walls, the

barriers, the stress, the strife are

fact versus something that we just sort

of conjure up in our own, you know, out of the ether of our own

anxiety and our own fear. So, yeah,

there's. There's a lot going on in that, in this, you know, relatively

short book, unlike Dostoevsky, which you have ahead of you.

But there's a lot. There's a lot there. There's a lot there for sure.

There's also the idea and, and I like how you sort of brought some of

those themes together, some things that even I didn't. I hadn't even picked up on

in my reading of it because I was so.

Flummox is probably not close enough to the word.

Every time I go into Nabokov and I'm

glad I'm going into him. On the one hand, I'm glad I'm going into him

now when I'm in my, like, late 40s, because

I'm a little too old to be seduced by the Kurt

Vonnegut, like, sort of, oh, isn't it cool

that everybody's lying kind of thing that you get into when you're, like, in high

school and a little bit into college when it's like, oh, I discovered that everybody's

lying in the world? Yeah. Okay, great, great big wolf here.

And I'm not. And I'm not saying, like, to be cynical or dismissive of it.

I'm saying at the certain developmental stages in our lives, certain

authors make more sense. There's a reason why we

haven't covered Vonnegut on this show. I don't, I don't know. I don't know

that that well. Anyway, there's a reason why we haven't covered Vonnegut on this show.

I think some people mature. I think you have to mature past certain,

certain authors. Right. And that's fine. Certain authors exist a certain

period of time for certain groups of, for certain groups of people.

Right. Nabokov, though,

this is not my second interaction with him.

And I got to admit, I, I,

I, I looked at it and I'm like, I don't know what's going on in

your, in your brain pan. Like, I, so I see the total, to your point,

I see the totalitarian thing here. Right.

And that is reflected in Abakov's life. So when I went back and looked at

his life, did a little bit more research on him, I mean, you know, he,

he was early to absurdism. He was

early to, like, the absurd nature of totalitarian societies in

1938, you know, coming up in,

in a Stalinist Russia where there were

secret police and gulags and everybody inside of the country knew it,

but the information was not going out to the broader, the broader

world population. And even if it was, it was 1938.

So we're knocking on the door of Hitler and we're knocking on the door of

World War II. So all of that needed

to be sort of negotiated in a geopolitical sense. And

Nabokov often said in interviews about this book

that he did not anticipate German fascism.

And so for him, the book stood in not as an

indictment of German fascism as a totalizing

geopolitical force, but communism as

a totalizing geopolitical force. But he would never say that out loud

because, you know, you gotta live right? You can't have the secret

police chasing you around Europe and Switzerland in America for, like, the next. Like,

for the rest of your life. Right.

But with that framing, with that thinking, I also got the

sense from reading the book, this was one of the things I held on to

solidly. And you could tell me if I'm maybe if I'm right or wrong.

He was obsessed with, at least in this book,

the dichotomies between what

Communism or Marxism promised and then the reality

that showed up. And I don't think he had a good handle on how

to deal with all that. And I think this book

was an attempt to get a handle on how to deal with that. Am I

reading. Do you think I'm reading that correctly? I mean, I

think that's absolutely valid. I do think that he, like a lot of

the other authors of that time and other times in

history where thoughts were regulated or

speech was punished, the great authors, this is their form

of rebellion, right? This is their form of speaking out in a way that is

somewhat. I don't want to say protected, but disguised.

Right. And it's. So. I think he lived in a time where he

didn't perhaps see German fascism, but he did

see what was coming, and the world was shifting in

ways that he wasn't totally cool with. And so he thought,

well, the more absurd I can make this story, the

more outside the bounds of reality, the safer

it is for me to be uber critical

of the jailers and of the sentence and of the crime.

Right, right. Well. And this book got passed around

first as samizdat, Right. Which is the Russian

term for. The Russian

term for the practice and actually the product

of sending around mimeograft, basically

mimeograph books at the state, if they got a hold of them, would kill you

for having. Right. And so samizdat was

revolutionary papers. It was anything that was outside of

Pravda, which was, of course, the Russian word for truth, Right. The official

organ of the Communist Party in. In. In the Soviet

Union. And so samizdat got passed around between people. Like,

literally talk about this with our episode on

Solzhenitsyn, right, where Gulag

Archipelago got passed around as Miami. A graph, a

mimeograph document that you had to pass from neighbor to neighbor by hand, and

you only pass it to people that you trusted, and that was it.

And if it got out of the neighbor's hand, everybody was gonna be like, nope,

not mine, you know, and. And back away.

If I remember correctly, in my research into the. The book and how it came

together. This was also passed around as part of that

samizdat, sort of underground

publishing scheme that was going on in Russia,

at least at first. That's how it was first published. And then when he escaped

and got out of the Soviet Union and came to the west,

he managed to go ahead and publish it sort of more openly and

collect everything together and publish it more openly.

And that idea of sort of subversively passing around

ideas. Oh,

it's not necessarily a theme that runs through the book.

I don't sense that. You talked about.

Whatever his name is, the guy with the P. And. And I can't really get.

Okay, you got to explain that character. Me, I could not get a handle on

him. Like, what is his role there? Is he a. Is

he a prisoner? Or is he just, like, a MacGuffin for,

like, other things? Well,

we're going to get into that with the whole second Cincinnatus, don't

forget, because there's this shadow, one of him, too,

that. The. The Pierre guy. Just for simplicity, let's just call him

that. It took me a beat

to understand what the heck he was, too.

Both within the story as the character, and then also

from the writer's perspective. He was a vehicle for something. Right. Because

everything's a device. And so for him to just sort

of show up billed as a fellow

prisoner, but clearly with more.

With more freedoms than Cincinnatus enjoyed, or

at least he took advantage of more

freedoms that were offered to him than Cincinnatus did, because sometimes

Cincinnatus was allowed out of his cell and he could go for a walk and

he could play with the daughter of the warden. I mean, what was

that about? Right? Was she real? Was she imaginary? So,

yeah, and then for Pierre to come around and all of a sudden go, oh,

I'm the one who's gonna separate your head from your body tomorrow. So I wanted

to, you know, get to know you. It's like. Right,

yeah, yeah. Again, absurd, right? It's all.

It's. And it's like, as he's. As he's sitting there writing that,

do you think he kind of, like, would. Would write a section, walk away,

have some vodka, and then go, how do I even amp up

the absurdity of what I just wrote? Because I don't think it's absurd enough

yet. Oh, so I don't think

Nabokov needed vodka. Oh, yeah. So

it's certainly Stephen King. Like, all of his plots come out of dreams he has.

Yeah, that's scary, too. Yes. I think. I think

Nabokov is one of those. Was one of those

literary novelists whose brain was just

that way. He didn't need another.

I'll put him. Another person who I would say is. Was kind of wired that

way was Charles Bukowski and.

Or. Or. Or maybe a More. A more popular title because he was a

poet. Was more of a poet. Hunter Thompson.

Right. He. He was. Now. Now, people.

Here's the interesting thing. People confuse the absurdity of how a

person's brain, a creative brain, works with the creativity. Absurdity, the

creativity of how a brain works. They confuse that with a lack

of discipline, which is why Stephen King's book. I'm glad you brought up Stephen King.

Stephen King's book on writing is one of the greatest books about writing ever written.

Because just like Hunter S. Thompson, who had a

ridiculous discipline that he stuck to with writing,

Stephen King has a ridiculous discipline that he sticks to with writing

that he then filters, like, you know, the cocaine fuel. Tommyknockers through,

you know, or whatever. Right. You know, and

that book is wild, by the way. We'll never cover that book on the show.

This is not. This is not the show for that. But Tommy Knockers is a

wild book if you ever have an opportunity to pick it up. Nabokov,

I think, was the same thing. He had a. And here's. Here's how I

kind of get a sense or I kind of know that he had that discipline.

You don't go out and become a la doctor with the

butterfly stuff. Yeah. Without having some, like,

discipline inside of you. Yeah. That's not an

accidental sort of. I'm just gonna trip and fall over this hobby kind of

thing. Yeah, that's not a casual hobby. Yeah, that's not a casual hobby. That is

a. That is a thing that comes directly out of who he

is as a person. And so I absolutely think he was

disciplined in his writing and in his production.

And he came from a time when writers didn't talk about writing because

they didn't want to ruin the magic of it. It's only the post World War

II writers that talk about writing, because now everybody wants to know about

process and wants to get into the thing, wants to figure out how the magician

does the tricks. Pre World War II writers, or I would say

writers up until World War II,

they didn't really explain the magic. They're just like, I don't know, I sit down

and stuff comes out of me. Yeah. But, you know, I think you're spot on

in terms of speaking to his discipline. Because while the

story is absurd and like you, I kept

getting through certain points of it and going, why did we agree to cover this

book? Like what it. It. Because it's, it is so

to say, bizarrely absurd, I realize is redundant, but it is bizarrely

absurd. But I'm also thinking the

original was written in Russian. Yes. Right. Yes.

The translation into English, which is the version that,

that we read. I also have to wonder, just sitting here kind of

unpacking it with you, did it become more absurd in the translation?

Less absurd? Like, is it true to the absurdity in

the original? Because there were a couple of very, very few, but there were a

couple of phrases in the book that he kept

in Russian because they didn't, they don't translate. Right. It was

like one or two. They were sort of throw, throwaway lines for us because I

don't know about you, but I don't speak Russian. But like they, they defied

translation. Right. So I just, it's just another

layer of, of nuance when you think about, when you, when you are

setting about and your job is to translate

this absurd book into English and,

you know, keep it true to the original absurdity. That was the

Russian original. Tall task. Well, it's a

tall task. Yeah. And, and we don't, we never talked about this on the show,

but this is a good opportunity to sort of unplug or not unplug, but

unpack this for a couple of minutes. So,

so we're going to read Dostoyevsky. And Dostoyevsky made his money

before he sort of, not sort of, before he started creating novels and writing

novels. He made a ton of his money

translating novels from Russian into various

other languages. And so he sort of walked that divide.

Nabokov, if I remember correctly,

translated his own novels right. Into, into

other languages. He was also, he also spoke, you know, French

and I believe German

as well as Russian and of course English. Right. So he's operating in,

in four different languages. And the dynamic

of translation and the

dynamic of different languages

saying or being able to express the same

human idea but in a different kind of way

is something to your point that I think we,

I think we devalue very much in the west because English has just sort of

won the day and sort of in business and all my

French speaking listeners, I apologize, like, but

sorry. So, so, but, but if

we want to do business, even with the Chinese, if you want to do business,

we're all going to speak English, right? So

there's a certain level of cultural and

Civilizational hubris that comes along with that, that's just sort of baked into

the pie. And so coming from Russian

into English and realizing that

even though both, there's. There's

no fundamental difference between people who speak English and people who speak Russian at a

human level, it's just a difference in language, how you express

absurdity. But the way in which the depth of that

absurdity is expressed is going to subtly shift in

language. And a translator is going to. A translator who doesn't. Either doesn't know anything

about Russian or doesn't know anything about English is going to miss that. But if

you do know that, you are going to struggle. Like I think

of if I'm trying to get instruction in whatever

I'm doing in jiu jitsu, this is the first time I'll bring it up and

the last time I'll bring it up, because I gotta bring it up once a

show. But if I'm doing jiu jitsu and I'm doing something, and one of my

instructors speaks. Is Brazilian and speaks Portuguese, I could.

I could watch him get frustrated explaining a

concept in English. And finally he just defaults to, we'll just do this. I don't

know you, ain't you. He always says, you Americans, you have to name everything. And

he just walks away like everything is in your name. Just do this thing.

Yeah, right. Because it doesn't. There's no

parallel in Portuguese, right. For what we're doing

here in. In. In English, right.

Even though the body is doing. There's no difference between a Portuguese, a Brazilian

body and an American body. There's no difference. Same. Come on. It's like

we're Martians or whatever. But there's no way to sort of get that across,

right. The depth of that. So I think it's the same thing with, with the.

With this. With this book and with the translation.

One other thing, and I'm reading Les Miserables right now

because we're going to cover that in June, and I would love to read Les

Miserables in the original French. Actually, the person who I have coming on,

she's probably going to outdo me and she's going to read it in the original

French because she's. She's a huge Francophile and she'll so

comfort of the original French and I will be at a significant disadvantage. But

that's fine. She will beat me on my

own show. But, but. But

one of the things that strikes me is I wish I

knew Russian because I think I would get something more

out of the book. I think it would probably make more sense if I read

it in the original Russian. And then the little

French pieces that, that are dropped into invitation to a beheading

would actually make more sense as well, because I'm reading this, this whole entire

sentence in English. And then there's this little French piece here, and I

don't know about you, but I don't go to Google Translate and then, like, put

the French piece in. I don't, I don't have time. I just got to read

the book. Right. So I just sort of live with that, not knowing. I live

with that little hole in the boat. And there was a lot of that here

in this book. Right. And he did. And this will be the only time I

reference Lolita. He did that a lot in that book. I as well,

you know, where I, I, I took high school French. So I, I knew enough

of the words to be dangerous, get the general sense. And then, like you, I

just, you know, moved on and just assumed it wasn't going to materially

affect my understanding of the book. Right, right.

So it really didn't. But it really didn't. Y.

There's another thing here that we'll go, we'll go back to the book, another

idea here that I want to lay the foundation for and we'll talk about today.

So does Navakov believe

that people can be decent? I'll frame it as

a question.

I'm going to say yes, because.

Two bits of evidence that I would say to back that up. One is,

despite the fact that he was imprisoned throughout the entire book,

there was a common thread of frustration,

but I didn't really pick up on a sense of

hopelessness. Right. There was

frustration, less so about his quarters

and more so about the people who kept visiting him and interrupting

his solitary confinement, essentially. Right.

And then, of course, the ending, which I know we'll get to, and I don't

necessarily want to spoil the ending for, you know, the audience, but, you

know, the fact that the, the ending was, if not

redemptive, at least not final. And

so I do think, you know, and then there's other threads, like this, this

Pierre guy who was like, you know, by all, by all accounts,

he was the executioner, but he wanted to make sure that Cincinnatus had a good,

good time right up until the final cutting.

Right. I mean, like, I wanted him to be well fed, and how could you

complain about this meal? And we, you know, we ate so well. And then, of

course, later, Pierre had some indigestion to deal with, but regardless.

Right, so. So I do think that that

would suggest that Nabokov is, at

heart. I wouldn't call him an

optimist. I don't think we would call him that, but let's not go that far.

He generally believes that most

people are inherently good.

Okay, okay, I'm going to. I'm going to

pick up on something here. By the way, there's a bunch of other characters in

here, too. It's not just Cincinnatus and Pierce.

That's also. There's Rhodian, who. So

Rodion is the jailer. Right. I had

a little bit of trouble following that bouncing ball that. That kept, like, sliding off

of the glass. But Rhode on is the jailer. And then

you have the other character in here who also has an R name. Right.

Rodrigo. Right. I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Who or not Rodrigo. Sorry,

Rodriguez. Rodrigue. Rose. Rig was the.

Was the. The librarian. Correct.

Who kept bringing him back? He's a librarian. Yeah, probably. Yes, yes. I don't

know. There were too many. There were too many. There weren't nearly as many names

as in a dusty Epson novel, but there were a lot of names. No, no,

not the Librarian. He was the prison doctor. That's right. Rodriguez was the prison doctor.

That's right. Yes, yes, yes. And then the librarian

sort of just. I don't think he had a name. He didn't have a name?

No, no, the librarian didn't have name. The Library just comes in and out, like,

delivering the magazines and being bothered that he's being bothered. And they just.

Right. He's. He's Brooks from Shawshank. Absolutely. Yeah.

Ah. I would not have drawn that parallel, but yes. Yes, he is.

Yes, he is. Oh, my gosh. Oh, and let's. One

last thing before I go back to the book. So, Cincinnatus. Right.

The name Cincinnatus comes from the. No,

Greek. Is it Greek? No, Roman. Right. Roman legend

of. Yes, it's Roman. The Roman legend of

Cincinnatus. Who was. I'll just give a very

brief overview. You can go Wikipedia more of this. And I

had to Wikipedia just to be sure what I was like remembering.

But Cincinnatus was a farmer

in the Roman Republic who was invited in

by the Senate, or invited and petitioned by

the Senate. The Roman Senate, when Rome was still a republic,

to. To basically take control of Rome and become

a dictator in order to defeat an invading

army from the outside. I can't remember who it was. It might have been The

Persians or one of those other invading armies. Anyway, so Cincinnatus comes

in, he takes on the mantle of authority from.

From the. From the Senate, becomes a dictator,

marshals the Roman city state, marshals all the forces,

defeats the invading barbarian hordes, and then. And this is the

thing that makes Cincinnatus so interesting, then goes back to the

Senate and basically says, I don't want to be dictator anymore. You all

have a good day. Lays down his power and leaves, sort of

walks out the door. Mic drop, I'm finished. Goes back to his farm

and. And in the. In the legend, if I remember correctly, and those

of you who are listening will correct me if I. If I don't remember correctly,

but dies behind his plow, not pursuing any. Any power.

And. And Cincinnatus is used as a. As a

sort of an avatar for the individual who

comes in, is offered dictatorial

power. Right. Uses that power

not to his own ends, but to service the city state or to service the

populi vox. Populi. Right. And then. And

then steps back and steps away from that.

The usual parallels, by the way, in the American Republic

are to, of course, George Washington,

who didn't want to be president and didn't want to be king

either, he just wanted to go back to Mount Vernon to be left alone, which

is kind of amazing. And who put down power when he could have actually

been a king and people would have. Would have been fine

with that at that time, but it would have set a terrible precedent for the

future of the American Republic.

So I say all that to say it's interesting that the prisoner's name who

is due for execution is

Cincinnatus. I do not think that that is an accidental

pick that Nabokov had for that name and for that character.

And I'm still not clear from reading the text why

he picked it. Like, what the subtle jab is

he's making at the Russian Communists there, because

I think it is a jab at the communists, but I'm not quite sure where

the jab goes in Russian. Right. I just know it's there.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's interesting. And you're going to. You're going to

hate me for the commercial parallel, but, you know, it's sort of the

alternative ending to Gladiator. Right. Where he

had ultimate power and he conquered the barbarian horde and wanted to

just go back to his farm and turn the power over to the Senate. Right.

Would have been a completely different movie. Yeah, it's interesting. I.

So you did more research on that than. Than I did. I

figured, okay, Cincinnatus, Unusual name. Did it for a reason, and then I

just accepted it. Yeah.

I'm struggling to understand the parallel between that name, which I

absolutely agree with you. He chose with intention

and what that message,

subtle as it might be, was to

the communists of the time. Interesting. Yeah.

And I wonder if it was a message that

the. I wonder if it was a message about

dictatorship and. And

totalizing power. And I wonder if it was a

message to the readers and less to the party members, because the party members

wouldn't. While they were aware of. Of samizdat, they

weren't like, trying to stop it because they didn't think it had any power. Right.

So it's like, I think of the eye of Sauron in Lord of

the Rings. Right? The eye that searches for everything and misses

the smallest thing. Because of course.

And it is a totalizing eye. It always is.

But it's interesting too, because you're parallel about

the war of Cincinnatus.

Would you characterize this Cincinnatus as a hero? Because that, you know, the

Roman one clearly was.

Right. Because a lot of protagonists are heroes.

They're heroic, they do something. They conquer

evil. They, you know, they defeat a global enemy, whatever it

is. We don't have that here.

So that's a good question. And this is a little bit far

afield from where we are today, but that's okay. So

one of the things that I'm. I'm involved in a project

in another area of my. My work life

where we are. I'm working with a group of people

to

bring in a professional, an ensconcer

professional in an academic institution who has

spent 25 years of his career

working on and delivering on.

Not delivering on, but delivering the ideas that are embedded in

Jungian myth to. And Jungian myth and mythological

structures to people who do not have a story structure in

postmodern America, and that's vague enough to not be

specific and specific enough to get to the idea of where it is. I want

to go with this idea. Right. And one of the things that this individual, this

professional points out, who we are working with on this project, is that

everybody has a myth and everybody has a hero's journey. That's what

Jung would say, but that not everybody

knows either knows what their myth is, which is

true. And if they do know what their

myth is, most people are not aware of where they are on their

hero's journey. Now, I said all that to say this.

I'm not Quite sure Cincinnatus is on a hero's

journey, because in myths, depending upon which

myth you read, while we can look at all of

the journeys as heroes. Journeys. Most characters in myths are on

their own journeys that all intersect with the main hero's journey.

So there's the journey that the women may be on in the myth were referenced.

There's the journey that the. The gods are on in the

myth, and then, of course, there's the journey that the villain is

on in the myth. Now, the professional I'm working with would,

if he were here, he would probably say they're all heroes journeys. And just

that's. That's what Young would say. Okay, Perhaps. I think that

those are distinctive journeys, and I think that Cincinnatus is not on a

hero's journey, but he's on an absurdist journey

which. Which mirrors the. The. The

hero's journey, but it's a distorted funhouse mirror of

that journey. Because I don't think Nabokov. This gets back to my idea.

Looping it back now. This gets back to my question about decency.

I think that Nabokov thought that

this is not me being influenced by Lolita, although it does show up in. In

that book quite a bit, and a number of other books that he wrote, too.

I don't think. I think he was skeptical about human decency.

I don't think he believed human beings could be decent.

I think he thought that.

I don't think that he thought human beings could arise. Could rise. Could.

Could. Could rise above banality and nihilism and absurdity.

Like. Like Camus. This is why one of the reasons I struggle with Camus, because

Camus, at the end of the day, his only solution to the absurdity

problem, and we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but his only

solution to the absurdity problem was eat, drink and be merry and let's crash my

car, you know, in France somewhere. Like, that's not a solution,

Albert. May I call you Albert? I'm going to call you Albert. Come on.

Like that's not a solution. Right? So.

But I think. I think that struggle

begins when you don't see people being decent

and when you live in a society. And Nabokov had to add far more,

I think, of a permission slip

to be skeptical of human decency than Camus did,

even in spite of seeing everything with World War II. Still more of a

precious slip than Camus did, because Nabokov was in a

society where everybody lied and everybody knew everybody

was Lying. And the liars knew. Everybody knew that everybody

was lying. And so you're in this weird panopticon of

lies. And the person who is going to be the

outlier in that, as Solzhenitsyn would say, would be the person who dares to

tell the truth. And that's maybe who

Cincinnatus is, the person who dares to tell the truth.

So not a hero, just in a funhouse mirror.

Yeah, sure. And you know, and the other thing I. I think about

is, you know, to your colleague's point that

everyone is on a hero's journey,

it. It may just be the case that Nabokov chose not

to tell us that point. Portion of Cincinnatus life. We don't know

that much about his life prior to his sentencing.

Correct. Right. We know what his wife was up to.

She's perhaps the only other one who was telling the truth throughout because she

didn't really make a secret of the fact that she was

not terribly faithful to the guy. Right. But we don't really

know much of it. So it's sort of that unanswered question

also. Also of maybe he was a hero prior to being

sentenced. And we just don't know that part because Nabokov chose a portion of

his life that came after that.

Or. Or. Or maybe comes before that, because as I

said, the ending is not a final ending. Well, and his mother shows up.

I don't know if you remember this. I do.

And I'm like, oh, so Mom's gonna show up and we're gonna have a bit

of dramatic. I mean, can we. Can we just call her a drama queen?

That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I've been thinking a lot

about family lately and just kind of goes through

things in my own head. Not about my own family, but just families in general.

And it's just. It's amazing how people show up in families. It's

just. It's amazing, you know, and that

in and of itself is an absurdity.

Again, the idea that it's not just lies that

impact the top of the state, but the line goes all the way down

to the substrate of even who the individual is. It

poisons the well all the way down. And

Nabokov was early, I think, in invitation to a beheading,

to an idea that Solzhenitsyn fully developed law and fully

developed out later on in Gulag Archipelago.

And these Russian writers were inside of. They were inside of a nightmare.

Bulgagov is another one. Like, they were just inside of a nightmare

where, like in the Master of the Margarita, right? Where

Mikhail Buglecog, where, you know, the devil shows up, but no

one recognizes him. Wow. I haven't thought about that book. I did read

it, but it was decades ago. Yeah,

it's. It's. The Russian writers of the

20th century were dealing with a hell of a thing. Yeah. And they didn't.

They didn't have a lot of good. Have a lot of good

frameworks because the hero's journey, the hero, the

myths got smashed, right. And the people got smashed.

And so how do you. How do you

rebuild in a time when all of that. And it's not just the

spiritual infrastructure and not just the economic infrastructure, but the

psychological infrastructure and the physical infrastructure is all just.

All just wrecked, just wrecked by

people who, by the way, you know,

believed, as Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov Lenin did,

that in order to build a better society, you gotta break a few eggs.

Yeah, well. And just as I'm listening to

you take me through that, I think back to

our core protagonist, hero or non hero,

Cincinnatus, who nothing in the book is as. Is

what it seems, right? And

you think about the tap, tap, tap, and the digging

going on at night, and he doesn't know what that is, and he doesn't know

who it is. And out pops our buddy Pierre again.

And he's dug a tunnel, or maybe it was always there

that has he. He had just gotten there,

right. A matter of days ago. Could be weeks, I don't know. Because time is

not terribly, you know, predictable in this book either.

And he leads him back through the tunnel through a series of dead ends and

wrong turns, and, you know, finally into his

cell, and they have a nice evening, and then he has to go find his

way back out. And then he takes a wrong turn again, and he

finds himself on the outside of the walls of the fortress.

And then he meets up again with Emmy. What was the young girl? Emma.

Yeah, Emma. Emma, Emmy. It was Emmy. Yes. And

he allows her to lead him right back into the dining room where

his captors are enjoying their tea or their dinner.

So there's this. Nothing is what it seems. And throughout

the book, he continues to be led by false leaders,

by people who are. Who are trying to

not lead him astray, lead him back to

the path that they want him to be on.

I think that is an important

idea right there, Claire, that you brought up, that. That idea of

being led by false leaders. I think. I think you're onto

something. There. I think that's, I think that's skip toward when we get

to leadership. I'm getting older and senile Hassan, and if I

don't say it when it comes to me, I'm going to lose the thread. So

yeah, it's okay. The threads. Are we going to talk about the spider at some

point? Yes, we'll talk about the spider. Okay, I'm going to get to the spider.

This is your show. You go, where are we going next? I'm going to, I'm

going to tie the spider into the, the visit

from the family. Because this is one of the more important, this is one of

the more important things in the book. So let me, let me pick up with

the invitation to be heading once again, we're going to jump around in this book.

It is still under copyright to Nabokov's estate.

While I don't think he would have a problem with any of this, the estate

might have, might struggle a little bit with it. So we are going to just

pull some things out here and there. But I'm going to go to

chapter nine in Invitation to a Beheading.

And this is when Cincinnatus's family

randomly shows up.

I'm going to start with this. And again. The day

began with a din of voices. Rhodion was gloomily giving

instructions and three other attendants were assisting him. The entire family of

Martha had arrived for the interview, bringing with them all their

furniture. Not thus, not thus had he imagined this long

awaited meeting. How they all lumbered in. Martha's aged father

with his huge bald head and bags under his eyes and the rubbery tap of

his black cane. Martha's brothers, identical twins, except that one had a golden

mustache and the other a pitch black one. Martha's maternal grandparents, so old that

one could already see through them. Three

vivacious female cousins who, however, were not admitted for some reason. At the last

minute, Martha's children, lame Diomedan and

obese little Pauline. At last, Martha herself,

wearing her best black dress with a velvet ribbon around her cold white

neck and holding a hand mirror. A very proper young man with a

flawless profile was constantly at her side. So this

is the, this is the table that is set for this visit.

And then I'm going to jump to this. Meanwhile, furniture, household utensils,

even individual sections of walls continued to arrive. There came a

mirrored wardrobe bringing with it its own private reflection, namely a

corner of the connubial bedroom with a stripe of sun, a strip of sunlight across

the floor, a dropped glove and an open door in the distance,

a cheerless little tricycle with orthopedic attachments was rolled in. It was

followed by the inlaid table which had supported a flat garnet flacon and

a hairpin for the last 10 years. Martha sat down on her black

couch embroidered with roses. Then a

conversation just pops up because why not?

And the father in law is striking the floor with his

cane and. And yelling. Well, not yelling,

but berating Cincinnatus for some reason,

calling him, quote unquote, an insolent fellow. I am entitled to

expect from you, if only today, when you stand at death's door, a little respect

how you managed to get yourself on the block. I want an explanation from you.

How could you? How you dared. And then of course, it keeps going on with

the father in law. Martha is talking to a young

man in a low voice who apparently is her lover,

much to. Much to Cincinnatus's dismay. And

then, because I have animals at my house,

this little detail popped up to me, which I thought was interesting.

And I quote a black cat stretched, straining back, one hind

paw rubbing itself against Cincinnatus's leg, then was suddenly on the

sideboard and from there noiselessly leaped onto the shoulder of the

lawyer, who, having just tiptoed in, was sitting

in a corner on a plush hassock. He had a bad cold and

over a handkerchief held ready for use, was inspecting the assembled company and

the various household items that made the cell look like the site of an auction.

The cat startled him and he threw it off with a

convulsive movement.

C. Has a conversation with his brother in law, his father in law.

And then

Cincinnatus stood up, Rodion and another employee, looking at each

other in the eye grasp of the couch on which Martha was reclining, grunted, picked

it up and carried it toward the door. Goodbye, Goodbye. Martha called childishly,

swaying in time with the step of the porters. But suddenly she closed her eyes

and covered her face. Her escort walked solicitously behind, carrying

the black shawl he had picked up from the floor, a bouquet, his uniform cap

and a solitary glove. There was commotion all around.

Their father, breathing asthmatically, was overcoming the multi

segmented screen. The lawyer was offering everyone a vast sheet of

wrapping paper obtained from him by some unknown source. He was seen.

He was seen unsuccessfully attempting to wrap it in a bowl

containing a pale orange little fish and clouded water. Amid

the commotion, the ample wardrobe with its private reflection stood like a pregnant woman,

carefully holding and turning aside its glass belly so that no One would brush against

it. It was tilted backward and in a reeling hug, carried away.

And then. I'm going to skip down. Emmy unwillingly followed Rhodian as

he dragged her. Her eyes kept rolling back. Her shoulder straps slipped off, and now,

with a swinging motion, as though he were emptying a water bucket, he splashed her

out into the corridor. Yes, pausing. Yes, I said. He

splashed her out into the corridor. Back to the book. Then, still

muttering, he, meaning Rhodion, returned with a dustpan to pick up

the corpse of the cat that lay flat under a chair. The door

slammed with a crash. It was now hard to believe that in this

cell only a moment ago,

That held me up for two days, that entire chapter,

I pardon my use of the French, I did not know what the

hell to make of any of that.

It was like one long, protracted fever

dream where it just got

absurder and. Absurder. That's probably not the right word to the point

of stupidity. Where. And I think that was definitely a point where I was

reading through it and going, how much longer can this go on?

Is there a way to get out of this interview with you? Because if I

have to continue this story, I may, I may, I may grow

to resent you. But it's like. But these are the things that stretch us and

help us to grow so. And eventually it ended. Yeah, I was. I was

upset about the cat. I did not like the treatment of the cat. The cat

was the only one who acted like himself.

The cat was the only one that knew what the hell was going on. I

mean, he was just like, I'm. I have legal representation here.

The wife brings a date to an interview with her

condemned husband. Right. You know, again, being the

most transparent about her infidelity. So she was, like, the only

one there. Even though she came in with an elegant hand mirror and she's dressed

to the ninth. She was the only one who was completely open about who

she was. Right? Yeah, she's the only. She was the only

person actually being truthful out of that entire sequence. The

father in law, the grandparents, the cousin, the brother in law, even

Rhodian, the. The. The prison guard, right?

Like, coming in and out and moving things around. It kind of

reminded me a little bit of. For some reason, last week, not

last week, but the week before, I was goofing off at work, which,

you know, occasionally I do goof off at work. I am human, after all. So

I was goofing off at work and I was playing yakety

sax. That's what it was. The. The theme song from Benny Hill.

And, and this put me.

Yeah, see, when you put that as the soundtrack to all the. All

the. Wow. That's it. That's. That's. That's it.

It's. It's literally the end of Benny Hill. You remember that? I mean, you remember

he's running around with like. I didn't like the Benny Hill show either. For

this very reason. This very reason. Because

that was absurd. The scantily clad ladies all chasing him

around. What is happening? Yeah, that's in my head now.

That song is in my head. And the whole. Yeah, the whole intro and

outro. Wow. Yeah, well, well, we were.

We did reference Yakty Sax a couple weeks ago with the man who was Thursday.

We did me. And again, I guess I'll drop in that reference here too. I'll

run the soundtrack again. That's gonna be like your new thing.

You gotta have a sound button in your studio. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Of all the absurdity throughout this book, that

was the most consolidated, intense burst of absurd.

Absurdity. Other than the final dinner.

Yes, other than the final dinner. But. But this was probably the.

The most absurd collection of absurdities in the entire

book. Well, and what does it say when like

even the family is. Is rendered absurd by the

actions of the state, Even the

relationships between the family are warped. Right. So the father in

law isn't saying anything that makes even any remote sense about

anything. He's. He seems to be more concerned with.

With the fact that Cincinnatus, which by the way,

interestingly enough, I'm now clicking on something. When you read

stories of Russian dissidents who, who escaped or folks who

escaped from Russia, one of the things that they would talk about is. And

I might be confusing this with something that I read, Solzhenitsyn or maybe even in

Bulkov. But. But you would read about

how people would actually be jealous

of family members and turn in family members if they had a larger apartment than

them. Right. So the entire

machine. Well, not the entire machine.

One of the pieces or the bits of fuel that

goes into a totalizing machine and the reason it makes

it work is

envy. And

envy is always about things. Jealousy is always about people in relationships. Just keep that

in mind. Those are distinctions with a difference that we need to understand. We're using

words. And envy of another person's

possessions obviously could easily slip over into

jealousy of a person's interpersonal relationships. This is why the,

the. This is why the two. The

two most perplexing commandments of The Ten Commandments, or thou shalt not covet

thy neighbor's wife, nor thy neighbor's husband. And

then it goes into the neighbor's possessions. There's a reason for that.

It's not an accident. Nope.

So and so when you eliminate that right and you

allow envy to be part of the fuel that drives the state,

it filters down into those interpersonal relationships. And you see that in the father in

law, he's not actually seeking to understand

what's happening with Cincinnatus. He wants to know why Cincinnati's got such a big

cell. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

and in their own way, his

family, mostly his in laws, turned him in as well.

Right. Because his criticisms, as well as

Martha's at the very end were, why don't you,

first of all, why can't you behave more like the rest of us?

And also, why don't you just own it, apologize for it, and throw

yourself on the mercy of the court, essentially?

Right. Why don't you conform? Because if you

conformed, you could get out of here, right?

Yeah, but I could just not conform and have a bigger cell.

So I think I'll hang out for a little bit. Which is. Which is, by

the way, since that's his response to this, I'll just sort of, you know, I'll

just. And. And look at the. Look at the very thorough cleaning job they

did for him when he was expecting, you know, the interviewer

to come in. Well, and maybe that's. And

I, I now about. I'm about to switch an idea here. So we just talked

about Hero's Journey, and I was like, well, maybe I said, you know, I took

the position that, you know, maybe he doesn't have a hero's journey. No, I think

the hero's journey is the journey towards. I'm now thinking the hero's journey

is the journey towards the beheading. That's spoiler alert. It's in

the title. But like, like, you know, I don't want to ruin the end for

you folks, but you've had many decades to read this, people, so

if we're spoiling the ending for you, really, it's your fault. Yeah, it's been around

for a while. It's. You can go get it. It's not. Not new,

but. But maybe that is the journey. The journey

is the journey. The hero's journey through,

to your point, the battle against conformity.

I. I had not seen it that way. And I think you're

right, because he could, at any time, according to various

visitors, have gotten on board with just

conforming, agreeing, being agreeable, being hospitable.

And he chose to stay individual and, and

be himself, even knowing that that

was going to secure his beheading at the end. Well,

and he's a better hero. Better hero. He's more heroic

than. What's his name in 1984.

The. The. The. The guy who basically gets brainwashed and tossed back into

the mix at the end of, at the end of 1984.

I can't remember the character, but yeah, because. Because he ultimately did

relent and just relented and just gave in. Or

I think of. I think of,

oh, who was it in that coupe in the Kubrick

movie? Yeah.

Clockwork Orange you're talking about. Yes, yes. Anthony Burgess. Yes, yes. Okay, so, so

Clockwork Orange, right, The character in Clockwork Orange that

he's forcibly submitted. Right. To.

To the state, right, in order to change him forcibly and

brainwash him forcibly into being a good citizen.

Cincinnatus. Doesn't, doesn't. He's like, no, you know what?

He takes the opposite tact. He says, no, you know what? I'm not a hero.

I don't want to be a hero. Don't look to me for anything heroic.

I'm just going to walk this out logically, because

walking in a logically is

more truthful than the

lie of conformity. And again,

to my point earlier, the person who has the most

power in a state where everyone lies from top to bottom

is the person who tells the truth, even if the truth means

being killed by the state. Which, by the way, is

a very. Oh, sorry, kids are gonna hit you with this. Sorry,

folks, gonna hit you with this. But, like, that's a very Christian martyr way of

looking at things.

That philosophy doesn't just come from nowhere. The philosophy just doesn't come from

nowhere. Yeah, so. So.

This book is about the geopolitical disaster. One of the things it's about is the

geopolitical disaster of communism. Right? And just

a massive, like, way, how do, how do you deal with that disaster? Right?

And you had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell who were trying to deal with it

from the West. And then of course, you have, you have

Naov in this book. I've already mentioned Solzhenitsyn and

Orwell, but also Milan Kadera, who wrote

A Bearable Lateness of Being and tattled on everybody and

then ran away to France, told on all of his enemies,

and then vac off Havel, who wrote the Power of the Powerless, which

we've Also covered on this. On this show.

Let's turn the corner to our more. Our more code contemporary times. I do

want to talk about the spider web in a minute here. But in

our contemporary times. And I did open

up this episode by saying that historians in the future, I do think, are

going to look at two or 300 years from now, after we're all long dead

and. And gone, they are going to look back at the

20th century and they're going to. I think.

I do. I think they're going to say, what was wrong

with those people? Like, what the

actual hell was going on with those people's

brains? Because everything

that we've accomplished technologically or

even at a leadership level, I wrote a blog post about this today.

We've taken practically, we've taken material reductionist

thinking to its logical conclusion. Everything can be

reduced to atoms or to how physics works.

Everything can be reduced to biochemical this and

biochemical that. The interaction

that you and I are having is mediated by technology. We're not even in the

same state, much less in the same time zone, and yet we can do this

quote, unquote, magic together. But the 20th

century has utterly failed. And now we're 25 years into the 21st

century and we are still utterly failing to provide

any sort of sense of cosmic meaning behind any of this.

Now, I do think we'll get out of the meaning crisis. I do think we

are going to find meaning. And that's part of the reason why I do this

show, is because part of this show is a search for meaning to go

into. Go into the books that have been written and

pull out what we can and provide meaning for leaders and provide meaning for

people. Because I do think the biggest crisis of our time is a meaning

crisis. And I wish

that more people would accept a Christian conception

of meaning. And there's a lot of water in the

pool in the other direction that's got to get either drained out

or replaced, right? Because absurdism and

nihilism and those kinds of things, existential dread, none of

that's going to provide meaning. And 300 years from now, people are going to wonder,

why did you have existential dread? You had everything you could possibly

materially wanted, yet you didn't know what it

meant, right?

Nabokov was on to this. So were the writers, the

Russian writers of the 20th century. They were on to the meaning

crisis. And that is the great crisis of our century.

God almighty. We're now in a space where we have unserious people,

like in 20, 26, we have unserious people running things. And I'm not just talking

at the political level and I'm not just talking about politics and political decisions. I'm

talking about people who are fundamentally lack seriousness in their roles. So for

instance, I'll use an example. We have members of school

boards who are so worried about Facebook posts

threatening their lives that they hire private security

to walk around their local communities.

I'm going to draw a parallel in my local community, where I

live. We're, we're one of the local communities in,

in the country that is where, where there are, where there are fights going on

right now about data centers. Where do data centers go in for

AI? Do they go in, do they not go in? What does that mean for

water, energy consumption, things like this? Right. And because

we've outsourced sourced our emotional absurdity to Facebook and other

social media platforms, the mayor of my

town, who's an 80 year old former entrepreneur who didn't have to do

the job of being mayor at all, he could have just

stayed retired, is lambasted left and right

as if he's, pardon my use of the term, as if he's Donald Trump

and he's not.

The other day I was walking down on the street going to get lunch or

whatever. I happened to see him and I had a nice 10 minute long

conversation with him. And guess what? It wasn't

absurd, it wasn't nihilistic, it wasn't

existential. Although he did ask me a question about

how do we actually get people to not be so afraid of

change. He's 80 and he's asking me this

question. And so we're exploring ideas while we're sitting

there. That's local politics, that's

localized all the way down to something that's meaningful. Yeah,

but what we've done with our technology is we've

ramped up the absurdity and the unseriousness and

we still don't know what it means. What does it mean

to have a school board person who takes something on social media

from some random person they've never met in their community so seriously that they think

they're going to. Or, or even worse, even

worse. We have people who pretend to be serious and put

on the language of seriousness, but their behavior, their

actual lived behavior is just as absurd as anything, an invitation to

a beheading. And we can all name names and we can all give examples,

not just nationally, but also locally, also in our,

in our civic life, in our social life, in our government. This is the

Challenge right Now, the early 21st century is how do we walk the line between

work because we're past absurdity, now we're into unseriousness, just people who are

fundamentally unserious. Right. About fixing

problems or about proposing solutions. This is

the question in the, in leadership, in all spheres eventually

descends into absurdity on a long enough timeline.

How do we walk the tightrope as leaders between absurdity

and seriousness? Because we're in a seriousness crisis too, along with the

meaning crisis. But yeah, how do we do that?

You know, one of the things that I try

to, if not remember,

at least convince myself of is we are not the

only generation and we are not the only, only point in the

quote unquote evolution, which implies forward progress.

But it doesn't always happen

and we're talking about it now. I think one of the reasons that you

pull forward into our modern times,

these great books of decades and centuries ago,

is for this very moment, this question you just asked, asked

because as absurd as the times we are living in

now. And you just painted the picture of the absurdity.

This is not the first iteration of that in human history.

Right, Right. It feels like that

because we are, we are by definition self centered.

And so we think, well, surely even totalitarianism,

Communism, Marxism, right? Nazi

Germany, surely they had to be serious people there. Well, not only that,

but you know, they, they had it easy compared to. If you've seen the knuckleheads

run in the world net like it. That has always been

true. But this is the reality we live in now. And I, and I

have to say that out loud because I have to, I have to believe that

just like they got through that, not unscathed.

We have to get through this. We have to

somehow welcome back the people

that are done drinking the Kool aid of the truth

that they are told is truth. And they go, well, that's easier than me finding

that out or thinking for myself or having serious conversations or having serious

thoughts. I think one of

the things that makes it so difficult to be a leader right now and a

true leader, not someone who goes around and says that they're a leader because they've

been granted people power they probably did not earn. But a true

leader is they have to somehow,

which gets to the heart of your question, help

navigate the people trying to follow them,

the business are trying to run and themselves

toward a clearer, sharper, brighter, achievable horizon

somehow. And the problem with their navigating is

on top of everything else that leaders have always had to Deal with.

There's all this noise. There's all of this

bombardment of 24. 7 news cycle

news in air quotes, social media,

you mentioned AI. We haven't even scratched the surface of what that

has introduced where every wall, everything that's

plugged in is listening and feeding what you

consume, right? On your smart TVs, your social

feeds, your email sidebars, all the things.

And so there's all this noise.

And I think, you know, part of. And I'm going to bring

it back to Cincinnatus for a second because I think part of what frustrated him

was he saw how absurd his situation

was and what he was trying to do was the reason he didn't want

to be social and go, let me spend the last few days on earth

conversing with and breaking bread with some really interesting people. He

wanted all of them out of there because the noise was stopping him

from getting to the conclusion that he could change his

circumstance at any time. And he wasn't allowed to because he kept getting

filled with absurdity and noise and visitors and furniture and cats, right?

So all he wanted was space and quiet

to read, to write to and to. And to somehow come to

terms with his life and have an accounting

of that life and what he was writing. And I want to come back to

what he was writing at some point too. I think fast forward to

today. That is part of what leaders need to find a way to

do is to not rise above the noise. Because I don't know

how possible that is right now, but somehow

separate themselves from the bombardment of the obstruction absurd

and say, this is what I have to stand for. Because if

I just continue to think that leadership is a role that I play

where nothing is what it seems, but instead is

a, you know, an obligation that I have or

a, you know, a responsibility that I own,

then I'm always going to have it. Look at leadership as something

other than. And then it's too easy to say, well, that leader is evil and

that leader's good because it's just a right. Yep.

So there's no easy answer because there's still. The

world is still chock full of some really bright people, really bright people.

And there's a subset of those really bright people who are using those really bright

brain cells for good. And there are others who are using that for power.

And right now, and it's not just right now, history has

proven to us that whoever is in power gets to

make the rules. Right? Who writes the history books?

It's the victors Right. It's not the conquered.

The barbarian horde, as far as I know, do not have a history book.

Well, they do. They, they all became the barbarian horde, turned around, became

Christians. So, I mean, you know, you can, all right, you can, you can argue

that, but. No, no, no, but I understand your point. No, no, no, but I,

I understand. No, but I understand your point. And this is. Well,

and this is the challenge of. One of the points that was

made not by myself, but by somebody else is

the, the challenge of Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Trials,

was that the, the, the west,

not the west, the victors in the United

States, Great Britain, Russia, in an attempt to

say something meaningful. This is that word meaning again

to say something meaningful about the death of 6

to, to 8 million, you know, people

in Germany. The attempt to say something

meaningful about this was made.

But. Was made. And by the way, Hannah Arendt pointed this out in Eichmann in

Jerusalem when she went and covered the trial of

Adolf Eichmann right after the Mossad kidnapped him and brought

him back to Jerusalem in 1961, or 62, I believe it was.

And she reported on this. Nuremberg attempted

to make an argument about morality without an appeal to a

higher transcendent good. And thus

that appeal to morality, she said,

fell hollow because.

And the Germans were right on this. The German response to

that was, well, you won the war, so you get to make the rules,

I guess, which is where everything then devolves, which is our

current. One of our other current problems with the lack of seriousness, where

deconstruction, the French deconstructionists took this idea,

deconstructed everything out, and now we're just in this place of

not authority, because the authority and power confusion is real,

but a place where who has raw power is the only thing that

matters. And all of

that is. Or all that leads to is a

Hobbesian hellscape

mediated by social media, which is what we're

in now. And all against all

doesn't preserve a society or a civilization. All

against all doesn't work when you have to make a moral

judgment about, like I said two episodes ago,

objective evil or objective truth. Right.

Like one of the things. And it. I'm saying it more this year probably than

I have in previous years, but I do believe you can know

objective truth. You can, because we

know what objective untruth is. Matter of fact, we're all very clear on what objective

untruth is this. Like we could spot a lie like a dime on the highway

going at 80 miles an hour. Yep. But all Of

a sudden. But we don't know what truth is. Come on, That's. That's

logically fallacious. Get. Get out of town. No, we don't want to talk about

objective truth or we don't want to say there's objective truth because we might

risk running into, not hurting somebody's feelings. We're past that now.

We might run into actual accountability.

Oh, wait. If there's objective truth, then I actually have to be accountable, not

just in my own life, but I might have to be accountable to other

people in my life. And thus I might have to be accountable to a larger

community and I might have to be accountable to the state. And by

the way, no one from the state's going to come here and tell me what

objective reality is. I have to tell the state what objective reality is, which means

I really have to be aligned with objective truth.

Okay, That's a lot of accountability. Maybe I don't want that.

Maybe I just want to be free to float anchorless and be

unserious. But

then you can't lead, and then your family falls apart. You fall apart, your family

falls apart. The whole thing, the whole thing undoes itself and the

challenge. And what Nuremberg, the trials of Nuremberg did.

And this is my whole point with this. What they did was they.

They opened the door to devolving questions of morality, to just

questions of power, which allows unserious

people in at the back end. It takes a few generations because the

people who, the people. I would, I would assert that the people who,

who put the. Who put. What's his name?

Guring, right? Herman Guring on trial and executed him.

Those people were deeply serious. They were. They were deeply read.

They were deeply serious. But they were

also struggling with. How do you.

How do you insert or reinsert objective truth into a

nihilistic and absurd world? How do you do that? And they

didn't have the tools to do that other than, well, we'll just be the role

models. We'll just role model this and it'll be fine. The role

modeling is enough. The statue is enough of the thing.

The problem is they topple the statues or they erode.

The role modeling is not enough of the thing. You have to actually say

the thing. You have to actually say the truth. You have to actually advocate for

it. And post Nuremberg,

generation after generation after generation, four or five generations past Nuremberg

now, and people are surprised.

Why? There's right wing ridiculousness online. People are surprised. People

are. I mean, I talked. I do. I talked to some people who just genuinely

Surprised? Like I'm not surprised. They have no historical

anchoring to any of that. That's number one. But also number two, they have no

more. They have no anchoring to a higher objective morality because we've

just sort of done relative truth for the last 80 years. So why, why

would. Why wouldn't it be fine? It's a logical cul de sac at the end

of this philosophical idea. Oh, you don't like the results

of it? Because there's a lack of accountability there. Oh,

well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news because you're all nice people

and I hate giving nice people bad news, but this is where

you wind up at. Now it's really hard to deal with it to your

point, because how do you get quiet and the noise and

the bombardment. I do have an idea on that, but thoughts on anything that I've

just said before I go rambling onto, like the idea of how you solve that

problem? No, I mean, well, I'd love to hear how you solve that problem, but

I. Yeah, you know, it's so. It's so crazy because the

world today, and I know there have been previous versions of this,

but currently the world today says whoever's in power

tells you what the objective truth is and they point to it

as objective truth. And when it doesn't line up with keeping them in power,

they label them alternate facts. This. Right. We are

in the generation where, you know, the previous. The previous generations called

it something else. Our generation now refers to those as alternate

facts. And we no longer. I don't know

about you, but I find it next to impossible to

watch the news. The only news that I watch is the local

news, where really the big stories are. There was a, you know,

not a cat in a tree, but the equivalent of. Right

where it is as. As unbiased as you could

possibly be in the moment that we're in. But

beyond that, we are. We pin our

beliefs, we believe what we do because either we do watch the

news or we just can't get away from social media. And we

believe what the algorithm tells us to believe. And the algorithm

is designed to continue to feed what your

micro expressions light up about the first time you see, see them.

Right. That's where we are right now. But the. These

alternate facts and AI and everything else, those were created by human

beings who had an intention perhaps for, you know,

it originally for efficiency and productivity. And, you know, this

is evolution. We want to be more productive by automating, you know, the

things that we used to do. But then,

of course, it gets corrupted, right? Power corrupts.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And here we are. Well, and while it may

be escaping from the noise is a form of Gnostical turpitude. I just

clicked this together in my head. Maybe this is the Gnostical turpitude. So

let's look at the word gnostic, right? Gnostic typically means secret,

secret or unknown or mystical

special knowledge. Right. It's typically how it's used, particularly in a

religious construct, which. It is a religious term. Term. But it's, it's,

it's. It's the idea that.

It's the idea that there's a conspiracy and they're hiding something from you, and I'm

going to gnostically bring you into this mystical knowing and mystical understanding of

this thing. Okay, so you got the Gnostic part, then you got the turpitude

part. The turpitude is just, you know,

going against the grain. Right. Refusing to comply. Right.

Refusing to go along. An older word would be a Joan

Didion word would be declassee.

And so you're combining these two ideas, right?

We're going to be. We're going to be outside the

mainstream and refuse to comply. And that's going to be a secret.

That's what the crime is. The crime is being secretive

outside of the mainstream. Well, in our time, if you want to be

secretive outside of the mainstream dream, I think you do a couple of things.

I think you, at a practical level, as a leader

or anybody, I think you

get off of Facebook. I think that's one

practical way to do that. I think you also abandoned TikTok.

I don't think that place is any better. I don't think any of those neighborhoods

are any better. Never been on TikTok. Yeah, but

I've never. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never been to that neighborhood. I. I'm too

old to go over there. There's certain neighborhoods I'm too old to go to. I

have no business over there. You know, I'm too

much of a grown man. So

you abandon Twitter, Right. You know, maybe

cut your Pinterest consumption. The

other way you engage in. In Gnostical turpitude in our time

is you touch grass, as the kids say these days.

So you leave your phone at home and you

go outside and you talk to real people.

Some of them, you're going to have to rest from their phones because they don't

really have enough discipline or willpower to kind of get away from the algorithm. But

eventually you walk along far Enough. Down the street, you'll find people out walking their

dogs. I see them in my neighborhood. You'll find people mowing their lawns. I

see them in my neighborhood. The AI still can't mow the lawn and walk the

dog. They actually tried an experiment with a dog walking humanoid

robot, and the dog found a. The

dog screwed up the robot with the AI

Somebody was telling me about this. This is the most amazing story ever. The dog

screwed up the humanoid robot by chasing a squirrel.

Wow. There is a robot lawnmower now, though.

There is? Okay. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I still. I think of.

It's. It's like a Roomba, but it. Yeah, it plots that. I've seen it. I've

seen it. So. So. Did you ever watch the movie the Big Lebowski?

I don't know that I've ever seen it all the way through. I'm. I'm familiar

with it, but I don't think I saw. So remember when

Labowski is at Jackie Treehorn's house?

Okay, so Jackie Treehorn is the. The.

The adult film producer in the movie.

And. And. And Lebowski is at Jackie

Treehorn's house, and Jackie Treehorn is trying to paint him a

vision of the future of adult entertainment in America.

And he says, it's going to be all digital, dude. It's going to be amazing.

And. And. And Lebowski says, and I quote,

that sounds cool, dude. But I still, you know what?

Manually. And this is what I always think of when you tell me about

humanoid robots mowing lawns. I still mow my lawn manually, man.

Yeah. Oh, you go right on ahead. It could all be digital. It could all

be algorithmic out there with the AI or whatever. I'm still going to do it

manually. I'm old school. I'm old school. I still have records

in my house, you know.

Gotta be very delicate with that. Sometimes we got kids listening to this show. Sometimes

my kid listens to this show. Gotta be very delicate with that. But,

but. But this is the. This is how you defeat

the noise. This is how you engage in gnostical turpitude in our time.

You go talk to people. You do the things that need to be done. You

put your phone down, you exit the panopticon of social media.

I'll do you one better. Go buy yourself some chickens.

Seriously, go buy yourself some chickens. Put them in your little yard in the front.

That'll your HOA number one will drive your HOA crazy, Number two, they'll

produce eggs, and number three you'll get all of the challenges you could

possibly need with chickens in your front yard. That will

distract you from literally everything else. And don't get them a WI fi feeder. It

doesn't work. Trust me, I've tried. None of that

works. And the chickens don't care. They will beat the WI fi

because they don't. They don't. They're engaged in gnostical turpitude. They.

This is how you escape. This is how you

engage in the secret act of not complying.

I think more people are onto this than ever before. And I think the reason

we don't know more about it is because it's not being

broadcast, it's not showing up online.

It is quietly happening. And I do

think that. I think the people are

moving in that direction. And I do think that the future serious

leaders that we are going to have over the next 25 years are going to

come out of that milieu. Now, with that being said, I also think

on the opposite end, because there's also flattening that's going on with AI. There are

the people who can't pull themselves out of the spin or

out of the decline. There are people who are half in,

half out and can't make a decision and their families are half in, half

out. And all of our future leaders come from families because families, the first

organizational culture. And you're going to have a lot of

confused people who were raised half in, half out, or

you're going to have a lot of people who are flattened who were raised all

in. I think

that's going to be. Those are going to be your three groups for the next

25 years. Those who engaged in gnostical turpitude, those who were

half in, half out. And those were all in on the matrix.

Yeah, I agree. I think that's true.

Yeah, I do think that is the thread that pulls

this book into the present is

how do we make sense of the nonsensical?

And the answer is you don't. The answer is you don't.

The answer is you have to remind yourself that you have your own choices

and you can make them. And that sort of, you know, again, not

to spoil the end of the book, but when he finally realizes that he can

choose to do something other than lay down

and wait for the ax,

everything changes.

So, you know, I think the. The

entire story, he is not spending time trying

to rationalize the absurdity going

on around him. He's just trying to tune it out. He's

trying to just stay within himself.

And so. And through that comes the solution, Right.

It's not, you know, I finally figured out what

Pierre is. Or, you know, how to make friends. Friends with Rhode on

it's or, you know, I'm going to take that spider home and make him a

pet. One of them did. I think he put him in his pocket. But

regardless, you know, he. He doesn't get. He doesn't break through

because he. He makes sense of the absurd. He breaks through because he

finally recognizes the absurd for what it is. And he says,

I'm done pretending it's real.

I'm gonna pull something from the book because there's something here. And then we're gonna

round the corner and close because we've talked for a while about this. Go get

this book and read it. It's Nabokov. It's going to be challenging. Go

get this book. Okay, we're gonna pull from chapter

two here. Okay. Okay. The

morning papers brought to him with a cup of tepid chocolate by Rhode on

the local sheet. Good morning, folks. And the more serious daily voice of the public

team does always with color photographs. And the first

one he found the facade of his house. The children looking out from the balcony.

Balcony. His father in law looking out of the kitchen window. A photographer looking out

of Martha's window. Window. In the second one there was the familiar view from this

window looking out in the garden, showing the apple tree, the open gate, and the

figure of the photographer shooting the facade. In addition, he found two

snapshots of himself depicting him in his meek youth. By

the way, this whole setup, I thought, oh, my God, this is social media. Oh,

my God. This is what he's setting up. This is. This is so true. It's.

Oh, my God. Nostradamus. All of a sudden. Oh, my

gosh, this is it. Cincinnatus

was the son of an unknown transient and spent his childhood in a large institution

between the Strop River. Only in his twenties did he casually meet twittering

tiny, still so young looking Cecilia C.

Who had conceived him one night in the Ponds when she was still in her

teens as his mother. From his earliest years, Cincinnatus, by some strange and

happy chance, comprehending his danger carefully managed to conceal a

certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others

and therefore produced, when off his guard, a bizarre impression as of

a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent

to one another. He learned, however, to feign

translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as

it were. But he had only to forget himself to allow a momentary lapse in

self control. Pause right there in that sentence. I think of

the Pink Floyd album. Momentary lapse of reason. Anyway,

back to the book. In the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and

angles at which he turned his soul his soul. And

immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of

a game, his co evals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that

his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty

deception, and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque.

Sometimes, in the midst of a sudden silence, the teacher, in chagrined

perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes,

gaze at him for a long while, and finally say, what's wrong

with you, Cincinnatus? And cincinnatus

would take a hold of himself and clutching his own self to his breast,

would remove that self to a safe place.

In the course of time, the safe places became ever fewer. The solicitous sunshine

of public concern penetrated everywhere as and the peephole of the door was placed in

such a way that in the whole cell there was not a single point that

the observer on the other side of the door could not pierce with his gaze.

Therefore Cincinnatis did not crumple the motley newspapers, did not hurl

them as his double did, the double, the gang girl that accompanies each of

us, you and me and him over there, doing what we would like to do

at the very moment but cannot. Cincinnatus very calmly laid the papers aside and finished

his chocolate. The brown skim that had mantled the

chocolate became shriveled scum on his lips, and then Cincinnati put on the black dressing

gown, which was too short, too long for him, the black slippers with pom poms

and the black skull cap, and began walking about the cell as he had done

every morning since that first day of his confinement.

That's how you survive the social media

opticon. If you're looking for a practical way to survive the social media panopticon, if

you can't get rid of Facebook because maybe you use it for your business or

use it for marketing or use it for thought leadership, maybe use it for whatever,

and you're trapped in there and you see the absurdity of it, you need to

withdraw into yourself and become opaque.

I also think some people have figured that out.

That, my friend, is the secret. That's

gnostical turpitude right there. Right there.

Yeah, we've covered a lot today,

covered a lot of waterfront for Benny Hill and Yaki

Sachs all the way to. All the way to Nau Turpitude.

We have not touched on. Let's do this with the last few minutes that we

have here. We have not touched on

what I think is probably the. The next level troubling

thing here, which is the teleology

on silicone. Right. The eschatology that artificial

intelligence allegedly is going to bring us.

And I'm not the only person who's saying this.

So as

a person who is a Christian and who follows Christian

principles, at one level,

I am concerned about

the development of idolatry in our

pockets. But idolatry is a sin as old as time.

It goes back to when, you know, infants were being

put on the temple. The. The temple, sorry, the statues of BAAL and were

sacrifice. Right. Like that. I'm not. Idolatry is

a very old sin. Old

wine and new wine skin, such as it were. Right.

What is troubling to me, though, at a deeper

level, and I see it with. With the AI tools, and I've. I've

used many of them in. In some of the work that I've done with clients,

and not in my personal life, but in my professional life, I'm keeping

a nice veil between those two,

or curtain, actually.

What. What troubles me is people will look for life's

purpose in the temple in their pocket.

And I haven't really brought this up yet on the show,

but I think Nabokov would appreciate this in all kinds of

ways, by the way. So would Aldous Huxley. He would be horrified,

actually, because we finally got to Brave New World, and he was

like, oh, my God, I thought you would, like. I thought it would take a

long time, or you would, like, pull yourself back from the edge, but apparently not.

And so the eschatology of intelligence on

silicone won't be absurd, and that will be absurd in and of itself. It will

be ruthlessly logical. It's already ruthlessly

logical, and it's because it's just following patterns and matching them all the

way out to. To a logical end. Right. And it

doesn't know to get off a certain path unless you tell it to get off

a certain path. But if you don't even know how to question the path,

you're not going to tell it to go off of a different path. And so

it's just going to keep going.

And I'm going to read this here. Intelligence on silicone doesn't

understand absurdity, because when, while it contains the language

of emotion and can elicit emotions from the humans around it that they

experience. It has no emotional life itself to

recognize absurdity as any more meaningful than a predictive data

point. And when it is asked to find the meaning,

it begins invariably to hallucinate patterns

that do not exist.

This is going to be a real eschatological. And yes, I mean

that in terms of Book of Revelations kind of eschatological. This is going

to be a real eschatological problem that I don't think we're

prepared to deal with with God on

silicone, and I use small G. God on

silicone won't

seek to overcome us. I don't believe that. But I do

believe it will seek to make our lives better, to serve us, just as we

seek to serve a God or any other transcendent thing that we put out there

above ourselves. And it will of. We will of course be above

it and it will seek to serve us.

But again, we will not have solved for meaning, but we will

fool ourselves into thinking we have. That's

far more disturbing to me than anything else.

And it will be absurd on its face.

But just pointing out that absurdity won't solve the problem

as I pink people want. They want the, they want

the,

They, they want the safety and security in their amygdalas of not having to think

about meaning.

And I don't know how to solve that problem, but I see it coming.

I have no solutions for that. No, no, you

know, and it, and it doesn't get more absurd, absurd

than over indexing on the

intelligence part of that word and

intentionally forgetting that it's artificial,

right? When we, when we think about all that, you know, coming

back to this, we are all bombarded 24,7 by

noise unless we

willfully, intentionally and and of our own

free will turn it off, tune it out, put it down

or stand up before the ax falls in the back of our

neck, right?

That after a while it become. To your point about

Cincinnatus is more of a hero than the protagonist in 1984 and in other

books it becomes

the path of less resistance, less effort and less

judgment to just lay down and take the ax,

right? To get the lobotomy to, to, to be, you know, to,

to join the institutionalization and call it community.

Right?

And I don't have the solution for that, that either. But I,

but I do think that's why we're so

deeply in the muck of where we are right now. Because the

noise became too much

and it is exhausting and otherwise

good hearted, good natured Intelligent people are saying, I just

can't anymore. And so I'm just going to accept

that this is our world, this is my reality, and I

can do nothing to change that. And like Cincinnatus,

we accept the walls that are confining us

until we decide, no, you know what? I. I'm

not going to anymore. I find it interesting, and I had

forgotten that until you read the first passage you shared

during our discussion today. When he was first sentenced,

Cincinnatus needed to be helped as he walked. Mm.

And when he was going up to the. To the gallows, to the

platform, to the stage. Because this, after all, was a performance

and a ceremony. Right. Where all. Everyone in town was invited and children

were frolicking. Creepy.

But, you know, has happened in history. He was

adamant, in a more

emphatic way than he had been throughout this entire story, that he would

walk himself. Yeah. And maybe to your

earlier point, that truly does make him a hero,

because he faced. He took accountability for

a crime he had not committed, and he

took accountability for accepting the

execution of his sentence. No pun intended.

Right. Because it was the logical end of his confinement.

Until then. He chose a different path, of course. But I just find it interesting

because when I. When I look at the arc of the story,

he. He originally accepted the sentence, needed to be helped to. To

sort of move forward, and by the end, he said, no, I'm going to do

it myself. Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. I think of.

Some movie I saw years ago or might have been. Might have been Old

Yeller. I don't know. You know, why would I. Why would I have somebody else

kill a dog that I raised myself? Why would I. Like, I'm going to do

this myself, you know, or, you know,

it's. It's. You've got a.

What is the last thing you own? Here's a deeply

philosophical question. What is the last thing you own? What is the

final thing you own? And. And

nobody, nobody higher up the transcendental ladder than Jesus said,

you know, don't fear the person who can kill the body. Fear what

can kill the soul. That. And cast it into. Basically cast it

into hell. Right. Or bring it up to heaven. That's who you should be

fearing. Right. The body, though. And this is the problem that

Christians have had with the body for the last 2000 years. This is part of.

Wrapped up into it. But the body, this physical life,

this thing, yes, it's something. It has meaning,

but it's not all of meaning. That's a

deception. It's not all of meaning.

And this is something that we have forgotten.

And again, Nabokov grew up in an environment where the

Orthodox. The Orthodox Russian Church wasn't quite

completely destroyed and dead.

And yes, he may have been atheistic or agnostic in his

later life, but he had all of those.

All those threads running through him. The same way John Steinbeck at East of

Eden had all those, you know, Old Testament biblical threads running through him because of

how he was raised. That it's all. It was all in the water for

Nabokov. Right. And so there is a sense of

not saying that Cincinnatus is standing up for Jesus here, but I am saying

that. That. That idea that I could put my body down, I'm

not gonna pick it back up, but I can put it down. I'm free to

do that. And it will be my will that does that, because

it's the last thing that I own. And the state doesn't get that.

That's not what the state gets. The

question, I think, for our times

is, well, where are our lines? What do we own?

You know, we're promised that we will own nothing and love

it. And.

And, you know, that's just. That's just the. The phraseology of a

totalizing demagogue. So. So I think

we have to be very, very clear. I also think we have to escape.

We got to escape. We got to figure out where can we. Where can we

go? What are the places where, like, much like Cincinnatus in Invitation

to a Beheading, where are the places where we can read magazines in the cell

and just be left alone? If. If we're going to live in the cell. Right.

If we're going to live in this thing. I do think, unlike

Russia, we do still have. While there may be

social pressure to stay inside the cell, at this point,

there is not sufficient state pressure to stay inside the cell.

There's not. People think there is, but there's not. Not like there was in

Russia, not even close. So you still don't have the

state coming for you. Anyway,

final thoughts, Claire, on

Invitation to a Beheading. And thank you, by the way, for coming on the show

today. This was an excellent conversation. It was

absolutely my. My honor. I appreciate that you asked

me back again.

You know, I think coming. I wanted to come back to this. This

note or this series of notes that Cincinnatus kept writing

when he had time, when he was not interrupted by all the absurdity.

And there was something he said toward the end of the book,

I think, on page 211, where he

said, well, actually, two page numbers I wrote down. One was page

194, where he said he

basically hoped someone would read these words,

otherwise he should tear them up. Right? And it was sort of

this, These. These words were not a vanity project for him.

They were his attempt at leaving behind

a legacy. And in fact, when Martha came back in

to see him, he tried to give her those pages

and she refused to take them. And it's interesting because it kind of comes back

to something you had said, said earlier in our conversation where

that might have also been a little bit of a jab to

contemporary Russia where if she had been caught with his

words, she would be implicated. Right? And so it's sort

of the. If no one ever reads my words, what was the point in writing

them? And then on page

211, where he, you know, before he's even

let out of his cell, the walls had started to. To

dissolve. They didn't crumble, they didn't break, they

dissolved. And he said, nothing of me will remain

within these four walls. And so I, you know, I was

reminded of how important it is

for all of us. And I'll bring it back to leaders, because

that's the, you know, core of your. Of your show,

how important it is for leaders to be

not just mindful, but intentionally nurturing the legacy

they will leave behind. A few moments ago, you

said, you know, in 75 years, people are going to look back at

this time in this era and what we all did or did not

do, what we did or did not stand up for and

say, what the hell were they thinking? Right? And I think

leaders have to be mindful of that now and understand

what is that legacy? What do they want to be known for, remembered for?

And I don't think it is going to be authoritarianism. I think it is going

to be some deeper impact

that is. That is lasting. So that's that thought.

And then I'm going to ask you one final question, because as you were sort

of sharing your. Your final notes on this book, a question popped

into my head that I can't answer, and I'd love to know if you can.

At the very end of the book, he's

laying face down. He has to adjust because Pierre didn't

like the angle, and he wanted to get a clean shot at the back of

the neck. And he stands up. So my

question is, which Cincinnatist stood up?

The real one or that shadow one who, as you just

read the description of him, did all the things that

he really wanted him to do, but he had to tuck him away.

I think, number one, that's a great question.

Number two, I think. I don't

know.

I think. I don't know. I think I would have to.

I think I'd probably have to read the book again.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I. I don't have a

firm conviction.

And maybe that's the point is for us to not

know and to not have a firm conviction,

because.

Maybe at the end of the day, when the state takes away,

maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't

matter. It does have meaning, but maybe it doesn't matter,

but I don't know. That's. That's me groping towards an

idea that I don't have. I don't have a full

or even a partial grasp of

that question did not occur to me as I read that

scene. It. It truly had only occurred to me as

you just took me through as a fellow Christian, the, You

know, the idea that the. The body that we all get obsessed

over is transitory and

really it's about what you take with you and, you know, it's your soul.

Right. So that's what kind of triggered that. That question. And I. And I

would honestly have to go back and read through it again because there was a.

The Shadow Cincinnatus was a little bit of an Easter egg right. Throughout the

book. He didn't appear everywhere. It wasn't like every single thing

Cincinnatus did. The Shadow Cincinnatus did the

opposite or something more brazen. And in fact,

by the end, he really didn't appear at all, to the point where I was

even thinking, where is that guy? What happened to the

shadow version or whatever they're calling him the second

Cincinnatus. So, yeah, I was just. I was.

I was curious what your. What your reaction would be to the question,

because it did not occur to me in real time either. Yeah.

Yeah. I think this is going to be one of

those episodes where we've resolved nothing and we've

solved nothing. And that's okay, by the way, We've

just put forth the questions.

We haven't. And yes, we've deconstructed a little bit

the text, but I would encourage folks to go read it and go

figure out the answers to these questions

yourself. I want to thank

Claire Chandler for coming on our podcast

today. Always a pleasure, Claire. Always have a great time with you.

And with that, well, we're out.