Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And you can attain a position of dominance through force, but if you don't think you'll pay a price for that, you're a bloody fool.

Uh, Alexander Solzhenitsyn did quite a nice job of investigating the psychological state of Joseph Stalin, for example, and Stalin was clearly the most powerful man in, in the world's most corrupt country, which made him the biggest devil in that particular form of hell.

And you might say, "Well, what did he gain for his trouble?" And I can tell you what he gained.

It was that every single person around him lied about absolutely everything all the time.

What does that do to your soul? I think those are really good questions.

And one of the people who would be best positioned to answer that would be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was a great resistor to the Soviet Union, suffered terribly for it.

And he said this, you can resolve to live your life with integrity.

Let your credo be this.

Let the lie come into the world.

Let it even triumph, but not through me.

That's Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

And the enthusiasts... for the enthusiasts, for synodality and so on, and reimagining doctrine and dogma and overlooking the perennial wisdom and teaching of the church, those people frighten me as much as they repel me.

And even in Greece, because I was in Greece for the first two years of it, and then on Mount Athos even, even on Mount Athos, we saw there was no place on the face of the earth that did not have this question.

You know, I mean, it reminds me of Solzhenitsyn who says, you know, good and evil...

it goes down the heart of every human being, the divide, right? Well, the divide goes across every society, every community on how they respond to the question of truth right there in the gospel.

There'll be for the rise and fall.

But the thing is, the philosophy is oftentimes the dangerous part.

It's the philosophy that overruns and overrides, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out, it's the ideology that overrides our innate sense of right and wrong.

And here in America, we don't want to hold classes of people accountable for the actions of one of those people, or 10 of those people, or 100 of those people.

But we do have to look at philosophies and ask ourselves if they're inherently bloodthirsty.

The AI system we use reflects our ability to travel.

I'll use the Solzhenitsyn image.

It's always in my mind whenever we deal with human criminality.

Solzhenitsyn went in the gulag.

I hope you all understand.

He was a brilliant literary writer, a Russian, who ended his life in bitterness in America, alienated from his own country.

There's a line down the center of every human heart.

And each day, when you awaken, you make a decision.

The second time you read it, though, you're going to grab a highlighter and read it as a textbook that explains the world around you.

Yeah, I've read Solzhenitsyn, and I just can't believe I haven't read 84.

And so I've seen the movie, but I haven't read the book, and that's probably worth getting.

So I will take your advice on that.

Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality.

This they don't understand, and it will be a greatest shock for them, of course.

And Solzhenitsyn, he tells stories of the Soviet that in situations where party purists were thrown in the gulag, They maintain their innocence, and their silver lining is it's a mistake.

The party will see the mistake.

carrying.

It's what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said.

And Gulag Archipelago, live not by lies.

Don't repeat the lies.