Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

The Gulag Archipelago/One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
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Exploring Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Hasan Sorrells delves into the catastrophic effects of suppressing free speech in totalitarian regimes. This episode examines the necessity of robust free speech for effective leadership, the dangers of totalizing ideologies, and the role of literature in preserving individual liberty and truth. Listeners will gain insights on how intentional leaders can resist cultural and political pressures to protect both speech and societal integrity.
  • Book Titles: The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  • Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Guest: Jesan Sorrells 
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Time-Stamped Overview
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  • Welcome and Introduction - 1:00
  • The Gulag Archipelago - 2:00
  • 05:07 Nighttime arrests and their rituals
  • 14:39 Books on freedom of speech
  • 20:28 Outlawing political parties and arrests
  • 27:37 Jordan Peterson on Solzhenitsyn
  • 30:12 Early Soviet class warfare ideals
  • 36:22 Importance of Protecting Free Speech
  • 41:14 Shukov's survival tactics
  • 46:50 Leadership and emotional intelligence
  • 55:35 Freedom of speech and censorship
  • 59:47 Arrest and accusations of treason
  • 01:06:06 The power of social proof
  • 01:12:56 The role of truth in society
  • 01:17:20 Importance of Cultural Confidence
  • 01:21:42 Importance of Diverse Viewpoints
  • 01:22:00 Staying on the Leadership Path with The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

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Out. Hello, my name is Hasan

Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast, episode number 16 with

our book Today Our Author Today,

this Guy. Today we are going to

be reading insights and excerpts

that are the results or

that are about documenting the results of oppression,

suppression and the loss of the freedom

of speech. Sure, freedom was

restored, but as we have

as we wrap up the month, as we come to the end of a month

focused on writers of Russian descent,

where we have covered Lenin and Chekhov and

Dostoyevsky on the podcast, we've arrived

at the clearing at the end of the

totalitarian path. And

there in the clearing at the end of that path

stands a monumental giant of 20th

century literature. Whether you agree with his

conclusions or not, the anti

communist writer Alexander

Solzhenitsyn.

From the Gulag Archipelago.

That's what rest is. It's a blinding

flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly

into the past and the impossible into omnipotent

actuality. That's all.

And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able

to grasp anything else except that in your

desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you. It's a mistake.

They'll set things right. And everything which is

by now comprised in the traditional, even literary

image of an arrest will pile up and take shape not in your own

disordered memory, but in what our family and your

neighbors in your apartment remember

the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door,

the insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the

unsleeping state security operatives,

the frightened and cowed civilians witness at their backs.

And what functions does this civilian witness serve? The

victim doesn't even dare think about it, and the operatives don't remember, but that's what

the regulations call for. And so he has to sit there all night long and

sign in the morning for the witness jerked from his bed. It is

torture too, to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors

and acquaintances. The

traditional image of arrest is also trembling hands packing for

the victim, a change of underwear, a piece of soap, something to

eat. And no one knows what it is that is needed, what is

permitted, what clothes are best to wear. And the security

agents keep interrupting and hurrying you. You don't need anything,

they'll feed you there. It's warm There it's all

lies. They keep hurrying you to

frighten you. The traditional

image of an arrest is also what

happens afterward, when the poor victim has been

taken away. It is an alien,

brutal and crushing force, totally dominating the

apartment for hours on end. A breaking, ripping

open, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks

onto the floor, shaking, dumping out and ripping apart, piling up mountains of litter

on the floor, and the crunch of things being trampled beneath

jackboots. And nothing is sacred in the search.

During the rest of the locomotive engineer in Ocean, a

tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly

dead child. The

jurists dumped the child's body out of

the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people

out of their sick beds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath

them for those left behind after the

arrest. There is the long tail end of a wrecked and

devastated life, and the attempts to go and

deliver food parcels. But from all the windows,

the answer comes in barking voices. Nobody here by

that name. Never heard of him.

Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad, it took

five days of standing in crowded lines just to get to that window.

And it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested

person responds at all. Or else the answer

is tossed out, deprived of the right to correspond.

And that means, once and for all, no right to

correspondence. And that, almost

for certain, means has been

shot.

That's how we picture arrest

to ourselves.

Sam.

In the west in 2022,

shockingly enough, freedom of speech is on the ropes

everywhere you look. Speech is confused with

physical violence. Speech is confused with

intent. Speech is confused with

hurting my feelings.

And this is not the

legacy of the West. This is not

what people fought and died for in the West.

People fought and died in the west, and quite frankly in the east, for

the right to speak and the

responsibility to accept the consequences.

All of them, not just the ones we feel comfortable with, of

such speech. We can talk

about platforms and public squares versus private

all we want, but fundamentally, at the end of the day,

speech is really the only thing that we have.

And as a person who makes his living

talking, speech is very

valuable to me.

When we think about freedom of speech, we have to think about where the suppression

of that speech ultimately winds us up at, and it should

scare the living hell out of us. And I don't say that

lightly. There are consequences

to the suppression of free speech, and I don't care if you're a

soft totalitarian or a hardcore one. The

totalizing impact of Suppressing speech, the totalizing

impact of oppressing views you don't like

does have an impact on the future

on this podcast. While we are not political, we are about leadership.

And leadership does eventually intersect with politics and culture and

family and everything else, even creation itself, just

as speech does. Leaders need

to speak freely in order

to lead effectively.

Remember I said in the west, the freedom of speech is on the ropes. Well,

it's on the ropes for three reasons, and I've kind of gilded the

lily a little bit. I've kind of gleaned over them a little bit, but I

want to go in depth about all three of them. Freedom of speech

is on the ropes because freedom of speech is inherently socially unjust.

There is no room for social human

justice inside of the freedom of speech. As a matter of fact, that's a

construct that doesn't even exist.

The other reason freedom of speech is on the ropes is because it exposes

those in power, regardless of their ideologies,

who would seek to be our betters. It

exposes them to ridicule. I was. I was watching the

Adventures of Robin Hood, a ironically enough

Disney movie, the other day, and. And King John

was undone by freedom of speech.

As a matter of fact, the only way he could suppress the speech was by

locking everybody else who was speaking, all

the other animals anyway in prison, including

the rooster who was strumming

the bandolier. So free speech is inherently

socially unjust. It puts the people in power, regardless of

their ideology, in danger of being exposed as the

tyrants that they actually are. And finally, freedom of

speech exposes to the raw,

sanitizing light of day the contradictory

nature of systems of all types, but mostly of a

system, the current system we are living in, in 2022, that

promises material comfort, but that can

only really deliver genuine inequality.

And we don't like that. We don't like that at all.

If you're looking for a reason for why freedom of speech must exist beyond the

ones that I've just mentioned and why it must be robustly defended.

It's because if words lead to the hearer feeling

hurt, demoralized, or disempowered, it doesn't mean that

those words can be conflated with actual physical violence.

And I want to hit on that quite hard today,

because actual physical violence is what happens when you

seek to curb speech. And we will see that today

throughout not only our readings here, but also

through the observations of others who have written about

these readings that we're going to read on this podcast today.

Totalitarians and tyrants don't like to be critiqued.

And, and they have feelings, you know, they're, they're

people. They can be, they can be hurt, they can be wounded.

Yes, I'm at the top of the hierarchical ladder, but do I

not bleed? Do I not also hurt?

Well, yeah, you do. And you're the ideal. And because you're at

the top, well, we see your butt, all of us

below you. Freedom of speech encourages humility

in leaders. Fortunately

for us, there are books that you can still get, and I would

recommend buying them before you can't get them

anymore, that expose the outcomes of both

suppressing speech and they show the power of speech

unleashed, how it can completely and utterly

destroy totalitarian institutions if even

just a drop of it is allowed to exist, which is why

totalizing ideologies seek to curb it everywhere

they can. The best

of these kinds of books

include 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New

World. But in the late 20th century, in the

late 20th century, the

Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

really was the drip of acid

that followed a first drip of acid one day

in the life of Ivan Denisovich that began

to slowly and surely

corrode away and eventually destroy the,

the totalizing ideal that Lenin

had created in his revolution

all those decades ago.

One other point about free speech that I want to make here before I go

and back it up with the rest of this podcast today. When leaders

seek to build a heaven on earth in the philosophical and

the theoretical and even in the rhetorical, they

usually wind up in the practical, building hell

instead. And then those same leaders

will dare to put up a sign, metaphorically and

rhetorically, designed to convince the

denizens trapped within their own

hells that they are in fact in

heaven. And all of these

lies need to be exposed

through free and unfettered speech.

Sam,

Back to the Gulag

Archipelago. The version that we are

going to be reading from today is the Perennial

Library version, a little bit different than the Vintage Classic

version. This version of the Gulag Archipelago

was published in by Harper

and Rowe Publishers back in the day

in 1973. So if you

have the edition most recently released by

Vintage Classics that has the introduction

from Dr. Jordan Peterson, an introduction that we will

be reading some selections from today, it may not match

the version that we've got. We have some interesting information here,

particularly in this book in, in chapter

two that we are going to be reading from today, the

chapter entitled the History. Let me pull off the

little thing here. The history of our Sewage

Disposal System. An

ironic title for a chapter in literature,

if there ever was one.

And I quote directly from the Gulag Archipelago from

1973. In compiling this list, the most difficult thing is

to begin partly because the further back into the decades one

goes, the fewer the eyewitnesses who are left and the therefore the light

of common knowledge has gone out and darkness has set in, and the written chronicles

either do not exist or are kept under Locke

and Key. Also, it is not entirely fair to

consider a single category the especially brutal years of the civil war

and the first years of peacetime, when mercy might

have been expected.

But even before there was any civil war, it could be seen that Russia, due

to the makeup of its population, was obviously not suited for any sort of

socialism whatsoever. It was totally

polluted. One of the first blows of the dictatorship was

directed against the cadets, the members of the Constitutional

Democratic Party. Under the Czar they had

constituted the most dangerous ranks of the revolution, and under the government of the proletariat,

they represented the most dangerous ranks of the reaction.

At the end of November 1917, on the occasion of the first

scheduled convening of the Constituent assembly, which did not take place,

the Cadet party was outlawed and arrests of its members

began. About the same time,

people associated with the alliance for the Constituent assembly and

the students enrolled in the soldiers universities were being

thrown in the jug.

Knowing the sense and spirit of the revolution, it is easy to guess that during

these months such central prisons as Kretsky in Petrograd and the

Buchiri in Moscow, and many, many provincial prisons like them were filled with

wealthy men, prominent public figures, generals and officers, as well

as the officials of ministries and of the state apparatus who refused

to carry out the orders of the new authority. One of the first

operations of the Cheka was to arrest the entire Committee

of the All Russian Union of Employees. By the way, the

Cheka. The Cheka is the nkvd, which would later

be called the kgb, which would much later

have a person working in it that you may know

by the name of Vladimir Putin.

Back to the history of our sewage disposal system.

One of the first circulars of the NKVD in December 1917

stated, quote, in the view of sabotage by officials,

use maximum initiative in localities, not excluding

confiscation, compulsion and arrests.

And even though V.I. lenin, at the end of 1917, in order to

establish, quote, unquote, strictly revolutionary order,

demanded, quote, merciless suppression of attempts at anarchy on the

part of drunkards, hooligans, counter revolutionaries and other persons,

in other words, Foresaw that drunkards and hooligans represented the principal

danger to the October Revolution, with counter revolutionaries

somewhere back in third place, he nonetheless put the problem more

broadly. In his essay how to organize the

competition, January 7th and 10th, 1918.

V.I. lenin proclaimed the common united purpose of purging the

Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects, unquote.

And under the term insects, he included not only all class

enemies, but also workers malingering at their

work. For example, the typesetters of the Petrograd Party

printing shops. That is what time

does. It is difficult for us nowadays to understand how workers would just

become dictators, were immediately inclined

to malinger at work they were doing for themselves.

And then again, in what block of a big city, in

what factory, in what village, are there not saboteurs who call themselves

intellectuals? True,

the forms of insect purging which Lenin conceived of in this

essay were most varied. In some places they would be placed

under arrest, in other places set to cleaning latrines. In some,

after having served their time in punishment cells, they would be handed yellow

tickets. In others,

parasites would be shot.

Elsewhere you could take your pick of imprisonment or punishment

at forced labor of the hardest kind.

Even though he perceived and suggested the basic directions punishment should

take, Vladimir Ilyich proposed that

communes and communities should compete to

find the best methods of

purging.

Sam.

There are different versions of the Gulag Archipelago.

I want to address this versions question right off the bat

or concern. If you're thinking about this as I. As we read

from these various versions and put things together, I want to address this because up

front, because this can be somewhat confusing and it can also

cause people to question the validity or the credibility of the argument that

Solzhenitsyn is making in the Gulag Archipelago. Not in One Day in the

Life of Ivan Denisovich that seems to be a pure manuscript,

but this version,

this book, seems to have struggled to get it right.

And I don't mean that Solzhenitsyn struggled to get it right. But

there's different versions because of the problems

that arise, because many on the political

left worldwide, they had

problems with Solzhenitsyn's assertions about the nature of

communism in the Soviet Union. And of

course they control, and still do in many

cases globally, the the dissemination of

culture, including literature, across the globe. And

so, because they couldn't confirm the things that Solzhenitsyn was

saying, they waited and they then

sought to counterbalance Solzhenitsyn's assertions

in his book the Gulag Archipelago against

what the KGB and other declassified documentation

about communism stated about the system In a post

1989 context, in the context we all live in

now. Now, the problem with

counterbalancing the the

unclassified documents with what Solzhenitsyn

saying that the problem there lies in the fact that

the entire dialectic of Marxism is

fundamentally and foundationally

founded in perpetual grievance and

extremely sophisticated manipulation

of language, which the common people

call lying. Marxism

is basically a lie. Actually, there's no basically to it. It is

a lie. And communism was built on the foundation of Marxism.

Did Marx get to some truth about the historical forces

that are between groups of people? Sure.

But even a wrong clock is right at least once a day.

That doesn't mean that it's right the rest of the time,

though. And so, in adopting this counterbalancing of

Solzhenitsyn public intellect, individuals of all

stripes on both the right and the left have sought to whittle

down Solzhenitsyn into something else.

However, there is a person who has chosen to take

Solzhenitsyn at his word and has looked at the

history of oppression and has chosen to

stare at the facts as they are and tell the

truth. And this would be the Canadian psychologist who

author, podcaster and public lecturer Dr. Jordan Peterson.

From Dr. Jordan Peterson, from the introduction to

the new version of the Gulag Archipelago, the vintage classics

version of the Gulag Archipelago, and I quote extensively,

it was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of

many more were instead a direct

causal consequence of the philosophy. Worse,

perhaps, the theology driving the communist system,

the hypothetically egalitarian universalist doctrines of Karl

Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred,

resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and

responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death

when manifested to the world.

For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic

class, a group that and little more, and history

nothing but the battleground of classes of groups. His

admirers regarded and continue to regard Marx's doctrine as

one of compassion, moral by definition, virtuous by

fiat. Consider the working classes in all their

oppression and work forthrightly to free them. But

hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love.

In consequence, it took no time in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution for

solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality

to manifest its unarticulated and ever darkening shadow.

First came the most brutal indictment of the class enemy.

Then came the ever expanding definition of that enemy until every single person

in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within

that insatiable and devouring net.

The verdict delivered to those deemed at fault by those who

elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and

executioner. The necessity to eradicate the

victimizers, the oppressors, in toto without consideration

whatsoever for reactionary niceties such as individual

innocence. Let us

note as well, this outcome wasn't the result of the initially pristine Marxist

doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very

beginning of the Soviet state itself.

Solzhenitsyn cites, for example, one Martin Latsis,

writing for the Newspaper Red Terror, November

1, 1918, quote, we are not fighting against

single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.

It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused

opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question

you should ask him is, what class does he belong to? What is his origin,

his education, his profession? These are the questions that will determine the fate of

the accused, such as the sense and essence of Red

Terror, unquote.

It is necessary to think when you read such a thing, to

meditate long and hard on the message. It is necessary to recognize, for

example, that the writer believed that it would be better to execute 10,000

potentially innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to

remain free. It is equally necessary to pose the question,

who precisely belonged to that hypothetical entity, the bourgeoisie?

It is not as if the boundaries of such a category are self evident. There

are, therefore the mere perceiving,

they must be drawn. But where

exactly? And more importantly, by whom? Or by

what? If it's hate inscribing the lines instead of love,

they will inevitably be drawn so that the lowest, meanest, most cruel and useless

of the conceptual geographers will be justified in manifesting the

greatest possible evil and producing the greatest possible

misery. Members of the bourgeoisie, beyond all

redemption, they had to go as a matter of course. What of their wives,

children, even their grandchildren?

Off with their heads too. All were incorrigibly

corrupted by their class identity and their destruction, therefore ethically

necessitated. How convenient that the darkest

and direst of all possible motivations could be granted the highest

moral standing. That was as

true. That was as true. A marriage of heaven and

hell. What

values, what philosophical presumptions truly dominated

under such circumstances?

Was it a desire for brotherhood, dignity

and freedom from want? Not in the least. Not

given the outcome it was instead, and obviously the

murderous rage of hundreds of thousands of biblical

Cains, each looking to torture,

destroy and sacrifice their own private

ables. There is simply

no other manner of accounting

for the corpses.

The primacy of the importance of the

individual to be seen either by the nation

state or by the corporation, it matters

not, is the struggle of genuine

intentional leadership.

Leaders seek to bend the apparatus of a

truly ethical state, including the apparatus of a

nation state, right? It could be any state that they're in, could be the state

of their family, could be the state of their community, it could be the state

of their company, any state. They seek to bend the

apparatus of that state away from the work

of hiding, away from the individual. And

they seek to move, they seek to push. They seek to bend the

apparatus of the institution, the organization, the

systems that they are in toward acknowledging the

consequences of the responsibilities that the individual

carries. And this is a fundamental thing that is missing in Marxism. It's

a fundamental thing that is missing in Communism. It's a fundamental thing that is

missing underneath cries

for social media justice

rather than an acknowledgment of

individual responsibility.

When leaders don't do this work, when instead they follow the

crowd, when instead they, they do what the crowd wants,

that, that the acts of

moving the apparatus towards

actual individual justice become blocked, they become, they

become cordoned off. There's barriers, there's impasses.

And moving and ameliorating these blocks,

these impasses and these barriers becomes the true work of an

intentional leader. And of course, one of the biggest blocks, one of the

biggest barriers in

moving the inertia of a nation state away from

repression, towards, towards freedom and maintaining it

in the direction of actual freedom is this idea.

It is a big idea, but it is this idea of protecting

speech. Look, repression inside

of totalitarian systems isn't a bug, it's an actual

feature. And if you're too naive as a leader to believe

that, or you're too willing to only look at the

bright side of humanity and miss the dark side

entirely, you will always be taken by surprise by how dark

human beings can actually become.

Leaders must overcome laziness and willful blindness and

arrogance and a sense of entitlement in order to bend the arc of the

organization away from apathy, away from,

hey, can't we all just get along towards,

can't we all just take some responsibility?

And in order to do that, leadership requires a robust

social and public defense of free speech.

Now, there's a couple of points here I want you to Consider as you think

about this as a leader, as we turn towards one day in the life of

Ivan Denisovich for a fictionalized example of

what this repression practically looks like.

Leadership does require leaders to know where the line

of propriety is in speech and to be prepared to define that line clearly for

their followers. I'm not saying you can yell fire in a

crowded theater, and I'm not even saying that speech doesn't have consequences. Matter of fact,

I believe that speech does have consequences. But we socially

negotiate what those consequences are, and we all have to agree on the

deal. It's not that one extreme or another

extreme gets to set the tone for the conversation.

It is indeed the moderate middle that should

be in charge. And leadership requires the

ability to emotionally and psychologically address the

consequences of free speech. Look,

you probably can't have real equality and

you probably can't get to real equity

here in this world with these

fallen humans. But both the

theories of equity and equality have the same premise

at the bottom and in the basement. And it is a Marxian premise.

And it's this idea that man and man alone

can successfully adjudicate all matters of justice and

mercy without any guidance, without any

external boundaries placed on them by a

transcendent morality.

We talked about this in our podcast episode this month with

David Baumrucker in looking at the work of Fyodor

Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, a book written,

oh gosh, well over, or not well over,

close to 100 years before 1 day in the life of Ivan

Denisovich came out. And just as Solzhenitsyn knew the Russian

people weren't ready for socialism, Dostoevsky knew the same thing.

He knew they weren't ready for a glorious revolution. He thought they needed

a Christian God before they needed

a Marxist humanistic

revolution. He thought they couldn't get there

from here. Potentially.

Potentially, he was right.

From one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich at five o' clock

that morning, reveal was sounded as usual.

Reveille sorry was sounded as usual by the blows of

a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.

The intermittent sounds barely penetrated the window panes on which the

frost lay two fingers thick, and they ended almost as soon as

they'd begun. It was cold outside and the camp guard was reluctant to

go on beating out the revelry for long.

The clanging ceased, but everything outside still looked like the middle of the night.

When Ivan Denisovich Shukov got up to go to

the bucket, it was pitch dark except

for the yellow Light cast on the window by three lamps,

two in the outer zone, one inside the camp itself.

And no one came to unbolt the barracks door. There was no sound of the

barrack orderlies pushing a pole into place to lift the barrel of

excrement and carry it out.

Shukov never overslept reveille. He always got up at

once for the next 90 minutes until they assembled for work belonged to him,

not to the authorities. And any old timer could always earn a bit by

sewing a pair of mittens for someone out of an old sleeve lining,

or bringing some rich loafer in the squad, his drive a lanky right

up to his bunk so he wouldn't have to stumble barefoot round the heap of

boots looking for his own pair. Or going the

rounds of the warehouses offering to be of service, sweeping up this or fetching

that, or going to the mess hall to collect bowls from the tables and bring

them stacked to the dishwashers. You're sure to be

given something to eat there, though there were plenty of others at that game. More

than plenty. And what's worse, if you found a bowl with something left in it,

you could hardly resist licking it out. But Shukov had never

forgotten the words of his first squad leader, Kuzeomin,

a hard bitten prisoner who had already been in for 12 years by

1943, who told the newcomers just in

from the front as they sat beside a fire in a

desolate cutting in the forest,

here, men, we live by the law of the taiga, but even

here people manage to live. The ones that don't make it are

those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on

doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their

buddies.

As for the preachers, he was wrong there. Those people were sure to

get through camp alright, only they were saving their own skin

at the expense of other people's blood.

Shukov always arose at revelry, but this day he didn't.

He had felt strange the evening before, feverish with

pains all over his body. He hadn't been able to get warm all

through the night. Even in his sleep, he had felt

at one moment that he was getting seriously ill, at another that he

was getting better. He had wished morning

would never come.

But the morning came as

usual,

Sam.

The morning came as usual.

There is justice, but not the kind of

cosmic dealing, not the kind

of cosmic reckoning that we

want in our hearts. The language of justice

employed by people who want justice for their enemies, but only mercy

for themselves, tends to cast a dark shadow

in light of the fact that the sun rises on the just

and the unjust alike.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was released

before the Gulag Archipelago, as I mentioned previously, and it

landed like an atomic bomb in Russian culture and Soviet

culture after Khrushchev's equally shocking public

repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality at the

22nd Party Congress in the late 1950s,

early 1960s. This book

details a day in the life of a prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, in

a Gulag. It is raw, it is unfiltered, and it reflected

in an emotional way the experiences that Solzhenitsyn

had himself that were further fleshed out and

ID'd in the gulag Archipelago.

The book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich lays out to critique

the previously unmentionable.

And it lays out the results at a social contract level of a

fully realized totalizing vision of what an

organized culture where lies, fear and machinations

serve as the Marxist driven concrete underpinnings,

an utterly rotten superstructure.

When leaders think about Ivan Denisovich, we have to think

honestly about the results and the consequences of speech and what that gets

us. And the fact of the matter is,

leaders must have the willingness to die socially,

culturally. Yeah, that means getting canceled. Yes, that may

mean losing jobs. Yes, that may mean not having food

to put in your kid's mouth. Leaders have to have a

willingness to die to protect the word of truth, to

protect the ability to even say that truth.

But leaders also, concomitantly

or co. Commitmently, or however you want to frame it, leaders also must

have a willingness to extract the highest meaning from the words they

speak and then have the guts to speak those words and speak that

meaning out. Now, the kinds of

folks who don't like that, the kinds of folks who find that to be

threatening, are folks at an individual level who

are, as Dr. Peterson mentioned earlier,

at the lowest, most mean spirited point in

their own experience. They are experiencing jealousy, they are experiencing

rage, they are experiencing hatred. They are. They're not

experiencing love of any kind, although they may use the words

of love, they may use the words of justice, they may use the words of

mercy, but that's not what they actually mean.

Amateur tyrants do not possess a totalizing

vision other than the vision of totally

controlling other people and other people's

responses to them all the way down to the

social contract level. And in

case you think I'm crazy, think of the last person you

saw being yelled at for either wearing a mask

or not wearing a mask in public. During the last

two years,

back to one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.

Ah, but not simply to report as usual to the authorities for the daily

assignment. Now this is after Shukov gets up and he's moving around the camp.

Zhukov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance. They wanted to

shift the 104th from the building shops to a new site. The socialist

way of life settlement. It lay in open country covered with

snowdrifts, and before anything else could be done there, they would have to dig holes

and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them, wire

themselves in so they wouldn't run away.

Only then would they start building. There

wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month, not even a doghouse. And fires

were out of the question. There was nothing to build them with. Let your

work warm you up. That was your only salvation.

No wonder the squad leader looked so worried. That was his job, to elbow some

other squad, some bunch of suckers into the assignment instead of the

104th. Of course, with empty bands, you got nowhere.

You'd have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if

not a couple of pounds. There's never any harm in trying. So

why not have a go at the dispensary and get a few days off if

you can? After all, he did feel as though every limb was out

of joint. Now we're

gonna switch down a little bit. We're gonna move forward a little bit.

Shukov is now tasked with with performing a

task in the gulag. And. Well, it's, It's.

It goes directly to. Well, well, cleaning

sewage. The top

of the well was so thickly coated with ice that he only just managed to

slip the bucket into the hole. The rope hung stiff as a

ramrod. With numb hands, he

carried the dripping bucket back to the guard room and plunged his hands into the

water. It was felt warm. The

tartar was no longer there. The guards, there were four now stood in a

group. They'd given up their checkers and their nap and were arguing about how

much cereal they were going to get in January. Food was in short supply at

the settlement, and although rationing had long since come to an end, certain articles

were sold to them at a discount, which were not available to

the civilian inhabitants. Shut that door, you

scum. There's a draft, said one of the guards.

Now we're going to switch to the Gulag archipelago for just a moment.

And how is it the genuine religious believers survived in camp? As we

mentioned, more than once in the course of this book we have already mentioned

their self confident procession through the archipelago, a sort of silent

religious procession with invisible candles. How some among them were

moved down but were mowed down by machine guns and those next in line

continued their march, a

steadfastness unheard of in the 20th century

and it was not in the least for show. And there weren't any

declamations. Take some, Aunt Da Silas

Chamille, a round faced, calm and quite illiterate old woman.

The convoy guards called out to her, shamil, what is your article? And she

gently, good naturedly replied, why are you asking, my boy? It's all written down there.

I can't remember them all. She had a bouquet of sections

under Article 58 and we're going to talk about article Pause for just a moment.

We're going to Talk about Article 58 coming up here in just a few

moments. Back to the Gulag

Archipelago selection. Your term, Auntie Diocese

Auntie Dusia side She wasn't giving such

contradictory answers in order to annoy the convoy. In her own simple hearted way

she pondered this question. Her term. Did they really think it was

given to human beings to know their terms?

What term? Till God forgives my sins. Till

then I'll be serving time. You are

a silly, you silly. The convoy guards

laughed. Fifteen years you've got and you'll serve them all and

maybe some more besides. But

after two and a half years of her term had

passed, even though she had sent no petitions,

all of a sudden a piece of paper came release.

How could one not

envy those.

Leaders who oppose the power of

free speech, who are frightened by it?

Either they fail to understand, or they understand all too well

the totalizing nature of

a Creator. And they may indeed really be

in rebellion against that Creator. And that rebellion

exposes itself as an opposition to genuine

free speech. People of Christ,

people of the Christian religion who genuinely understand their

religion, understand this fact, although they may not

know how to articulate it. There's

something very basic built into Christianity that

demonstrates that God loves liberty and God

loves freedom and God loves

true speech. Let me quote directly from the

Book of Genesis in the event that you're not really buying this.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now

the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the

surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering

over the waters. And God

said, let there be light. And there was light.

God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light day and the darkness he called night, and

there was evening and there was morning the first

day. You can go

back to Genesis and read the rest of it, and I'd recommend doing that in

the event that you haven't. Because the freedom to speak

is freedom from the Creator. The Creator is

pro liberty. The Creator is also pro

judgment, pro consequence, and pro mercy.

Freedom of speech requires leaders insisting on the

responsibility of individual people to form a society and a

culture from the words of the truths that they speak.

But very often when a society is taken over by a

totalitizing ideology, there are

rules and regulations and boundaries that are put around this speech

that stop it from occurring and that works in the

totalitarian tyrant's favor. You

know, the one who's in rebellion against creation

itself.

Back to the Gulag Archipelago the History of our Sewage

Disposal system from the 1973

Perennial Classics edition by Harper and Rowe

Paradoxically enough, every act of the all penetrating, eternally wakeful

organs over the span of many years is based solely on one

article of the 140 articles of the non general division of the criminal code of

1926. One can find more epithets in praise of

this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or

Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia, great,

powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multi form, wide sweeping 58

which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of

its sections as in their extended

dialectical interpretation.

Who among us has not experienced its all encompassing embrace?

In all truth there is no step, thought or action

or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by

the heavy hand of Article 58. The article

itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved it possible

to interpret it this broadly. Article 58

was not in that division of the Code dealing with the political crimes, and nowhere

was it categorized as political. No, it

was included with crimes against public order and the organized

gangsterism in division of crimes against the state.

Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize

anyone under its jurisdiction as a political offender.

All are simply criminals. Article

58 consisted of 14 sections.

In section 1 we learned that any action and according to article 6 of the

Criminal Code, any absence of action directed toward

the weakening of state power was considered to be counter

revolutionary. Broadly interpreted, this

turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in

a state of starvation exhaustion.

This was a weakening of state power and it

was punished by execution,

for instance, the execution of malingerers during the war.

From 1934 on, when we were given back. The term motherland

subsections were inserted on Treason to the motherland. 1a, 1b,

1c, 1d. According to these new subsections, all actions directed

against the military might of the USSR were punishable by

execution, one battle or by 10 years imprisonment. 1a. But

the lighter penalty was imposed only when mitigating circumstances were present and

upon civilians only.

Broadly interpreted, when our soldiers were sentenced to only 10 years for

allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Side note,

Solzhenitsyn had a little bit of trouble in the

Soviet military with the Germans. Back

to the book. Actions injurious to Soviet military might. This was

humanitarian to the point of being illegal.

According to the Stalinist Code, they should have been shot on their return home.

Here is another example of the broad interpretation. I remember well an

encounter in Bukiri in the summer of 1946. A certain

pole had been born in Lemberg, when that city was part of the Austro

Hungarian Empire. Until World War II he lived in his

native city, by then located in Poland. Then he went to Austria where he entered

the Service, and in 1945 he was arrested there by the Russians. Since

by this time Austrian Lemberg had become Ukrainian Lvov, he received

a tenor under Article 51 1A of the Ukrainian

Criminal Code, that is for treason to his motherland, the Ukraine.

And at his interrogation, the poor fellow couldn't prove that treason to the Ukraine

had not been his purpose when he went to Vienna.

And that's how he conned his way into becoming

a traitor. One

important additional broadening of the section on treason was its application via

Article 19 of the Criminal Code, via intent.

In other words, no treason had taken place, but the

interrogator envisioned an intention to

betray, and that was enough to justify a full term,

the same as for actual treason. True, Article 19

proposes that there be no penalty for intent, but

only for preparation. But given a dialectical

reading, one can understand intention as preparation.

And preparation is punished by the same way, that is with

the same penalty as the crime itself. In

general, we quote, we draw no distinction between intention and

the crime itself. And this is an instance of the

superiority of Soviet legislation to

bourgeoisie legislation.

Sam.

Tyranny inevitably arises

when the ideological purists of a totalizing

system turned their lidless all seeing

eye, as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings,

toward individuals who refused to go along. Like religious ones,

genuinely religious ones who refuse to get in line, like just

the rebellious no folks and those

folks who refuse to toe the line or who are

confused about where exactly the line is, because it keeps shifting.

This is again, not a bug of

tyranny. This is a feature

from Dr. Jordan Peterson's introduction to the Gulag Archipelago Vintage

Classics edition. And I quote,

is this not a, or even the essential point of difference between

the west, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible

egalitarian systems generated by the pathological communist

doctrine? The great and good framers of the American

Republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full

stock and full measure of eradicable human imperfection. They

held modest goals derived not least from the profoundly

cautious common law tradition of England. They endeavored to establish

a system. The corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too

vainly. That's humility.

That's clear headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and

good intention. But the communists, the

revolutionaries, they aimed gradually and admirably, at least in theory, at

a much more heavenly vision. And they began their pursuit with hypothetically

straightforward and oh so morally justifiable enforcement of economic

equality. Wealth, however, was not

so easily generated. The poor could not simply become

rich, but the riches of those who had anything more than the

greatest pauper, no matter how pitiful that more actually

was, that could be redistributed or at least

destroyed. That's equality too,

that sacrifice in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not

enough. With all its theft, betrayal and death,

mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the

overarching and truly totalitarian desire, and to

remake man and woman as such, the

longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image

of communist preconceptions,

attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom.

And with unshakable belief in the glowing but

ever receding future, the newly minted

Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and

betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue.

From the Gulag Archipelago directly, and I quote from Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn, this was the nub of the plan. The peasant's

seed must perish together with the adults. Since Herod

was no more. Only the vanguard doctrine has shown us how to destroy

utterly, down to the very babes. Hitler

was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck. His

murder camps have made him famous, whereas, and no one has any

interest in ours at all.

Social proofing is powerful when you can get everyone to go along with a

totalizing creed or a creed

based on liberty. Social proofing has power. And

this is what both the Founding Fathers knew and Karl Marx.

But the Founding Fathers knew something about human nature that Marx rejected

and Lenin found to be a fool's errand to even consider.

The founding fathers knew, and leaders have to know that words

at the individual level mean more than they do even at the nation

state level. But they also knew that leaders

use their words to challenge the frontiers of

social proofing. They use their words to put together a podcast like this and

read books like we've read during the month, and make arguments and

assertions like we've made during this month about these works,

and to comment on current cultural tropes and

trends without fear, without shaking, without

wavering, to plant a flag

and take a position. This is what leaders do.

They do it in their small businesses, they do it in their medium sized

entities. And even more importantly, leaders must do it in their

gigantic mega corporations where they all hang out

trying to build us a better world, one technological

gee whiz advancement at a time.

Leaders also use their words to defend the boundaries of propriety. And I'm

looking at you, cultural leaders.

If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from

religion. And religion, well, religion is the actual

root of everything. But if you're rejecting that root, if you

don't even know if you have that root, or if you're in open rebellion

against that root, well, you're going to tear down

the boundaries, you're going to remove them, or you're going to pretend that they

never really existed anyway. And this is a fundamental

flaw in your speech. It's a lie,

and you need to stop. Because on the other

side of that lie is someone taking you very

seriously and listening to you very, very

closely. And someone who might be willing to

take your lie as a marching order to reinforce

or to support a resentment or an envy that they are nursing

in their heart.

Totalitarian leaders, whether benevolent or tyrannical,

rely on the power of your social proofing from your words. Leaders

to reinforce totalizing control.

They rely on it just like bread

relies on. On butter, if

you can get it.

Sam.

Back to one day in the life of Ivan

Denisovich. No sense in getting your

boots wet in the morning. Even if Shukov had

dashed back to his barracks, he would have found another pair to change into.

During eight years imprisonment, he had known various systems for allocating footwear.

They'd been times when he'd gone through the winter without Valenki at all, or leather

boots either, and had had to make shift

with rope sandals or a sort of galoshes made of

scraps of motor tires. Chetzeses they called them. After

the Chiabinsk tractor works, now the footwear

situation seemed better. In October, Shukov had received, thanks to Pavlo, who

he trailed to the warehouse, a pair of ordinary, hard, wearing leather

boots big enough for a double thickness of rags

inside. For a week he went about as though he'd been given a

birthday present, kicking his new heels. Then, in December,

the Valenki arrived and oh, wasn't life

wonderful? But some devil in the bookkeeper's

office had whispered in the commandant's ear that Valenki should be issued only to those

who surrendered their boots. It was against the rules for a prisoner to

possess two pairs of footwear at the same time, so Shukov had to

choose. Either he'd have to wear leather throughout the winter, or

surrender the boots and wear Valenki even in the thaw. He'd taken such good

care of his new boots, softening the leather with grease. Ah, nothing had been so

hard to part with in all his eight years in camps as that pair

of boots. They were tossed into a common

heap. Not a hope of finding your own pair in the

spring. Now Shukov knew what he

had to do. He dexterously pulled his feet out of

the Valenki, put the Valenki in a corner, stuffed his foot rags into

them. His spoon tinkled on the floor. Though he'd made himself ready for the guardhouse

in a hurry, he hadn't forgotten his spoon and barefoot,

sloshed the water right under the guards. Vilenky. Hey there,

you slob. Take it easy. One of the guards shouted, putting his feet on a

chair. Rice, another went on.

Rice is a different category. You can't compare cereal with rice.

How much water are you going to use? Idiot? Who on earth washes like that?

I'll never get a clean otherwise. Citizen Chief. It's thick with mud.

Didn't you ever watch your wife scrub the floor? Pig.

Shukov drew himself up, the rag dripping in

his hand. He smiled ingenuously, revealing the gaps

in his teeth, the result of a touch of scurvy at

OOST Ishima in 1943.

And what a touch it was. His exhausted stomach wouldn't hold

any kind of food, and his bowels could move nothing but a bloody fluid.

But now only a lisp remained from that old trouble.

I was taken away from my wife in 41, Citizen Chief.

I've forgotten what she was like.

Citizen Pig.

Idiot. I've forgotten

what she was like.

The ties that bind society together are woven together for the gossamer of

truth. No matter what you may think of that gossamer, it

does bind society together. And when that truth is

no longer protected or actively dismembered by those with the intent to

build a quote unquote better world, it doesn't take long for

man's inhumanity to man to appear in even the

most inhumane situations.

It also doesn't take long for those situations to morph into the actual hell

verbalized in insults, degradations, and bureaucratic apathy

that encourages leaders to stick with the totalizing lie

rather than break it and destroy it in favor of the

freeing absolute truth.

Leaders understand this, and leaders have the courage, and it

is a courageous act to break and

restrain the ties that bind with their language, their

speech and their words. They raise the alarm,

and they recognize when those ties are being cut,

and they identify who's doing the cutting very

clearly. And then they go about the process

of reweaving back the fabric not only of

the social contract, not only of the

society, not only of individual entities, but they go back to

reweaving the fabric of the social contract, the fabric

of life together itself. And they

take this role very, very

seriously, even, and especially

now, innocuous leaders in

innocuous places in the.

So why am I going on and on about this? Why am I

lecturing into the void? Why is there no guest on the podcast? Why do I

not have an Amen corner on this one?

Because quite frankly, I don't need it. And I want to be

unambiguously clear. I am pro free speech, and I don't care

if you're white or black. I don't care care who you sleep with or

where you are at about your gender. I don't care what country

you came from, and I don't care what ethnicity you have. I don't even

care what God you serve or choose not to serve. I don't

care. I am for untrammeled free speech. Now,

with that being said, I'm also for untrammeled

consequences for that speech. And by the way, those

consequences, as I've already previously said, must be

socially constructed. And that's what we

did in America. That was the American experience.

Gosh, up until probably about six years ago,

when everybody kind of just went crazy because a

guy with a bad haircut came down an escalator and said

he was running for president.

But we've been going crazy a little bit before that, and he was just a

symptom of a much larger disease.

And the disease is a loss of faith in the promise of

America, a loss of a belief in the Republic, a

decline of cultural confidence. And I've said this on other

podcasts in other places, but I'll say it on this one. Our

literature reflects our cultural confidence and our ability to

read literature and understand hard literature as leaders

reflects and shapes our ability to actually say

hard truths out loud and know what underpins them.

If you don't know what underpins your speech, you will abandon it in

a heartbeat for any ideologue that comes along. And I firmly

believe that. And by the way, the ideologue can be from the right

politically, or the ideologue can be from the left politically, but you will

abandon it, and you will abandon it in lies and betrayal. And

the abandonment won't start in the voting booth. The abandonment will start

in your home, in your school,

in your neighborhood.

How can innocuous leaders this is the other thing I'm worried about. How can

innocuous leaders in a modern Western culture,

surrounded by the disturbingly unserious and influenced

by the peculiarly lightweight, how can they avoid the path of

least resistance and do the actual hard things, walk the hard

path and do it in a way that will perhaps make them happy, but that

for sure will create a better world. In essence, how can leaders tell the

truth in a time of untruth and unseriousness?

You want to know why some training programs in some sensitive

areas like diversity and inclusion don't work?

They don't work because we're not telling the truth. We're

merely passing along ideologies. You

want to know why books and movies that

have cultural tropes shoehorned into them about what you should believe or what

you shouldn't believe? You want to know why those fail at the box office or

fail to pull ratings or fail to pull subscription numbers? Well, they fail because they

aren't telling the truth. The truth is

complicated and messy, but it is the truth.

And the truth of situations, the truth of life, the truth of

circumstances is multifaceted. It's not all one thing or

another. Everyone is neither hero nor villain. As a matter of fact,

Solzhenitsyn said, infamously enough, that

the line of good and evil passes through

each and every human heart. We are all

sinful, and we have all fallen short of the glory of God.

We are all our brother's keeper.

These are principles that I hold, and these principles

undergird this podcast, and these principles undergird the books that

we read on this podcast. I do not come

to this work from an unprincipled, wavering Cultural position.

I actually care very little about

that. I care very much though, about rock ribbed principles

and making sure that you all understand exactly where we stand

and where I stand over here. And

leaders, leaders have to be clear about where

they stand and where they stand and stay on the

path based on principles

rather than on temporarily held positions.

You want to stay on the path as a leader? Start saying

no. It's very simple. Just start

saying no to a lie that you know is a lie. And it doesn't have

to be a big lie, it doesn't have to be a medium sized lie.

Usually the lies you have to start saying no to are lies in your own

house, lies in your own business, lies in your own

relationships, lies in your own communities.

Say no to lies and say the truth.

That is true liberty and that

is true free speech.

Sure, the humorists and the politicians

may want to own that space, but it really begins the

ownership of that space and the protection of that space really begins with you.

And then there's the ever present now, right?

Staying on the path requires rational engagement with the ever present

now, as well as intentional preparation for the ever

arriving future. The future is coming,

no matter how you feel about, is

agnostic to your emotions, but it is not

agnostic to your preparing for it.

And so staying on the path requires that rational

engagement. And the only way you can rationally engage is if you have the freedom

to speak the truth, if you have the freedom to

not worry about being thrown into a

gulag for pointing out that the emperor, whether the

emperor is the emperor of Amazon or Walmart, or the

emperor of the United States or China, or the emperor of the

bank down the street and or the emperor of your family

pointing out that the emperor, wherever he may show up or

she may show up, pointing out that they are naked while

everyone else claims that they are clothed.

Staying on the path requires leaders to engage with ideas, words,

speech, and concepts that they might find to be

personally objectionable, but that

in principle must be aired to protect

one of the two types of diversity that really actually

do matter. And that's diversity of viewpoint.

And the second is diversity of mindset.

We all don't think alike, nor should we. We all

don't have the same viewpoint and nor should we. And we need the

freedom to air our viewpoints and air

our mindsets without fear of a

totalizing ideology clamping down on us.

Staying on the path means that leaders are emotionally and psychologically prepared for the

consequences of speech against the potential

totalizing power of the mob

and that's really what you're all afraid of, isn't it? You're afraid of the

mob. Well,

don't be.

The mob is fickle.

Julius Caesar found that out.

Leaders protect free speech

no matter where it shows up.

And that's it for me.

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HSCT Publishing can help you and your team do that.

So check out our training webinars, our coaching services and

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Red podcast we launched earlier this year with the same name

as this Little Red book, my boss doesn't care

100 essays on disrupting your Workplace by disrupting your boss.

And of course pick up my Most recent book, 12 Rules for Leadership

the foundation of Intentional Leadership, written with Bradley

Madekin. You're going to want to pick up a copy of that in April

2022 and you can get both of these books in

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subscribe to the Hay Sans Sorrells Presents Audio Experience podcast.

Yes, I have three podcasts on YouTube where I

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about all matters that matter in the world today. Everything

from fatherhood to criminal justice, Christianity to artificial

intelligence. We cover the entire plethora of things

that are floating around in my mind and that's why it's called

an audio experience. Alright,

well that's it for me

out.