Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, it’s funny when you just . . . I think anyone listening to what we’ve said so far would say, “Boy, this is a depressing book.” Right? It’s about death and war, death under the Nazis, death under the Communists. I did not find it depressing. I did not find it a dark read. Let me expand on that a little bit, and I want your reaction. Yes, people go through horrible things, but one of the themes of the book is the resilience of the human spirit, and he talks about it explicitly in a few places. He talks about the desire to live even when you think it’s “hopeless.” He talks about how people do things that are not going to have an impact for months and maybe years, even though they think they’re about to die, but they do them anyway. The human circus or whatever you want to call it, the parade goes on. It’s weird to say this. I didn’t find it a particularly dark book. I was not depressed or down. I found it a nice example of what I talked about with Susan Cain. I found it a very bittersweet book because there’s a lot of life in it. Do you agree with that? I don’t find many things depressing. It is tough to read. I think most ordinary readers — if you just polled them, they would say, “This is depressing. ” But that the book itself exists is part of the ultimate reason why it’s not depressing, that the book managed to survive. That’s a testament to some of the negotiable elements in the Soviet system. Even though they tried to destroy it, you have to wonder, how hard did they try? When you read the stories of how it survived, it seems maybe they could have destroyed it if they had truly wanted to. One thing I’m struck by — the terror reign of Stalin more generally — for all the terrible things he did, he had some modest tendency to protect his geniuses, whether it was Pasternak or Prokofiev or Shostakovich or Grossman. Those are not the people he killed. Babel was killed, but the geniuses tend to survive, and they’re able to do something, however twisted it may have been, or whatever circuitous path it had to go through to come out and be shown to the public. Maybe Shostakovich is the clearest example of that. It’s really interesting. Obviously, he was ruthless with respect to his political rivals, including people who —…

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