Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…The notion of what people will put up with and how they deal with it, of how they will keep on absorbing indignities. And the set point — you could say it gets reset, and then something else happens and something else happens. And he’s so psychologically astute in presenting that in a wide variety of settings for different people, whether it’s interrogation, torture, being in the camp, seeing your child suffer. It’s one of the hardest things about this novel to read. There are so many instances of it, and any one of them is heartbreaking, and you keep on seeing it again and again. I take it you found that hard as well. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.