When Feodor Dostoevsky wrote the novel "Crime and Punishment" in 1866 to describe a world made possible by Russian nihilism, he was describing not only a literary character, Rodion Raskolnikov, but a whole future philosophical point of view. Raskolnikov, who regards himself as a well-educated and superior but powerless person, asks himself: “Why not kill a wretched and ‘useless’ old moneylender to alleviate human misery?”
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? … One death, and a hundred lives in exchange--it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm.
He convinces himself the answer is "nothing" prevents such an act. It surely cannot be God (who does not exist) nor conventional morality (which is humbug) that forbids killing the moneylender. The only problem is how to escape detection for the "crime." As Dostoevsky formulated the situation in another novel, "Brothers Karamazov," those of great will and intellect can do whatever they can get away with:
‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ he said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said. ‘A clever man knows his way about.’
A world where you can enact your own morality is one in which superior people are all-powerful. Getting caught is all you have to worry about. One only has to fear the mindless wrath of the cops. But the superior men, the men like you, will understand that killing the moneylender was a cool thing and give you their tacit, coded approval.
Piers Morgan lost his cool during a heated debate on his “Uncensored” show, swearing at guest Taylor Lorenz.
Lorenz, a former Washington Post and Daily Beast reporter, was on the show Monday to defend controversial social media posts that appeared to celebrate the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Lorenz, now a podcaster for Vox Media, admitted on the panel that her reaction to the killing was “joy,” according to NBC. …
Lorenz was making a case for Americans who had been denied life-saving health care by insurance firms, like UnitedHealthcare, she said. The company has indeed been hit with claims of high rates of denial, and using AI software to reject some, according to Fox. The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate arrested in the killing, Luigi Mangione, reportedly cited his own frustrations with the healthcare industry in a manifesto that he was carrying.
Perhaps the most famous imitators of Raskolnikov in American culture were Leopold and Loeb, “two American students at the University of Chicago who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on May 21, 1924. They committed the murder – characterized at the time as ‘the crime of the century’ – hoping to demonstrate superior intellect, which they believed enabled and entitled them to carry out a ‘perfect crime’ without consequences.” Not surprisingly:
Leopold was also interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "supermen" (Übermenschen), interpreting them as transcendent individuals possessing extraordinary and unusual capabilities, whose superior intellects allowed them to rise above the laws and rules that bound the unimportant, average populace.
The Leopold and Loeb case was dramatized in the 1948 movie "Rope," where a professor (played by Jimmy Stewart) is confronted by his students with an actual implementation of the doctrine that it was the elite, with their higher concepts of the way things should be, not some nonexistent God or codified convention, that should govern affairs. The 1948 audiences would have seen the absurdity of the argument instinctively, but it is never explicitly refuted in the film.
Yet as anyone who has read "Crime and Punishment" knows Dostoevsky’s answer to the conscience-stricken Raskolnikov’s rhetorical question “Crime? What crime? That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!... Was that a crime?” is not only a resounding yes but that there were actually two crimes: the murder of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and the murder of Rodion Raskolnikov’s soul. Dostoevsky independently arrives at the message in Matthew: “Don't fear those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body.”
Dostoevsky does this not by philosophy but by exposition. Raskolnikov, for reasons he does not immediately understand but later learns only too well, realizes he has destroyed that part of himself that provides kinship to the rest of the human race and nature itself. The miserable old woman, the noxious bug who he thought so little of was in a very profound sense similar to him. Rather than feeling pride, he becomes conscious of having committed a profound act of betrayal – that he a handsome and intelligent man killed an ill-favored, stupid crone.
This awareness makes Raskolnikov fear what he formerly desired, the chance to get away and escape punishment. He no longer wants to hide beneath the façade of cool that now shames and disgusts him intensely. Then he began to think and plead with no one in particular: take my body, but give me back my soul.
Dostoevsky could scarcely have imagined that his character would have become the template for the moral dilemma of millions of self-righteous nihilists in the 20th century. Far from being fictional, Raskolnikov became as real as history gets. The millions of Red Guards, who in a fit of moral certitude squashed insects experienced a mass Raskolnikov moment. Take the case of a Red Guard who betrayed his insect of a mother.
They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her.
Fang Zhongmou's execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child.
More than four decades on, Fang's son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic.
Zhang Hongbing, now an old man himself, like some ancient mariner, will tell anyone who will listen how he killed the woman who loved him more than anyone else in the world. Ironically in that relentless self-abasement lies his last hope. One is naturally sad to see young and promising individuals like Leopold and Loeb condemned to spend the rest of their lives in jail. But perhaps it is not the worst fate they could have suffered. The worst fate was they could have gotten away with it.
In A.E.W. Mason’s "The Four Feathers," two star-crossed lovers discuss irreparable faults, of which some must befall all of us in this world. "Do you understand? I have a hope that if—this fault can be repaired," – and he pointed to the feathers, – "we might still, perhaps, see something of one another – afterwards."
When nihilism fails, hope in something more is all we have left.