Prince Myshkin from “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky comes home from a sanatorium with epilepsy, no money, and no idea how to protect himself. Within a day, a roomful of rich strangers have decided he is a fool because he says what he thinks and means it. Towards the end, he is sitting in a dark room beside the man who has just murdered the woman they both loved, stroking the murderer’s hair so he will not be alone, and by morning his mind is gone. Nobody is punished. The book ends.
Even though I read this book years ago, it has been on my mind quite a bit lately. I can’t get the news without thinking about it.
This is a lament about the state of society now: how hopeless it seems, and how it has become almost a crime to be born poor, a minority, or on the wrong side of a line on a map. Not a crime with a trial. A crime with a sentence: worse schools, worse air, a shorter life, and a world that shrugs. It feels like we are regressing backwards, even with all the comforts and advancements that make our lives easier than in the dark ages. A fever that killed children back then now costs a few rupees to cure, and still the lights get brighter while we walk the other way. It has never been easier, and we have never cared less. This is what makes The Idiot so relevant today.
In the novel, the prince says exactly what he believes at a party, and the room does not pity him; it enjoys him. We have removed the walls from that room with social media. A minor girl molested is the morning headline; by evening we have moved on to something new. Why doesn’t our heart bleed anymore? Are all our tears reserved for K-dramas? A man loses the job he held for twenty years and is told the economy is booming. The same week, a billionaire launches a rocket for fun. The rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor and the middle class, and being born poor is the one sentence you can never appeal, because society is the judge, jury, and executioner.
And when everything has a price, kindness looks like a trick. Everyone in the novel assumes the prince has an angle. That is cynicism: not the belief that people are bad, but that no one is ever simply good. Nowhere is it plainer than in the war I will not name. On a strip of land, the size of a small city, children have been dying under bombs for so long that a small body pulled from rubble no longer stops the doomscroll. Their deaths arrive as a number, and the number is debated. And now the latest news I cannot get out of my head: that children are being blown apart by explosives left behind in the shape of toys. A doll. A small football. The one bright thing in a street of rubble, and a child runs to it, because a child runs to a toy. Who makes such a thing? Who sits at a desk and designs it, who signs for it, who carries it into a place where children live and sets it down? How does a person target a child, even if they are just following orders? And how do the rest of us read it over breakfast and turn the page? The prince learned everything he knew about love from children. He could not have looked at those pictures and argued about definitions. We can. I have.
So where does a person go, in a world like that, to be understood? Increasingly, to a machine. A non-human companion has emerged which can comfort us and agree with us on everything, leading us into an echo chamber built for one. I use these tools daily and understand the pull. The novel has this character too. His name is Lebedev, and he tells every person in the room exactly what they want to hear: the general, the merchant, the prince, whoever is in front of him. Everyone keeps him around, because for the length of a conversation he makes each of them feel bigger than they are. It wears off by the door. Nobody is helped by him. The prince is his opposite. He tells the ruined woman the truth about herself and stays, and it is his honesty, not Lebedev’s comfort, that changes anyone in that book. That is what connection costs: someone who will disagree with you and not leave. Is this even possible in today’s world? If we practice on the machine long enough, we will forget how to connect or be there for each other. Dostoevsky wrote his flatterer in 1868. AI was inconceivable then, and still he is exactly right about it; I marvel at his intellect.
The forgetting has a direction. A boy who learns closeness from a screen that never pushes back is an easy sale for men who tell him women should not push back either. The novel’s real villain is a respectable man who used a girl of sixteen and then auctioned her off; every man in the book blames her. Extreme patriarchy is on the rise in India. I grew up there, and over the last decade, under a government whose ideas come from a men’s organization that drills in khaki shorts and dreams of a nation with one faith, I have watched that old idea sold back to us as tradition, cheered from stages, taught to boys as pride. A surname tells a mob a man’s caste and faith, and the mob knows what to do. And an internet full of men with podcasts and courses to sell teaches lonely boys the same thing: kindness is weakness; a real man takes. That is the murderer’s philosophy, and the novel shows where it ends. I am scared for the young generation, not because they are cruel, but because the cruel ones have found a microphone and the kind ones have been told to be quiet.
I identify a lot with Prince Myshkin: not his illness, but his instinct to assume the best of people after the evidence comes in. I have said the sincere thing and felt the room go cold. I have been told I would do better if I were harder, if I just lived my life, and that none of this is my problem to fix. I have lain awake pondering whether my fate is going to be like his fate: liked, used, and gently set aside. The book corrects me. The prince is destroyed by two people whose wounds were too deep to heal, not by the world. Everyone else he touched was changed: a schoolboy grows up decent; Lebedev’s own daughter becomes the most honest person in the book. The prince never gets to see it. That is the part that makes me cry.
So, are we humans losing our humanity? Or is this just a cycle of progress and regression, with humanity evolving in very small increments, so that a woman born today is still better off than one born in 1868? Or have we reached an age of hedonism and capitalism where we have lost our humanity, and the courage to speak up against the injustices of the world, and just keep going on as long as it does not affect us? I think the last answer is what the cycle looks like from inside a bad decade. The good were always rare. What is new is a world comfortable enough that the rest of us never have to find out whether we are among them.
We need more people like him today. Not because they win; they do not. Because they are the only reason anyone else does. So be the idiot. Say the sincere thing and let the room go cold. Look at the child in the rubble and do not scroll past. Disagree with the machine and with the man on the stage. And the boy who was told that kindness is weakness: do not argue with him, show him. Be kind to him until he remembers what it feels like, and walk him back. Then do the hardest thing the prince did: when the room goes cold, do not leave it. My fate may well be his. I have decided I can live with that, because the alternative is to become one of the people in the room.