Lex Fridman

I don't know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.

Yeah, maybe that's it, the roots of it.

And you also mentioned the three great World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, and The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.

What makes for a great war book?

And it was written by Vasily Grossman.

He experienced Stalingrad firsthand.

And there's also just the deep philosophical component.

And also just, I mean, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

It seems like that context reveals, in the most pure way, human nature and like what kind of, you know, in Man's Search for Meaning is when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love for, in this case, his wife.

It's the thing that is a little flame that burns.

And let's say Grossman is...

small acts of kindness is the thing that allows the human spirit to persist.

And that was, you know, people in modern day politics talk about communism like it's trivial that it would lead to atrocities, but I don't think it's that trivial.

It's this idealism of humans.

It's like, why can't, basically, why can't we all get along?

There's a real compassion behind it.

There's real love.

And what you realize is,

It's a real study, the 20th century of human nature, that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion is abused by centralized powers.

So there's a dictator in that context, in those, given that set of technologies, a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the promise of the ideal is supposed to be.