Mollie Hemingway

So it's interesting here how they're talking about children, how they have imagination.

And I keep thinking also about how in our culture, the way that a lot of parents give children just complete... Carte blanche.

Freedom.

And how when you're young, in fact, you shouldn't have complete freedom.

You do need boundaries on your world.

You shouldn't have that much roaming ability.

As you age and as you're able to handle...

life and make your own decisions and assess risk better, then you get more freedom that comes with it.

This system seems to treat people as just ever children who never develop.

And that's kind of what I took out of that

situation there.

But we also seem to have inverted it ourselves where we give complete freedom to young people and then we get more controlling as they grow older, again, through our technological systems where we are suppressing what people can say, policing the contours of their debate.

But back to your point about the way he presents heaven as having no freedom and it's

It struck me as weird, because he was raised Eastern Orthodox, that he had such a childish conception of what heaven is.

And it seemed like so limited to human understanding in a way that usually the Eastern Orthodox are much better at having like a... Kind of mystical.

Yes.

And it seemed just like he didn't understand at all the complexity of what it means to be a full human or what bondage of the will means on earth.

So, this is to me so interesting about his background that he was involved in revolutionary efforts in 1905, gets arrested, gets exiled, is a total Bolshevik and follower of Lenin, and then writes this book.

Yeah.

which predicts, you know, because again, this is being written in 1921, predicts what's going to happen with the totalitarian system that ends up happening in the Soviet Union, in Russia.