Let's all be Idiots

2025-09-04

In the Idiot (the Dostoievski book), the main character, prince Myshkin (the so-called “Idiot”) is in fact a genious.

He’s fresh out of therapy in Switzerland and arriving by train to Saint Petersburg. He’s like a baby just born into the world. He’s been isolated from the world his whole childhood, and in his 20s, comes his first experience of Russian society, which is really his first experience of anything outside of the primitive alps. He acts completely naively and without any notion that people around him could have malicious intents.

What happened then is a piece of art.

The truth is: people do hate the kind of people who are ready to take advantage of weaker people. In fact, I’d advance it’s literally the only motive of hatred in the world. And what you hate you don’t usually do yourself.

The aristocracy and oligarchy of Petersburg are people full of themselves, completely blind to the harms they make to the world, playing dumb game of oneupmanships, yet they are not uniform. The book is full of colorful characters, each with their weakness, their foibles, their flaws. But if something is true, it’s how unbearably full of themselves anyone in the Petersburg elite is.

But Myshkin has a magical aura. He’s like an angel, every time he enters a room, pretty much everyone is reminded of modesty.

How comes an idiot with no experience survives after being dropped in this shark tank of jagged cynical bastards ready to eat whole the first thing come their way?

If Myshkin is an “idiot” he’s certainly not a fool. He knows the world is full of hypocrisy, that people are mean.

But he choses to act as if nothing. In fact, Myshkin is a great stratege, and he is in an quixotic campaign against greed and hypocrisy. He identified the best weapon against those: honesty and modesty. It’s quite simple: be ostensibly harmless, start by showing off your weaknesses. Decent people won’t take advantage of it, great people will pay attention to you and remember the ones who try to take advantage of you.

What you become then is not just a vulnerable person, but you become like a bubble of oxygen in an asphixiated world. A view of a better world. We live in muddy time, under a constant grey sky, everybody wish to see the sun at least a little bit. And that’s what you become to people. A ray of sun, a reason to live another day. We all live for admiration and love, and we admire and love people who give us those things.

People aren’t hypocrits. Society imposes hypocrisy on people.

No one likes hypocrisy, no one likes to pretend being something they aren’t. But we are afraid. The core is the weak point, and we want to protect it. Especially when people around us have an history of exploiting other, being mean, and getting away with it.

But being always on your guard is tiring. Everybody is always on the lookout to express their innermost selves. As difficult or ostracizing as it can be.

Even as individuals, we can’t grow without the help of a community. You aren’t born with friends, you become friend.

Now, what prevents us from expressing the truth? Shame: sometimes manipulated so as to make you affraid of the most harmless thing. Fear of repercusion. Now, this is a perfectly legitimate worry.

Exposing weakness is difficult, and dangerous. But we are the product of what we do. Stafford Beer famously said that “the purpose of a system is what it does”, put more crudely, we are what we do. And if we aren’t yet, we will soon be. And by dint of hidding ourselves in drab little tasteless characters, we become drab little tasteless characters.

It’s risky, but rewarding. It turns out, most people are decent. Being weak and being answered with kindness is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing to feel the trust someone puts in you as a result. It’s the start of a little secret society. A new garden you have mutual responsibility over.

This the start of a network of mutual aid. Alone we are weak. Alone, we get the world we live in right now. But together, we build the power. A world of reciprocity and mutual trust exists. William Gibson said that the future is here, but not equally distributed. In fact, there are many possible futures currently active today, our task is to find the one we want to see persist and grow, and work for it to be our collective future, there is a world to win out there.