What’s wrong with men according to Dostoevsky?

Why Does Dostoevsky Speak to Men?  Was Dostoevsky the first RedPill Guy? While Tolstoy wrote about the winners  mainly, the aristocrats, Napoleon etc.

, Dostoevsky predominantly wrote about the  male losers. Precisely men without women. Today, there is a movement called Red Pill,  mainly among men, which uses evolutionary psychology to understand male-female  dynamics.

Red pill idea is based on the movie the Matrix in which the red pill  gives your harsh truths while blue pill keeps you in comforting lies. So the example  of blue pill is the old Disney fairytale of love and romance. While red pill says we move  like ruthless animas when it comes to mating.

So basically according to red  pill, we are animals and women are as ruthless as men when it comes to mating. So let’s see if Dostoevsky is a red pill or not. Poor Folk: Women are saved but men are not In his first novel, Poor Folk published in 1845, Dostoevsky tells the story of two cousins.

Despite  living across from the street from each other, they have very different paths in life simply  because one is a man and the other is a woman. In the beginning, both struggle with poverty  as life keeps punching them in the face. But soon the cousins fall in love.

You expect  them to make it in life together. But in Dostoevsky’s world there is no Disney fairytale.  As it seems that their lives take turn for good, and they are on the verge of moving together,  when something incredible happens.

The girl is snatched away. By whom? A rich man.

She has moved  onto a life of luxury afforded by her husband. The novel ends with the man still clinging  tightly onto his love for a woman who doesn’t even bother responding to his letters. The harsh  reality of natural selection.

The man has to lick his wounds and accept humiliation and defeat.  White Nights: Platonic friendship is not real In 1848, Dostoevsky published a short story  titled White Nights. It tells the story of a lonely young man who walks alone at night in the  dark streets of Saint-Petersburg.

One night he meets a woman and they start talking. He wants  to be friend with her. She has one condition, “do not fall in love with me”.

The man promises  not to fall in love. But as they continue their nightly meetings on the street, the man slowly  falls in love with her. But he keeps it secret as he helps her with her own lonely heart. 

He keeps her company as she is waiting for her boyfriend to return from Moscow. As his  obsession with her grows stronger and stronger, the climax seems very promising. And he secretly  hopes that the boyfriend never returns.

But then the woman’s boyfriend shows up and snatches  her away. He watches her in the other man’s arms while himself licking his wounds. He put  all his effort in comforting the woman only to see someone taking her away.

So a man  always has a romantic or sexual interest, no matter how much he says otherwise. Platonic  friendship tends to be one-sided and only benefits women. So do not trust men who say  they only want to be friends with a woman .

House of the Dead: Male losers are  in prison (house of lonely men) For Dostoevsky himself, following the publication  of this novel and its success he had the most gruesome experience of his life. He was arrested  a few years later and sent to Siberia to spend 4 years in a prison labour camp and then  another 6 years of exile working for the Russian army. In other words he was banished from  Saint-Petersburg for 10 years.

During these 10 years, he spent most of it with other fallen men,  mostly convicts sent to Siberia to do jail time. Upon his return, he wrote the House of the Dead in  1862, depicting the harrowing tales of fallen men, convicts, criminals, political rebels, living in  the harshest of conditions. You can see glimpses of women in this book, but the inmates are all  men from all over the Russian Empire as far as Poland to the west and Dagestan to the South,  all thrown together in a tight space.

During the day they have to work like animals and  at night they have to nurse their own lonely thoughts and failed dreams. Life couldn’t get any  worse. But despite all the horrors of Siberia, these men bond each other, tell their stories,  take whatever joy life throws at them.

And occasionally they can scrap whatever money  they have to pay for a prostitute for a few minutes or hours of female company. Just like  his first book, the House of the Dead is really the house of lonely men who have little to no  access to women like defeated male animals. Notes from Underground: Male losers go underground In 1864, Dostoevsky followed that novel with one of his most amazing depictions of male loneliness  in the Notes from Underground.

The main character is a total loser who is so fed up with society  constantly punching him in the face so many times that he has decided to hide in some underground  basement like an injured animal. He has given up on everything. He doesn’t even want to treat  his own liver disease.

He is waiting to die alone. He is one of those male animals defeated  in their fight to mate and so injured that he is waiting for his own death and unable to pass on  his genes. Today millions of men hide in their parents’ basements avoiding society altogether. 

So the underground man is not only the men hiding in their basements, but also millions of lonely  men hiding in their offices behind a computer. Crime and Punishment: Lonely men are dangerous In 1866, Dostoevsky published his most famous novel, and perhaps one of the most famous novels  of all time. Crime and Punishment is about a young poor student called Raskolnikov who has a grand  ambition and thinks he is just like Napoleon, and history is waiting for him.

Why does he have  such a delusion of grandeur? You guessed it. He’s a lonely man, with only one friend and also away  from his family.

When you have nobody around you, you weave grandiose dreams in your  head. To achieve his Napoleonic dream, he thinks working hard, climbing a career ladder,  the conventional way is not for him. So what does he do?

He takes a short-cut to get rich. Not  scamming or a pyramid scheme. No.

He picks up an axe. Not to chop wood. He walks into an  apartment.

He murders a rich old woman. Thinking you are Napoleon is one thing, but killing people  is a whole different ball game. As it turns out, he is not really Napoleon.

This poor student  trembles like an autumn leaf. He hides in his dark apartment until the Russian law catches up to  him. He is sent to Siberia where he can lick his wounds in the cold.

So from his dark apartment in  Saint-Petersburg to a dark prison cell in Siberia, it’s a story about a lonely young man.  Today everywhere in the world, prisons are filled with men, just like Raskolnikov  who all wanted to take a short-cut in life. The Idiot: Nice guys finish  last, words are cheap, see action In 1869 Dostoevsky wrote the Idiot, in which  he tells the story of a good-hearted man or you could say a nice guy in today’s world. 

He’s perhaps the nicest guy you would ever meet. Some likens him to a Jesus-type figure.  He falls in love with a woman.

Once again, he has a rival. You might have guessed it. His  rival is not just some rich dude, this time it is also a bad boy, a violent man.

Let’s see who  the girl picks. She says all the nice things to the nice guy, Prince Myshkin. She says she loves  him dearly.

Alright, words are cheap. But her action speaks louder. She picks with the bad boy,  leaving the nicest guy in Russia high and dry.

The woman sees all the goodness in him. But still  decides to marry a horrible man, a man who ends up killing her. This is Dostoevsky’s psychological  observation that an orphaned woman without proper parental guidance goes for the wrong man.

Today  there is a saying that nice guys finish last and this is depicted in Dostoevsky’s novel beautifully  some 150 years ago in Russia. So no matter how nice you are as a man, life still punches you in  the face, so much so that you would go insane. Prince Myshkin licks his wounds and heads to  Switzerland to recuperate in a sanitarium.

Demons: Men use violence In 1872, Dostoevsky wrote Demons, a novel about political change. It’s about a bunch  of revolutionary men who want political change in a small town in Russia. Throughout history,  violence has predominantly been a male tool in shaping reality.

Nowadays however, the threat of  violence comes from the police and the military. In Dostoevsky’s novel, a bunch of young radicals  overthrow the government and the consequences are terrible for everyone. This novel is considered  to have predicted the October Revolution of 1917 in which the communists took over Russia. 

Again, Dostoevsky’s men are at the forefront of social upheaval. In the animal kingdom, horny  males sometimes team up to overthrow the alpha male or create chaos that might bring change  beneficial to them. Human history is filled with men teaming up to overthrow the kings or  conquer other territories.

But in this novel, just like all Dostoevsky’s novels, these  men predictably fail in their attempt. Brothers Karamazov: father and son compete In 1879, Dostoevsky published his biggest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Again, 5 men are at  one another’s throats.

The father, Karamazov, and his three legitimate sons and one illegitimate  son are battling each other. One of them kills the father and now fingers are pointed at all  his sons. Each brother has a story, a wound, and there is no happy ending in their lives. 

The only one who has a positive outlook or light at the end of tunnel for his life is the  youngest brother. It’s only a matter of time for him. Who knows what happens to him later on  in life.

Dostoevsky again tells the story of men in serious trouble. Here the trouble is more  complex, philosophical and existential. But again, you could say that in the Karamazov household,  the presence of females is very scarce.

These men fight over women. In fact one of the  brothers tries to seduce the same woman his father is courting. Male competition also means  that two or three generations of men compete for the same woman.

The woman in question is also  confused about who to pick. The youth of the son or the wealth of the father. The father  ends up dead and the son ends up in Siberia.

Why Dostoevsky Understood Men? 1. First-hand experience As I have shown you in all his novels, the most  common theme is lonely men.

But why? It is pretty simple. He was a man.

He experienced almost  everything men experience in life. He lived the highs as well as the lows of a male experience.  He was a published author, respected by his peers and then bamm!

He was thrown in the most  terrible prisons where he shared a room with the most dangerous men in Russia. He saw everything  men were capable of. In the House of the Dead, he says the hardest thing about prison is not the  work, nor the food or the cold or the guards.

The hardest as well as the scariest thing about prison  was other men. On the outside, you would never want to be close to these men, yet in prison  you have no choice but to sleep next to them, not just one man but many of them, and not just  one night but for years and years. He says: “…one suffering is perhaps the sharpest, the most  painful… there are men there with whom no one would consent to live.

” So Dostoevsky understood  the male psychology because he lived with them, with the most violent, wretched men but  also the most noble and humble of men. Here he also talks about one of the best  inmates, a Muslim from Dagestan. Quote: “Ali was an exceptional being, and I always think  of my meeting him as one of the lucky things in my life.

”—Dostoevsky (The House of the Dead). 2. Small Physique The second reason he was able to write about  men was his own sensibilities.

Dostoevsky was not as physically robust as other men and  suffered from epilepsy. Tolstoy was a giant who even tackled Napoleon in his novel War and  Peace. But Dostoevsky not only was a small man, he also suffered from poor health.

Poor health  in anyone is a terrible thing but in men it is even more detrimental because among the sexes,  men are measured for what they can produce. In Russia in particular, if you were not tough as  a man, you might have struggled in life. You only garnered respect from other men if you were  physically strong and mentally robust.

This is why Putin wrestles bears. The next Russian president  must be able to wrestle with tigers to beat Putin in an election. This is why the Dagestanis  have become a big force in combat sports.

Dostoevsky was a bit short at 5, 6’ or 169cm.  Compounding that with the sensitive mind of a writer, he wasn’t picked for any sports team.  This meant he would stand back and observe how society treated men based on how strong they  were or how useful they could be.

All his male characters are pretty weak, mentally as well as  physically, and they tend to be the thinking type, not the action type, and almost all of them end  up becoming losers. The underground man hides in the basement, Raskolnikov moves to a prison  in Siberia, Ivan goes mad, and so does Myshkin. 3.

Men without women This inability to attract women shows up in almost all Dostoevsky’s novels and short stories. In Poor  Folk, the man watched his love being stolen by a rich man. In White Nights, the man again watches  the girl he loves in another man’s arms.

In Notes from Underground, the underground man can only get  a prostitute but loses her soon after because he had no experience with a woman and has no idea how  to keep her. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov might be a virgin. In the Idiot, Prince Myshkin  loses the woman he loves to a violent man, a bad boy so to speak.

In Brothers Karamazov,  women are very scarce, so much so that the father and one of his sons fight over the same woman.  This is why Dostoevsky speaks to men. Human mating is as old as dinosaurs.

So it doesn’t matter that  Dostoevsky was writing 150 years ago. It was as true back then as it is true today. Men and women  have always struggled in mating.

But Dostoevsky looked not at the men who were successful  but those who had failed. He wrote about lonely men.  Or the so-called losers in society.

The winners are loved by other men and women. What happens to the losers in society? According  to Dostoevsky they end up in Siberian prisons, or go underground. 

Dostoevsky’s Message? So what’s Dostoevsky’s message to men? Dostoevsky  proposed religion as an antidote to all the social upheavals that were taking place in Russia at the  time.

Why religion? It gives society a structure. It defines roles.

It simplifies things. But  most importantly, religions force people to be monogamous and stay with one partner. This  way the majority of men get to reproduce.

While it limits female choice, it does provide  the men at the bottom a sense of purpose. Dostoevsky liked unquestionable hard work,  dedication, naivety and simplicity of the old Orthodox Russian way of life where people feared  God and loved one another. A bond among brothers so to speak.

However, we are not in Russia so  what would be his answer to today’s world? I think Dostoevsky wanted men to keep their heads  down and work. Yes, work.

It sounds so simple that you might think this is such a stupid answer.  A very cliched answer. But it is true.

Simply by working, you already have a purpose. With  purpose comes joy after every little triumphs, achievements, and success. We’re wired to  get energy from success and achievement, no matter how big or small.

When I started this  channel, it was unimaginable that one day I would have thousands of people watching my videos. I think Dostoevsky depicts how unfair the world is and it’s up to us to decide what to do with it.  He is like a father figure who tells you stories about the world.

He is like a father who has been  through a lot in life. Now he sits with you and tells you some amazing, yet profound stories that  you can learn from. His novels also punch you in the face sometimes.

Why? To wake you up that  life is what it is. It is unfair sometimes.

Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian labour camp,  one of the harshest prisons in the world. For what? For his intellectual activities.

Isn’t that  unfair? Despite not killing or harming anyone, he was sentenced to 4 years of hard labour  and another 6 years of exile. Yet he used the experience to understand his fellow men. 

On a very deep level. He came back and started writing some of the most profound novels.  Novels that have given joy, tears, cold sweat to the readers throughout the world.

Dostoevsky  understood that the world was unfair. But it is far easier to change yourself than the world,  conquering yourself than conquering others. Dostoevsky’s novels are not only about men.

It’s  just an aspect of his writing but he is so much more. His stories is deeply psychological,  philosophical and also incredibly engaging. So now that you have a better  understanding of Dostoevsky, you should watch my 3.

5 hour video on his  major works with a fresh new perspective and learn how he predicted the modern time. Thanks for watching.