Three books I read

I am taking part of PewDiePie's 2025 book club. The community is making monthly events on Discord, and I missed the last two. In February, I couldn't read In the Buddha's Words because the writing did not appeal at all to me. In January, I had a great time reading the Tao Te Ching and discussing it with the community. In March, though... I missed the event!

We were supposed to have a free month and just follow our interests, in Felix's own words. I read two books, one was a compilation by Dostoevsky, containing White Nights and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and the other was Portuguese writer Jaime Nogueira Pinto's Bárbaros e Iluminados, a more political reading.

The former gives me the opportunity to talk about one I'd read the month before, René Girard's Ressurrection from the Underground. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I took the life-changing course Mapa do Subsolo by Pedro Sette-Câmara, focusing on applying the Girardian interpretation of Dostoevsky's underground image to one's personal life, so I took a page from the man himself to try to understand my favorite author a little better.

A common sentiment with people who read the incredible Notes from Underground is to identify with the pathetic narrator of the book. Sette-Câmara defines the underground as a poetic image of "maintaining the position of moral victory even when defeated, in the ditch". At the same time the underground man feels like the greatest man on the planet and worse than a worm. He is drenched in ideas and completely detached from his reality, which is much more nuanced. Like every man, he has his faults and strengths, his pros and his cons, his virtues and his vices, but he cannot comprehend this.

Girard doesn't shy away from the initial part of Dostoevsky's career, which was far from as groundbreaking as his latter works, nor from his horrible personal life. The Russian basically tortured his first wife Maria Dmitrievna by forcing an untenable level of romanticism, that could never show his vulnerabilities because of the idealism of his own love. Some of Dostoevsky's own words about her include:

"I don’t want to give the impression that I’m working on my own behalf." "I love her insanely. . . . I know that in many respects I act absurdly in my relations with her, that there’s almost no hope for me—but whether there may be hope or not is all the same to me. I cannot think about anyone else. To see her only, only to hear her . . . . I am a poor madman. . . . A love of this sort is an illness."

On this, Girard notes that "[p]ushing the logic of this reasoning to an extreme, [Dostoevsky] adopts the behavior of his own heroes and makes himself the advocate and supporter of his rival for the young woman." The man who gave us the underground man was not far from being the underground man himself.

The main character in White Nights is nothing short of pathetic, and sees himself as the correct person for Anastasia, his idealized model (the external mediator, Sette-Câmara and Girard would say), which he adores and sees as the woman's salvation. In his personal life, Dostoevsky tried to put himself as the savior for his first wife Maria, but at the end he was nothing short of pathetic, making her a very miserable woman until the day she died. Dostoevsky himself said that "[b]ecause of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became".

Dostoevsky was in the Petrashevsky Circle of left-wing liberal and westernized intellectuals that sought revolution in Russia. After going to jail and going through the experiences of The House of the Dead, a great novel, Girard says that "perhaps there was no other outcome for the Dostoevsky of 1863 than madness or genius". He gave up on the Western ideals in favor of a more reactionary political position, and Notes from Underground is the first step in that direction.

The novella is most discussed by Girard through the psychological aspect and the image of the underground. Thing is, the underground is the place where ideologies often viralize. The book, by criticizing ideologies that purport to explain human nature and engineer utopias (symbolized by the Crystal Palace), ends up talking about the subject of one of the other books that I read in March.

Jaime Nogueira Pinto is a Portuguese writer whose work was introduced to me through a friend a long while ago, particularly through the podcast Radicais Livres (Free Radicals). "Barbarians and the Enlightened" is a title that suggests much of the political climate of the recent years, but the subtitle — "Populism and Utopia in the 21st Century" — may suggest much more.

Nogueira Pinto is basically describing the Whig theory of history, which is an Enlightenment idea that directly opposes the contemporary reactionaries. For these barbarians, no, the world isn't constantly getting better and globalism is a threat that should be taken seriously. Nigel Farage explains it best:

The European Union has become a sort of prototype for what Hillary Clinton and some of the Wall Street banks want to see. Namely, where individual nation-states give up their democratic rights, give up the supremacy of their courts, and hand it all over to a higher global order that wants to homogenize, harmonize, and make everybody the same.

Who is a better figure to open such a book other than "the son of the lights" Emmanuel Macron, who didn't even bother to play the Marseillaise, France's national anthem, in his victory speech, but the EU's "Ode to Joy"? And, naturally, he is also a great example considering that he openly disdains the barbarians, who are still stuck at the darkness of the irrational past? He is, after all, "waiting for a new hope, a new humanism, for a safer world," and "Europe and the world are waiting for us."

The natural criticism to such an approach to politics is that global coordination is nothing short of... utopian. And yes, it is. The Portuguese writer traces back the origins of such an utopian thought, showing the influences of the likes of Marquis de Sade, the utopian socialists, and dismantles how these ideas created horrifying scenarios including communist China and the USSR. Not only that, the reaction to such thoughts also created Fascism and Nazism.

For such utopias to work, there is the need of a sort of gnostic initiation of the select few who are going to work out society according to their whim. Uniting this megalomaniac necessity to the "killing of God" that the likes of Sade were trying to do — by taking morality out of the human world, which leaves us with nature, desires, impulses and violence — the resulting view is a form of amoral landscape where human beings are reduced to mere biological machines, where passions are nothing but distractions from boredom and sex — there is no love without the transcendental — is no more than the mechanics of sensation.

The rebirth of Sade in the mid 20th century by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, the existentialists and beatniks mixed the libertine utopian socialists created the grounds for hippie culture, which ended up being nothing but puppets for intelligence agencies, as even Frank Zappa knew — what was LSD but a government plant?

With the fall of the USSR, Nogueira Pinto argues that Fukuyama's theory of the "end of history" is full of shit and neoliberalism isn't the end. He gives as examples the case of Brexit in the UK, of the Le Pen family in France (though he probably would never have guessed that Marine would be banned from running in 2027), and of Donald Trump in America. It's hard to argue against him.

Populism was the tool against globalism. It's a very Machiavellian way of thinking but it's true.

Nogueira Pinto ends up by discussing the cases of populism around the world, commenting even the Brazilian case. As in other cases, our barbarians have little to no in common as a group, they basically just reject the current rulling class of globalists, while also being moved by the desire for revenge against groups who abused them systematically through ideological justification.

As anarchist Michael Malice says in his great book The New Right, such a group can be defined as

A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

Indeed, if there is something that I can learn through reading Girard, Dostoevsky and Nogueira Pinto, it is that equality is a false god. Much of our political motivations are nothing more than desires and justifications that rule us. The desire to design society, to make other act conveniently or in a way that you accept — the Crystal Palace! — that is what moves the enlightened ones, and that is what the barbarians of the New Right fight.