 As always, the music plant played the March of the One State with all its trumpets. The numbers walked in even ranks for a breast, ecstatically stepping in time to the music, hundreds, thousands of numbers. I am reading to you from Zamiatin's Wee. This is a very important book. It's considered the granddaddy of anti-utopian fiction, so it's a, you know, it proceeded and influenced Brave New World, 1984. This was the first one. It was written in Russia, or I guess in the newly created Soviet Union in 1921. And as you can see from that little passage, there are no people in this book. There are numbers. In fact, they don't even have names. They just have numbers. It's a vision of a totally controlled and tyrannical society. And I think it amazingly accompanies Ludwig von Mises' essay, Positivism and Behaviorism, which is an excerpt from chapter 11 of Theory and History. The main character in here, I forget his number, D503, if I remember correctly. Anyway, the book is a series of D503's journal entries. And D503 is a mathematician. He's a very important mathematician in this scary world. And he says things like how everything is planned. For all the numbers, meaning all the people, their whole day is planned except for one hour of free time. And he wants to bring that one hour under control of mathematics and give it all that precision and beauty. He talks about straight, simple lines being beautiful. When he visits the ancient house, and there's a really cool history of like how the ancient world collapsed. There's some specter of a big war. When he visits the ancient house, he's just freaked out by all the chaotic shapes of the couch and old dresses that a woman's dress. It just drives him crazy. He can't handle that. But as he begins to question the one state, he becomes a little more accepting and even his language changes. So you see throughout this book, the attempt to capture humanness with mathematics. Humans are described in terms of shapes. In terms of X's appearing, or horns on your lips pointing up or pointing down. He's like really trying to apply mathematics to understand humans, and running into the impossibility of doing that. And I'll read to you three excerpts that I've strung together from Ludwig von Mies' positivism and behaviorism, which you can find online if you search for those terms. But Mies' writes, The natural sciences do not know anything about final causes. Inquiry and theorizing are entirely guided by the category of causality. The field of science of human action is in the orbit of purposes and of conscious aiming at ends. It is tealeological. The marvelous achievements of the experimental natural sciences prompted the emergence of a materialistic metaphysical doctrine, positivism. Positivism flatly denies that any field of inquiry is open for tealeological research. The experimental methods of the natural sciences are the only appropriate method for any kind of investigation, according to the positivists. They alone are scientific, while the traditional methods of science of human action are metaphysical, that is, in the terminology of positivism, they are superstitious and spurious. The language of physics is the universal language of all branches of knowledge without exception. What cannot be rendered in the language of physics is metaphysical nonsense. It is arrogant pretension in man to believe that his role in the universe is different from that of other objects. In the eyes of the scientist, all things are equal. All talk about consciousness, volition, aiming at ends is empty. Man is just one element in the universe. The applied science of social physics, social engineering, can deal with man in the same way that technology deals with copper and hydrogen. I think that essay is like the perfect accompaniment in this book because throughout this book, the main character, D503, struggles to deal with his humanity. He talks about imagination as a disease. After he visits the ancient house, he begins dreaming about strange things and it just freaks him out. He goes to doctors to try to cure him of his imagination. In this essay, there's also the primitive people who live on the other side of the green wall. That's one thing that I think this novel gets wrong economically, though I can't blame them just as a writer. You see this also in Brave New World. The free people are the primitive people. They're the savages. In this book, they even resemble savages. They have more hair on their arms and stuff. It's the controlled people who are more prosperous when in actuality the controlled society would run into the knowledge problem. They'd be the primitive ones. There are tons of examples, North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, today there are tons of examples of that. In his time, I can forgive him for getting this wrong. This is something that I've thought about a lot. It seems to me that in the Soviet Union in particular, the socialists from America and Western Europe have no excuse, but the socialists from Eastern Europe do have an excuse because it was only after socialists came that the real benefits of the Industrial Revolution followed. It was the central planners building many, not the first, but building among the first factories. I can forgive him for relating socialism to prosperity and thinking that, oh yes, if we have this horrible tyranny, we'll still be the rich ones. We'll just also have a tyranny. And that's what he deals with in this book, when in fact he's wrong. It's the tyrannical people are going to be the primitive savages, hunter-gatherers, while the free people are going to be quite prosperous. Incidentally, this is also evident in Brave New World. In Brave New World, he's like, yes, socialism creates all this material wealth, but maybe this material wealth is bad. So he gets it wrong as well. What else did I want to say? Of course, this is also a fiction if a society ever exerted half as much control as this society exerts. There would be mass starvation. There wouldn't be any food or clothes or buildings. But again, I can forgive him for that economic ignorance. I heard one person say once that this author was a great prophet. The person saying this was a professor. And of course, he believed, as many lefties do, that things didn't get bad till Stalin. Lenin was great. And if Trotsky took over, things would have also been great. But unfortunately, we got Stalin and it turned bad. That's a whole bunch of nonsense. Lenin was a mass murderer. He built among the first concentration camps in Europe. And what this author is describing is war communism, which he saw with his own eyes. War communism didn't end until 1921 and Lenin's new economic policy, in which he reintroduced property rights to keep the workers' paradise from starving to death. Now this book is mostly read, in my estimation, just because of its unique place in literature. Like I said, widely believed to be the first anti-utopian novel. It's hard to read. Maybe this isn't the best translation or maybe just it's not that great writing. But it's hard to read. Some chapters make no sense at all. There's nothing to latch onto. You just hear D503's rantings and he's kind of going a little crazy. So the chapters are crazy. You can't understand them. In other places, it seems like the whole world came to an end in one chapter and then you turn the page and it's just his normal day again and you don't know what the hell happened and it takes you a lot of effort to figure out was it a dream or was it just not as bad as it sounded. So it's not the easiest read and it's not difficult in a rewarding way but nevertheless a very entertaining lot of unique ideas and it has a very unique and important place in literature. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more.