Michael Malice: New Year's Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #253

Уважаемые дамы и господа, the following is a conversation with Michael Malice, his fifth time on this, the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now here's my New Year's Eve 2021 conversation with the one and only, Mr. Michael Malice. Привет, товарищ.

С Новым годом!

С Новым годом! Достоевский wrote in The Idiot, my favorite of his books, through, uh, the main character, Prince Myshkin, that beauty will save the world. Красота спасет мир. These words, seemingly naïve and ultimately, at least to me, profound. What do they mean to you? Beauty will save the world.

Naïve? Really? I don't think they seem naïve at all.

Well, uh, Solzhenitsyn, actually for his 1970 Nobel Prize, uh, speech, talked about this line a lot. And he thought for most of his life that it was a silly line, it was just words thrown out there. Because with all the suffering that's in the world, what has beauty actually ever done?

Oh my God, I hate this so much.

(laughs) .

I- I- I-

Talking trash about Solzhenitsyn?

Yeah, I am.

Okay.

Um, and this is- perfectly sets up this theme, you know, why I said let's do this episode, start the new year on a positive note, give people hope, give people joy. Uh, y- you and I both have friends who are models, right? And it's a silly profession to some extent, of course, but-

You are actually a model.

I a-

And you are my friend (laughs) .

I am. That's right, that's true. I am an under model. I was trying to be subtle, but for those people who actually, you know, deserve to be models, um, when you look at someone who is a model and in some of their photos, and these- they- these people look perfect. Now in real life they're not perfect, they have flaws, they'll be the first to admit it, so on and so forth, but when you look at beauty, it is almost impossible to maintain a sense of cynicism and hopelessness. Because if there's even one moment when some, uh, element of perfection has been a- actualized, if there's one moment where, uh, beauty has been realized and captured, you can't say, "Well, it's never gonna happen again." So I think beauty, i- it means hope. I think... I hate that cynical idea of like, um... I- I get, I- I appreciate Solzhenitsyn's broader point in that a lot of times people, there's something called the deepity, where people throw words together to sound profound, and if you s- take it apart, like this is just complete gibberish. I don't think this is an example of that. I think b- beauty inspires and it v- more importantly, it proves to you this is something that can actually happen on this earth. Plato, right, the platonic theory of forms, like this world isn't perfect, but these perfect forms exist in another dimension and that's where our concepts come from. You know, he's a- he was an early, uh, person trying to figure out where our concepts come from, uh, and epistemology and so on and so forth. Um, but that is something that is real and here. So I completely disagree with, uh, his analysis of that, and I don't know if it'll save the world, but it's certainly a prerequisite. And what's the point of fighting for your values if you don't wanna make the world a more beautiful place?