Letter #262: Do You Want to Be Made Well?

Sometimes the answer is no.

Dad,

Recently one of these tiresome influencer accounts on X posted, amid a stack of inane trash, a picture of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. I was trying to explain to the chuckleheads online why this towering work of fiction is a fundamentally different object than say, Good Vibes, Good Life, by Vex King. In the process I downloaded Dostoevsky’s novel, which I hadn’t read since high school, onto my phone.

Then I did the one thing a man should never do: I ignored my mother’s advice and left the house without a book in hand. I got stuck waiting for some friends at a bar. So I pulled out my phone and started re-reading Dostoevsky.

What a genius that man was. The book is a portrait—a prophecy, really—of the kind of sneering misery that will come to typify modern psychology once notions of right and wrong fall out of favor. This time around I’ve been noticing how often the main character says things like “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You probably will not understand,” he tells his listeners on the first page. What they won’t understand are the marvelous complexities of why he has to stay miserable. “It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.”

This is why Dostoevsky was his era’s greatest psychologist. In reality, the little humiliations and insecurities that the Underground Man suffers are perfectly normal discomforts that all of us experience every day. Most respectable people bear up under them and press on in spite of them. But the Underground Man wraps them in a cocoon of intellectualism until he falls in love with them. He would be furious if anyone tried to take them away.

I think this is an important thing for us to take stock of in our ongoing discussion about sanity. Ours is an age of pathologies, as you say, and one wonders from time to time why people can’t just snap out of it. When you came to town the other weekend and we went to church together, I remember you looked at all the nice young Christian families and said something like, I don’t see why everyone doesn't want to be sane and normal like this.

Well, there are plenty of real barriers to building a decent life these days, but there are also plenty of people who just don’t find themselves romantic and important enough unless something is incurably wrong with them. You need a diagnosis to ennoble your pathologies, which of course is the one thing guaranteed to keep you from getting over them. I think we have to consider the unpleasant possibility that one reason why our epidemic of derangement persists is because it’s flattering to people’s egos. Even Jesus, before he could heal a man who had been sick for 35 years, had to ask him: “do you want to be made well?” Sometimes the answer is no.

Love,
Spencer