Episode 42: Fear Those Who Urinate in Churches | K.G.I. Podcast

I remember a story from the Soviet Union — a woman bought a piece of meat, wrapped it in a newspaper, and got ten years in a labor camp because the newspaper had Stalin's photograph on it. And another story: two Bolshevik soldiers urinating in a church, two priests watching them, and one priest tells the other, "I'm afraid of them." The other priest answers, "You don't have to fear them. You have to fear their children." In this episode I argue that tyranny doesn't arrive in one act. It comes like a frog in boiling water — slowly, gradually, one step at a time, until the children of those who normalized the first failures have grown up not knowing anything else. Freedom of speech is not self-evident. None of our rights are self-evident. We can lose everything quickly when people get comfortable enough to stop having uncomfortable conversations. I walk through how Soviet citizens were forced to pretend to believe — and how after a few years of pretending, they actually started believing, because that's how humanity works. I make the parallel with contemporary America: the indirect restriction of gun rights through prosecutorial pressure, the silencing of speech through social cost rather than law, the substitution of subjective experience for objective reality. Your subjective experience is supposed to adapt to objective reality, not the other way around. The Christopher Hitchens principle closes the episode: whatever can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.My book Mythos: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZN1TKMy Book https://kirillkhrestinin.com