Why We Should All Be Idiots
Dostoevsky and five minutes of time
Here is a PDF for those limiting their screen time:
Thank you for reading What then? where we dig deep into what it means to be here and how to be even more “here.” Let’s lean into it.
I see more depth in myself—and therefore humanity—when I look up from the pages of Dostoevsky. At times, I wonder why he uses twenty words where five will do. And then at that moment, I realize the twenty words were so significant he actually needed a thousand, and he is now teaching me a crucial truth of the human condition. I can almost see Dostoevsky smiling to himself, assuming he was actually capable of smiling.
This happened while I was reading The Idiot and fell into a micro-sleep. Suddenly, I was jolted awake as the story transitioned from an irrelevant conversation over tea into an intense discussion of the psychology of an execution.
What, then, goes on inside a man’s mind when he is about to be executed?
Dostoevsky being who he is, we know the story is about to walk a darkened stairwell to the dungeon of the human condition. We know when we hit rock bottom he will sit there beside us, take our hand, and put words to ancient truths that hook in our minds for the rest of our lives.
This essay is about one of those stories.
In it, I argue we ought to be idiots.
Prince Myshkin is the central character of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Myshkin is the idiot. He tells a few ladies the story of a man he knew who was condemned to capital punishment. Let us refer to him as the Man.
The Man was led to the scaffold and his sentence read out—death by firing squad for a political offense. Twenty steps away from the scaffold stood three stakes driven in the ground. The first three men condemned to die were draped with white gowns, and white caps were pulled over their eyes so they could not see their killers. A priest gave them their last rites as soldiers armed with rifles took their positions in front of each blindfolded prisoner. The Man in the story watched and waited for his turn.
He could see his death, and it struck him he had five minutes left to live.
Myshkin continues the story: “He told me those five minutes seemed to him an infinite time, a vast wealth; he felt that he had so many lives left in those five minutes that there was no need yet to think of the last moment.” The Man decided to divide his last five minutes on earth. He set aside two minutes for his friends, and “… he remembered asking one of them a somewhat irrelevant question and being particularly interested in the answer.” Then he set aside two minutes to think, since merely “… thinking to himself” was a breathtaking gift. And lastly, he set aside one minute “…to look about him for the last time… Not far off there was a church, and the gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine… he could not tear himself away from the light.” [54]
But the Man said nothing was worse than this recurring thought: “What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life—what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!”
And then at the last minute, his death sentence was commuted. The Man was allowed to live.
It is here Dostoevsky drops his hammer.
When the ladies ask Myshkin what the Man did with that wealth of time afterwards and if he truly lived counting every moment, Myshkin said: “Oh no, he told me himself… He didn’t live like that at all; he wasted many, many minutes.”
What then?
The crucial point is the Man was not an idiot. Let us go further back in history. It was normal for a chimpanzee to forget his little scuffle with a leopard when it struck him how delicious a few bananas would taste right about now. It was normal for a hunter-gatherer to roll her eyes at the flash flood that swept her mammoth bone hut away three moons ago when she had the Great Gathering to look forward to in a few days.
So, too, with us. The irony is that most of us are not Dostoevsky’s idiot. Instead, we are merely human.
The pressure plate IED our foot misses by an inch becomes an interesting bit of thinking material by nightfall, and a de-emotionalized image in our memory within a week. The IED, the cancer, the car crash, the addict whose overdose woke him up—we too easily forget the feel of the bone finger of death on our shoulder.
As the fearful awakening of death atrophies over time so too does the splendor of life fear gives birth to. Suddenly, visions of infinite bliss in the future strike us as far more attractive than the five worthless minutes right in front of us. We begin living for the future.
Now we may answer our question: why, then, should we be idiots?
Well, who wakes up and says, “My goal today is to waste as many minutes as I can.” It would be insane to say this, and yet how many of us do this? For my part, how many times have I intended to be fully present, only to let a YouTube video, an angry thought, or some grand vision of future bliss massacre five minutes of my life? How much time in our past was spent waiting for the future, which is now the present, but which is now merely an empty platform from which we hinge our hopes on the future once again?
And what about the future? 30 minutes per day over one year is 182 hours. Over 10 years it is over 1,800 hours. What, then, could we do with all that time if we chose to be idiots? Would all those five minute time blocks be better spent shaking our heads and moaning about the news, or getting on hands and knees on the floor with a mutt? Thumbing back and forth between apps on a screen, or sprinting hills under the sun with another human? Staring into a digital void, or obsessing over an epically stimulating idea?
The hammer falls heavier when we realize the Man’s story was Dostoevsky’s autobiography in fiction form. The Man’s sentence of death-by-firing-squad, his agonizing five minute wait in front of his executioners, and his last second reprieve—this was Dostoevsky’s personal experience. It was his existential awakening. Dostoevsky went from not being an idiot to a über-idiot. He was warning us that we ought to be idiots too.
The paradox is clear: a man tied to a stake at the point of a gun can reach infinite consciousness in five minutes while one with absolute freedom can sleep-walk through five decades. The moral is clear: only an idiot can maximize his or her attention in each five minute time block over the course of a lifespan. And the irony is clear: only an idiot can master the five minute mode of life without the constant threat of death.
Thus an idiot would ask him or herself, “What would I do differently if I had five minutes left to live?”
Why not, then, pause for five minutes to admire the glimmering gold on the roof of a church or a forest in fall? Or pause for five minutes of eye contact with those furry quadrupeds and featherless bipeds we love, and lose ourselves in their irises of blue, brown, green, and grey? Or spend five minutes thinking for the sheer love of playing with an idea of worth, or asking an irrelevant question and being particularly interested in the answer, or on turning each minute into an eternity of attention?
It is within our control to be idiots.
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I’ve spent this year thinking about the continuity of time. What is the connection between the past, present, and future. The modern world teaches us that our individual lives matter more than our collective lives. The man’s five minutes was a feeble, last moment effort to make his life matter. However, if we are serious about our lives, we will realize that the life we have has been given to us, for good or ill, by those who came before us. The lesson to learn is that our lives matter to the generations to follow. The continuity of time is realized by our generational memory. In those five minutes, the man reached for but could not ultimately grasp this truth.
Sam, I am amazed that you pulled out an incident that is only one of so many themes/lessons in “The Idiot”. I think that Dostoyevsky threw this “kitchen sink” at us as a madman would. It is for us to find our “cherry” and chew on it. You found one that you most likely could relate to in your life experience. I keep thinking what it takes for me to break a habit like minimizing small screen time.