Stalin as Politburo note-taker
anecdote · historical ·
retold in 3 talks
Žižek quotes Stalin's private note stating that strength, activity, and cleverness are virtues, while idleness and stupidity are vices, regardless of other moral failings.
As told 2
“If a man is one strong spiritually, two active, three clever or capable, then he is good regardless of any other vices”59:10 Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 2pub. 2018-11-28 · 1:56:22
“Weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty2Brothers Grimm1Sophia Karpay1Arthur C. Clarke1Wiesel? (Implicit: Holocaust victims/survivors)1Fox Mulder1Jean Améry1W. G. Sebald1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
59:10 Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 2pub. 2018-11-28 · 1:56:22
Žižek quotes Stalin's private note stating that strength, activity, and cleverness are virtues, while idleness and stupidity are vices, regardless of other moral failings., illustrating immoral ethics
After Stalin's death, a copy of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism was found with a note in Stalin's red pencil: weakness, idleness, and stupidity are the only vices; strength, activity, and cleverness make one good regardless of other vices. Žižek reads this as the perfect formulation of immoral ethics., illustrating immoral ethics,objective guilt,Stalinist ethics