dostoevsky’s crime and punishment

in dostoevsky’s crime and punishment the main character struggles with the choices he has made that he originally thought was justified but now having done it he realizes it wasn’t and he needs to face consequences. more specifically there is woman who allows people to sell there things to her but she doesn’t pay the people enough for there things and the money she gets for the things she is sold she hoards it, keeping everyone else poor as she gets richer and richer. she also takes advantage of her mentally disabled sister knowing that she can’t leave her. seeing this our main character decides that the woman’s death is the only way to solve the problem of not just his poverty but everyone else’s, he sees that she is doing no good for anyone and her death only has pros so he kills her. This thought process mimics the totalitarian ideology that every good action can be rationalized, so if you can rationalize someone’s death than it should happen and you shouldn’t feel remorse for it. but after he kills the woman he struggles with overwhelming guilt, this causes him to question if he believes in totalitarianism. is he the person he thought he was or was he a bad person who chose the wrong way to deal with something just because it was easier and then proceeded to justify it by using the (at the time) highly popular philosophy that it could be rational and therefore good? well, yeah, he was just a bad person and he made a wrong choice and now that he comes to terms with that he has to decide what he wants to do with himself. during this inner turmoil he thinks about religion, because he had stopped believing in God and following religion because it wasn’t able to be rationalized, he had no one to atone to so he was always going to carry the guilt since he couldn’t  be forgiven. eventually he meets a woman who is in a bad spot to but instead of taking the easy way and rationalizing it she made a self sacrifice to fix it and this is when he really realizes that he had been wrong, he wasn’t a special person doing a great deed, he was a man. 

dostoevsky also talks about prison, he says a man can spend 20 years behind bars and still have served no time if the man never feels true guilt and actually wants to take responsibility. a lot of repeat offenders are repeat offenders simply because they have served no real time, they have not reflected and see nothing wrong with there actions. i won’t get into the prison system today because i don’t agree with it on an extreme level and my views are very radical. 

This conversation that dostoevsky brings up about god is very interesting to me because he isn’t wrong, a complete lack of belief in a moral compass is very rare and i’m not even talking in a religious sense. i am not religious but i still believe there is a type of person i should strive to be and i believe in rights and wrong and morals. a person that lacks a moral compass often does so due to mental illnesses that cause a person to have a lack of empathy, often psychopath adjacent illness. these people do not have the instructions built in on how to be empathetic and have to actually make an effort to be so, truthfuly i think that this makes there empathy more sacred as it’s a conscious effort they have to make and not a automatic response. there are story’s of these people turning to religion as a way to learn to be a good person and have morals laid out for them but this doesn’t always work, a person that is rational does not have blind faith and therefore will never be a “true” believer but this does not mean they can’t take the lessons religion provides. my favorite theory on religion is from nietzsche who states that God is dead and man has killed him and now with his death man is trying to fill the whole of god and failing to and this is bringing a wave of nihilism because if we can’t fill the role of god which we had destroyed how are we to fill the void in ourselves. i feel that best describes how i view modern religion, we here every year that the rapture is getting closer and we need to repent now to prepare for the wrath of god and we justify this fear mongering by saying that they are just trying to save our souls, they’re trying to help you so you should be grateful. in reality god has been slain by man and now man is taking a role of power over man in the ways of moral responsibility.