Dostoyevsky was an author in Russia who lived in the mid-1800s. He is famous for the novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, which both looked at the idea of rationalism and the dangers of unalloyed rationalism being the guiding force for humanity. I’ll be talking about another of his works, Notes from the Underground.

Notes from the Underground is set up as the diary of an unnamed narrator who lives in in St. Petersburg, Russia in the mid-1800s. Some people who talk about the book refer to this narrator as “The Underground Man”. The book is separated into two sections, the first is filled with his musings, and the second filled with a variety of stories from his life.

The Underground Man introduces himself with the words, “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor about it and never have, even though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.”

He paradoxically claims he believes in medicine because he is superstitious but he is educated so he is not supposed to be superstitious, one of many sets of paradoxes in his life (and one of many times where he lies to us because he lies to himself).

He describes himself as having spent time working for the civil service where he intentionally abused his power. He claims that in the rationalism of Europe he has no freedom because a Laplace’s demon sort of creature could predict his every move and he doesn’t want to be controlled by predictability so despite the fact that such actions may be perfectly rational he would strive to be irrational just to be able to say he is truly free and that man is not a piano key. So once he earned a small inheritance he decided to do nothing.

This first half is quite intellectual and the underground man showed himself to indeed be quite educated. You might even as I did come to like him based on his words and the ideas he presents. You can tell besides being educated, he uses the latest French terms (in the 1800s France was a center of philosophy, art, science, culture). He does warn us that he is not a good person many times, but it’s easy to ignore at that point since he’s so superficially polite, calling the readers “Gentlemen” and humbly accepting that perhaps there is even nobody reading his notes.

In the second part, he shows that he is acutely aware of all imagined slights, because he relies on his feelings of superiority as a core part of his being. This is why he treats people badly as a civil servant, because he must feel superior to those below him and resents those who are above him.

He sees a seedy bar and imagines that he could get in a fight in such a bar and finds it a grand notion, but instead of getting in a fight, an officer from the army just moves him aside to walk in instead of getting into a fight. The Underground man is a coward, and doesn’t start a fight. Instead he obsesses over the officer, stalks the officer, tracks down the officer, and plots his revenge – to brush past him. He borrows money to prepare, sells his scarf for a much nicer looking one that would fall apart soon, all for his revenge of… brushing past him in the street without clearing the way for him.

Later, he invites himself into a meeting between some people he went to school with because he’s so lonely, but it is a disaster. He resents his old schoolmate for being his superior in many ways, and he spends the entire night storming around making an ass of himself. As a reader, it’s deeply uncomfortable reading this loser who thinks so well of himself so awkwardly making a scene.

That night, he goes to visit a brothel, thinking the others would do that. He’s wrong, but he decides to go in anyway. The girl he gets looks miserable, and that makes him feel good. He uses her and then falls asleep for a time. When he wakes up, he paints her a terrible story of her eventual being used up by the brothel and then dying ignobly, but also paints another picture in words of a story where she leaves that life and tries to do better and becomes an impossibly perfectly loved wife somewhere out there, giving her his address before he leaves.

Afterwards, he is terrified but excited that the prostitute might come to his house. He imagines how they might run off together in love and live happily ever after, but still he dreads it and hates the idea of her coming around.

During this time, he describes the antagonistic attitude towards his servant. Despite his status as a superior to his servant, he hates his servant for having innate self-confidence. It describes in details the petty games he plays to try to get his servant to submit to him so he can feel good about himself.

Just in the middle of such a game, the prostitute arrives, and he viciously attacks her verbally. They have a tender moment but he can’t handle the idea of being vulnerable so continues to attack her, and she leaves. He runs after her, but loses her in the falling snow and doesn’t bother to further pursue her.

The story ends, and it’s 20 years since that moment, the underground regrets what happened, but won’t do anything about it.

The book ends suddenly, claiming he continues to ramble for a long time afterwards but it’s best to stop there.

Before I continue, I need to lay something else important. It may seem unfair to characterize an entire website’s userbase in one way. After all, there are many users, and they are individuals. Such an argument can certainly be made.

I would counter-argue that when that website is designed to min-maxx conformity, the userbase necessarily ends up as a community of conformists, and anyone who doesn’t conform is likely to either leave or to stay as a shunned outsider, not a part of the community.

Reddit does in fact operate in ways to min-maxx conformity. Those who conform will be upvoted and be given privileges through reddit gold, perhaps even becoming powermods. Those who do not conform are downvoted and highly downvoted posts are hidden from normal view, having posts deleted by mods and if you don’t conform enough many subreddits will refuse to let you post because you don’t have the karma, and ultimately you may be banned from subreddits and ultimately from reddit, and if you’re part of a non-conforming group, your subreddit can be deleted and your community scattered like desert sands. On many platforms, the worst that can happen is you are ignored or argued with, but on reddit you can get significantly more direct feedback that people don’t just not like what you wrote – they hate it, so much they seek to punish you for it.

You see it. On major subreddits, some posts which conform the best get thousands of upvotes, some comments get thousands of upvotes, but those which do not conform may be downvoted into oblivion, with dozens or thousands of people crawling over each other to silence the discord. You know when you’re chatting with redditors as well because you’ll see the same arguments used over and over again, like religious mantras.

You can also see it in the way that redditors treat themselves. Earlier, more liberal versions of themselves must be rejected, castigated, disavowed. Just to imagine being a more fun, less conformist version of yourself as you once were is an original sin you can never fully atone for.

The subreddit for the president of the united states was deleted. They might say it was for bigotry, but that’s obviously not true – you can be a bigot all you want as long as it’s against acceptable targets. I’ll elaborate on that point further in a bit.

To begin with, reddit’s users start off appearing very much like the first half of the book. The site appears to be highly educated, and at first it might even seem like there is no problem here. They’re all well-versed in the latest academic trends and language, and part of their community is indeed to at least appear very well-mannered at first. The reason for the stereotype of the fedora tipping redditor (which honestly is likely somewhat out of date) is someone trying on the trappings of class so they might feel like they are someone with class despite lacking the skill set required to play the part.

In the 19th century, the growing class of nouveau-riche had books filled with all the classical education they lacked to try to fit in with the upper class of society who had been educated in a completely different way than the commoners. One could learn every letter from every book, but no book would eliminate your working class accent, mannerisms, attitudes, behaviors. Blue blooded aristocrats could see a nouveau riche from a mile away, and all the money in the world couldn’t change that. Indeed, that was part of the famous novel The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby was brilliantly wealthy and held all the best parties, but at the end of the day he was still from where he was from and all the trappings of wealth couldn’t change that.

In a similar way today, luxury beliefs are the latest craze among the upper classes to show how they aren’t like the other classes since it’s considered poor taste to show off your wealth through clothing, jewelry, sports cars, and fancy palaces. You express views that are trendy and would absolutely destroy the lower classes if they were to live by them, and in so doing you show how high class you are today. If you’re fabulously wealthy and powerful you don’t need to be married necessarily, you can hire help, but for a poor person it’s a little piece of how to live a good life and the data supports that. There are many attitudes the wealthy claim to hold because it shows how wealthy and powerful they are while not overtly being so.

In the same way, these luxury beliefs have like a fedora tip and “milady”, percolated into this group, but just like the fedora tip and “milady”, a few trappings of class cannot hide the fact that these people aren’t part of that class. Sometimes the façade breaks and we get a glimpse into the lives of some redditors, and just as the underground man uses French terms occasionally to show how cultured he is but lives in backwards St. Petersburg, the redditor expresses the trappings of modern luxury beliefs while living in destitution.

The redditor is a picture of contradictions. They hate /r/atheism, but for certain they are militant atheists and reject Christian ideas (or at least think they do given their surface level understanding of the topic). They preach tolerance, but have a list of people they absolutely hate and would perhaps even support having killed (but not doing the killing themselves, because like the underground man, the redditor is a coward whose revenge might be something so petty as not moving aside on a sidewalk – thankfully it’s rare for anyone to be killed on behalf of a redditor since besides being cowardly they are also poor). They are more likely than the person in the street to be a virgin, but will hate the incel, but far more hate the consumer of the pick-up artist who would better themselves by any means to achieve their goals. Most importantly, they claim to be liberal, but want everything they see, hear, touch, feel, controlled tightly.

Unlike the Underground man, who understands rationalism and actively rejects it, the redditor claims to embrace rationalism and science but passively rejects them by refusing to countenance ideas that are not part of their strict orthodoxy. “Sciencism” thus becomes an irrational religion with the trappings of rationality, an unscientific thing where you are given a set of tenets to obey and have faith in disconnected from the truth of the world independently of your understanding of that world. The redditor may laugh and scoff at the salem witch trials, but will happily call for the disenfranchisement of people who refuse to take their experimental vaccine or wear a mask.

Part of the idea of rationalism and science especially is a sort of intellectual humility, and that is directly contradictory to the idea of a strict orthodoxy. If you’re sure you know the answers, it seems to me you are either overwhelmingly arrogant (which isn’t rational), or overwhelmingly sure you have the truth (which isn’t scientific)

Once you get past the superficial exterior presented, then the reality becomes immediately apparent.

If you want to see who the redditor hates the most, look to the enemy of the Underground Man, the officer who never really wronged him in any way. Stick around the site long enough and you’ll see that sort of one-sided seething resentment and anger. You’ll come to understand there’s a list of acceptable targets and they all happen to be people who generally don’t care about the redditor’s existence, just like the officer barely acknowledged the underground man.

The redditor injects themselves into things to feel important, but knows they are disconnected from anything but their website and so it doesn’t matter. If someone somewhere else is having fun, they seethe in anger and have a tantrum similar to the underground man stomping around while his old school mates have a nice night together. Once they arrived on the Fediverse, their favorite word was “defederate”, because they thought themselves important and powerful and that if the wrongthinkers could only be deprived of them that their absence might be like the absence of God is considered Hell in some religions, but in reality, while they stomp around everyone else continues to have a good time without them. They make spiteful little lists because they’re petty, but in the end it only really hurts themselves.

The redditor has a strange relationship with women. Even the reddit feminists hate real women who have opinions they can’t control, and reddit is filled with porn subreddits, but if a feminist subreddit shows up with opinions not allowed they will surely be banned. Ironically for a group whose ideology lambastes the “madonna whore complex”, even the sex worker is considered a saint, but a woman who wants a simple traditional life of a marriage and kids is a whore in their worldview. The latest academic research will be shared (the source of many of these inhuman beliefs of theirs), and if you say something as simple as “men like women and women like men” people will sound the alarm for your hateful conduct.

All the people reddit swears to protect must, to achieve said protection, be avatars of exactly what reddit wants them to be. Women who have the wrong opinions, black Republicans, trans people who think feminists have a point sometimes, they’re no longer what they are, instead they are the avatars of evil and can be treated to any level of hatred. “Can you believe the nerve of Clarence Thomas being black and not having my exact opinions? We should get him removed from the supreme court.”

We are in the beginning of the end of the book now. Many of these redditors aren’t 20 anymore. The oldest are in their 40s, and if nothing changes, the website is all they’ll have. Many living with their parents will soon find themselves alone in a house they inherited only to find that far from the landlords being evil, houses take a lot of effort to upkeep. Much like our Underground man, it’ll mean a long, drawn out, ignoble end while the end of the story stops suddenly in the middle.

To conclude, I call on anyone who thinks they’re in a toxic echo chamber to get out into the real world. Volunteer doing things. Get a job if you can – any job, even if it’s for free. Fjord’s Theorem remains in effect – those who are online stay online and those who stay irl stay irl. Next, try not to just jump into another echo chamber, but to find spaces with diverse conversation. If you see people you agree with and people you strongly disagree with, that’s probably a good space. You never know, those people who you disagree with might make good points and help broaden your horizons. The reality of real people’s opinions and the diversity of non-echo chambers is such that you might find your current opinions are actually broken (but you might find those opinions you pretended you didn’t have being in an echo chamber aren’t so crazy after all)