Idiota Dostoievski: O

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the "idiot." He has epilepsy, he has spent the last four years in a Swiss sanitarium cut off from society, and he returns to the corrupt, hyper-competitive world of Russian aristocracy with zero practical knowledge of how to lie.

But in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky—the master of psychological torment—wrote a novel called The Idiot . And if you pick it up expecting a story about a man with a low IQ, you are in for the most uncomfortable spiritual sucker punch of your life. o idiota dostoievski

We are all trying very hard not to be idiots. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the "idiot

We live in the age of the algorithm. We are taught to be strategic. We curate our social media feeds, we practice our "elevator pitches," and we hide our genuine emotions behind a wall of ironic memes and calculated indifference. We are all trying very hard not to be idiots

Myshkin walks into a room where everyone is performing. The aristocrats are performing virtue. The businessmen are performing power. The desperate are performing dignity. Myshkin looks at them, sees straight through the performance, and does the one thing polite society cannot tolerate:

The Underground Man vs. The Idiot: Why Dostoevsky’s Most Misunderstood Hero is the Only Sane One Left

How do the "clever" people react to the Idiot? They lose their minds.