Episode #170 ... Albert Camus - The Fall
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Thanks to everyone out there that supports the show on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophize this. Thanks to the people that contribute what they want for the back catalog of the show on PayPal. And thanks to everyone out there who's leaving a comment, leaving a review, helping to keep philosophical conversations like this going between people. Could never do this without you. So one of the things people have requested the most over the years on this podcast are more episodes on Albert Camus.

He was a French-Algerian absurdist philosopher known for his fiction, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I think, 11 different times. And I thought it might be interesting to think about what he would possibly have to say to this hypothetical protagonist we've been talking about in our ongoing Creation of Meaning series. For anyone who's unaware, or for anyone who's listened to the podcast for the first time today, the premise of this series goes something like this.

Imagine someone who doesn't believe in a God, doesn't believe that there's any sort of intrinsic meaning or moral code written into the universe. How does that person not only start creating a system of values, but how do you ground it in something that is on one hand open-ended enough for you to revise your values with new circumstances that you find yourself in, but on the other hand have it be enduring enough that your feelings in a given moment don't dictate everything that you do?

What mistakes do we gotta look out for if we're trying to manufacture stability in an unstable universe? That's the premise here. And it should be said, Camus is not the guy that's gonna think that the solution to existential dread is for someone to just create a system of meaning out of thin air. However, that's not to say that he wouldn't have a lot of good advice to give someone that was embarking out on that sort of quest. In fact, the main character in one of his final books, called "The Fall,"

a book released just a couple years before he died in a car accident when he was clearly about to head into a new direction with his work. The main character of The Fall in many ways can be seen as a great example of what not to do as someone creating a system of meaning.

Because it might be tempting at first to think that the biggest obstacle in your way to finding meaning in life is the fact that you live in a disinterested universe that doesn't care about you. And that's certainly something. We've considered this. We've talked about Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Becker, Chiron, and all the rest of them. But something Camus in particular is going to warn us about in this book, dare I say better than all the others, are the pitfalls of self-deception.

In other words, you can have the greatest plan in the world, right? You can come up with a dynamic, pluralistic value system that represents exactly who you want to be, and you can be religiously committed to carrying it out. But if at the end of that process, you're just kidding yourself, if you're just playing some psychological game that allows you to never take responsibility for your values for more than just a couple days, the biggest obstacle to there being lasting meaning in your life could actually be you.

So with that said, The Fall is the book we're going to be talking about today. The actual title of the book, The Fall, is a reference to the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden. We all know the story. Adam and Eve, God tells them not to eat the fruit. They have a conversation with the nice snake gentleman in the garden one day. They take a bite from the apple, and now we are all implicated in the doctrine of original sin.

Camus, of course, doesn't believe in any of this. He doesn't believe in a god or any sort of moral commands handed down that we could be disobedient against in the first place. What he does believe, though, is that this is a powerful metaphor for the fall of modern humanity.

A similar fall in the way we often see ourselves in our lives from a high place of delusional, self-perceived innocence to a more self-aware, humbled place where we recognize how implicated and responsible we are for our own actions and all the games we try to play along the way to avoid that guilt, that judgment, that responsibility. The book is, at its core, a critique of modern people and modern society.

The main character of the book is the sort of poster child for all this. And the hope is that by listening to such an extreme example of the hypocrisy of modern society, that we might be able to see pieces of this hypocrisy in ourselves and come out the other side of this book with a little less self-deception about how we fit into things in the world. Now, the last thing I'd ever want to do here is have this sound like a book report, you know, standing up in front of the class. The central theme of chapters two and three is to believe in yourself.

No. I want to talk about the philosophical themes here, some of which can get a little dark and unstructured given the absurdist philosophy of Camus not restricted to chapters. But in order to do that, I'm going to have to explain the main character of the book, so bear with me during the couple moments I gotta do that on this podcast, like right now for instance.

The story begins in a bar in Amsterdam, of all places. The main character is a guy named Jean-Baptiste Clemence, obvious biblical reference to John the Baptist. We find Clemence sitting at a bar talking to the person that's sitting next to him ordering a drink. Now, the person he's talking to. You quickly realize that it doesn't really matter who they are. This person barely speaks over the course of the entire book. They could be anyone. They could even be you. And that's kind of the effect Camus is going for here.

99% of the book is just Clemence more or less talking at this person about himself. Anecdotes from his life, his thoughts about other people, his thoughts about his thoughts. Like, if you've ever known anyone in your personal life that's prone to going on long, narcissistic, dramatic monologues about themselves, they'd probably be a big fan of Jean-Baptiste Clemence and his work. I mean, it truly is a glorious display of narcissism.

And without question, some of the first shots fired by Camus at a type of person that is rampant within modern society. Now, what becomes obvious as Clement starts talking about himself is that he's not a very happy person. I mean, not only is he sitting in the middle of a bar in Amsterdam, not only is he drinking, but then you find out that he's drinking gin. I mean, that's just nasty. This man clearly doesn't love himself anymore. And as a reader, you can't help but start to wonder what happened to this man that got him down to such a lowly, lowly place.

And as he goes on, what you discover is that what happened to him is that he had a bit of what you could call a fall in his life. That he used to be one version of himself, some events played out in his life that led to his fall, and now he finds himself in a bar in Amsterdam talking to strangers. He starts out the book telling the person next to him about the man that he used to be. He tells this person that before the fall, not too long ago, Clemence used to live in the city of Paris. He was a successful trial lawyer.

He was so successful at being a lawyer that he chose all the cases that he took on because there was some sort of charitable angle to them. He would defend widows. He would defend orphans. He would defend people accused of crimes that couldn't otherwise afford a good criminal defense. Seems like a nice enough guy. Then outside of his job, he was seemingly an even better person. He lived in a high-rise loft above the city. He dressed well. He was charming. He was successful in his love life, given his own interpretation of that.

He was the kind of guy that would offer up his seat on the bus if someone was standing. He was the kind of guy that would stop and give people directions if they were lost. He helped blind people and old ladies cross the street. This is the kind of stuff he would do with his free time throughout the day. He didn't believe in God whatsoever. But nonetheless, he says, when he takes a second and he stops and he just thinks about how great of a guy he is,

He can't help but think that he was chosen in some way by the universe. And he doesn't even believe in stuff like that, but it just, it feels that way to him sometimes, like he's special or something. Yes, yes, Clemence was a pretty great guy. People couldn't seem to get enough of him. Or was all of this some sort of elaborate multi-level deception that was going on? Something Camus would want us to consider at this point is that from the outside, not knowing anything else about Clemence and the kind of stuff that's going on inside of his head,

This charitable, successful lawyer is the kind of person that other people might look up to. This seems like someone who may have done something similar to this creation of meaning series, doesn't believe in God, and yet still finds a way to bring what seems like a solid moral foundation to his work and to his small role in society at large. But there is so much more to being a strong person with a moral foundation than just keeping up outward appearances. Because as Clement says later on in the book,

Looking back on the way he acted every day as a lawyer in Paris, in retrospect, he was a total fraud. He says one way he knows he was a fraud is because this one time he was helping a blind dude cross the street, and then after the blind guy was safe on the other side, as Clemence is walking away from him, he tips his hat to the man as a token of respect. But I mean, the guy's blind. Why would I do that, he says? Why would I tip my hat if it wasn't some sort of performance I was putting on for all the other people watching?

And this goes with giving up his seat on the bus. This goes with the cases he chooses as a lawyer. All of this has nothing to do with some moral code that he's living by and everything to do with feeling superior to others around him. This is the kind of guy in modern society that has a conversation with someone who clearly knows less than he does about whatever it is. And he feels the need to subtly make them aware of just how inferior they are to him in that area, needing that validation from everyone.

On top of that, he's a smart guy, so he understands perfectly well which values the society around him appreciates and expects of people. And if asked for the values that mean the most to him, he could easily come up with a list of the values that he's emulating. But the truth is, if anything were to ever come along in his life and test any one of these values, he would absolutely crumble.

None of these values people see in him from the outside would hold up because he doesn't really care about any one of them. He's just putting on a performance so that he looks superior to others. And it is this moral bankruptcy that would lead to his eventual fall.

Camus uses symbolism in the book to accent this fall. It's a fall from way up high, the high-rise lofts of Paris, but this overinflated idea of how great he is, falling, tumbling, all the way down to Amsterdam, below sea level, where Clemence compares the various canals in the city to the seven circles of hell in Dante's Inferno. Clemence sits in a bar in the deepest circle of hell, telling strangers the story of his fall. And here is that story.

Three events in his life took him from thinking he's God's gift to humanity to just some random dude in a bar drinking on a juniper bush, confessing his sins to all the people around him.

The first event is something similar to a road rage incident in today's world. One day, as Clemence is walking around town, there's a guy whose motorcycle stalls in the middle of the road. Clemence starts talking to him. It escalates somehow. Now they're screaming at each other. There's a crowd that's forming on the side of the street watching all this go down. And someone from the crowd sneaks up behind Clemence, sucker punches him, and knocks him to the ground. Now, this moment was a traumatizing moment for Clemence and his ego.

Keep in mind, by the way, the kind of modern person we're talking about here. This is the kind of guy whose values have never really been tested in his life. This is a guy that goes throughout his daily life and truly believes that nobody talks bad about him behind his back. That he's always on the right side of the argument. That nobody sees through his charm.

This is the kind of guy that would probably sit around and fantasize about road rage situations like this and all the cool stuff he would do. Imagining all the things the dude on the bike would have said to him. Oh, and then he'd be like Socrates, just dressing him down in front of the crowd. Everyone's laughing. Imagining the dude trying to sneak up behind him. That whole classic, what I would have done if I was there mentality. I would have seen the guy coming. I got great peripheral vision on my grandfather's side of the family. I would have seen him.

come up behind me. I would have slipped that punch. Tiger paw to the kneecap. Put that man on the ground. That's what I would have done. And in reality, it's like, no, no, you wouldn't have. What would happen is you would get sucker punched just like anybody else would.

One of the things Camus is alluding to here is the fact that it's very easy to live in a safe bubble you've created for yourself in modern society, to come up with all the values that matter the most to you, practically never have those values tested, and then, like Clemence, have an extremely overinflated idea of what you would do in some hypothetical scenario, all the while judging other people for how they mishandled things in your eyes. You hear people say stuff like this sometimes.

They'll say, "If I lived in 1930s Germany, what I would have done? I would have been one of the brave ones standing up to Hitler." Or, "If I lived in the mid-1800s, I would have been one of the people on the Underground Railroad trying to liberate people." But the fact is, there's no shortage in today's world of horrible things going on to innocent people within your reach. And you have to ask yourself, "How often am I currently putting my own safety and my family's safety in danger for the sake of correcting what I see as a grave injustice in the world?"

The reality is, you'd probably be putting in a similar amount of effort if you lived during those times as well. It's just from this privileged position within modern society, we always have the ability to talk about how great we would be if only we were given the chance to be. This is the kind of fantasy that Clemence was indulging in about himself that leads to his eventual fall. For a lot of people, getting sucker punched in the street, having people laugh at you, no doubt it would be embarrassing,

But it's not something that would typically ruin someone's life. But for Clemence, it's different. For Clemence, this is a tragedy. When something embarrassing happens to someone who is this morally baseless and untested, it shatters the illusion that he builds his entire identity around. The effect it has on him can best be described as a sort of reverse baptism. See, in a normal baptism, the ritual of it all is supposed to cleanse you. It's supposed to forgive you for the sins or the evil that you've already committed.

It's actually a neat trick. I mean, you can truly be one of the most detestable people that's ever lived in the history of the world. And then someone dunks you into six inches of water in an above ground pool in the attic of a Baptist church somewhere. And you're good now, buddy. You're in.

You found the loophole in the system, I guess. But in the case of Clemence, once again, he's living in a delusional place of innocence. He thinks he's the greatest person ever. So when he gets sucker punched and quite literally is smacked across the face with the reality of who he truly is, it illuminates weakness. It illuminates evil, sin, a lack of integrity. This event in his life acts as a reverse baptism for someone like this.

And you can see this just as clearly in the second event that leads to his fall. Because after the motorcycle incident, Clemence tries to go on with his life until one evening when he's walking across a bridge alone. He sees a woman leaning over the side of the bridge, looking down at the water. And then a few steps later, he hears a scream, a splash in the water below, and then the woman screaming getting further and further away as she's carried downstream.

Clemence is left with a choice at this point. He can risk his own life and jump in and try to save the woman, or he can just keep on walking, try to forget about it and not read the paper for a couple days so he never really knows what the outcome is. The second option is exactly what he decides to do.

And again, it messes with him and his ego. This is the kind of guy that before these things happened to him would probably wax poetic about how, you know, if I were there, what I would have done, I would hear the scream and the splash. And without question, I would dive into that water and save the day for everyone. But presented with the actual moment in his life, he realizes who he truly is. This moment, again, illuminates weakness in him rather than absolves him of it.

The last event that really sends him over the edge into his downward spiral also happens on a bridge. He's walking, just like the second event. But this time he hears behind him, coming from the darkness, someone just laughing. Just hackling and cackling to themselves like a witch flying away on a broom. And to someone as insecure as Clemence, the assumption here is that this laughter is directed at him.

Now, this laughter on the bridge that Camus uses in the story is symbolic. It represents the fact that we are always on trial. We are always being judged by other people around us. Clemence, for the first time in his life after these events, after the illusion of who he is has been shattered, Clemence is for the first time feeling the weight of this omnipresent judgment coming from everyone around him all the time. And it doesn't feel good to him.

He's once again smacked across the face with the cold backhand of reality. This is just what people do. They judge other people. And nobody's doing this because they're a mean person or something. This is how people keep their family safe. This is how people decide who they do or don't want to associate with. This is part of what keeps society together.

But for Clemence, this is something he's never really had to consider in the safe bubble that he formerly lived in. Remember, as a lawyer in Paris, he was never the judge or the one accused of the crime. He was always able to play the middle ground there. And in the everyday world, he figured everyone just agreed that he was this remarkable, exceptional person just like he thought he was.

Once he realizes, though, that he is not, in fact, God's gift to humanity, and how vulnerable he is to the constant judgment of others, this leads to a paradigm-shifting moment in Clemence's life. The biggest priority for him, from here on out, was going to be to find a way to avoid being judged at all costs, and thus to avoid the feeling of responsibility or guilt for his actions.

For Clemence, there is nothing more important for your survival in this modern world than to find a way to do that. In fact, he thinks you're downright stupid if you don't try to find a way to avoid the judgment of other people. I mean, why wouldn't you? He says, if you're someone living in modern society and you have no strategy at all to avoid the judgment of others...

That's kind of like being an animal tamer that cut themselves shaving that morning. You got blood all over you, you got blood all over your clothes, and then you show up to work and get into the lion's den taming some lions. They're all looking at you like you're a pizza roll that just came out of the oven. That's how you look to society when you go out into public with no defense mechanism at all against what everyone thinks about you. Now, Camus might want to ask us at this point, does any of this resonate with you?

Do you, as a modern person, have any tactics you use to be able to soften the judgments of the people around you? And before you say no, before you say I'm the most open-minded person in the world, I just start convulsing with joy every time somebody proves me wrong about something, the Clements talking to you in a bar might want you to consider the ways you avoid judgment that are disguised to you as something you're doing that's entirely different. Friends, for example. Why do we choose the friends that we have, he asks.

I mean, you'd think it's Aristotelian, that it comes down to the mutual inspiration that two people give to each other. But in reality, he says we choose the friends we do because we want sympathy, not inspiration.

That's why we hang out with people who agree with us on stuff. We don't actually want to be told that we're wrong and inspired to be better. We may put up with disagreements about insignificant things from our friends, but really what we want is for them to reinforce the foundational bias that we already have, almost like our own personal cable news network.

Say you're out grocery shopping one day and some stranger comes up to you and says, hey, you're being inconsiderate right now. Your cart is blocking the entire aisle for everyone and no one can get through here. What are you doing? And you call them rude and you boil in your own soup and you go home and you tell your friend later about it and they say, look, don't worry about that person. They're a loser. Let's be honest, they're probably criminally insane as well. They're going to go home to their miserable life and complain all day to their mother, who they still live with. Don't worry about it.

This is the service that friends provide in the eyes of Clements. Regardless of the fact that your friend wasn't there, has only heard your side of the story, and isn't exactly an impartial jury rendering a verdict here, despite all this, you still for some reason want them to tell you that you were right, this other person is wrong, and that even if this random stranger judged you, the jury of your peers finds you innocent.

And if you expand this example to everything you tell your friends about, relationships, career choices, fears, dreams, you can see how if you indulge in this sympathy service that friends provide for you too much, your friends will allow you to keep yourself the same person, making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Clement says despite what they say, this service is actually what your friends want from you.

Camus says this is symptomatic of what he calls a sort of modern amnesia, where we're able to conveniently forget about all the mistakes we make in our lives and just move on as though nothing has really happened. We've all met somebody like this before. You know, a person who has no problem at all judging everybody else for what they're doing wrong. They'll define a person's entire character based on a single moment. They'll hold a grudge against people for years because someone mistreated them.

But when something goes wrong in their life, they'll go to their friends, their friends will tell them it was all the other people's fault, and they'll just continue being the exact same person thinking no rational person ever has a problem with me. If anybody thinks I should be judged, well, that person's just irrationally holding on to the past. They need to get over it. Make no mistake, this modern amnesia is a defense mechanism against that feeling of guilt and responsibility that comes with always being judged by others.

And Clemence always found a way to conveniently forget about all the mistakes he made in the past. That is, until after the motorcycle incident, after the woman on the bridge, after hearing the laughter of others. At that point, he says, there came a time in his life where he just couldn't forget about the person he was anymore. For the first time, he was forced to look at himself in the mirror honestly. And what he sees in the mirror sends him into a total panic.

Remember, finding a way to avoid the judgment of other people was the main goal of his life now. Once these events make his old strategies ineffective, he tries out like five other ones that all fail miserably for him. And this is obviously Camus as an author laying out several examples of ways people in modern society try to avoid judgment as well. But for Clemence in the story, he tries all them out back to back and they fail. He tries drinking himself to sleep every day until he runs into liver problems. That doesn't work.

He tried to, well, in a very PG Muppet Treasure Island way of putting it, he had random encounters with people and tried to fall in love with them. That didn't work out either. Then he tries to sabotage his own character. This is an interesting one. The thinking is, if I just become a caricature of a person, rather than a real person, if I just say a bunch of inflammatory things and troll everyone all the time and am never really myself...

then when other people judge me, they aren't really judging me. They're judging this character I came up with. And you're supposed to hate this character. Now I never have to find out if they don't like my real personality. It's a way of avoiding judgment. But when Clemence does this, that laughter that he heard on the bridge, which at this point in the story has started to haunt him, the laughter just gets louder and louder the more he trolls people. Because at the end of the day, the people whose judgment he's trying to avoid are not morons.

They know he's just trolling. No serious person would ever say the kind of stuff that he was saying. So instead of avoiding the laughter, he ends up becoming even more of a joke to them. So after all these strategies end up not working out for him, eventually Clemence comes up with a new strategy.

The reason he's sitting in a bar confessing his sins to strangers is because his role in the world, as he sees it, is to be what he calls a judge penitent. And this judge penitent was one of the most important things Camus wanted to introduce in this book. So let's take it apart a bit.

The term judge penitent, if you just look at the words that it's made up by, is in itself a contradictory thing. On one hand, you are a judge, which is obviously someone judging others for what they do wrong. But on the other hand for Camus, you are a penitent, which is the root of the word penitentiary, or someone that feels extremely remorseful for all the things that they have done wrong.

Now, a couple questions immediately come up. Why would Clemence be using contradiction as a psychological strategy? And how in any way does this help him avoid the judgment of others? The simple way to describe it is that if I can judge myself before others can judge me, then I never have to feel the guilt that comes along when somebody points out something that I'm doing wrong. And it puts me in a great position to criticize others because I'm always swinging upward with every criticism.

Let's talk about an example of this. Based on letters Camus wrote to his friends, he definitely saw this exact strategy being used in the political realm of his time, and he thought it may be used more and more going into the future. Think of any privileged group you want out there. Anyone you want.

And think of how capable any one member of that privileged group is of engaging in a sort of self-hatred that makes attacking them almost feel pointless. Here's the kind of things that Judge Penitent will say: "Hi, I'm a member of whatever group, and I'm here to say on behalf of the group that we are horrible. Shame on us for how horrible we have been for so, so long. And there are of course members of my group that are still doing these horrible things,

But at least when it comes to me, I'm one of the ones that recognizes how horrible I am. I don't even deserve to be talking to you right now. I am scum between the toes of humanity. That's the penitent, remorseful side of this. And then what gets smuggled in inevitably is the judging side of it. Because now that I position myself as the lowest rung on the ladder of society, once I've confessed all of my sins...

Now I can launch attacks at any group out there that I want. Because what's the point of you coming back and reiterating what I just said about myself? And even if you do come back at me, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look, I'm the first one to admit that I'm a piece of trash. I'm the worst. We agree on this. But as a piece of human garbage, can I not point out how other people out there are pieces of garbage as well? Can we not make the world a better place? That seems counterproductive.

Camus saw this strategy being used in the French intellectual elite of his time, no doubt specifically in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was a member of the rich bourgeois class who centered his critiques around attacking the bourgeois class.

Point is, revealing everything bad about yourself makes it impossible for anyone to criticize you in a way that fully stings like it should. This is a defense mechanism, and it's a psychological game you can play in your personal life as well. Clemence reveals on his deathbed to the person he's been talking to that this has been his strategy all along after the fall. As he sits in this bar in Amsterdam, confessing his sins to the people around him, telling them about all the horrible things he's done in his life,

He's only telling people this stuff because it allows him to judge them, to take away their illusion that they are moral people just as his was, and leave them feeling just a little less good about themselves than at the start of the conversation. And if over the course of this podcast you felt a little bummed out by some of the negative takes that Clemence is rambling about in a bar, well, then I've done my job as a podcaster here today conveying the character that Camus was going for. This is Clemence and his entire twisted strategy.

He wants to transfer his miserable discontent about his own personal struggles onto everyone he meets. He wants to do this because if he can judge people while being impervious to a counterattack, if he can make people in his immediate proximity leave the conversation just a little more depressed about their place in the world, then he can leave the conversation still feeling that sense of superiority over others.

Clemence is not the voice of wisdom in this book. There may be little nuggets of wisdom sprinkled in here and there because to Camus, people are complex things. But at the end of his life, Clemence is a tortured man, so consumed by needing to be better than the people around him that he doesn't actually do the work of being a better person. He just plays a game that allows him to feel one step ahead, showing people how messed up they are.

Now, again, despite the fact that Clemence is a cartoon of a person, Camus would want us to ask ourselves, do I see any piece of Clemence and this modern hypocrisy present in my own approach to life? Seems obvious Camus saw it in himself towards the end of his.

But in keeping with the Creation of Meaning series, I think Camus would have some words of caution that he'd want to give. That if you think you're going to arrive at some ultimate system of values, and then you're just going to live by those values day after day, regardless of the circumstances that you find yourself in, maybe it'll work out that way. But his prediction is that it's going to be a lot more complicated than that. We live in a completely, tragically absurd universe. Nothing out there in the world really makes sense until we decide that it does.

And that contrast between the true uncertainty of it all and our propensity to steer our thinking into certainty as much as we can, that's a dangerous place that can lead to crusades and nuclear wars and all the rest of it. This urge that someone might have to come up with a perfectly crafted system of values and then try their hardest every day to never deviate from it

That's an expectation of yourself that may be impossible to ever live up to for Camus. Because he'd say, understand your tendencies as the type of creature that you are. Understand that as people, especially given the structures of modern society, as modern people,

We have gotten really good at playing both sides of the fence when it comes to morality. Much like the judge-penitent strategy of Clemence, we've gotten really good at holding two seemingly contradictory beliefs, having them manifest in the exact same moment, and then somehow not feeling ridiculous at all as we do that. To Camus, there's a fundamental duplicity that's written into the way modern people often approach how to behave in their life.

Example in the book: Clemence talks about a Nazi soldier who approaches a mother who has two sons. And he says in the most polite way that he can possibly think of in the moment: "Ma'am, ma'am, sorry to bother you. Don't want to be disrespectful of your time here, but one of your sons has to die right now. Please, graciously tell me which one of them it should be. I really think you should be able to decide." Simultaneously holding the belief that it's very important for us to be polite to people. We want to give people the respect they deserve.

but then also holding the belief that it's important for you to kill their family because they're on the wrong side of the political line in the sand. Thousands of examples of this sort of duplicity all around us in modern society, some we've already seen in Clemence as a character in the book. He doesn't believe in God, and yet still feels special and chosen in some way. He talks in the book the entire time like he's part of some elaborate marketing campaign to convince you that he's a humble guy, all the while constantly low-key telling you how amazing he thinks he is.

They're the people we talked about before that have no problem judging others for a mistake they made. But when it comes to their mistakes, well, anyone that can't get over it is just being unreasonable. Another example at an epistemological level, people in modern society will often simultaneously believe that, you know, I feel like I'm better than most people at figuring out what's really going on out there in the world. You know, seeing the facts, reasoning about it. I'm pretty good at separating the wheat from the chaff. I'm better than most people I know at being right about things.

But then again, I'm extremely humble as well. I'm one of the best people I know at admitting when I was wrong about something. In fact, I'm wrong about stuff all the time. I'm the first to admit that. Don't feel ridiculous at all saying that I not only have the best strategy for being right all the time, but also the best strategy for being wrong all the time. In fact, I take pride in that contradiction. I actually think it makes me a balanced person.

Something I want to make super clear here about what Camus is saying: He is not saying that you are a weak person if you sometimes embody contradictory values at different moments. To Camus, this is part of living in an absurd universe. This is part of being a human being. The weak person is the person who can't see, or won't see, the built-in duplicity and contradiction in their own thinking.

The person that's playing some variation of a psychological game that allows them to believe that they're just living universally by a set of values every day of their life.

Like if you never find yourself speaking passionately about something you believe in and then catching yourself and saying, oh, but, you know, then again, there's that other area of my life that I do almost the opposite of what I'm preaching about now. If you never do that, then you're probably not looking at yourself as thoroughly or as honestly as you could be. And maybe it's impossible for us to ever totally escape contradictions in our values. But one thing we can do, Camus thinks, is to be more self-aware of them.

What Clemence wants more than anything in this book is the dream of innocence. Like many others in modern society, what he wants is to be innocent of any moral wrongdoing. What he realizes, though, is that nobody out there is innocent. If you believe in free will...

Which, for the record, Camus has probably just taken a shot at Sartre here and how similar his ethics is to Christianity. But if you believe in free will, then nobody has been perfect their entire life. Everybody is guilty for something. At the very least for Camus, even under a deterministic view, everybody is at least responsible for something. That's just part of being a person, living a life out with all the variables on this planet.

Take the woman on the bridge, for instance. Was Clemence doing anything wrong that led to him being faced with that choice that night to save the woman? No. Sometimes life throws you situations that are going to test your values. You didn't ask for these moments. You didn't earn these moments. And you can go for years with everything going great, never having your values tested. But eventually, inevitably, you're going to be shown exactly who you are.

Clemence was not guilty for what happened to the woman on the bridge that night, but he was a part of it. He was in some way partially responsible. There is no one out there that lives in a state of total innocence like Adam and Eve under the grace of God before taking a bite from the apple. That's a fantasy. We are all fallen and implicated in modern society. And this is Camus' point.

The only way you could ever, even for a moment, believe that you are innocent, absolved of your guilt, absolved of your responsibility, is if you essentially do what a Christian does: repent for your sins, become saved by God's grace, and then accept a moral doctrine given to you from above. Our modern version of that would be to surrender to any one of these strategies that Clemenceau used throughout the episode to escape the omnipresent judgment of other people.

One way to think about this, as Clements would confess to the reader in the very late stages of the book, Clements says that there is innocence in slavery. What does he mean by that?

He says, quote, "For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style." End quote. What does he mean by that? See, Clemence is a morally weak person. Being responsible for his actions, being judged by other people, the "weight of days" as he calls it, is too much for him. For someone that's as weak as him, that can't find any way to live with the feelings of being judged sometimes,

There really is no other option in his eyes than to find some master to serve that turns him into a foot soldier. He says at one point that he longs for the day that an authoritarian leader is going to ride into town, take things over, and just tell him how to act. The thinking is, "If all I'm doing is carrying out someone else's moral vision, then I'm not really making any moral decisions that can be judged. You, sir, have a problem with my master, not with me. I am but a humble slave here."

Once again to Camus, there is innocence in slavery. Just as there is innocence for Adam and Eve as long as they're blindly accepting that they shouldn't eat the apple. So in many ways, the protagonist of the Creation and Meaning series, the people listening to this right now, are the fallen people of modernity. They are the ones who took a bite from the apple. They are the ones who are trying to find a way to live with the responsibility and judgment for their own decisions.

Clement says at one point in the book, quote, irresponsibility is grace, end quote. So to fall out of grace would be to fall into a life of responsibility for ourselves. Responsibility is the fallen state of modern humanity. And the only way to be restored to innocence is to commit what Camus calls philosophical suicide.

I can't help but think of earlier this year when we were talking about Karl Popper and his book The Open Society and Its Enemies. And Popper talks about the responsibility that citizens have in a democracy to do the work every day to stay educated and stay active for the good of the society overall.

And one of the criticisms to that idea has been that people love the idea of having freedom on paper, but that staying politically active and informed is hard work, takes up a lot of time in your day, and that whenever it comes down to it, people are much more willing to not necessarily have much control over the political process as long as they have cheap food to eat and teams of people on apps curating the next video for them to watch, enabling their distraction.

to create a system of values and then try to maintain it? I think on paper, people love the idea of morals a la carte, where they get to choose the direction of how they live their lives. But to live with the weight of the responsibility of your choices that you came up with, to live with the guilt and the judgment of others, I think Camus thought when writing this book that if we can see the character of Clemence in ourselves even just a little bit,

then maybe by being self-aware of that fact, it can help make us a little less susceptible to falling into the delusional innocence of feeling certain about things. Maybe Camus also wanted us to consider that it's possible to accept the fact that you're going to be judged by others, sometimes unfairly, but that maybe that's not too much to bear for you. Maybe that was just too much for Clemence to bear. And maybe his cynical worldview is just yet another defense mechanism so he can deny the reality of the world around him.

Don't trade your integrity as a person for a few sweet moments of denial. But maybe Camus says it best. Camus says you got two choices in this life in terms of how you're going to deal with the judgments of other people. You can be, quote, happy and judged or absolved and wretched, end quote. Take your pick, I guess. Hope you love the episode today. Try to never ask for anything. Try to just give. But if you enjoy the show and haven't left a review on the respective app that you listen to it on,

Thank you in advance. Just trying to keep doing this for as long as I can. Going to try to do more episode updates on Twitter, at IamStevenWest. Hey, have you seen any of this art that's been generated by AI recently? It's insane. I typed in Albert Camus eating a pizza. One of the... I don't know if it's funny or disrespectful, but it's mind-blowing. Anyway, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.