The existential wickedness of man

It has been quite a while since I finished Dostoyevsky’s: Notes from underground, and only recently have I been thinking about how words of a fictitious civil servant are vindicated in our modern world.

Per my observations and sensitivities, the human condition has been deteriorating over the past few decades, and it’s an amalgamation of different societal problems manifesting themselves in extreme manners. Political violence is rampant, people are afraid to speak the truth, afraid to express their ideals and thoughts, for fear of being shunned or, in extreme cases, subjected to violence.

That train of thought brought me straight to notes from underground, because I recalled a passage in the book, whereby the civil servant is giving his philosophical and moral qualms about Man’s wickedness.

And it goes like so: ” Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.”

Reading this, I felt convicted. The Underground Man was not describing some abstract, distant specimen of humanity — he was describing me. The arguments did not land as literature; they landed as confession. And perhaps that is where we must begin, not with a diagnosis of the world but with an honest reckoning with oneself.

Man is flawed in character and has fallen short of the glory of God. His inability to be grateful, to be content, to be merciful; that is man’s existential problem. We wrap ourselves in the pursuit of perfection, without ever looking inward at our own iniquities. This causes us to throw away any good that we have, and throw ourselves in the mud for the most fatal rubbish.

And as a follower of Christ, my solution for this wickedness is for us to realize our shortcomings and come into the love that God has for us. As it is written in Isaiah 54:10: “Though mountains shake, God’s steadfast love will not be removed.” God does not change. His love, His mercy, His forgiveness are eternal, they will not change. Many of the problems that we face in the world today can be remedied by this love, a love that has no ending, which can be given by Him who was, who is, and will ever be.

And if all can be gathered in a single source of truth: There is nothing more manly and powerful than Christ.