The Lesson Tolstoy Tried to Teach the World | Prof. Jiang Xueqin

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]All right.

[00:00:01]So, this is um Russia's Third Rome strategy, okay? So, Moscow is the center of Third Rome. As you can see, Russia spreads throughout Europe and throughout Asia. And what Russia's trying to do is it's trying to unite the different religious traditions. So, it's trying to um unite Greek Orthodoxy with even Orthodoxy. It's trying to work with the Catholic Church, okay?

[00:00:27]It's And it's trying to work with uh Israel as well, because Israel is also a religious tradition. Iran has a very important part of this Third Rome strategy.

[00:00:43]Okay? Iran is a very important partner of Moscow.

[00:00:47]And um in the future, India could also be a partner as well, because India is Hindu, okay? But the great enemy, the enemy that must be destroyed, is the Anglo-American Empire. So, the UK and North America.

[00:01:04]And the idea is to cause them to go into civil war. And the theory is that um because the Anglo-American Empire is so focused on individual achievement, you can actually force them into a civil war by exploiting the selfishness, the egotism of the people, okay? Basically, the material greed of their people.

[00:01:32]So, what underpins Moscow's Third Rome strategy are certain texts, okay? So, you have a Virgil's Aeneid, which focuses on the importance of duty, okay?

[00:01:48]Duty.

[00:01:51]Then you have St. Augustine's Confessions.

[00:01:55]And in his uh book, he argues that we humans are proud, okay? But, whereas John Milton says pride is a good thing, but it allows us to achieve godhood, um Dostoevsky says says that pride is evil because pride moves us away from God. It makes us think we're better than God, so it moves us to Satan.

[00:02:21]Therefore, our life should be a journey into defeating our ego, our selfishness, and our pride, and embracing God, okay? It's something that um Dostoevsky uh sorry, Dostoevsky talks about in his book Crime and Punishment.

[00:02:41]So, Crime and In the In the um book Crime and Punishment, the protagonist wants to become a superhuman. He He wants to prove he's better than everyone else. And so, to do that, he decides to commit murder, okay? He wants to show himself and to others that he is beyond morality.

[00:03:00]That he's a god.

[00:03:02]He's not constrained by emotions. And so, he kills um his um landlady, but afterwards, he feels tremendous regret for what he did. And what saves him is his love for a for a woman, okay? He submits himself to the power of love.

[00:03:26]He submits himself to the power of God.

[00:03:28]And that's what redeems him in the end.

[00:03:31]Okay? So, the argument here is that your belief in your own possibility of achieving godhood can only lead you to your own doom.

[00:03:43]Okay? What will save you, what will redeem you, is to admit your mortality, admit your fallibility, and to seek help from those around you and from God, okay?

[00:04:00]All right. So, um this is something that Toy Story talks also about in his book Anna Karenina, okay? So, we're going to read a passage from Anna Karenina.

[00:04:11]And Anna Karenina is a woman who's obsessed with um finding love.

[00:04:21]And she believes that through passion, through devotion, I can find true love and therefore complete myself.

[00:04:30]Okay, so she has an affair with a man named Count Vronsky. And in the beginning, it's a wonderful thing. It brings her tremendous happiness. She leaves her husband, she leaves her um son.

[00:04:42]But eventually, what she discovers is that this lust for another for a man, in order to fill the void in her heart, makes her even more empty.

[00:04:59]And um she feels her life becomes more and more pointless, okay? So, she decides to kill herself. But before she kills herself, she has this internal monologue with herself, okay? And this this is what she says.

[00:05:13]"My love keeps growing more passionate and more egoistic, more selfish, more proud, while his is waning and waning and that's why we're drifting apart, okay? So, she [snorts] demands Count Vronsky love her as much as she loves him. The problem is that she doesn't recognize that this love is not about love, it's about control, okay?

[00:05:38]>> [snorts] >> She wants him to be as devoted to her as she is to him. Okay, she wants to control him and he rebels against his control.

[00:05:52]Okay, and so he starts to drift away because he wants to maintain his freedom.

[00:05:56]>> [snorts] >> She went on amusing and there's no help for it. He's everything for everything for me. I want to I want him more and more to give him some up to me entirely.

[00:06:05]Okay, so she wants him to surrender himself completely to her. She wants to become God and she he wants she wants to make him the servant. Okay, this is not about love, it's about power.

[00:06:19]And he wants more and more to get away from me. We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly driven in different directions and there's no altering that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous, but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm unsatisfied.

[00:06:39]Okay, but she opened her lips and shifted her place in the carriage and the excitement aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses, but I can't and I don't care to be anything else. But the desire I arouse aversion in him and he arouses fury in me and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he won't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sherbaskaya, that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me? I know all that, but it makes me it makes it no better for me.

[00:07:09]If about loving me from duty, he'll be good and kind to me. Well, what I want, that's a thousand times worse than that kindness. That's hell. And that's just how it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved me and where love ends hate begins. I don't know these streets at all.

[00:07:25]Hills, it seems, and still houses. Okay, and so she's going to go carousel because she recognizes that she's been living a lie.

[00:07:33]She thought that if I truly love him, then he will love me back.

[00:07:42]She wants me to become God. What she doesn't recognize is that as a human, she has an ego.

[00:07:48]And so, when you she thinks she's loving Count Vronsky unconditionally, but in fact, what he what she's trying to do is control him.

[00:07:58]And have him obey her unconditionally.

[00:08:02]Okay? That's the difference between God and human. Where God God is all-knowing, all-forgiving, all-generous, all-love.

[00:08:11]But a human can do that. And when a human tries to become a God, a human can only become a tyrant.

[00:08:21]Okay? And that's a lesson from Toy Story.

[00:08:26]Don't think you could you you you could become God. You can only destroy yourself as well as others around you.

[00:08:32]And so, what um Toy uh Toy Story will do is that he will contrast Anna Karenina with a man named Levin, okay? And Levin is different. Levin, rather than try to seek happiness in passion, he just submits himself to duty and to to to tradition. He marries a woman he loves, and then he spends all his time being responsible to her as well as to himself as well as to the household. He just does what he's supposed to do. And by doing that, by submitting his freedom, by submitting himself to duty and tradition, he makes himself truly happy.

[00:09:17]Okay? So, really, the argument between America and Russia is a different understanding of the story of Adam and Eve.

[00:09:27]For the Americans, they believe that Eve's disobedience is a good thing because it's what leads to to progress.

[00:09:35]It's what leads to um um achievement.

[00:09:41]Americans believe that godhood is possible and it's a good thing. The Russians are different. They believe that Eve disobeyed because she was too proud and she does not recognize the limitations of her humanity.

[00:09:57]And perfection is impossible.

[00:10:00]Progress is impossible. What is good is recognizing our limitations and submitting ourselves to the power of God.

[00:10:08]Okay?

[00:10:09]So, that's why Russia and America cannot reconcile because not only do they have geopolitical differences, but fundamentally, the way they perceive the world is different and they're fighting to impose their own reality on others.