Chapter: But these are all golden dreams.  Oh, tell me, who was it first
announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things
because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were
enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man
would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and
noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage,
he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all
know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests,
consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good?
Oh, the babe!  Oh, the pure, innocent child!  Why, in the first place,
when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has
acted only from his own interest?  What is to be done with the millions
of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully
understanding their real interests, have left them in the background
and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger,
compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were,
simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully,
struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the
darkness.  So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter
to them than any advantage....  Advantage! What is advantage?  And will
you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the
advantage of man consists?  And what if it so happens that a man's
advantage, SOMETIMES, not only may, but even must, consist in his
desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself and not
advantageous.  And if so, if there can be such a case, the whole
principle falls into dust.  What do you think--are there such cases?
You laugh; laugh away, gentlemen, but only answer me: have man's
advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty?  Are there not some
which not only have not been included but cannot possibly be included
under any classification?  You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of
my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the
averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas.  Your
advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace--and so on, and so
on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly
in opposition to all that list would to your thinking, and indeed mine,
too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute madman: would not he?
But, you know, this is what is surprising: why does it so happen that
all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon
up human advantages invariably leave out one?  They don't even take it
into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken, and the
whole reckoning depends upon that.  It would be no greater matter, they
would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list.
But the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any
classification and is not in place in any list.  I have a friend for
instance ...  Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and
indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend!  When he
prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to
you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with
the laws of reason and truth.  What is more, he will talk to you with
excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony
he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own
interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter
of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through
something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will
go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to
what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws
of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to
everything ...  I warn you that my friend is a compound personality and
therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual.  The fact is,
gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to
almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical)
there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which
we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than
all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready
to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason,
honour, peace, prosperity--in fact, in opposition to all those
excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental,
most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all.  "Yes, but
it's advantage all the same," you will retort.  But excuse me, I'll
make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What
matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that
it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every
system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind.  In
fact, it upsets everything.  But before I mention this advantage to
you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly
declare that all these fine systems, all these theories for explaining
to mankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably
striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and
noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises!  Yes,
logical exercises.  Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of
mankind by means of the pursuit of his own advantage is to my mind
almost the same thing ... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle,
that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less
bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare.  Logically it does seem to
follow from his arguments. But man has such a predilection for systems
and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth
intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to
justify his logic.  I take this example because it is the most glaring
instance of it.  Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams,
and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne.  Take the whole
of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived.  Take Napoleon--the
Great and also the present one.  Take North America--the eternal union.
Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein.... And what is it that
civilisation softens in us?  The only gain of civilisation for mankind
is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely
nothing more.  And through the development of this many-sidedness man
may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed.  In fact, this has already
happened to him.  Have you noticed that it is the most civilised
gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas
and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so
conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they
are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to
us.  In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more
bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.  In
old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace
exterminated those he thought proper.  Now we do think bloodshed
abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy
than ever. Which is worse?  Decide that for yourselves.  They say that
Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking
gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from
their screams and writhings.  You will say that that was in the
comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too,
because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that
though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages,
he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would
dictate.  But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn
when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and
science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a
normal direction.  You are confident that then man will cease from
INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set
his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say,
science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous
luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own,
and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the
stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws
of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it,
but is done of itself, by the laws of nature.  Consequently we have
only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to
answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.
All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these
laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and
entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which
everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will
be no more incidents or adventures in the world.

Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be
established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical
exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the
twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be
provided.  Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built.  Then ...  In
fact, those will be halcyon days.  Of course there is no guaranteeing
(this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully
dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be
calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be
extraordinarily rational.  Of course boredom may lead you to anything.
It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that
would not matter.  What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I
dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.  Man is
stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all
stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like
him in all creation.  I, for instance, would not be in the least
surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of
general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a
reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his
arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick
over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to
send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more
at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what
is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the
nature of man.  And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one
would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere
and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose
and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.  And one may
choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one
POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea).  One's own free unfettered choice,
one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at
times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we
have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which
all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.  And
how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally
advantageous choice?  What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice,
whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.  And
choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

 The Underground Man recalls someone once saying that man only does nasty and wicked things because he doesn't know what's good for him. If he were enlightened, he would only do good things, because he would realize that being good was in his own best interest. The theory, then, is that no man would ever act against his own best interests. BUT - the Underground Man begs to differ. He says that men consciously act against their own best interests and will rush out to meet peril because they dislike the beaten track. And he says it in beautiful, gorgeous language, in one of the most famous passages from this novel. He knows that people will disagree with him, the counter-argument being that man always acts to his advantage. So the Underground Man asks us to define "advantage." In one specific case, he says, an "advantage" is actually harmful to him. Just this one special case. Yes, that's right, one specific, special case. One peculiar instance that will make man act not only in opposition to reason, but in opposition to his own benefit. There is one thing more important to man than all the other advantages in the world. But before he tells us what it is, he takes us on a major digression. The digression begins. The Underground Man thinks that all these systems we have for talking about man's "best interests" are useless. They are merely "logical exercises." The popular argument, he says, is that man does indeed follow his best interests. He goes on to talk about Henry Thomas Buckle, who claimed that as man became more and more civilized, wars would cease, since we'd all realize that war was more about producing dead people than about serving our own advantages. The Underground Man puts forward his argument, using the "take a look around" tactic. . So the Underground Man's argument holds water in mid-1800s Russia, as well as every other decade up to and including the present. He also points to Napoleon's conquests and the U.S. Civil War as further examples.) He concludes that civilization has made mankind more bloodthirsty, not less. It used to be that violence was considered a form of justice, so either we still feel that way today, or we know it is abominable but engage in it anyway. He doesn't know which is worse. And now a historical digression focusing on Cleopatra. The Underground Man talks about how, supposedly, Cleopatra used to stick gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts because she liked to see them writhe in pain. The Underground Man basically argues that we do the same sort of thing now. We're still just as far away from acting as science dictates we should act. The common argument, which he presumes we agree with, is that science will show that man has no special character - that he is little more than a piano key, because he must follow the laws of nature. It follows, then, that if we discover all the rules of nature, all human action can be calculated according to these laws. "There will be no more accidents or adventures in the world." Then, the theory goes, the world will be full of rainbows and bunnies and we can all build our "Palace of Crystal." When that happens, everything will be rational, but terribly boring. This is dangerous, since "it is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people." But at that point, it will be so dull that everyone will be thankful for the gold pins . He wouldn't be surprised if, when this very rational world came about, some gentleman suggested out of the blue something along the lines of, "Hey there chaps, let's throw rationality to the wind so we can actually live again. Whaddya say?" And that is exactly the big example from which we digressed at the beginning of Chapter Seven. This is the one cause for which man will go against his own interest, the one advantage for which man will shatter all reason and law, system and theory: the fact of his own free will. Man has to think that he has the ability to choose independently, and he will do anything to prove it.

