Russian History

I have been reading The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. What a downer it has been in the first 200 pages. You really see how terribly people lived under the Communist regime in the former Soviet Union.

The description of the irrational methods of arresting and interrogating people was baffling and the methodology behind will never be know 100% due to evidence being destroyed.  I think about the countless numbers of people whose lives were destroyed and the gruesome and barbaric torture they went through. As an American, it is incomprehensible that humans were treated that way by their government.

I found a documentary on Vice about a family that escaped to to Siberia in 1937 and lived undetected for over 40 years. When they were visited by geologists, they infected the family with pneumonia and killed 3 of them. The mother died earlier of starvation and to make a long story short the only one still living is the 70 year old daughter. 

When I read the previously mentioned book I think what if these people hust escaped. Here I find a real case scenario of a family that did just that. In the eyes of natural selection it would have been better for them to stay put in the city so at least one of the kids had a better chance of carrying on the families genes. On the other hand, by escaping, the family got to spend many years together they would not have been able to if they stayed back west of Siberia.

So was it that some idiots that took over the government in Russia irresponsibly used evolutionary science to engineer utopia? The folks rounded up were impediments to progress and had to be eliminated. That is what I think about as i learn new ideas and take them in. There has to be a time of thinking things through before you make decisions that are a huge mistake or state that you buy into a completely thought out worldview.  If you get too convinced of ideology you will stop at nothing to protect it.

So what would you do? With a Darwinian worldview do you stay put so one of your offspring has the potential to spread your genes?  Or do you take your family and isolate them from the rest of the world and have 30+ years together with no heirs. A person who has faith that there is something beyond this existence on earth takes the flee from civilization option. There has to be a reason for each persons existence, even the nameless ones throughout history that were killed and forgotten by xyz totalitarian regime.

When reading the numbers game of human history I begin to realize how lucky I was born at the time and place I was. I don't think my life is any more important than the millions of people who die from genocide, war, famine and disease. How is someone picked to get murdered  and I dread all I have to on my day off from work. I am a spoiled ungrateful jerk sometimes and history shows me my place.