“What fresh hell is this?” writer Dorothy Parker famously quipped when the doorbell rang in her apartment.
Today, the world bypasses the doorbell and delivers fresh hell directly to our screens. We approach our feeds with trepidation, wondering what new evil we will encounter, yet we keep scrolling. Identifying a villain makes the world feel more predictable: evil belongs to this group, this country, or this religion. The more evidence we collect against them, the more certain we feel that we have located the threat—and absolved ourselves.
The Line Through Every Heart
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says not so fast: “If only it were all so simple!” In Volume 1, he writes what became perhaps his most enduring insight: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
If there were purely evil people and groups, we could “separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.” That belief is false. When we recognize humanity's interconnectedness, he asks us to consider, “Who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
We are often taught to imagine that the line between good and evil runs not through individuals but between groups. When individuals categorize a group as evil, they feel relieved of personal moral responsibility and fail to examine their own conduct.
In Volume 2, he repeats the lesson more strongly: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
Who disclosed this lesson to Solzhenitsyn? He saw it in himself as he reflected on his own conduct under the pressures of war and Stalinism. Looking back, he admitted, “In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.” Even when he committed evil, he “was convinced that [he] was doing good” and was “well supplied with systematic arguments.”
As a Red Army Captain in World War II, Solzhenitsyn “tossed out orders to [his] subordinates that [he] would not allow them to question, convinced that no orders could be wiser.” Even amid the war’s carnage, he saw his “power” made him think he “was a superior human being.”
This mindset led to evil deeds. He sent his soldiers under shellfire to repair communications wires so his superiors wouldn’t reprimand him for breaking communications. His soldier Andreyashin died in the process.
Yet before the war, Solzhenitsyn had already faced a moment when conscience restrained him. In 1938, he was a member of the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party. In his third year at university, he was strongly urged to apply to the NKVD school. The NKVD trained the secret police and other brutal internal forces the Stalinist regime claimed the “Motherland” needed.
This was at the height of Stalin’s show trials. Solzhenitsyn was taught that “the struggle against the internal enemy was a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task.” If he accepted, “NKVD school dangled before us special rations and double or triple pay.”
Yet Solzhenitsyn and a few of his friends said no. It was internal moral conscience that helped him resist totalitarian ideology: “People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’” Yet still “inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.”
As in the parable of The Two Wolves, we are all saints and sinners. Which wolf we choose to feed is up to us. The line between good and evil “oscillates.” Solzhenitsyn wants us to know that “even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
Perhaps Solzhenitsyn was too hard on himself when he wrote that it was “only when I lay there on rotting prison straw [in the Gulag] that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”
Without challenges, it is easy to maintain an idealized fiction of our own goodness. Must suffering always come before awakening? For many people, it does. Yet, Solzhenitsyn directs us to a different path. “Know thyself!” he urges. “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.” Those reflections gain us humility:
After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?”
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We know Solzhenitsyn didn’t deny the barbarism of the Soviet system, but he also stopped projecting his own failures and flaws onto others and the state. Giving up projections is necessary if we want to change.
When Ideology Replaces Moral Conscience
Often, we don’t want to change; we want others to change. So, we adopt an ideology centered on projecting blame onto others. Collectivists are eager to supply the evil group deserving of blame. Ideology, Solzhenitsyn warned, “is what gives evildoers their long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” The revolutionary seeks a “social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”
Those words should chill us. Alongside every act of public violence come explanations designed to make cruelty appear righteous. Reactions to the murders of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk, and the atrocities of October 7 show how readily ideologies can justify, even celebrate, the suffering of human beings.
Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.” What will the 21st century bring? It has not been a good start.
Think of someone whose political identity seems to supply a ready-made answer to every moral question—perhaps a Democratic Socialist, an adherent of pandemic-era “safetyism,” or an avid listener to Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker, or Tucker Carlson.
You may have noticed how an ideology can begin to substitute for a developed moral conscience. Its followers would reject the idea that they are merely passive non-player characters. Their minds may be as active as yours or mine. But their “moral” thoughts arrive prepackaged by a “granite ideology.” The danger is that borrowed judgment leaves little room for sympathy, self-doubt, nuance, or an appreciation of the interconnectedness of humanity. Under those conditions, ordinary people can become capable of remarkable cruelty while remaining convinced of their virtue.
When we understand Solzhenitsyn, we understand the question is not only which ideology has captured the minds of people. Solzhenitsyn observed, “a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life.” Here lies hope for our troubled times. For a person gripped by an ideology rather than their own moral conscience, “the possibility of returning remains” if they have not left “humanity behind.” Solzhenitsyn’s insights pierce our conscience when we look inside and expose the line running through our own hearts.
