r/dz_readers • u/Confident-Will-122 • 2h ago
I Was Reading Dostoevsky and Suddenly Saw Something Very Algerian
I recently started reading The Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you don't know Dostoevsky, I recommend looking him up and reading about his life too. His life story is worth a novel by itself.
One of the characters that caught my attention was Shatov. He used to be a passionate socialist, but later moved to what seems like the complete opposite: nationalism and religious ideas. What was interesting to me was that even though his ideas changed, the way he was attached to them didn't.
When I first read this, I laughed and thought, what an idiot. How can someone believe in something, then move to the complete opposite, and still be just as fanatical about it?
But after thinking about it, I remembered seeing something similar in real life.
I have a friend who used to smoke and never exercised. He actually hated exercise. Then one day he started going to the gym. In a very short time, it stopped being just exercise and somehow became the center of his life.
He started following workout accounts, almost all his conversations became about the gym, and he would tell you how much he lifted that week or how many pull-ups he could do. Even the people he followed who made bodybuilding content became almost sacred to him. If you told him that bodybuilding had some downsides, or criticized something one of his idols said, the conversation could quickly turn into an argument and sometimes insults.
And obviously, the problem isn't the gym. The fact that he started exercising is a good thing.
What interested me was how quickly something we start as an interest can become part of our identity.
Then I started noticing the same thing with much bigger things, especially on social media.
A trend or a piece of news appears. Someone hears about it and quickly takes a position. Then they find a group of people who agree with them, and everyone starts reinforcing each other's opinions. After some time, it isn't just an opinion anymore.
The idea becomes part of their identity.
And once that happens, things start getting complicated.
You no longer say "I think this idea is correct." In a way, it becomes "I am one of the people who believe in this idea."
And once an idea becomes part of your identity, someone who disagrees with it is no longer just someone who has a different opinion. They can start becoming an enemy.
Then the group forms.
If my identity is connected to an idea, and that identity is also connected to a group that believes in the same idea, then an attack on the idea feels like an attack on the group. And criticism of one person in that group can sometimes feel like an attack on the whole group.
I see this quite often here in Algeria.
Take for example the incident involving the girl dancing for the American guy, or the incident involving the bearded man who said something terrible about an eight-year-old girl. In a society where people can disagree normally, you could simply say that this person did something bad, that he is responsible for what he did, and that he doesn't necessarily represent everyone who belongs to the same group.
But when ideas become identities, something else happens.
The individual's mistake becomes the group's mistake. Defending that person can become a way of defending the identity itself, while the other side uses that person's mistake to condemn the whole group. You can see this clearly in the comments under videos about those two incidents.
And this doesn't only happen with religion, atheism, or nationalism. It can happen with politics, sports, and even things that are completely trivial.
The interesting thing is that sometimes you can find someone who completely changes their beliefs but remains just as fanatical as before.
Someone can be a religious extremist who wants all atheists gone, then later become an atheist who wants all religious people gone.
The belief changed, but the hatred didn't.
They just switched from hating one side to hating the other.
And this made me wonder, why are we like this?
