I see where you’re coming from - the state is just the will of the people. From my perspective, the State’s capacity to enforce the will of the people has impr

I see where you’re coming from - the state is just the will of the people. From my perspective, the State’s capacity to enforce the will of the people has improved dramatically. People both then and now would have wanted no indentured servitude, no starvation, better healthcare, safety from violence and so on. But governments can actually deliver on most of those to a reasonable degree now. In that sense “everything is permitted” is limited by what the state will allow you to get away with. Is murder permitted? Yeah, but you’re probably getting caught. Is littering permitted? Same. We don’t need a belief in God to prevent people from committing crimes against their fellows. Less violence, less starvation, fewer children dying. People haven’t become better, but the world has become gentler. Whether a person believes “everything is permitted” or not, there’s a lot less permitted now than back then. A simple morality of “I’ll follow the laws of society”, which you have to do anyway, is probably good enough to make a stable society. On some level, this makes the Brothers Karamazov feel a bit less timeless. It feels like those difficult questions Ivan was grappling with aren’t eternal, just a problem of the circumstances he was living in. If he lived in 2025 he’d probably just be an atheist and he wouldn’t lose his mind over it. It doesn’t matter to me thought, the book is still a masterpiece. Thank you for discussing this with me. This book is a bit niche so I can’t remember the last time I got to discuss it with someone.