Dostoevsky’s Warning About Forced Equality

A Commentary podcast dealing with Charlie Kirk's horrendous assassination included a reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1873 novel The Demons. I had never read it, so I determined to rectify that oversight. I am so glad that I did. I commend it to all.

Here is my take.

When Dostoevsky wrote Demons in 1872, he seemed to be spinning a wild satire about a group of provincial radicals. In truth, he was peering into the future. What he saw was that the dream of enforcing equality of outcomes—the idea that no one should ever stand out (does that sound familiar?)—can only be achieved by breaking the human spirit.

The radicals in his novel, led by the scheming Pyotr Verkhovensky, want to level society so thoroughly that genius, beauty, and individuality disappear. To get there, they lie, blackmail, and even kill. Their town collapses into chaos, not utopia. Dostoevsky’s message was clear: people cannot be forced into sameness without destroying what makes them human.

History vindicated him. The Bolsheviks promised equality but delivered gulags, starvation and the mass murder of millions. Mao’s Cultural Revolution humiliated teachers and artists in the name of leveling society and produced even more deaths. Pol Pot’s Cambodia tried to erase all distinction, even executing people for wearing glasses—and resulted in the killing of a quarter of the population. Different ideologies, but the same result: the crushing of individuality, freedom, and progress, and the deaths of millions.

Human beings long for freedom, creativity, and meaning. When a system demands absolute equality of outcome, it collides with those desires. To close the gap, coercion steps in: censorship, propaganda, prisons, and terror. The result is not progress but stagnation, disease and death. A society that silences its most creative and courageous people is a society that withers and dies.

Demons still matters because its warning is timeless. A culture that sacrifices freedom and individuality for the illusion of perfect equality gains neither justice nor happiness. It only breeds resentment, despair, and decay. Dostoevsky reminds us that true human flourishing comes not from leveling people down, but from allowing them to rise, each in their own way.

I'm reminded of Robert Frost, Poet Laureate under John F. Kennedy, saying, “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.” Would that his philosophy were still with us today.