* The Underground Man's spite as a symptom of a deep moral, spiritual, and existential malaise born out of a feeling of powerlessness, as well as a rebellious and revolutionary spirit that lacks any obvious theoretical or practical outlet. His vulgarness is one born out of the vulgarness of bourgeois culture and values. And all of his acts of spite and humiliation are simply a way for him to assert his free will in a world where few other choices really are open to him.
* The Underground Man's self-hate and self-harm (chronic depression?) as being conditioned in large part by how bourgeois society makes him feel about himself (i.e., unfulfilled, lacking in comparison to others, unproductive, alienated from others and his work, etc.), which in turn conditions his anger towards the society that makes him feel this way. He's oppressed within and without. He could just as easily be called the Alienated Man.
* The Underground Man's praise of lazy idleness and criticism of vocations in general as the lamentations of someone living within a mode of production that forces people into 'vocations' for the sake of getting ahead/being someone. Possibly a criticism of the protestant work ethic and bourgeois social values imported to 19th century Russia from Europe and its bourgeois revolutions, as well as the drudgery of work under capitalism itself. Compare this POV to the liberation of the working class from the confinement of capitalist social relations touched upon by Marx in The German Ideology:
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the 'general interest,' but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
* The Underground Man's acute consciousness as an awareness of the ills of bourgeois society while at the same time partaking of and deriving enjoyment from them, i.e., a psychological contradiction reflecting material contradictions inherent under capitalism. His awareness of this contradiction is viewed from his POV as a disease stemming from the scientific rationalism of bourgeois society that infects/influences his particular consciousness.
* The metaphorical wall the Underground Man often speaks of as representing capitalism (which some, like Francis Fukuyama, see as the natural end of history) and all the material and psychological barriers present within bourgeois society to living a more healthy, fulfilling, and less alienated life. He prefers his 'corner' (or hole) to that outside world, unable to let himself believe that there's any alternative he can actively (and successfully) fight for. He doesn't have the strength to break through it or the 'natural laws' that give rise to his present reality, but can't (or won't) make peace with them, either. For the Underground Man, only the ignorant can accept this reality and act; the intelligent, on the other hand, are doomed to think themselves into inaction. Compare this, however, to Frederick Engels' perspective in Anti-Duhring:
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.
* The idea of 2 × 2 = 4 vs. 2 × 2 = 5 as referring to, in part, the influence of ruling class ideology and capitalist social relations on the working-class. The Underground Man connects the former to 'natural laws,' which here can be reflected in the slogan coined by Margaret Thatcher, "There is no alternative" (TINA), i.e., the idea that capitalism is akin to a natural law that's impossible to rebel against.
* The Underground Man's criticism of rational self-interest, the idea that people will do what's profitable for themselves rather than what's harmful, as a criticism of heterodox economics, which posits producers and consumers as rational agents. Sometimes, as the Underground Man argues, what profits a person is against their interest. And the market is often irrational. Moreover, capitalism is a system based on profit to the exclusion of all morality. Benefit and harm are extraneous concerns to the creation and realization of profit. In fact, it actively creates desires that are harmful and then feeds them to grow ever larger (e.g., tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, weapons manufacturing, etc.). And the logic of capital accumulation itself tends to lead to crises of overaccumulation, i.e., capital's own self-interest (accumulation for accumulation's sake) actually destabilizes the economy and creates both violent economic crises and social and political inequality, one of the biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism. He's critical of the rational egoism of Chernyshevsky in his argument that people will do what's harmful to prove or express their free will; yet at the same time, he's a victim of a system that subjects him to the amoral (and often destructive and dehumanizing) whims of the market, which gives us the illusion of choice and freedom while in reality stripping us of real control over the production process, the product of our labour, the added value incorporated in production, and ultimately, the material shape of society.
* The Underground Man's admission of having become "unaccustomed to living life" as a response to the alienation and existential suffering created by the suppression of his/our species being, i.e., the emotional and psychological pain of living a world dominated by capitalist social relations and bourgeois individualism, complete with the numerous contradictions and forms of alienation that separate us from one another, as opposed to the fullness of life possible under a less exploitative socio-economic system.
* The Underground Man's conclusion that it's "better to do nothing" while at the same time admitting that, in actuality, he thirsts for something different/higher as reflecting an acute awareness of the alienation and exploitation of capitalism — the life of capitalists/bourgeoisie/normal people 'above ground' who don't challenge the system, intellectually or otherwise, and buy into the dominant ideology of TINA — vs. his intuition that there really is an alternative (represented especially by the potential for love personified in the character of Liza), one that has the potential to unite and liberate all classes, 'above' and 'below' ground, but one that he seems unable to fully articulate. He envies those above, yet doesn't want to be them "in the circumstances" he sees them. In essence, it's expressing the struggle of an emergent class consciousness within him, a struggle between the 'false consciousness' of bourgeois rationalism and the alienation that that engenders within the Underground Man and his dream of something better.
Basically, where Dostoyevsky tries to imply a turn towards Orthodox Christianity as the synthesis to these internal contradictions within the Underground Man's psyche, it can also represent the Underground Man's failure to connect his existential suffering to the bigger picture contained in anti-capitalist politics, becoming lost within the nihilism and depravity of the individualism of bourgeois culture, politics, and ideology rather than turning towards the 'salvific' communalism of socialism. Christianity, in this sense, can be seen as the spiritual embodiment of the French slogan "liberte, egalite, fraternite" (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the Underground Man's unrealized wish of something different, i.e., the love of others and useful action represented by, and symbolically contained within, the radical love and egalitarianism of Christ.
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