Doctor Zhivago’s Heart: The Moral Nature of Disease

One of the defining features of dystopian regimes, and in particular, of regimes fundamentally in opposition to truth, in service of lies no matter the human cost, is that they are always convoluted. The laws are arbitrary and constantly changing. People cannot keep up with what they can and cannot say. There is no rhyme or reason to the tyranny and this in itself is the psychological torture--the arbitrariness of walking through a minefield, never knowing which seemingly ordinary step will anger the gods and lead to your demise. If this sounds a lot like modern leftism to you, then you are not mistaken. 

Boris Pasternak’s novel reminds us that this has all happened before and that human societies are always vulnerable to this form of torture toward mankind. There is one wonderful passage from the novel that reminds us that, even if you DO somehow survive the myriad arbitrary circus regulations and bureaucracies of a leftist state (as as was the case with Marxist communist Russia and much of the modern West) your psychological torture will manifest itself through physical symptoms. 

The eponymous protagonist of Doctor Zhivago physically survives through the novel but dies right at the end of it due to a heart attack. But that heart attack was not borne of a poor diet or over-drinking or any of the material causes we may measure. Rather, it was a disease of always lying to oneself for survival.

“It’s an illness I’ve got, sclerosis of the heart. The walls of the heart muscle wear out and get too thin, and one fine day, they’ll burst. And I’m not yet forty, and it isn’t as if I were a drunkard or burned the candle at both ends!”

“Nonsense! We aren’t playing your funeral march yet. You’ll last us out!”

“Nowadays there are more and more cases of small cardiac haemorrhages. They are not always fatal. Some people get over them. It’s the common illness of our time. I think its causes are chiefly moral. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Your nervous system isn’t a fiction, it’s a part of your physical body and your soul exists in space and is inside you, like the teeth in your head. You can’t keep violating it with impunity. I found it painful to listen to you, Nicky, when you told us how you were re-educated and grew up in jail. It was like listening to a circus horse describing how it broke itself in.”

(Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, pg 432)

Despite the materialistic bent of modern allopathic medicine, even it admits that a person’s psychological and emotional well-being has a significant effect on their physical health. German New Medicine by Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer is one exploration of the systems and mechanisms by which different kinds of psychological conflicts affect the body and cause disease. Leftists are some of the most mentally ill people in society. This is not simply because of the menchausens culture of modern psychiatry that pathologises normal behaviours and emotions, it is also because constantly lying to yourself puts your body at war with itself. 

Leftists exist in a cult constantly changing laws of political correctness that become increasingly egregious and illogical year after year. They support criminals even when it contradicts the human drive for safety. They support the killing of infants even as they claim to be compassionate people. They support the destruction of their country’s economy even as they struggle financially. They put the pronouns in their bio. They say the man can get pregnant. They say 2+2=5. Perhaps so they can keep their jobs, but perhaps they also convince themselves it is all true so that it is more bearable.

But what Doctor Zhivago suggests, and what the incredible rates of illness among leftists suggests, is that deep down, the truth persists, no matter how much it is suffocated and subdued. This truth fights back and this conflict results in disease that goes beyond the mere psychological.