“The heart of the matter is that in this gentleman’s article all people are divisible into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ The ordinary must live obediently and have no right to transgress the law—because, you see, they’re ordinary. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and to transgress the law in all kinds of ways, for the simple reason that they are extraordinary. That would seem to have been your argument, if I am not mistaken.”
Raskolnikov smiled again.
—Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Oh, what we once thought we had, we didn’t
And what we have now will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain