Living in the age of prophets
Salman Huseynov ’26: “What we should aim for, it seems, is a world with fewer prophets”
On September 12 of 2025, the MIT community received a message from president Sally Kornbluth in the form of an email: there had been signs of hate speech engraved on the walls of our campus. This news comes as no surprise to us today; hate has been all around us for a while now. Recently, the conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on a university campus in Utah. Before that, Democrat lawmaker Melissa Hortman was shot and killed in Minnesota. The reactions to the killings are no less violent in nature: the killing of Democrat legislators is largely ignored by the political right, while the killing of Kirk is dubbed as yet another act of the “violent left.” On the left, of course, there is a mixture of opinions, ranging from a general condemnation of political violence to “what needs to be done, needs to be done.”
During moments like this, I am reminded of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In the novel, the young student Raskolnikov murders a woman who he deems a parasite to society, but he can’t get away with it and eventually confesses to the murder. The most interesting discourse in the novel is that of Raskolnikov’s theory:
“… legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed — often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law — were of use to their cause… In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals — more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it…”
Here, Dostoyevsky gives us, I believe, a great definition of a prophet: a person who can transgress the laws precisely because they know that they’re doing it for a good cause. The keyword here is the word know — something that we, as common believers, lack.
It seems to me that today, we are living among prophets who are sure enough of their convictions to kill, to take a life. Or perhaps they, too, are simply testing whether or not they are prophets, like Raskolnikov did. As Cormac McCarthy put it in the novel The Road, today “there is no God and we are all his prophets.” It is difficult to say what is the reason for this: in other words, it is difficult to separate the symptoms from the causes.
Even more difficult, however, is to ignore the effects of the internet, the new propaganda machine of the masses. Sitting behind the screen, behind an anonymous name, I feel real to myself, but everyone else doesn’t; they are fake names, behind which are people whose reality is very easy to ignore. To see others as the “common rut,” to take away their humanity, becomes increasingly easy. A simple example is the ease of ignoring a message on your phone, compared to not responding to someone who is talking to you face to face.
In his early writings, German philosopher Friedrich Hegel creates a distinction from man and everything else. The ego — subject — becomes the master of everything else — objects. Today this is perhaps more true, or true in a more literal sense, than ever. Hegel defines love as the merging of two selves through the life in the subject seeing a life in the object. In such a way, the object ceases to be an object, becoming a subject and one with the self. Some claim that the internet brings us together and makes the world smaller, but it seems like the opposite is in play: today, we are far too distant from each other to sense the life in each other. This renders love difficult, and at times, impossible.
It is easy to say that the solution to our conflicts is love, but it is also impractical and vague to say so. What we should aim for, it seems, is a world with fewer prophets. Fewer people enacting the will of God, fewer people seeing themselves as not responsible because they are effectively the hand of God. In a time where everyone has their own truth, perhaps we should aim at having less truth, and spending more time in its search, in uncertainty.
Salman Huseynov is an undergraduate student at MIT studying physics and philosophy, with a concentration in literature. His interests lie in the intersection of philosophical literature and current social events.