2026-08-29
34 分钟Hello, everyone.
I'm Stephen West.
This is Philosophize This.
Patreon.com slash Philosophize This.
Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there.
I hope you love the show today.
So I want to start today by telling you about a guy named Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut was an author, born in the U.S.
Year 1922, which was an interesting year to be born because it placed him in perfect
position to be coming of age during the opening stages of the Second World War.
And being in this spot, the choice he makes is rather than sit around
and wait to be called up and drafted into the military by force, he decides he's just going to enlist
and at least have some kind of marginal control over what his own fate's going to be.
When he gets to the war, he's assigned to the 106th Infantry Division as an intelligence scout,
which meant that for his job, he would often be a guy that's on the battlefield and he'd have to push forward,
sometimes behind enemy lines, to secretly get information about the position of the enemy.
Now, on December 19th, 1944, Vonnegut was fighting in the very famous now, Battle of the Bulge.
In the middle of the battle, his whole unit becomes encircled by a bunch of Nazis he was fighting.
So typical of those guys.
So he was captured,