Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
to my next reading. I just finished reading but in
finish she Believed by Eric Hoffer, I just became Oh,
I mean I did what a lot of us do.
You read a book and I told you I was
reading it with you, I'd never read it before, and
you decide, Yep, this book is crap. And yeah, I
think that I read far enough to get the gist
of his message. I think I showed you where the
flaws are and I want to move on to something else.
And this next book is very important to me because
when I finally was able to just say out loud, yeah,
there's no way I can be a libertarian anymore. I
don't believe that. I just don't believe in it, and
not in the world way that it is promoted. This book,
The Demon and Democracy by Rizard Lagutko, just this is
the one that probably spoke to me the most. Where
I reached one point in the book and I just
said out loud, yeah, but I can't be a libertarian anymore.
It's just this doesn't doesn't make sense to me, So
all right, I think I also the reason I want
to read this book is, first of all, it's great
arguments are I mean steelmanned and it's one of those
one of those readings and commentaries that you can give
to your friends, you can give to normies. This is
a book that actually I think you can that normies
can pick up, and especially if they've been following, say
they're a Trump supporter or something like that, someone who
sees there just is something really wrong. This is something
you could actually give to them. So I'll try and
make it as normally friendly as possible. All Right, a
little bit about Lagutko. He's a Polish philosopher, politician. He's
a professor of philosophy at the I probably should have
pronounced the practice this one first. Yah Yagi leone ya
Yi a Yonian university in Krakous specializing ancient philosophy and
political theory. Member of the right wing Law and Justice
Party domestically, he has also served as a member of
European Parliament since two thousand and nine, being a prominent
member of the minority European Conservatives and Reformist political group groups.
Under communism, he was one of the editors of the
Samastad quarterly OKRA. After the collapse of the communist regime,
he co founded the Center for Political Thought, which combines research, teaching,
seminars and conferences, and is also a publishing house. He
has translated and written commentaries on Plato's Feida Fido You
three frow an Apology. He is author of several books,
Plato's Critique of Democracy, Toleration of Treaties on Liberty, an
Essay on the Polish Soul Socrates. Two thousand and five,
he's elected the seats of Polish Senate, where he became
Deputy speaker. In two thousand and seven. He was Poland's
Education Minister and from two thousand and seven to two
thousand and nine Secretary of State in the Chancellery of
President Lech Kaczinski. He is currently member of European Parliament,
where he sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee ahead of
the Polish Law and Justice delegation to the European Parliament,
and the co chairman of the Conservatives Hen Reformists parliamentary group.
Sued in twenty ten for violation of personal rights by
calling students who demanded removal of Christian symbols from a
public school unruly brat spoiled by their parents. He asked
for a dismissal of the case based on his immunity
as a member of European Parliament. In twenty eleven, the
court deny the requests plaintifts are represented by an attorney
on a pro bono basis under the Presidential Cases program
of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. He lost this case.
He is a fellow of Collegium Invisibilite as a professor
of philosophy. I won't go into his views too much.
You know, he thinks that same sex marriage is an unnecessary,
destructive experiment. He's argued homophobia is a stick with which
you beat people who dare to raise any kind of
objection and a totally fictitious problem, and claim that Christians
are the group that have been discriminated the most discriminated against.
So yeah, let's get into this. I'm just going to
jump right in and his first chapter, I think it's
only five chapters, and the first chapter is called history,
So let's go. Let us begin with what seems obvious
that communism and liberal democracy share a similar perception of history.
Great assumption right out the gate. Right societies, as the
supporters of the two regimes, are never tired of repeating,
are not only changing and developing according to a linear pattern,
but also improving. And the most convincing evidence of the improvement,
they add is the rise of communism and liberal democracy,
and even if a society does not become better at
each stage and in each place, it should continue improving,
given the inherent human desire to which both regimes claim
to have found the most satisfactory response. So these both
of these democracy, liberal democracy, and communism, of course have presuppositions.
The communisty of history is well known. The simplest version,
the one that circulated among the great unwashed in people's democracies,
was that communism is bound to prevail everywhere, even in
the capitalist the United States, among our distant African comrades,
and on any other continent. It is in its Marxian vision.
This was expressed in a more complex way. Marx and
his colleagues did not occupy themselves with communism as the
goal of history, and did not deliberate over details of
the communist political machines. To be such a prospect was
too fanciful and vague. What they focused on was an
analysis of capitalism, capitalism and the transition from the present
to the future system. If you listen to Thomas and
My or watch Thomas in my episode with on Hobsmom Hobsbam,
you will probably understand that a little clearer. The description
of the historical process leading to communism has three main versions.
According to the first, socialism slash communism was the final
stage of social development, illuminated by the discovery of Marxist
laws of history. As Engles famously said at Marx's funeral,
just as Darwin discovered the laws of nature, so Marx
discovered the law governing societies. According to these inexorable and
universally binding laws, capitalism would be superseded by socialism due
to the inherent logic of history, just as in nature,
some species had replaced others as a result of innate
process of natural selection. Later on, the liberals sharply attacked
this view. Carl Popper, to give the best known example,
argued in his books on Historicism and too Futalitarianism that
history cannot be an object of a scientific inquiry, and
therefore it is impossible to discover the laws of historical development.
In fact, he said more than that. He claimed that
those who like communists formulate such laws not only commit
a methodological mistake, but also open up the field for
political violence, which they feel free to use in the
name of the future. In communist countries, historical thinking translated
itself into a very simplistic but politically momentous formula. Communism
would prevail everywhere, it was said, but there were countries
that were more or less advanced on the road to it.
The most advanced was, of course, the Soviet Union. The
orthodox disciples of the laws of history thus surmised that
all other countries would have to advance through the same
stages that the Soviet Union did, even though the Soviet
Union from the start was not an industrial powerhouse, which
is kind of a kind of a need there the
most advanced. Okay. Later on, this doctrinary assumption was modified
to allow for some national specificities, which were called the
Polish or the Romanian or the Hungarian roads to communism.
The idea of national specificity of communism came to be
more or less adopted in practice, but never in the
official ideology, because it could have legitimized the unthinkable and
unpardonable act of leaving the socialist camp. This expression is
not the author's irony, but the term then officially used.
The second version of transition from capitalism to communism was
to a conscious human action. The society could be pushed
forward to the next stage of development by the group
that was most aware of its historical role. Who this
group was supposed to be was a hotly discussed issue.
The most common response was, of course, the proletariat. Another
possibility was the Communist Party, which was believed to be
the vanguard of the proletariat. Some pointed out the peasants,
as in China, where there was no industry and therefore
no working class, no working class. Others, as in the
nineteen sixty eight revolution that shook the Western world, students
and intellectuals, the constitutions of the peace post democracies ascribed
the role to the working people of town and country,
which in practice meant, of course, the communist party. The
third idea for transition to communism, the most complex and
the most difficult to translate into political categories, originated from
specific anthropological assumptions, according to which the historical development of
humanity was toward full self consciousness, which meant the full
realization of human nature. Laisak Kolakowski, in his history of Marxism,
made this insight, which he derived from earlier philosophical sources,
the key to understanding the whole Marxist tradition. Thus, the
quest for communism was not dictated solely by implementing a
specific political plan or simply by a desire to win
the struggle for social justice. All of these strategies sprang
from a deeper source, which was to bring the human
potential to its full flourishing. This humanistic anthropological theory, somewhat
convoluted and expressed in an unintelligible language of German metaphysics,
was to play a significant role in the history of Marxism.
It was dug up from time to time, especially in
the twentieth century when communism transformed itself into a regime
of crime and terror, in order to rehabilitate the movement's
human face and to contrast it in its refined anthropology
with Bolshevik socialism. The humanistic thrust was associated with the
young Marxis Marxis remaining under the influence of Hegel and
contrasted with the old Marx Engels and Lenin, and indirectly
with the Soviet Union and Communist parties, over which, as
it was argued, the spirits of the old marx Angles
and Lenin presided that these three scenarios were not separated
by Karl Marx, but constituted the three aspects of the
same historical process. There existed laws of history, the laws
that were objectively determining the direction of historical change, executed
through human activities by groups and organizations, such as communist
parties that were increasingly aware of their historical roles. All
of this contributed to the growing self consciousness of humanity
on its road to the fullness of existence. Needless to say,
in the communistic practice, the unity of the three aspects
did not matter, because the interpretation of historicism depended not
on the choice of philosophy but on the current party line.
So you can see that it's confused. They're guessing which
one of these is going to work best for where
we are. The concept of communism as the culmination of
history was not a mere succession of political regimes. History
covered the entirety of human experience, including human nature, the
human minds, social relations, law institutions, and even science and art.
The group that took responsibility for change was clearly at
the beginning a partisan group, almost marginal in the context
of the then existing political system, but in the process
of approaching the final stage of history, was growing in
importance and finally became the only political actor capable of
pulling together and transforming whether gradually or radically, peacefully or
by force, everyone in everything, thus elevating the human species
to new, previously unknown levels. A segment, party or faction
from some point in history was granted the status of
the midwife, an architect of the whole. In the short
stretch of one society Russian, Polish, German, and in the
long haul of the whole of humanity start with one country,
and then it just the dominoes starts to fall in
other countries when they see what's happening in that country,
or as was the case in what became in the
Soviet Union, was they would go looking for satellites that
were ready, that were ready for their influence, that they
could influence within they're manufacturing and their weapons, things like that.
From the perspective of historicism, any opposition to this process
was extremely harmful to humanity and inconceivably stupid. So when
Thomas seven seven seven says that all of the twentieth
century was a dialogue with Marxism, that comes from this
attitude that from this perspective of historicism, any opposition to
this process was extremely harmful to humanity and inconceivably stupid.
While these Marxist movements were going on, even our in
the United States, our intellectuals, our academics were arguing that
this is what this is where we were headed, this
is what we needed. And in many places it wasn't
a conversation if you'd understand what I'm saying. What the
what the enemy of progress defended was by definition hopelessly parochial,
limited to one class, decadent, anachronistic, historically outdated, and degenerate.
Sooner or later it had to give way to something
that was universal, necessary, and inclusive of the whole of humanity.
It was obvious to any open mind that history had
to grant victory to communists, and that they and that
all they had to do was wait patiently for the
signs of impending victory. Communist artists and intellectuals produced countless treatises, novels, films,
and plays showing how the New Times condemned the enemies
of communism to the dustbin of history, and how the
armies of socialism marched to their final victory. For an
average citizen of a communist country, it was enough to
take a look at a newspaper or turn on the
radio to be convinced of this implacable truth. When you
when you believe, when you have this, this ideology that
is going to basically create a utopia for mankind, how
do you not it's just a given that everybody that
this is going to happen everywhere. And if you're in
a country like the Soviet Union, of course your newspapers,
that's all they're going to they're going to be promoting
that as truth. And they will be talking about other
countries like the United States as completely decadent and how
they treat their minorities and things like that. And yet,
despite the ardent belief in historical inevitability, the longtime prospect
of the advent of socialism for the entire race, at
some point drifted far away, so far that it seems
to be taken into serious It ceased to be seriously
taken into consideration. Might indeed eventually admit that communism was right,
but the signs of its conquest were increasingly weaker. The
World Revolution was not coming, and in fact was not
even close. The failure of spreading the flame of the
Bolshevik Revolution to Western Europe closed a certain chapter in
the communist narrative. The idea of bestowing the blessings of
communism on all people on earth was thus abandoned. Instead,
the Party doubled its efforts in the countries that were
lucky enough to find themselves in a communist orbit. The
success of the new order depended on the rate and
extent of penetration of communism in all areas of life.
In more concrete terms, it meant, amongst others, that the
entire society had to be transformed into a communist society,
with all communities and institutions controlled by the Communist Party,
the sole maker and arbiter of socialist standards. We in
Poland had a socialist society, socialist schools and universities, a
socialist family, socialist morality, and for some time even socialist
art and socialist realism. In the socialist motherland, we had
the socialist economy, in which people worked in a system
that took the form of a socialist competition. What did
such language mean in practice? First of all, it was
a signal that everything and everyone was involved in building
socialism and that it was not possible to evade this task.
The person who dodged the duty could reasonably be suspected
of stupidity or bad intentions, and usually of both. Even
relatively independent organizations, and these were few, had to submit
regular declarations to prove that they participated in work according
to the best of their abilities, and that they certainly
appreciated the value of the project. Sometimes this meant, especially
in the beginning, a radical restructuring that would change everything
and not leave anything as it was before. Such was
the experience of the universities, schools and all organizations that,
when restructured in accordance with the nature of the communist system,
lost their heritage and acquired a new function and a
new identity. By now, anyone should know that part of communism.
If everything is going to become about communism, anything that
is not about communism, like your your religious belief, your
family loyalty, your loyalty to anything, has to be abandoned,
has to be destroyed, and you must adopt the new identity.
For a long time, building socialism was presented as a
race against capitalism in bourgeois society. The more socialists we
made ourselves, the less we were capitalists bourgeois, and thus
our ranking in the race improved. Later on, the race
rhetoric subsided because of the leadership's weakened self confidence and
the decreasing chances of success. What remained, however, was a habit,
even though only verbal, to oppose all that was capital
in bourgeois because and this message was transmitted with paralyzing monotony, Communism,
in one form or another, was always our destiny. For
all of us living in the camp of socialist countries,
history was already determined. The reconstruction of old bourgeois structures
could not be expected, because the eggs from the omelet
had the eggs from which the omelet was made had
disappeared long ago. Rather, one had to look for a
place in the new communist structures and adapt them to
the elementary requirements of reason. Even if capitalist bourgeois elements
were to appear from time to time as necessary concessions
in order to save the country from a dramatic disaster,
they still had to have a socialist label. Part two.
Liberal democracy does not have, and never had, an official
concept of history that can be attributed to a particular author.
It does not have its Marx, Lenin or Lukx. Nevertheless,
from the very beginning, the liberals and the democrats made
use of a typical historical pattern by which they were
easily recognized, and which often appeared not only in the
variety of general opinions they formulated, but also, on a
less abstract level, in popular beliefs and stereotypes professed to
be a representation of liberal thinking and mass circulation. According
to this view, the history of the world, in the
case of liberalism, was the history of the struggle for
freedom against enemies who were different at various stages of history,
but who perpetually fought against the idea of freedom itself,
and in the case of democracy, the history of a
people's continuing struggle for power against forces that kept them
submissive for centuries. Both of these political currents, liberal and democratic,
had therefore one enemy, a widely understood tyranny, which in
the long history of humanity assumed a variety of additional
distinctive costumes. Every now and then it was a monarchy,
often the Church, and at other times an oligarchy. The
main enemy of freedom was portrayed in various ways in
different countries and different traditions. As John Stuart Mill wrote
in The Passage. In the Passage opening his essay on Liberty.
The struggle between liberty and authority is the most conspicuous
feature of history since the earliest times known to us.
In England, at some point there emerged a Whig concept
of history that was to portray the country's basic, dramatic
political history. According to this view, the history of British
civilization was a progressing expansion of freedom and its legal safeguards,
and the disappearance into the past of bad practices of
autocracy or arbitrary authority beyond the control of the people
in parliament. More specifically, the history of England could be presented,
as has been done many times, as a narrative of
the emergence of parliament and creation of a constitutional monarchy
with a particular legal system sanctioning it. But the Whake
view of history of Great Britain deserves a broader look.
There were also authors who treated it as a basic
libertarian model of development. If one was going to introduce
the idea of freedom to Western civilization, then, as they claimed,
the most clearly expressed representation of the idea of freedom
at its most mature, the one most rooted in law,
institutions and customs, and in freedom mechanisms themselves was revealed
in the history of England. Such were the feelings of
numerous Angliphiles, from the Enlightenment thinkers to Friedrich Hayek. Naturally,
a question arises of what was supposed to happen and
what would happen at the end of history when freedom
would claim victory over tyranny. There were millions of people
communism there. For millions of people, communism offered a rousing
but actual quite vague vision. Under communism, people were promised
to have a lot of time off from work, to
be free from alienation, to find employment that was rewarding
and fulfilling, and to have the means of production socialized,
which would result in each person receiving according to his needs.
What all that was supposed to mean in more specific terms,
nobody knew. When Soviet communism emerged. Some said that, in fact,
it was precisely the system that the socialist profits had
in mind. Others categorically opposed this opinion, claiming that communism
was a terrible perversion of genuine socialism, while still others
argued that the Soviet regime was merely a transitional phase,
somewhat unpleasant, yet necessary leading to the future realization of
Soviet ideals of socialist ideals. Given the vague notions of
what true socialism was supposed to be, each of these
assessments was right to some extent. So you see what's
happening here is if you have no general vision of
what socialism is supposed to be, and you have you
can't even figure out even look at your ideal, which
is the Soviet Union, and figure out are they in
the transitional phase? Are they? Where are they? Then it's
hard to even know what it is, or to how
to run it, or to know what path you're on,
or if you have an end goal. If you have
an end goal, you have to know where you are.
The liberal vision, although less thrilling to hearts and minds,
was a bit more concrete. The impetus of liberalism was
understood to lie in its cooperative feature, which was to
bring the human race to a higher stage of development
than called the age of commerce. The era of conflicts,
wars and violence, it was claims, was coming to an
end and the period of cooperation, prosperity and progress was near.
In short, the liberal era was the era of peace. This,
in any case, was the way of thinking one could
find in Adam Smith, Friedrich Bastiat, and other classical liberals.
It does not sound particularly grand or original today, but
we should remember that war was a ubiquitous experience then,
and thus the prospect the peace of peace appeared tempting,
if almost unrealistic, and the theories that justified it had
to appear exciting in their boldness. In a famous essay,
Emmanuel Kant wrote about the advent of the era of
perpetual peace among the republics. What is interesting, however, is that,
according to Kant, the blessed era could and actually should
be preceded by a phase of enlightened absolutism. Authors such
as Spinosa, who wrote favorably about democracy, made the praise
conditional on people's first meeting high intellectual and moral requirements.
That's something that we high intellectual and moral requirements. It's
pretty much been read out of our culture, right. We
don't promote the most intellectual, We promote the ones that
are the most deserving. Morality is subjective. What does morality
even have to do? Why would we care if the
president of the United States was moral or not, as
long as he can do the job that started with
Clinton very openly. They believed, and it was fairly widespread
view at the time, that tyranny, despotism, and other anachronistic
regimes hindered the development of human capacity, stopping in at
the early stages of dependency and helplessness. Following the removal
of such regimes, work was to begin, partly resulting from
spontaneous internal desire for self improvement in the mind, and
partly imposed by the enlightened rulers, that in the end
would generate and improve society composed of better and more
rational individuals. A comparison between the liberal democratic concept of
the history and that of communism shows a commonality of
argument as well as of images of the historical process.
Three common threads occurring in Marx's work have their counterparts.
In the liberal and democratic tradition. There is a belief
in the unilateralism of history, leading inevitably and triumphantly to
the iror perpetual peace, or in other terms, to the
refinement of commerce and cooperation that humanity will reach due
to the victory of freedom over tyranny. Another is the
equivalent of deliberate human action, albeit not run by the
party but by active entrepreneurs and all types of freedom fighters,
as well as to distinguish minority groups, elites and enlightened
rulers who will prepare humanity until now apathetic, enslaved, and
ignorant for the new reality. The third topic, mankind's achieving
maturity and intellectual independence, is usually described in simpler languag
which than the German romantic used by the young Karl
Marx and amounts to a promise of a modern society
liberated from ignorance and superstition. Part three. Over the past
one hundred and fifty or two hundred years, the concepts
of communism, liberalism, and democracy evolved under the pressures of reality.
It seems beyond doubt, however, that the first two views
that history has a unilateral pattern and that a better
world is shaped by conscious human activity, are still very
much present in the modern political mind. That first sentence
is really important. Over the past one hundred and fifty
or two hundred years, the concepts of communism, liberalism, and
democracy evolved under the pressures of reality. Ideologically, you have
all these kind of theories libertarianism, classical liberals, even national
socialism and communism, and all of these things start out
in a lab. It start out free from the air,
free from contamination. But once they start to are implemented
and start to evolve under the pressures of reality, they're
not going to look like what was dreamed up from
the beginning. That's something that you have to get in
your head. And as soon as I got it in
my head, mostly from reading like James Burnham, then you
just realize, well, what do you what's most important? What's
the most important ideology? As usually it's the ideology that's
closest to you, and it's closest to your community, and
it's who you are and where you came from. It's
the language you share, it's the culture you share, it
is the history you share. Those that's what's most important.
And will they eve under the pressures of reality? Yeah, yeah,
But they they're eternal and their real their real life.
They're not something that was drawn up in a lab.
They actually evolved under the pressures of reality, not from
some grand vision of who we are, but from the
reality of who we are. Of course, few people talk
of the laws of history today, mainly because this quasi
scientific language lost its appeal in an age when the
concept of science changed Nevertheless, both the communists and liberal
Democrats have always upheld and continued upheld the view that
history is on their side. Whoever thought that the collapse
of the Soviet system should have done away with the
belief of the inevitability of socialism was disappointed. This belief
is a long as ever in the past, practices of socialism,
whether Soviet or Western, are well appreciated, not because they
were beneficial in themselves, but because they are still believed
to have represented the correct direction of social change. One
can observe a similar mindset among the liberal Democrats, who
are also deeply convinced that they represent both the inherent
dynamics of social development and a natural tendency in human aspirations.
Both the communists and liberal Democrats, while praising what is
inevitable and objectively necessary in history, praise at the same
time the free activities of parties, associations, community groups, and
organizations in which, as they believe, what is inevitable and
objectively necessary reveals itself. Both speak fondly of the people
and large social movements, while at the same time, like
the Enlightenment philosophers, have no qualms in ruthlessly breaking social
spontaneity and order to accelerate social reconstruction. What is social sponsaneity?
It something that evolves naturally among groups. And what have
we seen in this country? What have we seen under
our republican representative republican form of government? There comes times
when people called social engineers seek to destroy that sponsor,
that social identity, that social cohesion that has formed organically,
and sorts of destroy it so that they can reform
it in the way they think best. Admittedly, for the
liberal Democrats, combination of the two threads is intellectually more
awkward than for socialists. The very idea of liberal democracy
should presuppose to freedom of action, which means every man
in every group or party should be given a free
choice of what they want to pursue. And yet the letter,
the spirit, and the practice of the liberal democratic doctrine
is far more restrictive. So long as society pursues the
path of modernization, it must follow the path whereby the
programs of action and targets. Programs of action and targets
other than liberal democratic lose their legitimacy. The need for
building a liberal democratic society thus implies to withdrawal of
the guarantee of freedom for those whose actions and interests
are said to be hostile to what the liberal Democrats
conceive as the cause of freedom. How much do the
people who promote this the hardest hate Christianity, hate the family,
hate gender norms, whatever their vision is, whatever the And
when he says liberal Democrats, he's not talking about the
Democrat party in our country. He's not talking about progressivism.
He's talking about classical liberalism. He's talking about liberalism in
all its forms. In order to if you say, oh, well,
I mean, everybody should be allowed to do what they want,
and you know, as long as you're not hurting anybody
else and everything, well that's that doesn't exist. Everything is
going to affect if you have a town of people
and twenty percent of them decide. If you have a
town of a thousand people and everything is peaceful, and
you know, things start going bad economically, and you know
twenty percent of the women are prostituting, there are people
who will tell you that that's not going to affect
the society at all, or they'll tell you, yeah, it'll
affect the society. But so what, as long as nobody
is getting hurt, as long as nobody's property or person
is being disturbed. Thus, the adoption of the historical preference
of liberal democracy makes the resulting conclusion analogous to that
which the communists drew from the belief in the historical
privilege of their system. Everything that exists in society must
become liberal democratic over time and be imbued with the
spirit of the system, as once when all major designations
had to be preceded by the adjective socialists or communists.
So now everything should be liberal democratic or liberal democratic.
And this labeling almost automatically gives a recipient a status
of credibility and respectability. Conversely, a few a refusal to
use such a designation, or even worse and an ostentatious
rejection of it, condemn one to moral degradation, merciless criticism,
and ultimately historical annihilation. That goes for republic representative reform
of public republic too. Okay, what did what did our
representative reform of public become? It was voting right, and
you go along, and what happens, Well, times are changing.
We have to let more people vote. Yeah. Ahead of
this conversation with someone the other day and they you know,
they said that they were fighting. You know that Trump
was fighting for conservative values and I said, great, so
he's a leftist and he the person asked, how are
how are conservative? You know? And then I asked him,
I said what are you fighting for? And he said,
I'm fighting for the the values that the founders of
the country. And I said, okay, so you want white
European rule and you want only white landowners mail to vote.
And you know, there wasn't any pushback because this person
is a thinking person. They're struggling, they're questioning their priors
and realized immediately that yeah, pretty much conservatism is in
this country is just basically Civil rights era liberalism. But
they want to still want to go to church, be
able to go to church. That's it. That's it. It's
all leftism. They don't get it. They don't get that.
And where does that lead? Where are we? Why did
Donald Trump get elected? Countries emerging from communism provided striking
evidence in this regard. Belief in the normalcy of liberal democracy,
or in other words, the view that this system delineates
the only accepted course and method of organizing collective life
is particularly strong. A corollarily being a corollary being that
in the line of development the United States and Western
Europe or at the forefront, while we the East Europeans,
are in the back. The optimal process should progress in
a manner in which the countries in the back catch
up with those at the front, repeating their experiences, implementing
their solutions, and struggling with the same challenges. Not surprisingly,
there immediately emerged a group of self proclaimed eloquent accouches
of the new system who from let me look that
up real quick. My apologies, I should have done this prior,
but I did not. It is a it's a male midwife.
That's pretty remarkable, so let me start that again. Not surprisingly,
they immediately emerged a group of self proclaimed eloquent male
midwives of the new system, who, from the position of
the enlightened few, took upon themselves a duty to indicate
the direction of change and to infuse a new liberal
democratic awareness into anachronistic minds. They were, one would be
tempted to say, the Kantian Prussian kings of liberal democracy,
fortunately devoid of a comparable power, but undoubtedly perceiving themselves
to have a similar role as pioneers of the enlightened future.
In their view today, also consciously or unconsciously professed by millions,
the political system should permeate every section of public and
private life. Analogously to the view of the erstwhile male
midwives of the communist system. Not only should the state
in the economy be liberal democratic or liberal democratic, but
the entire society as well, including ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities,
community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations the people.
Structures thoughts that exist outside the liberal democratic pattern are
deemed outdated, backward looking useless, but at the same time
extremely dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Some
may still be tolerated for some time, but as anyone
with a minimum of intelligence is believed to know, sooner
or later they will end up in the dust bin
of history. Because progress needs because we're progressing, we're progressing,
we're getting better, and all we need is the right
economics to do it. All we need is the right
form of leadership to do it, or all we need
is no leadership at all to do it, as long
as it's liberal and democratic. Because, believe me, even in
my former anarco capitalist self, everyone's going to have to agree.
Anyone who speaks out is going to be looked down upon,
is going to be marginalized, is going to suffer some
kind of, as has been described, some kind of shame,
some kind of ostracism from the group because you don't
believe like we do, and we're going to keep this
like this, whether you like it or not. Their continued
existence will most likely threaten the liberal democratic process, and
therefore they should be treated with the harshness they deserve.
Once one sends one's opponents to the dust pint in history,
any debate with them becomes super superfluous. Why waste time,
they think, arguing with someone whom the march of history
condemned to nothingness and oblivion. Why should anyone seriously enter
into a debate with the opponent who represents what is
historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish. People
who are not there are people's you know, there's still
people out there who want to live around people who
look and sound like them. These I thought we'd put
those people in the dustbin of history. Ugh. People who
are not liberal democrats are to be condemned, laughed at,
and repelled not debated. Debating with them is like debating
with alchemist or geocentrists. Again, an analogy with communism immediately
comes to mind. The opponents of communism, example, those who
will leads free market to be superior to planned economy,
where it best enemies to be crushed or laughing stocks
to be humiliated. How else could any reasonable soul react
to such anachronistic, dangerous ravings of a deluded mind. Nowadays,
if you're like, well, I don't want either a free
market or a planned economy, both sides look at you
like you're insane. After all, in a liberal democracy, everyone
knows and only a fuller fanatic can deny that. Sooner
or later, a family will have to liberalize or democratize,
which means that the paternal authority has to crumble. The
children will quickly liberate themselves from the parental tutelage, and
family relationships will increasingly become negotiatory and less authoritarian. These
are the inevitable consequences of the civilizational and political development,
giving people more and more opportunities for independence. Moreover, these
processes are essentially beneficial because they enhance equality and freedom
in the world. There is no legitimate reason to defend
the traditional family. The very name evokes the smell of mothballs,
and whoever does it is self condemned to a losing position,
and an addition, perpetrates harm by delaying the process of change.
The traditional family was after all part of the old despotism.
With its demise, the despotic system loses its base. You
get that the traditional system, the traditional family was after
all part of the despotism. With its demise the despotic base,
the despotic system loses its base. The liberalization and democratization
of the family are therefore to be supported wholeheartedly and energetically,
mainly by appropriate legislation that will give children more power,
for example, allowing increasingly younger girls to have abortions without
parental consent, or providing children with legal instruments to combat
their claims against their parents, or depriving parents of their
rights and transferring those rights to the government and the courts.
I mean this is he wrote this before the whole
transgender thing blew up, But I'm sure that would have
been in there sometimes. To be sure, these things can
lead to excessive measures perpetrated by the state law and
public opinion. But the general tendency is good and there
is no turning back from it. Similarly, in a liberal democracy,
everyone knows and only a full or a fanatic and
deny that schools have to become more and more liberal
and democratic for the same reasons. Again, this inevitable process
requires that the state, the law, and public opinion harshly
counteract against all stragglers, those who are trying to put
a stick in the spokes of progress. Dreamers who imagine
that in the twenty first century we can return to
the school as it existed in the nineteenth Pasts who
want to build an old time museum in the forward
rushing world, and so on and so forth. Similar reasoning
can be applied to churches, communities, and associations. Result, liberal
democracy has become an all permeating system. There is no,
or in any case cannot be, any segment of reality
that would be art, that would be arguably and acceptably
non liberal democratic. Whatever happens in school must follow the
same patterns in politics. In politics, the same patterns in art,
and in art, the same pattern as in the economy,
the same problems, the same mechanisms, the same type of thinking,
the same language, the same habits. Just as in real socialism,
so in real democracy it is difficult to find some
non doctrinal, doctrinal slice of the world, a non doctrinal image, narrative, tone,
or thought. And for those who do not believe that
this would have anything to do, anything would be apply.
In a society such as you know you do you
like a libertarian society, Let a bunch of traad families
start getting together and building, building their own community and
deciding and having people watch the pushback, because you'll have
pushback from people who, if they start building a community,
will start thinking that they're looking to build political power,
or they're willing to or they're trying to create their
own state. And see what happens. See if you don't
feel like you're threatened, you will, because eventually they will,
because people will start coming for them. People will start
threatening them. People will start saying that they're they're not
following the same they're not following the same path as us,
and that they may start influencing other people, and they'll
start going after them. When they start going after them,
they're going to seek to protect themselves. And the best
way to protect yourself is to build a state is
to create a government to protect yourself, which is why
anarchism can't work. In a way, liberal democracy presents a
somewhat more insidious ideological mystification than communism. Under communism, it
was clear that communism was to prevail in every cell
of social life, and that the Communist party was empowered
with the instruments of brutal coercion and propaganda to get
the job done. Under liberal democracy, such official guardians of
constitutional doctrine do not exist, which paradoxically makes the overarching
nature of the system less tangible, but at the same
time more profound and difficult to reverse. It is the
people themselves who have eventually come to accept, often on
a pre intellectual level, that eliminating the institutions incompatible with
liberal democratic principles constitutes a wise and necessary step. Forty
years ago, at the time when the period of liberal
democratic monopoly was fast approaching, Daniel Bell the Popular Social
Writers set forth the thesis that a modern society is
characterized by the disjunction of three realms social, economic, and political.
They develop so, he claimed, at different rates, have different
dynamics and purposes, and are subject to different mechanisms and influences.
This image of structural diversity that Bell saw coming was attractive,
or rather would have been attractive if true, But the
opposite happened. No gisjunction occurred. Rather, everything came to be
joined under the liberal democratic formula the economy, politics, and society,
and as it turns out culture Part four. The very
idea of the political regimes come into being through historical
necessity must seem dubious, not to say ludicrous, to any
sane mind. Unquestionably, an infinite number of additional parameters, including
yet unknown and unexpected ones, may change the direction of history.
Even if one is deeply attached to libal democracy, one
should always keep in mind that there are many worthy
goals inconsistent with the movements, mechanisms, and traditions, that a
lot of people can or should pursue, because they enrich
our experience and have accompanied human strivings since time immemorial. Besides,
once we grant and the liberal Democrats usually do, that
progress has been made possible by humans incessant pursuit of creativity, inventiveness,
power of imagination, and freedom of thought, and that these
qualities have often changed the course of history. Why should
we all of a sudden acquiesce to a complacent notion
that the same qualities cannot lead us beyond the liberal
democraphic horizon. The so called Hegelian sting, or to put
it simply, veneration of historical necessity, has been well described,
mainly by Syslot Mislos in The Captive Mind, which analyzes
mechanisms of the communist servility of Polish intellectuals. The author himself,
let it be noted, was likewise massively stung, and for
the rest of his life struggled painfully with the vicisitudes
of historicism, which he never entirely abandoned. The manner of
thinking that made artisan intellectuals scouts out to the communist
creed and subsequently to invest all their intellectual and artistic
capital to legitimize as atrocities which Milosch recreated accurately captures
an important, if not the entire, aspect of the treason
of the intelligentsia into ittalitarian systems. It seems that the
idolatry of liberal democracy which nowadays we observe among the
same groups that so easily succumbed to its totalitarian temptation.
Their angry rejection of even the slightest criticism. They're inadvertent
acceptance of the obvious maladies of the system, their silencing
of dissenters, their absolute support for them. Monopoly of one
ideology and one political system are part of the same
disease to which apparently intellectuals and artists are particularly susceptible.
It thus seems that the mental enslavement described by Milosh
was not a single occurrence occasioned by a short lived
infatuation with communism, but an inherent handicap of the modern mind.
One can imagine two opposing mindsets represented by two attitudes,
that of an old man and that of a younger.
The old man, with his rich experience, is likely to
be wary of further fundamental changes, perceiving them to be
an ever recurrent symptom of immaturity. The youngster, full of energy,
will enthusiastically get involved in changing the world for the
better according to the plan that he believes to be
superior to all previous ones. The old man will prefer
to remain meditative, prompting young people to learn from the
older and wiser, calling for humility, prudence, and discretion. The
youngster is active, happy to instruct others, full of pride
and his responses bold in action, dreaming of trans discretion
and admiring it in others. The old man will be
inclined to think that everything has already been done. The
young man believes that he, himself, society, and perhaps even
humanity are currently facing a unique opportunity in history. The
old man will be guided by the image of a
golden age. Everything used to be better until a lasting
and deepening decline that most likely stems from corruption of
human nature. The youngster looks into the future and believes
that all the best things for the human racer yet
to come, in that the history of humanity, despite occasional calamities,
shows a steady progress. The old man is balanced in
his reactions and assessments, looking for the appropriate courses of
action in the world, which, according to him, was founded
on human error, ignorance, poor recognition and reality, and premature ventures.
The youngster has an excitable nature, moving from desperation to euphoria,
eagerly identifying numerous enemies whose destruction he valuably advocates, and
equally happy to engage in collaborative activities with others because
he believes the world is full of rational people. The
old man says that, given the weaknesses of the human race,
institutions and communities, family, schools, and churches should be protected
because over the centuries they have proven themselves to be
tools to tame humans' evil inclinations. The young man will
argue that such institutions and communities needs to be radically
exposed to light, air it out, and transformed because they
are fossils of past injustices. The old man is a
loner who believes that only such an attitude as his
can protect the integrity of the mind. The youngster eagerly
joins the herd, enjoying the uproar, mobilization, and direct action.
So here we have contrasting in where's the the one
that meant the most to me? The old man says that,
given the weaknesses of the human race, institutions and communities, families, schools,
and churches should be protected because over the centuries they
have proven themselves to be tools to tame human evil inclinations. Yes, families, schools,
and churches keep people grounded, keep people together, keep people
as part of a group. It is individualism, as we
learned from the last book, true believer. Individualism is what
causes breakdowns and inevitably the reaction to go back to collectivism,
to the families, the schools, and the churches, because it's
not that they're getting it wrong. It's not that they
haven't just come up with the right formula yet, but
the right formula was there all along. Families, schools, and
churches for centuries have been used to tame humans' evil inclinations.
Can you argue against that? When in light of this
dichotomy we take a look at the modern mind, we
might say, the risk of simplification, that it resembles that
of a youngster much more than that of an old man.
This mind, equipped with a variety of assumptions and technical means,
ventured a huge attempt to reform knowledge, society, and individual people.
The most obvious of his assumptions is that the purpose
of man's existence in the world is to change things.
The youngster, relative relevant to his age, arms this assumption
with arrogance, self indulgence, and irresponsibility. See the Hoffer would
say that the youngster is just somebody who he can't make.
He doesn't see that he can make it as an individual,
so he's going to go join a group no, no,
more more or less. He's if he's going to join
a group, it's going to be one that seeks to
tear down Yeah, the tear down the from a left standpoint,
in a in a society such as this, in a
society such as ours, he's going to join a group
that's going to seek to tear down the past. And
the way you can see that that is what this
society that we are in is is anytime one pops
up that talks about restoring the past, they are called Nazis,
reactionaries backwards. Every every phrase that has phobe has phobe
at the end of it. Yeah, yu, groups or what
protects us groups are what protects society and liberal democracy
classical liberalism seeks to break down those groups, even though
they might say, no, we're okay with those groups. As
long as you're not hurting anyone else, The individuals will
eventually come for them. That's just history, and how are
you going to stop people from doing it? The socialist
and a liberal democrat interpretation of history is typical of
a youngster's. It delivers the promise of great transformation. It
is bold, absolute, simplistic, easily stimulated by optimistic projects. It
is only natural that so many intellectuals have been at
the service of this promise, at least since the Renaissance era,
worshiping revolutions and plans for new ones to the younger.
Communism once represented itself as the greatest, most comprehensive, and
most sublime idea for such a transformation. Another idea at
the time was fascism, which was close to socialism in
style at least, and appeared in several national versions, of
which the Italian interpretation won the greats to claim as
a manifestation of youth. The parliamentary systems were not so
exalted as part of various national traditions and institutions. They
preserved their common sense and fared well at a time
when half the world had gone mad for communism fascism
in German national socialism, and surrendered to bloody excesses with
the approval of the masses in a large part of
the elites. At some point, however, when they became the
model of democracy and liberal democracy, everything changed. Suddenly. It
turned out that liberal democracy was the global pioneer of progress,
and that it, rather than its predecessors or competitors, was
to bring humanity to a stage of development that had
only been dreamed of for centuries, and intellectual and a
liberal democracy faces a similar dilemma to that to the
one that once troubled his fellow socialists. Whether to join
the vast torrent of history or to remain on the sidelines,
To continue to be a vigorous youngster transfer forming the world,
or to change into a grumpy old man who does
not like much and whose wisdom has little social effect.
For many, the choice turned out to be not so
difficult after all. Moving with the flow the socialist and
liberal democrat gives an intellectual more gives an intellectual more power,
or at least an illusion of it. He feels like
a part of a powerful global machine of transformation. He
not only understands the process of change better than others
and knows how to organize the world, but also, by
looking at the surrounding reality, can easily diagnose which phenomenon, communities,
and institutions will disappear and when resisting will have to
be eliminated for the sake of the future. Therefore, he
reacts with indignant pity toward anyone who wants to stop
the unstoppable. He indulges in a favorite occupation of the youngster,
to criticize what is in the name of what will be,
but what a large part of humanity, less perceptive and
less intellectual intelligent than himself fails to see. The youngster
it committed to his liberal democracy is, however, somewhat different
from his communist comrade. Communism was entirely a figur into
the imagination of theorists who put it in practice as
a big and brutal experiment against the will of the majority,
while liberal democracy is no invention, but a system that
boasts an impressive track record and has grown out of
the community commute. That word is killing me community cumul
cumulative experience of generations. I guess to the point where
I'm reading, where I'm reading so much and words just
disappear on me. At a time when death camps, gulag's
five year plans, and political police regimes are created, many
Western countries preserved that which is difficult to overestimate and
always worth defending, parliamentarism and a multi party system and
the rule of law. This youngster, however, fails to notice
that at some point the system, or rather the arrangement
of systems covering many variants, become haughty, dogmatic, and dedicated
not so much to facilitating the resolution of political conflicts
as to transforming society and human nature. It lost its
prior restraint and caution, created powerful tools to influence every
aspect of life, and set in motion institutions and laws,
frequently yielding to the temptations to count conduct ideological warfare
against disobedient citizens and groups. Falling into a trap of
increasing self glorification, the system begins to define itself more
and more against its supposed opposition, all sorts of nonliberal
and non democratic enemies, whose elimination was considered a necessary
condition to achieve the next level of ideological purity. The
multi party system was gradually losing its pluralistic character, parliamentarism
was becoming a vehicle of tyranny in the hands of
ideological of theological constitute of majority, and the role of
law was changing into judicial arbitrariness. Thus, the youngster's mind,
in its previous embodiment, had flirted with communism canal without
any resistance, transfer its affections to liberal democracy, finding in
it a source of similar ecstasy, but reassurance that this
system had never resorted and never would resort to the
drastic measures known from the history of communism. Confident in
the humanistic values of his new liberal democratic creed, he
infuses the old political institutions with new energy and injects
them with new ideological content, while remaining notoriously unaware that
under new circumstances, these institutions are no longer what they
once were, and that they now serve a new purpose.
I think I'll stop right there. So, yeah, I hope
you're enjoying this so far. A lot of this he
writes and such, probably because he's I don't know. This
was written in Polish originally, I believe, and then it
was translated, and I think it's very he writes in
a way that's very easy. I think a lot of
the first part where he's talking about communism basically some
people can get lost. But once you get past that,
you start to see exactly where he's going with it.
And believe me, this gets it gets more and more
where you're just your eyes are going to be open
to Oh yeah, how could I not see this before?
So yeah, that's it. I'll be back for part two
in a couple of days. Thank you for tuning in.
Take care by