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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to part eight. In my reading of Reisa Lugutos
The dmon in Democracy, we are in the middle of
chapter four and we're in part four and Chapter four
is called titled ideology, So let's go the ubiquitous ideology
in the communists and liberal democratic societies drag people farther
and farther from reality. One of the most unpleasant aspects
of living under communism was an awareness that we were
always surrounded by non reality, i e. Artifacts fabricated by
the propaganda machine whose aim was to prevent us from
seeing reality as it was. Oftentimes it was a fraud
or simply a suppression of information about, for example, the
state of the economy, or who murdered whom at Katyan,
or what the fraternal parties agreed on during the summit,
But it was something more sinister than that. The entire
atmosphere was sultry because we could not free ourselves from
a feeling that we were living among phantoms in the
world of illusion, or rather a delusion. Back in twenty twenty,
when COVID was happening, there was this some of us noticed,
there was this mass moving back of people going back
to church, or people who had never been to church
before going to find churches, and I believe it was
their way of trying to find where reality was or
it was a way of looking to something historically that exists,
did that was real, was something you could see lasted
for hundreds even thousands of years, and it wasn't. Twenty
twenty unleashed what could be called fantoms in a world
of illusion, and I think a lot of people were like,
I need something, I need a solid foundation, And a
lot of people decided to abandon their delusions, whether that
was political ideology or what have you. And what's funny
is a lot of people make their political ideology into
their morality. So they saw people leaving their political ideologies
as abandoning morality, which literally makes no sense. If your
politics is your morality, you've completely lost the plot. You're
living in a world of illusion. Among fantoms, people went
and they tried to find something real or something historic.
We were surrounded by entities whose reality seemed precarious, but
whose power of influence was enormous. Party working class revisionists, zionists,
antisocialist forces, extremist elements, five year plan work, stoppages, forces
of imperialism, socialist renewal, leading role of the party, fraternal parties,
domestic export. All these terms and many others impossible to
translate into English. Were supposed to describe real facts, processes,
and institutions, but were actually political declarations. It was impossible
to conduct any serious debate about the real issues because
the language served to conceal, rather than to reveal. Whoever
used those keywords automatically gave his consent to this function
of the language and agreed to take the role of
participant in a linguistic political ritual, and thereby to declare
his loyalty. The more participants, the noisier the political rights,
the more impressive seemed to be the performance of the
entire political system in the eyes of those whose minds
are limited by the choice of the official language. If
you don't openly say no to the ruling political order,
to the spirit, to an evil spirit of the age,
to the post war consensus, you're giving it its power.
You're allowing it to remain powerful. The first step in
breaking loyalty was to abandon this language in order to
see the world as it was without the meant a
mediation of fraudulent words or the false hypothesis that generated
They generated this eye opening experience of a break with
the ideological masks and the elation one felt when touching
the real world was well depicted in Polish literature in
the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Whoever lived in the
atmosphere of those days could not forget this blissful enjoyment
of speaking, seeing, and feeling the truth, and how after
years of linguistic deception, it brought a breath of a
breath of life and a reviving influx of fresh air,
not only to those who dared to reject the language
of the ideology, but also eventually to the entire community.
The mere description of the world sincere and truthful had
an electrifying effect on people's souls, discovering the richness of
human experience, bringing back to the memory long forgotten facts,
the old ideas being revived and restored to their former nobility,
Recognizing a variety of styles and forms of expression, all
of these awkward, All of these awakened people from their
ideological slumber. Many of them also understood that their newly
rediscovered desire to see the world as it would was
needed to be preceded by the cleaning away of all
the contaminating dirt that the decades of ideology had left
on their souls. The collapse of communism and the entry
of the liberated countries into the global system of liberal
democracy was supposed to intensify and consolidate this change. Europe,
or as it was often said, the West, was believed
to be founded on objectivism and truth. After all, it
was there where renowned institutions of research and education had
flourished for centuries, where free media and free journalists had
been giving the world at large free and unbiased information,
where science and technology had been developing an incomparable rate
and with incomparable successes. And finally, where for decades people
had been blessed with democracy, that is, a system with
an unbuilt mechanism that allows different points of view to
act as correctives to another to one another's one sidedness.
We thought, or rather we believed, that all these magnificent
things would be would have been impossible without long and
institutionalized traditions of respect for the truth and endowing the
human mind with a desire for objectivity and an inculcated
aversion to ideology. Those of us who had such high
hopes were met with disappointment, or met disappointment if the
reality revealed itself to us. In Eastern Europe, It was
short lived and without consequences. Very quickly, the world became
hidden under a new ideological shell, and the people became
hostage to another version of the new speak, but with
similar ideological mystifications. Obligatory rituals of loyalty and condemnations were revived,
this time with a different object of worship and a
different enemy. The new commissars of the language appeared and
were given powerful prerogatives, and, just as before, mediocrites assumed
their self proclaimed authority to track down ideological apostasy and
condemn the orthodox the unorthodox, all of course, for the
glory of the new system and the good of the
new Man media. More refined than under. Communism performed a
similar function, standing at the forefront of the great transformation,
leading to a better world and spreading the corruption of
the language to the entire social organism and all itsels.
Communism as an ideology, an ideology that you had to
live every day, that you had to speak, that you
had to think, that you had to outwardly wear, was
replaced with another liberalism, simple as that in order to
be able to give a fairly accurate description of reality,
one has to be somehow detached from it. And it
is precisely this condition that the ideology invalidated by transforming
the majority of people, whether they agreed or not, into
participants in the World War it itself created. Practically, everyone
felt coarse not only to take the right side, but
to reassert his partisanship by surrendering to all the necessary
language rituals without any critical thought or disarming doubt. The
person accused of a reactionary attitude under communism could not
effectively defend himself, because once the accusation was made, it
disallowed any objection, even the best counter argument to the
effect that the charge was ill staged and that being
a reactionary does not mean that one is necessarily wrong,
just as being a progressive it does not mean that
one is necessarily right. Only sank the accused person deeper.
Any such argument was a confirmation of his belonging to
the reactionary camp, which was clearly reprehensible, if not downright criminal.
There's that word. What did Thomas say said after Nuremberg?
Being right wing basically became criminal. Another thing I like
to point out is he's in Poland, which was behind
the Iron Curtain. East Germany was behind the Iron curtain.
If you look at most of the places that were
behind the Iron curtain, not all of them, definitely Northern Europe.
When they came out, they were untarnished by what Globalhomo
had turned into by nineteen ninety one. And you still
see that today. Poland is still fighting against this liberalism,
this progressivism taking over same thing in the parts of
Germany that were under Eastern occupation. When you take into
consideration Globohomo liberalism, progressivism, this disgusting post war consensus, those
who were behind the Iron curtain fared better when it
came down being confronted by it. At least they're holding
it off. We shall see what the future holds. The
only option that the defendant had was to admit his
own guilt and submit a self criticism as self downgrading
as possible, but even that did not have to be
accepted if the defendant had the right to answer the
charges in public, and of course he did not. The
immediate result was an avalanche of well orchestrated condemnations and
mass protests, where the indignant engineers, workers and writers shredded
the insolent reaction into pieces. Today, when someone is accused
of homophobia. The mere fact of accusation allows no effective reply.
To defend oneself. By saying that homosexual and heterosexual norms
are not equal, even if supported by most persuasive arguments,
only confirms the charge of homophobia. Because the charge itself
is never a matter of discussion, the only way out
for the defendant is to submit a self criticism, which
may or may not be accepted. When the poor daredevil
is adamant and imprudently answers back, a furious pack of
enraged lump and intellectuals inevitably trample the careless polemicist into
the ground. Prudent people but then and now anticipate such
reactions and made a preemptive move before saying anything reckless.
Under communism, the best tactic was to start by condemning
the forces of reaction and praising the socialist progress. Then
one could risk smuggling in a reasonable, though somewhat audacious statement,
preferably wrapped in quotations from Marx and Lenin. In a
liberal democracy, it is best to start with the condemnation
of homophobia, followed by the praise of the homosexual movement,
and only then sheepishly include something common sensical, but only
using the rhetoric of tolerance, human rights and the documents
issued by the European Parliament in the European Court of Justice.
Otherwise one invites trouble. Or here it would be the ACLU,
the ADL, or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The characteristic
feature of both societies, communists and liberal democrat was that
a lot of things simply could not be discussed because
they were unquestionably bad or unquestionably good. Discussing them was
tantamounts of casting doubts on something whose value had been
unequivocally determined. Under communism, one could not discuss the merits
of idealism because by definition it did not have any,
or the leading role of the party because such a
role was indubitable, or the good sides of Marxist revisionism
because the revisionism had only bad sides, or the controversies
over planned economy because there was nothing on controversial in it,
any other things that the doctrine declared clearly right or
clearly wrong. In a liberal democracy, the degree of freedom
is much larger, but even so it seems to be
shrinking at a frightening speed. Some concepts are not so
value loaded that they permit no discussion, only unconditional praise
or equally unconditional condemnation tolerance, democracy, homophobia, dialogue, hate speech, sexism, pluralism.
They therefore serve either as a stick to beat those
who are not docile enough, or the ultimate form of laudation.
For the majority of people. There is no other way
but to follow the orthodoxy and to watch one's language.
Because the power of ideology increases, one should be more
and more careful about the language one uses. The language
discipline is the first test for loyalty to the orthodoxy,
just as the neglect of this discipline is the beginning
of all evil. The liberal democratic, just as his communist counterpart,
lives in a world almost totally packed with conventions and interpretations,
with very little space for individual initiative, he relies almost
exclusively on ready made formulations, moves within well known stereotypes
of thought and language through which he expresses his feelings
of approval and disapproval, and justifies his role in a community.
The ideology that surrounds him is not only a set
of concepts, but also a system of mandatory practices. Like
an erstwhile African savage he is expected to dance his
ritual dances in order to manifest his tribal affiliation through
the well trained gestures and rhythms the village sorcerers taught
him so that he could express his enthusiasm war. So
he could express his enthusiasm for the war his superiors
thought it rational to wage against the enemies or to
give his joyful support of peace, if this accords with
the strategy of the tribe. For him, there is no
reality apart from from that which bears the meaning given
it by the sorcerers. Nothing else exists, and if it does,
it's not worth communicating. Of course, one can argue that,
after all, in the entire history of mankind, a large
part of the human race lived and thought like that.
They lived in a world already interpreted and thought according
to the rules created by somebody else. This is when
you read this, and even myself reading this, that immediately
comes to mind. It's like, well, I mean, hasn't it
always been like that? Having societies always been like that?
He continues, But the liberal democratic society is different from others,
being closer to a socialist society than to the traditional ones.
The difference boils down to two things. The first one
was already mentioned, a society that is ideological, that prides
itself on having the highest level of emancipation in dependence
and autonomy and history, which raises the stark contrast between
the declaration and the reality. The second difference concerns the
nature of that society. The earlier communities were significantly conventionalized, indeed,
but mainly by a social custom, not by ideology. Today
the custom significantly weakens and the ideology takes its place.
It was actually somebody on Twitter, I think I commented
yesterday or it was very early this morning. They were
talking about the free market, and basically all the free
market is is property rights and natural law. And I said, well,
that's ideology, and that ideology doesn't exist in reality. And
he just came back basically repeating the first thing he said.
And what I said was, there is no natural law.
Your laws are customary cultural. As soon as you say
natural law, you're globalizing it. You're turning it into something
that's for everyone. And as soon as you globalize something,
it loses its power, it loses its significance, and also
you lose your sovereignty because now that's for everyone. And
do you just taking immigration into account stuff we've seen
about importing Indians to come in here and replace American workers.
Do we need that? I mean, is do they do?
If we're looking at a natural law, if we're living
in a natural law society, Sure there's no problem with
them coming here. They have the same rights, they're under
the same laws. They recognize natural law just as you do,
because natural law is universal. But do they or do
they recognize cultural and customary laws and custom and customs.
You can talk about natural law all you want. You
can believe this is the way it works. But that
person coming in is coming from a society that doesn't
have doesn't believe in natural law. They believe in their customs.
Do their customs match up with what you believe? Well,
if they don't, you're importing a problem. That's why you
cannot universalize these things. Therefore, your people, the people who
assent to it. Why would you force it on somebody
else when they don't believe in it and will never
Ortego was right when he said that in the old societies,
people had customs, proverbs, stories, and sayings. Today they have
opinions which they quite sincerely believe to be their own.
What they do not know, however, is that they owe
these opinions to the ideology that surrounds them, not to
their independent intellectual efforts. If you're believing in an ideology,
you are basically abandoning the customs, the proverbs, stories and sayings.
And you can say, well, that's my ideology. Okay, Well,
understand what the term ideology means, and maybe latch onto customs,
proverbs and stories and sayings and so in the absence
of social custom and the hierarchy that such custom usually
brings about. It is the opinions that today, It is
opinions that today have become. It is the opinions that
today have become the major way of manifesting one's presence
in the world. It's not your customs that you're your
ancestors carried down that you're not allowed to act that way.
If you act that way, you are going against the
ideology of the day. If you look at your social
customs and they say they build this hierarchy, no, there's
a hierarchy in place. It's the president, the vice president,
Speaker of the House. That's your hierarchy. And if you
go against that, you're a threat to the ideology. But
because we live in a democratic society, the surest way
to achieve that goal is to join a large group
of people united by having the same opinions. Even if
such opinions are stereotyped, expressed in terms of deceptive concepts
and in vulgar language full of stale banality that distorts
the picture of reality and has a paralyzing effect on
our faculties of thinking and perceiving, it is enough that
they are shared by a sufficiently high number of people
living in the absolutely certainty that these ideas are fresh, innovative, innovative,
and controversially feisty, and that their brilliance is worthy of
the brilliant minds that admitted them. That is why most
intellectuals in academia are are paid by the state so
that they can have these They have these ideas, this ideology.
They're passing it on to you. They are seen, they
are called doctor, they're called professor, So that you look
upon them as you would was the term appear as
you would. The hierarchy. They're the higher, they're at the
top of the hierarchy. You are to believe what comes
out of their mouths they're teaching you about reality, and
to go against that, you're going against the smartest people alive.
You do you think you're smarter than a doctor, You're
a professor twenty twenty again, Part five. The overwhelming presence
of ideology in liberal democratic and communist societies can be
easily explained. The main cause is equality, which both regimes
gave a status of the highest value and made a
regulating principle. Both systems enforced the liquidation through revolutionary means
in communism evolutionary in liberal democracy of social hierarchies, customs, traditions,
and practices that had existed prior to the emergence of
the new political system. You're hearing this right, What the
goal of these social hierarchies, custom or the goal of
the revolutionary means in communism and the evolutionary in liberal democracy. Remember,
you need a foundation for you need a firm foundation
for everything. Accept your customs, accept your political order, accept
your hierarchy. It has to constantly be evolving, and it's
the way they destroyed the social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and
practices that existed prior that your forefathers followed the construction
of the communist society was possible only after the government
carried out a planned and brutal destruction of most of
the existing communities and social structures. The new system eliminated
the social classes, ostensibly to create a classless society, which
in practice meant the dismantling of the entire social fabric communities, organizations, institutions,
something that Aaron McIntyre talks about all the time. It
had or the church. They had to destroy the fraternal
organizations because they were a direct threat to them. They
need you to rely upon them, and if you have
a private and a cultural customary safety net, you're not
going to take theirs. You don't see them as the authority.
In Poland, virtually no institution survived, with the exception of
the Catholic Church, and the ones that were formally considered
to be continuations of the former structures, such as schools
and universities, were substantially altered. In the new society, all
people became comrades or citizens, enjoying equal status and sharing
equal concern for the welfare of communism. This equality was
secured and watched by the Communist Party, which had its
branches and representatives almost in every segment of a sietnxiety,
no matter how small. Alongside a new administrative structure, in
a new technocratic and a new tech neocratic hierarchy of directors,
presidents and managers, there existed a parallel network of communist
community committees and apparatics who controlled the ideological discipline in
the administration, in the administration and management, setting the goals,
nominating the cadres, and preventing any independent decision making from
emerging universities, to give an example, recreated part of the
original academic structures, but next to them, and in fact
above them, there was in each a communist party organization
which made the strategic decisions, supervised academic promotions and the
teaching curricula, and saw to it that the central directives
were followed. One can, of course, raise a counter argument
to the effect that communism was essentially anti egalitarian and
generated glaring inequalities unparalleled in any other political system of
modern times. A member of the party had a far
superior status, and a fellow citizen outside the party, the
top party officials had privileges absolutely and accessible to ordinary workers.
And yet, despite all such examples, egalitarianism and despotism do
not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand
to a certain degree. Equality invites despotism because in order
to make all members of society equal, and then to
maintain this equality for a long period of time, it
is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power
so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality
in every sector of the society and any aspect of
human life. To paraphrase a well known sentence by one
of Dostoyevsky's characters, we start with absolute equality, and we
end up with absolute despotism. Some call it a paradox
of equality. The more equality one wants to introduce, the
more power one must have. The more power one has,
the more one violent relates to principle of equality. The
more one violates the principle of equality, the more one
is in a position to make the world egalitarian. But
the root cause of strong correlation between equality and despotism
and communism was of a different kind. In societies that
are disintegrated or whose fabric is destroyed by the revolution,
political power becomes practically the sole organizing force. Such power
does not encounter any resistance, as all forms through which
a society normally organizes itself have been wiped out. There
are no traditional hierarchies, no spontaneously developed communities, no historically
entrenched institutions. When unchecked, despotism meets with no barrier for
itself aggrandizement. This is one of the major reasons why
despotism was never effectively in traditionally structured societies, where each group,
even if situated in a low rung of the social ladder,
had considerable autonomy in its own code, hierarchy and rules
of cooperation. Specifically that immediately calls to mind of feudalism.
Where there are no such groups and no internal differentiation
within a society, where there is a social and political vacuum,
thatotic power is left as the only form of control.
But to be really effective, the despotic control needs something
more than sheer terror intimidation. It must supply the people
it is deprived of old social environments with a new
identity and a new sense of belonging. And this is
the role of ideology. The communist societies were never made
totally egalitarian, although in a country such as Poland it
was difficult to indicate an institution with As I said,
the exception of the Catholic Church that during the first
ten years of the communist regime was sufficiently untouched to
provide a protective barrier. Later on, some old structures were
partially reproduced, but the conquests of social egalitarianism came to
be accepted and considered irreversible. The society seemed to have
come to a conclusion that equality in itself was a
good thing, and that although the means used by communists
were reprehensible, in the end the country was pushed in
the right direction. The learned people argue that equality was modernity,
and therefore communists despicable, as they were served the cause
of modernization. Well. In light of this new logic, what
had been once thought to be a barbarism was now
viewed as birth pangs of a new society finding its
way to modern rationality. The metaphor of birth has another implication.
A trend toward more and more equality was one directional,
and the hierarchies that were once dismantled or destroyed could
not be rebuilt. A desire to reverse the trend would
be like a desire for a grown man to return
to his mother's womb. It is true that the egalitarian
ideology of socialism. Communism sometimes times became an object of
an object of popular jokes, and it's absurd as well
as ferocious aspects were not overlooked yet Yet, the idea
that there could be something inherently wrong with coupling modernization
and egalitarianism, that equality should not be a paramount value.
That ideology was often in costly conflict with conflicts with justice, liberty, virtue, beauty,
and other basic moral notions never stayed in the people's
minds for long. The value of equality was not only
retained unscathed, but turned out to be a singularly attractive
both as an ethical idea and a rallying call. No
one could legitimately object to the standard of equality, because
no other standard had behind it the authority of history, ethics,
and common sense. To argue that a society should be
organized according to a criterion other than equality seems preposterous.
It was therefore quite understandable that if the communist state
began to criticize from within at some point, the most
convenient platform for criticism was that it failed the test
of equality, the value of which socialism was believed to
be the ultimate embodiment but which, unfortunately for reasons that
were never quite clear, betrayed. But egalitarianism was not only
the paramount value of communism. Liberal theories, especially although not exclusively,
those that made us made use of the concept of
the state of nature assume people's primeval equality. Looked at
from this perspective, all social hierarchies become immediately problematic because
they were obviously not natural, and because not natural meant
that they were human constructions. The conclusions any liberal could
draw was that there was nothing sacrosanct about them. They
could take a different form, be improved upon, or, if need,
be liquidated all together. All inequalities that exist must therefore
have explicit justification, because as otherwise, there was no reason
for them to be tolerated. Liberalism in the classical version
had a clearly anti royalist stance, especially with regard to
hereditary monarchy and ancestral institutions, all of which, it was claimed,
were based on a mystification, a reference to mysterious origins
in the remote past. This strategy of debunking institutions seemingly
ennobled by long history was extended to other social hierarchies, families, schools,
and churches in which one could see from the perspective
of the state of nature hypothesis, variations of political monarchism.
And once it was assumed that originally we were all equal,
no matter that originally could have a lot of meanings,
it seemed probable that those inequalities that had emerged in
the course of history must have resulted from subsequent usurpation, fraud, conquest, accident,
and other similar reasons. Egalitarian societies have an innate propensity
to fall into EA ideologies, and this for at least
two reasons. First, a desire for equality goes hand in
hand with a general mistrust towards social and political arrangements, which,
all when scrutinized carefully enough, may fail the standard. The
feeling of suspicion that they indeed do fail the standard
of equality may take a variety of forms. If someone
climbs to the top of the hierarchy, no matter if
it happened in accordance with the rules agreed upon, he
is likely to suspect that those on the level below
him wish to take his place. Not because this is
logic of competition, but because the mere fact of somebody's
being at the top always offends egalitarian sensibilities of the rest.
The question why him and not me is then an
expected reaction of a person with such sensibilities, and the
stronger he is, the more painfully acute this question must seem.
Because the suspicion that an unequal distribution of power is
immral and illegitimate incre with the progressive victories of egalitarianism,
the struggle for equality has no ending. Equality resembles a
monster with an insatiable appetite, regardless of how much it
has eaten, the more it devours, the hunger it becomes.
It's another thing like I was talking about with how
liberalism is just it's a path, and it's a path
that can veer off all over the place. It's not
a foundation. They're going for equality. Liberalism is about equality,
no matter what anyone wants to tell you, and you're
never going to get there. You're never going to get
to equality, So you just have to keep trying. And
while you do that, you're making You're trying to guide
an engineer society. You're trying to engineer people. And you
can engineer some people, but there are some people that
won't be engineered, and there are some people that are
going to want to be the engineers. You see where
that sends up. People might generally agree that they are
all equal before the law, but this does not dispel
the concerns of a dedicated egalitarian, who will argue with
it that this principle is too abstract to be sufficient
in every instance. After all, even if we respect equality
before the law, other types of inequality and domination continue
to exist, and their existence is morally repugnant and cannot
be tolerated. He will then add that the persistence of
inequality and domination has its origin in their being moored
in people's customs and habits, which, as can be expected,
considerably thwarts the principle of equality before the law. But
people's conduct, although entrenched in the historically transmitted experience, has
always some deeper sources in the ways they think and
conceptualized or image of the world. So at a certain moment,
the spirit of mistrust turns to human minds and human thoughts,
which are believed to be the fountain head from which
acceptance of the inequality springs. It is thus a matter
of time before the sting of egalitarian ideology is directed
against education, where the minds are shaped against family life
and community life, through which human thoughts acquire social durability,
against art, language, and science, where they will find more
refined expression. The spirit of suspicion will not disappear, because
they there are always newer areas to conquer and deeper
sources of inequality to discover. There is another reason why
egalitarian societies take ideology so easily. The experience of communism
is in this respect illuminating. The communists, who destroyed a
great number of the constitutive identities that people had been
developing for decades, if not centuries, were aware that the
need to belong was deeply embedded in human nature, and
that the void had to be filled with a new identity.
The process of imposing a new identity on the atomized
and uprooted mass of people was much more difficult than
they thought, but they achieved some success. For many, the
new communist identity, though appallingly crude, proved adequate enough to
make up for a lost sense of belonging and to
give a new one sufficiently strong to create millions of
communist sympathizers. Those who parted in hope or in despair
with the old homeland soon embraced a new one, and
in no time took to heart the rules of the
political system, its language, its perverse code of morality, and
its assurd mythology. Captured by the imperatives of ideology, they
quickly grasped the necessity of being both suspicious and enthusiastic.
They knew they had to sever, if only verbally, all
links with tradition, and to fill the empty space in
their souls with the content of the socialist creed Tokeville
brilliantly described the ideological needs of a democratic man. He
was perhaps the first to discover how this relatively simple,
pragmatic creature, devoid of impractical grandeur and und efficient in
his activities, is in need of general concepts. This need,
he argued, was typical of an egalitarian society, in which
people are largely undifferentiated, hardly distinguishable from one another because
they think in a similar way, and an accustomed to
any complexity of social arrangements or any intellectual ambiguity, ambiguities
and ambiguities. Armed with these concepts, they do not want
to be bothered with the details of intricacy of Let
me start that again. Armed with these concepts. They do
not want to be bothered with the details or intricacies
of the surrounding reality. Neither do they have time for
complicated intellectual operations or a disinterested cultivation of the intellect.
But of course they need an overall picture of the world,
not only for philosophical self confidence, but also as a
source of ultimate justification for their decisions and their convictions.
This is how the democratic man, while thinking of himself
an intellectual independent, almost a quasi Cartesians, as Tokevilt put it,
soon transforms himself into a reflection of the social group
in which he lives and submerges deeper and deeper into
conformity and anonymity. We see this today, right. People think
that they're these incredible thinkers, these incredible independent and intellectual thinkers,
Yet they don't have an opinion that disagrees with the
person on the news, or the politician, or the regime
in charge, or the spirit of the age. The development
of liberal democracy confirmed Tokeville's diagnosis. Because egalitarianism weakens communities
and thus deprives men of an identity giving habitat, it
creates a vacuum around them. Hence a desire exists for
a new identity, this time modern and in line with
the spirit of malignant egalitarianism. The ideologies fulfill this role perfectly.
They organize people's consciousness by providing them with the meaning
of life and individual and collective purpose and inspiration for
further endeavors and a sense of belonging. What is more
devious than somebody is looking for purpose in life and
you just hand them the spirit of the age. Here,
read this book, and the book is just the spirit
of the age. Go to this school and all you're
learning is the spirit of the age. Watch this person
on TV and all they are is completely one hundred
percent in line with the regime, yet they think they're
an individual. It's amazing to me that there are people
out there who completely they believe the same exact thing,
repeat the same exact words and the same phrases, yet
they think they're rebels. That's what liberal democracy, liberalism in
all its flavors does. With the emergence of ideology, the
problem of a lonely individual and egalitarian society no longer exists.
Feminism makes all women's sisters, all homosexualists become brothers in
the struggle, all environmentalists become a part of an international
green movement, All advocates of tolerance join the ranks of
the universal anti fascist crusade, and so on. Once a man
joins an ideological group, all becomes clear to him and
everything falls into place. Everything is either right or wrong,
correct or incorrect, and this perception soon changes the man himself.
In a liberal democracy, as in communism, ideology not only
characterizes the entirety of individual and collective existence into correct
and incorrect, but also imposes on people's minds an imperative
to side with one and be against the other. If
not indeed than in word or at least in thought.
In earlier societies with rich internal structures, differences in loyalty
that an individual could experience occurred quite often. In those
built on ideology, there should be no divided loyalties, and
to the ex extent they exist, they are dangerous symptoms
of a deadly disease. The ideological correctness is like a
pill that, once consumed by a patient, should improve his
organism to such a degree that he must correctly. He
must react correctly whatever circumstances and problems he encounters. His
mind and body become perfectly united, combining intellectual force with
quasi physiological reflexes, and the moment this unity has been achieved,
he can no more doubt his wisdom. But because this
wisdom turns out to be in practice overwhelmingly simple, he
cannot help believing that whoever resists it must suffer from
some profound malfunction of the mind. I'm reminded of the
NPC meme from seven eight years ago. This is how
he get the NPC. One does not have to be
over really acute to see a strong resemblance between a
communist activist on the one hand, and a feminist a
homosexual activists, and a liberal democratic lump and intellectual on
the other. Their opinions have the same tedious predictability, their
arguments are based on similarly crude syllogisms, their styles are
similarly vulgar, and their minds are equally dogmatic, unperturbed by
any testimony from outside, and prone to the same degree
of zealousness. On both sides, we also see what the
Marxists called the unity of theory and practice, which translates
into clear language meaning the total subordination of thinking to
the ideological precepts of political action. The subordination, instead of
being a cause of shame, is proudly held up in
his achievement of the new times. Both sides, communists and
liberal democratics, share their dislike, sometimes bordering on hatred, towards
the same enemies, the church and religion, the nation, classical metaphysics,
moral conservatism, and the family. Go ahead, argue, say no,
it's not true. Good luck. Both are unable to mitigate
their arrogance towards everything that their ideology despises and which
in their revolutionary ardor they seek to remove from the
public space and from public lives. Both are fixated on
one or two things that they refer to ad nauseum,
because those things delineate the unbreachable boundaries of their mental horizon.
That's the thing, the current thing that you latch onto
in every sentence. From the Lendiness and Stalinist catechisms, one
can replace proletariat with women or with homosexuals, make few
other minor adjustments, and no one will recognize the original source.
Both sides desire a better world so badly that in
order to have it, they do not hesitate to control
the totality of human life, including these aspects that are
most personal or intimate. Both, unfortunately, have been successfully successful
politically and have taken over the ideological power of institutions, laws,
and even something as elusive but nonetheless important as political atmosphere.
It is true that both those in the communist countries
and those throughout the Western world after the demise of
communism were and still are quite frequently an object of jokes,
sometimes quite deadly, but at the same time their presence evoked,
and the latter cases are still evoking feelings of fear
or at least a sense of the clear message that
opposing those people is not safe. Finally, both sides spectacular
victories among the intellectual and artistic elites. This is particularly
puzzling because one would think that the people endowed with
artistic and intellectual talents would be the first to reject
with contempt something whose repulsive primitivism. Only persons with serious
mental deficioncies could miss. Part six. The collapse of communism
played no small part in making the liberal democratic ideology
more impregnable. The end of the Cold War was almost
instantly given an interpretation, and not and not just any interpretation,
no one dared to refute it. Despite its obvious falseness.
According to it, the Soviet Communism that had enslaved many
countries in and outside Europe, was finally defeated by the West,
which represented the forces of freedom and democracy. Millions of
people thus accepted the image of liberal democracy as the
essence of Western civilization, a system of enormous moral and
political power and embodiment of the eternal human ideals. By
having that war by communism being the enemy when it falls,
no matter for what reason, you'd take credit for it falling,
And now you're the hero. You're the winners, obviously are
side one the end of history, right, This system turned
out to be stronger than the great, vitalitarian empire, whose
people and citizens have embraced democratic values, made their long
dreamt of vision come true, and could at last go
the liberal democratic way, reclaim their rights and promote the
ideals of pluralism and tolerance. This picture is patently false.
First of all, the liberal democratic West did not fight
the Soviet Empire, and with few minor exceptions, never had
such intentions. The general strategy of the Western countries was
to have good relations with the Soviet Union, even at
a comparatively high price. They recognized the Empire to be
a key player in world politics and part of the
political balance on the continent and internationally. Despite occasional heated
exchanges with the Soviets, Western europe governments. Western European governments
on both the left and the right, had mixed feelings
about anti regime movements in the Soviet blocked countries and
were far from giving them the endorsement they deserved. The
democratic aspirations of the East European peoples posed a risk
of destabilization, sometimes to a degree that pushed Europe onto
the brink of an international conflict. The Soviets were ready
to defend their interests militarily, as in Hungary and nineteen
fifty six in Czechoslovakia in nineteen sixty eight. The Western
Powers were aware of this and could not do anything,
so it was natural for them to avoid such confrontations
and not to give too much encouragement to distant activities.
They hoped for a durable, organic stabilization of the communist
system and an equally durable and organic rule of the
Soviet Union over its allied satellites. Such a scenario was
far preferable to turmoil in the cause of democracy or
human rights, or any other seemingly sacred principles. The sharper
rhetoric and openly anti Soviet policy sometimes demonstrated by the
US government irritated the European politicians who thought the American
that thought the American politics to be simply immature. If
one could imagine the political history of the last six
decades without the United States and the political map of
the world, and look at communism only through the prism
of the relations between the USSR and Western Europe, it
seems almost certain that Communism would still be thriving and
Poland would continue to be called the Polish People's Republic.
From Europe's point of view, conducting the Cold War, much
less winning it was never a priority. An accommodation between
the two parts of Europe was reached at a certain moment,
which to the approval of the political elite and the
convenience of Western societies. Some Communist leaders were believed to
have redeeming features, and drop off was found of Whiskey, Gerrick,
spoke French, which Kutar invented Gulash communism, whereas certain anti
regime movements seemed less trustworthy, especially those that were too
conservative and too vocal about their anti communism. It was
obvious from the beginning that among the Eastern East Europeans
who defied the Communist system that those that were closer
to the left found more sympathy and support. From the
point of view of ideology prevalent in Western societies, Communism
obviously did not have a good image, but the image
it did was not the worst. It never incited the
indignation that fascism did, the latter term, having catapulted to
almost diabolical notoriety and denoting the worst of political evil
always placed on the political right. For this reason, anti
communism did not require respectability even remotely comparable to that
of anti fascism. In fact, it was never widely respected,
either in America or in Western Europe, or eventually in
Eastern Europe after the fall of the Old Empire, perhaps
the democratic liberals intuitively, since they had a deeper bond,
no matter how unclear, with the Communists than with the
anti communists. After nineteen eighty nine, it was obvious what
the Western public what the Western public opinion wanted to hear,
no matter that the movement the communist system. No wonder
that the moment the communist system fell, the anti anti
communists and liberal Democrats immediately started proclaiming their victory in
the Cold War, even if it were the war they
had done their best to avoid and during which they
had scored a pathetic record of appeasement and pusillanimity. Jeez,
I don't remember that one. This is what the Western
public opinion expected, and this is what they got. To
make things worse, when the satellite regimes in Eastern Europe crumbled,
the post communist leaders and functionaries got amazingly good reviews
in the West, as opposed to the avowed anti communists,
who were treated far less kindly. Post Communist government, even
the worst, was condemned by the European Union, while the
anti Communist governments the Polish Law and Justice Party and
the Hungarian fide Fides sparked a fury of enormous intensity.
To this day, the former and present day Communists are
under the protection of the European Union and the political
mainstream it represents. That just tells you everything right. Communism fails,
Communists don't disappear, as a matter of fact. I know
for a fact in Romania, when Romania had their first elections.
After chad Jescu was as was killed, they just re
elected the communists, the communist leaders previous. No, the West
wasn't concerned about the Communists, they were there, guys. They
were worried about the anti communists because they were seen
as right wing and what is right wing? Ben Since
Nuremberg criminal this false image of opposition groups in the
communist countries was disseminated and became a sort of uncontested wisdom.
To be sure, some of the terms of qualification were
partly correct. These groups had been traditionally referred to as
a democratic opposition, which of course accurately captured that what
they had striven for a multi party system in free elections.
The anti regime dissidents who did not articulate these demands
openly kept silent, primarily for tactical not doctrinal reasons. If
democracy stands for a multi party system and free elections,
then all the members of the anti regime opposition were democrats,
but most of them were not democrats in the meaning
attributed to the word today. They certainly did not envisage,
nor were they willing to accept, the democratization of the
entire society with all its segments, and many of them
view that changes in today's liberal democratic societies with the
mixture of bewilderment and disgust. Another term by which the
opponents of the regime were defined was that of human rights.
They were routinely called human rights fighters, which again was true,
but in a narrow and frequently misleading sense. It is
true that they were fighting for freedom, also for freedoms
of speech, of religion, of religion, of research, all of
which can indeed be accurately called human rights, not only
in terms of the universal declaration of any legislative doc document,
but in a more fundamental sense. It is also true
that the anti regime opposition had no qualms about accepting
this term, as well as the language in which it functioned,
because by having done so, they obtained a stronger legal
justification for their actions and a more efficacious way of
communicating their message to the Western public opinion. But it
is no less true that most of them were as
far as one can be from what today goes on
to the label of human rights, which is the arbitrary
claims ideologically motivated made by various political groups in blatant
disregard of the common good, generously distributed by the legislatures
and the courts, often contrary to common sense, and usually
detrimentals of public and personal morality. The crucial fact that
has been widely ignored is that what gave the anti
regime movements to strongest impetus to resist the seemingly irresistible
communist power, and what the communists had tried to eradicate
from the very beginning, but to their doom failed, had
little to do with liberal democracy. These were patriotism, a
reawakened eternal desire for truth and justice, loyalty to the
imponderables of the national tradition, and a factor of paramount importance, religion.
People rebelled because the regime deprived them of what they
held the most precious. Free elections in a multi party
system were mechanisms, very much hoped for, nevertheless simple mechanisms.
But the massive resistance was not in the name of
the mechanism. It was for the ideas this mechanism could
serve to achieve, and those ideas were derived from the
experience of the nation, and in some cases that of
a religious community. They had nothing to do with the
rights of democratic schools or a rights of legislation that
allows tracking of hate speech, or the right of a
teenager to have an abortion without parental consent. If the
people who defied communism had been told that told then
that their success would lead to all these things, and
all these things would be attributed to their success, they
would have felt betrayed. This not because they were not
bright enough to see the consequences of their actions, but
on the contrary, because these were the developments their actions
were directed against. Poland's Solidarity movement would not have been
possible without its members strong patriotic and religious motivations. These
enabled the polls not only to rise in large numbers
against the oppressive region, but also to identify the very
reasons why they rose against it. These were, among other things,
to regimes utter contempt for institutions, laws, norms, and social
mores that had both rational and historical justification. It's about
historical justification, not natural rights or all our rights come
from God. That's not how you structure that's not how
culture is structured. To have freedom meant for the polls
not to have a government that would subject these institutions, laws, norms,
and social mores to thoughtless social engineering but this is
precisely what happened when the communist regime was replaced by
the liberal democratic one. The depressing fact was that this
sober choice of experience and reason against ideology was not
sufficiently durable to withstand the pressure from the new wave
of a new ideology. Intimidated and dispersed, the citizens of
the new system turned their backs on the other ideals
and duly admitted that the credit for defeating the old
ideology went not to them and what had really been
close to their hearts and minds, but to the new ideology.
They readily agreed that the liberal democracy, that liberal democracy
was the victor, and that it had for a long
time animated people's dreams and given them courage to oppose
the most inhumane political system in history. It soon turned
out that the real victor was even more concrete. When
browsing the propaganda the materials published by the European Union today,
one discovers, to one's astonishment that the actual goal of
the anti regime opposition in communist Europe was European integration
and indirectly the then non existing European Union. As such,
the amazing propaganda success of this strikingly false. Interpretation has
many unpleasant effects. One of them was a widespread the
widespread practice of rewriting history and of projecting the stereotypes
of the present onto the past. One had an impression
that the old ideas suddenly ebbed a way unfairly and
prematurely disowned by their former adherents. Many former opposition activists
were simply embarrassed by what they had believed in the past,
because now these beliefs seemed out of tune with the
new tides of modernity. Even if they were still proud
of what they had done, it was now for different reasons,
as the old reasons had lost their appeal. The inevitable
effect was also a reinterpretation of the political drama that
had ended with the collapse of the ancient regime. The
old narrative about the national and religious identity, awakened by
historical circumstances and by the influence of powerful personalities such
as Pope John Paul, had been replaced by a new one,
according to which, predictably, there had been a conflict between
the forces of light and the forces of darkness. This
dichotomy having obviously many analogies progress versus reaction, nationalism versus democracy,
liberalism versus authoritarianism. Who represented the force if darkness was
not clear? The candidates to this role changed together with
the evolving of political constellations. What became clear, however, was
that a growing number of people started to believe that
the real opposition that had defeated the communist regime was
a pro EU one. It was this group that, together
with Gorbachev, the reformist wings of the Communist Party, that
European institutions, Western governments, and the enlightened European public opinion
pushed Europe toward further unification, more pluralism, and more tolerance.
That's it. That's chapter four, and I'll be back in
a couple days to start on five. We'll finish us up.
I think we can probably might be able to do
this in two more episodes, So I hope you're enjoying this.
That was a particularly important section that I hope if
any section you want to share out of this to
that one chapter part eight of this. All right, that's it,
see you in a few days. Thank you.