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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to part seven of my reading of Raizard Lagut
goes the Demon in Democracy. I'm going to start with
chapter four and get about halfway through all Right, here
we go. Chapter four is titled Ideology Part one. Both
communism and liberal democracy have a strong tendency to ideology.
The concept of ideology owes its career to Marxism. It's
an interesting statement there saying there is no political ideology
before Marx, Or maybe he's not saying that. Marx and
angles made the following argument. People, they claimed, are not
in control of the views they hold and profess. They
accept as their own, usually without realizing it. The idea
is produced by the socioeconomic system in which they live.
Do you agree or disagree? That's the question I would
ask you. You may not, But what do you say
about most of the people around you? You know those
people that you read pill all the time, and the
next day you go back to them and they've completely
forgotten what you talked about. Well, every such system generates
not only institutions and economic relations, but also a more
or less coherent set of ideas that legitimize it and
delineate the boundaries of its change. Contrary to what most
of us think, the prevailing opinions, theories, and convictions that
we consider timeless and self evident are neither timeless nor
self evident, but are the products of the economic and
political arrangements peculiar to a specific phase of historical development.
A bunch of people run around calling each other Marxists, right, well,
they call people before that. Think about that before the Enlightenment.
Say what kind of political pejoratives of people throw around
at each other even before Marx tyrant whoever thinks otherwise
and claims he speaks from a non committed, absolute absolutist perspective,
is cheating himself, failing to notice that his supposedly politically
disinterested consciousness has been fabricated by material conditions. This does
not mean that we are all slaves of our time.
There are those who see more clearly than others, not
because they are free from a historical entanglement, but because
their minds have a better grasp of the world to come.
It is these people who speak in the name of
the future and are purveyors of a revolutionary spirit. Both
these types of consciousness, the one mystified by its false
claim to timelessness, the other, anticipating a new era Marx
and Engels called ideology. The concept vaulted to unprecedented popularity,
primarily because it proved to be a most convenient tool
in political conflicts. It allowed discrediting one's opponent without entering
into a substantive argument. There was no sense in analyzing
the opponent's view on their merits, such an analysis being
usually inconclusive and politically inefficient. It was much better to
show that his views represented his interests and were conditioned
by his social and economic position. This way, under communism,
much of philosophy, art in literature could be discredited as
arising from a bourgeois ideology, legitimizing the domination of the
bourgeois of bourgeois z and representing its interests. By being
identified as serving the cause of the bourgeoisie, the philosophers,
artists and writers could be arraigned on a charge of
being on a charge of being the enemies of the
socialist revolution and standing in the way of the future,
often with lamentables consequences for the defendants. Ideology is always
inherently simplistic and simplifying, as its function is instrumental, not descriptive.
The purpose of ideology is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities,
but to make a clear statement. This and this reflects
the interests of capitalism, and that and that reflect the
interests of communism. Lenin called it very aptly the principles
the principle of partisanship. One is either for something or
against something. Whoever is trying to find a middle of
the road position or to evade the dichotomy automatically passes
to the enemy side. All philosophy CIVI, a well known example,
is either materialistic or idealistic. Whoever wants to go beyond
this distinction becomes, whether he means it or not, a
traitor of the materialists cause, and slouches towards toward idealism.
The ideological interpretation of one of Marks's basic tenets, that
the history of humanity is a history of class struggle,
stipulated that this struggle leaves its stamp on human life,
both individual and collective, on society, art, science, institutions, law.
At the peak of communist domination, when culture was in
the grip of the doctrine called socialist realism, it was
officially proclaimed that nothing in the human world would not
have an ideological dimension in other worlds. In other words,
nothing could be neutral with respect to the conflict. Because
communism and capitalism between the working class and the bourgeoisie,
the past and the future. Anything that existed not only
materially but also as thought or a seemingly harmless folly
of imagination could be non mistakenly identified as correct or incorrect,
bourgeois or proletarian, revolutionary or counter revolutionary, socialists or anti socialist,
materialistic or idealistic, progressive or regressive. This practically put an
end to any form of intellectual argumentation. No one argued,
but either accused someone of ideological treason or defended himself
against such a charge. Is this hitting anybody square on?
Some people mad at him and disagreeing with him right now,
maybe even a little. No wonder that those contaminated by
ideology developed a deep suspicion toward ideas. They knew that
ideas were not really ideas, and the person expressing one
did not really say what he said, even if he
personally thought so, but that he had a hidden agenda,
even if he was not personally aware of it. The
suspicion increased even more when Marx, who was called the
master of suspicion, was joined by two other masters, Nietzsche
and Freud. Nietzsche prided himself on having discovered the genealogies
of ideas and disclosed the biological conditions that had generated them.
Sometimes he claimed that their root was strength or weakness
of the body. Sometimes health or illness, as for example,
skin and gastrointestinal tract diseases were at the root of metaphysics,
and sometimes even race. Usually Jewish. Freud, in turn, derived
ideas from causal relationships between the conscious and the unconscious
subconscious minds. The masters of suspicion practically annihilated a debate
understood as an exchange of arguments. When someone expressed an
opinion or put forward a thesis, there was no point
in considering it in terms of truth or falsehood. It
was much better to show, or rather unmask, the conditions
that are originated this opinion or thesis. One could say, therefore,
that the opinion had bourgeois content and served the interests
of the bourgeoisie, or that the thesis arose out of resentment,
or that at the bottom of a certain statement was
the Oedipus complex of the speaker. In the ideological perspective
of what looked innocent, whimsical, utterly non political in art
philosophy or science. What may have had solely aesthetic, intellectual,
or moral value, or no particular value at all, What
more or less accurately described the world in human existence
suddenly began to be seen in a new light. All
of these were believed to be embedded in a political plan,
sometimes all the more insidious because camouflaged. There was not
a single writer or artist or thinker who was not ideological,
i e. Who would not represent some attitude towards the
mechanisms of power, whether affirmative or critical. The communist textbooks
and encyclopedias invariably included the information that could pinpoint the
ideological identity of artists or authors. Those who were ideologically correct, criticized, condemned, exposed, accused,
and denounced what it was proper to criticize, condemn, expose, accuse,
and denounce. Those on the wrong side of the ideological
fence were described as uncritical, apologists, blind supporters, sellouts, serving
the interests of lackeys of the ruling class, running dogs,
and the like. At some point, actually, pretty quickly the
ideology that first served primarily as the instruments, unmasked and
discredit the false consciousness of those who were the mental
slaves of the social and economic environment began to be
used as a tool in the service of communism. The
new communist ideology had to meet certain criteria. Similarly to
a capitalist ideology. It had to be so simple and
clear that everyone would understand what communism stood for and
how to identify an enemy. The difference was that, contrary
to the capitalist ideology, the communist counterpoint was not false
and did not need to be exposed as a false consciousness.
Its role was to shape a new mind dedicated to
work for a new society. Though, because this new mind
and new society were to emerge through the process of
incessant bombarding of people with a few simplistic slogans, the
communist ideology became indistinguishable from communist propaganda. In fact, the
communists readily admitted it and used the two words interchangeably.
For instance, every Communist party committee had its department of
ideology and propaganda. The transition from ideology as a false
consciousness to ideology as a true insight into the future
of historical development, From the mind full of self deception
to the mind permeated with truth was quite puzzling. How
is it possible, one would ask that the same person
can be, on the one hand, suspicious of all ideas
as arising from particular conditions and having no truthful content
of their own, and on the other be dedicated body
and soul to a set of ideas that he finds
mandatory and compelling. The answer is already included in the question.
Ideology is a mental structure that allows a combination of
conflicting traits and extreme distrust of ideas and a blind dogmatism.
The ideological man is thus both absolutely suspicious and absolutely enthusiastic.
There seems to be no idea under the sun that
he would not put into question and make an object
of derision, skepticism, or contempt. No idea that he would
not reduce to an offshoot of hidden instincts, mundane interests,
biological drives, and psychological complexes. Hence, he is likely to
despise reason as an autonomous faculty, to downgrade lofty ideas
and to debunk the path past, seeing everywhere the same
ideological mystification. But at the same time he lives in
a constant state of mobilization for a better world. His
mouth is full of noble slogans about brotherhood, freedom, and justice,
and with every word he makes it clear that he
knows which side is right, and that he is ready
to sacrifice his entire existence for the sake of its victory.
The peculiar combination of both attitudes, merciless distrust and unwavering affirmation,
gives him an incomparable sense of moral self confidence and
intellectual self righteousness. So how is he going to relate
all of that to liberal democracy? Part two? One should
think that liberal democracy is relatively free from ideological temptation.
The emergence of one unifying ideology seems rather unlikely when
there is considerable differentiation in a society, and it is
precisely such a differentiation that liberal democracy promised to tolerate
and even stimulate. If, as liberal logic seems to indicate,
people are more and more concerned with their private matters.
If following the logic the democracy political power is available
to any party in the democratic pendulum prevents power from
staying in the hands of one party for a long time. If,
thanks to the efficiency of the liberal democratic institutions, a
system acquires remarkable stability and a high degree of prosperity,
the need for ideology seems rather insignificance. So basically liberalism
is sold as non ideological because you're allowed to believe
anything you want you're an individual. That's pretty much the
way it's sold. But continuing the ideological propaganda was useful
in the communist countries with structural and stability in poor
economic performance, where it serves to disarm people's dissatisfaction and
to restructure their minds by means of aggressive propaganda in
accordance with the directives of the polic bureau. But in
a country where people are free and prosperous, where they
enjoy the role of law and institutional stability, in a
country where human desires are not inhibited and life plans
are not regulated, where there is no pollet Bureau and
no department of ideology in propaganda, there does not seem
to be any place for or need of ideology in
the system toward which noble goals. Can human consciousness and
the human energy be mobilized to achieve democracy and freedom.
They have already been attained. Bread for all, it's already
here in excess universal delienation. Who while living in a
stable consumer societies characterized by mobility and unlimited access to
information and knowledge would be lured by something so ephemeral.
In the nineteen fifties, a number of prominent writers, independently
of one another, came up with a widely discussed thesis
that the age of ideologies was coming to an end.
So said the Americans Daniel Bell, Seymour, Martin Lipsett, and
Edward Shills, and Europeans such as Raymond Aaron. While they
did not foresee the total demise of ideological thinking and
even thought that it would continue to be popular among
some groups, such as intellectuals, they genuinely saw conspicuously declining
need for and less readiness of societies be mobilized for
a radical transformation by means of simplistic slogans which they
thought were irreparably worn out. A liberal, democratic world with
a markedly reduced level of ideology seemed a likely prospect,
But soon the experience dealt a blow. But soon the
experience dealt a blow to these predictions. The sixties was
the time of ideological explosion, with the intensity unexpected and unforeseen.
A revolution rhetoric swept across the entire Western world and
awoke a surprisingly strong response. Radical calls to overthrow the
system and replace it with another one unheard of for decades,
found millions of sympathetic minds and ears. Even more surprising
was that the ideas behind those calls had strongly Marxist undertones,
and indeed were often inspired directly or indirectly by Marxism,
the theory that, as some thought, Western societies had long
put into the dustbin of history, intellectuals played a major
role in igniting and maintaining the flame of the revolution,
and in this respect the sociologists, predicting their natural commitments ideology,
were right. But mobilization left no segment of society unmoved.
Such turbulence the liberal democratic societies had not lived through
for many decades. No institution, social practice, moral rule remained intact.
As one would expect, the new ideology showed its old face,
a combination of suspicion and enthusiasm. Suddenly, millions of residents
of affluent societies became disciples of Karl Marx, ready to
lay bare the dishonesty of the established truths and to
search for the economic, political, and biological conditioning. But an
enthusiasm was there as well for the new world, the
age of Aquarius, love, peace, brotherhood, freedom, and spontaneity. The
hypnotizing power of the war word utopia, previously sotled with
bad connotations and often associated with inhuman experiments, miraculously resurrected itself.
The feeling that a new utopia was right around the
corner lasted a few years and then began to subside,
but the ideology did not loosen its grip on the
Western mind. Though the course language of the Paris Barricades
was softened. The Flower Children quietly retreated from the stage,
and so did the Age of Aquarius and the counterculture manifestos.
But the society never returned to a pre protest identity,
and there was neither a scenario nor a desire to
move away from ideology. Soon the ideology reasserted itself, this
time in less menacing form. Now it was the ideology
of liberal democracy, slightly more complicated than that form of communism,
but comparably simplistic and equally impoverishing people's range of thought.
See here's the thing about liberal democracy. Somebody who has
the will can take it over and make it whatever
they want. Because when it comes down to it, liberal
democracy in its purest form has no gatekeepers. There's no
one there to go, No, you can't teach that here,
because as soon as you say no, you can't teach
that here, you become what national socialists. So you have
to have this phone the marketplace of ideas, where the
best social engineers win and take over until someone comes
along and says, there's not going to be any competing ideas.
Who are we? Where do we come from? The ideological
man has colonized a vast part of the public life
and private thought, and his conquests are not yet over.
As did his communist predecessor, he exhibits a mixture of
suspicion and enthusiasm, which gives him a comparable sense of
self righteousness. In one respect, at least, these ideologies differ
to the disadvantage of liberal democracy. The influence of ideology
and communism had a downward trend. At the beginning, everything
was ideological, but over a long period of time the
ideology began retracting, not without resistance, to be sure, For
those who lived in these country it was clear that slowly,
too slowly, of course, the ideological vigilance weakened. The crew
dichotomies were losing their clarity. The new was fighting the
old with less zeal. With the disappearance of the ideological
smoke screen, reality began to disclose itself in all its
richness and complexity. The world, in short, was becoming more
and more interesting. In liberal democracy we have been, unfortunately
observing a reverse trend. The ideological smoke screen is becoming
more dense and more impenetrable than before. The entire system
seems to be embarked on a great transformation. One would
be tempted to say that the system created by its
own liberal democratic version of the old communist theory, that
the building of a new society must coincide with the
intestification of the campaign against its enemies. That liberal democracy
has ambitions to create a new society and a new
man and that is and that it is pre out
of its achievements, is being proclaimed with deafening vehemence. But
at the same time one is the impression that the
concluding chapter of this magnificent project is always receding into
the future. No matter how much work has been done,
the enemy is still as strong as ever. How Else,
how else one could explain the growing officiousness of ideology.
There is more and more of it in politics and law,
and education in the media in the language under communism,
let us repeat the conceptual engine that animated the communist
ideology was the idea of class struggle, supposedly fought throughout
the entire history of humanity. In a liberal democracy, this engine,
believed to have been present in the history of humanity
since the beginning of time, is an improved version of
the original. The Marxist had only classes an ideological leverage.
In today's liberal democracy, the main ideological triad is class, race,
and gender. But this triad does not exhaust all forces.
On the battlefield between the old and the new. We
have eurocentrism, eurocentrism versus multiculturalism, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, logocentrism versus
its opposite, whatever it may be. But even this is
not enough. The war goes on between black and white,
Africa and Europe, metaphysics and politics, old and young, skinny
and fat. We have sexual, ecological, educational, climactic, and literary ideologies,
as well as dozens of others. Schools and universities absorb
more and more ideology, politics as steeped in it, and
the media make it their religion. In the European Union,
the ideology has been emanating with such intensity that each
prolonged contact with its institutions requires a thorough detoxification of
one's mind and one's language. Think about that, you can't
even interact with these forces without having to detoxify your
minds prior and post the liberal democratic mind, just as
the mind of a true communist feels an inner compulsion
to manifest its pious loyalty to the doctrine. Public life
is full of mandatory rituals in which every politician, artist, writer, celebrity, teacher,
or any public figure is willing to participate, all to
prove that their liberal democratic creeds bring spontaneously from the
depths of their heart. As listening to Jay Burden on
Timeline Earth talking to the Timeline Earth guys this morning,
and yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people
have used this in the past, but look at a
band like Green Day Day was singing a song American
Idiot about how much of an idiot George Bush was
George W. Bush was, And he was. But now they're
completely on the side of everyone who cheerlead that cheerlead
that war. And think about that, in the communist system,
every citizen was expected regardless of the situation to mention
something if only in passant about the absolute superiority of
communism and or a brotherly friendship with the Soviet Union,
or the devilish nature of the capitalist exploitation of the
working masses today, and an equal knee jerk reactions of
homicet reaction. One is expected to give one's approving opinion
about the rights of homosexuals and women, and to condemn
the usual villain villains, such as domestic violence, racisms, in aphobia,
or discrimination to find some other means of kowtowing to
the ideological gods. For instance, it is often advisable to
add something about climate change, demonstrating that the outdated term
global warming is no longer used, but at the same
time not even with the quiver of an eyebrow, communicating
that replacing one word with the other means anything. This
language has practically monopolized to public space and invaded schools,
popular culture, academic life, and advertising. This last phenomenon is
particularly telling. Today. It is no longer enough simply to
advertise a product. The companies feel an irresistible need to
attach it to a message that is ideological, ideologically correct.
We don't have TV, but we have like Amazon Prime,
and you do get commercials, some TVs and some shows
like if you watch tub or something like that. And
I hadn't even done that in years. I stopped. I
cut cable TV in like twenty fourteen or twenty and
fifteen and just watch like DVDs and that's about it
for a while, or recently I wanted to watch some
stuff from overseas and the commercials, the commerce, Every commercial
would have you believe that every couple is inter racial.
That's not by accident, right, it's part of the religion.
You're showing that you're a member of the church. If
you don't, well, I mean the the only uh, I
guess when you look at army ads now that they
they're trying to ramp up war fever. That's only supposed
to be for white people. Even if this message does
not have any commercial function, and it hardly ever does,
any occasion, is good to prove oneself to be a
proponent of the brotherhood of races, a critic of the
church Church with a capital see, and a supporter of
homosexual marriage. The sycophant weedling is practiced by journalists, TV
morons pornographers, athletes, professors, artists, professional groups, and young people
already infected with the ideological mass culture. Today's ideology is
so powerful that almost everyone desires to join the great
camp of progress. This omnipotent urge to seek refuge in
this great liberal democratic church somewhat contradicts the very ideology
to which so many have been drawn. If ideology, by
definition expresses particular interests of particular groups, then the world
in which we live should be full of conflicts, or
at least of debates in which we would hear the
ideological claims of the male part of the population of Eurocentrists,
home of heterosexuals, etc. But these claims are not to
be heard. Individuals and groups seem to have seem to
be contrary to the ideologies they were expected to espouse,
but indulge in adulation of the other side. Moreover, they
seemed to do it quite selflessly, out of pure love
for the idea, completely ignoring their own alleged self interest
condition race, class, and gender. This created a situation almost
as surreal as that under communism. The ideology that was
originally to reveal the roots of ideas economic conditioning group
interests biological predilection turned into an independent agent of such
a coercive power that if it forced people to say
and to do things that in the light of this
ideology they should not be doing. Men free themselves as
male conditioning and become feminists heterosexual and become feminists heterosexual
supposedly in the yoke of their gender. Praise homosexuality most profusely. Europeans,
who were said to be the slaves of parochial criticized
eurocentrism in Eurocentrism in the strongest terms possible. Philosophers who
for ages have been the apostles of the logos treat
it today with contempt, and the monas have quite unexpectedly
become attracted to pluralism and multiculturalism. Part three. Political ideology
made spectacular conquests in art and intellectual life. Captured by
the ideological animus, both socialists and liberal democratic art abandoned
the criterion of beauty, considered anachronistic and of dubious political value,
and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. Ideas and
works of art had to be ideologically correct. During the
dark years of communism, artists were writing books, painting pictures,
composing pieces of music that were meant to be straightforward
eulogies of what was then called the correct party line,
including the five year plans and the heroism some of
the political security forces and their offensive against foreign and
domestic fascists. These artists used their talents to depict as
persuasively as they could the sinister role of the enemies,
the US imperialists, Coolock's spies and subboteurs. But as I
said later on, along with the cracks and ideology, art
took on a more noble character. In fact, in Poland
and probably in other countries of the region too, the
weakening of communism was accompanied by an extraordinary blossoming of culture,
which can only be fully appreciated in our time. It is,
of course an open question whether there was any clear
relationship between the relaxation of the ideological strait jacket and
the development of artistic creativity, or weather which is more probable,
this relaxation was simply, as it always is, a necessary
but not a sufficient condition of any free activity, including art.
Some other factors must also have been, presumably stronger, yet
difficult to identify and certainly impossible to reproduce at will,
as is usually the case when at a certain moment
of history and in a particular place, we have a
sudden outburst of artistic creativity. Similarly, it is probably the
absence of these or related factors, as several decades later,
prevented the artists of a Poland deliberated from Communism from
reaching comparable heights of artistic achievement, despite the fact that
they enjoyed considerable considerably greater freedom both as citizens and
as creators of art. I saw a Polish politician have
produced some incredible art last year with the fire extinguisher.
In the liberal democracy of the last decades, we have
also had a large crowd of artists who produced works
meant to be correct. They depict and condemned fascism in
all its forms, undermine the center and praise to periphery,
call for emancipation and deploy discrimination, and declare the superiority
of pluralism over fundamentalism. Write about the plight of homosexuals
among intolerant heterosexuals or women in the world of the
merciless patriarchy. They talk of the other of sex of
the body. This virtually exhausts the message that the artists
of today are conveying to their audience. The message is
hopelessly simplistic, but its correctness cannot be doubted, which is
enough to give the artists the necessary recognition among the
dictators of artistic fashions. The artists who ignore the imperative
of correctness have a harder road toward recognition. Correct art
is not only political, but in fact apologetic towards the
liberal democracy as it is envisioned by its ideology. In
this respect, an artist loyal to liberal democracy is no
different from an artist who is loyal to communism. Both
fight against the enemies of their respective political systems. Both
oppose what is deemed old and outdated. Make it for
granted that the world was a terrible place to live
before it became open to the benefits of socialism in
the case of the socialist artists, or of liberal democracy
in the case of the liberal democratic artist. Both tend
to depict the human relations as a more or less
accurate illustration or a consequence of the political mechanisms communist
or liberal democratic, or the lack thereof. Both believe in
their respective utopias at least as a mental exercise or
a thought experiment, and both perceive within them the new
man to be borne by discarding his past conditionings and
thus acquiring a freedom to create his identity afresh. You're
not allowed to live historically. It has to all be
washed away. To be sure. There are different actors in
both cases, and yet they perform similar roles. A proletarian
was replaced by a homosexual, a capitalist by fundamentalists, exploitation
by discrimination, a communist revel lutionary by a feminist, and
a red flag by a vagina. One encounters a similarly
a similarly narrow intellectual space in today's humanities, which ultimately
are dependent on liberal democracies to the same degree that
the communist humanities depend on communism. The language they use
is not only political, but derived directly from the terminological
storehouse of the liberal democratic ideology rights, exclusion, recognition, emancipation, equality, domination, colonialism, imperialism, etc.
Entering the field of the humanities today exactly as in
the communist past, is like entering into the battlefield. One
has to join the forces to defend what is right
against what is wrong. Literary critics, writers, performers, filmmakers, and
theater directors imagine themselves to be listening to the voice
of the excluded and searching for the deep roots of domination. Anthropologists,
social scientists, journalists, and celebrities are preoccupied with pretty much
the same, believing of course, that what they do has
momentous weight upon the world. That is, as well as
upon the world that will be what those people do.
When you look at critics, writers, performers, filmmakers, theater directors, anthropologists,
social science as, journalists, celebrities, they believe they're fighting for
the little guy. They believe that, you know, the little guys.
You know, he needs to be propped up, someone needs
to be his hero. But really what they're doing, you know,
in the if you understand Hilo versus middle as, they're
just basically propping up the regime in charge and whatever
it's ideologies, simple as they will never true dissidents are
attacked by the regime. If you see someone who's not
being attacked by the regime well and its apparatucks. Sometimes
the regime will lay off of certain people, but their
apparatucks will definitely come after you. Once we understand how
strikingly the liberal democratic artisan intellectuals are mentally a mirror
reflection of their communist counterparts. We will notice that the
resemblance also extends to the way they behave In each system.
The artists intellectuals willingly gather in herds. They treat the
centers and outsiders with contempt and enmity. They shamelessly and
theose over idiocies that bear the stamp of modernity, and
exhibit a revolting temerity in the face of what they
consider to be the imperatives of the time. Their cowardly
behavior they call dignity, and their dishonorable adulation stupid, a
conscious act of attunement the spirit of the times. In
the past, they fell into raptures over the works of
the Soviet comrades. Today they exhibit ecstatic agitation when reading
the works of American feminists, although the intellectual quality is
in either case comparably low. In the past they wrote
dissertations about Thomas Hobbs as a materialist fighting idealism. Today
they take Hobbes to be a misogynist defending patriarchy. And
even if someone refrained from writing such things then and
refrains from writing them now, he would not protest against
this sad spectacle of intellectual degradation. Not because of his cowardice,
to be sure, a wide to be sure, a widespread
weakness among humans in general, and the intellectuals in particular,
But because in his heart he believes or is not
strong enough to shun the belief that there must be
something fundamentally right in all this deluge of nonsense, and
he persuades himself that depreciating it would be more wrong
than keeping silent. Artisan intellectuals often resemble a character in
a Polish film who said that he only liked the
songs he knew. They too, reduce everything to what they know,
being unable to recognize the value of anything else. So
when they put Onigen on stage, they make the title
character and his friend Lensky two homosexuals joined by mutual attraction.
This is an absolutely idiotic supposition, but well illustrates what
almost compuls compulsorily passes for originality today. When they staged
a magic Flute, the Queen of the Knight becomes the
owner of an escort service, obviously a positive character because
she represents sex and secret represents freedom. On the other hands,
Zarastro is made into an evil headmaster disciplining students because
the head masters disciplining students today has to be a
bad man, and the new productions Romeo and Juliet are
two junkies, and the warriors from Troy nervously wait for
a new supply of condoms, and so on and so forth.
All of these examples real, not made up, are sad
proofs that artists supposed to be models of creativity and
independence have come close to being a heard of mediocrites,
indistinguishable from one another, whose minds have been sterilized of
all that is new, revealing, and unexpected. That's one of
the points that needs to be made about that, Like
clutting Gay at Harvard, when these people are being accused
of plagiarism, they're all plagiarizing each where are they getting
original thought from. There's nothing new under the sun for them.
They're not allowed to let anything else in. They read
the same things, and they read them over and over again.
Of course it's going to be in there. There are
sayings that I say that I don't even because I
read a lot of the same I read a lot
of the same authors. Sometimes I'll fall into the same
thing where I'll just be repeating lines that I've read
in a book because I think they're they're relevant. You
read them enough times and you're just you're not going
to give credit for them anymore, because I mean, basically
it's become my own almost so the whole Oh, these
are plagiarists and everything. There's only so much source material
they can drive anything from. The authors and artists usually
defend themselves by saying that they do all these pathetic
experiments mainly for today's audience, who find the old text
utterly unrelated to real experience, and who, in order to
understand those text need translations into modern cultural idioms. The
visitudes that befall the Capulets and the Montagues will appeal
to modern theatergoers only if the families from sixteenth century
Italy are turned into two gangs in an American metropolis,
and if Romeo and Juliet, instead of wearing strange costumes,
are making long speeches in a funny language, become two junkies,
or some other characters well known from the movies and television.
These arguments and practices that have trivialized a modern reception
of the classical art bring to mind the arguments and
practices of the communist artists, who just like their counterparts
today organize themselves into a herd in whose productions were
equally predictable. What they were doing was supposedly also for
the audience, a different one, to be sure, but equally
as it was then assumed, fed up with the old
style view of literature. So the communist artists modernize the
classics to adapt the old stories to the new sensibility
of the communist society. They made Hamlet a progressive medical activists,
and a Karenna a victim of class egoism, Antigone a
pioneer of the woman's movement, etc. The truth is that
the modern artists, no less than their predecessors, make those
these crude updates of the classics, not for the audience
but for themselves. Their works well reflect their imagination and
mental capacities, which are just as flat and vulgar. They
sometimes try to give the impression, mostly in interviews and
press conferences, that this flatness is only apparent, that underneath
their works boil with irony, ambiguity, and of subversive polemics
with the old masters, all these being allegedly an attempt
to bring to light an unorthodox message hidden in the
classical literature. Sometimes the artists pretend to Sometimes the artists
pretend to be like Gombrukwis Erdeduc, who rebelled against the Classics,
asking resolutely, how come they impress us when they do
not impress us at all? How come they impress us
when they don't when they do not impress us at all? Huh? However,
the same question, repeated a thousand times today by the
vulgar minds, has come to have the value of a
television commercial. Perhaps more adequate would be to compare the
artists with their aversions of the Classics, to another of
Gmbrus Gumberg Gumberwitz's characters, Miutus, known for his notorious fascination
with the vulgar and the low. This last analogy may
be quite instructive. Inferdituke infurditerk Meredis, I know I'm pronouncing
that wrong. Don't be mad at me, especially Pollocks. I'm
one of got half of that in me, so leave
me alone. Inferdi Dirk minus defeats his adversary Siphon, a
defender of the high and the sublime, by raping him verbally,
that is, through his ears. Just as our authors and
artists seem to triumph by raping us through our ears
and eyes, and above all through intellect and Gumbrukwitz's Gumberwitz's
the novel. The episode ends with the death of Siphon,
unable to hear the humiliation and Mietus during his search
for the vulgar, finally at his own request, to his delight,
having his face slap by a young farm hand. For
the time being, today's farm hands, far more culture than
their literary counterparts, kissed the hands of meat dislike characters,
but one cannot rule out that the time will come
when they will slap their master's faces, and not necessarily
at their request. The liberal democratic man, especially if he
is an intellectual or an artist, is very reluctant to learn,
but at the same time all too eager to teach.
This trait of his character is in a way understandable
once we remember that his nature was considerably impoverished by
his turning back on standards of classical and Christian anthropology.
He lost, or, rather, as his apologists would have put it,
was relieved of the intellectual instruments deemed unnecessary that would
enable him to describe the inadequacy of his existence and
to articulate a sense of want. He is, as Ortega
once put it, a self satisfied individual, not in the
sense that he occasionally fails to feel his misery or
to be haunted by a fear of death, a disgust
of meaninglessness, a fatigue of the mystification that, as he
begins to realize, more and more acutely surrounds him. But
because he assumes, and never has the slightest doubt that
he is in possession of the entirety of the human experience.
Looking around, he finds hardly anything that would put this
conviction into question, and a lot that gives it practically
each day and with each development, a strong corroboration. All right,
well up to part four. I'm going to finish it
right there. We'll finish this out next episode. Yeah, that's it.
Go to my substack. Look up my substack at Pekiniana
Show and check out the updates I've done on North Carolina.
What's going on with the relief in North Carolina and
exactly what they need there, and I list exactly what's
necessary to keep people warm and keep people housed up there.
And if you can donate, and if you can contribute
in any way, please do all right, thank you very
much and see you on episode eight.