Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekenona Show
and welcome back eron what's up Nanks for having me. Yeah, yeah,
always a pleasure, always a pleasure here to do a reading.
And I don't know, this may take this will definitely
take two, This could take three, So people be people
can be uh patient with us as you're a very
busy man to get you back on and uh and
do more of this. But this is an essay kind
of kind of popular. A lot of people, even people
on the left push a lot of people on the
left push this essay. But a lot of people who
like left the left or say the left left them,
and then they start coming over to the center more
or less. Oh, you have to read Repressive Tolerance by
Herbert Marcuse. So what do you What do you know
about him?
Speaker 2: I know that very little other than that he was
he was a Frankfurt school guy now big in the
big in the sixties, leftist thinker, kind of a post Marxist.
Didn't wasn't wasn't too into the scientific socialism like I am,
but more of the socialist humanism and you know, just
different focuses, but focused a lot on culture and Praxis,
and you know, I did a little background on this
essay and him, and it's one of those things that
I think, I think it's perfect that we're having this
episode because I love peering into the enemy's plan book
and seeing what we can seeing what we can use.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep. So let me do a quick little let's
do the Wikipedia. Marcus born July nineteenth, eighteen ninety eight
German German American died July twenty ninth, nineteen seventy nine
German American philosophers, social critic, and political theorist, associated at
the Frankfort School of Critical Theory. Born in Berlin, Marcus
studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg,
where he received his PhD. Was a prominent figure in
the Frankfurt based Institute for Social Research, which later became
known as the Frankfurt School married YadA YadA. In his
written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet communism, and
popular culture, arguing that they represented new forms of social control.
Between forty three and fifty Marcus worked in the US
government service for the OSS Office Strategic Services, which is
the people don't Know precursor to this CIA, where he
criticized the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet
of the Soviet Union in the book Soviet Marxism, A
Critical Analysis, released in nineteen fifty eight. In the sixties
and seventies, he became known as the pre eminent theorist
of the New Left and the student movements of West Jerymany, France,
and the United States. Some consider him the father of
the New Left. His best known works are Aeros and
Civilization and One Dimensional Man. His Marxist scholarship inspired many
radical intellectuals and political activists in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
both in the United States and internationally. So that's pretty
much where where we're at to start this out. And yeah,
this essay, I mean you just the title is, you know, pregnant,
where you're just like, okay, what the hell's coming? You know,
So all right, let me share this and we'll get
it going. Oh both, but that's not it. That's the
Wikipedia page there. It is, all right, stop me whenever, man,
this is U. This starts out well. Repressive tolerance. Herbert
Marcus nineteen sixty five and he taught at Brandeis university.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that's on the street from me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not a shock at all.
Speaker 2: No nice neighborhood.
Speaker 1: This essay examines the idea of tolerance in our advanced
industrial society. The conclusion reached is that the realization of
the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions,
and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions
which are outlawed or suppressed.
Speaker 2: All right, we'll stop you right there. What is the
What is the end goal of tolerance? Is tolerance of
means or an end?
Speaker 1: I should say, tolerance should be a means to achieving
whatever you wish? I mean, do you I mean, do
you want? What happens?
Speaker 2: What happens when you and Shapiro is tolerance and means
or an end.
Speaker 1: When you turn on Ben Shapiro, tolerance is whatever he
needs it to he needs it to be at the moment.
Speaker 2: Tolerance is the end goal. It's not. It's it's not
tolerance of what it's We just need to be tolerant.
And he'll tell it. People like him will tell you,
you know, if he'll he'll he'll invite a leftist on
a show, he'll invite a communist. It's it's really flipped
where lip you know, modern liberalism still still calls for tolerance,
but it's conservatism that's flipping the script saying, oh no,
we're the ones being shut down. So now they're the
ones calling for tolerance. And he's going to get into uh,
exactly why that's not going to work out well for them?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and tolerance always you can you use tolerance
to get where you want to go. I mean the
way that we've gotten to where we are from where
where this country was founded, where you make a lot
of people make the argument, you know, and it's true
the founders were you know, a lot of them were
steeped in the Enlightenment, but when it came to tolerance,
they were they were tolerant of certain things that about
their culture, about the culture that they created that they
live in. They were intolerant of other cultures.
Speaker 2: There were there were cultural bumpers put yeah, you know
on the on the three by five index card of
allowable opinion.
Speaker 1: Yes and uh, and the by there being tolerance and
tolerance has always been used against the right so that
the left can basically just gain as much power as
it wants. And people on the right, you know, the question,
the question asked often, and I forget where where I
was having this conversation recently, is is why does the
right not want to? Why does the right never want
to rule? Why does the right never want to Why
why do you never have a right with an iron fist?
You know that wants to roll with an iron fist.
And because most of the people who would call my
opinion is most of the people whould call themselves right
now have been completely possessed by leftism, by leftist by
leftist tolerance, by Enlightenment tolerance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but it's uh, that's going to be a
hard book to break.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right. In other words, today tolerance appears again as what
it was in its origins at the beginning of the
modern period, a partisan goal, a subversive, liberating notion and practice. Yeah,
and you just to scroll down here to the definition
of partisan because a lot of people the modern version,
the modern definition of partisan is pussy shit. A partisan
is someone who's prejudiced, prejudiced in favor of a particular cause,
and prejudice to the point where they're they're willing to
fight for that cause.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd also call it activist now, yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Conversely, what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today
is in many of its most effective manifestations, serving the
cause of oppression.
Speaker 2: Wow, he's just fucking bad.
Speaker 1: In one thousand, the author is fully aware that at present,
no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate
liberating tolerance into practice. But he believes that it is
the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and
preserve historical possibility which seem to have become utopian possibilities.
That it is his task to break the concreteness of
oppression in order to open the mental space in which
the society can be recognized as what it is and does.
Speaker 2: That's critical theory in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: Ye. So, and this is just basically like the just
an outline. Now we get into the meat of the text.
So tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of
violence and the reduction of suppression to the extent required
for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are
preconditions for the condition of a humane society.
Speaker 2: It's just a given, man, don't question it.
Speaker 1: Such a society does not yet exist. Progress toward it
is perhaps more than before, are more than before arrested
by violence and suppression on a global scale.
Speaker 2: I think I'm going to be pleasantly surprised at how
much I agree with this, But not for the reasons
he thanks.
Speaker 1: And I would say that when he mentions utopia here,
when I say utopia, I don't mean I have my
own version of utopia. Utopia is getting the ideology in
reality that you want. Like so if you have it
in the box, ideology you get. If you can get
it to exist in reality, you have utopia. My you know,
my understanding is you get. My goal is to have
the best and most orderly society I can. Considering man's
fallen nature.
Speaker 2: It's funny because you know, he was working for the
precursor to the CIA in the late fifties early sixties
basically critiquing Soviet Communism, and it was at that precise
point in history that Soviet Communism was, you know, at
their apex in terms of you know, their comparability and
material conditions.
Speaker 1: Totally, he's working for them from forty three to fifty,
so he's even got two years of World War Two
in there, and then and then the after and then
the aftermath, which is I mean, you want to talk
about one of the most interesting times in history, the
Soviet Union between nineteen forty five and nineteen fifty, not
only considering the the absolute horror that they imposed upon Germany,
but also the purging of a certain group from the
government that brought about the rise of the neo conservatives
in this country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the glass ceiling for the j words. Yeah, strictly imposed.
Speaker 1: All right, as deterrence against nuclear war, as police action
against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism
and communism, as methods of pacification in neo colonial massacres,
violence and suppression are are promulgated, practiced, and defended by
democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to
these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary
for the preservation of the status quoz. He definitely was
educated in Germany. I mean, just look at that sentence.
It's such a German sentence. Structure, well, the structure of it.
Speaker 2: But you wouldn't have to go you wouldn't have to
have too much of an imagination to replace all of
the things that he mentioned with current day things that
that we would mention instead of uh, wait, where is it?
It's nuclear war police action against the version technically in
the Yeah, I mean you could mention, you know, entire
groups of black kids beating on white kids. You could
mention surgical removal of gen genitalia. You know, take your pick,
go on your Twitter timeline and you can just take
those out and fill in with whatever you want. And
once again we can we can agree with everything he's saying.
Speaker 3: Mhm.
Speaker 1: Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior
which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if
not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear
and misery.
Speaker 2: So he's talking about culture.
Speaker 1: I know that.
Speaker 2: Most schools of socialism don't like to talk about culture
because it's stock grounded in materialism. It's transcendent. But he's
talking about culture.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Of this sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the
majority against which authentic liberals protested authentic liberals. The political
locus of tolerance has changed. While it is more or
less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it has
made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies, Tolerance has
turned from an active into a passive state, from practice
to nonpractice. Lais fair the constituted authorities. It is the
people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition
within the framework determined by the constituted authorities. Is that's
what Chompsky invoking Chompsky would talk about right about that
six seven years later. Also, he's just basically he's he's
making arguments that I make all the time. The assebity
had posted to the way to save this country is
it was founded on the principles of liberty. We need
to go back to the way. The only way it's
gonna we're going to get it back is to go
back to the principles of liberty. And I just like
one sentence, maybe those principles are how we got here.
Speaker 2: Is that an opposition within the framework determined by the
cost student authorities. We need to we need to roll
back the state.
Speaker 1: Let's go tolerance toward that which is radically evil now
appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the
whole on the road to affluence and more affluence. The
toleration of the systematic more moronization of children and adults
alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness and
aggressive driving, the recruitment for the train and training of
special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception
in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations.
They are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance
as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and
suppressing the alternatives. Do you do you disagree with any
of that? Peter?
Speaker 2: Are we are we frank for school? Now?
Speaker 1: Disagree with?
Speaker 2: Are we frank for school? Socialists?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: Ship? Oh? Man? Isn't it amazing that once you know,
if you're one of those people who's on social media
the time, and you're like, oh, this is what I
You know, I learned about communism from a meme, Or
I learned about socialism from a meme. I learned about
Marxism from a meme. Once you start reading it, you know,
I learned about critical theory from a meme. Once you
start reading it, you're like, it's just like reading Marx.
Oh he's got it figured out. It's just his solution
is just shit, you know.
Speaker 2: Yep, the prescription is exactly on point.
Speaker 1: The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against
the increase in juvenile delinquency. They are less vociferous against
the proud presentation in word and deed and pictures of
ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs, the mature delinquency of
a whole civilization. Hmm, that's an interesting.
Speaker 2: That that's smacks of bumple Ted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there, Yeah, it really explains why Ted hates
the left so much. According to a dialectical proposition, it
is the whole which determines the truth, not in the
sense that the whole is prior or superior to its parts,
but in the sense that its structure and function determine
every particular condition and relation. Thus, within a repressive society,
even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to
the degree to which they accept the rules of the game.
There's an Uncle Ted for you right there.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: To take a most controversial case, the exercise of political
rights such as voting, letter writing to the press, to senators, etc.
Protest demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counter violence in
a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration
by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which in
reality have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In
such a case, freedom of opinion, of assembly of speech.
Speaker 2: That's Sam France, Sam Francis, Yeah, managerial revolution.
Speaker 1: In in such in such a case, are you thinking
Burnham or Francis? But as Francis wrote what I think
is the greatest book on Burnham. He wrote this little
book where he just does a commentary on every Burnham book.
It's one of my favorite books. Is it's just because
you get you know, Francis is so much closer to us,
and he was just such a great man. Mean, he
wrote for the USA today to a certain point, that's amazing.
In such a case, freedom of opinion, of assembly of
speech becomes an instrument for absolving servitude. And yet, and
I was just recording with Semi Agogue and we're talking
about the first paragraph of the Engineering of Consent by
Bernez where he talks about how freedom, freedom of speech
within a society is just the greatest tool for being
able to engineer that society. Yeah, all right, okay, And
yet and only here the dialectical proposition shows its full intent.
The existence and practice of these liberties remain a precondition
for the restoration of their original oppositional function, provided that
the effort to transcend their often self imposed limitations is
intense A five.
Speaker 2: Wait, I need to I need to chew on that. Sorry,
i'mah yeah, I'm rolling that around a little bit.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: I'll if he's talking about the unit, if he's specifically
talking about the United States, he may just be talking
about how you you start by a revolution and then
basically you maybe your restoration of the original oppositional function.
Provided that the effort to transcend their limitations is intensified,
it reverts back to it. All right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you have these liberties, you're bumping up against opposition,
you know, the the proverbial bumpers. And the more you
bump up against the limitations imposed, the more intense the
bumping gets. I get it.
Speaker 1: Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the
quality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced.
Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria, Its range, and
its limits cannot be defined in terms of the respective society.
In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only
when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as
well as by the rule, by the lords as well
as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as
by their victims.
Speaker 2: Once again, that's called culture. It's not tolerance. That's culture,
fucking libs.
Speaker 1: And such universal tolerance as possible only when no real
or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education
and training of people in military violence and destruction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, acab.
Speaker 1: As long as these conditions do not prevail, the conditions
of tolerance are loaded. They are determined and defined by
the institutionalized inequality, which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality,
i e. By the class structure of society. In such
a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual
ground of legalized violence or suppression police, armed forces, guards
of all sorts, and of the privileged position held by
the predominant interests and their connections.
Speaker 2: I see no issue whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Once again, these background limitations of tolerance are normally prior
to the explicit and judicial limitationations as defined by the courts, customs, governments,
et cetera. For example, quote unquote clear and present danger,
threat to national security. Heresy, Ye can't yell nigger in
a movie theater? Well, now I know, now I know
which little preview clip is not going to be on
YouTube within the framework such.
Speaker 2: I'm saying, don't say that.
Speaker 1: Within the framework of such, they wouldn't be able to
hear you anyway. Damn it. Oh, within the framework of
of such a social structure, tolerance can be safe. Tolerance
can be safely practiced and proclaimed. It is of two kinds.
The passive toleration of entrench and established attitudes and ideas,
even if they're damaging effect on man and nature is evident.
And the active official tolerance granted to the right as
well as to the left, to movements of aggression as
well as to movements of peace, to the party of
hate as well as to that of humanity.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's right. That's now we're getting into it, this
whole idea that you know, those those cultural bumpers that
I was talking about. You need a bumper on the right,
but you need to remove the bumper on the left.
So that way the direction, as you know, as you
and I and everybody else have said, the direction can
only go one way. That's that's what he's calling for.
Speaker 1: I call this nonpartisan tolerance abstract or pure inasmuch as
it refrains from taking sides, but in doing so it
actually protects the already established machinery of the discrimination.
Speaker 2: That's right, Silence is violence.
Speaker 1: The tolerance, which enlarged the range and content of freedom
was always partisan, intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive
status quo. The issue was only the degree and extent
of intolerance. In the firmly established liberal society of England
and the United States, freedom of speech and assembly was
granted even to the radical enemies of society, provided they
did not make the transition from word to deed, from
speech to action. Remember the I forget who was it was?
It was, Chris Cuomo said on CNN during the summers
of twenty twenty. Where does it say in law that
the protesters can't get violent? As it's right here in
the constitution, It's like right right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's probably a lot of places in the criminal
code I imagine too sure, But yeah, I know that's
you know, tolerance of repressive structures is in itself intolerant. Therefore,
the direction can only move left because left means destroying
oppressive power structures, and the right means keeping them or
building them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wish.
Speaker 1: All right. Relying on the effective background limitations imposed by
its class structure, the society seemed to practice general tolerance.
But liberalists theory had already placed an important condition on tolerance.
It was to apply only to human beings in the
maturity of their faculties. John Stuart millt Yeah, where is
this going that again? Then? But liberalist theory has already
placed an important condition on tolerance. It was to apply
only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I want to be frank for
school anymore, pete.
Speaker 1: John Stuart Mill does not only speak of children and minors.
He elaborates liberty as a principle has no application to
any state of things anterior to the time when mankind
have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.
Anterior to that time, men may still be barbarians, and
despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,
provided the end of the end be their improvement, and
the means justified by actually affecting that end. We're going
to make men better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you you have to have whatever whatever
you need to do to benefit the condition of mankind.
If that means a dictatorship, if that means a police state,
if that means you know, uh, a military industrial complex
with a health a health care industrial complex with it.
If that is what you need to get to this
betterment of mankind, then it is what it is. That's
That's not what markc Use is saying, but that's what
Mills said.
Speaker 1: Mills often quoted words have a less familiar implication, on
which their meaning depends the internal connection between liberty and truth.
There's a sense in which truth is the end of liberty,
and liberty must be defined and confined by truth. Yeah. Now,
in what sense can liberty be for the sake of truth?
Liberty is self determination autonomy That is almost a tautology,
but a tautology which results from a whole series of
synthetic judgments.
Speaker 2: Wow, I like where this is going.
Speaker 1: It stipulates the ability to determine one's own life, to
be able to determine what to do and what not
to do, what to suffer and whatnot. But the subject
of this autonomy is never the contingent private individual as
that which he actually is or happens to be. It
is rather the individual as a human being who is
capable of being free with the others.
Speaker 2: So this is getting into just Frankfurt School socialism's whole
end goal is the pursuit of self actualization. It's the
removal of any impediment in that pursuit. So whether that
be material or cultural, which is what the Frankfurt School
focuses on, any any type of impediment towards self actualization.
How this, how this connects back to repressive toll. This
idea of repressive tolerance is that you need you need
some type of practice, and he's going to get into
practice later, but some type of practice to remove those impediments,
meaning people like us, out of your way towards self actualization.
Speaker 1: And the problem of making possible such a harmony between
every individual liberty and the other is not that of
finding a compromise between competitors, or between freedom and law,
between general and individual interest, common and private welfare in
an estatelish society, but of creating the society in which
man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiate, which vitiate, vitiate?
I swear I know that word self determination from the beginning.
Let's go down and let me see that word apreciate. Yeah,
to make ineffective. Okay, Yeah, So basically lazada, But of
creating the society in which man is no longer enslaved
by institutions which make ineffective self determination from the beginning.
In other words, freedom is still to be created, even
for the freest of the existing societies. And the direction
in which it must be sought, and the institutional and
cultural changes which may help to attain the goal, are
at least in development, in developed civilization, comprehensible. That is
to say, they can be identified and projected on the
basis of experience by human reason.
Speaker 2: You can point to an oppressive structure and say that
is inhibiting my pursuit of self actualization.
Speaker 1: It opens It just throws open the doors to basically
any anything being repressive, anything be anything, anything I can
think of is stopping my self. Realism is permanent. Yes, yes,
In the interplay of theory and practice, true and false
solutions become distinguishable, never with the evidence of necessity, never
as the positive only with a certainty of a reasoned
and reasonable chance, and with the persuasive force of the negative.
For the true positive is the society of the future,
and therefore beyond definition and determination, while the existing positive
is that which must be surmounted, open ended, progressive is open.
There is no there is no goal. We have this goal.
It's completely unachievable, but we are going to strive to
do it. And it doesn't matter how many tangents or
rabbit drills it goes up.
Speaker 2: I mean, we see this playing out every single day.
Once they get one thing they want, then it's onto
the next.
Speaker 1: But the experience and understanding of the existence of the
existence society may well be capable of identifying what is
not conducive to a free and rational society, which impedes
and distorts the possibilities of its creation. Freedom is liberation
a specific historical process in theory and practice, and as
such it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood.
Speaker 2: So one thing that the Frankfurt School kind of improved
upon Orthodox Marxism is that it's a lot less rigid
in defining the historical process and these stages of history
they're they're a lot more vague about it, and you
can see this, I mean those that the last paragraph
that you just read is talking about this prop this
arduous march towards true freedom. It really has no beginning
and endpoint. It's just a constant cycle. And I've listened
to a couple of podcasters talking about this.
Speaker 1: But uh, like.
Speaker 2: What the actual end goal is is? It depends on
depends on who you talk to. I mean, we we
did a reading of uncal Ted and the the end
goal is you know, you're you're a meat you're transhumanist
meatbag battery.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The uncertainty of chance in this distinction does not
cancel the historical objectivity, but it necessitates freedom of thought
and expression as preconditions of finding the way to freedom.
It necessitates tolerance. How However, the tolerance cannot be indiscriminate
and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither
in word nor Indeed, it cannot protect false words and
wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the
possibilities of liberation.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's the terms of service you signed a party.
Speaker 1: Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation
and academic discussion. It is indispensable in the scientific enterprise,
in private religion, but society cannot be indiscriminate where the
pacification of existence, where the freedom and happiness themselves are
at stake. Here, certain things cannot be said, Certain ideas
cannot be expressed, Certain policies cannot be proposed, Certain behavior
cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the
continuation of servitude. Man, I totally agree, Man, this, I mean,
you know, and then I've been really it's really hard
to like for me to sit down and read a
thousand page book, but I've really been pouring over the
authoritarian personality by Adorno and oh this is this is all.
It's just all right. The danger of destructive tolerance, of
benevolent neutrality towards art has been recognized. The market, which
absorbs equally well, equally well, although with often quite sudden
fluctuations art, anti art and non art, all possible conflicting
styles schools forms, provides a complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss
in which the radical impact of art, the protest of
art against the establishment reality, is swallowed up.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If everything's if everything is permitted, then nothing can
be radical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, However, censorship of art and literature is regressive under
all circumstances. The authentic of war? Is it of war?
Or how the hell do you pronounce that? I should
have left that up before I read and just jump
over and read let Me Go twenty one? A work
of art, music, or literature. It's a French word, of course,
where is it? There are cases where an authentic piece
of art carries a regressive political message. Dostoyevsky is a
case in point. But then the message is canceled by
the work of art itself. The regressive political content is
absorbed in the artistic work, in the work as literature.
Is that saying that is he saying in this paragraph
that once art that art can be, can be completely
you know, revolutionary, but as soon as it's accepted, you know,
like you know how you had artists in the sixties
who are just doing just absolute garbage and it was like, oh,
you know, like like Andy Warhol was a complete degenerate, yeah,
and then all of a sudden, all these rich people
discovered him, and now it's not so edgy anymore. Is
that is is that the message is being relayed? Here
is how it just something can be revolutionary, but then
it just becomes what it is, a piece of art,
a piece of literature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess in a in a truly tolerant society
where anything goes, then you know, even even if you
do put up you know, take take four Chan for like,
four Chan would be Marcus's Dostoyevski. If everything's permitted on
four Chan, then you, as a four chan consumer, like,
aren't going to be inspired by really anything on it.
Speaker 1: M hmm, yeah, m all right, here we go. Tolerance
of free speech is the way of improvement, of progress
and liberation, not because there is no objective truth and
improvement must necessarily be a compromise between a variety of opinions,
but because there is an objective truth which can be
discovered ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which, that
which is, and that which can and ought to be
done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind.
Speaker 2: It's just it's funny, how it's I wish we were
we had as much certain certainty and just like fanatic
belief in what our outlook on what improving mankind looks like.
Speaker 1: That thoughts like that were made illegal in the late
nineteen forties. Yeah, yeah, made very criminal. Yes, the common
and historical ought is not immediately evident at hand. It
has to be uncovered by cutting, through splitting, breaking asunder
the given material, separating right and wrong, good and bad,
correct and incorrect. The subject whose improvement depends on a
progressive historical practice is each man as man. And this
universality is reflected in that of the discussion, which a
priori does not exclude any group or individual.
Speaker 2: So let me see if I can parse this out.
This is painful. There is an objective way to arrive
at truth, and it's through the It's through the process
of critical analysis. Is that basically what he's saying. Sure,
we imagine, imagine that that just happens to be the
thing that he went, that he studied for his entire life.
Speaker 1: But even the all inclusive character of liberalist tolerance was,
at least in theory, based on the proposition that men were
potential individuals who could learn to hear and see and
feel by themselves, to develop their own thoughts, to grasp
their own true interests and rights and capabilities. Also again
established authority and opinion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but what if they agree with it. What then,
what if they like established authority an opinion? Well, or
what if what if the critical theorists become the established
authority and opinion.
Speaker 1: This was the rationale of free speech and assembly. Universal
toleration became questionable. Becomes questionable when it's rationale no longer
prevails when tolerance is administered to manipulated and doctrinated individuals
who parrot as their own the opinions of their masters,
for whom he heteronomy has become autonomy. The telos of
tolerance is truth. It is clear from the historical record
that the author nic spokesman of tolerance had more and
other truth in mind than that of propositional logic and
academic theory. Former libertarians chuckle John Stuart Mills speaks of
the truth which is persecuted in history, and which does
not triumph over persecution by virtue of its inherent power,
which in fact has no inherent power against the dungeon
and the steak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I quoted me, and they're still hitting me.
Speaker 1: And he enumerates the truths which were cruelly and successfully
liquidated in the dungeons, and at the stake that of
Arnold of Brescia, of fraud, Dulcino, of Sabon, of the
alb Albigensians, valdenz Ians, Lollards, and Hussites.
Speaker 2: So a bunch of like fringe h Christian sex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that's what's funny. Is Yachi in imperium
mentioned soeign many times? Tolerance is first and foremost for
the sake of the heretics. The historical roads towards humanitas
appears as heresy, target of persecution by the powers that be.
Heresy by itself, however, is no token of truth. Well
that that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The criterion of progress in freedom, according to which Mill
judges these movements is the Reformation. The evaluation is ex post,
and his list includes opposites. Nourala two would have been
would have burned the fraud Dulcino. Even the ex post
evaluation is contestable as to its truth. History corrects the
judgment too late. The correction. The correction does not help
the victims and does not absolve their executioners. However, the
lesson is clear. Intolerance has delayed progress and has prolonged
the slaughter and torture of innocence for hundreds of years.
Does this does this clinch the case for indiscriminate pure tolerance.
Are there historical conditions in which such toleration impedes liberation
and multitudes and multiplies the victims who are sacrificed to
the status quo. Can the indiscriminate guarantee of political rights
and liberties be repressive? Can such tolerance serve to contain
qualitative social change?
Speaker 2: Why didn't he just start off with that? We got
to skip that into higher page. It just read read
up to those questions you just ask.
Speaker 1: He has to do a little religion bashing. They always do.
I shall discuss this question only with reference to political movements, attitudes,
schools of thought, philosophies which are political in the wildest sense,
affecting the whole the society as a whole, demonstrably transcending
the sphere of privacy. Moreover, I propose a shift in
the focus of the discussion. It will be concerned not
only and not primarily with tolerance towards radical extremes, minorities, subversives, etc.
But rather with tolerance towards majorities, toward official and public opinion,
toward the established protectors of freedom. In this case, the
discussion can have as a frame of reference only a
democratic society in which the people as individuals and as
members of political and other organizations participate in the making, sustaining,
and changing policies. In an authoritarian system that people do
not tolerate, they suffer established policies.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, that's convenient.
Speaker 1: Yeah, under yeah, the road you know, I mean, oh,
that road is thorny. I think I'll take this one
over here. Under a system of constitutionally guaranteed and generally
and without too many and too glaring exceptions, practice, civil
rights and liberties, opposition and dissent are tolerated unless they
issue in violence and or in exhortation to an organization
of violent subversion.
Speaker 2: I'm with them.
Speaker 1: The underlying assumption is that the established society is free,
and that any improvement, even a change in the social
structure and social values, would come about in the normal
course of events, prepared to find and tested in free
and equal discussion on the open marketplace of ideas and goods.
Speaker 2: That's how it works. Which I'm happy he's like saying
that that's stupid.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, In recalling John John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew
attention to the premise hidden in this assumption. Free and
equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only
if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking,
free from induc indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of
pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement.
One might, in theory, construct a state in which a
multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other
out and result in a truly general and rational interest.
Speaker 2: That's the foundation myth.
Speaker 1: However, such a construct badly fits a society in which
powers are and remain unequal, and even increase their unequal
weight when they run their own course.
Speaker 2: So sometimes a free exchange of ideas doesn't go in
the direction you wanted to. That could be bad.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think he understands elite theory, and sometimes I'm
just like, what the hell is he? Where's he going
with this? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean, we all see what happens when the free
and open exchange of information, like the actual free and
open exchange of information happens. The characteristics of whatever platform
that's happening on inevitably comes far right, even yep, yep,
without a doubt then you to start tamping down on
all these fucking cell phone videos, cell phone videos and
pop us subways.
Speaker 1: And I mean, am I the only one who you
know realizes that, like Twitter has become world star hip
hop world star?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I would like to think that Elon has something
to do with that, or it could just be that
he got rid of whatever the whatever, the algorithm, what
whatever the algorithmic guard against that he just got rid of.
And this is you know, organic.
Speaker 1: Whatever it is. I'm liking it, well, not liking some
of those videos I can't watch, but at least the
exposure is there. Then then the if it fits, it
fits even worse with a variety of pressures, unifies and
coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers
by virtue of an increased standard of living and an
increasing concentration of power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is where we're at right now, Well maybe
not right now, where the material conditions right now are
still pretty good. Everybody more than likely has food, water,
easy access to food, water, clothing, shelter, that type of thing.
And then you know, if you really start thinking about
what our luxuries we have access to, those two for
the most part. And I mean this goes back to
Ted kay. As that becomes cheaper and proliferated more, it's
really easy to ignore the structural problems that are taking
away your i mean your humanity in the background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as you participate them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I've said this a bunch of times. But
the more people I talked to who are leaving cities
and going and you know, even buying a half an
acre or an acre in the country and you know, saying, hey,
I'm gonna grow some of my own food and maybe
get a couple of chickens. These are people who they
may not even know what Uncle Ted taught, but they're
going backwards in order to go forwards.
Speaker 2: It's it's uh, it makes me think of Julius Evola.
It's some something is transcendent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what it was Evola thing, I've stolen it. My
my values are that which were be normal before seventeen
eighty nine.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then the laborer whose real interest conflicts with that of management,
the common consumer whose real interests conflict with that of
the producer, the intellectual whose vocation conflicts with that of
his employer, find themselves submitted to a system against which
they are powerless and appear unreasonable. That's a great sentence,
oh bit, such a great sentence. Okay, the ideas of
the available alternatives evaporates into an utterly utopian dimension in
which it is at home for a free for a
free society is indeed unrealistically and undefinably different from the
existing ones. Under these circumstances, whatever improvement may occur in
the normal course of events and without subversion, is likely
to be improvement in the direction determined by the particular
interests which control the whole.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, mark us who are.
Speaker 1: Ah By the same token, those minorities which strive for
a change of the whole itself, will, under optimal conditions
which rarely prevail, be left free to deliberate and discuss,
to speak, into assemble, and will be left harmless and
helpless in the face of the overwhelming majority which militates
against qualitative social change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're allowed to talk about whatever you want. It's
just it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1: He Let me, let me see something here, looking at
early early years of Marcus. Okay, I'll leave that alone.
We'll talk about that.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find anything in any early life check.
Speaker 1: Oh it's it's right there. Oh yeah, second sent second
sent okay, control by the same token those manner did
I already say that sentence?
Speaker 2: By the same token those minorities which strive for a change.
Speaker 1: I don't think I gonna, I'll say it, I'll go No, No,
I haven't said it. Okay, by the same token, those
minorities which strive for a change of the whole itself
will under optimal conditions which were oh no, I did
say that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: This majority is firmly grounded in the increasing satisfaction of
needs and technological and mental coordination, which testify to the
general helplessness of radical groups in a well functioning social system.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within
the established framework it is tole are. To a large extent,
all points of view can be heard, the communist and
the fascist, the left and the right, the right and
the negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament, moreover,
and endlessly dragging debates over the media. The stupid opinion
is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one.
The misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and
propaganda rides along with education, truth and falsehood.
Speaker 2: So at the apex of American civilization, you can kind
of define that by you know, all those I forget
what it's called, but the roundtable show where they have
somebody from the right, somebody from the left, the fascist,
the communist, and they're all just having a calm conversation.
That is the apex in material condition of America. Now
what do you have? This pure talk? Well, good, but
whether it's good or not, it's just an indication as
to how well your civilization is doing.
Speaker 1: This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by
the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual is
in possession of the truth and capable of defining what
is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting
opinions must be submitted to the people for its deliberation
and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic
argument implies a necessary condition, namely that the people must
be must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the
basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information,
and that on this basis their evaluation must be the
result of autonomous thought. So deliberating and choosing on the
basis of knowledge. They basically said, first of all, they
have to be smart and not be a fucking one.
Speaker 2: Are on, we do this all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then stepp Bee comes in and just frigging
makes us all feel like idiots. They must have access
to authentic information, doesn't mention what that authentic information is, uh,
And that on their basis, their evaluation must be the
result of autonomous thought. So this is somebody who's lived
it has never been taught how to think what to think?
I mean, we're in friggin fantasy land here.
Speaker 2: It's the source. I saw it in a dream.
Speaker 1: It was a fever dream though all right. In the
contemporary period, the democratic argument for abstract tolerance tends to
be invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic process itself.
The liberating force of democracy was the change, was the
chance it gave to effective dissent on the individual as
well as its social scale. Its openness to qualitatively different
forms of government, of culture, education, work of the human
existence in general, The toleration of free discussion and the
equal right of opposites. Was to define and clarify the
different forms of descent, their direction, content prospect. But with
the concentration of economic and political power and the integration
of opposites in a society which uses technology as an
instrument of domination, effective descent is blocked where it could
freely emerge in the formation of opinion, in information and communication,
in speech and assembly.
Speaker 2: Yep, Uncle Ted and Mark hus one of the.
Speaker 4: Same when he says here, well, the integration of opposites
in a society, what's he talking about?
Speaker 2: Oh, just the ability of the fascists and the communists
to sit down and have a conversation mm hm, which
I'm guessing at the time he was writing. I mean,
what the hell was that show with? Was Buchanan on it?
Speaker 1: Oh? The McLachlan group, Yeah, yep, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean that was probably the apex of society when
that was on.
Speaker 1: I used to watch it all the time. I watched
it up until like two thousand and nine, two thousand
and ten. Yeah, I was obsessed with it. I couldn't
couldn't have that. Yeah, no, at least not in any
man I think. Yeah, I think it does actually exist now.
I don't think Buchanan's on it. I think there's a
new version of it. But I mean, I just I
can't wake up at nine thirty on us. I'm doing
other nine thirty on Sunday morning. I'm getting to I'm
getting ready to go somewhere else, all right. Under the
rule of monopolistic media themselves, the mere instruments of economic
and political power. That's good.
Speaker 2: So this is the critique that we hear all the
time of the legacy media, I mean, the corporate press,
in the context of what the Internet did to them,
they did have a monopolistic stranglehold on the flow of information.
You know, what choices you're you're given at the ballot
box are determined, you know, by the cathedral. He's he's described,
he's describing, you know that as it's happening.
Speaker 1: Under the rule of monopolistic media themselves, the mere instruments
of economic and political power, a mentality is created for
which right and wrong, true and false are pre defined
wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. This
is prior to all expression and community. A matter of semantics,
the blocking of effective descent of the recognition of that
which is not of the establishment, which begins in the
language that is publicized and administered the meaning of words
is rigidly stabilized, and I would say, now the meaning
of words it is actively distorted.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's yeah. He's he's a little
behind the times. He's a little too modernist. Just him
talking about objective truth at all. Yeah, that's that's like
a early frank like early Frankfurt school sixties characteristic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, the nineteen forty six Orwell essay politics and
the English language. I mean it's twenty almost twenty years
before this. Orwell's talking about the distortion language at that point,
how it basically means nothing. And academic agent Nima calls
him says, how most political language and journalistic language is
loaded with thought terminating cliches. Yeah yeah, or these cliches
are just fed in there, and it's like, oh, I
know exactly what to mean now, I don't have to
think anymore. I know exactly. I know exactly what to
think now.
Speaker 2: I was just reading a critical review of Imperium, and I,
I guess I couldn't really, I couldn't really put it
into words to articulate like that that exact thing you
just said, thought terminating just phrases.
Speaker 1: That's what the the person who was writing the Yeah critique.
Speaker 2: The entire time he was doing the review, it was
just cliche cliches. Yeah did in early life check on
him too, and.
Speaker 1: Rational persuasion. Persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded.
The avenues of entrance are closed to the meaning of
words and ideas other than the established one established by
the publicity of the powers to be and verified in
their practices. Other words can be spoken and heard, other
ideas can be expressed, but at the massive scale of
the conservative majority. Outside such enclaves as the intelligentsia, they
are immediately evaluated, i e. Automatically understood in terms of
the public language, a language which determines a priori the
direction in which the thought process moves. I can I'm not.
I want to disagree, but I can't. I can't.
Speaker 2: We I mean, that's where we're we're slipping down the
slope from the things that he's talking about in his
day right now, like we are still sliding down that slope.
You know, the ability to think three steps ahead in
terms of policy and just in terms of introducing ideas
to the mainstream, the direction that that's going to, that
that they're going to take. Now it goes back to
the old trope that there are no conspiracy theorists anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're gonna do about another another page here,
and then we'll cut it and cut it and uh,
we'll do the rest, do the rest another episode. This
is just take two episodes. In the beginning of this,
when we were stopping every sentence, I'm like, oh man,
this is going to take ten episodes. All right, But
that's the process of reflection. And that's the process of
reflection ends where it started in the given conditions and
relations self validated. The argument of the discussion repels the
contradiction because the antithesis is redefined in terms of the thesis. Yeah,
I get it. Yeah, well it's like begging the question,
like the begging the question fallacy, Yeah, or.
Speaker 2: Just controlling the opposition speaking all you know, referring to
your opposition to say a cultural trope in the exact
terms of the enemy, the exact terms the enemy gave
to you in order to talk about it.
Speaker 1: For example, thesis we work for peace and to and
to antithesis, Why did I want to say anti anti thesis,
so that for example, thesis we work for peace antithesis
we prepare for war or even we wage war. Unification
of opposites. Preparing for war is working for peace. Piece
is redefined as necessary as necessarily in the prevailing situation,
including preparation for war or even war or even war,
And in this Orwellian form, the meaning of the word
piece is stabilized. Thus, the basic vocabulary of the Orwellian
language operates as a priori categories of understanding, all pre forming,
all content. These conditions invalidate the logic of tolerance, which
involves the rational development of meaning and precludes the closing
of meaning. Consequently, persuasion through discussion and the equal presentation
of opposites even where it is really equal, easily lose
their liberating force as factors of understanding and learning. They
are far more likely to strengthen and the established thesis
and to repel the alternatives. I can't argue with them
on any of this. No, this is is, in fact
what they do.
Speaker 2: He's not telling us what we don't already know. But
I guess at the time it was cool to notice
he was doing a little noticing himself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if you ever searched out his early
nevermind impartiality to the utmost equal treatment of competing and
conflicting issues is indeed a basic requirement for decision making
in the democratic process.
Speaker 2: Here's why that's wrong.
Speaker 1: It is an equally basic requirement for defining the limits
of tolerance. But in a democracy with totalitarian organization, objectivity
may fulfill a very different function, namely to foster a
mental attitude which tends to obliterate the difference between true
and false information and indoctrination right and wrong. In fact,
the decision between opposed opinions has been made, has been
made before the presentation and discussion get under way, made
not by a conspiracy or a sponsor or a publisher,
not by any dictatorship, but rather by the normal course
of events, which is the course of administered events, and
by the mentality shaped in this course. Here too, it
is the whole which determines the truth. I'm people who
have never read stuff like this, like when we were
reading when we read A State and Revolution. You know
all the people in the comments who are like, holy crap,
I agree with so much of this. Here too, it
is the whole which determines the truth. Then the decision
asserts itself without any open violation of objectivity in such
things as the makeup of a newspaper, with the breaking
up of vital information into bits interspersed between extraneous material,
irrelevant items, relegating of some radically negative news to an
obscure place, in the juxtaposition of gorgeous ads with unmitigated horrors,
and the introduction and interruption of the broadcasting of facts
by overwhelming commercials.
Speaker 2: That's my timeline. Just describe My timeline is man made
horrors beyond your comprehension. You can then an add for
some like cool gifts for your for your wedding.
Speaker 1: Party, green anarchists, or have been all over this for
so long. I mean, this is a conversation. Bellamy could
be preaching this right now. The result is a neutralization
of opposites, a neutralization, however, which takes place on the
firm grounds of the structural limitation of tolerance and within
a pre formed mentality. When a magazine prints side by
side a negative and positive report on the FBI, it
fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity. However, the chances are
that a positive that the positive wins, because the image
of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of
the people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I mean if you think about it practically
on an individual level, Let's say something hurt. Let's say
I don't know, nine to eleven to two happens, and
then at the same time there the article is in
one column for that, and then the article right next
to it is, you know, pictures of tits. You know, like,
I'm not going to feel anything about nine to eleven
two because I'm going to read that and say, wow,
that's awful, and then I'm going to look at tits
and then I'm going to walk away feeling kind of
bad about nine to eleven two, but probably not as
bad as I could conceivably be, not bad enough to
do anything about it.
Speaker 1: Or if a newscaster reports the torture and murder of
civil rights workers in the same unemotional tone he uses
to describe the stock market or the weather, or with
the same great emotion with which he says as commercials,
then such objectivity is spurious. More, it offends against humanity
and truth by being calm where no one where one
should be enraged, by refraining from accusation where accusation is
the fact is in the fact themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I get what he's saying. It's psychological.
Speaker 1: The toleration expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or
even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression. If objectivity has to
do with truth, and if truth is more than a
matter of logic and science, then this kind of objectivity
is false, and this kind of tolerance inhuman. And if
it is necessary to break the established universe of meaning
and the practiced and closed in this universe in order
to enable man to find out what is true and false,
this deceptive impartiality would have to be abandoned. The people
exposed to this impartiality are no tabula rasa. They are
indoctrinated by the conditions under which they live and think,
and which they do not transcend. Yeah, didn't you get
what he's saying. Yeah, well, I mean it's interesting that
he brings up tabula rossa because progressivism, it assumes every
prepos is, it presupposes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just not, I guess, just not in this case,
in the context of you know, propaganda.
Speaker 1: Well, no, in this case, the tabula rasa, which which
should have been from the very start, you know, probably
taken away from their parents who maybe Christians or Muslims
or or whatever, they're already poisoned. Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 2: And then your average news watcher is yeah, definitely not
a blank slate to be filled.
Speaker 1: All right, let's finish this. I think if we finished
these up to the right up to I think we
finished this paragraph, it would be a good ending point,
all right, to enable them to become autonomous, to find
by themselves what is true and what is false. For
men in the existing society, they would have to be
freed from the prevailing indoctrination, which is no longer recognized
as indoctrination. But this means that the trend would have
to be reversed. They would have to get information slanted
in the opposite direction. For the facts are never given
immediately and never accessible immediately. They are established, mediated by
those who made them. The truth, the whole truth quote
unquote surpasses these facts and requires the rupture with their appearance.
This rupture, prerequisite and token of all freedom of thought
and of speech, cannot be accomplished within the established framework
of abstract tolerance and spurious objectivity, because they are precisely
the factors which precondition the mind against the rupture.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I guess if if we suddenly started seeing
journalists speak to people speak to us like they would
in real life, it would probably blow our minds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be like.
Speaker 2: Or just anybody on the Internet, because we're all purveyors
of information.
Speaker 1: It's like if you're used to seeing and if you're
used to going to the zoo and seeing an animal
performed tricks, they'd be like seeing them in their natural
habitat where you're like, oh, they're actually really boring, and
then you realize, oh, wait a minit, they're putting on a performance.
It's a performance for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's it's always been an idea I've
had that you know that not I've had, but just
a popular idea that absolute tolerance can't work and can't
exist any ways, just because we we live in we
we we live in the system that we do, and
all the venues that can show that that are that
are bound by whatever whatever metrics of tolerance there is,
like social media, TV, news, pop culture whatever like there
there's it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Absolute tolerance wouldn't work,
just not not on a practical level. And once you
kind of break through that that idea that tolerance is
not good you can start to kind of fight back
against you know, while we we can't let Nazis at
our protest because okay, well I can't let liberals at
my house. You know, they've they kind of just don't.
I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say.
Five of these in well, give me your thoughts and
all boun.
Speaker 1: I mean, he makes the point that if his goals
are going to be achieved, any thought, any action that
is against that would derail those goals needs to be repressed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the goals are the destruction of oppressive structures.
Speaker 1: Which some which could very simply be called hierarchies, aristocracies,
things like that. Yeah, which hierarchy, Yeah, which I think
are inherent in nature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely there, but to the bottom left, they exist
to be destroyed.
Speaker 1: Yep. All right, Well we'll pick this up again. Do
you want to plug anything I was listening to this
episode today that I was actually supposed to be on
on on Exorcism.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We just dropped an over the line episode on
Timeline Earth for our Patreon subscribers, if you want to
check that out. It's about exorcism and spiritual warfare, getting
into the history, the practice, the nuts and bolts. I
haven't I do need to come up with a Boystown
episode eventually. That's that's my personal spin off of Timeline Earth,
and I haven't done one in over a year because
I'm a piece of ship with a very demanding job.
Speaker 1: Well, I think everyone appreciates you taking the time to
do this, and we'll we'll we'll talk about when we
can do part two and everything. Because I'm someone with
a with all of time on my hands and you're
someone with like no time on your hands. So and
you know, someone with a lot of time on their hands,
like canceled at the last minute to be on that episode,
which I really wanted to be on. But you know
the reason why you forgive me because you've been there recently.
All right, man, until part two? Thank you. I want
to welcome everyone back to you the Pekana Show. Aaron.
Let's finish this out how you don't know?
Speaker 2: So far, so good.
Speaker 1: Let's do it all right, Let's get this up there
and just jump right in. I had to look up
exactly where we left off because you know, I'm not
gonna remember that ship So the last the last paragraph
before we ended, I was talking about the people exposed
to talking about tabula rossa, people exposed to this and partiality.
There are no tabula ras so they are indoctrinaty, so indoctrination.
So all right, the factual barriers which totalitarian democracy erects
against the efficacy of qualitative dissent are weak and pleasant
enough compared with the practices of a dictatorship which claims
to educate the people in the truth.
Speaker 2: Huh. That's uh, yeah, I don't know if I agree
with full on dictatorship, but you know, whatever, we have,
whatever you would call it right now, that's that's the
main characteristic of the people of power. Yeah, I mean,
that's that's the disease of intellectualism.
Speaker 1: Well, and what we have now is so they're they're
claiming to educate the people and the truth. They have
the truth, and they are definitely at that drawing broadline
friend enemy distinction.
Speaker 2: It's they've conspicuously taken on that task as heroically as
they can possibly make it. That, yes, this is their
rise on Detroit is to educate, educate the people and
the truth. And you see it every single day, whether
it's all meeting. I mean that's what we're doing too.
So I mean like, but when everybody is doing that,
then you have that's yeah, you have a diseased society.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, if we if you have a society where
people are warring over what the truth is, your society
is completely as far to the left because you're existing
in chaos.
Speaker 2: There's no order at all, even if the fight is
between objective truth and this you know, idea of subjective truth,
whatever subjective truth, whatever branch that gets off into for
for both sides. Yeah, we are. That's I would say
that would characterize this spiritual warfare that we're in. Then
I talked about the Patreon episode that you should buy
a tile on Earth.
Speaker 1: It's a good episode, all right, with all its limitations
and distortions. Democratic tolerance is, under all circumstances, more humane
than an institutionalized intolerance, which sacrifices the rights and liberties
of the living generations for the sake of the future generations.
Speaker 2: All right, It is that a knock or is he
just stating a fact?
Speaker 1: With all its limitations and distortions, Democratic tolerances, under all circumstances,
more humane than an institutionalized intolerance, which sacrifices the rights
and liberties of the living generations. Now, when he says that,
I immediately think of like what a like monarchy where yeah,
where it also a humane, humane institute. You know. Thomas
said something on an episode recently. He was talking about
the difference between the Soviet Union and the United States
after nineteen fifty, and he was saying that, you know, well,
what did the Soviet Union do after nineteen fifty? They
just basically and after Stalin was out of power. I mean,
they could abuse your body, they could you know, you know,
a lot of the Gulags were you know, we're they
weren't as severe as before, you know, before when Stalin
was alive. But really, the when you look at what
the United States has done to people, I mean, at
least Russians still believe that they're Russians. They still look
they have some kind of identity. Everything that we that
we have, we possess, any kind of tradition, any kind
of family, they've they're this regime seeks to derascinate us
from and just basically strip us down into nothing.
Speaker 2: Well, we don't have anything comparable to Goole Aggs or
or even the destolinization process within living memory. And the
further we get from these references that you know our grandparents,
you know your grandparents, you're you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, I'm older than you. Fuck you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, uh, certain certain members of
your tribe. What you're Ukrainian background, Oh yeah, Ukrainian dash something.
Speaker 1: No, I'm like my DNA thing says two percent on
that part one drop, yeah, right, one drop role.
Speaker 2: But no, we don't have anything like that in living memory.
So the further we get from both the atrocities and
the wine down from the atrocities being tolerable, the more
apt we are to go back to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Good point, all right. The question is whether this
is the only alternative. I shall presently try to suggest
the direction in which an answer may be sought. In
any case, the contrast is not between democracy and the
abstract and dictatorship in the abstract. Democracy is a form
of government which fits very different types of societies. This
holds true even for a democracy with universal suffrage and
equality before the law, and the human costs of a
democracy are always and everywhere those exacted by the society
whose government it is. Their range extends all the way
from normal exploitation, poverty, and insecurity to and insecurity to
the victims of wars, police actions, military aid, etc. In
which the society is engaged, and not only to the
victims within its own frontiers. Yeah. These considerations can never
justify the exacting of different sacrifices and different victims on
behalf of a future better society, but they do allow
weighing the cost involved in the perpetuation of an existing
society against the risk of promoting alternatives which offer a
reasonable chance of pacification and liberation. Surely, no government can
be expected to foster its own subversion. But in a democracy,
such a right as vested in the people i e.
The majority of the people.
Speaker 2: Ah yeah, in theory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it sounds good. Yeah, this means that the
ways should be This means that the ways should not
be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and
if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their
reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. Obviously, Yeah, they would
include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from
groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination,
on the grounds of race and religion, of which opposed
the extension of public services, social security, medicare, etc.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean maybe when he wrote this, I mean
the last the social security, medical uh, public services, medical,
medical care, all that grap I don't think there's a
that's that's not really a thing with the left right debate.
I think the right is okay with having a welfare state.
Speaker 1: Yep. They they're actively anti racist. Just call them a
racist and you'll find out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate
new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the education,
in the educational institutions, which, by their very methods and
concept the concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the
established universe of discourse and behavior, thereby precluding a priori
a rational evaluation of the alternatives.
Speaker 2: So that's not happening, right, I mean, the the the
enclosed us of the mind is happening again. Like, this
is all stuff that we can agree for, but for
way different reasons than he wants us to.
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, and to the degree to which freedom of
thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom
would also imply intolerance towards scientific research in the interest
of deadly deterrence of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions,
et cetera. I shall presently discuss the question as to
who is to decide on the distinction between liberating and
liberating and repressive human and inhuman teachings and practices. I
have already suggested that this at that this distinction is
not a matter of value preference, but of rational criteria.
Speaker 2: Yes, the fattest, most blue haired, most transgender Muslim activists
they are are the ones qualified.
Speaker 1: While the reversal of the trend in the educational enterprise
at least could conceivably be enforced by the students and
teachers themselves and thus be self imposed, the systematic withdrawal
of tolerance towards regressive and repressive opinions and movements could
only be envisaged, had envisaged envisaged enough to look that
up as results of well, try to figure it out
contexts as results of large scale pressure, which would amount
to an upheaval book could only be you know. In
other words, it would presuppose that which is still to
be accomplished. The reversal of the trend. However, resistance at
particular occasions, boycott, non participation at the local and small
group level may perhaps prepare the ground. The subversive character
of the restoration of freedom appears most clearly in that
dimension of society where false tolerance and free enterprise do
perhaps the most serious and lasting damage, namely in business
and publicity.
Speaker 2: So corporations and media. Let's try to parse, parse all
that together. I guess, to dumb it down. In a
democratic system, there will never be any type of social
upheaval that they haven't already approved of way ahead of time.
What else is he trying to say? It's going to
be the fortune five hundred corporations in the media, which
are the most liberal and all so the most free enterprise.
I don't mean free enterprise and like a libertarian context,
I mean like they eat amongst each other. They are
going to be the uh, the Petri dish, and the
accelerant for any type of any type of social upheaval
that has been pre approved. I think that's what he's
trying to say. In a nutshell.
Speaker 1: If that's what he's trying to say to you think
we've seen that, Oh yeah, absolutely, it's default though, Yeah,
against the emphatic insistence on the part of spokesmen for labor,
I maintain that practices such as planned obsolescence, collusion between
union leadership and management, slanted publicity are not simply imposed
from above on a powerless rank and file, but are
tolerated by them and by the consumer at large.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we tolerate a lot.
Speaker 1: However, it would be ridiculous to speak of a possible
withdrawal of tolerance with respect to these practices and to
the ideologies promoted by them, for they pertain to the
basis on which the repressive, affluent society rests and reproduces
itself and its vital defenses. Their removal would be that
total revolution which this society so effectively repels.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean again, I think what he's trying to
say is our material condition is so good that they're
willing to put up We are willing to put up
with so much. When we will eventually reach that trip
wire to where we chimp out, I don't know. But
even now, however bad you might think it is, I
think we still.
Speaker 1: Have a while. Well. I mean, you were saying in
twenty twenty that people aren't hungry yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ye, people aren't hungry yet.
Speaker 1: To discuss tolerance in such a society means to re
examine the issue of violence and the traditional distinction between
violent and nonviolent action. The discussion should not from the
beginning be clouded by ideologies which serve the perpetuation of violence.
Even in the advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails.
It is practiced by the police, in the prisons and
mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities, it is carried.
It is carried by the defenders of metropolitan freedom into
the backward countries. The violence indeed breeds violence, but to
refrain from violence in the face of that superior violence
is one thing. To renounce a priori violence against violence
or ethical or sociological grounds because it may antagonize sympathizers
is another. Yeah. Nonviolence is normally not only preached to to,
but extracted from the weak. It is a necessity rather
than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm.
The case of the strong is the case of India
an exception. Their passive resistance was carried through on a
massive scale which disrupted or threatened to disrupt the economic
life of the country. Quantity turns into quality. On such
a scale, passive resistance is no longer passive. It ceases
to be non violent. The same holds true for the
general strike.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would just gallons if if the general strike
even approach entering the entering the modern discourse.
Speaker 1: I mean when you every once in a while you'll
see someone talk about it, it'll be like Caleb mop
In and you just the people you would expect it
to come from. But it's it's a I mean from
the right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No, I mean as as blue collar as
the rights become in the last you know, thirty years,
you'll you'll never you'll never see a general strike because
then you go.
Speaker 1: Hungry, right, right, And we're not a grarian.
Speaker 2: Nope, not anymore, we're not.
Speaker 1: Nope. Robespierre's distinction between the terror of liberty and the
terror of despotism, and his moral glorification of the former,
belongs to the most convincingly condemned aberrations. Even if the
white terror was more bloody than the Red terror. Yeah, well,
I mean, who want to try and compare and see
which one was more violent? I don't think we need
to do that. Yeah, the comparative evaluation in terms of
the number of victims is the quantifying approach, which reveals
a man made horror throughout history that made violence and necessity.
In terms of historical function, there is a difference between
the revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the
oppressed and by the oppressors in terms of Yeah, I
mean think about that.
Speaker 2: And it's each ideology's responsibility to capture either one of
those terms.
Speaker 1: First, I have seen people this week on social media
and in comments that we actually read yesterday in the
live stream we did for Old Glory Club where pro
trands people, people who were actually celebrating what happened at
that Christian school in Nashville were basically saying that they
were the oppressed and that the government was the oppressor
is still the oppressor to.
Speaker 5: Them, They're yeah, I mean this is actually it's it's
so perfect that we're reading this in the backdrop of
that Nashville shooting.
Speaker 2: Because you're seeing this in real life. Yeah, I mean,
it's it's insane. It's been such a black pill to
see just nobody, like even people that we would expect
to have some type of strong take with it. Nothing,
nothing except for the usual people like that that we
see in our timeline that we expect, but man, it's
been fucking it's just been disappointed.
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope I made some sense last night,
because you know, I'm one of those people who believes
that trans people are victims. I believe they're victims of
a campaign that, you know, just like any other campaign,
the campaign for FIAT money, the campaign for wars and everything.
But when it comes, once the violence starts, and once
innocent people start start falling by their hands, then I
have to step back and I have to go all right, Well,
I wasn't exactly supporting you at this point up until
this point, but I'm definitely you know, I'm definitely disengaged,
and I'm not going to make any excuses anymore.
Speaker 2: If tragedies like that are just, by the odds going
to happen, then I I almost hope that the level
of vitriol and shaden freud and just the opportunity, the
opportunism that comes about from basically dancing on victim's grave,
I almost hope that it drowns out rational voices. That's
that's what needs especially on the internet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, excelent accelerationism on the Internet is basically the default.
There should be the default.
Speaker 2: I I I don't like seeing it, and I don't
I don't know if if there is a way to
separate your internet self from your real life self and
say that it's the complete fucking opposite. I'm I'm there.
I don't know if I'm morally correct. I don't know
if I'm going to burn an l for that, But.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, right. In terms of ethics, both forms of
violence are inhuman and evil. But since when is history
made in accordance with ethical standards? It's a great question.
It's a question that I ask all the time when
people try to make moral arguments with me. So what
does morality have to do with this? To start applying
them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppress,
to start applying them at the point where the oppressed
rebel against the oppressors, the have nots against the haves
is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the
protest against it. Here he quotes Jean Paul Sart. Try
to understand this at any rate. If violence began this
very evening, and if exploitation and oppression had never existed
on the earth. Perhaps the slogans of non violence might
end the coral. But if the whole regime, even for
non violence, even nonviolent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand
year old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you
in the rank of the oppressors.
Speaker 2: Silence is violence.
Speaker 1: But I mean, you see see people on our side too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm an ally.
Speaker 1: You're an ally. That's great, all right. The very notion
of false tolerance and the distinction between right and wrong,
limitations on tolerance, between progressive and regressive indoctrination, revolutionary and
reactionary violence, demand the statement of criteria for its validity.
These standards must be prior to whatever constitutional and legal
criteria are set up and applied in an existing society
which has clear Yeah.
Speaker 2: First principles shouldn't be my constitution, yep, orm due process.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, yeah, I remember the first person I
really talked to who who said this was Arn McIntyre,
and he said, look, if you got to write, if
your society has to write stuff down, you've already lost.
If you have to write your laws down, you've already lost.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Who are you writing them down for?
Speaker 1: Yeah? All right? So okay, read that whole thing again.
These standards must be prior to whatever constitutional and legal
criteria are set up and applied in an existing society,
such as clear and present danger and other established definitions
of civil rights and liberties. For such definitions themselves presupposed
standards of freedom and repression as applicable or not applicable
in the respective society. They are specifications of more general concepts.
By whom and according to what standards can the political
distinction between true and false, progressive and regressive. For in
this sphere these pairs are equivalent be made and its
validity be just defied. At the outset, I propose that
the question cannot be answered in terms of the alternative
between democracy and dictatorship, according to which in the latter
one individual or group, without any effective control from below,
arrogate to them to themselves the decision. Historically, even in
the most democratic democracies, the vital and final decisions affecting
the society as a whole have been made constitutionally or
in fact, by one or several groups without effective control
by the people themselves. The ironical question what true I mean,
it's it's.
Speaker 2: Just democracy is just a bunch of interest groups fighting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's whichever group of elites you win. Basically,
the ironical question who educates the educators i e. The
political leaders? All so applies to democracy. The only authentic
alternative and negation of dictatorship with respect to this question
would be a society in which the people have become
autonomous individuals, freed from the repressive requirements of a struggle
for existence and the interest of domination, and as such
human beings choosing their government and determining their life.
Speaker 2: Chazz, he's describing Chaz.
Speaker 1: And Capistan and Japistan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, autonomy and freedom.
Speaker 1: Such a society does not yet exist anywhere in the means,
and it never will. In the meantime, the question must
be treated in an abstract though abstraction, not from the
historical possibilities, but from the realities of the prevailing societies.
So he's basically going to apply something that doesn't exist
to reality. And as I think it was, Sam Francis said,
channeling James Burnham, that never works because, and I will paraphrase,
everybody thinks they have a plan till they get punched
in the mouth. YEA. Everybody or everybody has a plan,
so they get punched in the mouth. All right. I
think that was Mike Tyson too, just bringing all the
philosophers in. I suggested that the distinction between true and
false tolerance, between progress and regression can be made rationally
on empirical grounds. The real possibilities of human freedom are
relative to the attained stage of civilization.
Speaker 2: Right now, we're getting into some Marxism.
Speaker 1: They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at
their respective stage, and they are quantifiable and calculable to
a high degree. So are at the stage of advanced
industrial society the most rational ways of using these resources
and distributing the social product, with priority on the satisfaction
vital needs, and with a minimum of toil and injustice.
Speaker 2: Oh god, oh.
Speaker 1: H, you knew it was coming. You knew it was coming.
Speaker 2: Oh I was waiting for it so excited. I'm back,
I'm back.
Speaker 1: In other words, it is possible to define the direction
in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be
changed in order to improve the chance of a peace
which is not identical with cold war and a little
hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not
feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also
possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this
chance and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of
the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of
the progressive ones.
Speaker 2: It's power as a fixed pot, baby, and the Marxists wanted,
I want it.
Speaker 1: My My theory is that power is a power, is
a constant, and it's just it's just being divvied up.
Who divvs it up? Who gets the biggest piece? The
question who is qualified to make all these distinctions, definitions,
identifications for the society as a whole has now one
logical answer, namely, namely everyone and the maturity of his
faculties as a human being. Everyone who has learned to
think rationally and autonomously. What about Yeah? Well what about
the ones who haven't? Yeah, And that's how you get
a dictatorship?
Speaker 2: What they if your average country is plummeting?
Speaker 1: What if this is Somalia? John Stewart Mill's conception of
the of the rest publica is not the opposite of Plato's.
The liberal, too, demands the authority of reason, not only
as an intellectual but also as a political power. Huh okay,
I was just thinking how the objective the objectivists all,
you know, say they need a society based on reason,
where the police would they would be the police would
enforce reason. I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding.
In Plato, rationality is confined to the small number of
philosopher kings. In mill every rational human being participates in
the discussion and decision, but only as a rational being.
Where society has entered the phase of total administration and indoctrination,
this would be a small indeed, and not necessarily that
of elected representatives of the people.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: Imagine that the problem is not that of an educational dictatorship,
but that of breaking the tyranny of public opinion and
its makers in the closed society.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, public opinion can never really be organic,
can it? Because public opinion is itself a weird, fucking
nebulous idea.
Speaker 1: Even if you broke it down to like Dunbar's number,
the whatever natural elites or pastors are in that group,
or who are going to make public opinion, you know,
the they're they're going to be the leaders. Pretty much
what people say about their governing style. Their governance is
going to be coming. They're just going to be repeating
what those men.
Speaker 2: Are saying, yeah, more or less, or basing their opinions
off of what they were taught from, you know, the
progenitors of those men.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: However, granted the empirical rationality of the distinction between progress
and regression, and granted that it may be applicable to
tolerance and may justify strongly discriminatory tolerance on political grounds,
cancelation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion.
Another impossible consequence would follow. I say that, by virtue
of its inner logic, withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements
and discriminatory tolerance in favor of the progressive tendencies would
be tantamount to the official promotion of subversion. Hume, imagine that.
Speaker 2: All right, now, he's on to something.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: The historical calculus of progress, which is actually the calculus
of the perspective reduction of cruelty, misery suppression, seems to.
Speaker 2: Such a vagina.
Speaker 1: Read it again, The historical calculus of progress, which is
actually the calculus of the perspective reduction of cruelty, misery,
and suppression seems to involve the calculated choice between two
forms of political violence, that on the part of the
legally constituted powers, by their legitimate action or by their
tacit consent or by their inability to prevent violence, and
that on the part of potentially subversive movements. Moreover, with
respect to the latter, a policy of unequal treatment would
protect radicalism on the left against that on the right.
Can the historical Can the historical calculus be reasonably extended
to the justification of one form of violence or against
as against another, or better, since justification carries a moral connotation,
or better, since justification carries a moral connotation, Is there
historical evidence to the effect that the social origin and
impetus of violence from among the ruled or the ruling
classes to the have or the have not, the left
or the right, is in a demonstrable relation to progress
as defined above.
Speaker 2: I love it, We're getting taken on another wild ride.
Why here's why you should throw your face into the
brick being thrown at you.
Speaker 1: With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an
open historical record, it seems that the violence emanating from
the rebellion of the oppressed classes broke the historical continue
of injustice, cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief
but explosive enough to achieve an increase in the scope
of freedom and justice and a better and more equitable
distribution of misery and oppression in a new social system.
In one word, progress in civilization. Oh, I'm glad he's
bringing these up here. Okay? Good? The English Civil Wars,
the French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban revolutions may
illustrate the hypothesis. In contrast, the one historical change from
one social system to another marking the beginning of a
new period in civilization, which was not sparked and driven
by an effective movement from below, namely, the collapse of
the Roman Empire in the West brought about a long
period of regression for long centuries, until a new, higher
period of civilization was painfully born in the violence of
the heretic revolts of the thirteenth century and in the
peasant and laborery vaults of the fourteenth century.
Speaker 2: That's a very generous interpretation.
Speaker 1: With respect to historical violence emanating from among ruling classes.
No such relations to progress seems to obtain the long
series of dynastic and imperialist wars. The liquidation of Spartacus
in Germany in nineteen nineteen. Fascism and Nazism did not break,
but rather tightened than streamline the continuum of suppression. Really,
I guess where that.
Speaker 2: Did not break, but rather tightened in streamlined. Yeah, I
don't get that. I don't get why he would describe
Nazism as tightening and streamlined. Yeah, I guess lining the
continuum of suppression.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But if he's if it's meant to be pejorative, then yeah,
he's giving it more credit.
Speaker 1: I said, emanating from among ruling classes. To be sure,
there is hardly any organized violence from above that does
not mobilize and activate mass support from below.
Speaker 2: Oh all right, I see what he's saying.
Speaker 1: The decisive question is on behalf of and in the
interest of, which groups and institutions is such violence released?
Speaker 2: I mean the National Socialist Party, I mean that's that's
started as grassroots kind of street brawling, right, yeah, like
it didn't really get well, I don't know were there's
some like old old kaiser Reich types in it from
the beginning.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean they were all guys who fought world
in World War One?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, But were they like aristocrats?
Speaker 1: I mean there were a couple.
Speaker 2: There were just a couple, not enough to characterize it
as an aristocratic movement.
Speaker 1: I would probably say there may have been a chance
that there were more aristocrats in the KPD. Yeah, yeah, right.
And the answer is not necessarily expost in the historical
examples just mentioned. It could be and was anticipated whether
the movement would serve the revamping of the old order
or the emergence of the new liberating tolerance then would
mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of
movements from the left. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: There highlight that as to the scope of this tolerance
and intolerance, it would extend to the stage of action
as well as of discussion and propaganda, as well as
of word.
Speaker 2: And you're seeing that since twenty.
Speaker 1: Fifteen, since he came down that escalator. Yeah, yep. The
traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no. We
talk about that, We talk about how people want to
discount exactly. I mean, who cares. I mean, Trump didn't
get anything done and couldn't get anything done, But that's
not the point of Trump. That The point of Trump
is just how he started all this. Yeah, there were
you know, okay, the Trayvon Martin shooting, well, Occupy Wall
Street and the Trayvon Martin shooting, and then the Michael
Brown shooting, the formation of BLM, which most people don't remember.
Barack Obama would basically call a terrorist group, the Democrats
would call a terrorist group. And then you get up
to twenty fifteen and Trump goes down that escalator, start
saying the things that he says, and then it was
just okay, we have to take sides. Now.
Speaker 2: I think if Trump were the most competent, most machiavellian politician,
political actor, power player in the world, that he still
would have wouldn't have been able to do anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They they started working on him from the second he
blew away the primary debates.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when when he acted like a like no one's
ever seen in you know, in this lifetime and in
many lifetimes, someone acts like that in a political debate
in this country. When he started acting like that and
the people responded to him positively, you know, when a
certain group on the right responded to him positively, the right.
But basically then they knew that there was something really good,
and then brexits it was another thing. Yeah, but which
really means nothing. I mean, but it was it breaks
it means basically nothing has meant nothing other than some
other than symbolism. Pretty much just like Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean again, you could have the most the
most ruthless, ruthless political actors, the highest caliber, and I
think they still would have ended up like Trump, just
as effective as Trump and breaks it. Yeah, they were,
they were, They were ready. They had everything in order
well before he posed a real threat or while before
he've got formal power.
Speaker 1: These people have been doing this for one hundred years.
They're not stupid. Yeah, all right, let me start that
one again. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance,
it would extend to the stage of action as well
as of discussion and propaganda of deed, as well as
of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger
seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole
society is in the situation the theater audience when somebody
cries fire. It is a situation in which the total
catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by
a technical error but also by a rational miscalculation of risks,
or by a rash speech of one of the leaders.
In past, in different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist
and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre.
The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the
organization and its release on the people had become too short,
But the spreading of the word could have stopped before
it was too late. If the democratic tolerance had been
withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would
have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz in the World War.
Speaker 2: He sounds like every jew on my timeline.
Speaker 1: All right, let's keep going. The whole post fascist period
is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification
requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the
stage of communication, in word, print and picture. Such extreme
suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly
is indeed justified only in the whole of a society.
Only in the whole of a society is in extreme danger.
I maintain that our society is in such an extreme
emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state
of affairs.
Speaker 2: Yeah this once you declare a state of emergency, it
never goes away.
Speaker 1: Different opinions and philosophies can no longer compete peacefully for
adherence and persuasion on rational grounds. The marketplace of ideas
is organized and delimited by those who determine the national
and the individual interest. Hey, I'm back, I'm here, I'm back, we're.
Speaker 2: The description of the problem is spot on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. In this society for which the ideologists have
proclaimed the end of ideology, the false consciousness has become
the general consciousness, from the government down to its last
subject objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against
the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped. Their
continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused
rights and liberties, which grant constitutional powers to those who
oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that
the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have
them presupposes to withdrawal of civil rights from those who
prevent their exercise, and the liberation of the damned of
the earth presupposed the suppression not only for their old
but also of their new mass.
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, I'm rock hard again, look me gaining
my sense of normalcy requires you losing yours.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: And more and more people are having less and less
problem telling people that, which is great because he's absolutely right.
There is no rational discourse. There hasn't been for a while,
and even when there was, it was artificial in every sense.
Speaker 1: How can you have a rational discourse with people who
are I mean, it used to be Oh it was
someone on Oh, this is just someone on Twitter. Come on,
just turn on the cable news.
Speaker 2: All right, it's two channels.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: There's a plu.
Speaker 1: Right withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can
become active in tolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word,
and finally intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, towards
the self styled conservatives to the political right. These anti
democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society,
which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're doing that right now. It's great.
Speaker 1: The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating
and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance
mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society,
when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men
immune against other and better forms of life than tolerance
has been perverted. I mean you're yeah, I agree, Yeah,
I agree.
Speaker 2: Only let's let's fucking let's rotate this. Yeah, one hundred
and eighty degrees. And when this perversion starts in the
mind of the individual in his consciousness, his needs when hetero,
when hetero, when heteronom heteron heterononymous, heterononymous. Let's do that again.
Speaker 1: And when this perversion starts in the mind of the
individual in his consciousness, his needs when heteronomymous interests occupy
him before he can experience his servitude, than the efforts
to counteract his dehumanity. Dehumanization. Dehumanization must begin at the
place of entrance. There where the where the false consciousness
takes form, or rather it's systematically formed. It must begin
with stopping the words and images which feed this conscious.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's why we're going to crack down on disinformation.
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you know, planting the idea sees in people's
head like that's bad and wrong and you shouldn't do it,
And it goes from there. You go from there too.
Now you're not allowed to do.
Speaker 1: It, to be sure, this is censorship, even pre censorship,
but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship
that permeates the free media. Where the false consciousness has
become prevalent and national and popular behavior, it translates itself
almost immediately into practice. The safe distance between ideology and reality,
repressive thought and repressive action, between the word of destruction
and deed of destruction is dangerously shortened. Thus, the breakthrough
the false consciousness may provide the Archimedean point for a
larger emancipation at an infinitesimally small spot, to be sure,
But it is on the enlargement of such small spots
that the chance of change depends. The forces of emancipation
cannot be identified with any social class which, by virtue
of its material condition, is free from false consciousness.
Speaker 2: Going to ameliarize the escaton bro.
Speaker 1: Today, they are hopelessly dispersed throughout the society, and the
fighting minorities and isolated groups are often in opposition to
their own leadership. In the society at large, the mental
space for denial and reflection must first be recreated. Repulsed
by the concreteness of the administered society the effort of
emancipation becomes abstract. It is reduced to facilitating the recognition
of what is going on, to freeing language from the
tyranny of the Orwellian syntax and logic, to developing the
concept that the concepts that comprehend Reality's describing libertarianism more
than ever, the proposition holds true that progress in freedom
demands progress in the consciousness of freedom. Where the mind
has been made into a subject object of politics and policies,
intellectual autonomy, the realm of pure thought has become a
matter of political education, or rather counter education. This you
got anythink, not just just yeah. This means that previously
neutral value free formal aspects of learning and teaching now
become on their own grounds and in their own right,
political learning. To know the facts, the whole truth, and
to comprehend it is radical criticism throughout intellectual subversion. In
a world in which the human faculties and needs are
arrested or perverted, autonomous thinking leads into a perverted world
contradiction and counter image of the established world of repression.
I think the world that he is trying to lead
them into is going to be a much more perverted world,
but I'm using perverted in a much different way.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a much more annoying world.
Speaker 1: And this contradiction is not simply stipulated, is not simply
the product of confused thinking or fantasy, but is the
logical development of the given the existing world. To the
degree to which this development is actually impeded by the
sheer weight of a repressive society and the necessity of
making a living in it, Repression invades the academic enterprise itself,
even prior to all restrictions on academic freedom. The preempting
of the mind vitiates, vitiates, vitiates impartiality and objectivity. Unless
the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he
will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant
framework of values.
Speaker 2: What would that look like nowadays?
Speaker 1: Mean the academy scholarship, i e. The acquisition and communication
of knowledge prohibits the purification and isolation of facts from
the context of the whole truth. An essential part of
the latter is recognition of the frightening extent to which
history was made and recorded by and for the victors.
That is, the extent to which history was the development
of oppression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that needs to be changed, but uh, he'd be
I think you would be extremely happy with how that's
working out today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh, did you know that Marcuse was? I think
he was Paul Gottfried's doctoral director.
Speaker 2: I I believe that. Actually, Yeah, I haven't listened to
Godfried and a long time. He must he must be
like in his nineties now.
Speaker 1: No, he's like eighty, he's eighty. But oh but he's sharp. Yeah.
He was riding a bike like a year and a
half ago and just got hit by a car and
he's fine and he's like recovered and everything. And I
mean that guy's not That guy's not going anywhere man,
all right. An essential part of the latter is recognition
of the frightening extent to which history was made and
recorded by and for the victor. That is, to the
extent to which history was a development of oppression. And
this oppression is in the facts, in the facts themselves
what it establishes. Thus they themselves carry a negative value
as part and aspect of their facticity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hell yeah, facts don't care about your feelings. Oh yeah,
face the wall.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: To treat the great Crusades against humanity with the same
impartiality as the desperate struggles for humanity means neutralizing their
opposite historical function, reconciling the executioners with their victims, distorting
the record. Such spurious neutrality serves to reproduce acceptance of
the dominion of the victors in the consciousness of man.
Speaker 2: So getting back to last episode, no, actually, an objective,
an objective overview of history is not good.
Speaker 1: Actually yep. Here too, in the education of those who
are not yet maturely integrated in the mind of the young,
the ground for liberating tolerance is still to be created.
Speaker 2: That's right, children are our future.
Speaker 1: Education offers Still another example of spurious abstract tolerance in
the guise of concreteness and truth. It is epitomized in
the concept of self actualization, from the permissiveness of all
sorts of license to the child to the constant psychological
concern with the personal problems of the student. A large
scale movement is underway against the evils and repression and
the need for being oneself.
Speaker 2: Frequently self heavily medicated in all times.
Speaker 1: Frequently brushed aside is the question as to what has
to be repressed before one can be a self oneself.
The individual potential is first a negative one, a portion
of the potential of his society of aggression, guilt, feeling, ignorance, resentment, cruelty,
cruelty which vitiate his life instincts. If the identity of
the self is to be more than the immediate realization
of this potential, undesirable for the individual as human being,
then it requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation.
Speaker 2: This process involves at each stage SSRIs.
Speaker 1: This process involves at each stage, to use the ridiculed
terms which here reveal their succinct concreteness, the negation of
the negation, mediation of the intermediate. An identity is no
more and no less than this process. These people so much.
Alienation is the constant and essential element of identity, the
objective side of the subject, and not as.
Speaker 2: We identify ourselves through alien through what we are alienated from.
Speaker 1: For the most part, alienation is the constant and essential
element of identity, the objective side of the subject, and
not as it is made to appear today, a disease
of psychological condition. Freud Well knew the difference between progressive
and regressive, liberating and destructive repression the publicity of self
actualization promotes the removal of the one and the other.
It promotes existence in that immediacy, which in a repressive
society is, to use another Hegelian term, bad immediacy. I'm
not gonna do I'm not doing German today.
Speaker 2: Thats mite bark.
Speaker 1: It isolates the individual from the one dimension where he
could find himself, from his political existence, which is at
the core of his entire existence.
Speaker 2: This is why I fucking hate Frankfurt School because it
is basically just Freud and it's all German. So you
can you can take probably two thirds of the sentences
that we read so far and just delete them, and
then the remaining third is what he was actually trying
to say.
Speaker 1: Freud Yaqui does some destruction of Freud in part one
of Imperium that is beautiful and is just a map
and unbelievable takedown. Instead, it encourages nonconformity and letting go
in ways which leave the real engines of repression in
the society entirely intact, which even strengthened these engines by
substituting the satisfactions of private and personal rebellion for a
more than private and personal and therefore more authentic opposition.
Speaker 2: Oh God.
Speaker 1: The desublimation involved in this sort of self actualization is
itself repressive inasmuch as it weakens the necessity and the
power of the intellect, the catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness,
which does not revel in the archetype, in the archetypal
personal release of frustration, hopeless resurgence of the id, which
will sooner or later succumb to the omnipresent rationality of
the administered world, but which recognizes the horror of the
whole in the most private frustrated and actualizes itself in
this recognition. Oh fuck yourself so much, man.
Speaker 2: It's he just fucking freuded up. God, I can't do
it so bad.
Speaker 3: Oh oh.
Speaker 1: The TV show Mash used to push Freud. They would
bring on this, It would bring on this psychologist every
once in a while, Sydney, you know, try member. Oh yeah,
and he would he was like writing letters to Freud.
He was constantly like, you know, talking, quoting Freud. And
it's just like, oh God, that show was so bad.
It was. It was great in the first couple of seasons.
What was just a comedy. But then Alan all that
took over, and it was like, oh no, no. I've
tried to show how the changes in advanced democratic societies
which have undermined the basis of economic and political liberalism,
have also altered the liberal function of tolerance. The tolerance,
which was the great achievement of the liberal era, is
still professed with, professed, and with strong qualifications practiced, while
the economic and political process is subjected to an ubiquitous
and effective administration in accordance with the predominant interests.
Speaker 2: All right, he's he's back to being somewhat understandable.
Speaker 1: The results is an objective contradiction between the economic and
political structure on the one side, and the theory and
practice of toleration on the other.
Speaker 2: I can get down with that.
Speaker 1: The altered social structure tends to weaken the effectiveness of
tolerance towards dissenting and oppositional movements and to strengthen conservative
and reactionary forces.
Speaker 2: Knowing what we know now, not so much.
Speaker 1: Equality of tolerance becomes abstract spurious with the actual decline
of dissenting forces in the society. The opposition is insulated
in small and frequently antagonistic groups who even were tolerated
within the narrow limits set by the hierarchical structure of
society are powerless while they keep within their limits, I
mean one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: He's describing the right.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, yeah, but the tolerance shown to them is
deceptive and promotes coordination and on the firm foundations of
a coordinated society all but closed against qualitative change. Tolerance
itself serves to contain such change rather than to promote it. Yeah,
I mean, this is just more chomps what Chompsky eventually
really starts talking about.
Speaker 2: I forget who the organizer was, but the guy that
started Lollapalooza back in nineteen ninety one and originally intended
it to be like this.
Speaker 1: Was it Perry Farrel? Was it for Perry fell from
Jamee's addiction or was it someone else?
Speaker 2: I think it was somebody else. I'm pretty sure it
was a Jewish guy.
Speaker 1: But uh, it was a Jewish guy.
Speaker 2: All right, Maybe maybe it was him. I don't remember
his name, but within like it started in nineteen ninety one,
By nineteen ninety two, there were t shirt kios selling
selling t shirts for like twenty three dollars, which at
the time was ridiculous, and the bands weren't allowed to undercut.
There were you know, you weren't allowed to bring blankets
in because they wanted to charge you for their own plank.
It within a year, so you still had this this
idea of you know, this rebellious, this rebellious festival full
of you know, anti corporate you know, all these anti
corporate actors, and but it existed within the framework of
everything that they hated.
Speaker 1: I was at one, two and three. Yeah. Yeah, the
first year was great. The first year was fantastic. Yeah.
After that it was just like, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: It still looked great, Like looking at the videos from
back in the day, it still looked amazing.
Speaker 1: But well the bands were great and everything. But you know,
it's just like, yeah, but it did. It was like
it was sort of like it sort of wanted it
to be like the Agora. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean
it just yeah, yeah, I mean ten dollars waters and
stuff like that. Eventually within a year. But the tolerance
shown to them as acceptive and promotes coordination and on
the firm foundation of a coordinator society all but closed
against qualitative change. Tolerance itself serves to contain such change,
rather than to promote it.
Speaker 2: These yeah, think of lollapalooza, these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I just looked it up real quick. They do.
At least Wikipedia calls Perry Ferrell the founder. These same
conditions render the critique of such tolerance abstract and academic,
and the proposition that the balance between tolerance, the tolerance
towards the right and toward the left, would have to
be radically redressed in order to restore the liberating function
of tolerance becomes only an unrealistic speculation. Indeed, such a
redressing seems to be tantamounts to the establishment of a
right of resistance to the point of subversion. Yeah. Yeah,
so you have to basically allow one of those groups
to side with the state and then you can control them.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if you ask any liberal what their ideal,
I mean, where their definition of tolerances it would they
would probably say that it includes you know, movements, subversive movements,
which is, you know, in and of itself leftist and
anti rightist. No, it is you know. They would also
say that they would tolerate, you know, activism towards a
return to tradition and a return to uh you know,
homogeneity and all that, but only up to a point
where you used to Hitler.
Speaker 1: Well, well, I mean you you're a an iron kingdom.
More so in the twenties, the existing government and Hindenburg
and everything was I mean, they were tolerance of the left,
but they were more aligned with the right.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So the the real revolution you would call the real
revolutionaries would be coming from the left, and that would
be the k KPD.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: There is not there cannot be any such right for
any group or individual against the constitutional government sustained by
a majority of the population. But I believe that there
is a natural right of resistance for oppressed and overpowered
minorities to use extra legal means if the legal ones
have proved to be inadequate.
Speaker 2: All right, you heard him, did he?
Speaker 1: I mean, but I wonder what he would when he's
looking at this, if he were to see, now, what
would his opinion be of what is happening and the
fact that it's actually promoted from on high.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you could probably there's probably more than
a handful of people that are directly influenced by Marcuse
on the left that you could kind of see that
they're in lockstep with whatever they're told to be Yep.
Whether that's whether they're doing it grudgingly or whether they're skeptical,
I don't know.
Speaker 1: Law and order are always in everywhere, the law and
order which protect the established hierarchy. It is nonsensical to
invoke the absolute authority of this law and this order
against those who suffer from it and struggle against it,
not for personal advantages and revenge, but for their share
of humanity. There is no other judge over them than
the constituted authorities, the police, and their own conscience. If
they use violence, they do not start a new chain
of violence, but try to break an established one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: Hold on, someone send me it, Ryan Dawson Bell, Well,
let me read that again, because that's that's a good one.
If they use violence, they do not start a new
chain of violence, but try to break an established one.
Speaker 2: Does that mean violence is permissible in all instances?
Speaker 1: Well, only from one group, I'm sorry, since they will
be punished, they know the risk and when they are
willing to take it. No third person, and least of
all the educator and intellectual, has a right to to
preach them abstention.
Speaker 2: Hey, I mean to their credit, like actual Marxists, actual
communists have no problem calling calling the pacifist a liberal.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, oh yeah, I mean yeah, what was that
that one piece of graffiti that was making it around
Liberals get the rope too, Yeah yeah, I had with
a hammer and sickle on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If only there were more of them like that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a lot of people from our side
came to understand just how useless and actually dangerous liberalism
and classical liberalism is from like from neo reactionary, from
like Italian elitists and everything. And I think we both
came to it from like reading Lenin. Yeah we can't.
We finished reading Lenin and we're like, oh, oh, those
guys kind of go those guys are useless. Those guys
they're not only useless, they're kind of productive. Holy shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh atross around our neck.
Speaker 1: So what do you what do you think of this one?
Speaker 2: That was good? I I I love getting into uh,
getting into dialectical materialism. I hate Freud, and I love
that he finally he finally said it. We need to
tolerate violence from the left, and we need to not
tolerate violence from the right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I would rather they just speak the truth.
I mean, that's the Yeah, it's a great thing about
people in the Frankfurt school and you know Marxist Leninis.
They they're going to tell you exactly, You're not going
to question what they believe. Yeah, yep. Where you know
people who may have more right wing tendencies than say
like Glenn Beck, I have to hide them because yeah
they uh yeah, yeah, because.
Speaker 2: They get their their material material condition is contingent on
pleasing their liberal overlords.
Speaker 1: Yeah, classical liberal overlords and neo liberal overlords.
Speaker 2: Yep, don't get canceled.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, it's I understand why Owen Benjamin
went out there and he has eighty chickens and ten
goats and all these cows and everything like that.
Speaker 2: He is.
Speaker 1: Everything. If it all got taken away from him, even
if he couldn't spend paper, still live, still survive. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I Actually, my my cousin who's in my in
my wedding party, he texted me today is like, hey, man, like,
should I start thinking about like you know, forming alliances
and like getting to know my neighbors and stalking up
on Ammo? Because thanks right now? Really fucked and I
don't know how high or drunk he was at the time,
but I was like, man, we'll be fine, Like, we
will be fine.
Speaker 1: You didn't want to you don't want to break it
to them.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's the uh, that's the difference between online
me and real life met. I know that at least
where I'm at, I have a good support network I have.
I'm pretty secure in my Uh. It's like ship would
really have to go down for me to be in
any any real danger of starvation or going to jail
or anything like that, which it may very well, but
at the end of the day, I'll be fine.
Speaker 3: Mh.
Speaker 2: I think. I think if you're watching this show, you
already kind of have that in your in your mind.
You know, the the the trip wires that need to
happen before you start really freaking out. And I don't
think we're there yet.
Speaker 1: No, No, we're not there yet, but I know what
it looks like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Yep.
Speaker 1: To study, if anybody wants to go study, don't ask
me for book recommendations. Steady Yugoslavia sided places like that, Yep.
Speaker 2: I mean we can draw a lot on history and
we can kind of you know, parse things out a
priority with everything that's going on right now, you know,
foreign policy wise, domestically. But I think by and large,
if you're not in a highly populated urban area that
with you know, less than favorable demographics, you'll probably be fine.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, working on Uh even where I am right
now is a little too much for me. Working on
getting out Yep. We're going to get a little more. Yeah,
h the potential place. You're gonna have to know exactly
where that is to even find it.
Speaker 2: It looks amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, oh man, But all right, why don't you
talk about t L E or whatever you want to
talk about.
Speaker 2: I don't want to talk about t Luck. Those guys.
Speaker 1: Those guys are there's something wrong with them sometimes. Yeah,
this is one episode they got Donald Trump on there
and like Tucker Harles, the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2: I'll give your audience a stick peek where we're going
to get to the manisphere. Oh my god, we're gonna
be talking about the linear man doing everything in a
straight line.
Speaker 1: At least it'll be straight all right, man, Thank you
very much, thanks for having me. Thank Gar