Speaker 1: If you want to support the show and get the
episodes early and ad free, head on over to Freemanbeyond
the Wall dot com forward slash Support. I want to
explain something right now. If you support me through substack
or Patreon, you have access to an RSS feed that
you can plug into any podcastcher, including Apple, and you'll
be able to listen to the episodes through there. If
you support me through subscribe, star gum Road, or on
my website directly, I will send you a link where
you can download the file and you can listen to
it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support
everyone gives me. It keeps the show going. It allows
me to basically put out an episode every day now,
and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate.
I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two
even three a day, and yeah, I can't do it
without you, So thank you for the support. Head on
over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com, forward slash
Support and do it there.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show.
Thomas is here. We're going to go into part two
of Eric Hobsbaum. Are you doing Thomas, I know it
pretty well. Thanks for hosting me, of course. So what
are we going to look into today when it comes
to mister Hobsbam.
Speaker 2: I was going to expand upon his historical perspective and
why in substance terms he opposed the schismatics, the schismatic
tendency is, and the standard bearers of those things. After
nineteen sixty eight, people have very superficial understanding of Mersus
Leninism and of what Sovietism was generally. You know, That's
why I object a lot of people banning the phrase
cultural Marxism, like there's an appropriate context to apply that phraseology.
I'm not going to say there's not, but generally people
don't apply it in those contexts, and they seem to
discern anything or identify anything that's at all like radical
or you know, progressive and orientation or that's related to
the ongoing social engineering regime and like the paradigm that
he gives rise to in like discursive terms, that's identify
that as Marxism. I mean, that's that's grossly incorrect, you know,
And it's I'm not just playing word games or being
like a pedant or something, you know, it's important to
be clear about what we're talking about. Particularly we're dealing
with something as kind of abstract and conceptual as political theory,
you know, and a guy like Hobbs will almost a
real Marxist, you know, and he actively disdained the standard
bearers of the sorts of tendencies I just mentioned, you know,
not because he was like a good guy, you're because
he was correct in his assessment of historical phenomenon and
the approximate causes of you know, these punctuated developments in
the twentieth century. But he did have certain insights into
historical processes. You know. He's the one who coined the phrase,
the quote quote the short century to refer to the
twentieth century. I mean, Nolty agreed with it, you know,
the short century being the cycle of events that were
emerged in nineteen fourteen and that ended on November ninth,
nineteen eighty nine, you know, contra the long century, you
know of after water after Waterloo until nineteen fourteen, I
mean after Waterloo, other than the Crimean War and the
Franco Prussian War, both of which were very localized conflicts
and both of which were brief and neither of which
really had some destructive impactfulness at scale on the continent.
One of the reasons why so many mercenaries from Europe
fought in the War between the States, and even you know,
Henry Henry Werez, the commandant of Andersonville, who was unceremoniously hanged.
That's a that's a really grim and macabre story, everything
about Andersonville and his demise. But he was a Swiss
national who found his way in the United States, you know,
because that's where the action was, you know, don't get
me wrong, Like all kinds of punctuated things were happening
in Europe of a technological nature, of a developmental nature,
but like power political affairs weren't really happening there, you know,
I mean, and and if you take a long view, yes, okay,
that kind of thing is always underway. But in Warren
peace terms, there were not punctuated crises. There were not
you know, crisis modalities that were emerging that you know,
generated a need for men under arms and men of
adjacent sorts of skill sets, you know, to participate in
in those sorts of those sorts of uh happenings. But
in America, obviously you better believe that was underway, and
it's this is a tangent. I'll make it brief. But
you know McLellan who was famously sex by Lincoln, you know,
and he you know, Lincoln, I'm paraphrasing what you know.
Lincoln famisly said, you know, I've got I've got a
commanding general who refuses to assault, you know. And uh
so his detractors and not just among not just among
radical reformers and abolitionists, but even pretty moderate people either
band they brand him some kind of coward who was
like afraid of being under fire or this, or he
was some kind of like secret copper head. He was
in neither of those things. He'd been on the ground
in primea because before the up in the States kicked off.
Other than the Indian Wars, which were utterly savage, but
we're not. But in scope and scale, we're very limited,
you know, other than that like conventional combined ours what
was then emerging combined arms, you know, indirect fire like
the only way you really I mean liaising with foreign
militaries was like something that was done in the Western
world anyway. But it's also like if you wanted to,
you know, if you wanted to if you wanted to
cut your teeth in a combat zone. You know McClellan's generation, Well,
you went to Europe, you know, you drilled with the Prussians,
or you know, you you were ear liaison to the
French or the British. And McClelland saw what was happening
on the ground in Crimea, and you saw like master
artillery and what it was doing to the human body.
And he's like, this is horrific. So he's like, if
we if we we started, if we start, if we
start cavalry charging like masks, Confederate artillery, like, this is
gonna be a slaughter. And that's what happened, you know.
But uh, this is sort of an aside with any event,
you know. Uh, to bring it back to where we
should be at. I I did it right up years
back of Paul Godfrey's talk and his paper. You know
how the left won the Cold War? Because the left
did win the Cold War. The people like Hobsbaum lost
the Cold War, you know, the standard bearers of Sovietism
and of Uh. I don't think Hosmam was a Stalinist
in the sense that somebody like Dougan kind of is
or in the way more and more properly. He's not
a Stalinists in the way that guys like Jackson Hinkle are.
But I mean he wasn't He wasn't opposed to that
tendency either, you know. And like we got into he stated,
and know un certain terms, you know, after after the
Ennergerm and border came down, that you know, whatever happened
in the Soviet Union, but it had the had the
Communist revolution been realized, it would have been worth it
in his opinion, you know. And that's so he was.
He was honest about, you know, about that perspective. And
I mean that's the way every that's the way every
Marcist Leninists thought, you know, and and such that they
still exist today. I don't think guys like Hankle when
like the kind of reconstituted American Communist Party they've always
got a presence on the East Coast. These days, they're
distinct from like whatever this vestigial Communist Party USA, which
are just like a bunch of liberals who don't know
what the fuck they're talking about. But kind of like
the reconstituted American Communist Party, I mean, they believe that too,
But they're kind of they're they're kind of like a
dialectical offshoot of what was the Marcus Lennon's perspective. I
think that they uh, I think they're big on guys
like Emmanuel Wallerstein and like they they subscribed like global
systems theory, which is serious stuff. But but they are
like Stalinists, like they don't you know, they're they tolerate
religious people these days, they're not they're not these like
doctrinal atheists who view themselves as being at war with
established churches and things like, they're tolerant to that, but
they're they remain like atheistic. But what was it matter
if you killed twenty million people to advance, uh, you
know the realization of true communism, Like it doesn't matter
because well you know that that that's that's just creative
destruction and and human if humans are just so much
mentioned material, admittedly more valuable than you know, animal livestock
or material things that may be as they may be there,
there's still just like so much you know, material, you know,
and that uh, that's important to keep in mind. I mean,
I'm not not just I'm not being you know, I'm
not I'm not like moralizing her, saying like, and this
is why the Communists are a bunch of slavery beast.
I think that their worldview, in addition to being kind
of laughably up to and it's there. Yeah, I I
believe it's like highly crr up morally, But that's that's
not at base. It's not really why people like me
like object to their perspective, you know. But at the
same time, you know, I uh, for some reason, the
kinds of people people looks like Chompsky all the time.
And don't get me wrong, like I think Chomsky wrote
some pretty good stuff on linguistics and he he he uh,
he'd be pretty handily treated people like Fuco who considered
to be kind of un serious degenerates. But I mean Chompsky.
Chompsky's basically like a moral lier and a polemicist, and
I don't think he's got to really develop view of
political theory. But I mean, I mean guys on the right,
or at least guys kind of adjacent, they don't have
to say Chomsky, but then they act like I'm some
weirdo where like it's being like devy and my side
hobbsbamb you know, like Howsong was a serious historian man
like unlike Chompsky, he like drops polemic about like, you know,
America is doing mean things, but the and like donomy wrong,
like America is there to be savage but the day Chompsky,
you know, he's he comes off like some handwringing old woman.
And I don't, I don't. I don't think he's a
real political theorist, you know, like it's I don't. It's
not just me kind of guarding my own proverbial wheelhouse.
I you know, at the level of deep analysis like
nol Tine Hosbaum and like economy, political economs like Joseph Schumpeter,
the sence of insights, they were cable of like in
the moment, most people can't do that, you know. And
I meet a lot of guys whoever this idea that
you know, oh, you're like a mathematician or like you
sell insurance, or like you're you know, some kind of
molecular biologists, but oh, anybody you can have a take
on political theory. It's like what the fuck are you
talking about? You know? And that's these guys that went
no insight. It's not even made like IQ man, Like
these guys are like way smarter than I am, you know,
and but they they're but they're like conceptually illiterates because
they can't discern the relevant patterns and things, you know,
like it's it's not like an intelligence thing. Yeah, I
don't think you can.
Speaker 1: I mean, I accuse of religion now on the right,
on some parts of the right. I mean, if you
mentioned IQ and you do anything to like take one
step to say, well, you know, it really doesn't matter
with this, they just oh, that's cope.
Speaker 2: That's cope.
Speaker 1: Bro, that's cope.
Speaker 2: Well, no, they're retards and that's like outmoded thinking, you know,
Like I always making the point like Bill Gates, I
guarantee you as a higher IQ than Muhammad, Cromwell, Napoleon
or Hitler. He's also like a total shithead. He's totally
devoid of any creativity and in some ways as the
fucking idiots and like nobody is gonna die for Bill Gates, Okay,
I mean it's like, okay, great, Like there's some there's
some Chinese guy who like faint have you ever saw
like a girl naked and lives with his mommy, and
he's got an IQ of like two hundred. Okay, that's awesome.
If I need somebody to do like math problems nobody
can do, I'll hire him to do that. But I
don't understand why I should give a fuck, you know,
like it's basically you know what IQ is, man, IQ
is a it's like it's it's cold war managerialism, whereby
it's like, look, we basically like like we need like
widget makers, and we need guys who manage the widget factory,
and we need some criteria where can identify people who
below a certain threshold are basically subnormal and useless. That's
what IQ is. It's not like you know, oh, if
you're like Q was this high, you know you're you're
you're gonna like lead like a revolution and conquer the
Arabian Peninsula. Or if like your IQs like within these parameters,
like you're Adoff Hitler or I mean it's fucking retarded,
like it doesn't and I mean for people I even
meaning some v measy and sort of like that, and
it's like you're basically taking you're basically taking, uh, this
kind of ridiculous sort of like bureaucrats fetis from the
public school system and like deciding it's like some like
holy criteria, like and they don't even realize that's what
they're doing. So but yeah, we'll get into the substance
of what we need to talk about today. I uh,
I didn't mean to uh whip off about uh about tangents,
but I made the point before. You know, Hobsbam, he
talked a lot about the origins of nationalism. And to clarify,
because I don't want people jumping over my shit. We're
not talking about believing in one's ethnos, we're not talking
about caring about your race, We're not talking about any
of that. We're talking about this kind of like progressive
modernist like political modality, like organizing modality called nationalism, which
is a base of liberal idea. And it basically arbitrarily says,
you know, kind of the classical view of sovereignty, whether
it invests in like a royal dynasty or whether it
invests in you know, you know, men who are kind
of like you know, for all part, permsons an elected
king by the police. In lieu with that, it says,
like all these people in this geographic area who happen
to have linguistic fluency, and like we've declared the national dialect.
You're part of this nation now, you know, it doesn't
matter what religion you are, It doesn't matter where your
loyalties lie in terms of things that supersede you know,
administrative politics. This is just like the French nation, or
this is the Polish nation. And famously Hitler said that
was about the biggest obstacle to Germany being able to
project power on the world stage. It's people internalize this
nonsense and it became this kind of like self defeating imperative,
like whereby people mired in this kind of alienated circumstance
wrought by industrial urban modernity, they kind of like clung
to this idea of like a nationalist like political model.
And again we're not talking about real belief in one's ethnos,
We're talking about a contrivance, you know, and the and
it's also Habswam made the point and we're so made
the same point. Nationalism it based as individualistic. It emerged
as a liberal idea and entailed the notion of okay,
here's this nation based on these arbitrary criteria that generally
have to do with the ability to communicate and mutual intelligibility.
But it's made up in the estimation of people who
contry tribe, of the cityology of individual citizens, and every
individual is recognized by the nation, you know, as as
some kind of like sovereign decision maker unto himself, like
obviously rubber meets the road, and nobody abides that who's
actually in power. But that's the theory, and that's kind
of like the moral mythology of it. You know, this
is extremely at odds with the past. You know, where
your responsibility was to your monarch or to the local
lord and above him and ultimately like to you know,
your your faith and the representatives of your confessional heritage
and your rights and privileges accrued from your profession or
from you know, these social and collective or corporate corporative
groups that you belong to. You know, the whole point
in nationalism is it tears all that down, know, these
kind of natural ancient communitarian bonds. No, no, no, that's
the illegitimate. Now you're just an individual, but you're part
of this body politic because you happen to speak French
or you happen to speak Polish, or like, you know,
you happen to be somebody who speaks like High German,
but you live in Belgium. Like that's that's what we're
talking about. That's what he was talking about, you know.
And that's Cobsbomb's take, which is well placed, was that
conservatism is just it's just like it's just like liberal individualism.
That's basically a kind of class war against aristocracy by
like a thirsty and kind of covetist like capitalist class
go on to like discredit everything that came before, say no, no, no,
all these things that are important, you know, relating to
national identity, like we're the ones who are the managers
those things, and you know, everybody's an individual, but you
need us to like guard these individ dual rights. Like
that's what nationalism is in the capital in sense it's
not saying I don't want to live in multiculturalism. It's
not saying I'm proud to be white. It's not saying,
you know, I want my country to be owners and Catholic.
There has nothing to do with it. Nothing, And that's
one of the reasons why these quote unquote nationalist governments
they like never lead anything, you know, and the moment
they go away, you know what little kind of concessions
there were, the kind of preserving normalcy, just like evapellites,
because it's a it's a house, it's a paper house,
you know. And Hobsbaum was very big on what he
called the Dual Revolution, I mean, my stay was big
on it. I mean he identified he identified the dual
Revolution as a historical phenomenon that came to shape governmental
imperatives and came to kind of frame everything related to,
you know, the political sphere of activity, both you know,
in theoretical capacities as well as in terms of praxis
and what actually developed. Like what do you mean by
the Dual Revolution specifically? And as we got into it
before last time, and we're talking about Hobbsbom's kind of
like four value magnum opus, you know, dealing with the
age of the Age of revolution between seventeen eighty nine
eighteen forty eight, House Slump's take is that, okay, you know,
the Jacob Revolution and all this kind of radicalism and
all this all this abhieval you know, He's like that
was inextricably bound up with like technological and economic changes
that they constituted this kind of grand future shock, you know,
really like the first industry revolution. So is that you
can't extricate these things. You know that they're very Marxist
lenin this view of it, but they're not wrong. You
can't really you can't really identify like what came first
or what was the prime move on. It was both
of these things, you know, kind of like inextricably tethered
doing another a combination of like dialectical process and conceptual
activity as well as you know, kind of the the
binding up of of economic imperatives with political life in
a way that hadn't happened before. So you know, these
enlightenment ideas, which on the one hand are kind of
hollow ideological phraseology, these kinds of you know, democracy like
but not real democracy like you know, procedural procedural democracy
like nationalism and liberalism. This kind of stuff gained traction
because people were getting crushed by these new economic modalities
that nobody knew how to manage, you know, and old
wealth was being wiped out hand over fists. Know, so
there was charaistropic effects to this. So like people looking
for remedies, you know, they were uniquely susceptible to this
kind of thought. But they also people develop these kinds
of ideas based on these disruptions, you know, because they
were kind of ripped out of environs where they had
meaningful reference points beyond their own lives, you know, and uh,
people's lives were comparatively short then, you know, and so
this this this kind of taken together, this developed its
own momentum. It was like going the process and an
animating principle as well as uh, you know, like uh
a key, like framing a key, framing device of of
of the zeitgeist, you know. Now, when the French Revolution
was defeated, you know, and and particularly after you know, Waterloo,
I because Napoleon, Uh, Napoleon was a lot like Cromwell
and a lot like Hitler. I agree with Russell Stoffley.
I think Hitler was more like Mohammed than he was anybody.
But and Napoleon didn't have that messianic uh sensibility. I'm
talking in political terms, not in like theological ones. But
what happened in the I mean, what happened in the
Reign of Terror and what happened in the aftermath when
Napoleon literally trying to conquer the continent and you know,
become Emperor of Europa. The view from what remained like
the royal courts in Europe, and the view from kind
of like the nascent political managerial class was this can
never ever happen again. Okay, So the Congress of Vienna
Metternich kind of first and foremost among this type, you know,
kind of like the whole raison deetra of state craft
became like balance of power, you know e. Michael Jones
makes the point that all rationalist perspectives partake in some
way of like Newtonian physics, you know, this kind of
like perfect balance of like dynamic but totally controlled motion.
It's more complicated than that, and Jones is its own
as a very like punitive view of like Newton. I
don't want to get into that, but he's right about
what I just indicated, okay. And balance of power politics,
that's where it comes from, okay, And that's why it's
misguided when a lot of these people it's kind of
like the mantra of the midwidth that oh, Churchill wasn't crazy,
and Churchill wasn't totally corrupted you know by alien interests.
He was just trying to maintain the balance of power
and no European power can become too strong. That's not
at all what he was doing, and that was obsolete
anyway by the twentieth century. That got shot to pieces
in nineteen fourteen, and nobody thought that way anymore, okay,
And that's why the reason why it was apocalyptic thinking
came about in the twentieth century because what had been
the return to like rationalist normalcy. That died in the
trenches along with millions of guys who got blown to bits.
It died like buried beneath like the mud and shit
and all of their body parts. Nobody thought that way,
And that's not what Churchill was doing. And even if
it was, that's that that be a ridiculous mission to
take on in nineteen thirty nine, It would make no sense.
But that's the uh that's the source of this kind
of like reactionary stance, and Haslam calls it reactionary equals
the Metrinage perspective reactionary because it's not truly conservative. It's
literally a reaction it's saying, how do we deal with
future shock? How do we deal with the disruption of
this kind of like rational balancing of furies. How do
we restore something manageable and something that is primarily governed
by reason? You know, here is how we do it.
We do it by like managing power, you know, like
it's some kind of like it like it's some kind
of quantity of energy. You know, they can be like
redirected or kind of purpose towards this or you know,
almost like an engineering problem. Okay, that's that's what is
meant by reactionary. Because it was a nobody, not Metterniche,
not the people at the Congress of Vienna, not not
you know, not the people who later opposed the eighteen
forty eight revolutions. Nobody was saying, we're gonna go back
to having you know, like a king holds absolute sovereignty.
Nobody was saying, we're gonna go back to you know,
the pope being the true like Emperor of Europe is
God's emissari. Nobody was saying that It wasn't even they
would have like scoffed at that prospect, but it wasn't
even within their contemplation. You know, it was a reaction okay,
and the fact that it had some trappings of what
came before that really had more to do with an
interest in stability moving forward and like Enlightenment ideology, conceptual
biases than it did with any like, oh, we gotta
guard tradition and we got to guard like the organic
basis of national life or so this is really important. Okay,
This is one of the reasons I cite Hosbo because
conservatives are not aditionalists. They're not trying to like preserve
like the integrity of your race, if that's important to
you or whatever. They're not trying to that. They're not
they're not trying to undo modernity. They're not trying to
I mean, I'm not even saying that's good, but that
they're not doing that. You know, they're they're they're they're
arch modernists. They're arch modernist liberals who are trying to
manage revolutionary imperatives and stop them from happening. Whether they're
from the left or whether they're from the right, you know,
no matter where they come from, that is their notion.
That's why conservatism is bullshit, you know. And this is uh,
you know again, that's if people, I know, not everybody
wants to sit around reading political theory like I do.
But it's like Okay. This is why you should read
Hobsbaum just as like an educated partisan, Okay, because he's
right about those things, like his conclusions in terms of
like applied UH efforts and his his conclusion in terms
of what's desirable are wrong, but his diagnostic process isn't wrong,
and his observations aren't wrong. They're generally correct, you know.
And again the Marxist over emphasize this. But you know,
the degree and the degree to which suddenly production got
taken out of like a communitarian shop or like your household,
to go from being like I'm a farmer and you know,
I'm a subsistence farmer, but I have enough surplus to
trade with other farmers, or going from being like a
blacksmith where you're part of some collective with like three
other guys and you like make stuff people need. Getting
ripped out of that and going to work in a
factory where you're literally pulling a lever or like manhandling
some dangerous machine for ten hours a day. That's probably
that's about the most disrupted thing that's ever happened to
people at scale, you know. And it's and on top
of that too, the introduction of money at scale like anything,
all all indicators of wealth that for forty thousand years
quite literally, like people were habituated to no, no, no, no no.
Now you get a paper certificate and it's fungible, and
you can find somebody who like has stuff you need,
they'll accept that this is this is insane. This is
totally insane, you know. And it took decades for people
to adapt to that, you know, And it really wasn't
until people born in the nineteen twenties and thirties were
totally habituated to that. But it took that long, you know.
So the degree to which this disrupted everything that everybody
had taken for granted and you know, just created unmanageable conditions,
you know, I mean think about too, like trying to
manage economic imperatives. I'm not even talking about a planned economy.
I'm saying just being able to balance the proverbial like
a Ledger Bucks. There's a factory that employs twenty thousand people.
I'm using a pencil and paper and an advocates to
try and figure out like what our outlays are, like
what we need to produce to be profitable, like what
we need, how much we need to earn to like
stay afloat like what debts we owe to who? At
some point that's going to collapse on itself and people
are gonna starve. And then happened over and over and
over again, and most punctuatedly, it happened in a great depression.
And it wasn't because of like bankers or whatever like
von Mesian's think. It was because of what I just said.
That could never happen now because it's been rubberized, because
data management now it's as simple as turning on a machine.
Now that's incredibly corrupt. People make half with that wealth
is wiped out owing to malfeasans in greed. But there's
not gonna be like the stock market is not going
to plummet five thousand points because of some like air
because of like some accounting error at scale, or because
of like a lack of situational awareness that has like
a catastrophic impact that could never happen again. Okay, so
when people talk about that, that's stupid. But this was
like an everyday reality really from like the close of
the eighteenth century until like like really until like the
nineteen seventies, you know what I mean. It's so basically
people were like costing on the precipice of some kind
of like disaster, you know, and that's why people became communists,
like the man in the street, And that's why guys
like Ernest Tollman, who's kind of the consummate like like
uh like aryan German like Burger type, Like that's why
those guys like fact like like like Factory Floridas beinging
communists like communist iyology and it's it's foundation and like
a Jewish revolutionary spirit or like sectarian antipathy or like
ethnosectarian hostility, like yes, that at at scale of at
dialectical scale and process, like yes, that is where it
comes from. But where the rubber meets the road. What
I just said is why it became this. There's there's
animating imperative that swept up millions and millions of people.
Like that's why you know, now it's a bit different.
There's other reasons why. I mean, it would never become
a mass movement again, you know, even though when I
say that, like Marxist Leninism or like it's it's dialectically
altered variant. When I say that, it's like enjoy something
of resurgence. I mean like in terms of like fringe elements, okay,
and there's like a small, very small and absolute terms
like vanguard of those guys or somewhat in us. They
haven't kind of had their shit together and moving forward
like this century. They were probably able to carve out
some semi sovereign spaces locally, but were small and scale.
But that's what I mean. I don't mean that like, oh,
this is resurgent and there'd be like some sort of
highly scaled variant of this again, but one a second,
but Hosbo, I'm also like moving on a bit. You know,
all these things, this basic of storicism, this is kind
of what there's kind of what separated Hosmon from the schismatics,
like initially, okay, because they were always schismatics. I mean,
the sixty eight ers were basically the ideological descendants and
Trotsky even I who a lot of them were just
kind of bandwagoning. I didn't realize that's what they were,
you know, at the cadre level of of the leadership element.
That's what they were about, you know, And uh, this
is important and you Hosbom his later his later output,
especially and you know, after people are about forty or fifty,
they don't like really radically change their viewpoint guess what
I mean in a moment in condext But hosbom Uh
his later output in like especially in the nineteen nineties,
it dealt a lot with what he perceived is like
cultural decadence, like the kind of corruption is social democracy,
the intellectual and moral poverty of the new left, you know,
the ability of capitalism as he perceived it to resist
historical processes and endoor beyond in his estimation, it's what
should have been. It's kind of viable, it's sort of
viable life as a conceptual bottle. So people kind of said, like, oh,
haswak again this second bittered old guy after the Cold
War and saying, no, I don't. I don't believe that
he always thought this, But it would have been pointless
to kind of bandy that like during the Cold War,
there was just there just would have been a context
and it would have gone without saying. And also even
much as uh like the orthodox left, you know, the
pro Soviet left, much as they kind of despised the schismatics,
I mean they they were they were literally at war
with America and NATO, and it's a Jason Elements. They weren't.
They weren't gonna pick like some sectarian fight with a
bunch of sixty eight ers who were like voting in
like the sweetest Green Party. When you know there's there's
a good possibility at some point there's gonna be a
nuclear war with their ops. They're not. That was just
was not even within their contemplation. But in uh in
the early nineties, Hosbon dropped a book that's I think
this might have been his last. I should know this.
I think this was his last. He wrote say something only,
but I think this is his last, like like published book.
It was called The Age of Extremes, The Short Century.
The Short Century nineteen fourteen to nineteen ninety one identify
at the end of the Short Century as nineteen eighty
nine Hobbswall nineteen ninety one with the formal dissolution of
the Soviet Union. So over clarity, that's what he meant.
But he kind of on popular culture a lot, you know,
and he said, look, he's like in the sixties popular
culture totally changed. You were like before that. He's like
the kind of pop culture icons where they were talking
about like pet Boone, or they were talking about John Wayne,
or whether they were talking about somebody like even even
somebody like Steve McQueen or or some of these guys,
you know, they they they might have represented kind of
adalized vision of Americana. But he's like just and he's
like those very deliberate and there's something very corporate about that.
But at the same time, these kinds of figures and
these motifs, they basically mirrored the way that like people
had always kind of thought, you know, like simple minds
that may be to some people, you know, in the
nineteen sixties, the kind of like rock star identity, which
don't get me wrong, had always you know, uh, the
reason a lot of like old rock and blues guys
would always talk about selling your soul to the devil
because guys in that life did die young and they
ended up and totally fucked up circumstances. But kind of
like the mass murdering of this to like Bougie's and
like and Lanes, you know, he had tonified like Janis Joppelin,
Brian Jones, Bob Marley, you know, and all and all
this kind of hippie garbage. You know, he's like, Okay,
these people weren't just viewed as pop culture figures, Like
people decided these these people stood in for like literal
cultural icons, you know, the you have, like the kind
of like stereotypical like boomer idiot or things like the
Beatles that are like uttering like like sacred truths or something,
you know, like and this idea that being old is bad.
You know, life is horrible after you're like twenty eight
or thirty, you know, Uh, there's something glorious about not
getting beyond that stage and like dying from partying. You know.
Cosmon View was like, Okay, first of all, this is
a way of kind of like dumbing people down, and
it's it's it's a way of kind of like capitalism
artificially sustaining itself by selling this kind of like lifestyle
image that's pretending to be radical or pretending to be
like at odds of what came before, and it is
but not in you know, the post seventeen eighty nine sense,
you know. And he said that like this basically, this
kind of passive nihilism turns anybody, turns everybody you know,
basically into sort of like a comatose like consumer, you know,
and this kind of contempt for older people. He's like,
you know, if you're gonna say that like everything is
shit basically after not ruled by your hormones, and I
don't I don't have content for young people, and I
don't think Osmon did either. But he's saying this kind
of caricature of youth I was presented you know by
like capitalist media in his estimation. You know, he's like, basically,
you're saying that anyone who has lived long enough and
gonna develop like an evolved in view of what of
the system we live under a scale they're bad or
they're like the police, or they're trying to tell you
to do things you don't want to do. So it's
kind of just like deliberate dumbing down under auspices of rebellion.
And that's insightful because that really is true and this
kind of weird preaching. You know, these like Rocketbelly guys
like Eddie Cochrane, like Elvis, like Buddy Holly, like uh
you know, like like like like Richie Valen, these guys
weren't trying to sell people on some lifestyle. You know,
they were like poor, They were poor redneck guys in
balance case you know, you're poor, like East La Spanish guys,
you know, and there was a real like energy there.
They had kind of a dark side that was exemplified
by people like stark Weather, I mean, unfortunately, but these
guys were never going out like preaching some weird sociology
of people that wouldn't even occurred to them, because that's
that's not what musicians do. Like the fact that this
became part of the package in Hobswham's view, that was
totally ideological. You know, that was not some accident. That
wasn't just people in the thing with the zeitgeist. It
wasn't just some kind of weird feedback loop owing to
sort of like the integration and narratives because of TV. No,
this was very deliberate, you know. And so in his view,
in his view, like basically American pop culture from about
nineteen sixty four or sixty five to like the then president,
which was like nineteen ninety three when he wrote this,
He's like, this is basically capitalist propaganda, you know. And
you obviously in our view it's social engineering. At Hobbs,
they picually care about that on its own terms. But
again he opposed that stuff because he's like, this is
basically trying to get you drunk on sex or taking
drugs or like cloud chasing, so that you basically never
mature in like a rational adult and you never contemplate
like why you're in the condition you're in, and you
never contemplate like why there's not like any economic justice
in his view, you know. And again it's these conclusions
really have nothing to do with our perspective. But the
process he describes and what these what this sort of
like pop cultural uh product represents, Like he is right
about that or he wasn't right about that, you know,
and he and he said this stuff had like real
he said, he said that the true like he said
that was truly different about this this sort of this
sort of propaganda as pop culture is threefold. You know.
He's like, first, he's like, youth was always seen, even
even in cultures that like revered youth, if you're talking
about like classical Greece or the Third Reich or even
like doing so a Union, it was still vis like
a preparatory stage for adulthood in some sense. As you know,
youth is important, the youth are vigorous. We need them
to protect us, to fight our wars, to you know,
develop passionate ideas that they can later build upon and innovate.
But you know, this is important because it's a critical
stage towards the final phase of full human development, that
that all was like done away with. It's like, no,
youth is some end in itself being old as shit,
you know, being a young being a teenager or a
young person, that is the zenith of life, and your
life is miserable after that. So you've got to try
and hang out those aspects as much as you can,
whether it's through taking drugs or like you know, including hormones,
whether it's like refusing to get married so you can
like have sex a lot of girls, whether it's you know,
refusing to behave in a responsible way, whether it's you know,
refusing to take on a real political perspective because that's like, oh,
that's like, you know, that's that square stuff. This all
is very deliberate, and this is very This is that
odds basy with every human culture that ever existed. Secondly,
it became dominant in market economy. It's like every single
one of them. It's not just like in America or
in the UK, there's this weird kind of youth obsessed
tendency owing to kind of the population boom of World
War two. No, this happened like everywhere that America like
was able to like plant its footprint. You know, they're
talking about Japan with you know, India, whether you're talking
about you know, France, whether you're talking about you know
that then you know East Block former his block that
was like opening up, but you're talking about Finland, where
you're talking about you know, Latin America. That they can't
just be like some spontaneous homogenization, okay, like uh, pop
colog doesn't just developed this kind of like homogenous ideological
imperative just by complete accidents, especially like pre internet that
was that was laughable. And the third thing you identified
was that it became truly international in a way that
didn't really make sense. You know. He's like if you
take stuff like the Beatles, or if you take stuff
uh you know, like some of these movies that like
pop so much on the production code got done away with,
like the graduate. A lot of times stuff will even translated,
like people don't even understand like what they were hearing
because it was you know, and it wasn't. It's not
there was some program where you could upload subtitles to
release a movie in India or China. But nevertheless, there
was this constant stream of mostly radio then but also
TV and like the richer developing world that said like
this is cool, this is how you should be. So
people kind of like ate up the visual aspect and
you know, kind of in congress with you know, the
the overtly ideological kind of like radio media stuff. There's
all model in radio for Europe of course. You know,
it's like this became this international kind of this became
this uniform, ideologically motivated international subculture without even being linguistically diverse,
you know. And it was a it's not like no,
it's not like this was happening a gunpoint. You know,
like it's not like, uh, it's not like American soldiers
were going into like Angola and like blowing away the
guy who ran like the local radio station and saying,
you're gonna listen to this, You're gonna play this. You know,
its ability to like insinuate itself kind of along with
you know, the the illusion of wealth. He's like, that's
rare in terms of trying to insinuate a social sensibility
within people or try to get them to develop sort
of like a covenist sense of self and how they
want their life to be. You know, He's like, that's
kind of strength of capitalism. Capitalism is really, really, really good.
And again I don't use terms of capitalism to describe
what he's describing, but we're talking about Hobsbaum, so I'm
using his vernacular. In his view, he said, other ideologies,
whether you're talking about state socialism, you know, whether you're
talking about some kind of a you know, some kind
of anti modernist, but at the same time, like futurist fascism,
nothing is as effective as this and like insinuating itself globally. Now,
this is a buddle of that. Obviously. It's like, well,
you know, if you're dealing with like poor mentioned material,
or you know, if the rest of the world's laying
in ruins and all that exists is of America in
the Soviet Union, as producers of you know, mass culture,
you're gonna have perverse outcomes. Yeah, that's true, but that's
not really what he's talking about. He's saying, like, in
absolute terms, you wouldn't think that this stuff would have
like gone what we consider it by the face terms
like viral, but he did. And in Hobswong's view, that's
what keeps capitalism alive because it's not like it's not
like there's like great outcomes from people like yeah, if
you're in America, you're basically rubberized. If you're like if
you're rich comparatively you're middle class or amazing middle class,
you're basically rubberized against like true catastrophes. Now there are
people in America who really struggle, and they are not
but they're not the majority. Hobsam is talking more in
terms of like planetary scale most people in the world,
they're not. Really there's nothing to offer you from like
what he called the capitalist system. I mean, yeah, you
can you know, shortages as you may have known in
your lifetime have been largely mitigated. But that probably would
happen in any way. That doesn't explain like why in
like in brass Tacks terms, like white people in Africa,
white people in Latin America, white people in Asia have
just like internalized this perspective. It doesn't explain why some
like Jackass in Liberia like decided in nineteen ninety five.
He wants to be a gangster rapper like that. That
doesn't make any sense in terms of kind of most
precedented sociology. I think it makes a lot of sense
according to certain criteria that we're not present before that
are a bit outside the scope. But that's kind of
hops On's point, okay. And there were not many true
sociologists on the left. There was Seawright. Mills wasn't really
a leftist. I mean he he was viewed as like
a progressive by like by you know, by like Eisenhower,
ara standard, but he was an He was more kind
of like an economic sociologist who was like hostled uh like,
was consideredly a cabalist perspective. He but Hoswaon was a
genuine you know again it's I this is not an
absolute signifier that in Capsulate twenty was. But he was
like a Stalinist of its height, and very few of
those guys were like real sociologists. He was Christopher Lash
ironically hime in a lot of the conclusions Hoswaan did,
and his final book it was called progress that true
only Heaven. It dropped in like nineteen ninety four. So
over last died. Now, of course, Lash had been some
kind of peculiar frighto Marxist in his younger days, like
the kind of guy who'd been on a gism drawn mark.
He'd been very much influenced by marcusa in that school
I thought. And then Lash gradually became like one more
kind of conservative in his thought, like literally conservative. So
I'm not sure if you really count so Hoswem kind
of stands not quite alone, but it's there was a
very small fraternity of revolutionary Marxist Leninist who who had,
you know, like a sociologist that that was both methodologically
as well as intellectually rigorous in terms of you know,
in terms of UH output. So that's another reason why
UH people should take him seriously if I haven't convinced
the subs and other people who like what we do.
Hosbon did say, though, with a big shortcoming of of
capitalism or the capitalist perspective, is he says that owing
to this inherently conservative tendency. Now again, we're talking about
conservatism in the post seventeen eighty nine sense. We're not
talking about belief and tradition. We're not talking about you know,
reverence for for for customs. We're not talking about people
want to preserve old ways or preserve Harry, We're not
talking that at all. We're talking about ideological conservatism, which
again is UH is a product of Enlightenment liberalism. One
hundred percent. Cosm says that the thing that these that
these capitalists ideologues are really, really, really bad at is
predicting the future, not putting the future like a gypsy
the crystal ball, but kind of diagnosing the trajectory of
politics and UH an economic phenomenon. You know. That's why
he said that, Like he said that, like people like
Fukiyama are laughable, you know what they're like theories of everything,
like oh, you know they'll be they'll be no more
armed conflict because you know, they'll be prosperity, and you know,
people will will naturally like reject religion because they'll they'll
have all these like hedonistic outlets that no longer force
them to sublimate. And like Hobson's like that's ridiculous, that's nonsense,
you know, And he's like, basically, nobody has a worst
track record speaking in the nineteen nineties. He's like, nobody
had the worst nobody has the worst track record of
the preceding forty years, so basically probably a post war
era in like the nineties than like, you know, the capitalists.
You know, He's like, they're spectacularly bad at predicting what's
going to happen, and that's also why they got utterly
blindsided by like the implosion of the Soviet Union. You know.
Hobshm reserve a particular contempt for Calvin Coolidge. He did,
Coolie's kind of like a Reagan figure, which isn't I mean,
Reagan himself like lionized the Coolidge, but I think Reagan
is more like Eisenhower. Frankly, but uh interestingly, George Kennan
had a similar contempt for Reagan. He thought he was
an idiots. I mean, I got love for Kennon old day,
but I think he had some blind spots in his
own right. But what what hos I'm said in one
of his later books, Coolidge in nineteen twenty eight, I
think it was his is like a holiday message. You know,
there is nothing even a great depression. They had not
the kind of terrors in Ainty twenty nine obviously had
not sit in yet, but there was there was there
was an ominous air about things. So Coolidge's message, like
in Holiday Season nineteen twenty eight was quote the country
he can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the
future with optimism. That's fucking meaningless. That's like saying like,
things are great because my McDonald's lunch today, you know,
cheeseburgers taste good and it's Friday, and you know, I
like pussy Like it's I think a Cranser version of
what Coolidge dropped. Okay, I mean that's that's like almost
Clintonian and it's superficial, supervisually moronic, you know, uh essence,
you know. So like that's why Hobswom says that like capitalism,
it's got a permanent alibi for its failures because it
creates this climate. It basically just this dumb down climate
of cloud chasers and people thirsty and desperate for youth
and the kind of pleasures that supposedly attend youth. And
they're told that the experts, And you're always supposed to
trust experts, you know, like no Ball's wall says we
trust doctors. You're always supposed to trust the experts, whether
they're an economist, whether they're you know some Pentagon whiz kid.
I'm beating myself with that phraseology, I realize, or whether
they're you know, some medical doctor like doctor Fauci, and
the experts always say, you know something in the same
thing as what Coolidge said, there's just nothing but progress ahead.
There's nothing a prosperity, aad so oh when there's natural
when there's natural hiccups so to speak, you know, in markets,
or when there's problems or when a combination of malfeasance
and badly coded inputs lead to something like the two
thousand and eight crisis where billions of dollars are wiped out,
like oh the alibi the capitalists and who in a
at hop view is like, oh, this was an unforeseen crisis,
almost like a terrorist attack, you know, but darn it,
like we got the gumption to get through it. And
these things just can't be predicted, you know. It's a
hosba on this nonsense. This is absolutely foreseeable, you know, Like, granted,
there's always something of a there's always something of a
mystics belief in augury to Marxist Lenin is it's like
dressed up as like oh no, we're just diagnosing, you know,
through through a scientific method, the world historical process. But
they do they are right when they say, like, no,
history does not repeat itself. That some thing moron say.
But there are patterns two advents, particularly crises of like
an economic or military nature, and this idea like we're
just being blindsighted because this this can't be predicted, you know,
like that he's right about that, and that that is
the ongoing alibi of capitalism. Again, this is his phrase ology,
what he calls capitalism. I think I'm wanna take part
three in it somewhach different direction. And I think we're
coming up in the hour, So I'm gonna cease, if
that's okay, because if I if I start in on
what I want to start in on it, we're just
gonna have to abrogate it. And I don't want to
do that.
Speaker 1: No problem, Midt, all, no problem. Middle And you're getting
ready for a trip and everything, so yeah, yeah, you
don't want to don't want to keep you here forever. Yeah,
two plugs, we'll get out of here.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, my my, my good buddy. I don't want
to name check him because he's a very private person.
But like my homie, and my erstwhile like tech Frog,
who maintains my website, it's back up and running. Tyler
seven seventh seven dot com number seven h seven seventh
seven dot com. It's up to date, it's current. You
can find the archives and everything I do, and like
the alerts automatically kick on, like when this gets uploaded,
it'll automatically pop up, so it's current. I know it
was down for a few days. I'm gonna retool some stuff,
or rather my guy is gonna retool it. I've no
idea how to do that, but there's some things I
want to change. I'm not gonna I can't do that
until I get back from this trip. I'm going to
Portland tomorrow tomorrow being Halloween, a happy Halloween. I'll be
back on November seventh. I'm gonna need a few days
to recover, so realistically, it's probably gonna be like November
tenth before like I'm i'll be, I'll be streaming and
stuff from the road. But I this stuff's not gonna
get done other than that, so there's good. It's gonna
be about three weeks before a new POT episode is
is is uploaded. But speaking of the pod, you can,
and I'm gonna retool the website around mid month of November,
so the it'll be a lot easier to use and navigate.
They'll be I want that to be like at archival
library where you everybody can find everything for free, of course,
and that's that. But you can find the pod at
real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com. It's
the mind Phaser podcast. We've also got a pretty active forum.
There's also like there's a combination like short and medium
forum stuff, and that's the best way to keep up
with me, like hit me up there or hit me
up on t Gram. I got a t gram channel.
I don't fuck with dms on Twitter and stuff. I
had too many bad experiences and I I cannot keep
up with like Halpit dos and DM systems. But about
social media at Capital r EA l Underscore number seven
him as seven seven seven on Instagram, on t Gram,
I got a merse shop and yeah, man, if you
plug like the merse shop and the description, that would
be tremendous. I'd appreciate it very much, man.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's all set up and just copy and paste
it over safe travels man.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah, than anybody