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Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yana Show.
We're here for Part five Continental Philosophy. Thomas, what's happening
you do.
Speaker 2: Man, I'm doing okay, thanks for hosting me. I realized
that literally the subject of this series is condinal philosophy
like a capital C. But I'm gonna have to spend
time with Thomas Hobbes. First of all, that Hobbs in
dialogue with the condin old tradition, and he's a counterpart
to Machiavelli. And if you want to understand modern political philosophy,
there's a really good book that Leo Strauss wrote on this,
and Strauss's scholarship that's not of a polemical character, is
actually really good. I maintained he was like an important academic. Okay,
but if you want to understand, one of the reasons
why I called Schmidt was so much in dialogue with Hobbes.
I think of Schmidt Schmid's relation with the Hobbes as
being not on lake Mars's relationship to Hegel. It's complicated,
but we're gonna have to talk about Hobbs and Machiavelli.
And I'm gonna tackle Hobbs first because in a lot
of respects, I think he's the more significant theorist, especially considering,
you know, the guiding ideology of the political monoculture of globalism,
and Hobbs is ill understood by people, Like some people
view him as this kind of tepid reactionary who's just
making concessions to what became enlightenment shibblis, you know. Other
people view him as sort of a theorist of crisis actors.
Neither of those things are really true, you know. And
also one of the reasons why the political culture of
the UK tells us things, especially for somebody who's proverbial
stock in trade as regards to the research concentrations, as
comparative politics, there's a microcosm of what happens on the
continent in many ways in the British Isles, and the
Thirty Years Wore didn't touch and concern the UK obviously
like it did the continent, but the War Three Kingdoms,
there's a lot of common causes obleak to what was
happening across the English Channel. And the ascendency of Cromwell.
Brahmo was very much a Mohammed or Adolf Hitler, a
Napoleon type figure. I'd say that he was, in fa
act sort of the splendid example of that archetype. And
Cromwell is a great man, you know, but beyond the
obvious fact of his significance, the paradigms of a historical
and conceptual character that created him are are highly significant
to anybody who seeks to identify ultimate causes in a
processes of mind and the ongoing phenomena of you know,
conceptual discourse that creates political reality. So we're gonna dive
into Hobbes for the next this episode of the next one,
we're gonna dive into Hobbs in Machiavilli for context too.
If you read people like John Meersheimer, these like neo
realist types. They claim, like I said at the outset
of this series, that people like Thucidides, you know, represented
a tendency towards realism. That's nonsense. However, in the case
of Hobbs, who they like to claim as well, it's
somewhat less off base. There's something to that Hobbs was
a mathematician at base, and something I've noticed that people
don't fully understand unless they grew up reading the King
James Bible and stuff like that. When Hobbs talks about geometry,
he's talking about all of mathematics. He's also talking about
physics and physical sciences. You know, that was kind of
the convention of academ at the time. And it's also
relevant because one of the things that was happening at
this point is during you know, the scientific Revolution and uh,
you know, the proto Enlightenment and and and beyond, was
that general knowledge what there to for had been considered
general knowledge was bifurcating, but it hadn't fully been the
the verbal schisms hadn't fully ossified yet. So basically, when
when Hobbs says in geometry, he's talking about mathematics theoretical
and poetical, and he's talking about physics. Okay, Hobbes's impunitive
dialogue with Aristotle, and the key to that is his
ontological description of what it is for man to live
in nature, and we'll get to that in a minute.
But Hobbes viewed his mandate as well as uh, his
mission was to cultivate a scientific basis of political and
ethical philosophy. And this is the first time anybody had
really attempted this. Okay, Now that's got certain implications, not
the least to which is that it essentially calls for
extricating any ambition to perfect a man or to force
political ethics to comport with what is otherwise understood to
be a virtuous soul and conduct derived therein. It's brutally pragmatic,
and Hobbs goes even further and suggests that moral evaluations
are basically extrapolated from these kinds of instinctive things of
a pragmatic nature, and the kind of progeny of reason
within any man capable of it is that you know,
he's acting in his own self interest. And that doesn't
mean he doesn't have any attachments or or or genuine feelings,
burn't of passions, not reason, but it means that when
he acts politically and civically in total sociological terms, and
he actually takes is basically self interested and what he
purports to be a reciprocal abiding of duties, it more
derives from, you know, a kind of non aggression pack
to further that self interest with other similarly situated individuals
than it does any sort of high or moral imperative.
We'll get into what's wrong with that probably in the
next episode, but just laying foundation, we're getting a little
bit ahead of what I want to cover in Livning
your Terms. But obviously the challenge they're in vis a
vis that first postulate, how to cultivate, how to cultivate
and curate a scientific basis of political philosophy. There's got
to be some sort of basis for civic society that
is permanent, that can coexist with that first partiulate and
mitigate what otherwise would be the proverbial war of all
against dall, and possibly the literal war of all against all.
So some kind of ambition within the individuals who constantly
the body politic and make the mistake, and Hobbes's view,
they are animized individuals in their natural state, some sort
of impulse towards fulfillment of civic duty incidental active citizenship
has to be cultivated. And this is a no mean feat. Now,
this is also kind of the birth of analytic philosophy
in my opinion, as we think of it. Okay, because
the way Hobbs reationalizes what I just said and the
way he approaches that paradigm. How to reconcile these apparently
conflicting tendencies is by modeling sovereign authority and the essential
characteristics of sovereignty on a kind of systemic discourse. Now
to Hobbes, what was always most imperative, whether we're talking
about how to inculcate the body politic with civic responsibility,
or how to you know, define the parameters of sovereign
authority and describing what its essential characteristics are. He was
always fundamentally concerned with tethering the practical and theoretical and
any theory of state craft or ethical philosophy. He considered
it a vital imperative that it comport essentially splendidly with
with practice. Okay, this is very much at odds with
in some ways. This is the opposite of the classical orientation.
And Machiavelli made that same point, although his purposes were
totally different than he was addressing a totally different audience.
You know, which is significant, it's not, it's in essential
ways the In other words, I was looking for the
right way to describe this. Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotilian
model is aiming too high, you know, when in fact,
politics is base and the political realm, which is a
discrete sphere of human activity, the currency of it is
violence at the end of the day, and it is
power activity. In ontological terms, Hobbes's view was really that
of the mathematician, you know, and again like Hobbesian geometry
is basically proto analytic philosophy, Hobbs wasn't concerned with whether
it was too lofty and ambition to curate virtue within
the political His view is that it's nothing to do
with praxis and it doesn't mitigate the war of all
against all, So what use is it? You know, it's
to him it would be like arguing over like the
aesthetic beauty of numbers or something in lieu of actually devising,
you know, formulas that can create a bridge or a
house that you know, can stand up to weathering tensions
and things like that. You know. In some ways, I
go as far as to say Hobbs's paradigm is substantially
more brutal than that amachia Velli. And I think people
don't understand that because in their view, like they don't
understand that the kind of core philosophical curriculum of progressivism
is see a very brutal ideology. I go as far
as to say it's anti human. Okay, it's not like
people have this idea They're like, oh, that's like liberal stuff,
so which look for pussies or something. Yeah, there's definitely
an aspect of it, especially considering we live in an
age of conceptual i literacy. But the original progressives, the
kind of original Enlightenment utopian types, they have no problem
with killing huge numbers of people in order to realize
this supposedly sort of like perfect geometry of the political
you know, and that's there's something pretty monstrous about that,
just as an aside, but you know, it's also too,
It's not Hobbs is credited with this egalitarianism and make
a mistake, like contra Aristotle, he completely rejected the ontology
of you know then you know, men who were like
naturally fit to command and the natural sleeve. But he
didn't do that because he thought that like there was
equal dignity to like all people. He said that because
he said, there's a basic equality within within violence, Okay,
because any man can kill another man, you know, if
he's cutting enough, and if he's ruthless enough, and if
he in corral enough allies for the immediate task at hand.
Like basically, equality within the political realm is you know,
it belongs to it. It's an equality of violence, Okay,
it's like an equality of the capacity to commit murder,
and it has nothing to do with like the intrinsic
dignity of the human being or anything like that. Francis
Bacon echoes some of this, or is echoed in in
both bodies of work, like Baking claim that Aristotilian politics
was imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths. You know. So there's
a self conse repudiation of the classical view of the
political you know. But that again, that doesn't mean it
make it liberal in the contemporary sense or anything like that.
But this is the basis for this kind of rejection
of what theretofore had been, you know, the basic understanding
of human nature and his intrinsic sociality and him being
born to an identitarian structure, him being born to a
policy in the terms of you know, the source material.
You know. So, in other words, the true roots of
human behavior aren't really historical in nature. They're basically mathematical
or geometric. The Hobbesian view and Leviathan, which is what
we're concerned with, is Leviathan is that it's not a
waste of time or irrelevant to study the historical record
and even to identify processes they're in. But this has
nothing to do with identifying the proximate or ultimate causes
a human behavior or identifying what the sources are of
passions that translate to violence of a political nature. You know.
So what Hobbs suggests in lieu of, you know, both
what Plato did in the Republic as well as whatever
stotled it in the Nico Mockey and ethics and the
politics by saying that you know, philosophy, if we accept
that philosophy as a science, and that politics is within
that number of and thus is you know, like a
subcategory of that scientific discipline that you know, there's one
of two ways to proceed with identifying what are the
bases of human action, you know, individually or collectively. One
of those ways is what Hobbs called synthetically, which in
brass tags turns involves identifying or reasoning out the generating
causes of human action and tracing the process to apparent
effects of those motives and causes. The second aspect or
method of identifying these core impulses is what he called
resolutive or in plain English, analytical, which is basically deductive. Okay,
and this becomes important as for reasons I'll get to
in a minute. The resolute or the analytical, it begins
with effects, identifies the facts that constitute the essential aspect
of those effects, and then traces possible causes of their generation,
you know, based on the totality of quantifiable variables and
the conditions in which they're situated. How is this possible
considering you know, what most people consider to be the
political and you know, the metaphysical aspects that go into it.
Hobbs that say, there are no metaphysical aspects there, you know,
the first principles of all things that define its body
or matter, you know, and how motion, change of place,
and self directed action bears on, you know, that matter.
That doesn't mean a Hobbs was saying that there's not
such a thing as like a domain of mind. But
he's saying that we're you know, again, the pratice of
political science has to line up with the theory of
human action, you know. And basically he's talking about war
and peace, okay, because that's really all that the political
is concerned with as regards the human condition, and the
political is always the business of war and peace. It's
not you know, it's not how to make men better.
It's not how to identify what virtue is, you know,
in the police or in a man, or in a woman,
And how to curate these things is none of that,
you know. It's how to identify the source of human
passions that animates men to violence, how to mitigate those things,
or at least channel those energies constructively, and while doing that,
how to prevent the deterioration into a kind of superficially
dignified brutishness that you know, simply a dresses up nakedly
ambitious violence, as as some sort of noble endeavor, you know,
And how do we accomplish these things well? Inculcating people
with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship
into something that is beneficial to all the individuals who
collect that we make up the body politic well at
the same time creating a strong enough civic apparatus that
can fend off enemies from without. Like we haven't even
gotten to how this translates to preparateness and waging war
against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about, bas essentially,
how to how to manage civil society and generate what
we know of as you know, a functioning state where
you know, non aggression is what reigns between the otherwise
annamized individuals who constantly the body politic. We haven't even
gotten to, you know, questions beyond that. So this is complicated,
but it's it is internally logical, even if one rejects
it outright, you know the uh. And of course there's
a what I think of as if we can think
of to draw an improved analogy. If we're gonna think
of Nietzsche's constant of eternal recurrence, it's kind of his
counterpart to constant categorical imperative, kind of the hob Besian
counterpart to both would be what would be or, rather
more perfectly, Hobbes's version of I think therefore I am.
If it was put to Hobbes, or if this paradigm
was challenged by well, how can you begin to speculate
about the passions of other men? And what concepts of things?
Hobbs would say, Well, any every rational man possess passions
of one sort or another. He can identify, what you know,
within the parameters the bounded parameters of reason, he will
do to satisfy or accomplish things that will save those passions.
So essentially you have like a living example within your
own mind and heart of what the human condition is,
and inductively you can extrapolate things about humans from that,
you know, And this is universal because like cob would
say in rebuttal to the people saying like, well, what
about sectarian motives or what about people are situated in
different task paradigms, That doesn't matter because again we're talking
about the political like, we're not talking about people's view
of what is good. We're not talking about somebody's like
esthetic judgments. And the equality of violence is what renders
this universal, you know. And again I there's serious problems
with this, with this entire paradigm, but there's something to
a lot of what is being said, and that's why
Schmidt obviously rejected outright the this the Habisian description of
the state of nature. You know, Schmidt viewed the first
community as the folk community, that's the pre rational identitarian criteria. However,
you know, Schmidt also said that Hobbes was the greatest
political scientists who ever lived, you know, and uh, I
don't totally disagree, you know, So this is important and
I'll also add, and I realize I'm jumping around a bit,
one of the things that the kind of current I
sort of midwid political science Academy is right about two.
You know, during the Cold War, a lot of attention
was paid to Hobbs, especially what had to say about
political psychology and the economy of violence, you know, And this,
this is really the basis of game theory is applied
to conflict paradigms. You know, this is very important, you know.
And anybody, anybody who's learned in this subject matter, who
picks up Leviathan, it'll start to jump out at them
where they've seen these where they've seen these claims and postulates,
and these analogies pop up again and again, you know,
and all in all kinds of discrete sources. So it's
not it's it's not just a matter of kind of
developing a conceptual picture or the history of political theory
or something. It's important to read Hobbs for all kinds
of reasons, so you know, And I go as far
to say too, and I'll move on in a minute.
Anybody who reads my stuff, I think discerns and I'm
a radically inductive thinker, and that's probably exacerbated by the
fact that you know, I I I was a lawyer,
and legal reasoning, uh tends to be highly inductive. But
that uh, this has been outside the scope. But if
you accept that the Hobbisian claim that politics is basically
a subcategory of of of geometry, you know, and and
and as a science and to itself, it's essential that
one proceeded inductively in order to reach conclusions about the
human condition, which is its subject matter, the variables being
humans and their capacity for violence and everything that associated
with that. And for the reasons I just enumerated that
that's implicitly inductive. You know, that's the only way relevant
data can be derived that could line up the theory
with practice, which within the Habizian paradigm is the that's
the ultimate objective of of political science. You know, and
arguably have analytic philosophy in the total sense. But you know,
by but also by looking into oneself, you know, there's
predictive that's really your only like moment to moment living
model of a human mind where one can overcome the
barriers of you know, the idiosynacy of thought, because obviously
you can't see into another man or woman's mind. You know,
you can speculate about things, you can. There're there's predictable
nuances and observable variables the human behavior, but there's there
are no absolute indicators. But somebody who's capable of stepping
outside themselves for the purpose of inductively discerning and identifying
the core variables of political behavior. You know, you do
have a kind of moment to moment model in your
own mind. And that's not naval gazing. That's not you know,
positing oneself at the center of things. It's nothing like that. Again,
the qualifier is somebody who's cable is stepping outside themselves
as a scientist does you know. And we're speaking about
a discrete domain of human activity, you know, we're not
talking generally about like what food you like, or what
kinds of women you find pretty or why or whether
you like the Las Vegas readers, you know, And this
is key also, you know, you've got to look at
the political as a discrete domain of human activity, you know.
And this is another thing that separates Hobbs from contemporary
liberals that they don't understand this, you know, those that
did in the past outright rejected that but I you
know that that distinction has been abolished. So there's that too.
Hobbs is a type of theorist that doesn't really exist
anymore in all kinds of ways. But you know, so
at the end of the day, human behavior to Hobbes,
it's not this the platonic hierarchy of you know, reason,
will and passion. And obviously Freud, I mean, Freud was
a con man, but he was also just kind of
like a a simple mighty plagiarist. You know, reason, will
and passion is super ego ego id Okay, But Aristotle
essentially abided that despite you know, his political ontology basically
deviating from the platon this model, and this was the
classical understanding, you know. And Hobbs is no, no, no, no, no.
Human behavior is primarily a mechanistic psychology of the passions, okay,
as applied to the political those the forces that pre
rationally animate him. You know. Now, of course, man being
capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways
to again, like say, the hunger's figuredtive in literal born
of these passions, but the core animating principles and phenomenon
or what so to speak, pushes him from behind, you know,
he's not the product of like rational contemplation, you know.
And how when ranks the objects of this passionate convetousness,
that's going to vary from man to man, you know.
And again, like any given man's constitution, education, social standing,
this tends to obscure things to some degree, but not
really because anything that is realizable in the political realm,
you know, again, our currency is violence. There's not infinite
ways to configure violence to derive some sort of reward
capable of sating any thing, any on anything on the
spectrum of the litany of passions, you know, and obviously
the constant ones of this too in political terms, you know,
Hobbs posits that is positive rather that good and evil
and nothing. These are just words for what characterizes desires
and aversions and how these things can be realized or
avoided by way of political activity, which is again violence
and the economy of violence. You know. So it's meaningless
to talk about, you know, what constitutes of virtuous activity
in the political realm. Now that's not to say there's
not normative convention. That's not to say it's good to
be needlessly violent, but Hobbs would again say, you know,
and returning to the harmony between theory and praxis, it
doesn't matter anyway, because what we're worried about is outcomes.
And even if the only reason why, you know, a
political actor shows restraint is because he doesn't want to
be availed to reciprocal violence of a boundlessly, you know,
uninhibited character, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what his
motives are, so long as there's basic compliance with these
normative strictures Taylor to maintain, you know, a permanent peace
within the body politic WISC, constant civic society, you know,
or at least permanent as much as is feasible, you know,
so subtly. Also, to be clear, Hobbes is structuring his arguments,
at least in Leviathan. I'm not a hobb scholar, but
I've read Leviathan many times, and the structure of his
argument he's qualified. He's qualifiably agreeing with the Soprantic and
the Thomist view absolute view that the character of political
life it needs to be defined by human nature, or
at least by categorical reference to human nature. But he's
got a completely different concept of what human nature entails.
And furthermore, the subject matters abrogated by the fact that
we're talking about the political as a discrete sphere of
human activity. You know, so you're essentially managing passions by
appeal to reason born of self interest and an understanding
that you know, abiding these strictures that facilitate peaceable living
and the non aggression pact between individuals and the body politic.
Any given man capable of reason can divinate that this
is the best way to satisfy the demands and the
passions which are pre rational in nature and which have
a greater part of animate the human organism than any
other factors. And as a consequence of that, we can
also extrapolate what what the essence is of sovereign authority.
You know, if the if the political is the economy
of violence, and that's all it is. And if civic
responsibility and the moral consensus within civil society is essentially
an agreement of the on aggression, and you know what
facilitates the realization of the passions, which again are what
animates man in pre rational terms towards any political activity.
The only thing facilitating that is his understanding that you know,
he'll be reasonably free of the fear of him and
in death. So the sovereign at the end of the
day is he who decides who lives and dies. And
if you transgress against his sovereign will you will die.
And we're gonna get more into the concept of Leviathan
itself or himself, because the hobbes understanding the state apparatus
and sovereignty has contraryed like literally in a man or
in a person. He believes this is fundamental, but we're
not there yet, but you know, and he'll he'll he
gets into the the psycho the symbolic psychological aspect of
how man structures his concept of authority and why this
poll is like a certain fascination over the human psychology.
But at the same time, you know, this isn't really
that important because the fact of the sovereign's ability to
deliver death to the individual at any time in a
universal capacity, that's another thing too, Like before Leviathan, like
all are equal because nobody can fight Leviathan. Leviathan can
kill any man. So whether you're a king or whether
you're a beggar, it doesn't matter. You're like equally vulnerable.
Before Levia then, so you know, even somebody who even
somebody who hated the government, or who who had contempt
for the concept of the divine right of kings, or
who rejected out right the concept of authority over him
his body and mind because he was some sort of
anarchist or something, it doesn't matter, because he understands that
he will die if he doesn't abide the sovereign will
of Leviathan. So, you know, again, practises and it's harmonious
compliment to theory is what matters. And hobbes go further
and positive to you, Like, how do we even know
like why people are abiding what Leviathan represents? Like even
if they say that they believe in you know, the king,
or they believe in king and country, or they believe
the emperor is like a divine instantation of of some
marvelous idea, how would you know if they really think that,
you know, And who's to say this not just some
artific act of you know, the pre rational mind, you know,
and and the way it develops. It's kind of like
conceptual syntax, so to speak. You know, So that's important
too when people you know, again, I obviously anybody who
follows what I write and say. You should realize I
basically reject the hot easy and paradigm outright, you know.
But it's but there's an internal logic to it that's
very developed. It's not just nonsense. And uh it's also
not as debased as something like Bentham, who I think
and this is a sod of discussion kind of reduced demand,
almost like a bovine, you know, roduce me almost like
a talking animal or something. But you know, where we're
talking about a very we're talking about a very narrow
although fundamentally important I mean, dude to which it's the
sub subject matters life and death, you know, but it's
we're talking about like one kind of narrow domain of
human activity, you know, like Hobbs's business isn't there wasn't
a you know, describe like the human condition and absolute
terms or you know, describe what cos it it's like
a good life or something like that. So that's something
that that's it stay people. It's kind of more punitive
attacks on it. Now there were a buddle obviously even
from people who again uh abide uh the kind of
France's Bacon view, which in a lot of ways is
sympathetic to what I just posited. You know, they there
were there were a buttle that Hobbs from kind of
all quarters, or the attempt to rebuttal is you know, well, okay, fine,
you know if there was no even if you except
that there was no kind of like first society, and
you know, like man is born to the state of nature,
like what he's saying, he's being positive here that there
was some just like global state of savagery. Hobbs actually
wrote specifically on this in anticipation of those attempts to rebuttal,
and what he said was really interesting. Hobbs didn't hobby
it clear, he never he was not saying that there
was ever a state of nature all over the world.
You know, he's saying that at different times, in different places,
you know, and in any even obviously you know, there's
ordered societies, and there's what we could that or there's
arrangements that says for all the criteria of of political order.
But you know, there's there's just as many other places
you know that exist, you know, in conditions of splendid
anarchy and the war of all against all. And the
example he invoked was the America of the day, you know,
sixteenth century, sixteenth and seventeenth century America was like was this,
you know? And Hobbs said that the America is in
his era, you know, was react by civil wars, independent sovereigns,
all like declaring dominion over you know, various swaths of
territory and and trade routes. And you know, some of
these were some of these people were white men, you know,
some of them were some of them were American Indians
who presided in a lot of cases over surprisingly large
amount of what we consider capital and territory. You know.
So his so Hobbs' example is basically like, well, look
at the Americas, you know, like do you want to
you want an example of the state of nature and
the war of all against all juxtaposed against you know,
sovereign political societies. Like there you go, and this is
what we used to be. And you know that's uh,
that's fairly persuasive. You know. The problem, as I said,
is what the problems that it becomes tautological. I mean,
that's that's a problem with the Enlightenment perspective across the
board is that you know, if it's like okay, so
if you're gonna if you're gonna reduce human behavior to
individual anomized integers, rendering discreete decisions based on some kind
of biologically in most cases quantifiable impulse, you know, then
it's like, oh, well then then the first society you
must have have just you know, have been this kind
of state of individuals waging war on each other and
it's all you know, And that's not that's not the
way humans work. You know, You're you're not born as
this individual like doesn't have parentage and and doesn't live
in a community, and doesn't speak a certain language and
doesn't isn't surrounded by symbols that are resonant in discrete
cultural psychology, that are probably heritable, you know. And beyond
that the whole kind of equality of violence. It there
are some men who are fit for command and some
who are not, Like, like, my example is democratic Campachia. Like,
you know what the community rouge did. They killed a
third of the population, They killed everybody who was master
cast as they viewed it, Well, okay, where did it?
What happened?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 2: Did does that mean that the commune rouge is now
like the permanent government in Camot? You like, No, apparently
four years later they they were dust, you know, And
it's not that that's kind of the logic of the
prison yard or something like. But even there, it's like,
it's not. People don't just like follow around the guy
who's like the most violent man or who has the
most weapons or something like. That's not how things work.
You know. You follow more often than not, you know,
and people follow, you know, people are hardwired to follow
men who constitute this kind of archetype in their mind
that you know, is comports with some sort of idealized model.
But beyond that, there's just natural human tendencies towards obedience.
You know. Most people aren't capable of discrete action onto itself,
not related to command, from originating from a source to
views authoritative. And anybody who doesn't recognize that doesn't really
it doesn't really know about man, you know. And I
suppose the counter rebuttal to that is that, well, people
are just educated from birth and condition towards these things.
I mean, okay, but that doesn't explain the perennial existence
of cast paradigms. It's a dozen't, you know. And like
I said, there's not that the twentieth century is a
living laboratory of slaver Boles where people rose up and slaughtered, uh,
the ruling cast, and these experiments were disastrous. You know,
it's got it. It's got a failure. Y. So apparently
that's not the way things are ontologically. I realized going
going like fifty minutes, but I don't want to. I
was gonna I want to dive into Leviathan, like the
concept of Leviathan, and then it'll have to I don't
want to go for just like ten minutes on that.
So we got we gotta wait until next time. I'm
sorry for that. Let me ask the question then, Yeah,
of course, if we saw in the twentieth century a
slaughtering of the master class a cast, especially in the
beginning of the century, is that why they had to
switch over to the intense social engineering so that they
at least had you know this this quote unquote upper cast,
but really a slave cast that could actually keep the
keep the engines running and keep the machines moving. It's both.
They had to. It's complicated in the case of revolutionary
communism for a couple of reasons, because you've got to
eradicate competing modalities psychological modalities and the only way you
can do that, you've got to you've got to kill
the host literally of those concepts. You know. One of
the reasons why I invoke the Kremure rouge a lot,
not just because I don't think I'm am a cob person,
at least I hope not, and I don't just have
a discrete fascination with the extreme violence of their of
their system. But Paul Pott, you know aka cells Are,
he was actually a very learned guy, unlike somebody like Mao,
who is an idiot. They took to its logical extreme.
You know, the understanding of revolutionary praxis as the only
way to realize true communism is you've got to eradicate
all potential competitor modalities, because that's the only way it
can flourish, because you've got to you've got to eradicate
the understanding of value as money, or you've got to
under you've got to eradicate the concept itself a private property.
You can't just recondition people, you know, by by re
education or something, or by forcing them to, you know,
repeat bad ideological strictures, you know, the kind that would
pop up in a propaganda pamphlet you've got to render
it literally impossible to devise psychologically a competing system or
a preceding system, you know. So that's part of the
social engineering. But part of it also was the idea
was even among people who weren't you know, like true
believing communists, like, the idea was that the machine age
and the scientific age, you know, and especially you know,
into the atomic age, it's like, well, you know, the
master elements sous that it exists is technicians, and it's
men who can wield and understand technology. And in order
to prevent the kind of previous cast paradigm from snapping
back into some kind of reactionary form, is we've got
to disseminate knowledge of these technological processes and the science
that underlies them. Is like why it is pos possible
and take like people from diverse actually diverse not diverses
like a regime buzzword, from diverse places and situations, you know,
and and make them comminant in these processes and sciences,
you know, and then install them like in these key
like powerful roles, you know, and that'll that'll prevent you know,
some sort of like new aristocracy from ossifying. Of course,
all that happened was like the nomenclature. It became like
the dictatorship of like the military bureaucrat. You know, that's
like what sovietism is. It's just like the dictatorship of
instead of like the dictatorship of the Tizar and and
uh and these like landed aristocrats, you have like the
dictatorship of the guy who runs like you know, the
mccoim brutish design bureau or like the guy who's you know,
the some senior man in supreme Soviet to you know,
you've got to like report to with with your numbers
for like the rain production according to like the yearly
plan or whatever, you know, and like, you know, people
realize very quickly as not somehow like superior, and the
realism among them realized like this, this is just reality.
There's there's no other thing as uh, there's those things
a headless leviathan. And that's part of why hobbes account
of what sovereignty is is important, despite his blind spots
that we just kind of like explicated here, if that
makes any sense.
Speaker 1: Well, in the Soviet case, you know, Marx argued that
you needed capitalism to keep going because not only was
it going to give you the means of production that
they were going to see so that they could keep,
so that they could eventually take it over. But also
it would deracinate people from their capitalism, would derastate people
from their heritage, from their history. And it seems like
in the in the case of and Stalin even knew
that he wrote that. But in the case of the
Soviet Union, it was it seems like it turned more
into partly a revenge upon the orthodox or revenge upon
the bizarre. And they didn't take it to that logical
conclusion because, I mean, let's face it, at that point,
Russia was not as industrialized as say, the United States was.
Speaker 2: Well, no, there was no in nineteen eighteen, in nineteen seventeen,
nineteen eighteen, there was no industrial proletariat in Russia. I
mean such that there was in Moscow. It was like
a tiny percentage of the body politic No, Soviet Communism
is weird, and the way it developed is weird, you know,
and the fact that it happened there is weird, you know.
I mean, the Soviet Union was an incredibly strange society,
you know, but at the same time made sense, you know,
And it it's a subject for another podcast. But as
I'm always coming back to the only realized the power
and the power potential of the Soviet Union as it existed.
They also forget that the Soviet Union at its z
are you will zenith, you know, like the bresident of
era when they accomplished with AGD parody, the Soviet Union
was like a crippled beast because the Third Reich had
devastated it and they never really recovered, you know, without
without the Third Reich, the Soviet Union dominates this planet,
and America is this kind of garrison state that uh,
you know still has like the bounty of a continent
full of you know, probably like probably like half the
planet's remaining natural resources, but it's basically besieged by this
kind of like world Communist Leviathan of you know that
that's overrun Europe and you know, devas state at any
any resistance, be it in like Japan or the Islamic
World or or Africa or anywhere else. So Mary's basically
this island a missed like a hostile like colored world
of the Communist Leviathan. I mean that's people like born
after you know, the nineteen eighties or the nineteen seventies.
Really they don't. They don't understand that, or they might intellectually,
but they don't like really understand it. You know. Yeah,
that's a fascinating subject matter.
Speaker 1: All right, plugs and we'll get out of here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Like I was shouting out the last few days,
I'm kind of in the process of restructuring my online
presence and my content and I'll begin that in earnest
when I get back from OGC the week of the eighteenth,
I guess, but my online home is substack. We recently
got kicked off at Discord, which I that did not
surprise me. But I'm seeking out a new like online
home for our chat server, and when I get home
from the ODC conclave, I will do that. I will
do all this stuff I haven't forgotten. But my online
home or all kinds of good stuff is is substack.
It's real Thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com.
I mean, I'm active a lot of places, but go
there and you know you can find where I'm at
on other platforms. And as I kind of restructure my
online presence so you know, I'll have more to tell
people in this regard. But for now go substick awesome.
Speaker 1: Thank you till the next episode.