Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show.
I'm here with j Neil Janiel right, Jay, Jay's okay,
you can call me Josh, Josh, Josh Neil.
Speaker 2: What's going on, Josh, Oh, it's going well, it's it's
a great pleasure to be speaking to you. I have
to say shout out to my friend Jefferson Lee. H
he put me on to you because you have this
great series with Thomas seven seven on like all these
historical things, and it's just a it's a real it's
a real public service you two guys do, so kudos
to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and then tomorrow starts the balk the nineteen
nineties Balkan Wars.
Speaker 2: All right, let's go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, so, as I said before, I host or
co host Jefferson Lee Show with my friend Jefferson Lee,
who's also in this. I write. I have a substack
Jneil dot substack. I've branded it as Psychopolitics and it's
mostly essays on psychology and politics, and there's an accompanying
YouTube channel. My first book with Imperium Press is called
American Extremist. The Psychology of Political extremism, and I actually
got a new one coming out with them in a
few weeks called Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But yeah, for people
who don't know me, I've been i would say, in
the radical righte with my name and face out there
since twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. I made the switch. I think,
like for a lot of people I know, we were
hardcore Trumpists, like very libertarian, but like on that cusp
of well what used to be called the liberty, like
the libertarian to a right pipeline. And so I was
one of those guys. And when when the Seria strikes happened,
that's when I started to look away from Trump and
start looking to other things. And then in twenty seventeen,
obviously that was the ault right. So for people who
don't know me, that's my background.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about American extremists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a little bit of a personal story. I
was in twenty nineteen. I was involved with some people
that your audience may be familiar with, people like Richard Spencer,
so on and so forth, Augustas and Victis. At the time,
he was running for office at presidential office and remember yeah, yeah,
and it was wild, great guy, terrible what happened to him?
He's out, obviously, and so he's back to streaming, you know,
to your audience, showing your love and affection. He's a
great guy. But I got docked as a result of
getting involved with a lot of those people. And I
had already I came into the alt right because I
have a background in psychology, maybe you guessed from the
title of the book, and I went you know, I
didn't go to the doctoral direction because the kinds of
questions I was interested in were more political and philosophical
than like strictly speaking about mental health or whatever social
science research I guess on today. So I was already
working on some stuff observations I had over the years.
But it was really like getting into the radical right
was like having the veil pulled away from your eyes
entirely so, and then getting docked as a result of
that kind of made me have to confront some kind
of realities. Like when I got into it, I was like, oh, well, Nazis,
that's not a real thing. That's just like a libtard fantasy.
And you know, by and large it's not you know,
it's not like there's a well organized, politically active machine
that has political, cultural material resources, things like that. Obviously
that's not happening, but nonetheless there are people who espouse
those views, and they range from totally harmless, tepid, you know,
contributing members of society who just want the trains to
run on time, and on the other end are actual degenerates.
People you wouldn't want to associate yourself with. The reality.
I think, as most people probably know, is that really
is an extreme, heavily ostracized minority, not just by polite society,
but even in these kinds of circles. You know, I
do think we do a really good job of self policing,
maybe to our detriment, because obviously the left doesn't do
that at all. They just set their freaks loose. So
when I came out of that, I felt like I
had some unique things to say about what was wrong
with American politics, left right and center, and so I
kind of wrote the book imagining I'm holding someone's hand
through a red pill process a very you know, not
like cutesy memes and gifts like this is a little
bit more. You're gonna have to take some breaks, You
have to go back to the corner and have them
you know, fucking whatever those things in boxing that they
put when you get when you start developing the mouses,
they put that huge fucking like think or compress on
your head like this is a red pill like that,
but you'll need the compress and everything. So it starts
off talking about media control, myth the mythological narrativizing as
the framework people should be thinking about rather than like
ideology or so on and so forth. And so I
carry people through this, you know, here's what's you know,
here's what myth is. Here's like how this kind of
psychological framework is influencing your decision making, so on and
so forth. And I give actual lots of citations to that.
And then obviously going of the media. You know, this
is because the basic thesis of the book is it's
not an original idea. I just really kind of beat
the hell out of it over the course of the book.
Is that the liberal establishment is genuinely where political violence
originates from. Whether it's you know, forced integration by gun
by military, whether it's Antifa in the streets, which is
not so much a thing right now, whether it's journalists
going after you wait, oh yes, right, just yeah, I
don't want to speak too soon, knock on wood. So
getting people to think, which is very easy if you're
talking to conservatives, because they already hate the government, and
they hated the government for like one hundred and fifty
three hundred years. The Americans have just always hated the government,
and so it's very easy to be like, well, here's
here's this persecutory framework, but you have to adjust some
of the variables because obviously Connink runs on his own
persecutory framework and it's false, as we all know. So
that's the basic thesis, and then I try to explain
how that is, and in some cases it's talking about
literally I was writing this during twenty twenty, so every
week i'm like kind of pseudo like like almost like
a historian of it, like an ancient Roman historian, like
there were this many black people on the street this day,
and they busted this many heads or whatever. So it's
half like okay, philosophical analysis, but also half like detailing
the actual political violence that was happening at that time.
I actually think it made it even more impactful because
it's like here's theoretical stuff, here's some nice sise sources
and citations. And then also, here's the video of a
black guy stomping on someone's head until they're bleeding all
over the place. Obviously that's not what's in the book.
And then taking these people, you know, well, here's what's
wrong with the left wing in America, here's what's wrong
with the centrism, liberalism it kind of informally, and then
what's wrong with the right, And a lot of it
relies very heavily on kind of classical psychoanalytic theories, but
it's not all psychoanalysis, and as Mike likes to say,
the book does take Freud back for the right. So
I mean, if you have if you're allergic to or
sensitive to Freud, and obviously I understand why people would be.
It's very much like a different spin on kind of
a familiar story.
Speaker 1: One of these days, you've got to come back and
do an episode just on narrative building, because I mean,
that's where everything is. And anybody who doesn't realize that
after the last four years is just not paying attention.
They're in their ideological box and they're you know, playing
playing with is them and their friends playing by themselves.
You know, it's just you and stepped out to look
around and see exactly what's happening out here. But one
of the things that I really been looking at lately
is individualism. And I think it's hard to miss that
this was. Individualism was a big part of the founding
of this country. You can see it in the founding documents.
People will argue that, sure, you know there was individual
people talked about individual rights, but there was collectives and everything.
Well sure, okay, yeah, there were collectives and everything, but
everything always moves left, it seems, so you you sort
of knew that it wasn't going to last anyone who
you could look at you you know things, things don't
get better until they get really, really, really really bad.
And so there's a section in the book where you
talk about is after the narrative, part about the narrative,
it where it's individualism, anarchism, and I think sociopathy. So
can we get a little bit into you know, like
what you see as when it comes to individualism, is
that what you see is that is that what you
see this society and this culture being all about.
Speaker 2: Yes and no pros and cons on both sides of
that equation. I mean, Kevin McDonald obviously famously has written
about this. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that
the Western tradition is the tradition of the individual. However,
in the same way, to be a liberal in the
eighteenth century meant something different than to be a liberal today.
To be an individual in the eighteenth century meant something
different than it does today.
Speaker 1: I read a lot.
Speaker 2: I've been reading a lot of San Francis and James
Burnham lately, and you know, one of the things that
San Francis emphasizes, Sorry, I just lost my train of
thought is that.
Speaker 1: So eighteenth century liberalism is different than liberalism today.
Speaker 2: And then being an individual okay, thank you. So he
talks about like, for instance, great safe, very good job.
You know, he talks about okay, you know, there's these
different types of liberals, and if you were a liberal
in the eighteenth century, actually, you know, fundamentally, what's distinguishing
it from today's liberal is all of these restraints and
considerations and obligations and duties and belongingness and embeddedness. That
is the background of all this cool, sexy enlightenment liberal
stuff that we started doing over the last couple hundred years.
There was a story in the news not too long ago,
maybe a couple of years ago, someone was trying to
get Immanuel count canceled because they found his like private
correspondences where he just talks about racism and hating women
and stuff like that. And it's like, none of these
people it was just a foregone conclusion that that that
whatever they theorized was occurring in a homogeneous European Christian context.
So same thing with being an individual. You still had
responsibilities and obligations and duties and and and other things.
Your individualism was still curtailed by larger social forces, the church,
the different political organizations, so and so forth at that time,
and so you still had to fit in society. But
today it's really the opposite. Society is now increasingly bending
to accommodate the most extreme individual people who can collectivize
and then create this political edifice that that makes the
rest of us conform to them. Where I work, you know,
I had to accommodate a gender, non whatever kind of person,
and you know that's their individualism kind of like having
this warping effect on the social fields around them. Like, well,
suddenly the rest of us are caught in your madness,
And that's just part of the equation you said before
you kind of like hinted at the moldbug line about
you know, Cthulhu always swimming left. I think that's obviously
because technology has this corrosive effect on social norms and
morera's the ultimate consequence or outcome of which is this
kind of radical liberation from all this social embeddedness going on.
So today, to be an individual is I mean, I'm
not the first person to say this. Your audience hopefully
very well understands this. To be an individual today is
unlike any probably any kind of person that has ever
existed in human history. To the point I remember I
for a short spell, I was a teacher, the university teacher,
and I remember telling my students like ten years ago,
like because the hot question I would always get day one,
like intro psychology classes, like okay, professor deets, what's up
with all these trans folks?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And then like I'm trying to go through the like
syllabus and they're like can you make sense of this?
To me? Like all right, hold on, but like to
go through that conversation with them and be like, well,
guess that's not even weird, Like just wait seven years
and you're going to have people like with prosthetics and
you're gonna have to start calling them what they want
or just the the the the the, if you want
to say. The continuing like revolutionary spirit of this is
just going to keep bringing new manifestations of this. So
with regards to the title of that section, Individualism and Sociopathy,
the argument I make said, effectively, to be like an entrepreneur,
you know, the Fu Coodian self entrepreneur, to be this
neoliberal person, to be an American you know extensive air quotes,
is to be this radically self constructed person with like
no predecessor, no context, no pretext. It's solipsism. I mean,
it's every nasty word you've ever heard in a philosophy class,
but ultimately it's pathological.
Speaker 1: Do you see that as like, particularly a post World
War two phenomenon where you really start seeing things this
it all start breaking apart as far as a real
change and what it means to be an individual.
Speaker 2: Yes, although the seeds of that were very clearly starting
to show in the fifty sixty years prior to that. So,
you know, the progressive tradition in the United States at
the turn of the twentieth century was a Nazi progressive vision.
To put it indelicately, I mean everything that the Third
Reich did, not everything, but the things that we mostly
remember them for, the economic policies and the kind of
extreme technocratic interest on social policies. That's those are Anglo inventions.
That's Atlanticist philosophy. Turn of the twentieth century. American and
Englishmen are looking out at the world and they're seeing
what we've come to inherit and they're like, oh my god,
what what the hell do we do about all this?
And I think there was some kind of attempt to
shepherd in a new vision of the individual that could,
you know, protect the white race, to protect white people,
to protect America, to protect England, the British Isles, to
protect political sovereignty in European nations, so on, to protect
the Constitution. I mean, these these things are all synonymous, really,
It's not like they're separate things. If you want to
protect the Constitution, if you want to say of America,
if you want to do the North I almost had
Norman Rockwell, if you to the George Lincoln Rockwell thing, Well,
it's all the same thing. But uh yeah, So as
far as that post war aspect of that, I look
at the post war order, and this is an argument
I'm making my upcoming book. There was a slur that
was very common at that time used by effectively the
radical right whenever they would talk about the liberal consensus,
you know, they'd talk about, well, that's that's what they
would call them. It was this consensus view, and it
had a kind of derogatory uh kind of like proto libtard,
like if you were the consensus, your your you were brainwashed,
you were just spouting kind of like this new fangled
liberal social ideology that had no popularity really or history
prior to the Second World War. So this consensus was
the meeting of you know, the dying Atlantis sist Empire
and this surge of European migration into the West, of
a very particular type of European from Russia, maybe the
Pale somewhere over there, and they met in the middle.
The West had to be saved. We you know, the
whole European experiment, like twentieth century is like this great
tragedy of us, just like figuring out new ways to
just roast each other, and by the middle of the
twentieth century, how many of us are left, not a
lot of the good ones. So it's this waning Western
empire that's bringing in a lot of this well as
we know now ex Bolshevist you know, or descended from
Bolshevist types who came in wanted to find a place
in America, and they found flattering ways to reinforce the
waning American liberal ideology in a way that made sense
post you know, San Francis to speak, to invoke him
one more time, post this managerial revolution, this mass managerial revolution.
So you know, there's a lot of ideas and concepts
that emerged at that time that are not necessarily related.
Maybe if you tried to do a genealogy and try
to connect these things, like Glenn Beck on Fox News
with his whiteboard, maybe you couldn't do that. But nonetheless
they're all talking about the same goal. I invoked Fuko
before the Entrepreneur of the Self, his idea of neoliberalism.
This is the new American economic policy post World War Two,
which the major emphasis of which was about this internal
kind of psychic development that was supposed to be this
you know, essential to unlocking this American economic engine to
fulfilling you know, the old American idea, but in a
new way, uh, in this new technocratic society. And so
my inherited wisdom. You know, I'm a little bit younger
than you. I'm still in my thirties. I had my
birthday earlier this week. The things I was told growing up,
that we're good pieces of advice, follow your dreams, do
it makes you happy. This is like the head smashed in,
you know, inherited version of of like the Fucodian ideas,
like you can liberate yourself and you can be anything
that you want, and all of this is like a
radical political act, but it's also American and bubblah. So
I think it's specifically and obviously the purpose of this
consensus being, you know, how do we manage the existing
populations while we get this new migratory program in place.
So I feel like that individualism not to get like
crazy tinfoil hat is not like an intentional thing that
was done, like we're going to ameliorate or we're gonna
anesthetize people while we start moving infinity Africans around. I
think it was kind of a natural development, but the
consequences obviously for us have been terrible.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like we've become we're like these radical
surfs or these radical annuities, walking annuities. Basically, what they
wanted was a transactional society, and it basically turned us
into transactional beings. And yeah, nasally, that's part of the
individuality of it is what what are you contributing to commerce?
It's what the military is now. I mean, if you
go to the Navy's website, it will say that they
are there to protect the the you know, the sea
lanes for commerce in the world, you know, so that
it can move. And yeah, so I was thinking you
were One of the things that you had mentioned was
how even with the individualism of the old, of the
previous to what we're dealing with now, when you had church,
when you had family structure, when you had a lot
of things to keep you grounded, to keep you as
part of a tight knit I think our our reno
return to the strong gods something like that. Yeah, and
that's that's what That's what I was thinking the whole time,
was the goal of crushing you know, like the Italian
American society and mutual aid societies, churches, and the family
is to turn everybody into this radical kind of monetary instrument.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, I well, some things to keep in mind
as you're talking. I've always got the eternal like devil
angel on one side or the other. I'm a terrible contrarian.
So as you're talking, I was starting to do a
bit a bit of a like a hey man, that's
not really fair, right, because I was starting to think, well,
transaction has always been part of society. You know, the
internal critic who's like watching us and thinking they're full
of shit. I'm trying to answer them as I'm listening
to you, like, there's always been an economic component of society.
So fundamentally, how is this different, right, Because that's probably
what someone who's listening to you and disagrees with you
and me might say, And it's the fundamentally, it's a
qualitative difference more than anything else. One of the things
I was thinking of that I think is a really
good example of what you're talking about, a contempt a
modern phenomenon is exactly how the red pill manisphere or
community has ended up like this year, where if you
listen to or read people in these communities talk about specifically,
men talk about, you know, why they fail with women,
or why feminism sucks, or why the world has given
them a raw deal, so on and so forth. Is
they start talking about, like they roll out their laundry
list of things that they expect the woman to bring,
because it's a it's a tit for tat, you know,
I want to solve the free loader problem. You know,
all of these things where well she doesn't you know,
if she doesn't cook and do this and that and
have one hundred and seventy thousand dollars or four or
one k and blah blah blah blah. It's like, for
one thing, it's very feminine because like the whole transactional
thing was like trying to solve the native sexual inequalities
between men and women and trying to solve like all
of these complex social problems fertility, pair bonding, alleviating tribal conflicts,
ameliorating tribal conflicts, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And so on.
Speaker 2: The one hand, you know, qualitatively has it different is
part of this inversion the wrong people or have become
the being counters. Being counting is kind of a womanly thing,
and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, like
you know they mind the domestic life. You know, they're
very fastidious details in that manner. They make up eighty
percent of automestic spending, like that's their domain. That's a
qualitative difference. But now that it's also I was going
to say this before, it's also much more egotistical, and
we might as well say egotistical pejoratively egotism. I mean
we might as well say when I really, when I
talk about individualism in the book, it's probably better to
say egotism and extreme radical egotism, which is all about, well,
ultimately like you're not really interfacing with direct reality because
you're interfacing first with this buffer of your own self
aggrandizing bullshit, which the contemporary version of individualism is just
like constantly throwing It's like a guy just always throwing
gasoline on the fire so you can come up with
ever more insane cope, like this guy Will Stancil on Twitter.
I don't know if you've been watching him. It's like
it's like we're going on a full business week of
this and all you're watching is just egotism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's remarkable. Well, let's let's talk about this.
Because we can talk about individualism, we can talk about anarchism,
but what it crosses over and in your personal life,
I mean, that can cause enough problems, especially relationship wise
with your family. But let's cross over into the political. Now,
when that crosses over into the political, where do we
end up? What's the path down that road?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, anarchism is one, you know, expressly political manifestation.
I have a very small I would say, like maybe
sub ten percent sympathy for anarchism, but it's not morally
related to what you typically see from anarchists. I mean,
most people I think have a It's why we like vigilantes,
the punisher, the batman, because innately, we all, especially as conservatives,
I think, have a distrust of society. We have a
distrust of large groups. We have distrust of things that
we can't see, smell, taste, touch, hold a cant accountable,
so on and so forth, for better or for worse,
and gosh, I don't know where my brain is today.
But anyway, So the point about anarchism, right, so it's
it's a little tougher for conservatives, or maybe it's a
little easier for conservatives. That's what I was getting at.
But nonetheless, like political anarchism, it's it's distinct from individualism,
and that I think it is more specifically about kind
of you know, the Ed Dutton mutational loads, spiteful, mutant, sexual,
deviant situation. Like at bottom, it seems to me that
anarchism politically is just about protection of I don't know
what words I can use on your show. I don't
care the common pizza types. Right, So it's like it's
effectively like a political organization for pedophiles. I don't think
there's anything more meaningful to anarchism about that. But then
again again it's like, well, how do you even have
like a political block of pedophiles be party participating in
your democratic society. Well, I think that you have this
continual radical liberation. I don't know if individualism is related
to this, but certainly the criminal as being elevated, you know,
into a higher moral position than you know, people who
enforced the law or people who simply follow the law
might not be related to individualism per se, but it's
you know, this cascading decay of American society.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a it's a tool I mean, if we're
going to talk about Sam Francis, we can talk about
a narco tyranny. And I know a lot of I
know a lot of anarchists, especially a narco capitalists, who
absolutely hate that term because you know, it seeks to
you know, it makes anarchy look bad. And historically it's
let's talk about the Spanish Civil War. I could do
that for ten to twelve hours. Okay. When I think
of anarchism, I think of the Spanish Civil War, digging it,
disint turning nuns and priests. But when you look at
a society where basically the people in charge are off
doing whatever they're doing, like you were just mentioning, but
they're allowing they can only get away with that, doing
what they're doing by unleashing the worst dregs of society
upon the good people and telling the good people they
can't protect themselves from the dregs of society. And then
if the drugs of society do something really horrible, they
don't even just like this cop that just these cops
that got jumped in New York a couple of days ago,
and they were the people who did it. Migrants illegals
were released on wind, noobail. It's all a tool, and
it's anarchy for some and not for others, and definitely
not the kind of anarchy that anarcho capital, a narcho
capitalist one, at least most of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a certain like just base conformism that we
all have as like human people with souls that these
people don't like. I mean that kind of Look. I
went through an edged lord atheist phase, you know. I
mean I never spit on priests or did anything really terrible,
but you know, I probably said some untoward things towards
our Lord. But like that degree, like we're going to
dig up nuns, We're going to you know, desecrate graves,
We're gonna just try to innovate new ways to spit
on the normal social institutions around us. That's really what
anarchism tends to be a lot of times. It's it's
that like lack of conformism, like that thoughtless conformism. I
just go to church because it's because it's there, and
I just love Jesus because that's what I do. Right
like this, you're not even contemplating on it. But as
far as like individualism and like what are the political
consequences of that, well, I think by and large, I
think the two biggest outcomes are depoliticization, right, because what
if you're an egotist. The kind of persuasive filter that
ultimately matters is like, oh, does this titillate me, does
this interest me? Does this speak to me? Does this
have an immediate application to my my life world as
I perceive it? Whereas like, really political action is like extroverted.
It's about looking at other people, looking at the problems
of other people in society. It's fundamentally, I mean, real
politics is extraversion. I don't want I don't want to
use psychiatric language and abuse it that way. You know
what I mean, You're not in an agreement. So on
one hand it's it's depoliticization, and then obviously on the
other hand it's like it's extreme, well not just identity
politics you could say would be part of it, maybe counterintuitively,
but also like single issue voting, like all this wacky
stuff like I only care about voting laws or whatever.
I mean, as opposed to like nationalist folkish politics, where
it's like, well, everything is a political question, everything has
to be addressed politically, and we're going to have a
vehicle to put people in those places to do that, right,
like the individuals who are part of the collective and
see them as selves as such and then can function
as individuals in service of the collective. You know, that's
like again part of maybe that's why it's better to
say egotism, because ultimately being an individual is a good thing.
It's who we are, it's our tradition. We couldn't really
abandon it if we tried, and so fundamentally, what's different
is this profoundly psychological dimension to modern life. You have
to have justifications for everything. You know, everything's personalized. You're
encouraged to make everything your self, and that for a
lot of people that means they're politics too, which is
not always a good thing.
Speaker 1: I still engage with libertarians online. I know, I'm a masochist,
and you know, one the other day was like, oh,
so you know, what's a bigger what's a bigger issue
than economics? And you know, one of my friends posted up,
you know, drag queens from Weimar and drag queens now
and he's like, oh, oh, I'm scared of the Oh
I'm supposed to be scared of the men dressing up
like women. And that's just that's exactly what it is.
It's the meme of Rome falling, and you know the
guy saying, oh, how does this affect me personally?
Speaker 2: But it does. It perfects you profoundly personally. I have
a working theory. It's not I'm not totally Maybe I
shouldn't bring it to you, but I'll do it anyway.
It has a lot to do with the explicitly property
focused tradition in I think the Western economic auvoir. If
you want to say this is you know, people like
me who came up six seven years ago when like
the nas bole thing was popular. And the reason why
like people like Keith Woods and whoever are constantly fighting
these accusations of communism is because I think the the
aspect of Western political society, which is kind of kind
of like libertarians, but not not strictly limited to them.
The kinds that think of well, they think of America.
What makes America great is its economy. So ultimately there's
this extreme economic preference or privilege over privileging. But they
look at like Adam Smith, and they look at how
we solved the issues of property in the Western canon
as being like definitive to who we are. And you know,
I have a different temperament I actually, I mean outside
of like toothbrushes and things like that, I kind of
don't care so much about property. You kind of figured
those things out, like I don't know, maybe because I
in another life I was a musician.
Speaker 1: Well you know, you know what an anarcho capitalist is
going to say, Oh, so you don't mind if I
move into your apartment?
Speaker 2: Right, well, and are narco capitalists don't mind if they
move migrants into my apartment? So like fundamentally, you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, really they were so many of them really
need to go fuck themselves. I mean, I mean, I
saw I was going back and forth with a guy
today who was like, like, debate me on Israel. Debate
me on Israel, Debate me on Israel, because I'm like, oh,
I mean, I know the history of Israel and I
know how it was founded and out of the opinion
if you found something on terrorism, you're always going to
have terrorism there. So anyway, but then what did I
what do you find when you go into his tweets
open borders, free trade, and then you know, well, do
you feel the same way about Israel. I mean, so
it's like these libertarian types, they're just oh, well, yeah,
if I say we shouldn't have open borders, that means
that I worship the border patrol, and that means that
I'm a boot liquor whatever did I.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, there's They're anachronistic. It's one of the like
most BTFO political ideologies post twenty fifteen, with communism as
a very close second. But ultimately these are materialists, which
I think is related to egotism, which is related to
this obsession with private property mine, you know, delineation of
what is mine, this this over elaborated legal artifice to
define what is mine. I mean, ultimately, in a folkish setting,
these questions answered themselves right, Like my if I leave
my shirt at my brother's place, like there's not going
to be World War three because my property, he's holding
my property. It's like it's whatever, I'll see him next week.
It's not the end of the world. Because I think
also there's a certain assumption in a folkish, nationalistic America
first society of like, hey man, I love you, you know,
like we're related to each other, we come from the
same place, probably even literally, but metaphorically, you know, in
terms of the grand myth man myths that animate our lives,
like we're the same and these types of nerdish economic
questions which do need to be solved and at complex societies,
obviously you need to think about those kinds of things.
But it's a fixation. It has a lot to do
with paranoia, I think all of Once we start highlighting
these psychological factors, the types of people become very clear
who they are.
Speaker 1: Well, you use the term sociopathy and the header there
under individualism, anarchism, and sociopathy. So when you use sociopathy,
how are you using it?
Speaker 2: Uh? Yeah, that's so. It's one of these funny psychology
words that has a million definitions. I gave my own
loose ish definition in the book. I actually don't have
it in front of me, so I don't remember what
I said. Do you have it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm looking for it right now. I can't find it,
But go on, I'll I'll see if I can. I
can spot it.
Speaker 2: The main thrust, because it's one of those things that
like people confuse with psychopathy, right, and you know there's
there These are very poorly defined concepts, yet there they
do stand for something, and it means something when you
use them. Psychopathy effectively, we're talking about, you know, in
loose colloquial terms, we're talking about the most dangerous, violent, abrasive,
non conforming members of society.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have here, Okay, So it says sociopathy as
a concept is poorly defined within the disciplines of psychiatry
and psychology, and, owing to its operational weakness, is greatly
abused by the late public and sadly professionals especially often
complated with other somewhat nebulously defined terms such as anti
social and psychopath. Here, sociopath should be understood as an
individual with an impoverished social feeling, often exhibited by the
following characteristics impulsivity, weak ego defenses, narcissism, irresponsibility, callousness, and
attachment related anxiety.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that covers it, because, if you want
to think in a congenital sense, sociopathy very small representation
in the overall population, not a lot of natural sociopaths,
But we're mass producing people due to this intention to
destroy the family, destroy the community, destroy the nation, religion, borders,
so on and so forth. I mean, if you encourage
people to get divorced. If you encourage people to be
sexually liberated, then that naturally has the consequence of weakening
the social unit we call the family. Children grow up
with fewer resources. Also think of like the crazy psychiatry
fads and child rearing fads over the last hundred years.
Each one's kind of like perverse and dysfunctional in his
own unique way from the one that came before it.
So like, for example, like kids don't sleep with their parents.
You know, you don't nurse the children, you don't you
intentionally ignore the children. And some of these have caveats
like it's appropriate at certain times, under certain conditions for
certain people, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not how
America works, that's not how marketing works. And an idea
is brought to people and we try to do this
one size fits all thing, which is not good. You
get people with these attachment related disorders. Fundamentally, what that
means is while they didn't spend a lot of physical
time with mom and dad, they are on a hormonal,
neurological probably other levels, malnourished, underdeveloped, and there's a very
limited window that infants and small children have to get
these resources, especially when it comes to social development. It's
really like age five, age six, and the trend over
the last fifteen years is to shove as many screens
and images and highly stimulating things at ever younger children,
so they're not socializing with people anyway. Then they go
through a crazy education system that's racially diverse, and blah
blah blah blah blah. What do you have. You have
people who don't know how to develop relationships, who don't
actually on the structural level of their brain. They can't
look at you and see you as a person with
a soul like that. They need to respect the dignity
of like all of these things that are kind of
I think second nature to people who maybe are older,
grew up with a different way of life, had more
like put in more rounds interacting with people. So you
have this mass like phenomenon of kind of like an
artificial sociopathy. People are constantly to invoke the transactional thing
from earlier. They're constantly looking at other people as means
to some other end. They are in a fundamentally exploitative
mode of social interaction, and they are themselves very distressed
and suffering. Often to the point of some kind of
addiction or otherwise impairment, fixation, fetish, what have you? Sex, politics, food, tattoos,
all of the above the thing. And I'll close it
off on this. I've got gab fever all night. I apologize, Like,
like I said, I'm a younger guy. I turned thirty eight.
It was very common still is, but when I was younger,
like normal millennial discourse is is this kind of neurotic
of like am I normal? Can you? Can you affirm
that I'm normal? Are you secretly a sociopath? This paranoia
of like what laundry list of mental disorders do you have?
How quickly can I find it out? And then what
are we going to do about it? You know? For
some people will be like, let me find out so
I can avoid you, and for other people it's like,
let me find out so that I can never get
away from you, right Like anyway, point being the sociopathy
like is just the norm almost.
Speaker 1: It also seems a lot of people point out that
so many people these days there when they refer to truth,
it's always something subjective, and it seems like if you're
this radical individual, you know, this neoliberal kind of individual,
your morality is going to be based around how anything
affects you. You can't have a universal morality if everyone's
an individual.
Speaker 2: You also can't have political organization if everyone's an individual.
So this is even more meaningfully the ultimate political outcome
of individualism. If all justifications, all explanations, any any rationalization
you can offer has to come specifically from you, your
specific circumstance of life, from the exact moment you were
born until exactly this moment. You can't have reference to
anything else. Like you are atomized. You're one node, but
all of the circuitry around you has been like smashed
with ambers, so you can't plug into the larger network.
And that's very pernicious. I mean, ultimately, with that like
type of lot, the question like how does this affect
you personally? Like that is a persecutor's logic. That is,
someone who that's friend enemy stuff like I don't talk
to you or my brother or my friend or my
neighbor like that. I get involved because I realized that
we're part of the same thing, and there's not really
a conflict or a contradiction between him as an individual
and the social ecology that he's plugged into like this
is a big problem with libertarians too, collectivism. Collectivism is
like one of these still remaining boogie words in politics,
and they only really see it with libertarians. But it's
like it's again, it's it has to do with egotism, right,
because there are always collectives. The type of social activity
is ultimately a collectivist activity. So I mean all this
spoils down to that. Jefferson Lee would say, as nationalists,
the economic or the the the unit of society is
actually the nation itself, the people, right. But in neoliberal society,
it's just you, not even your kids, not even your
grandparents unless they want to blame you for things, shame
you for things.
Speaker 1: But it seems that there is a group, and I
think we know that pretty much down the middle when
it comes to the most important things. You know, Republicans
and Democrats are going to get together. I mean, if
you're if you're having a vote on whether you know
anti semitism is irrational and repugnant, everyone is going to
vote for that. If it's a vote for war, everyone
is going to you know, there's going to be very
few people who are going to to abstain or even
say no. It's always issues that where it's like, oh,
well it's like to like to financial systems or the
two competing financial systems. Well, no, we're not going to
cut taxes now. Yes, we're going to cut taxes now.
It always seems to be like the things that do
cause the most control or cause the most damage to
the system and the people financially and bodily, war sending
kids off to war for nothing. Those are right down
the middle. Okay, everything's good, we've given you the you're
allowed to fight about this here. But it's the whole
elite theory thing too. You do have some people who
get together, five hundred and thirty five of them, and
then you know, stretch it out a little bit from there,
who agree on things. But when everyone is a radical individual,
when everybody's a neoliberal individual, getting groups to get together
to possibly push back or to even supplant what's existing
makes it impossible. It's like they it's like they designed
the perfect system. If it was a hydrae, you wouldn't
even know where to start cutting off heads because yeah, yeah, yeah,
so yeah. The individualism thing also is a great tool
for them because there hundred and fifty million people can't
organize against what is essentially probably what two thousand.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, there's there's a lot of aspects to what
you just said.
Speaker 1: What was the devil? What was the angel devil saying
that I did I say something that you that made you? No?
Speaker 2: I just well, just I always think because as the
older I get, the less psychologically inclined I become, or
in fact, I mean we should say, the more I
think about these types of issues, the less psychology uh
factors into my ultimate kind of analytical process. Not to
say it's unimportant, because it's you know it, it's explicitly
on a psychological battlefield that what you just said is
being waged, right, is by putting you into just your
body and blocking off all of the literally social resources
that make us who we are, Like just on the
small level, or been like with the group friends and
then the chat ended or the friend group fell apart,
or maybe you just like checked out for a little
while and you felt like dumber or like less sharp
or less on your less like you normally are, because
actually you're like plugged, You're like plugged into the Avengers.
Like Okay, now I have plus fifteen IQ points because
the guy next to me is a super genius and
I've absorbed all of his knowledge, right, So, like, so
much of what makes us great, even as individuals, are
the relations that we have. And to impose this program
of individualism is to impose this program of ultimately kind
of psychologism, which makes us all prisoners of our own
fears and anxieties, except for those of you know, people
in the audience who are extroverts and not neurotic. You know,
I hate you. I hope you have a great life,
but I hate you the rest of us. You know,
it's it's this I'm imagining, like the guy on the
train throwing the coal into the into the oven or whatever.
Like you've just got it. It's just endless coal. You
can just kind of keep like psychologically, you just have
continual resources to harm yourself because life is difficult. Being
in the body is weird. Nobody gets it right, But
we all come from crazy circumstances. And there's a criminal,
exploitative class at the top of everything. So it's not
exactly you know, rosy pictures, rainbows things like that. However,
there's no devil an angel. I just do like to
emphasize that, you know, this is a program of containment.
These are the parameters through which that gets achieved. And
so yeah, like if you can't get a couple of
people together to flyer or rally or protest or pass
around some kind of petition, I mean those first barriers,
and they're the most important bearers. A lot of the
times are fundamentally psychological, Like seeing myself as a unit
with Peter r. Kenonia's right, Like that's a psychological hurdle
that you have to clear, not expecting. There's the joke
about like you know the guy who like meets hangs
out with his cousin from like Norway or Denmark and
then gets a venmo for like seventy eight cents because
of half of the coffee you drink on the way
to work together. Like that kind of like tit for
tat am I going to get everything out of Peter
that Peter is getting out of me. Like that's not
a normal response. If we're a family of folk, we think, okay,
we're gonna work all this out together. So yeah, I
feel like I'm repeating myself a little bit, but I'll
leave it a bet.
Speaker 1: People need to hear that. Let's finish on this what's chophobia.
Speaker 2: It's the hatred of the familiar, or fear of the familiar,
maybe even disgust of the familiar. It's what every Midwesterner,
every Midwestern eighteen year old, you know, just at a
fresh out of college who moves to New York that
I've ever met, That's what they're all like, Oh my god,
Wyoming is so terrible. It's like, fuck you, I'll go
there for in a second. Let's stright place. It's well,
I say, this is someone who suffers it. Right, Like,
if you want to again, on psychological terms, what is acophobia,
it's high trade openness. Right, you are a novelty oriented person.
You buy your temperament, experience lower levels of disgust at
unfamiliar or things that would typically that trigger discust. Right,
feel less discussed, You're more inclined to experiment, try new things.
You're more novelty seeking. You're probably less neurotic neurotic, meaning
the intensity of negative emotions that you experienced. Like sometimes
we think of neuroticism as just like self attacking, but
it's more like how hot does the engine get when
you're stressed? And if you're very neurotic, well, it gets
very hot, very quickly, and it takes you a very
long time or maybe never to totally decompress, not literally never.
That would be like a very extreme case. Comorbidity is
up to you, huh, but a certain type. But it's
also of the condition that we've inherited. Especially I want
to emphasize this, it's technologically facilitated. It is absolutely like
you would not see the kind of Jesus Christ get
me if there was not an ease of the ability
to get the fuck out of town. So, you know,
travel being the way that it is, these things encourage
psychological tendencies that have pros and con You know, I
love Peter Gabriel's album that's also his like I'm a
third worldist, you know, screw Whitey album. But it's great
and he's has a great ensemble of musicians and he's
playing this kind of world style and it's interesting and
it's cool, but you can't live there and uh yeah,
I mean the flip side, I guess is auchophelia. And
this might be like the conservative disease of too much
veneration of tradition and too much kind of well to
be crass boot licking, right, like the extreme like a
peliac is effectively the boot licker, and the extreme likegophobic,
is going to be the you know, the race trader
or just just the trader.
Speaker 1: It's funny that that came up because I was saying
on Twitter the other day that like the town I
live in there, I have friends who their families have
been here for two hundred years and they they own
their own land here, they owned businesses here, and even
though you know, they went an hour and twenty minutes
away to go to college, they came back and they
knew they were going to come back because they were
continuing a tradition and continuing continue well a legacy. And
I think it's really interesting to find out that when
you start talking about that to people and you're like,
you know, it's not too late to start do that. Now,
find a plot of land, find something, start building, you know,
start living, you know, as Thomas seven seven seven says,
start living historically and teaching, you know, teaching your progeny
how to do that. And the amount of pushback that
you can get from get from talking like that is
just you know, what if I want my kid, what
if my kid meets somebody you know from another state,
you know, and they want to get married with someone
from another state, Well, he or she can move there,
you know, could move there if you have ten if
you have ten acres, if you have twenty acres, Why
would you want him to go buy a house. Just
build a house on the property and you know, stay
there and you know, build something and build a legacy
of some sort when you when you look at Monticello
and Mount Vernon in places like that, I mean, those
were supposed to be legacies, and now they're museums. And
I think Monticello is now the museums awoke of some sort.
And I don't think that's aichophelia. I think that's just
the way people have lived and kept order within society
for hundreds and hundreds of years until until we this
technological revolution, but also this individual revolution.
Speaker 2: The And they would certainly like to pain When I
say they, I mean people who are opponents of our
worldview would certainly try to paint that as I mean,
they would take it a step further. Iphelic might be
kind of a sort of polite way, still derogatory ultimately
in this context, but they're going to take that to
the next step. I mean, they're just going to accuse
you of being like an in breeder, and then it
immediately becomes some kind of dysgenic, disgusting thing, which ironically
or humorously enough, is like the opposite. You know, the
thing that they're instituting is very much what they're accusing
us of trying to promote. I would just say one thing.
I mean again, it's also part of the political program.
If you de industrialize major parts of the country, it
becomes a less attractive place to live. And what happens
to the people there. They get fat, they become addicts,
they die early, They beat the shit out of their
kids and their wives, They fucking kill people. They turned
the local law enforcement into just bullshit, They turned the
court system into everything decays, and young people grew up,
and that young people who naturally have an inclination to
explore and persevere and test boundaries and are very much
bored with the familiar. Actually, in the climate that we're in,
what else are they supposed to feel when they look
at the town they grew up in and know people
either leave or they die. That's you know, that's that's
a political program. And that's also something I think people
don't understand all that. Well.
Speaker 1: I talked to friends and I'm like, you know, family,
I wish I would have grown up in a family
that would have put such a great importance on family
and the family, the family, land and everything. My my grandmother,
my grandparents had land in Puerto Rico that could have
been handed down, but of course it got sold off
like all boomers do and everything like that. I didn't
want the money. I wanted, you know, I wanted the legacy.
But the I'm talking to a friend of mine and
saying how important family is, like, well, my parents were
shiit my you know, my mother, my mother was a
piece of shit. And it's like, well, why why do
you think there was some kind of external circumstance. Do
you think they grew up in a in a society
that gave them this mentality that just poison their food,
did all this stuff to them that made them become
become like that? You know, it can all start with you,
And I mean that's yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's trauma induced I hate to
use that word, but or if it's more akin to
this individualism and egotism we're talking about. But you know, like,
I not to get too personal. I mean, I love
my family. I'm glad I had the family that I had.
I'm glad I grew up where I grew up.
Speaker 1: I like my.
Speaker 2: Life, but it wasn't the greatest situation. But I always
felt and this is something I saw reflected in the
people who grew up around me, was that at a
certain age, you look at the people around you as
people who have had to answer the same challenges of
life that you have to answer, and then you come
to understand them in a more human way. I look
back on my parent parents, and of all the things
I'm dissatisfied with now as an adult, I think back, well,
when they were my age, well, they probably thought the
whole world was like constantly on the precipice of nuclear abomination,
you know, like they row They really thought that right
for decades, they really thought that it was a real thing.
And before that everyone they knew had fucking pieces of
them blown off in Vietnam or Korea or w W two. Uh.
And before that, maybe they grew up poor, and maybe
their parents lived through the there lived through the Great Depression.
Maybe they were immigrants and they came here and they
had all kinds of like generally speaking, you know, like
when when lefties talked about how awful and brutish and
violent and terrible history has been, they're right, it's it's
a it's a rough go.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The twentieth century was literally us just like, how do
we fucking kill more? How do we kill more European people?
Industrial baby, let's do it. Your parents inherited hellscape, grandparents
inherited hellescape, your great grandparents. We've actually, maybe for only
a couple of generations, have kind of had it pretty
good where you know, you didn't have to go through
child labor, you didn't have to like all the things
you could. You had an adolescence. That was the thing.
One hundred years ago, there was no there was no
idea of let kids be kids. Oh don't you know,
don't give little timmy too much homework. There was that
idea did not exist. Turn of the century. Twentieth century
British psychiatry was telling parents just short of beat your kids,
it's good for them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So this is all a very different thing, and maybe
I'm willing to bet it has more to do with
the psychological dimensions of suffering and trauma that people don't
look at these prior generations, see that humanity and want
to be the torch bear for that tradition. That's where
I ended up, That's where most of the people I
know ended up. And if you want to end up
there too, I think logical questions cool.
Speaker 1: All right, remind everybody where they can find your stuff again,
and I'll end the end.
Speaker 2: This Jneil dot substack dot com. That's for the Substack
on YouTube, Psychopolitics on X, Psychopolitics with the K, and
then check out Imperium Press for American extremists, and then
probably in like three weeks understanding conspiracy theories. And thank
you again so much, Peter for your patience and your
your invitation.
Speaker 1: No problem, and come back real soon and we'll talk
about narratives or something like that. Absolutely, thank you. Josh.
I want to welcome everyone back to the Peakingana Show.
Josh Neil is back after after a long hiatus. What's happening, Josh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good to be back. I appreciate the invitation.
As I was saying to you before we went live,
this is live, I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, now we're we're recording, we're just hanging out
you Nick, As.
Speaker 2: I was saying before I had to what's the saying,
I had to get my ducks in a row, and
I did and it was good because it helped me
put a lot of things into focus. And I feel like.
Speaker 1: A lot of my.
Speaker 2: Energy in this space, this community has gotten like laser focused,
much narrower, much more refined. Like I'm so much happier
with my writing. And that's obviously what we're here to
talk about. So, yeah, thanks for asking me on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so. I've done as much as I can
to stay away from this topic in my in my episodes,
in my sub stack, I bring it up here and there.
But the thing I liked about and we're talking about
the woke, right, something that it looks like James Lindsay
might have came up with, and you know, and then
a bunch of other midwits are running with like Constantine
kissing and people like that. And the reason I decided
I wanted to talk about it is because after I
read your substacle about it that UNS picked up. I was,
you come at it from a completely different angle than
most people. Most people are like here, You're coming at
it from actually a historical angle and comparing it to
something that's happened in the past. So what was what
was your reaction the first time you heard the term
woke right?
Speaker 2: Well, it made me think of and I wrote this
in the essay, but it made me think of when
people started using SJW against Trump people back in the day.
I mean I was, I'm you know, we're both not
spring chickens per se. We were both like fully formed
adults ten years ago. So we have a really good
memory of like who the players were, what ideas were happening,
where the culture was moving. And you know, I wasn't
alt right or a nationalist or anything until after basically
Election Day twenty sixteen, but I was online and I
followed all the memes. I followed all the stuff that
kind of trickled upwards to YouTube and like Stefan Molyneux
and people like that and or Scott Adams, and so
I remember the anti SJW moment. I guess some people
who were plugged into gamer gate would say, you know,
it had something to do with that too, And so
I remember, like for a couple of years, like twenty
ten to twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, like social justice, social
justice sat, social justice Warrior. And then the moment that
there was the Trump right came in and was starting
to really be effective pushing back against all of the
crazy late Obama era politics. Suddenly that got turned around
on people like me who were just like, you know,
I thought I was just being like a rational, normal person,
like enormy with like my head on a swivel. But
now suddenly it's like, oh, now we're going to turn
this this rhetoric back around on you, because now we've
got to control you, like like we've scapegoaded all these
people who are not out and now you're the problem,
and so we're gonna throw it at you. So it
made me think of when SJW was was turned on
the right wing. And so my first thought after that,
or my second thought, I guess, was just like, Okay,
this is just a slur, Like this is very obviously
a smear to again kind of go after the harder
wing of the Trump right, but also to go after
like real nationalists, real identitarians, or real conservatives, real Christians,
basically people with a spine and the backbone who are
willing to call a spade a spade and I'm not
going to play euphemistic word games and step around the
thorny issues. So those were my first thoughts, and then
I also kind of thought it wouldn't stick. But he
but James Lindsay has like really like a dog with
a bone, he just keeps He's kept putting it back
out there to the point where he starts building like
a coalition with that the triggeronometry people. And then when
that I guess this would have been a week ago,
maybe a week in a day, when that clip went
on Twitter, like there's a light bulb moment, I was like, Oh,
this is because he actually explained what he meant by
woke right. He gave this whole sort of counter narrative
against our worldview. And I was like, oh, I know
what you're doing now, Like you're actually trying to put
forth this other worldview and this this is familiar. I've
seen this movie before.
Speaker 1: What I thought is most interesting about it was it
was coming from somebody and then adopted by other people
who were I didn't leave the left. The left left
meet people and you Normally when something like this happens,
it's usually the quote unquote right wing that's doing it.
You know, Joanah Goldberg out liberal fascism or something like that.
So he can accuse anybody who's you know, to the
right of eleanor Roosevelt of being a fascist. And yeah,
that's what I saw. It's like, okay, so this is
like IDW adjacent you know, intellectual dork web people adjacent
who And the first thing I thought was Lindsey, he's
just grasping because he's kind of irrelevant. He's blown his
load on what he does. Okay, you explain to a
bunch of people who are too you know, are too
offended by Paul Gottfried to go read what he wrote
twenty five years ago where he could tell you exactly
what this whole woke stuff is. And he was a
prophet back then, and he's writing two right wingers. But
you know, right wingers always want the approval of the left.
They don't want the approval of anybody to their right,
because you know that those are just Nazis. But yeah,
that was the thing that it was. These the those left,
the left left me people. You cannot entertain them, you
cannot give them the time of day, you cannot platform them.
They will always stab you in the back I don't
how the fuck people don't know this. I did that
with somebody with like one specific person in the past,
one specific person I did that with in my libertarian days,
and I learned deleted all those episodes, repented, and it's like,
it's not going to happen if I have a leftist on,
It's going to be a leftist who's not here to
talk about leftism or rightism. They're an expert on like
Ukraine or something like that. You know, So, isn't it weird?
Isn't it weird that it's the left left? The left
left us? Guys?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking about that last night, and it
the thing that I guess there's two things that makes
that suspect. One, these are not people with agency, so
it's not like they that's it's it's in the phrase
the left. I didn't leave the left. The left left me.
In other words, you were totally fine with the way
everything was happening, the direction the country was going, in
the way your own party operated, but actually your party
wasn't happy with it. Your party was like, we don't
need you anymore. So these are not agency. These are
not people with agency, Like they didn't come to this
Eureka moment where they suddenly realized that that they were,
you know, on the wrong side of history or whatever.
So and they also like don't have any self reflective
ability either. They just they think that they were always
in the right and you know, they were always morally correct,
not politically right, and that the left just got too wacky.
But really what happened was the left, you know left
progressive liberal is and had somewhere else who wanted to go,
had scheduled to keep up with We got to get
to the next stop. We have to wage the next
battle in the culture war. And and now you know,
the left left me. Those people are now just they're
the latest scapegoats. And that's kind of what like the
same thing with the SJW thing. It's like, Okay, clearly
Trump comes in, the political culture is different. We need
somebody to hold the bag for us, and we'll dump
it on BuzzFeed, We'll dump it on Vox, will dump
it on blue haired crazies, We'll dump it on people
that are not useful to us anymore. And that's the
same thing with woke. It's like, okays, as people are
saying on Twitter, you know, woke was defeated at the
ballot box. I don't asterisk asterisk, I don't totally condone
that statement, but just for the sake of conversation, you know,
things are different and some people have to go. The
regime has to kind of cut some dead weight in
order to pivot whatever is going to happen over the
next four years. It has to do something different, and
that means getting rid of things that don't work anymore.
And so this woke left thing is just it's now
a scapegoat that lots of people in the establishment are,
whether cynically or honestly or whatever, are willing to dispose
of and maybe even look at a little bit critically,
so they can sacrifice that. Now you can call the
new enemies, which is people like us, people who put
Trump in office, people who liked Project twenty twenty five,
so on and so forth, people who are supporting Daniel Penny.
By the way, he just beat another count today. So
we need to be dealt with, and they've got this
convenient tool. Just as a final thought, is I kind
of admire the way that the system really can repurpose
everything that happens, Like they can turn a bad thing
into a good thing. So like Woke was this horse
that they rode into or wrote in, you know, rode
into power on and then it became something that was
not feasible for them anymore or problematic, but it still
has a use for them. It's still so it's still
a cudgel they can beat us with. So I just
I think there's something kind of darkly funny about that.
But yeah, those are my thoughts.
Speaker 1: Something you said there about how there was a it
was a train there. You know, Leftism is this train
and it's moving and it took a direction. It went
in a direction that they they didn't want to follow,
where they had to get off. Yeah. I've been reading
this book The Demon and Democracy by Raizard Lagutko, and
he talks about this. He's he basically says, if you
have a political ideology that is a path that it's
you're going somewhere with it. If it's not like you're
seizing power and saying stop, this is who we are.
We're we're tradcath we're you know, right, we're right wingers,
where national socialists, whatever the fuck it is. If you're
not if you're not taking power to say this is
where if you're looking at a path going forward, you're
a liberal. You're trying, you're trying to move in a
direction to make things better and better and better. No,
there's already some that's not the goal of politics. That
should be like your personal life. That should be your
church life. Maybe your church wants to has goals, but
your politics can't have goals. Your politics have to be
something that stays in one place and protects you so
that you and it's not trying to move you anywhere.
Because if it's trying to move you somewhere, you have
to go with it. If you don't go with it,
if you decide to go with it, now you're on
the path of it going left or right or everywhere,
and you're basically screwed.
Speaker 2: Yeah I agree.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So all right in the article, and here's the
thing that I think you brought up that really no
one else has brought up. You had a heading called
the New Paranoid Style, and you bring up Richard Hofstetter.
Why don't you get into exactly why you bring up
Hostetter and how you relate it to this wook right thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I this is a kind of a convenient
thing for me because I've been reading up on the
post war consensus the last couple of years for a
lot of my writing, and it started with Carl Popper.
Last time we spoke, I think, which was back in February,
was just before my new book, my most recent book
came out called Understanding Conspiracy Theories, and it was very
much based on the idea that a big part of
contemporary conspiratorial culture has to do with the development of
the post war consensus. And James Lindsay on his recent
Trigonometry appearance, and this I considered to be a major
own goal, like a crazy faux pas. He went ahead
and he basically spilled the beans on our worldview, and
he said it in half the time it takes us
to say it. He said it maybe more articulately than
a lot of us can say it. He named a
lot of the players involved. I mean, he showed all
of the receipts. It was really kind of impressive. It's
like if you wanted the elevator pitch for the radical
right or the nationalist right, like you could clip out
that section. And he talks about how well the woke
right believes in this thing called the post the kooky
post war consensus, this crazy idea of a post war consensus.
And I had been reading about Richard Hofstadter, who was
a celebrated historian throughout the forties and fifties. He's a
New Yorker like me. He's from Buffalo, ethnically Jewish, but American,
and he was an avowed American liberal. In his youth.
He was a Marxist. Like a lot of people at
that time, he was a Marxist. I believe he may
have even been affiliated with the American Communist Party. And
like a lot of people of his ilk at that time,
when communism in Russia changed moved in a more Stalinist direction,
people like hof Staddard said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, this
is the left leaving me kind of thing, like whoa
pumped the brakes, dude, we don't want to do this.
And you know, my suspicion, which I think is born
out historically, has a lot to do with the fact
that Stalin moved Russia into a more kind of ethnic,
sort of nationalistic, sort of traditional culture due to moving
into a wartime footing, due to all kinds of things
that were happening. So it wasn't Bolshevism anymore. It wasn't
Leninism anymore. It wasn't what the kinds of things that
people like cough stat Are saw in it. It wasn't
that intensely liberalizing political force that it was early on,
because when Lenin came in, and I'm not a historian,
I don't really have the greatest understanding of Soviet Russia,
but you know, some of the things that Lenin and
the Bolsheviks did when they first came in was liberalize
a lot of things abortion, marriage laws, you know, sexuality,
sexual sexual ethics, things that look a lot like what
liberalism has done here and around the world is what
happened there. And so obviously people like cof Status saw
that and they said, hey, that's great. Stalin comes in,
changes the direction of things more religious, more ethnic, more chauvinistic,
more chest thumping. You know, he's a Georgian bank robber.
Stalin so's he's a strong man. And that didn't appeal
to people like cough Statter, so opstat are pivots, dis
his communists passed, and disavows his history, his historic material
history history. I forget what the phrase is. The Marxist
kind of genealogical method, historical materialism.
Speaker 1: He disavows dialectical materialism.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, and he starts moving in this
direction of what's called consensus history now at the time
in the United States, consensus history. Again, this has been
thirties forties roundabout. There was how a lot of historians
viewed history. That's how they did a lot of their
history writing. Charles A. Beard being a good example of this.
Charles A. Beard basically kind of put forth his own,
if you want to say, like I say this, very
very loosely, sort of his own American spin on what
people might think of as a kind of Marxist historiography.
Because he emphasized economic class a conflict, not using Marxist language,
not on Marxist terms, not without other Marxist baggage, he's
often been confused or interpreted as a Marxist historian. As
far as I can tell, that's not the case. But anyway,
Hofstadter comes in and he makes some alterations, adjustments to
this Beardy and hypothesis, and as a result, he's kind
of given he's branded as the new face of consensus history,
and he's looking at things like educational reform over the
course of American history. He's looking at things like the
emergence of populist parties over the course of American history.
He's looking at things like gun rights, the gun culture
in the United States, and as is relevant to this
essay in the nineteen sixties, he's looking at what he
called pseudo conservatism, which would have been at that time,
the Barry Goldwater presidential candidacy, the John Birch Society, it
would have been McCarthy and the Red Scares. And he's
calling this pseudo conservatism. It's his way of sort of
smearing the most populist wing of the American right at
his time, in the same way that James Lindsay is
doing today with this idea of the woke right. And
he's basically saying that, well, you have this group of
people who are engaging in a sort of analysis of
power relations, but they're doing it because they're parochial, backwoods
yokels who are paranoid and mentally ill. And that was
the essay Paranoid style and American politics, talking about the
John Birch Society, talking about Barry Goldwater, talking about all
of this kind of aggressive conservative energy that was developing
at that time. Of course, they needed to do something
with They didn't want that to become hegemonic in the
United States. When I say they, I mean the progressive Liberals,
other factions in the United States at that time. So
that eventually got published a year later in a collection
of essays, and I just it just looks that there's
a couple of things in the way that Hofstadter presented
his case that was just very similar to me as
to how James Lindsay presented his picture of the woke right.
In both cases, they're they're they're presenting the narrative from
the point of view of their opposition. In the case
of James Lindsay, he's walking us through the development of
the post war consensus. He's walking us through Bill Buckley
in the National Review, kicking out the real conservatives. He's
he's he's name dropping all of these intellectuals who are
black listed from kind of academia and the popular culture,
like Karl Schmidt. But then at the very end of it,
after basically laying out all the facts and laying out
all the receipts, he just says, but it's woke. But
all of this truth okay, okay, okay, okay, but it's woke.
Now forget about it, which is basically what Hofstadter did.
He's talking about the ethnic replacement of German Irish Catholics
and Anglo Saxon Protestants. He's talking about well, he's talking
about the John Birch Society and the resistance against communists.
He's talking about Robert Welch in the Birch Society, he's
talking about McCarthy, and he's laying out these facts and
an at the very end of it, we have at
the pivotal moment where you have to either say, like,
they're right, we should do X as a result of this,
he says, but they're paranoid, and so we can swipe
it under the rug and it's illegitimate and it doesn't matter.
And they're all creat kooks and they're all parochial. They've
got their their pitchforks and their torches and they don't
really know anything. And there's some really really remarkable things
he says in the book, Like he uses the example,
I don't know if you're one of these people that
gets into this kind of stuff. But he brings up
floride in the water supply.
Speaker 1: I'm just like, I'm just familiar with it.
Speaker 2: So he says, there's one passage where he says, uh,
and this is very Lakanian. Lacan Is a French was
a French psychoanalyst. There's a famous quote attributed to him. Uh,
if your wife is cheating on you, if you if
you fear that, even if you let me walk it back,
if you fear that your wife is cheating on you
and she is, you're still paranoid for worrying about it.
Like so to chew on that for a second, Like
that's a crazy kind of statement to make. Hofstetter does
the same thing. He's like, even if the government put
fluoride in the water supply as a form of social control,
political control, and they were doing it to buttress a
larger socialist agenda, you would be crazy for thinking of that.
And now you read that in twenty twenty four, and
it's like we've for like twenty years or more, we're
reading all of these reports about, well, that's what happened,
and that's why it happened. It's like, not only did
they put fluoride in the water supply, but they did
it for this kind of biopolitical demographic control along the
way towards rolling out this comprehensive socialist agenda. It's just
like that's really really crazy to read after the fact.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so.
Speaker 2: In addition to this kind of comprehensive narrative and the
use of a pejorative, I just think that there's a
I lay out some other arguments in the essay two.
I don't know if you want to get to them,
but those are just the most remarkable things that allowed
me to draw that comparison.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we can get to the other I
just wanted to say. It's what's funny is as Lindsay
is listing all of these things, which are historical facts,
painting that them as conspiracy theory, these things for a second, Yeah,
you wrote it that out pretty badly, Okay, so let
me let me start that again. So one of the
things Lindsay did that just was he's listing all these things.
So he's listing all these people and he's trying to
present it as a conspiracy theory. Yet like all the
people he's mentioning are writing that they're doing these things,
are writing these that these things have happened, are saying
there is a postwar consensus, are bragging about the fact
that they've changed the the social and political habits of
the American public, and that I think the thing with
Lindsay is is that he realizes he's losing and that
and that his classical liberalism. I remember he had this
tweet and I think it's the tweet that got me
blocked because he said, the only thing that can defeat
the left, the woke on the left is classical liberalism.
And classical liberalism hasn't even gotten started yet. And my
comment was, so what you're saying is real classical liberalism
has ever been tried, and you know, and this was
at a time when he was attacking Paul Gottfried as woke,
and Paul Gottfried said on my show and like, people
didn't hear it. People said, no, Paul said this. I'm like,
go back and listen to what he said. Paul Godfrey said,
the only thing that is going to defeat this left
authoritarianism is right wing authoritarianism. And I agree with him
that that is the only thing that reverses the post
war consensus is to the one thing that actually that
they were actually fighting against. That the whole war had
the whole world had to go war against you know,
back back in time when the post war consensus was
in the in the in the in the the mid
war years between the wars, when it was starting to
formulate and people were literally fighting back. I mean, you
had new political movements rising to fight against it. And
I think Lindsey just realizes it. I think he's in
a panic. I think he's in a complete panic that
he knows that people are just falling away that Like
you say what you want about mega people, I think
mega people right now at this point want change and
they don't care how it get it. They don't care
if you know Trump has to become an article to president.
They just want change. And I think that's what scares
the crap out of these people is they know that
eventually this is coming for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the if you were a libertarian in the previous life.
I was a libertarian in a previous life. I remember
reading Thomas D. Lorenzo like Abraham Lincoln is the American dictator.
It's like, these were the kinds of concerns people had seven, ten,
twelve years ago. And if you talk to your average conservative,
they don't care at all, especially post COVID once things,
you know, stopped heating up in the COVID era and
you're able to go out and do things again. I
did a lot of going out, I think probably like
a lot of people did, like let me get some air,
and just talking to people, business owners, whether it's like
local bars, restaurants, whatever, people who had to close businesses,
people who kept their businesses open stream cost to them
and their families and their financial security and things like that.
And to a person, everyone is saying things like, well,
I won't repeat what they said on air, but they
were saying things like I don't care what has to happen.
I do not care what has to happen, but it
has to happen. These are the kinds of things that
they were saying. And just to your point, like we've
almost I say this again with a little bit of
an asterisk, we've almost been able to have kind of
any other political option presented to us, but something like
a strong conservative executive. We've had all these flavors of
right liberalism, libertarianism, paleo libertarianism, conservatism, paleo military or minoritarianism, whatever,
all these flavors on the left of different brands of
socialist communist, light communists, you know, diet communism, communism, thunder whatever,
like mango communism, like boiler plate neoliberalism. We have had
every kind of personality, every flavor, every color, but the
one thing we haven't been able to have, and it's
also the one thing that we had to fight a
ten year culture war, almost ten decade long culture war
just to be able to get is something like right
wing authoritarianism. So yeah, the thing like getting on Paul
Gottfried's case and calling him woke, it's like he's probably
like one of the best bridges from like the genesis
of woke to us that exists. Like he studied under
Herbert Marcuse, you know, he was thrown out by these
old school communist left wing anti anti family types, anti
capitalist types, anti you know, anti everything good effectively, and
he's documenting it for decades and decades he's documenting it.
So just yeah, James Lendsy is definitely shitting his pants.
The thing that I the thing I've also kind of
come to realize about his whole position is this, and
it makes me think he's I guess there's two you
can always play this game of does he know what
he's doing or does he not know what he's doing?
I'm you know, I'm not going to put on my
mind reader hat, but just taking what he says at
face value, his worldview only makes sense if you don't
interrogate it, if you don't think about it, if you
don't really ask any questions, then it sort of works.
But the moment you start picking pulling at threads, it
really doesn't make any sense at all. So there's the
definition that James Lendsay gives for woke. I'm actually, uh,
I'm going to read it from my essay. What does
woke mean? Woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes
people like me and we need to band together inside
colidarity in order to be able to create a powerful
enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by
putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves.
So he's saying, is that what it means? Actually, there
was there was an even better quote, actually to awaken
a critical consciousness of the power structure. So that's that's
actually I tweeted that at him and then he blocked me.
So woke is to come to a critical consciousness of
the power structure you that is such a thin or
or or kind of like widely applicable definition as to
fundamentally not have any real meaning. And it's why he's
waging this like weeks long jihad with people, Like what
are you even talking about? How can you call these
people woke? Because if you think about something, you're being
critical and everything has the structure, so you're becoming aware
of the structure. So one, like he's he's basically saying,
you have to be unconscious. You have to not think
about things. We want this like illiterate unconscious liberalism where
we just float around in the world and we don't
really pay attention to what's going on nineties liberalism. Basically,
he wants to go back to a time where things
are kind of like you're like embryotic, like you're in
your mom's belly and things are warm and gushy and
you feel good and you don't have to worry about anything.
One that's not the world we live in anymore. Two
that's not a good world to live in at all.
Like imagine being this like brilliant academic mathematician. You've got
all these prizes and awards, and you're telling people that
you want them to not be critical thinkers. Like that's
not even that doesn't even follow from the kind of
nineties liberalism that we lived through that I grew up in,
where it's like be a critical thinker, like you know,
baby Josh in elementary school, like grow up to be
a critical thinker, like everyone saying critical thinking is good,
build your critical thinking skills. And now here here's James lindsay,
like critical thinking is bad, don't do it. It's like,
that's kind of ridiculous. But also like by that own definition,
coming to a critical consciousness of power structures, like he
is woke by his own definition. How can you reverse
engineer this Marxist revolution without coming to a critical consciousness
of the power structures that produced woke Marxism? Right, he
wants to talk about Franz Finon and all of these
other people, Like you have to think and deliberate and
research and work and and be critically. You have to
critique the power structure. You have to come to an
awareness of the institutions and networks that created this. So
this is one of the reasons why I say that
is that it's predominantly a smear. It's it's what I
called regime polemics, because he's basically working for the system
to come up with a larger bad to to beat
us with.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, and one of the other things that
he ascribes to woke is he's like, oh, they're studying
Carl Schmidt. The friend and enemy distinction when you call
someone woke, right, what are you doing? Are you not
practicing friend? Enemy? And it's the this just goes to
show how retarded classical liberals are. And I'm not talking
about like historically classical liberals. If it's twenty twenty four
and you're still a classical liberal and you're not just
I don't know, you don't really have anything. You can't
join the discussion. You're not in the discussion anymore. Classical
liberalism has been so i mean just marginalized, and it's
just so dead in the water that the people who
are arguing for it, they justin arguing for it, they
contradict their own their own assertions about other groups. And
it's you're he's some great intellectual because he wrote a
bunch of fake papers and got them. I mean, come on,
come on, and then you then you completely rewrote the
Communist Manifesto. The only thing you left in there that
would jump out at anybody was something about a specter,
and I can that's the way I write, where I'll
I'll borrow a really famous kind of line from somewhere
and rearrange it to make it and and if I'm
reading that, I'm just like, oh, okay, So because I
read that thing, and I'm like, if I didn't know
this was supposed to be the Communist Manifesto, I wouldn't
have known it. Because I've read the Communist Manifesto many times.
I didn't see it in that. All I saw was
him using some kind of device where he's picking the
most famous line out of it and then using it,
which is a device I use, but I don't use
it to fool people. I use it because it's like,
oh look how smart I am.
Speaker 2: Basically, how many times have you seen somebody say once
as tragedy, again as farce, Like I've written that phrase
everybody uses. It's like just part of it's part of
a vocabulary, right, but it's it's it. It does remind
me of Frankly, I was gonna say ten years ago,
but really at any point in the last ten years.
It sounds like a blue haired commie who says you
uttered the magic words. It's just like Hitler that therefore
your bad, right, Like it's it's the same type of psychology,
it's the same type of like way logical, you know,
way of analyzing this that whole episode. By the way,
I'm glad you brought it up, because I'd kind of
forgotten about it. Tell me if you had this feeling.
There were two real problems I had with that. It
was the Christian Reformer, who's that the name of the
website that.
Speaker 1: Oh god, I can't remember. The Amermericanformer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So there's two things about that that stuck out to
me right away. One the American he was. He kept
calling it the leading woke Christian national It's like they
have less than twenty thousands subscribers on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that. I don't even know who
they are. Never heard of that, right, you know. And
I'm a Christian. I have no idea who they are.
And I'm someone who reads Interview Christian Nationalists, and I
had no clue who they are because it's like, yeah, yeah,
it's very arbitrary.
Speaker 2: Again, this is a kind of thing that's common in
regime polemics. Is because you're working on behalf of the establishment.
When you select something, it becomes significant, right, Like it
has the importance and the meaning that you imbue it with.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So if James lindsay, as a representative of you know,
big gay you know, big gay liberalism, and he says, well,
this is the institution, this is the Christian nationalist woke
paper of record, Well, him with his half a million
Twitter subscribers and his network of academics and his sec
of fans are now that's it. It's that's that that
perception has been created, that becomes part of the discourse.
You now are kind of pushing up against this brick
wall even trying to refute that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's like this sort of polemical power he has
as as a member, and he complains, by the way,
as a brief aside, he complains all the time like
he doesn't get the star appointments and he's kind of
left out of all the cool hip soares so like
obviously he's not the same thing as like Ibram x
Kendy was, you.
Speaker 1: Know, and even though and even though he is he's
bankrolled by somebody I'm not going to name because this
person is very litigious. But he's bankrolled by a ev
by a big time evangelical who has ties to big
J money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. So there's this
arbitrariness to selecting the American Reformer as the woke right
paper of record. But also, I mean again, you and
I we've written things, We've published things, We've tried to
get things published at places for you know, whether it
was libertarian paper or a conservative or whatever, or even
like maybe your town, your local newspaper in your hometown.
Like I kind of know, like I have some idea
of how things get published and like what that review
process is like and how extensive it is, Like does
it really prove that that they like that by publishing
this kind of mishmashed paper, that it actually reflects like
they actually are co signed, Like the act of publishing
obviously is a sort of endorsement. But knowing that, like
it's the Internet, things move fast and quick. It's a
shoe string operation. They don't have all this, they don't
have a whole team of editors, they don't have people
who it is their job to just do that forty
to fifty hours a week. They see something, it comes
through in their email, they probably look at it real
quick and they say, okay, we'll publish it on Wednesday
at three pm, thanks for your submission. Like does that
prove that they are secret Marxists or does it prove
that in a fast moving technological economy where you are
part of the alternative media and there's maybe I don't
want to say anything bad about the American Reformer, I
don't know them, but just as an example, like maybe
you don't have the most strenuous submission review process. Maybe
there's a couple of things you look for and then
you just publish it. It's like, actually, all you've really
done is demonstrate that the economy around publishing is probably
not as rigorous as it ought to be, right, Like
this is not an actually ideological point that you're making.
This is like sort of like a banal business failure
of the business world in the Internet age. Like there's
so many things that were goofy about it, and like
it's just funny to me, Like every time he's tried
to slam the you know, big comical acme hammer down
on us. It's like it bounces back and hits him
in the face, like you know, it's like wildly Coyote
and the road Runner. It's like he he runs into
the tunnel painted onto the brit wall and bounces off
of it. He's just it's it's just to your point,
and I'll leaven hear what I'm done. It does really
reek of a guy who's desperate and like kind of
shitting his pants and in a full blown panic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, he's worried. He's he's seeing his meal ticket disappear.
That's what it is. And he knows that his meal
ticket right now is going into Milk Toasts event events
with milk toast evangelicals who love Israel and who hate
the woke. And he goes in there and tells them
some stories about how all of this came from Karl
Marx and it's all Marxism, so you better be scared
and because you know that's really dangerous stuff and everything,
even though it's you know, it's like it I mean,
it is in practice and it is in thought, but
it's like, I mean, he's never going to talk about
the fact that liberalism has no gatekeeping mechanisms that allows
anything to come you know, Oh, well, you're just going
to have the marketplace of ideas and you're going to
come in there. And if you have the marketplace of
ideas and you're a classical liberal, well, classical liberals are
not about Schmidtian you know, Schmidtian exceptions and Schmidtian friend enemy.
So I don't care if a communist gets a job
at the local university and then another one, and then
another one and then another one. I mean, he knows
that this is that liberalism has as much to do
with the takeover, with this postliberal you know, this post
war con says, I mean the post wark and sens
this is liberal. It is liberalism in its final form.
And well, I mean maybe not its final form. I
mean it could get worse. So he gets a left
pure left wing authoritarianism. But what we're seeing now is
is liberalism. It is we're going down this path and
we're there's an endpoint. There's an endpoint, but we just
can't get there. We can't. We just took we took
a rite. We got to get back on the path.
What do we gotta do to get pack? And then
all these other things just sneak in. He just he knows,
he knows. I'm convinced. He just knows that this classical
liberalism that he totes because he can't call it what
he really wants to is which he's a leftist. He
has said that he would rather the woke left wind
than than like the West become TRADCAF. Again he's actually
oh yeah, oh yeah, he said that. Yeah, I can,
I can pull up the screenshots of it. Yeah. Yeah,
he would rather the woke left wind. Like someone said, well,
you know what if it has become TRADCAF. He goes that,
we're not. I don't want that. I would rather the
left one. Yeah, he's he's not a friend to right wingers,
but right wingers are such fucking pussies that they like,
they have no problem. They're reaching left, well, reaching left
and punching right. And that's what they've been trained to
do by the post war consensus. And that's exactly what
he that's what he's he does, and he's taught a
bunch of people to do. And unfortunately a lot of
Evangelical Christianity has just rische. Even a lot of Evangelical
Christianity is quote quote we lose down here quote, which
means we can't do anything love our enemies. Never says
anywhere to love God's enemies. And these are the kind
of people who in nineteen thirty six in Spain, while
while priests and nuns are being executed in the streets,
people would say, no, that's the way it's supposed to be,
because you know, I mean, we can't fight back. We
have to love our enemies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's funny. Again, just one final comment
on the whole American reformer situation. All kinds of people
that I didn't really think would line up alongside. It's
literally like the stone toss meme of like you know,
the two play the tug over war and then you
look to your left, who's behind me? It's like suddenly, actually,
Saint Clair and Mike Cernovich, you're behind you, Like what
the hell's going on? Like always, people who either are
really not part of that conversation or their message is
not really a hyper illiterate message, like in the case
of Ashley Saint Clair are like, but like, don't you
think like some of this is like worth considering? Like
the most milk toast, tepid thing like I think Mike
either Sargon or Mike Cernovich were both like, yes, but
his criticisms of capitalism were accurate, Okay, which is one
line of rebuttal that you could take. And I think
Ashley Saint Clair was like, yeah, but don't you think
there's any room at all to criticize the system that
we're in. It's like, you won't even allow for the
possibility of self reflection. That's how you know you're the
bad guy. Dude, Like you won't look like dack cool,
you won't look into the mirror. That's how we know
you're the bad guy. You have no reflection. We know
you're the bad guy. I'm inclined to think and this
is maybe armchair psychoanalyzing, and just because of these are
things I've seen pop up on Twitter in the last
few days, I'm inclined to think that he gets you know, nobody,
nobody blow up my DMS or send me an affidavit
or anything. I'm inclined to think he gets up to
some weird purp stuff. You know, somebody posted a picture
of him taking a selfie, like in the nude, with
like a potted plant precariously positioned where his genitals are.
It's like, so you put that on the internet, man,
like there is something wrong with you. And the thing
about like even his social media personality, it says something
to me like this is kind of a dysfunctional person
because he's on triggernometry and he starts off, you know,
Constantine kiss and asks him what is the woke right
and James Lindsay starts kind of apologetically like, gee, you know,
maybe I've used woke to liberally. It might not be
the best word. So he's like a kind of human
being a little bit the start of that interview, and
then you watch him on Twitter and he posts like
he's a fourteen year old.
Speaker 1: And everything is really just edge alarding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like this is not an actually mature adult man,
and that's the type of person that the establishment has left.
Like these like they're reserve troops. This is like calling in,
I don't know, the National Guard. And it's like the
fat guy from the bar with like terrible diabetes and
his legs are all swollen up. It's like they they're
not sending their best. Okay, they're not sending their best.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, what's what else is interesting about the
post war consensus is that it's while they are sneaking
in a lot of like social Marxism. If you if
you use any kind of critique or if you agree
at all with Marx or Lenin or anybody of that ilk,
if you say, oh, well, you know, they made a
really good point hear about industrial society and capitalism. I
saw this today. They were talking about this kid, an
Italian anarchist who's assassinating people in the streets. Again, what
year is this. The they were saying, Oh, well, he's
like really into like Ted Kazinski and everything like that.
I'm like, and they're like, oh, that means he's a leftist.
That's what the Jews from Libs of TikTok said, So,
oh that means he's a leftist. I'm like, have you
read Ted Kazinski. The whole first thirty seven parts of
that is him completely shitting on the left. And then
he explains why technological society, why what it's done to
our psyche and what has done to us and what
has done to our nature, And to argue against that,
you're retarded. So it's like, you can what the post
war consensus says is, oh, we're gonna sneak all this
Marxism in here, in this socialism here, and basically you know,
and Marxism in a way, we're going to strip away family.
We're gonna we want you to become the liberal, the
post war consensus man and woman and everything. But if
you agree at all where you say, well, I think
marx and the German ideology made some really good points
about what's happening to society, Well then you're a Marxist.
It's like, wait a minute, but you're promoting you're promoting
shit that's almost almost literally Marxist, and we have it
in our society and we've pointed it out. And what now.
So you can't even win with these people because it's
like you can't. You they can have it one way,
but they can have it both ways. You can't.
Speaker 2: That's the power of that again, it's the power of
being a regime polemicist. You said, the rules, you establish
the frame, You determine what pieces are in play, what
pieces aren't in play, what's hypocritical, what isn't. Just kind
of go back to the parallel between Hofstadder and James Lindsay,
between woke right and the paranoid style, you know, one
of these other things, and I think it's exemple it
demonstrates what you're just talking about, is the way things
that there's kind of self evidently farcical or hypocritical are
used in this polemical, pejorative way. So one of the
key arguments that Lindsay puts forward is that the woke
right behaves just like the woke left. Like this is
kind of like this is one half of his entire argument.
He says there's an ideological component. He says that there's
a practical component, and the practical component is how we
behave we behave the same as the woke left. We
use social media the same way we believe in an
oppressed oppress or dialectic the same way. I'm gonna actually
try to pull up some of the examples he use,
is here, sure? So yeah, He says that they create
an illusion that there's support for one thing and distaste
for another. He says that you know, both are highly
invested in identity politics, and he says that ultimately, what
what what else can you call this but woke? And
so therefore there's this complete you know what he's what
he thinks he's done, is eliminated any difference between Pete
Canonas and Josh Neil Versus. I look Slava, Bernie Sanders,
Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, uh Man Jail, whether he's our anarchist
or not or whatever, like, actually there's still are There
still are fundamental differences, even if you can point to
superficial similarities. So this is another thing that there's a
there's a very telling passage in the paranoid style of
of in American politics where to dispel the to kind
of like defang this what he calls pseudo conservatism. He
points to the rivalries of right wing conspiratorial groups and
shows how that they are identical to their opposition. So
he talks about the KKK, and he says, well, you know,
they wore priestly uniforms, just like the Catholics, and they
had this strict hierarchical structure, just like the Catholics. So
actually their rivalry is kind of like this petty envy
and it's totally illegitimate and they're just paranoid. Never mind
the fact that the KKK were made up of a
specific group of people from a specific place, operating under
a specific political pretext with a very particular set of
goals for themselves. And you know, the Catholic Church is
the Catholic Church like not the same thing, right or that.
He uses the example of the John Birch Society versus
is you know, this communist spook, and he says, isn't
it really remarkable that they both fight a zero sum
ideological war. It's like, okay, so they're both really committed
to the ideas that they have. Therefore, there's no difference
at all between you know, mom and pop from down
the street who give their one hundred dollars every month
to the John Birch Society and communist organizers who are
like burning down houses and whatever. He also gives the
example of Christians Christian anti communists versus communists, and the
exact phrase here, just let me pull it up. It's
so goofy one second, okay, So he says, you know,
Christian anti communists were intellectually and spiritually vigorous like their
Communist foes. They admired the vigor of their Communist opponents
and they tried to emulate it. And that's how we
know that there's no actual rivalry here. That the right
wingers are just parented by the way, there's never any
actual kind of antagonization or examination of the left wing
people on that side of the Communists are just like
kind of unimpeachable to Richard hobs.
Speaker 1: Goughlin and Justice Stalin same person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's commons. You would even think that a guy
who had formally disavowed his Communism and like shredded up
his Communist party, you know, uh credit card or whatever,
might have like an interest in publishing even just to
say face publishing like even tepidly communist critiques, just to
distance himself and the public perception he's created. But no,
he doesn't. He's the same thing with Carl Popper, not
to get off on a tangent, although I guess with
Carl Popper later on in his career he did become
more critical of communism. But Carl Popper's another again architect
of the post war consensus. Literally the Open Society Foundation
is based on the title of his book, and he
was a mentor of George Soros.
Speaker 1: Was not even didn't he come up with the term
conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 2: He wrote an essay called the Conspiracy Theory of Society, Right,
I don't know if he coined these, but that's a
great essay, by the way, very very ridiculous stuff that
he puts in it. But another guy who, like in
a previous life was a communist, And when he does
his big brained intellectual defense of liberalism, really only has
time to talk about how bad fascists are, how bad
nativists are, how bad Nazis are, how bad populists are,
how bad nationalists are. It's like, guy, you were with
the communists and you almost got killed by them, and
you can't even give me a sentence about how bad
that is. And again I'm being a little bit hyperbolic
because he does talk about marks in the open society
and his enemies, but most of that book is spent
slagging nativism. It's spent slagging the closed society, which would be,
you know, a nation that protects his borders and has
law and order and has a you know, vaguely authoritarian,
hierarchical political structure. So I mean, these guys just telling themselves,
it's remarkable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there's really I think at this point to
argue with him, is you're giving them legitimacy, because I
don't know that. Yeah, if you look at how many
followers he has on Twitter, and people say, oh, Twitter
isn't real life. People said that like eight nine years ago,
Oh Twitter has become real life because it really is
the public square. So yeah, you look at how many
followers he has. You look at if he posts something.
If he posts something about classical liberalism, he's lucky to
get like the amount of likes. He's lucky to get
ten percent of the likes of like a meme account
just posting a meme. But when he posts about stuff
like this, he may get like double that. And all
that tells you is that no one's buying this. The
only people who are really going along with it are
people who are so bought into his worldview. And let's
face it, yeah, I was talking about this with a
friend of mine on his show this afternoon. Is that
a lot of people who get into a quote unquote movement,
they're just looking for God. They're looking for their God.
And if somebody is like really into oh, classical liberalism
and anti woke, James Lindsay can become their God really quick.
If you're really into like free market economics, Ludwig von
Mises can become your or got really quickly, and that's
just basically what we're seeing. I mean, I don't know
really if you had to guess, do you think James
Lindsay has any kind of influence on the incoming Trump regime?
Speaker 2: None at all, I would assume. Then he complain that
like they literally didn't even ask me, Like I think
he said something to that effect on Twitter, like no
one's calling.
Speaker 1: Me, why would why what are you going to tell them?
What are you going to advise them on? What I mean,
if you're if your goal? Trump has said, Look, I
think most people are at the point where it's like,
just get rid of all the get rid of all
the the illegal immigrants. If he got rid of you know,
half of the illegal immigrants in the in this country
at this point, that would just be a win. Because
I mean, no one's expecting and no one really expecting success.
No one who's realistic, no one who understands how the
administrative state works, how the post war consensus works, is
really expecting an insane amount of success. But I mean,
is he going to be for that? How does he
help that? How does he help like say Doze say
this Doge outfit does start dismantling the managerial estate, managerial state.
That's what he's fighting for. So why is he complaining
about what? Is he expecting them to invite them in
there so he can tell them everything that they're doing wrong,
because we have to keep doing We just have to
go back to the nineties. Bro I heard was so Amari?
And which one is so Habo Mari? He's the one?
Is he Claremont?
Speaker 2: What I think he's Is he an editor for Compact?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Who's like? Is he associated with Claremont? I can't remember,
but I think yeah. So. And he was talking to
Dave Rubin and this was three or four years ago,
and when I was just listening to everything and now
I just can't listen to everything. And they were talking
about how they we need to go back ten years.
This all started falling apart ten years ago. And I'm like,
who's asking Who listens to that and takes that seriously?
Who says, in like in twenty twenty one that we
just need to go back to twenty eleven? What we
need to go back to ab the ending of Barack
Obama's first term. But these people are retarded, and I'm
fully convinced. I become convinced of this more than I
the longer I do this. These people are just trying
to keep a job. There's just they're just saying the
things that they need to stay in their job. If
they were to deviate one bit, they'd get fired. They'd
have to go somewhere else, they'd have to Why would
you change your opinions on Why would you all of
a sudden become a Karl Schmidt fan? You know when
you've been when you've been a John Locke, when you've
been promoting lockey in philosophy your whole life, especially if
you're making your living off of it, you're cutting your
income off. That's why Lindsay. That's why Lindsay's acting the
way he is is because he's his income. He's seeing
his potential downfall and more than that, not being invited
to be on the stage anymore. And he's one of
those people who can't take that.
Speaker 2: I know all this. I was thinking the exact words
you were saying as you were saying them, Which is
that a big part of getting involved with this in
this scene for me has been realizing some of us
are fighting for ideals and outcomes, and some of us
are fighting for paychecks. So that's very astute, totally co
signed that. As far as Sorabamari is concerned, I do
believe he's connected with Claremont. He was the editor of
Compact and Commentary. He is the editor of Compact now.
He was previously the editor of Commentary, and I do
think he was like a Claremont fellow or something. But yeah,
I mean, yeah, it's not surprising that these people would
want to go back to the period when their sinecure
first opened up. Like, yeah, I want to go back
to ten years ago when you open the floodgates and
gave me, you know, a lifetime job at gay Boy Inc.
Or whatever, you know, like publishing bullshit dot com. Like yes, please,
I want to go back to that time so that
I can have that job. I don't know that I
have anything else to say on that point other than
when you asked, like, what influence would James Lindsay have
on the incoming Trump administration? I immediately thought of that
really weird anti Saint Michael bit He was on like,
so imagine you're Donald Trump, Like you can't even get
a tweet out the front door with that James lindsay, like,
excuse me, this is really a big problem and you
need to stop doing it. It's like, Okay, this guy
is trying to like kick forty million people out the
front door, and you're raising a stink over at Tweet like, yeah,
you don't actually have a place here, and uh and
don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Speaker 1: He was wrong about Arn McIntyre being the guy behind that.
I'm the one with the saint. I'm the one with
the saint. Michael coyn right next to me when I uh,
when I podcast.
Speaker 2: It was you, it was you all along a ha ha.
Speaker 1: Tell everybody about your book on conspiracy theories necessarily conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: Yes, so yeah, last time we were on we talked
about American extremist imperium Press, the chapter on individualism and
socialism or sociopathy rather. Yeah, my book came out in
February of this year. It's actually part one of two,
and the new book is coming out early next year.
But understanding conspiracy Theories, I had worked on it for
like five years. It's half of everything I have to
say about the subject matter. But yeah, I came into
nationalism through the conspiracy content if you want to stay online.
You know, I read all the Jim Mars books I read.
You know, I listened to Alex Jones. I watched his
documentaries on the police State. I listened to Coast to
Coast I watched I was a young person, a very
young person, when loose change and Zeitgeist were like the
thing on the internets, and it was really harrowing, honestly
to like develop a content like to be I'm a
man hormonally and like mentally, at the same time you're
being hit with this incredible technology called the Internet and
all of the information we have available to the human species.
So you know, I'm and of course I grew up
with nine to eleven. Like I remember the day the
towers hit. I was sitting in my sophomore biology class
with the cute redhead teacher at my Catholic high school
and being pulled out of the classroom thinking that my
father was dead. You know. So like these are all
deeply like and there's hundreds of thousands of people, millions
of people with the story just like that. So it's
not my pity story that I'm saying to your audience.
Lots of people have stories like that. I Yeah, I
grew up in New York City. That was the formation
of my consciousness. I remember when you could go on
an airplane and it was nice, And I remember a
couple of years later when you went on an airplane
and a morbidly obese Haitian person grabbed yours Like I
lived through that. Okay, So the Patriot Act and everything
that followed from that. So the idea of of and
now we're living in this moment where conspiracy theories are
kind of like a thing you can cash in on.
It's like a career. You can be an all media
guy with a TikTok account doing the whole you know,
your your blurry face in front of like a text
scroll going isn't this look at this and this kind
ofct and here and here. It's like you can do
that as a career. And fifteen years ago, twenty years ago,
if you did that, you were a pariah, you were medicated,
you were kicked out of polite society. So it took
me coming into this nationalist community learning a few new
things that mainstream conspiracy culture from ten years ago didn't
let you in on. People like Michael Collins Piper, like
if I had known about Michael as Piper fifteen years ago,
it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I
didn't learn about him until like two and a half
years ago, and it's like, oh, well, this guy. It's
not like the skeleton key that literally unlocks everything, but
it clears up a lot of stuff. So I think
the thing that's really that at my selling point for
the book is the the there's a neutral way to
think about conspiracy theories because we're now in this point
where people of a certain age like that is who
their identity is. It's like I just am a conspiracy theorist, right,
And there's it's very difficult to think clearly because there's
sort there's sort of this heuristic in the conspiracy theory
community where because you had this skepticism about things that
happened in the past, you have this sort of like
gnostic pure knowledge of everything that's happening now and conspiracy
Oh it's this is a false flag, just like what
I saw ten years ago. There are heuristics that work,
and then they are heuristics that don't work. And so
like what I was trying to do with this book
was try to establish Okay, really, what is a conspiracy theory?
How does it work? Why is everyone today in this
hyper vigilant, paranoid, neurotic mindset where there is a conspiracy
lurking or i should say, an illegitimate conspiracy lurking behind
every door. Ten years ago, if you were a liberal Democrat,
the big bad and it actually has been the same
conspiracy theory for the last ten years. The big conspiracy
was Russia, Russian bots, Russian hacking coutin Donald Trump got
urinated on by a prostitute in a Russian hotel, and
that's the blackmail they've got. Sorry to be lewde with
you and your audience, but you know, maybe if you've
got young people in your audience, they didn't know that
that happened. If you were going through the first Trump campaign,
like that was the October surprise and we're all just
sitting here like are you kidding me? So the basic
punchline here is a conspiracy theory effectively is a folk
account of history. It's you and me trying to figure
out what's actually happening, without the benefit of a PhD,
without the benefit of a Walter Cronkite, without the benefit
of some expert or authority, a regime a James Lindsay,
a regime approved personality who can disseminate a coherent narrative
to us so that we can go back to sleep
and then go to work and then pet you know,
a little Pete junior on the head and send them
off to soccer practice, you know, the things that make
our day to day life livable. So what you really
have is that this folk history and then regime history,
and there's this tension between the two. So I talk
a lot about that. I bring in a lot of
Marshall mccluan to talk about how the Internet has created
this unique paranoid culture. That gentleman he was on Joe Rogan.
He popularized the phrase mass formation psychosis. You know, that's
been one of these phrases to explain kind of why
everyone is so crazy and why everyone is so distrusting
of the things that they see and the people that
they live around. I don't think we actually need novel language.
I don't think we need, if anything, this book does
very similarly what my first book did, which was like
take the psychology out of it, take the psychiatry out
of it. Because as I make the point with the
you know, Jim, Lindsay and Hofstad are the psychology that's
been used to make sense of our political life has
made it worse because it isn't a psychological problem. Intrinsically,
it's a political problem. It's a social, cultural, civilizational, historical problem.
We're dealing with real things, not just artifacts of the mind,
and we need to be able to treat it that way.
So that was probably a little incoherent. But it's a
great book, and I hope your audience loves it.
Speaker 1: No anything I promote anything from Imperium Press. I send
people there all the time and they just get lost
in it. Thank you for mentioning Coast to Coast, though
it reminds me I haven't listened. To keep it on
my phone to listen to every once in a while.
His nineteen ninety six interview with William Luther Pierce about that. Yeah,
and it was one of the only episodes that you'll
ever hear art Bell like going at the guests, like
attacking the guests. It's wild. But the thing I love
about it is Pierce is just so even I'm here
to tell here to tell my story, I'm here to
answer all these ridiculous claims that have been made and everything.
But yeah, there's some there's some good stuff out there,
and yeah, Turner Diaries and Hunter, those are good books
to check out, you know, and there some compelling writing.
To say the least.
Speaker 2: There Not to slam Alex Jones because he's sort of
a folk hero for a lot of people, even to me,
but it's like, yeah, Coast coasted that in the nineties,
and it took Alex Jones until like twenty seventeen to
have David Duke on and he came at David Duke
the same way that William Luther PIERCEC. Gott treated So
it's the same kind of tension in the right wing.
And this is one of the hypotheses of my book
and my new book. It goes back to the John
Birch society in effect, where you have or between Buckley
and the National Review and the Real Rights, or between
Buchanan and the Conservative inc. There's this tension between the
mainstream post war consensus right and then the more principled
hardline nationalists, and that has always existed. This is why
there wasn't alt right. This is why James Lindsay complains
in that interview with Constantine kissing. Well, they don't even
actually attack the left, who supposed their real enemy. All
they ever do is attack the conservatives because conservative inc.
Is a proximately our biggest threat, because our message. We
have to squeeze our message through this very narrow funnel
to get half or a quarter or a third of
our ideas out in this very domesticated way, because conservative inc.
Is the problem. What did Nixon say, right a thousand times?
The media is the enemy. Conservative inc. Is the enemy.
So that's you know, that says it all right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't the Clintons that got got Sam Francis
canceled and fired from his job. Yeah, it was the
un right wingers. Yeah, all right, Josh, I appreciate it,
thank you, and let's do it again. STIM appreciate it absolutely.
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pegana Show. Josh,
Neil's back. What's happening, Josh, It's going well.
Speaker 2: Pete love talking to you. Thanks for the invite as well.
You're a very gracious host and we always have good conversations.
I'm looking forward to it today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Thank
you for doing the Old Glory Club live stream last week.
Gave us some context into the JFK mess and and
other things. But last time you were, we were Last
time you were on, we talked about the term woke right,
and we talked a little bit about your second book,
Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But the new book, Intolerant and Intolerant
Interpretations is starts to go even beyond that and really
starts to get into start tearing apart. It seems like
you're trying to tear apart like the basis behind these
conspiracy theories, where they came from, and basically how they
grew and specifically you know, it's really easy to say, oh,
the president's head exploded, and you know it looks like
it came from the front, but you know they're saying
it came from the back. But no, it goes much
deeper than that. When when when you start getting into
conspiracy theories. So you know the first part of your
new book you specifically talk about Richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper,
So jump in there and start talking to you know,
if you can start to start there and take us
down the road of where we're at where where we
came from to get to where we are now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again thanks for having me on to talk
about the book available with their Antelope Hill Publishing. It's
called Intolerant Interpretations.
Speaker 1: And and if you if you use code, guess code
pete q off. So yeah, I've been an olybel things
so cool.
Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome. I view it as a sequel to understanding
conspiracy theories. Uh, it's written that way. And yeah, as
you pointed out, the book starts with sort of a
genealogy of this like anti conspiracy polemic. It's called actually
the first chapter it's called and abbreviated genealogy because honestly,
if we really put our thinking hats on it, probably,
you know, we could look much further into the past, uh,
to to figure out how we got to where we
are today. But the very recent history, very recent past,
is certainly enough history to kind of understand the climate
that we're in now. And so yeah, I did single
out Carl Popper and I singled out Richard Hofstadter for
two I think very important reasons. I was kind of
imagine myself having to do a robot when I talk
about my books or offer some of my arguments, and
one of those, like my imaginary interlocutor is, you know, well,
why pick on Carl Popper, why pick on Richard Hofstadter?
What makes them so important? And there's really two reasons,
one for each. The first reason being that Carl Popper
is basically the philosopher of the open society. He's the
philosopher of the great replacement. And he's also because of
his a lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology
and things like that, he's also kind of like the
philosopher for the anti conspiracy theory point of view. And
there's two really important works that he wrote that I
critique in the book. Obviously. The first is The Open
Society and Its Enemies, and it's like a seven or
eight hundred book. Basically, it's like the be all and
end all of liberal democracy apology, right, that's kind of
what it's a seven hundred, eight hundred page book justifying
why open societies, which is to say, liberal democracies are
superior and preferable to closed societies. And he gives several
examples of what constitutes a closed society NSDAP Germany, Soviet Russia,
Fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or
Romania or really any of the countries where there was
a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into
human history. The original closed society was Plato. Plato's republic
is basically the if the open society and its enemies
is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's republic is
really the apotheosis, the intellectual apotheosis of you know, nativist, authoritarian,
ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. That's what Popper. And again
maybe some context on Popper. He was from Central Europe.
He was from a well educated, high cultured bourgeois I
want to say, Lutheran family. I think Richard Hofstadder came
from a Lutheran family, so maybe Popper wasn't. But anyway,
they were upper class Jewish, ethnically Jewish living in Europe,
and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin.
He was a Communist in his youth, he almost died
at a Communist rally, and then he was some time
later obviously persecuted or felt the heat of the German
Reich on his heels, and he fled Europe and he
sought sanctuary basically in what we tend to think of
as the Atlanticist states, England, the United States, I think
even New Zealand. And so that experience informed his philosophy
about the superiority of liberal democracies, and as a kind
of second hand to that work, in the mid fifties,
he published a very very short essay like three pages
called The Conspiracy Theory of Society, and basically this was
his anti conspiracy polemic. He compares in that short essay,
he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something like homer
or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this olympus of
deities that are really pulling all the strings, and more
than just pulling all the strings, they're specifically moving people
into place and positioning them to take important roles. So
he basically says, you know, when you abandon, when you
abandon God, you elevate man into this theistic state, and
so men become these supreme agents, capable of all kinds
of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting there is that is immediately, you know,
I think of Riizard Leguco his book The Demon and Democracy,
where he compares democracy and communism and just shows how
parallel they are in having to sell themselves. And all
that does is it sounds like he's selling. He's doing
his best to sell liberal democrac or sy while either
hiding or not understanding that in order for liberal democracy
to continue, a conspiracy does have to happen. But it's
not one continuous conspiracy. It's one conspiracy takes over and
that gets supplanted by another conspiracy and another, and it's
just not on down the line and you have you
just have competing conspiracies the all time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's a chain of conspiracy? Like a never ending
chain of conspiracies? Well, what Popper says is different. He
actually says that things that we don't like Basically, he argues,
we attribute outcomes that we don't like to conspiratorial origins.
But what he claims is really happening is that there
are simply unexpected consequences, sort of like that old line
the road to hell is paved with good intentions, like
the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences. So,
and he says things like you know, economic depressions, military conflicts,
societal collapse, the whole list are. These are all things
that come about as a consequence of other political actions
that are being undertaken, and that a social theorist's responsibility
is to trace those lines and figure out the causality. Right,
But ultimately it's never a conspiracy. Man does not replace God.
Everything can be understood empirically through proper social theory, social
proper social theorizing. And so that's why I chose Carl Popper,
because he has such a monumental legacy, and the more
you dig into it, actually the kind of creepier it gets.
A lot of the I will say a lot, but
some of the most well known names in the contemporary society,
people who are strong advocates of not only liberal democracy,
but also like the censorship regime and using state power
to prosecute political minorities, which is something that Carl Popper
advocated for. You find that a lot of the really
relevant people today were also connected to Carl Popper. Cass
Sunstein was a student of Carl Popper. George Soros was
a student of Karl Popper. I think Richard Hofstadter may
also have been at one point affiliated with him, So
he beyond his own works, Carl Popper was a mentor to,
or had close relationships with basically anyone who's ever had
a bugaboo about nativism, so he was a really obvious
example to pick. Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, I think,
if I had to guess, it's kind of a name
that not many people think anymore. He died somewhat early on,
but he had a very successful career as an academic
historian and public intellectual in the mid twentieth century. Many
of his several of his books won Politic Serprizes, so
he was really really creme de la creme. The Age
of Reform was a Politz Serprise winning book. I believe
that The Paranoid Style and American Politics was another Politz
Surprise winning essay, and in both of those works, Carl Popper,
excuse me. Richard Hofstadter basically takes aim at populists, rural
types middle you know, flyover Middle America with San Francis
would describe as Middle American radicals, the kinds of people
who probably donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds
of people who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds
of people who became maga. Basically, in those two works,
he's going after populism and in particular he's going after
what he calls the paranoid style in American politics. And
Richard Hofstadter also has his own legacy of influencing academics
to write anti conspiracy polemics, and his most famous essay
was the Paranoid Style and American Politics. Basically he uses
Freudian psychoanalysis as a in an artful way. That's his
own word. By the way, I'll give you this the
second sort of two a to why I chose these guys.
But it's because of they tell them themselves basically in
their works they tell him themselves repeatedly, so it makes
for a good learning.
Speaker 1: This is a this is a running theme with a
certain group of people. They can't help themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in particular, Paper and hopstadd are like at
the top of the mountain of just letting you know
exactly what's on their mind. That's how you can, at
least for me. It's like, if you want to present
an argument and you want to present people as spearheads
or figureheads of a certain movement or whatever I mean,
you don't want to leave the audience feeling like you
arbitrary really picked these people or whatever. So I mean,
it was really great that in both cases they just
they just telling themselves. So in the essay of Paranoid
Style in American Politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He
coins this term pseudo conservatism, and he talks about the
paranoid style. So he says he uses paranoid in an
artful way, appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology. I think
he says something like in the way that a historian
of art would describe a certain period as barok or whatever,
he wanted to use paranoid style in that same way. So,
which is like a way of saying, you're not doing
it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of
literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end. Like if
you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking
this term that has a very specific meaning and application,
I'm taking it outside of his discipline, and I'm plopping
it in a completely different discipline in an informal way,
just because you know, and there's.
Speaker 1: Like so much of that today, so much of that today.
I don't know if you saw and I hate to
even talk about this person because it just gives him attention.
But Joel Berry from the Babylon b he said, there
is going he said, very soon, progressives are going to
start embracing white identity. Square peg round hole man, what
the hell are you doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it seems you know, and then obviously the
most obvious one is the main wook right guy. What
the hell is the same James Lindsay. I mean, he's
you forget, he has nothing is he's incoherent. At this point,
it's gotten to the point where they they can't make
They know that they've lost, They know that neoliberalism is dying,
they know that the open society is falling apart what
they love the most, and they're doing every and it's
this isn't right after World War Two when you have
a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open
society because they don't want to go back to what
it was just you know, ten years ago, and you know,
they need a society that they can blend in in.
And yeah, I mean we're past that at this point,
and especially especially since October twenty twenty three, which I
think is like literally a changing of the age like that,
like we're in a new age now.
Speaker 2: I totally agree, so Hofstadter basically, And there's a couple
of I don't want to spoil all of the really
really juicy bits of it, but there's so many like
telling on yourself moments, some of them like they weren't
obvious at the time. But there's one passage where he
talks about, Uh, there's a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques lacan Uh.
He's sort of like a he's a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically,
he's like your average like shit lib French intellectual had
all of the bad uh you know positions, political positions.
Speaker 1: Like a precursor to post like a precur precursor to
the French postmodernist or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, basically one generation earlier than that, sort of overlapping
into the that movement getting its legs off the ground.
But there's a famous Lakhanian law that I think most people,
most readers in this sphere have kind of come across
one way or another. Gets quoted a lot. He says,
you know, if you're paranoid, if you fear that your
wife is cheating on you. Even if she is, you're
still paranoid and it's illegitimate to have that fear. So
so your wife is cheating on you, you're suspicious that
she's cheating on you. You're pathological. So look like Hofstadter takes
that and he uses it in the context of floridization
in the water supply. He says, you know, if even
if it came out to be true at some point
in the future that the government was putting contaminating the
water supply for expressly political, even socialist reasons, you would
that's still exemplary of the p aid style. And then
lo and behold, decades later, that's basically exactly what happened.
And that's like only the tip of the iceberg basically
in terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply,
the soil, the air, everything that we kind of consume
and are just moving through even passively. Like we all know,
we all have the receipts on that. It's not a mystery.
There's it's basically pretty much an open and shutcase. It
did happen, It happened for expressly political reasons. Still people
still want it to happen. RFK junior, as he was
being sworn in as head of HHS, basically said we're
going to take the floride out of the water. So
it's like, oh, but you're still a crank if you
think that, You're still a crazy person if any of
that troubles you in any way. So to my imaginary
interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically target these
two people as being progenitors of this way of thinking,
that's why that's kind of my rebuttal I was gonna
say before, there's like a two A aspect to that,
or like you know, like a tertiary aspect to that,
and it's it's entirely the way in which these these
academics basically told you what the final outcome of their
preferred political program would be. Towards the end of the
Open Society and its enemies, Popper basically says, you know,
if we followed this open society policy to its final conclusion,
then it's not only conceivable, I'm paraphrasing, by the way,
just for the audience at home, it's not only conceivable
but highly likely that you would have mass scale a
demographic replacement. You know that it would so rupture the
health and stability and coherency of an area, but the
open society is still better, so we have to do it.
So these are two guys who basically laid out a
sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy. They also
issued a series of polemics against people who are skeptical
of liberal democracy, and they also kind of spilled the
beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program. So
it's very difficult for me to find a better example
of the kind of thing I'm trying to communicate to
the audience, which is all of these kinds of things racialism, conspiracism,
anti liberalism are inexorably tied to one another. And it's
not for arbitrary reasons. It's for like first principles political theory.
And also just like I was gonna say, urban planning,
not urban planning, but like like basically like state craft and.
Speaker 1: And and social engineer, social engineer.
Speaker 2: Social engineering, right, yeah, yeah, like your demographic construction things
like that. Social engineering is more succinct. So I started
with them, and the more I read them and the
more I do this kind of writing, I just feel
like vindicated in that decision because they just keep proving
to be relevant over and over again.
Speaker 1: Before we move on to the next next one, the
term conspiracy. Theorist Carl Popper wrote, use that term, and
I believe it was nineteen fifty seven. And then there's
this it's been revealed that the CIA was using that,
like had said, Oh, that's the term we need to
use against against people who are talking about the JFK.
Is that is that right? Or is it uh? Or
should we be looking at Popper for that?
Speaker 2: I you know, I've heard that. I've heard that basically
all of my life. I've never independently researched that. I've
kind of taken it at face value because I've heard
other and I've seen other, you know, well regarded researchers
make that claim. Before I would say, I would say
this that there there's more than one road to critiquing
liberal democracy. And I do think it comes down to
sort of your specialization. I think people who are more
into who are more like wonks and more into political
culture and more into the nitty gritty of institutions and
and and the ways they sort of like octopus tentacles
get involved. Have there have their their tentacles in every
other pot because obviously the CIA has a long, a
long history of social engineering. I'm actually just now reading
this great book Who Paid the Piper, which is basically
it's by H. Francis Stoner Saunders, and is talking about
the CIA during the Cold War and they're anti Communist
initiatives and how people like James Burnham were, you know,
in effect, you know, whether explicitly or implicitly, doing Cold
War culture war stuff on behalf of America against the Communists.
Speaker 1: I've kind of always known that it was kind of
obvious if you work at if you were working at
a National Review when he worked there, you were you
were tied to the CIA in some way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so well, naively, I actually didn't know that. I
was very late to the James Burnham train. Everyone was
reading him during COVID and earlier, and I picked him
up like two years ago, and my head was, my
hat was blown off my head. I was like, wow,
this is great. And then and then like a week
later someone was like, yeah, but Burnham was the spoon
Come like wait, what so yeah.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't But but the thing the thing about
it is that doesn't bother me because you know, when
I think about the first two books that he wrote.
When he wrote The Managerial Revolution, he wrote Machiavellians, I
can't be one in two percent. Sure he was spooked
up at that point. He was, you know, possibly, but
still it doesn't mean that he was writing those books
for any other any other intention then, because he that's
that's the book he wanted to write at the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in particular, The Managerial Revolution seems like a relatively
non ideological kind of academic work. But anyway, I think
there's probably multiple roads you can take. And for people
who are you know, as they say on the internet,
like theory cells, who are into the philosophical tradition, I
don't think, you know, focusing on Carl Popper versus focusing
on the CIA, that there's any obstacle or that there's
any hurdles, or that they're not congruent with one another.
This just happens to be the road that I took,
and so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean,
obviously the CIA is involved in political assassinations regime change coups,
so we're if anything, I think what is worth extracting
out of this is sort of the if you want
to say, multidisciplinary or multi factorial, multi personnel engine behind
liberal democracy. That you can come at it from the
popular culture space, you can come at it from the
academic space, you can come at it from the intelligence
services space, and basically it all leads you to the
same thing that you've got political conflict, right, valry, subterfuge,
All the kinds of things that people like Carl Popper
told you don't actually have them and are not really
relevant in understanding political anything related to politics.
Speaker 1: Let's jump forward to Jonathan Heyde. You talk about his
book The Righteous Mind. That's one of those Height is
one of those people that really gets pushed by a
lot of the people who call themselves classical liberals, the
people who want to return to the nineties, the golden
age of the nineties. But you know, one of the
things that you point out is that they're his ideas
about psychological about how he misrepresents political differences between people
who have I think the terminology you use was broader
moral palette or what he used is broader moral palette
and liberals six and tuitions versus versus liberals have three.
So can you talk a little bit about how Height
continues this how he explains how this continues and moves
forward from you know, from World War Two and the
post war consensus.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think a friend of yours, astral Flight,
made this really great observation to me. I didn't even
realize it that Jonathan Height was kind of like like
the Jordan Peterson. Before there was a Jordan Peterson. Five
or six years before Jordan Peterson got into political commentary
and political culture, you had Jonathan Hight as this sort
of centrist. And I say none of this with invective
or hatred. I actually think pretty of all of the
people who've done the I d W centrist, we just
need to get along thing. I really do look at
Jonathan Height as being like the most honest and really
the most competent person to try that out. But I
would just say, like, it's really remarkable if you want
to compare the public intellectuals of say today or the
last ten years compared to twenty thirty, forty, fifty, sixty
years ago, it's really startling. The issue I had with
Jonathan Hite was that his and this is really the
same issue with Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem
that way with Peterson is they're actually very narrow minded.
I hesitate to say uneducated, but they are ignorant really
of other disciplines beyond their own. Jordan Peterson, if you
want to know about psychology, probably is one of the
best living educators of psychology. But when and this has
always been a parent when it comes to philosophy, history,
political theory, he's basically indistinguishable from like your grandpa sitting
at the actually your grandpa at the Thanksgiving dinner probably
knows more than Jordan Peerson. But same thing with Jonathan Hyde.
Very good, very astute as a sociologist, as a anthropologically
minded person, obviously as a PhD of social psychology, But
the big glaring hole in his theory of the moral
foundations as applied to the political binary is actually politically ignorant.
So the John so the Heights moral foundations theory says
that there are six elementary moral foundations or intuitions care, fairness, liberty, sanctity, authority,
there's a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at
the moment. And his research demonstrated that conservatives were more
in touch with all six than liberals were. And he
gives the example of the John Kerry campaign back in
two thousand and four and the rhetoric that was on
the campaign trail, and he basically said that Democrats were
unable to access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, sanctity, purity,
purity would have been the sixth one, right, that these
are kind of like classically conservative moral intuitions. They have
to do with They're they're inexorably bound up with like
the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military,
hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably bilt bound up
with the family and a paternal sort of view of
the world. And so Height says, well, this is really
a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections, they're losing
the culture war, They're not really able to communicate to
all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to
develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palate.
There's a couple of problems with that. First, and what
I think the biggest problem is is that his research
actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's
just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied differently.
When a conservative Bible thumping rust belter practices sanctity, they're
thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about
the Church. They're thinking about the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments,
they're pastor. But this is according to Height. When secular
humanist types think in terms of sanctity, well, they think
about the environment, They think about pollution and climate change,
they think about sort of these very novel, untraditional, outside
of the box ways of applying these basic moral intuitions.
You know, what was the old liberal maxim, you know,
think globally, act locally. That kind of describes the problems
are the way liberals think is in this fundamentally non
parochial way. So that tells us one that liberals don't
have a problem accessing these moral intuitions, it's just they
apply them differently. So to me, the first problem that
arises out of that is it tells us something about
the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that
they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have
two completely different populations living side by side as though
they were actually one people. You know, when we are
we here in the whatever you want to say, the
Trump right, the online right, student right, radical right right, whatever,
I mean, A lot of us, if not most of us,
are here because we have certain foundational concerns about our kin,
about the folk, about the race, about homogeneity and a
coherent national identity. This sort of issue in Heights. Theorizing
betrays the fact that we don't have a coherent national identity,
and that homogeneity is not just an issue in terms
of racial characteristics or religious affiliation, but actually there are
other ways in which people are or aren't alike, and
that's meaningful in terms of how you organize your polity.
So basically the punchline of that essay is there's two
different political economies. This goes back to James Burnham. There
are two different political economies operating in this country, and
while they're not necessarily opposed to one another, they are
in conflict. You have the classical liberal political economy bourgeois
entrepreneurial capitalism, which, even though that was critical in displacing
the old aristocratic order and the monarchy and things we
think of as even more based and conservative and hierarchical
and all these kinds of things, but relative to like
modernity where we are now. You know, that's pretty, it's pretty.
They were still deeply devout religious people. They were still
deeply patriarchal. These were not people who who comparable today anyway,
who thought like we will literally burn through all of
our social capital if it will earn more money or
help us achieve some kind of kakamamie political agenda. You
had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and then what comes after that,
as James Burnham said, is managerialism. Managerialism, the tech technocracy,
the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know, the welfare state,
all of these things which are built on bourgeois entrepreneurialism
but also in a way sort of parasitize bourgeois capitalism.
That's kind of like one of the stories of the
recent Trump victory with Vance as his VP, is like
we're trying to put the managerial revolution back in the
box a little bit here. Burnham says that, you know,
managerialism emerged because actually San Francis says this, expanding on
James Burnham, that nation states were growing so rapidly both
demographically in terms of like their geographical territories, and so
you had this dual problem of mass and scale. They're
getting larger, they're also getting more complicated. So if you're
a you know, if you're like an early twentieth century
robber baron, a capitalist, well you while it might have
been possible for you in eighteen fifty or nineteen hundred
or even nineteen fifty to literally micromanage everything and understand
A good example of this is maybe Walt Disney trying
to put together Snow White. He was intimately involved in
every aspect of that production down to the finest detail.
And then if you look at what Disney's doing today,
like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening,
no idea, what's even happening in terms of casting and
like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large
and kind of complicated that you had a new class
of people emerge, and these were the managers, technically minded,
technically skilled people usually with a college education, usually living
in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists
in the sense that they have large reserves of money
that they can allocate and spend and whatever captains of industry,
but they have very narrowly defined highly skilled roles that
put them. I think the quote from San Francis is
they literally put their hands on the levers of of
these industries. So as San Francis said, you know, the
change in the kind of people who became in charge
of things also became rather, he says, the change in
the class of people also became a change in the
kind of people. So we went from capitalists to managers.
But also we're dealing with a different demographic of people.
You know, a lot of you know, Ellis Islanders, you know,
are getting into these positions, a lot of newer immigrant
Americans are getting into these positions. To your audience, I'm
bringing this to a conclusion here. If it seems like
a crazy digression, we could say, in a sort of
loose way that the liberal democratic, you know, liberal progressive liberals, democrats, socialists,
these kinds of people, you know, in terms of heights,
moral foundation, the threes versus the sixes, these are people
who basically live in a completely different economy than the
conservative person. The conservative person even today still lives in
a farm, works on a farm, or runs their own business,
or comes from a family that does that. You know,
they tend you know statistically, we know this. You know,
they tend not to go to college, they tend not
to complete their degrees, they tend not to read as much.
The divide what Jonathan Hite treats as psychological differences between
liberals and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an
economical difference. So it's not that liberals are out of
touch with the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition.
It's that they are basically into a completely different style
of life, and so they apply these moral intuitions to
the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the
same moral intuitions differently. Jonathan Hype points out that for conservatives,
fairness has more to do with like proportionality, for example,
compared to liberals, where it's about like distributing to everyone.
Now everyone gets a piece of the pie. But conservatives say,
well that doesn't sound fair, Like why does the guy
who does nothing have as much, say as I do?
Hence the proportionality right, Okay, well there's an opportunity. This
goes into like one of the old debates like equity
versus equality? Are we trying to give everyone an opportunity?
Or are we trying to give everyone an outcome? Like
these are mentality differences that arise out of different economic
social organizations. So I know, I just throw a whole
bunch atch you. Maybe I'll take a pause there and
let you pick apart from that.
Speaker 1: Uh No, I mean I think that that it's uh,
it's something that's been covered on this on the show
endlessly managerialism versus a role by experts or you know,
role by asarc So, uh, the next thing I wanted
to move on to was just touch on this, you know,
as quick as quick as we can, because I really
want to talk about a Louis a little bit and
get into a liule and condoment the the idea that
unconscious group dynamics and not individual brainwashing drive shifts and
culture and how the American myth of individualism, you know,
as a noble as a noble lie, obscures how social
forces shape behavior. Talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I came. I came into contact with the
work of a German, very well celebrated germansy colug Just
his name is Gerd. I'm probably butchering it. He has
a name like straight out of German folklore, and he
looks like like, you know, like the most German Man
on earth, a gird gigorinzer or gigerenz or. I have
no idea how you would say it.
Speaker 1: Oh, I have no clue. I look, no no idea.
Speaker 2: He's a psychologist and well a little bit of context.
One thing that's really interesting to me about the last
twenty years of psychology publishing, popular publishing, academic publishing is
that since the turn of the century there has been
an extreme focus on irrationality, on what's sometimes called choice architecture,
a decision making basically cognition, but in terms of our
capacity to choose. What are the actual cognitive mechanisms that
are responsible for a decision making process, When do they
go right, when do they go wrong? What are their limitations?
This stretches all the way back to the really the
early twentieth century. I want to say, Herbert Spencer. Maybe
I could be mixing up some of my names, but
in the early to midish nineteen sixties you had what
was called the probabilistic revolution in the social sciences. What
basically refers to statisticians gained a lot of influence in
academic psychological research. And so there became this quantitive intent,
heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning to understand
and explain social behavior. And one of the people that
was at the start of that was Daniel Koneman. Now
let's just table that now, just to give some context
for the audience. So Gert Gigorenzer is working sort of
in this milieu, but he's coming at it from a
different point of view. One of the actually he's kind
of like hearkening back to the very earliest the theorists
theoreticians in this statistical revolution. He's basically saying that there's
and this this is contrasting to the Daniel Connomans of
the world, basically saying that there's a type of logic
that humans engage in that you could say is intrinsic
to our decision making process. It's not arbitrary, it's actually evolutionary.
And it's not only evolutionary, it's environmentally bound. Right, So
in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to
think of it as something that developed within a context.
We need to think of it as something that developed
according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations selection pressures, for example.
So he and again, I won't spill all the beans.
I'll leave some for your you know, your audience, if
they want to read it. I hope you do. Get
up an Anaal up Hill Publishing. He basically says that
there are three rules of human social organization, more or less,
and and there's actually no getting around them. There's no
you can't break them, you can't refine them. They are
fine tuned over countless generations of evolution. So when I
read that, my first thought was, and you know, it's
getting involved in all this radical politics stuff. I'm kind
of a neophyte still. I've only since like twenty fourteen,
twenty fifteen really been thinking this way. And one of
the like the kind one of the thoughts that are
or just like repeating questions I've always had, is actually
the subtitle of the essay that you referenced, you know,
how did things get this bad? You know, we're always
constantly asking ourselves, like why are people like this? How
do things get this way? Would you know or we
play the historical revision game? You know, would think be
different if you know Group X won this war as
opposed to group why, or you know, if this president
won this election or this, and we're we're always asking
ourselves like, why are people like this? How did things
get this way? The point of my essay is to
say that there's a profoundly evolutionary reason for people to
become conformist, because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism, or
at least for us, it's this sort of thing we've
accumulated that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger.
You can't know everything, it's impossible to know everything, it's
impossible to account for everything. And really all we can
do is just, you know, look to the person to
our left and right and do what they're doing. And
this is like deeply encoded into us. And so it's
very common for people to think like, well, it's it's
what the universe did. It was brainwashing through media, it
was brainwashing through Hollywood, it was brainwashing through the universities
and the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong.
I'm not saying that that didn't play a role. What
I'm saying is that before you ever read fucuou in
freshman year of college, before you ever turned on the
TV and saw some subliminal, licentious thing getting beamed into
your brain. You were conforming to the social dynamics in
your home, at the park, in the classroom, at the
lunch table. And these are the things we need to
think about in terms of why and how people adopt
certain political beliefs. And the real point of that I
was trying to drive home in that essay. Maybe I'm
kind of a bleeding heart here. You tell me if
you agree or disagree. The point I was trying to
drive home is that we want to have actually empathy
because like a libtard moment, we want to actually have
a sort of like patience and compassion for people, because
it's very common for us who are sort of like
initiated and know a little bit about this, to get
angry and bitter and like man, like you should know better,
or you got duped, or you were brainwashed by the
by the race communists or the woke mind virus. Actually,
most people have no idea consciously in an intellectual way
about what's happening around them. They're just simply imitating what
the people around them are doing. They are simply using
the same solutions that have worked for the people around
them in a sort of unthinking, unconscious way, because it's
actually too mentally taxing, cognitively demanding, and socially punishing, ostracizing
to get into the weeds on every one of these
individual issues, whether we're talking about LGBT or we're thinking
about tariffs or the immigration policy or whatever. Most people
don't think there is no actual rational, cognitive, sort of
deliberative process going on. It's just simply people going along
and getting along. And when I read his book in
the Wild, actually I bought a bunch of his books
and read a bunch of his papers around that time
when I was writing this, it gave me a profound
Actually it felt like I was being like liberated, liberated
by like this sort of anger at other people, like
why aren't you taking up this challenge like I'm taking
it up. Why aren't you trying to decode all of
the bullshit? And why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself
from your friends and your family in the name of
the truth. Because that's not actually what the kinds of
foundational social dynamics we've evolved to function with. That's not
how they operate. Which isn't to say that they're like
deviant or pathological. It just means that you know, people
like you and me are like a different breed of
person basically. And if we're getting in front of an audience,
whether it's you and your podcast or me and my
blog or whatever, or somebody at like a rally or
a pub, you actually have to have like some heart
for the people in front of you, the people who
are gathered around you, because they don't actually know better.
And most of the time people treat that as a
sort of insult or a smear, or they say in
a pejorative and condescending way in the same way that
I don't know any better when it comes to physics
or mechanical engineering. Doesn't make me like a loser or
a conservative or a dueb or whatever. It just means
I don't have that specialization. I would need to rely
on a well meaning expert. I think, to the point
of that essay, people believe and act the way they
do far less for deliberative, conscious reasons than they do
for invisible social dynamics that mind and tether people together.
That was another really long winded answer, So I apologize.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a pedant but I think
when using the term empathy, we have to be able
to separate what's known as effective empathy and cognitive empathy.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective.
Effective empathy is the more dangerous one, and I think
it's what's taken over a large amount of the left
and progressivism, which is being able to understand one's another
person's emotions, but also sharing them with them, trying to
share their experience. I don't have any interest in that.
Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to
seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly
what they're feeling. I think that leads that leads us
down the path of the where you that what's become
the meme of how you know, most people who would
be right wing care about the people most around them,
and then out here it's the people, yeah, the heat map,
and I think the we have to be careful of that.
Understanding where people are coming from is one thing real
that that section of empathy which has become the most popular,
where you're trying where they want you to share and
feel what other people are feeling. I have no interest
in that. I have enough I have enough of my
own problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I give three examples in that essay, and they
all are examples of cognitive empathy. So I'm glad you
made that distinction. I mean affective empathy. That's the sort
of Again, I don't say this in a really negative way,
but it's kind of how we've ended up in this squishy,
womanly school marm kind of mentality where it's like, well,
how do you feel if that happened to you, Well,
I would feel bad, So then don't judge them so harshly.
It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples
I give, if I can remember, one of Gigrinser's one
of his three rules is basically the default rule that
if there's no other solution, then you do what everyone
else has done previously. And I give the example of somebody,
a young man who enlists in the US military in
two thousand and two or two thousand and three, and
they did that for rule one, do what other people
around you do. And so if you're a young man
and you're watching TV and all of the men in
your family are like, this is fucking a travesty. We
need to go to war, we need to defend America.
You think, yes, it's a travesty. I need to go
to war. I need to defend America. Maybe maybe ten
other guys from your high school classroom did that, and
you're like, I'm gonna do that. And then you go
and it's awful and you come back and you're a
fucking mess and you look around at your other peers,
other guys who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug
problems or they kill themselves, and what do you do?
You develop a drug problem and you kill yourself, and
like that's the default. This is like a very sort
of like bleak way of applying it, but it gave
me a greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen?
Does it happen because we didn't give them enough education?
Did it happen because they didn't have enough socialization time?
Did it happen because like all of these were not
trying to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no,
he did it for like the three basic rules of
social organization. You do what everyone else does. If there's
no other solution, you do the solution that everyone else
has been using. And if you're a young guy who
enlisted in the military. Well, you see a lot of
your peers falling apart completely and maybe killing themselves. Or
another example I use is like a freshman aged college girl.
You know, how do they all fall into or how
does so many of them fall into this like destructive, licentious,
borderline pornographic sexual behavior because they looked around what the
people around them were doing, and they defaulted back to
the same type of social behavior that most of the
people around them were engaging it. And I think if
you can understand the degree to which just about everybody
you know is engage aged in some kind of like mimesis,
then it really does de emphasize the extent to which
you think of them as a competent, individually, rationally minded person. Now,
they may also be those things, but we are most
of the time we are that in a very limited capacity.
You go to the hospital, your physician is giving you
all these scans and using all of this large, you know,
fifty thousand dollars words, and they're flexing their upper learning
degrees at you, and you're like, Wow, this guy's really smart.
And then they turn around and then they watch Bill
Maher and what then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever.
You're like, Wait, I thought you were like a thinking person.
You realize actually this that type of demanding, deliberative cognitive function.
You know, if there was a big pie chart, how
much of your life you're you know, you're actually engaged
in that. It's a tiny sliver of the pie. Most
of the rest of it is. I mean, why did
that guy end up in medical school in the first place.
Because he looked to his left and his right and
that's what the people around him were doing. Or because
someone from on high their their father, their mother, their
grandfather said you're going to do this, and so they
did it. It wasn't a deliberative, individualistic process of rational choice.
It was unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that
to say, I agree with you. We have to be
careful about the E word, and my essay does skew
on the cognitive empathy and not the affective empathy. So
I appreciate you bringing that up.
Speaker 1: No problem. Let's move on to Connoman because you've already
mentioned him. Daniel Conneman. He basically portrays human cognition as
inherently flawed. How does that? How does that bolster a
move towards technocracy and yeah, I mean you mentioned a
little too, so I mean whichever direction you want to
take that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Cooman, I remember when I remember both when the
Jonathan Hype book and then Daniel Connoman book came out.
They came out within a few years of each other,
and they were some of the biggest I mean, the
podcast circuit of ten to fifteen years ago was like
those two guys, like every talk show, every podcast. And
it's actually really really difficult to overstate how influential Daniel
Khnoman has been on social science research but also the
general intellectual culture. So Daniel Conoman's Israeli psychologist who was
in the idea. If he died, like last year, I
think killed himself, it's probably interesting. It's probably not totally
meaningless to out that he signed himself up for like
one of these you know, end of life self terminating things.
I don't know exactly. I don't know if you went
to Denmark or wherever in those countries they have. So
his partner, Amos Tversky. I'm probably butchering these names because
I'm not Israeli. They had been research partners since the
fifties of the sixties they were part of. They actually
originated what's called the Heuristics and Biases research program. So
to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took
a psych instruction to psychology class at any point when
you were in college, there was probably a section on
cognitive psychology, and a lot of it probably had to
do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically
the Heuristics and Biases program says that human and this
ger Gigorinzer accepts this, by the way, he just sort
of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Uh, we're basically perpetuating this
line of research. They were both you know, mathematically minded,
statistical thinkers, so they both perpetuated through their research and
their public advocacy, their intellectual work, the idea that human
cognition is sort of a it's based on it like
maybe a handful of mechanisms or principles, if you want
to say, and we don't necessarily have an immediate ability
to activate those mechanisms or principles. They kind of seem
to have a life of their own. Uh, and they
work in the background, and somehow magically we draw inferences
and conclusions and and and and answers to things. You know,
Like when I as a kid growing up, my dad
would always say to me, you know, like, you know,
if you've ever got a problem you don't know the
answer to, you know, stop thinking about it for a while,
and a couple of hours later, you know, poof, it'll
hit you. And I was like, well, that's kind of crazy,
and that would happen. Maybe you go to sleep and
the answer comes to you in a dream, or you're
trying to remember the name of some actor and it
hits you a week later. It's like, what happened in
my brain that I went from really forcedly trying to
think about this to not and then suddenly the answer comes. Well,
this is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There
are a handful of mechanisms and principles that operate somewhere
kind of nebulously in the mind or within human consciousness
that help us to think and make choices and make calculations.
There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there
that is running all these these programs and calculations, and
we don't really get to ever put our hands directly
on it. But that's how the brain works now, Caiman,
and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit,
I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story.
But the important thing to take away from it is
that Caniman and Versky basically argued that this is an
inexorably flawed evolutionary process that leads us to basically make
a lot of errors, that human cognition is barely better
than a coin flip, and so their academic work was
about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them
with all of this statistically informed psychological research, which, by
the way, is also what Gigorenzer did. But the difference
between Caniman and Tversky versus gigaenzers Gigorenzer's idea was that
these heuristics and he didn't use the word biases, he
just talked about them in terms of heuristics, are like
it doesn't get better than that. Like, if you're telling
me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work
in this way, then it probably did it really well
because just about everything else about us works really really well,
but you have to understand the context that the mind
is developing it. You have to understand the context the
kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout
human history to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions.
And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy
tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary
selection pressures, and can you know, Gigorenzer's argument is, basically,
we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has
to deal with a wildly unpredictable, unstable, information rich environment,
which is a you know, historically a unique circumstance that
we've really never there's a very little precedent for it
in the past. And so when humans make mistakes, it's
because we are We have evolved in these niches, these
tightly bound ecological niches, to produce certain types of solutions
and to think about information in a particular way. We
don't live in that world if you want to think,
if you want to zoom out and say, you know,
the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance. Right
in the world of scarcity, there's limited resources there's also
limited information, there's limited choices to me. But in a
world of abundance, such as as the one that we
live in, to the extent that you could say it's
a world of abundance, well, you see things like, well,
there's a great study that got published some years ago.
I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number after which,
once presented with this number a number of options, humans
actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do
you know what that number is?
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't.
Speaker 2: I think it's about a dozen, okay, between six and
twelve six.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, like you go trying to buy a car, you
see like three dozen cars on the lot. It's like, well, meaningfully,
how do I know which is the right car for me?
Or you go shopping for clothing like me, and you
go down the mail the aisle and you see like
thirty gazillion racks of genes and you're like, I just
need a fucking pair of pants. Man, Like, I don't
even know what I'm looking at. You know, this abundant,
information rich environment is not something we're really evolutionarily adapted to.
For gigaenz are, that's not a fundamental problem with human
cognition for Kaniman it is and so Canaman. The thing
that's even more interesting about Caneman about not just his
academic research program, but also his affiliations. If you read
his book Thinking Fast and Slow, which you won a
Nobel Prize for Nobel Prize and Behavioral Economy, he's talking
about his good friend cast SUNS team. My gread friend
cast SUNS team whose judgment I trust so well. Who
at the same time that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean Condoman like was literally born in
mandatory Palestine in like the thirties. Yes, it went to Paris.
His parents escaped Paris because you know, the evil Nazis
came to power, they moved back to Palestine, like right
before before it became Israel. I mean this is you
want to talk about having your child, like having your life,
your life's attitude set up for you right from the start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very charm life. So you know, there's
so much to say about kind of and it's actually
the one essay I'm the most proud of because it
really gets to a lot of things that have bothered
me over the course of my life. I'll just say this,
you know, all throughout Countiman's kind of portraying himself as
on the side of like Joshmo, you know, here's all
this research showing that you're kind of a dummy, but
don't worry. You know, you're my dummy, and I'm going
to make sure nothing Dad happens to you. So he
has this sort of libertarian ethic about him where he
talks about the need for sort of paternalism because people
are so dumb and can't think straight and can't make
decisions for themselves. That means that they are at they
are easy prey for other people who would want, you know, demagogues,
people who'd want to manipulate them, what have you. And
he treats he views his research as basically a way
to help Joshmo navigate this world of complexity that he's
just too much of a dumb gentile group to navigate
on his own. And he keeps talking about it's just
really funny the way he keeps talking about people like
Cass Sunstein. You know, my good friend Cass Sunstein with
his tremendous work. Meanwhile, at the same time Canman's writing
that book, Cass Sunstein is writing his a series of
white papers with people like Adrian Vermule on conspiracy theories,
on cognitive infiltration, on like the og misinformation, like his
whole idea of cognitive infiltration, Cass Sunstein. That is was literally,
we're going to go into spaces where people are generating
novel explanations for political and social crises, and we're going
to fuck it up by deliberately throwing in pants on
on you know, ahead retarded counter conspiracy theories. So it's
a really really dangerous situation. I'll put it. I'll put
a bone it real quick, just like you.
Speaker 1: Just describe right wing Twitter or what I mean.
Speaker 2: That was one of his big bugaboos was the Internet.
It's basically, you know, his essay on conspiracy theories was
directly about nine to eleven and the Israel conspiracies. We're
in this unit two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,
so not like at the birth of the Internet or
even the birth of like, you know, AOL, within ten
years of it, and he's basically saying, it's a really
big problem that all of he doesn't say this, but
I'm editorializing a little bit. Cass Snstein is basically saying
to people, it's a problem that these dumb, gentile rubs
are looking at Israel the wrong way, and we need
to figure out a solution to discourage them from doing that.
And if we can't discourage them, we have to make
the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that no social
transformation can come as a result of that. And so
that's the reason I wrote about Knoman is because the
basic conclusion of his research is that humans need a
class of credentialed technological experts to do the thinking for them.
And you mentioned elul Eluill, famous French sociologist, probably published
like one hundred books. He might be one of the
one of the most prolific writers of all time. He's
a Christian, he was an anarchist, and he was French.
That was the worst part about him. He basically argued
all the way back in the nineteen sixties that there's
this encroaching metaphysical problem in human society is called technique.
This is very actually very complicated his definition of technique.
So I won't really get into it here on the
show with you. I give a lot of time in
the essay explaining it in a lot of different perspectives.
So it's definitely comprehensive in the book, but basically he
says that, you know, technique is this, to put it
very simply, is this sort of efficiency mechanism that throughout
different periods of human history was subordinated to some other
aspect of human social life. He says, you know, in
the Roman in the Greek and Roman times or the
Roman times, that technique was subordinated to state craft, and
that in the Medieval times that technique was subordinated to
the aims of the Church and sort of theological thinking.
That you know, what technique looked like in the Mid
Ages was you know, theologians debating sort of the minutia
of like Christian metaphysics. You know, how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin, that kind of thing.
But at some point in the last couple of hundred years,
technique has become unmoored from other social forces or other
social domains of human life. Technique is no longer just
something you do to build a better bridge, or to
build a better government, or to build a better cathedral,
or to build a better love for God. It's actually
its own good, its own end. That sort of like
colonizing every other social space, and if you look at
the world around you, it seems like every endeavor that
people are engaged in is kind of subordinated to this
idea of more efficiency, more productivity, more conformity. If people
complain about the algorithm online, it's kind of a way
of talking about the problem of technique. People want to
talk about the rapaciousness of capital, and even ilul gives
there's a whole section in the technological society where it
basically says like even in the early generations of sort
of like Thebarian, you know, wasp capitalism, that it was
still pretty much kind of confined to economic logic and
economic concerns, and at some point after that it became
its own thing. Daniel Kahneman, the people involved in this
heuristics and research program, contemporary technocrats are really people who
have become like the physical embodiment of this principle of technique,
where you know, we don't even care about a nation
state or a community. All of these things are inefficient,
you know, they they don't they don't grow or progress
on their own. There's something that Jacque Olleuwell says that
I consider to be a really profound thing. He says
people who are kind of hypnotized by the magic of technique.
If you talk to them and express trepidation, trepidation about
like the direction of technological progress, they will treat you
as an enemy of mankind. Like what you're not. You
don't want to go to Mars. You don't want to
replace your eyeballs with glass computers. You don't want to
be able to erase down syndrome from the from the
from the human uh, you know, DNA, like whatever thing
we can achieve through technological progress. If you are an
advocate of that, then your enemy are the Ludites and
you know, like the spiritually Amish people who have some
skepticism at the idea that we can just keep innovating
and progressing and making everything more technical. Just as an
idea or as in a example for your audience, Like
I love heavy metal, but I really don't like a
lot of heavy metal from the last twenty years, and
it's really taken me my whole life to figure out why.
If you compare Black Sabbath and Tony Iomi to I
don't know, the one of the guitar players from Lamb
of God or Trivium or some death metal band, like literally,
Tony Iomi grew up in like bombed out Birmingham, like
around the factories, and the sound of heavy metal was
the sound of industrial, technological society. But Tony Iomi never
like he still used that sound to write melodies and
things that sort of resonate with the human spirit and
our ears and are pleasing to hear. But you listen
to a band like My Sugar. I recently started listening
to My Sugar. That song bleed. The first time I
heard it, I was like, Wow, that sounds like an
airplane engine. That's such a crazy sound to make on guitar.
So I bought the whole album, and every single song
is like we're literally going to recreate the sound you know,
what the inside of your washing machine sounds like. And
it's like guitar and guitar music was, whereas in the
era of Black Sabbath, it's like we're sort of imitating
industrial society to produce music. It's like and now today
it's like we're sort of using music to recreate technological society.
It's less pleasing to listen to, it's more technically demanding.
The guys, you know, James Headfield has a much more
aggressive rhythmhand than Tony Iomi has had. But I mean,
is every Metallica riff as great as every Black Sabbath riff?
And then you know, twenty thirty years later, is who's
ever headlining oz Fest? Now? Are they really better than
Pantera was in nineteen ninety four? They may be better performers,
the music may be more on the hunting edge, let's say,
of a particular genre. But it's also like nobody buys
those records anymore. Nobody goes to those concerts. If you
want to see a Lamb of God, you've got to
see them like on a big festival tour with the
same seven or eight other bands that nobody will pay
to see on their own ticket. Anyway, the point I'm
making is that technique sucks and it ruins good things.
Speaker 1: Let's uh okay, So you have an addendum that I
I don't even want to touch it. I want people
to read that on their own because you know that's
where you know, if we start talking about that here,
we're going to be We'll start getting into maybe yeah,
having ton couch some language, especially talking about certain groups
and things like that. Let's finish up talking about this.
Let's talk about let me ask this question, if babies
are boring racist, what's that means? We're just racist? Right?
Let me talk about Paul Bloom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, let me tell you a short story. Back
when I was a university lecturer. Obviously I'm from New York.
I taught in New York very racially, you know, multiculturally
diverse in every sense of the word. So whether it
was Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or
Nasau or Queens whatever, I had to teach the same material.
And one of the chapters was on human development, from
you know, infancy to Cradle of the Grave human psychology.
And at the time I was teaching, or around the
time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published
a series of studies that were, oh there were sixty
minutes segments on it. He got he wrote, you know,
New York Times bestselling books about it. Basically, he developed
a very unique set of research methodologies by which he
claimed you could get infants under twelve months old to
demonstrate complex social cognitive behavior, things that, according to the
psychological dogma of previous generations, really didn't show up until
like four five six seven years old. According to Paul Bloom,
it was present in babies as young as three months old. Basically,
what he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend
enemy distinction test, so they were so infants would and
there are multiple iterations of this. I won't get into
all the minutia of it, but one such example was
infants would base the watch sort of a play of
two dolls interacting with one another, or three dolls interacting
with one another, where you know, the two dolls are
maybe in conflict over something, and then a third doll
comes over and helps one. Maybe in a different iteration,
a third doll comes over and hurts another one. Basically,
the infants were They're measuring the responses of these infants
to either aggressive or cooperative social behavior between complete strangers.
So you know, generally, the outcome of the study was
that babies tend to like the helpers more than they
like the kind of anti social obstructive ones. They like
neutral people more than they liked hurtful people. They like
helpful people more than they like neutral people. And so
I would show the sixty minutes clip to students, and
invariably Paul Bloom would would try to scale up the
findings of this research. Okay, So Tier one is infants
have a preference for pro social behavior over anti social behavior. Okay,
So in Paul Bloom's world, that means there's a sort
of rudimentary faculty there pretty much from birth, where infants
can make a friend enemy distinction, And with each subsequent
iteration of this experiment, they would fold in other social conflicts,
including racism. And again, around the same time, there was
a whole bunch of studies based on what are called
looking time research. Methodology is basically, how long does an
infant stare at something, and how in particular do they
maintain their gaze or do they look away and get
bored and seek other kinds of stimulation. So at the
same time Paul Bloom is doing this research, there's other
research showing that, well, infants have a sort of racial preference.
You know, white babies are going to look at a
white face longer and more intently than they'll look at
a black face or a yellow face, or a red
face or a brown face, and so on and so forth.
And basically Paul blooms making this argument that we are
much more cognitively complex at an earlier stage and human
human development. That would be part one. That part two,
we have an innate preference for pro social or what's
sometimes called you social behavior. And three that part of
that preference is kinship preference. We have a bias towards
people that look like us, so on and so forth.
And I would show this, to go back to the
story time. I would show this to my students. The
students would be you know, as young as fresh out
of high school, as old as as like in their
fifties and sixties, trying to get another degree because the
economy was totally shit ten fifteen years ago, so you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever,
And routinely the two things I always observed, doesn't matter
where I taught it doesn't matter who I taught it to. One,
they were amazed at the idea that we have that
sort of cognitive sophistication that early on, so amazement. But
there was also a sort of horror at the idea
of implicating infants in the sort of nasty prejudices and
social evils that adults get messed up in. You know,
my class would be like, Okay, sure, maybe I'm racist,
but not like twenty four week old Timmy, he can't
be racist. That's you know, that's wrong. And so my
students had this sort of innate sense that you shouldn't
talk about infants that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants
that way, and that kind of sat with me for
a long time. And the point of the essay that
I basically make is there's a really really heavy presumption
that Paul Bloom is making that, whether it's wrong or correct,
the whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart.
And the basic presumption he makes is that kinship is
a moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of
cognitive phenomenon. In other words, is it necessarily is there
a moral dimension to kinship preference. I think that's an
open question. I think it's a presumption that you're making
that the behavior or the type of categorization that the
infant is doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social,
as opposed to some other facet of social sorting would
be the technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sort
of Really, the only way you can, seemingly, the only
way you can define those behaviors as moral is if
you have a problem with those kinds of behaviors if
you see an issue with an individual identifying with someone
that they're genetically related to as opposed and showing preference
for someone that they are genetically related to over somebody else.
And there's a there's an excerpt in that essay from
a New York Times piece that that Paul Bloom wrote
that again, like the way we started our conversation basically
gives away the whole game. He says, oh, jeez, I
can probably pull it's probably worth pulling up the exact quote.
If you'll just bear with me for like half a second.
Speaker 1: Sure, here we go.
Speaker 2: All right, I'm not going to waste your time. Basically,
he says, there are there are key differences in the
ways that infants develop morally, and the problem is not
that they have those tendencies, is that they differ from
how we would like them to be. So basically he's saying,
we need to social engineer kinship preference out of infants,
and if we can demonstrate that they show kinship preference
as early as two three months, then that's really as
early as the social engineering program ought to start. And
that was what my students were intrinsically picking up on
in the classroom. They were recognizing that if you are
treating this novel cognitive psychology experiment as a pretext for
a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program. Almost none of
them ever said that, but the horror that they all
saw in treating an infant like like something you can
mold was written all over their face. And that's really
the big issue with Paul Blum's body of work, And
that's what I'm focusing on in that essay is that, Look,
it's an open question whether or not there's a utility
and a benefit to studying moral and social development and infants.
But if you're doing that with the express intention of
trying to effectively derail cognitive development infant cognitive development, then
there's really there's neither a moral nor even a scientific
justification for doing so. I chose Paul Bloom's essay because
it's actually or his book, because it's actually one of
the worst books I've ever read in my entire life.
From an academic, you know, ivy league educated researcher. There's
no citations, which, by the way, like that doesn't bust
my balls that there's no citations in it. But if
you're like an Ivy League person, you're a department chair
of universities, you're on sick like that's what you're supposed
to do. Like that's this just like the bare minimum,
and it's just non sequitor after non sequader after nonsequitur
and and it's it's it's almost again not to get
too naughty and anti semitic here, but like you're reading
that book of his is like getting into the mind
of a Jewish propagandist because he's just telling you he's
he's demonstrating to you why his own logic doesn't really
make sense. You're getting to see the weaknesses in their worldview.
And there's a few other things he cites in there
in terms of like anti racist race science that I
think probably your audience would really enjoy it. So that's yeah,
that's what's up with Paul Blue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just it goes back to that. I mean,
at this point it's been attributed to so many people
as apocryphal that give me a child before they're two
three years old, and I'll I'll own their mind for
the rest of their lives. I'll mold their mind for
the rest of their lives. Yeah, I mean, that's that's
all I hear. And you know, and also what I
hear is I don't want this kid to grow up
to be baby Hitler, so we need to we need
to make sure of that. So please let me have
access to that mind so that it'll never think to
turn its gaze upon me.
Speaker 2: There's in that book. I like it, really, I was thunderstruck.
They're peppered all throughout the book. His book is called
Just Babies Origins of Good and Evil, you know, a
little bit of a punny title, like they're just babies,
but also just in the sense of like justice and
all that kind of thing. Peppered all throughout the book
are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups,
and like in the first two or three pages he
mentions the show and all with only there's one exception.
All throughout the book, all of his examples of like
evil racism, evil group conflict. It's always anti Jewish pogrim
stuff throughout the book, and like you just can't help
but read it and think, like there's an agenda here.
This actually isn't science, this isn't social theorizing. This is
just as I said in our last conversation, like this
is just like a racial polemic, like you are wearing
the And this is a concept I introduce in that essay.
It's not my own concept, but I've kind of put
my own flavor on it. Back in the sixties, you know,
there used to be this talk of ethnoscience as a
way to talk about like, you know, uh, some African
guy in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft, voodoo
and and and basically there was there was an attempt
to try to make you know, non industrial societies and
their rudimentary like knowledge power, make it on an equal
footing to you know, Western civilization. But I twist that
a little bit, and I say, Okay, let's accept the
premise that different groups practice the scientific method differently. That's
basically what this concept of ethnoscience is trying to say. Well,
when when people like Paul Bloom tried to do the
scientific method, it's actually not about like objectivity, empiricism, uh,
science knowledge, It's it's racial self defense. And that's particularly
egregious when you are making in defense the object of
your racial self defense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think if people pick up the pick
up the book and read the read the addendum, they'll
get that. They'll I think you wrap that up where
basically a lot of the writers that you're you know,
most of the writers that you're covering, that's what they're doing.
It's basically all of their work is in defense of
their own self interest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is why I think is an important book.
I'm certainly not the first person to bark up this tree,
but I do think I did it pretty comprehensively, and
I tried to go after as many like central figures
as possible. Are there other people of the you know,
besides Daniel Konnoman who are worth interrogating. Yes, And I
hope that somebody reads this and thinks, well, I'll plug
that hole. I mean, this book is like very much
in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing. Right. So,
you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing, but I
do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman and
Jonathan Hyde, you know, these are two people who I think,
because of their recency, there's such a lack of skepticism
towards their work. It's easy to look you know, fifty years,
one hundred years in the past and say, oh, well,
Carl Popper kind of or Theodore Herzel or whoever kind
of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up part
of my language, Like it's obvious, but you're you know,
when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and
maturing whatever, and you're seeing this work. You know, for
a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their their
scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right Jonathan Jonathan
Height's work is cited pretty much uncritically, and to me,
like his ideas have always been on their face wrong.
Same thing with Daniel Connoman, like the idea that evolution
over whatever thousands of years, millions of years, tens of
millions of years would create something like us that is
like a fifty to fifty coin flip in terms of
the shit going on between our ears, as it has
any positive utility, Like that's so obviously wrong. And the
thing that's so like to me kind of characteristic of
someone like a Daniel Connoman is that they develop all
this language, and they develop all these concepts that you
can't like test or apply in the real world or
that don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion.
So like there's like one of the big concepts of
Daniel Connoman, and this is a tangent I apologize this.
He talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up
into two systems, system one and symptom system two. Hence
the title of his book thinking Fast and Slow. One
is faster, one is slower. One's more prejudicial, one is
more conservative and reserved. One is more rational, one is
more irrational. And then if you ask yourself, well, where
is System one in the brain or in the body,
or you can't point to it. It's not an actual
thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality chemisphere.
Speaker 1: Is that one hemisphere versus another or something.
Speaker 2: That right right? Even with Freud, and there's lots of
bad things you can say about Freud, but his tripartite
model of the mind more or less kind of corresponds
to the major areas of the brain prefrontal cortex, mid brain,
hind brain. There's a sort of analogical thing happening there.
But with kind of me, it's like I'm just making
it's it's literally word craft, it's just word wizardry. And
and then you know, the title of the book, Intolerant
Interpretations is a very specifically intended title, like you need
to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them.
Like part of the problem that a lot of us have,
for one reason or another is we're just uncritically accepting
what's happening. And you can actually be like a like
a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and
be right about like the whole affair. And that's that's
what I'm That's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm
encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight,
like like just don't accept the premise and and that
that that pertains to like our political activism, Like I
don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States
of America is a you know, giant job fair for
the whole rest of the world. I don't have to
accept the premise that our ancestors were bad people and
we need to be punished for it. I don't need
to accept that we should encourage people to forego family
formation so because reasons, because reasons that like on their
face don't even stand up to scrutiny anymore.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things that was mentioned is
just the myth of the individual you know, coming from
a libertarian background, the first thing somebody does when they
become a libertarian, which is the most individualistic ideology out
there political quote unquote political ideology out there, is they're like, oh, wow,
I'm an individual I need to find other people who
consider themselves to be individuals. There's a fucking political party
in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that
doesn't tell you that that individuality and radical individualism is
just a myth that as soon as somebody finds, oh
I'm embracing this, but oh I want to hang out
with other people who who are radical individuals too. It's
like that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?
You know, and you know, people should you know, once
you start going down the rabbit hole of you know,
who preached libertarianism and where that came from, and you know,
maybe look at some of the names. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
may start seeing some similarities there too to what we're
talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is again it's a fine line that we
have to walk because I correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't think you would flat out reject anything associated
with individuality, like we are our own people. I mean,
this is.
Speaker 1: Why individual we're individuals within a group mmma, which is why.
Speaker 2: I emphasize people like Gerd gigorinz Or in my book
as sort of an antidote to that. Yes, you are you,
Peter R. Cononas, and there is no other Peter R. Cononash,
and you are in critical ways very different from everyone
around you. But at the end of the day, we're
a collective. We're a sort of hive organism. We exist
in physical spaces in proximity to other people that we
all depend on, even in ways that we can't possibly fathom.
So that's those those are kind of the major take
homes of my book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, And remind everybody again where they can
find the.
Speaker 2: Book Antelope Hill Publishing dot com. It's also on Amazon.
If you like the way this stuff sounds, you can
pick up my old books and Imperium Press. And I
maintain a blot janeel dot substack dot com where I
basically continue the same type of writing. So Pete, I
really appreciate it your total gentleman, and to your audience
by my book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a reminder, you have five percent off of
if you go buy his books at Antelope Hill and
any other of the great books at Antelope Hill if
you use code PEQ all one word at checkout. I
cover shipping most of the time. So yeah, I've My
library is on the other side of the room, and
if I were to start pulling out the amount of
books from Antelope Hill, it'd be quite the pile. So
head on over there. Thank you, Josh, really appreciate it.
I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinana Show.
Josh Neil is back. Josh, how you doing.
Speaker 2: I am nasally congested, and that makes me very much
like the the gentleman we're about to talk about today,
So I'm feeling sympatico with the subject matter.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're going to talk about Freud here. We're
going to talk specifically, we're going to read an article
that Lorraine Gignol wrote back in twenty nineteen and included
in one of his books. So, if we're talking about Freud,
is there anything that gives you like, have you ever
been what's your credibility to be able to talk about Freud?
Speaker 2: Well, the graduate school I went to was a heavily
psychodynamic psychoanalytic program. Most of the people, most of the
faculty in the psychology the grad program had had that background,
and so that was most of I mean, most of
the classes I took to were from a Freudian perspective.
I'm not a Freudian myself, and most of my career,
if you want to call it that, what I took
from Freud was sort of like a a contrarian point
of view, which is to say, there's a there's a
couple of like to the extent that people know about Freud,
they tend to land on a couple on one of
a few perspectives. One conventional perspective is that, well, he
wasn't doing real science, so all of it is junk
if you're in this milieu. One perspective as well, he
was Jewish, so it's all junk. Or if you're like
sort of like a like a left winger, then he's
sort of unimpeachable in a lot of ways. I fall
somewhere in the middle. I think his work is very
instructive as an insight into the Jewish not just the
Jewish mind, but like Jewish communal living, because as we're
going to see with this essay, most of his work.
You could say his work is heavily autobiographical. The concept
he develops are a direct result of his own experience,
and he prefigured, he prefigured like the sort of modern
preoccupation with with like trauma, which is unfortunate because I
think it was it was, it's an it's now like
sort of a trite observation to make that a large
amount of psychological dysfunction, even social dysfunction, is due to
disruption of of the home, the domestic circumstance early in
a child's life. Whether we're talking about like homosexuality or
you know, aberrant sexualities in general, they're just statistically, they're
they're the result of dysfunction in the home life early
on in the kid's life. I also think he's interesting
just for his like sort of anthropological work, which also
kind of you have to take him into view what
what Lourentz argues in this book to kind of understand
his anthropological work. His his whole idea of like the
the son's ganging up to kill the father, takes a
different tone when you consider his own personal autobiography and
and and what his work was about but also like
some of his anthropological work, like his book From Moses
to Monotheism. You know, he's treated as a subversive, especially
people who get into stuff his his relatives were up to,
like Edward Burnet's and they there's maybe you could say
he was an equal opportunity subversive because he undermined the
Jewish claim to being the first monotheistic people. So I
think he was an interesting He had an introst in career.
But what's more interesting is the stuff beneath the surface,
which we're obviously going to get into today.
Speaker 1: All right, So I'm going to start reading stop Me
at any time. Don't just stop me. Don't be you know,
don't hesitate to stop me. It's not I'm not going
to be insulted or anything like that. And yeah, so
this is the title of it. The chapter in the
book that this is included in is different, but the
title when he wrote it and it was put on
uns review was Freud's Sexual Abuse in Bena Breath. So
I'll start reading stop Me whenever. In the last few years,
there I've been lots of news reports, documentary films, and
articles about sexual abuse of children in Orthodox Jewish communities
in March twenty seventeen, for instance, Haretz reported that the
Israeli police arrested twenty two ultra Orthodox Jews for sex
crimes against miners and women, and in July twenty nineteen,
Times of Israel reported that the Deputy Health Minister Jakov
Litzmann was alleged to have improperly intervened to aid at
least ten sex offenders from Israel's ultra Orthodox community. In
twenty fifteen, Jewish attorney Michael Lescher wrote Sex Abuse Shanda
and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities to document, quoting the
dismal history of how far too many of those cases
have been assiduously concealed, both from the public and from
the police. How influential rabbis and community leaders have sided
with the alleged abusers against their victims. How victims and
witnesses of sexual abuse have been pressured even threatened, not
to turn to secular law enforcement for help. How autonomous
Jewish patrols, displacing the role of official police in some
large and heavily religious Jewish neighborhoods, have played an inglorious
part in the history of cover ups. How some Jewish
communities have even succeeded in manipulating law enforcement officials to
protect suspects did abusers. This reminds me of the story
of how Freud, having stumbled upon the widespread reality of
child abuse among his mostly Jewish clientsele, covered it up
with the theory that all little girls desire their father's
penises and all little boys dream of screwing their mothers,
and named his theory after a gentile myth.
Speaker 2: Well just to well, just just the bit about how
the Jewish community will aggressively not even self police, but
but more of like do run interference between themselves and
the larger community. There was an there was an article
like ten years ago in the New York Times that
was talking about the tendency for the rabbinical Orthodox Jews
to ostracize members of their community if they brought stories
of sexual abuse to the broader, gentile public. So I
wish I could pull that up. I just there's I
don't know, I'm not finding it now, but yeah, it's
just it's remarkable. I hesitate to say exactly that that
sexual abuse or sexual violence is like sort of intrinsic
to the Jewish social milieu, but it's hard to argue otherwise.
Speaker 1: All right. Two Freud's assault on truth the story has
been told by Jeffrey Massan, and the Assault on Truth
Freud's suppression of the seduction theory. In eighteen ninety five
and eighteen ninety six, Freud, listening to his neurotic and
hysterical patients, became convinced that most of them had suffered
from traumatic sexual abuse in their childhood. The traumatic origin
of hysteria and overused diagnosis in these days had already
been discussed by neurologists, including Jean Martin Charcaut, whose conferences
Freud had attended in Paris, and Hermann Oppenheim, who published
in Berlin in eighteen eighty nine a treatise on traumatic
neurosis Neuroses, Yet psychological traumas of sexual nature were rarely
discussed openly. On the other hand, there were medical publications
known to Freud documenting the frequency of violence on children,
including sexual assaults, but they focused on the physical consequences.
In April eighteen ninety six, confident to have made a
major breakthrough in psychiatry, Freud presented his findings to the
Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, his first major
public address to his peers. His lecture met with total silence.
According to Masan, Freud was urged never to publish it
lest his reputation be damaged beyond repair. He found himself isolated,
but nevertheless published his paper The Ideology of Hysteria. Are
you familiar with that term?
Speaker 2: Actually, I'm not. I think it's just an orthodo orthodox
pronunciation of ideology, just to say the origin of hysteria.
Speaker 1: Freud's conclusions are drawn from eighteen case studies, six men
and twelve women, all of which he claims bear his
general thesis. This is quoting. I therefore put forward the
thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria
there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience,
occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but
which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in
spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is
an important finding. The discovery of a caputnilli kaputneli in neuropathology.
Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals,
coitus like acts and so on, must therefore be recognized
in the last analysis as being the traumas which lead
to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to
the development of hysterical symptoms. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Just that's the UK spelling of ideology, and that phrase
couput neeli is also just saying the origin of neuropathology, okay.
Speaker 1: Freud suggests that this conclusion applies not only to hysteria
but to most neuroses. Among other remarks, he suggests that
children who aggress sexually other children do so as a
result of having been sexually abused themselves. Quote. Children cannot
find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they
have been seduced previously. However, one year after this article,
Freud decided that he had made a mistake in believing
his patients. He determined that what he was taken at,
what he had taken as repressed memories of sexual abuse,
were in fact fantasies. For the rest of his life
he would keep telling how he overcame his era and
discovered that these fantasies were intended to cover up the
auto erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to
embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And
now from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a
child's sexual light came to light. The This is from
the history of the psychoanalytic movement in nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just to clarify, I mean, there's a lot
of sort of unorthodox language and spelling of common terms
in the English language, like fantasy with a pH is
not meant to be synonymous with fantasy with an F.
Fantasy with the pH is And this was something that
other psychoanalysts picked up later, like Melani Kleine. But it's
basically a sort of mental representation of the the wishes
and desires of the individual. So it's it's not quite
it's not a fantasy with an F. It's a fantasy
with a pH. It's it's connected to sort of unconscious
mental processes in the way that they they generate this,
they generate wish fulfillments. That's tied to Freud's idea of
the wish fulfillment but also frustrated wishes. So that's just
generally what the pH is supposed to denote.
Speaker 1: From the standpoint of Freud's earlier theory, which he euphemistically
called the seduction theory, his new theory of spontaneous infantile
sexual fantasies can be seen as a projection. Not unlike
sex offenders tendency to blame their victims, theations themselves are
now accused of both sexual passion and murderous fantasies towards
their parents. By repressing these self generated impulses, says Freudian orthodoxy,
they have created their own neuroses, which may, in hysterics,
take the form of false memories of abuse. Thirty five
years later, Freud's most gifted disciple, once president of the
International Psychoanalytic Association, stumbled on the same realization that Freud
had shared in the Ideology of Hysteria. Sandor Freji wrote
in his diary in July nineteen thirty two that the
Oedipus complex could well be the result of real acts
on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward
the children, who then develop a fixation not from desire,
as Freud maintained, but from fear my mother and father
will kill me if I don't love them and identify
with their wishes. Becoming his apprehension of Freud's reaction, Florenci
dared present his conclusions before the twelfth International Psychoanalytic Conference
of Congress in electrotitled Confusion of Tongues between the Adults
and the Children. His paper contains a number of important
ideas confirmed by later research, such as the victim's psychological
identification with the aggressor or introjection. The aggressor disappears as
external reality and becomes intrapsychic instead of extra psychic, so
that even the guilt feelings of the aggressor are introjected.
Farensi hypothesized that helplessness caused the victim to empathize with
the aggressor, a process today known as Stockholm syndrome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's what interjection basically refers to. It's
the internalizing, making a mental model of some authority, the
internalizing of the characteristics or habits or mentalities of some authority. Figure.
Now that takes a very different context, you know, the
difference between like internalizing a teacher or a school master,
or a parent or an older sibling, as opposed to
internalizing the attitudes and dispositions of an abusive of an abuser.
I mean that also there's a lot of Freudian concepts,
not to like get way ahead of where we're at already.
But there's a lot of Freudian concepts that take on
a different character if you view them as being sort
of compensatory responses to extreme trauma, extreme sexual violence, Like
repetition compulsion is another example. Repetition compulsion, in like the
orthodox Freudian worldview, is the tendency of an individual to
repeat some action, usually aunctional action, until they gain mastery
over it and then can integrate that aspect of themselves
into the larger psychological world. But when you think about
the habit or the tendency of like sex abuse victims
to engage in repetitive sexual dysfunction, to like volunteer themselves
into pornography or prostitution, or go from one one disastrous
sexually violent situation to another disastrous sexually violent situation. It
they never get to a point of mastery, and it's
sort of like dispels the whole idea of the of
the like the claim, the cleaned up interpretation of what
that is supposed to express. It makes more sense in
the context of as we're going to see a little
bit later on, that individual has a split internally and
they don't have the only frame of reference they have
is this violent, chaotic, traumatic aggressor personality.
Speaker 1: Extreme adversity, especially fear of death, may also trigger a
premature development, for which Farenci uses the metaphor of a
fruit that ripens or becomes sweet prematurely when injured by
the beak of a bird, or of the premature ripening
of a wormy fruit. Shock can cause a part of
the person to mature suddenly, not only emotionally, but intellectually
as well. Such traumatic maturation happens at the expense of
psychological integration, and Ferensi brings in the notion of a
personality split quote there can be no shock, no fright
without traces of a personality split. In his personal diary,
reflecting on a patient who cannot remember having been raped
but dreams of it ceaselessly French, he writes, I know
from other analyzes that a part of our being can die,
and while the remaining part of our self may survive
the trauma, it awakens with a gap in its memory. Actually,
it is a gap in the personality because not only
as the memory of the struggle to the death effaced,
but all other associations associatively linked memories disappear, perhaps forever.
The observation is consistent with the findings of French medical
doctor and psychologist Pierre Janet, whose work has long been
overshadowed by Freudian psychology but has generated increased interest. In
the nineteen eighties, Janet theorized the first model of disassociative
identity disorders, now included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders. In Les Nevrosis, Janet wrote, justice, synthesis,
and association are the great characterists of all normal psychological operations,
so disassociation is the essential characteristic of all diseases of
the mind. Disassociation accounts for the evolution of traumatic memories
composed of psychological, sensory, effective, and cognitive experiences, which Shanez
calls ide fise. These fragmented aspects of the experience do
not allow a real memory to integrate the biography of
the subject, and instead develop into separate psychic entities which
nevertheless interfere with the main personality. In the most severe cases,
it can develop into schizophrenia or multiple personalities. Parensi's lecture
Confusion of Tongues met with the same disapproval from members
of the Psychoanalytic Association of Freud's ideology of hysteria had
met with the Viennese psychiatrists. Farensi was ostracized by Freud
and his secretarian disciples, and his paper was never translated
into English for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, as was customary.
He died a few years later a broken man. Section three,
The Hidden Fault of the Father. This story raises two questions. First,
what is it that made Freud change his mind in
the first place and made him shun ferencies work thirty
years later? Secondly, and more importantly, why was Freud's theory
so successful despite being long proven scientifically flawed and its
therapeutic value baseless. On the first question, Massan shares his
conviction that what Freud had uncovered in eighteen ninety six
that in many instances children are the victims of sexual
violence and abuse within their families, becomes such a liability
that he literally had to banish it from his consciousness.
This theory has been challenged, and Massan has been criticized
for exaggerating the negative reactions to Freud's seduction theory. All
that can be said with confidence is that his paper
didn't bring him the instant fame he expected.
Speaker 2: That's actually that's the first time I actually ever heard that.
I thought the only story I'd ever heard was that
he had presented this idea of sexual violence as the
precursor of psychological dysfunction, and that he was basically threatened
with losing his career for proposing something that was so
shocking to the senses of bourgeois European society. I guess
I would have to see, you know, I tried to
click that link there. I think that's a dead link.
So I don't know if you can actually find the
source that he's claiming, but it would be interesting to
find other accounts. Certainly, if he self censored out of
a sort of inability to leap frog his career, that
would be a lot more damning than simply he thought
that he was going to be shut out of the
discipline and out of you know, the academic system for
proposing something that was so like barbaric and shocking. That again,
that would also put a very different spin on because
Freud also the thing that's like you would not really
get this from just reading the Freudian ouvoir, so to speak.
He was intensely self conscious about his work. He was
intensely self conscious about the sort of the psychoanalysis as
a sort of universal system of interpretation, Like that was
one of his grand or ambitions. Was not just that
it would be a therapeutic intervention or you know, his
ambition wasn't just that he was advancing a science of
the human nervous system. He later again I invoked, like
from from Moses to Monotheism, he invoked his own system
as a as a as a as a medium for
literary criticism, for historical analysis, for sociology. So he thought
it was a way, a revolutionary way to look at everything,
not just the human psyche and not just medicine. So
on the one hand, he does have this reputation is
like an intentionally self conscious, sort of career minded person.
Even his even his relationship with Carl Jung, it was
to an extent a sort of opportunistic way to present
his ideas to gentile society by having them come through
the mouth of a gentile speaker. So I guess maybe
it's not a stretch to to argue that that he
self censored out of a frustration with the lack of
positive reception, but the common explanation going all the way
back to Stefan Malianews. Stefan Maliannu did a video about this,
like ten or fifteen years ago, that the reason he
pivoted from the seduction theory to this sort of if
you want to say, victim blaming account of mental illness,
was basically because he had been threatened by his peers
in the in the discipline. So I guess that's up
for debate.
Speaker 1: Masson takes other factors into account. He believes that Freud
was influenced by the wacky or what the hell is
that word Oderheinau knowologist William Fliss, unhappy inventor of the
nasal reflex neuroses, with whom Freud had developed a very
peculiar emotional bond. Incidentally, Fleiss's son would later write on
sexual abuse and hint of his own abuse by his father.
Massan is the editor of the unextrogated version of Freud's
letters to Flie. Freud destroyed Fleiss's letters, but failed to
have his own letters destroyed, which provide unique information on
the way Freud elaborated his theories. Yet, at the end
of the fascinating investigation, Massan and miss that the full
explanation for Freud's sudden conversion eludes him. Additional insight has
been supplied by two books published almost simultaneously nineteen seventy nine,
one in French and one in German, both translated in
English in nineteen eighty two, Marie Balmari Freud and the
Hidden Faults of the Father and Marianne Krohll Freud and
his father both draw extensively from Freud's letters to Fleiss,
which document how Freud was led to his theoretical about
face by his introspective self analysis. Balmari and Krohl point
out that Freud undertook this self analysis just after the
death of his father, Jacob. On November second, eighteen ninety six,
ten days after his father's death, Freud writes a flice
about a dream he had the night before his funeral,
in which appeared a sign saying you are requested to
close the eyes, which he interpreted as referring to one's
duty to the dead. Yet, on February eleventh, eighteen ninety six,
after mentioning that forced oral sex on children can result
in neurotic symptoms, he adds, ultimately my own father was
one of those perverts, and is responsible for the hystery
of my brother, all of whose symptoms are identifications, and
those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance
often makes me wonder. The following summer, he went through
a depressive episode and wrote on July seventh, I still
do not know what has been happening to me. Something
from the deepest depths of my own neurosis set itself
against any advance in the understanding of the neuroses, and
you have somehow been involved in it. Soon after September
twenty first, he announced to his friend, I want to
confide in you immediately the great secret that has been
slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I
no longer believe in my neurotica his seduction theory. He
gave his one explanation, the surprise that in all cases,
the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused
of being perverse. In the next letter, October third, he
wrote confidently that in the case of his own neuroses,
the old man plays no active part. Finally, October fifteenth,
he referred to the Oedipus story, quoting a single idea
of general value dawned on me. I have found in
my own case too, the phenomenon of being in love
with my mother and jealous of my father, and I
now consider it a universal event in early childhood. Balmari
and Krall independently build a strong case that Freud backed
off from a theory which tarnished the ideal image of
the father he was grieving. After his father's death, Freud
felt constrained by a mandate that he was unable to resist,
and hence dutiful son that he was took the guilt
upon his own shoulders. With help of his Oedipus theory,
Balmari and Krall bring in the equation a recent biographical
discovery of Jacob Freud's less than perfect behavior, the forgotten
second wife named Rebecca, who mysteriously disappears, possibly by suicide,
at the time of Jacob's marriage with his third wife,
the beautiful Amelia Nathanson, his half his age and already
pregnant of Sigmund. Of fact, Jacob tried to conceal by
falsifying Sigmund's state of birth. In light of post Freudian
developments in transgenerational depth psychology, it is possible that Freud
had from early age an intuitive sense of a hidden
fault to the father linked to his own identity, which
may have combined with memories of his father's sexual abuse
on himself and his brothers and sisters. During his self
analysis at the age of forty, the whole thing came
knocking at the door of his consciousness, but he finally
surrenders to the self conscious imperative to close the eye
to cover up the menacing truth of his father's faults.
Freud invents of the Oedipus complex, changing children charging children
themselves as polymorphous perversion, while Mary points out that in
his personal identification with his hero Oedipus, who solved the
riddle of the Sphinx, Freud truncated the myth. According to
Greek tragedians, Oedipus's father, Lais, was cursed by the gods
for seducing a young teenage boy and leading to his suicide. Then,
frightened by the oracle's prophecy that he would be killed
by his own son if he conceived one, conceived one,
Lais had his newborn son abandoned in the forest ankles
pierced by the middle by the middle with iron spikes,
Euripides the Phoenician maidens. Thus, in the complete myth Oedipus,
Oedipus's predestination to kill his father and marry his mother
is not determined by his own impulses, but by the
faults of his own father. For Balmari, Freud's ignorance of
this part of the myth reveals and symbolizes his own
blind spot, his failure to discover the secret guilts of
the father, both of his own father and by consequence,
the fathers of his neurotic and hysterical patience. Got anything there, No, no, no,
I'm just following them. Let's keep going, All right, here
we go, Part four, The dark emotional powers of Jewishness.
Neither Massan nor BALMII deal with the Jewish aspect of
this issue. Marion Kroll hints that the father's mandates to
close the eyes was a question of filial piety, on
which ultimately the entire Jewish tradition is based, but although
Jewish herself, she does not insist on that aspect. For
an interesting reflection on the Jewish hidden background of the
Oedipus complex, we can turn to the very stimulating Book
of John Murray Cutahee The Ordeal of Civility. The author
points out that Freud had been fascinated by Sophocles Sophocles's
play Oedipus Rex from his adolescence. When he saw it
played in eighteen eighty five, it made again a deep
and mysterious impression on him. Twelve years later he wrote
to Flices that he found, with his new theory of
universal repressed wishes of incest and parricide, the explanation for
the gripping power of Oedipus Rex. In other words, comments Cuta,
he Freud proposes a theory to explain the play's power
over him and to make intelligible why he should identify
so deeply with its hero Oedipus. It is in the
course of that effort that the core of the theory
of psychoanalysis is born. But then cute, he suggests that,
but then cute. He suggests that Freud failed to see
the real origin of his fascination with Oedipus Rex. What
had resonated deeply in him from the time he first
read Oedipus Rex was not so much the general plot
of the play, the hero killing his father and marrying
his mother as the circumstances in which Oedipus killed his father.
Coming down a narrow road, Oedipus was rudely ordered to
step aside by the herald of the king, then was
struck on the head by the king himself. Enraged, Oedipus
slew the king, his herald and the rest of his
retinue except one. This story, not acted but narrated in
the play, bears an uncanny resemblance with another story that
had made a lasting impression on Freud a few years earlier.
As he explained in the Interpretation of Dreams, this is
the story of a father. This is a story that
his father, a stead old Jew from Morovia, where Sigmund
was born. Moravia, where Sigmund was born, had told him
when he was ten or twelve years old, quoting to
show how much better things were now than they had
been in his days. When I was a young man,
he said, I went for a walk one Saturday in
the streets to your birthplace. I was well dressed and
had a new kap on my head. A Christian came
up to me and with a single blow, knocked off
my cap into the mud and shouted, jew, get off
the pavement. And what did you do? I asked, I
went into the roadway and picked up my cap. Was
his quiet reply that struck me as unheeric conduct than
the part of the big strong man who was holding
a little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation
with another which befitted my feelings better, the scene in
which Hannibal's father, hamilkar Barka made his boy swear before
the household altered to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever
since that time, Hannibal has had a place in my fantasies.
Freud cut he argues, had experienced shame, had experienced shame
of his father, and to be ashamed of a father
is a kind of moral parricide. Quoting Freud, presumably experienced
not only this rage and shame, but guilt about the
rage and shame. He quickly censored these unacceptable feelings. Unacceptable
to a dutiful son, ostensibly proud of his father, he
repressed them. Years later, he encounters Sophocle's tragedy and it
lays a spell on him. Still later, after his father's death,
he rationalized the spell with a universal theory that discharged
him from further inquiry into his own family story. But
the idea fix which that Oedipus was to become for
Freud cut he maintains, hinges on a small detail, small
but structurally indispensable of the action of the story that
Freud never mentions in all the countless times he retells
the legend a social insult, a discourtesy on the road
stemming from someone in a position of social superiority, King
Laius to the unknown wayfarer Oedipus, just as a Christian
in Freiburg who forced Jacob Freud into the gutter. According
to kutahe the supposedly universal Oedipus complex that Freud thought
he discovered was in reality the veil of characteristically was
the veil of a characteristically Jewish complex of his time.
Speaker 2: Again over, yeah, I was just gonna say, because in
his book Totem and Taboo, Freud is basically trying to
again create like an originary scene for how societies sort
of organize themselves. And the basic idea is this idea,
the myth of the primal Horde, which, to put it really,
really simplistically is describes this symbolic murder of the father
by the sons, And I'm just I've never looked at
the because it's been like many, many, many years since
I read some of these books, certainly before I ever
took on like this kind of framework to think about them.
I'm sitting here just wondering now with the implications of
his anti pological explanation would be, you know, in the
context of this Jewish persecution, the weakness of his own father,
the way his own parental sort of by the way
that id fix means fetish, so the way his own
sort of fetishized parental relations are informing his his hys theorizing.
I'm gonna mallel that one a little bit more, but yeah,
you can.
Speaker 1: You can continue, even if we judge that I already
read that one, or did I.
Speaker 2: I don't think he did.
Speaker 1: Okay, even if we I'm sorry, you know, that's yeah,
Even if we judge, yeah, even if we judge that
that thesis overstrained, it is questionable how the fantasies with
pH of avenging and killing the father could merge. We
can appreciate how kind of he draws attention to the
fact that Freud's father, the father whom he felt held
to exculpate, but toward whom he nevertheless experienced a murder.
Wish was a Jewish father recently immigrated from Yiddish Land
into the heart of European civilization. Freud's disciple and first biographer,
Ernest Jones remarks that Freud felt himself to be Jewish
to the core, and evidently it met a great deal
to him. Books dealing specifically with Freud's Jewishness, such as
Moishe gracer Dual Allegiance Freud as a Modern Jew Sunny
Press nineteen ninety four, can rely on several statements made
by Freud himself, either in private correspondence or in Jewish environment.
In the preface for the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo,
for example, asking himself rhetorically, what is Jewish in his work?
Freud answered, A very great deal and probably its very essence.
In a speech prepared for delivery at the Benet Breath
Lodge in Vienna in nineteen twenty six, Freud explained his
motivation for joining thirty years earlier in eighteen ninety seven.
Whenever I have experienced feelings of national exultation, I've tried
to suppress them as disastrous and unfair, frightened by the
warning example of those nations among which we Jews live,
but there remained enough to make the attraction of Judaism
and the Jews irresistible. Many dark emotional powers all the
stronger the less they could be expressed in words, as
well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the
familiarity of the same psychological structure. So I became one
of you. The statement is actually excellent.
Speaker 2: I was just gonna say that sounds very much like
the Ordeal of Civility hypothesis right there, that trying to
become stepping out of the schedtle, stepping out of their
sort of tight knit, borderline, incestuous little world, and suddenly
they're confronted with, you know, the technological modernity of European societ.
I don't know if this is kind of his argument,
because I've actually never read The Ordeal of Civility, But
that could if we wanted to take a more cynical
approach to to explaining why he has gone through these
changes in his psychological theory. I mean, it could be
that he wanted to in the same way he wanted
to absolve his father. He also wanted to absolve his
people of their own dysfunction, their ugliness, the violence that
their community sort of harbors. That in bringing bringing Jewish
society to gentile society, he wanted to sort of make
their dysfunction like not a particular dysfunction. I mean, I
don't know if is he would we say that his theorizing,
the universalizing of his theory is a way to whitewash,
particularly particularly Jewish dysfunction. Is it a way to help
integrate Jews into gentile society by saying, well, all this
expressly Jewish dysfunction is actually sort of a universal human tendency.
I don't know, but that sentence, so I became one
of you is very telling to me.
Speaker 1: Well, what I think is interesting here is that he
says that he joined the Bena Brith in eighteen ninety seven,
which is I believe they says the year his father died.
I believe it says that earlier in the article. So
he's it seems like if he's joining the Bene Breath
at that point, he's embracing his Judaism as his father
is passing, and I don't know what his dad dies
on November two, eighteen ninety six or ten days before that,
and then the next year he joins the ben a breath,
which is I assume to be around, be around other Jews,
or even to find a replace his father in some
way by finding somebody who you know, in a leadership
role in Judaism. I don't know, just there as yeah.
The statement is an excellent illustration of what cut he
calls the ordeal of civility, The struggle of every Jew
who wishes to assimilate yet feels unable to overcome the
dark emotional powers of his ancestral Jewishness, with its implicit
imperative not to assimilate. Jewishness has much to do with
what Ivan Menagi calls those invisible loyalties. They combined a
person to his ancestors by an irresistible system of values, obligations,
and debts. The question is to what extent freud psychoanalytical
theory is the result of Freud's surrender to those dark
emotional to those dark emotional powers. We must fikee Freud
seriously when he tells us in the Interpretation of Dreams
that his own Jewishness took the form of an identification
with Hannibal and the fantasy of taking vengeance on the Romans.
He went on to say, quoting I myself had walked
in Hannibal's footsteps. Hannibal, with whom I had achieved this
point of similarity, had been my favorite hero during my
years at the Gymnasium. Moreover, when I finally came to
realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race and
was forced by the anti Semitic feeling among my classmates
to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic
commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and
Rome symbolized in my youthful eyes to struggle between the
tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church.
The significance for our emotional life which the Antisemitic movement
has since assumed, helped to fix the thoughts and impressions
of those early days. Thus, the desire to go to
Rome has in my dream life become the mask and
bimble for a number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose
realization one had to work with the tenacity and single
mindedness of the Punic general. Though their fulfillment at times
seemed as remote as Hannibal's lifelong wish to enter Rome.
The significance of this public confession, printed in eighteen ninety
nine for all the world to read, cannot be overstated.
Here Freud names as a driving force for his life
the fantasy of entering Rome, the Christian world and destroying
it to avenge the Phoenicians the Jews. If Freud was
deeply influenced by his Jewish background, so were the other
founding members of the Psychoanalytical movement. Dennis Klein writes in
Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytical Movement, quoting from its beginning
in nineteen oh two to nineteen oh six, all seventeen
members were Jewish. The full significance of this number lies
again in the way they viewed themselves. For the analysts
were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained the sense
of Jewish purpose and solidarity. This feeling of positive Jewish
pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytical
circle as a spirits are renewed independence. It tightened the
bond among the members and powered their self image of
a redemptive elite The exception is Carl Jung, whom Freud
named president of the International psycho Analytical Association in nineteen ten,
precisely is to deflect the reproach that psychoanalysis was a
Jewish science. Interestingly, Jung is the only member who never
subscribed to Freud's theory of infantile sexuality. In response to
a letter by Karl Abraham, who complained that Jung seems
to be reverting to his former spiritualistic inclinations, Freud explained,
it is really easier for you than it is for
Jung to follow my ideas, for you stand nearer to
my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship. Freud asked Abraham
not to antagonize Jung because it was only by his
appearance on the scene a psychoanalysis escaped the danger of
becoming a Jewish national affair. In contrast to Young, Abraham
was the most zealous supporter of Freud's theory of infantile
sexuality in the history of the socho analytical movement. In
nineteen nineteen, Freud wrote that the last word in the
question of traumatic etiology was later on said by Abraham
when he drew attention to the fact that just the
peculiar nature of a child's sexual constitution enables it to
provoke sexual experiences of a peculiar kind, that is to say,
traumas self inflicted traumas, so to speak. Freud was referring
to a nineteen oh seventeen paper by Abraham, the experiencing
of sexual trauma as a form of sexual activity. It
is perhaps significant that Abraham, son of an Orthodox rabbi,
was also the most ethnocentric of Freud's disciples. He wrote
in nineteen thirteen an essay on neurotic exogamy, diagnosing Jewish
men who say they could never marry a Jewish us
with a neurosis resulting from disappointed incestuous love.
Speaker 2: I wondered, Yeah, not not to interrupt too much, I
always wondered why. I mean, because that that basically Jung's
rejection of the seduction theory, really his rejection of Freud's
sort of like, if you want to say, fixation on
child's childhood sexuality, was the wedge that drove them apart.
And the further that uh as that as that that
sort of disagreement became more pronounced than Freud started to
more aggressively attack Carl Jung privately and publicly, even taking
out full page of newspaper ads saying that he was
basically undermining him in his career. I've always wondered why
Jung didn't take up that that explanation of Freud's and
I just wonder if that speaks to like a fundamentally
different sort of I don't know, if you want to
say just cultural hygiene between gentiles and Jews, that it's
like less credulous to like a gentile of well upbringing
to believe that there's rampant sexual violence going on.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Jung was famously sort of sort of had his own
sexual hang ups, or maybe not hang ups per se,
but we'll put it this way. He brought pleasure into
his private practice quite a bit. In fact, Freud chastised
him for romancing his his patience, and Carl Jung would even,
like when he was giving speaking engagements, he would travel
with his wife and his family and his mistress, so
like he had his own sort of sexual I guess
if you want to say sexual identity related issues. But
it was never clear to me why why he took
such a conflict with Freud on that point. I mean,
I don't know, just wondering out that. Well, here's a
question for you, and I don't know if you know
this or not. You know, basically the beginning of this
and through the beginning, it seems to imply that there
may have been a problem with parents, fathers molesting their
children in the Jewish community, and that it still happens
through today.
Speaker 1: Back then. Do you know how do you know how
was that just common? Was that just something that was
you know, was done by more than just Jews. There
were a lot there were a lot of cultures that
engaged in that.
Speaker 2: I certainly couldn't point to like empirical proof of that.
I mean, I think it's probably not just a problem
in like the Jewish community, but I mean the type
of dysfunction that Carl Jung, I mean, there was not
a lack of sort of friction between him and his father,
but it was of an entirely different nature. Jung's father,
I think was I don't remember. I don't think he
killed himself, but he was sort of like a faith
he was a pastor, but he also had his own
sort of personality conflicts. Yeah, I don't think I have
an answer to that. Question. I don't think it's a
strictly Jewish phenomenon. I think what is unique to the
Jewish community, and it clearly has been for a long time,
is like circumcision is effectively part of their tradition and
has been for a very long time. And do we
have to get specific into a kind of, you know,
all overly narrow idea that that sexual violence. I mean
that to me, circumcision is a kind of sexual violence.
The rabbi cleaning the aftermath of that with his mouth.
This is basically a violation, whether we want to talk
in more overt terms or in a sort of to
borrow Freudian word, a sort of sublimated religious excuse for
engaging in the same kind of territorial behavior. It's no
matter what way you want to look at it, there's
something intrinsic to their community that produces that sort of dysfunction.
But I mean, I don't think it's if we just
wanted to talk about the problem of incest more generally,
or like familial sexual violence more generally. I think is
out there, what's it? What's kind of I did my
own show on my substack ebl on the work of
George Patai recently, and one of the questions that we
had sort of raised. George Pattai was a French well,
he was a seminary student, and then he became sort
of a sort of your stereotypical kind of French pervert philosopher,
and he carried on this tradition that you see a
lot during Freud's time and after, where there's this extreme
preoccupation with incest as a sort of foundational anthropological, psychological
question to be answered about human nature. And some of
the most obvious examples of intellectuals who approached that question
were Freud, but also Levi Strauss, who was also Jewish,
and there were a number of Jewish intellectuals at that
time who in their social theorizing were wondering about the
foundational rule incest place what it tells us about human nature.
And they weren't all Jews. He did that. George Batie
was not Jewish, but he was also very heavily influenced
by Levi Strauss. And you know, that to me is
like sort of an indication that there's an overrepresentation of
this problem in that community. But I don't think by
any stretch of the imagination they were the only ones.
Speaker 1: To uniquely deal with that. Okay, a new section denial
projection inversion. I suggest that Freud's abandon of the seduction
theory and it's cover up by the Oedips complex were
motivated half unconsciously, at least by Freud's loyalty not only
to his father but to his Jewish community. In the
eighteen nineties, Freud's clientele was drawn exclusively from the Jewish
middle class. Imagine if Freud's seduction theory had earned him
the recognition he craved for. Although he disguised the identity
of his patients and his case studies, it would not
have been long before his work was attacked not just
as Jewish science, but as evidence of the depravity of
Jewish mores. However, I don't think Freud's consciousness. I don't
think Freud reasoned consciously in this manner. As he was
turning a blind eye in the incestuous sexuality of his
patient's family, his blindness was not fake, but psychologically constrained.
It is the blindness that characterizes Jewishness. At the core,
Jewishness is the conviction deeply internalized from the earliest age
of the superiority of Jews over non Jews chosenness. Anything
contradicting this superiority creates a cognitive dissonance which is overcome
by denial. Denial means projection. To protect the dirty secret
of child abuse and Jewish families, including his own, Freud
projected an imaginary, repressed, infantile perversion on all mankind. Projection,
in turn, means inversion. Freud's close disciple Otto Rank claimed
the Jews had a more primitive and therefore more healthy
sexuality than Gentiles. Freudians and Freudo Marxists have systematically denounced
Christian civilization as suffering from sexual repression. According to Wilhelm Reich,
anti Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration and
could be cured by sexual liberation. The Mass Psychology of
Fascism nineteen thirty four, an improvement from Leo Pinsker's theory
that judaeophobia was a hereditary and incurable disease transmitted for
two thousand years. In order to understand the psychological background
of the Reichean Messianic mission to cure the Christian West,
and in order to see more clearly the projective nature
of the psychoanalytical theory of repression. It is helpful to
know that the personal story of Wilhelm Reich, which reads
as a caricature of Freud's. At ten years old, when
he realized that his mother was having an affair with
his tutor, the young Wilhelm thought of blackmailing his mother
into having sex with him. Eventually, he confided in his father,
that is, about his mother's adultery. In nineteen ten, after
a period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide,
in which Reich blamed himself. One of the most puzzling
aspects of Jewish relationship with their host nations is its
ambivalence pattern on Biblical history. Within Jewish thinking, saving the
nations and destroying them are not two sides of the
same coin, but one and the same, because what nations
are supposed to be cured of is their very identity,
their gods in biblical terms. According to Andrew Hines, author
of Jews in the American Soul, Jews have shaped American
ideas about the mind and soul with the preoccupation to
purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization. It really
started with Freud and September nineteen oh nine, invited to
give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly
asked his companion Sandor Ferenci and Carl Jung, don't they
know we're bringing them the plague? An extraordinary statement for
a medical doctor pretending to have found a cure for
neurosis and a prophetic one. Freudianism became a justification for
a sexual liberation that can be seen in retrospect as
a massive sexual abuse of the youth.
Speaker 2: So I don't want to rebut this too strongly. It's
just worth pointing out that Reich was a critic of Freud,
and that Reike they met in nineteen nineteen. Reich did
try to get to some degree into Freud's inner circle,
have access to his clientele, and he took up some
of Freud's theory rising but certainly by the end of
his career he was sort of an antagonist to Freud.
And there's some I think there's I don't want to
sound like I'm trying to do apologetics here because I'm
not really a Freudian. I think he's an interesting person
in in you know, intellectual history, but there's there's a
sort of a difference between Freud and then Freudianism that
followed after him. And there's a lot of people who
took up Freud as a kind of revolutionary figure. It
took his ideas as a as a vehicle for like
anti Christian, anti gentile, anti you know, Western polemics. I mean,
as Lourene Greynatt mentions earlier in the passage that you read.
You know, a lot of the post Marxist tradition was
a blend of Freud and Marx UH, and it was
taking up some of those ideas that really were compatible,
compatible as a sort of like radical communist polemic against uh,
you know, the the inherited tradition of Western society. But
Reich in particular used this sort of free wheeling sexuality
as as a as a foundation of his theorizing. It
was a it was a foundation of his polemic against
Christian sexual morality. I don't know that I read into
Freud that as much, although some of those quotes I
had not heard that about the plague before. So that's
the first time I'm hearing that, you tell me for
the first time. It's that is telling. And I think
it's undeniable that he had a conscious self concept as
a Jewish and interfacing with gentile society. But sometimes I
feel that he gets tarred a little bit too much.
Just a thought.
Speaker 1: Just for those who are watching. There's a picture here
of Sigmund's grandson, Sir Clement Freud claiming is a British
MP pedophile, rapist, suspected murder of three year old girl
if you go to Wikipedia. All of these allegations were
made after his death, and I don't think anything could
be proven, but two or three women gave very similar accounts.
So just I know people who are watching this are
going to be like, Hey, what's that? What's that? So
all I can say is Clement Freud has a Wikipedia page,
and I'm sure if you want to go go down
a rabbit hole, all right? Part six. But a Brith
and the Roads of Fame by a Stuning CoInc and
Freud was initiated into the recently founded Bene Brith in
September eighteen ninety seven, precisely the time of his conversion
to the dogma of infantile sexuality. Dennis Klein writes in
chapter three of his book the Book The Prefiguring of
the Psychoanalytical movement Freud in the bene Breth that after
the bitter disappointment of being denied professorship, Freud filled through
the bena Breth the professional as well as the social vacuum.
In his life. He was a very active member, attending
almost every meeting. During the first decade his most productive years.
He recruited at least three members, and in nineteen oh
one was a founding father of a second lodge in Vienna,
the Harmony Lodge. The same year he gave a talk
on goals and purposes of the bene Breath Society. Freud
often presented his work to the benea Breath before publishing it.
In this respect, writes Klient, the Viennase bene Brith Lodge
was a precursor of the movement of psychoanalysis. After his
death in nineteen thirty nine, the bene Breth of Vienna
continued relentlessly the support granted during his lifetime to the
famous brother. To what extent where the bene Breath Masonic
meetings influential in Freud swing from the seduction theory to
the Oedipus theory. No one can say. However, we can
hold as fairly certain that Freud's membership in Nay Birth
was influential as becoming one of the major intellectual stars
and gurus of modernity. As a scientist, Freud was a failure,
duped by his own unconscious and unrealistic confidence that he
could solve the human enigma by self analysis alone. He
was also an impostor who, in his published case studies,
invented cures when there was none as investigations, as the
real biographies of his patients have shown true, he was
sometimes insightful, but the hagiographic image of Freud as a
discoverer of the unconscious is totally unwarranted, as Henri Ellenberger
has shown in his classic study The Discovery of the Unconscious,
quoting throughout the nineteenth century, there existed a well rounded
system of dynamic psychiatry. The basic features of the first
dynamic psychiatry were the use of hypnosis as an approach
to the unconscious mind, the interest in certain specific conditions
called magnetic diseases, the concept of a dual model of
the mind with a conscience with a conscious and an
unconscious ego, the belief in the psychogenesis of many emotional
and physical conditions, and the use of specific psychotherapeutic procedures.
The therapeutic channel was seen as being the rapport between
hypnotists and patient. The cultural impact of the first dynamic
psychiatry was far greater than is generally believed. It could
easily be argued that in matters of psychology, every sensible
thing that Freud said had been said before him, and
that almost everything he said hadn't been said before has
been proven wrong. So why did Freud become famous? The
long answer is that Freud benefited from the same kind
of communication networking that produced many other Jewish intellectual quote
unquote geniuses and made French novelists. Andre Guide comment in
nineteen fourteen in his diary about this tendency to constantly
emphasize the jew This predisposition to recognizing in him talent,
even genius. The shorter answers to the question above is
bene Breth. I will not suggest that the bene brit
supported Freud's Oedipus theory because they saw its potential for
the moral corruption of the West. Nor do I suggest
that the bena Breth and Freud conspired to ruin Western
civilization with at pest elential idea of infantile sexuality. But
I do suggest that had Freud maintained his earlier conviction
in the reality of the abuses suffered by the Jewish parents,
he would not received as much support, probably none. To
clarify this point, is it appropriate to recall a memorable
demonstration of power by the Bene Breth, which has an
obvious relevance to Freud's intelectual biography. In nineteen thirteen, the
Bene Birth created the antidefamation lead to save the life
and reputation of Leo Frank, the wealthy young president of
the Atlanta chapter of the Bena Brith, who was convicted
of the rape and murder of Mary Fagan, a thirteen
year old girl work in his pencil factory. The evidence
for Frank's guilt was overwhelming, but tremendous financial resources were
deployed for his legal defense, including false testimonies. An intense
publicity was orchestrated in the news media, with the New
York Times devoting enormous coverage to this case. I quote
from ron Uns's article, quoting for almost two years to
nearly limitless, funds deployed by Frank's supporters covered the cost
of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels,
including to the US Supreme Court, while the national media
was used to endlessly vilify Georgia's system of justice in
the harsher's possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction,
and during this period, outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy
Jews who were spending such enormous sums today subvert the
local criminal justice system. All appeals were ultimately rejected, and
Frank's execution date for the rape and murder of the
young girl finally drew near, But just days before he
was scheduled to leave office, Georgia's outgoing governor commuted Frank's sentence,
provoking an enormous storm of popular protests, especially since he
was legal partner of Frank's chief defense lawyer and obvious
conflict of interest. A few weeks later, a group of
Georgia citizens stormed Frank's prison farm, abducting and hanging him,
with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in
American history. Thanks to the mobilization of the Jewish power elite,
as one man, Leo Frank had been turned from a
convicted pedophile and child murder into a martyr of antisemitism.
We don't know what Freud thought of this case, but
there is an obvious residence between his assaults on truth
and the Benet Brits. If young Mary Fagan had visited
a Freudian psychoanalyst before her atrocious death and complained of
her boss's sexual overtures, she probably would have been told
about her own penis envy. Had she protested, she would
have been told that her protest proved her sexual repression.
Exactly has happened to Freud's patience. Dora at a bower
by her real name, an eighteen year old girls suffering
from hysterical symptoms. I will say this, the KKK up
until this point really had no the Jewish question wasn't
really on their radar. This basically was a turn in
their organization. And actually at that point their organization had
weakened and this kind of woke them up. So yeah,
we see the Uh what happens when when Jewish power
and money goes to protect their own people doing who've
done something wrong or being accused of doing something wrong?
How other people just go wait a minute, let's start
asking some questions about this. So all right, part seven
the Isaac complex. The son's repressed wish to murder his
father is perhaps Freud's most fertile intuition. The problem is
with Freud's abuse of generalization. Only the neurotic son of
a destructive and manipulative father has a repressed wish to
kill the father. Freud discovered this impulse in himself and
confounding his own self analysis for a scientific quest of
universal laws, he projected it on all mankind. But the
fact that Freud's Jewish disciples all discovered the same impulse,
and that Freudian has and became so widely accepted by Jews,
suggest that Freud's generalization was not without merit. It only
suffered from the tendency of Jewish intellectuals to protect to
preject Jewish issues on all mankind. The child's repress wish
to kill his father is not universally human, but maybe
character Jewish. For the Jewish father is the guardian of
Jewishness and the representative of the Jewish God, and every
Jewish buyer is in the depth of his soul to
free himself from Yahweh, the archetypal abuse of incastrating father.
As Philip Brought's character Smilesberger says, in Operation Shylock to
appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years,
that is what is to be a crazy Jew. And
so the secret wish to murder the Jewish Father is
also a secret wish for the death of the Jewish God.
It is therefore identical with the so called Jewish self
hatred that Theodore Lessing saw as affecting every Jew without exception.
There is not a single man of Jewish blood in
whom cannot be detected at least the beginning of Jewish
self hatred.
Speaker 2: This also begs the makes me wonder again, like thinking
of his book From Moses to Monotheism, if we're taking
this point of view that Lorent is putting forth year,
maybe there's a vested interest in Freud wanting to complicate
or problematize the Jewish view of themselves as being the
first and only authentic monotheistic people. I mean, I do
think in that book he talked about Yahwehs being a
volcanic god. I mean, these are sort of things that
like contemporary comparative religious scholars sort of look at. Certainly
it's something anti Semites look at and say, hmm, this
is a particularistic god with the specific origin that reflects
an aspect of the Jewish psyche. And maybe it's not,
you know, the one true loving God of the Bible.
Blah blah blah. I mean, it's certainly interesting to turn
the psychoanalysis back on the psychoanalyst. That's always a fun
game to play.
Speaker 1: We're almost done here, I guess we're going to finish
this up alrighty. By choosing a Greek myth as a
metaphor for his theory, Freud was projecting on Gentiles a
Jewish problem. Had he recognized the Jewish overtone of the complex,
he might have called it the Isaac complex, since Isaac
is the son that Abraham was willing to slaughter. The
expression The expression Isaac complex has actually been used by
French heterodox psychoanalyst Jean Pierre Fresco, who defines it as
the overall consequences of the son's psyche of a father
perceived as as psychologically menacing, destroying, or murderous. Fresco calls
such a father a Brahmic. He draws his insight from
a reading of Frantz Kofka's autobiographical and posthumously published Letter
to the Father, in which Kafka describes the devastating effect
on his personality of a father whose means of education
were abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and oddly enough, self pity.
Kafka also wrote to his father, my writing was all
about you. All I did there after all was to
be moan what I could not be moaned upon your breast.
Kafka's major novels refer autobiographically to his relationship with his
father and its deletarious psychic consequences. The Metamorphosis tells of
Gregor Sams's transformation into a repulsive insect, chased and killed
by his father, whose incestuous violence is suggested in the
scene where the father attacks his son from behind with
a cane, tapping his feet and pushing out sibilants like
a wild man. After the death of Gregor appears his
sister Greta, his double in the other sex, the homosexualized
son in the Verdict, George, anagram of Gregor, has just
become engaged with Frieda Brandenfeld same initials as Felice Bauer,
the woman who Kafka had just started dating, and announces
it to his father. The father opposes a terrible prohibition
to this project of marriage, accompanied by extreme narcissistic biolence.
The paternal prohibition of emancipation through marriage is linked to
an incestuous domination that becomes clear when George submissively proposes
to the father to exchange beds. Fresco also finds a
psychic trace of the father in Kofgo's novel The Trial,
whose narrator Joseph Kay was arrested without knowing who slandered
him nor who will judge him. According to Fresco, this
incomprehensible and omnipotent slanderer accuser judge is the palympicist, the
polympicist of an archaic Abrahamic father, unconsciously introjected as an
archaic and sadistic super ego and turned into an inner prosecutor.
I find it significant that Kafka, by his own omission,
drew his inspiration from his experience as the son of
a psychopathic father, while whose Jewish literary critics consider him
quintessentially Jewish, by common consents that Harold Kafka is not
only the strongest modern Jewish writer, but the Jewish writer.
Hence Israel's long decade long legal battle to secure his
autograph manuscripts as national treasure. Who is right of Kafka
and his critics? Does his genius come from being Jewish
or from having a psychopathic father? Obviously it is impossible
to distinguish the two factors. Because the psychopathic father happens
to be Jewish, he is, in Fresco's terms, the typical
a Brahmic father. But are not all Jewish fathers of
Brahmik in the measures of their jewishness? Is not the
Jewish God a psychopathic father, and the psychopathic father of
a Jewish god. Kafka perceived his sadistic father as a
cruel divinity whose laws were totally arbitrary and yet unquestionable,
just like the Jewish God. For me, as a child,
everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment,
he wrote in his Letters to the Father. From your armchair,
you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct. Every other
was mad, wild with sugar, not normal. Your self confidence,
indeed was so great that you had no need to
be consistent at all, and yet never ceased to be right,
quoting Hence the world was for me divided into three parts.
One in which I, the slave, lived under laws that
had been invented only for me, and which I could
I did not know why never completely comply with. Then
a second world which was infinitely remote from mine, in
which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of
orders and the annoyance about their not being obeyed. And finally,
a third world, which everybody else lived happily and free
from orders and from having to obey. I was continually
in disgrace. Either I obeyed your orders, and that was
a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me.
Or I was defiant, and this was a disgrace too,
for how could I presume to defy you? And I
could not obey because I did not, for instance, have
your strength, your appetite, your skill, although you expected it
of me as a matter of course. This was the
greatest disgrace of all. I mean, this is I was,
as I was reading this section right here, the quoted section,
I was just thinking of.
Speaker 2: E.
Speaker 1: Michael Jones, a Jewish revolutionary spirit, where I mean, he's
just basically he's revolting against everything around him, and all
he wants to do is just be it seems like
just be a solo man where the only the only
person he has to answer to is himself.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, that that that sort of radical
individualistic streak does seem to be kind of characteristically Jewish.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's a it's been pushed upon us, upon
this culture, upon America and you know what used to
be the West for one hundred years now it's a
you know, it's seen as a virtue. And if you
go against that individualism, you're a communist, which is ironic
considering where both of those ideas came from. Right, yeah, right.
Part eight, and this is the last part, the trauma
of eight days circumcision. After all, the Abrahamic father is
the executioner of the commandment given to Abraham. As soon
as he is eight days old, every one of your
male's generation after generation must be circumcised. Had Freud preserved
his original insight into the psychological damage of sexual abuse
on children, he might have eventually reflected on the impact
of neonatal circumcision, but he has been rather discrete on
the subject. Though he didn't have his own sons circumcised,
he broaches in his later books, but only in the
context of anthropological speculations. In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
he speculated that during the human family's primeval period, castration
used to be carried out by a jealous and cruel
father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so frequently
plays a part in puberty rights among primitive people, is
a clearly recognizable relic of it. Freud went further in
Moses and Monotheism, circumcision is the symbolic substitute of castration,
a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons long
ago out of an awfulness of his power. And whosoever
accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was
ready to submit to his father's will, although it was
at the cost of a painful sacrifice. Interestingly, Freud originally
got that idea from Sandor Ferenci, who had written an
article that greatly impressed Freud, that circumcision as a means
of inspiring terror a symbol of castration by the father.
We note that in the above quotations, Freud isn't referring
to Jewish circ circumcision of eight day children, only to
circumcision of adolescent boys. Given the Jewish undercurrent of Freud's
intellectual biography. It is reasonable to assume that his inability
to deal with the issue of Jewish neonatal circumcision is
connected to his refusal to face the devastating reality of
child abuse. Isn't the first abuse suffered by every Jewish
male that part of his parents and kin's circumcision on
the eighth day, It physically impresses on every Jew and
on all Jews collectively, the traumatic domination of Yahweh and
his covenants. The psychological impact of neonatal circumcision performed without
anesthesia and causing unbearable pain has been studied by Professor
Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision The Hidden Trauma. His research
shows a disturbance in the mother child bonding process after
the ritual. Testimonies from mothers who observe circumcisions show that
the mother's guilt is also part of the equation. Here
is from Elizabeth Pickard Ginsburg. I don't feel I can
recover from it. We had this beautiful baby boy in
seven beautiful days, and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it
was like something had been shattered. When he was first born.
There was a tie with my young one, my newborn,
and when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it,
I had to cut off the bond. I had to
cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so, I
cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut
it off to repress the pain and to repress the
natural instinct to stop the circumcision. The unnatural, incestuous wish
that Freud and his Jewish male disciples discovered in their
repressed unconscious could perhaps be explained as a result of
the inhibition in mother child bonding caused by the trauma
of neonatal circumcision, a trauma cause at this age has
little chance to ever be brought back into consciousness and
be healed. More research is perhaps needed on the possible
link between Jewish circumcision and the fact that, according to
the nineteen oh six Uish Encyclopedia, that the Jews are
more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the
other races and peoples among which they dwell. Research done
by sociologists Leo Stroll in nineteen sixty two show that
the rate of neuroses and character disorders among Jews was
about three times higher three times as high among Catholics
and Protestants. In the Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud
describes religion, meaning essentially Christianity, as universal obsessional neurosis, which
has for believers the merit that their acceptance of the
universal neuroses spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
With a similar approach, Judaism can be described as a
collective sociopathy. That does not mean that the Jews are sociopaths,
but rather that, in proportion to the degree of their
identification as Jews, they are victims of a sociopathic mindset
patterned from the Tanak marked in their flesh, impressed traumatically
in their subconscious by circumcision, and fuel by their elites
with the paranoia of anti Semitism. The difference between collective
sociopathy and individual sociopathy is the same as between collective
neurosis and individual neurosis. According to Freud, participation in a
collective sociopathic mentality allows members of the community to channel
sociopathic tendencies towards the outside of the community and to
maintain inside a high degree of associability.
Speaker 2: So I'm thinking, especially in the light of those last
two sections. If you look at a lot of if
you look at some of the other classic Freudian concepts,
some of his defense mechanisms, even his tripartite model of
human consciousness, to d the ego, the super egos. I mean,
this is one of the reasons, going through my education,
but also just reflecting on it throughout my life, I
never really considered myself a Freudian was because I never
felt in my own experience as a thinking person any
identification with or recognition of some of these things that
he treated as sort of paramount to the human experience. So,
you know, the idea of a super ego as this
sort of crushing mental tyrant, urging you into conformity. I mean,
that sounds a lot more like how Lourent Goynott talks
about the relationship that Jewish men, Jews in particular, feel
towards Yahweh and the desire to overthrow the Father, to
set themselves up as a sort of authoritarian guy of
one type or another. I mean, that is what the
super ego is and his conception, and that's sort of
what you know, a certain like anti Semitic reading of
the God of the Old Bible looks like and I
don't know too many gentiles my whole life who really
necessarily had a problem with like I mean, there's an
extent to which, you know, nobody likes to be told
what to do, and at some point in life we're
all like shaking our fist against the man or whatever.
But this sort of like deep seated, for lack of
a better word, pathological relationship with authority or conformity. I mean,
most of the guy I mean, I grew up middle
class for the most part, so most of the people
I knew like never had a problem with conformity so
long as the nature of the authority was acceptable or justifiable.
And you see a certain and streak in like these
more radical Jewish intellectuals, where there there literally is no
standard that they will subject themselves to and and many
Jewish philosophies are entirely based on this idea that I
am my own measure and how dare you? This is
almost like like is his name, Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports.
It's like he's like almost a good representation of this,
Like fuck you, there is literally no standard I will
accept because that standard is external to myself and that
is so dysfunctional. Uh and and Lorenz says at the end, sociopathic.
I mean you literally can't build a society. You can't
build a community around a type of masculine psychology that
simply categorically rejects any other and any other responsibility to
beyond itself. I have some other thoughts. I don't know
if you want to respond to that. No, keep going,
So I mean the other thing that so, the other
thing that Freud is well known for putting forth are
this sort of comprehensive list of defense mechanisms, some of which,
like frankly like never made sense to me. Part of
the reason why I struggled to really embrace my career
as a psychologists because it was like, some of these
these are supposed to be foundational ideas, and it's like
I don't really see them reflected in other people. I
don't really see them in myself. So, like, for example,
reaction formation and sublimation. These are psychological defense mechanisms that
actually make a lot more sense if you're assuming that
it's a sort of group outsider group strategy in a
hostile society. So the idea of reaction formation is that
you behave in a way that is the opposite of
how you feel, or is the opposite of your natural inclination.
And maybe if you are sort of like maybe like
Freud potentially was, where you just simply bristol at the
norms and the expectations that the society around you expects
you to conform to, that you have to go through
this sort of tortured psychological transformation where you're taking your
native sort of again, if we want to invoke e.
Michael Jones, if you have a sort of like radical
transgressive impulse, but you necessarily have to function in a
society that will not tolerate that. And I don't know
about you. I didn't go around as a kid like
necessarily feeling like I had to flip everyone the bird
and flip over every table and piss in everyone's cheerios.
I mean I had youthful vigor. I think every young
man growing up has like a certain like desire to
impress themselves upon the environment around them. But to the
degree where you like are constantly like foaming at the
mouth with like I can't be the way they want
me to be. I refuse to do anything they want
me to do. I hate them, and yet I've got
to I've got to abide by them anyway, like reaction formation,
where you've got a there's a fundamental dissonance between your
behaviors and your actual internal experience. That doesn't I feel
like you don't really see that. Some of the places
you do see that are frankly like pathological work environments,
you know, the like you see them really you kind
of only see them in this sort of post Jewish
privileged world where everything is sort of remade and reformed
to conform to a sort of Jewish morality. That I mean, yeah,
when I go to my if I have my office
job and I hate my deiboss, and I have to
smile at him even though I'm cursing under my breath,
like you don't. I mean, that's that makes sense. But
then again, it's like the same framework, like you are
an outsider. You are sort of a marginalized person in
this existing ecosystem, and you've got to find a way
to navigate it. Sublimation is another one, channeling unacceptable impulses
into socially acceptable activities. I mean, doesn't that describe tikon Oleum.
It's like it's like I got into this argument with
this Jewish woman on Twitter the other day. She's like
one of these not to get all inside baseball Twitter
micro communities on you and your audience. But she was
part of this like Hegelian egirl thing that was like
a very minor social media thing a year ago. And
she's an ethnically Jewish woman but a devout Christian. And
over the course of this conversation, she's basically you know,
she's being provoked because she's she's she put up this
post where she said how much she hates German people
and that she confused considers them a inferior people, and
she prays to God for forgiveness and she prais it
the Germans prayer to God for forgiveness too. It's like, Okay,
if you have these sort of tortured reactions to the
world around you that you are trying to make acceptable
to those around you, like, isn't that like isn't that
what Tikon Olham was? Because she's basically saying, like, I'm
a really good Christian because I want to bring about
this Christian eschatology, And isn't that really the same thing
as Tikon Olham Isn't there no difference between Christ coming
back to Earth and also I'm going to destroy all
your icons and overturn all of your world orders. It's like, actually,
I think there is a fundamental difference between what the
return of Christ means versus I'm literally going to destroy
every representation of gentile society that exists around you. When
you look at these, you know, the history of Jewish
intellectuals driving civil rights legislation or DEI or woke or whatever.
What are they doing if not masking their sort of
radical transgressive spirit via a asking it with this sort
of like liberal Christian morality or this liberal Enlightenment value systems.
It's actually difficult to look at some of these Freudian
ideas and not see them as dressed up vehicles for
basically Jewish impulses.
Speaker 1: Well, it's if you believe in the authoritarian personality. The
book from nineteen forty nine nineteen fifty commissioned by the
jew American Jewish Committee, put out by Adorno and the
Frankfurt School, which basically lays out how to destroy Anglo
society so that they'll never be fascism again. All of
this makes sense because if Jews are going to be
safe and no longer persecuted. You're either going to have
to turn the population into Jews, like instill Jewish values,
those Jewish values, you know of basically chaos of rebellion
against everything that historically Anglo Europeans held deer. You're either
going to have to do that or you're going to
have to figure out a way to sedate them, you know,
with pornography and and basically attack everything. And then you know,
in the end, if they start fighting back, then you
make it. You make antisemitism illegal, You start you know,
persecuting people who are you know, starting to ask the
Jewish question. And I mean, I think that's like the
last hundred years is pretty much a picture of that
of tkamol On basically destroying seeking to destroy Western culture
so that Jews can fit in, so that they can
blend in. So basically now everybody is, everybody has is
carrying their ideals. But also you know, they don't seem
as the outsider anymore, because that's been the problem. You know,
that was the problem in Russia. The problem in Russia
was it was like you had gigantic diaspora German you know,
in the in the seventeen eighteen hundreds, you had German
populations in Ukraine and they were thriving and they you know,
the Czar's leadership loved them. But then you had this
other group that just stuck out like a sore thumb
because they were so different than everyone else, and whenever
you tried to deal with them, it was like, no,
we have to remain different. And then when laws were
changed and the stettle was broken, the schettle system was
broken up, it was just this reaction of trying to
push back against that, trying to trying to keep your traditions,
but also this group of people who are escaping from
their traditions and they're like, Okay, now I can do
anything I want. And in order for me to be
able to do anything I want, I have to basically
create a world where people can do anything they want.
I mean, that's that's what it seems like to me.
That's of all the reading I've done, you know, two
hundred years together, Jews in the Economic Life by Sombart Shahaks,
Jewish History, Jewish Religion, You Gentiles, Maurice Samuels, it just
basically seems like the it's like we were this people
were these people who've always been on the outside. We
are always going to be on the outside. So we
have to create a society that looks like us, so
that we're no longer you know, we're no longer persecuted,
we're no longer seen as the outsider. And then you
throw into the fact that they get their own country
and they have nuclear weapons, and then that's a whole
different discussion.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like an impossible mission to set out upon, because,
as Laurent mentions towards the end of this essay, the
sort of self persecuting tendency within Jewish society. I mean,
we're living now in the most judaized version of the
United States that has ever existed, and the sense of
these people as being persecuted seems like it's more pronounced.
It's certainly more pronounced than in my forty years on
this planet or my twenty five years odd as a
thinking adult aware of global dynamics. I mean, they didn't
have this same oh my god, we're on the precipice
of Hitler two attitude in the nineteen nineties. They didn't
have it in the two thousands. It only started to
creep up in the twenty tens, now that we're halfway
through this decade.
Speaker 1: Because we have the we have the Internet, and we
have cameras on our phones, and information can be sent,
you know, can be sent instantaneously, and their people are
watching them basically incinerate populations. Yeah, it's I mean, how
is that not going? And then, you know, and that
would be bad enough if it was just this country
six thousand miles away, but then you have people who
are claiming this to be the same as those people
over there that are doing it in your own country,
who are defending it and calling you evil and calling
you an anti Semite and basically saying that you you've
given up your right to exist anymore if you criticize this,
if you say that it's evil, if you say that,
how can you do this? What is it inside of
you that allows you to do this? And it's just information.
That's the thing that changed in the nineteen nineties. You know,
they could they could go into Gaza or the West
Bank and they could do what they did, and the
world only knew what The New York Times and what
you know, a couple a couple cable news outlets and
the local news told them. But now that everybody can
see it and it's exposed, you know, and it's basically
it's like they're back in Russia. They're back in Russia
where they're amongst people who you know, it's like my
you know, my mother's family came from is from Galicia.
They're you know, Hungarian Hungarians and pollocks who were around
them in Galicia, and like they came here in like
nineteen ten and nineteen eleven, and and you know, I'm
growing up and I'm like, why is my grandmother, well
that's what I'm talking about, my great grandparents, And I'm thinking,
why is my grandmother hate Jewish people so much? And
it's like, oh yeah, because they because they lived in
they lived in basically what was Pale Settlement at the time,
and they got to see the way that they acted,
and they got to see how revolutionary they were, and
they got to see them assassinate like public officials and
everyone knew who was doing it. And that's what's happening now.
It was like back then they couldn't hide it because
you know, they were in one section and they stood
out like a sore thumb. And now everyone can see
what they're doing because we have the Internet and it's
blasted everywhere, and they start their own telegram channels and
post videos of them doing it, like the seventy two
Virgins channel that was run by IDF by Unit eighty
two hundred, and they were advertised what they were doing,
so let the world know. And it's like, okay, yeah,
well how do we how are we supposed to deal
with that? I mean, and if you ask questions, it's like, okay,
why are you doing this? Why you know, why are
you saying that? You know every time a baby dies
there was a terrorist hiding behind them. Yeah, It's like,
I mean, how do you You can't rational I can't rationalize.
You know, a terrorist in this country hiding under, you know,
a building in downtown New York and dropping a bomb
on that building to get to get one terrorist. I
don't see how that can. I don't see how you
can do that. But oh everybody in that building is evil?
What I mean you talk about? I mean, this goes
beyond gas lighting, This goes to Holy fuck. Do you
think do you think I'm I mean, how fucking low you?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: What do you think about?
Speaker 2: IQ is?
Speaker 1: I mean you think I'm i do think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I must not be as extremely online as I thought,
because I've never heard of this channel you mentioned, and
now I'm looking at a Jerusalem Post article about it,
and Holy Christ, that is that's yes, Uh, it's hard to.
Speaker 1: Their own fucking atrocities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't imagine that that level of of of barbarism,
which is funny because we're told that they are the
outpost of Western democracy in the Middle East, and that's
that's barbarism. That makes you know, uh, what they did
take a daffy look like uh, you know, an elementary
school beat down, you know, like you're in the backyard,
you got roughed up behind the fucking slide or whatever. Like.
That's that's like child's play compared to the stuff that's
on there. Just to go back the section or the
excerpt you've read about the woman expressing guilt over circumcising
her son, I mean again, it's it's just the persecution
is coming from inside the house, is really I think
the punchline of this essay. Whatever we want to say
about Freud's genuine intentions or his genuine malice or not.
Maybe he was totally unconscious, Maybe there was no malice whatsoever.
Maybe he just was a wacky guy with a weird
sense of humor and which from time to time say
really condemned, you know, self condemning things to his peers
and whatever. Just the nature of that community. And they're,
like you said, their their need to separate themselves out
from every other population. Uh, they do that through barbarism,
they do that through terrorism. And you know, the sort
of tragedy say this trying to be you know, a
little bit careful with my language here. I mean, the
tragedy of it is that they are still human and
that they obviously are tortured by these things they do
to themselves that they like. On the one hand, they
want to do it, and they seem to consciously understand
the purpose of circumcising themselves, of doing the brits, of
doing all these things that they do, these ritualistic ways
of marking their identity and cohering their community, like they
understand the role that it functions, and they sort they
seem to understand the brutality of it, but they nonetheless
carry the toll of those consequences. And then they're out
in the world amongst us, you know, and and and
That's what makes sort of these Freudian defense mechanisms kind
of so significant, because if you, you know, imagine yourself
in the shoes of somebody who brutalized their infant son
because it was part of their their religion and part
of their identity to do that, and they had been
doing it for countless generations, and they know that it's brutalizing,
and the only way they can cope with it is
to sort of become like this cold, distant tyrant to
their own children. And then you're the child that grows
up like that. You grow up basically cattle prod you know,
within seven days of being born, and it's your parents
go ahead.
Speaker 1: It's worse than that, Okay, So not only are you
brought up that way, you're also brought up being told
that everybody wants to kill you, that historically everybody has
wanted to kill you, and you're told that your God's
chosen mm hm, that we are this special people. Now,
I'm not going to pretend like I've read, you know,
papers and books on narcissism, but to me, all of
those things combined seem to create soup like the greatest
army of super narcissists that have ever walked the planet.
Speaker 2: Complex narcissists too, because if you think about so just
I mean to put a little bit of technical technical
language on you, I mean, there are multiple kinds of narcissists,
and and and there's and it's interesting. I mean, on
the one hand, you have like the categorical personality disorder
of narcissism, but there's like grandiose narcissists, which is to say,
overt narcissists. That's like the kind of stereotype that we
all have in our mind of like the guy who
gets out in front of the crowd to be the
big man, you know, That's what we all tend to
think of as narcissists. But then there's communal narcissists. There's
antagonistic narcissists. There are malignant narcissists, covert narcissists, and it
seems like in any given moment, an afflicted Jewish person
can kind of like oscillate between all of them. They
are the grand standing moralizer or the grand standing like
I am a superhero. But then there's also like the
like Jonathan Green Black type of shrinking back, where anything
you do, anything you say is an attack on me
makes me feel small, makes me feel like you're being punitive.
The type of narcissists where you know, like the social
worker or the community organizer or the you know, social
justice activist, where they're masking their narcissism in this kind
of grand, almost christlike manner of being everything to everyone.
I mean, they they seem to like hit every flavor
of narcissism imaginable and that almost I mean, this is
one of the things where if you want to get
racist about your psychology, you have to take a step
back and say, like, Okay, is narcissist a racial type
before it's even a psychological type. And if it's a
racial type, then how do you even categorize narcissism as
a sort of general psychological tendency when it looks different
from one group to the next, and even within one group,
it looks different based on the context, Like when you
sort of generalize narcissism to to like the whole of
the human species, Like the most common ones are like
the timid you know, I'm I feel bad about myself
and my narcissism is a is a cope versus the
sort of like strong narcissistic type where it's patholo, it's
a it's a the word I'm looking for, sort of
intractable personality style that always shows up in every situation.
Speaker 1: That they're in.
Speaker 2: It's like, those are the most common types of narcissisms
of narcissism that you see in the world. And maybe
you could say that's a sort of general tendency speaking
to whether you know people either have inflated sense of
self worth deflated sense of self worth, but Jews have
this sort of like complex narcissism that is that again,
it defies generalizing to a to the level of a
universal human condition.
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there. Please promote you have you have books,
you have yes, please promote.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well again, thanks for having me on. I love
talking to you. I wish I had more to offer
during the essay. I was just really wrapped up in
getting through that with you. Definitely thought provoking when we
got to the end of it. But check me out
on Antelope Hill Publishing dot com for my new book,
Intolerant Interpretations. Check out Imperium Press for my two previous books,
American Extremist and Understanding Conspiracy Theories. On Substack, I haven't
published anything in a while, and I might not for
a while because I'm busy doing a lot of shows
like with you Janeel dot substack dot com and on
Twitter or x. Still, Janeel, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Pete.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure. Hope your audience enjoys appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Josh yeah Man, thank you.