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