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Christofascism or Liberalism // 165 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

0:08
Speaking of beautiful, What a day outside in Toronto right now? I holy
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shit, Yeah, my Plato senses are tingling. It's fourteen degrees celsius out
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there. And for you Americans, I'm not you do the fucking conversion yourself.
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Yeah, it's like ninety ninety eight degrees fahrenheit. This just the time
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when I feel perpetually on the edge of being sick, but like not quite
0:29
sick. Man. You just had COVID bro, I know, but like
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it's just this time of year I feel like I could get sick again because
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the temperature changes. Eric, you're dragging us down. We're here to discuss
0:42
the true, the good, the beautiful, all of which find their true
0:48
their true idea is realized in our topic today. Crystal fascism. Yeah,
0:55
Crystal fashion yay. And there's a wide weight range of crystal fascism we can
1:00
cover. We're doing kind of the tame end. But before we get to
1:03
the tame end, did you guys see the the tweet complaining that Netflix made
1:10
Alexander the Great Gay. Oh my god, that was good. I believe
1:14
I sent it to you actually, so yes, yeah, they don't have
1:19
to know that, Victor. That's that is true. Now we're constructing the
1:26
narrative. We're not there. We're constructing. Hey, did you see that
1:30
thing that you sent me? Oh? What did I send you? Alexander
1:34
the Great would never be gay in a Christian society. I know, it's
1:40
it's pretty amazing, and I have to say I was. I was.
1:42
I don't know if impressed is the right word, but maybe just a little
1:46
bit relieved that most of the comments, I feel like, or at least
1:48
the most like upvoted comments were kind of like hate to break it to you,
1:52
or like, you know, oh, like I guess you haven't read
1:55
about the Greeks. He whoops, Like, yeah, I still remember Zachnder.
2:00
We did an episode psychoanalyzing the oedipal symbols in one of the Zack Snyder
2:06
movies, The Snyder Cut. He is the most the most hetero filmmaker,
2:12
for sure. So the hetero did hetero revisionism by making the Spartans anti gay
2:20
and anti pedophile. Oh yeah, in the movie, that's right, and
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like the Spartans not like the boy lovers over in Athens, and it's like
2:31
it was a huge fucking masculine orgy. The Spartans are arguably the most pro
2:38
pedophile, gayest society in history, by the way, not at all to
2:44
suggest that those two things are connected, just in case anybody gets mad,
2:47
Not naturally. If you want to look up the terms like pederasty, that's
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that's where you should start your research. Yeah, exactly. The only competition
2:57
that the Spartans have for being gay pedophile is who we're talking about for the
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rest of this episode, which is the Catholic Church of course number one and
3:06
number two. Well, actually, just a quick comment though about like sort
3:08
of recent right wing reactionaries on Twitter. Like I think about that guy Bronze
3:14
Age Perver, you know BAP if you follow him on Twitter, Like he's
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always posting these like hyper masculinized and even shit like Andrew Tay, Like I
3:23
feel like there is some sort of a weird, like a kind of subtle
3:28
homo eroticism, like implicit in all of like the way that they talk about
3:31
things, the way that they like kind of hold masculinity up and like like
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Bronze Age per for example, he's always showing like he's always posting pictures of
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like jacked, like greased up like six pack dudes, and it's like as
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like this symbol of like optimal masculinity. And so it's just like, I
3:51
feel like there is this like subtext, some kind of a homoerotics subtext on
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some of the far right right now anyways, the subtext this is kind of
4:00
like you have to be gay to want to have sex with a woman because
4:02
it's too exactly too too fragile, it's too beta, it's too I mean,
4:09
listen to this. This is an article I found from two thousand and
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four on Oliver Stone's new Alexander movie. And this one, I mean,
4:19
this one was published in China Daily, but I see a bunch of others
4:23
that strike a similar tone. Oliver Stone's new film about Alexander the Great depicts
4:27
the King as bisexual, fueling outrage from Greeks and prompting Hollywood to ask if
4:31
a world conqueror with dyed blonde hair and waxed legs will be able to attract
4:36
a box office hordes. All right. One newspaper calls it the Queer Eye
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for the Macedonian Guy. Though I've speculated that Oliver Stone, always a controversial
4:47
filmmaker, is taking a big risk with one hundred and sixty million dollar epic
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by including scenes of passionate embrace between Alexander and his best friend, he Feistian.
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Yeah, and this was Colin Ferrell, right, Yeah, it's a
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Colin Farrell version. Yeah, he starred as Alexander the Great. The Gay
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and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation says the film breaks new ground for a big budget
5:14
epic because it shows a Feistian as the true love of Alexander's life. So
5:18
you can see the same conversation just running on repeat again today. I think
5:25
Jared Leto was a Fastian, right. I don't remember, but I remember
5:28
it being a bad movie. It was bad. They were they were trying
5:30
to go off the Gladiator energy and it didn't really work so well. It
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did kind of drag on, and I think I think there was some dong
5:39
hanging pretty quickly in the movie too. That's that's culture rights. If the
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Greeks got mad, he wasn't technically great, right, No, he's Macedonian.
5:47
What did the Greeks get mad about recently? Oh? Yeah, they
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also got mad about the Cleopatra thing on Netflix. They depicted her as black
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and recently, and like a bunch of Greeks got mad and initially The reason
6:00
why I didn't feel like it's as bad is because they also if you go
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way back and look at I think it was Audrey Hepburn who played Cleopatra in
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like the really old movie could be mistaken. H yeah, Golden Age,
6:12
and so they were consistent. So they also got really mad back then because
6:15
they're like, she wasn't that white. You can go all the way back
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to black Athena. They a she was massaging roots of classical civilization Martin Bernall,
6:26
nineteen eighty seven. Back to the theory arc. If you've been listening
6:30
to us, we are on an arc of the end of history and Fukiyama
6:34
everybody knows. And now and again with all these readings again this week when
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I was doing them, he's described as a triumphalist like ninety percent of the
6:45
time. And I don't like the book, and it's I'm not even going
6:51
to defend it, but it's not triomphlist at least. It's stupid in other
6:56
ways, no doubt. But the whole resigned, if any, it feels
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like a very resigned tone. I agree, a resigned kind of triumph like
7:04
I guess this is the best we got. Yeah, he's like living in
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under liberal capitalism might suck, but living into the USSR would have been worse,
7:15
Yeah, which I think is probably actually true. He's saying this is
7:20
the best, but yeah, all those qualifiers like this is the best to
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fail so far, and now we have someone saying, well, it did
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fail, and so what does that mean it should we look for something else?
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Yeah, he really means best as in like least worst. I think
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Fukuyama, like, I don't think that he's like loves it. He's not
7:42
like having a but it does seem to block the way of inquiry in that,
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you know, he's also saying that it's unlikely, in fact, we
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won't find anything better than this, Like it's that kind of prognosticating point that
7:58
that makes it a little tough to say swallow. Too, though, it
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felt like he made no efforts to think through alternatives in a serious way like
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that that are different, Like that's what it felt like. So I think
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that is no point well, because I think that what he was doing was
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really just comparing actually existing a liberal democracy with actually existing alternative attempts at alternatives,
8:22
right, And on that ground, it's like, yeah, sure,
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but he didn't do any work to be like, well, what could we
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imagine as not actually existing alternatives? And like, you know, he might
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say, well, that wasn't my project, But still I felt a bit
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overly defeatist maybe in that sense. Well we're giving you today an alternative.
8:39
Yeah, well kind of definitely definitely a counterpoint to Fukuyama. But from the
8:45
right, we're going to have a new alternative, which is Christian crystal fascism.
8:50
So conservatives they're opposed to liberalism plus capitalism. Also, we have found,
8:58
although I found most of them don't really have any grasp of what capitalism
9:01
is other than consumerism, which is at least you know, in our the
9:07
way we read it, that's not what capitalism is. You could have a
9:11
consumeristic socialism without a contradiction. But anyway, they hate they hate porn,
9:18
they hate gay Disney, and the vague goal is some sort of world government
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that aristocratic Catholics run what they also hate. Kind of to give the most
9:31
I don't know if this is the most generous read, but I would say
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like, at least in what we read, there's very much a through line
9:39
of hating the fact that there are not ideals for people to live up to
9:46
that forces them to self regulate or something like that. Like, so there's
9:50
no like virtues like cultural virtues that tell people that like basically that they should
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be ashamed if they're not, you know, if they're not push themselves somehow
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and in their case right, pushing themselves to be like good Christians or like
10:03
you know, family people. Like norms that are somehow you know, have
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having to have actual coercive effect even though they're just in the ether. So
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so it's like a stronger account like lamenting the loss of cultural values that actually
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have an effect where people feel ashamed if they don't live up to them,
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and media is really important to them. Media is responsible for the decline and
10:28
these these great ideas that we used to have. So yeah, there's a
10:33
lot of the conservative right trying to put out put out their own shit,
10:37
but it doesn't survive the market ever, because it's very bad. I find
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the media is often like the source of all their problems and the material they
10:46
use for evidence to make their arguments. At the same time, it's like
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the very thing that is the problem is your evidence for why you're right.
10:54
It's never there's no analysis, there's no it's very surface level. Have you
11:00
guys heard of Adrian Vermule, Yes, common good Conservatism. He's a professor
11:07
at Harvard Law School. His full name is Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermule. That's
11:15
like a Roman emperor. Why do all these crazy conservatives have those crazy names?
11:18
Like what was that guy from the blog? Uh Westington? Charles Arthur
11:26
the third, I'm one of the editors of this Deanon book. What was
11:31
what was the name there? John m Owen the fourth. They have a
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true history, Their trappings of aristocracy are are rampant. Yeah, I mean,
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these aren't waspy elites at all, people tracing their nobility back to ancient
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times. I guess I guess they're probably Catholics. They're not wasps. Well,
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Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermule is a convert. And the converts they're scary,
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you know, because they get to they're too excited. They want to part
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Catholics that I know, you know, basically raised Catholic, kind of lapsed,
12:11
maybe went to Catholic school, don't really care anymore. But the converts
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are the ones you have to watch for, Yeah, because they want to
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feast on that body of Christ. The blood the body. This guy who's
12:24
a Harvard professor, here's a direct quote. Catholics need to rethink the nation
12:28
state. We have come a long way, but we still have far to
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go towards the eventual formation of the Empire of our Lady Guadalupe and ultimately the
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world government required by natural law. Wow. And this is in a this
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isn't a little pamphlet he put together about immigration priority that says America needs to
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start prioritizing importing Catholics so they can get their empire going here and this means,
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quote, immigration from Canada will rightly become a rare and difficult event at
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least if we do not count a small subset of Quebec war. Wow,
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that's fine. What about what about the Irish? I mean, we can
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reach Irish Catholics. I'm fine getting rid of the Quebec Wa, but take
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your hands off our Irish. I love the Quebecua. They're like, it's
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funny because I feel like the quebecquar are also simultaneously like the most subversive even
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though they also are the most Catholic because they're French. Just yeah, I
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feel like there's a pretty strong presence of huge Knots in Canada too, which
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are they go back to Calvinists. They're Protestants. They're radical. I mean,
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if you go back and read like the sixteenth century huge Enot texts,
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they're like against tyranny and about rising up against the like. They could be
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very radical, and they went through waves of persecution. All those religious you
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hear about sixteenth century religious wars, Yeah, those are the Catholics fucking up
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the Protestants. A lot of times the Calvinists because the Lutherans sort of got
14:11
along with the Catholics. Yeah. After England took over Canada from the French,
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they invited the Huguenots to get over here because they hoped that they could
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convert all the French Catholics in Quebec to Protestantism. It would just be easier
14:31
to manage that way. But I think most of them ended up switching to
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speaking English because in sixteen sixteen eighty five, King Louis the fourteenth said all
14:46
you got to convert to Catholicism or get the fuck out, and so they
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had to leave. The large expulsion of the huge Ennot community. A lot
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of them came to eventually ended up in Canada anyway, the Empire our Lady
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of Guadaloupe is a terrifying prospect. But yeah, you can be a professor
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at Harvard Law and still call for world government under the Catholic Church, which
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I'm saying again, we already tried it. Okay, it didn't work out.
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Yeah, we have like it's almost like, well, I think another
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term that they call some people call them is Catholic integralists. Yeah, yeah,
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yeah, yeah yeah. But a few of them, a few of
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these guys want to hit the rewind button, and everyone else is like,
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we already saw what you did when you're in charge, Okay, no one
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else wants Yeah. I mean, I guess the point of my anecdote was
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that there's a lot of religious intolerance throughout history within Christianity obviously not just between
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you know, Christianity and Islam and Judaism, but even within Christianity. And
15:52
do we really want to go back to that sort of shit like intolerance and
15:56
persecuting this sect and that sect. And I mean that this seems to be
16:03
a very not very historically aware kind of community of right wing people. I
16:08
mean, Denan accuses most conservatives of just being like right wing liberals. Basically,
16:15
it's Daneen, and that's who we're reading. By the way, don't
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think we've said that, Yeah, Daneen. We're reading Daneen, and he
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accuses conservatives of being right wing liberals. The you know, the major parties
16:27
liberals or Democrats or left wing liberals, and then you have the Republicans or
16:33
conservatives, right wing liberals. They're all liberals. Well, let's turn from
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Vermuel, the Christo fascist in name and self declared, to Daneen, who's
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a much more palatable version but says more or less the same thing. I
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mean, it's definitely moving. Is appeals to a similar sentiment and is moving
16:56
towards a similar direction. But I don't think that he would be as like
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I don't think he would say anything like as crazy as those quotes, at
17:03
least not publicly. Not publicly. You know, this is so palatable that
17:08
Obama put this on his reading list, and it's a big point of pride
17:14
that why Liberalism failed is on Obama's reading list. He said, it's a
17:19
very important book, but I don't agree with the conclusions. But the problems
17:25
he identifies we should take very seriously. Something something like that. Yeah.
17:29
The blurb, the blurb on the back is why liberal liberalism failed, offers
17:33
cojin insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel,
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issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril. Ye. And if
17:42
nothing else, this at least invalidates all of Barack Obama's reading recommendations that this
17:48
book was totally inane. I mean, it was a little disturbing. If
17:56
we can summarize, or if I can summarize, it's, ah, I
18:00
want to there's a word that's used for it that doesn't make that much sense
18:06
to me. But it's supposed to be a communitarian text, which is a
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it's a critique of liberal individualism especially, but communitarian makes me think like there's
18:18
some sort of redistribution. But this is more like family values communitarianism. And
18:26
I guess the point of the book is, remember when we all used to
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go to church on Sunday? Wasn't that so good? Remember? Do you
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remember? Do you remember the Renaissance? Wasn't that good? Yeah? Or
18:37
like remember like family values? When you know, like families were the basic
18:44
unit and the sacred the sacred bonds of familial relations, the sacredness of marriage,
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the sacred the sacred right of childbirth, Like everything is so trad and
18:56
fucking predictable, with like what the actual value like the critiques. Okay,
19:00
fine, I agree with like the shit he's complaining about with liberalism, but
19:06
then all that other stuff is just so predictable. Well the reas So the
19:10
reason why I thought it was maybe worth taking a look at was, well,
19:14
first of all, I just thought there're'd be funny stuff in there for
19:15
us to laugh at, potentially, like when he just complains and winds about
19:19
porn and consumerism and family values. But then but I also think that what's
19:26
interesting to me about it is that he does appear to offer a diagnosis of
19:32
many factors that I think a lot of people on the left wouldn't disagree with.
19:34
It's like not anything new in a certain sense, but it's also interesting
19:40
to hear it from a right wing perspective, like a kind of non capitalist
19:45
and like non free market libertarian right wing and look like he doesn't and he
19:49
does have some influence, Like I think I was looking on YouTube just to
19:52
see who he's been talking to you lately, and he actually had a you
19:56
know, he was on he's been on panels with like you know g Evans,
20:00
who's now a US senator. Right, So it's just like, you
20:02
know, this this shit's like influencing, influencing people, and I think I
20:07
mean, you know, they're especially the economic critiques in here, right,
20:11
Like he just says stuff that most I feel like left landing people would agree
20:15
with, just not agree with the framing. Right. So, you know,
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here's a quote where he's talking about economics, and the intro says,
20:21
civic unhappiness is mirrored in economic discontent. Citizens are more likely to be called
20:26
consumers. Yet the liberty to buy every imaginable consumer good does a little to
20:30
assuage the widespread economic anxiety and discontect discontent over waxing inequality. Indeed, the
20:37
assumption by economic leaders seems to be that increased purchasing power of cheap goods will
20:41
compensate for the absence of economic security and the division of the world into generational
20:47
winners and losers. Right, I mean, this is like a pretty typical
20:49
like social democratic left, you know complaint. Right. So there's now I
20:56
think it's scary to me that there's some right wingers who are getting onto this
21:00
message and the reason it's scary to me is because I think it could be
21:03
appealing to some people that kind of message. Now, a more optimistic read
21:07
of that is like, well, maybe there's now opportunity, you know.
21:11
The more pragmatist, optimist side of me is like, well, if there's
21:15
more people in the Republican Party who buy into that kind of message, maybe
21:18
there could be some coalition over policy between like some Democrats and some Republicans in
21:22
terms of just economic issues. But we're obviously not here to talk about like
21:26
real politics. But I just thought I would mention that. So it's scary
21:30
because it could attract more voters to people like this and and you know,
21:36
steal away whatever we would call the working class, even more from left leaning
21:40
politicians. But I mean not that there really are any real leftnd in politicians.
21:44
I feel like the stuff has been like in its audience test screening phase
21:48
for a little while, and now it's being launched as like a rhetorical platform.
21:53
And for you know, I agree with what Victor was saying, And
21:57
it's like, if you find yourself like either to the left or to the
22:02
right of sort of the mainstream maybe political positions, then maybe you do have
22:08
similar critiques. But I mean, like, for example, I've said things
22:14
that he's said before that he's said in here. I've said these things before,
22:17
Like the liberals and the conservatives, the Democrats and the Republicans, They're
22:21
not really that much different. They're two different positions within a generally very similar
22:26
framework. But I don't agree with the motives. And you have some environmentalist
22:30
stuff in here too, Yeah, global warming is caused by liberalism. Actually,
22:34
everything bad that has ever happened is caused by liberalism. Yeah, like
22:41
liberal capitalism. Well he also thinks capitalism is caused by liberalism, which I
22:47
think you know, okay, but the more compelling case, especially for a
22:52
material history, is to reverse those two. But again, when he says
22:56
capitalism, he just means consumerism. So consumer side, they have too many
23:03
options, they have a bunch of choices, and that's what gets made in
23:06
sold. Yeah. I feel like the left has made a lot of these
23:08
critiques and now they're being like almost audience tested and given like a right wing
23:14
spin. And now, if you find yourself to the right of the mainstream
23:18
discourse, well here we have some ideas for you. Right. He hate
23:22
they've been purged of their Marxist and their anarchists and their leftist libertarian content.
23:27
Here they are, Are you catholic perfect, You're already halfway fucking there,
23:32
then, I mean, if you're not a left wing Catholic, this is
23:36
like a cartoonish critique of liberalism. And you know, I fucking hate this
23:41
guy for nothing else. He's making me carry water for liberalism. But every
23:47
everything bad that has ever happened he names liberalism, which is kind of like
23:52
the other guy saying, Eric Vogelin, another one of these Catholic right wings,
23:57
everything that has ever happened that's bad is because of modern right there with
24:04
Hobbes and Locke. This is kind of also the thing that you'd hear from
24:10
a twitter Marxist saying, you know, liberalism is responsible for everything bad that
24:15
has ever happened. So this is true horseshoe theory. Yes, it's a
24:21
taste of horseshoe theory right here. And he's saying, you know, the
24:23
classical liberals turned into conservatives, and the progressive liberals of the sort of later
24:30
wave of liberalism, the second wave liberalism from like kind of Enlightenment times are
24:37
you know, they're they're what the modern progressivist liberals came from. So you
24:41
have the liberal traditions splitting into these two sides, and you have like John
24:47
Locke and Hobbs on one side, and then I forget some of the examples
24:52
of the other one, like Francis Bacon, he talks about Macheavelly a little
24:56
bit too. I think being the start of my as being kind of like
25:00
the first modern because he because he kind of gave up. He was the
25:03
first to give up on the idea of like leaders acquiring virtue or whatever,
25:10
and like just like it's all about interests, right, I'm the individualists liberals
25:14
and the statist interventionist liberals. They're like the classicals and the progressives. I'm
25:21
so fucking tired of idealist history. So for all this whining about postmodernism killing
25:29
meta narratives, postmodernism evidently didn't do a very good job of it. Because
25:33
one of these stupid and Obama endorsed books comes out every single year. I
25:37
think we should I'm just going to ban them right here, We're banning idealist
25:42
histories. No one is allowed from now on to attribute causation to John Locke
25:48
ever again. And you're not allowed. This is my number one rule.
25:52
You're not allowed to write about Plato, Locke, Machiavelli, and Schmidt in
25:57
the same book. One of his proofs that the left and the and the
26:02
right in terms of like the mainstream parties aren't so different is like one of
26:07
one of his proofs is, like, a white liberal Southerner is likely to
26:11
be more comfortable revealing political outlooks to a black northern Democrat than to a white
26:15
conservative in his neighborhood. A progressive homosexual and a liberal Christian will quickly recognize
26:21
commonalities. He does these kinds of He has this argument. It's this argument
26:26
that you know, the individualists, the methodological individualists and the methodological collectivists or
26:33
the statists and not so different. They these these fake differences between the Republicans
26:38
and the liberals, I guess the moderate Republicans and the moderate liberals. These
26:44
fake differences are overblown. They're really not so different. And I do want
26:48
to say we have to keep in mind this was published by Yale University Press.
26:55
Yale is a very distinguished institution. The pressing wrong. They're very thorough
27:00
with their editings, solid scholarship. You know who else went to Yale was
27:04
a bronze age pervert. Really he was a PhD student political theory at Yale
27:10
and then he dropped out. But yeah, bronze age mindset is just kind
27:12
of the explicit version of this book. This book is written for polite society.
27:18
We tend to put the ivy leaguers on a pedestal. And yeah,
27:23
it's all about paying that tuition and taking the right bird courses like any other
27:29
university in existence. If we can go through some of these examples, like
27:33
just his overall broad what is liberalism? Liberalism is individualism? Now is it
27:40
wrong? Not totally? Is it right? Certainly not? Yeah, I
27:45
mean no, Liberalism for him is something that was invented to stop wars that
27:51
were caused by religion. Yeah, And I want to just say, as
27:55
anyone who has ever played Europa Universalis knows, the wars of religion were only
28:02
peripherally about religion. There were Protestant states and Protestant leaders and Catholic states and
28:08
duchies whatever. But the stuff that caused those wars is the stuff that has
28:14
always caused wars, which is hint, hint, not really religion. It's
28:19
control of territory, all this stuff. Because if his hypothesis were true,
28:23
then it would suggest that Christians weren't killing each other before the Reformation, including
28:30
like what bro you ever heard of the one hundred Years War? Yeah,
28:36
was there was there? Maybe there was some sort of sense of unity that
28:41
was lost when there was I mean, but like, think about the papal
28:45
schism that happened in the late Middle Ages. There was a maximum of three
28:51
popes at one point, at the height of it, there were three popes
28:53
or two popes and one anti pope or something like that. The papacy was
28:57
moved back and forth between Roman Avignon. You know, the northern monarchs were
29:03
getting involved in marching armies down. I mean, it was still. Christendom
29:08
was a mess even before Luther banged his thesis onto the wall of a church,
29:14
as legend has it as ninety five theses, because someone was coming around
29:18
collecting money for indulgences in order to fund the papal building of the Renaissance Roman
29:26
churches, and another northern leaders also trying to buy a electorate seat and all
29:36
this weird nonsense. Luther was very crotchety about that stuff. But the point
29:41
is, yeah, Christendom was a mess even before Luther came along and Calvin.
29:45
Yeah, And I do want to hedge what I just said. It's
29:48
not to say that religion had no historical efficacy during this period. Clearly it
29:55
did. But if I'm looking for causation, I'm not going to start with
29:59
what everyone says that they were doing the reason for these wars and the reasons
30:03
for these schisms. But if you take his analysis seriously, it's that everything
30:08
was fine until liberalism showed up with its fancy new version of freedom, and
30:15
then everything started to disintegrate. That was just fine before. Well, no,
30:21
because liberty changed its meaning completely in the early modern era. That's his
30:26
idea, like liberalism, he goes. He does this like sort of etymological
30:30
argument. You know, liberty used to mean cultivating yourself and edge, culturating
30:34
yourself, being responsible to the to the others, to live to the community,
30:40
like the ancient Greek concept of pi idea and the Roman concept of humanitas.
30:45
Like that was what liberty meant. I have it right here. Actually,
30:49
the Greeks, especially regarded self government as a continuity from the individual to
30:55
the polity, with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance,
30:59
wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered.
31:03
Self governance in the city was possible only if the virtues of self governance governed
31:07
the souls of the citizens, and self governance of individuals could be realized only
31:14
in a city that understood that its citizen shall itself was a kind of ongoing
31:18
habituation in virtue, both through law and custom, which everyone believed because everyone
31:26
was fucking literate and everyone was sitting down and reading Aristotle. Yeah, just
31:32
the citizens, just the citizens, of course, every last peasant, every
31:37
last person. And this is the Greeks, by the way, the Greeks
31:40
that killed Socrates. Yeah, the slave society. This is one of the
31:44
problems with ideal history and writing like this is because it's taken to be widespread.
31:48
But at any given time, like twelve people believe this. Well,
31:51
yeah, you take a class on this stuff. You learn, like you
31:53
know, even the Renaissance, which started in Italy and spread around Europe blah
31:57
blah blah. But it was like a the upper crust of nobility. It
32:01
was a very very limited, elitist and exclusive movement, and it took a
32:07
long, long long time for those ideas to really spread to all throughout all
32:13
society, and even then most most people were very unaffected. Now Renaissance ideas.
32:20
Let me just like maybe provisionally defend a little bit ideal history here only
32:23
in this way, which is I guess I agree with you completely that it's
32:29
like who was actually even living up to this or like had this strong idea?
32:32
But I think isn't it worth just looking at like I mean even today,
32:37
right, Like what would our ideal history be here? Right? It'd
32:38
be like self realization, you know, like find yourself, be your true
32:43
self. But it's like who's actually living up to that? Right? Everyone's
32:45
fucking miserable, No one's actually themselves right. But still the fact that that's
32:50
the ideal tells us something about that society, right, And so if you
32:53
look back and go, it's like, yeah, sure no one was living
32:55
up to that ideal. But what does does the fact that that's how you
32:59
know, the writers and poets of the time were self describing the ideals?
33:04
I guess is it? I'm not saying I agree with his thesis about how
33:07
he puts all these pieces together, but I'm just it still seems somewhat valuable
33:13
to me. Yeah, Like, if you want to learn about why the
33:16
American government is the way it is and who the founding fathers were reading,
33:22
then yeah, go back and read Montesquieu, and go back and read the
33:25
Spirit of the Laws. Where did the separation of powers come from? Oh?
33:30
And then you got to go all the way back to Locke because he's
33:31
the one who's originally talking about the separation of the legislative and the executive.
33:37
You don't get the separation of the judicial until a bit later, but you
33:40
get that, like, you know, the idea, the history of ideas
33:45
is very different from an idealized kind of history. Yeah, right, Okay,
33:49
that's the distinction. I want to talk about Locke for a second,
33:52
because Daneen hates Locke because Locke is apparently a theorist of individual license, which
34:00
which is, you know, not the impressionalist, not the impression I get
34:04
from reading him, and a voluntarist. That's the problem too. He's a
34:07
voluntarist because this bullsh it's bullshit, right. The two Treatise a Civil Government.
34:15
It was written at the same time as the Glorious Revolution, which was
34:19
when what was it a Catholic. A Catholic was inheriting the throne to become
34:28
the ruler of a mostly Protestant country. And then Parliament was like, yeah,
34:32
that's not going to happen. We want a Protestant. So they invited
34:37
William of Orange over and William of Orange comes over to rule, and the
34:43
two treatise was. Was Locke actually in the parliament when this shit was happening
34:49
or did he was he just around for it? I don't know. I'm
34:52
not sure exactly where he was. He was in the parliament at one time,
34:55
right, I think he was. Let me look it up, Okay.
34:59
Anyway, Locke basically puts this conflict into philosophy political philosophy terms that says,
35:07
no, there should be a separation of powers, mainly so that the
35:09
king can't just decide to arbitrarily dissolve parliament at any time because they had a
35:17
Catholic inheritor of the throne. I don't really know how that happened, but
35:22
the Parliament was like, yo, we don't want a Catholic up in here.
35:24
But if you listen to Denean, Locke's only concern was advancing liberalism so
35:30
that it could eventually event invent porn so that Locke would have something to jack
35:36
off. Like his favorite Locke quote is that liberty is the freedom to satisfy
35:42
our appetites. And I don't know where he's getting this quote from. I
35:45
didn't even care enough to go and find out where it comes from, because
35:49
this is not really Locke. This is unlike Locke to be like, oh,
35:53
yeah, let's let individual appetites run rampant. Yeah, we're not dealing
35:59
with Rousseau in this case. Russeau might have said something like that, but
36:04
definitely not Locke. So this whole story of Locke being like, oh,
36:07
yeah, we need to have appetites immediately fulfilled. We need to destroy community
36:14
in the past and history. No, Locke was dealing with a concrete situation
36:17
in front of his face, which is get a little Marxist here. It's
36:22
a class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The bourgeoisi in trying to
36:28
write their texts, form their organizations, including Parliament, so that they could
36:32
say, no, we're gonna curtail you. You're not gonna be able to
36:37
just dissolve us whenever you want because of religious differences. So the whole motivation
36:44
that Deneen has for presenting Locke in this way, it's complete bullshit. It's
36:49
like you read sections of this in an anthology in an undergrad course, and
36:52
then you're you're allowed to go write a book. Well, his upshot of
36:59
Locke is Locke had this voluntarism to him, which quote ultimately affects all relationships,
37:05
including familial ones. You get a little what Deneen is like upset about
37:10
liberalism erasing so like one of these these familial eroding of familial bonds and ultimately
37:16
community bonds. He says. Locke, the first philosopher of liberalism, on
37:22
the one hand, acknowledges in the Second Treatise that the duties of parents to
37:27
raise children and the corresponding duties of children to obey, spring up from the
37:31
commandment honor thy father and mother. But he further claims that every child must
37:37
ultimately subject his inheritance to the logic of consent right. So consent it has
37:43
to be consensual. It's choice now, it's choice theory. It's voluntarism.
37:47
And he says Locke, though he didn't fully endorse this, he planted the
37:52
seed of this idea that would bloom into full blown, you know, liberal
37:58
voluntarism, into dualism, where you know, if you want to, if
38:04
you want to, you know, break the contract, the social contract with
38:07
your family, go ahead, your community, go ahead with your church,
38:12
go right ahead. You don't feel like you get along anymore, you want
38:15
to get out of your marriage. That's a social contract. Just break it.
38:17
Because it devolves down to the people anyway, So just break it.
38:22
It's a logic of consent that liberalism is going to be based on that Locke
38:25
originally planted the seeds of That's kind of where Locke goes. Even marriage,
38:30
quote Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are
38:36
temporary and subject to revision. He doesn't like Danen hates this idea. And
38:40
see I get the get the I get that he hates this idea like marriage
38:45
should lock you in, especially if you're a woman, you can't lie,
38:50
and family like the father should be able to kill the child if he wants.
38:53
He never says that, but I mean it's so no, he definitely
38:57
doesn't say that, And I think you would say that for sure. That
38:59
that meant men should be held to the same responsibility. But yeah, yeah,
39:01
I'm being obvious. I'm being ridiculous, he says, He says.
39:06
In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by
39:10
widespread lawlessness and cheating, along with increasing surveillance of the youth, while in
39:16
the fraught realm of coming of age, courtship norms are replaced by hookups and
39:22
utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable, lifelong marriage is replaced by various
39:28
arrangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children
39:31
are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, which contributes to liberalism's commitment
39:37
to abortion on demand, while overall birth rates decline across the developed world.
39:43
Yeah, now this is his theme of self interest, which brings along with
39:46
it this kind of rampant immorality. Now, this rampant immorality where students used
39:52
to be very you know, they used to be very ethical. They didn't
39:55
cheat, they didn't hook up. Now they do because it's a few fucking
40:00
liberals, especially Locke, starting all this shit where nothing matters anymore. It's
40:06
all about self interest, Like this was Hobbes too, right, You start
40:09
as in a state of nature. You're this self interest, isolated, atomic
40:14
individual and everything's about desire for power, which is yeah, okay, that's
40:17
that's what Locke says and Hobbs says. And then we give up those rights,
40:22
we bestow them upon a sovereign if we can contract with others who are
40:27
seeking peace, which is what reason tells us to do. Otherwise we're in
40:31
a state of nature where you know, life is nasty, brutish and short,
40:36
and it's a war of all against all. This is what conservative Christian
40:39
history is not history. Like, no one had extra marital sex until Locke
40:45
wrote the Two Treatises of Civil Government. Yeah, like the social contract theory
40:50
runs all the way up to rawls too, and that that experiment to be
40:54
to be as generous as I can to his view, I think what he
40:58
would probably say is, yeah, of course people didn't live up to the
41:01
norms. And actually this isn't a very generous interpretation now that I think about
41:05
it before I say it. But like, what matters is that you had
41:07
grounds to shame people who broke those before right, which would lead which is
41:13
more likely to lead to conformity. So the problem isn't so much that oh,
41:16
there was a time when no one was hooking up. What was good
41:19
was that it was regulated by the shame that everyone would publicly impose on those
41:22
people. Now liberalism, with its like laisy affair attitudes, means that no
41:28
one has to feel ashamed about it anymore, and now therefore it's less regulated.
41:31
Yeah, and he paints like a nice picture of I mean, he
41:37
says very clearly, he says, you know, we cannot go back to
41:40
a preliberal era, but you do get a sense of this enormous amount of
41:45
nostalgia for what liberalism has erased. So he'll say things like, you know,
41:52
a preliberal era dismissed the idea that it's not that they dismissed the idea
41:59
of individual free choice. It's not that they didn't believe in individual free choice.
42:05
But preliberal Christianity contributed to an expansion of human choice in the sense that
42:10
they transformed the idea of marriage from an institution based on familial and property considerations.
42:17
Now here's the bad part of the new liberalism made it into a choice
42:22
made by consenting individuals on the basis of sacramental love. Liberalism now gets rid
42:30
of this nice preliberal picture of marriage. So what's new now is that the
42:37
default basis for evaluating institutions, society, affiliations, memberships, and personal relationships
42:44
is dominated by the calculation of individual self interest. Not the beautiful sacramental love,
42:51
but self interest without the broader consideration of the impact of one's choices on
42:57
the community. One's all theations to the created order and ultimately to God.
43:02
We forget about those things and we act on self interest. He kind of
43:07
sums it up when he says, you know, on forty one liberalism was
43:13
thus a Titanic wager that ancient norms of behavior could be lifted in the name
43:16
of a new form of liberation, and that and that conquering nature would supply
43:22
the fuel to permit nearly infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort,
43:27
the depletion of moral self command and the depletion of material resources, make inevitable
43:34
an inquiry into what comes after liberalism. Yeah, and that's the separation from
43:40
nature theme, where you know you have Francis Bacon, who Hobbes was a
43:45
secretary for which I didn't know until I reread this. Actually, I guess
43:50
because I had read this before, and I forgot that fact. I didn't
43:52
know that. Did you guys know that before? I didn't know that.
43:53
I didn't know that they were even alive at the same time. I must
43:57
have. Yeah, yeah, it was something. Yeah, I'm not saying
44:00
I don't. I don't. I still learn things from reading these coue that
44:05
goes without saying. I mean and Francis Bacon, you know he's got these
44:07
famous sayings about nature. Does he say nature is like a woman and we
44:12
have to torture her to get her secrets or something like that, Like basically,
44:15
you know this idea that nature is something we have to conquer. Masculi
44:21
says the same thing about about Fortuna, and then Niets says something similar about
44:25
truth or something, Yeah, beaten into submission the gendered metaphors. Yeah,
44:31
Fortuna is a woman and needs to be beaten into submission. Virtue needs to
44:37
be held down and struck. So we got something like a thesish. My
44:43
thesis that I pulled out of his book is quote. The breakdown of family,
44:46
community, and religious norms and institutions, especially among those benefiting leads from
44:51
liberalism's advance, has not led liberalism's discontents to seek a restoration of these norms,
44:58
meaning like I don't know, medieval norms, Greek norms, and then
45:04
continuing these would take effort and sacrifice in a culture that now diminishes the value
45:09
of both. So there's some there's I mean obvious nostalgia, terrible terrible historiography
45:19
and nostalgia which we've all agreed upon. And then what does he want out
45:23
of this? It's not found in this book, but I might it might
45:28
be relevant to mention just so we can see what he's going for. He
45:30
wrote a book called Regime Change, and he terms aristo populism, which is
45:37
we reinstitute hierarchy and we have some sort of cultural elites that craft, you
45:45
know, policy in line with the common good and the common good. You
45:51
know, it's a very old idea from not just the Greeks, but the
45:54
Christians taking up the Greeks. The elites are going to form this common good
46:00
or everyone else, even if we don't get there. It's the thing that
46:05
we're aiming at. Whereas liberalism is to blame for porn and TikTok and climate
46:09
change and everything. Climate change, like have just said, climate change is
46:15
liberalism just disrespecting nature. Yeah, the mastery of nature, the separation from
46:20
nature. I just wanted to say that, you know, I don't think
46:24
that these views are you know, they wouldn't be appealing to anyone if there
46:29
wasn't at least something in them that people would latch onto that is appealing.
46:34
And I would say that for me, the one thing that I find like
46:37
appealing, well, I don't even know if appealing about the whole year,
46:39
because I don't find his conclusions appealing, but one of the observations, and
46:44
I mean it's true, we've already said that there's there's critiques that he makes
46:46
in here that you know, our old critiques that left us subm made for
46:50
a long time. Right about the economy. You could just call it alienation,
46:52
except they would of course disagree on the alien Yeah, exactly, cause
46:58
exactly. But the one thing that I think maybe is like that right wingers
47:00
have more of a tendency to bring in than like left wing theorists is you
47:05
know, it's actually in the quote that I read earlier about about the moral
47:12
the depletion of moral self command. So this question of like self command,
47:15
self mastery, like I will say that That's something that I often find Left
47:21
theorists have a harder time to have a vocabulary about. Like there's It's just
47:25
something that I think is important, and I think all of us have experienced
47:30
those moments when we push ourselves to do something that matters to us, that
47:35
is requires a tremendous amount of self mastery, and like the meaningful upshot from
47:39
that is just like so much more than just some hedonic you know, resorts
47:45
time when you're at a resort, Like the satisfaction you get from pushing yourself
47:50
to do something to discipline yourself is I think surpasses, you know, any
47:54
sort of like whatever. How he describes voluntary like head right, Like,
48:00
I think that's true, and I think that So that's like just talking about
48:05
that, having go vocabulary to talk about that and talk about why it's bad
48:07
to not have that somehow or not have some source of where to find that.
48:13
I mean, I think there's something to that, is all I'm saying
48:15
now. Of course, I think it's scary to talk about that, and
48:16
I think there's good reasons why the left doesn't want to talk about that.
48:21
Insofar as you know, whatever we would bunch up with left theorists is because
48:25
I mean it does sort of require well, who's going to tell us what
48:28
the right thing to self master is? Right? And then that becomes scary.
48:30
That's when you get fascism and shit like that. Right, So it's
48:34
I'm not even I don't even know if it's a solvable problem, but I
48:36
just think, like that's true. Like I think that's a true fact of
48:38
whatever we would call human nature, that you know, when we are some
48:40
masters of ourselves, where we have that sense some of the most meaningful times
48:45
in your life, Right, I think that's just true. If they got
48:47
their way, there's some sense that they want this to be law. Well,
48:53
that's what's scary exact now. For him, liberalism is simply, and
48:59
this is in correct, by the way, liberalism deserves to be critiqued,
49:01
but not on these grounds because liberalism, for him is just the greatest possible
49:07
freedom from external constraints, which it wasn't because the primary purpose of liberalism and
49:15
the environment that it came out of, was to limit the abuses and arbitrariness
49:21
of public political power, which is why the rule of law is put ahead
49:27
of you know, any individual head of government or the rule of democracy,
49:31
Yeah, merit instead of birth, you know, these kinds of things.
49:37
But yeah, the alienation stuff, I think that's that's where this purchase is.
49:43
And I agree that I don't I'm never gonna have a solution to that.
49:47
And we kind of see this with the the manisphere stuff. It's like
49:52
like this be like me follow this, which is never something that I'd be
49:57
willing to say. Yeah, exactly. You know it if you look in
50:00
if you look at the history of political thought and what the theorists were saying
50:06
and arguing with each other about. You know, you have say, during
50:09
the eighteenth century, the idea of of the of the spirit of the people
50:15
or the collective will. Right for Locke and Hobbes, they were more on
50:20
the side where the collective will was really just like the sum of individual wills.
50:24
Like if you look at the picture of the Leviathan, it's really just
50:28
made up of a bunch of people if you look closely. And then the
50:32
French actually had more of a collectivists kind of spirit of the people, spirit
50:37
of the laws, the collective will, which kind of stood over and above
50:40
people and and and fascists and totalitarians were just as fan just as much a
50:47
fan of Rousseau as Democrats were, because Rousseau you could read him to say
50:53
he wants a kind of aristocracy that would tell the people what was best for
50:58
them, like, you don't really know what's for you this because there's the
51:01
collective spirit, the collective will, and that stands over all of us.
51:06
And we're going to be the people who tend to this spirit and help it
51:09
along by making the right laws that guide itn't allow you to flourish within this
51:15
context, and that has led to ideas on totalitarian, left wing kinds of
51:22
things, right, and now we see a kind of right wing version of
51:25
that kind of emerging as if it's something completely fresh and new and religious,
51:30
and it's like has the trappings of a return to ancient Greek and early Christian
51:35
kinds of values, and it's all nice like that, but you got to
51:38
admit that the problem is, you know this, what do we do about
51:43
this sort of collective spirit that stands over each of us. If we're not
51:47
going to be individualists, right, then what are we going to do with
51:52
that idea where it's there's the collective spirit, it's more than just the sum
51:57
of all of our wills right, We seem to not know how to deal
52:00
with that problem, so we're stuck in this kind of I mean, he
52:05
points it out here, like individualists versus statists, right, state intervention or
52:10
laissez fair right, Like should we allow our healthcare to be sorted out by
52:16
the free market or should the state deal with it? But in either case
52:21
it's really not you know this collective will, Yeah, to back and forth.
52:27
These conservatives are resigning. They just don't want to think anymore. They
52:30
want someone to take on the burden of thinking from them, and they don't
52:35
want anyone else to think anymore either. So what do we do? We
52:37
go back to a time when there was, in their view, no debate
52:43
over individual versus collective will. They want in their own brain, in their
52:50
own big other and ideological straw man to tell them what to do. So
52:54
they read a two thousand year old book and decide that that is the answer
52:59
for all time, and for some that two thousand year old book is the
53:04
Bible. For others it's Aristotle's ethics. But in truth, there never was
53:09
a time when there was no debate over individual and collective will. Yeah,
53:15
that's like the fabrication that's piecemealed together. The bad history is that this debate
53:22
about liberty in the like, just in the context of Locke, is we
53:25
need to get power out of the hands of these corrupt hedonic tyrants or just
53:32
totally incompetent idiots. The liberty is not like we want to do whatever we
53:38
want. It's like these people actually suck, and they keep sucking. And
53:45
Deneen talks about Aristotelian liberty and then leaves out all the insane shit that his
53:51
holy church did, like just the High Oh, the Crusades, how about
53:55
that one, the Spanish Inquisition. I mean, I I'm as critical as
54:01
liberal of liberalism as the next guy, but I prefer that to anyone who
54:07
believes that whiches are real. Yeah, you got to take the good with
54:12
the bad. You can't really just cut out all the nasty parts and say,
54:16
look, here's this sort of great thing we should sort of aim at
54:21
in the future, not return to, but sort of re establish a kind
54:25
of self governing sort of education where people are gonna where students are gonna sort
54:30
of just on their own stop cheating, or you know, romantic relationships are
54:37
going to be non utilitarian, not like pleasure oriented, but like more I
54:43
don't know how like sacred I guess, like, I don't know how you
54:45
would, you know, if I'm not really a religious person and I'm kind
54:52
of okay with people whether they want to choose not to get married or not.
54:54
Well, I'm a voluntarist. Now I'm a fucking liberal, so I
54:58
can't say that. It's difficult to find see myself in this kind of perspective,
55:05
to say the least. But I do I agree with what Victor was
55:07
saying too. I do like the sort of whatever, the classical preliberal sense
55:15
of liberty he's talking about it. It's not the worst thing in the world.
55:20
He also blames liberalism is responsible for the emancipation of women, which is
55:27
quote, child children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, which
55:31
contributes to liberalism's commitment to abortion on demand. Yeah, that's what I read
55:36
earlier. I think, Yeah, that's almost like negative enlightenment. Materially.
55:40
This is not liberalism. That was just like, hey, women, here's
55:45
all your rights, Like otherwise there wouldn't be women fighting for rights. You
55:50
can blame. Maybe I'm just doing the same thing from the other side here,
55:52
But you can blame capitalism for that because it's like the profits, the
55:59
rate of profits. But we got all these workers that are just sitting at
56:02
home taking care of their babies, why don't we get them into the business
56:07
factory. I mean, I think you wouldn't. No, I mean my
56:08
sense is he wouldn't actually disagree with that analysis. I didn't. I don't
56:12
think he said it, at least in the parts that we read. But
56:15
I mean I think that he does see, like the economic liberalism, as
56:19
you know, another side of the same coin. So I think he'd be
56:21
like, yeah, of course, of course that's that's the part of liberalism
56:23
that led women to do that. And then the solution, I guess the
56:29
end point of this is really the scary part. You just you you want
56:35
the regime Chaine theocracy. You want Baron Trump to be the next guy.
56:40
I don't know if Baron Trump's a bad ruler, but this is the point
56:44
of liberalism. You don't know if the kid's going to be good or bad,
56:46
right, it could be it's a coin flip. Whereas if you have
56:51
some electoral process, at least there's a chance that there's like meritocracy involved as
56:57
opposed to the divine right of king, and that's at least in theory,
57:01
what democracy is supposed to be able to do. No, he says,
57:06
he says at the end, he says, here these are just three steps,
57:09
not going back but actually acknowledging the achievements of liberalism and building on them.
57:15
That's his first. And then the next one is outgrowing the age of
57:17
ideology. So he thinks we're going to go post ideological. So there's almost
57:23
an end of history kind of thing here, if you take the end of
57:28
history to mean history of the capital age, post ideology, but just not
57:34
liberalism is the best. But he wants to go you know, of the
57:37
three great modern ideologies, only the oldest and most resilient remains. And that's
57:44
I guess the early Christian tradition going back to the pre pre modern definition of
57:50
liberty and the liberals ruined all that. Okay, then, and then you
57:54
know, a better theory of politics and society might ultimately emerge that estews liberalism's
58:02
ideological dimensions, but again is cognizitive its achievements. Sounds like marx Well in
58:10
his new book. In his new book, I think he talks more about
58:14
I think you called it aristocratic populism, aristo populism, Yeah, And I
58:20
think that he has in mind. I know that he talks a lot about
58:22
the mixed regime, and I think like the aristo populism would probably be that
58:27
you have, you know, these aristocrats at the top who then are like
58:31
responsive to a popular demand, but are still also somehow setting you know,
58:36
norms. I'm not exactly sure how, but I haven't read the other books.
58:38
So it's postliberalism infused with orthodox religious traditions. That sounds really easy.
58:47
Why don't we just get it done. Yeah, let's just get it done.
58:50
Let's just push it through. Remember, push it through. Remember when
58:53
everyone went to church on Sunday. If people would just sort of have this
58:58
sort of self governed liberal arts education where they learn how to be moral and
59:04
you know, bring back honor and virtue as kind of an ideal, then
59:08
we wouldn't need this whole state apparatus, this ridiculous giant state apparatus, and
59:14
this interminable argument between individualists and statists freedom from or freedom through laws? Like
59:23
He's like, what's that all about? But to me that just seems like
59:25
almost like a kind of panopticon argument. He wants you to internalize all of
59:30
that sort of moral baggage, and it kind of reminds me of Fuco's chapter
59:37
on the panopticon and discipline and punish. He who is subjected to the field
59:42
of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.
59:46
He makes them play spontaneously upon himself. He inscribes in himself the power relation
59:52
in which he simultaneously plays both roles. He becomes principle of his own subjection.
59:59
By this very fact. The external power may throw off its physical weight,
1:00:04
it tends to the non corporeal, and the more it approaches this limit,
1:00:07
the more constant, profound, and permanent arts effects. It is a
1:00:12
perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.
1:00:16
And that's what Dineen wants. He wants to put little fucking panopticons, which
1:00:23
ironically is something Bentham dreamt up. And ironically, Bentham is the one who
1:00:30
made this distinction between positive and negative liberty that Dineen is not acknowledging, but
1:00:37
he's sort of so he's just kind of reinventing this wheel from a conservative right
1:00:42
wing Catholic side. Liberalism is responsible for everything bad except for the parts I'm
1:00:47
going to plagiarize and present is my own. Wow, he's here, So
1:00:52
this is quoting from his new book. He says, what is needed is
1:00:55
the application of a Machiavelian means to achieve Aristotelian ends, the use of powerful
1:01:02
political resistance by the populace against the natural advantages of the elite to create a
1:01:08
mixed constitution in which genuine common good is the results. And he talks,
1:01:14
and aristo populism is. This is from a book review. He says,
1:01:20
it's a pie in the sky blending of working class populism with a classically educated
1:01:23
and conservative new nobility inculcated with the civic virtue needed to assure a politics of
1:01:30
the common good. So like a political priesthood. Oh that's this sounds amazing.
1:01:36
This sounds like a great society we should try where a bunch of oppity
1:01:39
Christian liberal arts college graduates with three names get to approve any new films being
1:01:45
made or which TV shows come out, because you know, conservatives have a
1:01:51
great and proven track record of making really good art and music and film.
1:01:58
He actually has some concrete policy recommendations as well. So he's worried about like
1:02:04
the mixing of class. So he recommends much smaller districts for representation, as
1:02:07
America's long ago anti federalists. So because right now I think there's only four
1:02:12
hundred and something there are giant districts, he thinks that, like they should
1:02:15
be much smaller to have more local representation. He thinks that you should move
1:02:19
the nation's capital around the country, as Rousseau apparently recommended. He thinks that
1:02:23
there should be mandatory national service for the youth. You should break up the
1:02:29
tech and social media monopolies like so like kind of yeah, break up those
1:02:32
monopolies into into smaller companies, and revise university emissions processes, and replace racial
1:02:38
and sexual affirmative action with working class affirmative action. Hey man, if that's
1:02:45
all, I'm on board with all of that, except for the one what
1:02:47
was it, the national the Hitler youth clause. I know, I know
1:02:51
none of that, But other than that, that sounds not too bad Earth,
1:02:53
Let's let's do it. But yeah, I know. Then then the
1:02:57
real politic comes along, is as well, How are we going to do
1:03:00
that without completely violating the basic liberal constitutional value. I think there's some I
1:03:07
think there's some sleight of hand here with what working class means for Deneen,
1:03:10
Like, I think that could be a little bit of sleight of hand,
1:03:13
Like, you know, because at one point it's like national, foreign,
1:03:15
industrial, economic and social policies need to prioritize working class and promote traditional moras,
1:03:22
right, So like that's where you get some smuggling in of stuff.
1:03:24
And you know, actually a good example which I know Denean is a fan
1:03:28
of, this is what Victor Orband's been doing in Hungary with family policy.
1:03:32
So like, for example, in Hungary, if you're a woman and you
1:03:36
have four or more children, you never have to pay taxes again in your
1:03:39
life to incentivize more like family formation and reproduction. So ultimately it just seems
1:03:47
to be just the morals that he wants, that he likes, the values
1:03:52
that should be inculcated, like you know, economic you know, equality and
1:04:00
material distribution, those are secondary to family values and Christian values. It's almost
1:04:09
like a right wing Chomsky with the anarcho syndicalism as the end. Well,
1:04:15
the biggest fear obviously for anyone who is not a Catholic, Christian, liberal
1:04:23
arts student. Is what he means by norms and customs, and how norms
1:04:28
and customs are going to be enforced because again, like what we started out
1:04:32
with, they're certainly obsessed with the media, so we'll probably get some sort
1:04:36
of new Hayes Code all that kind of stuff. But then how is the
1:04:42
how is how are the rest of what he calls the constraints upon individual choice?
1:04:46
How are any of those going to be imposed? Well, so he
1:04:50
does say apparently in the new book he talks about eliminating the separation of church
1:04:55
and state, so like because right now, there you go, it's strict,
1:05:00
so he thinks that like it should be allowed to like, you know,
1:05:01
have some more. That's where the integration, right, the integralism comes.
1:05:04
It's like integrating religion into into like state institutions. So if we have
1:05:11
these like small districts that he's talking about, you can have like a Catholic
1:05:15
district, but then presumably you'd have a non Catholic district too, right,
1:05:20
you could have a yeah, I think you'll have some Mormon ones. You'll
1:05:24
have some yeah, I think so exactly, you'll have the atheist coastal e.
1:05:28
And that's that's why, that's why he would say, that's why he
1:05:30
would still say, like there's gonna be diversity, there's gonna be like different
1:05:32
stuff. It's just gonna be more localism, right where like more insular localism.
1:05:36
You know, who had localism and who never had any internal conflict,
1:05:42
the Holy Roman Empire. Yeah, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
1:05:47
Let's just rewind or the original papal states and the pope was the head
1:05:55
of state and government and there is no distinction there. So he just wants
1:05:58
to Balkanize America up into like duchies based on kind of quote unquote norms and
1:06:05
customs. This I mean, I I'm down to see it. Let's go.
1:06:11
That's that is. And you know what, there is actually hints of
1:06:14
that. I don't know if any of you notice, but like he does,
1:06:15
there is hints of it in the Why Liberalism Failed book, because he
1:06:18
mentions a couple of times pretty early in the book. I think he says
1:06:23
that like the only realistic thing is kind of like resistance at the local level
1:06:27
or something. He kind of talks about how like you can you can build
1:06:29
your own communities at the local level, and I think that he would want
1:06:31
to see a regime change that sort of enforces or creates the conditions for that
1:06:36
local resistance to be more universalized across I think you're right. I think you're
1:06:43
you're right to say, like, yeah, we would see like these little
1:06:45
Mormon districts, these little like Catholic's okay, but he sounds like he's advocating
1:06:48
for a labor organization, So we could also have a little communist state,
1:06:54
you know, try try it out. So is this the point where we
1:06:57
make common cause with this movement? But we just sit back and say,
1:07:00
well, it's not gonna go the way they think it's gonna go. But
1:07:03
they were just useful. They're gonna be useful idiots for for us. Now,
1:07:08
That's exactly what I kind of meant at the beginning when I was saying
1:07:11
the pragmatis side of me is like, if this becomes more of a popular
1:07:14
way of going, there might be opportunities for like left leaning politicians to ally
1:07:18
themselves with if they on specific policies like right that are like supportive of working
1:07:25
class, Like supposing we can alleviate some of the enormous burden that neoliberalism since
1:07:31
the eighties has created and and a lot of this conflict goes away. Then
1:07:38
it's not gonna go towards religious fundamentalism. It's gonna go towards a open,
1:07:43
non nationalistic pluralism. So let's fucking do it. And it's gonna go that
1:07:48
way and not the way that these idiots think it's gonna go. It's not
1:07:51
gonna go towards orthodox Christian, ancient Greek libertos. It's not gonna go that
1:07:57
way. But let's just we'll just put that idea out for now. We'll
1:08:00
just have that as the carrot on the and then and then we'll use that
1:08:03
Machiavellian stick to to push all the changes through. Break up capitalism. Get
1:08:09
rid of the the social media companies, yeah, get rid of the fucking
1:08:13
tech monopolies, get rid of all the profit driven bullshit that's ruining our education
1:08:17
and our banking and our healthcare. Get rid of it all, and then
1:08:21
fuck, maybe we'll end up somewhere better than we started. That is actually
1:08:27
what I've heard some post liberals talk about, that that there's there, there
1:08:30
is opportunity here for common cause, Like who was it? Ah God?
1:08:32
I wish I could remember like has publicly talked about He's like, I would
1:08:35
love to all with AOC on some stuff about you know, on like some
1:08:41
some working class stuff. But you know what, I think they're thinking the
1:08:44
same thing that you're thinking on there, and hey, yeah they're like,
1:08:46
we'll use these left wingers and then like, yeah, we'll use them to
1:08:53
get the to get the papal states back in order. This is exactly what
1:08:57
Hobbs says. And the Leviathan to everyone thinks they're smarter, you know,
1:09:00
in this state of nature, you know, we are equal of mind,
1:09:03
the dumbest human being and the smartest human being. There's not really that big
1:09:08
a gap there. And the fact that everyone thinks that they're more intelligent than
1:09:12
everybody else is a good sign that intelligence is pretty evenly distributed. So let's
1:09:17
let's do it. Let's use each other. You know how this would actually
1:09:20
turn out though the crysto fascists would not get their way, but neither would
1:09:25
the leftist get their way. It would become the Boudriardian States of America,
1:09:30
where every state is run by an influencer and all their followers would move to
1:09:36
their state. So you'd have the largest state, which would be Swifty Nation,
1:09:43
the Tom Brady States, those would be pretty well populated, and then
1:09:47
Influence and then you have the Jordan Peterson State, and then you know,
1:09:53
Hassan Piker could have his own state, the in Cell State, which it
1:09:58
doesn't matter because it would die out with in one generation. Yeah, so
1:10:03
you could just you could just move geographically to the state that you want to
1:10:08
live in and then see how it goes. Yeah, we could somehow facilitate
1:10:12
border crossing and getting up and moving. You just go find the place that
1:10:15
you know reflects your values the best. And and you know, we might
1:10:19
need a few underground railroads to get people out of places that want to prevent
1:10:25
that sort of thing. Like if you have to do a hobbsy and kind
1:10:28
of covenant to enter this place and then you can't break the contract, well
1:10:32
then we might have to get you out somehow. But otherwise, yeah,
1:10:35
well we'll have that. Okay, I've been convinced this sounds pretty good.
1:10:40
We should try. We should try the influencer States of America. Everyone goes
1:10:46
to the place that they agree which already exists, but we're going to create
1:10:49
it in geographical form. I like it. That's it. I think I
1:10:55
think we figured it out in the end of his history done. We figured
1:11:00
I didn't expect us to solve this, but I think we just did.
1:11:03
The Balkanized Holy Roman Empire of the Influencer States of America our political program.
1:11:11
We endorse it going forward. Although you know what, I'd be really afraid
1:11:15
of the state, the Trump State, because it would be probably the biggest
1:11:20
and also the most willing to invade its neighbors. So I don't know,
1:11:26
Danian Trump. I don't know if the Dannean state would be the same as
1:11:28
the Trump State, but I'd be scared about the Denean State would have like
1:11:32
four sixty year old elbow patch nerds in it, and then the Trump State
1:11:40
would just immediately absorb it. The reason teaches us that we shouldn't hurt each
1:11:44
other. We are all God's creations, and we will ban together and punish
1:11:48
you if you break the first law that reason teaches us. Yeah, they're
1:11:51
like holding out a copy of Niko Makian ethics, trying to trying to convince
1:11:57
the Trump is not to invade them, and they just run over by a
1:12:01
whole bunch of monster trucks painted with America. That's our it's our solution,
1:12:06
your move centrist establishment. Yeah, the country is just descending into chaos because
1:12:12
of state Trump. It's all on fire and the politics nerds, they're all
1:12:16
gathered in the Obama state of course, and they're just like, it's so
1:12:21
good that everyone has something to add to the conversation, your move globalist elite.
1:12:27
We gotta gotta thank John m Owen the fourth for editing this, this
1:12:31
series of books. I love these people. I love these these these people
1:12:36
with with like I don't know what's the name Is there a name for like
1:12:40
having a number at the end of your name, Like what do they call
1:12:42
that? If there were, I wouldn't know what it was. Yeah,
1:12:45
so it's so funny. All right, guys, good stuff. I'm glad
1:12:50
we fifth, glad we came to a conclusion here. This is James Tate,
1:12:57
the first signing out. Okay, hey, thanks everyone for listening,
1:13:00
and we'll thank you later. M HM.