Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 163 - How to Control a Democracy ft. 1Dime

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Pill Pod 163 - How to Control a Democracy ft. 1Dime · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:06
  All right, welcome to Phil Pod one sixties something going to I'm going to
• 0:14
  say one sixty three subject to revision. We've been talking about audience. We've
• 0:20
  been talking about modern communications media versus you know, nineteen thirties leftists reflecting on
• 0:27
  communications media, Walter Benjamine, all the stuff that goes with that leftism resistant
• 0:34
  hegemony. So today we have a guest. He's a YouTuber. Do you
• 0:38
  identify as as zoomer out of curiosity? When is zoomer starts some somewhere late
• 0:47
  mid nineties or whatever it is that you start using the term logging. No,
• 0:53
  he doesn't identify. Yeah, that's your answer. I feel like also
• 0:57
  zoomers are defined by by choosing to identify as something they do know all of
• 1:02
  the mental illnesses. One is that we didn't even have Yeah, whereas we
• 1:06
  we are just uh we are just Do you remember when you had to sit
• 1:10
  and wait for your parents to reload the film into the camera. I vaguely
• 1:15
  do. Actually yeah, anyway, uh not a zoomer got his master's degree
• 1:21
  recently, political theory content creator one dime. How's it going, man?
• 1:26
  Pretty good? Gonna be on this pod with the goat. Yeah, you
• 1:32
  know, the Goat and his minions. Yeah, I still I still like,
• 1:38
  I know, I know you're you like to play the humble guy,
• 1:41
  you know, but like I will say that, I genuinely believe you're the
• 1:46
  only YouTuber who makes better videos than me. And I say that as like
• 1:49
  a cocky thing because I do take pride also in like visuals and trying to
• 1:55
  make it substantive while being very visually engaging. And there's not a lot of
• 2:00
  examples you can really find on the Internet of balancing accessibility content and you know,
• 2:06
  artistry. It's pretty hard. There's there's some people I like who do
• 2:09
  it in a different way. There's the Whole Theater kids, the bread too
• 2:15
  people. They're really good at that. I think that's a talent. Uh,
• 2:17
  It's not not a talent I have, but yeah, no, I
• 2:23
  respect that. So, yeah, it's cool to be on this pod.
• 2:27
  Great, good to have you. So we watched your video. I mean,
• 2:30
  also thanks for gassing me up. That's why we invited you too.
• 2:37
  Modest that well, it's a matter of taste and defining the quality of a
• 2:44
  video based on how long it took you in after effects. I mean,
• 2:47
  that's something I do it's not something that the algorithm does. Of course,
• 2:53
  that's one way to do it. And I definitely appreciate videos that I need
• 2:55
  to pause and rewatch section for some real clean, good animations, but I
• 3:02
  can tell you that that's not the algorithm's priority, unfortunately for us. But
• 3:08
  One Dime spend some time on his evidently, and yeah, we're talking about
• 3:15
  one of his videos in particular today. It's about controlled opposition, and in
• 3:21
  terms of audience and all the stuff that we've been talking about. In terms
• 3:24
  of media, YouTube videos, they're made to be quick paced there, made
• 3:30
  to be fast and lose. You got to keep that viewer retention really high
• 3:35
  if you want any views. But here we try to do something a little
• 3:39
  bit more thorough here. So we wanted to not we're not debating, we're
• 3:45
  discussing, but the topic of the video that we're looking at One Dime's video
• 3:53
  controlled or is it contained opposition? Contained opposition? Title control opposition because it'll
• 3:59
  get more or search value that way people will find it. That hasn't worked
• 4:04
  out. Weirdly, sometimes the videos I'm most proud of end up getting less
• 4:09
  views than the ones I made in two weeks and did this one knock out
• 4:13
  as many views as you were as you were expecting. No, yeah,
• 4:15
  really underperformed. I was really surprised compared to other videos. I didn't think
• 4:21
  my video on modern monetary theory would pop off. And that's my most viewed
• 4:26
  video that has like three hundred, three hundred and sixty thousand views now.
• 4:30
  And do you know what that tells you? It's like people searching for monetary
• 4:33
  policy and are looking for an explainer who are in some undergradual class that come
• 4:36
  across your video. I wonder if that could be part of the boost.
• 4:40
  Are they teaching MMT and in undergrad I don't know. It's just like but
• 4:44
  it is one of those things where it's like, Okay, what do people
• 4:46
  you mean by Like I could imagine someone maybe just because I'm the kind of
• 4:48
  person who, like I thought, will pop it into my head and I'll
• 4:50
  be like, Okay, what that thing? That fundamental feature of our society?
• 4:54
  I don't understand it. I'm going to google that, And I feel
• 4:56
  like if the video comes up with that, I might be more inclined to
• 4:59
  see it. I mean, that could be a good way into audiences.
• 5:01
  Is like why is that? Why does that happen videos you don't expect to
• 5:05
  do well do well, and the ones you're more proud of than not to.
• 5:10
  I mean, it seems like it could be a lack of just like
• 5:13
  buzzwords, like you said, control, Okay, yeah, control, let's
• 5:16
  watch this. But I guess MMT happens to be like hot right now and
• 5:19
  a bunch of like podcasts and YouTube circles. So yeah, maybe never having
• 5:25
  that that was a coincidence rather than having those kinds of words, just a
• 5:29
  coincidence that people happen to be interested in this right now. Yeah. Also
• 5:32
  being first to market matters when the term's not already saturated. Like Nietzsche is
• 5:40
  a highly searched term, but there's so many many bad videos on Niatsche and
• 5:46
  if you try to add to that at this point, yeah's probably not going
• 5:50
  to work. But anyway, we have contained opposition a theory. Yeah,
• 5:56
  I would call it conspiracy style is the video editing style. And then we
• 6:01
  want to talk about to what degree is this a conspiracy? And I think
• 6:06
  I'm going to probably back myself off of this for a while because Victor is
• 6:13
  also an expert in this, currently writing his dissertation on democracy and all that
• 6:19
  pills. I know you said you didn't want too much biographical stuff, but
• 6:21
  I just I have to ask before I kind of dive into the questions.
• 6:25
  I'm just I want to know a little bit about Tony's background in terms of
• 6:28
  what got you into like political theory. I know you said you just did
• 6:31
  a master's in political theory, and you mentioned that actually in your video.
• 6:34
  And it's funny because when I was watching the video, you talk about how
• 6:38
  you've got a degree where most of the people who get the degree end up
• 6:41
  working in you know, that's actually my bachelor's I was referring, Oh okay,
• 6:46
  okay, yeah, okay, what was that in? So I actually
• 6:48
  really liked my master's degree. I was really lucky to be with some of
• 6:53
  some of the best professors I've ever met, some really good mentors. I
• 6:57
  felt like there's people there who actually were interested than reading it, and we're
• 7:00
  there because they liked it. Because you know, no one does a police
• 7:02
  side. Masters because you want to get a job is not Exactually it's not
• 7:09
  the most employable thing. It's like, you know, studying philosophy, it's
• 7:12
  like your prospects is just you like philosophy, you want to go into law,
• 7:15
  but it was my bachelor's degree was which was actually called the Public Affairs
• 7:20
  and Policy Management. I know about all the Popham kids, I know about
• 7:24
  them. Yeah, I know the reputation. Yeah, well, as you
• 7:27
  know all too well that that is I would say the prime type of program
• 7:31
  geared towards pumping out like the archetypical professional managerial class individuals people who are prime
• 7:41
  to be bureaucrats. And you know, the ideology that dominates that sort of
• 7:46
  program is very status quoi and it's you know, you might have a sort
• 7:50
  of progressive side and a conservative side was generally around it within the centrist Overton
• 7:57
  window. Absolutely. Yes. So I mentioned in that video that people who
• 8:01
  were in this program would generally be going to NGO as if they were on
• 8:05
  the left. That's what I saw a lot of people doing, and they
• 8:09
  would get into this sort of faux activism. And I mean that sounds a
• 8:13
  bit harsh because I know a lot of people have good intentions when they go
• 8:15
  into these things, but there's all sort of funnels for people to just kind
• 8:18
  of feel like they're doing something and exhaust their energies, and yeah, they
• 8:24
  end up just frankly just having their emotional labor exploited for no money in internship
• 8:28
  totally. Yeah. And then yeah, who just are literally in the bureaucracy
• 8:33
  totally totally. And you know those kinds of programs too, You know when
• 8:35
  you hear like paranoid conservatives saying, oh, the university is dominated by you
• 8:39
  know, the woke or Marxist elite or something. And I don't know,
• 8:43
  maybe it's different now, but my memory of Papham was it there was actually
• 8:46
  a lot of conservatives there, a lot of people ended up going to work
• 8:48
  for the Conservative Party of Canada and stuff. That was like one of their
• 8:50
  main pipelines. But can you tell anyway what is what is pap them public
• 8:56
  public affairs and policy management. It was just the way that they It's just
• 8:58
  like the way pop up kids. Yeah, are these the type that were
• 9:03
  like suits to class. Yeah, there are people like that. There are
• 9:05
  peoples. There's people who would go do mock parliament and that experience made me
• 9:13
  because I found those people very annoying. So there's a small sub sect of
• 9:18
  people within the program who were more like artistically minded, and it was about
• 9:22
  four or five of us, and I was these were like my friends in
• 9:26
  the university at the time, and uh, I don't know, I game
• 9:30
  kind of depoliticized, almost due to the program. Just I would do my
• 9:35
  readings and I found especially the early years of political theory interesting, But then
• 9:39
  it got increasingly more administrative. I was literally taught classes like political communication,
• 9:45
  which was teaching you how to, you know, do propaganda. Literally it
• 9:48
  was very about administration, the administration of politics as opposed to politics itself,
• 9:56
  like what are the ideas? That was only for a short time the earlier.
• 10:00
  So I gotten into philosophy and a lot of stuff that I wasn't taught
• 10:03
  in that program on my own, completely on my own, just for the
• 10:07
  fun of it, like Marxist theory. I got into critical theory, got
• 10:11
  into a bunch of stuff that I wasn't really being taught in that program.
• 10:15
  So I guess that's sort of stuff for no. I just I just read.
• 10:18
  I just bought the books, okay, just interest All right, Well
• 10:24
  then that's settled. He's not a zoomer. Yeah. Yeah. During COVID,
• 10:28
  I really accelerated the amount I read. It's actually I remember during that
• 10:35
  time I came across pills as videos, because I was trying to understand what
• 10:37
  the hell I think, what the hell it was Gi debor what he was
• 10:41
  on about one of your really early videotle. Yeah. I was going to
• 10:46
  ask you the question about what you said. I think you already answered the
• 10:50
  question I was going to ask. But you're saying programs like Papham kind of
• 10:54
  prepare people either for a life in what like the NGO industry bureaucracies, or
• 11:01
  like the corporate private sector, or to this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 11:05
  The way you put it was you referred to it as like this the
• 11:09
  socio political matrix that I guess absorbs graduate students, And I was going to
• 11:13
  ask you how you escaped from that matrix, but I guess you already sort
• 11:18
  of answered my question there. You got into philosophies or reading on your own,
• 11:22
  and then you studied it from a more theoretical perspective later in grad school.
• 11:26
  The sort of thing. What I mean by escaping the matrix, I
• 11:30
  don't so much mean like, oh, you know, this makes you have
• 11:33
  a politics, or let alone a revolutionary politics, but rather just not falling
• 11:37
  into that cycle, which is, oh, I feel there's something wrong with
• 11:41
  the world. I'm going to try to do some things better than nothing,
• 11:45
  and people get sucked in. They get in this habit where you are radical
• 11:48
  while you're young, and then you'd become a sort of conservative or liberal when
• 11:54
  you're older. It's such a common pattern I've seen, and it's it's quite
• 12:00
  interesting, just due to the fact that it's actually not it's not in the
• 12:03
  interests of people who are older and who pay taxes and who have to work
• 12:09
  full time. You'd think that they would it would be more in their interest
• 12:13
  to be critical of wage labor and to be more critical of capitalism, to
• 12:16
  want a better society. But you tend to see people get conservative as they're
• 12:20
  older. That's a prope. I'm not sure empirically how true that really is,
• 12:26
  but you see it for sure, and that's uh. I think it's
• 12:30
  kind of part of that. Part of that is because people get sucked into
• 12:33
  sort of pseudoactivity, and that includes radical parties. So some people think it's
• 12:39
  not just peaceful protests. Peaceful protests is useless. But I'm going to go
• 12:43
  join a maoist org and you know, and gae throw molotov cocktails at small
• 12:48
  businesses. It's like that's just as useless. Yeah, nice. So we
• 12:52
  are pretty much already at the topic of the video, which is contained opposition
• 12:58
  a theory, and I think it's pretty bold to say I'm going to present
• 13:03
  a new theory, my own theory as original work, especially on YouTube,
• 13:07
  because the majority of the feedback is either great video, man fire emoji or
• 13:13
  your hair looks stupid and I don't like you, but that's what we wanted
• 13:16
  to ask you about. So your theory, and I also want to ask
• 13:20
  you about why it's yours, how it's yours, all that kind of stuff,
• 13:24
  and I'd like you to explain that if you can. But your theory
• 13:28
  is contained opposition, which has a lot to do with this feeling of being
• 13:33
  exhausted and kind of like you've already been saying, your energy is channeled into
• 13:39
  things that are useless as opposed to things that are useful. I'd also like
• 13:43
  to know what you mean by you know, what's pseudo politics versus real politics,
• 13:48
  what's real action versus non real action? But to start all that off,
• 13:52
  could you package up contained opposition the one dime theory for us? Dude?
• 13:58
  But first, just real quick, did you you say exhaustion in the
• 14:01
  video? I don't remember that coming up. Maybe I missed you did,
• 14:03
  Okay, I missed thatsag that's actually that's actually a reference to society. No,
• 14:11
  actually, but that I could that would be a good comparison. But
• 14:15
  there's a lot of references to other people's theories who I was responding to.
• 14:20
  So in my dissertation which ended up getting quite well received, and there's a
• 14:26
  bunch of things I wanted to add to it and to make it to a
• 14:30
  book which is going to come out and Reval Press, and it's mainly on
• 14:35
  building on the theories of Sheldon Wolen basically containue Sheldon Wollan has this theory of
• 14:39
  managed democracy, and it's a framework of understanding democracy that I think, obviously
• 14:46
  is very critical of liberal democracy and liberal ideas of democracy, liberal rhetoric of
• 14:52
  it, but also of Marxist theories that try to just you know, write
• 14:56
  it off as bourgeois democracy. We accepts the anti capitalist critiques in Marxist texts
• 15:05
  of the limitations of constitutional democracy, how capitalism undermines democracy, you know,
• 15:11
  class conflict, et cetera. But the idea of bourgeois democracy doesn't actually tell
• 15:16
  us very much about the differences between different constitutional democracies and what is possible within
• 15:24
  them. So there's a lot of things that I ended up responding to in
• 15:28
  discussion with my supervisors, which one of those things was resistance. So for
• 15:37
  an undemocratic society, how can we have resistance? How can you have a
• 15:39
  totalizing system? Because Sheldon will and as this theory of inverted to ittalitarianism if
• 15:45
  you have resistance. And one quote that somebody said in a discussion was they
• 15:50
  invoked who COO's quote from the history of sexuality, where there is power,
• 15:56
  there is resistance, and the sort of idea here as you can't actually have
• 16:00
  a totalizing power, and that there is resistance inevitably and there's all sort of
• 16:06
  resistance, just not in one center. There's not one big power, and
• 16:10
  there's not one big revolution. There's all these disparate resistances. And I kind
• 16:14
  of thought, I mean, this sounds awfully compatible with the current system because
• 16:18
  we've had that, We've had nothing but disparate resistances since you know, you
• 16:23
  could go much further back, but I think really the nineties is when you
• 16:27
  start seeing a lot of constant disparate resistances. There's a in the video you
• 16:33
  might notice I invoke a heart and Negri's multitude, because in the nineties,
• 16:38
  you know, they write this book called Empire in which they kind of think
• 16:42
  the old Marxist class conflict is over and that the new revolutionary force will be
• 16:48
  this popular multitude of disparate resistances. Now I kind of thought, well,
• 16:53
  how do you square the fact that the system seems to be really going in
• 16:56
  a dramatically undemocratic direction. And when Sheldon Willen published his book Managed Democracy and
• 17:03
  the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, it was around the election, the re election
• 17:08
  of George W. Bush. I hope you didn't come here to knock heart
• 17:11
  and agree because revolutionary multiplicity. We're big fans here. That's a joke,
• 17:17
  by the way, do you sure, man? I think they solved it.
• 17:19
  I think we're good now. Yeah, no, I know you're not
• 17:22
  like that other podcast but that we won't name. We won't name them.
• 17:27
  What I'm just saying, if you, if you turn off the lights and
• 17:32
  say revolutionary to yourself a whole bunch of times in the dark, then what
• 17:36
  you're going to get the world you want? Yeah? So I always found
• 17:38
  this idea interesting controlled opposition. A lot of people talk about it in a
• 17:42
  sort of conspiratorial way. But we know that in some people today will give
• 17:48
  examples of the CIA Congress of Cultural Freedom, you know, having funded various
• 17:55
  magazines in which left wing thinkers have written for to back a sort of compatible
• 17:59
  legs. But I think most of us who study politics seriously know that there
• 18:03
  isn't just a big cabal controlling the opposition, and that this isn't a very
• 18:08
  lousy theory. This would be a very lousy theory to explain why the left
• 18:15
  is as impotent as it is. But this sort of challenged me to think
• 18:19
  about a lot of things, the nature of power in regimes as well as
• 18:25
  the nature of resistance of politics. A big thing was, well, why
• 18:30
  do we seem to think that resistance is an exception to the rule of hegemony.
• 18:34
  That's almost like a presupposition and left thinking we tend to think, oh,
• 18:40
  there's resistance. At least it's not Nazism. It's at least it's not
• 18:42
  we're not at fascism. Yet you always hear the rhetoric, the totalitarianism,
• 18:48
  the dystopia, whatever is coming, you know, with whether it be Trump,
• 18:52
  whether it be so and so boogeyman, And there's lots of an examine.
• 18:56
  They think that just because you have the right to protest, now now
• 19:00
  that okay, forget so the system now it could be worse. It could
• 19:03
  be like Orl's nineteen eighty four. But I mean, I really should be
• 19:07
  considered that the right to resistance is not some sort of exception to hegemony.
• 19:15
  It's actually this expression of a stronger hegemony. If a system is able to
• 19:18
  tolerate resistance, it's much more powerful. I mean, if a system feels
• 19:23
  the need that any protests is in an existential threat to its regime, like
• 19:29
  how East Germany felt about its protests, or how the Soviet Union felt about
• 19:37
  the protests in Hungary, for example, I mean, that's a sign of
• 19:41
  a very unstable, weak regime. And if you're able to tolerate resistance,
• 19:45
  it's good, not just due to the fact that you have sort of a
• 19:48
  legitimacy, a democratic legitimacy that you have see, people have a right to
• 19:52
  resist, but also if you allow resistance to exhaust itself to a certain degree,
• 20:00
  it actually undermines long term the ability to change the system, because you
• 20:06
  really see revolutions in history occur when a boiling point reaches when all attempts to
• 20:11
  reform the system. When attempts to change it peacefully have all been exhausted or
• 20:18
  just been shut down violently. I don't really need to go down to the
• 20:22
  list of examples here, but that's part of it now. Of course,
• 20:26
  it's risky to allow opposition. It could manifest into something dangerous. And that's
• 20:30
  why I say there's a twofold character to the system. There is this totalitarian
• 20:33
  aspect to it, which is I hint at I talk about cointel pro surveillance
• 20:41
  and how when there it was examples of serious resistance, the state does resort
• 20:45
  to classically totalitarian maneuvers to obliterate it. But it seems to be very lenient
• 20:51
  with all sort of other protests. And I think we get in a bit
• 20:55
  of a cycle, a cycle of contained opposition. And I say that because
• 20:59
  if you allow resistance to occur, you don't have to control it. You
• 21:03
  just have to make sure you know when the kids are playing outside that they
• 21:08
  don't go out of your reach. Basically, you'll notice I invoke a lot
• 21:14
  of psychological metaphors, there a lot of parental metaphors. I've always found views
• 21:19
  of ways of viewing the states sort of like an extension of the family.
• 21:26
  Very interesting you see this, and of course Freudian Marxists views of the state
• 21:32
  as well as you know, even Hegel's philosophy of right kind of sees,
• 21:36
  you know, the state in this way to some extent. The real way
• 21:40
  is to actually allow people limited degree to resist it. And it's not just
• 21:47
  an illusion. It's not just a conspiracy for the system to fool people,
• 21:51
  but it's actually just good for the system. Sometimes a system needs to adapt
• 21:56
  to its resistance in order to actually improve itself, because when you don't have
• 22:02
  a degree of liberty and expression, whether that be political or economic, you
• 22:07
  actually don't really understand what your population really believes. If you try to enforce
• 22:11
  rules too hard, you get a sort of complicity that you don't ever know
• 22:17
  is genuine. You have people say, oh, I support the regime,
• 22:21
  but they secretly, you know, are very opposed to it. The good
• 22:26
  examples of the movie The Lives of Others about the DDR really illustrates this phenomenon
• 22:30
  well. The parent how if you get overly paranoid about your subjects stand up
• 22:34
  just lying, and you get a sort of confusion as to what's going on
• 22:41
  with the populist. So if you allow economic liberalism, which China does,
• 22:45
  you know, you have now consumer research, marketing research. If you allow
• 22:48
  political liberalism, you have what public opinion research, you have voter demographics,
• 22:55
  you have all these ways of stuttying the population. That's good not just for
• 22:59
  controlling the population using rhetoric to win votes, but also just actually adapting the
• 23:04
  system in the ways that change a few things so that everything else stays the
• 23:10
  same. However, right, if you embrace the ideals of liberal democracy genuinely,
• 23:14
  and you know, you really allow for different parties to participate, and
• 23:18
  you allow for all kinds of different parties to mobilize, of course you have
• 23:22
  the risk of the system destabilizing. France is a chronic example of this.
• 23:26
  France always has protests. It's been much harder for the French government to impose
• 23:30
  neoliberalism and austerity without protesters trying to blow up cars every week. There is
• 23:37
  a real risk of parliamentary democracy from the standpoint of the dominant classes of society.
• 23:42
  Whereas so that's why some often the wealthy symptoms opt for a dictatorship.
• 23:49
  They would like a pinochet because it restores order. It not destroys a threat.
• 23:53
  But what I kind of argue is that with an inverted totalitarian regime,
• 23:57
  which Japan America's I think the best example, but there's other examples like Japan,
• 24:03
  like some others which I don't discuss in the video. By discussing the
• 24:06
  book a little bit, it has the best of both worlds in this regard.
• 24:10
  It allows for a good mix of hard power and soft power that allows
• 24:15
  enough liberty for people to feel that they can change the system and to engage
• 24:22
  in activity and you know, get get out of their system, so to
• 24:26
  speak, as well as to give the system legitimacy so people follow its authority
• 24:30
  regardless of how bad the economic downturn is. And also a degree of hard
• 24:36
  power with the national security apparatus is that is you know what people today called
• 24:40
  the quote unquote deep state. You know, there's been studied academically by people
• 24:45
  like Peterdale Scott. They call it deep politics. Just institutions that are kind
• 24:48
  of completely undemocratically accountable that engage in terroristic forms of suppression of violence. Fbis
• 24:57
  co Intel pro mission as example of this, or the CIA sabotaging of democracy
• 25:03
  internationally. We don't need to go over that again. Okay, that's a
• 25:07
  lot. That's interesting. That's a good summary. That's a good that's a
• 25:11
  very good summary. Yeah, it's a big package. Maybe could I just
• 25:15
  do in advance of getting real heady with this an example that came to my
• 25:19
  mind that many of us remember all No, we remember part two, but
• 25:25
  part one was before we were born. The punk rock scene had a bunch
• 25:29
  of albums and tours Britain and the United States basically saying F Reagan, F
• 25:34
  Thatcher, and it was called rock against Reagan. And then fast forward,
• 25:40
  this was brought back in the Bush ears by the new punk scene, protesting
• 25:44
  in particular the invasion of Iraq, and they put out a few albums and
• 25:48
  did tours as well as f Bush called rock against Bush. And I like
• 25:53
  this example because what is a mosh pit but a supremely you sliss expenditure of
• 26:00
  energy. And here it becomes just by veneer or simulation and expenditure of political
• 26:07
  energy, and all the big you know, big name punk bands are on
• 26:11
  there, No Effects, Offspring, Green Day, Anti Flag, Penny Wise,
• 26:18
  et cetera. And I think it's it exactly shows what you are saying
• 26:25
  in this respect. That it's just give people that disagree something to do.
• 26:30
  They're gonna wear their T shirts, they're gonna buy their band merch. They're
• 26:33
  gonna maybe kick in some windows. But as long as it's just kicking in
• 26:37
  windows, then that's okay, And then the whole thing goes away and we
• 26:42
  continue at operating as usual. But it's like, let don't don't be a
• 26:48
  hard parent, be a parent, you know, have the rules in place.
• 26:52
  Parents. Yeah, there you go, You let them, you let
• 26:55
  them act out a little bit, but then at the end of the day
• 26:57
  they're always going to come back home that they Yeah, there's that like space
• 27:02
  of sort of cultural freedom of expression where you can sort of have edgy punk
• 27:08
  rock music. I mean, this even reminds me of Adam Curtis. I
• 27:15
  think we did an episode on this a while back on his latest documentary is
• 27:22
  it still his latest one? Whatever can't get You out of My Head.
• 27:26
  He even mentions Tupac Shakur in this context too, saying, you know,
• 27:32
  American culture especially opens up these spaces of expression where you can, you know,
• 27:37
  protest or critique capitalism and those sorts of things. But they it's it's
• 27:42
  false. It's kind of an illusion. The space itself is just where these
• 27:47
  kinds of energies emerge, burn themselves out, and then kind of disappear.
• 27:52
  And that it did remind me a bit of of the idea of contained opposition,
• 27:56
  because I think if I'm correct, me if I'm wrong, But that's
• 28:00
  the idea that there are these sort of gaps in the system of power,
• 28:04
  but they're planned to be there. They look like places where you could enter
• 28:10
  into and sort of leverage some kind of revolutionary or you know, protesting power
• 28:17
  there, but really they're supposed to be there. There's spaces where, like
• 28:21
  a permissive parent, you can allow your children to act out and complain about
• 28:27
  shit and then but really what it does is it is it you know,
• 28:32
  they're shaping the landscape underneath that activity and guiding it towards this sort of burnout.
• 28:37
  So, like what you said earlier, then later on down the road,
• 28:41
  you just kind of become disillusioned, you give up, you become like
• 28:45
  a centrist or conservative. And this is actually it's not a it's not an
• 28:52
  unplanned thing. It's a feature of the hegemony of how liberal democratic capitalists systems
• 29:00
  work. Yeah, so currently we're kind of looking at this low fidelity rendering
• 29:07
  and maybe risks sending to twenty year old by saying it's the system, this
• 29:11
  is how the system works. So to avoid that, I wanted to kick
• 29:17
  it to Victor and ask, what's your political theory? Angle on this political
• 29:23
  theory? Yeah, I've got a lot of questions, but I kind of
• 29:26
  want to zoom out a little bit, because you know, the account you
• 29:30
  offer just now, like you know, you're really good summary of the argument
• 29:33
  you make in the video, and I think kind of how you lay out
• 29:37
  the argument in the video itself, it's kind of like, you know,
• 29:41
  you're engaged in a kind of theorization, or it seems like it, and
• 29:45
  you can cry from wrong that I think is sort of descriptive, right,
• 29:48
  It's sort of like describing an account of how the system works, and you
• 29:53
  know, it feels like there's maybe an implicit normative theorization, but it it
• 30:00
  doesn't feel like it's stated outright. And I think this is something that I
• 30:03
  find in like Fucoh, right, like he's describing the system in a way
• 30:07
  that sounds nefarious, but like he doesn't come out and say like this is
• 30:08
  bad. He just kind of like is talking about it, and it kind
• 30:11
  of seems like and many I would say critical theorists kind of engage in this
• 30:15
  kind of theorization, and it seems like you're doing that. But I kind
• 30:18
  of just want to come right out and ask you, like, what do
• 30:21
  you see, Like do you have a view on the moral status of something
• 30:25
  being a system? Right? So, like, is something being a system
• 30:29
  necessarily a bad thing? If it is, then like what's bad about it?
• 30:33
  And then that also raises a whole bunch of questions of like what it
• 30:37
  would mean to live in a world like without a system? Right, which
• 30:40
  could I don't know if that means true democracy. I mean, there's a
• 30:41
  lot of questions there. Maybe we can talk about democracy afterwards and we can
• 30:45
  just take them piece by piece. But I'm kind of curious how you see
• 30:48
  the kind of theorization you're doing and whether there's normative questions fit in to that
• 30:53
  or are you kind of agnostic or neutral about that question. I'm going to
• 30:59
  before you ass answer, I'm going to intervene on behalf of the audience because
• 31:03
  Victor, we know that you like this word normanty. All it means is
• 31:07
  something good or bad if you have if you think something is morally good or
• 31:12
  bad. That's all. It's a value judgment, that's all it means.
• 31:15
  Yeah. And when you say value judgment, do you mean as a moral
• 31:19
  principle, as if you're judging the system from the outside, or do you
• 31:22
  mean it in a practical sense of normatively it's easier to carry on just by
• 31:29
  doing what's expected in this case. Uh, well, like okay, Well,
• 31:32
  in this context, how I'm thinking about it is there's a lot of
• 31:33
  talk about systems in the way that it controls opposition, right, But it's
• 31:37
  not like, at least as I could tell, as far as I could
• 31:41
  tell that, like Tony comes right out and it's like that's bad right for
• 31:44
  this and this and this reason. It's just describing it. He's like,
• 31:45
  here's how it works. And by the way, I will say, like
• 31:48
  quite persuasively. I mean, I think a lot of the things that you're
• 31:49
  saying, I agree with them. But to me, like I guess the
• 31:55
  more I don't know if it's more important question, but like the question of
• 31:57
  like the so what question I think requires kind of answer the question, well
• 32:02
  is this bad? Right? Because if it's not, then who cares?
• 32:06
  Right? But if it is, then maybe we should do something about it.
• 32:08
  Maybe we can't do anything about it, So I don't know. Yeah,
• 32:12
  go ahead. So within that question there's sort of two questions, it
• 32:15
  seems. One is the fact value distinction, which I wouldn't say I fully
• 32:22
  believe is possible to maintain in any analysis fully, but I think you're right
• 32:27
  to characterize my analysis that way, as it is with a lot of critical
• 32:30
  theorists, and that it is an attempted descriptive analysis. Obviously I have an
• 32:37
  implicit value judgment of it, but there's aspects I try. I try to
• 32:43
  be as descriptive as possible. In a good example of that is when I
• 32:46
  mentioned the Soviet Union and the and the East Germany, because I have a
• 32:52
  point where I say, perhaps if the East German government didn't psychotically foreclose you
• 33:00
  know, all dissent, you wouldn't have had the sudden fall of the Berlin
• 33:04
  Wall. And my point there is, aside from the you know, psychoanalytic
• 33:08
  references there, which is that you know, it's just really under I'm trying
• 33:15
  to understand how governance works, because if you're from the standpoint of a socialist,
• 33:22
  I found a good, okay, I'll give it a good example.
• 33:24
  I found myself arguing with you know what so called tankies often with and because
• 33:30
  I would try to I don't deny the overt realities of you know, the
• 33:36
  super authoritarian nature of a lot of those regimes. However, I don't take
• 33:39
  a sort of anti communist position, and they would often say, well,
• 33:45
  no, it was for the good of society and they needed to do it,
• 33:49
  et cetera. And I'm trying to say, no, they didn't.
• 33:52
  Even from a pragmatic point of view. It's not even I'm not interested in
• 33:54
  morally denouncing communist regimes just because I hate communism, but from pragmatic governance,
• 34:02
  I think part of the descriptive theorem trying to lay out is that of pragmatic
• 34:07
  governance. It's trying to understand how the system works, but also subtle sort
• 34:12
  of notes for you know, even socialists, because I think a big thing
• 34:17
  that went wrong in actually existing socialism was that there was an inability to reform
• 34:22
  the system. That was a huge really it was just a very rigid system,
• 34:27
  and when they tried to suddenly reform it way too fast, like in
• 34:30
  Gorbachev, it just totally collapsed. It wasn't prepared for that. It absolutely
• 34:34
  wasn't. So it's I guess, I guess it's hard to separate facts from
• 34:37
  values. You know, when Marxist, of course objectively analyzing capital, he
• 34:43
  has the normative analysis that exploitation is bad even though it's an objective thing,
• 34:47
  right, Yeah, yeah, Although I just wanted to make sure because we
• 34:51
  don't lose the central point here, because I want to sharpen the edge of
• 34:55
  a disagreement if there is one, And ask Victor, is that kind of
• 35:00
  of what you meant going this fact value route, Well, I would just
• 35:04
  say that I think I'm just more interested in hearing what Tony thinks about,
• 35:09
  you know, the system as he describes it as being kind of control,
• 35:13
  a contained opposition, whether he thinks that's a bad thing, just kind of
• 35:16
  like sit to simplify it. Well, I think I have a way to
• 35:20
  put this that brings it down to earth too, because the way you frame
• 35:22
  that video is you talk about the two thousand and three protests of the Iraq
• 35:28
  War and you say, you know, these are some of the biggest protests
• 35:31
  in history throughout the US and UK, and yet they had like zero effect
• 35:37
  on government policy. Decision making throughout the war. So, and you mentioned
• 35:43
  some others too. You could think of, like, you know, the
• 35:44
  Black Lives Matter protests or Occupy Wall Street or the climate protests whatever, they
• 35:50
  all seem to have very little impact on like actual government policy. And then
• 35:54
  so the question is why. And a potential answer to that question is,
• 36:00
  well, we can understand this phenomenon through the idea of contained opposition, that
• 36:04
  these protests and movements are planned for. Whether or not contained opposition is like
• 36:09
  a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know. I think it's
• 36:13
  like Machiavelli right, writing the Prince right, this is how you govern.
• 36:16
  You have to be good when it's good to be good. You can be
• 36:21
  bad when you have to be bad. But the prince has to be able
• 36:23
  to do these things, to be the fox and the lion when it suits
• 36:28
  their needs. And so you know, that's like throwing morality aside, just
• 36:31
  being like morality is just kind of like a clothing you can put on when
• 36:35
  it suits you. So one thing that was difficult for me to square with
• 36:38
  this analysis was the fact that I'm not actually a radical democrat. And this
• 36:45
  is because when I was studying Sheldon Wollan in his theories. One thing I
• 36:49
  found at I found myself at odds with him is the fact that he is
• 36:53
  a radical democrat, and I just couldn't really, I just couldn't find myself
• 37:00
  believing in his vision of democracy which didn't seem very clear, which was a
• 37:02
  sort of more local, directly participatory democracy. And you know, I could
• 37:09
  be wrong on that. I do think, you know, there's a lot
• 37:14
  of forms of democratization which I do believe in, which are actually more on
• 37:16
  the economic side, especially in terms of economic democracy, and I think there's
• 37:22
  a ways we could heavily improve representative democracy, but I'm not quite there when
• 37:28
  it comes to direct democracy. I'm actually very skeptical of that. In fact,
• 37:32
  it sounds like you're kind of trying to develop a more pragmatic account.
• 37:36
  You use the word pragmatism earlier as well. So, yeah, because you
• 37:38
  know, I was, I had this other professor who's a teacher of radical
• 37:44
  democratic theory, who is much more on the sort of you could call it
• 37:50
  far left in terms of democracy, at least libertarian left, and he believed
• 37:58
  that democracy was a good in itself. Yeah, And I actually thought about
• 38:04
  that for a long time, and I thought, actually, I don't even
• 38:07
  know if I agree with that, because I mean, yes, because what
• 38:09
  if you democratically, you know, elect a fascist, or you democratically decide
• 38:14
  to kick all the immigrants out, or you democratically decide all sort of different
• 38:17
  things. And I found in the Cultural Revolution is a big lesson with regard
• 38:22
  to that, as if you let unrestrained mass rebellion and allow for a so
• 38:27
  called democratic people's courts, which a lot of people don't admit. That's what
• 38:30
  struggle sessions and the Cultural Revolution were was people deciding the fate of other individuals,
• 38:36
  often by a sort of disorganized vote within groups. I'm quite skeptical of
• 38:43
  that. I think there is some truth to the tyranny of the mob.
• 38:45
  But so I'm not a radical democrat, and I don't think there's a sort
• 38:52
  of we can return to ancient Athenian democracy. However, Okay, okay,
• 38:54
  okay, So there's good, there's bad, and then there's worse, but
• 38:58
  just fee to the fire contained opposition. But I think the big question for
• 39:02
  me, and this is where I do become a bit of a bit of
• 39:07
  a old school Marxist, and just as regardless for whom. For me,
• 39:09
  that's what matters is like for whom, who is a system being governed?
• 39:14
  For who is being represented in this representative democracy? Because I do believe in
• 39:19
  representative democracy. I think it's much more practical than direct democracy. And I
• 39:22
  think you can democratize aspects of life. But I'm not sure about voting on
• 39:28
  all sort of different things directly. I could be wrong, because I know
• 39:30
  Victory, you read a lot about sorticians, so I'm curious to learn more
• 39:34
  about that. No, I mean, I think it sounds like we're it's
• 39:37
  it sounds like we're we might be somewhat aligned, because I think I share
• 39:39
  a lot of that kind of skepticism. I think, I mean, my
• 39:44
  dissertation is is kind of a critique of radical democracy, which includes you know,
• 39:49
  although it's funny, wooln is someone I skipped for some reason, but
• 39:52
  I have like, look lacloum, William Connolly, you know Bonnie Hanigg and
• 39:55
  like you know a bunch of other people and also heart and agree, and
• 39:59
  so it sounds like we might be somewhat aligned. So it kind of sounds
• 40:02
  like what you're saying, Like, so maybe the way to read your argument
• 40:07
  is more like, look at the way this particular kind of contained opposition is
• 40:14
  preventing the representation of certain kinds of voices, right maybe namely in this case
• 40:19
  working class voices or other kinds of interests, and the system kind of does
• 40:22
  a good job of letting those people become occupied with other things. But so
• 40:30
  it's not so much. But you're not saying that because your alternative is some
• 40:32
  radical democracy. It's just something a little bit more pragmatic, because I guess
• 40:37
  the other question I was going to ask, and I don't know, maybe
• 40:39
  maybe it's too long a road to go down it, but I guess like
• 40:44
  the ontological status of that contained opposition, because I think some of the conversations
• 40:47
  we've had on this podcast a lot are sort of about in some ways like
• 40:52
  some form of that is maybe unavoidable in the sense that it's some kind of
• 40:54
  spontaneous reaction that ends up building some kind of system that becomes calcify in some
• 41:00
  way. And it's not like you can't really ever have something that's free of
• 41:04
  a system, because sometimes I think another thing that you know, maybe like
• 41:08
  like less educated readers of people like Fuco and and and you know, a
• 41:14
  lot of the theorists that you engage with. I think they kind of make
• 41:16
  the mistake that, oh, there can be such a thing as like no
• 41:20
  power, or there can be such a thing as right, and it's like
• 41:22
  no, no, Like power is spontaneous, it's you know, it's productive
• 41:25
  of the of the social world. You can't really get rid of it.
• 41:29
  And I think maybe similarly, some kind of containment or some kind of I
• 41:32
  mean, maybe you see these things as separate. So to be fair,
• 41:35
  fu God, I don't think thinks power is you can live without power.
• 41:38
  I think he's more of a nie totally. I'm saying that people who read
• 41:42
  him, but saying that people who read him or don't understand. Yeah.
• 41:45
  Yeah, Well, I do find it very interesting the fact that you have
• 41:49
  people who are Fucodians, Delercians, heart and Negrians. They tend to gravitate
• 41:55
  to sort of anarcholiberal or i'll say libertarian left politics, and they they do
• 42:02
  really believe they view power with hostility, not all of them, but it
• 42:07
  definitely does show in their politics because they're very skeptical of any sort of centralization,
• 42:12
  any hierarchy. Yeah, and you do see this tendency with the left
• 42:15
  in general with which is to fetishize these even with someone like bay Jew,
• 42:21
  especially with someone by with like by do actually uh, to fetishize big spontaneous
• 42:25
  revolts, to fetishize the revolution, and to not think about what comes after
• 42:30
  and the order. And for me, that's what I'm very interested in,
• 42:34
  is how to governmentality? Uh. One person who caught up caught on actually
• 42:38
  to what I was really doing with that video was someone said, oh,
• 42:43
  so you're looking for a socialist governmentality? Mm hmm, Like yeah, actually,
• 42:47
  because it's I'm not trying to understand governmentality in general, though of course
• 42:52
  is the FUCODI intern. But at a practical level, it's how do you
• 42:57
  just govern society and their subjects? And I think socialists have to think about
• 43:00
  that too, because if you don't, you risk it just falling apart.
• 43:06
  It not because I'm a socialist, that's my normative stance, like I would
• 43:10
  say, I'm I'm not very partisan, I'm not very sectarian, but I'm
• 43:14
  a socialist and I generally gravitate to a Marxist conception of communism, which is
• 43:20
  one that isn't based on equality, but one based on freedom and one based
• 43:23
  on needs. And the teacher according to the need to teacher, according to
• 43:28
  the ability. I'm not anti hierarchy, but I am I do. I
• 43:30
  do think class holds back human evolution. This will be something that's actually in
• 43:36
  another video of mine in the future called what is socialism for the Darwinian origins
• 43:40
  of Marxism? Sounds spicy. I wanted to jump to a different thing here.
• 43:45
  I think it's connected. Still, the US Constitution serves a ruling class.
• 43:51
  This is I guess this is maybe the first time I heard about that.
• 43:54
  I always had an inkling, I guess. But you kind of say
• 43:58
  the founding father's goal with writing this Constitution was to you know, enfranchise the
• 44:06
  property propable property owners, the ruling class, and to keep the populace powerless,
• 44:13
  the general population of properly the less people. That's not unique to any
• 44:17
  That's not a unique argument though, Like that's as old as someone like Charles
• 44:22
  Beard made that argument. Yeah, yeah, he in nineteen thirteen he wrote
• 44:28
  he wrote the economic Interpretation of the Constitution, right, yeah, Well.
• 44:31
  I also found it very interesting that John Locke and Jefferson, who wrote the
• 44:37
  Declaration of Independence highly inspired by John Locke. Both Jefferson and Locke literally believe
• 44:45
  in the right of revolution against the despotic government. And I always thought this
• 44:50
  was fascinating because they were, you know, slave owners and massively wealthy property
• 44:54
  owners who presumably did not want to lose that privilege. So when they're talking
• 45:00
  about revolution, what are they talking about? Because you know, you look
• 45:02
  at it, it's such a great impetus. Why don't Marxists take this up
• 45:07
  and use that aspect of liberalism and flip it on its head. But one
• 45:12
  also should think that unlike Hobbesian, someone who believes in a strong which I
• 45:16
  really think a lot of you know, Marxist Leninists are Hobbesians in the way
• 45:22
  they think they believe in, you know, the strong state, that the
• 45:27
  proletarian state has to suppress opposition. But what if you actually for legitimatey,
• 45:32
  legitimacy, to legitimize power, you allow for resistance and allow for that potential
• 45:38
  right of revolution against the despotic government in theory, because then you have a
• 45:44
  much more meaningful basis for consent of the governed. And if you don't have
• 45:50
  a meaningful and what is perceived to be a legitimate basis for power and democracies,
• 45:55
  of course, legitimized through a popular sovereignty can scent Well, what is
• 46:00
  legitimacy based on exactly? And it's really performance. And I talk about this
• 46:07
  in Phantom Democracy, the video called Phantom Democracy, And in that video I
• 46:10
  talk about how you tend to see the collapse of one party states whenever there's
• 46:15
  an economic collapse, or whenever they don't fulfill their stated function, whenever they
• 46:19
  don't perform in other words, because if you're not if people don't believe that
• 46:22
  their consent is given to them voluntarily, given to the ruling order, to
• 46:28
  a vote, why would they want to allow you in power. It's as
• 46:30
  long as you know, they can grill. As long as they can chill,
• 46:36
  is it's whatever, that's what they care about. But when shit hits
• 46:39
  the fan, that's and there's no basis for popular for the government's rule,
• 46:45
  you'll have a resistance. So that's the point there is. Socialist regimes previously
• 46:52
  were legitimized on the basis that they were the dictatorship of the proletariat and that
• 46:58
  they would fulfill the transition to communism, And eventually this just got watered down
• 47:01
  to improving living standards. You know, after a certain point to socialism meant
• 47:07
  like, if you're doing better, that's what it is. And when that
• 47:10
  stopped happening, when you start having the decade of stagnation, and that really
• 47:15
  bleeds in for a while and the crisis intensifies with Gorbachev's performs which made it
• 47:19
  worse not better, you have, you know, like you have a power
• 47:23
  vacuum in which you know, borisi Elson is elected as president of the r
• 47:29
  rs FSR, who then they kind of have a coup deta against the USSR.
• 47:35
  Point being there is it's the question of I view democracy from this sort
• 47:38
  of realist standpoint of legitimacy and the case I think for a lessons for someone
• 47:45
  who espouses different prescriptive politics, which let's say that's socialism you want to govern
• 47:51
  around that we have to understand these things and not just think that, oh,
• 47:54
  because we support the right ideas, that we will be able to govern
• 47:58
  a society. No. Do you either have to govern through performance or through
• 48:01
  consent of the government. Now what if your regime can't perform due to things
• 48:07
  you can't control, Yeah, you need I think popular sovereignty. Is this
• 48:13
  a thing that isn't considered and it's not considered by like Marxian theories of dictatorship
• 48:16
  of the proletariat very rigorously enough. And I say that as someone who's greatly
• 48:21
  sympathetic to Marxist and I would even, you know, I would call myself
• 48:24
  a Leninist in a certain degree. Well, I know, Victor breaks up
• 48:27
  legitimacy a lot. Yeah, Well, so, I mean that's interesting.
• 48:30
  So kind of circling back a little bit to what we were talking about before,
• 48:35
  because it kind of just reading between the well maybe it's not so much
• 48:37
  reading between lines, but like it kind of sounds like what you're saying is
• 48:39
  like we need to learn from this controlled opposition and kind of like use it.
• 48:45
  So it's not so much, oh, we need to get rid of
• 48:46
  controlled opposition. It's just that we need to use it so they can be
• 48:49
  a socialist version of which maybe you're alluding to when you say, uh,
• 48:53
  look at the you know, maybe the Soviet Union. Not that you would
• 48:57
  wanted the Soviet Union necessarily, so I don't want to put those words in
• 48:59
  your mind, but like if they had allowed for more kind of built in
• 49:02
  forms of descent, maybe they would have been a more robust form of governmentality
• 49:07
  that could have been you know, better at surviving, you know, not
• 49:12
  as liable to collapse. So I don't know, am I wrong that your
• 49:15
  view is really just you want to build a kind of socialist system, or
• 49:17
  at least implicitly where we learn from controlled opposition and use it. I think
• 49:24
  there's a lot of truth in that characterization. The caveat is I do think
• 49:30
  there needs to be more democracy and all sorts of aspects of life. So
• 49:34
  there is a you know, an idealistic element to my politics, like,
• 49:38
  but I try to keep that a bit separate from the analysis in the video,
• 49:42
  because yes, I do think I do believe in establishing a sort of
• 49:45
  socialist society. But what always gets me is whenever you talk to like Marxist
• 49:51
  Leninists and how are they going to deal with opposition? They can only think
• 49:55
  in terms of repressive hard power. And I agree when it comes to certain
• 50:00
  aspects, like if you have a far right in militia trying to you know,
• 50:04
  terrorize people, and it's they're trying to forcefully take over the government or
• 50:07
  mobilize you know, through violence. I mean, yeah, even in this
• 50:10
  society, you'll get shut down by the secret police if you do that.
• 50:14
  You'll get you you're disobeying the law. I agree with hard power in those
• 50:19
  circumstances. But what really gets me is when you hear like radical leftists online
• 50:23
  talk about how they're just want to guillotine all these right wingers and all these
• 50:28
  right wingers will go to the Gulag, and I think, really like,
• 50:30
  with that sort of thinking, is just gonna repeat Stalinism again, and it's
• 50:36
  bad, not just morally. That's the problem. I think a lot of
• 50:38
  lefties they look at it, they disregard the liberal criticisms of Soviet regimes because
• 50:44
  they say, that's moralistic thinking. Why do you have so much sympathy for
• 50:47
  the fascists? And it's not just that, it's it's that when you go
• 50:51
  overboard with cracking down on dissent, you actually make the problem worse, and
• 50:55
  you make it feel as though the only way for people to express their agreement
• 51:00
  is through violence, and is through revolting in a more serious way, rather
• 51:06
  than just expressing their criticism. Because, for example, I believe in a
• 51:09
  social society, people like Jordan Peterson they should be able to stay there and
• 51:14
  criticize. I don't care he won't have as probably as much money as he
• 51:16
  does, but he should be able to criticize. You should be able to
• 51:20
  have right wing media. They shouldn't be funded by billionaires. They should they
• 51:22
  will lose a lot of most of their resources and all the crazy privileges they
• 51:28
  have. And there's probably some ways in which one could, I guess,
• 51:31
  censor dissident elements that aim to overthrow the government, like any society that once
• 51:37
  the government does. But I think there needs to be a regime in which
• 51:42
  that tolerates opposition even if it disagrees with it. You could sell it in
• 51:47
  a liberal way to say, oh, I believe in toleration. That's how
• 51:51
  probably Matt would say, yeah, totally, But that doesn't sell well with
• 51:53
  a lot of leftists because they're like, why would I tolerate Jordan Peterson and
• 51:58
  all these people? I hate them? Well, you know what they're There's
• 52:00
  not that many leftists, so we can ignore them actually in reality, Like,
• 52:02
  Noah, that's fair, that's fair. But I also think though,
• 52:06
  you know, if there's any change, a lot of those leftists are going
• 52:08
  to be in power, and fanaticism is involved in any radical change ever,
• 52:15
  regardless if it's when you support or not, it's usually involves a degree of
• 52:17
  fanaticism, So I think that's unavoidable. We can't just say reject that.
• 52:22
  But what I would say is if you frame it in this Machiavelian position I
• 52:25
  guess, which is you're tolerating opposition to a degree, you know, because
• 52:31
  you if you crack down on it too much, you'll you'll exacerbate resistance.
• 52:37
  And also perhaps maybe they'll get it out of their system. Let them all
• 52:39
  go to rumble, Let let entertate, Let all the right wingers, let
• 52:44
  them all, you know, make their exactly, let them do it.
• 52:49
  Who cares, And that's contained opposition. So I think if you make sense
• 52:52
  of it that way, you can kind of understand the tactical, tactically useful
• 52:59
  way of for liberalism really for giving a certain degree of liberties, even to
• 53:05
  the enemy, because sometimes I think even this is where capitalist regimes go wrong.
• 53:10
  Far people on the far right tend to, I think, handle dissent
• 53:15
  much worse compared to people in the center, the liberals, because the far
• 53:21
  right, they overreact to every protest. You think Black lives matter, we
• 53:22
  need to send in the cops, we need to send in the storm troopers.
• 53:27
  In reality, actually what you should be doing is taking a knee for
• 53:30
  George Floyd, because that does seem seems to do way more to like ossify
• 53:35
  the resistance. Is this theory? Do you see yourself as a you're saying,
• 53:39
  even if you're a liberal, these are the best tactics anyway, but
• 53:44
  you're acting as a socialist tactician. Is that fair to say what you're describing?
• 53:52
  Yeah, I mean I do think tactically in terms of that. Regard
• 53:55
  the practical aspect of politics, I think it's always been interesting me because I
• 54:00
  was literally taught and back in my undergrad how to do propaganda for the existing
• 54:07
  system. And you know, I don't support the existing system, but I
• 54:10
  do think realistically you need any Any system that's going to maintain itself is going
• 54:15
  to have propaganda, it's going to have administration. So how do you do
• 54:20
  this effectively? How do you take the lessons of the enemy and take them
• 54:22
  to your side, Because if we go the anarchist route, which is reject
• 54:27
  hierarchy, reject power, you know, you can't separate means from ends.
• 54:30
  You just you just end up, you know, being so allergic to power,
• 54:35
  you never you never touch it. We should use it, we should
• 54:37
  use it. I have a question about this WI because we're here and there's
• 54:43
  a bunch of there's a Wei here, and there's a bunch of shadows in
• 54:45
  the ghosts in the room with us, the online left, it's making an
• 54:51
  appearance, the anarchists and the tankies. And if this is going to take
• 54:59
  a form of something like strategy, don't you have to have some of the
• 55:02
  current mechanisms of power accounted for as something that you can even strategize about or
• 55:08
  change, Because I don't know, it's it's a little bit card before the
• 55:15
  horse when we're speculating, speculating tactically, I guess, but assuming the current
• 55:21
  status quo and the world that we live in is going to amount in no
• 55:24
  results? Oh well do you wait? Do you mean, like what kind
• 55:28
  of actual politics does he want? Or because I mean, I just hear
• 55:31
  him as saying that we need to learn from like the success of liberalism,
• 55:37
  that like the way that it has this continue that it allows for dissent.
• 55:39
  It's like we need to learn from that, and like who's the wisdom?
• 55:43
  Who's the left? I don't know, like socialists, people who are working
• 55:45
  class values. Yeah, br you're skipping to v for vendetta too. First,
• 55:50
  you either have to get elected or overthrow elections. Well, yeah,
• 55:53
  see, that's we're actually an argument I've heard from Marxists who try to use
• 55:59
  that as a sort of way to get out of thinking about this sort of
• 56:02
  thing. I'm not saying you're doing that because I don't think you're like orthodox
• 56:07
  Marxist or anything like that, but definitely not that is what do you mean?
• 56:09
  What if I were, all that it would take is for me to
• 56:13
  get on a different T shirt. Meanwhile, if I'm looking at this from
• 56:15
  the outside, having this speculative tactical discussion is the same as having a tactical
• 56:21
  discussion in D and D. Yeah yeah, post left okay, but you
• 56:28
  keep trying to sloganize it with names. But I'm wondering we're going to rehash
• 56:31
  like a three hundred year old debate between leftism and liberalism. But we because
• 56:37
  we're using special effects to create a situation that doesn't exist. Then to argue
• 56:40
  about if the situation existed, then what's the most important thing is to get
• 56:45
  right? Like, Okay, should we not see what the system we want
• 56:50
  looks like? We should try to envision it, even if there is no
• 56:52
  politics there to meaningfully get there. I think it's worth thinking about pills.
• 56:59
  As a doomer who doesn't possible this is something you both say. You call
• 57:04
  me a doomer. One dime at the end of his video is like,
• 57:07
  I'm not a knealist, but I don't think I'm an eolist either. I'm
• 57:10
  just asking what what are we even having the conversation about? What is the
• 57:15
  actual pushback segment? Well, if you want to talk about systems, I'm
• 57:19
  happy to, but it's also fair for me to ask what this one's made
• 57:22
  of. All systems consume energy, So is this one just made of cycles
• 57:28
  of conversation? Is it made of air? Well? Look, I want
• 57:30
  to be also sorry to interrupt here, but like I also feel like part
• 57:34
  of this is maybe my fault because I was pushing him to tell me,
• 57:37
  like normatively what he wants, which isn't in the video right. It's like,
• 57:40
  so I don't know, maybe like this could be partly my fault.
• 57:44
  Robert appears, You know Robert, that popular boy the like ocular ocular ocular
• 57:49
  democracy? Is that here to know, Jeff Robert Green, That's that's super
• 57:52
  like mainstream airport book type author, but he writes books like forty Laws of
• 57:58
  Power, State thirty three Strategies of War, you know, laws of human
• 58:04
  Nature. He's one of those guys who just writes sort of machiavellian or realist
• 58:09
  analysis of the world in power. But for advice, anyone can use it,
• 58:14
  a politician, businessman, student, whatever. So I see this what
• 58:21
  I'm doing in terms of political advice. I'm not doing politics because from doing
• 58:27
  politics involved organizing a party and involves, you know, reaching out to people
• 58:31
  and figuring out what your vision is. But I think the tactical discussions are
• 58:37
  something that lacks on the left because let's say you try to do politics and
• 58:43
  you have a party, and let's say even you find yourself getting elected to
• 58:46
  power. Well, then what if you don't know what you're doing, like
• 58:50
  that's it's important to think about that sort of thing, or else you just
• 58:53
  end up reacting in the moment. You end up winging it. And sometimes
• 58:58
  there's only limited degree of what we can do there. But you know,
• 59:02
  if you if you don't think about what economic plan you want to implement,
• 59:06
  you're up. You're gonna end up hiring status quo advisors who are going to
• 59:09
  just say do the same old thing because you don't want to take a risk.
• 59:14
  So are you, like, are you the Machiavelli to AOC are you
• 59:17
  writing the prints for her? Yeah, the Machiavelli is the socialist. That's
• 59:22
  what we have to write. Then well I would I would say even this
• 59:24
  entire like so called Machiavellian element is pretty subtle implicit in the in the video,
• 59:31
  right, which is you know, I'm only even talking about it because
• 59:36
  uh, sort of Victor got out of me. But I'm glad that he
• 59:38
  noticed that, because that is what I wanted the people. I have two
• 59:43
  audiences in mind. I have audiences the audience who I want to be more
• 59:46
  critical of this system and not analyze it only on its own terms. Right,
• 59:52
  So people who believe in liberal democracy on his own terms, they think,
• 59:55
  oh, you can protest and that's it. Why are you complaining you
• 59:59
  can protest? Like for me, that's how food is. Someone like Fukuyama
• 1:00:01
  thinks, for example, and that's good to know and good to hear.
• 1:00:06
  You reflect on audience too, because I'm not trying to do simply that cheap
• 1:00:09
  criticism that's like solve all the problems that I can imagine for me right now,
• 1:00:15
  now that you're here, I'm more interested in the media question, like
• 1:00:17
  what do conversations like this produce? What do books like this produce? Is
• 1:00:23
  it the sort of ongoing word game that we like to play, because no
• 1:00:27
  problem, all of us enjoy these games. We kind of worry, We
• 1:00:30
  kind of worry on our podcast that we are part of the contained opposition and
• 1:00:36
  anything we say about say, what's the road to socialism, here's the game
• 1:00:40
  plan, here's alternative visions. But that all presupposes that we have this space
• 1:00:45
  where the Gestapo's not knocking our door down. We can just make our podcasts,
• 1:00:49
  we can make our videos. We worry about that stuff because it's like,
• 1:00:52
  okay, but how do we really know? How do we really break
• 1:00:55
  out of this? If capitalism is this totalizing system that can co opt or
• 1:01:00
  control its opposition, then all this seems like it's just really a symptom of
• 1:01:05
  that we're never gonna have a breakthrough. I think, like, you know,
• 1:01:09
  even protesting is kind of useless, right you say, you know,
• 1:01:13
  I'm not saying all protesting is useless, but like kind of is, right,
• 1:01:16
  even if it's successful, then the media just spins it as like,
• 1:01:20
  oh, look at these like sort of Hummas supporters. Right, you can
• 1:01:24
  never really have a good even if you have a good protest that's successful,
• 1:01:28
  just get spun in the media and everyone will hate you. It seems like
• 1:01:30
  we can never really break out of this. If if we're really in this
• 1:01:34
  sort of hyperreal media simulated landscape, then just seems like nihilism is the is
• 1:01:42
  the way to go, or is where we're all gonna end up well at
• 1:01:45
  the end of it, end of the video where I said, is that
• 1:01:50
  false hopes are just as crippling as nihilism or is something around the something like
• 1:01:55
  that, but it too much optimism or something. Yeah, And I don't
• 1:01:59
  think I think both fatalism and hope are two sides of the same coin because
• 1:02:04
  they kind of presuppose a teleology or a finality. When in that sort of
• 1:02:09
  idea of the end of history that there's nothing that can be changed, or
• 1:02:15
  that simil the idea that socialism is inevitable that you just might hope for it.
• 1:02:20
  I think both both of those are illusions. And this is where I
• 1:02:23
  would, you know, agree with someone like Ale end By Jew's idea of
• 1:02:25
  the event, because sometimes there are catalyst events that can completely change the situation.
• 1:02:34
  But it's up to people at the end of the day to intervene into
• 1:02:37
  history and take advantage of that event to promote a politics. Now, I
• 1:02:45
  don't really as far as my estimation, as far as I'm aware of,
• 1:02:50
  I don't really see any politics in the United States or Canada at the moment
• 1:02:55
  on the left. You know, I would say, actually, there are
• 1:02:59
  politics on the right to some extent. You could say the Trucker convoy was
• 1:03:02
  an event for the right, one that saturated. But I think it was
• 1:03:07
  an event, not one one which I would have criticisms of, but I
• 1:03:10
  think it should be we should be willing to acknowledge when the opposition has its
• 1:03:16
  successes. But you think it was an event in terms of there was a
• 1:03:22
  break and that, like as you mentioned Alan bed you you think this is
• 1:03:27
  an event that came from nothing and then actually shifted the direction that politics was
• 1:03:32
  headed. I think it shifted the way we Yeah, it shifted the whole
• 1:03:36
  way we thought about the pandemic. Because after the Trucker protests, they they
• 1:03:40
  all opened up all the all the provinces, they all you know, ease
• 1:03:44
  their restrictions. You know, they know, people stopped caring about COVID.
• 1:03:49
  I think another event was a Russia Ukraine war, but that's more an obvious
• 1:03:52
  event. It kind of had something to do with that. But also the
• 1:03:55
  Trucker convoy showed a kind of revitalized the means of very old means of protesting,
• 1:04:02
  which is more effective, which is, you know, blockades. They
• 1:04:06
  effectively try to They blocked international the stream of international trade with the United States,
• 1:04:13
  and that's why it was seen as an existential threat by the establishment and
• 1:04:15
  why they literally seize people's bank accounts to stop. Now I'm critical of the
• 1:04:19
  people who participate in the truckers. I'm not a fan of people who some
• 1:04:24
  people who are leaders of the movement who were you know, like neo Nazis
• 1:04:28
  and stuff, and they, you know, I think a lot of them
• 1:04:31
  are just a bunch of idiots to be frank, But to act like that
• 1:04:34
  was a meaningful protest that did far more to you know, scare the government
• 1:04:40
  into accepting many of their demands in comparison to you know, a lot of
• 1:04:45
  a lot of protests we've seen on the left these days, which end up
• 1:04:48
  amounting to chanting slogans and you know, posturing, And I don't want to
• 1:04:55
  seem too disparaging your like I said, but you know, we've probably all
• 1:05:01
  been to protests here who have been burnt out or felt a little stupid.
• 1:05:04
  Like I think we shared that experience. I was there to protest a real
• 1:05:09
  event when Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup to Boston. But do you really see
• 1:05:15
  a causal link between the trucker protest and those policies, Like I thought they
• 1:05:17
  were coming up anyway, Like I don't know, Maybe I need to go
• 1:05:19
  back and look, but I don't I don't really recall it being like I
• 1:05:24
  think that their time was kind of up anyway, Like I don't know,
• 1:05:26
  I don't know. It's hard for me to Maybe maybe there was a real,
• 1:05:29
  a real impact there, but my memory was kind of like, oh,
• 1:05:31
  well, we're going to do this anyway. And then the trucker stopped
• 1:05:33
  in Canada definitely seemed like it immediately shifted the government's policies, especially the provincial
• 1:05:42
  governments. I mean you saw immediately with Ontario, Saskatchewan and you know,
• 1:05:46
  even quebect But maybe yeah, it's I think, you know, events don't
• 1:05:53
  come out of nowhere. I don't want to say that, like, you
• 1:05:54
  know, there's always a material basis of events. They don't they never just
• 1:05:57
  come out of nowhere. But well that I mean Jew's ideas that events do
• 1:06:01
  they come from below the count, not out of nowhere materially speaking, but
• 1:06:04
  out of nowhere where they cannot be imagined, and then suddenly everything has changed.
• 1:06:10
  Yes, then the trucker approach. I just need a little bit more
• 1:06:13
  convincing that the Trucker convoy was that type of moment below the count. And
• 1:06:18
  if they were about events, right, they have to remember one of the
• 1:06:23
  things by Jews says is you have to people have to have a fidelity to
• 1:06:26
  it in order for it to actually have that impact. So, you know,
• 1:06:29
  if it's an event that happens when people forget about it, or you
• 1:06:31
  know, there's the I don't want to go and explain by do with the
• 1:06:35
  obscure subject and the reactive subject and all that, but you know, it's
• 1:06:40
  people's choice to actually see that as an event, because if people just go
• 1:06:45
  on about their lives later and forget about it, you know, it's it
• 1:06:49
  loses its status as that. But temporarily it might have a change in the
• 1:06:53
  logic of the world. But if things can go back to usual, now
• 1:06:57
  there's a whole debate one can have. Now this probably something in pills as
• 1:07:00
  wheel house as the weather. Events in the bad Dounian sense are really possible
• 1:07:05
  in the virtual age. I think that that's a scary thing to think about.
• 1:07:10
  I'd like to not think that events are not possible due to simulation.
• 1:07:15
  But you know, maybe they're more They're at least more rare. They seems
• 1:07:20
  like they got the soft power treatment at the at the right wing protest get
• 1:07:25
  the soft power treatment, whereas like the leftist protests like Solidarity with Palestine will
• 1:07:30
  get the hard treatment. Right And then you know, the news was kind
• 1:07:34
  of I wouldn't say they let them go. Yeah, I don't know,
• 1:07:40
  Freezing someone's bank account is a pretty big deal. I mean, they infringed
• 1:07:43
  on constitutional liberties, like even the Canadian Senate a Supreme Court ruled like that
• 1:07:49
  they went too far. They went too far on liberties like even according to
• 1:07:53
  this system, like the system's own you know, priests are saying that it
• 1:07:58
  went too far and cracking down on the opposition just seemed how long they took
• 1:08:04
  to really even think about calling in the army and all the discussions, the
• 1:08:10
  quitting of the chief of police or whatever, all that stuff seemed like really
• 1:08:15
  dragging their feet, whereas if there's like an Indigenous protest, it's like send
• 1:08:17
  the RC that's true, yeah, absolutely, get them out of here.
• 1:08:20
  And then they get the hard treatment and the news is like, oh,
• 1:08:25
  well, we're not really comfortable with their sort of fascist ideology, but like
• 1:08:29
  these people have real grievances, we should listen to them. Whereas when it
• 1:08:31
  comes to the left, it's like these are a bunch of fucking radicals.
• 1:08:34
  Fuck them, get the batons in there. It depends. It depends on
• 1:08:39
  the left, I guess, But like I didn't see that with Black Lives
• 1:08:42
  Matter, Like Black Lives Matter, for the most part, the protests,
• 1:08:45
  aside from you know, the stuff and the destruction of it, was pretty
• 1:08:51
  positive coverage. Yeah, you know, we can't really say the media is
• 1:08:56
  and equivocally depends what you mean by left. I mean, yeah, certainly
• 1:09:00
  I think pales sign there's a vested interest due to Israel lobby and all sort
• 1:09:03
  of stuff like that to be a bias against Palestine protests, But I wouldn't
• 1:09:08
  there's a lot of progressive causes in which the media is you know, pretty
• 1:09:12
  partial to UH in some regard. But I think we have to be careful
• 1:09:15
  what we mean by left and what we mean by politics, and those aren't
• 1:09:19
  easy things to delineate, certainly. But yeah, I agree with media.
• 1:09:27
  The media is more gener the state will be more repressive towards the left,
• 1:09:33
  but that's I think insofar as the left is hurting the interests of the rolling
• 1:09:40
  class, and in the case of the indigenous protest, it's because of oil
• 1:09:42
  pipelines, so they're getting to respond full force against that because they don't want
• 1:09:47
  oil pipelines being built. And I think they wouldn't have responded to the truck
• 1:09:50
  or convoy at all if they didn't block trade with UH, you know,
• 1:09:56
  the on the border of the US, if they weren't, if they they
• 1:10:00
  weren't hurting the interests of capital. In other words, they wouldn't have imposed
• 1:10:03
  as a threat. They would just be peaceful with protesters or whatever. So
• 1:10:06
  thank you too. I mentioned before there's really a net benefit of having a
• 1:10:11
  reactionary right that's just spun off into their own mirror universe, because the kind
• 1:10:15
  of despotic thing Trudeau would try to do is like create monthly listening to each
• 1:10:23
  other sessions, but they're so far they would all start smoking cigarettes just because
• 1:10:28
  he said, we're not going to sell them anymore. So thank you for
• 1:10:31
  keeping our communist dictator in check. So we have time for probably one more
• 1:10:36
  segment. So yeah, I'll kick it. I'll kick it to you Victor.
• 1:10:41
  Yeah. Yeah, So I have a question. I'm wondering if you
• 1:10:43
  have a model of the human subject and let me elaborate. And because you
• 1:10:46
  know, in your video it seems like, you know, this talk of
• 1:10:53
  contained opposition system, right, it's you know, as we've been talking about,
• 1:10:58
  it's sort of got that conspiratorial or like kind of like all encompassing,
• 1:11:01
  all encompassing feature to it or or texture to it. And so there's maybe
• 1:11:08
  an implicit there's maybe a totalizing what's the word I was looking for, Thank
• 1:11:11
  you, Eric. So there's maybe an implicit idea that, oh, like
• 1:11:15
  people aren't doing anything because they genuinely prefer it. Right, So people in
• 1:11:18
  liberal democracies, you know, even though they have their you know, their
• 1:11:24
  their freedoms, they still stick to the system because the system is so good
• 1:11:28
  at manipulating them into you know, buying into it like a Marcus. Yeah,
• 1:11:33
  exactly, So I guess that sort of implies, Well, then,
• 1:11:38
  what is the human subject just something like a sponge that just like accepts it
• 1:11:42
  what it's given, or or is it possible that people just prefer liberal democracy
• 1:11:47
  or something like that that they do I mean, and it sounds like in
• 1:11:49
  your video you do upfront say hey, like, I'm not saying that totalitarianism
• 1:11:53
  is better, and I'm not saying that. I'm just curious, like,
• 1:11:56
  well, where is the subject in all this? Is it just a reflection
• 1:11:59
  of power or is there actual desires? There? Oh, no busting out
• 1:12:03
  the one thing that the pill pods seems to have come to an agreement on
• 1:12:08
  that the most reliable human drive is to resist doing anything differently. But yes,
• 1:12:15
  well, I don't really have that full Marcusian critique that you know,
• 1:12:20
  people are just automict Well, I don't even think Mark, that's really a
• 1:12:23
  fair characterization of Marcus's critique, to be honest, of that people Marcus.
• 1:12:29
  But yeah, well it does remind me of the Frankfurt school critique that people
• 1:12:31
  are just manipulated, that's why they support the system, etcetera. But I
• 1:12:33
  mean even in their critiques they're saying that there's a material basis for it,
• 1:12:36
  Like Marcus's whole thing and one dimensional man, is that people support the system
• 1:12:42
  partially, you know, more because they're just more well off. I mean
• 1:12:45
  they have cushy jobs and stuff. But that's increasingly not the case. I
• 1:12:49
  mean, we have a proletariat that's replaced with the precary it. I mean,
• 1:12:54
  you just have a gigification of the economy, you have more instability.
• 1:12:59
  Even even people who are in the so called managerial class are getting proletarianized like
• 1:13:05
  a junks adjunct professors, you know, like uh yeah, you just peop
• 1:13:11
  me. It's like, yeah, there's I don't even don't don't get me
• 1:13:15
  started on that. But the theory of the subject, Okay, so I
• 1:13:17
  wouldn't say I have my own theory of the subject or nothing like that,
• 1:13:20
  but I dabble, and I'm not decided as to where I lean, But
• 1:13:25
  I do dabble between bai Jew's theory of this subject, which is very complicated,
• 1:13:30
  but and Yujak's Lakenian Hegelian theory of the subject, which are kind of
• 1:13:35
  always they're very they're very intension with each other, and it's something I'm still
• 1:13:42
  trying to think through. I wouldn't say, you know I exactly fully.
• 1:13:47
  Uh. I can say like I have a theory of the subject, but
• 1:13:50
  I guess to answer your more practical aspect of the question, which is is
• 1:13:55
  are do people have agency? And are they maybe obeying the system because it's
• 1:14:00
  there just like it? They actually just like it. I think that's true
• 1:14:03
  for a degree of the population. It's not true for a large degree of
• 1:14:06
  it, because you can see that in polls. We have our Prime minister
• 1:14:13
  in Canada's popularity is at an all time low, and you have voting voting
• 1:14:18
  turnout, as I believe what something sixty four percent, very very low.
• 1:14:24
  In Canada and US, a voter turnout is quite low. People often even
• 1:14:30
  vote for the Democrats solely to get Crump out, who they believe is worse.
• 1:14:34
  Yeah, I know you have. Also that famous is the Harvard study
• 1:14:39
  where the correlation between what policies are popular and what policies get introduced in Congress
• 1:14:47
  there is almost like a zero chance or something point zero zero chance that people
• 1:14:51
  have an impact on it. So I think that people do want a lot
• 1:14:56
  of people do want the system to be better, and there is you know,
• 1:15:00
  they have no means whatsoever institutionally speaking of changing that system in terms of
• 1:15:05
  alternatives. I go into this more in depth with Woolen's work and managed democracy
• 1:15:11
  inverted to atalitarianism aspect. So there is a degree in which people are I
• 1:15:15
  think, do obey the system because they like it. But I think it's
• 1:15:19
  not true for a large degree, and we can see that in you know,
• 1:15:23
  polling data regarding policies that are popular but that don't get at all introduced
• 1:15:28
  by the government and the fact dissatisfaction. Yeah. Yeah, A lot of
• 1:15:33
  mls like to point out the fact that you know, supposedly China has greater
• 1:15:38
  popularity for its government than you know, Canada or US. But you know,
• 1:15:44
  that might be a better example actually of your case that maybe people obey
• 1:15:48
  those sort of authoritarian systems when it they simply do well when they see their
• 1:15:54
  standard of living increase. But that's the problem, right when You're legitimacy is
• 1:15:58
  based on that what happens when it decreases in this system, because our legitimacy
• 1:16:02
  has nothing of the system, has nothing to do with the standard of living
• 1:16:05
  or freedom or any of that is has to do with you know, kill,
• 1:16:09
  It must be. It must be tacked to it somehow though, because
• 1:16:11
  like if like I think, like you said at the beginning, if things
• 1:16:13
  get bad enough, like there seem to increasingly be, I think that's going
• 1:16:15
  to be a legitimacy threaten no matter what regime you're in. I think on
• 1:16:18
  these polls, when they say are you happy with the system as it is,
• 1:16:23
  and then you know sixty percent say no, then the follow up question
• 1:16:27
  should be, all right, are you willing to dedicate five hours per exactly
• 1:16:32
  to change it? And I think you'd see I'm just going to say that.
• 1:16:35
  Yeah, you drop that to I don't know less than any Oh never
• 1:16:39
  mind, I'm happy, Yeah, never mind, never mind, I have
• 1:16:41
  to do work, never mind. Yeah, I kind of agree with that.
• 1:16:44
  It's kind of like the classic example when you ask like Americans, you
• 1:16:46
  know, do you want socialize like uh, you know, free healthcare,
• 1:16:49
  It'll be like and like AOC will be like, look like sixty five percent
• 1:16:53
  of Americans want. But then if you ask them do you want health care?
• 1:16:56
  But it's going to mean your taxes are going to go up by like
• 1:16:58
  three percent, Then then it's like it goes down like fifteen percent. Do
• 1:17:00
  you want healthcare? But you're not allowed to have Netflix pick there too.
• 1:17:05
  It's in the video. Yes, yeah, in his theory of the subjects,
• 1:17:11
  but his gaps aren't exactly the gaps in contained opposition. They're like gaps
• 1:17:15
  in the symbolic order, right. Yeah, all these theories about recovering some
• 1:17:20
  lost purity or some authentic community, calls it, and the logic I think
• 1:17:28
  of contained opposition. I mean, he describes it perfectly. It's just that
• 1:17:30
  for him it's more at a psychoanalytic level. He doesn't really conceptualize it at
• 1:17:35
  the level of political structures. Yeah, because inherent transgression is his way of
• 1:17:42
  replacing that sort of perfect community. Then there's a fall and we've lost something
• 1:17:46
  and now we're in this phase where we're going to get it back now at
• 1:17:50
  some point. So there's a kind of almost like nostalgia for this time before
• 1:17:54
  the fall, this prelapse area, and it creeps into all of our theories,
• 1:17:59
  and he wants to replace that with this idea of inherent transgression, which
• 1:18:02
  is the idea that you know, the emergence and the loss coinside. He
• 1:18:06
  says it's a it's actually like, yeah, they come about at the same
• 1:18:12
  time. And that's sort of that analogy I made in the in the video
• 1:18:15
  when I talked about East Germany. How when they try to suppress opposition to
• 1:18:19
  such an extreme extent, you have a return of the repress, but in
• 1:18:25
  the real as opposed to it and the unconscious, and you have that that
• 1:18:30
  comes in the fault. What I mean politically is you had the fall of
• 1:18:32
  the Berlin Wall, which is quite sudden. People did not predict predict that
• 1:18:35
  at the time. That's uh, we always forget retroactively. We think it
• 1:18:41
  was such an inevitable, inevitable thing, but at the time they thought,
• 1:18:44
  uh had You had even leftists like libertarian leftists like Cornelius Castriatus who thought the
• 1:18:48
  Soviet type regimes were going to outlive the American regimes. And when I was
• 1:18:54
  reading them, I thought, how did these guys get it so wrong?
• 1:18:57
  How did they have such a wrong idea of power? And yeah, so
• 1:19:00
  I built off really just a lot of a lot of influences. I went
• 1:19:04
  off of like, you know, JJ's one of them, but someone like
• 1:19:08
  be Young Chohan, I think, also understands power very well. In his
• 1:19:11
  book what is power and psychopolitics? But this is this idea of power not
• 1:19:18
  being this in a Hobbsy in view and a physicality, but rather being a
• 1:19:25
  you know, an expression of not having to to do as little as possible
• 1:19:30
  in order for people to obey or will. Yeah, it's a big,
• 1:19:32
  monolithic theory of power centralized on the Leviathan, embodied in the in the monarch,
• 1:19:39
  or in the in the person who holds that power. Right. Well,
• 1:19:43
  I like that as a place to stop Victor. I know you had
• 1:19:45
  a bunch of questions. Were you able to get through them or you want
• 1:19:49
  to recap something? I mean, actually, you know, it's funny because
• 1:19:51
  when he sort of when when Tony An started answering, I think one of
• 1:19:57
  my first questions I just I kind of I don't know why, but I
• 1:20:00
  expecting us to maybe disagree more like just based on your video. But then
• 1:20:03
  like when you started unpacking what you meant, I was like, okay,
• 1:20:05
  well some of these other questions were sort of premised on the fact that maybe
• 1:20:10
  we would have disagreements. I was just quickly going to mention that you know
• 1:20:14
  what you were talking about there? You know, how did they get this
• 1:20:16
  so wrong. It reminds me you mentioned Heart and Agri early and like in
• 1:20:19
  Empire, and I think even in Multitude. You know, they talk about
• 1:20:23
  how they're so optimistic about the Internet. They're like, you know, the
• 1:20:26
  Internet is going to be this new, this new you know, opportunity for
• 1:20:29
  free expression where you know, these networked struggles will work together. And it's
• 1:20:33
  just so funny how wrong they were about that. And maybe it's because of
• 1:20:38
  a of a misunderstanding of how power works. I wonder, I don't know,
• 1:20:41
  that could be an interesting paper right there to make that argument. But
• 1:20:44
  yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I really have a recap
• 1:20:45
  other than like I think, I think we've covered a lot of ground.
• 1:20:47
  So that's a chapter. Was it a chapter in your thesis Tyranny through Decentralization?
• 1:20:54
  Oh yeah, nice? Good. It seems to me like we're always
• 1:20:57
  at all times sitting in something thing, some network that can be called the
• 1:21:02
  system, but getting it wrong. It's a it's a matter of like in
• 1:21:09
  the in the moment that it's operating, taking yourself outside of it, looking
• 1:21:13
  down at it as if it's an object and going, oh, I bet
• 1:21:15
  this is really what it's not going to be able to handle this is this
• 1:21:19
  is the one thing that it's going to push it to its limit, and
• 1:21:21
  we keep getting to those limits and by the time that that happens, it's
• 1:21:26
  reorganized to yeah, exactly, which is why I think I agree with a
• 1:21:30
  lot of the spirit and especially the way you've unpacked it to like here.
• 1:21:34
  Yeah, I mean, I think I think even though pills is probably more
• 1:21:38
  of a I don't know if like a pessimist or like it's just like,
• 1:21:42
  what's the point of talking about I don't know if you's exactly so what's the
• 1:21:44
  point of talking about strategy? But I think I think what's good about this
• 1:21:46
  view is like it's not like the solution isn't just getting rid of the system,
• 1:21:50
  But well, there is a point to talking about strategy, and that's
• 1:21:55
  that it's fun. It's fun in the same way as playing D and D
• 1:21:58
  and writing chess. Go is fine. This is something that we need because
• 1:22:02
  we need to feel like we're involved politics question again, Yeah, well,
• 1:22:08
  isn't all politics enjoyment? To some extent? Even Jik would say that,
• 1:22:12
  you know, enjoyment, there's a if you look at enjoyment as a political
• 1:22:15
  factor, right, it's a changes the way you view about politics and in
• 1:22:19
  many ways. Uh. I had this great conversation with one of my favorite
• 1:22:25
  people at Theory Underground, uh, Michael downs He has a blog called The
• 1:22:28
  Dangerous maybe one of the best, a really great theory blog you'd find very
• 1:22:31
  interesting. I've actually always wanted to get you guys to talk to him at
• 1:22:35
  some point, but Michael, Michael Downes has conversation with him because he's a
• 1:22:41
  total auto di DAC guy. Anyway, ask him, how do how do
• 1:22:44
  you read so much? How do you read this much while working at Amazon
• 1:22:48
  and driving trucks? And he said, well, I'm not even that smart.
• 1:22:51
  I just this is where my jewey sauce is geared towards where my enjoyment
• 1:22:57
  is given. My death drive happened. Death drive of wasting time reading theory
• 1:23:01
  happens to serve an intellectual direction. And I view it that way too,
• 1:23:08
  Like we can this, this very conversation is enjoyment, you know, studying
• 1:23:15
  Why should I study theory when I could be studying business books how to get
• 1:23:18
  rich? That's more rational, right? But I kind of just get off,
• 1:23:24
  you know, learning more politics. I guess it just happens to be.
• 1:23:28
  And maybe if more more people, you know, thought deeply about politics,
• 1:23:32
  maybe you'd have better politics. I don't know, but uh yeah,
• 1:23:38
  it's enjoyment as well. I would say that other worst ways of enjoyment is
• 1:23:42
  what I mean. I'm glad you say that, because with with the juissance
• 1:23:46
  or with the pleasure principle, there's always this like flip into pain or a
• 1:23:50
  potential flip into pain and actually getting pleasure from the pain. And with with
• 1:23:58
  a lot of the people who are obsessed with politics, I think they're not
• 1:24:03
  enjoying it anymore. The performance is a product of pain. That is the
• 1:24:09
  only thing that they can get pleasure from at that point. I mean,
• 1:24:12
  you know that all too well making videos, don't you. I mean you
• 1:24:15
  why why would you make the videos that you make? Why would you?
• 1:24:18
  I I talked to you once then you said that you do all your rgbs
• 1:24:23
  in your videos. You're red the red, green, blue effects manually instead
• 1:24:28
  of using a preset, And and I was like, are you're You're crazy?
• 1:24:31
  That takes so much more time than like just seeing what I saw in
• 1:24:34
  your stream. Had the way you edit you take, like the longest route
• 1:24:39
  you do, like everything from scratch, and it's like, why do you
• 1:24:42
  do that? It's death drive, but it pays off, you know,
• 1:24:45
  in terms of good art. But it's you know, it's death drive.
• 1:24:47
  Nah, I know too well, it's pleasure principle, because the death drive
• 1:24:53
  would be to hand my creative work, which is myself for intents and purposes
• 1:24:59
  as far the other is concerned. But the death drive would be to hand
• 1:25:02
  myself over to the presets and just use them. And it's not true that
• 1:25:06
  I don't use any presets, although if that's I don't know. If if
• 1:25:11
  editing is death drive, it would be something for me more akin to meditation,
• 1:25:16
  where the author dies and becomes the text. You know, zen blow
• 1:25:21
  stage? Is that different than it being Huey sance? Now? I mean
• 1:25:26
  it's I mean, if you take Jewey Sauce seriously, it's all Jewey s
• 1:25:30
  Yeah, of course, exactly, exactly. Well, maybe here's where the
• 1:25:32
  Jui sance comes in, is that I like thinking that if someone like one
• 1:25:36
  Dime were to pause on a frame of my video, they'd say, I
• 1:25:41
  see what you're doing here, clever, good boy, and who understands what
• 1:25:45
  it takes to actually make it right? Most people don't, so yeah,
• 1:25:48
  there's probably like four out of a thousand that even know what after effects is.
• 1:25:54
  Anyway, why don't we cut it there? We are going long,
• 1:25:57
  but thank you so much one dime. You've referenced a ton of videos that
• 1:26:01
  people can go look at. Well, we were talking about controlled opposition a
• 1:26:08
  theory, and the theory is actually contained opposition. And yeah, we got
• 1:26:13
  books to check out that you're referencing and anywhere else the video anywhere else people
• 1:26:18
  should go. Was it? What's your favorite video that people have not watched?
• 1:26:25
  Maybe control opposition video? Because the control Opposition video underperformed compared to my
• 1:26:30
  other videos. Everyone everyone wants to have me on to have the talk about
• 1:26:33
  the cultural revolution stuff. Kind of sick talking about it. But the control
• 1:26:38
  opposition, when I'm very very proud of, especially though hopefully doesn't nothing gives
• 1:26:43
  it a boost. Yeah, well we'll see. And your book, your
• 1:26:45
  book is going to be called Liberal Totalitarianism, The Spectrum of Capitalist Democracy and
• 1:26:51
  What makes the US Difference coming out later this year too, just so you
• 1:26:55
  don't have to call that out for yourself. Sure. Yeah, and I
• 1:26:59
  guess the last thing I've podcast also, so if you you know, don't
• 1:27:01
  like watching videos. You just want to listen to stuff on the way to
• 1:27:03
  work. I have One Time Radio, the podcast where I talk about mainly
• 1:27:08
  theory, history, politics and economics, but lately a lot of theory and
• 1:27:12
  history mainly. And yeah, and if you want to give me money on
• 1:27:15
  Patreon, go for it if you got the bucks to spare. Is that
• 1:27:18
  podcast? Just do you already have guests on or do you have some co
• 1:27:21
  hosts or I've just interviewed Andrew Fienberg. He's a mark who's a students and
• 1:27:28
  expert on MARCUSA and technology things like that and Canadian academic. Yeah, thanks
• 1:27:33
  for having me on. All right, thanks uh for everyone out there.
• 1:27:39
  I hope you got off. That's what I'll say. This is, this
• 1:27:42
  is what it is. As long as there's some jowy sons going we're transgressing
• 1:27:45
  together, we're getting off. They don't want you to hear this. All
• 1:27:49
  right, take care, guys. Sure