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Pill Pod 175 - The Straussian Plot Against America · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:07
  Nice. It's on Mike's hot so yeah, no opening, no opening banter.
• 0:14
  Racist Twitter, well, you know, there's kinds of official or even
• 0:20
  just unspoken social rules against racism, and then racism has to kind of evolve.
• 0:25
  It takes some creativity if you have to be racist obliquely, like in
• 0:29
  the form of jokes or ironic speech or something. And I don't know,
• 0:34
  I don't want to say that's better. But the Twitter feed right now is
• 0:37
  just so baldly racist. That stuff it encroaches. Like I was browsing it
• 0:45
  for fifteen minutes looking for something to just take up the first ten minutes.
• 0:50
  But I kind of feel dirty now, Like racism that requires some mediating creativity,
• 0:58
  shows that there's some trace elements of humanity there on the other side.
• 1:03
  But this kind of racism, it's just ikes, it's so depressing. Sometimes
• 1:11
  I feel like I mostly get I mostly get memes and like cat videos because
• 1:15
  I send my girlfriend a lot of cat videos. But I also see the
• 1:19
  racist stuff. But we're not racist, right, guys. And if we
• 1:23
  do end up providing some gristle for the anti Semitic conspiracy grinder, that's incidental
• 1:30
  in this case, because this conspiracy does involve mostly Jews, but there's also
• 1:36
  a Japanese guy pretty high up there, so I don't know what the theorists
• 1:40
  are going to do. Is you mean Japanese American? Are you talking about
• 1:42
  Fukiyama? Yeahka, okay, Well there's eight mentioned, and he's one of
• 1:47
  the eight. But you know, even the way Strauss himself puts it,
• 1:51
  this doesn't assuage the fears of a conspiracy here. Yeah, but let's go.
• 1:57
  What if I told you that a secret cabal of nihilist philosophers were plotting
• 2:02
  to take over America? What would you say to that? What? What
• 2:07
  kind of conspiracy is this? I'm reminded of your strange pronunciation of nihilism.
• 2:12
  Nihilism is the correct incorporation into English from French. Not fair enough, and
• 2:17
  even without the genetic argument, because I don't know who knows what the Latin
• 2:22
  pronunciation is. But when we read x niih hello, we don't say x
• 2:28
  and ihlo. I think I have a case here that's true. Ah,
• 2:32
  the nihilists did take over America actually, and then I think they kind of
• 2:38
  lost it temporarily anyway, via the Republican Party twenty years ago or so.
• 2:45
  That's according to this article Leo Strauss Neo Conservatism and US Foreign Policy colon Esoteric
• 2:53
  Nihilism and the Bush Doctrine. I think he should have just stuck with esoteric
• 2:58
  nihilism and the Bush Doctors. Yeah it's a hell of a title. Yeah
• 3:01
  it is. And you know, it's interesting. It's something that I always
• 3:05
  heard tangentially, you know, both of well, I guess two of the
• 3:09
  four universities that I studied at had like some sort of a history of Strosianism
• 3:15
  of like, and I think when I was doing my undergrad at Carlton University,
• 3:20
  there's like a couple there. I remember getting taught by this really weird
• 3:23
  professor Tom Derby who like taught me Kojev and it was actually a really interesting
• 3:27
  class. But then I would hear from other students being like, oh,
• 3:30
  like, you got it. You can't listen to the Strosians in your department,
• 3:32
  Like they're just like Bush to apologists. And I just like didn't really
• 3:36
  understand what they meant by that. I'm starting to get that now. And
• 3:39
  then, of course, University of Toronto had a University of Toronto had has
• 3:44
  like a more even more stronger link to it because Alan Bloom used to teach
• 3:47
  there, I think, for pretty much all of the seventies. So there
• 3:52
  I continue to hear obviously about the Strosian and the Strosian method that I still
• 3:57
  didn't really understand. But this week we actually sat down and read some stuff
• 4:00
  that I feel like lays out the basics pretty well and also tries to lay
• 4:03
  out the case for how it's connected to Bush. I even remember when I
• 4:06
  think, I think on Facebook, I announced that I got into my PhD
• 4:11
  program at UFT, and I remember some guy who I went to Carlton with
• 4:15
  in the philosophy apartment was like, don't let those Stroussians poison your mind.
• 4:20
  So let's find out what this mind poisoning is, the Strauss mind virus.
• 4:26
  Is it real or a mere conspiracy theory. That's what we've tasked ourselves with
• 4:30
  today. But the acolytes or you might say, the cult members of the
• 4:35
  political philosopher Leos Strouss, we actually read Leo Strauss primary source today, so
• 4:41
  we're up on this. But according to this article, Strauss is quote a
• 4:47
  philosophical nihilist, influenced most profoundly by Karl Schmidt, the Nazi one Heidegger also
• 4:57
  the Nazi one and a particular reading of Nietzsche end quote, as well as
• 5:01
  Plato Thrasamaccas and Xenophon. I've also heard favorable mentions of Machiavelli from Strauss as
• 5:09
  well. It's like the og political text. You know, Strauss was in
• 5:13
  a Zionist youth group with Walter Benjamine, Isn't that cortl Wow, that's all
• 5:18
  that's interesting. Benjamine was like a campus activist and stuff, and he was
• 5:23
  joining all these student groups and they were like Nietzschean's right, like they were
• 5:27
  trying to sort of do these Nietzschean reforms of universities, like university should be
• 5:32
  about like living life and all this sort of academic irrelevant nonsense. I mean,
• 5:39
  I can see why it would be sort of a student led kind of
• 5:43
  exciting thing. This would have been in like nineteen fifteen before Benyamine was a
• 5:47
  communist and then he became an anti Zionist. But even then they're not reading
• 5:53
  Nietzsche like fully, it seems, because it seems like there's a lot of
• 5:57
  kind of anti Semitism on the surface of each's writing, and yet they seem
• 6:00
  to also have already had kind of like a paired down Nietzsche. Like I
• 6:05
  mean, I'm referencing again, like the understanding we have of Nietzsche from recent
• 6:11
  scholarship, like that Domenico Liserto book about the Aristocratic Rebel. But yeah,
• 6:16
  I don't understand so what Nietzsche these guys are reading. So I don't know
• 6:20
  if we said it yet, but we read Esoteric Nihilism and the Bush Doctrine,
• 6:26
  and there's a part in it that I think kind of sums up the
• 6:29
  Strosian view pretty well, and I'll just read it quickly. The intellectual result
• 6:33
  is Stros's view that the fundamental truth of the Western philosophical tradition is a nihilist
• 6:39
  truth, that all morality, all notions of justice, all distinctions between good
• 6:43
  and evil are actually matters of power and interpretation and political ideology, not metaphysical
• 6:48
  or theologically or theological irreducibility. So far, that doesn't sound bad, I
• 6:54
  guess, by the way, right, so far maybe going on that more
• 6:58
  precisely, religious faith and notions of morality and justice are politically, ideologically and
• 7:04
  interpretively created. And then a few lines down, the author goes on to
• 7:09
  describe this view as quote unlike modern thinkers obsessed with liberal and egalitarian imperatives,
• 7:15
  argued Strauss, the ancient scholars guarded and concealed this knowledge lest it become known
• 7:20
  to those unable or unwilling to deal with its consequences, Hence their reliance on
• 7:27
  esoteric deception as a way of protecting themselves well secretly informing their most talented followers
• 7:33
  about the nihilist reality of human life and society unquote. So basically like the
• 7:41
  Strosian vision quote really simply is just like the world, there's like no meaning
• 7:45
  to anything, and all these myths we tell ourselves are actually just noble eyes.
• 7:47
  But the public is too feeble and stupid to handle that truth. So
• 7:51
  the knowers, the philosophers need to guard that truth. And there's some interest
• 7:56
  in stability, so it's worth basically perpetuating some of these noble lies about democracy,
• 8:03
  about legitimacy politically, like, basically those are useful myths we need for
• 8:07
  stability, and only those are who are capable of handling it. And if
• 8:11
  you read the ancient texts and the history of political thought, you'll find basically
• 8:16
  tidbits of these hidden truths from Plato all the way up. And it's like
• 8:20
  up to the philosopher to basically conceal them in I don't know. So that's
• 8:24
  like a summary I think of the view I don't know. If you guys
• 8:26
  want to add something to that. It's a cultic structure of knowledge. And
• 8:28
  according to him, we read him Primary In Persecution and the Art of Writing,
• 8:35
  he says, if you read any philosopher, good philosopher, they all
• 8:39
  realize this, but they had to write it in code. Yeah, and
• 8:43
  that changes with like modern political theory, when everyone just puts it all out
• 8:48
  there and no one really cares. But if he says, if you read
• 8:50
  like I don't know, Hobbes or Plato or Xenophon, then you'll understand that
• 8:58
  they're all writing for each other, really perceptive bids who can decode what they're
• 9:03
  really saying. Yeah. And here's here's a great quote from the Primary Text
• 9:07
  where Strauss directly mentions this. He says, the axiom that thoughtless men are
• 9:11
  careless readers, and only thoughtful men are careful readers. Therefore, an author
• 9:16
  who wishes to address only thoughtful men has but to write in such a way
• 9:20
  that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of his book. So
• 9:24
  that's that, right, there is like the esotericism that's usually talked about in
• 9:30
  this context. It seems like, yeah, nihilism and esotericism are at the
• 9:35
  center of it here. Like I always get struck by how much this sounds
• 9:39
  like a kind of post sixties leftist position too, right, like morality,
• 9:45
  justice, good and evil, they're just power and interpretation like that seems to
• 9:50
  be like a Fucodian position or even like a post structuralist position more broadly.
• 9:56
  But they don't, you know, you know, like strauss would maybe or
• 10:01
  the Straussians would see them epistemologically as relativists, right, And they seem to
• 10:11
  just get around this charge of relativism by saying, no, this is about
• 10:16
  like norms and values. This isn't about you know, just anything goes subjective
• 10:22
  interpretation or you know, just power politics, Like you know, these things
• 10:28
  have to be grounded in values, traditional values, which are informed by religion
• 10:37
  and long held beliefs about justice and morality. But yeah, they're not just
• 10:43
  open to interpretation. That part is the esoteric part, you know, only
• 10:48
  we are capable of sort of knowing the truth of these texts. And it's
• 10:52
  dangerous if you just you know, let anybody into the university and anybody read
• 10:58
  these things, they'll interpret them in a place, lie them incorrectly. Well,
• 11:01
  they're they're terrified of the consequences. They're also relativists, though yes they
• 11:05
  say they are. But there we can't terrify the us, we can't let
• 11:09
  the masses become relativistic, but we can be. And in fact, I
• 11:13
  wanted to put it really simply that I think the difference that you're correctly identifying
• 11:16
  Eric too can just be put like, maybe metaphysically, there's actually quite a
• 11:20
  lot of compatibility with the view that you're mentioning, the Strosian view, But
• 11:24
  the difference is about well, there is actually maybe at the root core here
• 11:28
  a metaphysical difference too somehow, or an ontological difference about like human nature,
• 11:31
  which is that the Left position is that not only can the public handle it,
• 11:37
  but they need to know it so that they can create a better world,
• 11:39
  whereas I think the Strosian position is like, the public cannot fucking handle
• 11:43
  this. If they learn about this, it's going to be chaos, and
• 11:46
  we need like someone with responsibility and intellect and philosophical knowledge to basically I don't
• 11:50
  know, would you agree with that that that was my impression. I think,
• 11:54
  yeah, they have a more negative view of human nature, whereas like
• 11:58
  it's more common in those sort of post sixties left to kind of say,
• 12:01
  to be suspicious of the idea of human nature at all, as kind of
• 12:05
  essentialist saying, you know, now, humans don't really have any essential nature.
• 12:11
  It's all kind of socially constructed or you know, based on you know
• 12:18
  this or that whatever, deconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition or criticism of that.
• 12:26
  So they don't seem to have a consistent view of human nature, whereas
• 12:31
  Ostrausians, Yeah, like their hierarchical, elitist esotericists, and they believe that
• 12:39
  most humans are stupid and untrustworthy, So they do have a very specific view
• 12:45
  of human nature that kind of melts with all this as well. Yeah,
• 12:48
  I would say it's a very Greek notion of human nature. I mean,
• 12:52
  I think they go to the Greeks a lot for the ways in which we
• 12:54
  can become unvirtuous in the way that your soul can be like, can lose
• 12:58
  its harmony, you can be pulled by these different directions and kind of the
• 13:01
  effort and care and exceptionalism that it takes to actually master yourself, and they're
• 13:07
  like, very few people can do that. Therefore, yeah, like virtue
• 13:09
  ethics would fit nicely in here in some way, and like, yeah,
• 13:16
  distinguishing between the sort of aristocrats the best people, and the sort of demos,
• 13:20
  the dangerous masses who can also be tyrannical if they get control of democracy
• 13:28
  and all the best ideas go go to the dogs kind of thing. So
• 13:33
  the biggest threat practically to this kind of theory this is, by the way,
• 13:37
  an interpretation of Leo Strauss Like it's there, it might not be this
• 13:43
  strong, but putting that aside for a second, because we want to get
• 13:46
  to the practical effects of that, and that is basically the Reagan administration and
• 13:52
  the two Bush administrations were full of what we now what we call neocons,
• 13:58
  and a selection of these neocons were also Straussians. So a lot of the
• 14:05
  conspiratorial claims follow from that connection. Is this a tight knit conspiracy where this
• 14:09
  Straussian secretly pulling the strings or vice versa, And we could make this case
• 14:16
  strongly or weekly. And while there is a connection demonstrably, there's also some
• 14:22
  yeah, butts to be included and the people and liberalism more generally is kind
• 14:28
  of the enemy here because they just get in the way because they're stupid.
• 14:31
  But you know, any aristocratic philosophy always puts themselves on the side of the
• 14:37
  aristocrats, like, no, we are we are not one of the people,
• 14:41
  We are one of the insiders. So I think it. Yeah,
• 14:45
  it has this cultic or gnostic structure to it. Yeah, this is a
• 14:50
  key part of the Strauss influence on the neocons. So this is going to
• 14:56
  be the way that the neocons kind of read or get. What they get
• 15:00
  out of Strauss is this justification for noble lies. The government has the right
• 15:05
  to lie, to manipulate, to not tell the truth in the interest of
• 15:11
  the greater good or the good of society. And the other thing is that
• 15:16
  you need a small group of elites to mediate sort of between the best ideas
• 15:22
  and the advisorship of the powers that be, and you need a sort of
• 15:30
  public face. You need a public facing dimension of this, which will you
• 15:35
  know, pacify the masses or tell them the necessary lies, like you know,
• 15:39
  oh, we're going in because there's weapons of mass destruction. There doesn't
• 15:43
  matter if it's true or if it hasn't been confirmed yet, Like, that's
• 15:46
  what we're going with because that's what's going to get people on board with this,
• 15:50
  you know whatever, this war, this intervention. So it is it
• 15:56
  has a cynical dimension to it basically at you know, it's just it sees
• 16:03
  kind of it's like sees the worst in people, and it sees that this
• 16:07
  is a power game and that we need to play to win. So they
• 16:12
  understand this aspect of power that we have to play to win. Now,
• 16:15
  there's a dialectic in philosophy. You may have heard of some other very silly
• 16:21
  logical ontological dialectics, but this is the fundamental one between the jocks and the
• 16:27
  nerds. And usually when a nerd starts talking like this, the jocks just
• 16:32
  say shut up, nerd and wedgie. But we know nerdism is resoltanment,
• 16:38
  and Nietzsche was the first nerd to say, you know, actually the jocks
• 16:44
  are just better than us. Yeah, but here it's very nerd coded to
• 16:48
  say, well, it may look like the jocks are in charge, but
• 16:51
  if you look carefully, if you're in on the secret, you know that
• 16:55
  the nerds are secretly puppeting the jocks, and normally you can just say,
• 16:59
  shot up, nerd, we don't need your theory here. But if this
• 17:02
  conspiracy is real, then the nerds actually pulled it off for once. Yeah,
• 17:07
  I mean as a key example of like the Bush doctrine and the ways
• 17:11
  in which it could be connected to this kind of noble lie is like the
• 17:15
  whole thing about weapons of mass destruction, like it kind of hypothesizes that,
• 17:18
  Like that was like the to get the American public to go along with the
• 17:23
  war in Iraq, it was like necessary to kind of like bend the truth
• 17:26
  a little bit and just be like, well, because we know it's for
• 17:29
  the greater good. We know that, like I guess Saddam Hussein is a
• 17:33
  danger, so you know it's worth it. Even if we think the things
• 17:36
  the story we tell isn't one hundred percent tru it's still going to be in
• 17:40
  the service of benefiting America's interests in the long term. And the WMD lie
• 17:45
  is part of a bigger lie. And the bigger lie is we like where
• 17:48
  the bastion of democracy, the rest of the world is non democratics, so
• 17:52
  we have to enforce peace through war. Ultimately, that's the big lie,
• 17:59
  and then little lies are also justified. One of the funny tidbits here is
• 18:03
  that Irving Crystal one of the og neo cons or one of those guys who
• 18:10
  used to be the sort of leftists and campus activists and even Trotskyites. I
• 18:15
  think Irving started out as after he's transformed into a neo conservative. He loved
• 18:22
  the movie Rambo. He heaped praise on Rambo in nineteen ninety five because quote
• 18:30
  like sorry, movies like this quote their popularity indicated that ordinary Americans are still
• 18:36
  entranced by war and simple patriotism in the wake of Vietnam. So the popularity
• 18:41
  of films like Rambo give the neo conservatives hope that people can still be encouraged
• 18:49
  to love war and go along with aggressive foreign policy decisions. Yeah, that
• 18:57
  masculine image, that masculine and kind of like American patriotism is very useful.
• 19:03
  I think he's commenting on how useful it can be to further their interests.
• 19:07
  And it's exactly the kind of like perpetuating the kind of story the noble lie
• 19:12
  like the stories that kind of pacify the public to make them accept certain kinds
• 19:17
  of actions and yeah, it's a pretty funny example. And the funniest part
• 19:19
  of the example, the funniest part of the lie is like, you guys
• 19:23
  lost, You lost to a bunch of under equipped peasants in the woods.
• 19:29
  You're not the heroes here. You mean during in the Gulf War? Is
• 19:33
  that what you're referencing there? No, no, no, Rambo Vietnam.
• 19:37
  Oh the Vietnam Oh that worry. Yeah yeah, yeah, Well that's the
• 19:41
  thing because it was such a big disaster and he's like, oh, Rambo's
• 19:44
  popular, so people are still into that even though you know, Vietnam I'm
• 19:48
  not gone so well and created a lot of opposition, but people love Rambo,
• 19:52
  so that means, you know, Vietnam wasn't a total disaster. I
• 19:56
  think the article one of the things that it points out that I found interesting
• 19:59
  is sort of the tension between Astrossian worldview and liberalism and the kind of the
• 20:03
  way that liberalism itself is developing, because I would say that in some ways
• 20:08
  Strowsianism as in the way that it interacts with American politics and the American right.
• 20:14
  I mean, it is a creature of the American right for sure.
• 20:17
  An American intelligence intelligentsia on the right. But it's not merely just like a
• 20:22
  right wing liberalism. I mean, it kind of is. It seems like
• 20:26
  it wants to preserve certain kinds of in so far as they're liberal American institutions.
• 20:30
  But it also worries, I would say, about the way that liberalism
• 20:34
  is going, the way that it's transforming America, the way that it's turning
• 20:38
  it into. And I think he says a useful organizing principle for such a
• 20:42
  discussion is the proposition that at based Stroussians and neo conservatives in general are primarily
• 20:48
  concerned with the survival of the culture of the West in the face of liberalism,
• 20:55
  and goes on to say that they're worried about the way that the American
• 20:57
  good life is being true transformed. And you know, they say liberalism as
• 21:02
  the drug culture, as racial tensions, as promiscuity, as disrespect for authority,
• 21:07
  as a catastrophic school system, as a culture of nothingness, liberalism as
• 21:11
  weak, vacillating foreign policy, detrimental to American strategic interests and cultural values.
• 21:18
  You know, family, church, patriotism, the flag, the bedrock of
• 21:22
  the real US democracy. So that kind of just gives you an idea of
• 21:29
  the way that it can be used, like what they're trying to protect through
• 21:32
  this kind of way of thinking about the need to sort of mislead the public
• 21:37
  and preserve something. And so it's not exactly anti liberalism. Like I wouldn't
• 21:42
  call it fascism, and it would be disingenuous because you know, if you
• 21:47
  go to Strauss's writings, you know he actually one of his biggest worries,
• 21:51
  you know, to be fair is like tyranny, like, and the whole
• 21:55
  thing is like, we actually need this philosophical class too to protect the American
• 22:00
  public. In fact, you know, I would say that going back to
• 22:02
  the Greeks, I would say, and someone's consistent with the Greeks is like,
• 22:06
  well, it's the Demos, So we're going to be most seduced by
• 22:08
  a tyrant. So that's why like the Demos shouldn't be you know, we
• 22:12
  need to protect the Demos from itself. I wouldn't classify it as fascism in
• 22:17
  the way that like the liberals are like or like you know, the Catholic
• 22:21
  integralists who are kind of hot right now in the right or or people like
• 22:25
  Nick Flentes or whatever. Like, I don't think that those people are like
• 22:27
  Strossian really would be. I think they would be opposed to Strosianism, but
• 22:32
  still it's in that direction. Yeah, a lot of them hate Trump for
• 22:34
  that reason. They switched to Hillary. A lot of these neo cons and
• 22:38
  Straussians they switched to Hillary because Trump was Yes, they become never Trumpers exactly,
• 22:45
  and in fact, a lot of them are still our Biden supporters now,
• 22:48
  even the corpse of Biden, William Crystal still tweets about this stuff.
• 22:53
  We're still in the theory zone. But I want to if we're going to
• 22:56
  argue that this is not a conspiracy theory, that it's just a conspiracy,
• 23:02
  we have to go through a bunch of high ranking Straussians or they were high
• 23:07
  ranking as of the Iraq War. So I'm really sorry because reading list is
• 23:11
  boring to listen to. But there's basically eight names that get focused on,
• 23:17
  and we mentioned a few of them already and some of them will be familiar
• 23:19
  to you. So we start with Bill crystal official position. He was a
• 23:25
  chief of staff in Reagan's cabinet and then chief of staff to the Vice President
• 23:30
  in Bush Senior Poppy Bus yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, the
• 23:36
  vice president chief of staff, right, so he's up there in both Bush
• 23:40
  administrations. Next one's this is the big one. Is Paul wolf Witz.
• 23:44
  Yeah, architect of the Iraq War quote unquote. But he was a deputy
• 23:51
  Secretary of Defense at Donald Rumsfeld and then I didn't know this president of the
• 23:56
  World Bank right after. Yeah yeah, but I think he got stepped down
• 24:00
  soon after because he got caught up in a bit of a scandal. But
• 24:04
  you know, that just shows the bower of these guys. I think it
• 24:08
  was corruption, if I'm not mistake. I don't remember that scandal. It
• 24:12
  might have been something. Yeah that was a while back. But Paul Wolfowitz
• 24:15
  is definitely like an architect of foreign policy in the and I think a student
• 24:22
  of Alan Bloom for sure, and in fact stayed in contact with Alan Bloom
• 24:26
  for a long time, who was a student of Strauss. And I think
• 24:30
  maybe also a student of Harvey Mansfield, who's somehow still alive at Harvard,
• 24:36
  who's also like a extress. Again, how old is he. I think
• 24:40
  he's in his nineties. Jesus, Okay, so well, yeah, by
• 24:42
  the way, in case it's not clear, this list is of people who
• 24:47
  are not Justini o'conn's but designated Straussians. So next is Robert Kagan, who's
• 24:52
  a speech writer fore George Schultz in the Reagan administration and then a foreign policy
• 24:57
  advisor to John McCain. And he's currently still writing. All these guys are
• 25:03
  still writing in like the Washington Post and stuff. But he's a never Trumper.
• 25:07
  He's one of the never trumpers. Yeah, some of them were,
• 25:11
  really so it's not such a conspiracy theory, it really is. You know,
• 25:18
  these people were in powerful places. Yeah. I got one thing to
• 25:21
  add though to that list, which is a funny little tidbit. I just
• 25:22
  found Harvey Mansfield at HOSE ninety two. By the way, in two thousand
• 25:27
  and four he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W. Bush,
• 25:33
  of course, So there you go, the add to the conspiracy theory.
• 25:36
  There there you go. Yeah, okay, So next we got Abram Shultzky,
• 25:41
  director of the Office of Special Plans, which sounds totally Orwellian, but
• 25:45
  this was if you can remember back to the Iraq War, this is where
• 25:49
  all the intelligence talking points for the justification that there were WMD's in Iraq.
• 25:55
  This is they produced them all. And this is interesting that I found found
• 26:00
  out from this and we're gonna come back to this a little bit. But
• 26:02
  the White House was actually in conflict with the CIA, and they saw the
• 26:07
  CIA here as being like overtaken by liberals. So the CIA kept kind of
• 26:12
  saying stuff like, you know, we're pretty sure that there's not weapons over
• 26:18
  there, and they were like, through the Office of Special Plans, the
• 26:22
  White House was like, no, there are Look look at these satellite pictures.
• 26:26
  So that came out of the Office of Special Plans, which it was
• 26:29
  in a deep state conflict with the CIA at this time. Oh my god,
• 26:33
  is that all eight? No, that's only four. Next is Douglas
• 26:37
  faith he's Under Secretary for Defense for policy. And then this guy you might
• 26:44
  remember him, Scooter Libby. He's chief of staff to Dick Cheney. The
• 26:48
  only guy prosecuted, but it wasn't for war crimes, despite you know,
• 26:53
  the war crimes. But he was a particular kind of evil because in that
• 26:57
  war with the CIA, he go was prosecuted for leaking the identity of undercover
• 27:04
  CIA operative Valerie Plane. It's called the what is it called the Plame affair
• 27:11
  or the plame playing gate. Yeah, but the reason that he did this
• 27:15
  was because her husband went to where Saddam was supposedly getting uranium from in Africa.
• 27:23
  I think it was Nigeria. And he was like, I didn't there's
• 27:26
  nothing here. This is all made up published in the New York Times.
• 27:32
  And he said, you know this is this is based on a lie.
• 27:34
  They're telling you a lie. And then Scooter Libby leaked his wife's identity while
• 27:41
  she was she was undercover, she was a spy. So he's the only
• 27:45
  guy who got charged with anything, but he it wasn't It wasn't war crimes.
• 27:49
  It was obstruction of just I forgot about that. Such that's such malicious
• 27:53
  behavior. Holy fuck, I forgot about that. Yeah, that's that's I
• 27:57
  mean, not that I'm going to defend I but you can know the cost
• 28:00
  going on here. And then Trump, uh Trump parted. Oh yeah,
• 28:03
  did he Trump pardons Scooter Libby? Oh man, that's so funny, boy
• 28:08
  boy, right, that makes sense because I guess he was prosecuted under Obama.
• 28:12
  I'm guessing. And then so Bush couldn't pardon them, I think or
• 28:15
  maybe no, waits that's wrong. Now Bush commuted him. Bush commuted him,
• 28:19
  but he refused to pardon him. Actually worth watching, by the way,
• 28:22
  a documentary where it's just interviewing Dick Cheney called the World according to Dick
• 28:27
  and Uh in that documentary, it's fascinating. I actually watched it twice because
• 28:32
  it's so interesting, like listening to the way Cheney thinks, Like he's so
• 28:37
  he has such a binary mind of just like either it helps American interests and
• 28:41
  it protects America, or it doesn't or I'm not interested in with us or
• 28:45
  against us. Yeah, and like he he talks very candidly in that documentary
• 28:51
  about the conflict he had with George W. Bush because he wouldn't actually pardon
• 28:56
  Scooter Libby because Bush refused. He was like no, It's like he's like,
• 29:00
  all commute a sentence. And Cheney very honestly thinks. And I remember
• 29:06
  he says something like, it's like I felt it was wrong. It was
• 29:08
  like we had a man down and we left him on the battlefield, and
• 29:11
  I think that that was wrong. Oh well, he was his chief of
• 29:15
  staff, it was his guy. Yeah, it got mad at and im
• 29:19
  And actually I actually watching that documentary, by the way, this is kind
• 29:22
  of I mean it's on topic because we're talking about that Bush Iraq war era.
• 29:26
  But like, honestly, like i'd be curious if any listeners or if
• 29:29
  you guys watch it, but I've been when I finished watching it, I
• 29:32
  would just felt bad for Bush a little bit. I was like, okay,
• 29:36
  like Cheney was like, because you can tell, like, especially in
• 29:38
  the last two years or three years, like Cheney, like Bush is pretty
• 29:42
  much disagreeing with everything Cheney says because he realized that like Cheney was kind of
• 29:47
  partially responsible for lying to him about the w and DS. And I mean
• 29:52
  I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say I felt like pity for him.
• 29:53
  Well, I felt more pity than bad for him morally. I was just
• 29:56
  like God, like you got, you got can like lied to by your
• 30:00
  own people a lot, Dick Cheney. By the way, Jock, And
• 30:06
  if there is a gust of wind, that's gonna blow this theory over.
• 30:10
  It's that these Straussian nerds were manipulating Cheney and he wasn't aware of it,
• 30:15
  rather than vice versa. Well, it's yeah, Libby, though Libby was
• 30:19
  influencing him. Maybe, Well, it shows you that the neocons didn't have
• 30:23
  total ideological control. But they were well placed and had a lot of control,
• 30:29
  but they often did get into conflicts with the administration and were critical of
• 30:34
  George Bush Senior, you know, when he didn't push on to Baghdad during
• 30:40
  the First Iraq War. During the Gulf War, he didn't push on to
• 30:45
  Baghdad, and the neocons were encouraging to him too, and they were really
• 30:48
  angry at him for that, for not just taking the war even further and
• 30:53
  completely initiating a regime change. I guess Bush Senior was just happy with having
• 31:00
  the regime collapse and not like controlling the how how it went after that.
• 31:04
  But the neocons wanted to and so one of the things they reasons they want
• 31:10
  to break away from the liberal consensus on foreign policy is that idea of Dayton,
• 31:18
  which is, you know, reducing the idea of reducing tensions between countries.
• 31:25
  Like the most famous example is with between Russia USSR when Nixon went to
• 31:33
  visit you know, I think he went to visit like Mao, and he
• 31:37
  was trying to you know, improve relations with I guess, I guess Russia.
• 31:41
  It was after Stalin, so it would have been what's his name yeah,
• 31:47
  and they were pissed off at even you know, Nixon for this sort
• 31:52
  of initiating or buying into these dayton sorts of strategies of reducing relations. They
• 31:56
  thought that was part of the liberals. So these guys are fucking like warhawks
• 32:01
  is really a great way to describe them, because they just want, you
• 32:06
  know, US hegemony all over the world, complete control and warfare and destruction.
• 32:14
  It seems connecting back to what we talked about on the Patron episode last
• 32:16
  week. I mean, it's not the right is just so much better at
• 32:21
  building alliances with people who don't necessarily agree that I guess it should be no
• 32:23
  surprise, right that, like, yeah, you got some strup maybe where
• 32:27
  it's actually more plausible that you could have a couple of Strosians influencing other neo
• 32:31
  conservatives because they're just so good at being like, okay, well we agree
• 32:35
  about this, we agree, but this is like, let's work together and
• 32:37
  fucking get that shit done because they're so good at it, as you know,
• 32:40
  as I've said, and we've said, we fucking suck at it.
• 32:44
  Yeah, this is kind of the difference between a neolib and a neocon.
• 32:46
  Is the neocons want all war, all the time, everywhere, and they're
• 32:51
  doing the same shit right now with China and Russia in so far as they
• 32:54
  can. And I think one of the key things is that when they do
• 32:58
  encounter, you know, when the neo con servatives do encounter resistance to the
• 33:02
  kinds of policies they want to see pursued, you know, the right generally,
• 33:08
  as we sort of I think we briefly touched on this a couple of
• 33:12
  weeks ago with the politics of fear. You know, they're so well funded
• 33:15
  that they don't need to do this authoritarian purging or this sort of lurch into
• 33:22
  these purity politics when they say, well, no, we're not going to
• 33:24
  deal with anybody who's not as radical as us. They have so much economic
• 33:30
  backing that they can pursue sort of like softer strategies, I guess, or
• 33:34
  economic strategies, like they can make a lot of noise, they can get
• 33:37
  their opinions heard, and they can bring people on side rather than yeah,
• 33:44
  refusing to work with them. And I guess the left is generally, you
• 33:47
  know, less well funded, so they seem to sometimes I guess when they
• 33:53
  encounter opposition or someone's not as radical as they want them to be. They
• 33:58
  just completely you know, secede. They just leave or they just refuse to
• 34:01
  work with them. Ever, so the neo kons kind of just you know,
• 34:06
  yeah, they know, Okay. That was six out of eight.
• 34:08
  Seven is Elliot Abroci, who is Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor for Global democracy
• 34:15
  strategy. There's STROUSI and this guy also he lied to Congress and was indicted
• 34:22
  during Iran Contra but pardoned by Bush senior Poppy Bush. So the idea of
• 34:29
  lying to Congress would go against their noble lives thing, because if they get
• 34:32
  caught up in that, that's not good for them. They get punished for
• 34:36
  it. They'd prefer not to be in trouble. Then they just pardon.
• 34:39
  That's that's kind of a theme here. They just pardon anyone who gets caught.
• 34:44
  And the last on the list, we know him well, I don't
• 34:49
  really actually know why he's on this list because he's unique in two respects.
• 34:53
  A he never had a government position in the Bush administration, and B he's
• 34:59
  not you wish it's uh, it's Friendsis Fukiyama. He's a Rand Institute guy.
• 35:06
  The most famous Straussian probably because of the End of History book. But
• 35:10
  bad. We all agreed, it's not bad for the reasons that almost everyone
• 35:15
  references it. So please have a listen to pill Pods one fifty one and
• 35:21
  to hear why his thesis is correct, but how he gets to his thesis
• 35:25
  is still wrong. He's wrong better than the book is certainly better than than
• 35:30
  the fucking vast commentary on it that hasn't actually bothered. Read ninety nine out
• 35:36
  of one hundred references to that book only bring it up in a sentence in
• 35:39
  order to immediately dismiss it. And the book should be dismissed, but not
• 35:44
  on those grounds, on different grounds, and not to be dismissed after you
• 35:47
  read it and understand like the mistakes it's making, but it's not to be
• 35:52
  dismissed so callously as it is now. I do think that Fukuyama is also
• 35:58
  unique, although I guess I can't speak with as much authority about the other
• 36:00
  people on your list, but like, oh yeah, but by this guy's
• 36:06
  list, Jim George's list. But I think Bukiyama is also like well,
• 36:10
  especially since then and since he wrote End of History is really like a liberal,
• 36:15
  like he's really not a neocon even, Like, I mean, you
• 36:17
  know, a lot of his recent writing is about protecting liberalism, liberal institution.
• 36:23
  Like you know, I think he he voted for Obama, right,
• 36:27
  Like, so I'm not saying that's like left, but it's just like a
• 36:30
  lib. It's just like a lib. Well, I think this is a
• 36:32
  good place to say this too, is like we've already talked about. I
• 36:37
  mentioned their foreign policy strategy. The neocons like very aggressive foreign policy. They're
• 36:42
  domestic policy is part of their problem with liberalism at the time, right,
• 36:46
  Like, I think liberalism has changed the liberalism they wanted to break away from,
• 36:51
  and it says, this is a good way to put it. They
• 36:53
  wanted to put a wedge between the like immediate association of democracy with liberalism is
• 37:00
  you know, new deoliberalism or kind of that, you know, the Great
• 37:05
  Society liberalism, which was like Lyndon Johnson's program in the sixties. They so
• 37:13
  it's the welfare state too. That's part of their attack on you know,
• 37:17
  domestic policy seems to just be to undermine the you know, welfare state.
• 37:23
  So now that you know, I think liberalism has moved a little bit or
• 37:28
  diversified since you know, it's no longer simply associated with like big government and
• 37:34
  welfare programs and things like that, although some of it still is. You
• 37:37
  also have neoliberalism now, which is like an economic more of like an economic
• 37:42
  policy. Seems to overlap with neo conservatism a lot all these fucking terms.
• 37:47
  But you know, I think he's on the neoliberal you know, the end
• 37:52
  of history, victory of neoliberal capitalism. You know, okay, down with
• 37:58
  regulations with you know, trade borders and protectionism and tariffs, and I mean
• 38:06
  the next step is, you know, if some country tries to nationalize an
• 38:09
  industry that is heavily invested in by US interests, then that's perfect justification for
• 38:15
  you know, intervention. And you know, all the human rights groups will
• 38:20
  start to magically find human rights violations and then the US uses status pretext to
• 38:24
  go in and protect their investments. There'd be a great benefit in actually having
• 38:30
  a conspiracy corkboard up here, because all these guys they're all still alive.
• 38:35
  I google them all. They have titles like scholar, researcher, guest lecturer.
• 38:39
  They're all in think tank jobs, well paid or universities. It's like
• 38:45
  Hudson Institute, the Brookings Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Rand Corporation,
• 38:52
  That's where they all end up. They're still doing their stuff. They don't
• 38:54
  have the influence that they once did. But contrary to popular wisdom, there
• 39:00
  is in fact rest for the wicked. Yeah, and like we said,
• 39:04
  well they pump them full of adrinachrome and so they live until they're ninety nine
• 39:07
  years old. Most of them aren't really Bush or sorry, most of them
• 39:09
  aren't really Trumpists at least I don't think. But yeah, we were kind
• 39:14
  of thinking that Maga Republicanism it has overlapped certainly with neo conservatism, and they
• 39:20
  do, you know, as we say, kind of work together, don't
• 39:22
  completely reject each other. But yeah, like Maga Republicanism and the influence of
• 39:28
  neo Conservatism seems to have very much like shifted lately. And maybe even the
• 39:34
  neo cons have been going into the Democratic Party since like Obama and Biden and
• 39:38
  trying to you know, get their influence more established there because they seem more
• 39:44
  willing now to go around Congress and also when it comes to economic policies.
• 39:49
  I mean, look, I think that at the end of the day,
• 39:52
  the Republican Party is still going to end up passing a lot of like tax
• 39:55
  cuts. But Trump's rhetoric, right, he does talk about protectionism, and
• 40:00
  he does talk about work somehow to working class people, even though they're wrong.
• 40:06
  But like it does seem like there's a lot more rhetoric at least around
• 40:12
  you know, Oh, maybe we should transform the Republican Party, the Mega
• 40:15
  Republican Party to be more like you know, some of these new like right
• 40:20
  wing movements in Europe. You know, I have kind of in Hungary Hungary
• 40:22
  in mind with Victor orbn right, where he's actually passing quite a lot of
• 40:27
  social policies, right that are very like ethnocentric social policies, right, that
• 40:32
  are kind of keep hungry Hungarian right, like give women on all these you
• 40:38
  know, tax breaks. I think if a woman has four or more children,
• 40:42
  she never has to pay taxes again in her life in Hungary. So
• 40:45
  it's like, you know, these kinds of more like domestic family friendly social
• 40:50
  policies that I think like some mega Republicans and certainly some of the you know,
• 40:55
  right wing intellectuals in so far as some of them who support Trump,
• 40:59
  they to have that in mind, like the post liberals. But still of
• 41:01
  course, the Republican Party in the in Congress are still very much I would
• 41:06
  say neoliberals most of them, right, or neo conservatives. Well, this
• 41:08
  is where we get from Strauss to all these guys and their think tanks and
• 41:14
  then the media ultimately that they produce, is that they understand that the populace
• 41:19
  always needs an enemy and they always need to constantly be reminded of like how
• 41:24
  precarious their their position is in terms of their culture whatever, so West versus
• 41:30
  everyone else, any other form of politics of fear that you can think of.
• 41:35
  They're just trying to keep the masses distracted. That's really the only purpose
• 41:40
  of the masses is to get them like cheering for the national anthem and seeing
• 41:45
  the jets fly over the next The cold was so good. Yeah, that
• 41:51
  should have lasted forever. They would have been scare and everything. The coldor
• 41:54
  was perfect for the way that they the kind of thing that they had in
• 41:58
  mind, right, keep the public passed by. So then they had the
• 42:00
  War on Terror right as the new thing. And it's funny. I remember
• 42:04
  that movie from the nineties. I think Michael Moore. It might have been
• 42:07
  Michael Moore's only movie that's like a drama movie, like not a documentary.
• 42:13
  It's Canadian bacon, right, And the whole thing about that movie is have
• 42:15
  you guys seen that. It's like an old comedy from the nineties with John
• 42:19
  Candy. The whole subplot of it is like basically neocons who are like sad
• 42:24
  that the Cold War's over and they need to look for a new enemy,
• 42:28
  and they start to manufacture this this fear of Canada, blame Canada, and
• 42:35
  they were narratives and they're like, look, they're like ninety percent of their
• 42:37
  population lives within like within fifty miles of our border. They're massing at the
• 42:43
  border against us, and like all this shit. Oh yeah, we're huddling
• 42:46
  down there for warmth. We're gonna steal your warmth. So if we can
• 42:52
  make the connection, I mean, the author does. I don't know how
• 42:55
  long we need to spend on it, because it's pretty clear. But from
• 42:58
  the Straussian perspective, you need like a Schmidian war always happening inside outside you
• 43:06
  externalize the violence in order to fund the dumb populace back at home. And
• 43:12
  yeah, the classically educated, disciplined, intellectual elite is supposed to be keeping
• 43:19
  hold of this knowledge of the ancients. And then from this perspective, even
• 43:22
  someone like the Waspy Bush family, they're sort of they're supposed to be puppets
• 43:28
  for these secret nerds who understand the true nehilistic core at the center of values
• 43:35
  is that they're all created. So with that secret in mind, do you
• 43:39
  want to read some actual Strauss to see how this all connects. I've got
• 43:44
  stuff to say about the Strauss in general and the primary reading, but I
• 43:47
  just also thought of it's an anecdote I heard from someone about George Grant Right,
• 43:52
  who's kind of the Canadian conservative philosopher are excellence in some way, I
• 43:59
  would say the twentieth century, maybe George Grant Right, and he was actually
• 44:02
  friendly with Leo Strauss, and I heard this story that he was gonna do
• 44:08
  we have this thing in Canada on CBC Radio CBC Ideas, which is still
• 44:13
  on and you can get it in the form of a podcast, and the
• 44:15
  usually bring some sort of intellectual on to talk about something. It's scientific philosophical
• 44:21
  and it's usually like hour to two hour documentary, sometimes multipart. And at
• 44:24
  the time I think this was maybe in the sixties or seventies. Who I'm
• 44:28
  not actually sure. I couldn't tell you for sure, but it might actually
• 44:30
  exist. George Grant might have done it. I think he did a documentary
• 44:34
  about Nietzsche for CBC Ideas, and Leo Strauss tried to talk him out of
• 44:39
  it, apparently, and was like, you shouldn't be talking about Nietzsche to
• 44:43
  the public, Like you shouldn't be trying to make it understandable. Like that's
• 44:46
  dangerous because Nietzsche is the one though showing our that's in a book called Time
• 44:52
  is History. I believe. Oh really, so it's true, I guess.
• 44:54
  Yeah. So it's like they don't like tipping their hands. It's a
• 44:59
  Nietzschean historiography. Yeah. But to not let this out, you know,
• 45:04
  you have to view yourself as an intellectual, as a cynical puppet master.
• 45:12
  You're like manipulating your manipulating minds. You're trying to get a club together.
• 45:15
  And this is what these fucking Straussians love, is like their secret meetings where
• 45:20
  they drink wine and talk about politics and fucking Plato. They're they're getting all
• 45:23
  the campus conservatives to their secret club. I know, I have a good
• 45:28
  friend who goes to the Strossian reading group with Clifford Orwin at the University of
• 45:30
  Trona and the and the Philosopher Kings thing seems almost literal just to add to
• 45:37
  the conservatives at the Conspiracy Theory Angle, a lot of these that the ideas
• 45:43
  seem to run in families, you know, Like we mentioned Irving Crystal kind
• 45:46
  of first generation, and then and then Bill Crystal being VP chief of Staff
• 45:52
  under the butt in one of the Bush administrations. And we mentioned also Norman
• 45:55
  Poderetz, who was uh that was the guy got awarded the was it the
• 46:01
  Medal of Freedom or something by George Bush junior. Norman Poderetz's son, John
• 46:08
  Poderets, is also the editor of Commentary magazine Now, which is and he
• 46:15
  was speechwriter for Reagan and Bush. So you know, this child of Norman
• 46:21
  Porterets, the child of Irving Crystal, like they're continuing to be influential and
• 46:27
  promote these ideas. I don't know if there's something we can talk about like
• 46:30
  a third generation. I think we're kind of talking about second generation neo cons
• 46:36
  at this point, and they're still alive a lot of them. All right,
• 46:38
  Well, let me here's a transition. I'll read what this article says
• 46:43
  about Strauss. In this reading of strauss quote, his classically trained elite is
• 46:47
  little more than a reconstituted pre modern aristocracy, encouraged to believe that their intellectual
• 46:53
  superiority and titles them to rule over their fellow citizens and to use any as
• 47:00
  beans at their disposal in this process. So the question is that we've got
• 47:05
  to answer in the next half an hour or so, is reading Strauss himself,
• 47:09
  can you get this out of what Strauss actually said? Because this is
• 47:13
  kind of a matter of debate. We have all the Straussians. Now,
• 47:16
  did they just take Strauss and then apply it the way they wanted to and
• 47:21
  then cause the Iraq War? Or is this a direct in the direct lineage
• 47:24
  of Straussian thinking? So I would say that it's not direct. I would
• 47:31
  say that, like with any interesting philosophers, there's a few different ways of
• 47:36
  interpreting. But I think that there's a couple of key aspects, especially in
• 47:39
  what we read here persecution in the art writing pretty short essay that certainly invites
• 47:45
  I would say, a certain kind of aristocratic, hierarchical thinking that could then
• 47:50
  lend itself. Now do I think that reading stress will lead you to be
• 47:52
  a neoconservative. Absolutely not, And I actually know many people who really like
• 47:55
  the approach to Strosians and are not conservatives at all. Right, it's a
• 48:00
  way of reading the text. But I would say two things are important in
• 48:06
  that kind of open the door to more conservative styles of thinking. And I
• 48:09
  would say the first one we talked about at the beginning, which is that
• 48:14
  the public cannot handle certain truths. So I would say, like the math
• 48:17
  the fact that like for him, a premise is that the mass public is
• 48:22
  like vulnerable to the effects of certain kinds of truths and they need to be
• 48:25
  protected from it. And that philosophers and thoughtful, careful thinkers kind of have
• 48:32
  some sort of authority or are in a better position that is, you know,
• 48:37
  invites a certain kind of aristocratic thinking. And then I would say that
• 48:40
  another one, which is related, is that there is such a thing as
• 48:49
  this idea of a great thinker. Straussians love to talk about how there are
• 48:54
  these great thinkers, and I would say that they talk about them in a
• 48:59
  way that almost deifies them. And I would say that this is my biggest
• 49:04
  disagreement, because you know, one of the thoughts I was having when I
• 49:07
  was reading the Strauss. I was actually thinking about kind of pills his worldview
• 49:10
  a little bit, and I was thinking that there's some, you know,
• 49:14
  room for agreement in terms of the certain nihilistic aspects about you know, that
• 49:19
  these things are expressions of like ideology. There's some sort of a compatibility there.
• 49:23
  But but where I think the Strosians go wrong is and I kind of
• 49:28
  have a couple of selections from the text. So one of the key premises
• 49:35
  of Strosian reading of the text is that they're these great thinkers, as I
• 49:38
  mentioned right, Basically, they don't make mistakes, okay, And so because
• 49:43
  they don't make mistakes, then when you see contradictions or you see things that
• 49:47
  are a little bit confusing, well he must the author must have done that
• 49:51
  for a reason. And that's where you can find your esoteric reading of it
• 49:54
  and you can interpret. So, to quote from Strauss, he says,
• 49:59
  if a master of the art of writing commits such blunders as would shame an
• 50:02
  intelligent high school boy, it is reasonable to assume that they are intentional,
• 50:07
  especially if the author discusses, however, incidentally, the possibility of intentional blunders
• 50:15
  in their writing, so like, if you see a big mistake, basically
• 50:19
  you have to you should assume that it's purposeful. And a lot of this
• 50:22
  this essay also kind of deals with oh, these like naive dominant readers of
• 50:29
  text in philosophy right now who just read it at face value, Like they're
• 50:32
  so silly and they're so quick to dismiss. Oh if you see like an
• 50:37
  author's views seemingly change from text to text, well that must mean that their
• 50:42
  views changed. Whereas the Strossian wants to be a lot more suspicious and be
• 50:45
  like, oh, you know if Machiavelli said something different in you know,
• 50:49
  the discourses on Levy versus the Prince. You know, Oh, or that's
• 50:53
  actually a bad example, because I would say that they're actually that one.
• 50:57
  Maybe they are actually more consistent than people think. That don't have to do
• 51:00
  with Strosianism, but out of a Nietzscheer whatever, all these other texts where
• 51:02
  like their views seem to change over time. The Strosian, i would say,
• 51:07
  has this assumption that the great thinkers have a really stable, coherent view
• 51:13
  of the world and it's our job to find it, and there's no possibility
• 51:16
  that they could have made a mistake that's not intentional, and that is in
• 51:20
  itself. I would say that, like, I kind of agree with Strosians
• 51:22
  in a way, and maybe some of the listeners who know me better know
• 51:27
  that, you know, I'm somewhat amenable to being like, yeah, the
• 51:30
  public is, you know, not stupid, but like the public can be
• 51:32
  manipulated in all kinds of ways. I think I kind of agree with that,
• 51:37
  and that there are these truths and these myths that we believe. But
• 51:40
  where I think I diverge with the Strosian is to think that this elite class
• 51:45
  is going to be any better. I think elite classes are just as liable
• 51:49
  to make all kinds of ridiculous mistakes as we saw with the Bush administration.
• 51:52
  And I think is this is also true with the philosopher, I don't.
• 51:55
  I think that this is a myth their own, kind of like noble lie
• 52:00
  that they tell themselves, is that there are such thing as great thinkers who
• 52:02
  don't make mistakes. There's also a why you did a great, great job
• 52:07
  on that explanation, But there's also a why to that, and that's because
• 52:10
  for him, the great thinker always realizes they're in the midst of a polity,
• 52:16
  and the polity doesn't want the truth. So the prime example is Plato,
• 52:22
  but not just Plato, I mean, sorry Socrates. Socrates had to
• 52:27
  be condemned to death because by one interpretation he was just really fucking annoying,
• 52:32
  but on this interpretation, it was because he was so wise, and a
• 52:36
  wise man can't show his cards because the stupid, opinionated masses, including those
• 52:43
  with power, will just kill him. So this carries throughout political history up
• 52:47
  to the twentieth century in Strauss's mind, because you know, in the sixteenth
• 52:53
  century or so, you know, beating of Age of reason, a lot
• 52:57
  of these philosophers are deists or atheists, but you're not allowed to be that
• 53:01
  in public. You can't say that. So as a result, these intelligent
• 53:08
  thinkers are connected by this realization. So then they write in code, they
• 53:14
  write secretly for each other to be like, you know, I know there's
• 53:16
  no God, but and if you read me carefully, you're going to realize
• 53:21
  that we are of a similar class. We're friends that we have to keep
• 53:27
  these opinions secret, but I also want to get my ideas out to my
• 53:30
  secret friends. And then if the government censors or an ordinary person reads these
• 53:36
  books that are written in this code, they're not going to see anything that
• 53:39
  offends them, but the friends of the philosopher will be able to understand it.
• 53:45
  So, you know, this is something I wish we're true. I
• 53:46
  think I agree with you. I wish it were true because this gives a
• 53:50
  really romantic perspective, and it's why it sucks in dumb guys, young bastically.
• 53:54
  Yeah, those who we know on this podcast affectionately as twenty year olds.
• 54:00
  Well, I mean I talked about this with Matt Simon when we interviewed
• 54:04
  him, me and Matt a while ago for this podcast. He's of the
• 54:06
  Know Your Enemy podcast, and he was a former right wing intellectual at the
• 54:09
  University of Virginia, and he hung around in right wing intellectual circles met a
• 54:15
  lot of these people. I think he I think he met Harvey Mansfield.
• 54:20
  He's met a lot of these people and used to hang out with them,
• 54:22
  right, And we get invited to all these things. And he talked about
• 54:24
  the experience of being a young man in academia and how you have these professors
• 54:30
  who tell you, oh, like you have the kind of mind that you
• 54:34
  can read these texts and we can together understand these truths about society, and
• 54:40
  society is being lied to on purpose, and it's our jobs to kind of
• 54:44
  foster and safeguard this knowledge. And we're going to meet together. And how
• 54:47
  fucking exciting that was, right to be this young person who's being introduced to
• 54:52
  books and you have this really exciting way of reading the text. I mean,
• 54:57
  it's no wonder it can pull some people in, right, Like,
• 54:59
  I totally get it is grumer cultists. There's a huge there's a humongous analogy
• 55:05
  here between this sort of political gnosticism or esotericism and like the scientific tradition back
• 55:14
  when like alchemy was a thing, right, because that was also about secret
• 55:19
  interpretations, you know, like the Hermes trismagestus and the sort of alchemical tradition.
• 55:25
  You get really exploding out from the Renaissance, you know, people like
• 55:30
  Pico della Mirandola and even even Isaac Newton was an alchemist. And the idea
• 55:36
  of secret knowledge being coded into texts and you need a kind of key to
• 55:40
  interpret these things and so getting scientific knowledge, you know, and keeping them
• 55:46
  out of the hands of the wrong people and having the right way of decoding
• 55:52
  the text was Yeah, originally kind of born. It seems in a scientific
• 55:58
  tradition. Don't know if it predates this, like political this seems very new
• 56:04
  reading the old political philosophies in this way, but it seems very analogous to
• 56:09
  me, except for alchemy. It's you know about Philosopher's stone transforming metals into
• 56:15
  gold and things like that, rather than how to organize a society. Yeah,
• 56:20
  it's kind of like kabbalistic decoding or or high Deggre. Even they never
• 56:27
  the article didn't mention why this was hidegerion, but I think you can see
• 56:30
  it there the truths in language if you uncover it the way that stupid people
• 56:36
  use it. But all of this is the same cultic structure. That's I
• 56:39
  have a super high IQ. Anyone who understands me also has a super high
• 56:45
  IQ. Hey, do you want to cover read books with me? Oh?
• 56:49
  By the way, once you're reading books with me, be careful because
• 56:52
  if you let the masses realize this, they are going to persecute you because
• 56:57
  they are low IQ. So you have to keep this secret. And you
• 57:00
  know exactly the type of people that this rhetoric attracts. The annoying campus conservative
• 57:09
  international relations Dipshitz who grew up in rural Alberta, and now they're trying to
• 57:14
  go get an internship in Ottawa so they could defend Western civilization. So I
• 57:19
  have a funny example of a Leo Stross interpretation of a text. So this
• 57:22
  is from It's kind of famous. Some of you might be familiar with it.
• 57:25
  It's like this history of political thought textbook edited by Strauss and Crops.
• 57:31
  It's like this Purple book. A lot of people even talk about it.
• 57:34
  Oh, the Purple Politics book. It's got a bunch of essays about the
• 57:37
  history of political thought. And the one on Machiavelli's written by Leo Strauss,
• 57:42
  and he gets a little bit numerological here. It's pretty funny. He says
• 57:45
  here, quote, we have seen that the number of chapters in the Discourses
• 57:50
  is meaningful and has been deliberately chosen. We may thus be induced to wonder
• 57:53
  whether the number of chapters in the Prince is not also meaningful. The Prince
• 57:58
  consists of twenty six chapters. Twenty six is the numerical value of the letters
• 58:02
  of the Sacred name of God in Hebrew from the Tetragammaton. But did MACIEVELI
• 58:08
  know this, I do not know. Twenty six equals two times thirteen.
• 58:14
  Thirteen is now one for quite some time has been considered an unlucky number,
• 58:17
  but in former times it was also and even primarily considered a lucky number.
• 58:22
  So twice thirteen might mean both good luck and bad luck, and hence altogether
• 58:28
  luck fortuna. Oh my god, so a case can be made. Yeah,
• 58:32
  it meant he was doing kabala analogically, but he's literally just doing cobala.
• 58:37
  Yeah, he really is. He really is applying like gnostic methods of
• 58:42
  interpretation to these political texts. Yeah, so, I mean it's right there.
• 58:46
  God damn not to say. I never knew that he went that far.
• 58:51
  I know him as an interesting hermony, as someone who gets stuff out
• 58:54
  of texts that no one else does and probably no one else can using standard
• 59:00
  traditional historicism. But I'm in favor of this, not in favor of the
• 59:02
  Iraq war or grooming twenty year olds. But why not, fuck it,
• 59:07
  let's do cobo. That's all right. Like this is such an This is
• 59:12
  such an extreme hermeneutic, like an extreme way of interpreting texts, because it's
• 59:17
  a religious text. That's the only equivalent is reading the Bible. You know,
• 59:22
  like a classic interpretation of the Prince is like trying to square it with
• 59:28
  like Machiavelli's writings on democracy and his other things, is that the Prince was
• 59:32
  written in exile and that he was writing it to was it Ludovico Medici as
• 59:38
  a kind of gift in order to encourage them to, you know, let
• 59:43
  him back in to Florence. Like that's that that kind of interpretation to explain,
• 59:49
  you know, why Machiavelli's views seem to also like diverge between texts.
• 59:54
  Is a contextualist kind of explanation, right, le see that as relativistic.
• 1:00:00
  They would see that as kind of relativistic because like they want to see these
• 1:00:05
  eternal truths that are being expressed in these secret ways. Yeah, well that's
• 1:00:08
  another thing. That's that's where they're their fight with historicism also comes in.
• 1:00:13
  Right. They always talk about historicism being wrong because that's I guess on their
• 1:00:16
  view, it's kind of another way of it's kind of a placeholder for relativism
• 1:00:20
  for the Strosian, Like historicism for them just means like that everything is culture
• 1:00:24
  is historically contingent that like people change as time changes, and like, oh,
• 1:00:30
  we can't really know what it was like to be back in Greece because
• 1:00:32
  they had different values. And they think that's nonsense. No, there's there's
• 1:00:37
  eternal human truths, and we're dealing with the same eternal problems all the time,
• 1:00:40
  and people are fickle in the same way that they were back then.
• 1:00:45
  The you know, the conditions the history doesn't fundamentally change that ultimate nature.
• 1:00:50
  So I have another example of this kind of interpretation method. And actually this
• 1:00:57
  is a paragraph that Irving Crystal pulls out of this text. So this text,
• 1:01:06
  The Persecution in the Art of Writing by Leo Straus, was written in
• 1:01:08
  nineteen forty one. Irving Crystal is reading it, and in nineteen fifty two
• 1:01:15
  he publishes an article about this text called The Hidden Truth The Philosopher's Hidden Truth.
• 1:01:23
  But this is him quoting, you know, Leo Strauss, and Leo
• 1:01:30
  Strauss gives a sort of example of his interpretation method. And so it's like
• 1:01:35
  a thought experiment. And Strauss says, we can easily imagine that a historian
• 1:01:39
  living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only
• 1:01:47
  party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of
• 1:01:52
  the government sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him from
• 1:02:00
  publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would,
• 1:02:07
  of course, have to state the liberal view before attacking it, and
• 1:02:10
  he would have to make that statement in the quiet, unspectacular, and somewhat
• 1:02:15
  boring manner which would seem natural. He would use many technical terms, give
• 1:02:21
  many quotations, and attach undue importance to insignificant details. Only when he reached
• 1:02:28
  the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse
• 1:02:34
  and lively style, which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who
• 1:02:37
  love to think. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a
• 1:02:43
  glimpse of the forbidden fruit the attack. The bulk of the book would consist
• 1:02:49
  of virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the Holy Book or books of
• 1:02:53
  the ruling party. So he's it's the strangest kind of thing. It's this
• 1:03:00
  view that there's this sort of coding, yeah, this way of like coding
• 1:03:06
  your views into the text in this like key part, and you have to
• 1:03:09
  sort of know where to look for it and how to interpret it, and
• 1:03:14
  then you see the whole text in a totally new light. But this is
• 1:03:17
  the idea, I guess, of writing under persecution, right, So I
• 1:03:22
  guess I don't know what the counterpart would be for this. You live under
• 1:03:25
  a liberal kind of consensus and you want to attack that consensus. And you've
• 1:03:29
  got to codify your views in certain ways so that they're acceptable and get out
• 1:03:34
  there, but only to other people who are already perceptive and have the sort
• 1:03:37
  of tools to interpret what you're saying, and for everybody else it would just
• 1:03:43
  seem like, you know, like a technical work. Yeah. So now
• 1:03:45
  we don't have this situation anymore because you can write whatever you want and no
• 1:03:50
  one will pay attention to it anyway. But this gives like an intellectual,
• 1:03:54
  rich historical meaning to playing the role of philosopher. You say that because when
• 1:04:00
  I was reading I don't know if you thought of this when when you were
• 1:04:01
  reading The Persecution in the Art of Writing. But he's talking about like,
• 1:04:05
  you know, oh, like the SAE, like the heterodox views in a
• 1:04:08
  liberal society, and I was like, you know, he does concede.
• 1:04:12
  He's like now you can pretty much write whatever you want. But at the
• 1:04:14
  same time he still said that there's certain things that you maybe can't say all
• 1:04:16
  the time. You have to be a little bit careful about them. And
• 1:04:18
  I was just thinking about from I was imagining a Conservative being like, oh,
• 1:04:21
  yeah, like right now, it's with wokeness that you have to you
• 1:04:24
  know, yeah, you can't. You have to disguise those views and your
• 1:04:29
  write in your work if you want, if you want to be in academia
• 1:04:30
  and like say, like some stuff about I don't know that questions something some
• 1:04:34
  sort of consensus about, and for it to get uptick, you have to
• 1:04:38
  maybe disguise it somehow. I don't know that's true, but I don't know
• 1:04:41
  if you got to hide it though. They usually just load up the old
• 1:04:44
  YouTube and watch the corporate donations for him exactly. The more like racist ends
• 1:04:49
  of the Conservative Party. No, they can't just come out and be racist,
• 1:04:53
  so they have to sort of couch their views in sort of indirect terminal,
• 1:05:00
  right, like they can't go back to like Jim Crow laws, but
• 1:05:03
  you know they can talk about like you know, they can still do the
• 1:05:08
  gerrymandering thing, which seems more like a technical election thing, but it's really
• 1:05:13
  like driven by a kind of racism, right, same with like redlining and
• 1:05:16
  getting around those sorts of things. Like they just can't, you know,
• 1:05:20
  they can't be explicitly X. So they sort of say why and I mean
• 1:05:26
  like they say something different, but it really means X. But they're coding
• 1:05:31
  it in various ways that will achieve whatever X is designed to achieve. But
• 1:05:38
  just it doesn't, you know, it doesn't draw the heat that just being
• 1:05:41
  like explicitly you know, racist or you know, explicitly attacking abortion would would
• 1:05:46
  you know, it wouldn't bring that flack. Yeah, I'd want to qualify
• 1:05:50
  that a little bit to say that's regular political double speak, whereas this is
• 1:05:56
  supposed to be the special gift that philosophers have to ide identify one another.
• 1:06:00
  Right, yeah, this is I don't know, it's kind of exhausting.
• 1:06:03
  Just like with Nietzsche, any twenty year old who reads it thinks, oh,
• 1:06:09
  here the smart ones he's talking about me. I am like these guys,
• 1:06:13
  I'm on the in group, and it's everyone else who makes fun of
• 1:06:15
  me. Those are the dumb herd animals. So beyond that feeling that subjective
• 1:06:23
  feeling as a criterion, how are you supposed to really identify a philosopher?
• 1:06:28
  Well, I remember, I remember when when we had Clifford Orwin in our
• 1:06:30
  class, and there's a PhD seminar for political theorists and each week we would
• 1:06:35
  have a different theorist from our department come. And I remember the week that
• 1:06:39
  that Clifford Rwin came to Straus kind like the main Yeah, he's the only
• 1:06:44
  one who's left who's a strousian who studied under Alan Bloom and all these other
• 1:06:46
  people. And he someone had the question about like, well, so are
• 1:06:53
  you so then do you have to concede that Leo Strauss isn't one of those
• 1:06:57
  great thinkers since he's not being esoteric right because he's telling us all about it,
• 1:07:00
  right, So like isn't so? How could Leo Streuss himself? So
• 1:07:03
  Leo Stress must not be, you know, one of a great thinker because
• 1:07:09
  he's telling us everything. I don't know, he didn't really have a guy.
• 1:07:13
  I can't remember what his response is, to be fair, but I
• 1:07:15
  just thought the question was good, yeah, or he said them in private.
• 1:07:17
  But this is like what is it? This is for people who are
• 1:07:20
  going to be like oh, I'm on the inside of that cold You would
• 1:07:23
  never you would never read this and be like, oh, yeah, I'm
• 1:07:26
  one of the dumb people. Yeah. Well, Strauss's sort of the influence
• 1:07:33
  of Straussianism in the Neokon interpretation of him anyway, seems to have, you
• 1:07:41
  know, influenced a small number of very powerful people that were able to exert
• 1:07:45
  their interpretation of Stress's texts the esotericism stands. That's it. This is the
• 1:07:55
  difference between like a conspiracy and then like nerds who think that they're doing a
• 1:08:00
  conspiracy because they actually did it, or they at least got the author of
• 1:08:03
  this article to believe that they did it. What makes this a little bit
• 1:08:08
  funny, especially because we keep going back to the Nietzschean thing. Nietzsche is
• 1:08:15
  half on the side of this where it's like the masses are dumb, I
• 1:08:18
  am so smart. But the other side of it is Nietzsche is like,
• 1:08:24
  in terms of life, an unsuccessful loser, and he kind of lamb bases
• 1:08:28
  intellectuals who think they know this kind of stuff also as just losers in real
• 1:08:33
  life. And he said this about Socrates, which is who Leo Strauss is
• 1:08:38
  holding up or at least Plato writing about Socrates, like Nizja says that the
• 1:08:43
  Greeks didn't hate Socrates because he was telling the truth. They hated him because
• 1:08:46
  he was annoying and ugly. And this is where we get back to jocks
• 1:08:51
  versus nerds. He was ugly, low born, and so invented the dialogic
• 1:08:57
  method out of revenge so we could gound embarrassing the aristocracy, and the aristocracy
• 1:09:03
  eventually got tired of it and like, okay, you have to kill yourself,
• 1:09:08
  you little bitch. And then he chose to because he was a pussy.
• 1:09:11
  Yeah. The aristocrats then would have been I guess like the jocks,
• 1:09:14
  the warrior class. Yeah, exactly. Now, the Strauss interpretation of the
• 1:09:18
  same thing is that Plato saw this happen. Plato saw the truth die or
• 1:09:25
  the truth was forced to kill itself. So Plato was the one who invented
• 1:09:29
  this secret method because socrates problem was that he went around talking to people and
• 1:09:34
  people got annoyed. So forever after this point, now we have to keep
• 1:09:39
  it secret. We'll just write in texts to each other, but we'll always
• 1:09:45
  try to get the ear of power, like Machiavelli did. We'll try to
• 1:09:47
  get the ear of power, and then fast forward to these white house nerds
• 1:09:54
  somewhere down the line in this tradition, and they're like, no, all
• 1:09:58
  we really need to do is get into their ears, because then we'll be
• 1:10:02
  We'll be like little Finger behind the we're playing the game of thrones, and
• 1:10:06
  they're just thinking that they're playing the game of thrones. But that just perfectly
• 1:10:11
  describes these nerds and the kind of people that would be drawn to esotericism in
• 1:10:15
  general, is you are the one with all the secret power, and the
• 1:10:19
  people that you're influencing, they're just your puppets in real time that you can
• 1:10:27
  just pull their strings and the real power. Like Cheney, for example,
• 1:10:31
  he's probably like, Okay, who the fuck are you? Like if I
• 1:10:34
  feel like if Cheney read this, you know, CEO of Halliburton, he
• 1:10:39
  would read this and be like, shut up, nerd. Yeah. But
• 1:10:44
  then on the other hand, he wouldn't know that. I mean he might
• 1:10:47
  he would, but he might not know that. Like what, But this
• 1:10:50
  has all had a major influence on the political party that you were a part
• 1:10:55
  of, and it's had a huge influence on American foreign policy and policy and
• 1:11:00
  he'd be like, yeah, but I'm rich and I fucked up, saddam,
• 1:11:03
  So who are you with your little disguise? Is it? I don't
• 1:11:06
  know, Like, I really don't know if this is the jocks versus nerds,
• 1:11:10
  which kind of Nietzsche thought it was. But Nietzsche was a nerd who
• 1:11:14
  always wanted to be a jock. But this is still like a revenge of
• 1:11:17
  the nerds, almost a resultable kind of It looks like they're in power,
• 1:11:23
  but we are secretly in power. And it's only eight guys. So you
• 1:11:27
  know, that kind of makes me question, you know, is this conspiracy
• 1:11:31
  actually what it looks like, or is it a bunch of people who think
• 1:11:34
  they are really important in a much grander you might say capital interests sort of
• 1:11:41
  conspiracy. Well, yeah, I would say definitely. You know, generally
• 1:11:45
  the New Right has a lot of corporate funding behind it, so I think
• 1:11:48
  neoliberalism, you know, is baked into this cake as well, because that's
• 1:11:55
  what they want, is basically neoliberal policy, because it gives them more freedom
• 1:12:00
  and better capital accumulation. But then, yeah, a lot of this influence
• 1:12:03
  comes out of the University of Chicago as well. I think Strauss worked there
• 1:12:09
  among other influential people on the neo con movement. And you know what came
• 1:12:14
  a little while later from University Chicago, the Chicago Boys and the Freedman neoliberalism.
• 1:12:24
  I mean, the University of Chicago has been like very influential in all
• 1:12:28
  of this, like a hub almost that I don't know, what do you
• 1:12:32
  think. I'm kind of arguing this looks like a conspiracy, but they're not
• 1:12:39
  that important if you if you if you look at the broad landscape of even
• 1:12:44
  the Bush administration, He's there's these eight guys, Yeah, but there's also
• 1:12:48
  the Bush family and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Connolly's a rise and the Kochs and
• 1:12:54
  pat Robertson and their interests all happened to align. But to say that these
• 1:13:00
  guys were pulling the strings that brought all the pieces into play, like,
• 1:13:02
  I just think they're way overrating their importance. And then they're also overrating the
• 1:13:09
  importance of ideas in general, which is you know the primary sit well,
• 1:13:14
  I mean, he addresses this directly. You know, he calls it an
• 1:13:17
  interlocking networks of people in and around the Bush administration, and he says,
• 1:13:24
  you know, some have resorted to conspiracy theory to establish connections between these networks,
• 1:13:30
  but this is not necessary, and he says that, you know,
• 1:13:33
  my view is that the Bush doctrine and the views of the President himself represents
• 1:13:39
  a kind of hybrid of these alliance perspectives with the neo Conservatives and the Straussian
• 1:13:45
  influences at the forefront of some of the most significant sites of doctrinal policy.
• 1:13:50
  So he basically just says, yeah, it's like complicated, and there's different
• 1:13:54
  networks and different like views involved, but you know, these people have had
• 1:14:00
  an influence in very key areas. And again, like you know, the
• 1:14:04
  broader New right, which includes the religious elements, but these guys are atheists.
• 1:14:12
  It involves people from middle and upper class, but the New Conservatives are
• 1:14:15
  generally working class and that sort of stuff. Right, So there is all
• 1:14:19
  these other origins and networks and fund different funding bodies and different institutions. But
• 1:14:28
  you know, yeah, I guess, I guess it's not conspiracy theory because
• 1:14:33
  this isn't all being orchestrated by the small group of people who all have like
• 1:14:39
  the same views. It's just, you know, it's a it's a it
• 1:14:43
  is a power game, and for some time these people have been influenced,
• 1:14:48
  influential basically mostly from the you know, Reagan administration down to Bush Junior,
• 1:14:57
  and they get marginalized every now and then when a Democrat like Bill Clinton gets
• 1:15:01
  in there, and then they come back with a vengeance. I just don't
• 1:15:05
  think that, Yeah, Leo Strauss's particular philosophy is the cna quand on of
• 1:15:12
  neo conservatism. No, no, so I agree. I think what I
• 1:15:15
  was going to say, what I was going to say about that question is,
• 1:15:20
  you know, kind of what like going back to my explanation of like
• 1:15:24
  the Leo Strouss position in his actual text is like I think that what it
• 1:15:28
  can provide is it can provide some sort of philosophical grounds for justifying a certain
• 1:15:32
  orientation a group of people might already have. Right, So, like,
• 1:15:35
  I just think that these neocons were, like Eric was saying, a kind
• 1:15:40
  of overlapping bunch of different interests converging, and you know, I think what
• 1:15:44
  a position like this can do, or like this kind of intellectual foundation can
• 1:15:48
  do is just sort of justify something. And you know, maybe some of
• 1:15:53
  these people in the administration felt less bad or questioned less what they were doing
• 1:15:57
  because they had this kind of like Leo Strouss in the back maybe at best,
• 1:16:01
  Yeah, provides a kind of legitimacy. It gives it a kind of
• 1:16:04
  intellectual legitimacy and justifies its position in universities. It gives it a kind of
• 1:16:11
  mystique. I've personally, I think that's the big thing. It's the mystique.
• 1:16:15
  It's being part of this club where you have a secret, very important
• 1:16:20
  role to play. I think you don't need any of this if you have
• 1:16:24
  actual power. But this is like the the secret society in group versus out
• 1:16:30
  group part that probably matters to some psychologically disposed to it. Yeah, there's
• 1:16:36
  a kind of smoke and mirrors effect that the Straussian influence injects into all of
• 1:16:43
  this, because you know, I haven't read enough Strauss, but I don't
• 1:16:46
  see where you know, let's say, Paul Wolfowitz is like the architect here
• 1:16:51
  of like foreign policy, and you know it's it's extraordinarily imperialistic, right,
• 1:16:59
  like we about American imperialism even today. And I think a lot of the
• 1:17:04
  basic tenets of that were set out by the neo conservatives. But I don't
• 1:17:08
  really see where that comes from from Strauss with Strauss sort of openly imperialistic in
• 1:17:14
  any of these texts. I'm not entirely sure, but like, yeah,
• 1:17:17
  I don't see where like aggressive foreign policy comes from. It seems like more
• 1:17:24
  like, yeah, these are like clothes to dress up imperialism and you know
• 1:17:29
  war again, like war and intervention, and like America acting like a bully
• 1:17:34
  all over the planet. Like you can't just say that outright, you have
• 1:17:38
  to couch it in language like you know, we're the defenders of democracy.
• 1:17:42
  There you go, that's a dog whistle for imperialist intervention or like there's human
• 1:17:46
  rights violations going on here in this you know, communist country happens to be
• 1:17:53
  trying to nationalize their oil industry or something, so like human rights violations,
• 1:17:57
  let go away. It becomes another dog whistle for America imperialism. But you
• 1:18:01
  know, this, this this secretiveness and this writing like acting like you're persecuted,
• 1:18:09
  and this writing in a kind of obscure, oblique way about things seems
• 1:18:15
  to you know, get its at least its intellectual credentials from Strauss, but
• 1:18:19
  the more concrete stuff, Yeah, I don't see where that comes from.
• 1:18:23
  Also, this didn't really work right the Iraq war is considered a failure.
• 1:18:29
  They could never do a lot of the smaller wars that they probably want to
• 1:18:31
  do. They can never do one again because everyone still remembers. So if
• 1:18:35
  this were the secret plan of a shadowy cabal, it didn't really advance their
• 1:18:41
  worldview. It probably put it on the back foot, if anything. Yeah,
• 1:18:45
  I mean I would say that to some extent, even the Tea Party
• 1:18:46
  movement on the right in America in kind of the Obama years certainly a reaction
• 1:18:51
  to Obama. But I also think also like a reaction to like ignoring like
• 1:18:58
  domestic issues and being like hawkish also, and also the financial crisis, which
• 1:19:01
  I think, you know was also kind of a neo conservative potentially cut like
• 1:19:08
  caused by neoconservatives to some extent. This line about persecution that Strauss writes is
• 1:19:15
  so clear, you know, he says, persecution then gives rise to a
• 1:19:17
  particular a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature
• 1:19:25
  in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines end
• 1:19:30
  quote. So there you go, truth. But you have to learn how
• 1:19:34
  to read between the lines in the right way to get the truth out.
• 1:19:38
  And it doesn't seem also like a coincidence that a lot of these people were
• 1:19:44
  a lot of these neo conservatives were like literature scholars and stuff like who was
• 1:19:49
  that Lionel Trilling was like no, Norman Podretz's teacher, And a lot of
• 1:19:55
  them were part of like groups of New York intellectual societies or whatever. I
• 1:19:59
  think there's one that has that name, and they were a lot of them
• 1:20:02
  were sort of like doing literary and kind of philosophical scholarship rather than so you
• 1:20:11
  can see why they would probably be kind of, you know, at least
• 1:20:15
  amenable to this strange kind of esoteric writing. And you know, they like
• 1:20:19
  to have kind of edgy ideas because then they can see themselves as persecuted,
• 1:20:24
  and then that gives them the excuse to sort of read Strauss and and learn
• 1:20:29
  how to write under persecution, which means hiding the truth. And whether it's
• 1:20:34
  all just like a freaking game, and you know, in the end,
• 1:20:39
  they just want to destroy the welfare state and make America into the global superpower.
• 1:20:45
  I don't know if any of this is necessary to that, but it
• 1:20:48
  seems like it's a little game they've sort of invented to play amongst themselves and
• 1:20:57
  I don't know, maybe give it a more intergenerate rational sustainability to all of
• 1:21:01
  this. It's like the kind of the web that ties this together rather than
• 1:21:08
  something that is like really concrete and like here's the list of things we'd like
• 1:21:12
  to achieve. Now there's nothing like that. That's the other thing about this
• 1:21:15
  is they're spelling their own do not. I mean, they're not spelling it
• 1:21:18
  just the content sphere. Everyone's got a podcast, everyone's got a column,
• 1:21:24
  everyone's got a blog. No one is looking for these secret intellectuals who view
• 1:21:29
  themselves so highly in order to spend like three hours decoding their texts. So
• 1:21:33
  just from a from a media ecology perspective, if you're holding to this,
• 1:21:39
  you're out of the game, I say, because no one's going to spend
• 1:21:42
  this much time reading your set. Yeah, there can't really be the emerging
• 1:21:45
  gents of a new esoteric writer. Like that's a dead and gone no one
• 1:21:49
  if it ever existed, no one's doing it anymore. Yeah, because like
• 1:21:54
  that persecution angle has just kind of gone global, Like you know, like
• 1:21:57
  a lot of conservatives who get intrare canceled right, Like that's the big response
• 1:22:01
  to being canceled is like, you know, my ideas are worthwhile, but
• 1:22:05
  like I'm just being persecuted because of some kind of moralistic views that that people
• 1:22:12
  have, and that my ideas are really worthwhile. And then then and then
• 1:22:15
  they can sort of sell themselves as like the kind of persecuted intellectual. The
• 1:22:23
  it's kind of detached from the neo conservative stressess everyone's the main character and everyone's
• 1:22:28
  everyone's doing their own identity politics. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of gone
• 1:22:32
  global. They're called well collapse based on that alone. If it hasn't already,
• 1:22:36
  I bet you they're reading this at the University of Austin. Yeah,
• 1:22:42
  the neo conservative influence maybe, like we said, has gone a bit towards
• 1:22:46
  the Democratic Party now. So we'll have to see if the persecuted intellectual the
• 1:22:54
  kind of you know, that sort of thing is still a core strategy in
• 1:22:59
  the way that they communicate with each other. Yeah, or at least they
• 1:23:02
  give a certain coherence to their project, even if it's just kind of flavor
• 1:23:06
  text. Yeah, but even in academy it's kind of dying a little bit.
• 1:23:11
  Strossians. I mean, there's there's only one left to Toronto and they're
• 1:23:15
  used to be a lot more. Well, if the conspiracy is still happening,
• 1:23:18
  we want you to be on the lookout everyone, because they might be
• 1:23:24
  your neighbor, they might be your friend. But on the other end,
• 1:23:26
  don't avoid like Stress's writings, like there's actually some pretty fun stuff, like
• 1:23:29
  is that say on tyranny is pretty fun? There's there's good stuff there to
• 1:23:31
  be honest, Yeah, that's true. I think he's a great writer.
• 1:23:34
  And those funding, those connections they had and those funding networks that they were
• 1:23:39
  a part of have not disappeared, and they continue to be influential. And
• 1:23:44
  to think that they've completely like shifted their position and expelled all the neo conservative
• 1:23:48
  ideology seems to me like unlikely. So that's because the conservative that's because conservatives
• 1:23:55
  in general are just better at organizing with a bunch of disagreeing people. So
• 1:23:59
  it's like, you know, it's not like you can ever just be like,
• 1:24:02
  oh, you know, the neocons or this, it doesn't matter because
• 1:24:05
  conservatism in general is just so good at at mobilizing to like defend certain interests
• 1:24:12
  that it like doesn't really matter if the neocons are gone or whatever, it's
• 1:24:15
  you know, it's not one, it's they're all. They're a legion.
• 1:24:19
  Yeah, it's true, it's true. I I guess this just this Straussian
• 1:24:25
  sheen gives it, gives it a nice excuse to be, you know,
• 1:24:29
  a small more unified than like a broad based kind of movement. All right,
• 1:24:33
  shall we wrap it there, guys, Yeah, that was good.
• 1:24:38
  Yeah, I think we got through a lot. If you want to look
• 1:24:40
  back at Fukiyama, what is it episode one fifty two or one or two
• 1:24:45
  or three? You mentioned it earlier somewhere thereabouts, so it's a little ways
• 1:24:49
  back. Also, you can look back I don't know what episode it is,
• 1:24:53
  but you can look back for me and Matt's interview with Matt Simon if
• 1:24:58
  you're interested, because he talks a lot about about the whole conservative intellectual school
• 1:25:02
  and stress comes up quite a bit. If I remember correctly, it was
• 1:25:04
  a while ago. It was about three years ago, so you might have
• 1:25:08
  to dig through the logs because I don't have it on hand. But anyway,
• 1:25:11
  thank you listeners, Thank you guys, thank you for the discussion,
• 1:25:15
  and stay tuned till next week. Yes, until next time, nerd Nerds
• 1:25:21
  for Life on the Pill Pod like subscribe please