A Geek History of Time - Episode 264 - The Mandalorian and Distributism, Is This the Way With Gabriel Gipe

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

We were saying that we were going to get into the movies. Yeah, and I'm only going to get into a few of them because there were way too goddamn many for me to really be interested in telling you this clone version or this clone version in the early studio system. It's a good metric to know in a story arc. Where should I be? Oh, there's Beast. I should step over here. At some point, I'm going to have to sit down with you, like, and force you, like, pump you full of coffee and be like, no, okay, look. And are swiftly and brutally put down by the Minutemen who use bayonets to get their point across.

Well done there. I'm good Damian, and I'm also glad that I got your name right this time. I apologize for that one TikTok video. Men of this generation wound up serving the whole lot of them as a percentage of the population because of the war, because of a whole lot of other stuff. Oh yeah.

And actually in his case, it was pre-war, but, but you know, I was joking. Did he seriously join the American Navy? He did. This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect nursery to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. And I am very glad to be in my, my guest room slash office here in the house right now to record this because this is at the tail end of a day in which we had a couple of other families over

for a playdate. So our house was full of people. And I'm an extrovert, but there's a certain level at which when you have six adults and three, five, almost six-year-olds, and then two younger kids under that age, the amount of, of the amount and the volume of the background noise just becomes too much. And I mean, it was great to their, their, you know, friends of ours, we've known them as long as our son has been around actually longer. and it was great to see everybody But like I was very happy when the house got quiet again everybody left

And now I'm tucked away here in the guest room and I can kind of you know Bleed off the extrovert energy I got from all of that people in earlier. So that's that's Where I am right now. How are you doing? Well, I'm Damian Harmony. I am a US history teacher up here in Northern California. And last night, on the way home from a game, I was driving down the main thoroughfare

to get to where I turn. And I was stopped by a lot of people in yellow vests and flashlights. It was clear that I was meant to stop so I slowed down to stop their police officers and the fellow asked me, he said a whole bunch of words really really fast. I heard the word sobriety checkpoint. I think I heard the word license please and so I said I said, I'm sorry, you spoke really fast and I'm new to this. Could you say what you're doing again?

And he says, oh, I'm very sorry about that. I'd like to see your license. This is the variety checkpoint. I said, oh, very well. I get out my license, hand it to him. And he says, ah, where are you coming from? I'm like, my friend's house. Or yeah, my friend's house.

Oh, where's that? Where he lives. All right, well, where are you going to? And I say, then he asked me where I was going. And I said, oh, to my home. And he said, well, where's that? And I said, oh, to my home. And he said, well, where's that? And I said, you're holding my license.

It says so right there. And he hands it back to me. I just handed you the official document that gives you the answer to that question. Weird question, man. So then- You know, you're a cop because you got Cs in high school. Like, this is how I can tell.

Like, come on. So then he asked me me it's not that it's you know It's him flexing at 1130 at night on on a main thoroughfare But then and then he says to me have you been drinking? And I'm like no And he's are you sure? And I couldn't stop laughing. I'm like And he's, are you sure?

And I couldn't stop laughing. I'm like, I'm really sure. Now for our audience who is friends and relatives of Ed's, I've never had a drink of alcohol in my life, not even a drop, and I'm 45 years old. By the time of this recording I'll be 46, and I likely won't have changed that status. And so he's like, are you sure? And I'm like, I couldn't stop laughing. I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. And he's like, are you sure? I'm like. Man, I am in a hybrid wearing a cardigan and listening to my own podcast on the radio.

It's a whole kit. Yes, I'm the most boring person you will meet tonight. Yes, I'm the most boring person you will meet tonight So he waves me on. Do you manage to roast him by roasting yourself is very aikido. Thank you. Thank you So then I'm assuming that you actually got a six year long prison sentence And we'll be working on on Death Star components. Right. For Lockheed Martin. For Starc International.

And we heard that voice again, which means I thought we were done with Andor, but as it turns out, there's more streaming TV shows of Star Wars that need to be dissected and made so that none of us can enjoy them. So I asked Gabriel Gipe to join us again. We have to roll on for everybody. Welcome back, sir. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Have you ever had like a sobriety checklist point or check?

I don't even know what the fuck they're called. You know, for the amount of times that I've been pulled over by the police that know me by name, I have not ever been pulled over for a sobriety checkpoint. But this last week, totally different. So I don't know. This is a terrible segue. I'm not the king of segues anymore. I went to my very first Sacramento Kings game. Oh, wow. Oh, cool.

And I've lived in Sacramento for eight years, so I feel like this is another punch card moment where I'm almost almost at my free sandwich. And I I'm not a sports fan. And I and I say that like I like to go to games where sports are happening and I can get into it, but I I don't know literally all about sports. I don't know teams.

I couldn't tell you the rules of any particular game. If you told me like soccer, football, basketball, baseball, like I know some of the basics, I know the point of it and how to play it. Right. But I don't I don't know the rules. And it was a ton of fun. Obviously the Kings have been doing really well and there's a lot of fanfare. Um, and there's the whole beam aspect and they won against the Oklahoma city Thunder. I think that's what the team was called. And it was, uh, it was just a blast. Even though we were up in nosebleeds and

I was really watching the TV a lot of times, cause I couldn't see the players that great. It was just a blast, even though we were up in nosebleeds and I was really watching the TV a lot of times because I couldn't see the players that great. I definitely got caught up in the whirlwind of it and I get why people do that more often. Go to games and see it. I felt like there was a lot of community spirit there. Comradery. Yeah, camaraderie, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. That is, you know, I, at some point perhaps we'll do an episode on my manifesto on municipal sports.

I'm a big believer that you don't do sports stuff in your community until you have taken care of all of the community's ills. And then with what's left over, then you celebrate your community, because look what you've done. Love that. And if there are more ills, you put the sports stuff on hold,

or if the sports are a private enterprise, I still believe in public ownership of sports teams, like the Green Bay Packers. But if it's- I do know that. Yep, if it's owned by a corporation or a people, then fine, they can kick in as well. Once the ills of the city are taken care of,

we get the sports back. That's always been my theory, but I'm low man on the totem pole when it comes to those kinds of decisions. So, but, well, let's see tonight. Uh, I believe we're, we're, we're shifting from Andor. Um, we're moving forward in the timeline by about 10 years. Is that right? No, 15 years.

Uh, well actually so and or it is five bby So we are moving to bby, of course is And and what's no? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah before battle of Yavett. Oh, I thought it was a big brown Yoda Okay. Well, That's a whole other That's you gotta go. You gotta go searching certain corners of the internet. Yeah, that's my morning B.m. That makes sense because your species is a girl so

Which is what happens after I eat a lot of those So, okay, so yeah that was five BBY. So the events of the Mandalorian take place in the New Republic so it is sometime after The Battle of Endor which I want to say battle of Endor is like two after two years after that one should be three okay it's about nine months after Empire okay yeah all right so yeah so so the Mandalorian is taking place after, you know, the Ewoks through their fireworks display in the middle of the Redwoods. And you know, we have a Republic that is in the process of rebuilding itself.

And in the second and third season second season was was basically the Mandalorian acting as a jump-off point for the Ahsoka Series there was there was a lot of stuff in the second season. That was just like I mean, you know, don't get me wrong. Ahsoka Tano is an amazing character Love it. But like this is not our Main character who is literally the title of the show is is not the center of this now. This is kind of frustrating And so we see Over the course of the three seasons that have been so far

We see a lot of the kind of tension involved in rebuilding the Republic and all that. But that's not what I'm gonna be talking about. I'm gonna be talking about Din Djarin himself, the Mandalorian, and talking about the other Mandalorian factions that we encounter. And I'm gonna need to rely somewhat on your expertise as the guy who knows more about the the deep lore of The Mandalorians then than I do well keep in mind that tends to come from an understanding of the pre the schism Okay, so ten four, but I'll do what I can. That's great. Yeah, okay cool

and so What I when I first need to talk about is Since you know we're talking about real-world stuff I need to talk a little bit about the Industrial Revolution. Hell yeah. Nice. And I knew Gabriel would be like so down for this. You know, because the thing is, so the Industrial Revolution, depending on which historian you

ask, it starts sometime in the 1700s, late 1700s. 1780s, some historians say, well, you know, yeah, it started, but we don't see the effects of it until like the 1830s or 40s. I don't, I don't 100% agree with that. I think, I think we can see the follow on effects of it coming sooner than that. Sure. I mean, there's smoke on the water, but there's fire in the sky, you know, yeah. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Good. Good job It's a really good like that's that's Recursive in reference. It's very damp and it's purple. Yes Yeah, nice. Nice

And So for for anybody, you know So for anybody listening at home who is not 100% sure of what exactly I'm referring to when I talk about this, this is also referred to as the first industrial revolution. And in it, it was the beginning of modern mass production and it most notably began in and around the textile industries. The ability to create large scale machines powered in many cases by steam engines, very early mills were so called because they were powered by water wheels. And what this created was something that's essentially very very familiar to all of us in the now industrialized world today, where you have goods being produced with a

very large economy of scale, things suddenly become much less expensive when you are creating reams of the stuff than it is when it takes one craftsperson a certain amount of time to create a limited amount if you take that craftsperson out of the equation and it's a machine that can do the same thing much faster and on a much on a much larger scale what you have are the ability to mass produce clothing which then develops into the ability to mass produce shoes which then gets turned around and okay wait we can take these same principles and we can apply these to basically manufacturing anything.

Right. And there, and this is widely agreed to have been a mistake by just about everyone. And as someone who is the beneficiary of the advancements that have come since the Industrial Revolution technologically, there have been ways in which this has made a lot of things easier for a lot of people. The problem is the way in which it was implemented, implemented makes it sound wrong. The direction in which it evolves,

I think would be a better way to put it, created situations in which individual craftspeople were driven out of business. They were no longer able to make a living. A weaver had been a very highly skilled worker who was able to earn a great deal for their specialized, highly trained skilled labor. Somebody working in a factory was not nearly as skilled right and so the the value of their time and training and

then additionally the power that was wielded by the people who owned the mills Meant that well, you know, they need a job because they can't make a living as a weaver anymore. They need to come to work for me. And I have the power to basically tell them, all right, this is what I'm going to pay you. Right. Which are you going to where you where else are you going to go work? What are you going to do? Right. Peasant. And so we just spent the last several episodes

talking with Gabriel, in my case learning a lot from Gabriel, about the Marxist lens and the Marxist Leninist outlook. And before you can have Marxism, you have to have capitalism. And, you know, because you you you have to have the problem before you can have anybody suggesting a solution. OK. And the problem is capitalism. The problem in this case is that this new mechanism of production took control of production out of the hands of the people doing the work and put control of that into the hands of the people who owned the machines.

And I'm phrasing this specifically because of what I'm leading up to So are you telling me that Etsy has not solved this problem yet? Feel like we might miss you know sadly sadly now Lift could really disrupt this whole model and I'm gonna reach the screen and punch you so hard lift uber all these I'm gonna punch you harder god damn it The new version of that song now There's a lot of people in the Bay Area have a little of shit to answer for. So the, you know, it is a central tenet of Marx's argument that the means of production should be owned by the and The the

essential problem that that Marxists and a lot of other people can fundamentally agree on even if like from this point they violently disagree with each other on everything else is the ownership of the means of production by a small number of very powerful individuals Fucks everything else up. I thought you were gonna say with everybody to do a better job and Therefore they can all feed their families through cover. They're right Ronnie. Whatever the fuck you say, right? Yeah

Yeah, right Ronnie, whatever the fuck you say, right? Yeah Right. I really feel it incumbent upon me to point out here. Yeah that one of us grew up Believing that Ronald Reagan was the second coming of Christ. I Wouldn't go that far my family my family was not that religious Right. So yeah, no There are many conversions I have undergone in my life The more Catholic you got the less Republicans Which I really like that

Yeah, man, yeah, I'm that part of the Venn diagram. Yeah carving that yeah carving that right away. Yeah, all right Read is good and works go on No, no gecko fuck off. No, we're done No, you say satire. I say I didn't read in class. So it's gold what? Same same right? Right. Yeah, let me see. Come I saw right? Yeah, I know Where's my rolled-up newspaper? All right, I don't have one because Well and then and then you combine that with a profit motive and and you know a profit motive and not just, well, I am making enough money through my labor to build my house, support my family, and maybe have a little leftover at the end of it. You have

the acquisitiveness that comes of that kind of concentration of wealth in the first place, right? It's not just that, well, I'm the one who owns the machines and you all need to come to me to get a job. It's also, well, and also you owe me the profits from this business because I own this, right? And this led to Horrific working conditions and terrible terrible grinding poverty amongst the working poor In in the industry as the world was industrializing what we now refer to as the industrialized world

what we now refer to as the industrialized world. Like if you look at any kind of publication, any kind of social commentary from the early 1800s into like up to the present day really, but it's most nightmarish during the Dickensian era in many ways because legislation and public morals had not caught up with the evil that was being done. And so you have this, you know, consistent kind of background noise going on in all of the social commentary of the era of how awful the living conditions were for the poor. And there's a whole, whole separate diatribe that we could go into about the paternalism of the particularly English upper middle class kind of kind of

Responses to this You know this this, you know, we not not merely a sense of like no bless oblige, but a These poor people are lesser than we are and so, you know, they they cannot help themselves. We have to You know help them coupled with this this very shitty Protestant work ethic idea of well, you know if they were really Genuinely hard-working if they were really genuinely moral and genuinely worthy Then they wouldn't be in this situation

Which also carries through to the present day in all kinds of shitty awful toxic kind of ways and So you have you have capitalism which creates this this situation where Children are working 60-hour weeks in the mill alongside their parents Because see you need the kids working because the kids are small enough that they can actually climb into the machine while it's running Mm-hmm to fix things Yeah, whereas if you want to get an adult in there

You got to shut everything down and of course we don't want that right so reproduction is good for production Yes, yeah, yeah and teaching them valuable life skills really yeah, you know like Fingers right You know, I mean that's math that's subtraction. I don't see this math. Yeah, that's value added. Yeah You know, what doesn't kill you something something something something something? Kids to exist in a digital world Uh-huh, oh you really only need one finger to like like, you know, honestly, yeah That's part of the point of the whole point of web 2.0, right? Um

Can you tell this is a confab full of teachers? Um Direction we go with this stuff. But so one response to all of this and a response that has, as we have learned over the last several episodes, spun off into a whole ecosystem of thought is Marxism, the work of Marx and Engels. is Marxism the the work of marks and angles and All all of the offshoots that have come around since and that led to a great deal of hand wringing

not merely by the the upper upper echelon of capitalist society, but because of the context in which Marx and Engels were writing and because of the context in which a lot of the other European thinkers who took their ideas and ran with them and built on them and did stuff with them existed. And then when we get to the early, or the very late 19th century and the very early 20th century, when we get to Lenin and Stalin and everybody surrounding the Russian revolution, There is a very very significant anti-clerical streak Which I don't know is the right word, but that's involved in in a Marxist Leninist thought now real quick anti-clerical as in anti guys that wear the collar or

Anti-clerical as in guys that balance the books Anti guys that wear the collar. Okay. Thank you. The church was and and Gabriel correct me if I'm if I'm painting with too broad a brush or if I'm if I'm mischaracterizing anything but the the church was seen as an inherently anti-revolutionary institution. Yeah. I mean, I think that people often lend that quote of, you know, to marks of the religion is the opiate of the masses type thing.

Um, and, and I mean, you can trace that also to like the French revolution, right? Like they melted the church was, yeah. Like as, as it was seen as part of that, um, you know, superstructure, rights the hegemony of the class by reinforcing that. Like, you know, you said the Protestant work ethic, but we also see it with like Calvinism. There's all sorts of tendencies within religion that uphold class dynamics. That's the idea when you manipulate it in a certain way that rich people are that way because, you know, fucking God chose them to be in your poor because

God hates you. And that's just the way it is. You don't know how to read. You can't interpret this. I'm telling you how it goes. Yeah, just just a more benign version. Your reward is awaiting you after you're dead. So once we've used you up, yeah, stop, stop worrying about this world. Right. Because this world sucks. The more this world sucks, the better. It's going to be for you later. You should really pray for the rich

Because it's not gonna be because they're gonna have a hard time getting into heaven exactly So you need to pray for them and love them and it's not what he was trying to fucking say What do you mean? He's turning over the moneylenders things so that they would be fucking less it praying and no The whole second estate was the clergy yeah Yes Yes, the second estate was the clergy and and and when we go back into like even before capitalism Existed if we come back into the feudal era You know the church the church was one of the three pillars of of the state right, you know and and so for anybody who is who is

by nature a revolutionary thinker something that is as institutional as the church is Is gonna be in the crosshairs And I'm going to engage in into little bit of favoritism. I'm gonna say the Russian Orthodox Church in particular Might have might have looked that way So so the church Had a very specific kind of response to this

to to these forces. And what this culminated in turned into the ideology of distributism. And if you've been listening to the last few episodes, you probably remember that at the end of one of them I mentioned distributism and I said that you know, Gabriel is probably gonna have an awful lot of fun vilifying me as a You know counter-revolutionary enemy of the people, you know Middle Road I don't know quasi Crypto-fascist, I don't know

Because Distributism is a third-way philosophy where you you criticize rivers that flow into larger rivers and you make fun of them for it yes yes yes dissing tributaries so yes distributive distributive the facility you have was taking things that rapidly and doing that I If it didn't infuriate me, I'd admire it. So That will be the name of my autobiography There you go. They didn't infuriate you you would be admire me. Yeah so

Because of where distributism falls on the falls on the spectrum from left to right, anybody coming from a hard left or hard right position is going to see this as milk toast and bullshit. But, it is kind of where I'm going to stick my flag for the moment. And I do also have to say that based on our podcast listener followers, the population, and our pretty vigorous punch all Nazis always policy, I'm pretty sure I know where most of the criticism here is going to be coming from. So yeah, yes, I am an insufferable moderate, whatever, moving on. Distributism is tied inextricably to Catholic social teachings. And we're talking specifically in this sense about This we're talking specifically in this sense about social teachings from the 1800s through through the present.

Although liberation theology comes into the picture in more recent decades and liberation theology would look at distributism and go yes. Yes, that's a good starting point But that's that's your Inseparable middle-of-the-road assholes. No, we need to go farther So distributism gets it like from all sides Funnily enough I was a distributist before I knew what distributism was and I was a distributist before I was a Catholic But I didn't I didn't have the vocabulary to express my thoughts as an ism until I started reading GK Chesterton So now in 1891

this is after the the industrial revolution has now been going for over a century. We are seeing the the I would argue the height of the excesses of Gilded age like in the United States. This is the height of the Gilded age Beginnings of when We really start seeing meaningful pushback for limitations on work hours. We start seeing pushback for safety regulations in the workplace. I should have

looked it up. I don't remember when the jungle was published I Think it's after this six. I want to say okay. Yeah, so but but this is Yeah, so this is in that same era where there is a growing understanding within the zeitgeist of you know February work sucks ass And and this is really creative. This is this is this is ugly and and and not not good And There was a lot of conflict going on between labor and capital this is a period of time during which unionization is

happening And is being fought very very strongly My pinker violently reference our conversation earlier. Yeah. Yes, there is all kinds of violence happening And there was violence against the working class going on even before workers were trying to organize as such. The example I always think of is in 1819 on 16 August in Manchester, there were somewhere between 400 and 700 people

Injured and 18 people killed When Home Guard Cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people Those folks were gathering in order to protest for reform of parliamentary representation It wasn't even about Like stop killing us in the goddamn factory. It was about we want to have a voice in the government and How dare you fucking peasants was probably said by at least one or two of the We really wish we had been on the continent fighting against Napoleon

But we failed the psych exam So we're we're at home with our cavalry sabers, and we're gonna beat up on our own people Yeah as one does I mean you know obviously when you're when you're not quite an aristocrat how how else are you going to flex your class position? So that was the Peterloo Massacre. And we can point, we've talked on this show so many times about so many instances of anti-labor violence that, I mean, it's a trope at this point. Yeah.

You know, and so faced with all of this, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 issued an encyclical, Rerum Novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. Now, for those who are not familiar and encyclical, when the Pope says something, this is one of those, I now need to explain Catholicism a little bit. The Pope is the vicar of the church and he is God's representative's representative on earth if you're a believing Catholic now the thing is anything he says Excathedra Meaning if he is seated in the cathedral sitting on the throne of st. Peter and he says something

he is saying that with all of the authority of God's voice on earth. He's speaking in in the office of his job. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And modern popes. And when I say modern, I mean, going back to the early modern period since the Reformation and I'm going to say the end of the 30 years war. Since the Reformation and I'm gonna say the end of the 30 years war

Hopes have generally Shied away from spending a lot of time talking ex cathedra Okay, and encyclical is Is somewhere below that and encyclical is a, hey, look, we have looked at scripture, we have looked at tradition, we have looked at how Jesus told us we ought to be doing things, and we're looking at what's going on around us. And here is a policy paper that we're going to put out that that you know this this is now official this is now the position of the church but I'm not going to ever claim to be infallible in putting this out there if he speaks ex cathedra it did it it is it is not capable of error so is it fair to say that this is comparable to like playing a game of telephone and the Pope has maybe like

Heard it from a person who heard it from God kind of yeah. Yeah, that'd be Yeah, I actually I like that analogy. I kind of like that. Yeah So alright, so Gabriel was talking to st Pete and Pete of course is talking to the big guy and and so so, you know Gabriel tells me that Pete said as the big guy said Kind of a little bit blame it don't blame it on me and you can't even blame it on st Peter you might have been Stephanie in seventh period English that told St. Peter you might have been Stephanie in seventh period English that told St. Peter Yeah, yeah, we don't know I don't know where I don't know where where Peter got his got his info like but you know

From his girlfriend that goes to another school You'd win a nowhere she's from Canada. Yeah, she's Niagara Falls You she didn't hang out with us. She's a Calvinist, right? Oh Actually, no, sorry. Sorry. I'm gonna wind that back St. Peter is too good a dude to hang out with Calvinists. No, she's she's She's a Methodist. There we go All right, it's like like, you know almost here but not quite sure So it's like, you know almost here, but not quite sure

It's like you know the other Catholic school on the other side of the town right and I know I know exactly which of our listeners are gonna be like messaging me on Facebook going what I'm sorry Love y'all um so Leo the 13th yeah puts out Rayrum Novaram and in it he lambasted

Capitalism he lambasted the capitalist class although he didn't use those those terms And he he invade in really blistering language Against the concentration of wealth and thus power in the hands of capitalist monopolists and industrial corporations He particularly addressed and I quote the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on a majority of the working class so unjustly on the majority of the working class, end quote, and stated that a small number of very rich men had gathered the power to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

All right, so real quick, he does this in what year? 18? 1891. Okay, so he's the second guy in a row in the 1800s. And if I recall correctly, if you combine their reigns, I don't know if that's the right term, but if you combine their time in cathedra,

I think it adds up to like 60 years or something. Like there are people who spent their whole life with him and his predecessor as the only popes that ever existed ever. Yeah. And he's one of the because of the nature of the office. Yeah. Right. But like like he had an exceptionally long reign. I think it's like fifth or sixth longest reign ever. Yeah. He's up there. Yeah. And he's Italian. Now he's one of a long line of Italians at this point because they're like four years of Italians. Yeah. You know, not counting

the French anti-popes. But but he's Italian. And in the, late 1800s, an Italian pope is addressing how the workers are being fucked. Italy has only recently become its own state and the amount of Italian impoverished laborers who are moving to the Americas specifically, it's, I I believe from 18, God I want to say like 1870s to 19 teens or 1920s there were 4.2 sounds about right Italian immigrants. Oh yeah. Yeah it was huge. So he's writing right in the middle of that. So he's seeing it in real time.

Yeah. Yeah. And he's the second guy out of two that were like, they're both like in the top five, I think, of longest 10 years as Pope. So. Yeah. And maybe an important side note, but you know, Marx died in 1883. And the first Italian translations of his work were in 1884.

So he had to give or take about seven years to catch up on Marx before he made this declaration against capitalism. Wow. Yeah. And knowing what I know about the Vatican and the intellectual culture of the church, and especially like when you really get rarified. I'm sure a whole lot, if not Leo XIII, a whole lot of the people around him, certainly cardinals and everybody else, they had read it if only in the sense of we better read up on what these people are saying, right? You know so that we can be prepared for You know Uh, whatever whatever comes of it. Yeah, they're nothing if not learned. I mean, you know, they oh, yeah

They have access to all the books Yeah. Oh, yeah, literally. Yeah They have access to all the books. Yeah, oh yeah, literally. Question for you, is the guy who comes after him gonna be like a hella reactionary guy who wants to turn back the clock a fuckton? You know, I didn't look that up, I should have. Okay. Because I know that, because the era that you're getting to is getting right around,

because Leo's the one that dies literally days before World War I starts, right? Yeah. Okay. So then yeah, the next guy is like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's go back to dial it back there. Yeah, yeah. I almost want to say yes, it's Bennett.

I bet you dollars donuts is going to be a Benedict because the most recent Benedict was like call back such a goddamn. Sorry yep He was was very I don't know what you're talking about Darn it. That's one more um But yes, yes, I pretty sure this as a as it was as a papal name Benedict has been attached Generally speaking to regressive ass shall we say I'll say it for you. You said it. Yes, so all all you can pray for me

Yes, because then you have to you. I know how you feel about that Oh, man, come on consent, but but there. But there's this flip-flopping of the pillow that happens in the early 1900s that I remember. Because again, a lot of studies on World War I and stuff. So if I'm right, then yeah, this is the guy who dies right before World War I, I forget how. And then the guy who takes over is like super regressive. And then when he dies, the next dude I think is the dude who's like we need to modernize y'all Yeah, and then the next dude is like Nazis. I'm gonna look over here. Never mind

Yeah, I'm doing some cosmetic shit like where I do actually save several Jews from the Nazis But then I'm just gonna go over here But I'm gonna spend a lot of time. We're cool Yeah, I'm gonna spend a lot of time over in a corner right very quiet about a lot of things right you know It's it's also worth worth mentioning This encyclical is in 1891 mentioning this encyclical is in 1891. As you said, there's a huge diaspora happening from Italy to particularly North America, the United States. And in 1882, the Knights of Columbus were founded in New Haven, Connecticut here in the United States. The Knights of Columbus is the largest Catholic fraternal organization

in the world. And they were founded specifically as an aid society for most, especially, particularly Italian Catholic men, because of the difficult, dangerous, underpaid, shitty working conditions that many of them were dealing with. They didn't have, there was no such thing as benefits. There was no such thing, like they couldn't get health insurance. And so this was formed by a Catholic priest as a mutual aid society and also as a kind of counterbalance to

the Masons. Who very famously... What year did you say that was? 1882. Okay. Nine years before the encyclical And very famously the Masons would not allow Catholics to join Brooke sorry to jump in yeah, yeah, no no um one year after the encyclical is 1892 yes, which is the year that a bunch of like 11 12 13 year that a bunch of like 11, 12, 13 double digit Italian men were lynched in New Orleans, which then led to Columbus Day. Yes. Because they were afraid, Benjamin Harrison was afraid. And that's 1892.

And I believe that's around the same time as Haymarket, what, within two, three years? Within, yeah, within five years the same time as Haymarket what within two three years within within yeah Yeah, yeah, I need you six. Yeah, so you've got the the lynching in 1892 of Italian laborers in New Orleans You've got the setting up of Columbus Day in order to be like hey, hey, hey, let's not March Okay, this labor thing is kind of crazy here in America. Don't do that Yeah, you know and you know, you've got yeah, you know fair enough anarchists coming over by this point So yeah What's in the soup in the 1890s? There's a whole lot going on. Yeah, so

Leo's encyclical explicitly supported trade unionism, explicitly supported collective bargaining as a check on the power of capital. It called for government to take a strong role in the protection of the dignity of workers by way of regulation of industry and capital. It stopped short of calling for direct redistribution of wealth, but it did very strongly support the idea of social welfare. So not socialism, but social welfare.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Now after lambasting unchecked capitalism for the damage it did to the liberty and dignity of individual workers Because this is a middle-way philosophy and because this is the church The Pope turned around and simultaneously criticized socialist ideas But what's interesting Was very interesting about this we had a lot of a lot of talk a lot of information

in last few episodes about different We had a lot of talk, a lot of information in the last few episodes about different socialist schools of thought and their relationship to the state. What Leo lambasted socialist ideas for was placing too much power in the hands of the state, thereby threatening the role and importance of the family unit which right? This is this is where we really get into like the deep core of none of this. This is a Catholic ideology here the family unit is is the root of Everything like the family unit is the universe and microcosm,

if you want to get really, really mystical about it. Like the family unit is crucial to society as a whole in the Catholic paradigm. The elimination of private property, according to the church's logic, would arrogate to the state, the rights and freedoms that ought to be enjoyed by the individual worker through his or her own labor. Now, this was a Catholic

document written in. That's a tightrope. Yeah, boy ain't it. I mean, it's also fascinating because that's like the antithesis to the argument that Engels makes in the history of private property, the family and the state, which is, which is that that private property actually demolished the family unit. And yeah, so just an interesting counterpoint. Oh, yeah.

Have I told you my experience playing tether ball? I've heard this, but yeah. So there are many rules to playing tether ball, but one of the ones that was most skilled rule was called the no nothing rule. Couldn't hold it, couldn't grab it, couldn't grab the rope, couldn't grab the pole. It was just hitting the tether ball, right? And it's a ball that's tethered to a pole. Your job is

to wrap it going your way to keep the other guy from wrapping it going his way. Okay. What could happen is that somebody can get into a really good rhythm and just as it comes around, they hit it and it goes faster. They hit it again, it goes faster and pretty soon you just can't stop it. And sometimes they're hitting it at such an angle that it goes up and over where you can reach, right? So there's no fucking way you can stop it and you're gonna lose.

The way to beat that is to run to the other side. Cause as it's coming down, it's coming down into his territory, you hit it faster than, you hit it going further, right? So if I'm trying to wrap it around going rightward and you're trying to wrap it around going leftward, and I've got it at an angle where you can't stop me from going rightward, you run to the other side

and you hit it as it's going past you going rightward, which makes it accelerate past my rhythm. And now I've missed it. And now you have, you've, you have boosted it so that now, so yes, you're losing ground, but then you can reverse it. This feels like that. Mm. Like, okay.

Marxism's big. We've got a lot of people in Italy who are going anarchist and are going Marxist. How do we make it so that people don't forget the church? And again, this is very cynical of me, but how do we... I'm almost gonna say co-op, and I don't want to say co-op because I'm going to assume good faith on this guy's part. Yeah. How do we reach the people? Yeah. And we'll use the language of that.

We'll use this new language, which of course makes a lot of sense why Benedict would probably have been the guy to turn around and go, whoa, fuck you modernism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I might have left out a pope in there or something, but. Yeah, it was pious. It's fine. It was pious that did that? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. I mean, you know, no one's, no one's keeping track, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. So, one thing I do want to note is in what I just said that, you know, irrigating to the states rights and freedoms, et cetera, et cetera, through his or her own labor. This was written by a Catholic in the 1890s. He didn't say his or her. He said his. It was all right. It was all male pronouns like you know there that was yes Yes, just no his it was all his head of the family. That's why yeah, yeah head of the family patriarch. Yeah

There are there are Was what's? Dr.. Cruz's way of putting it problematic steps forward yeah progress history of problematic steps forward problematic steps forward yeah So basically the the church's stance, the encyclical can kind of be boiled down to everybody's the asshole. And the answer is somewhere in the middle, where the right to property is still protected, where the government steps in to protect rights but not to overstep, and where individual rich dudes are prevented from abusing other people. So he was like the John Maynard Keynes of his time.

Kinda. That's a good comparison. Which is also interesting because he was also born in 1883. Keynes? The year that Mark, Keynes. Wow. So he was born the year that Marx died, right? Yeah, so, you know, he was like eight when this happened and maybe he was inspired who knows?

Yeah, well, I'm open an entire economic theory based on this Pope's cyclical decoration Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking about Patterns on wallpaper So yeah, it could have been now. So this was the encyclical. This was 1891. Now the time went on and shit happened and distributism as an ism grew out of this when a number of influential Catholic writers and thinkers led by GK Chesterton Took the ideas of Leo the 13th encyclical and the manifestos of multiple Catholic liberal political parties Because okay now take a moment to explain to our American listeners In other parts of the world other countries aren't stuck in a two-party system

What? Yeah, I know Yeah, it's it's it's so efficient this way Why would you need more than two? Why would you need more that well because you have a whole plethora of? Different places on the political continuum where people want to give, want to put their vote. And, you know, they didn't have the issues that we had with, you know, trying to own people for the first hundred or so years of their countries existing in the same way that we did. So, you know, parliamentary systems as opposed to the way ours works.

And so in many countries in Europe, within their parliamentary systems, there are, you know, you'll have whoever the, you know, maybe not Marxist, but whoever the genuine leftist socialist party is. You'll have the folks slightly to the center of them. Usually you'll then have somewhere closer to the middle, a left leaning Catholic party. Or Christian party even. Or Christian, yeah, just generally. Yeah democratic christian something Then you know to the right you'll have a right-leaning christian party and then you'll get wingnut

Like right wing and you know full-on like no, no, we don't call ourselves fascists, but wink that's yeah Or you'll have genuine conservatives as well. Yes. Yeah, they will be in there They're they're the ones that think that they can control the fascists. Yes. Yep. Yeah and and Oddly oddly, although they're the ones that are trying to conserve things. They don't seem to read history Well, they're conserving their power Yeah, okay there there so so there's a thing that I believe Bernard Shaw talked about no Bernard Shaw was According to Orwell a useful idiots

Conservatives would be useful dickheads in I like that. Yeah, like that. Yeah, at least in the 20s and 30s, you know, yeah Yeah, yeah might be less useful to other people. Yeah. Side of that realm. But yeah. Or to draw a Tolkien comparison, they could be, um, uh, why am I blanking on his Boromir, you know, they think that they can wield the ring.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, can really only be destroyed. Yeah. Really, really? You just need to take it and fling it like, no, it's got to die. We can't have that here. As long as that exists, we cannot

have nice things like, no. And so these Catholic liberal or Catholic workers parties or Christian workers parties, their platforms, because they're coming out of Catholic or European Christian kind of viewpoints, echo many of the same ideas. And so Chesterton and his cohorts kind of codified all of this in,'re this this is what we're gonna call it It's distributism and this is these are these are our bullet points. This is what we're gonna push for as Its name implies distributism at its root calls for a wide distribution of property ownership

Okay, okay arguing that the right to ownership of property is a fundamental one. In his book, and Chesterton has a real gift for titles, in his book, What's Wrong with the World, published in 1920, speaking of being a surly Catholic Makes the argument that what a man makes or builds through his own industry And again, this is 1920 and he's a Catholic. So it's all male pronouns Ought to be his to shape and do with what he will and this is where we get all mystical about it in the same way that God has shaped the world so God God has brought the world into being our Capacity for creation is part of our connection to the divine and so what we make or what we build

we we should have Ownership of and and control of Interesting because this is coming out at a time when recorded music and recorded artwork recorded performances are Starting to come out like you've got radio. You've got records Like it's in its infancy, but like that that I mean we're talking kind of of the same thing. Those are my songs Those are my masters, right?

Copyright, yeah. Exactly. And there were people immediately gobbling up the masters going like, no, no, no, I let you record here and I pay you 20 bucks to sing into a can. To borrow from my brother, where art thou? But I keep the masters. And then so to see that at its infancy and and to have him say those things

It's just kind of an interesting again like look what's on the wallpaper Yeah, so according to Distributist ideas private ownership gives dignity to the thing that is built and to the person I'm gonna be modernist about it who built it to the person, I'm gonna be modernist about it, who built it. Since this is a fundamental right, then circumstances in which a small number of people prevent the greater mass of people from enjoying it

need to be prevented. This is the most basic role of government to distributists is to protect the dignity of individual citizens. Sounds like an invisible hand to me. The dignity of individual citizens sounds like an invisible hand to me hmm Well, okay, because the invisible hand She's really speaking isn't it well now no Regulation is not invisible the the idea of the invisible hand, and I'm trying to remember whether it was

Smith father of capital yeah Smith The idea of the invisible hand was okay So my self-interest is I want to create a situation in which I can create the most best widgets I can in order to make the most money and when I need to build these widgets I need to buy parts from this person over here and the the Relationship between me and my suppliers and our mutual Purchasers Our customers. Yeah, the the the invisible hand has to do with interconnected

with Interconnected self-interest interconnected in in Smith's view interconnected enlightened self-interest because Smith was a utopianist at his heart See it's that in like that self-interest part is what I'm referring to them like that We can't let anybody hold too much because that would work against all of our self-interest. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The difference is that Smith believed that, well, you know, Smith just put it out there that this is the way it's going to go and everybody's, you know, rising tide lifts all boats.

Distributism is like, no, no, we need to regulate that shit to make sure, you know rising tide lifts all boats Distributism is like no we need to regulate that shit To make sure you know that that that that the concentration of wealth doesn't wind up happening and fucking everything up. Okay In keeping with Catholic social teaching the family unit is the most basic building block of society the family unit is the most basic building block of society. And again, we're going to get very Catholic, very early 20th century. Every man should have the means to shelter and provide for his family. In circumstances of hardship, the state should take a role in helping nurture the family and provide a safety net. Now in modern distributist influenced policy, this takes several forms.

A social safety net and programs to broaden home ownership being two of the most obvious. So each end, go ahead. A GI bill. Yeah, yeah, GI bill and post-war consensus in the UK, with the proviso that it was, we're gonna build all this housing, and like the distributors would be like, okay, we're gonna build all this housing, and then we're going to sell it to,

lowered subsidized rates, we're gonna sell it to citizens, so they have ownership of it. It is theirs. They control it, you know, and therefore they'll take care of the roads and the then therefore. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And have a stake in the system, right? Like if they are part ownership of property, then they will defend the system that provided that for them. That is true. And the place where we could find some common ground with people farther left is nobody's going to be paying a landlord.

There isn't going to be a landlord class who is making money off of the simple existence of other people? Needing a roof over their heads Adam so classically against landlords. Yes. Hmm. Yeah, it's true so Again because enlightened self-interest. Yeah, right. Well fucking limit people's banality. Yeah Chesterton and all of his buddies would also no doubt consider programs like WIC and food stamps representative like bare minimum support of poor and working families. Right. And speaking of working families, distributist economic theory is built around a really deep

seated distrust of large corporate entities and the circumstances of wage work well I could see why the British East Indies had like two three hundred years to fucking prove that problem didn't they though and then and then like you could just look at Belgium and be like right okay okay yeah we're good yeah in a distributist utopia, land ownership would be widespread. Small farms would dominate food infrastructure and chain stores of all kinds. Retail goods, restaurants, services would be almost vanishingly rare. You wouldn't see a Walmart at all. Norm McDonald's individual workers would own the means of production of their own businesses

Sounds a little like yeomanry very much like yeomanry yes employee-owned Cooperatives would allow for some larger scale enterprises to follow distributist ideals But beyond a certain size they're still gonna get the hairy eyeball from Chesterton like once once once any Economic interest gets beyond a certain size distributists are gonna just look at it and go Like we can we can see your charter documents we see you're a B Corp, you know we see that you've got you know employee ownership and all this but like You're a really big organization doing this and this could be done by three smaller Organizations that are more local and we'd like that a lot

No Trust-busting right yeah, yeah Credit unions are good corporate banks are evil if You are paying wage workers. They should receive a living wage period, like full stop, doesn't matter. But if you don't have corporate banks, how would you have growth if nobody's willing to risk anything? Because the only people who can risk things are corporate banks. Like

individual investors can only lose their houses. That's not risk. That's not sufficient sacrifice to the altar of almighty dollar. Yeah, total destitution is the only option. Is the only possible, yeah. Total destitution of others. Yeah, other people's money, OPM. Yeah. Because too big to fail. Then you got to have the state bailout.

Yeah, you got it. Yeah. I mean, like, duh. What's going on? Yeah, hippies. So tradesmen and workers in general should have unions and if possible, guilds. Guilds provide a mechanism for mutual aid and support and establish moral and ethical guidelines for members to follow

in pursuit of their work. And I kind of I mentioned this a moment ago, but subsidiarity is a distributist idea where larger units shouldn't do things that are achievable by smaller units. Okay. On a practical level, this means a household before local government local government before regional and regional before national This also means Why do you need to have a franchise operation? When like you can just have a burger joint

locally owned by an individual Okay, you know so this is almost like economic federalism. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. To kind of paint with a broad brush. Yes. Localism.

Yeah. And so if an independent shop or several independent shops can meet the needs of a community, you should have an independent shop rather than a gigantic corporation doing the same thing. And like, so an organization like Walmart is Satan incarnate in distributist philosophy because it's this overblown gigantic corporation that is a machine for concentrating wealth in the hands of the Walton family. It pays its employees so little that they're all relying on government assistance. Just go down the laundry list of all of the things that are shitty about large scale retail chains in the modern landscape and

they're, they're the devil. And since I'm talking about this from a Catholic point of view, I can say that and I'm not really wrong. That's, that's only slightly exaggerated, right? Um, and I know there's a lot more going on. In modern politics, distributists have moved along the capitalist socialist axis to different degrees. More capitalist leaning distributist groups lean in the direction of like social capitalism or the social market economy, while more socialist leaning ones look

more like libertarian socialism. And for those following along at home who are like, I have no idea what the hell any of that means, when we talk about social capitalism or the social market economy, we're looking at something that looks more like the economies as they are managed by governments in Western Europe, where we see lots of regulation, we see lots of trade unions, we see a very, very significant safety net, like way better than the one we have here in the United States because they didn't get fucked up by the Puritans. Sorry, I said that out loud again, didn't I? And so that's what we'd be talking about

about like social market economy. Libertarian socialism, I was not really able to pin down, that's a more anti-statist collectivist outlook. I would say, yeah, I think that's a pretty good breakdown of it, but like Noam Chomsky is probably one of the most famous like libertarian socialists. And I would say that like libertarian socialism or like, is another term for, I mean, so like libertarianism as a term came in vogue when anarchism as a term was outlawed, right? So it is fundamentally pretty similar, right? Libertarian socialism is definitely more aligned with like the anarchist understanding of like the role of the state.

Okay. Antiauthoritarian. more aligned with the anarchist understanding of the role of the state. OK, anti authoritarian. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So more like syndicalist, more like workers, cooperative, less state apparatus, less centralized authority. Yeah. OK. Thank you.

Literally the thing that they school King Arthur on in in the holy grail Yeah, yeah, we're in a narco syndicalist. Call me again. Yes, exactly exactly that yeah Who are the britons? Who are the britons? Well, you're the britons And I am your king, um, and you know interesting on that note of royalism Hmm I'm sure after hearing all of this that that you guys are thinking exactly the same thing

I am which is that din Jaren bounty hunter and semi sort of maybe chosen one Is the obvious ideal distributist protagonist? Oh Give me more All right, so so he is an independent contractor Who is part of a guild and? What we see of the guild is The guild is a clearinghouse for work Right yep, he has the freedom to choose what work he pursues. Oh

my god, he is actually the ideal that Vince McMahon pretended to be playing up to in the 1980s Yeah, he is the independent contractor who's Okay, yeah, um and There are rules everybody at home take a shot Yeah, you said that your friends time you or give you the steps to get you to like Nazism How is it not been wrestling? That's yeah. Well It has been yeah the podcast it has been wrestling.

Yeah on the podcast it is wrestling. Yeah. Okay so sorry go on. So yeah no the guild has very strict rules about the way to conduct your business and it is an organization in which like they know each other like they know who they're dealing with they have You know there it's it's not an ideal guild from a distributist point of view because it's a guild of assholes But it's yeah, you know, yeah, yeah still a guild and there's mutual aid involved too There are rules about mutual aid like you absolutely have to help if asked

Yeah, which by the way West End Games also backfilled a whole bunch of that shit that they then put into this series Yep, yep Like there were so many things in the first couple of episodes of the band of Lauren I was like, oh, I remember that source book right or oh, hey That's from that's from the boss chapter of tales bounty hunter yeah worst character ever then I mean like not bad character like bad guy oh yeah awful in fairness he understood taking off your shoes before stepping into someone else's domicile very true you did manners are their own reward gentlemen yeah it's. It's my favorite. That was from Robot Chicken.

I don't know if you remember that, but like it's Bounty Hunters. We don't need their scum. And he's and like the subtitles is, am I the only one with any who had the good manners to take off my shoes? And then like everybody starts running off and he's tying his shoes back on. He's like, Manners are their own reward. Nice. It's just so good. But so besides that, yeah. Yeah. So part of a guild. Uh huh.

He owns all of his own tools, all of his own kit, his blaster, his armor, his ship claims them as as religious expression expression too. Yes It's like a throwback to they live episode owning your own tools Yeah, and Speaking of Roddy Piper contractor

One of the few ones who kind of got ahead under that system, so Who but he mostly said that they needed a union? after Chris Benoit Died and having murdered his his wife and son. Yeah. Yeah, so Thanks for that total buzzkill No, you're not don't lie kill. No, you're not. Don't lie. But he is he is pursuing this line of work when he gets hired. He chooses a job, right? He heads off on this job and he winds up encountering the being that we learn a season and a half later is Grogu, the child. So a small child with mystical abilities who is a part of, is associated with heavily associated with an ancient religion

He encounters this child and At first he is going he he he fulfills the terms of his contract because he's a good guild member right and And he does what he's supposed to do under the rules of the guild But he winds up having flashbacks to his own childhood Right in which he was a foundling Who was raised into the Mandalorian tradition okay the way right and now this this is where I'm going to lean a little bit on your understanding of things if I remember

correctly in the flashback the Mandalorians who rescued him from the destroyer droids were death watch I Believe they were not death watch okay. I could be wrong Okay, I'm trying to remember what clan markings they had right? But he winds up being raised by the children of the watch Are they? Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah. Yeah. And he is raised in that religious tradition. Right. And it is that religious,

it is his own experience as a foundling and it is his, uh, to some extent his religiousness that drives him to not be able to abandon the child he faces a moral conflict between the terms of his guild and his own internal fully formed conscience Which is a Very important concept. I think I've talked about it on previous episodes when I've gotten into Catholicism, the idea that anytime you have to make a decision, you consult scripture.

What did Jesus say about it? So what is the way? You look at tradition, which is also related to what is the way. What are the scriptures? What is the way? And then, and then interrogate your own fully formed conscience, which if your moral upbringing, education and formation has been properly done, is going to be in touch with or informed by the Holy Spirit. Right. By the by, you were absolutely correct. It was Death Watch that rescued him. That's what I remembered. Okay. It did not feel right, but it's because of my own bias against Oz Vizsla.

Yeah, well, fair. He was a dick. Yeah. Well fair because he was a dick. Yeah, so like no argument there so but he he He he has to struggle with And and and from a from a strictly like Catholic spiritual lens looking at it He doesn't really want to interrogate any of that he wants to be able to just be like it was a job. I did a job

I want to go back to doing more jobs. I don't have to think about it But ultimately he he comes back down to know this is a child, right? And I I I don't know what they're gonna do to that kid, but it ain't gonna be good. And so he goes back and unleashes the badassery. Yeah. And- This is the way, gets in the way of this is the way.

Yes, yes. He winds up having a situation in which his own code of conduct, his own code of honor and his conscience come into conflict with each other and he has to make a choice. Now he makes a choice and winds up making the guild angry, making the imperial remnant angry like everybody's pissed off at him. And he turns to his not, obviously can't turn to the Bounty Hunters Guild because he went back on the rules there.

He goes to the Mandalorian covert. He goes back to the children of the Watch. And again, distributism is a Catholic based teaching and this is kind of like going back to the church, but in a meaningful way, it's also going back to his family. And family unit, right? He goes, yeah, he goes back to the family unit and it is ultimately in, in season one in the gigantic shootout It is his family unit that you know rescues him Because that is the way because that is that is what families do right?

Here's the great line looking out the window of the razor crest gotta get one of those right It's just just as a moment. I love that. And then he, he, you know, gets away and we get into, you know, the rest of his, of his adventures and misadventures. And throughout all of his Everything everything he winds up doing he keeps the child with him on the one level because There's no safe place. He can leave the child for a while Because there's you know people people hunting for him But at the same time it's also because he and the child have formed a clan.

They are now a family unit. Right. There are clan mudhorn. I want to go back just a second here. When he has his crisis of conscience, essentially, which way is the right way? Yeah, he's already part of a group that is a stateless nation. Yes. He then becomes a stateless, a nationless man. Like he has pissed off everybody, every association that he's a part of, and every association

that he's a part of, is not part of a state anyway. Yeah, he operates in a weird space where everybody's a stateless actor. Right. Like the closest thing he's up against, like in season one, the closest thing he's dealing with is the Imperial remnant. They really desperately want to be a state. Right. They want to throw weight around like they're one, but they can't. Right. And then in the second season he deals with the New Republic that is just a fledgling state. And he largely flouts their authority anyway. But then he works with them in an unofficial unstated capacity.

And then he does the same thing with Grief Karga when he sets up things on that world in third season. Yeah. And I'm going to skip ahead to a couple of things. So he, and now I'm completely blanking on her, and I don't have it in my notes, but the the heir to Mandalore oh Katie stack off remember the actress but Starbuck um damn it Anyway go on cries right anyway

he he winds up fighting against the I really you know want to be part of a state and I'm trying to build a militarist state but like I fucked it up He gets the dark saber kind of a happenstance and In the process of doing that he has allied himself with a royal. Right.

And you know, there is this is where where we get to the, you know, maybe he's kind of sort of the chosen one. He really doesn't want to be like he just he doesn't want He's he's an ideal district part of part of his being an ideal distributed zero is he he could Say yeah, I've got the darksaber Let's go. We're gonna we're gonna rebuild You know the Kingdom of Mandalore, right? But he doesn't he doesn't want any of that. He wants. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say he is definitely interested in seeing the

like glory of Mandalore restored. Yes, he doesn't want to wield the authority over it and the person Bo Katan Bo Katan. Yes. over in the prison Bo-Katan Bo-Katan yes thank you who is who's very much lusting for the throne yeah well once once the authority believes that she is entitled to it and sees it as like the culmination of her self-expression hmm is is like thatexpression Is like that's her final form is Mandalore

Well and not just for her own ambition either She genuinely believes in the restorative power of her being in charge again Yes Like she... So it's not just a lust, it's not a lust for power, but it is an ambition. I would say there's a difference there. That is, yes, and that's fair.

And I didn't mean my description of it to be quite as cynical as it was. Right. But it is a very big part of her internal identity. And if I'm remembering Clone Wars correctly, she was also like partly responsible for Mandalore's fall. Big, right? Yeah. So like fighting.

Yeah. So there's part of it that's like, yeah, it's like kind of making up for. Yeah. For the fall of Mandalore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Catholics and redemption, it's like a whole thing. It's like a religion to these people. And so, yes. or for the Mandalorian, he sees this in a very, very overtly religious light.

The restoration of Mandalore is a spiritual thing for him. He's not concerned with the prosperity of the Mandalorian people. He's not really concerned about like nationalist ideas of identity. Right. It is it is the restoration of a religious thing for him. For Bo Katan, there is politics, there is there is a much more earthly level of concern for it. And so like, you know, he tries to hand it to her like, no, it's like, seriously, no, just, and, and, you know, it's not until season three that she, that she accepts it for him.

The covert winds up in season three, Grief Karga gives them a parcel of land outside of town on the, if I remember right, on the east side. And this is again a family unit gaining ownership of The land on which they are going to live and they have earned it through their very violent labor By fighting off the pirates right Now there's also kind of feudal overtones a little bit involved in that like you've you've earned this through you know Combat your you know fighting warrior types Knights, you know, there's there's feudal overtones But but we can also look at it through a distributed lens that it's this is a family unit that now has this this ownership And these same themes keep recurring when

Bo-Katan and then go off to Jack Black's world To to meet with the Mandalorians there That group is again a company of Professionals With a guild they're they're not working as bounty hunters. They are mercenaries, but they have terms and conditions of their employment They don't say anything In the episode about a mercenaries guild, but again West End Games did introduce

Guild, but again West End Games did introduce material in the role-playing game about bonded mercenaries, which is influenced very heavily by other science fiction writers and other works outside of the Star Wars universe, but it was a part of established canon for a long time. And so I think it's fair to assume that there's probably some level of guild or other kind of authority that This is a band of mercenaries Who you know they they have to negotiate with to to get them to you know, join the movement for the restoration of Mandalore and

so these same kinds of themes keep keep showing up and within the Mandalorian culture. This is the This is the archetype That the economic model they're all operating in and the social model they're all operating in it's heavily influenced by religion even the non children of the watch Make reference to the way Even the the non children of the watch

Look at the dark saber as a totemic religious kind of thing Yeah, I'm that interesting because Bo Katan and and her followers Were very big on the Necessity of the darksaber, but then they called out din Jaren for being another one of those religious nuts Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's like which What are you? Like as a Catholic I found that funny because like you know we all Have have different different aspects of our own theology that we you know emotionally cling to and we look at other people and like

Seriously the rosary of the wounds like how weird the fuck are you like you know it's a thing I get it sports fans are fucking nuts But then I see somebody in a in like a Dodgers hat I'm like that guy's probably an asshole. What a dick. Yeah, I mean I'm sorry I'll gotta jump into this conversation too then because I as someone who grew up as a Toebs witness and then hearing Toebs witnesses That I'm still in contact with talk about like Scientologists. I'm like, are you sure? Are you sure that you really

want to be attacking this group of people? That sounds crazy because I have some glass house. Have you checked your own color there? Yeah. Yeah. So. So yeah, that's pretty much basically my whole thesis. Like I said before, this is not, I don't have the depth of scholarship to go into on distributism. I think you did exactly that. And then you're like, and here's five structures of Mandalorians. And I mean, it's slam dunk. I mean, yes. Everything that you mentioned for the first hour

and 15 minutes of this podcast absolutely is shown in the last 20 minutes of this podcast as far as the Mandalorian stuff goes. That's really interesting. Do you think that, like, it was clear in the Andor episodes that some of the writers were clearly versed in leftism and leftist writings, Marxism and so on. Do you think the same thing happened or is there something going on zeitgeist-y where this idea of like we don't trust the state because this was made in 2017 I think I kind of think that's more of it. I think there's there's also There are ways in which

The the state of the Star Wars universe in the time period in which this is taking place Makes it easy to create a character who has these motivations who has these particular kinds of internal conflict and these part of part of distributism's identity or maybe not its identity, but its personality is is the fact that many of the ideas the distributists are pulling from come from very very old

sources like the whole idea of guilt is just is literally medieval and well And Star Wars is like Romans. Yeah. And Star Wars is a universe where we're going to throw everybody way, way, way out into what looks like a future, but we're going to pull on mysticism, religion, magic, you know, medieval social structures. And so that juxtaposition and that kind of synthesis lends itself to looking at this and going, oh, well, obviously this Catholic worldview is going to work real well here as a lens to view this through. I think the writers fell backward into it in your phrasing. It's also interesting that the first

original write-up for Andor as a show was very similar to what Mandalorian became. The idea was that K-2 and Andor were going to be essentially Mando and Grogu, right? They were going to fly around the universe on different adventures in every episode. And it became something wholly different, but Mandalorian is much more in line with that kind of, the spirit behind Star Wars as this like adventurous model of storytelling. But then they wove in, kind of a new interpretation of the religious aspect, because we got the whole Jedi Sith thing, and then having the storyline of like Death Watch

and the Mandalorian culture explored fully within the context of them existing as a stateless people, right? That operate on this guild ethos of like these are the jobs that we perform, but we are, we are still a people that have like a national identity. Um, and some of us still really rely on this like family unit or this like religious culture that binds us together. And I think it's also really interesting that the Mandalorian, you know, Din Djarin is since he's a foundling, there are still people within his religious sect that don't see him as fully.

Fully one of them. As one of them. Yeah, exactly. Oh, wow. Yeah. And let's see, Mandalorian came out before Andor did. Yeah. So it was kind of the first original Star Wars series, right?

Like live action series? Yeah, so I think there's a lot at play there. Yeah, I think it's not somebody setting out and going like, okay, pretty soon we're gonna have a chartist one, but right now we're gonna go distributist. You know? Like, and you know, I think that also this kind of model lends itself to the individualism that a lot of Star Wars fans love. It lends

itself to the, frankly, space westernism that you can get back to right? Yeah that that tension between Individual liberty and reliance on community, right? But that is not yeah assigned community. No, yeah Because you're on pretty well. Yeah Fucking hippies Yeah, okay cool Fucking hippies. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, what are you going to recommend for us to read this time? I am very strongly going to recommend that you read Tales from Java's Palace. Wow.

Because as a collection. Boba Fett one, yeah. Because the Boba Fett one. First time you see Concord Dawn mentioned, first time you see Jaster Creel mentioned, first time you see Boba Fett having an ethos other than, you know, long as I get paid. Yeah.

Yeah, like he's straight up against Spice, like he yells at Leia about why Han Solo had it coming, saying Spice is illegal. It's like, whoa. Yeah. You shoot people for a living. Like. Well, and then, and then.

Well then, because what she says, because she gets tossed into Boba Fett's room. Spoiler alert on a book that's more than 20 years old. She gets tossed into Boba Fett's room by Jabba, and she's in the slave outfit. He doesn't take off his helmet. No, he does. He had it on his chest and then he puts it on when she gets in. OK. And then and then they have a tete-a-tete and he shouts that spice is illegal.

And she's like, so is rape. And he's like, yeah, so is rape. And then and she's like, you know, why don't you just send me out of here? Like, because then we'd both get killed. Stay here the night. I'll sit here. You can sleep Like and it's just like this. It's really really different. Yeah. Yeah, it's not what you expect right when when the story starts and It is it is the proto beginnings of

What became the way that's true. So yeah. Yeah. Cool. So that's my recommendation. How about y'all? I'm gonna recommend Tales from... Tales of the Bounty Hunter, actually. Partly because you see Boba Fett older. Much older. This is the one where his knees are shitty, and he like, hey, he does one last job to to get new knees

And he and Han end up having the the moment where they got guns on each other and these they're like Sick of this shit man, like come on Just walk away and like they they have that moment So I'm gonna recommend that one largely so you can see Boba Fett as an old man because that'll lead into what I'm gonna talk about next. So it's rare that I give you homework, but there you go. Gabriel, what are you gonna recommend to us? And I mean, since you both did Star Wars books

and since you also kind of crapped on this book a little bit, I'm going to recommend Shadows of the Empire. I'm gonna be dead. And for a lot of good reasons, you should read this book. I mean, ignore the fact that George Lucas approached this to see if he could sell a video game and a bunch of other, you know, memorabilia without making a movie. But, but I do think for folks who saw the sequels and were really impressed with Rey's slightly orange, maybe yellow lightsaber, that was not the first time it has been done, my friends. Not

the first time that it has been done. And you can find out more about that lightsaber if you read the book. There you go. All right, and and not not to be one of those guys, but I i'm going to for just a second actually Uh the yellow lightsaber first shows up in the luke skywalker toy Oh from kenner It's a yellow lightsaber on the first release

Yes, that you can use your thumb to push it up through the hand. Oh, yeah, it looks like a condom Yeah, it's like a little reservoir tip at the end. Um Catch the midi-chlorians right? Yes, Lee. Yeah clearly Yeah, well and who knew that later on it would be cover your stump But but yeah. OK, so Shadows of the Empire. OK, you know, there are great parts in it. I'm not going to I'm not going to just I forget because it's been a really long time

since I've read it, but what's the name of Dash Rendar's ship? The out outrider. OK, also also a cool name, you know? It is. You see it actually in the special edition of Star Wars Episode IV. It's taking off from Mos Eisley as they're riding in. Oh wow. Yeah.

So, pretty cool. Part of the 10% that led to Lucas's ex-wife not getting anything after the movies. Hell yeah. Way to stick it to the ex. There you go. It led to Lucas's ex-wife not getting anything right movies. Oh, yeah Way to stick it to the X So well cool Ed where can they find us? We collectively can be found online at wubba wubba wubba dot geek history time comm On the website we have every episode that's been put out so far

There's over 200 of them now So so take a look find any topic that that catches your eye Don't start anything in the middle of a series though because that's just barbaric Otherwise we can be found on the Amazon podcast app because I forgot that one last time. We can be found on the Apple podcast app and on Spotify. Wherever it is that you found us, since you're listening to the dulcet tones of my voice right now, be sure to take the time to subscribe and give us the five star review that you know we deserve and where can you be found sir? You could find me at the

Comedy Spot in Sacramento on the first Friday of every month at 9 p.m. slinging puns with capital punishment that starts let's see by the time of this recording we're talking April 5th, May 3rd, June 7th, July 5th. Any one of those, actually I say all of them, mark your calendar and get on down here. You might even find some folks that you've heard on the show previously, sometimes guest starring on Capital Punishment. So give it a shot. You'll love it. And if you've been missing my puns in these last couple episodes, because I've just been enraptured by what everybody's saying,

you definitely need to make your way down there because you'll get like you know what? We are to puns what punk rock is to music. You get more beats per minute with our pun show than any other series. Alright. Yeah. And Gabriel, where can you be found? You can find my band on all streaming platforms. The band's name is Get the Wall. And also, if you're interested in hearing a different Marxist analysis that I did on a podcast, you can find an episode back from, I think, 2019 that I did on revolutionary left radio,

doing a Marxist analysis on dystopian fiction and its role in anti-communism. Wow. So yeah, I'm interested in hearing a lot of shit talking about George Orwell. I have a very strong love-hate relationship with him and the books that he wrote. You can check that out. You can just find it on their all podcast streaming stations. Nice. Very cool. Well, thank you again for joining us for this brand of our nerdery. So it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, appreciate you being here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

Well, for Geek History of Time, I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, this is The Way.