Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Cultural Marxism Industry

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

In the 1930's,Theodor Adorno fled Nazi Germany. In America, he studied the Authoritarian Personality. On YouTube, he’s the object of study in a massive conspiracy theory that many have tried (and failed) to debunk. Chapter two in the new ToE Failure miniseries.

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Cultural Marxism Industry. When Facebook was new, people liked to look for their favorite stuff, their favorite books, and they would join groups, and it was all quite naive and nice. And that's when I came across this Facebook group called Adorno Changed My Life. In 2009, German film student Georg Bosch discovered the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Like many Adorno fans, it all started with Adorno's book of aphorisms, Minima Moralia. I wasn't really sure I understood it, and I didn't know so much about all the Marxist theory background, or even the history that all came later, but it had some kind of potent

transmission. Like the way he describes simple things like doorknobs, and then turns that into a history of like Western culture in a few sentences. Reading those texts was really quite mind-blowing. When Georg discovered the Adorno Changed My Life Facebook group, it already had hundreds of members. Many of them had too been seduced by Adorno's aphorisms, like the one Georg can still recall about new doorknob designs and how they've made the world more harsh and violent. For me, it was one of the aphorisms about intellectual activity.

For the intellectual, Adorno wrote, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. Finding minima moralia is the entry, a rabbit hole to an alternate reality game. After a few weeks of lurking, Georg Bosch posted a video message. Am I the only player?

He invited everyone to collaborate on his film school thesis project. I was definitely into technology and had high hopes for it enabling new ways of storytelling. And I think I wasn't the only one. There was really this, you know, the sweetness in the air of social media and the remix culture.

I tried to make a film that was purely created by user-generated content. Georg asked the group members to film themselves with a webcam, talking about why Adorno was important to them. I think Adorno would have loved that. Adorno changed my life. His theory made me free from domination and

manipulation. You look outside and you see a mall. You think, oh, it's just a mall. Adorno would be like, wait, what are you seeing? I'm seeing buildings. Yeah, he's working in the buildings. Who built that? Who benefits? What are the commodities inside there? I was curious what the people that were in this group were actually all about.

What were they thinking when they joined? How did Adorno change their life? Reading Adorno teaches me that I don't have to be totally frustrated by my incapacity for real political or revolutionary action in my life. A lot of these guys are not very articulate, but hey, if you had asked me how Adorno had changed my life when I was 18, I would have just taken a sharpie and shown you how you can turn a swastika into a dollar sign. I actually did this in college, defending my interpretation of Adorno's concept of the culture industry. Watching Georg's film today in 2019,

you can't help but notice the techno-optimism. These guys all thought Facebook was somehow outside of the culture industry. Facebook is a wonderful example of the digital commons that is counteracting the tendency of capital to commodify and control everything. You also can't help but notice that the film is all dudes. I certainly can't walk out on the street and start chatting with somebody about Adorno. Yeah, somehow it turned out that way for some reason. For some reason.

Yeah, who would have thought? But even though these dudes threw themselves into the Adorno changed my life Facebook group, getting on camera for Georg's Adorno changed my life film was a whole other story. What I ended up having to do was almost like therapy. This idea of user generated content magically appearing out of nowhere is not real. You know, you still have to do the hard work of filmmaking and getting a rapport, a real relationship with your subjects. You cannot trust the interface to do it for you. It just never works. Georg's film played a few film festivals,

but after graduation, he just wasn't able to find a way to persevere with the experimental filmmaking. Today, he's a creative strategist and experience designer. I wasn't able to continue this niche that I found while making this film. And I thought we could find a minimal viable audience that would pay for it. But I've tried many times on Patreon and other you know websites that's supposed to be doing this and it never really worked and so these chances that are enabled by technology are not necessarily sustainable in real life you know where you have to make a living. So what about the Facebook group is it still you know going? It's still a public group and they're like, how many people are in it?

This group is like dead, nobody's in there anymore. Just five members now. How weird is that? Wow. So what's the last post? I could read to you, but it's in German, so I don't know. Is it a quote from Adorno? Yeah. Well, just read it in German, and I'll just put the translation over it later. Right. So,

The world is a system of horror, but that is why those of us who think of it entirely as a system do it too much honor, for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting the wholesale irreconcilability of the general and particular. Its essence is mischief. Its appearance, however, the lie, by virtue of which it continues to exist, is the placeholder of truth. Have you ever wondered, Georg, if maybe the real issue was that you were just too far ahead of your time?

Because it seems that a lot of these processes are almost built in now to platforms like YouTube. Well, I mean, those people don't talk about Adorno there, do they? Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art. The group of Jewish sociologists that invented critical theory. Infiltrated American universities. Bringing in their cultural Marxist beliefs. Post-structuralism, queer studies, African-American studies.

Cultural Marxism dominates practically everything about modern Western culture. The connection between beta, haters, heretics and cultural Marxism. Theodore Adorno ended up running a big part of the cultural industry. Adorno might be friendless on Facebook, but on YouTube,

well, they're definitely talking about Adorno might be friendless on Facebook, but on YouTube, well, they're definitely talking about Adorno. He is a central figure for conspiracy theorists who believe that the Frankfurt School in the 1930s brought cultural Marxism to America. We welcomed the Frankfurt School. We accepted them with open arms. They took full advantage. The world which I inhabit, and people talk about the Frankfurt School from a scholarly or sometimes activist perspective, in no way whatsoever has had any exchange with this other world, the world of all the memes on YouTube and elsewhere. It's a complete parallel rather than intersecting universe. This is Martin Jay, a Berkeley professor, a world-renowned intellectual historian, and the author of numerous books on Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

Around 2010, he decided to get to the bottom of this whole cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Initially, my interest in this was spawned not by an understanding of the right-wing appropriation, but rather by the fact that Fidel Castro, of all people, had followed a conspiracy theory which included the claim that the Frankfurt School had somehow been mobilized by conservatives to help dull revolutionary fervor in the United States through spreading the opium, as it were, of the people being not religion but rather mass culture. Now, Castro's conspiracy theory is totally insane. This one states that Adorno

was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation to write songs for the Beatles to combat counter-culturalism. But what Martin J. discovered is that this crazy theory and the right-wing Frankfurt School conspiracy theory both are indebted to the same source, a 1992 article called The New Dark Age, The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness. In this article, for the first time, the Frankfurt School was named as the occult source behind, first of all, cultural Marxism, and then secondly, political correctness. Now, the Frankfurt School and its collaborators determined that the easiest angle of attack was on the highest expressions of Judeo-Christian culture itself.

This is Michael Manassino. He's the guy who wrote The New Dark Age. And he's speaking at a Lyndon LaRouche conference in 1993, just after his article was published in the LaRouche journal Fidelio. He was basically a young acolyte of LaRouche. LaRouche was more a cult rather than a party, clever enough to seduce people into thinking they had found the key to what made modern capitalist society work. Sometimes I miss seeing the LaRouche people outside of concerts and lectures. They would always have these giant handmade signs explaining how the Queen of England is a drug kingpin

controlling scientific progress in order to keep the Queen of England is a drug kingpin controlling scientific progress in order to keep the rest of the world backwards, and that a massive land bridge is being built by China to rule the globe. Today, the LaRouche cult is a shadow of what it once was, but their campus recruitment methods still live on. They would choose ironic issues that were just exploitable enough to get a bit of a fight going so that we could invite Linda LaRouche on campus. And Lynn would talk about the meaning of life. And that's how we recruited a whole bunch of people. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

In 1998, a right-wing political operative named Bill Lind seized on Menasino's ideas to further his attacks on left-wing intellectualism. Bill Lind produced a documentary about the Frankfurt School for the Free Congress Foundation. The film bills itself as a tell-all expose about Adorno and the other Jewish refugees who came to America fleeing Nazi Germany. Once in America, the Frankfurt School

gradually shifted the focus of its work from destroying German society and culture to attacking the society and culture of its new place of refuge. Bill Lind interviews a number of prominent conservatives in his film, people who rail against political correctness, cultural Marxism, and students. But he also snags a Berkeley professor, a world-renowned intellectual historian, and author of numerous books on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Martin Jay, chairman of the history department at Berkeley,

an author of the history of the Frankfurt School, explains why the name was changed. Well, I was simply asked to give an interview about the Frankfurt School and political correctness. And what they used were the more obvious things where I said, well, of course, they were Marxists, and no one ever denied that. And I mentioned that they had decided to call the Institute the Institute of Social Research rather than the Institute for Marxism, which made it sound as if they were hiding their origins. So it's a fairly bland name, the Institute of Social Research. So they were able to splice the footage and, in a way, integrate what I said into their larger narrative. Critical theory itself always felt reluctant about being put

in the straitjacket of systemization and defied its reduction to a simple definition. Critical theory actually attempted to politicize logic itself. Cultural Marxism in a complicated way is a reality in terms of the ways in which the Western Marxist tradition did take culture very seriously. And so the Frankfurt School was part of an attempt to criticize bourgeois culture and to argue usually for an avant-garde culture, which would be able to realize the best potential of the Enlightenment in Western culture. Through unremitting destructive criticism of every institution of Western society, they hope to bring that society down. Now, at the very end of the piece, they're quite explicit that my book is written by

a sympathizer of the school. And so they try to then say, be careful when you read this book. But nonetheless, this is the best source. So they give a kind of advertisement for the book, which rather oddly, but nonetheless, this is the best source. So they give a kind of advertisement for the book, which rather oddly, I suppose, helped its sales, but also trying to inoculate the readers against being too seduced by it. Bill Lind is very proud of his documentary. In 2009, he crowed, the video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School and he

spills the beans. Right, right. Now that's the metaphor that they loved. Yeah, no, it's clear that they felt that they had, you know, it was kind of gotcha moment, I guess, or at least a moment in which I was playing the useful idiot. They could have, you know, basically had somebody else say the same things that I said, but by having me, they, I guess, gained a certain legitimacy. Thanks to Bill Lind and his documentary, the term cultural Marxism became one of the right's most important boogeymen, or strawmen, or straw boogeymen, for people like Pat Buchanan. The hostile culture, which is rooted in deeply an anti-Christian belief, cultural Marxism, in two words. And Andrew Breitbart. What scares me more about economic Marxism is cultural Marxism, and that is exactly what political correctness is.

These guys hate cultural Marxists as much as Hitler hated cultural Bolsheviks. They were, to a man, Marxist Jews. If you peruse the comments on these YouTube videos dedicated to cultural Marxism, you will often see one word, all caps, Jews. In his research, Martin Jay stumbled upon an 11-point list attributed to the Frankfurt School from 1923. It's almost a philosophical Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is also a complete fabrication. The power of the Frankfurt School has been magnified beyond anything that any normal group of people could ever expect to have achieved. The first one on the list is 11 points here.

The 11-point plan to subvert Western culture. I'd like you to just listen carefully see if any of them sound familiar to you. There's 11 points here. The 11-point plan to subvert Western culture. I'd like you to just listen carefully and see if any of them sound familiar to you. Absurd concepts like diversity is our strength and multiculturalism. First one, huge immigration to destroy identity. This is certainly a product of cultural Marxism. The second, the creation of racism offenses. They would use racial groups to tear down the United States. Now the private school obviously was against racism, but it was not in fact at the center

of its analysis. Their goal was to continue to create confusion. Now this can, you know, I mean you could argue this is exactly what the Trump administration does. They weren't after truth or understanding. They wanted to change society. They never argued that we have to push for change. I mean it's ludicrous.

In the next, the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children. Indoctrinate, recruit, teach and expose children to queer sexuality. The sex education was one of the appliances. Ridiculous. Primary school children are going to be taught pornography. The undermining of schools and teachers' authority. Tearing down campuses, vilifying decency, glorifying violence and

pornography, and nancifying the spelling of America. Where have they got, I mean, this is, this is loony. It's a frantic school subversion technique to undermine schools and teachers. They never wrote about schools and teachers' authority. College campuses, many of which have at this point become small, ivy-covered North Koreas. And the next is really out of, you know, out of space. The promotion of excessive drinking. To induce a helpless, alcoholic nation

that can easily be controlled. Uh, I mean, I can't even begin to think where that came from. The seventh is the emptying of churches. The chastity in the church caused repression, which eventually led to violence. And I, once again, am totally baffled. Cultural Marxism would attack religion because there was another place where people could go other than to the government. We're moving down dependency on the state or state benefits.

The socialist welfare state and all the bad. They were very, very critical of the idea of paternalism as the way to go crazy. Then encouraging the breakdown of the family. They had a kind of nostalgia for the bourgeois family, even recognizing its patriarchal. The next one, unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime. Something they never advocated. And finally, control and dumbing down of media. Shrink the attention span down to two minutes of irrationalism

and pornography. Here too, this is the opposite of what they argued for. By making the culture that underpins our society completely meaningless, it can be easily overthrown. Well, the exact opposite. They wanted, wanted in fact media to be self-critical and to be much smarter. Only propagandist news would be allowed. That's because the same group of people own all of the newspapers 99% of them anyway. Yeah it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland world.

So in 2010, Martin Jay wrote an essay for the academic journal Salma Gandhi. It's called The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe. It's an attempt to not just exonerate himself, but also an attempt to once and for all expose all the anti-Semitic nonsense behind this twisted distortion of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. When you read the essay today, you can't help but note how bemused he is by it all. I wrote it with a sense of incredulity and amusement. The extent of it, the full power of it, was unclear to me.

The blast shattered this capital city on a sleepy Friday afternoon. It was like a rioting war scene from some kind of movie fire. Barely six months after the publication of this essay, a young man named Anders Breivik unleashed horror in Norway. Police now say at least 80 people were killed in a shooting spree at a youth camp. Well, you know, obviously I was shocked, as everybody was, by the act itself, which was so diabolical in terms of its extent, its planning, the victims, many of them children. I mean, the whole thing seemed almost 9-11-like in its horrific quality.

He called for a European revolution, a revival of a white Christian land. Breivik committed his act of mass murder to direct attention to his manifesto, 2083, a European Declaration of Independence. There are over 600 references to cultural Marxism. Breivik even cites Martin J. He'd read my book. There's considerable paraphrase of parts of the book, and he even, in a weird way, recommends the book.

But the extent of Breivik's monstrosity, of course, was something that's impossible to, you know, to feel comfortable with. It leaves you with a very sort of sickening feeling. I mean, you never can choose your readers. The culture industry, it's a very useful term for us. I think that's a term we should be using and maybe even using it in a lot of the same ways as Adorno did. Richard Spencer, the American Nazi, mostly famous for getting punched in the face,

he also, like Breivik, advocates for a white nationalist state. And it turns out he wrote his college thesis on Adorno. I think cultural Marxism has infected the military in the United States. It's kind of incredible. But we had a major army general claiming that diversity is the great strength of America's armed forces. And so this kind of, let's call it the Bravic moment, is not one that will pass very quickly. It's been quite a triumph. It doesn't really even make sense to call this cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

a conspiracy theory anymore. Today, it's totally mainstream. What the Frankfurt School decided is in order to make this change happen, we have to change the culture. Ben Shapiro is a popular figure on campuses and he also has used the Frankfurt School meme in ways that suggest he's also consumed Kool-Aid. I don't believe the full-scale conspiracy theory that everybody was taken over by them, but I think that influential thinkers do have influence beyond just the people who read

their books. There was no question that the anxiety of people who saw the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy coming to the United States through the migration that Hitler unleashed, the connection between that migration and the current incredible anxiety about migrants from other parts of the world, that this has tapped a very deep fear in some circles in the United States, luckily not all, that something very valuable is about to be eroded and that we have to somehow stand firm against it. We meaning white patriarchy. We have very bad immigration laws. I just think it's changing the culture.

I think it's a very negative thing. Martin Jay showed me a photo of Donald Trump shaking hands with Bill Lind. Trump's holding up a copy of Lind's book, The Next Conservatism. And sure, it's highly unlikely that Trump read this book. but people who work for him most certainly did, like Rich Higgins, who was an aide in the Strategic Planning Office of the National Security Council. Shortly after these Charlottesville events, he wrote a memo called POTUS and Political Warfare. This memo blamed the opposition to the president on the cultural Marxism spawned by the Frankfurt School. Donald Trump Jr. gave this memo to his father, who supposedly gushed over it. And I know it's politically not necessarily correct to say that, but I'll say it, and I'll say it loud. Martin Jay's return to his research into the cultural Marxism industry

with a new essay that's less an update and more an investigation into why facts and rational thinking totally fail to debunk the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. His new essay points us in the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. His new essay points us in the direction of the authoritarian personality. This is a research project that Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School worked on when they were in exile in America. Martin J's convinced that the authoritarian personality offers us a path to understand why people are drawn to conspiracy theories like the one about the Frankfurt School and to individuals who evangelize them.

The authoritarian personality has come back with a vengeance and it's come back as a way to explain the phenomenon that we're seeing. I mean, why people accept strongmen, why they hunger after a kind of figure who is post-democratic, why they like the illiberal democracy of an Orban or find Duterte or Erdogan or Bolsonaro in Brazil. I mean why they're attracted to people like this. In the introduction to the authoritarian personality, the authors state their conviction that mass delusion cannot be healed by focused propaganda. What is required, they insist, is a scholarly study of the root causes of the delusion.

Adorno and his colleagues spent years interviewing prison inmates, college students, factory workers, housewives, office managers. Using a series of questionnaires, they attempted to figure out where America was on the F scale. That's F as in fascist. This is why the study was and remains controversial. Peruse the Amazon comments for the book today and you'll discover that people are still outraged by the idea that the Frankfurt School would take patriotic, God-fearing Americans and reduce them to fascistic personality types. But the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were not doing conventional typology.

They were interested in the social reality behind personality types. For Adorno and his colleagues, even the typification of man itself is a social function. Adorno's larger argument was that the psychology was really itself in effect of the social reality. So yes, they were types, but not because they were psychologically somehow rigid, but because society had created types which they then internalized. So that the larger culprit, we might say, is not their own internal psyches or even their family backgrounds, but rather the ways in which they were somehow the victims of a society which created pseudo-individuals and created conformists and created people who were not really capable of critical maturation.

So that's a deeper argument. That means you have to not attack individuals as psychological types, but rather look at the social conditions which breed them. The authoritarian personality was an attempt to make the social conditions behind typology visible. The ultimate reason for the ignorance and confusedness, the authors wrote, might well be the opaqueness of the social, economic, and political situation to all those who are not in full command of all the resources of stored knowledge and theoretical thinking. In its present case, our social system tends objectively and automatically to produce curtains

which make it impossible for the naive person really to see what it is all about. They nonetheless have a different evaluation of what it's all about. Today, most of the attacks on the authoritarian personality actually come from those who are advocating for a sort of legitimate authoritarianism. They tell us that if we hope to regain what's been taken by immigrants, women, and cultural Marxists, we must first return to a legitimate authority. So some people think authority

is a good thing, and they think that an overly permissive society, an overly somehow individual society, is a corrupt society. So they want to bring back authority. So personalities that accept authority, that know who to obey, that know their place, that know what the hierarchy tells them their place should be, that this is a healthy rather than a problematic response. So there's a kind of meta-level understanding. Yes, they're being labeled as authoritarian personalities, but it's not a bad thing to be a respecter of legitimate authority. A man who has authority and competence has power as a byproduct,

but the authority and competence is everything, and people who can't understand that fail to make the distinction. YouTube celebrity Jordan Peterson is famous for his rants. We need authority and competence. What else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run? Rants about how political correctness is awful, about how young men need to clean their room, and how feminism ruins everything.

Women's studies and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go. And the faster they go, the better. But he doesn't use the phrase cultural Marxism. He prefers the term postmodern neo-Marxism. School systems that our kids are going through from, say, the age of five to the age of 18, they're increasingly occupied by the postmodern neo-Marxist ideologies. But it's the same thing.

I mean, there's buzzwords, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege, systemic racism, gender equity. Equity, that's a no-go zone, equity. That's equality of outcome. That's a preposterous, murderous doctrine. Postmodern neo-Marxism is a concerted attack on the natural hierarchies of authority. I'm quite enamored of lobsters, as some of you might know. Jordan Peterson sees these hierarchies of authority as the glue that holds society together. I mean, they've been conserved since the time of lobsters, right? That's another indication

of just how important hierarchies of authority are. On YouTube, Jordan Peterson is a legitimate authority. One could probably even make an experimental film using only the testimonials his fans post about him. This is a video about how Jordan Peterson changed my life. Jordan Peterson's course really changed, I would say it's been the most influential agent of change in my life ever. I want to share one advice that I

got from Jordan Peterson that has changed me for the better. I attribute the increase in my quality to Peterson's future authoring program. Jordan B Peterson, he has deeply affected my life in many profound ways. Jordan Peterson he was who inspired me to get started on this journey. This is a video about how Jordan Peterson changed my life. This is part two. If it wasn't for Jordan Peterson, I think I would have committed suicide. So today I want to talk about a gentleman named Jordan Peterson. It's not even all nerdy dudes.

Who has changed my life in several ways. Four main ways that I think Peterson has influenced the way that I think and the way that I act. Once I started applying Peterson to my life, I saw changes. Dr. Jordan Peterson helped to save my life. Sound dramatic? What's up YouTube? So in this video I clean my room because Jordan Peterson said so. I'm going to clean my room for Jordan Peterson. I'll give you a quick pan around what I have here. Just some stuff essentially from garbage and my desktop.

Oh I almost got it. That is fantastic. How could I be so wrong. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Cultural Marxism Industry. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It featured Georg Bosch and Martin Jay. You can find links to Martin Jay's work on our website, theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. Our failure hotline is still open.

You can leave us a voicemail at 850-739-4128. And if you ordered a Benjamin coin but haven't received it yet, send us an email at toe at prx.org because we are getting ready for our next release, The Benjamin Pill. Stay tuned. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.