Chapo Trap House - Bonus: The Marianne Williamson Interview

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Thanks to a positive mental attitude and the power of good vibes, Chapo has landed its first ever interview with a Presidential candidate. Virgil and Matt have a spirited dialogue with fellow bestselling author Marianne Williamson about Marxist materialism versus the idealism in her campaign book A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution.

Hey everyone, Virgil here with TVs Matt Christmas. With us is activist, humanitarian, and fellow bestselling author and candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Marianne Williams. And Marianne, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So I've been reading A Politics of Love and there's a lot of just really kind of fascinating ideas there that I don't see, I've never really seen from a politician. And something that I were talking about last night is that no other candidate in this race other than Bernie Sanders, I think has a well-defined philosophy, you know, an ideology that is

in contrast to the dominant ideology that they're running on. Everyone else just says, you know, oh, I'm a problem solver and that kind of thing. So I guess what I want to do is if you can, in your own words, you know, explain the thesis of politics of love to the audience. And then I think go from there and just have a spirited conversation about, you know, defining what that is and defining your terms and about this idealism that's at the core of your political beliefs. And then opening that up to a contrast with where me and Matt Moore stand, which is a firmly materialist conception of politics and seeing how both of these interact and ultimately in practice, how do you produce political

change? I understand. And thank you. The first thing I'd point out is that if you look at the two greatest movements of political change in the 20th century, they were Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Mahatma Gandhi articulated a politics of love. That's what the philosophy of nonviolence is, where he said that there is an inner light he said within every man woman and child and that that inside us not only heals all personal relationships, but all political and social relationships as well. Now, you can't say he didn't create political change with that. And then Martin Luther King went to India. He studied those

principles and he brought them back to apply to the struggle for civil rights in the United States in the 1960s. Once again, can't say they didn't achieve political change with that. I don't think that either Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. were naive, unsophisticated or lacking in courage about real political change. So I'm not inventing any wheels here, reinventing any wheels here. I'm simply talking about a philosophy that's been around for quite a long time with which I agree. And that is that the idea that there are inner powers as well as outer powers, an idea that I think all of us know in our own individual lives. That's why people go to therapy. That's why people meditate. That's why people are

in AA. We realize that we have internal dynamics, justice. We have external dynamics. Now, in our collective experience, just as in our inner one, the inner life precedes behavior. So there are many psychological and emotional and even spiritual dynamics that underlie political phenomenon. I think that the 2016 election was a perfect example. The left was gobsmacked by Bernie and the right was gobsmacked by Trump because neither one of those establishments factored into their calculations what was going on inside people. Whereas if you had any kind of psychological perspicacity, you saw people out there are angry. People out there recognize that this system is rigged and they're going to have a real hard time

just voting for someone who says everything's fine and let's continue with all the success we've had for the last eight years. Now, I'm not saying that's really what she felt in her heart at all. So I don't mean that as a criticism of Hillary Clinton, but she didn't name the rage and despair that was out there. So my point is to say that that rage and despair in her feelings don't matter politically is simply naive. It's not as sophisticated as it sounds. So in the 20th century, which is now behind us, the dominant worldview was very mechanistic, rationalistic and externalized. The 21st century is a much more holistic integrative consciousness, whether it's in science, whether it's in medicine, whether

it's in education, people have a much more sophisticated evolutionary perspective on who we are as people and who we are affects what we do. So I find the traditional political establishment at this point stuck back in the 20th century. And because it has an overly externalized take on everything, it addresses symptoms but doesn't address cause. It waters the leaves of what's wrong, but it doesn't water the roots. And a politics of love is saying that what has happened now, which we all know, racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, all the horrifying aspects of human nature really, have been harnessed for political purposes. And collectivized hatred is one of the most dangerous phenomenon

that has ever existed on the planet and can exist on the planet. That has happened here. Fear has been harnessed for political purposes. But love is to fear what light is to darkness. The only thing that can override that is for us to now turn love into a political force. We need to harness love. We need to harness our mercy, our compassion, our goodness, our sense of justice and fairness, and standing for each other and standing for this planet and standing for what we know in our hearts to be right and thinking about what it's going to be like on this planet for 50 years from now because we do care about other generations than our own. We have to harness that for political purposes. And that is the politics

of love. That's very compelling because in the most famous American political ad of all time, it ends with a voiceover from President Johnson saying, we must love one another or we must die. In your conception, is political reality the situation that we're in now entirely due to psychoanalytic factors? Well, everything on a certain level is due to psychoanalytic factors in that everything that happens in the world was preceded by consciousness. Any time anyone does anything, there was a thought that preceded it, that preceded it. In terms of the line from Johnson

that you just said, there's that famous line from Martin Luther King, Jr. We will learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools. And as we face the 21st century, this is not just nice sentiment. Look what's happening even as you and I speak. We have people talking recklessly about war with Iran. You have to be insane to talk recklessly about war with Iran. And Albert Einstein said, I know not with weapons we would fight World War III, but I can assure you, World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. What I found striking about politics of love is that you and I, and I think a large segment of our audience come from different theoretical backgrounds. And the message that we prefer

on the show that we try to convince people of that we think is necessary to reintroduce to our politics is a materialistic worldview. It is a ultimately a vulgar Marxist worldview that says, you know, what actually matters are these relations of one to the means of production, whether you're a worker or an owner, and this this irreconcilable tension between those two groups that has to be overcome in some fashion. And yet, in your book, Politics of Love, I find a lot of the language is just strikingly similar to what you would read in the pages of Jacobin and any socialist journal today, that you've come to the same conclusion about, for instance, the this cult of rationalism today, this, what do you call

this, technocracy by which a class war is being fought by the people in charge who dress it up in this language of no, no, no, this is rational, you know, that's just how the numbers work. And then while in practice, millions of people's lives get worse and worse. And you you talk about that. There was this part that I found very interesting. In the words of French philosopher, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Teilhard Deschardin, Teilhard Deschardin, Teilhard Deschardin, some day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides of gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. I used to read

those words and think it would be nice if it were to happen. Now I read them and realize that only if it happens will humanity survive. And you're talking about this in the context of climate change, which is a global existential crisis. And I think the exact same way. But I would substitute the word love for the word socialism, you know, this is just semantics. And for that matter, when you were talking about Marxist materialism, before Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, read his humanitarian writings. He was a humanitarian philosopher. His whole notion of communism emerged from his theory about the value of work and the dignity of work. So the idea that there is something inside us that matters, I mean,

it was coming whether we believe the political manifestation that it was ultimately brought forth based on his work was a good idea for humanity or not, is a separate issue. It emerged in his philosophy and in his political thinking from his deep sense of the dignity that was the right of every worker. So in other words, I'm not ignorant of the level in which you're speaking, but I don't see it. I mean, you could speak French and you could speak German, but you're really it's the same sentence. You're just speaking a different language. So most of what I hear you saying is more the kaleidoscope of truth, you know, nature mimics itself on every level, the same patterns. That's why you'll see a you'll see a movie

about a tidal wave and really they filmed it in a bathtub because it's the same phenomenon in the ocean is the phenomenon of the of the drain in the bathtub. So once and that's why by the way, those of us who are students of a kind of universal patterns of universal truth, it actually clues you in. Oh, this is what's really happening in economics. Oh, this is what's happening in world affairs. Oh, this is what's happening in that relationship. These patterns of truth are the same everywhere. And that's why what you and I are saying what is happening today, for instance, is that the kind of capitalism that is being that is being practiced, the capitalism completely untethered to any kind of moral or ethical

consideration requires cheap labor in order to thrive. I get that. I've read the same stuff you've read. I get that. And that's what that's why I recognize that that kind of an economic system is ultimately tyrannous. It has no plans to really allow for the liberation of people and the genuine actualization of democracy, because that is contrary and inconvenient to its economic purposes is your project then the same as a socialist project, which also seeks to create economic justice and equality. Well, I believe, first of all, I think that a lot of the conversation we've been having recently about capitalism and socialism is a little juvenile. What do you call the police department if not socialist? What do you call

the fire department if not socialist? I think capitalism, while it can create great economic opportunity, does not inherently take care of everybody. Socialism, while it is more prone to taking care of everybody, does not necessarily create great economic opportunity. One of the things that I think has been very interesting and this complete severance of American capitalism, and I'm not romantic about what it was before, but it's never been anything. Well, it has been, but when it has been so severed before from any kind of ethical and moral consideration, generations pushed back. That's where we got labor unions. That's where we got the labor movement. That's where we got child labor laws. In our time,

this severance began in the 1980s. The idea that fiduciary responsibility to stockholders was the only responsibility of the American corporation. I believe now, and I will see how this goes down. But right now, you do have big capitalist moguls like Jeremy Grantham, like Ray Dalio, who are saying what this one Italian industrialist said a few years ago. If we want things to stay the same, some things are going to have to change around here. So we'll see. We'll see if they start writing their ship and course correcting. But in the meantime, the lack of government regulation, the fact that we have basically given the structures of the US government and the powers of the US government over to this new class

of overlords, and this is exactly what you would be saying from a socialist and materialist perspective. It is a new class of corporate overlords. It's a veiled American aristocracy. It has led to 1% of Americans owning more wealth in the bottom 90. And whether you talk about it in spiritual terms or in political terms, it is wrong. It is immoral and it needs to stop. In an orthodox Marxist view, the state exists to enforce the powers and the will of the dominant class. And so in some way, yes, what you and I are talking about, we agree that we have a government run for the 1% for a small, small number of self-interested people.

If that's the case, how do you tell someone with all the power who doesn't need to change that, no, no, you have to take a hit here. You have to do ethical capitalism now. The point is that any time we have had a course correction that has led to social justice, it has not been because the traditional political establishment made the change because they get co-opted. If it was always thus, they get co-opted, they get bought as it were, they get corrupted by that dominant class. But this is America. We're not supposed to be doing that. We repudiated aristocracy in 1776. So it always changes and goes back to the American, the democratic experiment when the people step in. That's why I'm running

for president because if you look at slavery, it didn't end. The abolitionist movement didn't happen because the dominant political structure said, let's end slavery. It happened because the people stepped in. The political establishment didn't wake up one day and say, oh, let's give women the right to vote. The people stepped in. We didn't end segregation because the political establishment said, let's do that. It happened because the people stepped in. So the answer to your question is it only happens because and when the people step in. And that's how it's supposed to happen in the United States. That is why power was vested in the people by the founders. And for the most part, our narrative has been moving

in the direction of the expansion of the actualization of democracy when it has been under attack and assault. Now we'll see what happens right now because what's happened is what you would call the dominant class. We have some different languages. The same stuff has so messed with the thinking. It is so messed with that there's been so much gaslighting. But the people I do believe are waking up. And for that matter, I think that's what's happened in 2016. The people want to change why they knew the system was rigged. And you know what? They were right. And it still is.

Again, another orthodox Marxist view. You just mentioned the way that just our minds have just been changed by this country in which we live in this current neoliberal circumstance. And you have the idea of base and superstructure, this pyramid where by which all our laws and politics and our culture and even our thinking and language emanate from those material relations. But do you flip that pyramid on its head and say, no, no, it's actually the base that's driven by our thought? Thomas Jefferson and the founders turned it on its head. Now the irony of the Declaration of Independence, which did turn that on its head, is that 41 percent, no, 41 signers of

the Declaration of Independence were themselves slave owners. So our country has always been this dichotomy. This is our characterological makeup, this polarity. So this has been true from the beginning. It's baked into the cake. Then on one hand, we have these aspirational principles, which is the turning of the paradigm on its ear and the fact that we have throughout our history been at times, even from the beginning, at times the most violent perpetrators of transgression against that new paradigm. So far, as I said, we've always woken up in time and people have pushed it back towards a democratic ideal. And that is the struggle that to me has to happen today.

You alluded to this, but you talk about the need for a renewal, for a rebellion, a revolution, love. Let's kind of talk about that in concrete terms. What does that look like? What's your theory of political change taking place right now? Well, first of all, nothing is going to happen unless the people wake up to what's gone on here. And one of the things you have to wake up to is that expecting the traditional political establishment to save you from this ditch when they're the ones who drove you into this ditch is everything that you've been saying about neoliberalism, et cetera. This corruption did not begin with Donald Trump. We have been heading in a very perilous

direction for 40 years. So what happens, once again, about consciousness preceding action, is people waking up and recognizing this. And I see this on the campaign trail. It's fascinating. People are not stupid. You know, only 11, no, there are 11 states in the United States that do not even require half a year of education in American government, civics, and history. Too many Americans don't see the through line, don't understand the narrative of what has occurred here. But when people do, there's an inherent rambunctiousness in the American character. That is what we need to reclaim for ourselves. So as it turns out, the American Revolution is an ongoing experience. We repudiated aristocracy in 1776, or you could call it

class domination, whatever words you want to use. We repudiated it in 1776, and we need to repudiate it again. It turns out, and if you think about it, why would we have ever thought otherwise? If you don't take care of your body, why should you be surprised if you get sick? If you don't take care of your relationship, why should you be surprised if you lose it? You don't take care of your business. Why should you be surprised if it goes to pot? And the same thing with our democracy. We kind of farmed it out. We just thought we would say things like, oh, I'm not political, or somebody else is handling that. And we realized now, the founders weren't kidding when they said the only safe repository of

power is in the hands of the people. Well, say people wake up and they say, well, I want to do something. What do they do? Well, look who you're talking to. I think they go to Miriam2020.com. And vote for me, you know, volunteer for me, send money to my campaign. I think that my campaign is one that stands for a fundamental pattern disruption. We need, of the entire political and economic system in the United States, we need a moral, political, and economic revolution in the United States. Nonviolent, peaceful, but revolutionary nonetheless. Do you view, is this just purely an electoral movement, or is it something like civil disobedience

that you see with the Sunrise Movement? It's all of the above. It's all of the above. And look what happened to look where the Sunrise Movement, look what it ultimately became. It's multi-dimensional. You know, I grew up in a time. My youth was a period of time of great revolutionary counterculture and political change. So we read Alan Watts and Ram Dass in the morning and went to Vietnam anti-war protests in the afternoon. So I grew up in a time, and my comfort zone has always been the both and of external and internal change. My life has been that and continues to be that. To me, there's no, it's not either or. Even the conversation you and I were having

before, I've read Marx. I remember when I was in college reading Shuala Smith Firestone, but I also, who is a great Marxist feminist, you know, but I also remember reading his humanitarian papers and going, isn't that fascinating? So I'm a student of history of that stuff. I get it. When you're talking about a politics of love, is that love for everyone or does that acknowledge that today there are villains in this society? There are people that we have to oppose and ultimately defeat. Well, the two are not contradictory. On one hand, the love that will save the world is

not just love for my children. It has to be the love for children on the other side of town, the children on the other side of the world. It has to be a love for all sentient beings, which by the way, includes animals. At the same time, as Martin Luther King said, the fact that I'm supposed to love my enemies doesn't mean have to like them. So a belief in a higher power of love does not lessen your brain cells. It doesn't make you stupid. It doesn't make you more vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, being taken advantage of, etc. Anything that makes you wiser makes you smarter. Love is not an abdication of political strategy. It is the ultimate political strategy.

You know, when King was assassinated, he was in Memphis, I believe, and at the time he was working with these garbage workers who were on strike. And where does the labor movement fit into? Oh, it's huge. The attack on the labor movement, first of all, the labor movement when it first began in the United States was a total example of a pushback against the overreach of capitalist forces when they become untethered to moral and ethical consideration. The fact that the labor movement has been under attack the way it has been since the 1980s is a perfect example and a perfect embodiment of the corporatist agenda. As I said before, that brand of capitalism

requires cheap labor. So of course, it is contrary to the full embodiment of the democratic ideal and the union movement is an important facet of the effort to embody the democratic ideal. When you talk about love, and I was talking with Matt about this the other night, when you talk about love, that seems like kind of a fraught concept because the people, millions of people who are Trump supporters, who see things like children in cages and cheer it on and think that's good, they consider themselves beings of love, too. They think I'm, they by and large think I'm a good person. They don't wake up and say, you know, I'm a villain.

So how do you, is there more to it? Is there, is there a more, you know, it's not just love as an abstract concept, but it's a specific conception of it. There is no love without justice. There is no love without mercy. There is no love without forgiveness. So I don't want to stand in judgment of anyone who votes for anyone for any reason. However, there are sociopaths on this planet. So the fact that someone, you know, I think Mohammed Atta, before he killed the first person on the plane, yelled, God is great. So you know, you can use words like God, you can use words like love, it's not words that matter, it's behavior that matters. So to me, when I talk about love in political terms,

what I'm talking about is the fact that we have millions of American children who are living in chronic trauma throughout this country, going to schools that don't even have adequate school supplies with which to teach a child to read. And if that child cannot read by the age of eight, the chances of high school graduation had drastically decreased, and the chances of incarceration had drastically increased. Love means you rescue that child. You rescue those children no differently than if they were the victims of a natural disaster. And all that the traditional political establishment does right now is to normalize the despair of these kids. Why? Because they're not old enough to vote, so they're not a constituency

— they're not old enough to work, so there's no financial leverage. So how could they possibly compete with the clout of all the corporate money that floods Washington? What does a politics of love mean? You save those children. You create wraparound services. You create trauma-informed education. You create restorative justice. You create conflict resolution. You create mindfulness in the schools. You fund education. You make every school in this country a palace of learning. Right now we have a system where our primary way of funding education is through property taxes, which means that a child who just didn't win the birth lottery in terms of the money that their parent makes has a much less of a chance of an education.

And we all know that it happens now eight years old and younger. What love means is you go in there and you save those children, and you recognize that a financial system that is so bent on giving $26 billion last year alone in corporate subsidies to the fossil fuel companies, or $2 trillion tax cut, where $0.83 of every dollar goes to the very richest among us, while you then say, we don't have the money to give even glue sticks and paper to these children, you call that for what it is. It is immoral. And the economic system that it represents is so devoid of any sense of morals or ethics in terms of responsibility to other human beings as to be sociopathic that we have a sociopathic economic system

at this time. And it is tyrannous. This is economic tyranny. And that's why I say it is time for the people to step in. Now we can go through situation after situation. We can talk about the children who are dying starving in Yemen. We can talk about the fact that for the sake of $350 billion in an arms sale, we are supporting with aerial support that genocidal war and on and on and on. If you're president, you know, chances are you're facing a hostile Congress. It might even be a hostile Democratic Congress. Oh, why would the Democrats be, you mean they like corporates as Democrats?

Yeah, I mean, the kind of thing that stymied parts of Barack Obama's agenda in 2009, 2010, even though he had very big margins in both houses of Congress. And it's something we talk about on this show. If Bernie Sanders were to win the presidency, well, you know, your president is not like you could wave a wand and, you know, just make the country socialist like you. But that being said... Like you meaning like Bernie Sanders? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that being said, what would you do as president to address not just this inequality, but this immense amount of power that these companies, these one percenters

have? Like what in practice in terms of actions, legislation, things like that? I want to repeal that 2017 tax cut, although I would want to put back in the middle class part. I want to get rid of those corporate subsidies such as the fossil fuel subsidy that I just mentioned. I want the United States government to be able to negotiate with Big Pharma rather than having Big Pharma completely dominate our healthcare system. And I want the American people to realize that the military industrial complex is alive and well. And while we need a strong military, the budget of the military is not a reflection of our legitimate security needs as determined by our military, so much as they are a reflection

of short term profit maximization for defense contractors. I also see every dollar that we spend actually helping people thrive as a stimulant to the economy. So I have a very strong sense of where, for myself, of where money comes from. Even with your Marxist and materialistic conception, I think in the 21st century, we're moving, we're evolving even further into the sense that the money actually doesn't just come from the labor. Money comes from the energy of people whose labor is infused by their highest level of creativity and productivity. And so that's why I believe that anything that helps people thrive, whether it has to do with their healthcare, even on a material

level, once people have universal healthcare through Medicare for all available for everyone, once that happens, just think how much less, how much more money will be in the pockets of every American. And then from that comes money that they spend, more of a consumer base, more of a tax base, et cetera. And you can apply that to everything else, such as free college, state colleges and universities. You apply it to a higher minimum wage. You apply it to cancellation of those college loans. And what you have is more money in the economy. So it turns out, love really is the answer. How we relate to each other, soul force as

opposed to brute force really is the key to both peace and prosperity. Well, certainly that is the ethical, the humanist reason in my mind to be a Marxist is because this would lead to the most just, equitable distribution of resources and thereby encourage human flourishing. You mentioned negotiating with big pharma, but I want to ask you this. Should massive private pharmaceutical companies even exist? Not the way they do. Absolutely not. They should not have the power that they have. This is what we have in the United States. The FDA, Food and Drug Administration, CDC, Center for Disease Control, what has happened in an aristocratic situation is that we have a government that

does more to advocate for the short-term profits of these huge multinational corporate conglomerates than it does to advocate for our health, safety and well-being, the health, safety and well-being of the rest of the world, and the health and safety and well-being of the planet itself. So these agencies, which were theoretically set up to advocate for the people, have instead become handmaidens to these forces. The same with the FAA and the hands of Boeing. Same with the EPA now being led by a chemical company executive, and before that being led by an oil company executive. So what you need to do, and what we'll do when I'm president, is you, those people are out. No more chemical and oil company executives at the EPA, and

the FDA gets teeth back, and the FDA doesn't even have, you know, I heard some young staffers say to me years ago, and I remember when I first heard this, I thought, what is he talking about? I was in Washington at a meeting in a congressman's office. I had talked about something, and a young staffer said to me, well, Ms. Williamson, what about the dual advocacy of these agencies? And I looked at him and I went, what dual advocacy? And he said, well, you know, I mean, we're supposed to protect the people, but we're also here to protect their ability to, you know, do well in business and make money. And I said, no, you're not. No, you are not. You are here to be of the people, by the people for the

people. You can't have it both ways. And that's what the corporatist agenda does, even on the democratic side, when there are those who think we can have it both ways in places where you really can't. So what, you know, I would not be president to represent big pharma. I would be the president to represent the people. You said that you support, and correct me if I'm wrong here, a public option for Medicare buying for health insurance. But, you know, other candidates go even further than that. I mean, do you think that private health insurance companies should exist? Well, this is certainly the big question, of course, the Bernie versus some of the others.

And I, you know, I've been through this in my mind. I've been through this in conversation with many people. I do understand that ultimately the idea of for-profit insurance does not represent the highest possibility. However, I want to say something here. I want to be an agent of change. I don't want to be an agent of chaos. And if you go when you were talking before about obstruction and blowback and hostility, I'll tell you, if I walk in the first day and I say, okay, no more private insurance, no more Obamacare, and we just go like that, that to me is not leadership. With vision, you must not compromise, but sometimes with politics, you must. So in my mind, you have a Medicare for all plan available

as an option. And then people who want to keep their private insurance, if they want to keep their private insurance, I think they should be able to. You know, I had to tell you, I do believe that capitalism with conscience is a possibility. We'll see. I could be wrong. But I think we've got another few years for me. Obviously, you've crossed the river. I have not crossed in my mind from what you're saying anyway, because in my life, I've experienced the upside of the free market as an author. I don't think the problem is that the problem is that not enough people can't, not enough people have a chance to. But I believe it's possible in a society where conscience and humanitarian and democratic values are your

ordering principle. Well, I mean, we've also achieved success as podcasters in this society, but I don't believe that things like books and podcasts would not exist in a socialist society. I guess my objection is, and you even cite this in your book, that you know, the problem is we are driven by material greed, these these decisions of powerful driven by overwhelming greed. But isn't that fundamental to the capitalist system, just self interest and primitive accumulation of wealth? I do not believe so. Prior to the 1980s, the American corporation was expected to have

an ethical and moral responsibility that went beyond mere fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. So with Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys and that whole trickle down economic theory in the 1980s, the idea was, yes, just just fiduciary responsibility without any sense of responsibility to the larger stakeholders, the workers, the community, the environment. That was allowed. And I think it's worth noting that even even Milton Friedman, who devised all that, he himself said, if you're going to get government out, if you're going to just let market forces do whatever they want in that kind of unfettered capitalist ethos, even he said, but then, of course, you're going to have to have a universal basic income.

What they did, those guys in the 1980s, is they took the most the most the most entitled aspect of capitalism, and they left out any sense of concern for other people. I believe there are such things that there are possibilities of reasonable regulations. And like I said, we could see. But that before that, the people have to wake up. The people have to wake up. And we have to recognize that the entire corporatist agenda is an economic tyranny, which absolutely must be overthrown. I want to go backwards a little bit and talk about your family growing up. You talk about your father, and he was working class.

Well, my father was brought up. No, actually, my father was brought up in deep poverty. And then he was educated, a Catholic university, gave him a scholarship, and he ended up going to law school. He grew up very poor. He had to fall. It was during the Depression. He had to drop out of school at 17. He was the only one in his family who could work. He went back and finished high school at 25, was given scholarships, and became a lawyer, and was an immigration lawyer. But his experience of deep poverty growing up, not only deeply informed his whole being, and he transmitted the sense of social justice to his children with great passion.

Besides your father, who were your major theoretical influences that held you along the way to develop your own set of theories? Well, I was very much a child of the 60s and 70s. I mean, that was a generation I grew up in. So the left wing at that time, who affected me more, Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon, I'm not sure which. And you were opposed to the Vietnam War? Absolutely. I was very young. I was in high school. I was born in 1952. So I was sort of the tail end of that era, but man, I was in there.

Why were you, what led you to oppose the Vietnam War? My father, I was in the seventh grade, and I came home from school. You might have read this. I think I wrote that in the Politics of Love. Seventh grade, I came home from school. It was a social studies class. And I remember it like it was yesterday. I started explaining to my parents what the social studies teacher had told us. And she had talked to us about what was then called the domino theory. And the domino theory was the idea that we had to fight in Vietnam, because if we didn't fight in Vietnam, all the nations of Southeast Asia would fall to the communists and we'd soon be fighting them on the shores of Hawaii.

So I explained to my parents why we had to be fighting in Vietnam, and that if we didn't fight in Vietnam, we will be fighting in Hawaii someday. My father stood up and he said, sweetheart, that's what he called my mother. Get the visas. We're going to Saigon. Now this was 1965. And my parents traced all three of their children to Saigon because my father said, kids, you're going to see what war is. You're going to see what war is. And the military industrial complex will not eat my children's brains. And so you've been anti-war your entire life, is that right? Well, my father fought in World War II. I believe that World War II was a righteous war. I'm

not saying I wouldn't have fought that. And I have great respect for the service of people like my father. I have great respect for the military. My criticism of the military industrial complex is not a criticism of the military. It's a criticism of the political decisions that are made based on short-term profits for defense contractors, even opposed to a real agenda for peace in the world. But I look at the military the way I look at a surgeon. I mean, if you're going to have to have surgery, you certainly want to have the best surgeon, but I think any sane person wants to avoid surgery if at all possible. Is our military necessary? Is military this size with bases in hundreds or so countries?

Well, there are two very different questions that you asked. First question you asked was, is our military necessary? I believe the answer is yes. Then the second question you asked, a military this size. There we have, there are very legitimate questions to be asked. You can't just take medicine. You have to cultivate health. And you can't just endlessly prepare for war. You have to cultivate peace. So even Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense under George Bush, said we must cultivate, we must wage peace. That's why I wanted my administration, a Department of Peace. Right now we have about a $750 billion military budget. Our State Department budget, and James Mattis, before he left the Department

of Defense, said if you're not going to fully fund the State Department, I'm going to have to buy more ammunition. Our State Department, so that's diplomacy and mediation and development, that's $40 billion. And the actual peace building agencies within the State Department, those things of humanitarian, not just humanitarian aid, because that's a USAID, which is $17 billion, but only less than $1 billion go to specific peace building efforts, which is expanding economic opportunities for women, reducing violence against women, expanding educational opportunities for children, and ameliorating unnecessary human suffering wherever possible. We should see large groups of desperate people as a national security risk, because desperate

people become more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces. So what I want to see, you don't just not take care of your body, not take care of your diet, not take care of your lifestyle, and then just hope that allopathic medicine can suppress or eradicate the symptoms that arise when sickness almost inevitably comes. Right now, we put too much burden on our military. The military has to clean up messes. It should never have even happened. But there are no corporate profits to be made. That's the whole point here. There are no corporate profits to be made by our peace building measures. And that's why we need a politics in which the bottom line is not corporate profits.

You know, I could not even name the number of countries we're currently bombing, where we have active military engagements. And you mentioned earlier in this interview that you oppose a war with Iran, which in the time we've been sitting here might have started. What military engagements would you support? I would support military engagement if number one, there was actually an attack on our own homeland. I would support military engagement if there was an attack on an ally. And I would support military engagement if there was genuinely a threat to the humanitarian world order. For instance, I would not have had a problem sending the military into Rwanda. Matt, did you want to... I guess the question I have

is a couple of them. The first one is about the idea of the politics of love in power, if you were to become president. Is the definition of that just a merely a just the sum total of the policies that you're putting out in terms of funding for education, reducing the military budget, increasing healthcare access, or is there a higher element of it that would be something that as president, you would be directing? Like a spiritual project for America, basically. Well, I think there's been a spiritual context for America from the very, very beginning. I mean, the very idea that all men are created equal. The very idea that God gave all men an alienable rights of life and liberty and

the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted to secure those rights. That's our mission statement as written in the Declaration of Independence. That's not just a political document. That's a spiritual, moral, and philosophical document. They were speaking, and that's what made it so profound, and so world earth shattering. They were speaking not only to, and this goes back to Marx, because you cannot separate political relationships from the issues of the human condition. That's what made it so brilliant. Now, we talked before about how the dichotomy, how 41 of them owned slaves. To me, it's about everything, whether you're talking about politics or anything else, all human behavior, individual and collectively,

is about the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of the human race. That's all we're talking about here. We are now living in the 21st century, and the imperatives of the 21st century are very different than the imperatives of the 20th century, and we need leaders, and it would be very nice to have an American president who gets and understands how profoundly different the evolutionary imperatives are. When you're a 20th century leader, you have to worry about nuclear bombs. A 21st century leader has to worry about a plethora of nuclear bombs that 20th century leaders did not have to worry about, and also the 21st century leader has to realize and factor into all decision making that there are people every

single day trying to get hold of one of those things. Number two, the 20th century president knew that the environment was an issue, but the 21st century president today knows, no, no, no, no, this is not just an issue. It is the greatest moral challenge of this generation to so fundamentally alter things, conditions in the next 12 years, so as not to do irreparable harm to the planet, thus risking the possibility of the destruction of the human race. Both of those things do, both nuclear bombs and. So we have to work on far more cylinders than just addressing symptoms here, and we cannot afford to not factor in the realization of all the psychological and emotional factors

which actually both prevent disaster and ameliorate disaster when it has occurred. So what I'm talking about here is that you cannot separate political evolution from the evolution of the human race. In A Course in Miracles, this is one day you will realize there is nothing outside you. You know, whether it was Buddha saying life is an illusion or Einstein saying time and space is just an illusion, albeit a persistent one. I mean, we're living now in an age of quantum mechanics where the very idea that you're over there and I'm over here isn't quite what it appears. And factoring that in and understanding that has got to be part of the evolutionary movement which will create a survival. But we're not

even talking about sustainable. We need to go beyond sustainable. We need to realize that means survivable. What do you mean when you talk about evolution and social evolution? What I mean is if you look at world history, and it doesn't go in a straight, it's never gone in a straight line. It goes kind of in a jagged line. But for the most part, and I'm not naive about the history of the United States, and I'm not overly romantic about the history of the United States. But the possibility that has been posited by the founding and the existence of the United States has been an expansive opportunity for the betterment

of humanity. Because that's all we're talking about, whether you're Thomas Jefferson or Karl Marx. That's all you're talking about. You're talking about the possibility of the betterment of humanity. And that's what I mean by social evolution. And depending on whether it's a democracy, whether or not it's an enlightened society or social politically, or demagogue, dictatorship, et cetera, you're either talking about the evolution of humanity on a social level or the devolution of humanity on a social level. You talked about how you came up in the 60s and 70s and that era of activism and consciousness

raising. And that was a time when it did seem like there was a real movement towards shifting consciousness in a fundamental way. But then, as Hunter Thompson said, the tide broke and rolled back. And then shortly after that, you saw the sort of devolution of the rise of this super predatory capitalism. I guess the question I have then is, what's different about this moment that gives us a real hope that it'll be different this time? That this time that the movement towards evolution, as you say, and towards consciousness raising will overcome the obstacles to it? Thank you so much for asking that question because it's sort of my favorite topic. Let

me go back a little bit. When that period of time occurred and that it was in its own way a golden moment, there were men who held aloft the possibility in political terms of something deeply spiritual, deeply beautiful, and deeply hopeful. They were shot and killed in front of our eyes. And those of us who looked to them with such hope were young at the time. We didn't have the levers of power in our hands at the time. The assassinations of King, the assassinations of the Kennedys were a very loud, unspoken message, particularly when they followed it up by killing the kids at Kent State. The message was very clear. There will be no further protest. You can do whatever you want in the private sector,

but kids go home. And nothing needed to be said, but the message was clear or we might kill you too. So that generation, that's what we did. We went into the private sector where they told us, you can have all the choices that you want and only gradually did it dawn on us. The choices we were given were between the blue consumer product or the red consumer product or the yellow consumer product, but no real choices in the public realm. Now then followed, and then there was the post-traumatic trauma. You know, I remember reading about Bobby Kennedy's son who was watching television, saw his father's assassination on television, got stoned and died. And that was really what, there was just this huge,

you know, collectively we go through periods of shock and trauma as well. Now years went by, all of that led, then, you know, Nixon got elected, then ultimately Reagan got elected. We know what happened in the 80s, 80s children. Now, life goes in cycles. So now two things have happened. Number one, my generation's gotten older. And the idea for many of us, the idea that we might die, knowing we didn't really go for it, as my father would say, the bastard's got to you, is actually scarier than the thought that they might kill us if we do. So there's this fearlessness that comes with age. And then it's like the keys on a piano, it's a perfect third with the younger generation. So there's this hunger that we,

my generation is kind of like an astrological square with Reagan's kids. But an astrological trine with the young ones, because they're kind of hippie redux in their own way, particularly the really newest one. So there's possibility. Then you add to that Donald Trump and this kind of mass awakening, there are moments. And it's like, it's like surfing a wave. It couldn't have come right before. It couldn't have come a moment too soon. But if we don't seize it, we'll miss it. So that's what I discern. That's what I believe. And that's why I'm running any last thoughts that you guys are great. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you so much. Mary Ann Williams.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. We want you to lose everything to you No more to do with the choices you make There's no way, no more nothing No more to do with the choices you make I love to live in a devil Cracked with their body all night long Cracked to live in a sacred sect

itos diluting that pain back then