Rev Left Radio - Ideology: Capitalism and Liberal Culture

Episode Date: April 14, 2017

 Ideology is an important concept in leftist political philosophy. It has a colloquial meaning as well as a more nuanced philosophical meaning. Brett sits down with two of his comrades, Brendan and Miles, to discuss the concept. All episodes including this one can be found on iTunes and Stitcher. Be sure to leave a comment or review and subscribe! Follow Us on: https://www.facebook.com/RevLeftRadio/ Message us on Facebook or email us at [e-mail] 

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs game. Shut up! Will you shut up? Now we see the violence inheriting the system. Shut up! Come and see the violence inheriting the system! Hell yeah, I would. Almost confess to her Marxist's use. Very nice words, but happens to be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, fraud, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. They're smashing the Starbucks windows. They're smashing the Starbucks windows. garbage windows right now. This is complete anarchy. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. Coming to you today from inside the thought

bubble of a Trump supporter wearing an American flag as a cape while pledging allegiance to a nude photo of Vladimir Putin. I'm your host, Brett O'Shea, and with me today are two comrades and friends here to discuss the topic of ideology. Can you guys introduce yourselves, please, and maybe

touch on what got you interested in this topic? I'm Brendan Leahy. I've just always sort of been interested in political doctrine. And as you kind of look at theory, you see how doctrine is informed by ideology and ultimately deviates from it. And I think that's very interesting. I'm Miles Shannon. I got into ideology through, I got my undergrad in political science. So, you know, intro to polysai, you're given that ideological spectrum where you've got, you know, communism on the, far left and fascism on the far right. And we really just kind of touched on it in an intro to Polysai. It never really went any further. So I found myself in my senior year, like really getting

a lot more interested in ideology, particularly from a Marxist perspective. So, you know, I just want to point out, we noticed this before, but you got Shannon, you got Leahy, and you got O'Shea. There's three Irishmen in here, so it should make it interesting, maybe, I don't know. anyways do you guys want to start with maybe some definitions because you know when we're talking about ideology we're talking about a slippery concept the way it's used colloquially is different than how it's used in Marxist theory and maybe you know more nuanced terms in political science itself people think ideology is just a set of beliefs that's kind of the colloquial way of thinking about that word so maybe we can touch on some definitions or some some orientations to that concept

off the top. I was reading and I got this really good definition. I'm just going to read it straight up because I think it's really good as a primer to get us into this conversation. So ideology is a term developed in the Marxist tradition to talk about how cultures are structured in ways that enable the group holding power to have the maximum control with the minimum of conflict. This is not a matter of groups deliberately planning to oppress people or alter their consciousness, but rather it's a matter of how the dominant institutions in society work through values, consent, of the world and symbol systems in order to legitimize the current order. So it's kind of this background, ambient noise that you pick up just by virtue of living in a society. Would you

guys want to expand on that a little bit? Yeah, I think that's a pretty good definition, especially from the Marxist sense. Broadly speaking, whether you're talking about the colloquial sense or more of a political science or sociological concept, the thing that really stays the same, is that it's a collection of ideas, sort of like a constellation of interrelated sort of concepts that don't make up your entire worldview, but ultimately inform your worldview. Yeah, and I'll just kind of piggyback on what Brendan said. So from like mainstream political science, your basic definition is, you know, ideology is your worldview. It's how you think the world is, how you think it should be, so you have empirical and normative, and then you have

your identity in that. So how do you fit inside of this world? And then, so that's like mainstream, so you can think of ideology as kind of like your lens, right, which is constantly being recalibrated throughout your life experience. But also you have like, you know, liberalism, conservatism, all these various ideologies. And I like to think of these as kind of pre-calibrated lenses that we you know if we subscribe to that particular ideology you put that lens on and and then you know everybody based off their life experience will kind of calibrate that lens a little bit but yeah that's that's just kind of how I look at and then like you were saying about the Marxist interpretation of ideology it's kind of a pejorative it's it's inherently negative in

that it keeps it's the ideas of the ruling class that maintains the status quo maintains their position as the rulers yeah and yeah and Marx actually thought that you know once there was the dawn of communism once class society was fully deconstructed that ideology itself was no longer needed because ideology kind of fills the gap between what is and how things appear to be and in class society it serves a certain class interest now people like you know louis althuser that's the super american way to say that i think it's like louis al thuzet yeah althusair yeah he uh he disagreed with marks on that front and said you know it's it's a little different and we'll get we'll get into that later i don't want to get ahead of myself um but i guess a good jumping off point two would be to talk

about how liberalism especially would be considered the dominant ideology would you guys agree with that at this time right and it's you know it stems from kind of the the dawn of the Enlightenment age. And you know, you'll see conservative and political ideologues both subscribing to Hobbs, both subscribing to Locke, the classic political, liberal thinkers. And Adam Smith as well would fall into that category. Yeah. Beyond that, it's really interesting. If you look at ideology, conservative ideology is always really concerned with national character. and usually as opposed to liberalism, but in the United States, in a very, like, small-scale bubble, our conservatism is still liberalism because even the sort of people who really want to follow our national

traditions are still interested in individualism, the free market, things like that, these very liberal ideas. Yeah, and I would say, just to be extra clear, that's absolutely true. When I say liberalism, I'm not talking about it in, like, the Democratic Party inside of America's sense of liberalism. I'm talking about it in the broader philosophical sense, which you guys both touched on, which in my opinion includes liberals, includes conservatives, includes libertarians, and even includes social democrats like, you know, Jill Stein and the Green Party. That's all within this dominant paradigm of liberalism, which is individualistic and which supports the

notions of private property and therefore props up capitalism. So wherever capitalism is, the ideology of liberalism is there as well. Would you guys agree with that? Oh, for sure. Definitely. Maybe we can touch on going back to Mark's base superstructure analysis. So Mark's had this idea that in a society you had the base and the superstructure, the base was the productive forces, who make stuff under what conditions are they made, who profits off of them, you know, what tools do we use to make things.

And that gave rise to the superstructure. So the superstructure almost blossomed out of it out of the base. And that superstructure is culture, politics, education, you know, movies, film, everything like that. And that serves to maintain the base. Did you guys want to say anything about that or how that serves ideology? Yeah, I think a good way to really understand what that means is to think about it from a more anthropological lens. The amount of energy you have in a society that you can draw on is kind of how you produce things. So, for example, the way that the base would feed into the superstructure, let's say you're a society living in the Mediterranean, you know, very rocky, you can't really farm there, you become very dependent on sea travel, you know, and then suddenly you start to see as gods develop, certain gods are more important, you know, the gods that control thunderstorms, for example, or perhaps, you know, the second most important god would be the god that control thunderstorms, for example, or perhaps, you know, the second most important god would be the god that control.

is the ocean because it's very related. And that in and of itself creates sort of like a feedback loop. I was talking about the ancient Greeks if that wasn't clear. Yeah. I was thinking Poseidon. Yeah, exactly. So as you become even more of a naval culture, you know, and Poseidon becomes important, then maybe people are a little bit more intrigued in the idea of, you know, being a sailor. You know, you hear stories about demigods, you know, and you start to think, you know, I descended from, you know, Poseidon, and if you think that you are, and people really did believe that they were descended from gods back then, you might be more inclined to, you know, join a ship and, you know, colonize what is now Turkey or whatever it is, you know.

And that all stems from the, from the material conditions of that society. Yeah, but ultimately they feed each other, which is sometimes, I think, misinterpreted. Yeah, we'll get into that in a bit, too. So, yeah, I'll just, I'll take it to where we're at. now, if we're going to apply daily life in a base superstructure model, you know, the base, the mode of production, capitalism is the base. The superstructure is our society and all of the cultural accoutrements that come with it, your religion, your daily work life, your ideology. So what you have between the base in the superstructure is you have a dialectical

relationship to where both capitalism and society are both constantly moving and they have this dynamic tension between the two and you know in the classic Marxist sense you know if we're going to talk about like historical materialism you have like feudal society starting as as the base and then you have like monarchy and the church yeah those relationships within feudalism the tensions got to a point where there had to be a transformation in the base, which then became capitalism. So just to kind of bring that up to modern day, we're here now and capitalism is the base. And that's extremely interesting, too, then you decide to project forward. So you just laid out how feudalism had certain tensions within it that led to the development of a new system,

capitalism. And I think we're now living in what is often referred to as late capitalism. There's some contention around that, but the point being is that now we're starting to see capitalism itself bump up against some of its contradictions. You know, environmental collapse, you know, massive wealth inequality, globalism affecting workers even in the first world. So now the first world is getting, you know, angry about things, and they're being deprived of their material well-being. And so it's very difficult for me to imagine a way where capitalism survives for the next 500 years, you know. It's very interesting in that a lot of people sort of their reason for justifying sort of Marx, Mark's hate, if you will, is that Marx and Engel supposedly had so and so

a number of predictions that ended up going wrong. And I think the only one that is consistently pointed out is that the revolution hasn't happened yet, that capitalism did not fail. But we do see a series of crises that occur through capitalism. And at certain points, people have reformed it. I think in regards to Gregorism, Marx called it a capitalism's last stand to wash in socialism. That applies to Keynesian economics, too. You put enough, you know, band-aids on the system that it lasts a little bit longer. But each time that people kind of forget how bad capitalism went the last time, the capitalists start to undo those regulations they themselves made. And now that we have neoliberalism, the system has really changed rather than, you know, being pure

colonialism. We're in sort of like a post-colonialism where a country doesn't even have to invade you anymore to still kind of get those sort of colonial exploitative relations. But rather than having wealth kind of be increasingly different between nations, it's actually coming closer together for the first time since colonialism and that there are global elites that are getting richer and the global masses as you were saying even in developed countries are getting poorer even in you know this is the wealthiest country and our income inequality is astronomical that's a global phenomenon and it's it's hard to see capitalism recovering from that if it ever reaches that sort of conclusion yeah and you can you can see how how that development of this global

elite, it also brings together the global proletariat. So, you know, these things are developing in such a way that, you know, capitalism is pursuing its own goals, i.e. consuming every corner of the world, you know, extending its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the planet. But by so doing, it gives rise to a more globally coherent community, a civilization that shares problems. So you're more and more likely to be able to relate to someone in China or someone in India who's in the working class, as you are to somebody in America or in Canada or in the UK or Germany that's in the working class, these things are coming together. And when they say, you know, Marx and Angles made predictions and stuff, well, no Marxists

that I know thinks of them as prophets. You know, they're not like they're some gods that Nostradomass, or Tomass, I always say that because it's the joke, but it's not like there's some predictors where we're all faithfully bowing down to their predictions, not at all. They just gave us a methodology and analysis, and then we have to apply it in our own times. Well, Brad, I want to go back to what you just said, where it's like we start to relate to, you know, workers in China, workers elsewhere. But we may do that, but most people do not have the class consciousness to be able to make that connection. And many, many more people

don't even recognize the fact that, particularly if they're a worker, which most people are, they don't recognize the fact that they're being exploited on a daily basis. And at the same time, you have people like, let's say that you make $100,000 and you have a family of four, because you have achieved that level of material comfort where it's like you've got pretty decent health care, you've got two cars, the house, you know, the American dream, quote unquote. But you're so much closer to, you know, that person that's barely getting by at 30,000. thousand dollars a year than you are to the billionaire class but those people that are making that amount of money ideologically find themselves to be more like the billionaire capitalist class than

they do that working working poor family and that really ties back into liberal ideology ultimately there's that Steinbeck quote and I bring it up all the time about um americans seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires you know rather than the proletariat and so on. And that's really the case. Because we think of things so individualistically, our ideology is informed in so many ways by like Puritanism and like Calvinism, even though we don't necessarily follow those religions. So we have a tendency to what we have we have we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn. We unintentionally, I think oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined.

who will achieve this sort of material success. And in order to justify our privilege, speaking broadly as Americans, we tend to think that the people who have less must not have earned it, which is so often the case not true. Yeah, and that's pounded into our heads from every angle. You're right, we did evolve out of this Calvinist work ethic, of the pilgrims and the early colonists that came over to America. and that really perpetuated American capitalism, but then you also had slavery and you had

the genocide of Native Americans. Both of those things were absolutely crucial for the development of capitalism. But even today in the political arena, you know, when a Republican gets up there and talks about welfare queens or talks about, you know, these dog whistles that racial and class certain segments of those populations are lazy and that's why they're not making it. That's ideology. Now are those Republican politicians sitting there cynically consistent? this plot to, you know, trick our minds? And of course not. They're victims of it just as much as anybody. They play up for it for their own material benefit and their own political careers. But I doubt that very many Republicans have studied, you know, the history of ideology and our

masters of molding people's minds. But it's fair to a note that some of them are. Like, if you look at the Southern strategy, that was a deliberate attempt to appeal to ideology in order to get the Southern states that used to always vote Democrat up till the New York. deal. And then as the Democrats increasingly embrace the civil rights movement, the Republicans saw an opportunity and they took it. Absolutely. That's a great point. Yeah. And yeah, I think the Althusarian, well, one of his definitions of ideology is important here. And it's, he says it's a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their material conditions of existence. Yeah. And Marx did that same thing where he said,

It's the difference between the essence and the appearance. So there's a way the site he actually is, and then there's this frothy surface stuff called appearance that makes people think about how it is, and there's that disparity between the two things. And that's where ideology comes in to fill that gap. And Altheuser clearly is in the Marxist tradition. I read an article in grad school that really blew my mind.

It's called the Urban Sinsorium by a guy at York University in Toronto named Kanishka Gunawarna. There's a lot of words right there. Yeah, so he used the parable of the Buddha to explain how ideology in our worldview is shaped through sensual experience. That's mostly through our visual senses. So he uses the parable of the Buddha, which I'll just paraphrase.

So Buddha, prior to being Buddha, was Siddhartha Gautama or Guatama, however you want to say it. So he's a prince, and his father surrounds him with luxury in this lavish palace, and basically is trying to force this idea on him that he is a prince and that he is. So he kind of earns his allegiance, or is attempting to earn his allegiance by just surrounding him with beauty and beautiful women, food, comfort. and one day Sadarta goes out into the city that

is ruled by the palace and he finds working people, sick people, poor people. And he like his visual senses are so disrupted by that contrast. What he's gotten

used to and then how the world outside really is that he asked his father, he's like, how could I go on living like this when there's so much suffering out there and then it's like that moment just completely he was basically he was presented with a contradiction and when we are presented with these contradictions uh our lens becomes recalibrated and we all know what siddarta became he became the buddha that's really that's really interesting because that gets to the point of um how you overcome the ideology that you're given so there's no

such thing i think we all agree there's no such thing as being non-ideological people that say they're not political or they don't have an ideology are just diluted because they're one, you can't not have one. But when you become aware of these things, when you become aware of how ideology operates, you can then make conscious choices about how you want to go from there. And so that awareness creates some free will as far as, okay, I understand that I'm being messaged and programmed in a certain way. I can be consciously aware of that, and then I can now consciously and critically go look for other things. And that's kind of like bumping up against that contradiction when you see what i'm being told what what i'm seeing on tv what i'm seeing

in popular culture is not fitting in with what i see in my personal life you know people working really hard that i love still struggling to keep the lights on and stuff there's a contradiction there and that could be and i think for a lot of us it is that moment of epiphany where we wake up and realize that like mark said the essence of things and the appearance of things are different That can go both ways, though. I think, like, for us in the room, if we've, you know, like, for example, like, I started out as a Republican. I grew up in an ultra-conservative family, and yes, when I was presented with these contradictions, I ended up, you know, now I'm a Marxist. However, there's this phenomenon called cognitive dissonance.

And it's like when you are, some people, when they are confronted with this contradiction, they retreat and they double back and double down on, what they've been told and they even, you know, maybe even cling to it more vigorously than before. Because there's an anxiety there. Yeah, there's an anxiety and then beyond that, your ideology also really can trigger a lot of confirmation bias as well. Definitely. So if you see somebody poor and you're operating under a liberal ideology, you know, it's very possible that even if you see something that indicates, you know, for example, yeah, homeless folks, it's very hard for them to get jobs because what is the first thing that is on the job application, the address, you know, anyone who's filled out a job application has already seen that

to know that it's not really fair to tell someone without an address to just go get a job, somebody who doesn't have a phone, you know, somebody who doesn't have an access to the computer. If you filled out a job application, you know these things, but people will still see it, in the street and they'll still revert to their ideology in some ways ideology can be a crutch that allows us not to see those uncomfortable truths and the thoughts that come in you know when you pass somebody on the street if you're steeped in the ideology is like your own your own head says things like get a job you know or why why am I here working why aren't you out here working and people will then think hey those are my own thoughts you know I thought that thought in reality you didn't think

that thought you've been programmed to think that thought and that's that's a conditioned reaction you have to homelessness because if everybody sat there and every time they saw a homeless person started questioning the economic system that gives rise to homeless people, the system wouldn't last. So there has to be more nuanced ways of doing it. And powers really evolved over the centuries. You know, the rulers have figured out whether consciously or not that whipping us, beating us, you know, throwing us, using us as slaves or as a peasant class is not going to work any longer. They had to be more nuanced and more clever with how they maintain their control. And that's where I really think ideology is really come into its own. And Marx was one of the first

people to point that out. And then there's a long tradition of people afterwards. I also want to touch on, I don't know if you guys are totally into this lane, but Freudian, psychoanalytic sort of mixture with ideology. So you know you had Marx come forward and do all that. And then you had Freud in that same sort of half a century time do his thing a little later than Marx. And that gave people a whole new way to look at ideology because you're looking at the material conditions-based superstructure analysis, all of that, and then Freud comes in and talks about the unconscious and the id. And then a lot of thinkers picked that up and ran with it and mixed Marx and Freud.

I mean, that's why we kind of had like the Lacanian-Zizek sort of analysis of culture and collective subconsciousness. do you guys have anything to say on that well i think uh later understandings of ideology are absolutely informed by psychology um particularly in the development of fascist ideologies concept of ideology it's really informed by some ideas that end up kind of turning into collective psychology um and from a collective like sort of like a social psychological standpoint They've got some understandings of the world through that lens. And as people are conscious of ideology, there are a lot of different ways to look at it,

and over time they've become blended. Academia is a lot less compartmentalized, I think, than it was. I'll just point out I'm not very well-versed in Freud. My window into Freud is pretty much through the Adam Curtis documentary century. of the self, which I would highly recommend the listeners to check out. So I guess we're going to play on Freud. We're talking about like these kind of animal desires that we all have, that Freud pointed out, and the satiation of these animal desires through consumption, essentially.

So you become satiated, you become docile, these drives that we have for, like, freedom, which are animal drives, they become satiated. through comfort, through being able to, you know, being able to go out to eat at the same restaurant as your boss or, you know, you like the same sports team as your boss, so you guys

really aren't that much different, you know, but... Yeah, it all goes down to that. And, you know, the Marxist materialism as being the base of things and then the Freudian id and the animalistic drive, they certainly complement each other.

And you can have a broader picture when you combine the two. Absolutely. And I think that also gives rise to, to some extent, the Frankfurt School, which we might want to talk about. The Frankfurt School was, when did that pop up in the 30s, late 20s, early 30s sort of thing? In Germany, that's when they kind of, I think it was in the mid to late 20s, and then after Hitler rose to power, they all came to the United States in New York and Los Angeles.

And so the 40s, 50s, and 60s were really influenced by the Frankfurt School. Right. Did you want to touch? I know that's your interest. Well, yeah, and once again, not too well-versed, Marcuse has kind of become a new little exploration for me since I've been out of school, but one thing that, and so I've been reading one-dimensional man, and the whole book isn't necessarily about ideology per se, but chapter three talks about sort of the banalization of high culture, so whereas like music, art, literature, they initially have, this kind of have a critique with that actually has real teeth a critique of society but that critique becomes blunted as corporation sees them and so I'll give you a good example just that's come up recently the Maha music festival or

or even music festivals in general that are so have heavily corporatized so in Maha for example we have Run the Jules coming which if you don't know who Run the Jewels is it's a it's a it's a rap duo who has a heavily critical message of capitalism and racism and the power structure in general. Well, Run the Jewels will be performing on the White's investment management stage. So if that's not just a glaring contradiction, and what it does is it renders that critique useless. Right.

It, you know, you can... It defangs it. Exactly. And then, like, even last Maha, you had Vince Staples, who is also heavily critical. critical of the power structure of police, you know, but it'll be those same police at the festivals that are, you know, that are there defending the status quo. And you can go back to like Woodstock, you know, and Woodstock was largely a cultural phenomenon that was anti-war. You know, you had Jimmy Hendricks kind of doing his own rendition of the Star-Spangled banner, lighting his guitar on fire. There's a lot of like symbolism there. And nowadays, like, music festivals have just become just completely. completely corporatized and lacking in all critique. Like nobody that goes and sees run the jewels, like with their little blanket and their picnic basket,

are going to leave and actually be like, you know what? Those guys are right. Like we've got to, like, we've got to rise up. We've got to organize. Let's burn a police car. Yeah, nobody's going to do that. Yeah. Well, I think that really kind of shows

something that's very difficult for musicians, particularly political musicians, and I think something that we all deal with in some way, shape, or form, capitalism is not just the economic system of the United States. It's a global system now. So it's something we can't escape. We can't really create a true pocket outside of it. If they exist, you know, I don't know, maybe it's in Rojava or Chiapas, but, you know, little tiny communes. But these are little, like, bubbles. And even they are still impacted by the global reality. They're surrounded by wolves.

Yeah. So when you're a musician and I think run the jewels, in all fairness, they are definitely informed by radical politics, but last I checked, Killer Mike still identifies as a capitalist. But one that's still highly respectful of social democracy and the role that socialism has played in resistance. movements in the United States. Actually, one of the verses off of the new album sounds like straight Maoism. I highly recommend you listen to the new run the Jules album. I love it.

But if you have to, if you want to get that message across, you kind of come to a dilemma because it's very hard to reach a broad audience without, you know, playing these sorts of stages, doing things that are ideologically compromising. And if you only play with bands you want that that are your pure ideology, that's going to be really hard, especially if you are radical. You know, how many bands in Omaha are, you know, genuinely Marxist? Probably less than five, I don't know of. You know, I think, you know, you've got a couple. You've got some great feminist bands, too, but that still is a very limiting sort of problem.

And you kind of get to like this sort of rage against the machine sort of point where capitalist is like, here's a million dollars for you to, you know, put red stars everywhere and you can go on your hour-long rant or you can only play basements. And so is it worth it losing a couple diehards and having, you know, several fans that don't really care about the message? You know, Paul Ryan loves rage against the machine. But, you know, but at the same time, I'm probably as police. as I am because I did hear Raytranes machine at a young age and I you know I would hear something and I'd look it up like oh you you know you support you know EZLN what is that so I think it's really hard when you're in this sort of system how how do you navigate when to make those compromises yeah dead prez was instrumental for me you know dead prez when I was late teenager they opened my mind up to a lot of things and made me go in that direction and you're right if they had never made a record and never sold copies I mean how do you get out there? And that's one of the most clever aspects of capitalism and its

ideological reinforcement is that it can co-opt revolutionary movements. In the 60s, you had the counterculture. And soon after the counterculture got really popular, you started seeing hippies on commercials for soap and shit and detergent. And that's how it does it. You know, they can take a Che Guevarez's face, put it on a T-shirt, and sell it to you. And you're walking around. Now, you had a release valve. Your revolutionary anti-capitalist feelings have been funneled into the capitalist system, you've actually played their game, but you still get to walk away, walk around strutting with Che on your chest, feeling like I'm a revolutionary, and they're up there smoking their cigars, just laughing at it. That's true. At the same time,

that can be their downfall as well, because it can give platforms to these ideas. It kind of ties into the sort of, you know, not American arms manufacturers selling arms to the Nazis up until they legally couldn't anymore. Knowing full well that the Nazis were not really truly a friend to liberal capitalism. So there's a trade-off there too. So yeah, I found this quote in one-dimensional man that kind of sums up what we're talking about says, if mass communications blend together harmoniously and often unnoticeably art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator, the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth

value counts. Exactly right. That hits right to the core of what we're saying. And that That might get us into Antonio Gromsky. He was an Italian Marxist thinker, imprisoned and ultimately killed by the fascist Mussolini government because he was such a brilliant, brilliant person with a lot of pull. They literally had, they framed it as locking his mind up for 20 years because his mind was a weapon that he used against people. But one of his main concepts, of course we know him for cultural hegemony,

but he talked about these same issues, and he talked about building an alternative socialist culture. So the only way he saw out of this little contradiction, this trap that people are forced into is by starting to build up alternative structures, alternative schools, alternative forms of pop culture, alternative workplaces. And if we can just start carving out little niches in the bigger society, maybe, maybe that can start to create the momentum for real revolutionary movement. Because anything that's attempted to take place within the system is ultimately, going to be devoured by the system in the same way that we're talking about and so this goes back

to like the ideal kind of the ideological form of like creating class consciousness with people and in in that passage where cultural legitimacy comes from it's the intellectuals and inside the prison notebooks gromshy talks about that like anybody can be an intellectual organic intellectual exactly yeah it's not just the people that go to university you know it's uh the people that are PhDs anybody can be and it's our job as somewhat well-informed Marxist of you know hopefully one day a vanguard party where we where we can actually go to people working class people who are not yet haven't yet achieve that class consciousness and kind of you know get them get them to get there and what the system is kind of doing is it's allowing more and more of us

although with bigger and bigger debts to go to college. So then we go to college, we get these degrees, then we come back to society, we can't do anything with our degrees. I have a degree in philosophy, I can't do shit with it. So I just go back to being a regular working class dude

that's maybe four years behind my peers who didn't go to college in their working class endeavors. And the same boat. Yeah, we're not in an ivory tower here. We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that,

because more and more of us are waking the fuck up, more and more of us are getting angry and more and more of us are rooted in the working class. We're not detached, you know, academic, you know, cone heads. We're part of the working class, but we're educated. We have this tool. Marxism to me is a tool. It's a weapon.

Put it in my hands. We can start talking like this, raise class consciousness, hopefully get enough people to fight back. Yeah, and I think intellectualism ultimately can be a tool, but only if you choose to do so. I mean, within liberal ideology dominates academia. absolutely completely and sort of this idea of objectivity uh in academia and in journalism and stuff it's kind of a it's kind of a false idea because if you are you know sort of quote

unquote objective really what you're doing is you know taking society as it is uh at face value which it's not like society as it is perfect i mean clearly none of us think that in this room But I think even, you know, people who are liberal wouldn't say that. And yet this sort of idea that, you know, you go to school and, you know, it kind of gets channeled through this liberal framework. At that point, it reinforces the system. So it's very important if you, you know, if you're an intellectual, you can be a self-taught intellectual. But the thing that really makes whether or not that sort of intellectualism is valuable is whether you choose to go against the dominant ideology with an alternative. And that's very much to the contrary of people saying that universities are Marxist hubs.

That's not at all true. And what you're saying about the gloss of objectivity, I really think that economics as a field serves this really strong ideological purpose. Because economics is capitalist economics. Go to any economic class, you're going to be taught capitalist economics, but it's given this illusion of objectivity, and it's called a science. And so that gives it a sense of immutability. Like, you know, capitalist economics is just a science of how to make and produce and distribute things. And there's everything that tries to go beyond that or outside of that is not science. Now, that's not always explicitly said, but it's implied.

And, you know, the entire field of economics, I think, serves that ideological function more than we often think. Absolutely. And as Margaret Thatcher said, there is no alternative. And that is how the whole discipline of economics acts. and the assumptions that they operate on are completely ideological. They fall right into, like what we were talking about earlier, this liberal, in the philosophical sense,

this liberal idea of individualism and every single human in their models is this kind of pleasure-seeking, rational individual, homo-economic is what they call it, where he's just, the only thing that homo-economics cares about is getting the most bang for his buck in the marketplace and supply and demand

always reach equilibrium. Well, if that's the case, then why do we have so many people without health care right now? Why do we have affordable housing shortages? It's like, you know, supply and demand don't always... Why do you eight men own more wealth in the bottom 50% of human beings on planet fucking earth?

And, you know, their answer to that would be efficiency or their answer to that, especially if you're talking about neoliberal or like Chicago school, Austrian school, economics, they're going to say something like, well, there's too much human interference in the economy. The economy is a social construct in and of itself. It's always going to be informed by people. So that's the first fallacy right there. The second fallacy is as things get more pure, pure free market economics, they're supposed to do better. And historically, we see

that's not the case. You look at like Pinot-Ca's Chile, for example, they privatize everything, The economy kind of goes up and down the entirety of the Pinochet's regime. It doesn't get better, but they go through a couple different issues, including the Latin American debt crisis. You know, neoliberal Chile did not escape it any more than any of the other countries that went through the Latin American debt crisis in the 80s. And the thing that saved them by several, even liberal economist studies, was they, that they did not prioritize the copper industry. But if you talk to Milton Friedmanite, they're gonna say, oh, the only reason

that Peanut Chase's economy wasn't the best ever was because they didn't privatize the copper. So there's a fallacy there. And you'll hear some of the same thing from communists about certain, like quote unquote, socialist economies is that there was too much capitalism and that's why things went wrong. And this is a fallacy.

plain and simple, no matter who says it, and the economic sort of departments of the world so often make that mistake. Even the ones that are critical of neoliberalism still ultimately advocate capitalism because it's the only thing that works, even though you've seen non-capitalist economies totally do well historically. And as you said, there's the supply and demand. It doesn't work because our scarcity is artificial. our demand is high and our supply is high and still not everybody gets everything look at houses we have more empty houses than we have homeless people yeah we could house everybody in this country and still there would be empty houses and they're still building houses they're building houses in my neighborhood right now so there's there is no equilibrium absolutely automatically it's a social construct it's not a force of nature yeah that's absolutely a great point and then i would just add one more wrinkle in there which is anytime a large-scale society tries to do anything outside of the normal capitalist, you know, economic paradigm, they are immediately attacked by the strongest military and economy in the world, whether it's Cuba, whether it's the Soviet Union, whatever it is, they will be attacked. And so you never really get a chance to see, you know, a society really given the, you know, the context in which they can flourish. Yeah.

So you can't separate analysis of those societies without taking that into account. Yeah, going back to Chile, before the Pinochet coup, the government was a democratically elected socialist government. Lende, right? Yeah, Salvador And the Nixon administration, in particular, actually though, Henry Kissinger and people actually associated with Friedman's element of the Chicago School of Economics, understood that having a democratically elected Marxist who's slowly and peacefully implementing socialist change with the complete and total consent of the people was so dangerous to liberal ideology because liberal ideology was framed in this sort of idea that communism is inherently undemocratic, that people don't want it, that it's always imposed by a gun. So they deliberately paid newspapers in United States businesses and the government, CIA, financed papers that would spew anti-Ayende rhetoric. They funded people. They knew that were interested in a coup.

They literally, the United States government paid to take Chilean students and send them exclusively to the University of Chicago's economic program. So by doing that, we were exporting neoliberal ideology. And I think Nixon said in a letter in regards to how we need to act towards Chile, we need to make the economy scream. We interfered every way that we could. And yet liberals are always saying that socialism fails, and yet they always feel the need to make it fail. They will never give it a fair chance, and that's something we have to recognize. They will never allow it to work. They will much rather have fascist, right-wing death squads murdering Marxists,

then they will have a democratically elected Marxist in office, and they will make sure. And when push comes to shove, liberalism, capitalism turns into fascism. It will clamp down. That's when the teeth come out and the claws come out, and fascism is what you get to just violently hold on to the order and reestablish capitalism. And that happens in Italy. It's happened in Germany. It's happened with Pinochet.

That's always something that does occur. absolutely so shifting now away from all of that to how ideology is transmitted by a culture maybe that's a good place to go next do you have anything to say about you know how that how that occurs in our society yeah I mean it happens in in a number of different ways and we're kind of getting back into base superstructure when we talk about this so you know political campaigns would be one politicians you know you've got these two parties that the media makes out to be so diametrically opposed to one another they're so different it's like democrats and republicans they cling to these identities as such you know i'm a democrat and therefore

i think this republicans the packers versus the bears yeah exactly but at the end of the day and i'll just use our current in omaha our mayoral election right now i i would love for somebody to come to me and tell me what choice we actually have between heath me and jean stother you know it's Both of their platforms are built around tax cuts. They're built around improving the police. And by improving the police, they're not talking about community policing. They're talking about more police, more guns, like more... Bigger budgets.

Yeah, more funding for the police. So that would be one way that via culture, like, we're kind of tricked into thinking that we really do have a choice between. Democrats and Republicans we've already touched on education I mean like you said like people I guess people that people think that universities are like this cesspool of like Marxism and socialism that was not my experience yeah so like four I four years that you know and Marx was nothing but a footnote the word capitalism I think was mentioned in one class or two and if the word itself is never mentioned it's not up for

critique. You know, we've talked about the commercialization of art. You know, I'll give you a great example. You know, some of you may be familiar with Banksy, the kind of insurgent graffiti artists who has some very like moving stenciled graffiti all over the world that speak, it's, it's, it offers a social critique to the power structure. Well, now you can go into urban outfitters and get a coffee table book with all of Banksy's art on it or now like cities as they compete for resources a Banksy goes up that's critiquing the power structure and the city decides to put kind of this vinyl like covering over it so it can't be removed it's like oh we've got a Banksy in our city like come visit come visit this city and God yeah so it's like pop culture

it's it all kind of goes back to what we're saying where uh capitalism is there is no alternative this is the way to do it uh and it's and uh it what it does is it assimilates uh opposition and brings it into uh brings it into its fold and by so doing it it takes away its weapons it defends it exactly and it co-ops it to serve its own purposes i will say um that even though you know culture is very much liberal in the united states there are certain elements of it of culture that are anti-liberal and it's usually not framed in such a way but for example like I was watching an episode of Futurama the other night where Futurama or Frye sorry ends up like going to the bank and finds out he's super rich because of all the interest over a thousand years

and and the whole plot of the episode ends up becoming a conflict between Fry and mom, who presents as this super nice, loving mom who, you know, oh, I make all the robots and I homemade cookies and I'm just a small, nice lady. And then, you know, she's got a suit, like a robotic suit. She takes off and she's like super skinny and just, you know, chain smoking. She's like berates in like slaps her sons around and she's just you know just a ruthless venture capitalist ultimately um so in some senses you know the episode still fits into liberal ideology clearly capitalism is the predominant system um and you know fries success having gotten all this wealth is measured in the things he buys and the show itself is pushed through capitalist yeah channels

yeah but at the same time you still see this sort of idea that you know that first and foremost that what were presented, the ideology that we're presented, is to a degree false. That's, you know, mom's suit. Beyond that, though, also, you know, ultimately the capitalist is the bad guy, and Fry would have better off just caring about his friends. And that is an anti-capitalist idea that exists within this broader framework. I think that speaks to the fact that even though ideology makes a lot of people believe that they like capitalism, a lot of them don't, and they don't realize it. It's sort of

I have a comrade who likes to say that the people love us. They just don't know it yet, or something similar. And I think that's really true. I think when you see a lot of these messages in TV sometimes where, you know, it's like, you know, love your friends. It's because we all, we understand the importance of camaraderie deep down. So there are elements of other ideas within culture. It's just not dominant and it's usually not conscious there's no class consciousness to it yet but there could be and you might even argue that you see them arise during certain periods of crises so now we're really having the climate change crisis and you see things like uh what's that show the zorlax movie or wali um these are like kind of hidden critiques of capitalism and this affects on on society

and the environment adventure time did that episode where the businessmen whether they're in suits and they're just kind of like zombies and they just like go and they consume things and they're destroying the world and you know Finn has to fight them off and everything. Yeah, the investors in Venture Brothers.

Yeah, yeah. So at times when things start getting into crisis mode, you do have these more subversive things kind of bubble up and I think that's kind of what we're seeing. And it really takes an educated society and not an educated society in the sense that you have a college degree

but we're going back to class consciousness. If you have class consciousness, you will pick up on those subtleties that are inherent in The Simpsons, in Futurama, in pop culture, because certainly they're there. But if you don't have the tools to see them, which most people don't, then there is no effect. And I think that's why, you know, like Fox continues to let the Simpsons kind of do it at once. A great example, and I'll bring Banksy back into it. I don't know if you guys have seen that Simpsons episode

where they let Banksy do the opening theme. It's a scathing, scathing critique of capitalism. They've got sweatshop children working on a manufacturing line. It's like that's a scathing critique, and we get it, but like Rupert Murdoch owns Fox, owns the Simpsons, essentially. and he's just fine with letting that get out because most people that are watching The Simpsons

are just like, oh, ha ha ha, like that's funny but like we were talking about earlier with the, you know, in China, like relating to workers it's like nobody, or not nobody, but many, most people probably that watched that did not think like, oh shit, like that's, that's how like children in like Bangladesh or in China that's what they're subjected to.

That's, you know, they don't, the, you know, you just think that that's how. how it is and it's not my problem it's that's a problem over there let their government fix it you know yeah i think um and this is sort of just an idea i've had now so maybe i'm wrong but um mr burns he's the capitalist right you know everybody knows that he's evil everybody knows he's evil everybody always knows that that the person is evil deep down people know that they're exploited by somebody at some point in the chain um the thing is is that the dominant ideology will not allow an alternative. It's not that there isn't, you know, like the Margaret

Thatcher thing. There is no alternative. They tell you there isn't. So shows like King of the Hill or Futurama or The Simpsons, I've seen all three of those shows described as apolitical. Well, they're apolitical in an American ideological sense because it's not, it doesn't fit into the contest between Democrat and Republican. So it's apolitical. When in fact, you know, the Simpsons fully recognizes that there's no real difference between the candidates. In Futurama, literally, there was a presidential campaign with two clones. And I think there's a Simpsons episode where there's the aliens are running and somebody's like, I'm going to vote for a third party. And the aliens like, oh, go ahead and waste your vote then. And they'll happen. You know, that is very

political. There's nothing apolitical about those ideas. It's that the critiques that these shows present fit outside of the broad liberal framework. And so they're presented as a political because we are not allowed to have that alternative. But they exist. And I think that kind of speaks to the fact that ideologies are collections of ideas and sometimes they don't match. But everybody has their own personal ideology. So, you know, the person who creates The Simpsons has his own ideology.

The person who, you know, does art on Adventure Time has their own ideology. So sometimes these little shows have elements of dissent in them, but the broader system is still that sort of dominant, hegemonic liberalism. And that goes to a point that I think Chomsky's brought up, and a lot of other thinkers have brought up as well, is what they do is they get a very narrow spectrum of political debate, like the Overton window of acceptable political ideas. And then the debate within that narrow spectrum is very rambunctious and loud.

And so, you know, every day you can turn on the news and see Democrats are filibustering and the Republicans are refusing to, you know, even have nomination hearings with Obama's, you know, choice for the Supreme Court, blah, blah, blah, infinitely. And that gives the illusion that, hey, these are the ideas that are possible. There, you can either be a Democrat, you can be a Republican. Hell, you can be a fucking libertarian if you want to, too. But that's the third party, aliens laugh at that point. Yeah. But that's kind of the setup. And in a lot of ways, even dissent, like you say, because it's framed as a political, serves that basic narrative.

Yeah, and this touches on the idea of, like, politics is theater. You know, you turn on the TV and it's a theater. It's like everybody's got their role and they play that role out. But I do want to just talk about appearance in that article that I read. Which article is that? It's called the Urban Sensorium. And you can get it on Google Scholar. It's a heady read, but a good one.

But he talks about how gentrification is a perpetuator of capitalist ideology in the sense that you have this kind of blighted, kind of not nice looking area, and then capitalism comes in and saves the area and makes it all nice, and it's like, oh, hey, like now, like look at this. This is an accomplishment of capitalism, and, you know, if you can see it right now in, like, the Blackstone District. where, like, you know, I've been hanging out at Brothers in there for, you know, 10 years now. And it's like now all of a sudden, you know, the other day we're sitting outside of Brothers and two Audi SUVs are parked out in front of it, eating next door at Strunella, you know, straight from West Omaha. And it's like that is a, just Sternella next to Brothers is this glaring contradiction

that if you're awake, you can see it and you're like, okay, this, there's something. there's something wrong here and it doesn't actually solve the problems of poverty and community destruction it just shuffles them off the stage and it says oh here's a brand new area you know rents skyrocket the price of living skyrockets it looks nice from the outside I guess but those problems aren't fundamentally solved and those people that used to inhabit those areas are now just being shoved off into worse areas exactly and and the fact of the matter is is sort of gentrification as cleaning up the area is an illusion as you said because people are being pushed out so the poverty that brings the crime is brought to a different area.

But beyond that, sometimes there's not that much poverty. Midtown, while definitely a poor area, is still actually affordable. Omaha being one of the few cities that you can actually afford to live. But, you know, I've lived in that area in Midtown for several years now. And when I moved there, it was, you know, there was Sullivan's. There was brothers. There was McFosters, which isn't even there anymore. And now it's Dundee Bank, which is not even the same, that's not even the same part of town.

But so this idea that they've cleaned up this neighborhood, though, is false because you have all these shiny places. Sternella has a dress code. And I think I heard something about their wine lists being made out of the panels of the house they tore down. Like that's offensive to them, I think. But beyond that, so now, you know, I go to brother. all the time. I love that bar. I'm in there thinking I'm going to get a little work done. I'm going to write a little paper on fast-rest ideology. You have a couple beers. And then a horde of people in suits come in. They order, you know, something like Bud Light or something. They're in their

suits and, you know, they look nice, I guess, to people on the outside under a liberal framework. But they're bringing in a lot of things that I don't like into my neighborhood. You know, people are just puking on the streets. These, like, rich people who, like, drive down in their SUVs you know they go to night owl and then they go to sternel and they get like super drunk and then they they puke and they're they don't care because it's not their neighborhood they're not actually cleaning up midtown at all right they get there they get their SUVs and drive the fuck away after they've had their party night yeah they have their party night and you know it's it makes it uh less pleasant for people who who live there sometimes not always um i know a lot of people who

lived in the area already who started working at some of these places and that's great but for others i don't know it's it's not uh they present gentrification as as being beautiful but it's really not and it's very ugly and that's just how like our how appearance informs our ideology yeah it goes back to the uh difference between essence and appearance which marks touched on you know a century and a half ago absolutely so i think we're getting kind of close to the end um let's just do something where i think a lot of people will find this interesting and i've found this interesting in my life but kind of quickly almost but chart out the evolution of your ideology your worldview where you started the things that happened that made you revisit your ideas and then the things that

ultimately pushed you to the revolutionary left i'll start um so you're the republican right yeah like i said like i said earlier i grew up in a very conservative household and and really there was no alternative in my household and i've actually become kind of estranged from my family uh down in texas as a result of this transition. But I guess, so I started out as a Republican and then I started, I enrolled at UNO in political science. I even worked for a Republican congressman in the state of Nebraska, and it was actually through that work that I realized just how ridiculous it was. You know, initially I was attracted to the rhetoric of freedom and liberty, and I was like, hell yeah. And And then also, like, Obama was president at the time, and I didn't, prior to getting into this,

I had no idea about politics. I knew I was, like, anti-war and, like, pro-choice and, like, pro-LGB stuff, but everything else, I was like, this is my identity. I'm a Republican. So anyways, I think the nail in the coffin for me, in terms of switching over to, well, then, Democrat, but a nail-in-cover for me was when the Citizens United Supreme Court decision happened, which basically gave corporations the ability to donate unlimited amounts of money, anonymously to political campaigns. So I saw that happen and knew in my heart, like, this is not right. Like, this is just, this increases corporate power over democracy.

And it was celebrated by the right. You know, Mitch McConnell, all the right-wing talk radio people who I was listening to at the time were celebrating this corporate, a greater corporate takeover of the quote-unquote democracy that we have. And it was at that moment, plus having seen all the bullshit that, and also going to these Republican events and having no one to talk to you. Everybody else is like one-dimensional, completely bland. And so it was kind of after that that I started looking into democratic politics

and then Occupy happened. And that kind of lifted the veil on capitalism for me. I think that was big for a lot of us. And so, you know, long story short, I was presented with so many contradictions in my worldview that I ultimately just kept moving further and further to the left where these contradictions started to show up less and less. I started off as a left libertarian, I suppose, very socially, you know, in an American sense liberal. but, you know, fiscally conservative, I grew up, I got a lot of phrases like, you know, socialism is a great idea, but it doesn't ever work in your life or, you know, keep the government's eyes away from your window and the government's hands out of your pocket and stuff. But very left libertarian, very classic libertarian, really, sort of, you know, feminist house, you know, LGBTIQIA. plus, you know, house. So as a child, I did participate in activism in that way, helping my mom

cook and donate food to, you know, women shelters or whatever. So I was already, you know, aware of the role activism played. And as time went on, I got really interested in environmental issues. Some experiences with anti-Semitism made me really interested in, you know, the sort of social dynamics, you know, whether it's race or religion, kind of depends. But that sort of thing. And as time went on, I just kind of became more and more of a socialist. I also got into punk rock that helped. So, you know, the clash got me looking at socialism, you know, looking at history, got me thinking, you know, the socialists really did get screwed over. And I decided that early on. But I was kind of like a, maybe a trade unionist or something. I think really

talking about like the influence of culture, I think like New Dealist ideology kind of came to me. I read Grapes of Wrath for a class and I read it before the class. We were supposed to read it over the summer and I didn't really care about it that much. And then I got crushed on the first book that we were supposed to do and I was like, oh, I should probably read Grapes of Rath so I don't get crushed again. And then something just like broken me. And I think that's when I became a real social. And then by the time I got to Marx, the history of all of humanity is class struggle, you know, plebeians versus patricians.

Well, you know, I took Latin. I know that there was a class struggle between plebeians and patricians. And I don't know. At that point, it was kind of just a free-for-all. And now I'm just reading and what I like. I like, you know. Yeah, really interesting. I guess then I'll do mine.

I grew up in, like, an apolitical house, but very, like, lower class. household now my parents were divorced my dad was a car salesman and then he got into i don't want to get too deep into this but selling drugs which he ultimately went to jail for but for a while he was living high on that hog so there was a weird part of my life from like for like a two year span from like age eight to ten where my dad had like corvettes and like we went on a cruise and shit but then the cops busted into our house and one day when i was getting ready for school you know locked his ass up that all ended and you know he's never he never got back to that point but then at that point i really went with my mom full time and that's you know that's really lower working class very small house

we grew up in and i know i saw that my parents went to work every single day and i know that they worked their asses off they were these were not lazy people you know but there'd be times when i come home from school and our lights would be shut off or our water wouldn't be running or one day i came home from school my mom sitting on the front porch crying because her car you know which was a nice car first thing nice she's ever had in her life was repossessed and so these things really really hurt me because when I when I would hear right wing radio talk show hosts or people in the greater population talk about laziness and you know if you work hard you get stuff I knew that that was false now I didn't have the political apparatus by which to analyze that deeply but that was always

something that was sticking in my craw and I just didn't have any way to really flesh that out quite yet then when I was 18 I had this very bad case of depression I was hospitalized and my dad who had gotten out of jail and had moved to Montana at this point he said hey you need to come live with me. Come up to Montana, maybe just get out of your normal spaces. I was like doing a lot of drugs at that time too, which didn't help my depression. So I went up there and the weirdest thing ever happened. He lived in a town called Hardin Montana, which is right on the reservation, the Crow Reservation. So the town itself was like 60% Native American, 40% white. And I got to see up close and personal the poverty and the problems that poverty caused in terms of mental illness

and addiction and alcoholism in that community and it fucking horrified me the people that lived there were almost desensitized to it that was just their normal way of living and so there was no powerful critiques about it but me coming from omaha being dropped in that place i was fucking you know flabbergasted at the poverty and and just the depravity of the situation and so that gave me this this huge kind of paradigm shift um then i came back long story short I started going further, further into politics, got an education, and when you're in philosophy, you're going to bump up against Marx, and you're going to bump up against these ideas.

And so immediately I was like, here is an economic, social critique that fits perfectly with my experience. And ever since then, it's just a bit a matter of not only deepening that myself, but like making this podcast, trying to show other working class people who have these experiences that this is why these things are happening, you know? Yeah, and I think everybody in our, our audience has different but similar evolutions where like you say we're presented with contradictions we're given ideology but then we're presented with these contradictions that don't

quite match up and now we have to wrestle with that so yeah and if anybody's listening to this if you want to say your political evolution on our Facebook page or anything like that message us email us we'd love to hear it because I find these things truly fascinating probably going to wrap it up here I know that you wanted to talk about different ideologies and I think maybe we could do that in a separate podcast So for the audience to know, we'll have another episode where we just talk about different ideologies, Marxism, Anarchism, Fascism, all that stuff. And that deserves a show of its own. It's a big spectrum.

Yeah. So before we go, I do this thing where I just let you guys offer an article, a film, a book, anything that you think that somebody who's interested in these ideas could go to to further their understanding. I would say that Adam Curtis, the British Documentarian, is a nice, like, easy way to start because you're just watching. Two documentaries, Century of the Self, which explores Freud and the use of Freud for social control, and then his latest one, which is called HyperNormalization, which kind of seeks to explain the rise of Trump and Brexit. it. And then also, the book I quoted from earlier, One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcusa. If you really want to see, there's so much I recommend. Yeah. If you're really not into something super heady but still pretty informed,

there's a book by Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine. It's about crisis capitalism, and it kind of goes into the sort of, way that Chicago School economics and free market ideology has been spread through systems of crisis, both political, material, economic debt crises, all of these things. It's pretty good. I have some critiques of it, but it's a pretty good book. You can learn a lot. That's a good jumping point. Cool. Yeah, I have a few recommendations as well. One of the classics, and I think is really interesting, is Chomsky's manufacturing consent. It's interesting because it touches on these topics, and it goes back to Gromsky,

who talked about cultural hegemony as a form of consent, as a port of manufactured consent, and so I think Chomsky grows out of that tradition, and that book really puts him in that tradition. Michelle Foucault also takes it in a different direction, a more postmodernist direction, which we have critiques of, and maybe we'll have an episode on at some point. But he takes that Gromsky critique or that cultural critique and takes it in his own direction. So seeing how these traditions evolve and split and create these new traditions is fascinating. I would also recommend for more of a light watch, more fun, is the perverts

guide ideology by Ajizek. That's just interesting. Yeah, sniff, sniff. That's just interesting because he takes movies that we all know, like the Titanic and, you know, these pop cultural things that we can all relate to. And he breaks down how they, you know, push. ideology and how ideology is entrenched in things that are seemingly innocuous there's ideology there and so once you walk away from that movie entertained you're let you laugh but you also walk away and then you have a new paradigm you can kind of look at the world through um in pop culture especially so i'd recommend both those things well thank you very much to both of you guys for coming on thanks for for letting us be on yeah thanks for having us is a great discussion so everybody else we'll

talk to you next time thank you I fancy myself a rational animal and by logical extension I want to know what's happening yo analyzing myself until I feel a lot like a cannibal in this society it's fashionable anxiety and depression and just par for the course melancholy fatigue stress man my heart's been to war my ship's stern smashed the shore i got lost in the storm but struggles the price you pay it's the cost to be born so i'm I'm gonna pay it. Where's my wallet at? Life handed me my pride and so I swallowed that. Stared straight into the sun that's where Apollo sat.

So I embrace my emptiness. They call me hollow man. I'm just a hologram. Particles and atoms, barnacles and fathoms. It's harder growing a chasm. No stars and no planets, no gases. It's all random. Nothing inside of me.

I'm basically a fanzance. They call me hollow man. You can call me hollow man. I'm like a hologram. I'm fucking hollow man. They say atoms are composed of 99% empty space That goes a long way and explaining the blank face I'm a blank page

An immaterial materialist Ephemeral and nihilistic as shit Vacuous physics Flash me your digits Mind signifies zero You should have listened to Sigmund Alphroidian slip and fall into Nietzsche's abyss Vincinnian silence

Vipasani and bliss They call me Halloween And you can call me Halloween And you can call me hollow man I'm like a hologram I'm fucking hollow man I'm fucking hollow man