Rev Left Radio - Philosophy Series: Hegel, Marx, & Modern Life (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Part Two: Breht listens to, comments on, and expounds upon a public lecture by  the late professor of philosophy Rick Roderick from 1989 on Hegel, Marx, and modern American capitalism. Along the way he discusses the central role of reproductive labor, the dialectic of feminism in the US across the last century, identifying with your job under capitalism, reactionary psychology and understanding the joy they take in cruelty, the insane irony of "Make America Great Again" under both Reagan and Trump, the prescience of Professor Roderick, socially necessary labor, and more. Finally, Breht opines at length on a crucial and often overlooked dimension of a truly present, meaningful life. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/ outro music 'Mooncakes' by Spinitch find and support more of their work here: https://spinitch.bandcamp.com/album/com-postables-4-dessert  

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. This is part two of an earlier part one that I did on Hegel, Marx, and Modern Life. A lecture that I'm reacting to in real time by the late philosopher Rick Roderick, talking in 1989 or 1990, I believe, was when he gave this lecture. And I am commenting on and expanding upon it, deepening Marx. analysis and applying it to our own time 35 plus years after he gave this really

insightful, prescient lecture on Hegel and Marks. So this is part two. You could listen to this straight up and get something out of it for sure, but it would probably be ideal if you went back and listened to part one. It does assume some background knowledge of Marx and Hegel,

which I assume most of you are at least somewhat familiar with. I know more so Marx than Hegel, but either way, I'll link in the show notes to part one of this lecture and response and this is part two enjoy be utopian no it's not utopian to demand in a world with this kind of technology with that that as a moral demand of society feed clothes and house its people a society that doesn't do it with the kind of technology and the wealth we have is beneath contentious

and makes a mockery of all the previous history of civilization. And to the extent that we're silent and among such brigands, we're brigands too. It's despicable. It's disgusting. Amen. And we've lived with it. And it seems like it's getting more support every day. I don't know.

Looks like we're in a very dark time. And when we look at the conditions I'm discussing today, we're not looking at abstract looking at abstract moral conditions, I'm not offering a grand abstract theory of them, I'm trying to give something like a rough account of the fabric of daily life, a rough account of it, because it's too rich, especially in this country once you get off the interstate, the fabric of daily life is very rich. Something like the distinction I'd want to make between a sort of theoretical approach and an approach more rooted in daily life to the issues that we'll be discussing, I'm just laying some of them out now, is the difference between driving

cross-country on the interstate or flying over it, and then occasionally taking the back roads. This is very interesting driving through the South, but it's also interesting driving through the Midwest. Because the United States is not the kind of country. You notice how after Hegel we've started giving a theory of the present and stuff? See, that was what we promised we'd do is that philosophy at its best should be our time comprehended in thought that keeps it from being what Nietzsche says sort of a museum of ideas says you know which is built for loafers in the garden of knowledge well for philosophy to be more than that sort of museum of ideas built for loafers in the garden of knowledge it needs to give an intransigent account of conditions in the present

And Marx allows for that uniquely. I think Kierkegaard said that, you know, life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards, meaning there's a sort of retrospective look back over your shoulder that you can make sense of things that have happened. And certainly there's some truth to that. And Hagle famously said that the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, right? Dusk being the end of the day when philosophy, the owl of Minerva, of knowledge and understanding, can look back over the day and take account of what happened. There's more extreme and less extreme versions of that, right?

There's more time needs to pass to make sense of certain things. But certainly we would want a philosophy that in real time can give us real epistemic traction in what's happening. And I think Marxism is uniquely positioned to do exactly that. And in fact, this whole show is attempting to do that. all of our current events analysis episodes that I do often with Allison is attempting to use Marxism to do exactly that. And it works. Like right now, we're living at a time when more and more people are slowly and hesitantly and often for very cynical opportunists or self-centered reasons like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama coming out and not even saying that it's a genocide happening

in Palestine, but commenting on the mass starvation of civilians, which is a war crime and a quintessential hallmark of genocide coming out and commenting and kind of trying to distance themselves from it some people now who have hesitated to use the word genocide are coming out and saying I'm now ready to use the word genocide people are either sincerely or for opportunistic and retrospective reasons in the future for posterity coming out and trying to get something on the record to say that they were always against it and I'm not trying to say that we were unique in this everybody listening to this. You know, if you're on the revolutionary left,

if you're on the pro-Palestine anti-imperialist left, you saw this too, which is from day one, we knew what this was. From day one, we have episodes you can go listen to right now, Allison and I, a couple days after October 7th, explaining exactly what this was, exactly what Israel was going to do on the Ukraine-Russia war. You can go back to when that first popped off.

Listen to Allison and I, give you real-time analysis. that is only proven to be correct. I'm quite proud of that record. I'm quite proud of the fact that people can go back and listen to us in real time as a situation was just emerging, make sense of it through the lens of Marxist materialism,

and those things turn out to be right, and then slowly as time goes on, more and more people wake up and accept those conditions. Now, there's a grotesqueness to it because it doesn't stop the bloodshed. The genocide still happens. so it's cold comfort to say we knew that what this was from the beginning right and i'm not trying to say that that fills me with any particular joy there's a pride that says we are principled and we were

able to see this thing for what it was from the very beginning we didn't need you know somebody else to tell us what this was or we didn't need for an illusion to be dismantled by some analysis or or some history unfolding and finally it beats into our thick skulls that this is what's happening. We knew through the tools of Marxism what this was from day one. So there's something to take pride in, but not to take joy in because this has been horrific. And being right about something doesn't at all blunt the tragic, historic, mass murderous, genocidal impact it has and is continuing to have on the Palestinian people or on people anywhere else of any other sort of event that was predicted or,

made sense of in real time by Marxist analysis. But insofar as we want a philosophical outlook that allows us, which we need, allows us to make sense of events in real time, nothing superior to Marxism. Certainly it's not liberalism, to say much less of any other spectrum of the capitalist liberal, broadly conceived, philosophical, liberal domain of ideologies, conservatism, libertarianism. etc so it is what it is but um but that's why i'm a marxist i mean among other things i'm a marxist first and foremost because it's true and it's actually useful and it actually demystifies and make sense of the world in real time we do not need the hindsight of retrospection to make sense of things some things sure but the bulk of what's happening can be made sense of right now

and then once you make sense of something in real time that gives you at least the possibility of being able to do something meaningful to stop or to change it. Now, it could be wrong, okay? I told you I was a fallible. It's what I'm saying. That could be wrong. But that shouldn't be decided by slogans or TV commercials or by Willie Hart and ads, but by debate, by argument

among a public body, public citizens talking and arguing. Now, the further problem, and this is, a problem that Marx in part is implicated in is the way in which political discourse has as it were dried up and narrowed. The things about

which we can debate, the topics which are open for alternatives and for other explanations and descriptions. And this is the deep sense in which I have used the word pseudo-democracy instead of democracy throughout. Because even in

its Greek form where it was limited only, to Greeks who were citizens, not slaves, or not foreigners. Even there, the institutions of representation where people could be recalled much quicker. It's hard to recall someone once they get in this city. Not many people come back. We didn't like it. And again, why not?

Well, because in the current situation, as many events that have just happened, I think, indicate political power and economic power are deeply interlocked. It seems to me hardly accidental that most of the people in the Senate are millionaires. I think all but what? One or two? They're all millionaires. All of them today. Is that just an accident? An accidental relation? Most of them, white guys, notice that? Accidental relation? No. See, that's the kind of prima facie evidence one should look at.

You should go, well, that just looks like a bunch of white guys at some really rich club in New York. Well, it is. Like them. In fact, when they go to New York, it is them. Now, that's not a conspiracy theory because all of them appear on TV and tell you they're running your lives. So it's not a conspiracy. The deep insight Marx has, and it's really an important one, is that whatever, and it, By the way, this is not a sufficient condition for what we would like to call a good or excellent human life, but it's a necessary condition, necessary but not sufficient, is that you not have your life reduced to total poverty.

That's just, in other words, it's not enough to just be free from constraints. You can't be just reduced to penury and then say that that person has a free life. And on the other hand, you can't have your life reduced to work, no matter how to wage, and have it be a really excellent life. That reduction of life to work itself cripples life and cripples the challenge to become something else, larger, other. And it's out.

Yes, and I agree with that. I mean, the idea that most people in the world have had to subordinate the vast majority of their waking life to to toiling just to get by prevents many people from being able to even find out who they are, to being able to find out what they would otherwise even be interested in doing. I have people like this in my life, right? And to some degree, American capitalism and the American culture

incentivizes you to identify almost exclusively with what you do for a job. And that can come with pride or that can come with shame or that can come with ambiguity and ambivalence. but it is a core aspect of identification. I once had a, I was getting a tattoo many, many years ago, and the tattoo artist said something that always stuck with me. He was talking about creating small talk with all of his clients, right? Somebody comes in, they want a tattoo.

You're sitting basically pretty intimately close to a total stranger for sometimes several hours in a row. And we somehow were talking about the social aspect of tattooing. And he said, for many years, I would kind of just impulsively, ask somebody like what do you do for a living basically thing you know he's like i got to see different reactions to that question some people perked up right away and were happy to share other people recoiled a little bit and you can see that they were uncomfortable some people said what their job is and you could tell that it was a a source of shame for them and he he said so

what i stopped doing is i stopped saying for a living and what i would make clear to people is like what do you do like for fun like what do you what are you interested in that's how he would start to frame the question when he first, you know, met somebody in to start conversation. Because, you know, when you're getting tattooed, sometimes it is just complete silence and sometimes that's nice. But oftentimes a conversation will emerge. And, you know, so that was a common thing that he faced. And so that switch that he made from asking people what they do for a living to what they do for fun, what interests them, he's like, people will light up. People that otherwise just have a mundane or shitty job or a job that we've been conditioned to think is a shame.

shameful one. When you ask them what they actually do for a living or not when you stop asking them what they do for a living and ask what they do for fun, they'll light up and almost everybody has a hobby or an interest. And that's stuff that people squeeze in. But if you go to the global south or you go to, you know, other places in the world where you might not even, you might work even more and you might have even less material basic access to things because of plundering and colonialism and imperialism. We all know. the conditions that certain countries face and what creates poverty domestically and internationally. But you'll have people, and certainly this is true throughout history, you know, slaves and serfs and peasants throughout history, depending on where they were and when they lived, had very little time to themselves. So there is an element in which, you know, work robs of you, your ability to become who you are. And going back to the Higalian conception of freedom as self-actualization and self-detention. you need some free space, some free room to find those questions out, to explore different

things in life. And so, you know, there is a necessity for work in labor. It's not like we can just snap our fingers and nobody has to work anymore, right? We can make that work dignified and certainly doing the same job, but in different contexts, makes a huge difference. So I just take one job that I've worked in the past, working in retail, right? When you're working a relatively meaningless job for a shitty fucking wage, I think I was getting $12 an hour, no health care, no pension, no benefits, no job security, no union, right? That's very, very different, dignified wise, as far as like how you experience your day-to-day life, than working that same job for $30 an hour with full health care, with a pension, and backed by a union. same exact day-to-day doings, right?

I'm doing the same thing and there's no job like that in America that is unionized in a retail space unfortunately every worker deserves a union and unions are a sort of seed bed out of which socialism and democracy in the workplace can and will grow

but there's a qualitative difference in that same exact job based on the background conditions right and so you know I think that that matters a lot. There is still, there is work that will always need to be done until we can totally automate, you know, post-scarcity automated gay space, luxury communism or whatever, right? There, you know, that's not going to be in our lifetimes. In our lifetimes, there will still always be

human labor that needs to be exerted around socially necessary things, you know, and that's unavoidable. And so the next question is, how do we spread that necessary labor across multiple people so it's not you know a strata of society that is forced to do shitty work while other people live lives of luxury and leisure how do we spread that across the population to each you know according to their need from each according to their ability and how do we make that work dignify how do we democratize and dignify all work all socially necessary work even the unglamorous and sometimes shitty aspects of work we all have to do shitty unglomerous things in life not even just for work but just in life we have to do shit we don't want to fucking do you know we're

not going to be able to escape that facet of it but we can we can embed it in a context that makes it much more doable and dignified and compensated than what we do under capitalism and i think that's a crucial distinction and i don't think we should jump from work is bad to a socialist revolution after that we don't have to work anymore no we'll will have to work And I think there is an aspect of human nature that does want to contribute to the community, going back to our ancient roots, that you want to be sort of useful in a communal social context, right? In a family, you want to have each other's backs. Amongst your friends, you want to have each other's backs. If your friend is in a bad place and needs something of you that you otherwise would not like to have to do, right?

I'm drunk at a bar and I don't have a right home and whatever, I need your help. And even though it's 2 a.m. and you're in bed. and I just woke you up out of a sleeve. You would prefer to go back to sleep, but hey, that's my friend or that's my family member. I'm going to get the fuck up and go do this thing I don't want to do because I have their back and I love them. Right? That makes a task very different in quality. In a bar, right?

You're sitting at a bar with your friends and some guy, drunk guy walks up and punches your friend in the face. You don't want to fucking get into a fucking fight. You don't want to get your fucking face punched and have to punch other faces. That certainly wasn't on. the menu of things you would choose to do in that night but you're not going to sit back and let your loved one get attacked and not fight back, right?

That can also be expanded into revolutionary politics and fighting for each other's future. But I think that's a point worth making of the context in which certain forms of labor and work and actions take place and that context

giving those actions imbueing those actions with meaning depending on that context. In that sense, that we'd started with these philosophical ideals. Because each one of them points the way at projects other than, right? Other than simply being the person who sold the most hires. Who pushed the most papers through the largest office? Each one of them.

In that regard, let me refer back to a really old one. Alexander the Great on finding a skeptic. in the streets a really famous philosopher and this guy was really just totally otherworldly all he did was just think and lay in the streets and he was really dirty and some of Alexander the great's officers

and by the way Alexander the Great did better the George Bush ever will conquered the whole world you know and he was like 26 or so younger than Dan Quayle probably just as sharp and he sees this whole philosopher lying in the streets and he said, well, if I wasn't Alexander, I would want to be

that man. The reason is that they both had extreme and extremely interesting projects. It's hard for us to even have a sense for a project like that now, because our projects have been reduced to a series of bills, petty annoyances, and in our spare time, the search for what little meaning is left over from all that busyness and change. that goes into that process. Now, this is not, I mean, I'm aiming it at this audience because we're here. So please don't get confused. I'm not a foreign agent.

I don't know a government in the world where I couldn't say similar things and in most governments, some worse. Now, I don't want any complacency about my lecture or that to be viewed as me pulling back from what I've said because it is no argument and it never has been. and it never has been to say, our tribe is a little better than everybody else is, so that's fine. You know, why that's no argument, don't you? Well, if you're among tribes of savages and you only lop off 20,000 heads a year as opposed to 19,

that's no lopping off heads argument. Even if you are the greatest tribe in the world, a claim that we believe a prior to. In any case, now, to try to summarize these sort of far-ranging and sort of nasty anti-Republican polemics here or whatever, left-wing talk, what I've been trying to fill out today for you is a richer notion of freedom in which we recognize that before moral problems really come up in the sense, the philosophical sense, before they really come up, there are conditions for human life that have to be fulfilled, which I call necessary human requirements. they're not sufficient to live a good life but they're necessary among them or food shelter

ordinary health care real exciting huh see that's not as much fun as Kant but they're real important because without that it's hard to follow the categorical imperative you know it's easier to follow a ham sandwich without that so that's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good life it's also and this is a more this is a more radical claim. It's also a necessary but not a sufficient condition that one have the freedom in one's life to pursue other goals than work. And in a strong sense, I'm not talking now about getting a hobby, but a life not reduced to work, not reduced to work. A life where when you go to a cocktail party and they go, they don't know what are you, they go, what do you do,

and you don't have to answer with your job description, which is another way of asking who are you in a metaphysical sense, right? That accounts for a lot of the Phil Donahue shows. Women show up and are embarrassed to go, I'm a home worker. I work at home. One of the most socially necessary fucking forms of labor you could possibly do on this planet, domestic reproductive labor in the household,

and it is a source of shame for people and for women especially and I've talked about this before I'll talk about it again which is this dialectic over the last century and a half of women in the in the home right and the barriers to going out into the to the work world to you know having your own individual income just sitting at home all day raising children which interestingly reactionaries look back on and in nostalgia as if it was a golden era right

these detached fathers who spent most of their time outside of the home at a fucking corporate meaningless job but could technically provide for their family on one job and the wife that stayed home alienated from the broader society often alienated from her own husband

having to do the genuinely grueling task although it is rewarding in an existential emotional sense to be able to raise your children and not have to, you know, give them to somebody else to raise for you in this form of daycare or whatever so you can go to work. It is also incredibly stultifying and suffocating to spend day in and day out with multiple little children. It's very hard. It's just fucking hard. And when you are when you're living a work life in modernity and post-modernity, you can look back on that and think about it

nostalgically when you're in it and forced to do it and there's no way out of it it is anything but liberating and i can say that from my own experience as somebody who has spent many many days weeks months as a co-parent in the house and sometimes you know my my wife works and it's me in the house all day for sometimes several days in a row with with young children and it is fucking hard you do not have a second to yourself to think that that labor is uncompensated and looked down upon is degrading. But anyways, you go from that and a genuine feminist movement arises that in part wants to break out of that particularly suffocating confined life of I am just a homemaker, right? I want to go out. I want to self-actualize. And in a

capitalist society, what is the mainstream consensus on your path to self-actualization? Well, join the workforce. Become somebody, i.e. have a job. So when somebody asks, what do you do you can say I'm a girl boss or whatever the fuck right and for for that time dialectically that was an advance for many women that opened up spheres of of life and engagement with society that were otherwise shut off to them then you usher them in capitalism takes advantage right and now you need two people to work and to even get by so you take your kid to daycare pay way too much money to workers who are getting paid way too little and miss out on huge chunks of your child's life in this country don't even get guaranteed

maternity leaves you can't even see many people especially lower wage workers don't even have the luxury of spending the first several months with their own fucking child that's been robbed from you and you start to say god i wish i could just fucking stay home i wish my husband could just go to work and make the money and i didn't have to fucking do this so at least i could raise my own kids we're struggling economically anyways i might as well raise my own kids right and so there's a certain reactionary, nostalgic tendency to look back and say, let's go back. Let's make America great again. Let's go back to the 40s and 50s when it was like that. No, the only way out is through. We want reproductive domestic labor compensated fairly. That comes in many forms,

not just direct cash payments, although we'll take that, but also universal health care, universal childcare, universal education, right? Building out community, instead of living in a hyper alienated isolated individualist society we live in a communal society where the burdens of child care can be you know shared with others and other people aren't fucking at work 24-7 so they can't help you right anybody that has young children knows that having retired grandparents who can watch your kid for you sometimes especially when shit comes up and you need somebody is so helpful having extended family right with some people have days off here grandparents are retired um you know this our our niece is is 20 and she only works part time so she can help

having extended family is for working class motherfucking people is absolutely essential to fucking raising children i do not know and many of you out there might have to be forced in a situation where you don't have extended family for one reason or another and are forced to do it all yourself that is overbearing we want that labor to be compensated we also want people not to have to be confined to any role people can live life outside of their toil right so we don't want to go back to an old way of being we want to go forward to a new way of being that actually resolves the contradiction between suffocating householder with no other options and corporate girl boss that only actually satisfies one percent of people and most other people all that really means in practice is

you're going to a job and getting exploited by a capitalist for very little money just to struggle to get by and miss out on huge swaths of your of your kids childhood we don't want either of those right and in order to really get past both of those and to move forward that does require socialism that requires a new social economic arrangement where human flourishing is the is the core incentive system of society not profit maximization for a few um so yeah we have to think we have to think in those terms and and true liberation is never backwards it's only four words it is reactionary nostalgia is a reactionary fog not the feeling we all feel nostalgia you walk in you smell your grandma's cookies you're nostalgic you know you watch a rug rats from the 90s episode

and you get a wave of nostalgia but we don't get tricked by that ideologically to think that if we could just go back to that time that it would it would be better right reactionaries do the whole idea of a romanticized past and i this is my theory is that reactionaries have that feeling that we all have of nostalgia and then they construct a false reality of the past out of that feeling and they want to return to it and in a deep unconscious way it's it's really a desire to return perhaps to childhood or maybe even return to the womb it is an impossible return that is that is desired by the reactionary and that is why they are actually never happy even when they get their way even when they're in charge of the political and economic

system. They can't solve the problems and they're never satisfied with the results. They live in a perpetual state of anger and hatred and disillusionment and even when they get what they want and they enjoy the cruelty of it because that gives them a temporary feeling of psychological reprieve that at least everything sucks and nothing can get better and I can't go back to that time that I actually want to go back because it doesn't exist but at least I can impose suffering on others. At least I can project outward my own inner suffering that I will refuse to take accountability and ownership of and deal with in a healthy, mature way, I will project that out onto others who I scapegoat for my feelings, who I can put

the blame on for why I feel this way. That is a deep component of reactionary psychology. They are cruel people because they do not have self-knowledge. They do not have compassion or wisdom. they have a tortured psychological world and they project that out onto the world and there's also material of course that's just the psychological layer of explanation we can go to a material layer of explanation an ideological layer of exploration right i'm not trying to reduce those to the psychological i'm just excavating the psychological strata of that broader sediment

of explanation it's quite the metaphor brett thank you that be a problem well in a capitalist economy, it's a terrible problem. And here's why. Because housework is unwaged. And since we value labor by the wage it brings, it's not surprising that an old person in arrest home's ability to tell a beautiful story is not valued because it's not waged. You go to an old folks home. I mean, we ought to realize this, we'll all be, we'll either be old or we'll face another alternative that's unpleasant. You've got an old folks home, that's unwaged labor. They're whittling and their storytelling. Not valued in our culture, in our society.

It's not waged. Housework. No matter how many kids you raise, not really valued. I mean, oh, come on, they'll say something about you on the Today Show if you live to be 100. This woman lived to be 100 and had nine kids. And you get a little clap, that's it. other than that very little social value all that unwaged labor

the reason it's not valued is because it's not waged Donald Trump you know he opens a hotel huge wage he's talking about Donald Trump in 1989 let's see what he says huge value to his labor well what the hell did he do

talk to Merv Griffith in a room for three minutes and that's more valuable than some old man who's lived a 90 years worth of experience and can tell a story about his life in which you might find a human meaning. A society that produces that situation is pathological. It neither has nor deserves the very long existence. Amen. That's the end of the lecture.

I mean, I talked about in part one, at the end of part one, how prescient this was and how even though he's speaking in 1989 or 1990, he is extrapolating insights that are more true than ever. And to just end that lecture on a touchstone of Donald Trump as an undeserving person who this disgusting system laps money onto, just just throws money at this fucking guy who was born rich to a real estate fucking developer and who does nothing really meaningfully contributing to society whatsoever. But in virtue of just being born in a certain place and time, circumstance and winning the lottery of life. convinces himself through his own ego that he's a genius, makes him run for political office,

the American fucking people, who have never been accused of being particularly intellectual, see him as a smart businessman. The only way he could be this rich is if he was like a fucking genius. So we got to run government like a business, and here's a businessman, just ideology all the way down, just distorting and lobotomizing the minds of Americans, that this fucking dumbass,

who happened to be rewarded, by this insane fucking system is by virtue of being rewarded by this insane fucking system uniquely positioned in place to lead this fucking decaying empire like my god um and and to do that in 1989 and we're speaking in 2025 we go back and tell rick roderick like you know that motherfucker's going to be president twice and you know he's going to run on the reagan slogan of make america great again and you know all these things you're talking about are just going to be fucking worse in in 35 years from now I don't even think he'd be surprised. Wow, amazing.

And again, I didn't even listen to that lecture until I pressed play to record my thoughts to it. That's what I do on these philosophy series. I don't listen to these lectures ahead of time. I like the extemporaneous shoot from the hip. He'll say something and it'll stir something up in me. And then I put it out there. I like that organic back and forth more than anything that's like scripted or I listen to it and trying to come up with ideas for what to say.

It feels much more immediate. it and it just kind of spills out of me. So I hope it's useful for people. I hope we clarified some ideas about the Higalian conception of freedom. We've disseminated some lies at the heart of liberalism. We've launched some scathing, deep, structural critiques of capitalism, and we've shown why Marxism in particular is a crucially important philosophy and essential to our current historical moment, as well as providing a vision for the sort of world we want to

build that actually solves the problems, which liberals cannot do. What is the liberal vision of the future? I guess you could go read the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and get the best shot at that you're going to get. Something like that. It's basically a patchwork of techno-silicon valley utopianism where then maybe if we get AI to work just right, we can fucking build a utopian. I mean, there's no vision at all. What's the, what's the vision of conservatives for the future? Just endless cruelty forever? What's the vision of libertarianism? Oh, let's, let's unleash corporations even more, guys.

Let's let corporations run everything even more with even less regulation and less democracy, guys. Then it'll really work. If the free market is just fully unleashed, then we'll produce a good society. And then what's the fascist vision of the future? The Fourth Reich? the U.S. and Israel already are the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich? There is no positive vision.

There is no present, meaningful analysis. There is no structural critique. These are dead ideologies that are tied to a dying system. And the reason they cannot produce coherency in the form of critique, analysis, or vision is precisely because the very system that they are ideological functionaries of is in a state of irreparable decay. and as the material system itself circles the drain, the ideologies that it generates dissolve into incoherence.

And yet Marxism remains. History reasserts itself. And the struggle continues. One last thing I want to say before I wrap up, he was talking about work and he was talking about, you know, the Hegelian conception of freedom being rooted in self-actualization and self-determination, and there has to be certain conditions in place in order for people to even have a shot at pursuing that sort of real substantial freedom, right? And he was like,

you know, outside of your job, it's not just about hobbies. Oh, I like to ski. I like to wakeboard. I like to, I don't know, write dirt bikes. Okay, that is cool and good for you if you're into that shit. We should all have hobbies. But there has to be something deep. There has to be a search for meaning. There has to be a search for purpose. There has to be an embedded name. in the natural world and in community something deeper than merely I enjoy doing this thing in my free time and one of the things I think we can all do

and if you're listening to an episode like this you have the moral intellectual existential capacity to do this although you might not immediately see how you can go about it or you might be confused about the metaphysical baggage that some of this comes with but I would present the idea of a spiritual journey of enriching your life spiritually

and that can look like different things for different people there are ways to do it that are bastardized and commodified and cheap and false and you know a lot of new ageism and online guruism is just complete bullshit it's commodified capitalist controlled pseudo-spirituality just as they're pseudo-intellectuals

they're pseudo-spirials but there are also rich rich traditions and practices that you can engage in that really do profoundly deep in your relationship with life. And, you know, I've talked about many of them on this show. I've had, you know, Christians and Muslims and Jewish people and Buddhists on this podcast to point people in the direction of meaningful spiritual lives. We've critiqued atheism as kind of like irony, a useful, destructive device,

but in and of itself offers very little of a positive vision. and we've talked about how atheists will often start talking about the aesthetics and majesty of the cosmos as a sort of spiritual, an attempt to create a positive vision, and that's in a good direction. We've talked about Spinoza as a path that scientific atheists can reasonably take that require no metaphysical baggage that you could start to have at least intellectually a spiritual understanding of the cosmos and of mind of matter of coming from some underlying form and God as nature. Those are all beautiful things. Meditation practice is a systematic applied theory

to the radical transformation of self and ultimately the transcendence of self that works through your unconscious, that brings stuff up, that produces within you a deeper, more present, more related way of being in the world. A way of being in the world that is no longer, are confined to identifying perpetually as an isolated ego and a way of being moment to moment that is not inherently and inexorably a relationship with compulsive thinking, that there is

a spiritual practice that goes back thousands of years that can be integrated into any belief system. You can be an atheist, you can be a Christian, you can be a Muslim, and you can take the spiritual practice into the context of your already existing beliefs. There's nothing wrong with that. and it is a transformative, experiential approach to spirituality. It's not just believe these five claims and now you're this. Because that doesn't work for us. I can't just believe thing. I can't just make myself believe in like Christian dogma

and then have some sort of meaningful spiritual relationship with the world because I believe those claims. Real spiritual practice has to be experiential and not belief-oriented, not conceptual, experiential. And it has to be transformative. And if you are actually pursuing and facing and integrating truths, that is transformative. And if you're listening to a show like this, you've already done that politically and economically and socially. If you're a Marxist, you understand the process from going from ignorance to more and more clarity and demystification,

encountering harsh truths about the actual state of the reality that you have to face, be unsettled by, resist, accept, and integrate. And that's not always a fun experience. It's not all rainbows and lollipops. It's very challenging, you know, and it pulls back the veil of ideology and reveals a really dark truth sometimes. But would you trade that for ignorant bliss?

Would you go back if you could? Almost nobody says yes. You'll often hear people like, I wish I didn't even learn about this Marxism shit. Like, to see the world as it is, is like so tragic and heartbreaking and it's just like god i wish i could almost it's like the matrix scene where the guy's eating the steak and he's like ignorance is bliss right i want to go back into the simulation except my ignorance and my naivete and go back into a blissful ignorant state

as opposed to understanding this meta reality that i'm forced to face you know and deal with intellectually and emotionally it's too hard for me to do i want to go back but we don't actually want to go back. The hard-earned truths build in us a character and a compassion and a wisdom that we don't want to sacrifice for ignorant comfort. In a very similar way, a practice like meditation, a deep, time-honored form of transformative spiritual practice is the inward analog to that. It is this ruthless seeking of inward truth, this courageous, face, of everything that you often distract, deny, or run away from within yourself. And it is a transformative process by which you relate to your own mind differently.

You relate to other human beings differently. You relate to other sentient beings differently. You relate to the natural world differently. In a way that is much less alienated, much less separate, much more interconnected, and not just conceptual and intellectual, but is felt viscerally, experientially, existentially. it is a it is a ruthless process of uprooting delusion which is hard and challenging and scary right and there are times where it feels like you're totally lost that you're in over your head i mean you know anything worth having is hard anything worth pursuing is hard but i think

on the other end of these practices is if there is another end it's just a process it's another process that goes your whole life i am by no means on the other end of it whatever that means. And I'm not even saying that you should try to pursue some end state. Like if I just do this for long enough, if I meditate every day for 10 years, then I'll become enlightened. And that's when I can stop. And no, just accept that everything in life is an ongoing process. There is no final destination that we're rushing towards. Reorient your relationship with the present moment, which is actually all we have. Although our mind spends so much fucking horsepower, thinking about the past or envisioning the future, right? When the future comes, it is the

present when the past happened it was the present so if you can radically reorient and anchor yourself in the present moment in a wise compassionate and deeply connected way you can transform your moment to moment experience of life in a way that among many other things radically reduces anxiety and depression and fear and hatred deepens self-understanding and other understanding which naturally gives rise to wisdom and compassion, which are actually the same thing in the end. True wisdom is compassion.

True compassion is wisdom because it is the realization that there is no separateness. That the interconnectedness of the cosmos and of each other are so profound, so deep, can be analyzed at so many different layers. That compassion naturally arises. I always say, when Jesus said,

love your neighbor as yourself, that's impossible to the ego. When you tell the ego, love your neighbor as much as you love yourself, it might flatter itself to think it can do it. It can't. Because the ego is fundamentally concerned first and foremost about me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I'm separate from him over there. I wish him the best.

I don't wish him any harm. I'll have his back. If he comes over and asks for some sugar and ketchup, I can give him some. Ketchup, I don't even know what the fuck. If he comes over and ask for a cup of sugar, I can give him some. If his house is on fire, I'll go knock on his. door and help him get out, but like I can't love him as much as me. I think about me all day long. One of the first revelations you'll have in meditation practice is, holy fuck, I think about me all day

long. I am so me centric. Me, me, me, me, me, me. Of course. That's what the ego is. It's a me structure. And it made sense at a certain part in our human development to have that separation from the natural world and from each other and to have an individual personality and that's part of the overall dialectical process of human consciousness and just like capitalism it's created some good things

and it also comes with some serious downsides and the longer that process of ego goes on like the longer that process of capitalism goes on the more unsustainable it becomes and the more suffering it imposes and what is that suffering and that pain if not the impetus and the call from nature itself to transcend to this thing.

This thing now is wasted. It's spent. It had a useful place in this process. It served its processual role. But now that role is expired. And if you insist on keeping it around, it's going to be the end of you. So I'm asking you to move forward to level up.

We do that in the social political world through revolution and the shift towards socialism and communism. And we do that within ourselves. in spiritual practices specifically meditation that are systematic truth-seeking processes of seeing beyond ego identification and seeing and feeling, more importantly, than merely thinking,

but feeling and seeing directly the profound interconnectedness and interrelatedness of you and all things. And once you feel that in your bones, you cannot watch another human being suffer needlessly without feeling profound grief and pain and wanting to stop it. And once you feel that in your bones,

that old Jesus command to love your neighbor as yourself actually makes sense for the first time. I actually get what that means because I've been able, at least for moments at first, to transcend my ego enough to realize that I am him, he is me,

she is me, I am that. That the feeling and the thought that I was actually fundamentally separate from them somehow was always an illusion. and colonialism and imperialism and war and slaughter and ethno-s supremacism is ultimately rooted in the delusion that you and your tribe are somehow separate from them it's the basis of otherization

so if we're going to move into a world where we grow up as a species beyond class society that is going to require an inward shift away from ego identification. Not that the ego disappears, not that we all sort of live in an oceanic feeling of oneness all the time. Of course not. The ego, conceptual thinking, is a tool. It's really, really useful when you use it. It becomes very deleterious to your well-being and to the well-being of society when it uses you.

When you can't expand beyond it and put it. it in its proper place. Just like the economic system of capitalism. Right? Historically, it serves a purpose. Now it's to the point where that purpose has expired and we are supposed to believe that we're just here to serve it. Instead of being a tool, we become the tool.

Keep the economy going. Keep the capitalist machine churning at all cost. To nature, to the biosphere, to the fucking climate, to countless lives throughout the, global south and in the imperial core just keep it going keep it going keep it going it's it's manic it's pathological and it's literally threatening our species and life on earth that's not that's not hyperbole to say that so one of the ways that we can find meaning in our lives even as workers in an unjust exploitative system is to find that part of our being that is deeper

than sociality, then our economic system, then our vocation, that is deeper even than our interests and hobbies, that actually attempts to reorient the relationship one has with one's own mind. And in order to reorient the relationship with one's mind, one has to face one's own mind. When you sit down first day of meditation, and it says, you follow your breath, follow your breath, trying to get distracted by thoughts. What's the first thing? happens you get like half a breath in and you're distracted by a thought and the more you become aware of it the more you realize how much you're distracted by thought like before you start meditating you actually you actually radically underestimate how much time you were just lost in

conceptual chatter and talking to yourself in your head all day and when you sit down for the first time and try to sit in complete silence breathe in focus on your breath breathe out all of a sudden you'll hear it come in okay this is kind of boring what am I going to do next how long do I have to do this has it been five minutes already they want me to do this every day

did you hear that one guy meditated for five hours I heard this one guy went on a retreat for three weeks how the fuck can you do this for three do do do do do do do bring oh I saw it I'm thinking again let me bring my attention back to my breath the breath is always here it's rhythmic

and when you fully bring your attention to your breath you can't also be thinking. So this instruction, is very introductory instruction of bringing your attention back to your breath. Breathe in, feel it, put your whole attention on that way it feels, the sensations that come in and as it goes in and out.

And then inevitably, after one second, after five seconds, if you're really good after 10 seconds, the chatter will come back in. But what about, do you remember in the future? blah blah blah blah and then now you're starting to catch it now you're starting to see it this first this first aspect of this process is to start to see how much time you spend in compulsive inner chatter and how useless so much of it is that's the first revelation like holy

shit i talk to myself in my head all day most of it is utter nonsense and even when i try really hard i can't stop that's the first set of revelations you'll have in spiritual practice And if you look at the whirling dervishes in the Sufi tradition, you look at praying mystics in the Catholic tradition, you look at all these mystical elements, it's all about shifting attention. It is this, where do I place my attention? By default, the ego places attention in inner chatter.

To take your attention somewhere else, the Catholic praying to God, chanting, swirling and feeling your body moving in space or in simple meditation following the breath in and out is to take your attention and move it away from conceptual compulsive interchatter and towards something else. And by doing that, you'll feel it pulled back and that pulling, that tug of war that will go on initially

is your indication like, wow, I spend a lot of time in this compulsive interchating scenario. And that actually, and this might be a little more complicated and harder to get at first, but what you'll start to see eventually is that that compulsive inner chatter is what creates the sense of a false separate self that compulsive inner chatter actually creates by virtue of it chattering to itself implicitly it creates a sense that I am somewhere behind my eyes between my ears looking out at a world that is not me it is that inner chatter that produces the sense of a false sense of separate self

and when you can start to see it you can start to catch it eventually you get so good that you can choose to engage in it or not and eventually when you meditate meditate meditate the the chattering itself will become an alarm oh there goes my mind let me let me drop down into being let me drop down into feeling presence and eventually instead of putting your awareness on your breath this is complicated if you don't fully understand this this is just part of not understand it's like trying to learn about dialectical materialism when you just learned about the communist manifesto yesterday it's a little

advanced but you will get there eventually you put awareness attention on attention itself instead of resting your awareness on your breath eventually you turn awareness around to look at awareness itself. It's like trying to take the headlights of a car to turn around on its own wiring. And, you know, that is where incredible transformation can occur. And that is where the self can dissolve. But even if you don't get to the point, right, these are all processes. We will all get to different degrees of this process. Even if you don't get to the point where the self completely dissolves. There are benefits every step of the way. There are challenges every step of the way. And there are benefits every step of the way. Meditating for two weeks,

for two months, 15, 20 minutes a day will generate serious benefits. It will also unlock things over time. Like things will start coming up and challenges will face. But I mean, I know like in the first couple months of meditating, I felt much more serene. I felt much less anxious. anxious. I wasn't as susceptible to outbursts of anger. I realized very quickly in my meditation practice as a teenager, I started crying more. There's a saying, and I forget who says it, but the idea is there's an ocean of tears within you. And the quote goes, if you haven't wept, you haven't meditated. That as you start to feel feelings that your ego wants to keep submerged in the subconscious. And as you start to feel, you start to feel, you know,

your interrelatedness with all beings, you feel this ocean of tears well up inside of you. And to let them out, to weep madly in the face of another person's suffering is a sure fucking sign. You're on the right motherfucking path. When you can cry uncontrollably at a total stranger suffering, you are spiritually adept. You are on the spiritual path. I mean, even if you haven't fully meditated or you know some people stumble across this stuff there's instances of people having spontaneous enlightenance in the history of buddhism that have never meditated at all it's very rare i wouldn't count on it if i were you odds are it's not going to be you but that is to say that there's something very natural about this process it is like an unfolding it's like a flower

blossoming you can't force it you can't rip open the petals but by sitting in awareness focusing on your breath being present, it's like you move the clouds and the flower gets light. Even that is too doing, right? You're moving the clouds. It's like simply setting your flower pot outside in the sun.

Even setting the flower, whatever, you are the flower. It's just you are basking in the sun's rays when you are meditating. And if you do that enough, if you put your flower of being in the sunlight of awareness, the petals start to unfurl naturally. You try to force those pedals open. You're going to rip the fucking pedals off and it's not going to work.

It's never going to. You don't make a flower bloom. The ego wants to make the flower bloom. It's really about giving up the need to control, giving up the attempt to make something happen, and resting in awareness. And it's that kind of getting out of the way that allows this very natural process to unfold naturally. And you will start to feel that over time, that this unfolding, this thing that I call meditation that I at first thought I was doing is doing me.

This process is natural. It wants to happen. I'm just providing it sunlight for it to unfurl. I'm not even providing it. It's just there. I'm getting out of the way. I'm actually, all I'm doing actually is ceasing to cast a shadow. Maybe that's the best way to do it, to frame it.

You're not doing anything. You're ceasing to do something that obscures. And what this process, this spiritual journey as I'm calling it, crudely perhaps, this offers your life a whole new dimension. This offers your life a whole new level of existential meaning and connection that nothing else, no hobby, no interest, and certainly no motherfucking job would ever be able to offer you. And it's hard at first, and most people give up. You know, most people give up.

They'll try meditating, they'll get really excited. I'm going to meditate. Even I give up, I mean, even I struggle with the discipline to do it. Still, I struggle hard. I mean, I haven't meditated in several weeks, unfortunately. So I'm not trying to ever paint myself as some accomplished master or some discipline, Zen priest, some monkish type of person. I got kids and shit. I got to do shit.

I struggle with discipline. I try to wake up today at 6 a.m. because I wanted to meditate and work on my book, which I've had a horrific case of writers block on. I'm getting up at 6 a.m. I'm fucking meditating. And I'm writing my book. And for periods of time in the winter this month, or I'm sorry. Sorry, a couple months ago, I was doing this almost every day.

Every weekday, I was waking up at 7 in the morning, and I was meditating for 30 to 40, sometimes 60 minutes, and then I'd spend an hour or two hours writing my book, and I got through 100 pages of my book. And then I just, now I go to part two. Ironically, it's about meditation and this exact argument I'm making to you right now. This is part two of my book, is laying this all out. And even though I can do it right here, pretty damn good, extemporaneously, I am struggling so fucking hard to do it by putting pen to pad and writing writing my thoughts out why i don't know it's a

challenge it's a roadblock i'm dealing with it but anyways i set my clock i'm like i'm on it's monday i'm starting now um i have in two weeks i started a new job so i want to get big progress made on my book before i have to start this brand new job and i'll maybe tell people more about that in time but set my alarm for 6 a.m my alarm goes off i wake up i put my alarm across the room so i have to get out of bed to go turn it off and I'm already out of bed right so that will make me really just get going with my day I set my coffee so my coffee's already done in the kitchen I just have to walk my tired ass out to the kitchen in a robe pour my first cup of coffee and get this ball rolling what do I do wake up turn off my fucking alarm go back into bed sleep till nine and by nine o'clock my kids are awake

Brett you're not getting shit done beat myself up beat myself up so I'm just all that is to say it's not easy. Nothing in life worth having is easy. It takes practice and discipline. It takes consistency. And it takes momentum. You got to build on. You got to build. You got to build. You can meditate for six weeks and then you take six weeks off. You lose a lot of that progress. There's something like rubbing a stick together to start a fire. You got to keep that fucking stick moving. You take the stick off. The momentum dissipates. The heat dissipates. You kind of got to start all over. It's not quite the same. You don't have to start all over. There's some progress that once you make it, it's entrenched in your being but there is there is a sense in which that that that analogy holds

quite true um but anyways that's just a dimension of life you dear leader or dear leader dear listener dear reader can pursue to fill out and and make meaningful this other dimension of life which involves deep self-knowledge which involves self-determination self-actualization and possibly even self-transcended. Love in solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. Who's who?

Who is people who are the world? Today, for us, today for the long of the world, the world of all the United States. This is the whole thing until the world. The United States, there is a need to be there.