The Pete Quiñones Show - Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Episode 11-19 w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

9 Hours and 15 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the final 9 episodes of the Continental Philosophy series with Thomas777. He covers Kant, Sombart, Husserl, Wolfgang Smith, Marx and the Frankfurt School.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back and we are continuing the series on continental philosophy. How are you doing it, Thomas? Right. I'm going to talk about Emmanuel Kant today. Initially, I was going to discuss the Reformation and after providing a background in Aquinas and Thomas thought. But I'm going to do that after I conclude the main body. of this series for reasons that I think will become clear as I proceed.

Emmanuel Kant's fundamentally important to the Enlightenment Project. I mean, the point before that, in my opinion, one of the only purely political theoretical contributions from the Germans to the Enlightenment Enterprise was Klausowitz. I stand by that because Kant wasn't a political theorist. he wrote precious little on politics in direct capacities he said he has this enduring and tremendously outsized impact on um

on um conceptual um matters relating to a political discourse which makes sense he was an intellectual giant I'm not this session going to talk about concepts like the categorical imperative and a priori and a posteriori distinctions and the thing in itself as a conceptual postulate those things are tremendously important but we're getting into very deep metaphysics there and things like the anthropic principle which in my opinion i've got an epistemological view of politics among other things that's one of the reasons why I hold out

Heidegger is so significant not just because of his ideas on on epistemology and things

and political ontology that I view as systemically and very integral you know it's because I don't think that politics is

as discreet a domain as you know is often suggested so it's probably a two-part treatment of Kant and

Kant was in conceptual dialogue with Hume specifically Hume's radical empiricism even for an enlightenment partisan that was remarkable but i mean hume obviously was not a continental theorist but we'll get into that too moving forward um i'm still not feeling great um that's one of the reasons why i split this up but i think it's appropriate just uh not so much for the sake of brevity but

I think it makes more sense that way otherwise it becomes kind of unmanageable I had an interesting background say the least he was the progeny of radical

pietists and the Germans is a deeply theologically impacted people in terms of their intellectual culture, I think that can't be overstated. You know, I made the point before, speaking of Heidegger, he's very much in the tradition of Meister Eckart, as with Schopenhauer in my opinion, although it's more obvious with

somebody like Heidegger than is with Schopenhauer or Ficta. But German pietism is equally important, and I'd argue was an essential aspect of the modern German political and cultural mind and one of the reasons I think it's misguided for example when people posit it's mostly very partisan-minded Jewish writers as well as Englishmen they enjoy suggesting that the NSDAP was this culturally Catholic phenomenon it really was not at all. The National Socialist Heartland was the rural

and semi-rural Protestant North and I believe there's a direct connection between pietist thought and national socialist ethics, especially

as regards the congregational understanding of communitarian life and the inner witness as the arbiter of political and social ethics and things like that. You know, this isn't middling trivia or something. You know what I'm getting at is that it's just a way the people, such as the aforementioned, you know, fascism or the Third Reich is their stand in for Lucifer. so the and they you know the um the the english being rabidly anti-catholic and you know um zionist types having similar prejudice is a little emergent from a different place that's the source of that um conceptual prejudice but even some people should know better sometimes parrot that um that um suggestion but um

Kant was in East Prussian from what's now Kaliningrad you know so the eastern most frontier of the Prussian state you know and that undoubtedly

colored his perspective on you know high politics he lived a very priestly life he was very much like in that mold you know he never married he devoted pretty much the entirety of his waking life to academic uh research and writing he was tremendously prolific you know and i um i'm not sure people fully grasp his influence you brush up against Kantian perspectives constantly in serious academe

such that it continues to exist in legacy terms and it's just something people take for granted nonsense like democratic peace theory which no serious person abides obviously there is some connection

to Kant therein but it's a bastardized and it's dumbed down to the point of being infantile such that I don't really think it's fair to claim a direct lineage however

Kant's anthropological suggestions about man as a political actor and what his intrinsic motives are and how these things can be manipulated are are remarkably at odds with reality and his conclusions aren't really suggestive of they they're very kind of self-damming you know this is a man who had absolutely no understanding of the political

you know and no most of the earth by Carl Schmidt is a substantial portion of that book which is Schmidt's magnum opus in many ways it's a savage repudiation

of Kantian conceptual biases and theoretical models you know which is very well placed but nevertheless, Kant was complicated, just like Hobbes was, you know, Hobbes was a pure political theorist, contra Emmanuel Kant. However, his ontological claims were, you know, nakedly at odds with reality.

And stuff like this, of course, is the basis of, of scientism. you know, in the sense, Wolfgang Smith talked about it. You know, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, not a, essentially curative of all um you know human shortcomings and things and that's obviously preposterous beyond um belief um the uh the uh const um you know again his direct uh treatment of politics it's largely oblique and derivative relative to the main thrust of his subject matter nevertheless it becomes central when one immerses himself and comes to truly understand the core tenets of

of Kanti and metaphysics and ethical postulates the three chief works Kant is most known for are critique of pure reason critique of practical reason and critique of judgment

for example critique of judgment he speaks of politics in direct terms literally in one paragraph and that's it when he talks explicitly of politics he generally does so under the guise of metaphysics

or law he was very much a legal theorist or by resort to historical analogy or drawing upon what he views as precedent to the historical record

to discuss what he views as progressive or curative imperative um these uh so make no mistake the body

the the main body of Kantian theory is full of practical proposals and utopian social engineering But if you were seeking out some sort of statement where by Kant, like Hobbes does, you know, breaks down what he views as, you know, European man's political mind and the source of, you know, its structure. and the nature of, you know, the relationship between ethics and politics in direct capacities. You're not going to find that.

The two most significant theorists that Kant was in dialogue with, and that impacted his political thought where Rousseau and Isaac Newton I haven't read many contemporary people who understand this fully. E. Michael Jones does.

Newton was a strange character and his entire body of work is basically an almost kind of petulant attempt to repute illustrate Aristotelian logic, okay?

Be that as it may, Newton was viewed as this intellectual giant who ushered in the scientific revolution and thus the Enlightenment. This is the way that, you know, partisans of that perspective viewed it. And even those who are not particularly disposed to take up that proverbial banner with zeal.

He viewed him as essentially the progenitor of, you know, kind of the new science, all right? The view of Kant was that, you know, man had been essentially mired in ignorance until he was able to master the kinds of methodologies that were most splendidly synthesized. and systematized by people like Newton, you know, this, for example, you know, without an understanding of the natural world and how to manipulate its aspects, you know, things like land navigation or maritime navigation would be unthinkable, you know, even comparatively prosaic things, like building shelters against the elements. You know, this is the source of all. practical and curative knowledge relating to how man can master his environment and improve upon his own mind towards those pragmatic ends.

So Kant's belief was that there was a method that could be applied to state relations. most significantly international relations, but also within the state where peace had been achieved in discrete and limited capacities at minimum. And once this sort of physics of the political had been fully systematized and adopted, then a kind of architecture of permanent peace could be implemented and sustained. Why that would be desirable, we'll get to in a minute in the Contean perspective. It's different than what we think of as the secular humanist perspective, although, again, there is a relationship there of dissent, you know, not dissent

like dissent is and descended from the former however again it's I take exception to it when people posit that these sort of lazy

polemical appeals of the secular humanist left you know partake of a meaningful philosophical tradition because they really don't And Kant would have never used the term democracy because that would be meaningless in context. You know, he talked about an enlightened republicanism, which was not accidental.

The relationship between, I think there's actually strains of neol-Politanism and Kant, but that's a bit far afield. anyway Kant's political theory that we consider it to be like a discrete Kantian political theory it can be summed up as Republican government

enlightened republicanism and international organization Kant had this idea that the doctrine of state for it to be not just legitimate but enduring it had to be rooted in law above all else and again he viewed the law as this sort of discrete science you know whereby basic truths about the world could be revealed

you know almost by way of a methodology that, you know, the law to him represented a sort of like science of ethics, you know, and both these formulations, you know, the idea of Republican government and international organization, it relied on this suggestion of peace through law, you know, and he drew the distinction within and among states, the process of coming. to order, political order is a matter of passing from the state of nature which is axiomatically a state of war to a state of a higher reason which is the permanent or semi-permanent peace so by definition

or by essential aspects. The lawful state and the legitimate state are synonymous and the function of it is maintenance of the peace above all else, which facilitates all other goods, coming into being

and again he appeals to morality in history more than he does what we think of as a conventional political theoretical partialist you know it's

it's not so much esoteric as it is oblique that's the best way I can describe it However, Kant viewed the primary tension within the European political mind and thus within the modern state itself, you know, the nascent modern state, he viewed the primary tension or the primary internal contradiction within that. conceptual framework as involving science contra morality like again

Newtonian physics de Kant represented a kind of deep and revealed truth about the nature of reality its structure its potentialities and he discerned within it like a natural tendency towards balance and order

is almost like this little a markie and kind of will within nature and within reality, you know, whereby, you know, the scientist or the physicist, you know, he can divinate and identify in discrete terms, you know, kind of the trajectory of this inherent will within reality and matter and by curating that, you know, structures that partake of its essence can, you know, become perfected with the correct mode of intervention and engineering. this is co-extent and alongside a moral consciousness which man and man alone is capable of cultivating you know which distinguishes him from beasts of the field um you know and the problem is you know and the problem is is that the setting of moral activity how it comes to be the precedent for it the only way we can understand it is um by resort to you know um strife and and warfare you know that is the precedent

and even men who are morally correct in the Kantian view there's going to be coercive aspects to enforcing an enlightened morality which is going to call upon a certain zealousness to sustain those efforts and to inundate its standard bearers

with the fervor and violence, figurative, and literal in order to see these things through. Kant realized that these two tenancies couldn't be properly reconciled in conventional ways but they could coexist in a complementary fashion, kind of like

competing forces within physics bound by the same laws of nature and gravity or what have you if a common theoretical basis could be a identified and um an understanding of these competing forces therein you know and how they could be cultivated so as to allow some sort of harmonious resolution to be realized at least in terms

of praxis um And what's essential and understand here, too, is that the state of nature, yes, it is the state of war, but it also is a state of perfect freedom. And the free will can flourish within that setting. The problem is that there's not ethical restraints. So it becomes this, you know, if not a war of all against all, and not be easy in terms. It becomes a kind of glorified beastiery, where might makes right, and the perfection of the human will and the full flourishing of it, you know, can't possibly be realized. This relates to what Kant also identified as the basis of metaphysics. And this comes up again and again in his main body of work.

He essentially divided the world into the realm of phenomena and the realm of Pneumina. the realm of phenomena is the realm of things in their manifestation or appearance the world of numina is the world of things as they are in themselves or as they could be known in their essential capacity if knowledge of them could be acquired without the mediation of experience, which is a fascinating postulate. But, you know, what's relevant here is that the world of phenomena

is what science reveals to us. The world of numina is from where ethics derive and how these things can be reconciled, if they can be reconciled, that would be the basis of a perfectly enlightened politic whereby a perpetual peace could be accomplished and thus a full flourishing of the human will, which in Kantian terms is like the telos of politics. like that's why the state exists you know that's why politics exists you know of the

enlightened sort as he would characterize it of course that begs the question and this is Schmidt's big concern like why why is that important and more critically and more

immediately that's not the way humans are You know, and politics isn't this process whereby, you know, we become ethically perfected, or we socially engineer man and do, you know, something better than he was. You know, politics is the business of friends and enemies. And why, you know, and Cyrillo made the same point. Like, why violence is not just intrinsic to man, but why it's essential to his creativity. you know and the kind of convergence of reason will and passion in violent political impulses

allows man to kind of reach a relative zenith of action and conceptual activity it doesn't really matter why that is it just is you know and so this idea that well we're going to break man of the same things that allow him to be creative and allow him to, you know, act out heroic values on sort of the grand historical stage, you know, the idea that we need to do away with that to realize some sort of perfect free flourishing of free will for every man and woman as much as possible. possible um that really can't be rationalized and um you know it's it's the problem with all enlightenment paradigms and the problem of capital of liberalism is at base it takes a splendidly arbitrary set of values and aesthetical preferences and declares these things are the

highest good for all time for all people because i say so you know and i say so isn't good enough and appeal to universal ethics few that these um postulates may be a number isn't good enough you know and it also and again I'm no I'm no libertarian or Von Miesian but it also begs the question why is this the business of the state you know the state isn't this perennial thing it's something that was emergent as we know it I made a mistake. The modern state is this discreet and unique phenomenon.

You know, it's not, we're not just talking about different iterations of some identical tenancy or sociological impulse. The modern state emerged out of the catastrophe of the 30 years' war. It endured for a little under 300 years. you know um and then gave way briefly to a kind of true globalism in political terms which proved to be totally unsustainable only to a combination of factors some you know some related to hubris some of which were historical but um you know the state's business is war and peace. It's not it's not to perfect

a man or to like educate your children or to improve or to like mitigate the tragedy of the commons or something or like help men and women like understand each other better you know frankly suggesting

the state should be doing anything other than what it was tailored to do commensurate with, you know, the raison d'etra of a collective defense and the need to mitigate

catastrophes such as that that began with the defenestration of Prague and ended with the Westphalian peace. You know, like why is the state that

instrumentality. Of course the Schmidian view is that well the state does a stand-in for for God to the secularist and it's acts of sovereign authority

take on the symbolic psychological trappings of miraculous events quite literally And there's also If you accept the Kantian paradigm You basically need to accept that This sort of ethical schema

Political in nature Isn't bound by any territorial imperative You know, and a Schmidt point I keep making back to Schmidt Because he is the most direct rebuttal to Kant in, um, you know, uh, in, in, in, in any epoch. Schmidt makes the point about the spatial nature of political life. Because that's, that's an essential, it's not just conceptually essential.

You know, you can't talk about sovereignty, unless you're talking about sovereignty over a place. I, I, I can't give you coordinates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. and say okay you see like the united states navy sovereign over these coordinates you know i i can't tell you that just anywhere you are on this planet you know that like the portuguese parliament has the power to tax you i mean i'm being going really obtuse but you know to make a point but part of it is you know pragmatic conceptual but part of it also is You know, human life, the setting of human life is physical reality. You know, that's just the way humans are wired psychologically, but also, you know, it's literally the setting of any human action, other than that, which is purely psychological in character.

And in a category of pure mind. You know, so if you're talking about, it's not accidental that the first political order, and during really until only a few centuries ago, it always attached directly to a discreet land area, great or small. You know, so it's all good and well, I mean, aside from everything else that's wrong with these appeals to what is reportedly a universal ethical schema, aside everything else that's wrong with that, you know, you're, it's located literally nowhere. You know, you're saying, and saying that, you know, there's a sovereign authority over everything. you're saying that you know you're sovereign over nothing you know there's um a need for a um a concrete spatial orientation and um that's fundamentally important um frank herbert makes that point too which uh i mean it's probably sounds like incredibly like spurgish but i especially because like in the Herbert

universe you're quite literally talking about massive and vast swaths of space time and discrete planets situated they're in but the reason why there's an emperor of the known universe is because people have to be able to say like you know there is a planet

and there's literally a man who you know sits in in a palace on that planet and is the emperor of, you know, all of these other worlds. You know, otherwise, even if you're just a figurehead and, like, the pedestrian emperors in Dune,

like some of them have more power than others, you know, depending on the man on the throne, and depending on the constellation of factors that are kind of dictating affairs of the Lanzerad. But even if he's only a symbolic figurehead, there always has to be like an emperor of the known universe otherwise there's not an orientation

point and I remember this was before like I read Carl Schmitt or anything so I was like 12 or 13 years old when I first read that I remember thinking that was really profound because I'd never thought in those terms before but yeah that's essential

it's you know and it's also too obviously I mean I realize I'm spending more time in the critique than I am the subject matter of what's being postulated by time

but the you know the just war as an essential aspect of an ethical schema yeah there's a very strong Thomas tradition there

but the way people talk about it at least in the anglosphere it's a Kantian concept you know at least during like the Vietnam era and beyond you know just speaking to what

people are probably familiar with who are listening to this now you know and the everybody I would assume this point, you know, who follows or Kant and knows the Schmidian objection. You know, you're just talking about the tyranny

of values dressed up as universal imperatives. But aside from that, you know, Kant admits that, you know, again, there's going to be a coercive aspect to forcing recalcitrant states and peoples

to join this federation, you know, that has abolished war. So, I mean, if you're going to if you're going to wage war to abolish war you're rendering your enemy the ultimate

you know adversary of humanity which means that you're exponentially increasing the level of inimical hostility that there would be

otherwise within an accepted you know moral consensus bound by cultural and territorial parameters. So it's sort of a self-refuting proposition. And the Kantian rebuttal to that is a kind of special pleading

whereby, well, you know, the ends justify the means so long as you are in fact, you know, acting in accordance with an enlightened reason. You know, and it's like, well, how would I determine that? Do I, like, consult a panel of philosophers? and if they if they give me if they green lighted that means i can do whatever i want you know i mean that's this is kind of what i mean by um saying that con was kind of the ultimate ivory tower academic and this is why um this is why these people need to be kept

um as far from politics as possible you know um because i mean there's anti human aspects of these things too and i'm not assigning this to con his loose ideological descendants are more often than not of a certain stripe ideological stripe that is incredibly destructive and abides the kind of anti-human, anti-cultural zeitgeist that quite literally wants to, you know, wipe out the ability of people to live historically. It wants to annihilate the bases of human identity. I mean, really monstrous stuff. But even in lesser iterations, you know, you're dealing with you're dealing with zealids

who are kind of like a child who in their inability to understand some relatively complex puzzle or something decides to set it on fire or like upset the table maybe as a better analogy you know that's why I'm always coming back to the fact

about dangerous it is that I mean, I think, I think the president is kind of a cipher and a lame duck. But the office does still hold some concrete authority beyond the merely symbolic. You know, one of the really bad things about Trump is that the man demands an idiot. You know, in politics, I mean, he's got zero understanding of high politics. You know, it's like a monkey holding a book on. high school algebra you know i mean aside from the fact that he's just kind of a bad guy and has um some really questionable commitments you know you can't have people like that rendering

decisions that's that's preposterous you know um and uh these things can't be remedied oftentimes you know it um I mean, to make a point again and again how everybody feels about Bush 41 and Baker they had a viable model for

the new global order moving forward you know, whether you and again, I mean, I don't think globalism is a good thing but because it was the reality if the Interdurban border came down

I'd rather have it be viable than not. and I certainly rather have Bush and Baker at the helm than some crazy Zionists and some game show host who's an absolute Creighton on matters of politics. You know, the, um, a, uh, an abject cretan, you know, white inward, like piggy Bill Clinton,

deciding, um, with these, um, uniform fetishists, fuckheads like Wesley Clark you know to for all practical purposes like assault the Russian Federation and the Balkans they they destroyed a decade of goodwill proceeding and eradicated any possibility of full disarmament of strategic nuclear forces they basically poisoned um the 21st century

you know um by sheer hubris and in the case of piggy just like abject like staggering degrees of stupidity you know you can't i mean the fact that bill clinton you know the guy the guy should have been like face down in a ditch like no i'm not advocating violence or like fed posting or fed speaking but um like the guy is a totally like subhuman piece of shit so i mean that's like an extreme example but you can't you can't um you can't with these people anywhere near um the levers of power that's what i got today like i'm sorry this was kind of brief man and i'm still kind of recovering from not feeling well i've been burning the candle on both ends sort of because i'm trying to get stuff done before the fourth and i've got people coming to town and which i'm excited about

There's a lot of fun stuff on the agenda, but I'm trying to get my health back so that I can be a proper host and stuff. So forgive me if this didn't go as long as you or the subs would like. No worries. No worries. Just tell people where you're at right now, and yeah, get out here. Well, no, thanks. You're very generous. I mean, always, but, yeah.

my website is in the process being retooled and it's almost done but it's an up-to-date feed now of like everything i'm doing like here with pique and with our dear friend um jay burdon and with my friends adam and nick and with my my phaser pod it's like a it's like a one-stop kind of site where you can find everything i'm doing um it's thomas seven seven seven dot com it's number six HMAS 7777.com I'm told that the mobile version is still kind of janky that's being worked out

but if you try and load it like on your smartphone or um your droid or whatever and it doesn't work don't like blow me up it doesn't work it doesn't work it's just might be fucked up on the mobile app um other than that

um you can always find me in substack that's where my pot is and like long form stuff and all kinds of other good things and we got like an active chat going there it's real thomas 7777 that substack up um like going to those two places and you can find all my other stuff you know like my i've got a tgram and

an instagram and things like that but yeah go to go to my website or go to substit all right until the next episode thank you thomas appreciate it yeah you're welcome i want to welcome everyone back to to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back, and we are going to, Thomas is going to talk about one of everybody's favorite people in history

in the last couple of hundred years. So go ahead, Thomas. I want to talk about Karl Marx and Marxism. You know, the 20th century, there was a conceptual dialogue with Marxist Leninism that really can't be overstated. And virtually nobody understands Marx. Okay, Marxism's invoked as this polemical device to describe the ideology of the managerial state,

which is this kind of post-1968 secular humanism. And, you know, this kind of ad hoc ideological pastiche that's invoked for expediency. to kind of play populations off against each other. It's really kind of a hollow core. But what it's not is it's not Marxist. Like people have this idea that Marxism is a more extreme version of liberalism or that it's some sort of egalitarian ethos. It's none of those things.

And this isn't just trivia or some sort of pedantic interest I've curated because I deal a lot in political theory in my research it's essential to understanding the 20th century and it's essential to understanding the configuration of globalism and why

the sort of dialogue around nascent globalism and you know was characterized by the sort of ideological poll stars that it was you know I can tell

I'm not just saying things I can tell by talking to people even fairly intelligent people you know not not just polemicists you say ridiculous things like Mark Levin or whatever I can tell they've never read Carl Marx because of the way they describe Marxism

or communism when it existed or some of these people they'll say with a straight face that somebody like Kamala Harris is a communist or that oh you know university professors are all Marxists that betrays a fundamental ignorance of what the intellectual culture is of the establishment okay one of the only people who's written specifically on this is Paul Godfrey I think, I mean, obviously,

I part ways with Godfrey on a lot of subjects and positions. But he's got a very deep knowledge of political theory and especially of praxis as it developed in the 20th century. And he's written extensively on the fact that the Cold War was basically, it was left-wingers and liberals who were, It was left-winger's and Marxist schismatics against Stalinists. That's what it was.

They came, both of whom came to view Orthodox Marxist Leninism as this kind of quasi-fascistic reactionary tendency. There was also an aspect of viewing it as a kind of oriental despotism

I mean that was more on the conservative side or what passes for conservatism in America but you know there's a provincialism to American liberals as well that IDAR is even more pronounced than their nominal opponents on the right and especially in the later

phase of the Cold War that was a subtext that they're objection to you know the the governments of the east block and things although they didn't come out and say it i that's not just me reading into you know what the proponents of this position said without cause it it's very much there okay so it's as misguided to call american liberals Marxists as it would be to say that somebody like George

W. Bush is a fascist. It's at odds with reality. And more than that, you know, it's conceptually illiterate on you know, the way

that globalism developed. You know, and I'm always making the point. And I'm not sure people fully grasp this. There's only one mode of government these days. There's not competing modes of statecraft. There's only globalism and the resistance. And within globalism, obviously locally,

there are in constellations of power, de jure and de facto. They'll hold different cultural values and things. But that's not what the cholera was about. We were talking about two radically different ways of configuring what was to be the planetary order. order okay that's done pretty much every state and Westphalian states are ceasing to exist make no mistake with such that they do still exist and there'll

always be some kind of devolved localism just by necessity no matter how much you know, information technology integrates processes and structures, but there's only, with the exception to outliers like North Korea, which is this unfortunate garrison state that happens to border China and the Russian Federation, or these kinds of one-off kingdoms or Emirates, there's only one form of government. You know, the Russian Federation obviously is very much on enemy footing with America and vice versa

but the resident federation it's not that's a radically different kind of government it's not run by a party state it's not a political bureau that you know enforces ideology from the top down there's not some centrally planned there's not some central planning

authority that you know stands in for private ownership of productive mechanisms you know and the fact that people don't seem to fully understand this is a testament to there being a basic you know what kind of can kind of just lack of understanding in total and um you know to bring it home one of the many things that was basically unprecedented in the 20th century

I can't think of another historical paradigm wherein there's a singular ideology that at planetary scale is essentially dictating all political activity either in the service of its praxis or in opposition to it people can invoke things like the Roman Empire but that wasn't remotely planetary

and the idea of Rome was more sort of an acceptance of this configuration of power there wasn't some theory of human life that underlay the Roman Empire you know and you can take the ascendancy of

Islam was remarkable the scale and scope of its success which was attained rapidly but again that was not

planetary scale and you know sectarian wars are kind of their own thing the entire the entire planet wasn't in dialogue

with Islam You know, there was Dharal Islam, and there was its enemies. You know, so I don't really think there's anything comparable. And the Jacob and Revolution, it was so violent and so disruptive, that purely ideological cycle of violence in the source of the revolutionary cause, it was essentially done after a decade and what followed

was this Napoleonic crusade but that that was something entirely different you know the revolutionary fervor that had animated the proceeding

revolutionary form a lot of those energies were sublimated into the Napoleonic cause, but it was something categorically different. You know, so the way to understand this is what is Marxism. It's not merely a political ideology.

It presented itself as a comprehensive account of human life. And not only human beings and the way they live their lives and their psychological makeup, but of all of nature. And the Marxist theory of history, it's not just the theory of the modern age, or it's not just the history of capitalism, it literally claims to be providing an account of man's entire existence from the time when humans truly became human and anatomical and behavioral terms to the present. and it claims to be able to discern in categorical terms what the future will look like based upon a science of socialism and a science of history whereby you know through rational means and through a consistent methodology all in certainties about, you know, human political and social life and even biological phenomena can be identified and largely predicted, okay? And its proponents marks himself and

its later, and subsequent accolades of his ideology, they acknowledge that it wasn't possible to achieve this sort of predictive. augury yet but they fully believe that this is going to become possible you know and people generally

don't understand that the totality of it secondly Marfs wasn't really issuing a moral condemnation of capitalism there is a value centric discussion of the then present

paradigm and why it's, you know, wrongheaded and a social ill to perpetuate those state institutions in the Marxist view because this is violated with the dignity of workers and in the Marxist paradigm, labor is really the end-all, be able to human life. But another misnomer is this idea that Marxists were moralists who were mad about capitalism,

supposedly it's racist or it's harmful to women or it's you know it promotes inequalities Marxists didn't care about any of that Marxist didn't care about racism now mind you they might have looked at certain paradigms locally or at wider scale and said okay these people are being uniquely pressured by capitalism because within the sociology of that failing system they're being targeted for hostility

they will probably be the logical population to target as our cadre but Marxists didn't sit around saying the gravest evil ever is racism and capitalism is bad because it's racist their take was that these identitarian characteristics

that people think are so important aren't actually important and it's this artificial contrivance so we need to get to the point where people realize that these things don't matter the last people Marxists who are going to say we need a black history month

because black people are uniquely oppressed in history that's that's bourgeois morality that's a way of dividing the body politic or trying to shore up a sort of moral credibility within a failing system. You know, so when people look at BLM or something and say, well, that's Marxist.

Or when they say that affirmative action, that's Marxist. It's not at all. You know, not mind you, Marxists don't object to these things for legitimate reasons or for accurate reasons, but that's not something they promulgate. you know, which is why the Soviet Union and the DDR and communist Poland

they refused to acknowledge the purported victim, quote, a Iraqi and jury. They said, why is Jewish identity matter? They said, we lost 30 million people fighting the fascists. You know, we're not, we're not going to single out some some contrived sectarian identity and say these people are the victims of fascism why do we care about that

you know and I mean that speaks for itself okay it wasn't because everybody's anti-Semitic or whatever the current rationale is or why the Warsaw Pact proceeded that way it's because in a lot of ways

the Soviet Union and its satellites were in fact very orthodox Marxists. I know that there's those who would object to that, particularly in left revisionist academe, but that's a discussion for another day. But this is important because, again, these kinds of curated moral paradigms about the alleged victimization of discrete populations that's such an essential characteristic of therapeutic liberalism, you know, that they must be acknowledged. That's not remotely a Marxist priority. They view it as nonsense. Now, the Marxist treatment of capitalism, the reason why it's capitalist features

or emphasized and make no mistake capitalism and the Marxist paradigm it describes a discrete phase of historical development where there's very specific sociological tendencies

extant as well as labor and production schema that are historically contingent they're not talking about capitalism in the way like a neoliberal economist does or in the the way they describe it to people in high school civics class.

You know, and they're not, Marxists aren't really talking about doing business, okay? The Marxian contention is that the economy in any given era is basically the kind of distilled organic essence of the society that created it. and, therefore, to grasp the essential features of the economy in any given epoch, in that way you understand the most relevant and the most potent facts about that society. Okay. So Marx's analysis of the then present and what Marx is considered to be late modernity the 19th, and 20th and 21st centuries

is essentially organizing means and sociological structures around a certain theory of value, okay, which is at odds in the Marxian view with what's instinctive to human beings and what can entail something approaching equity. Okay. His account of the way that history transitions from past to future

it's wholly dependent on dialectical materialism. And the depth to which this is existentially significant is something I think is understated even in a lot

of contemporary texts that otherwise grasped the theory in practice pretty well you know it goes beyond a priority of economic conditions again economic conditions in the Marxian worldview or body of theory are quite literally the distilled essence of every relevant aspect of that society to human life, not just to political affairs. You know, and Marx's claim, the way he fleshed this out was he said, look, the study of man and must reflect mankind as he really is, you know, not based on an ideal conception of him or of his presumed potentialities or what constitutes the good in some abstract sense.

you know and he also considered destructive to contemplate some pristine natural man even as a thought experiment you know he said at base what empirical man is he's primarily a like a living organism that's essentially a biological machine right he consumes food he needs clothing he needs shelter needs fuel so at base human life is is exclusive oriented around and towards the compulsion to find or to produce these things. You know, man before history or before man truly became man, which demarcates as a course as a biological accident. You know, there's God didn't create these things. Once upon a time, you know, anatomically, if not behaviorally, modern humans, they might have survived simply by using things they could find or kill or gather, but at some point increase in population or shortages or pressures from predatory animals

or predatory hominids, it forced them to produce their own necessities and find a way to make things. And this is what distinguishes man from the beasts. The singular defining characteristic of humans and what separates them from animals in the Marxist paradigm is to get the capacity for conscious production, not rationality, not political order, not the capacity to love, not not the ability to produce art, it's simply the capacity for conscious production.

Now to be sure, you can find animals who produce primitive tools or insects who devise structures, but that's purely instinctive. It's not consciously productive, okay? And man by way of the same psychological mechanism that facility of conscious production,

he can contemplate the object of his labor. Okay? So, where man, you know, and again, because all there is is is human life and the Marxist paradigm, the only thing

that gives life value is man's ability to contemplate the value of his labor and of itself and say, I can build this house, or I can take these mammoth bones and make a weapon. Or, you know, I can, or a woman saying, you know, I can, I can make clothes out of this animal hide. You know, and that's essential not just the human psychic health and social stability, but that's, literally the essence of what life is. You know, it's not feeling good about yourself as a black person. It's not feeling

fulfilled in your relationships. It's not like being the best Frenchman or white person or Muslim or Catholic that you can be. It's literally this ability to contemplate the finished

product of your labor. And to live as a man is for some acknowledgement to be rendered to that process. So once you remove that from people, you're turning people into animals, essentially. You know, and that's also the reason why slavery is insidious in the Marxist paradigm.

Now, mind you, Marxists would say slavery was an essential aspect of economic development and the historical process, but they'd also say, it's not evil to enslave people because then they're not free to supposedly carry out this agency that they all have

or whatever. It's because you're turning man into an animal by removing from him the power to consciously produce and more significantly contemplate the future product of his labor and take pride and satisfaction in that.

Okay. Now, especially to younger people, this probably sounds very strange. And it is objectively reductionist. But the degree to which during the second industrial age, life was dominated by this kind of rote and dangerous and difficult labor that really can't be overstated. And not only was it not a welfare state, but there wasn't plenty.

Like here, in 2025, despite what people say, and don't get me wrong, homeless people, most of whom are addicted and are mentally ill, admittedly, being homeless sucks, and I can attest to that because I've been homeless. But you can basically find free stuff in any big American city or metro area. Like you're not going to die a starvation. You might die from violence or from drugs or from illness. You're not going to literally starve to death. Well, that's a recent innovation. You know, in 1840, if you lived in some London slum, there's a good chance you lived in a shanty where literally it was a floor made of dirt. If your wife managed to survive childbirth, she probably wasn't going to live much beyond 40, in part because the air was poisonous.

You know, your kids were at constant risk of death until they reached about seven or eight years old. You would be working 13 or 15 hours a day in some factory setting doing a rote task over and over and over and over and over again. And if your body failed you or if you got too old or if you broke a limb or if you had your face. fingers chopped off. You were going to starve to death. Nobody's going to hire a cripple or a broken down old man or a guy who's, you know, got a tubercular cough or whose liver's failing because it was alcoholism. You're just going to die. You know, maybe there'll be some poor house charity that'll have mercy on you and feed you once every two days. Or maybe some churchman will, you know, occasionally, you know, feed your children a slice of bread or something. something but your life and your death literally orbited around your ability to labor and sell your labor to a producer you know so looking at it's hard to see outside of the historical moment for anybody but in the case of Marx and Engels, and we'll get into Engels next episode. This wasn't speculative, really. I mean, what they extrapolated from it was a sweeping conclusion that couldn't be

substantiated to start what they said by a scientific methodology. But what they were describing, the aspects of the human condition and political and social life that they considered to be absolutely paramount, these things were dictating the terms of human existence, day-to-hour, minute-to-hour, minute-to-minute, and that has got to be acknowledged, you know, so in other words, to bring it back, the Marxist doctrine of productive force determinism and the primacy of production it rests in the belief that it was the pressure

of material needs. You know, the need for food, the need for fuel, the need for things to consume, the need for shelter, clothing, the production of these things. That's what forced man upward and made him human. Okay?

It wasn't his mind. You know, this these intellectual capacities were curated by this material need to produce and that's what continues to press man onward and upward and this is why again

Marxists don't condemn the historical process or say see slavery is evil and in some terms is evil or industrial labor in its era was evil because man is transcending his limitations

in this admittedly brutal historical process whereby he developed knowledge of technology and technological processes which in turn produce more plenty which in turn extend human life which in turn facilitate greater and greater

you know horizons of production and activity it's actually a very very very brutal view of the world. There's nothing soft about it or liberal about it or humanizing. One of the things that's sinister about it is it's incredibly dehumanizing. It basically causes, it basically says that, you know, the things that most people in a capitalist society would value our weakness, you know. I mean, it should be clear to anybody who reads about life in the DDR or the Soviet Union

or communist Poland. I mean, that's one of the things that's corny. It's like, Kamala Huris is a Marxist. Or, like, this pink-eared HR lady used 400 pounds as a Marxist. It's like, these people, these people would be eaten alive in a Marxist society. You know, or they'd be viewed as degenerates who were useless eaters, and they'd be condemned, basically, by everybody. You know, like, don't get, make no mistake.

There's nothing cool or laudable about. some policeman in some Stalinist state thinking that, you know, owing to his revolutionary credentials, the fact he dropped bodies in the revolution and entitles him to decide who lives and who dies because that's fucked up.

But what that's not is some soft liberal perspective or personality that's being curated. You know, um, it, uh, you know,

you know and of course the conditions of production in any given epoch that's what determines prevailing property relations you know we're not talking and Marxists weren't talking about the abstract definition of property

they're not talking about personal things you own or you know individual people in some, you know, individuated way, being able to accrue more stores of things than other people. We're talking about who has actual access to productive means and who is prevented from acquiring it.

So, for example, under a feudal system, which endured for a really long time, and Marks actually had a fairly interesting account of why this is which people like Werner Sombard actually shared but under feudalism for example you have lords who possess land and they have rights to other properties such as the commodities produced by that land

and the people who work that land are serfs who are tied to that parcel and serfs their their legally precluded from owning property, like even a serf who got manumitted and somehow I mean maybe he was a hero

with some religious war or something let's say however unlikely this is this former serf he got some you know military title of lesser nobility or something okay he still wouldn't be able to go back and buy that parcel

no matter how much gold he could come up with but the thing about the feudal arrangement and one of the reasons why it endured for so long and why there weren't catastrophic pressures that destroyed it is because there's a natural interdependence in that system there's far far less alienation you know you're almost related to the lord who owns the land that you till if you're a surf you know and odds are your families lived on that land for generations and the lord unless he had no progeny or something odds are it's the same thing with him and in time of war he's going to need able-bodied men to fill out the ranks of his army you know if we come under attack we're

going to have to work together to defend off those who would slaughter us us. If I need justice because another man, um, either of my class and station or of a higher cast and station does violence to near, or my family, I've got to approach, you know, the Lord of the Manor and appeal them for justice, you know, and there's always some kind of accountability. We, were you talking about the sort of direct relationships between people, even if they're grossly unequal and even if they're not born of warm and spontaneous

intentional relationships you know you can't have people under these conditions being totally at odds of one another or otherwise the system doesn't work okay there's got to be a basic give and take even if it arrives from a position a totally unequal footing

with respect to station you know And Marfs also makes the point, too, that, you know, the primacy of money really didn't exist until later modernity. because yeah in a feudal system you basically only use money as a

you know a symbolic indicator of of a of a of a of a fungible commodity you know

it's because it's not possible you know to convey you know to pick up attract a land to convey it to representative of somebody purchasing it, for example. You know...

Can I interrupt for a second? Would that be why competition was so looked down upon? Because competition would raise prices, it would make profit. Now you're putting profit above everything. Yeah, that's a big part of it. And that's also too why...

I mean, Werner Sombard gets into that. Like, the... When... Sombard generally agrees of Spangler, the advent of double-entry bookkeeping and the abstraction of profits from the loci of production you know that changed everything and it created this it created this catastrophic tension between this between the town and the country yeah that's definitely a big part of it but it's also like we're talking about

hot our rent the other day as a statecraft became more and more scaled money became more and more important, you know, and that meant that there was perverse incentives that kind of prioritized money over what theretofore had been the metric of wealth, which was inextricably tied to production. So, yeah, it's all of those things. But Marx is the key takeaway from Marx is that. that, like, Marx actually, and we'll get to this, this gets to be complicated,

but the Marxist's viewpoint is that Marx refers to the science of economics, the purported science of economics is ideology, because he said that all it is is that, he said what it is is people viewing capitalist relationships of production and labor and the preeminence of money and declaring that these are perennial things. And even if the paradigm changes a bit, He said people like Adam Smith or like Edmund Burke, what they were saying is that these variables are constant for all time.

It's just that the way they're symbolized and the scale and complexity of the way they interact with one another and the relative significance of each variable might change, but these things are constant. And Marx's all point is no, none of these things are constant. and even money is a recent innovation because, again, Marx's theory, it essentially spans 40,000 years. Okay, so it's like, okay, well, for 33,000 years, there wasn't money. You know, so you're telling me this is a permanent feature of human life. And again, to him, human life isn't politics or the ability to love your children or, you know, the impulse to glorify God. It's the ability to contemplate production and the finished result of that production and to remove objects from one sensory environment and convert them into utile objects. You know, so yeah, and we'll get more into that as we go on.

probably not today though but you know so the Marx's big assertion and Das Capital is a really difficult value

like I said Dascapital though along with business cycles by Shumpeter those are key if you want to have been a political economy you've got to read both of those I think and they're

it's a it's a it's a it's a It's a substantial undertaking, but to still down one of the major aspects of DOS Capital is that it's a grave error as any kind of analyst or historian or political theorist. It's a grave error to treat consumption, distribution, money itself, the way in which exchange is conducted, you know, of commodities and labor, treating these things. things as eternal categories that have some permanent context or

relevance. That's a grave error because he said none of those things are true. You know, which is why the primary defect in his view of political economy or economics,

you know, he calls it bourgeois ideology. You know, and the market's view is that this isn't even intentional. Like, yeah, there's people who have a vested incentive in manipulating historical data to suggest that, you know, what they view as being essential to their personal prosperity, host an outsized significance, you know, but he said a lot of it, even people who weren't directly insinuated into, you know, capitalist processes or, you know, ownership and people who play no role in their professional life in terms of the financing of these things you know they their conceptual horizon is colored by what by by existential and ontological variables they can't think outside of this paradigm you know and and the

raremen who can are the ones who you know are possess the foresight you know or possess the foresight to predict outcomes in basic terms you know um so you know um so you know this raises an interesting problem though with Marxism and this isn't um it's not just Marx this is a problem of the empiricists. And if you read Hume, this is obviously the question that will emerge as well as the later

critics of idealism. That's why, like I said, when we complete this Marx discussion, I want to get into Husserl. And Husserl is a hugely important thinker. And he was the primary ficta and Hustral where the primary influences

on Heidegger in my opinion, but the problem of idealism, specifically as in discussion of Marx relates to Marx's relationship to Hegel. Obviously, Marx's take on the dependence of

political and economic theory on historic conditions of production, This entails far more than just economic theory. You know, and like I said at the outset, what I don't understand Marx is he's talking about the human condition in its entirety from the dawn of man to the then present and into the distant future. That's a theory of,

that's a theory of deep historicism, okay, and that they can't be. that's not up for debate. Marx's claim is, again, is that all morality, all philosophy, all religion, all cultural belief systems are there resolved to conditioning by men of their environments. And the man-made aspects of that environment, which increasingly, as scale increases, shape and determine the natural. natural environment, these things are exclusively the expression of modalities of production.

The opposite view is the pure Higalian view that man has an independent mind. And the intelligence contained within that mind, man devises institutions, he formulates conceptual structures relating to ethics you know he developed aesthetical conventions Marx rejects all of these things as ideology

once again and to Marx any doctrine that is purported to have an independent status or origin point independent of productive schema which is the progeny of man

needs to provide for necessities of life you know but the problem of course here is that that in and of itself that's an artifact of an idealist

schema you know so what you're saying is that Marx is devising this entire theory of human existence I mean that itself is derivative of mind, okay?

And what's a man's basically an automaton who is essentially a beast but the instinctive behaviors that he implements individually and as part of a collective are just

part of some conscious programming. But Mark specifically disavows that. So there's a contradiction here. And from what I can glean, and it's not much directly related to this subject matter, believe it or not. What I can glean is that Marx would say, would have said or contained kind of within the more sociological essays he wrote was that, well, you know, I don't purport, and nobody reports to fully understand processes of mind, but it's clear that there's a, uh, it's clear that there's an exponential aspect to learning and man's also evolved you know to

once he devises you know fairly relatively complex objects you know from that process of devising those things and from the process of learning new uses for those things you know thoughts take on their own kind of momentum related to

this instinctive necessity to produce you know and that seems tautological but as far as I can tell that would basically be the Merckian answer you know

but like I said it's this precious little written directly on this subject matter um and i have looked you know um but uh moving on and this brings us to you know i said at the outset remarks was not primarily an ethical theorist and that that's a big misunderstanding even among people who are fairly learned in political theory but um what is an ethical imperative is uh you know to resist the advance of history and the end of history within the marvellous paradigm and the achievement of, you know, a classless society, not an egalitarian society. There are two different things, you know, by the fulfillment of, of, you know, historical processes that

allow socialism to flourish. You know, it's, it is in fact a, a moral ill to try and sabotage these things. Now, why is that? Well, we already established that within the Marxist paradigm, all historic modes of production and labor had one feature in common. And that was that control of production means was not shared in by everybody. There's always been a narrative. of producers or owners or possessors who had more, not just to the material product that was

being rendered, but their capacity for work largely belonged to themselves. So they could live fulfilling lives, even if, you know, Marks and the rest of acknowledge managing a massive conglomerate is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. But what it also entails is many, many different types of labor and many types of power processes that have to be imagined, devised, brought into reality, and then fulfilled. Okay, so somebody like Henry Ford, for example, he's living as a fully realized man, even if his life's not particularly happy, and even if he's, all he ever does is work as opposed to say a man

who works in a factory for a low wage who performs one row activity over and over and over and over again for 15 or 18 hours a day that man's not only been totally alienated from his labor

his labor has been bifurcated into a fractured aspect of a total process but he also has no capacity for other labor. He can't build a house. You know, he can't invent a better hunting

rifle. You know, he can't perfect a better kind of robote. You know, he is in a position that a slave was, but even worse. Because even a slave basically only had to work till sundown.

And then if you wanted to go play his banjo or carve scrimshaw, he could do that. okay if you're the proletarian laborer you're being quite literally worked to death and when you do die probably well before your time

you will have nothing in your life that could be said to belong to you and the only again the raison daintiary human life in the Marxist paradigm is the productive process and the ability to imagine

the completed artifact of that productive process and that doesn't exist to the exploited proletarian. He's been reduced to the level of an animal and then he will die.

And again, too, when I say that this is Marx's moral ontology, he's not just pontificating how awful this is for its own sake or that this shouldn't have happened. He's saying this was an

essential aspect of the historical process, but to try and sabotage progress beyond that, you're trying to keep people at the level of animals. You are oppressing them, and you are trying to sabotage the advance of history, which, because Marxists are atheists, history is God, the end-all beauty of human life is labor. You're essentially revolting against God to try and stop history, and you're doing it for the sake of your own piggish greed. um that's why capitalists are pigs by the way okay um because that's the uh the the pig

stands in as a symbol for gluttony okay so the the capitalist tooth and nail wants to fight the proletarian revolution he's only thinking about himself and his own belly you know um and And that's why such people also, there's an intrinsically homicidal aspect to Marxist praxis I maintain. I don't think they're going to be denied. That's not some cheap polemical point. You know, like, comrades kill people. I mean, they do, but I, I'm not just saying stupid things.

I mean, there's a, there's an intrinsic need. to categorically annihilate people who aren't educable in, you know, the Marxist praxis. And beyond that, I'm getting ahead of myself, but, you know, you've got to wipe out the ability of people to consider alternative modalities, because if you allow them to do that, or if you allow that potentiality, you know, an inherently counter-revolutionary sociology will develop. You know, and that's part of the double-edged sort of literacy, you know, but we'll get into that. But I'm going to stop there because I'm about to change gears a bit, and I need another hour for that. Not a problem. Not a problem. I think that's a good place to wrap up.

And, yeah, this is good stuff. It's amazing to me that you have no idea how many people I've engaged, like, especially on social media who say they're Marxists. And then you start talking to them and you're like, this person has never read Marx by like, except like past like the, never gone past like the communist manifesto. Jackson Hinkle is a serious guy and I consider him for limited purposes to be I don't know the dude but him and people like him I consider them for limited purposes to be allies

he's a serious Marxist I mean don't get me wrong he's not one of these guys who has some retrograde view of things you know he's more of a world systems theorist which anybody who abides Marxist political economy is, I mean, if they're not in the game, if they're not a, you know,

kind of abiding a lot of Emmanuel Wollerstein's ideas. So, I mean, that Jackson Hinkle was one of those kinds of guys, but he, and obviously don't agree with that paradigm, but yeah, he's a serious guy, but there's, there's not, and what, I mean, his whole, as far as I understand it, From what I've read of his content, his work product, his all notion is that there's a real intellectual poverty on the radical left. It's just degenerate liberals and, you know, bourgeois morons and, like, sexual deviance. And he's not wrong. I mean, the death of the intellectual left is one of the weirder things in my lifetime, you know, because they were such, that's, arguably such an outsized impact on that intellectual life and even you know did that

trill down into like day-to-day discourse but yeah I hope uh I'll the sobs get something positive out of this man like I'm I'm trying to do the best I can to convey these things in an accurate way that that's also listenable and not torturous to subject oneself to so I'm feedbacks been totally positive like lean so that makes me happy yeah well i look forward to part two of this because that's when uh yeah the thing is it's just not a simple subject and people try to make it really simple because all they see what they either concentrate on the death or they concentrate on the economics of it and they don't see exactly what it was and that it

No one's ever read marks. No. What I saw the other day? Like, um, people, uh, in lieu of educating themselves, they, they just, they just look at memes. Like, abolish the Fed. And I'm like, what does that mean? Why? Why is the Fed just evil?

Oh, because it's the Fed. It's regulation. No, no, no, no. That doesn't mean anything. You know, and so, I mean, I mean, I, I'm like, I'm like, I'm a Schumpeter guys. I think he'd gleaned, you know, and a lot of people mistakenly put Schumpeter with the Austrians, because he literally was from Austria.

And the Vamizans for limited purposes will invoke him because he's too important not to. I mean, I think he's the... Rothbard invoked him a lot. Rothpard invoked Schumpeter a lot. Yeah, yeah. But it's these, these, like, internet guys will try and push it back on me. And I'm like, you've never read any of this stuff. you know you're you look at memes it's like you don't know what you're talking about you know you don't

have any understanding of political economy you've never read a single book on it you know like like stupid means don't convey anything i don't know am i thinking wrong here it seems like to me when you run into somebody who is well read on subjects that are important they have a tendency to be able to argue from both sides, they have nuanced thinking, and they're not, they don't have to argue from their ideology. It seems like the people who you run into who are the most like, you know, we got to smash the Jews and stuff like that. These aren't people who actually like have read historical accounts of the history of like the Jewish people for the last 2000 years. Well, that's why I don't understand what they think they're getting out of.

this you know i guess to them it's like a video game or i don't even know it's uh well social media is a playground where people it's a playground where people try to outsmart each other and they do things like you know they they see somebody who you know has 10 000 followers and they're like oh i got to follow this guy and make him look like a make him look like a try to if if i can make him look like a retard if i can uh get someone to, you know, to laugh at him, or if I can spot him saying something wrong, because, I mean, what, we, you and I speak, what, 100,000, you know, how many words a week do we speak?

We're going to misspeak on something, you know, it's like, and that's like their whole life, you know, so it's like, okay, so go argue about the Texas Longhorns and how they're going to do this season, like, why pretend you understand political economy? That's so fucking random, you know, it'd be like some hobo deciding he's an expert on nuclear physics, you know, it's like, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't anything about home building. I don't go find where carpenters hang out and be like, you're wrong, man, who's that you build a house? Like, why would I do that? That's fucking retarded. I guess that, I guess that's my point. Like, good. People have, people do

this thing where it's like, you know, why do you talk about, you know, why do you talk about the history of the Jews? Why are you reading a book like 200 years together? Do you think the Jews run everything? And I'm like, and I think to my, and I think to my, myself, look, when you look at academia and you look at very important subjects, important industries, important, there are Jews at the top of it, insinuated at the top of it, in most cases. If that was Chinese, if they were Chinese, I'd be reading Chinese history 24-7. Well, yeah. I'd be. Yeah. So it's like, it's like, oh, you're obsessed. It's like how could you not be you know it's like you see you see a ruling class like

where my research takes me like I am I trying to I'm not trying to like impress randos by what I research I go where it takes me you know if like if I think that's deviant or weird okay I mean they're that means nothing to me but also these people aren't in my league you know I'm not good at a lot of things man I'm probably fine with it you know most people for some reason this culture aren't they want to pretend they're good at everything I'm good at very very very very few

things I understand political economy and political theory better than the overwhelming majority of people and I will die on that hill because I know it's fucking true so when some like internet rando with an IQ of

89 like tries to tell me he knows things it's fucking embarrassing you know yeah There was a guy on Twitter today who, I mean, probably a really nice guy. He wasn't mean at all. I mean, you know, he was, but he genuinely thinks that this system can be, like, rehabilitated.

Like, if your people take over this system, it can be rehabilitated. It's like, you don't understand that it doesn't have, the system's an anachronism. Well, yeah, also, I mean, history, the history is, I mean, one of the things, Marx wasn't wrong about and admittedly I mean a lot of this was what he owes to his hegelianism especially when he was a young man

there's nothing constant about history it doesn't repeat itself there's not perennial institutions okay now that doesn't mean there is no truth that doesn't mean there is no morals what that means is that pretending that

the 20th century state is this perennial thing that's as constant as a mountain range you don't understand history like I don't mean you don't understand like the meaningless factors that give you in high school

civics class I mean you don't understand that's a process and even now it's everything is changing you know and that's that's why there's so few political theorists worth reading

because very very very very very few men can identify these changes and the kind of configuration of what's developing as it happens. It's the metaphor I like is this, okay? If you're in the desert and there's an obelisk, you know, like in 2000, or a monolith, okay, and you're smacked up against it like this, you can't discern its dimensions. And you can probably tell it's color, maybe what it's made out of. that's it

you know only at distance possibly even miles distance can you establish its actual configuration and dimensions that's kind of the role or the situatedness of you know a revisionist or any kind of historical

analyst you're smacked up against the obelisk that is not just the historical record but the present and probable and possible futures you know what do you think that when people say that history repeats itself they're just seeing human behavior that very rarely changes especially among certain cultures things like that you know human you know just human need human action they don't they

don't know what they're saying is that some guy said that to them in high school who was their teacher or it's some cliche that they read in some midwit book by somebody like venereal disease hanson but well there's wars and stuff you know history repeats itself we're the roman empire you know history repeats itself is it um i mean it's that basic i think i don't know yeah the roman empire that is uh that that wasn't that never even approached the scale of which the american empire is because the American Empire is global. What's all the people are doing is they're saying, I mean, it's like, okay, if your

inputs are the most basic universal things, you know, like, it's like, it's like saying, okay, Leonardo, you know, Leonardo da Vinci wore pants and Tom Brady wears pants. So Tom Brady's a great artist. You know, I mean, you know, if the metric is, yeah, the Roman Empire was, was powerful and expand a lot of territory and it was a hegemon and oh america's a hegemon and spans a lot of territory okay but that's not what we're talking about all right thomas let's uh i'm looking forward to part two uh tell everybody where they can find you right now yeah the best place is my website it's thomas seven seven seven dot com but that's number seven hm as seven seven

or Substack. Substack is what I favor, and that's my podcast is, and all kinds of other stuff. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. Social media is fucking garbage, and I swear, since I set up this new account a few weeks ago, Zitter's gotten exponentially fucking dumber. Like, I shit you not. It's like literal retard. You have no idea. You have no idea. you are you are spot on like uh yeah so i mean i don't know how much longer i'm going to

waste my time with that i only set up the new timeline because people i actually like and care about you kept on asking me to but it's at thomas sear that's my government name t h o'm as c y-r 777, but I'm not just talking some shit. I may shut down that account because it's it's not really worth my time anymore. But yeah, that's pretty fine

you can. I notice you don't even you hardly ever look at the comments people make to you either. No, there's a way to my time. You don't even pay it attention, yeah. Yeah. All right, man. Talk to you in a couple days. Look forward to part two. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show. We're here with Thomas for a

Karl Marx part two, and I think people are excited about this, considering the response we got on the first episode. The response we got in the first episode was absolutely amazing, Thomas. Yeah, that's great. That makes me very happy and relieved. I speculated that this would be a subject of strong interest to people. It's essential in any discussion of modern political theory, obviously. Like I said, Marx and Marxism characterized the entire dialectical

process and psychological environment of the 20th century, but also I think a lot of people find it timely because there's so much misunderstanding about the subject matter. The feedback I got, a lot of people were asking me,

They wanted to, they wanted me to speak on the schism, or these schisms, plural, between Orthodox, Marxist, Leninism, you know, the exemplar, which obviously was the Soviet Union, and, you know, these Frankfurt School type radicals who really found, or whose ideas really developed momentum in 1916. 68. I don't want to talk about that yet, though. I'm going to touch on it, but I want to complete our discussion of Marx, qua Marx, before we get into any of these collateral issues. I think, too, the Sino-Soviet split, I don't think Maoism is a particularly coherent ideology, but it was an animating principle, at least in symbolic or abstract terms and there was a praxis to it and people identified as Maoists were taking direct action and doing you know profoundly violent acts as well as there were armed elements under the Maoist banner who were proxies of the Peking government who were actively engaged

against the Soviet Union, you know, in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, other places. That's important. And I'd argue that the most effective revolutionary cadres that the Cold War remained those who were abiding a fairly orthodox praxis, you know, the Roth Army fraction, they were very much a Stalinist outfit. You know, obviously they were the they were a proxy of the East German government and the first generation of that cadre was drawn from university radical types and a lot of these young people were very much a product of that culture but as they matured as partisans they shed most of those pretensions

You know, and that's one of the reasons why people like Horst Amalor gravitated towards them. You know, but the way to understand these schisms, everything was framed, that this, you know, is to monitor some of the point I was making. Everything in the epoch was in dialogue with Marxist Leninism. So, any in all potentialities functioned with, you know, within the Cold War psychological environment. So you had people like Khorstamala, who were at base national socialists, who found common cause with,

you know, Stalinists in the DDR. You had these, profoundly kind of a socially anarchic leftist whose primary interest was identity in things and a perverse and obsessively narcissistic sexuality they gravitated towards marcusa and marcoza was very much writing in dialogue with marks however much he may have not fully understood the subject matter That's not the point. The point is that every tenancy was bounded by these parameters.

You know, and even... Even writers, I think, were pretty insightful. There was still a thoroughly active community of public intellectuals in the 70s and 80s. You know, and a lot of people on the right, like Christopher Lab. She's kind of seen as a foil to Alan Bloom, who whatever else's problems, I always thought it was a real mediocrity. But Lash's first book, The Culture of Narcissism, this Freudian and Marxist concept shot throughout that book. And these weren't just fixations of Lash, or this wasn't just because he'd come out of social science, academe. so this is the kind of thing that he was familiar with.

It was just taken for granted that any sort of writing about culture war concepts or sociological concepts or anybody writing about the psychological environment of states would be talking about Freud and Marx, which seems very strange. to people today but that was just the norm you know um in in terms of praxis you

you can't ever escape the what characterizes the psychological environment of the epoch on which you're situated i mean obviously it's not to say that you're some one somewhat precluded from writing about, you know, concepts in the abstract, but if you're talking about praxis or applied principles of political theory, you know, you're, you're not engaged with the relevant variables if you're not abiding, you know, the, the, the, the and that's essential understanding marks it's essential understanding the 20th century the cold war and because the world we live in today and the zeitgeist that we're immersed in today is 100% the you know derivative of all of those things you know so if people require um

a contemporary relevance, that's what it is. And to bring it back or bring it home to our subject matter, I think where I left off the other day, we were talking about the psychic violence, that alienation from various power processes, and most significantly, and first and foremost, alienation from the ability to contemplate the finished product of one's labor and see through that process, as well as, you know, to be a fully realized human who is engaged in various aspects of productive processes. And equally significant is that there's a natural or spontaneous, I guess maybe would be the better way to characterize it, communalism to productive processes, you know, that aren't manipulated by technological apparatus and man-made situations that in turn,

give rise to increasingly complicated permutations of labor specialization and division, aside in the fact that in a hyper-specialized manufacturing-driven economy, you know, you're alienated from your own labor, but you're also, you're kind of discreetly isolated within your own life. There's contradictions here because On the one hand, life is increasingly homogenized, and the way that political life is communicated to you by elites and public authorities is in terms of identitarian things within a collective. You're expected to be patriotic and a good citizen, and for most of the 20th century. century. If you were male, you know, you were availed to the military draft. But this was all

very hollow and really kind of formal. You know, you didn't really share any communal experience with the man beside you at the factory or on the construction yard. Like you might become friends in personal terms or have affection for these people, you know, but you were really only kind of bound by your common situatedness in this alienated environment of, you know, hyper-specialized labor. And that also puts people artificially at odds with one another. You know, it means that, say, like, a shop or like seamstress's work will be at odds with a factory where, you know, that's phasing out the labor that they do with their hands, you know, it'll put certain sorts of factory laborers at odds with other ones,

owing the vagaries of the market, or, you know, a curated competition between firms, you know, and even people who resist this in ethical terms, their ability to earn a living unless their survival, you know, depends on participation in these things, you know, so you'll find yourself corralled sometimes even into life and death situations against men who are situated exactly like you, but in, you know, different sectors of the economy whereby a zero-sum paradigm has emerged between, you know, the respective structures in which you labor. You know, and Marx calls this unnatural, not in the, you know, he's not talking about a state of nature and like the Habeasian or Lachian sense.

What he means is, when he's by natural is things that are man-made, you know, and to be clear, Marx doesn't have a problem with any quality. He made the point that the first division of labor is, in fact, totally natural because men and women are different, and Merps fully acknowledges that, and they're good at different kinds of things, and they've got to fulfill different kinds of roles for the species to survive, you know, and some men are stronger than others, some are more intelligent than others, some have peculiar skill sets. So the natural division of labor is going to be stuff

that emerges between the sexes based on biological and social realities or stuff that develops between men who are, you know, strong in body but not particularly and actually inclined, you know, and those in contrasts who are essentially brain workers, you know, and there's nothing wrong with this going to Marx. You know, obviously people have different talents and some people are substancing more capable than others. You know, there's not, like, again, the Marxian, paradigm. It aims at a classless society. It doesn't aim to make everyone equal. Like, nobody does that except, you know, um,

utopian liberals and, uh, you know, people who take of these kinds of enlightenment conceits that incorporate that in their, this kind of secular humanist morality. You know, so this is an important point. Um, you know, and, So essentially, Marx said that in the modern state, even if you're reasonably well provided for, you know, in terms of your material conditions, there's these inherent contradiction. It's like on the one hand, on the one hand, the individual and his personality is diminished and political life is kind of reduced to this collective, not communal existence.

But there's not real fellow feeling there. because capitalist production and labor schema force every man into a kind of war of all against all. And sometimes by design, sometimes just owing to the sociological reality of these things, even when people are given more and more of a stake in the franchise, at least in the formal terms, by getting the vote and stuff, social divisions will be even further institutionalized and formalized. because that's intrinsic to the parliamentary structure and also the only way to really appeal to people to get them motivated to engage in direct political activity is to appeal to their individual self-interest, you know, contra everybody else. So this creates a circumstance where the center really cannot hold. and this is why

you know in Marx's estimation and interestingly this did this did basically come true if you will get the final phase of the Great War this is why mass armies

under conditions of capitalism have a tendency to mutiny you know in the Marxian analysis It's not just because there's no heroism or any patriotic impulse that drives men to just kind of march into an enemy field of fire and be cut to pieces by machine guns before, you know, the enemies even within visual range. That's part of it. but it's also

it becomes meaningless to be an Englishman or to be a subject of the Habsburg Empire or to be a German like I don't accept these things but this isn't totally wrong

okay so not only does this kind of absence of communal potentiality and fellow feeling. Not only does it

psychologically oppress man, but over time, this system becomes unsustainable, because people just aren't going to sacrifice for it anymore. You know, and there is, and I won't even have a context anymore. You know, um, and that's an important point about Marxism.

What's peculiar about Marxist-Lennonist-Praxis, is that the Soviet Union is an odd case. I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense that the Soviet Union became a superpower or that, you know, whatever succeeded, the Russian Empire became a superpower, just to only be the fact

that a goodly proportion of this planet's remaining natural resources exist in Russia and Central Asia. But, you know, it's not like there was an industrial proletariat in Moscow that was, you know, that was large enough that most people would, if you would as a natural revolutionary cadre, that would, you know, facilitate this, these revolutionary ambitions that should, took the planet, you know, one of the odd things about Leninism is that it basically became a developmental mechanism and a catalyst for mobilization whereby primitive but high potential societies entered the modern age rapidly in very punctuated in brutal ways. you know it's odd and obviously that's

not really congruous with the predictive elements of Marxist's historiography like I said I wasn't going to talk about this until later and here I go talking about it but I think it's important as an illustrative example but you know in the Marxian viewpoint

Marx's notion was that and his successors, his accolades, who succeeded them. They believe that communism would first be realized probably in the United Kingdom and Germany, you know, which makes some kind of sense within the bound of rationality of, you know, the body of a theory in question. But to be clear, yes, you know, Marx acknowledged that there would need to be revolutionary cadres to facilitate, you know, to wipe away the old order, but communism would essentially be realized by historical process, precisely because these structural contradictions within the psychological environment and these structural features of a capitalist societies at scale just would no longer be sustainable.

You know, and that's important. If you look especially, or if you read Cruzeff's speeches, cruistiff was very much a peasant. He literally was like a barefoot peasant. He grew up in the Ukraine with nothing.

You know, And in the West, he was perceived of this very dangerous man, you know, this kind of crude and crass and very rough proletarian who really frightened people with the way that he talked and some of the gambols he took, you know, with strategic deployments and things, obviously. But in fact, he was very much a reformer. You know, that's why he implemented the, I mean, he's really the only man, too, who could have implemented the de-Stalinization paradigm because he was Stalin's right-hand man. You know, and he was the commissar of Stalingrad, too. Like, he was, he was a hard guy, you know, no doubt about it. But he, his claim, his vision kind of what he wanted to characterize his tenure as, you know, general secretary was, he was saying communism by the year in 1980. So people would look at that and be like, what does he mean?

The Soviet Union is already a communist state. That's not the way Merce just look at things. You know, they look at themselves as abiding, you know, a zeitgeist that comports with the progress of history, you know, in a way that is shepherding and stewarding it. You know, so even though it was clear that this intention wasn't present because, you know, the states become resistant to reform. because men are greedy, and they not only do they not want to give up the privileges they enjoy, but people are comfortable with stasis. It's rare that you have a truly revolutionary cadre leading a state that is truly dynamic, because the human preference is for stasis with very rare exceptions.

and the people who are those exceptions, they constitute outliers in psychology and personality. But the Soviets themselves claimed that as progress was made towards communism and after the United States was defeated and the world was communized, you know, the Red Army would cease to exist because military power, other than a military power, other than a a revolutionary instrumentality and a defensive apparatus against capitalist aggression only serves as a means of resolving contradictions emerging within capitalism by violence. So the Soviets always claimed, like, after the communist version of NSEC is realized, you know, that there won't be a Red Army, and there won't be a Soviet state. And there will be no need for this massive internal security apparatus. Because there won't be, you know, this competing globalism that is threatening to annihilate us.

You know, so the, like, their rationale was the only reason that the state exists right now is the one to the exigencies of war and peace, you know, which is emergent based, you know, on capitalist aggression towards us. and the fact that, you know, the party is the vanguard of the proletariat and during this critical phase of historical development and during this critical period where we're under threat, you know, it's essential that we defend ourselves in the most, you know, in the deepest and most thorough capacity possible. You know, and that can only come from having a might. state in a powerful party and by suppressing you know vagaries of thought and behavior that could compromise

the advance towards communism but uh no communist claim like the states and ending itself even if that's in practice like what you know Leninist practice represents and that's important you know um

but anyway um And at some point, I know, and the subs, no, we did a series on the Cold War, but it might be worthwhile at some point to discuss the various general secretaries and Soviet leadership element and, you know, how they, what their relationship was to, you know, Mars is learning orthodoxy and how to what degree

they reflected those imperatives but I don't want to get ahead of us those but um

yeah the uh yeah the uh yeah so basically life under advanced capitalism is a

fractured social existence. There's a contradiction between civil society which is collectivist but not all communal you know a political existence which while couch in the language

of communalism and patriotism is based appealed, it's basically oriented almost exclusively to entrenched divisions that are curated purposefully and

as well as you know psychic appeals to naked self-interest because that's the axiomatic situation that results from advanced capitalist

You know, so at some point, aside on the fact that this isn't workable, based on, you know, again, there's, you know, an absence of fellow feeling and an absence of genuine patriotism that moves people to sacrifice and laid on their lives if necessary. It also, there's just not any kind of animating principle to substantiate the state's claim to legitimacy. So eventually it just loses that legitimacy. you know and um what's left in its stead is a vacuum and um this is a such that there's a such that there was a marxist uh veldpolitik in uh kind of brass tax terms marxelude to the fact that states such as I described

that refused to abide the advance and progress of history they'll become essentially failed states so in the communized planet of the future there'll be outliers that are

that are kind of like Mogadishu at its most dysfunctional you know but that's you know eventually presumably those people will die out or be dealt

with just as the lumpen criminal element or unmanageable element or in educational element within you know the the nascent Marxist

fully realized communist society will be but it's an interesting thought experiment think um the um the um but it also

to once marks came back again and again to the claim that bourgeois ideology it had within it the seeds of its own undoing you know so you look at

the Marxian view of the enlightenment this obsession with individual rights and with devising these thought experiments where the state of nature are these discrete individuals who

essentially contract with one another for the sake of self-interest Marx believed not even entirely consciously these thinkers like Hobbes like Locke, like Hume, like Thomas Payne.

They conceptualize things that way because, in their mind, you know, based on technological progress and other things and the creation of wealth in a way that was unprecedented, they believed that things were proceeding towards utopia, but socially things were falling apart. and the alienation intrinsic to the psychological environment carried by capitalism was becoming so critical that these

things became an irreconcilable contradiction in its own right so this kind of ontology that's totally at odds with what Merck's viewed as kind of the natural communal state of production relations developed. You know, which is one of the reasons why, again, what he called, you know, the bourgeois ideology of economics was so poor at predicting outcomes, you know, and it's interesting because a lot of

a lot of Marxist economists like I don't I think that's a contradiction because Marxists are their it's a body of sociological theory

and anthropological postulates and psychological paradigms and claims about the state of human life and the human condition, but it's not, it's not economics, but for the sake of clarity, these people who do refer to themselves as Marxist economists, they're obsessed with this idea of crisis modalities characterizing advanced capitalism. You know,

they almost sound like Vinesians in that regard, you know, but there's, there's a confirmation bias and the way they talk about this stuff. You know, I spent a lot of time with economic data and owing in large measure to, you know, the fact I read Shumpeter a young age and that kind of colored my perspective, you know, you've got to look at increments to send, you know, two or three centuries to really understand long-term trends, you know, um, if your sample, if your temporal sample size is arbitrarily, arbitrarily, um, decided upon,

I mean, yeah, you can, you can make the case for boom and bust being the norm, you know, but I don't accept that. But it's an interesting, like I'm not saying that Marx has everything in common with these Von Misesian offering school types, but it's interesting because, albeit for very different reasons,

you know, they kind of cherry-pick their data sets to make a similar claim about, you know, frailties within the regulated economy. trying to look at that way.

But again, for very... I saw that the other day. I was studying real estate cycles. And, you know, your typical von Meezy and we'll talk about how everything fell apart once we went off of hard money. But even if you go back to the 19th century, you can track real estate cycles going up and down and you can... And it has nothing to do with hard money.

It doesn't have to do with Lincoln printing green. backs during the civil war. This is, this, this goes far beyond the federal reserve and fractional reserve banking. Yeah, and it's also, I,

well, it's almost too. I mean, I don't want to hijack a conversation. And again, I'm not, I'm not just trying to like trash the Austrian school people, but they almost have their fixation on sound, what they call sound money.

It's almost like, the Marxian obsession with like the labor theory of value. It's like marginal utility is some sort of you know that's a lot of smoke and mirrors or something like it's um

and this idea that I mean don't get me wrong you know I'm a shumperer guy I'm not into conventional economic modeling in the way Chicago school and neoliberal types are but this idea that any economic

modeling is a fool's errand and you know it the only people who claim that it's a viable research tool you know are people who are shills for the banking system that's a ridiculous way to approach it and this isn't just in economics there's this bias for empirical modeling of a certain sort because everybody became obsessed in the 20th century and academe were trying to pass off their research as scientific and I mean that you know economics isn't really a science there's scientific aspects to it but there's not a science of economics like there's a science of physics you know and there's there's aspects that are mistaken because any time you're talking about

human decision making and aggregate you're dealing with all sorts of complex permutations and for something that's so basic the human existence is kind of ill understood so I get it I get where these Austrian school guys are coming from because there's something there but their conclusions and

there's almost it's almost cult like too in the way they in the way they talk to people who don't share their viewpoints like I'm a heterodox I buy heterodox views too I mean I'm a shumperer and Frederick List and Bernard Sambard guy

okay I'm not sitting here saying you know you need to read Milton Friedman you know, that doesn't matter. And, you know, the, you can, you know, you can, you can, you can mitigate inflation with quantitative easing. I'm not some, some regime show. Anybody who thinks that as an idiot. But I've had these Von Mezian guys get very abusive to me because, you know, they're almost like Scientologists or something. Like, I imagine, you, you nailed it.

It's a cult. Yeah, and it's like, if they identify. One told me, one told me, why are you talking about Friedrich List? He's been debunked. And I said, by who? Yeah, by who, some, like, random guy who, like, he talked at some, like, conference that seven people went to. That, um, well, yeah, and it doesn't, uh, let's also, too, like, Peter, I remember for a while, they probably moved on to different gurus or whatever, but, you know, Peter,

Schiff who's actually got some fairly interesting ideas on stocks like some of his stock tips I I thought were pretty sound not that I'm some like stock guru but I know something about investing but Schiff was their big the like the internet botanizing guys for a minute he was their big guru this was I think probably like 15 20 years ago and literally every six months he was claiming like they'd be there's going to be some, like, punctuated crisis and markets were going to take a dive. He's like, it's going to be worse than the crash of 87. Then, like, this never happened.

He was wrong, basically 100% of the time, but he still had this audience. And if you didn't abide his predictions, like, people told you you were an idiot. You know, it's like, I want this guy's graft. He's, I mean, I think he was pretty wealthy anyway, obviously, because, I mean, he knows investing. but it's it's like this guy's got this guy's got like half a million subs which at that time was a pretty big deal especially for a niche finance guy you know and he's and he's literally wrong 100% of the time you know that's that's not a bad kick yeah there's a bunch of there's a bunch of people who um like his son his son's like 20 years old 20 years old i don't know he had a son okay yeah his son has a son had a son okay yeah his son has a has outperformed all of his funds just investing in crypto. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. Now, I figured, too, he was also, he was one of these guys who, in the aftermath of 2008, it was a weird environment as regards to demand for financial services. Because on the one hand, a lot of people were hanging out of their money because they were afraid. I totally get that. but they didn't trust the like grifters actually were doing well then

because people didn't trust these universal banks anymore obviously and I'm not saying Schiff was like stealing from people I think he believes in the investment paradigms that he promotes but it's it's weird you know and it's not

I'm not qualified to talk about this is anything other than a layman, but I'd advise people when they'd ask me, like, what my take was on ship. I'm like, look, man, like, some of his stock picks are definitely good, but definitely do not, like, pull everything out of your 401K to, like, invest with Peter Schiff. Because, yeah,

like, that, you know, that would be a mistake. But, um, but yeah it was a weird time i there's other there's other odd guys who have clout these days and in investing circles and stuff but i they're different than shift um i uh for some reason i i i i get why i mean i it was because you know there was a real crisis of confidence in what was conventional wisdom but yeah von mezzi and some of their fellow travelers, after 08, they had a moment where they were very clout heavy.

But, yeah, forgive that digression, man. And also, too, and we'll move on from this kind of subtopic. Marks me the point that this process of whereby you know communitarian fellow feeling is totally diminished and individual hostility

and self-interest is magnified and kind of institutionalized in ways both formal and and subtly psychological you know in the advanced capitalist state you know people's like economic uh self-interest takes on an outside significance obviously so people become overly concerned about money and the state of money you know and again to marks you know labor and production and productive processes and power processes they're in are the essence human life but money is not and money is ephemeral and

you know it's it's uh something that uh really only took on a significance into itself in late modernity you know so that people becoming existentially fixated and concerned I would amount to this man-made artifact of advanced capitalism and crisis you know

leads to all kinds of pathologies and you know obviously people at the top they're not immune to this kind of clouded thinking you know

so this leads to decisions based on incorrect inputs and you know unscientific evaluation in the Marxian paradigm. It's not to say that Marx is anti-money or something. You know, eventually when

communism is realized there won't be money because there'll be no need for it, But such that it is utile at discrete junctures in the historical process. There's not something evil about money, but it taking on an outsized significance and particularly being of paramount concern in political life represents an irrational pathology at scale. And Das Capital gets into this. Not enough people write about the Marxian view of money, and I think that's important. But maybe it's because I'm a son of an economist or something.

You know, and political economists deal a lot with the psychological environment and confidence in national currencies and things. But I don't think it's just that. to something. You know, and again, I'm not an economist. I'm a political theory guy. I think I know something about econ, but I, uh, there's not enough, there's not enough written on the subject matter of Marx and, um, and money and the role of, the role of money itself, as well as the money supply and advanced capitalism. But, um, the, uh, the, uh, And also, too, obviously, according to Marx, as these contradictions, you know, cause the nation to basically fall apart and fragment from within in unsustainable ways, you know, the only thing preventing this fragmentation from causing a total collapse is, you know, the course. power of the state so state power becomes more oppressive violence and negative reinforcement

becomes normative the men in this role of needing to coerce the body politic they develop a contempt for their charges because obviously they're now on an any footing that creates other pathologies you know it uh and this is um and this is um i mean i guess people you know robert conk was made the point that that's an irony of Stalinist states is that that that's that that was exactly the fate that befell them but you know that I made the point that a lot of Marxist sociological observations I don't agree with his ontology and like what the sources are these things in the Marxist estimation but he's not wrong about a lot of them the way he describes conditions under what he called

late capitalism that's a very real thing you know one of the reasons like Werner Sombart and Sorrell is because they took from Marx was valuable

you know in sociological and psychological terms and discarded the rest you know one of the reasons I say that to be truly educated in political theory, you need to read

Marx. It's not just for the obvious reason that, you know, like I said, to understand the 20th century, you've got to understand Marx's theory, but you know, Marx wasn't wrong about everything. You know, there are worthwhile things in

his body of work. And I think that's lost on a lot of people. If if Marx had been less ambitious or less possess, you know, hubris maybe, or I think if he'd lived 100 years before or 100 years after, and he contended himself to be a sociologist and a political theorist who focused heavily on the psychological aspects of political life,

or if you, you know, was an anthropologist or an evolutionary site guy, he'd probably be almost universally praised as this man who had tremendous insights I mean I think you know and

kind of the elephant in the room I'm sure with some of the subs and listeners is you know the Jewishness of Marx that's something I actually agree with I agree with

E Michael Jones on that I don't think Marks particularly cared about his own ethno-sectarian background, but he was the product of that culture, and there is a Jewish revolutionary spirit that is just kind of distinctive.

I don't think Marx's writing as a self-conscious Jew, like, here's a strong of capitalism. You know, it's because, as the state developed at scale, my people became, you know, despised and you know we lost a privileged position we had a court and

you know it was nothing like that but there I don't even think there was an inherent antipathy to European political forms

I think he just viewed it as something I think to him there was no reason he to be attached to these things or relate to Indo-European forms of political and economic life as anything but an outsider based on existential reasons. You know, I mean, that's the way I read it.

And I think that's the case that's a case of a lot of atheist Jewish political theorists not all of them mind you, but a lot of them you know

and that's the whole issue with politics and the political is a discrete sphere of human activity a lot of the story is ontological and some what instinctive you know people don't sit around and decide to like devise their

identity and consciously adopt their cultural psychology you know um and to me Marx is a case and point of that but uh yeah I realize I got to wrap this up in a second let me see what else I wrote down on just um would it be a would you object if uh next episode we got into the kind of schismatic aspects of uh of communism like the sound of soviet split in the 1968 um post 1968 vagaries of leftism i mean do you want to do that or no i think i think the subs definitely want to hear okay yeah well we'll do that next time then and um all one of the things I find really compelling about that subject to very

Paul Godfried and Ernst Nolte wrote about this kind of obliquely but I think Godfried borrowed from Nolte or was aware of this phenomenon by virtue of what Nolte wrote during the historian's controversy. But Marx's early stuff is fairly conventionally Higalian. You know, obviously his conclusions are profoundly at odds with those of the right Higalians but this kind of pure dialectical materialism

whereby he rejects properties of mind as the discrete kind of causal engine unto itself of political life

and the conceptual horizons that give rise of political life that's something you took on later and a lot of the post-68 schismatics particularly the ones

and there was more than you might think who came out a Lutheran confessional churches as well as Catholic student communes and there's some precedent for that in the 1848 revolutionary

culture a lot of these radical reformers were were Catholic guys but those guys when they'd invoke Marx it was always early Marx and it was always very much

with a fairly orthodox Higalian flavor to it and I think there's something to that and also I'll say this for the dedicated episode but I

you know, the way to look at a lot of these, I don't speak from anybody myself, but I, you know, Horstomaller was somebody like myself and situated in the zeitgeist as he was, one had to work within those parameters. So a right-winger or national socialist, again, he'd find his way towards the hardline

Stalinist cadres somebody if you were some radical leftist but not at all a communist

it didn't matter your starting point would still have to be Karl Marx and I think that the true

at least in America in Europe is a bit different but the true radical left in America I'm not just

talking about the typical simpleton liberals who support the regime I mean, these true kind of extreme leftists, I think that they're I think they abide

Marcusa more than to do the Frankfurt school. I don't think these guys and ladies are sitting around reading Ramsey and Adorno. I think they do read Maracruza and stuff like that. And it's obvious. And that's one of the reasons why

they're fixated on sexual identities and things. you know my um what's that my buddy aaron and i read uh i think we we did in two episodes repressive tolerance by marcus yeah and it's it's amazing how much you know as as a right winger you're reading through there and you're like well that makes sense yeah that makes sense well that makes sense that's that's in the american situation um and stuff like the authoritarian personality but you know i agree with godfrey again on this point too like anti Fascism is an ideology into itself.

And that's a huge component of American leftism, is anti-fascism. You know, so it's this weird pastiche, but it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not primarily Frankfurt school stuff. Like, I don't want a people read Buchanan's Death of the West when it came out, oh, gee, it's like 24 years ago now. And that's a good book, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's a bad book or people shouldn't read it, but Buchanan over-emphasized the Frankfurt School, so it kind of became this boogeyman in people's minds. And it's a mixed bag.

Like one of the reasons I liked Sam Francis, he made the point that Gramsie was somebody you should read if you're a right-wing culture warrior because he identified the culture, cultural environment and the psychological environment as being important to do itself, not just some superstructural feature of, you know, labor and productive relations and schema, but nonetheless, you know, which is the setting of human lives. So we should prioritize that first. Now, Gramsie said this is significant to itself. This is paramount. Life isn't,

you know, a labor in production scheme of. Like, man, is it just a worker? You know, people aren't insects with the ability to tell time. You know, at least that's my,

I'm sure it's a heterodox take. And I'm not saying, for clarity, I'm not saying I agree with the substance of of Ramsey's political values. But, you know, but yeah

odd little odd little fact do you know who was the first person to translate Gramsci into English in the United States Pete Buttigieg's dad

weird yeah no I figured that guy said that guy's such a weirdo I mean it's at the fact that he's got these weird sexual habits I figured he was the progeny of some

disturbed ideologues or you know 60s fossils who live some bizarre lifestyle I mean frankly people like they usually are like some weird guy who has got kind of delusional ideas about his own viability as a politician and who has never had a real job

just always been involved in a political life and his old kink is you know putting on display his bizarre sex parapherias, like people like that don't just devise that identity in college or something. They come out of a certain coterie of dysfunction, I think. Yeah, well, we'll get into the post-68 schismatics and the Sino-Soviet split, which had a real practice behind it.

And maybe touch a bit on people like Mahler and the National Socialist Resistance and their relationship to Stalinist direct action elements. Awesome. All right. For people who are just tuned in for this one, tell them where they can find you. Best place is Substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. On social media, I'm at Thomas Sear, T-H-O-M-A-S-C-Y-R-777.

The best one-to-stop place to find my content is my substack or my website. My website is number 7-H-M-A-S-777.com. Awesome. Until part three. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignonez show. Thomas, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. Of course. I'm going to talk about one of my favorite writers today. So go ahead. I want to talk about Werner Sombart because Werner Sombart's an important theorist in his own right. And he's been a lot more impactful than people think. Even Paul Johnson, who's as normie as can be normie coded, I mean, don't mean, don't mean wrong, because he's written some pretty good books.

You know, I cite the history of Christianity, not infrequently. He's two kind of similar books or a history of the American people, which, if you notice, he wrote that as a direct rebuttal to Howard is in this nonsense. And you wrote a book of History of Christianity. The latter is better than the former, but the former's not bad. And especially on early American history, 16th century to around the World Peninsula. States, it's pretty solid. But he, he of all people, cites Sombart. Obviously, does so qualifiably, and I'll get into what I mean by that as we progress in this discussion.

But my point is Sombard, he's, yes, he's rather esoteric going to the school of, of academic culture from where he emerged. But, you know, he's, there's a very wide spectrum of, of intellectual endeavor where he had a very impactful, you know, um, legacy. And the term late capitalism, specifically, but even capitalism entering into the, conceptual and verbal lexicon that very much knows to sambart you know if you read das capitol i mean marx obviously talks about capitalist structures but capitalism as a kind of complete sociological phenomenon that very much knows to sambart and we'll get into why that is in any event a lot of the subs are asking me in part incident to a discussion on

on sub-stack chat about competing socialisms or, you know, what the discursive environment was that Marxism conquered, as it were, because there was a very active, you know, discourse on the subject matter of socialism that really characterized your account. and social thought, I'd argue probably from around the time of Edmund Burke until you know, really, until Marx and Engels became active and disseminating their theories

through mass dissemination of published material and not just within, you know, university cloisters and things like that. But so people wanted to, you know, talk about that kind of stuff and Werner Sombard, I think Werner Sombard and George Sorrell, if you're talking about, if you're talking about the, the new right as it existed in Europe, you know, the concerted revolutionaries and then the fascists and the national socialists and myriad iterations iterations of radical rightist thought. from the turn of the 20th century onward, you know, George Sorrell and Bernard Sombard, their impact can't be overstated.

And Sambart generally, like I just said, I mean, I think Scarell is important and has an enduring significance, but that's somewhat esoteric and that's somewhat ideologically coded in favor of certain conceptual sympathies. Sombart, yeah, Sambart definitely has a

I want to go as far as the rightest, definitely conservative. I mean in the tradition of Ficta, you know, he was right wing in a sentence, but there's a general relevance to sociology,

political theory, and most significantly political economy, because Sondbert accomplished something that markets did and he was a competent economist. as well as being an adept sociologist. And Marx was not competent in economics. Intrinsic to Marxism is a repudiation of conventional praxis, which in and of itself doesn't defeat its validity.

But it can't be said to be an economic science. And there's a scientific aspect of economics. I don't put any great stock in, economic modeling. I don't think that is a complete, I don't think it creates a complete conceptual picture. I don't think the data yielded therein describes the totality of economic reality and the ontology, ontological aspects there in. But there is a place for it. You know, I mean the point last time, and I'm sure people will say mean things about me on account of it, that Marxist economists almost remind me of Amnesians, and they're almost,

religious fervor about this idea that economic modeling is is is you know doesn't yield anything and and not just that it's it's almost immoral to resort to it because the data yields corrupts you know conclusions that both camps begin with and then proceed from which in itself is you know any any anything that purports to be an economic science but that get into the conclusion isn't any such thing. But Bernard Sombard was primarily known for two seminal texts. One was, why is there no socialism in the United States? The other one is the Jews in modern capitalism.

The latter is quite controversial for I think reasons that are self-evidence, okay? Uri Sliskyn cited that directly and indirectly quite a bit in the Jewish century. he essentially agrees with the core thesis that capitalism and again sombart was instrumental in coining capitalism as a conceptual signifier so he was talking about a discrete world view not just a way of doing business and sambar was a contemporary of max vaver and obviously max vaver he attributed um he's a lot a lot of made America successfully treated to Calvinism, okay? And the sociological aspects of it that tended to favor the creation of wealth

and a sort of active engagement by people who in more traditional societies would be viewed as commoners and not particularly prone to wealth creation. You know, Vavor made a big deal about that. Well, Sambard's book, The Jews,

He was in modern capitalism that he wrote that as an intended counterpart to Max Weber's book on Calvinism and Prots and Ethics. And I want to mostly focus on his book on the United States, but briefly, Sambard basically says that Jews were hostile to the guild system, and they were hostile to fixed capital in lieu of fluid capital. in large part for political and social reasons, you know, because the guild system and the feudal system, it wasn't just that Jews excelled at finance aspects of, of national economics, such that, you know, there were national economies in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. You know, instinctively, they had this antipathy to other modalities of economic life. Because to them, that was axiomatically associated with people who despise them and oppress them. This wasn't even totally conscious. Like, Somers not saying there was some rabbinic council that said, see, we've got to do away with the leather workers' guild because they're dirty going.

I mean, I'm sure some people thought that way. But, you know, intrinsic to the Jewish world of social existence was this antipathy. you know and one of the reasons syndicalism took root in Europe I think it was an attempt to repair the social fabric that people were ripped out of by the collapse of the interdependence that characterized feudalism you know and that's one of the reasons why even left-wing syndicalists were almost unfailingly anti-Jewish you know it's not some accidents and it's not just because everybody's prejudiced rationally or something you know the anything any kind of labor any kind of mobilized labor concern that especially that which tends towards fixed capital and the idea of a self-regulating kind of craft guild extrapolated to modern production means that especially tends to be just anti-jewish okay you don't really have a counterpart for that in america but You know, it's different than, you know, and this tracks even, too,

even in places like Hungary or like Romania where Jews didn't just have power in the nascent revolutionary movement on the side, you know, on the kind of side of the, we're talking out the ranks of political soldier, you know, like the check on Soviet Union, you know, in places like Hungary, and David Irving makes a plunge of uprising from inception throughout, you know, there really was a Jewish cadre that kind of controlled the communist movement there. And despite their proletarian sensibilities, they were hostile to traditional labor organizational modalities, like make no mistake. They wanted to replace it with something else and being a beginning class warfare is not the same thing you know um just to be

clear but that like i said i don't i don't want to deep dive into that book right now but moving on the way to understand sombar this also relates to marks because you know like i said a minute ago and like the point i emphasized as we've discussed marks you've got to understand remarks was coming from, you know, not just in terms of his prejudices based on his own heritage and things that were intrinsic to his worldview. But Marx didn't devise this idea of integrating sociology and political theory and economics and this unitary body of theoretical research. That was the way the Germans did things in their traditional academy um this is kind of what succeeded scholasticism you know and that's one of the reasons why the traditional university system i mean it's traditional

to us it's what it came about really in the early modern period in europe but like what we think of as high academe that's basically a german you know innovation or the German kind of conceptual structure. The Gottengen School of History that's essentially the

foundation of historicism. Okay? It was the University of Göttingen. That's where that was the original center of history as an academic discipline. You know, and not

just something that was kind of domain, a churchman, and, you know, people who were documenting, you know, the guys in the employee of political authorities who were documenting military events and things, you know, history has a discreet domain of academic inquiry and, you know, philosophically rigorous academic endeavor that really came from the Guttingen culture. You know, and

it was one of the newest universities in Europe. It was founded in the 1730s, which seems ancient to us, but again, most of the, most iconic universities, like, literally came out of the medieval Catholic Church. You know,

that's one of the reason it's a joke when these half-ass kind of new atheists like the like the church they always say the church as if there's some monolith that there's no such thing as sectarian

identities but you know the church is anti-intellectual it's like well actually like what you know is intellectualism comes from the church you stupid fuck but the uh you know the people in this kind of new university

structure they wanted to combine critical methods that were, you know, very much privileged under the scientific revolution. They wanted to combine that kind of methodology with traditional philosophical historians and the way they did things, you know, like Voltaire and Edward Given specifically. You know, but they also, they were, they were the ones who were responsible. possible for first devising a scientific basis for historical research. The difference is obviously the Angle-Saxon way was to crowd out all other modes of analysis and inquiry in favor the scientific method, and that's a mistake, according to the traditional European view, as well as that, you know,

most other places, but as we talked about before, I mean, if we're talking about the intellectual tradition anywhere, we're talking about something derivative of the Western tradition, so I don't think I need to elaborately explicate what I mean by that. But the German approach to economics, academic economics as well as to public administration and that held sway through the Third Reich was this historical school of economics that combined historicism

anthropology you know understandings of the contingencies of political structures and economic development to race and ethnos and historical experience the idea of economics being this discrete departmentalized science that didn't exist in Europe proper until the 50s okay and you'll notice Joseph Schumpeter very much came out of this school okay and I don't know as Joseph Schumpeter very much came out of this school

okay and I maintain the pushbag is going to be people saying well how can you criticize the Austrian school and hold out of people like Schumpeter all he was with some speculative sociologists no he wasn't read business cycles one of the strengths of it is that it's incredibly rigorous in its application of the scientific method to economic data it's an incredibly difficult read okay it will take you years to get through both values i'm not kidding the issue with shumpeter though is that he was also a historicist okay and that's the point i'm getting at it's not one or the other that's also why i object honestly i mean just for the sake of intelligibility and the tagline of the series we're doing is continental philosophy That's the way you have to discuss things. Continental versus Analytic. And analytic is basically a stand-in for angle-sax and or anglosphere philosophy,

which is essentially the philosophy of mathematics or formal logic. It's not one or the other. Okay. Or rather, the way I think of it is analytic philosophy. There's an intrinsic prejudice in analytic philosophy to non-imperiodic philosophy to non-imperiodic. methods but the converse isn't true the German school economics doesn't somehow disdain empirical methods even Marx didn't it's just that his conclusions couldn't be borne out by those methods and he began with a

conclusion because any political partisan does that you know and if your partisan commitment is inseparable From your view of the ontological aspects of economics, you're repudiating your own postulates if you subjected to an empirical scrutiny in lieu of a philosophical analysis or what passes for one. Interestingly, the German historical school attracted a lot of American students. We studied over there, particularly after Max Weber came to prominence. Okay. You know, and here's another example of a German historical school economist. having a

huge impact you know and you see this even that's one of the ironies too of these progressives and these new dealers who in part were aping

anglophone sensibilities and you know when the English establishment lost its mind and decided to target everything teutonic as their enemy and also of course you know there's the semitic influence that i don't think needs to be stated but everything about american administration american national economics the public education system the u.s military is essentially filched from germany and even to this day

well i mean it's interesting isn't it that the u.s army in the late cold war they fully adopted mission-oriented tactics and started literally wearing schallelhelms, you know, and then all good Americans send their kids to kindergarten. I mean, yet, you know, and Frederick List essentially presented their roadmap for what became Gilded Age economics, yet, you know,

the same people who were implementing these reforms were reeling a, you know, against German militarism and Teutonic Barbarism and racism. Which we call cognitive dissonance writ large. But, you know, the historical school, again, it's not just the sister discipline of historicism.

They're one and the same. Its emphases are simply discreetly oriented towards economics. you know the german historical school held that the key source of knowledge about human actions and economic matters was culture specific because all human activity at scale and particularly that of a political nature is culture specific and historically contingent so it's impossible they generalize over space and time about economic activity qua economics now mind you people like Schumpeter and like Sombard and even like Marx they favored long views in terms of their data sets but that's a different thing because you're talking about a discrete culture or nation or the political configuration or constellation of nationalities, you know, engaging in economics in the historically contingent capacity

that discrete populations do, you know, within the parameters of their politics, that's a different thing. That's different than declaring that there's absolute economic imperatives that transcend you know temporal limitations and epochs and races and cultures you know you can say that all humans have economics

which is true whether you're talking about some Zandi tribe in subter in Africa or whether you're talking about you know Japan and in the 80s there is something called economics just like there's something called political behavior

but that's where universal criteria and characteristics end. So that's why the German school or the historical school

rejected the universal validity of economic theorems. And it favored a historically empirical approach. You know, what is the experience of this nation, of these people, of this population, just as one would

in determining the prime symbols that the feature most prominently in the symbolic psychology of a culture in question and how that informs political and social values and things. That's the way to understand it. Their methodology drew very strong influence from Leopold von Rank. who in the mind of some, he's considered the father of historicism. I'd say ficta is, but that's academic. I don't mean that in a punning way.

I mean, it's literally like an academic controversy. Von Ranc wasn't an economist, but he insisted on source-based analysis. you know and a direct testimony and things of this nature and the literal artifacts of the culture in question controlling for certain variables you know of a temporal nature and other things in order to identify any given society's approach to economic activity and behavior and also i mean another aspect of this is there's sectarian or religious orientation, okay? I mean, things like this. You know, how they view authority, all this kind of stuff. And not accidentally or not incidentally, you know, people recognize that methodology is the kind of thing that I employ

and that I learn from people like David Irving and Norman Davies you know revisionism is something of a return to form in tried and tested

ways methodologically speaking so yeah you can think of you can think of Leopoldon rank as as the father of source-based history you. And incidentally, the seminar teaching method, which is different than what people call

a Socratic method. And for those of the subs were in law school, you're not actually practicing the Socratic method and what you're doing in law school. That's just like what they like to call it. And it's a pretext for your law professors to try and embarrass you and put you on the spot. Maybe with the ubiquity of data devices, they can't do that anymore. But that seminar method of a university lecture that that's the German way of doing things and specifically it came

out of the German historical school and Van Rank building on the Göttingen schools conventions he established this ongoing historical seminar

you know where he emphasized original source documents, you know, primary sources, narrative history, and in understanding the role of economics in the state system, which again was a paramount interest to his, because he wasn't an economist. You know, at base, he was a historicist and a political theory guy. You know, he said, okay, what's the narrative history of this people in question?

How do they interact in the international system in their epoch? and what's their impression of their role within those systems and this was so impactful on the continent in the UK and even in American Anacadine

he was ennobled thus the Vaughan in his name he wasn't born to aristocratic pedigree arguably and this comes up a lot in Paul Gaufried's stuff

Van Rack was probably the single biggest influence on 19th century historiographical studies you know everything was basically in dialogue with his methodology or directly abiding it and uh i realize this is a long introduction

this is essential to understand sambart but also marks and essentially every school of socialism including the frankfort school which kind of uh i mean misguided as they were there was was a logical, if flawed progression whereby pure economics was almost totally eschewed from their analysis of revolutionary praxis and what would be effective in the era. And that's fundamentally what they were concerned with. They weren't trying to arrive at fundamental. about the human condition based on rigorous anthropological inquiry and comparative analysis, obviously. And we'll get to that, too, if that wouldn't bore the subs to death. But Sombart, the man.

Interestingly, Sombart, I believe he's the only economist that Julius Evela wrote about extensively. and sought out for correspondence, which is interesting. Evela, despite his reputation as a mystic, which was not misplaced, one of the reasons why he praised Sombart is because he considered him to have an understanding of the emphases in research methodology that were significant to the traditional school but he his analytical methods removed from the deformations and conceptual biases of materialist sociology specifically you know the Marxist

Leninist type according to Evel economic life is composed not just in material quantities and physical processes and biological organisms but there's a spiritual or if you prefer

an idealist an abstract conception of it that's essential you know that culminates in a symbolic psychological overlay you know there is there is such a thing as an economic spirit and this is value centric that's what vapor is getting at in his discussion of calvinism is a sociological imperative

and an anthropological phenomenon and an animating principle that not just characterizes but renders possible an entire mode of economic life. You know, and obviously Sombard's book on the Jews of Modern Capitalism emphasizes that, but so does Sombard's book on America. And Adolf Hitler very much agreed with Sombard's diagnosis, which was very unflattering to Europeans, almost punitive. And I made the point, I believe, in one of our previous discussions, when we were talking specifically about the Brendan Sims historical biography of Hitler, you know, Hitler made the point that Europeans were deteriorating and that a lot of the best European racial stock in his estimation had ended up in America. and that psychologically, in many ways, Americans were more robust.

And the Americans of that era, you know, an America born in the frontier and racial warfare and all manner of creative destruction, you know, they were unwilling to be servile in a way that Europeans have a condition to be. And even physically, a fascinating. the data point in the Battle of the Hurtkin Forest you know and among other things

that was the Colise's defeat ever issued to the U.S. Army American soldiers and German soldiers with similar wounds caused by similar identical caliber weapons Americans tended to survive

something like two to one compared to their German enemies because physically they were just more robust they just had more fat and muscle on them it was harder to break them by shooting them and that's not a minor thing you know and

part of the National Socialist imperative you know I made the point Hitler wasn't going around saying Europe is the master race or Germans are or Europeans are Quite the contrary, he was saying, we need to become that way because we are losing. And, you know, from the 30 years war onward, Europe suffered a series of punctuated catastrophes

that if weren't remedied, would lead to the death of Europe as a civilization. You know, and Sombart echoed a lot of that. Hitler was echoing a lot of what Sombard observed. And like I said, there's data points to shore this up. I mean, additionally, too, the, you know, America contained the bulk of the world's remaining natural resources. And that's true still. And that, that changes things too, just on its own terms. But the racial stock or the.

element that constitutes the majority, or at least the driving engine of economic and productive life. They've got to be able not just extract those resources, but convert them to be utilized or render those things into value-added manufacturers, obviously. and um the ability of americans to do that at scale um itself in a prima facie way was demonstrative of the concern um it was a you know it was a concern but also it was you know like i said a rather praising of american uh mentioned material contra that of germany um which is really interesting but uh the uh i realize that was tangential but it i think it's i think it's important not just demonstrative but um the uh you know and again i'll wrap up this evolta discussion in a minute but i i think it's significant on its own terms but

also to demonstrate what wasn't as important about Sombard to the rightest intellectual canon. The immediate and instinctive purposes of production processes are somewhat secondary to what animates pursuit of the capitalization literally of those processes and of those raw materials laboring in this way is

an objective in itself to great races and cultures and increasingly you know in the 20th century where potentialities were truly becoming what there to four

it seemed impossible you know this this was especially poignant and relevant it's not prosperity arrives because superior races that's the

that's the bounty of their laborers That's not the reason why they do labor. This is, you know, a better way to think about it. You know, and despite people think, people like Sombard weren't anti-money or anti-wealth or something, or they weren't hair-share to view the American way as being inherently corrupting. There is obviously serious problems with America even back then, and Sambard acknowledged that. But, you know, again, great wealth is the bounty of, of great and imaginative labors and also wealth makes all other things possible you know the idea is a surplus not so you can hoard things and be greedy and and indulge yourself it's because it it frees up man collectively for high cultural activities or for you know things that are

transcendent and truly great, you know, whether it's the conquest of space or whether it's, you know, making great works of art, or whether it's improving the human condition towards physical and spiritual and intellectual excellence, or whether it's creating instantaneous and global networks of communication, you know, like we have now, people take for granted how remarkable these things are. I don't want to sound corny, but like I was thinking today, every time I buy groceries at Target, I realize people don't like Target, not really either, but I'm on a budget because I'm kind of a poor writer. And they've got the cheapest produce and stuff. But it's I've got a giant tub of coffee beans in my kitchen.

I got fresh fruit from like three different continents. I got a case of bottled water. I can grab whatever I want. I got a cart and a cigarette. I got the kind of chewing on my like. I live better than a great condid. You know, and I'm like, I'm some poor guy. You write stuff.

That is truly incredible. And I don't think people realize that. You know, in my pocket, I've got, what's nominally a phone, but I can talk to anybody anywhere on the planet except maybe the Amazonian Basin or Antarctica, you know, and being just some random guy who can do that and have all that stuff. That's completely insane. Even in the 1950s, it was a luxury to have decent coffee in a lot of Europe. You know, I mean, think about that. And yeah, I mean, too much of a good thing can make people complacent, but it's incredible that these kinds of things were devised and can yield what they do. I mean, obviously, it was an expiration day, you know, and that needs to be taken seriously too, but I don't think people realize.

how remarkable this is and the amount of research and man hours and labor it required to generate these modern conveniences. I really don't. I mean, I know they don't because I hear the way people talk. You know, it's as if this stuff literally just falls out of the sky or something. But, you know, and that itself is a Faustian imperative. You know, that's why there's something misguided. I think this was years back, but you, this sentiment is repeated, or at least it's conveyed

in slightly different, you know, metaphors or language. When that movie, Fatherland came out, it's based on the Robert Harris book. You know, it's about a third-right victory, and the movie slash book opens in 19, 64 were the Reich is preparing for Hitler's 75th birthday, and President Joe Kennedy, who in this counterfactual timeline becomes president, it's his big state visit to Berlin, because this cold war is going on between America and the Reich, since the Reich won the war. And there's a really, it's a combination of matte paintings and, uh, or matte paintings and early CGI that renders this futuristic Berlin.

And some reviewers said, yeah, there's the perverse collision of this racism and this reverence for the past. But with this dystopian futurism, it doesn't make any sense. I'm like, no, it absolutely makes sense. If you don't understand the future of sensibility of national socialism, you don't understand national socialism, it's not reactionary. That's the whole point. The whole point was we're not trying to turn the clock back. We're not trying to go back to the time of the Peasant's War. we're not trying to make our people

ignorant so that they're not worldly and those are our childlike and their and their morals. Nothing like that. You know, it was in it is about overcoming what therefore had been the realities

of of caste even in higher races. You know, like Younger said, the concept of the Anarch, that was a concept taken very serious of a national socialism. The new national socialist man, he's neither a master nor a slave.

He's a self-contained godman almost. You know, it would be, he's not a slave because he couldn't be a slave. He's not a master in the traditional sense because in his racial community, there are no slaves. You know, the only

formal equality can exist between a you know a race of anarchs and that's important

and incidentally that's the kind of equality people like Sorrell or Sambart we're talking about you know of course there is a there is you do need slave labor to build

something like the thousand-year Reich that was envisioned, but you know, those slaves are drawn from your vanquished enemies outside of the race, you know, and the race, including

all of Europe. And that's a very brutal proposition, but you know, I used to point out to this lady that I was tight with. I used to take her she was nice and I kind of museum campus with me a lot like when we were in law school and she really liked the egypt exhibit

at the field museum they've got a whole but they got a permanent Egypt exhibit like incredible stuff and uh one of the exhibits they've got a um they've got a pyramid stone you know it's it's like seven thousand pounds and it's on these skids um in this uh on this like thick plexiglass thing and there's sand there to cut the friction and there's a chain and like kids climb on it and stuff but they invite you to try to pull it

to get a sense of like the sheer weight of this thing you know and she was always saying me to task for once she perceived as like really callous things that I'd say

about historical processes and I'm like look you know I'm like and you know she'd been to Egypt and been to like the Valley of Kings and stuff. I'm like, you know,

it was slave labor and it was strong men who were breaking themselves hauling these giant stones, you know, to build those pyramids.

I'm like, where do you think they came from? You think robots built them? You know, I was trying not to be too mean about it, but the degree

to which all high culture is literally built on the backs, the once strong backs, you know, broken by the way, their burdens of slaves you know millions of them the historical process is an endless march of slaves their back stooped by these giant stones and things you know um and that uh

that's not something people should shy away from but um in any event uh let me find a place here the uh the uh the uh except anything about Sabar's personal background he was he was born to wealth

his father was a a liberal politician in the 1848 sense and to be clear a lot of a a lot of a I mean there was a lot of

a lot of the 1848 revolutionaries were the descendants of Jacobans in a real sense, but a lot of them also were very Catholic and were very concerned with equity between the classes and things, and the sense of the sympathy for liberalizing tendencies, this wasn't a Jacobin type sensibility, you know, to be clear. I'm not saying they were right, but These distinctions are important. But he's a son of a wealthy industrialist and a state owner and, like I said, politician, Anton Ludwig Sombard. He initially studied law and economics. He received his PhD from Berlin, mostly in the direction of Edolf Wagner.

Edel Wagner was kind of the other Wagner, and there was no relation between him, as far as I know, and I've looked into it. and the Wagner family, you know, but Edel Wagner, to this day, you crack an economics textbook or take a class in political economy, your teacher and or your text will refer to Wagner's law, also known as the law of increasing state activity. And, um, Wagner's law postulates that the public expenditure in any modern state axiomatically increases as national income rises and there's no exception to this date to this rule it's closely tied to industrialization

but that's not that's not the dispositive cause it basically predicts that the development of an industrial economy will always lead to an increased share of public expenditure in GNP and that welfare states always develop from free market capitalist paradigms because once the budget comes up for vote, which really is all we're talking about in a late capitalist state ruled by a managerial system or what somebody like somber would have called a parliamentary system the the body politic will always vote for entitlements you know and even it's not even a question and there might be entire political cultures built out of people saying we need to cut entitlements but as they're saying that they're they're remaining off

is based on the distribution of entitlements. So it's almost this, it's almost this conscious irony or this kind of polite fiction. You know, and I mean, you see that here. You know, I mean, writ large, like the, how are the Republicans some small government party?

You know, they, I mean, it's, it's, it's not even standing on ceremony. It's just, it's, there's nothing, um, there's nothing there. It's just, uh, it's,

It's not even performative because there's not even perfunctory cuts to the permanent bureaucracy and the entitlement structure. I don't think it's an accident. I'm not some like Elon Musk fanboy. I've had some serious, I don't think he's a good guy at all. However, it's not an accident that. When Doge became, appeared to, you know, have some actual momentum at least, uh, with regards entrenched interest groups outside of the deep state, suddenly, suddenly must became this bad guy. You know, and it's not that this, that wasn't just Trump's decision, Trump's something of a cipher, you know. I mean, I realize this is a tangential thing, but that's, that's not an accident.

then it's not you know it's not um it's not it's not because musk be a liability by saying politically incorrect things or something i mean if that was the case trump would fire rfk2 immediately you know it's what i said it was you know and again and not i'm not saying musk is some good guy or something but he was correct in in in in some of his sentiments and doge was a something i mean the way he went about it was stupid and the branding was stupid but the sentiment was correct. But that's an odd starter.

Because Musk is literally autistic. He doesn't understand why that's not going to work. They can't come from some policy perspective. They can't come from the Oval Office. You can cut taxes. But that's a different thing. And that's always popular.

Even if there's not, a real impact in terms of the in terms of the percentage of a G&P that's dedicated to public revenue but in any event fleshing further out Wagner's law concomitant obviously

with this increased share that outlays occupies, a G&P, the public sector and the share it occupies and the national economy grows continually. And ultimately this becomes unsustainable. You know, and sociologically, this increase in state expenditure, it derives, according to Wagner's law, from three sources, which, although long term this slays the golden goose short term it's in relative short term I mean I don't mean in terms of weeks or years or decades but really the only way the modern state the late capitalist state cannot sustain itself is through these state expenditures that

funds social activities the state you know social engineering and welfare state outweighs, administrative and protective actions, you know, mostly relating to the aforementioned activities and three direct welter functions, you know, old age pensions, you know, things of this nature, like the public health bureaucracy, you know, and this is, you know, vulgar's point is this is why. It's a non-starter to not treat all economic analysis as a study of political economy, you know, because all economic decision-making, even a nominally lays a fair regime, you know, decisions are made based on socio-political realities with a body politic demands or what's going to vote for itself. you know there's there's economic imperatives where there's going to some outlays are necessary you know some market hostile outlays outlays outlays are necessary you know of a science technological nature of a military nature you know you don't you don't you don't build sdi for the hell of it you know you do it when you're in a strategic paradigm that is totally zero sum that if it resolves in war there's going to be 80 million people dead and you know that as

human decision makers are increasingly being sidelined there's a very real possibility that you know a nuclear war is going to happen when there's not even any direct intent to make it happen that's just one example okay so you find yourself having to dump you know 800 billion in the SDI because the alternative is, you know, possibly the death of your entire country for all practical purposes, you know, and finally, um, there's physical, um, contingencies that need to be planned for, like whether you're talking about natural disaster, or you're talking about, you know, the state having to service loans that it took on to cover contingencies or real crises that emerged, you know, and the sum of government debt and attendant interest grows, you know, servicing this debt expenditure requires physical processes and energies to do so. you know and that's um you know again there's no way to neutralize that or to mitigate that

people claim the empirical evidence has been mixed um there's this broad those broad-based empirical study undertaken to try and prove a refute Wagner's law was by these two guys named Alan T. Peacock which is an awesome name, and Jack Wiseman, that tends to prove the truth of the matter asserted. And from 1891 to 1955 in the American situation and in the United Kingdom, they found that Wagner's law, it pretty much described public expenditure to a T. okay you'll find especially stuff from the 90s and beyond

that claims this is you know socialist economics and shit but again I've never seen a persuasive study that was as thorough and was complete

in terms of the variables coded as the Peacock and Wiseman study. So if somebody has one, I'd love to take a look at it, but I don't think you have one. But I guess we're coming up in the hour, man. I'm sorry I thought it was through Scattershot. There's a lot I wanted to get out to sort of lay the foundation. And I realized I almost didn't say anything on this book.

And that was like my whole intention was the cover of this book. I promise next time I will cover this correctly. and we'll devote like half of it to deal with this, and then we'll deal with George Sorrell, and maybe you'll say we're about VABlin and stuff, but I promise I'll move on from this foundational stuff. But like I said, I think it was essential. I'm saying the subject matter.

You know what I mean? Yeah. A couple of things. Sambart, you initially talked about Jews and modern capitalism. one, that book wasn't always controversial. I mean, the first person who translated into English was a Talmudic scholar. Yeah, it's not particularly, it's not punitive against Jews. It doesn't say, oh, Jews are these bad people when they're doing these bad things.

I mean, it's, like I said, Yuri Slisking cites it extensively. I mean, that's the reality. If you don't accept that, if you don't accept that, there's conceptual prejudices built into jewish political life i i don't want to tell you there is every population is like that you know i mean not not like them but i mean that that's the reality is that there's you know conceptual prejudices born of historical experiences go ahead i'm sorry well yeah another question i had is the uh the original the german title is uh de juddin das Wyrshaftersleben, which translated literally means the Jews and the economic life.

Is there a reason? Yeah. The way that's translated approximately is late capitalism. Why that is, I don't know. German's a tough language. I can read it passively, but there's nuances. not just of enunciation and stuff, of a conceptual nature.

I mean, I go like this. Like, geist, geist literally means ghost, spirit. But zeitgeist, we're not, we're not talking about an age spirit or a world spirit.

That's something we're talking about something like American Indians are into or something. Like, that doesn't, I mean, this is one example. But presumably, if you're talking about the modern life in a German, particularly in a German academic sense, you're talking about the way people live, you're talking about the way they think, you're talking about the technological features of the lives they live,

you're talking about the way the government is configured, you're talking about what's important to people, it encompasses all these things. So in the context of it, like an American, English is a very literal language. Like English isn't really versatile. There's 10 words for every noun, but it's also very literal, you know, but in context, you know, if you say in German, for example, you know, the attitude of Jews towards the modern life. If you're not talking about how Jewish people like washing machines and the Internet, you know, you're talking about a whole orientation towards this entire constellation of things that characterize modernity, you know, including late capitalism, which is a Sombard concept. concept you know um uh that's the best way to explain it i'm far from fluent i'm semi fluent in reading it excellent all right well we'll pick up uh start talking about the book the next episode

on why there is no socialism in the united states and uh you just it's no i'm just kidding it's so it's so ridiculous that we we've been socially engineered to think to hear socialism and think it's just one thing and not ask questions of oh why were people who obviously weren't socialist calling themselves you know like the marxian conception of socialist why why weren't they active you know why why did adolf hitler take power and actually privatize uh some public works. Yeah. When, like, I mean, one of the Air Hardin Milch,

he, he founded Luftanza. I mean, among a, Eric Miltz is a fascinating dude. I mean, not just because of his

weird background, um, which is interesting, but he wasn't just a military prodigy, but he was, he was basically the world's first airline CEO, you know,

and it's like airline CEOs aren't guys who are into, state socialism as we know you know what I mean it's like yeah not even close yeah

um do plugs real quick we'll on this yeah man um my substack and that's that's the best place to find me and also unlike

platforms like X which I despise I actually stand by substack I think they're a great platform but that's where you can find really good things it's real Thomas 777 7.substack.com.

I've got a website. It's number 7, HOMAS 777.com. All my social media and my Instagram can be accessed from those two places, as well as my YouTube, which I'm going to try and do more stuff on. I've been reluctant because I think they're going to try and ban me

if I get too comfortable there. But my homie, J. Burton, and my friend Derek, why are you messing the scabs guy? They have been following their example on some content stuff, and they both really like YouTube. But anyway, my social media is at Thomas Sear 7777. That's my government name.

It's T-H-O-M-A-S-C-Y-R-777, and that's it. All right. Thank you. Until the next time. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinao show. Thomas is here, and I'm going to talk a little more about the work of Werner Sambart.

How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well, thanks for hosting me. I realized it kind of looked like a hobo. I didn't do anything crazy yesterday, but it was my birthday. So I had a couple of jambuis, then I ate a bunch of ice cream, and I was in, like, a coma. So my birthday present to myself is I just, like, chilled the last 48 hours and caught up on correspondence. I didn't really put anything in on the manuscript so I mean I've just been being kind of a schlub

so well I wish you happy birthday privately but happy birthday oh yeah no thanks I yeah no I wasn't I wasn't fishing for for praise or well wishes but I like I said I I try not to be a freaking hobo like when I do these things because I'm not out of vanity I just think it's a bad look so forgive me for it's but I did want to I don't want to derail our discussion from the dedicated topic. But, you know, obviously this has been kind of a rough week for the country, you know, along to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

And there's a lot of disinformation as well as just ignorance around the man himself, but also around the political climate that what I believe facilitated is murder. You know, I I don't believe there's some specific then conspiracy of discrete actors in the deep state or in Israel or something to whack Charlie Kirk but a psychological environment where this sort of thing is

common, it has been purposefully curated and there's all these pundits popping off as well as just internet guys and content creators saying stuff like oh these this trans movement is Marxist or you know these people described to this blah, blah, blah, ideology. They really don't.

You know, the whole thing is that there's a deliberately cultivated moronism to this. I don't even mean that pejoratively. I mean, literally. You know, that Tyler Robinson kid, you know, what he supposedly was scrolling on his shelves with stuff like, take that fascist, L.O.L. You're gay. That's the level these people are on. They're almost barely sentient.

You know, and when it derives from, the reason why there is such this huge emphasis on sexual identity and sexuality is supposedly this essential mode of catharsis that have sublimated leaves all these social pathologies you know that was basically the that was basically the the primary um thesis of marcusa okay and that's not accidental don't get me wrong i think marcusa actually believed that you know he Freud and Marx very much informed his ideological paradigm but the reason why sex and this sort of pre-rational instinct and the alleged relationship of that to the essential dignity and core of the person looms so large is because that's the whole point. The whole point is that there's this sort of pre-rational rage that can be accessed whereby for reasons of egotism that have no rational relationship who we think of as, you know, ideological imperatives or higher reason you know this is what animates these people and that's important to keep in mind you know not just for the sake of clarity but this isn't something it's not like we need have some dialogue to neutralize this radicalization tendency or something it's sort of the it's sort of the opposite of a substantive ideology you know and that's important to consider

I think because this is something that contributes to rendering the conceptual landscape peg when people refuse to accept that. Does that make any sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, yeah. Yeah, you know, and I suppose, too, like, some people might respond to that and say, well, why should I give a shit? These people are scum. Yeah, they are, okay, but correctly identifying the nature and character, the threat is

important. You know, and like I said before, too, I know, I know some people have been saying, too, that people like Sam Hyde are being disingen. He was, when they claimed had been, like, moved by the murder of Kirk. Like, look, I was not a Charlie Kirk guy. I think people know that I would read my content, you know. But the guy was a white man.

He was a white Christian. He was a Calvinist, you know, from right here, like a little bit west to me. And he was the kind of guy he wanted as a neighbor. You know, whatever his flaws and his shortcomings and his conceptual blind spots. The guy wasn't, not only was he not an enemy, but, you know, for better or worse,

he was a symbol for white America and that kind of normalcy, okay? And it's really, really bad that this happened, you know, and I think people need to acknowledge that. You know, I was saying today to some of our comrades said privately, that Charlie Kirk was like on the path, like headed towards where we are. And the scary thing is he's 31 years old. A lot of people, I know you, you didn't buy into this, you discovered it and you realized

what it was at a much younger age. But he was 31 years old, had come a long way in 10 years, come a long way definitely in the last two years. And there was potential in the future that he could be the kind of leader that we would hang out with. Oh, 100%. Well, it's also, too, I think a lot of people don't fully realize, you know, Kirk, when he started turning point for all practical purposes, he was a kid. He was like 19 years old. So Kirk, and recently he turned down some big donation from APEC.

you know basically he's like i don't want your money and i mean obviously that's fed speculation by people that they said to do with his murder i don't believe that but the point being he's some teenage kid you know he's uh he all these important and powerful people say hey we like what you're doing we want to fund your pack you know i mean what's he going to say like you know oh you know go f yourself because you're a jew and you know i've got to take a stand against zionism Like, don't get me wrong. Like, I'm not being flippant. But most teenage kids in that position, they're not going to be thinking that way,

especially not some guy who grew up in Arlington Heights, you know, goes to church, who lives in a two-parent home. You know, he knows something's wrong, but he's not exactly immersing himself and esoteric political theory. And he's not an outlaw. Like, this isn't a flex, but I've always been an outlaw. Okay, I don't need to, I'm not saying that people should emulate that, or that makes me better, smarter, like, more cunning than anybody.

But when you've always been on the outside, it's easier to accept some of these realities, okay? So you've got to consider that, too. But point being, yeah, as Kirk was maturing, as his brand developed its own kind of momentum, it was clear that he was discriminating and who he was willing to take money from, you know, because obviously that money comes with a price, and you're expected to be a mouthpiece. and um you know so yeah i i i mean people can people can think whatever they want on this i'm not saying you've got i'm not saying that if you didn't care about charlie kirk or if you found his viewpoints to be trivial or or or corrosive to you know the the advancement of a revolutionary

imperative i'm not saying you got to pretend to like him or something i'm i'm saying i don't think hide was lying or do what we're saying this for clout and in my own case i mean i'm a nobody but i i'm not this is why i made the statement i did about his murder there's nothing cool about it and i mean it's not cool if anybody's murdered if it's got to be done it's got to be done and you should be a man about it but that still doesn't make it cool but in this case not only is it not cool it was a very tragic thing and a very horrible thing but i just wanted to get that out there and yeah the But the main thrust is, like I said, the sociological phenomenon and of these disturbed people like this Robinson guy, it's not a traditional process of radicalization. You know, don't compare these people to the kinds of guys who join ISIS and become Mujahit.

They're not anything like that. It's way more banal. It's way more like literally moronic. it's way more infantile and that's the whole point you know it's a detonation strategy it's not the regime saying we've got to curate cadres of people who have this deep ideological vision of how things should develop it's saying let's how do we make human torpedoes that's it you know um and this kind of I mean, you see this, too, and I promise I'll get into the substance of what, of the, of the top. And I want to hit you at a question before, before we go ahead. Okay. Well, I guess what I would ask is, what someone would ask is when you see, you know, 40,000 people that they've taken information on that they're targeting for some kind of retribution about celebrating his death.

I mean, literally millions of people celebrated. his death. And not only millions of people, but like people on the news, talking heads, people who have audiences that are hundreds of thousands of people, and millions of people even, what does that say about where we are? What does that say about what we should be doing? You know, considering that, you know, the odds that this, you know, this government, this regime is going to do something about cracking down on these people. What should we be doing? The same thing we've been doing. I mean, these people expose themselves when they do this kind of stuff, and their regime's weird reaction to it.

Like, on the one hand, you've got guys like Prisker and, like, Bill Mocker, who are obviously happy that Kirk is dead, but they're overselling this kind of pretend somberness. Okay, that's them playing their hand. And these talking heads, too, they don't even really know who Charlie Kirk is. They just think he's some, like, Donald Trump, too, or something. Like, you can tell by the way they talk about him. They've never watched his content.

you know because again he was a very mainstream guy but he i've heard some of what these fools are saying it's obvious they've never listened to his debates or listened to his talks they got just because it's conceptually off base like what they claim he thought or said you know they're saying some people are saying he's like a white nationalist other people are claiming he's some like trad catholic type guy like it's obvious they don't or just some like super trump mega supporter and like don't get me wrong he very much was a trump show But, you know, he also was talking about the Epstein thing and saying that, you know, the 80, like literally saying the EDL is anti-white.

Okay, so it's, it's more nuanced than that. And that's also why, you know, the regime and its adjacent elements curating these kinds of, this kind of political homicide. And then, like I said, it's the actors within the regime pretending this is some somber moments. That's part of the whole point. So like these fools like seal clapping, like they're they don't get it. They're

selling the regime narrative wrong and that's one of the reasons they're being punished because it's like, what are you doing, you fucking idiots? You know, like that's not there's like a tone deafness there. But that's part of the thing, that's part of the whole narrative too because I made this point again and again

and recently I I dress down somebody for it like in real life there's this Greek chorus of like self-styled intellectuals and academic

types and they love this cliche of saying well everybody knows fascists or anti-intellectual no the cliche even among the ops of the right is you're a bunch of disturbed freaks who spend all your time with esoteric ideologies

and artistic movements that nobody cares about because, you know, you think that ideology trumps human dignity. Hitler was literally an artist, okay? The NSDAP was populated by guy who sat around reading Dietrich Eckart. Like, in contrast, the left are people like, my body, my choice. What I do with my penis is the most important thing in the world. You know, you're a racist.

It's literally dumb, dumb, moron, bumper, or stuff, you know, hedonic narcissism passed off as some kind of ideology. It is literally the definition of anti-intellectualism, you know, and that's being exposed. Like, people are realizing among other things, there's like nothing to this. It's Charlie Kirk made me mad because I like this kind of pornography and he said that's bad. Or I don't go to church. I have no ethnic background. I have no culture. You know, to me life is sex and buying stuff

and he said women should get pregnant. It's my body. Fuck him. It's literally on that level. Yeah, when they find one of these people, when they finally find wherever they've been nesting, they don't find Gramsci. They don't find Harry Potter and pornography.

Yeah. It's so funny that people think that they're like, oh, they were, they went to college and they wouldn't you know i saw a leftist saying oh that he went to college he wouldn't you know in college he would have learned i'm like what what would he have learned in college yeah reading reading some book by some lady from north africa who's a self-identified radical lesbian talking about the taliban is mean so like that that means that he's he's educated but i mean it's like the i mean it's also too i mean i'm old enough i you know i'm almost 50 years old

I spent my youth debating guys who were, like, actual mouse, you know, who, like, threw Molotov cocktails in the 60s because they were insane, but they also were very smart people. And being in Chicago, that was at ground zero for that kind of stuff. So I'd run into these guys, you know, like when Loyola would have some symposium for political theory students, and there'd be some crazy Jewish guy, University of Chicago, you know, trying to dress down me and the other guys he identified as right wing. All right, these guys were incredibly bad people, but they were also very smart, and all they did was sit around, when they weren't raising hell, they were sitting around reading Hagel

and reading, you know, Das Kavanaugh, and they had this whole, they had a very nuanced worldview, which was premised completely on fallacious epistemic priors, but they weren't morons whose life revolved around their kines who had the mentality of a retarded baby and saying you should die because you said bad word I mean that that's the difference you know it's like where is this left wing

intellectualism like some white trash girl who was like in college learned that men are trying to make her get pregnant so she's outraged or some guy some guy who decided he's like a sports team man ascot, transsexual, who hates conservatives, and who, L.O.O. You're gay. Yeah. Okay. Real, real, real weighty stuff there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was one of those things that I didn't think it would, you know, affect me, something like that. And I was actually had just finished recording with Dr. Matthew

Raphael Johnson. And we had just cut the recording and his wife jumped at. in the room and was like Charlie Kirk got shot and we're both like what why I thought uh this a friend of mine he was on the road like one of the fellas um you know he he was passing new Chicago so I took him at dinner we hung out and then like I bid him farewell like that Tuesday and then uh on Wednesday he texts me and he's like Charlie Kirk got shot like I thought he was talking about some guy I'm like who's Charlie Kirk I mean I knew about the famous Charlie Kirk I thought he meant like some dude we know. And I'm like, who?

You're like, no, you know, Charlie Kirk, turning point. I'm like, no way. Like, why would somebody shoot him? And then like, I'm like, wow, that's, yeah, it was surreal, man. You know, like, you know, it really points to the fact that, I mean, this is, this is what they think is radical. They think what Charlie was out there. I mean, Charlie was willing to have conversations with anybody. Well, even the people.

I'm not willing to have conversations with everybody. No. No, well, that's why, I mean, obviously he was looking ahead to, I think, I think, had he continued on this trajectory, I think he very well could have become president, and media is where you come up through these days, okay? And he, yeah, but the, but I, I don't know, like I said, these people who are seal clapping over his murder, I don't even think they ever consumed his content. I mean, even like the Trump derangement syndrome people, they say really weird things that, tell. me like the it's just it's just like a it's like our I mean I realize Orwellian metaphor is overstated but it's like in the movie version where um goldstein is on the screen and these people go berserk like this one who leaves like throwing her shoes this one guy is like shaking because he's like flying into the house idle rage but you can't even hear what goldstein saying it's just like there's goldstein's like he's responsible for you know the reason why you can't afford a gallon of milk like

He's why, you know, you've got to take cover from missile attacks in the city. He's why, you know, you don't have good health care or whatever, like it, or whatever these people prioritize. Like, TDRs, TDS is the same thing. It has nothing to do with Trump himself. I mean, maybe Trump's a piece of shit. Maybe he's not. I don't think highly Donald Trump, but it's some, he's some stand-in for the curated rage objects within these people's pre-rational mind. you know and i mean frankly

no american president is really that important these days you've got something wrong with you if you're becoming literally enraged at a political figure especially trump he's uh the guys the guy's a game show host you know quite literally you know like i his campaign was significant for it represented

and i'm not saying he's a trivial figure in the historical process It's because he's not. Okay, and a lot of time, guys aren't particularly good people or deep thinkers or people who exhibit great moral fortitude do play a significant role in this role of process. He's one of those people. I'm not saying he's not. But if he's literally triggering rage within you, you've got something wrong with you. It has nothing to do with him.

It has to do with a curated response in a psychological environment where people have this abject need. to externalize this negative emotional energy almost like expelling body fluids like I'm not kidding and that's cultivated this kind of pressure cooker emotional and psychic violence that people are subjected to day and day out and that that that has a poisoning effect on their sensibilities and emotional intelligence but also this this this this psychotic rage that it's curated. You know, it's all part of the same process, and it makes no rational sense to respond that way to some political figure. I don't even respond the way to Netanyahu, and without saying dumb things, they're going to get me a visit from the police or something.

I don't think highly of Mr. Netanyahu, and I wouldn't be sad if something bad happened to him, okay? But when I see his face on TV, I don't go berserk. Okay, I don't, I don't find a rage is at the mention of his name. You know, so we're talking about something that really has nothing to do with ideological commitments or political sympathies as we know it.

But, yeah, we can get into this subject matter in a minute. I just wanted to, I thought that was important. At best, people like Netanyahu deserve an eye roll, just like him again.

No, exactly, and it's also, I mean, I mean, don't get me wrong. I feel very strongly about the fortunes of our people and our political allies. And I know that some people don't understand that and that makes them mad. I mean, I don't care about that. But, you know, I'm not saying you should be some totally dispassionate robot or something. But I, you know, but this kind of targeted rage at public officialdom is not rational. Now, plus, these people don't have skin in the game, man.

I mean, that's the whole point. It's pure ego. It's pure narcissism. You know, you're in a rage at Donald Trump because you feel he hasn't validated what you do with your penis enough. You know, you're, he's said bad words. He's not, he's not genuflecting before, you know, before the corpse of George Floyd adequately.

I mean, like, he's not, Trump didn't rape your mother. He didn't burn down your church. He's not, he's not, he's not, uh, he's not coming. a battalion of of volunteers or ethnically cleansing your village. You know,

you're literally enraged because he transgressed some matter of ego often relating to sexuality or some parapheria or something you identify as like some core part of yourself and that enrages you.

I mean, it's like how any normal adult would be embarrassed at the prospect of appearing that way in the eyes of others. You know, I, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, a kind of mass mental illness, you know, and that's, that's, that's important to keep in mind. And, um, that is also why it's important don't, these people don't weren't engaging with, you know, they, they, they, they don't have a position that deserves a hearing or anything like that, you know, I mean, I mean, in contrast, some of our enemies do.

You know, these people do not. They're the scum of the earth. And like I said, they're literally functioning on the level of monkeys. If monkeys could talk, that's what they'd be. Without the malice. I don't think monkeys are malicious like that, but, you know, otherwise I stand by it. All right. One jump in?

Yeah, I think last time I was discussing Wagner's law. Yeah, I realize I pronounced Wagner, but, you know, in American academic nomenclature, it's Wagner, Adolf Wagner, Adolf Wagner, Adolf Wagner, you know, and Gustav von Schmaller, we're probably the most relevant German economists of the 19th and early 20th century, and like Schumpeter, a lot of, Sombart's work product was dedicated to discussing the relationship between state activity, public expenditures, national income, and GDP, you know, increasing state activity and public expenditure related to or facilitating that activity increases as national income rises. That's Wagner's law. Schumpeter made the same point in capitalism, socialism, and democracy. And this appears to be the case.

Like I said, if you read mainstream economics, textbooks, basically Milton Friedman adjacent stuff, and most of what's considered the essential canon of neoliberal theory, it'll say that the jury is out in Wagner's law. There is a lot of empirical data substantiated, particularly this one broad-based study, like I mentioned, from 1891 to 1951 approximately. The focus was on the United Kingdom, but there was a lot of parallel data curated about the United States from the Gilded Age onward. And this seems to be the case.

Okay, people can argue, if people in the comments want to argue about that, that's fine. and I'd be willing to engage anybody who wants to do on a debate of a Wagner's law, but I don't want to get into that right now. But there's a sociological aspect here that can't be denied, okay? The Wagner's law, like all these principles that are discussed in causative terms relating to socialism, and it's closely tied to industrialization. the development of an industrial economy, it's going to be accompanied by an increased share of public expenditure

and gross national product. There's never an instance where that didn't happen. It changes people's conceptual horizon of economics, as well as the role of the state. Okay, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, people make a lot of, especially not just on mesians, And I know I bring up Von Misesians a lot as people representing a counterpoint.

I don't want people to think I'm straw manning the Vinesians or something, but it's relevant to this discussion especially. A lot of Vemisians as well as free market types, like neoliberal free market advocates, they like the claim that people like Schumpeter and Bernard Sombard were social, or people like Schumperter and people like James Burnham, like, oh, they were these hardline socialists. You can't invoke them in discussing California. capitalist economics, because they've got conceptual biases.

They're not understanding. Everybody was some kind of interventionist in this era. And to be fair, Sambart, like Schumpeter, he wasn't saying this is a good or a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, he had a spanklerian view of the German model of socialism. That's why he qualified it by talking about German socialism,

which was a stand in terminology really for what Spanelago called ethical socialism repression socialism but this was a structural reality okay and there were there were no parties in Western Europe that didn't have some

socialist aspect and structural terms to their program okay and even in America and we'll get to this a lot of the sources of tension that Sambark predicted in the

American situation in, you know, the first years of the 20th century, these things were very much taken up by the new dealers, okay, and by Huey Long and by others. And a lot of the, however performative, a lot of the New Deal program was, and so in macroeconomic terms, I think a lot of these initiatives actually prolonged the depression. You know, I agree with Murray Rothbard in that regard, but that didn't matter. It was a matter of perception, okay? And the fact of the matter is even doctrinally anti-socialist America in the era, you know, the first half of the 20th century, this was a defining characteristic of electoral politics. Okay, so it can't be denied. And Wagner's law, which was accepted essentially in totality by Sombart, was that there's basically three, causes of this phenomenon and the trajectory of political economy and industrialized states.

There's sociopolitical causes, there's truly economic causes, and there's physical causes. So what are we talking about? Sociopolitical we're talking about as state social functions expand over time, you know, whether we're talking about old age pensions, a tax regime, you know, that is dedicated in comparatively disproportionate terms relative to previous epochs towards things like military readiness

you know responses to natural disasters you know be of a fiscal and market nature or you know like a literal natural disaster you know

that plays into the equation economic we're talking about science and technological advances that increasingly become incorporated into the repertoire of, you know, available resource at the state's disposal, which then in turn can be said correctly or not or accurately or not to eliminate uncertainties and thus promote efficiency and state intervention rather than the contrary, which obviously, you know, efficient allocation a capital and the inability of the state or any

public actor to predict these things which are spontaneously emergent variables at the macro level in economics you know that that's obviously an issue and

the physical state of the government's ability to intervene fund and otherwise maintain this welfare apparatus You know, the sum total of government debt expenditures, interest rates, things like that, the fixed capital, and how these things can be utilized to realize these things, all that plays that obfsy to the physical aspect. And like I said, the empirical evidence has been mixed. You know, the most persuasive, that study that I cited, it was, I can't remember.

who commissioned it, either can't remember or I never conclusively identified what institution it was emergent from, but Alan T. Peacock and Jack Weissman were credited with that

project. The you know, and there's also So of major, one of the reasons why the aforementioned study was commissioned, related to Wagner's law is a concept in political economy called the displacement effect. And it's almost axiomatically related to warfare and national mobilization. The displacement effect refers to when an earlier and lower tax and expenditure levels are in a punctuated in a sudden way replaced by new and higher budgetary expenditures and allocations, you know, those tend to remain owing to people becoming sociologically habituated, but also outlays of a way of becoming permanent because there's not at, scale of a national government with all these attendant sort of lesser bureaucracies serving it in a top-down way, there tends to not be an expedited way to call these things.

You know, that's obviously that was, I mean, Elon Musk didn't phrase it that way, but that was, the core theory behind something like Doge wasn't misguided. I mean, we can argue over whether those kind of initiatives from the Reagan era onward have been correctly implemented or not, but it's an arguable, the displacement effect is an arguable. Okay, I don't see how anybody could say otherwise. But, you know, that's one example, too, Frank. Sombart and Wagner having an enduring relevance because they were really the first, take on these issues in a

consistent way where, you know, there was a modeling methodology that would be accepted in the present as legitimate, you know, and appropriately rigorous and falsifiable. Interestingly, I mean, in the Anglosphere, not just in America, but throughout the English-speaking world, Samar's book on America, why is there no socialism in the United States?

That's his most famous tome, but his magnum opus, was their modern capitalism. Modern capitalism. And the term late capitalism, it was, I can't remember if I mentioned this the other week, but it was quite literally coined by Sambart. Because he divided capitalist development within his conceptual paradigm into four discrete stages or phases of development.

You know, the earliest iteration being feudalism, which develops into proto-capitalism as productive means become, you know, applied to value-added manufacturers rather than agrarian products exclusively or near-exclusively, than to you know early pro-to-early capitalism gives way to high capitalism

what we think of as the gilded age here in America and then finally late capitalism you know and in the post World War I era that many people identified 1918 is the onset of late capitalism

you know and that that resonated with a lot of people but I find that very interesting there's a lot of Sean Bart concepts even people who identify as Marxists or I mean actual Marxists I don't mean

I don't mean Berkeley goofs or internet people or something I mean guys like Jackson Hinkle and some of these people who identify as world systems theory proponents. You know, Emmanuel Ballerstein kind of stuff.

Late capitalism is not just a term, but a concept that frames their conceptual paradigm. I mean, I know a lot of them don't realize it's a Werner-Sombard concept. They think it's a, they think it's a Marxian concept.

But that's that's significant. That's also one of the reasons why congruous with Wagner's law, the displacement effect, the sociological inputs that shape these proximate causes.

You know, that's why a lot of people don't understand that state intervention or this odd interdependence between public officialdom and regulatory mechanisms and you know private capital the lines become totally blurred it's not just cronyism it's not just

state capitalism it's not just some variant of you know what they called in the japanese system picking winners and losers all those things are part of it but structurally you know there's a deliberate effort to maintain a discreet kind of barrier between these two loci power that's not realistic you know um and this is why burnham i mean obviously burnham was a sociologist not an economist but modern political economy is axiomatically sociological and when burnum was talked about the managerial state that's got implic that's got profound implications for political economy okay and um so it's not either here or there whether that's a good or a bad thing it's uh i mean yeah obviously it's well

placed to talk about insidious aspects of modern government but this idea that there's some alternative mechanism where the modern state would be structured differently that's not realistic and it's it's also i mean yeah we'll we'll all be at you and i and everybody watching this right now will be dust by the time this comes to full fruition but as is the subject and part of my manuscript I'm working on now, and as I'm always saying, and I'm sure people are sick of it, the Westphalian state, and maybe more probably the post-Westphalian state, that entire system is ceasing to exist. It will not exist in two, three hundred years. Okay, so the problem, if you're a Hegelian is at least, or if you've got a tolerance for long timelines that you will not. not live the sea, because I would hope everybody does who's, you know, engaging with this

material, the problem is going to take care of itself. You don't need some reform package to dismantle the managerial state. Anywhere they need to plot to murder a man who's dying of terminal cancer, you know. Could it, let me, I've always wanted to ask you when you, when you mention that. Could technology hasten that end? yeah technology is always the wild card input you know future shock's a real thing and i think i mean people don't realize it i think because obviously the 20th century the future shock was quite a bit more disruptive and punctuated i mean literally in the 20th century you literally had guys who spent their childhood you know growing up um in a house that

often didn't even have an indoor bathroom and people got by you know uh in horse drawn carriages and by the time they were not even all that elderly there was jet airplanes that you know was the preferred mode of travel that's totally insane nothing like that's happened in the 21st century but the information revolution and it has changed everything and that's having a massive psychological impact at scale and that's directing political economy economy and all kinds of ways. And the most critical thing, and not enough has written about this, even among guys who are way smarter than me and deal in macroeconomic analysis for a living, even guys who

are technology experts, you know, who understand macroorganomics and also understand high finance, the degree of which uncertainties can be eliminated in terms of market events and to the second informational awareness has eliminated the potential for panics, you know, like in 1987, for example, that is huge. So you have this market, you know, and for the record, too, I mean, just as an aside, and this doesn't mean, she'lling with Trump, but it's interesting how markets just, like, continue to boom when supposedly tariffs are going to, like, make us all poor and starving and having to eat dirt or something.

But, you know, the degree to which, I mean, don't get me wrong, like, the growth can't go on forever. I'm not saying that. But the degree to which uncertainties have been eliminated, and which in turn not only allow for efficient allocation of capital in a way that's never before seen, which in turn obviously facilitates profitability in plenty, but also it means, you know, panics born of. aggregate uncertainties that's a thing of the past and that changes everything and that continues to change everything you know um and i mean that's just one example okay so yeah i i don't claim to be an auger or anything but these sorts of historical features the very bare bones historical features of humans and how they behave politically and you know based on the precedent of the exceeding, you know, 10 centuries, if we want to use the Spanglarian timeline of, you know,

the West is a coherent culture for them being emerging around 1,000 AD, based on all those things, based more approximately on the present of the 20th century, globalism is replacing the post-Westphalian order in a way that's comparatively rapid, and this will be fully realized within a couple of times. of centuries, in my opinion. Maybe more like three centuries, but I think it'll probably have it on about two. And yeah, obviously there's some sort of punctuated event, whether it's like a true natural disaster or something, or whether it's some sort of game-changing technological innovation

or neither, but something that for whatever reason is the ability to impact, you know, either the availability of essential commodities that fuel the economy, the number of which are increasing, too. I mean, things are, yeah, there's a great, that's, that's the part of the dichotomy of economic development. You know, efficiency, it's like you can make, okay, you can get, like, more power out of, like, a four-cylinder engine now than, like, you used to get out of, like, a top-of-the-line V8.

It's insane. you know like the amount of horsepower you can squeeze out of that only to more efficient engineering you know and obviously you know the switch to electric and stuff is you know

sparing you know the need for petroleum but there's this voracious need for other commodities and the need to exploit resources in greater depth and at greater scale to facilitate these things

that's just inevitable you know so it's But at the same time, you know, and I'm not, I'm not some neoliberal economist, as I mean, I think anybody knows. And I'm certainly not somebody who has some abiding faith in the experts to model solutions to everything, you know, in any endeavor or subject area. But I do believe, and don't be wrong, modeling is not some end-all-be-all. in economics, but there is a place for it in some, in terms of devising some predictive metrics. And I, that makes it easier to negotiate a true crisis than before, you know, but again, I don't, something like the Great Depression isn't possible anymore.

That doesn't mean there couldn't be some utterly catastrophic event. And I think a shortage economy, especially in some places on this planet where logistical structures are tenuous at best and are susceptible to break down, that's going to become a reality in a way that people aren't really used to in the developed world. you know but I there's not going to be and there could be some catastrophic political event you know

I mean obviously everything changes in the globalist paradigm because you're not talking about states facing off at scale and all that entails but there could absolutely be some catastrophic political event of a war and peace kind of nature that causes some huge disaster you know like I don't

even if I don't see this happening but it's not impossible Let's say there was some sort of mass escalation in, you know, the border, in the no man's land between India and Pakistan or something. And there was some sort of, there was some sort of substantial nuclear exchange. You know, and like 40 million people are wiped out. And there's a big chunk of the subcontinent and it's now that's irradiated wasteland. That would totally fuck everything up. you know like make a mistake um and again i don't see that happening but you can never write

something like that off but you know there's not there's not going to be some catastrophic market event like the great depression and where you know in one day all this uh all this fluid capital is just wiped out and you know there's uh this kind of top down uncertainty as the crisis is underway. I mean, that's not possible anymore unless somehow you know, the contemporary communication grid

just suddenly got wiped out. I mean, that's interesting counterfactual, too. I promise I'll stop this derailment in a second. But, you know, in the latest, in the final phase of the Cold War, it was a foregone conclusion of SAC, NORAD and the Pentagon and war planners or guys who'd game scenarios like Thomas Schilling

that if the Soviets launched a Baltimore blue with salt the first salvo would be a submarine-launched ballistic missile at depressed trajectory which wouldn't trigger early warning and it'd be airburst and the EMP would basically blind the East Coast and knock out early warning

and telecom and then presumably you can saturate the target area with with nuclear strikes and one fell swoop and essentially knock out the kind of the United States

the ability to blind the kind of global communications grid you could you could really foobar the world economy that way if days went by

and they couldn't get it back online I'm sure there's backup systems I'm sure there's terrestrial backup systems that I don't understand because I'm not an engineer or a tech guy but that that wouldn't mitigate if you truly if you truly sabotage the ability of, you know, America to communicate with Europe and Asia

and the Near East and vice versa for, say, like, a week. You know, you could, like that in of itself would be bad, but, you know, it wouldn't be catastrophic. But within that operational environment, you could really mess a lot of things up. And that's something that's not often talked about. maybe in part because nobody wants to give anybody ideas, but I, you know, I don't, I don't, that's definitely not impossible, man. You know, it's certainly not just like info wars kind of stuff, but, but failing something like that, there's, there's not going to be just some spontaneous market collapse, you know, and I stay, I'll die on that hill. And I know some people claim that

that's not thought out but I can assure you it is thought out but in any event you know the and for context too Sambart was viewed in his day

and even a bit beyond as being radically left wing and he was considered to be something of a social activist as regards the the fortunes of working people, you know, that he, that, that, you know, and he made these things a priority, you know, and he, in his youth, when he, uh, you know, he, he started out at the University of Bresla, which at the time was considered somewhat of, not so much a lesser

institution, and it was kind of out of the way. It didn't have the same kind of prestige behind it, but he made a lot of waves with even his early work product. And at that time, he couldn't be called an orthodox Marxist because he was too committed to a true Higalian perspective. But he did, at the very beginning of his career, identify as a Marxian economist. You know, he quickly stepped back from that in his more mature works

and then ultimately he broke altogether saying Marx made fundamental errors on critical points of importance you know but he getting into the getting into the subject

matter that I intended to why there is no socialism in the United States it's really interesting because we're fairly early on in the book, he takes on Weber's theory head on. You know, and he says conventional wisdom is that the Anglo-Saxon race is uniquely averse to socialism and even the proletariat within Anglophone societies and particularly ones founded by, where the majority of the founding stock was, you know, the center Protestant and culture, that the individualism of these people and their hostility

to central planning, you know, defeats any prospect of in nascent socialism emerging. Sambart didn't accept that. First, he said, you know, there's, he said, if you look at the history of England, particularly You know, in the 1830s and 1840s, there was a strongly socialist flavored everything that was happening there. And that continued to the then present, you know, which was the early 20th century. You know, and by the late 19th century in America, the urban proletariat was overwhelmingly German, Irish, and the big cities, I mean. you know, Slavic, Italian. I think the data that Sombard cites, you know, I think the urban American population

of around the turn of the 20th century, I think only about 7% of people were Anglophone. You know, they were either Protestant English speakers of, you know, an Anglo or Anglo-Irish or Anglo-Scottish heritage or immigrants from England or Scotland in Northern Ireland. But they couldn't be said to have the numbers on the ground and having a dispositive effect. You know, and especially in places like Chicago or Philly or New York City,

it wasn't a melting pot at all. It was, you know, communities and neighborhoods divided by ethnos, you know, it's not as if these people were somehow assimilated into, some Anglo-Saxon dissenter Protestant mode of culture. I mean, I don't think that kind of thing is really possible anyway. I, that, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a 20th century kind of mythos, civic mythos. But, you know, there's, there's complexities of a sociological nature that Sombardum identified as, as the, as the psychological,

basis and resistance to socialism. And there's a huge structural factor, too, that is interrelated to that. Some aren't made the point

that public life in America is extraordinarily complicated, the size of the USA, the regularity of elections, the way federalism operates with local

political concerns, he said that the reason why political machines emerged to advance policy initiatives is because otherwise there's no reasonable way, even for an informed citizen, to, you know, to participate in the process in a way that advances a policy initiative. And even people organize into what could constitute a political action committee and have capital behind them, you know, you essentially need a political, machine to organize policy across dozens of offices, you know, some of which are going to be abjectly hostile to each other during election season, even if they're on the same party ticket

for, you know, budgetary reasons or for reasons of, you know, the duties they owe to lobbyists or bankrolling the campaign. So he said that single member districts, a couple of complexity, couple of the regularity of elections, this essentially makes it an inevitable. that political machines are going to develop, okay? And the probability of some political machine taking on an overtly socialist platform at odds with the interest of, you know, the industrial patrons that they're bankrolling the machine,

there's no chance of that happening, you know. But also, he made the point that in America even working people, you know, true proletarians, he said that if you're paid living wage in America, you can essentially partake of the same stuff that a rich man does, I mean, within reason. You know, not somebody like Andrew Carnegie, but, you know, he's like,

there's not the same relationship between producers and employees in America that there is in Europe. You know, and in Europe, You know, he said working people not only weren't respected, but the familiar forms of feudalism were taken on really by the new capitalist elite. But it wasn't templed by noblest obliged. But at the same time, one thing that was retained was this, frankly, oppressive sensibility whereby workers were expected to maintain the distinctions between themselves and their social betters. you know something's really interesting to me and uh this might seem like a peculiar example but it's illustrative

you ever wondered why the swiss guards you know guard the pope they wear these really wild harlequin outfits do you know why that is i don't okay traditionally in europe during the throughout the feudal era there was what's called sumptuary laws if you were a peasant you could only dress a certain kind of way you can only wear certain colors you couldn't bear arms you couldn't like carry a sword or a blade on you and there were certain articles of clothing that marked out you know lesser nobility greater nobility you know knights what have you the people who uh eventually these laws just kind of faded you know as as the modern age set in in earnest but during the 30 years war and the swiss guards

they trace their heritage of the 30 years war because the Swiss produced the best mercenaries. If you were a man under arms in the 30 years war, it was almost certain you were going to die. And also there had to be incentives to join up and basically serve as a mercenary because privateers were the core of infantry in the 30 years war,

like some Duke or some baron raising a battalion or whatever, you were exempt from the sumptuary laws. So 30 years were mercenaries. they basically were like they dressed like mob guys or like yakuza for the day they were like really wild loud clothes basically to mark themselves out and because they could you know um so the swiss guards took to wear in these crazy harlequin outfits and that kind of became their trademark you know so the guys going to the pope uh they they still like wear those kinds of clothes like those guys are badasses they'll like tear you apart if you like make

so you don't want to make fun of them and be like, you're dressed like a fig or something. I'd hope nobody would do that anyway because that kind of, you know, guys in that role deserve respect, but, you know, I like that they, uh, I like that they carry MP5s. Yeah, yeah, no, they're just cool, I think.

I read this whole, I read this whole thing on them because it became, I think it was, when Ratsinger became the Pope, he was an interesting guy, you know, and I started reading about the Swiss guards, and like, it's its whole interesting thing. But, uh, like, the Vandigan city is interesting, like what goes on in there. Like, I just think it's cool.

Maybe it's because, like, it's alien to me because I'm, I'm this, you know, kind of anglophone, Midwestern prod type guy. But in any event, uh, that's just one example whereby these distinctions of a hedonic and, um, very, very personal nature were, we're maintaining to distinguish between class. And in Europe, this created real dysfunction as people tried to sustain that system. For among other reasons, there's a control mechanism to mitigate the potential for a radical consciousness emerging within the proletariat. But this led to really bad outcomes. But in America, obviously, that wasn't an issue.

And people wouldn't begrudge you having money. Like, if you had it, I mean, frankly, in America, it's good to have money. You know, yeah, there's like envy and stuff and some ugly sociological tendencies that were kind of ingrained in America. I was going to look at a working guy who's doing well who's like getting paid and being smart with his money who buys nice stuff. No one's going to be like, you know,

that's out of order. Like you shouldn't be doing that, you know, obviously. You know, but that's yeah, I guess we're coming up on the hour. I'll as we... What's that? Do it part three?

Yeah, and I promise, well, I didn't mean to take up so much time on that sort of ancillary stuff. I just thought it was important. But we'll wrap up Sombard next episode, and we'll get into the Frankfurt School and some of these things like Gramsia and Dornow

who, you know, I think a lot of people read stuff like Buchanan's Death of the West. It was telling me wrong. That's a good book. But they develop kind of an oversimplified view of the Frankfurt School and a lot of these post-Marxist radical ideologies, and

they paid all sorts of tendencies with the broad brush of cultural Marxism, and that's not conceptually accurate. So we'll get into that. And again, I apologize, and I took too much time on discussing the, you know, the tragedy last week and stuff. I just thought it should be acknowledged. No, I think people, people want to hear exactly what you have to say about it because, yeah, I mean, it affected, it affected me differently and I thought it would, so, yeah. but anyway

give your substack and your your website will get out of here yeah I the best place to find my content is on substack it's Real Thomas 7777.com

my website's number 7homAS 777.com I'm on social media for the time being we'll see how long that last because they love to censor me but you know you can you can find my, you can find my Twitter, my X from Substack, I'm on Instagram. I mean, I'm a lot of places, but the best place to find, you know, my dedicated content,

like my long-form stuff and the podcast and other things is on Substack. So please visit there and engage. You know, we've also got a pretty active chat community there too, you know. And if you're, if you're one of us, you're welcome. Thank you, Thomas. Until the next time. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back. How are you doing today, Thomas? I'm doing well. How are you?

Doing good. Doing good. We're going to continue in the series. Tell us what we're going to talk about today. I was going to talk about the post-Marxist paradigm because that's important. And I don't think people have a proper conceptual picture. that's not condescending or pedantic. In America, unlike in Europe, people don't really conceptualize political theory as

informing praxis in direct capacities. Part of that is because of the Anglo-Sphere conceptual bias against theoretical constructs that don't fall within what passes for scientific models. You know, it's obviously what analytic philosophy

is paramount. You know, when people talk about continental philosophy, they're talking about it contra-analytic philosophy, which is basically formal logic. It's formal logic. It's theoretical mathematics and things like that there's philosophical questions that arise in neuroscience and things

and consciousness studies but that's sort of its own thing but if you want to understand what sort of succeeded Marxist dialectics and discourse

and what really animated the revolutionary cadres that were able to insinuate themselves into American political and cultural life. You've got to understand what's succeeded Marxism. I part ways with Padua Buchanan qualifiedly. In 2002, Pathie Canaan wrote this book called Death of the West, which was actually a really ballsy book. It's pretty good.

It's a pretty good Castle's summary of the subject matter and he cited a lot of very platically incorrect stuff including American dissident voices the, you know, William Pierce's radio show.

It's very interesting flipping through the citations and end notes in that book. And I think that book that's before there was nearly as much freely available data online

and I think that book allowed a lot of people to properly educate themselves in a meaningful curriculum but where I part ways of them and I realized part of this was he did it for reasons of brevity he consistently referred to the Frankfurt school

as cultural Marxism that's where that he coined that term which is really interesting because it's become mainstream conservative nomenclature I don't think it's accurate though

people like Gramsian Adorno and Marcusa Marcusa succeeded people like Giori Lukach and the aforementioned but I

I mean, he was a disciple of Luke Gatch. But these guys weren't, they weren't Marxists who added some sort of extrinsic body of work to Marxist theory. I think that they split entirely with that tradition. I mean, if you look at people, and I'll get into what I mean by this, but if you look at the guns of people who are pushing for mass immigration, multiculturalism, you know gay social identity and

LGBT stuff these aren't a bunch of Marxists and they're not a bunch of labor rights and they're not a bunch of people like Jackson Hinkle who really are the post-Marxist left they

they draw up on people like Emmanuel Volerstein you know but they they've got um it's not it's not a bunch

of Marxists or post-Marxists who promote this stuff. You know, I generally agree with I generally agree with Paul Gottfried. Stalinism was really its own thing and most of the late Cold War was

these kinds of the Frankfurt School Radical types and these Trotskyists who found a home with them you know dialectically and physically at odds with

Stalinists who they viewed as this kind of fascist retrograde tendency that was as a psychologically scarring to the person as as capital

society was. And this isn't just academic. This is important. Because if you don't understand this, you don't really understand the government you live under, among other things. You know, so

it's it's tiresome to hear people invoke this these lazy malapropisms, you know, as if Hillary Clinton's a Marxist. Or that the Democrats or some actual party or some political tendency

or some cadre of Marxists that's asinine. You know, and one of the problems, I mean, I don't really care what conservatives do. They've got nothing to do with me, but it is a problem when you have a majority of the body politic that otherwise would be shifting in their conceptual focus such that it would deprive the regime of legitimacy

except for the fact that they're totally illiterate. You know, and the I mean the point before the dissident right traditionally and, you know, in the 20th century, the fascist right

and the people that succeeded them that traditionally are positive of intellectuals, but the center right, they are conceptual illiterate. It's not just something liberal say, and that's a problem, because of this

has a sabotage discourse, even if one has no interest in corraling them into some sort of hypothetical cadre or something. But you know, the roots of the Frankfurt School, too, really

are at the in the opening salvo was a World War I. One of the reasons, a lot of the original Marxist vanguardists, when, you know, including Lenin himself, when August 1914, when the hostilities kicked off, at first they thought, okay, this is the catalyzing event, you know, all the social democrats and the Reichstag, they're finally going to stand with us and there's going to be this broad front

that overthrows the monarchies and realizes a socialist revolution but instead what happened was to a man the social Democrats and the Reichstag signed off on the

Kaiser's war credits and you know, got 100% behind mobilization. You know, it was a huge this almost killed the movement. That's how much of a that's how injurious it was

the credibility of the communists. You know, because suddenly all these social Democrats who'd been at least superficially abiding Marxian

claims about the historical process, they suddenly threw their lot in with this patriotic caucus and were just as taken with war fever as either can serve as were

and, you know, the Catholic centrist were. You know, this antagonism that supposedly was going to fulfill the dialectical mission of history was totally absent. And interestingly, I mean, this is why after the war, after war two, you know, it wasn't the KPD that rural East Germany. It was the socialist unity party. And that effectively banned the social Democrats. And that was not accidental. They weren't ever going to let this

happen again. Furthermore, this really was the catalyst for Lenin taking on the vanguardist sensibility. You know, that's always what put the Bolsheviks at odds with what had been a plurality within the early cadre. They were totally opposed to, you know, a mass party because this is what they were afraid of happening. You know, and that was, always a that was always a conceptual obstacle that the that Marsus Leninists couldn't overcome

because they were they really were proven wrong you know it was almost it was almost like some of these um millinarian you know

a Christian cults offshoots in the 19th century that we're trying to put a date at which you know Armageddon was coming and then that time would come and pass and these people would be ridiculed

you know there really is a political theology of an apocalyptic character to Marxist Leninism you know and further you know people the guys who ultimately came to a concert

the Frankfurt School they were watching this from the sidelines you know as young revolutionaries And then when the Bolshewreck revolution did happen, you know, there were these vanguardists crews attempted in Budapest, in Munich, Berlin. The Bavarian Soviet got crushed by the Free Corps, Rosa Luxembourg, and Carl Leibnacht. You know, they, they were beaten and then shot to death by the Free Corps in the middle of Berlin.

You know, that's why Rosa Luxembourg, despite the fact that she was very much a schismatic in some ways within the Bolshevik movement that became this big martyr to the Reds. You know, in Bella Kuhn, after a few months, his regime was so brutal. and, you know, he was so hated that it collapsed on itself. You know, and what, in all cases, what failed to materialize was the proletariat didn't rise up. And in the Russian case, you know, Russia was an unusual case because on the one hand, you know, the Soviet Union obviously became the world vanguard of, the revolution but Russia was this odd country and sociologically it wasn't like Europe and there wasn't a real proletariat so people could point to that sympathetic elements could point to that and say well there wasn't the historically developed class structure to facilitate you know

a revolutionary situation as predicted but in Berlin there was and that didn't happen, you know, and then kind of the final nail in the sort of traditional claims within Marxist's Lennox dialectic in the first years of the Revolution Enterprise was when Trump, people forget Trotsky assaulted Poland. You know, this was very much sort of a redox of the Jacobin's aiming to take the revolution across the continent and when Trotsky met

Marshall Potsolski yeah at the Vistula they got thrown back you know and cut the pieces And, you know, this is, this is where the Polish junta that reigned for decades and ultimately spoiled for war with the German Reich, you know, in 1939, this is where they got their mandate from because they threw back the Reds, you know, and so the historical role assigned the proletariat wasn't emergent. And this was the, this was the original source of this, this was the original source of the schism within the, the revolutionary movement. I don't say the communist movement, because again, I think the Frankfurt School at this point really abandoned Marxist Leninism, almost entirely.

You know, and there were further schisms in, 53, 56, and then in 68, you know, in the most pronounced way. And the Sino-Soviet split had a different proximate cause, but it was related to the historical situation, and much of a buffoon as Mao was, he also saw the writing on the wall and that Stalinism was losing legitimacy as an animating catalyst in the third world. And the third world at that point was what mattered, because that's where the Cold War was going hot on every continent. But, you know, this is the origin of Frankfurt School, which is the origin of the schismatic tenancy within the revolutionary ideological culture,

which in turn later facilitated the schismatic tenancy within the Cold War, which ultimately was the victorious tenancy, and which now informs the ideological schema that defines the ruling ideology of globalism. The only places where that ideology is not dominant is, is within resistance um coded societies you know um so this is this is an academic this is a very real thing the two key figures of uh the frankford school and buchanan does get did get this right was Lukach and Antonio Gramsie

Gramsie was sort of the Tolkien Goy within the Frankfurt school um and he uh Gramsie and Adorno are

uh are often credited as being political um revolutionary political geniuses on the order of Mussolini or Lenin. And I basically agree with that. Lukach was more of a

was more of an intellectual sort of sort of Zawahiri, if that makes sense, to somebody like Gramsies, bin Laden for those that understand the example you know

Lukach wrote he was an agent of the common term and he wrote history and class consciousness which was fairly orthodox in some respects

but it made clear that the revolutionary destruction of society the superstructure that you know

supposedly is wholly derivative from productive forces and capitalist imperatives Lukash suggested this was paramount at least in terms of praxis because

a worldwide overturning of values it can't take place without you know the denial the direct assault on normative modes of thought and behavior it's not something that just abides once conditions become materially suitable for you know

to facilitate revolutionary cogniz and lukech made the point too that advanced capitalism isn't making things worse for workers you know and this is actually a sovereign sambarck point too you know the the injury to the injurious aspects of capitalism and the opinion of lucotch and the entire cadre that came to constantly the Frankfurt school their notion was that capitalism is psychologically scarring to the person and that it's arbitrary and authoritarian

strictures and what it requires of the person is fundamentally anti-human. I made no mistake. People like Lukash were humanists. They just were humanists in a very debased way. They viewed the human being as essentially nothing more than

an animal. And the most base aspects of that human animal being what is paramount, you know, essentially placing passion over reason and viewing will as malleable. That's why there's this

singular emphasis on sex. That's not accidental and it's not merely pragmatic owing to a improperly weighted variables or something. You know,

um, and according to Lukach, what he just he said that within christian society he said what's identified as demonic he said these are basically aspects that are arbitrarily vilified you know aspects of the human being and the core of the human psyche that are arbitrarily vilified

owing to the needs of the capitalist system, or to reinforce social prejudices for various pragmatic reasons that play individuals and groupings, you know, against one another within the body politic. And he himself described these things as, you know, he said, you've got to, you've got to advocate for demonic things in the service of cultural terrorism. These are his words. This is an hyperbole that fascists came up with or that I came up with. They're a happy canon devised.

And that's very telling. And a major element of this, and mind you, this preceded Kinsey by decades. This preceded, you know, these strange characters who emerged in 1960s, media by decades. It, you know, preceded, um, obviously, uh, the regime that, um,

the social engineering regime that was implemented in, in the Bundes Republic as the day of defeat by decades. Um, Luka said, you've got a, you, as part of this cultural terrorism,

there needs to be a radical sex education program insinuated into public schooling. You've got to instruct children that sex is basically like going to the bathroom and it shouldn't have any relationship to emotional bonding. That, you know, anything related to familial morality and social codes is outdated and oppressive, that monogamy is artificial, that religion is irresponsible, that religion is here. relevant and it only exists to deprive people of pleasures that as a human being you have some intrinsic right to pursue um you know he said that uh it was essential to encourage women to get abortions and to rebel against sexual amours you know commanding modesty you know it becomes

very obvious, too, that this was something very different than what Lenin envisioned because, and this is not me saying positive things about Leninism or suggesting that he was a man of high moral character, but Lenin viewed these kinds of things as

abhorrent and as decadent aspects of you know, a capitalist society and things that, you know, the lump in proletariat was prone to that were so deleterious they were basically

you know disadvantage to curating a revolutionary environment you know and the people like Lukatch in some cases consciously but in some cases just because this was intrinsic

to the world of social existence they were mired in which was fundamentally Judaic there's just this axiomatic antipathy to what they view as Christian civilization and they can't be denied and

you know it this sort of moral leveling down of the human being that it's obvious Lukash and the only person I know who makes this point directly

is E. Michael Jones Lukash very much owed to Marquis de Saad if you went to college in America, even a fairly conservative college, at least his way it was 30 years ago, they'll treat Desaude de Sade as a sort of, as a sort of eccentric literary figure who wrote pornography because he was perverted. And those things are true. But he was a political thinker, and that's what he viewed himself as. He openly said that. You know, I'm doing what I'm doing to tear down, um, you know, uh, middle class morality.

And Lukash, it's obvious if you read, particularly his essays that succeeded history and class cautionist, it's obvious that's who and what he's drawing upon. And that's really would underlies everything from this kind of recasting of free speech as being access to pornography and this idea of feminism going from being this sort of Victorian this kind of thing Victorian rich ladies were into

to try and get women to learn to read and go vote to, you know, to being this thing that worships abortion and, you know, suggest that promiscuity is somehow this great thing that liberates people from these paternalistic moors. This all comes back to Lukach, which, who is drawing upon to Saad. You know, and, um, among other things, too, I mean, this was very sick anyway, obviously.

But, you know, decided it was literally a pimp. You know, and he had contempt for women. If you read his stuff, and I have read it, you know, it's pretty gross and pretty tawdry. But there's very much a pimp's sensibility throughout. You know, every pimp at the one hand is over-conversating for the fact that he's worried he himself is an F-A-G-G-O-T. I don't know this might be, I end up on YouTube, so I don't want to say things that will get us murked. But also, there's this kind of jailbird and in F-A-G-coded, like, hatred of the feminine. and then that's like shot through this stuff.

So that's one of the ways you can tell that I'm not talking about young women or misled by this kind of thing because they don't know any better and they haven't educated themselves yet, but these, you can tell these people like Gloria Steinem who like advocate this kind of garbage.

I mean, first of all, within Judaism, it's a massively patriarchal culture. where women basically have no say. But also what she's doing is she's basically promoting the ideology of the pimp and pretending that this is somehow liberating. It's really, it's really, um, self-refuting, according to its own stated postulate's irrationales.

But what is interesting, and this is important, In many respects, these people like Lukach and like Gramsie and like Adorno, they were basically bringing by advocating a humanist revolutionary tendency, and again, this is very much a deteriorated and morally and spiritually corrupt humanism, but that, but it was a humanist tendency by abiding that, anthropological aspect of their, you know, within their historical schema, it did represent a return to a conventional Higalianism, as opposed to that of Lenin and Marx himself. and that was and is one of its enduring strengths

I say that qualifiably within the bound irrationality of political philosophy and the kind of linear tradition of it from really the 14th, 15th,

century, you know, Hobbs and Machiavelli through Heidegger, it does situate more seamlessly within that schema than Marx does. Marks seems like a profound breach with precedent, despite the fact that, yes, Marx was a Hegelian, especially in his younger days, and even when he matured as a thinker, and even within his magnum opus which was Das Kapital the Hegelian stamp is inescapable

I mean I make the point that Hegel is the Marx what Hobbs was to Carl Schmidt and if you approach it with a certain understanding there doesn't seem to be

that rigid sort of breach with precedent and discourse but nevertheless it's not just superficial the kind of conventionally coded hegelianism of the Frankfurt School the and the course of the Frankfurt School you know like I said I stipulated that Lukash his early writings very much were within the paradigm dialectically and conceptually of Marxism I think that owes the fact that everything

was encompassed by that conceptual horizon I've discussed in a very different context how a lot of these people after the day of defeat a lot of these national socialist revolutionary types, including like Horstamalor, he was very much allied

with the DDR and with the Stalinist element that ruled the DDR. And even as he and the Roth Army fraction were exporting these revolutionary sensibilities to the nascent political culture, in the Arab world, they were still very much coloring any sensibilities they had they were in within a Marxian veneer and that wasn't even fully conscious, I don't think. You can't escape a the zeitgeist if you're engaged in

political warfare you know otherwise you're not engaged in any such thing but also some of the parameters of what's possible within political life

isn't there's not limitless permutations of how that can be expressed or implemented or even conceptualized. It's always tethered due the zeitgeist and the dominant political forms. That's somewhat hard for people to, I think, truly realize today. I mean, the president is no different,

but there's such a homogenous, maybe Hamas isn't the word for it. There's such a monoculture in political life. I mean, even within the axis of resistance, there's not radically different ways that states are organized. You know, I made a point before, the Russian Federation, for example, their political values are totally different than Americas.

They're on a very hostile footing with America, but it's not like their government structurally is arranged differently. It's not like just some political bureau and, you know, that decides everything. There's not a party state. There's not some apparatus where the prices and wages are fixed according to some calculus that abolishes the price mechanism deliberately, you know, being spontaneously ordered. There's only one form of government. So essentially, anybody who's talking about politics in a critical capacity is coming up with permutation. of resistance

to what exists everywhere that can have one or two effects on the zeitgeist. That can mean that everybody basically is only having one conversation which sort of happened in the years

before World War I in Europe or it can mean that there's all manner of conceptual models for alternative structures within that dominant paradigm and that's what's happening today but part of that's because there's a free mobility of capital across national frontiers it's easier to access money than ever before that this may come to an end within our lifetime but right as of right

now, there's unprecedented levels of production and availability evaluated products. People have a lot of options. You don't need to decide how you're going to proceed politically based on the fact that I'm fixed in this location, because otherwise there won't be drinkable water or I won't be able to access things I need. That's not on the table in the developed world. And increasingly, even in the third world, you can get what you need. if you have money.

So that changes things too. But this is important. It's not it's not merely academic. But, you know, Lukach himself,

so I mean, when the Fragard School was formally established in Weimar era, even then, it had an ambivalent relationship with communist power

and with to Stalin himself and to these you know communist parties that were within the official structure the common turn and in Moscow's orbit Lukash

he fled to the Soviet Union after 933 like a lot of revolutionaries did, you know, particularly Jewish revolutionaries along to the national socialist descendancy. And when he was there, I mean, he was immediately swept up, you know, by the security services and basically, it was basically demanded of him that he explained himself. So he frantically was defending his rejection of dialectical materialism and trying to explain the reasons why

he'd adopted these heterodox and arguably schismatic and arguably counter-revolutionary positions in Germany and in Hungary and in Weimar. He was convincing enough that not only did the NKVD and not have him shot

but you know he and he nor was he imprisoned but he was never really accepted and in putting After the day of defeat, he went back to Hungary, thinking that, and as David Irving makes the point,

communist Hungary was very, it was the one Stalinist regime, especially after 953, that was still heavily Jewish. You know, so Lukach obviously thought that there'd be a home for him there. but any chance of that was smashed because you know the writing was on the wall and he even went as far as to openly endorse the Soviet suppression of the 1950s uprising I mean how whether I was him trying to save his own skin or curry favor that he lost with Moscow

or if he actually believed it I mean, who knows, but that even that couldn't dispel this idea that he was not, that there was nothing but a, quote, social humanist and a fifth columnist. You know, and that if there was any vestigeal sympathy for the Orthodox Marxist camp, and I don't think there was, within the front of the school, I think this was, I think it ended after the 56th uprising. you know even aside in in more in more global

and in conceptual terms you know i don't and again this isn't just me being pedantic or being hung up on nomenclature or phraseology we can't talk about the left being Marxist after November 9th, 1989, anywhere in the world. You know, the left United States had really been doctrinally Marxist for decades. You know, and the common cause they'd find with these, what they call these liberationist

movements like the Sandinistas was more. of a pragmatic decision owing to, like I suggested a minute ago, questions as Zike guys. But in doctrinal terms, you know, it's worth noting and Paul Gaffrey makes this point a lot.

And that's one of the reasons. I mean, he's a great scholar and he's had a huge impact on my own thinking and research and things. But he makes the point, especially in his book, the strange death of Marxism

which is all about this schismatic tendency that we're discussing to serious communists to Orthodox Marxist Lenin is what was and we talked about this when we covered

Marx a few weeks back what was bad about fascism it wasn't that it was opposed to immigration or that it was racist or that it you know it didn't it didn't view women as as being valuable

or that it didn't think that they didn't think that gay people were valuable people who deserved dignity fascists to orthodox Marxist as Lenin is they're engaged in a struggle against the working class and they join

with beleaguered capitalists to stave off the advance of history and the form of socialist revolution they're class enemies who are trying to frustrate the historical process either for reasons of you know

self-interest or because they're diluted by attachments to arcane sociological forms but that that's the issue with them you know

and that's why despite what people claim and they don't understand the reason why this kind of language was invoked in the DDR and the Soviet Union, when the swords of these Germans invoked anti-fascism, they weren't

talking about Antifa, they weren't talking about LGBTQ. They weren't saying Germans are evil because they're racist. They were saying that capitalism in crisis and fascism are the same thing. and trying to frustrate the advance of history

is a fascist tenancy because all this stuff is meaningless anyway. There is no actual religion. Social authority, as is preceded in late modernity, is a bourgeois conceit. These things are secondary aspects of you know the arrangement of economic forces according to productive modalities that's it there's not some deep moral implication here you know

Bolshevik anti-fascism was a totally different thing than the ideology itself of anti-fascism the latter is 100% based on this human of moralism, which the communists rejected outright. You know, and even the European left today,

even these people who are very radical, even within the contemporary monoculture, you know, dictated by America and what have you,

People like the Left Party in the Bundes Republic who claim some lineage with the original KPD, they don't abide communist ideas or advocate them. You know, they're economic neoliberals. They, their base is what remains of the middle class or the kinds of people who, you know, work in academia and the, the public sector which serves a government which is totally capitalist adjacent you know they

the priorities that they that they assert you know in in these European parliaments and legislatures and the kind of stuff they try and force the center left coalition partners into

it's stuff like you know it's stuff like passing heat speech codes it's it's stuff that's punitive towards the white Christian majority. You know, it's stuff like criminalizing, you know, quote, Holocaust denial. It's things that the communist had absolutely no interest in

and would have viewed as counterproductive and probably even viewed as counter-revolutionary and some kind of enemy-coded tendency. So what I'm getting at is even to the degree that we can suggest that there's such a plausible continuity between the current culture of the left, the post-communist culture of the left, and 20th century Marxism, that apparent continuity, if it's anything, if it's anything, thing it owes to zeitgeist. In the same way that the Revolutionary Right

in the Weimar era, people like the NSDAAP called themselves socialists because everybody was a socialist after 1929. There were no non-socialist. James Burnham's made that point. You know, and you're

always a product of the zeitgeist. You know, like that's another that's another matter of illiteracy of the official opposition in America and people who are adjacent that the sort of media culture

is declaring that everything that's identified as socialist is somehow left wing or liberal it doesn't that doesn't make any sense you know it's at odds with reality, you know, and um, so I, you know, like I said, I, I realize even though I'm probably in my, I'm not that I care, but I mean, I'm probably rushing the minority on this take, but

it's, it's because it's informed by the historical record and it's informed by the dialectical And I mean, even if you don't accept the Hegelian paradigm, there is this sort of discursed, this ongoing, discursive phenomenon that takes on different, you know, conceptual forms over time owing to historical occurrences. I mean, some of this stuff is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy within, owing to the conceptual and intellectual prejudices, the people, you know, so on engaged in this process, but even if you reject that, it's something independent of, of, um, you know, human derivation and, and, you know, kind of the intellectual culture that forever attends the political occurrences and the business and government, that doesn't make it somehow not real. And, you know, regardless, it, it informs and, and very much brands to invoke a contemporary signifier the way these things are expressed and interpreted, you know, the

such that there was a neo-Marxist tendency that came out of the Frankfurt School, I'd say it was Herbert Marcusa. I'm probably going to have to dive in. We'll dive into Adorno and Gramsie and Marcuse in the next episode, but just briefly, with the time I got left, I want to briefly discuss Mercusa and who and what he was. You know, Marcusa's big, what used to be part of the philosophical and sociological and sociological curriculum in American universities with civilization and discontents by Marcusa. Marcuse identified, he literally identified as a Freudian Marxist. Strange this might seem, and one of the reasons why I was talking a burden about this in one of our episodes the other week, Freudian concepts were dissinuated into the American

culture in all kinds of ways, and that very much owed to Marcusa and others. But even proceeding their sort of a sentency within pop academe after the day

of defeat in 45 there was this idea that Freud was bringing some sort of scientific rigor to psychology which is absurd because I mean you know

Freudianism is nonsense. It's some guy just making assertions without any meaningful methodology. But that's the way it was perceived. The ardently secular

and rationalist, not rationalist, rationalist culture of the especially the first half of the 20th century, you know, you're taught about, it viewed everything relating to human affairs in very, uh, reductionist terms, you know, biologically and materially.

So this idea that, well, you know, the human being is, is basically, and you know, what the human being is is, is the human mind and the mind is it the brain, the human, the human being is basically a pastiche of these pre-rational dries. And first among them is sexuality. But, of course, to live in a civilized culture, you can't just be

acting out on sexual impulses all the time. So these things are sublimated. And if they're not sublimated correctly, or if there's too pronounced of a willful mechanism curated

into the person in the form of the super ego, all these pathologies will emerge and people behave in dysfunctional ways and institutions will become autocratic and no longer serve the needs of human beings. And people have accepted this. Like, oh, that's true. You know, the great man, rabbi, sorcerer, Freud says so.

Well, Marcusea took that And to understand the depth of the rot, even early Christopher Lash, I'm not saying Lash with some incredible man, but he was a serious guy, and late in his career, he died only, he was only about 50 years old, which is a pretty young when it's young to just drop dead, you know, but he, in his earlier stuff, which is very critical of the then-dominant culture of the 70s, even that was shot through with just Freudian nonsense. as a supposedly scientific method of explicating human behavior individually in that skill. But Marcus's notion was, look, capitalist society, the reason why it's so injurious

is because it's psychologically scarring to the person. because of alienation from one's labor, although that's part of it. But the needs of capitalist production modalities and the ordering mechanisms that facilitate those things, they require suppression of Eros to the point of people developing this profound sense of shame, such that they can't achieve this orgiastic catharsis in any meaningful way.

and even if they do accidentally they feel as if they're engaged in something criminal or grossly immoral and this guilt mechanism in turn generates its own pathologies which generally translates into violence

this idea that violence all violence of a private and public nature not just violence against females or something the idea is that all violence is essentially supplemented arrows.

That's a Marcuse idea. That's where it came from. And that's basically the rationale of the 68er what they called

free love, which is essentially institutionalized promiscuity. It's deliberately divorced from love. That's why I object to it to these weirdo subversives as well as a bunch of like normies

or basically just sheep who can talk when their big kink was the fiction of gay marriage they were going around talking about it you can't like regulate love it's like okay so eros is love does that mean like a guy who has sex with his kids is like loving them

I mean, that's disgusting, but it's disgusting to say that, you know, people running like animals is love. But also just categorically, there's not, there's not some concept called love. You know, like, eros isn't the same as, you know, love between a parent and a child or between comrades or between two women, obviously. but you know this isn't just trivia for people who like studying political theory marcusa I would say other than Lukach on the theoretical side he's probably the most important post-Marxist thinker in the American situation Gramsie if the Lenin of the post-Marx just left

I'd say Marcuse is probably the Marx if that makes any sense but yeah it looks like we're about done but I hope that this was informative because I think it's particularly important and especially if you

identify as a partisan in the present day as I do and it be clear for people monitoring this, and I know they are, that does not suggest anyone should break the law because they shouldn't. But it's important to know who and what your adversaries are.

Well, this is what your adversaries are. They're not Marxists, and they're not liberals. So they're not the Democrat Party, which doesn't actually exist, to be clear. And if you think it does, you're stupid. We mentioned Paul Gottfried in this, and

I always think it's, I I always find it ironic that his Ph.D. advisor was Marcuse. Yeah. Well, and interestingly, he wrote his master's thesis was on Strasser, and Strasserism, and it's really good. You can find, it might not be so easy anymore. You'd probably find an archive, but I've got it somewhere on one of my, I don't know if it's because technology hates me, or if because I overload them with too much long-form stuff, but all the laptops I get eventually just, like, blow up and shit the bed.

And, like, one of the ones I have around here that so shit itself, I've got the Gottfried Strasser Masters thief. And, yeah, and it's really thoughtful. And particularly in the mid-60s, that wasn't just esoteric, but that would have been viewed as, somewhat unseemly but um it's it's very it's actually very praising of the black front and of a and a stressor um but yeah no it uh that's one of the reasons why godfrey is uh i mean he knew marcusa personally and and uh he doesn't harp on that point in the strange death

of marxism but he does mention the intro you know as somebody who knew the man i can yeah feel like i have some insight into this beyond that which one can glean you know just from studying the historical record yeah would have been interesting to hear the dialogue that they were having considering uh godfried's phd was on a thesis was on uh catholic romanticism in munich 1826 to 1834 yeah that's fascinating i think um yeah like i said godfried reminds me of kissinger and i mean that like i know a lot of people don't like him Kissinger. I'm not one of those people who villainizes

them, obviously. But he, I think his PhD thesis was on Metternich. Yeah, no, it's very Godfrey's very fascinating guy, and I'm glad he's Burton was in touch with him the other

day, and that's great, because Godfrey's, you know, he's getting up there in years, and I'm glad he's still active and mental well with stuff. So you contacted me today, said you had a new way that people could support your work.

What was that? Oh, yeah, it's buy me a coffee. If you'd like include that in the show notes. Patreon is janky and it was, Patreon was being weird about sinking with my substack and other stuff. And

I just I just prefer buy me a coffee and it seems to be it seems to be expedited um so yeah yeah if you want to if you want to support the brand and what i'm doing you can buy me a coffee all right i'll link to that link to substack link to everything um including uh radio free chicago which is uh doing doing really good work there so um yeah no it's great people seem to i mean thanks for the endorsement people seem to really like it and I think a current event's program is important because I get kind of so lost in theoretical space and stuff and doing, I mean, I'm blessed because, like, Burden is our dear friend, and he's a great kind of creator, but he's also, he's got good insights into, you know, things in the news cycle.

I think I can read the proverbial tea leaves and with some macro level stuff, particularly like power political stuff, but there's things they mean. miss because I'm like an old guy and I'm at base like a bookworm and stuff. You know, like burden helps keep me grounded and things. So, yeah, I feel very lucky to have him on deck. All right. Thank you, Thomas. Until part two of the Frankfurt School. Yeah, thank you, man.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanuenae show. Thomas is back and pick up where we left off last time. So how are you doing it? at Thomas. I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. Of course. I don't remember exactly where I left off last time. The key issues of significance, though, with respect to the Frankfurt School are two things. Like I said, even though there's some errors, I think, in the way he described this phenomenon and

by this phenomenon I mean the impact of Frankfurt School ideology on the American political system and cultural life from you know the

the Second World War and beyond but also you know I think people misunderstand that this isn't this isn't some theory of history or some attempt to correct some sort of ethically impoverished system in America

as perceived and make things better. It's purely punitive. It's a doctrine of destruction but not even creative destruction. The idea is to tear down what exists because the people who ascribe this ideology approach the American system or what traditionally was, you know,

the normative values and cultural practices of the American system, they approach it in purely adversarial terms. And something also that hurts me, these people like Pete Hegseth and all these mega people, they talk about, quote, critical race theory. There is no critical race theory. There's critical theory. And there's an

ontological account of what the significance of race is within that. But saying critical race theory is like, it's like saying Marxist socialist theory. Like, it's a malapropism. There's no such thing, you know, so that's important too. And also, they're generally describing what amounts to kind of random derivatives of this overall praxis, you know, like with some school board in Texas or something is indoctrinating kids with in terms of false history and stuff. And I mean, don't get me wrong, that kind of stuff is insidious, but it's not, you know, people who don't really understand political philosophy, you don't really understand the source of ideological practice, they shouldn't just mouth off on it because they sound stupid. And it's, it just obfuscates the issue. you know, and a more or less

systemic psychological paradigm is what came out of the Frankfurt school. It wasn't some elaborated form of neo-Mercism. You know, like I said, last session, these people basically broke with Merckx completely. You know, the, like, don't get me wrong, people like Max Horkheimer, um

georg lukosh Herbert marcoza theodore they saw capitalist organizational models

and the sociological aspects of those models is a profound source of psychological scarring but they didn't they didn't view it as some problem

in and of itself and they didn't view capitalist organizational modalities as some prime very target that once eradicated would

usher in some sort of perfect paradigm of social justice or something. They viewed it as very secondary. I mean, they weren't Marxist, cultural or otherwise. You know, they basically they basically viewed capitalist productive

modalities as the kind of instrumentalization of an anti-human system masquerading as a as the zenith of rational human organization. And don't get me wrong, it's this important to consider, and Heidi were used to make this point in a different context. These people were humanists. They just have a totally debased view of the human being. They basically view man as this. sort of semi-sapient animal that's why they emphasize totally debased aspects of the human being

is like you know like um and they take something like sexual gratification and and positive that is absolutely central to the human identity you know um so there's uh you know and the post-martin right and we'll get to this way, and Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Schopenhauer to some degree, the postmodern right is in a lot of ways a humanist tendency, but it aims to elevate the human being. You know, and the humanist left is a very debased account of, you know, the human condition, but that doesn't make it not a humanist tendency or something.

something um and i i realized in recent years that caused a lot of confusion with people um you know so the so in other words the Frankfurt schools account of the capitalist system was that labor modalities being a one aspect of systemic alienation owes to the philosophical turn towards

scientism, which is another way that they deviated from the Marxian paradigm, because Marxist held out their historical paradigm and the and the

And the dialectical materialist process, they held this out as a scientific process or something that could be interpreted scientifically, according to rational criteria. Horkheimer in particular rejected that. He said that any total theory of society, you know, had to account for the basic irrationality of human desires and things. And as much as it's possible, these desires had to be sated and social organization had to connect with them on some level that allowed them to flourish. And in his view and that of his comrades, in this Revolution enterprise, you know, the increasing rationalization of the then present situation. And what do you call the narrowing of rationality is one of the things that precluded, not just human beings from accomplishing catharsis to their true desires, but it also precluded the possibility of meaningful social criticism because it winnowed away potential avenues of criticism. in conceptual terms and

all that remained was what was referred to as quote, mere positivist descriptions of what was underway in social, economic psychological spheres. Adorno himself and like I said,

Gramsian Adorno were more sophisticated in terms of what they identified as correct revolutionary praxis in my opinion and I don't think that's a particularly controversial take but

they suggested they were waging a lifelong battle against what they called quote administrative sociology which what they meant by that was that the state and these structures adjacent to state,

whether you're talking about, you know, public administration at scale or whether you're talking about capitalist institutions that facilitate labor production modalities, they were tailored to avoid allowing people to come to terms with inherent contradictions

between human psychic needs and the satisfaction of those needs and what society had to offer by way of these rigid and oppressive social structures and administrative sociology in their view it was the entirety of the system

that was tailored to preclude addressing these things in a constructively critical manner you know and again this entire paradigm has nothing at all to do with Marx you know cultural or otherwise It's something very different.

And the fact that some aspects were informed by the reality of the Cold War and the dialectical process and the centrality of Marxist Leninism to that entire paradigm, well, that oh, do the zeitgeist. Because everybody was in dialogue with that reality to some degree or another. You know, that doesn't mean that being thusly situated in historical capacity. makes the participant a Marxist of some heterodox sort. Gramsie's interesting, Antonio Gramsie, he's largely viewed as the laying in of the Frankfurt School. I think more properly, he's the Mussolini of post-Marxist revolutionary praxis.

after Mussolini's march on Rome I can't remember if I got into this last time Gramsie fled to Russia and he actually got the attention of the of the Bolsheviks there because they viewed him as different than the useful idiots of the schismatic left

and they viewed him as fundamentally different than some of these American journalists who although not truly in line with the Bolshevik enterprise. They viewed themselves as being superficially adjacent, you know, and they'd proffer this kind of copy and propaganda in the English language media that Laversa all this kind of praise on the Soviet Union as the sort of centrally planned society that was relevant.

remedying the potential for crisis modalities, you know, that the, that capitalism, as it became increasingly reliant on high finance, was prone to. You know, Grams, he was writing far more serious stuff than that. And obviously, he was choosing his subject matter carefully as he was in exile in the Soviet Union, because you could very easily end up dead. if your brand some sort of counter-revolutionary

element or disruptive personage but the kind of stuff that he was writing his own kind of

Sam is that that was being smuggled out to Italy and other places where there's friendly cadres and his big

criticism was that the Soviet Union was only such that it was effective and such that this restructuring was useful and mind you Gramsie unlike people like Trotsky who in their own right you know at odds as they may have been with Stalinism were pretty orthodox Marxists unlike uh unlike Trotsky Gramsie didn't care about the fact that there wasn't a properly developed revolutionary class paradigm in Russia. His notion was that, well, the only reason why this system is working in superficial terms

is because of this terror state that is, you know, compulsory owing to the threat of violence and the ever-present, you know, panopticon that, uh, that, uh, you know, keeps people terrified of finding themselves within this punitive apparatus or being disappeared in the middle of the night, you know, which means to Gramsie, you know, any, to Gramsie, any kind of revolutionary praxis had to truly conquer psychological spaces. You know, you essentially had to not just indoctrinate people into the revolutionary enterprise, by winning their sympathies. It went far beyond that.

You essentially had to preclude the possibility of them entertaining any other potential modality. You know, and you can't do that through coercion alone. You know, the manner in which psychological environments, both, you know, the inner life of the human being, as well as the sort of collective psychological space wherein conceptual life occurs it was essential for any

revolutionary movement to appropriate and dominate those spaces and there's got to be an entire constellation of incentives and disincentives to facilitate that and simply making people afraid or compelling obedience through terror

you know and I believe and Gramsie believed too that there was a natural susceptibility of the Russian peasantry to this kind of coercion you know and Solzina needs to me at that same point

you know so that that further sort of corrupted the the system that was extant in the Soviet Union and people who didn't understand these sociological nuances developed a very skewed perspective, you know, and Grams, he made the point again, again, that, you know, even the czar, even at his lowest step, when, you know, the Russian army in the field was near

mutiny, you know, even the czar commanded more instinctive loyalty than the Bolsheviks, you know, and were he to reemerge somehow counterfactually and magically, there's every reason to believe that he probably could sweep away, you know, the Bolshevik cadre, which had taken charge of the country, and that didn't speak well of the integrity and future posterity of the revolution. There is an interesting question as to what degree the great patriotic war, as the Russians as they call it, prolong the lifespan of the communist party. That's hard to say.

You can't really extricate political systems from the historical situations in which they exist. So it may be a kind of question begging that doesn't yield any meaningful data. But I think that that's a fair point. I think there is something to be gleaned from that and entertaining counterfactuals where the second world wouldn't happen, or at least didn't develop the way that it did in actual history. But Gramsie's conclusion, as far as the general postulates about the human condition and specifically about revolutionary potentialities and data relating to revolutionary potentialities could be extrapolated from the Soviet example,

He concluded that it was 2,000 years of Christian cultureization and the normative sort of moral paradigm therein and the sort of moral paradigm therein and the sort of behavioral modalities and roles assigned there in. And, you know, that that was what accounted for the civilized world's resistance to a revolutionary imperative, you know, whatever that imperative may be, whatever the substantive aspects of it may be. So in terms of revolutionary praxis, Gramsie said, and he quite literally wrote this in his private journals, was that, Christian beliefs and values had to be overthrown and eradicated and the roots of Western civilization had to be torn out if anybody wanted to devise an alternative to capitalist productive modalities, which in his view is really just sort of a shield or a prophylactic overlay for the Western culture. He didn't view, he didn't view productive. forces and

economic paradigms as representing the distilled essence of cultural activity and you know the the sociological expression of

you know the combined energies or the aggregate energies of a culture like Merck did he viewed his things as not incidental we viewed them as intrinsic to the sociological situation in question, but again, he viewed them more as a

kind of orally. You know, the core of behavioral modalities and psychological symbolic structures and conceptual horizons. You know, he viewed these things as basically derived from moral narratives and

ethical postulates that were given life, as it were, within, you know, cultural spaces and psychological horizons, you know, by way of, you know, again, normative moral paradigms. So really the only way to facilitate a revolutionary practice was to deculturate people annihilate their religious belief structures, alienate them from what had come before so that these things are no longer accessible

in a linear way and, you know, attack basically the means by which people become habituated to these things, you know, emotionally, psychologically, conceptually, and intellectually, and otherwise. um you know um and gramsie spent some time in a prison when he finally uh returned to italy he took up with the communist party which had very much been driven underground um musilini and the internal security apparatus

to the kingdom of Italy was actually quite adept people with this idea that Italy other than the Salo Republic in the final year and some months of access Europe's existence they got this idea that well you know the Salo Republic was this

police state mired in a state of emergency that was ever been as oppressive as they perceived the German Reich being but they've got this idea I think of the kingdom of Italy otherwise

being a relatively open society to employ the favorite nomenclature or contra the Third Reich. This really wasn't true and I'm not saying as punitively obviously but Mussolini was very aware of the need to guard the revolution

and Mussolini had very, he viewed the fascist mandate as deriving very much from a revolutionary imperative and sort of conventional terms in a way that the national socialist didn't. National socialism is a very different thing. But the internal security apparatus in the kingdom of Italy he was constantly on the lookout for partisan actors and subversives who are looking to, you know, undermine the fascist mandate or otherwise find a way to undermine the party state. and Mussolini wasn't taking any chances, so he had Gramsie locked up.

Gramsie was finally freed, but he died shortly before the onset of hostilities in World War II, but his prison notebooks were voluminous, and that Gramsie's prison notebooks kind of came that's kind of like the Gramsian equivalent of Das Kapital or you know the equivalent of Francis Yaqui's Imperium it's it's not just his seminal ideological statement

but it's really something of a blueprint for successful revolution in cultural terms when you look at the American situation and the Frankfurt School of partisans who ultimately came to America and these people who

devised the social engineering regime that was implemented and continues to be in the Bundes Republic it's clear that in aggregate terms that this

was based on Grams's revolutionary musings and his roadmap for cultural revolution

you know and Gramsie wrote extensively on the Russian situation and what was unique about it and what was

universal about the Russian revolution that could be extrapolated and he accounted for the fact that in Russia the body politic had something of a perverse relationship with the state going back a millennia you know

Russia was very authoritarian it was very much oriented towards what Occidental people would view as an oriental despotism

depending on the epoch to the harder or softer degrees but even that said it was civil society that was paramount even in a society like Russia where the state had this outsized corporeal

and conceptual power over the body politic you know even under those conditions according to Gransy you've got to capture civil society and you've got to dominate the psychological

environment you know and of course he contrasted that with Western Europe and the UK in America because you know although he stipulated America was

the nuances there were distinguishable but he said throughout the Occidental West the there's a proper relationship between the state and civil society it wasn't skewed

it didn't tend axiomatically towards despotism there was this nuanced given take that on the one hand meant that that the body politic

was generally going to be more sophisticated than what would find in Russia or in other Eastern domains but at the same time you know there wasn't this obstacle of a Leviathan state

that was sort of acting as a shield against any possible revolutionary ingress you know in this this is very insightful, I think. So Gramsie argued that

any revolutionary cadre in the West would be setting itself up for failure if it aimed to seize power first, either by the rifle or by way of the ballot box, then imposed, some sort of cultural revolution from the top down, as the Soviets were doing.

You know, he said first, you know, anybody intending to dictate outcomes in a revolutionary capacity in the West would have to change the culture. And once these cultural conventions and these normative conceptual and behavioral modalities were eradicated within a generation or two power would fall into the hands

the revolutionary cadre because nature abhorred is a vacuum if for another reason and they would be the only people who are actively creating a new modality of political examples existence, you know, and all revolutionary praxis is

characterized in a whole or in part by attention strategy and a crisis act of modality. So that's something needs to be accounted for too. Like, Grams, he wasn't talking about these things occurring amidst some sort of splendid stability. You know, he's talking about

these things being advanced within a paradigm of curated political warfare so that's essential too but even that is secondary because the entire purpose

of a revolutionary practice, the entire purpose of the enterprise, is to appropriate any of all conceptual and cultural spaces, whether you're talking about the arts, you know, and the cinema and transforming those things into propaganda platforms to, you know, then nascent electronic media, which, you know, was radio and, and, um, the movie screen where most people in those days got their visual news.

schools, universities, including seminaries, you know, newspapers and magazines, and print media. You know, every aspect of cultural and intellectual life had to be conquered and appropriated, such that, again, there is this winnowing of discursive activity in conceptual terms to the point where, where it simply

people came to lack the intellectual tools and the reference points they're in to discuss or consider any alternative modalities to those presented by the revolutionary cadre

and this is what was attempted and largely succeeded in America you know there was not a Marxist revolution in America and the institutions weren't appropriated by Marxists, you know, and these Frankfurt school ideologues weren't Marxist schismatics. Again, they parted ways with Marxism really, in my opinion, in 1920, you know, so this continued insistence on speaking in these terms is yet

another reason why the official opposition in America, you know, which is the mainstream right, they're just not, they're not part of the conversation because they're describing things that don't actually exist, you know, and this isn't just academic, this is important. you know and another another key to point of divergence like I emphasize in her discussion of Marx Marxist Leninists

and their ideological heirs you know people like Jackson Hinkle like world systems theorists they viewed and view themselves as engaging in a scientific enterprise. This is essential, okay? Frankfurt School theorists totally broke with that. One of their, part of their whole praxis is a radical critique of what they viewed as over-rationality.

Because, again, they viewed the capitalist productive and conceptual schemas. and the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Paradigm they viewed both these things as arbitrarily rationalist and scientific and again they viewed this as anti-human because human desires

are not fundamentally rational you know man in their opinion is basically a sum total of these primitive drives and desires some of which are grounded in a reason most of which aren't but the way to prevent the scarring of the human being and to preclude destructive and injurious sublimation of these core drives

that demand catharsis and satisfaction you know the the forcing of human beings to abide these overly rational, behavioral, and normative moral schema is one of their big things, that that's bad, okay, and that this, all the organizational modalities and cultural pressures and social compliance and enforcement mechanisms that derive from rationalist organization that's an enduring source of oppression and anguish to human beings so no matter how no matter how many benefits of a material nature can be afforded to the individual or the collective body politic

within a capitalist or within a Marxist-Leninist schema schema this injurious process is not mitigated. You know, the only way for the human consciousness is to be fulfilled is to liberation from these entire paradigms that preclude the meeting of desires with outlets for orgiastic catharsis. You know, and the only way to do that is to rip out the root of a reason-driven culture that instrumentalizes capital and human potential to serve capital, you know, the only way that's got to be ripped out in total.

And, again, that represents a fundamental digression from Marxist-Leninist, not just Marxist-Leninist praxis, but Marxian ontology. And Horkeheimer, who is very significant in terms of how he aimed it to pathologize the familial structure in the white Christian oxidant. He basically turned the Aristotelian model on its head. He basically said that, yeah, the family unit is a sort of school of culture. normative behavioral paradigms, but it's this abomination that is, uh, that, that, that, that inculcates people into fascist tendencies and things, you know, and breeds patriarchal and authoritarian personalities. And this is the original source of alienation. And,

modern Western societies so the only possible means of remedying this curated process of alienation is the destruction of the family you know like ripping it out

by its root um you know and uh this theory of society. There wasn't really any concern

with the material conditions of people within these paradigm. And there wasn't any essential connection of an ethical nature

drawn between productive force dialectic and economic considerations or political economy and the social dialectic you know it was largely the former was largely

incidental you know um um and you know economics really did take a back seat in the

American situation for this reason. And part of this owes to there is a connection. I mean, this was people like at Dornow, Granzi, Horkheimer, Lukash, they weren't particularly concerned with

economic discourse anyway, but obviously after the war, the American situation being paramount and you know economic socialism or trade unionism in America was a non-starter anyway you know like Werner Sombard explicated so I mean that was part of it too I think some confusion arises because on the one hand okay the Frankfurt school when it was literally situated in Frankfurt in the the Weimar era, yes, there was a fundamental concern with Marxist Leninist dialectics, but that's

because, I mean, everybody was concerned with that subject matter because that was the prime animating catalysts more than any other single political or social tendency in Europe at the time, and that really endured for most of the remainder of the 20th century. But at the same time, this wasn't any intrinsic matter of emphasis or significance to the men who ultimately became the revolutionary cadre that informed the radicals who. brought the revolution to America but even were that not the case you know again

socialist politics are just a non-starter in America and even they were even a hundred years ago outside of comparatively narrow pockets of you know

of the country where there is unique pressures that sort of indoctrinated people into a labor-centric, radical perspective, you know, and guys like L. Smith and Upton Sinclair very much were the product of some of these discrete environments. And they were universally respected by people on the left, but, you know, they, they, they, they, weren't leading the proverbial march as it were you know quite uh quite the contrary you know upton sinclair was viewed in his day not much different than he differently than he is now primarily as this kind of like literary figure you know i mean obviously people took people looked at jungle way more seriously when it was released because i mean it was a reality it wasn't

you know obviously it wasn't viewed as a period piece when it was contemporaneous but at the same time you know these guys weren't national political figures because that didn't have any percentage

at the time the percentage of Hughie Long is important and I mean that's that's a subject matter for another day but um you know and it becomes sort of something of a no true scotsman exercise to argue over who was a real socialist or not but you know again like i said we were discussing the case of james burnham everybody was a socialist of one type or another in the 1920s and 30s

that doesn't really tell us anything but it's clear that you know Hughie Long was no dialectical materialist nor is any orthodox labor socialist you know that anybody who suggests otherwise

doesn't really understand the conceptual environment of the era but you know it was in 1923 is when

the Frankfurt School was kind of formally incorporated it's a lucoch and some schismatic

elements of the KPD instead of shop at Frankfurt University and originally they branded themselves under the banner of the Institute for Marxism which was directly modeled

the Merce Engels Institute in Moscow I believe at least in part this branding was a way to attract funding and support you know I think that goes about saying after a while they rebranded as the Institute for Social Research

it wasn't so much to be less provocative I don't think but as to distinguish themselves as not just another sort of academic satellite office of the common turn but it really sort of found its identity around 1930 and that's when

Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research and Horkheimer as I think I got into last session he was a huge admirer the Marquis de Sade and he was open about this

you know and he was was open about his belief that there wasn't really any future in Marxism in terms of liberating the human being from these psychically injurious institutions. You know, Horikheimer had a sort of haughty contempt for the working class. he didn't think they had potential as a revolutionary elements, certainly not as a vanguard.

So, I mean, he was passing moral judgment on them, but also Horkheimer wasn't a stupid man. I mean, he was evil when he was a pervert, but he wasn't stupid. And he made one of the same points that Sabart did. he said, you know, America being the model, and eventually, unless there's some sort of total collapse of capitalist social and economic scheme in Europe, you know, Europe's going to come to look like America in terms of its capitalist infrastructure, material, and sociologically.

And, you know, he's like workers are going to consistently enjoy a middle class life. if not in terms of their status you know they're going to have you know the disposable income and a level of material wealth you know sight unseen you know ever and this is you know basically

the system is productive enough and lucrative enough and viable enough that even if a already passed zenith you know um there's just not their requisite pressures on the working class to facilitate molding them into a revolutionary cadre and uh there was something to that in my opinion it's more complicated than that that wasn't the so approximate cause by any means But he wasn't wrong.

You know, and it was Horkheimer who really directed the Institute of Social Research to dispense with the Marxist playbook. You know, from that point onward, from 1930 onward, the Frankfurt School and its subsequent iterations, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it treated Marxism as a, you know, as a slightly less insidious version of the American system, you know, just another productive modality that was unsuited, the fulfillment of the essential and hedonic, needs alike of the human being. And, yeah, to be clear, such that there was, I mean, I guess, in dialectical terms, Horkheimer didn't emphasize this as much, but Gramsie definitely did in his prison writings. Gramsie identified as a, quote, absolute historicist, or he said that what he advocated was a, quote, absolute historicism.

Meaning that morals, values of an ethical nature and otherwise, what people view as true in both factual and ethical terms, all of these things are the product of conceptual horizons that are historically contingent. They're derived entirely from historical epochs. okay so that's why in the Frankfurt School of view which is in Gramsdy's view if we're talking about historicism you know it's synonymous

he invented Frankfurt School of storicism real radical purposes in conceptual terms Gramsie would have said that take for example the Aztec Empire which endured for a really long time

they'd practice ritual cannibalism they'd cut people hearts out, to appease, you know, the terror gods and things. They were this entire, and like Spangler said, the Mesoamericans, they accomplished genuine civilization. These people weren't savages, but they did horrifying things, and they were homicidal pagans, and they killed huge numbers of people for reasons of ritual practice.

spectacle and things. So according to Gramsie, the only reason why say, you know, 20th century white men would claim to consider that abhorrent is because it's expedient

according to the demands of, you know, social and productive forces and the schema built up around those realities within the culture that these modern white men come from, that they'd use something like that as being evil or deviant.

You know, there's not any sort of absolute moral standard that renders such things objectionable. You know, it's entirely relative to the demands of the epoch and the determinative aspects therein and the discrete course of the cultures that you know inculcate people with an idea that what came before or is

morally wrong or that alternative modalities are you know somehow deviant and I don't think that that's a convincing argument but it is internally And that is one thing that separates these true kind of Frankfurt School of Vanguardists

and their descendants in the present day from your kind of run-in-the-millal dummy liberal because the latter, like I have no understanding of matters of ethics and comparative analysis they're in. you know people like gramsie and again is the the serious individuals um among the current um among the current crop of ideologues you know they they they do present a fairly sophisticated argument um but yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna end here because i'm run out for me for being a lane It's just, um, I still have been directing up today, not to be an old bitch, but that's just the reality. Well, let me ask you this. Yeah.

You talk about how back then everybody was some form of socialism because that's what, is it today that everyone is some, not everyone, obviously, we aren't, but that the, the norm is that everyone is some sort of globalist? Yeah, but today it's more, that's the structural reality. reality today um back then that agreed to which all kinds of things were underway in terms of economics at scale like high finance was uh developing in ways that telecom and calculative uh technology couldn't keep up with so there was all this uncertainty because tools of analysis and situational awareness, moment to moment, hour to hour, even day-to-day, couldn't keep up with the velocity of money and capital. So it seemed as if macro-organomics had become too complicated, too nuanced, and there was too many variables.

this to be left a chance because otherwise there'd just be one crisis after another so the idea was well you know and especially other 1929 the idea was is obviously got to be some sort of regulatory mechanism to eradicate uncertainty as much as possible but then as technology mitigated these uncertainties you know the stuff is simple as advanced telecom went a long way towards that and uh you know computing technology and things and people learning the view capital and uh as as a fluid um variable more and more you know that gradually changed things and really that's what the deregulation um trend was in the 80s because Because, you know, that was, I mean, I think that kind of over-regulation always slays the golden goose.

I think that's an arguable, but that's not, it was just obsolete, it was obsolescent to think in terms of imposing regulatory schema to mitigate uncertainty. You know, so, yeah, it's related, but it's distinguishable. there just didn't seem to be an alternative modality to state intervention in those days globalism is a lot more of a spontaneous reality I mean it's just the way things are organized inevitably and that doesn't mean that it's permanent globalism may totally fall apart I don't think that's going to happen for a few centuries if it does happen really from

the era of you know 1990 to today that's really that's the trajectory of the of where political organization and social organization

at scale has been moving in that direction since the 17th century and we live like under its culmination. So it's more spontaneous and historically driven than the conceptual aspect of socialism in the mid-20th century. It's a short answer.

Okay. All right. I want to ask you for your plugs. I'll tell people where to go. Go to Thomas the substack. It's Real Thomas 777. I have the links to everything, every way you can support Thomas.

he has a new buy me a coffee thing i have a link there it'll be in the show notes and uh yeah please go support thomas and uh we'll be back for the to continue the series in a few days thank you yeah thank you man yeah man appreciate you likewise want to welcome everyone back to the pecan yono show thomas how are you doing today i've done pretty well i i'm jumping ahead little bit and as people probably gleaned i'm not trying to present a conceptually biased curriculum but i'm emphasizing what is relevant to people who are seeking a political education with certain partisan emphases and i'm also narrowly tailoring what i deal with

you know, discrete political philosophies. It's somewhat ambiguous, you know, what fingers constitute true political philosophers. I mean, there's

somewhere that's indisputable. You know, people like Machiavillia, or Hobbs, but you know, we're talking about, like, Kant or Leibniz, it gets complicated. But political theory obviously is my wheelhouse I mean that's what I do that's what my background is in but also I'm trying to present a curriculum of a partisan nature and I am not pretending to do otherwise

you know and if if people want to bone up on you know continental philosophy generally there's better men than I who could do that. But I'm jumping ahead a little bit today. I'm going to talk about Edmund Hustrel. You know, and Hustrel was, Heidegger was a student of Hustrel, and then he broke with him profoundly. And there's kind of a simple thing

this ideological take that, like, oh, well, that's because Hustrel was Jewish. That's not why. Hidegger was a national socialist, and Hidegger was, politically and philosophically, very anti-Jewish, but he wasn't some weird racialist. You know, Hannah Arendt,

you can tell that Heidegger's intellectual DNA is shot through her scholarship because, I mean, she was his protege and probably his mistress. And there's nothing inconsistent about that. You know, um, it's not an error. hypocritical. I mean, yeah, you shouldn't step out in your wife, but I mean, what I'm talking about is Heidegger associated with Jews in his professional and personal life, you know, and as

one would imagine for somebody like him, but he also was uncompromising in his belief that in academia and in European intellectual life, going back a millennia, there is a Jewish perspective that was ontologically subversive, you know. But so, and Hustral also, Hustral was a complicated figure, and he, people argue back and forth about whether Hustrel was, I mean, you can't escape your confessional heritage,

and there's, there's an ontological reality to how you interpret things and the process of interpretation is to the lens of mind. And that's discreetly situated, you know, according to, you know, whose mind we're speaking of. But the hustle wasn't really a partisan figure in the vein of Leo Strauss or something. I consider him to be a lot, like, wideness. but he's the father of phenomenology that that can't be disputed and heidegger is the it wasn't like an ethical schism between him and heidegger it was a heidegger's view of hermeneutics i'll get into what i mean by that was what really caused the intellectual breach it wasn't a political question

and it wasn't because Husseril was arguing for a Jewish political theory subliminally or otherwise and that's important because like I said

people on both sides of the aisle try to claim that there's people too claim Husserol isn't a political philosopher and I don't accept that. But even if I did, again, he, he's basically the father of phenomenology.

Okay, every 20th century, every 20th century philosopher, including Heidegger, obviously, was in dialogue with Hustral. So you can't, you can't get away from that. and phenomenology and psychological aspects are paramount if we're talking about political theory. You know, and this also, this touches and concerns neuroscience, anthropology, group patterns of behavior, you know, positiveism,

in the anti-positivist reaction so it becomes political regardless so there'd be a gap in the conceptual

narrative if I redacted him but I wouldn't do that anyway because it at base you know my own orientation

is Hegelian and Heidegarian. So, if you're going to ask me about political theory, you're going to have to subject yourself to hearing about Hustrel. So I was concerned with the fundamentals of thinking. You know, and that, interestingly, because even, even though in terms of his ethics, he was totally at odds with somebody like Nietzsche or Marx, but that also put him in proximity to them more than these analytic philosophers who often invoke phenomenological concepts. That's kind of like the only thing they take away from continental philosophy.

so his legacy's complicated um husserl's view and to be clear to husserl absolutely accepted the reality of the crisis of western civilization that's what he was fundamentally concerned with okay and his view was that his view was that the highest one a life, the only way for European civilization to save itself is to discover its potential for this hidden telos that can be realized within the culture and presumably within every individual man who's capable of that sort of intellectual activity. You know, Hustro believe that all men can live somewhat autonomously, even if they're not suited to higher intellectual activity, you know, they can partake of this telos and it becomes culturally insinuated. But obviously, you know, in all times, in all epochs, in every race and cultural form, there's always a minority of philosophers, if you will,

who kind of shoulder the task of, you know, altering or generating the prime intellectual modality. what this higher telos was in his mind he said that it needs to be truly value neutral and he said that european rationalism and the scientific perspective is not actually value neutral it's burdened and uh with all these conceptual biases and value judgments that are passed off as factual you know um and there's all these there's all these assumptions that are epistemologically prior to the people who present these ideas you know um and he said at one time men were more cautious about succumbing to that tendency which in hospital's view was grave error, but he said that the nihilism of late modernity has caused people to do away

with that sort of cultivated responsibility in any kind of caution, you know, and that's why he said, you know, even, even many had huge respect for these philosophical giants like Descartes Leibniz, he said they contributed some great things in, you know, demonstrating why philosophy is necessary, you know, for a culture to survive. And they also educated ordinary men in, you know, the sort of praxis of philosophy and philosophical systems in everyday life. But their writings on these supposedly neutral subjects are not neutral, you know, and thus it's not suited to the enterprise of curating this higher telos. You know, and he said that as theoretical discourse has sort of trickled down. into everyday life in Europe, it's completely value-coded.

And even revolutionaries, you know, whether they're Marxians or whether they're, you know, right reactionaries, they're all speaking as if, you know, they're discussing some sort of scientific postulate or as if they're partaking of this kind of. positivist empirical reality when in truth what they're doing is they're abolishing the

fake value distinction and they're claiming that their revolutionary imperatives or their or these crisis modalities that they've taken on you know to resolve this terrible problem

they're suggesting that there's some scientific solution you know and ultimately people can't even tell the difference anymore was his conclusion and that's true you know um the kind of

the major foil to hustle all is viewed as Max Weber which is kind of interesting because most people associate Weber contra Spangler And Weber and Spangler actually had a debate, and it's interesting because it was a bunch of Weber students, I'll bring this back, I realize this is tangential. A bunch of Weber students organize this debate with Oswald Spangler, because Weber spontaneously began lecturing on the subject of decline of the West, because he viewed it as an important book. took exception to what he viewed as its distorted hermeneutics.

Okay. And if you read the transfer of this debate, it's really quite fascinating, although at the time, people viewed it as kind of a dud. I attribute that to, I mean, I don't know. I've got a passion for the subject matter, but I think that was reducible. You know, how styles make fights in boxing? I think people expected fireworks between Vavor and Spangler,

and that wasn't forthcoming. But it's, it really helped, reading it really held my interest. Like, it's very different, obviously, and the players involved couldn't be more different, but one of the, only other economic debates where I really got engaged with the material was the Chomsky-Foucault debate.

But, yeah, but in any event, you know, Weber was very much kind of the foil to what most students of philosophy will consider it as when in reality they should be thinking of a Heidegger and I don't think most people really apprehend a Heidegger

you've really got to study him for decades and you've got to have a deep grasp of Aristotle and Nietzsche to understand Heidegger and then on top of that you've also got to understand phenomenology and the issue of hermeneutics and what Heidegger's objection was to Husserl.

I think a lot of people just sort of read the CliffsNotes version of Husserl. They get some selected works or something, or they read the write-up in like the Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, encyclopedia, political philosophy, which is a great value, but it's just like introductory. And they don't realize the depth of the conceptual divide. you know, between Heidegger and Husserl, or they view Heidegger as just, you know, the intellectual progeny of Husserl, but with ideological commitments and prejudices that set them apart.

So simply stated, Hustle's assumption is that the highest way of life, the hidden telos or the consummation of European man's higher intellectual enterprise that will redeem Western civilization by placing it on the same

level as Doric Athens would be the accomplishment of this kind of pure theoretical inquiry that from the point of inception almost this sort of a nirvana state of the intellect

where from inception at the point of contemplation there are not any epistemic prior in encumbrances and there's nothing within the beholder's mind or the active thinker's mind that's corrupting his ability to interpret owing to conceptual biases or psychological symbolic phenomenon, you know, it's a way in which the, it's a way in which man,

um, culturally situated man can totally take himself out of these discreet characteristics that situate him as a historical and culturally, engaged organism, you know, and he, to be clear, too, he believed that this was the logical progression of where Athenian philosophy would have arrived, had it had it endured, you know, and to be clear, too, as I think we got into into the vicinities, I'm not classic scholar, but I don't know some things. And the Peloponnesian War is viewed as having destroyed Athens, to be clear. So, and this is just kind of commonly accepted, especially among intellectuals of Husserl's generational cadre. So his view is that we're not trying to emulate

dead forms or draw upon you know Paracles, Athens in some sort of emulation to resolve this existential crisis of our civilization we're enduring

we're identifying potentialities and what can be accessed by higher cultures of man and we're attempting to go beyond that. You know, um,

and there's something there's something about this that is very transcendentalist. Not in like the new age way, but, you know, I've been watching the movie 2001 a lot, and Arthur C. Clark was very much informed by this kind of philosophy.

And the implication is, you know, if you watch 2001 or if you read the book, that's the tie-in to the film, the creatures, the alien intelligences who left the monoliths, they deposited those modelists, you know, millions of years ago, including the one in sub-Saharan Africa that caused Australopithecus to become a human being. But then, you know, a million years subsequent, when the model is discovered on the moon, these ETs have forgotten it suggested that they even deposited these things

because their view was that the cultivation of intellect was the highest good so they went around the galaxy like encouraging evolution and the development of um

of uh of intelligence you know in these creatures as they found them but then at some point at some point these aliens became entities of pure mind to the point that

they got to upload their consciousness and essence into machines but then they also they transcended the machines even and they became intelligences of pure energy

somehow out. And that's why when Bauman meets them they don't really know how to deal with them. So they read his mind about what they

think a human being would like. And they're like, okay, well, here's a luxury hotel room. And in some sort of imperfect mock-up of French architecture. You know, and they make food appear that they think like a human being

would like to eat. But it's been so long since they were corporeal beings, they can't really figure it out. You know, and then they observe his life cycle and then when his body dies, they zap him and turn him into

something like them. And that's the next stage in human evolution. But there's something of that concept, very much coded into Hustral. I'm not suggesting Hustral sat around thinking about science fiction like I do, or even like Ruther C. Clark did. But there is a very theologically oriented concept or set of concepts here. And that's what I mean when I suggest that this is a very, very ethically-driven postulate about this higher telos

then this is essential Hustral's not saying he's not he's not some post-enlightment liberal saying oh you've got to shed old desire you've got to abandon all belief in anything you know beyond the pragmatic

he's not saying that at all quite the contrary he's looking to elevate man, ultimately, I believe, into something else. Like, not his philosophy is transformative, obviously, but this is the path before man to, you know, overcome his own humanity.

And this birth process, in part, the potential of it, this is one of the reasons, is one of the reasons why European man as the turn of the or at the close of the 19th century and beyond is

enduring this crisis and that's why there's both great and terrifying aspects to it you know so this is important because a lot of people misunderstand that you know um

and to be clear to when I said Hustrell is the father of phenomenology he wasn't the first thinker to employ that term but

the way he utilized it was distinct and it came to characterize his entire body of work in a way that is this positive of what he aimed to convey

he wasn't just trying to uncover the and describe the primary phenomena of consciousness you know he was trying to develop a rigorous methodology

that was total in its ontological implications for the human being. You know, in a way of grounding this process without resort to suppositions and epistemic priors and things. You know, this really is a total enterprise that stands to alter human life he's not just saying this is a better way of doing science or this is a better way

of interpreting cultural phenomena or this is a more rigorous philosophy you know and I think too and again this isn't Hustra wasn't like

Strauss, there's not some hidden exegesis that he believed could be accessed, quite the contrary. But this is very theologically coded, I think.

I think that's indisputable. But that's part of the point. You know, because the crisis of the crisis of the West is nihilism. And you You can't remedy that by trying to revive religious orthodoxies or by trying to emulate, again, you know, the Athenians or anything like that.

You know, you one must advance the entire enterprise in absolute terms. that was his aim. And that's one of the reasons, too, why I spend so much time of a hostel, because that's a monumental ambition, but that's what philosophy should be about. And political theory, that's worth anything, one of the things that should separate the partisan right, not just from the enemy,

but from everybody else is it's not just some means of pragmatic administration or some alternative mode of social engineering or like a way of trying to identify good government and incentivize moral behavior within these structures that supposedly constitute good government. You know, it's, there's an integral aspect to the way you should think about politics as a partisan, and it should be theologically coded. It should be primarily oriented towards a complete philosophy.

There's got to be a praxis there. You know, it's got to be grounded in reality. People shouldn't retreat from the world and be monks to try and achieve this sort of elevated state of consciousness or something or intellect. But the conceptual horizon needs to encompass all of these things. Otherwise, there's, you know, if you don't view it that way, you know, you're not. really part of a resistance tendency you just have

you know you're just some kind of reformist and you may feel very passionate about these things you want to reform but that's a different phenomenon or a different commitment you know and to be clear when I say that

Hustrell is the father of 20th century phenomenology not all phenomenologists abided Husseril's thought or were in agreement with it or viewed it even as particularly worthwhile but he is the

but they were all in dialogue with him and his body of work you know and pretty much every even to this day I mean the mainstream academic culture, the EU is literal garbage

but there are still serious guys writing about history, writing about you know, I'm talking about like in the revisionist camp there are still serious guys writing about political theory um you know and all these

all of these people you know in this it's um hustral's concepts and his his particular phenomenological way of thinking touches and concerns all this stuff okay and even you know you read i mean there's no idea is important too but you know obviously the concepts that Heidi are improved upon, in my opinion, or nevertheless, you know, devised by Husterole in the form we're talking about, you know, if you're talking about AI,

if you're talking about neuroscience, if you're talking about the nature of thought, you're talking about consciousness and what it is. And whether it's contingent upon a material, configuration or if it exists independent of matter all of this stuff relates to Husserl

and his systemic paradigms. You know, he really was a giant of philosophy and and this kind of

high concept thinking. And to a lesser degree in America, I mean, America is always kind of on its own program. And American academic culture is very strange. You know, even the minority within mainstream

academic dean who are producing valuable stuff that's intellectually rigorous and serious. and isn't you know um propaganda oriented it's very it's almost uh it's almost obsessively oriented towards the analytic uh tradition um it it it you know even even people who don't have an ethical objection to this kind of material they go out of their way to avoid it it's you know i mean that that's a whole other discussion but even so the way these questions are framed

owe to phenomenological populates that are framed by the you know theoretical body of work

devised and articulated by Hustral um You know, and that was, to clarify some of what Hustral, particularly the stuff he was writing towards the end of his life. And, you know, even, even the crisis of European civilization was well underway. by 1848, but it truly reached Zenith in 1914, obviously. And one of the reasons why the crisis emerged

most sharply in Weimar, where there was just, no reconciliation possible between the factions of what had been the fractured cultural organism is because

the epistemic priors that informed deliberate contemplation and intellectual activity, even that which was

oriented towards a hard positivist sort of methodology or ethic, those sort of conceptual poll stars or framing devices

have been totally corrupted. You know, and they were in separable from these anxieties and existential realities that were totally disrupting people's lives. So it was impossible for any kind of higher telos to be identified within at the point of contemplation. You know, it'd be like, like an imperfect metaphor, like it'd be like trying to work out

complex math problems, like, while you're under artillery fire. You know, you can't truly elevate. your your conceptual activity beyond immediate

crisis modalities when you're in the midst of life and death challenges every waking hour you know and even such that

you know certain level of concrete knowledge could be taken from the sciences as they then existed. It didn't really matter because

this wasn't being purposed and directed towards elevating European man and resolving the crisis and nihilism. These things are just being purposed to deal with, you know, immediate exigencies and, and mortal crises relating to this kind of permanent emergency, you know, so that, not only did that not solve the problem, it arguably made it worse.

You know, and that's why World War I became such a metaphor for the failure of progress and the entire progressivist mindset, because all this high technology in a very punctuated and raw sense that supposedly was going to do things, you know, like liberate man from the burdens of labor and it was going to create plenty. It was being used to, like, systematically slaughter people, you know, and it wasn't even doing that in an efficient way. I mean, it was very efficient at creating corpses, but it was creating stalemates in the battle space.

It's not even, like, it was, you know, sparing attrition and things by, you know, rapidly bringing hostilities to conclusion or something, you know, and this is why this fundamental doubt about the ability to ascribe some sort of rationality, some sort of positivist rationality to, you know, these processes and these challenges amidst the crisis and nihilism. That's a point that, like, Nietzsche and Vapor and even, like, Marx, like, made that point, too. You know, and obviously, like, all three men, radically different as they were, what they posited as the solution. was totally at odds of what Hustral would have considered to be correct,

but they were in agreement about the ontological reality of things. You know, and that's really interesting because it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, um, Weber, it was Marx, it was later Heidegger, who agreed with these core premises. you know, that framed Hustrell's entire system of thought. It wasn't the, it wasn't these empiricists of these people who were, you know, viewed themselves as the heirs, the, you know, Kant and Hume, who were taking on this perspective, even though in supervisual terms, one would think that those of the people like most positively

disposed but again I mean that's why that's why Marx and Nietzsche are important whatever their shortcomings and however

misguided you know they were in their account of the human being and things, you know, they, they were, they understood the spirit of the age and the epoch in, in a way that most didn't. And, I mean, that, that's really the mark of, uh, of, of, of, a great political theorist. You know, it's not, I mean, I mean, yeah, there's some, there's people, in my opinion, like,

bentham who most of what they produce is this literal garbage but that's the exception you know like I said even the reason I'm trying to study Marx is it's not

it goes out saying that you know Marx embodied the the spirit of the age and the entire 20th century was this violent dialogue with Mars

you know and that I mean that speaks for itself it's got it's incidental that you know he was a godless radical

you know that that's the whole point you know that's what that's what this that's what the zeitgeist was um you know and it's uh and to clarify

I want to when the time I got left I want to say at least a little bit about Heidegger specifically, and we'll segue into a discussion of Heidegger. In coming days and weeks, you know, and Heidegger, this isn't just pedantic stuff, Heidegger's phenomenology. the very word for the term phenomenology, it's a portmanteau. Is that the right term? Is a portmanteau, like, two words smack together?

Is that what a portmanteau is? I'm trying to remember. I haven't heard that term in Portmanteau is blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others, for example, motor and hotel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So phenomenology is a portmanteau

of phenomenon and logos. Okay. What it actually translates to is that that which reveals itself. You'll see it

you'll see it translated as that which is shown or that which is observable. That's not what it means. This is important. It's that which shows itself or is revealed. And in Heidegarian terms, this is the essence of sensory experience. You know, is objects and subject matter revealing itself. you know um so heidegger's view of logos is that it's tantamount to a kind of discourse with the human mind you know and the discrete mind of the beholder as a sort of mediator

between you know subject and object and the senses to which it is being a subject to which it is being revealed, you know, and Heidegger, intentionality and categorical intuition to Heidegger is an essential aspect of the process. So there's not any true a priori positivism. You know, because that removes the reality of the situatedness of the discrete human mind from the equation, you know, because mental activity is always about something. It's never just this neutral interpretive function that's not. encumbered by symbolic psychological phenomenon and discrete aspects of, you know, the idiosyncratic mind. You know, and this is why Heidegger. is a

hermeneutics are the basis of his you know anti-positive is sensibility if we can think of it in that way I don't there's someone who would disagree but I'll I stand

by that assessment you know there's there's always a sort of give and take and you know um it's this kind of phenomenology to

Haider is kind of this this broadest possible epistemological process you know and how that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as objectively rational assessments but the process of thought

is being it's literally dicing their being you know and to be in the world is to be what you are you can't take your mind or your perception outside of that their being and neutralize those essential characteristics and somehow do away with hermeneutics and intentionally thinking about this subject or object before you or that you've sought out.

So, this this kind of higher state of telos that Hussler will consider to be you know, Western man's salvation from the

crisis of nihilism that's simply not possible. You know, it's not even It's not even that Heidegger was condemning this because it didn't have the potential for palaninesis or whatever. I mean, that might be true too, but that wasn't a Heidegger's objection. It was that this is a mischaracterization of, you know, ontological things. You know, human beings can't be something they're

not. So suggesting that this is possible is just a kind of counterfactual thought experiment. Which if it was presented

that way, might have some merit. Like, obviously, John Rawls, I mean, Rawls didn't have merit. Rawls was a shithead. But those kinds of thought experiments can have merit. Or maybe like Hobbs, a better example. Okay, but it wasn't, but

the whole point was, is that it wasn't being presented as that. It was being presented as a potentiality. You know, and that's, that's, they're in the problem wise. Um,

you know, in the and the real the real point of contention I can't remember where I read or saw this but it's not but it's not my

concept you know basically the point at which like phenomenology to Heidegger is the point at which the human mind engages with the subject and all of that entails

you know axiomatically and essentially the Husserol this can somehow supposedly through teleological cultivation

this can become some sort of fixed point of reference whereby everything that moment and everything subsequent can be unencumbered you know by um by um conceptual biases you know i think of it as kind of a

a kind of a a sort of state of pure inquiry it's almost Kantian um it's sort of uh and if like this and if if if this was presented again like Haas categorical imperative or like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence that would totally change things but that's not what is being positive this is being presented as an active potentiality aspirational as it may be you know and that um you know to be you know to be clear too and I'll wrap up with this hustle wasn't saying he wasn't trying to affirm

reason as this is this ultimate good in and of itself he really was i mean however much you can criticize his account of ontological things he really was fundamentally concerned with human beings and the process by which human beings engage with the world And he had a grave concern for, um, the human organism and the human soul, I believe, because otherwise, you know, what would be the point of his, um, his, um, emphases. You know, like I said, at the start of this discussion, you can't really escape from the fact that Hustral was very theologically oriented. You know, and, you know, the implications for political theory. are complicated, but the fact that they're there should be pretty clear. You know, and that's why I include Husserl in this series.

But also, you know, like I said, I think if there's a single philosopher, and it's probably, I'm not, I'm a heritage American, like reformed prod i i'm not a guy like yaki who's kind of you know who i i think was spiritually european frankly like a lot of roman catholics are and i mean yaki was an irishman um i'm not somebody who feels like spiritually european at all i'm uh very much uh but um so it probably sounds strange to people that i kind of view heidegger and haigel as as the intellectual foundation of a partisan commitment but um you know i it's essentially understand haigel and heidegger and

the intellectual traditions that, you know, they emerged from if you want to understand what we're doing, or at least what, you know, me and my cadre are trying to accomplish. So I try to always tie this back to praxis or, you know, practical aspects as well. I mean, I'm all for learning about things to better yourself, but at the end of the day, political subject matter needs to be front and center. And political subject matter without praxis is not a great use of time because all of us have

limited time left on this planet. but yeah i'm going to stop there man all right pick it up on the next episode um head on over to thomas's substack real thomas seven seven seven seven dot substack.com and check the show notes in on this and there will be links to every way that you can support thomas and find the rest of his work and all of his work so um yeah always appreciate it thomas thank you very Very much. Yeah, thank you, Pete. What to welcome, everyone.

Back to the Pete Cagnonez show. Thomas is here, and we are going to continue continental philosophy. So how are you doing, Thomas? How was Thanksgiving? It was fine. See, I'm observing the day of the bird. It was nice, man. I like Thanksgiving.

And I met some of the fellas downtown on Wednesday night. And that was great. One of my comrades here, he's a Muay Thai fighter. Like, he lived in Thailand and stuff. I mean, he's white, but, you know, he's a serious competitor in boxing in Muay Thai. You know, so I mean, I'm old now, but, you know, I was always a huge fan of the fight game. And he tends bar at a place on the Russian Division. So, like, his, he's being of family.

like his family came out and his wife who's a real peach and yeah we we hung out and got to rip it up a bit it was nice and then yesterday i'd show with my dad and i kind of made the rounds and spread holiday cheer with my magic bags that's what i do on holidays you know that's that's awesome man that's awesome glad it was glad it worked out yeah it was all right but i think an unsung cultural theorist and philosophy assigned figure, who was a real giant, was Wolfgang Smith. Interestingly, a lot of younger people became aware of them in the YouTube era, because he only died a couple of years back, and he was in his 90s, but he's one of these guys, like Kissinger was, who had all his marbles into advanced age, and he was still writing when he was 92 or something. But he was a huge critic of the scientific perspective.

what he postulated, dovetailed a lot with a lot of figures in that traditionalist school, but he was not of that. He was very distinct from that body of thought. He was, he was, it was Viennese by birth, but he moved to America, I think in late adolescence. He was an aerospace engineer. He worked for a bell aircraft, and to be clear, before the days, and McDonald-Douglas and general dynamics, and all these, kind of giants of the Cold War and

high-tech weapons platforms. Bell Aircraft was king. They developed the first super hypersonic multi-role aircraft prototype. And Wolfgang Smith, he taught at Purdue. He taught advanced physics. And he wrote

prolifically in the problem of atmospheric re-entry, which was a major engineering concern in the early Cold War obviously this had

basic implications for the space program. It ought to devise an engineer re-entry vehicles that wouldn't kill the occupants. But you know, there's a strategic application

too. Not just in terms of intercontinental platforms. that obviously trail on a ballistic trajectory. But the zenith really of that mode of strategic nuclear technology is orbital bombardment. So even as far back to the 50s, even when manned bomber aircraft or the primary platform or strategic delivery mechanism of the most powerful nuclear weapons.

It was understood in the future that being able to assault from orbit, which would defeat early warning and overwhelming countermeasures. It was clear that that was the way to accomplish a splendid first strike capability. And obviously, and that's what the Space Shuttle ultimately was. It wasn't, the Soviets freaked out about it because clearly there was a, deployment mechanism for orbital strike platforms. But my point being

Wolfgang Smith, he wasn't just some theologian and he wasn't some coistered philosopher. I mean, there's nothing wrong with being those things, but this gave him an innate credibility because the man was a scientist, he was a high-level scientist, he was also an engineer, people couldn't

dismiss him and say, well, this is some man of religion who just has an axe to grind with the scientific establishment. They couldn't say, well, he's some academic philosopher. He doesn't understand science. He understood science better than virtually anybody he was criticizing. Okay. And he was very much an ally of people in the 20th century who were resisting the calculated assault and religiosity. And then after the Cold War, he made the point, he made a case for ecumenicalism. And I do too. As

Sometimes I like Renee Ginoon, you know, Orthodox, Catholics, reformed people like myself, pious Muslims, we need to look on our differences and resist the tyranny of Zionism, as well as the scourge of secularism, which is an assault on the assault on the human being. their offices of a you know a humanist concern but so smith was that basically the way to understand him is that a hero he was a philosophy of science um scholar but he wrote critical treatments of the science of what he called scientism his starting point was that what he called Scientism, it does away with the fact-value distinction. You know, facts and the interpretation of facts are not synonymous. And subjectively, facts are always associated with some kind of interpretation of this value-oriented. You know, so when we're talking about scientism, we're not talking about perspectives that value the scientific method or something.

something. And we're not talking about some Luddite sensibility that use science is bad. Your technology is deleterious to human culture. I mean, there's a case that you made for those things. It's not what Smith was talking about. You know, it made the point that when we say science, we're talking about two disparate factors. We're talking about with positive findings, which are articulable facts that can be falsified and are neutral. in their interpretation as presented, but we're also talking about an underlying philosophy and the way in which these discoveries

and their implications are framed and discussed. You know, so when we're talking about science as affiliated with some sort of political regime of any kind, it's never some sort of purely empirical enterprise as it claims that it is. There's epistemic priors and ontological assumptions and moral claims that always underlie it. You know, I want one good example,

I mean, it looks like the Human Genome Project, okay? You get these goofs in the, in Academe. They'll go out of their way to talk about population genetics and, you know, human biodiversity, you know, this has all these incredible implications for medical research, which it does. But now we'll turn around and insist, but this means, this doesn't mean there are racial differences.

But you can't, that's Orwellian, literally. holding like two totally contradictory posthalids in your mind and refusing to acknowledge that one repudiates the other. You know, these aren't serious people. A lot of things that they propose are quite literally insane.

Yet, yet this has become sort of the religion of officialdom. You know, um, most recently it was on display with the COVID nonsense. You know, people in authority demanding

under pain of any number of punitive sanctions that you do insane things that even a child would recognize are insane yet insisting that it's because of science you simply must abide this you know there's this reflexive thoughtlessness to it that these people that have the gall

to turn around and say characterizes religion in their mind you know but and the problem with this is too is that people are inundated from a young age with these foundational postulates that again are concept that are conceptually prejudiced towards a discrete ideological coding but sort of by osmosis they internalize that you know this this is just part and parcel of a scientific education you know and they

almost subconsciously internalize the lie that this can't possibly be partisan or driven by politically motivated concerns you know and really from the enlightenment onward the scientists themselves they've refused

to even acknowledge that this exists you know Einstein and Heisenberg were both they both stand out because they did acknowledge that Einstein really kind of sold out everything Einstein was morally a good

man, but that's a different thing. But he wasn't a fraud in the way that a lot of these scientists are. And obviously, Heisenberg was a great man in all kinds of ways. But, you know, Heisenberg openly acknowledged that there is such a thing as a, as a, it's a, it's an ideology, you know. But, uh, you know, the problem is too that scientism what it draws upon it draws upon a valid set of postulates and it it draws upon an exceptionally utile methodology that does produce results but then it bastardizes those results

and suggests that there's some total theory of human existence you know so it's it's a lot easier to robust something that's abjectly farcical that they can't draw upon a body of knowledge that has actual merit you know but again um the problem here isn't what actual scientific methodology the problem is with the framing and interpretation of you know the data that that methodology yields and also i'll get into this in a minute but i want to get ahead of myself there's essential pillars of the science of the scientism perspective that are truly fallacious

but they superficially present some of these ideas as scientifically valid and methodologically rigorous when they're not so it gets assimilated into a broader pastiche of rigorous incredible science that then can't be extricated

so this is very very confusing especially to people you know, again, we've been availed at this sort of subliminal conditioning through the entirety of their education, you know, and that was some of this whole point that, you know, scientific belief is an oxymoron, and it's become a secular theology. Science isn't about beliefs. It's not about trusting things. You know, a good scientist is part of his mandate as a researcher is to rebut things that he previously believed to be factual. But the scientific stale doesn't do that. What they'll do is they'll cling to outmoded structures. and theories that have in fact been falsified,

they'll insist that they're true, they'll insist that these things are factually coded when in reality they're philosophic opinions being passed off as scientific truth, you know, and when challenged, there'll be this kind of a fuscatory rationale where they point to things that have been proven and claim that if you don't accept these dubious

philosophical postulates, you're somehow rejecting science in absolute terms. You know, it's a very false dichotomy, and it's very dishonest. You know, and the problem is, too, you get a lot of mediocris who, owing to, you know, sometimes even the most dubious, association with a highly respected and admired the sector of the scientific community. Like, take, you know, a guy like Fauci, you know, people will associate this guy in his title. This guy was a mediocrity and a nobody in a liar.

And, you know, they'll associate him with, you know, some doctor who, like, helped their mom overcome cancer or some, or some surgeon who's world-renowned because, you know, he devised some incredible technique. You know, it really has kind of taken on the trap. A guy with doctor in front of his name or a guy in a lab coat who's got credentials from MIT. It's like a man in a priest's collar in the Middle Ages. You know, it really is. It reminds me back in the 90s when David Letterman was still on the air, he had Edward Bernays on. And Edward Bernays made him call him doctor and then he explained why he called why he made dave call him doctor because it now everybody thinks i'm an expert on something yeah yeah exactly and it think it shouldn't be like that

you know um but unfortunately i mean people are hardwired to i mean uh humans are human psychology is It's highly symbolic. I think that's indisputable. And people have this need to seek out authoritative structures and personages, you know, both in concrete terms and in abstract and conceptual terms. And especially when you consider a lot of these punctuated crises of modernity of a psychological and social and spiritual nature, if you'll allow that descriptor,

if people look for a new priestly cast you know that they do okay even otherwise sensible people I see it all the time you know and like I said

I'm sorry to keep going back to the COVID thing like some cheap polemicists but I that's the that's the best case and point in recent memory of this kind of mass hysteria owing to acclaim cloaked

in you know a veneer of science when it's nothing of the sort you know it's it's a it's an ideological and philosophical imperative being presented as something that it's not but um the uh smith talked about two aspects of of scientism and then you went on to talk about three pillars of these aspects that constitute in broad strokes the the core and essential elements of this

perspective one of these fundamental aspects is what he called universal mechanism or what he thought of as the axiom of physical determinism which is the tenet that the external universe

consists exclusively of matter and the motion and action within this constellation of matter is determined exclusively by the discrete interaction of its parts and given the configuration of this physical universe and the state of the matter that constitutes it the science and ideology essentially posits that once the physical laws that govern

this mechanism can be determined in principle the future revolution and development of the entire universe that are the most discreet minute detail can be predicted or calculated all uncertainty

can be eradicated by deciphering the physical properties of the universal mechanism. Okay, so in this way, the Enlightenment perspective, which is the basis of scientism, is that the cosmos is a kind of gigantic clockwork, you know, where all these discrete parts interact with other parts and they determine the movement of the whole. whole and this idea began to take shape

in the 16th century you know and Newtonian physics which can point to a tremendous litany of accomplishment like don't get me wrong and Newton himself also was something of a crank

and he had this sort of petulant need to assail a classical and thomist notions of matter and the essence of physics. You know, the traditional view, obviously, is that the natural state of objects is to be at a rest. Like, how can objects naturally be in motion and tend to remain in motion without being acted upon that doesn't make any sense that's one example you know um this perspective a guy named herman von helenholz he was one of the leading uh kind of early progressive era intellectuals and he was a leading scientist and no game wrong he was re-accomplished

but he openly stated that the final goal quote the final goal of all natural science is to reduce itself to mechanics now interestingly I'm admittedly a very much a layman like astronomy and stuff but I you know I I'm I don't know about physics and things you know I I consume a lot of podcasts and

magazine content related to astronomy but I don't know any more than anybody else does, to be clear. But what I do know, and this has become a big deal, and the guy who does the event Horizon podcast, which is

dope, he gets into this a lot. The advent of quantum theory really dramatically changed things. And it It completely screwed up this kind of traditional Newtonian perspective because the new physics, as it was called, is not compatible with this mechanistic premise, you know, because it's totally indeterminate. But despite the fact of quantum indeterminism, you still have this kind of community of the, you know, the scientific community, continuing to insist on what amounts. like the Newtonian mechanistic tenant. You know, that's one example of

this kind of sensibility among these people of like let nothing ever change. You know, and we'll return to this because it becomes important in terms of what Einstein's significance was as, you know, something of an outlier

as regards you know, people being willing to abide the ideology of scienceism. Because, like I said, like, qualifiedly, I praise Einstein, but he, you know, he very much was heterodox in his thinking. And he wasn't a fraud in this way, like a lot of his peers were and successes are. The second basic tenet of the perspective of scientism is described Wolfgang Smith as physical reductionism. what he means by that is the fact that this perspective

it hinges upon an epistemic prior which ironically is really an idealist postulate this perspective claims that all sensory perception terminates not in an external object as it actually is and as we experience it, but at some sort of subjective representation of some kind that's intrinsically corrupted by the inadequacy of human senses to perceive reality. So to overly simplify it for a layman like me,

you know, looking at a red apple, the way in which I perceive it or any man or woman perceives it, is, you know, somehow tragically and incorrigibly limited, you know, we need a scientist to explain to us, like, what the constituent elements are of this apple, you know, and what it actually is, because otherwise we're just mired in ignorance, you know, and without, uh, without, without literally the enlightening, perspective of these people who, you know, constitute the scientific priesthood and possess the tools and intellect to, you know, wield this methodology, you know, we, we, we, we, we, we can't possibly determine the actual essence and nature of things, you know, and that's, that's really the enduring legacy of cartisanism. They cart contributed a huge amount to mathematics, including

theoretical mathematics of which I have no understanding at all. But what I just described as the Cartesian element that constitutes a core philosophical foundation of modern scientism. Not science, scientism. They're going to be clear. I don't want a bunch of people thinking of some what I hate science. I'm not talking about that. And neither is neither was Smith. He's dead now. You know, so this constitutes Alfred North Whitehead, who was actually a major critic of what was then the scientific perspective, you know, in his lifetime, he referred to this as the Cartesian bifurcation, you know, which he said was deleterious to reason, practical reason, and thus morality, and those all the kind of things that hold, you know, you know,

the intellectual side of human culture together because what it essentially is is this concerted attack on the common intuition of man and it's equally at odds with you know what is kind of the western canon of philosophical traditions not just tomism but you know the Aristotelian perspective

and you know the pre-socratic going better the pre-Socratics even you know and this is a fundamental what Wolfgang Smith called it like artisan bifurcation Wolfgang Smith considered to be a fundamental

plank of physics you know or a fundamental core aspect of the scientific worldview in terms of how common people are expected to interpret physics

you know it's something that's just totally beyond them and can only be interpreted by you know the the scientific priesthood um and what whitehead was talking about and uh working smith came back to whitehead again and again he was a guy he really respected but why this is so destructive is because it it represents It represented and represents a relinquishing of dominion over the physical world by religious authorities, but also by anybody but, you know, the self-enointed scientific community. You know, Smith's contention was that religion goes astray the moment it relinquishes what it justly, it's rights that it has. over the natural domain and, you know, the attendant morality and philosophical orientation that encompasses that, that now has been occupied by science.

You know, the contemporary crisis of faith in his estimation and the ongoing assault and Christianity in Western society, he believed this was only possible, Smith believe it's only possible because this had been openly seated to the scientists you know and that's really

that's really almost unfathomable when you think about it you know a priest who spent his life studying philosophy and you know who is scientifically literate declaring that well he's not he's not going to

way in on um you know questions relating to the the cosmos because that that's for the scientists to decide that that's preposterous you know um well gang smith one of his books opens a quote by a guy named theodore rostchick science is the religion of, you know, the postmodern West because most people, in his words, with any living, can't with any convictions see around it. You know, everything in your environment, every sort of intellectual endeavor relating to ontological or epistemological things, people only capable of thinking of these things in the terms established by scientific authorities and that is true um the only way people can understand the natural world

in any other way is if they have some sort of religious education you know and and going to some mega church now and again or going to some you know non-denominational milk toast church or some guy like joel ostene basically talks about self-help you know but and and and occasionally mentions Jesus Christ, it's not adequate. You know, people aren't equipped with the intellectual tools to contemplate competing perspectives or even conceptualize them. And I believe, and I'm obviously, I can't prove this, but people need to have that exposure and conditioning at a young age. You can't one day at 45 wake up and say, you know, I'm going to start reading Calvin's Institute. I'm going to start reading, you know, the sum of theologica on, like, going to mass or, you know, or going to, you know, a serious reform church and just somehow, like, empty out my mind and heart of the sort of conceptual biases.

I mean, yeah, intellectually, people might understand that, you know, okay, there's problems with this dominant perspective, but they're not really going to develop an instinct for it, I don't think. but again, that's probably pretty subjective, but I do believe that to be true. You know, the, and also, too, the, you know, people, even people who come to reject this kind of, the scientism of the regime, and, but they don't, have any proper spiritual education they're just going to become nihilistic because they're

just going to say that well you know what i'm being told doesn't accord with physical reality you know it certainly doesn't accord to spiritual reality that means everybody's lying to me and you know the the system i live under is is is based upon you know false postulates you know but if there's nothing to fill that void you know you people basically come just wallow in despair where they become totally fixated on hedonic distractions and i mean so that's the other side of it too i mean it's not just a question of disabusing people of this miseducation it's the fact that it's uh you know destructive of the human spirit and the cultural learning that can mitigate that deterioration of the basic dignity of the human being um you know um smith cited a guy named

Jean Barrella a lot, who I didn't, I'd never heard of him until I started reading Smith, which probably exposed some of the gaps in my philosophical education. But he said, quote, the truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted by the most formidable problem where religion can encounter the scientific disappearance of the universe of symbolic forms, which enable it to express and manifest itself. That is to say, which permit it to exist. The destruction has been affected by Galilean physics, not as one generally claims, because it's the private man of a central position,

which for St. Thomas Aquinas is cosmologically the least noble and the lowest, but because it reduces bodies, material substance, to the purely geometric. Thus making it at one stroke scientifically impossible, or devoid of meaning that the world can serve as a medium for the manifestation of God what Borrella called theophanic capacity

is thus denied in absolute terms now fundamental the Wolfgang Smith's paradigm is what he called the three presiding paradigms of scientism

that encompass and frame all conceptual modalities within the postmodern West, reigning as the scientific perspective does. The first of these is the new. Newtonian, which, again, defines the world and the cosmos as this clockwork universe. What exists is bare matter, the parts of which are only animate, only the forces of attraction or repulsion, and that the movement of the whole, of the entirety of the cosmos is determined by the disposition of these discrete parts.

Unlike the other two presiding paradigms that we're going to get into that Wolfgang Smith identifies, the success, as it were, or the enduring persuasive power, the Newtonian perspective, that actually makes sense in a way that the other is dumb. because dubious as core aspects of the Newtonian philosophy and it is a philosophy are

that Newtonian theories have had spectacular successes that are unprecedented in my opinion relative to any other you know individualated

school of physical science um what really put newton on the map was the publication of a what's called colloquially the principia the full title translated is natural philosophy and principles and mathematics a philosopher sophia naturalis principia matamatica really from the seven century until the early 20th century it was regarded not just as a framework or the paradigm of physics but it was literally viewed as like the the king james bible of natural science almost like some sort of master code for understanding everything about physical matter you know from the most prosaic understanding of you know magnetic retraction to the uh movements of astronomical objects and everything in between you know

and anything that's that dominant in terms of its ability to frame conceptual processes it's going to exceed the boundaries of you know mere mechanics or mere physical science is it's going to become for lack of a more dignified way to phrase it a theory of everything and I mean make a mistake I agree with Michael Jones I believe that was I believe that was Newton's intent you know um now what happened however was

the emergence of quantum physics again you know that did real damage the Newtonian perspective you know but there was something of a there's something of a synthesis after Einstein's revolutionary proposals

which did break fundamentally with Newtonian conceptions but there was a return I don't fully understand all this and also I'm not going to bore people with the essence I do understand there was something of a return

to the fundamentals of Newtonian physics okay even even into the atomic age okay and to this day and this is fascinating to me because I'm kind of a space F-A-G, I'll be like a layman. You know, one of the reasons the Webb Telescope

and these deep-field telescopes generally are such a big deal, they're cutting to pieces the entire theory of Big Bang cosmology, but the scientific community just won't accept it. you know, they'll resort to these tortured and laughably, you know, unprovable claims and tautological, um, potulists to try and shore up and sustain, you know, uh, what amounts to a totally obsolete and speculative understanding of cosmology. But increasingly, that's not possible. That's another thing that the internet is facilitating is breaking the bully pulpit of the scientific community.

But, you know, I, the last kind of gasp of the Newtonian perspective is this cosmological theory of everything that's going to be done by the end of this century. And it's going to be because of discoveries yielded by things like the web telescope. I stand by that assertion. I know there's probably guys watching this. We're going to, like, chuckle or get mad and say, well, you're not a scientist. You don't know shit. I stand by that postulate.

You wait and see. Moving on, the second aspect of the three paradigms is Darwinism. Okay? Darwinism is the weakest of the reigning conceptual paradigmatic aspects of scientists. Wolfgang Smith described Darwinism as kind of the opposite of the Newtonian perspective. Because Darwinism has been a failure from the start. It's literally on the level of Lysenkoism. It's not science.

It's not biology. It's tautological assertions, speculation, conjecture. You know, it really is kind of the anglophone parallel to Soviet Lysenkoism. Smith contends that not only is Darwinist claims about about evolution incorrect but he said it's worthless as a biological

paradigm this is not a scientific theory it's literally an ideological claim masquerading in scientific garb and interestingly Carl Popper who got nothing nice to say about he made a big deal about that and that guy was an atheist Jew.

Like, what does that tell you? Okay, it remains amazing to me. People act like Darwinism is science and anyone doesn't accept that. It's some holy roller who doesn't believe in dinosaurs. I've got to believe they don't understand

what Darwinism actually is. You know, nobody takes this seriously. Who isn't a blithering idiot? There isn't, you know, grossly intellectually dishonest and utilizing this paradigm to prop up a conceptual model that they

profit from personally and professionally. Now, Louis Smith's core objection, well, Darwin claimed that existing species derived from one of our primitive ancestors through chains of linear

descent over millions of years. Now, he never explained by what means this transformation from primitive to differentiated comes about or what that even means and truly you know

explicatory terms but what is clear to anybody who's right origin of species is a dark you can see a revolution as a gradual process involving countless intermediary forms that's indisputable

yet somehow none of these appear in the fossil record apart from a handful of highly dubious specimens many of which have been discredited as representative of the aforementioned phenomenon these intermediary types that should be legion are nowhere to be found

this is now generally admitted even by scientists who believe in some process of evolution Stephen j gould you know who was this big progress who is and he's still alive you know he was this big progressive anti-racist type you know not exactly a guy who puts scientific rigor atop his priorities he stipulated that orthodox darwinism is basically worthless you know I mean, what does that tell you? You got Steven J. Gould, you got Carl Popper. You got people like this saying, I'm not going to cite Darwin in any direct capacity

because that would, you know, subject me, at best, it would subject me to kind of casual ridicule by my peers. At worst, it would shoot to pieces, everything that I'm going to claim subsequently. You know, I'm not just reserving to hyperbole. nobody takes this shit seriously except maybe I'm like Reddit or something. You know, you're expected

to accept this as some absolute tenet of a of a, you know, of a biology and existence. It's

quite literally insane. Philip Johnson he's kind of forgotten now in 1991 he wrote a book i think it was called it was called darwin on trial and johnson he was a law professor okay he was at berkeley and uh he wasn't some holy roller i think he was uh he might have been a soft atheist but he was at least an agnostic He is also the father of intelligent design. That's what these frauds and these cretons like Dawkins branded him as,

which, I mean, obviously, they were trying to do so in a punitive way, but that's not entirely inaccurate. But he was famous for the quote, he said in this book that he wrote, quote, Darwinism apparently passed the fossil test, but only because it was not allowed to fail. Now, his book Darwin on trial, he wrote it in response.

It was this famous Supreme Court case from the 80s. It was in 1997, I believe. There's some law students watching, and I'm wrong on that. Feel free to correct me in the comments, whatever. But there's this case called Edwards v. Aguilar. And I think it was from Louisiana, but it involved one of these challenges

that was common in a lot of Southern parishes to the exclusive teaching of Darwinist theory as the only perspective on human origins and they wanted there to be equal time

given to other perspectives including things related to intelligent design now what Johnson came across, he noticed this amicus curie brief that was filed by a National Academy of Sciences and it basically defined science in such a way that it was impossible to dispute the claims

the scientific establishment. Like with this NES, MECIS curie brief proposed in the Supreme Court was that, well, what public schools need to do is they need to adopt a rule precluding what they called or what their lawyers called, quote, negative argumentation and the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools.

So basically, they wanted it to be forbidden for anybody to present the reasonable doubts for all practical purposes around Darwinist theory such that you know basically you could only

present competing perspectives that were signed off on by some arbitrary quorum of scientific authorities and it was going to be de facto illegal to criticize Darwinism in a classroom

by anything other than an absolute proving up according to whatever evidentiary standard of a competing perspective on its own merits in a way that rebuts Darwinism by being more persuasive. Like simply pointing out things like the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record, that would not be allowed. You know, pointing out that Darwinism isn't a true science. scientific law, as it were, you know, it's basically a postulate, a theoretical postulate, that would not be allowed. You know, so again, this is this censorship masquerading as, well, no, we need to be scientifically rigorous or people are not going to get the education they deserve. And like Johnson found this somewhat shocking, you know, and again, there's like some, there's some like Berkeley liberal, you know, like all these guys that Wolfgang Smith has ticked off. And his main critique of Darwin, which was an essay, which later became incorporated into one of his books,

these guys are like Jewish atheists, like Berkeley liberals, guys like Carl Popper. You know, these are not a bunch of Southern Baptists or, you know, right-wingers or something. You know, the fact is that this doesn't have legs to stand on. you know the uh one of uh i can't remember who said it um it might have actually impoper himself you know darwin's great idea obviously other than the fact that nature produces small random mutations which then you know are passed on to the genetic line in accordance with survival of the fittest like that

phrase itself is a tautology it's the quote of saying the rich have lots of money you know I mean you know and it's it's a definition of an unfalsifiable claim and thus by definition

it's unscientific you know there's um there's a really interesting around the time when ID intelligence design challenges to the

kind of new atheist community, which interestingly like nobody, it's just considered cringing out. Like nobody invokes Dawkins or or Chrissy Bitchens or any of these fools. But when that was

you know, kind of kind of in pop science journals and stuff and in mass media when that kind of thing was popular, There was a quorum of ID proponents for also mathematicians. They relied on the work and part of this guy named D.S. Ulam.

And here's the example, he's the case of a human eye. You know, and Darwin telling us, I mean, the human eye is unimaginably, almost unfathomably complex. So, I mean, to accept the Darwinian paradigm, you've got to accept that this was accidentally formed. through a series of minute mutations. D.S.U. You calculated the number of mutations required to produce a structure of that kind is of such a magnitude

that even in a time frame measuring billions upon billions of years. The likelihood of that occurrence is so astronomically small, it's laughable. You know, the Smith concludes

with a quote from Ernst and Mayer who was known as one of those kind of committed orthodox Darwinists, like his, this was this big response to these challenges. Quote, somehow or other, by adjusting these figures, we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred. That was this big rebuttal. You know, I mean, I know, I know guys who spend their days like gluing their ass to bar stools who could come up with something better than that and this guy this guy was a

scientific authority you know um the final paradigm of this sort of core trifecta is what smith called the copernican paradigm and uh it has really little to do with it with Gopernigus himself, but what it involves, and again, a lot of this is like outside of my wheelhouse, but field equation, Einstein's field equations plus astronomical data,

it doesn't suffice to determine an account for the total structure of the universe and the indeterminate nature of it. Now, of course, after Einstein scientists realized

that they had to tweak what had been the consensus relating to spatial uniformity and things and the distribution of matter how the average density of matter

is defined what we can assume to be constant throughout space you know how matter behaves in a sufficiently large scale

how matter behaves at the quantum level under observation I mean really crazy stuff you know that shot to pieces this sort of static perspective

there was a guy named Herman Bondi who referred to these assumptions that you know scientists who had difficulty reconciling these theories refused to abandon with the new physics. You refer to this as the Copernican principle.

You know, even though Copernicus, I always knew nothing about the controversies that are than a foot, you know, stuff relating to, you know, stellar matter or whatever. But, you know, it, um, Bondi, it strikes me as something like an inside joke among theoretical physicists and astronomers about how the subject matter in total, you know, somehow, uh, represents the complete repudiation of geocentureism. We don't fully understand it. But Bondi dubbed it the Copernican principles. That's what it became. Um, you know, and it, uh, you know, and it, uh, so this idea went from space in the cosmos

being this sort of clockwork mechanism you know to space being defined as a void of structure and design but subject to localized fluctuations from some sort of average density

of astronomical objects not unlike as I understand it or as I gleaned from Smith molecular fluctuations within a gas which although might remain imperceptible without the aid of high-tech instruments

some of which haven't even been devised yet, you just need to accept this because this is really the only way that, you know, these sort of grand theories of cosmology makes sense. I mean, that's literally what it is. This isn't based on positive findings or proven facts. It's a set of assumptions that basically these leading lights in theoretical physics and astronomy claim, well, this is just what we have to account for, you know, for the theory. theory to make sense. So it's, it's an acceptable supposition. Like, well, there you're a dark matter. You know, it's like, over the equation doesn't make sense. There's, you know, there's not,

there's not adequate matter calculable, you know, for this to make sense. Well, there's this thing called dark matter, which isn't detectable, but you just got to believe that it exists. You know, it, um, there's something really amateur, amateurish about it. Um, you know, the, uh, And, I mean, there's even observable observational facts that are being rejected, you know, and especially, I mean, it's on display in the case of the web telescope and other things. I guess a big controversy of the last 30, 40 years. There's galaxies that have been identified. supposedly by close to

a billion light years but given what was supposedly the low relative velocities between galaxies it would take some inconceivably long time for the configuration

at these distances of these galaxies to exist based upon current, like, reigning cosmological theory. It would take something like 10 times longer than the estimated age of the entire universe. You know, and there seems to be not nearly enough matter to account for the gravitational forces that would facilitate this. So, again, the alibi as well as dark matter. You know, the matter, it is there. You just can't see it. Because otherwise, my theory doesn't make sense.

and we can't have my theory not make sense. Like, it sounds like I'm being petulant or being funny. That's literally, like, what these fucking people say. Thomas Kuhn pointed out that... So the primary concern of science as it exists in, you know, modern America is to preserve the paradigm to protect science against hostile data, you know, and um, that's, uh, that's a point that, uh,

Peter Dewsberg used to make a lot. As, um, as did, uh, how Jesus, what's his name? The, uh, the PCR test guy, um, Nobel Prize winner. He cladled with Dewsberg on inventing the AIDS virus. I mean, a senior moment. But, um, that's, that's indisputable I mean, across the board, but I'd say it's most on display in the field of cosmology. And one of the reasons that's possible is because, again, they presume an ignorance of weight people. Admittedly, I don't understand theoretical physics or astronomy beyond the most, like, rudimentary level.

But I do know what the scientific method is, and I do know what it is for a claim to be falsifiable or not. and it should be obvious to any reason we told an adult that these posthalists don't stand up to scientific rigor. Kerry Mullis, that's what I'm thinking of, Kerry Mullis. He makes the point a lot about, where he made the point, he's dead now, unfortunately, about the scientific community being this sort of cloistered in priesthood, the primary interest to which is preventing the emergence of hostile data, tendency to rebut what they claim are absolute truths um yeah that's uh that's all i got um for

today um again forgive me if uh this isn't really my wheelhouse i mean i continental and um analytic philosophy are both things i understand quite well but i'm not a science guy i'm no bill nye or that or that black guy who pretends to know about science and space but he really kneel the grass Tyson or whatever Yeah Steal the bike

Tyson Yeah Just a couple things Actually Stephen Jay Gould died in In 2002 Yeah he's been dead Yeah that's right

That's right yeah He was only 60 years old Yeah I didn't Yeah that's right And Edwards versus Aguilar Was argued in 86 And decided in 87

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Because Rehnquist was Rehnquist was chief at the time. Right. Cool. Yeah. Thank you, Woody. Yeah, man. No problem. All right. Everybody go to Thomas's Substack. That's IsraelThomas-777.7.com.

And you can connect to him wherever he is, all the other places, uh, from there. So, uh, go ahead and do that. And, um, yeah. We will, I don't know, maybe the next thing we're going to do is watch a movie. Yeah, it would be great. But we'll be back soon with Thomas. I will invite you back on soon and we'll see what comes next. Yeah, that's great.

Thank you, everybody. All right, thanks.