The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1215: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 5 - Thomas Hobbes w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

59 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. In this episode he talks about Thomas Hobbes. Although Hobbes is not traditionally regarded as a continental philosopher, he remains a significant figure with whom many contemporaries engaged in discourse.  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.

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So thank you for the support. Head on over to freemanbiontweal.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. We're here for part five, Continental Philosophy. Thomas, what's happening? How you doing, man? I'm doing okay.

Thanks for hosting me. I realize that literally the subject of this series is continental philosophy, like a capital C, but I'm going to have to spend time with Thomas Hobbs. First of all, Hobbs in dialogue with the continental tradition, and he's a counterpart to Machiavelli. And if you want to understand modern political philosophy,

there's a really good book that Leo Strauss wrote on this. And Strauss's scholarship that's not of a polemical character is actually really good. I maintain he was like an important academic, okay? But if you want to understand, one of the reasons why Carl Schmitt was so much in dialogue with Hobbs, I think of Schmidt's relationship to Hobbs as being not unlike Marx's relationship to him. Hagel. It's complicated. But we're going to have to talk about Hobbes and Machiavelli. And I'm going to tackle Hobbs first because, in a lot of respects, I think he's the more significant theorist, especially considering, you know, the guiding ideology of the political monoculture of globalism.

and Hobbs is ill understood by people. Like some people view him as this kind of tepid reactionary who's just making concessions to what became Enlightenment chivalis. You know, other people view him as sort of

a theorist of of crisis actors. Neither of those things are really true. You know, um, And also, one of the reasons why the political culture of the UK tells us things, especially for somebody who's proverbial stock and trade as regards to research concentrations as comparative politics, there's a microcosm of what happens on the continent in many ways

in the British Isles. and the 30 years war didn't touch and concern the UK, obviously like it did the continent, but the War of Three Kingdoms, there was a lot of common causes oblique to what was happening across the English Channel. And the ascendancy of Cromwell, Cromwell was very much a Mohammed or Adolf Hitler or Napoleon-type figure. I'd say that he was in fact sort of the splendid example of that, archetype. I mean, Cromwell was a great man, you know, but beyond the obvious fact of his significance, the paradigms of a historical and conceptual character that created him are highly significant to anybody who seeks to identify ultimate causes in processes of mind

and the ongoing phenomenon of, you know, conceptual discourse that creates political reality. So we're going to dive into Hobbs. For the next episode on the next one, we're going to dive into Hobbs and Machiavili. For context, too, if you read people like John Mearsheimer, these like neo-realist types, they claim, like I said, at the outset of this series,

that people like Thucydides, you know, represented a tendency towards realism. That's nonsense. However, in the case of Hobbs, who they like to claim as well, it's somewhat less off base. There's something to that. Hobbs was a mathematician at base, and something I've noticed that people don't fully understand unless they grew up reading the King James Bible and stuff like that. When Hobbs talks about geometry, he's talking about all. of mathematics, he's also talking about physics and physical sciences.

You know, that was kind of the convention of academia at the time. And it's also relevant because one of the things that was happening at this point is during, you know, the scientific revolution and, you know, the proto-enlightenment and beyond was that general knowledge. what they're therefore been considered general knowledge was bifurcating, but it hadn't fully been, the verbal schisms hadn't fully ossified yet. So basically, when Hobbes says geometry, he's talking about mathematics, theoretical and practical, and he's talking about physics, okay? Hobbs is in punitive dialogue with Aristotle. And the key to that is his ontological description of what it is for man to live in nature.

And we'll get to that in a minute. But Hobbs viewed his mandate as well as his mission, was to cultivate a scientific basis of political and ethical philosophy. And this was the first time anybody really attempted this. Okay. Now, that's got certain implications, not the least to which is that it essentially calls for extricating any ambition to perfect a man or to force political ethics to comport with what is otherwise understood to be a virtuous soul and conduct derived therein. it's brutally pragmatic. And Hobbs goes even further and suggests that moral evaluations

are basically extrapolated from these kinds of instinctive things of a pragmatic nature. And the kind of progeny of reason within any like man capable of it is that, you know, he's acting

in his own self-interest. And that doesn't mean he doesn't have any attachments or genuine feelings born of passions, not reason. But it means that when he acts politically

and civically in total sociological terms, any action he takes is basically self-interested and what he purports to be a reciprocal abiding of duties.

It more derives from, you know, kind of non-aggression pact to further that self-interest with other similarly situated individuals than it does any sort of higher moral imperative. We'll get into what's wrong with that probably in the next episode, but just laying foundation. We're getting a little bit ahead of what I want to cover in linear terms. Obviously, the challenge therein, vis-à-vis that first postulate, how to cultivate and curate a scientist, basis of political philosophy, there's got to be some sort of basis for civic society

that is permanent, that can coexist with that first postulate, and mitigate what otherwise it would be the proverbial war of all against all, and possibly the literal war of all against all. So some kind of ambition within the individuals who constantly the body politics. and make no mistake. And Hobbes' view they are atomized individuals in their natural state. Some sort of impulse towards fulfillment of civic duty, incident to active citizenship, has to be cultivated.

And this is a no mean feat. Now, this is also kind of the birth of analytic philosophy, in my opinion, as we think of it. Okay? because the way Hobbs rationalizes what I just said and the way he approaches that paradigm of how to reconcile these apparently conflicting tendencies is by modeling sovereign authority and the essential characteristics of sovereignty on a kind of systemic discourse Now, to Hobbs, what was always most imperative, whether we're talking about how to inculcate the body politic with civic responsibility, or how to define the parameters of sovereign authority, and describing what its essential characteristics are, he was always fundamentally concerned of tethering the practical and theoretical. and any theory of statecraft or ethical philosophy,

he considered it a vital imperative that it comport essentially splendidly with praxis. Okay. This is very much at odds with, in some ways, this is the opposite of the classical orientation. And Machiavelli made that same point, although his purposes were totally different, then he was addressing a totally different audience, which is significant.

It's not, it's in essential ways. In other words, I was looking for the right way to describe this. Machiavelli, he viewed the Aristotelian model as aiming too high, you know, when in fact politics is base and the political realm, which is a discrete steer of human activity, the currency of it is violence at the end of the day,

and it is power activity in ontological terms. Hobbs' view was really that of the mathematician. You know, and again, like, Habesian geometry is basically proto-analytic philosophy. And Hobbs wasn't concerned with whether it was too lofty ambition

to curate virtue within the political. His view is that it's nothing to do with praxis and it doesn't mitigate the war of all against all. So what use is it? You know, it's, to him, it would be like arguing over like the aesthetic beauty of numbers or something

in lieu of actually devising formulas that can create a bridge or a house that, you know, can stand up to weathering tensions and things like that. You know, in some ways, I'd go as far as to say Hobbes' paradigm is substantially more brutal than that of Machiavelli. And I think people don't understand that because in their view, like, they don't understand that the kind of core philosophical curriculum of progressivism is actually a very brutal ideology. I'd go as far as to say it's anti-human.

Okay, it's not But people have this idea They're like, oh, that's like liberal stuff, so which is like for pussy's or something? Yeah, there's definitely an aspect of it, especially considering we live in an age of conceptual illiteracy. But The original progressives, the kind of original enlightenment utopian types, they have no problem with killing huge numbers of people

in order to realize the supposedly sort of like perfect geometry of the political you know and that's there's something pretty monstrous about that um just as an aside but um

you know it's also too it's not Hobbs is credited with this egalitarianism and make no mistake like contra Aristotle he completely rejected the ontology of you know the men who were like naturally fit to command and the natural slave.

But he didn't do that because he thought that like there was equal dignity to like all people. He said that because he said there's a basic equality within violence. Okay, because any man can kill another man. You know, if he's cunning enough and if he's ruthless enough and if he can corral enough allies for the immediate task at hand, like basically equality within the political realm is, you know, it belongs to, it's an equality of violence. Okay, it's like an equality of the capacity to commit murder. It has nothing to do with, like, the intrinsic dignity of the human being or anything like that.

Francis Bacon echoes some of this, or it's echoed in both bodies of work. like begging claim that Aristotelian politics was imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths. So there's a self-cons repudiation of the classical view

of the political. You know, but again, that doesn't mean it make it liberal in the contemporary sense or anything like that. But this is the basis for this kind of rejection of what therefore

had been you know the basic understanding of human nature and his intrinsic sociality and him being born to an identitarian structure

him being born to a polis in the terms of you know the source material you know you know You know, so in other words, the true roots of human behavior aren't really historical in nature.

They're basically mathematical or geometric. The Habezian view in Leviathan, which is what we're concerned with is Leviathan, is that it's not a waste of time or irrelevant to study the historical record and even to identify processes therein, but this has nothing to do with identifying the proximate or ultimate cause as a human behavior, or identifying what the sources are of passions that translate to violence of a political nature. you know, um, so what Hobbes suggests in lieu of,

you know, both what Plato did in the Republic, as well as what Aristotle did in the Nicomacian ethics and the politics by saying that, you know, philosophy, if we accept that philosophy as a science, and that politics is within that penumbra, and thus is, you know, like a subcategory of that,

scientific discipline that, you know, there's one or two ways to proceed with identifying what are the bases of human action, you know, individually or collectively. One of those ways is what Hobbs called synthetically, which in brass text, terms, involves identifying or reasoning out the generating causes of human action and tracing the process to apparent effects of those motives and causes. The second aspect or method of identifying these core impulses is what he called Resolutive, or in plain English, analytical. which is basically deductive.

And this becomes important as a reason I'll get to in a minute. The resolute of the analytical begins with effects, identifies the facts that constitute the essential aspect of those effects and then traces possible causes of their generation

based on the totality of quantifiable variables and the conditions in which they're situated. How is this possible considering what most people consider to be the political and the metaphysical aspects that go into it? Hobbes and say there are no metaphysical aspects there. The first principles of all things are to find as body or matter and how motion, change of place, and self-directed action bears on you know that matter

like that doesn't mean a Hobbs was saying that there's not such a thing as a good domain of mind but he's saying that we're you know again the the praxis of political science has to line up with the theory of human action you know and um basically he's talking about war and peace

okay because that's really all that the political is concerned with as regards to the human condition and the political is always the business of war and peace it's not you know it's it's not how to make men better it's not how to identify what virtue is you know in in the palace or in a man or in a woman and how to curate these things it's none of that you know it's how to identify the source of human passions that animates men to violence, how to mitigate

those things, or at least channel those energies constructively, and while doing that, how to prevent the deterioration into a kind of superficially dignified brutishness

that simply it dresses up nakedly ambitious, violence as some sort of noble endeavor, you know, and how do we accomplish these things? Well, inculcating people with a kind of civic responsibility that makes active citizenship into something that is beneficial to all the individuals who collect that we make up the body

politic. Well, at the same time, creating a strong enough civic apparatus. that can fend off enemies from without. Like we haven't even gotten to how this translates to preferiteness and waging war against or deterring external enemies. We're only talking about essentially how to manage civil society and generate what we know of as, you know, a functioning state where, you know, non-aggression is what reigns

between the otherwise atomized individuals who kind of, to the body politic. We haven't even gotten to, you know, questions beyond that. So this is complicated, but it is internally logical, even if one rejects it outright. You know, the, and of course, there's a, what I think of is, um, if we can think of, to draw an impertogynology, if we're going to think of Nietzsche's concept

of eternal recurrence as kind of his counterpart to Kant's categorical imperative, kind of of how Beezian counterpart to both would be, or rather more perfectly, Hobbes's version of, I think, therefore I am. if it was put to Hobbs or if this paradigm was challenged by well how can you begin to speculate about the passions of other men and what concepts of things

Hobbs would say well any every rational man possesses passions of one sort or another he can identify what you know within the parameters the boundaries the boundary of reason he will do to satisfy or accomplish

things that will save those passions. So essentially you have like a living example within your own mind and heart of what the human condition is. And inductively you can extrapolate things about humans from that. You know, and this is universal because like Hobbes would say

in rebuttal to people saying like, well, what about sectarian motives or what about people or situated in different caste paradigms. That doesn't matter because, again, we're talking about the political. We're not talking about people's view of what is good. We're not talking about somebody's, like, aesthetic judgments, and the quality of violence is what renders this universal, you know. And again, there's serious problems with this entire,

paradigm, but there's something to a lot of what is being said. And that's why Schmidt obviously rejected outright the Havisian description of the state of nature. You know, Schmidt viewed the first community as the folk community. That's the pre-rational identity criteria. However, Schmidt also said that Hobbes was the greatest political scientist who ever lived.

And I don't totally disagree. So this is important. And I'll also add, and I realize I'm jumping around a bit, one of the things that the kind of current I sort of midwit political science academy is right about too.

During the Cold War, a lot of attention was paid to Hobbs, especially what he had to say about political psychology and the economy of violence. You know, and this is really the basis of game theory is applied to conflict paradigms. You know, this is very important, you know, and anybody who's learned, in this subject matter who picks up Leviathan, it'll start to jump out at them where they've seen these claims and posthalids

and these analogies pop up again and again, you know, in all kinds of discrete sources. So it's not just a matter of kind of developing a conceptual picture or the history of political theory

or something. It's important to read Hobbs, for all kinds of reasons. So, you know, and I go as far to say, too, and I'll move on in a minute. Anybody who reads my stuff, I think, discerns that I'm a radically inductive thinker, and that's probably exacerbated by the fact that, you know, I was a lawyer, and legal reasoning tends to be highly inductive. But that, this is a bit outside the scope, but if you accept that the Havisian claim that politics is basically a subcategory of geometry and is a science and to itself, it's essential that one proceed inductively in order to reach. conclusions about the human condition, which is its subject matter, the variables being humans and their capacity for violence and everything

associated with that. And for the reasons I just enumerated that that's implicitly inductive, you know, that's the only way relevant data can be derived that could line up the theory. with praxis, which within the Habesian paradigm is the, that's the ultimate objective of political science. You know, and arguably of analytic philosophy in a total sense. But, you know, and by, but also by looking into oneself, you know, there's, predictive. That's really your only like moment to moment living model of a human mind where one can overcome the barriers of, you know, the idiosyncrasy of thought. Because obviously you can't see into another man or woman's mind. You know, you can speculate about things. You can,

there's predictable nuances and observable variables, the human behavior. But there's, there are no absolute indicators, but somebody who's capable of stepping outside themselves for the purpose of inductively discerning and identifying the core variables of political behavior. You know, you do have a kind of moment-to-moment model in your own mind, and that's not navel-gazing. That's not, you know, positing oneself at the center of things. There's nothing. like that again the qualifier is somebody who's capable of stepping outside themselves as a scientist does you know and we're speaking about a discrete domain of human activity you know we're not talking generally about like what food you like or what kinds of women you find pretty or why or whether

you like the las Vegas raiders you know um and this is key also you know you've got to look at the political as a discrete domain of human activity. You know, and this is another thing that separates Hobbs from contemporary liberals, that they don't understand this. You know, those that did in the past outright rejected that, but I, you know, that distinction has been abolished. So there's that, too. Hobbs is a type of theorist that doesn't really exist anymore in all kinds of ways.

But, you know, so at the end of the day, human behavior to Hobbes, it's not this, the platonic hierarchy of, you know, reason, will, and passion. And obviously, Freud, I mean, Freud was a con man, but he was also just kind of like a simple-minded plagiarist. You know, reason, will, and passion is super ego-ego-ego-id. Okay. But Aristotle essentially abided that despite, you know, his political ontology basically deviating from the Platonist model. And this was the classical understanding, you know. And Hobbs says, no, no, no, no, no, human behavior is primarily a mechanistic psychology of the passions, okay, as applied to the place. those are the forces that pre-rationality animate him.

You know, now, of course, man being capable of reason, he'll devise rational ways and calculated ways to, again, like, sate the hunger's figurative and literal, the born of these passions, but the core animating principles and phenomenon, on or what, or what, so to speak, pushes him from behind. You know, these aren't the product of, like, rational contemplation, you know, and how one ranks the objects of this passionate covetousness that's going to vary from man to man,

you know, and again, like any given man's constitution, education, social standing, this tends to obscure things to some degree, but not really because anything that is realizable in the political realm, you know, again, our currency is violence. There's not infinite ways to configure violence to derive some sort of a war capable of sating anything on the spectrum of the litany of passions. You know, and obviously the consequence of this, too, in political terms, you know, Hobbes posits that is positing, rather, that good and evil have nothing. These are just words for what characterizes desires and aversions and how these things can be realized or avoided by way of political activity, which is, again, violence and the economy of violence. violence. You know, so it's meaningless to talk about, you know, what constitutes a virtuous activity in the political realm. Now, it's not to say there's not narrative convention. That's not to say it's good to be needlessly violent. But Hobbes would again say, you know, in returning to the harmony between theory and praxis, it doesn't matter anyway because what we're worried about is outcome.

and even if the only reason why, you know, a political actor shows restraint is because he doesn't want to be availed to reciprocal violence of a boundlessly, you know, uninhibited character that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what his motives are so long as there's basic compliance with these normative strictures tailored to maintain, you know, a permanent peace within the body politic, which constitutes civic society, or at least permanent as much as is feasible. So, subtly also, to be clear, Hobbes is structuring his arguments, at least in Leviathan. I'm not a Hobb scholar, but I've read Leviathan many times.

and the structure of his argument he's qualified he's qualifiably agreeing with the Socratic and the Thomist view absolute view that the character of political life it needs to be defined by human nature

or at least by categorical reference to human nature but he's got a completely different concept of what human nature entails And furthermore, the subject matters abrogated by the fact that we're talking about the political as a discrete sphere of human activity. You know, so you're essentially managing passions by appeal to reason, board of self-interest, and an understanding that, you know, abiding these strictures that facilitated. facilitate peaceable living and the non-aggression pact between individuals and the body politic any given man capable of reason can divinate that this is the best way to

satisfy the demands of the passions which are pre-rational in nature and which have a greater power to animate the human organism than any other factors. And as a consequence of that, we can also extrapolate what the essence is of sovereign authority. You know, if the political is the economy of violence, and that's all the political is the economy of violence, and that's all. it is and if civic responsibility and the moral consensus within civil society is a essentially an agreement of non-aggression and you know what facilitates the

realization of the passions which again are what animates man in pre-rational terms towards any political activity. The only thing facilitating that is his understanding that, you know, he'll be reasonably free of the fear of imminent death. So the sovereign at the end of the day is he who decides who lives and dies. And if you transgress against his sovereign will, you will die. And We're going to get more into the concept of Leviathan itself or himself because the Hobbs understanding the state apparatus and sovereignty as concentrated like literally in a man or in a person. He believes this is fundamental. But we're not there yet.

But, you know, and he'll, he gets into the symbolic psychological aspect of how man structures. his concept of authority and why this polls like a certain fascination over the human psychology. But at the same time, you know, this isn't really that important because the fact of the sovereign's ability to deliver death to the individual at any time in a universal capacity, that's another thing too. Like before Leviathan, like all are equal because nobody can fight. Leviathan. Levillian can kill any man. So whether you're a king or whether you're a beggar, it doesn't matter. You're like equally vulnerable before Leviathan.

So, you know, even somebody who hated the government or who had contempt for the concept of the divine right of kings or who rejected outright the concept of authority over him, his body, and mind, because he was some sort of anarchist or something. it doesn't matter because he understands that he will die if he doesn't abide the sovereign will of leviathan so you know again praxis is and it's um harmonious um compliment to theory is what matters and how to go

further and positive you like how do we even know like why people are abiding what leviathan represents. Like even if they say that they believe in, you know, the king or they believe in king and country, or they believe the emperor is like a divine instantation of some marvelous idea.

How would you know if they really think that? You know, and who's to say that's not just some artifact of you know, the pre-rational mind, you know, and the way it develops. It's kind of a conceptual syntax, so to speak.

You know, so that's important to when people, you know, again, I, obviously anybody who follows what I write and say, you should realize I basically reject the Havisian paradigm outright, you know, but it's, but there's an internal logic to it that's very developed. It's not just nonsense. And it's also not, it's, there's, there's, based as something like bentham who i think and this is a subject for the discussion kind of reduced man to almost like a bovine you know uh almost like a talking animal or something but you know um where we're talking about a very we're talking about a very narrow although fundamentally important i mean due to its it's the subject matter's life and death You know, but it's, we're talking about, like, one kind of narrow domain of human activity. You know, like, Hobbs' business isn't, or wasn't to, you know, describe, like, the human condition in absolute terms or, you know, describe what, it's like a good life or something like that. So that's something to, that should stay people is kind of more punitive, um, attacks on, um, um,

on it now the rebuttal obviously even from people who again abide uh the kind of france's bacon view which in a lot of ways is sympathetic to what i just posited you know they there were the rebuttal to hobbs from kind of all quarters or the attempt to rebuttal is, you know, well, okay, fine, you know, if there was no, even if you accept that there was no kind of like first society and, you know, like man is born to the state of nature, like what exactly is being positive here, that there was some just like global state of savagery. Hobbs actually wrote specifically on this in anticipation of those attempts at rebuttal and what he said was really, interesting. Hobbs didn't

clear. He was not saying that there was ever a state of nature all over the world. You know, he's saying that at different times, different places, you know, in any given epoch, obviously, you know, there's ordered societies and there's what we could, or there's arrangements that says for all the criteria of political order.

But, you know, there's just, as many other places, you know, that exist, you know, in conditions of splendid anarchy and the war of all against all. And the example he involved was the America the day, you know, 16th century, 16th and 17th century America was, like, was this, you know, and Hobbs said that the Americas in his era, you know, was racked by civil wars, independent sovereigns all like declaring dominion over you know various swaths of territory and and trade routes and you know some of these were some of these people were white men you know some of them were

some of them were were american indians who presided in a lot of cases over surprisingly large amount of what we consider capital and territory you know so his so hobbs's example is basically like, well, look at the Americas. You know, like, if you want an example of the state of nature and the war of all against all, juxtaposed against, you know, sovereign political societies, like, there you go. And this is what we used to be. And, you know, that's fairly persuasive. You know, the problem, as I said, is what the, the problem, as I said, is what the, the, the

problem is that it becomes tautological. I mean, that's a problem with the enlightenment perspective across the board

is that, you know, it's like, okay, so if you're going to reduce human behavior to individual atomized

integers, rendering discrete decisions based on some kind of biologically, in most cases, quantifiable impulse,

you know, then it's like, oh, well, then the first society must have just, you know, have been this kind of state of individuals waging war on each other. And it's all, you know, and it's not, that's not the way humans work. You know, you're not born as this individual, like, doesn't have parentage and doesn't live in a community. It doesn't speak a certain language and doesn't, isn't surrounded by symbols that are resonant, in discrete cultural psychology that are probably heritable. And beyond that, the whole kind of equality of violence, there are some men who are fit for command and some who are not.

Like my example is Democratic Campocia. Like, you know what the community did? They killed a third of the population. They killed everybody who was master cast as they viewed it. well okay where what did that what happened then i did that does that mean that the camier rouge is now like the permanent garment in cambodia like no apparently four years later they they were dust you know and it's not that that's kind of the logic of the prison yard or something like but even there it's like it's not people don't just like follow around the guy who's like

the most violent man who has the most weapons or something thing. Like, it's not how things work. You know, you follow more often than not, you know, and people follow, you know, people are hardwired to follow men who constitute this kind of archetype in their mind that, you know, is, comports with some sort of idealized model. But beyond that, you know, there's just natural human tendencies towards obedience. You know, most people aren't capable of discrete action unto itself, not related to command from originating from a source to view as authoritative. And anybody who doesn't recognize that doesn't really, doesn't really know about man,

you know. And I suppose the counter rebuttal to that is that, well, people are just educated from birth and conditioned towards these things. I mean, okay, but that doesn't explain the perennial existence of caste paradigms. It just doesn't. You know, and like I said, there's not that the 20th century is a living laboratory of slave revolts, where people rose up and slothed. ordered the ruling cast and these experiments were disastrous. You know, it's got a 100% failure rate.

So apparently that's not the way things are ontologically. I realize we're only going on like 50 minutes, but I don't want to... I was going to dive into Leviathan, like the concept of Leviathan. And that'll have to, I don't want to go for just like 10 minutes on that. So we got to wait until next time. I'm sorry for that. Let me ask the question then. Yeah, of course.

If we saw in the 20th century a slaughtering of the master class, a cast, especially in the beginning of the century, is that why they had to switch over to the intense social engineering so that they at least had, you know, this quote on? quote, upper caste, but really a slave caste that could actually keep the engines running and keep the machines moving? It's both. They had to, well, it's complicated in the case of revolutionary communism for a couple reasons, because you've got to eradicate competing modalities, psychological modalities.

and the only way you can do that, you've got to kill the host, literally, of those concepts. You know, one of the reasons why I invoke the Khmer Rouge a lot is not just because I, I don't think I'm a macabre person, at least I hope not. I don't just have a discreet fascination with the extreme violence of their system. But Paul Pot, you know, aka Celeth Sarr, he was actually a very learned guy, unlike somebody like Mao, who was an idiot. They took to its logical extreme, you know, the understanding of revolutionary praxis as the only way to realize true communism is you've got to eradicate all potential competitor modalities. because that's the only way it can flourish. Because you've got to eradicate the understanding of value as money. You've got to eradicate the concept itself a private property.

You can't just recondition people by re-education or something or by forcing them to repeat back ideological strictures, the kind that would pop up in a propaganda pamphlet. You've got to render it literally impossible to devise, psychologically a competing system or a preceding system. You know, so that's part of the social engineering. But part of it also was the idea was, even among people who weren't, you know, like true believing communists, like the idea was that the machine age and the scientific age, you know,

and especially, you know, into the atomic age, it's like, well, you know, the master elements that it exists is technicians and it's men who can wield and understand technology. In order to prevent the kind of previous caste paradigm from snapping back into some kind of reactionary form is we've got to disseminate knowledge of these technological processes and the science that underlies them as like why it is possible and take like people from diverse um actually diverse not diverse is like a regime buzzword from diverse places and situations, you know, and make them competent in these processes and sciences, you know, and then install them, like, in these key, like, powerful roles, you know, and that'll, that'll prevent,

you know, some sort of, like, new aristocracy from ossifying. Of course, all that happened was, like, the nomenclatured, it became, like, the dictatorship of, like, the military bureaucrat. You know, that's, like, what Sovietism is. It's just, like, the dictatorship of, instead of, the dictatorship of the czar and and uh these like landed aristocrats you you have like the dictatorship of the guy who runs like you know the McCoy and gruevish design

bureau or like the guy who's you know the some senior man in supreme soviet who you know you've got to like report to with your numbers for like the grain production according to like the yearly plan or whatever

you know and like you know people realize very quickly that's not somehow like superior. And the realists among them realized like this is just reality. There's no this thing as a, there's no this thing as a headless leviathan. And that's part of why Hobbes' account of what sovereignty is is important, despite his blind spots that we just kind of like explicated here, if that makes any sense. Well, in the Soviet case, you know, Marx argued that you needed capitalism to keep going because not only was it going to give you the means of production that they were going to seize so that they could keep so that they could eventually take it over, but also it would deracinate people from their capitalism, would deracate people from their heritage, from their history.

And it seems like in the case of, and Stalin even knew that, he wrote that. But in the case of the Soviet Union, it seems like it turned more into partly revenge upon the Orthodox revenge upon the Tsar. And they didn't take it to that logical conclusion because, I mean, let's face it, at that point, Russia was not as industrialized as, say, the United States was. Well, no, there was no, in 1918, in 1917, 1918, there was no industrial proletariat in Russia. I mean, such that there was in Moscow was like a tiny percentage of the body politic. No, the Soviet communism is weird. The way it developed is weird. You know, and the fact that it happened there is weird.

You know, I mean, the Soviet Union was an incredibly strange society. You know, but at the same time, it made. sense. You know, and it is a subject for another podcast, but as I'm always coming back to, people don't realize the power

and the power potential of the Soviet Union as it existed. They also forget that the Soviet Union at its arguable zenith, you know, like the Brezhnavera when they accomplished strategic parity, the Soviet Union was like a crippled beast because the Third Reich had

devastated it and they never really recovered. without the Third Reich, the Soviet Union dominates this planet. And America's this kind of garrison state that, you know, still has like the bounty of a continent full of, you know, probably like probably like half the planet's remaining natural resources, but it's basically besieged by this kind of like world communist leviathan of, you know, that's overrun Europe and, you know,

devastated any any resistance be it in like Japan or the Islamic world or or Africa or anywhere else so Mary is basically this island amiss like a hostile like colored world of the communist Leviathan I mean that's

people like born after you know the 1980s like or the 1970s really they don't they don't understand that or they might intellectually but they don't like really understand it you know yeah, it's a fascinating subject matter.

All right. Plugs, and we'll get out of here. Yeah. Like I was shouting out the last few days. I'm kind of in the process of restructuring my online presence and my content. And I'll begin that in earnest when I get back from OGC, the week of the 18th, I guess. But my online home is substack. We recently got kicked off at Discord, which I, that did not surprise me.

But I'm seeking out a new, like, online home for our chat server. And when I get home from the OJC conclave, I will do that. I will do all this stuff. I haven't forgotten. But my online home or all kinds of good stuff is, is substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.7.com. I mean, I'm active a lot of places, but go there and, you know, you can find where I'm at on other platforms. And as I kind of restructure my online presence, so, you know, I'll have more to tell people in this regard.

But for now, I'll go to something. Awesome. Thank you. Until the next episode.