The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1275: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 17 - The Frankfurt School Pt 2 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

62 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 Thomas concludes a talk about the Frankfurt School.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' 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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Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there, Gumroad, and what's the other one? Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the Picanueno show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. The things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy. It's all because of you. And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So, um, thank you. The Pekignanos Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back and, uh, I pick up where

we left off last time. So, um, how are you doing it at, Thomas? I don't know and well. Thanks for hosting me. of course i i don't remember exactly where i left off last time the key issues of significance though with respect to the frankford school are two things like i said even though there's some errors i think in the way he described this phenomenon and um by this phenomenon i mean the the impact of Frankfurt School ideology on the American political system and cultural life from the 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 you know 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 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 Hegs Seth and all these mega people, they talk about, quote, critical race theory. There is no critical race theory. There's critical 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 what some school board in Texas or something is, 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, or don't really understand the source of ideological practice. They shouldn't just mouth off on it because they sound stupid. And it's just obfuscates the issue.

um the uh you know no more or less systemic psychological paradigm is what came out of the frankford school it it wasn't some elaborated form of neo-mercism you know like i said last session it these people basically broke with merps completely you know the uh like don't get me wrong people like Max Horkheimer, Georg, Lucas, Herbert Mercuse, Theodore, Adorno. They saw capitalist organizational models

and the sociological aspects of those models is a profound source of psychological scarring, but they didn't view it as some problem in and of itself. And they didn't view capitalist organizational modality, as some primary 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 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

semi-sapient animal that's why they emphasize totally debased aspects of the human being is like you know like

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 postmodern right and we'll get to this we're in 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. And I realize in recent years that causes a lot of confusion with people.

You know, so the, so in other words, the Frankfurt Schools account of the capitalist system was that labor modalities being one aspect of

systemic alienation owes to you know 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 dialectical materialist process they held this out as a scientific process or something that could be interpreted scientifically, according to rational criteria. Horkeimer 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. As much as is 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 he called the narrowing of rationality is one of the things that precluded, not just human beings from accomplishing pathorosis through 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. ESB transformed how the country powered itself once. And now we're doing it again.

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the central bank of arland adorno himself and like I said, Gramsina Dornow 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 Linen of the Frankfurt School. I think more properly, he's the Mussolini. of post-Marcist revolutionary praxis um 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 um of the Bolsheviks there because they viewed him as different than you know the useful idiots of the schismatic left

and they viewed them 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 and they'd proffer this kind of copy and propaganda

in the English language media that Lavostles kind of praise on the Soviet Union as a the sort of centrally planned society that was remedying the potential for crisis modalities you know that that the um that that that capitalism as it became increasingly relying on high finance was prone to um 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 you were branded some sort of counter-revolutionary element or disruptive personage but the kind of

stuff that he was he was writing his own kind of Samizdat 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 indoctrinated 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-in-eats and made that same point.

You know, so that further sort of corrupted 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 Gramsie made the point again, again, that, you know, even the Tsar, even at his lowest step, when, you know, the Russian army in the field was near mutiny, you know, even the Tsar 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 War didn't happen, or at least didn't develop the way that it did in actual history. But Gramsie's conclusion, as far as 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 therein you know that that was what accounted for the civilized world's resistance to a revolutionary imperative you know whatever whatever that imperative may be whatever the substantive aspects of it may be so in terms of revolutionary praxis gramsie said uh and he quite literally wrote this in his uh 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.

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We're talking thousands of your favorite Lidl items all reduced to clear from home essentials to seasonal must-habs when the doors open the deals go fast Come see for yourself the Lidl Newbridge warehouse sale 28th to 30th of November Liddle more to value 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 productive forces and

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

or the aggregate energies of a culture like Merck did. He, he, he, viewed these things as not incidentally viewed them as intrinsic to the sociological situation in question but again he viewed them more as a kind of overlay you know the the core of behavioral modalities and psychological symbolic structures and conceptual horizons you know he viewed these things is basically derived from moral narratives and ethical populates 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 Grams he spent some time in a prison when he finally returned to Italy he took up with the Communist Party which had very much been driven underground

Mussolini and the internal security apparatus to the kingdom of Italy was actually quite adept people this idea that Italy other than you know the Salvo 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 every bit 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, contra the Third Reich.

This really wasn't true. And I'm not saying it's 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 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 he had Gramsie locked up Gramsie was finally freed but he died shortly before the onset of hostilities in World War II but his uh his prison notebooks were voluminous and that uh gramsie's prison notebooks kind of came to con that's kind of like the gramsian equivalent of das capitol or uh you know the equivalent of francis yaki'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 partisans who ultimately came to America and these people who devised the social engineering regime that was implemented and continues to be an occupied in the the Bundes Republic, it's clear that in aggregate terms that this was based on Gramsie'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 but 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 you know even that said

you know 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 a it 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 give and take that on the one hand meant 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, and 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 impose 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 existence. you know and all revolutionary praxis is characterized in a whole or in part

by attention strategy and a crisis actor modality so that's something needs to be accounted for it too like Gramsie wasn't talking about these things occurring amissed 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 a, you know, then NASA electronic media which, you know, was radio and

and the movie screen where most people in those days got their visual news. Schools, the university, 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 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 you're there was not a Marxist revolution in America and the institutions weren't appropriated by 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 um you know and another another key to point of divergence like i emphasize in her discussion of marks Marcis Leninists and their ideological heirs, you know, people like Jackson Hinkle, like World Systems theorists, they viewed and viewed 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 schema and the Marxist-Leninist-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 of these uh 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 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 a for

to the individual or the collective body politic within a capitalist or within a marcus Leninist schema this injurious process is not mitigated you know the only way for the human consciousness to be fulfilled is to liberation from these entire paradigms that preclude the a meeting of desire desires with outlets for oriastic 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. the only one that's got to be ripped out in total and again that represents a a fundamental digression from Marxist Leninus not just Marxian Leninus praxis but

Marxian ontology and Horkeheimer who is very significant in terms of how he aimed that 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 and normative behavioral paradigms, but it's this abomination that

that inculcates people into fascist tendencies and things, and breeds patriarchal and authoritarian personalities. And this is the original source

of alienation in 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 you know and this underlay Horchheimer's entire theory of society there wasn't really any concern with the material conditions of people within this 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 and you know economics really did take a back seat in the American situation for this reason and part of this is a There is a connection. I mean, this was people like at Dorno, Granzi, Horkheimer, Lukash.

They weren't particularly concerned with economic discourse anyway. But obviously, after the war, the American situation became paramount. And, you know, economic socialism or trade unionism in America was a non-starter anyway. you know like verner sombart 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 Weimar era yes there was a fundamental concern with marxist leninist dialectics but that's because i mean that's everybody was concerned with that subject matter because that was the prime animating catalyst more than any other single political or social tendency in Europe at the time and that

really endured for most 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 100 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 for the product of some of these discrete and environments and they were universally respected by people on the left but you know they they weren't leading the proverbial march as it were you know quite uh quite the contrary

you know up then 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 look at the 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 uh at the time the percentage of hughy long is important and I mean that's that's a subject matter for another day but um you know and it becomes 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 along with no dialectical materialist, nor is he some 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 Lukach and some schismatic elements of the KPD set 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 without saying um 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 of the Marquis de Sade, and he was open about this. You know, and he 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, Horkeheimer had a sort of haughty contempt for the working class. He didn't think they had potential as a revolutionary element, certainly not as a vanguard. so i mean that he was passing moral judgment on them but also

hork oner wasn't a stupid man i mean he was 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 schema 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 is a productive enough and lucrative enough and viable enough that even if it's already passed zenith you know there's just not their requisite pressures on the working class to facilitate molding them into a revolutionary cadre. And there was something to that, in my opinion. It's more complicated than that. That wasn't the sole proximate cause by any means. But he wasn't wrong. you know and

it was 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 treated Marxism as 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. Grams, he 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 frankford school view which is in grahamty's view if we're talking about historicism you know synonymous he invented frank for 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 practiced ritual cannibalism they cut people's 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 and spectacle and things. So according to Gramsie, the only reason why, say, you know, 20th century white men would claim to consider that a 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 view 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 logical. 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 serious individuals among the current um among the current crop of idealogues 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 as I'm run out from me for being a lame it's just I still 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 norm is that everyone is some sort of globalist? Yeah, but today it's more, that's the structural reality today. back then the degree to which all kinds of things were underway in terms of economics of scale like high finance was

developing in ways that telecom and calculative 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

economic macroeconomics had become too complicated too nuanced and there was too many variables for this to be left a chance because other Otherwise, there'd just be one crisis after another. So the idea was, well, you know, and especially in the 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.

computing technology and things and people learning to view capital as a fluid variable more and more

that gradually changed things and really that's what the deregulation trend was in the 80s because you know that 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 but really from the era of you know 1990 to today

that's really that's the trajectory 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 is 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 thank you man yeah thank you man appreciate you likewise