The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Ryszard Legutko's 'Demon in Democracy' Part 7

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

48 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a reading of a book that greatly influenced him, "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies" by Ryszard Legutko.The Demon in DemocracyPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete'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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support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to part seven of my reading of Rizard Lagut Goes, the demon in democracy. I'm going to start with chapter four and get about halfway through. All right, here we go. Chapter four is titled Ideology, Part 1. Both communism and liberal democracy have a strong tendency to ideology. The concept of ideology owes its career to Marxism.

It's an interesting statement there. Saying there is no political ideology before Marx. Or maybe he's not saying. that. Marx and angles made the following argument. People, they claimed, are not in control of the views they hold and profess. They accept as their own, usually without realizing it the idea is produced by the socioeconomic system in which they live. Do you agree or disagree? That's a question I would ask you. You may not, but what do you say about most of the people around you? You know those people that you red pill all the time, and the next day you go back to them and they've completely forgotten?

What you talked about? Well, every such system generates not only institutions and economic relations, but also a more or less coherent set of ideas that legitimize it and delineate the boundaries of its change. Contrary to what most of us think, the prevailing opinions, theories, and convictions that we consider timeless and self-evident are neither timeless nor self-evolveillance. evident, but are the products of the economic and political arrangements peculiar to a specific phase of historical development? A bunch of people running around calling each other Marxists, right? Well, they call people before that.

Think about that. Before the Enlightenment, say. What kind of political pejoratives that people throw around at each other? even before Marx. Tyrant? Whoever thinks otherwise and claims he speaks from a non-committed absolute absolutist perspective is cheating himself, failing to notice that his supposedly politically disinterested consciousness has been fabricated by material conditions.

This does not mean that we are all slaves of our time. There are those who see more clearly than others, not because they are free from a historical entanglement, but because their minds have a better grasp of the world to come. It is these people who speak in the name of the future and are purveyors of a revolutionary spirit. Both these types of consciousness, the one mystified by its false claim to timelessness, the other anticipating a new era, marks an angles called ideology. The concept vaulted to unprecedented popularity primarily because it proved to be a most convenient tool in political conflicts. It allowed discrediting one's opponent without entering into a substantive argument.

There was no sense in analyzing the opponent's view on their merits, such an analysis being usually inconclusive and politically inefficient. It was much better to show that his views represented his interests and were conditioned by his social and economic position. This way, under communism, much of philosophy, art, and literature could be discredited as arising from a bourgeois ideology, legitimizing the domination of the bourgeoisie and representing its interests. By being identified as serving the cause of the bourgeoisie, the philosophers, artists, and writers could be arraigned on a charge of being on a charge of being the enemies of the

socialist revolution and standing in the way of the future, often with lamentable consequences for the defendants. Ideology is always inherently simplistic and simplifying as its function is instrumental, not descriptive. The purpose of ideology is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities, but to make a clear statement. This and this reflects the interests of capitalism, and that and that reflect the interests of communism. Lenin called it very aptly the principle of partisanship. One is either for something or against something.

Whoever is trying to find a middle-of-the-road position or to evade the dichotomy automatically passes to the enemy side. All philosophy, to give a well-known example, is either materialistic or idealistic. whoever wants to go beyond this distinction becomes, whether he means it or not, a traitor of the materialist cause and slouches towards idealism. The ideological interpretation of one of Marx's basic tenets that the history of humanity is a history of class struggle stipulated that this struggle leaves its stamp on human life, both individual and collective, on society, art, science, institutions, law. At the peak of communist domination, when culture was in the grip of the doctrine called socialist realism, it was officially proclaimed that nothing in the human world would not have an ideological dimension.

In other worlds, in other words, nothing could be neutral with respect to the conflict because communism and capitalism between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the past and the future. Anything that existed, not only materially, but also as thought or a seemingly harmless, Folly of imagination could be non-mistakably identified as correct or incorrect, bourgeois or proletarian, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, socialist or anti-socialist, materialistic or idealistic, progressive or regressive. This practically put an end to any form of intellectual argumentation. No one argued, but either accused someone of ideological treason or defended himself against such a charge.

Is this hitting anybody square on? Some people mad at them and disagreeing with him right now? Maybe even a little. No wonder that those contaminated by ideology developed a deep suspicion toward ideas. They knew that ideas were not really ideas, and the person expressing one did not really say what he said, even if he personally thought so,

but that he had a hidden agenda, even if he was not personally aware of it. The suspicion increased even more when Marx, who was called the master of suspicion, was joined by two other masters, Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche prided himself on having discovered the genealogies of ideas and disclosed the biological conditions that had generated them. Sometimes he claimed that their root was strength or weakness of the body, sometimes health or illness, as for example skin and gastrointestinal tract diseases

were at the root of metaphysics, and sometimes even race, usually Jewish. Freud, in turn, derived ideas from causal relationships between the conscious and the subconscious minds. The masters of suspicion practically annihilated a debate understood as an exchange of arguments. When someone expressed an opinion or put forward a thesis, there was no point considering it in terms of truth or falsehood. It was much better to show, or rather unmasked, the conditions that originated this opinion or thesis. One could say, therefore, that the opinion

had bourgeois content and served the interest of the bourgeoisie, or that the thesis arose out of resentment, or that at the bottom of the certain statement was the Oedipus complex of the speaker. In the ideological perspective, what looked innocent, whimsical, utterly non-political in art, philosophy, or science, what may have had solely aesthetic, intellectual, or moral value, or no particular value at all, what more or less accurately described the world and human existence suddenly began to be seen in a new light. All of these were believed to be embedded in a political plan, sometimes all the more insidious because camouflaged. There was not a single writer or artist or thinker who was not ideological, i.e., who would not represent some attitude

toward the mechanisms of power, whether affirmative or critical. The communist textbooks and Encyclopedias invariably included the information that could pinpoint the ideological identity of artists or authors. Those who were ideologically correct, criticized, condemned, exposed, accused, and denounced, what it was proper to criticize, condemn, expose, accuse, and denounce. Those on the wrong side of the ideological offense were described as uncritical apologists, blind supporters, sellouts serving the interests of, lackeys of the rules, or the rules, rolling class, running dogs, and the like. Ready for huge savings?

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Saver sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift. of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Faragea. At some point, actually pretty quickly, the ideology that first served primarily as the instruments

unmask and discredit the false consciousness of those who were the mental slaves of the social and economic environment began to be used as a tool in the service of communism. The new communist ideology had to meet certain criteria, similarly to a capitalist ideology. It had to be so simple and clear that everyone would understand what communism stood for and had to identify an enemy. The difference was that contrary to the capitalist ideology, the communist counterpoint was not false and did not need to be exposed as a false consciousness. Its role was to shape a new mind dedicated to work for a new society, though because as new mind and new society were to emerge through the process of incessant bombarding of people with a few simplistic slogans, the communist

ideology became indistinguishable from communist propaganda. In fact, the communists readily admitted it and used the two words interchangeably. For instance, every Communist Party committee had its department of ideology and propaganda. The transition from ideology as a false consciousness to ideology as a true insight into the future of historical development, from the mind full of self-deception to the mind permeated with truth was quite puzzling. How is it possible one would ask that the same person can be, on the one hand, suspicious of all ideas as arising from particular conditions, and having no truthful content of their own,

and on the other be dedicated body and soul to a set of ideas that he finds mandatory and compelling? The answer is already included in the question. Ideology is a mental structure that allows a combination of conflicting traits, and extreme distrust of ideas and a blind dogmatism. The ideological man is thus, both absolutely suspicious and absolutely enthusiastic. There seems to be no idea under the sun that he would not put into question and make an object of derision, skepticism or contempt, no idea that he would not reduce to an offshoot of hidden instincts, mundane interest, biological drives, and psychological complexes.

Hence, he is likely to despise reason as an autonomous faculty to downgrade lofty ideas and to debunk the past, seeing everywhere the same ideological mystification. But at the same time, he lives in a constant state of mobilization for a better world. His mouth is full of noble slogans about brotherhood, freedom, and justice, and with every word he makes it clear that he knows which side is right and that he is ready to sacrifice his entire existence for the sake of its victory. The peculiar combination of both attitudes, merciless distrust and unwavering affirmation, gives him an incomparable sense of moral self-confidence and intellectual self-righteousness. So how is he going to relate all of that to liberal democracy? Part two. One should think that liberal democracy is relatively free from ideological temptation.

The emergence of one unifying ideology seems rather unlikely when there is considerable differentiation in a society, and it is precisely such a differentiation that liberal democracy promised to tolerate and even stimulate. If, as liberal logic seems to indicate, people are more and more concerned with their private matters, if, following the logic to democracy, political power is available to any party and the Democratic pendulum prevents power from staying in the hands of one party for a long time, if, thanks to the efficiency of the liberal democratic institutions, a system acquires remarkable stability and a high degree of prosperity, the need for ideology seems rather insignificant. So basically, liberalism is sold as non-ideological because you're allowed to believe anything

you want. You're an individual. That's pretty much the way it's sold. But, continuing. The ideological propaganda was useful in the communist countries with structural instability and poor economic performance, where it served to disarm people's dissatisfaction and to restructure their minds

by means of aggressive propaganda in accordance with the directives of the Politburo. But in a country where people are free and prosperous, where they enjoy the rule of law and institutional stability, in a country where human desires are not inhibited, and life plans are not regulated, where there is no Politburo and no Department of Ideology and Propaganda, there does not seem to be any place for or need of ideology in the system. Toward which noble goals can human consciousness and the human energy be mobilized? To achieve democracy and freedom?

They have already been attained. Bread for all? It's already here in excess. Universal dealionation, who, while living in a stable consumer society, characterized by mobility and unlimited access to information and knowledge would be lured by something so ephemeral. In the 1950s, a number of prominent writers, independently of one another, came up with a widely discussed thesis that the age of ideologies was coming to an end. So said the Americans, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Edward Schills, and Europeans such as Raymond Aaron.

While they did not foresee the total demise of ideological thinking, and even thought that it would continue to be popular among some groups such as intellectuals, they genuinely sought conspicuously declining need for and less readiness of societies be mobilized for a radical transformation by means of simplistic slogans, which they thought were irreparably worn out. A liberal democratic world with a markedly reduced level of ideology seemed a likely prospect. But soon the experience dealt a blow. But soon the experience dealt a blow. But soon the experience dealt a blow to these predictions. The 60s was the time of ideological explosion with the intensity, unexpected, and unforeseen. A revolutionary rhetoric swept across the entire Western world and awoke a surprisingly

strong response. Radical calls to overthrow the system and replace it with another one, unheard of for decades, found millions of sympathetic minds and ears. Even more surprising was that the ideas behind those calls had strongly Marxist undertones, and indeed were often inspired directly or indirectly by Marxism, the theory that, as some thought, Western societies had long put into the dustbin of history. Intellectuals played a major role in igniting and maintaining the flame of the revolution, and in this respect, the sociologists predicting their natural commitment's ideology were right, but mobilization left no segment of society unmoved. Such turbulence, the liberal democratic societies had not lived through for many decades, no institution, social practice,

moral rule remained intact. As one would expect the new ideology showed its old face, a combination of suspicion and enthusiasm. Suddenly, millions of residents of affluent societies became disciples of Karl Marx, ready to lay bare the dishonesty of the established truths and to search for the economic, political, and biological conditioning. But an enthusiasm was there as well, for the new world, the age of Aquarius, love, peace, brotherhood, freedom, and spontaneity. The hypnotizing power of the word utopia, previously saddled with bad connotations and often associated with inhuman experiments, miraculously resurrected itself. The feeling that a new utopia was right around the corner lasted a few years and then began

to subside, but the ideology did not loosen its grip on the Western mind, though the coarse language of the Paris barricades was softened. The flowered children quietly retreated from the stage, and so did the age of Aquarius and the counterculture manifestos, but the society never returned to a pre-protest identity, and there was neither a scenario nor a desire to move away from ideology. Soon the ideology reasserted itself, this time in less menacing form. Now it was the ideology of liberal democracy. slightly more complicated than that form of communism,

but comparably simplistic and equally impoverishing people's range of thought. See, here's the thing about liberal democracy. Somebody who has the will can take it over and make it whatever they want. Because when it comes down to it, liberal democracy in its purest form has no gatekeepers. There's no one there to go, no, you can't teach that here. because as soon as you say no you can't teach that here you become what national socialists so you have to have this phony marketplace of ideas where the best social engineers win and take over until someone comes along and says there's not going to be any competing ideas

Who are we? Where do we come from? The ideological man has colonized the vast part of the public life and private thought, and his conquests are not yet over. As did his communist predecessor, he exhibits a mixture of suspicion and enthusiasm, which gives him a comparable sense of self-righteousness. In one respect, at least these ideologies differ to the disadvantage of liberal democracy. The influence of ideology and communism had a downward trend. At the beginning everything was ideological, but over a long period of time, the ideology began retracting, not without resistance to be sure. For those who lived in these countries, it was clear that slowly, too slowly, of course, the ideological vigilance weakened. The crude dichotomies were losing their

clarity. The new was fighting the old with less seal. With the disappearance of the ideological smokescreen reality began to disclose itself in all its richness and complexity. The world, in short, it was becoming more and more interesting. In liberal democracy, we have been, unfortunately, observing a reverse trend. The ideological smoke screen is becoming more dense and more impenetrable than before. The entire system seems to be embarked on a great transformation. One would be tempted to say that the system created by its own liberal democratic version of the old communist theory that the building of a new society must coincide with the

testification of the campaign against its enemies. That liberal democracy has ambition to create a new society and a new man, and that it is proud of its achievements, is being proclaimed with deafening vehemence. But at the same time, one has the impression that the concluding chapter of this magnificent project is always receding into the future. No matter how much work has been done, the enemy is still as strong as ever. How else one could explain the growing officiousness of ideology? There is more and more of it in politics and law and education in the media, in the language. Under communism, let us repeat. The conceptual engine that animated the communist ideology was the idea of class struggle, supposedly fought throughout the entire history of humanity. In a liberal democracy,

this engine, believed to have been present in the history of humanity since the beginning of time, is an improved version of the original. The Marxists had only class as an ideological leverage. In today's liberal democracy, the main ideological triad is class, race, and gender. But this triad does not exhaust all forces on the battlefield between the old and the new. We have Eurocentrism versus multiculturalism, heterosexuality versus homosexuality versus homosexuals. Logocentrism versus its opposite, whatever it may be. But even this is not enough.

The war goes on between black and white, Africa and Europe, metaphysics and politics, old and young, skinny and fat. We have sexual, ecological, educational, climactic, and literary ideologies as well as dozens of others. Schools and universities absorb more and more ideology, politics is steeped in it, and the media make it their religion. In the European Union, the ideology has been emanating with such intensity that each prolonged contact with its institutions requires a thorough detoxification of one's mind and one's language. Think about that. You can't even interact with these forces without having to detoxify your minds prior and post. The liberal democratic mind, just as the mind of a true communist, feels an intercompulsion to manifest its pious loyalty to the doctrine.

Public life is full of mandatory rituals in which every politician, artist, writer, celebrity, teacher, or any public figure is willing to participate, all to prove that their liberal democratic creeds spring spontaneously from the depths of their heart. I was listening to Jay Burden on Timeline Earth, talking to the Timeline Earth guys this morning. and I mean, I know a lot of people have used this in the past, but look at a band like Green Day. Green Day was singing a song, American Idiot, about how much of an idiot George Bush was, George W. Bush was, and he was. But now they're completely on the side of everyone who cheer lead that war. And think about that.

In the communist system, every citizen was expected regardless of the situation to mention something. if only impasseant about the absolute superiority of communism and or a brotherly friendship with the Soviet Union or the devilish nature of the capitalist exploitation of the working masses today in an equal knee-jerk reactions of homoise reaction one is expected to give one's approving opinion about the rights of homosexuals and women and to condemn the usual villains villains such as domestic violence racism xenophobia or discrimination or to find some other means of

coutowing to the ideological gods. For instance, it is often advisable to add something about climate change, demonstrating that the outdated term global warming is no longer used, but at the same time, not even with a quiver of an eyebrow communicating that replacing one word with the other means anything. This language has practically monopolized to public space and invaded schools, popular culture, academic life, and advertising. This last phenomenon is particularly telling. Today, it is no longer enough simply to advertise a product. The companies feel an irresistible need to attach it to a message that is ideologically correct. We don't have TV, but we have like Amazon Prime and you do get commercials, some TVs and some shows, like if you watch Tubeby or something like that.

And I hadn't even done that in years. I stopped. I cut cable. TV in like 2014 or 2015 and just watch like DVDs and that's about it for a while. But recently I wanted to watch some stuff from overseas and the commercials. Every commercial would have you believe that every couple is interracial. Well, that's not by accident, right? It's part of the religion. You're showing that you're a member of the church. And if you don't, well, I mean,

I mean, the only, I guess when you look at Army ads now that they're trying to ramp up war fever, that's only supposed to be for white people. Even if this message does not have any commercial function, and it hardly ever does, any occasion is good to prove oneself to be a proponent of the Brotherhood of Races, a critic of the church, church with a capital C, and a supporter of homosexual marriage. The sycophant weedling is practiced by journalists, TV, morons, pornographers, athletes, professors, artists, professional groups, and young people already infected with the ideological mass culture. Today's ideology is so powerful that almost everyone desires to join the great camp of progress. This omnipotent urge to seek refuge in this great liberal democratic church somewhat contradicts the very ideology to which so many have been drawn.

If ideology, by definition, expresses particular interests of particular groups, then the world in which we live should be full of conflicts, or at least of debates in which we would hear the ideological claims of the male part of the population, of Eurocentrists, of heterosexuals, etc. But these claims are not to be heard. Individuals and groups seem to behave contrary to the ideologies they were expected to espouse, but indulge in adulation. of the other side. Moreover, they seem to do it quite selflessly out of pure love for the idea completely ignoring their own alleged self-interest, condition, race, class, and gender. This created a situation almost as surreal

as to that under communism. The ideology that was originally to reveal the roots of ideas, economic conditioning, group interests, biological predilection, turned into an independent agent of such a coercive power that if, It forced people to say and to do things that, in the light of this ideology, they should not be doing.

Men free themselves as male conditioning and become feminist, heterosexual, and become feminist, heterosexual, supposedly in the yoke of their gender, praise homosexuality most profusely. Europeans, who were said to be the slaves of parochialism, criticize Eurocentrism in the strongest terms possible. philosophers who for ages have been the apostles of the Logos treat it today with contempt, and the monists have quite unexpectedly become attracted to pluralism and multiculturalism. Part 3. Political ideology made spectacular conquest in art and intellectual life. Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty, considered an anachronistic and of dubious political value and replaced it with the criterion of correctness. Ideas and works of art had to be ideologically correct.

During the dark years of communism, artists were writing books, painting pictures, composing pieces of music that were meant to be straightforward eulogies of what was then called the correct party line, including the five-year plans and the heroism of the political security forces and they're offensive against foreign and domestic fascists. These artists used their talents to depict as persuasively as they could the sinister role of the enemies, the U.S. imperialists, Kulok, spies, and saboteurs. But as I said, later on, along with the cracks in ideology, art took on a more noble character. In fact, in Poland, and probably in other countries of the region, too, the weakening of communism

was accompanied by an extraordinary blossoming of culture, which can only be fully appreciated in our time. It is, of course, an open question whether there was any clear relationship between the relaxation of the ideological straitjacket and the development of artistic creativity, or whether, which is more probable, this relaxation was simply, as it always is, a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, of any free activity, including art. Some other factors must also have been present, presumably stronger, yet difficult to identify in certain, impossible to reproduce at will, as is usually the case when at a certain moment of history and in a particular place, we have a sudden outburst of artistic creativity. Similarly, it is probably

the absence of these or related factors, as several decades later prevented the artists of a Poland deliberated from communism from reaching comparable heights of artistic achievement, despite the fact that they enjoyed considerably greater freedom, both as citizens and as creators of art. I saw a Polish politician have produced some incredible art last year with the fire extinguisher. In the liberal democracy of the last decades, we have also had a large crowd of artists who produced works meant to be correct. They depict and condemn fascism in all its forms, undermine the center, and praise the periphery, call for emancipation and deplore discrimination, declare the superiority of pluralism over fundamentalism, write about the

plight of homosexuals among intolerant heterosexuals or women in the world of the merciless patriarchy. They talk of the other of sex of the body. This virtually exhausts the message that the artists of today are conveying to their audience. The message is hopelessly simplistic, but its correctness cannot be doubted, which is enough to give the artist the necessary recognition among the dictators of artistic fashions. The artists who ignore the imperative of correctness have a harder road toward recognition. Correct art is not only political, but in fact apologetic toward the liberal democracy, as it is envisioned by its ideology. In this respect, an artist loyal to liberal democracy is no different from an artist who is loyal to communism.

Both fight against the enemies of their respective political systems. Both oppose what is deemed old and outdated. Both take it for granted that the world was a terrible place to live before it became open to the benefits of socialism. in the case of the socialist artist or of liberal democracy in the case of the liberal democratic artist. Both tend to depict the human relations as a more or less accurate illustration or a consequence of the political mechanisms, communist or liberal democratic, or the lack thereof. Both believe in their respective utopias, at least as a mental exercise or a thought experiment, and both perceive within them the new man to be born by discarding his past conditionings and thus acquiring a freedom to create his identity afresh.

You're not allowed to live historically. It has to all be washed away. To be sure, there are different actors in both cases, and yet they perform similar roles. A proletarian was replaced by a homosexual, a capitalist by a fundamentalist, by a fundamentalist, exploitation by a communist revolutionary by a feminist, and a red flag by a vagina. One encounters a similarly narrow, a similarly narrow intellectual space in today's humanities, which, ultimately, are dependent on liberal democracy to the same degree that the communist humanities depend on communism. The language they use is not only political, but derived directly from the terminological storehouse of the liberal democratic ideology, rights, exclusion,

recognition, emancipation, equality, domination, colonialism, etc. Entering the field of the humanities today, exactly as in the communist past, is like entering into the battlefield. One has to join the forces to defend what is right against what is wrong. Literary critics, writers, performers, filmmakers, and theater directors imagine themselves to be listening to the voice of the excluded and searching for the deep roots of domination. Anthropologists, social sciences, journalists, and celebrities are preoccupied with pretty much the same, believing, of course, that What they do has a momentous weight upon the world that is as well as upon the world that will be. What those people do when you look at critics, writers, performers, filmmakers, theater directors, anthropologists, social sciences, journalists, celebrities, they believe they're fighting for the little guy.

They believe that, you know, the little guy is, you know, he needs to be proper. up. Someone needs to be his hero. But really what they're doing, you know, in the, if you understand, high low versus middle, is they're just basically propping up the regime in charge. And whatever its ideology is, simple as. They have, they will never, true dissidents are attacked by the regime. If you see someone who's not being attacked by the regime, well, and it's apparatchiks. Sometimes a regime will lay off of certain people, but their apparatchiks will definitely come after you.

Once we understand how strikingly the liberal democratic artists and intellectuals are, mentally, a mirror reflection of their communist counterparts, we will notice that the resemblance also extends to the way they behave. In each system, the arts. artis and intellectuals willingly gather in herds. They treat the censors and outsiders with contempt and enmity. They shamelessly enthuse over idiocies that bear the stamp of modernity and exhibit a revolting temerity in the face of what they consider to be the imperatives of the time. Their cowardly behavior, they call dignity and their dishonorable adulation, stupidity, a conscious act of attunement,

the spirit of the times. In the past, they fell into raptures over the works of the Soviet comrades. Today they exhibit ecstatic agitation when reading the works of American feminists, although the intellectual quality is in either case comparably low. In the past, they wrote dissertations about Thomas Hobbs as a materialist fighting idealism. Today, they take Hobbs to be a misogynist defending patriarchy. And even if someone refrained from writing such things then, and refrains from writing them now, he would not protest against this sad spectacle of intellectual degradation, not because of his cowardice, to be sure, to be sure, a widespread weakness among humans in general and the intellectuals in particular, but because in his heart he believes,

or is not strong enough to shun the belief, that there must be something fundamentally right in all this deluge of nonsense, and he persuades himself that deprecating it would be more wrong than keeping silent. Artists and intellectuals often resemble a character in a Polish film who said that he only like the songs he knew. They, too, reduce everything to what they know, being unable to recognize the value of anything else. So when they put Eugene Ongon on stage, they make the title character and his friend Lensky two homosexuals joined by mutual attraction. This is an absolutely idiotic supposition, but well illustrates what, almost compulsorily, compulsorily, passes for originality today. When they staged a magic flute, the queen of the night becomes the owner of an escort service,

obviously a positive character because she represents sex and sex represents freedom. On the other hand, Sarastro is made into an evil headmaster disciplining students because the headmaster disciplining students today has to be a bad man. In the new productions Romeo and Juliet are two junkies, and the warriors from Troy nervously wait for a new supply of condoms and so on and so forth. All of these examples, real, not made up, are sad proofs that artists, supposed to be models of creativity and independence, have come close to being a herd of mediocrities and distinguishable from one another whose minds have been sterilized of all that is new, revealing, and unexpected. That's one of the points that needs to be made about, like, clotting gay at Harvard. when these people are being accused of plagiarism,

they're all plagiarizing each. Where are they getting original thought from? There's nothing new under the sun for them. They're not allowed to let anything else in. They read the same things, and they read them over and over again. Of course it's going to be in there. There are sayings that I say that I don't even And because I read a lot of the same, I read a lot of the same authors sometimes, I'll fall into the same thing where I'll just be repeating lines that I've read in a book.

Because I think they're relevant. You read them enough times and you just, you're not going to give credit for them anymore. Because, I mean, basically it's become my own almost. So the whole, oh, these are plagiarists and everything. There's only so much source material they can drive anything from. The authors and artists usually defend themselves by saying that they do all these pathetic experiments, mainly for today's audience, who find the old text utterly unrelated to real experience, and who in order to understand those texts need translations into modern cultural idioms.

The vicissitudes that befall the capulets and the mum, Montague's will appeal to modern theater goers only if the families from 16th century Italy are turned into two gangs in an American metropolis, and if Romeo and Juliet, instead of wearing strange costumes, are making long speeches in a funny language, become two junkies or some other characters well known from the movies and television. These arguments and practices that have trivialized a modern reception of the classical art bring to mind the arguments and practices of the communist artist who, just like their counterparts today, organize them, into a herd in whose productions were equally predictable. What they were doing was supposedly also for

the audience, a different one to be sure, but equally, as it was then assumed, fed up with the old style view of literature. So the communist artists modernized the classics to adapt the old stories to the new sensibility of the communist society. They made Hamlet a progressive political activist, and a Karenina, a victim of class egoism. Antigone, a pioneer of the war. woman's movement, etc. The truth is that the modern artists, no less than their predecessors, make these crude updates of the classics not for the audience, but for themselves. Their works well reflect their imagination and mental capacities which are just as flat and

vulgar. They sometimes try to give the impression, mostly in interviews and press conferences, that this flatness is only apparent that underneath their works boil with irony, ambiguity, and a subversive polemics with the old masters, all these being, allegedly, an attempt to bring to light an unorthodox message hidden in the classical literature. Sometimes the artists pretend to, sometimes the artists pretend to be like Gomborkwik who rebelled against the classics, asking resolutely, how come they impress us when they do not impress us at all? How come they impress us when they do not impress us at all.

Huh. However, the same question repeated a thousand times today by the vulgar minds has come to have the value of a television commercial. Perhaps more adequate would be to compare the artists with their aversion to the classics to another of Gumbruwitz's characters, Mietis, known for his notorious fascination with the vulgar and the low. This last analogy may be quite instructive. Inferded duke, Inferdedirk, Mirdis, I know I'm pronouncing that wrong. Don't be mad at me, especially you, um, Pollux.

I'm one-e, I got half of that in me, so leave me alone. Inferdy, Dirk, Mierrez defeats his adversary siphon, a defender of the high and the sublime, by raping him. Verbly, that is, through his ears, just as our authors and artists seem to triumph by raping us through our ears and eyes, and above all through intellect. In Gumbrookwitz's novel, the episode ends with the death of Seifin, unable to hear the humiliation, and Mietas, during his search for the vulgar,

finally at his own request to his delight, having his face slapped by a young farmhand. For the time being, today's farmhands, far more culture than their literary counterparts, kissed the hands of Mietis-like characters, but one cannot rule out that the time will come when they will slap their master's faces, and not necessarily at their request. The liberal democratic man, especially if he is an intellectual or an artist, is very reluctant to learn,

but at the same time, all too eager to teach. This trait of his character is in a way understandable once we remember that his nature was considerably impoverished by his turning back on standards of classical and Christian anthropology. He lost, or rather, as his apologist would have put it, was reliant. of the intellectual instruments deemed unnecessary that would enable him to describe the inadequacy of his existence and to articulate a sense of want. He is, as Ortega once put it, a self-satisfied individual, not in the sense that he occasionally fails to fuel his misery, or to be haunted by a fear of death, a disgust of meaninglessness, a fatigue of the mystification that, as he begins to

realize more and more acutely, surrounds him, but because he assumes and never has the slightest doubt that he is in possession of the entirety of the human experience. Looking around, he finds hardly anything that would put this conviction into question, and a lot that gives it practically each day and with each development a strong corroboration. All right, we're up to part four. I'm going to finish it right there. We'll finish this out next episode. Yeah, that's it.

Go to my substack. Look up my substack, the Peking Yono Show, and check out the updates I've done on North Carolina, what's going on with the relief in North Carolina, and exactly what they need there. And I list exactly what's necessary to keep people warm and keep people housed up there. And if you can donate and if you can contribute in any way, please do. All right. Thank you very much. And see you on episode eight.