The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Ryszard Legutko's 'Demon in Democracy' Part 8

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

63 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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I want to welcome everyone back to part eight in my reading of Rizar Lugutko's, The Demon in Democracy. We are in the middle of chapter four and we're in part four. And chapter four is titled ideology. So let's go. The ubiquitous ideology in the communist and liberal democratic societies drag people farther and farther from reality. One of the most unpleasant aspects of living under communism was an awareness that we were always surrounded by non-reality, i.e. artifacts fabricated by the propaganda machine whose aim was to prevent us from seeing reality as it was.

Oftentimes it was a fraud or simply a suppression of information about, for example, the state of the economy, or who murdered whom at Katian, or what the fraternal parties agreed on during the summit. But it was something more sinister than that. The entire atmosphere was sultry because we could not free ourselves from a feeling that we were living among phantoms in the world of illusion, or rather a delusion. Back in 2020, when COVID was happening, there was this, some of us noticed there was this mass moving back, people going back to church, or people who had never been to church before, going to find churches.

And I believe it was their way of trying to find reality was. or it was a way of looking to something historically that existed, that was real, was something you could see lasted for hundreds, even thousands of years. And it wasn't 2020 unleashed what could be called Phantoms in a world of illusion. And I think a lot of people were like, I need a solid foundation. And a lot of people decided to abandon their delusions, whether that was political ideology or what have you. And what's funny is a lot of people make their political ideology into their morality. So they saw people leaving their political ideologies as abandoning morality, which literally makes no sense.

sense, if your politics is your morality, you've completely lost the plot. You're living in a world of illusion among phantoms. So people went and they tried to find something real or something historic. We were surrounded by entities whose reality seemed precarious, but whose power of influence was enormous. Party, working class, revisionists, Zionists, anti-socialist, forces. extremist elements, five-year plan, work stoppages, forces of imperialism, socialist renewal, leading role of the party, fraternal parties, domestic export. All these terms and many others impossible to translate into English were supposed to describe real facts, processes, and

institutions, but were actually political declarations. It was impossible to conduct any serious debate about the real issues because the language served to conceal rather than to reveal. Whoever used those keywords automatically gave his consent to this function of the language and agreed to take the role of participant in a linguistic political ritual and thereby to declare his loyalty. The more participants, the noisier the political rights. The more impressive seem to be the performance of the entire political system in the eyes of those whose minds are limited by the choice of the official language. if you don't openly say no to the ruling political order, to an evil spirit of the age,

to the post-war consensus, you're giving it its power. You're allowing it to remain powerful. The first step in breaking loyalty was to abandon this language in order to see the world as it was, without the mediation of fraudulent words or the false hypothesis that generated. They generated. This eye-opening experience of a break with the ideological masks and the elation one felt when touching the real world was well depicted in Polish literature in the 1970s and 1980s. Whoever lived in the atmosphere of those days could not forget this blissful enjoyment

of speaking, seeing, and feeling the truth, and how after years of linguistic deception, it brought a breath of life and a reviving influx of fresh air, not only to those who dared to reject the language of the ideology, but also eventually to the entire community. The mere description of the world, sincere and truthful, had an electrifying effect on people's souls, discovering the richness of human experience, bringing back to the memory long-forgotten facts,

the old idea is being revived and restored to their former nobility, recognizing a variety of styles and forms of expression, all of these awkward, all of these awakened people from their ideological slumber. Many of them also understood that their newly rediscovered desire to see the world as it was needed to be preceded by the cleaning away of all the contaminating dirt that the decades of ideology had left on their souls.

The collapse of communism and the entry of the liberated countries into the global system of liberal democracy was supposed to intensify and consolidate this change. Europe, or as it was often said, the West, was believed to be founded on objectivism and truth. After all, it was there where renowned institutions of research and education had flourished for centuries,

where free media and free journalists had been giving the world at large free and unbiased information, where science and technology had been developing an incomparable rate and with incomparable successes. And finally, where for decades people had been blessed with democracy, that is, a system with an inbuilt mechanism that allows different points of view to act as correctives to one another's one-sidedness. We thought, or rather we believed,

that all these magnificent things would have been impossible without long an institutionalized traditions of respect for the truth and endowing the human mind with a desire for objectivity, and an inculcated aversion to ideology. Those of us who had such high hopes were met with disappointment. Or met disappointment. If the reality revealed itself to us in Eastern Europe, it was short-lived and without consequences.

Very quickly, the world became hidden under a new ideological shell, and the people became hostage to another version of the Newspeak, but with similar ideological mystifications. Obligatory rituals of loyalty and condemnations, were revived, this time with a different object of worship and a different enemy. The new commissars of the language appeared and were given powerful prerogatives, and just as before, mediocrities assumed their self-proclaimed authority to track down

ideological apostasy and condemn the orthodox, the unorthodox, all, of course, for the glory of the new system and the good of the new man. Media more refined than under communism performed a similar function. standing at the forefront of the great transformation leading to a better world and spreading the corruption of the language to the entire social organism and all itself. Communism as an ideology, an ideology that you had to live every day that you had to speak, that you had to think that you had to outwardly wear, was replaced with another. Liberalism. Simple as that. In order to be able to give a fairly accurate description of reality,

one has to be somehow detached from it, and is precisely this condition that the ideology invalidated by transforming the majority of people, whether they agreed or not, into participants in the war it itself created. Practically, everyone felt coerced not only to take the right side, but to reassert his partisanship by surrendering to all the necessary language rituals without any critical thought or disarming doubt. The person accused of a reactionary attitude under communism could not effectively defend himself because once the accusation was made, it disallowed any objection. Even the best counterargument

to the effect that the charge was ill-staged, and that being a reactionary does not mean that one is necessarily wrong, just as being a progressive does not mean that one is necessarily right, only sank the accused person deeper. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liedel Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your LIDLi items all reduce to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself.

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Trump on Dunbioghush Farage. Any such argument was a confirmation of his book. belonging to the reactionary camp, which was clearly reprehensible, if not downright criminal. There's that word. What did Thomas say? He said after Nuremberg, being right-wing, basically became criminal. Another thing I'd like to point out is he's in Poland, which was behind the Iron Curtain. East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain. If you look at most of the places that were behind the Iron Curtain, not all of them, definitely Northern Europe. When they came out, they were untarnished by what Globo Homo had turned into by 1991.

And you still see that today. Poland is still fighting against this liberalism, this progressivism, taking over. Same thing in the parts of Germany that were under Eastern occupation. when you take into consideration global homo liberalism, progressivism, this disgusting post-war consensus, those who were behind the Iron Curtain fared better when it came down, being confronted by it. At least they're holding it off. we shall see what the future holds. The only option that the defendant had

was to admit his own guilt and submit a self-criticism as self-downgrading as possible, but even that did not have to be accepted. If the defendant had the right to answer the charges in public, and of course he did not, the immediate result was an avalanche of well-orchestrated condemnations in mass protests where the indignant engineers, workers, and writers

shredded the insolent reaction into, pieces. Today, when someone is accused of homophobia, the mere fact of accusation allows no effective reply. To defend oneself by saying that homosexual and heterosexual norms are not equal, even if supported by most persuasive arguments, only confirms the charge of homophobia because the charge itself is never a matter of discussion. The only way out for the defendant is to submit a self-criticism which may or may not be accepted. When the poor daredevil is adamant and imprudently answers back, a furious pack of enraged lumpen intellectuals inevitably trample the careless polemicist into the ground.

Prudent people both then and now anticipate such reactions and made a preemptive move before saying anything reckless. Under communism, the best tactic was to start by condemning the forces of reaction and praising the socialist progress. Then one could risk smuggling in a reasonable, though somewhat, audacious statement, preferably wrapped in quotations from Marx and Lenin. In a liberal democracy, it is best to start with a condemnation of homophobia, followed by the praise of the homosexual movement, and only then sheepishly include something commonsensical, but only using the rhetoric of tolerance, human rights, and the documents issued by the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice. Otherwise, one invites trouble. Or here it would be the ACLU,

the ADL or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The characteristic feature of both societies, communist and liberal Democrat, was that a lot of things simply could not be discussed because they were unquestionably bad or unquestionably good. Discussing them was tantamount to casting doubts on something whose value had been unequivocally determined. Under communism, one could not discuss the merits of idealism

because by definition it did not have any or the leading role of the party because such a role was indubitable, or the good sides of Marxist revisionism because the revisionism had only bad sides, or the controversies over planned economy, because there was nothing on controversial in it, and many other things that the doctrine declared clearly right or clearly wrong. In a liberal democracy, the degree of freedom is much larger, but even so it seems to be shrinking at a frightening speed. Some concepts are not so value-loaded that they permit. at no discussion, only unconditional praise or equally unconditional condemnation, tolerance, democracy,

homophobia, dialogue, hate speech, sexism, pluralism. They therefore serve either as a stick to beat those who are not docile enough or the ultimate form of laudation. For the majority of people, there is no other way but to follow the orthodoxy and to watch one's language. Because the power of ideology increases, one should be more and more careful about the language one uses. The language discipline is the first test for loyalty to the orthodoxy, just as the neglect of this discipline is the beginning of all evil. The liberal democratic man, just as his communist counterpart, lives in a world almost totally packed with conventions and interpretations with very little space for individual initiative. He relies almost exclusively on ready-made formulations, moves within well-known stereotypes of thought and language through which he expresses his feelings of approval and discipline. disapproval and justifies his role in a community.

The ideology that surrounds him is not only a set of concepts, but also a system of mandatory practices. Like an erstwhile African savage, he is expected to dance his ritual dances in order to manifest his tribal affiliation through the well-trained gestures and rhythms the village sorcerers taught him so that he could express his enthusiasm for the war, so he could express his enthusiasm for the war, his superiors, thought it rational to wage against the enemies, or to give his joyful support of peace if this accords with the strategy of the tribe. For him, there is no reality apart from that which bears the meaning given it by the sorcerers.

Nothing else exists, and if it does, it's not worth communicating. Of course, one can argue that, after all, in the entire history of mankind, a large part of the human race lived in thought like that. They lived in a world already interpreted and thought according to the rules created by somebody else. this is when you read this and even myself reading this, that immediately comes to mind. It's like, well, I mean, hasn't it always been like that? Having societies always been like that? He continues.

But the liberal democratic society is different from others being closer to a socialist society than to the traditional ones. The difference boils down to two things. The first one was already mentioned. A society that is ideological that prides itself on having the high. highest level of emancipation, independence, and autonomy, and history, which raises the stark contrast between the declaration and the reality. The second difference concerns the nature of that society. The earlier communities were significantly conventionalized, indeed, but mainly by a social

custom, not by ideology. Today, the custom significantly weakens in the ideology takes its place. I was actually somebody on Twitter. I think I commented yesterday, or it was very early this morning. They were talking about the free market, and basically all the free market is is property rights and natural law. And I said, well, that's ideology and that ideology doesn't exist in reality. And he just came back basically repeating the first thing he said. And what I said was there is no natural law. your laws are customary cultural.

As soon as you say natural law, you're globalizing it. You're turning it into something that's for everyone. And as soon as you globalize something, it loses its power. It loses its significance. And also, you lose your sovereignty. Because now that's for everyone. and do you, just taking immigration into account, stuff we've seen about importing Indians to come in here and replace American workers, do we need that? I mean, do they, if we're looking at a natural law, if we're living in a natural law society, sure, there's no problem with them coming here.

They have the same rights. They're under the same laws. they recognize natural law just as you do, because natural law is universal. But do they? Or do they recognize cultural and customary laws and customs? You can talk about natural law all you want. You can believe this is the way it works. But that person coming in is coming from a society that doesn't have, doesn't believe in natural law.

they believe in their customs do their customs match up with what you believe well if they don't you're importing a problem that's why you cannot universalize these things therefore your people

the people who ascend to it why would you force it on somebody else when they don't believe in it and we'll never you catch them in the corner of your eye Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Kupra plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro.

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the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Savour 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 Dune-Begg. Search Trump, Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kosh Faragea. Ortega was right when he said that in the old societies, people had customs, proverbs, stories, and sayings. Today they have opinions, which they quite sincerely believe to be their own. What they do not know, however, is that they owe these opinions to the ideology that surrounds them,

not to their independent intellectual efforts. if you're believing in an ideology, you are basically abandoning the customs to proverbs, stories, and sayings. And you can say, well, that's my ideology. Okay, well, understand what the term ideology means. And maybe latch on to customs, proverbs, and stories, and sayings.

And so, in the absence of social custom in the hierarchy, that such custom usually brings about, it is the opinions that today, it is opinions that today have become, it is the opinions that today have become the major way of manifesting one's presence in the world. It's not your customs that your ancestors carried down, that you're not allowed to act that way. If you act that way, you are going against the ideology of the day. If you look at your social, customs and they say they build this hierarchy. No, there's a hierarchy in place. It's the president, the vice president, the speaker of the house. That's your hierarchy. If you go against that,

you're a threat to the ideology. But because we live in a democratic society, the surest way to achieve that goal is to join a large group of people united by having the same opinions. Even if such opinions are stereotyped, expressed in terms of deceptive concepts and in vulgar language full of stale banality, that distorts the picture of reality and has a paralyzing effect on our faculties of thinking and perceiving. It is enough that they are shared by a sufficiently high number of people living in the absolute certainty that these ideas are fresh, innovative, innovative, and controversially feisty, and that their brilliance is worthy of the brilliant minds that emitted them. That is why most intellectuals in academia are paid by the state so that they can have these, they have these ideas, this ideology, they're passing it on to you. They are seen, they are called doctor, they're called professor, so that you look upon them as you would, what's the term up here, as you would, you know, the hierarchy. They're at the

top of the hierarchy. You are to believe what comes out of their mouths. They're teaching you about reality. And to go against that, you're going against the smartest people alive. Do you think you're smarter than a doctor or professor? 20-20 again. Part five. The overwhelming presence of ideology and liberal democratic and communist societies can be easily explained. The main cause is equality, which both regimes gave a status of the highest value and made a regulating principle. Both systems enforced the liquidation through revolutionary means and communism, evolutionary and liberal democracy, of social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and practices that had existed prior to the emergence of the new political system. You're hearing this, right? What the goal of these social hierarchies custom,

or the goal of the revolutionary means in communism and the evolutionary in liberal democracy. Remember, you need a foundation for, you need a firm foundation for everything, except your customs, except your political order, except your hierarchy. It has to constantly be evolving.

And it's the way they destroyed the social hierarchies, customs, traditions, and practices that existed prior, that your forefathers followed. The construction of the communist society was possible only after the government carried out a planned and brutal destruction of most of the existing communities and social structures. The new system eliminated the social classes ostensibly

to create a classless society, which in practice meant the dismantling of the entire social fabric, communities, organizations, institutions, something that Orrin McIntyre talks about all the time. They had to destroy the church. They had to destroy the fraternal organizations. Because they were a direct.

threat to them. They need you to rely upon them. And if you have a private and a cultural, customary safety net, you're not going to take theirs. You don't see them as the authority. In Poland, virtually no institution survived, with the exception of the Catholic Church, and the ones that were formally considered to be continuations of the former structures, such as schools and universities, were substantially altered. In the new society, all people became comrades or citizens enjoying equal status and sharing equal concern for the welfare of communism. This equality was secured and watched by the Communist Party, which had its branches and representatives almost in every segment of society, no matter how small. Alongside a new administrative structure and a new technocratic hierarchy of directors, presidents, and managers, there existed a parallel.

network of communist committees and apparatchiks who controlled the ideological discipline in the administration and management, setting the goals, nominating the cadres, and preventing any independent decision-making from emerging. Universities, to give an example, recreated part of the original academic structures, but next to them, and in fact above them, there was in each a Communist Party organization which made the strategic decisions, supervised, academic promotions and the teaching curricula and saw to it that the central directives were followed. One can, of course, raise a counterargument to the effect that communism was essentially anti-egalitarian and generated glaring inequalities unparalleled in any other political system of modern times.

A member of the party had a far superior status than a fellow citizen outside the party. The top party officials had privileges absolutely inaccessible to ordinary workers, And yet despite all such examples, egalitarianism and despotism do not exclude each other, but usually go hand in hand. To a certain degree, equality invites despotism, because in order to make all members of society equal and then to maintain this equality for a long period of time, it is necessary to equip the controlling institutions with exceptional power so they can stamp out any potential threat to equality in every sector of the society and any aspect of human life. To paraphrase a well-known sentence by one of Dostoevsky's characters, we start with absolute equality and we end up with absolute despotism. Some call it a paradox of equality.

The more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have. The more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality. The more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian. But the root cause of strong correlation between equality and despotism and communism was of a different kind. In societies that are disintegrated or whose fabric is destroyed by the revolution, political power becomes practically the sole organizing force. Such power does not encounter any resistance as all forms through which a society normally organizes itself have been wiped out.

There are no traditional hierarchies, no spontaneously developed communities, no historically entrenched institutions. unchecked, despotism meets with no barrier for its self-aggrandizement. This is one of the major reasons why despotism was never effectively in traditionally structured societies, where each group, even if situated on a low rung of the social ladder, had considerable autonomy and its own code, hierarchy, and rules of cooperation. I specifically that immediately calls to mind feudalism. Where there are no such groups and no internal differentiation within a society,

where there is a social and political vacuum, the despotic power is left as the only form of control. But to be really effective, the despotic control needs something more than sheer terror intimidation. It must supply the people it as deprived of old social environments with a new identity and a new sense of belonging. And this is the role of ideology. The communist societies were never made totally egalitarian, although in a country such as Poland it was difficult to indicate an institution with, as I said, the exception of the Catholic Church, that during the first 10 years of the communist regime was sufficiently untouched to provide a protective barrier, later on some old structures were partially reproduced, but the conquest

of social egalitarianism came to be accepted and considered irreversible. The society seemed to have come to a conclusion that it's, that it's, that, equality in itself was a good thing, and that although the means used by communists were reprehensible, in the end the country was pushed in the right direction. The learned people argue that equality was modernity, and therefore, communist, despicable as they were, served the cause of modernization well. In light of this new logic, what had been once thought to be a barbarism was now viewed as birth pangs of a new society, finding its way to modern rationality.

The metaphor of birth has another implication. A trend toward more and more equality was one directional, and the hierarchies that were once dismantled or destroyed could not be rebuilt. A desire to reverse the trend would be like a desire for a grown man to return to his mother's womb. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. And now this is over the hamshire. It is leargoal gilor gweha and not Gereena in Aondun, and leant de galla to ghawn father to Gail to Deirin. In Ergrid, we're dig tour chawin'vunach to findivin'vunah. It's a uschrotho eunuch in aangachurchase,

onus'clock, gnaw, and people, tariff in one t'a'an. Follam nis more in Ergird, Pongahy. It is true that the egalitarian ideology of socialism, communism, sometimes became an object of, an object of popular jokes, and it's absurd, as well as ferocious aspects were not overlooked. Yet the idea that there could be something inherently wrong with

coupling modernization and egalitarianism, that equality should not be a paramount value. That ideology was often in costly conflicts with justice, liberty, virtue, beauty, and other basic moral notions never stayed in the people's minds for long. The value of equality was not only retained unscathed, but turned out to be a singularly attractive both as an ethical idea and a rallying call. No one could legitimately object to the standard of equality because no other standard had behind it the authority of history, ethics, and common sense. To argue that a society should be organized according to a criterion other than equality

seems preposterous. It was therefore quite understandable that if the communist state began to criticize from within at some point, the most convenient platform for criticism was that it failed the test of equality, the value of which socialism was believed to be the ultimate embodiment, but which, unfortunately, for reasons that were never quite clear, betrayed. But egalitarianism was not only the paramount value of communism. Liberal theories, especially, although not exclusively, those that made use of the concept of the state of nature, assume people's primeval equality. Looked at from this perspective, all social hierarchies become immediately problematic because

they were obviously not natural. And because not natural meant that they were human constructions, the conclusions any liberal could draw was that there was nothing sacrosanct about them. They could take a different form, be improved upon, or, if need be, liquidated it altogether. All inequalities that exist must therefore have explicit justification because otherwise there was no reason for them to be tolerated. Liberalism in the classical version had a clearly anti-royalist stance, especially with regard to hereditary monarchy and ancestral institutions, all of which it was claimed were based on a mystification, a reference to mysterious origins in the remote past. This strategy of debunking institutions seemingly

ennobled by long history was extended to other social hierarchies, families, schools, and churches, in which one could see, from the perspective of the state of nature hypothesis, variations of political monarchism. And once it was assumed that originally we were all equal, no matter that originally could have a lot of meanings, it seemed probable that those inequalities that had emerged in the course of history must have resulted from subsequent usurpation, fraud, conquest, accident, and other similar reasons. Egalitarian societies have an innate propensity to fall into ideologies, and this for at least two reasons. First, a desire for equality goes hand in hand with a general mistrust towards social and political arrangements, which all, when scrutinized carefully enough, may fail the standard.

The feeling of suspicion that they indeed do fail the standard of equality may take a variety of forms. If someone climbs to the top of the hierarchy, no matter if it happened in accordance with the rules agreed upon, he is likely to suspect that those on the level below him wish to take his place, not because this is logic of competition, but because the mere fact of somebody's being at the top always offends egalitarian sensibilities of the rest. The question, why him and not me, is then an expected reaction of a person with such sensibilities, and the stronger he is, the more painfully acute this question must seem. Because the suspicion that an unequal distribution of power is immoral and illegitimate

increases with the progressive victories of egalitarianism, the struggle for equality has no ending. Equality resembles a monster with an insatiable appetite, regardless of how much it has eaten, the more it devours to how much it has eaten, the more it devours to hungry it becomes. It's another thing like I was talking about with how liberalism is just, it's a path. And it's a path that can veer off all over the place. It's not a foundation. They're going for equality. Liberalism is about equality, no matter what anyone wants to tell you, and you're never going to get there. You're never going to get to equality. So you just have to keep trying. And while you do that, you're trying to guide an engineer society. You're trying to

engineer people. And you can engineer some people, but there are some people that won't be engineered. And there are some people that are going to want to be the engineers. You see where this ends up. People might generally agree that they are all equal before the law, but this does not dispel the concerns of a dedicated egalitarian who will argue with it that this principle is too abstract to be sufficient in every instance. After all, even if we respect equality before the law, other types of inequality and domination continue to exist, and their existence is morally repugnant and cannot be tolerated. He will then add that the persistence of inequality and domination has its origin

in their being moored in people's customs and habits, which, as can be expected, considerably thwarts the principle of equality before the law. But people's conduct, although entrenched in the historically transmitted experience has always some deeper sources in the ways they think and conceptualized or image of the world. So at a certain moment, the spirit of mistrust turns to human minds and human thoughts, which are believed to be the fountainhead from which acceptance of the inequality springs. It is thus a matter of time before the sting of egalitarian ideology is directed against education, where the minds are shaped, against family life and community life, through which human thoughts acquire social durability against art, language, and science,

where they will find more refined expression. The spirit of suspicion will not disappear because there are always newer areas to conquer and deeper sources of inequality to discover. There is another reason why egalitarian societies take ideology so easily. The experience of communism is, in this respect, illuminating. The communists who destroyed a great number of the constitutive identities that people had been developing for decades, if not centuries, were aware that the need to belong was deeply embedded in human nature and that the void had to be filled with a new identity. The process of imposing a new identity on the atomized and uprooted mass of people was much more difficult than they thought, but they achieved some success. For many, the new communist identity, though appallingly crude, proved adequate enough to make up for a lost sense of belonging and to give a new one sufficiently strong to create millions of communist sympathizers.

Those who parted in hope or in despair, with the old homeland soon embraced a new one and in no time took to heart the rules of the political system, its language, its perverse code of morality, and its absurd mythology. Captured by the imperatives of ideology, they quickly grasped the necessity of being both suspicious and enthusiastic. They knew they had to sever, if only verbally, all links with tradition, and to fill the empty space in their souls with the content of the socialist creed. Tocqueville brilliantly described the ideological needs of a democratic man. He was perhaps the first to discover how this relatively simple, pragmatic creature, devoid of impractical grandeur and efficient in his activities, is in need of general concepts. This need, he argued, was typical of an egalitarian society in which people are largely undifferentiated,

hardly distinguishable from one another because they think in a similar way and are accustomed to any complexity of social arrangements or any intellectual ambiguities. Ambiguities. Armed with these concepts, they do not want to be bothered with the details of intricacy

Let me start that again. Armed with these concepts, they do not want to be bothered with the details or intricacies of the surrounding reality. Neither do they have time for complicated intellectual operations or a disinterested cultivation of the intellect. But of course, they need an overall picture of the world not only for philosophical self-confidence, but also as a source of ultimate justification for their decisions and their convictions.

This is how the democratic man, while thinking of himself an intellectual independence, almost a quasi-Cartesian, as Toakville put it, soon transforms himself into a reflection of the social group in which he lives and submerges deeper and deeper into conformity and anonymity. We see this today, right? People think that they're these incredible thinkers, these incredible independent and intellectual thinkers, yet they don't have an opinion that disagrees with the person on the news or the politician or the regime in charge or the spirit of the age. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. By design. They move you.

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E. Development of Liberal Democracy confirmed Tocville's diagnosis. Because

egalitarianism weakens communities and thus deprives men of an identity giving

habitat, it creates a vacuum around them. Hence a desire exists for a new identity, this time

modern and in line with the spirit of malignant egalitarianism. The ideologies fulfill this role perfectly. They organize people's consciousness by providing them with the meaning of life, an individual and collective purpose and inspiration for further endeavors and a sense of belonging. What is more devious than somebody is looking for purpose in life and you just hand them the spirit of the age?

Here, read this book, and the book is just the spirit of the age. Go to the school and all your learning is the spirit of the age. Watch this person on TV and all they are is completely 100% in line with the regime. Yet they think they're an individual. It's amazing to me that there are people out there who completely, they believe the same exact thing, repeat the same exact words and the same phrases. Yet they think they're rebels. That's what liberal democracy.

liberalism in all its flavors. With the emergence of ideology, the problem of a lonely individual and egalitarian society no longer exists. Feminism makes all women's sisters. All homosexuals become brothers in the struggle. All environmentalists become a part of an international green movement. All advocates of tolerance join the ranks of the universal anti-fascist crusade, and so on. Once a man joins an ideological group, all becomes clear to him and everything falls into

place. Everything is either right or wrong, correct or incorrect, and this perception soon changes the man himself. In a liberal democracy, as in communism, ideology not only characterizes the entirety of individual and collective existence into correct and incorrect, but also imposes on people's minds and imperatives to side with one and be against the other, if not in deed, then in word, or at least in thought. In earlier societies with rich internal structures, differences in loyalty that an individual could experience occurred quite often. In those built on ideology, there should be no divided loyalties, and to the extent they exist, they are dangerous symptoms of a deadly disease. The ideological correctness is like a pill that, once consumed by a

patient, should improve his organism to such a degree that he must react correctly, he must react correctly, whatever circumstances and problems he encounters, his mind and body become perfectly united, combining intellectual force with quasi-physiological reflexes, and the moment this unity has been achieved, he can no more doubt his wisdom. But because this wisdom turns out to be in practice overwhelmingly simple, he cannot help believing that whoever resists it must suffer from some profound malfunction of the mind. I'm reminded of the NPC meme from seven, eight years ago, this is how you get the NPC. One does not have to be overly acute to see a strong resemblance between a communist activist on the one hand

and a feminist, a homosexual activist, and a liberal democratic lumpen intellectual on the other. Their opinions have the same tedious predictability. Their arguments are based on similarly crude syllogisms. Their styles are similarly vulgar and their minds are equally dogmatic, unperturbed by any testimony from outside and prone to the same degree of ziligms. zealousness. On both sides, we also see what the Marxists called the unity of theory and practice, which translates into clear language, meaning the total subordination of thinking to the ideological precepts of political action. The subordination, instead of being a cause of shame, is probably

held up in its achievement of the new times. Both sides, communist and liberal democratics, share their dislike, sometimes bordering on hatred toward the same enemies. The church and religion, the nation, classical metaphysics, moral conservatism, and the family. Go ahead, argue. Say no, it's not true. Good luck. Both are unable to mitigate their arrogance towards everything that their ideology despises and which in their revolutionary ardor they seek to remove from the public space and from public lives. Both are fixated on one or two things that they refer to at nauseam because those things delineate the unbreachable boundaries of their mental horizon. That's the thing, the current thing that you latch on to.

In every sentence from the Leninist and Stalinist cateisms, one can replace proletariat with women or with homosexuals, make few other minor adjustments, and no one will recognize the original source. Both sides desire a better world so badly that in order to have it, they do not hesitate to control the totality of human life, including these aspects that are most personal or intimate. Both, unfortunately, have been successful politically and have taken over the ideological power of institutions, laws, and even something as elusive, but nonetheless important, as political atmosphere. It is true that both, those in the communist countries and those throughout the Western world after the demise of communism, were and still are quite frequently

an object of jokes. Sometimes quite deadly, but at the same time, their presence evoked, and the latter cases are still evoking, feelings of fear, or at least a sense of the clear message that opposing those people is not safe. Finally, both sides have spectacular victories among the intellectual and artistic elites. This is particularly puzzling,

because one would think that the people endowed with artistic and intellectual talents would be the first to reject with contempt something whose repulsive primitivism only persons with serious mental deficiencies could miss. Part six. The collapse of communism played no small part in making the liberal democratic ideology more impregnable. The end of the Cold War was almost instantly given an interpretation and not just any interpretation. No one dared to refute it, despite its obvious falseness. according to it, the Soviet communism that had enslaved many countries in and outside Europe

was finally defeated by the West, which represented the forces of freedom and democracy. Millions of people thus accepted the image of liberal democracy as the essence of Western civilization, a system of the enormous moral and political power, and the embodiment of the eternal human ideals. By having that war, by communism being the enemy. when it falls, no matter for what reason you take credit for it falling. And now you're the hero. You're the winners. Obviously, our side won. The end of history, right? This system turned out to be stronger than the great totalitarian empire whose people and citizens have embraced democratic values, made their long dreamt of vision come true, and could at last go the liberal democratic way, reclaim their rights and promote the ideals of pluralism and tolerance. This picture is patently false.

First of all, the liberal Democratic West did not fight the Soviet Empire and, with few minor exceptions, never had such intentions. The general strategy of the Western countries was to have good relations with the Soviet Union, even at a comparatively high price. They recognized the empire to be a key player in world politics and part of the political balance on the continent and internationally. Despite occasional heated exchanges with the Soviets, Western European governments, on both the left and the right, had mixed feelings about anti-regime movements in the Soviet-block countries and were far from giving them the endorsement they deserved. The democratic aspirations of the East European peoples posed a risk of destabilization, sometimes to a degree that pushed

Europe onto the brink of an international conflict. The Soviets were ready to defend their interest militarily, as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Western powers were aware of this and could not do anything. So it was natural for them to avoid such confrontations and not to give too much encouragement to dissident activities. They hope for a durable, organic stabilization of the communist system and an equally durable and organic rule of the Soviet Union over its allies satellites. Such a scenario was far preferable to turmoil in the cause of democracy.

or human rights or any other seemingly sacred principles. The sharper rhetoric and openly anti-Soviet policy sometimes demonstrated by the U.S. government irritated the European politicians who thought the American politics to be simply immature. If one could imagine the political history of the last six decades without the United States on the political map of the world and look at communism only through the prism of the relations

between the USSR and Western Europe, it seems almost certain that communism would stand. still be thriving, and Poland would continue to be called the Polish People's Republic. From Europe's point of view, conducting the Cold War, much less winning it, was never a priority. An accommodation between the two parts of Europe was reached at a certain moment, which, to the approval of the political elite in the convenience of Western societies, some communist leaders were believed to have redeeming features, and drop-off was found of whiskey, Gyrrhic spoke French, Qatar invented Gulash communism, whereas certain anti-regime movements seem less trustworthy,

especially those that were too conservative and too vocal about their anti-communism. It was obvious from the beginning that among the Eastern Europeans who defied the communist system, those that were closer to the left found more sympathy and support. From the point of view of ideology prevalent in Western societies, communism obviously did not have a good end. image, but the image it did was not the worst. It never incited the indignation that fascism did, the latter term, having catapulted to almost diabolical notoriety and denoting the worst of political evil, always placed on the political right. For this reason, anti-communism did not require respectability even remotely comparable to that of anti-fascism. In fact, it was never widely

respected, either in America or in Western Europe, or eventually in Eastern Europe after the fall of the old empire. Perhaps the Democratic liberals intuitively sensed they had a deeper bond, no matter how unclear, with the communists than with the anti-communists. After 1989, it was obvious what the Western public opinion wants it to hear. No matter that the movement, the communist system, no wonder that the moment the communist system fell, the anti-anti-competion. and liberal Democrats immediately started proclaiming their victory in the Cold War, even if it were the war they had done their best to avoid, and during which they had scored a pathetic record of appeasement and pusillanimity.

Geez, I don't remember that one. This is what the Western public opinion expected, and this is what they got. To make things worse, when the satellite regimes in Eastern Europe crumbled, the post-communist leaders and functionaries, got amazingly good reviews in the West, as opposed to the avowed anti-communists who were treated far less kindly. No post-communist government,

even the worst, was condemned by the European Union, while the anti-communist governments, the Polish Law and Justice Party and the Hungarian Fidez, sparked a fury of enormous intensity. To this day, the former and present-day communists are under the protection of the European Union and the political mainstream, it represents.

that just tells you everything right communism fails communists don't disappear as a matter of fact I know for a fact in Romania when Romania had their first elections after Chalchescu was killed

they just reelected the communists the communist leaders previous no the West wasn't concerned about the communists they were their guys they were worried about the anti-communists, as they were seen as right-wing.

And what has right-wing been since Nuremberg? Criminal. This false image of opposition groups in the communist countries was disseminated and became a sort of uncontested wisdom. To be sure, some of the terms of qualification were partly correct. These groups had been traditionally referred to as a democratic opposition, which, of course, accurately captured what they had striven for, a multi-party system in free elections. The anti-regime dissidents who did not articulate these demands openly kept silent, primarily for tactical, not doctrinal reasons. If democracy stands for a multi-party system and free elections,

then all the members of the anti-regime opposition were Democrats. But most of them were not Democrats in the meaning attributed to the word today. They certainly did not envisage, nor were they willing to accept the democratization of the entire society, with all its segments, and many of them view the changes in today's liberal democratic societies with a mixture of bewilderment and disgust. Another term by which the opponents of the regime were defined was that of human rights. They were routinely called human rights fighters, which, again, was true but in a narrow and frequently misleading sense. It is true that they were fighting for freedom,

also for freedoms of speech, of religion, of religion, of research, all of which can indeed be accurately called human rights, not only in terms of the universal declaration of any legislative document, but in a more fundamental sense. It is also true that the anti-regime opposition had no qualms about accepting this term as well as the language in which it functioned, because by having done so, they obtained a stronger legal justification for their actions and a more efficacious way of communicating their message to Western public opinion. But it is no less true that most of them war as far as one can be from what today goes under the label of human rights, which is the arbitrary claims, ideologically motivated, made by various political groups in blatant disregard of

the common good, generously distributed by the legislatures in the courts, often contrary to common sense and usually detrimental to the public and personal morality. The crucial fact that has been widely ignored is that what gave the anti-regime movements the strongest impetus to resist the seemingly irresistable communist power, and what the communists had tried to eradicate from the very beginning, but to their doom failed, had little to do with liberal democracy. These were patriotism, a reawakened eternal desire for truth and justice, loyalty to the imponderables of the national tradition, and a factor of paramount importance, religion. People rebelled because the regime deprived them of what they held the most precious.

free elections in a multi-party system were mechanisms, very much hoped for, nevertheless simple mechanisms, but the massive resistance was not in the name of the mechanism. It was for the ideas this mechanism could serve to achieve. And those ideas were derived from the experience of the nation, and in some cases, that of a religious community. They had nothing to do with the right to democratic schools or a right to legislation that allows tracking of hate speech or the right of a teenager to have an abortion without parental consent. If the people who defied communism had been told then that their success would lead to all these things and all these things would be attributed to their success, they would have felt betrayed.

This not because they were not bright enough to see the consequences of their actions, but on the contrary, because these were the developments, their actions were directed against. Poland's solidarity movement would not have been possible without its member strong patriotic and religious motivations. These enabled the polls not only to rise in large numbers against the oppressive regime, but also to identify the very reasons why they rose against it. These were, among other things, the regime's utter contempt for institutions, laws, norms, and social wars that had both rational and historical justification.

It's about historical justification, not natural rights or all our rights come from God. That's not how you structure, that's not how culture is structured. To have freedom meant for the polls not to have a government that would subject these institutions, laws, norms, and social mores to thoughtless social engineering.

But this is precisely what happened when the communist regime was replaced by the liberal democratic one. The depressing fact was that this sober choice of experience and reason against ideology was not sufficiently durable to withstand the pressure

from the new wave of a new ideology. Intimidated and dispersed, the citizens of the new system turned their backs on the old ideals and duly admitted that the credit for defeating the old ideology what not to them and what had really been close to their hearts and minds, but to the new ideology. They readily agree that the liberal democracy was the victor and that it had for a long time animated people's dreams and given them courage to oppose the most inhumane political system in history. It soon turned out that the real victor was even more concrete. When browsing the

propaganda materials published by the European Union today, one to discovers to one's astonishment that the actual goal of the anti-regime opposition in communist Europe was European integration and indirectly the then-nonexistent European Union as such. The amazing propaganda success of this strikingly false interpretation has many unpleasant effects. One of them was the widespread practice of rewriting history and of projecting the stereotypes of the present onto the past. One had an impression that the old ideas, suddenly ebbed away unfairly and prematurely disowned by their former adherents. Many former opposition activists were simply embarrassed by what they had believed in the past,

because now these beliefs seemed out of tune with the newest tides of modernity. Even if they were still proud of what they had done, it was now for different reasons, as the old reasons had lost their appeal. The inevitable effect was also a reinterpretation of the political drama that had ended with the collapse of the ancient regime. The old narrative about the national and religious identity awakened by historical circumstances and by the influence of powerful personalities such as Pope John Paul II had been replaced by a new one, according to which, predictably, there had been a conflict between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. This dichotomy, having obviously many analogies, progress versus reaction, nationalism versus democracy,

liberalism versus authoritarianism. Who represented the forces of darkness was not. clear. The candidates to this role changed together with the evolving of political constellations. What became clear, however, was that a growing number of people started to believe that the real opposition that had defeated the communist regime was a pro-EU one. It was this group that, together with Gorbachev, the reformist swings of the Communist Party, the European institutions, Western governments, and the enlightened European public opinion pushed Europe toward further unification, more pluralism, and more tolerance.

That's it. That's chapter four. And I'll be back in a couple days to start on five. I'll finish this up. I think we can probably, might be able to do this in two more episodes. So hope you're enjoying this. That was a particularly important section that I hope. Any section you want to share out of this, do that one.

chapter um part eight this all right that's it see in a few days thank you bye