The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Ivan Ilyin's 'On Resistance to Evil by Force' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Pt. 15

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

49 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Pete and Dr. Johnson continue a reading and commentary of Ivan Ilyin's 1925 book, "On Resistance to Evil by Force."Tolstoy's "What is a Jew?"The Lies of Leftism: Ivan Ilyin, Atheism and the Death of Reason in the East and West by Dr. Matthew Raphael JohnsonDr Johnson's PatreonDr Johnson's CashApp - $Raphael71RusJournal.orgTHE ORTHODOX NATIONALISTDr. Johnson's Radio Albion PageDr. Johnson's Books on AmazonJohnson's Law in Action: Venezuela and the Foreign Policy of Mass PresumptionDr. Johnson's Pogroms ArticleThe Orthodox Nationalist: Karl Marx “On the Jewish Question” (1844)Article: Karl Marx’s Theses on the Jews and the Necessity of Free Trade: Zur Judenfrage (1844) by Matthew Raphael JohnsonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

With election time approaching, political ads will be inserted into the episode, along with other ads that, frankly, I'm not going to like and you aren't going to like. So please ignore them, skip by them, whatever you have to do. I don't endorse any of the ads that are inserted, but it is another way for me to generate income. So I appreciate you guys putting up with them. If you don't want to deal with them, go to the Picanuena Show.com. can subscribe through Patreon. You can subscribe through Substack, which is my preferred one. Because with both of those, you get an RSS feed, only Patreon and only Substack give you an RSS feed. There's also a link to my website, Gumroad, and SubscribeStar, where you will get

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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Aline, Dr. Johnson. What's happening today? Did you know that there's an entire website dedicated to listing all the songs in rock that have the cowbell? And even more than that, I contributed to it because it didn't have Matthew Sweets into your drug that upset me. And I sent it to them and now it's on there. They want to capture every single rock song that had a cowbell after the SNL skit did so well.

in addition to that. In addition to that, I have two main coons. I've one at my feet, the little one, and the big one, a very big one, next to me on the table. She takes up the whole table. She's nowhere near stuff growing yet. She's going to keep growing. She's already monstrous, I tell you. And the little one's still kind of little, but her tail is getting poofier and poofier by the day.

So those are the two things that have me preoccupied today. That's awesome. And, you know, maybe we should mention we are recording this on Independence Day. I think that that's the best thing, the best way to refer to the day is a day of independence and not, you know, July 4th is just another, I think is another way to make you forget exactly, exactly why they started shooting, shooting people. Well, going back 20 years now, I usually play a lot of Serbian nationalist music on July 4th. It's actually kind of a long story. But I've been listening to the Belgrade Syndicot and groups like that. I do it every July 4th.

It's my thing. All right, here we go. Starting Chapter 11, nihilism and pity. The idea of love advanced by Lee. O'T Tulsoy and his followers, however, suffers not only from traits of pleasure-seeking, weakness of will, sentimentality, egotocentrism, and antisocial behavior. It describes and affirms an ideal state as an ideal state of feeling that is, in a certain sense, demonic.

And this characteristic of sentimental love is perhaps of greatest significance for the problem of resistance to evil. I think the listeners need to know how I suffered over this thing. it was not that I mind I'm not complaining this is what I do but I spent a ridiculous number of hours I mean Google Translid is absolutely useless with this kind of thing so I had to do most of it myself and I got the worst headaches and but hey it's a labor of love but that's the effort I put into this to make it not just you know not just to translate it but to make it readable and have it make sense to our audience.

We appreciate that. I'll talk you about after we stop recording, I'll mention possibly something else that might be a good translator. See, if you'll send me something, I'll try and plug it in there, see what happens. Well, I mean, I'll, oh, I use Yandex sometimes too, but that's only as a way to check things. You can never depend on it, you know, but it does help quite a bit.

As has already been shown, Tolstoy's entire worldview was grown by him from moral theory, which replaced or displaced all of their sources of spirituality in men, devaluing them or eliminating them altogether. Thus, moral experience replaces religious experience and takes its place. Morality is superior to religion in his mind. It judges all religious content by its own criterion and asserts the limits of its experience as binding on religion. The full depth of religious perception, religious mystery, and symbolism, the entire richness of positive religion, is critically and skeptically forced through the stifling

confines of personal moral experience, half blind, limited, and complacent. And we know what this is like in our world today. What he's saying here is that moral theory is simply more important than theology. Yeah, every once in a while, you know, Tolstoy will use a line from the New Testament, but for the most part, this is, you know, sentimental moralism, as he calls it. And like various kinds of ecumenism, liberalism today,

theologicalologies, you know, institutional theologies are all forced through that procrastian bed, so to speak. And he's saying it's the same thing here. and I think I said this last week, but Tolstoyanism became secular very, very quickly because it really wasn't a doctrine of theology whatsoever. Theology wasn't necessary to it, but given who he was talking to at the time,

a use of the New Testament was necessary, and even there are very limited. So, you know, even in his own mind, theology wasn't all that interesting. Moral theory was far more important and completely outshone the theology, and the theology eventually dropped out after his death. Yeah, this is very common today, especially when you'd talk about immigration. As soon as you mention, start mentioning race or culture, anything like that, there's a certain segment of Christianity. which interrupts you and says, well, you can't be a Christian and be racist.

I've heard that before. Believe it or not, I've heard that before. Or you can't be, you can't talk about the Jews in a negative way collectively and be a Christian. I mean, if someone wants to say that, then I guess you can't either be God man either because Jesus Christ was probably one, probably the most critical. of the Jewish people in the history of mankind. Oh, critical, difficult. You know, as I always say, there's not a single place in the New Testament

where he's shown smiling or laughing. And that's not an accident. Same thing for all the prophets. They were extremely harsh on everyone around them. It's a very important point. And, you know, it all comes from the ignorance of the Old Testament. and all my papers concerning race, I didn't want to talk about, I didn't start off wanting to talk about race.

Race was forced on me through various things like immigration and the attack on Europe. It's forced on us. Would we want to talk about it or not? Now, I usually don't bring a lot of this stuff up in church. It's not, you know, unless someone asked me about it. but there is a theological element to it. I think there's even a theological element to being opposed to mixed marriages,

as the great prophet Ezra talks about to a great extent. But ignorance of the Old Testament leads to a to Stoian point of view, where the only thing that these people know was one or two lines from something that Jesus said in the New Testament, and that's what they think Christianity is. they don't even know the prophets the condemnation of mixed marriages in the Old Testament went on and on and on and on and on

and on and it wasn't merely I mean ethnicity and theology often went hand in hand sometimes it's hard to tell which one so it really was both Ezra went so far as to say you dissolve it I don't care what else you have to do you dissolve it now if you have a marriage

with a non-Israelite and so because they don't know anything about the Old Testament, they come to this point of view, and it makes them sound smart, and it makes them sound moral, and people love being moral without having to sacrifice anything. They love that, so that's where you get that from. Yeah, I like to point out to people that the Great Commission,

Matthew 28, 19, and 20, is not telling people to go to all nations and destroy them and to subvert them and to change them, saying to go there and preach the gospel to them. Nowhere is that commanded. No. Armed with quote unquote simple common sense, in all its shallow impoverishment,

the moralist sorts through and analyzes the dogmatist sorts through and analyzes the dogma rights to the Christian Church, dismissing everything that seems strange and incomprehensible, and accepting each short-sighted observation as a manifestation of critical honesty and wisdom. The idea that the religious dimension permeates, sanctifies, and deepens the entire spiritual culture, and that to this extent the everyday Philistine mind, with its sobriety and prosaic nature, loses its competence, remains alien to him. For he does not see that every spirit, spiritual state of man and not only the moral, places him before the face of God, gives him a living intrinsically valuable experience of mystery and the revelation hidden in mystery

and apparently not suspecting that the work he is concerned with is, in a deep sense, a vulgar matter. He mocks the mystery and depth that are inaccessible to him and gives his rational moral worldview, the character of religious nihilism. And I'm pretty sure that's what we just said. I love the simple common sense. We hear this all the time. Shallow impoverishment. These are people who don't understand what Christian culture is.

They've never lived in one. Even when they try to be knowledgeable, they look at the older rituals of actual Christians. I'm not talking about Protestantism. That was a solvent, a destroyer. but whether east or west and because they don't understand it they can't read the symbols they dismiss it

it's all out of ignorance and they believe that they're somehow critical in doing this this happens in academia this happens and they bet their souls on this nonsense this is why your average individual

even an average educated individual can't be doing this stuff they don't understand what these things mean The peasant, whether literate or not, understood the symbolism in church, understood far more than the typical academic, even the academic who specializes in this kind of thing, will ever do. He understands that the inside of the, I'm talking about the literal temple, literal church itself, is a historical object, showing everything from the fall to the end of the world in various symbols. well, this type of person, and especially your typical, you know, Protestant, I have no idea. They wouldn't know what that means under any circumstances.

And it doesn't line up with what they think. These are the same people who think that Martin Luther King is a church father. There were some Catholic churches who did have, and all the sort of, obviously, who had Martin Luther King with a halo around his head, which is, you know, blasphemy to a most extreme degree. and of course Protestantism has that most of it has that anyway but they actually think that they're being

critical and intelligent through their ignorance not understanding what an actual Christian culture is they have no experience with it they don't understand it and they usually end up hating or negating things they don't understand and it is that you know

this Philistianism this you know the Protestant society or nominalists, they have no conception of what a culture is. You know, you own to a Protestant household, and they're nothing but contemporary art and whatever, you know, it's a secular place. And because they don't get it, they dismiss it. And it's maddening, and it goes on all the time then and now.

Similarly, moral experience asserts its supremacy in the reign of science. Failing to recognize a spiritual intrinsic value of truth and its measurement, the moralist considers himself the supreme judge of all that the scientist does. He judges his work and its purpose, measuring everything by the measure of moral benefit or harm. All scientific culture, insofar as it does not serve the tasks of sentimental morality and does not supply the moralist with the material he needs, is declared a bad and harmful matter, the product of idle curiosity, professional vanity, and deception. mental labor is not labor at all, but the simulation and shatter of a lazy and cunning person.

Yeah, the Russian term for knowledge or for science refers to any kind of systematized knowledge. You know, it could be literature. You know, it could be political science. It doesn't have to never study a big guy in, you know, chemistry or biology. So the height of this was socialist realism in the USSR, where the part. party claiming to have unlocked the purpose of history and coming to the end of it with their own rule, then says there's no reason for any kind of art other than what shows our victory. That was the only thing that they permitted. That was the most extreme version of this. So any of these idyllogs are going to look at any work, even the heart sciences, all the way down to the literary critic.

and if it doesn't support their agenda, they're going to reject it. And this paragraph comes from the one before it. And generally speaking, that too comes from ignorance. You can't, you know, it's like the IQ issue. You people claim to believe science until they don't. And because that rejects their agenda, they want to reject that. Whether it's true or not, doesn't matter.

It's something they have to simply cut off. It's a bad and harmful matter, as Elyne would say. All spiritual culture is cultivated and supported here. For in reality, every human spiritual state conceals some truth and brings them some insight. Are the boundaries of personal spiritual experience legitimated here too? Scientific knowledge is viewed from the perspective of moral utilitarianism, and this imbues the entire worldview with a peculiar character of scientific nihilism. The same moral utilitarianism triumphs in relation to art.

The intrinsic value of artistic vision is rejected, and art is transformed into a means serving morality and moral goals. Artistry is tolerated if it carries within itself a morally useful lesson, accessible to all people throughout the world, and is rejected as a product of idleness and a manifestation of depravity if it does not carry such a lesson or if it teaches something morally unrecognito. Any work of art that does not speak to the personal experience of the moral utilitarian is rejected and ridiculed, but any morally useful product is approved and extolled, often despite its aesthetic inconsistency. Well, I'm assuming that most of our listeners know what utilitarianism is, but just in case they don't. It was an ideology that in our modern form was developed by Jeremy Bentham, and it's actually pretty simple.

It's pure consequentialism. It comes down to a policy that either a government or a person should follow is that which maximizes the amount of pleasure and satisfaction in the world and minimizes pain and dissatisfaction. And therefore, someone like Bentham or Adam Smith, who was a follower of Bentham and was a utilitarian, didn't talk about a right to private property. It's just that having private property created the most good, created the most beneficial society, therefore it should be maintained. They don't talk about rights. They don't talk about anything like that. It's just that things should exist because they produce results, produce results that we like that we find pleasurable. And we have to get rid of those things that cause pain and that cause harm.

So everything else, every other type of system, metaphysical or otherwise, should be eliminated. I mean, Jeremy Bentham tried to, he loved writing constitutions for different countries and sending it to them, saying this is how your country should be run. A couple of Latin America, too, if I'm not mistaken. But in general, he's saying the same thing here. Go to any modern art museum,

and you'll see the liberal agenda. the leftist agenda everywhere. It's everywhere. The garbage that you're seeing serves that agenda in a very broad sense. Monarchist, I'm sorry, monarchist, liberalism

in its broadest sense. Ideology is far more important than the work of art itself. And again, socialist realism being the most extreme version of this. Because really in the Soviet, system, we had reached, you know, the end of history. So why do we need art at all? Things like abstraction and any kind of, any other kind of school of art of any sort. That's from alienated

people from times where the working class was suffering. But they're not now. So we don't need that kind of thing. No one is crying out to the heavens for help. So, and And, you know, Russell Kirk did call Marxism a form of utilitarianism. It's probably the case. But, and the same thing goes for music. You know, our music doesn't get published too much. I remember I was in grad school when I first heard of Raid Against the Machine, where you had an openly communist group being financed by corporate America

and being pushed on every TV station, every late night talk show. And that did something to me. So this doesn't make any sense. And it shows you what a mockery of Marxism really is. It's always been a plaything of the rich. On the other hand, our people couldn't get a record deal if no matter what. God, you know, even moderates libertarians like, you know, Ted Nugent can barely function anymore because of a few nasty things they say. So everything has to be ultimately it comes down to a totalitarian system.

That's what this agenda really is. They think they're anarchists, but the exact opposite is true. As I've said this before as well. The mind of the moralists consistently draws all conclusions, showing off its straightforwardness and paradoxes. The aesthetic dimension is distorted and fades away. The all-pervading, refining and deepening power of artistic vision, called not to moralize, but to see the divine in images and to depict the form of the human spirit,

weakens and fades, giving way to the moral idea. The moralist strives to impose on art something alien to it and thus loses its originality, its dignity and its calling. He himself sees this, recognizes it, and articulates it in the form of a specific principle and doctrine, thereby imbuing his entire theory with a peculiar aesthetic nihilism. Remember, he's not necessarily talking about Tolstoy as a man or as a writer. He's also talking about his followers and these communities that were functioning and the entire mentality that surrounds him, not just him personally. His works of art were something, you know, it's a must read for any intelligent person.

No question about it, especially Anna Karinana, I think, and the Cossacks and a few others. what he's saying here is that this is the mentality that comes from it and this is the mentality that informs Tolstoy's view on violence and resisting evil. So he's not necessarily pointing the finger at Tolstoy personally, but the nature of this morality leads to this kind of thinking. Even more acute is the denial with which demoralists approach law in the state. The spiritual necessity and function of legal consciousness completely eludes him. This entire sphere of soul-forming spiritual experience says nothing to his personal well-being.

He sees here only the most superficial appearance of events and deeds. He qualifies this appearance as crude violence and arbitrarily characterizes the intentions hidden behind the violence as evil, vindictive, selfish, and vicious. Law and the state not only fails to, they would say, not only fails to educate people, but develop in them bad traits and inclinations. Statesmen respond with contemplatively organized and hypocritically justified evil to the rare attempts at violence emanating from the so-called murderers, robbers, and thieves, and other unfortunate fallen brothers. The sympathy of the moralist is allegedly entirely on the side of these unfortunate and the

activity of state-minded patriots is declared, quote, the most empty and, moreover, harmful human activity, end quote. Naturally, as anger falls with particular force on the entire sphere of spirituality. This was a huge part of liberalism in general. I think it reached its apagy in the 70s, where criminals really aren't criminals. This is why they're opposed to the life imprisonment. they're opposed to the death penalty. They just were raised incorrectly. If they're given the proper, you know, training, the proper mentality, they won't be criminals anymore.

Now, whether they actually believe that or not is another matter, because revolutionaries tend to open the prisons every time they take over. They did it from, you know, Spain to France to the USSR. And there is this love affair that. the left has to this day with criminals or the right kind of criminal you know especially in in america the non-white criminals the same kind of mentality um it's destructive at its root you know um they'll attack the police at the slightest problem but make excuses for gangs and and criminals and this has to be explained this mentality this it's more than just sympathy it's um

the romanticization of this kind of criminality. I mean, look at the viciousness with which the so-called Biden Winehouse attacked El Salvador. When they solved their gang problem, they won. It wasn't the methods they used, is that it was successful. That was their problem. Oh, you're hurting these people. They're not really criminals deep down, even though the El Salvador state was almost totally disintegrating.

that was far less significant than the fact that you may hurt an innocent person once in a while. And you see, you know, the ACLU has paper after paper saying that the FBI exaggerates the gang problem. Well, gangs outnumber the cops. It's done deliberately. Gangs are better armed than the police are. The gangs are never blamed for anything. The cops does one thing wrong. They're the ones who are in trouble and are attack.

and they media, of course, create these anti-police riots. And all this comes down to this very same thing. These aren't real criminals. They're not evil. In fact, maybe evil doesn't exist. It's just that they're not raised properly. They're not treated right. And therefore, we have to create the conditions where they are,

and there won't be criminals anymore. And yeah, this is a university, you know, hot house nonsense. but it was a core principle of liberalism, maybe less so today than it was in the 70s, but it certainly exists still. The ideological compromise to which state power is forced and in which personal participation is for the citizen a responsibility and honorable burden, the function of protection, the function of suppression, the function of judgment, the function of the sword, deeply outrage the sentimental soul and evoke in it words of disgust and stigmatizing outrage.

It is also clear that along with the rejection of law as such, all institutions, relationships, and ways of life formalized by law are also rejected. Landownership, inheritance, money, which in itself is evil, lawsuits, military service, trial, and sentencing. All this is washed away in a stream of indignant denial. ironic ridicule and graphic defamation all this in the eyes of a naive moralist flaunting flaunting his ignorance deserves only condemnation rejection and staunch passive resistance well he is talking about Tolstoy here because Tolstoy says all of this despite being a landowner himself all of these

institutions that are listed here have to be destroyed that these institutions are the cause of criminality. All human beings are born equal, somehow. As Rousseau would say, equal and independent, which, of course, the opposite is true. I mean, they're totally dependent, but Rousseau is famous for it. Liberalism and leftism is known for this.

Therefore, anything that causes inequality, unless it can be somehow justified for the benefit of society, has to go. and all these institutions are among them. This is what the typical anarchist is going to think and what they simply don't realize is that if the state were to disappear tomorrow,

it wouldn't just be free people living their own life. It would be, you know, the most powerful drug dealer in every city dominating the place like a mafia war war. It would be an oligarchy. and the Soviet Union collapsed that's exactly what happened

you had the oligarchs people already who were gaining power took over everything for their own purpose now sometimes I really it's hard for me to believe that they really believe this that if the state

and all these institutions were to disappear tomorrow that people would be free and happy there would be no crime there would be no oligarchy nothing like that but in fact fact, in the examples we do have of the state collapsing, that's exactly what you get. You know, you get essentially war wars. Regardless what label we may call them, it's essentially what they are.

People run to them for protection. That's what comes from the collapse of the state, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the origin of serfdom, et cetera. So to say this today, or even in Tolstoy's time, is absolutely absurd. This is just a, they're cut off from actual experience. They live in a bubble made by ideology. And today, of course, it's maintained through media control. And if you're in academia, a huge pillar of the regime by conformity.

by punishment, and of course, censorship everywhere. And there's plenty of people who really believe this today. Every communist system that tried to eliminate money had to re-institute it again, including everyone from Castro to Popat. And regardless of that, it doesn't matter. That wasn't real socialism, which is a big problem for me, people say that. Such a stupid thing to say. They see that it's failed miserably every time. All of the intentional communities that have tried to do away with these things have failed

every time. And it doesn't matter. One of the things that makes it attractive is that it's very simple. This kind of utilitarianism is really simple to formulate. I just did it. And to have this very simple ideology that gives you immediate answers to all questions makes you sound very very intelligent without actually being intelligent at all. This is the worst part of ideology, Marxism, various kinds of liberalism, anarchism. It has answers to all life's questions concerning both sociology and politics. And you don't really have to study everything. You already have the answers.

Michael Oakeshott made a big deal about this in his life. You don't really have to know much if you're an ideologue. You already know the answer. These are fairly simple and simplistic ideologies that anyone could just repeat, and it makes it very attractive for many people. Same thing for the two Testaments. You know, I don't like the idea of separating the old from the new. I think it's all essentially one body of work ending with, you know, revelation, of course, that somehow, because the Old Testament is difficult, it's long, it's complicated. A lot of people get killed in it.

We don't want to deal with it, and therefore we won't. We'll just focus on what we want to focus on. It's a disaster. It leads them to complete ignorance. These are the same people who believe you can pick up a Bible and they start reading it, just anybody. And actually believe that the terms used back then, or the society back then, is the same as society today.

And it's shocking, that level of ignorance. and they bet their soul on this, to the extent that it is spiritual at all. They bet their soul on this kind of mentality. And it does deserve condemnation, rejection, and at least passive resistance. The inevitable conclusion of all this rejection is, finally, the denial of the homeland, its existence, its form of government, and the need for its defense. Moral Brotherhood embraces all people, regardless of race or nationality, and especially regardless of their national affiliation. All are worthy of fraternal compassion, and no one deserves violence. One must give the enemy who takes away everything he takes away everything he takes.

One must pity him for what he lacks and invite him to resettle and live together in love and brotherhood. For man has nothing on earth worth defending to the death, dying and killing. I don't even know. I mean, this is still very common, more radical Protestant sex. during the Reformation, the so-called radical Reformation, you had this mentality even in the radical reconstruction after the Civil War. That race doesn't exist.

Nations don't exist, and therefore states shouldn't exist, unless they're running it, of course. Anarchism is a pure negation. You know, when they do speak positively about the future world, like Bukunin and Kropotkin, they speak in generalities of people living the way they want to live, just easily taking over capital and running it for their own purposes. I mean, no conception of what the collapse of all power, and actually even all authority, would mean, and that the Machiavellian people in the population wouldn't just take over.

Anarchy is just an negation of things. It's an angry, I don't think you consistently be one. Most anarchists in academia rule with an iron fist when they take over the department, throughout who they want. But yes, this is the final gnosis of these people that the worst thing you could possibly be is a nationalist or racist of any kind, whether or not they believe it exists or not. But you know, you can't really talk about imperialism. and then say that nations don't exist.

That doesn't make any sense. Imperialism is bad because it takes over other nations. So without nations, there is no such thing as imperialism. So, and this is what they want to force on the population, which, of course, is vehemently opposed to their principles anyway. And it's an angry negation. It's not a positive ideology, just like Marxism. anarchism is just a more extreme version, especially Bakunin's version.

And yet it's fully acceptable and understandable. And you get grant money. The Smithsonian just had this huge anarchist celebration just a few years ago, Rosa Luxembourg in particular. You know, that this is stuff that no matter how many people they've killed over the years, they're still to be worshipped and venerated. And how badly they've failed. These people don't live in the real world.

And you still have people also that they don't realize that big money supports all of it. That all of these leftist groups have corporate America behind them. I have a paper where a lot of people did, actually, not just me. The financing of the Black Lives Matter violent came from almost everyone in corporate America. as they were burning down their stores or their institutions. It didn't matter. It didn't make any difference. This was something to be celebrated.

And criminality is almost romanticized if it's the right criminal. The sentimental moralist neither sees nor understands that law is a necessary and sacred attribute of the human spirit, that every human spiritual state is a modification of right and justice. and that it is impossible to safeguard the spiritual flourishing of humanity on earth outside of a coercive social organization, outside of law, judgment, and the sword. Here, his personal spiritual experience is silent and his compassionate soul falls into anger and foe prophetic indignation. As a result, his teaching turns out to be a form of legal and patriotic nihilism. In old Russia, the term nihilism was normally defined as somebody who believed entirely in positivism or empiricism, the scientific method.

That kind of, that's what a nihilist was. It wasn't someone who believed in absolutely nothing. Like Pavlov would be an example of a nihilist there. and there should be no other method of reaching any kind of knowledge. There's no other justification for anything except in that way. But his Hegelianism is showing here very much that law is a necessary and a sacred attribute because we're a fallen people. We're sinful.

We're self-regarding. We can be incredibly stupid. That criminality often organizes itself. And we're living in a society where in urban areas, the gangs outnumber the police to a huge degree. In Detroit, they dismantled their anti-gang unit, slashed the department manpower by half, and now you have parts of the city that are no-go areas for cops.

This is what you get when the state begins to crumble, not freedom, not flourishing of individuals. and people like to say that, you know, violent crime was going down during a Clinton administration. And that was a common claim. No, it's just that the police departments were cut in half in that era. Crime was going unpunished. That's why the crime rates were down. It was just being unpunished.

People didn't, you know, it wasn't being recorded. The entire, and I can't help but think of the defund the police movement that actually existed and functioned. supported by big money. And during that time, you saw the massive upsurge in violent crime to the point where, you know, you can't really function in certain parts of almost every major American city. Pittsburgh is an exception, thank God. A few other places are. Detroit is an extreme example, as we all know.

And gangs have the ACLU given. them lawyers and public support, NGOs internationally, giving them all the support that they need as they arm themselves in a way that the police are not armed. This is what happens when their ideology is put into practice. But for someone like Tolstoy, who lived in, compared to our society, was almost idyllic. You could think in these terms, not realizing what would happen. because he was rational. He thought everyone else was just like him. No, a lot of people, if not most people, are irrational.

And there's also no reason to believe that people seek pleasure. I see people destroying themselves deliberately all the time. It's just a very naive and childish view, but it's simple and simplicity gets followers. With such a blind and naively moralizing approach, the entire vast repository of spiritual culture is emptied and its treasures cast out. All creative spiritual intensity of the human spirit is condemned and forbidden, religiously disempowered, ridiculed and degraded, cognitively weakened and blinded, artistically curtailed and enslaved, deprived of rights, defense, and homeland. Man remains at the end of this anti-spiritual cyclone, a pitiful creature with a single moral dimension, and his highest

calling is self-compulsion to weak-willed sentimental pity. The sentimental moralist knows only one dimension of perfection, the moral. For him, the entire essence of the spirit, the entire life of the spirit is reduced to moral self-improvement, and all moral achievement is reduced to saturating the soul with compassionate sympathy. And as a result of this, all human understanding of God and evil becomes good and evil becomes shallow, flat, and soulless. We spoke of, in the Solstinian book, I've spoken of it in a million other places. The nature of the proletariat in the 19th century, people who were denuded of all of these things, their connection to the village, to the church, to nation.

They were exposed very naively to things like gambling and prostitution for the first time. and they were deeply alienated as a result. This is exactly the sort of person who the Jewish Marxists would want to go after. Imposing this on people makes, for example, laborers in capitalist enterprise is very easy to control. On what grounds would you rebel if all of these things were gone? Usually, you know, nationalism. I mean, there's always, you know, economic problems, but economic problems, when connected to a nation, that's the foundation for for rebellion but if you eliminate all of this or even the conception

of right and wrong then on what basis do you rebel there is no basis and we see in america it might be too late but there is a certain revolt against this kind of thing everything we've talked about you know 20 years ago of course it all came true um south african another great example this is what happens people thinking that the black revolutionary was at the same moral level the same intellectual level

as you know those running the apartheid state and of course they weren't everything we said was going to happen happened they don't really talk about it much anymore in what's going on in South Africa you should talk about it constantly

in the 80s it's the same it's the same mentality what do they create what kind of person it's a cipher It's hard to even call them a people anymore. That's a deep alienation. I mean, alienation is the only real word I could use for it.

Separation from everything that makes a normal person in the past. They're just ciphers now. They can complain. There's not much they can do about it. All of this seems to be in the interest of capital. I'm not saying this is why, you know, they support it. But, you know, globalism can't exist unless these very institutions are destroyed. Cosmopolitanism is central to these ideologies.

And it just so happens. It makes international trade much, much easier for the great multinational corporations. We talked about Karl Marx, an important doctrine of free trade has to exist prior to any revolution. because free trade will destroy all local and national forms of identity. Only then can you even think about a communist revolution at that point. You can't talk about it with a strong sense of nation or an agrarian tradition or religion. So free trade meant a lot of things, it's to Mars. But it was something that was meant to destroy national borders and therefore national identities.

Then you have these alienated proletarians and those are the people who are going to create this revolution had nothing to do with their economic point of view or the economic point of view. Today, the left has abandoned that group entirely and now only deals with race and sexuality. But Marx in its classical sense saw the destruction of these institutions is absolutely necessary for it to come into power. And that's something that someone like Tolstoy or the anarchist will never understand. It looks like... he's starting a new a new thought here so um i think we should end it right here yeah yeah i think it read really well i'm very pleased very proud of what i did here this was good i only saw one hiccup

okay okay um i need i wanted to also make sure that um uh it this is this is not elin speaking this is um the tolstoyan speaking i want to make that very clear We had the same problem with the Saltin-Eason book, too. I'd actually come out and say, no, this isn't him. He's actually citing the ideology of people he's opposed to. And so I make sure that we know that as well. All right. We'll be back in a couple days to continue this chapter.

In the meantime, go over to the show notes. Go over to the description in the video. Donate to Dr. Johnson's work. Subscribe to him on Patreon by his new book, by all of his books. Yes, please. Yeah. Show them, support him. Show him some support. So that's it. Back in a couple days, and as always, thank you very much. I appreciate you. Thanks to you. I appreciate it very much. Bye-bye.