Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure today of sitting and talking with Michael Melis. And we start by talking about his book, The White Pill. And his book is a walk through the catastrophes of the Soviet era, the dire hell that emerged in the aftermath of the formulation of the hypothetical worker's paradise and a description of how that dreadful system, how and why that dreadful system came to an end. But we also talk about something
I suppose more fundamental, if there is something more fundamental than that, which is a conceptualization of what appropriate social and psychological relations might look like in alternative to dogmatic and structured government. I share with Michael the precise reason that his
tension has been attracted by the claims of anarchism per se. I'm always curious about dissociating anarchism, say, from a kind of impulsive hedonism. We drag Ein Rand into the mix to sort that out and come to conclusions that I think are, well, they're interesting and likely appropriate, concentrating particularly on voluntary association as the antithesis to
power, right? Power and compulsion. The power and compulsion that inevitably leads to tyranny and hell. So that's the conversation. So I was reading your book this morning, The White Pill. And I've read a fair bit of Russian history in the 20th century and some before that. And but every time I re-encounter it,
It never really stops stunning me, the brutality that was associated with that regime. I mean, it's obviously the case that the same can be said about what happened in Nazi Germany and perhaps even to a greater extent, what happened in Maoist China, although that's a competition between pretty deep hells. But it never stops being
it's really unbelievable to me that things can go that badly. And I thought maybe what we do here is start with two, I'll read a couple of things from your book, one kind of ideological and then the other, just a description of the consequences of the ideology. So you write about this Berkman character who was an anarchist, agitator for the working class in the United States.
who had the, what he thought was the good fortune to go to Russia after the revolution, to see the workers' paradise in action. To be deported, he was deported by Hoover. Right, right, right, right. And he said with his friend, what was her name? Emma Goldman. Goldman, Emma Goldman, of course.
that they were virtually motivated to kiss the ground when they landed in Russia. Okay, so now the Berkman's talking to Lenin. Lenin says liberty. Lenin told Berkman, he's a luxury.
not to be permitted at the present state of development. When the revolution is out of danger, external and domestic. So that's kind of an interesting idea to be out of danger. That's when you get to have liberty. It's when there's just like zero danger. You know, that happens a lot in life. Then free speech might be indulged in. Right. And indulged in. Right. Right. Right. Lovely phrasing.
He's a man who meant what he said, insisting that, quote, enemies must be crushed and all power centralized in the communist state. Lenin admitted that in this process, the government is often compelled to resort to unpleasant means, but that is the imperative of the situation, right? That's the other thing that the totalitarianists always do is that
The situation right now is so bad and vital to get worse that any means whatsoever are to be justified. Not only that, but if you stand against them, then, while all you're doing is contributing to the eventual catastrophe, and then given the magnitude of the catastrophe, no punishment could possibly be severe enough for you. But that is the imperative of the situation.
from which there can be no shrinking. So that's lovely too. Now it's a moral obligation to torture people. In the course of time, yeah, these methods will be abolished when they have become unnecessary. So that's lovely. Okay, so what does that end up producing that attitude in?
in mere years when Lenin is still alive. So, Berkman and Goldman left the Soviet Union in 1921 with complete loathing. Her memoir of her time there was split by her publisher into two books given the titles of My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923, and My Further Disillusionment in Russia.
24, because there were two books worth of disillusionment, and that wasn't nearly enough. Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth came out the following year, and the two never stopped speaking about what they had seen firsthand in Russia, warning the rest of the world of the horrors that the Russian citizenry were endearing.
Remember, these were people who were hoping that workers' revolution would produce a broad-scale improvement in the working conditions of ordinary people.
Let's go down a little closer to the actuality on the ground. This is another quote from your book. Life remained difficult in the USSR for years after the Russian Civil War had been won by the Bolsheviks, the Communists. Housing became even more of a concern as rural citizens flocked to the rapidly industrializing cities in search of work and food.
Families became crammed into apartments that had already been occupied by other families. Yeah, well, it was a bourgeois conceit that people needed like their own space. Including their own bathrooms. Right. Well, we'll get to that right away here. And both eviction and trying to find a new place to live effectively became impossible. And that's lovely. So no matter how terrible the people were who you lived with, there was no possibility of doing anything about it. Some of this was by design.
In keeping with communist ideology, the ultimate vision was to have homes without kitchens, so that everyone would eat communally in government-run cafeterias. It's a lovely idea, assuming that there's food and that the people who are cooking are motivated somehow to cook and decently, and that the people cleaning up are motivated somehow, other than by terror, to clean up.
And then, you know, if you let the government provide your food every single day and you don't even have a storehouse or a kitchen, then what's to stop the people who are hypothetically giving you everything from stopping to provide everything that you so foolishly allowed them to present yourself with whenever they want on any pretext whatsoever. People think no one would ever do that. It's like, yeah, right. True believer communist architects.
lovely group, designed buildings where everyone would have to share bathrooms as well. Part of an assault on bourgeois concepts such as shame, privacy, and individualism.
This created an enormous incentive for families to turn in those living with them to the authorities for the most specious of reasons, if not downright lies. One phone call the living quarter for one's family instantly doubled.
What's the harm? If they weren't guilty of one thing, then surely they were guilty of another. I remember that from Solzhenitsyn, right? This is what the good thinkers in the West think, too. When something happens, when the government extends its tentacles and takes away more liberties or starts threatening people, the idea is
Well, if you didn't do anything wrong, you wouldn't have anything to worry about. We still hear that today. Oh, absolutely. We hear that all the time. It's like I see. So if I never did anything wrong, I wouldn't have to worry about you. Okay. So that means the only the person who's utterly innocent has nothing to fear. Right. Well, yeah, that'll work out well for everyone.
And if they hadn't done anything, then surely they would have nothing to fear from the Cheka we'll talk about them, right? This became such a commonplace occurrence that was even joked about in popular magazines of the time. Just think, Masha, how unpleasant I wrote a denunciation on Dalcon. And it turns out that Balkan had a bigger room. Yes, very funny.
Okay, so what's the end consequence of this? I think this is in the early 20s. This is in Ukraine. Bit mask deportation starts. Victims were about to be deported, were stripped of their shoes, and their clothes taken and given to lower peasants as a bribe to ensure their cooperation.
Coolak children, so the coolaks were farmers who actually produced food. That was basically the definition of a coolak, or who could conceivably produce food, or had ancestors that might have once produced food. These coolak children were left as beggars on the street. Those transported to Siberia, where there was no buildings, by the way, and where it was winter often,
Often? Often, yes. Well, in Siberia, after all, those transported to Siberia faced insuperable hardship, yes, and insuperable by design. If a village existed, they were squeezed into it. Otherwise, they were simply abandoned without shelter and extreme cold, and ordered to build dwellings.
Many managed to do so by working almost around the clock without sleep in order that they and the others would not freeze to death. Those employed as forced labor in mining regions faced starving rations of one bowl of thin gruel a day and eight to ten ounces of bread. They died in waves. No matter. Their numbers were replenished by the arrival of new deportees.
And then we'll read this too, I think, because this is where it, I don't know, is this as bad as it got? Probably not, you'd never find the bottom.
It thus became common. This is during the Koolak starvation. It thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another. Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one's family. Not only was there a guarantee of a meal, but there was now a guarantee that said meal would be seized by the requisitioners who were going from house to house looking for any evidence that you might have, even literally even a grain of wheat somewhere on the premises.
Furthermore, those who could not produce a quota of grain during starvation conditions were subject to a fine of five times the value of what the grain would have been, yet another reason to seize property and savings. Not enough, not having the food to fulfill one's quota was taken as evidence if not downright proof that one must have been hiding it. And if the food was being hidden, then why wasn't being handed over? Many of the tactics, however, could only be explained by pure sadism.
In some villages, the requisitioners went from house to house, killing all the dogs and taking their bodies with them for good measure. Fingers would be slammed in doorways or needles jammed under fingernails. Those found concealing food were robbed of their remaining possessions evicted from their homes and thrown into the snow without any clothes. To ensure that the starving peasants did not somehow steal the food that they so desperately needed, fields and barns were kept under armed guard.
The activists even came for the tools used for making food, breaking millstones necessary to process grain. If they took soup from a hungry family, they made sure to take the pot as well. We'll end with this one.
One day as I waited in a queue in front of the store to buy bread, I saw a farm girl of about 15 years of age in rags and with starvation looking out of her eyes. She stretched out her hand to everyone who bought bread, asking for a few crumbs. At last, she reached the storekeeper. This man must have been, some newly arranged, arrived stranger who either could not or would not speak Ukrainian. He began to berate her, said she was too lazy to work on the farm and
Hit her outstretched hand with the blunt edge of a knife blade. The girl fell down and lost a crumb of bread. She was holding in the other hand. Then the storekeeper stepped closer, kicked the girl and roared. Get up, go home and get to work. The girl groaned, stretched out and died. Some in the queue began to weep. Yes, well there, little walk through communism.
in all of its glory. So you start your way. There's one line after that where he chastises the people online who are crying for the dying girl. And he says, oh, it looks like enemies of the people are everywhere. So to make sure you're not even showing sympathy for this kid who just stormed in front of you.
Right. Right. Yeah. Well, one of the things, you know, one of the things I learned from reed exogenous, so absolutely bloody brutal was, and it was in keeping with what you just said was that once you establish a state like the Russians established where heaven is claimed to reign when hell actually prevails, you can't even admit to your own suffering, much less the suffering of other people, because to admit that you're in pain,
is an accusation against the state because like, well, who are you to be in pain? That glorious socialist workers' revolution has come. There's no such thing as pain. And so then you're in a situation where you suffer and everyone around you suffers. And now if you dare to admit it, then
You suffer more. There was a line in the Gulags where one of the Eleanor Lipman, I believe, is her name, says that not only did they want to torture us, they want us to thank them for it. Yeah, right. So to even acknowledge that something is wrong or an issue is, in fact, criticism of the state. And the only people who are criticizing the state are, by definition, counter-revolutionists.
who not only want up there for overthrow the government, but pretty much want what's worse for everybody. So when people like this exist, there is nothing that is too bad to be done to them because they are monsters who must be wiped off the face of the earth.
There's this line when the secret police just talked about how when you're chopping wood chips will fly because his point was it's better to kill nine innocent people to get to that one spy because that is what happens when you have a society based on the common good before the individual good. They tell you constantly and explicitly you do not matter.
We are building a great society for the sake of all. You are one little dad of one. You and your family are completely irrelevant. So fall in line because everyone else is falling in line. What makes you so special?
So, I have to tell you, I'm sorry, it's just, you know, being born in the Soviet Union and having worked, and this was very difficult, but hearing it coming from you and just this kind of arm-as-length thing is just getting me all agitated once again because it's the kind of situation that is as Americans and a Canadian, almost incomprehensible.
uh you know the book starts with iron ran on the back cover where she testified in front of the house at america's civic activities committee and she says it's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship she goes i could give you a lot of details i could never completely convince you and she goes anyway it's good but you can't even see what it's like yeah
like imagine what it's like to live from morning to night in constant terror and at night you're waiting for the doorbell to ring where you don't know who or what it's going to do or when it's going to do what to you because your friends who spy on you or your family member or your family member where you live in a country where human life means nothing less than nothing and you know it and you're reminded of it constantly.
Yeah, and purposefully. Yes. Right. And where power has been delivered to the hands of the most sadistic people you can possibly imagine who claim constantly that they're doing nothing except operating in the name of the highest good. I will correct you because I think they're more sadistic than you could possibly imagine because if you and I sat down
and try to think of sadistic things to do, we would not be creative enough as people with the slightest bit of conscience to think of the things that they did in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China. It would just never enter our heads.
So why did you write this book? I mean, there are other histories of the Russian brutality, obviously, and it's also the case, I would say, that if people were inclined to educate themselves, this is something we can talk about in detail, if people in the West were inclined to educate themselves about the inevitability
the inevitable consequences of, let's say, a communist revolution. There are plenty of sources to draw from. The black book of communism, everything's social. It's wrote, for example. I mean, and books by Robert Conquest. Yes. I mean, we know this. We know this, or we could know it. Now, you know, one of the things that stunned me, and I suppose it was one of the first
What would you say the first source of insights I had into the absolute corruption of the modern education system in the West was that I taught a module on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in my personality class, which was a second year class. I taught it at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto. So I was teaching it to pretty damn bright students and they were in the 14th year of their education.
And I taught it because Solzhenitsyn was essentially an existentialist psychologist in many ways. He extended the work that was done by Viktor Frankl, who wrote a great book called Man Search for Meaning, but Solzhenitsyn went even deeper. And what stunned me was, despite the fact that we had carried on a cold war for 40 years to try to defeat this absolutely brutal ideology, almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster that
130, 40 million people had been slaughtered in the 20th century in its name that most of the students had absolutely no bloody idea that any of this ever happened. And I thought, how in the hell can we be that? You know what they say? There's none so blind as those who will not see. And so you wrote this. Why do you write it? I think you just answered my question because the fact that this was the
absolutely unambiguously number one foreign policy issue for the greater part of the 20th century that all foreign policy was viewed through the lens of the Cold War. And the fact that the Soviet Union has now not only been memory hole, but has become a bit of a kitschy joke that you can get all foods and have like Russian brand ice cream and they mean Russian like Soviet Arab brand ice cream and they make little jokes about it. It's strange. It's not strange. It's strange. It can be morally ambiguous. It's depraved, in my opinion.
No, but here's the strange part of it is, you know, is that that's true of the Soviet Union, but it's not true of Nazi Germany. Now, I have heard that in South Korea, there is Nazi-keep-kitch. And in India as well, they have Hitler ice cream. And in India, okay, but here it's been the case that
Apart from the male Brooks Broadway production right springtime for Hitler or that was the production exact I think there was a song that was a song yeah right that was the only time that I actually saw like a kitschy kind of parody still a dark parody Hitler and the Nazis are still off limits for
for what would demented nostalgia. But that doesn't seem to be the case, as you pointed out, for the communist regime. Because we're the good guys in World War II and the people we sided with, therefore, are the good guys. So to have the narrative explained that we had to deal with a devil, to deal with the worst devil, is to end the fact that there are many agencies, the US government and the newspapers, who are still in power today, that they were the ones who helped
to cover up solids atrocities possibly in the sake of something that needed to happen to win world war two but they never went back and were like guys this is hardly you know someone who is an angel you know church role in an fd and fd are calling him uncle joe
at Yalta and things like this. There was a huge movement to censor in Hollywood anything that implies that Russia's dishonest or brutal or harmful. There are allies. We have to portray them in the best possible light. This is the war effort. The fact that there isn't this easy narrative, they're like, wait a minute. Our foreign policy is always, we're the good guys, whoever we're against is the bad guys.
So to have any kind of ambiguity in that, even historical, is something that I think our corporate media, which is very dedicated to promulgating binary thinking, good versus bad, you know, black versus evil, is something that they're very heavily invested in. And to answer your previous question, that is why I wrote this book, because
I thought it was insane that something that is, again, the number one issue of the 20th century in this regard is something that educated, highly educated people know very little about. But the reason I don't want to, in fact, when Emma Goldman spoke in London shortly after she left the Soviet Union, it was all these lefties standing ovation. And when she's like, this is not what we want. These people are destroying
The workers, you could hear a pin drop. They did not want to hear it. But the other reason what's different from this, from conquest and soul geniuses of his books, is this book is a story of hope. Because why I feel so hopeful in many ways about the West, and maybe I'm delusional and that's a separate issue, is the fact is
This depravity was defeated, and it was defeated in our lifetimes, and it was defeated relatively painlessly and relatively easily. So if you have that model of the victory of all these peoples after so much sacrifice to overthrow these demonic, satanic regimes is, I think, one of the happiest endings, imagine. Right, in the emergence battle,
into freedom of the Eastern Europeans who are doing that well. One after another and this was in the 80s. We have color footage you can watch on YouTube, but you know, this again, the narrative is too complicated for entities like the New York Times to tell that story. Yeah. All right. So maybe part of it too, with regards to the distinction between the Nazi regime and the communist regime, I've thought this tried to think this through a lot.
And maybe this is also why we can't exactly remember it. It's very difficult to shake the hope that there is a form of hyper organized government, let's say, that can provide, well, can provide what, that can provide period, that there's a form of social organization that would permanently rescue people from the world of want that seems to be the law of man. I mean, now,
We have erected a technological enterprise that has freed us from privation to a large degree. So it is the case that if we organize ourselves intelligently, that we can push back against the tragedies of the world. And the logical extension of that or a logical extension of that, I suppose, is that it's something like a permanently utopian state characterized by the
lead brotherhood of man right without concern for creed race or color where everyone's equal which starts to become a very difficult proposition and the communists in principle offered that and it's actually in some ways one of the things that distinguishes them from the Nazis because the Nazis offered that too but only for a certain group of people whereas the communists did
did promote a universal brotherhood. I've asked some of my Jewish friends why communism was particularly attractive in the Soviet Union to Jewish intellectuals of the time. And I would say it's partly because the utopian schemes of that sort tend to be more attractive to intellectuals period. But the wisest answer I got was that that offering of universal brotherhood where all the distinctions between different creeds and races and religions would be
abolished in principle was attractive to people who'd been the brunt of ethnic and religious conflict, often murderous for centuries.
We have this longing within us for the emergence of something approximating a paradisal state, and then it's very easy to be sucked into two propositions, is that one, that state could be brought about by organization and government fiat, right? And two, that that, what would you say that that organization could provide everyone with what was wanted without
they're being shattering the negative consequences of handing other people that much power. So see, it's a mystery because you'd think that we could learn. Why do you think it's so difficult for people to learn that the dream of a worker's paradise that's predicated on something like radical equality almost inevitably degenerates into
perhaps inevitably degenerates into something so murderous that you can't even comprehend it. Because I think it speaks to the inherent narcissism of intellectuals, because we're the ones who are going to do it right. They didn't have me to run. They had dumb people all if only...
I'm sure you see this every single day with any kind of administration, any college. We're the one, everyone else is stupid, but me, if I was in charge of the ship, we'd land it to shore safely and happily. And to speak by was so popular Jewish intellectual specifically, if the choice was the czar and pogroms.
where you're by law mandated to live in a ghetto and every so often the police and the citizenry are going to ride through that ghetto kill and rape not only with impunity but with the cheers of the populace and the state and the alternative is everyone's going to be equal and you're going to have a stake in making society that works for the sake of all it's not a difficult choice to make for this certain population. Yeah well that first comment you made you know that's so I've spent a lot of time as
and intelligence. Yes. And the Luciferian intelligence. So the reason I use that term in particular is because of Milton's characterization of Lucifer, right? So you can think of Lucifer as the embodiment of evil. Oh, what's his name? Well, Mark, my master and Margarita. Now there's a book, a great Russian novelist wrote a book called the
Margarita in the 1930s and in that book Satan himself comes back to earth and USSR but no one believes in him so he can do whatever he wants right and so so Bogacov this is name and it's a great book it's like a dusty FCN level book it's a great book but
Milton characterized Lucifer as God's highest angel, gone most spectacularly wrong. And Lucifer is the light-breaker, and he's essentially associated with the intellect. And the idea, the dreamlike idea that Milton laid out in his poetic masterpiece, Paradise Lost, was that if the intellect attempts to reign supreme, it instantly produces hell.
that it has to be subordinate to something else. Now, you make a case like that, I think, implicitly in your book, because one of the things that you're proposing is that if I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if a society loses its foundation on the presumption of the ultimate worth of the individual per se, which is something like a soul concept.
Right, right. If that presumption disappears and it's replaced by status presuppositions or even by group identity, then hell isn't far away. You know, I just read a book by this woman, Immaculate is her name. She was one of the
Rwandans who spent 92 days in a three by four bathroom. She was one of them, crammed in there with nine, seven to nine, depending on the time. Other women who were basically starving to death over that period, right? And what happened in Rwanda, even though it was quite a peaceful state, although poor, was that the notion of group identity became paramount. And then one
is reminiscent of the sorts of things perhaps faster and even more brutal possibly than what happened in the Soviet Union. A million people killed in a span of mere months in the most brutal possible way. It was a consequence of the valorization of group identity. You saw the same thing happening in Russia because, and this happened soon after the revolution, is that the communists were attempting to eradicate bourgeoisie individuality. And so people started to be
classified and judged by group guilt, and then almost immediately after the revolution, if you were a landowner or property owner or anybody who'd had even a modicum of success under the czar or your family or your family. That's the next thing you were classified as an oppressor and as an enemy of the people, but immediately it spread to your family.
Even if you didn't own anything, if you had people in your ancestry, whoever dared to own anything, which meant everyone who was even vaguely, they identified success with oppression, which is something that we're trying very hard to do in our culture at the moment too, which is absolutely catastrophic. We're doing the same bloody things, dividing people into groups, making group identity paramount, identifying success itself with oppression. I mean, now and then people who are
crooked and parasitical become successful so to speak temporarily, but that doesn't justify for a moment, assuming that if one person owns something that another person doesn't, that you associate the first person's ownership with theft and oppression. And then, of course, the Communist says you laid out did attempt to eradicate
every single form of private property whatsoever. And the consequence of that was, well, we already read about that, is that in no time flat, you and your family were being thrown out into the snow naked for having the temerity to keep, like to literally keep a cob of corn on your table so that you might either have something to eat or so that you had some seeds for the next year. So again, we're back to the initial problem, which is
When the evidence that this goes, your proposition was, we can't accept the evidence that these ideological presuppositions go so starkly wrong because of something like the prideful intellect. People just show up time and time again. They get entranced by these ideological theories and they make that move that you suggested, which is, well, if I would have been in charge of the revolution.
with my in-depth and accurate knowledge of the niceties of Utopia dogma that I would have
shepherded in the promised utopia. And why not try again? Well, I think if you really want to go to the roots, it goes to Plato versus Aristotle, right? How do you approach knowledge? Do you look at what's around you and deduce things and draw conclusions, so on and so forth? Or do you start with your mind and this perfect world of ideas and then try to force reality to comport to your ideology? And you saw this go through Kant and to Hegel, then to Marx.
And basically the whole thing is since we know that our, you know, they call it scientific socialism, right? That was the whole idea of communism is we're scientific, not like this market where you have these little shopkeepers with their prices and, you know, it's a complete mess and food's getting thrown out. We're going to work scientifically. We're going to have the big brains at the top. We're going to figure everything out, turn the entire country to either a laboratory or a factory. And then when things don't work out, thanks to the fact that we have it down,
someone must be sabotaging it. We have the records. So you have this concept of scapegoating because since we know, so again, that's the difference between, you know, if my plan doesn't work, you know, am I going to look back at the plan fix and tweak it because somehow the cars I'm producing are working or this arrogant, you know, idealistic
mindset. By idealistic, I mean this concept which Westerns don't even understand that ideas are more real than reality. Since my ideas are correct and the output is incorrect, someone must be screwing up with what I know is the perfect set of ideas. And you can't twist the thumb screws hard enough.
because you're here to bring a sense of heaven on earth and to save the country and all of the world. And Stalin even said explicitly that the further along you go in the revolution, the more brutal you have to be because it's losing that in those last 10 pounds of fat, right? It's going to be that much harder to weed out these capitalistic and bourgeois elements because they're going to be so much more hidden.
for things not going well because it's only the real subtle snakes. They're invisibly ruining everything behind the scenes. Well, the other thing that occurs to almost like almost immediately after the revolution when Lenin decides that everyone has to be clamped down on is that the true sadists come to the fore. And so that also raises the specter in my imagination that it's not merely intellectual arrogance that
produces this proclivity to fall, hook, line, and sinker for the communist utopia, especially the one that that intellect would be in charge of, but that there's a latent sadism that's associated with that pretentious intellect that's looking for a mode of expression. And so, you know, one of the things I used to see in my clinical practice to tell me what you think about this, and I see thinking like this that's latent in your book, you're putting your finger on it from time to time, is I'd have clients who were
You know, say 35 years old. They were often men, these particular clients, women have their own pathology, but this was more male pathology. These were guys who were like, they're pretty damn smart in
They're intelligent in elementary school, junior high in high school. They were in the top 5% of the class. They generally didn't work that hard, but they could skate by. Everybody knew they were smart, and that really constituted their identity.
and but they never learned how to work and and the fact that they had been differentially rewarded for their intellect in the absence of work meant that they developed a kind of pride that was associated with that intellect.
No, and so you can imagine that one of the ways of turning someone into a narcissist is to reward them for something that's intrinsic to them because a lot of whether or not you're intelligent is more or less given to you, right? I mean, you can make someone stupid or it's not that easy to make them
more intelligent on IQ side. If you're down IQ 145, which would put you about the 99th percentile, there's a huge biological contributor to that, right? And the benefits of good health. So it's a talent or a gift. And then you become proud of that. And then these guys, the same guys would often be not successful in their life. And that made them bitter because their presumption was always something like,
Well, I'm so smart that the world should fall at my feet. And then the world doesn't fall at their feet. They're less popular with women, for example, than they think they might be. If the women actually had the sense to see what it was that they were passing up. And then that consequence, that consequence of having their intellect rejected makes them bitter. And the step from bitter to sadist is not very far away.
You know, and you see also, you see this idea of being toyed with even in the popular culture. So I watch a fair bit of number of episodes of the sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory. Yeah, well, it was interesting to me because it featured these nerd type characters, right? Who were intellectuals, you know, they're techno intellectuals.
and tended to be rather unpopular with women and awkward, and also awkward socially, but they were hyper-intelligent. And there is this sense of aggrieved intellect that runs through the entire show that's part of the comic trope, but it's also extremely true.
And so I'm wondering if what you think of the proposition that along with the intellect that proposes these utopian schemes, right, and doesn't like distributed problem solving, it wants to accrue all the decision-making power to itself, because it wants the glory of doing that for itself, and it wants that for the status
And the fact that that doesn't occur produces this aggrieved nature that can't help but express itself in sadism. Because Lenin's a great example of that. It took no time at all before he turned in from the working man's revolutionary, which he never was, to a sadist whose depths were
What, what? They're, they're unstoppable, right? And, and so quickly. Well, he was always talking about how much blood we'd need to flow even before he got into power. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why they brought him back to Russia, the Germans, because they're like, once he's there, he's going to make a home muck of it. No one ever thought he was actually going to seize power. But to your point about sadism, this is something I do address in the book because there was an evolutionary process.
So one of the things that the Russians did is, as you mentioned earlier, is they have these things called anigodote, which are little jokes, because you can't criticize the state, but you can make little jokes about it and get that point through without the person realizing you're being so devastating your critique. And there was one joke where Stalin was talking to Beria, who was just
third and most brutal executioner, or maybe not most brilliant competition. But Stalin lost his pipe, and he goes, Barry, my pipe's been stolen, and then Barry goes out, and the next day, Stalin calls it in, and he's like, oh, I found it as my drawer, he goes, but the combat's stolen, we got three people to confess to it already. So I mean, Barry's most famous quote was, show me the man, I'll show you the crime. But there was an evolutionary process to maximize sadism for the simple reason that if you have 10 people who are interrogators,
The guy who is the cruelest and most effective in his infliction of pain, psychological, physical and otherwise, is the one who's going to get the most confessions. He's the one who's going to get the most results. If I'm at all a decent human being, some people are going to stand up to my tortures where if I'm the one who is a complete
a human monster who will stop at nothing to make sure that that person admitted things which are literally impossible, I'm the one who's going to get the promotion. So the system itself forced these people to become sadistic because otherwise, and the thing is,
It's not also a matter of, well, I'm gonna lose my job. If I'm not being cruel enough, then maybe I'm one of these records. Maybe I'm counter-revolutionary. What's wrong with comrade malice? Why can't he get any of these confessions? Well, all his colleagues can. Maybe I shouldn't be trusting you. And if you're not trusting me, then my wife and my kids are suspect as well. So, you know, to your point, it very much- The most merciful torture is the counter-revolutionary. Yes. Yeah, right, definitely.
Well, just one more point, because you were talking about it being an assault on private property. It goes much deeper than that because it was an assault on civil society and private relationships. Because any two people who are talking are a threat to the society, to the state, because then you have the beginnings of a conspiracy.
The kids, as you know very well, I'm sure, were taught this lesson of public morozov. They taught this in elementary school about the story of this boy who turned in his parents to the police because dad was hoarding grain or something, and public was later murdered by his dad. And this kid, their statues of him, was regardless, glorious. And the kids were taught, you have to turn in your parents to the police if you see them doing anything wrong, even if the cost is your life. And the same thing, it became a crime to be married.
to an enemy of the people. How are you going to plead innocent in that case, right? Well, you should have known that your husband or your wife was engaged in counter-revolution activity because every citizen needs to be vigilant against the counter-revolutionaries who are trying to undermine this glorious scientific socialistic society that we're building. Well, then you could see very rapidly if you think about it, how love itself would become
an anti-Soviet act. Yes, that's bourgeois. Love is a very bourgeois value. No, even precisely, but even more directly. Like one of the things that happens if you love someone is that their suffering is going to hurt you. Yes. And so if you love someone and they're suffering, you're going to listen to them. And then in a state that's already perfect, if you listen to someone suffer, you're basically listening to people at your counter-revolutionary propaganda, right?
any genuine sympathy between people that would result in a truthful confession of personal catastrophe would immediately be placed in the
camp of counter-revolutionary propaganda, necessarily. This is why Rand said, and Rand said that it's impossible for free people to imagine what it's like to live 100% under the dominion of the lie, because we can't imagine, thank God, what it would be like to be so terrified of the truth that, well, you couldn't even tell it to yourself, but worse, perhaps you couldn't tell it to the people most around you who most particularly loved you, right? Children or
Parents or spouses and one of the things that I learned in the writing this book and I'm not sure if even you know this after Germany was reunified all the Stasi files were made public So you could end the then percent of secret police informers in East Germany one three Yeah, it was some crazy number of blue this Soviet Union Nazi Germany out of the water as Steven reason thought a new point out he goes the Stasi were much worse They were German they're efficient
So everyone in that country had to make that choice. Do I want to look up what did they know about me? And as importantly, who was the one turning me in? And there's a woman in Frau Trumpleman who had a job.
Working in these files and when the reporter wrote about he goes, how can you work with poison and not yourself be poisoned? So she asked the warn people and this one woman came in she had gone to jail I think for three or four years because she expressed an interest I don't even either emigrating or just visiting Outside of East Germany. Yeah, and she looked up the files and it was the man who she
It was the man she still lived with. And just that morning, he told her, have a good day, and she's got to go back home to this. And she just collapsed. Well, you guys, you would. Yeah. And it's just like, again, this whole country had to make this kind of Faustian bargain or decision, do I want to know? And again,
Don't put betrayers in the lowest level of hell. Yes, but these are people who were like, it's been my husband since day one, or my brother, or, you know, and the thing that was extremely disturbing, and this is something Americans do not get, but I think I've started to get with the result of COVID. We, I, I as well, was of the belief that these informers had a gun to their head. And Jordan, if they take me in, it's like, it's either my family or I'm turning in Jordan Peterson. Sorry, sorry, Bucko. I'm turning you in. They were tripping over themselves to volunteer. I saw that.
These are people who are bored or lonely or just want to just force the disc, which want to feel like they had something over somebody else. And that is something that I think Westerners also. So that's also this attempt to garner unearned moral sphere of art. It's like, it means if you're during the COVID time, you could phone the state on your neighbor and then you could inform them perhaps that your neighbor had gone to
their relatives' house for a Christmas gathering, and that they were putting the population in danger. And so you got to manage two things at the same time, right? Especially if you had any lurking jealousy whatsoever of that neighbor for any reason whatsoever. Maybe they're younger, better looking, or they didn't suffer as much, or God only knows, because there's any number of dimensions for the Mary. Right? Any reason. And then you could
you could cause them a lot of trouble which is of course that's quite a lot of fun especially if you don't have anything better because now you feel powerful that you are powerful and moral that's the other thing is because you can just pat yourself on the back and say well you know you did the collective if you don't pat yourself on the back you go on facebook and brag about it's not even a self pat on the back then everyone else is giving you likes and being like great job you kept me grandma's safe yeah yeah right right so if that's the kind of thing where i i think americans
Don't realize how well we have this delusion in the west that in a totalitarian society It's like the freedom-loving mass. Yes. Yes, and there's like this oppressive guy that the tyrant or an impressive guy with his henchmen putting guns to people's heads all the time
And that's nothing could be farther from the truth than that. It's like, I figured that out in part just when I was reading the Gulagar-Kapalago, because socialists kept making the case that there were nowhere near enough guards to keep the camps running. The prisoners ran the camps. It's like, well, that's the definition of totalitarian state. Is the prisoners run the camp?
And so, and in a totalitarian state, this is what a totalitarian state is. It's not the top down in position of power. It's the fact that every single person in this society lies about absolutely everything to everyone all the time. I was reading the book of Abraham and
In that book, God is deciding he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they've wandered off the moral path. So that implication there is that a society can adopt modes of being that dooms them to catastrophe. We're talking about exactly how that might come about. Abraham is concerned about this because he thinks, well, it doesn't seem fair to obliterate the whole city when there might be innocent people.
still dwelling in it. And so Abraham says to God, if there's 40 people there, if I can go there and I can find 40 God-fearing, honest people, will you suspend the destruction of the city? And God says, yes, and Abraham bargains again to 30. And I think he gets God down to it.
So can I interject? There's a part of this story that isn't commonly known. They taught us this when I was a kid in Yeshiva. And I think the number that starts with the 50. And then Abraham says, double check the numbers at home. And Abraham goes, how about five less? And guys like God's look OK. But what Abraham met was 50, and you crossed out the five.
zero. So he's really like, I know there's no hope for this sound, but these even zero righteous people, let's not kill them all. Yeah, well, I mean, you can understand that. And you can, well, you can also, people have ambiguity about the morality of God as presented in the Old Testament because of these destructive waves come. But to me, that's a reflection of the fact that there are modes of being that will lead to catastrophe. But the
The implication of the story seems to me to be quite clear, which is that in any society, even if it's become extraordinarily deviant, if there's even a handful of people who don't lie, that's enough to turn the tide or stem the flow, right? Because it means that the grip of hell has become, it's not complete enough yet so that all hope whatsoever has been vanquished.
you know i think it was socianist said that one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny and that's but what what that also implies and this is a very perverse thing to us is that
The people who are in a totalitarian state are complicit in it every time they agree to participate in the lie. And you might say, well, they had to because they were as a gun to their head. But the thing is, there was a gun to their head anyways. And I think that's the same when we face moral conundrums in our current society. I saw
university faculty back away from the administration onslaught over the course of decades, never willing to stand up and say, okay, I actually think that you guys are pushing farther than I'm willing to go. And the rationales were always the same. It's like, I will be punished unduly for my objection. But the consequence of that is, is that you're certainly punished
for your silence, right? You might escape that immediate catastrophe, although probably not, because I don't think anybody escaped anything in the Soviet Union. But the long-term consequences of abiding by the lie are, well, it's hell as far as I can tell. Well, a few things. First of all, you're not going to find anyone more contemptuous of academics than myself, a pressing company excluded. So to find that they are universally weak is not at all a surprise.
But to your other point, one of the reasons I did write this book was because I am so hopeful about the future. And one of the counters to that people are like, how can you be hopeful? We don't have the numbers. We're not going to have the numbers. And one of the things that you just pointed out is we don't need a majority. We just need an alternative.
If you do have this small cadre of people who refuse to give in to the lie, who demonstrate there is another chance than the path that we're currently on, that is so much more powerful and punches so much more above its weight than a lot of people who are simply ballast and are simply going to go with the majority decree where the zeitgeist happens to be at the moment. And we saw this over and over.
in the countries of eastern Europe the self-liberated they did not have the numbers in terms of organization they couldn't have or else they would have been smarter as a whole but Poland's you know specifically solidarity this labor movement which brought down first the Polish government and then you know it was a domino that kind of toppled the the Soviet Empire it was not a huge percent of the population and these men suffered you know immense hardships and and duress but they stuck through it enough that they managed to win so i think
The issue with people like Solzhenitsyn and Conquest is those books and the Blackbook communism. You finish those books, you want to put a bullet to your head. And what I want to do here is you've only written 80% of the story because the point is, despite what we were told in the West for decades, that the Soviet Union is perpetual. We have to learn to live together. They're not going anywhere. We tried it with the Korean War. We tried it with the Vietnam War. We have dates haunt.
Are you there was a time in our lifetimes when criticizing the Soviet Union was told was in regard explicitly as inching us closer to nuclear war because they regard as a provocation. Look, you can't antagonize them. We just got to figure out how to work together.
And at a certain point, both Reagan and Thatcher said, do you want to know what my policy is for the Cold War? It's a simple, somebody even called simplistic, you want to hear it? We win and they lose. And he was correct, but his entire presidency, despite him refusing secretly to retaliate if the Russians struck him with nuclear weapons,
was this commitment to this cannot, I will not have this power of the presidency and abide the continuing existence of this absolutely satanic evil empire. And so what do we do about China?
We, listen, I don't know what we do much, I don't know. Let's stick to what they get it. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Well, I'll tell you what we do about China. We certainly don't valorize them. We don't regard them as a decent state that you don't use them as a model for emulation during pandemics. Right. And we don't.
we criticize and I think expose their tactics and machinations internally, externally, as much as possible. But the corporate press is very interested for reasons that I'm not in position necessarily to opine on, to downplay as many Chinese atrocities and even just Chinese standard operating procedure as much as possible. Yeah. Well, everyone was hoping for a good amount of time that if China was pulled into the modern Western economy, that one of the consequences of that would be
individual freedom, like an incremental democratization. And there was a few years where that looked like real possibility. I mean, China lifted itself. I should say that. As a consequence of abandoning its stupider policies, China managed to free its people enough so that they lifted themselves out of
for a while, it looked promising, right? And then, well, and then they installed 700 million closed circuit television cameras and built the world's most total surveillance state. You know, the name of that system is the same name as the system that goes astray in the Terminator series. Skynet? Skynet. No, it's 100%. If they called it Skynet, and the engineers who built it said we're building the good Skynet,
This is actually true. Yeah, I know it's impossible to believe. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, well, no kidding. It's like, well, they're the, they're the techno luciferian technologists who think, oh, this time, you know, this time we'll get the surveillance state a hundred percent, right? But they are getting it right. It's as far as it serves their purposes. Yeah. Well, yes. Yes. And, and, and it's drifting.
quite rapidly into the West as well. You know more and more you go through like I was in the store the other day that had the ability where you could pay with your palm, right? We're getting very close to the face ID payment systems and everybody thinks, well, isn't that convenient? It's like, yeah, it's convenient until the centralized databases know absolutely every goddamn thing you're doing every second, then they can start putting on differential
like that. And that's a high probability outcome as far as I can tell. I mean, I'm not pessimistic. I think I share your fundamental optimism. But boy, the slippery slope slide is sitting there right in front of us and we can take a trip down. I don't think it's a slippery slope at all. I think it's an elevator shaft.
Yeah, like it's really just like that's just the ultimate and slippery. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, an elevator shaft that's bottomless. But I think the other thing I think a lot of people don't appreciate is to what extent people are. Again, this is something that the enlightenment I think gets wrong. Menken who was one of my great role models. He's a journalist from the early 20th century. He said the average man does not want to be free. He merely wants to be safe.
So this isn't being done with, you know, gone to head. These are people tripping over themselves because they would rather be convenient because they compete on the metric of obedience. So if it's like, I'll just do whatever I'm told as long as I don't have to worry about anything. What do I care if you keep track of everywhere I go, what I buy, what I consume. Nothing I'm consuming is outside the medium, the bell curve. Where it goes unusual at all doesn't cost me anything. And I get taken care of. I get to be a pet of those in power. If you can understand from their perspective,
This is a great market for them.
If you give up all the difficulties of your life, let's say, because you're looking for difficulties in danger of life, because you're looking for security and satiation, then you don't have anything interesting and meaningful to do. So there is no pathway to happiness that's merely a consequence of security and satiation. But don't you think it's a brave new world situation where people are perfectly comfortable just living a life of mild pleasure, not in this, like a orgiastic kind of way, but rather than seeking any sort of happiness, which is beyond their means? I don't.
No, because I don't think it actually works for people. Well, actually, they have that they don't have the present mind to realize that they're living more moment to moment. They're not having this kind of long term strategy. Look at their own lives. Right. The root that the chickens probably come home to roost in times of existential crisis. Yes. Yeah. And that's when people do some soul searching and perhaps decide that what it is that they've been
satisfying themselves with is insufficient. And then there's an opportunity for transformation. But not always taken. Oh, well, it's also calm. Well, okay, let's talk about that a little bit, because one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is
I don't know to what degree you would still ally yourself with the anarchist movement, and I want to know to what degree you do, and also I would like to know what that means. You open your book with Ayn Rand, and I know that's a bit of a tangential.
intrusion into that question, but she's definitely an arbiter or what a spokeswoman for an individualistic stance. I want to talk to you, but I ran because I have some ideas about that that I want, but I'm also curious, you obviously regard a focus on the individual
as the appropriate medication against this kind of status, intellectual, illusory utopianism. And I think that's appropriate. But I want to know what your vision of an alternative is and why you adopted that particular vision.
Well, I don't know that I have a vision for Sam, not a central planner. But what anarchism means to me, and I do 100% regard myself as an anarchism, is it is an approach to life. It is an approach to treating people peacefully. It is a recognition that political authority is inherently illegitimate, although sometimes it is powerful. And it is regarding our existence as an amazing opportunity, and to live life to its fullest, and to realize that to take that away from somebody else.
is a huge moral outrage. So that is kind of what anarchism means to me. And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, if I had to sum up my worldview or whatever it's from, she used in one word, it would be this individualism. So yes, that is exactly. So let me delve into that.
But it's also just important because, you know, Berkman and Goldman, there's this boomer idea that more government is left-wing and less government is right-wing and puts Goldman and Berkman on the right-wing. It's just this weird thing because they want Hitler to be leftist because their right-wing is good, Hitler is bad, Hitler is leftist. That kind of mindset. Point being, it's very important for me to give credit to the fact that the first critics of the Soviet Union with firsthand experience were a hardcore
unmitigated lefties. These Emma Goldman and Berkman were both bloodthirsty, happy to slit the roads. But they're saying, we're doing this in the sake of revolution to kind of bring about a society that works through everyone, not against the workers themselves that we are championing. This is not what we're for. So they weren't kind of this pansy type of lefties. They were home.
But Emma Goldman gave a talk in Union Square, and she told the audience, she goes, go to the capitalist and ask for work. And if they don't give you work, ask for bread, and if they don't give you bread, take bread. So she's like, you do not have a moral obligation to starve. So they have this contemptuous, why are people starving when there's millionaires out there? Was there mindset? So the fact that these people,
at great cost to themselves and to their status in this kind of workers movement, were so vocal about denouncing what they had seen firsthand and were called puppets of the chapter. So why do you think that's important? I mean, you spend a lot of time on Berkman and Goldman.
I forgot the first name. Yes, Alexanderberg, but I'm a goldman. Yeah, right. Okay. Okay. You spend a lot of time on them. And you do show that they were as representatives of the autonomous worker, let's say they were appalled by what they saw in the Soviet Union. And you seem to be making the case that that's important because of their stress on individualism or because you also wanted not to
you know, fall prey to the delusion that was only the right that was standing against. Exactly. I hate this idea that right, good, left, bad or vice versa. There were the fight against totalitarianism was a series of dots that are often completely counterintuitive. And I think it's very important historically when people fight these individuals who fight against these kind of atrocities that they give. Right. So you're looking at something like attempting to replace
the right wing versus the terrible communists narrative with something more like people who are concerned with the individual. Yes, yeah. Okay, fine. I see. I see. Okay. So now here's, I read reread, read, I ran books, the fountainhead and out in the shrug. Yeah. And I think the third time I read both. And I read them within the last couple of months. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I was, you know, now and then I, I'm looking for a, I don't know,
a romantic read, maybe, that's somewhat intellectually challenging, and now then I'll pick up one of her books. And she's a curious singer to me, because Ayn Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good counter voice to their machinations. But, well, and you know, I got introduced to her books. It was quite interesting. So I worked for the socialists when I was like 14 till I was 16, before I figured out that
I didn't know enough to presume that the way I wanted to arrange the world in a utopian fashion was credible. And I figured that out by the time I was about 17, I thought, well, what do you know? You don't have a job. I had little jobs. You know, you don't have a business. You don't have a family. You don't have any education. It's like, what the hell do you know? Really? Right. So, okay. Anyways, the person who gave me Ayn Rand's books was this woman, Sandy Northland. She was the mother of one of El
Curtis recent premiers, a socialist premier. And she was the wife of the only elected socialist official in Alberta when I grew up. And I asked her why she gave me social nets and then Huxley and Orwell, like she was an educated woman. And she gave me, I read books, which I read when I was like 13. And you know, there, I found them compelling. Yeah. You know, they've got that.
There are romantic adventures fundamentally with an intellectual band, and I liked the anti-collective ethos that was embedded in them. And then I've read them, like I said, a couple of times since then. So here's the problem I have, and you can help me sort this out. I certainly agree with you that a society that isn't predicated on something like recognition of the intrinsic and superordinate worth of the individual is doomed to catastrophe.
Right. And so, but then, but here's the rub as far as I'm concerned. And this is what I had, really had a problem, especially this time when I went through red spokes. It's like her golf, John Gold, for example, in Francisco, to Danconia, her and the, who's the architect? How it worked? Correct, correct, correct. Her heroic capitalists, essentially. They're not precisely heroic capitalists. They're heroic individualists. Yes.
who compete in the free market. And that's fine. And you can see the libertarian side of that. And I'm also a free market advocate. And partly because I think the distributed decision making is a much better computational model than centralized planet, obviously.
Well, yeah, it should be. Sure. But it should be. It's not obvious to utopian, Luciferian intellects. But it's obvious, even if you just think about it from a computational perspective. Well, I'll just say the smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. Yes. Exactly. That's exactly it. It's precisely why you want to distribute it. Okay, so that's partly what I want to go into. So,
Now the Randy and heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists and they, and you taught me as soon as I get any of this wrong or in some way you don't disagree with. They're pursuing their own selfish ethos. Yes. Okay. So that's the rub to me because I, and I would think about, I'm going to think about this psychologically and neurophysiologically. So just to make it complicated. Okay. So the first question would be,
Well, what exactly do you mean by the individual and the self? Okay, so when a child develops, let's say when a child first emerges into the world, they're essentially a system of somewhat disconnected primary instinctual subpersonalities, right? And
So with the nascent possibility of a uniting ego, identity, personality, something like continued a continuity of memory across time. But that has to emerge. Now, it seems to emerge as a consequence of neurophysiological development and experiential maturation. And so the child comes equipped into the world, say, with a sucking reflex, because its mouth and tongue are very wired up.
So that's where the child is most conscious. That's why kids when they can't put everything in their mouth because they can feel it and investigate it. Far before they have control over their eyes or their arms because their arms sort of float around it. So what happens is they're born as a set of somewhat independent systems and then the independent systems, partly under the influence of social demand, integrate themselves.
So, and then like by the time a child is two, that child is still mostly disintegrated emotional systems. So if you watch it to your old, and I use two for a specific reason, what you see is that they cycle through basic motivational states. So a child is often like a child
whose demand-oriented motivational states are satiated will play, right, and play and explore. But then they get tired and they'll cry, or they'll get hungry and they'll cry, or they'll get angry and they'll have a tantrum, or they're versed into tears while I said they'll cry, or they'll get anxious, right? And so they're cycling through these primary motivational states. Now, we understand that to some degree, neurophysiologically, because
the older the brain system, the more likely it is to be operative in infancy, right? So like the rage system or the system that mediates anxiety or the system that mediates pain, those come into being pretty early, but it's hard for them to get integrated. Okay, now here's the problem. And I don't know how to distinguish individualism
from hedonism. And I don't know how to distinguish hedonism from possession by one of these lower order motivational states. So when when Rand says we should be able to pursue our own selfish needs, she's kind of taking a class. She doesn't selfish needs. She says self interest.
Okay. Okay. So fine. Okay. Okay. So, so that, no, well, no, she, I would say she moves between those two because there are says needs and positive. Okay, she may never stay needs. Okay. Okay. Okay. Right. Fair enough. Okay. Okay. So I'll back off on the needs side. That was the old chosen and she does, she makes absolutely bloody sure
Well, wait a second now. She says your needs are not a blank check on my... I know, I know, but she doesn't, does she say simultaneously that I have no right to pursue my needs? And she doesn't use that word. She says you pursue your self-interest to the best of your abilities. Okay, but she also uses the word selfish. Yes, okay. Okay, so far you're just in an incredible way. Right, absolutely, absolutely. I would just want to make sure that we're proceeding on grounds that we both regard as appropriate.
So the liberal types, the Scottish liberals believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest, that that would produce a self-regulating system. Now, Rand seems to accept that as a proposition, yes. So if people are freely able to pursue their self-interest,
then a system of free exchange will emerge out of that that has the appropriate qualities of governance. Yes, she says this explicitly on Donahue. She was saying that if people pursue their own self-interest, there wouldn't be any oppression, there wouldn't be war, there wouldn't be any headless, because should they be less than she goes, there wouldn't be any. Well, look, when I'm negotiating with someone for a business deal, let's say, or when I'm trying to formulate a strategy
that enables me to work happily together with someone over the long run. I'm hoping that they'll be thrilled with the deal. Like, I'm not trying to win. Of course. I think, well, I would like to set you up in a situation so that you could pursue our mutual goals completely of your own accord. And then I don't even have to watch you, right? Because you're doing things for whatever reasons you have. But this is the thing. This is what I don't quite understand is that
That self-interest, okay, so it seems to me that for that self-interest to work, then it has to be a self-interest that's commensurate with the structure that would emerge if everyone was pursuing their self-interest simultaneously. You see what I mean? Everyone. Well, okay, okay. So let's say,
You and I make an arrangement, and it's a long-term arrangement, and at one point you decide that it's in your self-interest to violate that agreement, because you can garner an intense short-term gain as a consequence. But there's a long-term cost.
Okay, that's fine. Okay. So when this relationship and also there's a long term cost in terms of myself. Okay, what's the cost? The cost is I'm no longer a person of integrity. I'm not a man of my word. So Rand says there's two Rand quotes where she goes, first of all, she says that man is being a self-made soul. And she also says in the fountainhead, which is that hard work they architect, that a building has integrity just like a man and just to seldom.
So right. So you're seeing her self interest is something that's nested inside a larger scale conceptualization of integrity. Yes. And then okay. And in fact, the whole point of the fountainhead is she's contrasting these two types of selfishness. The first is Peter Keating, who is this basic striver social climber who has no internal self at all, no values other than what he sees around him. In fact, the working title of the fountainhead was secondhand lives.
Yeah, this Rand was working in Hollywood and she asked the woman who she was working with and there's just kind of this like pin drop moment where she's like, I'm looking in the face of the devil where the woman goes, I'll tell you what I want. If someone has a cloth coat, I want a fur coat. If you have one car, I want to. If your house is 500 square feet, I want a thousand square foot house and Rand is like, oh my, she's like, this is evil. Someone who has no self and whose values are strictly a function of comparison of those around her.
as opposed to Howard Rourke, who was selfish in the sense that he pursues his own goals and values in accordance with his moral code. And I think those are the two definitions of selfish. I know. Okay, so let's still find. So let's still certainly Keating is portrayed in Rand as nothing but a
But he's the kind of social climber who will do anything to gain comparative status in his profession. But he will never be able to tell you why he wants the status. What is he going to do with it? It's kind of just in and of itself good, but he has no value. So that's the thing that's interesting to me because I don't think that it's appropriate to presume that the mere
Search for social status is not self-interest now. I'm not I know you're making a more sophisticated argument than that But I want to elaborate it completely so I could say I can play devil's advocate against round and for now Okay, okay, so I would say well
On what grounds are you criticizing Peter Keating's decision self-interested decision to prioritize status above all else mean that's what he thinks is appropriate apparently and so on what grounds is that an inappropriate conclusion.
But I would even say that he thinks it. I think it's more that he's kind of taken this subconscious subconsciously from the ethos. He does not someone who thinks these things through. He just goes with what everyone else tells it. Fine. I've got no objections to that. I think that's how he's portrayed. But what on what grounds do you believe that that's inappropriate? Because just because his self-interest doesn't match that of, and you know, Peter Keating is
an archetypal character in the random universe, right? I mean, he's duplicated in many other characters, like Ellsworth Toohey, for example, is like a meta-keating, essentially. He's the spider behind the scenes who's orchestrating everything, but he claims to be selfless, but he's certainly pursuing comparative status, like Keating is, but there's a very powerful
overt and covert implication in rem that the path that Keating and Tooie takes is inappropriate. And the path that Roark takes or Francesco, dead Coney, and I'm probably mixing up the characters in the book at the moment, is the path of like true individual heroism. That's the romantic adventure part. But the exactly the reason they're
They're both self-interested. They're not self-interested because Peter Keating doesn't have a self. There's no one there. And that was my mystery. So what does it mean for there to be something there, right? Because he's reduced himself to one dimension, which is social comparison. But that's not nothing. That's one dimension. But it's nothing to him. It doesn't matter to him. It only matters to other people. So therefore, it matters to him. The call is not coming from inside the house. And this is where I would bring in Albert Camus.
because sometimes they can talk about networking. And one of the advice I give people, I say, if you know someone's in town for their birthday, I go, I always take out that person for their birthday, and I do for selfish reasons. And everyone laughs, and I go, the reason I do it is because don't you want to be the guy who takes people out for their birthday? It's awesome. What's it going to cost you? 25 bucks in an hour?
So the whole point of the Camus kind of absurdism is that life is inherently meaningless. But this is a wonderful opportunity because you can be the kind of person that you want. And it's not necessarily that hard. It's just being consistent. So if you want to be someone who's high status, who no one genuinely, no one who genuinely knows you likes or admires, knock yourself out.
At a certain point, the brain can only dilute itself. Right, it's counterproductive. Or do you want to be the kind of person who, when faced with tough decisions, as I have in my life and as you have in your life, we're like, you know what? 20 years from now, I'm going to look back at this fork in the road, and I'm going to chastise myself if I buckle and do the weak thing, even though it's going to cost me something in the medium term, these are two different paths that ran for traits.
And I think that's a very good moral code to live by. Okay, so let me extract out some principles from that and you tell me what you think. So one of the things that I proposed was that a very young person, two years old, is still a relatively unintegrated conflict of internal
dimensions, motivational dimensions. That's a good way of thinking about it. Okay, now we also hypothesize that the problem with Keating and Toe, for example, is that they sacrifice to social status. So they become one dimensional and you portrayed it as a false dimension. And you said there's no self there. Okay, so here's a hypothesis about why it's a false, why it's false.
Okay, and you tell me what you think about this. Okay, so imagine that there that there's a set of constraints that are implicit in the natural and the social world such that
If all these underlying motivational systems want to optimize their interrelationships, and they want to optimize their interrelationships in a social world, and they want to optimize their interrelationships across time, so iterates that a pattern would, that a necessary pattern will emerge.
Now, I think that's the pattern that your conscience calls you on when you deviate from, by the way. And I also think it's the pattern that makes things interesting to you in the world. So imagine that out of this internal conflict of spirits, that's a good way of thinking about it, there's a way of a mode of integration. And that will satisfy all these internal systems in the optimal possible manner. And then there's an instinct
that feeds that development that calls to you by making things interesting to you that would force you to develop in an integrated direction or that emerges as conscience if you fail to do it.
That's not a unidimensional system of value. It's a multi-dimensional system of value and it's a multi-dimensional, iterable system of value that also works so that if you play that game and I play that game and we occupy the same territory, both of our games will improve. So it's not a zero sum, it's not a zero sum optimization. So then this is where I have
part may be problems with the concept of anarchy per se. So let me tell you why. So does any of that seem inappropriate? That seems fine. Okay, so let me tell you why I have a harder time placing anarchy in that position. Okay, so I did this seven
One of the things we did was elaborate up a conceptualization that's derived from the Exodus story that's the basic basis of Catholic social teaching or much of it, as it turns out, called subsidiary. Subsidiary comes out of a particular story in the Exodus narrative. And so what you have in the narrative is these relights who have the habits of slaves. And so they're basically
You could think about them as a mass of Peter Keating's. They're only after short-term gratification. And so they have the habits of slaves. They've never planned. They've never integrated. You could say maybe the true self is absent. That might be another way of thinking about it. And so they try to make Moses into another
Pharaoh yeah right in the desert right he sits as their judge and he has to work out all their problems okay so that's the scenario this is happening while they're in the desert now Moses father-in-law whose name is Jethro comes along and he says
You have to stop doing this. He says this to Moses. He says there's two reasons. Number one, if you take all that responsibility and power unto yourself, it'll kill you. Plus, you'll just set yourself up as another pharaoh by taking all this responsibility that the Israelites are abdicating. And then you'll be back in the same situation you were in to begin with.
And two, if you take away that decision-making power from the Israelites, then they'll just stay useless slaves forever. So you can't do that. And for two reasons. You don't get to be a tyrant and they don't get to be slaves. But then he proposes something very specific in consequence. He says, take all your tens of thousands of people and make them into a hierarchical society.
get them to group themselves in groups of 10 voluntarily, right? So pick your 10 people. And then from amongst yourself in the 10, nominate the best of the 10. Okay, so now you've got your 10 people and leader. Now all the people are dividing to 10s. Now take the leaders, put them in groups of 10, have them do the same thing. Do that all the way up to you, because you're the voice of God at the moment. And then if the Israelites have a
have a dispute, they settle it. If they can't settle it by themselves, they settle it with their guy who's one in 10. And if he can't figure out how to do it, he goes to one in 100 and then one in 1000. Now, so you have a social hierarchy in place, right? But it's a voluntary social hierarchy. Right. And every single level of the hierarchy has a requisite responsibility. And that makes a
that makes a pyramidal structure that's the alternative to the tyrant and the slave. Okay, so now, maybe there's two ways you could conceptualize the individual, and this is where I have the problem with an article viewpoint. I think that the identity that Rand is promoting is actually a reflection of the harmonious operation of that whole hierarchy.
Like the whole thing, it's not, it can't be simply located at the level of the individual because if you're going to comport yourself in a harmonious manner, like we are in this conversation, like at the moment, I know you're not subjugating your individuality to the demands of the conversation because then it wouldn't be a conversation, right? But you are bringing your... I am subjugating some extent. This is your show. I can't just talk about whatever you want. Right, right, right.
Well, well, but but you're doing it voluntarily and you know the rules of the game correct and you're doing it because you have your own reasons So so I wouldn't say I don't think it's it's so not so much subjugation as it is your choice to play the same game I'm playing correct, okay, so this is Your show right right right well I set the phrase for this particular interaction right and I would return the favor if I was if you were hosting this right right, but but you're doing it voluntarily correct, but but then
See, the thing about Rand, and this is the same thing by the way that's done by virtually every psychologist, just so you know it, is that Rand doesn't spend much time detailing out the necessary structure of the subsidiary hierarchy that would have to be produced to transform an emphasis on individual orientation into a complex and sophisticated society, right? And I don't think it's enough to say
if people were just pursuing their own enlightened self-interest that society would automatically harmonize because you could also imagine that okay so that that you've got to sit with you it's not automatic at all it's every group it is Starbucks and automatic hierarchy no it's
thousands of employees working together and they create this international organization where if I go to the Starbucks in Washington, it's giving me the same as roughly as I go the Starbucks in Paris, right? So these hierarchies do emerge voluntarily, but it's not automatic at all. It's just, if you're looking at it from the Eagle's eye perspective, it's just these little dots. But when you get more granular perspective, it's infinite people choosing to work together, create this kind of superstructure. Yes.
Right. Okay. Okay. Well, so, so one automatic is it's not automatic. Fine. Fine. Well, that that's, I'm perfectly happy to accept that because I don't, I also don't think it's automatic. I think that those structures have to be set up and maintained. Yes. And in keeping with the need, though. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So.
One point is this is why culture is so important and having this kind of promulgation of ideas and morals and values because if you just have people who are all very high-time preference and just are not thinking past the next moment, you're not going to be able to build this aside.
unless you get rid of that first because if you're only thinking to the next five minutes and this kind of like maybe someone who's been in prison all his life and don't have been trained not to think long-term, it's going to be almost impossible to have any kind of working relationship because he'd rather have that candy bar today than to candy bar today because he knows he's not going to see you on it. Okay, so you brought in the concept of time preference, which I think is absolutely appropriate. Well, yeah, because... Crucial. Okay.
Why did you come to the conclusion that that first of all, why don't you define time preference so everybody knows exactly what you're talking about and then I want to know why you came to the conclusion that
There's a reason that you brought the time preference discussion into this discussion. So maybe you could elaborate on what it is. I always get them backwards. There's high time preference and low time preference point being like we see this with kids in inner cities who they aren't sure they're going to ever see old age. The people they deal with are not trustworthy. So if they're offered, look, I'll give you either a candy bar today or tomorrow. If you wait one day, you'll have two candy bars. They will overwhelmingly take the one today. Right hand. Right.
because the odds that the person is going to be there tomorrow or is trustworthy are quite low. And this extrapolates in a very nefarious way, because if you're living moment to moment, you're not going to school to plan for medical school. How long do you have to go to medical school for your doctor? It's years and years. You're just thinking just getting past tomorrow is a function. Also a poverty. When someone's worried about their next meal, it's very hard to maintain that vision of what am I going to be doing when I'm 40.
So that is that concept of high government. And this is also why having a stable society is important and why governments are often a problem, take inflation. If I don't know how much a dollar is going to be worth 10 years from now, how am I going to make a contract with you that
Yeah, we're right. Well, you're also punished then for going gratification, right? That's one of the terrible things about inflation is that you actually punish the people who are the conscientious people upon whose labor society would be. Imagine you tell me that, okay, in a year from now, you're going to deliver 10 yards of silk, but the definition of a yard today is 36 inches, but tomorrow it might be three inches. It's just like, or you boy, or 50 inches. Yeah.
I can't make any kind of plan if the definition of a yarn changes. So if the definition of what a dollar exchange is year to year and it loses its value, you can't make long-term planning. Because if you say, I'm going to give you a million dollars, 10 years from now, I don't know what that means. It could be absolutely worthless. Right, right, right, right, right. Okay, so now back to this neurophysiological spectrum. Sure. Okay, so what is the thing? One more point. Yeah. Yeah. Rand is very much, and this is where I very much park on you, sir. Yeah. Very much a child of the enlightenment.
Yeah, she has this enlightenment delusion, in my opinion, that if a bunch of people sit down and they're giving all the data and they hash it out, they're all going to come to the same conclusion. Yeah, I don't think that holds up at all. No, but you're outlining the structure of the proper constraint through which that massive data would be interpreted. So, yes, you're right. Okay. So, well, so because the
Once you bring time preference into it, you're starting to work in the domain that implicitly assumes that there is a higher order integration. So these initial systems, these initial motivational systems, they're very short-term. And they want short-term gratification. So when a baby wails, when it crawls, it wants
to be satisfied now. But can I say one thing? This is the distinction Rand draws between hedonism and her philosophy, because she thinks that the more moral a person, the more long range is thought. Whereas hedonism is very much a pleasure at the moment. And I'm going to defend hedonism a little bit, because the term gets a bad rap. Hedonism isn't cochorgies. Hedonism is Martha Stewart, where you're having coffee and book club with your friends and having the pleasure of the world. That's more of an is OK, but I would put you can actually separate those. Sure.
Because that kind of hedonism would be more on the aesthetic end. Sure. But it's more sophisticated. Pleasure per se isn't bad. Right. With these Epicurean idea of hedonism, how was pitch thousands of years ago, it wasn't at all this maximizing pleasure in the moment. Yes. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. So, okay. So we'll just define the kind of hedonism that we're objecting to as
blinkered by the short term. But I also hate this kind of wasp suspicion of hedonism, this pure talent. If you're having pleasure, you're doing something wrong. And it's like, pleasure is wonderful. People should do it more. In the sense of, I'm reading a nice book. I'm enjoying a fire. I'm having it walk with my friends. Well, everything in this place is the proper notion for that. So the demand for hedonic gratification shouldn't
be put forward in a manner that sacrifices the overall integrity. It's the reward. Yeah. Yeah. I worked hard and now I get to watch a stupid TV show and I feel any guilt about it because I did my work for today. Right. Right. Well, it needs no shame about it. Yeah. Well, the psychologists know if they're wise that you want to have all the forms of motivation that are available to you working to push you forward. Yeah. And certainly the draw
So technically, the source of reward that people work hardest for isn't satiation reward. They would if they were starving. You can put animals and human beings into a situation where they've worked like single-mindedly for satiation. If you haven't had anything to drink for two weeks, you're going to be pretty motivated. That aside,
And this is something the Soviets understood very well. That is something. Yes, definitely. Yes. Well, tyrants understand that very well. Yes, yes, because they leverage the force of these basic motivational systems, right? Mostly the sort of pleasure that people pursue is the pleasure of noting that they're moving forward towards a desired goal. Yes. There's a whole neurophysiological system set up that mediates that. And it's the system activated by drugs like cocaine. That's the dopaminergic system.
and it has its origins in the same system that mediates voluntary exploratory activity. It's a very ancient system, it emerges, it's hypothalamic, the hypothalamus is a part of the brain that sits right on top of the spinal cord. It's an absolutely ancient system and the pleasure that we
generally are most motivated by, does activate these systems. And if you want people to be actively engaged in a meaningful way in their own life and in their social pursuits, then you want to make sure that that system is operating in the direction of those pursuits. So then, one of the things that happens when people make an agreement is that they set up a shared aim.
Right. So we are aimed today was to have an interesting conversation that we could share with people. Okay. So that sets up our nervous system. So as long as we're uttering words in a manner that moves us towards that aim, then we're going to stay engaged and enthusiastic because that, well, because that the system that produces enthusiasm and engagement is now on board in relationship to that aim. Okay. So imagine this then so that your aim becomes the
Participation in the social system that's optimally balanced when people are pursuing their enlightened self-interest in a manner that's of maximal social utility that stretches across the longest possible time span.
I don't have any use for social utility. I don't think that term has any. Okay. This is okay. So, so, so that is that mean. Let me explain that and you tell me what you think about it. Okay. So let's go back to this idea of subsidiarity, right? Okay. It's higher. Yes. Okay. So.
You can think about that in your own life. So maybe you have an intimate relationship with someone, might be a child or a parent or a sibling or your spouse. Okay. Now, so that would be the primary domain of social interaction. All right. So now, how would you characterize your
How do you characterize that relationship? You want it to sustain over a long period of time. You have an obligation to it. You have a responsibility to it. And is that the beginning of the polity? Just that dyadic relationship? If you want to be a good person, I think that you do have a kind of
Again, this speaks to what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want to be someone that your family can admire and rely on and knowing that when this shit hits the fan, they'll be in a position to reciprocate? Do you want to be that provider or that source of strength? Again, this is your opportunity to do that person. Or do you want to be the guy who's not there for his kids? You have that opportunity too.
And at the end of the day, you're going to have to look yourself in the mirror or avoid making or avoiding eye contact in the mirror and face. We're waking up at three in the morning, being tormented by your conscience. Yes. If you still have one or you're deadening it with alcohol or whatever the situation might be. So yeah, that's how we look at it. So then that was what I was trying to portray as a social good. But I mean, the social good is the consequence, not the goal.
How about the good is the harmony between the social manifestation and the individual manifestation? So look, part of the reason I've been thinking this through is because I think that the modern definition of mental health as subjective is sorely wrong.
Because I think that mental health is actually the harmony in that hierarchy of being and not something that you have in your head. I mean, Rand called her philosophy of objectivism, so I completely agree with you. I don't, I think anytime you're introducing subjectivism to a large extent, you're treading on thin ice.
Okay, so then let's go to the objective in relationship to what? Where's the objective reality that Rand's pattern of behavior is aiming to, what would you say, to adapt to? Everywhere. We live in it. There's nowhere else to go.
That seems to me to be the same notion as this subsidiary structure. So, so we can walk through it. So you've got your wife, let's say. Sure. And you make a bond with her that's long run. Sure. And your narrow individuality is integrated into the broader dyad of that group. We're all then diagrams. Okay. Okay. Then you do that with your staff. There's you and your coworkers, there's you and your employees, there's you and your friends, there's you and your daughter, your city, your town.
Right. Okay. Okay. It's a weak peers. Right. So we agree on that. Okay. So that's the polity that I'm thinking about. So how do you do it?
Well, it's not what it's it changes all that you can do with your job. Right. Right. Right. Right. But there's principle. It's not entirely fluid because it's not entirely fluid. Right. Right. It's hopefully it's optimally fluid. Sure. Right. Right. Right. Okay. So that's fine. And that optimal, I would say part of the marker of its optimality is fluidity. Yes. Right. Right. That's why the Dow is water. Right. It's not stone. It has this capacity to adapt and
Sometimes you have to cut your losses, and that's fine. The sum costs, just because you've been in a relationship for 10 years, does not mean, well, as you continue it in perpetuity. At least any relationship. I don't mean marriage. It could be just your contractor you work with or a lawyer. Right. Well, so your point seems to me to be that your alliance in any of those subsidiary organizations shouldn't be in prison. Correct. Right. But it's something that thrives and needs maintenance and is reborn every single day.
Like every single day, anyone has the option to get divorced, or to not talk to their kids, or to fire whoever, or to swear. So if you accept the necessity of these embedded relationships, multiple embedded relationships. Okay, so why do you conceptualize that? Why exactly? I'm not trying to catch you out here. I'm curious. Well, why do you conceptualize that as anarchy? Because it's voluntary.
Yeah, fine. So that's the fundamental principle. Yes. Yeah, fine. Fine. Fine. That's it. That is OK. So here's the rule of thumb. So this is actually a rule of thumb that we implemented in this arc enterprise that I've been trying to promote, let's say, is that all policy that's not based on volunteerism is to be regarded at minimum as suboptimal.
Well, it's a force. If there's any use of force, I just converge or in peace. All right. Well, so let me take that in the golden. Well, I think the principle of volunteerism is extraordinarily important, right? Because it's actually a sign of the optimization of the relationship. Yes. Correct. Yeah. OK. OK. Bye.
All right. All right. Yeah, but wait now. Well, I think we should cut it. Yeah. That's what I wanted. OK, well, the situation can only go to that direction. There's a complication. Here's the complication. All right. So while it's unfortunate, there's a complication, but there is a complication. So imagine that if we engage in interactions voluntarily, right, that we can cooperate. Sure. OK, now imagine we set up a whole domain of cooperators. Who's we?
You and I have another French. And we have a conversation with nine people. And we're having a good conversation. Okay, fine. Now, we're all playing by the rules that enable that conversation to continue. And the rules include the fact that anybody can step out of the conversation whenever they don't want to participate. So it keeps playful and aimed in a positive direction and self-sustaining. Now we get one person in there
Okay. Who plays stat escape? That's okay. Right? Okay. Now, so, and let's say for the sake of argument- Let's call it Lex.
That game brings the conversation in some ways to a halt. Okay, so these dynamic voluntary associations have been marked. So you can imagine you could set up a stable society of cooperators. But the problem is if you drop one person in there who's a shark, like a short-term hedonistic psychopath, they can take everything.
They can take everything. Okay, so you said you said you can't use force. What do you do with people who don't play fair? If you're at a party, let's go to this party scenario and there's someone there who is being an ass, whoever's home it is. It's their domicile. At a certain point, you tell them get the F.L. Okay, but then you have the problem of the necessity of force in that situation. It's your home. Is there a trespasser at that point? I'm not saying it's on jail. Okay. No, it has the right hand. Okay.
Define, okay, we already agreed that an optimized relationship is dependent on voluntary assets. Correct. And we also agreed that- And they're fluid, right? And they're fluid. So my right to be here on the show is fluid. At any moment, you could be like, Malice, you know what? You are really crossing a line. We're cutting it here. Get the hell out. And that's not forced. It's still your house. This is your house. Okay. Then we need to define force.
And that's what private property does. Private property delineates who has the position to determine what happens within that area. So if it's your house and you say, if you want to be in my house, you have to wear an orange shirt. I'm not giving you an exclamation. I have a choice. A, I can show up in orange shirt, or I can push your buttons and be like, I'm going to show up in property. So you're defining private property as, I believe, as a domain where you are
Yeah, so what that means is that you have the right and maybe even the responsibility to use requisite force in that situation to maintain the necessary peace that's a precondition for voluntary association. But I wouldn't even call it force because if I'm trespassing, I'm the one who's initiating force. If I go to someone's home where I'm not welcome, I'm the one who's using force.
I need a definition of force. Because look, if you throw prisoners in prison, because they continually violate other people's property. They're the ones who initiated force by going after somebody else, assuming that these people were actual criminals. Yeah, yeah. I'm making that assumption. Make actual rapists. And now they were locked into a cage.
They're the ones who initiated force as who started this chain. And what is done to them is a consequence, which is, let's assume it's done a rational and above board manner, is the consequence of their actions. So, okay, okay. So you're implying, I believe, that the use of force, this is why we need a word. Because if I have to throw you out of here, most people would say, by the normative
meaning of the word force that i use force to throw you out now you're not in the moral sense right right not in the moral sense right right so then the the issue because i've been welcomed in your in your home right at a certain point if i have to stay by what even about that you're like a malice can crash my sofa you know i mean i know you're here at a certain point if i'm blasting music or outstate my welcome and you're like okay you're right to stay here has been revoked and if i start squatting i'm the one who is
infringing on your property. Yeah, right. Right. Either yourself or call private security or the police to be like, get this guy out of here. Right. That's not an issue. So that's minimum necessary self defense or something like that. Yeah. Well, that's a good principle. I mean, I think, I think one of the other principles of appropriate social organization is minimum necessary force. So your claim
See, but the problem with government is that people won't see, we already agreed that the proper social organization is one based on voluntary assent. And if you're crashing on my couch, you might not want to leave voluntarily. So I'm transgressing against it. Again, you're the sovereign is your home. That's what private property adjudicates who's the who's opinion matters. Yeah. And if it's your house, it's yours period.
Yeah, right, right, right, right. Well, period within some appropriate limits. And I think we have actually worked those out quite well, generally speaking, especially in the United States with their definition of what constitutes private property.
See, I'm still, I'm still, I'm still having trouble with the domain of how you organize policy if your emphasis is on what's voluntary with people. Right. Great rules. eBay does this all the time. If I buy a fossil as I have recently from Czech Republic and that fossil turns out to be fake,
I can adjudicate it through eBay, I can adjudicate it through PayPal, where I paid, or I could adjudicate it through my credit card company, none of these are governments, but they're all in a position to reverse that transaction. This is an example of anarchism and practice, because the idea that I'm going to sue someone in Czech Republic for a fossil is there's no possibility of that happening. Okay, so this definition that you use that equates anarchism with voluntary- Yes.
Do you think that that's, I wouldn't say necessarily that that's how anarchism is viewed in the popular culture? Correct. And that's by design, just to say where the Soviet Union is viewed as somehow infinitely preferable to Nazi Germany in the popular culture, right? It's okay. So you're... Because those two are in power... I wondered why you were relatively used to get along with an anarchist and fundamentally because you predicate your notion of anarchism on voluntary ascent. But they all did.
i mean i'm a goldman bergman did as well they would be one of the society based on peace and they view the capitalist as exploiters so even at the end of the day they were this is one of the reasons that the bergman goldman were both yelling at ley they're like we're for their version they call it the panics and the socials regardless anonymous in that school at the time
Therefore, we're for the individual, complete free speech. Emma Goldman fought to have fought to fight the draft in World War I, she was correct, and to teach women how to prevent pregnancy, at the time it was a felony, to distribute condoms or to explain birth control from a doctor to someone who wanted to prevent pregnancy. And books were banned. You can't use the males. Ulysses James Joyce was banned, for example.
So that was their version of anarchism and their spot on in that regard, that the government has the position to tell you what you can or can't say to who. So your claim probably is something like, it seems to me, that your claim is something like
You have the right and perhaps the responsibility to respond in a manner that restores the peace. That's a good way of thinking about it. If someone violates the principles by which any interaction could continue on the basis of voluntary asset.
I don't know. I don't know if I could follow that train that's open. Well, I'm trying to figure out exactly the justification for me being able to throw you off your couch. My couch is like your point is that the fact that you've overstayed your welcome means that you've already introduced an element of compulsion. Correct. That's exactly correct. Well, and the reason that that would be wrong is because it violates that principle of voluntary asset. Yes. I no longer want you on my day of couch. Right. Right. Right. So you've already- That's not your language. Right. Right. Exactly.
Yes. You've already, you've already, you've already initiated a process that violates that. Yes. That integrity, the integrity of the relationship. Right. And so then I'm normally justified, but required. I wouldn't say required, but well, that's a tough one, right? Because like, yeah, well, you could imagine, let's say in the situation that you already described is you did someone a favor and they're in on your couch and they, they're being there for three months and they didn't get a job and they're eating like Cheetos. And it's like, it's just not a good situation.
But what alternatives like is Toronto and I'm going to be on the street and I'm going to die, right? So like that might be a situation where like, okay, maybe let me put you in a hotel. I can say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, fair enough. But the requirement would come because maybe the reason you're not calling me on my behavior is because you're afraid or because you don't want to, you don't want to appear mean or you don't want to hurt my feelings. So that when you're, but when you're in your room at night,
You're like pissed off at yourself and you're conscious of knowing at you because you actually have something to do. And it's time to call this person out because you are violating your intake. So that's what I meant by the responsibility. I didn't mean a deterministic responsibility. I meant because we're elaborating the idea that there is a principle of long-term integrity here that's actually real or maybe the most real thing. What kind of person do you want to be?
At the end of the day is when it comes down to and this is again why I'm such a kamoo fan and the idea that existence precedes essence in it I don't know if I'd say that literally but the idea that we have we are that I always use this metaphor and I think it's very informative where there's two types of people you go to a top of mountaintop and you see the blank canvas and a bunch of paints and a certain mentality is like what is this this is just stupid and the other type is like this is a wonderful opportunity.
I can paint this mountainside, I can paint something abstract, I can paint myself, I can paint, you know, just this blade of grass. And that is what life is like. The Camus version of life being inherently meaningless is a great opportunity for any of us to be the kind of person to a certain extent that we want to be. And this is very, very exciting. Because we're not really taught. I mean, you're taught in school that you could do anything you want, and that's a kind of a lie. But in terms of you can be the kind of person you want to be morally
that everyone does have that capacity to be and we're all going to make mistakes and that's a restitution is for okay so let me ask you why you conceptualize that as meaningless and why it is that because it sounds to me like the the meaning of what you mean by meaningless is something like
the freedom to choose the direction. Yes, correct. But you've already made it clear that you don't regard that. Okay, so back to the Exodus story. I'll tell you something that also that happens in Exodus. It's very interesting. So when God enables Moses to stand up to the Pharaoh,
He informs him that there are certain words he should use. He says, let my people go. It was very famous phrase, but that's not what he says. He says, let my people go so they may worship me in the wilderness. And that's very much relevant to this issue of subsidiarity. Because what it posits is that there's a form of escape from tyranny that isn't, well, I would say anarchic hedonism. Let's try that out, right? Which is what happens when the golden caskets worship, right? It's that everybody
reverts to immediate gratification and everything descends into hell. It's an ordered freedom. And that's a vision of ordered freedom. That's the proper worship in the desert. And that's the alternative to tyranny and slavery. And that ordered freedom seems to me to be something like the service of the principle that allows for voluntary ascent across the broadest possible range of circumstances, right? And that would be a very good, there's
Is there a difference then in your argument for anarchism and the libertarian argument for a radically restricted government? Like do they dovetail? Yes, six months. Okay, so what do you mean? Meaning this minarchist delusion is completely incoherent. There's no such thing as a minimal government. And we've run this experiment. The Constitution was designed to create the smallest government possible and ended up creating the largest government that's ever existed. So if you're going, so yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you think it's inevitable that the government just I don't think so. That's what the data tells us So, you know one of the things that happens in the Old Testament and by the way before the income that Constitution was dry people were going to jail for violating the first for a speed-free speech So it didn't even last five years before the sedition laws were being passed Well, no me in the Old Testament the Israelites once they escaped from the Pharaoh
call out to God continually for a king. And God says, no, you don't want a king. And God says, no, we really want a king. And God says, no, you actually don't want a king. What you want to do is take responsibility for your own lives. And the Israelites go, no, we want a king. Right. And so that's your point. Clean your room.
Yeah, well, the thing, what I've realized more and more clearly too is that part of the reason that you, and this is an ethical requirement, I would say, and this is part of why I was struggling with Rand's conceptualization, but is that every bit of responsibility that you don't pick up for yourself,
That's like 100. That's really the core problem with the utopian delusion is because you could just imagine, you can hear, you can see, I've seen whiny tiktokkers bitch about the fact that they have to go to work and their complaint is, well, why doesn't the government, we're rich enough so I could be provided with the universal basic income.
And I think, well, if you don't have the imagination to see that if the government made you so dependent or encouraged you and enticed you to become so dependent that now you're dependent on that universal basic income, if you can't see that as the door opening to a tyranny so absolutely pervasive, you could hardly imagine it, then you're just not thinking. Because of course that would happen, right? But a lot of people don't want to be free. They want to be in that cage.
We see it nowadays where people are desperate to have COVID restrictions back and they're wearing masks. Yeah, well, that's a false security, right? Yeah, yeah. It's also a cue that you're a part of the in-group. It's a very clear visual signal that you're one of the good guys, because I'm wearing... Yeah, well, that's a form of security, too, in a form of unearned moral virtue. All right, so let's maybe we'll close with this. We probably should. So let's try this.
This is a complicated question. All right, lightning round. You're contrasting that form of, in that specific comment, you're contrasting a kind of security and status seeking.
with the proper morally moral orientation so let me try something on the phone on you for size i don't necessarily status necessarily i think a lot of people will just want security they don't care about status they did okay that's fine that's fine but you can imagine some people would concern themselves security and other people must correct that's fine that's fine in both of those could be illusory and unearned correct okay so
Obviously, there's an orientation that isn't that, right? That's an alternative to that, that you would find admirable. Yes. Okay. So here's one of the things that I've been deriving. I'm writing this book on the, on the biblical corpus called we who wrestle with God. And I've been trying to understand the nature of the ethos that's being presented. Okay. So one of the things I would say, there's two elements to the ethos. One is that you sacrifice the short term for the long term.
Right? So that's a time preference issue. Yes. And in fact, that's the definition of sacrifice. So part of what the Old Testament is about is an inquiry into the form of sacrifice that's most pleasing to God. And it's clearly something like a long term sacrifice, right? As you put up with the privations as the moment to ensure riches in heaven. Yeah, exactly. So it's actually, it's actually a time
frame that's extended out into eternity, which is a very interesting thing. I'm not even sure what to make of that is that is the proper time frame.
like, is that how you should be regarding the equings of each of your actions? Because the answer to that could hypothetically be yes. Well, this is a big distinction between Judaism and Christianity, or at least as I was taught in Yeshiva, where we were taught that this whole, when I went to church for the first time with a bunch of friends in the Midwest, they'd never been a Jewish person before, so they started interrogating me. I didn't have a lot of the answers, and one of the points is Judaism is not at all thinking about the afterlife, because the way we're taught is
This life is a beautiful gift to the creator. And if he's giving you this amazing meal and you're like, what's for dessert, it's almost spitting in his face. So appreciate this gift you've given and do the most you can with it in accordance with his wisdom. And let him worry about the dessert. He knows what he's doing.
William Blake would have a good objection to that idea, I would say, because his transcendent vision was to see eternity in a grain of sand, right? So that instead of replacing the present with the
forestalled and suffering the error that you just described as you integrate the eternal into the moment. You see echoes of that in the gospel insistence that Christ has that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth but man will not see it.
So it isn't something like it's ambiguous because it's also what happens in the infinite future, but it isn't only that. It's what happens in the infinite future that's infused into the current state. There's very different kinds of Christianity and how they approach it. Right. Right. Well, and it's a complicated problem because one of the things we've talked about today is the notion of time frame and the fact that as you mature, and this is actually the definition of maturation, is that your time frame expands so that you're trying to calculate the proper path along
all across the broadest possible variety of iterations. But I just also feel very, very strongly that this life as we have it, no matter what your religious view is not a dress rehearsal. Right. And don't take it lightly. And no matter what your faith is, God put you on this earth for a reason and don't just be like, yeah, whatever. I'll worry about it, you know, after. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can see that the, what the exaggeration of that viewpoint leads to the Marxist
criticism, that religion is just the opiate of the masses, is you can suffer all you need to know because in the afterlife will be infinite. Yeah, well, I, right. No, no, it seems to me that it has something much more to do at a more profound level with this notion of infusing the moment with eternality is that, and need you kind of caught into that to some degree, right? Because when he was trying to work out
