Discussing Communism in All Its Glory ｜ Michael Malice ｜ EP 407 (3cVr2Qp_ic8)

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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. Look, you can’t antagonize them. We just got to figure out how to work together. Yeah. At a certain point, Reagan said, do you want to know what my policy is for the Cold War? It’s simple, somebody even called simplistic. You want to hear it? We win and they lose. Right. Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure today of sitting and talking with Michael Melis. We start by talking about his book, The White Pill. 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 workers 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 hashed out with Michael the precise reason that his attention 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 Ayn 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, 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 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 serenely 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 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. Emma Goldman, of course, that they were virtually motivated to kiss the ground when they landed in Russia. Okay, so now Berkman’s talking to Lenin and Lenin says, liberty, Lenin told Berkman, is 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 like zero danger. You know, that happens a lot in life. Then free speech might be indulged in. Might. 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 totalitarians always do is that the situation right now is so bad and liable to get worse that any means whatsoever are to be justified. Not only that, that if you stand against them, then, well, 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. 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. OK, so what does that end up producing, that attitude 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, 1924, 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 enduring. Remember, these were people who were hoping that a workers revolution would produce a broad scale improvement in the working conditions of ordinary people. So, OK, so let’s go down a little closer to the actuality on the ground. So 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’ve 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 quarters for one family 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. Yeah, I remember that from Solzhenitsyn, right? This is this is what the good thinkers in the West think, too. You know, when when something happens, when the government extends its 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. OK, so that means 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 checker. 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 Galkin and it turns out that Balkin had a bigger room. Yes, very funny. OK, so what’s the end consequence of this? I think this is in the early 20s. This is in Ukraine. Mass 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. Cool. Act children. So the cool acts were farmers who actually produced food. That was basically the definition of a cool act or who could conceivably produce food or had ancestors that might have once produced food. These cool act 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, this is Siberia after all. Often. 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 cool act starvation. It does became common for villages 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 wouldn’t 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, while they’re a little walk through communism in all of its glory. There’s one line after that where he chastised 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 starved in front of you. One of the things I learned from reading Solzhenets, so absolutely bloody brutal, 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? The 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 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, counterrevolutionaries, who not only want to therefore 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 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 data point, 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 being born in the Soviet Union and having worked in this was very difficult. But hearing it coming from you and just this kind of arm’s 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. The book starts with Ayn Rand on the back cover, which she’s testifying in front of the House on American Activist 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 can never completely convince you. And she goes, anyway, it’s good that you can’t even conceive what it’s like. Imagine what it’s like to live from morning till night in constant terror. And at night, you’re waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you don’t know who or what is going to do or when is going to do what to you, because you have 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 purposely. 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 tried 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, of 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 Solzhenitsyn wrote, for example, 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 Victor Frankl, who wrote a great book called Man’s 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’d 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-holed, but has become a bit of a kitschy joke that you can go to Whole Foods and have like Russian brand ice cream, and they mean Russian, like Soviet era brand ice cream, and they make little jokes about it. Yeah, it’s strange. It’s not strange, but strange can be morally ambiguous. It’s depraved, in my opinion. No, but here’s the strange part of it, 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 kitsch. 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 Mel Brooks Broadway production, right? Springtime for Hitler, or that was the production exactly. I think there was a- That was a song. That was a song. It was a song. Yeah, right. That was the only time that I actually saw like a kitschy kind of parody. It’s still a dark parody. Hitler and the Nazis are still off limits 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 the devil, to deal with the worst devil, is to- And 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 Stalin’s atrocities, possibly in the sake of something that needed to happen to win World War II. But they never went back and were like, guys, this is hardly someone who is an angel. Churchill and FDR 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 is dishonest or brutal or harmful. They’re our allies. We have to portray them in the best possible light. This is the war effort. So the fact that there isn’t this easy narrative that like, wait a minute, because 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 of that, even historical, is something that I think our corporate media, which is very dedicated to promulgating binary thinking, good versus bad, 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- Dan don’t want to. Dan don’t want to. In fact, when Emma Goldman spoke in London, shortly after she left the Soviet Union, there 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 Solzhenitsyn’s other 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 that 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, a very, one of the happiest endings imaginable. Mm hmm. Right. Right. And the emergence back into freedom of the Eastern Europeans who were doing well. One after another. And this was in the 80s. We have color footage. You can watch it 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 the 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 promote a universal brotherhood. You know, 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 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, you know, for centuries. And so 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 there being shatteringly negative consequences of handing other people that much power. With the holiday season approaching, why not include saving a baby’s life on your Christmas list? Through our partnership with Preborn, an organization that’s rescued over 270,000 babies, you can do just that. 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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 the ship. They had dumb people. Oh, if only, I’m sure you see this every single day with any faculty, 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 to why it was so popular with Jewish intellectuals 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, so I’ve spent a lot of time, especially recently writing about the Luciferian 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. What’s his name? Berkman? Mastered Margarita. Now there’s a book, a great Russian novelist wrote a book called The Mastered Margarita in the 1930s. And in that book, Satan himself comes back to earth in USSR, but no one believes in him. So he can do whatever he wants. Right. And so, so Bogakov is his name and it’s a great book. It’s like a Dostoevsky 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-bringer 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, right? 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 the 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. Yes. 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, Why This Woman Immaculate is her name. And 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 ethnic group was set against the other. And what happened in Rwanda 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, right? In the most brutal possible way. It was a consequence of the valorization of group identity. You saw the same thing happening in Russia, right? 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, a property owner, or anybody who’d had even a modicum of success under the Tsars. Or your family. Or your family. Well, 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. You know, 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, right? Dividing people into groups, making group identity paramount, identifying success itself with oppression. You know, 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 utopian dogma, 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, then to Hegel, then to Marx. And basically the whole thing is since we know that our, they called 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 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 into 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 if my plan doesn’t work, am I going to look back at the plan, fix it, tweak it, because somehow the cars I’m producing aren’t working or this arrogant 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 thumbscrews 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 like 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. Plus, you have a good excuse then at that point that for things not going well because it’s only the real subtle snakes that left, right? They’re invisibly ruining everything behind the scenes. Well, the other thing that occurs too 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, tell me what you think about this. And I see thinking like this, it’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 a male pathology. These were guys who were like, they’re pretty damn smart in, they’re intelligent in junior high, elementary school, junior high and high school, you know, they were in the top 5% of the class. They generally didn’t work that hard, but they could skate by. And everybody knew they were smart. And that was really, 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. You know, 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 stupider, it’s not that easy to make them more intelligent on IQ side. If you’re, if you’re down IQ of 145, which would put you at 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 not, 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 watched a fair bit of number of episodes of the sitcom, the Big Bang, you know, and 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, 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 a grieved 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 a grieved nature that can’t help but express express itself in sadism, because Lenin’s great example of that, man. I mean, it took no time at all before he turned in from the like working man’s revolutionary, which he never was to a sadist whose depths were what what they’re, they’re unfathomable, right, and so quickly. Well, he was always talking about how much blood we 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 whole 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, as you mentioned earlier, is they have these things called anecdotes, 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 his third and most brutal executioner, or maybe not most brutal, it’s a competition. But Stalin lost his pipe, and he goes, Beria, you know, my pipe’s been stolen. And then, you know, Beria goes out, and the next day, Stalin calls it in. And he’s like, oh, you know, I found it as my drawer. He goes, but comrade Stalin, we got three people to confess to it already. So meaning, Beria’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. If I’m the one who is a complete inhuman monster, who will stop at nothing to make sure that that person admit to 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 going to lose my job. If I’m not being cruel enough, then maybe I’m one of these wreckers. 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, to your point, it very much was- Right. The most merciful torture is the counter-revolutionary. Yes. Yeah, right. Definitely. Well, also- 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, on private relationships. Right. 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. So, the kids, as you know very well, I’m sure, were taught this lesson of Pavlik Morozov. They taught this in elementary school, about the story of this boy who turned in his parents to the police because the dad was hoarding grain or something, and Pavlik was later murdered by his dad. And this kid, the statues of him, was regarded as valourious, 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-revolutionary 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. Because- That’s bourgeois. Love is a very bourgeois value. Well, 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. 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, utter counter-revolutionary propaganda, right? And so 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 and necessarily. This is why Rand said, Ein 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 around you who most particularly loved you, right? Children or parents or spouses. One of the things that I learned in 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, and then percent of secret police informers in East Germany- One in three. Yeah, it was some crazy number. It blew the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany out of the water, as Simon Wiesenthal pointed out. He goes, the Stasi were much worse. Well, 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 named Frau Trumpleman who had a job working in these files. And when the reporter wrote about it, he goes, how can you work with poison and not yourself be poisoned? So she has to 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 in either emigrating or just visiting outside of East Germany. And she looked up the files and 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 in this. Well, as 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- Dante 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. 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 in Toronto. These are people who were bored or lonely or just want to feel like they had something or with somebody else. And that is something that I think Westerners- So that’s also this attempt to garner unearned moral superior ordinance, right? It’s like, it means if you’re with 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 relative’s 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 of comparison. Or right, any reason, right? Any reason. And then 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 to do. 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 did the collective a favor. You don’t pat yourself on the back. You go on Facebook and brag about it. 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 safe. Yeah, right. So that’s the kind of thing where 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 masses. Yes, yes. And there’s like this oppressive guy, the tyrant or an impressive guy with his henchmen, putting guns to people’s heads all the time. And nothing could be farther from the truth than that. It’s like, I figured that out in part just when I was reading the Gulag Archipelago, because socialists kept making the case that there were nowhere near enough guards to keep the camps running. The prisoners ran the camps. And it’s like, well, that’s the definition of totalitarian state, is the prisoners run the camp. And so, and in a totalitarian state, and this is what a totalitarian state is, it’s not the top down imposition 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. And so that implication there is that a society can adopt modes of being that dooms them to catastrophe. And we’re talking about exactly how that might come about. And 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 like 10. But can I interject? Yeah. Yeah. 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 a 50, and then Abraham says, how about, double check the numbers at home. And Abraham goes, how about five less? And guys like, God’s like, okay. But what Abraham meant was five, oh, 50. And you crossed out the five, zero. So he’s really like, all right, like, I know there’s no hope for this town, 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 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 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. And I think it was Solzhenitsyn who said that one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny. And that’s, but what that also implies, and this is a very perverse thing too, 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 know, you might say, well, they had to because there was a gun to their head. But the thing is, there is a gun to their head anyways, right? I mean, 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 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, as 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 that self-liberated. They did not have the numbers in terms of organization. They couldn’t have, or else they would have been slaughtered as a whole. But Poland, specifically with Solidarity, this labor movement, which brought down first the Polish government and then was a domino that toppled the Soviet empire, it was not a huge percent of the population. And these men suffered immense hardships 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 black book, 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 detente. There was a time in our lifetimes when criticizing the Soviet Union was told, was regarded explicitly as inching us closer to nuclear war, because they regard it 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 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. Let me ask you this question. Are you at peace with the mindless screen time you spend on your phone every day? 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We start January 1st. Find resources to prepare for Exodus 90 at Exodus90.com slash Jordan. That’s Exodus90.com slash Jordan to start your journey. And so what do we do about China? We? Listen, I don’t know what we do about China. Let’s stick to what they get at. Yeah, yeah. No, no. Well, I guess 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 should be- We 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 a position necessarily to opine on to downplay as many Chinese atrocities and even just Chinese standard operating procedure as much as possible. Yeah, 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 a turn towards something approximating individual freedom, like a general, what an incremental democratization. And there was a few years where that looked like real possibility. I mean, China lifted itself. I shouldn’t say that. As a consequence of abandoning its stupider policies, China managed to free its people enough so that they lifted themselves out of poverty. And then 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. It’s the same name as the system that goes astray in the Terminator series. SkyNet? SkyNet. No, it’s not. 100%. 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. Wow. Well, no, 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 100%. Right. But they are getting it right. It’s, it’s, it’s so 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 tax that’s calculated according to your hypothetical carbon load or something like that. And that’s, 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, we can, 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. Well, like it’s, it’s really just like, that’s just the ultimate slippery. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not 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, guns ahead. 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 everything, where I go, what I buy, what I consume, nothing I’m consuming is outside the medium, the bell curve. That’s where I go, is 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 fair, this is a great bargain for them. Yeah. Well, the cost is that if you give up all the difficulties of your life, let’s say, because you’re looking difficulties in danger of life, because you’re looking for security and satiation, then you don’t have anything interesting or meaningful to do. And 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, none of this like an orgiastic kind of way, but rather than seeking any sort of happiness, which is beyond their means? I don’t know, because I don’t think it actually works for people. Well, I don’t think they have the 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, a look at their own lives. Right. The root, 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. Yes. And then there’s an opportunity for transformation. But not always taken. Oh, well, it’s also commonwealth. Okay, let’s talk about that a little bit, because one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is, you know, I don’t know to what degree you would still ally yourself with the anarchist movement. And I want to know, well, to what degree you do. And also, I would like to know what that means. You open your book with Ayn Rand. Yeah. I know that’s a bit of a tangential intrusion into that question. But she’s definitely an arbiter or a spokeswoman for an individualistic stance. So I want to talk to you about Ayn Rand, 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, luciferian, 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 per se. I’m not a central planner. Yeah, right. 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. Okay. And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, if I had to sum up my worldview or whatever term she used in one word, it would be this individualism. So yes, that is exactly what she said. Okay. Okay. 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 it 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 the fact that the first critics of the Soviet Union with firsthand experience were hardcore, unmitigated lefties. These were Emma Goldman and Berkman were both blood thirsty, happy to slit throats, but they’re saying we’re doing this in the sake of revolution to kind of bring about a society that works for everyone, not against the workers themselves that we are championing. This is not what we’re for. So they weren’t, you know, kind of this pansy type of lefties. They were, you know, but Emma Goldman gave a talk in Union Square and she told the audience, she goes, go to the capitalists 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 their 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 capitalists. So why do you think that’s important? I mean, you spend a lot of time on Berkman and Goldman. Have I got the first name right? Yes, Alexander Berkman and Emma 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 fall prey to the delusion that was only the right that was standing against. Yeah, exactly. I hate this idea that right, good, left, bad, or vice versa. 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 to give the credit that they are due. Okay, 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. Okay, fine. I see. I see. Okay, so now, here’s, I re-read Rand, I Rand’s books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Yeah. I think this is the third time I read both. And I read them within the last couple of months. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, you know, now and then I’m looking for, I don’t know, a romantic read, maybe, that’s somewhat intellectually challenging. And now and then I’ll pick up one of her books. And she’s a curious finger to me, because I Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good counter voice to their machinations. But, 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 the 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 Knoblin. She was the mother of one of Alberta’s 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 Solzhenitsyn and Huxley and Orwell. Like she was an educated woman. And, and she gave me Ayn Rand’s books, which I read when I was like 13. And, you know, there, I found them compelling. You know, they’ve got that, they’re, they’re romantic adventures fundamentally with an intellectual bent. 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. Like, 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 with, especially this time when I went through Rand’s books. It’s like her, Galt, John Galt, for example, and Francisco D’Anconia, her, and the, who’s the architect? Howard Roark. Roark, Roark, Roark. Her heroic capitalists, essentially. They’re not precisely heroic capitalists, they’re heroic individualists who compete in the free market. Okay. And that’s, 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 that distributed decision-making is a much better computational model than centralized planning. Obviously. It’s not obvious. Well, yeah, it should be. 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. I’ll just say the smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. Yes, exactly. Well, 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 Randian heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists and they, and you stop 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. 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 sub-personalities. Right. And so they, 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, you know, the child comes equipped into the world, say with a sucking reflex because it’s, it’s 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, far before they have control over their eyes or their arms, because their arms sort of float around. And so what happens is they, they’re born as a set of somewhat independent systems. And then the independent systems, partly under the influence of social demand, integrate themselves. Right. Now, so, and then like by the time a child is two, that child is still mostly disintegrated emotional systems. And so if you watch a two year 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, you know, or they’re burst into tears. Well, I said they’ll cry and, or they’ll get anxious. Right. And so they’re cycling through these primary motivational states. Now we understand that to some degree, neurophysiological physiologically, 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 classic. 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 say needs. That’s that word all the time. Okay. Okay. Right. Right. Fair enough. Okay. Okay. So I’ll back off on the need side. That was the old chosen and she does, she makes absolutely bloody sure. Well, wait a second. She says your needs are not a blank check on my, I know, I know, but does, but, but she doesn’t, does she say simultaneously that I have no right to pursue my needs. 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 fine. Okay. Right. Okay. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I would just want to make sure that we’re proceeding on grounds that we both regard as appropriate. Right. So the liberal types, the Scottish liberals believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest, that that would produce a, a self-regulating system. Now Rand seems to accept that as a proposition. Yes. 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 asking, 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 Hitler. She goes, there should maybe be less than she goes. There wouldn’t be any. Yeah. Well, look, when I’m negotiating with someone for a business deal, let’s say, or, you know what, 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 you’re 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. Then I don’t even have to watch you, right? Because you’re doing things for whatever reasons you have. But this, this is the thing. This is, this is what I don’t quite understand is that that self-interest case. 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? Not everyone. Well, okay. Okay. Okay. So, 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, so- That’s part of 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, which you go first of the quotes, she says that man is a being of self-made soul. And she also says in the Fountainhead, which is that hard work, the architect that a building has integrity just like a man and just as seldom. Once your business gets to a certain size, cracks start to emerge and things you used to do in a day are now taking over a week. If this is you, then you need to check out NetSuite. 37,000 businesses have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. NetSuite turns 25 this year. That’s 25 years of helping businesses do more with less. They can help you close your books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. Because your business is one of a kind, you get a customized solution for all of your key performance indicators in one efficient system with one source of truth. NetSuite will help you manage risks, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. I cannot stress enough that you will have everything you need to grow all in one place with NetSuite. Right now, download NetSuite’s popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance for absolutely free at netsuite.com. That’s netsuite.com. To get your own key performance indicator checklist. Again, that’s netsuite.com. Right. So you’re seeing her self-interest as something that’s nested inside a larger scale conceptualization of integrity. Yes. And then, 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 Second Hand Lives. Yeah. Because Rand was working in Hollywood, and she asked the woman who she was working with. And there’s just kind of this 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 two. 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. Right. But okay, but why is- Hold on. As opposed to Howard Rourke, who is 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 selfishness. I know that she’s not- Okay. So let’s tell- Fine, fine. So let’s tell, 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- Yes. 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 values. Well, okay. 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 can say, I can play devil’s advocate against Rand. And for now, we can- Okay, sure. 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? I mean, that’s what he thinks is appropriate, apparently. And so on what grounds is that an inappropriate conclusion? Well, I wouldn’t even say that he thinks it. I think it’s more that he’s kind of taken this subconsciously from the ethos. He does not, someone who thinks these things through, he just goes with what everyone else tells him. Fine. I’ve got no objections to that. I think that’s how he’s portrayed. But on what grounds do you believe that that’s inappropriate? Just because his self-interest doesn’t match that of, and you know, Peter Keating is an archetypal character in the Rand universe, right? I mean, he’s duplicated in many other characters like Ellsworth Toohey, for example, is like a meta Keating, essentially, although 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 Rand that the path that Keating and Toohey takes is inappropriate, and the path that Rourke takes, or Francisco de 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 exactly the reason, they’re both self-interested. They’re not self-interested because Peter Keating doesn’t have a self. There’s no one there. Okay, that’s okay. That was my mystery. So what does it mean for there to be something there? Right? Because so 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. This is not coming from the calls not coming from inside the house. And this is where I would bring in Albert Camus because I sometimes I keep in talks about networking. And one of the advice I give people, I say, if you know someone’s in town for their birthday, right? I go, I always take out that person for their birthday. And I do for selfish reasons, right? 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? 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. 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 brand portrays. Okay, okay. So that’s a very good moral code to live by. Okay, so let me extract out some principles from that. You tell me what you think. So one of the things that I proposed was that, you know, a very young person, two years old, is still a relatively unintegrated conflict of internal dimensions, motivational dimensions. Sure, sure. Okay, now, we also hypothesize that the problem with Keating and Toohey, 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 false. Okay, and tell me what you think about this. Okay, so imagine 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 it iterates that a pattern will, 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. And that 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, right? So it’s not a zero-sum, it’s not a zero-sum optimization. Okay, so then this is where I have part, maybe, problems with the concept of anarchy per se. So let me tell you why. So does any of that seem inappropriate to you? No, that seems fine. Okay, that seems fine. Okay, so let me tell you why I have a harder time placing anarchy in that position. Okay. Okay, so I did this seminar on Exodus with a group of people, and one of the things we did was elaborate up a conceptualization that’s derived from the Exodus story, that’s the basis of Catholic social teaching, or much of it, as it turns out, called subsidiary. And subsidiary comes out of a particular story in the Exodus narrative. And so what you have in the narrative is the Israelites who have the habits of slaves, and so they’re basically, you could think about them as a mass of Peter Keatings. They’re like, they’re only after short-term gratification, right? 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, right, in the desert. 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 onto 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. Right. Okay, so you can’t do that. Right. And for two reasons. You don’t get to be a tyrant, and they don’t get to be slaves. Right. Okay, okay. So then, but then he proposes something very specific. As in consequence, he says, take all your tens of thousands of people and make them into a hierarchical society. And so 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 divided into 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 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 a hundred and then one in a thousand. Now, so you have a social hierarchy in place, right? But it’s a voluntary social hierarchy. And every single level of the hierarchy has a requisite responsibility. And 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 the anarchical 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 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 to some extent. This is your show. I can’t just talk about whatever I want. Right, right, right. Well, but you’re doing it voluntarily. Yes, correct. And you know the rules of the game. Correct. And you’re doing it because you have your own reasons. Correct. So I wouldn’t say, I don’t think it’s not so much subjugation as it is your choice to play the same game I’m playing. Correct. Okay, so this is a hierarchy of games. Yes, it’s still your show. Right, right. Well, I set the frame for this particular interaction, right? And I would return the favor if you were hosting this. Sure. Right, right. But you’re doing it voluntarily. Correct. 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 doesn’t sit with you well. It’s not automatic at all. It’s every group. Is Starbucks an 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 going to be the same as roughly as I go to 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 to create this kind of superstructure. Yes. Right. Okay, okay. Well, so one of the things- Automatic. It’s not automatic at all. Fine, fine. Well, I’m perfectly happy to accept that because 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 an ethos. Yes, of course. Okay, okay, okay. So- One of the- The 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 not thinking past the next moment, you’re not going to be able to build a society out of them unless you get rid of that first, because if you’re only thinking to the next five minutes in 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 two candy bars tomorrow because he knows he’s not going to see tomorrow. 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 do 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 that 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, burn hand, 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 if you’re a doctor? It’s years and years. You’re just thinking just getting past tomorrow is a function also of 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 time preference. It’s extremely crucial. 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 you’re going to be- Well, you’re also punished then for forgoing gratification. 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 50 inches. I can’t make any kind of plan if the definition of a yard changes. So if the definition of what a dollar changes 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. But I’m just going to make one more point. Rand is very much, and this is where I very much park out of me with her, very much a child of the Enlightenment. She has this Enlightenment delusion, in my opinion, that if a bunch of people sit down and they’re given all the data and they hash it out, they’re all going to come to the same conclusion. Yeah. And I don’t think that holds up. She’s an empiricist. Yeah, I don’t think that holds up at all. No, but you’re outlining the structure of the proper constraint through which that mass of data would be interpreted. So- Yes, you’re right. Okay. So, well, so because 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- Yes. Initial systems, these initial motivational systems, they’re very short-term. So, 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? Yeah. This is the distinction Rand draws between hedonism and her philosophy because she thinks that the more moral a person, the more long-range his 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 Kogorges. Hedonism is Martha Stewart, where you’re having coffee and book club with your friends and having the pleasure of the- That’s more of an- Okay, but I would put, you can actually separate those technically, by the way, because that kind of hedonism would be more on the aesthetic end. Sure. Right? And it’s more sophisticated. But I’m talking about- Pleasure per se isn’t bad. Right. With this epicurean idea of hedonism, how it was pitched thousands of years ago, it wasn’t at all this maximizing pleasure and just- In the moment. Yes. Right, right, right. Okay, yeah. So, okay. So we’ll 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 tactic of like, 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. Yeah, well, everything in its place is the broad notion for that. Right? Right. And 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 not feel any guilt about it because I did my work for today. Right, right. Well, and it’s- And have no shame about it. Yeah, 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. Sure. Like, you can put animals and human beings into a situation where they’ll work single-mindedly for satiation, right? Like, 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. Yes, definitely. Yes. Well, tyrants understand that very well. 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. 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, right? So 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, right? So then one of the things that happens when people make an agreement is that they set up a shared aim, right? So our aim 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 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 meaning. Okay. Okay. So that… What does 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, yeah, then 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 be that person. Okay. 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 avoiding eye contact in the mirror. Or waking up at three in the morning being tormented by your conscience. Yes. If you still have one. Or deadening it with alcohol or whatever the situation might be. So yeah. That’s how it looks 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 objectivism. So I completely agree with you. 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. Okay. So that seems to me to be the same notion as this subsidiary structure. So we can walk through it. So you’ve got your wife, let’s say, and you make a bond with her that’s long run. Your narrow individuality is integrated into the broader dyad of that group. We’re all venn diagrams. Okay. Then you do that with your family. There’s you and your coworkers. There’s you and your employees. There’s you and your friends. There’s you and your daughter. You and your city. You and your town. Yes. Right. Okay. You and your peers. Right. So we agree on that. Okay. So that’s the polity that I’m thinking about. So how do you- It’s fluid. It changes all the- You can quit your job. You can podcast. You can get divorced. Right. But there’s principles. It’s not entirely fluid because- No, it’s not entirely fluid. Right. Right. Hopefully it’s optimally fluid. Sure. Right. Right. Okay. So that’s fine. And that optimal, I would say part of the marker of its optimality is fluidity. Yes. Right. That’s why the Dao is water. It’s not stone. It has this capacity to adapt. And sometimes you have to cut your losses and that’s fine. Just because you’ve been in a relationship for 10 years does not mean, well, I should continue it in perpetuity. At least any relationship. I don’t mean marriage. It could be just your contract you work with or a lawyer’s. Right. Well, so your point seems to me to be that your alliance and any of those subsidiary organizations shouldn’t be a prison. Correct. Right. But it’s something that’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 quit. So if you accept the necessity of these embedded relationships- Yes, of course. … more 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. Okay. Fine. So that’s the fundamental business. Yeah. Fine. Fine. That’s it. Okay. 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. Welcome to activism. If it’s forced. Okay. I’m glad I’m glad- If there’s any use of force. I just converted Jordan Peterson. Okay. All right. Well, so let me- Take that Emma Goldman. Let me- 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. Okay. But, all right. Wow. All right. Yeah. But wait. Now, wait. No, I think we should cut it here. I got what I wanted. Okay. Look. That installation can only go in that direction. I thought- There’s a complication. Here’s the complication. All right. So, well, it’s unfortunate that there’s a complication, but there is a complication. So imagine that if we engage in interactions voluntarily, that we can cooperate. Sure. Okay. Now imagine we set up a whole domain of cooperators. Who’s we? You and I have another friend. Sure. Right. And we have a conversation with nine people. Sure. Right. And we’re having a good conversation. Sure. 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 in the conversation. Sure. Like in a party. Yeah. Okay. Right. So it keeps it playful and aimed in a positive direction and self-sustaining. Yes. Now we get one person in there- Okay. Who plays status game. That’s okay. Right? Okay. Now, so, and let’s say for the sake of argument- Let’s call it Lex. Lex. That, that game- What a jerk. That, that, that brings the conversation in some ways to a halt. Okay. So these, these dynamic voluntary associations have been moral. So you can imagine you can set up a stable society of cooperators. But the problem is, is if you drop one person in there who’s a shark, like a short-term hedonistic psychopath- Lex. They can take everything. They can take everything. Okay. So 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 this party scenario, and there’s someone there who’s 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, but then, then you have the problem of the necessity of force in that situation. It’s not force, it’s your home. If they’re a trespasser at that point, you have- I’m not saying it’s unjust. Okay. No one has the right to- Let’s define, okay. Define, okay. We already agreed that an optimized relationship is dependent on voluntary assets. Correct. And we also agreed- And that they’re fluid, right? And they’re fluid. So my right to be here on this 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 force. It’s still your, this is your house. Okay. It’s your show. Then we need to define force. No, and that’s what private property does. Private property delineates who has the position to determine what happens within that area. Okay, okay. 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 an explanation. I have a choice. A, I can show up in an orange shirt, or I can push your buttons and be like, I’m going to show up in purple to see what happens. So you’re defining private property as, I believe, as a domain where you are- Sovereign. Yeah. Well, and so what, 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 piece. That’s a precondition for voluntary association. 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 or 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, sure. 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. We’re making that assumption. Yes. Someone’s an actual rapist 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 as a consequence, which is, let’s assume it’s done in a rational and aboveboard 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, like, 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 claiming that- But not in a moral sense. Right, right. Not in the moral sense. Right, right. So then the issue becomes- I’ve been welcomed in your home, right? At a certain point, if I outstayed my- even if I’m- you’re like, hey, malice come crash on my sofa. You know what I mean? I know you’re here. At a certain point, if I’m blasting music or outstaying my welcome, and you’re like, okay, your right to stay here has been revoked. And if I start squatting, I’m the one who is infringing on your privacy. So, for you to either yourself or call private security or the police to be like, get this guy out of here, that’s not initiated. So, that’s minimum necessary self-defense. Yes. Something like that. Yeah, well, that’s a good principle. I mean, I think one of the other principles of appropriate social organization is minimum necessary force. So, your claim- See, the problem with government is that- The thing 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 that. Again, you’re the sovereign. It’s your home. That’s what private property adjudicates. Whose opinion matters. 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 our definition of what constitutes private property. So, see, I’m still having trouble with the domain of how you organize policy if your emphasis is on what’s voluntary with people who break the rules. Look at eBay. 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 can adjudicate 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 in practice, because the idea that I’m going to sue someone in Czech Republic for a fossil is no possibility of that happening. Okay, so this definition that you use that equates anarchism with voluntary, yes, volunteerism. Do you think that that’s, I wouldn’t say necessarily that that’s how anarchism is viewed in the popular culture. 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? So, okay, so you’re- Because those who are empowered- I wondered why you were relatively easy to get along with for an anarchist, and it’s fundamentally because you predicate your notion of anarchism on voluntary asset. But they all did. I mean, Emma Goldman and Bergman did as well. They wanted a society based on peace, and they viewed the capitalist as exploiters. So even at the end of the day, this is one of the reasons Bergman and Goldman were both yelling at Lenin. They’re like, we’re for their version. They call it anarchism and socialism regardless synonymous in that school at the time. Therefore, we’re for the individual, complete free speech. Emma Goldman fought to have, fight the draft in World War I, she was correct, and to teach women how to prevent pregnancy. At the time, there 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. James Joyce was banned, for example. So that was their version of anarchism, and they’re spot on in that regard. The government has the position to tell you what you can or can’t say to whom. 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 if I could follow that train of thought. Well, I’m trying to figure out exactly the justification for me being able to throw you off your couch. Your point is that the fact that you’ve overstayed your welcome means that you’ve already introduced an element of compulsion and force. That’s exactly correct. The reason that that would be wrong is because it violates that principle of voluntary asset. I no longer want you on my damn couch. Right. Right. So you’ve already initiated a process that violates that integrity, the integrity of the relationship. So then I’m not only justified but required. I wouldn’t say required. Well, that’s a tough one, right? Because, yeah, well, you can imagine, let’s say, in the situation that you already described, is you did someone a favor and they’re on your couch and they’ve been there for three months and they didn’t get a job and they’re eating Cheetos. And it’s just not a good situation. But what are the alternatives? It’s Toronto and I’m going to be on the street and I’m going to die. That might be a situation where you’re like, okay, let me put you in a hotel. I can see that. 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 appear mean or you don’t want to hurt my feelings. So that when you’re in your room at night, you’re like pissed off at yourself and your conscience is gnawing at you because you actually have something to do. And it’s time to call this person out because you are violating your integrity. Okay, so that’s what I meant by the responsibility. Okay, yes, the self, yes. Yeah, yeah, 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, maybe the most real thing. What kind of person do you want to be at the end of the day is what it comes down to. And this is, again, why I’m such a Camus fan and the idea that existence precedes essence. I don’t know if I’d say that literally, but the idea that we have, I always use this metaphor and I think it’s very informative where there’s two types of people. You go to the top of a mountain top 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 just this blade of grass. And that is what life is like. That 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 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 what 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 meaning of what you mean by meaningless is something like the freedom to choose the direction. Yes, correct. Okay, 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. 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, right? It was a 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 calf gets worshiped, right? It’s that everybody reverts to immediate gratification and everything descends into hell. It’s an ordered freedom. And that’s the 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… Is there a difference then in your argument for anarchism and the libertarian argument for a radically restricted government? Did 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. We’ve run this experiment. The constitution was designed to create the smallest government possible and it ended up creating the largest government that’s ever existed. So if you’re going… So talking about Plato versus Aristotle… So you think it’s inevitable that the government just… I don’t think so. That’s what the data tells us. So one of the things that happens in the Old Testament… And by the way, before the ink on the constitution was dry, people were going to jail for violating free speech. So it didn’t even last five years before the sedition laws were being passed. Well, no, in the Old Testament, the Israelites, once they escaped from the Pharaoh, call out to God continually for a king. Yes. And God says, no, you don’t want a king. And the Israelites say, yeah, 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, tyrants will take it and use it against you. Oh, yes. That’s like… Yeah, right, right, right. So that’s also… That’s really the core problem with the utopian delusion is that… Because you could just imagine… You can see, I’ve seen whiny TikTokers 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 a 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, 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. 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. Yes. A form of unearned moral virtue. Yeah. All right. So maybe we’ll close with this. We probably should. So let’s try this. So 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 moral orientation. So let me try something on you for size. I don’t necessarily status necessarily. I think a lot of people just want security. They don’t care about status. They just… Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine. But you can imagine some people would concern themselves with security and other people might… Yes, correct. That’s fine. That’s fine. And 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 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 of the moment to ensure… Riches in heaven. Yeah, exactly. So it’s actually a time frame that’s extended out into eternity, right? Which is a very interesting thing, right? I mean, I’m not even sure what to make of that. Is the proper time frame infinite? Is that how you should be regarding the echoings 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 met 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 of the creator. And if you’re looking… If he’s giving you this amazing meal and you’re like, what’s for dessert? It’s almost spitting in his face. Yeah, right. So appreciate this gift you’ve given and do the most you can with it in accordance with his witness. And let him worry about the dessert. He knows what he’s doing. Right. Well, 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. Yes. Right, right. And then, well, you see echoes of that in the Gospel insistence that Christ has that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but men will not see it. Right? 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. Of course, there’s very different kinds of Christianity and how they approach it. Right, right, right. Well, and it’s a complicated problem, because, you know, 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, right? So that you’re trying to calculate the proper path along 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, 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, whatever, I’ll worry about it, you know, after. In the afterlife. 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 now because your reward 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 Nietzsche kind of caught onto that to some degree, right? Because when he was trying to work out what you would be motivated by, if you actually, what would you say, express what he described as the will to power properly, that you would try to live every moment so that if you were destined to have to relive that moment for eternity, you would say yes to it. Right. So, yeah, yeah. So, so that is, that is a constant. You see, and you see this in the Sermon on the Mount too, though, because what Christ basically says in the Sermon on the Mount is that you should orient yourself towards the highest possible good. Both transcendentally and communally, but then you should concentrate intently on the moment. Right, right. And then that brings eternity into the present moment. Yes, do what you can with what you have. And you have that opportunity every single day. Right. And that’s what presents, well, and I actually, actually think that that is the reality that presents itself. Yes, I agree. Is that what we see, your metaphor of being on a mountain with the, with the, with the easel in front of you is a metaphor that if, so you climb the mountain, now you can see everywhere, right? So, that’s a transcendental place. And so your metaphoric claim in that imagery was that if you climb to the place where you can see everything, that what presents itself in front of you is something like a blank canvas. Now you associated that with meaninglessness, but that’s a strange association because I would associate that with the deepest of all possible meanings is that you have the ability to participate in creation itself, essentially. So why do you, why does it? Because the canvas is blank and there’s no wrong answer per se. Well, there might be an answer that violates the principle of voluntary ascent. Sure. And it might be that you’re going to draw a painting that looks like complete garbage, right? But the point is this is an opportunity and this is an opportunity that’s uniquely yours. And this is not something to take lightly. Okay. So, but still why meaningless? Like, because Camus’s word, right? Right. He says life is inherently meaningless, meaning this idea that you have to live for the sake of society. Right. Okay. Oh, I see. So you see it, you see that as a rebellion against an arbitrary moral code. Essentially. That’s one of his books is called the rebel. So yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that’s right. All right. So I would see that as a variant of, of what the, the insistence that you should follow the spirit, spirit instead of the dogma. Yes. You don’t substitute dogma for spirit. Correct. Okay. Okay. Yes. Look, that’s a good place to end actually. And unfortunately- You never said the second thing. You said there are two things. Oh, yes. Okay. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Sorry. Absolutely. Okay. Well, so, so the sacrifice there has, see, see the question that emerges in the Old Testament corpus is what’s the nature of the optimized sacrifice. Right. And it is, it’s something like, it’s something like we’ve discussed already. It’s the sacrifice, it’s the ultimate sacrifice of the narrow self to the transcendental self. And this is where I was having trouble with Rand because I wasn’t sure how she organized the transcendental self. We’ve already defined it. Like the transcendental self is the self, one of the ways of thinking about it is the self that enables you to establish a voluntary relationship, even with yourself across long spans of time, while simultaneously doing that with other people who are also voluntarily doing it. Right. There’s a pattern there. This is why the meaningless thing got me a bit, because if there’s a pattern of voluntary ascent that’s optimal, which is what you’re striving for in this anarchism, then that’s not meaningless. It’s just structured in a very complex and sophisticated way that can’t be reduced to a simple dogma. Correct. And also it starts to be transcendental. We’re still talking about her 40 years after she died. So her mission has been accomplished. Right. And doing her work and engaging. Right. Well, that’s the thing about, you know, if your work is infused with something approximating eternal truth, right, which means that it would highlight certain archetypal realities, those be objective realities in her phraseology, then it’s going to last because it’s part of the tradition that lasts. And the tradition that lasts is a reflection of games that can be played iteratively and voluntarily. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that’s even a better place to end. Okay. You are welcome. All right. All right. So it turns out that we agree. That’s very, very annoying. I love being annoying. It’s my brand. All right, sir. Very good to talk to you. Everyone watching and listening today. Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure to hash through these topics with Michael. And I hope that you enjoyed, let’s say, our walk through the terrifying consequences of a dogmatic utopian state and took to heart the fact that that is so dangerous that to call it unimaginable is correct. The depths of horror that were produced in places like the Soviet Union are enough to turn you inside out if you have the barest comprehension of what happened. And the notion that that could be in any wise attractive is, I think it’s the most terrifying thing that I can apprehend. And then the question starts to become, you know, what’s the alternative to that? Is there an alternative to totalitarianism and misery in the final analysis? You know, and our conversation today revolved around the notion that whatever that might be, it definitely has something to do with iterability and voluntary asset. And, you know, those aren’t merely subjective claims. And that takes you out of the domain of an idiot moral relativism, the idiot moral relativism that makes all things permitted, you know, everything permitted in the Dostoevsky sense. So, all right, good. Thank you, everyone, for paying attention and following this and to the DataWire people for making this possible, for Michael Mellis for showing up today and being able to do this live with me. That’s a great privilege as far as I’m concerned. And so now we’ll flip over to the DailyWire Plus side and I’m going to talk to Michael a bit on the autobiographical side, talk to him about his future plans as well. And if you want to join us there, please feel free to do so. you