Many things in modern life make us fearful. The Fear Inoculant series will explore ways to be less fearful and live a more authentic life. In this, the first of three episodes, we cover a host of philosophical concepts aimed at demystifying reality in order to lay the groundwork for examining social movements in the next episode. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @FaseyCranco
Many things in modern life make us fearful. The Fear Inoculant series will explore ways to be less fearful and live a more authentic life. In this, the first of three episodes, we cover a host of philosophical concepts aimed at demystifying reality in order to lay the groundwork for examining social movements in the next episode. We start with exploring how certain Events can seem to change the past and present, Reality itself and a couple ways to quantify it, how Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek can never seem to agree, Dialectics and the limits of reason, Metaphysics and how to separate yourself from the universe, Freedom and how to measure it, Existentialism and other curses from the gods, Sociology and how to build a society, how school brainwashes you, plus Economics, The State, Violence, Alienation, Structural Ideology, Neurotypicality, Revolution, and somehow even more!
Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @FaseyCranco
Table of contents:
Intro: 4:06.729, Corrections: 4:46.498, The Setup: 10:09.070, Events: 12:13.001, Critical Theory Summary: 19:35.657, Materialism: 21:00.876, Idealism: 24:06.432, Chomsky vs Zizek: 28:00.512, Dialectics: 31:06.255, Dialectical Materialism: 36:49.128, Ontological Case Study: 42:55.002, Events Continued: 46:25.000, The Particular and the Universal: 48:36.065, Freedom: 54:04.679, Morality: 1:00:34.962, Existentialism: 1:03:40.028, Sociology: 1:16:07.278, Socialism: 1:20:41.226, The "C" Word: 1:24:02.290, Commodification: 1:27:41.976, Some Folks You Might Meet: 1:31:41.562, The State: 1:39:32.853, Violence: 1:48:32.395, Ideology: 1:52:19.431, The State Continued: 1:56:12.565, Alienation: 1:59:09.955, Structural Ideology: 2:01:53.580, Anti-Oedipus: 2:04:16.992, Neurotypicality: 2:06:19.322, Revolution: 2:09:35.000, Class: 2:13:33.919, Proto-Synthesis: 2:16:40.012, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: 2:19:46.433, The Wrap Up: 2:24:56.266, Surprise: 2:26:08.991
Works Cited:
Egalitarian Societies: https://www.solidarity.net.au/marxist-theory/the-original-egalitarian-societies-what-human-history-tells-us-about-human-nature/
Reexamining Zizek and Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne3uZSQmXzc
Yale's Social Theory Course: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/foundations-of-modern-social-theory-audio/id430657557
Spinoza and Knowledge: http://www.geocities.ws/bignum/spinoza.html
Critical Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
Historical Materialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
Sartre on Freedom: https://www.e-ir.info/2013/01/23/jean-paul-sartre-existential-freedom-and-the-political/
Radical Freedom: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/existentialism-is-a-humanism/themes/radical-freedom-choice-and-responsibility
Chomsky on Human Nature: https://chomsky.info/199808__-2/
Comparing Rousseau and Mill on Liberty: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/philosophy/comparing-rousseau-and-mill-on-liberty-philosophy-essay.php
Positive and Negative Liberty: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
Forms of Feudalism: https://turbulentpriests.group.shef.ac.uk/the-forms-of-feudalism/#_ftnref2
Power and Authority: https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/14-1-power-and-authority/
Hegel's Excess: http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/download/30/38/
Negation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negation/
Zizek on 'Absolute Knowing': https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/zizek-on-hegels-absolute-knowing-2/
Hegel's Dialectics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
Once upon a time, there was a road. And on that road, there were five houses to, to the West and two to the East or to, to the North and two to the South, depending on where you stood, these neighbors didn't particularly like each other. And it was mostly because of the flags. Each of them flew in front of their houses.
The North Eastern house flew a blue lives matter flag and their neighbor to the South flew a yellow flag with a green serpent that red don't tread on me across the roadway. The Southwestern house flew a black banner with a large encircled AE on it and their neighbor to the North, a bright red hammer and sickle as different as all these neighbors were from one another.
They found solace in yelling across the road. When the Eastern side of the street put up Trump signs, they were met with jeers from the West. When the West put up black lives matter, flags jeers from the East, whenever there was something wrong in the neighborhood. Each side of the road knew exactly who to blame.
Few things split the bond between the two Western and two Eastern next door neighbors. But every now and then conflicts did arise. When the town's taxes were raised to increase the city budget. The Southern houses shouted out in protests. The Northern houses had no problem with this, even if they both disagreed on how much of those funds should be given to the police and how much should be devoted to food stamps.
One day, the rent in the neighborhood increased and the Northeastern house with the blue lives matter flag. Despite always following the rules, found themselves unable to pay their new rent and eviction notice was placed on their door in quiet resolution. They awaited those same blue lives to come and take them from their home.
As they called their neighbor to the South for help, no answer was given saved for the soft flutter of their yellow flag. When that same Southeastern house needed to hand their neighbor to the North gave the same response. One day an opportunity arose for a community outreach program. The neighborhood had fallen into disarray.
The Western side of the road saw this as an opportunity for mutual aid and community building. They met with each other to coordinate the effort, but in every detail could not find consensus or could agree on what was to be done. They bickered bitterly over insignificant hypothetical's until the sun went down.
The application window for the proposed public programs passed and their community suffered for it. The house with the banner that red a and the house with the hammer and sickle each blame the other for the missed opportunity and dreamed of a day when the other would be evicted. Even if they still smiled and waved through their windows, when the Eastern side of the road could take no more, they took to the streets as they thought, if the West would stop talking and play by the rules, perhaps their neighborhood would be in better shape.
When the Western side could take no more. They also took to the streets and blamed. The Eastern side of the road are constantly distracting them, ensuring nothing could ever be done, shouting became violent. And in the chaos of the blows up the road sitting peacefully was the fifth house. Their landlord eager to collect insurance on their may, him.
They knew the next tenants would pay more and that they could probably claim a casualty deduction on their taxes from all this unrest and flying high in front of the fifth house up the road was a banner that contained and negated all the others at once the American flag.
hello, everyone. And welcome to God's masters in cloud three things you can live without I'm Casey Franco. First and foremost, I want to thank you for your patience on this episode and for indulging me in that little bit of neoliberal melodrama, no matter how far I get from Christianity, I think I'll always have an affinity for parable.
If you've heard the last episode, then, you know, my life is a bit up in the air. Yeah. Right now, as I'm sure many of yours are as well, not going to dwell on my personal life nearly as much in this episode, but I will say yes, that I'm back in California and doing just fine. And as I'm, I'm sure you've noticed from the episode length, we've got a lot to get into today, but first I want to very quickly correct or clarify a couple of things.
From the previous episode, I do a massive amount of research for this show, but I do tend to miss a couple of things as I'm also learning many of these topics as I'm reiterating them. The first thing I'd like to outright correct from the last episode is when I said my hometown voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, that is just flat out wrong in both 2016 and 2020 Stanislaus County went blue.
I think I fell prey to the same deception. Many voters did and assumed from the line of trucks, carrying Trump flags throughout the town, that there were more of them. Vocal does not equal powerful, I guess. And I think that lesson will be very poignant today. Two other things I'd like to address are oversimplifications.
I boiled down a lot of things in the first episode, but there are two things in particular. I think I simplified to the point of them being borderline incorrect. The first is structuralism. It is not simply a study of archetypes as I have come to understand it. It's a general term. That means to look at aspects of culture as they relate to broader systems, but is most commonly known as a field within linguistics rather than semiotics and analysis of the structure of language, rather than neural archetypical architecture.
Structuralism is the analysis of consciousness through the lens of three elements, sensations, images, and affections or archetypical analysis could then be applied to various studies of those elements of consciousness. Structuralism as a whole is not that also social contract theory was not invented by John Locke.
As I may have implied that it was simply approved upon by John Locke. Thomas Hobbes also had a theory of social contract as did John jock Russo as did Montesquieu without explicitly using that term. It was not one unified theory of social contract, but rather a thought device for analysis of how a sovereign arrives at and maintains power.
And then finally, when I say that this show is an anti ideological guide to life, I do so with the fullest, understanding that ideology is inescapable. In fact, one of the most ideological things a person can say is that they are operating outside of ideology. So here I am very deliberate. When I say anti ideological instead of non ideological, I know that doing philosophy is not outside the realm of spin.
And some people I referenced here may be problematic for some looking at you Heidegger. But I do think that when presented in context and with proper relations philosophy itself can be used to categorize and evaluate the truths that come from other fields, oftentimes transcending, even the masters themselves, that incepted the ideas ideology is the thing that distorts those philosophical truths, even pure empiricism itself is not free from ideology.
As interpretation of any kind gets subjected to the Arabic prone, human mind fair and balanced enough for you. But spinosa said in his book, the ethics that there were three types of knowledge, the first is that, which we perceive as almost random or occurring without reason knowledge, a Priore or knowledge that precedes deduction.
We understand that our perceptions may be flawed. So apply reason to these perceptions, thus entering into the second kind of knowledge. Through this rational process, we may arrive at something eternal or useful, but not enough to understand the true nature of God. Thus, the third kind of knowledge arises when we strive to know the essence of things through action, especially ourselves.
Since we are one of the infinite modes God can exist in, in Spinoza's words, quote, the greatest goal of human life is to understand one's place in the structure of the universe. As a natural expression of the essence of God, unquote, humans should seek blessedness. What he called a kind of harmony with nature.
This means seeking knowledge to aid in action and in turn seeking action to aid our knowledge so that we may better engage with nature for spinosa reality consists of all substance substance here in the Cartesian sense, meaning material that exists without our mind, more on that later reality. And all of this substance in all of its forms is God or nature.
If we are something apart from God, then in seeking to understand nature through action or study, we get a little closer to God. And every action that is harmful against nature is an attack on God. I mentioned this to say that my use of philosophy will be as a tool to alleviate the skewing power of ideology.
We can never be free from its grasp, but we can loosen its grip and in doing so we become a little holier it's me from the future. Uh, just wanted to say that this kind of like traditional philosophies is most of what I do on the show today. So if it's not your bag, if you don't really like that kind of thing, go ahead and skip to about the 55 minute Mark, the 53 minute Mark to when I transitioned into the discussion on freedom and things, get a little bit more political and maybe a little bit more tolerable for you.
Thanks now onto today's show. As you've probably guessed by now, today's going to be much more political than the previous episode. Last time I wanted to try and give you guys the building blocks for identifying ideology in rhetoric today, we're going to be applying those ideas, but in a much less abstracted way, today's show will be driven by the subtext of one of life's greatest motivators, not love, not high fructose corn syrup, but fear more specifically, the aim of today's show will be to borrow a lackluster tool, album, title, fear, inoculum, or the anecdote to fear this past year has been a big one for fear.
In fact, this last century has been a pretty big one for fear. The way in which I see fear causing the most unhappiness right now is through the unknown, like the shadowy figures in your closet. At midnight, many aspects of modern life become a lot less scary with a little enlightenment. So with that in mind, the goal of the next few episodes will be to delve into a lot of things that have been going on in the world.
Over the last few years, I'm going to attempt to explain how they came to be through historical and philosophical frameworks. So that the next time you see one of their names scroll across a Kyron, there'll be a little less unknown there to fear. However, if you've listened to the first episode, you know, that I am physically incapable of making things that simple.
So we're going to do this in three parts. In this, the first episode, I'm going to be outlining many of the philosophical ideas I see as potentially causing fear or the ignorance of such ideas. I see as causing fear in part two, I'm going to cover some social movements of the past few years. And the misunderstandings I see is potentially causing fear.
Then in the final part, a fire Chekhov's gun, I'll wrap everything up, try to distill all my bullshit into a moral and hell. I may even throw in a bonus section. Now, before we begin, I'm just kidding. Part one, fully automatic luxury philosophy. If we're going to be talking about events, it may be helpful to come to some consensus on what a capital E of event actually is.
So what is an event besides the name of Ben Shapiro's real doll? That joke was better in the last episode. Like if your car runs out of gas, is that an event. I mean, maybe for you, but what your neighbors consider it. An event get used to hearing this phrase. says that events are manifestations of ideology.
They're large scale occurrences that seem to change everything. He says, they're the synthesis of the material with the conceptual, and therefore can be seen as both a spacial occurrence and an ideological occurrence. What does he mean by this GCX book? On the matter is called event of philosophical journey through a concept was written in 2014, about an in the wake of the Arab spring, a series of anti governmental movements that arose in the early 2010s and took place in the middle East.
The revolutionaries of the Arab spring discovered that when their governments tried to shut down, their traditional means of organizing Twitter and Facebook could be used in their place and to a much greater effect. The Arab spring changed our collective perception of social media as a simple networking device.
To a revolutionary tool. This shift in our perspective, this changing of the way we view the internet shapes the way we retroactively view the invention of the internet, the Arab spring, recontextualize the invention of the internet. From the standpoint of the Arab spring, the department of defense program that invented the internet and decades later eventually gave rise to Twitter.
Looks completely different to us. Then it would be to a person viewing the invention of the internet in the mid nineties and event, conceptually changes our symbolic order. It changes the meaning of our reality as it exists now. And as it's existed in the past, in the example of your car, running out of gas on the freeway, this can be a personal event.
And until you cause a 10 car pileup, it will remain a personal event. But after the collisions of the pilot, the actions you took before you got in your car, start to take on a much greater importance. The thing that separates a personal event from a cultural event is the same difference between the particular and the universal.
We'll be coming back to those terms later in the show. But for now, just understand that a capital event contains elements of both the particular. And the universal. So simply put an event is that which constitutes the usage of the terms before and after, as Gigi says in his book, the shift from the not yet to the always already a Vince can seem to erupt out of nowhere, Dziedzic says this is because materially things change very slowly and subtly.
By the time this change becomes formal and we see its effects consciously, the battle is over the event symbolizes a change that has already occurred. And one that can never be psychically recovered from so long as it remains in the Zeit Geist, popular memory, or collective conscious, as desperately as you may want the pile up to be forgotten.
The insurance companies, at least of the other people involved will never let that happen. The great German philosopher, Oh man, he's got a lot of names. Hold on. George Wilhelm Fredrick Hagle said, quote, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk. This is to say that only at the end of history while we truly know what it all meant, or only after the story's final chapter, will we truly understand the preface?
We cannot see the causes until an event shows us the effects. The storm may be brewing, but until the cyclone forms, we will only see the rain.
In philosophy. This is called regalian retroactivity in psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud called this afterwards Snus, or put simply the way in which the present distorts the past to quote an essay titled Hegel's excess by Rasmus quote, the beginning of a sentence only becomes fully clear. Once the sentence is completed, like if someone tells you to go to hell main street, you can't really see the intention of the sentence until the sentence fully forms.
He's not telling you to go to the theorial hell. He's telling you to go to a street. Play-Doh devised a similar concept in his analogy of the cave, where he said that if you've lived in a cave your whole life and only ever been shown shadows of objects from the world outside, and one day you see the sun, the shadows will never look the same again in literature, GGS says Franz Kafka himself can be seen as an event because even though he had predecessors, when you try to isolate why they're credited as being his predecessors, you see that this distinction is only possible after knowing what Kafka brought out of them as USIA is very fond of pointing out.
Love. Can be an event. That's why they call it falling in love. Because in a sense, it ruins the life that you had before when you fall in love your life thus far is then recontextualized as leading up to the moment when you met your love because of this ability for events to retroactively create their own causes.
They're very scary to us. People today can be too scared to engage or too lethargic to act because of the impact a seemingly innocuous event can have, but this shouldn't scare you into inaction. Our circumstances create us. We in turn, create events that shape our circumstances, and it happens whether you act or not.
So why not act sure you might cause the pilot, but you also might not. So why not try your best not to and drive your car? Anyway, an event is something that can happen that is causally produced. That recontextualizes the past, in a sense of Vince can be seen as miracles in effect that is greater than the sum of its own causes and who would be scared of a miracle, you know, besides seemingly everyone in the Bible, the fame, linguist and anarchic thinker, Noam Chomsky also has a bit to say about the concept of an event.
He says, we should really ask ourselves if events are a thing that exists purely in the mind, or if they exist outside of the head. For example, do events contain every individual action of every individual person within, or our events, the cultural sum, total of all individual actions within if we're going to say that events exist in reality, not only conceptually, we need to keep in mind that this is highly dependent on our perspective, as well as how we even define reality.
So in order to better quantify reality, we first have to examine concepts, critical theory and materialism, and all of the confusion that lies there within delve deep into either of these topics. Let me just give you some simplified definitions. Well, first defined by max Horkheimer in 1937, the foundations of modern critical theory began with Hagle in his belief that the critique and assessment of society could be used as a tool to identify power struggle, or for liberation critical.
He presupposes that when something is going wrong in society, it's more helpful to be viewed more so as the fault of social structures in that society, rather than the individuals within those structures, like the pile up you. Cause when your car runs out of gas, it could be seen as your fault for not filling up your tank, but simply adjust your perspective from the individual to the structures of that individual's life.
And more interesting factors begin to arise. It could also be seen as partially the fault of your job that made you tired and forgetful or partially the fault of a phone that was created to do nothing but distract you or partially the fault of the automobile manufacturers that lobbied against public transportation reform and necessitated everyone's need for a car in the first place.
It's easy to see the pileup as the fault of one person in their actions and those actions are important, but there are so many potential solutions you miss. If you're thinking stops there, critical theory does not presuppose that it can be used to arrive at definitive conclusions inherently. It's a truth seeking method that should be used to generate more and more complex questions about our society.
Now, as for materialism put very simply it's exactly what it sounds like. It's a belief that all reality is made up of physical matter. The mind then is a consequence of material reality and not the other way around. We'll go into more detail on this shortly. Materialism got its start in the scientific discoveries that took place around the time of the Renaissance.
These discoveries were powerful in their utility so much so that they began to eat away at the unchallenged power of royalty in church. Take it for granted in that time. Let's jump forward in time, a little to two evolutions of materialism, dialectic, materialism, and historical materialism. Let's set dialectics aside for now.
We'll come back to it later and entrust the latter first historical materialism was a concept devised by Karl Marx and Frederick angles have used history, not as the expression of ideas by individuals, but rather places, a much greater importance on the shifts in power regarding the means of a society's production or material itself.
This created a lens for viewing history that interprets social change in terms of physical material, changing hands from one group to another. In other words, the global shifts from tribalism to feudalism to capitalism were not solely the effect of Adam Smith's writings on economics, but rather truly occurred in reality when the means of agriculture or manufacturing shifted from being a burden shared by small communities for the benefit of what they produced in tribalism to being labored on by surfs for a share of what they made in feudalism to being operated by employees for a salary in capitalism.
These societal shifts didn't happen solely because of theoretical or technical writings, even if the enlightenment thinkers did influence public thought, but rather the societal shifts occurred tangibly materially in reality, because of who owned the farm or factory, be it a community, a Lord or an employer, the enlightenment thinkers, technical writings retroactively gave name to the event of the shift in ownership of the means of production.
Now, this theory stood in contrast to the thinkings of a philosopher like Hagle, who saw history as a sort of grand narrative. He saw all of human history as progressing towards what he called absolute truth, which once discovered what unify all thoughts and understanding together. Hagle recognized that there was a material reality, but that it had to be understood through consciousness.
He therefore thought that consciousness was the engine propelling history forwards towards more ideas, like absolute truth. This makes Hagle and ideal ladies and gentlemen, we got them.
I'm sorry. I've been spending too much time on Twitter lately. More on idealism in a bit. The inception of historical materialism and materialism as a whole represents a shift in history, away from idealism and mind, body dualism, which asserted noble things in nature were byproducts of the mind. And that the mind and nature were two separate and independent forces towards materialism.
And monism the idea that physical matter is a singular substance that makes up all of nature. That reality is fully a product of the physical one in the same as our consciousness instead of a product of our consciousness. So it's not so much the question of whether or not a tree makes a sound if it falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, it's more so the idealist believing that to understand the falling tree and whether or not it makes a sound, it requires a conscious mind to be present.
As reality is rooted in the activity of the mind, that knowledge in this case, whether or not the tree makes a sound can be created through deduction by bringing the specific out of the general establishing broad principles, and then using them to create specific principles. And whether or not one believed it was possible to make those broad principles about trees falling and making sounds would place an idealist either as an objective idealist or a subjective idealist.
The objective idealist thinks that even though reality is rooted in the mind, the perceiver is one with which it perceives and therefore objects outside of human consciousness can exist as manifestations of an objective consciousness of which our consciousness, consciousness, consciousnesses of which our consciousnesses are themselves.
A manifestation of the subjective idealists simply says, no objects only exists so long as they're able to be perceived by a consciousness, much simpler and yet not helpful at all. The materialist on the other hand, thinks that since our understanding of reality is rooted in our sensing of something determinant or materially, the same as our mind, if our senses can be trusted, then yes, the tree makes a sound materialism is the usage of inductive reasoning reasoning.
From the specific to the general, you can put up a camera, fell a tree, listened to the recording. And since the camera in the tree exist in reality, in the same knowable way that our mind does, you can reasonably say that the tree makes sounds when you're not there. Furthermore, you can even say that it's logical, that all trees make sounds when they fall.
And no one is around to hear the simple and helpful, but this also begs the question of whether or not we can trust our senses. And suddenly our answer is no longer simple or helpful. So does a tree fall and make a sound when no one is around to hear it? Does the chicken or the egg come first does a bear shit in the woods.
These are all deeply serious and highly academic questions that I am not qualified to answer. This contrasting of idealism and materialism is called ontology the study of the nature of reality, and can potentially sound obvious or boring to the modern observer due to the fact that as I mentioned in the previous episode, our lives are so dependent on an understanding and trust in the physical world, science and materialism.
But the world before Nietzsche said, God is dead, was much more entrenched in mysticism and held concepts of the mind up in a more transcendent regard, the shift towards materialism and the idea that the world is not one that we ourselves create, but rather one that exists uncaring only independent of us was a scary one, but I don't think it has to be more on that later.
Now I mentioned Noam Chomsky's and sloshy X thoughts in succession because the two always seemed to be at odds with one another. This is as traumatic to me as my parents fighting. I don't get it. You guys are on the same team. No. And their bickering always seems to be semantic like over small differences in definition, the kind of linguistic philosophical, arguing that Martin Heidegger despised, Hey man, sick reference that 99% of your current audience, I bring them up because I think in examining how their worldviews differ, we gain a better understanding of what they're bickering over, regardless of who we think is correct.
In regards to the idea of the event existing in the physical world in general, Chomsky doesn't believe that we have a functioning definition of the word physical in modern times, due to the seemingly infinite complexity of ontological arguments. He thinks that we may have had one around the time of the rationalism of Isaac Newton, but that it ended with the materialism of David Hume.
When he asserted that inductive reasoning cannot be justified rationally, but is rather the product of mental habit and must be justified through experience about a hundred years after Rene Descartes said, I think therefore I am, or that our senses are fallible. And we can only really know that we exist and all else can never be absolutely known.
David Hume took essentially the opposite position. What we can understand about reality can only be understood through our senses. However, flawed our senses may be. He believed in empiricism, a form of materialism that says only our senses can provide us with a meaningful understanding of the world that the human mind cannot know truth, but that it can witness it.
He said that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience, human was radically skeptical of the human ability to know reality. You thought the best way to understand it was through the census, but that, that would never be enough. We have to take in as much experience as we can in order to create work in models of reality, to spite the shortcomings of our senses.
Hume said that we experience events in constant conjunction or that to make inferences about the future. We have to assume that the future will resemble our perception of the past, which as we've already discussed our perceived experiences of the past recontextualize with every event, we encounter Chomsky things that Hume's ideas on materialism poisoned, the well that they pulled the focus of what constitutes physical reality into semantic positions that are very difficult to square.
That if we simply rely on pure empiricism, that we can only know truth through our senses and positivism, that genuine knowledge is only gained through experience. We operate from an assumption that truth is unknowable, not simple, not helpful things as the writer, Phillip K Dick said, well, that reality is what stays even when you stop paying attention.
That inductive reasoning can be rationally justified if it is rooted in knowable reality now is where I build towards dialectical materialism. And this rambling will start to make a lot more sense. This debate on the nature of reality obviously goes back much further than jijak and Chomsky. Although not by much, they're pretty old Emmanuel Kant, a great fan of David Hume thought, similarly that the substances that make up the world are inherently unknowable through reason that we can only perceive distorted fragments.
However, he wasn't nearly as skeptical. He followed Decartes epistemology or the study of knowledge so that we may quote know what we know, but before we talk about reality, whether you're an idealist or a materialist, you have to know what you know, and how, you know, it concept or understanding of reality.
Isn't informed by consciousness so much as it is constrained by consciousness that science doesn't tell us how our reality actually is only how reality appears to our senses. This was his great philosophical revelation and revolution from his book. The critique of pure reason that reasoning only allows us to perceive reality as we perceive it.
Not as things truly are. This was monumental for the time. He stated that all reason can do is show us the limits of our knowledge. Like the question of free will versus determinism can never be fully answered. Using reasoning. As reason will only take us to deeper and deeper levels of contradiction without ever telling us how things actually are.
Only how we are able to perceive them Hagle a great admirer of cond accepted this premise, but took things one step further using the ancient method of dialectics, which was known in ancient Greece as the method for determining truth or knowledge through debate and conversation. Hagle thought the world could be understood through the contradictions at the limits of our reasoning.
He considered the noumenal world to be knowable, even if only as a lack of meaning the word noumena refers to the unknowable aspect of phenomena. It's not just the unseen floorboard that cracks. When you drop a hammer, it's the effects that exist in a manner that is imperceptible to us. I cannot describe what pneumonia looks like because by definition, I cannot know it.
It's not something like ultraviolet light, either which through technology we can see, but without even seeing it, we can still conceptualize it. Phenomena or occurrences as our senses and mind are able to perceive and quantify them any aspects of an occurrence that exist in a manner our senses or mind cannot detect or even conceive.
Would be numinous. This is a good way of thinking about what drives cons thinking that reason can only lead to contradiction as that, which we perceive will always conflict with reality as we experience it, because we're never able to fully grasp reality as a whole, for every phenomena, there will always be numinous.
Our existence is staring at a Jackson Pollock painting with red, green color blindness forever. And that's okay. Angles thinks that this unknowable aspect of occurrence can be quantified in some way, by our recognition of its unknowability or in our acknowledgement of the new mana of dropping the hammer.
We know that something has occurred that we cannot know because of the currents of the phenomenon that we can know. We know that the unknowable is there. Even if we don't necessarily know it, a part of reality may be hidden behind a veil, but we can consider that veil and what's behind it as still being part of reality.
Without seeing it to our reasoning. Reality is made up of contradictions like this. We can perceive noumena through understanding negation or the idea that everything contains its opposite or that which it also negates. GJ constantly tells the joke of a guy who goes to a coffee shop and orders, coffee without cream, to which the barista replies, sorry, we're all out of cream.
I can only offer you coffee without sugar in a sense. This is how all things are that a thing is never just a thing. A thing. Also, conceptually contains that, which that thing negated, some things being is always determinant upon something else's otherness like up needs down and down needs up. I mean, just like looking around the room right now.
I see a door when I perceive that door at the same time, I also perceive the impassability of the wall that it took. The place of every experience that I have with the door will also contain a modicum of an experience with a wall that I cannot pass without the impassable wall. The passable door loses all meaning furthermore, in a world without walls, we'd have no way to even imagine a door.
Even stranger in a world without doors, we wouldn't be able to conceive of walls, even if we were surrounded by them. Every conceptual thing to us will contain irreconcilable contradictions, but this shouldn't be the end of reason. This is the basis of Hegel's dialectic or the examination of the inherent contradictions within all things, a recognition of the contradiction and an attempt to delve ever deeper.
Now, as a brief aside, this wall door example of mine is honestly a bit disingenuous to assigned to Hegel's dialectic because for Hagle, dialectics were only used to examine the inherent contradictions within ideas returning now to dialectical materialism. It was marks calmed down and angles that applied Hegel's dialectic to the material world and applied it to history.
They theorize that historical events such as the relationship between those who own, and those who operate the means of production can be seen as a series of contradictions and their solutions, unlike Hegel and despite being followers of his philosophy and part of a group known as the young aliens, Carl Marx and Frederick angles were materialists.
Despite adopting Hegel's belief in the dialectic method as a useful tool for understanding reality, they thought that truth was more than what could be reasoned through consciousness marks calmed down, even wrote quote, my dialectic method is not only different from the head Galean, but is its direct opposite unquote.
They posited our consciousness is shaped by our material conditions. The haggle wasn't a subjective idealist. He didn't think that the human mind literally created the world around us, but rather that what we experience as the world is created by the mind like can't handle thought we can't experience the world directly.
We only experience it through the filter of our mind, mind and thought were independent of reality. Body, mind, dualism marks
thought this was mysticism. He wrote quote with me on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else in the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought unquote dialectics was not a method that drives history forwards towards an absolute truth, rather than it could be seen as a tool for quantifying the complexities of reality in a way that is easily graspable to the human mind angles set of dialectics quote, the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, In which the things apparently stable concepts go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being, and passing away, unquote reality and history as a whole can be seen as contradictory forces acting on one another.
Since dialect materialism saw consciousness as a product of the material. It not only refuted idealism, but it also refuted positivism and Humes empiricism on the grounds that it focused too much on the sources of our knowledge and too little on the forms of our knowledge, idealism and positivism and pure empiricism, all lacked a connection between the mind and the material.
They were fatally, dualistic, the idealist dismissed all since data, as products of the fallible mind, empiricism dismissed, all reason as a product of fallible, since perceptions, dialectical, materialism, bridges, this gap, and allows us to move forward. You can have your rationality and since it too, yes, the material proceeds the ideal.
But the ideal also shapes the material. It's a material and humans are material girls. Our circumstances shape our ideas and our ideas shape the actions we have on the material world. Dialectical materialism can give us more nuanced concepts of reality. The process of organizing, quantifying and qualifying these concepts can then be seen of as science.
Science being the process of bringing our concepts evermore in line with reality. Now, returning briefly to contradictions and cooling off a bit, many times Hegel's dialectic is misunderstood as simply thesis antithesis and synthesis or something occurs. This creates another occurrence and the two were at odds and eventually come together in a neutrally charged way that we call a synthesis, which goes on to become the new thesis and the cycle repeats that's close, but it's not entirely correct.
In fact, Hagel never even mentions the words, thesis, antithesis or synthesis, and not just because he wrote in German, when you hear the word dialectic, as it pertains to modern philosophy, you should always think contradiction that within reality, as we perceive it, the inherent contradictions of all things will always conflict and force us to arrive at knowledge.
That is not a full reflection of how things are in themselves or as things really are. It's these inherent contradictions, that form, what we can think of as a thesis and antithesis, which through negation form a new contradictory synthesis, which goes on to become a new thesis and the cycle continues.
So is it possible to truly know anything sort of per Hagle dialectic analysis strives to reduce contradictions down to their most basic level? Contradictions by nature can never be fully resolved. They can be minimized the acknowledgement of the resolving of contradictions as an ever moving target constitutes the absolute for Hagle as contradictions are resolved and move closer towards the absolute or understanding of the new syntheses also contains the previously negated ECS and antitheses.
This is why all haggled tech should either come with a bottle of aspirin. If it's going well or a bottle of bourbon, if it's not, I bring up both materialism and critical theory to show how useful it can be to make an assumption about reality. There are many ways of looking at the world and until you fleshed out your own or adopted a standpoint on idealism versus materialism, it's very hard to move forward on.
Sure. Footing. Now I'm of the belief that dialectical materialism can bridge the two, but if you don't arrive at that point, that's perfectly fine. You just need to choose something. Otherwise your ID we'll make the choice for you in the words of rush. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
Now here's a real world contradictory example from recent memory that highlights the importance of taking a side in idealism versus materialism in 1998, while zooming the corpse of fair Rams as the second archeologists made an interesting discovery. Since his body was so well-preserved they were able to determine his cause of death, tuberculosis, the French philosopher, Bruno Latour, protested, this discovery.
He said that since TB wasn't discovered until 1882 tuberculosis could not and should not be considered as the official cause of death. What did he mean by this on face value? His protests seems almost silly. Like of course it was tuberculosis, but Latour's protest has less to do with the Pharaoh's actual cause of death and more to do with what our retroactive diagnosis mint for social constructs in general, in 1882, our society gave the name tuberculosis to the state of being where mycobacterium, tuberculosis enters and attacks a person's lungs.
What Latour is basically saying is that it would be disingenuous of us to retroactively apply that modern social construct to the past. When at the time their society would have had a completely different socially constructed name for that phenomenon. Even if it's materially the same phenomenon, we should be idealistically sensitive to the potential.
And acronystic in compatibility in applying the present to the past, shout out to Ms. Peterson in 11th grade, AP English for that lesson. Now as just another very quick example, spinosa also died of tuberculosis. However, at the time they called it, . So if we wanted to properly analyze what Spinoza's death meant to the people of that time.
Historically, if we say that the people mourned his death at the hands of tuberculosis, we don't get the full picture because they're socially constructed name for tuberculosis. And the concept of tuberculosis was consciously and unconsciously thought of and conceptualized under the name and concept of faces.
Michelle Fu CO's notion of a measure of truth may add some nuance to this predicament. He asserted that every field of study arrives at truths that are specific to that field of study through a rejection of some objective truth. The way that things actually may be gets constrained through the lens of that particular field of study, Dziedzic says about this reality may split from our notion of consciousness, but that doesn't make it any less real idealism can be just as valid as materialism, even if it's in the same way.
We recognize noumenal understanding through contradiction, dialectical materialism in this way, the Lacanian real, which is a term psychoanalyst shock Lacan used to describe the unknowable surplus within reality, that exists after our minds have taken in all they can symbolically and sensationally. It's able to be better realized through science measure a phenomenon knowable to our raw consciousness or numinous raw consciousness here, meaning something like Spinoza's first degree of knowledge that which is taken in and understood before reasoning as applied.
We should be allowed to retroactively apply the present to the past so long as we understand exactly what we're doing materially and idealistically, before we do bring things back to the concept of the event. Remember that that's what started all this mess. All of this is perfectly exemplified in Marx's calmed down idea that through historical materialism, it's only after capitalism is invented, that we can see all of history is the history of class idealistically people before marks who ant calmed down.
But we analyze through the lens of class would have had no such concept themselves. Their idealistic conditions would have been wholly unique to them, and we can never fully understand their realities nuance materially. On the other hand, the same physical material distinctions we see between the classes today, even when applied retroactively to the past can be of great insight and utility for understanding history.
Through dialectical material analysis, we can study the material conditions that would have given rise to their idealistic conditions in order to better understand not only reality as they would have perceived it better understand history and reality as we currently yeah, for the modern person, looking at Hagle helps us realize that as we try to live up to the norms of the modern world, we change the world.
At the same time, events are very hard to observe because even if we can pinpoint the material changes, the idealistic changes are fluid. Dialectical materialism can help quantify both for Chomsky. The world is unknowable and it's the task of the philosopher to investigate the world. Scientifically Chomsky says, for example, that people are born free, but the limits in terms of that freedom or idealistically fluid, if we are to assume that modes of freedom are determined by consciousness in constant flux, in response to this, Dziedzic posits that the risk and assuming freedom exists beyond the knowable is that we may inadvertently put unfreedom in its place without even the tools to recognize it.
Either throw up our hands trudge on through contradiction. So how do we salvage ideas like freedom and reality from the eternal struggle of material versus idea. For an answer that isn't dialectical materialism, we can return to the topic of the particular and the universal in metaphysics. Metaphysics.
Woo, yay. Go metaphysics. All right. Hey, what's up in metaphysics. The universal refers to recurring characteristics that may occur in many particular things. Something that applies to all yet that no single one possesses in its entirety, particularities than the personal differences that separate say you from me, particularities in some sense, a suppression of the universal or a shallow way of relating to the universal.
Something that applies to one that all seemingly have the potentiality to express, but may not seems straightforward enough. Like if you have two green chairs in a room, they share the universal quality of greenness. And chairness. However, what if you had a green chair and red chair? Well, they may appear particularly different.
They are still both universally, a chair, both greenness and redness can be thought of as particular expressions within the universal of chairness that a chair can exist in many particular forms, but we'll always share a universal chair, like quality with other chairs, like a green bar stool and a red rocking chair.
So they may have many different particulars. They'll always share a universal quality of being a chair. When I described this part to my brother, he also mentioned that at this point, chairness could also then be thought of as a particular expression of redness or greenness. So all chairs may not be particularly green, but they all universally contain a chair like essence and everything that is green will share a universal greenness, but may not always particularly be a chair.
And now the word chair has lost all meaning chair, chair.
Nietzsche said that there existed universal problems in life. For instance, a commute to work that you hate would be a particular problem for you. But the universal problem of the difficulty of travel has existed for all. Humans. Always GJ thinks that for us to more easily discover the universal problems that plague us in modern life, we should stop arguing over the frame from which we view the past.
Do we call it tuberculosis? Do we not call it tuberculosis? Who knows? Furthermore, who cares? Jesus says that we should examine our own maternity through the lens of the past. To get through the idealistic barrier to truly knowing if we are free. We should imagine a point in the past that we can agree was before freedom and judge ourselves.
From that standpoint, in this way, we avoid some of the infinite debate, stability of retroactivity and the limits of reason. In general, we can use this kind of proactivity to better understand the universals that transcend time and our myriad of particulars. From the perspective of your ancestor, who had to haul as much fruit as they could carry across the vast distance to feed their family.
Your morning commute starts to look a little different and maybe feel a little familiar, particularly for you getting to work in your car is difficult for your ancestor. Delivering food to their family is difficult, but universally you each share a need to travel a great distance in order to survive or feed your family something else you should get used to hearing.
And now a bit more on niching. Nietzsche's Magnum Opus is widely considered to be his book on the genealogy of as with most of his works on the surface, it looks like a spiteful critique of religiosity, but I think it's better understood as a historical examination of the objective truths or universal principles behind the shifts and what is considered moral in the flow from society to society across history.
Michelle Fuko summarized the book like this, and I'm paraphrasing here. Tell me what you think is right. And I will point to a place in history when it was considered immoral. Nietzsche was somewhat obsessed with the idea of universal truth. In fact, what he tried to do with this book was craft a type of critical theory that did not require a point of critical reference.
Or in other words, he wanted to be able to say that the movie we're watching sucks without having to suggest a better one. When we say that something is bad, we're almost always implying a relationship to something else that is comparable, but good Nietzsche hated this obstacle. So we tried to formulate a way to suss out universals independent of particulars, and he did it by examining patterns and morality through history.
Take what we consider to be freedom now and compare it from the standpoint of many points in the past and what those people may have thought of our own view of freedom. When you do that, honestly, your view of freedom stops being so tightly bound to your particularities. You may start to see what would constitute universal freedom.
So now with all this in mind, let's aim a little higher. What is freedom? It's one of those things that everyone thinks they know until they have to define it. The word fits neatly on a bumper sticker, but can you use it in a sentence? Well, in the United States, we've got a few things that we point to as the byproducts of freedom, you're free to own a gun by as big of a car as you want, choose from the 37 different kinds of chicken noodle soup.
What are those really only explained by freedom let's practice, a little critical theory. You live in a society where you feel scared to the point where you spend money that could otherwise be spent on food or entertainment on the purchase of keep and licensing for a gun. Did you choose that freely?
You buy the biggest car? But why did you want the biggest car? You probably saw it on TV that you can send to that. And those 37 different kinds of soup. They're probably all owned by the same two or three parent companies. Your favorite flavor of soup was probably designed by suited men in a boardroom somewhere 70 years ago.
Could you have even conceived of chicken noodle soup? If it was never explained to you, what if chicken noodle soup could exist in a different form, vastly superior. And here's two unknown to us. You'll never know because it already exists as it does now. Any future advancements in the field of chicken noodle soup will be automatically tainted by our current social construct of what chicken noodle soup is supposed to be.
You have been robbed of that potentiality by being born into a society where chicken noodle soup has already been constructed, you will never have the freedom to Steve. Have it on your own, no soup for you. Now I don't bring this up to make a political point about soup. At least not yet. I bring this up to make a philosophical point only partially about soup.
One that I briefly covered in the previous episode, if everyone is completely free, suddenly not everyone is so free. Let's try to get a working concept of freedom before we continue. The modern debate on freedom can be boiled down to two sides, liberal freedom versus radical freedom. We can think of it as a simple dichotomy as Isaiah Berlin put it in his famous essay.
Two concepts of Liberty between positively and negative Liberty. Positive Liberty is the possibility of acting in a way that takes control of your life free from both coercion and commandment of obedience. Negative Liberty is the absence of obstacles or barriers. In other words, positive can be seen as being able to choose your own destiny and negative Liberty can be seen as a lack of things standing in between you and your destiny.
The usage of the word negative here, isn't being used to imply inferiority or moral badness, but instead like the positive and negative ends of a magnet, two sides of the same coin liberal freedom or negative Liberty is the ability to choose from any car in the lot radical freedom or positive Liberty is being free from the coerce of advertisement that convinced you to go to the dealership and buy a car in the first place.
John jock Russo had much to say about Liberty. He thought like Thomas Hobbes, that human nature is that of the noble Savage, which society itself corrupts Russo's take on Liberty looks more like Berlin's notion of positive Liberty. You thought that people are able to reach their most virtuous potential when they replace.
Oh, fuck. This is French. Okay. I'm S I'm sorry, I'm going to butcher this, uh, more propane pro uh, more more ProPay, uh, more ProPay, the love of oneself with a more destroy, more G uh, more this soy, the desire for self-mastery or the replacement of self-esteem built on the opinions of others with self-esteem built on self-love independent of others.
This can be seen as becoming more liberated in both the positive and negative sense. He thought the love of oneself was unnatural and arose out of competition with in comparison to others. When one is able to rise above the opinions of others, the love we feel for ourselves is no longer shackled by the barriers or coercions placed upon us.
Russo also had a concept for a general will or an intangible collective desire that no individual can fully comprehend. And therefore people as a collective need a kind of centralized state apparatus to interpret what they want or need for them. And that laws are simply manifestations of the general will.
He believes in his writing on the social contract, that it is exactly these state created restraints that reel in our Savage nature. Sure. And allow us to live freely within a society, not think that there was an unresolvable contradiction when it came to people living freely within a society that limits certain actions.
On the other hand, John Stuart mill, one of the biggest proponents of individual autonomy in history said in his essay on Liberty, that in order for society to be considered free, government must only act in an industry Juul's life when absolutely necessary. He said in a direct response to Russell's general, will that a belief in such would bring about a tyranny of the majority where minority views are suppressed.
He thought, well, it should be free to pursue their own thoughts, tastes and non-coercive unions with other individuals. He was also a great proponent of being free from principles. Which I would say includes ideological coercion like advertising and to make things even more complicated. I have to mention.
Yeah. One thing that Khan said about freedom, he thought that the inclusion of law in our society, mint that we have free will let me say that again. He thought the inclusion of law in our society meant that we have free will that under certain circumstances, a law that forbids an action is what gives us the freedom to follow or break them law.
Without the law, we couldn't have conceived of an alternative that is an inherent contradiction within freedom. Paradoxically restricted laws can give us a bit of freedom in allowing us to consider actions we wouldn't have without the laws. Some modern libertarians may say, we need a society free from laws, but without laws, how would we conceive of our own freedom?
Like a door in a world where only walls exist, our determination of whether or not to follow these laws would then fall to concert morality and the categorical imperative, whether or not we're acting out of duty or out of the promise of some reward, whether or not we're acting in a way that could be universally good.
If applied to all people or only particularly good for us in this instance, this is called the universal principle that you should act in a way that if anybody acted in that way, it would always be good for someone else. The inclusion of a law in this equation. Enables the ability to act in a more selfless manner.
For example, once I was walking with my father in San Francisco, when an elderly woman about a block away fell while crossing an intersection before I could even register what had happened, my father threw his hot cup of coffee to the ground, sprinted across oncoming traffic and rushed to help this woman.
He got to her before the people walking around her, got to her, he was 66 at the time. He helped her up, brushed her off, asked if she was okay, and then use the crosswalk to return to my side of the street in doing this act. He broke a jaywalking law and a littering law, but notice how that only makes the action more moral.
He was acting in a manner that I think we would all agree ethically transcended the law in that moment. And I don't think there's a jury on earth that would convict him of either jaywalking or littering. And he didn't do it for some hypothetical reward. I even insisted on buying him a new cup of coffee and he refused.
And anyone who's ever walked in a big city knows that for this action, he gotten no praise from the pedestrians around us and everyone just continued on with their day. How much better would the world be if this kind of selfless act was done by all. This day, that's my best example of the universal principle and categorical imperative, the best one I've ever experienced.
All of it, the enlightenment philosophers were operating before the invention of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. One of the main psychoanalytical insights and morality, or how we act when free is that since we are driven by an unknowable unconscious, we can't truly know if we're acting pathologically or morally.
We don't fully know if we're following the categorical imperative or some hypothetical imperative, but it's exactly this inability to know that enables us to be moral, just like a law that you break to help somebody, even if you can't be entirely sure if you're helping somebody morally or not. If you still help them.
Despite the inner conflict, I would argue that that's moral Russo's mills and con's thinkings on freedom. All imply that to really understand freedom. We need to understand human nature and to know what it means to be fully virtuous. We need to know what constitutes a base level human desire is that the return to the noble Savage, what do people want prior to the corrupting influence of society?
Now, I really want to save Freud's and Lacan theories on human drives and desires for a future episode. So to better understand human nature through philosophy, we can turn to existentialism. Or the philosophical approach to studying existence as a way to better express your own free will from the existentialist perspective, all that we perceive as a product of our own subjectivity put very simply as I mentioned before, but the famous philosopher, uh, having my notes here, uh, Billie Eilish, I think therefore I am, we can really only absolutely know that we exist.
All else is interpretation. This means that inherent in our existence will be a search for meaning, because even that is not a given in a biological sense. Our body is in a constant struggle against entropy. This pairs nicely with Spinoza's third type of knowledge, or that humans seek to understand the world through acting on nature through the necessitation of our struggle to stay alive.
We're forced to impose our will on the world around us. We must move forward in some way. This is mythologized in the ancient Greek tale of Sisyphus, a King who for literally cheating death was cursed by the gods to an eternity of rolling a Boulder up a steep Hill only to have it rolled down again.
Once it reached the top in life to stay alive, we must continuously make choices of action against the backdrop of a seemingly infinite number of actions we could potentially take. We're forced to make these actions as the alternative is death. John Paul Sartre. Oh God French again. Okay, I'm sorry.
Sartor John Paul Saatchi. Sarge, Sarge, G R, sorry. Hold on. I'll look it up. Sartre. John Paul Sartre, ha ha. John Paul Sartre saw this contemplation of our infinite number of potential actions as causing an amount of mental terror for us or what he called anguish in our modern society. We experienced this regularly.
Sartre said that we are condemned to be free, like when choosing one of the multitude of similar products to buy, or when deciding where to go in the limited free time you have on the weekends, what book to buy next? What hobby to invest your time in trying to decide what kind of restaurant you'd like to eat at whether to eat healthy or not, whether to work out or not.
Where do you want to work or live? How do you want to work or live? Do you want to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand launching the world into world war one? The sheer number of choices we are free to make can be terrifying at times Martin Heidegger expands on this by saying it's not our state of being that tortures us.
It's the potentiality of our States of being, since we live in a state of constantly looking towards the potential of the future, Sartre thinks individuals should aim to surpass themselves to always aim for greater potentiality. As a means of narrowing our choices of action. He thought existentialism should not drive you to despair, but should rather motivate you.
That we should seek to be excited by the sheer number of choices that we have an aim for ones that improve ourselves when faced with an eternity of rolling a Boulder up. But he'll at some 0.1 may start to contemplate suicide. Albert KEMU again, French, sorry. Albert, whose famous quote is that? Whoa, one must envision Sisyphus as happy unquote.
This is the core tenet of what he calls absurdism. It's similar to stoicism and tower wisdom in that it says we should try not to be rocked by the ups and downs of life that we should instead look at our constant struggle and take pride in it. Try not to focus on the potentiality of where on the mountain.
You're rolling your Boulder. Rather the pride that comes from putting one foot in front of the other, we should strive to make our existence authentic to ourselves, or at least as much as we can. Nietzsche had a similar, slightly more abstracted way of looking at this that I think makes the point a little more digestible.
Nietzsche said that there were three types of person in life, camels, lions, and children. He thought the majority of people spend their lives as camels, beasts of burden who have ideas and ones and desires thrust upon them, which they follow without question. Most people tend to believe what their parents taught them as kids.
As they get older, these ideas may become more nuanced, but their self-expression will always be hinged on these originating ideas that they themselves didn't come up with a small amount of people recognize this, and it can be an infuriating experience. This is who Nietzsche sees as lions who seek to aggressively rebel against the mandates, put upon them.
In his words, attempting to slay the dragon named quote thou shalt. Some people spend the majority of their lives rebelling against what they were taught as children. And then she thought almost in a Galean dialectic sense that committing your life to doing the opposite of what someone told you to do is still committing your life to something that you didn't freely decide.
If I tell you not to push the big red button and in rebellion, you push the big red button. You are still forced into an action that you yourself didn't incept. If I never told you not to press it, you might've just ignored it. Not to be fair. Caught might then say that it was exactly my imperative, not to push the button that gave you the freedom to decide whether to push it or not.
Nietzsche may then say that someone who is Elian would not recognize the inherent freedom in my direction. They would be acting out of spite when they push the button, not of their own free will. He said a very small fraction of people in life are able to fully understand this meat. You says those people become like children, but not in a pejorative sense.
He sees this as the highest level of freedom we can attain. When we come at the world with a childlike sense of wonder or innocence, a level of innocence, a yearning to explore what it is that we truly want, which may in fact, be the same things. Put upon us as children. Your parents may raise you to be religious in college.
You may rebel and maybe become a militant atheist. Uh, later in life, you may come to realize that those myths and stories that you were told as a child were sources of comfort, and then may freely decide to adopt some of those aspects back into your life and not to dwell on this too much. But this idea is really personal to me.
I was raised extremely religious. I did rebel and nowadays I love the themes of community service and forgiveness and religious teachings. Even if I myself are not religious. This gives me the freedom to dismiss certain aspects of religion. I don't like and choose to adopt others, to create something wholly authentic to myself.
Now I would be remiss if I didn't include the thoughts of one more, very influential existent thinker, Simone de Beauvoir. She's widely known for her contributions to feminism, but also had many insights on existentialism. I'd go so far as to say that her particular brand may be more poignant. Humanity strive towards liberation in modern times, then either Sartre or Kemo.
She said that humans were stuck between facticity and transcendence stuck between what we are and what we can be. The anx generated from this dilemma seeps into many other aspects of life. Are you an individual or part of a group? Are you truly free? What is your identity? These questions only add to our
Many people seek out religion or some kind of institution to fill or solve this problem of angst and give them some identity. Also warns that the leaders of these institutions like theologians or academics, shy away from the greater existential questions. They narrow their fields down and answer easier questions.
Then what is my purpose? She says their ideology prevents them from looking at the greater questions because doing so may place their institutional answers somewhere in the middle. Only partially solving the questions of life. When they purport to have all the answers, maybe life is complex. The answers can't be found in singular doctrines or fields of study.
For example, when we ask if we were individuals or part of a collective, many ideologies will say definitively one way or the other dibble, Voss says that this is a false binary and that we are in fact both at the same time, she says that we should be weary of the convenient answers given to us. Our world consists of multitudes and that people use bad faith tactics to escape this tension things like what needs you would have called true world theories or ideas that imply that this is not the real world.
So it's okay to not take the decisions you make so seriously. Is it just a coincidence that humanity has been asking? What is my purpose for so long, without a definitive answer? I mean, people still ask the question and new answers pop up every day, they move off. As humanity's response has been to create full philosophies that attempt to rationalize the entire picture in a convenient way.
That stops us from asking the difficult questions like Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir also had a few classifications for types of people in life who either get it or don't. There's the sub man, the person who cowers at the anx presented by our infinite freedom. They shut down or become apathetic towards life.
Through their choice of inaction. They can dim themselves to unfreedom and may inadvertently become puppets. For other people, remember, choosing not to decide is still a choice. There's also the serious man are the ones who assume that they have everything figured out the ones who subscribed to full philosophies and assume that there's conveniently is the correct one with all the answers.
Then finally there are the nihilist and these are Nazis not gone to these men are nihilists. There's none to be appraised who know that life, it doesn't inherently give meaning and that nothing ultimately can slake this desire. They know that reality can never be fully understood. They reject the idea that the questions of life can be fully answered by singular doctrines.
They are also depressed into an action. Simone de Beauvoir says that even operating in a way that presumes life is meaningless. Paradoxically gives some form of meaning to your life. You might cause the pile up, but you also might not. So why not drive anyway? Well, Voss says that if there is meaning out there to be found, it will be found through action that ultimately in your limited time on earth, it is your actions that make up your meaning.
How you spend your time and more importantly, who you spend your time on. She says the best course of action in the wake of this realization is to act in a way that is honest and that benefits others. She breaks from starter here saying that your best course of action is not to seek your own betterment, but the betterment of the people around you.
And we should aim to surpass ourselves, not as individuals, but as collectives, she says freedom is to be found in focusing on the other. You cannot be free without the freedom of the other, that the other is not really the other. You are the other. And the other is you. There may be varying particularities between you and others, but you'll all share a universal you like quality.
This human search for authenticity of the self expression of will. And liberation from barriers can be seen in the flow of the history of society. It's thought that humans first existed as scavengers then after inventing tools became Hunter gatherers with the invention of agriculture and the division of labor.
Our freedoms changed where once we only had to work as hard as it was required for us or who we were feeding to stay alive. After the agricultural revolution, we were forced into a different kind of work. Farmers still had to farm. And everyone else had to find a way to also benefit society or at the very least make the farmers toiling worthwhile.
If we skip forward to feudalism or society, in which a land owning Lord allow surfs to live on their land in exchange for services or the surplus production they produce capitalism can be seen as an attempt through liberal enlightenment ideals to liberate individuals. The idea that through exchange value, we could use money as a stand-in for value generated by labor property rights re-imagined as something not just doled out by the state to a militarized elite or claimed by a militarized elite without a state, but to anyone who could afford land protected by the state.
The surfs may be very good at making shoes, which the Lord may need more than they need someone to farm their land. And if bolt the Lord and the surf value money, the Lord has an incentive to allow that surf to be free. And the surf has an incentive to follow and chase a greater authenticity. I'm now going to transition fully from philosophy to sociology.
It's still keep with this topic of freedom. Adam Smith's capitalism look different than it exists today. I would pause it that it was meant to be a foundation for continuous societal building rather than the end all be all because in modern times, we can see that in practice capitalism did not live up to many of its enlightened, liberal, libertarian, or a galitary and values.
We say that everyone is free to do what they want, but what if, what they want, doesn't generate a lot of money. They're free to own land, but what if they can't afford it? What if the only way to pay their rent is to work multiple jobs because that's all they can qualify for and leaves them with no extra time to pursue things like education.
What if they were born into a place that provides them with very limited upward mobility or less opportunities than other people that they have to compete against in the same job market. In this case, these people would have been more free being born into a Hunter gatherer society. Sure. They wouldn't have an iPhone, but they also wouldn't know that they wanted an iPhone capitalism.
Didn't dismantle few Dale hierarchies and the way it was devised to in practice it's solidified those hierarchies made them tangible and lawful created a status quo where a small amount of comfort afforded to laborers, create an incentive to keep things the way that they are. So as not to lose what little they had, whereas in feudalism, you may have been a surf or a merchant, but your time was still relatively your own after you'd toiled a certain amount for your Lord.
The rest was up to you, make what you want for yourself. The Lord wants 30 bushels of hay by the end of the week. Once you've seen that job through, from start to finish the facilities and your time are your own in our capitalist society, it took until the 1930s before the concept of the weekend was invented.
And even that took much struggle and legislation to accomplish. No, I'm not suggesting that feudalism was more moral than capitalism, not by a long shot. But what I am saying is that many of the same critiques of the lack of freedom under feudalism, that capitalism was devised to eliminate can. Now almost all still be made regarding the lack of freedoms under capitalism.
We still have Lords and serfs haves and have nots. We just call them employees and employers. Now the way we justify it as no longer some divine Providence, it's now meritocracy God doesn't ordain. The rich, the invisible hand of the market does small bit of irony here. The first time the Adam Smith writes about an invisible hand.
It's literally in reference to God. Now this is not a moral argument on the rich or rich people. It's a critique of how capitalism didn't soften hierarchy is like, meant to it. Rigidified them. Now this is very oversimplified, but. Socialism can then be seen as an attempt to return capitalism to its enlightenment roots, to re-imagine the strictness of the hierarchies that created to give people who labor a greater freedom of choice in the conditions they must work in.
It tries to push our society further towards democracy. The idea that the greater the body of people is the more power they should have over their own existence. Socialism does this by reexamining property rights. For example, if you own a factory that makes sweaters most likely, it's not going to be you running the sewing machines.
If we are to assume that value is generated by labor or exerting energy to manipulate nature. As, as the human condition, according to Ricardo, Adam Smith and Karl Marx calmed down in the way that businesses are run and capitalism begins to look a little bit strange in the price of every sweater you sell, you factor in a fraction of your rent, upkeep and workers' wages, et cetera, but you must always charge more than all of those factors require.
Otherwise there'd be no sense in running a business. So you pay your workers, a going rate, despite the fact that the value they generate will be greater than that rate. That additional surplus value goes back to the person who owns the factory by the nature of how property rights are devised under capitalism.
For example, it's somewhat common for clerical errors to be made in payroll for an employee's weekly wage to be short accidentally. This is not a criminal act. Sure you can file a complaint, but litigation, isn't really an option. Now let's say at the end of your shift, you take a hundred bucks from the register and walk out with it.
Best case scenario, they take a hundred bucks off your next paycheck and you get shitcan. What will likely happen is that you will go to jail and that action will stay on your record for a very long time. Do you see the inconsistencies here? Marx and Smith would both be sorry, calmed down would both be totally in agreement on all of this.
Their point of contention comes from what percentage of the surplus is deserved by the risk involved in the procurement of capital socialism. Doesn't seek to eliminate hierarchies entirely rather give the workers a greater say in their working conditions by democratizing the workplace, ideally through legislation, but also through things like unions co-ops or syndicates.
If labor is after all the thing that creates value. The laborers are the ones that hold all the cards, hints striking as an effective form of protest. Socialism can be defined by a single sentence is when the workers own the means of production. That's it. So whenever you hear someone apply that name socialism to something that's not, when the workers own the means of production, ask them to define socialism.
I've been ghosted more times than I can count asking that exact question online. And in-person, this brings me one of the dirtiest words a person can say in the United States, Oh,
anarchism, and be seen as a continuation of the galitary agonism of socialism. But instead of trying to soften capitalism's hierarchies, communism, and anarchism seek to flatten them entirely. They do this by questioning the entirety of property rights and state apparatus is presupposed by capitalism. If land is a human, right, it has no business being bought or sold can be operated by a society on an as needed basis.
Many parts of production can be automated. As our modern technology often allows for it seeks a de commodified society where people work according to their ability and receive according to their needs. Most interpretations of communism involve a temporary state to usher in the new status quo with mechanisms in place to ensure that it Withers away after a few generations.
And you're left with a stateless society where class no longer exists in D commodifying society. You also eliminate the need for a state more on that in a minute. This is the idea of communism and its most basic for usually when you hear variations on this, they're either in bad faith or have more to do with implementation rather than the function after society has changed systems.
But these are the core tenants you can ask someone about when they apply that name to something. Besides what I've said above communism is a classless stateless moneyless society, which seeks to abolish private property and eliminate hierarchies while retaining industry. It's a little bit more complicated than socialism, but Hey, most things
now briefly returning to retroactivity the idea that hierarchies aren't needed returning to the kind of a galitary in society that existed prior to feudalism by while retaining the industrial nature of capitalism as a means to liberate as many people as possible as a means to more deliberately realize the enlightenment values that created capitalism.
It isn't possible without capitalism existing in the first place. It's impossible to conceive of communism. Without capitalism. Mark's calm down, said this himself. I think a lot of communists today, miss this point, we can never go back home. The genie is forever out of the bottle Pandora's box already opened, unless you can devise a way to eliminate or completely replace the surplus enjoyment that comes from commodification out of the minds of anyone who existed in a capitalist society, no return to an egalitarian state will ever be enough just like chicken noodle soup.
Any attempt to return to the past will be tainted by the present. Any future a galitary in society must be seen as the next stage of capitalism, rather than a complete refutation of capitalism. Otherwise, I think it's doomed to failure more on this and analysis of surplus enjoyment, which he called Jewish songs in part two of this series.
And right now I'm imagining I'm imagining both like Andy Warhol and Vladmir linen rolling in their graves because I keep bringing up kit. I keep bringing up chicken noodle soup in the context of communism. One of the caveats of the implementation of money in society is that it caused us to begin looking at life in terms of commodification.
If money could be used as a stand in for what you wanted, then anything you wanted could start to be thought of in terms of money, pre agricultural peoples on a plot of land may have shared certain tools or luxuries out of a sense of mutual aid through commodification. They were then incentivized to commodify these goods or services, borrowing a hammer from your neighbor.
Now costs money to rent where they once may have accepted to say some shoes you cobbled on trade or just your word, or maybe they would have given it to you out of nice. Now money has stood in for all of those things. On one hand, this is good. In case, for instance, your neighbor with a hammer doesn't need a shoe or isn't nice, but it also means that you need to make money somewhere, to be able to use the hair thus perpetuating the cycle of commodification.
Your labor can be a commodity to be bought and sold as is your time or your ideas intellectual property is something to be bought or sold even though your ideas are probably based. Well, I mean, they're definitely based on preexisting ideas. That's how human progress works. Tragically. Some societies began to see human bodies as commodities to be bought and sold our lives began to revolve around financial feasibility instead of survival, the most authentic and free way we could conceive or manage.
An implication of the introduction of commodities was commodity fetishism or this tendency of humans, especially those in modern times to see commodities as almost falling to earth from the heavens, with their value fully intact, instead of being an object, which had been labored on by someone else or many other people, Wallace Shawn, yes.
Inconceivable that wall is Shawn, I think said it best. When he said, when you buy a sweater, you enter into a relationship with not only the person who sold it to you, but also the person who gathered the materials, refine the materials, spun the materials, transported the materials, shelve the materials, and finally sold you the materials by buying the product of their labor.
You are connected to every system that perpetuates how they lived their lives in under what conditions. The thing that stands in the way of realizing this is commodity fetishism, that we see a commodity as some kind of Holy object, existing, purely in and of itself with hardly any relationship to who may have produced it.
The philosopher and sociologist max Horkheimer coined the term culture industry to explain how this inherent commodification, infects, even art and culture in our modern society, it becomes very hard to follow the categorical imperative when creating art in examining culture. It clouds, the reasons behind why we do things are that can help humanity, but that doesn't turn a profit.
No longer has an incentive to exist in anyone who's ever told their parents that they want it to be. Artists knows that slight look of fear in their eyes is they resist asking you that dreaded question. How do you expect to make a living doing that? If history is to be viewed as Hagle thought, from the perspective of humans struggling to be free, these little quirks, like commodification must be examined.
We're to understand modern freedom. We must be able to raise our view above the day-to-day monotony to see if what we're doing is that which we truly choose or that which we are being coerced into doing this takes a certain amount of time, courage. It takes a certain amount of honesty. It takes a certain amount of fear, inoculant to be able to do see-through the chaos of the headlines.
Now there are a few more classifications of people I want to discuss in order to frame some paths. This thinking can travel down in some ways I think negatively impact people. The first classification is the reactionary society evolves at a rapid pace, and oftentimes the status quo can be thrown aside in favor, a new one.
These shifts in a Jimminy can be scary. It's very human to fear the new, but if we are to act as spinosa suggests and act upon nature as a means to be more blessing. Then society must always progress. The reactionary is one who seeks to return to a previous status quo or resist the changing of the current status quo.
They're typically overcome with the idea that society has taken a wrong turn somewhere, but remember, you can never go back home. Time moves only in one direction. Any return to the past would be tainted by the present, our freedom, our lives. They're constantly changing on rails towards the future. We can only choose of that.
Track will bring greater prosperity to humankind or less. The second classification is the reductionist. This is the logical conclusion of some kinds of materialism. If all society and all history are simply the changing hands of capital, then class is all there ever is. And all there ever was no identity because identity would then be shaped by material circumstances.
So it can be somewhat dismissed if not entirely dismissed. Now I do think there's a bit of truth in this, but it's a slippery slope of materialism is all there is. If nothing exists outside of class, then we run the risk of reducing people to numbers in ushering in a form of unfreedom in the place of our March towards freedom.
If you're going to be a materialist, I would argue that you should always consider dialectical materialism as well. Ideals and identities should not always be completely cast aside. They can be sources of cultural and historical insight in the same way that the shifts in class struggle can be also a third classification.
And when at times I might sound like, is the enlightened centrist more than often, this is a moderate conservative or liberal that dismisses both far left and far right policies as being equally oppressive. This almost always stems from neoliberalism, which I'm going to get way, way into in part two of the series.
But basically neo-liberalism is a signifier that contains both liberals and conservatives. It's a general belief in like friendly market-based solutions. Centrism usually follows from a belief in horseshoe theory or that if you go far enough to the left or the right in politics, you arrive at the same place.
This is patently false. It's insanely disingenuous to say that a socialist seeking to reduce hierarchy and a fascist seeking to crush and underclass into submission are exactly the same. There is a somewhat controversial YouTuber named Voss who has an interesting way of classifying political ideologies.
I bring him up somewhat ironically, and that he gets called a Neo liberal, moderate by the left. And a left wing extremist by the right, instead of the usual four quadrant political compass. Like the one I alluded to in the intro, if you didn't catch that, he uses a single line on the left. There is no hierarchy.
And on the right, there is nothing but hierarchy. I find that this model is kind of helpful when weighing ideologies like stolen ism, that purported to be a Galatarian yet was a hierarchical. And at times oppressive state by nature, without taking any hard moral stances here, I will say that I don't think as dishonest to assert that materially Stalinism and Jacobin ism were similar in that they just changed the class that the state sanctified violence towards the state never withered away, like it was supposed to Jacobin ism, at least has the excuse of coming before
Stalinism doesn't even have that. It had the benefit of both the writings of Marx and Lenin. Holy shit, calmed down, and it still failed to create a state that withered away or create a classless society. Even if it did increase the prosperity of some underserved classes, Trotsky, calm down, said, quote, the party organization, the caucus at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole, then the central committee substitutes itself as the organization.
And finally a single dictator substitutes itself for the central committee, unquote, which we can see in hindsight is exactly what happened with Stalin. You don't need to calm down for that one. Okay. Uh, unfortunately this means I do need to address a fourth classification, a person, and that is the tanky.
It's a terminally online sort of nebulous term for someone who identifies as a leftist and thinks that in order to bring about leftist change, we'll need a possibly authoritarian state to usher it in one that may or may not, whether away or in other words, I believe a Marxist Leninist, although there may be some variants of, of Marxism Leninism that I'm not familiar with.
The things are so complex when we get this deep into leftist philosophy. And I'm not here to condemn tankers, to be honest with you only to point out how they differ from an Arcus and orcas are radically opposed to a state, whereas Marxist Marxist-Leninist Pankey's Solanus, whatever you want, all of them, or maybe none of them more possibly some, some of them need a state to usher in an anarchist society.
And then tankinis specifically would probably want that state to be authoritarian and oppressive at least to get us there. And then maybe, or may not, whether a way it's. This is a really hot button issue for the online left. And honestly, my take is that right now, I don't particularly care if the left took power today.
Like it was the radical left, you know, quote unquote took power today. We're like 50 to a hundred years out from any of these questions being partially right relevant. Okay. There's been enough division left regarding how change should be brought about and notice how, when all these people are squabbling online about Trotsky or odd tank Paris Familia, nothing is actually being done to systematically bring about a more egalitarian society.
So while I do think it's important to have distinctions for various types of nuanced political stances for practical reasons, and for my own sanity, I'm going to ask you what you want society to be, and then file you under either one's hierarchy Marquis or doesn't all of these classifications of people.
I believe in some way, miss the Mark, Mark singular. It is good on some level to be critical of radical change. It's good on some level to examine material conditions. It's good on some level to weigh all options. Good on some level to consider hypothetical power struggles, but there's a lot of wiggle room there.
There's infinite forms. Our future can take. So maybe right now, instead of focusing on the potential ideologies of tomorrow, we should shift our gaze towards the agency that would either implement those ideologies or crush them or maintain the current status quo. What is the state?
This has been a debate amongst philosophers, sociologists and uncles at holiday dinner tables for time immemorial in the U S the average person has a general grasp of what the state is. City councils, state congresses, the presidency, all that, but that's just how the concept of the state has taken form for us.
If you ask a modern liberal, the state may be the thing that enacts welfare or criminalizes or legalize a certain behavior for a conservative, the state is that cancerous entity that collects taxes and cycles industry with regulations, and also maybe protect against monopoly every now and then when they remember to the state, both is, and isn't only all of these things and the debate on what exactly constitutes sovereignty or the right to rule over others has been waged since before the enlightenment Thomas Hobbes thought that since people were inherently savaged by nature, the state needed to be a Leviathan that forces them to be civil Russo thought of the state as the only entity that could interpret the theorial general will.
The anarchist writer, Peter said the state is quote, a whole mechanism of legislation and policing that has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others. Unquote, max Weber said the state is quote the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence.
Within a given territory. Max Weber had a lot to say about authority. He thought politics at its root was the distribution of power that in a society decisions must be made based on how resources are expended or distributed. This means that there needs to be some form of authority to function as a final say on the decisions regarding a nation's resources in tribal pre agricultural simple societies.
Humans could maybe get by with decentralized localized. Decision-making using the resources at their disposal. However, they saw fit our modern societies, however, are too complex for this kind of decentralization. We're too industrialized. Our institutions that maintain people's livelihoods require flows of certain resources.
And those flows need to be monitored by some agency to keep them going. So that the whole thing doesn't collapse like a house of cards. This means that so long as such urgency exists. An agency will be necessitated. And so long as the agency exists, there will always be some group of people with power over another group of people.
Social power is different than political power. Someone can doctor up a charter, walk up to your front door and tell you that your house now belongs to them socially. This is just some guy and not the state exercising eminent domain or anything like that. You're going to kick his ass and give him wedgie, call him a nerd and dunk his head in a toilet Weber, distinguished legitimate authority as a special type of power.
He said, this is the authority seen as just by those over whom the power is exercised by now. You know, I like lists so naturally Weber gave three types of authority that people see as legitimate. The first is traditional authority. This is when the Sovereign's power is rooted in long-standing practices.
People raised in these types of societies often enjoyed them very much because they tended to be the children of people also raised in this kind of society. These societies obviously tended to be more religious too, and used religion to justify the divine right of Kings or the church to rule these societies were very common in the preindustrial age, unlike our modern societies, the merit of rulers, wasn't nearly as important as the divine blessing upon rulers.
Since God is thought to have ordained the King, their bloodline carries the means to exercise legitimate authority. Then there's legal, rational authority, which routes its power to govern in laws and rules and the rights of leaders to act under these rules. This is like every single modern government power is given through majority mandate and voting leaders are ordained by a constitution charter or some kind of federal founding document where traditional authority existed in the individual legal, rational authority exists in the office that individual occupies and the last kind of authority is probably the most interesting.
That is charismatic authority, charismatic authority. His power is rooted in a single individuals, extraordinary qualities. These persons can be good or bad, but they're seen by people as being almost divine in and of themselves. Weber said this form of authority is less stable than the others because when this leader dies.
Their authority and their charisma dies with them. Sometimes they can be aware of this so they can try to designate a replacement leader. But it's rare that this replacement leader can live up to the original charismatic leader. Weber said this type of authority is only stable when it evolves into one of the other types.
If a charismatic leader can convince the people that their divinity comes from their bloodline, this society shifts towards traditional authority. If they can convince the society that their divinity comes from rules and structures, then that society shifts towards legal, rational authority and examples of charismatic authority.
I mean, come on like, uh, you know, like, uh huh. And you know, nobody really comes to mind if the us was meant to be the land of the free, why did the founding fathers see fit to constitutionalized the federal government through legal, rational authority let's instead ask is authority and the state a part of human nature in a pre agricultural society.
How would a tribe collectively make decisions? A tribe, presupposes, a territory or a border that you can draw that separates us from them since the entire world isn't taken into consideration when making collective decisions within one of these borders. And if we are to assume that enlightenment individualist liberalism is universal retroactively, then these people would have needed some way of organizing the hierarchy of decision-making or distribution of resources.
As we just discussed some cultures, elected chiefs or leaders, some deigned, Kings and Queens, some voted in some lived as a collective of peer individualism, exercising, direct democracy when needed, but that's the rub. Humans are social creatures. We group together that interdependency will always stand in the way of a society based on the idea of a collective of pure individualists.
There's just too much contradiction there. When studying economics, you have to assume that humans function as collectives or your models of reality. Won't work properly. In 1833, a British economist wrote about a hypothetical field that was shared by multiple herders and their flocks. If no coordination was done in each sheep was allowed to graze to their fill.
Eventually the resource in this case, the field of grass ran out and everyone involved suffered for it. This is called the tragedy of the commons. The idea that in a world with finite resources, if everyone acts as unfettered individualists, without any regard for anyone else, not only will, they eventually suffer for it every day, we'll eventually suffer for it.
Uncoordinated action may seem freer in the short term, but give it time and it will eventually lead to unfreedom for all. So then there's voting via enlightenment thinking. Every person is ordained to make decisions for themselves, but modern society requires complex cooperation. So therefore, if the majority of people would like to act in a certain way, by nature of them, having more individuals, those decisions are sustained.
This is called direct democracy, and it's difficult to do in societies with large populations. So electoral politics was seen as an abstraction of the will of the majority. The people directly elect their representatives, their representatives vote on their behalf. Now ignoring things like lobbying and the electoral college.
This is basically how our society exists now, but there's another side to the state. We can argue over what constitutes a social contract. But if we are to accept that there is one, then a population consents to the governing force by acknowledging their right to use violence on certain people. What is violence?
Besides the no, no, no, no. We're not going there. Perhaps. It's harm done to other people. When, how is harmed defined. If you're mugged, you're the victim of violence. If you're robbed, you're the victim of violence. Okay. What if you do the robbery, then you're forcibly detained, blocked in a prison. You're the victim of violence, just the same as if you locked someone else in a room against their will, because they would also be a victim of violence.
We just tolerate a certain kind of violence towards a certain kind of people because it's ordained by the state. Our legal, rational society has rules and codes that it abides by. This creates a status quo, a sense of normalcy when behavior deviates from that status quo to protect our way of life. We incentivize conformity through the threat of ordained violence in this way, the state is inherently counterrevolutionary, as it can be seen as enabling a kind of coercive cooperation act in the way that we've said is correct, or we will take your freedoms away.
What's more, we will be justified in taking your freedoms away. Okay? Sure. In the content sense, this imperative to follow the status quo allows us to freely decide if we will obey or not. But a lot of good feeling morally superior does for you when you're sitting behind bars for stealing bread. So if we see the state as the agency, which regulates types of ordained violence, what is poverty, the state legislates and oversees a status quo that creates the inherent class divisions of capitalist society.
That requires some to own the means of production and others to work the means of production. If violence is seen as a restriction of freedoms, like bodily autonomy, freedom of movement, pursuit of happiness, et cetera, than even something. So innocuous as a city budget could be considered violence as it may restrict or redirect.
The material means that constitute people's ability to exercise those freedoms. Some right, libertarians might then say that those people are free to create their own material circumstances, but are they really, as long as they exist within a state's borders, they're subject to the state in whatever form it takes.
side note on libertarians. I was just talking with one the other night and he was railing against both socialism and the state. I almost felt bad telling him that the thing that stops private corporations from becoming collectively owned syndicates are property laws enforced by the state. Capitalism needs the state.
If we were to create a fully stateless tax-free capitalist, right? Libertarian in society that puts individual freedom above all else. How would property rights be disputed? How would people be able to groove that they owned anything and who would stop someone from lying or stealing? It would be materially, a return to feudalism or whoever has the largest standing army is the one who owns the land.
The second that two people create a mediating agency to oversee legitimize and enforce property. He claims they've created a state. This presents a problem for anarchists on both the right and the left, although more so for the right due to left for Tarion's belief that mutual aid can replace these mediating agencies and right libertarians insistence, that capitalism is a force that limits people's inherent greed, or, you know, I guess noble savagery.
So what is the thing that for lack of a better term, keeps people in line. What stops people today from creating a large standing army and therefore their own monopoly of power, power, and just doing things their own way. It takes more than just well-equipped militia or police force. It takes more than just fear to get people well to obey.
It takes a story. In feudalism or monarchal societies. This story was Christianity. God has ordained the sovereign after the enlightenment, this way of thinking no longer worked. That's why we need, she said, God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. What is holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives who will wipe this blood off us.
It was a statement, not of celebration, but a fear of what was to come next. Yes, the us is very religious, but we were founded on the idea of the separation of church and state. For a reason, the Greeks had the gods of Olympus. The Indians had the gods of the Vedas. Few Dale's societies had their Kings after science and materialism began to demystify and quantify the world.
What became of our shared narrative. What stopped us from descending into hedonistic, industrial nihilism marks. I would say ideology calmed down ideology. She filled that mythic and mystical void once filled by unopposed idealism, things like nationalism, entertainment or culture took its place in our modern society.
The meek are no longer promised to inherit the earth as the serfs once believed. Now it's that we live in a land of prosperity and through work hard work, you can gain the merits of a good life that our society, our culture, our nation is the bedrock of global ethics and almost in the same way as divine command theory.
What we do is just by nature of the fact that we are doing it. Ideology exists in the reasons given for why the status. I cannot change the late model philosopher, Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism. Our inability to take seriously, any other alternative, because capitalism is all we've known and increasingly it's all we can even imagine that it's elimination may mean giving up what few comforts we have.
Louie authors are defined two types of apparatus used by the state to control people, repressive, apparatuses that control people through threat of violence, like prisons and the police and ideological apparatuses that prevent revolutionary change through things like school or media. Think about professional sports through this lens.
For a moment, there may be some ulterior motives in the politician who displays a love of sports. There's always an energy for change that exists in society. This is a by-product of human nature to act on and shape our environments to better suit us. The maintaining of the system requires that this energy be spent in a way that does not disrupt the sense of normalcy in people.
You choose a team, you wear the clothes who study the doctrine. You hate your rivals, but all in a way that expends your radical energy in a safe way that doesn't disrupt the status quo. But that revolutionary energy is always there. Just waiting to be tapped into or redirected. Look at the chaos that overtakes the cities of teams that win window's broken buses, torched that energy is consciously thought of as maybe pride in the team, but maybe it can be better quantified by a different type of passion.
One that will riot only up to the point that it threatens the existence of the next season. Hagle thought that civil servants of the state represent a kind of universal class. He thought the governmental class would be the, would be interpreters of Rousseau's general, will it is the state after all that Outlaws slavery and enforces the civil rights act ignoring of course, that it was the state that created the conditions that necessitated these legislations in the first place.
The state can be viewed as the protector of certain universal freedoms. But calm down. Mark said that we should never think the state is really as impartial as it may seem from the outside. What is lobbying and how does it differ from bribery in a word legality. Those who have money in our society have more influence over the government.
Just look at how, how much money you need to win elections. You need a staff ads, slogans, banners, commercials, friends in high places. And if you're serious about winning a super pack that allows large corporations to donate large amounts sounds to you in capitalism. The universal class of government is never quite as universal as it seems no matter who is at the helm, would it be possible to create this universal reigning class one that considered the needs of all people equally calm down?
Mark said yes, but it requires universal suffrage or the assurance that it is really the will of the majority that is making societal decisions, a society where something like the electoral college, which was created to elevate the votes of white male landowners couldn't possibly exist. It would have to be a society where the people can very easily revoke their representatives authority.
If they were acting out of self-interest or in a way that their constituents disagreed with a society, he provocatively called the dictatorship of the proletariat. A governing class of regular working people. And that's something I think even right wing people would agree with. Just look at how popular election reform is for both red and blue voters.
Wonder why neither party ever for it. Hmm. Puzzling call Mark's didn't think that this universal suffrage would arise from the politics of the particular. You can't raise just one boat. You need to create a tide that lifts all boats at once in aiming for the universal solution. You solve the particular problems as well, because if a state can't be trusted to carry out universal suffrage, then what agency can, well, perhaps the people legitimize the state, but to have this kind of Universalist movement, you need to direct the energy of people away from things that drain it like ideological state apparatuses culture war, Mr.
Potato head, Dr. Seuss ASP bullshit and alienation alienation is a big one. I'll try to summarize it from the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy quote, alienation picks out a range of social and psychological ills involving a self. And other more precisely, it understands alienation as consisting in the problematic separation of a subject and an object that properly belong together.
Mark's expanded on Hegel's idea of alienation and saying that the subject can be thought of as the worker and the object can be thought of as that, which the worker creates a member of the merchant class under feudalism may have learned the trade of shoemaking in the energy expended upon raw nature to create the commodity for selling.
There's a bit of the Shoemaker that goes into the shoe. Everyone, he gives a shoe to will know exactly who to thank, and the Shoemaker can take pride in the entirety of his work. Compare that to the modern Shoemaker on an assembly line. One person may attach the souls. Another may string the laces, not one of them can point to the product of their labor and take pride in the whole thing.
They're alienated from it. Subject and object have been disconnected. And this manifests itself in the Malays from the workers and exhaustion after putting the caps on shoelaces for eight hours a day, five days a week. And if you're lucky all but two weeks a year, you just want a beer and a couch and a TV.
This is what capitalism demands of people. You don't choose the shoe designs, and you're this alienated from the product of your labor. You don't create the entirety of the product and you're thus alienated from the production process. You're meant to check your problems at the door when you're at work, you're an employee and nothing more.
You're this alienated from your nature or your species, essence, that which makes you human. And finally you and the other workers around you are incentivized or sometimes coerced into just doing your own job, working subjectively instead of collectively, you're thus alienated from your fellow person.
Think about this. The next time you're stuck in traffic investments in public transportation would greatly improve the chaos and congestion of the morning commute. It may even increase productivity, but it may also have you thinking that you share something in common with your fellow human beings. You may be tempted to sell your isolating car or move to a place with denser housing or pay into a universal healthcare system.
The same way you pay into insurance.
Michelle. Fulco had a lot to say about the design of prisons more. So he had a lot to say about the resemblance of regular civic buildings to prisons, things like hospitals or schools. They're hierarchical the ran by directors and principals, not unlike a warden, they're isolating and categorical like classrooms, wards, or cells.
Designed to divide revolved around obedience. You listened to the doctor because they know better because they've studied more and have your best interests at heart. Not inherently bad. I'm not saying you should distrust doctors, but isn't it strange that the same could be said about a judge that puts you in prison.
Fuko said that the best possible way to design a prison would be a single guard tower in the middle of a massive cylindrical room made out of prisoner cells. He called this the panopticon. If you can condition prisoners to live in a state of perpetual potential observation, you get maximum conformity with minimal effort.
There might not even be a guard in the tower, but the prisoner can never truly be sure they're not being watched. Sometimes I like to look into my webcam and just say, I know you're watching to keep my NSA agent on his toes. Noam Chomsky is a fan of reiterating this point as it relates. It's the school that school functions as a filtering process for revolutionary behavior from a young age, you're taught to accept constant supervision, to seek the approval and meet the standards of those in positions of power and to work collectively only when it's sanctioned and you accept it from such a young age that you never even think about it.
Children with natural rebellious energy that doesn't align with how young humans are supposed to behave are subjected to punishment until they conform. If they don't they're expelled or ostracized in the same way that greater society will constrain or remove you for behaviors, it deems inappropriate or illegal.
Even calling disobedience and children. Rebellious is ideological in that it implies a personal moral failing on their part and a monopoly on morality on the part of the person or apparatus. Who's calling them rebellious, shut up and do your job. Maybe the panopticon isn't watching, but you better damn well act like it is.
I do want to save this future episode, but I do also feel like I have to mention fucking orange, uh, Jill's day lose Giles' day Jill's gay lose stay, lose,
lose was a French philosophy or Jill's shield. They lose. And Felix Qatari and their book, anti Oedipus here. The book amongst other things is a reputation of Freud's obsession with family hierarchy, as the basis of psychoanalysis and psychic trauma. They think that in assuming all trauma stems from the nuclear family and childhood trauma ignores huge parts of society, they think that this line of thinking can be used to further legitimize fascism, which I will be delving into heavily in the next episode.
But very, very simply is a form of society. That is nothing but top down hierarchy from an edible or Freudian psychoanalytical point of view, if all trauma ultimately stems from your family structure, then top down hierarchy is ingrained in human nature. Now, I don't believe that this is correct due to the existence of non-hierarchical societies in history.
As GJ said, once in an interview and I'm quoting from memory, we should keep in mind that nature may appear hierarchical, but it's mostly improvisational. Oh, I think that was from his, uh, debate with Jordan Peterson. However, it does seem like something that humans are at the very least prone to do or have been prone to do for the last 10,000 years or so.
The really interesting way that Deleuze and Guattari think that we can combat hierarchy apology inherent in psychoanalysis and psychology is by becoming more like the schizophrenia. One who's thinking and behavior jumps from the individual to the social, to the political, to the physical dimensions and back again in a manner that cannot be predicted by fashion or any hierarchical power structure, hierarchy, the stop sign you will obey without thinking.
It's interesting to think what constitutes a mental from this perspective. This is part of the reasons psychologists and psychoanalysts don't really get along from the psychoanalysts perspective, the psychologist, or especially the psychiatrist are only attempting to mitigate the symptoms rather than treating or studying the disease.
Think about what a wealth of information into the functions of the human mind. A person with schizophrenia may be yet for us. People who suffer from extreme schizophrenia are mostly outcasts and burdens. Why? Because they're not profitable. They're not predictable. Our society has set up a frame through which we think it's moral to invest in sick people's rehabilitation.
So long as we're able to eventually continue extracting labor from them, your job is making you depressed or anxious. So you go to a therapist that gives you techniques or medications to help you cope with those symptoms. If the goal of the therapist is to minimize human, psychic suffering, then why isn't there a league of anticapitalist psychologists, a big box store that moves into a small town drives mom and pop stores out of business gains command of the local supply chains, forces hundreds out of their jobs, or courses them into working for that very big box store for a starvation wage is simply considered to be doing good business or is a successful big box store.
And yet a person who Lutes a single TV from that very store is an irredeemable criminal and an employee depressed because they don't know how they're going to feed their children. That week is told to check their problems at the door and see a shrink on their own time. Of course, we've accepted a status quo that was given to us as children.
In the same way we vilified criminals. We diagnosed children with ADHD and then give them the pharmaceutical equivalent of meth. They work more productively. We ostracize guys, people suffering from what the state defines as a mental disorder, without any consideration. For what point of critical reference we are saying that their mental state is lesser, like shaving the corners of a square peg to make it fit around hole, or maybe more accurately shaving the corners off a square hole so that a square peg no longer fits how tragically ironic that in a life that forces you to labor to stay alive in a system that commodifies your labor, the system that alienates you from the enjoyment of that labor treats, the symptoms of that labor like personal failure on your part suggests that you are the reason you are unable to fit and it's on you to fix yourself and then ties medical treatment of those symptoms to the very system of labor that created them not to get too much into my personal political opinions, but the commodity finding and tying of health care to your job in the United States, barbaric from a psychoanalytical philosophical, or even just a human standpoint.
So what if you don't like this. What, if you don't agree with the raw deal being explained to you by the little dweeb on the podcast? Well, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg reform or revolution, I'll come back to reform for now. Let's talk about the fun one. What is revolution? The war word itself implies a cycle like that of the earth around the sun.
Simply put revolution can be thought of as violence directed at the state or whatever agency materially makes decisions for or on behalf of the people. The word revolution itself can conjure up either fear or pride, depending on which context is spoken. It ask an American what they think of the American revolution, and now ask them what they think of the Bolshevik revolution.
Americans revolted against the colonial state. They felt oppressed and unrepresented by spilled blood to free themselves. The French revolted against an aristocratic state. They felt oppressed and unrepresented by spilled blood to free themselves. The Russians revolted against an oppressive monarchy and aristocracy.
They felt oppressed and unrepresented by spilled blood to free themselves. The Haitians revolted against an enslaving colonial state. They felt oppressed and unrepresented by spilled blood to free themselves. While the particulars may differ the mind that there are some universalities we can identify.
A through-line here is people dissatisfied with their state. So naturally the question follows, is it possible not to have one people like Noam Chomsky and Peter might say yes for most of human history, our tribes were gala Tarion without the need for repressive modern state apparatus. If someone broke the tribe's trust, they were reformed or ex-communicated at the will of the people.
Most, everything was shared. So no need for a mediating agency to determine property rights. There are hundreds of examples of these kinds of societies throughout history. I'll link a few in the show notes. That's where the anarchist belief in mutual aid comes from society doesn't need to be built on competition.
It's possible to build a society on cooperation. In fact, throughout history, most of our societies were built on cooperation, Hobbes and Rousseau may partially agree, but to take a society from a tribal one capable of sustaining a few dozen people to an industrial modern one capable of sustaining millions.
Thanks agriculture, the noble Savage Venus of human nature needs to be handled or at the very least taken into consideration. There's no definitive answer here because it's very hard for us to understand what exactly human nature is. We can only look at societies throughout history, but I would personally agree with the former.
I think once people's needs are provided for assuming they're not deemed to be psychotic by their society, which is a real possibility, their incentive to harm their fellow man falls to almost nothing. Your wellbeing is more conducive to my wellbeing. It's not until concepts like greed or power are instituted that people have to lie and steal and cheat.
Now, obviously I'm speaking in very general terms. I know tribal warfare existed that gives a little credence to Hobbes and Rousseau. It can be true that tribal societies were both more egalitarian and also capable of warfare and lying at the same time. I'm not the man who's going to dialect ties this contradiction.
There are as many types of revolutionary theory as there are instances of revolution in history because nobody's struggle is particularly the same. The tendency to name revolutionary movements is almost always retroactive. Once the action has occurred, history attempts to categorize with names like Jacobin ism, Leninism, Bolshevism, but you could just as easily say Americanism or Haitian ism to understand revolution from a materialist standpoint, it's important to understand class.
I'm sure you're aware of the terms, bourgeoisie and proletariat, even if it's just in a cursory sense or something you heard in a rap song, you can also think of this as the haves and the have nots or those who own the means of production in the case of the bourgeois and those who operate the means of production.
In the case of the proletariat, I'm going to assume that you're calm. Now. This is how Mark's classified the division of labor under capitalism, but since he was critiquing capitalism, while it was still in its infancy, this view of our society can seem a little too binary at times. Like where does the small business owner fall in the binary of bourgeoisie and proletariat?
They don't own incredible amounts of capital likely any means of production. And they don't work in a sweat shop for marks. They would fall under the category of the petite bourgeois or the petty bourgeois or the small bourgeois, small time capital owners or people with small capital investments who despite sharing material circumstances more in line with the proletariat, identify as bourgeoisie.
It's the small business owner with one or two employees who still wants tax cuts for billionaires. He's one bad month away from being homeless. But if you ask him he's a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, what about the nonpolitical or people who can't be bothered to give a shit about politics or this class mumbo-jumbo nonsense, they would fall under the category of the lumen, proletariat or proletariat mass of working people, unaware of class consciousness or operating under a false consciousness, which is a phrase which means a misunderstanding of the interpretations of reality.
Through the frame of class consciousness, the American revolution begins to look a little different. The American people saw themselves as proletarian people alienated from the fruits of their labor. And it had enough. We oversee the fields and the factories. They said, why should the King get a cut? It's easy through the Rose colored glasses of history to see this as a universal phenomenon that swept across the country.
But I'm sure that there were those petite bourgeois few who defended the crown and the safety that British sovereignty provided. And I'm sure there were at least one or two people who worked hard at their jobs, paid their taxes. And as long as they got to go home and have some rum or wine at the end of the day, they didn't want to fight a revolutionary war.
Now they'd probably go along with the revolutionary sentiment. Once the red coats started quartering men in their dominance, third amendment bitch, but until then may nonpolitical the status quo was just good enough for them. Of course, there was also the slave proletarian of the time who revolted again and again, throughout the founding of the American colonies, seeking their freedom only to be crushed by the state.
I'll be coming back to them. Revolution looks different to people inside of a society enriched by bourgeoisie capitalism or imperialism than it does to the people in a country that is ravished by bourgeoisie capitalism or imperialism change is inevitable. It's the nature of the universe. We can either resist that change or embrace it.
If we're going to embrace it, we need to ask ourself if it's better to be done safely or directly, this was the heart of the great debate that ended the friendship of John Paul Sartre and I'll bear Kemo. And this is the debate that still rings true today. To usher in a better world, as we see it, should innocence be put in harm's way.
How do you know if your revolution is just, or if it will just create a new form of oppression as of yet unseen, it's hard to tell the event of the Bolshevik revolution created stolen ism and the enlightenment created capitalism and capitalism created both Marxism and fascism. So who knows? I think the answer lies in what each revolution once.
And if they're fighting on behalf of the particular or the universal, we should always seek to do as little harm to people as possible. That's the building blocks of ethics. Noam Chomsky says that true revolution only happens without slipping into totalitarianism. When the vast majority are made aware of the fact that their institutions have been pushed to their limits and are still failing, the status quo must be shown to be hollow.
And you need almost everyone to participate after the French revolution was over and the Jacobins ruled the terror began thus a new state was created through monopoly of power, the exercise to violence on its people, the lines for which classes it was appropriate to use violence against were just redrawn, not erased.
Now granted how the aristocracy treated the peasants. It's a little hard to take pity on Marie Antoinette. I will grant them that. Chomsky has a great line where he says, you can start the revolution tomorrow. You can take up arms and March on chase bank tomorrow, and you'll be shot in five minutes. And then the revolution is over.
That's where reform comes in using liberal electoral politics to push our institutions to their limits, to see if we can create a more just society with them. Should there come a time when we deem further action necessary, we can't have this stupid 50 50 split when it comes to our politics in the United States, otherwise a potential revolutionary war just becomes a civil war.
On the other hand, there were those who tried to assassinate Hitler. How much more just can include a top B than that. The answer here is that there's no easy answer. Every revolution must be judged on its own merits. Chomsky says the burden of proof is always on those who choose violence, but stipulate that threshold can actually be met.
Sometimes it depends on who's asking who they're asking and what each of them want a whole dissertation just to arrive at talk is cheap.
One last exam. Before we close this section out a little thought experiment in revolutionary perspective and critical theory, as told by professor Gerald Horne and paraphrased by myself. Before the American revolution of 1775, there was the glorious revolution of 1688 in which the British people depose their King.
The poppy narrative is that the revolution took place because of religious differences between the people and the royalty, but there were other material interests at play. The merchant class was highly in favor of the revolt due to the monarchs establishment of the Royal African company, a regulatory entity for the slave trade, the merchant class as the producers of a mince wealth for the Monarch through their trade of slaves, wanted a greater say.
So they joined the revolt ousted, the King and the country greatly reduced the power of the crown for the merchant class. This meant that they could celebrate their new found freedom by further, during the slave trade with much less government foresight. After the revolt British slavery flock to Africa in droves as their market was freshly unhindered.
The market boomed and it led to the enslavement of exponentially more Africans across the globe, but especially in the Western hemisphere where increased slave labor in turn created a boom in the sugar cane industry. Now with the rise and enslaved populations also came arise in the revolutionary energy among those enslaved populations, slave revolts in the Caribbean increased exponentially.
Similarly to the Haitian revolution, the population of African slaves greatly outnumbered the population of British slave owners. The increasing ferocity of the slave revolts caused many of the British to flee northwards towards the, as of yet ununited of England, where the English still outnumbered the slave population.
However, this did not free them from slave revolts. They happened regularly across the adolescent colonies from New York. The Gulf of Mexico London looks at this situation in order for the call and he's across the seed to be viable and profitable. They need to be much, much less volatile. So the British and tours and the French and Spanish who had been instigating many of the slave revolts in order to undermine British rule over the land, the British one, these war, but it was costly.
So they many new taxes on merchants of all kinds across the Americas in order to cover their losses. Slavery had made North American settlers complacent and rich. Uh, society revolved around forced unpaid labor can be very lucrative for the ones holding the whips. They weren't accustomed to being overtaxed.
Most of what they had came for free, the only investment they paid for the goods they sold were blood, sweat, and tears that they themselves didn't shed through the Royal proclamation of 1762. London hindered the movement of the settlers West in the Americas towards new peoples to genocide and enslave and away from a higher tax rate.
This put London in direct material conflict with American real estate speculators in the Western part of the United States real estate speculators like George Washington in 1772, the London courts began to hear arguments regarding the outlawing of slavery. This made the merchant class across the sea, a little uneasy, the prosperity of the new world hinged on free labor.
The conflict came to a crescendo with what is commonly called the American revolution in 1775, but is what professor Gerald Horne calls the counter-revolution of 1776 in his book, the counter-revolution of 1776 slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America in the book highlights how even the white Americans were fighting for their perceived freedom.
African-American cited oddly with London because the freedom the colonists were fighting for also contain the freedom to enact oppression, carte blanche on the enslaved population, particularly the war was a refutation of colonialism and a declaration of enlightenment style Liberty, but it failed to meet the universality of those liberties.
The revolutionary, everybody contained a huge population that was not included in the Liberty being fought for. It was a particular suffering, a rising tide that lifted only white male land owning boats. The Americans won the war. This let them return earn to and expand the slave trade, which was made even more lucrative by their new found independence from Britain and therefore British taxes run rough shot through native American lands and carry out one of the worst genocidal campaigns in history.
It let them continue using slave labor for another 54 years after England outlawed it. And yeah. Okay. I guess they threw some religious freedoms in there too big whoop though. It's been mythologized for American citizens. Even the American revolution is not immune to recontextualization by way of events.
When viewed through the lens of historical materialism, even something like a yearning to be free of taxation without representation begins to look differently. I bring this up to highlight that no event in history is isolated often. It's not until they happen, that we're able to see clearly each of the steps along the way to creating them.
But you need only look and ask simple questions to understand why follow historical and dialectical materialism, ask yourself who is fighting for the universal and who is fighting for the particular. If your side one, would it raise all boats, you should ever encounter an ideology that claims to want to return to a previous epoch, ask them what it would mean for certain classes of people who suffrage is a little more recent.
So fear. How do we build up a tolerance? There's one last thinker who agrees with spinosa in this regard, mows say tongue parallel that I haven't seen many people make. So we're kind of in unchartered waters here. In his essay on practice, mouses of knowledge, than it can only be gained through direct action or experience.
You cannot truly know something without investigating it. Humans are social creatures. We engage in political, social scientific and artistic pursuits because it's our nature to change our environments. We have no choice, but to change the past, Mao says that in all these pursuits, as we act, we see more clearly our relationships to our fellow man Mao.
And spinosa both agree that we cannot form concepts of knowledge. A Priore our raw interactions with reality are purely phenomenal. In the literal sense. We can not draw conclusions from these raw interactions with reality alone. So we proceed through social practice or action. We manipulate our environments.
We leap towards concepts. Models of reality in our minds. Humans are incredibly special in this way. We don't just simply seek to discover external patterns or relations and things. We grasp the internal connections within things. Our knowledge transcends itself becomes greater than the sum of its parts through practice and action.
We're constantly recontextualizing our own views of the past. So perhaps even our perception. It would be seen as an event, perhaps even our consciousness can be seen as a miracle. The process of aligning our perception of reality is a difficult one. It takes work, but that's life. You might as well aim for accuracy.
When our imagined reality doesn't align with how reality really is our goals fail. But every time we fail, our perception of reality gets a little more true to the real thing. Our goals get a little more achievable, but only if we keep acting through failure, Mao, warns that we should avoid the pitfalls of what he called.
Book worship. He quotes a Chinese proverb. How can you catch tiger Cubs without entering the layer? Theoretical knowledge can only be gained through practice after your theoretical knowledge is refined to practice. It must return knowledge must progress through the stages of the perceptual, to the rational, to the revolutionary.
Otherwise, all knowledge is useless. A virus has overcome our global society. The name of this virus is fear. It's crippling and paralyzing. It causes delusions and in serious cases, death, but there is a cure. The name of the vaccine is material collective action. Don't let your reality be so fluid that it can't be understood.
Don't let it be so solid that you assume your ideology conveniently has all the answers don't fall for the lies of rugged individualism. Your life is a complex series of interrelationships with the people around you and all of those people are searching for meaning and fighting off the anguish of freedom.
Same as you do not allow yourself to lose the meaning within the meaninglessness. Be free to wonder if Sisyphus ever laughs and know that. Should you ever catch your breath and get a chance to look up from your Boulder and pushing it up your mountain? You'll see a billion other climbers around you would gladly accept a hand.
In my opinion, one of the most hindering paradoxes of our time is that our hedge funds ideology has made us feel so powerless that it's able for us to convince ourselves that things just happen senselessly and at random. And while it's true that you may know ever know the full extent that any single action may have on reality.
If we fear what we don't know now, now in the present, well, we'll know what to fear soon enough to quote Mao. One last time. Everything under heaven is an utter chaos. The situation is excellent. And finally, in the words of the late Michael Brooks, be ruthless with systems and kind to individuals. Thank you very much for listening.
I hope you learned something. Be sure to leave a review and I will see you in part two.