The Panopticon
On power, politics, culture and art.
Two cellmates. Prisoners of the cave. Students of shadows. Observers of light. Wander to the outside.
The Panopticon
#12 Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch
A discussion on the Revolt of the Elite and Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch.
Twitter is @ThePanopticon84
Welcome to the Panopticon. It is October 5th year of our Lord, 2023. I am thinking out loud here with the Archtichrist. The Archtichrist, archtichrist, why don't you talk to us about your name? But before you do, let me tell our audience what we're going to talk about Today. We're going to talk about the revolt of the elites in betrayal of democracy by Christopher Lash. It's going to be a fun podcast, lot of insight here. But, archtichrist, why say you name?
Speaker 2:Well, in the revolt of the elites.
Speaker 2:He discusses, towards the end, oscar Wilde's kind of idea that art should be the religion, the new religion, and he says that Wilde, in this essay called the Soul of man Under Secularism, kind of says that the artist, that Christ, was an artist.
Speaker 2:He was someone who identified, who distinguished himself from the group, which was, I guess, the Jews or whatever Jews that he was running with at the time. He came up with his own sort of philosophy, his own idea, and it was about individualism and that each and every Christ, I guess, according to Wilde, says that each and every person should love themselves right and be able to develop that personality they have and not be constrained too much or oppressed, let's say, or uniform like made uniform, like other people have. And that's what kind of the artist is like in our minds at least, is that the artist is always almost anti-tradition, anti-group mentality, coming up with their own ideas, trying to flesh them out, living a life according to their own ideals and creating beautiful things at the same time. So that's kind of I'm kind of playing off that. And then I'm playing off the Nietzschean notion of the Antichrist for purposes of this podcast.
Speaker 1:All right, and.
Speaker 2:I am Now. What about yours? Well, I'm thinking out loud.
Speaker 1:Well, initially, I think, my years in the military, we had to do a lot of self-evaluation and evaluation with our bosses and one of the things that always came up well, you know what are your strengths, and give me three strengths and give me three weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses I thought that would always come up on my for me would be I think out loud too much. Others may call it brainstorming, so I relate it to brainstorming, and so you have some mini folks who are able to think, then talk, which I find and they come out with a kind of a brilliant, articulate description of whatever they're talking about. I'm on, then I'm on the other or the other end of it, I guess, or the opposite end is I have to talk, to think, especially when it comes to complex things such as politics and religion, philosophy and other things, because I have to get that shit out of my mind and out into the ether, and I prefer having other people there too. I can, you know, I'd prefer not to talk to myself or think out loud to myself. I need other people there to kind of almost like a tennis match I throw an idea out there, the person on the other end of the net hits it back left, right down and that really helps me form opinions, ideas, theories, what have you Thinking out loud in a military environment can be dangerous, because then people can perceive that as indecisiveness or unknowing or just playing out in competency.
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever got myself into trouble like that too much, but often in my own head I felt like I was getting to that point where I wanted to brainstorm, I wanted to apply some critical end up thinking and I think some folks had biases of their own, where you're like the George Patton and you have answers for everything right off the bat, kind of this Hollywood characterization of what army generals, army leaders, military leaders are and should be, where they are making decisions automatically. But there's a lot of thinking in a lot of it's like a God.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but what people need to understand I guess this is again my own self rationalization is there went a lot of research and training behind all that too, behind being a leader, behind being a military soldier or a Marine or what have you. There's a lot that goes into doing that. Now you do want that for sure on the battlefield, but it takes years and years of preparation to get to that point. Now, when you're in a I spent many years planning strategy and operation, military operations and stuff like that it's encouraged to brainstorm, it's encouraged to think out loud, and so thinking out loud has always been a phrase and a attribute. I guess you would.
Speaker 1:I've struggled with back and forth on whether I should like it or not, and right now I'm in a point of I appreciate thinking out loud. I like thinking out loud despite what others may think, but now I'm in a position where I can think out loud despite what other people may think, where, before you have to take other people's perceptions of you, whether they are real or not, into account, you always have to kind of self survey what people are thinking of you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in this podcast, we're not experts, we don't have these ideas in our grasp. Really, we're just kind of, we're trying to understand them and so thinking out loud, going back and forth, the Socratic method is a good way to fully understand something, and a wise professor of mine once said that, if you can, if you can, if you, the way you can tell if someone understands that idea, a complex concept like what we're reading here and discussing, is if they can utter it in a cohesive, coherent way. Right, if you don't, if you can utter it a clear, cohesive way that reflects that you've grappled with it interior in your mind and that you can make sense of it and it makes sense to you, and so I mean, you're not a philosopher in the well, you may think of yourself as one right and you are thinking of these ideas, but you're not an authority.
Speaker 2:I'm not. So we don't have these things in our grasp yet. That's not to say we won't, but yeah, this podcast isn't people aren't. If they are gonna come to it at all, aren't they coming to it? Shouldn't come to it for authority on these topics. What do you think?
Speaker 1:I, I, I, I, I. I mean, in my mind, I agree with you. In my heart, I'm like, no, I'm a philosopher and we might have, we might be just the simple tools of the gods and might glean out some real truth here and not even know it, or know it and never be heard. And so I guess it's the explorers which our audience is, is. They might be coming to our podcast for different reasons than why we are producing this particular episode, and so we might give out nuggets of of a small truth that is part of their larger truth that we may have no idea. And so so, yes, I do agree, if you're expecting some sort of inside information on politics, government, theology, military and all that, you're not gonna get that here, like the facts, you know. Oh, I have information that President Trump pissed on his. I don't know, you know, I have information that the still dossier was true.
Speaker 1:You know, we're not, we're not, we're not journalists, I guess you could say, and we're not insiders, definitely you could say that. But philosophers, I think you could argue that we are. But going back to thinking out loud, I mean, that was one of, I think, my number one ideas of the name for this podcast, but then when he searched it there was like 20 other thinking out loud podcasts. So that kind of scratched that out for me and that was my favorite one because it's even. This is exactly what we do. I think, going back to what you were saying, is we're not authorities on most of these topics and we're just kind of thinking out loud and trying to we're trying to figure out the truth ourselves, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Well, even Lash discusses this issue of public opinion, public debate versus authority, the elite control over the universities, control over truth. In the middle chapters, if you remember that, he discusses certain philosophers on journalism who feel that public opinion is a mess and journalism shouldn't really reflect public opinion. This is Walter Lippmann he alludes to, Because all we care about is we get too emotional about it. We don't want to know. So he proposes facts in journalism, just simple information versus almost interpretation of the facts, which is what's going on now and has been going on for many years in journalism, way back when. So let's get into a summary of this book the revolts of the elites, shall we? We shall. So I'm just going to read a summary from Wikipedia, or do you want to try to summarize it yourself?
Speaker 1:Let's try to do it. Let's do it ourselves first.
Speaker 2:Because in the vein of thinking out loud, yeah, in the vein of thinking out loud.
Speaker 1:Do you want to go or do you want me to say it? You got to give me a few minutes to open up Wikipedia and I'll just pass it out of my eyes, all right.
Speaker 2:I'll give it a go. So, again, this author in this book touches on some things we've been discussing, which is this I mean, we've talked about the power elite by C Wright Mills, so, like the fact that he mentions the elite, right, there's this 20% of elite people out there who are running things the education system, the culture system through media, the political system. Also that they're different, right, that the elite are different than the masses, the elite for one, which separates them and makes them unique and different from the aristocracy, which is the old elite, in that they're more mobile. This issue of mobility, whereas the aristocracy, back in the day, were tied to the land and they were invested in increasing the livelihoods or the prosperity of the people that are on the land, the peasants, and so they would do these public services out of making their power greater, but also to make what? To make the, I guess, the people better. It mattered to them.
Speaker 2:Whereas now the elite are global, they're globalist, they're not really tied to one space, because last says that you have to be able to leave your neighborhood in order to achieve success in whatever field you're entering, that achievement and power. Therefore, power is tied to being able to be very mobile, and so you go to the coastal cities. If you're from Omaha and you want to be this big lawyer, you go to New York and then on top, even after that, investing in money, world travel. Cosmopolitanism is all tied into this to Lash's idea of what the elite are. They have more money to travel. They're more invested. The elite culture now is more cosmopolitan in flavor. That's what they value also, so they're going to go to films and theaters that promote this. The negative effect this has on the public is that the elite, who has all the capital, is no longer going to invest in Omaha, let's say, or whatever state these people come from, even the country itself, because the elite are more international. They're not tied to any one nation. So what happens if one nation starts becoming degraded and going into decline? Well, they don't really care. Is what Lash says Just starts come from and we've discussed this in our podcast all along is like this elite is global, it's super national, it appears, and so they they don't really Well, they don't have to or feel the need to reinvest in the nation from which they come.
Speaker 2:So he goes on and ultimately in this book he goes on to not only distinguishing the elites of old, the aristocracy In the elites of today, but also how those elites and that idea of cosmopolitanism Starts infiltrating the education system to which they go to. The elite educate the elite schools, but also the cities themselves are made up differently. There's no longer a neighborhood Because of their lack of investment in the people. From what? In the states and nations from which they come, the neighborhoods that made up the middle class are starting to decline because there's no longer, you know, money being pumped in. There's a fracturing of the middle class and Also an alienation of the middle class from the political system and political debate, knowledge systems.
Speaker 2:And then, and then, lastly, from what I understand, it's almost this degradation of religion. What lash sees as a problem in the modern world, that the elite are no longer religious. They've in fact hijacked a new or made a new religion through means of Freud and Marx Therapy, the psychoanalytic view of the person and the culture that that's replaced religion. And so all the, the big religious figures back in the day are now, like you know, the psychologists and the. The self-help movement reflects that all these lingo that's permeated through the culture, through psychoanalyst analysis, has, has is evident of that and what you know, because what?
Speaker 2:When he points to this fact of the church used to, I guess, deal with these high moral things, guilt, sin. It helped relieve the individual of that. Psychoanalysts does the same. You know it deals with guilt, the reasons why you're. It's not because of something wrong with you, it's something wrong with the society or the your dad and your mom that caused you to do this. You know it's like you're a passive victim almost in this, in your problems. So it focuses on the individual, which is new and last talks about this end of rise of individualism is. I don't know if it's beneficial to the elite or it's a reflection of what the elite in themselves are like and that it's affecting the culture. And so it almost like his, his antidote to this problem Going on with the separation between the elites and the public is a New, a new religion, like an older type of religion, like a traditional Religion, needs to come back or what that religion did for people at the time.
Speaker 2:He doesn't get to specifics really, but it seems he's very conservative in ideas. He I was reading a bio on him he was in the 60s a neo-Marxist but that took a turn and and in the 80s I think the late 70s, 80s and 90s, before he died in 94, he's quite conservative, I feel. So that's just that's kind of what I got from a lot of it, but very detailed, very complex, and he brings in all these thinkers into different his different chapters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think he contrasts, he opens up and contrasts his theory with the theory of a Spanish philosopher, or or tega, who in the early 20th century wrote a book, revolt of the masses, and and.
Speaker 1:And it was under the umbrella of communism, the rise of the people, tearing down the old institutions of the old aristocracies and so forth. And you know, the people were just spoiled, the recipients of hard work done by the aristocrats, and it was the masses who were breaking, breaking away from the old way. And and then lash opens up with, in contrast, where in other, in fact, it's the elite who are who are acting this way.
Speaker 2:Well, I can go back, go ahead with or tega II Jose or tega II gusset, published in 1932 the revolts of the masses. He he seems to be like saying that the masses like democracy right. The rise of the people is a negative because the masses are uneducated, ill-informed about history, don't know the ramifications of power and what they're doing their vulgar, you know like, unsophisticated type folks. So he saw the mass man as a problem. It sounded like, according to lash, I yes yeah. Yeah, they're lower middle classes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if I could just read a passage, it's. It's about a half a page long and kind of the contrast that he, that lash, brings up with respect to or tega. From or tega's point of view, one that was widely shared at the time, the value of cultural elites lay in their willingness to assume Responsibility for the exacting standards without which civilization is impossible. They lived in the service of demanding ideals. Quote nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us, by obligations, not by rights. I'm quote the.
Speaker 1:The mass man, as you were alluded to, on the other hand, has no use for For obligations and no understanding of they, what they implied, no feeling for the great historical duties. Instead, he asserted the rights of the commonplace. At once resentful and self-satisfied, he rejected everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. This is again or tega. On the mass man, he was incapable of submitting to the direction of any kind, lacking any comprehension of the fragility of civilization, on the tragic character of history, he lived unthinkingly in the assurance that tomorrow the world will be so richer, ampler, more, perfect as it is, or as if it enjoyed a spontaneous and inexhaustible power of increase. He was concerned only with his own well-being and looked forward to a future of limitless possibilities and complete freedom.
Speaker 1:His many failings included a lack of romance in his dealings with women. Exotic love, a demanding ideal in its own right, had no attraction for him. His attitude toward the body was severely practical. He made a cult of physical fitness and submitted to hygiene Hygienic regiments that promise to keep it in good repair and to extend its longevity. It was above all, however, the deadly hatred of all that is not itself the individualism that you were describing earlier, that characterized the mass mind as, as or take it describe it, incapable of wonder or respect. The mass man was a sport quote-unquote spoiled child of human history. And then last goes on say well, all these habits of mine, I submit, are now more characteristic of the upper levels of society. Basically goes on the rest of his book describing why well, yeah, like they vote, he says.
Speaker 2:They folk, upper class, focus on Health, fitness, beauty, almost as a, he says, almost has a way to stave off the inevitability of death, whereas the middle of the lower classes, he says, are quite attuned to the fatalism that is what's meant for us all, that we're all gonna die there.
Speaker 2:It seems like he's saying if there's more nobility in that, almost that you know, and I don't agree with the sense that only the elite do that you see, that permitting the culture now, the fitness culture, all of that I can see maybe in Diets, maybe lower class diets, or they're not as consumed with With that being actually healthy. You know, the blues, the blues and jazz all kind of supposedly deal with this, this embracing of fatalism, and that life is, is sorrow and pain and you just got to live through it. Don't try to fight it necessarily, because there is no way of fighting it. Embrace the ugliness and all of that of degradation or, you know, decline of physicality and of Almost like, not idealistic, right, more realistic view of the world. I don't know if do you agree with that, that it's an elite type of tendency to pay to try to stave off death and Be the beautiful thing be the healthy, godlike person.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't think so, as in fact, when you were given your summary and mentioned mobility, and when you summarize lashes Theory, its mobility applies To even the common folk as well, the middle class. This let's give military. The military is an example which is generally middle class, lower class folks. You uproot yourself out of Middle Texas or wherever Oklahoma, and you travel the world. You go from podunk Oklahoma to traveling the world. Now, there's a lot of stuff that there's a lot of mobility that goes in between that too. But the point is you leave your family, let's say your mom and dad, if you have one, your brother, sister, your friends, and you start a new family. Essentially, you meet new friends, you meet a wife or a husband, and it's a different culture than the one you came from as well. The military culture, the professionalism of military, I mean. My point is the mobilization is not only for the elite we're. The globalization has also required the mobilization of the middle, for sure, the middle and Upper middle, middle and maybe a little bit of the lower middle class.
Speaker 1:The only ones who have not traveled or, I guess, been affected by this mobilization would be the poor and the very poor, the very poor so To get to your point is One more quick thing on the military, back in the day, you would go fight a war for a few months or a few years and then you'd come back and Go back to farming when we were agricultural, primary Agriculture, or you'd go back to the plant when we were industrial and things of that nature. It wasn't a professional army per se which required you to leave your, your family in your hometown for probably forever, and so that has an effect, not necessarily between the elite in the middle class, but the Within the middle class itself, a splintering within the middle class itself, nursing or, let's say, the medical Community. All, all Industry is affected by this globalization, this mobilization, if you want to advance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's that's. That's all tied up in. That is the elite Determine the way the rest of the culture is gonna, or the rest of the people, the public, are going to behave. Right through their capitalism, through their economic, the demands of capitalism demand the splintering up of the neighborhood, as he calls it, the middle class, making them more mobile, making them force a Decision, deciding to choose whether or not to stay in Omaha or go to I don't know LA, to to for their career, in order to provide for their family.
Speaker 2:There's not a lot of options, let's say, in Nebraska, small town Nebraska, in terms of succeeding and achieving an accelerate and and Advancing in your career. Also tied up in this is the you can talk about. The notion of the American dream that we all are told, in a way almost Influenced, to follow, to believe in is that you know, care about success, about money, about getting the car, materialism, bigger, house, going to the cosmopolitan cities. They're more attractive, you know, do what you want. And Now? But which one's more influential, or are they tied together in some way?
Speaker 1:I Think it's no, but that's no doubt that the elite Drive the culture. In fact you can even already create the culture. And then what's good and bad of it? And then the media Amplifies that. Not only the media, but marketing businesses, everything around it, amplifies the desires of the elite. Like you were saying, the American dream was you go to high school, then you go to college, you get married, you move to the suburbs, like this thing called the suburbs is relatively new.
Speaker 1:You move to the suburbs where you have cookie cutter homes. You have a cul-de-sac, you get a car. You go to work from nine to five for 20 years. You get a pension. You have two or three kids your straight. Uniform, all that kind of you go to baseball good old-fashioned baseball game and then you repeat that with your kids. That was all the suburbs and industrialization and the railroad and I I bring up the railroad because that kind of applies to us that changed what Was America before I?
Speaker 1:mean, you can argue, when they did saw start the industrialization of America, but that was adjuxted to position or a contrast to the agricultural standards and culture of America before some say the Civil War, others maybe early 20th century. Nevertheless, the transition was made in. The transition was directed by the elite, sometimes through force, like the Civil War or other other wars, world War one and two other other ways through manipulation, changing laws. Entertainment is big again, we'll talk about this through Hollywood changes what Used to be Bad into good and good into bad and things of like that.
Speaker 1:But my ultimate point is I Think there's no doubt that the elite drive, drive, drive that cultural change. Now they tap into what the middle class likes and Kind of co-opt it, make it their own and then spit it back out in a different version. They I mean, if we're looked at as customers or at least, or a worst case is some sort of Lower-class animal that has to be. You have to be dealt with and you don't want to do it by complete like annihilation or anything like that. You, you have to kind of tap into what, what the middle class and lower class want and like and then manipulate it, because then you can say they're the behavior.
Speaker 2:And you can sell your products. I mean, they're consumers at the end of the day middle-class, lower class, right. But lash is very critical of this Change. He in fact he says, like the American dream I don't know if he states this directly, but what people, in pursuing sort of this individualism, in this achievement which in many times is unachievable, this meritocracy he talks about? It's like he feels. It seems like he feels people should focus more on Humble kind of advancements increasing a skill like that's maybe not valuable in this American dream type thing, increasing woodworking, carpentry, yeah, being a mechanic building a home, you know these, these things that actually are valuable, right, not knowing how to be a manager, you know, when you get fired from the company, what do you have left? Nothing, really, I guess.
Speaker 2:Experience as a manager, but yeah, these Making and what happens as a result is to you make your community better if it this old type of understanding of a neighborhood, a community where it's quite insular in a way, but also diverse People around each other. What the suburb does is it separates people in their little cookie cutter homes. People hardly know their neighbors I guess maybe some on their street or what have you but you're all alike primarily, you're all middle-class. You're all doing the same types of service jobs. You're not like trading your skills for each other.
Speaker 2:You know I'll do your all fix your windows If you I don't know cook cake or something. Do you know what I mean? And you learn more from the adults around you? Do you remember where he talks about the old Congregation areas back in the neighborhoods back in the day, as opposed to the mall now or the city? Even that back then younger people learn from people, older folks, who weren't their fathers necessarily or their mothers. There was a sense of a greater family and you were invested in the community and you were invested in those people's lives.
Speaker 2:What happened to them you learn from them they you know, more like a code, an actual community, yeah, whereas now that's pretty much all gone and I think lash was saying, as a result of these, this revolt of the elites, it degrades on that. And in fact he says the middle class is, who are all trying to strive for this dream, are deteriorating and becoming less and less.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. I think for sure he was. He was on to something when also part of this American dream, as you were just stating, is the glorification of position over skill. You know you wanted to be, instead of being, a great carpenter or great craftsman. You know everyone prided their selves on their craft. Whatever that was is a from blue collar to white collar. You want to finish your career as the CEO of X corporation or vice president or regional manager, as you stated. These were all positions with no little to no tangible value other than perhaps the money you got from it.
Speaker 1:But what that? What impact that had over not having skilled workers anymore? I mean, we could debate that, for because this not having skilled workers can lead off into immigration as well. You could argue well, well, I guess the league could argue, but we don't have any skilled workers anymore. We've got a bunch of people who have degrees but have no skills. So we have to bring in immigrants from XYZ country to, you know, to build homes, as an example, and even a worst case scenario and more scary is, a lot of Americans don't want to do those jobs anymore because they don't value them anymore. Like Latch was talking about, we weren't raised or conditioned to appreciate building homes or even working out on the farm or doing all these things that we consider for many years considered low class.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this actually he he covers this that there was a tendency in the elites back in he mentions wild Oscar Wilde that he was an elite member right Of the Victorian age, of Victorian London, europe.
Speaker 2:He took on a with and people like him in the elite circles started taking on this sort of individualism, elevate that labor, and he was tied into Marx in a way he was influenced by Marx in this that labor is somehow degradation, like it's a degraded state to do manual labor, and so he professed you know this art of beauty and religion, or religion of art, and that art is beautiful and that the intention and that the elevated state of being a person is to being able to foster that, that idea and to live accordingly, live in a state where labor is no longer needed.
Speaker 2:In fact, he states that wild thought in at the end of the day, what will happen is machines will take over manual labor. They'll come up with these genius machines that he calls it take over the labor from the people and therefore the people will be able to be more elevated and more of what a person should be, which is, you know, this sort of individual who's allowed to, to develop a personality that's separate from that degraded state of a labor or working person, he can put his energies into something beautiful art rather than meaningless labor.
Speaker 2:And so what lash implies is that through the through the 20th century, what happened is more elites took on this, this kind of philosophy, and that it permeated the culture. Eventually, which is why most of us, I think lash is implying, is that most of us view labor or a life of labor as being somehow less than it's an elitist type of mentality that we've adopted.
Speaker 1:We have it's almost it, but it's all it's suicidal mentality. Because then, if you look, if, if our job is not, let's look at it from an elites perspective, if they see us as just simple, simply as labor, well, what happens when we don't need, you know, the middle class, lower class anymore because we have the robots, the machines and other things and it goes back to Uncle Ted's manifesto we discussed a few months back is what then? What does elite do with us? They're not going to let us just sit around in the lap luxury and become fat pigs because we take up a lot of resources. And again, this is the latest perspective. Is, well, one, two things happen is they liquidate us, get rid of us all together, and so there's a very small minority of humans still alive, or they keep us around. Is is like domestic pets almost, which still would require, you know, can't still have us all around. So we become domestic pets.
Speaker 1:And that's a brief summary, but I guess a lot of question is if, if, if we don't value, we have no foresight and seeing oh shit, the only thing we are valuable for is our labor. Let's say we've given that up, we've adopted some of the cultural elitist ways like the lap luxury and shit. Eventually the elite are gonna say you know what, we don't need these folks anymore. Or the question would be right what do we do with these people If they're not working anymore? What? What value do they have for us? As you, as you ponder that answer, I'm gonna go get some more coffee real quick.
Speaker 2:What just made me think about. Did that affect? Like the tendency of the wild Oscar Wilde? Like mentality, which is labor, is degraded, a degraded state of man, and that the individual should be able to live a life free of labor in order to cultivate a sense of personality and beauty and whatnot, individualism, and fulfill, kind of the potential of what a human should do. Did that affect what? So the effect that had on it permeated the culture, supposedly, gave us all that idea that we shouldn't pursue a life of labor, rather life of art and self, self, make art out of ourselves, if that makes sense. That that has a negative impact on us. Yes, okay, you could say that I lost my train of thought. Anyways, what wild. What last is? Is that wild was?
Speaker 2:This idea of his was tied to Marxism, marxism but also socialism, and that permeated the culture as well. He talks about how. I'll read from lash socialism in wild conception would not come about through the action of the masses. The masses were too stupefied to by drudgery to be capable of emancipating themselves. They were extraordinarily stupid in their deference to authority. Indeed, they were not really conscious of their own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people by, quote, agitators, an absolutely necessary class without whom there would be no advance towards civilization. Agitators were political equivalent of artists, disturbors of the peace, enemies of conformity, rebels against custom. They shared with artists a hatred of authority, a contempt for tradition and a refusal to court popular favor.
Speaker 2:Agitators and artists were the supreme embodiment of individualism. Wishing only to please themselves, they took no notice whatever of the public, nor did they pay the slightest attention to the sickly can't about doing what other people want because they want it, or any hideous can't about self sacrifice. Artists were accountable only to themselves, and their selfishness, as it might be regarded from the point of view of conventional morality, was a precondition of any genuine achievement of the imagination. All great leaders in history, according to Wilde, had the artistic temperament. Jesus Christ himself was an artist with an artist's message to the world. He said to man you have a wonderful personality, develop it, be yourself.
Speaker 2:I found that interesting. Agitators and artists what page is it? That's 232. They were the supreme embodiment of individualism. I mean, we have a cult of the artist in our country and I would say in the world we value them, we almost idolize them, you know, because they're the rebels, they're the ones who do what they want. They're not tied to any rules or to any, to any, anybody, any sense of. They do what they want, they're free, you could say, in our idea of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's I mean Nietzsche talks about that, right, I mean he, and this is about what we've been talking about Is that leader Mao? What you could say then, as an artist? Because he did what he wanted. You know, he agitated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess the true artists are the great artists, the great man. But, as we've discussed and we'll discuss some more detail with respect to art in the future, is it gets co-opted, oftentimes even the individual artists themselves in their mind. Like Bruce Springsteen was became known because of his kind of rebellious attitude but also his observational music on the rough and tumble life of living in Pennsylvania, where the hell he was from.
Speaker 2:New.
Speaker 1:Jersey and. But now he's hobnobbing with the Obamas and in the elites of the world and I don't know. I would love to know in his head, does he still think of himself as the speaker of the people, or at least artists of the people, an observer of the people? Because in reality he's not.
Speaker 1:Once you become, once you grow as an artist, I think you leave that and you start making money and you go on tour and Howard Stern is another example is just by the nature of your success. You become part of the elite and you become a microcosm example of the revolt of the elite. You start adopting the elites culture, its behavior, its attitudes, and it's gone. And so the artist has to be careful of. I mean, unless he, his whole job or his whole intent was to make a lot of money in the first place or or, as I think with Howard Stern, was to become part of the elite in the first place, then that that was a conscious effort. But in your mind, those who think they're a rebel still do they even realize that they're just to show? I bring up Bruce Springsteen as an example. Yeah, because what?
Speaker 2:they made their achievement on was speaking for the people like what? Because Springsteen's really songs are about middle class, lower class life, being the worker beaten down, being young and small town neighborhood John Melecamp type middle class all that. Yeah, and then once they made that achievement and the success and money, then they, like you said, move around circles, these power circles in New York. They no longer start living the life they once lived, so their values changed, their songs perhaps start reflecting concerns of the elite, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they move out. They move out of the neighborhood that they once lived in. They they just go live by the elite, with the elite. They don't eat at the same restaurants. They watch the same movies, the same entertainment. They become one.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or no longer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you living the pressures of a middle class, lower class person. They don't know what it's like even more maybe they lose connection to it.
Speaker 1:Comedians. I mean. This applies to all artists, I believe, is, or at least the dilemma is posed to all successful artists, because at some point in time you have to decide what you want, what you're an artist for, because the industry or the way of life, the culture, is going to decide for you. Now you have those eccentrics that you know denounce all Hollywood. You never see them and but like Eminem is another example, they try to put out art after they become multi-millionaires and have lived the elite life 10, for at least a, you know, 10, 15, 20 years and the art is trash. It's awful, at least from my perspective.
Speaker 1:But then it goes back to this discussion. So we've had before as well with respect to these late night comedians. They came up presumably from the middle class and had pretty good art and entertainment from a middle class perspective. But then they become popular, they become achieved, they've achieved a lot, become an elite, and then what we see a nightly, you know, the night shows. It's horrible, it's not funny, but it might be funny to the elite, it might be entertaining to the elite.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like they've now been. They're being their spokesperson. Oh yeah, their audience is not no longer. They speak to an ideology rather than to. Maybe what made them interesting like we'll take Colbert, for example was that he had a ostensibly a middle class, lower class viewpoint, and so he satirized elite thinking. And that's what he was. He was a satirist. I mean, look at what he did with John. What was that guy? John Stewart? Yeah, he was. They satirized the elite Fox News, you know by making fun of them. Basically, he opposed, he posed as if he was a Bill O'Reilly type figure in order to expose their corruption and to expose their fucked up ideas and viewpoints. Then, once he became popular, famous, successful who knows what else caused him to do it, but he, then he started speaking to the ideology of the elite, and he still does that to this day, I feel.
Speaker 2:But to get back to, I want to read this passage about Wilde's theory of you know, the individual and this religion of art. Lash says this kind of message, whether or not it came from Jesus Christ, which is, you know, be yourself, and whether or not it was cast in a purely secular idiom or the pseudo spiritual idiom of Wilde's book, day Profundus appealed to intellectuals in search of a substitute for religious faiths, faiths by then widely regarded as offensive to the modern mind. In place of self denial and self control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unrestrained by civic, familial and religious obligations. It confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd. It sanctioned their revolt against convention, against bourgeois solemnity, against stupidity and ugliness, by equating social justice with artistic freedom. The religion of art made socialism palatable to intellectuals who might otherwise have been repelled by its materialism. So in a way Lash is saying that you know these elite people back in the day.
Speaker 2:This idea of Wilde's and of all of that was attractive to them because at the heart of it there was this lack of religion or faith right Brought on by the scientific revolution. And what do you call it? The Enlightenment focused more on the material world less than not the spiritual, mystical world, rationalism, all of that, that that created almost a void in people's lives. Who you know? People who didn't work, basically, because when you're working, all the time you don't have, you don't really maybe think about all this stuff, you're too busy, you're too exhausted. But that that idea was attractive. This idea of individualism, the cult of personality, beauty, perfection, all of that became attractive to them because there was nothing else, there was no meaning, which I think Lash is suggesting that religion supplied some sort of meaning.
Speaker 1:I think it, yeah, I think it applied some sort of spiritual meaning to your cultural norms, mores and rules and so forth. I mean, lash even mentions that Freud states that religion is a hoax but defends its necessity for the protection of culture.
Speaker 2:So he under.
Speaker 1:He appreciates the, the, the practicalness of religion, but the spiritualness of it. He totally disregards it. But then he replaces it with his own inter inter dialogue. You know psychoanalysis.
Speaker 2:This cell I found that I found that chapter to be very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:His last talks about the therapeutic worldview replaced the religious worldview. Now, for whatever reasons, I don't know, but or why that came about? I guess it's that because they deal with trying to treat the individual. The problems that are are keeping the individual down. You know, guilt, shame, meaningless, meaningless that are. Yeah, I just found that one to be interesting because also, you could, psychoanalysis started really permeating through the culture, through the elites, through filmmakers, through the culture, the media. You can see it starts seeping through Hitchcock and all these people. But why did it replace it? Do you remember what Lash says? Why did what, what purpose did it serve the elites to? To adopt a therapeutic worldview versus a religious? It focuses on them themselves, individuality.
Speaker 1:I don't. I don't recall him ever kind of explicitly stating why. What I gather from it just naturally happens, you know, much like the elite separation itself, the revolt itself, is not necessarily a collective, conscious decision or deliberate decision like on this date we're going to separate or we're going to revolt from the, from the masses. It is a conditional thing that happens just based off of well, globalization is an example.
Speaker 2:Well, he talks about how therapy and psychoanalysis attracted them because, also, it allows a permissiveness in a way. It's like it. You're not the problem. There's nothing wrong with you, something's wrong with society, something's wrong Like and you know, there this allows so like gays, lesbians, all these different types of lifestyles, because those are cosmopolitan type of, I guess, engendered subcultures in the cities, the big cities, back then I don't know, I'm grappling with this that there's some sort of freedom from constraint, that psychoanalysis allowed these people to be able to be okay with the fact that you're doing certain things. But there's reasons for it that are kind of wrapped up in your early days, before you had any determined, any agency, right, and that you're I don't know, I'm grappling with this.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what it allows not only elite but common folk as well. Yes, you're right to avoid constraints, but it allows you to become a God, almost a demigod, or quasi-God, whatever you want. The problem is, no one takes accountability for kind of whatever their actions are. It's easy to say, well, I messed up because of my parents or because of my culture, because of the patriarchy. So at the same time you're trying to escape the constraints of the old way, let's say in this case the white Protestant patriarchy, but you still need them as the foil unless you take responsibility.
Speaker 1:This is not necessarily Lash's theory. This is my just again thinking out loud, based off what you were just saying, but it goes. I mean the last paragraph in chapter what was it? 12, kind of alluding to what you were talking about in the same chapter that you're recording on it. We need institutions and interdictions, god knows, but they are not themselves sacred. Nothing but confusion, as Luther and Calvin pointed out a long time ago, and his reef himself has reminded us on many occasions comes from equating faith with submission to the moral laws mankind makes for its own government. So again it goes back to what I was saying earlier about Freud's admittance that, for practical reasons, religion is necessary, because it gives validation, especially amongst the middle class who, again, who are in lower classes, tend to be more religious and take the spiritual realm as literal. It gives validation to the moral laws of the government and thus the elite Imposed on them, imposed on them exactly.
Speaker 1:But to go back to your question, I don't I would have to go back. I don't think there was a specific answer he had for why the therapeutic religion benefits them over the spiritual religion or the Christian religion or what have you.
Speaker 2:Well he does mention, I think or alludes to, that the religion of all the religions, christianity and so forth, provide a sense of love of the individual and that that has been transferred to permissiveness in this atheistic society. That permissiveness is has replaced it.
Speaker 2:So but that that what Lash was saying, that that overall has a negative impact on the culture because if everything's allowed, then there's no standard, in a way that there's no hierarchy of morals or values for the culture, and that that has a splintering effect. People start subcultures, start kind of creating their own sense of values and focusing on those rather than coming up with a sort of universal thing. This reflects kind of relates to what he was talking about with the neighborhood of old. You would have all these different people together working for each other, kind of subplanting or subverting their own, I guess. Individual values for a greater, greater values, that for the entire group, I guess, which was a positive, it's like, because those, the greater group, those should be your values too, because you know, the greater the group is, the greater the individual. I don't know Well, the great your chances of survival.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, initially you had the, you had the family, the clan, the tribe, and then eventually you know the nation state and you all needed. You as an individual needed all that to survive. If you you couldn't survive the world of old on your own, not for very long. You needed your family. And then you needed your neighbors, which would more than likely your family in some form or another. You know your brother, your sister and her husband, and so forth. And so the bond of family was tight, but the bond of survival was the necessity of survival. What lied in your family, and then your clan and your tribe, and so forth. We don't have that anymore. We have individualism and it's driven by many things, and again Lash hangs on to the globalization and mobilization that leads from that which separates one from from their original family.
Speaker 2:But going back to, kind of.
Speaker 1:What you're talking about is like he did say we're all minorities. Now Lash did we're all minorities. There's the balkanization of and it goes back to what you're saying now, without a collective spirit or even a collective nation, you basically there's a balkanization of ideas and cultures, where you have a million, you have a million cultures now and we just all kind of gravitate to our own little world wherever that is. But more than likely we agree with everything that this world is saying. You know he talked about social spaces being now the mall, but I would say when 94 was the mall, now it's. It's the internet. We gravitate to certain chat groups or Twitter accounts or that has become our culture now, but they that doesn't do anything for your survival, but I do. It did hit me when he said we're all minorities now because we're all out here on our own. What's that saying?
Speaker 2:a country of individuals, but a nation of non, or so I don't know. Do you know that saying? I don't know.
Speaker 1:No, but going back to religion, religion is the glue, I think that can keep a large group together. But because once that bond, that that, that that bind starts to fray of that family bond, you need something to keep you together, and it can be religion, it can be ideology, but for sure I think it's advantageous for an elite to have a, a religion that keeps people with different ideas, with different family ties and a diverse amount of people together under one umbrella. You could argue woke, woke ism is that now there's got to be some sort of religion that keeps a people together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it, can it be it. I mean, the ideal would be that it should be a religion that's does that, but also doesn't that allows an individual to become what they're naturally good at or supposed to be like. It should be a religion that's not too intolerant. I'm just trying to think of what. So what is lash advice or what does he support? What type of religion it's? A religion that should be, yes, have a set of values that are that benefit the group, but at the same time, it shouldn't be one that that that eliminates, that is too uniform, you know. I mean like it embraces the differences in order to elevate the group, which I feel, like many interpretations of Christianity, islam, are perhaps too intolerant and in fact, what they do is they create the very rebel artist revolter because of that, because they're too intolerant, and so what that has? Gradually, those rebels get together, you know, and try to overthrow that. That's kind of a simplistic view, but you got to embrace, I think you can't.
Speaker 1:You got to be careful about if you're kind of trying to come up with this group, you know, to not exclude too many people, because that can cost you well, I'm sure there's a, there's a ratio, but I mean the very nature of religion established the haves and have nots, or the the pious and the sinners, and those who are going to heaven and those are not. I mean, that's again the clue, that the the glue that keeps a people together and what helps you to find what a people is when there is no more family bind, is you have to define who is not. You know, the outsiders, the others or whatever you want to call them. So, by the nature of establishing rules, or at least a religion that supports rules, you have to have people who are excluded from that now, or or what you get to is there.
Speaker 2:You have to rely on submission of that. That individual has to submit their own desires or, in a way, personal values. Yes, for that groups values yes.
Speaker 1:I think it goes back to. What we're talking about is like there's the collective whole requires us individual sacrifice on certain things. Whatever that, whether the certain things are, whether it's sexuality, whether it's greed, whether it's gosh I don't like to pray seven times a day or things of that nature or the aim where we're going back to war again. I don't really want to have to go back to war because of x, y and z. Well, you have to do it anyway because you're part of this community, if you want to be a part of this community you have to sacrifice your own individual, not all one, but certain individual.
Speaker 1:What you consider individual rights or desires for the greaterness, for the greater good, if that makes sense and that slips into very dangerous territory. I mean, communism is rooted in that kind of attitude, but oftentimes again, it gets sabotaged by the elite, thinkers or whoever, by those who are seeking real and true power. They just use communism as a, as a tool to gain their own power. All the stuff we had talked about in previous podcasts and I think you're gonna have that in any group type of behavior.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean that's the even. I mean we, we romanticize them nomadic days when you know we were hunters and gatherers. But I would argue that the quest for power, for being more than what life has given you, has always been there. I mean you had during the nomadic days, are they were very they were very, very warlike people they had to be because it you had people trying to take over your land or your people, your women, your children whatever and which required keep talking.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna, I'm gonna pee right, keep talking all right.
Speaker 1:So the nomadic life was not an easy one, and certainly not a civilizational one, and so that when we, when we were analyzed these type of books the revolt of the elites and the revolt of the masses it's easy for us as readers or even writers, to pinpoint one particular causation of where we're at today. And I think it's a combination, it's a relationship, it's a network of of things that emerge, of things that interact with one another, and in this case the elite with the, the middle and lower classes, and vice versa. As we have discussed, the middle class and little classes take on the attributes of the elites, the, the fashion as an example, what cars they drive, what houses they have. That is not necessarily the elite separating themselves deliberately. That is also us separating ourselves from ourselves, because we value the elites opinion on fashion, on entertainment, on pretty much everything within culture.
Speaker 1:Which why I say? I say that the elites drive everything, at the very least drive culture. At the more likely scenario, they invent culture and therefore change it if, if they so, if they so want. So let me see here what. What other?
Speaker 2:but hey, this idea about this made me think too about our podcast is he mentions okay, so religions gone, those into institutions are gone.
Speaker 2:One problem with thinking that what we've been thinking in this podcast all along is that all structures, all systems, all hierarchies are based on power and you know contentions within those, the elite, within whatever system, inevitably it's gonna be about a power struggle.
Speaker 2:The part. But he lash says that's like a postmodernist nihilism viewpoint. It made me think like, oh wow, am I, am I kind of a nihilistic thinker? Because he says, it seems like he suggests that there are actually institutions out there that are not necessarily like structured on power, necessarily, that there's actually positive, that it's a, it's a group or a system made up of positive values, positive hierarchies that make sense. You know, because it again it resorts, it refers to his idea, lash, that there need, that there's something wrong with this country, in this nation, and it revolves around a lack of religion.
Speaker 2:I think like, if you take the postmodernist view, which is it's, if you, if you apply what he's saying to the way we think in this podcast, that you know it's all about power, that's a postmodernist view for co and all of them, then you're, you're almost not allowing for that new religion to come into place or that return to a traditional type of religious structure or culture, because you're gonna be suspicious of it. I guess, or always think it's. It's about power and not about the power of the group yeah, I think.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you even assuming everything that you just said of lash is true, like it's a postmodernist viewpoint which you could say, yes, in the 20, in 21st century, that it is true. But these type of attitudes on realism, if you look at the classical realists do cities as an example, even Machiavelli. They were long, they were those, these type of ideas on power were long before.
Speaker 1:Foucault and Nietzsche and so forth. So descriptive wise or academic wise, yes you could. You could say it's postmodern. Now his, his thoughts on. Well, if you allow yourself, I agree with you and him with respect to we, you and I have to question even what we're reading, what we appreciate.
Speaker 1:You know, the Machiavellians by John Burnham and all these folks that we read are elitists, come from the elite or were former communists, john Burnham, or socialists, same with Foucault and all these others. Supposedly they were all just enfranchised communists or socialists or things of that nature. So we must question what they their intent first, and even if their intent was just to tell the truth, how far do we want to dive into this abyss like you are leading to, into nihilism where everything is power? But I think you, two things can be true, three, three things can be true.
Speaker 1:You can still have the power of the collective, you can still have a new religion, but still have people, individuals or even small groups within this new religion who are always going to strive to eat this new religion up. And this goes back to again what I said in the first podcast, going back to juveniles on power, where power is always going to be trying to find and expand itself, even with new religions. So I think you can both be a realist that being, hey, everything is a strive, striving for power but also be an optimist where you want to replace the old with your new, because if you don't replace it with your new, someone that you may not like or may not like you, is gonna replace the new religion. And you know, some argue that woke, this woke ideology is just that. So I think I think.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think, as I was talking about before, when you were into the restroom, is it?
Speaker 1:yes there's not one causation to where we're at today. There's many things that got us here and it's a relationship. It's not the elite necessarily deciding one day that they're gonna break from us. It's a, it's a series of decisions at all levels on our hierarchy that decided that we're gonna split from each other. And when I say decided, it's not one big group saying hey, we're gonna go to cultural war, it just happens. And again this goes back to on power. The book it's, it's it's.
Speaker 1:Power is its own organism and we're all hosts to that organism organism if you will, and and so there are deliberate decisions within that organism, but I don't think this split was caused by you know, one or two collective decisions by the elite or even the by the populace. It just happened, and so I guess the long-winded answer to what you were saying is I think a new religion can emerge from this, while at the same time you still think people strive for power. And it really goes back to what do you think about human beings themselves? Are they under, what would you say, john Locke? Or we talked about this earlier?
Speaker 1:Are you a hobb's hobbist, where human nature and men are nasty, brutish, selfish human beings that are out for themselves? Or do you take a Russo in perspective, where we're net, naturally good people but we become corrupted by the lives we live? And I think if once you answer that question or you understand what perspective you lean to, then that helps you on the collective level as well but where the understanding of groups, that power is at the heart of it or can be there, also needs to.
Speaker 2:It seems like last is saying that the religions of old, or some certain ages of religions, certain periods of time they provide, that they were founded on love of that other person too. You know, it's not about that. The leader of the group, let's say, loved you. You loved him too and that's why you followed him. But it was like real love, you know and accept. Not love in the sense of like valuing each other in this life to get through it, to be better, to excel, and that love. So if the new leaders now are first of all, is that an idealistic view of that time, like a romantic view of it? Possibly you know where there ever people, groups like that. Is that just a fantasy? And he says, kind of like now, what is the new religion? What are the? What is the elite? They're not about, they're about themselves.
Speaker 1:They're individualistic.
Speaker 2:They don't love us or they don't love the people. They don't really value us. We don't value them either. We're. You know, many of us, I would say collectively are suspicious of them and kind of are aware of what's going on. I think, yeah, I don't know. There's a part of me thinks what he's saying is a fantasy. You know that that could just, in this state where everyone's separated and fragmented, how could the people in power love us and how could we love them were to removed from each other physically, in that sort of idealistic view of the old neighborhood that lash sets up as being kind of an idealist, ideal state you around each other, right physically. You would meet in the public spaces and hear the leader discuss, or the leaders discuss things and you could apply pressure to them. You know, demand things and your health and their health are somehow intertwined, just from the physicality being around each other.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, yeah, I think I mean because back then that the ties that bind were strong. The effects of the decisions made by the quote unquote elite back then or the representatives of that particular community, whether it was a town or village or what have you the decisions made by that elite affected the elites as well. Let's say it was about agriculture, or when we're going to plant our crops, or who are going to sell our crops to, and so forth. That that affected them. Where you could argue, now the decisions made by the elite don't necessarily. If the negative consequences of the decisions made by elite don't affect them now they're presumably they're make they affect us Presumably. Let's say crime as an example. You know that.
Speaker 1:You see this argument that the quote unquote loose attitude of the elite on crime doesn't affect them as much as it affects the middle class. Because what can the elite do? They can hire barter guards, they can buy a huge land, piece of property, even if it's in the city that has large walls and things like that, so they can exempt themselves from their decisions where most of us can't. And I think that's a huge difference from what happened back then to happen today. But even as I talk about it. I'm sure that happened back then too At some point in time.
Speaker 1:There are there that the ties that bind either are loosened or you have some sort of rebel, as you were describing, decided. You know what. I'm going to go outside of, what the culture, cultural norms are. I'm going to form my own little army and I'm going to fucking, I'm going to start dictating what life's going to be and I'm going to build my castle or what have you. And so I think what the best thing for us as a middle class and lower class and this is what I've certainly learned since we've started this podcast and all the research that comes with it, is you just as a middle class, lower class person or a non elite?
Speaker 1:you just need to hope and pray that you get an elite that quote unquote loves you or sympathizes with you or empathizes with you or at the very least recognizes your, your value to them. You know, in a practical sense, throw the emotions out. They just, oh, we need these people because of they help us with the military, for example. They're the dumbasses that go and fight our wars, things like that. Now, if you have that virtuous leader, as Ortega was talking about in Lash's book, that's a golden age for us common folk because they actually we actually do have an elite who cares about us, empathizes with us, appreciates humanity. So I guess, as a realist, I would hope I wouldn't want a realist in necessarily as King, let's say. Perhaps we would want the idealist in there who does actually care for, for their people. I don't know. I guess two things could be true. You can be a realist and care for people. I just don't know if that's a reality. I don't think that's a reality outside of the family, clan and even the tribe, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's about numbers, population, it's about space. If you don't see someone every day, you don't even know they, you don't care, you're not going to care about them. You don't know them, you don't know their struggles, their mistakes, their fragility, their strength. You know their story. I think it's like a predicament of modern life. It's like that's, it's almost like a hopeless view. In my opinion, how could you go back the way the system set up now in sheer population numbers, and I mean with the Internet, everything's moving, moving further away from each other. People are actually, they might be right next to each other, but they're in another world of their own Like you said they're, we're even now.
Speaker 2:we're not only physically separate, we're I don't know how to state it we're. We're completely in our own world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Individually.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, we've talked about it not to get too personal, but we have young children and, let's say, teenagers and young adults in our own family who quote unquote fact check us if we're sitting at the table and discussing politics, philosophy, entertainment, you name it there's that little brick in their hand that, oh, I heard that, I heard something different, or let me see if that's true. And those are reference points. That doesn't even get into the point that that brick is in their hand, shit, 15 hours of the day, and what kind of conditioning, whatever website they're on or whatever, has been applied to them as just on a routine basis. And then it goes back to oftentimes you go to a restaurant and you see the whole family on phones, as you were stating.
Speaker 2:we're together physically, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, we're in different worlds and experientially, we're not experiencing the same cohesive feelings at the same time. One family member might be watching a shark attack, which is dread fear, fascination, morbid fascination. Another one might be talking to her boyfriend or experiencing a different emotion at the same time. I mean that's not to say it's better for everybody to experience the same emotions at the same time. It's fact, it's impossible. But if you're all collectively together, sharing the same kind of experience, devoid of any splintering brought on by the phone, I mean there's maybe something I mean you take that in the long view is like over time you're going to have a greater love for each other, greater understanding, a greater sense of community.
Speaker 1:I guess Well, I mean, I think we talked about what replaces the old religion is right and wrong. Like our family used to watch certain types of shows, whether it be like Roseanne or Survivor. Those and we experienced that show together at the same time. Now we may have observed it differently.
Speaker 1:We may have seen some of the, some of the fucking themes that came out of it differently we might have, but and we could discuss it, it could act, the very least, as a prompt for later discussion, whether during the show or after, on what that all meant to you. And so it also offers a shared experience, but also a prompt to discuss maybe serious things. That Roseanne was funny, was a sitcom, but it also allowed you to use those because it was also controversial to use those things as a discussion as a family, and I think, as you're alluding to, with phones you can't do that, it's very hard to do that, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well for one go ahead. I was just saying I mean the share experiences now between that individual on the phone and whoever else is on that website, or let's say TikTok. But who is driving the popularity of a particular video? Let's say, I don't know, but you could argue that who is driving the themes of Roseanne and so forth. But the point larger point is, I think, is it's the splitterization all the way down to the family level, not to mention the undermining of authority of the parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he also mentions the access to information, which I found kind of interesting. I mean, if you take it with phones, with the way news is doled out now it's 24, seven real time, but not everyone experiences the story at the same time. It's in different times, you know and also the dumbing that the videos are edited or what have you?
Speaker 1:you're not seeing the full context. We don't have time to look at the you know, hour long video.
Speaker 2:We whoever edits it sales to 10 minutes and we base decisions off of that, you know and you move on to the next thing, the next inundation of information, and that he even last even talks about how there's no longer a past or future. It's like almost like a constant present, which we I think we'll get into later with some other theorists I forgot but also the dumbing down of public discourse, the lack of public discourse, which kind of related to what I talked about, with all this information that we have at our fingertips but no one's accessing it. I forgot what he says about it, but he's. Basically we live in this age of knowledge and information, but in fact our culture's more ill-informed or misinformed than ever before. Supposedly Because but why does he? We would have to, I would have to go read that chapter again. There's a reason, he says, but I forgot the loss of argument, the lack of.
Speaker 1:You know, there's no more argument anymore, no more battle of the market of ideas and stuff like that is gone. I'm trying to get to it right here, you there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've got it.
Speaker 2:I've got a digital version of the book, so since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform itself about civic affairs. It is the decay of public debate, not the school system as it is, that makes the public ill-informed, notwithstanding the wonders of the age of information. When debate becomes a lost art, information, even though it may be readily available, makes no impression.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the lost, gosh, damn it Now. What's more?
Speaker 2:valuable is debate and discussing rather than reading, let's say, or just simply. I mean, you can have all the information in the world, like how we learn and how we set up values and make sense of things is through discussion. So if you don't have that, you could have all the information in the world at your fingertips. But it doesn't matter, because I don't yeah, I don't, I would have to read this chapter again. It's like we value, but I mean, is there let's take as assumption is there a degradation in public debate now, or is that, is that an assumption? That's not true.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, if I can real quick go back to what the lost art of argument, page 162, and you know. As for the claim that the information revolution would raise the level of public intelligence, it is no secret that the public knows less about public affairs than it used to know. Millions of Americans cannot begin to tell you what is in the Bill of Rights, what the Congress does, what the Constitution says about the power of the presidency, how the party system emerged and how it operates. A sizable majority, according to a recent survey, believe that Israel is an Arab nation. Instead of blaming the schools for this disheartening ignorance of public affairs, as is the custom, we should look elsewhere for further, a fuller explanation. Since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to inform itself about civic affairs, like you were talking about. Is the decay of public debate, not the school system, bad as it is, that makes the public ill informed? When debate becomes a lost art, information, even though it may be readily available, makes no impression.
Speaker 1:So I mean, you basically just said that, but more information is not equate to a more intelligent, more active civilization, or people, if you will?
Speaker 2:Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise, we just take in information passively, if we take it in at all.
Speaker 1:Political debate this is again a quote began to decline If you assume debate is important around the turn of the century, curiously enough at a time when the press was becoming more quote unquote responsible, more professional, more conscious of its civic obligations. In the early 19th century the press was fiercely partisan, and that kind of goes back to what we've talked about. The press has never been objective. It's always been partisan, I believe. But going back to his quote, until the middle of the century, papers were often financed by political parties. Even when they became more independent of parties, they did not embrace the idea of objectivity.
Speaker 1:Again going back to what we were talking about, or neutrality, in 1841, horace Greeley lost his New York Tribune with the announcement that would be a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand, and from gagged mincing neutrality on the other. Strong-minded editors like Greeley, james Gordon Bennett, e L Gotkin and Samuel Bowles objected to the way in which the demands of party loyalty infringe upon editorial independence, making the editor merely a mouthpiece for party or faction, but they did not attempt to conceal their own views or to impose a strict separation of news and editorial contempt.
Speaker 1:It is no accident that this type of journalism, this kind, flourished right around 1830 to 1900, when popular participation in politics was at its height. So, and then one quick other coat, because this goes back to debates. We had a discussion on debates on our two plus two podcast. That debates are relatively new. It started with, I think, what was it? Nixon and Kennedy. It was disastrous for Nixon and they didn't have another presidential debate until 1980, I believe, with Reagan and Carter.
Speaker 1:The Lincoln-Douglas debates exemplified the Earl tradition at its best by current standards. Lincoln and Douglas broke every rule of political discourse. They subjected their audiences, which were as large as 15,000 on one occasion, to painstaking analysis of complex issues. They spoke with considerably more candor, in a pungent, colloquial, sometimes racy style that politicians think prudent today. They took clear positions from which it was difficult to retreat. They concluded themselves as if political leadership carried with it an obligation to clarify issues instead of merely getting elected. So, but that goes back to the virtue of the elite. Now you could argue Lincoln was not an elite. He may have been the exception and the purpose of the elite and purpose of politicians. They took a more socratic philosophical stance on what a politician is, and that's why they had these large and long complex debates which put themselves in a corner and they had to stand by it. That doesn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2:Well, now the control of the press over the debates and I think even Aleut talks about this is that the ones the press now is in control of it In where it's directed. You know, they segment all these short debates into little chunks where nothing can be really discussed in full. And of course, the question there wasn't a moderator back in the day, now there is, so that moderator is really deciding what's going on.
Speaker 1:Now you hear that if I can really interrupt real quick, because the next line is what you just said, in which, in contrast to the Lincoln Douglet debate, is now the media defined the issues and drop the ground rules and so, like you were just saying, the moderator and, more in particular, the boss of the moderator, they drive the issues.
Speaker 2:And what's being discussed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, force what's being discussed and more times than not, it's not at the concern of at the local or even regional level.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean it's these, it's these controversial topics that, well, what we know about wedge issues and all of that, identity politics and the pseudo issues, I think, a lot of them, I think as a way to deflect the public. Yeah, this is a really good chapter.
Speaker 1:I think I would have to read it Me too. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:But because it goes, because this chapter goes back into what we've been talking about with a lot of things debates, but also who controls the media. It's not some random journalist who decides to come up with some good questions and decides I'm going to drive the debate this way. Now that journalist has told exactly what to ask. And then you ask all right, by whom? Oh, by their boss. Well, who's their boss? Who owns the newspaper? Who owns Fox? Who owns you know it leads you down a long rabbit hole which you know we can get into it and we'll get into with other podcasts. But and what's the purpose, like we were talking about, we've talked about this Is it to drive a wedge between the middle class within the middle class and lower class and so forth? So we don't look up, we don't blame the elite because of the for the economy or for racism or what have you. We blame each other, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, because if the debates focus on our distinctions or our differences, we're going to focus on that.
Speaker 2:I mean, if, if the media focuses on those, then we're going to focus on that, because we can't help, but get wrapped up in it, but that what we, it seems like what Lash is implying, is that we need to focus more on what our similarities and our common interests, what binds us rather than what differentiates us, in order for democracy to work, is because, at the end of the day, what he's talking about is this idea of democracy, of us all having a say in it, for the sake of each other, you know.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, I think, the, the idea of a kind of ideal politician or ideal politics stops at the, at the village or at a small town. After that it just becomes a weapon because, as we've discussed and as Lash was alluding to, we become detached from one another after a certain threshold of community, you know.
Speaker 2:So this, this idea of nationhood, which is relatively new in the human experience, that's kind of like a poor substitute. This idea that we're all German or we're all English or we're all French American and that we all think the same way, have the same values that was an illusion from the get go Right, and it's not. Really doesn't feed our need for community, I think is what it does. It benefits the whoever's running that particular nation, To get us all feeling that we're the same but in actuality we're not. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it was an illusion and it was also forced upon this this idea of a nation state took hundreds, if not thousands, years of war to establish. Establish that you know.
Speaker 2:Or like when you create, I were what do you call it? Iraq? Oh, suddenly you're all a nation now. Yeah, well, you're made up of people who hate each other and fight each other. It's like it's a Hmm, yeah, because you have a lot of. You still have a lot of people, let's say within Afghanistan, as an example.
Speaker 1:That do not recognize the borders, because their tribal borders overlay Afghanistan and Pakistan, as an example, and they're loyal to those borders, as opposed to these, this most recent nation state, especially the newer ones post World War One and two. They don't. They acknowledge it, but they don't recognize it and they don't abide by that authority. And so places like Afghanistan and Iraq have extreme amount of trouble of keeping people under under this idea of nation state. And the best way to do it is what Saddam had to do. He had to fucking become a tyrant and annihilate and move people and all that kind of stuff. That's the only way, or I would say the most practical and perhaps the most practical and practical way to do it, practical and perhaps effective way of keeping a country with completely different views on life, different cultures, even under one, but not to so called state but not necessarily for the betterment of those people.
Speaker 1:For the betterment of the nation.
Speaker 2:maybe you beat down the public. That's not benefiting them. You utter control over the public. It's benefiting the nation, you know, so that that nation can now operate within the global what have you? The global theater, you know. It's like creating a nation that might be stable doesn't necessarily help the people, right, helps the leadership of that country, and then how that leadership interacts with other nations to lay out whatever plans they have, or what have you know? Yeah, at the same time, it's interesting the people who supposedly are more patriotic, at least in the US, are the ones who vote for people who do not have their interest in mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know well, that's where it becomes susceptible to like demagogues and so forth. People are just you're focusing on their looks and how they talk and what they say and what they do.
Speaker 2:Which is where we're at. I think, yeah.
Speaker 1:Attacking the person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's wrap it up. This was a great book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really good book, really good, better than I thought it was going to be, because he goes off into a bunch of different topics relevant to his thesis, but that you know, the supporting, as you were mentioned earlier at the beginning, is some of the supporting material, is a podcast, interesting into itself, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he wrote this book called the. What's it called? The rise hold on the rise of narcissism. The culture of narcissism, and that's supposed to be a really good book. It relates, I think, to this individualistic individualism, rise of individualism and the culture. I'd like to read that one. I was surprised that it was as conservative as I feel it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wasn't expecting that. Does it relate to yeah, we can talk about our next book that we're discussing the Revolt of the Public by an XCIA agent?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Martin Gerro or whatever. Now, Russell Brand talked about this book recently. He really liked it, so yeah let's see how we get into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited about that one. I think we might have to get into the Revolt of the Masses by Ortega as well.
Speaker 2:It's a small book, I have it, I have it All right so go to our sister podcast 2 plus 2 equals 5 where we discuss some more current events.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in this particular one, we will talk the alert system. Are you a zombie? Now, many have claimed if you listen to it, the alert system, it would activate your if you're vaccinated your COVID DNA and make you a zombie. Some of these stories are fantastic. We're going to talk about the persecution of Russell Brand, mom rage and then also the Hollywood strike is over. We can talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:And the strike in the healthcare is on. Oh, at my hospital.
Speaker 1:I did not know that. I'm excited to learn about that. So is the public, and potentially your bosses might be listening to this.
Speaker 2:Probably I never thought about that.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you for joining us. I am thinking out loud. The art, the art Tide. Christ is here with me. Thank you for your time. Revolt of the elite by last great book so long yeah.
