RadixJournal - September 13, 2022


Everything's A Remix


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

148.98143

Word Count

1,214

Sentence Count

57

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In this episode, I talk about the end of history, and how the world is headed in the same direction as it was in the 60s and 70s, and why it s time to get out of here.


Transcript

00:00:00.720 See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out.
00:00:08.140 And we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late 30s. Get out of here.
00:00:12.880 Of course, the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.
00:00:21.780 See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished.
00:00:30.000 And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now.
00:00:33.080 That from now on, there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.
00:00:39.500 And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts.
00:00:47.420 And that history and memory are right now being erased.
00:00:51.040 And soon, nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.
00:00:56.300 Wow.
00:00:56.520 I admire the sentiment in the sense that it's not telling us the familiar story, which is basically there are these baddies out there and they're sadistic monsters.
00:01:12.800 And they want to destroy your life and kill you, maybe.
00:01:16.940 And these are the Nazis and they're going to be controlled.
00:01:20.660 It kind of reverses it in the sense that, like, postmodern society, it's not Nazism, but it is a kind of concentration camp.
00:01:33.040 You're, you're, you're, you're, that you've built yourself and that you are the guard of it and that we've kind of created this world that we, we can't quite escape out of.
00:01:44.920 I, I think it's a, and that everything, you know, where are you going to even escape to?
00:01:49.140 Everything's headed in the same direction.
00:01:50.780 I, I think one of the things that I was, I was talking about with, um, the, the group that we have here on, on Substack and, um, and I, I've brought up this sentiment before is that, um, is this end of history sentiment where there's, there's no out and there's no in.
00:02:12.060 And, um, and, you know, when I was a kid, I was born in 1978, so I can remember the cold war and I can even, um, even though I was very young, um, but I, I can even distinctly remember, uh, in, it was 1990 or thereabouts being in Neiman Marcus with my mother and we were doing Christmas shopping, um, might've even been 1989, but I don't think it was.
00:02:41.020 And, uh, they, they were selling in Neiman Marcus pieces of the Berlin wall.
00:02:48.440 And so you, for, I don't know if these were, this is accurate or not, but, uh, it might've been a complete scam who knows, but you could, you know, for a hundred bucks or something, buy like a piece of the Berlin wall and had spray paint on it.
00:03:01.000 But it was the, you know, I, I do remember this kind of sense of like ending and, and in fact, history has been commercialized where you can literally buy it at an affordable price, an artifact.
00:03:11.380 Um, and, uh, but when I was a child in the eighties, um, even though I was quite young, I, I had a sense of like, you, you were, you could be in communism or out of communism or in America or freedom or out of America or freedom.
00:03:30.580 And you could kind of escape, you know, I remember this story of this young kid, I believe from Norway who flew, um, a light aircraft to Moscow or something.
00:03:41.540 So he, he kind of like evaded the Soviet anti-aircraft systems and, and got to red square some, some classic story like this, or people escaping East Germany through whatever means, uh, tunneling or hot air balloons or something.
00:03:58.400 You could kind of go somewhere else.
00:04:01.040 And I, I do think that one of the disturbing sentiments in, in that clip is that there's, there's kind of nowhere else to go.
00:04:11.540 You know, you, you, you could, uh, you know, I, I could escape somewhere and I would be in the same global structure that I'm in now.
00:04:23.820 And even on a cultural or intellectual level, like there's no, we're not really headed in some different direction.
00:04:35.460 I think a lot of these things that you hear from say Alexander Dugan or, uh, uh, or lesser lights in the dissident, right.
00:04:45.520 Or something about how, you know, Russia is some, it's, it's on some totally different path, uh, you know, multi polarity.
00:04:55.200 There would be some Russian sphere that would just be right.
00:04:59.000 You'd be traditionalist or free or, or, or whatever.
00:05:03.720 I don't buy it in the slightest bit.
00:05:07.160 I mean, I think even well into the 1980s, there was a, a general convergence.
00:05:13.480 Regents of the Soviet sphere and the American sphere.
00:05:17.980 I mean, there was McDonald's in Moscow and in a way there was communism in Nebraska.
00:05:25.800 If you, if you understand there, there was this just very, you know, not that America wasn't kind of more powerful by that period.
00:05:35.680 And, and, and not that America didn't on some level win the cold war.
00:05:40.700 Um, I think it was much more ambiguous than that.
00:05:43.220 I think it was a general convergence into kind of one ideal for the planet.
00:05:49.860 And so we are, you know, sorry to sound a bit like Alex Jones here, but like we are confined in a prison planet.
00:06:02.000 We are confined in the same sphere of things.
00:06:05.780 And there, there's kind of no way out.
00:06:07.460 There's no real, this is what Fukuyama was getting at, at the end of history.
00:06:12.480 It wasn't just that, um, you know, American capitalism and liberalism is more profitable or wealth creating than Soviet communism.
00:06:25.080 I, I think he's obviously correct about that, but that wasn't what he was saying.
00:06:29.000 He was saying that you can't think yourself out of Americanism.
00:06:33.380 And that even if he, he, one of the things he said in the preface to the end of history was that all of his critics were basically reiterating his thesis.
00:06:44.400 And so they were saying, oh no, actually you're wrong.
00:06:47.460 History hasn't ended yet because there are some places on the globe that aren't democratic and where women don't have the same rights as men, et cetera.
00:06:54.780 And he was saying, well, you're, you, that's my thesis that it, it wasn't that there aren't some kind of backward places on the planet.
00:07:04.800 It's that everything is moving in the same direction.
00:07:10.160 And yeah, I mean, I, I think that's the profound sentiment.
00:07:14.260 I mean, you, you could kind of say that there was a trad revolt by the Taliban or Al Qaeda of this, this violent traditionalist revolt using contemporary means that, that is using weapons and airplanes and, uh, technology of America, but kind of turning them against America and attacking the world trade center.
00:07:40.580 Uh, you could kind of say that that was the, the rejoinder to Fukuyama.
00:07:46.440 Um, but that rejoinder has been short lived and it isn't something that, that I think can ultimately win, at least at this point in time, um, that we're kind of all building up this structure where we're the prisoners and the gatekeeper.