The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Fourth Political Theory： Part Five ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸19⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.520 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.620 I've got a great stream that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.400 Now, we've been working hard on this for a while,

00:00:40.200 but we are finally at our fifth and final episode,

00:00:43.760 going through Alexander Dugan's fourth political theory.

00:00:48.900 We've kind of moved through each chapter, each section of the book here,

00:00:53.160 outlining the different theories that Dugan is expounding,

00:00:56.720 his ideas, where he's going with this fourth political theory,

00:01:00.000 what those things mean.

00:01:01.400 And today, we're going to be taking a look at the last two chapters,

00:01:04.480 along with two appendices, which I think are interesting.

00:01:07.100 They introduce some interesting ideas as well.

00:01:10.260 And as always, helping me unravel the mystery of Dugan is Michael Millerman.

00:01:14.960 Michael, thanks for coming on.

00:01:16.420 Good to be with you.

00:01:16.960 Absolutely.

00:01:18.440 So let's just go ahead and jump in on chapter 13 here.

00:01:22.880 Now, chapter 13 is about gender in the fourth political theory,

00:01:27.220 and this is another one where I'm a little doubtful on some of the things that Dugan asserts.

00:01:34.160 I think it gets a little kind of tricky with his language or doesn't say some things with his language,

00:01:40.260 though he is also, again, of course, looking at Dasein here.

00:01:44.060 And this is a concept I'm not as familiar with.

00:01:46.940 I haven't read my Heidegger yet.

00:01:48.220 So there might be some insights here that you can unlock for us as we get started.

00:01:54.000 But he talks about early on the gender of politics,

00:01:59.240 how in other political theories, the modern political theories,

00:02:03.160 the dominant gender is male.

00:02:06.380 And for anyone to really participate in politics, to be a person in the political sense,

00:02:12.240 one must be male. 0.81

00:02:14.560 And so even in these different political theories that might challenge the supremacy of males in politics

00:02:21.900 or patriarch or these kind of things,

00:02:24.240 the only thing they end up doing is trying to shift women into the male role 0.94

00:02:29.500 to make them fully human by making them more male.

00:02:32.700 Do you want to expand a little bit on kind of his understanding of the kind of the political gender as male?

00:02:40.500 Sure.

00:02:41.100 So you could say his question is kind of like this.

00:02:43.900 Each political theory has its own understanding of what the genders should be. 1.00

00:02:48.280 So he does distinguish at first between biological sex and sociological gender.

00:02:53.280 So we're in the realm here of the political standards, ideals or conceptions.

00:02:57.800 And he does say that according to the classical liberal conception,

00:03:01.060 it's the wealthy, urban, white, rational male.

00:03:04.780 And that you could imagine a situation where, for example, for the sake of equality,

00:03:09.800 you don't try to make women more like that standard. 0.99

00:03:13.000 Rather, you try to make men more like a female standard, for example. 0.98

00:03:16.240 That would be another way of equalizing the sexes. 1.00

00:03:18.560 So in his analysis, he shows the typical model of the liberal man and woman,

00:03:23.840 the typical model under the communist ideology and the typical models under the fascist ideology.

00:03:30.460 And I think if we ask ourselves, you know, doesn't your conception of the classically liberal man,

00:03:35.220 the communist man and the fascist man, they give you different pictures.

00:03:38.640 And the classically liberal woman and the communist woman, the fascist woman,

00:03:42.520 they would probably also give you different pictures.

00:03:44.460 So that's what he's interested in assessing, how the gender roles differ in those different models.

00:03:51.000 And obviously, because he's rejecting all three of them,

00:03:53.880 he has to think about what an alternative might look like.

00:03:57.180 Right. And so in the kind of the liberal sense,

00:04:00.440 he says that liberalism accepts kind of the urban white male as the core political actor.

00:04:09.240 In the Marxism, it attempts to kind of destroy this idea of gender,

00:04:14.080 but ends up failing in practice.

00:04:16.340 And then in fascism, it actually exalts the the white male,

00:04:21.540 the urban white male beyond a the just the actor to kind of the ideal.

00:04:26.740 Yeah, he says the third political theory, it intensifies some of those attributes.

00:04:30.260 So no longer just the white male, but the Nordic white male, no longer just rationality, 0.63

00:04:35.680 but hyper rationality, super rationality or the image of the Superman,

00:04:40.280 not just a man of action, but the man of the will to power.

00:04:44.160 So that kind of carries forward some of the tendencies of the liberal model,

00:04:49.620 but just sort of to the to a higher degree or to a more intense extent.

00:04:54.820 And one place to look for some of these figures, you know, would be in like propaganda posters.

00:04:59.420 You know, you could consider Soviet propaganda posters or communist propaganda posters.

00:05:02.860 And you'll see there that even though there's some attempt to undermine the classically liberal roles,

00:05:09.020 still you have the sort of hardworking soldier like masculine figure.

00:05:14.540 And in some cases, the women presented with the same sort of features. 0.87

00:05:17.620 So he has he's looking towards all of that.

00:05:20.240 And one helpful thing I want to mention on the communist side of the equation,

00:05:24.080 this I always found was very profound and insightful.

00:05:27.440 So Leo Strauss, by the way, my view is when we're studying Dugan,

00:05:30.480 it's helpful, as you know, from our previous conversations, in my view, in your view,

00:05:33.780 any support we can get from other thinkers besides Dugan and understanding what he's saying

00:05:38.140 is is only to our benefit.

00:05:39.820 So Strauss one time was lecturing on Marx, and he said that in Marx, the source of the division of

00:05:47.380 labor. So the division of labor is an obstacle to a social equality.

00:05:51.220 And the source of the division of labor is the division into the sexes or the, you know,

00:05:55.500 basically the division between men and women.

00:05:58.000 So if you want to overcome the division of labor, you have to overcome the division between the sexes,

00:06:02.580 which already tells you that in Marxist ideology, broadly speaking, there's a kind of orientation

00:06:08.460 towards overcoming that bifurcation and towards overcoming the firmly rooted roles of men and

00:06:15.820 women, which would be very different from the fascist or the liberal models.

00:06:18.980 So, yes, he also says, you know, fascism has introduced into post-liberal or post-modern

00:06:24.560 interpretations of gender, some like BDSM elements and so on.

00:06:28.700 And all of this discussion, you know, I think there was an article that came out some years

00:06:33.460 ago called Alexander Dugan, queer theorist, question mark, because people read this chapter

00:06:37.440 and they were like, what exactly is going on?

00:06:39.000 He wants to overcome, he apparently wants to overcome the classical gender divisions, whether

00:06:43.700 they're liberal, communist or fascist.

00:06:45.320 And his proposed solutions, which we'll talk about in a minute, are so suggestive and elusive

00:06:49.760 that people were able to wonder all kinds of things about the meaning of this, of this chapter.

00:06:55.280 But for sure, you know, the idea that you're going to be the white, rational European male

00:07:01.440 of property, who's, you know, that sort of, who cuts that figure, for Dugan, that is just

00:07:06.700 too liberal in the classical sense, too modern, too outdated, and no longer defensible, no longer

00:07:13.340 feasible, no longer desirable.

00:07:15.040 But so too, the communist and fascist alternatives.

00:07:18.800 Yeah, I can definitely understand looking at this, you know, chapter, how it can easily

00:07:23.820 be read that way.

00:07:24.700 I mean, he starts out by immediately, like you said, separating biological sex and gender,

00:07:31.440 talking about how, you know, these gender roles are, you know, only understood as valuable

00:07:38.000 in that the man is the actor here.

00:07:40.760 It's, you know, like you said, later on, we'll get to some of his solutions that also kind

00:07:44.880 of talk about destroying some of these distinctions.

00:07:47.560 And it does, in many ways, sound like some aspects of modern gender theory, if you're

00:07:52.700 not looking very closely at them.

00:07:54.380 So, you know, that context is certainly very important as we kind of move forward here.

00:07:59.660 Yeah.

00:08:00.140 So just one, well, quickly, I want to say one, one part of this argument, which we saw earlier

00:08:05.400 versions of, and in the chapters, we're still going to discuss, you see other versions of

00:08:09.540 it, it's very clear that whenever he looks at post-modernity with its, its unique and

00:08:17.520 specific characteristics, which he despises, and, you know, I'll leave it to your viewers

00:08:21.980 and listeners to decide whether they also despise it.

00:08:24.060 There's always the option of a return to the modern, like take one step back.

00:08:30.500 You know, things are getting so crazy in post-modernity.

00:08:32.640 Can't we just take one step back?

00:08:34.360 Can't we go back to the good old days of the 80s and 90s or of the, you know, Washington

00:08:38.340 consensus or some, can't we just, just take one step back?

00:08:41.820 And it's never Dugan's view.

00:08:44.020 And we have to wonder whether there's, you know, whether he has any good reasons behind

00:08:48.260 this, because obviously there are people today who do still prefer the one step back approach.

00:08:52.560 But Dugan's view is that, no, you know, you had the march, there's a logic inherent in

00:08:57.140 this movement and the step from modernity to post-modernity, it brought us to some sort

00:09:01.360 of abyss or precipice, but there's no, there's no turning back.

00:09:04.260 There's somehow only going through, but you can go through in different ways.

00:09:07.760 You can go through in the way of total dark night of the soul of post-modern dissolution,

00:09:12.660 or you can go to some sort of other strange alternative, Dasein, the radical subject, Heidegger's

00:09:19.320 other beginning, but you definitely can't just roll back the clock.

00:09:23.480 So a very interesting phrase here that I think a lot of people will probably raise an eyebrow

00:09:28.220 at when they read this is he has a sentence that says, madness is part of the gender arsenal 0.99

00:09:34.060 of the fourth political theory.

00:09:36.620 What does he mean by that?

00:09:38.760 Okay.

00:09:38.960 So this is a very good point and observation about the different ways you can go when you're

00:09:44.840 beyond the modern models.

00:09:47.020 And I'm going to say something about both about madness, but also about the sexes and also 0.83

00:09:51.640 about this whole picture, because they're all related in a way.

00:09:54.040 So Dugan does not mean we should all be completely insane, crazy, like on the street corner, you know,

00:09:59.400 attacking people just randomly out of the blue, that kind of deranged mental illness, the kind

00:10:04.780 of insanity that follows to anticipate the collapse of order, you know, or a mind that has sort of

00:10:10.980 become degenerated and decayed and crazy in that sense.

00:10:15.600 That's not what he's talking about.

00:10:17.280 But there's a kind of madness that is like Socrates once said, you know, the greatest gift of the gods.

00:10:23.900 There's a kind of madness, which is a divine inspiration, which goes above merely human

00:10:28.900 rationality, or just above sort of mundane, calculative concerns about how what we need

00:10:34.980 to do to stay efficient and well cared for and alive.

00:10:38.800 There's a kind of madness that is Dionysian in the full, beautiful, poetic sense of the word.

00:10:45.580 And that is what he has in mind.

00:10:47.740 You know, mere rationality has cut us off from the roots of our deeper humanity.

00:10:52.300 But somehow the madness that is Dionysian in the proper sense, and not just like New York

00:10:58.700 City public transit madness, is the kind of truly genuine, deep human and divine madness.

00:11:07.560 So now on the Dionysian point, this is also very important.

00:11:10.480 It's an idea he develops elsewhere.

00:11:12.080 So I only want to just suggest something about it here.

00:11:15.240 Dugan says, you can imagine three fundamental ways of interpreting the world.

00:11:19.920 The, what she calls the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and the Sibyllian.

00:11:24.780 Sibyllian means the great mother.

00:11:26.600 Sibyllian is sort of, there's a whole other story about Sibyllian, but Apollonian, Dionysian,

00:11:30.180 and Sibyllian.

00:11:31.100 He says each of these three different ways of interpreting the world, they have their own

00:11:35.360 construction of gender. 0.94

00:11:37.040 So for example, in the Apollonian model, the woman has power and wisdom, kind of like Athena.

00:11:43.680 Athena is a version of a goddess under the logos of Apollo.

00:11:47.460 You know, she has the characteristics of penetrating wisdom and power. 1.00

00:11:52.620 But in the Dionysian world, gender is much more fluid and liminal.

00:11:57.560 And the roles between the male and the female androgynous figure are much differently constituted.

00:12:04.280 And finally, in the logos of the great mother, or in this third way of seeing the world,

00:12:08.420 men become women by way of castration, primarily. 0.68

00:12:11.960 So in later books, that's how he interprets our world.

00:12:14.980 Our world is a world in which the men are being castrated and becoming swallowed by the 1.00

00:12:19.500 great, the dark, the black logos of the great mother.

00:12:22.560 So all of this is to say for him, the, and there are also these different kinds of madness

00:12:27.360 because Apollo, take Apollo as an image of rationality.

00:12:30.880 So as you go up and up and up the chain of rationality, as eventually you have this like

00:12:36.140 beatific vision, you know, or you have this ecstatic moment.

00:12:40.200 And that ecstasy is for him a kind of madness, you know, it's one step beyond our usual limits.

00:12:46.460 So you get a sort of complicated model, much more complicated than just, you know, man and

00:12:51.300 woman.

00:12:51.580 Well, we're talking about Apollonian, Dionysian, Sabellian, but that's sort of what he means.

00:12:56.200 One other thing here too, because in the chapter, he admits that he's saying things that are very

00:13:02.080 hard to understand.

00:13:04.380 And he put, he says, for example, that he's explaining one unknown through another unknown

00:13:08.760 when he says that gender in the fourth political theory is the same as sex in Dasein.

00:13:13.280 That is, we have explained one unknown through another unknown.

00:13:15.920 So he's changing the words, but they remain a puzzle.

00:13:18.740 So one way I think that it's helpful just to like begin to grasp what that might mean.

00:13:24.100 So biologically, let's say it's very straightforward.

00:13:27.240 Okay.

00:13:27.700 With 99.9% of the time, man and woman. 0.77

00:13:30.680 And sociologically also 99.9% of the time, let's say it's pretty straightforward.

00:13:35.380 But then you have a question.

00:13:37.020 What if you believe man is primarily characterized not by his sexual organs and so on, but by

00:13:42.260 his soul or by his intellect?

00:13:45.100 Then you say, okay, are souls gendered?

00:13:47.680 Well, now it's slightly more complicated.

00:13:49.820 And it's very clear somehow that bodies are gendered, you know, that like your biological

00:13:54.380 existence has a sexual identity.

00:13:57.960 That's sort of, you know, straightforward.

00:13:59.560 But if you believe that you're a spirit in a body, is your spirit also gendered in the

00:14:04.860 same way? 0.96

00:14:05.280 Like people don't typically think that the soul has sexual genitalia.

00:14:11.760 So how do you start to think about the sexuality of the soul or the sexuality of the spirit?

00:14:17.600 In this case, that's like a hint to why for Dugan, the question of the sexuality of Dasein

00:14:22.340 can also be open or strange.

00:14:24.300 Because we have the whole problem of how does our body, bodily, biological self, interact

00:14:29.360 with this other transcendent or spiritual dimension of ourselves?

00:14:33.820 So that's sort of what he's trying to puzzle out.

00:14:35.500 Yeah.

00:14:37.160 And, you know, I'll say this, you know, forgive me for doing this.

00:14:41.420 It does sound a little Gnostic, right? 0.95

00:14:43.180 In this way that we're that we need to separate that these things aren't an interplay.

00:14:48.660 And instead, they need to be separated and understood without context to each other.

00:14:53.480 So again, I only I only suggest about the soul as a like, so that you can get the sense of

00:14:59.300 the problem or the question, because in Heidegger's philosophy, there's not, I mean, the body somehow

00:15:04.600 or the bodily self is under theorized in a way in Heidegger, but he's more interested

00:15:08.160 in our relationship to being.

00:15:10.140 But there's a all I meant to point to was that kind of question.

00:15:14.520 So not necessarily that we are body, soul and spirit, and we have to figure out where

00:15:19.160 does our masculinity or femininity come from, but that if you consider the human being from

00:15:25.800 some transcendental perspective or existential perspective, like Heidegger does, then it just

00:15:31.920 becomes more complicated than if you're merely looking at, you know, let's say, the other

00:15:37.520 telling signs of sexuality and gender identity.

00:15:40.460 I gotcha.

00:15:41.900 So I also wanted to say really quickly, it's interesting that he brings this example of

00:15:49.160 because he often he references to lose more than you would expect in this.

00:15:54.840 Most people don't put a lot of tie a lot of postmodernism to to lose.

00:15:59.500 And of course, to lose famous for a number of things, but particularly, you know, the fact

00:16:04.060 that schizophrenia is it was what frees you from capitalism keeps you, you know, it might

00:16:08.860 make you the most able to kind of escape these things.

00:16:13.480 So it's interesting that he does introduce madness here as kind of a factor.

00:16:17.080 And he is bringing the lose into this very, very often.

00:16:20.680 He does talk about the body of organ without organs.

00:16:23.760 He does talk about the desiring machine.

00:16:27.240 But he also rejects many of the things that the lose kind of comes to an end with.

00:16:33.120 So he's pulling from some of this Marxist theories pulling from some of this postmodernism,

00:16:39.680 but he's not embracing all aspects of it here.

00:16:43.560 That's right, because any serious analyst of postmodernism or any serious postmodern thinker

00:16:47.840 is saying something deeply true to some extent.

00:16:51.800 And the question for Dugan is always to what extent and how can we borrow profitably from

00:16:55.720 their ideas?

00:16:56.180 Another one is the fold.

00:16:57.080 But he has other things in this chapter, he says, which, again, are mysterious, you know,

00:17:02.040 and you sort of have to puzzle through how literally he means them, what exactly he means

00:17:05.960 to say by them.

00:17:06.840 So he says that the subject of the fourth political theory is a non-adult male, you know.

00:17:12.380 So there's a reference there to the child, to immaturity, to the notion of play and playfulness,

00:17:19.780 because there's a person related to Heidegger who wrote on the world as play.

00:17:25.380 So there's always, like, what he says on the surface, and then all of the implied layers,

00:17:31.000 you know, that have reference to these other philosophers.

00:17:33.400 And then sometimes we're sort of left just having to try to see, is this totally bogus?

00:17:38.120 Is this halfway bogus?

00:17:39.720 Or is this, you know, not bogus at all?

00:17:41.940 This chapter leaves a lot of open questions, obviously.

00:17:44.340 But I would say that he's right.

00:17:46.840 But gender does shift under these different ideologies, the gender models and roles and

00:17:52.000 the ideal man and woman, the ideal type changes with the ideology.

00:17:56.400 Okay, that seems fair enough to say.

00:17:57.980 And so if you're trying to get outside of the ideologies, you're left with the question,

00:18:01.820 what would be the new ideal type?

00:18:03.700 And only other thing I want to add on this chapter that I think it's kind of clearer here

00:18:10.120 than it is elsewhere, that not everybody who criticizes postmodernity,

00:18:16.840 and who criticizes the current state of post-liberalism, goes into all of this existentialist,

00:18:24.040 Heideggerian side of things.

00:18:25.840 So take, for example, again, my other key point of reference, Leo Strauss,

00:18:29.500 his alternative was to have recourse to the notion of nature, human nature.

00:18:34.680 You know, human, the ideologies may tell you something different.

00:18:38.180 But the underlying human nature doesn't change.

00:18:41.200 All that changes is the way that the ideologies force you to interpret it,

00:18:44.780 or the way they lie about it, or the way they try to push another version of it on you.

00:18:49.320 But you can expel nature with a pitchfork, nevertheless, it returns.

00:18:53.800 But in Dugan, that idea of a constant foundational nature is sort of absent.

00:19:00.340 And it's absent in a way that it is from Heidegger as well,

00:19:03.240 because the history of being and all of these other deep and strange philosophical questions

00:19:08.820 dominate over top of the idea of a stable nature.

00:19:13.780 So all of the weirdness around this discussion, I think, partly reflects that difference as well.

00:19:19.280 So you could say, well, look, the ancient Greek polis, it was neither liberal, nor fascist,

00:19:24.340 nor communist, and it had its own version of men and women.

00:19:27.960 Maybe there's a constant that lies underneath all of those changes.

00:19:31.300 Dugan doesn't quite consider that here.

00:19:32.980 So, as you've hinted at a number of times here, of course, he goes into Dasein once again.

00:19:40.760 And here he talks about Dasein as kind of being androgynous,

00:19:45.460 and that it allows us to kind of move beyond the gender binary.

00:19:50.340 Again, language that I think a lot of people will immediately say,

00:19:53.660 okay, so here we go, you know, the gender theory hitting hard. 0.99

00:20:00.560 But he kind of explains that there's something to be reached when we're no longer looking at the opposites of these two,

00:20:08.900 when we're no longer in the tension of these two, but instead the unity of those two genders.

00:20:14.940 Could you go a little more into that?

00:20:17.160 Yeah, here's how I would put it.

00:20:18.200 So in one of our previous discussions, in one of the previous chapters,

00:20:21.080 he looked at the question of another binary, of another split, theory and practice.

00:20:26.200 You know, and he tried to understand, okay, how are we going to make fourth political theory practical?

00:20:30.800 And if you remember, he said, post-modernity overcomes that division,

00:20:35.080 but it overcomes it by blurring it horizontally.

00:20:37.540 The fourth political theory overcomes that division by digging to the root, the common root.

00:20:42.760 And in some sense, I think a similar logic applies to his analysis of gender.

00:20:47.140 So post-modernity may start to blur the gender boundaries, 0.82

00:20:50.380 but it does so sort of horizontally.

00:20:52.180 I like to think this is just, I'm sure other people have written about this,

00:20:56.660 but I find it helpful that like post-modernity has closed off the possibilities of self-transcendence.

00:21:00.560 And instead, the transcendence is like you become sexually trans, you know, 0.95

00:21:03.640 you move horizontally from one thing to another, or you're in that sort of murky, horizontal, mixed ground.

00:21:10.120 But Dugan says, yes, we need to overcome the binary.

00:21:13.980 At least we need to think about what it would mean to overcome it.

00:21:16.800 But we have to do that by going not just in the middle and not just, you know, adding them together

00:21:22.780 so that it's a big, you know, mix of things that were already there in the first place.

00:21:27.840 But you need to try to penetrate to the origin of the division.

00:21:30.600 And obviously, he doesn't mean the biological origin of the division.

00:21:33.700 He really is always primarily concerned with the conceptual or the existential dimension of this split.

00:21:40.340 So it is interesting that when Heidegger analyzes the nature of human existence,

00:21:43.920 he doesn't talk about the, you know, it's almost like it applies equally to men and women

00:21:48.720 in his analysis or presentation.

00:21:50.960 It's not linked to or indexed to being a man or being a woman.

00:21:55.940 And therefore, it sort of is that kind of open question.

00:21:58.780 But even, yeah, so it's always that idea of can we go deeper down than the division

00:22:03.560 and then come back up instead of some sort of mechanical operation of adding them or combining them.

00:22:10.300 Gotcha. And then he goes ahead and talks about kind of how there are three different approaches

00:22:16.460 to kind of attempting to understand this problem of political gender.

00:22:22.300 He talks about how postmodernism is a maximization of kind of the liberal man.

00:22:27.700 It's kind of taking it to its extremes.

00:22:29.840 He looks at Marxism and what he describes as the sexless cyborg.

00:22:34.580 And then he talks about how conservatism attempts to basically kind of reassert masculinity,

00:22:40.640 bring us back to continuing modernity by reasserting that classical understanding of masculinity.

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00:23:19.440 Yeah, that's right.

00:23:20.340 I mean, those are some of the options we have.

00:23:22.200 Probably all three of them are operating simultaneously.

00:23:25.560 Sexless cyborgs, that's not so far-fetched.

00:23:27.780 You know, AI and robot technologies are getting to be pretty good.

00:23:30.380 And these sex chatbots and so on from what I see on the Twitter timeline.

00:23:34.020 So that kind of like, you know, androgynous sex with robots or whatever, 0.76

00:23:37.300 it's probably maybe people are already doing it as we speak for all I know.

00:23:41.140 So these are all potentialities.

00:23:44.420 And it's very important for him that the conservative response, as he puts it,

00:23:49.860 when conservative forces stand up for this archetype, demand the return of masculinity,

00:23:53.960 they thereby only try to continue modernity through these gender reconstructions. 1.00

00:23:57.560 The position seems hopeless.

00:23:59.560 And here again, the fourth political theory, in our opinion, goes forward.

00:24:02.740 So I would say this, what's good about this chapter and what's good about Dugan's position here,

00:24:08.040 whether we buy into part of it or, you know, all of it or none of it,

00:24:11.780 is that at least it's clearly carving something out.

00:24:15.260 You know, the reassertion of traditional masculinity or of like 80s, 90s or 50s, 60s masculinity or

00:24:21.940 whatever, right?

00:24:22.520 It's carving out a clear position that, and he is saying, no, that's not viable.

00:24:26.800 That's not gonna, we just, you can't roll with that.

00:24:28.960 You know, there's more, there's more happening than meets the eye.

00:24:33.840 And we can't respond to it just like that.

00:24:37.560 He is not ignoring this issue, which I think a lot of people would just like it to go away.

00:24:43.120 So I think that is.

00:24:44.200 Yeah, and if you consider, you know, the Russian version of the book was written in 2009,

00:24:47.580 if I'm not mistaken, I'm pretty sure that I'm not.

00:24:49.520 And he mentions here, you know, all of the transgenderism and all these things that maybe

00:24:53.880 then were less, less a matter of everyday conversation.

00:24:58.740 You know, now we're inundated with these themes and topics.

00:25:01.160 And for him, they were pretty self-evident trends even then, which I think says something

00:25:05.500 about how he's analyzing post-modernity.

00:25:07.760 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:25:08.880 Whenever somebody makes at least a solidly predictive statement, you want to make sure

00:25:14.980 you understand kind of some of the logic behind it.

00:25:16.920 There's probably some value to it.

00:25:19.320 All right.

00:25:19.600 So our next chapter is 14.

00:25:22.380 And this is the final official chapter of the book.

00:25:25.580 It's against the post-modern world.

00:25:27.440 Now, in a lot of ways, I felt like this is pretty much kind of a restated chapter where

00:25:32.540 we're going over a lot of the ideas and summing them up.

00:25:35.900 There's still some, I think, important things to hit here, but he is tying up some of those

00:25:40.840 loose threads.

00:25:41.640 So it's called against the post-modern world.

00:25:44.060 And the very first thing he kind of steps back into, again, is unipolarity versus multipolarity.

00:25:50.480 And he specifically says a line here, which is very bombastic, which people will want

00:25:57.060 to hear.

00:25:58.080 America is the center of the kingdom of the Antichrist. 0.99

00:26:01.780 So it's not pulling too many punches here.

00:26:04.480 But I guess we can kind of touch again on his understanding of multipolarity versus unipolarity

00:26:11.400 and how the only way through, if you're going to, the only way out is through, then the American

00:26:16.240 empire kind of as it stands, the global American empire can't continue in its current form.

00:26:21.600 Yeah, I think you could say for him, the America under the rule of the Democratic Party

00:26:26.700 is the kingdom of the Antichrist, because he did support Trump.

00:26:29.780 And in this other book that he put out not too long ago, The Great Reset versus The Great

00:26:33.020 Reawakening, or the other way around, he says that Trump threw a wrench into the whole

00:26:38.120 system of the unipolarity and of The Great Reset and of the forces of the destruction of

00:26:43.600 the essence of the human being and so on.

00:26:45.180 So he's not against everything happening in the United States.

00:26:47.940 He's against what the United States is when it is run by Clinton, Biden, the Democratic

00:26:52.580 Party, and so on.

00:26:53.200 That's a big part of it.

00:26:54.600 But it's also worth noting, in my opinion, restating, because we said something like it

00:26:59.480 earlier, that even within America and within the West, there are defenders of the pre-modern

00:27:03.740 West, or let's say of the genuine, true roots of American identity.

00:27:09.000 And it's really this hostile takeover of the West and the hostile takeover of America

00:27:14.600 that, in my view, anyway, he's primarily against.

00:27:17.480 So anybody who has that spirit of unipolarity in them would be representing the bad guys

00:27:21.680 from his point of view.

00:27:22.780 But anybody who has the spirit of tradition in them, whether they're inside America or

00:27:27.100 outside of it, would be part of the good guys.

00:27:29.640 And therefore, he talks about the anti-globalist and anti-imperialist front and this kind of

00:27:34.900 alliance among the different religions, among the different factions, among the different

00:27:41.180 states and civilizations and peoples, because there's a common enemy, in his view, the common

00:27:45.980 enemy, unipolarity and its acolytes. 0.84

00:27:49.360 So for what it's worth, I mean, I think there are parts of this chapter, of this particular

00:27:54.940 part of the chapter that are important, where he says Muslims shouldn't fight Christians,

00:27:58.460 Christians shouldn't fight Jews. 0.98

00:27:59.640 You know, don't make this a religious holy war, because in fact, when you defend tradition,

00:28:03.380 you're defending somehow the right of each of those other players to have its place in

00:28:07.660 the world.

00:28:08.000 So the common enemy is the one who wants to wipe out the possibility of a tradition, custom,

00:28:14.080 a faith and so on.

00:28:15.320 So that and some other things are new.

00:28:17.900 But yeah, I mean, he does say those things against the United States.

00:28:22.020 But in my opinion, they apply with those caveats.

00:28:25.580 Yeah, he does, as he did previously, when he used this kind of language, does specifically

00:28:30.260 say there are people inside the United States who stand against this.

00:28:33.760 They will be essential to kind of opposing this.

00:28:36.600 And so he does give that caveat, to be fair.

00:28:40.000 And yeah, it does.

00:28:40.640 It does kind of like you said, he frames this as you need to have all people of tradition,

00:28:45.340 all people who would oppose kind of this current ruling order to stop squabbling and move together

00:28:51.020 together as one.

00:28:52.520 You do kind of get the feeling of the Lawrence of Arabia, where all the tribes need to be 1.00

00:28:56.700 united to fight against the force that would otherwise kind of collapse their their different

00:29:02.960 traditions.

00:29:03.400 But they seem unable to actually, you know, work together.

00:29:06.560 And so they are divided and destroyed individually.

00:29:10.000 And so you do get that feeling from him here.

00:29:12.900 I will say, you know, I started working on Dugan in 2011.

00:29:17.600 That's when I began translating this book.

00:29:19.120 And since then, I've had a lot of students and professors and people, you know, talk to

00:29:22.480 me about Dugan and his ideas.

00:29:24.440 And I do get the sense, because some of them have been religious Jews, some of them have

00:29:29.760 been Muslims, some of them have been Christians, you know, some of them are traditionalists

00:29:32.480 of another sort or stripe.

00:29:34.400 Some of them just are American patriots who don't like what's happening with the current

00:29:39.180 American regime and so on.

00:29:40.840 And everybody has found something valuable in his analysis, even if they don't share it

00:29:45.020 all the way.

00:29:45.380 So you get you do I think reading him, you do get the sense he's trying to make sure

00:29:50.680 that he says those things that unite for the most part, the right groups against the wrong

00:29:56.180 groups, the wrong group being, again, the party of unipolarity and so on without at least

00:30:01.760 now.

00:30:02.080 I don't say this is true of everything he's ever written, you know, but without trying

00:30:05.960 to introduce all kinds of new divisions or new schisms or new factions, because the whole

00:30:11.960 idea, if you remember from earlier in the book, he says it's not it's not just enough

00:30:15.980 to have a great ideology and it's not just enough to have a lot of political power, because

00:30:20.480 if you have a strong state with no great idea or a great idea with no power behind it, you're

00:30:25.320 not actually going to be able effectively to oppose unipolarity.

00:30:27.760 So part of his part of his rhetoric or part of his art of writing, part of the way that

00:30:32.300 he presents his ideas is designed to be able to fashion a consensus among groups that may

00:30:38.180 otherwise not have one.

00:30:41.020 So maybe, you know, how much of that is strategic, rhetorical, viable and so on, but it's for

00:30:45.440 sure it's a part of his project.

00:30:47.400 Yeah, I think that is one of the more interesting parts of this book for me, because many people

00:30:52.960 are willing to say I'm against globalism.

00:30:56.340 I'm against kind of this new world order.

00:30:59.500 I'm against this attempt to unify and liquefy nations into kind of this this one global hegemon.

00:31:06.440 But they don't really think about what that would take and what that would entail.

00:31:09.900 And the fact that he stops to remind people like the only thing that's going to most people

00:31:15.460 ignore the problem of the centralization of power.

00:31:17.520 They just say I'm against globalism, but they ignore the fact that a unified global power

00:31:22.320 is going to be stronger than whatever divided nationalism they might embrace.

00:31:27.700 And so the fact that he understands that and he says, OK, there is a way to unify these

00:31:32.200 things.

00:31:32.480 There is a way to kind of form an opposing position where everyone does not have to agree

00:31:39.120 on the same culture, the exact same tradition, the exact same way of life, but does agree that

00:31:44.800 the existence of those cultural and moral particulars is valuable is important.

00:31:51.400 I think it's a detail that's too often brushed over by the those that oppose globalism, but

00:31:57.040 don't think critically about what actually make would actually take to kind of unify and push

00:32:02.400 back against it.

00:32:03.100 Yeah, absolutely.

00:32:05.100 And part parts of it may still strike people as unsettling or uncomfortable or unfamiliar,

00:32:11.200 because he says, you know, there should be cooperation between the left and the right.

00:32:14.480 You know, you could combine the ecologists and the orthodox traditionalists.

00:32:18.700 And, you know, so we have to make it's in this sense, it's a big anti liberal or big anti modern

00:32:25.440 tent, because you may have people on the like he puts it here, conscious cooperation of the

00:32:31.200 radical left wingers and the new right, as well as with religious and other anti modern

00:32:35.260 movements, such as the ecologists and green theorists, for example.

00:32:38.600 So nor, you know, normally, let's say you might look at the green theorists and think that

00:32:41.780 they're completely, whatever, right, and they may look to the right and think that those

00:32:44.840 people are completely crazy.

00:32:45.700 So the prejudices have to be put aside.

00:32:48.720 And I think a memorable passage from this chapter, along a couple of other things that are worth

00:32:52.480 discussing where he says that these little group divisions, you know, the hostility of

00:32:57.680 one group to another group, these prejudices are the instruments in the hands of liberals

00:33:02.160 and globalists with which they keep their enemies divided.

00:33:04.580 So we should strongly reject anti communism, as well as anti fascism, both of them are counter

00:33:09.060 revolutionary tools in the hands of the global liberal elite.

00:33:11.700 Very interesting, because on one hand, he's rejected communism and fascism.

00:33:15.200 So he's not for communism, he's not for fascism, but he's also not for anti communism.

00:33:19.640 And he's not for anti fascism, because those movements can be exploited by the central

00:33:25.200 power for the sake of opposing any possible genuine alternative, which is just also intriguing.

00:33:33.500 And I don't think you see that kind of argument necessarily every time you read a criticism of

00:33:37.500 contemporary postmodernism.

00:33:39.420 No, I thought that was very interesting, because, for instance, Paul Gottfried has written a whole

00:33:43.780 book about how the American kind of global order is inherently a program of denazification,

00:33:50.820 anti fascist, and it's, you know, it's construction, and that it kind of blinds it to kind of all of its

00:33:57.360 other problems are all the ways that anything might be opposed to it. So I do think that's

00:34:02.720 interesting that he picked up on that strain of thought there. But I also wanted to point out that

00:34:08.860 he encourages the opposition here to be anti capitalist, anti liberal, anti cosmopolitan and

00:34:17.120 anti individualist. Again, a lot of people might read kind of pull back from any one of those

00:34:23.900 assertions. But it is obvious that these are elements that are essential to kind of the current

00:34:29.380 world order. And so if you're looking at something that's beyond it, you are probably going to have

00:34:34.160 to oppose all of these things, at least some way. Yeah, so I haven't read it. But one of his recent

00:34:39.800 books is called anti capitalism from the right. So it's clearly a part of his attack on the modern world

00:34:46.340 isn't it, you know, is a critical assessment of capitalism that he can borrow in part from the

00:34:51.500 leftist tradition, but reinterpret it from a traditionalist, let's say, or right wing perspective.

00:34:57.540 Obviously, people who are all in on the social and political virtues of capitalism won't like that.

00:35:02.680 But even so you learn from people who have criticized your position, and therefore, it's worth considering

00:35:06.880 one thing. One thing I want to say about an earlier page in this chapter, just because I think it's

00:35:13.000 helpful. So way back near the beginning of the book, when he started talking about the

00:35:17.940 towards the fourth political theory, the subject of the fourth political theory, and he said it's

00:35:22.860 going to reject the individual, the class, the race, and the state, it's going to pause at something

00:35:27.920 else. One thing he said, then was, you know, as we look for possible key players of the fourth

00:35:35.880 political theory, ultimately, it's upon that sign. But as we look at it, we can see like combinations.

00:35:40.140 So for example, maybe you, you know, combine, like national Bolshevism, you've somehow you've

00:35:45.180 combined the class concern of communism with the ethnic or state concern of fascism or something

00:35:53.060 like that. So some people who have written about this book are like, yeah, all Dugan's trying to do

00:35:56.560 is to combine the other political theories. But here he says, in my opinion, this is important for

00:36:01.120 understanding him. He says this idea of a combination, I'm not quoting yet, I'll be quoting

00:36:05.640 in a second, the idea of combining the first, second, third political theory, he says, is only

00:36:09.540 the first step, the mechanical addition of deeply revised versions of the anti liberal ideologies

00:36:15.220 of the past. In other words, combining some sort of red brown alliance will not give us a final 0.99

00:36:19.960 result. It's only a first approximation and preliminary approach. So it's kind of like just

00:36:24.900 the first mental exercise to get you outside of the usual way of thinking. But then as he puts it,

00:36:30.120 we must go further and make an appeal to tradition and pre modern sources of inspiration. So you're not

00:36:34.960 going to fight liberalism effectively just by combining nationalism and socialism. Rather,

00:36:40.320 you have to have recourse to Plato, to medieval philosophy, to theology, and to all of these

00:36:45.500 deeper, somehow more serious sources. And therefore, he also puts it, he's not telling us what the theory

00:36:51.980 is and what it's not. It's a kind of invitation and appeal rather than a dogma. So I've always thought

00:36:56.620 that was pretty important as well, both because he's saying there's this preliminary step, like an

00:37:01.900 operation to get us warmed up, then there's a much bigger task. And everybody's invited to participate

00:37:06.640 in that task to develop it to think it through, you know, and what he's really doing is just setting

00:37:11.220 some initial parameters. Yeah, that covers most of the rest of what I was going to say there. I think

00:37:16.840 he yeah, he touches once again, on the synthesis of communism and fascism talking about how you need

00:37:22.660 to discard the the materialism of communism, you need to discard the race obsession of fascism, and you

00:37:28.880 need to kind of take what what else is still left between those two. But as you said that, you know,

00:37:35.640 he then talks a lot about national Bolshevism there. I don't know if you want to touch on any

00:37:41.500 more of that. We mentioned national Bolshevism before and why that might be important to him.

00:37:45.980 I don't think we went into a lot of detail of what it is and kind of how that might connect to the

00:37:50.080 political theory. Yeah, so I'll just say one thing about national Bolshevism, which is Dugan had been

00:37:55.980 involved with this ideological experiment earlier in his career, and it had a political dimension

00:38:01.520 because he was one of the co-founders of the National Bolshevik Party. There's an essay online

00:38:05.820 of his you can find called The Metaphysics of National Bolshevism, which is interesting and worth

00:38:09.380 reading. And what I really like about that essay, as a clear conceptual distinction, he says, you know,

00:38:16.140 there's this book by Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. So he says, I'm going to define

00:38:21.140 national Bolshevism as the enemies of the open society. So on one hand, you have, okay, and that's

00:38:26.680 that's how he defines it at first in that essay. So that gives you some sense of where he was going

00:38:30.520 with it before the concept developed further. And then I have to say, there are all of these minor

00:38:35.620 details, you know, that point to other arguments in Dugan's work. And there's a very important one at

00:38:41.060 the end of this chapter. So remember, he's against unipolarity geopolitically, ideologically,

00:38:45.520 and spiritually. He defends multipolarity, but he makes this point at the end, he says,

00:38:49.920 multipolarity in all senses can be helpful. And quoting the important concept of nous,

00:38:56.500 intellect developed by the Greek philosopher Plotinus corresponds to our ideal. The intellect

00:39:01.500 is one and multiple at the same time, because it has multiple differences in itself. And then he

00:39:05.920 says the future world should be noetic in some way. Now, I'm going to make one little comment about

00:39:10.620 this. So he's combined multipolarity, which people might normally think of as just geopolitical,

00:39:15.520 with the idea of nous, a purely philosophical concept. And he has a series of books, I think

00:39:21.820 there's 24 of them in total, called Noo Magia. The noo part of that is nous. And the magia part

00:39:28.560 means like war. So wars of nous. And it's his philosophical analysis of civilizational

00:39:34.240 multipolarity. So here he says it in a paragraph, multipolarity must be noetic. Well, what does that

00:39:40.340 mean? Well, he's got 24 volumes on the analysis of civilizational multipolarity based on nous.

00:39:45.560 So in my school, I have a course on the introductory volumes just to get people acquainted before he

00:39:50.820 goes into like civilization by civilization analysis. But it's just another kind of Dugan move,

00:39:57.360 you know, multipolarity, everybody gets it. Oh, that means that, you know, BRICS is going to be

00:40:01.020 something and Shanghai Cooperation Organization is going to be something and Saudi Arabia is getting

00:40:04.480 strong. But that doesn't tell you what he means when he says it must be noetic in some way. And

00:40:09.640 that's where the philosophy comes in. See, I thought like the four volumes of society in the

00:40:13.760 mind were a little excessive, but I guess, you know, I should be grateful I didn't have to go

00:40:17.600 through 24 volumes of it. All right. Yeah. And he said in one of his interviews, he says these 24

00:40:24.400 volumes, they should really just serve as like a table of contents for the real work. So, you know,

00:40:28.920 he's he really wants a rich account of civilizational multipolarity. But, you know, 24 volumes is already

00:40:35.400 a lot. It feels like a decent amount. Yeah. All right. So then we get to our appendices here.

00:40:40.640 And there's two of them. The first one is kind of a sum up of terms that are used in the writing

00:40:48.120 here. He goes through political post-anthropology, political post-humanity and the post-state,

00:40:53.960 the political soldier in the simulacrum, and the alternative in political post-human anthropology,

00:41:00.140 pre-human and PC here. Some of these are just, again, restatements of ideas we've already gotten

00:41:05.680 through in the book. But is there any of this that you want to stop and focus on for a minute?

00:41:09.320 Yeah. So I'll say just like in the case of gender, there was the question, can you return to a standard 0.77

00:41:14.280 classical masculine ideal or something like that? So to here, he says in the post-modern state of

00:41:21.440 affairs, can you just return to the figure of the political soldier, someone who's willing to fight

00:41:26.480 and die for his idea? That's a modern, in his view anyway, you know, there were political soldiers,

00:41:31.880 but in our virtual post-modern state, it would be like a self-parodying weird simulacrum type thing,

00:41:38.840 you know? Like it's, there's no longer a space in the world for genuine political soldier. That would

00:41:44.400 be another example of taking a step back. So that's why I said in the logic of gender, in the logic of 0.91

00:41:48.760 the ideologies, and here in the logic of the figure of the political man, there's no taking a step back.

00:41:54.680 So I think that's a helpful idea. And then there's some things he says that, again, I don't know,

00:42:00.140 the references to Deleuze for sure, but also where he says, you know, the, now how fashion,

00:42:06.140 celebrity, glamour, show business, they're inculcating ideas that to attain material

00:42:10.180 prosperity, one doesn't need to earn money through work. One must instead be recognized by the relevant

00:42:14.540 social set, become a member of the ever-changing glamour network. All of these things, I think, again,

00:42:19.020 trends that he identified there that have continued and gotten even crazier. Actual work is not

00:42:24.080 necessary. It's optional. That made me think of all those TikTok videos of like a day in the work

00:42:27.460 of a Google employee where they're just sitting around looking pretty or whatever. That's, you

00:42:31.060 know, the post, the post state in a nutshell. And then he has other just nice phrases, like it's a

00:42:36.440 sort of pirate republic placed in cyberspace or a Brazilian carnival, a hallucinatory game. So somehow,

00:42:43.720 you know, it's all related to the things he said before in this sort of unreal virtual parody,

00:42:50.100 confused parody of the earlier states of relative normality. But we also just can't return there.

00:42:58.260 Right. So the next appendices is an interesting one. I don't know what the context came in for this.

00:43:05.980 If it was a separate chapter, I know you helped to translate this. So maybe you know better how this

00:43:11.520 kind of ended up where it did, but it's called the metaphysics of chaos.

00:43:14.960 Yeah. So I didn't translate this chapter and I'm not, uh, I wasn't involved with the compilation of

00:43:19.700 the text. So it combined some of the original chapters of fourth political theory with some

00:43:23.140 other ones, but I will say this chaos is a very important theme for Dugan. Some people who have

00:43:30.460 skimmed the surface of his, uh, public profile have said, you know, there's this star, uh, the star

00:43:37.920 that's in the middle of the cover right here. They're like, that's the chaos star. And that proves that

00:43:42.400 Dugan is a Satanist because he follows Alistair Crowley and he's like chaos. You know, I've heard,

00:43:48.080 you can read all kinds of things about the meaning of that star and so on the chaos star. But the,

00:43:52.040 the idea of chaos is actually very important in his work, not only here in this appendix,

00:43:56.660 in his second Heidegger book called Martin Heidegger, the possibility of Russian philosophy.

00:44:01.360 He has a whole section on the meaning of a philosophy of chaos. I translated parts of it and

00:44:08.280 they're available in my book on my second book, which is called, uh, inside Putin's brain,

00:44:13.640 the political philosophy of Alexander Dugan. Uh, if anybody wants, they can reach out and I'll send

00:44:17.560 a free PDF copy or whatever. You don't have to buy it, but it has excerpts of his philosophy of chaos

00:44:22.240 from that book. Uh, another thing I want to say is there's a very nice essay of his available online,

00:44:27.780 which is, he goes over like the original meanings of chaos among the Greek philosophers and

00:44:33.600 pedicles and so on. And there's a lot about this topic. That's very, very, very important.

00:44:38.820 So in this chapter, you start to get a sense, a sense of it, you know, not the last word,

00:44:43.260 like much of this book is like that suggestive, but not the last word, but still a lot, you know,

00:44:48.440 and here the idea, this is the crucial idea is that there is not one chaos. There are two chaoses.

00:44:55.340 There's a chaos that follows the collapse of order. And there's a chaos that proceeds as it were,

00:45:02.320 the birth of order. And that little division, like so many other little divisions in this book,

00:45:08.700 help Dugan to analyze the state of affairs. So if logos or reason or rationality has played itself

00:45:16.700 out to this post-rational, schizophrenic, post-modern, uh, world, uh, playground or nightmare or carnival,

00:45:25.140 depending on how you prefer to see it. So it's going into a chaos. It's becoming chaotic.

00:45:31.220 And that chaos is reflected in all kinds of processes and new technologies and the development

00:45:36.880 of chaos, you know, the mathematics that's appropriate to the study of chaos,

00:45:40.220 but it is all the collapse, a collapse of logos, collapse of reason, dissolution, dissipation,

00:45:48.060 and somehow destruction, but a destruction that's interpreted as progress, as progressive,

00:45:53.020 as better. And Dugan, when he puzzles through philosophically, all of these challenges,

00:45:58.780 you know, what do we need a new philosophy? Are we just, are we just left with what we have now?

00:46:03.600 What are we going to do? He goes all the way back to the beginning, as it were, and says,

00:46:07.640 what about the original chaos? What about the womb of order? What about that, which embraced logos,

00:46:16.940 but wasn't logos, you know? And it's, again, some people might hear that and be like, this is totally

00:46:23.140 abstract. This is totally useless. It doesn't solve any real problems, but it doesn't matter because 0.61

00:46:27.360 whenever we think about things like rights or the state or authority, legitimacy, we're always going

00:46:33.640 to be thinking, quote unquote, abstractly, but in ways that do have a lot of relevance. So in the

00:46:39.400 Heidegger book that I mentioned, he says, when he goes through the philosophy of chaos, he's like,

00:46:43.600 from this perspective, we have to reinterpret the whole meaning of Russian history and of world

00:46:47.280 history and so on. So absolutely crucial concept. And not to go on and on, but I want to say one more

00:46:52.980 thing which isn't in the chapter, but which may help people to think about it. The natural opposition

00:46:59.620 is between chaos and order. Like people who read Jordan Peterson or whatever else, you know,

00:47:04.800 may be familiar with that kind of opposition. So if the natural, I mean, in this chapter,

00:47:08.640 he talks about chaos and logos, but another natural opposition to chaos and order. So when we think

00:47:13.700 about international affairs, when we think politically, usually we think in terms of order,

00:47:19.300 new world order, as you mentioned earlier, a fight for the global order, you know, a multipolar world

00:47:24.820 order. And one of the things that Dugan tries to bring out is that it's not just a new order that's

00:47:31.060 at stake. It's not just the nature of order in the world that's at stake right now. It's also the nature

00:47:36.000 of chaos that's at stake. And chaos is related to the processes around these wars because war is

00:47:41.700 chaotic. So it's a huge theme for him, way beyond this chapter. But as I say, this chapter is like a

00:47:48.700 for a good first exposure to it. Yeah, I think that hit most of the notes I had on there is just

00:47:54.920 talking about how logos was kind of the end of European philosophy, kind of the two chaos is the

00:48:02.620 distinction that you talked about there. That's important that I wanted to hit on, you know, logos

00:48:09.040 as the center of a number of religions, especially Christianity and Greek thoughts.

00:48:13.860 And so, yeah, I think that that pretty much it's everything. Conservatism is kind of the

00:48:20.140 restoration of logos. That might be interesting to talk about for just a second. I see a lot of

00:48:23.960 people, Jordan Peterson, others, especially on kind of the the non woke left or the kind of the

00:48:31.680 classical centrist or classical liberal kind of centrist movement, talking about logos as a way to

00:48:39.660 kind of revivify the Western tradition and bring things back. He kind of pre he he predicts this,

00:48:48.980 right? He predicts that this is the route that conservatives will take attempting to kind of

00:48:54.240 rehabilitate logos and bring it back into the kind of the center of the discussion. But every time I hear

00:49:00.380 people talk about this, it's always feels like them trying to do a disembodied rationalist version of

00:49:07.420 Christianity. It always feels like them trying to find kind of the remnants of Christian ethos and 0.84

00:49:15.380 kind of tie it together in a way that will become acceptable for people who are no longer able to be

00:49:20.820 bound by kind of a religious ideal. And I think that might be kind of part of what he's pointing

00:49:26.780 out when he's talking about the kind of these attempts will fail and it has to kind of move

00:49:30.580 beyond that. But I didn't know if you wanted to expound a little bit on that at all.

00:49:34.060 So there would be, in my view, different ways you could try to return to logos, you know, some of

00:49:39.900 them would be a reassertion of a specific kind of rationality, some of them may be an attempt to

00:49:43.820 restore classical learning, you know, the class, let's go back and can't we all just go memorize

00:49:48.060 Dante like we used to or something like that, you know, the classical school model, others may be a kind

00:49:52.420 of watered down Christianity, you know, or very unified or so there are all of these possible ways that

00:49:59.540 you could do it. But Dugan, again, following the logic that you can't take a step back unless you

00:50:05.500 go back to the very origin of the very source. That is always the sort of movement of his thought here.

00:50:11.740 And one of the things that I've observed, a lot of the slightly different from the point you made,

00:50:18.380 but I've observed that a lot of, let's say, conservatives, Republicans, or, you know,

00:50:22.260 defenders of tradition, anti-postmodern thinkers, they want to go back to, let's learn Greek again and

00:50:28.520 Latin again and really let's do this sort of like encyclopedia of the cultural treasures of the

00:50:35.200 Western world, you know, in other words, the whole positive history of Logos. But one of the things

00:50:41.800 that Dugan is so adamant about is that in some way, the postmoderns are right that you have to go to

00:50:49.600 Nietzsche, you have to go to Heidegger, you have to go to those people who saw the end of Logos, or at

00:50:55.660 least who claimed to have seen the end of it, who claimed to have seen the, its total loss of power

00:51:02.720 and legitimacy, and who were able to analyze that process in a lot of detail. So it's kind of like,

00:51:08.940 again, this is the way that I, this is the way that I see things. I think it maps on somehow.

00:51:13.460 German philosophers who, especially, obviously, especially Heidegger, but not only, who looked over

00:51:19.680 the whole process of Western philosophy, they were read by the left postmoderns and not so much by the

00:51:24.920 conservative rightists. And therefore, the combination of a desire to go back to the very

00:51:31.500 origin of the whole drama of reason, of Logos, the whole problem of being and non-being in some sense,

00:51:37.780 the whole problem of chaos and order, to go all the way back to the origin of that problem,

00:51:41.940 the conservative Republican, you know, somehow classically oriented right would have to go where

00:51:47.720 it doesn't want to go into German philosophy. And that's why Dugan represents a very unique

00:51:54.040 alternative. He's combined that concern with German philosophy, but in a way that is unfamiliar,

00:52:00.680 because we, we tend to see that among the French postmodern leftists, not among the, you know,

00:52:06.060 Russian postmodern rightists, as it were. But that's, you know, that's, that's a key and crucial

00:52:12.180 problem. Because even though it would be good, let's say, let's say everybody at the table could

00:52:16.640 agree, you know, it would be much better for people to read the Bible and Shakespeare and Plato and

00:52:22.740 Cicero and all of these other great works, you know, like you can get from a St. John's curriculum

00:52:27.880 or something like that, that, that would be much better than if they constantly read some sort of 0.88

00:52:32.560 contemporary ideological trash. That's probably true. They would become more cultivated, more cultured, 0.96

00:52:37.780 they'd have more points of reference, and they would understand the whole heritage and the legacy

00:52:43.300 of the Western world in a way that right now is under attack. That's true. But will they have

00:52:51.700 penetrated to the deepest dimension of the most fundamental problems? That's, that remains open.

00:52:57.700 And that's what, that's where Dugan in his constant reference to Heidegger is always looking to go.

00:53:02.500 So that's sort of where, where matters stand, I would say, with the question of chaos. That's what

00:53:07.340 it represents to him. It represents the, the very source and origin of the tradition.

00:53:14.620 All right, well, we can go ahead and probably wrap up here. Before we go to the questions of the

00:53:21.220 people, first, is there anything that we, you know, we've, we've gone through five episodes here,

00:53:26.320 but is there anything that we didn't get to something that we didn't explore in enough depth

00:53:30.680 or something that we need to touch on again that you can think about?

00:53:32.900 No, I think we did a good job. Uh, all credit to you for covering the book, uh, cover to cover.

00:53:38.100 I'll just say for those who are intrigued enough to want to read more, there's definitely more to

00:53:42.580 read. So there's the rise of the fourth political theory, which is part two. There are all of these

00:53:46.320 other books that we referred to of Dugan's ethnos and society beginning, uh, with Heidegger, my book

00:53:52.000 on him. And this, you know, there's a lot that you can read if you want to keep studying Dugan,

00:53:56.000 but this was a great place to, uh, to start. And for many people, a great place to finish too,

00:54:00.040 because it does give you a nice round overview, I think of his major concerns.

00:54:04.740 And let me encourage people. I know, uh, Michael was graciously like, you don't have to buy my book.

00:54:09.200 I'll hand you a copy or whatever, but do buy Michael's book. He's put in the yeoman's work

00:54:13.340 here. Uh, he's given you a masterclass on understanding of this book, uh, throw the man

00:54:18.440 some, some help here. You got to support people who are doing great work. So make sure that you're

00:54:22.520 taking care of those who are, who are putting in the hours like Michael is. Cause I think that's,

00:54:26.620 it's really important. Uh, but that, that said, uh, Michael, where can people find your work if

00:54:32.120 they want to support you? Want to look into what you're doing? So I'm on Twitter, M underscore

00:54:37.280 Millerman. I have a school millermanschool.com, some paid courses, some free courses. I'm on YouTube

00:54:42.820 where I put out lectures on Heidegger, Strauss, Dugan, and other figures. And, uh, you can find some

00:54:48.280 of my books, my two books on Amazon. And, uh, yeah, so just, I'm putting out material on political

00:54:54.280 philosophy and political theory wherever I can. Uh, Millerman school is my main, my main site.

00:54:59.360 Excellent. And guys, I've really enjoyed this, uh, series. I've gotten really good feedback from

00:55:04.500 this. I'm thinking about doing, you know, uh, streams like this as kind of a regular feature.

00:55:09.680 So if there is a work, if there's a thinker, if somebody that you'd like to have a deep dive in

00:55:15.760 kind of a multi-part series, looking at a particular, uh, work, let me know, put those comments down in the

00:55:21.700 description and I'll take those under advisement as I kind of plan out going forward, what we're

00:55:26.120 going to be looking at. Uh, that said, we do have a super chat here. So let me grab it here.

00:55:30.960 Uh, Cripper weirdo here for $5. How do we know this isn't another attempt at enlightened centrism?

00:55:37.260 So yeah, there's a lot of synthesis here, right? There's a lot of, well, we take a little bit of

00:55:41.440 this and we take a little bit of that and you know, we, we pull it all together. Uh, I think there's

00:55:46.640 a couple of obvious answers here, but how do we know that Dugan isn't just pulling a little bit

00:55:49.980 of enlightened centrism, but just kind of, uh, to the, his geopolitical interests?

00:55:55.460 Well, I would say that one way to think about centrism is the kind of moderation. We don't

00:55:59.400 want to go to the extremes. You know, we sort of want to, you don't want to upset the people

00:56:03.140 on the right too much. You don't want to upset the people on the left too much. Let's find this

00:56:06.220 sort of moderate, happy, uh, middle ground. That's not Dugan's view. He's a much more radical thinker.

00:56:12.280 You know, one of the biggest criticisms against him, I think is how, how little moderation

00:56:16.400 matters to him, how extreme he is in wanting to go all the way to the beginning or all the way to

00:56:20.880 the end, or, you know, very much against this or against that. So, um, a centrism would be more a

00:56:26.880 matter of playing it safe here. This is much more revolutionary. It's just not a leftist

00:56:32.500 revolutionary. It's a different kind of conservative revolutionary thought. So I think that would be one

00:56:36.780 way to, uh, to distinguish it. And then also with its interests in mysticism and in madness and in chaos,

00:56:42.940 I think that it goes against the grain of what we would normally consider enlightened,

00:56:47.360 which is sort of like purely rational, uh, and less mystical and less mad and less chaotic.

00:56:53.440 Yeah. I think that, uh, your point of, you know, normally you, you would be trying not to offend

00:56:58.000 anyone and instead Dugan seems to offend everyone, uh, you know, is a, is probably a sign that he's not

00:57:03.160 just aiming for the broadest audience. So, uh, I think that's a, that's a safe bet. Also, I noticed a

00:57:08.440 number of people bringing up the chaos symbol. Yes, guys. I also recognize that symbol from

00:57:13.580 Warhammer 40 K. So, uh, that's, that's where, that's where I knew the chaos symbol from. I knew

00:57:18.820 it immediately. So I hear you. All right, guys, I think that's everything. Once again, thank you to

00:57:24.440 Michael for coming on, did a great job, laid it out in a very helpful way. I know I learned a ton.

00:57:29.600 I got lots of good feedback from other people who learned a lot. So excellent that we were able to go

00:57:34.220 through this. I think it'll be very helpful. Again, guys, just want to remind you, you know,

00:57:38.180 these are not endorsements of ideas. This is not embracing of all of these things. We're looking

00:57:42.740 at a thinker because we want to better understand where they're coming from, the different sources

00:57:46.480 they're pulling together, the thought they're exploring. You don't have to embrace all of this

00:57:50.700 stuff or even any of it to still find value in the points that he's bringing forward. The analysis

00:57:55.400 that is bringing forward. As I pointed out many times, Dugan is often pulling from a lot of different

00:58:00.660 people. A lot of these thoughts aren't new to him, but he's bringing them together in a very

00:58:04.460 interesting way. And there's a lot of value in that. So even if you don't find one thing that

00:58:09.100 Dugan said particularly helpful, remember, he's drawing from lots of other thinkers that you can

00:58:13.540 explore as well to kind of better understand those different pieces of the puzzle that he's

00:58:19.240 pulling together. As always, guys, if this is your first time here, please make sure that you go ahead

00:58:24.440 and subscribe to the channel. And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts,

00:58:28.200 make sure you subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on all your favorite podcast networks.

00:58:33.320 Thanks for coming by guys. And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 19, 2023

The Fourth Political Theory： Part Five ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸19⧸23

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