The Fourth Political Theory： Part Five ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 5⧸19⧸23
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.89565
Summary
Dugan's Fourth Political Theory is the final chapter in the book, and the final addition to the appendices. In this episode, we take a look at the final two chapters, along with two appendices, which introduce some interesting ideas as well.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:00:10.720
Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
00:00:25.260
Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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,
00:01:01.400
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.
00:01:10.260
And as always, helping me unravel the mystery of Dugan is Michael Millerman.
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.
00:01:48.220
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,
00:02:06.380
And for anyone to really participate in politics, to be a person in the political sense,
00:02:14.560
And so even in these different political theories that might challenge the supremacy of males in politics
00:02:24.240
the only thing they end up doing is trying to shift women into the male role
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?
00:02:41.100
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.
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,
00:03:04.780
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.
00:03:13.000
Rather, you try to make men more like a female standard, for example.
00:03:16.240
That would be another way of equalizing the sexes.
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,
00:04:16.340
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,
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.
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
00:05:39.820
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,
00:05:58.000
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
00:06:39.000
He wants to overcome, he apparently wants to overcome the classical gender divisions, whether
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
00:07:15.040
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
00:07:24.700
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
00:07:40.760
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
00:07:54.380
So, you know, that context is certainly very important as we kind of move forward here.
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.
00:08:34.360
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?
00:08:44.020
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
00:09:38.960
So this is a very good point and observation about the different ways you can go when you're
00:09:47.020
And I'm going to say something about both about madness, but also about the sexes and also
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.
00:10:17.280
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.
00:10:47.740
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.
00:11:12.080
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.
00:11:26.600
Sibyllian is sort of, there's a whole other story about Sibyllian, but Apollonian, Dionysian,
00:11:31.100
He says each of these three different ways of interpreting the world, they have their own
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.
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.
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
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
00:12:51.580
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
00:13:04.380
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.
00:13:30.680
And sociologically also 99.9% of the time, let's say it's pretty straightforward.
00:13:37.020
What if you believe man is primarily characterized not by his sexual organs and so on, but by
00:13:49.820
And it's very clear somehow that bodies are gendered, you know, that like your biological
00:13:59.560
But if you believe that you're a spirit in a body, is your spirit also gendered in the
00:14:05.280
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
00:14:24.300
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.
00:14:37.160
And, you know, I'll say this, you know, forgive me for doing this.
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
00:15:10.140
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.
00:15:41.900
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.
00:16:27.240
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,
00:16:43.560
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
00:16:57.080
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
00:17:06.840
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?
00:17:41.940
This chapter leaves a lot of open questions, obviously.
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.
00:17:57.980
And so if you're trying to get outside of the ideologies, you're left with the question,
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,
00:18:25.840
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.
00:19:32.980
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.
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.
00:20:18.200
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,
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,
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
00:21:50.960
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.
00:22:29.840
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.
00:22:47.680
What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
00:22:52.940
A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper
00:22:59.660
A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.
00:23:04.120
Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.
00:23:08.280
Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:23:22.200
Probably all three of them are operating simultaneously.
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,
00:23:37.300
it's probably maybe people are already doing it as we speak for all I know.
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.
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
00:24:22.520
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.
00:24:37.560
He is not ignoring this issue, which I think a lot of people would just like it to go away.
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
00:25:08.880
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.
00:25:22.380
And this is the final official chapter of the book.
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
00:25:44.060
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
00:25:58.080
America is the center of the kingdom of the Antichrist.
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
00:26:45.180
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
00:26:54.600
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
00:27:22.780
But anybody who has the spirit of tradition in them, whether they're inside America or
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
00:27:49.360
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,
00:27:59.640
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
00:28:08.000
So the common enemy is the one who wants to wipe out the possibility of a tradition, custom,
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.
00:28:40.640
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
00:28:52.520
You do kind of get the feeling of the Lawrence of Arabia, where all the tribes need to be
00:28:56.700
united to fight against the force that would otherwise kind of collapse their their different
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.
00:29:12.900
I will say, you know, I started working on Dugan in 2011.
00:29:19.120
And since then, I've had a lot of students and professors and people, you know, talk to
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
00:29:34.400
Some of them just are American patriots who don't like what's happening with the current
00:29:40.840
And everybody has found something valuable in his analysis, even if they don't share it
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
00:30:02.080
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
00:30:41.020
So maybe, you know, how much of that is strategic, rhetorical, viable and so on, but it's for
00:30:47.400
Yeah, I think that is one of the more interesting parts of this book for me, because many people
00:30:59.500
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
00:31:32.480
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
00:32:05.100
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
00:32:48.720
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
00:33:39.420
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:52:32.560
contemporary ideological trash. That's probably true. They would become more cultivated, more cultured,
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.