The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Fourth Political Theory： Part One ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 3⧸22⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.660 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.960 Now, Alexander Dugan is somebody who is shrouded in a lot of mystery for people.

00:00:43.220 It's someone who they've heard rumors of.

00:00:46.560 They've heard different opinions about his connection with Vladimir Putin and different political ideologies.

00:00:53.740 And it's hard to clarify some of that because his books are increasingly difficult to find even in our Western free markets.

00:01:01.260 I had to work quite hard to read just one of his books.

00:01:05.340 Luckily for me, I have with me on the show today Michael Millerman.

00:01:09.680 Mr. Millerman is a YouTuber.

00:01:12.400 He also has a set of courses that teach on a number of different philosophers, including Dugan himself.

00:01:19.060 And if I'm correct, he also was involved in the translation of the fourth political theory.

00:01:23.400 Is that right, Michael?

00:01:24.840 That's right.

00:01:25.340 Excellent. So he's a great source for this.

00:01:27.960 And we're going to be diving deep into a number of different things.

00:01:30.980 As I was talking to Michael at the beginning of this, I started taking notes about what I wanted to talk about.

00:01:36.600 And I think I made it to chapter three and realized I already had an hour's worth of notes.

00:01:40.340 So we're going to focus on just a few topics.

00:01:42.500 We're not going to be able to cover everything today.

00:01:44.460 But if we're very lucky, we might get Mr. Millerman back and be able to kind of expand on this in more depth.

00:01:50.400 But before we do all that, guys, I want to talk to you really quick about today's sponsor.

00:01:54.400 This episode is brought to you by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

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00:03:14.220 All right, guys.

00:03:16.280 So like I said, we're going to be focusing mainly on Dugan's book, The Fourth Political Theory.

00:03:21.360 Now, there are many books that Dugan has written.

00:03:24.240 This is the only one that I am familiar with at this point.

00:03:26.600 And to be fair, this is only my first pass on it.

00:03:29.060 Normally, I try to go ahead and spend a good amount of time.

00:03:32.380 But unfortunately, I had to work with kind of a PDF and an audio recording.

00:03:37.240 I'm still waiting for my physical copy to come in.

00:03:39.600 So I haven't gone through this in quite the level of detail that I normally like to.

00:03:44.120 But as I understand, there are a number of chapters that were taken and put into a second book.

00:03:50.240 Is that correct?

00:03:50.820 There's another book that was kind of put together of chapters that were not included in this one?

00:03:56.300 That's right.

00:03:56.720 And that's called The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory.

00:03:59.600 Okay.

00:03:59.960 So hopefully, so this might also be incomplete.

00:04:02.260 There might be additional.

00:04:03.500 I'm not sure if there's a natural break in there or is there a further expansion?

00:04:07.880 You know, there are chapters that were in the original Russian that weren't included in the first volume that was put together for a conference in July 2012.

00:04:16.460 So I think the publisher wanted to use what they had available.

00:04:19.360 And then the chapters that were in the Russian but not in the first volume that came out in English were released as The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory.

00:04:26.920 But I'll tell you one thing, which is that in some sense, all of Dugan's books connect to one another.

00:04:32.800 So there are passages even in the Fourth Political Theory that refer to ethno-sociology or to his books on the sociology of the imagination.

00:04:40.700 It's a kind of universe of discourse.

00:04:42.840 But I do think still this is a natural starting place.

00:04:45.360 And in some sense, it's self-contained, even though there is that second volume.

00:04:49.380 Okay.

00:04:49.500 So hopefully we can get enough here to have a good discussion, even though I don't have a broader understanding of some of the other particulars that he'd be referencing throughout there.

00:04:58.580 But to go ahead and get started, for those who just might not be familiar, could you explain a little bit about Dugan's background and also how you first came to kind of interact and become interested in his work?

00:05:10.280 Sure.

00:05:10.960 So I'll start with how I became interested in him.

00:05:14.600 I was an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia studying philosophy and studying political philosophy as well, in part.

00:05:22.280 I have a background in the Russian language because my family is from the former Soviet Union.

00:05:27.260 So that's how I got into the world of Russian thinkers.

00:05:31.020 But I also had an interest in mysticism, religious studies, and political philosophy.

00:05:36.060 And so I was sort of looking for Russian political theological type figures to be reading and to be studying.

00:05:43.100 And I came across an article about Dugan, this was probably 2010 or 2011, and the article basically argued that he's Russia's philosopher king, he's a kind of philosopher mystic, and you can't understand Russia today and Russia's place on the world stage better than you could do if you did it through Dugan.

00:06:02.940 And so that just met, that ticked all the boxes for me, you know, there's the mystical dimension, the philosopher king, the Russia side, and the key to understanding something important about this massive civilizational state and country and important player in world affairs.

00:06:17.640 So that's when I went out and started digging more.

00:06:20.380 And the first book of his that I found was the fourth political theory in Russian, obviously.

00:06:25.700 And then I undertook a process of translating that, and that was the first of several books I ended up translating.

00:06:31.260 As for Dugan, who he is, I like to say that he's a Russian philosopher, ideologue, and activist, because he combines these several functions in himself that are often parceled out among different people.

00:06:43.860 You know, sometimes you have a philosopher whose books get read by an ideologue, whose ideological tracts get put into practice by political parties or political agents or activists.

00:06:56.400 Dugan somehow does all of that himself.

00:06:58.460 He's built, over 30-odd years, a universe of books that articulate the meaning of Russia's place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

00:07:10.540 That's the specifically Russian part.

00:07:12.140 But the one that I think is more interesting for people outside of Russia is a general theory of international and political life, one that spans from the foundational metaphysics, ontology, or first philosophy, all the way to organizing institutions and having strategic partnerships and tactical alliances geopolitically.

00:07:33.080 So he's one of these figures whose intention is to have a comprehensive and, as it were, epic, in the sense of broad-ranging with great heights and depths, an epic theory of global affairs and of man's place in the world.

00:07:49.820 And so he's been doing that book after book.

00:07:51.960 He's quite prolific.

00:07:52.900 He's said about himself that his biography is his bibliography.

00:07:55.880 So that shows you how important it is to him to be a writer, a thinker, and somebody dealing with these questions.

00:08:04.300 What are we doing in post-modernity?

00:08:07.220 And if we want to get out of the situation, how?

00:08:09.540 I think it's really interesting, too.

00:08:12.160 For him, he would have to be all those things, right?

00:08:15.100 For him, like, simply espousing the theory would not be enough.

00:08:18.540 You'd have to be in the action of doing it to really understand it and embody it to really have it mean anything.

00:08:26.220 Yeah, that's right.

00:08:27.000 So, in other words, one of his ideas of what it is to think is that it's not just a disembodied abstract practice removed from the existential concerns of human and political life.

00:08:37.000 That's for sure.

00:08:37.540 But he's also just had to single-handedly put together a project.

00:08:42.500 Now, as you, I think, posted about on Twitter when you were commenting on the book, and as I'm sure you saw in the first part of the book, he's pitched it as an open project.

00:08:50.860 So he has other collaborators and contributors and thinkers.

00:08:54.820 But somehow, you know, it has rotated around his efforts for all that time, and it's an accomplishment.

00:09:00.580 Absolutely.

00:09:00.980 So, like I said, we're not going to get to everything today, but I'm hoping that we can maybe just work through a few of the key points early on.

00:09:07.400 In the book, I kind of expound on those, and they're very interesting.

00:09:11.760 They cross over some of the philosophy I'm more familiar with when it comes to the neo-reactionary sphere, when I kind of touch on some of those points and maybe examine some of that.

00:09:21.140 But to start out with, he kind of lays out, of course, the three political theories of modernity, right?

00:09:28.080 The three liberal theory or the three theories he talks about, of course, are liberalism.

00:09:33.940 That would be the first one, communism in reaction to liberalism, and then fascism in reaction to communism and liberalism.

00:09:41.700 And he kind of explains that, obviously, fascism kind of exploded itself through a couple different problems, including, of course, obviously, Nazism and everything else that followed with that.

00:09:55.400 Communism kind of died of old age, and liberalism kind of reigns supreme at the end of this thing.

00:10:00.940 But that's put us into a different state, which is post-liberalism, in which liberalism is kind of assumed.

00:10:06.740 And that puts us in a very different situation.

00:10:09.720 Could you talk a little bit about what he means by kind of that post-liberal situation?

00:10:15.060 Yeah, so Dugan has an argument that liberalism, when it's contesting other ideologies, it's in the field of political combat that hasn't yet been resolved.

00:10:26.640 So when liberalism, communism, and fascism are fighting, they're fighting for who gets to dominate and become, as it were, the status quo operating in the background.

00:10:36.740 So before one of them has won, the background isn't established, it's not settled yet, it's contested.

00:10:42.800 When liberalism wins, it goes from being a player in the field to constituting the field itself.

00:10:50.600 So that suddenly, after the victory of liberalism, everything that shows up as a political phenomenon does so in the hue of, or against the backdrop of, liberalism's dominance.

00:11:02.460 And when that happens, when it goes from being one among the fighters in the arena to the arena itself, everything changes.

00:11:10.720 Everything changes about itself, and everything changes about that field of contestation.

00:11:15.880 Because in the era of the three political theories, you could oppose liberalism by getting into the ring, by getting into the arena.

00:11:23.700 The era of post-liberalism, suddenly the only thing that shows up as an opponent to it, Dugan analyzes this at various points throughout the text, is it's not so clear what can oppose liberalism after it becomes the last ideology standing.

00:11:38.100 So another part of his argument, for example, is that in the classical phase of the combat between the three ideologies, liberalism was dedicated to the individual and to no external authorities over and above the individual, kind of liberation from collective identities that are externally opposed, like church identity, for example, and things like that.

00:12:00.040 But he has an argument that when liberalism wins, it takes all of the energy and all of the attack that it had previously directed outside of itself against external forms of hierarchy and so on, and redirects it into the individual himself.

00:12:14.480 So that the post-modern individual, the post-liberal, post-liberal, post-modern individual, now attacks not only external authorities, but internal authorities, like the authority of reason itself.

00:12:26.080 So that the post-liberal individual culminates no longer in the primacy of reason, but in an attack on that, the liberation of our schizophrenic urges, irony, and all of these other uniquely post-modern characteristics.

00:12:38.980 So it's a nice analysis, you know, it's one thing when there's a fight, because the fight somehow constitutes the field of the political.

00:12:45.480 When he says at the beginning of Fourth Political Theory that it seems like politics has come to an end, that's what he means is that at the ideological level, there's no longer viable contestation with liberal dominance.

00:12:57.680 Yeah, and the end of politics is really important there.

00:13:00.920 I think he leans very into that end of history from Francis Fukuyama, that language, and saying that, you know, now that liberalism has emerged the victor, everything moves out of the realm of the political and is re-territalized into the realm of the marketplace, right?

00:13:16.020 And so all questions really become questions of economic efficiency, that we move out of the ability to really think of things as a specifically economic term and really only have the ability to think of them in this kind of marketplace scenario.

00:13:33.240 It really does feel like that explanation, of course, of Schmidt, and he references Schmidt regularly, so I'm sure that that's part of it, of kind of liberalism, putting all the existential questions in the broom closet so that you could just kind of create, you know, a minimum viable morality that allows the marketplace to function.

00:13:53.240 But we don't actually ever remove those existential questions, but it feels like he's saying, like, there's just people no longer know how to even engage with those politically anymore.

00:14:05.220 They've kind of even just lost the vocabulary for that, which I think is very interesting because, again, it also kind of overlaps with someone who I also like quite a bit, Alistair McIntyre, kind of losing the ability to have even moral conversations or political conversations because the language of the marketplace is now just dominant.

00:14:23.240 Yeah, that's right.

00:14:53.240 And if you just consider that as settled, then maybe you can have a world of tolerance, peace, and compromise, as the liberals pretend to be interested in, whereas obviously their logic betrays the fact that they're in a full-out war against any alternative to liberalism.

00:15:08.620 So that's true.

00:15:09.620 We've lost the vocabulary, and Dugan is definitely interested in analyzing that situation, giving us the vocabulary.

00:15:14.720 One thing that I think is nice about his approach, I have benefited from it personally, and I think it stands out in some sense as unique or as distinct, I would put it like this.

00:15:25.600 Some people who are searching for a vocabulary in the context of liberal dominance to talk about meaningful and good life, some of them go to ancient political philosophy.

00:15:34.240 Aristotle, in particular, Stoics in some cases, Plato for sure.

00:15:39.360 So you have the return to classical political philosophy, the ancients, in some cases religious thought, Aquinas, you know, a kind of Christian common good vocabulary.

00:15:48.280 But as a rule, those people tend not to go all the way in the direction as well of German philosophers like Heidegger.

00:15:58.880 You know, we're going to go in the direction of antiquity, we're not going to go in the direction of German postmodernity, let's say.

00:16:04.880 Another group of thinkers in trying to criticize liberalism goes in the direction of German postmodernity, but it does so from the left.

00:16:11.480 So you have leftist thinkers who are well-versed in Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, and all of these other thinkers.

00:16:18.320 But one of the things that Dugin thinks is important is that we can't actually understand our situation if we don't see the whole picture.

00:16:26.340 And part of the whole picture is the postmodern element.

00:16:30.060 Therefore, we need the language to understand, and we get that language not just by returning to Christian thought, not just by returning to classical thought,

00:16:36.980 but by incorporating all of the theoretical insights of other schools of thought and other disciplines.

00:16:43.960 Partially the postmodern theorists I just mentioned, but also, for example, he thinks there are other disciplines we need to draw on.

00:16:50.500 Geopolitics being one of them, sociology being another one of them, structural linguistics, and so on.

00:16:55.780 So he wants the full arsenal of intellectual disciplines to help us to grasp the unique character of postmodernity.

00:17:03.380 I don't think that's always the case on the right, because sometimes, again, it's hard to stand fully for the defense of the Western tradition

00:17:13.940 and to take seriously on their own terms, to the extent that they deserve it, the critics of the Western tradition culminating in people,

00:17:24.080 you know, in some sense the critics of the Western tradition among those German thinkers.

00:17:28.400 So you have to have, in my view, Dugan represents the alternative that says,

00:17:33.620 let's try to grasp modernity on the basis of both premodernity and postmodernity.

00:17:39.680 We're going to hit it from two flanks and really try to get the big picture that way, which I think is a worthwhile enterprise.

00:17:45.900 Yeah, I unfortunately am not familiar with Heidegger.

00:17:49.180 I've got being in time on the bookshelf, but I haven't tackled it yet.

00:17:53.440 I'm looking forward to eventually getting in there.

00:17:55.760 So I am missing some of this as well.

00:17:58.120 So very useful to have someone to kind of fill in those parts.

00:18:02.280 But I think it's very interesting that the, and I talked about this too with my friend Gio Pinchetti,

00:18:09.640 who's very well versed in a lot of postmodern theory.

00:18:13.060 But a lot of conservatives have been, a lot of people on the right have been told that they have to be very worried about postmodernity.

00:18:19.760 It's the boogeyman in the closet that will come and destroy all truth and all knowledge and all value and everything will just disassemble itself into relativism.

00:18:30.860 Very interestingly for, I think for a lot of people who might not be familiar with some of this thought is Dugan, from what I can tell, really looks at this as the opportunity, kind of this collapse of logic in on itself.

00:18:45.700 The absurdity and contradictions reaching levels that can no longer be borne by kind of the logical load.

00:18:53.780 The collapse of this creates a situation where mysticism, religion, things from beyond this very stifled realm of logic can reemerge into the discussion.

00:19:08.000 They're freed once again to kind of come back and be a part of this because they're no longer completely locked out by this rigid commitment to pure reason.

00:19:21.280 And he had one quote that I really liked where I wrote it down here.

00:19:25.300 Modernity was about the death of God.

00:19:29.020 And kind of the whole point of this is to kind of say the people in postmodernity don't even know what the death of God means anymore.

00:19:37.600 They no longer have a concept of God.

00:19:40.600 It's the death of who, right, is what he explains it as, you know, the people would not understand the death of God.

00:19:46.540 And so that allows then a return to discussions about God in kind of a whole new context, a whole new way that is not burdened by all these modern discourses surrounding the subject.

00:19:58.020 And it kind of opens people up to understanding a different way of being, a different way of understanding value.

00:20:03.880 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:20:05.180 It's a point well made by him, I think.

00:20:07.600 Because he's the section there is called the return of myths and archaics.

00:20:11.100 So everything that modernity had displaced as as premodern, as a prejudice, as a relic of the past, as antique or ancient or outdated in principle is in play again with the end of modernity.

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00:20:55.340 So when the conservative critics look at post-modernity and criticize it, Dugan does too.

00:21:01.160 But he, like they, shines his light on the freaks and the monsters and the chimeras and the cyborgs, you know, the post-humanism and the sort of degenerate, degraded insanity.

00:21:14.860 But together with the freak show, you also have the possibility of the return of genuine religious faith and of the re-articulation and re-assertion of forms of life that modern dogmatism had discarded or had tried to dispose of.

00:21:33.940 So that, again, just as an intellectual operation.

00:21:36.700 So a simple way in which I think that's relevant is you say, okay, the modern interpretation of the human being, it showed us something, you know, it had some, let's say, some upside, some benefit to it.

00:21:47.040 It taught us something relevant about science and technology.

00:21:50.080 Let's say, you know, it accomplished something.

00:21:52.320 But it came at a cost.

00:21:53.500 And one of the things that it came at the expense of was an understanding of the full potentials of a human being.

00:21:59.980 The modern human being is a very narrow, small interpretation of the human being proper.

00:22:04.120 Individual is a very small, narrow interpretation of human being proper.

00:22:07.700 So Dugan has this view, what was left out of the picture?

00:22:10.800 And part of what was left out of the picture that got suppressed in modernity, what he calls, and he's got various presentations of this in other texts and in other places.

00:22:18.860 But you can say, for example, all right, you had the rationalist history of theology and a rationalist kind of dogmatics.

00:22:27.900 But what about the undercurrent of mysticism, like you mentioned, of the Dionysian, of the dark logos, dark not in the sense of evil, but dark in the sense of, you know, mystics often speak in terms of the darkness that is even higher than the light and things like that.

00:22:44.220 So there's a whole realm of texts and ideas and perspectives that fell out of the picture in modernity, including, as I say, the classical teachings.

00:22:57.000 Like that's why Dugan has several essays on Plato, for example, on the possibility of a return to Plato.

00:23:01.080 But not only that, of other figures and of other teachings.

00:23:04.500 So why is that helpful for us?

00:23:07.760 Because in part, I think his work appeals to those of us or those readers who believe that the deep experiences of the human being are that basically there's a war on the human being right now.

00:23:23.960 We see it at a surface level, which is like the war on gender identity, the war on traditional faith, the war on certain other, you know, normal and natural roles.

00:23:33.560 And somehow the human being himself is under the gun.

00:23:36.380 But there's, you know, there's more to the human being than we even think about when it's not just that, you know, what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman.

00:23:45.360 What is it to be a spiritual being?

00:23:47.640 What is it to be an ensouled being?

00:23:49.420 What is it to be a questioning and thinking being?

00:23:51.860 What is it to exist?

00:23:53.360 What's our relationship to time?

00:23:55.240 All of these kind of philosophical or abstract questions they get, you can access them again.

00:24:00.640 If you put everything that had pushed them aside into question and suspend it.

00:24:06.280 And so that's his operation here.

00:24:07.860 His idea is that that'll help with the construction of new models of understanding that have some political relevance.

00:24:13.520 Yeah, I think it's really interesting, too, because his language sounds, again, very much like many near reactionary thinkers that I have read.

00:24:25.420 He himself seems to be an accelerationist.

00:24:28.500 He regularly encourages accelerating the collapse of kind of this postmodern structure to move on to the next thing.

00:24:38.700 Most of the guys like Nick Land saw this as the opportunity to kind of achieve escape velocity from politics at all, as where he sees it as the ability to kind of have reemergent tradition and reemergent mysticism and moral particulars and so many things that have been locked out.

00:25:02.000 Which I just I just I just thought was very fascinating because I've seen this argument before I've seen this line of reasoning before, but I've only seen it with the kind of the goal of accelerating and escaping the human as where his is the is accelerating and escaping the prison that is locked.

00:25:19.880 Kind of kind of the individual inside of this system and can reconnect to something far more ancient and as emerges kind of outside of these constraints.

00:25:29.460 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:25:30.820 The idea of an accelerationism that leaves the human being behind, broadly speaking, I think he would regard as evil, antichrist, satanic.

00:25:38.400 OK, that's a negative polarity.

00:25:40.060 But the accelerationism that allows for the reassertion or for the reinception of what's uniquely human, he regards as a good thing.

00:25:49.280 So I know you mentioned you are I won't take any Heidegger for granted in what I'm about to say, but I think it's a nice way of mentioning this.

00:25:57.200 So Heidegger had an idea that Dugin does discuss in the fourth political theory that we live at the end of philosophy, that nihilism, alienation, technological interpretation of the world.

00:26:10.040 All of these things are characteristic of the fact that we live at the end of the process that began with the first philosophers in Greece.

00:26:19.280 But Heidegger had another idea, which is that properly understood the history of philosophy, if we really grasp it and its significance, doing so will prepare the ground for what he called another beginning of philosophy.

00:26:34.840 And Dugin, for whom Heidegger is such an important figure, his first book on Heidegger is called Martin Heidegger, The Philosophy of Another Beginning.

00:26:42.940 So the idea is that you want to accelerate the end because you want the end to end, as it were, for the sake of what?

00:26:51.260 For the sake of another beginning, another beginning of philosophy, another spark, as it were, in the human soul or spirit, where we once again become connected and rooted to the grounds of our existence.

00:27:03.100 So in that sense, the exact opposite of the idea of reaching escape velocity, because escape velocity would be becoming unrooted, uprooted or ungrounded from what, for Dugin, is the soil of our existence.

00:27:17.460 And that, for him, is ultimately his main, the main interpretations of his that I'm interested in and where I think he puts his emphasis is that that soil is philosophy for him.

00:27:27.100 You know, and Heidegger is the key to all of that.

00:27:28.880 But yeah, the postmodern world should come to an end.

00:27:33.000 That doesn't mean that the world should be destroyed.

00:27:36.280 It means that the coordinates of interpretation about the nature of man, the nature of time, the nature of politics, the reigning screen through which we see the world, that has to play itself out so that it can be replaced.

00:27:50.180 And we can actively have a role in that process through the free construction of something like the fourth political theory.

00:27:57.960 It's not, just to be clear for anybody who's listening, Dugin is very adamant about the fact that it's not inevitable.

00:28:04.040 It's not automatic.

00:28:06.000 It is an act of human will.

00:28:10.060 It's a project, but it's one that can either be, as I say, rooted in the truth of things or acting against the truth of things.

00:28:17.560 But it's an open question.

00:28:19.260 Therefore, it's a political task.

00:28:21.660 So there's another Heideggerian concept that I just don't have because I haven't read that hopefully you can help flesh out a little bit.

00:28:28.620 And I might be asking, hey, can you do a 19-hour lecture in 10 minutes here?

00:28:33.560 But, you know, just do your best.

00:28:35.060 The concept of, I'm probably going to pronounce this incorrectly, de-sign?

00:28:40.980 De-sign is how I would say it.

00:28:42.960 Okay.

00:28:43.720 Yeah.

00:28:44.520 So that's very important to Dugin, obviously.

00:28:48.380 He brings it up very often in this.

00:28:50.360 Could you explain a little bit?

00:28:53.220 Again, I might have asked you to just explain the entire book, but could you explain a little bit about that concept?

00:28:58.060 Sure.

00:28:58.420 I'll try to be brief about it.

00:28:59.940 It's the idea of human existence.

00:29:02.620 So normally, if I were to say, you know, characterize yourself as an entity, right?

00:29:10.120 Like, what does it mean to be a human being?

00:29:13.280 So some people will have some kind of answer for themselves.

00:29:16.180 For example, a materialistic answer.

00:29:18.540 You know, I'm just an evolved animal and I'm subject to all of the laws of biological evolution.

00:29:23.320 Or someone might say, you know, I'm body, soul, and spirit in some sort of configuration with one another.

00:29:28.520 So imagine the plane of answers that you can give to the question, what kind of entity are you?

00:29:34.400 Or, you know, embodied consciousness.

00:29:37.020 All of these kinds of answers.

00:29:38.980 Heidegger, from whom the term, from whom Dugin uses the term Dasein in the specifically Heideggerian sense.

00:29:45.080 Heidegger basically had said, look, if you look at all of those different kinds of answer, there's a layer below them.

00:29:52.660 There's something about ourselves, namely our openness to being, the fact that we are beings open to being, is somehow this ground that's taken for granted by all these other answers.

00:30:08.580 So whether it's a Christian or an atheist or evolutionary or some other kind of answer, Heidegger said, there's this unexplored prior dimension underlying that.

00:30:21.140 And that dimension primarily concerns the question, what does it mean to be?

00:30:25.580 So we are, as I said at the beginning, if we interpret ourselves as an entity.

00:30:29.860 But what kind of entity or being are we?

00:30:32.380 Am I the same kind of being as the things that are on my table?

00:30:36.800 Like here's a cup, a book, a phone, paper, pencil, camera, TV screen, and me in the chair.

00:30:41.940 Are those all the equivalent kind of entity?

00:30:44.200 What is it that's uniquely the case about the human being?

00:30:48.880 Heidegger gave all of his attention over his whole life and several thousands of pages and many tens of books to that question.

00:30:55.100 And the realm that he believes himself to have discovered and, you know, I guess you'll have to decide for yourself when you read Being in Time whether he did or didn't.

00:31:03.860 But that realm he denotes with the term da sign, which basically for our purposes means the da is like the location there and the sign is being, being there.

00:31:13.460 So he reoriented all of our tools of analysis to the question of our being, which not everybody had done.

00:31:23.080 And that's why Heidegger was a revolution somehow in the history of philosophy.

00:31:26.980 And Dugin says, look, as he took what he learned from Heidegger and he looked at the field of political theory and political ideology, he said,

00:31:35.140 the liberal interpretation of the human being as an individual, the communist focus on class, the Nazi focus on race, the fascist focus on state.

00:31:45.040 All of these things, Dugin observed, they also are on the second floor of the building, so to speak, not on the ground floor of the building.

00:31:54.780 They also are not linked in an understanding of the question of being.

00:31:59.580 And so somehow you can take your axe, as it were, to all of the modern ideologies, digging underneath them by following Heidegger into the question of being.

00:32:10.120 And when you do that, Dugin believes, you come out the other side of it with a different set of concepts and a different way of understanding political phenomena,

00:32:19.880 which can provide an alternative to all three of liberalism, communism and fascism.

00:32:26.480 This is a difficult thing.

00:32:27.480 This is not a very easy notion to grasp.

00:32:31.440 I've said it, I've tried to simplify it and state it quickly, but for a lot of people, it's difficult to understand that opposition to a political theory doesn't just have to move horizontally from, you know, from liberalism to communism or to fascism or to some other horizontal alternative.

00:32:47.280 The idea of the fourth political theory isn't like you have room 501, 502, 503, 504.

00:32:52.120 It's literally going down a level, down to the fundamental level, and then back up with a new set of concepts.

00:32:59.380 So that's partly the significance of Heidegger and of the notion of Dasein for Dugin.

00:33:05.080 He wants, even as you may have seen, like, I'll give you another quick example.

00:33:08.660 People know that in liberalism, in progressivism, and in other forms of ideology as well, there's always some implicit notion of time.

00:33:18.580 Like, it's 2023, right?

00:33:20.740 We're not, we're no longer in the Middle Ages.

00:33:22.720 You know, things have progressed.

00:33:23.720 Like, I think it was Justin Trudeau at one point who said, of course, we're going to have 50% women in our cabinet because, you know, it's 2022 or 2023.

00:33:31.300 Like, in other words, as time goes forward, equality should also grow, equity should also grow, and any outdated idea is also ascribed to the past as being outdated or antiquated.

00:33:43.720 So one of the things, too, that Heidegger had raised as an issue that Dugin takes as a theoretical tool for all of his analysis is what's the relationship between being and time?

00:33:55.140 We can't even take something as apparently simple as time for granted.

00:33:58.640 Certainly not its homogeneity, its unidirectionality, its progressivism.

00:34:05.080 So the whole question of the nature of time comes into question as well with Heidegger,

00:34:08.980 and that's just another tool for criticizing the existing political theories and for articulating a new one.

00:34:15.360 Excellent.

00:34:16.060 So moving on to the criticizing and synthesizing of a new theory, he breaks down these, you know, obviously his, he just says, we need to discard liberalism.

00:34:26.760 But he also looks at fascism and communism and says, these are incomplete, these don't work.

00:34:33.240 A lot of people will just say, oh, well, it's just, you know, his fourth political theory is just warmed over fascism or warmed over communism.

00:34:40.280 I think that's weak.

00:34:41.020 I think that's a really lazy way to look at this because he specifically decries both.

00:34:46.800 But I want to look at the way he decries both of these because I think one of these is sloppy.

00:34:52.160 And I'm not sure if this is something that is in the translation, but you translated this.

00:34:55.600 So I feel like you'll know you can, you can give me a very direct kind of a clarification.

00:35:02.020 But when he looks at fascism, right, he looks at fascism and he says, a big problem of this is racism and we need to reject racism and kind of all of its forms.

00:35:10.500 And of course, he explains, you know, the, what would be the general understanding of racism, I think, for most people.

00:35:16.920 But he also says we need to reject things like basically economic racism, that, you know, glamour, fashion, even progress itself.

00:35:26.080 The notion of progress is racism.

00:35:30.100 This is, seems very strange.

00:35:32.260 I feel like he can attack all of these concepts while putting him into discrete things that make a little more sense.

00:35:40.260 Is this the language he uses intentionally?

00:35:42.360 And if so, why?

00:35:44.320 Yeah, so let me say a few things about it.

00:35:45.560 First, I just want to say for the record, I co-translated this.

00:35:48.680 So the other translator is Marcus Lobota.

00:35:50.440 Both of our translations were put together.

00:35:51.860 So I got to give credit where it's due.

00:35:52.820 I didn't do the, this volume, I wasn't the sole translator.

00:35:55.580 But with that said, yeah, so racism.

00:35:58.260 He explicitly rejects the biological racism of the Nazi party.

00:36:04.480 And he does so incidentally in other works as well.

00:36:07.580 So in his book, Ethnosociology, where he explains the relevance of the category of the ethnos to our social understanding,

00:36:13.780 he has a section on racism where he says why, in his view, it's an illegitimate category.

00:36:18.200 And there he doesn't apply it to all of the various forms.

00:36:21.860 Like you mentioned, fashion, glamour, civilizational racism, technological racism.

00:36:26.580 He focuses more on the field of race studies and says why, in his view, race is not basically a legitimate social category from the perspective of ethnosociology.

00:36:35.060 In the fourth political theory book, what he, yeah, he extends the concept for sure.

00:36:41.020 You know, you can have like a temporal racism.

00:36:43.120 Temporal racism is the idea that everything new is better than everything at all.

00:36:46.280 Civilizational racism, everything Western is better than everything non-Western.

00:36:49.700 Technological racism, same thing, right?

00:36:51.120 If you have, if you have yesterday's Apple phone, then, you know, you're already outdated.

00:36:55.860 You're like a second class citizen or, you know, third world slum dog or something like that. 1.00

00:36:59.880 And I think that the key thing he's pointing out there is not that, well, you know, there's a slight ambiguity.

00:37:07.260 So on one hand, he's not saying fashion is racist in the sense that, you know, in a narrowly biological racist sense.

00:37:16.160 But the idea is that some group elevates itself above all other groups on the basis of a small set of criteria.

00:37:21.800 And on that basis, excludes the others as subhuman or, you know, of less worth of comparatively subhuman and second and third class citizens. 0.75

00:37:31.760 I think he's right about the phenomenon, even if you don't necessarily like the extension of the term racism to categorize it.

00:37:40.260 The reason I said it's ambiguous is because built into all of those processes, he does mention in passing, is the universalization of Western standards.

00:37:52.140 And there is an ethnic core to Western civilization for him.

00:37:58.000 In other words, there is an ethnic dimension, not racial, but there's an ethnic core to what gets universalized.

00:38:06.560 And so somehow still, in all of those cases, you have a group or a sector projecting its preferences as universal and delegitimizing everybody else along the way.

00:38:21.200 So, yes, strictly speaking, it's not in those cases, he's just extended the concept.

00:38:25.000 But he wants to make the point, I think, that one of the points he wants to make is that the liberal Western globalist anti-racists who act as though they are, you know, there's no blood on their hands, they don't offend anybody, they're pure tolerance.

00:38:42.540 In fact, when they send their LGBT armies to orthodox countries and when they try to put all of these attacks on, they're, in effect, doing the same thing. 0.97

00:38:55.120 They're effectively delegitimizing anything other than their own preferences, anything other than their own standards.

00:39:00.640 And it's such a big part of Dugan's model, whether people like this or not is a separate question, but it is.

00:39:06.000 It's such a big part of Dugan's model that you have to take seriously, philosophically, sociologically, anthropologically, theologically, human difference.

00:39:17.160 And in particular, the difference among peoples and civilizations, that any universalization like that is illegitimate.

00:39:25.480 So he uses the strongest term available, you know, somehow in showing that, but it's true that he extends it further than its normal reach.

00:39:34.560 Now, I think the part that he says that you do want to take from fascism, because, again, he breaks down and repudiates large parts of both of these theories, but he says there are valuable things to be taken from each one of them.

00:39:49.680 And I think that will put a lot of people off.

00:39:52.020 But he's very careful to say, I'm trying to remember what the exact wording was, break the circle of something.

00:40:00.400 Yeah, break the hermeneutic circle.

00:40:02.020 Yes, thank you.

00:40:02.660 The idea is a nice one.

00:40:04.120 It's kind of like if the ideology is an organism, the whole thing hangs together, but you rip its heart out, let's say, then it's just a corpse.

00:40:11.740 There's no longer an organism, you know, or it's like the pieces have, they no longer hang together in a coherent way when you've deprived them of the thing that gave them their unity.

00:40:21.060 And when they no longer hang together in a coherent way, then you can pick and choose the elements.

00:40:25.560 First, you have to diffuse the bomb or, you know, rip out the heart or whatever metaphor is best, break the hermeneutic circle.

00:40:32.120 So, yeah, once he does that, then he's free to recombine the elements.

00:40:36.260 Right.

00:40:36.400 So now that this monster is no longer roaming the countryside, we can kind of figure out what what made it tick and what things are valuable and what things were terrible.

00:40:43.620 And so the one that he focuses on for fascism is is ethnos and is, you know, he uses the term ethnocentrism, which I think a lot of people, again, you know, will get a lot of warning flags on this.

00:40:56.080 Now, obviously, he wrote a whole book kind of explaining what he probably meant by that.

00:41:00.240 So I might be asking you to explain a whole book again.

00:41:02.760 But could you get for people who are trying to understand him here?

00:41:05.840 What is he saying about taking the idea of ethnos or ethnocentrism from fascism as something valuable that could be carried forward?

00:41:13.200 Yeah.

00:41:13.320 So I'll I'll try to say it like this, the what he's rejecting is the idea of a racial supremacy, you know, like if you're not if you're not Aryan life, you know, you're going to be destroyed or you're going to be deprived.

00:41:25.980 You're going to be, you know, annihilated, all of those things.

00:41:28.840 So that's a categorical no.

00:41:31.960 OK, that's a complete rejection to all of that for many reasons that he is explicit about here and elsewhere.

00:41:37.560 But the category of ethnos is a little bit different because the category of ethnos, first of all, as he uses it, it doesn't presuppose superiority or inferiority.

00:41:46.040 This is a model for understanding social phenomena.

00:41:49.700 So he has in the book, Ethnosociology, what he does is he goes over several schools, many different schools of cultural anthropology, social anthropology and so on.

00:41:58.840 And then he also, after reviewing them, develops his own theory.

00:42:01.440 But one thing you can say is, OK, ethnos is the simplest social group.

00:42:08.020 It lies at the basis of more complex social groups.

00:42:11.780 I'll explain it in a minute.

00:42:13.200 And it's characterized, among other things, by belief in a shared origin.

00:42:17.660 In other words, belief means it's a sociological category.

00:42:20.680 You can change ethnosis.

00:42:22.020 It's not baked into your DNA.

00:42:23.900 Belief in a shared social origin, some shared cultural rights, you know, linguistic.

00:42:29.280 Proximity and things like that, you know, speaking the same language.

00:42:31.600 When he characterizes the ethnic society in the books, he says they primarily are closed in on themselves.

00:42:39.040 They're not open to the outside world.

00:42:40.800 And whenever something arises in the ethnic society that has the potential to upset it, you have specific figures.

00:42:47.580 For example, the figure of the shaman whose job it is to restore harmonious relations within the ethnic society, within the ethnos.

00:42:55.260 But at some point, the ethnos meets the outside world and it cracks open and becomes something else.

00:43:03.980 It doesn't disappear.

00:43:05.360 But as I say, it's the simplest form of social society for him.

00:43:08.360 And it gets, he has this idea that it gets pushed into the denominator in more complex social forms.

00:43:16.480 So, for example, I'll just be, I'll just put it like this.

00:43:20.640 In ethno-sociology, you have the ethnos as the first one.

00:43:22.960 Then the narod, folk or people, that's the second category.

00:43:26.520 Then the nation, like nation-state.

00:43:29.040 Then civil society, global society, and post-society.

00:43:32.240 So, that's a spectrum from the simplest social form to the most complex.

00:43:37.080 Global society is very complex, large, all-encompassing.

00:43:40.740 Ethnos is a small, simple, relatively homogenous, and closed in on itself.

00:43:45.780 But as you move from one to the other, you don't erase the ethnic dimension.

00:43:51.200 You just, as you mentioned earlier, you know how we put the existential questions in the closet or put them under the floorboards or whatever.

00:43:57.400 Here, too, the ethnic component gets pushed down.

00:44:00.720 It doesn't fully disappear.

00:44:02.700 So, even in civil society, for example, or even in global society, the ethnic identity hasn't disappeared.

00:44:08.920 It's just been marginalized.

00:44:10.720 So, you have, you know, in the third world, where the capitalists, where, you know, where you have labor, basically, the laboring part of the world, ethnic identity may be more in the forefront.

00:44:20.360 And in the capitalist core of the developed world, the ethnic identity is subsumed but present. 0.85

00:44:26.320 So, he has a full analysis.

00:44:28.300 But the key idea here is that the ethnos and its derivatives, folk, nation, civil society, global society, and post-society, are sociological category.

00:44:37.720 And understanding them in that way helps us to remove, in his view, the dominant view of civil society and global society.

00:44:47.520 So, the analysis, basically, is we live under globalist circumstances.

00:44:50.940 And these other parts of our sociological self-understanding have been lost.

00:44:57.600 We can recover them and start to get a sense of traditions, ways of life, ways of being, ways of relating, ways of forming families, ways of speaking.

00:45:08.140 All of these various phenomena that focus on civil society has cut off.

00:45:14.000 So, we're amputated souls if we only take the globalist perspective as the full sociology.

00:45:21.180 So, in his view, the globalist perspective is derived from ethno-sociology as a sort of modification or, as I say, amputation of the big picture.

00:45:29.800 It's a nice argument and a nice model.

00:45:31.700 But the key thing, it's not a supremacist view.

00:45:35.400 There's no, in his view, there's no ethnos that's better than another. 1.00

00:45:38.960 What you have is the tools for analyzing human plurality and diversity.

00:45:44.480 When we say diversity in DEI language, we tend to mean, like, you know, all of the ways that you can be a gay, liberal, or leftist.

00:45:53.640 The contemporary diversity doesn't take into account Orthodox Christian Russians or, you know, the varieties of Islamic eschatological faiths.

00:46:05.320 For us, diversity is very narrow and constrained.

00:46:08.560 It's diversity within the paradigm of liberal, of post-liberalism.

00:46:13.540 Dugin wants a broader understanding of human diversity, one that includes those who say no to post-liberalism,

00:46:21.540 those who say no to liberal democracy, those who assert some other way of being in the world.

00:46:26.320 And so ethno-sociology is one of the ways that he's able to describe that.

00:46:30.120 Yeah, funny enough that you should end with that example because we just had someone from the White House explaining that our foreign policy is,

00:46:38.880 you know, LGBTQ rights are a key aspect of our foreign policy, which is a big part that he talks about here in this sector as well.

00:46:47.480 It talks about multipolarity versus unipolarity.

00:46:52.080 And one of the things that I think a lot of people, you know, should go eyes wide in with this is that Dugin is very interested in Russia and Russia's future.

00:47:00.860 He's centric on this, as he would tell you he has to be, as there's no other way to be.

00:47:05.200 And he repeatedly talks about the importance of he calls for a global crusade against America and the West and how important it is to end the unipolarity and domination of America and return to a multipolar structure.

00:47:24.300 For a lot of people, that sounds like he's trying to start World War III.

00:47:27.980 I don't think he likes America, but I understand his point. 0.99

00:47:32.260 As someone who would prefer the United States to care more about its own people than the empire of elites that don't care at all about those in the United States,

00:47:43.780 I also wish that they would pull away from this strategy.

00:47:47.980 His seems far more aggressive, maybe because he sees this as a direct threat to his geopolitical existence.

00:47:52.680 But he's very clear that, like, collapsing this unipolar system is a key part of this.

00:47:59.260 Yeah, that's true.

00:48:00.560 There's a lot there, and some of it I feel I have to comment on as a sort of priority, which is this.

00:48:07.700 It would be weird, I think, for Americans who love America to find themselves attracted to an author who sometimes has these anti-American or anti-Western formulations.

00:48:19.240 Like, if you read that somebody says American empire should be destroyed, and you're an American patriot, you love America and what it stands for and its traditions and its possibilities,

00:48:28.420 and you want to restore American greatness and sound common sense and all of that,

00:48:33.600 it would be natural to categorize Dugan, you know, as a hostile player, as somebody who hates America and wants to destroy it.

00:48:41.020 So my view is that, on the basis of the textual evidence, he is pretty explicit, for example, in The Great Awakening versus The Great Reset and elsewhere,

00:48:51.900 that the West itself has been occupied by post-liberalism, post-modernity, and anti-Western sentiments.

00:49:01.100 And that he wants to, he doesn't hate the West.

00:49:04.240 This is, I can tell you very explicitly, I wrote about this in my Dugan book, because the passages are super stark and unambiguous in my view.

00:49:11.840 He says he doesn't hate the West, he loves the West, he loves its authors, which is absolutely true.

00:49:15.820 He's written many, many volumes about the countries of the West, which is true.

00:49:19.340 What he hates is what the West has become under the dominance of people who hate the West.

00:49:24.320 And the task is to liberate, among other things, the global task of the fourth political theory would be to liberate the West for its own traditions.

00:49:32.880 Nobody could say right now that the modern Western world is true to the best elements of what made it the West.

00:49:41.100 Somehow it's at war with the best elements of what made it the West.

00:49:44.360 It's censoring and punishing and attacking the best things that made it the West.

00:49:48.600 Philosophy, faith, beauty, and all the rest of it.

00:49:51.280 So he says at various times in various books that the war is not against the West.

00:49:55.700 The war is against the liberalism that has hijacked the West.

00:49:59.560 Take that for what it's worth.

00:50:00.560 Again, maybe not everybody will see it in those terms.

00:50:02.960 Another thing he said is, look, you have to recognize that the United States is the center of the world as it stands.

00:50:10.020 And you can reject America's international liberal hegemony.

00:50:16.180 In other words, like you said, the fact that it must export LGBTQIA plus values everywhere around the world as a key element of its foreign policy, its destruction of other peoples and civilizations. 1.00

00:50:27.060 You can reject that perfectly well in full consistency with believing that America should remain a pole in the world, should assert its rights and interests in the world, should defend itself and be strong and be flourishing in the world.

00:50:40.400 What he doesn't like is the universalization and destruction of other civilizations and peoples that comes as a function of that.

00:50:48.680 Now, nobody likes to have their side of the battle squashed and destroyed.

00:50:53.560 He's all in as a Russian patriot on the defense of Russian civilization, Russian existence.

00:50:58.580 He sees it as a good thing.

00:50:59.780 And he's very cautious about the forces that are trying to destroy it.

00:51:02.880 When he reaches out to American audiences and when he writes about America these days, it's definitely with an eye to the fact that something similar is happening in America.

00:51:13.540 That the forces of the Great Reset, as he characterizes it in the Great Awakening versus the Great Reset, are as much at war in and against America as they are at war against other peoples and civilizations.

00:51:26.160 So for what it's worth, people may find that to be slippery.

00:51:31.360 They may find that to be just merely political rhetoric.

00:51:34.200 But I think we have some evidence that Dugan is making points that resonate, namely that there are a lot of people, freedom-loving American patriots, who find his criticisms of the Great Reset and his criticisms of global liberalism, his criticisms of the postmodern left, powerful.

00:51:51.900 And the fact that he's able to articulate them and give us a new way of thinking about them doesn't mean we have to accept everything he's ever written anywhere, but they do mean that we should make the most of and take the best of what we find in the critics of modern liberalism.

00:52:08.580 Yeah, I think it's really important for people to understand that pointing out that Dugan has powerful ideas or criticisms in certain areas doesn't mean a wholesale embrace of his positions or his worldview, his outlook.

00:52:22.900 There are many really important thinkers that if you totally embrace every part of their philosophy, you'd be horrified.

00:52:29.840 And so it's really important to be able to take these things, think about them, see how they interact with other ideas that you're exploring without assuming that someone who's talking about them is just on board for every geopolitical objective or every part of someone's writings.

00:52:48.140 I think that's something people need to keep central in their mind.

00:52:51.360 But that said, I also want to make sure we touch just real briefly on his criticism of Marxism because he doesn't leave that alone either.

00:52:58.500 He says that the problem with Marxism is it's wholly materialistic, it's wholly atheistic economic determinism.

00:53:08.240 He says this too is he agrees with many of its critiques of liberalism and capitalism, but he has a serious problem with kind of the resulting system that replaces those things and thinks that in general fails as a reaction to the first political theory.

00:53:26.220 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:27.800 So he says exactly it's unidirectional progressivism, it's historical materialism, it's atheism, it's idea that you can exhaust your account of social and human life on the basis of class analysis.

00:53:40.860 All of that is narrow and much of it is false.

00:53:44.260 He explicitly rejects the pretty much everything we mentioned there, the historical materialism, the progressivism, the unidirectionalism and the focus on class.

00:53:52.000 On the other hand, yes, there are aspects of its criticism of capitalism that he thinks are valuable and that can be combined with other perspectives.

00:54:00.600 So just the fact that you're an anti-Marxist doesn't mean you have to have no interest in labor rights, no interest in elements of social justice.

00:54:08.740 Again, if they're combined with other sound observations and somehow merged with other basic core principles.

00:54:15.740 So he's anti-Marxist in that sense, but he does think that the criticism of capitalism has something to offer.

00:54:22.400 Emphasis on justice does have something to offer.

00:54:24.040 And one of the things, too, that people may find surprising or exciting or whatever the case is, depending on who's reading it, that I like at any rate, is this experimental spirit where he says, look, you can read Marxism from the right in a way that is deriving useful insights for your political project on the basis.

00:54:45.160 When you put him in a different context, you can derive new insights from him or a figure like Julius Evola, traditionalists typically consider on the right or on the far right, Dugan says, read him from the left.

00:54:55.900 In other words, the key idea in the especially the first few chapters here of the fourth political theory is we're so used to automatic ideological analysis instantly, like we're running chat GPT, the liberal interpretations on the table or the Marxist interpretation or the fascist interpretation.

00:55:14.940 And somehow that's all recycled, well-known and unthinking.

00:55:20.360 And you can interrupt that process of automatic, quote-unquote, reasoning by doing some experimental juxtapositions, by doing operations like the one we said, where reject the thing that makes the theory a coherent theory and then see what remains.

00:55:37.000 So even when he discusses, for example, the idea that having rejected the individual from liberalism, the class from communism, the race from Nazism and the state from fascism, and he says, well, so what's going to be the key actor of the fourth political theory?

00:55:52.180 At first, he says, we can imagine a compound subject, some combination of these.

00:55:56.760 And very important, he says, we'll treat this as a preliminary exercise, a preliminary methodological exercise.

00:56:03.400 In other words, when it comes to political concepts, ideas and ideologies, we have to learn again how to think, not just how to automatically spew and regurgitate previously processed, hundred-year-old ideological phrases.

00:56:19.580 So one of the nice things about this book is I think that it does that.

00:56:22.380 It invites us to play around a little bit as a warm-up exercise for the serious work of constructing an alternative.

00:56:29.660 And again, this idea that we have to construct an ideological alternative, he says, one of the presuppositions, this goes without saying, but it's worth saying anyways, one of the presuppositions is you're interested in this project only if you have some opposition, some revulsion, to put it strongly, some opposition, to put it neutrally, towards the reigning ideological status quo.

00:56:52.160 If it strikes you as odd or as strange or as undesirable that America should have as a key component of its foreign policy, the promotion of what that statement was, or if you find the marksification of higher academia and lower academia, K-12, not to mention undergraduate and graduate studies.

00:57:13.160 If you have any sense that that's wrong, then the task is really to understand how we got here, what's going on, how has the situation changed, and on what grounds could we possibly advance a meaningful alternative?

00:57:26.260 So that's just another nice thing here.

00:57:29.880 And rereading Marxism from the right, or let me say one other, not to go on about this, but just to give the listeners another taste or flavor for it.

00:57:36.960 It's like when liberalism was fighting communism and fascism, it was to see who inherits the right to claim themselves as most modern.

00:57:46.460 Liberalism won, that means liberalism proved that it was most modern.

00:57:49.780 But in losing, that showed you that there was something non-modern about communism and fascism.

00:57:55.720 And the fact that there's some non-modern trace or residue, which explains in part why they lost, also can pique our interest.

00:58:04.400 Because suddenly, if we reject what's most modern about communism and fascism, we may still be curious about what's not modern in them that can be recovered.

00:58:14.620 And when he talks about communism, he says the eschatological, mythological structure of the communist faith and the communist story about the development of society.

00:58:25.420 So that's part and parcel of the return of myths and archaics.

00:58:28.500 What about treating communism not as a scientific account of society, but as an eschatological myth?

00:58:33.220 That could be interesting.

00:58:34.740 And so on.

00:58:36.220 Absolutely.

00:58:36.840 So there's one more thing I want to get to before we kind of go to the questions from the audience.

00:58:43.280 Again, guys, there's so much here.

00:58:44.940 We've barely scratched the surface.

00:58:46.820 Hopefully we'll end up doing some more of these.

00:58:48.240 But I want to get to one more concept before we go.

00:58:51.540 And this is the monotonic process.

00:58:53.560 Now, I found this one particularly interesting because, again, it touches on something that neoreactionary theory, Nick Land specifically, and accelerationism hits on a lot, which is cybernetics and the closed feedback loop, the closed positive feedback loop.

00:59:10.380 And he seems to be saying in this that it's really important that we basically be able – he gives the idea of a governor on an engine.

00:59:20.520 You know, you need to – once the reaction has started, you really need something that's able to, you know, stop the feeding of fuel into the engine or you end up with a very serious, you know, consequence.

00:59:31.600 And he says, basically, we've lost this or we've engineered this out of a lot of what we do.

00:59:38.740 And so he talks about the need to kind of reintroduce the ability to apply negative feedback and control kind of this reaction of deterritorialization.

00:59:48.160 And I think that's really interesting because I would like that to be true, but I'm not sure that it's possible.

00:59:55.800 And this is what so many people in the neuroreactionary sphere mean when they say the only way out is through.

01:00:03.080 That basically there is no way to escape the self-exciting feedback loop.

01:00:08.140 There is no escape from cybernetics as it is now.

01:00:12.240 And we don't have a way to control the, you know, this self-accelerating process.

01:00:19.240 But what do you think Dugan is kind of – what would he use to apply kind of the brakes to this runaway train, if there even is a chance for that?

01:00:30.180 Well, I would say a few things.

01:00:32.780 First of all, he's analyzed in the ethno-sociology books what he also mentions in that chapter in passing, which is kinds of ritual like the sacrifice or the gift and other forms of organization that are designed, you know, social rituals, let's say, that are designed to have this effect.

01:00:50.380 So he may think that you could reinstitute some version of that or you could support that type of thing.

01:00:58.960 But even just learning about how to oppose, even just learning that monotonic processes are destructive of life and then putting our attention not on growth but on life, what can you do to support the cycles and rhythms of life and what kinds of practices have done well in doing that before and what can be recovered.

01:01:15.920 So a lot of his teaching is, like in The Return of Myths and Archaics, what used to work that we left behind that we could recover.

01:01:23.820 So the possibility of recovery, you have to clear the playing field to be able to do that.

01:01:27.020 The critique of monotonic processes is part of that, I would say.

01:01:32.140 That's the key.

01:01:33.140 Besides the ethno-sociological dimension, like I say, these various ritual forms, theological forms, religious forms, things you could do in –

01:01:44.980 I mean, you have to get off the one-way technological train, that's for sure.

01:01:50.720 And I think for him – I mean, he mentions that you can use technology against technology.

01:01:55.200 That's – he said even opponents of the Internet Society can still use the Internet to accomplish, like, some –

01:02:00.880 they can stop using the tools themselves.

01:02:04.340 So that's a part of it.

01:02:05.200 But in my view, he may have more to say about this, but of all the things that I've read and that I've seen,

01:02:11.060 the key thing here is understanding what's going on and orienting our thought, our, you know, our comportment, our lives towards –

01:02:23.180 like, away from the darkness, as it were, towards the light.

01:02:26.160 Or, you know, you have to recognize that you're on a runaway train and get off it.

01:02:29.220 So you asked, like, what's his specific way?

01:02:33.300 Partially, I think, in understanding it, in grasping it, in seeing it, you already have one foot off.

01:02:38.520 So it's not – he doesn't resign himself to the inevitability of the process.

01:02:42.600 Because from where he's coming, what we didn't say is that, you know, he borrows the critique of capitalism from communism,

01:02:48.380 and he borrows the ethnos from fascism, but he also borrows human freedom from liberalism.

01:02:52.680 And so we always have the freedom to say no, we always have the freedom to oppose something to something,

01:03:00.440 and we always have the freedom to go another way.

01:03:03.180 But in order for us to realize that freedom, in order for that freedom to have a chance,

01:03:07.560 we must see the alternatives, we must understand the situation.

01:03:10.880 If you don't know you're on a moving train, you can't get off of it.

01:03:14.140 Once you get the analysis right, once you've set up an alternative,

01:03:17.400 then you can leap onto another, as it were, timeline and operate differently.

01:03:21.900 Or you go to your destruction.

01:03:25.960 Yeah.

01:03:26.380 And I don't blame him or anyone else for not having a ready answer for how that actually gets solved.

01:03:32.680 It's just something I think about a lot.

01:03:34.660 Because for Nick Land, you know, he describes something like gunboat diplomacy

01:03:38.640 as just pulling the rods out of the nuclear reactor.

01:03:43.020 And then you just lose – you know, you have these traditions, you have this society,

01:03:48.700 you have these rituals that protect the society from the process, from kind of this acceleration.

01:03:56.900 But once a further accelerated society comes by and just demolishes those protections,

01:04:03.440 then you can't – you can no longer contain kind of what's going to come next.

01:04:08.160 And so kind of once the process has escaped one society, if it inevitably crashes into another,

01:04:15.600 it will collapse all the defenses of that society from this process.

01:04:20.080 And then you end up in a scenario, for land at least, where you have the collapse of decision space,

01:04:27.460 where people no longer – because each decision – the technology is self-exciting with the production,

01:04:34.280 you end up in a scenario where each decision is made in shorter and shorter feedback loops

01:04:39.420 and people lose the ability to actually protect themselves through ritual and culture

01:04:44.300 from kind of this acceleration.

01:04:46.880 And then the whole process has just escaped, again, kind of human control

01:04:49.960 because the time you would need to think about and implement cultural protections

01:04:55.060 is always collapsing.

01:04:58.100 And so into smaller and smaller pieces.

01:05:00.720 And you kind of – that decision eventually leaves human hands.

01:05:03.480 I hope he's very wrong about that.

01:05:05.120 And I hope Dugan's far more right.

01:05:07.580 But it's just – again, it's just – I thought it was very fascinating.

01:05:11.220 Two guys coming from very different points but reaching very similar –

01:05:17.480 a very similar moment of decision within very different situations

01:05:22.620 and applications of solutions for that.

01:05:26.520 Or like thereof, I guess.

01:05:28.120 Yeah.

01:05:28.560 Dugan later in the book acknowledges that things are running out of human hands

01:05:31.720 and he says you have to propose what he calls – this is going to sound obscure,

01:05:35.300 but sometimes he writes in the spirit – a political angelology

01:05:38.560 where suddenly these automatic processes that are taking place,

01:05:42.340 he still wants to try to interpret them in a way where they can go either

01:05:47.360 in the direction of the angels or in the direction of the demons

01:05:50.220 as opposed to it's all destined to go a certain way.

01:05:53.440 But that's for what it's worth.

01:05:54.560 Yeah, I was actually going to definitely bring that up as well.

01:05:58.780 But again, we're just – we can't get to everything.

01:06:01.100 We can't hope to touch it all.

01:06:02.220 So I'm glad you brought it up.

01:06:03.300 But maybe we can explore that a little more at another time.

01:06:07.340 So we're going to go ahead and just take the questions of the people here real quick.

01:06:12.300 But before we do, can you tell people about where to find your excellent work,

01:06:15.960 all the courses and everything you do, where they can find all that?

01:06:19.280 Sure.

01:06:19.840 So millermanschool.com is where I sell courses on Leo Strauss, Plato, Aristotle,

01:06:24.920 Dugan, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and other figures.

01:06:28.300 Duganbook.com is where you can see a book that I wrote on Dugan

01:06:31.700 as well as my book on Heidegger.

01:06:33.320 I'm on Twitter, M underscore Millerman.

01:06:35.720 That's my main social media platform.

01:06:37.600 And I have many free videos on YouTube on Dugan, Heidegger, and these other figures.

01:06:41.780 So I translated – I started about 11 years ago or so.

01:06:46.660 And in that time, I've given many – I've said a lot about Dugan and written a lot about him.

01:06:51.400 And if people want to learn more besides other conversations that we may have,

01:06:55.680 just look up Millerman Dugan on YouTube and you'll see a lot of different sources.

01:06:59.440 Absolutely, guys.

01:06:59.840 You should definitely check that out.

01:07:01.980 Let's go ahead and get our questions here real quick.

01:07:05.660 Creeper Weirdo for $20.

01:07:07.260 Thank you very much, sir.

01:07:08.100 Apparently, with the rise of AI in the tech field,

01:07:10.900 a lot of atheist thinkers have started talking about living in a simulation.

01:07:14.780 It's really funny, Dawkins.

01:07:16.560 You know, I'm rather fond of the idea of a creator.

01:07:20.800 Yeah, it does feel like you can never truly escape this, right?

01:07:24.020 Like we get – there's many, many parallel universes where everyone's in a simulation.

01:07:29.640 So many substitutes, technological substitutes for the divine.

01:07:34.420 I feel like that's an extremely modern necessity to try to capture something

01:07:39.460 that you really can't capture in the technological language, in the modern language.

01:07:44.320 And you're only going to see more of this as people try – as more of these more esoteric

01:07:50.260 and traditional concepts kind of reemerge and people search for modern language to explain

01:07:55.260 phenomena that doesn't really have the capacity to do.

01:07:59.840 Let me see here.

01:08:04.280 Pranami and Chonsky for $5.

01:08:06.400 What would Mr. Millen's response be to some right-wingers who say Dugan's philosophy is just

01:08:10.620 a post-hoc rationalization for Russian state interests?

01:08:14.080 I think you touched on that some there, but do you want to expand a little bit?

01:08:17.160 Yeah, I would say a couple of different things.

01:08:18.640 So first of all, if Dugan were merely interested in the defense of Russian state interests,

01:08:25.740 it wouldn't be necessary for him to do 99% somehow of the theoretical work that he's done.

01:08:32.260 You don't necessarily have to go into Heidegger and Husserl and all of these other thinkers

01:08:37.440 in order to provide a justification or a rationalization for state interests.

01:08:42.520 I think the evidence of 30 or so years of writing as you go over and you see

01:08:46.940 is that he's driven to understand, like several key philosophers are,

01:08:53.140 the question of how to correlate the realm of the political with things like metaphysics,

01:08:59.280 theology, and ontology.

01:09:00.720 Because as a thinking being, you're placed before that question, before that problem.

01:09:05.300 He clearly does also want to defend Russia.

01:09:09.540 He says the fourth political theory in the introduction is for Russia a question to be or not to be.

01:09:14.220 In other words, it's existential for Russia.

01:09:16.940 But his analysis of what it is to be Russian is really rich and complex,

01:09:22.080 whereas you could have a very vulgar Russian nationalism that doesn't rise up to the heights

01:09:30.300 of anything of intellectual substance, but he always has avoided that.

01:09:33.900 In fact, he debates with Russian nationalists because he's an anti-nationalist.

01:09:37.360 That's hard to understand.

01:09:38.580 He's for Eurasian empire as opposed to Russian nationalism.

01:09:42.300 And so on.

01:09:45.440 Sort of the key pillar of my response would be, if that's all he wanted to do, he could do it not this way.

01:09:52.520 We have to understand why does he think we have to go into Plato?

01:09:56.080 Why does he think we have to go into Heidegger?

01:09:57.700 Why do we have to raise questions about the ontology of the future?

01:10:00.480 In fact, he even says at one point in one of his books, I think it's the second Heidegger book,

01:10:06.700 he says, any talk of a Russian national idea or any talk of a defense of Russian interests,

01:10:11.500 let's say in the terms of your question of Russian state interests,

01:10:13.780 that isn't rooted in an answer to the question, what does it mean to be Russian?

01:10:18.440 Like, what is the, what is it, you know, why do we even want to defend being Russian?

01:10:23.140 Why not just be globalist?

01:10:24.700 Why not just be liberal?

01:10:25.580 Why not just be Western?

01:10:27.040 In other words, even to defend Russia for Dugan means to understand the whole height and depth

01:10:31.020 of what it is to be, to be your ethnicity, to be a member of your civilization,

01:10:35.460 to be a thinking being, to be a political being.

01:10:38.540 It's a big, a big task.

01:10:40.480 And that's, that's why I always characterize him as a philosophical supremacist,

01:10:45.140 to make it clear that it's the philosophy and not the politics, in my view,

01:10:49.140 if we could separate them neatly like that for a moment, that runs the show.

01:10:54.060 Cripper Weirdo here for $5.

01:10:55.920 I've also heard an argument for the idea that we're moving towards neo-medievalism.

01:11:02.200 So people could mean that in a couple different ways.

01:11:04.660 For instance, a lot of people who just throw around neo-feudalism just mean that you're not

01:11:08.800 going to own anything and be happy.

01:11:10.220 And in that sense, that's certainly the goal of a lot of people who are involved in the

01:11:16.380 World Economic Forum and others like that, a system in which you're entirely dependent

01:11:22.540 on Leviathan, but in a globalist sense.

01:11:26.000 For others, they might mean something like, you know, Moldbug or Curtis Yarvin's Patchwork,

01:11:32.800 in which you kind of have the king, you have a king, the neo-monarch, but each individual,

01:11:38.260 rather than being bound to the land, has full exit and kind of votes with their feet.

01:11:44.500 And then I guess you could also have people who mean more a return to the idea that we're

01:11:50.480 returning to these more regional communities, these ones in which you kind of have the protection

01:11:55.260 of landed gentry that would create, again, would almost reconstruct these barriers that 0.66

01:12:01.260 both land and Dugan talk about that would protect you from kind of this deracination that would

01:12:08.240 kind of re-territorialize you back into something that was more cohesive and culturally resilient.

01:12:17.240 But all of those could be possible meanings of neo-feudalism or medievalism.

01:12:22.800 So I hope I did my best to cover all those, Creeper Weirdo. 1.00

01:12:26.760 Pernomi and Chonsky for $5.

01:12:29.460 Does Dugan draw on Evola for his understanding of race?

01:12:32.640 Does biology have a place in his system?

01:12:34.600 Yeah, I thought it was very interesting.

01:12:35.700 I was going to mention that both Evola and Spengler, both of whom he references,

01:12:43.520 had an understanding of race that was, I think, closer to the ethnos that you were talking

01:12:50.140 about, where both of those guys kind of thought that the, I haven't read Evola completely,

01:12:57.020 so I can't speak to him, but at least Spengler had an understanding of race that was much less

01:13:01.880 biological.

01:13:02.420 In fact, he called the biological essentialism of race a disaster for kind of the understanding

01:13:07.620 of human being.

01:13:09.340 And so does he draw from either of those, to your knowledge?

01:13:12.280 Just on the spot, I don't remember him discussing Evola in the criticism of race that's in

01:13:18.600 ethno-sociology or as one of the key figures for the understanding of the ethnos in ethno-sociology.

01:13:24.700 I know that he's written about Evola in several different places, some of which I've translated

01:13:28.960 before separately from this book, but I just don't remember him talking about race in Evola.

01:13:33.600 He might have, but I'm just not familiar with it.

01:13:36.100 Gotcha.

01:13:36.960 All right.

01:13:37.220 And then Maxwell Bliss for $2.

01:13:38.880 How is the Ukraine war is going?

01:13:42.640 How does it end?

01:13:43.920 Yeah, I'll be honest.

01:13:45.200 There's so much misinformation and confusion and constant propaganda about the Ukraine war

01:13:52.800 that I find it very difficult to follow.

01:13:55.680 I know there's a lot of guys sitting on Telegram, like, you know, looking at every single post

01:14:00.880 and trying to decipher the actual situation in the Ukraine war.

01:14:04.580 One of the interesting things, of course, about our situation is the more the narrative

01:14:09.280 fractures and the more ability of each side to kind of just have this insane amount of

01:14:15.140 information flow, the less certain it becomes.

01:14:17.860 The more information we have, the less certain the understanding and the narrative of how

01:14:21.880 that war is going, is happening.

01:14:25.500 I don't know.

01:14:26.580 I don't know what's going to happen.

01:14:28.200 It seems insane that the United States seems to be willing to bleed its entire treasury and

01:14:33.820 its entire arsenal and that of the wider West dry in an attempt to have a battle of war of

01:14:40.200 attrition with a country that doesn't seem to be directly threatening it at the moment.

01:14:45.140 But that does seem to be the the position of both of the parties of the United States

01:14:52.160 right now and most both of the major parties.

01:14:54.300 And so I'm not sure how it will end.

01:14:57.420 I just know that it seems almost impossible to follow at this point.

01:15:01.920 All right, guys, so that said, I think we got to all of our questions.

01:15:06.060 Uh, once again, make sure that you're checking out all of Michael, Michael, sorry, Michael

01:15:11.740 Millerman's, uh, stuff.

01:15:13.140 Well, can you remind everyone one more time, just real quick, where to look for your, uh,

01:15:17.520 your courses and such?

01:15:19.720 Millermanschool.com is where I have my courses.

01:15:22.640 M underscore Millerman on Twitter.

01:15:24.800 Uh, if you go to dugancourse.com, you can get my Dugan book for free.

01:15:28.200 Don't even have to put in an email address or anything.

01:15:30.140 There's just a link where you can just get the book.

01:15:32.520 Uh, YouTube, look me up.

01:15:34.200 I've given many, many interviews, but yeah.

01:15:36.180 Millermanschool.com is the school.

01:15:38.400 Excellent guys.

01:15:39.100 And of course, if this is your first time here, please make sure you're subscribing to

01:15:42.000 this channel.

01:15:42.800 If you want to catch these as podcasts, of course, you can go ahead and go to, uh, the

01:15:48.120 Oren McIntyre show on all of your favorite podcast platforms.

01:15:51.980 Make sure that you leave a rating and review when you do so.

01:15:54.300 It really helps with all the algorithm stuff.

01:15:56.460 I just had a new piece go up on the blaze today, so you can make sure to check that out.

01:16:01.720 And of course, this is on all kinds of alt tech stuff as well.

01:16:04.440 If you want to go to Odyssey, if you want to go to rumble, if you want to watch it on

01:16:08.000 blaze TV, you can catch all these broadcasts on those platforms as well.

01:16:12.140 Thanks for coming by guys.

01:16:13.220 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 22, 2023

The Fourth Political Theory： Part One ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 3⧸22⧸23

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