The Charlie Kirk Show - The Central Contradiction of the Modern Left with Glenn Ellmers

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Glenn Elmers joins us for the full hour.

00:00:02.000 Plato Foucault, political philosophy and more.

00:00:05.000 Great conversation.

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00:01:19.000 Here we go.

00:01:20.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:22.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:24.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:28.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:31.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:32.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:02:03.000 Very important guest, someone that has taught me a lot the last, I think, six months.

00:02:08.000 I'm taking several classes enough to make your head spin with the amazing Claremont Institute.

00:02:14.000 They have these online evening courses that push you intellectually, and they're just amazing.

00:02:20.000 And right now I'm doing with Michael Anton on Machiavelli, if you can get a word in edgewise.

00:02:24.000 But the guest is the man behind all of that with a very, very important book called The Narrow Passage, Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy by Glenn Elmers.

00:02:35.000 Glenn, thank you for taking time.

00:02:37.000 Welcome to the program.

00:02:38.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:02:39.000 Great to be here.

00:02:39.000 You're one of my favorite students.

00:02:41.000 Well, thank you.

00:02:42.000 I actually do the reading.

00:02:43.000 And so, and I have a lot to catch up for because I didn't go to college.

00:02:48.000 Tell us about your book, Glenn.

00:02:49.000 Excited to talk about this.

00:02:50.000 Sure.

00:02:51.000 The elevator pitch is I'm trying to understand some of the philosophical background behind what we could call the woke regime crisis.

00:03:00.000 So, you know, the country's in bad shape.

00:03:03.000 We're under a lot of stress.

00:03:04.000 There's tremendous tension.

00:03:06.000 We seem to be under the rule of a kind of strange, deranged ideology.

00:03:11.000 So I'm trying to make sense of both the left and the right, some contradictions and internal incoherence on the left.

00:03:18.000 Why does woke ideology seem so strange and bizarre and angry?

00:03:22.000 And so I'm trying to think through some of the ideas, the deeper issues that brought us to where we are.

00:03:28.000 So let's start with the first, Plato.

00:03:30.000 You know, an elementary understanding of Plato.

00:03:33.000 You know, you contrast with Aristotle, kind of more into abstractions, more into the ideals.

00:03:38.000 The famous, I think it was Raphael's School of Athens pointing to the sky, kind of talking about that in the clouds.

00:03:43.000 Aristotle, you know, focusing more on what we can materially see or empirically see.

00:03:48.000 So Plato, obviously being prolific, not something that I consider myself an expert in, nor any of our audience.

00:03:55.000 How would Plato connect with the modern woke?

00:03:58.000 Did he, the first ever philosopher, start the modern project of woke liberalism?

00:04:05.000 He did, sort of.

00:04:06.000 And I don't want to make this sound too simplistic, and it would be too simplistic to say all this can be traced directly to Plato's feet.

00:04:13.000 But in a way, he is the original source, both of our problems and I would say our solutions.

00:04:19.000 Okay, what do I mean by that?

00:04:21.000 The problem is in a way, Plato, following his great teacher Socrates, introduced the idea of bringing reason into political life.

00:04:28.000 And in a way, that's perfectly sensible, right?

00:04:30.000 We don't want to be governed by superstition and mindless, barbaric traditions. 0.99

00:04:35.000 We want to be able to make intelligent distinctions. 0.96

00:04:38.000 We don't want to live according to deranged, disgusting, primitive religious idolatries, right? 1.00

00:04:48.000 And so we want to think reasonably and rationally about how we should conduct ourselves and organize our politics.

00:04:53.000 And Plato is in a way the first to do that, to think about bringing reason and rational thought into politics.

00:04:58.000 But in a way, that's also the source of our problems, because in a way, that's now become deranged, especially in the course of modern philosophy, introducing the idea that experts should rule us without our consent.

00:05:11.000 That you can have people who are so wise, so smart, so well-trained, that they can become philosopher kings, and we no longer need the consent of governed.

00:05:19.000 We can get rid of limits on the government, and the wise expert class will simply rule us for our own good.

00:05:25.000 That's obviously a real problem.

00:05:27.000 So Plato, in a way, is the source of the problems, but in a way, I would also say points us to the solution, which is to get back to taking political philosophy seriously.

00:05:36.000 So let's focus on the philosopher king aspect of this.

00:05:39.000 There has been this repeated incantation in the media, trust the experts, trust the experts, trust the experts.

00:05:45.000 I can't help but think that this is in some ways an extension of the administrative state.

00:05:49.000 And I do want to get into that because I think that is what happens when you have this group of people that almost could be, say, they have the secret gnosis, the secret mind, the secret society that they know better than us.

00:06:01.000 So can you help build this out?

00:06:02.000 There's a fair amount of pride or hubris, but also Plato said this is how politics should be formed, that you have people that know better because they've been trained and because they went to the right schools.

00:06:16.000 And in some ways, Glenn, the problem with the American project as it is today, we're living under the tyranny of experts living in the clouds who call themselves philosopher kings.

00:06:25.000 Right.

00:06:26.000 Now, it's important to remember when Plato wrote this famous book, The Republic, where he talks about the philosopher kings, he makes it so extreme, so radical, so outrageous and unreasonable that a lot of intelligent scholars say he was being ironic.

00:06:41.000 He was trying to show you just how crazy it would be to live under this regime of philosopher kings in order to point to the limits of politics, precisely to show you the limits of trying to make all political life rational, right?

00:06:54.000 And in a way, then to show we have to be more moderate in our expectations from politics.

00:06:58.000 We have to be sensible about what we can actually achieve in political life.

00:07:03.000 And so it's a lesson in moderation if you understand the philosopher king as sort of an ironic, outrageous idea, which points to something then more sensible.

00:07:13.000 But in modern philosophy, the idea of the philosopher king is taken seriously.

00:07:18.000 And why that happens, and why that happens is an interesting story.

00:07:23.000 It partly has to do with this idea of the end of history.

00:07:25.000 You know, Charlie, you're just in class with Fukuyama and this German thinker, Hegel.

00:07:31.000 And the idea is history is unfolding in a process, right?

00:07:35.000 There's an element of that that leads to Marx.

00:07:38.000 And we now are much wiser than the people in the past.

00:07:41.000 We figured things out.

00:07:42.000 We have all the answers.

00:07:43.000 And since we have all the answers and we figured everything out, let's just go ahead and implement all the solutions.

00:07:49.000 And that's the presumption of the left, which is we figured everything out.

00:07:53.000 We're so smart and wise.

00:07:54.000 And we don't need any limits.

00:07:55.000 We don't need your consent.

00:07:56.000 We're just going to go ahead and do what we think is best.

00:07:59.000 Yeah, as Wilson said, we don't want to muddy up the business of government with politics, aka.

00:08:04.000 We don't want elections to get in the way because we figured it out.

00:08:07.000 Hilariously, Glenn, as a side note, this has been a theme we've talked about: is that we're told by our leaders they figured it all out.

00:08:13.000 Yet we can't fight fires anymore.

00:08:15.000 We can't manage our border.

00:08:16.000 We can't do the very basic stuff.

00:08:18.000 I think this would be a time for mass humility, not massive narcissistic pride.

00:08:24.000 Right.

00:08:25.000 No, that's an X. That's an excellent point.

00:08:26.000 The crisis of expertise is that the bigger their ambitions, the bigger their goals, the less competent they are in doing that.

00:08:34.000 The ordinary thing is that they're not.

00:08:35.000 It's like making your bed.

00:08:37.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:08:38.000 Exactly.

00:08:39.000 You know, people complain about the corrupt city machines of the 19th century, you know, Mayor Curley and the big city policy.

00:08:47.000 But, you know, they built bridges and libraries and roads and things worked and they actually got a lot done during this so-called era of corruption.

00:08:55.000 Oh, I mean, I'm a child of the Chicago suburbs.

00:08:58.000 I've always said that I would rather have the corrupt politician than the ideological one.

00:09:02.000 And our audience attacks me for saying that.

00:09:04.000 I would rather have Mayor Daly who sells out for a buck with the unions, but there was low crime.

00:09:10.000 The trains ran on time.

00:09:11.000 It was a beautiful city.

00:09:12.000 And yeah, he was obviously on the dole.

00:09:14.000 He was obviously cutting deals, but he didn't have some sort of abstract revolution that he was trying to bring forth to Chicago.

00:09:21.000 He just wanted to get paid.

00:09:23.000 That's the idea, right?

00:09:24.000 So, this petty corruption, in a way, you know, it's the idea that if you can make politics perfect and get rid of all the corruption, you make matters worse.

00:09:32.000 This utopian idea that we can achieve perfection, we can achieve heaven here on earth, it doesn't solve the problem of corruption because people are still self-interested.

00:09:43.000 What it does, though, is introduce these vast, unrealistic schemes that leave ordinary day-to-day function behind.

00:09:52.000 And so, we can't, our bridges and our roads and our schools don't work anymore while we're trying to achieve diversity and economic justice and all these ridiculous things.

00:10:02.000 And basic infrastructure falls by the wayside.

00:10:04.000 Yeah, I mean, our military, unfortunately, is falling apart.

00:10:09.000 And basic infrastructure, basic things like getting your kids to read, having your young people not kill themselves at record rates, like really kind of basic indicators that your society is healthy.

00:10:20.000 Almost every single one of those is going in the wrong direction.

00:10:23.000 And yet, the lecturing we receive is about viva la revolution.

00:10:29.000 We will bring forth diversity and equity.

00:10:31.000 There's this amazing clip, which is Hegel.

00:10:34.000 It's Al Sharpton and Kamala Harris.

00:10:37.000 And I don't know if you saw this, it was on SNBC.

00:10:38.000 You have to have a trained ear to catch it.

00:10:40.000 And Obama said something similar where they talk about this arc of justice, right?

00:10:44.000 How history folds itself out.

00:10:46.000 And meanwhile, you know, the observer that is walking around the cities these people govern is like the people are defecating, they're doing drugs, the kids aren't in school, but they're like, hey, no, but the revolution is what matters.

00:10:58.000 There's a lot there that I want to unpack.

00:11:00.000 The book, I want you guys to read it, the narrow passage, Plato Foucault, and the possibility of political philosophy.

00:11:06.000 And oh boy, we are going to get to Michelle Foucault because he was a trickster.

00:11:10.000 I'll tell you what.

00:11:14.000 Do you get the feeling that something bad is going to happen soon?

00:11:17.000 Well, I do.

00:11:17.000 But between the distractions and smokescreens in the media, we probably won't see it coming.

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00:12:17.000 Okay, Glenn Elmers continues with us.

00:12:18.000 Let's play this tape here, Glenn.

00:12:20.000 The book is the narrow passage, Plato Foucault, and the possibility of political philosophy.

00:12:25.000 Let's listen carefully, play cut 133.

00:12:28.000 You know, I think so much about, I talk about, you know, we talk about the arc.

00:12:35.000 I think about it as also like a relay race and those who carried the baton and were measured by what they did when they had it, and then they passed it to us.

00:12:46.000 And the point will be, what do we do while we're carrying the baton?

00:12:49.000 Before we pass it.

00:12:50.000 Before we pass it, understanding that the race will never be over.

00:12:53.000 But the question is, what do you do in the time when you're carrying the baton?

00:12:57.000 That's exactly right.

00:12:58.000 Right?

00:12:58.000 You know, I think so much about, I talk about, you know, Glenn, what are they really saying here?

00:13:05.000 Well, first of all, I think we should respect some of the two great intellectuals of our time having our colloquy there.

00:13:12.000 Very high-model stuff.

00:13:13.000 But so they're in a way very watered-down version of what this philosopher, German philosopher Hegel was talking about, that history has a process, right?

00:13:23.000 And this is what the left has believed for a long time.

00:13:24.000 This is where the idea progressive comes from, that history is a progressive unfolding, becoming more and more advanced.

00:13:33.000 Right.

00:13:33.000 So what that means is we're so much smarter than everyone in the past.

00:13:36.000 We don't have anything to learn from the founding fathers.

00:13:38.000 We don't have anything to learn from Plato and Aristotle.

00:13:41.000 We're so much smarter.

00:13:42.000 And since now we've figured things out, we can just have the experts treat politics as a kind of a technical problem, just use their expertise to solve various administrative issues, since we already know that all the basic questions of life are answered.

00:13:59.000 So just, you know, get rid of consent and allow the experts to administer things.

00:14:04.000 That's the implication of that idea of history.

00:14:07.000 And you hear them talk about, I mean, Obama says this too, the arc of history.

00:14:12.000 And so tie this in then with your book and the argument you're making, the narrow passage.

00:14:18.000 And so the byline, Foucault, I want to spend a fair amount of time on him now or whenever you want, but now is appropriate.

00:14:26.000 How does Foucault get on the front page of the title of a book by Glenn Elmers?

00:14:31.000 I mean, he's not exactly my favorite.

00:14:34.000 Right.

00:14:34.000 So listen, if you were my age, you'd remember, in fact, in the 80s and 90s, when people on the right, like me, we all made fun of Foucault and Derrida and these other French paternists, French postmodernists, with their ridiculous jargon and their opaque language.

00:14:50.000 But I think he's relevant.

00:14:52.000 But to say that, I have to step back for a minute and mention another guy who I'm sure you know, Nietzsche.

00:14:57.000 So one of the things that makes the left so crazy now is, on the one hand, they believe in the end of history, which means the rational state, the rule of the experts, science, since we've got everything figured out, we can just administer politics as a form of social science.

00:15:11.000 And so you get people like Fauci saying, I represent science.

00:15:15.000 You get the whole bureaucratic apparatus, Environmental Protection Agency, and the FBI.

00:15:20.000 I'd say, we have the labs, we have the expertise, we have the technology.

00:15:23.000 Just let us take care of things.

00:15:25.000 We don't need your consent, right?

00:15:26.000 So that's the idea of the rational state.

00:15:29.000 But then you have this other idea, which comes from Nietzsche, which says, you know what?

00:15:34.000 Progress turned out to be a lie.

00:15:35.000 Marx and the others promised us the final utopia, the workers' paradise, the solution of all human problems.

00:15:42.000 And yet, World War I, World War II, the nuclear bomb, for all these things, the left said, well, wait a minute, progress turns out, you know, where is it?

00:15:52.000 Why haven't we solved all these problems yet?

00:15:53.000 And so there's been a disillusionment by the left that has led to this postmodernism that you get from Nietzsche, which says, you know, you know what, progress is a lie.

00:16:04.000 And it turns out there is really nothing to believe in.

00:16:07.000 We live in a meaningless universe since history doesn't lead to anything.

00:16:11.000 And since they reject God, and since they reject the idea of objective morality, and since they reject the idea of transcendent truth, they're left with literally nothingness, this idea of nihilism, that human beings just live in a world empty of all meaning.

00:16:25.000 And so this postmodernism, which says, you know, truth is a construct.

00:16:29.000 It's, you know, comes from the power narrative.

00:16:32.000 Mathematics is just white hegemony. 0.95

00:16:34.000 There's no such thing as objective chemistry.

00:16:36.000 That, you know, you have European chemistry and African chemistry, and who's to say what's right and wrong, right? 1.00

00:16:41.000 But this idea of postmodernism obviously conflicts with the idea of the role of the experts and science.

00:16:48.000 And this conflict is part of what makes the left so crazy now.

00:16:51.000 And part of the reason I wrote my book is to point out that there's this internal contradiction on the left, which wants to say science and the role of the experts.

00:17:00.000 Also, postmodernism and all truth is just the power structure, the power narrative.

00:17:06.000 And the conflict between those two things is one part of the craziness of our politics today.

00:17:11.000 In some ways, they're embracing those contradictions because at least they can say we agree that we need to oppose the neo-fascist right or whatever nonsense that they have.

00:17:20.000 They actually don't actually have to have those contradictions face themselves and iron them out.

00:17:25.000 Glenn Elmers, author of The Narrow Passage, Plato Foucault and the Possibility of Political Philosophy.

00:17:30.000 You probably wonder, Charlie, where did the woke come from? 0.97

00:17:32.000 What drives the left?

00:17:33.000 This book can teach you a lot.

00:17:36.000 Very smart, well put together.

00:17:38.000 Glenn Elmers is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

00:17:40.000 Great organization.

00:17:41.000 Check it out.

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00:18:42.000 Who was Michelle Foucault?

00:18:44.000 I mean, and we can go as deep as you want, but he had a very weird personal life.

00:18:47.000 We'll put that aside.

00:18:48.000 But what did he believe?

00:18:50.000 What is his contribution to modern political philosophy?

00:18:53.000 Yeah, he was kind of an odd guy.

00:18:55.000 He and some other thinkers, mostly from France, Derrida Jacques, Derrida, and Lacan and others, they were these, they were called postmodernists.

00:19:05.000 And Michel Foucault was one of the smarter ones among them.

00:19:09.000 Why am I interested in them?

00:19:10.000 Why am I interested in these weird French postmodernists? 0.99

00:19:13.000 They show what society is like after the death of God or the rejection of God, the rejection of the Bible, the rejection of objective truth, the rejection that there's any ground for determining right and wrong, the rejection of nature as a standard.

00:19:27.000 All of these things that come out of modern philosophy, and especially Nietzsche, which define the way the ruling class, the way the left thinks.

00:19:35.000 Now, the left is in charge of all of our major institutions, from the government bureaucracy to popular culture and the media, certainly academia, more and more corporations, even the military.

00:19:48.000 And so, since they reject God, since they reject objective morality, since they reject the idea that there's permanent truth, since they reject nature, what do they believe it?

00:19:57.000 They believe in this phrase that you used a moment ago, Nietzsche's will to power.

00:20:01.000 Power just exists for us to get whatever we want, to impose our wishes, to manipulate nature.

00:20:06.000 If we want to turn little boys into little girls, who's to stop us, right?

00:20:10.000 The world just exists to satisfy our wants and desires and our needs.

00:20:14.000 Well, that's kind of crazy.

00:20:16.000 And what does that actually mean for how the institutions of society function?

00:20:20.000 And Foucault and the other French postmodernists were very insightful in this.

00:20:26.000 They said, okay, what happens in a world like that, where you reject truth, where you reject God, where you reject morality?

00:20:33.000 How does the will to power actually function in the institutions?

00:20:37.000 And Foucault was very good at showing how the structures of power, how the idea of truth is manipulated to become a weapon or a tool for the power structure, how our identities are co-opted into the institutions of power.

00:20:51.000 He was very good at exposing that.

00:20:53.000 And the reason that's relevant now, and the reason I'm bringing this up to try to show to people on the right why this is relevant is because when Foucault wrote, it was the left that was the anti-establishment.

00:21:04.000 And it was the left that saw itself as opposing the structures of power, opposing capitalism and free enterprise and liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

00:21:13.000 But now the tables have turned in half a century, right?

00:21:17.000 And it's the right.

00:21:18.000 And one of the things I'm always emphasizing to people on the right is we have to get our minds around the idea that we're the counter-establishment.

00:21:25.000 We're the anti-establishment.

00:21:27.000 We're the dissenters.

00:21:28.000 We're the counter-revolutionaries, right?

00:21:29.000 We can't think of ourselves as normal supporters of the establishment because the establishment is now in control of fanatics who don't believe in natural rights or limited government or consent or the rule of law or any of that.

00:21:43.000 And Foucault, because he was this weird counter-revolutionary in the 70s, understood some things that I think are very useful that we need to understand today about how to battle these anonymous, oppressive structures of power that the left now manipulates and uses.

00:21:59.000 That's such a deep point.

00:22:00.000 It also runs against who we are as conservative, because naturally we want to just say no and defend.

00:22:06.000 And oh, you know, also built into the word conservative is almost this idea that you're in charge, that you control the institutions, right?

00:22:15.000 What you're saying is, no, we have to recapture, we have to think like dissidents in our own country.

00:22:21.000 It's very difficult to try to, let's just take the word conservative side, just on people on the normal side that believe in natural law and believe in physics not being something of white supremacy.

00:22:33.000 So then what can we learn, Glenn?

00:22:37.000 What can we glean from these?

00:22:38.000 I mean, do we have to go as far as what Marx would say, the ruthless criticism of all that exists?

00:22:43.000 I mean, is it time to pick up our Alinsky and to find the target, freeze it, polarize it, isolate it, keep the pressure on and do a tactic that your people enjoy doing?

00:22:53.000 Walk us through it.

00:22:55.000 Well, you know, that's a very tricky question, what exactly we should do.

00:22:59.000 And it's, you know, you have to be careful nowadays.

00:23:02.000 The left now, since they no longer believe in due process and the rule of law, and they believe in weaponizing the FBI and the Justice Department, means people like you and me have to be careful about what we say.

00:23:12.000 And let me emphasize I'm not encouraging anyone to do anything outside the bounds of the law.

00:23:18.000 But these thinkers of the left are useful just to think about how things work, you know, how to oppose these power structures, but to also just think through the problem.

00:23:30.000 Once you see the problem, the solutions, you start to think for yourself what the solutions might be.

00:23:36.000 And so, for instance, Foucault talks about how power structures co-opt your identity.

00:23:41.000 Now, I have a lot of friends who went to Ivy League schools, and I don't want to bash them, but I'll mention one little point is Foucault is very good at showing if you have high status, if you're invested in the society because of your degree from an Ivy League university, because you work at a prestige law firm or a prestige corporation, your identity is invested in the stability of the regime, right?

00:24:04.000 You don't want to overturn the status quo because your status, your credentials, you know, I've got a Harvard degree and I work at this prestigious law firm.

00:24:14.000 And so you're invested in maintaining the status quo.

00:24:16.000 And Foucault is very good at showing the subtle ways that the power structure co-opts people and prevents you from opposing the power structure because your status and your identity are tied up in it.

00:24:27.000 So things like that, I think, are very useful for people on the right to understand.

00:24:31.000 So one of the things you mentioned is this forced marriage, this contradiction in the woke regime between the ruling class philosopher kings and let's just say the infantry, right?

00:24:41.000 The shock troops of people that they believe in egalitarianism or just, I think it's just weaponized complaining.

00:24:50.000 And yet they're kind of in this left-wing coalition because they hate the right so much.

00:24:54.000 Is that something that is going to eventually manifest in a schism in the woke coalition?

00:25:02.000 Yeah, you know, it's on the one hand, you'd say, well, it can't last forever, right?

00:25:07.000 On the other hand, you know, people on the right have been saying, oh, the left, they went over their skis now.

00:25:12.000 They've gone too far.

00:25:13.000 You know, once we started doing, you know, gender reassignment surgery on little kids, you'd think, oh, well, they've definitely gone too far now. 0.97

00:25:21.000 There's going to be a reaction.

00:25:23.000 Yet the big reaction from middle America never seems to come, which shows you in a way, again, that these power structures operate in very insidious indirect ways. 0.54

00:25:32.000 And they, in a way, they sap the energy out of people.

00:25:36.000 They make it seem like it's impossible to oppose the power structure.

00:25:40.000 So, you know, it's very unclear exactly what we should do in these circumstances.

00:25:46.000 But certainly understanding the problem is the first step.

00:25:49.000 What largely keeps, I mean, I alluded to it earlier, what keeps it together?

00:25:53.000 If there are philosophical contradictions building a political community, what does keep these two together if there are these inherent contradictions?

00:26:03.000 Yeah, so for right now, they're on the top, right?

00:26:05.000 And so for the time being, it's just basically a marriage of convenience.

00:26:10.000 You know, the Silicon Valley people believe in a sort of global oligarchy.

00:26:14.000 They obviously don't have the same agenda as the radical anarchists in Antifa, who also seem to have a separate agenda from the racial grievance-mongering faction.

00:26:28.000 All of these now have an uneasy alliance.

00:26:32.000 And because they're in control, they're working together.

00:26:37.000 Certainly, as you say, simply a hatred of traditional old-fashioned American constitutionalism.

00:26:44.000 But it's unclear how long this can last.

00:26:48.000 One of the things I say is, again, none of us want violence.

00:26:51.000 None of us want a crisis.

00:26:53.000 But global events, a financial crash, some other catastrophe could really break apart this coalition.

00:27:01.000 And one of the things I try to do in my book is encourage people on the right, look at the fundamental questions.

00:27:06.000 Go back to the essentials.

00:27:08.000 Think about what is the purpose of life?

00:27:10.000 What is the purpose of politics?

00:27:11.000 Because if there is going to be a crisis or some kind of catastrophe that comes and things fall apart, it'll be very useful to have thought about these basic questions of, okay, how do we come together as people?

00:27:23.000 What are we living for?

00:27:24.000 What are we trying to accomplish here?

00:27:26.000 Yeah, I mean, these are basic fundamental questions.

00:27:29.000 So let's talk about this kind of will to power, which I think some people find hard to believe.

00:27:34.000 Is it fair to say that one of the animating forces of the political philosophy on what we would call the left is really a disregard for any sort of objective truth, you know, let's just say understanding of their place in the logos or the cosmos.

00:27:49.000 All there really is for power, for power's sake.

00:27:52.000 Is that a summation of a large faction of what we would consider the political community on the left?

00:27:57.000 Sure, because what happens when you reject God, when you reject the idea of nature as a standard and a limit on what we can do in life, when you reject the idea of transcendent truth, what's left, right?

00:28:09.000 There's literally nothing to limit the fulfillment of your desires.

00:28:13.000 And so you use science and technology to simply manipulate the world to satisfy whatever you might want, whether it's changing your gender or economic redistribution or whatever.

00:28:24.000 And so you simply use power to exert your will.

00:28:27.000 That's literally what Nietzsche meant by that.

00:28:30.000 And I think that does characterize the left because they don't believe in any higher standards that would limit their exercise of power.

00:28:37.000 What limits the exercise of power for people on the left?

00:28:39.000 Nothing except their own desires.

00:28:41.000 And the major issue is post-German historicism.

00:28:45.000 They actually think they can remake nature itself.

00:28:48.000 Riff on that a little bit.

00:28:50.000 This is a creepy undercurrent of some of the medieval witch doctors that call themselves pediatricians, where they think they can actually reconfigure the raw material of nature, change man to woman, or even change the species. 0.84

00:29:05.000 Right.

00:29:05.000 So for most of human history, human beings respected nature.

00:29:08.000 And I don't mean environmentalism or going out for a hike, but in the sense that there's something outside of human will, right?

00:29:16.000 There's, even if you don't necessarily believe in the God of Bible, the God of the Bible, the idea that we're born into a world we don't create.

00:29:22.000 And so the natural world imposes limits on what we can do.

00:29:25.000 And it actually provides some guidance.

00:29:27.000 Our human nature tells us what it means to have a fulfilling life, right?

00:29:32.000 We're built in a way that leads us in a certain direction to find our happiness.

00:29:36.000 The modern left, in the pursuit of radical, unlimited freedom, rejected the idea of nature, rejected that it imposes any limits on it, rejected the idea that human nature is any kind of standard.

00:29:49.000 And so they want to use science and technology to manipulate nature, including human nature, to just make us into whatever we want to be.

00:29:58.000 An absolutely uncontrolled radical freedom to transcend human nature and use science and technology to fulfill our wildest fantasies, our most utopian longings.

00:30:07.000 And that's in a way what we're seeing.

00:30:09.000 And the most egregious case, as we mentioned, is gender reassignment on surgery. 0.82

00:30:14.000 But you see it all transhumanism, the pursuit of immortality, all of these things.

00:30:18.000 Well, and even going back, this is one of the issues that is not always talked about in the 20th century, right?

00:30:24.000 So the way that the academics or the media talks about the Holocaust or Stalin is they say it was just racism or whatever.

00:30:33.000 That's part of it, is the racial part.

00:30:34.000 But it also was man's willingness to try to control nature.

00:30:37.000 It was this idea of a small group of man scientists that wanted to exert their will.

00:30:42.000 And I just hope everyone understands we're not talking about like the forest and the trees and the rivers.

00:30:46.000 We're talking about this like Latin phrase, natura or whatever.

00:30:49.000 It's the order that is outside of man, right?

00:30:52.000 Oquiness would call it the natural law.

00:30:54.000 And they reject that.

00:30:55.000 They say, well, why can't we just do what we want?

00:30:58.000 Exactly.

00:30:58.000 The idea that there is an objective order to the universe, a moral order to the universe that is independent of our will, the left rejects that.

00:31:06.000 And that means they reject any limits on their power and their wants and their desires.

00:31:10.000 And that's very dangerous.

00:31:11.000 And that's the society we're living in now.

00:31:14.000 And so the way back is what we're trying to do in our evening classes, understand how we got here, right?

00:31:20.000 Understand that there is a natural law.

00:31:23.000 And I hate to oversimplify things, but that's part of what we do here is that if you think that there is a logos or a harmony to the cosmos or a natural law, you do get a little bit of humility and maybe awe or wonder.

00:31:35.000 And I believe what Aristotle said, wonder is the beginning of philosophy.

00:31:39.000 You get some understanding of that.

00:31:41.000 But if you don't think there's any design, and I don't mean that even in a metaphysical way, just there's anything here, then you get awfully cocky rather quickly, especially in your own ability to change the natural world.

00:31:54.000 That's absolutely right.

00:31:55.000 You'll remember, of course, the famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and nature's God.

00:32:01.000 It imposes both a direction, a framework, and a limit on what we can do in our own lives and what the government should do.

00:32:09.000 But when you reject that, when you reject the laws of nature, when you reject the idea of there's an independent order outside of our will, then there's literally no limits.

00:32:18.000 And this unlimited pursuit of absolute unfettered freedom is the root of the very dangerous fanaticism that now rules our intellectual class.

00:32:29.000 In some ways, it will be reality that saves us because it's reality they're declaring a war on.

00:32:34.000 And that's the question, right?

00:32:35.000 Is how far can they push this?

00:32:38.000 And all indications are pretty far.

00:32:42.000 Please, Glenn, final thoughts.

00:32:44.000 The Soviet Union, which also was premised on a complete rejection of human nature, lasted seven years and caused a lot of misery. 0.99

00:32:51.000 And a lot of insanity.

00:32:53.000 I mean, the one example I'll use, which will make people chuckle, is that you have the CDC saying that men can take lactating-inducing drugs to breastfeed young children the same ways that women can.

00:33:04.000 That's an all-out war on reality.

00:33:07.000 And eventually.

00:33:08.000 Absolutely.

00:33:08.000 Yeah, riff on that, Glenn, and we'll close it up.

00:33:11.000 And that's a perfect illustration also of what Foucault is talking about.

00:33:14.000 In this postmodern world, in this Nietzschean world, the world that Foucault described and tried to help us understand, words lose all their meaning because there is no objective ground of reality.

00:33:23.000 We impose our own will on the world, and truth and language and power just become what we declare them to be.

00:33:34.000 And that radical rejection of nature is the very dangerous fanaticism that's on the verge of destroying this country.

00:33:42.000 That's an amazingly deep point.

00:33:44.000 But if you understand that words represent things and they are not what you want them to be, then all of a sudden you start to think that's the war on speech, the war on reason.

00:33:55.000 He's like, oh, wow.

00:33:56.000 Okay.

00:33:56.000 Glenn Elmers, great conversation.

00:33:59.000 Come back soon.

00:34:00.000 The narrow passage is the book.

00:34:02.000 And look forward to our course on the Bible and Nietzsche.

00:34:04.000 That's going to be a fun one.

00:34:05.000 So thank you, Glenn.

00:34:06.000 Talk to you soon.

00:34:07.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:34:07.000 Thanks.

00:34:08.000 Appreciate it.

00:34:08.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:10.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:13.000 Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.

00:34:17.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 31, 2023

The Central Contradiction of the Modern Left with Glenn Ellmers

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