00:01:14.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:17.000What it's about is that we're publishing it through the Amazon Direct Publishing through the New Discourses imprint from our own company, New Discourses, rather than going through a big box.
00:02:28.000So, that's the only option they give for pre-order.
00:02:49.000So, you know, there's no honest word about critical race theory out there.
00:02:52.000There's a lot of stuff that is critical race theory, being critical race theory, and, you know, doing what critical race theory does in its own words within its kind of own bubble of interpretation.
00:03:05.000And then there's virtually nothing from the outside because people who are outside of critical race theory very rarely have the interest to dig deep.
00:03:12.000Of course, it's changed over the last year or two.
00:03:15.000So there's no like truly deep dive that explains what critical race theory really is.
00:03:48.000And then finally, what are some ideas of things we might be able to do about critical race theory since it is here?
00:03:54.000So you have an interesting word on your cover, praxis.
00:03:56.000That's where we get our English word practice from.
00:04:00.000What is praxis, praxeology, and why would you put that on your cover, the study of human action?
00:04:06.000Well, it's because the Marxists use that word in place of the word practice to mean practice that is informed by their theory.
00:04:15.000And so, what they actually believe, I know you said we're going to go deep, it depends on how deep you want to go, but they actually believe that if you are doing activity that's not informed by theory, then your activity is probably either illegitimate or maybe even part of the problem.
00:04:31.000And so, you have to be in this kind of continual relationship with your activity.
00:04:36.000So, you go out and do some activism, or you interact in the world, or you hold some beliefs within yourself, and you constantly need to be reflecting against theory.
00:04:44.000In other words, Marxian theory or Marxist theory to better understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and so on, and advancing that theory's implementation.
00:04:53.000So, praxis is basically the word that means the implementation of a Marxist theory.
00:04:59.000And so, what you see in particular is what you'll see a lot of people argue that critical race theory is not being taught in schools.
00:05:07.000But the truth is that critical race praxis, which installs critical race theory ideas, is what's happening in schools.
00:05:14.000They are actually implementing critical race theory rather than teaching the theory in a detached way.
00:05:19.000And that's their little linguistic trick to get around it.
00:05:22.000And we're seeing that at every corner.
00:05:24.000So, I'll give you an example here that I want to explore with you in Denver.
00:06:05.000Well, because what critical race theory does, and what you'd find if you end up picking up race Marxism reading chapter five, all critical race theory does is attempts to make more critical race theorists.
00:06:16.000The religion of critical, and then put them in positions of power, I should add.
00:06:21.000The religion of Marxism in general, or of critical race theory, more in specific as a kind of race-based denomination within that broader Marxist faith, believes that when everybody has the right consciousness, that they're going to use that consciousness to put action into the world.
00:06:38.000And when everybody's putting the correct practice into the world or praxis into the world, then what you're going to eventually have is the utopia.
00:06:46.000The communists called it communism, and the Marxists of today, using things like critical race theory, call it justice, which is just a euphemism for communism as they like to do.
00:06:56.000So, why are they doing this in the schools?
00:07:00.000They literally think that it is not just appropriate, but necessary to replace the lessons in every single subject with consciousness raising.
00:07:08.000And if it's critical race theory, it's racial consciousness raising.
00:07:11.000You mentioned queer and transgender, so you have to have the queer, gender, whole sex, sexuality universe consciousness raising in terms of that being its own Marxist approach to identity.
00:07:24.000And so, what you see there is the entire grab bag under this doctrine of intersectionality: that all of the various forms of oppression, as they call it, which means communists not getting their way, have to be considered all at once in this kind of huge bucket.
00:07:41.000So, you have to talk about race constantly.
00:07:43.000You have to talk about how we don't have a perfect global communist world order because that oppresses people who are in, say, the third world, as you might say it, to the advantage of the first world.
00:07:54.000You have to talk about how people who are held under normative expectations of sex, gender, and sexuality are being oppressed and being kept out of their ability to enter into actually what turns out to be the Marxist religious practice, which is that of transition.
00:08:12.000Transition, the process of becoming from what was to something different is, in fact, the whole program.
00:08:19.000So what this is, is just an attempt to use identity.
00:08:23.000factors and global politics and liberation politics that have always been kind of communist programs to push communism into the schools because that's all they do.
00:08:34.000Because if they can awaken that consciousness in a new generation of kids, get them to break away from the previous culture, get them to hate their parents, get them to hate their parents' faith, get them to hate the cultural values that have built this country, then they can get that ground, that ground becomes tilled and prepared for them to have a revolution and then start a new society.
00:09:06.000Yeah, I mean, we can go really deep into how it's a religion, but that Great Commission thing is exactly right.
00:09:10.000Consciousness raising is the name of their Great Commission, and they believe that if that there are two types of people, in essence, there are people who see the power dynamics that structure all of society.
00:09:21.000That's called structuralism, and that's the heart of the Marxist belief system.
00:09:24.000And then there are people who are either naive or willfully ignorant to it and don't see it.
00:09:29.000So there are the people who see it and people who don't.
00:09:31.000And what they believe is that if they can go and get people to basically be born again through the work into conscientized people, then they can have their revolution and their new world.
00:09:52.000The point is that just from an objective onlooker, they basically just kind of carbon copied the entire commission of Christianity and incorporated it into this hyper-politicized secular religion.
00:10:14.000In the coming segments, I want to ask you about Rousseau and kind of where he fits into this.
00:10:19.000One of the three social contract theorists that we talk about on the show, because there were Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, and they all got some things correct.
00:10:29.000But I'm interested, because you know the literature a lot better than I do, where he was the, where he derived the most inspiration behind what we now know as CRT.
00:10:39.000I find that to be really interesting because he was a critic of commercial society.
00:10:44.000He was right about the alienation of commercial society, but the question about human nature and all those things surrounding it, I want to explore with you.
00:10:58.000They feel soft and lotiony in the stores, but you get them home and they don't absorb.
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00:11:57.000James, tell us about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the influence he has had on now what is known as critical race theory.
00:12:04.000You know, it's really funny because, you know, you mentioned he's a social contract theorist and he's really well known for the social contract theory that he put forth.
00:12:12.000And there actually is a critical race theorist who recently died by the name of Charles Mills, who wrote a book in 97 called The Racial Contract that directly tries to update Rousseau's social contract theory to say that there is a racial contract in our society where all of the people who have access to whiteness silently and secretly collude.
00:12:30.000They never hear about the contract, but they all play by it.
00:12:32.000And the point of the contract is to keep whiteness up and to keep other people of other races out of access to whiteness.
00:12:40.000And this is really an extraordinary conspiracy theory that he's put forth at the heart of critical race theory.
00:12:45.000But the much more relevant, rather than social contract theory, part of Rousseau is that Rousseau became fascinated with what became known as the master slave dialectic by looking into, he was reading, and in fact, misreading, misunderstanding things that were being sent back to Europe by colonial priests who were in, say, the Caribbean or other places around the world.
00:13:08.000And they're sending back what it was like to work with the natives.
00:13:10.000And he had this idea of this very, you know, noble savage who had a completely different conception of the world.
00:13:15.000And he was obviously, as you said, he got some things right and some things wrong, but he was very sour on the idea of reason-based, enlightened society.
00:13:24.000And thought that the problems that Europeans were facing were a result of civilization.
00:13:30.000So he came up with this fantastical notion of creating savages made to live in cities.
00:13:35.000And this ended up being, you know, something he really put a lot of effort into thinking about this dialectical synthesis, we would call it now, of so-called savages and so-called civilized Europeans, both of whom should be learning from one another and kind of becoming this new averaged thing.
00:13:53.000And this ended up in the hands of the philosopher Schiller.
00:13:57.000And Schiller taught it to one of his students by the name of Hegel.
00:14:02.000And when Schiller taught it to Hegel, he used the word to describe this.
00:14:05.000He used the German word Alfhaben, which means simultaneously to keep and to abolish or cancel, but also to lift up, which the Marxists translate as sublate, which means to raise to a higher level of consciousness or understanding.
00:14:18.000And so the master slave dialectic fascination that Rousseau had, combined with his social contract ideas, combined also with his emphasis that reason is too alienating and too dangerous in that regard, and therefore that sentimentality and sincerity are better arbiters of what's true, which spawned the entire Romantic movement, which in a long arc of history led to the postmodern movement.
00:14:45.000Those pieces all kind of come together to form a lot of the philosophical underpinning that defines how critical race theory operates.
00:14:55.000A man is born free and he spends the rest of his life in chains, Rousseau famously wrote and would say.
00:15:06.000Well, and that's that's one of the great tensions of Rousseau is he hated industrial society, but he benefited a lot from it, actually.
00:15:15.000He enjoyed it, despite the fact that he hated it, which is a really important point that I want to explore with you in the next segment.
00:15:22.000That is, we could go really deep into the philosophy of it, but I want to kind of connect all this with a theme of white liberals that have been pushing the kind of cocktail conversation of Black Lives Matter until all of a sudden their kid doesn't get till Princeton.
00:15:34.000I want to get to that because it really does kind of buttress up against kind of the Rousseauian hypocrisy because he's there, you know, whining and dining in Geneva, Switzerland, while he's telling everyone to stop, you know, enjoying the benefits of a market society.
00:15:50.000But let me just ask you this in the last minute, which is, so he started romanticism.
00:16:07.000The really quick thing, and this is not the main part of the story, is that Romanticism inspired existentialism, inspired structuralism, inspired postmodernism through post-structuralism.
00:16:28.000And then that Marx took up, and Marx's theology is based in that idea that you as subject create the object in the world outside of it and come to know yourself.
00:16:37.000Critical race theory calls this the work, just like Marx referred to it as productive work.
00:16:42.000And it's done with the racial dialectic now instead of the dialectic across economic class.
00:17:02.000There were some thinkers before him in a more political standpoint, like Machiavelli, who just cared about power, where Rousseau definitely cared more about emotion and feelings and a more pathological or pathos way of looking at it.
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00:18:19.000So, James, when we look at political movements, we look at these sort of cultural movements, you always try to find the base.
00:18:24.000You say, what group of people are really making this happen?
00:18:29.000And I think if we look at the BLM CRT base, it's not the black population that is the driving force of this.
00:18:37.000There's a fair amount of support here and there, but it sure seems to be financed, supported, driven forward, and endorsed mainly by upper class, miserable, college-educated, white liberals, specifically white liberal women.
00:19:01.000So I'll tell you what I did for Martin Luther King weekend.
00:19:03.000I got invited to speak at a conference in Franklin, Tennessee, where I was the only, this is a Martin Luther King themed conference on the weekend preceding Martin Luther King Day.
00:19:11.000I was the only white solo speaker invited to the conference.
00:19:15.000And after I spoke, I had all these black women come up to me, laying hands on me, praying protection over me, you know, all of this.
00:19:21.000And they think that critical race theory is of Satan, and they're probably right.
00:19:25.000And so what you see actually is that the statistics are that it is white, especially it skews female educated liberals who are the driver of this thing.
00:19:38.000They are the ones who have been captured by the Marxist ideology, and they are the ones who are pushing it, using race as the thing that they are absolutely most inflamed about, unless it's masks and vaccines.
00:19:51.000So then let's take that a level deeper because you look at, let's just take ruling class exhibit A, Chuck Schumer.
00:20:01.000So Chuck Schumer, he just says what he needs to say, all this sort of stuff.
00:20:04.000Let's say Chuck Schumer's grandson wants to go to Yale or Princeton.
00:20:09.000I don't think the Schumer family will be happy if they lose out to some kid from Brooklyn because he's black.
00:20:16.000At what point does all of a sudden the white ruling class or the white upper middle class that has been pushing this all of a sudden maybe realize that they might be harmed or their children might be harmed or their financial interests might be harmed?
00:20:31.000Well, they won't be because they get positioned as allies in this power struggle.
00:20:36.000And so allies means that you're on the correct side of this.
00:20:39.000If you look at it kind of from the Maoist perspective, where he creates all these demonized identities and then gives you, you know, good revolutionary identities you can get into to get out of that problem, becoming a so-called ally moves you into a revolutionary identity.
00:20:53.000So as long as people like Chuck Schumer and so on keep doing what they're doing, their kids are not going to be threatened.
00:20:58.000Now, your average middle class and even upper middle class white person is probably going to be threatened.
00:21:03.000Certainly, we're looking at it right now with the Supreme Court that if those people are Asian, it's super being threatened.
00:21:09.000But you have to understand that these elite universities like Harvard and Princeton and Yale and so on need to be best understood as hedge funds that are betting on kids.
00:21:16.000And what they care about most of all is how moldable those kids are to ideology and how socially connected their families are.
00:21:23.000That's ultimately all they really care about.
00:21:25.000And so the game is really to bring in ideologically moldable kids.
00:21:29.000Anybody who says they're an ally is obviously ideologically moldable and who are in well-connected families because that's what they're actually hedging on so they can keep their endowments growing.
00:21:38.000It's a very crooked, very corrupt system in these elite colleges and universities.
00:21:43.000So those people actually don't have to worry.
00:21:45.000Now, your average upper class middle, upper middle class white liberal should be worrying, but won't because that would be racist.
00:21:52.000And they've been cowed into fear about worrying about the realities of what they're supporting or they're just completely naive to the realities of what they're supporting or some combination of both.
00:22:04.000So are the CRT people, are they explicit about trying to play into people's white guilt?
00:22:18.000You know, from the Christian faith, of which I am a believer, there's a very specific way to deal with guilt, to deal with sin, right?
00:22:26.000And the Catholic tradition has a way to deal with it through the Eucharist or through confession, the evangelical world, through worship, through praise, and through asking the Lord for forgiveness.
00:22:34.000And that's a big deal because the dealing, how you deal with guilt basically explains a lot of how your society functions.
00:22:47.000Obviously, the title of Shelby Steele's book, White Guilt, points you in his direction if you really want to understand the mechanism that he identified as well.
00:22:56.000A lot of people, just to say it, think that Shelby Steele wrote a book called White Guilt Must Be Woke.
00:23:03.000And he's saying that as a black radical from the 70s and the 60s, that he participated in the extortion side of this racket and then came to understand it.
00:23:15.000What I've actually realized, and I saw it more because of the COVID, the masks, the vaccine bullying, and all of this.
00:23:21.000I saw it more from there than I did originally in CRT, but now I see how it applies in both.
00:23:26.000What I noticed is that if you want to affect a tyranny, if you want to make a tyranny come about, the best way to do that is to take some category of people who are kind of not aware of really what's going on.
00:23:38.000They're actually somewhat low information, who are very proud of themselves, but most importantly, that they're very comfortable.
00:24:01.000And then you give them a way to absolve themselves, like you said, of that guilt by enacting the practices, the cult practices that you want them to enact.
00:24:09.000So maybe it's that they're going to go yell at people who aren't vaccinated and make sure they can't come into the establishments.
00:24:14.000They're going to apparently say Black Lives Matter and punch a black guy in an elevator for not wearing a mask at the same time because they're scared of that.
00:24:23.000Or maybe it's that they're going to go around and call everybody else racist, lest anybody discover that they're not totally racially pure or that they're not secure in the fact that they can deal with other people.
00:24:34.000And so that's how you mobilize a mask that actually will do your bidding for you.
00:24:38.000You find the most comfortable group of people and you make them scared or morally sickened with themselves and whip them into a frenzy and then give them a set of activist practices that they can do that absolves that guilt rather than if it's confession, repentance, Eucharist, etc.
00:24:55.000You know, the religions actually did a great job of coming up with ways, well, most cases, of dealing with the facts of actual guilt.
00:25:05.000And this as a religion has its own mechanism for doing so, which is that you have to become an activist.
00:26:17.000I mean, this is the stuff of fantasy novels.
00:26:19.000I want to ask you a question, though, because that was a really interesting thing, which it goes to a broader point that we could spend a whole hour on, which is an essay I wrote that is this matters more than that, trying to unpack the hierarchy of the oppression of the collectivists.
00:26:34.000And it's not really clear what matters more than that, because at that moment, those people are obviously liberals.
00:26:44.000So they know the Nicene Creed, which is Black Lives Matter.
00:26:48.000But the thing that mattered most at that moment was the medical industrial complex, right?
00:26:55.000So all of a sudden, medical tyranny, instead of saying, you know, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, at that moment, it's like, you're not wearing your mask.
00:27:17.000The vaccine thing was pushed super hard and played into deep existential fears by the narratives that they threw out.
00:27:24.000You remember, they gave us these models that, like, I think everybody was going to die.
00:27:28.000I actually got told by somebody in person who's an educated guy with an advanced degree that if we didn't all get vaccinated, and of course, this is fake news.
00:27:38.000But he actually told me that if we didn't all get vaccinated very soon, that within five years, 99% of the population would be dead, which I don't understand how that works because the survival rate of the virus itself is incredibly higher than 90%.
00:28:10.000And that apparently hitting somebody and overriding their racial guilt issues while invoking the Black Lives Matter magic spell simultaneously for no apparent clear reason.
00:28:19.000Like you can clear, you can tell there's clearly no logic behind what's going on now.
00:28:25.000But they know that if they can bully somebody into wearing a mask, getting away from them, et cetera, then they are taking an action that absolves them of that fear that they have.
00:29:12.000But I even forgot my point that I was going to make.
00:29:15.000I see with that, though, that, you know, there are all these behaviors that you have to take against those people in order to absolve your fear.
00:29:21.000And this is exactly how you affect a tyranny.
00:29:23.000Critical race theory does it with race, gets that existential guilt going about your even generational guilt going.
00:29:30.000But with the vaccine stuff, you have the exact same model that people have now been primed for.
00:29:38.000You're either fighting this, resisting 100%, or you're complicit.
00:29:42.000That entire mentality that's been mainstreamed through these critical theories for a while now, especially the last year and a half, has now been completely attached to vaccine policy, mask policy, et cetera, as though these people are saving not just themselves, but the world in the process.
00:29:58.000There's a COVID-0 false hope or faith that's driving them.
00:30:03.000And it's ultimately a fear-based religion.
00:30:05.000And so it's higher up in the hierarchy right now.
00:30:10.000Look, it's a new year and not much has changed.
00:31:33.000It looks like it's different, but it's actually exactly the same.
00:31:37.000Instead of using race, it uses sex, gender, and sexuality as or anything non-normative, as it's so mental illness, for example, as its places that it does its operation.
00:31:49.000And so, the definition of queer means it is literally an identity without an essence.
00:31:54.000That's Halperin's definition of queer, which means that it is an identity that is not defined in and of itself, but is defined in opposition to anything that's considered dominant, normal, normative, expected, or commonplace.
00:32:08.000So, if there are, you know, men and women are two sexes that are different from one another and they're complementary in whatever ways, we could get biblical about that straight from the very beginning of Genesis if you want.
00:33:22.000With critical race theory, they say that the races are socially constructed categories that are being imposed by white people who want to keep their power base.
00:33:32.000So, in that sense, they're actually the same thing, but you cannot choose your racial identity because your racial identity is determined for you by the power dynamics being put out by white people according to the doctrine of whiteness that they have.
00:33:45.000And then, with queer theory, you can choose and, in fact, must choose your identity because otherwise, people who believe in biology are trying to enforce an identity upon you.
00:33:55.000And so, that's where the imposition of identity comes from.
00:33:58.000And the imposition of identity is a thing that's limiting your subjectivity.
00:34:01.000To go back to the Marxian theology, your subjectivity is being limited, thus, your ability to create the objective world in which you inhabit and know yourself as its creator is limited, and that's considered arbitrary.
00:34:12.000So, that's where you resolve the tension.
00:34:14.000But in practice, you see this clear contradiction, you see this clear struggle, and then you see this clear fight, as you mentioned before the break, with like Dave Chappelle.
00:34:22.000He apparently used his white privilege, the article tells us because he made jokes about trans people.
00:34:27.000Um, and to just point out, then what you obviously can derive from all of that is that none of this is meant to make sense, it is all meant only to exert control and power over people that are saying and doing things you don't want them to do using any tool, calling them racist, accusing them of whatever other evil that you can possibly do in order to get that control.
00:34:45.000You explained it better than anyone else that I could think of.
00:34:49.000I still am confused by it, and you understand why I'm confused because it is like a subjective-objective kind of tension where part of their whole thing is like what matters is that we are black and that is who we are, and you can't be black, and we're in the cool kids club.
00:35:08.000All the while being like, hey, anyone can change their gender to be anything they want to be, and there's no such thing as objective identity.
00:35:35.000This kind of we our identity really matters by the way, your identity could be anything you want it to be because they don't believe in transracialism, but they believe in transgenderism.
00:35:49.000Okay, so what you said does make sense, but I need to break this down to you.
00:35:53.000Like I had a good grasp on it, but now I have a really good grasp on it in just the past couple months.
00:35:58.000And so I'm going to go backwards in history a little bit to Marx.
00:36:02.000And so Marx has this belief that what you are doing is that you are you are a man within a continuum of history that began when man started to bootstrap himself out of being an animal by doing productive work.
00:36:16.000So work is what makes where you picture the product of your work in your mind, then you bring it into reality and come to know yourself as a creator.
00:36:24.000In case you wondered if it's a heresy against Christianity, obviously yes.
00:36:29.000So what that does is it creates what he said is social relations because you have all these different people doing that, some of whom become dominant over others by getting them to work for them.
00:36:40.000So if I hire you, you are not bringing your vision of the world into being anymore.
00:36:45.000You're bringing mine into being and I give you money, but obviously it's not worth it because I've stolen your spiritual, your path to spiritual renewal and realization.
00:36:55.000And so you're bringing my vision into reality.
00:36:57.000And it sounds like this isn't going to be connected to any of this, but what this creates is a superstructure of people who dominate and an infrastructure of people who produce.
00:37:05.000And those are in what he calls dialectical tension with one another and create a structure to society.
00:37:12.000And that structure of society actually determines what society looks like at that stage of history.
00:37:18.000History is in fact the trajectory of all of those structures of society unfolding as they progress toward a utopia when all the contradictions inherent in there are resolved and everybody is of one collective unified social mind, socialist mind or communist mind.
00:37:35.000And so what does this have to do with critical race theory and queer theory and how does it make them the same?
00:37:40.000It turns out that identity is constructed by that structure, which is created by the social relations that they believe are the only real interpretation of anything.
00:37:50.000So what it doesn't matter, is it race?
00:37:51.000Is it sex, gender, sexuality, everything?
00:38:21.000And Kimberly Crenshaw says that identifying as a minoritized race or black becomes an anchor for your subjectivity.
00:38:28.000So you can participate in this Marxist creation project for yourself.
00:38:32.000What's happening in queer theory is that they don't believe that material reality is anything except the social relations limiting the range of your subjectivity.
00:38:43.000Michelle Foucault referred to it as expanding the potentialities of being to challenge this.
00:38:48.000So you were born, say, with male genitalia, XY chromosomes, et cetera, and your doctor imposed maleness on you by assigning your sex at birth.
00:38:58.000And so you have now had your identity imposed upon you by belief in that reality being objective and outside of yourself rather than your subjective identity being central.
00:39:10.000And so you get to enter, if you believe in this religion, into a dialectical process of transforming or transitioning by recognizing your subjectivity is first.
00:39:19.000And so your resistance against that which has been imposed upon you, whether in race or in sex, gender, sexuality, or mental illness, disability status, fat status, et cetera, that becomes your anchor of subjectivity through which you can do the work and start to become more and more and more so-called social man at the enlightened end of history.
00:39:42.000So it really is the same thing, but you have to understand that they believe that everything is imposed upon you by the social relations that limit your range of imagination, basically, and that expanding that by resisting whatever's been imposed on you is the relevant way to go.
00:41:10.000Well, what they want is power to enforce their consciousness on the world.
00:41:14.000Because if you wanted a little bit more fleshed out summary of Hegel and Marx takes off from Hegel and all of this kind of flows from there, Hegel's idea is that nothing is.
00:41:39.000And how does it become through the thinking and life processes of human beings doing the work?
00:41:46.000They start within their subjective view, their idealistic view for Hegel, their analysis and interpretation of their material conditions for Marx.
00:41:54.000They create what they envision in the world from their mind and they come to know themselves through their own production, the object they create.
00:42:02.000So they start as subject, have a vision for an object, create the object, and they in fact make themselves their own object.
00:42:10.000They make the human species its own object that they are doing the work on.
00:42:14.000And so everything's in a state of becoming.
00:42:16.000Now, they believe that if we all get on board with this and we all do it correctly and we all do it long enough and if it's enforced strongly enough, that eventually all the contradictions between all of these different perspectives of subjective ideas will eventually resolve themselves and we will emanatize an eschaton, a very religious concept.
00:42:34.000We will enter into a state of perfection where the state is no longer called a synthesis.
00:43:35.000And so they believe that when you get enough people who have that consciousness that all believe that we're in this process of becoming together, then we're on the road to literally, they put this in their own language.
00:43:47.000Like Marx said it, Marcuse said it, that we're going to get back into the garden because they view God as a false God who is a jailer and that we can become like that God, throw him out of Eden, and we can get back into Eden, as Herbert Marcuse says in Eros and Civilization, by taking another bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
00:44:08.000Man, there's so much there to no kidding.
00:44:16.000So when you look at Hegel and you look at the process through history, he really adopted a Christian concept of the eschaton because we as Christians believe history has a rhythm to it, has a plan that is progressing.
00:44:34.000A form of Christian thinking that heavy emphasis on this is called dispensationalism, which is very structured of different types of time when God comes and dispenses his grace on his people.
00:44:47.000So I'll never forget, James, I was having a debate with Vausch, that's his name, right?
00:45:29.000All of this tension, all of this collision, this antithesis and thesis and the, and what do you call it, the struggle, the ark bends towards justice.
00:45:42.000It was really, it was really instructive for me.
00:45:44.000And you could call it utopia, you could call it heaven on earth, but there is a belief by some of them that they can usher that in.
00:45:55.000And the thing is, is the ark of history does bend toward, we'll say, progress when you have the correct principles that enable that to happen.
00:46:04.000When you're actually according, the Christians would say when you're according with God's law or God's will, people outside of the tradition might say when you are doing what actually works, which of course the Christians would say is what has been ordained by God.
00:46:19.000I'll take both, by the way, just to be clear.
00:46:26.000Yeah, they're very close to the same thing.
00:46:28.000And so the Hegelians don't believe that.
00:46:30.000They believe that God created the world other to himself so that he might come to know himself.
00:46:34.000And within the world, he brought the divine idea onto earth.
00:46:39.000The exact quote is, the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth.
00:46:43.000So in the Hegelian trinity, the state replaces Jesus, which that's intense.
00:46:49.000And then that creates a spirit that informs people until the contradictions build up and then you have this revolution.
00:46:54.000But if you look at the trajectory of real history without some kind of an ideological overlay and isegesis and kind of interpretive terms stuck on it, what you do not see an arc, a steady arc of progress.
00:47:07.000You see forward movement, you see backwards movement.
00:47:10.000When the principles are right, people flourish, people do better because they're getting closer to what works.
00:47:14.000But when they get it wrong, you end up with 100 million dead people in China.
00:47:18.000No, but that's part of the tension, James.
00:47:23.000That's why evil works is because people decided that they didn't quite have the full enlightenment.
00:47:28.000So they installed, rather than installing a true social mentality, a true socialist idea, they installed a state capitalism, which is still at its heart capitalist and therefore ran rampant over everything.
00:47:39.000That's what they criticized Lenin for, who said you need a state capitalism so you can feed the dialectic through that stage to get to the other side.
00:47:46.000And so they have a perfect explanation that ends with real communism has never been tried for every one of their calamities, that it's just working out the dialectic, no matter how many people have to die, because what's another Hegelian sentence?
00:48:00.000That history uses people and then discards them.
00:48:15.000I believe Machiavelli was the beginning of the Enlightenment when basically he argued we could forget these ancestral traditions of Aristotle and Plato and Socrates.
00:48:24.000We don't need the thinkers of antiquity.
00:48:38.000I don't talk about Machiavelli in this book, but as far as the Enlightenment goes, I hate to do this because this is what the critical theorist type people do.
00:49:15.000There's a German Enlightenment, which is all this kind of like idealistic idealism.
00:49:19.000Immanuel Kant came out of idealistic philosophy, Kant, et cetera, critique of pure reason, yada, yada, yada.
00:49:24.000And of course, Machiavelli would fit within this kind of broad sweeping set of different Enlightenment movements.
00:49:30.000But the one that mattered, the one that mattered was the Scottish Enlightenment, the British Enlightenment that Rousseau was at war with.
00:49:36.000And that one was not based in just raw, naked power struggles.
00:49:41.000It didn't embrace everything to do with what Hobbes had to say either.
00:49:45.000They were in this kind of, you know, constant brutal struggle.
00:49:50.000The Scottish Enlightenment was based off of people like Locke, for example, who understand that there is this thing in Hume, of course, that there is this liberty available.
00:49:59.000And of course, by the way, with Hume, Hume and Rousseau, I don't know if they had like a lover spat.
00:50:04.000I don't know what happened, but they got in this huge fight and Rousseau decided he hate him and hated him.
00:50:07.000And then all of a sudden, reason and logic are bad and emotion is good.
00:50:10.000So, you know, read into that what you want.
00:50:12.000I don't know what the nature of their friendship was.
00:50:14.000Maybe it wasn't a relationship, but I'm just saying it was after their fight that he all of a sudden said sentiment and sincerity is more important than reason.
00:50:23.000But with like Locke, you're really looking at, in particular, the idea that people can be free.
00:50:28.000And if you go back to what their endowed rights or their natural rights are, what are those?
00:50:34.000You know, well, the ability to pursue their own happiness was very important for him.
00:50:37.000So he talked about, well, the only way you can really do that is through having your life protected, your liberty protected, and your property protected.
00:50:46.000Because if they can't kill you, they can't jail you, and they can't depose you from your means of living in modest comfort, then they can't really control what you say, what you want to do with your time, how you want to engage in business, who you want to associate with, et cetera, et cetera.
00:51:02.000And so, this Scottish Enlightenment, especially on that political front, is really the thing that changed the world and that has made the illusion that Vausch gets to dip into that isn't stuff just getting better?
00:51:14.000Because for a very long arc now, it in many ways has.
00:51:19.000I mean, we've got some degeneracy going on these days with the internet that's a problem.
00:51:24.000But in many ways, things have actually become better.
00:51:26.000And even around that degeneracy, you know, there can be productive uses of some of the things that tip into that that do enable greater amounts of freedom when the responsibility is paired with it that the founders and people like Locke believed were going to be there and immoral people.
00:51:41.000So that's an anomaly that's caused by having got some conditions right for once.
00:52:10.000There was kind of this piling on of different power thinkers.
00:52:16.000That's not well put, but you know what I mean.
00:52:18.000They were all theorizing of who could be.
00:52:20.000And Machiavelli really kind of started that off.
00:52:23.000We like Machiavelli on this show because obviously in the political space, so much of what he wrote is playing out around us, especially the subjectivity aspect of it, which is that, you know, power for power's sake is actually something desirable.
00:52:54.000You know, it depends on what you're doing, but what you need to do is you need to be aware that this is real and that you have to do something.
00:54:04.000Secondly, you have to make yourself available to other people and to show that you are willing to have this conversation, that you're willing to talk about, to doubt some of this stuff.
00:54:13.000And then what you can do is gather and get organized.
00:54:16.000You have to make the information your own.
00:54:18.000I hate to tell you, I've been saying this for three years.
00:54:47.000And so you get a couple of these kind of local states, just two states now, putting a real thorn, and Ken Paxton, of course, in Texas, suing.
00:54:55.000You put these thorns in the sides of these big powers.
00:55:38.000It actually, it's the first one I've ever seen that makes sense.
00:55:40.000These kinds of things can be done by getting people at the local level starting to take action, working up to the state level, and to just resist this stuff.
00:55:48.000It's actually empowering and it feels great.
00:55:52.000You think it's all terrible and awful, but stop doom scrolling too.
00:55:55.000And by the way, the most important thing people can do, the action step is turn off the news.