In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with the author of The White Pill, Michael M. Mellis, to discuss his new book, "The White Pill: A Guide to Soviet Communism and How It Created A Totalitarianism." Dr. Peterson and Mr. Melsis discuss the ideological and psychological consequences of Soviet communism, and the role of Ayn Rand in creating the ideology that led to the fall of the Soviet system, as well as the theories and theories that have been used to explain why the communist system failed and why it was replaced by a communist one. Dr. B.P. offers a roadmap towards healing, showing that, while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. -Let this be a step towards a brighter future that you deserve, and a better life you can live in a better, more peaceful, more free and more prosperous world. Peace, Blessings, Eternally grateful, and Happy Manifesting, -EDUCATION - Dr. J.B. Peterson and Dr. Michael Melses, MD, PhD, PhD (The White P Pill, The White Puff, The Last Man's Guide to Communism and Anarchism, The New York Times Square, New York, NY, NY - Michael Mellis, PhD - The White pill, The Other Man, The Old Man's Notebook, The New Man, - The New Woman's Guide, Michael Melliis, Jr., PhD, The Great White Pill? Michael talks about how the White Pill is a guide to communism and Communism and Communism, and how it led to a better future, and what it means to be free, and more freedom, and why we should all be free from the Stalinist system, not less so than the Soviet Union, not just in the first place, but in the second half of the Second World War, and in the Third World, and China, the Great Revolution, and America, and much more. , and how we can learn from it, we can all learn from the lessons from history, and learn from history.
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00:00:57.420Hello, everyone. I have the pleasure today of sitting and talking with Michael Mellis, and we start by talking about his book, The White Pill.
00:01:17.160And his book is a walk through the catastrophes of the Soviet era, the dire hell that emerged in the aftermath of the formulation of the hypothetical workers' paradise and a description of how that dreadful system, how and why that dreadful system came to an end.
00:01:35.360But we also talk about something, I suppose, more fundamental, if there is something more fundamental than that, which is a conceptualization of what appropriate social and psychological relations might look like in alternative to dogmatic and structured government.
00:01:57.580I hash out with Michael the precise reason that his attention has been attracted by the claims of anarchism, per se.
00:02:08.820I'm always curious about dissociating anarchism, say, from a kind of impulsive hedonism.
00:02:13.580So we drag Ayn Rand into the mix to sort that out and come to conclusions that I think are, well, they're interesting and likely appropriate, concentrating particularly on voluntary association as the antithesis to power, right?
00:02:38.340So I was reading your book this morning, The White Pill, and I've read a fair bit of Russian history in the 20th century and some before that.
00:02:54.640But every time I re-encounter it, it never really stopped stunning me, the brutality that was associated with that regime.
00:03:05.580I mean, it's obviously the case that the same can be said about what happened in Nazi Germany and perhaps even to a greater extent what happened in Maoist China.
00:03:16.800Although that's a competition between pretty deep hells.
00:03:21.080But it never stops being surreally unbelievable to me that things can go that badly.
00:03:29.380And I thought maybe what we do here is start with two – I'll read a couple of things from your book.
00:03:35.920One kind of ideological and then the other just a description of the consequences of the ideology.
00:03:42.900So you write about this Berkman character who was an anarchist agitator for the working class in the United States who had the – what he thought was the good fortune to go to Russia after the revolution to see the workers' paradise in action.
00:04:52.600Insisting that, quote, enemies must be crushed and all power centralized in the communist state.
00:04:59.400Lenin admitted that in this process, the government is often compelled to resort to unpleasant means.
00:05:05.860But that is the imperative of the situation, right?
00:05:09.340That's the other thing that the totalitarians always do, is that the situation right now is so bad and liable to get worse that any means whatsoever are to be justified.
00:05:21.080Not only that, that if you stand against them, then, well, all you're doing is contributing to the eventual catastrophe.
00:05:27.640And then, given the magnitude of the catastrophe, no punishment could possibly be severe enough for you.
00:05:34.960But that is the imperative of the situation.
00:05:52.500Okay, so what does that end up producing, that attitude, in mere years, when Lenin is still alive?
00:06:01.460So, Berkman and Goldman left the Soviet Union in 1921 with complete loathing.
00:06:07.500Her memoir of her time, there was split by her publisher into two books, given the titles of My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923, and My Further Disillusionment in Russia, 1924.
00:06:19.960Because there were two books worth of disillusionment, and that wasn't nearly enough.
00:06:23.860Berkman's The Bolshevik Myth came out the following year, and the two never stopped speaking about what they had seen firsthand in Russia, warning the rest of the world of the horrors that the Russian citizenry were enduring.
00:06:37.140Remember, these were people who were hoping that a workers' revolution would produce a broad-scale improvement in the working conditions of ordinary people.
00:06:46.000So, okay, so let's, let's, let's go up a little, let's go down a little closer to the actuality on the ground.
00:06:57.160So, this is another quote from your book.
00:06:58.860Life remained difficult in the USSR for years after the Russian Civil War had been won by the Bolsheviks, the communists.
00:07:06.400Housing became even more of a concern as rural citizens flocked to the rapidly industrializing cities in search of work and food.
00:07:14.100families became crammed into apartments that had already been occupied by other families.
00:07:20.800Yeah, well, it was a bourgeois conceit that people needed, like, their own space.
00:07:41.680In keeping with communist ideology, the ultimate vision was to have homes without kitchens so that everyone would eat communally in government-run cafeterias.
00:07:51.140It's a lovely idea, assuming that there's food and that the people who are cooking are motivated somehow to cook and decently and that the people cleaning up are motivated somehow other than by terror to clean up.
00:08:05.320And then, you know, if you let the government provide your food every single day and you don't even have a storehouse or a kitchen, then what's to stop the people who are hypothetically giving you everything from stopping to provide everything that you've so foolishly allowed them to present yourself with whenever they want on any pretext whatsoever?
00:08:26.320People think, no one would ever do that.
00:08:27.320People think, no one would ever do that.
00:08:30.680True believer communist architects, lovely group, designed buildings where everyone would have to share bathrooms as well.
00:08:38.680Part of an assault on bourgeois concepts such as shame, privacy, and individualism.
00:08:45.180This created an enormous incentive for families to turn in those living with them to the authorities for the most specious of reasons, if not downright lies.
00:08:57.900One phone call in the living quarters for one's family instantly doubled.
00:09:05.980If they weren't guilty of one thing, then surely they were guilty of another.
00:09:10.020Yeah, I remember that from Solzhenitsyn, right?
00:09:12.020This is what the good thinkers in the West think, too.
00:09:14.920You know, when something happens, when the government extends its tentacles and takes away more liberties or starts threatening people, the idea is, well, if you didn't do anything wrong, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.
00:10:18.140Victims were about to be deported, were stripped of their shoes and their clothes taken and given to lower peasants as a bribe to ensure their cooperation.
00:11:41.080It thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another.
00:11:45.280Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one's family.
00:11:51.960Not only was there a guarantee of a meal, but there was now a guarantee that said meal wouldn't be seized by the requisitioners who were going from house to house looking for any evidence that you might have even literally even a grain of wheat somewhere on the premises.
00:12:05.560Furthermore, those who could not produce a quota of grain during starvation conditions were subject to a fine of five times the value of what the grain would have been.
00:12:15.680Yet another reason to seize property and savings.
00:12:18.560Not having the food to fulfill one's quota was taken as evidence, if not downright proof, that one must have been hiding it.
00:12:25.900And if the food was being hidden, then why was it being handed over?
00:12:29.900Many of the tactics, however, could only be explained by pure sadism.
00:12:34.140In some villages, the requisitioners went from house to house killing all the dogs and taking their bodies with them for good measure.
00:12:41.680Fingers would be slammed in doorways or needles jammed under fingernails.
00:12:45.740Those found concealing food were robbed of their remaining possessions, evicted from their homes and thrown into the snow without any clothes.
00:12:53.680To ensure that the starving peasants did not somehow steal the food that they so desperately needed, fields and barns were kept under armed guard.
00:13:02.760The activists even came for the tools used for making food, breaking millstones necessary to process grain.
00:13:10.000If they took soup from a hungry family, they made sure to take the pot as well.
00:13:15.620One day, as I waited in a queue in front of the store to buy bread, I saw a farm girl of about 15 years of age in rags and with starvation looking out of her eyes.
00:13:25.800She stretched out her hand to everyone who bought bread, asking for a few crumbs.
00:16:49.680There was a line in the gulags where one of the, Eleanor Lipman, I believe it's her name, says that not only did they want to torture us, they want us to thank them for it.
00:17:04.020So to even acknowledge that something is wrong or an issue is, in fact, criticism of the state.
00:17:10.940And the only people who are criticizing the state are, by definition, counter-revolutionaries, who not only want to, therefore, overthrow the government, but pretty much want what's worse for everybody.
00:17:21.600So when people like this exist, there is nothing that is too bad to be done to them because they are monsters who must be wiped off the face of the earth.
00:17:31.880There is this line when the secret police just talked about how when you're chopping wood, chips will fly, because his point was, it's better to kill nine innocent people to get to that one spy, because that is what happens when you have a society based on the common good before the individual good.
00:17:52.280They tell you constantly and explicitly, you do not matter.
00:17:56.800We are building a great society for the sake of all.
00:18:14.640It's just, you know, being born in the Soviet Union and having worked in this was very difficult.
00:18:20.000But hearing it coming from you and just this kind of arm is length thing is just getting me all agitated once again,
00:18:26.880because it's the kind of situation that is, as Americans and a Canadian, almost incomprehensible.
00:18:34.620You know, the book starts with Ayn Rand and it's on the back cover, where she testified in front of the House on American Activist Committee.
00:18:42.920And she says, it's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.
00:18:48.680She goes, I could give you a lot of details.
00:18:50.740I could never completely convince you.
00:18:52.760And she goes, in a way it's good that you can't even conceive what it's like.
00:18:55.180Like, imagine what it's like to live from morning till night in constant terror.
00:18:59.780And at night you're waiting for the doorbell to ring where you don't know who or what is going to do or when it's going to do what to you.
00:19:05.920Because you have friends who spy on you.
00:19:17.760And where power has been delivered to the hands of the most sadistic people you can possibly imagine, who claim constantly that they're doing nothing except operating in the name of the highest good.
00:19:30.060I will correct you because I think they're more sadistic than you could possibly imagine.
00:19:33.900Because if you and I sat down and tried to think of sadistic things to do, we would not be creative enough as people with the slightest bit of conscience to think of the things that they did in the Soviet Union and in mouse China.
00:19:52.260I mean, there are other histories of Russian brutality, obviously.
00:19:56.440And it's also the case, I would say, that if people were inclined to educate themselves, this is something we can talk about in detail, if people in the West were inclined to educate themselves about the inevitability, the inevitable consequences of, let's say, a communist revolution, there are plenty of sources to draw from.
00:20:17.440The Black Book of Communism, everything socialists wrote, for example.
00:20:28.020Now, you know, one of the things that stunned me, and I suppose it was one of the first, what would you say, the first source of insights I had into the absolute corruption of the modern education system in the West was that I taught a module on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in my personality class, which was a second year class.
00:20:48.840I taught it at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto.
00:20:51.000So, I was teaching it to pretty damn bright students, and they were in the 14th year of their education.
00:20:57.800And I taught it because Solzhenitsyn was essentially an existentialist psychologist in many ways.
00:21:04.820He extended the work that was done by Viktor Frankl, who wrote a great book called Man's Search for Meaning.
00:21:11.300And what stunned me was, despite the fact that we had carried on a Cold War for 40 years to try to defeat this absolutely brutal ideology, almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster, that 130, 40 million people had been slaughtered in the 20th century in its name, that most of the students had absolutely no bloody idea that any of this ever happened.
00:21:35.180And I thought, how in the hell can we be that?
00:21:39.200You know what they say, there is none so blind as those who will not see.
00:21:45.560I think you just answered my question, because the fact that this was the absolutely unambiguously number one foreign policy issue for the greater part of the 20th century, that all foreign policy was viewed through the lens of the Cold War.
00:21:59.640And the fact that the Soviet Union has now not only been memory hole, but has become a bit of a kitschy joke, that you can go to Whole Foods and have like Russian brand ice cream, and they mean Russian like Soviet era brand ice cream, and they make little jokes about it.
00:22:35.880Okay, but here, it's been the case that, apart from the Mel Brooks Broadway production, right, Springtime for Hitler, or that wasn't the production exactly, I think there was...
00:22:55.900Hitler and the Nazis are still off limits for what would demented nostalgia.
00:23:02.200But that doesn't seem to be the case, as you pointed out, for the communist regime.
00:23:05.720Because we're the good guys in World War II, and the people we sided with, therefore, are the good guys.
00:23:11.280So to have the narrative explained that we had to deal with the devil to deal with the worst devil is to...
00:23:17.660And the fact that there are many agencies, the U.S. government and the newspapers who are still in power today, that they were the ones who helped to cover up Stalin's atrocities, possibly in the sake of something that needed to happen to win World War II.
00:23:32.540But they never went back and were like, guys, this is hardly someone who is an angel.
00:23:39.500You know, Churchill and FDR are calling him Uncle Joe at Yalta and things like this.
00:23:45.100There was a huge movement to censor in Hollywood anything that implies that Russia is dishonest or brutal or harmful.
00:23:57.680So the fact that there isn't this easy narrative that, like, wait a minute, you know, because our foreign policy is always we're the good guys.
00:24:04.900Whoever we're against is the bad guys.
00:24:06.300So to have any kind of ambiguity of that, even historical, is something that I think our corporate media, which is very dedicated to promulgating binary thinking, good versus bad, black versus evil, is something that they're very heavily invested in.
00:24:21.220And to answer your previous question, that is why I wrote this book, because I thought it was insane that something that is, again, the number one issue of the 20th century in this regard is something that educated, highly educated people know very little about.
00:24:56.180But the other reason what's different from this, from Conquest and Solzhenits and these other books, is this book is a story of hope.
00:25:01.820Because why I feel so hopeful in many ways about the West, and maybe I'm delusional and that's a separate issue, is the fact is that this depravity was defeated.
00:25:11.620And it was defeated in our lifetimes, and it was defeated relatively painlessly and relatively easily.
00:25:17.020So if you have that model of the victory of all these peoples after so much sacrifice to overthrow these demonic, satanic regimes, is, I think, one of the happiest endings imaginable.
00:25:33.980And the emergence back into freedom of the Eastern Europeans who are doing well now.
00:25:37.780One after another, and this was in the 80s, we have color footage, you can watch it on YouTube, but, you know, this, again, the narrative is too complicated for entities like the New York Times to tell that story.
00:25:49.780So maybe part of it, too, with regards to the distinction between the Nazi regime and the communist regime, I've tried to think this through a lot, and maybe this is also why we can't exactly remember it.
00:26:03.140It's very difficult to shake the hope that there is a form of hyper-organized government, let's say, that can provide, well, can provide what?
00:26:15.440That can provide, period, that there's a form of social organization that would permanently rescue people from the world of want that seems to be the lot of man.
00:26:27.740I mean, now, we have erected a technological enterprise that has freed us from privation to a large degree, so it is the case that if we organize ourselves intelligently, that we can push back against the tragedies of the world.
00:26:46.920And the logical extension of that, or a logical extension of that, I suppose, is that it's something like a permanently utopian state characterized by the brotherhood of man, right, without concern for creed, race, or color, where everyone's equal, which starts to become a very, you know, difficult proposition.
00:27:06.480And the communists, in principle, offered that, and it's actually, in some ways, one of the things that distinguishes them from the Nazis, because the Nazis offered that, too, but only for a certain group of people, whereas the communists did promote a universal brotherhood.
00:27:22.980You know, I've asked some of my Jewish friends why communism was particularly attractive in the Soviet Union to Jewish intellectuals of the time, and I would say it's partly because utopian schemes of that sort tend to be more attractive to intellectuals, period.
00:27:37.700But the wisest answer I got was that that offering of universal brotherhood, where all the distinctions between different creeds and races and religions would be abolished, in principle, was attractive to people who'd been the brunt of ethnic and religious conflict, often murderous, for, you know, for centuries.
00:28:00.500And so, we have this longing within us for the emergence of something approximating a paradisal state, and then it's very easy to be sucked into two propositions, is that one, that state could be brought about by organization and government fiat, right?
00:28:21.260And two, that that, what would you say, that that organization could provide everyone with what was wanted, without there being shatteringly negative consequences of handing other people that much power.
00:28:35.400So, see, it's a mystery, because you'd think that we could learn, why do you think it's so difficult for people to learn that the dream of a worker's paradise that's predicated on something like radical equality, almost inevitably degenerates into, perhaps inevitably degenerates into something so murderous that you can't even comprehend it?
00:28:58.960Because I think, because I think it speaks to the inherent narcissism of intellectuals, because we're the ones who are going to do it right.
00:29:10.300Oh, if only, I'm sure you see this every single day with any faculty, any kind of administration, any college.
00:29:17.000We're the one, everyone else is stupid but me.
00:29:19.200If I was in charge of this ship, we'd land it to shore safely and happily.
00:29:23.580And to speak to why it was so popular with Jewish intellectuals specifically, if the choice was the czar and pogroms, where you're by law mandated to live in a ghetto, and every so often the police and the citizenry are going to ride through that ghetto, kill and rape, not only with impunity, but with the cheers of the populace and the state, and the alternative is everyone's going to be equal and you're going to have a stake in making society that works for the sake of all, it's not a difficult choice to make for this certain population.
00:29:51.500Yeah, well, that first comment you made, you know, that's, so I've spent a lot of time, especially recently, writing about the Luciferian intelligence.
00:30:17.840Now there's a book, a great Russian novelist wrote a book called The Master and Margarita in the 1930s, and in that book, Satan himself comes back to Earth in USSR, but no one believes in him, so he can do whatever he wants, right?
00:30:31.360And so, so Bulgakov is his name, and it's a great book, it's like a Dostoevskian level book, it's a great book, but Milton characterized Lucifer as God's highest angel gone most spectacularly wrong, and Lucifer's the light bringer, and he's essentially associated with the intellect.
00:30:50.300And the idea, the dreamlike idea that Milton laid out in his poetic masterpiece, Paradise Lost, was that if the intellect attempts to reign supreme, it instantly produces hell, right?
00:31:05.880That it has to be subordinate to something else.
00:31:07.860Now you make a case like that, I think, implicitly in your book, because one of the things that you're proposing is that if, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if a society loses its foundation on the presumption of the ultimate worth of the individual per se, which is something like a soul concept, right?
00:31:29.560Right, right, right, right, right. If that presumption disappears, and it's replaced by status presuppositions, or even by group identity, then hell isn't far away.
00:31:39.860You know, I just read a book by this woman, Immaculate is her name, and she was one of the Rwandans who spent 92 days in a three-by-four bathroom.
00:31:54.340She was one of the crammed in there with nine, seven to nine, depending on the time, other women who were basically starving to death over that period, right?
00:32:05.600And what happened in Rwanda, even though it was quite a peaceful state, although poor, was that the notion of group identity became paramount, and then one ethnic group was set against the other.
00:32:19.780And what happened in Rwanda is reminiscent of the sorts of things, perhaps faster and even more brutal, possibly, than what happened in the Soviet Union.
00:32:29.180A million people killed in a span of mere months, right, in the most brutal possible way.
00:32:34.460It was a consequence of the valorization of group identity.
00:32:37.740You saw the same thing happening in Russia, right, because, and this happened soon after the revolution, is that the communists were attempting to eradicate bourgeoisie individuality.
00:32:48.700And so people started to be classified and judged by group guilt.
00:32:54.920And then almost immediately after the revolution, if you were a landowner or a property owner or anybody who'd had even a modicum of success under the czars...
00:33:05.800You were classified as an oppressor and as an enemy of the people.
00:33:09.440But immediately it spread to your family.
00:33:13.180Even if you didn't own anything, if you had people in your ancestry who ever dared to own anything, which meant everyone who was even vaguely...
00:33:20.440They identified success with oppression, you know, which is something that we're trying very hard to do in our culture at the moment, too, which is absolutely catastrophic.
00:33:28.500We're doing the same bloody things, right?
00:33:30.140Dividing people into groups, making group identity paramount, identifying success itself with oppression.
00:33:37.780You know, I mean, now and then people who are crooked and parasitical become successful, so to speak, temporarily.
00:33:48.120But that doesn't justify for a moment, assuming that if one person owns something that another person doesn't, that you associate the first person's ownership with theft and oppression.
00:33:58.820And then, of course, the communists, as you laid out, did attempt to eradicate every single form of private property whatsoever.
00:34:07.240And the consequence of that was, well, we already read about that, is that in no time flat, you and your family were being thrown out into the snow naked for having the temerity to keep...
00:34:18.020Like, to literally keep a cob of corn on your table so that you might either have something to eat or so that you had some seeds for the next year.
00:34:25.800So, again, we're back to the initial problem, which is when the evidence that this goes...
00:34:34.220Your proposition was, we can't accept the evidence that these ideological presuppositions go so starkly wrong because of something like the prideful intellect.
00:34:45.400People just show up time and time again.
00:34:48.020They get entranced by these ideological theories.
00:34:50.700And they make that move that you suggested, which is, well, if I would have been in charge of the revolution with my in-depth and accurate knowledge of the niceties of utopian dogma, I would have shepherded in the promised utopia.
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00:36:51.040It was, we're scientific, not like this market where you have these little shopkeepers with their prices and, you know, it's a complete mess and food's getting thrown out.
00:37:16.080So you have this concept of scapegoating because since we know—so again, that's the difference between, you know, if my plan doesn't work, you know, am I going to look back at the plan, fix it, tweak it, because somehow the cars I'm producing aren't working?
00:37:28.860Or this arrogant, you know, idealistic mindset.
00:37:33.620By idealistic, I mean this concept, which Westerns don't even understand, that ideas are more real than reality.
00:37:39.640Since my ideas are correct and the output is incorrect, someone must be screwing up with what I know is the perfect set of ideas.
00:37:48.180And you can't twist the thumbscrews hard enough because you're here to bring a sense of heaven on earth and to save the country and all of the world.
00:38:00.280And Stalin even said explicitly that the further along you go in the revolution, the more brutal you have to be because it's going to be—it's like losing those last 10 pounds of fat, right?
00:38:10.980It's going to be that much harder to weed out these capitalistic and bourgeois elements because they're going to be so much more hidden.
00:38:18.400Plus, you have a good excuse then at that point that for things not going well because it's only the real subtle snakes that are left, right?
00:38:26.380They're invisibly ruining everything behind the scenes.
00:38:29.220Well, the other thing that occurs too almost immediately after the revolution when Lenin decides that everyone has to be clamped down on is that the true sadists come to the fore.
00:38:41.600And so that also raises the specter in my imagination that it's not merely intellectual arrogance that produces this proclivity to fall hook, line, and sinker for the communist utopia, especially the one that that intellect would be in charge of, but that there's a latent sadism that's associated with that pretentious intellect that's looking for a mode of expression.
00:39:08.440And so, you know, one of the things I used to see in my clinical practice, tell me what you think about this, and I see thinking like this that's latent in your book, you're putting your finger on it from time to time, is I'd have clients who were, you know, say 35 years old.
00:39:22.080They were often men, these particular clients.
00:39:24.400Women have their own pathology, but this was more a male pathology.
00:39:27.960These were guys who were like—they're pretty damn smart in—they're intelligent in junior high, in elementary school, junior high, in high school.
00:39:37.740You know, they were in the top 5% of the class.
00:39:40.860They generally didn't work that hard, but they could skate by.
00:39:46.800And that was really—that really constituted their identity.
00:39:51.200And—but they never learned how to work.
00:39:53.160And the fact that they had been differentially rewarded for their intellect in the absence of work meant that they developed a kind of pride that was associated with that intellect.
00:40:05.380You know, and so you can imagine that one of the ways of turning someone into a narcissist is to reward them for something that's intrinsic to them, because a lot of whether or not you're intelligent is more or less given to you, right?
00:40:18.580I mean, you can make someone stupider.
00:40:20.440It's not that easy to make them more intelligent on the IQ side.
00:40:24.080If you're—if you have an IQ of 145, which would put you in about the 99th percentile, there's a huge biological contributor to that, right?
00:40:38.080And then these guys, the same guys, would often be not successful in their life.
00:40:44.400And that made them bitter, because their presumption was always something like, well, I'm so smart that the world should fall at my feet.
00:40:53.940And then the world doesn't fall at their feet.
00:40:56.220They're not—they're less popular with women, for example, than they think they might be if the women actually had the sense to see what it was that they were passing up.
00:41:06.500And then that consequence, that consequence of having their intellect rejected makes them bitter.
00:41:13.260And the step from bitter to sadist is not very far away.
00:41:16.560You know, and you see also—you see this idea being toyed with, even in the popular culture.
00:41:21.560So I watched a fair bit of a number of episodes of the sitcom The Big Bang.
00:41:30.780Yeah, well, it was interesting to me, because it featured these nerd-type characters, right?
00:41:35.780Who were intellectuals, you know, they're techno-intellectuals, and tended to be rather unpopular with women and awkward, and also awkward socially, but they were hyper-intelligent.
00:41:49.400And there is this sense of aggrieved intellect that runs through the entire show that's part of the comic trope, but it's also extremely true.
00:41:59.080And so I'm wondering if what you think of the proposition that, along with the intellect that proposes these utopian schemes, right, and doesn't like distributed problem-solving, it wants to accrue all the decision-making power to itself, because it wants the glory of doing that for itself, and it wants that for the status, and the fact that that doesn't occur produces this aggrieved nature that can't help but express itself in sadism.
00:42:27.400Because Lenin's a great example of that, man.
00:42:30.420I mean, it took no time at all before he turned in from the, like, working man's revolutionary, which he never was, to a sadist whose depths were—what, what?
00:42:48.440This is one of the reasons why they brought him back to Russia, the Germans, because they're like, once he's there, he's going to make a whole muck of it.
00:42:54.440No one ever thought he was actually going to seize power.
00:42:56.280But to your point about sadism, this is something I do address in the book, because there was an evolutionary process.
00:43:01.880So one of the things that the Russians did, as you mentioned earlier, is they have these things called anekdote, which are little jokes, because you can't criticize the state, but you can make little jokes about it and get that point through without the person realizing you're being so devastating in your critique.
00:43:14.900And there was one joke where Stalin was talking to Beria, who was his third and most brutal executioner, or maybe not most brutal, it's a competition.
00:43:21.580But Stalin lost his pipe, and he goes, Beria, you know, my pipe's been stolen.
00:43:26.120And then, you know, Beria goes out, and the next day, Stalin calls it in, and he's like, oh, you know, I found it, it's my drawer.
00:43:30.600He goes, but Comrade Stalin, we've got three people to confess to it already.
00:43:33.700So, meaning Beria's most famous quote was, show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
00:43:38.180But there was an evolutionary process to maximize sadism for the simple reason that if you have 10 people who are interrogators, the guy who is the cruelest and most effective in his infliction of pain, psychological, physical, and otherwise, is the one who's going to get the most confessions.
00:43:54.800He's the one who's going to get the most results.
00:43:57.320If I'm at all a decent human being, some people are going to stand up to my tortures.
00:44:03.020Where if I'm the one who is a complete inhuman monster who will stop at nothing to make sure that that person admits to things which are literally impossible, I'm the one who's going to get the promotion.
00:44:15.280So, the system itself forced these people to become sadistic, because otherwise, and the thing is, it's not also a matter of, well, I'm going to lose.
00:45:01.160Because any two people who are talking are a threat to the society, to the state, because then you have the beginnings of a conspiracy.
00:45:08.780So, you were—the kids, as you know very well, I'm sure, were taught this lesson of Pavlik Morozov.
00:45:13.680They taught this in elementary school about the story of this boy who turned in his parents to the police because the dad was hoarding grain or something.
00:45:21.280And Pavlik was later murdered by his dad.
00:45:23.400And this kid, the statues of him, was regarded as valorous.
00:45:27.400And the kids were taught, you have to turn in your parents to the police if you see them doing anything wrong, even if the cost is your life.
00:45:34.980And the same thing, it became a crime to be married to an enemy of the people.
00:45:39.740How are you going to plead innocent in that case, right?
00:45:41.780Well, you should have known that your husband or your wife was engaged in counter-revolutionary activity because every citizen needs to be vigilant against the counter-revolutionaries who are trying to undermine this glorious scientific, socialistic society that we're building.
00:45:53.640Well, then you could see very rapidly, if you think about it, how love itself would become an anti-Soviet act.
00:46:13.600And so, if you love someone and they're suffering, you're going to listen to them.
00:46:17.000And then, in a state that's already perfect, if you listen to someone suffer, you're basically listening to people utter counter-revolutionary propaganda, right?
00:46:27.380And so, any genuine sympathy between people that would result in a truthful confession of personal catastrophe would immediately be placed in the camp of counter-revolutionary propaganda unnecessarily.
00:46:43.600This is why Ayn Rand said that it's impossible for free people to imagine what it's like to live 100% under the dominion of the lie.
00:46:52.580Because we can't imagine, thank God, what it would be like to be so terrified of the truth that, well, you couldn't even tell it to yourself, but worse, perhaps, you couldn't tell it to the people most around you who most particularly loved you, right?
00:47:11.380And one of the things that I learned in writing this book, and I'm not sure if even you know this, after Germany was reunified, all the Stasi-philes were made public.
00:47:19.740So, you could, and the percent of secret police informers in East Germany.
00:48:38.120Or my brother or, you know, and the thing that was extremely disturbing, and this is something Americans do not get, but I think I've started to get with the result of COVID.
00:48:46.580We, I, I as well, was of the belief that these informers had a gun to their head.
00:49:16.880Right, it's like, it means if you're, during the COVID time, you could phone the state on your neighbor, and then you could inform them, perhaps, that your neighbor had gone to their relative's house for a Christmas gathering.
00:49:35.020And so you got to manage two things at the same time, right?
00:49:38.020Especially if you had any lurking jealousy whatsoever of that neighbor for any reason whatsoever.
00:49:44.260Maybe they're younger, better looking, or they didn't suffer as much, or God only knows, because there's any number of dimensions of comparison.
00:49:55.300And then you could, you could cause them a lot of trouble, which is, of course, that's quite a lot of fun, especially if you don't have anything better to do.
00:50:31.280And there's like this oppressive guy, the tyrant, or an oppressive guy with his henchmen putting guns to people's heads all the time.
00:50:39.560And nothing could be farther from the truth than that.
00:50:41.960It's like, I figured that out in part just when I was reading the Gulag Archipelago, because Solzhenitsyn kept making the case that there were nowhere near enough guards to keep the camps running.
00:50:54.660And it's like, well, that's the definition of a totalitarian state, is the prisoners run the camp.
00:50:59.700And so, and in a totalitarian state, and this is what a totalitarian state is, it's not the top-down imposition of power.
00:51:06.900It's the fact that every single person in this society lies about absolutely everything to everyone all the time.
00:51:17.660I was reading the book of Abraham, and in that book, God is deciding he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they've wandered off the moral path.
00:51:31.600Okay, and so that implication there is that a society can adopt modes of being that dooms them to catastrophe, all right?
00:51:39.800And we're talking about exactly how that might come about.
00:51:43.140And Abraham is concerned about this because he thinks, well, it doesn't seem fair to obliterate the whole city when there might be innocent people still dwelling in it.
00:51:54.380And so Abraham says to God, if there's 40 people there, if I can go there and I can find 40 God-fearing, honest people, will you suspend the destruction of the city?
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01:39:58.600So, well, then that was what I was trying to portray as a social good.
01:40:02.620But it's, I mean, the social good is the consequence, not the goal.
01:40:07.320How about the good is the harmony between the social manifestation and the individual manifestation?
01:40:13.860So, look, part of the reason I've been thinking this through is because I think that the modern definition of mental health as subjective is sorely wrong.
01:40:25.560Because I think that mental health is actually the harmony in that hierarchy of being and not something that you have in your head.
01:40:33.940I mean, Rand called her philosophy objectivism, so I completely agree with you.
01:40:37.100I think any time you're introducing subjectivism to a large extent, you're treading on thin ice.
01:40:42.580Okay, so then let's go to the objective in relationship to what?
01:40:47.280Like, where's the objective reality that Rand's pattern of behavior is aiming to, what would you say, to adapt to?
01:51:10.320The government has the position to tell you what you can or can't say to whom.
01:51:15.100So your claim probably is something like, it seems to me, that your claim is something like you have the right and perhaps the responsibility to respond in a manner that restores the peace.
01:51:30.580That's a good way of thinking about it.
01:51:32.020If someone violates the principles by which any interaction could continue on the basis of voluntary asset.
01:51:41.200I don't know if I can follow that train of thought.
01:51:42.780Well, I'm trying to figure out exactly the justification for me being able to throw you off your couch.
01:51:49.500It's like your point is that the fact that you've overstayed your welcome means that you've already introduced an element of compulsion and force.
01:52:24.060Because, yeah, well, you can imagine, let's say, in the situation that you're already in.
01:52:28.600Described is you did someone a favor and they're on your couch and they, they've been there for three months and they didn't get a job and they're eating like Cheetos and it's like, it's just not a good situation.
01:52:37.600But what, what the alternative is like, it's, it's, it's Toronto and I'm going to be on the street and I'm going to die.
01:52:48.200But, but the requirement would come because maybe the reason you're not calling me on my behavior is because you're afraid or because you don't want to, you don't want to appear mean or you don't want to hurt myself.
01:52:58.420So that when you're, but when you're in your room at night, you're like pissed off at yourself and your conscience is gnawing at you because you actually have something to do.
01:53:16.540I didn't mean a deterministic responsibility.
01:53:18.700I meant because we're, we're elaborating the idea that there is a principle of long-term integrity here.
01:53:25.040That's actually real or maybe the most real thing.
01:53:27.480What kind of person do you want to be at the end of the day is what it comes down to.
01:53:31.380And this is, again, why I'm such a Camus fan and the idea that existence precedes essence.
01:53:35.540I don't know if I'd say that literally, but the idea that we have, we are, I always use this metaphor and I think it's very informative where there's two types of people.
01:53:43.460You go to a top of a mountaintop and you see the blank canvas and a bunch of paints and a certain mentality is like, what is this?
01:53:59.540That Camus version of life being inherently meaningless is a great opportunity for any of us to be the kind of person to a certain extent that we want to be.
01:55:29.860And that's a vision of ordered freedom.
01:55:32.700That's the proper worship in the desert.
01:55:34.420And that's the alternative to tyranny and slavery.
01:55:36.520And that ordered freedom seems to me to be something like the service of the principle that allows for voluntary ascent across the broadest possible range of circumstances.
01:57:03.080What I've realized more and more clearly, too, is that part of the reason that you...
01:57:08.040And this is an ethical requirement, I would say.
01:57:10.080And this is part of why I was struggling with Rand's conceptualization, but is that every bit of responsibility that you don't pick up for yourself, tyrants will take and use against you.
01:57:31.400I've seen whiny TikTokers bitch about the fact that they have to go to work.
01:57:35.360And their complaint is, well, why doesn't the government...
01:57:37.840We're rich enough so I could be provided with a universal basic income.
01:57:41.300And I think, well, if you don't have the imagination to see that if the government made you so dependent or encouraged you, enticed you to become so dependent that now you're dependent on that universal basic income.
01:57:53.640If you can't see that as the door opening to a tyranny so absolutely pervasive you could hardly imagine it, then you're just not thinking.
01:58:02.240Because, of course, that would happen, right?
01:58:03.860But a lot of people don't want to be free.
01:59:23.820Okay, so here's one of the things that I've been deriving.
01:59:27.720I'm writing this book on the biblical corpus called We Who Wrestle With God, and I've been trying to understand the nature of the ethos that's being presented.
02:00:05.340So it's actually a time frame that's extended out into eternity, right?
02:00:11.340Which is a very interesting thing, right?
02:00:13.000I mean, I'm not even sure what to make of that.
02:00:16.460Is that, like, is the proper time frame infinite?
02:00:20.620Like, is that how you should be regarding the echoings of each of your actions?
02:00:24.280Because the answer to that could hypothetically be yes.
02:00:26.780Well, this is a big distinction between Judaism and Christianity, or at least as I was taught in Yeshiva, where we were taught that this whole…
02:00:34.080When I went to church for the first time with a bunch of friends in the Midwest, they'd never met a Jewish person before, so they started interrogating me.
02:01:07.960William Blake would have a good objection to that idea, I would say, because his transcendent vision was to see eternity in a grain of sand, right?
02:01:16.480So, instead of replacing the present with the forestalled and suffering the error that you just described, is you integrate the eternal into the moment.
02:01:29.840Which, and then, well, you see that, you see echoes of that in the gospel insistence that Christ has that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but men will not see it.
02:01:54.340Well, and it's a complicated problem because, you know, one of the things we've talked about today is the notion of time frame and the fact that as you mature, and this is actually the definition of maturation, is that your time frame expands, right?
02:02:06.520So, that you're trying to calculate the proper path across the broadest possible variety of iterations.
02:02:14.580But I just also feel very, very strongly that this life as we have it, no matter what your religious view, is not a dress rehearsal.
02:02:21.800And don't take it lightly, and no matter what your faith is, God put you on this earth for a reason, and don't just be like, eh, whatever, I'll worry about it, you know, after.
02:02:31.660Yeah, yeah, well, you can see that the, what, the exaggeration of that viewpoint leads to the Marxist criticism that religion is just the opiate of the masses, is you can suffer all you need to now because your reward in the afterlife will be infinite.
02:02:47.600Yeah, well, I, right, no, no, it seems to me that it has something much more to do at a more profound level with this notion of infusing the moment with eternality is that, and Nietzsche kind of caught onto that to some degree, right?
02:02:59.360Because when he was trying to work out what you would be motivated by if you actually, what would you say, express what he described as the will to power properly, that you would try to live every moment so that if you were destined to have to relive that moment for eternity, you would say yes to it.
02:03:21.340You see, and you see this in the Sermon on the Mount, too, though, because what Christ basically says in the Sermon on the Mount is that you should orient yourself towards the highest possible good.
02:03:48.800What we see, your metaphor of being on a mountain with the easel in front of you is a metaphor that if, so you climb the mountain, now you can see everywhere, right?
02:03:59.440And so your metaphoric claim in that imagery was that if you climb to the place where you can see everything, that what presents itself in front of you is something like a blank canvas.
02:04:09.540Now, you associated that with meaninglessness, but that's a strange association because I would associate that with the deepest of all possible meanings is that you have the ability to participate in creation itself, essentially.
02:05:50.520Like, the transcendental self is the self—one of the ways of thinking about it is the self that enables you to establish a voluntary relationship, even with yourself, across long spans of time, while simultaneously doing that with other people who are also voluntarily doing it.
02:06:06.600And this is why the meaningless thing got me a bit, because if there's a pattern of voluntary assent that's optimal, which is what you're striving for in this anarchism, then that's not meaningless.
02:06:19.640It's just structured in a very complex and sophisticated way that can't be reduced to a simple dogma.
02:06:31.660Well, that's the thing about, you know, if your work is infused with something approximating eternal truth, right, which means that it would highlight certain archetypal realities, those would be objective realities in her phraseology, then it's going to last, because it's part of the tradition that lasts.
02:06:51.760And the tradition that lasts is a reflection of games that can be played iteratively and voluntarily.
02:07:11.680Everyone watching and listening today, thank you very much.
02:07:14.660It was a great pleasure to hash through these topics with Michael, and I hope that you enjoyed, let's say, our walk through the terrifying consequences of a dogmatic utopian state,
02:07:29.260and took to heart the fact that that is so dangerous that to call it unimaginable is correct, that the depths of horror that were produced in places like the Soviet Union are enough to turn you inside out.
02:07:41.620If you have the barest comprehension of what happened, and the notion that that could be in any wise attractive is, I think it's the most terrifying thing that I can apprehend.
02:07:50.480And then the question starts to become, you know, what's the alternative to that?
02:07:54.640And is there an alternative to totalitarianism and misery in the final analysis?
02:07:58.800You know, and our conversation today revolved around the notion that whatever that might be, it definitely has something to do with iterability and voluntary asset.
02:08:07.540And, you know, those aren't merely subjective claims, and that takes you out of the domain of an idiot moral relativism,
02:08:15.840the idiot moral relativism that makes all things permitted, you know, everything permitted in the Dostoevskian sense.