Jacob Siegel Transcript
00:01.29
cactus chu
So something that really strikes me about Tablet in general and your writing and specificity is that you have a kind of curiosity for wild or deep figures in both the present and in the past so that leads me to our None question when was the none time you became interested in an obscure figure. And who was it?
00:22.51
Jake
Okay, before I answer that hold on I'm now having another problem getting this audacity to record. Um, so I will answer that in one sentence. I don't know why I'm having so many technical issues right now.
01:15.23
cactus chu
Yeah, no worries.
00:58.55
Jake
Her opening recording device. Okay, why is that having air? Oh I see why because it thinks it's the shirt Macbook prep. Okay there we go. Okay so the question was ah doing her bit. Ya should be.
01:51.53
cactus chu
I'll just repeat it. I'll just restart basically and oh I forgot to actually tell you this before but the podcast has a pretty lengthy intro so they should already know who you are. I have been a senior writer for the tablet writer of the scroll newsletter and host of the manifesto podcast.
01:36.63
Jake
Yeah.
02:05.50
Jake
No, just the the manifesto podcast with co-host Phil Kly
02:26.41
cactus chu
Is there anything you want to add to that?
02:21.75
Jake
Yeah, or you know the novelist Phil Cly um yeah that's perfect. Thanks.
02:43.53
cactus chu
Yep, okay.
02:54.75
cactus chu
Cool alright so going on with the question, something that really strikes me about tablets in general and you're writing and specific is that you have a kind of curiosity for wild or deep figures in both the present and in the past. So. Leads us to our None question when was the one time you were interested in an obscure figure and who was it.
03:25.45
Jake
Um I appreciate that you pick up on that it certainly comports with how I think of myself. Um, and yeah, it's an interesting question. The only thing I can say for sure is that it would have had to do with my older brother Harry who formed. Most of my early tastes and I think you know to some extent my interest in wild and deep figures comes from him. Um, and so I'm just thinking like you know there was a whole kind of there are all these people to choose from it. He was really into this English group called Klf for a while. He always had a very good sort of sophisticated musical tastes. I had much more childish musical tastes but he was into this kind of English I don't even know how to describe. They were a kind of subversive. English guerrilla situationist marxist dance group who once burned a million pounds on an island somewhere. And yeah, so k left comes to mind but they're not.
06:06.79
cactus chu
Oh my.
06:00.47
Jake
I feel like it's not a great answer. I was certainly into Philip K Dick I think before he had achieved the popularity he has now. But I mean he was always a mainstream figure after um blade runner. So. Have to think about that a bit more and get back to you. The only thing I can say for sure is that it would have come from my brother. I almost feel like there are too many choices and um, I'm not sure which direction to go with this. But. It. It felt like that to me from a very young age. Yeah sure.
07:38.77
cactus chu
Yeah, we can bring this to the present if that's easier. What's your methodology now for thinking about these kinds of figures? How do you find them? Why do you look for them?
07:37.29
Jake
Ah, my methodology I wouldn't say that I have a methodology I would say that I have a consistent curiosity that leads me to them the methodology. It's not present either and how I look for them or in how I think of them. Frankly I would say that the internet has made it easier to stumble into these figures than it once was. It's easier now to feel like you've come upon some obscure thinker incidentally. And that wasn't the case when I was a kid I mean this is a familiar story but there used to be a kind of trail that you would follow a more deliberate trail that you would follow and so you know you would find None writer that writer. Lead you to another you know I got into a prison writer named Malcolm Braley who wrote this really brilliant novels kind of ah modern. Um. None century modern not modernist, modern social novel of prison life and he was in prison for something like None decades called on the yard and through Braley for instance and through my interest in Braley. Then I discovered people who were also into Bareilly which led me to other sort of more obscure crime writers and you know that was a process that could take years sometimes you know to find a handful of writers.
11:27.69
cactus chu
Um.
11:14.37
Jake
Take years because it wasn't like once you discovered a name you were able to achieve some kind of automatic intimacy with that name or be able to feign intimacy now you come across a name online and it's very easy to Wikipedia the name and feel like you've learned enough. Sort of you've made contact with the obscure you know and that wasn't the case so it would take a long time and it was just a sense of pursuit. The methodology was just the sense that there was something out there that something out there was not. Fully expressed by the establishment figures and that there was I mean I had a sense from a young age that there were reforms of truth that had to be repressed to make routine life possible. You know I just. Felt that.
13:29.75
cactus chu
That's a very big line. There are forms of truth that have to be repressed to make life possible.
13:22.41
Jake
Well this is the whole idea behind proust and a remembrance of things past. For instance, the flood I mean if you think of it. Um, we're all exposed to the infinite at every moment of our lives. And in order not to be overwhelmed by that in order not to be rendered mute and immobile by that contact with the infinite we have to we have to delimit things we have to um. Have to be sometimes a bit brute with reality in order to to reduce it to recognizable patterns that we can deal with and and you know in order not just to be overwhelmed by the flood of sensory input and the flood of. Intellectual and emotional input. Our bodies do that for us or you know we're limited by our physicality and and we're also um, limited in ways that we're not fully conscious of by the kind of routine processes of our. Thinking and emotional lives and I mean I don't I don't mean to suggest at all that as a kid I had this all worked out in some kind of rigorous philosophical sense. What I had from an early age was a sense that there was something else out there, some other kind of.
16:13.81
cactus chu
M.
16:28.57
Jake
Outside like the routine of my own life or my family life for the lives of my friends that was a deeper and potentially dangerous form of knowledge and experience and that was thrilling and then in sort of.
17:21.52
cactus chu
Yeah, so.
17:05.73
Jake
In terms of how I just finish the thought in terms of how I approach those figures then the thing that I tried to do is just to approach them on their own terms. This is what I do. This is methodological. I mean Insofar as I have a methodology. It's that I do my best not to impose certain not just normative expectations. But ah, but not not. To impose my own prejudices and biases on these figures and to try and get what they're trying to say in the way that they mean it and then I make my judgments afterwards I'm ah hardly non-judgmental but I try to at least experience it in the Non contact. In the way that it was intended.
19:13.70
cactus chu
Right? I Mean there's a very strong tension. There. Some things are buried because perhaps it's better not to pay attention to them. But now we're uncovering those things and we're finding them. What do you think about that? Do you ever think that maybe these figures would be better off obscured.
19:42.23
Jake
Um, ah I don't better off for whom better off for the society at large better off for them I mean you know famously Kafka didn't want his papers published right? This is sort of um, famous and.
20:11.69
cactus chu
Good question.
20:28.57
cactus chu
M.
20:20.19
Jake
Archetypal illustration of the None aspect of the paradox of the dilemma that you're talking about you know is it worth violating the wishes the explicitly expressed wishes of the individual artist in order to. Provides humanity with whatever benefit or even just the individual reader with whatever benefit. They've derived from Kafka's work. You know I'm inclined to say yes because because. Been so enriching and because it seems like that that dying wish reflected a set of personal concerns that might have been like the Kafka's hangups about this. Personal hang ups about this which are directly related to the subject matter in his work might have been alleviated to some extent at least by knowing ah how much. Ah. How much influence he'd had in his work though. Of course that could be wrong. So you know it's hard to say in that case in the larger sense or in the societal sense of would it be better. Give certain figures like let's say for instance somebody I'm interested in so the german. Um, and part of what was known as the conservative revolution in Germany the writer named ernst de jur who was a decorated german soldier in the first world war served in Paris during the second world war and was a kind of right-wing. Mystical anti-nazi figure and also a quite brilliant writer in my estimation in the illiberal tradition would it be better if somebody like Yongr had remained obscure because in. It is becoming popular. He's exposed certain philosophical vulnerabilities in liberalism that have made the maintenance of the kind of pleasant liberal status quo more tenuous. I tend to think no that that he rather than being the cause of the instability of the liberal system is just ah, an especially um and especially insightful.
25:49.13
Jake
Guide to why it's unstable Now. So Ah so yeah, I mean there's I could interpret your question in a lot of different ways. I mean there's also like the classic you know, cool kid I liked this band better before everyone else knew them. Thing would it be better if if it stayed obscure so it didn't get swarmed by the dumb Masses. You know I don't know sometimes yes, but it seems like a selfish way of looking at things.
27:17.55
cactus chu
Yeah, so I want to ask about exactly one of these liberal figures or sorry exactly one of these obscure figures right now and this is one of your this was one of your columns I found particularly interesting. Ah, so I'll quiz you on your own work. A little bit. Ah this is a political figure name starts with a why and you described him as the None genuinely post liberal figure in American Political life. Ah, who is this? yes.
27:59.51
Jake
I almost said Yarvin but it's Yang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the the presidential candidate Andrew Yang
28:32.29
cactus chu
Yeah, almost almost.
28:49.35
cactus chu
Rights. So ah, why is Yang the None genuinely post liberal figure in American political life.
28:47.41
Jake
Ah, trying to remember what I meant when I said that but I think I think of him as a genuinely post liberalberal figure insofar as the. American tradition of um, a kind of liberalism that had to do both with a respect for private property and for what we now think of as civil libertarian causes like. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression and also finally a kind of broad tolerance that was connected to a particular American political tradition that's largely. Gone now and Yang rather than trying to summon that back in some way which is what virtually every other candidate does. So if you take like Trump and Biden for instance each on their own. Well Trump and Clinton for that matter. Each in their own ways is trying to harken back to an earlier period of ah american social stability and prosperity I mean this is explicit right? Make America great again is explicitly a call. Restoring an earlier historical period Clinton in her own way was trying to do the same thing Biden ah, very explicitly trying to sort of restore the Obama era Dispensation Yang was doing something different. Which was to point towards an apocalyptic scenario in the near future which is the obliteration of working class jobs in America by a wave of artificial intelligence that will lead to. Ah, massive convulsions that will tear apart. Whatever remains of the social fabric and and have not just you know, not just ah. Bad consequences or deleterious consequences but will be genuinely volatile and unpredictable and could mean the end of representative democracy. Let's say that Yang's vision was actually.
34:09.29
Jake
None and foremost about forestalling an apocalyptic scenario that he saw in the future and the way he wanted to do that quite interestingly ah was by essentially striking a deal with the kind of masters of. Tech economy and with the working class to protect and preserve some social status and ah some buy-in in the political system. For the working class bought through this ubi though I forget what he called it. He had a different freedom dividend Ryan exactly exactly which that's like very boomer branding the freedom dividend but he had a ah very.
35:54.87
cactus chu
The freedom dividend is a thousand dollars a month. Yes.
36:02.35
Jake
Distinctly Unboomer approach for the reasons I just laid out not backward looking at all but and not not simply forward looking in a sort of hopeful liberal sense right? because Liberalism is premised in philosophical and. And epistemological terms liberalism is premised on the ability of human reason to the ability of individuals through the exercise of their reason to secure their own progress and and their own happiness and an individual level and then in historical terms. To achieve the progress of all humanity. But if you're saying that unless we do something drastic. The machines are going to take over and we're going to have massive riots and we're going to have mass unemployment. That's not a liberal vision at all. Now his solution was this kind of ah so like tech-enabled social democratic bargain or compromise rather where you achieve social democratic ends by getting the. Oligarchs subsidize social democracy which is not that much different from aspects of the new deal actually. But yeah, so that's what I was getting at um and the fact that he made that apparent in his style and so like. You know it sounds a bit grandiose to say oh he's the first post-liberal figure or or maybe it just sounds like ah you know sort of the use of a fashionable term and I wouldn't deny that entirely., But there is a reality to it in a substance to it and the substance is not just in terms of these. Ah. Kind of more conceptual issues I just laid out. It was also clear in the style which is why he attracted all of these meme kids and message board kids and like you know, 20 something um Internet native.
40:24.87
cactus chu
Right? A non-poster. Yeah I think something that really strikes out to me and I do think this is a unifying trait between Yang and a lot of the other figures that you cover.
40:09.11
Jake
Millennials picked up on this and they liked it. Yes, yes.
41:03.41
cactus chu
Is the sense of locus of control because I think for a very brief time. Maybe the post-war period. You could say that it existed to some degree since the enlightenment but really during the post-war period. There was this idea that the locus of control was given to the individual or rested upon the individual. Instead of some massive outside figure. Of course this wasn't true around the world. It wasn't true in the Soviet Union for example, um, but at least in western democracies. There was this sense where you really could be an agentic person and of course there are stologgenic people today but I feel like. In politics this kind of idea is drifting further and further away we're drifting further and further towards a collective political model where we assume people's locus of control is largely external and that's really what this kind of um. Either illiberalism or post-liberalism. Whatever you want to call it That's really what this is looking for. Most people are going towards a world where most people don't have that much agency over their lives. So. Do you think that this is a correct assessment?
43:23.51
Jake
Ah yes I do um I think that the reasons for it are interesting and and not strictly political in so far as a lot of this change that you're describing um or the look. Control is moved from the individual toward. Um, you know I notice you didn't name an agent right? You said collective. But I think people ought to be skeptical. Collective models of control because they often conceal concentrations of power that would rather not be named but clearly ah clearly there's something to what you're saying I don't I think it's driven as much by. Technological changes perhaps more by technological changes than by um, you know a conscious rejection of None political philosophy or a conscious embrace of another political philosophy. You know the telecommunications revolutions drive a lot of this. And I wrote another piece about Joe Rogan. I'm trying to remember exactly how I put it but essentially there's a line in there. Ah about um, you know the one century being about individuals and mass movements. Ah.
46:16.93
cactus chu
Yes.
46:23.73
Jake
And the non century being about these periodic effusions of swarms essentially internet driven social swarms and that's a largely technological change and that. Technological change tracks to political and ideological distinctions. But I think that if you're looking at what mid-century liberalism was about in terms of political economy. What were the physical properties? What were the fixtures, the kind of economic material fixtures of that mid-century american liberalism and then what do things look like today. The individual agency. Had a lot to do with the individual economic and therefore political power of a private sector middle class that doesn't exist in much of the United States anymore that's been effectively eradicated. In much of the United States and it's been eradicated through a combination of legislative and judicial decisions and through um, technological changes sometimes it's hard to tell sort of where one ends and the other begins but the. The power of that private sector middle class and defining the social political consensus that was the kind of normative mid-century american liberalism doesn't exist anymore and so then. So where is the agency now if it's not in you know the kind of a middle class white collar professional or middle class. Ah you know there was a blue collar middle class. There was a white collar middle class that was also. And this is also critical, right? So a a ah a white collar professional in Tennessee did not necessarily have identical political opinions and culture.
51:12.90
cactus chu
Who?
51:21.51
Jake
Psychosexual sensibilities. As a white collar professional in Northern California these were people who might have worked in the same field and might have had similar levels of educational attainment on paper.
51:55.15
cactus chu
Yes.
51:58.75
Jake
And likely actually their salaries were far closer than they would be now right? The person in California would have ah would have only been earning twice as much as the person in Tennessee or None times as much, not 4 times as much as might be the case now. Um. So they were both part of the same kind of economic class socioeconomic class and yet retained these meaningful differences of culture of political orientation et cetera and those differences. Express themselves in the politics of the time and have now been largely eliminated through a combination of the internet. Ah you know the kind of institutional homogeneity of the. Educational institutions in the United States you know more than likely these people members of the kind of broadly defined professional managerial class are far more likely to have virtually identical tastes to shop at the same stores. Probably I say shop the same stores probably for the most part. Purchase the same types of products from online ah mass hegemon distributors ah retailers that also happen to control the back end of the us government right? So to wrap this up. Where has the control gone right? like that was what I asked originally in your model if we can see that there's less interest in individual agency and more of a kind of collective process where then has the power gone and None of the places. It's gone. Is it? Um, you know corporate sovereigns like Amazon that both control the retail market in the United States and effectively are partnered with the United States government. Forward facing administrative agencies and it's a secret and intelligence agency since Amazon now provides the backend for a lot of that. Also so that's just it's simply ah, a different. Structural model in that sense.
57:17.51
cactus chu
Yeah, so something that at least I find to be very convincing is there's this case made in George Dyson's book alogia that this kind of. Enlightenment science is kind of reasonable, understanding the idea that we can use reason to draw understandable comprehensible truths from nature is a very fleeting thing and if we look at the development of. Technology recently It's basically been heading towards this kind of miasmatic and indiscernible state where you have machine learning. Of course this is almost the epitome of this. We can take large datasets and you can draw amazing results. And we will have very little idea why or how this works but in many other technologies as well. Medicine. Certainly although that has always been more of a black box than say computing. Um many ah, many kinds of hard technologies as well. Batteries. Although I do think there is more of a grasp there but a lot of these processes are driving us from areas where even relatively lay people could process. The forces at play think ah non grade high school student learning how the saturn None rockets work but we're not in that world anymore and so what this says about agency is that it was kind of a head fake. Is a very short-lived headfake where we felt we had agency because we had the narratives and the tools to paper over a lot of the randomness and uncertainty in our lives. And that those tools are now being rewritten to be ones that don't paper over those uncertainties at all and so we're not able to keep up this illusion and I would I would actually say that it was kind of an illusion.
01:01:36.93
Jake
Um, well I'm so glad you said that I think what I think it's very insightful. What you just said and an astute comment but I disagree with your conclusion. Um it. Think you're making a category error or you should at least consider the possibility that you're making a category error insofar as you're implying that the meaningful exercise of control consists in eliminating. Randomness or unknowability from human social processes whereas I would argue that it's precisely in the means by which we paper over them as you put it or restrain them or account for them that we exercise our control. So the difference between ah the let's say the medical black box and the you know neural net machine learning Black box is significant because in medicine there were long procedures where perhaps. Empirically, we knew that they worked but we didn't know exactly why they worked so famously handwashing ah was a practice before germs were discovered right before the germ theory of disease.
01:04:36.85
cactus chu
Right.
01:04:41.95
Jake
I understood. Hygiene was known to be important, right? Not everywhere at all times precisely precisely and the difference between those 2 kinds of black boxes is not ja it's not simply nor principally.
01:05:07.71
cactus chu
Right? Traditions of cleanliness in general. Yeah, very powerful.
01:05:16.93
Jake
Ah, function of their relative complexity. It's that one is capable of generating its own additional complexity and the other is not the danger of the machine learning black box is not that it's more complex in a fixed sense.
01:05:56.29
cactus chu
Move.
01:05:52.17
Jake
The danger of the machine learning black box is that it's capable of generating potentially ever increasing degrees of complexity that not only obscure the mechanisms and processes by which it's. Executing Whatever function, it's assigned. But then ultimately we'll end up making it harder and harder to say what the hell the thing was supposed to be doing in the None place right? and and that doesn't yeah and that yeah, that doesn't mean that.
01:07:11.90
cactus chu
Oh I see yes I think this is very important.
01:07:05.77
Jake
Machine begins to exercise agency. I mean that the machine doesn't exercise agency. You know, Um, ah, whatever my hang ups about the liberal politics of the moment remain basically a humanist and. Terms of how I understand Concepts like agency I don't believe in anything like machine agency. I think it's a hoax and I think it's a hoax perpetrated by either people who have bought into forms of mystification. Um, or you know more in more sinister terms a hoax perpetrated by people who benefit from those forms of mystification because they focus on terrifying. Ah. You know machine Consciousness. They take the focus off of their own control over those Machines. So the thing that makes so the thing that makes the social arrangements of the present. Ah hapless Impotent. Et Cetera is not the inability to understand the technical processes at work. It's even more devilishly that the complexity of the tech technical processes at work has vested more and more power. Into the people who um, who do understand those technical processes and who can hide the ways in which the technical processes ultimately end up serving the same very limited rather fixed set of humans. Decisions and cost-benefit calculations that we have been grappling with since the dawn of Civilization. So The loss of agency at the moment while it certainly has a technological dimension is not Deterministic. It's not that the machines have. Have made it impossible for us to exercise agency. The machines have made it easy for us, enticing for us to divest ourselves and be divested of our agency as we come to believe that these are things over which. Nobody can exercise any control. But in fact, you know the dollars go into certain bank accounts and not others. The machines are programmed by certain people and not others. They serve certain ends and not others decisions are being made every day you might not be involved in those.
01:12:45.13
Jake
Decisions I'm certainly not involved in those decisions but the machines are not making these decisions for themselves. There's a whole other you know conversation to be had about like ah where humans are in the decision making cycle for machines insofar as like the. Control loop as it were but those are technical questions they might bleed into existential questions but they're not fundamentally existential. Um or I don't believe that they're fundamentally existential though I acknowledge that it's it's. It requires faith on my part to say that to some extent I can't. I can't offer a proof of it that makes sense.
01:14:37.83
cactus chu
Yeah certainly and I think just None excellent example of the thing you're describing there where agency is hidden is ah all of these all these covid prediction models and of course felippe luma and has done great work I hope to have him on the podcast soon. Essentially dissecting these models and giving a very clear explanation that actually what's happened here is that we assumed that the only major thing that can cause changes in case numbers is lockdowns or other non-pharmaceutical interventions and then we ran the model. And as it turns out if you assume the only thing that can cause changes are lockdowns lockdowns seem like they cause a lot of changes but that this of course is just built into the assumptions. It's not necessarily reflective of the data at all and that's why when we ran the test forward when we actually. Looked at this in real life. Those predictions were wildly off and yes I do think this is actually very very important that there's this quote from ah.
01:16:31.79
Jake
Um, red.
01:17:12.47
cactus chu
Now a candidate for prime minister or candidate for leader of the conservative party Pierre Polyev talking about a corruption scandal I think maybe six seven years ago no it wasn't that far back maybe None or 4 at. Where he said complexity is the refuge of the scoundrel. That's all of this strange bureaucracy, money shuffling and so on. Ah when you have all of that it becomes much easier while the accusation in this case was essentially that a charity was paying off the government. for a contract and I do think there is something there. There is something there where you can't really hide anything in handwashing but you can hide a lot in this kind of deep tech in this kind of in this kind of very very opaque and kind of. Kind of asymmetric highly asymmetrically opaque system I guess that leads us to some of the reactions to these types of technological or political developments and one area. Of reaction that you've been very interested in covering that I'm interested in hearing about as well is ah Neo reaction and we mentioned him earlier Curtis Yarvin so what is the general. Let's. Let's look at this in a kind of diagnostic way, which of these types of problems are neo reaction looking at or near reactionaries looking at and what do they think about them. What do they think is the problem?
01:20:21.91
Jake
I think near reactionaries are certainly looking at the problem of individual agency versus collective decision making or collective political models and their solution is essentially that. Individual agency was an illusion that liberalism therefore is founded on this illusion of um, the individual as ah, a suitable political agent for administering society collectivism they see is quite real. But functionally hellish and you know they also imagine the one inevitably turning into the other so liberal individualism being ah, kind of inherently demotic tends towards. Kind of mobocracy right? So you start with this kind of enlightened liberal individualism where ah, the liberal is ah a rational act or the individual rather is a rational act or exercising judgment. In ah, a kind of lofty way about their own life but you end up in ah a some kind of collectivist hellscape um is a general general. Arc you see. Neo-reactionary thought the solution to them is some kind of restoration of aristocracy in a formalized sense so to take Gotis Yarvin as ah, you know an illustrative. Case because he's the premier neo -reactionary thinker of the present and has certainly had vastly more influence than any of the other neore reactionctionaries who also get read. You know? Yeah, Arvin's argument essentially is that. And this is an argument. He takes most directly from a writer named James Burnham but which is actually much older than Burnham and you know they're classical Greek antecedents, the idea basically those that all societies are. Oligarchies all societies tend toward oligarchy insofar as power is always concentrated. Um, among either people with a greater will to power than their fellow citizens or people with greater capacities for the exercise of power and.
01:25:54.87
Jake
So the advantage of some kind of aristocracy then is not that having a small number of people rule is greater than having a large mass of people who are too indecisive to rule effectively. For instance, that's not the argument because. According to Yarvin we're already ruled by a small group of unelected you know undemocratic officials in the form of this bureaucratic ah oligarchy. The. Preferable thing about aristocracy or or something approaching aristocracy in the kind of yarvin worldview is that it formalizes this system and so therefore makes it accountable and makes admission into the aristocratic class dependent on some kind of. Um, either hereditary principle. You know Yarvin wouldn't subscribe to the hereditary principle but but ah, some sort of ah meritocratic basis or ah, some kind of caste-based basis where essentially you have ah you know. Think the modern Neo Reactionctionaries would probably want to make it based on something like some of them would make it based on iq others would want to I should say actually this is where there's a real division among Nea reactionaries between the ones who are more neo and the ones who are more reactionary. So.
01:29:16.47
cactus chu
Citizens.
01:28:56.63
Jake
Yarvin in his way is more of a technocrat than he is a reactioner. You know Yarvin is a kind of reactionary technocrat. He is basic. Yeah Yarvin basically believes in the corporatist technocracy he believes in. Ah.
01:29:32.21
cactus chu
Interesting.
01:29:36.30
Jake
He believes in technological progress as being more or less durable. He believes in it. Um, he believes in intellect. Intelligence as a proper basis for administration he believes in. Ah you know he believes in the sort of techno-capitalist model and you know he can be sort of tongue in cheek about this sometimes but that. Tongue-in cheek ways in which he embraces. These are basically covers for the ways in which he's fundamentally sincere in this world in other words yarvin has no desire to revert back to some kind of feudalism or. None century model even as he ah you know calls himself a jackupey it and and calls for the you know the stuart monarchy and and engages in to call it cast play would sound would be unfair and a bit. Too dismissive but these are metaphors and analogies that he's using and he doesn't mean that that a pre-modern basis of social organization or a pre-modern epistemology is better than the technological. Epistemology you know, explicitly whereas there are more sort of romantic literary reactionaries who view modernity itself as the problem and who. Recognize feudalism as being rooted fundamentally in a pre-liberal church and castle-based epistemology where there are very strictly enforced limits on what kind of questions you ask. Very strictly enforced rigidly enforced aristocratic hierarchies and so you know that's an important distinction. I would say all the power is with the people on Arvin's side at the moment. The other people are romantic.
01:34:25.37
cactus chu
Right? you.
01:34:17.57
Jake
I don't mean romantic as a good thing necessarily but I mean it's essentially a kind of aesthetic thing. It's not political.
01:34:57.27
cactus chu
Yeah I Certainly think I mean yeah teal vance Masters. They're all, they're all kind of the more yaevinn side I mean maybe they wouldn't consider themselves neoreactionaries at all. But that's the kind of.. That kind of direction is the kind of techno Techno capital as you said or I don't know who coined that term but that kind of that kind of direction.
01:35:28.25
Jake
Yeah they're certainly in that orbit and like yarvin a lot of what they're doing and this is a point I didn't get to fully draw out my profile of yarvin for tablet which I think is important in terms of understanding what it means ah practically. What do we mean when we talk about reactionary politics? You know there's a whole history of reaction in the original sense that means counter-revolutionary right? This is where the idea of reaction comes from opposition to the french revolution in opposition to the nationalist and liberal revolutions. Um, and. Ah, you know you have figures like demaist then and later Thomas Carlisle and and these figures who are counterrevolutionary romantics. Ah, and when you talk about reactionaries now in the American sense. Yes, it preserves some of that broadly counter-revolutionary spirit and in the case of yarvin he applies that you know he has the intellectual honesty to come out and say yeah you know the american revolution was a mistake right. Which somebody like Vance is not going to say but is the correct reactionary position as it were because the american revolution was a liberal revolution and and and so I'm not suggesting that vance is I covering up his opposition to the american revolution. I'm saying that there's still another distinction to be drawn which is between reactionary in a kind of strict sense and then what you could call the old right? Which yarvin is certainly invested in and I think people like Vance and Blake Masters and Thiel. Are borrowing from in some sense and the old right the pre-war right? The pre-new deal right? and so it's a much more explicitly anti-progresive right? There are some liberal elements of the old right insofar as it is. It defends private property. Um, and you know I'm sorry this is like None inside baseball or too technical but okay, good good I'm glad to hear that so the terminological confusion these terms have gotten. So.
01:40:28.93
cactus chu
Oh certainly not. This is very interesting and I think my audience will find it very interesting too.
01:40:36.85
Jake
Confused, it almost becomes difficult to talk about. But basically the non century meaning of liberal was especially in the kind of classic Manchester variety that was very much rooted explicitly in private property rights. And had much less to do with the kind of later editions people like Js Mills even um and these sort of broader ah sort of missionary liberal worldviews or or liberal epistemologies. And there's a broader tradition of liberalism that really is about epistemology but in the political sense just to focus on that for a none. There's a lineage that goes from liberals to modern libertarians which stays connected to. Private property is being the most important thing in a sense right? So. There's this sort of mid twentieth century merger early none century merger of liberalism progressivism in a way that ah takes liberalism away from. Strict focus on individual ah property rights and the strict focus on protection from the state right? and merges it with the much more expansive crusading progressive ideology. Which wants to use the state um to achieve these particular social ends insofar as liberalism and progressivism emerge in that way libertarianism in the american variety remains more connected to this older none century version of liberalism. So. Hopefully that's still clear so far. So if you take that forward to somebody like um like Thiel or Yarvin for that matter who both start off their political trajectories in the kind of ah libertarian. But also Austrian school libertarian space. Specifically they're still connected to this ah private property ah tradition of liberalism and libertarianism but they end up connecting that also to what's called the old right? meaning. The right in America before liberalism sort of merged with progressivism and became hegemonic and turned the establishment right? and here I'm sort of paraphrasing the worldview of these people and turning the establishment right into.
01:46:11.10
Jake
Not a genuine opposition but merely a minority faction of the ruling party. What they derisively refer to as um, what is it the conservat minimum? Yeah, yeah, well Mensovit is perfectly right in the sense that mensovit means minority.
01:46:49.97
cactus chu
I believe Yarvin calls them the mensheviks.
01:46:50.89
Jake
No Jesus Menschvik means majority. So it's perfect in that sense bolshevik is the minor. Oh yeah, oh my god yes, it's the other way. MM right
01:47:20.53
cactus chu
No, I think it's the other way. Yeah, but the idea is that the mensjavix were kind of a slightly more moderate communism right? and they.
01:47:23.90
Jake
Sort of sort of yeah, that's how I mean that's not actually right? This is not exactly true, but that's certainly how Yarvin sees it right? but they were also the majority is what I meant to say though though it means minority they actually had the numbers. Um.
01:47:59.33
cactus chu
Um, yeah.
01:48:14.10
cactus chu
Yeah to clarify this up to the listeners. There was a kind of ah there was a political trick that was played here where ah the bolsheviks even though they had smaller numbers. They had less people in their movement. They called themselves bolsheviks bosha , meaning larger. And they called their opponents the Mensovviks even though they had more numbers on their side. It was a very shrewd political move.
01:48:44.89
Jake
Right? right? There's a great ah short book about this by Richard pipes I think it's the three whys of the russian revolution. It's only an I None page worth checking out. Um, but.
01:49:41.83
cactus chu
But yeah, that's quite apt. I think that analogy or that comparison is quite apt because I think much like Marxism which was a reaction. I do think it was more of a reaction. It's strange because.
01:49:23.85
Jake
Sorry I yeah.
01:50:19.93
cactus chu
It's kind of now rebranded as this kind of very progressive thing but I feel like it was very much a reaction to industrialization and the dissatisfaction that came along with that I feel like we're getting a new either a revival or ah or a. New thing entirely of a type of mass dissatisfaction and that's exactly what this kind of illiberal or post-liberal or neo-reactionary and the kind of like modern modern communists or marxists and the actual ones they're all gaining. Ah, draw because of this type of alienation and I'm wondering why you think that alienation is there. We've talked about some of the factors here. The loss of agency. The power being more vested in. Opaque technologies and so on and so forth. But what are the kind of touch points, where are the kinds of narratives, the kind of individual stories where someone looks at this thing happening and says okay I Want to become a new reactionary now.
01:52:29.43
Jake
I Think that's a very good question I mean I think part of this has to do with um you know to put it in crude terms a lot of this has to do with how much free time you have to spend online if if you're looking at a single indicator I think that would probably be the best.
01:53:13.75
cactus chu
Yes.
01:53:07.21
Jake
Single indicator of who is drawn into. Let's say who's drawn into illiberal ideologies of any variety like time spent online I would guess is probably a better indicator than education level or. Race or age group or or anything else. But ah um I I think that the alienation is a response to the genuinely alienating circumstances of. Um, how American society has set up its institutions and its communities and the ways in which people have available to them the most I mean it all in a sense comes down to work and family. It all in a sense always comes down to work in the family and there are fewer meaningful opportunities to engage in work. That's both remunerative to the point where you can raise a family and that also feels. Um, connected in some way to the sort of useful processes of life. So um, you know I think that there are more and less alienating kinds of work and. Certainly that was something that you know the None 2 waves of industrialization seemed to suggest and also that the the ways in which it's become more difficult to. To be part of being part of communities to form families has run parallel to and without even getting into the cause and effect just saying that they've happened in parallel for now. That has happened in parallel with much larger long-term social campaigns aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing traditional communities and families and um. You know that would sound conspiratorial if it wasn't so easy to find progressives ah saying this allowed and well there's a double game that gets played though right? where liberals pretend that it's conspiratorial while at the same time Ho humming.
01:58:39.17
cactus chu
Yeah I don't think it's conspiratorial at all because.
01:58:45.43
Jake
When the progressives to their left. Do it. So there's a whole class of people who are functioning. Yeah.
01:59:08.87
cactus chu
No, but we're talking About. We're talking about explicit campaigns against tradition right? These aren't so Subtle. It's like saying like it's it's like saying Pro-lifers had a conspiracy to overturn and wrote Roe V Wade like they were talking about it constantly. Everywhere All of the time. It's not.. It's not hidden at all and I think it's the same deal here and this isn't to say that this is necessarily a bad thing. I think some traditions are wrong. Some traditions are right and I'm sure we'll discuss those as well. But like the idea that this is conspiratorial and. That's very silly to me.
02:00:06.77
Jake
I agree and I'm glad to hear you see it that way. But I think you have to acknowledge that there were many prominent people for many years, centrist liberals more or less, whose main function. Was to pretend that these things were not happening while making it easier for them to happen. So Their main function was to I mean you can look at the sort of easiest recent example was campus radicalism right.
02:01:39.25
cactus chu
Mm yes.
02:01:18.25
Jake
There was a whole class of people, a whole class of writers at Vox and The New Republic, the new new republic slate where wherever these sort of more or less center-left publications when center left was still a meaningful designation. The New York Times, the Washington Post et cetera. And these were people who did not endorse all of the claims of the campus radicals right? Rather what they did was poo poo the notion that the campus radicals who were pushing for mandatory safe spaces or who were you know insisting on. The kind of continual expansion of ah compulsory transgender pronoun usage or who were labeling mathematics white supremacist. The people who are engaged in these campaigns. They didn't endorse their claims. They said oh they're not so important it's merely rightwing hysteria to make too much of them now 85% of the people who were doing that ten years ago have not moved on to endorsing their claims because that's how that's the dialectic. That's how it works. Another 15% has sort of moved on to um, you know, kind of people like Matt Galacias who have moved on to offering some very mild criticism of those claims without really acknowledging at all their role in. In laundering and legitimizing those claims. But that was not insignificant and the degree to which that has fundamentally transformed the conditions of like normal people's lives who are who are not engaged. In these pitched ideological battles but who lives downstream of them is hard to overstate I think and so it operates on 2 levels on None level I think it's alienating to live in a society where. There's ah, there's a continual kind of paranoid relationship toward the basic foundations of leading a contented life. You know like I hate to tell this.
02:06:24.10
cactus chu
Yeah.
02:06:14.69
Jake
To people I'm being facetious I don't hate to tell it to people at all. But I think it's a mark of maturity to understand that. Ah radical individualism is not a path to Contentment. It might be necessary. Might be necessary and valuable and and important as a means of experimentation and wild truth seeking and you know I'm an artist I don't look down on those things at all. But that's not.. It's not the same as what makes you happy.
02:07:48.27
cactus chu
Yeah I want to put a pin into that because that's definitely something incredibly important to talk about but before we go there I do want to push back a little bit on the kind of idea that it is. It is fully a kind of slippery slope.
02:07:30.69
Jake
And sure. So.
02:08:26.81
cactus chu
Because I think some things are a slippery slope and we're continuing them but some things just stopped and we were kind of correct in saying that this was not a problem and by we I mean kind of like the center left folks which I still do identify at least a little bit with because. I mean here's the case I would make right? Um, I would say that most of the things that perpetuated were things in the kind of administrative or bureaucratics state or not just the state as in the government but also these kinds of corporations and so on and so forth. That's what's continued. And there are some things that haven't continued and that's a lot of what was done um well is done in actual politics. So for example, um, we are we are ended up. We ended up largely not defunding the police at all. There are some. There are some local officials. Um, where republicans never had a chance where where. Um, that happened, some of them reversed it and Biden provided more funding for the police. So as a kind of like or from the kind of center left perspective. You would say that like a lot of these situations. There are kind of overplayed or overgeneralized situations where a lot of people who. Really aren't that bad like I would say Biden is not that bad. Ah, and I would say that I mean like inflation that is a problem but that's kind of like a normal politics problem. That's not really like ah that's not really like a progressivism gone wild problem. Um, and he could be better on that for sure. But that. A lot of especially the kind of right-wing news cycle does play some parts out to be much more sorry about that to be much more destructive or to be much more widespread than they actually are and that. Discerning between these things properly, not falling for a kind of dogmatic approach because I do think there are a lot of problems especially with not necessarily even the neo-reactionaries but the kind of mainstream right? where they're just kind of dysfunctional and misled. I talked to Richard Tanzania about this kind of. Impulsively jumping at the bit whenever there's a chance I think it creates an environment where you can't do politics and you can't do policy. You're just constantly reacting and there is no kind of coherent thought there.
02:13:08.77
Jake
no no I think they're all well taken and I think that the distinction you're drawing between the bureaucratic and administrative policies on the 1 hand and the.
02:13:30.17
cactus chu
Sorry I made like 3 different points and I didn't really stop for a response but between any of them.
02:13:39.11
Jake
Cultural ideological ferment on the other hand is an important distinction. But ah, don't ah don't I don't think it's a neat distinction. So to my mind. The only thing about you know you want to call it wokeness or the Successor ideology.
02:14:21.21
cactus chu
Oh.
02:14:16.87
Jake
Ah, you know whatever you want to call it The only thing that matters about the sort of activist social justice movement that is ah explicitly you know quasi-totalitarian in its aims The only thing that matters about it is the bureaucratic administrative dimension now. That's an overstatement but insofar as I don't mean to suggest that the ideas are irrelevant but the ideas are not ultimately powerful. So when I say the only thing that matters what I mean is that if you're trying to distinguish between alarmists. News cycles or or a kind of endless volley of culture war bullshit and you know politics and policies that are truly impactful. You have to look at what the bureaucracy does. Ah so in that sense. I disagree with you and I disagree with the larger contention that Biden is basically a reasonable figure of the center left and has been an ah effective kind of restraint on wokeness. There's no distinction doesn't exist anymore. Actually, the conceptual distinction I just made, rather I should say the conceptual distinction still exists institutionally; the distinction doesn't exist at the national level. At the local level. There are Democrats who are operating legitimately outside this at the national level to to talk about the democratic party the dnc wokeness whatever you're just using. You're just describing something different. Ah. Different wings of the same structure all right? What did Biden do in terms of wokeness under the Obama administration? He was the guy who pushed title None right? Hit. Biden was the one who pushed the radical expansion. Of regulatory power based on very crude ideas of gender discrimination that ended up in power in college bureaucracies vastly expanding the ah the bureaucratic power and um. Payroll a university in service of what was basically ah a kind of gender. You know a kind of gender ideology view on college campuses.
02:20:07.95
cactus chu
Or I don't think it was quite that like title 9 was like most people refer to okay, let me just clarify a few terms for the audience. So so the title 9 thing was mainly around claims of sexual harassment or rape and it essentially instituted a bureaucratic regime.
02:19:54.13
Jake
Um.
02:20:15.99
Jake
Um, well well not exactly not exactly. That's not exactly the case. No it was about a hit title, none was not principally just about you're talking about what it was.
02:20:47.11
cactus chu
In a lot of these universities that's huh.
02:21:13.63
cactus chu
Yeah, the dear colleague letter. Yeah I thought that was what you were talking about as well. Okay, my bad.
02:20:53.83
Jake
Dear administrator letter or think you know I'm sorry good. Well, that's 1 aspect of it, that's one aspect of it. no so title nine is a much older ah much older regulation that has to do with um.
02:21:36.61
cactus chu
Yeah.
02:21:27.31
Jake
Discrimination based on sex and then later on Gender Identity right? and the the um the the kind of procedures for dealing with claims of sexual assault were one part of this of what came out of it. But it's. It's broader than that. So Anyway, I didn't mean to cut you off there.
02:22:32.21
cactus chu
Yeah, so um, yeah, just just clarifying. Essentially there were some title nine is as you said ah this sex discrimination and later read more as gender discrimination ah part of the civil rights act and what it essentially. Ah I mean my interpretation of what the Obama administration did was that they created this environment where there were strong pressures in one direction to essentially deal with these claims. And not necessarily any kind of rigor in terms of verifying whether those claims were factual or not um and that this was the major. This was the major thing I don't think the gender identity stuff really became a thing until post Obama right. At least not in kind of like the public debate.
02:23:51.95
Jake
Um, gender Identity didn't what sex was in it from the beginning. So in other words like the explicitly sort of gender ideology view of gender identity being something distinct from sex um was part of.
02:24:23.50
cactus chu
M.
02:24:27.95
Jake
I might be getting the timeline wrong. But I think you're right. It's basically like after ah Trump had repealed some of the executive orders that Biden reinstated them and that became more explicit but it was there implicitly because the original title None regulations. Dealt with um sex. It just hadn't yet graduated to the point where it was making this distinction between biological sex and gender identity. Um, but there are other examples. I mean I think that the title 9 is a pretty clear example, but it's not the only one. So if you look at the expansion of the counter-extremism counter. Ah, what's now being pushed as domestic terrorism was once countering violent extremism is now these counter domestic terrorism programs which are. Functionally part of the same sort of broad campaign as these disinformation agencies like the one that was just you know quote unquote put on points in the department of homeland security what they're all doing is expanding. Intrusive surveillance and regulatory powers of the state to police private american citizens on the basis of ideology and on the basis of ideological. Ah. Kind of strictures and thick dots that change fairly often and that are essentially used as mechanisms to punish political dissent now. But can you find it hysterical, right? wing versions of this in the. Wing news. Yeah, of course you can. But I mean the news cycle is the news cycle. So the right wing news is playing off largely, most of the right- wing news is playing off the same kind of crude impulses that's driving the left wing news and. So I just I don't know how far it gets you to say that like these things are being overstated or or there's a kind of right-wing hysteria about some of this stuff only insofar as I take that for granted so it's incumbent on you on me on your listeners on anyone to try and filter out. Hysteria which is why I say it's important in these cases to look at what is actually becoming part of law or unofficial law since bureaucracies enact on official laws versus what is purely discursive.
02:30:06.85
Jake
Is purely a matter of rhetoric and you know what to defund the police stuff. It's a thank you now. Thank god that there's been some correction to some of this but you know we're also in the midst of a historically unprecedented murder spike. The United States right so it's None thing to say that there's been some pushback on this but the pushback has not saved the lives of of the the people who've been murdered because there were just clear obvious changes.
02:31:06.79
cactus chu
King.
02:31:23.99
Jake
Not just at the level of departmental policy but at a kind of Meta social cultural level to how people understand the legitimacy of policing the white house. Sure.
02:32:07.33
cactus chu
I mean a whole hold up hold up. There's this Meme. Ah,, there's this meme that I saw about basically like every single every single chart in All. Ah, for the rest of time we will have a star around 20202021 because of the pandemic. I Think it's quite difficult to to say like to give a causal explanation of like why why there is increased particularly like past the kind of Summer period. Why there's this increased crime I don't think you can. I don't think you can draw a kind of especially a monocausal explanation. But I think it's still like that. Completely up in the air. Why is this actually happening?
02:33:01.67
Jake
Yeah, you can say that if you want you'll be making the same argument that people made back in the 1980 s and 1990 s when they argued that it was impossible to say what drove the spikes in crime then so I just said you should know while you're saying it. Yeah, of course there was an alternate hypothesis then.
02:33:45.91
cactus chu
Wait but there is actually like an alternate hypothesis here right? there.
02:33:39.75
Jake
You should be aware. You should just be aware that this is not. This is an older argument. Um.
02:34:12.39
cactus chu
Yeah, but I think like there was nothing back then that was as salient as the pandemic is now like the drastic changes of life like okay there was no period in time where where we were kind of mandated or like at.
02:34:01.70
Jake
Um, say you say you.
02:34:45.10
cactus chu
Business closures really like a very strong enforcement regime where we were kind of shut in a shut in our homes right? like that. That's something that is something that is new.
02:34:41.59
Jake
Oh yeah, no, that was very new and I have no doubt that that had an effect I don't look at. You're right that there's not a monocausal.. There's not a simple monocausal explanation, am I saying that there's a clear correlation between them? Massive Nationwide you know, essentially an anti-licing movement that was legitimated by the most prestigious institutions of the liberal press and was treated at the very least as a kind of.
02:36:01.21
Jake
Totemically a sacred cause by the leaders of the democratic party and the ensuing spike in violent crime. Yeah I'm definitely saying I think that there is a strong correlation and you know there are any number of. Um, there's evidence to support that and one part of that evidence is that the spike has persisted beyond the lifting of lockdown restrictions and essentially the end of pandemic restrictions and it doesn't track to the. Severity of lockdown restrictions. So if the argument is that hey the pandemic caused this, you'd expect to see higher spikes in the rate of violent crime because again here's the other part of it. You would expect that if it was related to the pandemic. Primarily if that was the dominant cause why is it only a violent crime that's going up. That's not obvious. Maybe there's an explanation I don't have but in any event my larger point is that is not about what caused this. It's about the relationship of the leadership of the democratic party. To these things and I'm not saying that like Biden was a defund to the police guy he obviously wasn't I don't think that the white house has that much effect on this one way or the other and i'm. Skeptical to say the least of this idea that the white house has been a moderating influence and is sort of pushing back against the radical or progressive wing of the party I think that's a bit naive.
02:39:54.25
cactus chu
Yeah I do want to save some time for a topic that I think we have a lot more agreement on so I'll just give a I'll just give a quick statement and then give you the give you the last word on this and then we'll just move on I guess but really I do see this kind of problem where.
02:39:57.13
Jake
Sir.
02:40:33.73
cactus chu
There's just a lumping of all kinds of there are really different factions in my eyes of like covid ah covered Hawks and um and obviously the quote unquote woke and then like liberals or like centrist Democrats. Ah. And then a kind of apathetic democratic base. Ah where I think these are hyper distinct groups and the differences between them are vital in the political incentives that exist. Ah and I would say I'm going to link or I'm definitely going to link one of my articles called. The fire hose of bullshit about how these different groups interact in the incentives that they create but I really do see a very noticeable difference between especially democratic politicians and ah and especially democratic party voters who are. Kind of more centrist who are more neoliberal who just believe in a regime of kind of soft redistribution. A kind of ah civil. Ah, a kind of civil liberties type argument and. Ah I do think they kind of play into this kind of technocracy sometimes but I do think there are just different groups and there's a struggle over internal power and they are like primaries. You can see this happening and there are internal bureaucratic fights over things like department nominations and such. And there's games of influences that are played but it's it's it's not like there's there's one and there's there's None thing that that's what I would say.
02:43:31.77
Jake
There's 1 thing that there's only one look . Your first point I ah totally agree with right? So insofar as you're talking about the divisions between democratic party voters and the national party.
02:43:58.41
cactus chu
So.
02:44:06.25
Jake
Not only do I agree with you, I think anything that's not strong enough. The divisions between democratic party voters and the national party are so great as to be irreconcilable which is why the party is bleeding voters right.
02:44:41.47
cactus chu
Mm.
02:44:40.27
Jake
Which is why the party is losing historic numbers of Hispanic voters. For instance who are poised to um, ah you know flip some seats red in the midterm elections that are coming up. There's a vast divide between the national party base. The sort of liberal activist base which has pulled the party way to the left and which is sort of largely um progressive managerial in its orientation and then the average democratic party voter who as you're describing is like. Pro-free speech, not anti-capitalist, wants a more fair and equitable system of capitalism, not anti-police, right? Beaumonts more fair and equitable policing I mean this is the single most salient phenomenon so I don't want to suggest at all that I'm lumping in. Ordinary registered Democrats and in the kind of thing I've been describing I mean for what it's worth I'm also a registered as a democrat and obviously I wouldn't fit that but I think I'm also you know I'm an outlier a journalist whatever I'm hardly an ordinary voter but. Ordinary voters couldn't be more alienated from the party in that sense and the way the party deals with that is by placating them with these sort of ah fake sort of head faints and in both directions. But that's ah, that's a major major divide and it exists across all of these um, kind of key issues if you just look at the policing stuff we were talking about a second ago, you know you would not have known it from listening to most national politicians in the summer of 2020 or for the year after that and certainly not from reading the New York Times or the Washington post or other publications like that but poll after poll showed that most black voters most black americans were not anti-police right. And that in fact, ah, repeated polls show that people wanted more and better police and so there was a genuine desire for police reform of a sort There was a genuine desire for less. Abusive less intrusive policing which I think actually could have turned into a real if not bipartisan than at least a more popular national cause that didn't have to be explicitly racially divisive in the way that it was presented and could have actually brought people to.
02:50:19.41
Jake
Yeah, um, but that's different. These do you know in another obvious example, this is almost too obvious but you know the kind of Latin X stuff right? So those are voter party divisions.
02:51:01.91
cactus chu
Yeah I totally agree with you on these 2 points.
02:50:57.25
Jake
Where I disagree with you is on the salience or significance of these divisions within the party within the party disputes over who gets what nomination or who gets what seed or or local races. Um. You know I don't. I don't deny that they make a difference. I don't deny that there are real differences at play here but the differences are far less significant than the degree of top-down hegemony and control that's exercised. This is why this is dangerous. This is why I'm so invested in it because I think that it's um, destroying human freedom destroying the possibilities for difference and meaningful disagreement and that's um I find distasteful and and dangerous. And that's why I call attention to it so on the one end I think you're right about the differences being important between the party and the voters on the other hand within the party itself I think look the less. The final thought I don't want to go on and on more than I already have. But we're not just. Talking about what exists sort of technically in terms of the outcomes of particular races. We're talking about the overall orientation of the party itself and of the politics associated with the Democrats which is. Explicitly geared towards control and establishing a centralized top down locus of control punishing disagreement punishing dissent imposing a kind of rigid ideological conformity which is then. Enforced through these regulatory apparatuses like a department of homeland security or like the us postal service taking on surveillance duties for the security agencies as you know was exposed last year and as is. Enforced on an even more informal level by social media and by non-governmental bureaucracies across the country that are in some way tied to the government for their funding and legitimacy so there. What's important is the. Ah control.
02:56:18.79
cactus chu
All right? As I promised, those are certainly some very hard hitting points. But as I promised you have the last word on that topic and so the next thing that I'm just very interested in and I. And really glad that I stumbled upon this is ah 1 on to your podcast episode on the Manifesto Podcast. Ah where you talked about this. Ah this Jewish classic I think. My quarrel with Herrsch Razer I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly and it really was a kind of parable I think about the nature of reason and the nature of reason in a kind of.
02:57:14.25
Jake
Close enough. Yeah.
02:58:08.95
cactus chu
The kind of overlapping regions between the secular and religious world in this place in this case. Um Judaic World so the question I want to ask here is ah first give ah give a kind of short explanation of that story. And then at and then I want to ask how this kind of story situates itself in our kind of current liberal-ish society.
02:58:50.23
Jake
Yeah I have to thank our guests on that episode the great Joseph Keegan um for bringing that story in it's an incredible story. You know I hope you'll include a link to it. Cook can read it. It stopped too long. Great yeah by a ah yiddish writer.
02:59:37.21
cactus chu
I Certainly will.
02:59:29.87
Jake
It's called Kayam Gra and I'm supposed to summarize the story now, right? Okay, so basically it's ah. I think it took me like 40 minutes to summarize the podcast. I'll try and do it a bit quicker here, but it's essentially about 2 Ah.
03:00:01.95
cactus chu
Citizen.
03:00:16.91
cactus chu
Yeah.
03:00:07.25
Jake
These two orthodox Jews who grew up together. Um in a particular strain of Orthodox Judaism. It's not so important to get into here but the significant thing is that they are this is before the war they know each other as children. And they have this disagreement that starts between the 2 of them and and and I'm trying to remember where it set at the beginning. Do you happen to recall I think um.
03:01:36.93
cactus chu
Where it's set. No, I'm sorry.
03:01:22.97
Jake
Yeah, okay, well somewhere in the kind of greater Russian empire let's say um, but basically there's this dispute between these two childhood friends. None of whom is the. Kind of representative. It is drawn towards um, secular enlightenment. Let's say and the other of whom is a keeper of the faith and continues to believe very strongly in the um. The jewish covenant with god and and in his own duty to uphold that and and in the and in the the ultimate authority of the torah and ah, they're separated the religious friend ends up being sent to a concentration camp. During the holocaust he survives the camp and and not only survives but maintains his belief in god and years later years after the beginning of this quarrel between the 2 of them. Secular friend is in ah Paris on a train and he recognizes the religious friend on this metro in Paris and kind of ah ah you know, accosts him but in ah in a friendly way and they go sit together in a park. And as they're sitting together in a park. They continue this argument that they've been having for all these years separated by decades by the holocaust by the camps and the argument is about where one's obligations are and and whether ultimately one can find the truth only within the. Religious tradition with its the ultimate authority of torah and the divine text or whether that's a kind of um, not only a limited but perhaps even ah, a cowardly attitude and whether you know the real search for truth. Has to acknowledge the bravery of the poets and the artists like our secular character in the story who are willing to pursue the truth wherever it takes them even if it takes them away from god and toward blasphemies. And yeah and that's that the heart of the story is the coral.
03:07:00.43
cactus chu
Mm and actually I want to get your take on this first before giving mine. But what ways would we change our life After. Reading the story in the world we live in right now.
03:07:21.19
Jake
I'm not sure I understand the question What would I change my life after sure?''
03:07:46.99
cactus chu
Maybe I'll give my answer none because the virtue that stuck out to me the most was this which is very strange because it's very. It's very well-written. Very well-articulated choral but it really dances around or maybe dances. Um ah dances directly with this idea of an inarticulable insight. Right? An insight that can't be explained that can't be crafted into words ah that can't be ah that can't be processed by this kind of ah, purely purely rational in the vavarianian sense this purely rational world. And I feel like it's really the best articulation of something that maybe is quite disconnected in most people's minds, but which is this kind of like ah this really kind of like shape rotator instinct this instinct that I think exists in basically every mathematical field. And I think in a lot of kinds of pursuits of thought where it does feel like chasing an instinct chasing something sacred really of having some kind of calibration, having some kind of understanding. The world that drives where you lay out your arguments where you seek truth and how you seek that truth that can't be embedded into say a proof in the math sense or can't be embedded in say an essay or in ah. Ah, kind of like a rationalist description of the world and what I really drew from this is that there is and and something that really strikes me is that um Hirsch really kind of articulates this. Well right? he. It's kind of this paradox or he's articulating this description of things that are inarticulable and that is what really strikes me and so my answer to the question would be something along the lines of there are things that are. That is sacred if you want to use that word and here I'm speaking to my audience or at least things that are things that are inarticulable. Ah incomplete in the kind of godal sense at.
03:13:14.71
cactus chu
That you do want to hold on to and that you do want to cherish.
03:13:46.23
cactus chu
I am sorry if I just spoke for something like 8 minutes straight
03:13:31.97
Jake
No, no, no I I was very interested in what you were saying I'm not sure I heard a question though I can respond to copies that sure.
03:14:07.91
cactus chu
Oh right? Let me just repeat the question because I want to ask the same question that I just answered which is basically like I mean there are so many incredibly valuable insights that I think apply directly to how we reason about the world Now. So I would ask you the same question that I just answered, which is what kind of insight? Do you? you kind of walk away with you reading the story and then say like okay this is something that I'm going to that I'm going to persist into the future that I'm going to keep with me.
03:14:57.91
Jake
Ah, yeah, Well I mean certainly the story had a lasting impression on me. So I don't need to. I don't need to get too philosophical to answer that because my own experience is a testament to the fact that it stuck with me and I. Suppose The you know it's the quarrel that stuck with me more than a particular insight. It doesn't resolve the quarrel for me, it dramatizes the quarrel which is what great fiction does. Um.
03:16:10.47
cactus chu
Um.
03:16:14.99
Jake
And there's a way in which the truth emerges from the quarrel not from ah you know that's the poetic truth the poetic truth consists in the appreciation of this kind of irresolvable tension and i. Think that one of the things to consider is , um, whether it's possible for a truth to be worthy of being called sacred if you've, um, arrived at it yourself. Ah so in other words. Um, to take a line from the story. There's a point where after the secular character is delivered this rousing speech on behalf of the nobility of secular writers such as himself who have you know, not merely tried to pursue the truth. Their work. Let's say who has taken real risks for it. The rabbi character says something along the lines of you know he tells a story about somebody that they had smuggled a torah into the camps torah being the hebrew bible. Sacred text for jews and and risked his life for the torah and he's saying to the secular friend would any of your poets have risked their lives for a piece of paper on which they wrote a poem or for. Shakespeare for that matter for Chaucer would anybody risk their life to protect Chaucer. So it's not to deny the power of Chaucer. Perhaps you know people with enlightened ethical worldviews might regard it as an advancement, a moral advancement. Nobody should have to sacrifice themselves for a text but it is difficult to imagine something over which we can understand something over which we can see the fully human fingerprints. You know like. Where the human agency is totally transparent. It's hard to imagine truly accepting that as sacred you know and so maybe the torah is not your sacred text. But if you want. To uphold the sacred in your own life. It's worth considering what its sources are and what the possible sources are for the truly sacred rather than the vaunted or the valuable.
03:22:02.75
Jake
Maybe that's a bit esoteric but hopefully that made sense.
03:22:34.70
cactus chu
Rights and I think there's a desire for that right that that rolls into that kind of post-liberalism or kind of reaction to this kind of construction of technologies that Govern whole swaths. Ah lives are obscuring something very important, obscuring something that we should not lose.
03:23:00.97
Jake
Um, yeah, absolutely I agree with that 100% and to your earlier point about why people are feeling alienated at the moment part of it is the. You know the destruction of the foundations of the sacred to include the family and some of this is just a human civilizational Process. You know to make it out as if this was like a whole deliberate effect. By the left is part of a Grand ideological program I think is deceptive and shortsighted some of this is human beings human societies. Really human societies have to continually renegotiate their relationship to the sacred.
03:25:07.59
cactus chu
Yes.
03:24:49.13
Jake
It's not Fixed. It's historically contingent and we're in a moment now where its foundations have been eroded and the traces of it are being lost to some extent and need to be recovered and you know there I have no doubt. Are people who feel like they're living meaningful happy lives without any sense of it or without God and who are perfectly content in their atheism. But maybe they should consider that that doesn't work for everyone.
03:26:20.85
cactus chu
Yeah I think that I would agree with that. I don't know how to be okay here. Here's maybe an articulation going back to the difficulty of this thing. Um. Difficulty articulating it. But that's sacred does need to be situated in a specific time and place and that when you kind of dilute it. Especially if you make it universal I mean a synonym of universal is ah everything everywhere all at once race. Um, that kind of makes it impossible to cohere or even something deeper than to cohere but to it it creates that kind of disenchantment and and not only. Um, not only creates a potential for that disenchantment but makes it a certainty I think.
03:27:59.50
Jake
Yeah I don't have an answer to that but things being everywhere all at once all the time the permanency of that state. You know the kind of indefinite. You know say you're permanently universal and ephemeral at the same time.
03:28:24.33
cactus chu
She isn't.
03:28:38.73
Jake
Sort of the more globalized things get the more ephemeral they become right? The instantaneousness um is a form of transience and lasting things have to be rooted in particular places and in particular times.
03:29:06.55
cactus chu
M.
03:29:11.50
Jake
And then you say well if it's rooted in a particular time it isn't that ephemeral. No Why because of the chain of human connections. Another word for family and community that persists over time and. How do you restore that I mean I don't have the answers but all I can say is just as an observer and I'm not trying to be a you know I'm not trying to like endorse a particular program or religious outlook or anything like that I don't. Don't have the answers definitively. I Just noticed that people are unhappy and in need of something that seems to have been somewhat carelessly taken apart without any regard for. What it was providing and what might be able to replace it.
03:31:35.17
cactus chu
Mm on that note have the last question of the show which is what is something that has too much chaos and needs more order or has too much order. And need some more chaos.
03:31:48.17
Jake
What a great question. Um, okay, well I it's that's a I would say that popular art at the moment is suffocated by order stifled by a. A compulsory regime of orderliness and is desperately in need of more chaos and I would say that the emotional and. Emotional lives and emotional relationships between um americans under 40 seem to me to be. Chaotic in ways that cause them great pain and offer little consolation and satisfaction and ah and our people's emotional lives and their romantic lives are desperately in need of more order and. They would find much greater satisfaction and they would find much greater romance in that order you know like the formlessness is sexlessness. You know like the Void The Formless Void is kind of purely chaotic. Purely? Um, ah, emotionally impulsive approach to love and sex and human relationships is ultimately totally sexless. You know.
03:35:35.41
cactus chu
That is ah that is a very interesting contradiction I'm not sure I completely understand, but certainly the dating scene life has ah has not been great for. For me or for anyone in my generation. Yeah, on that note, Thank you.
03:35:56.17
Jake
I Wish you all better luck. Yeah, thank you very much for having me on this is ah it's been ah, an interesting and rewarding conversation.
03:36:34.83
cactus chu
Thanks for coming on and I hope that I'll be able to have you again in the future for another quarrel.
03:36:26.35
Jake
Sounds good I look forward to.