Interviewing Josh Neal on 'American Extremist'

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FX8qO5IYsk"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]okay so here we are josh neal uh interview on the subject of his new book american extremist link to buy the book will be in the description from our good friends at imperium press um and this is really an excellent book i spent the last couple of days reading it in preparation for the stream and um you know it kind of took me back a little bit to when josh and i actually with tyler did this series on uh on ebl on critical theory and what josh seems to be doing here is it's very heavy in psychoanalysis is do a kind of critical theory but perhaps you could say from the right um and uh it's it's it's quite interesting because essentially he's kind of psychoanalyzing particularly the american political order and i guess a good place to start to kind of get your thoughts is it seems like the most important distinction that kind of runs down the center of the text is this extremist radical distinction at least in my reading and you know when you when i first heard you're writing this book called american extremist i thought you were going to write a book about like what is conventionally understood as extremists and you're just going to talk about you know far left right extremists and and what they do or whatever and then i started reading it and i realized actually what you're doing is basically describing how the dominant ideology and power structure is extremist uh and you kind of recast what an extremist means to be a kind of psychopathology and you talk about our society as being a pathocracy so to speak where um psychopathology essentially violently centralizes power or maybe subtly centralizes power through forms of psychological manipulation um and then you counter pose this with the radical who um rather than having this kind of fragile narcissistic ego and projecting their um fragility and their complicity and guilt onto others into this kind of manipulative uh you know tragic game so to speak the radical you kind of cast in this very positive light as someone who kind of seeks this kind of young individual through this like kind of genuine attempt at dramatizing the ego ideal and it's it's it's a very cool distinction um which which i found very interesting so so yeah i i just you know what made you come up with this distinction where did you you know what i'm very curious to like where where was the eureka moment for you in your thinking where you where that all kind of came together oh that's a good question um well thanks for reading and thanks for having me on it's a pleasure to talk to you again so uh get that out of the way first and pick up the book at imperiumpress.org a lot of people are buying it on amazon please don't do that uh amazon's for marketing uh jeff bezos sucks uh if you're putting out material on amazon i hate this phrase but content creators are not rewarded as they ought to be monetarily so send your money to mike and imperium press they're all fantastic i don't know the whole team i've only talked to mike he's at the risk of of sounding like i'm i'm affiliating him via the internet i mean he's he's such a great guy he's been so generous with me he's whip smart and uh he immediately understood the value of what i was doing which was why i wanted to work with i mean i sent the book out to a bunch of people and i was seriously considering other offers but i in the back of my head i was like i got to go with mike and i got to thank you for that as well because you didn't send me uh chris book you know it would take me much longer to get to where i am now so very appreciative to you and mike and and chris who was one of the last guests on no apologies so the distinction um yeah you know the left has had ownership of the word radical for a very long time and and and maybe in in the left framing it's the radical versus the reactionary the left leftists are the radicals excuse me and right wingers are our reactionaries which i think is true in in a broad sense but the something that is not really it's implicit in the writing and maybe i'll do something a little bit more on this later on uh is just the relationship towards violence so extremism is violent and radicalism is non-violent and that's kind of i think sort of the dichotomy that's been imposed on us and it's violence is a difficult thing to talk about in a heavily censored uh environment that we're in so i'll have to do a little bit of a tap dance around the subject but uh if that's not even to say that radicals aren't per se violence you know one example i often think of uh think of the formation of the of the israeli state and depending on what perspective you're taking on it you could look at these people as extremists but they had a strong ideological foundation they had a philosophical tradition that they were using to justify uh their actions and um putting aside the the the political and maybe uh geopolitical factors that helped them formulate their state there was a strong intellectual spiritual uh foundation to what they were doing and has obviously proven successful and so for me the distinction of the extremists and the radicals is is kind of in that vein where there is no there's no underpinning to the actions of the extremists and i think that's what what makes it extreme is that it's just this um lashing out uh or an acting out of despair that has no political aim that has no social aim and that i think rather than just thinking of right wings right-wingers as extremists because they're opposed to liberalism or they're opposed to um you know the progressive project of equality and all these other things that we're all familiar with you know they're extremists by definition of being opposed to the uh american project and it just makes it difficult to think about you know really essential questions and you know the the the radical is someone who has a project that they're they're aiming towards and it's really not about themself or their life history or their personal melodrama it's their actors in a much larger story that they're trying to impose on a world stage uh and and and you see a lot of people who ostensibly might be aligned with maybe your and mine interests and they lean into that the the narrative or the framing that is established by liberals you'll see this all the time on twitter it's like well how could you not be an extremist in these times right what are some conservative tropes uh not to denigrate them but like uh transgender story hour or um any of the things that that that people find kind of disgusting and offensive and reprehensible they're saying well if this is what's normal uh then how could you not be an extremist and that is accepting and reinforcing the frame that the power structure wants to put forth and i don't think we should be reinforcing or playing into uh system ideology or or system psychology and so i kind of set that up as a way to give people a an off ramp uh into something that could lead to uh actual successful political action you know a culture of creation uh as opposed to what a lot of people are slipping into now so um that's that was the kind of the heart of the dichotomy for me and it came out of a personal experience interacting with a lot of people in the alt-right and certain people i had befriended and worked alongside and just observed maybe from the outside i don't know how useful it is to embrace these modes of thinking and being that ostracized us from potential allies and from from from i know this is something that you're interested in uh from projecting narratives that would be beneficial to us and i i wanted to you know just because something is presented in media or has institutional support uh or is normalized you see more of it in public like for example transgender story hour or and i don't need to beat up on that specifically but just as an example of the kinds of things that are rolled out you know those things aren't normal uh just because they're increasingly uh ubiquitous doesn't mean that that is the new norm it's it's something that's uh it's very fringe uh fringe in in a in a negative sense a phrase that i was using for a very long time is like this idea of the tyranny of the margins that is those are marginal things uh and they only occupied the center because of the institutional support that puts it there so it's this very uh faux astroturf kind of thing that is projected by media and gives the impression of normalcy it gives the impression of of of acceptance but it if you took away that institutional support it wouldn't be there um and if you go where the normal people are so to speak that's not something that they view as acceptable it's not something that they would encourage so i just kind of wanted to shake up the conventional ways in which people think about some of these issues um because you know more and more people are becoming politically aware i suppose you could say in a way that they they weren't in the past and you see a lot of focus on like the radicalizing or what have you and a former colleague of yours through dilton this was something that he you know before shortly uh escaping the scene you know released a few videos about uh you know kind of trying to protect uh people from slipping into these right wing rabbit holes of of extremism um so i wanted to provide people who are thinking really in a deeper way about their own life in the world that they live in with an alternative i guess without belaboring the point too much uh the only alternatives are what the system is providing uh and then kind of the the anti-system communities that have cropped up on the internet uh over the last few decades um and there's kind of um uh like a regression to the lowest common denominator effect that happens on the internet uh this is something that like journalists get really worked up about or people are posting on on 4chan and poll and russian trolls and their memes and it's also toxic and it's also evil and most of it is just kind of playful mischievous uh kind of uh light-hearted dionysian uh impulses that come out underneath that there is a a kind of a sinister underbelly but it really is marginal um and all and a lot of it it should be noted is also astroturf as well so it's not it wouldn't be right to say that you know like genuine right-wing uh extremism uh is there and it's uh it's just fomenting and polluting people's brains because a lot of it is false and and deliberately placed there as as kind of a way to psychologically entrap people so um yeah it's it's easy to go in into a very dark place especially if you think of everything that's happened in the last year people are locked down they're isolated they're unemployed their personal lives are deteriorating their economic life is deteriorating it's very easy to slip into you know i'm gonna wear that mask that you're you're creating for me and i there are other choices i guess that's fundamentally what it comes down to and and behind the radical is is really all of this really positive creative uh energy that i think people can embrace uh and it and you know the radical is someone who's forward thinking uh maybe to use a phrase that i know you've become very fond of lately there's kind of a promethean aspect there uh there's a visionary aspect there and i think that's something that should be encouraged so i just wanted to to to uh in my own way provide some kind of alternative way of thinking about uh the world and and politics that will make people more successful successful whether it's in their own personal lives or if they enter the political arena uh you know the radical is a good thing you know it's a it's a good thing to be a radical uh and and the choices that we have are very limited so i just want to be able to funnel people into constructive visionary uh creative activities and that that's really that's that was the impulse behind it and a lot of it came from uh interacting with a lot of you know so-called dissident types from the internet with their right wing left wing or whatever the case might be so yeah it came from personal experience um and it's something look you were saying before we started recording and even at the start of this that i'm repurposing a lot of critical theory language and approaches to writing and uh i think we should steal everything that the left has done that's been successful over the last half century because they have been successful and um while that success again uh has benefited from large-scale institutional support i don't see why we can't take these tools these methods that have have worked uh and and use them to our own benefit well sure but i don't even in this case like psychoanalysis i mean psychoanalysis i mean you could say nietzsche uh pioneered this style of thinking but this uh it's a very it's a very radical way of taking a look at the question of ideology because ultimately psychoanalysis says before you have your rationalizations your you know your abstract thought processes um there is this kind of unconscious problematic of desire which is which is constitutive of our intuitions which exists prior to the formation of the ego to the formation of the rational self um and it draws attention to this and you know nature does this so a generative anthropology does this is other traditions that do this um but psychoanalysis is i guess you could say the dominant tradition of the 20th century which which attempts this and so i mean uh you know uh there are many books famously anti-oedipus by toulouse and guattari written by leftists complaining at the potential reactionary um implications of psychoanalysis um you know i remember when we did uh a kind of a two-part video series on g-check sublime objective ideology um we were talking about how there was actually so much in that text that we found actually relevant to kind of critiquing uh to the kind of you know right-wing uh social critique that we were engaged in um so i don't know if it's totally cut and driving it's also worth noting that what the left was at the beginning of the 20th century is nothing like what it is today um and you reference jonathan hates work in this which i think is also quite um uh quite an important thing to bring in here because i mean i've been going back over i remember i got into jonathan hates work back when the jordan peterson thing was a thing and you know peterson referenced him extensively um and i got into an argument with um a bunch of communists on twitter and it made me kind of just uh refresh you know uh because we were kind of engaged in this conversation and and i was noticing how they were constantly attributing all of these like uh evil intentions i'm just trying to find rhetoric that will enable me to like build concentration camps or something and i was like no i legitimately have issues with capitalism and i'd like to live in a society that's better for everyone and i'm not a bad guy you know what i mean i'm not to get anyone um but they just couldn't compute it you know in their world view and so it's interesting because jonathan hate um he talks about how leftists like modern leftists in in the in the united states at the very least have this two-factor morality that their two moral central moral intuitions uh fairness and um care or harm like harm avoidance um kind of mostly empathetic um and whereas like right-wingers have these moral values these moral intuitions that we but robbing us also have sanctity uh purity and loyalty and and right wing is balanced between like a five or i think he expands it to six factors even he adds in liberty or something in like in his revised works um and so what he finds and it's i think he's kind of shocked by this and you can see it in his presentations he's it's almost like he has cognitive dissonance about how to represent it it's that it turns out that conservatives are just far more morally balanced and developed and nuanced than than leftists and this is a you know the question is what shuts down all of what are these intuitions not forming and this is i think i think the answer he doesn't really give an answer but i think the answer he kind of talks about certain things but i think the answer is probably given here in psychoanalysis like you're presenting by actually going into okay well what if we have this model of ego formation being problematized uh and this kind of disables the kind of sacred connection to saying to kind of sanctified or puritanical or you know groupish concerns of loyalty um because of some kind of fundamental psychological illness so to speak or pathology i think this is a really profound idea because it really changes you know we're not going to sit around and just have this rational discussion uh you know and then come to different conclusions um it's almost like we have to engage in therapy towards our political not opponents because i mean but like people with different political views if we actually we have to actually enter into their pre-rational problematic of desire and actually engage with this and this is a this is a far more intimate and complex relationship than just like having owning them with facts and logic or whatever or having superior arguments yeah to the point about the the leftist concern about psychoanalysis giving oxygen to the reactionary in those that ebl series we did um you know it was alarming to me and this wasn't something i was totally ignorant of it was alarming to me uh how if you want to talk about pre-rational how much of the foundation of their worldview whether they were gentile or jewish was predicated on stopping the ultimate evil of mid 20th century totalitarianism in their words you know habermas famously uh to some extent built his system on rehabilitating germany and and german intellectualism and the frankfurt school uh you know being predominantly jewish uh were concerned perhaps rightfully so with with how they were treated uh i'll leave that as an open-ended question that people can spur out about in the comments section but um you know i i like a lot of those thinkers but if you cut past the intellectual contributions that they made when it comes down to fundamental questions of how society should be ordered and you know where you're drawing the line on say age of consent and things that are kind of more meaningful and immediate to people and the health of the community a lot of these people aired on very destructive just frankly disgusting practices you know i mean how many of the top french left intellectuals uh signed petitions to lower the age of consent to a number that you know certainly we would find repellent um so i mean and and this is something that that i've joked before that leftists are the real schmidians because they fully embody that that absolute enmity that that carl schmitt wrote about certainly it's the idea that most people who know schmidt are familiar with the friend enemy distinction they have that all the way down to their core and that's part of what makes that you know the thera the therapizing with them and and the the the uh perspective taken with them difficult because we are pure evil they are pure good and that's a barrier you i don't think you can really rupture um but uh i actually don't like height very much jonathan hate height however you say his last name um and i don't really agree with his hypothesis that that left wingers have kind of a a a deficit of of moral feeling and if if you look at how people have responded to the events of january 6th i just think it's a perspectival issue that the right winger might talk about the sanctity of a racial bloodline or the sanctity of their religion or the sanctity of a nation but these people uh will talk about the sanctity of the capital and the sanctity of democracy and so you know the the the to use authority in term it's very uh there's a cathexis going on where you know where how they're deploying these moral foundations really depends on what institutions or values that these people hold to be preeminent so i'm not so sure i i i cite height quite a bit in his book in the book but i don't really endorse him because i i think you know he's one of these like dave rubin liberals who are like ah the left just got too crazy and and so you know he just moves one step away from the from where leftism has gone and says well guys all right we need to we need to to uh review things and kind of reconfigure them but it's not radical enough it's still totally within that liberal framework he's like in his 60s or something he's an older guy he comes from that older type of of of leftism again the early stories anecdotes that he shares in uh the righteous mind you know he's like one of these i'm gonna backpack through india smoke a little hash and uh admire the noble savage and isn't it all so cool and novel and interesting points to expand my western mind by entertaining how the other side lives so you know there's a lot of voyeurism there um i don't know how seriously he ever took any of those things but yeah i don't find a lot in height that's really all that uh meaningful to to uh expanding our conversation but to the point about like engaging in therapy you know part of the the issue and tapping into that pre-rational the desire of the leftist uh you know a very well-established psychometric factors is the the higher trait neuroticism of left wingers so i'm i'm not so into the left right dichotomy as as a political thing but as a biotype left wingers are more neurotic on average uh higher trait openness right wingers are higher trait conscientious they're less neurotic uh they're they're more mentally stable uh maybe that would be a better way of saying they have greater access to these six uh moral foundations is that they're just they have a cleaner bill of mental health i don't know how many really neurotic people you you've known in your life joel but they're very difficult to to to to relate to they're very difficult to talk to uh everything is shrouded by paranoia and insecurity and projection um and and there's a internal conflict with all of these competing desires which is kind of fundamentally what neuroticism is in some sense it's this multiplicity of desires that are not they're not ordered in any way they're always competing with one another they're fractured and it creates tension for the individual uh and and that level of neuroticism makes identity formation very difficult who am i uh well i don't know because i've got um well ostensibly i'm heterosexual but gee that guy or that girl over there at at a certain light at a certain time of day with enough substances in my body oh i feel a little bit differently or well gee i i you know i am a middle class or upperclass person but i feel kind of guilty about it and when i go through the train station and i see these homeless people i feel a little dirty inside there's all these you know it's it's not an ordered kind of like um the spirit of apollo does not uh blossom in these people right they're not very well ordered so um one thing that that makes that even more difficult is the way in which contemporary leftism has just kind of democratized and and flattened the desire that they're all equal anyone can be pursued no single desire is better or worse than any other desire there was a story in the news recently i don't know if you heard about this you don't strike me as like a hollywood gossip type but uh there's this actor who apparently text messages got released of him and his sexual conquests where he's talking about wanting to eat these women army hammers the guy's name i've never seen a movie uh and it started this whole thing of like a cannibal fetish like he's like i'm a cannibal i want to eat you i want to devour you apparently he's very sexually abusive and aggressive and whatnot and there was a headline today like and i'm paraphrasing you know the normal way the healthy way to to pursue your cannibalism fetish like yes you can be a cannibal and there's a there's a there's a right way to do it like ethical non-monogamy which is kind of an oxymoronic term like you can do this fundamentally very destructive thing uh but you can do it the right way if i just tell you hey joel like i'm gonna do some bad stuff but if we agree that i'm gonna do the bad stuff then hey you know it's it's okay because i told you you can consent or not consent uh and and i'm you know i don't have any moral responsibility now because i told you i'm going to do these foul things now you're aware of it right so that makes it difficult um and i mean obviously it's your point before the people talk all the time about how terrible the frankfurt school was but uh you know a lot of those intellectuals were very conservative foucault for for all of his um proclivities in some sense was kind of like an upper upper-class bourgeois conservative type you know if you think about how some of these people have responded to the uh the student protests uh of may 1968 uh adorno fame you know famously uh foucault to some degree these were all people who were kind of repelled by what they saw and there was a deep conserved freud then another guy who's kind of viewed in some ways as like a degenerate pervert and and and the the the origin for everything that has gone wrong in american society in the last 100 years deeply conservative in a lot of ways um and then that so you can't look at whoever would be at a top left-wing intellectual today and say that they really bear any resemblance to the the intellectuals of the past and that speaks to kind of just the hegemonic influence that that that way of thinking has has uh enjoyed over the last few decades i'm trying to i'm trying to home in on the point here but uh yeah fundamentally it's hard to have that kind of therapeutic experience with very neurotic types because they're not even aligned in their own best interests so it's one of those situations where it does kind of feel a little bit like we're out here uh on our own and we have to do it for ourselves this is actually um i think quite relevant to a lot of these you said these are famous tropes of like normie leftist online discourse particularly amongst women like to normalize whatever weird sexual or you know voyeuristic or sorry exhibitionistic behavior or men would rather x than go to therapy like in many ways i think going to therapy is actually awful uh at least in the way therapies are commonly practiced i mean i know you have a psych like you know you know more about psychology than me because you have a degree and you teach the subject like oh i have taught the subject formally in the university system i studied psychology for a few years at university when i was younger and i remember becoming repelled by essentially it's amoral character it seems like the whole goal of i mean obviously there is a lot of difference within the discipline and so you can't paint the whole thing with the same brush but a lot of it seems like what they were teaching us was to just get people to accept their flaws and be like you know what you know what i i really i really suck in all of these different ways but what's important is that i don't feel guilty about it or shameful about it rather than how about you actually like get better you know and be a better person so you can actually take pride in who you are to a certain degree and not feel like such a piece of [ __ ] all the time that you need to come to therapy to perform these mental gymnastics to normalize your own behaviors to yourself and um this seems to be like almost like a metaphor for so much of the culture like you were describing with the cannibalism uh you know it's like i think this is where the kind of those three valleys i know you you said you think jonathan hyde sucks but those three values it seems like they have set up all of these um antithesis where like you know injunctions against loyalty you should feel guilty for feeling loyalty to your own people or you should feel or like sanctity and purity these are just um oppressive constructs designed to make you feel guilty and shameful about who you are and so you need to release yourself from them so you can be liberated and it's interesting because in this way it seems as though the leftist kind of needs it needs the fascist menace to be just on the horizon of power even if they're not there in any meaningful sense like trump needed to be the next hitler even if he was just like you know a slightly um you know a slightly more slightly less disingenuous version of the neocons or whatever uh kind of whatever you want to say about him let's not go down that road but um he had to become like the next hitler you know because in that way they could have this whole narrative about their oppression and about liberation and so forth that would be able to kind of enable them to sidestep the fact that they're ultimately incredibly nihilistic that they're just what they're not really affirming anything that's that inspiring uh but then it becomes that the kind of the kind of what they are for uh kind of attempting to defend becomes all of a sudden really like cool and interesting because it becomes liberatory um as soon as there's this kind of external authority imposed upon them and so actually source like i've seen like a lot of the leftists online react very like negatively to biden coming to power because now they don't have but now they don't have this big meta narrative you know that they can that they can like load or their desire into i think this relates to scapegoating mechanism um you know which goes back i guess to like you know nietzsche's model of resentment where um ultimately you know what the kind of hysterical subject needs to do is take all of this self-loathing as you describe neuroticism all of these kind this this kind of disordered set of desires that are contradicting one another and kind of unload it on some external uh locus has to be some bad guy that all of the problems and guilt so instead of you know instead of any of my personal failings being responsible for when my life's going up there's this suppression narrative there are these bad guys ruining everything and then i can feel like the good guy by just taking the right opinions and like posting the right things on twitter i can somehow legitimate myself um so you're right it's kind of difficult to kind of get through to these people um but i think we can at least start by recognizing that it's kind of like uh like as you described in the book we live in a pathocracy where psychological illness is what's governing society and what's and and kind of the kind of perverse incentives of of maintaining these constructs that uh i would drive all of this discourse and this is where i think bringing the psychoanalysis in is so vital and to to kind of give you something else to kind of uh talk about i got like this kind of distinction that i picked up from the fundamental extremist versus radical distinction was a distinction between condemnation and um uh uh redemption you don't use the term redemption specifically i don't think you use the term condemnation um but this idea that you were describing how the extremist hates people uh themselves so like we like you you see this leftist i'm like you know why don't you like go and hate like a hedge fund manager or these like big capitalists or like people that go to the bilderberg group and like design the global system the people who run the imf no no no i'm just going to hate some trucker guy with a maga hat because he's the real racist responsible for everything that's wrong so you have this condemnation of individuals that are really just kind of it are kind of low agency they don't have very much power and they are themselves just an expression of these wider cultural and systemic forces if they lived at a different time or they're in a different context there would be a different person they wouldn't have those beliefs um whereas you say that what the radical does is the radical kind of diagnoses the ideas and the systems which bound up our the individual self-image and doesn't blame the individual people but instead blames the kind of the kind of cultural context and and and its kind of structure and seeks to do violence in this kind of uh in this non-material dimension almost in this kind of discursive dimension um and and redeem people by saying hey look if we had if we aspired to a different set of ideas and a different kind of systematicity and how we and how we orient one another and how we organize ourselves then we could overcome the problems of of you know the interpersonal fallouts are just symptoms of this like deeper reality and so in this way there's a redemption we it's not hating any individual every individual in principle could kind of become a part of this like redemptive process if only they could um you know spiritually buy into it and go through the process of of gen of kind of incubating and and actualizing these new ideas i think this is powerful because what this does is it really it creates an incredibly interesting moral dichotomy between the kind of condemner which were kind of conditioned by christianity to un instinctively understand as as the perverse um projection a character of projection who's covering up their own sins by you know by judging the other and scapegoating with this kind of i think more culturally um uplifting archetype of of the redeemer um which is kind of very girardian kind of dichotomy but anyway i'll throw that back to you see what you think yeah to the point earlier you made about your university experience and the the psychoanalytic tradition that maybe has been more influential than any other uh probably could be traced back to to three guys uh eric fromm otto rank um and wright whose first name i don't quite remember and they were very much focused on on liberation to some degree sexual liberation almost predominantly sexual liberation um and the reason someone like trump is is the fascist is because all right wing uh thinking is fascism because it's all fundamentally you know it's axiomatically about order and hierarchy and uh to some degree repression i don't know if i really agree with that i'm not so much of a freudian on that point but sublimation would be a better way of putting it from their perspective dominance uh that any any authority in like a logocentric is necessarily dominance rather than benevolence so they take all these things which have existed in every successful civilization all throughout human history uh and they kind of flip it on the shadow side so all these things become the the hideous or evil version of what they really are so you know benevolence is dominance um you know being able to to exert will and maybe not choosing to do the most the base things you can do well that's repression um so you know rank from a lot of those guys they really honed in on on sexual liberation as being an important thing and and you go down the the the literature of the ant of the authoritarian personality and it comes down to fundamentally the child uh the child's relationship with the father and the child's developing sexuality and i think that's why you go a few decades later and all of these these leading intellectuals are you know if if not encouraging pederasty or pedophilia they're more erring on the side of emancipating the desire of the child uh so you get like the child can consent to a relationship with an adult uh you get the child can consent or or desire and it should be treated as as a something sanctified they can their desire to identify uh with their truer self the boy who wants to be a girl the girl who wants to be a boy a 70 year old man who wants to be a 15 year old girl so on and so forth you know that's what's that's what's sanctified for the leftist is his desire itself uh and so and it kind of gets to maybe somewhat of a convenient uh dichotomy of you know the left wing approach is more abstract and the right-wing approach is more more concrete and uh imminent you know you you care about about what your children look like you care if your neighbor's family stays together oh that's so the class a is so it's so ghost it's so it's always but what is really you know vivacious and vitalistic is these abstract ideals which nobody understands anyway but um yeah so the trucker is is is a bigger evil than whoever these [ __ ] that shut down robin hood and uh stop this the game stop uh amc stocks from being sold uh there are the hedge fund managers are the real heroes meanwhile your unemployed uh disabled diabetic uncle trucker uh who you know is living in his truck has nothing to his name is the ultimate embodiment of evil and it goes to a an idea that was very prominent so it's ubiquitous now you know the idea that the personal is political so they take these uh these interpersonal and intra psychic dynamics and that becomes uh the political world that they want to enter into and so everything is like you were saying a projection of and again this is a little bit convenient and and perhaps um simplifying the idea but every you know all these political issues become how i related to my father to my pastor to my older brother to the law enforcement in my neighborhood and and that's i think that is meaningful and and that's where people live and that's it's closest to home and i think it's kind of an unavoidable reality is that people project these kind of primary experiences and make a whole world view out of it and try to twist the world to conform to some idealized version of what would have been better at an earlier stage of development but um yeah i think i've taken that thought as far as i can i can stretch it to the point about redemption and condemnation uh there's an interesting guy who you might want to look into jonathan paul who's a historian and one of the things he talks most about are uh narratives of redemption and he's very interested on in the idea of well the victim narrative is predominant today it has certain appeals it's very uh it can certainly lead you into a certain kind of luxury of lifestyle our most powerful uh members of society today achieve status and are celebrated for talking about their victimhood uh i don't want to demean her for doing this but alexandria ocasio-cortez obviously kind of made a lot of news headlines in the news by talking about her experience with sexual trauma and connecting that to the attack the attack on the capitol on january 6th and in some sense you know again i didn't pay very much attention to it because i don't care um maybe she was sexually abused maybe she wasn't uh if she was you could understand why she might have the response that she did uh if she wasn't and i don't really think of her as a terribly cynical or machiavellian person at least not an intelligent one anyway um that's something that's just it's it's again it's ubiquitous it's everywhere so paul jonathan paul talks about how do you how do you encourage people to uh pursue that kind of redemptive narrative when the victimhood narrative is so powerful has so much social incentive behind it and is it's kind of psychologically always nearer to us i mean anything that goes wrong in your life like you were saying before the very first thing you can do is say you know [ __ ] you joel it was your [ __ ] faulty piece of [ __ ] i did nothing wrong right it's that's the most immediate instinctive feeling that you can have uh it it spends it takes no calorie expenditure to do that uh but you're going to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about self-reflecting and gosh you know you mentioned peterson before i haven't read uh log archipelago but i have it in my room somewhere apparently one of the ideas i'm going to go here talking about something i've never read so i apologize to the audience but one of the themes apparently in the book is uh is that souls nation kind of makes this argument that uh yeah anything that goes wrong no matter how much it was an external force that did it to you you can kind of trace back to actions that you took however minimal however seemingly inconsequential they were that sets you on this path it's very difficult to do that most people don't want to do that it takes a very high degree of humility uh to be able to think that way so yeah the victimhood is is near to us the the redemption thing you know it requires us to recapture a heroic ideal and that's very difficult to do when all of the heroes of your past are the most sinister hideous genocidal maniacs who have ever existed nothing else can compare um i i didn't i don't use the the idea of redemption at all in the book now that you've brought it up i'm kicking myself for not having done it so uh kudos to you for kind of innovating on that but that that's something i mean that's the most masculine thing in the world is i'm going to be a hero i'm going to defend other people uh you're saying before the therapy is like gay or stupid or whatever one of the reasons that it has failed so badly is because it takes a fundamentally feminine psychological uh approach and says well that's what's going to work for everybody your girlfriend my girlfriend something bad happens to her she'll cry uh talk about her feelings uh you and i you know would rather uh if something goes wrong in our neighborhood we'd rather go vigilante chase down people with baseball bats and whatnot and that's what will make us feel better and we'll be better socially integrated and we'll have more success in the future because we need to uh embody that heroic ideal it's more important for us to have dignity to be respected to feel powerful uh and those are all things that are to be brave to be able to to to be unabashedly courageous those were all things that are fundamentally uh part of heroism uh the redemption narrative can only be pushed forth by heroic people uh and you know the hero by by definition is is not there's not a whole lot of them proliferating you know it's it's you think of all the great myths it's one person from the tribe or or one person that came up lifted the world on the shoulders and then rescued everybody it's it's always a minority uh those types of people there aren't a whole lot of them around so it really does require people who can embody that heroic ideal to be as visible and successful as they can uh people like yourself or you know other people in the sphere to to uh if that redemption narrative is going to have any traction uh it requires heroes to to bring it forth well there's a few things in what you were saying that made me think of your book so one was uh i can't remember which particular psychoanalyst it was with this theory but you described um somewhere toward the middle of the book uh that the child is originally enters into this uh schizoid paranoid um mentality where before the ego forms um you have basically desires need to be met by external authorities namely the parents but any other authority figure and so the child can't exactly understand uh how to organize because it lacks an ego it lacks a capacity to kind of attribute agency in a kind of mature way um the difference between getting what they want and someone taking care of them and and someone neglecting them or denying them what they want and so you get splitting um where you and so the splitting can take different forms um but ultimately they separate out the parent that takes care of me with the parent that limits or or neglects me even if it can be inside the same parent and i've experienced this with um people with borderline personality disorder um where uh one second you're like the greatest person in the entire world and then something upsets them and now you're pure evil and it just like keeps flicking back because i think from what i understand about borderline personality disorder it has this root in this inability to progress past this stage in a fundamental way at least a certain aspect of the psyche um and so that really does seem to correspond well with the aoc example you brought up because just before she had made this whole big deal about how traumatized she was like two day two weeks after the the capitol ride or whatever many days after it was um i probably shouldn't use the term capital right because i'm legitimating the absurdity of it being called the right but anyway um a few days before that yeah well a few days before that happened the um uh the kind of gamestop thing happened and she came out actually in support she said screw the hedge funds i like that the redder boys are doing this and kind of broke ranks in a way um with what the hegemonic cultural position was supposed to be and then ted cruz responded to her saying yeah i agree with you and it was a very kind of interesting cultural moment um uh and i think you could have this kind of degree of splitting going on here if you if you wanted to psychoanalyze her and say well she realized she was on the same side of the fence as ted cruz and a bunch of nazis oh no oh no so she has to then re-establish the splitting to like reset the the kind of and she has to go through the trauma and ted cruz tried to kill me and and and you know everything is being it gets kind of reset into this dichotomy because it was very unsafe uh and and confusing um and i think i think this is a profound notion to kind of pick up because this i think enables us to understand why you have this politics of condemnation um and this like attacking of the individual and this kind of difference between i guess you could say a more mature uh psycho-politics of redemption which is based in human agency and free decision and trying to uh have a politics in which you engage with others in such a way that they've kind of voluntarily uh willfully uh embrace change and so you have this kind of right wing desire to red pill normies and like to engage in discourse and whereas then you have the left-wing condemnation of drawing this line in the sand and even like people who are nominally communist like i'm thinking of amy therese for example who is like literally a communist but she gets banned from twitter every week because she talks to leftists who are like you're not left just enough and she gets you know kicked and they're constantly cancelling people or you know the tropes um they have to keep condemning people all the time and because they don't have it's a very deterministic worldview they're either one side or the other of the paranoid schizoid split and that there's there's no capacity there's no ego formation in which i can individuate my relationship to my ego ideal okay i might do something wrong at certain times but it doesn't mean i can take responsibility for that it doesn't mean that i'm now evil um you can have nuance you know another person can make a mistake it doesn't mean they go from being you know they said one racist thing on twitter five years ago now they're like the next hitler you know what i mean like i think it really does explain the exacerbation and so in a certain way you could see a lot of these political phenomena as infantilization essentially where you have this very um undeveloped uh formation of the self and and it kind of just reflects itself in all of these moral judgments that are just pathological but i think this is where we can kind of get into the interesting most interesting idea i found in your book which is bringing in lobicheski or i don't know exactly how you pronounce this polish dude's name um but he ponerology was his thing the kind of the study of evil he was a psychiatrist but similarly into sociology political science as well and he was writing in the early 20th century um you know basically i think in this kind of interregnum period of you know national socialism and communism kind of laying siege to poland um and so he was very kind of he's confronting totalitarianism in a very real way and he he was essentially psychoanalyzing totalitarianism and i'd never read this dude um so it was a very interesting reference for me and it's where you get this idea of the pathocracy and he basically describes how you know you have these two periods in human history one where things are going more or less well which is true it seems like translated to english as happy times which sounds a little bit on the nose but i'm sure in polish it sounds a little bit better um where we basically suppress knowledge of psychopaths and you know you have like you know the the neck beard centrist who's like you crazy conspiracy theorists there's no pedophiles running the government and like you know there's no conspiracies and you know there's no evil people behind the shadows manipulating things it's just you know human error and you know we just need to like you know work on systems and we can like develop things better this kind of mentality um and he says you know essentially what occurs is is a psychopathological class basically projects its internal logic where it shifts the guilt that it should be feeling itself and the shame that it should be feeling and the moral reprehensibility that it should be feeling for its actions on to its victims and then it then uses ideological discourse to basically pathologize you know the political masses and invert their their kind of moral sensibilities into expressing their resentment and hatred upon to upon the scapegoat of which have a particular class and you bring in the juvenile and high low verse middle mechanism which is primarily the victim of this elite and i think this is very powerful idea because you describe how essentially you have normal people who have this instinctual reaction against this you know that the conservative instinctually reacts against cancer culture and against transgenderism or whatever because the conservatives a little bit more morally developed a little bit more of a well-formed ego believes in individual responsibility mature social relations and says this is this is this is ridiculous this is going too far or whatever and so eventually you have this process whereby to be normal becomes radical you know takakasana talks about the war on normal people and so you get this radicalization essentially of normality where the normal sensibilities the normal reasoning the normal uh you know the kind of usually it's no coincidence i think that conservatives are christians uh by and large the kind of natural moral default settings start kicking in and then um you kind of get this this dichotomy where then you know the um the elite in its schizoid nature that this pathography becomes increasingly paranoid and um uh overreacts perpetually to the enemy you see this now with this massive overreaction to the threat of white supremacist terrorism or whatever and if you read all the journals of you know atlantic council journals or whatever the uh you know we'll watch george soros talk or something the elite are petrified of what they call populism as this threat to democracy uh even though i think both words actually should surely mean pretty much the same thing how can you be an unpopular democracy but so you have this this massive overreaction where you just have like you know a bunch of middle class guys that just want to grill and have like normal society like it was back in the 90s or the 80s or something like uh but this is like so radical and it's a threat to their entire the entire power structure and they have to like you know attack us with vociferous uh retaliation in order to prevent us from even like seizing a little bit of power a little bit of cultural representation um it really does i think explain very profoundly a lot of these dynamics so i i you know what got you into low um and this kind of theory of totalitarianism and you know i'm very curious as to how that thought process was developed going into the book well just to your equivocating of populism and democracy i think you're right and it's funny to me you look at the totalitarian supposedly governments in the 20th century the left will tell you they were populists uh but they themselves viewed themselves as the genuine democracies of their age mussolini uh and and in a probably an accurate sense rose to power through democratic channels to some degree not totally but i mean i'm not going to get into historical tiff at this point but national socialism fascism viewed themselves as the real embodiment of of democratic government and they were populist movements so yeah i think those two ideas come together very very neatly um i wish i could tell you the the rabbit hole i slipped into that i found this global character uh you spend too much time on the internet you just start clicking things somehow you you arrive upon where you arrive but i've always wanted to understand evil uh and i think that arises from the fact that like you're saying liberalism tells us they speak out of both sides of their mouth evil isn't real you know the the the savage rapist or pedophile or mass murderer can be rehabilitated you know it's it's a therapeutic culture it's not a moralizing culture right there's no kind of almost like an arab i think aristotle irish and civilian way like there's no evil there's just making mistakes there's ignorance right you just don't know enough uh therefore you act improperly if you knew more you wouldn't act improperly so evil is ignorance um or in a modern like psychological context evil is trauma so so the the mass murder we need to understand what happens to him and his father or him and his pastor or did his mother not breastfeed him enough and so evil has some kind of uh social context or or or pedagogical context that explains it and if you admit like you're saying reform the system in these ways what we naively consider to be evil is really just the mistake of the system we correct those mistakes and then evil disappears um and that never really made sense to me uh not that i have any explanation for for evil or or where it emerges from in the lobeckian model it really is just a biotype it's a kind of um evolutionary hiccup or maybe a an evolutionary advantage of some kind it progresses through time it creates a biotype of this very dysfunctional uh histrionic uh deeply insecure narcissistic power seeking type uh that is not really socially useful and that's really the only ability they have the the comparison i always make is tolkien with wormtongue who you know insinuates himself uh next to the king and now has control of the kingdom and uh he has the real power the king just becomes a puppet for him and his desires his wills uh his will and uh where these people come from you know i'm going to ask you any metaphysical explanation but they're there they're there throughout human history they will always exist and the the liberal kind of um desire to to expel these kind of perennial human features from from from just our natural makeup uh is is very flawed just because you can't eradicate these things but yeah so he like you're saying he's confronted by all this totalitarianism he's confronted by these these very controlling violent people uh and he's trying to figure out where they come from and he basically says that that that political evil arises on the backs of three types of people the spellbinder the skirtoid and the jackal and the spellbinder is this worm tongue character socially useless no constructive creative vision no ability no desire to participate uh in in the existing social norms and so they insinuate themselves into power structures and then they begin to ostracize and they ostracize the good moral noble people uh and then recruit into the the elite uh sycophants uh violent types so so you have the spellbinder he will employ these two other classes the skertoid um loveachesky i left this out of the book to not be too edgy but he does ascribe a racial characteristic to the spellbinder and the skerotoid types um in his own research he says predominantly that his studies showed that you had more jews among the spellbinding class you had more slavs among the skirtoid class so the scriptoid is this kind of militaristic conventional conservative character who thrives in times of conflict and actually is kind of useless uh in peaceful times and and becomes kind of tyrannical when there's not some some enemy to fight uh he doesn't know how to be uh in a situation where there's no violence to commit effectively um and then the jackal type which are like these mercenaries they don't have ideologies they don't really have belief systems uh maybe you could think of them as like uh the types that eric prince might hire for blackwater uh people who are kind of amoral they they they're thrill-seeking uh they are also a perennial unnecessary type but they're mercenaries and they will just fight for whichever cause gives them the ability to uh have that intense you know in a kind of younger way that that passion for war the passion for violence the mystification of death and and those are the three types and and the pathocracy comes to power on on on the strength of these three psychological types centralizing uh usurping the existing power structure and then you know executing their will and one of the things i don't really directly connect this in the book i leave it at the very very end uh it was something i kind of hit on as i was closing up the book because you know there's a lot of talk about disgust discussed as it relates to the conservative and and liberal type uh liberals being more prone to moral disgust conservatives being more prone to kind of more biological disgust um contamination concerns about contamination food sexual disgust things like that um i i was curious about this idea of self-disgust and i only found one study that showed that that even explored self-discussion but the researcher who i believe his name is olatunji uh connects high feelings of self-disgust with an inability to or an unwillingness to strongly condemn immoral actions and i do i think we're living in an age where one prevailing affect is feeling a feeling of self-discussion the unwillingness to condemn evil the unwillingness to confront evil the unwillingness to even identify something as evil and i think you can only have something like that predominate in a culture once the spellbinding class has achieved hegemonic control because as you're you were saying before and what love chesky points out is that the spellbinder subverts the kind of folk wisdom of the people your natural naturally evolved sensibilities um if you leave people alone i think this is the the idea behind the showing point if you leave people alone they don't have uh kind of micromanaging figures around them they're going to naturally pursue the most sensible and and satisfying things that that are there for them and for most people they're going to find a job they're going to get married they're going to pursue aptitudes and hobbies that are their strengths the spellbinder comes in and he just turns all those instincts off and and what happens over time is my natural instinct might be to feel discussed towards some practices and some ideas suddenly those practices and ideas become sanctified and sanctioned by the spellbinding class what do i do in response to that after sufficient conditioning or the intergenerational accumulation of influence of the spellbinder well now that disgust which would be externally directed becomes internally directed there's something wrong with me uh for having these feelings for making these moral judgments about the things that are around me that i instinctively pre-rationally reject um and so i don't condemn them what i'm really doing is i'm i'm condemning myself and it's it's um you could also even tie in kind of a fukodian idea of responsibilism where i you know i am alone this is where some of these ideas become almost contradictory but i do think they fit side by side you know we were saying before where there's a lack of responsibility taking but um to use kind of a weird example hopefully it makes sense to you and hopefully the audience follows i don't remember exactly when this happened i think it was last summer biden got hit with a me too charge uh and it was very very quickly well i mean the whole the whole idea of joe biden you know inappropriately touching small children and sniffing women and all the weird possibly sexual stuff that he's been photographed doing um that was pushed to the side and the metoo accusation was pushed to the side and so extensively in this you know culture that is very sensitive to microaggressions and sexual improprieties uh and the the imposition of male sexuality uh that gets neatly pushed away when the the the neoliberal object of desire has to take the center that was biden all of these things that we purport to care about we don't care about them anymore uh we need our guys we're gonna push all those things away so um there's a similar thing that concept i think is similar here where ostensibly we have these values but we will dismiss them in a real politic kind of way when it's uh beneficial to us same thing with responsibility so ostensibly you know it's not a culture of responsibility but when we want to hurt you uh when we want to subjugate you when we want to marginalize you then we will invoke responsibility as a governmental technique that will help us achieve our ends so self-discuss becomes a a technique of governance whereby i am taking inordinate responsibility for my shortcomings while also not condemning or even identifying the shortcomings of the people around me shortcomings of those around me so that's just one aspect right shame and guilt are other kinds of ways in which the spellbinding class will use these psychological techniques of manipulation to harm attack and kind of defenestrate the the normal population what's that meme uh so i'm going to oversimplify it like bad men create hard times uh good men create easy times and so on and so forth everyone's heard that right that's kind of the the idea behind the lobochecking models you have these spellbinders they usher in the hard times the good men come in they push back the spellbinding class they usher in the good times uh this allows the spellbinders to proliferate again the hard times re-emerge and you have this kind of eternal cycle where uh lazy ineffectual dastardly people are able to take advantage of prosperity and then overturn the apple card so that's that's the lobocheskian idea is that prosperity naturally kind of brings about the opportunity for these spellbinders the psychopaths to inaugurate the pathocracy uh until a sufficient point where the masses rise up and this is like the conservative fantasy one day there's going to be a civil war or this is the alt-right fantasy we're going to red fill the normies and you'll reach a critical mass where the normal people rise up uh and then the pathocrats are defeated i don't think it really works that way not exactly that neat and clear-cut uh uh an approach but that's that's the idea he puts forth and he's you know i didn't know who he was he's not somebody you learn about in psychology textbooks um and and supposedly the myth goes um there's a little bit of a of a conspiracy as to whether this gentleman actually existed but supposedly he had this manuscript for several decades and he tried publishing them many many times but but the communists suppressed the publication of his work he fled poland uh zignu brzezinski uh suppressed the publication of his book and then just as he's about to die he gets it into the hands of this small publisher uh and it's released so um yeah it's interesting and i think it does provide some insight and i think one of the things that always bothered me is people when they want to talk about types of government that they don't like they they deploy these terms uh an oligarchy uh uh an autocracy all of these different concepts which actually do mean something but in our era where these words kind of have been abused because they ultimately boil down to things i like versus things i don't like what is simpler to me is to simply say what's the pathocracy i mean does it matter what style of government they're employing they're bad people and they want to do bad things they want to hurt you and they don't want to just hurt you for the accumulation of wealth they don't want to just hurt you because they want to centralize power those are necessary for their success but they want to hurt you because they're bad people and that's that's their existence is predicated on the suffering of those who would oppose them uh so it's just simpler to me to describe these things as a pathocracy because it tells us i think more about what's happening than some you know uh very like you're saying before we are we're going to try to appeal to facts and logic or are we going to talk about kind of the psychological realism that's happening here we could talk about well is this really an oligarchy or not it's simpler to say that these are deeply psychologically disturbed people and they're employing all of human history uh all of the models of economics and military strategy and psychology and media to make sure that they stay where they are yeah that's funny because it seems ve<br><!-- wp:image {"id":1776,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->rn<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img class="wp-image-1776" src="https://en.videoencontexto.com/2021/01/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Interviewing_Josh_Neal_on_American_Extremist_-FX8qO5IYsk.jpg" alt="Interviewing Josh Neal on \'American Extremist\'" /></figure>rn<!-- /wp:image -->[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]