View source for BHoP 004 Pejorative Pride: The Irish in Wonderland

[https://abriefhistoryofpower.com/bhop004-pejorative-pride-the-irish-in-wonderland/ BHoP#004 Pejorative Pride: The Irish in Wonderland]

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[[Jonathan Fisk]] (JF) [[Adam Koontz]] (AK)

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=== Transcript ===
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[JF]: It's A Brief History of Power, episode four with Professor Adam Koontz.

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[JF]: He's at ctsfw.edu.

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[JF]: He's an agrarian, an egghead, and a white guy.

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[JF]: I am Fisk, Pastor Fisk.

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[JF]: I'm at stpaulrockford.org, author, fanatic, white guy.

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[JF]: And today we're going to be talking about rabbit holes.

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[JF]: The sense this is, this is, this is in the Irish and trying to understand when are the Irish, the Irish, because I mean, if it's not offensive enough to talk about when is a Jew a Jew, let's just, let's just go all whole hog.

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[JF]: Was that a pun?

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[JF]: I don't even know.

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[JF]: I don't know.

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[JF]: Could I have offended the Irish by talking about hogs?

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[JF]: That's my question.

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[AK]: Well, you could have offended the Jews, so at least we're talking about the Irish today.

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[AK]: True, true.

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[JF]: But let's start with the rabbit hole idea, because that is what I do for life, is I go down rabbit holes and I try to come out and say, look what I found in the rabbit hole.

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[JF]: But I think you're getting at something a little more.

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[JF]: You're getting at maybe what is it about human nature that desires conspiracy theory or hidden knowledge is maybe the better way to get at this.

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[JF]: Is that what you're talking about?

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[AK]: Yeah, sort of.

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[AK]: I think there's kind of two levels on which the term rabbit hole, which I think is coming originally from Alice in Wonderland because she falls down a hole and thereafter finds a completely different world available to her, open to her, but also incomprehensible to her.

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[AK]: A rabbit hole, I think, exists on one level because so many of us spend so much of our lives on the internet now.

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[AK]: And the internet, it runs

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[AK]: by nature of links.

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[AK]: So rather than listening to a speech before the invention of the printing press, where text just goes everywhere, or after the printing press, where you have linearly explained knowledge in a book, which is why books are honestly just so much longer on the same subjects in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

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[JF]: No, no, no, they're boringer.

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[AK]: Well, I think I think that depends.

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[AK]: I mean, like, because I spend so much time in books, I find the Internet extremely superficial in a certain way.

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[AK]: I'm going to say something positive about rabbit holes soon, but I think it's just rabbit holes are the way that people think about anything deep or if you talk about anything for

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[AK]: longer than five or 10 minutes, it's a deep dive at this point, is simply because we have now conformed the way that we process knowledge to the way that the internet allows you not really to focus, but to go all over the place.

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[JF]: I would suggest that in that way, you have two different kinds of rabbit hole.

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[JF]: And this gets into media ecology because frankly, you've got a rabbit hole in a book.

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[JF]: or a series of books on a topic, and you could be gone for years on that topic, right?

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[JF]: But the thing is, you're on that one topic.

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[JF]: You're on that one thread.

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[JF]: You're in a rabbit hole that can't be comprehended.

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[JF]: And Cloud Cuckoo Land, if you don't know that reference, the Internet's crazy chaos of space and interconnectedness of everything, even if it isn't really connected,

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[JF]: That's a little different, right?

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[JF]: It's harder to come up with a congealing thought or sentence.

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[JF]: In my experience, the more time you spend in that as your baseline for thinking, the more likely you are to be in Alice's Wonderland and not on terra firma.

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[AK]: So I would say that when a book gets you onto something, it either, by virtue of its amount of references or lack of references, is trying to explain to you that you're either in some kind of unreal situation, which fiction is very open about.

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[AK]: No references in fiction unless they're completely fake.

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[AK]: No references, so this is fiction.

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[AK]: If it's nonfiction and it's a book, it's trying to argue to you why this is actually important.

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[AK]: And so it doesn't want to show you that the connections are only your connections that you're making.

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[AK]: Whereas with the internet, I think negatively in the sense of you could get lost and all the knowledge that you have and the way that it's connected is completely unique to you.

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[AK]: kind of like dreams.

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[AK]: And so your knowledge, which is supposed to in some way reflect reality, now become your dreams.

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[AK]: That's possible.

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[AK]: I think positively, the thing that rabbit holes do for you, whether they're in a book or I think something positive about the way the internet is structured, is that positively, you are now able to make connections that are not otherwise available to you, which to be as somebody that works with books for a living,

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[AK]: is actually the ideal.

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[AK]: When somebody is high functioning with books, like when your profession is the writing of books, the production of books as an academic is, people don't want me to just regurgitate other people's connections.

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[AK]: They want new, unique connections from me and an adeptness with those connections that no one else has had.

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[AK]: And so I think in that way, the kind of the peril and the promise of the Internet is that everyone can do that.

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[AK]: Everyone can be a researcher.

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[AK]: I don't know if that's actually what happens, but that's that that's the suggestion from Clay Shirky.

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[JF]: And here comes everybody.

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[JF]: And he's a guy out of, I think, New York University a decade ago writing about the media ecology of the Internet and trying to make the case that it's a good thing where you just says a good thing is that it's not that everyone's going to do good work is that in the white noise, the good work will float and the bad work won't float.

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[JF]: Now, I think maybe in a system that has no confirmation bias slash no outside external pressure of money trying to mold the system, that might be true.

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[JF]: But at the moment, what passes for what people call capitalism, I'm not sure it really is capitalism, I call it global mercantilism maybe, that is tending to move the barometer on any of these kind of suggestions right now.

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[JF]: That's what we see happening regardless of what we talk about.

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[AK]: Right.

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[AK]: So I would say like rabbit holes can be positive in this sense on the internet, because the internet is honestly so much more controlled than it was even a decade ago, let alone two decades ago.

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[AK]: The nature of information, it's, it's much easier to use the internet.

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[AK]: But I would say most people are using the internet through some platform in which algorithms control the availability of information, right.

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[AK]: So if you're

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[AK]: you're on Facebook or you're on YouTube or you're using Google as a search engine, they are functioning like a kind of reference librarian and you can see the stuff within the parameters that they've set.

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[JF]: And it is pay to play.

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[JF]: It is pay to play in terms of them getting the information.

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[JF]: The information that's coming to you is not just the best guy stuff.

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[JF]: If the best guy stuff made enough money for the best guy to pay for the advertising, then it is the best guy stuff.

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[JF]: But it may be the best guy stuff stolen by a mega conglomerate turned into cheap product from another country that is being sold to you as if it were the best guy stuff.

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[JF]: Who knows?

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[JF]: It's on the internet.

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[AK]: And the best guy has to say things that are acceptable to those corporations.

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[JF]: So that's a nice segue, I suppose.

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[JF]: Not really.

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[JF]: That doesn't get us to census oddities at all.

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[JF]: Not even close to census oddities.

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[JF]: However, let me, before we do that, let me recap here.

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[JF]: We've been through a couple of episodes where we've been, I think, dialing into the story of lineage, the mythology of

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[JF]: who you think you are is usually connected to your heritage in some way, where you came from.

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[JF]: And that can be ethnicity, that can be other things.

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[JF]: America's trying to make a mythology that joins ethnicities together.

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[JF]: But one of the things we've kind of realized that if we're talking about Münster and the French Revolution and other things, is the eschatological nature of these.

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[JF]: Communism also is always promoting an end of the world, not like it ends, but like there's going to be a better thing that comes now, right?

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[JF]: We're going to get there soon.

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[JF]: So these mythologies of eschatology.

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[JF]: So what we've rushed into is, well, is there a lizard man race trying to run the planet to make this happen?

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[JF]: And our answer was kind of maybe, yeah.

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[JF]: And then there's the question of these revolutions continue to happen, have they ever given what they promised?

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[JF]: Munster, the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, all the like.

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[JF]: Not so much, but what you see is the history of men using crowds to gain power for themselves over against the previous powers.

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[JF]: And then we looked at social groups who continue in spite of this, focusing on the Quakers and the Jews as good examples of ethnicity and or ideology kind of wed together that endures over time.

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[JF]: So with all of that…

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[JF]: I think the purpose of the census, again, is to get us to the Irish, which I don't know if anybody cares about except for the Irish in you.

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[JF]: And so that's really going to be interesting for all the Irish listeners.

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[JF]: Everyone loves the Irish.

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[JF]: We like to watch them fight.

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[JF]: We like to watch them drink.

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[JF]: We like to watch them sing.

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[JF]: But it's kind of like cultural appropriation at its worst, I think, on almost every level, right?

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[JF]: We turn the river green so we can get drunk.

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[JF]: I mean, that's not really – that's not the land of the leprechauns, not quite.

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[AK]: Okay.

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[AK]: I mean, I think the connection there, and I want to get to the census, is that one of the differences between the Postal Service and Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley is fighting as hard as it possibly can to not be forced to distribute its technology and its platforms to anyone, regardless of what he says.

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[AK]: The Postal Service, pretty much, unless you're, you know, mailing bombs, has to deliver what you're saying in the mail, including your census form, and the census has to count you regardless of how

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[AK]: People may or may not like you based on who you are and what you answer on the census.

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[AK]: So what you're dealing with, with how the internet functions, is that the internet is still a place where on the basis of what you think, or to some extent who you are, platforms that almost everybody uses in the same way that pretty much everybody uses, telephone lines and mail services, which have to be neutral.

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[AK]: You have to be able to have a phone.

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[JF]: Yeah, so what we got to say here – I'm in the middle of writing it down – that this is pretty systemically, ideologically imperative to get this distinction, that there still remain in this country public platforms that are truly public, and the internet is not one of them.

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[AK]: No, no, no.

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[AK]: And maybe it was more public.

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[AK]: It was absolutely initially.

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[JF]: Yeah.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[AK]: Right.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[JF]: Phone freaks and all that.

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[JF]: I mean, they were, they were going outside the lines to make it happen in the first days.

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[JF]: I don't know if you ever watched it or heard any of that kind of stuff, the early eighties to hackers and all that.

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[JF]: But like, yeah, so again, I asked you a question about the Irish, you talked about the post office.

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[JF]: So I wrote a note.

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[JF]: Get to the census.

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[AK]: The reason I did is because the census is a place that gives you lots of interesting data, because it's delivered to everybody, everyone is actually legally required to answer that doesn't mean they do, but they are legally required to answer.

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[AK]: And you get people's self-reporting.

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[AK]: So they're not operating when they answer questions.

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[AK]: They're operating within the parameters provided by the census.

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[AK]: We talked last week about how Arabs have generally been on the U.S.

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[AK]: census white, kind of an interesting factoid.

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[AK]: But after you report your race, you can report, for instance, ethnicity.

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[AK]: And an interesting thing is that the Irish, based on immigration statistics, which are fairly exact for the Irish, the Irish are probably overrepresented on the U.S.

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[AK]: Census.

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[AK]: And there's two little kind of things to say about this that we can then discuss.

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[AK]: One factoid is that there are lots of people who really ethnically and historically should be called Scots-Irish, which is not the same thing ethnically as Irish, properly speaking at all.

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[AK]: And a lot of those people who should call themselves Scots-Irish either call themselves Irish or they report themselves, this is generally the ethnic term that's most often used in Appalachia, if you look at census maps, is American.

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[AK]: And yeah, and so there are lots of people who, if they were giving their ethnicity, probably wouldn't say American, because that really has no ethnic component at this point.

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[AK]: They should say that they're Scots-Irish, and there are lots of people who should say that they're Scots-Irish, which we can explain what that actually is.

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[AK]: who call themselves Irish, which partly has to do with how popular being Irish has become over time, whereas 200 to 300 years ago, it was not a popular thing to be at all.

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[AK]: It was, in fact, a thing that 400 to 500 years ago, the English were fairly fervently devoted to extinguishing, which the Scots-Irish had a role in.

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[JF]: Yeah.

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[JF]: I'd be curious to hear that distinction there.

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[JF]: Far and away the movie, for those of you who want to learn about the Irish and the plight they had, honestly, under even their own lords, but under British law, for the kid level.

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[JF]: More important, it's cool to be the minority once you're no longer the bottom minority, it seems, in American history.

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[JF]: And I don't want to say that that makes it OK.

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[JF]: I'm not saying that makes it okay.

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[JF]: I'm just saying it's the way it's been every generation.

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[JF]: Like there's a bottom to the immigrant, and you work your way out in one generation if you want to.

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[JF]: Are there systemic things that stop that?

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[JF]: Well, that's I guess the question of the day, isn't it?

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[JF]: I'll let you hit that before I do.

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[JF]: But can we do that through the Irish-Scots-Irish distinction, that there's a difference between these two?

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[AK]: At first, there's largely no distinction in colonial times, because they're both coming to America either from Northern Ireland, where the Scots Irish, Scots hyphen Irish were, or from Ireland proper, where the Irish, who are Roman Catholic religiously, many of whom may not speak very good English, they could also be coming from Scotland directly.

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[AK]: They're all coming here in colonial times very often as what are called at the time white slaves.

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[AK]: So there's now a distinction.

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[AK]: Yeah, there's now a distinction that's made between indentured servants and black slaves in colonial America, but legally there isn't so much of a distinction in colonial times.

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[AK]: And so they're all pretty much looked down upon, and many of them are called Irish, flat, you know, full stop, in colonial times.

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[AK]: The difference is that after the founding of the Republic, America is an overwhelmingly Protestant country.

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[AK]: And therefore, Irish, who are Roman Catholic, occupy a class kind of below Scots-Irish in many situations.

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[AK]: Oh, I see.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[AK]: Because they're not normal, right?

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[AK]: So there are actually battles on the streets of Philadelphia before the Civil War between Scots-Irish and Irish over whose Bible, Catholic or Protestant, will be read in public schools.

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[AK]: because the Protestants all go to the public school and some of the Irish go to the public school.

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[JF]: And when you say there's fights, what kind of fight are you talking about?

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[AK]: Like physical, physical, like... Physicals, but not gunfire.

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[AK]: Yeah, gunfire.

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[AK]: Gunfire.

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[AK]: Like New York right now?

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[AK]: Yeah, like present day America gunfire.

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[AK]: Yeah.

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[AK]: My goodness.

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[AK]: Yep.

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[JF]: Wow.

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[JF]: And so what year was that?

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[AK]: You know, uh, that specifically in Philly, that's 1844.

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[JF]: And is that connected to any other unrest in the area or is that really just a local Irish thing?

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[AK]: It's something that the Irish and the Scots-Irish, or Irish versus what will call themselves Americans or Native Americans, that's what the term originally meant, that happens in a variety of cities.

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[AK]: Philly, it's 1844, specifically where someone dies, and it's an American, not a Scots-Irishman, specifically ethnically, but a kind of Americanized German, just a Protestant,

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[AK]: They all think of themselves as American.

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[AK]: So they think of themselves as Americans fighting Irish.

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[AK]: The Americans actually die, but the Irish have their property destroyed.

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[AK]: There's a convent that's burnt down.

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[AK]: And the state troops, the militia, fire on the Americans.

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[JF]: So which one are the Americans?

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[JF]: The Americans are the Scots-Irish?

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[JF]: Is that right, too?

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[AK]: They're mostly Scots-Irish.

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[AK]: What's interesting here is that American identity

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[AK]: always has some sort of presumed ethnic component, but it's never official, and then it'll change, right?

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[AK]: So eventually the Irish, when they get enough political power, will also think of themselves as American.

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[JF]: How close are the Scots-Irish to the Puritans of Albion Seed?

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[JF]: uh... not at all not at all really completely that's right because they're down in the other corner right so i'm looking at it now we got quakers puritans to south southeastern tobacco and now we got the scots-irish quadrant that we're kind of filling out right now yeah that's the question so the irish in the scots-irish hang together ethnically kind of from way back but totally not together until more recently because of like notre dame maybe right and and rivers yeah you drink by stuff like stuff like notre dame football or the fact that

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[AK]: St.

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[AK]: Patrick's Day is a holiday in many states, or it's like a thing that people know about, it's a thing you do if you go to public school, probably, maybe.

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[AK]: All of that has to do with a renovation of being Irish, that the Irish accomplish in Ireland proper, but also in America in the 19th century, later on.

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[AK]: Lots, they come up with sort of, here are positive things about being Irish.

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[AK]: Here are ways that we stick together, even when we move oceans away from each other.

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[JF]: So Irish is an example.

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[JF]: Forgive me, world.

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[JF]: Are you telling me that this is a positive white culture?

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[JF]: Is that what you're saying?

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[JF]: The Irish have a positive?

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[JF]: Well, you're also nearly in a civil war, aren't they?

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[JF]: I mean, there's all sorts of other stuff going on in terms of Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland, IRA, who's in charge and all that.

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[JF]: But the image, you're right.

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[JF]: And I just got to say it.

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[JF]: I mean, no one's wanting the fighting Irish to stop having him be the fighting Irish because it's somehow bad for the Irish.

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[JF]: Everyone's like, this is good for us.

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[JF]: This is marketing people, hello.

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[JF]: You don't have to agree with me on that if you're another minority right now, but I'm saying it worked for them.

17:59.680 --> 18:01.101
[JF]: I mean, write it, write it.

18:01.742 --> 18:02.022
[JF]: Go ahead.

18:02.502 --> 18:04.824
[AK]: So it's a positive white culture.

18:04.844 --> 18:10.809
[AK]: I think the thing that you can't say is that whites have a culture now.

18:10.989 --> 18:11.690
[AK]: Yeah, right.

18:11.770 --> 18:16.273
[AK]: You can be Irish or you could be Romanian or if you're from Chicago, you could be Polish.

18:17.034 --> 18:19.478
[AK]: you couldn't say, I'm white, and I'm proud of that.

18:19.518 --> 18:22.221
[AK]: You could say, I'm Irish, and I'm proud of that.

18:22.241 --> 18:30.192
[AK]: So part of the way this functions is that really specific and often inaccurate ethnicity is OK if you're white.

18:30.994 --> 18:32.776
[AK]: Whiteness is not OK if you're white.

18:32.836 --> 18:33.277
[AK]: Interesting.

18:33.637 --> 18:33.757
[AK]: Yeah.

18:34.218 --> 18:34.478
[JF]: Yeah.

18:34.799 --> 18:41.003
[JF]: But then again, if I were to try to make a positive argument for being white, what would that even look like?

18:41.424 --> 18:44.226
[JF]: I mean, I'm not saying for being not something else.

18:44.246 --> 18:45.747
[JF]: I just happen to be me and I'm white.

18:45.787 --> 18:50.290
[JF]: And so I would like to think positively about myself without privilege and hating other people.

18:50.611 --> 18:52.132
[JF]: What does that argument look like?

18:52.252 --> 18:53.092
[AK]: Right, right, right, right.

18:53.152 --> 19:02.299
[AK]: Well, I think I think the reason that that is basically politically impossible to make that argument, the reason it's politically impossible is because white has gone from being

19:03.200 --> 19:25.200
[AK]: having a sort of, like American, the word works this way, it's gone from having a kind of positive component to it that was kind of ethnically specific and was really specific to Anglo-Saxon Americans because they were the vast majority of the white population of the United States for almost all of its existence.

19:25.620 --> 19:29.583
[AK]: Okay, that changes because of immigration from other sources in Europe.

19:30.143 --> 19:52.557
[AK]: And that but, you know, sort of, well, what were what were your ancestors conforming to if they came here in 1893, and they had to become American in some way, right, whether they were coming from Ireland, and they spoke English, or they were coming from Italy, and they spoke Italian, the kind of ways of being that they were conforming to were Protestant Anglo Saxon ways of being, I really don't have any doubt about that historically.

19:53.177 --> 20:05.481
[AK]: That kind of gets evacuated of being specifically Anglo-Saxon really during the period when America's like 90% white, but there's almost no immigration between the 20s and the 60s.

20:05.561 --> 20:10.703
[JF]: Because Anglo-Saxon, you've talked about this before, is almost a jargon term that doesn't have meaning.

20:10.923 --> 20:12.903
[JF]: When you're using it now, I'd like to know what you mean by that.

20:12.983 --> 20:15.244
[JF]: So what do you mean when you're talking about Anglo-Saxons?

20:15.504 --> 20:23.646
[AK]: Anglo-Saxon is sort of what is the common culture of the English-speaking people who hail from the British Isles.

20:23.686 --> 20:30.508
[AK]: They're not all from the same place, but they have some kind of common culture which itself changes over time, right?

20:30.548 --> 20:35.570
[AK]: So Anglo-Saxon means something slightly different in the 12th century than in the 19th.

20:36.570 --> 20:47.925
[AK]: But it's identifiable to the degree that America, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, their intelligence agencies to this day work together to a degree.

20:48.245 --> 20:49.206
[AK]: They don't work with anyone else.

20:49.226 --> 20:50.248
[JF]: They got the queen on their money.

20:51.249 --> 20:53.091
[JF]: It's the commonwealth still to some extent, right?

20:53.992 --> 20:56.394
[JF]: In that way – I feel like I said this last time and you didn't like it though.

20:56.414 --> 20:58.235
[JF]: So I'm going to say it again and then make you defend it.

20:58.615 --> 21:01.937
[JF]: Then – so it really – Anglo-Saxon is trying to describe Britannia.

21:02.057 --> 21:08.581
[JF]: I mean this is like the Arthur concept that the British Empire became for good or for ill, right?

21:08.702 --> 21:08.782
[JF]: OK.

21:09.682 --> 21:29.293
[AK]: Right, and so if you look at, you know, American names in the Civil War or kind of public discussion in the 1890s or something, there is a sense that being American has this Anglo-Saxon-ness to it, which means that Britain is, for instance, this is where the phrase the mother country comes from.

21:29.753 --> 21:35.256
[AK]: But obviously if you come here and you're Jewish and you're from Poland or you're Catholic and you're from Italy,

21:35.996 --> 21:39.658
[AK]: Thinking of Britain as the mother country makes less and less sense over time.

21:40.138 --> 21:47.681
[AK]: So that's why over time, I think this Anglo-Saxon-ness to America kind of evaporates.

21:48.121 --> 21:57.925
[AK]: And that makes it easier for someone who's Irish to think of himself as American, because if you just look at the history, being Irish and being Anglo-Saxon is kind of, those are two opposites.

21:57.965 --> 22:01.087
[AK]: That would be like being Israeli and Palestinian.

22:01.127 --> 22:01.927
[AK]: It's kind of hard to do.

22:02.427 --> 22:04.229
[JF]: Even though there's a lot of ethnic overlap.

22:04.990 --> 22:07.553
[AK]: Even though there's tons of shared history.

22:07.653 --> 22:20.107
[AK]: And if you look at sort of now that we have population genetics, I mean, English people and Irish people are not nearly so genetically distinct at this point as, say, English people and German people.

22:20.467 --> 22:21.948
[JF]: Yeah, right, right.

22:22.648 --> 22:27.390
[JF]: It has more to do with you and your family being together on that island for a couple generations than anything else.

22:27.730 --> 22:28.971
[AK]: That's really what it's about, right?

22:29.411 --> 22:33.033
[AK]: And a lot of history and a lot of suffering and a lot of violence.

22:33.581 --> 22:35.223
[JF]: Well, yes, yes.

22:35.263 --> 22:35.703
[JF]: Conflict.

22:36.524 --> 22:50.520
[JF]: The ways in which the world continues to revolve with nations rising against nation and falling with people being married and giving in marriage and every generation, I believe, a 40-year generation of intellectual thought can have a lot of cultural change take place.

22:50.580 --> 22:51.982
[JF]: I think the current

22:52.182 --> 22:52.743
[JF]: Exactly.

22:52.763 --> 22:55.906
[JF]: Philosophy of history is that things are stagnant generation to generation.

22:56.266 --> 23:02.612
[JF]: I'm not convinced that that's really true, at least in terms of people's identity and then be able to understand who they were, what they were moving toward.

23:03.353 --> 23:05.535
[JF]: Education levels didn't stay in place all the time.

23:05.595 --> 23:06.135
[JF]: Sometimes they do.

23:06.155 --> 23:06.936
[JF]: I don't know.

23:07.657 --> 23:14.503
[JF]: And so in that, culture can change a lot in three generations, and reading books will show you that it does, I think, right?

23:14.523 --> 23:15.965
[JF]: Right, yeah.

23:16.005 --> 23:16.085
[AK]: Yeah.

23:16.105 --> 23:16.946
[JF]: You want to respond to that?

23:17.586 --> 23:35.803
[AK]: Well, I think that is why rabbit holes are valuable, because a rabbit hole would be something like, if I give you a book title from the early 20th century, it's public domain, you can find it on the internet, still, they still let you look at those books, you're going to jump into an entire mental world

23:36.383 --> 23:43.009
[AK]: where, for instance, the term Anglo-Saxon has definite ethnic and political meaning that makes no sense at this point.

23:43.049 --> 23:45.711
[AK]: Where I would say that term has disappeared.

23:46.231 --> 23:51.596
[AK]: White still has a sort of racial meaning, but it's not really positive at all.

23:51.716 --> 23:55.139
[AK]: It really just has sort of negative information inside of it.

23:55.499 --> 23:57.260
[AK]: So the value of

23:58.081 --> 24:10.925
[AK]: rabbit holes is basically that they can preserve information, ideas, all kinds of knowledge that don't get carried along with whatever the mainstream is in your culture at that moment.

24:11.446 --> 24:20.949
[JF]: So it's interesting then that white as a word was asymmetrically treated as positive for what arrogant reasons, reasons, greedy reasons, money.

24:22.287 --> 24:29.650
[JF]: wealth, being able to control or limit your risk by putting that risk on other people who you call bond servants, white slaves or whatever.

24:29.690 --> 24:35.512
[JF]: But even though they were white slaves, they were not the white of that class that was bringing them over.

24:36.413 --> 24:44.356
[JF]: And that class of people saw themselves sitting on a hill, a light for the world, something to spread truth everywhere.

24:45.356 --> 24:52.204
[JF]: That was associated with the word white and then over the course of the next 200 years used pejoratively against the word black.

24:52.905 --> 25:01.836
[JF]: What we see then right now is that asymmetry trying to resolve itself and swinging asymmetrically, I would say, the other way, which sounds Hegelian once again.

25:02.136 --> 25:05.139
[JF]: You can see where Hegel gets this stuff, I think, even if he's not right in his conclusions.

25:06.058 --> 25:16.625
[AK]: Okay, so I like I would say that if you take the terms white or black, something that they're doing is differentiating all people in this case racially, regardless of income.

25:17.846 --> 25:22.789
[AK]: And so if you're in the south in the 1910s, you might be dirt poor.

25:23.370 --> 25:27.713
[AK]: But if you're white, you have certain legal advantages that a black person does.

25:27.753 --> 25:28.553
[AK]: Right, right.

25:28.573 --> 25:28.794
[AK]: Okay.

25:29.975 --> 25:31.636
[AK]: Black functions the same way.

25:32.217 --> 25:42.746
[AK]: It doesn't tell you anything about socioeconomic differences with among Blacks in any country, because these are terms that function anywhere you have a colonial endeavor, right?

25:43.367 --> 25:50.433
[AK]: It doesn't tell you anything about sort of differences of color and how, or especially in Africa, differences of tribe.

25:51.414 --> 25:53.055
[AK]: It just tells you that the person is black.

25:53.075 --> 26:07.299
[AK]: So in the United States, just being black, no matter what color your skin is or anything like that, just being black can, at this point in American history, get you legal and financial advantages that just being white doesn't get you.

26:07.879 --> 26:26.274
[AK]: So one of the things to watch here is how these really big level categories that are usually racial but could be economic in an explicitly kind of orthodox Marxist setting like revolutionary Russia, although there's ethnicity there too, but leave it aside for right now.

26:26.674 --> 26:33.159
[AK]: These big level categories can often end up benefiting the poorest members of that category group

26:33.985 --> 26:42.414
[AK]: much more than if you just go explicitly with this is about money, in which case almost nobody kind of benefits except the wealthy.

26:42.855 --> 26:50.623
[AK]: So if you look at like a racially homogeneous society, take the British Isles in the 17th century, the people that are not benefiting

26:51.764 --> 26:58.348
[AK]: from that society are the poor, because there's no other group that's lower than they are.

26:59.388 --> 27:02.610
[AK]: So all of this stuff is extremely complex.

27:03.391 --> 27:08.914
[AK]: Rabbit holes preserve this for you, listening to mainstream discourse in your own place and time.

27:09.734 --> 27:11.395
[AK]: It doesn't let you ever think outside the box.

27:11.455 --> 27:12.315
[AK]: Even ask the question.

27:12.715 --> 27:24.259
[JF]: So – and that's where – I mean you made me think about capitalism again there as you're talking about when the poorest of the poor have no one below them, then there's nothing for them to do, no way for them to grow.

27:24.819 --> 27:28.200
[JF]: So competition in some ways needs to exist.

27:28.260 --> 27:35.482
[JF]: I think that's what capitalism rightly and so deposits, is that without competition, there is no way for anyone in the society to grow.

27:35.602 --> 27:38.083
[JF]: There will only be decay and the bottom will decay first.

27:38.863 --> 27:41.866
[JF]: And a society in which the poor of the poor are always going to be the poor.

27:41.906 --> 27:44.087
[JF]: There is no competition and therefore you're going to decay eventually.

27:44.107 --> 27:45.869
[JF]: And this gets back to that tail risk stuff.

27:45.909 --> 27:53.475
[JF]: I remember reading Skin in the Game by Taleb and this idea of tail risk is just so huge that when you have the system trying to avoid risk, it can do it for a while.

27:53.535 --> 27:58.379
[JF]: But the more you push it off, the more you expose yourself to a fragility you were not expected by an event you could not foresee.

27:58.879 --> 28:01.281
[JF]: And that just seems so real in all of this to me.

28:02.042 --> 28:04.624
[JF]: Even when we talk about like American debt and all that, that's what Taleb's into.

28:05.004 --> 28:06.486
[JF]: But going back, it still applies.

28:07.026 --> 28:20.758
[AK]: So I think one of the difficulties that people have, if they haven't gone down enough rabbit holes or don't know enough about the past, is that they think that they're going to reach what you called earlier some eschatological, some end time state, right?

28:21.138 --> 28:30.106
[AK]: So if we take these measures, or if we elect this guy, or if we do these things in the next 10 years, we will achieve, for instance, in modern America, justice.

28:30.686 --> 28:37.808
[AK]: And the problem with that thinking is that you don't realize that if there are human beings around, you will continue to have problems.

28:38.288 --> 28:42.369
[AK]: So let's say that you just got rid of all white people, right?

28:42.689 --> 28:49.631
[AK]: Like you achieve, for instance, NYU, they're trying to get racially segregated housing for black students.

28:49.651 --> 28:50.951
[JF]: So it sounds like a real victory for them.

28:51.990 --> 28:55.533
[JF]: I'm sorry, I can't help myself sometimes.

28:56.193 --> 29:03.758
[AK]: I am basically certain they're going to get what they're asking for because we did this in the 60s and they got stuff like that too.

29:04.338 --> 29:05.079
[AK]: Let's say they get that.

29:05.459 --> 29:05.679
[AK]: Okay.

29:06.020 --> 29:09.582
[AK]: That group is then going to fracture along other lines.

29:09.722 --> 29:16.427
[AK]: And the reason that's going to happen is that human groups will reorganize themselves once the external enemy goes away.

29:16.867 --> 29:21.630
[AK]: Politics is not the pursuit of some sort of state of just static justice.

29:21.630 --> 29:22.330
[AK]: justice.

29:22.911 --> 29:30.295
[AK]: You can never get there with human beings because they will find something else to do to each other on some other basis.

29:31.275 --> 29:40.681
[JF]: I've been thinking about that in the inverse with the way that both parties, I think, are pitching the vote this this November, that it's all over if the other party wins.

29:41.461 --> 29:44.503
[JF]: This time, if the other party wins, it's the end.

29:44.563 --> 29:46.604
[JF]: If Trump wins, it's all over.

29:46.664 --> 29:49.125
[JF]: If Biden wins, it's all over.

29:49.525 --> 29:50.006
[JF]: And the thing is,

29:51.049 --> 29:52.069
[JF]: It's really not all over.

29:52.670 --> 29:54.110
[JF]: It's not all over till the world ends.

29:54.530 --> 29:58.972
[JF]: And no matter how you look at that, I'm pretty sure it's not happening on November 7th or whatever day we're voting.

29:59.012 --> 29:59.872
[JF]: I don't even know what day it is.

29:59.952 --> 30:13.637
[AK]: I mean, I think it's a barometer of the dysfunctionality of the American system such as it is that our politics have become apocalyptic, strictly speaking.

30:13.677 --> 30:14.197
[AK]: Yeah, right.

30:14.757 --> 30:30.921
[AK]: that your politics become apocalyptic when you're no longer able to even discuss the issues that politics have always existed to deal with, which is roads, where do people live, are people able to feed their families, issues like that.

30:31.501 --> 30:40.283
[AK]: And so for instance, I mean, the vice presidential candidate for the Democrats from California, we're not really debating on a national level

30:40.743 --> 30:48.847
[AK]: how or why California has gone from a place that has an enormous middle class 40 years ago to a place that now has almost no middle class.

30:48.887 --> 30:50.288
[AK]: Middle class can't afford to live there.

30:50.308 --> 30:52.249
[AK]: They have to go to Colorado, Texas, Idaho.

30:52.990 --> 30:57.372
[AK]: And California is a place where you have enormous wealth, but also enormous homeless encampment.

30:57.933 --> 31:03.621
[AK]: Like, how did America get favelas like Rio de Janeiro within the past 40 years?

31:04.042 --> 31:04.783
[AK]: How did that happen?

31:05.063 --> 31:07.527
[JF]: Especially since we got rid of them after the 30s.

31:07.607 --> 31:11.172
[JF]: I mean, they were there in the 20s and 30s, and then we got rid of them.

31:11.252 --> 31:12.013
[JF]: And now they're back?

31:12.093 --> 31:12.714
[JF]: I mean, what do?

31:12.774 --> 31:13.555
[JF]: Did we learn nothing?

31:13.635 --> 31:13.816
[JF]: Yes.

31:14.096 --> 31:16.139
[AK]: Okay, so like, how did that happen?

31:16.599 --> 31:17.540
[AK]: Why is that happening?

31:17.821 --> 31:18.581
[AK]: How could it be fixed?

31:18.962 --> 31:29.995
[AK]: You can't talk about stuff like that when everyone understands politics to actually be really a kind of religious struggle between ultimate goods and ultimate evils.

31:30.195 --> 31:33.059
[JF]: Which is the apocalyptic nature of all the debate at the moment.

31:33.419 --> 31:34.501
[AK]: Right, that's apocalypse.

31:34.801 --> 31:45.235
[AK]: Part of the reason that religion and politics are not identified historically in the West is because Christianity does not see them as actually talking about the same things.

31:46.482 --> 32:03.429
[AK]: But when people slip into thinking that they're the same things, it's not only that violence can be unleashed, because in any apocalyptic scenario, evil has to be not just rebuked or have its might cut off, it actually has to be destroyed, like physically destroyed, exterminated, right?

32:03.869 --> 32:05.430
[AK]: But also- Punch Nazis.

32:06.150 --> 32:09.353
[AK]: Yeah, punch Nazis, just destroy them, cancel them.

32:09.653 --> 32:20.502
[AK]: The reason all that is happening is because what I think we're actually seeing is not that so much that politics have become apocalyptic, as we are seeing the birth of new religions.

32:21.266 --> 32:29.968
[JF]: Absolutely, and I can tangent into that one directly, but before we do, I want to emphasize that sometimes it takes an evil – it takes a good to make an evil.

32:30.569 --> 32:36.910
[JF]: The idea that evil's final solution is the destruction of evil and no toleration of it whatsoever is in fact true.

32:37.371 --> 32:38.951
[JF]: That is the way that it goes.

32:39.311 --> 32:40.571
[JF]: The evil must be destroyed.

32:40.611 --> 32:44.973
[JF]: The trick is when you think you're the judge and you're in fact in the dark.

32:46.433 --> 32:47.233
[JF]: That's the trick, right?

32:47.633 --> 32:54.895
[JF]: When you're putting yourself in a position where you don't have the ability to decide what good and evil is, or you're being led by the nose by all sorts of other stories about what good and evil are.

32:55.275 --> 32:59.516
[JF]: But there is a point at which, you know, the bad guy just has to get stopped too.

32:59.916 --> 33:01.576
[JF]: And so we don't want to say that we're not saying that.

33:01.816 --> 33:06.677
[JF]: But now, we had a nice tangent into something else, which I've managed to lead myself away from, but I'm sure you remember where we went, so.

33:08.578 --> 33:13.639
[AK]: The place that we're going is to talk about what politics is actually capable of handling.

33:14.431 --> 33:22.078
[AK]: Politics is capable of handling things like whether or not you should be able to get mail, regardless of your political views.

33:22.578 --> 33:26.702
[AK]: Politics is capable of handling issues like how many roads are there?

33:26.942 --> 33:29.024
[AK]: Should we have more trains or fewer trains?

33:29.564 --> 33:33.688
[AK]: Politics is not actually capable of handling ultimate goods and ultimate evils.

33:34.489 --> 33:40.534
[AK]: That is why historically, certainly in the civilizations that founded what we know as the West,

33:42.349 --> 33:46.251
[AK]: politics and religion couldn't ever actually be the same thing.

33:46.532 --> 33:52.435
[AK]: That doesn't mean that politics and religion were always equally separated or enmeshed with each other.

33:52.795 --> 33:55.037
[AK]: That varied widely over time and space.

33:55.577 --> 34:09.786
[AK]: But politics and religion being exactly the same thing will lead to not the denigration of politics or of religion, but they're fusing in a way that can only actually finally ever be terrifying.

34:10.106 --> 34:10.266
[JF]: Yeah.

34:10.586 --> 34:13.468
[JF]: And again, that does sound a bit apocalyptic on your own, right?

34:13.789 --> 34:15.650
[JF]: Because it actually is apocalyptic.

34:15.670 --> 34:17.311
[JF]: That's right out of Revelation.

34:17.331 --> 34:36.925
[JF]: But I think aside from the spiritual reality that we could teach from that, the idea that you see two primary modes of power that exist trying to attain universal control in whatever civilization you're in, and one will use the sword and one will use the word, and sometimes they come together and then you really can't do much about it.

34:37.205 --> 34:38.907
[JF]: especially if everybody believes what they're saying.

34:38.967 --> 34:40.750
[JF]: That's when you get Japan doing what they did in World War II.

34:40.770 --> 34:42.532
[JF]: That's when you get Germany doing what they did in World War II.

34:42.552 --> 34:43.573
[JF]: They literally believe it.

34:43.954 --> 34:44.775
[JF]: Like, they're the ones.

34:44.975 --> 34:51.864
[JF]: And that's the scary thing about what we see underground here, right, is that the – when it becomes a religious fervor and not merely nationalism,

34:53.405 --> 34:57.587
[JF]: And Americana has always been like this teeter-totter on that one, by the way.

34:58.328 --> 35:02.391
[JF]: But when it becomes religious fervor, it really turns into a whole other beast.

35:02.931 --> 35:07.194
[JF]: But then the question, you kind of were saying, we're seeing more than one religion spawn right now, maybe?

35:07.574 --> 35:10.076
[JF]: So let me just throw this idea out there, and you can go wherever you want with it.

35:10.836 --> 35:16.959
[JF]: I've been thinking about how terms that we use that I would call jargon, phrases that get thrown around a lot.

35:16.979 --> 35:17.899
[JF]: Let's just call freedom one of them.

35:17.919 --> 35:19.900
[JF]: That's a really easy one in the political context.

35:19.940 --> 35:20.240
[JF]: Freedom.

35:20.760 --> 35:21.440
[JF]: Slavery is another one.

35:21.901 --> 35:26.783
[JF]: These terms get used so much that as jargon, I can make it a wax nose.

35:26.823 --> 35:28.323
[JF]: I can make it mean whatever I want in a sentence.

35:28.383 --> 35:34.346
[JF]: If I string together five jargon terms in a sentence, it sounds like I said something, but if you're not listening, you have no idea that I didn't.

35:34.646 --> 35:37.387
[JF]: And I can, again, I can manipulate this way, you this way.

35:38.247 --> 35:39.368
[JF]: The supposition I have.

35:39.868 --> 35:46.031
[JF]: is that what if jargon is in fact false gods' names of sorts?

35:46.071 --> 35:59.717
[JF]: They're ideas that are evil, that have taken the name of a good word and supplanted it with that, thus by debasing it in some way and getting us to follow it without necessarily having to set up a statute against another statute.

35:59.757 --> 36:00.838
[JF]: So for example, again, freedom.

36:01.278 --> 36:03.219
[JF]: In the name of freedom, we will conquer everybody, right?

36:03.539 --> 36:04.960
[JF]: And we will call freedom as we go.

36:05.000 --> 36:07.521
[JF]: And I'm going to tell you that's more of a false god than

36:08.242 --> 36:09.546
[JF]: I don't know, just about anything.

36:09.606 --> 36:11.934
[JF]: And I don't think you have to be a Christian to think that either, by the way.

36:12.175 --> 36:14.121
[JF]: You can just be an atheist and think that's a false god they're following.

36:15.057 --> 36:16.418
[JF]: It's like they're shouting out for an idea.

36:17.118 --> 36:27.162
[AK]: Yeah, I mean, jargon functions in a way that it calls insiders back to things that whoever is in control wants them to care about or wants to remind them of.

36:27.302 --> 36:39.947
[AK]: So whenever, for instance, America is about to be engaged in a foreign military adventure, both Democrats and Republicans will begin at least fairly towards the center of both of those things.

36:40.367 --> 36:42.688
[AK]: We'll start to talk about American values.

36:43.670 --> 36:46.493
[AK]: and often spreading American values of freedom.

36:46.854 --> 36:57.285
[AK]: That is how America, somewhat uniquely, I think, in human history, tries to export its, quote, values, which is a very post-Enlightenment word.

36:57.645 --> 36:58.887
[AK]: We don't even say truths.

36:58.947 --> 37:01.690
[AK]: We just say values, things that we think are important.

37:02.190 --> 37:04.231
[AK]: We try to export those things militarily.

37:05.311 --> 37:15.915
[AK]: So we will go to another country that is essentially a different planet as far as their values, not saying anything about the truth of what they think, but their values.

37:16.495 --> 37:18.135
[AK]: Let me interpret that for you.

37:18.155 --> 37:20.036
[AK]: You're going to now do what we do.

37:20.516 --> 37:29.421
[JF]: So just on the values part, you're going there and it's not that they wouldn't value at all things we value, but their hierarchy of ordering these things is different.

37:29.741 --> 37:34.403
[JF]: They might value, say, time with family way over, say, income perhaps, or what have you.

37:34.663 --> 37:40.026
[JF]: And so we're going in and it's so different on every level that Babel has become an issue again.

37:40.046 --> 37:40.547
[JF]: Yeah?

37:40.627 --> 37:41.467
[AK]: Yeah.

37:41.887 --> 37:46.470
[AK]: I mean, we do not recognize or do not want to recognize that

37:47.458 --> 37:56.606
[AK]: what we think and how we are, regardless of our political views, has any historically specific reason for being there.

37:57.586 --> 38:06.834
[AK]: So if an American thinks it's normal for a woman to walk around with nothing covering her hair, even if he's a fundamentalist Christian,

38:08.590 --> 38:22.121
[AK]: It's like that the reason that we think that is just because it's good and obviously good and we will therefore be able to enforce that in another country something to recognize is that the Soviet Union engaged in the very same things.

38:22.561 --> 38:25.904
[AK]: So let me just give you a rabbit hole and I know we're close to being done.

38:27.845 --> 38:34.366
[AK]: It's a rabbit hole that is worth exploring in greater detail than we're going to be able to do today.

38:34.886 --> 38:43.628
[AK]: And that is that the Soviet Union and the United States, which still exists, maybe it won't in 20 years, the Soviet Union, the CIA didn't see that coming.

38:44.128 --> 38:55.871
[AK]: But the Soviet Union, less than 10 years before the CIA didn't predict it would just dissolve, was exporting a Marxist-Leninist way of life to Afghanistan specifically.

38:55.891 --> 38:57.551
[AK]: And that's why Afghanistan is so interesting.

38:58.663 --> 39:08.709
[AK]: Because it's a place not only that various Western empires have sought to conquer, Alexander succeeded, Britain, Russia, and the United States did not succeed.

39:09.417 --> 39:28.906
[AK]: But Russia and the United States within my own lifetime, and I'm only 34, within my own lifetime have both sought to socially remake to one degree or another Afghanistan in their own images, including things like women voting or women not wearing hijab.

39:29.707 --> 39:34.789
[AK]: Lots of things that over the course of time are totally culturally unprecedented in Afghanistan.

39:36.377 --> 39:39.519
[AK]: The question is why we are unaware of that.

39:39.619 --> 39:45.323
[AK]: Probably a lot of people don't know that the Soviet Union had a 10 year engagement militarily with Afghanistan.

39:46.064 --> 39:52.348
[AK]: And probably even fewer people know how poorly it went, especially on the cultural level.

39:52.768 --> 40:00.794
[AK]: So not the level of like, who has money, who has guns, but the level of how do I control what is inside people's minds?

40:01.869 --> 40:02.870
[AK]: How are they thinking?

40:03.251 --> 40:04.633
[AK]: What do they actually care about?

40:04.733 --> 40:06.896
[AK]: And what will they do when I am gone?

40:06.916 --> 40:09.940
[AK]: Especially if I'm not from there.

40:09.960 --> 40:11.462
[AK]: I'm going to go away one day.

40:11.842 --> 40:13.064
[AK]: What will they think then?

40:13.084 --> 40:16.569
[AK]: They will just go back to thinking what they've thought for hundreds of years.

40:18.301 --> 40:23.605
[AK]: So there are not only, I think, rabbit holes on the internet, there are also rabbit holes in culture.

40:24.545 --> 40:32.530
[AK]: And this is part of why trying to control people's souls is always such a dangerous, and I think, ultimately, a fruitless endeavor.

40:33.651 --> 40:44.277
[AK]: Because people's souls are formed by things that go far, far, far, far, far deeper than the things that they're, for instance, required to repeat in school at that time.

40:44.297 --> 40:45.818
[AK]: Do you want to talk about education?

40:46.719 --> 40:47.059
[AK]: Yeah, sure.

40:48.610 --> 40:57.857
[JF]: Education to me seems to try to stop people from asking good questions, to try to stop people from networking between ideas that wouldn't normally put together.

40:58.218 --> 41:01.160
[JF]: We're told kind of across the board, it's been studied already.

41:01.700 --> 41:02.101
[JF]: We know.

41:02.521 --> 41:03.322
[JF]: Just do what we say.

41:04.102 --> 41:14.206
[JF]: And while I don't really think reinventing tires is a great idea all the time, certainly not all the time, every so often looking at the old schematics ain't a bad idea, trying to figure it out again.

41:14.526 --> 41:21.188
[JF]: But that doesn't seem to be the way education intellectually is talked about or is engaged in now, and this is a bigger topic too.

41:21.208 --> 41:23.149
[JF]: I mean you want to talk Russia, Afghanistan.

41:24.009 --> 41:27.652
[JF]: Dewey is someone you and I have not spoken of in the past.

41:27.672 --> 41:31.694
[JF]: I don't know your familiarity with Dewey, but that guy is like my archenemy in American history.

41:31.734 --> 41:37.238
[JF]: That guy is the sole problem with the entire experiment of America in my humble opinion.

41:38.158 --> 41:43.882
[JF]: It's because what education has done to industrialize education and in this way has destroyed the man's mind.

41:43.942 --> 41:44.783
[JF]: It's not there – and woman too.

41:44.803 --> 41:45.903
[JF]: It's not there to make minds.

41:46.484 --> 41:47.745
[JF]: It's there to make cogs.

41:48.585 --> 41:52.187
[JF]: And cogs don't ask questions and then don't ask questions and then you can't solve problems.

41:52.207 --> 41:53.008
[JF]: We can't solve problems.

41:53.048 --> 41:53.568
[JF]: Things get worse.

41:53.588 --> 41:54.149
[JF]: They don't get better.

41:54.629 --> 41:56.050
[JF]: And that's a lot of what we see right now.

41:56.070 --> 41:59.672
[JF]: So I don't know if that's where you wanted to go in education at all.

42:00.393 --> 42:05.156
[JF]: Soviet Russia is also the Soviet Union and Afghanistan is also interesting because.

42:05.976 --> 42:16.884
[JF]: When you said that most people wouldn't know that connection, I'm curious how many do, because I knew enough to know that we made Osama bin Laden by arming him to fight against Russia in Afghanistan, right?

42:17.365 --> 42:19.967
[JF]: So he was already radicalized.

42:20.827 --> 42:24.910
[JF]: We just equipped him to fight our enemy, and then when our enemy was gone,

42:25.831 --> 42:26.512
[JF]: we were his enemy.

42:26.972 --> 42:28.033
[JF]: All right.

42:28.193 --> 42:31.035
[JF]: So the enemy of my enemy is my friend until my enemy is dead.

42:31.275 --> 42:33.236
[JF]: And now we're up a creek.

42:34.117 --> 42:47.085
[AK]: And from his point of view, it's sort of like our favorability to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, when he was fighting the French colonial forces who had been there a lot longer than the Americans ever would be.

42:47.606 --> 42:50.888
[AK]: And we were somewhat supportive of that, at least the CIA was.

42:50.908 --> 42:53.470
[AK]: And I'm not I'm speaking, these are all matters of public record.

42:53.490 --> 42:53.650
[AK]: I mean,

42:54.206 --> 42:55.886
[AK]: They're just down some rabbit hole.

42:56.446 --> 43:04.328
[AK]: There's a continuity for Bin Laden or Ho Chi Minh, which is they're actually kind of consistent in what they're trying to do, right?

43:04.388 --> 43:07.509
[AK]: Ho Chi Minh is trying to have a Vietnam run by Vietnamese people.

43:08.069 --> 43:12.030
[AK]: And Bin Laden is trying to have an Islamic world run by Muslims.

43:13.130 --> 43:15.070
[AK]: That's not our conception of the world.

43:15.170 --> 43:21.692
[AK]: And we think of Afghanistan as different from Saudi Arabia in a way that Bin Laden, a Saudi national, does not.

43:22.052 --> 43:23.712
[AK]: But for him, there's a consistency there.

43:24.741 --> 43:33.408
[AK]: What's strange is, you were probably taught, and I was too, although the Cold War was over by then, that America and the Soviet Union were two completely different things.

43:33.608 --> 43:34.369
[JF]: Mm-hmm, yeah.

43:34.509 --> 43:36.130
[AK]: That they were divided into completely different ideas.

43:37.291 --> 43:47.700
[AK]: But it is really interesting if you look at continental European ideas in like the 20s and 30s, France, Germany, Italy, or after the Second World War,

43:48.300 --> 44:01.586
[AK]: in different parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, they see much more commonality between us and the Soviet Union, because we're both very large, very wealthy, very militarily powerful.

44:01.926 --> 44:05.688
[AK]: And most of all, we want to make other societies like our own.

44:05.968 --> 44:06.328
[JF]: Right.

44:07.089 --> 44:13.892
[AK]: It's not even enough that they should support us or not oppose us, but they need to be like us.

44:14.366 --> 44:15.207
[JF]: We are ambitious.

44:16.368 --> 44:17.208
[JF]: We are ambitious.

44:17.429 --> 44:19.850
[JF]: And Russia was ambitious and China is ambitious.

44:19.891 --> 44:22.192
[JF]: Global powers tend to be ambitious.

44:22.212 --> 44:28.878
[JF]: And a lot of times, the ones that are less ambitious, just for the record, were ambitious at one point and then got tired and got conquered.

44:28.918 --> 44:34.843
[JF]: So we all go down this, again, rabbit trail, if we're going to call it that, one way or the other, over time.

44:35.383 --> 44:40.707
[JF]: The question is, what do you do where you are now, where you have no control or power over that

44:41.568 --> 45:01.605
[JF]: series of events right so so neither you nor i are going to conquer nor save afghanistan nor stop afghanistan from being destroyed by the u.s so it can save itself like that is not in our vocation so so what does the person who is just a american do and maybe that leads us back to your final question today too right like like what

45:02.580 --> 45:03.661
[JF]: What is American now?

45:04.421 --> 45:10.204
[JF]: Are you implying perhaps that we should not use that term or are you implying that we should embrace the term and make sure we define it clearly?

45:11.004 --> 45:24.851
[AK]: I think the term American will continue to shift and people that maybe fill out the census now and write that they are American, wherever they might be or whatever they might look like, may or may not want to do that in 10 years time.

45:25.451 --> 45:30.054
[AK]: I think that it's probably more productive for the future, whether you're an American citizen or not,

45:30.754 --> 45:53.580
[AK]: to understand the nature of what the victors of the Second World War were doing, and one of which continues to do that very thing, and that is to try to give you an overarching sense of what everything is and how you should be in a way that inevitably pushes really hard on your soul.

45:54.440 --> 46:06.611
[AK]: And that is why understanding a person like Dewey, and I'd love to talk about him next time, is so important because if you don't know what America did to itself, you can't understand what it's trying to do to other people.

46:06.631 --> 46:07.112
[AK]: That's right.

46:07.172 --> 46:08.733
[JF]: That we are not just here because.

46:09.494 --> 46:15.479
[JF]: But then we, Gen X and below especially, are products of an experiment that we didn't sign up for and neither did our parents necessarily.

46:16.500 --> 46:17.802
[JF]: We just all got put in that hopper.

46:18.142 --> 46:25.308
[JF]: And honestly, if we're going to talk in the language of the day, it was a privilege to be part of it because I came out with a much better quality of life than 99% of the history of the world.

46:27.370 --> 46:31.054
[JF]: I'll take that trade off, but you're not going to get my mind for the last 40 years I have left.

46:31.074 --> 46:32.776
[JF]: I'm going to take that part back, right?

46:32.816 --> 46:35.178
[JF]: And we call it square and go from here.

46:35.739 --> 46:38.762
[JF]: So going into Dewey, that connects to another idea.

46:38.782 --> 46:45.628
[JF]: I'm really curious about guildsmanship and the history of guilds, because if you're going to talk about Dewey, you're going to offend the guild that worships him.

46:46.129 --> 46:47.550
[JF]: And so we definitely want to

46:48.411 --> 46:58.316
[JF]: think about how outside of tribes and villages, guilds are a way that people of vested interest against a common threat bind together, right?

46:58.336 --> 47:01.098
[JF]: And that gets us into unionism eventually, which brings us back to the Irish.

47:01.218 --> 47:03.539
[JF]: It's all one big picture.

47:04.179 --> 47:06.841
[JF]: So those are some of the directions we can go.

47:07.261 --> 47:10.382
[JF]: Is there anything else from today that we didn't get into?

47:10.462 --> 47:11.583
[JF]: Words create revolutions.

47:11.603 --> 47:12.884
[JF]: We didn't really touch on that one yet.

47:13.184 --> 47:14.445
[JF]: And we still have, what are we at here?

47:14.485 --> 47:16.706
[JF]: We still got a good 10 minutes at least to fill up.

47:16.866 --> 47:16.986
[JF]: So.

47:17.455 --> 47:17.675
[AK]: Yeah.

47:17.796 --> 47:22.402
[AK]: So, I mean, we can tee it up for next time in this way by talking a little bit more about education today.

47:22.422 --> 47:26.628
[AK]: And that is that education is a far more revolutionary force.

47:26.868 --> 47:29.311
[AK]: And I don't just mean what happens in a classroom.

47:29.872 --> 47:33.898
[AK]: I also mean what you imbibe through the media you consume.

47:34.833 --> 47:42.159
[AK]: Education is a much more powerful force than almost anything else in any society, because education has to do with souls.

47:42.719 --> 47:55.669
[AK]: So whether or not you have a metaphysical belief in a soul as like a real entity, or you think it's just like brain chemicals interacting electrically with each other, that doesn't really matter.

47:56.170 --> 48:03.556
[AK]: What I mean is that the part of a human being that thinks, that reasons, that feels, that hopes,

48:04.136 --> 48:07.737
[AK]: Those are undeniably things that human beings do anywhere they exist.

48:08.537 --> 48:13.298
[AK]: And education, however it comes to you, interacts with that part of you.

48:13.658 --> 48:19.379
[AK]: So it doesn't just control your time or your clothing or the words that you say in public.

48:19.459 --> 48:25.780
[AK]: It controls how you think and what you're allowed to feel and what you're allowed to think is okay or not okay.

48:26.320 --> 48:28.741
[AK]: So it is incredibly powerful.

48:29.261 --> 48:29.861
[AK]: As a concept.

48:30.754 --> 48:31.474
[AK]: as a concept.

48:31.655 --> 48:45.682
[JF]: I think most people think of it as something that only happens some places and only with some people who are qualified to be the so-called teachers, as opposed to what you're describing sounds to me like I open my eyes, the doctor smacked my butt, that hurt, what next?

48:45.802 --> 48:47.363
[JF]: I got to figure this stuff out, right?

48:47.823 --> 48:53.026
[JF]: And from day one, it is the information of you by what you are exposed to.

48:53.046 --> 49:03.512
[JF]: And that includes everything from emotional trauma, by scary events, to a book you read about Pocono de Pupu, who somehow later in life, you know, you idealized his story and that becomes part of your core identity.

49:04.033 --> 49:09.796
[JF]: All of those things are the formation of you by the informing, the information, education.

49:10.016 --> 49:12.477
[JF]: So what about the word education etymologically?

49:12.517 --> 49:13.978
[JF]: Does that help us at all to think about that?

49:14.018 --> 49:15.059
[JF]: I've never even looked into that.

49:15.459 --> 49:20.220
[AK]: Education means, the etymology of the word means to lead something out.

49:20.781 --> 49:22.081
[AK]: To lead out.

49:22.721 --> 49:23.441
[AK]: I like that.

49:23.461 --> 49:24.542
[AK]: That's a good thought.

49:24.822 --> 49:29.483
[AK]: So that involves the idea that there are actually things inside of you.

49:29.923 --> 49:32.264
[AK]: And as an educator, I completely agree with this.

49:32.624 --> 49:37.465
[AK]: There are things inside of you that have to be drawn out and formed, but they're already there.

49:37.765 --> 49:39.426
[AK]: That's why education works.

49:40.276 --> 49:40.476
[AK]: Right.

49:40.576 --> 49:41.777
[JF]: That you already exist.

49:41.797 --> 49:42.838
[JF]: And that's what you were talking about.

49:43.158 --> 49:49.343
[JF]: You have to believe there's an ego or a will or a spirit or a soul or a person.

49:49.383 --> 49:50.864
[JF]: I mean, it doesn't really matter what you call it.

49:51.124 --> 49:56.007
[JF]: There's somebody there that's more than a mushroom and they're different from the other person next to them.

49:56.327 --> 50:03.252
[JF]: And to get them to truly blossom as a human and produce for society, they must be free to be who they are.

50:04.213 --> 50:10.242
[JF]: within reason that they also are evil and must be curbed by the reality of who the rest of us are too.

50:10.342 --> 50:12.445
[JF]: And that's where so much of the struggle comes into it.

50:12.705 --> 50:15.829
[JF]: But I think both of us would say that there is a positive way to do this.

50:15.869 --> 50:20.776
[JF]: We do not despair that education is impossible simply because confusion babbles sin and all that kind of stuff.

50:20.796 --> 50:20.996
[AK]: Yeah.

50:21.136 --> 50:22.057
[AK]: No, no, not at all.

50:22.157 --> 50:26.081
[AK]: And the basic, the basic difference is, has like two parts to it.

50:26.621 --> 50:41.034
[AK]: One is if you think of education as a process and not as a set of credentials, then you understand that the most natural educators are parents because by nature, they are the ones that inform the child's life.

50:41.174 --> 50:46.939
[AK]: Most education belongs to them in a, in a very basic way that it doesn't belong to anything else on earth.

50:48.163 --> 50:57.329
[AK]: Also, that because there's already something there that I'm leading out and shaping by education, I have to respect the person.

50:57.810 --> 51:07.316
[AK]: I'm not dumping stuff into him as if he's just there for me to dump a certain amount of core curriculum or whatever it is that I'm supposed to.

51:08.257 --> 51:10.498
[AK]: agitprop, you know, whatever the party told me to say.

51:10.518 --> 51:11.458
[AK]: Yeah, the kid's not a computer.

51:11.478 --> 51:13.799
[JF]: You're not uploading programs to his head via the matrix.

51:14.039 --> 51:15.900
[JF]: The kid has to come and go.

51:16.140 --> 51:19.341
[JF]: And they're all so different in this too, which is why it can be such an extensive conversation.

51:19.361 --> 51:20.302
[JF]: But please continue.

51:21.129 --> 51:24.850
[AK]: So the parents, therefore, are the most basic educators.

51:24.890 --> 51:32.693
[AK]: And then there's lots of other people, depending on your society, urbanization, media, whatever, that are going to be involved in educating.

51:32.793 --> 51:46.958
[AK]: And that means that the person is either formed rightly in the same way that we would say that if I am good at gardening, I'm getting plants to grow in the way that naturally the shape that they should take when they're doing best.

51:47.458 --> 51:53.341
[AK]: I'm not yanking them up out of the ground, and I'm not killing them with too much sun or too much water.

51:53.361 --> 51:57.083
[AK]: I'm leading them out so that they take the shape that they're meant to take.

51:57.472 --> 51:59.433
[JF]: which does include pruning from time to time.

51:59.574 --> 52:03.717
[JF]: And so all of this, yeah, we're talking in analogies a little bit, but it's great.

52:03.737 --> 52:11.022
[JF]: So education is the idea of drawing out the human that is there, but it's not as if the knowledge is there.

52:11.102 --> 52:18.588
[JF]: The human is being drawn out in order to discover what is outside of the human, namely the teacher first, but the teacher's not like, it's all about me.

52:18.608 --> 52:19.609
[JF]: They're like, hey, check it out over there.

52:19.949 --> 52:20.910
[JF]: And over there, look at this.

52:20.930 --> 52:21.650
[JF]: These things are cool.

52:21.670 --> 52:23.852
[JF]: And before you know it, the person has become their own

52:24.252 --> 52:39.638
[JF]: The idea would be then the educated learner is simply the explorer, or I like the word entrepreneur these days, not so much as business creator, but fearless tester of things with the willingness to try again and see if it works, right?

52:39.658 --> 52:48.881
[JF]: Because, I don't know, maybe this is a little too religious here for this one, but Solomon said, it is the glory of God to hide a thing and the glory of a king to search the thing out.

52:48.981 --> 52:51.362
[JF]: And I think there's something intuitive to man's creation.

52:52.162 --> 52:59.407
[JF]: discovering what God has placed there and that education is supposed to be how we would lead our children to that discovery.

52:59.827 --> 53:10.774
[JF]: Whereas what you've described and what I think we'll see as we're looking to do is it's more of a download dump of kind of basic manufacturer's instructions to be a good American and whatever that means again.

53:11.334 --> 53:11.534
[AK]: Right.

53:11.554 --> 53:12.375
[AK]: It's also, I mean,

53:13.390 --> 53:28.141
[AK]: the idea that you're kind of dumping stuff into the person or the person needs to be reeducated or whatever it might be, or you need, you know, more diversity training, whatever it is that you're going to do, you're doing that to control the person so that you can control outcomes better.

53:28.801 --> 53:40.290
[AK]: Whereas education in the sense that we're talking about does not involve finally maintaining control over the person is you're trying to get the person to mature at which point he's doing his own learning.

53:40.470 --> 53:41.751
[AK]: He's doing his own thinking.

53:42.759 --> 53:49.628
[JF]: You can also compare it, I suppose, to the idea of a – like a brace for a tree, a sapling that's growing up, right?

53:49.668 --> 53:56.297
[JF]: So that brace is an attempt to educate in a direction but the tree needs to become its own tree at some point.

53:56.317 --> 53:57.458
[AK]: You can't lean on that.

53:57.478 --> 53:58.159
[AK]: I can't grow for it.

53:58.379 --> 53:59.361
[JF]: Yeah, right, right.

53:59.941 --> 54:01.141
[JF]: So, okay, that's cool.

54:01.181 --> 54:02.422
[JF]: That gets us a little bit away.

54:02.622 --> 54:06.543
[JF]: So then if you had to call out, what was Dewey's best contribution?

54:06.583 --> 54:08.143
[JF]: Can you do that off the cuff?

54:08.383 --> 54:10.923
[JF]: Why are we thankful Dewey came along?

54:10.943 --> 54:15.104
[JF]: The decimal system made the Library of Congress more possible maybe?

54:15.184 --> 54:17.125
[AK]: I mean, is that- That's a different Dewey anyway.

54:17.145 --> 54:18.445
[JF]: He doesn't even get credit for that one?

54:18.485 --> 54:19.325
[JF]: That's too bad.

54:19.345 --> 54:20.226
[AK]: No, that's a different Dewey.

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[AK]: Yeah, that's Melville Dewey.

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[AK]: I will give John Dewey credit for thinking systematically about education.

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[AK]: There you go.

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[AK]: All right.

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[AK]: Because I think that when people don't think holistically about stuff, and this is where I will make a plug for books over internet rabbit holes, is that at some point you have to figure out the geography of the whole country.

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[AK]: You can't just go down one rabbit hole, pop up, go down another.

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[AK]: You have to figure out where they all are, where the trees are, where the water is.

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[AK]: You have to figure out how it fits together, and John Dewey was trying to do that.

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[AK]: I like Melville Dewey better, not only because I love libraries, but also because

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[AK]: the idea of classifying all knowledge, which is what a university and a library is supposed to do, is that realistically, someone who knows how to use the catalog, the system of reference, can go anywhere and connect the things for himself.

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[AK]: And that's ultimately what we're trying to educate people to do, not to control them, but to turn them loose in the library and let them find the things and make the connections and write their own books.

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[JF]: The goal is not to follow all the right steps and turn the switch.

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[JF]: The goal is to come to something you can't solve and be able to solve it, because you've learned how to ask your own questions.

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[JF]: And education makes that possible.

55:40.916 --> 55:43.498
[JF]: What we're trying to solve here on A Brief History of Power is

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[JF]: Ha!

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[JF]: What's going on right now?

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[JF]: And how on earth are we supposed to make sense of it?

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[JF]: How can we live as good people who I myself want to be an American in the present age.

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[JF]: I want to be a good American.

55:53.987 --> 55:55.789
[JF]: I don't know that I'd call myself Scott's Irish.

55:55.889 --> 56:00.012
[JF]: My son has suddenly become the first and only forever Italian male Fisk.

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[JF]: So

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[JF]: But that's what we are.

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[JF]: We're Italians from now on whether I like it or not.

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[JF]: But what we want to do is we want to live in this country as people who care about the civilization, not because we hate the Soviet Union, but because we want to live peaceful and quiet lives with our neighbors in a good neighborhood.

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[JF]: I want to raise kids and give them a marriage and all that kind of stuff.

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[JF]: So this discussion for me is saying I can't do that well unless I know the map.

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[JF]: And the map is exactly not just where American power has spread out, how it got to where it is today, how people and organizations and groups and ethnicities have gotten to who they think they are today, but also then that tie to the global reality, which frankly I think we should pay a lot more attention to.

56:41.598 --> 56:45.181
[JF]: dare I say first world problems still compared to some of the other stuff going on.

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[JF]: I'm really curious, do you think you could tie in a brief tidbit on India, Pakistan, and China and the Uyghurs into Dewey next week?

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[JF]: Can we pull it all into one?

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[AK]: I can do something like that.

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[AK]: I also want to talk about Sputnik and math education because these things are all connected as the endeavor to make people and an entire nation something that you can control.

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[JF]: So we're going to add Sputnik.

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[JF]: And I'm going to throw India on there.

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[JF]: It doesn't have to be India, but we'll just, we'll say the Dalai Lama for fun, because he maybe is right in the middle of all that too.

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[JF]: I still don't get what his, his end game is.

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[JF]: Does he still want Tibet back?

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[JF]: I don't know.

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[JF]: We'll talk about that one next time.

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[JF]: Professor Adam Coutts, you can find more about him at ctsfw.edu.

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[JF]: You can go there and learn at his feet.

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[JF]: I'm Pastor Jonathan Fisk.

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[JF]: Find me at redfist.com or stpaulrockford.org.

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[JF]: This is A Brief History of Power.

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[JF]: We're dealing with the Irish and how they are.

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[JF]: I don't know.

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[JF]: Are you Irish, Pastor Koontz?

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[AK]: Nope.

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[AK]: Scott's Irish.

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[JF]: Scott's Irish.

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[JF]: And there's not even a little bit of overlap in that?

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[AK]: No.

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[AK]: No?

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[AK]: Not a single good Roman Catholic in my genealogy.

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[JF]: Are there leprechauns where your Scott's Irish come from?

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[AK]: No, no, just moonshine.

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[AK]: All of that.

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[AK]: We would just write American on the census.

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[AK]: Probably.

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[JF]: There you go.

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[JF]: There you go.

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[JF]: So we'll be back to talk more about not that what is it?

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[JF]: We'll do it one more time.

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[JF]: It's gonna be Dewey, Sputnik, India, Pakistan, the Dalai Lama, and I don't know, the history of power with two white guys.

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[JF]: Catch you next time.