BHoP 005 Dewy Sputnik and the Ubermensch

BHoP#005 Dewy Sputnik and the Ubermensch

Hosts

Jonathan Fisk (JF) Adam Koontz (AK)

Transcript

00:06.561 --> 00:08.081 [JF]: You're back at A Brief History with Power.

00:08.301 --> 00:10.422 [JF]: I am Pastor, Reverend Jonathan Fisk.

00:10.682 --> 00:13.382 [JF]: I'm pastor at stpaulrockford.org, author, fanatic, and white guy.

00:13.402 --> 00:15.623 [JF]: And I got with me Professor Adam Koontz.

00:15.903 --> 00:18.543 [JF]: He can be found at ctsfw.edu.

00:19.144 --> 00:20.584 [JF]: He's an agrarian egghead and white guy.

00:20.624 --> 00:26.685 [JF]: And we are into episode five, five, five, of A Brief History of Power with Two White Guys.

00:26.745 --> 00:30.046 [JF]: The goal, as I was just saying to my friend and compatriot Adam here,

00:30.826 --> 00:55.498 [JF]: is to expose the reality that there's really only been one history in the world, and it is the history of power, and that it's not as hidden as you would think, and that this can even, I don't know, I would say inspire you to look at the world differently, even from like outside your front door today, and how you engage the world both in terms of calling it what it is, but then also not letting it just push you around all the time, and to do so without necessarily having to be a totalitarian yourself.

00:56.018 --> 00:57.118 [JF]: That's my opening salvo.

00:57.138 --> 00:57.879 [JF]: How do you feel today, Adam?

00:58.559 --> 01:15.168 [AK]: I think passivity is probably one of the dominant things we're going to ironically talk about today, because a lot of the stuff that we're discussing is and was designed to induce passivity and compliance, which is kind of the flip side of power.

01:15.228 --> 01:17.710 [AK]: That's how power is experienced by most people.

01:18.090 --> 01:21.596 [AK]: Most people don't get to be in power in any way in their lives.

01:22.778 --> 01:31.313 [AK]: They experience power and modern power in all of its overarching intensity and familiarity as passive compliance.

01:31.913 --> 01:45.097 [JF]: The fact is that the independent American man generally is far more powerless than he believes, and yet he feels it, and hence the existential dread that creeps over so much of city life these days, all because of American education and a man named Dewey.

01:45.117 --> 01:46.298 [JF]: But I won't just say that.

01:46.378 --> 01:48.598 [JF]: I'll attempt to have us defend that in some way.

01:48.638 --> 01:59.722 [JF]: But first we're going to start with the fact that if anybody's going to tell you that they have power over you and you're going to keep believing that power is real, then they must at some point

02:00.362 --> 02:05.303 [JF]: Create an imaginary version of themself that exists in your future that you are willing to follow.

02:05.683 --> 02:08.184 [JF]: To do that, they create a mythology.

02:08.604 --> 02:11.825 [JF]: They create a story about themself or about you, about the world.

02:11.845 --> 02:12.325 [JF]: It doesn't matter.

02:12.725 --> 02:13.705 [JF]: We all work this way.

02:13.745 --> 02:15.366 [JF]: It's tribalism, whatever you want to call it.

02:15.386 --> 02:16.566 [JF]: It's evolution, whatever you want to call it.

02:16.586 --> 02:17.226 [JF]: I think it's Christianity.

02:17.526 --> 02:18.287 [JF]: There's always a story.

02:20.007 --> 02:23.088 [JF]: And at some point, those stories get big enough, we call them mythologies.

02:23.108 --> 02:29.589 [JF]: But the line between story, mythology, history, those things are a little bit blurry, right?

02:29.649 --> 02:34.410 [JF]: And then where this comes to pass a little bit is then what story were you edumacated with, right?

02:35.050 --> 02:38.491 [JF]: What story did they tell you the world was about when you were at your most formative time?

02:38.911 --> 02:43.672 [JF]: And do you even know that that was manipulated in the history of the United States very, very, very strictly?

02:44.473 --> 02:45.493 [JF]: So there you go.

02:45.533 --> 02:45.933 [JF]: Is that a good?

02:46.573 --> 02:46.933 [JF]: Good segue?

02:47.454 --> 02:47.934 [AK]: That's great.

02:48.094 --> 02:59.742 [AK]: Because when we talk about the history of education, we're talking about a process that ultimately is about your being forced to claim a certain story as your own.

03:00.082 --> 03:12.170 [AK]: Because we've talked before about transparency and power, how, especially in the past, other societies which were far less invested in education, certainly universal education,

03:12.910 --> 03:15.712 [AK]: those societies were generally much more transparent.

03:15.872 --> 03:18.214 [AK]: I don't mean good, I don't mean bad, I just mean transparent.

03:18.254 --> 03:22.036 [AK]: Like, transparent is not, you've probably been taught that transparency is always good.

03:22.617 --> 03:23.778 [AK]: I really don't think that's true.

03:23.798 --> 03:33.004 [AK]: I don't want to be transparent about my medical history with every single person I meet or transparent about, you know, what...

[JF] A filter can be a good thing.

03:33.404 --> 03:35.826 [AK]: Yeah, filters are good things.

03:35.886 --> 03:41.450 [AK]: I mean, we do still have the concept of private life, even if Alexa gets to be in it at this point.

03:41.988 --> 03:42.749 [JF]: Not in my world.

03:44.670 --> 03:45.231 [JF]: I'm sold out.

03:45.291 --> 03:47.172 [JF]: I'm sold out on Apple, but I got an iPhone.

03:47.212 --> 03:51.816 [JF]: And if the iPhone is in fact watching me, I had this conversation with my iPhone just the other day.

03:51.836 --> 03:53.057 [JF]: It's like, it's like, hello, iPhone.

03:53.778 --> 03:56.820 [JF]: If you're there, you know, doing all this stuff, but whatever.

03:57.321 --> 04:01.704 [JF]: But do I need, I'm totally tangenting, but do I need all three of the different conglomerates in my house?

04:01.804 --> 04:02.685 [JF]: That's kind of where I'm at.

04:02.805 --> 04:02.945 [JF]: Right.

04:03.005 --> 04:05.209 [JF]: All the different powers warring in my house.

04:05.269 --> 04:05.950 [AK]: No, I don't.

04:06.050 --> 04:06.771 [AK]: No, no.

04:06.891 --> 04:10.476 [AK]: I just have I just have a rotary phone attached to the wall.

04:10.677 --> 04:12.339 [JF]: There you go.

04:12.379 --> 04:17.747 [AK]: AT&T owns and they come collect it when I move out and then they give me a new one when I move.

04:17.947 --> 04:18.548 [JF]: Is that for real?

04:18.608 --> 04:18.969 [JF]: Is that true?

04:20.243 --> 04:21.484 [AK]: Uh, no, I, I wish.

04:21.745 --> 04:22.285 [JF]: Yeah.

04:22.645 --> 04:22.966 [AK]: Yeah.

04:23.246 --> 04:23.987 [JF]: Telegraph paper.

04:24.007 --> 04:29.151 [JF]: I distracted you were on mythology story, the building of story as education.

04:29.652 --> 04:36.398 [JF]: You made me think there is this postmodern claim often in gender studies and, and social justice studies that education is violence.

04:37.119 --> 04:43.545 [JF]: Uh, which, which is an interesting thing because as you describe it, you know, that the compelling of you to adopt a story that was not necessarily your own.

04:44.965 --> 04:48.507 [JF]: And then the question is, what right does one educate after that?

04:48.527 --> 04:51.688 [JF]: And then we can go real, real deep fast, but continue on where you were headed.

04:52.169 --> 04:54.430 [AK]: So I cannot entirely agree with that.

04:54.530 --> 05:04.334 [AK]: And I, to some extent, I enjoy reading Foucault because he talks about histories of power, but I don't entirely agree with him that power is always violence.

05:04.374 --> 05:11.297 [AK]: I think that is connected to Foucault's own warped personal nature, which we can go into another time.

05:13.118 --> 05:16.059 [AK]: his fundamental perversion on a deep human level.

05:16.980 --> 05:18.420 [AK]: Violence is not always power.

05:18.860 --> 05:25.623 [AK]: Foucault's problem is that he can't understand that human beings do live in natural communities constituted most of all by the family.

05:26.044 --> 05:26.264 [JF]: Right.

05:26.404 --> 05:27.604 [JF]: So, education is power.

05:28.244 --> 05:29.145 [JF]: It's not violence.

05:29.785 --> 05:40.393 [AK]: Education is power, power in a positive sense, in which it fosters growth in a person, natural growth, is what we have called authority.

05:40.514 --> 05:40.714 [JF]: Right.

05:41.014 --> 05:43.316 [JF]: And violence then would be power misapplied, right?

05:43.436 --> 05:43.936 [AK]: Correct.

05:44.076 --> 05:44.336 [JF]: Yeah.

05:44.597 --> 05:54.144 [JF]: And to distinguish between those two things, it requires a certain level of objectivity, which some people's trauma, frankly, the gentleman you mentioned, might have blinded him to be able to see the distinction between.

05:55.385 --> 06:10.178 [JF]: With that all said, as kindly as I may, the idea that education then is a mythology start to finish, like you walk in before the prophet and the prophet begins to dictate to you the oracles of God as to your status and the status of your people, right?

06:10.559 --> 06:12.200 [JF]: That's the idea behind a classroom.

06:12.240 --> 06:14.823 [JF]: And no matter how you put it, that's the idea behind a classroom.

06:15.223 --> 06:16.424 [JF]: Are we going to debate whether it's good or evil?

06:16.484 --> 06:19.967 JF I don't think that's what we're here for today, but we're here to kind of say that's what's been done.

06:19.987 --> 06:20.568 [JF]: Why don't we look at the

06:20.908 --> 06:22.349 [JF]: the output of that a little bit, right?

06:22.369 --> 06:25.351 [JF]: Why don't we see what was done to this last generation and a half here in America?

06:25.371 --> 06:41.883 [AK]: I mean, the strange thing to note is simply, first of all, that universal education certainly being taken out of the family in order for the vast majority of people, pretty much everybody, to be educated is historically strange, right?

06:41.944 --> 06:42.924 [JF]: By that, date that for us.

06:42.964 --> 06:43.545 [JF]: Date that for us.

06:44.085 --> 06:55.199 [AK]: So the way that we have been at least aspirationally living since the late 19th century in the West is historically very strange.

06:55.460 --> 07:01.587 [AK]: The idea that every single child should be taken out of his family

07:02.108 --> 07:11.172 [AK]: in order to be educated for a certain length of time, and then he would be released by the state in the past, maybe at eighth grade.

07:11.813 --> 07:22.558 [AK]: Now it's end of college, end of undergrad is normal, such that, you know, the people that feel countercultural say, oh, well, you only have to go to school until you're 18.

07:23.598 --> 07:30.246 [AK]: You know, that feels countercultural, whereas in history, it's very abnormal to send people to school.

07:30.346 --> 07:35.191 [AK]: Now, school has to be differentiated from learning or wisdom.

07:35.352 --> 07:35.532 [JF]: What?

07:38.991 --> 07:43.496 [AK]: I've gone to a lot of school and so I know wherever I speak, those are different things.

07:43.916 --> 07:46.760 [JF]: Well, I've done a lot of learning without going to a lot of schools.

07:48.502 --> 07:49.283 [AK]: Right, exactly.

07:50.704 --> 07:55.890 [AK]: But the scheme that is kind of normal for us, everyone goes to school,

07:56.591 --> 08:02.936 [AK]: maybe he starts when he's two or three with pre-K, and maybe he stays there until he's 22, 23.

08:03.336 --> 08:05.558 [AK]: That's very historically strange.

08:05.858 --> 08:09.901 [AK]: And so the question that we're asking today is especially, well, why does that exist?

08:10.261 --> 08:21.469 [AK]: Because people were able to feed themselves and start families and kind of have functional, not necessarily amazing, but functional societies before that was normal.

08:21.869 --> 08:23.350 [AK]: Like, I mean, like the 1970s even.

08:24.651 --> 08:24.831 [JF]: Right.

08:24.851 --> 08:25.972 [AK]: So why is it like that?

08:26.473 --> 08:27.954 [JF]: That's a really good question.

08:28.194 --> 08:33.699 [JF]: And the underlying pieces that come out of that make me want to ask kind of deeper questions.

08:33.719 --> 08:37.322 [JF]: Because I know that certainly if we're going to talk about then this, we have to talk about Dewey.

08:38.482 --> 08:43.567 [JF]: Name him as different from the decimal system as I recently learned from you, right?

08:44.067 --> 08:49.131 [JF]: But he can't have been the only finger in the pie of the American story at that time.

08:49.151 --> 08:53.215 [JF]: And even before we get there, we have to kind of acknowledge that in the

08:53.795 --> 09:19.857 [JF]: post-Civil War into World War I and then World War I into post-World War II, there was a rising power that the United States had that it did not have before that could certainly compel men of various reputes to desire to hold it and to desire to extend it and desire to shape the future of a continent by means of certain organized what?

09:20.277 --> 09:20.838 [JF]: Experiments.

09:21.358 --> 09:22.459 [JF]: We really should call them experiments.

09:22.479 --> 09:23.719 [JF]: And I'm not saying this was all evil.

09:24.139 --> 09:25.320 [JF]: It's not all evil intent.

09:25.640 --> 09:25.820 [AK]: No.

09:26.080 --> 09:27.101 [JF]: But it certainly is corruptible.

09:27.901 --> 09:32.023 [JF]: And then Dewey's just a piece of that, what they wanted us to be.

09:32.083 --> 09:36.845 [JF]: And they put it in the water, you know, like into the panspermia of the aliens long ago.

09:36.865 --> 09:38.386 [JF]: It's just, you know, 100 years ago.

09:38.874 --> 09:41.636 [AK]: So yeah, so Dewey is not the first.

09:41.677 --> 09:56.490 [AK]: I would say that probably the most influential figure in education, American education before Dewey, is a guy named Horace Mann, who is part of what at the time was called M-A-N-N, what at the time was called the Common School Movement.

09:57.090 --> 10:01.714 [AK]: And that started in New England and then was exported to other states.

10:01.834 --> 10:05.638 [AK]: So first it comes to the kind of the middle, mid-Atlantic states.

10:06.458 --> 10:08.159 [JF]: Are you saying this is puritanical?

10:08.179 --> 10:09.239 [JF]: Are you saying this is Yankee?

10:09.259 --> 10:10.860 [JF]: Or wait, is it all of that?

10:11.080 --> 10:11.961 [AK]: So, right.

10:12.101 --> 10:25.487 [AK]: It's all of that because when we're talking about Yankee, not just the way that Southerners might have talked about that or maybe still do, but as a certain like exportation of a way of being American that is a way of being modern.

10:26.227 --> 10:39.619 [AK]: is that everyone goes into a school in Horace Mann's time that is at least non-denominationally Protestant and to which everyone goes for a certain length of time and it's run by the state.

10:39.759 --> 10:50.849 [AK]: And so the state is kind of unofficially Protestant and the state is also rather officially in control of your child's education because if you don't send your child

10:51.690 --> 10:59.012 [AK]: more and more and more as time goes on, the law will punish you for not sending your child to the state school.

10:59.712 --> 11:19.878 [AK]: And the opt-outs are unusual and few, and it's why long before there were homeschoolers, the fights that you had in American education, not so much in Mann's time, but down into Dewey's time, so we're talking late 19th, early 20th century, those fights are between parochial schools, religious schools, and state schools,

11:20.438 --> 11:23.000 [AK]: Because the fundamental question is who gets to tell the story.

11:23.341 --> 11:23.641 [JF]: Right.

11:24.361 --> 11:24.642 [JF]: Right.

11:25.482 --> 11:28.165 [JF]: So to just throw a cog into all of that.

11:28.185 --> 11:28.765 [AK]: Yeah.

11:28.865 --> 11:37.513 [JF]: I can't hear that without coming to the conclusion that public education is a breach of the separation between church and state, no matter how you do it.

11:38.038 --> 11:51.141 [AK]: I think that, like in the 1950s, because of a case, Abington v. Shemp, where a Unitarian boy sued in suburban Philadelphia for the right not to participate in school prayer.

11:51.621 --> 12:04.024 [AK]: And then the Supreme Court, because of various things going on with how the federal government relates to the states, said, yes, if the federal government cannot establish any exercise of religion, neither can the states or local school boards.

12:04.804 --> 12:15.748 [AK]: But I think what doesn't ever change in American educational history is the kind of the threat of education, which is you must participate in this.

12:16.428 --> 12:21.310 [AK]: And if you don't, you at least have to pay for it via things like property taxes.

12:21.670 --> 12:28.412 [AK]: So I think it is, I think it's more helpful if you think of public education as America's version of a state church.

12:29.048 --> 12:29.228 [JF]: Right.

12:29.268 --> 12:31.210 [JF]: Well, that's what I'm – so that's exactly what I'm saying, right?

12:31.691 --> 12:47.228 [JF]: So they claim to segregate religion from the process and create the religion of materialism if it wasn't already there before, which I have a total tangent on this, but it is fascinating to see it in the world of fantasy, sci-fi, blah, blah, blah.

12:47.788 --> 12:54.689 [JF]: You can probably find a lot of parallels of this, but a video game I played recently with my kids, there are three different religious paths you can choose.

12:54.709 --> 12:56.870 [JF]: It's just a little hack and slash 2D platformer thing.

12:57.490 --> 13:01.871 [JF]: And, but you have basically different gods and they describe them differently.

13:01.891 --> 13:06.631 [JF]: And one is this woman of life and giving and, you know, and one of the three gods of honor and justice.

13:06.932 --> 13:10.772 [JF]: And then you have this group that just worships the gold that exists in the ground.

13:11.052 --> 13:14.753 [JF]: And you have this other group that just worships the rocks that exist in the ground, because that's

13:14.913 --> 13:15.874 [JF]: all that there is.

13:16.134 --> 13:17.055 [JF]: That's life, right?

13:17.295 --> 13:19.497 [JF]: Well, hey, look at that.

13:19.557 --> 13:20.298 [JF]: It's modernism.

13:20.458 --> 13:21.099 [JF]: It's a religion.

13:21.339 --> 13:30.107 [JF]: And if we could just get over that, I think our discussions with atheists about, like, civil policy would go a lot further if they could acknowledge that they are a religious perspective, whether they want to or not.

13:30.127 --> 13:40.137 [JF]: I mean, a tangent here, but then these schools are, one way or the other, whether it's what the atheists want or not, they are a religious endeavor on behalf of the tribe.

13:40.777 --> 13:43.963 [JF]: And can Christians participate in that is a question maybe for a different time.

13:44.123 --> 13:46.428 [JF]: First, it's just—acknowledge this, right?

13:46.468 --> 13:48.151 [JF]: We have a mythology being told.

13:48.692 --> 13:49.814 [JF]: How much do you believe it?

13:49.854 --> 13:51.838 [JF]: How much do you have to believe this mythology, Adam?

13:51.898 --> 13:52.940 [JF]: Do you believe in John Bunyan?

13:54.019 --> 13:55.480 [JF]: That was part of it for me, man.

13:55.500 --> 13:56.080 [JF]: John Bunyan.

13:56.380 --> 13:58.120 [JF]: I want to know who Davy Crockett was, right?

13:58.401 --> 13:59.201 [JF]: And Daniel Boone?

13:59.821 --> 14:06.603 [AK]: Okay, so I think the reason this is confusing to people is because the mythology has changed over time.

14:07.504 --> 14:12.966 [AK]: So I went to public school, my parents went to public school, my grandparents went to public school, because we were

14:13.846 --> 14:19.970 [AK]: historically kind of low church Protestants, and there was no conflict between that and public school, right?

14:20.290 --> 14:26.334 [AK]: If we had been Catholic or certain kinds of Jewish or a Missouri Synod Lutheran, there would have been a conflict.

14:26.354 --> 14:27.195 [AK]: There was no conflict.

14:27.635 --> 14:31.397 [AK]: But the content of that mythology has changed radically over time.

14:31.437 --> 14:38.522 [AK]: So I took, you know, tons of American history classes in high school because I was interested.

14:39.302 --> 14:42.805 [AK]: And the content of what I learned was vastly different from what my father had learned.

14:43.425 --> 14:45.426 [AK]: in the same state decades earlier.

14:45.486 --> 14:56.390 [AK]: So he had learned a mythology surrounding certain American heroes, and especially a certain telling of what the Civil War was about, and the settling of the West, all of this kind of thing.

14:56.930 --> 15:06.313 [AK]: I learned a different mythology in which, you know, generally sort of white men are villains, and then here are these different groups that were hurt in different ways by the villains,

15:07.153 --> 15:09.654 [AK]: America is about the promise of expanding rights.

15:10.054 --> 15:14.535 [AK]: We don't really have heroes except people that have expanded rights, this sort of thing.

15:14.875 --> 15:20.097 [AK]: The content and the ideology and the mythology were very different.

15:20.477 --> 15:28.559 [AK]: What didn't change was that we had to go to that forum and listen to a certain mythology every weekday

15:29.399 --> 15:31.342 [AK]: for our entire youth.

15:31.962 --> 15:33.224 [AK]: That was the same, right?

15:33.284 --> 15:44.477 [AK]: So it was as if you had gotten a completely different preacher in the state church, but you all still had to go to the state church and you had to pay taxes to the state church and the state church would tell you what to think.

15:44.677 --> 15:48.982 [JF]: And it just has to hit you that the original Lutheran schoolhouse was the pastor.

15:50.443 --> 15:52.184 [JF]: Like, that was it.

15:52.244 --> 15:54.524 [JF]: He preached to you in the mornings all week.

15:54.684 --> 15:55.324 [JF]: That's what happened.

15:55.344 --> 16:00.506 [JF]: I mean, math happened too, but not without the connection to the story of the church.

16:01.346 --> 16:07.608 [JF]: And if you just compare that to the product now, we will see a little mission creep, is what I'll call that, going on.

16:08.888 --> 16:14.230 [JF]: Pun not intended, but it's actually there on both levels, actually, if you want to chase it.

16:14.910 --> 16:17.130 [JF]: But back toward our tack today.

16:17.951 --> 16:18.231 [JF]: So then,

16:19.158 --> 16:20.479 [JF]: We're talking about American education.

16:20.499 --> 16:23.281 [JF]: We're talking about the myth of the post-Deweyite world.

16:23.301 --> 16:26.363 [JF]: Let's just make sure we nail that myth down there.

16:26.423 --> 16:27.764 [JF]: What did Dewey want the world to be?

16:27.804 --> 16:29.185 [JF]: Because I think he did do it.

16:29.345 --> 16:29.786 [JF]: He won.

16:29.806 --> 16:31.107 [JF]: This is in fact his world.

16:31.587 --> 16:31.987 [AK]: Okay.

16:32.147 --> 16:39.733 [AK]: I think Dewey is formative in transitioning America from a sort of unofficially Protestant

16:40.273 --> 16:55.030 [AK]: And ethnicity plays in here too because America in Dewey's lifetime had shifted from being pretty much overwhelmingly British derived Protestants to being a sort of multi ethnic Europe transplanted to a different continent right so.

16:55.470 --> 17:19.416 [AK]: All of the immigration after the Civil War changes America, and Dewey is able to transition America's faith from a sort of unofficial Protestantism that you'll find on both sides in the Civil War, for instance, to a sort of, you know, maybe referencing God, but not necessarily having to reference God, because we shift in the Civil War from, you know, battle hymn of the Republic, we're marching in the name of the Lord,

17:20.157 --> 17:27.084 [AK]: to in World War I, which is when Dewey has gained sort of ascendancy in power within American education.

17:27.625 --> 17:31.649 [AK]: In World War I, we're making the world safe for democracy, not for Christ.

17:31.689 --> 17:36.874 [AK]: We're not necessarily saying that, you know, that we have to fight the Germans because Christ is on our side.

17:37.354 --> 17:38.996 [AK]: The Germans actually were still saying that.

17:40.277 --> 17:44.760 [AK]: in World War I, but we have to make the world safe for democracy.

17:44.900 --> 17:58.429 [AK]: So Dewey is able, I think, to successfully not only think systematically about how to expand public education in every state, especially in the South, which had had really no investment in public education.

17:58.789 --> 18:09.036 [AK]: not only how to expand it systematically, but also how to make it about the education of an individual for the sake of a democracy, for participation in a democracy.

18:09.116 --> 18:23.184 [AK]: So like the concept of critical thinking, which you learn in public school and is taught in schools that ape public schools, whatever is on the outside of the building, critical thinking is not really about

18:24.185 --> 18:28.369 [AK]: being critical of, say, democracy or equality or rights.

18:29.470 --> 18:36.355 [AK]: It's about participation in a sphere where those are gods, right?

18:36.455 --> 18:43.942 [AK]: It's not like you're going to go into your class on American history and say, I mean, I don't ever remember having a debate about this in any forum.

18:44.522 --> 18:49.166 [AK]: Hey, what about this idea of everyone being created equal?

18:49.406 --> 18:51.588 [AK]: I mean, does that make sense to you?

18:51.868 --> 18:55.050 [AK]: Like that would actually be to think critically about everything.

18:55.391 --> 18:56.732 [AK]: You're not supposed to do that.

18:57.112 --> 19:02.576 [AK]: Critical thinking is to give you a certain set of tools for how to talk in public within a democracy.

19:03.437 --> 19:18.390 [AK]: And Dewey, I think, is extremely successful as a person, and I think this is the power of our system, as a person who says, you're going to go to school and we're going to teach you that this school is about teaching you how to be a free person in a free country.

19:19.491 --> 19:22.413 [AK]: We will not announce what the parameters of that actually are.

19:23.530 --> 19:27.692 [AK]: Because we're not going to tell you you have to go to this school, otherwise your dad's going to go to jail.

19:28.412 --> 19:29.032 [AK]: That's the truth.

19:31.994 --> 19:32.974 [AK]: These are the parameters.

19:33.374 --> 19:35.815 [AK]: And within that, you are a free person.

19:36.115 --> 19:37.596 [AK]: You're a critical person.

19:37.896 --> 19:38.957 [AK]: You think critically.

19:39.237 --> 19:40.857 [AK]: You vote in an informed way.

19:40.877 --> 19:48.421 [AK]: I have lots of historical evidence that tells me none of it was really quite true, but it's powerful.

19:49.421 --> 19:50.181 [JF]: It's a powerful story.

19:50.201 --> 19:50.962 [JF]: It's a powerful myth.

19:51.766 --> 19:52.647 [JF]: It's a powerful religion.

19:52.667 --> 20:03.015 [JF]: And if you want to call it a civil religion, so you can feel like it's nameless and you can still, you know, I mean, this is for the Christian, you know, your master bows and he must lean on your shoulder.

20:03.055 --> 20:03.575 [JF]: What do you do?

20:03.595 --> 20:04.856 [JF]: You know, you're supposed to bow with him.

20:05.937 --> 20:12.622 [JF]: And so the life in two kingdoms is how we approach this, but then we have to approach it as a people who see this

20:13.863 --> 20:16.605 [JF]: this world of power as one that can be used for good.

20:16.625 --> 20:25.531 [JF]: And you've just kind of said that in some ways, you've described a lot of the good that Dewey did create, at least in theory, we have a literate populace, or we did before the 80s.

20:26.451 --> 20:31.955 [JF]: And TV, I mean, TV really was not in the equation for Dewey's system here.

20:31.995 --> 20:38.299 [JF]: And I'm not so sure we thought about this one at all in terms of its interface with the classroom and education, critical thinking, good question, all that kind of stuff.

20:38.740 --> 20:43.503 [JF]: But before we would go into that, I want to go back and ask if, so it may not have been Dewey's agenda,

20:44.924 --> 20:56.652 [JF]: But his time built into this something that I think was unexpected then maybe, and that is the movement into the industrial revolution from the agrarian world.

20:57.392 --> 20:58.273 [JF]: And that had to happen.

20:58.313 --> 20:58.853 [JF]: It did happen.

20:58.873 --> 20:59.454 [JF]: It's going to happen.

20:59.494 --> 21:00.254 [JF]: We're never going to go back.

21:00.414 --> 21:10.101 [JF]: But maybe there were some things that were lost that didn't have to be lost is really the thing, and it's because those who were making the transitions were unable to say, oh, we better save that gemstone.

21:10.741 --> 21:23.367 [JF]: And so now we have to go back and look at some of this and say that the—and here's my critique, and I believe I get this from other forward-thinking pedagogues, is that we're batching these kids as if they are cogs in a machine.

21:23.847 --> 21:26.708 [JF]: They're all coming out by assembly line according to year, according to age.

21:26.748 --> 21:28.189 [JF]: We treat boy and girl exactly the same.

21:29.209 --> 21:31.630 [JF]: We have industrialized the human.

21:31.650 --> 21:34.732 [JF]: And as a result, you have far less

21:35.572 --> 21:43.174 [JF]: critically thinking, questioning people than you would realize, because you simply cannot teach critical thinking on mass scale, right?

21:43.274 --> 21:49.016 [JF]: As soon as you begin to scale it into its – there is no critical thinking in the process of developing it.

21:49.036 --> 21:50.036 [JF]: It's automatic.

21:50.316 --> 21:52.317 [JF]: Well, there's not going to be any coming out of it either, right?

21:52.677 --> 21:58.559 [JF]: And that's what we've been doing inadvertently, I think, because of industrialization, and Dewey is a big part of making that happen.

21:59.639 --> 22:07.722 [JF]: And the loss of the home economy then becomes a big part of this too, which you could connect to just the pulling of the kids out of the family in the first place, but — Yeah.

22:07.842 --> 22:11.784 [AK]: I think — I mean Dewey also is training America.

22:12.524 --> 22:31.864 [AK]: for the time by the 1920 census when more Americans live in cities than in rural areas for the first time ever and it's never gone, it's never gone back from that, because what occurs in a school that gets beyond the one room schoolhouse is that now school is defined by what is communicated there.

22:32.524 --> 22:49.812 [AK]: and especially the age segregation that you undergo, whereas a one-room schoolhouse, even if it is a common school and you have to go under penalty of law, never runs for the same length of time, either during the day or during the year, that schools that any of us are familiar with.

22:50.032 --> 22:51.393 [AK]: It's much more ad hoc.

22:51.793 --> 22:57.816 [AK]: And the reason that it's off all summer is for the sake of the agricultural year and for the sake of the home economy.

22:59.597 --> 23:03.299 [JF]: I would contend that you can also, in that kind of environment, simply achieve more faster.

23:03.860 --> 23:06.942 [JF]: We think that by batching in big scale, we're actually going to produce more.

23:08.223 --> 23:13.086 [JF]: I think, especially at a young level, and then especially at the elite level, it's on both ends of it.

23:13.687 --> 23:14.628 [JF]: Batching is a bad idea.

23:15.250 --> 23:15.430 [AK]: Yeah.

23:15.890 --> 23:31.498 [AK]: So, I mean, I would say that not necessarily at the level of like school administrators or school district superintendents or something, but higher up than that, people who think theoretically and who are listened to, who make, you know, thousands of dollars every time they make a public appearance talking about education.

23:32.078 --> 23:38.841 [AK]: At that level, the level of Dewey, I don't think people design systems that are achieving the exact op.

23:38.901 --> 23:39.982 [AK]: I don't think they're stupid.

23:40.322 --> 23:41.062 [JF]: Right, right.

23:41.443 --> 23:58.131 [AK]: So I don't think that they designed our educational system the way it currently actually functions where you're batched and there's tons of you and generally, the newer the high school, the bigger the high school, or the more specialized it is, I think you are batched for the sake of a certain way of life.

23:58.931 --> 24:02.212 [AK]: which is antithetical to the home being primary.

24:02.532 --> 24:11.454 [AK]: Because the thing that you actually observe over the course of the 20th century is that Americans come to think of it as totally natural.

24:12.094 --> 24:16.476 [AK]: Even with how itinerant we already were before then, right?

24:16.736 --> 24:25.578 [AK]: Even with that, we come to think of it as natural that you will grow up to do what your parents do not do and to live in a place that your parents do not live.

24:26.618 --> 24:26.838 [AK]: Okay.

24:27.339 --> 24:37.249 [AK]: And I think, I think batching you with other people, your own age, and then you're being indoctrinated, although because it's not parochial school, they don't call it doctrine.

24:38.382 --> 24:57.793 [AK]: being indoctrinated from an early age, obviously, like, I don't think the system and the vast majority of people who move wherever their job needs to take them, wherever the greatest amount of money is, I don't think that entire system and the vast majority of the population is somehow failing to do what we were trained to do.

24:58.493 --> 25:02.235 [AK]: I think the system is actually doing what it's supposed to do.

25:02.475 --> 25:03.356 [JF]: I think they designed it.

25:03.376 --> 25:04.737 [JF]: I don't think it was a complete accident.

25:04.777 --> 25:06.598 [JF]: They wanted people to not be

25:07.518 --> 25:10.982 [JF]: critical thinkers but have just enough of it to manage some machines.

25:12.083 --> 25:23.035 [JF]: I think they wanted to create a bond-servitude working class that didn't ask questions about the mythology that we're told but is happy to be grateful for the handouts we have.

25:23.956 --> 25:27.920 [JF]: And as long as the implication that we are in fact

25:28.621 --> 25:31.203 [JF]: Having a hand in the guidance of this system is there.

25:31.583 --> 25:33.604 [JF]: Most of us are willing to float along with that.

25:34.065 --> 25:40.649 [JF]: I think it was designed to mask the reality that there is no real influence from the bond servants.

25:41.149 --> 25:44.832 [JF]: And by bond servants, I would say, do you have a job because of the health care?

25:44.852 --> 25:46.233 [JF]: Do you have a mortgage?

25:46.533 --> 25:47.634 [JF]: Do you have student loans?

25:48.034 --> 25:49.155 [JF]: You are in bond service.

25:49.795 --> 25:50.756 [JF]: They used to call it slavery.

25:51.336 --> 25:56.320 [JF]: You can get out of it, which is sweet, and it's not based on the color of your skin, which is also sweet, but it is what it is.

25:56.340 --> 25:57.320 [JF]: It's part of the history of power.

25:57.340 --> 25:58.101 [JF]: You can't get away from it.

25:59.061 --> 26:03.965 [JF]: I think that the system was designed to make sure as many people came here happy to be in that class as possible.

26:04.845 --> 26:05.346 [JF]: That's what I think.

26:05.386 --> 26:05.946 [JF]: And it's working.

26:06.526 --> 26:13.011 [JF]: And it will continue to work as long as the upper class that's way up and hidden above doesn't blow it all up for their petty fights.

26:13.671 --> 26:15.493 [JF]: Forgive me for getting contemporary on that.

26:16.433 --> 26:22.958 [AK]: I think that entertainment media has taken care of working class discontent.

26:25.567 --> 26:31.651 [AK]: Because at this point, it's really hard to have a stable job that supports a family while you work with your hands.

26:32.251 --> 26:42.578 [AK]: If you do do that, the way to support that family is to work so much, weekends, nights, all of it, to work so much that you are just dog tired at the end of the day.

26:43.458 --> 26:45.720 [JF]: Hence the alcohol, by the way.

26:45.840 --> 26:48.722 [JF]: Alcohol is there for the sugar and the alcohol.

26:51.064 --> 27:03.436 [AK]: The reason that the conditions of the working class change in the 19th century and the early 20th century is because they live close enough to each other and have sufficient free time to organize.

27:04.099 --> 27:06.159 [AK]: And they are literate.

27:06.460 --> 27:09.960 [AK]: And so, they're well-educated enough to read their own newspapers and their own books.

27:10.580 --> 27:11.941 [AK]: That time is now gone.

27:12.141 --> 27:12.621 [JF]: Right.

27:13.961 --> 27:17.482 [JF]: So, even the unions are no longer there for the unions.

27:17.942 --> 27:27.524 [AK]: I mean, they are, but they deal with the educated, which I want to talk about in a second because I think the way that that's controlled works differently.

27:27.984 --> 27:31.725 [AK]: Or they deal with service workers, many of whom are

27:32.345 --> 27:36.451 [AK]: Very recent immigrants are not fluent in English and therefore are no political.

27:36.491 --> 27:38.593 [JF]: And I'm not going to say that they're bad out of hand at all.

27:38.613 --> 27:39.394 [AK]: That's not where I'm at.

27:39.495 --> 27:43.820 [AK]: No, I'm actually saying they were great for working people.

27:44.461 --> 27:47.325 [AK]: That capacity to organize has been taken away.

27:47.705 --> 27:47.985 [JF]: Right.

27:48.165 --> 27:49.286 [AK]: That's what I'm saying.

27:49.306 --> 27:51.408 [JF]: Sometimes by the very thing that's there to protect it.

27:51.748 --> 27:52.869 [JF]: And that's kind of my point, too.

27:52.909 --> 28:10.303 [JF]: But we were talking about sports and the opiate of the working class, that if you are a man who has your craft detached from your work, right, so that when you work and all you can do is do someone else's labor for him and you're not able to have any soul in it, eventually you need some place to get, well, spirit, right?

28:10.343 --> 28:11.804 [JF]: I'm not talking Holy Spirit.

28:11.844 --> 28:15.067 [JF]: I'm just talking about, you know, energy in your life to be excited about something.

28:15.467 --> 28:16.828 [JF]: And sports have provided that.

28:16.848 --> 28:23.274 [JF]: This is why coronavirus has been so detrimental to our civilization, is because the aggression that we would normally be channeling into sports is not there.

28:23.334 --> 28:26.676 [JF]: And of course, the riots are being promoted as some nonsense thing, and people go there.

28:26.716 --> 28:32.341 [JF]: But the bigger thing is, you know, the Caesars knew this, the Coliseum, even though I wouldn't want the sports that were there myself.

28:33.102 --> 28:36.885 [JF]: You have to create a spectacle that we all enjoy.

28:38.206 --> 28:44.331 [JF]: Otherwise, we're going to be tired of doing the work that has thorns and thistles attached to it that someone else tells us to do in this big string of power that we're all stuck in.

28:44.994 --> 28:45.174 [AK]: Right.

28:45.955 --> 28:58.024 [AK]: And I think that something that you notice if you look at, let's just say the history of baseball in America, baseball goes in, you know, Dewey's lifetime from being something that is played essentially in every town.

28:58.084 --> 29:05.829 [AK]: Every town has a baseball team and they'll travel on a Saturday, you know, one stop down the railroad and play each other and then go back.

29:06.190 --> 29:07.310 [AK]: And that's baseball, right?

29:07.350 --> 29:10.633 [AK]: That's where like the Mudville nine comes from to being

29:11.860 --> 29:16.921 [AK]: the first really, really, really successful consumer sport, spectator sport, we now say.

29:17.302 --> 29:22.563 [AK]: But I think consumer is a better way to look at it because it transforms you into a passive person.

29:22.823 --> 29:25.724 [AK]: You yourself are horrendously out of shape.

29:26.124 --> 29:27.244 [AK]: You couldn't take a hit.

29:27.544 --> 29:39.888 [AK]: You couldn't run all the way around the bases without falling over, but you can pour your energy and your money and your social media posting into the Chicago Cubs or the Green Bay Packers or whatever.

29:40.248 --> 29:40.448 [JF]: Right.

29:40.528 --> 29:46.472 [JF]: To a brand, which again is a myth, which is a story about how you are good or evil and surviving in a difficult world.

29:46.852 --> 30:07.424 [JF]: So to see then that the place that sports have played in our history as Americans of allowing us to be content sort of where we are with a industrialized civilization that has removed some good things like contact with family, time with kids during the daytime, close tight-knit small communities, those have disappeared.

30:08.965 --> 30:10.866 [JF]: But that all came out of another tangent, too.

30:10.906 --> 30:28.534 [JF]: So I want to push back toward that, which is that – so the sports and the education are part of this mythology that is Americana, that's been changing, has brought us all where we are, and at the very least, you would argue, has succeeded in allowing for a middle class – a critical thinking middle class to still exist.

30:28.835 --> 30:30.275 [JF]: It has provided that, OK?

30:30.595 --> 30:35.938 [JF]: Even if not all take advantage of that, it is there and it still can be gained through the system, no matter how underprivileged.

30:36.038 --> 30:38.139 [JF]: It can be done.

30:38.179 --> 30:39.139 [JF]: It does get done.

30:39.900 --> 30:47.203 [JF]: OK, so there's a competing mythology that still gets in the Trump news yesterday, for pity's sakes, and it's called Russia.

30:48.203 --> 30:51.685 [JF]: Russia did this too at the same time.

30:52.165 --> 30:54.147 [JF]: with some of the same goals, right?

30:54.447 --> 30:56.449 [JF]: But with a very, very different undercurrent.

30:56.930 --> 30:58.751 [JF]: So do you want to kind of segue into that now?

30:59.032 --> 31:10.623 [AK]: So I would say that a central fact to remember, whether you're talking about middle class, upper class, lower class in modern America, is a fact from ancient Greece about education.

31:11.003 --> 31:15.308 [AK]: And it is this, that they did not let slaves go into the gym.

31:16.148 --> 31:29.252 [AK]: The gymnasium in ancient Greece is a place where you have both philosophy, education, the passing on of wisdom, profound thoughts about the world, and the capacity to change the way that you are collectively living.

31:29.292 --> 31:37.195 [AK]: That's why Socrates is a threat to Athens, because he tells young men ideas that the rulers don't want them to have.

31:37.915 --> 31:39.976 [AK]: Slaves are not allowed in.

31:40.216 --> 31:41.696 [AK]: They cannot train their bodies.

31:41.956 --> 31:43.837 [AK]: They are not allowed to be strong.

31:44.657 --> 31:51.404 [AK]: And in like a place like Sparta, which was probably 90% slaves, they were not allowed to train militarily.

31:51.444 --> 31:52.725 [AK]: They could not bear arms.

31:52.845 --> 31:57.590 [AK]: That's pretty common throughout history is that slaves are not allowed to bear arms.

31:57.690 --> 32:02.775 [JF]: Can we pause for a second on a complete non sequitur that's not non sequitur, which is this?

32:02.795 --> 32:03.136 [AK]: Okay.

32:04.292 --> 32:14.594 [JF]: Very many Americans on multiple sides aspire to things in history that we like, like the Spartans, Michigan State, but also, you know, The 300, the movies, and all this kind of stuff, right?

32:15.554 --> 32:30.738 [JF]: And here we have a history of people who are effectively an elite, ethnically Persian race-class city that enslaves everyone around them so that they can just only kill people whenever they feel like it, and train to kill people, and then make their slaves feed them.

32:32.640 --> 32:36.681 [JF]: And through the, what do you call them, the rose colored glasses of history, isn't it something?

32:38.282 --> 32:40.082 [JF]: What a wicked, wicked people we are.

32:40.282 --> 32:41.383 [JF]: That's just my, sorry, that was it.

32:41.483 --> 32:44.564 [JF]: I had to interrupt just to throw that at you, that we go past that so quickly, right?

32:44.584 --> 32:46.104 [JF]: And it's like, well, look what you just said though, right?

32:46.724 --> 32:49.605 [JF]: And thinking of all the times we would aspire, I mean, I wear Spartan stuff because it looks cool.

32:50.345 --> 32:52.006 [JF]: And yet here is this symbol.

32:52.026 --> 32:54.146 [JF]: You cannot remove the tarnish from these symbols.

32:54.346 --> 32:56.947 [JF]: It just can't be done, which I guess is part of our point too.

32:57.007 --> 32:59.068 [JF]: But can you remember what we were talking about before I jumped on you?

32:59.908 --> 33:00.969 [JF]: That was my interest.

33:01.670 --> 33:21.189 [AK]: Because I think I think if people knew anything about history, you know, Michigan State would change its logo from the Spartans to the rebels and bring in like a Confederate general as their mascot, because the Confederate States of America was far less of a slave holding power than the Spartans ever were.

33:21.209 --> 33:21.930 [JF]: Yeah, right, right.

33:23.311 --> 33:39.019 [AK]: I will say this in favor of the Spartans against Athens, and this will get us back to modern America, because I think modern America has most of the sicknesses that the Athenians did, is that the Spartans were straightforward about who was a slave and who was not.

33:39.679 --> 33:57.792 [AK]: The Athenians, being a democracy, I think one of the dangers of democracy, this is not a kill shot on the notion of democracy, but it's certainly one of its dangers, is that democracy very often involves everyone tacitly accepting an unspoken lie.

33:59.262 --> 34:08.625 [AK]: That is that, you know, oh, well, the guy that gets to talk in the marketplace and then sways us to go into battle, anybody could have done that.

34:08.705 --> 34:15.907 [AK]: You know, he just, you know, the people freely decided to follow him as if things like charisma or rhetoric aren't real.

34:16.468 --> 34:20.249 [JF]: But it's not as though communism can get away without having to tell lies to make itself go.

34:20.729 --> 34:22.390 [AK]: Right, right, right, right, right.

34:22.490 --> 34:28.654 [AK]: And so what I would say in favor of the Spartans is that they're straightforwardly like, if you're old, you get to be in charge.

34:29.014 --> 34:30.475 [AK]: If you're young, you have to fight.

34:30.835 --> 34:34.898 [AK]: And if you're a helot, you have to be a slave forever and you never get to bear arms.

34:35.218 --> 34:36.099 [AK]: That's the way it goes.

34:36.179 --> 34:38.000 [AK]: We're not going to act like that's ever going to change.

34:38.433 --> 34:39.254 [JF]: Right, right.

34:39.714 --> 34:53.407 [AK]: Okay, so one of the issues with the middle class and the upper class in modern America is that critical thinking and the way that our education system functions teaches you that you are freely deciding things.

34:54.068 --> 34:59.272 [AK]: that, you know, you have no influences in your life.

35:00.332 --> 35:14.442 [AK]: You have freely just decided, you know, 10 years ago you didn't know what transgender was and now you've really decided to put pronouns in your Twitter bio and to get enraged whenever someone misgenders somebody or deadnames them.

35:14.682 --> 35:19.966 [AK]: You just freely decided that because you're a free person and you're all about freedom and liberating people.

35:20.626 --> 35:29.630 [AK]: So I think that one of the issues that you get with mass education, universal education, is that you now have to convince people.

35:29.690 --> 35:39.635 [AK]: And I think our system is very effective in this because media reinforces what we hear in school in telling you that you are unique.

35:40.275 --> 35:44.117 [AK]: And part of your uniqueness is the exercise of freedom.

35:44.137 --> 35:45.598 [AK]: And this is your life.

35:47.050 --> 35:52.892 [JF]: This is the opposite then of what Russia tells in its mythology, and I pushed us off that by my tangent.

35:52.932 --> 35:58.693 [JF]: So coming back to how they have a mirror of this by which we can kind of see both more clearly I think, right?

35:58.713 --> 35:59.633 [JF]: That's the idea.

36:00.153 --> 36:08.556 [AK]: Well, I mean because what you can see and something that we talked about last time, you can see in the American education system certainly from the 1950s onward.

36:10.636 --> 36:30.534 [AK]: uh and we still have this in kind of the pushing of stem over against all other forms of education certainly in public education you can see many parallels between Soviet and then Russian but but mostly soviet and American education systems they both have definite national goals they're trying to achieve and however

36:31.095 --> 36:42.983 [AK]: they're, they are indoctrinating, they're giving different mythologies for why that is, but they're trying to achieve the same goal, say, in the 1950s and 1960s, of certain achievements in aviation and spaceflight.

36:43.063 --> 36:46.525 [AK]: And I, I kind of like love this on a just a technical level.

36:46.846 --> 36:51.369 [AK]: And I don't want to get sidetracked by, you know, [Korolev](Sergei Korolev) and rocket design.

36:51.409 --> 37:00.655 [JF]: No, but but the space race, though, did capture the mythological attention of both countries, and in some ways is part of the prevention of an actual ground war.

37:01.315 --> 37:03.376 [JF]: Or a nuclear war, frankly, right?

37:03.876 --> 37:04.376 [JF]: Atomic war.

37:05.177 --> 37:05.417 [AK]: Okay.

37:05.577 --> 37:07.458 [AK]: So that is part of it.

37:07.538 --> 37:24.525 [AK]: And what I would say is interesting about a lot of technological history in the 20th century is that it begins as a dream of freedom and then is successfully co-opted by both the educational system and the militaries of the two great post-World War II superpowers.

37:25.465 --> 37:41.010 [AK]: Not so much in the service of freedom but in the service of certain specific national defense goals, whether those are mutually assured destruction, whether that's being able to send ICBMs to certain cities in each other's countries.

37:41.690 --> 37:58.628 [AK]: But if you go back far enough in the history of spaceflight, aviation, rocket design, you'll always get somebody who has, you know, obviously no interest in destroying everything, but simply desires, for instance, to get into the air or to get into space.

37:58.689 --> 38:01.231 [AK]: It's sort of the same desire as an explorer.

38:01.932 --> 38:02.132 [AK]: Right?

38:02.432 --> 38:14.115 [AK]: He has no specific military goals, and it's not a goal for the masses to adopt in the same way that you get kids running around high schools today wearing NASA T-shirts.

38:14.296 --> 38:29.380 [AK]: It was, no one ever thought that, you know, Robert Goddard or Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, this is all way, this is, you know, before World War I in some cases, they never thought, oh, every single person will, you know, geek out about NASA and,

38:30.080 --> 38:33.562 [JF]: But there was no way to distribute the information at the time either.

38:33.582 --> 38:43.629 [JF]: So you're jumping ahead to the sloganeering world of the brand and the requirement now that you become a name for yourself in order to live in Babel.

38:44.149 --> 38:44.850 [JF]: You have to.

38:45.610 --> 38:46.871 [JF]: You must form your own tribe.

38:46.911 --> 38:49.633 [JF]: You must form your own slogan, whatever it is.

38:49.673 --> 38:55.837 [JF]: And so NASA, in the competition for the marketplace of ideas, has got to go back to symbolism, just like the rest of us.

38:56.317 --> 39:00.401 [JF]: But at that time, though, you're saying that that wasn't really the fight that was going on.

39:00.741 --> 39:13.312 [JF]: What was going on was an actual pursuit in both places of self-interested defense that harnessed the intellects of non-self-interested entrepreneurs, right?

39:14.193 --> 39:32.639 [AK]: They harvested the interest in spaceflight for itself in in courage or bravery for themselves in the case of test pilots and the earliest cosmonauts and astronauts, and they take those impulses that could exist under other technological conditions, completely free from anyone else.

39:33.499 --> 39:42.005 [JF]: This is why I love Elon Musk, even though I don't know the man, and I'm confident we would despise each other, actually, by the end of a conversation, except I'm a Christian, so I still love him.

39:42.425 --> 39:48.710 [JF]: But he would not like me, I don't think, and maybe we'd be able to work it out as friends and just disagree, but I adore SpaceX.

39:49.938 --> 39:51.779 [JF]: Just for it's doing this.

39:53.179 --> 39:53.399 [AK]: Yeah.

39:53.499 --> 39:56.980 [JF]: It is an endeavor of love for almost everybody involved in that thing.

39:57.521 --> 39:58.141 [AK]: And yeah, sure.

39:58.301 --> 40:01.442 [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to, we're going to do tourism to Mars, whatever, man.

40:01.542 --> 40:02.362 [JF]: Like good luck with that.

40:02.422 --> 40:02.882 [JF]: Have fun.

40:03.163 --> 40:08.965 [JF]: I don't think that's any way realistic, but what you're doing is you're harnessing the imaginations of people to build something bigger than themselves.

40:09.185 --> 40:11.125 [JF]: Now the danger is Babel, Babel and names.

40:11.145 --> 40:12.206 [JF]: Look at it's a tower to the sky.

40:12.226 --> 40:12.446 [JF]: Hey,

40:13.326 --> 40:16.428 [JF]: And I don't think we should worry about God sending the flood because of NASA.

40:16.768 --> 40:26.575 [JF]: But you can't disentangle all of this quest for glory, the pushing of the name, [Nietzsche](obsidian://open?vault=Ideaverse&file=Atlas%2FNotes%2FPeople%2FFriedrich%20Nietzsche)'s insight about controlling people, which we'll get to, and then the space race.

40:26.815 --> 40:29.137 [JF]: And you talk about rockets all you want, Adam.

40:29.317 --> 40:32.999 [JF]: You go into detail on fuel and shape, and that sounds interesting to me.

40:33.500 --> 40:41.245 [AK]: Well, because I think that the thing that changes so radically over the course of American history

40:41.765 --> 40:48.715 [AK]: is that when we begin, there is so much space, like just physical space, room.

40:49.015 --> 40:51.098 [JF]: On the American continent, not in the sky.

40:51.419 --> 40:57.567 [AK]: On the American continent that you can get people who legitimately get to pursue their own goals.

40:58.588 --> 41:21.382 [AK]: Once that's no longer the case, once you have urbanization and industrialization and levels of immigration that can't be sort of processed in terms of space and people are collecting, the power of someone like Dewey is to understand Nietzsche's insight about human nature, which is that the definition of the person who is above other people

41:22.569 --> 41:35.732 [AK]: apart from Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a slave morality, he sees it as enslaving people, we can leave that for another time, is that the person like Zarathustra, the person who controls the society is always in the nature of a prophet.

41:36.112 --> 41:45.655 [AK]: There's no way to have a group, to have a society, to have mass education or mass media or anything like that without things taking on a religious dimension.

41:46.547 --> 41:49.528 [AK]: There simply is no way to educate without being religious.

41:50.168 --> 41:51.689 [AK]: And I think Dewey understands that.

41:51.749 --> 42:08.035 [AK]: I've said it in earlier episodes in this forum that humanities majors, whatever the amazing nature of rocket science, humanities majors run the world because the world is run through what people trust in or believe, the stories, the mythologies that they believe.

42:08.735 --> 42:10.196 [AK]: And Dewey understood that.

42:10.436 --> 42:17.079 [AK]: He understood that education was in itself one of the greatest powers that you can exercise over a group of people.

42:17.899 --> 42:18.259 [JF]: It is.

42:18.840 --> 42:35.047 [JF]: Which is why it is an honor to have the opportunity to educate anybody and one to be kind of moved into with some trepidation because my read of the history of education is that blowback is something we didn't even think was possible and maybe still don't.

42:38.464 --> 42:41.506 [AK]: Do you mean like pushing back against what you're told?

42:41.707 --> 43:00.221 [JF]: I get this out of Ron Paul politics and it comes from a phrase used with regard to American military intervention overseas and how at times we create scenarios that nobody could have foreseen in places completely distinct from where we thought we even were because we just didn't understand what we were even doing.

43:00.561 --> 43:03.643 [JF]: And so while we thought we were improving something, we made it worse.

43:03.723 --> 43:07.186 [JF]: I'll just throw margarine out there as another example of this in the history of humanity.

43:08.247 --> 43:26.119 [JF]: But the idea is that if you're going to attempt a macro international experiment on the psyche of man as a species, there's going to be some side effects, and some of them might be so bad that you need to stop what you're doing.

43:26.859 --> 43:30.702 [JF]: And if you're not willing to ask that question, then I say it's already happened.

43:32.607 --> 43:35.410 [JF]: Like the critical thinking should be willing to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

43:35.490 --> 43:36.331 [AK]: Right, right, right, right.

43:36.831 --> 43:47.103 [AK]: That is why I think – I think that various opiates and specifically literally opioids are given to keep the lower classes under control.

43:47.583 --> 43:49.525 [AK]: The middle class has the illusion of freedom.

43:49.665 --> 43:51.968 [AK]: I would say our elites have an illusion of control.

43:52.128 --> 43:53.549 [JF]: Yeah, amen, obviously right now.

43:53.709 --> 44:05.233 [AK]: That is, they believe that they can keep the thing running forever, and they have a sense of their own immortality and invincibility, which is historically absurd.

44:05.493 --> 44:08.555 [SPEAKER_01]: No [tail risk](obsidian://open?vault=Ideaverse&file=0.%20Inbox%2FTail%20Risk).

44:08.755 --> 44:14.697 [AK]: Every single elite has eventually collapsed, sometimes under its own weight, sometimes under the pressures of invasion.

44:15.017 --> 44:16.878 [AK]: There are any number of ways to destroy something.

44:19.759 --> 44:25.449 [AK]: The thing that they don't foresee are things like, well, what if we are in Afghanistan for 20 years?

44:25.930 --> 44:28.414 [AK]: Or what if we're in Indochina from

44:29.489 --> 44:32.651 [AK]: we were there for roughly 20 years.

44:32.711 --> 44:35.712 [AK]: I mean, we had guys, quote, educating in the middle of the 1950s.

44:35.732 --> 44:49.779 [JF]: What if the system of macroeducation creates a type of man who is so physically weak, emotionally narcissistic, and in fact, fragile, that the civilization cannot propagate itself any longer?

44:49.819 --> 44:50.279 [AK]: Right, right.

44:50.319 --> 44:56.282 [AK]: And I think that's very insightful, because I think that is one of the things that they have not foreseen.

44:57.509 --> 45:02.772 [AK]: Is that is that mass indoctrination whether through school or tv?

45:03.332 --> 45:14.418 [AK]: Or hurting everyone that that's on the internet onto facebook and google They did not foresee That that would create people who were unable to keep the thing going.

45:14.438 --> 45:14.738 [JF]: Yeah

45:16.486 --> 45:20.212 [JF]: It's all an attempt – I'm all [Taleb](obsidian://open?vault=Ideaverse&file=Atlas%2FNotes%2FPeople%2FNassim%20Nicholas%20Taleb) still, [Nassim Taleb](obsidian://open?vault=Ideaverse&file=Atlas%2FNotes%2FPeople%2FNassim%20Nicholas%20Taleb).

45:20.292 --> 45:21.454 [JF]: This is all about tail risk.

45:21.474 --> 45:27.844 [JF]: You're trying to remove risk from the mathematical equation of civilization and keep everybody safe in both corners?

45:28.224 --> 45:29.667 [JF]: I mean no, it's going to break.

45:29.927 --> 45:30.167 [JF]: It has to.

45:31.229 --> 45:32.090 [JF]: There has to be risk.

45:32.130 --> 45:33.631 [JF]: There has to be give and take.

45:33.931 --> 45:42.857 [JF]: Karma – I don't want to call it karma myself, but it kind of gets to the idea of balance and symmetry in nature, which the proposition of Taleb is that it's a mathematical thing.

45:43.137 --> 45:49.462 [JF]: I think that any evolutionist has to admit that there is a balancing system taking place right now somehow in nature, right?

45:51.463 --> 46:09.965 [AK]: So, from an educational standpoint, the thing that they did not perceive was that if you want, let's say, let's say you just want sort of technological drones, right, so you don't want somebody who's going to I mean I don't think the guys that that invented certain kinds of airfoils or serve solve certain

46:10.666 --> 46:13.307 [AK]: problems in rocketry in the 1940s and 1950s.

46:13.407 --> 46:18.750 [AK]: I don't think every single one of those guys was thinking, boy, I really like freedom and space flight.

46:19.150 --> 46:20.611 [AK]: What if I just overthrew the government?

46:21.431 --> 46:22.612 [AK]: I don't think they were thinking that.

46:22.732 --> 46:30.076 [AK]: There were incentives to work within that structure in order to achieve goals that for themselves were personally meaningful.

46:30.216 --> 46:31.457 [AK]: And I love that, and I applaud that.

46:31.897 --> 46:37.800 [AK]: The problem that I think the system did not perceive was there was a certain kind of world

46:38.300 --> 46:42.022 [AK]: that produced men like Chuck Yeager or Werner Von Braun.

46:42.742 --> 46:44.583 [AK]: And they took that world away.

46:44.743 --> 46:49.245 [AK]: They took away the modicum of freedom of thought, freedom of movement.

46:49.366 --> 46:51.887 [AK]: At this point, you have to cover your face when you're out in public.

46:52.547 --> 46:58.130 [AK]: You can't do that and produce people who can do things like go to the moon.

46:58.846 --> 47:00.287 [AK]: You simply can't do that.

47:00.588 --> 47:08.835 [AK]: When you have people who are used to being controlled, sort of boomer memes on Facebook about millennials are fragile.

47:09.195 --> 47:11.477 [AK]: Well, millennials were trained to be.

47:11.497 --> 47:13.119 [AK]: They were trained to be obedient.

47:13.139 --> 47:17.563 [JF]: Just tell me the right answer so I can put it on the test and everything will be okay and make the noise go away.

47:17.583 --> 47:17.923 [JF]: Stop it.

47:17.943 --> 47:18.223 [JF]: Stop it.

47:18.243 --> 47:18.564 [JF]: Stop it.

47:18.684 --> 47:20.586 [AK]: I just want to be able to go to college.

47:22.387 --> 47:29.134 [AK]: they were trained to function within a system, I don't think they're doing anything other than what they were actually trained to do.

47:29.154 --> 47:43.969 [JF]: Absolutely, which is then either – well, ultimately splintering into one or two tribal stories that promotes a better future and does so on the back of claiming that the other tribe has such a determined and pessimistic future that it must be exterminated.

47:44.389 --> 47:54.578 [JF]: Whether that is the tribe of the American system and the federal government, yay Antifa, or whether that is we've got to kill Antifa because they're the communists and they're going to overthrow the American government, yay, I don't even know.

47:54.698 --> 47:57.340 [JF]: Alt-right slash everything else and it must be the orange man.

47:57.880 --> 48:04.446 [JF]: So the tribal splitting, the tribal splitting in search of a positive narrative, that's what I want to hinge on there though.

48:04.506 --> 48:07.388 [JF]: So yeah, you're telling a negative story about your enemy.

48:08.069 --> 48:16.214 [JF]: But you're telling a positive story about yourself, and when you have the country no longer telling a positive story about itself, then you're going to have a real competition taking place for that.

48:16.454 --> 48:16.654 [JF]: Right?

48:16.734 --> 48:17.074 [AK]: Obviously.

48:17.234 --> 48:17.394 [AK]: Right.

48:17.715 --> 48:17.895 [AK]: Right.

48:18.035 --> 48:18.195 [AK]: Right.

48:18.255 --> 48:18.435 [AK]: Right.

48:18.795 --> 48:21.077 [AK]: Well, it's also a difference in.

48:22.299 --> 48:31.385 [AK]: public education and media Used to function in order to tell a unifying story about the united states Okay, it doesn't matter whether or not that was true.

48:31.405 --> 48:37.229 [AK]: Uh in many cases it wasn't true and and that predates Radio and tv and the internet.

48:37.309 --> 48:47.615 [AK]: I mean you can find school books from the 1890s talking about our puritan forefathers and that's not literally true of like 90 of the American population in the 1890s

48:48.636 --> 48:51.757 [AK]: So the story has always been, to some extent, BS.

48:52.177 --> 48:55.258 [AK]: The issue was it intended to unify.

48:56.458 --> 48:57.859 [AK]: It does not do that now.

48:59.019 --> 49:00.480 [AK]: It intends to fracture.

49:00.860 --> 49:05.021 [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes that's along the ethnic lines that we've talked about, or racial lines.

49:05.061 --> 49:06.402 [AK]: Sometimes it's along gender lines.

49:06.842 --> 49:08.542 [AK]: But it intends to fracture.

49:08.962 --> 49:17.525 [AK]: And that fracturing does not create a unified body politic that can move in one direction, either into outer space or to whatever goal you're trying to move in.

49:17.585 --> 49:19.286 [JF]: They cannot exist without a prophet.

49:19.306 --> 49:20.727 [JF]: So you've really helped me here with this today.

49:20.827 --> 49:28.751 [JF]: So the reason the American president has the power that he has is far less to do with the Constitution of the United States, how it was written or even how it's exercised today.

49:28.771 --> 49:35.214 [JF]: It has to do with the power of his charism and his prophecy to stand as the figurative head that is the actual head, because we think figurative doesn't mean anything.

49:35.234 --> 49:37.215 [JF]: I'm going to say it means more than the material

49:37.555 --> 49:42.977 [JF]: He stands at the figurative headship of our country, and for the first time, I would say – counter me if I'm wrong on this.

49:43.237 --> 49:43.917 [JF]: You know the history better.

49:44.297 --> 49:49.758 [JF]: Perhaps for the first time ever, we have a four years in which his presidency has not been acknowledged.

49:50.519 --> 49:53.039 [JF]: We have said he is not the one leading us from the other side.

49:53.139 --> 49:54.840 [JF]: Under Obama, people didn't like it.

49:54.860 --> 49:55.580 [JF]: People wanted him out.

49:55.600 --> 50:02.862 [JF]: I mean we were really, really bucking, but no one said – forget that he's not my president, stickers with Bush, although that was the embryo of this now.

50:03.582 --> 50:12.752 [JF]: But at a certain point, if you're going to claim that the one we're all looking to is prophet isn't now prophet, he's an illegal prophet, yes, then we will fracture because you've broken the religion, right?

50:13.653 --> 50:14.434 [JF]: Sectarianism.

50:14.955 --> 50:24.526 [AK]: Yes, because a change that happened in the past is that he became a prophet, and I think that actually happened depending on…

50:25.046 --> 50:26.027 [AK]: how you want to think about this.

50:26.567 --> 50:28.708 [AK]: I think it began with Lincoln.

50:28.949 --> 50:32.331 [AK]: I think it became fully fledged with FDR.

50:32.351 --> 50:40.496 [JF]: Let me contend that based on what you said earlier and based on just Nietzsche's insight of the Ubermensch, he has always been a prophet.

50:40.556 --> 50:48.962 [JF]: And the reason Washington was able to be the prophet for America is because he said what America's prophet would need to say, which is, I will not be king.

50:49.662 --> 50:51.643 [JF]: Now the prophet is not the king, right?

50:51.903 --> 50:54.325 [JF]: And I will retire and I will give you words of wisdom.

50:54.625 --> 50:56.466 [JF]: And at the time of need, the prophet will arise.

50:56.486 --> 50:58.467 [JF]: It's a very different kind of prophet, right?

50:58.747 --> 51:00.048 [JF]: But he's still a prophet.

51:00.568 --> 51:01.309 [AK]: Okay.

51:01.569 --> 51:08.092 [AK]: I think that I want to distinguish here between a Christ figure, a Messiah, and a prophet.

51:08.193 --> 51:11.314 [AK]: That is, a Christ figure can be silent and gone.

51:11.855 --> 51:17.598 [AK]: So for instance, I think Lincoln becomes a Messiah after his death.

51:18.806 --> 51:19.847 [JF]: Okay, sure, sure.

51:19.907 --> 51:24.872 [AK]: He can still function symbolically, but he doesn't get to give ongoing revelation.

51:25.233 --> 51:25.533 [JF]: Right.

51:25.934 --> 51:34.082 [AK]: The power of someone like Joseph Smith in American history, the founder of the Mormons, is that he becomes quite literally a different prophet.

51:34.202 --> 51:34.362 [JF]: Right.

51:34.443 --> 51:36.445 [JF]: So then, so then we can make this, I can make this argument then.

51:36.485 --> 51:39.768 [JF]: So Washington during his presidency is a prophet, but then he

51:40.809 --> 51:45.171 [JF]: actually sets this pattern of leaving the prophecy state open for someone else to step into it.

51:45.651 --> 51:49.653 [JF]: And that is, in some ways—and tell me if it happened another time in history, because it'd be really interesting.

51:49.693 --> 51:55.796 [JF]: It seems to be that's where we have hit now, where we got someone who—we have a group who said, nah, it didn't really change.

51:56.036 --> 51:57.096 [JF]: It's a lie, right?

51:57.116 --> 52:00.498 [JF]: The actual thing, the vote, the presidency itself, it's a lie.

52:00.918 --> 52:01.939 [JF]: And no wonder we see what we see.

52:01.959 --> 52:02.939 [JF]: If we actually think it's a lie?

52:02.959 --> 52:04.000 [JF]: If half of us think it's a lie?

52:04.020 --> 52:04.480 [JF]: Wow.

52:05.270 --> 52:11.553 [AK]: Yeah, I think that – I'm willing to concede that Washington is a potential prophet.

52:11.673 --> 52:14.054 [AK]: I don't think he always exercised that office.

52:14.074 --> 52:14.754 [JF]: Oh, sure.

52:14.814 --> 52:17.035 [JF]: I'm talking from Nietzsche's perspective too though, right?

52:17.075 --> 52:17.935 [JF]: Are you with me on that?

52:17.995 --> 52:21.617 [JF]: I'm just using Nietzsche's definition of prophet, so don't read into it like any biblical connotations here.

52:21.897 --> 52:25.342 [AK]: Well, no, no, and I think he leaves that office vacant.

52:26.464 --> 52:34.977 [AK]: And then what happens after him down to Lincoln is generally a history of intentional vacancy of that office.

52:34.997 --> 52:36.740 [JF]: So saying we'll try to be a profitless people.

52:36.960 --> 52:37.440 [JF]: We're trying.

52:37.500 --> 52:38.201 [AK]: Right, right.

52:38.301 --> 52:47.124 [AK]: We will be a free people, which will mean that we have different prophets and – but the problem is we can't agree on the nature of that.

52:47.424 --> 52:50.926 [AK]: That's – I think we have a civil war because we don't agree on who gets to be a prophet.

52:50.966 --> 52:51.466 [JF]: Oh, that's interesting.

52:51.486 --> 52:55.788 [JF]: That's interesting because I was thinking how the prophet coming out and saying that

52:57.202 --> 52:59.583 [JF]: you don't have a prophet, is its own form of oracle, right?

52:59.643 --> 53:01.944 [JF]: It's sort of the atheist's inversion a little bit.

53:02.524 --> 53:22.150 [JF]: So to see, then, it was that lack of a singular vision—Nietzsche would say the Übermensch—that led to the Civil War, because the diversity of smaller prophet kingdoms, right, in the States, eventually their interests did not coincide, and it became about the Benjamins, I would say, is why they finally had to deal with the issue.

53:22.190 --> 53:25.832 [JF]: There was a moral reason, too, and certainly Christianity had something to say about that at the time.

53:26.932 --> 53:28.933 [JF]: We all know that the money makes the world go round.

53:29.033 --> 53:29.593 [JF]: So yeah.

53:30.313 --> 53:41.837 [AK]: And I think that Lincoln is parallel to Trump in the sense of being a figure whom one side looks at rather explicitly religiously.

53:42.657 --> 53:45.339 [AK]: And I think probably both sides look at-

[JF]: Oh, absolutely.

53:45.379 --> 53:46.860 [JF]: He's the Antichrist or he's the Christ.

53:46.880 --> 53:47.100 [AK]: Yeah.

53:47.361 --> 53:47.561 [AK]: Right.

53:47.921 --> 53:48.161 [AK]: Right.

53:48.562 --> 53:52.224 [AK]: And therefore he's either believed or utterly rejected.

53:52.825 --> 54:03.293 [AK]: And so you've gone to mythological levels, which is a level on which politics, strictly speaking, and sort of the management of power, or even making sure that the potholes get filled,

54:04.053 --> 54:05.574 [AK]: cannot be done.

54:07.115 --> 54:18.442 [AK]: Right, because religion runs deeper than politics and when we're on the level of debating religious questions such as what is true, what is real, we can't do politics.

54:18.542 --> 54:22.004 [AK]: Politics is for deciding do we go to war this month or next month.

54:22.571 --> 54:33.459 [JF]: So then pull it back into the space race a little bit here and tie some more of Nietzsche's insight of the need for a figurehead who tells the story of the myth for the people.

54:33.999 --> 54:34.159 [AK]: Yeah.

54:34.360 --> 54:43.006 [JF]: And let's, let's see if we can also then pounce that somewhere between, actually, can we tie this to some other presidents that were there during that, that time period?

54:43.066 --> 54:47.049 [JF]: I mean, Kennedy is the only one that jumps to mind for me, but that's probably not the best one to connect to.

54:47.896 --> 54:48.116 [AK]: Right.

54:48.277 --> 54:52.801 [AK]: Even though most of the achievements take place under Johnson and Nixon.

54:53.041 --> 54:53.201 [JF]: Right.

54:53.321 --> 54:55.143 [JF]: After Kennedy, but he set it up in a sense, right?

54:55.243 --> 54:55.464 [AK]: Right.

54:56.384 --> 55:04.532 [AK]: I think what is significant is that the sense of idealism connected with space and the notion of

55:05.905 --> 55:20.310 [AK]: I mean, political symbolism of who gets to be an astronaut I mean they they tried really desperately to get a black astronaut in Mercury and in Apollo, and the guys simply washed out, and the power of affirmative action was not

55:21.192 --> 55:25.474 [AK]: great enough in the 50s and 60s to guarantee it.

55:25.534 --> 55:30.977 [AK]: But I think by the 70s and 80s, they got both black male astronauts and also by the 80s, they had women.

55:31.397 --> 55:33.078 [AK]: And that was really, really important.

55:33.338 --> 55:37.260 [AK]: A lot of people who were paying attention to media in the 80s will remember

55:38.000 --> 55:41.762 [AK]: female astronauts, they may not remember any of the male astronauts from that time.

55:42.182 --> 55:59.991 [AK]: So the political symbolism was always important, and I think that's what's interesting is that people know what Kennedy said about space, but it was factually achieved under Johnson and Nixon, but nobody cares because those guys are not associated with the idealism that I think is co-opted in the sense of space exploration.

56:00.091 --> 56:04.898 [JF]: Let me tie this all together for the sake of Gen X, and maybe you know this already, but maybe you don't.

56:05.659 --> 56:08.884 [JF]: You just brought this kind of together for me as I have a book full off my shelf.

56:09.548 --> 56:16.534 [JF]: You're talking about, you know, Kennedy's inspiration of a people to see a future of exploration and hope.

56:16.554 --> 56:18.555 [JF]: You know, there's a good myth, no matter how you tell it.

56:18.975 --> 56:20.036 [JF]: And he embraced it.

56:20.056 --> 56:25.641 [JF]: And you got me thinking about, we got to do an episode, this will be way in the future, but like, we need to do one on American assassinations.

56:26.021 --> 56:30.424 [JF]: Just follow all the shots taken in presidents straight through one episode, you know?

56:30.585 --> 56:31.705 [JF]: That would be really interesting.

56:32.486 --> 56:36.349 [JF]: But you're talking about the space program being one that for a generation was inspiring them.

56:36.389 --> 56:41.272 [JF]: You see that women and blacks being brought in, and this is a way of unifying the country symbolically, which is all good.

56:41.292 --> 56:41.993 [JF]: I'm all for all that.

56:42.573 --> 56:46.997 [JF]: And what I'm thinking is you're saying that is what I remember is watching my teacher's clone blow up.

56:47.657 --> 56:51.380 [JF]: She was a woman and I was an eight-year-old, right?

56:51.560 --> 56:54.402 [JF]: And I got to ask, let me throw my, the reason I asked this out.

56:54.762 --> 56:56.183 [AK]: I was in utero, but I remember that.

56:56.283 --> 56:59.226 [JF]: If this is the program, right, of a generation,

57:00.046 --> 57:07.049 [JF]: And in a generation on how, how many years you got to go on either side of eight to have this be a traumatic experience, like bonafide, right?

57:07.069 --> 57:09.550 [JF]: Like your, your teacher's like, this lady is just like me.

57:09.650 --> 57:11.811 [JF]: Watch her go to the wow.

57:11.971 --> 57:12.971 [JF]: Turn off the TV.

57:13.252 --> 57:14.612 [JF]: Don't talk about this ever again.

57:14.832 --> 57:15.433 [AK]: Right.

57:15.773 --> 57:20.575 [JF]: And is it any wonder Gen X has so little hope in the system?

57:21.215 --> 57:22.215 [AK]: Yeah.

57:22.255 --> 57:22.575 [JF]: I don't know.

57:22.716 --> 57:23.456 [JF]: Is that just a myth?

57:23.676 --> 57:23.856 [AK]: Right.

57:24.156 --> 57:25.757 [JF]: But it is real in this thing.

57:25.797 --> 57:27.918 [JF]: And it certainly, if we're talking about the story of America,

57:28.973 --> 57:32.195 [JF]: I mean the loss of NASA was a pretty big loss in that sense too.

57:32.495 --> 57:36.058 [JF]: We had a lot of flag waving hanging on that.

57:36.618 --> 57:37.338 [JF]: What do you think?

57:37.418 --> 57:40.380 [AK]: Yeah, well, we did the space shuttle.

57:40.741 --> 57:46.945 [AK]: I mean so even by what – the time of what you're talking about, we had gone from actual exploration…

57:47.685 --> 57:49.086 [AK]: to cargo transport.

57:50.867 --> 57:54.069 [AK]: And Skylab didn't really work the way it was supposed to.

57:54.489 --> 58:01.333 [AK]: So the actual platform for existing in space was literally a Soviet holdover in Mir.

58:01.353 --> 58:01.633 [AK]: And so

58:05.615 --> 58:11.181 [AK]: They achieved functionally more than what we did with a different set of ideals.

58:11.421 --> 58:20.090 [AK]: I mean, they didn't say, oh, we're going to bring in Azerbaijanis on purpose and cut out a couple Russian guys for that purpose.

58:20.491 --> 58:21.992 [AK]: They had a different ideology.

58:22.012 --> 58:25.255 [AK]: They achieved more technically in a long-term sense.

58:25.876 --> 58:27.017 [AK]: We'll see what the future brings.

58:27.037 --> 58:30.859 [JF]: Technically, they achieved so much, we're still living on the fumes of it, I think, in a lot of ways.

58:30.899 --> 58:32.521 [JF]: We're just replicating.

58:32.561 --> 58:36.103 [JF]: We think we're not like China, as American Silicon, a little bit.

58:36.163 --> 58:41.887 [JF]: We think that we are, China's stealing our stuff and we're creating it, but we're just kind of building on the fumes of what was there.

58:41.907 --> 58:44.108 [JF]: The actual new stuff hasn't shown up, man.

58:44.329 --> 58:45.049 [AK]: Yes, exactly.

58:45.109 --> 58:50.533 [AK]: Because if you look at what is the actual technology, when was it first thought of and developed,

58:51.053 --> 58:59.119 [AK]: The technology that you need to create a smartphone, which is kind of all we do now, because we either we either develop apps to utilize that.

58:59.259 --> 59:04.123 [AK]: I mean, I'm talking hardware, actual new capacity to do something no one's ever done before.

59:04.703 --> 59:09.187 [AK]: That was thought of and developed in California in the early 1960s.

59:11.864 --> 59:16.206 [AK]: So even just the imagination, we are not making new things.

59:16.306 --> 59:22.888 [JF]: Now, there is the attempt at the quantum computer, which I should say is out there and hopes to be this kind of new thing if it's possible.

59:23.768 --> 59:26.309 [JF]: Now, when you say that thing in the 60s, why don't you nail that down for me?

59:26.349 --> 59:27.390 [JF]: I don't know if this is what I thought of.

59:27.610 --> 59:28.230 [JF]: What do you say?

59:29.110 --> 59:36.813 [AK]: I'm talking about research that eventually was sometimes started by, and sometimes they came alongside as investors.

59:37.073 --> 59:45.016 [AK]: The Defense Department is involved, but things like the Xerox lab, the Xerox PARC lab at Stanford, and there's a really interesting book.

59:45.236 --> 59:48.757 [AK]: We should just do an entire podcast on the history of venture capitalism.

59:48.797 --> 59:49.518 [JF]: Oh, absolutely.

59:51.578 --> 59:56.240 [JF]: If you want to live in an exploratory world and pretend it's still colonial, get into venture capitalism.

59:56.780 --> 01:00:07.304 [AK]: What I'm saying is that the notion that we have created new things as Americans since the 1960s, I think is highly debatable.

01:00:07.364 --> 01:00:08.204 [JF]: Yeah, absolutely.

01:00:08.544 --> 01:00:09.745 [JF]: We're building upon what was already there.

01:00:09.765 --> 01:00:10.445 [JF]: Yeah, go ahead.

01:00:11.025 --> 01:00:15.907 [AK]: Because I think that when you're looking at the history of technology and the history of power, which are so

01:00:16.767 --> 01:00:23.590 [AK]: tightly intertwined with each other, you're also looking at what kind of people are utilizing that technology and that power.

01:00:23.970 --> 01:00:26.952 [JF]: This is detailed so well in a book called The Problem of Physics, Problem with Physics.

01:00:27.492 --> 01:00:28.633 [JF]: It's been out in the last 10 years.

01:00:28.753 --> 01:00:33.215 [JF]: It's a critique of string theory, and I am fully sold on it.

01:00:33.295 --> 01:00:37.137 [JF]: And effectively, he says, I mean, we can't create anything new because we haven't found any new laws.

01:00:37.697 --> 01:00:40.419 [JF]: We've not actually figured out how anything else works beyond what we already figured out.

01:00:40.479 --> 01:00:42.501 [JF]: And so you gotta go even a layer lower.

01:00:42.761 --> 01:00:45.123 [JF]: I'm gonna say there's also this, here's a fascinating thing in my mind.

01:00:45.704 --> 01:00:52.529 [JF]: The entire endeavor of whatever's going on in your iPhone, at whatever level it is, is built on the idea of binary code at its root.

01:00:52.569 --> 01:00:55.212 [JF]: The idea that there is a distinction of one and zero, one and zero, one and zero.

01:00:55.612 --> 01:01:00.036 [JF]: And at this point we live in a civilization and a world attempting to say there's no such thing as binary.

01:01:00.356 --> 01:01:02.838 [JF]: There is no one and zero, one and zero, one and zero.

01:01:02.858 --> 01:01:06.021 [JF]: And that cannot lead to further discoveries beyond

01:01:06.701 --> 01:01:08.663 [JF]: the binary because you're denying its existence.

01:01:08.683 --> 01:01:13.449 [JF]: You're not going to find the next thing by pretending what's here doesn't exist, right?

01:01:13.589 --> 01:01:22.379 [AK]: You have to let nature and mathematics as its sort of foundational way that its reality is discovered, right?

01:01:22.420 --> 01:01:24.101 [AK]: That's why math is foundational to science.

01:01:24.642 --> 01:01:26.885 [AK]: You have to let that exist outside of you.

01:01:27.525 --> 01:01:45.779 [AK]: If you are trying to exercise a kind of magical control over reality to the extent that you are no longer letting the existence of hard things be there, be admitted, be discussed, and therefore be discovered, then you are condemning yourself to darkness.

01:01:45.939 --> 01:02:05.956 [JF]: So the fact that the entire world of physics today is pursuing string theory as a hunch and has been doing so for decades without it ever showing itself to solve the problems that were discovered with quantum physics in the first place, which is that, I mean, if I can sum it up quickly, there are certain things when you observe them, they give you different results than when you don't observe them.

01:02:06.276 --> 01:02:08.658 [JF]: And that's not how a materialistic universe should work.

01:02:08.838 --> 01:02:13.943 [JF]: And rather than assume there's more going on than a materialistic universe, we're playing with string theory and multiple universes.

01:02:14.343 --> 01:02:21.126 [JF]: We're going to do it until the civilization collapses around our ears because when you're in the ivory tower, you never notice that the waters are rising around Babel.

01:02:21.146 --> 01:02:23.067 [JF]: Ooh, I did kind of bring that all home.

01:02:23.748 --> 01:02:24.088 [AK]: You did.

01:02:25.088 --> 01:02:29.591 [JF]: Is there anything you want to lead into out of this one for next time to make sure that we're set in the same direction?

01:02:30.131 --> 01:02:31.093 AK I think for next time.

01:02:31.113 --> 01:02:45.053 [AK]: It's no coincidence that when you get surveys of scientists religious beliefs or profession or practices, the highest levels of belief and profession and practice exist among mathematicians and physicists.

01:02:45.874 --> 01:03:08.124 [AK]: Because I think the closer you get to fundamental realities the more you really wonder whether or not there are things in control That are not simply determined by you, and and not coincidentally for the sake of power and the rise of things like education and the other social sciences Levels of atheism are generally highest in the humanities, but especially in the social sciences

01:03:08.624 --> 01:03:16.027 [AK]: Because there, I think the illusion of control, which our elites have over all aspects of reality, that illusion is, I think, deepest.

01:03:16.567 --> 01:03:21.469 [AK]: The farther you get from hard facts, such as, this is the nature of a triangle.

01:03:22.129 --> 01:03:24.590 [JF]: Listen to a brief history of power with two white guys.

01:03:24.970 --> 01:03:26.030 [JF]: We're in closing here.

01:03:26.050 --> 01:03:28.351 [JF]: You do need to beware the Lizardmen.

01:03:28.731 --> 01:03:31.092 [JF]: And indeed, viva, viva revolution.

01:03:31.672 --> 01:03:33.273 [JF]: And we look forward to offending you next time.