Discussing Communism in All Its Glory | Michael Malice | EP 407

Despite what we were told in the West for decades—that the Soviet Union is perpetual—we have to learn to live together; they're not going anywhere. Look, you can't antagonize them. We just got to figure out how to work together. And at a certain point, Reagan said, "Do you want to know what my policy is for this, the Cold War? Some it's simple; some might even call it simplistic. You want to hear it? We win, and they lose."

Right.

Hello everyone, I have the pleasure today of sitting and talking with Michael Melis. We start by talking about his book, "The White Pill." His book is a walkthrough of the catastrophes of the Soviet era, the dire hell that emerged in the aftermath of the formulation of the hypothetical workers' paradise, and a description of how and why that dreadful system came to an end.

But we also talk about something I suppose more fundamental, if there is something more fundamental than that, which is a conceptualization of what appropriate social and psychological relations might look like in alternative to dogmatic and structured government. I hashed out with Michael the precise reason that his attention has been attracted by the claims of anarchism per se. I'm always curious about dissociating anarchism, say, from a kind of impulsive hedonism. We drag Ayn Rand into the mix to sort that out, and come to conclusions that I think are, well, they're interesting and likely appropriate, concentrating particularly on voluntary association as the antithesis to power—power and compulsion, the power and compulsion that inevitably leads to tyranny and hell.

So that's the conversation. I was reading your book this morning, "The White Pill," and I've read a fair bit of Russian history in the 20th century and some before that. But every time I reencounter it, it never really stops stunning me—the brutality that was associated with that regime. I mean, it's obviously the case that the same can be said about what happened in Nazi Germany and perhaps even to a greater extent about what happened in Mao's China, although that's a competition between pretty deep hells.

But it never stops being surely unbelievable to me that things can go that badly. I thought maybe what we do here is to start with two—I'll read a couple of things from your book, one kind of ideological and then the other just a description of the consequences of the ideology. So you write about this Burkeman character, who was an anarchist agitator for the working class in the United States, who had the what he thought was the good fortune to go to Russia after the revolution to see the workers' paradise in action, only to be deported by Hoover, right?

Right, right, right.

And he said with his friend, what was her name? Emma Goldman.

Goldman, Emma Goldman, of course—that they were virtually motivated to kiss the ground when they landed in Russia.

Okay, so now Burkeman's talking to Lenin, and Lenin says, "Liberty," Lenin told Burkeman, "is a luxury not to be permitted at the present state of development when the revolution is out of danger—external and domestic." So that's kind of an interesting idea: to be out of danger, that's when you get to have liberty when there's like zero danger.

You know, that happens a lot in life, then free speech might be indulged in, might, right? And indulged in, right, right. Lovely phrasing. He's a man who meant what he said, insisting that, quote, "enemies must be crushed, and all power centralized in the communist state." Lenin admitted that in this process, the government is often compelled to resort to unpleasant means, but that is the imperative of the situation, right?

That's the other thing that the totalitarians always do: is that the situation right now is so bad and liable to get worse that any means whatsoever are to be justified. Now, not only that, but if you stand against them, then, well, all you're doing is contributing to the eventual catastrophe. And then, given the magnitude of the catastrophe, no punishment could possibly be severe enough for you, but that is the imperative of the situation from which there can be no shrinking. That's lovely too. Now it's a moral obligation to torture people in the course of time.

Yeah, these methods will be abolished when they have become unnecessary.

So that's lovely. Okay. So what does that end up producing, that attitude, in mere years? When Lenin is still alive, so Burkeman and Goldman left the Soviet Union in 1921 with complete loathing. Her memoir of her time there was split by her publisher into two books, given the titles of "My Disillusionment in Russia" (1923) and "My Further Disillusionment in Russia" (1924) because there were two books worth of disillusionment. And that wasn't nearly enough.

Burkeman's "The Bolshevik Myth" came out the following year, and the two never stopped speaking about what they had seen firsthand in Russia, warning the rest of the world of the horrors that the Russian citizenry were enduring. And remember, these were people who were hoping that a worker's revolution would produce a broadscale improvement in the working conditions of ordinary people.

So, okay, so let's go up a little. Let's go down a little closer to the actuality on the ground. So this is another quote from your book: "Life remained difficult in the USSR for years after the Russian Civil War had been won by the Bolsheviks. The Communists, housing became even more of a concern as rural citizens flocked to the rapidly industrializing cities in search of work and food. Families became crammed into apartments that had already been occupied by other families."

Yeah, well, it was a berserk conceit that people needed, like, their own space, including their own bathroom, right? Well, we'll get to that right away here.

And both eviction and trying to find a new place to live effectively became impossible. Well, that's lovely. So no matter how terrible the people were who you lived with, there was no possibility of doing anything about it. Some of this was by design, in keeping with communist ideology. The ultimate vision was to have homes without kitchens so that everyone would eat communally and in government-run cafeterias. It's a lovely idea, assuming that there's food and that the people who are cooking are motivated somehow to cook, and decently, and that the people cleaning up are motivated somehow other than by terror to clean up.

And then, you know, if you let the government provide your food every single day, and you don't even have a storehouse or a kitchen, then what's to stop the people who are hypothetically giving you everything from stopping to provide everything that you've so foolishly allowed them to present yourself with whenever they want, on any pretext whatsoever? People think no one would ever do that. It's like, yeah, right—true, true believer.

Communist architects, lovely group, designed buildings where everyone would have to share bathrooms as well, part of an assault on bourgeois concepts such as shame, privacy, and individualism. This created an enormous incentive for families to turn in those living with them to the authorities for the most spacious of reasons, if not downright lies.

One phone call in the living quarters for one family instantly doubled. What's the harm? If they weren't guilty of one thing, then surely they were guilty of another.

Yeah, I remember that from Solzhenitsyn. This is what the good thinkers in the West think too. You know when something happens, when the government extends its tentacles and takes away more liberties or starts threatening people, the idea is, well if you didn't do anything wrong, you wouldn't have anything to worry about. We still hear that today.

Oh, absolutely. We hear that all the time. It's like, I see, so if I never did anything wrong, I wouldn't have to worry about you. Okay, so that means only the person who's utterly innocent has nothing to fear, right? Well, yeah, that'll work out well for everyone. And if they hadn't done anything, then surely they would have nothing to fear from the Cheka. We'll talk about them.

This became such a commonplace occurrence that it was even joked about in popular magazines of the time. Just think, Masha, how unpleasant. I wrote a denunciation on Galan, and it turns out that Galan had a bigger room. Yes, very funny.

Okay, so what's the end consequence of this? I think this is in the early 20s. This is in Ukraine. Mass deportation starts. Victims who were about to be deported were stripped of their shoes and their clothes and taken and given to lower peasants as a bribe to ensure their cooperation. Kulak children, so the kulaks were farmers who actually produced food. That was basically the definition of a kulak, or who could conceivably produce food or had ancestors that might have once produced food.

These kulak children were left as beggars on the street. Those transported to Siberia, where there were no buildings, by the way— and where it was winter—often, often, often, yes.

Well, in Siberia, after all, often, yeah. Those transported to Siberia faced insuperable hardship—yes, and insuperable by design. If a village existed, they were squeezed into it; otherwise, they were simply abandoned without shelter in extreme cold and ordered to build dwellings. Many managed to do so by working almost around the clock without sleep in order that they and the others would not freeze to death. Those employed as forced labor in mining regions faced starving rations of one bowl of thin gruel a day and 8 to 10 ounces of bread. They died in waves. No matter, their numbers were replenished by the arrival of new deportees.

And then we'll read this too, I think. CU, this is where it... I don't know, is this as bad as it got? Probably not. You'd never find the bottom. It does become common—this is during the kulak starvation—it thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another. Turning in a neighbor for having a stock of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one's family.

Not only was there a guarantee of a meal, but there was now a guarantee that said meal wouldn't be seized by the requisitioners who were going from house to house looking for any evidence that you might have even literally a grain of wheat somewhere on the premises. Furthermore, those who could not produce a quota of grain during starvation conditions were subject to a fine of five times the value of what the grain would have been—yet another reason to seize property and savings.

Not having the food to fulfill one's quota was taken as evidence, if not downright proof, that one must have been hiding it. And if the food was being hidden, then why was it being handed over? Many of the tactics, however, could only be explained by pure sadism. In some villages, the requisitioners went from house to house killing all the dogs and taking their bodies with them for good measure. Fingers would be slammed in doorways or needles jammed under fingernails. Those found concealing food were robbed of their remaining possessions, evicted from their homes, and thrown into the snow without any clothes, to ensure that the starving peasants did not somehow steal the food that they so desperately needed.

Fields and barns were kept under armed guard. The tivist even came for the tools used for making food, breaking millstones necessary to process grain. If they took soup from a hungry family, they made sure to take the pot as well.

We'll end with this one. One day, as I waited in a queue in front of the store to buy bread, I saw a farm girl of about 15 years of age in rags and with starvation looking out of her eyes. She stretched out her hand to everyone who bought bread asking for a few crumbs. At last, she reached the storekeeper. This man must have been some newly arrived stranger who either could not or would not speak Ukrainian. He began to berate her, said she was too lazy to work on the farm, and hit her outstretched hand with the blunt edge of a knife blade. The girl fell down and lost a crumb of bread she was holding in the other hand. Then the storekeeper stepped closer, kicked the girl, and roared, "Get up, go home, and get to work!" The girl groaned, stretched out, and died. Some in the queue began to weep.

Yes, well, their little walk through communism in all its glory. So you start your book—there's one line after that, where he chastises the people online who are crying for the dying girl, and he says, "Oh, looks like enemies of the people are everywhere," right? So to make sure you're not even showing sympathy for this kid who just starved in front of you.

Right, right.

Yeah, well, one of the things, you know, one of the things I learned from Rudakshin, it's so absolutely bloody brutal was—and it was in keeping with what you just said—was that once you establish a state like the Russians established, where Heaven is claimed to rain when hell actually prevails, you can't even admit to your own suffering much less the suffering of other people. Because to admit that you're in pain is an accusation against the state. Because, like, well, who are you to be in pain? That glorious socialist workers' revolution has come; there's no such thing as pain. And so then you're in a situation where you suffer and everyone around you suffers, and now if you dare to admit it, then you suffer more.

And so there was a line in the gulags where one of the—it was Eleanor Lipman, I believe it’s her name—says that not only did they want to torture us; they wanted us to thank them for it.

Yeah, right.

So to even acknowledge that something is wrong or an issue is in fact criticism of the state. And the only people who are criticizing the state are by definition counter-revolutionaries who not only want to therefore overthrow the government but pretty much want what's worse for everybody. So when people like this exist, there is nothing that is too bad to be done to them because they are monsters who must be wiped off the face of the Earth.

There is this line one—the secret police just talked about how when you're chopping wood, chips will fly because his point was it's better to kill nine innocent people to get to that one spy because that is what happens when you have a society based on the common good before the individual good. They tell you constantly and explicitly you do not matter. We are building a great society for the sake of all. You and your family are completely irrelevant, so fall in line because everyone else is falling in line and what makes you so special.

So, I have to tell you, I'm sorry, it's just, you know, being born in the Soviet Union and having worked in this was very difficult, but hearing it coming from you and just this kind of arms-length thing is just getting me all agitated once again because it's the kind of situation that as Americans and a Canadian, almost incomprehensible.

You know, the book starts with Ayn Rand on the back where she's testifying in front of the House on American Activist Committee, and she says, "It's almost impossible to convey to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship." She goes, "I could give you a lot of details, I can never completely convince you." And she goes, "In a way, it's good that you can't even conceive what it's like." Yeah, like, imagine what it's like to live from morning till night in constant terror, and at night you're waiting for the doorbell to ring where you don't know who or what is going to do or when is going to do what to you because you have friends who spy on you and family members.

You live in a country where human life means nothing, less than nothing, and you know it, and you're reminded of it constantly.

Yeah, and purposefully. Yes, right. And where power has been delivered to the hands of the most sadistic people you can possibly imagine, who claim constantly that they're doing nothing except operating in the name of the highest good.

I will correct you because I think they're more sadistic than you could possibly imagine because if you and I sat down and tried to think of sadistic things to do, we would not be creative enough as people with the slightest bit of conscience to think of the things that they did in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China. It would just never enter our heads.

So why did you write this book? I mean, there are other histories of the Russian of Russian brutality, obviously, and it's also the case, I would say, that if people were inclined to educate themselves—this is something we can talk about in detail—if people in the West were inclined to educate themselves about the inevitability, the inevitable consequences of, let's say, a communist revolution, there are plenty of sources to draw from: the "Black Book of Communism," everything Solzhenitsyn wrote, for example.

I mean, we know this; we know this, or we could know it. Now, you know, one of the things that stunned me, and I suppose it was one of the first, what would you say, the first source of insights I had into the absolute corruption of the modern education system in the West, was that I taught a module on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in my personality class, which was a second-year class. I taught it at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, so I was teaching it to pretty damn bright students, and they were in the 14th year of their education.

I taught it because Solzhenitsyn was essentially an existentialist psychologist in many ways. He extended the work that was done by Victor Frankl, who wrote a great book called "Man’s Search for Meaning," but Solzhenitsyn went even deeper. What stunned me was despite the fact that we had carried on a Cold War for 40 years to try to defeat this absolutely brutal ideology that almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster, that 130-40 million people had been slaughtered in the 20th century in its name, that most of the students had absolutely no bloody idea that any of this ever happened.

And I thought, how in the hell can we be that? You know, what they say, there is none so blind as those who will not see. And so you wrote this—why? You write it—you I think you just answered my question because the fact that this was the absolutely unambiguously number one foreign policy issue for the greater part of the 20th century, that all foreign policy was viewed through the lenss of the Cold War, and the fact that the Soviet Union has now not only been memory-holed but has become a bit of a kitschy joke that you can go to Whole Foods and have like Russian brand ice cream, and they mean Russian like Soviet-era brand ice cream, and they make little jokes about it, strange.

It's not strange. Strange can be morally ambiguous; it's depraved in my opinion.

No, but here's the strange part of it is, you know, is that that's true of the Soviet Union, but it's not true of Nazi Germany. Now, I have heard that in South Korea there is Nazi K-Kit and in India as well; they have Hitler ice cream in India.

Okay, but here, it's been the case that apart from the Mel Brooks Broadway production—right, "Springtime for Hitler," what—or that wasn't the production exactly; I think there was a song in that.

Yeah, right, that was a song. There was a song in it, yeah, right—that was the only time that I actually saw, like, a kitschy kind of parody. It was still a dark parody. Hitler and the Nazis are still off-limits for, for what would—demented nostalgia, but that doesn't seem to be the case, as you pointed out, for the communist regime because we're the good guys in World War II, and the people we sided with, therefore, are the good guys.

So to have the narrative explain that we had to deal with a devil to deal with the worst devil is too—and the fact that there are many agencies, the U.S. government and the newspapers who are still in power today, that they were the ones who helped to cover up Stalin's atrocities, possibly in the sake of something that needed to happen to win World War I. But they never went back and were like, "Guys, this is hardly..." You know, Churchev and FDR are calling him Uncle Joe at Yalta and things like this.

There was a huge movement to censor in Hollywood anything that implies that Russia is dishonest or brutal or harmful; like, they’re allies; we have to portray them in the best possible light. This is the war effort. So the fact that there isn't this easy narrative that like, "Wait a minute, you know, CU! Our foreign policy is always we're the good guys, whoever we're against is the bad guys," so to have any kind of ambiguity in that, even historical, is something that our, I think, our corporate media, which is very dedicated to promulgating binary thinking—good versus bad, good—you know, black versus evil—is something that they're very heavily invested in.

And to answer your previous question, that is why I wrote this book, because I thought it was insane that something that is, again, the number one issue of the 20th century in this regard is something that educated, highly educated people know very little about. But the reason? They don't want to, then don't want to.

In fact, when Emma Goldman spoke in London shortly after she left the Soviet Union, all these lefties gave her a standing ovation, and when she's like, "This is not what we want! These people are destroying the workers," you could hear a pin drop. They did not want to hear it.

But the other reason what's different from this from Conquest and Solzhenitsyn and these others' books is this book is a story of hope. Because why I feel so hopeful in many ways about the West, that maybe I'm delusional, and that's a separate issue, is the fact that this depravity was defeated, and it was defeated in our lifetimes, and it was defeated relatively painlessly and relatively easily.

So if you have that model of the victory of all these peoples, after so much sacrifice to overthrow these demonic satanic regimes, I think is a very one of the happiest endings imaginable.

Right, right. And the emergence back into freedom of the Eastern Europeans who are doing well now after another—and this was in the 80s—we have color footage; you could watch it on YouTube. But, you know, this again, the narrative is too complicated for entities like the New York Times to tell that story.

Yeah, all right, so maybe part of it too, with regards to the distinction between the Nazi regime and the communist regime, I've thought this through a lot, is maybe this is also why we can't exactly remember. It's very difficult to shake the hope that there is a form of hyper-organized government, let's say, that can provide—well, can provide what? That can provide, period? That there's a form of social organization that would permanently rescue people from the world of want.

That seems to be the lot of man, I mean now we have erected a technological enterprise that has freed us from privation to a large degree, so it is the case that if we organize ourselves intelligently that we can push back against the tragedies of the world. And the logical extension of that—or a logical extension of that, I suppose—is that it's something like a permanently utopian state characterized by the brotherhood of man, right, without concern for creed, race, or color, where everyone's equal, which starts to become a very difficult proposition.

And the communists in principle offered that, and it’s actually, in some ways, one of the things that distinguishes them from the Nazis because the Nazis offered that too, but only for a certain group of people, whereas the communists did promote a universal brotherhood.

You know, I've asked some of my Jewish friends why communism was particularly attractive in the Soviet Union to Jewish intellectuals of the time, and I would say it's partly because utopian schemes of that sort tend to be more attractive to intellectuals, period. But the wisest answer I got was that that offering of universal brotherhood where all the distinctions between different creeds, races, and religions would be abolished, in principle, was attractive to people who'd been the brunt of ethnic and religious conflict, often murderous, for, you know, for centuries.

And so we have this longing within us for the emergence of something approximating a paradisal state. And then it's very easy to be sucked into two propositions: is that one, that state could be brought about by organization and government fiat, right? And two, that, what would you say, that that organization could provide everyone with what was wanted without shattering the negative consequences of handing other people that much power.

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Jordan, so see, it's a mystery because you'd think that we could learn. Why do you think it's so difficult for people to learn that the dream of a worker's paradise that's predicated on something like radical equality almost inevitably degenerates into perhaps inevitably degenerates into something so murderous that you can't even comprehend it? Because I think it speaks to the inherent narcissism of intellectuals because we're the ones who are going to do it right. They didn't have me to run the— they had dumb people.

Oh, if only. I'm sure you see this every single day with any faculty, any kind of administration, any college. We're the one—everyone else is stupid but me. If I was in charge of this ship, we'd land it to shore safely and happily. And to speak to why it was so popular with Jewish intellectuals specifically, if the choice was the czar and pogroms where you're by law mandated to live in a ghetto, and so often the police and the citizen are going to ride through that ghetto, kill and rape not only with impunity but with the cheers of the populace and the state, and the alternative is everyone's going to be equal and you're going to have a stake in making a society that works for the sake of all, it's not a difficult choice to make for this particular population.

Yeah, well, that first comment you made, you know, that's so—I've spent a lot of time, especially recently, writing about the Luciferian intelligence. Yes, and the Luciferian intelligence, so the reason I use that term in particular is because of Milton's characterization of Lucifer, right?

So you could think of Lucifer as the embodiment of evil. B, what's his name? Burkman?

Master Margarita, no there's a book—great Russian novelist wrote a book called "The Master and Margarita" in the 1930s, and in that book, Satan himself comes back to Earth in the USSR, but no one believes in him, so he can do whatever he wants, right? So Vov is his name. It's a great book. It's like a Dovian level book.

It's a great book, but Milton characterized Lucifer as God's highest angel gone most spectacularly wrong. And Lucifer is the light-bringer, and he's essentially associated with the intellect. And the idea—the dreamlike idea that Milton laid out in his poetic masterpiece, "Paradise Lost," was that if the intellect attempts to reign supreme, it instantly produces hell, right? That it has to be subordinate to something else.

Now you make a case like that, I think implicitly, in your book, because one of the things that you're proposing is that if a society loses its foundation on the presumption of the ultimate worth of the individual per se, which is something like a soul concept, right? Right, right.

If that presumption disappears and is replaced by status presuppositions or even by group identity, then hell isn't far away. You know, I just read a book by this woman, Immaculee, I believe is her name, and she was one of the Rwandans who spent 92 days in a 3x4 bathroom. She was, you know, crammed in there with nine, seven to nine, depending on the time, other women who were basically starving to death over that period.

And what happened in Rwanda, even though it was quite a peaceful state, although poor, was that the notion of group identity became paramount; and then one ethnic group was set against the other. And what happened in Rwanda is reminiscent of the sorts of things—perhaps faster and even more brutal, possibly—than what happened in the Soviet Union. A million people killed in a span of mere months, right? In the most brutal possible way, was a consequence of the valorization of group identity.

You saw the same thing happening in Russia, right? Because this happened soon after the revolution, is that the communists were attempting to eradicate bourgeois individuality, and so people started to be classified and judged by group guilt. And then almost immediately after the revolution, if you were a landowner or property owner or anybody who had even a modicum of success under the czars, or your family or your—well, that's the next thing.

You were classified as an oppressor and an enemy of the people. But immediately, it spread to your family. Even if you didn't own anything, if you had people in your ancestry who ever dared to own anything—which meant everyone who was even vagely identified success with oppression—you know, which is something that we're trying very hard to do in our culture at the moment too, which is absolutely catastrophic. We're doing the same bloody things.

Right, dividing people into groups, making group identity paramount, identifying success itself with oppression. You know, I mean, now—and then people who are crooked and parasitical become successful, so to speak, temporarily. But that doesn't justify for a moment assuming that if one person owns something that another person doesn't, that you associate the first person's ownership with theft and oppression.

And then of course, the communists, as you laid out, did attempt to eradicate every single form of private property whatsoever. And the consequence of that was—well, we already read about that—is that in no time flat, you and your family were being thrown out into the snow, naked, for having the temerity to keep, like, to literally keep a cob of corn on your table so that you might either have something to eat or so that you had some seeds for the next year.

So, again, we're back to the initial problem, which is when the evidence that these ideological presuppositions go so starkly wrong, because of something like prideful intellect, people just show up time and time again and get incensed by these ideological theories, and they make that move that you suggested— which is, "Well, if I would have been in charge of the revolution with my in-depth and accurate knowledge of the niceties of utopian dogma, then I would have shepherded in the promised utopia."

And why not try again? Well, I think if you really want to go to the roots, it goes to Plato versus Aristotle, right? How do you approach knowledge? Do you look at what's around you and deduce things and draw conclusions, so on and so forth, or do you start with your mind and this perfect world of ideas and then try to force reality to comport to your ideology?

And you saw this go through than to Hegel, then to Marx. And basically, the whole thing is since we know that our—they called it Scientific Socialism—right? That was the whole idea of communism: "We're scientific! Not like this market where you have these little shopkeepers with their prices and, you know, it's a complete mess, and food's getting thrown out. We're going to work scientifically; we're going to have the big brains at the top; we're going to figure everything out, turn the entire country into either a laboratory or a factory."

And then when things don't work out, thanks to the fact that we have it down, someone must be sabotaging it. We have the record! So you have this concept of scapegoating. Because since we know—so again, that's the difference between, you know, if my plan doesn't work, you know, am I going to look back at the plan, fix it, tweak it because somehow the cars I'm producing aren't working, or this arrogant, you know, idealistic mindset. By idealistic, I mean this concept which Western don't even understand: that ideas are more real than reality; since my ideas are correct, the output is incorrect.

Someone must be screwing up with what I know is the perfect set of ideas, and you can't twist the thumb screws hard enough because you're here to bring a sense of Heaven on Earth and to save your people and all of the world. So—and Stalin even said explicitly that the further along you go in the revolution, the more brutal you have to be because it's going to be like losing those last 10 pounds of fat, right? It's going to be that much harder to weed out these capitalistic and bourgeois elements because they're going to be so much more hidden.

So plus you have a good excuse then at that point for things not going well because it's only the real subtle snakes that are left, right? They're invisibly ruining everything behind the scenes.

Well, the other thing that occurs, too, almost like immediately after the revolution when Lenin decides that everyone has to be clamped down on is that the true sadists come to the fore. And so that also raises the specter in my imagination that it's not merely intellectual arrogance that produces this proclivity to fall hook, line, and sinker for the communist utopia, especially the one that intellect would be in charge of, but that there's a latent sadism that's associated with that pretentious intellect that's looking for a mode of expression.

And so, you know, one of the things I used to see in my clinical practice—tell me what you think about this—and I see thinking like this. It's latent in your book; you're putting your finger on it from time to time. Is I'd have clients who were, you know, say 35 years old; they were often men—these particular clients—women have their own pathology, but this was more a male pathology. These were guys who were, like, they're pretty damn smart; they were intelligent in junior high, in elementary school, junior high, and high school. You know, they were in the top 5% of the class; they generally didn't work that hard, but they could skate by, and everybody knew they were smart, and that really constituted their identity.

But they never learned how to work, and the fact that they had been differentially rewarded for their intellect in the absence of work meant that they developed a kind of pride that was associated with that intellect. You know? And so, you can imagine that one of the ways of turning someone into a narcissist is to reward them for something that's intrinsic to them, because a lot of whether or not you're intelligent is more or less given to you.

Right? I mean, you can make someone stupider; it's not that easy to make them more intelligent on the IQ side. If you have an IQ of 145, which would put you at about the 99th percentile, there's a huge biological contributor to that, right? And the benefits of good health—so it's a talent or a gift. And then you become proud, proud of that, and then these guys—the same guys—would often be not successful in their life, and that made them bitter because their presumption was always something like, "Well, I'm so smart that the world should fall at my feet."

And then that world doesn't fall at their feet; they're less popular with women, for example, than they think they might be if the women actually had the sense to see what it was that they were passing up. And then, that consequence—that consequence of having their intellect ejected makes them bitter, and the step from bitter to sadist is not very far away. You know, and you see also—you see this idea of being toyed with even in the popular culture.

So I watched a fair bit of a number of episodes of the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory," right?

"The Big Bang Theory"?

Yeah, well, it was interesting to me because it featured these nerd type characters, right? Who were intellectuals, you know—they're techno-intellectuals—and tended to be rather unpopular with women and awkward and also awkward socially, but they were hyper-intelligent, and there is this sense of aggrieved intellect that runs through the entire show.

That's part of the comic trope, but it's also extremely true. And so I'm wondering if what you think of the proposition that, along with the intellect that proposes these utopian schemes, right, and doesn't like distributed problem-solving, it wants to accrue all the decision-making power to itself because it wants the glory of doing that for itself.

And it wants that for the status— and the fact that that doesn't occur produces this aggrieved nature that can't help but express itself in sadism. Because Lenin's a great example of that, man. I mean, it took no time at all before he turned in from the working man's revolutionary—which he never was—to a sadist whose depths were, what—they're unfathomable, right? And so quickly.

Well, he was always talking about how much blood we need to flow, even before he got into power. This is one of the reasons why they brought him back to Russia, the Germans, because they're like, "Once he's there, he's going to make a whole muck of it." No one ever thought he was actually going to seize power, but to your point about sadism, this is something I do address in the book because there was an evolutionary process.

So one of the things that the Russians did, as you mentioned earlier, is they have these things called anecdotes, which are little jokes, because you can't criticize the state, but you can make little jokes about it and get that point through without the person realizing you're being so devastating in your critique.

And there was one joke where Stalin was talking to Beria, who was his third and most brutal executioner—maybe not most brutal; there's competition—but Stalin lost his pipe. And he goes, "Beria, you know, my pipe's been stolen."

And then Beria goes out, and the next day Stalin calls him in, and he’s like, "Oh, you know, I found it; it's in my drawer." He goes, "But, comrade Stalin, we got three people to confess to it already.”

So meaning Beria's most famous quote was, "Show me the man; I'll show you the crime."

But there was an evolutionary process to sadism, for the simple reason that if you have ten people who are interrogators, the guy who is the cruelest and most effective in his infliction of pain—psychological, physical, and otherwise—is the one who's going to get the most confessions. He's the one who's going to get the most results.

If I'm at all a decent human being, some people are going to stand up to my tortures, where if I'm the one who is a complete inhuman monster who will stop at nothing to make sure that that person admits to things which are literally impossible, I'm the one who's going to get the promotion. So the system itself forced these people to become sadistic because otherwise—and the thing is, it's not also a matter of, "Well, I'm gonna lose my job if I'm not being cruel enough." Then maybe I'm one of these wreckers; maybe I'm counter-revolutionary.

What's wrong with Comrade Malise? Why can't he get any of these confessions? Well, all his colleagues can maybe I shouldn't be trusting you, and if you're not trusting me, then my wife and my kid are suspect as well. So, you know to your point, it very much—the most merciful torturer is the counter-revolutionary, yes.

Yeah, right.

Definitely. Well, also—and one more, just one more point—because you were talking about it being an assault on private property. It goes much deeper than that because it was an assault on civil society, on private relationships, right? Because any two people who are talking are a threat to the society, to the state, because then you have the beginnings of a conspiracy.

So you—the kids, as you know very well, I'm sure, taught this lesson of Pavlik Morozov. They taught this in elementary school about the story of this boy who turned in his parents to the police because dad was hoarding grain or something, and Pavlik was later murdered by his dad.

And this kid—their statues of him were regarded as valuable, and the kids were taught you have to turn in your parents to the police if you see them doing anything wrong, even if the cost is your life. And the same thing, it became a crime to be married to an enemy of the people.

How are you going to plead in that case, right? Well, you should have known that your husband or your wife was engaged in counter-revolutionary activity because every citizen needs to be vigilant against the counter-revolutionaries who are trying to undermine this glorious scientific socialistic society that we're building.

Well then, you could see very rapidly—if you think about it—how love itself would become an anti-Soviet act because that's bis love is a very, bis value even precisely. But even more directly, like one of the things that happens if you love someone is that their suffering is going to hurt you. Yes, and so if you love someone in their suffering, you're going to listen to them, and then in a state that's already perfect, if you listen to someone suffer, you're basically listening to people utter counter-revolutionary propaganda.

Right? And so any genuine sympathy between people that would result in a truthful confession of personal catastrophe would immediately be placed in the camp of revolutionary propaganda.

And necessarily, this is why Rand said—Rand said that it's impossible for free people to imagine what it's like to live 100% under the dominion of the lie because we can't imagine—thank God—what it would be like to be so terrified of the truth that you couldn't even tell it to yourself.

But, but worse perhaps you couldn't tell it to the people most around you who most particularly loved you, right? Children or parents or spouses.

And one of the things that I learned in the writing of this book—and I'm not sure if even you know this—after Germany was reunified, all the Stasi files were made public so you could—and the percent of secret police informers in East Germany was one in three.

Yeah, it was some crazy number; it blew the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany out of the water. As Swin pointed out, he goes the Stasi were much worse—they were Germans; they're efficient.

So everyone in that country had to make that choice: do I want to look up what they know about me? And as importantly, who was the one turning me in? And there's this woman, Nam Froud Truman, who had a job working in these files.

When the reporter wrote about it, he goes, “How can you work with poison and not yourself be poisoned?” So she has to warn people, and this one woman came in; she had gone to jail, I think it was for three or four years because she expressed an interest— I don't even know if she was immigrating or just visiting outside of East Germany.

And she looked up the files, and it was the man who she—it was the man she still lived with, and just that morning, he told her, "Have a good day." And she's got to go back home to this.

Yeah, and she just collapsed in, as you would. And it's just like, again, this whole country had to make this kind of fian bargain or decision: do I want to know? And again, Dante put betrayers in the lowest level.

Yes, but these are people who were like, it's been my husband since day one.

Yeah, or my brother or, you know.

And the thing that was extremely disturbing—and this is something Americans do not get, but I think have started to get with the result of COVID—we, I as well, was of the belief that these informers had a gun to their head. And Jordan, if they take me in, it's like it's either my family or I'm turning in Jordan Peterson.

Sorry, sorry, bucko, I'm turning you in.

They were tripping over themselves to volunteer. I saw that in Toronto. These were people who were bored or lonely or just sad or sadistic or just wanted to feel like they had something over somebody else, and that is something that I think—well, that's also this attempt to garner unearned moral superiorities, right? It's like it means if you're enduring the COVID time, you could phone the state on your neighbor and then you could inform them perhaps that your neighbor had gone to their relative's house for a Christmas gathering and that they were putting the population in danger.

And so you got to manage two things at the same time, right? Especially if you had any lurking jealousy whatsoever of that neighbor for any reason whatsoever. Maybe they're younger, better looking, or they didn't suffer as much, or God only knows.

Because there's any number of dimensions—

Yeah, or right, any reason, right?

And then you could cause them a lot of trouble, which is of course—that's quite a lot of fun, especially if you don't have anything better to do, because now you feel powerful, and you are powerful and moral.

That's the other thing is because you can just pat yourself on the back and say, “Well, you know, you did the collective—you don't pat yourself on the back; you go on Facebook and brag about it. It's not even a self-pat on the back then; everyone else is giving you likes and being like, "Great job. You kept me, grandma, safe."

Yeah, yeah, right?

Right, right. So that's the kind of thing where I think Americans don't realize how well—we have this delusion in the West that in a totalitarian society it's like the freedom-loving master, and there's like this oppressive guy, the tyrant, or an oppressive guy, with his henchmen putting guns to people's hands all the time. And nothing could be farther from the truth than that.

It's like I figured that out in part just when I was reading the Gulag Archipelago because Solzhenitsyn kept making the case that there were nowhere near enough guards to keep the camps running. The prisoners ran the camps. It's like, well, that's the definition of a totalitarian state is the prisoners run the camp.

And so—and in a totalitarian state—and this is what a totalitarian state is—it's not the top-down imposition of power; it's the fact that every single person in this society lies about absolutely everything to everyone, all the time.

I was reading the book of Abraham, and in that book, God is deciding he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they've wandered off the moral path, okay? And so the implication there is that a society can adopt modes of being that doom them to catastrophe. All right, and we're talking about exactly how that might come about, and Abraham is concerned about this because he thinks, "Well, it doesn't seem fair to obliterate the whole city when there might be innocent people still dwelling in it."

And so Abraham says to God, "If there's 40 people there, if I can go there and I can find 40 god-fearing honest people, will you suspend the destruction of the city?" And God says yes.

And Abraham bargains again to 30, and I think he gets God down to like 10.

But can I interject? There's a part of this story that isn't commonly known. They taught us this when I was a kid in Yeshiva, and I think the number they starts with a 50—and then Abraham says how about double-check the numbers at home, and Abraham goes how about five less? And God’s like okay.

But what Abraham meant was 50 and, you crossed out the five zero, so he’s really like “All right, look, I know there’s no hope for this town, but if there’s even zero righteous people, let’s not kill them all.”

Yeah, well, I mean, you can understand that, and you can—well, you can also people have ambiguity about the morality of God as presented in the Old Testament because these destructive waves come. But to me, that’s a reflection of the fact that there are modes of being that will lead to catastrophe.

But the implication of the story seems to me to be quite clear, which is that in any society, even if it’s become extraordinarily deviant, if there’s even a handful of people who don’t lie, that's enough to turn the tide or stem the flow, right? Because it means that the grip of hell has become—it’s not complete enough yet, so that all hope whatsoever has been vanquished.

And you know, I think it was Solzhenitsyn who said that one man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny.

And that—but what that also implies—and this is a very perverse thing too—is that the people who are in a totalitarian state are complicit in it every time they agree to participate in the lie.

And, you know, you might say, well, they had to because there was a gun to their head, but the thing is, there is a gun to their head anyways, right? I mean, I think that's the same when we face moral conundrums in our current society.

I saw university faculty back away from the administration onslaught over the course of decades, never willing to stand up and say, "Okay, I actually think that you guys are pushing farther than I'm willing to go." And the rationals were always the same: it's like, "I will be punished unduly for my objection." But the consequence of that is, is that you're certainly punished for your silence, right?

You might escape that immediate catastrophe, although probably not because I don't think anybody escaped anything in the Soviet Union.

But the long-term consequences of abiding by the lie are, well, it’s hell, as far as I can tell.

Well, a few things. First of all, you're not going to find anyone more contemptuous of academics than myself, a pressing company excluded. So to find that they are universally weak is not at all a surprise. But to your other point, one of the reasons I did write this book was because I am so hopeful about the future, and one of the counters to that people are like, "How can you be hopeful? We don't have the numbers; we’re not going to have the numbers."

And one of the things, as you just pointed out, is we don't need a majority; we just need an alternative. If you do have this small cadre of people who refuse to give in to the lie, who demonstrate there is another chance than the path that we're currently on, that is so much more powerful and punches so much more above its weight than, you know, a lot of people who are simply ballast and are simply going to go with the majority decree or the zeitgeist that happens to be at the moment.

And we saw this over and over in the countries of Eastern Europe that self-liberated. They did not have the numbers in terms of organization. They couldn’t have, or else they would have been spotted as a whole. But Poland, you know, specifically with Solidarity, this labor movement which brought down first the Polish government and then was a domino that kind of toppled the Soviet Empire, it was not a huge percent of the population.

And these men suffered hardships and duress, but they stuck through it enough that they managed to win. So I think the issue with people like Solzhenitsyn and Conquest is those books—and the black book of communism—you finish those books, and you want to put a bullet to your head, and what I want to do here is— you’ve only written 80% of the story because the point is this did—despite what we were told in the West for decades that the Soviet Union is perpetual, we have to learn to live together; they’re not going anywhere.

We tried it with the Korean War, we tried it with the Vietnam War. You know, we have Da Yong. There was a time in our lifetimes when criticizing the Soviet Union was being told was regarded explicitly as inching us closer to nuclear war because they regard as a provocation: “Look, you can’t antagonize them; we just got to figure out how to work together.”

And at a certain point, both Reagan and that said, Reagan said, "Do you want to know what my policy is for this, the Cold War? Some might even call it simplistic, you want to hear it? We win and they lose!" Right? And he was correct!

But his entire presidency, despite him refusing secretly to retaliate if the Russians struck him with nuclear weapons, was this commitment to this cannot—I will not have this power of the presidency and abide the continuing existence of this absolutely satanic evil empire.

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And so what do we do about China?

We…I don’t—I know I don't know what we do about China. I don’t...Let's stick to one thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no!

Well, I guess I'll tell you what we do about China; we certainly don't valorize them. We regard them as a decent state that should—we don't use them as a model for emulation during pandemics, right?

And we don’t criticize and, I think, expose their tactics and machinations internally, externally, as much as possible. But the corporate press is very interested for reasons that I'm not in a position necessarily to…downplay as many Chinese atrocities and even just Chinese standard operating procedure as much as possible.

Yeah, yeah. Well, everyone was hoping for a good amount of time that if China was pulled into the modern Western economy, that one of the consequences of that would be a turn towards something approximating individual freedom, like a gen—what, an incremental democratization?

And there was a few years where that looked like a real possibility; I mean, China lifted itself… I shouldn't say that. As a consequence of abandoning its stupider policies, China managed to free its people enough so that they lifted themselves out of poverty.

And then for a while, it looked promising, right? And then—

And then they installed 700 million closed-circuit television cameras and built the world's most total surveillance state. You know, the name of that system is…the same name, it’s the same name as the system that goes astray in the "Terminator" series.

Skynet.

Skynet.

No, 100 percent! They called it Skynet, and the engineers who built it said, "We're building the good Skynet." This is actually true.

Yeah, I know! It's impossible to believe!

Wow!

Okay, well that…wow.

No, no kidding! It's like, well, they're the techno-Luciferian technologists who think, "Oh, this time we'll get the surveillance state 100% right."

But they are getting it right, insofar as it serves their purposes, yeah.

Well, yes, yes, and it's drifting quite rapidly into the West as well. You know, more and more…go through, like—I was in the store the other day that had the ability where you could pay with your palm, right?

We're getting very close to the face ID payment systems, and everybody thinks, "Well, isn't that convenient?" It's like, "Yeah! It's convenient until the centralized databases know absolutely every goddamn thing you're doing every second." Then they can start putting on differential taxes that's calculated according to your hypothetical carbon load or something like that, and that's a high probability outcome, as far as I can tell.

I mean, I'm not pessimistic; I think I share your fundamental optimism, but boy, the slippery slope slide is sitting there right in front of us.

And we can take a trip down; I don’t think it’s a slippery slope at all. I think it’s an elevator shaft!

Yeah, well, I mean, it's really just like, that’s just the ultimate…

A slippery, yeah, yeah, an ultimate elevator shaft that’s bottomless!

But I think the other thing I think a lot of people don't appreciate is to what extent people are—again, this is something that The Enlightenment, I think, gets wrong—Mening, who's one of my great role models, he's a journalist from the early 20th century, he said, "The average man does not want to be free; he merely wants to be safe."

So this isn't being done with, you know, gun-to-head. These are people tripping over themselves because they would rather be convenient, because they compete on the metric of obedience. So if it's like, "I'll just do whatever I'm told, as long as I don't have to worry about anything, what do I care if you keep track of everywhere I go, what I buy, what I consume?"

Nothing I'm consuming is outside the median, the bell curve; nothing I go where I go is unusual at all. It doesn't cost me anything, and I get taken care of. I get to be a pet of those in power. If you can understand from their perspective, this is a fair—this is a great market for them.

Yeah, well, the cost is that if you give up all the difficulties of your life, let's say, because you're looking for security and satiation, then you don't have anything interesting or meaningful to do.

So there is no pathway to happiness that's merely a consequence of security and satiation.

But don't you think it's a "Brave New World" situation where people are perfectly comfortable just living a life of mild pleasure? None—like an orgiastic kind of way, but rather than seeking any sort of happiness, which is beyond their means.

I don't know because I don't think it actually works for people.

Well, I don't think they have the—they don't have the presence of mind to realize that they're living more moment to moment; they're not having this kind of long-term strategy—a look at their own lives.

Right, the RO—the chickens probably come home to roost in times of existential crisis, yeah.

And that's when people do some soul searching and perhaps decide that what it is that they've been satisfying themselves with is insufficient, and then there's an opportunity for transformation, but not always taken.

Oh, well, it’s also C…

Okay, let’s talk about that a little bit because one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is—know, I don’t know to what degree you would still ally yourself with the anarchist movement, and I want to know to what degree you do.

And also, I would like to know what that means. You open your book with Ayn Rand—

Yeah, I know that's a bit of a tangential intrusion into that question, but she's definitely an arbiter or what's a spokeswoman for an individualistic stance.

I want to talk to you about Ayn Rand because I have some ideas about that that I want, but I’m also curious. You obviously regard a focus on the individual as the appropriate medication against this kind of statist intellectual Luciferian utopianism, and I think that's appropriate, but I want to know what your vision of an alternative is and why you adopted that particular vision.

Well, I don't know that I have a vision per se; I'm not a central planner. But in terms of what anarchism means to me—and I do 100% regard myself as an anarchist—it is an approach to life; it is an approach to treating people peacefully. It is a recognition that political authority is inherently illegitimate, although sometimes it is powerful, and it is regarding our existence as an amazing opportunity and to live life to its fullest and to realize that to take that away from somebody else is a huge moral outrage.

So that is kind of what anarchism means to me.

Okay, okay.

And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, "If I had to sum up my worldview or whatever term she used in one word, it would be this: individualism."

So yes, that is exactly—

Yeah, so that's where—okay, okay.

So let me delve into that a little bit. Also, just important because, you know, Burkeman and Goldman, there's this boomer idea that more government is left-wing and less government is right-wing, and it puts Goldman and Burkeman on the right wing. It's just this weird thing because they want Hitler to be a leftist because that right is good, Hitler's bad, Hitler's leftist—that kind of mindset.

Point being, it's very important for me to give credit to the fact that the first critics of the Soviet Union with firsthand experience were hardcore unmitigated lefties. These Emma Goldman and Burkeman were both bloodthirsty, happy to slit throats, but they're saying we're doing this in the sake of revolution to kind of bring about a society that works for everyone, not against the workers themselves that we are championing.

This is not what we're for so they weren't, you know, the kind of pansy type of lefties. They were, you know, but Emma Goldman gave a talk in Union Square, and she told the audience, she goes, "Go to the capitalist and ask for work, and if they don't give you work, ask for bread, and if they don't give you bread, take bread."

So she's like, "You do not have a moral obligation to starve." So they had this contemptuous, "Why are people starving when there are millionaires out there?" was their mindset.

So the fact that these people, at great cost to themselves and to their status in this kind of workers' movement, were so vocal about denouncing what they had seen firsthand and were called puppets of the capt.

So why do you think that's important? I mean, you spend a lot of time on Burkeman and Goldman. Have I got the first name?

Yes, Alexander Burkman, Emma Goldman.

Yeah, right, okay, okay. You spend a lot of time on them, and you do show that they were, as representatives of the autonomous worker, let's say, they were appalled by what they saw in the Soviet Union, and you seem to be making the case that that's important because of their stress on individualism, or because you also wanted not to, you know, fall prey to the delusion that it was only the right that was standing against that.

Exactly. I hate this idea that right is good, left bad, or vice versa.

The fight against totalitarianism was a series of dots that are often completely counterintuitive. And I think it's very important historically when people fight these individuals who fight against these kinds of atrocities that they give credit.

So you're looking at something like attempting to replace the right-wing versus the terrible communist narrative with something more like people who are concerned with the individual against the collective?

Okay, fine, I see.

So now here’s—I read Rand, Ayn Rand's books, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged."

Yeah.

I think it's the third time I've read both of them, and I read them within the last couple of months.

Oh wow, yeah, yeah.

I was looking for a—I don't know, a romantic read maybe that's somewhat intellectually challenging. And now and then I'll pick up one of her books, and she's a curious figure to me because Ayn Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good counter-voice to their machinations.

But she—well, and you know, I got introduced to her books; it was quite interesting. So I worked for the socialists when I was like 14 until I was 16 before I figured out that I didn't know enough to presume that the way I wanted to arrange the world in a utopian fashion was credible.

And I figured that out by the time I was about 17. I thought, well what do you know? You don't have a job. I had little jobs, you know—you don't have a business, you don't have a family—you don't have any…it's like, what the hell do you know really, right?

So okay, anyways, the person who gave me Ayn Rand's books was this woman, Sandy Notley. She was the mother of one of Alberta's recent Premier—a socialist Premier—and she was the wife of the only elected socialist official in Alberta when I grew up.

And I asked her what she gave me: Solzhenitsyn and Huxley and Orwell, like she was an educated woman, and she gave me Rand's books, which I read when I was like 13.

And you know, they’re—I found them compelling. You know, they've got that—they're romantic adventures fundamentally with an intellectual bent. And I like the anti-collective ethos that was embedded in them.

And then I've read them, like I said, a couple of times since then.

So here’s the problem I have, and you can help me sort this out: like, I certainly agree with you that a society that isn't predicated on something like recognition of the intrinsic and superordinate worth of the individual is doomed to catastrophe, right?

And so, but here’s the rub, as far as I'm concerned, and this is what I had really had a problem with, especially this time when I went through Rand's books, is like, her GJohn G for example and Francisco D'Anconia, her… and who’s the architect?

Howard Roark.

Her heroic capitalists, essentially, they're not precisely heroic capitalists; they're heroic individualists who compete in the free market.

Okay, and that’s fine, and you can see the libertarian side of that, and I’m also a free-market advocate and partly because I think that distributed decision-making is a much better computational model than centralized planning. Obviously, not obvious, right?

Well, yeah, it should be, but it should be—it's not obvious to utopian Luciferian intellects, but it’s obvious, even if you just think about it from a computational perspective.

I just say the smartest person is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge.

Yes, exactly!

Well, that's exactly it. Is that precisely why you want it distributed?

Okay, so that's partly what I want to go into. So now the Randian heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists, and they—and you stop me as soon as I get any of this wrong or in some way you don't disagree with— they're pursuing their own selfish ethos, right?

Okay, so that’s the rub to me, because—and I would think, I'm going to think about this psychologically and neurophysiologically, so just to make it complicated—okay?

So the first question would be, well, what exactly do you mean by the individual and the self, okay?

So when a child develops, let’s say when a child first emerges into the world, they're essentially a system of somewhat disconnected primary instinctual subpersonalities, right? And so they—with that—with the nent possibility of a uniting ego identity, personality—something like continued a continued a continuity of memory across time—and that has to emerge.

Now, it seems to emerge as a consequence of neurophysiological development and experiential maturation. And so you know, the child comes equipped into the world, say, with the sucking reflex because its mouth and tongue are very wired up, so that's where the child is most conscious.

That's why kids, when they can put everything in their mouth, because they can feel it and investigate it far, far before they have control over their eyes or their arms because their arms sort of float around.

And so what happens is they’re born as a set of somewhat independent systems, and then the independent systems, partly under the influence of social demand, integrate themselves.

Okay? Now, so—and then, like, by the time a child is two, that child is still mostly disintegrated emotional systems.

And so if you watch a 2-year-old (and I use two for a specific reason), what you see is that they cycle through basic motivational states, so a child is often like a child whose demand-oriented motivational states are satiated will play, right? And play and explore.

But then they get tired, and they’ll cry, or they’ll get hungry, and they'll cry, or they'll get angry, and they'll have a tantrum, or, you know, or they'll burst into tears, right?

Well, I said they’ll cry and or they'll get anxious, right?

And so they're cycling through these primary motivational states. Now we understand that to some degree, neurophysiologically, because the older the brain system, the more likely it is to be operative in infancy, right?

So like the rage system or the system that mediates anxiety or the system that mediates pain, those come into being pretty early. But it's hard for them to get integrated.

Okay, now, so, and then, like, let's say, here's the problem, and I don't know how to distinguish individualism from Hedonism, and I don't know how to distinguish Hedonism from possession by one of these lower order motivational states.

So when Rand says we should be able to pursue our own selfish needs, she's kind of taking a classic—she didn’t say selfish needs; she said self-interest.

Okay, okay, so fine, okay, okay.

So that I—I would just want to make sure that we're proceeding on grounds that we both regard as appropriate.

So the liberal types—the Scottish liberals—believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest, that that would produce a self-regulating system.

Now, Rand seems to accept that as a proposition.

Yes, yes.

So if people are freely able to pursue their self-interest, then a system of free exchange will emerge out of that that has the appropriate qualities of governance.

Yes, she says this explicitly on Donahue. She was asked, saying that if people pursue their own self-interest, there wouldn’t be any oppression; there wouldn’t be war; there wouldn't be any Hitler.

She goes, "There should, there wouldn't be any."

Yeah, well look, when I'm negotiating with someone for a business deal, let's say—or you know, when I'm trying to formulate a strategy that enables me to work happily together with someone over the long run, I'm hoping that they'll be thrilled with the deal.

Like, I'm not trying to win! Of course, I think, "Well, I would like to set you up in a situation so that you could pursue our mutual goals completely of your own accord," then I don't even have to watch you, right?

Because you’re doing things for whatever reasons you have, but this is the thing—this is what I don't quite understand, is that that self-interest—okay?

So it seems to me that for that self-interest to work, then it has to be a self-interest that's commensurate with the structure that would emerge if everyone was pursuing their self-interest simultaneously.

You see what I mean?

It's not everyone—

Well, okay, okay, okay. So, let’s say you and I make an arrangement, and it's a long-term arrangement, and at one point you decide that it's in your self-interest to violate that agreement because you can garner an intense short-term gain as a consequence, but there's a long-term cost, okay?

That's fine; okay, so ruin this relationship, and also there's a long-term cost in terms of myself. What's the cost? The cost is I'm no longer a person of integrity; I'm not a man of my word.

So Rand—there's two Rand quotes where she goes, "Man is a being of self-made soul," and she also—

She is in the "Fountainhead," which is about hard work—the architect—that a building has integrity just like a man.

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Right, so you’re seeing her interest as something that's nested inside a larger scale conceptualization of integrity.

Yes, and then, okay, and so in fact, the whole point of the "Fountainhead" is she's contrasting these two types of selfishness. The first is Peter Keating, who's this basic striver, social climber, who has no internal self at all, no values other than what he sees around him.

In fact, the working title of the "Fountainhead" was "Secondhand Lives."

She was working in Hollywood, and she asked the woman who she was working with. And it's just kind of this pin-drop moment where she's like, "I'm looking in the face of the devil," where the woman goes, "I'll tell you what I want: if someone has a cloth coat, I want a fur coat; if you have one car, I want two; if your house is 500 square feet, I want a 1,000-square-foot house."

And Rand is like, "Oh my..."

She's like, "This is evil." Someone who has no self and whose values are strictly a function of those around her.

Hold on, as opposed to Howard Roark, who is selfish in the sense that he pursues his own goals and values in accordance with his moral code.

And I think those are the two definitions of selfishness.

I know, fine, fine! So let's tell—C, certainly Keating is portrayed in Rand as nothing but—he's the kind of social climber who will do anything to gain comparative status in his profession, but he will never be able to tell you why he wants the status, what he's going to do with it.

It's kind of just in and of itself good, but he has no values.

Well, okay, so that's the thing—this is interesting to me because I don't think it's appropriate to presume that the mere search for social status is not self-interest.

Now, I'm not— I