WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:21.360 [Music] 00:00:21.360 --> 00:00:23.600 Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roudy of DannyRoudy.com 00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:26.700 and today I'm talking with painter, philosopher, biologist, Raymond Peat. 00:00:26.700 --> 00:00:30.700 In this half hour long episode, we'll talk about the history and origins of authoritarianism 00:00:30.700 --> 00:00:35.100 and how the philosophy is baked into our cultural, political, and medical systems. 00:00:35.100 --> 00:00:37.100 In addition to thanking Ray for talking with me today, 00:00:37.100 --> 00:00:41.200 I'd like to thank my patrons for making this show and all the content I produce possible. 00:00:41.200 --> 00:00:45.000 If you would like to become a patron, please go to patreon.com/dannyroudy. 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:47.800 As always, please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. 00:00:47.800 --> 00:00:51.200 And in the spirit of William Blake, the true method of knowledge is experiment. 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:53.200 Without further ado, here is the show. 00:00:53.200 --> 00:01:09.200 [Music] 00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:09.900 Hello. 00:01:09.900 --> 00:01:11.000 Ray. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:11.800 Yeah, hi. 00:01:11.800 --> 00:01:13.200 Hey, how are you? 00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:14.200 Good. 00:01:14.200 --> 00:01:16.000 [Laughter] 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:17.300 Thank you so much for doing this. 00:01:17.300 --> 00:01:21.000 I've been interested in this topic for a while 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:27.000 and I had a chance to read through "Public Passivity and the Screw" 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:33.600 and I thought it was fantastic and I kind of made some notes about that, 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:37.800 but if you—I don't have any specific direction I wanted to take the show, 00:01:37.800 --> 00:01:40.400 so if you have like a thought— 00:01:40.400 --> 00:01:45.500 Was that a section in a newsletter or what was it? 00:01:45.500 --> 00:01:50.500 It was September 2003 and I have it in front of me here. 00:01:50.500 --> 00:01:52.500 You kind of summarized it and you were like, 00:01:52.500 --> 00:01:57.400 "I wrote this several years ago, but each month there was something more topical to send out." 00:01:57.400 --> 00:01:58.400 Oh, yeah. 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:00.600 We don't have to go strictly through that, 00:02:00.600 --> 00:02:04.000 but I was thinking like authoritarianism, when you talk about it, 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:06.700 it seems to be an ambiguous term to a lot of people. 00:02:06.700 --> 00:02:09.900 So I thought before we got into kind of the weeds, 00:02:09.900 --> 00:02:12.900 you could talk about what it means to you 00:02:12.900 --> 00:02:19.500 and then your general experience with it, maybe growing up and scientifically. 00:02:19.500 --> 00:02:26.700 Academically, there has been a study now for, I guess, about 50 years. 00:02:26.700 --> 00:02:32.100 Bob Altemeier's book, "The Authoritarians," which came out— 00:02:32.100 --> 00:02:37.600 I guess he put it on the internet maybe five or ten years ago— 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:45.600 and Bob Dean, the Watergate lawyer, became a fan of it 00:02:45.600 --> 00:02:57.400 and helped to publicize it because it was about the psychology of political authoritarianism primarily. 00:02:57.400 --> 00:03:04.800 His main focus is on what he calls the right-wing authoritarians. 00:03:04.800 --> 00:03:10.700 In my understanding of it, which started long before that, 00:03:10.700 --> 00:03:15.600 it was the intuitive thing of seeing that in the culture, 00:03:15.600 --> 00:03:23.100 there is the unreasoning submission to the ideas of anyone in power 00:03:23.100 --> 00:03:30.800 and conformism around what is taken to be the power-enforced authoritative doctrine. 00:03:30.800 --> 00:03:35.300 In reacting to Bob Altemeier's version of it, 00:03:35.300 --> 00:03:42.500 I have seen that in some ways publicizing these traits of the right-wing authoritarian, 00:03:42.500 --> 00:03:47.500 you might be adding to the confusion somewhat. 00:03:47.500 --> 00:03:54.800 One of Altemeier's images for how this can be conceptualized comes from Theodor Adorno, 00:03:54.800 --> 00:03:59.900 a group at Berkeley who made the subject popular, 00:03:59.900 --> 00:04:04.400 I think it was in the '60s when they were getting famous for it. 00:04:04.400 --> 00:04:11.000 Adorno's image was that it's the posture for riding a bicycle, 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:15.700 bowing from the waist up and kicking from the waist down. 00:04:15.700 --> 00:04:20.700 In other words, submission to authority of the power of those above you, 00:04:20.700 --> 00:04:24.500 knocking down anyone that's below you to keep them below you. 00:04:24.500 --> 00:04:28.400 Bob Altemeier says that it isn't a very good image. 00:04:28.400 --> 00:04:33.200 He used questionnaires and got really clear results, 00:04:33.200 --> 00:04:39.900 but then other people using a scale of social prestige-seeking, 00:04:39.900 --> 00:04:44.500 power-seeking, identified people rather than conforming and fitting 00:04:44.500 --> 00:04:48.000 into wherever they find themselves on the scale. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:51.900 They are only driven towards rising. 00:04:51.900 --> 00:04:58.200 You can think of the sociopath or the psychopath who cares about nothing but winning 00:04:58.200 --> 00:05:04.600 and isn't satisfied until they come out owning everything and controlling everyone. 00:05:04.600 --> 00:05:09.000 Over the last 50 or 60 years, there have been various sociologists 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:17.200 who look at different parts of the psychology of politics and society. 00:05:17.200 --> 00:05:24.800 And ideas like "interdirected" and "otherdirected" that was popular in the '50s, 00:05:24.800 --> 00:05:30.600 that you can fit into the idea of submission to authority 00:05:30.600 --> 00:05:34.400 and aggression against those below you in power. 00:05:34.400 --> 00:05:43.000 But the "otherdirected" doesn't necessarily limit itself to this authoritarian scheme. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.900 People can be "otherdirected" while they're trying to achieve something. 00:05:47.900 --> 00:05:53.400 Like the people voting for Bernie can look to the movement 00:05:53.400 --> 00:05:59.200 and try to integrate themselves into a movement to see what can be optimized. 00:05:59.200 --> 00:06:05.000 So they're being told that if they blend themselves into the Democratic Party, 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:09.600 they can improve that idea depending on their directedness. 00:06:09.600 --> 00:06:17.200 And the "interdirected" idea is that you're sort of spring-loaded in childhood 00:06:17.200 --> 00:06:19.600 to go in a certain direction. 00:06:19.600 --> 00:06:26.000 So the people who say, "If I can't have Bernie winning the election, 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:30.400 we'll maybe go off and find something just as good or better 00:06:30.400 --> 00:06:33.800 and vote for Jill Stein or the Greens or such." 00:06:33.800 --> 00:06:39.000 So "interdirection" can push you forward on a consistent line 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:43.000 where the "otherdirection" can be looking for compromise and such. 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:48.400 So it can be either forward-directed or simply authoritarian. 00:06:48.400 --> 00:06:51.600 And throughout the 20th century, for example, 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:59.000 Freud said, "Repression is a good thing," fitting into the system. 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:03.200 And from the time I was, I guess, in high school, 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:06.300 people were saying, "You have to work within the system." 00:07:06.300 --> 00:07:10.700 And my first thoughts on that were imagining what they were saying, 00:07:10.700 --> 00:07:17.800 that if you cooperate in the system for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, 00:07:17.800 --> 00:07:24.000 look at the pile of criminal activities you have participated in, 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:27.800 then you'll have the power to do something. 00:07:27.800 --> 00:07:31.200 And the first thing you do, you're out of the system. 00:07:31.200 --> 00:07:37.600 So you have a huge accumulated pile of bad stuff. 00:07:37.600 --> 00:07:41.200 And then the first chance you have to do good stuff, 00:07:41.200 --> 00:07:45.200 you might get a sizable, noticeable achievement, 00:07:45.200 --> 00:07:49.800 but it's always going to be smaller than what you did in the opposite direction, 00:07:49.800 --> 00:07:51.200 getting there. 00:07:51.200 --> 00:07:55.600 So I wasn't sold on the idea that you have to work within the system 00:07:55.600 --> 00:08:00.400 because it's really just a way of buying people into the system, 00:08:00.400 --> 00:08:05.000 telling them that maybe someday you would be able to do some good. 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:10.000 Freud really allied with the oppressing class 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:17.200 and he created this idea of the ego mediating between the id and the superego. 00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:19.800 It has to balance these forces, 00:08:19.800 --> 00:08:24.200 but he really came down on the side of the superego, 00:08:24.200 --> 00:08:27.000 smashing the id when necessary. 00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:30.800 And around 1929 or '30, 00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:34.200 Wilhelm Reich realized what Freud was doing, 00:08:34.200 --> 00:08:38.000 and he believed that Freud was very conscious 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:40.600 of the rightness of Reich's position, 00:08:40.600 --> 00:08:44.400 that you're never going to have a healthy individual 00:08:44.400 --> 00:08:47.200 as long as they're being oppressed. 00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:53.200 He believed that Freud simply wanted to save his movement from Nazism 00:08:53.200 --> 00:08:58.200 and make it able to survive by giving in to the oppression. 00:08:58.200 --> 00:09:00.800 From the 1920s, 00:09:00.800 --> 00:09:06.800 Reich was saying that there's an emotional plague all through the world, 00:09:06.800 --> 00:09:10.800 not just fascism, but it's the plague of authoritarianism. 00:09:10.800 --> 00:09:17.600 And at first he said education and medicine, psychiatry, can cure people of this, 00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:27.200 but then next thing he realized was that first you have to cure the doctors and the teachers of the emotional plague. 00:09:27.200 --> 00:09:31.000 I think Reich was essentially right, 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:36.200 but I think it really is more than just an emotional plague. 00:09:36.200 --> 00:09:42.200 I think it's something like a historical, intellectual, epistemological plague 00:09:42.200 --> 00:09:45.200 built into the way we believe knowledge works. 00:09:45.200 --> 00:09:48.400 Did it originate from Plato and Aristotle? 00:09:48.400 --> 00:09:53.800 Do you see like an origin for this type of oppressive society? 00:09:53.800 --> 00:10:00.000 Yeah, as soon as I started looking into encyclopedias and such, 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:02.200 trying to find explanations, 00:10:02.200 --> 00:10:07.600 I think it goes even before Plato. Parmenides and Zeno, 00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:13.000 they were the Greek school located in southern Italy, the Eleatics, 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:20.600 and they argued that there is only one reality and it doesn't change, doesn't do anything. 00:10:20.600 --> 00:10:23.800 There is no movement. 00:10:23.800 --> 00:10:30.800 And someone as smart as Bertrand Russell praised the subtlety of Zeno's paradoxes and such, 00:10:30.800 --> 00:10:36.800 but Russell was struggled for years in what seems like very stupid arguments, 00:10:36.800 --> 00:10:44.200 but he was smart enough to work himself out of that set of paradoxical mental activities 00:10:44.200 --> 00:10:49.400 that Western philosophy had been trapped in for 2,500 years. 00:10:49.400 --> 00:10:59.600 And Plato essentially gave in to the Parmenides school of thinking that at least the knowledge part of existence, 00:10:59.600 --> 00:11:06.200 which is the real part of existence, is unchanging, eternal, and perfect. 00:11:06.200 --> 00:11:14.000 And really was making worse of the crude ideas of Parmenides. 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:20.800 And Aristotle really acknowledged some of the reality of Heraclitus. 00:11:20.800 --> 00:11:28.000 Heraclitus said everything flows exactly polar opposite of Plato and Parmenides, 00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:33.600 that nothing moves. Heraclitus said that's what it is, everything is moving. 00:11:33.600 --> 00:11:38.600 And reason, meaning, steers everything through everything. 00:11:38.600 --> 00:11:42.400 So it wasn't a jumbled random movement. 00:11:42.400 --> 00:11:49.600 It was a developmental process which as a whole is steered by meaning. 00:11:49.600 --> 00:11:57.000 Aristotle tried to formalize this using some of the concepts of Plato, 00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:02.600 but putting it into a sensible scheme in which he had different kinds of causality, 00:12:02.600 --> 00:12:11.600 including the final cause principle, which is that things are moved according to meaning or intention. 00:12:11.600 --> 00:12:19.000 The universality of motion has no randomness in it. Everything is meaningful. 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:30.600 Everything can be seen in terms of the first cause and the final cause and the various causes consisting of their nature. 00:12:30.600 --> 00:12:36.600 So that for Aristotle, laws were derived from the nature of things. 00:12:36.600 --> 00:12:40.600 They weren't in some other eternal world like for Plato. 00:12:40.600 --> 00:12:44.200 Well that goes back to the newsletter. You say laws were written in the past. 00:12:44.200 --> 00:12:51.000 And since the past isn't accessible, it's almost as though a foreign power ruled from a distant imperial capital. 00:12:51.000 --> 00:12:57.000 Maybe this goes back to your writing on Blake, and you say that that's a representation of the past, 00:12:57.000 --> 00:13:01.000 and it's trying to retain the past into the current view of things. 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:05.800 Is that the problem with not only these laws, but politics maybe in general? 00:13:05.800 --> 00:13:16.200 Oh yeah. The Platonic idea is creating a false reality for everything that we have in our memory. 00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:23.800 Seeing everything in terms of the past, something that we have at one time generalized, 00:13:23.800 --> 00:13:27.200 and then saying that's absolute and unchanging. 00:13:27.200 --> 00:13:33.000 And what it does is to say that all of these current events are random happenings. 00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:39.000 They don't contain the meaning in themselves. They only get the meaning from these generalizations, 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:42.000 and those are all eternal, out of time. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:49.000 And this was taken up in the physics with the idea of randomness, the assumption of randomness, 00:13:49.000 --> 00:13:52.000 which can then be treated statistically. 00:13:52.000 --> 00:13:59.000 But it's a belief about current events and the nature of substance and experience 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:05.600 that it's proclaimed to be of a lower order and essentially lacking meaning or purpose. 00:14:05.600 --> 00:14:10.600 And so the mathematical statistics is needed to make sense of it. 00:14:10.600 --> 00:14:17.800 And this was Parmenides' doctrine, was that you had to be indoctrinated into his school 00:14:17.800 --> 00:14:24.800 and learn his language of mathematics before you really were a citizen or a human being. 00:14:24.800 --> 00:14:31.800 Using knowledge in this frozen, abstracted sense to identify the value of a person. 00:14:31.800 --> 00:14:37.400 And so Plato argued for tyranny, that the people who know would have the power, 00:14:37.400 --> 00:14:40.800 and the power would be logic and mathematics. 00:14:40.800 --> 00:14:45.800 When this was put into action by the physicists, they proclaimed themselves, 00:14:45.800 --> 00:14:51.800 those who did physics were those who knew the ultimate fundamental truth. 00:14:51.800 --> 00:14:56.800 When biology wanted to gain status, they said they would model themselves 00:14:56.800 --> 00:14:59.800 on the true basic science of physics. 00:14:59.800 --> 00:15:06.800 And so to find the eternal ruling class elements of the world, 00:15:06.800 --> 00:15:10.800 the physicists looked for timeless, unchanging atoms. 00:15:10.800 --> 00:15:15.800 The individual atom had no unique features, no history, 00:15:15.800 --> 00:15:18.800 and was an absolute and pure Platonic thing. 00:15:18.800 --> 00:15:24.800 But the only way they can be treated is by assuming that all of their later developments, 00:15:24.800 --> 00:15:28.800 their movements, all of these are meaningless and random 00:15:28.800 --> 00:15:31.800 and have to be described only statistically. 00:15:31.800 --> 00:15:38.800 And in modeling biology on physics, the equivalent of the timeless, unchanging atom 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:40.800 was the timeless, unchanging gene. 00:15:40.800 --> 00:15:44.800 Again, the soma, the body that we experience, 00:15:44.800 --> 00:15:50.800 was said to be basically just mortal junk that would be cast aside every generation 00:15:50.800 --> 00:15:56.800 while the immortal germline collection of genes was what was really important. 00:15:56.800 --> 00:16:01.800 And this was developed very closely with people like Herbert Spencer, 00:16:01.800 --> 00:16:08.800 who identified that even Darwin was a racist that believed that English plants and animals 00:16:08.800 --> 00:16:11.800 and people were the best in the world. 00:16:11.800 --> 00:16:14.800 [laughter] 00:16:14.800 --> 00:16:19.800 You mentioned psychopaths before, and in the KMUD interview, 00:16:19.800 --> 00:16:22.800 in the quote you mentioned the Dulles brothers, 00:16:22.800 --> 00:16:27.800 and I think you were alluding to a book by David Talbott called The Devil's Chessboard. 00:16:27.800 --> 00:16:28.800 Was that correct? 00:16:28.800 --> 00:16:30.800 Yeah, I think that's his name. 00:16:30.800 --> 00:16:34.800 You mentioned Reich before, and the connection with Dali, 00:16:34.800 --> 00:16:38.800 and the persistence of memory in Dali's shift, 00:16:38.800 --> 00:16:41.800 integrating himself into the fascist culture, 00:16:41.800 --> 00:16:44.800 and you mentioned it started in about 1945. 00:16:44.800 --> 00:16:51.800 I was curious just to unpack that and your thoughts on the CIA and the Dulles brothers 00:16:51.800 --> 00:16:53.800 and anything else you had to say about it. 00:16:53.800 --> 00:16:58.800 Well, 20th century history pretty much involved the Dulles brothers. 00:16:58.800 --> 00:17:03.800 They were working with Hitler and with the fascist Germans right from the beginning, 00:17:03.800 --> 00:17:08.800 and one of them was declared to be an enemy agent, 00:17:08.800 --> 00:17:14.800 and the German government had put their American properties in his name, 00:17:14.800 --> 00:17:19.800 and so the U.S. government, to confiscate the U.S. properties, 00:17:19.800 --> 00:17:22.800 identified him as an illegal foreign agent, 00:17:22.800 --> 00:17:26.800 but that didn't take away from their prestige or power, 00:17:26.800 --> 00:17:33.800 because Roosevelt himself was a great admirer of Mussolini, 00:17:33.800 --> 00:17:39.800 even after he took office he was saying what a great statesman Mussolini was. 00:17:39.800 --> 00:17:45.800 And so fascism wasn't a bad word until they needed to go to war on the side of England 00:17:45.800 --> 00:17:51.800 to save the British Empire because Hitler had double-crossed the West, 00:17:51.800 --> 00:17:54.800 and he wanted to knock out England and take their empire, 00:17:54.800 --> 00:17:59.800 where the West had figured that he would take over the Soviet Union, 00:17:59.800 --> 00:18:04.800 and then the British Empire and the American Empire could expand. 00:18:04.800 --> 00:18:09.800 Well, going back to saying the Dulles brothers shaped the current predicament we're in, 00:18:09.800 --> 00:18:12.800 do you see authoritarianism as a pathology? 00:18:12.800 --> 00:18:19.800 Like this is basically a sickness, and people are imposing their sickness. 00:18:19.800 --> 00:18:21.800 Is that a good way of looking at it? 00:18:21.800 --> 00:18:29.800 Yeah, in a sense. A philosopher I think would say it's a sickness of method or of conclusions, 00:18:29.800 --> 00:18:35.800 but if you look at it historically, Parmenides and Plato and Hegel, 00:18:35.800 --> 00:18:38.800 all of these people were part of the ruling class, 00:18:38.800 --> 00:18:42.800 and it was the purpose of their thinking that way, 00:18:42.800 --> 00:18:46.800 even though that probably seemed spontaneous and truthful to them, 00:18:46.800 --> 00:18:51.800 it happened to be that it was a way of defining who deserves power 00:18:51.800 --> 00:18:59.800 and defining their class as an eternal, justified controller of property and power. 00:18:59.800 --> 00:19:04.800 The idea of class was very conscious in most of history, 00:19:04.800 --> 00:19:09.800 and in the 20th century, one of the tricks of the ruling class 00:19:09.800 --> 00:19:14.800 has been to teach the public that there are no classes in America. 00:19:14.800 --> 00:19:19.800 I had a professor in graduate school when I was in 1959 or 60 00:19:19.800 --> 00:19:22.800 talking about the effect of class in literature. 00:19:22.800 --> 00:19:31.800 He interrupted me to say, "In America, we have no classes." 00:19:31.800 --> 00:19:39.800 It's truly either a mental disease or defect of some sort for people to grow up and study 00:19:39.800 --> 00:19:42.800 and be able to say something like that. 00:19:42.800 --> 00:19:47.800 It's because the ruling class learned to manipulate language 00:19:47.800 --> 00:19:51.800 and control the people that they need to be controlled. 00:19:51.800 --> 00:19:56.800 They don't want to necessarily define them as useless rubbish, 00:19:56.800 --> 00:19:59.800 which they believe they are, unless they can get away with it. 00:19:59.800 --> 00:20:05.800 But if they can make the people feel that they are equals with the royalty 00:20:05.800 --> 00:20:11.800 and keep them happy while they're living like garbage, that's the best thing for them. 00:20:11.800 --> 00:20:14.800 So they have taught people that in America there are no classes. 00:20:14.800 --> 00:20:21.800 People who are really in the bottom 30 or 40% of income call themselves middle class, 00:20:21.800 --> 00:20:25.800 and people who are more or less in the middle income range 00:20:25.800 --> 00:20:30.800 think of themselves as being in the upper 5% or such. 00:20:30.800 --> 00:20:38.800 Everyone seems to have this sort of escalated delusion of where they are in the social hierarchy. 00:20:38.800 --> 00:20:42.800 It almost seems like any movement is infiltrated by authoritarianism. 00:20:42.800 --> 00:20:46.800 For example, even your own work, I'm sure to your complete horror, 00:20:46.800 --> 00:20:49.800 people use that in an authoritarian sense. 00:20:49.800 --> 00:20:55.800 Is the environment essentially bracketing our current progress as a civilization right now, 00:20:55.800 --> 00:20:56.800 or how do you look at it? 00:20:56.800 --> 00:20:59.800 Yeah, environment in every sense. 00:20:59.800 --> 00:21:04.800 There are penalties of many sorts for getting out of it, 00:21:04.800 --> 00:21:08.800 and rewards of various kinds for reinforcing it. 00:21:08.800 --> 00:21:11.800 I first heard about Nicole Foss' ideas of degrowth. 00:21:11.800 --> 00:21:14.800 I think you forwarded that to somebody through email once, 00:21:14.800 --> 00:21:16.800 and I thought it was extremely interesting. 00:21:16.800 --> 00:21:21.800 Do you think there will be an inevitable, as she would call it, degrowth in our society 00:21:21.800 --> 00:21:23.800 and moving back to a simpler direction? 00:21:23.800 --> 00:21:30.800 No. There will be a rejection or loss of much of the trashy part of our culture, 00:21:30.800 --> 00:21:37.800 but there is no need to go as far as she suggests going back to isolated tribalism. 00:21:37.800 --> 00:21:44.800 What's unifying, what's creating the one-worldism at present 00:21:44.800 --> 00:21:49.800 is a really degraded sort of concept of human interaction 00:21:49.800 --> 00:21:53.800 and the interaction between people and their environment. 00:21:53.800 --> 00:21:59.800 It's all based on this polluted kind of philosophy or religion. 00:21:59.800 --> 00:22:06.800 It's a religion of emptiness and abstraction that is telling people that this is all there is. 00:22:06.800 --> 00:22:12.800 But leaving out all of these promotional, consumerist, economic functions, 00:22:12.800 --> 00:22:17.800 if you simply stop having wars and stop crooked advertising 00:22:17.800 --> 00:22:21.800 and stop promoting consumerism through schools 00:22:21.800 --> 00:22:26.800 and the way university research is directed and funded, 00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:30.800 if you simply stop the craziest practices, 00:22:30.800 --> 00:22:33.800 what will be left will still be international, 00:22:33.800 --> 00:22:39.800 but without suppressing the individual flavor of ethnicities and so on. 00:22:39.800 --> 00:22:47.800 The natural interactions and trade, I think, will keep a unified world economy existing 00:22:47.800 --> 00:22:51.800 without, even if Tofs is right about the peak oil, 00:22:51.800 --> 00:22:57.800 my opinion is that the world is creating petroleum about as fast as it's being used 00:22:57.800 --> 00:23:02.800 and it just takes a while to refill the wells after they're pumped out. 00:23:02.800 --> 00:23:06.800 But even if she was right, there are alternative sources of power 00:23:06.800 --> 00:23:12.800 that can keep a really high-level culture going more or less permanently. 00:23:12.800 --> 00:23:19.800 At present, I think it's something about a dozen species being extincted every day. 00:23:19.800 --> 00:23:24.800 That's an idea of what progress means in this current period. 00:23:24.800 --> 00:23:30.800 And if you stop that kind of progress, it's like you stop falling into a hole. 00:23:30.800 --> 00:23:36.800 And as soon as you stop falling, then you can see what kind of possibility is really there. 00:23:36.800 --> 00:23:42.800 So increasing the people's knowledge, ability, and power could restrain the authority of power? 00:23:42.800 --> 00:23:48.800 Yeah, making people conscious of the lies that they're having imposed on them. 00:23:48.800 --> 00:23:54.800 That involves things as drastic as the saying that most of the theoretical physics 00:23:54.800 --> 00:24:01.800 that we're taught to admire has been very, very clever technical adaptations 00:24:01.800 --> 00:24:08.800 with a gigantic, fraudulent hierarchy of mathematical theories built on that. 00:24:08.800 --> 00:24:16.800 A little bit of empirical technical stuff has been given a mythic sort of importance 00:24:16.800 --> 00:24:20.800 because it's used economically and in war. 00:24:20.800 --> 00:24:26.800 But the implications in theory I don't think are at all what we're being told 00:24:26.800 --> 00:24:30.800 by the theoretical physicists in Europe and America. 00:24:30.800 --> 00:24:32.800 Obviously you focus a lot on food. 00:24:32.800 --> 00:24:38.800 Do you think that's a way in to shift the consciousness of the people towards lower serotonin 00:24:38.800 --> 00:24:41.800 if that relates to somebody's authoritarianism? 00:24:41.800 --> 00:24:46.800 Yeah, first a person who is chronically sick and malnourished 00:24:46.800 --> 00:24:51.800 just doesn't have much energy or stamina to study and be critical. 00:24:51.800 --> 00:24:56.800 So first you just have to stop poisoning yourself by eating what the government 00:24:56.800 --> 00:25:00.800 and dieticians are selling as a healthful diet. 00:25:00.800 --> 00:25:09.800 And once you have the strength to read and think, then you realize who is doing what to you. 00:25:09.800 --> 00:25:14.800 And you start investigating the food industry, the agricultural production industry, 00:25:14.800 --> 00:25:20.800 the science industry that supports the agricultural imposition, 00:25:20.800 --> 00:25:27.800 and the political system that justifies the medical and agricultural economic imposition. 00:25:27.800 --> 00:25:35.800 All of these are very clearly wound together in a system to maintain class dominance. 00:25:35.800 --> 00:25:39.800 It's very healthful to eat lobster once in a while, 00:25:39.800 --> 00:25:43.800 but you don't see dieticians or the government recommending that. 00:25:43.800 --> 00:25:49.800 It started in the 1930s depression with the government having a three-tiered diet. 00:25:49.800 --> 00:25:53.800 One to prevent starvation in the very poor, 00:25:53.800 --> 00:25:57.800 one an economical diet to get along on very little, 00:25:57.800 --> 00:25:59.800 and then at the top a healthy diet. 00:25:59.800 --> 00:26:07.800 And if you look at the bare survival and economic minimal diet of the Great Depression, 00:26:07.800 --> 00:26:15.800 the dieticians in the 1960s and 70s adopted those survival diets as the healthy diet. 00:26:15.800 --> 00:26:18.800 Lots of beans and grains as the basic diet. 00:26:18.800 --> 00:26:23.800 Do you think that was on purpose in a form of control? 00:26:23.800 --> 00:26:27.800 Yeah, part of it was that the government had been buying milk, 00:26:27.800 --> 00:26:35.800 dehydrating it, making cheese and butter to keep American farmers working to support the prices. 00:26:35.800 --> 00:26:41.800 So they were warehousing huge amounts of powdered milk, cheese, and butter, 00:26:41.800 --> 00:26:45.800 and giving them away first as foreign aid, 00:26:45.800 --> 00:26:51.800 and then the precursor to food stamps was to have, I think, every month, 00:26:51.800 --> 00:26:56.800 a giveaway to poor people of cheese, eggs, powdered milk, and so on. 00:26:56.800 --> 00:27:05.800 And in the 70s, there was a big movement to stop helping the poor people in other countries, 00:27:05.800 --> 00:27:07.800 as well as the poor at home. 00:27:07.800 --> 00:27:13.800 And one of the arguments that came up in the pseudoscientific dietetic community 00:27:13.800 --> 00:27:19.800 was that people outside the United States hardly ever can tolerate lactose, 00:27:19.800 --> 00:27:22.800 so you should stop giving them powdered milk. 00:27:22.800 --> 00:27:29.800 And that argument against people, only certain white people can tolerate lactose, 00:27:29.800 --> 00:27:36.800 that was heavily promoted as a racist change of foreign policy against foreign aid and food aid in general. 00:27:36.800 --> 00:27:43.800 Sending them beans was okay, except we didn't need to support the price of American beans that way. 00:27:43.800 --> 00:27:48.800 Do you think this tendency to be authoritarian, or as Altameyer would have said, 00:27:48.800 --> 00:27:52.800 right-wing authoritarian, even though it's a semi-confusing term, 00:27:52.800 --> 00:27:56.800 do you personally see it more in Americans versus other places? 00:27:56.800 --> 00:28:03.800 I know you've mentioned Mexico as a different type of environment and being a little more cheerful. 00:28:03.800 --> 00:28:08.800 Do you think that's largely because of the history of the U.S. and how things got flushed out? 00:28:08.800 --> 00:28:15.800 A lot of it is the specific policy choices of the government and corporations 00:28:15.800 --> 00:28:18.800 indoctrinating Americans in a certain way. 00:28:18.800 --> 00:28:27.800 And one of my main criticisms of Bob Altameyer is that he has focused on the right-wing authoritarianism, 00:28:27.800 --> 00:28:34.800 and it would be okay to call it right-wing if you define right in the sense of the fascism 00:28:34.800 --> 00:28:40.800 that Winston Churchill and FDR subscribed to. 00:28:40.800 --> 00:28:45.800 Americans generally think of FDR as an extreme leftist president, 00:28:45.800 --> 00:28:52.800 but definitely his admiration for Mussolini says there was no leftism at all. 00:28:52.800 --> 00:28:57.800 He said what he was doing was saving his class, saving the ruling class, 00:28:57.800 --> 00:29:01.800 because there was such a threat of revolution in the United States. 00:29:01.800 --> 00:29:09.800 So he was saving capitalism, and that would, I think, fit in as, you could say, modified fascism. 00:29:09.800 --> 00:29:15.800 It was an inventive way of keeping the corporations lightly out of sight, 00:29:15.800 --> 00:29:23.800 letting them buy the various regulatory agencies, but keeping them out of the executive for their own good. 00:29:23.800 --> 00:29:27.800 He was fixing the economy with Keynesian economics, 00:29:27.800 --> 00:29:32.800 which the people who organized a coup in 1933 to get him out, 00:29:32.800 --> 00:29:39.800 they considered even the borrowing and spending to be a communist plot of government. 00:29:39.800 --> 00:29:46.800 They wanted to get Roosevelt out, but what he was doing was using finance to prevent revolution. 00:29:46.800 --> 00:29:55.800 And immediately the Dulleses, when it came out that Alan Dulles was working closely with the Nazis at the end of World War II, 00:29:55.800 --> 00:30:01.800 Stalin informed Roosevelt that his spies were aware that Dulles was collaborating with the Nazis, 00:30:01.800 --> 00:30:09.800 and Roosevelt, his comments suggested that he thought maybe Stalin had gone crazy to tell him such a thing. 00:30:09.800 --> 00:30:15.800 But within two or three days, Roosevelt surely would have found out that Stalin was right, 00:30:15.800 --> 00:30:21.800 and that would have put Dulles in line for the war crimes trials. 00:30:21.800 --> 00:30:26.800 But luckily for Dulles, right at that moment, Roosevelt chose to die, 00:30:26.800 --> 00:30:31.800 saving Dulles from criminal treason prosecution. 00:30:31.800 --> 00:30:38.800 And the powers in the Democratic Party who had connections both with Adolf Hitler 00:30:38.800 --> 00:30:44.800 and with the DuPont gang that had organized the 1933 coup attempt, 00:30:44.800 --> 00:30:49.800 they were in charge of the big city Democratic Power Party machine. 00:30:49.800 --> 00:30:58.800 And they knew that Harry Truman had expressed himself many times as wanting Hitler to go fight the Soviets. 00:30:58.800 --> 00:31:06.800 And since that was the preferred American policy, they had installed him as vice president in 1944. 00:31:06.800 --> 00:31:11.800 And so Roosevelt's death in '45 not only saved Dulles, 00:31:11.800 --> 00:31:17.800 but it put Truman in position to continue the pro-Nazi policy. 00:31:17.800 --> 00:31:24.800 - I have a project paperclip where the top Germans were not only helped move to Argentina and adjoining countries, 00:31:24.800 --> 00:31:29.800 but a lot of them were brought to the US, the scientists in particular. 00:31:29.800 --> 00:31:33.800 - It seems like Dulles was involved in a lot of sketchy stuff like MKUltra, 00:31:33.800 --> 00:31:37.800 and I know you've talked about LSD and its effects on the physiology, 00:31:37.800 --> 00:31:42.800 and that somewhere somebody said that LSD made you crazy and they outlawed it. 00:31:42.800 --> 00:31:48.800 Do you see him as an integral part of suppressing, I don't know if I want to call it the drug culture, 00:31:48.800 --> 00:31:50.800 but that specific substance? 00:31:50.800 --> 00:31:56.800 - Oh, for sure. One of the people who invented the idea of communist brainwashing, 00:31:56.800 --> 00:32:03.800 saying that when prisoners of war had confessed their crimes and wanted to stay with the enemy, 00:32:03.800 --> 00:32:07.800 he said that proves that they've got amazing powers of brainwashing. 00:32:07.800 --> 00:32:15.800 And I think it was two or three days after a big speech on that, he approved the MKUltra project 00:32:15.800 --> 00:32:22.800 for testing LSD and other drugs to see if they could wipe out a person's moral restrictions 00:32:22.800 --> 00:32:25.800 and give complete power over them. 00:32:25.800 --> 00:32:31.800 - Do you see the disestablishment of medicine as a central tower to turn over, 00:32:31.800 --> 00:32:36.800 to enable the people to resist the authoritarian ideas imposed on us? 00:32:36.800 --> 00:32:42.800 - Yeah, for example, you could still have very strong government control, 00:32:42.800 --> 00:32:47.800 but if it was rationalized so that, for example, a person had to pass a test, 00:32:47.800 --> 00:32:52.800 had to know certain empirical facts before they could get a license, 00:32:52.800 --> 00:32:59.800 they would have to know something about blood circulation and how respiration works and such things 00:32:59.800 --> 00:33:03.800 so that they wouldn't inject things into the wrong part of the patient. 00:33:03.800 --> 00:33:08.800 But with just a reasonable control, you could open up the whole field 00:33:08.800 --> 00:33:13.800 so that you would have not only more accessible medicine, but also better medicine. 00:33:13.800 --> 00:33:18.800 It would give people a choice between rational and irrational treatment. 00:33:18.800 --> 00:33:24.800 - If you were thinking of an optimal society, would it include medicine or government at all? 00:33:24.800 --> 00:33:27.800 I guess I'm interested in your position on that. 00:33:27.800 --> 00:33:37.800 - Tolstoy and Kropotkin are my oldest political influences, I think, people who had explicit ideas. 00:33:37.800 --> 00:33:45.800 And one of Tolstoy's lines was that a person should be ashamed to use government power. 00:33:45.800 --> 00:33:54.800 If you have an organization that has deleted for maybe five years or ten years, 00:33:54.800 --> 00:34:04.800 if you have simply deleted the threats and the craziness that presently is saturating our culture, 00:34:04.800 --> 00:34:11.800 I think you would very easily have a powerless society that would function without visible power. 00:34:11.800 --> 00:34:21.800 There's a town in Andalusia, Spain, which I think was 1989 they elected an anarchist mayor. 00:34:21.800 --> 00:34:26.800 And it's just an amazing town. 00:34:26.800 --> 00:34:29.800 They've reelected him ever since. 00:34:29.800 --> 00:34:34.800 And they gradually, piece by piece, expropriated unused land. 00:34:34.800 --> 00:34:40.800 And within just a very few years of his first election, they had eliminated poverty, 00:34:40.800 --> 00:34:46.800 eliminated the town police, and had everything cleaned up. 00:34:46.800 --> 00:34:50.800 And that's still going now 25 or 30 years later. 00:34:50.800 --> 00:34:58.800 I think that's an example of how any place can work if you just remove the most horrible, oppressive parts of the system. 00:34:58.800 --> 00:35:02.800 - We'd probably end there, but Ray, thank you so much. 00:35:02.800 --> 00:35:03.800 That was amazing. 00:35:03.800 --> 00:35:09.800 Not for the podcast, essentially, but I'm actually--this is the end of my stay in San Francisco. 00:35:09.800 --> 00:35:13.800 I'm going to head to San Miguel de Allende on July 1st. 00:35:13.800 --> 00:35:14.800 I thought I'd mention that. 00:35:14.800 --> 00:35:17.800 I think Sequiris, is that the artist that you enjoy there? 00:35:17.800 --> 00:35:19.800 I think some of his big stuff is there. 00:35:19.800 --> 00:35:21.800 - Oh, yeah. 00:35:21.800 --> 00:35:26.800 I don't think he ever finished a mural in San Miguel. 00:35:26.800 --> 00:35:28.800 I've always wanted to see that. 00:35:28.800 --> 00:35:33.800 I heard about the process of starting it and the conflicts that interrupted it. 00:35:33.800 --> 00:35:39.800 - Awesome. Yeah, I'll send you a picture because the prices in San Francisco are just too crazy right now. 00:35:39.800 --> 00:35:40.800 - Okay. 00:35:40.800 --> 00:35:42.800 - Thank you so much again, Ray. 00:35:42.800 --> 00:35:43.800 Total pleasure. 00:35:43.800 --> 00:35:44.800 I appreciate your time. 00:35:44.800 --> 00:35:49.800 This should be up probably in one or two weeks because of the move. 00:35:49.800 --> 00:35:50.800 But again, I appreciate it. 00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:52.800 Thank you, and I'll talk to you soon. 00:35:52.800 --> 00:35:53.800 - Okay, great. Thank you. 00:35:53.800 --> 00:35:54.800 - Okay, bye, Ray. 00:35:54.800 --> 00:35:55.800 - Bye. 00:35:55.800 --> 00:35:59.800 [music] 00:35:59.800 --> 00:36:01.800 - That's going to conclude this week's episode. 00:36:01.800 --> 00:36:05.800 I'd like to thank Ray again for talking with me today along with my patrons for their support of the show 00:36:05.800 --> 00:36:07.800 and making all the content I produce possible. 00:36:07.800 --> 00:36:11.800 As always, if you enjoy the show, please hit that Like button on YouTube 00:36:11.800 --> 00:36:13.800 and leave any comments or constructive criticisms below. 00:36:13.800 --> 00:36:19.800 I always say this, but the listenership of this podcast is exceptional, and I sincerely appreciate it. 00:36:19.800 --> 00:36:21.800 I'll be back with a new episode soon. 00:36:21.800 --> 00:36:27.800 If you're not already following the content on Facebook or Patreon, check that out, and I think you'll enjoy it. 00:36:27.800 --> 00:36:29.800 Take care, and I'll talk to you guys soon. 00:36:29.800 --> 00:36:30.800 Bye. 00:36:30.800 --> 00:36:50.800 [music] 00:36:50.800 --> 00:37:00.800 [silence]