SOTT Focus:

MindMatters: How Did We Get Here? The Atrophy of Liberalism in the West, with Nicholas Capaldi

Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli, Adam Daniels
Sott.net
Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00 UTC

Today on MindMatters we interview renowned American philosopher Nicholas Capaldi, author of numerous books, including The Art of Deception and the definitive biography of John Stuart Mill. Recently retired, Professor Capaldi reflects on his experiences teaching, the increasingly oppressive climate in American universities, the political philosophy of Mill, and why things have gotten so crazy in the West. Erudite and engaging, Capaldi takes us deep into the American political psyche with the hope of finding a way out of the current crisis.

Running Time: 01:39:12

Download: MP3 — 90.8 MB

Adam Daniels

Adam joined the editorial team in 2014 and is a co-host of MindMatters. His particular interests include philosophy, history, exercise science, and technology. He particularly dislikes Critical Race Theory and people who're so afraid of death that they prevent others from living. He also knows kung fu.

Harrison Koehli

Harrison Koehli co-hosts SOTT Radio Network's MindMatters, and is an editor for Red Pill Press. He has been interviewed on several North American radio shows about his writings on the study of ponerology. In addition to music and books, Harrison enjoys tobacco and bacon (often at the same time) and dislikes cell phones, vegetables, and fascists (commies too).

Elan Martin

Born and raised in New York City, Elan has been an editor for SOTT.net since 2014 and is a co-host for MindMatters. He enjoys seeing and sharing what's true about our profoundly and rapidly changing world.

Reader Comments

parzival · 2021-09-26T03:11:20Z

How about address the 800 pound gorilla in the room in the form of spraying tons of particulates into the atmosphere now ongoing for over 75 years! How about addressing mass psychosis and cognitive dissonance brought about by a psychological 'virus' [Link]

sir_isO · 2021-09-26T12:30:24Z

Shit, they've not even identified the 800lb gorilla in the room?

[Link]
"I got that 4'9 and 1500lb gorilla in the room. He says, I'm not here to lie about the pain, I'm here to make you feel it"

That's when I start referring to "tons of pro" and the brightest light.

parzival · 2021-09-26T12:58:19Z

sir_isO LoL! I guess google's working...

sir_isO · 2021-09-26T13:03:18Z

Nah, I've just listened to like more than a million songs.

parzival · 2021-09-26T13:10:37Z

sir_isO Here's one you shouldn't miss... [Link] Massive Attack, Young Fathers - Voodoo In My Blood

Dwoods44 · 2021-09-26T21:43:01Z

parzival Many things have been used to dumb us down. Fluoride in water to "protect" teeth is one.

parzival · 2021-09-26T23:54:12Z

Dwoods44 I agree. It all accumulates. That's why it pays to have a good water system that will remove impurities like fluoride. Also detoxing using chelation methods, and etc. At 63 there are less toxins in the body than @ 23! Immune system is strong, uncompromised. People can do these things for themselves short term... Long term...entropy rules.

Dwoods44 · 2021-09-27T19:33:48Z

parzival Did you see the link on bitchute that identifies the actor playing Biden. Here it is:[Link]
If explains why psaki emptied the interview room with Biden and Johnson

parzival · 2021-09-27T19:50:28Z

Dwoods44 WoW! I'll have to check that out when I get to a computer that isn't blocked or restricted. (At ~~work~~ at home...)

parzival ·

· 2021-09-28T00:40:47Z

parzival · 2021-09-26T06:30:54Z

Dayz of Noah breaks down in part how we got here. He explains the idea behind a 'psychopathic false moral authoritarianism,' deconstructs fear, describes what techno-totalitarianism is, and talks at length about propaganda... [Link]

Dwoods44 ·

parzival Thanks.

· 2021-09-26T21:43:36Z

parzival ·

Dwoods44

· 2021-09-26T23:54:31Z

parzival · 2021-09-26T07:25:00Z

'This Ends The Debate' - Israeli Study Shows Natural Immunity 13x More Effective Than Vaccines At Stopping Delta [Link]

parzival · 2021-09-26T11:55:23Z

ReSiDeNT BiDeN'S WoKeLY PRoG CLuB BaND...BY WILLIAMBANZAI7 [Link]
*

Bonus song at above link, Marty Stuart, 'Hard working man.'

parzival · 2021-09-26T12:09:19Z

What has happened to Ice Age Farmer?? [Link]

Dwoods44 · 2021-09-26T21:45:47Z

parzival Thanks. Censors at work.

parzival · 2021-09-26T23:55:06Z

Dwoods44 Yeah, right?

ПКостов · 2021-09-26T15:07:53Z

THE COMING SATANIC AGE IS HERE [Link]

sir_isO · 2021-09-26T15:12:17Z

ПКостов [Link]
I'm just a random guy.

Dwoods44 · 2021-09-26T18:12:05Z

Many cultures have elders who bring their wisdom to important issues. Prof Capaldi is one for our culture. We would all benefit from such elders.

The powers that exist believe in social science. DARPA has their New Social Science 2 program where they study collective identity to manipulate the people. Is this a benevolent study? It is to control.

The interview flowed beautifully. Nick showed how education at the college level has morphed into its opposite. In my view this morphing was manufactured over time. The story about the "Climate Activist" student tells you what has happened to education.

Nick talks about the breakdown of family, and the result of it in the black community where 9 of 10 end up dead or in prison. In my view, this too has been engineered through RAP music becoming the example to follow.

Nick recommends reading groups to create civilized conversation of freedom and equality for example. This sounds great for the literate who have been fortunate to read real literature. Our education system has dumbed down many. How to teach/reach them? In some way we need a rebirth of spiritual values.

There needs to be equality of opportunity, but there is free will and choice as Nick states. We each choose and learn from mistakes, or we descend into moral nihilism.

Rowan Cocoan · 2021-09-28T00:02:22Z

SOTT Troll Patrol: KellyWorkman RC

Animanarchy · 2021-09-28T00:23:07Z

Rowan Cocoan "troll patrol" - I like that one, nice ring to it.

sanhettenstaler · 2021-09-30T01:05:40Z

"How Did We Get Here?"

We can start with a poorly written "Commerce" clause in the Constitution. (Now interpreted to grant police powers to the CDC and its affiliates)

And a poorly written "General Welfare" clause in the same. (Interpreted to facilitate the Nanny State, producing generations of entitlement disease, particularly corporate )

The authors thereof were the progenitors of today's corporatists/bankers/property swindlers.

“The nationalists, placing their faith in persons and being skeptical of the people, were reluctant to allow a popular government to interfere with private business and not at all reluctant to conduct the business of government by interweaving its doings with those of private business and businessmen.” E Pluribus Unum p6

“The Founding Fathers, being skeptical of man's virtue, designed a republic whose actuating principle would be the opposite. The untidiness of the system necessitated that the operation of American government would ever recapitulate its process of birth. That is, the system was born of compromises—some arrived at openly and some under the table, some arrived at through ‘respectable’ means and others through ‘corrupt’ deals—and it could be made to work only through similar methods. So cumbersome and so inefficient was the system that the people, however virtuous or wicked, could not activate it. It could be activated through deals and deceit, through bargains and bribery, through logrolling and lobbying and trickery and trading, the tactics that go with man's baser attributes, most notably his greed and his love of power to those republicans who viewed the ‘grand question’ as what kind of national government should be created, rather than whether one should be created at all, the Constitution would be likely to be unpalatable.” E Pluribus Unum p194-5

" by 1787 a number of Americans had come to believe that even that modicum of democracy was incompatible with security for liberty and property. In thinking the subject through, James Madison and various others focused upon a feature of republics that had always been troublesome, namely, the tendency of men to divide into factions or parties and to put the interests of the parties ahead of those of the public." Novus Ordo Seclorum p162

That's how we got here. And this is but a wee drop in the ocean of evidence.

HVACTech · 2021-09-30T01:30:24Z

sanhettenstaler if only you had been There... in 1987.

[Link]

Dwoods44 · 2021-09-30T02:19:31Z

sanhettenstaler Please show us your new and perfect constitution. Yes power and greed corrupts; that is why this constitution has checks and balances, both between branches of government and between federal and state. The problem is not the constitution but psychopathic individuals without moras or ethics who have bought and blackmailed the congress, judiciary, the executive branch, and secretaries of state and governors of certain states. The American people are waking up to the narrative and the trolls.

sanhettenstaler · 2021-09-30T23:13:17Z

Dwoods44 You don't get it, do you? The quotation above has not settled into your consciousness as yet.

Its people STILL thinking a constitution will solve the Swamp's political venality that is this country's problem.

Go read the Anti-Federalist Papers and see just how prescient their predictions were. Read Thomas Paine's Common Sense and see if we don't have today in the Beltway exactly what he spoke of WRT Britain.

Anti-Federalist Papers #16 “When I look to our situation-climate, extent, soil, and its productions, rivers, ports; when I find I can at this time purchase grain, bread, meat, and other necessaries of life at as reasonable a rate as in any country; when I see we are sending great quantities of tobacco, wheat and flour to England and other parts of the globe beyond the Atlantic; when I get on the other side of the western mountains, and see an extensive country, which for its multitude of rivers and fertility of soil is equal, if not superior, to any other whatever when I see these things, I cannot be brought to believe that America is in that deplorable ruined condition which some designing politicians represent; or that we are in a state of anarchy beyond redemption, unless we adopt, without any addition or amendment, the new constitution proposed by the late convention; a constitution which, in my humble opinion, contains the seeds and scions of slavery and despotism. When the volume of American constitutions [by John Adams] first made its appearance in Europe, we find some of the most eminent political writers of the present age, and the reviewers of literature, full of admiration and declaring they had never before seen so much good sense, freedom, and real wisdom in one publication. Our good friend Dr. [Richard] Price was charmed, and almost prophesied the near approach of the happy days of the millennium. We have lived under these constitutions; and, after the experience of a few years, some among us are ready to trample them under their feet, though they have been esteemed, even by our enemies, as ‘pearls of great price.’”

Anti-Federalist #38 "It is degrading to a freeman, and humiliating to a rational one, to pin his faith on the sleeve of any man, or body of men, in an affair of such momentous importance…. I deny that we are in immediate danger of anarchy and commotions. Nothing but the passions of wicked and ambitious men will put us in the least danger on this head. Those who are anxious to precipitate a measure will always tell us that the present is the critical moment; now is the time, the crisis is arrived, and the present minute must be seized. Tyrants have always made use of this plea; but nothing in our circumstances can justify it…. I have seen enough to convince me very fully, that the new constitution is a very bad one, and a hundred-fold worse than our present governmen t. "

“Even the most enlightened inhabitants of the interior of New Hampshire—and of the Berkshire Hills and Worcester County, Massachusetts, and of Pennsylvania west of Harrisburg, and of the piedmont of lower Virginia and all of North Carolina and the South Carolina up-country—normally did not have contact with national authority from one year to the next, felt the existence of their state governments only through the militia muster and the annual visit of the taxgatherers, and encountered information, ideas, or people from the outside world only two or three times a year. To them it was as unreasonable to suppose that the thirteen states could be well governed by a single national government as it had been to suppose that the thirteen colonies could be well governed from London. Accordingly, for most people all the force of inertia was opposed to the Constitution, and it took something special to bring them to think otherwise.” p196-7 E Pluribus Unum

Anti-Federalist #68 “When you have a strong democratical and a strong aristocratical branch, you may have a strong executive. But when those are weak, the balance will not be preserved, if you give the executive extensive powers for so long a time. As this government is organized, it would be dangerous to trust the President with such powers. How will you punish him if he abuse his power? Will you call him before the Senate? They are his counsellors and partners in crime. Where are your checks? …. But were a revolution to happen here, there would be no means of restoring the government to its former organization.”

“ Many American Patriots became disillusioned with the idea of checks and balances by reading a single, grand polemical tract, Thomas Paine's Common Sense. To say that the English constitution was a ‘union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other,’ Paine wrote, is ‘farcical.’ The contention that the Commons provided a necessary check upon the king presupposed that he had ‘a thirst for absolute power’ which made him untrustworthy, and that the Commons was wiser and more deserving of trust. Yet the constitution also gave the Crown the power to check the Commons, which ‘supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him.’” p83 Novus Ordo Seclorum

“When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending ‘the pursuit of happiness’ was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke's doctrine of the predminent rights of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property p63 Our Enemy, the State

All you seem to know about the origin of that parchment likely came from the Pablum of PubEd. You imply that I am a troll of sorts. Well so would be Patrick Henry, who opposed the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin who did not like it, but signed it anyway to please those men present, nor Thomas Jefferson, who when he learned of it while ambassador to France was convinced those men involved were seeking to lay down the equivalent of a king in the vestige of a "President." You may call them trolls too.

Get some political history under your belt. To effectively argue a case in the positive, you have to know it well enough to argue against it.

Rowan Cocoan · 2021-10-01T00:47:57Z

sanhettenstaler You make some good points (hard not to do when quoting Common Sense) but your ad hominems detract from it both substance and form..

Who are the readers that you write this for? Whether only D44 or SOTTites in general, you should have enough 'common sense' to recognize that what valid points you might have are hugely and objectively weakened by those selfsame ad hominems.

To paraphrase:

Get some ~~political history~~ awareness of the basics of human communication and sociology under your belt. Your points would be far better presented.

Dwoods44 · 2021-10-01T11:51:23Z

[[sanhettenstaler. I have read the Federalist Papers when I was 17. I have not read the Anti- I have read Thomas Paine when I wad 19. Yes greed and power vultures have manipulated the Constitution throughout our history.

My original question stands, please give a better Constitution. Or are you suggesting anarchy?

HVACTech · 2021-10-01T22:48:07Z

Rowan Cocoan I will have to consider you a good man for writing that.

Rowan Cocoan · 2021-10-01T22:52:58Z

HVACTech RC

I figure you might appreciate what I'm listening to: (it's actually in my paste memory) " Weed, whites and wine." Little Feat, Waiting For Columbus, Willin: [Link]
And, something it followed to: TP doing that song: [Link]
RC

Rowan Cocoan · 2021-10-01T22:22:55Z

First, well, I can't let y'all talk about John Stuart Mill and On Liberty without quoting him on censorship from therein: (Free at: [Link] ) :

Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst.* It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in acco rdance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. (Snip)

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

* " The best government has no more title to it than the worst. " Doesn't that sound like Twain? Rather, I should I say I bet Twain mimicked - and proudly.

And:

No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

Second, re Mr. Capaldi, any relation to Jim of Traffic* or Karen of Colorado?

R.C.

*Saw them 7/94 in Orlando at a concert that was almost empty because they purposely refused to advertise (and play, as I recall) any of Windwood's smash solo stuff and they announced it in advance. I have always admired Steve for that. PHENOMENAL SHOW! I'd always learned to play every damn bar chord that existed, and watching that, it was there the light went off and I told self: 'Hey, dumbshit: Using a capo's a lot easier". (E.g., John Barleycorn.)

RC

Comment: Let it be noted that the Houthi's actions are not indiscriminate. They have clearly defined what is a target and what is not. Any ship...

Gator

Elephant Seal in BC today, is RC fascinated? RC knows why he's on the other side, prematurely. 😔 [Link]

LindaMay

They're starting to 'eat their own'.......running scared, looking to see who will be the scapegoat since some lawsuits are starting to emerge....

Kimster

This article seems a bit " homo-sapiens-centric " "Adoption of stone tools or fire, or intensive hunting techniques, are extremely flexible...

Buffalo_Ken

Sadly, the next time it will be the same. Most people will do whatever they are told, whatever the consequences. In a way, I think there are...

ReRan

SOTT Focus:

MindMatters: How Did We Get Here? The Atrophy of Liberalism in the West, with Nicholas Capaldi

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