© Joe Penney / ReutersOk, so what is it?
But is that true?
More to the point, do racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., as defined in popular parlance today, even exist?
Join your hosts today as we sort fact from hysteria with a little of that increasingly rare commodity: common sense.
We'll also be bringing you an up to date analysis of the week's major social and political news.
We're live from 12 noon - 1:30pm US Eastern, 5pm - 6:30pm UTC, 6 - 7:30pm Central European, this Sunday March 4th, 2018. If you can't tune in then, download the show from the Sott Radio Network archive!
Running Time: 02:16:35
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript of the show:
Joe: Hi and welcome to The Truth Perspective on the SOTT Radio Network. I'm Joe Quinn and my co-hosts this week are Niall Bradley,
Niall: Hi everyone.
Joe: Harrison Koehli,
Harrison: Hello.
Joe: And Jason Martin.
Jason: Hello.
Joe: So this week we are talking about a hot topic, a topic that's been hot for quite a while. It's something that probably most people listening to this show, probably most people in western nations and even around the world have not been unaware of let's say, at least to some extent. It's the apparent upsurge, if you listen to the media, or pandemic proportions of racism, sexism, homophobia and lots of other isms that are sweeping particularly western nations but really it's kind of like a meme that has taken over the whole world and you could be excused for thinking that it really is a big problem and maybe wondering where exactly it came from all of a sudden because, as far as I'm concerned anyway.
Five or ten years ago this wasn't really an issue but suddenly it's a big issue and everybody/somebody has to do something about it! All of these things, particularly racism. Homophobia has been around for quite a long time I think, but again, it has really taken center stage as well. What other isms are there that we all have to deal with?
Harrison: Transphobism.
Jason: Transphobia.
Harrison: Transphobia.
Joe: Islamophobia. Xenophobia in general.
Jason: Xenophobia. It's like the hatred of immigrants, whatever.
Joe: Anti-immigration, right. So there's a bunch of them there and they're all basically I suppose all other-focused or minority or generally speaking "oppressed". Of course minorities are oppressed because they're a minority, right? The fact that you're a small, distinct group in a bigger group, by definition apparently means that you are in some way oppressed or certainly you have the right to claim that you're oppressed if you're a small group within a larger group. That's a common theme amongst all these isms with the exception of sexism, obviously because the last I checked there are probably just about as many women as there are men on the planet, right?
Jason: There's more women.
Joe: There's more women, right? So that's a slightly different thing, but it's still in the same vein of "poor, unfortunate, oppressed, victimized in some way or another, people being victimized by someone else". And of course most people would probably be aware that the someone else that generally is blamed for victimizing all of these different small or large groups, are men, and particularly white men, which is patriarchy. So the patriarchy made up of white men is responsible for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, all of these phobias, it all comes back to white men. White men are really the only ones apparently - I'm just quoting the dominant narrative here - apparently they are the ones who are responsible for them. If we got rid of all the white men, then I supposed you'd have utopia.
Niall: Peace on earth.
Joe: Peace on earth and good will to everybody. That's the narrative and that's why I suppose there's a lot of people who retain a little bit of thinking and a little bit of common sense have a problem with that concept because it's unlikely that if you get rid of the white men - if that were ever possible - if you get rid of them then...
Jason: No offense Joe, but you're kind of an interested party though, aren't you?
Joe: Well yeah.
Jason: Being a white man of course you'd say that!
Joe: Well I'm going to recuse myself then.
Niall: We have a serious issue here because all four of us are white, by the looks of you are four white males.
Jason: We should change the show to SOTT's Mansplaining. {laughter}
Joe: SOTT Mansplaining.
Jason: We're going to white man 'splain you.
Niall: Maybe we should put that in the show title, actually.
Joe: Man 'splaining.
Jason: We're all straight white men.
Joe: Well to be fair, I don't think we have to necessarily get, for example, a person of colour or an immigrant or a woman or a Muslim or whatever of these minority groups, on the show for us to discuss this because their perspectives and their opinions have been shoved down everybody's throats by the media over the past few years. So I think it's fair enough to say that they have given their side of the story and it's fair enough then for the other side of the story to be presented.
It's not even about two sides anyway. I'm happy to entertain the idea that I'm an oppressor of everybody.
Jason: I'm not. I'll entertain that I am but I don't necessarily feel it's a bad thing.
Joe: What?
Jason: I just don't think it's a bad thing.
Joe: It's not a bad thing that you would be an oppressor.
Jason: If I said you're the king of the world would you be like "Oooo yeah. Maybe I should stop doing that?" Know actually, it's kind of cool.
Joe: Well you might be overthrown though.
Jason: Maybe there is a patriarchy and we're all part of it. Where's the problem?
Joe: Well the problem is for the minorities who have come...
Jason: But here's the question. This is the crux of the matter. How did this come onto the stage? It came onto the stage with the basic assertion of a secular value, that there is something intrinsically good about egalitarian fairness, about everyone being the same and that became a new value for everybody, that that is the most valuable thing in society.
Joe: And where did that come from?
Jason: Well it came from...
Joe: In recent times, let's say, because we know it's always been there in one sense or another but it seems to have coincided with Donald Trump. Donald Trump's to blame for all of this.
Jason: Yeah, there's certain...
Joe: Pretty much when he got elected that's when this all exploded, no? It was going on beforehand but it really went mainstream.
Jason: A little bit. Well what basically happened is that the identity politics people, that are the ones that we're talking about here, they had the run of America, the west for a long time, especially coming out of the nineties and around that time some people started to slowly but surely reject that with what came to be known now as the Alt Right with wider identitarianism and that really made them afraid in the academic world, like seeing somebody like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor, existing. The mere existence of those people sent them off into hysterics. There was the reaction to Gamergate. That also helped to spur it on. And then coming on the tail of that, here's Donald Trump and he seems to be the sum of all fears for the postmodernist academic.
Joe: He was the last straw.
Jason: Yeah, he was the last straw. They were like "Oh my god! It's really happening! Hitler's really here!" This of course is how they see Trump, right? So from their perspective their historical thing is that they think that genocide is two steps away. All of a sudden Donald Trump and the Alt Right are going to merge together and they're going to put on jackboots, SS uniforms and they're going to go around and gas all the transsexuals.
In this hysterical, emotional way, they believe that to be the case. So that's why it has kind of exploded. But it's always been under the surface and it stems from the postmodernists' attempt to find some kind of intrinsic value that isn't linked to "god" or any kind of religious morality, the sort of constant search for a secular moral value, utilitarianism or something like that.
Joe: Right.
Jason: And they came up with this idea "Okay, fairness and inclusivity and diversity" - in this ethnic sense - "is this core value. It's good."
Joe: Well that's...
Jason: What righteousness used to be in the religious times, diversity and inclusiveness, in their way of meaning it, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-Islamophobia, anti-Xenophobia, all of these things are being the righteous man who worships god back in the medieval times.
Joe: So you're saying this could be the result of years of scientism basically and the destruction of god over the past three hundred years maybe.
Jason: Right.
Joe: And the removal of religion and the concept of god and its replacement by secular materialism or material atheists basically.
Jason: Right.
Joe: Because when you listen to the atheists, that's what they talk about. They talk about the idea that morality can actually exist in the absence of god, that there's just human morality that just emerges by itself and it's there.
Jason: Right.
Joe: So all of this would fit these people's, the humanitarians or the pro-minority groups, the leftists let's call them, they're the ones who are really trying to give a voice or a body to that idea, that say that it does exist, "Look here. Look how strongly I advocate for minority rights therefore that's my god, that's my morality and it came from me." So they're actually victims, in a certain sense, of their removal of religion.
Jason: They're the victims of godlessness in a sense.
Joe: They're godless liberals.
Jason: The fundamentalist Christians are kind of correct in that they are victims of their own godlessness in a sense because they can't find anything big enough to put in the hole that they've made. So they have this real problem. It starts with Sam Harris' assertion. Think of the worst experience that any human being could have, absolutely the worst. We're talking about a life of constant pain and torture and skin peeling and all this different stuff. Think about that. That's the worst and then anything that pulls away from that becomes the good and that's their moral basis. It's called hedonism essentially. It's that the closer you get to enjoyment, of having a joyful life, whatever, the better things become. These people are simply saying "Well it's torturous to be a minority because when you're a minority, by definition, your issues, who you are, what you do, is minor. Nobody give a shit because you are not the majority.
Joe: But that's not fair.
Niall: Why are so many white people driving this then if they're not the minority?
Jason: Why are the white people doing it?
Niall: This began in dominant white academia.
Jason: You would ask me that question! That is a hard question to answer. {laughter} I don't want to answer that question. It goes to places I don't want to go. {laughter} I don't want to be on record explaining that one.
Joe: Well I think it's a personality disorder. This comes across, it's not just minorities, people of colour, actual people who are in a minority in a particular country or have a minority sexuality or a minority faith or whatever. It's more about people who have a gene, if you want to call it.
Harrison: It's become they're religion.
Joe: What makes a person attracted to atheism or secular materialism as opposed to someone who sees a value in or is happy with the idea of religion and a "god", whatever way you conceive god kind of thing? Well it comes down to nature. It's a nature thing.
Jason: There's a component of it we could talk about which is this survivor's guilt, from a weird situation. Because of a lot of interesting coincidences but also because of probably something that's a little bit minorly intrinsic to the culture and the race of white people, we kind of ended up on top. That's kind of lucky to a certain extent. We kind of survived and we know in a sense that we didn't survive because we're so great and wonderful but just actually because there was climate and there was the time and the situation and other empires had plagues and other empires had fallen and all these different things that kind of conspired for the west to have this rise. We've had it pretty good and most of us in the west actually live incredibly wealthy, comfortable lives compared to somebody living in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Even the poorest person in the US is wealthy beyond imagining to some of the people who are starving in Africa. So there's a certain amount of survivors guilt to this. It's like we didn't make it because we deserved it. I was just born into this and look at all the suffering in the world and there are people who have that feeling.
Joe: Here's a proposition. People often quote that idea that when people have a very hard life that that would lead them to question the existence of god. How can there be a good god? But it seems to be actually the opposite. A person who has a harder life would tend to simply put up with the struggle of their difficult life, they would need to find solace in the idea of a higher power to give some meaning to it, whereas people from a coddled, well-off, secular western societies are the ones who end up ditching god. So the easier the life you have, the more likely you are to ditch god, in terms of suffering, etc. I'm just putting that out there as a possible idea. It seems that it may have some truth to it.
Harrison: There are several aspects that come together in all of this that are hard to tease out and put back together and I think that's one of them. First, it comes back to what you guys have already said about the hole created by the death of god and how the need for something that is good in and of itself has been replaced. Well that need has been replaced by something else. So before, goodness itself, godliness, holiness or righteousness, in other words having a good character and doing the right thing, has been the good to strive for and that good has been exemplified by something higher than yourself, god and in Christianity, god through Christ.
When that goes away, the one thing we have, then "well what is good in and of itself now" and that has been replaced by things like diversity and inclusivity. So these things are now good in and of themselves, without distinction. That becomes the new holy goal to go towards. In the case of diversity and inclusivity and things like that, you lose a whole bunch of distinctions.
Joe: The complexity of the idea of good and evil rather than good and bad. That's not so simplistic. Simply being nice to other people is not necessarily good. What if you're nice to an asshole?
Harrison: Right.
Joe: You're not being good. So the idea of a definition of good and evil that is beyond what human beings can really conceive of and you just have to simply accept the fact that god defines what's good or transcendent or whatever, has a more complex, more nuanced conception or definition of what good and evil is and it's beyond our ability to really grasp and we just have to accept and therefore have faith. Whereas secularists or atheists basically say "Well no, we'll define it as being nice. Just be nice. If I feel bad, then that's evil. If somebody makes me feel bad then that's evil. If I feel good, it's good and the same for you. And then you go around and try and be nice to everybody and anybody who does any micro-aggressions or anybody who offends, that's evil and must be destroyed."
So it's like people putting themselves in the place of god.
Harrison: Yeah. Another aspect to consider is the whole industrial revolution, the growth of technology and the fact that we live in such a wealthy culture and society, that things become easy, like you said, to deny a higher existence and to be privileged in that sense.
Joe: Right. The thing that provokes a human being or a human spirit, whatever you want to call it, to conceive of something higher than themselves is suffering, effectively. When you don't have that suffering, like you just said, you don't need god, you don't need anything, we're the be all and end all and we make all the rules. Kind of interesting.
Harrison: And so bringing that back to these ideas that we're analyzing on the show, the racism and all these isms...
Jason: You've got to be clear about what you mean by racism.
Harrison: Exactly, that's what I wanted...
Jason: The postmodernist definition of racism which has changed, is now prejudice plus power. So "in order to be racist you literally have to be a white cisgendered male, otherwise you can't actually be racist no matter how prejudiced you are because racism is now prejudice plus power. If you don't have the power to implement your prejudice then you can't actually be racist".
Harrison: Right. So there was a video, I think I saw it on a Sargon of Akkad video where he's taking apart an SJW woman who's saying "It's not racism. It's colourism." She was looking at all these examples from black culture or Brazilian culture, these different societies and even different minority groups who are obviously what we would traditionally call racist against people with darker skin than they are, even if they're "coloured". But that's not racism, that's colourism because coloured people can't be racists.
Jason: Right. Because they don't have power.
Harrison: Right, because they don't have power. But if we just take a step back before this whole postmodernism thing happened, when did the idea of racism first come up? I don't know when the word was first used but you mentioned Xenophobia. That's a Greek word and a Greek concept. You would see that in ancient Greek in the Hellenistic culture where it was a fear of the outsider and you had your city state and there were foreign empires and foreign cities even, that might want to conquer your city state, take it over, take your stuff and murder the men and take the women and children, enslave.
So maybe we can tease apart what might racism actually be, where it comes from, why it seems that humans seem to be racist in the one sense, and then take it from there in the now.
Jason: There's two problems with racism. First there's the technical definition of what does racism mean. If I were going to give it a definition I would say that racism is when you attribute to the individual the attributes of the group that they belong to, racially speaking. "All black people are the same, or all white people are the same."
Joe: Or vice-versa, right?
Jason: Or vice-versa. Now that's just an idea. You could think that and it would be a thought. But somewhere along the line that thought became wrong. It used to be very popular, especially in the 19th century and even early 20th century. It was a very popular idea; the idea that there were different races and there was a hierarchy of races. For instance Margaret Sanger's whole planned parenthood/abortion thing was really about getting rid of the "subhuman black man". That was her goal.
Niall: In academia in the late 19th century it was the norm.
Jason: It was the norm.
Niall: Scientific racism was all the thing and there was no tenor of this being morally wrong at the time.
Jason: In fact it was morally right!
Niall: Right.
Jason: And then at a certain point, probably around the civil rights era, in a certain sense, a collective guilt had built up around it with the end of Jim Crow and the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. You have to realize and it should be noted that this was just coming on the tail of McCarthyism and the fact that the media had largely been infested by this point with Neo-Marxist intellectuals from the postmodernist school.
Harrison: Damn commies!
Jason: Damn commies in a certain sense. He called them commies. But they got in charge of the narrative and they began to push the narrative that there is a moral value behind it in a sense, that racism is not just a thing. It's not just a theory that's discredited in a certain sense. The academic theory of racism is kind of discredited a little bit, who knows, but at a certain point it became a moral crime, it became a thought crime, for you to even think prejudicial thoughts about any group of people. It was wrong or said to be wrong. In a certain sense it always had this flavour of it was only one way. Black people couldn't really be racist against white people.
Niall: There's a dictionary definition I have here of racism but it has a key difference to what you described. You said it was any difference, that people identify with their group along the simple fact that there are differences between them. But the dictionary definition says it's "Prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone of a different race difference but based on the belief that one's own race is superior".
Jason: Right.
Niall: I think that's the key thing that will lynch them. They're coming out like any expression of difference is a subconscious, maybe not verbalized or articulated, but a subconscious expression of "I'm better than you".
Jason: But that definition is problematic, as the leftists would like to say. How are you going to argue against someone like Jared Taylor who admits the fact that Koreans are intellectually superior to whites. So he obviously doesn't think that he's very superior. It's not from a supremacist standpoint.
Harrison: But even taking a step down further into the depths of just general human nature, if we forget about the academic ideas of scientific racism, if you look at cultures in general, you'll find what would now be termed racism in every culture. I'm looking at the map right now. You look at Japan. Japan is pretty notorious...
Jason: They hate the Koreans.
Harrison: ...well the Koreans, but you walk around in Japan and you'll see signs "We only serve Japanese". You'll have the white people who are born Japanese...
Jason: Gaijin.
Harrison: Yeah. Who live there, who speak fluent Japanese, it might be the only language they speak, and they're seen as foreigners.
Jason: Right.
Harrison: And they'll never be accepted as Japanese because they don't look Japanese. You see it between groups in Africa. Another example, what's going on in South Africa at the moment with how the tables have totally turned in terms of whites and black in South Africa. I mentioned Brazil earlier. You'll find racism, as we call it, between groups within a country that Americans in their kind of bubble of living would consider all to be minorities and discriminated against, but you've got discrimination going within the groups that are supposedly the same.
Joe: To what extent is this an American problem then if other countries that are largely ethnically homogenous, like in Japan? Where that kind of racism is okay. If I go to Japan and I choose to live there or a I don't, and if I don't like it there because some restaurants say "No whities" then I'll find a restaurant that does let me in. But obviously it's a personal choice in that sense, but there's nothing wrong with an island full of Japanese people all saying "We prefer Japanese people". For a Japanese man or a Japanese woman to want to marry a Japanese, is that racism? It's ridiculous! A lot of other countries, at least until relatively recently were largely made up of a vast majority of people were one ethnicity and all ultimately had one religious background as well.
But America kind of broke the mold on that since the start of America where you had this one giant country - and the fact it's a big country, it has 320 or 340 million people now, that means that its voice on the world stage is heard. If it was a small little country and it had the same kind of mix it wouldn't be a big deal. But because it's a very powerful country and over the past couple of hundred years with people from everywhere, it was virgin territory back then. But most other countries - okay the British spread around the world or whatever, but they didn't exactly spread British people everywhere. They went and colonized. The British empire had colonies that spread. They built roads and all the "wonderful" things the British empire did for countries, right, but they didn't spread British people everywhere, as in planting them in those countries.
Harrison: They didn't replace the...
Joe: They didn't replace the existing populations.
Jason: That was their main mistake.
Joe: But America did. But America didn't do it just with white Europeans. It was blacks and then it set up right on the border with Mexico where you have people of colour, they're a bit more brown. They're not black but they're brown. Brown people? I don't know.
Niall: They call them Hispanic.
Jason: They're Spanish.
Joe: What colour are they? I'm white. There's blacks. What colour are Hispanics?
Niall: Tanned?
Jason: No they're not!
Niall: They get a lot of sun.
Joe: Well we're using colours here. Have to use the colours!
Jason: The native, the indigenous Mexicans maybe, but...
Joe: But what?
Jason: They're kind of brownish I guess.
Joe: I'm just going with the colour scheme here. Somebody started the colour scheme, but whatever. Okay, is it racist to call somebody a colour?
Jason: I don't know.
Joe: I don't know. Don't care. I think it is a problem with America.
Jason: You have to understand...
Joe: If it's happening in America...
Jason: Everything is racist, everything is homophobic, everything is sexist, everything is xenophobic, everything is Islamophobic.
Niall: That can be.
Jason: No, it is. Both Hillary Clinton and Anita Sarkeesian have declared it so therefore, it must be the truth. Everything is.
Joe: The reason we're talking about this is because I don't think that racism as a fact actually exists. I don't think there is any large number of people - and anyone is free to cite me statistics or do your own research. Go out in the street. Find me the large number of people on the streets in western countries who are classically, technically, dictionary-wise, racist. I don't think there are any. I don't think the average person in the street displays any kind of racism, any kind of...
Jason: I would go one further. I would say that white people are the least racist people.
Joe: Could be.
Jason: Only because they're proactively trying to not be racist.
Joe: Right.
Jason: It's become a part of...
Joe: The Jews.
Jason: Whatever is a white western culture, which is largely been eradicated and just lost by this secular movement of the anti-traditionalism, the one thing that has been inculcated into people since young childhood is this idea that whatever you be, don't be racist.
Joe: Right.
Jason: So everyone is in a certain sense trying not to be racists, trying to be the least racist as possible. That's the replacement for your religious training. You don't say the Lord's Prayer anymore. You recite how much you love all the black and brown and purple and red people and how sorry you are for...
Joe: In terms of numbers of people it doesn't exist. Of course you're going to be able to find some people who are classically racist, the KKK or whatever, white supremacists.
Jason: I grew up in Florida and in central Florida on the coastline it's all yuppies and snow birds but there are some backward hicks. I went to school with two guys who literally were kind of in the KKK. They did the usual stuff and they were always talking about how they didn't like the inward this, but then one day an actual black student came to the school that we were at and at first they were like "We don't like black people". Within a week they had realized that he was actually pretty cool and they started hanging out with him and then the KKK stuff just disappeared, the whole "We don't like black people" disappeared.
Most of the time when you find those people it's pure and simple ignorance.
Joe: Right.
Jason: And absolutely no contact with anybody of that particular ethnicity.
Joe: Or they're messed up in some other way and like you were saying earlier, they felt like they probably have a lot of other problems, because they're basically personality disordered' someone running around saying "I hate this specific ethnic group" have got a problem and most people in their society will know they've got a problem and say "Yeah, that's the guy who's a bit nuts," not just because he runs around shouting "I hate Ns" or "I hate coloured people" but he has other personality problems. He's messed up.
So what I'm saying is there's a tiny percentage of people like that in the population. The rest of the population who aren't like that are not racist in any way. The radical leftists will accuse people of being unconsciously racists, that they're almost genetically racists, that it's in their DNA.
Jason: That's because they can't find any real everyday racism.
Niall: So it's been repressed or it's still there.
Jason: It's in the back. It's unconscious bias.
Niall: That's the point at which you see, like you're saying, racism as it was commonly understood has largely been eradicated or disappeared because people mix and they communicate more with each other within a country and with other peoples all over the world. It has naturally died a death. So along comes white privilege, the definition of which is 'all white people are guilty of systemic racism by birth'.
Joe: Yeah, you can't do anything about it. It's born into you!
Jason: It's a racist doctrine.
Joe: Isn't that what they accuse the Jews of? Hitler accused the Jews of, that kind of thing?
Jason: That they were guilty of Jew privilege, yeah.
Joe: No, that they were born evil, born sub-human.
Jason: Well these people are Nazis. You kind of have to understand that. This is the kind of people who became Nazis.
Joe: These are the antiChrists.
Jason: They in a certain sense are the actual only racists because they are literally racists. They think that you have some quality by virtue of your birth and your membership in a race which is the definition of racism.
Joe: But they want to help you!
Jason: And they think that they're better than you!
Joe: Well it's bad.
Jason: They think that they're better than you in your natural state. So they are actually, technically, by the definition, racists.
Joe: The thing that you're born with though, they try to convince you that it's bad. The way they define it, it's bad. "You're inherently or naturally racists and therefore we want to help you to exorcise this from your being".
Jason: In the early stages, but eventually they will give up on that thing and you couldn't convert to Nazism if you were a Jew. There was no choice between the showers or the party. And that's how these people are ultimately going to go. If they get power, that's where they'll go.
Joe: But there's a lot of people that they are convincing or converting and that's where you get a lot of the white people who have joined the radical leftist movement, the feminist movement and the minority rights movement. You have a lot of white people, particularly white men, and they're gold, right, it's really juicy when you get one of them. You get them - what's the term?
Harrison: Triggered?
Joe: What do they become? They become...
Jason: Allies?
Joe: Cucks.
Jason: Cucks. The problem is, a lot of those men who are male feminists are not really feminists in a real sense. They are under the delusion that the pretense of feminism will lead to some benefits for them.
Joe: Everybody's in it for themselves.
Jason: Yeah. And maybe feminists have pointed this out, that men can't really be feminists and that male allies really are a shifty bunch of people. The feminists have pointed this out and the anti-feminists have pointed this out, that there's something wrong about that group of men who pretend to be really, really concerned about the women. So I consider them as people who are trying to be opportunist and thinking like the Matt McGorry's and the Steve Shive's, that they somehow believe or are actually getting something out of getting close to certain types of liberal women, pink hair, free love types. All they have to do is say "Don't worry. You're going to be fine" and that kind of stuff. So these people are not really feminist and you shouldn't consider them feminist, even when they go and hang out with Black Lives Matter and it seems like they have the white guilt. Really they're just there because they think that they're going to get power and kudos.
Joe: So talking about white privilege, what about white privilege? Whitecoast in the chat room said that white privilege means that your society accords you certain benefits because of your white race, like having more makeup options in your skin tone.
Jason: Right, there you go. That would be a great example of it.
Joe: But Jordan Peterson said that that's just majority privilege, it's not white privilege.
Jason: Of course because generally speaking, if you manufacture...
Joe: Makeup.
Jason: ...makeup you basically say "How much of this can I sell, how much of that can I sell?" Generally speaking you're going to sell more to the majority.
Joe: Right. So you make more of that.
Jason: You make more of that.
Joe: You make it more appealing.
Jason: The thing is, when you drill down to it and people start talking about white privilege it's stuff like this because in reality, in western society, white people are not privileged.
Joe: That's heresy Jason!
Jason: Right. It's actually the exact opposite. You have diversity hiring programs and affirmative action and all these different what they call "positive discrimination" programs. So in a certain sense, the only institutionalized privilege in the west that right now that exists is privilege for two types of people, women and "minorities". Generally speaking, the revelations from the James Damore thing show, and Google has admitted to it, it's all out in the open and people have the emails and all of this stuff is circulating around, that they basically said "Get rid of all of the white men from the job applicants. Forget about white men. We want to hire this number of black people, this number of Latino" - they called them 'Latin X's' in the email - "Latin X's Latino/Latina. We want this many Latin X people and we want this many gay people" kind of stuff. So the only kind of systemic positive discrimination or any kind of systemic sexism or racism in the west is in favour of minorities.
Joe: Right. So to really actually get to the heart of the matter at the beginning of this show we say that it's basically about godlessness that has given rise to this at this point in time?
Jason: Well tangentially it's about that. It's about godlessness. It's about the search for a secular moral standard. The problem is it's really subgroups of people. So they're the kind of people who are looking for the good in the world and they're convinced that the good is now being anti-racist, anti-homophobia, anti-Islamophobia.
Joe: Because they're obviously bad things, at least when you describe them. They can be understood by many people as bad things.
Jason: If that's part of your value system, sure.
Joe: If you explain them in very simplistic terms, like being bad to someone simply because of their skin colour. The vast majority of people would say "Yeah, that's bad". Being bad to anybody because they are that person. It leads to anti-Semitism. I don't want to get on the Jews thing.
Niall: The JQ.
Joe: What's that?
Niall: That's the nomenclature, the JQ.
Joe: The JQ, what does it stand for?
Niall: Jewish Question.
Joe: Oh, the Jewish question. Okay. But it seems like the anti-Semitism meme that's been around for I don't know how long, 150 years in modern history, but certain since the establishment of the State of Israel. Criticism of Israel is conflated with anti-Semitism. In fact anything you say even vaguely negative about anyone of the Jewish faith is anti-Semitism and then most non-Jews are accused of being fundamentally by nature born anti-Semites basically. You don't know it so you have no way of knowing when you're being anti-Semitic because in your genes you will just express it. You're basically dangerous. A goyim or non-Jew is dangerous to Jews simply because he or she is a non-Jew because at any moment a notion would take you and you'd want to gas all the Jews at any moment, that's what can happen. So you're fundamentally anti-Semitic. It seems to be very similar to the accusations that radical leftists make about people who are not radical leftists, which is that you are fundamentally evil and you're born that way and we have to cure you.
Jason: Says an interested party. They're an interested party. If a Black Lives Matter protester comes up to you and says "You're a racist, you have white privilege", all this different stuff, it would be like "And then?" Where does the value system come from that makes me think that I should value your assessment of me? If you come to me and say "I think that you're a racist, sexist homophobe" I would be like "Well, since I'm white, male and not gay, your judgment of me has no meaning. Where does the value system come from?" And that's why we're saying the core of this is the added component of saying that there is a core moral value. "It's immoral to be racist. It's immoral to be sexist. It's immoral to be transphobic or Islamophobic." That's the extra step because otherwise it's just a statement of "You thought about blueberries today!" "Well I think about blueberries a lot!" But suddenly they're saying "But yes, but everybody knows that thinking about blueberries is immoral."
Joe: Right.
Jason: And then all of a sudden it's like "Oh, you're a dirty blueberry."
Joe: Right. But it does gain some traction...
Jason: Because it's just a thought in your head.
Joe: But it does gain some traction whenever...
Jason: I might eat blueberries.
Joe: With the average person...
Jason: Filthy blueberries.
Joe: There's nothing about blueberries, although some blackberries might disagree.
Jason: Jeez, colourism. It's proof of colours.
Joe: The reason is, my primary concern here is the way in which it infects otherwise normal people who might have a bit of common sense, how this ideology infects their minds and takes hold in their minds. And I see it happening.
Jason: If you accept the value.
Joe: But it's an appeal to something that is nominally on the face of it is a moral thing to do, like you just said "Don't be racist". So it's not really the same as saying "I like blueberries" or "I don't like blueberries".
Jason: But only because it has moral force. It's just a thought in the grand scheme of thoughts. Every thought is equivalently a thought, right? Until you say "Well some thoughts have moral force behind them.
Joe: Because of the implications of them.
Jason: Because of the implications of them. "As the man is in his heart, so is he in his actions."
Joe: Right, so he'll end up possibly killing all the minorities.
Jason: If you think...
Joe: Because they're bad.
Jason: ...badly of minorities, you are going to genocide them, you are going to oppress them, you are going to do all this different stuff. This is from whence comes the moral authority to say that they're bad. Otherwise it's just a thought among millions of other thoughts.
Joe: But that is a valid moral.
Jason: Why is it a valid moral?
Joe: The idea that arbitrarily, in any society, almost whimsically or on the basis of some irrational prejudice, that you'd go and start a war and kill a bunch of people. That's bad for society in general.
Jason: That's happened in the past, right?
Joe: Right.
Jason: As it happened in the past with Hitler.
Joe: Because Hitler.
Jason: Because Hitler. But again, when you start to analyze the postmodernist position and the social justice warrior position, you realize that it is set up so that you cannot win because you will always come to "Ah, Hitler." And it's like "Okay, now we need to spend five hours talking about you are like Hitler and I'm not" but they won't understand. You get into all this, it's a setup in this game where you are checked at every turn. All you can do is you can refuse to accept the presuppositions and therefore be free of the system. If you accept the presuppositions, you can delude yourself into thinking that you are not part of it. You can think "I'm rational. I'm like a light version of an SJW. I think that some social justice is good but not all these crazy one, the ones who are like 'I'm a leftist but I'm not with the radical leftists'."
Joe: Yeah.
Jason: That's bullshit. If you accept the secular presuppositions, you are in the trap. You are in the drain. You might be on the outside of the drain, but one day you are going to be in the center of the drain.
Joe: Right. And your moderate voice isn't the dominant voice in that grouping. You can be on the edge of the circle, or towards the edge of the circle and say "Well I'm out here. I'm not an extremist like the extremists in the core." But the problem is the extremists in the middle are the ones who are getting all of the attention and they're going to drag you and everybody else in the circle to a certain destination. So, sorry, there's no validity to claiming "I'm a sensible liberal." Don't say libtards because you don't even know what liberals are. "I'm not a radical leftist. I'm just a leftist for some good things." So dude, someone's overtaken your cause. Someone has appropriated your leftist political bent and they're taking it somewhere pretty scary and you're going with them. You're aiding and abetting them in effect.
Jason: Well they're taking it to the logical conclusion. That's the problem with postmodernism. I find it funny whenever I see a scientist or someone coming to defend the enlightenment against postmodernism. Postmodernism is the logical, rational conclusion to...
Harrison: Modernism.
Jason: ...modernism! These people weren't stupid. They really did kind of see a basic problem, which is "hollow out god, we've got some serious problems". Ultimately the problem comes down to the moral good is made by power, by fiat. That's the ultimate conclusion of postmodernism, is that whoever has the power makes the moral authority.
Joe: Makes the rules. Defines what is.
Jason: In a certain sense that filtered out into them. It started as textural analysis of saying "well whoever is the dominant group gets to decide the interpretation of the text, the interpretation of the cultural whatever, the position of the culture" and then it filters out to might makes right. "If we can beat people over the head enough to make them accept ethnic diversity over ideological diversity then by fiat we can make it right. We can make it a moral good, by definition." And all you have to do then is keep beating people. Anyone who pops up, like whack a mole, you hit him with a stick to keep him down and you have made moral good. You have solved the problem of from whence comes morality, where is the good, by beating people over the head. And that's what postmodernism is leading to and that's what scientism/modernism as a philosophical thing is leading to. It's the logical conclusion of it. You can't escape it.
You can place yourself on the spectrum of a little bit further back ideologically you can put yourself into 1950s postmodernism and then it's far more mild and less obvious that you're going to end up in 2018 even though if you really look at it, you were always going to end up in 2018.
Joe: Yeah.
Jason: That's where it had to go. Every generation always goes more extreme than the previous one and the old people are like "These whippersnappers are taking it too far" but it's the same for philosophies and ideologies. It's like Marx was a lightweight. He was an underachiever. He didn't go far enough. The Neo-Marxists have upgraded the ideas. They've taken identity politics of class identity of even gender identity which was part of Marxism as well, they've upgraded it into this fractionated gender identity spectrum of different races and pseudo races and half this and that. They just made it more of what it was. You have - I forget his name, he's a good guy. He's an Englishman. O'Brien.
Niall: James O'Brien? Radio host?
Jason: Just ruined my train of thought. He's well liked because he's a out-and-out communist and he's anti what he calls third wave. He's anti these postmodernists and stuff like that but he's just a traditionalist in the Neo-Marxist vein. He's like "Let's go back to traditional Marxist values.
Harrison: Well one of the tragedies of this whole progression has been that by creating this new good or searching for this new moral goodness, the thing that gets thrown out is all the good things that have been traditionally thought of as good. So you level out the playing field, get rid of all traditional values, then you can introduce the things that you want to become the new value like inclusivity, diversity and all these things, but then the terror, the nightmare scenario is that in the future, if these people get power for instance, then they will do exactly what the Soviets did, the Bolsheviks. It will be bloody and violent. Many people will die and a lot of these people, the ones you describe on the fringe of the toilet bowl, they're the ones that are going to get flushed.
Jason: Well they're going to get eaten, for sure because the problem is, this ideology has a unique feature which is why Political Ponerology was written about communism in Poland. There's a reason why it was leftist communists. This particular ideology attracts a certain type of person, but a person who doesn't have the courage of their convictions. They want to see a result in the world but they just can't bring themselves to dominate and slaughter the way that they're going to have to because if you want to take over the world, if you make an omelette you have to break a few eggs.
So you have this huge group of people who have a belief in a utopia and it's right across the way, we can just get to it if only we could get to it, but there's all these people in our way and we don't have enough balls to kill them. We need to find somebody in our society who can and they do. They find a hangman. They find a Lenin or a Stalin or somebody. They find this person and that person is willing to do the dirty stuff. But that person is almost always a psychopath. They give the power to that person thinking "He's going to take care of it. He's going to bring about the utopia" and they just ignore the screams of the people that have to die in order for their utopia [to come into existence] but then they end up becoming victims of the very person that they give the power to.
Harrison: And it's not just the Lenin or the Stalin. That's just the...
Jason: Or the Hitler.
Harrison: That's the exemplar of what happens at every level of society. So there's a hangman in every village.
Jason: Right, exactly!
Harrison: And in every community, every division that you can think of within that society, there's a hangman and he's doing the job that the fellow travelers just want to close their eyes to so they don't have to deal with it. They can ease their conscience.
Jason: Right. There's always someone willing to punch people. At every level. And they're not always murderous in the true sense of the word. They could just ruin your career or they're willing to lie and make false reports and get you fired.
Joe: Petty, mean people.
Harrison: Petty tyrants.
Jason: They're petty psychopaths. And then people glom onto them because they're willing to go the extra mile and do all the horrible things that the leftist who is really kind of a cuck doesn't have the courage of his convictions, can't do. And that's why conviction tyrannies are the worst.
Joe: But their convictions are all humanitarian. How could they ever lead a bloody revolution? They're all about helping people...
Harrison: That's exactly what the communist revolution was all about.
Jason: Exactly.
Joe: They're all about protecting people and minorities and being nice to each other and no triggers or no...
Jason: But it becomes mathematical.
Joe: ...microaggressions, trigger warnings. How could those people, who are concerned about it, ever lead a valid revolution.
Jason: Because it becomes mathematical to them. If I have to kill one to save a thousand, aren't I making a moral choice?
Joe: Right.
Harrison: And the people that you're fighting are animals. It's like they're evil.
Jason: They're subhuman. In fact you can see that. If you look at some of the deep feminists and the deep leftist blogs, they've started talking about the white male, the normal person, as being subhuman, the subhumans who don't recognize the horrible truth of rape culture and patriarchy and white privilege, they literally call them subhuman. It's already begun as a language inside of that.
Niall: They've been caught on a number of occasions expressing, articulating what they probably are, where it's leading to, the center of the drain - white genocide.
Jason: Right.
Niall: They probably don't mean that. Subconsciously they're probably thinking what you're saying, is anyone who is not ideologically correct is earmarked for genocide. We need to start making lists, that kind of thing.
Harrison: Well just look at the whole situation going on in the American and Canadian universities, where you have these conservative or even semi-conservative speakers like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro or Sargon of Akkad. They'll go and speak and you look at the SJWs that are protesting. They're scary. You wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that. There's a level of demonization that is so irrational that you can imagine what it would be like during the Soviet revolution. Imagine being Jordan Peterson and thinking "Well these people are protesting against a person and it's not me" but you're the one that they're aiming their sticks at. That's the situation that the people on the receiving end find themselves in.
"Well I can see that you're angry. I can see that you want to kill someone and I can see that you want to kill me but the person that you're actually so vehemently against, that's not me. You don't know me." But they think they do and that won't stop them.
Jason: Well they do. He's wrong when they say that. He's wrong when they say that they're arguing with someone who isn't him. And he knows why he's wrong. You have to read Gustave Le Bon's the crowd and you have to understand that when people are together in a group they think about things in terms of the archetype that you're representing and they are correct that he represents the harbinger of their doom. Now he doesn't want to kill them really. It's not really going to be a genocide but it's going to be a genocide of ideology and that's what is actually being risked.
A lot of people don't realize that you, me at least, we represent a genocide of their ideology. It's not physical violence. It's not really hurting them but there is a real desire and a lot of people - including Jordan Peterson - to annihilate the Neo-Marxist ideology, that it is evil in a way that is hard for people to understand unless they've really, really looked at it. What did it feel like to be a person in Russia and taken and lined up against the wall and being shot because you didn't agree with the economic theory? How crazy and ridiculous and mind-numbingly unfair and almost disturbing it must have been. "What do you mean, you don't agree with the alienation of labour and how we should handle surplus capital? It's time to go to the wall." And that's ridiculous!!
These people were not only ridiculous, but it's evil. And the tens and tens of millions of people who have died, like it has to be destroyed. And there is the coming conflagration. It's time for us to kill Marx, in a sense, to get rid of him, to get rid of this ideology. So their existential threat is an ideological existential threat so they're not wrong when they see him as this horrible destroyer in a very profound ego sense.
Harrison: They're wrong in the particular words they use to describe him but those words themselves are just newspeak. It's all double talk. That's just a code word that they're saying for what they really mean and what they really mean is "You're dangerous because you can see through our façade."
Jason: Right. "You can see through the mask. You know who we are. You know what we're going to do and what is worse, you're going to stop us." And it's existential. The thing is, the real problem that's going on now is everyone else doesn't seem to recognize the existential nature of the problem that's going on. And they won't and they never do. They didn't in Russia until they were lined up against the wall and suddenly before the bullet passed through their head the last thought that passed through it was "Oh, this shit's for real!"
Joe: So Steven in the chat room said that there are plenty of examples of supporters of capitalism engaging in mass murder of leftists around the world and he said that Marx is being caricatured.
Jason: Marx is being caricatured.
Joe: Yes.
Jason: Well I didn't actually specifically caricature Marx. I could but I didn't. I was talking about Neo-Marxism and postmodernism.
Harrison: You said Marx was a lightweight.
Jason: Yeah, basically Marx was an underachiever because he really just thought "Hey, this is going to be scientific socialism. This is going to be a new, perfect economic theory." He was just an economist who spends 80 pages in Das Kapital or more talking about what a commodity is, defining it.
Harrison: I'm reading a biography of Stalin right now, a new one by a Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk and one of the things that surprised me reading about his relatively early life - and this was at the beginning of the revolution so in 1917 - Stalin was actually a moderate and he was part of the moderate groups. The moderates wanted to support the provisional government because they thought that the communist utopia, the dictatorship of the proletariat was a far off goal. It would be the industrialized nations that would first have the revolution and then eventually Russia would get it. But for now we've just got to play the game and this is better than the Czar so we should just go along with the provisional government.
Stalin was part of that group and Lenin was like "No! If we can take it we want to take it now and there's nothing that's going to stop us and we're not going to have any moral inhibitions whatsoever." There's always a group of moderates, and these are the same people we were talking about. They don't know what's really going on yet. They're just kind of caught up in the fervour and the ideology and are true believers in Marx. Then it's the people like Lenin that shape and mold the revolution and take it down a really dark path and then a person like Stalin, who was a great opportunist and a very effective person - he was high in conscientiousness, he was a hard worker. He was competent at what he did but he was competent in evil.
Joe: Right.
Harrison: This is just in reference to the comment about caricaturing Marx. No, it's just that Stalin was the logical conclusion of Marx, that Marx himself couldn't see.
Jason: In a sense, but to go back to this guy's thing, he's pulling a Christopher Hitchens in a certain sense. Now I don't know the exact history here on this particular event. I just remember seeing Hitchens use this technique against somebody arguing against his leftist ideas. So at some time during the French Revolution there was this group of early proto-socialist kind of people who took over a town. I don't know which one. They started killing everybody who wasn't down with their stuff. So they did this. They instituted their own government. They had all their tribunals. They did all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, killed a whole bunch of people and then somebody sent in the army and the army came in and saw what they had done and killed them all, took all of the leftists and shot them and Christopher Hitchens was arguing that basically they were morally equivalent to each other.
It's like, Well hold on a second! No they're not! The ones who rebelled who started killing everybody, those people were evil. When the army came in to bring back order, saw all the slaughter that they had done and then killed them, they had the moral authority to do it because of what they did. So Hitchens' basic argument was that there was moral equivalence between these two and it's like if you feel there's moral equivalence then we have a fundamental problem of values. What could they have done? They seized family members, slaughtered these people. They killed all the magistrates, killed all the business leaders, did all this different stuff, running amok of this, what were they supposed to do? Be nice?
Joe: Well you don't have to go back to the French Revolution probably to get examples of what he's talking about. You take other examples more recently...
Jason: Right.
Joe: ...of America - and this would get into American imperialism - and America going in and using the claim of the communists "the commies are coming to take over this part of the world" and going in and staging coups and killing lots of people or causing the deaths of lots of people that really didn't know what communism was, but kill them all because they possibly were being swayed by leftist ideology and that didn't fit with American corporate imperialism, their plan for that part of the world. That's what he's saying.
Jason: Oh man, that's just...
Joe: Well it's true.
Jason: It's a minefield that I don't want to go into but I would say that I don't agree.
Joe: But it's actually true that they did do that.
Jason: Maybe.
Joe: But I think there's plenty of historical accounts of America going around the world either fomenting and killing civilians en masse in the name of America which is in the name of American capitalism, in the name of Coca-Cola let's say, and claiming to be doing it for freedom and democracy and that kind of stuff, but actually killing a bunch of people and destroying a country and leaving it in a lot worse state than it was before...
Jason: I'm going to say that I don't have specific details of any specific one. I don't have some sort of deep researched history of that.
Joe: Well you don't have to have deep researched history.
Jason: I don't, so I can't argue against it. Every single one that I've looked at that has claimed to have been that, when I looked at it, I felt, no there was a little bit more complexity here.
Joe: Well let's go...
Jason: Specifically, the Vietnam War. I understand it from America's perspective and I think I know why they did it and I know why it got screwed up. So that would be one example. But I don't go around and collect up all these stories of "Oh America sent in combat applications group and they killed a bunch of civilians". Sometimes you end up finding out that CAG was sent in to train the local torturers and it was them killing each other. So I've never seen any convincing evidence.
Joe: Well there's lots of it, let's put it that way.
Jason: I'll take your word for it.
Joe: Of American meddling. And you could say it's all fair in the sense of "It's all fair in love and war" type of thing and "you do what you have to do and the world's your oyster" type of thing. "Go and get what you can and it's dog eat dog". That's what America did and you could say it's all fair in that respect, but then we can't be on our moral high horse about leftists, let's say, doing the same thing if that's what "American capitalists". I don't know if they're real conservatives. The problem is that they weren't even conservatives in that sense. They were just out for booty. They were out for personal power and personal gain and wealth.
Jason: There's a bit of an argument to be made about the US and the extent to which it is in and of itself, controlled by leftist socialists and has been for a long time. There's nothing intrinsic to capitalism to sending the army in to ensure corporate monopolies. That's not actually capitalism. That's much closer to what we would call fascism to be quite honest and very close to even communism in a certain sense.
Joe: Right, it's fascism.
Jason: There's no real separate between the government and that corporation.
Joe: That's fascism.
Jason: In America I would not really define America as a capitalist country, I'd define it as a fascist country.
Joe: At least, yeah.
Jason: It's been a fascist country since the 1930s. So again, this whole idea that it's capitalism, that's a Marxist thing.
Joe: Right.
Jason: I'm not defending capitalism in any sense because capitalism is just a description of a basic economic mechanism.
Joe: Right. And capitalism works. It's the best of a bad lot.
Jason: Capitalism, as most leftists talk about it, is the Marxist definition which is whatever the f**k it means. Who knows what it is.
Joe: These people shouldn't be arguing capitalism versus socialism. Capitalism seems to have the best opportunity of creating a truly fair society, or as fair a society as you possibly can.
Jason: We have to define capitalism. We have to define what is capitalism. That's the problem . The leftist says capitalism and everyone acts like they know what they mean. Hold on a second, what is capitalism! Capitalism is the idea that somebody with money can invest that money, can owns the means of production privately and can get people to work. You can buy a loom and then hire somebody to work on the loom and then take the stuff that the loom did and you sell it. That's really kind of what we're talking about here. It's a very simple mechanism. It has no moral or ideological force to it.
Joe: That's why I said it's the best economic system. People conflate capitalism as an economic policy with the way that it is implemented. Obviously any system can be exploited and corrupted. People shouldn't be arguing for socialism and more welfare state and more handouts from the government and social utopia if they don't like capitalism as it has grown and developed in western countries. They should be arguing for responsible capitalism, i.e., don't have a bunch of people at the top who are going to mismanage the capitalist society.
Harrison: And the problem is that a lot of the people that rail against capitalism are capitalists at heart and they don't even know it or they won't admit it to themselves. They've got their cell phones, their smartphones.
Joe: Right.
Harrison: They're reaping all the benefits of living in a nominally capitalist culture.
Joe: Yeah. They hate themselves for it though.
Harrison: Right. If they really had true convictions and had integrity, they'd do something about it and they'd stop being capitalists and they'd be a lot worse off.
Joe: And Steven here, the same guy who said the capitalists doing the same thing as socialists, he says "US is controlled by leftist/socialists". He's quoting you Jason. "My god! You're not making much sense."
Jason: If you're a leftist I wouldn't make much sense. I'd be talking gobbledegook.
Joe: But hang on. It can be relatively easily explained.
Jason: Yes, 1.2 trillion dollars every year is transferred from the people who work to the people who don't.
Harrison: No matter what, whether democratic or republican administration.
Joe: The point is, these terms don't serve the purpose, capitalist, socialist, leftist, whatever, don't serve because you have to explain what's actually happening in a country like America in other terms than some catch phrase slogan. Oh it's leftist? Oh, it's capitalist. No it's not. Look at what's actually happening, what they're doing and then describe that. There's no term to describe that.
Jason: Some aspects of America have a capitalist bent for a short period of time. So utilities certainly don't. Big pharma, not capitalist. It is government insured monopolies. That is what is going on in America and has been going on.
Joe: But then big pharma companies...
Jason: They're not capitalists.
Joe: But they're getting stacks of cash but it's not synonymous with capitalism.
Jason: Yeah, but again, they're getting stacks of cash but behind that, deep down behind that is the idea that they're doing something, that they're getting stacks of cash because they're going in and out of the FDA. They become the chairman of the FDA for a couple of years and then all of a sudden now they're the chairman of such-and-such a big pharma corporation.
Joe: So you're saying it's a false comparison or false to say that because CEOs of the biggest companies in the US are getting $20,000 an hour or something, they're getting millions...
Jason: Who cares what they get?
Joe: ...that the fact that they're getting that should not be correlated with people being poor.
Jason: Wealth is not capitalism.
Joe: But people do correlate it because they say "That CEO who's getting $200 million a year..."
Jason: Yeah but then...
Joe: "...well he can get $10 million a year and give the $180 to the poor people".
Jason: But that's envy and resentment and who cares what he makes?
Joe: Well they're trying to make the claim that because he makes so much other people have less as a direct result.
Jason: Well not necessarily.
Joe: Other people are in grinding poverty as a direct result.
Jason: Not really. I don't know how they prove that.
Harrison: That's the way they see it but I don't think many people get upset - at least they don't get as upset that some athletes or artists or actors are super rich.
Joe: No, it's the politicians and the CEOs of companies.
Harrison: Right, the politicians and CEOs of big companies. There's something about the businessman that rails on people. It makes them feel uncomfortable.
Joe: But politicians in particular because they're public servants. "We're here to serve you" but...
Harrison: But also I think part of the problem is that a lot of what goes on in what leftists will call capitalism is it's really corporate welfare and what's really corruption. So what they're seeing is something that in certain instances is very unfair and unfair in a way that anyone would see as unfair, not just from the liberal perspective. It's that you see someone gaming the system and getting super rich out of it, but what they're basically doing is turning a free market into a monopoly.
Jason: But it's corporate socialism.
Harrison: Right.
Jason: When you create a public teat, they're just getting mad that these people are getting better at feeding from it than you. They're pushing you aside. In that sense, yes it's true. When the government bails out investment banks or any banks or any corporation whatsoever, that's welfare for corporations. We've created a socialist system. It's just not benefiting necessarily, people claim the poor, but I would say $1.2 trillion every year in entitlement payments constitutes a really big commitment to socialism and welfare, is the fact that America's not doing it so well with 350 million people. This hybrid system that has grown up where leftists keep pushing and infiltrating different areas and building up and getting the different bills passed, yeah it has led to a Frankenstein monster but America is more socialist than it is not.
Jason: I'm sure this will sound like gobbledegook to this guy.
Joe: But the thing is, when he takes issue with the idea that the US is controlled by leftists socialists, it depends what you mean by leftist socialists. People in the American political establishment going back 30 or 40 years, if you go back 30 or 40 or 50 years, you find the neocons who had a lot of power in the eight years under Bush, who were the immanent squeezes behind the throne, waging war and all that kind of stuff, but you go back and look at their histories. They were all quite aging guys at that time, Rumsfeld and Perle and Wolfowitz. Go back to the 1960s and all of them were Trotskyists. They all subscribed to hardcore socialist values and now they're in a republican administration under George Bush and what they launch is a humanitarian war.
Jason: Well they export democracy.
Joe: They export freedom and democracy. This was fundamentally liberal and leftist ideology that pushed, for example the invasion of Iraq, and it was done under a conservative republican government of George W. Bush by a bunch of former Trotskyists! So pick it out of that! What are you going to call the US? Left? Right? Apparently it doesn't really matter. It's what they do that matters!
Jason: Again, it's what the people do. There's the crux of the matter. They can call themselves anything they want.
Joe: And they do!
Jason: And they do call themselves anything they want. But what America has been doing is exporting the world revolution.
Joe: Right.
Jason: A different sort of brand. It's not exactly like international socialism, i.e., communism or Soviet communism or Maoist communism. It's its own sort of brand.
Joe: I think his problem is that Steven doesn't think that a leftist could or would launch a war of imperial conquest and kill a bunch of people.
Jason: But it's not imperial conquest. It's exporting the world revolution to them. It's ensuring human rights.
Joe: They're different terms.
Jason: It's humanitarian.
Joe: Right, exactly.
Jason: You can couch it any way you want.
Joe: Right, but he doesn't believe that someone with a leftist ideology would do that but at the top of the pyramid, at the top of the political hierarchy or where the power is wielded or the decisions are made, these people will call it whatever they want. They will launch a humanitarian intervention and in their hearts they feel "Yeah, let's free the people of Iraq. Let's give them freedom and democracy."
Jason: Right.
Joe: That's a leftist, liberal ideology but also they're saying "We might get pretty rich out of this. We'll get some more power." So Steven needs to separate out leftist values among the good-hearted average American person who sees suffering in his community and would like to do something about it, divorce that form any ideologies among the Hillary Clinton's or anybody else in positions of power because like we were just saying, they will switch those terms and those ideologies left and right and it serves their purposes.
Jason: And in a certain sense leftists are kind of the only ones who do start imperialistic wars. It does start from this desire to centrally plan and control everything and to have everything under their leadership. No matter where they are, they tend to do this kind of stuff and the problem is...
Joe: Look at Haidt. We were talking in the last show we spoke about the moral taste buds and stuff and conservatives so conservatives are not left wing. They're right. They're traditional conservative right wing and they're the ones with the high disgust.
Harrison: Yeah.
Joe: And traditional conservatism historically is more about isolationism...
Harrison: And creating borders.
Joe: Creating borders and keeping your group to yourself because your high disgust taste buds don't really like the other so much and those inclinations don't change. So that nature or personality type would be the least likely to want to go off spreading yourself around the world and then interacting with other peoples. Certainly they're less inclined than leftists towards humanitarian values and helping the poor other. They'll help their own group but they won't feel so much empathy for some far off group. But that's leftism that does that and that's what leads to imperialism.
Jason: Right. That's basically what I'm saying here. That's why I was arguing kind of against the "US capitalism is the thing that did this". Well when you look at it, when you send the special forces to be a death squad so that you can privatize some sort of water source for a large corporation, that's not capitalism. That has nothing to do with capitalism! That's what socialists would do to get centralized control over something. The problem is that leftists - especially the naïve ones - think that leftism as an ideology - and we're talking about a huge general 30,000 perspective here - is about helping the people and they don't realize that it's about using the people to gain power. It's about sectioning off society into a group of haves, have-nots and have a little, want mores, about managing them with propaganda to use them as an army to get yourself into power because you are envious and resentful of the people who are already in power. Back in the day it was the king or whatever, the politicians. Today mostly it's a lot of academics, like "Why are all these politicians running things? People should be coming to us" and so on and so forth. But that's just what it is.
They're just tools and in certain parts of the world a bunch of indigenous people with an IQ of 70 who are running around with loincloths, "We're not going to be able to turn these people into activists for us", so they'll just kill them. But when it comes to Missouri, they'll do the propaganda and turn them into activists. So leftism and all this stuff is about control and power and it's only sometimes that it's useful to use "the working man" or "the poor" or whatever, as some sort of mass that you can prod into action to cause chaos or to do something. But these people see themselves as arch overlords who are so smart that they're playing this chess game with societies and engineering them. But at the end of the day, the people who always suffer, even under communism, are basically the poor people.
Niall: We said at the beginning of the show that in general today there's no racism. What about the vitriol against Russia?
Jason: Clapper said something racist. He said that it was intrinsic to the Russian.
Niall: Yeah, he said it was in their genetic makeup.
Jason: It was in their genetic makeup.
Harrison: I don't know if I'd call it racism on a mass scale as the leftists seem to talk about it these days. You can have a racist statement by a guy like Clapper but again, if you have an average American who meets a Russian in the street, will they have a natural revulsion to that Russian because they're Russian? Some might.
Niall: I think they do in Europe, yeah. They go "Russia. Oh." There's an almost instinctive at this point, caution.
Joe: They're trying to create it certainly and it's very interesting to see whether or not they can actually create that in the average person in the street, create that animosity and racist feeling towards the people from another country simply via political BS and the media propagating it. Conversely, I have very little faith in the average person but in other ways I have more faith in them in the sense of basic human decency of the average person. I wouldn't trust them necessarily when their minds have been addled by all sorts of propaganda, especially when it's personal to them or when certain types of people who take it onboard, they're very easily manipulated. But when it comes down to one person meeting another person, you see a more basic kind of decency, person-to-person come into play. It's very hard to remove that from people because I think people are wired to be cooperative and not to be instinctively "I hate you just because I don't know you". I don't think that's normal for the average person.
Niall: Biology is interesting in this. I don't think it's a matter of being hardwired or not. I think everyone has both systems. They can both potentially be used. In the run-up to the First World War there was a decade long campaign to get the average English person to really feel that two minutes of hate towards anything German. And it was extremely successful.
Joe: Right.
Niall: It was so successful that by the end of the war the guy who organized it, Alfred Milner, who was ironically second generation German, in minutes from his meetings, the ones that survived - most of his archives were torched - said "It's gone too far. We need to get the press to reign in because we have other plans now. We need to - he didn't use this term but - we need to de-dehumanize all the work we've done to date to get people back on an even keel with Germany because we're going on a different tack with Germany now." It struck me that people have both capabilities. Now whether they tend in one direction or not, left to themselves, depends on their specific situation, in-group, out-group. Maybe their immediate neighbours in the town over, everything's fine with them, but there's a serious issue with the state-over or the country-over, it's going to be activated understandably. But if things are generally at an equilibrium then that biological function is not used. It's still there though.
Harrison: Haidt talks about that. I think what it comes down to is racism probably isn't the best word for it. It's more of a base tribalism. What does he call it? The hive switch?
Joe: Mm-hm.
Harrison: If you look at Russians, if you're just looking at them, most Russians are white. The same thing with Germans. There are tons of German immigrants that were in America for instance, and indistinguishable after generations of integration. So it's not something intrinsic to Germans but humans do create these groups and we call them nations. When you have a tribe like that, an extensive tribe, then you just have to flip that switch and you can turn the majority of people against those "other" people from that "other" country.
So I think that's what we're seeing. It's a manipulation and an exploitation of that tribalism which is in everybody to some extent.
Niall: Something that's really dominant in this ideology or set of overlapping ideologies, even if they don't articulate it explicitly, it's really apparent between the lines, this dripping with contempt. They seem to have a real revulsion to patriotism/nationalism, love of one's country. It's probably been drilled into them with lots of training. I wouldn't dare to say it's instinctive per se, but you can see it in the rhetoric at the moment. It's an apparently crazy categorization but it makes sense in a way. So you get these analyses, say in foreign policy or some hotshot magazine where it's stated "Oh yes, we're looking at a pattern here. The rise of Trump in the US, Xi Jinping in China now wants power forever as dictator, Putin of course has been in power for a quarter of a century, dictator, and there's these kinds of people coming up in Europe want to be dictators."
That's how they see it. They see it as all one amorphous thing. Obviously that's a crazy thing to do because look at the differences culturally or politically between the US and China for example, never mind Russia. I'm not sure what I'm saying. They're kind of right that they're onto something but they can't quite articulate it. They just know that it's bad! Patriotism. Love of country. And of course they introduce Godwin's law quickly "Because of what the Nazis did". You don't want to love your country because that's evil. They're all open borders.
Joe: Well there can be no patriotism in a country that has open borders and people from other countries can come in. Love of country means "I love this piece of land and its history." What is a piece of land? It's where we came from. Patriotism means you start looking at the history and you see the founding fathers and what it was founded on. You look into the Constitution, blah, blah, and that would tend to make you not be inclined to open the borders and accept a bunch of people that don't share the same values as us.
Niall: I think something that they don't connect with it, but it's there in the background, it's the same thing as the definition they have for racism. So their issue isn't that people categorize and discriminate - not in the negative sense - just simply "you're this, you're that". They're reading into it a subconscious threat that the person who's being "racist" is indirectly saying "I'm superior to those other people". And then it would be the same for country. Love of country is dangerous they say, because you're inherently saying "Mine is the best".
Joe: Because of Hitler. Because Hitler.
Harrison: Also, patriotism is dangerous because identity politics and a lot of leftism is founded on the idea that your enemy is internal and a big segment of your population. So in the US the enemy is the white cisgendered male and if you are first and foremost an American and a patriotic American, that difference disappears. This gets into one of the reasons that feminism has been so successful in what it does. It has created division within the society and at the most fundamental level in the family, between men and women and between fathers and their children.
When you facture society at such a basic level, and even at a level or two above that, at the level of minority groups or sexuality or whatever, then any kind of unity over and above that, is dangerous. So that ties into multiculturalism too because if you have a unified identity in a particular nation, then automatically that would act as a barrier against multiculturalism, for instance. In order to have multiculturalism you can't have patriotism because the two won't go together.
Joe: Right.
Jason: There's this other aspect which is at a certain point during the rise of communism, it was understood that it had failed because the workers had not united and had not rebelled and that English workers were willing to fight for England and French workers were willing to fight for France. This was what spawned the creation of Fascism as a modification from international socialism to national socialism. And that started the left/right split actually. When people say left and right they really mean two sides of the same coin. It's all leftism. It's all those dirty socialists.
But that kind of thing that came out of that was this resentment against what you could identify as this patriotism inside of these people, that even though they were the oppressed identity, they were the oppressed workers, they still didn't unite with the workers all over the world and revolt. So people like Antonio Gramsci and the postmodernist Adorno and Marcuse and all these Neo Marxists who came with the Frankfurt school who had come out of this, they were part of the ones who started this whole anti-patriotism bent, against this type of person because they suddenly realized that they were defective workers, that there was something defective about them. "How dare they fail me!" in a sort of sense.
So I think a lot of that anti-patriotism comes from that as well. In a certain sense it's a trace of a academic resentment against the "low, common worker who wasn't even smart enough to know how much better than him we were and didn't come and participate in our revolution and so now we have to talk about him dismissively." That's the impression that I get when most of them talk about patriotism. There's not grand arch scheme around it. It's just a strain of that, kind of like condescension.
Harrison: I think again we're looking at something that's very complex that has several contributing factors to it and if we want to go the deepest, that would get into Haidt again and the liberal moral taste buds. They don't seem to have that taste bud for the authority and the hierarchical structure that creates a single society. They're naturally more open. They're more open to other cultures. They want all the borders to be broken down so they'll look at that common identity as a limit and as an unnecessary border. But they won't see any of the positive aspects of having a wider identity.
Jason: I think a lot of that kind of stuff is influenced by this Jungian archetype stuff like you see with Jordan Peterson and I feel like it's throwing the leftists a little bit of a bone to say that "You're kind of good. You could be kind of good but we need each other", this complementarianism with the openness versus conscientiousness and stuff like that which to me is like pandering to them, like saying "Okay, you can come back. You can come back. We can be a little bit open."
Joe: I don't think it's pandering to leftists. It's more like saying that there are those different types of people in society and that they do potentially...
Harrison: They have different roles.
Joe: Well they can have benefits, as I said, if neither one is allowed to run away with itself or particularly leftists aren't allowed to run away with the situation and wreck the place.
Harrison: I had a very un PC thought as I was reading Haidt's book, that the leftist should only ever be an opposition party and never actually get into actual power, but they should have some degree of influence, but not to the point where they actually have the final say in anything.
Niall: And in our current time, this is why this is so important. In this time they're having their way on everything. I could not believe last week's news. It emerged that the Irish government have been secretly mandating that all press and media organizations in the country not talk about a secret plan to bring in a million migrants from abroad. That would be like 20% of the current populations by 2040. They're not allowed to talk about it. It's happening. It's called a plan. It's Ireland 2040 or something. It's like, what the hell?! Obviously that's shocking in itself, that there's a scheme and that it's in process, but they have the added twist of no one's allowed to talk about it. And I can see how in this climate that would be upheld, not so much by the law because anyone can break the law and then set a precedent, "Oh, okay it's too late now. We don't want to look bad" and so on, but most of it's upheld by people policing themselves!
Jason: Right, prior restraint, which is the main problem of what's going on because there's several different types of censorship.
Niall: If you object to it in any way, shape or form, if you raise your hand and suggest we talk about it, "He's a racist!"
Jason: Right, but that's the thing. People were all about free speech and they were against censorship and they didn't realize that censorship is a complex matter. There are all different kinds. There's one where the law says "You can't say cock sucker on the radio", like with Lenny Bruce.
Niall: Beeeeeep!
Jason: Yeah, exactly. That is one kind of censorship. The other kind of censorship is called prior restraint which is where it's not actually against the law, but because there might be consequences to it, you decide to self-sensor. You decide to censor yourself and not say it and by implementing this with a social exclusion program with "You'll get fired, you'll get de-platformed, you'll get harassed, you'll get docked, you'll get horribly treated," then you will self-censor and that's the new kind of censorship. I like to call it the back door censorship. It's not really the government that's doing any of these things. It's actually this cadre of people who have agreed tacitly to ostracize anyone who deviates from the ideological norm and then that then causes the self-censorship or the prior restraint.
Joe: We're going to take a call here. Hi Steven.
Steven: Hey, how y'all doing.
Jason: Oh Jesus that's loud.
Joe: Oh, that's good.
Steven: You guys can hear me okay?
Jason: I can hear you like loud. Oh my god!
Joe: Yeah, that's okay.
Steven: I just have a question and I'm being serious about this. What's wrong with people embracing the notion of racism, believing that for example, if you're white and you look at Africa and you look at Haiti and you look at all these different countries and you look at IQ scores, what's wrong with a white person coming to the conclusion that people of African or black skin, what's wrong with them thinking that they're inferior as a whole?
Joe: Well I don't think it goes together. You do the studies and people have done the studies, that's where you're getting your statistics from, IQ studies. To the extent that they actually mean anything or can be applied or useful, they look at IQs between blacks and whites and Jews and stuff and they say Jews are highest then come whites then come black people then come Hispanics or something. I don't see a problem with doing that if people want to go around and there's IQ tests that can be done, if someone sees a need or a usefulness to do that. But it's the idea then that simply because someone has lower IQ than another group, that group are worse or inferior. What does inferior even mean?
Okay, they have a lower IQ, they have an "inferior" IQ. Does that mean they're inferior human beings? I don't think so.
Jason: Well I have some points on this one, if I can do it. The first thing that I would say is who does this? Who runs around reading reports on IQ just so that they can say "Oh, I'm superior." It's this hypothetical person who's out in the ethers somewhere who's having naughty thoughts. I mean who give a flying flip?! I've never encountered one. I'm not one. I read Charles Murray's work. Reading about averages of IQs is like "Yeah, but it's an average."
Joe: Go and find that average person.
Jason: Go and find that average person. Average people don't exist. That's a statistical fantasy. I've met plenty of black people. They weren't stupid. That's one component of it, this idea of the average. It's the same with the wage gap. "Women earn on average..." On average means nothing. Do you know nothing about statistics? You take a large sample of data, add it all together and then you divide it and then you get an average. It's like Jesus Christ! Nobody cares about the average! What's the median, what's the deviation? There's all these other multi-varied analyses that you can do to some topic like that. IQ, as a univariate analysis is not really all that interesting. Who in the world is spending all their time caring so much about this? That's one thing.
The second thing is part of this is the problem of the worship of the intellect; this idea that somehow having a high IQ makes you a better person. I know plenty of high IQ leftist academics. Really, I would rather have a dumb, mixed-race child than a pure white leftist academic. Seriously. That would be a horror story for me. So there's this whole worship of the intellect as if IQ is some sort of number that is magical and it means you'll be fantastic. Have you met some of these people with really high IQs?! They are socially inept, weird, often crazy areas. Generally, if you have an average IQ, 100 to 120, you are going to be fine for most social tasks, most social problems. You're going to be able to get along fine. You're going to be able to have a job. This whole argument is ridiculous? Who cares what the average IQ of African American or white or Korean or Jews are? And who sits there and goes around and says "Well the average of my race". The average of your race means nothing. Your IQ might mean something, whether or not you have a good IQ, but the fact that somebody else in your race has one is freakin' irrelevant.
Joe: What do you think Steven?
Steven: Okay. One thing that I see as a problem is the label at this point "racist". "John is a racist!" It's almost like John has AIDS.
Joe: Right.
Steven: And my larger point is that we're enculturated into larger societies that categorize things in certain ways, whites, blacks, United States. We have a particular fairly short history of all of these groups, of different people coming here and we have a national mythos of the immigrant coming here working hard and this is still playing out today. I'm not disagreeing with the gist of what y'all's major point is about the absurdity of the SJWs. The democratic party is full of it. The media is full of it. You just keep on. "Oh, I caught you being racist. Oh now you're going to lose your career" and all of that. It's just so much BS and people are disgusted with it. I do up a lot of people that are very upper income and republican and white and many, many times I have heard views expressed that are generalizations about different groups that fit historical stereotypes that people have been struggling to dispel and challenge for generations.
So this is not a simple subject.
Joe: No.
Steven: I think also when it comes to the situation with what they call feminism, there's a lot of absurdities in that, especially now with the transgender and then calling me a cisgender white male so therefore I'm bestowed all of this privilege, this unearned advantage that I should feel guilty about having. I think that right now a lot of the frustration that I hear from you guys, from a lot of people, there's a reaction against this left progressive anti-racism that it's gone too far to the point of being absurd and a lot of it is. But I would just caution this.
Jason: So you're saying we're just reactionaries.
Steven: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. For example, communism. Communism developed as a reaction to feudalism and incredible oppression by oligarchs and by the upper classes of the working class and then it developed into the Soviet Union where you've got this Manichean black and white; the capitalists are for freedom and the communists - it become caricatured in ways that are self-serving and a lot of the nuances get lost in these discussions. I would say about capitalism, it's kind of like communism to a lot of people that are proponents of it. They're always claiming that true capitalism doesn't exist just like people that you could call apologists for the Soviet Union, you could say "Once they destroyed the workers' councils, that was the end of true communism.
You just had totalitarian hierarchy that ruled. China today is an example of that where you have billionaires and they still call themselves communists. So I would just caution that...
Joe: But you know what?
Steven: Go ahead.
Joe: Jordan Peterson talks about this, about something called the pareto distribution where it's completely natural, and not just in human society but in animal society, in the natural world with trees...
Jason: With beings.
Joe: ...in the cosmos, with stars, that there are some people who tend to do more in any society or some beings who tend to do more or are more able. He uses the example of in any organization, a corporation or a company, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. So once a person does more they tend to be given more to do or they do more themselves and they accrue more things to themselves. And it's not just about human societies. It's nature. It's a fundamental aspect of nature and for someone to come along and try and say "That's wrong!" is...
Harrison: Presumptuous.
Joe: ...deluded or presumptuous can you be? You don't understand it properly if you think you can just order society in a more egalitarian way when all of nature is pushing against that for some reason.
Jason: It all comes down to the bible man. "To those who have much, more will be given. To those who have little, even that shall be taken away." That's just the way of the world.
Joe: It's not just the way of the world. It's the way of the cosmos and nature itself.
Steven: Yeah, well you can...
Jason: You do in your daily life, right? Let's do a little thought experiment here. You have a house, right?
Steven: No.
Jason: You don't have a house? You don't live anywhere?
Steven: No. I rent. I don't own.
Jason: You rent. So let's say for instance that you find out that there's a lot of bugs in your apartment and let's just imagine for a moment that you're going to have to take care of it because your landlord won't. So you decide that you're going to consider who's going to come and fumigate your apartment. Are you going to hire the person who has a lot of experience fumigating apartments and who has all the tools and everything ready at his disposal? Are you going to hire some guy named Chuck who says maybe he might be able to get the stuff together if you give him a few weeks? Which guy are you going to hire?
Joe: Well obviously we know which one.
Jason: The one who has much or the one who has little? You, in your daily life practice the pareto principle because you want to go to experts. If you have a heart problem, you want to go to the guy who's done 50,00 heart surgeries and has a whole lot of experience. He has much. More will be given to him by you. You will give him your money for your heart surgery as opposed to the guy who's fresh out of school and has never done it before. You're like "Whoa, hold on a second. This is your first heart surgery?! I don't think so." It's a difficult problem to solve in society but it's something...
Steven: Well we have a situation in this country that if you get cancer or if you need heart surgery you don't have insurance, a lot of times people just simply die. You can use that kind of logic...
Jason: Apologetics.
Steven: Yeah, apologetics. You can use that kind of logic taken to its extreme where everybody who's super rich, they deserve every penny they have and anybody who's a worker who complains, "Oh, you're just a commie-loving ne'er do well that wants to take from the earners." I see some of that ideology coming through in what y'all are saying here.
Joe: But Steven,...
Jason: Me yes. I completely agree with that one.
Joe: But Steven you would like to think that in the job that you do, with the effort and time and money etc. that you have put into it to be good at your job, you would like to think that a client would choose you over some kind of grifter who just came in on the scene and you knew he wasn't going to do a very good job and that because of an ideology among your clients of equality, that they would pick someone else who had just come on the scene and who you know doesn't know what he's doing, but they'll pick him over you consciously and he'll do a crappier job and you're meant to be happy about that because of equality.
Steven: Well I don't think it has to do with equality when it comes to market decisions that people make. It comes down to people making judgments to get the most value and quality for the money that they expend. For example, I pay my helper as much as I can.
Jason: You have a helper?
Steven: This is the person in my work, my helper in my work, yes. And I pay him as much as I can. Now other people pay people in a similar position half as much as I do. I could find somebody else that would do the work for half as much as he does, but the quality would be 25% and the amount of work done would be 25% compared to what he does.
Joe: Right.
Steven: I'm not arguing...
Jason: You hired this guy because he's good, he does his job well. An ox is worth its hire is basically what you're saying. It's not because you're some grand wonderful person that you're paying this guy more than other people, it's because he's actually better than other people.
Steven: No, actually part of my calculation in how I pay him is if I was in this guy's position, given his skills and this guy's position as being a family man, having to support a family, if I was in his position, what would I think is fair. If I had a mentality like a lot of people that are business, rah, rah capitalist types in business, I would pay him as little as I could get away with and that's a huge part of the mentality among people that are the owning class and the employer class. This is why a lot of people will work 60 hours a week. They're not making enough money to even see a doctor if they need to see a doctor and that's bullshit.
Propounding this right wing pro-capitalist ideology and then labeling leftists as being bad - the only way we've ever gotten ahead as working people is when we organize ideologically and in movements to put pressure on the owning class so we can have a better share.
Joe: You're going to...
Steven: And the more we get this bullcrap and the more we get this bullcrap propaganda from MSNBC to Fox News to radio, this bullcrap propaganda that labels all leftists bad, unions are bad, that's why people are getting less for their efforts today and they're working longer hours for less and they can't even ever own a house. They can't see a doctor when they need to. If they get cancer they might die. That's the reality that we the working class in the United States are living in and I'm 54 years old. I've been working since I was 16 years old and I've watched everything get worse as the unions have lost strength and then the preponderance of right wing propaganda to convince other workers...
Jason: It's everywhere. Right Wing propaganda. It's everywhere. It's dominant in our culture. It's the corrupting propaganda from Fox News and from these political pundits, the Bill O'Reilly's who are going around. They have dominated the discourse, absolutely. I completely agree with you.
Steven: The only thing I take exception to in what you say is when you use examples of course in these countries there's a lot of injustice done to people who were formerly of the ruling classes when they're overthrown by these leftist Stalinists. Okay, a lot of injustice. But let's also not forget that places like Guatemala and Honduras and Columbia, today if you're a leftist and you are advocating and trying to organize unions, or if you're a journalist and you're a leftist, you're an enemy of the oligarchy and you are shot and killed. That is today. Is it any coincidence that in these countries people rarely ever improve their education system? They don't get results that have a better distribution of wealth for the citizens and there's a small oligarchy at the top.
Jason: I'm going to stop you there. I get it. You've drunk the Kool-Aid, you're read the interpretation...
Steven: I've drunk the Kool-Aid!
Jason: ...all of this history. I don't know what to say to you man.
Steven: I didn't drink any Kool-Aid. Listen, I didn't drink any Kool-Aid. I've been to Guatemala. I've spent extensive time in Honduras and Guatemala. I'm friends with families whose people have been murdered by the oligarchy...
Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steven: ...because they are leftists.
Jason: Political. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the anecdotes. Great.
Steven: It was just common sense! I have real life experience.
Jason: I have no control over Guatemala. I'm not in Guatemala. I don't know what's going on there and to be quite honest, we're not talking about Guatemala. What does that have to do with anything man? You're just going on this gigantic...
Steven: No, you were talking earlier...
Jason: You are basically going through the religious litany...
Joe: Alright.
Jason: of the left that goes around "all these oppressed people over here and all these oppressed people over there." But the truth of the matter is there's a little boy on the streets of Bombay who's basically eating garbage and that sucks and the world is like that and you are as far away from him as you are right now from Warren Buffet. His life and his experience! There is suffering all over the world. There is a story that will break everyone's heart. What the *** are we supposed to do about it?
Steven: Do we accept that? Do we accept that?
Jason: Your narrative has dominated the discourse, the leftist narrative has dominated the academic, political and think tank narrative in the west at least since the 1930s.
Steven: What?!? The think tanks are controlled by the oligarchy!
Jason: No!
Steven: They go to universities.
Jason: They're controlled by you guys!
Steven: You go to universities and the discourse is neo-liberal and pro-imperialist.
Jason: Neo-liberal. That's the new thing, that you guys have created this new thing that doesn't exist, this new thing that doesn't exist. There's no such thing as neo-liberal.
Steven: The think tanks...
Joe: Hang on a second!
Steven: Think tanks are controlled by the oligarchy in the United States!
Joe: But what's the oligarchy?
Steven: What you're saying is absurd!
Joe: But what's the oligarchy? Hang on a second. Look at the Iraq War. It was done on humanitarian freedom and democracy, very much leftist value grounds. Politicians, being psychos, are using any political ideology that they want, that they think will get them what they want, which is imperialism and domination and invading other countries and all that kind of stuff.
Steven: Well that's not leftist thought! Look at the British empire. It was the white man's burden.
Joe: Exactly.
Steven: "Free these people and help them exploit their resources because they were too dumb to learn how to make factories and engage in huge mining and dam projects." Okay? So it's always been used since the time of Rome, by the oligarchies, by the ruling classes that support imperialism...
Joe: Right.
Steven: It's always been used as an excuse for that. Always.
Joe: So it's neither left nor right then. You're just talking about a bunch of psychos.
Steven: Well generally the right are the ones that support the ruling order and the oligarchy. The left are the ones that generally want a better distribution of wealth. They want more workers' rights and protections and these are just generalizations, f we're going to use terminology correctly, but by saying that the think tanks are controlled by the left and socialists, it's taking the language...
Joe: I think you need to create new terms because what you're talking about, there's different types and different flavours of leftism and you're tending to group all leftist together when I don't think that's accurate. There are people who are more sane in their leftist orientations and then there are other people who are radical nut jobs and they're just in it for the power. Look at Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is uber leftism!
Steven: No!
Joe: Well nominally she is.
Steven: No!
Joe: Hang on a minute! She is! We have to define what we're talking about here because all of the pink-haired women, the radical leftists, the ones screaming at the sky, are all Hillary Clinton supporters. They're the anti-Trumpers, the other ones who love Hillary Clinton and love the democratic party under Hillary Clinton and wanted her to be President. These are the radical leftists who want a communist utopia. They're all in there. They're the ones screaming for Hillary Clinton. But they fail to recognize the fact that Hillary Clinton is the one who invaded Libya and bombed the crap out of Libya and destroyed the country.
Steven: Hillary Clinton supported NAFTA. She supported bailing out the banks.
Joe: Right.
Steven: She's a supporter of corporate oligarchy in her historical record.
Joe: But she's a democrat!
Steven: Now on cultural issues.
Joe: But Steven, who's left? You've got democrats doing that and you've got republicans doing their thing, so what are you?
Steven: Okay, so the terms...
Joe: You're neither obviously, so what are you? Who represents you?
Steven: What's considered the left in this country, over decades, especially since the unions have lost power, the discourse shifts to the right. So all the policies become more right wing. So what is considered left today, Richard Nixon was more on the left than Obama was because everything shifts to the right as the oligarchy gets more control of the propaganda, workers are not in a position to organize effectively and struggle. That's why workers are getting poorer and the oligarchy's getting richer and our problems are not getting solved because we don't have a workers' party in this country, unlike countries in Europe where they have real worker parties.
Jason: Like the Nationalists Socialist Workers' Party, right? That's what we need.
Steven: What? That's fascism!
Jason: Yeah, exactly. But we need the workers' party and then you're like "Oh, yeah, but isn't that exactly what Hitler did?"
Steven: No! Parties that are tied to workers are prevalent in Europe and they have more power, more say within their political systems...
Jason: I know.
Steven: These are traditional left parties. Now what we have in the United States with the SJWs and the cultural issues and this constant battle about race, this is a form of politics that excludes us coming together in dealing with things economically and that's its major function.
Joe: It's distracting from the real issues, exactly and that's the whole point, set people against each other. And that's what's happening in the US and it's all gone. It's all over but the crying at this point. When you just said, for the values that you espouse, there is no party or no politicians who represent what you espouse. So there is a left party, the democratic party and that's what most leftist people are putting their faith in. From what you're saying, you don't put our faith in those people anymore because you realize that they're all a bunch of corrupt politicians who are in it for themselves. A lot of them are psychos and that's the end of the story and there's nothing we can do about it because people have been...
Steven: I'll make this point too. We are in a very strange place as far as the political terminology of left and right, especially in this country right now. When you have Mother Jones and you have the writers from Mother Jones who was a woman who's a historical labour organizer, when you have them attacking people that oppose US intervention in Syria and support Syria, when you have them attacking people like me on that ground, these are imperialists that still call themselves progressives but they're really imperialists in their scum. We have Democracy Now which promotes the White Helmets. We, the historical left and I mean people that are working class that want a better distribution of wealth, we don't believe, most of us, there are hard core...
Jason: Distribution how?
Steven: Who gets to decide who gets what? It's through struggle. It's through historical struggle and pressure. When the workers are not united. When the workers are not united they're going to get screwed, okay? When there's death squads killing union leaders in Columbia, yes, the workers are going to get screwed. So having a more organized and coherent working class movement in politics is better for the majority of people because the majority of people are working class.
Jason: So workers of the world unite? You have nothing to lose but your chains. Thank you for that.
Steven: Oh, so you're calling me a communist with that. That's really smarmy.
Joe: No...
Steven: That's really smarmy. I'm not a communist. I don't believe in abolishing classes and having a working class be the total...
Joe: I understand...
Steven: I don't believe that at all!
Joe: I understand.
Steven: But what I do believe is that only through struggle and solidarity have workers ever made any gains and without those historical socialists that were leading the way...
Jason: And where are they now?
Steven: ...in Europe, in the United States. Without them we wouldn't have made the gains that we made in the past and it's no coincidence that now that union power is at record lows and we have ubiquitous propaganda, it's no coincidence that so many workers don't have health insurance. They're busting their ass and they can't even dream of owning anything, okay?
Joe: Yeah. Steven, we're going to let you go.
Steven: Well thank you. I appreciate it.
Joe: We've got somebody else waiting. Thanks for calling.
Steven: Thank y'all. I appreciate it.
Joe: Bye. Who have we got on the line here? A mystery caller.
Rau: This is Rau.
Joe: Hello Rau. We can call you Rau, okay.
Rau: Sorry, it's already late I think.
Joe: No problem. What have you got to say.
Rau: It's an interesting identity discussion. {laughter}
Joe: Interesting, yeah. It's all about identity.
Rau: Yeah. Actually I don't know much about left and right until I read this Righteous Mind book so I don't have many comments on that side. But since I was raised in India where you see the identity all over the place. These identities are there for thousands of years. When I started I have seen identities in my own caste, my own relatives, people all the time fighting. When I moved to my middle school I've seen people fighting across lower castes and higher castes. And when I moved to my college I've seen people fighting across lower castes and higher castes. I have seen the same pattern. When I came to the United States I saw people fighting across the nations.
So it's in people's' innate nature - you can call it tribalism - they always find one reason or another to maximum benefit. You can say people are fickle, selfish. There are always people who take advantage of that situation and I think the main thing currently with this left/right going on is I think because of this whole technology, the whole instant communication. The world identities are more or less getting melted down and you have a lot of fighting going on with these new identities, change of definitions, all that type of stuff. I think he's talking about the same things. I just thought I would mention. It's like ponerization, right?
Joe: Right.
Jason: India's a very interesting place, especially with what's going on now with the divorce laws and the dowry laws and things like that. It's an interesting situation.
Rau: It's rough. For example, when I was looking to get married I thought, okay, I want to marry somebody in my own caste. The reason is if I marry some other person, my mother is not going to like and my mother and my spouse never get along. So for me it's a logical choice. Okay, I'll marry within that. The caste comes with certain behaviours, vegetarianism, untouchability. There is quite a lot of serious behavioural preferences that comes with it. So naturally that will create a lot of distance. So I agree with you, it's too complicated in India. You have 24 official languages, hundreds of languages or dialects and within castes and you have vegetarian, non-vegetarian or that you are Hindus and Muslims. It's widely different.
But the point I am trying to make is we have always elections. A guy comes with the identity toward it and at the end of the day, after decades, nothing has changed. Everybody is the same politicians.
Jason: Can I ask you something Rau?
Rau: Right.
Jason: If you had the choice to live again in India, would you do it?
Rau: Again, when you say the choice, there are boundary parameters, okay? For example...
Jason: Naturally, naturally. But I mean do you choose to live in America or does somebody force you to? Does some situation force you to live there?
Rau: If you want one answer, when I moved to the United States one thing that made me the decision is brain drain is better than brain in-drain.
Jason: So would you rather live in America or would you rather live in India? It seems like you could probably do both. Do you think you could get a job in India and live there?
Rau: It all depends. I have kids and all that stuff.
Jason: Right. And they're used to living in America.
Rau: It all depends.
Jason: Do you think that they'd like living in India?
Rau: They'll hate it.
Jason: They'll hate it. Why would they hate it?
Rau: It's so different here. They're not exposed to this whole identity/diversity mixing. But the point I was trying to make...
Jason: Do you think that diversity is kind of a problem in Indian culture? Do you feel that...
Rau: Again, this all depends. For example you have currently the technology, if you want something you can go to Google it and you can get it but the olden times when you don't have internet and all this stuff how did you survive? It all depends on within your own group, even for people to talk to you, people look at your own group as much safer for you even to talk.
Joe: Rau, if I can ask you about the topic of the show, racism, what's your experience of that, if any, in the US?
Rau: Okay, let me tell you this. I'm an immigrant so of course naturalized immigrant. When I first came in the late '90s, we just did our part. You go to a bank, the moment they see the skin you will see the subtle changes in the faces and all, but we never really cared about it. We are immigrants, do our part, see how it goes. But this whole left, particularly when Bush came, people said Okay, conservative views and all that type of stuff, they're warmongering. Nothing has changed when Obama came. But nobody really cared about this left, became too left, right became too right.
For me all these things became polarizing in the last three years. Maybe Trump became everybody's dislike.
Joe: So do you still experience any kind of obvious racism towards you from anybody in the US today?
Rau: Let me put it a little bit differently. For example, in 2004 and 2005, that is the time corporations were offshoring quite a lot of stuff to India. My way of looking at it is, the United States and western nations, in these individualized societies, why do they send their jobs to east Asian countries? At that time I didn't know that it was the big business that makes the decisions. Now when big business makes the decision, the first thing they do, naturally the white people don't like it. They took us to a five star hotel. They talked about diversity, inclusion, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Naturally I didn't understand what they were talking about, even why they're doing it.
Only after coming out of the hotel lobby, looking at different types of skin colours, I realized they want to do it. They want to bring in other people, make them acceptable. So before we come back here, big business made a decision, they made it acceptable to the people and now naturally, they will fight back. I'll give you one simple example. When I was small I used to live in a small town. There used to be a lot of thieves. Again, nobody trusts police and all that stuff.
Joe: In India.
Rau: In India. Yeah, it's a small village. This is in the early '80s. So the police guys used to be there. The people from the police, they come here, they roam around in the street in the night, tapping their stick saying that "I'm there so that the thief doesn't come in". So he used to come and collect a minimum amount. Five years down the line suddenly you hear a new saying that now police are stealing Indians' jobs.
The point I was trying to make is the same people who use their services, so that they can sleep and this guy can roam around, they have no problem in pointing out that guy is stealing it. Fundamentally people are selfish.
Joe: And fickle.
Rau: Whatever their ideology, whatever their skin, people will use it. That is the basic point I was trying to make.
Joe: Okay. Well we can't disagree with that I suppose. Rau, we're going to let you go.
Rau: Okay, thank you very much.
Joe: Thanks for your call. Bye-bye. Alright, we didn't even get to sexism or homophobia, but I think we are going to leave it there for this week folks, unless Niall has something important to say.
Niall: No, we'll do sexism next week.
Joe: Will we?
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Oh dear! Well...
Niall: I hope not.
Joe: You hope not? Hot topics. You've got to address them or at least try to. It's not that you're going to solve any problems or sort it all out or come up with an explanation or solution but you may as well talk about it because that's what the whole western world, the international community, is all aflame about these days that bore the backside off of me a lot of times. But anyway, it's a problem. We hope you enjoyed the show. We will be back next week with another show. 'Till then have a good evening.
Niall: See you next week.
"White privilege" and "oppression" are buzzwords and I agree with that. There might have been a time where they meant something but not anymore. The bottom line is in white people are the majority in Western countries. Furthermore, they dominate a variety of institution (economy, entertainment, education..etc). Added to that is people natural inclination toward tribalism (preferring someone that looks similar to me). So, obviously equality accross racial line does not exist and can't really exist. One race is bound to be more privilegied/ have a better treatment than other. I know someone is going to bring up the example of China to point out that Chinese are doing better etc... Yes, indeed Chinese are doing better. But the history of China is different than the story of pretty much every country in Africa. Furthermore, Chinese's success does not invalidate my point. Every major institutions are Western (read white) and consequently Westerners are bound to benefit.
By the way, saying all this I am aware that equality of outcomes and equality are not something we can achieve and that we should even try to achieve, except if we want a total dictatorship. As Peterson said, we should aim for fairness. On another topic, I personally believe that one of the reason people go crazy about racism, sexism and homophobia is because they don't to accept that the world isn't a utopia and it wasn't meant to be.