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50 - The Forest Passage
3k Plays1 year ago
A discussion of WWI veteran Ernst Junger's book The Forest Passage, in which he describes many of the problems that our corner of the internet obsesses over to this day: cybernetics, technique, the capture of democratic institutions through mass media, etc.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'The Forest Passage' by Ernst Jünger
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today I'm reading The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger.
00:00:24
Speaker
Jünger's probably best known around here for his book Storm of Steel, which has the distinction of being maybe the only pro-war World War I novel of which I'm aware.
00:00:36
Speaker
Not necessarily that he loved or even particularly cared about the political justifications for World War I, but just that he viewed war
00:00:44
Speaker
and combat as a transcendental experience.
The Nature of War and Humanity's Role
00:00:48
Speaker
And I bring that up in the context of this book because World War I struck a lot of these writers and critics as fundamentally a different kind of war than they had experienced or read about because there wasn't this...
00:01:02
Speaker
glory of face-to-face combat, it was sort of just being obliterated anonymously in a rat hole by artillery from miles away.
00:01:13
Speaker
And the industrial character of the war was what they found so distasteful
00:01:20
Speaker
And you get some recognition of that from Storm of Steel, but it's interesting that Junger sort of found a way to imbue that experience with poetry and with meaning.
00:01:32
Speaker
And what you find in the Forest passage is that this is not a guy who overcame that distaste for the ugliness and industrialization of the war by being a meathead or not caring about it.
00:01:46
Speaker
This is somebody who cares intensely
00:01:49
Speaker
about what it means to be a human being when you are subsumed in these forces that are so much larger than yourself.
Understanding Jünger's Philosophical Insights
00:01:59
Speaker
When the whole world is so connected and so scaled up that there's almost nothing that any individual human being can do to sort of change the course of the overall system.
00:02:11
Speaker
And I'll be honest, this was a really challenging read.
00:02:14
Speaker
It took me a long time to sort of pick up what he was laying down.
00:02:17
Speaker
As a matter of fact, I read the entire book and felt like in the last maybe 10%, I really figured out where he was going with all of this.
00:02:27
Speaker
And then I actually went back and read it all again.
00:02:30
Speaker
And it was incredibly rewarding the second time through.
00:02:34
Speaker
So if you find that it is challenging for you, it may make sense to skim through it, blow through the whole thing, and sort of catch the overall gist of what he's saying.
00:02:49
Speaker
If you're looking for it to be narrowly political or prescribe a tactical...
00:02:56
Speaker
course for you to set for yourself as a dissident, you're going to be disappointed.
Critique of Automation and Political Systems
00:03:01
Speaker
He does not have those answers, and he's sort of waiting for those answers in the same way that a lot of us are.
00:03:09
Speaker
But what's uncanny about this book is that he so clearly understands the same questions that people like Moldbug are asking about democracy, that people like BAP are asking about
00:03:27
Speaker
moral convention and the communite and even stuff like the way that the way that biology is interested in negotiating sovereignty and freedom under conditions of hyper connectivity and cybernetics
00:03:44
Speaker
And of course, that leads to all the things that I'm thinking about, about how do you fight back or resist these forces, these institutions, without becoming a target, without just sort of walking blindly into a machine gun nest.
00:04:01
Speaker
And Jünger's definitely not a run and hide guy.
00:04:04
Speaker
Like, it's called the forest passage because it's saying that there's a path through which you must travel, and on the other side of that is freedom and sovereignty.
00:04:16
Speaker
Not that you will, you know, go hide in the woods and hope they don't find you.
00:04:22
Speaker
And I'll admit, at first I was tripped up by, you know, I opened this book expecting to read, you know, an authoritarian right-wing guy, and he's talking about liberty and the sort of sanctity of individual choice and conscience, and specifically the way that those principles were violated by the Nazi party.
00:04:43
Speaker
But he actually, which I mean this is something that kind of took me a while to come around to even this late in the game.
00:04:49
Speaker
It's remarkable that he was able to see this coming from 1951.
00:04:53
Speaker
But he basically says the enemy is not Nazism or socialism or some particular ideology.
00:05:03
Speaker
It's just the scaling up and the automation of public opinion and political decision making
00:05:11
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such that it's not that there's voters making conscious evil decisions or even rulers manipulating voters into conscious evil decisions.
Propaganda and the Illusion of Choice
00:05:21
Speaker
There's nobody in charge.
00:05:22
Speaker
There's nobody at the wheel.
00:05:24
Speaker
And the freedom, the liberty that he is trying to preserve is not this liberal democratic, you should be free to...
00:05:36
Speaker
maximize your hedonic well-being or just sort of maximally increase your amount of options for its own sake.
00:05:45
Speaker
The freedom that he's talking about is the freedom to act and not to be acted upon, including by
00:05:51
Speaker
Sentiment or goodies or social pressure or basically, you know, he actually characterizes America as the most automatized, the most advanced in terms of its decline into America.
00:06:07
Speaker
tyranny in 1951, not because they were jailing dissidents or whatever, but because the instruments of propaganda and of public opinion and the incentives that the state had the power to provide to the people were so strong and so overwhelming that essentially people's behavior was 100% predictable, 100% controlled.
00:06:29
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So I'll quote here.
00:06:33
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Where the automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection, such as in America, the panic is even further intensified.
00:06:41
Speaker
There it finds its best feeding grounds, and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light.
00:06:47
Speaker
The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear.
00:06:52
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The imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex.
00:06:56
Speaker
The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end.
00:07:02
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They provoke demonic contacts.
00:07:05
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And I think when he uses the term demonic, he's referring to what we would maybe in our sphere call egregores.
00:07:11
Speaker
The communications technology and the connectivity encourages everyone to live in the realm of billions of people and trillions of dollars, the global scale.
00:07:23
Speaker
And if you obsess over movements at that scale, if you keep your mind, and I think we all know people who do this.
00:07:29
Speaker
They're on Facebook all the time thinking about what's going on all over the world.
00:07:34
Speaker
And they make themselves almost literally atomized because they're constantly thinking about the world at a scale at which they are microscopic.
00:07:46
Speaker
They become mechanistic, a thing to be acted upon.
00:07:51
Speaker
And Junger doesn't say this explicitly, but it's a little bit of a meditation on the limits of freedom.
00:07:58
Speaker
Like you can say that you want people to be maximally free, but like you're not free to be 20 feet tall.
00:08:04
Speaker
You're not free to be a toaster.
00:08:08
Speaker
And obviously encouraging people to maximize their sense of freedom in that way is
00:08:13
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is to encourage them to disconnect from reality.
Control Through Documentation and Dissent
00:08:17
Speaker
So many of the problems that we're up against right now are people attempting to be free in nonsensical and absurd and insane ways.
00:08:28
Speaker
But one of the subtler absurdities that we all believe, or act as if we believe, is that one voter in a country of 300 million people, really a global empire of billions,
00:08:41
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can, by arguing with their relatives on Facebook or casting a vote, can make themselves significant to these global scale processes.
00:08:54
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And the purpose of propaganda, in his view, is to draw you into this sphere in which you are completely helpless, in which you are completely...
00:09:07
Speaker
unfree by definition, just by virtue of your scale, your smallness in comparison with these forces and problems.
00:09:15
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Because in that domain, your behavior is perfectly predictable and controllable and influenceable.
00:09:20
Speaker
You become, like I say, literally atomized.
00:09:24
Speaker
You become like a particle that can be manipulated the same way that any other component of matter can be manipulated.
00:09:31
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He spends a lot of time talking about the votes cast in Germany that had 98% approval for whatever initiative was being considered.
00:09:41
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He says, Voting is thus accompanied by the sense of security and even power that characterizes a freely expressed act of will within a legal sphere.
00:09:51
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The contemporary man who sees himself prevailed upon to fill out a questionnaire is far from any such security.
00:09:57
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The answers he provides will have far-reaching consequences.
00:10:00
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His very fate often depends on them.
00:10:02
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We see people getting into predicaments where they are required to produce documents aimed at their own ruin.
00:10:07
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And what trifles may not cause ruin today?
00:10:11
Speaker
Which is, it's so funny to hear this discussed in 1951, but it's exactly what our situation is.
00:10:17
Speaker
These questionnaires don't take place on election day.
00:10:19
Speaker
They take place every couple of weeks at your diversity training or in any one of just a million ideological tests that you're subjected to every day.
00:10:28
Speaker
The power of the pronoun thing where every sentence you speak to particular individuals becomes an ideological test.
00:10:37
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He talks about the urge that a lot of people feel to stand and be counted in these plebiscites, these votes that he's discussing in his time.
00:10:44
Speaker
But you could transfer this to the diversity training situation.
00:10:50
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He says, Within these hypnotic spheres there reigns, if not unanimity, then certainly a single voice.
00:10:56
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Because to raise a dissenting voice here would lead to uproar and the destruction of its owner.
00:11:00
Speaker
A single person seeking to make his presence felt in this manner might as well opt to attempt assassination.
00:11:06
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It would lead to the same thing.
00:11:08
Speaker
He talks about how the level of dissent has to be calibrated by the dictator.
00:11:13
Speaker
And, you know, we don't have these 98% plebiscites that are counted in this way.
00:11:18
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Our elections are mostly vestigial, but he says, In places where a dictatorship is already firmly established, even a 90% affirmation would fall too far short.
00:11:27
Speaker
A secret enemy in every tenth person?
00:11:29
Speaker
This is a consideration the masses cannot be asked to accept.
00:11:32
Speaker
On the other hand, a count of spoiled and nay votes around 2% would be not only tolerable, but even favorable.
The Metaphor of 'Forest Passage'
00:11:38
Speaker
From the organizers' perspective, these two votes have a double utility.
00:11:42
Speaker
In the first place, they validate the other 98% of the votes by showing that they too could have been cast as these two were.
00:11:48
Speaker
The second benefit consists in their sustaining the uninterrupted movement that dictatorships rely on.
00:11:53
Speaker
I mean, you think about the oppression narrative that drives our current regime, our current system.
00:11:59
Speaker
If there were no white supremacy, if there were no sexism, if there were no homophobia, if there were no transphobia, what would all these people be about?
00:12:08
Speaker
What would they be doing with their lives?
00:12:10
Speaker
They're not going to learn to code.
00:12:12
Speaker
So they have to be constantly searching for this class enemy.
00:12:15
Speaker
He says, propaganda relies on a situation in which the state enemy, the class enemy, the enemy of the people, has been thoroughly beaten down and made almost ridiculous, yet not altogether eliminated.
00:12:27
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Dictatorships cannot survive on pure affirmation.
00:12:30
Speaker
They need hate, and with it terror, to provide a simultaneous counterbalance.
00:12:35
Speaker
Let us assume that our voter, thanks to his powers of discrimination, has withstood the long, unambiguous propaganda campaign that has been astutely ramped up right until election day.
00:12:44
Speaker
Now on top of that, the statement required of him is clothed in highly respectable formulations.
00:12:48
Speaker
He's called to participate in a vote for freedom, or perhaps a peace referendum.
00:12:53
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But who does not love peace and freedom?
00:12:55
Speaker
Only a monster.
00:12:57
Speaker
A nay vote already receives a criminal character here.
00:13:00
Speaker
And the bad voter resembles a criminal slinking up to the scene of the crime.
00:13:03
Speaker
How invigorating, on the other hand, the day is for the good voter.
00:13:06
Speaker
During breakfast, he received final encouragement, his final instructions over the radio.
00:13:10
Speaker
Now he goes into the street, where a festive good mood prevails.
00:13:13
Speaker
Banners hang from every house and every window.
00:13:15
Speaker
He's welcomed in the courtyard of the electoral station by a band playing marches.
00:13:19
Speaker
The musicians are in uniform, and there is no lack of uniforms in the voting hall either.
00:13:23
Speaker
In his enthusiasm, it will escape the good voter that one can hardly still talk of voting booths here.
00:13:28
Speaker
That's the end of that quote.
00:13:29
Speaker
The same voice that tells Junger's good voter that he's important, that his vote matters, is also telling him the same thing about the bad voter.
00:13:41
Speaker
If my vote is so consequential, if I have the power to participate in this democratic process for good, then his vote must be just as consequential for evil.
00:13:51
Speaker
His wrong opinions aren't just wrong, they're dangerous.
00:13:54
Speaker
They're even
00:13:55
Speaker
violent, potentially.
00:13:57
Speaker
So he talks a little bit more about the psychology of the nay voter, the two percent who vote no.
00:14:02
Speaker
He says, It is thus a true form of resistance that we meet here, though one that is still ignorant of its own strength in the manner in which this should be exerted.
00:14:10
Speaker
By making his cross on the dangerous spot, our voter does precisely what his vastly superior opponent expects of him.
00:14:16
Speaker
It is without doubt the act of a brave man, but so too an act of one of the countless illiterates in the new questions of power.
00:14:23
Speaker
This is someone who must be helped.
00:14:25
Speaker
And he goes on to say that the no vote only reveals you to the people counting the votes, the system that's in control.
00:14:33
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And he basically says you'd do better spray painting your opinion on an overpass, because at least then your allies would see it.
00:14:39
Speaker
And this sort of surreptitious or informal dissent becomes more and more dangerous as the consensus grows.
00:14:46
Speaker
He says, as the fraction of good votes approaches 100%, the number of suspects only grows, since it must then be assumed that the agents of resistance have switched from a statistically determinable order to the invisible one we have characterized as the forest passage.
00:15:00
Speaker
And it got me thinking about the way that we sort of feel sorry for ourselves when they call us dangerous or they call us terrorists or whatever, but...
00:15:10
Speaker
The witch hunt isn't purely this delusional search for a non-existent enemy.
00:15:16
Speaker
It's actually this very well-informed sniffing out of some genuine enemies.
00:15:21
Speaker
You and I may not be guilty of the specific evils that we're accused of, but we are guilty of disloyalty, unreliability.
00:15:28
Speaker
We really are a danger to this state, and they're right to be looking for us.
00:15:33
Speaker
And not because we're holding any institutional power or because we're violent or whatever, but just because their power rests on narrative control.
00:15:41
Speaker
I think that's much more true of our situation even than it was of his situation in the 1950s in West Germany.
00:15:47
Speaker
These institutions' ability to master public narratives is weaker than it's ever been before.
00:15:52
Speaker
We have so much more power to expose them in lies, to make them look ridiculous.
00:15:59
Speaker
And the more they look ridiculous, the more just clogged and gridlocked their system of control becomes.
00:16:05
Speaker
I had my buddy Degree Studies on the podcast several months ago to talk about his efforts to help the DOD understand what the vaccine hesitancy was about in the U.S. Army.
00:16:18
Speaker
And they were basically like, you know, go do your sentiment analysis, your data science thing, and supply to us the magic words that
00:16:26
Speaker
that will put all these people's fears to rest and get them to comply.
00:16:32
Speaker
And he basically said that that can't be done.
00:16:35
Speaker
The things that they're aware of, not even the specifics of the vaccine, but just their consciousness of the unreliability of public health officials was not something that could be undone by propaganda.
Systemic Control and Leadership
00:16:47
Speaker
And like you may say that these narratives don't matter in the face of just the political control that our enemies have.
00:16:54
Speaker
But the fact that they're having this recruitment crisis, the fact that it's so hard to get young men exercised about the fate of Ukraine, much less Taiwan, that has ramifications for the people that run this country.
00:17:05
Speaker
It matters to them.
00:17:06
Speaker
Now, whether guys like us did that to them or whether they did it to themselves by just lying all the time and getting caught is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation.
00:17:16
Speaker
But the point is they're right to be concerned.
00:17:19
Speaker
And the problem is made worse by the fact that they and everyone else in the managerial class are strongly selected for against creativity, against initiative, almost against consciousness.
00:17:34
Speaker
And this is where he gets going on what we would call cybernetics or technique, what he calls automatism, the erosion and removal of human agency from the environment.
00:17:45
Speaker
He says, and specifically in how a system like that chooses its leaders, he says, "...the bothersome aspect of this spectacle is the association of such trivial stature with such enormous functional power.
00:17:56
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These are the men who make the masses tremble, whose decisions determine the fate of millions."
00:18:01
Speaker
Yet one must concede to the zeitgeist an infallible hand in picking out just these characters, meaning NPCs, drones.
00:18:10
Speaker
All the expropriations, devaluations, equalizations, liquidations, rationalizations, socializations, electrifications, land reallocations, redistributions, and pulverizations presuppose neither character nor cultivation, which would actually impede the automatism.
00:18:25
Speaker
Consequently, where positions of power open up in our industrial landscapes, we observe those individuals winning the contracts whose personal insignificance is inflated by a strong will."
00:18:35
Speaker
You look at how the board-selected CEO of all these publicly traded companies, you look at their CV and it's like these people were bred in a vat and acculturated from the age of three.
00:18:50
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for maximum conformity, maximum malleability, but also this intense ambition to succeed in climbing social ladders.
00:19:02
Speaker
And it's precisely because these are components in a mechanical system.
00:19:06
Speaker
The CEO of Lockheed Martin is not sovereign.
00:19:11
Speaker
They don't control anything.
00:19:13
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They are replaceable components.
00:19:16
Speaker
And the goal of the system is to select people who will be as inhuman and without agency as they possibly can manage.
00:19:25
Speaker
while still having this intense anxiety, this intense drive to perform as required by the institution.
00:19:36
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And that's a combination of psychological traits that I think is difficult for a lot of us to even get our heads around.
00:19:41
Speaker
And it's why a lot of our guys
00:19:43
Speaker
tend to shy away from the corporate world because we think, I can't imagine caring about this stuff so much that I would put in the kind of time that these people are putting in.
00:19:56
Speaker
And you meet these people and their souls are so small and they're so monomaniacal.
00:20:01
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And it's like, I wouldn't want to be that person even if I could.
00:20:05
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But so the system places these people in the commanding heights of the economy.
00:20:09
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and politics, and then when it's time for them to resist actual human beings and be persuasive, they're kind of at a loss because they've never needed to be persuaded of anything.
00:20:20
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He talks about another of the values of having dissidents in these states.
00:20:24
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He says, resistance only seems to invigorate the ruling powers, providing them a welcome opportunity to take offensive action.
00:20:31
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And of course, nowadays, we're about a century into the process of just making up resistance in order to justify offensive action.
00:20:38
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But he says it's also important to display those people being punished because, he says, the state sees itself forced to permanently subjugate a part of the population to gruesome assaults.
00:20:50
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Life may have become gray, but it may still appear tolerable to those who only see darkness, utter blackness beside them.
00:20:57
Speaker
So in other words, if the state can't make you safe and happy inside their bubble, and we talked about this during the How Did the Taliban Win podcast, but
00:21:06
Speaker
If they can't make you safe inside their bubble, what they can do is they can torture and terrorize people outside the bubble so that the bleak life inside looks fortunate by comparison.
00:21:15
Speaker
Alright, so I'm quoting again.
00:21:40
Speaker
After all, there are mountain passes and mule tracks that one discovers only after a long ascent.
The Balance of Resistance and Autonomy
00:21:46
Speaker
A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration.
00:21:50
Speaker
Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with this word today.
00:21:58
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It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one's own skin, but is also willing to risk it.
00:22:04
Speaker
The armor of the new Leviathans has its own weak points, which must continually be felt out, and this assumes both the caution and daring of a previously unknown quality.
00:22:13
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And this is basically what I'm thinking about all the time.
00:22:16
Speaker
I'm thinking about not how do you fight back or how do you frustrate or irritate our enemies, but on the contrary, how do you carve out freedom and sovereignty in a way that doesn't
00:22:33
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call in the artillery strike.
00:22:35
Speaker
And so when he says it takes caution and daring of a previously unknown quality, that means you have to have the caution
00:22:42
Speaker
to not deliberately provoke the enemy for the sake of provoking him, but you have to have the daring to probe those weak points, to look for places where it seems like the enemy is not present and kind of hold out your, you know, you see in the movies, the soldier will like put his helmet on a stick and stick it around a corner to see if it gets shot.
00:23:04
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That's kind of what you have to do.
00:23:07
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Anyway, moving on, he says,
00:23:29
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In general, he says, man will tend to rely on the system or yield to it, even when he should already be drawing on his own resources.
00:23:36
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He should know at what points he must not be induced to give up his sovereign power of decision.
00:23:41
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As long as things are in order, there will be water in the pipes and electricity in the lines.
00:23:45
Speaker
When life and property are threatened, an alarm call will summon the fire department and the police, but the great danger is that man relies too heavily on this assistance,
00:23:52
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and becomes helpless when it fails to materialize.
00:23:55
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Every comfort must be paid for.
00:23:57
Speaker
The condition of the domesticated animal drags behind it that of the slaughterhouse animal.
00:24:02
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This becomes evident in phases of extreme threat during which the apparatus not only leaves man high and dry,
00:24:08
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but encircles him in a manner that appears to dash all hopes of escape.
00:24:12
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He says in another place, There's that Godspeed lyric,
00:24:26
Speaker
Going back, while the weather holds and the outlook remains pleasant, he will hardly perceive the state of reduced freedom that he has fallen into.
00:24:33
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On the contrary, an optimism arises, a sense of power produced by the high speed.
00:24:38
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All this will change when fire-spitting islands and icebergs loom on the horizon.
00:24:41
Speaker
So then this machine stops being a thing that keeps you comfortable and starts being a thing that you are trapped inside and that you are powerless to redirect.
00:24:51
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And what I like about this is how clearly he sees that we're all trapped inside this thing.
00:24:59
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Every politician, every executive, in both parties, in other countries, we're up against this historical process that's so much larger than any one person or even one political ideology.
00:25:12
Speaker
He's got a passage in here that reminds me a lot of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, but without the sodomy.
00:25:17
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He says,
00:25:19
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The increasingly artificial cities, the automatized traits, the wars and civil wars, the machine infernos, the gray despots, the prisons, and the refined persecutions.
00:25:29
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All these have since been given names, and they occupy man's thoughts day and night.
00:25:33
Speaker
And so here's the passage from Ginsburg.
00:25:35
Speaker
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
00:25:41
Speaker
Moloch!
00:25:41
Speaker
Solitude!
00:25:42
Speaker
Filth!
00:25:42
Speaker
Ugliness!
00:25:43
Speaker
Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
00:25:45
Speaker
Children screaming under the stairways!
00:25:47
Speaker
Boys sobbing in armies!
00:25:49
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Old men weeping in the parks!
00:25:50
Speaker
Moloch!
00:25:51
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Moloch!
00:25:52
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Nightmare of Moloch!
00:25:53
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Moloch the loveless!
00:25:54
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Mental Moloch!
00:25:54
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Moloch the heavy judger of men!
00:25:57
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Moloch the incomprehensible prison.
00:25:59
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Moloch the crossbones soulless jailhouse and congress of sorrows.
00:26:03
Speaker
Moloch whose buildings are judgment.
00:26:05
Speaker
Moloch the vast stone of war.
00:26:07
Speaker
Moloch the stunned governments.
00:26:09
Speaker
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery.
00:26:12
Speaker
Moloch whose blood is running money.
00:26:14
Speaker
Moloch whose fingers are ten armies.
00:26:16
Speaker
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo.
00:26:18
Speaker
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb.
00:26:21
Speaker
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
00:26:23
Speaker
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovah's.
00:26:28
Speaker
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog.
00:26:30
Speaker
Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities.
00:26:34
Speaker
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone.
00:26:36
Speaker
Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks.
00:26:39
Speaker
Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius.
00:26:41
Speaker
Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen.
00:26:45
Speaker
Moloch whose name is the mind.
00:26:47
Speaker
Moloch in whom I sit lonely.
00:26:49
Speaker
Moloch in whom I dream angels.
00:26:51
Speaker
Crazy in Moloch.
00:26:52
Speaker
Cocksucker in Moloch.
00:26:53
Speaker
Lack love and manless in Moloch.
00:26:55
Speaker
Moloch who entered my soul early.
00:26:57
Speaker
Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body.
00:27:00
Speaker
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy.
00:27:03
Speaker
Moloch whom I abandon.
00:27:05
Speaker
Wake up in Moloch, light streaming out of the sky.
00:27:07
Speaker
Moloch, Moloch, robot apartments, invisible suburbs, skeleton treasuries, blind capitals, demonic industries, spectral nations, invisible madhouses, granite cocks, monstrous bombs.
00:27:18
Speaker
They broke their backs, lifting Moloch to heaven.
00:27:21
Speaker
Pavements, trees, radios, tons, lifting the city to heaven which exists and is everywhere about us.
00:27:27
Speaker
So what do you make of that?
00:27:29
Speaker
There's obviously a temptation because he's Allen Ginsberg to say that he's making this really facile point.
00:27:36
Speaker
It's always capitalism, man.
00:27:38
Speaker
It's about money, man.
00:27:41
Speaker
But I think he's actually saying something a little more profound than that.
00:27:43
Speaker
And this rhymes with a lot of arguments that we have with the libs, where they'll blame the patriarchy for some aspect about how men and women are different, and we'll say, no, you're not mad at the patriarchy, you're mad at God, you're mad at the structure of the universe, the nature of being, the nature of your being, who you are.
00:28:02
Speaker
And so, you know, maybe Ginsburg was dumb enough to think that what he's upset about here is capitalism.
00:28:10
Speaker
But Jünger finds this phenomenon in the capitalist West.
00:28:14
Speaker
He finds it in Germany.
00:28:15
Speaker
He finds it in communist Russia.
00:28:18
Speaker
And it's essentially, it's what he calls automatism, what Elul calls technique, what we might call egregores, the process by which human connectivity scales up, human institutions scale up to the point that individuals no longer have control over that system.
00:28:38
Speaker
And so for instance, if 200 million American voters are not in charge, and President Biden's also not in charge, and Kevin McCarthy's not in charge, and the Supreme Court's not in charge, then who's in charge?
Systemic Demands and Fear as Control
00:28:50
Speaker
And Ginsburg, I think, would say Moloch.
00:28:53
Speaker
And all these arguments about artificial intelligence becoming this tyrant that we feed it bad incentives or incomplete incentives, and then it goes wild with those incentives and crushes us under its boot.
00:29:08
Speaker
I mean...
00:29:09
Speaker
Jünger and Ginsburg would both say from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they would say that process is 75 years old.
00:29:18
Speaker
There's no more argument to be had over whether it's too risky or should we pursue it.
00:29:23
Speaker
It's like we did it.
00:29:24
Speaker
It's over.
00:29:25
Speaker
It already happened.
00:29:27
Speaker
And he, in post-war Germany, witnesses people responding to it in the way that people describe how they expect people to respond to the AI thing.
00:29:36
Speaker
He says,
00:29:43
Speaker
and who, in the full possession of liberty, are already considering the means and wiles they will employ to win the favor of the base when it comes to power.
00:29:51
Speaker
With horror, we also sense that there is no infamy they will not consent to if it is demanded of them.
00:29:56
Speaker
There's a thought experiment in the rationalist community called Rocco's Basilisk.
00:30:02
Speaker
And the story goes that you can imagine a future AI that threatens to take every person in history who opposed its accession to power and goes back in time and simulates all of these individuals and tortures their simulated person.
00:30:25
Speaker
basically like retroactively sending them to hell.
00:30:29
Speaker
Now, of course, do I care if a simulated intellectual clone of myself is being tortured in a video game in a computer program?
00:30:39
Speaker
Maybe not.
00:30:40
Speaker
But it's just sort of asking you how you would respond to a system that can make irresistible demands of you.
00:30:46
Speaker
Until quite recently, the only system that could make those kinds of absolute demands of you was nature, God.
00:30:53
Speaker
Every human institution could be defeated or at least in theory evaded.
00:30:57
Speaker
And he was thinking through in his own time the consequences of this all-reaching propaganda apparatus, these all-seeing surveillance techniques.
00:31:06
Speaker
Obviously, we're way farther down the road on all of that than they were in 1951.
00:31:12
Speaker
And basically, he indicates that the crowd, the masses,
00:31:15
Speaker
are essentially ruled by fear.
00:31:17
Speaker
They're ruled either by fear of pain, fear of punishment, or fear of each other.
00:31:25
Speaker
And George Orwell, writing it almost the same time on the same subject, when he described that the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever, that's kind of what he was indicating.
00:31:36
Speaker
The rulers of the party weren't necessarily happy, they weren't necessarily wealthy or comfortable.
00:31:43
Speaker
It says they were priests of power, meaning essentially subject to power, representatives of power.
00:31:49
Speaker
Not sovereign, but almost the eyes and the hands of this process, this superhuman process.
00:31:57
Speaker
Superhuman in the sense of being much, much larger than any human.
00:32:01
Speaker
And he sketches out the appeal of Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, which was this materialist, systematic, mechanized system.
00:32:14
Speaker
It's easy to forget from our current vantage, but in the 1920s, 1930s,
00:32:22
Speaker
Communism was the ideology of the future.
00:32:26
Speaker
It was the ideology of rationalism, of science.
00:32:29
Speaker
It was basically, we've learned how to engineer a combustion engine or an airplane or these synthetic materials that were just being conceived of.
00:32:40
Speaker
And the thinking was that this mode of analysis of science and engineering would eventually extend to the human sphere.
00:32:51
Speaker
It would extend to the relationships between people through the rationalization of science.
00:32:59
Speaker
biology and then psychiatry and then sociology like so going from the organism to the mind to the society and the fascists were this sort of romantic rejection of all that a rejection of the flattening of hierarchies a rejection of demythologizing the past demythologizing oneself
00:33:25
Speaker
And the thinking was essentially that you're up against this big machine, and so the immediate temptation is to try to become more dangerous than the opponent that you're afraid of, to become monstrous and faceless in order to destroy this faceless, monstrous opponent.
00:33:45
Speaker
And Jünger actually goes in a mold bug-like direction with that.
00:33:49
Speaker
He says, We should caution against starting with the danger.
00:33:53
Speaker
Aiming simply to become more dangerous than one's feared opponent leads to no solution.
00:33:58
Speaker
This is the classic relationship between reds and whites, reds and reds, and tomorrow perhaps between whites and non-whites.
00:34:04
Speaker
Terror is a fire that wants to consume the whole world, all the while fears multiply and diversify.
00:34:11
Speaker
The ruler by calling proves himself such by ending the terror.
00:34:16
Speaker
It is the person who has first conquered his own fear.
00:34:19
Speaker
And he waxes a little bit romantic about that, and he comes to the same conclusion that I think a lot of us have come to, that you're basically waiting for Caesar.
00:34:27
Speaker
You're waiting for King Arthur or Christ, the person who will rectify all the names and settle all the accounts and...
00:34:35
Speaker
And if he does have any kind of a tactical or strategic project associated with that, it's a little like Nietzsche where he's trying to speak to the kind of people who might become that person.
00:34:48
Speaker
He says,
00:34:56
Speaker
First, we need to understand, as in the example of elections, that only a small fraction of the masses will be able to defy the mighty fictions of the times and the intimidation that emanates from them.
00:35:06
Speaker
Second, as we saw in the example of the ship, the powers of the present will be insufficient to set up a resistance.
00:35:12
Speaker
So, number one, there are only a few of us who have the potential even to resist the propaganda to recognize that we're being propagandized.
00:35:22
Speaker
And number two, those people will not be able to right the ship.
00:35:24
Speaker
He says,
00:35:55
Speaker
If the retrospection is directed at the fathers and their systems, which lie closer to the origins, it will seek a conservative restoration.
00:36:02
Speaker
But in times of still greater danger, the salvific power must be sought deeper in the mothers.
00:36:06
Speaker
This contact liberates primal forces to whom the mere powers of time cannot stand up.
00:36:11
Speaker
And I think what he means by the mothers and their systems is sort of the fundamental, the ways we do things that are not maintained by law or by violence or
00:36:22
Speaker
or by contract, which I think he would say is the domain of men, but the things that are maintained by culture and by custom and by faith and all of the things that you sort of learn without knowing that you've learned them on your mother's knee.
00:36:42
Speaker
And it's just funny how timely it is.
00:36:45
Speaker
He says, a potential error is the temptation to stay in the realm of ideas, to stay in the realm of imagination instead of doing
Engagement with the Real World
00:36:53
Speaker
things.
00:36:53
Speaker
He says, though we will not deny that it is imagination which leads the spirit to victory, the issue cannot be reduced to the founding of yoga schools.
00:37:02
Speaker
I think it's just, that's just great.
00:37:05
Speaker
This is the vision not only of countless sects, but also of a form of Christian nihilism that oversimplifies the matter for its own convenience.
00:37:11
Speaker
So I've had this problem.
00:37:13
Speaker
He clearly has this problem.
00:37:15
Speaker
He's talking about the forest passage.
00:37:17
Speaker
We're talking about exit.
00:37:19
Speaker
And it's very tempting to think of that as run away to your homestead, hope nobody finds you, bury your head in the sand.
00:37:28
Speaker
Or in his case, the case of...
00:37:31
Speaker
a comprehensively defeated country like Germany in the 1950s retreat into mysticism and monasticism and just sort of disappear into your own head.
00:37:48
Speaker
For we cannot limit ourselves to knowing what is good and true on the top floors while fellow human beings are being flayed alive in the cellar.
00:37:55
Speaker
And knowing that he's talking to a post-war audience, he says, The vapors of the flayers' huts still hang in the air today.
00:38:01
Speaker
On such things there must be no deceiving ourselves.
00:38:04
Speaker
So maybe there's a temptation to view the war as a kind of catharsis, that the slaughter is over.
00:38:11
Speaker
And we lost, but at least it's over, and now we can sort of retreat inward.
00:38:15
Speaker
But he essentially says no, or at least if you're the kind of person who's interested in doing that, he's not really speaking to you.
00:38:22
Speaker
And I don't know if he would argue this, but from my perspective, the end of that war, far from being a catharsis, far from being a resolution, was
00:38:31
Speaker
was actually a consolidation and a deepening of the problem of technique or automatism or whatever you want to call it.
00:38:40
Speaker
But he also says equally unsatisfactory would be a limitation to purely concrete goals such as conducting a national liberation struggle.
00:38:48
Speaker
Rather, as we shall see, these efforts are also crowned by national freedom, which joins as an additional factor.
00:38:54
Speaker
After all, we are involved not simply in a national collapse, but in a global catastrophe, in which the real winners and losers can hardly be known, let alone prophesied.
00:39:02
Speaker
Which I take to mean that this has to go from top to bottom.
00:39:06
Speaker
this change, this transformation has to be inward and spiritual.
00:39:11
Speaker
And it also has to do with how you relate to your wife and your children and your friends.
00:39:17
Speaker
And then that also extends outward to the nation and the world.
00:39:22
Speaker
And the way that you make those changes, you know, people sometimes ask me, what does your project of helping people start businesses do?
00:39:33
Speaker
or trying to build a neighborhood or a homeschool co-op, like what does that have to do with your big picture ideological program, like what you're all about?
00:39:42
Speaker
And I think basically it's this.
00:39:44
Speaker
And he actually sort of addresses the specific, the anguish of the cubicle guy.
00:39:50
Speaker
He says, the individual still possesses organs in which more wisdom lives than in the entire organization.
00:39:56
Speaker
His very bewilderment, his fear, demonstrate this.
00:39:59
Speaker
In agonizing about finding a way out, an escape route, he exhibits a behavior appropriate to the proximity and magnitude of the threat.
00:40:07
Speaker
If he is skeptical about the currency and wants to get to the bottom of things, then he is simply conducting himself as one who still knows the difference between gold and printer's ink.
00:40:15
Speaker
And if he awakens at night in terror, in a rich and peaceful country at that, this is as natural a reaction as someone's head reeling at the brink of an abyss.
00:40:25
Speaker
There is no point in trying to convince him that the abyss is not there at all.
00:40:29
Speaker
Indeed, the edge of the abyss is a good place to seek our own counsel.
00:40:33
Speaker
Now, man, I can imagine reading that from my cubicle job.
00:40:38
Speaker
That would have spoken to me.
00:40:39
Speaker
If you've ever been to a therapist and talked about anxiety, you've maybe heard them say like, oh, your brain is built for like predators in the jungle, right?
00:40:51
Speaker
And now you live in a world where there are no predators in the jungle, but it's still expecting to be eaten.
00:40:57
Speaker
It's still expecting some danger.
00:40:59
Speaker
And so sometimes those systems of warning can
00:41:03
Speaker
get out of whack and that's what anxiety is and I think he's making the point that like no your anxiety in this machine that you're stuck in the center of I used to work in the very dead center of a secure facility with big heavy doors and no windows and because to have any work done inside whether it was maintenance or repair or cleaning I
00:41:28
Speaker
you know, you had to pay somebody with a security clearance to do it.
00:41:32
Speaker
So these places were always dimly lit, always filthy, always falling apart.
00:41:37
Speaker
And sometimes I would just think about the mass of the concrete and steel that was all around me.
00:41:44
Speaker
And if the power went out, how much I would be buried under and how long it would take me to get out.
00:41:51
Speaker
And after reading that passage, I
00:41:53
Speaker
in this book, I don't think that I was having an irrational response.
00:41:58
Speaker
Like I wasn't actually irrationally afraid that there was going to be a power outage or that I was going to be stuck inside that building.
00:42:06
Speaker
I was recognizing the truth that I was stuck inside that building.
00:42:11
Speaker
And the darkness and the steel and the concrete, those were metaphors.
00:42:16
Speaker
It wasn't physically true, but it was spiritually true that I was
00:42:20
Speaker
buried alive and I felt buried alive.
00:42:23
Speaker
So then he describes the way out, which is what he calls the forest passage.
00:42:27
Speaker
And apparently the forest passage is a word from Icelandic which signifies a banishment.
00:42:36
Speaker
Something like outlawry.
00:42:38
Speaker
So he says, a forest passage followed a banishment.
00:42:42
Speaker
Through this action, a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources.
00:42:47
Speaker
This was considered honorable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes.
00:42:51
Speaker
In those times, banishment was usually the consequence of a homicide, whereas today it happens to a man automatically, like the turning of a roulette wheel.
00:42:59
Speaker
None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law.
00:43:04
Speaker
Isn't that interesting?
00:43:06
Speaker
We talked in the Taliban episode about how a system of control breaks down when it's no longer clear who's inside of it and who's outside of it, because people no longer feel protected underneath its umbrella.
Freedom, Confrontation, and Pseudonymity
00:43:18
Speaker
And like almost everybody thought of the Taliban as being hard asses, being really, really strict and maybe even a little absurd in their religious beliefs.
00:43:26
Speaker
But...
00:43:27
Speaker
they had a powerful reputation for consistency.
00:43:31
Speaker
You knew exactly what you were getting from them in a way that you didn't know what you were getting from a Kabul bureaucrat.
00:43:36
Speaker
And likewise, in our time, out in the street in New York, you're free until you're not.
00:43:43
Speaker
You are free to speak your mind unless you say the wrong thing to a special type of person.
00:43:48
Speaker
You're free to defend yourself
00:43:50
Speaker
Unless you defend yourself in a way that a mob of millions construes to be jumping the gun or an excessive use of force or if you're just targeting a special type of person.
00:44:01
Speaker
And in some of these circumstances, you've watched these videos of people being antagonized almost beyond endurance by someone who knows that they can't be threatened in this situation, who knows that they have the law on their side or at least suspects.
00:44:16
Speaker
And there's just no right answer.
00:44:18
Speaker
There's no good call.
00:44:20
Speaker
For instance, if you're with your wife or your girlfriend and she's being antagonized,
00:44:25
Speaker
and you have this decision to make basically of how you're going to address that and pretty much either way it's going to cost you the relationship and if you handle it wrong it's also going to cost you your freedom and some people have characterized those confrontations as between a thug and a coward and this person who is confronted in this way has a moral duty as a man to stand up and be counted and strike back
00:44:54
Speaker
at this person, but he's not really up against this one thug.
00:44:58
Speaker
He's up against MSNBC and Google and the CIA and a global fleet of surveillance satellites and 11 carrier strike groups.
00:45:12
Speaker
And he has to understand his next steps in that context.
00:45:17
Speaker
And Junger makes that very clear when he's talking about the vote.
00:45:22
Speaker
power structure that has created this confrontation is knowingly acting in bad faith.
00:45:28
Speaker
When you show up to the voting booth, they are not asking for your opinion.
00:45:31
Speaker
They are asking you to essentially recite a catechism or swear a loyalty oath.
00:45:38
Speaker
And you don't owe them your honest opinion.
00:45:41
Speaker
This also comes up in conversations about pseudonymity.
00:45:44
Speaker
You know, should you stand up and be counted with your real name associated with your real ideas?
00:45:52
Speaker
Because you should be accountable.
00:45:53
Speaker
Because men hold themselves accountable for what they say and do.
00:45:57
Speaker
They say it with their chest.
00:45:59
Speaker
And the fact is, you are accountable.
00:46:01
Speaker
You should be accountable.
00:46:03
Speaker
But not to these people.
00:46:05
Speaker
And there's something about this forest passage that is self-imposed.
00:46:09
Speaker
It's partly forced on someone by circumstance, but it's also a decision to take one's life into one's own hands.
00:46:16
Speaker
He says, "...in our ancestors' times, anyone banished was already accustomed to thinking for themselves, accustomed to a hard life, and to acting autonomously.
00:46:24
Speaker
Even in later times, this person probably still felt strong enough within to take the banishment in stride and assume for himself not only the roles of warrior, physician, and judge, but also priest."
00:46:34
Speaker
Things are different today.
00:46:36
Speaker
People are incorporated into the collective structures in a manner that makes them very defenseless indeed.
00:46:41
Speaker
They hardly realize how irresistibly powerful the prejudices have become in our enlightened epoch.
00:46:47
Speaker
Additionally, there is our whole living off of processed foods, communication connections, and utility hookups, and all the synchronizations, repetitions, and transmissions.
00:46:57
Speaker
So you've become, instead of an independent organism, you've become almost like a cell in the body.
Quest for Autonomy Within Systems
00:47:04
Speaker
And to be excommunicated from that body, to be cut off from that body, is death.
00:47:08
Speaker
And I guess his critique of Nazism is that it's giving oneself as an individual over to this collective to make a fist to smash some other collective, that there's power in that.
00:47:23
Speaker
But he doesn't think that's the solution.
00:47:25
Speaker
And he also says the forest passage should not be understood as a form of anarchism directed against the machine world.
00:47:32
Speaker
though that temptation is strong particularly when the effort simultaneously aims at reconnecting with myth.
00:47:38
Speaker
So he's saying you also shouldn't try to smash the machine.
00:47:42
Speaker
Don't give yourself over to the machine.
00:47:44
Speaker
Don't try to smash the machine.
00:47:46
Speaker
So if you can't retreat and you can't fight and you can't try to co-opt the machine, what can you do?
00:47:55
Speaker
And this is where he gets a little mystical, and I'm not sure he knows for sure what he wants here, but he tells the story of Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian pirates.
00:48:05
Speaker
So Dionysus is the god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, parties, insanity, frenzy.
00:48:13
Speaker
So you can maybe put together why Junger would invoke that spirit to oppose this enemy.
00:48:18
Speaker
Well, anyway, maybe you've heard this story, but basically...
00:48:22
Speaker
Dionysus and Bacchus are waylaid in the Tyrrhenian Sea by pirates,
00:48:29
Speaker
And the pirates tie Dionysus up, and he immediately gets loose, and the helmsman says, hey, this is clearly an omen or a sign.
00:48:36
Speaker
This is Zeus or Apollo or someone, and so we should let him go.
00:48:40
Speaker
The other pirates mock him and say they're going to have their way with Dionysus because he's as pretty as a girl.
00:48:47
Speaker
So they're committing the sin of inhospitality.
Mythology and Overcoming Oppression
00:48:50
Speaker
And it's described a couple different ways, but I think Ovid's metamorphosis is probably...
00:48:57
Speaker
The most fun.
00:48:58
Speaker
It's a lot like a horror movie.
00:49:00
Speaker
It says,
00:49:16
Speaker
Dionysus himself, grape bunches garlanding his brow, brandished a spear that vine-leaves twined, and at his feet fierce-spotted panthers lay, tigers and lynxes too, in phantom forms.
00:49:27
Speaker
The men leapt overboard, all driven mad or panic-stricken.
00:49:30
Speaker
Midon's body first began to blacken, and his spine was arched into a curse.
00:49:36
Speaker
What magic shape is this?
00:49:37
Speaker
cried Lycobus, but even as he spoke, his mouth widened, his nose curved out, his skin turned hard and scaly.
00:49:44
Speaker
Libus, trying to pull the thwarting oars, saw his hands suddenly shrink, hands no longer, fins they might be called.
00:49:51
Speaker
Another, when he meant to clasp his arms around a hauser, it's a rope.
00:49:54
Speaker
had no arms and jumped limbless and bending backwards into the waves, his tail forked to a sickle shape and curved like a half-moon.
00:50:02
Speaker
All around the ship, they leapt in showers of splashing spray.
00:50:06
Speaker
Time after time, they surfaced and fell back into the sea, playing like dancers, frolicking about in fun, wide nostrils taking in the sea to flow it out again.
00:50:14
Speaker
Of the whole twenty, I alone remained.
00:50:16
Speaker
As I stood trembling cold with fear, almost out of my wits, the gods spoke words of comfort.
00:50:22
Speaker
Cast your fear aside.
00:50:23
Speaker
Sail on to Naxos.
00:50:25
Speaker
Landing there, I joined his cult and am now Dionysus' faithful follower.
00:50:29
Speaker
So I hope that clears it up, and now you know what to do about your desk job.
00:50:35
Speaker
But all right, let's go back.
00:50:37
Speaker
He's putting this archetype forward as one possible solution to our predicament.
00:50:41
Speaker
He also tells the story of William Tell, which I'll get into in a second.
00:50:46
Speaker
But here's how he connects it to the forest passage, the forest rebel passage.
00:50:51
Speaker
He says, there is no return to the mythical.
00:50:53
Speaker
Rather, it is encountered again when time is shaken to its foundations and in the presence of extreme danger.
00:50:58
Speaker
So in some sense, it's a hurry up and wait kind of a thing.
00:51:01
Speaker
You're sort of waiting for Dionysus to arrive, waiting for this chaotic spirit.
00:51:07
Speaker
And he says, neither is it a question of the grapevine or the ship, it is rather the grapevine and the ship.
00:51:13
Speaker
So I think he sees it as relevant that the vines and the beasts and the wild spirit actually overcomes and consumes the ship.
00:51:27
Speaker
He says, the number of those wanting to abandon ship is growing, among them sharp minds and sound spirits.
00:51:33
Speaker
This would amount to jumping off in mid-ocean.
00:51:36
Speaker
Then hunger, cannibalism, and sharks arrive, in short, all the terrors of the raft of the Medusa.
00:51:42
Speaker
It is thus under all circumstances advisable to stay on board and on deck, even at the risk of being blown up with everything else.
00:51:49
Speaker
So there's three kinds of pirate in this story, or three dooms that the pirates face.
00:51:55
Speaker
The first is that of the master of the ship, the captain, who mocks Dionysus and mocks the helmsman for warning him about Dionysus.
00:52:04
Speaker
And he gets eaten.
00:52:05
Speaker
He stays on the boat and he gets eaten.
00:52:08
Speaker
Then there's all the other sailors who jump off the boat and are transformed into dolphins, which, I mean, it's kind of the same thing as dying.
00:52:16
Speaker
They're destroyed in the flesh.
00:52:18
Speaker
It says they end up having fun and cavorting like dolphins, but it kind of reminds me of Warhammer, where the acolytes of the Plague Lord...
00:52:29
Speaker
Now they kind of enjoy being gross, but it's like they've been completely transformed in their personality and their desires.
00:52:37
Speaker
And then there's the third type of pirate, which is the helmsman, who regards Dionysus from the beginning with the appropriate reverence.
00:52:44
Speaker
He's fit to live in Dionysus' new world, the transformed world of the ship.
00:52:49
Speaker
And you do get the sense, and in some places Junger says this explicitly, that Junger is waiting for a particular kind of person to emerge.
00:53:00
Speaker
And it definitely rhymes with the overman.
00:53:04
Speaker
Certainly just the way Nietzsche talks about the overman.
00:53:06
Speaker
Like, I'm not that type of guy, you're not that type of guy, but it would be a good thing if this type of guy were to emerge.
00:53:14
Speaker
sort of a King Arthur figure or a Christ figure.
00:53:17
Speaker
One of the guys in our group discussion this week suggested that it might be Siegfried.
00:53:22
Speaker
I mean, he sort of sets this hero the task of defeating time and death.
00:53:27
Speaker
He literally says it's not a question of prevailing over the phenomenon, meaning the phenomenon of automatism, of technique.
00:53:34
Speaker
here or there, but rather of getting time itself under control.
00:53:38
Speaker
This requires sovereignty, and this will be found less in the great resolutions, meaning presumably the great ideologies.
00:53:45
Speaker
he just got done talking about Bolshevism and fascism, than in the individual who has renounced his inner fear.
00:53:51
Speaker
In the end, all the enormous preparations which are directed solely at him can only bring his triumph.
00:53:57
Speaker
This freedom constitutes the theme of history in general, and it marks off its boundaries on one side against the demonic realms, on the other against the merely zoological event.
00:54:08
Speaker
And I take that to mean the zoological meaning man as an organism, man as a Darwinian survival and reproduction maximizer, and the demonic being essentially Moloch, the will that emerges in the mob that doesn't reflect the interests of any of the individuals inside the mob.
00:54:34
Speaker
He says, this is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it always returns.
00:54:38
Speaker
So too the giants and the titans always manifest with the same apparent superiority.
00:54:43
Speaker
The free man brings them down, and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules.
00:54:48
Speaker
A stone from a shepherd's sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.
00:54:53
Speaker
So there he's talking about David and Goliath, Joan of Arc, and William Tell.
00:54:58
Speaker
And as far as I can tell, what these characters have in common with Dionysus is their release in crisis from practical considerations, from whether or not they'll be comfortable, whether or not they'll live or die.
00:55:13
Speaker
The zoological and the demonic and the technical, the machine world, runs on everybody pursuing their self-interest, everybody knowing what's good for them.
00:55:26
Speaker
And going back once again to the Taliban episode, we talked a little bit about how the Taliban...
00:55:32
Speaker
Part of the secret of their success was just not caring what was good for them.
00:55:37
Speaker
Like the occupational government had essentially limitless ability to reward and punish.
00:55:42
Speaker
And you see a similar phenomenon, though maybe not illustrated so colorfully, in like the difference between the United States and Canada.
00:55:51
Speaker
If you read the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it's all very reasonable.
00:55:56
Speaker
Everybody has rights as far as it makes sense, as far as it's practical.
00:56:04
Speaker
You can speak your mind provided you're being reasonable.
00:56:08
Speaker
And there's a deep cultural and maybe even biological difference
00:56:13
Speaker
between that attitude, which you find in Canada, but you also find it in the upper Midwest of, you know, let's be reasonable, let's go along to get along, that kind of thing, and the Appalachian and Southern just absolute unwillingness to endure authority.
00:56:31
Speaker
Like, you can be my friend.
00:56:33
Speaker
Everything you're saying can make sense.
00:56:34
Speaker
You can clearly be smarter than me.
00:56:36
Speaker
You can want what's
Preparing for Systemic Collapse
00:56:37
Speaker
best for me.
00:56:37
Speaker
My life can be a catastrophe, a complete mess.
00:56:40
Speaker
And I just don't care.
00:56:42
Speaker
Like, go to hell, I'm not going to do what you say.
00:56:45
Speaker
And that sort of blind, irrational refusal to be governed, I think, is a huge reason why the United States is a much freer country than anywhere else in the Anglosphere.
00:56:55
Speaker
And so I think partly what he's waiting for to emerge is, yes, a certain type of person, but maybe more importantly, it's the circumstances in which this Dionysian refusal to submit can emerge from a different class of person.
00:57:13
Speaker
Like there will always be a criminal underclass that behaves this way.
00:57:18
Speaker
But that criminal underclass is not capable of the kind of organization and the kind of restoration that Junger wants to see from the forest rebel.
00:57:26
Speaker
And so simultaneously, conditions have to decline, but also individuals have to prepare ahead of time to rise to the occasion.
00:57:36
Speaker
He says, freedom is the main subject of study for the free human being, and this includes the ways in which it can be effectively represented and manifested in resistance.
00:57:44
Speaker
Fear already diminishes when an individual is made aware in advance of his role in case of catastrophe.
00:57:50
Speaker
Catastrophes must be practiced for, as an emergency drill is practiced before embarking on a cruise.
00:57:55
Speaker
An entire population that prepares itself for a forest passage becomes a formidable force.
00:58:00
Speaker
Which I take to mean you've got to start by LARPing.
00:58:02
Speaker
You know, a lot of us are waiting around with some anxiety to learn who we're going to be when it all goes down.
00:58:11
Speaker
And I think Jünger is suggesting that we can just decide who we're going to be and start preparing, start gaming it out.
00:58:19
Speaker
Specifically, what's your line?
00:58:20
Speaker
Like, at what point do you abandon rational calculus?
Christianity and Resistance Through Sacrifice
00:58:25
Speaker
At what point are you unwilling to comply no matter what the incentives are?
00:58:29
Speaker
That line is going to be different for everybody.
00:58:31
Speaker
And you certainly shouldn't share your line publicly.
00:58:35
Speaker
But it seems like you should probably know where that line is.
00:58:38
Speaker
And I think even though Jünger is not Christian at this point in his life as he's writing this book, the gospel does provide some of this element of embracing your own death continually, dying daily, taking up your cross.
00:58:56
Speaker
Some determinists have said a man can do what he wills, but he can't will what he wills.
00:59:01
Speaker
And that's why we're not free to make choices.
00:59:03
Speaker
But...
00:59:04
Speaker
in the Christian way of thinking, you can be free by choosing to do what you don't will, by choosing to surrender your will.
00:59:14
Speaker
And when people say that has something to do with slave morality, it seems to me like this need to confront one's powerlessness
00:59:24
Speaker
is just as necessary in the life of a Roman centurion or an emperor or a Khan who confronts illness, confronts the death of a child, the death of a wife, watches his body degrade as he ages.
00:59:39
Speaker
And the pagan worldview would be that the way that you overcome your mortality is by
00:59:46
Speaker
single-mindedly pursuing kleos, pursuing fame to be sung of for all eternity and leave a pretty corpse.
00:59:54
Speaker
And I think those people would argue that the idea of heaven is a cope.
00:59:58
Speaker
But it's not obvious to me which of those visions of eternal life is more of a cope.
01:00:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:06
Speaker
But in any case, it seems like either of those worldviews provides a path to the forest passage, which is you can either have an indomitable will, just a categorical refusal to be a slave, or you can make your will irrelevant, and you can say, this is the line and I won't cross it, even if I want to.
01:00:23
Speaker
Even if it's the only way for me to be happy or safe or comfortable, even if I am not sure there's a god and I'm going to die, I just won't.
01:00:32
Speaker
But back to Junger.
01:00:56
Speaker
it quickly becomes clear to him that neutrality would be tantamount to suicide.
01:01:01
Speaker
Now it is a case of joining the wolf pack or going to war against it.
01:01:05
Speaker
Which I think reading between the lines there, he's describing the decision to resist the communist street gangs in Weimar Germany by mobbing up with the brown shirts or sort of letting them have the run of the place.
01:01:22
Speaker
Caught in such straits, where is he to find a third element that will not simply go under in the movement?
01:01:27
Speaker
And here he almost sounds like Jordan Peterson.
01:01:29
Speaker
He says, this can only be in his quality of being an individual, in his human being, which remains unshaken.
01:01:35
Speaker
In such conditions, it should be considered a great merit if knowledge of the virtuous way is not entirely lost.
01:01:41
Speaker
Anyone who has escaped the clutches of catastrophe knows that he basically had the help of simple people to thank, people who were not overcome by the hate, the terror, the mechanicalness of platitudes.
01:01:51
Speaker
These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly demonic insinuations.
01:01:56
Speaker
When such virtues also manifest in a leader of people, endless blessings can result, as with Augustus, for example.
01:02:02
Speaker
This is the stuff of empires.
01:02:03
Speaker
The ruler reigns not by taking, but by giving life.
01:02:07
Speaker
And therein lies one of the great hopes that one perfect human being will step forth from among the millions.
01:02:13
Speaker
And I'm not sure if he's explicitly waiting for the second coming of Christ, but he then goes into Christ's example.
01:02:21
Speaker
He says,
01:02:32
Speaker
The path leads to the brink of death itself.
01:02:34
Speaker
Indeed, if necessary, it passes through it.
01:02:36
Speaker
When the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness.
01:02:42
Speaker
The superabundance of the world lies before us.
01:02:45
Speaker
This is most evident where the teaching and the example are united, when the conqueror of fear enters the kingdom of death, as we see Christ, the highest benefactor, doing.
01:02:54
Speaker
With its death the grain of wheat brought forth not a thousand fruits, but fruits without number.
01:02:59
Speaker
The superabundance of the world was touched, which every generative act is related to as a symbol of time and of time's defeat.
01:03:06
Speaker
In its train followed not only the martyrs, who were stronger than the Stoics, stronger than the Caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena.
01:03:14
Speaker
There also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact.
01:03:18
Speaker
To this day this is a far more compelling force than it at first seems.
01:03:22
Speaker
Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs.
01:03:29
Speaker
Already on these grounds, we may be sure that the pure use of force, exercised in the old manner, cannot prevail in the long term.
01:03:35
Speaker
With this blood, substance was infused into history, and it is with good reason that we still number our years from this epochal turning point.
01:03:43
Speaker
The full fertility of theogony reigns here, meaning the birth of the gods.
01:03:47
Speaker
The mythical generative power, the sacrifice, is replayed on countless altars.
01:03:52
Speaker
In his poems, Haldurlin saw Christ as the exaltation of Herculean and Dionysian power.
01:03:57
Speaker
Hercules is the original prince on whom even the gods depend in their battle with the Titans.
01:04:02
Speaker
He dries out the swamps and builds canals, and by defeating the fiends and monsters he makes the wastelands habitable.
01:04:08
Speaker
He is the first among the heroes, on whose graves the polis is founded, and by whose veneration it is preserved.
01:04:14
Speaker
Every nation has its Hercules, and even today graves form the central points from which the state receives its sacred luster.
01:04:21
Speaker
Dionysus is the master of ceremonies, the leader of the festive procession.
01:04:25
Speaker
When Holy Land refers to him as the spirit of community, this community is to be understood as including the dead, indeed especially them.
01:04:33
Speaker
Theirs is the glow that envelops the Dionysian celebration, the deepest fount of cheerfulness.
01:04:38
Speaker
The doors of the kingdom of death are thrown wide open, and golden abundance streams forth.
01:04:43
Speaker
This is the meaning of the grapevine in which the powers of earth and sun are united, of the masks of the great transformation and recurrence.
01:04:50
Speaker
So, what would it now mean for a contemporary man to take his lead from the example of death's champion, of these gods, heroes, and sages?
01:04:59
Speaker
It would mean that he joined the resistance against the times, and not merely against these times, but against all times, whose basic power is fear.
01:05:06
Speaker
Every fear, however distantly derived it may seem, is at its core the fear of death.
01:05:11
Speaker
If a man succeeds in creating breathing room here, he will gain freedom also in other spheres that are ruled by fear.
01:05:16
Speaker
Then he will fell the giants whose weapons are terror.
01:05:20
Speaker
It is in the nature of things that education today aims at precisely the opposite of this.
01:05:24
Speaker
The intention of all systems is to inhibit any metaphysical influx, to tame and train in the interests of the collective.
01:05:31
Speaker
So I think Junger would maybe argue that the death of God is this necessity in the expansion of state power.
01:05:39
Speaker
The state has to disenchant your world so that you become increasingly a rational actor that can be incentivized in predictable ways, legible ways.
01:05:49
Speaker
And in the Latter-day Saint tradition, this is basically what we believe happened after the death of the apostles.
01:05:54
Speaker
The revelatory, the prophetic spirit was deemed to be inconvenient and unpredictable.
01:05:59
Speaker
You couldn't argue about it.
01:06:00
Speaker
You couldn't settle a debate.
01:06:02
Speaker
If I say God said X and you say God said Y, there's no way for us to reason that out.
01:06:07
Speaker
And so the construct of scholasticism, which then led to the Enlightenment, was the process by which metaphysical questions were brought into the realm of pure reason.
01:06:20
Speaker
And so states that were originally founded on the concept of human freedom, religions that are founded on the concept of divine revelation, all these things have to be extirpated
01:06:32
Speaker
in the pursuit of these technical goals.
01:06:34
Speaker
They get in the way of the administration of the institution, the rule of the priests and the scribes and the judges.
01:06:41
Speaker
And on this subject of time, he contextualizes the riddle of the Sphinx made to Oedipus in a really interesting way.
01:06:48
Speaker
So why is it that the Sphinx asks you about the beast that walks on four legs and then two legs and then three legs?
01:06:56
Speaker
And it will kill you if you get the answer wrong.
Healthcare and State Control
01:06:58
Speaker
He says,
01:07:23
Speaker
And so this relentless drive for efficiency and rationality is all based on this temporality, this sense of being a finite being in time, this fear of death.
01:07:35
Speaker
He says, if man answers correctly, meaning to the sphinx, the apparatuses lose their magical gleam and submit themselves to his hand.
01:07:43
Speaker
And so there you find maybe a synthesis of the Christian and the pagan notion of eternal life.
01:07:49
Speaker
Obviously, they're quite different, but what they share in common is the sense of revealing what is in you that transcends time.
01:07:56
Speaker
And that's what's heroic.
01:07:58
Speaker
That's what's divine.
01:07:58
Speaker
That's what transcends your animal nature.
01:08:02
Speaker
He says,
01:08:31
Speaker
Conservation of religiosity can't be created or destroyed.
01:08:34
Speaker
Which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches.
01:08:37
Speaker
Now freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything.
01:08:40
Speaker
This is the gullibility of modern man which coexists with a lack of faith.
01:08:45
Speaker
He believes what he reads in the newspaper, but not what is written in the stars.
01:08:49
Speaker
He actually spends a fair amount of time on the healthcare system and the way that people's personal data is catalogued, which I think is just remarkably forward-looking for 1951.
01:09:00
Speaker
To sum up, he says, "...all these healthcare enterprises with poorly paid doctors on salaries whose treatments are supervised by bureaucracy should be regarded with suspicion.
01:09:10
Speaker
Overnight they can undergo alarming transformations and not just in the event of war."
01:09:14
Speaker
It is not inconceivable that the flawlessly maintained files will then furnish the documents needed to in turn castrate or liquidate.
01:09:22
Speaker
And we're up against this situation where some of you may be familiar with the book Seeing Like a State, about how the state has this relentless drive to make things legible so they can be regulated and taxed.
01:09:35
Speaker
And it approaches the point at which questions of what the state should be involved in almost become questions of theodicy, meaning the problem of evil as applied to God.
01:09:47
Speaker
Because the whole problem of God's omnipotence and omniscience and omnibenevolence is like, how can all these bad things coexist in a world where God knows about it and could intervene but doesn't?
01:10:02
Speaker
And similarly, we're up against this situation where the state increasingly has the ability to see and intervene in the tiniest details of our lives.
01:10:13
Speaker
And so if anything about those details goes wrong, a certain type of person, in the same way that they might have said, you know, where was God when this horrible thing happened to me, will start to say, where was the state?
01:10:24
Speaker
Why wasn't the state involved?
01:10:26
Speaker
Because it could be involved.
01:10:27
Speaker
The more the state can see, the more it can justify intervention.
01:10:30
Speaker
The more that it intervenes, the more it needs to see.
01:10:34
Speaker
I mean, think about body cameras for police.
01:10:36
Speaker
Or even the role of media and NGOs in the apparatus of control today.
01:10:42
Speaker
Those institutions were created ostensibly to supervise the powerful.
01:10:47
Speaker
And of course, it's a who-watches-the-watchers situation.
01:10:50
Speaker
There's nothing natural, there's nothing rational to interrupt the cycle of greater legibility justifying greater intervention and greater intervention justifying greater legibility.
01:11:04
Speaker
And so you need something unnatural, something supernatural, which in his view is the forest rebel having undergone a forest passage, having been transfigured to rise above these natural incentives.
01:11:18
Speaker
He says,
01:11:41
Speaker
A laudable exception deserves mention here that of a young social democrat who shot down half a dozen so-called auxiliary policemen at the entrance of his apartment.
01:11:50
Speaker
He still partook of the substance of the old Germanic freedom which his enemies only celebrated in theory.
01:11:56
Speaker
Naturally, he did not get this from his party's manifesto, and he was certainly also not of the type Leon Bloy describes as running to their lawyer while their mother is being raped.
01:12:05
Speaker
You can feel this loathing for the offloading of responsibility, moral responsibility, for the defense of one's freedom to the police, to the state.
01:12:15
Speaker
Long periods of peace foster certain illusions.
01:12:17
Speaker
One is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the Constitution, which should guarantee it.
01:12:23
Speaker
In reality, it is grounded in the family father whose sons at his side fills the doorway with an axe in his hand.
01:12:30
Speaker
And I would actually argue that the primary role of the police, the security apparatus, the law in the United States right now is not to guarantee those rights, but to prevent you from enforcing them in that way.
01:12:42
Speaker
And that, I think, will get worse as the state's authority is threatened.
01:12:46
Speaker
Because the more it becomes an existential question for the survival of the state, the more they will be focused on maintaining their monopoly on violence at all costs and against all comers.
01:12:56
Speaker
We live in times in which war and peace are difficult to distinguish from one another.
01:13:00
Speaker
Subtle shadings blur the borders between duty and crime.
01:13:03
Speaker
This can deceive even sharp eyes because the disorientation of the times, the global guilt, spills over into the individual cases.
01:13:10
Speaker
The situation is aggravated by a lack of genuine sovereigns and by the fact that today's powerful have all risen through the ranks of the factions.
01:13:17
Speaker
So like in our situation, there's never again going to be a president who governs on behalf of the entire nation.
01:13:23
Speaker
Or if he does, it'll be because he's this type of person, this Augustus, this King Arthur, who overthrows and overturns the old system and creates a new one.
01:13:32
Speaker
And so the distinction between duty and crime depends very much on your relationship toward the ruling faction.
01:13:38
Speaker
And so he views the forest rebel as transcending all that.
01:13:41
Speaker
He says, "...the forest rebel has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right.
01:13:47
Speaker
He descends to the very springs of morality where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels."
01:13:53
Speaker
Matters become simple here, assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him.
01:13:58
Speaker
Now where exactly Junger thinks that that fount of morality comes from is unclear, and I think he would also maybe sneer at the question a little bit, because the whole point is you just know what's right, and your efforts to lawyer about it and justify it are fake and gay.
01:14:15
Speaker
Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock bottom of the maelstrom.
01:14:21
Speaker
Man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction.
01:14:26
Speaker
They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence.
01:14:33
Speaker
Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools.
01:14:36
Speaker
This miracle has happened even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to extend a helping hand to others.
01:14:43
Speaker
This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there.
01:14:45
Speaker
Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being and thereby reveal his native nobility.
01:14:52
Speaker
The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons.
01:14:57
Speaker
This is the hallmark of nobility.
01:14:59
Speaker
And I think that's true.
01:15:00
Speaker
When I read about the heroes of the ancient world, none of them are just brigands.
01:15:06
Speaker
They all fight brigands.
01:15:08
Speaker
In fact, that's core to their legitimacy as rulers.
01:15:13
Speaker
What they do is they clear out wild spaces, hostile spaces, and allow civilization to flourish.
01:15:20
Speaker
And that's the source of their kleos.
01:15:21
Speaker
That's the source of their fame.
01:15:23
Speaker
If they weren't beloved and admired by the people, their story would not be carried on.
01:15:29
Speaker
Junger says, It is critical for the forest rebel to clearly differentiate himself from the criminal, not only in his morals, but
01:15:36
Speaker
in how he does battle and in his social relations, but also by keeping these differences alive and strong in his own heart.
01:15:42
Speaker
In a world where the existing legal and constitutional doctrines do not put the necessary tools in his hands, he can only find right within himself.
01:15:49
Speaker
Which I would add means that keeping those springs clean and clear and being very honest with yourself becomes much more important.
01:15:57
Speaker
He then talks about property.
01:15:58
Speaker
He says,
01:16:18
Speaker
The economic activities may seem directed against property.
01:16:20
Speaker
In reality, they establish who are real owners.
01:16:23
Speaker
This is a question that is continually asked and must be continually answered anew.
01:16:28
Speaker
So again, why is your house your house?
01:16:30
Speaker
Because you'll stand in the doorway and kill anybody who tries to come into it.
01:16:34
Speaker
So in that context, is your country your country?
01:16:36
Speaker
Apparently not.
01:16:37
Speaker
By considering the process from the perspective of the forest passage, we subject it to the court of the sovereign individual.
01:16:43
Speaker
It is up to him to decide what he considers property and how he will defend it.
01:16:47
Speaker
In an epoch like ours, he does best to present as few targets for attack as possible.
01:16:52
Speaker
I think that's really important.
01:16:54
Speaker
Therefore, in taking stock of the situation, he must distinguish between things unworthy of sacrifice and those things worth fighting for.
01:17:00
Speaker
And I think that goes back to the riddle of the Sphinx.
01:17:03
Speaker
Who are you as a man?
01:17:04
Speaker
What is essential to you?
01:17:06
Speaker
What is eternal about you?
01:17:07
Speaker
And you can say that your property doesn't matter in the eternal scheme of things, but if you're the type of person who is expropriated and enslaved without complaint, then that's the kind of man that you are.
01:17:18
Speaker
Preserving one's true nature is arduous, and the more so when one is weighed down with goods.
01:17:23
Speaker
There is the danger that threatened Cortes' Spaniards.
01:17:25
Speaker
They were dragged to the ground in that mournful night by the burden of gold that they were loath to part with.
01:17:30
Speaker
In comparison, the riches that belong to one's being are not only incomparably more valuable, they are also the very source of all visible riches.
01:17:40
Speaker
Anyone grasping that will also understand that epochs which strive for the equality of all men will bear quite other fruits than those hoped for.
01:17:47
Speaker
They merely remove the fences and bars, the secondary divisions, and in this manner free up space.
01:17:52
Speaker
People are brothers, but they are not equal.
01:17:54
Speaker
The masses will always conceal individuals who by nature, that is, in their being, are rich, noble, kind, happy, or powerful.
01:18:00
Speaker
Abundance will flow their way to the same degree that the deserts grow.
01:18:04
Speaker
This leads to new powers and riches, to new distributions.
01:18:07
Speaker
And I think that's something to keep in mind as we complain about the oppressive and unfair nature of our circumstances.
01:18:16
Speaker
We're up against different tests of our quality, of our spiritual material, but it's hard to argue that they're worse tests or harder tests.
01:18:26
Speaker
than were faced by our ancestors trying to colonize the West in the face of hostile Indian tribes or trying to escape the poverty of Europe.
Community and Demographic Challenges
01:18:38
Speaker
We look ahead and we see these seemingly unsolvable problems, and you can concretize that as the capture of Western democracy or the death of God, the triumph of rationalism, the triumph of technocracy and propaganda.
01:18:57
Speaker
but our ancestors' problems only look solvable because we're here.
01:19:01
Speaker
We're on the other side of all those solutions.
01:19:03
Speaker
And I personally still have a lot of unanswered questions, but it seems to me that while we wait on some of those answers, the right thing to do, at least for me to do, is just to find other people who care about this, find other people who, as one of my friends puts it, to find other people who want to take a short position in this system, both because it sucks and because it's falling apart.
01:19:24
Speaker
I want to get these guys together, get them to encourage and challenge one another.
01:19:27
Speaker
And I've also been talking to some guys who are involved with like conservative job boards and like placement of our guys in professional spheres.
01:19:38
Speaker
And one of the challenges that we're recognizing in the space is that the kinds of connections that our guys need and want are fairly high touch.
01:19:48
Speaker
They want to actually know each other well.
01:19:51
Speaker
Because what they really want to do is partner with each other on big projects.
01:19:54
Speaker
They want to, you know, maybe they want to help a random onside guy get a job.
01:19:58
Speaker
There's value in that for sure.
01:20:01
Speaker
But anything beyond that, anything like I need a technical co-founder or I want to start a homeschooling co-op or I actually want to live in a healthy neighborhood and I can't find one and so I'm thinking about having to build one.
01:20:15
Speaker
All of these projects demand just a lot more trust than just like a standard job board or group chat.
01:20:23
Speaker
So anyway, if you don't know what we do here at Exit, that's what we do.
01:20:26
Speaker
You sign up on the website, you schedule an appointment with me, we have a conversation about who you are, what you're trying to accomplish, what you want from the group, what you offer to the group.
01:20:36
Speaker
And if we both agree that it's a fit, you're in, you join the group chat, you join the weekly group calls, you're invited to the meetups, which are...
01:20:43
Speaker
now 24 times a year.
01:20:45
Speaker
So we do it twice a month, try to be in each of six regions of the country quarterly.
01:20:52
Speaker
And we get together, we go rock climbing, we go shooting, we have, you know, picnics for the family, for the wives and the kids to get to know each other.
01:20:59
Speaker
And then we have some presentations and some workshops where we, the goal is to suss each other out professionally, get to know people who have similar aspirations, complimentary skill sets, that kind of thing.
01:21:12
Speaker
And it's a really high-quality group of guys.
01:21:15
Speaker
Now, is it a direct answer to this archetype that Jünger is trying to invoke in the forest passage?
01:21:21
Speaker
I don't know.
01:21:22
Speaker
Again, I'm not sure Jünger knows exactly what he wants.
01:21:26
Speaker
But it seems like this is the closest thing.
01:21:30
Speaker
It seems like men have to get together, and they have to work on something.
01:21:33
Speaker
And what are you going to get them to work on?
01:21:35
Speaker
Well, it's probably got to be things that make money, or else they won't be able to give it the commitment that it would need.
01:21:40
Speaker
And it has to be ways that make money that are sovereign, so that means entrepreneurship.
01:21:44
Speaker
Human-scaled businesses and relationships predicated on human judgment.
01:21:48
Speaker
So if you want to learn more about that, check us out at exitgroup.us or follow us on Twitter at exit underscore org.
01:21:54
Speaker
And while you're at it, you can check out one of the projects that's emerged from the group, one of the partnerships that I've built personally with the guys that I've met in the group.
01:22:02
Speaker
the NATO conference this December in Austin, Texas, December 1st and 2nd.
01:22:05
Speaker
We're bringing together the sharpest people we can find to talk about the issue of demographic collapse.
01:22:11
Speaker
You know, if you're in our spaces, you've probably heard about this, but if not, by the year 2100, every country on the planet is going to have a shrinking population.
01:22:19
Speaker
That's going to have massive consequences for, yes, the economy, for our ability to service our debts and take care of the old people, maintain our infrastructure, but it's also just going to be this tremendous drain on the vitality of all these cultures, all these populations that just will not have the gas to perpetuate what makes them unique and beautiful.
01:22:44
Speaker
So we're getting people together to talk about whether that can be arrested or mitigated, or if not, how do we get our families squared away?
01:22:51
Speaker
How do we connect with other people who want to make sure that their kids have kids?
01:22:56
Speaker
How do we preserve the elements of our cultures that we think are beautiful and worth preserving?
01:23:00
Speaker
So anyway, that's December 1st and 2nd, Austin, Texas.
01:23:04
Speaker
Day one of the conference will be a standard symposium with speakers and panels, reception, open bar, a chance to mingle with some of our panelists, our experts.
01:23:13
Speaker
But day two of the conference will be a curated workshop facilitated by...
01:23:18
Speaker
my partner Drew Gorham, who does Stanford D School innovation workshops.
01:23:22
Speaker
So you'll actually sit across the table from some of these experts and hammer out creative projects and products that can actually move the needle on this issue.
01:23:30
Speaker
So if you're interested in that, you can get tickets at natalism.org or follow us on Twitter at natalismorg.
01:23:37
Speaker
Thanks for listening.