Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: Today I'm reading The Forest Passage by Ernst Jünger.
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.
Speaker: Not necessarily that he loved or even particularly cared about the political justifications for World War I, but just that he viewed war
Speaker: and combat as a transcendental experience.
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...
Speaker: glory of face-to-face combat, it was sort of just being obliterated anonymously in a rat hole by artillery from miles away.
Speaker: And the industrial character of the war was what they found so distasteful
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.
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.
Speaker: This is somebody who cares intensely
Speaker: about what it means to be a human being when you are subsumed in these forces that are so much larger than yourself.
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.
Speaker: And I'll be honest, this was a really challenging read.
Speaker: It took me a long time to sort of pick up what he was laying down.
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.
Speaker: And then I actually went back and read it all again.
Speaker: And it was incredibly rewarding the second time through.
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.
Speaker: If you're looking for it to be narrowly political or prescribe a tactical...
Speaker: course for you to set for yourself as a dissident, you're going to be disappointed.
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.
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
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
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.
Speaker: And Jünger's definitely not a run and hide guy.
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.
Speaker: Not that you will, you know, go hide in the woods and hope they don't find you.
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.
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.
Speaker: It's remarkable that he was able to see this coming from 1951.
Speaker: But he basically says the enemy is not Nazism or socialism or some particular ideology.
Speaker: It's just the scaling up and the automation of public opinion and political decision making
Speaker: such that it's not that there's voters making conscious evil decisions or even rulers manipulating voters into conscious evil decisions.
Speaker: There's nobody in charge.
Speaker: There's nobody at the wheel.
Speaker: And the freedom, the liberty that he is trying to preserve is not this liberal democratic, you should be free to...
Speaker: maximize your hedonic well-being or just sort of maximally increase your amount of options for its own sake.
Speaker: The freedom that he's talking about is the freedom to act and not to be acted upon, including by
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.
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.
Speaker: So I'll quote here.
Speaker: Where the automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection, such as in America, the panic is even further intensified.
Speaker: There it finds its best feeding grounds, and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light.
Speaker: The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear.
Speaker: The imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex.
Speaker: The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end.
Speaker: They provoke demonic contacts.
Speaker: And I think when he uses the term demonic, he's referring to what we would maybe in our sphere call egregores.
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.
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.
Speaker: They're on Facebook all the time thinking about what's going on all over the world.
Speaker: And they make themselves almost literally atomized because they're constantly thinking about the world at a scale at which they are microscopic.
Speaker: They become mechanistic, a thing to be acted upon.
Speaker: And Junger doesn't say this explicitly, but it's a little bit of a meditation on the limits of freedom.
Speaker: Like you can say that you want people to be maximally free, but like you're not free to be 20 feet tall.
Speaker: You're not free to be a toaster.
Speaker: And obviously encouraging people to maximize their sense of freedom in that way is
Speaker: is to encourage them to disconnect from reality.
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.
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,
Speaker: can, by arguing with their relatives on Facebook or casting a vote, can make themselves significant to these global scale processes.
Speaker: 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...
Speaker: unfree by definition, just by virtue of your scale, your smallness in comparison with these forces and problems.
Speaker: Because in that domain, your behavior is perfectly predictable and controllable and influenceable.
Speaker: You become, like I say, literally atomized.
Speaker: You become like a particle that can be manipulated the same way that any other component of matter can be manipulated.
Speaker: He spends a lot of time talking about the votes cast in Germany that had 98% approval for whatever initiative was being considered.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: The contemporary man who sees himself prevailed upon to fill out a questionnaire is far from any such security.
Speaker: The answers he provides will have far-reaching consequences.
Speaker: His very fate often depends on them.
Speaker: We see people getting into predicaments where they are required to produce documents aimed at their own ruin.
Speaker: And what trifles may not cause ruin today?
Speaker: Which is, it's so funny to hear this discussed in 1951, but it's exactly what our situation is.
Speaker: These questionnaires don't take place on election day.
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.
Speaker: The power of the pronoun thing where every sentence you speak to particular individuals becomes an ideological test.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: But you could transfer this to the diversity training situation.
Speaker: He says, Within these hypnotic spheres there reigns, if not unanimity, then certainly a single voice.
Speaker: Because to raise a dissenting voice here would lead to uproar and the destruction of its owner.
Speaker: A single person seeking to make his presence felt in this manner might as well opt to attempt assassination.
Speaker: It would lead to the same thing.
Speaker: He talks about how the level of dissent has to be calibrated by the dictator.
Speaker: And, you know, we don't have these 98% plebiscites that are counted in this way.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: A secret enemy in every tenth person?
Speaker: This is a consideration the masses cannot be asked to accept.
Speaker: On the other hand, a count of spoiled and nay votes around 2% would be not only tolerable, but even favorable.
Speaker: From the organizers' perspective, these two votes have a double utility.
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.
Speaker: The second benefit consists in their sustaining the uninterrupted movement that dictatorships rely on.
Speaker: I mean, you think about the oppression narrative that drives our current regime, our current system.
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?
Speaker: What would they be doing with their lives?
Speaker: They're not going to learn to code.
Speaker: So they have to be constantly searching for this class enemy.
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.
Speaker: Dictatorships cannot survive on pure affirmation.
Speaker: They need hate, and with it terror, to provide a simultaneous counterbalance.
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.
Speaker: Now on top of that, the statement required of him is clothed in highly respectable formulations.
Speaker: He's called to participate in a vote for freedom, or perhaps a peace referendum.
Speaker: But who does not love peace and freedom?
Speaker: Only a monster.
Speaker: A nay vote already receives a criminal character here.
Speaker: And the bad voter resembles a criminal slinking up to the scene of the crime.
Speaker: How invigorating, on the other hand, the day is for the good voter.
Speaker: During breakfast, he received final encouragement, his final instructions over the radio.
Speaker: Now he goes into the street, where a festive good mood prevails.
Speaker: Banners hang from every house and every window.
Speaker: He's welcomed in the courtyard of the electoral station by a band playing marches.
Speaker: The musicians are in uniform, and there is no lack of uniforms in the voting hall either.
Speaker: In his enthusiasm, it will escape the good voter that one can hardly still talk of voting booths here.
Speaker: That's the end of that quote.
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.
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.
Speaker: His wrong opinions aren't just wrong, they're dangerous.
Speaker: They're even
Speaker: violent, potentially.
Speaker: So he talks a little bit more about the psychology of the nay voter, the two percent who vote no.
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.
Speaker: By making his cross on the dangerous spot, our voter does precisely what his vastly superior opponent expects of him.
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.
Speaker: This is someone who must be helped.
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.
Speaker: And he basically says you'd do better spray painting your opinion on an overpass, because at least then your allies would see it.
Speaker: And this sort of surreptitious or informal dissent becomes more and more dangerous as the consensus grows.
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.
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...
Speaker: The witch hunt isn't purely this delusional search for a non-existent enemy.
Speaker: It's actually this very well-informed sniffing out of some genuine enemies.
Speaker: You and I may not be guilty of the specific evils that we're accused of, but we are guilty of disloyalty, unreliability.
Speaker: We really are a danger to this state, and they're right to be looking for us.
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.
Speaker: I think that's much more true of our situation even than it was of his situation in the 1950s in West Germany.
Speaker: These institutions' ability to master public narratives is weaker than it's ever been before.
Speaker: We have so much more power to expose them in lies, to make them look ridiculous.
Speaker: And the more they look ridiculous, the more just clogged and gridlocked their system of control becomes.
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.
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
Speaker: that will put all these people's fears to rest and get them to comply.
Speaker: And he basically said that that can't be done.
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.
Speaker: And like you may say that these narratives don't matter in the face of just the political control that our enemies have.
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.
Speaker: It matters to them.
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.
Speaker: But the point is they're right to be concerned.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: These are the men who make the masses tremble, whose decisions determine the fate of millions."
Speaker: Yet one must concede to the zeitgeist an infallible hand in picking out just these characters, meaning NPCs, drones.
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.
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."
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.
Speaker: for maximum conformity, maximum malleability, but also this intense ambition to succeed in climbing social ladders.
Speaker: And it's precisely because these are components in a mechanical system.
Speaker: The CEO of Lockheed Martin is not sovereign.
Speaker: They don't control anything.
Speaker: They are replaceable components.
Speaker: And the goal of the system is to select people who will be as inhuman and without agency as they possibly can manage.
Speaker: while still having this intense anxiety, this intense drive to perform as required by the institution.
Speaker: And that's a combination of psychological traits that I think is difficult for a lot of us to even get our heads around.
Speaker: And it's why a lot of our guys
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.
Speaker: And you meet these people and their souls are so small and they're so monomaniacal.
Speaker: And it's like, I wouldn't want to be that person even if I could.
Speaker: But so the system places these people in the commanding heights of the economy.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: He talks about another of the values of having dissidents in these states.
Speaker: He says, resistance only seems to invigorate the ruling powers, providing them a welcome opportunity to take offensive action.
Speaker: And of course, nowadays, we're about a century into the process of just making up resistance in order to justify offensive action.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: Life may have become gray, but it may still appear tolerable to those who only see darkness, utter blackness beside them.
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
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.
Speaker: Alright, so I'm quoting again.
Speaker: After all, there are mountain passes and mule tracks that one discovers only after a long ascent.
Speaker: A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration.
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.
Speaker: It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one's own skin, but is also willing to risk it.
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.
Speaker: And this is basically what I'm thinking about all the time.
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
Speaker: call in the artillery strike.
Speaker: And so when he says it takes caution and daring of a previously unknown quality, that means you have to have the caution
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.
Speaker: That's kind of what you have to do.
Speaker: Anyway, moving on, he says,
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: He should know at what points he must not be induced to give up his sovereign power of decision.
Speaker: As long as things are in order, there will be water in the pipes and electricity in the lines.
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,
Speaker: and becomes helpless when it fails to materialize.
Speaker: Every comfort must be paid for.
Speaker: The condition of the domesticated animal drags behind it that of the slaughterhouse animal.
Speaker: This becomes evident in phases of extreme threat during which the apparatus not only leaves man high and dry,
Speaker: but encircles him in a manner that appears to dash all hopes of escape.
Speaker: He says in another place, There's that Godspeed lyric,
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.
Speaker: On the contrary, an optimism arises, a sense of power produced by the high speed.
Speaker: All this will change when fire-spitting islands and icebergs loom on the horizon.
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.
Speaker: And what I like about this is how clearly he sees that we're all trapped inside this thing.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: He's got a passage in here that reminds me a lot of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, but without the sodomy.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The increasingly artificial cities, the automatized traits, the wars and civil wars, the machine infernos, the gray despots, the prisons, and the refined persecutions.
Speaker: All these have since been given names, and they occupy man's thoughts day and night.
Speaker: And so here's the passage from Ginsburg.
Speaker: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Speaker: Moloch!
Speaker: Solitude!
Speaker: Filth!
Speaker: Ugliness!
Speaker: Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Speaker: Children screaming under the stairways!
Speaker: Boys sobbing in armies!
Speaker: Old men weeping in the parks!
Speaker: Moloch!
Speaker: Moloch!
Speaker: Nightmare of Moloch!
Speaker: Moloch the loveless!
Speaker: Mental Moloch!
Speaker: Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Speaker: Moloch the incomprehensible prison.
Speaker: Moloch the crossbones soulless jailhouse and congress of sorrows.
Speaker: Moloch whose buildings are judgment.
Speaker: Moloch the vast stone of war.
Speaker: Moloch the stunned governments.
Speaker: Moloch whose mind is pure machinery.
Speaker: Moloch whose blood is running money.
Speaker: Moloch whose fingers are ten armies.
Speaker: Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo.
Speaker: Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb.
Speaker: Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows.
Speaker: Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovah's.
Speaker: Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog.
Speaker: Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities.
Speaker: Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone.
Speaker: Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks.
Speaker: Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius.
Speaker: Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen.
Speaker: Moloch whose name is the mind.
Speaker: Moloch in whom I sit lonely.
Speaker: Moloch in whom I dream angels.
Speaker: Crazy in Moloch.
Speaker: Cocksucker in Moloch.
Speaker: Lack love and manless in Moloch.
Speaker: Moloch who entered my soul early.
Speaker: Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body.
Speaker: Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy.
Speaker: Moloch whom I abandon.
Speaker: Wake up in Moloch, light streaming out of the sky.
Speaker: Moloch, Moloch, robot apartments, invisible suburbs, skeleton treasuries, blind capitals, demonic industries, spectral nations, invisible madhouses, granite cocks, monstrous bombs.
Speaker: They broke their backs, lifting Moloch to heaven.
Speaker: Pavements, trees, radios, tons, lifting the city to heaven which exists and is everywhere about us.
Speaker: So what do you make of that?
Speaker: There's obviously a temptation because he's Allen Ginsberg to say that he's making this really facile point.
Speaker: It's always capitalism, man.
Speaker: It's about money, man.
Speaker: But I think he's actually saying something a little more profound than that.
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.
Speaker: And so, you know, maybe Ginsburg was dumb enough to think that what he's upset about here is capitalism.
Speaker: But Jünger finds this phenomenon in the capitalist West.
Speaker: He finds it in Germany.
Speaker: He finds it in communist Russia.
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.
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?
Speaker: And Ginsburg, I think, would say Moloch.
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.
Speaker: I mean...
Speaker: Jünger and Ginsburg would both say from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they would say that process is 75 years old.
Speaker: There's no more argument to be had over whether it's too risky or should we pursue it.
Speaker: It's like we did it.
Speaker: It's over.
Speaker: It already happened.
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.
Speaker: He says,
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.
Speaker: With horror, we also sense that there is no infamy they will not consent to if it is demanded of them.
Speaker: There's a thought experiment in the rationalist community called Rocco's Basilisk.
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.
Speaker: basically like retroactively sending them to hell.
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?
Speaker: Maybe not.
Speaker: But it's just sort of asking you how you would respond to a system that can make irresistible demands of you.
Speaker: Until quite recently, the only system that could make those kinds of absolute demands of you was nature, God.
Speaker: Every human institution could be defeated or at least in theory evaded.
Speaker: And he was thinking through in his own time the consequences of this all-reaching propaganda apparatus, these all-seeing surveillance techniques.
Speaker: Obviously, we're way farther down the road on all of that than they were in 1951.
Speaker: And basically, he indicates that the crowd, the masses,
Speaker: are essentially ruled by fear.
Speaker: They're ruled either by fear of pain, fear of punishment, or fear of each other.
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.
Speaker: The rulers of the party weren't necessarily happy, they weren't necessarily wealthy or comfortable.
Speaker: It says they were priests of power, meaning essentially subject to power, representatives of power.
Speaker: Not sovereign, but almost the eyes and the hands of this process, this superhuman process.
Speaker: Superhuman in the sense of being much, much larger than any human.
Speaker: And he sketches out the appeal of Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, which was this materialist, systematic, mechanized system.
Speaker: It's easy to forget from our current vantage, but in the 1920s, 1930s,
Speaker: Communism was the ideology of the future.
Speaker: It was the ideology of rationalism, of science.
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.
Speaker: And the thinking was that this mode of analysis of science and engineering would eventually extend to the human sphere.
Speaker: It would extend to the relationships between people through the rationalization of science.
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
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.
Speaker: And Jünger actually goes in a mold bug-like direction with that.
Speaker: He says, We should caution against starting with the danger.
Speaker: Aiming simply to become more dangerous than one's feared opponent leads to no solution.
Speaker: This is the classic relationship between reds and whites, reds and reds, and tomorrow perhaps between whites and non-whites.
Speaker: Terror is a fire that wants to consume the whole world, all the while fears multiply and diversify.
Speaker: The ruler by calling proves himself such by ending the terror.
Speaker: It is the person who has first conquered his own fear.
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.
Speaker: You're waiting for King Arthur or Christ, the person who will rectify all the names and settle all the accounts and...
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.
Speaker: He says,
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.
Speaker: Second, as we saw in the example of the ship, the powers of the present will be insufficient to set up a resistance.
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.
Speaker: And number two, those people will not be able to right the ship.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: If the retrospection is directed at the fathers and their systems, which lie closer to the origins, it will seek a conservative restoration.
Speaker: But in times of still greater danger, the salvific power must be sought deeper in the mothers.
Speaker: This contact liberates primal forces to whom the mere powers of time cannot stand up.
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
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.
Speaker: And it's just funny how timely it is.
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 things.
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.
Speaker: I think it's just, that's just great.
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.
Speaker: So I've had this problem.
Speaker: He clearly has this problem.
Speaker: He's talking about the forest passage.
Speaker: We're talking about exit.
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.
Speaker: Or in his case, the case of...
Speaker: a comprehensively defeated country like Germany in the 1950s retreat into mysticism and monasticism and just sort of disappear into your own head.
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.
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.
Speaker: On such things there must be no deceiving ourselves.
Speaker: So maybe there's a temptation to view the war as a kind of catharsis, that the slaughter is over.
Speaker: And we lost, but at least it's over, and now we can sort of retreat inward.
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.
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
Speaker: was actually a consolidation and a deepening of the problem of technique or automatism or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: But he also says equally unsatisfactory would be a limitation to purely concrete goals such as conducting a national liberation struggle.
Speaker: Rather, as we shall see, these efforts are also crowned by national freedom, which joins as an additional factor.
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.
Speaker: Which I take to mean that this has to go from top to bottom.
Speaker: this change, this transformation has to be inward and spiritual.
Speaker: And it also has to do with how you relate to your wife and your children and your friends.
Speaker: And then that also extends outward to the nation and the world.
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?
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?
Speaker: And I think basically it's this.
Speaker: And he actually sort of addresses the specific, the anguish of the cubicle guy.
Speaker: He says, the individual still possesses organs in which more wisdom lives than in the entire organization.
Speaker: His very bewilderment, his fear, demonstrate this.
Speaker: In agonizing about finding a way out, an escape route, he exhibits a behavior appropriate to the proximity and magnitude of the threat.
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.
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.
Speaker: There is no point in trying to convince him that the abyss is not there at all.
Speaker: Indeed, the edge of the abyss is a good place to seek our own counsel.
Speaker: Now, man, I can imagine reading that from my cubicle job.
Speaker: That would have spoken to me.
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?
Speaker: And now you live in a world where there are no predators in the jungle, but it's still expecting to be eaten.
Speaker: It's still expecting some danger.
Speaker: And so sometimes those systems of warning can
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
Speaker: you know, you had to pay somebody with a security clearance to do it.
Speaker: So these places were always dimly lit, always filthy, always falling apart.
Speaker: And sometimes I would just think about the mass of the concrete and steel that was all around me.
Speaker: And if the power went out, how much I would be buried under and how long it would take me to get out.
Speaker: And after reading that passage, I
Speaker: in this book, I don't think that I was having an irrational response.
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.
Speaker: I was recognizing the truth that I was stuck inside that building.
Speaker: And the darkness and the steel and the concrete, those were metaphors.
Speaker: It wasn't physically true, but it was spiritually true that I was
Speaker: buried alive and I felt buried alive.
Speaker: So then he describes the way out, which is what he calls the forest passage.
Speaker: And apparently the forest passage is a word from Icelandic which signifies a banishment.
Speaker: Something like outlawry.
Speaker: So he says, a forest passage followed a banishment.
Speaker: Through this action, a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources.
Speaker: This was considered honorable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes.
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.
Speaker: None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law.
Speaker: Isn't that interesting?
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.
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.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: they had a powerful reputation for consistency.
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.
Speaker: And likewise, in our time, out in the street in New York, you're free until you're not.
Speaker: You are free to speak your mind unless you say the wrong thing to a special type of person.
Speaker: You're free to defend yourself
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.
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.
Speaker: And there's just no right answer.
Speaker: There's no good call.
Speaker: For instance, if you're with your wife or your girlfriend and she's being antagonized,
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
Speaker: at this person, but he's not really up against this one thug.
Speaker: He's up against MSNBC and Google and the CIA and a global fleet of surveillance satellites and 11 carrier strike groups.
Speaker: And he has to understand his next steps in that context.
Speaker: And Junger makes that very clear when he's talking about the vote.
Speaker: power structure that has created this confrontation is knowingly acting in bad faith.
Speaker: When you show up to the voting booth, they are not asking for your opinion.
Speaker: They are asking you to essentially recite a catechism or swear a loyalty oath.
Speaker: And you don't owe them your honest opinion.
Speaker: This also comes up in conversations about pseudonymity.
Speaker: You know, should you stand up and be counted with your real name associated with your real ideas?
Speaker: Because you should be accountable.
Speaker: Because men hold themselves accountable for what they say and do.
Speaker: They say it with their chest.
Speaker: And the fact is, you are accountable.
Speaker: You should be accountable.
Speaker: But not to these people.
Speaker: And there's something about this forest passage that is self-imposed.
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.
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.
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."
Speaker: Things are different today.
Speaker: People are incorporated into the collective structures in a manner that makes them very defenseless indeed.
Speaker: They hardly realize how irresistibly powerful the prejudices have become in our enlightened epoch.
Speaker: Additionally, there is our whole living off of processed foods, communication connections, and utility hookups, and all the synchronizations, repetitions, and transmissions.
Speaker: So you've become, instead of an independent organism, you've become almost like a cell in the body.
Speaker: And to be excommunicated from that body, to be cut off from that body, is death.
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.
Speaker: But he doesn't think that's the solution.
Speaker: And he also says the forest passage should not be understood as a form of anarchism directed against the machine world.
Speaker: though that temptation is strong particularly when the effort simultaneously aims at reconnecting with myth.
Speaker: So he's saying you also shouldn't try to smash the machine.
Speaker: Don't give yourself over to the machine.
Speaker: Don't try to smash the machine.
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?
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.
Speaker: So Dionysus is the god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, parties, insanity, frenzy.
Speaker: So you can maybe put together why Junger would invoke that spirit to oppose this enemy.
Speaker: Well, anyway, maybe you've heard this story, but basically...
Speaker: Dionysus and Bacchus are waylaid in the Tyrrhenian Sea by pirates,
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.
Speaker: This is Zeus or Apollo or someone, and so we should let him go.
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.
Speaker: So they're committing the sin of inhospitality.
Speaker: And it's described a couple different ways, but I think Ovid's metamorphosis is probably...
Speaker: The most fun.
Speaker: It's a lot like a horror movie.
Speaker: It says,
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.
Speaker: The men leapt overboard, all driven mad or panic-stricken.
Speaker: Midon's body first began to blacken, and his spine was arched into a curse.
Speaker: What magic shape is this?
Speaker: cried Lycobus, but even as he spoke, his mouth widened, his nose curved out, his skin turned hard and scaly.
Speaker: Libus, trying to pull the thwarting oars, saw his hands suddenly shrink, hands no longer, fins they might be called.
Speaker: Another, when he meant to clasp his arms around a hauser, it's a rope.
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.
Speaker: All around the ship, they leapt in showers of splashing spray.
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.
Speaker: Of the whole twenty, I alone remained.
Speaker: As I stood trembling cold with fear, almost out of my wits, the gods spoke words of comfort.
Speaker: Cast your fear aside.
Speaker: Sail on to Naxos.
Speaker: Landing there, I joined his cult and am now Dionysus' faithful follower.
Speaker: So I hope that clears it up, and now you know what to do about your desk job.
Speaker: But all right, let's go back.
Speaker: He's putting this archetype forward as one possible solution to our predicament.
Speaker: He also tells the story of William Tell, which I'll get into in a second.
Speaker: But here's how he connects it to the forest passage, the forest rebel passage.
Speaker: He says, there is no return to the mythical.
Speaker: Rather, it is encountered again when time is shaken to its foundations and in the presence of extreme danger.
Speaker: So in some sense, it's a hurry up and wait kind of a thing.
Speaker: You're sort of waiting for Dionysus to arrive, waiting for this chaotic spirit.
Speaker: And he says, neither is it a question of the grapevine or the ship, it is rather the grapevine and the ship.
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.
Speaker: He says, the number of those wanting to abandon ship is growing, among them sharp minds and sound spirits.
Speaker: This would amount to jumping off in mid-ocean.
Speaker: Then hunger, cannibalism, and sharks arrive, in short, all the terrors of the raft of the Medusa.
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.
Speaker: So there's three kinds of pirate in this story, or three dooms that the pirates face.
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.
Speaker: And he gets eaten.
Speaker: He stays on the boat and he gets eaten.
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.
Speaker: They're destroyed in the flesh.
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...
Speaker: Now they kind of enjoy being gross, but it's like they've been completely transformed in their personality and their desires.
Speaker: And then there's the third type of pirate, which is the helmsman, who regards Dionysus from the beginning with the appropriate reverence.
Speaker: He's fit to live in Dionysus' new world, the transformed world of the ship.
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.
Speaker: And it definitely rhymes with the overman.
Speaker: Certainly just the way Nietzsche talks about the overman.
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.
Speaker: sort of a King Arthur figure or a Christ figure.
Speaker: One of the guys in our group discussion this week suggested that it might be Siegfried.
Speaker: I mean, he sort of sets this hero the task of defeating time and death.
Speaker: He literally says it's not a question of prevailing over the phenomenon, meaning the phenomenon of automatism, of technique.
Speaker: here or there, but rather of getting time itself under control.
Speaker: This requires sovereignty, and this will be found less in the great resolutions, meaning presumably the great ideologies.
Speaker: he just got done talking about Bolshevism and fascism, than in the individual who has renounced his inner fear.
Speaker: In the end, all the enormous preparations which are directed solely at him can only bring his triumph.
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.
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.
Speaker: He says, this is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it always returns.
Speaker: So too the giants and the titans always manifest with the same apparent superiority.
Speaker: The free man brings them down, and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules.
Speaker: A stone from a shepherd's sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.
Speaker: So there he's talking about David and Goliath, Joan of Arc, and William Tell.
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.
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.
Speaker: And going back once again to the Taliban episode, we talked a little bit about how the Taliban...
Speaker: Part of the secret of their success was just not caring what was good for them.
Speaker: Like the occupational government had essentially limitless ability to reward and punish.
Speaker: And you see a similar phenomenon, though maybe not illustrated so colorfully, in like the difference between the United States and Canada.
Speaker: If you read the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it's all very reasonable.
Speaker: Everybody has rights as far as it makes sense, as far as it's practical.
Speaker: You can speak your mind provided you're being reasonable.
Speaker: And there's a deep cultural and maybe even biological difference
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.
Speaker: Like, you can be my friend.
Speaker: Everything you're saying can make sense.
Speaker: You can clearly be smarter than me.
Speaker: You can want what's best for me.
Speaker: My life can be a catastrophe, a complete mess.
Speaker: And I just don't care.
Speaker: Like, go to hell, I'm not going to do what you say.
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.
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.
Speaker: Like there will always be a criminal underclass that behaves this way.
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.
Speaker: And so simultaneously, conditions have to decline, but also individuals have to prepare ahead of time to rise to the occasion.
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.
Speaker: Fear already diminishes when an individual is made aware in advance of his role in case of catastrophe.
Speaker: Catastrophes must be practiced for, as an emergency drill is practiced before embarking on a cruise.
Speaker: An entire population that prepares itself for a forest passage becomes a formidable force.
Speaker: Which I take to mean you've got to start by LARPing.
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.
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.
Speaker: Specifically, what's your line?
Speaker: Like, at what point do you abandon rational calculus?
Speaker: At what point are you unwilling to comply no matter what the incentives are?
Speaker: That line is going to be different for everybody.
Speaker: And you certainly shouldn't share your line publicly.
Speaker: But it seems like you should probably know where that line is.
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.
Speaker: Some determinists have said a man can do what he wills, but he can't will what he wills.
Speaker: And that's why we're not free to make choices.
Speaker: But...
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.
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
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.
Speaker: And the pagan worldview would be that the way that you overcome your mortality is by
Speaker: single-mindedly pursuing kleos, pursuing fame to be sung of for all eternity and leave a pretty corpse.
Speaker: And I think those people would argue that the idea of heaven is a cope.
Speaker: But it's not obvious to me which of those visions of eternal life is more of a cope.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
Speaker: But back to Junger.
Speaker: it quickly becomes clear to him that neutrality would be tantamount to suicide.
Speaker: Now it is a case of joining the wolf pack or going to war against it.
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.
Speaker: Caught in such straits, where is he to find a third element that will not simply go under in the movement?
Speaker: And here he almost sounds like Jordan Peterson.
Speaker: He says, this can only be in his quality of being an individual, in his human being, which remains unshaken.
Speaker: In such conditions, it should be considered a great merit if knowledge of the virtuous way is not entirely lost.
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.
Speaker: These people withstood the propaganda and its plainly demonic insinuations.
Speaker: When such virtues also manifest in a leader of people, endless blessings can result, as with Augustus, for example.
Speaker: This is the stuff of empires.
Speaker: The ruler reigns not by taking, but by giving life.
Speaker: And therein lies one of the great hopes that one perfect human being will step forth from among the millions.
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.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The path leads to the brink of death itself.
Speaker: Indeed, if necessary, it passes through it.
Speaker: When the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness.
Speaker: The superabundance of the world lies before us.
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.
Speaker: With its death the grain of wheat brought forth not a thousand fruits, but fruits without number.
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.
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.
Speaker: There also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact.
Speaker: To this day this is a far more compelling force than it at first seems.
Speaker: Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs.
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.
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.
Speaker: The full fertility of theogony reigns here, meaning the birth of the gods.
Speaker: The mythical generative power, the sacrifice, is replayed on countless altars.
Speaker: In his poems, Haldurlin saw Christ as the exaltation of Herculean and Dionysian power.
Speaker: Hercules is the original prince on whom even the gods depend in their battle with the Titans.
Speaker: He dries out the swamps and builds canals, and by defeating the fiends and monsters he makes the wastelands habitable.
Speaker: He is the first among the heroes, on whose graves the polis is founded, and by whose veneration it is preserved.
Speaker: Every nation has its Hercules, and even today graves form the central points from which the state receives its sacred luster.
Speaker: Dionysus is the master of ceremonies, the leader of the festive procession.
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.
Speaker: Theirs is the glow that envelops the Dionysian celebration, the deepest fount of cheerfulness.
Speaker: The doors of the kingdom of death are thrown wide open, and golden abundance streams forth.
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.
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?
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.
Speaker: Every fear, however distantly derived it may seem, is at its core the fear of death.
Speaker: If a man succeeds in creating breathing room here, he will gain freedom also in other spheres that are ruled by fear.
Speaker: Then he will fell the giants whose weapons are terror.
Speaker: It is in the nature of things that education today aims at precisely the opposite of this.
Speaker: The intention of all systems is to inhibit any metaphysical influx, to tame and train in the interests of the collective.
Speaker: So I think Junger would maybe argue that the death of God is this necessity in the expansion of state power.
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.
Speaker: And in the Latter-day Saint tradition, this is basically what we believe happened after the death of the apostles.
Speaker: The revelatory, the prophetic spirit was deemed to be inconvenient and unpredictable.
Speaker: You couldn't argue about it.
Speaker: You couldn't settle a debate.
Speaker: If I say God said X and you say God said Y, there's no way for us to reason that out.
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.
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
Speaker: in the pursuit of these technical goals.
Speaker: They get in the way of the administration of the institution, the rule of the priests and the scribes and the judges.
Speaker: And on this subject of time, he contextualizes the riddle of the Sphinx made to Oedipus in a really interesting way.
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?
Speaker: And it will kill you if you get the answer wrong.
Speaker: He says,
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.
Speaker: He says, if man answers correctly, meaning to the sphinx, the apparatuses lose their magical gleam and submit themselves to his hand.
Speaker: And so there you find maybe a synthesis of the Christian and the pagan notion of eternal life.
Speaker: Obviously, they're quite different, but what they share in common is the sense of revealing what is in you that transcends time.
Speaker: And that's what's heroic.
Speaker: That's what's divine.
Speaker: That's what transcends your animal nature.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: Conservation of religiosity can't be created or destroyed.
Speaker: Which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches.
Speaker: Now freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything.
Speaker: This is the gullibility of modern man which coexists with a lack of faith.
Speaker: He believes what he reads in the newspaper, but not what is written in the stars.
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.
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.
Speaker: Overnight they can undergo alarming transformations and not just in the event of war."
Speaker: It is not inconceivable that the flawlessly maintained files will then furnish the documents needed to in turn castrate or liquidate.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Speaker: Why wasn't the state involved?
Speaker: Because it could be involved.
Speaker: The more the state can see, the more it can justify intervention.
Speaker: The more that it intervenes, the more it needs to see.
Speaker: I mean, think about body cameras for police.
Speaker: Or even the role of media and NGOs in the apparatus of control today.
Speaker: Those institutions were created ostensibly to supervise the powerful.
Speaker: And of course, it's a who-watches-the-watchers situation.
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.
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.
Speaker: He says,
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.
Speaker: He still partook of the substance of the old Germanic freedom which his enemies only celebrated in theory.
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.
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.
Speaker: Long periods of peace foster certain illusions.
Speaker: One is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the Constitution, which should guarantee it.
Speaker: In reality, it is grounded in the family father whose sons at his side fills the doorway with an axe in his hand.
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.
Speaker: And that, I think, will get worse as the state's authority is threatened.
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.
Speaker: We live in times in which war and peace are difficult to distinguish from one another.
Speaker: Subtle shadings blur the borders between duty and crime.
Speaker: This can deceive even sharp eyes because the disorientation of the times, the global guilt, spills over into the individual cases.
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.
Speaker: So like in our situation, there's never again going to be a president who governs on behalf of the entire nation.
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.
Speaker: And so the distinction between duty and crime depends very much on your relationship toward the ruling faction.
Speaker: And so he views the forest rebel as transcending all that.
Speaker: He says, "...the forest rebel has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right.
Speaker: He descends to the very springs of morality where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels."
Speaker: Matters become simple here, assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him.
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.
Speaker: Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock bottom of the maelstrom.
Speaker: Man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction.
Speaker: They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence.
Speaker: Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools.
Speaker: This miracle has happened even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to extend a helping hand to others.
Speaker: This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there.
Speaker: Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being and thereby reveal his native nobility.
Speaker: The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons.
Speaker: This is the hallmark of nobility.
Speaker: And I think that's true.
Speaker: When I read about the heroes of the ancient world, none of them are just brigands.
Speaker: They all fight brigands.
Speaker: In fact, that's core to their legitimacy as rulers.
Speaker: What they do is they clear out wild spaces, hostile spaces, and allow civilization to flourish.
Speaker: And that's the source of their kleos.
Speaker: That's the source of their fame.
Speaker: If they weren't beloved and admired by the people, their story would not be carried on.
Speaker: Junger says, It is critical for the forest rebel to clearly differentiate himself from the criminal, not only in his morals, but
Speaker: in how he does battle and in his social relations, but also by keeping these differences alive and strong in his own heart.
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.
Speaker: Which I would add means that keeping those springs clean and clear and being very honest with yourself becomes much more important.
Speaker: He then talks about property.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: The economic activities may seem directed against property.
Speaker: In reality, they establish who are real owners.
Speaker: This is a question that is continually asked and must be continually answered anew.
Speaker: So again, why is your house your house?
Speaker: Because you'll stand in the doorway and kill anybody who tries to come into it.
Speaker: So in that context, is your country your country?
Speaker: Apparently not.
Speaker: By considering the process from the perspective of the forest passage, we subject it to the court of the sovereign individual.
Speaker: It is up to him to decide what he considers property and how he will defend it.
Speaker: In an epoch like ours, he does best to present as few targets for attack as possible.
Speaker: I think that's really important.
Speaker: Therefore, in taking stock of the situation, he must distinguish between things unworthy of sacrifice and those things worth fighting for.
Speaker: And I think that goes back to the riddle of the Sphinx.
Speaker: Who are you as a man?
Speaker: What is essential to you?
Speaker: What is eternal about you?
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.
Speaker: Preserving one's true nature is arduous, and the more so when one is weighed down with goods.
Speaker: There is the danger that threatened Cortes' Spaniards.
Speaker: They were dragged to the ground in that mournful night by the burden of gold that they were loath to part with.
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.
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.
Speaker: They merely remove the fences and bars, the secondary divisions, and in this manner free up space.
Speaker: People are brothers, but they are not equal.
Speaker: The masses will always conceal individuals who by nature, that is, in their being, are rich, noble, kind, happy, or powerful.
Speaker: Abundance will flow their way to the same degree that the deserts grow.
Speaker: This leads to new powers and riches, to new distributions.
Speaker: And I think that's something to keep in mind as we complain about the oppressive and unfair nature of our circumstances.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: but our ancestors' problems only look solvable because we're here.
Speaker: We're on the other side of all those solutions.
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.
Speaker: I want to get these guys together, get them to encourage and challenge one another.
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.
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.
Speaker: They want to actually know each other well.
Speaker: Because what they really want to do is partner with each other on big projects.
Speaker: They want to, you know, maybe they want to help a random onside guy get a job.
Speaker: There's value in that for sure.
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.
Speaker: All of these projects demand just a lot more trust than just like a standard job board or group chat.
Speaker: So anyway, if you don't know what we do here at Exit, that's what we do.
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.
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...
Speaker: now 24 times a year.
Speaker: So we do it twice a month, try to be in each of six regions of the country quarterly.
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.
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.
Speaker: And it's a really high-quality group of guys.
Speaker: Now, is it a direct answer to this archetype that Jünger is trying to invoke in the forest passage?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Again, I'm not sure Jünger knows exactly what he wants.
Speaker: But it seems like this is the closest thing.
Speaker: It seems like men have to get together, and they have to work on something.
Speaker: And what are you going to get them to work on?
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.
Speaker: And it has to be ways that make money that are sovereign, so that means entrepreneurship.
Speaker: Human-scaled businesses and relationships predicated on human judgment.
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.
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.
Speaker: the NATO conference this December in Austin, Texas, December 1st and 2nd.
Speaker: We're bringing together the sharpest people we can find to talk about the issue of demographic collapse.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: How do we connect with other people who want to make sure that their kids have kids?
Speaker: How do we preserve the elements of our cultures that we think are beautiful and worth preserving?
Speaker: So anyway, that's December 1st and 2nd, Austin, Texas.
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.
Speaker: But day two of the conference will be a curated workshop facilitated by...
Speaker: my partner Drew Gorham, who does Stanford D School innovation workshops.
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.
Speaker: So if you're interested in that, you can get tickets at natalism.org or follow us on Twitter at natalismorg.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
