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43 - Nima Cheraghi
1.5k Plays2 years ago
Nima Cheraghi is an EXIT member and Philosopher who is currently translating a memoir from the Baltic Freikorps. We discuss how search engines create selective memory, why capitalism feels increasingly centrally planned, and why academics suck at history, and pretty much everything else.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Nima Chiraghi and Technique Theory
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Ben and I'm joined here by Dr. Nima Chiraghi, a failed academic, disgraced former academic.
00:00:26
Speaker
That's right.
00:00:26
Speaker
A friend of ours in the group.
00:00:28
Speaker
And I want to talk to him about his experiences with academia, with what he's seeing in the study of history, and some of the projects that he's working on to move the conversation.
00:00:43
Speaker
So welcome to the show, Nima.
00:00:45
Speaker
It's a pleasure to be here.
00:00:46
Speaker
I've dreamt of this moment for many years.
00:00:51
Speaker
So let's start with where it all started, which is technique.
00:00:58
Speaker
Can you tell us about technique?
00:01:01
Speaker
So technique is an idea proposed by the French sociologist Jacques Ellul,
00:01:08
Speaker
Although technique theory sort of is found in other people as well.
00:01:12
Speaker
Like Heidegger talks about this as well, kind of, in his, of course, he calls it in the German, Technique.
00:01:20
Speaker
He calls it Technique Kritik.
00:01:21
Speaker
But Elul posed this idea that very basically...
00:01:29
Speaker
as technology has sort of progressed, that we've lost any semblance of, I guess you could say, a free will.
00:01:39
Speaker
And by technique, we don't necessarily mean just technology, machines and computers and things like that and factories.
00:01:49
Speaker
But we mean more of a societal nos, a societal mind.
00:01:55
Speaker
It's the way that we perceive things.
00:01:58
Speaker
And Heidegger sort of talks about it in the same way, that it's a mode of eclairung, a way of clearing things, to see things.
Technique Theory and Ideological Blurring
00:02:08
Speaker
And this societal noose drives us towards one destination, which is the ultimate efficiency of all things.
00:02:17
Speaker
You know, the way to find the single most efficient way to do something.
00:02:23
Speaker
And so what technique theory essentially does is that it says that any sort of, uh, distinctions we can make among things, especially, you know, he uses this example of, of capitalism and communism, that there are two very, there are two different ways to go about technique.
00:02:44
Speaker
You know, on one side, you, you have this idea that, uh,
00:02:48
Speaker
a free market will make the most efficient means and the other you think that centralized control will find the most efficient means.
00:02:55
Speaker
But the very explicitly stated purpose of both of these ideologies is that it finds the most efficient economic means.
00:03:05
Speaker
And you can abstract that idea towards almost everything.
00:03:10
Speaker
And I wrote this one piece on religious technique where people who profess to be part of a religion, but yet they act in ways that are very contrary to the doctrines of that religion.
00:03:25
Speaker
It's not necessarily because most of these people are midwits and they can't
00:03:31
Speaker
they're unable to actually parse any sort of total ideology.
00:03:35
Speaker
But it's just because they have this technical mindset where if you're fully...
00:03:44
Speaker
dedicated to your religion, it becomes sort of impossible to live in or embrace a secular society, right?
00:03:55
Speaker
So for example, like I wrote that.
00:03:56
Speaker
It gets in the way.
00:03:57
Speaker
It's inconvenient.
00:03:58
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:03:59
Speaker
So like an academic, for example, at a religious university, if he wants to be honest about his doctrine,
00:04:06
Speaker
well, then, you know, he's going to have a very hard time in the global academic apparatus.
00:04:14
Speaker
So he has to employ these methods of like, well, actually, our doctrine teaches, you know, it's not actually this.
00:04:20
Speaker
It's actually this, which just so happens to be a confirmation of the modern, I get progressive view.
00:04:29
Speaker
Well, you know, the Bible actually confirms social justice or whatever.
00:04:36
Speaker
We just figured it out.
00:04:38
Speaker
So that way he becomes once again a candidate for scholarships and teaching positions and stuff like that, which is his ultimate end.
00:04:47
Speaker
So he finds the way, the method of efficiency to at the same time profess his supposed religious values while also pursuing these technical career ends.
00:05:01
Speaker
And
00:05:03
Speaker
So essentially, the point of technique is that everything is sort of fake and exists only in a perceptive mode.
Technique, Globalization, and Historical Progress
00:05:13
Speaker
But ultimately, everything that you perceive under it is a means of pursuing the most efficient method to do something.
00:05:27
Speaker
What's interesting about the capitalism and communism conversation is...
00:05:33
Speaker
So basically, the reason that central planning seems to have failed in the 20th century was really mainly a question of communications technology and computational power.
00:05:48
Speaker
They just didn't have the ability to see all of the variables needed to control and plan that market.
00:05:57
Speaker
And there's an article by Scott Alexander,
00:06:04
Speaker
you know, some of you may know Slate Star Codex.
00:06:07
Speaker
He does this write up on, basically some folks think that we've reached the level of computational complexity and power where it's actually not obvious that central planning isn't more efficient.
00:06:29
Speaker
But the way those two paths converge,
00:06:32
Speaker
is that instead of the state imposing central planning,
00:06:41
Speaker
what's happening is because central planning is starting to become really, really efficient, you're having mega corporations grow so that they can access those economies of scale and essentially like, I mean, I mean, BlackRock, basically the, the, the number of the level of controlling interest they have in how many different sectors of the economy.
00:07:04
Speaker
I mean, they're bigger than the Soviet union was.
00:07:07
Speaker
And, and, and,
00:07:10
Speaker
And so sort of by this evolutionary process, central planning, by virtue of the fact that it works now and is efficient, is eating things and agglomerating and agglomerating and agglomerating, which is kind of the Marxist thesis of what was supposed to happen.
00:07:26
Speaker
So it's, I don't know, it's interesting.
00:07:28
Speaker
Right.
00:07:29
Speaker
And Elul writes that.
00:07:31
Speaker
So the thing that makes technique important is that it's a modern phenomenon.
00:07:35
Speaker
It's a way of understanding the period that we live in.
00:07:39
Speaker
Elul would say that although technique has sort of always existed, its current form only came about around...
00:07:49
Speaker
400 years ago or so.
00:07:51
Speaker
Before that, and the reason is that technique adapts to the state of the society which it operates in.
00:08:01
Speaker
So technique couldn't have been global in the times of
00:08:04
Speaker
the Romans, for example, because each different part of the world had adapted a, they were in different points of civilization.
00:08:15
Speaker
Some were a little bit more civilized, some were less.
00:08:18
Speaker
So, you know, each piece of technology, for example, can only work in that, in the setting that it is.
00:08:25
Speaker
It exists in like cell phones, for example.
00:08:28
Speaker
If you take a cell phone back to, you know, a thousand years ago, it would more or less be useless here, right?
00:08:35
Speaker
There wouldn't be cell networks.
00:08:36
Speaker
You wouldn't be able to charge it.
00:08:38
Speaker
After the power died, it would kind of be over.
00:08:41
Speaker
You wouldn't be able to do anything with it.
00:08:43
Speaker
But as sort of everything has become universal, you know, there really isn't a whole lot of difference fundamentally between peoples and countries anymore, right?
00:08:55
Speaker
Like everyone eats the same crap.
00:08:57
Speaker
Everyone watches the same TV shows.
00:09:01
Speaker
All the economies sort of function the same.
00:09:04
Speaker
So it's interesting to think of a person also, sorry to interrupt.
00:09:09
Speaker
It's interesting to think of a person also going back a thousand years.
00:09:13
Speaker
And being similarly useless because everything that I, all of my social capital, everything that I've built up, the skills that I know are all intended to plug me into this.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:28
Speaker
So, you know, it's funny you say that because Elul writes that, uh,
00:09:33
Speaker
At one point, man was to fill the holes in the tools that he had, right?
00:09:39
Speaker
So if you were a blacksmith, you know, and you have a hammer, like you're the one that strikes the hammer, right?
00:09:44
Speaker
You have to grab the hammer and hit the metal with it.
00:09:47
Speaker
But now...
Technique vs. Enlightenment Rationalism
00:09:50
Speaker
Man becomes sort of just, you know, the guy in the factory worker that pulls the levers and stuff.
00:09:57
Speaker
He can be replaced by any other meat bag, right?
00:10:00
Speaker
He's only purely there.
00:10:01
Speaker
And, you know, the same thing for like white collar jobs as well.
00:10:04
Speaker
Like,
00:10:07
Speaker
There are the countless coding academies online or whatever, and you don't have to be particularly skillful to learn any programming language or to be an accountant or to be a lawyer, as long as you have sort of a moderate IQ and a willingness to learn something for a year or two.
00:10:25
Speaker
Most people can do almost anything.
00:10:28
Speaker
But to be a skilled Black student,
00:10:32
Speaker
you know, a craftsman.
00:10:33
Speaker
Like it actually, you actually did have to spend actually quite a few years as an apprentice to be able to do that.
00:10:41
Speaker
Because your learning was embodied.
00:10:43
Speaker
It was, it was something that couldn't, couldn't be received out of a book.
00:10:47
Speaker
You had to, the muscle memory and the.
00:10:51
Speaker
Right.
00:10:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:57
Speaker
That's another way that technique differs from back then to now.
00:11:04
Speaker
All the jobs throughout the world are sort of the same as well.
00:11:09
Speaker
People may still buy rugs from Persia, but that's sort of just a historical formality because honestly, you could produce the same thing almost anywhere else and not...
00:11:21
Speaker
be able to notice the difference.
00:11:31
Speaker
And that's why technique has become sort of, and that's why central planning also has become more viable now because the world is sort of the same now.
00:11:39
Speaker
So almost any piece of technology or technique that you can find anywhere, it works anywhere else.
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah, everything's plug and play.
00:11:49
Speaker
Is there a distinction between technique as you're describing it and like enlightenment rationalism?
00:12:01
Speaker
Or are they kind of the same thing?
00:12:03
Speaker
So if you want to think of the enlightenment rationalism sort of more or less the same as liberalism, Elul does write that
00:12:15
Speaker
liberalism created the environment which allowed technique to overcome it.
00:12:21
Speaker
So when liberalism prevailed and these enlightenment ideas of freedom and individual liberty and things like that came about, it created the environment for which technique could overcome it.
00:12:39
Speaker
So for example, like the free market, now you allow people to do more or less whatever they want economically.
00:12:46
Speaker
Well, obviously, what they're going to do is use the machines, which are most effective, use the manufacturing processes, which are most effective, use the accounting processes, which are most effective, and use the economies that are most effective.
00:13:04
Speaker
But there comes a point where technique and liberalism start conflating, right?
00:13:11
Speaker
So, you know, you can know it's no longer permissible, as we see nowadays, to have someone who's not...
00:13:23
Speaker
loyal to the modern ideology.
00:13:26
Speaker
And that's because ultimately, if you have too many people who sort of value their own freedom, who don't just want to be meatbags doing line work, then the entire thing sort of slowly starts to fall apart.
00:13:42
Speaker
Because actually technique is a very sensitive thing because it's all encompassing.
00:13:48
Speaker
So, you know, one or two nodes within the network, if they collapse, just like the cell phone, for example, if the cell phone tower collapses, then the cell phone sort of becomes useless.
00:14:02
Speaker
So if one or two nodes of that network collapse, then everything else sort of starts to not work as effectively as well.
00:14:11
Speaker
So you have to replace those liberal ideas of like individual freedom and whatnot.
00:14:17
Speaker
with principles that facilitate technique.
Pre-Technique Philosophy vs. Modern Optimization
00:14:22
Speaker
So, you know, it's sort of a, it's an unfortunate circumstance of liberalism where that the ideology which made individual liberty
00:14:35
Speaker
I, you know, if you want to think a little, I don't necessarily think this is true, but if you want to think of it in this way, the ideology that made individual liberty possible was, uh, sort of taken over by the consequences of, of individual liberty.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:53
Speaker
It, it's, it's self-consuming.
00:14:56
Speaker
So one of the questions that I have about this is, I mean, people, uh,
00:15:03
Speaker
it's sort of taken for granted that we will optimize, right?
00:15:07
Speaker
We'll choose the maximally efficient path.
00:15:12
Speaker
And so how would you describe the pre-technique world?
00:15:18
Speaker
Is it people still trying to optimize but doing so kind of unconsciously or inefficiently?
00:15:27
Speaker
Or is it a completely different process?
00:15:32
Speaker
Well, the way Ellul thinks about it, and he gives this one example of Archimedes, where once Archimedes makes a machine that proves his numerical theories, he destroys that machine.
00:15:46
Speaker
And Elul thinks that pre-globalized technique, particularly the Greeks, which he has a reverence for, they were by nature very philosophical.
00:16:00
Speaker
So they didn't necessarily see the point of optimizing all things.
00:16:05
Speaker
They had this idea of a good life, which is philosophizing, eating grapes, drinking wine, having gay sex, things like that.
00:16:15
Speaker
And anything that and, you know, the idea is like, why would if you if you have that nice life and it's happy and it's and you can pursue intellectual endeavors, then why would you want to change it?
00:16:30
Speaker
You know, there's no reason to employ new methods of production because the production is already fine enough.
00:16:39
Speaker
What can abundance get you?
00:16:42
Speaker
So, he would desire, Elul would desire that...
00:16:50
Speaker
Although this isn't really possible anymore because we've gone so far into the world of technique.
00:16:56
Speaker
But he would have desired that when we find a new means of efficiency, that we reflect on whether there's actually any sort of, yeah, I don't like this term necessarily, but ethical purpose to use it.
00:17:15
Speaker
You know, and for example, like, so science in the conception of the Greeks was very different than our conception.
00:17:24
Speaker
So, you know, the example is that Aristotle is a scientist, as people would have thought of him back then.
00:17:31
Speaker
And what he's doing is he's just sort of going around cutting fish open, examining their bodies, diagramming them and whatnot.
00:17:39
Speaker
But science nowadays is about use, right?
00:17:45
Speaker
Everything is done for a purpose of doing something.
00:17:48
Speaker
If you discover a new material, well, it's not enough that you discovered a new material.
00:17:54
Speaker
The next step logically is find a way to use it.
00:17:58
Speaker
This is why plastic became so popular, right?
00:18:01
Speaker
and leached into the water and it's poisoning us slowly.
00:18:06
Speaker
And this is so, or a vaccine, for example, if you, if you discover some sort of vaccine it's not enough that you just potentially discovered the technology behind it.
00:18:19
Speaker
It's that now you have to immediately use it as, as, as quick as possible.
00:18:23
Speaker
Well, there's a competitive dynamic at work, right?
00:18:26
Speaker
Which is it's, um,
00:18:31
Speaker
The fear... Well, and this is sort of the argument between the guys who want to go escape to their trad remote work farm, their email job farm, where they...
00:18:54
Speaker
Like that's sort of your post-scarcity abundant life, right?
00:18:58
Speaker
Like you get to have this agrarian ideal subsidized by an email job that you work two hours a day, right?
00:19:10
Speaker
And the problem that I think a lot of our side of the internet has with that approach is that basically...
00:19:21
Speaker
the beast is coming for you.
00:19:24
Speaker
And like you, you can't afford to not use the weapons at your disposal to resist.
00:19:33
Speaker
And so like there's, there's almost, that's, I think the source of the pressure is it's not this like, it's not this like instinctive drive to optimize.
Religious Values and Secular Society's Challenges
00:19:43
Speaker
It's more like if we don't optimize, we'll get out competed and eaten.
00:19:47
Speaker
Like it's, it's, it's the difference between, um,
00:19:52
Speaker
It's the difference between a sort of hyper-competitive Malthusian environment versus the frontier where there's just all this unclaimed land that you could go live on and yeah, why would you optimize?
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, that's the societal nos, right?
00:20:15
Speaker
It's collective.
00:20:15
Speaker
It is the hive mind.
00:20:18
Speaker
That's the ideology of the hive mind.
00:20:21
Speaker
And Alul admits this.
00:20:22
Speaker
He says that...
00:20:25
Speaker
you can no longer go and live in the woods and be left alone or whatever.
00:20:33
Speaker
You know, as a Roman, for example, if you lived a few dozen kilometers away from the city, you could have more or less gone your entire life with like no contact with the state.
00:20:46
Speaker
Like the tax man wouldn't have come that far to collect taxes.
00:20:49
Speaker
You know, there was no police, really.
00:20:52
Speaker
And if you're in the empire, you know, there's no reason for the soldiers to come through.
00:20:58
Speaker
But that's not possible anymore.
00:21:00
Speaker
Wherever you go nowadays, you're followed by technique.
00:21:04
Speaker
Whether...
00:21:07
Speaker
Even if you find the most remote area in the world, you're still going to have airplanes flying over you at the very least.
00:21:17
Speaker
Unless you go to a country with a failed state, then the tax man is always going to come no matter where you live in that country.
00:21:26
Speaker
And Alula Metz, I use my telephone a lot.
00:21:29
Speaker
I use the typewriter.
00:21:30
Speaker
I use all these things.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:33
Speaker
Uh, so he's, he's very blackpilled, I guess you could say about, uh, moving on from technique.
00:21:41
Speaker
Although he, you know, he makes this argument that actually the only way, uh, you can sort of live a post technique life is through Christianity.
00:21:50
Speaker
And he makes that argument very explicitly, which, um, you know, a lot of the, the scholars, you know, so, so-called scholars studying him seem to ignore, uh, conveniently.
00:22:01
Speaker
Um,
00:22:03
Speaker
But the idea being that your Christian doctrines are pre-technique and the goal that you're aiming for in Christianity is post-technique.
00:22:15
Speaker
So that's the only way in which you can live a life that's not totally dominated by technique.
00:22:26
Speaker
I've been writing this post about my high school graduating class.
00:22:33
Speaker
And basically the fertility of the women.
00:22:39
Speaker
I mean, that's not me being sexist.
00:22:41
Speaker
TFR is always measured according to the women because that's who's the limiting factor.
00:22:46
Speaker
And it's much easier to study because a man can have more than multiple partners, et cetera.
00:22:52
Speaker
So anyway, looking at the ladies in my high school graduating class and their fertility so far and trying to...
00:23:04
Speaker
I'm not doing a regression model.
00:23:06
Speaker
I'm not tagging the data.
00:23:08
Speaker
But I'm just looking at who had kids and who didn't and trying to vibe it out.
00:23:13
Speaker
What's the difference?
00:23:16
Speaker
And one of the differences that I've identified is there is this susceptibility to hyperstimulus.
00:23:31
Speaker
Like...
00:23:33
Speaker
It's the, you've heard the story of those Beatles that found the knobbly beer bottles and they would have sex with the knobbly beer bottles instead of the other Beatles.
00:23:45
Speaker
Because the beer bottle looks like a really attractive female.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I guess what, the way that I relate this to the technique conversation is the Christians,
00:24:05
Speaker
it's not necessarily that like, well, I guess what I would say is they have a set of rules that prevent them from just pursuing the maximally efficient access to hyperstimulus.
00:24:26
Speaker
Right?
00:24:26
Speaker
Like they have another set of governing principles that,
00:24:31
Speaker
that makes sure that they are not seeking out the most attractive beetle-like object to sort of fruitlessly mate with.
00:24:46
Speaker
These rules require them to actually go find a real beetle.
00:24:51
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:24:51
Speaker
And it's the fact that it's pre... I think you're right, that there's something about it that's pre-technique, it's pre...
00:25:00
Speaker
uh, it's sort of like, um, it's sort of like booting back to an earlier version of the software that doesn't have this problem.
00:25:12
Speaker
And, uh, and what's interesting about that is that that's going to be who survives because the people, I mean, in, in my case, the people that are, uh, in, in terms of the, the, the population that I'm looking at, um,
00:25:27
Speaker
the people who had some rules that prevented them from responding to hyperstimulus are the only people who are going to be represented in the next generation.
00:25:37
Speaker
And that's going to iterate even more strongly in the second generation.
00:25:42
Speaker
And so it's sort of the, I think you're right that it's pre-technique, post-technique.
00:25:49
Speaker
It's a way of jumping over that gap and sort of surviving the cataclysm that it's creating.
00:25:58
Speaker
Right.
00:25:58
Speaker
And, but also like very basically, um, religion, uh, you know, a little use as Christianity, but you could probably, uh, use most religions as well.
00:26:10
Speaker
Like it's, it's anti-technic sort of, right.
00:26:14
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's, it can be very inconvenient at times.
00:26:18
Speaker
Uh, although, so, so, right.
00:26:20
Speaker
I mean, like think of the way, like we're, we're talking about this, like, uh,
00:26:24
Speaker
We're talking about it instrumentally.
00:26:26
Speaker
We're talking about it as a way of achieving a goal.
00:26:29
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:26:29
Speaker
Like it's inconvenient, right, to...
00:26:37
Speaker
as if everything is supposed to be convenient.
00:26:40
Speaker
But that sort of getting used to inconvenience, that something isn't completely about pursuing some sort of technical end.
00:26:54
Speaker
Well, I just listened to a podcast about... It's like the transhumanist pronatalists.
00:27:04
Speaker
It's the guys who are like, we have to have babies because the GDP is going to crash.
00:27:10
Speaker
Oh, yeah, the Elon Musk types.
00:27:13
Speaker
And home prices are going to collapse and generational wealth is going to evaporate.
00:27:19
Speaker
They've got all these reasons.
00:27:20
Speaker
And to be fair to them, there's also an element of like...
00:27:29
Speaker
hey, we believe life is good and life is beautiful and we shouldn't be saying that life is horrible and why would we bring kids in this world?
00:27:38
Speaker
So, you know, fair play to them.
00:27:41
Speaker
But there is this mentality of, because they're all secular, there's this mentality of like, we have to find a way to access the tools of religion.
00:27:56
Speaker
And use it as an instrument to achieve this goal that we have, which is maintaining... You know, that's a good goal, maintaining human prosperity and making sure that we all don't die and that we're not miserable and we don't live in a Somali-Detroit dystopia.
00:28:14
Speaker
But I guess... And I've had this conversation with tons of them.
00:28:20
Speaker
Because, you know, they'll look at...
00:28:24
Speaker
you know, some of, some of the value that we have in our communities.
00:28:27
Speaker
And they'll be like, man, I really wish that I, I really wish that I had that.
00:28:31
Speaker
I just can't buy all your wacky doctrines.
00:28:36
Speaker
Sure.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:36
Speaker
You know the type.
00:28:37
Speaker
And, and I, you know, I'm not like, I'm not trying to like own them or anything, but I'm like, it, it doesn't work that way.
00:28:45
Speaker
Like you can't, you can't do it instrumentally because the whole point is that it,
00:28:55
Speaker
It's not worth it from a calculus perspective.
00:29:00
Speaker
The math does not add up.
00:29:02
Speaker
It's more work than you think it is.
00:29:08
Speaker
It's worth it, but you really have to believe that
00:29:12
Speaker
when you die, you're going to be with your family and went like, and Jesus will come back.
00:29:16
Speaker
And like, that's what makes it make sense to do individually.
00:29:23
Speaker
Now it totally makes sense to like,
00:29:26
Speaker
live in a society where everyone else believes that.
00:29:30
Speaker
Like that's super useful.
00:29:31
Speaker
It's like, that's really good technology, really good technique to have a system where it makes everybody follow the rules because they think God will spank them.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so it's very high trust and I can operate safely.
00:29:46
Speaker
But to agree to be bound yourself by those rules doesn't fit within that technical mindset.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:56
Speaker
You know, that's exactly right.
00:29:58
Speaker
Like, uh, very bit, like you can't fake, uh, religion.
00:30:02
Speaker
Although a lot of people, uh,
00:30:05
Speaker
Try and, you know, you know, to some extent, a little would say that technique does sort of try to fill, you know, the God shaped hole within within people.
00:30:18
Speaker
But, you know, those people are always miserable and sort of decrepit.
00:30:24
Speaker
It's obviously, you know, not working for them.
00:30:30
Speaker
But yeah, yeah.
00:30:33
Speaker
Well, I wanted to also cover this project that you're working on, which is a translation
Freikorps Soldier's Memoir and Historical Context
00:30:44
Speaker
project.
00:30:44
Speaker
You're translating a book by a Fry Corps soldier.
00:30:54
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
00:30:56
Speaker
That's right.
00:30:57
Speaker
So this is a book, or I guess you could call it a memoir, by one of the captains of the Freikorps, which participated in the Baltic campaign after the first war.
00:31:16
Speaker
And at that time, Germany had invaded the Baltics for a brief period,
00:31:22
Speaker
And now the Bolsheviks were trying to push through and they had captured a good chunk of the Baltics.
00:31:29
Speaker
So the Entente and...
00:31:34
Speaker
And Germany and the government of Latvia sort of agreed to allow German Freikorps forces because the government itself was weak and incapable of defending anything at that point.
00:31:46
Speaker
And a Freikorps is like an independent filibuster army?
00:31:51
Speaker
Right, an independent volunteer union unit, as they call it.
00:31:58
Speaker
So, you know, the Fry Corps was supposed to protect the Baltics from Bolshevik invasion, and they did to some extent until they were forced to leave.
00:32:11
Speaker
I mean, they pushed out the Bolsheviks quite well, actually, which was sort of the problem for them.
00:32:16
Speaker
They had become too successful and had scared the Entente.
00:32:20
Speaker
I mean, they overthrew the provisional government of Latvia and replaced it with their own sort of puppet state.
00:32:28
Speaker
But yes, so I'm translating this memoir and should come out sometime within the first half of next year.
00:32:44
Speaker
You know, translation work is really, I think, something that sort of people have started to notice the importance of, I think, and making old books available to people.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah, particularly one of the things that I've learned from like listening to
00:33:09
Speaker
BAPS podcast and various interviews that Moldbug has done is how many books are just like Google Translate's not going to touch them and they're not going to do the screen grabs.
00:33:27
Speaker
They're just not going to make it accessible to you.
00:33:30
Speaker
It's that freedom of speech versus freedom of reach thing.
00:33:34
Speaker
But when like all of your...
00:33:39
Speaker
the dream of the internet, right, was all of the world's information accessible to everyone, right?
00:33:46
Speaker
And we've sort of integrated ourselves with this research tool.
00:33:56
Speaker
And so if Google doesn't want you to see it,
00:33:59
Speaker
you know, it's going to be really hard for you to see it.
00:34:02
Speaker
And so, uh, you know, stories like this, I mean, I, I think I had heard the word Freikor, uh, but I had no real sense of what that was.
00:34:17
Speaker
Uh, you know, I, I, because it was a German word, I was like, yeah, you know, it's probably some kind of Nazi thing.
00:34:22
Speaker
I, you know, it was a mid-century German thing.
00:34:25
Speaker
That's what I knew.
00:34:26
Speaker
And, uh,
00:34:29
Speaker
And so, so can you tell me a little bit more about that, about what those guys were like?
00:34:34
Speaker
I mean, who funded these like expeditions?
00:34:40
Speaker
So within the Baltic region, what had happened is that under the agreement signed between Germany, which was crafted by the Plenipetsk entry to the Baltics, August Winning, and the Umanis governments, the provisional government of Latvia,
00:35:00
Speaker
So the agreement was that after four weeks of service, I believe, the Fry Corps soldiers would be given plots of land in the Baltics in Latvia, and they would also be given Latvian citizenship.
00:35:13
Speaker
And because there was a lot of discontent amongst the men who had fought in the war about new Germany, because it had just recently fallen under a Soviet Democratic rule, which was totally inept and incapable of running a country.
00:35:32
Speaker
And, you know, we ultimately saw the consequences of that in the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
00:35:40
Speaker
But so these soldiers were more than willing to get back into the fight because for a lot of these guys, first of all, who had entered the war when they were 16, 17 or whatever, the war was the only thing they had known in their adult life.
00:35:59
Speaker
So coming back, it was just like, well, what do we do now?
00:36:04
Speaker
Where do we go?
00:36:05
Speaker
So this new opportunity for them was, it took on an existential form, really.
00:36:12
Speaker
And a lot of the books, a really good one is...
00:36:16
Speaker
The Outlaws by Ernst von Salaman.
00:36:20
Speaker
And that's a very easily accessible book.
00:36:22
Speaker
It's sold in a few places.
00:36:26
Speaker
But, you know, they talk about the Baltics sort of in a very romantic sense, about the trees, about the sky, about the mist and fog.
00:36:37
Speaker
So...
00:36:39
Speaker
So the soldiers, for citizenship and land, they had agreed to go and fight in the Baltics.
00:36:47
Speaker
But, you know, the Baltics did have a history of German-ness.
00:36:53
Speaker
The Germans entered the Baltics in around the 12th century or so.
00:36:58
Speaker
And that was through and, you know, facilitated the immigration to the Baltics was the Hanseatic League and the, and the, the,
00:37:09
Speaker
the crusades so a lot of a lot of the crusaders uh they became the the nobles of the region um the so-called baltic barons and uh they had you know from from the 12th century all the way to the 19th century they had lived there and their kids were up there and whatever you know there was constant lineage through there and the hanseatic league the merchants of the hanseatic league and the craftsmen they became the burgers of riga
00:37:34
Speaker
And the Germans had dominated decision making in that region for, you know, what is 600, 700 years or so.
00:37:45
Speaker
And what had started to happen in the late 1800s and the early 1900s was that ethnic tensions sort of started to become insurpassable because the Baltic Germans, the noble, had actually received significant privileges from all the empires that ruled, whether it be the Danish empire, the Swedish empire, or the Russian.
00:38:13
Speaker
They were spared from all Dainification, Sudification, Russification policies, while the Latvians weren't.
00:38:20
Speaker
But, you know, the nature of these Baltic Barians, I mean, think of who they were, right?
00:38:23
Speaker
They were...
00:38:25
Speaker
aristocratic, highly educated people who spoke several languages.
00:38:31
Speaker
They had studied all over Europe.
00:38:34
Speaker
What type of ideology does that make you a pre-discussed or easily influenced by?
00:38:44
Speaker
It's liberalism, right?
00:38:45
Speaker
That's the archetype of a person who's influenced by the Enlightenment ideas and liberalism.
00:38:50
Speaker
Cosmopolitan.
00:38:52
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:38:53
Speaker
And they thought of themselves in this way, too.
00:38:55
Speaker
Like, there's one passage by where a Baltic baron, you know, the Soviets or Bolshevich ideology had started to spread this idea of like, you know, the early ideas of deconstruction and identity and whatever.
00:39:10
Speaker
So they were forced to sort of figure out what their identity is.
00:39:14
Speaker
You know, I thought that before then, like no one had ever thought about like my identity.
00:39:18
Speaker
I don't know.
00:39:21
Speaker
So, and like, and the way he answered the question is something like,
00:39:27
Speaker
Well, first, I'm a Westerner.
00:39:29
Speaker
Second, I'm a noble.
00:39:30
Speaker
Third, I'm an academic.
00:39:32
Speaker
Fourth, I'm a German.
00:39:36
Speaker
Fifth, I'm a Baltic.
00:39:37
Speaker
Sixth, I'm a Russian.
00:39:39
Speaker
So German-ness wasn't super salient to them at the beginning.
00:39:43
Speaker
But...
00:39:46
Speaker
And actually, they were sort of very willing to cooperate with the Latvians and had implemented land reforms and feudalism reforms on their own accord without having the Russian Empire forcing them to do so.
00:40:02
Speaker
The Enlightenment ideas became very popular with them.
00:40:06
Speaker
But, you know, in the 1905 failed first Bolshevik revolution, they had become the victims of Bolsheviks, right?
00:40:17
Speaker
Latvian Bolsheviks.
00:40:19
Speaker
And they had, you know, they would burn their houses, they would beat them.
00:40:24
Speaker
A lot of manors were destroyed, a lot of property was destroyed.
00:40:27
Speaker
And that changed the situation for the Baltic Barons.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:33
Speaker
Sort of like the farm murder situation in South Africa, where it's just sort of escalating violence that's committed kind of with impunity.
00:40:44
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:40:47
Speaker
And so one of the Baltic Barians, Karl von Manteuffel Katzstangen, he writes that, despite my best efforts and the efforts of the modern Latvians and the modern Germans,
00:41:03
Speaker
we had become victims of the circumstances.
00:41:07
Speaker
The situation just developed to the point where efforts from both sides could no longer overcome the circumstances.
00:41:16
Speaker
So in order to ensure their own survival and the survival of their status as nobility, the barons adopted this idea that the Baltics should become somehow a part of Germany.
00:41:31
Speaker
And this was an idea that was sort of unthinkable just 20 years before that, before 1905, because why would the Baltic barons want to become part of Germany?
00:41:41
Speaker
They had very privileged positions in the Russian government.
00:41:45
Speaker
Most of them spoke Russian relatively fluently.
00:41:48
Speaker
And in fact, the Germans themselves, like the Reich Germans, which they're called, the Germans who lived in the
00:41:59
Speaker
in the main official German territory.
00:42:02
Speaker
They didn't really know much about the Baltic barons either.
00:42:05
Speaker
And in fact, Herbert von Hoene was arrested in Germany when he was, you know, this was a Baltic German, this was an ethnic German who spoke German as his first language.
00:42:18
Speaker
He was studying art in Italy and on his way back to the Baltics, he was arrested because they thought he was a Russian spy.
00:42:24
Speaker
So the relationship between foreign Germans and Germans who lived in the Reich wasn't necessarily one of brotherly love.
00:42:37
Speaker
The Baltic Germans felt like as if they were seen as foreigners just as much as anyone else was by the Reich.
00:42:43
Speaker
But after the First World War, when they were discovered by the German Empire, then the ideas of becoming part of Germany became more reasonable and actually the only way that they thought that they could pursue their survival.
00:43:02
Speaker
So they also made great contributions in terms of land and money in order to incentivize these soldiers to come to fight in the Baltics.
00:43:11
Speaker
They had offered up plots of their own property to Fricor soldiers in return for their service, with the idea being that the Baltics would become part of Germany in some manner, whether it was officially or an independent state that was sort of a satellite state of Germany.
00:43:31
Speaker
Well, it's fascinating to see some of the parallels with... Yeah.
00:43:41
Speaker
When you're... If you grow up not really thinking of yourself as a particular kind of... Like BAP actually has a whole rant about how the whole concept of identity is kind of gay and modern and fake.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:59
Speaker
And if you don't think of yourself as part of a team, but then all of a sudden you are being attacked on the basis of this...
00:44:16
Speaker
this division that like it was no it wasn't salient to you before, but now it's like, well, you know, if they hate all the guys who are 510, then I guess I'd better be a 510 nationalist and go sit at the prison table with all the 510 guys and mob up like, I guess that's what we have to do.
Chaos, Nationalistic Ideals, and Freikorps' Motivation
00:44:35
Speaker
You know?
00:44:35
Speaker
That's right.
00:44:38
Speaker
And yeah, 510 gang.
00:44:40
Speaker
That's me.
00:44:45
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, it's, it's man, it's so interesting.
00:44:50
Speaker
And I also think about how different, well, maybe, maybe it provides a little bit of a, of a model.
00:45:04
Speaker
You know, I'm always thinking about the frontier because I think the frontier is, is where that freedom exists.
00:45:12
Speaker
to the extent that it can be found.
00:45:13
Speaker
And you mentioned like going and living in Somalia as like the only place to escape the tax man.
00:45:26
Speaker
And I do sort of think that frontiers emerge in chaos.
00:45:37
Speaker
They emerge in disorder and there's
00:45:43
Speaker
I don't know.
00:45:44
Speaker
I guess I'm an opportunity guy.
00:45:45
Speaker
I see opportunity.
00:45:48
Speaker
As things break down, there becomes freedom of action, freedom to move, freedom to control your own space.
00:46:00
Speaker
I mean, let's be real.
00:46:01
Speaker
Even the Western frontier, the archetypal frontier of the American West,
00:46:08
Speaker
that's a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the perspective of the natives.
00:46:13
Speaker
I mean, it got wiped clean.
00:46:18
Speaker
And I think similar things are happening with respect to fertility, with respect to like the...
00:46:29
Speaker
the increasing incoherence of the sort of nation state framework of how states are organized and like it's this particular people within this particular geography.
00:46:42
Speaker
You know, I just see
00:46:45
Speaker
a lot of danger and a lot of opportunity.
00:46:47
Speaker
So, I mean, it's, you know, and like it didn't work out great for the, for the Fry Corps, like on any dimension.
00:46:54
Speaker
Right.
00:46:58
Speaker
But I mean, it provides, it provides a vision of, a vision of the frontier as being something that you kind of have to go out and make rather than something that just exists for you to occupy.
00:47:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
00:47:16
Speaker
So in this memoir, the captain of the Fry Corps, who had recently come back from the war and his unit was demobilized, and that caused some existential terror within him, I guess you could say.
00:47:37
Speaker
especially since, you know, he was worried about how the country would treat people who had fought in the war because the new Soviet ideology or the new socialist ideology, they rejected all forms of hierarchy, more or less.
00:47:59
Speaker
And, you know, thoughts would go in his head like, you know, You're talking about the official Weimar ideology?
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah, well, the ideology of, although, you know, this is, I guess, the difference between the SPD and the USPD, the USPD being the more sort of far left group and, you know, the Spartacists, as you may have heard.
00:48:24
Speaker
And a lot of the young reserve reservists, you know, young guys who hadn't actually fought in the war, but they were just reserve soldiers.
00:48:34
Speaker
They saw the Soviet or the socialist revolution in November as like their revolution.
00:48:41
Speaker
Right.
00:48:42
Speaker
And it was supposed to embolden them and break down the hierarchy so that there were no more orders they had to take from the captains and whatever.
00:48:51
Speaker
And so a lot of like generals would just be attacked on the streets, for example.
00:48:58
Speaker
And in the mind of the author, he was worried about like, would my father who, he comes from a noble family, an aristocratic family, like
00:49:08
Speaker
would my father be attacked one day by these people?
00:49:12
Speaker
So he has a lot of sort of anxiety about New Germany.
00:49:17
Speaker
So he decides to take a trip up into the mountains and do some skiing to clear his mind or whatever.
00:49:25
Speaker
And this is where, up in that mountain...
00:49:30
Speaker
that he comes up with the idea to go fight in Riga because he comes across... So, you know, in the mountains where he was, he had met some other soldiers who were there with their wives and sisters and whatever.
00:49:44
Speaker
And the ladies of that group had decided, like...
00:49:48
Speaker
you got you men are thinking way too much about you know the state of the country and the war and whatever like you guys need a break uh no more talking about politics or or reading newspapers uh while you guys are up here so like okay whatever but after some days uh he he's sitting by a fire and he comes and he grabs himself a newspaper and in the newspaper he's reading about what's happening in riga what the bolsheviks are doing um
00:50:14
Speaker
And truly, it was a reign of terror, although the Fry Corps, they reigned a good amount of terror as well afterwards in clearing the Soviets, the Bolsheviks out of the region.
00:50:30
Speaker
But yeah, so there was a good amount of legit terror happening against just the normal people by the Bolsheviks, like mass starvation in the Baltics, really.
00:50:41
Speaker
Um, and actually they had passed laws where you weren't allowed to trade like your possessions for food anymore.
00:50:48
Speaker
Um, so you just, everyone's starving and you're not even allowed to procure food.
00:50:55
Speaker
Uh, so, uh, he's reading about what's happening in Riga and he decides, you know, he, he hadn't really known what a fry for was at that point.
00:51:04
Speaker
Um,
00:51:05
Speaker
So he decides, like, I have to do something about this.
00:51:07
Speaker
You know, like there are, and he thinks in nationalistic terms, of course.
00:51:12
Speaker
He thinks, like, there are Germans there who are being abused by these Bolsheviks.
00:51:16
Speaker
I can't just let them be abused.
00:51:19
Speaker
I have to do something.
00:51:21
Speaker
So, you know, he creates a Freikorps, and then he gets the permission to go and make that frontier, to make the Baltics a frontier.
00:51:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:33
Speaker
So yeah, like frontiers very much do come through chaos and you sort of have to you have to make it a frontier.
00:51:42
Speaker
You have to seek it out.
00:51:43
Speaker
It doesn't just it doesn't just come to you to whatever extent that a modern frontier could exist.
00:51:53
Speaker
It's it's interesting also when you talk about the revolution in Germany, I had never
00:52:02
Speaker
You know, you grow up hearing about Weimar as basically like 1990s Denmark or something.
00:52:11
Speaker
Like they were just trying to be, they were just trying to be a liberal Western democracy.
00:52:17
Speaker
And like, yeah, it, yeah, it was, you know, it was socialist and it was, it was, there was the, the abuses and, and the,
00:52:29
Speaker
the sort of depredations of that regime were pretty extreme.
00:52:34
Speaker
There's a great book.
00:52:35
Speaker
Um, Oh shoot.
00:52:37
Speaker
What's it called?
00:52:39
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:52:39
Speaker
Necessary war by, by Buchanan.
00:52:42
Speaker
He does his sort of, uh, his sort of history of, of, of world war one and world war two.
00:52:47
Speaker
And, um, you know, he's, he's definitely got an ax to grind for sure about, about, uh, he really hates Churchill for, for one thing.
00:52:57
Speaker
Um,
00:52:58
Speaker
But it's fascinating as an illustration of like, you know, people didn't just go insane all at once for no reason.
00:53:12
Speaker
Like there was starvation and there was like these insane...
00:53:17
Speaker
laws and really terrible things happening.
00:53:19
Speaker
And like, it's, I guess what I view all of that as is like, there's a cautionary tale there, I think, about letting a justified rage dictate your actions.
Neoclassical Realism and Leaders' Perceptions
00:53:36
Speaker
And, you know, letting it be misplaced and letting it, one of the things that Zero HP Lovecraft has said is like,
00:53:44
Speaker
Whatever your ideology is, you need to be prepared to have it in the hands of morons.
00:53:52
Speaker
Like, because that's who's going to be the actual like functionaries and police and prosecutors and HR people.
00:54:02
Speaker
All of the foot soldiers of, you know, your glorious revolution are going to be morons.
00:54:08
Speaker
Right.
00:54:09
Speaker
And so like you have to think about how your ideology will be executed in the hands of people like that.
00:54:15
Speaker
Right.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:16
Speaker
I mean, one of the theories of international relations is
00:54:21
Speaker
I hate these academic terms, but it's called neoclassical realism.
00:54:29
Speaker
And what that basically says is that there's an objective international structure, but obviously humans perceive things, like everything is done by humans.
00:54:44
Speaker
And often humans can misperceive the reality of the international structure.
00:54:52
Speaker
And so the point is that like leaders matter actually, contrary to some of the other realist perspectives on international relations.
00:55:04
Speaker
Right.
00:55:04
Speaker
Like it's all just impersonal forces and, you know, if it wasn't this guy, it would have been some other guy.
00:55:10
Speaker
Right.
00:55:10
Speaker
And the only thing, like the only way to think about war is just through material capabilities and, right.
00:55:18
Speaker
How many guns did that country have?
00:55:19
Speaker
How many guns did that country have?
00:55:21
Speaker
You can figure out the structure of the world that way.
00:55:26
Speaker
Hitler was a buffoon.
00:55:30
Speaker
His perception of the international order was fundamentally buffoonish.
00:55:41
Speaker
He wasn't able to perceive things accurately.
00:55:45
Speaker
And
00:55:47
Speaker
And even his generals would tell him that what you're doing is stupid.
00:55:54
Speaker
This is not how Europe is structured right now.
00:55:58
Speaker
But he wouldn't listen to them, obviously, and...
00:56:03
Speaker
And I think there's also this... They had a similarly modernist instrumental approach to culture and religion.
00:56:14
Speaker
And they were like, well, we'll do Christianity, but it'll be the kind of Christianity that's maximally useful to the German state.
00:56:22
Speaker
And we're going to throw in some occult elements because this symbol looks cool.
00:56:28
Speaker
And it was very...
00:56:33
Speaker
silly in hindsight and then it's like even even down to like you know i don't know if i'm making too much of this or not but like
00:56:44
Speaker
the fact that, you know, toward the middle of the war, he's like all stimmed out.
00:56:49
Speaker
Cause it's like, ah, this, you know, it's, it's, it's better living through chemistry.
00:56:53
Speaker
It's let's, let's get on, let's get on Adderall and modafinil and, and the surely there'll be no consequences to my personality or behavior.
00:57:03
Speaker
And that goes back to like this, you know, well, I mean, like it's, it's maybe a, it's maybe a,
00:57:12
Speaker
a challenge to the, the Nietzschean like will to power the, the, the like limitlessness, the like, you know, whatever it takes kind
Nietzsche's Philosophy on History
00:57:26
Speaker
of mentality.
00:57:26
Speaker
It's, it's like it, it, it, uh, what if you're not the over man who's worthy to, to write new laws on new tablets?
00:57:34
Speaker
What if your new laws are retarded?
00:57:35
Speaker
Cause you're kind of retarded.
00:57:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:40
Speaker
That's right.
00:57:40
Speaker
Like, like, whatever you just, whatever you just make bad decisions.
00:57:43
Speaker
And yeah.
00:57:44
Speaker
Anyway, I want to talk also about just in general, this, this view of history and why, why history sucks so bad.
00:57:53
Speaker
Why, why are academics?
00:57:56
Speaker
I mean, you could, you could almost make it a conversation about like, why are academics bad at everything?
00:58:02
Speaker
Like why, why are they just so bad at, at perceiving reality right now?
00:58:08
Speaker
Right.
00:58:10
Speaker
I mean, where do you begin criticizing academics, right?
00:58:16
Speaker
Oh, you can start anywhere.
00:58:19
Speaker
So I think one of the best writings about...
00:58:24
Speaker
It's the study of history is by Nietzsche and it's called the use and abuse of history for life, I think.
00:58:31
Speaker
And he he he comes up for he starts with saying that man, to some extent, envies the animal who he sees just like eating his food and being happy and not worrying about anything.
00:58:51
Speaker
and it's because this animal lives ahistorically, right?
00:58:56
Speaker
He doesn't remember things.
00:58:57
Speaker
He doesn't remember what he did yesterday or what happened 100 years ago.
00:59:00
Speaker
He has no idea who his parents are or whatever.
00:59:04
Speaker
But man is constantly remembering things.
00:59:09
Speaker
He lives historically.
00:59:11
Speaker
He knows what happened yesterday.
00:59:13
Speaker
He knows what happened 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, and so on.
00:59:17
Speaker
And so he can only perceive things in the context of the things that he knows about history.
00:59:24
Speaker
So then, but Nietzsche doesn't say that, you know, because Nietzsche believes that ultimately everything that I guess you
00:59:35
Speaker
everything should drive you to action, right?
00:59:38
Speaker
It's supposed to get you to do great things.
00:59:41
Speaker
So Nietzsche doesn't say that you should just forget all the time, forget everything you know and just act.
00:59:47
Speaker
He says that there are three methods of studying history and these can be both used and they can be abused and you have to find just the right way and the right circumstance to use each one.
01:00:03
Speaker
And if I remember right, the three methods are the monumental use of history, the antiquarian use of history, and the critical use of history.
01:00:15
Speaker
And I guess you could say maybe the most important one, although anytime you talk about Nietzsche,
01:00:24
Speaker
Everything you say about him is like a very base level generalization with like 100 caveats.
01:00:31
Speaker
But the most important one, I guess you could say, is the monumental vision of history or study of history, which is...
01:00:40
Speaker
You study the great men of the past to know what's possible, right?
01:00:45
Speaker
To know what you can do, to know what they did so that you can maybe use what they did, imitate what they did so that you yourself can become a great man.
01:00:56
Speaker
And the second mode is the antiquarian history.
01:00:59
Speaker
And this is sort of more or less what we conceive history of.
01:01:05
Speaker
But although we abuse it instead of using it, I think you would say.
01:01:11
Speaker
And that's sort of knowing the history, you know, like...
01:01:16
Speaker
Who put the walls up in the city?
01:01:20
Speaker
Who built that bridge?
01:01:22
Speaker
When was that bridge built?
01:01:23
Speaker
Names and dates.
01:01:24
Speaker
Well, yes, but also as a method of rooting yourself in your society.
01:01:32
Speaker
The history of the city, he says, becomes the history of the man.
01:01:39
Speaker
who lives in it, right?
01:01:40
Speaker
He knows like, oh, my great ancestors built this city or whatever.
01:01:45
Speaker
And so I'm rooted in this through that.
01:01:49
Speaker
And maybe the which is maybe the Latter-day Saint, like view of genealogy.
01:01:55
Speaker
Sure.
01:01:55
Speaker
Like, yeah, it's to it's to tell you who you are.
01:01:58
Speaker
Sure.
01:02:01
Speaker
Although he would say that, like, that's that's being abused now because it
01:02:06
Speaker
It turned history into figures and facts.
01:02:10
Speaker
And the way that we perceive war is through like dates and whatever and newspaper articles and videos online.
01:02:19
Speaker
Right.
01:02:19
Speaker
You know, the way that most people see the war in Ukraine, for example, is by videos on the Internet and things like that.
01:02:27
Speaker
What it's supposed to do is create some reverence in you for the world, like some respect that you have for what has come before.
01:02:38
Speaker
That's the use of it.
01:02:40
Speaker
And then you have the critical use of history, which is sort of exactly what it says it is.
01:02:47
Speaker
If you live in a time that's not conducive to creating great men, it's the method by which you look at the past so that you are able to criticize the time that you live in.
01:02:57
Speaker
But he says that the man who critiques for no reason becomes suffocated.
01:03:08
Speaker
And this is what we see, right?
01:03:11
Speaker
Very common today that people use history as a means of criticism and they use ideas like justice and injustice, which Nietzsche would say that
01:03:23
Speaker
Like most people have no basis to judge justice and injustice fundamentally because, you know, in that critical view of history, you know, everything is, you know, the place that we exist right now has come from injustice.
01:03:39
Speaker
So using it as a basis to criticize history is meaningless.
01:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, digging up that Confederate general bones and breaking down his statue.
01:03:50
Speaker
That's not about history.
01:03:52
Speaker
That's about a war being prosecuted now.
01:03:57
Speaker
Exactly.
01:03:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:59
Speaker
So, you know, what are our historians doing?
01:04:02
Speaker
Well, you know, they're chiefly criticizing, I mean, obviously.
01:04:06
Speaker
And I guess the neutral perspective of history is just to sort of create encyclopedic knowledge.
01:04:14
Speaker
That's what our academics think, like, is their job, sort of.
01:04:18
Speaker
But Nietzsche would say that history is supposed to serve an end.
01:04:23
Speaker
It's supposed to help create you into a great man, to get you to act in a great fashion.
01:04:31
Speaker
So you're not necessarily, you know, you're not supposed to forget, but you can't live...
01:04:37
Speaker
in the shadow of history.
01:04:39
Speaker
Because if you're constantly thinking about, you know, the critical perspective, the injustice or justice of the past, if you're constantly thinking about the data points of history, then you're just going to be suffocated and unable to act, which we see this in a lot of people.
01:04:58
Speaker
They're totally... Yeah, I think BAP...
Critique of Modern Historical Analysis
01:05:04
Speaker
I think he said, I'm just going to keep quoting BAP because I don't read books.
01:05:08
Speaker
I just listen to the BAP podcast.
01:05:09
Speaker
I'm complete sued.
01:05:13
Speaker
But he talks about biography as being the most honest form of history and even in particular autobiography.
01:05:22
Speaker
And like, you know, obviously by the academic model of history, that's like the least valuable, right?
01:05:30
Speaker
Because it's totally biased.
01:05:32
Speaker
It's one person's perspective.
01:05:35
Speaker
It's an N of one, right?
01:05:36
Speaker
You can't make a statistical model on an autobiography.
01:05:41
Speaker
Right.
01:05:43
Speaker
But if your goal is to become a particular type of person,
01:05:51
Speaker
then what you really want is a view of that type of person.
01:05:57
Speaker
And like the best view you could get would be the view from the inside.
01:06:00
Speaker
Right.
01:06:02
Speaker
And, and how did they perceive the choices that were ahead of them?
01:06:07
Speaker
And how did they decide this is the path?
01:06:11
Speaker
And, you know, and like, there's definitely a role for the critical there, which is, you know,
01:06:20
Speaker
Maybe they didn't see 100% accurately.
01:06:24
Speaker
Maybe what they thought was prudence was actually luck.
01:06:29
Speaker
Maybe they undersell the value of their acumen.
01:06:35
Speaker
You do have to interrogate their decision-making process a little bit.
01:06:38
Speaker
It's not blind hero worship, but it should be like, how do I become the kind of person that could do the great things that that person did?
01:06:49
Speaker
Right.
01:06:50
Speaker
And, you know, our academics aren't interested in doing that, in creating, you know, there's no high culture right now in the pursuit of creating great men.
01:07:00
Speaker
It's just sort of either encyclopedic or critical and critical without reason.
01:07:06
Speaker
It's almost, well, I don't think it's almost, I think it is ideologically opposed to that kind of analysis.
01:07:13
Speaker
Yes.
01:07:14
Speaker
It's like, don't tell me about the great men.
01:07:16
Speaker
I want to hear about the roots that they dug up and like what did their shit piles look like?
01:07:25
Speaker
What was in their shit piles?
01:07:27
Speaker
Like, and you know, what kind of roots and berries did the common people eat and what were their folk dances like?
01:07:34
Speaker
And like, yeah, that's right.
01:07:35
Speaker
It's very like hoi polloi.
01:07:37
Speaker
And like that, that's interesting as, as, as trivia, but it doesn't lead anywhere.
01:07:45
Speaker
Right.
01:07:45
Speaker
Nietzsche isn't saying that you should forget these things necessarily.
01:07:54
Speaker
He actually says that forgetting and remembering aren't something that happened to you.
01:07:59
Speaker
They're active things.
01:08:01
Speaker
They're active actions that you take.
01:08:04
Speaker
So in terms of history, for example, like the ability to forget history, I guess you could say, isn't that you forget these factoids and trivia and maybe the injustices that you perceive of the past, but it's the ability to go beyond them, you know,
01:08:29
Speaker
Go beyond good and evil, I guess you could say.
01:08:35
Speaker
And, you know, Kierkegaard sort of writes about forgetting in the same manner.
01:08:42
Speaker
Because for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, they sort of had...
01:08:46
Speaker
They don't have teleological views on history, but they do have teleological views on man.
01:08:52
Speaker
Man is supposed to get somewhere.
01:08:54
Speaker
So for Nietzsche, he's supposed to become like the overman.
01:08:58
Speaker
And for Kierkegaard, he's supposed to become the knight of faith.
01:09:01
Speaker
And Kierkegaard says that man should not forget because to forget would be an act of a lesser creature.
01:09:13
Speaker
Right.
01:09:14
Speaker
So like the cat of the butterfly forgets who the caterpillar was.
01:09:20
Speaker
But and for Nietzsche, it's not that you should become an animal, right?
01:09:28
Speaker
That you just forget everything you've done before.
01:09:33
Speaker
He makes I think he makes this joke about.
01:09:36
Speaker
So the man asks the animal, like, why won't you talk to me?
01:09:41
Speaker
And the animal says, well, I would, but I immediately forget
01:09:45
Speaker
The animal would say I would, but I immediately forget what I was going to say.
01:09:49
Speaker
But before he can say that, he immediately forgets, right?
01:09:55
Speaker
So the ability to forget is something we've sort of lost because everything is encyclopedic.
01:10:05
Speaker
The academic is expected to just have all these factoids about history in which he builds his entire context of the world on.
01:10:13
Speaker
Well, but again, it's because your memory is so intensely mediated and outsourced.
01:10:22
Speaker
It's not that we've lost the ability to forget.
01:10:24
Speaker
It's that we've lost the agency over what is forgotten.
01:10:31
Speaker
It's Google that decides what is remembered and what is forgotten.
01:10:35
Speaker
Unless we make this very deliberate, very labor intensive effort to go find texts from the interwar period in Eastern Europe and translate them from German to English and then hawk them on a podcast.
Studying Technique and Pursuing Truth
01:10:52
Speaker
I mean, that's...
01:10:54
Speaker
That's the level of effort that it takes.
01:10:57
Speaker
And so I think we got to get ready for the Europe call, but I wanted to close with what is the value of your course of study?
01:11:11
Speaker
You're studying of technique, you're studying of philosophy.
01:11:15
Speaker
What do you see as the, well, and maybe you haven't figured out exactly how it cashes out yet.
01:11:22
Speaker
That's, you know, that's fine.
01:11:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:24
Speaker
But what is the hope that drives this line of study?
01:11:32
Speaker
What are you trying to find?
01:11:38
Speaker
There are times where you're supposed to act, but all things should lead to some sort of action, I think.
01:11:52
Speaker
But there's also a value in analyzing, and this is where I deviate from Nietzsche a little bit, I think.
01:12:00
Speaker
I do think it's valuable to understand what exactly you're dealing with.
01:12:06
Speaker
And technique theory, in my view, is the best method of...
01:12:15
Speaker
of so to say is to clear up um what's happening and i think it because it transcends ideology because you'll have like all the people who are who are totally subversive to to civilization right now they'll all profess different types of ideology right but ultimately you sort of act in the same way and you know what's so what's underlying that and i think that that's technique so and the way that uh you you escape this is
01:12:44
Speaker
to some extent, like knowing what people in the past did in similar situations.
01:12:50
Speaker
Although, you know, we do live in peculiar times, and I think all times are peculiar because they're
01:12:57
Speaker
the construct of what led up to them.
01:13:01
Speaker
And so you want the ability to abstract from the past and to be able to apply it to the present.
01:13:08
Speaker
And that's the part where it leads you to action.
01:13:13
Speaker
So unfortunately, we don't have a class of, really a class of people in the academies or really anywhere who are studying the past in terms of
01:13:27
Speaker
creating something better, creating a high culture.
01:13:30
Speaker
But the next best thing we have is us.
01:13:34
Speaker
And to whatever ability that we can, it's valuable to take the study of the world and the past, which I think originates in thinking that's much more similar to us in the first place, which has been abused and beaten to death.
01:13:55
Speaker
But
01:13:56
Speaker
we can take it and repurpose it in a classical tradition and use that to, you know, because the only way that you're going to create men is through a high culture.
01:14:09
Speaker
So like, well, maybe the us right now won't necessarily be great men because we grew up in a, in a decrepit culture, but we can set the foundation for a high culture, which will eventually produce a great men.
01:14:25
Speaker
And, you know, the ultimate exit, I guess, is a society in which, you know, there's, you know, everyone is sort of exited out of the creptiness that haunted the previous decades or so.
01:14:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:45
Speaker
When I tweet about when we win.
01:14:47
Speaker
Right.
01:14:48
Speaker
It's always my sons on top of the throne of skulls.
01:14:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:51
Speaker
It's not me.
01:14:52
Speaker
Right.
01:14:54
Speaker
And I think
01:14:56
Speaker
Well, and you mentioned the value of analysis.
01:14:58
Speaker
I think, I think the value in analysis, it's, it's kind of an act of faith.
01:15:04
Speaker
It's an act of saying, I don't know exactly how this leads to the answer, but I need to know the truth.
01:15:12
Speaker
Like it's sort of the truth will make you free.
01:15:14
Speaker
Like, like there's a, there's a, there's a path through this.
01:15:19
Speaker
Even if I can't see how, what I'm learning right now instrumentally leads to, uh,
01:15:25
Speaker
to the end I want to the action I need to take.
01:15:28
Speaker
Um, it's, there is, there is intrinsic value in understanding your situation and it will lead to, uh, the, the action.
01:15:37
Speaker
And, and a lot of times if you are, if you are studying just for, you know, tell me what to do.
01:15:45
Speaker
Um, you often don't have the sort of intellectual stamina to reach the depth where the answer really is.
01:15:54
Speaker
Um,
01:15:55
Speaker
Well, this has been a lot of fun, man.
The Exit Podcast's Mission and Vision
01:15:58
Speaker
I appreciate you coming on.
01:16:00
Speaker
It was my pleasure.
01:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, thank you.
01:16:04
Speaker
And my ambition as far as high culture, I want to get the guys who want to make a pile of money.
01:16:16
Speaker
I want to get them a pile of money so they can subscribe to the NIMS stack.
01:16:20
Speaker
And because there's a...
01:16:25
Speaker
there's a lot of really smart guys on our side of things, uh, who currently, you know, are, are independent enough to do a lot of interesting thinking, but I also want to get those guys set up to where they can support families and have the real, the real patronage that, uh, that maybe you saw in, in cultures that, that,
01:16:53
Speaker
that did have this kind of intellectual ferment.
01:16:57
Speaker
Uh, so that's, that's my dream is to sort of wed these worlds of, of, of intellect and culture with the, the, the guys who are just great at making money.
01:17:07
Speaker
Cause those guys value this stuff.
01:17:09
Speaker
They just don't, they just don't live in that world.
01:17:12
Speaker
And if you can get those worlds talking and, and, and communicating with each other, they can both be,
01:17:19
Speaker
made a lot better off and Nim will tutor your sons, your princelings.
01:17:27
Speaker
That's right, I'll give them a class qualification.
01:17:30
Speaker
That's right, that's right.
01:17:32
Speaker
Thanks everybody for being here.
01:17:33
Speaker
It's nimachiragi.substack.com if you wanna learn more about him.
01:17:38
Speaker
If you wanna get involved in the group as a whole, it's exitgroup.us.
01:17:43
Speaker
You can also learn more about kind of the projects that we're doing at exitgroup.substack.com.
01:17:47
Speaker
Thanks everybody for being here.