Exploring the Minimal Self: Narcissism, Politics, and Our Collective Psyche With Elijah Emery

What if the key to understanding contemporary politics, society, and culture were hidden in our collective psyche? In this thought-provoking episode, we explore Christopher Lasch's influential book "The Minimal Self" and its implications for our modern world. Join us as we delve into the fascinating concept of narcissism, the intriguing idea of the "parties of the psyche," and the relevance of Freudian and neo-Freudian theories to politics and society today.

Our conversation takes us through the evolution of psychoanalysis and its interaction with politics, focusing on the role of narcissism in shaping our understanding of the self and our relationship with the world. We also discuss the concept of the "liberal ego," the ways in which it has been influenced by various intellectual and cultural movements, and how these theories continue to shape the current American political climate. Along the way, we touch on the challenges faced by today's working and middle classes and the difficulty of creating a politics that fits with Lasch's ideal of selfhood.

Don't miss this engaging and enlightening exploration into the depths of our collective psyche and its influence on the world we live in today. You won't look at politics and society the same way again.

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip  ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
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You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Narcissism and Politics in 'The Minimal Self
• 17:02 Psychological Parties Relevant Today
• 31:55 Liberal Ego and Therapeutic Politics
• 45:12 The Liberal Tradition and Psychoanalysis
• 1:02:37 Collapse of Morality and Politics
• 1:15:23 New Left and Personal Politics
• 1:22:46 Individuality and Political Polarization
• 1:39:16 Debating Marxist and Freudian Theories
• 1:53:49 Critiquing Lash's Reading of Feminists
• 2:09:17 Cybernetics, Narcissism, and Ecological Consciousness
• 2:25:58 Return to Liberalism Debate
• 2:32:49 Generational Differences and Myth Making
• 2:44:58 Politics and Social Change Today
• 2:54:44 Attitudes Towards Women in Lash's Work

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:47

Hello and welcome to Varm blog, although Elijah comes on enough that we should probably give this its own title eventually. I give everything else a title, but I have no idea what I would call it. I was thinking about call it to heaps, talk about lash, but eventually we'll get done with talking about lash.

Elijah Emery: 1:04

They'll be like lash talk, like car talk.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07

Yeah, today we're talking about the last two chapters in this book. The minimal self Got my good old Norton edition and I know it's old because the retail price is 10 bucks, so Let's see when was this printed actually? Yeah, this is, this is an actual 1984 edition, so OG here. Now we're talking specifically about and I'm just going to Give people the chapter titles is chapter six, the politics of the psyche, and we're going to go into chapter seven, the ideological soul on the ego, which is a long chapter actually. But those are the last two chapters in the book and while they are kind of different From culture of narcissism and that lash, learn more about different Categorizations of narcissism and kind of neo Freudian theory from the 50s 60s and also takes an explicit position.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27

Yeah, well, let's go into that. What is lash's position on narcissism? before we get into The politics of the of the self?

Elijah Emery: 2:37

So lash makes clear something that he didn't in the previous book, which is that he thinks that narcissism is useful as a motive analysis because it illuminates the question, the right questions, and He makes clear that he thinks it's an approach which has been taken Because the other approaches, the politics of the super ego and the politics of the ego, have so exhausted and disgrace themselves Because of the existence of World War two and the remainder of the 20th century. And so his position on narcissism, as it asks the right questions and comes up with the wrong answers.

C. Derick Varn: 3:15

So let's let's dig into this a little bit, because a lot of people get stuck on Narcissism as a cyclonic category and they identify that with narcissistic Personality disorder and the diagnostic and statistical manual, which it is not. We are not talking about the same thing And that needs to be understood. In fact, i would actually go so far as to say Narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder is not actually contiguous, although is related to analytic, psychoanalytic conceptions of narcissism, and neither one of them are quite exactly Lashes conception of narcissism, which is confusing. But what are you gonna do? I mean, one of the things that you have to realize about narcissism, and I think it came up on an interview I did with Daniel cut, but it's something that I've thought about for a while. People think that narcissism is being in love with the self. That the myth is is that narcissists fell in love with himself and The way Freud and later Freudians actually take it is not that narcissists fell in love with himself If narcissists did not know the boundaries of the self and drowned in it.

Elijah Emery: 4:30

Yeah to lash.

C. Derick Varn: 4:31

The explicit danger is the lack of recognition that the the Characteristic quality of narcissism is a blurring of the boundaries between the self and the outside world right, and I Think we can go into this and subject object that, going all the way back to Hegel, like the reason why The blurring of the boundaries is so important, is that it it prevents self formation.

C. Derick Varn: 4:55

The self formation actually is predicated on distinguishing yourself from someone else, picking up the ability to communicate that, that differentiation through the means of someone else, through language to culture, through through economic activity, and being able to socially reproduce yourself in ways that Continue that differentiation with others, which is, you know, lash is also one of these figures. Who really understands that That the, the individualism and collectivism problem is is is a false binary, like you don't have one without the other. It is. It is against the collective of which an individual is defined. Lash gets that and I think, even in talking about this in like modern psychological terms, that those kinds of frameworks are still more or less true. But I do think people get hung up. We get, particularly when we get into these chapters, on the fact we are operating with Freudian categories and not like post 1990s, psychotherapy, neurological or disorder categories, like that's not really what's going on here.

Elijah Emery: 6:12

Yeah, yeah, i mean this. This proceeds The the common understandings we have. This is from a time I think that This is something that that really gets to me when psychoanalysis as a, as a discipline, was a lot more, you know, confident of itself and of its interaction with politics. That has been true for most of the past 30 to 40 years, you know. So he's engaging with these, in part because psychoanalysis was, you know, have these totalizing and and huge ambitions which he goes into in these chapters, and so he thinks it's, it's Becoming the most relevant category of debate across society Right now.

C. Derick Varn: 7:01

I think that's that's interesting, just to to get into What we're gonna talk about versus what we talk about with MPD, just before we get into the social stuff here. I don't think you could do What lash is doing with like modern categories from the DSM, which is narcissistic personality disorder, with the with the Three subtypes, which is grandiose, fragile and and exhibitionistic, and That's interesting. You could do something with like Communal narcissism, i guess, which is something that is not really recognized in the diagnostic and and Statistical manual and even the way that we think about it, from the DSM, for which is unprincipled, amorous, compensatory, elitist and normal. Nar verses of narcissistic personality disorder again didn't exist yet the earliest framework that we have Is probably cohorts, which is like what is that? is that where the type one and type two? or is it Ericsson where the type one and type two Come from?

Elijah Emery: 8:26

you know, I don't know, i'm not, i'm not super familiar with it.

C. Derick Varn: 8:29

Yeah, that's a problem. One of the problems with lashes is, even though he's fairly recent You know, this book was published in my lifetime, fairly in my lifetime, but in my lifetime- Yeah, but you read it like, all of the people he's talking about are like non-existent at this point.

C. Derick Varn: 8:46

Basically, yeah, i mean It is when I was going through this like To go back particularly, more interestingly, more this book than culture of narcissism, which I find this interesting. The names in here and the critiques he's talking about Have been largely dropped from public discourse. We did not pick this up, though.

Elijah Emery: 9:10

I will say when I was going through with, i thought a lot of the assumptions that he was talking about built into, say, ego psychology or behavioral psychology, are still super relevant, and so what's funny about this is that as this has become less descriptive of the psychological terrain, it retains a lot of descriptive of politics.

C. Derick Varn: 9:32

I think it's more descriptive of politics frankly than it did in 1984, which which puts you in this weird place with it. Because let's start off with the first assertion, from the politics of the psyche and that is the reason why it is better to frame this in terms of psychoanalytic categories is everybody from conservative to liberal to far left to new leftist, has internalized, whether they realize it or not in any way And in different ways, that the person was political. So he starts from that assumption that the person was political and has collapsed politics, like we think about it, and as we have to model politics on something like a model of the individual mind. I think that's interesting when you think about all the political temperament shit that we've seen for the past 15 years, a lot of which is empirically interesting, but it's hard to explain the past with it Because, like, for example, the biggest predictor of political temperament seems to be either genetic or age, and then how. But then you're like well, how the hell do you explain the fact that that we weren't evenly distributed politically? you know, for most of our history that's really a post 1980s phenomenon where political temperaments and political ideology are aligned, and there's some stuff that lash got me thinking about.

C. Derick Varn: 11:08

I'm gonna float as we talk about this, when I was, when I was thinking about this is one of the things that Daniel Bessner points out is we're actually in a moment of mass identification with politics, but actual politics is the least populist that it's been.

C. Derick Varn: 11:24

And populist not in the sense of like there's a populist movement because there is one, but populist in that popular opinion actually has an effect on policy, because it just empirically kind of doesn't. So I think it's interesting to me because this adds something to it. If you, if you take the 70s as the beginning of the move away from populist politics into this more truly neoliberal, managed terrain and I'm using neoliberal care specifically, i'm not using it, i'm not using it generically. I mean like the specific enciation of financialized capitalism where the state creates a whole lot of markets and kind of forces people into them indirectly that I find this to be particularly helpful and maybe We, as we get into this, why this still holds up, even though that the social reproduction schemes he talks about in the culture of narcissism have collapsed and they're done like I mean, i think, i think that the whole what he's talking about in this book is, as you say, it's the collapse of that social reproduction scheme and the coming of a new political order which is neoliberalism.

Elijah Emery: 12:55

It's an identification of the new boundaries of debate within neoliberalism, or what their possibilities are. And so I was thinking of this in the context of the seven thesis on American politics which you've been going into. So much of it is focused on class, the alignment I was thinking.

C. Derick Varn: 13:12

well, actually, this describes in many ways much more the realignment of the parties around assumptions of what locus of control as possible in some ways, but not all We go in the seven, the seven thesis by Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, who which, when you listen, you will find out how angry I get at this thesis, actually because most of it isn't new And with Matt Carp's response, which I find also not particularly, i find it descriptively compelling and accurate, but as he says it's not causal, he doesn't actually explain the causes, he's just describing it. I think it's interesting though when he bases the breakdown in, because it becomes economics, but it doesn't manifest that way. He. I'll just read verbatim what he says long established distinction between left and right, liberalism and conservatism, revolutionary politics and reformist politics, progressive and reactionary, are breaking down in the face of new questions about technology, consumption, women's rights, environmental decay and nuclear armaments, questions to which no one has a ready, ready made answers.

C. Derick Varn: 14:29

What I find interesting about right now is, with the exception of environmental decay, these have all been questions, and they've been questions settled actually by government collusion with the market, which I find. I find interesting because last seems to both kind of understand I mean, you know, and it's hard to follow him for this in 1984. He kind of understands what's happening, but not entirely, like I don't think anybody would have been completely understood the level of financialization that really started to happen from 1976 forward And to probably about the middle of the 80s, which is when last really gets concerned about neoliberalism proper, like you know and I think, if you look at the earlier, the earlier books, a lot of the writings by the new left they assume that the response to a profitability crisis is going to be either total societal breakdown and revolution or fascism.

Elijah Emery: 15:38

Yeah, And neoliberalism is neither of those things.

C. Derick Varn: 15:41

Right, which which, by the way, is my big warning about people who think we're in a final crisis right now, because we've seen this before.

Elijah Emery: 15:51

Yeah, the history of left-wing writing is like basically people saying we're in a final crisis, that being proven wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 15:57

Yeah, all the way back to 1850. Yeah, so, so that comes up in this book too, but in another chapter about the apocalyptic nature of current politics.

Elijah Emery: 16:11

This is him that that chapter, i should say, is not lash saying we're in a final crisis. It's him kind of like being like man, i was so wrong about saying we were in a final crisis.

C. Derick Varn: 16:21

Right, it's like it's almost him saying like well, i believed in Suizi too much, that crisis were over. Then I thought we were in a final crisis. Now I think like maybe they're cycles and they're bad.

Elijah Emery: 16:36

Yeah, Like adoption of the business cycle mentality.

C. Derick Varn: 16:41

Which is. Which is interesting, though, because last year is actually early to realize that.

Elijah Emery: 16:47

Yeah, well, he's, i think he's, and I think that this is actually a good example of he's early to a lot of things, which is why he's so interesting to read still and why he remains very relevant today. Can I say? I think we have two main tasks before us this evening. Okay, which is illuminating the parties of the psyche and what he means about them in the context of his own time, and then discerning whether or not they're still relevant today and precisely how.

C. Derick Varn: 17:15

Yeah, one of the things that I will say when I was reading these parties of the psyche is that I now see where last says they still vaguely line up to conservative, liberal and you left. You know roughly he doesn't, he can't say it's not useful to totally think about him that way, but that you can kind of see alignments with them. I think now you really can't like it's. I can't say that the left is the party of the anything or the right is the party of the anything.

Elijah Emery: 17:53

What I kind of noticed is that there's no party of the super ego left in American life And that one thing that has So the party of the super ego.

C. Derick Varn: 18:02

To premise this, Yeah, it's the first party.

Elijah Emery: 18:04

So let's go there And so very simply quote they regard a restoration of the social super ego and a strong parental authorities the best hope of social stability and cultural renewal. In this case, the party of the super ego is taking account of, like the general collapse and society in the 70s, and they're saying that the reason why is that there's a disrespect for institutions, there's a disrespect for parents. Basically, modernism has like destroyed everything, authority has declined and people have to have a renaissance of guilt, in the words of Phillip raff, to stem the rising tide of impulse.

C. Derick Varn: 18:46

Yeah, basically we got to put down this Dionysian remote. no more Nietzsche, absolutely.

Elijah Emery: 18:52

Lash devotes very little time to this, in part because it's very simple to understand. there's a repressive apparatus of laws and moral dogmas which enforce moral conformity, he says, but at the same time, more interestingly, he says that there's little confidence and external controls, laws against pornography and abortion, with a restoration of the death penalty, except the symbolic expressions of shared beliefs from these people.

C. Derick Varn: 19:18

Basically like we're going to, we're going to prevent abortion, we've given up. I mean, if there is a party of the secret ego, it might be radical feminist now, because everybody else is giving up on pornography at all And except for well, it's interesting because the only place I see this is in is in, not even in paleo conservatism. It's really specifically in the subset of like post paleo conservatism that use an awful phrase I coined right now, but in like Catholic, anti liberal national conservatism.

Elijah Emery: 20:00

There's some of the post liberals. I would describe this way because I've talked to a lot of them. I like hanging out with them. I hope they never gain power.

C. Derick Varn: 20:10

I like some of them too. I just hope they stay in church.

Elijah Emery: 20:13

Yeah, and what's fascinating about them is that they like are probably the most like socially conservative people active in American politics in a lot of ways, and they have no faith that government would succeed in exterminating any of the things they dislike.

C. Derick Varn: 20:29

Right, which is interesting, that. But that goes back to Christian thought, like all the way back to Augustine. Like Augustine thought, like we can't even ban the prostitution houses because something's got to keep everything together like.

Elijah Emery: 20:42

What these people want is like a just hugely congruent moral authority which will, you know, implant a guilt impulse in people and use that to repress people's worst impulses.

C. Derick Varn: 20:55

Some of them actually do want a theocracy, but most of them don't have faith in anyone to do it, like I think about Ron Dreyer, who's just basically like I mean.

Elijah Emery: 21:04

His Benedict option is like flee for the hills.

C. Derick Varn: 21:07

wait for time, come back It's basically like a revenant, a remnant political thought, which was also a big thing in paleo conservatism, but not not as much about religion And and you know it almost like. It's like chemical for Libowitz, but like what actual religion this time? And for those of you who don't know the reference chemical for Libowitz is like a bunch of scientists end up saving society by becoming mugs, kind of. It's interesting who he, who he identifies, because these are names that are still relevant, interesting We, because it's two conservatives in an old liberal. He identifies Philip Reef, who is, you know, our hyper conservative Freudian friend, who is conservative in the small see though, because he's not really always politically conservative, he's weird politically. Daniel Bell are the person most likely to be misread as having the same opinion as lash, and that's a total mistake or liberal.

C. Derick Varn: 22:18

Yeah, he's like an or liberal, but he's a conservative liberal, like, yeah, but he, you know, a liberal, a liberal Republican in the old sense, that, and we are in. And Lionel Trilling, who's like the ear, like American liberal post Trotsky, is like I was never Marxist when I hung out with the partisan review guys, and I didn't become a neoconservative, why. But those are your three, yeah, right. And Philip Reef is only, i think, become relevant again because of all the neo Freudianism that's become popular on the left. So so that's why we know him. But but Trilling and Daniel Bell, i think, are still readily referenced and read.

Elijah Emery: 23:07

Yeah, especially Bell in my experience.

C. Derick Varn: 23:12

I know a lot of people who know Trilling too, actually, but it's it, i will admit it's. It's people my age.

Elijah Emery: 23:18

Yeah, i was going to say maybe it's a generational function.

C. Derick Varn: 23:21

Yeah, it's, it's, it's like.

Elijah Emery: 23:22

Gen Xers who know Trilling. But I think anyway, like the fact that these are the citations, that this is the description. This is the simplest party to understand.

C. Derick Varn: 23:32

Yeah, moral consensus.

Elijah Emery: 23:34

He calls them the neoconservatives. Basically he's like they're basically neoconservatives. He doesn't call them the neoconservatives. He says to explain them, think of them as similar to the neoconservative position. And so, reading this, i was thinking wow, there's really not that many people who adhere to the super ego in American politics anymore. People have lost faith since the Bush administration in its ability to provide a governing moral consensus And the stuff where he was talking about in terms of cultural conservatism governing a governing moral consensus.

C. Derick Varn: 24:09

Let's add something to that That is positive, that is positive?

Elijah Emery: 24:13

Yes, i think that there's. There's an I. a huge element of this is a negative component that remains. But that lash doesn't exactly call the party of the super ego. So, for example, he talks about how there's a number of right wingers who have no faith in the super ego at all. Either they seek to simply enforce moral and political conformity throughout red coercion or, in the case of many free market conservatives, they take the same libertarian view of culture that they take towards economics. The first approach where I lies, not unconscious, but I'm pure compulsion. The second cannot properly be called conservative at all. A truly conservative position and culture rejects both enforced conformity and lassi fair. And the conservatives who we see most frequently follow that description. They're kind of like debased conservatives and lashes and lashes vision.

C. Derick Varn: 25:13

They're either libertarians who are also losing, but there's still a few of them and are there. If they, if they represent the super ego, they are only the repressive element, they're not the self controlling element.

Elijah Emery: 25:26

Yeah, there's no element of self control, there's just the and I think, lashes description of what the debased superior ego is. Follows very neatly that So it's when he's explaining why it's not a good solution to cultural problems. In fact, the super ego never serves as a reliable agency of social discipline. It bears too close a kinship to the very impulses it seeks to repress. It relies too heavily on fear. That's relentless condemnation of the ego breeds the spirit of soul and resentment and insubordination. It's only, it's endlessly reiterated thou shalt not surround sin with the glamour and excitement of the forbidden. In our culture, the fascination with violence reflects the severity with which violent impulses are prescribed. It also reflects the violence of the super ego itself, which redirects murderous resentment of authorities against the ego.

C. Derick Varn: 26:17

Yeah so basically, it's the Dionysian excesses of owning the libs, yeah, which is purely it is even self destructive. That's the thing like, and for liberals to try to fight. It's actually interesting because it's not like a call to hypocrisy is not going to work. That would, that might, might and this leads. This is one of the things where I think thinking about this politics of of psyche is actually helpful. Liberals have a tendency to take the and we're going to talk about liberals not being their party either but liberals have a tendency to take the current authority mongering and cult of the darkness of of the current right and retroject that to the right all the way back to I don't know how human or something, and that's wrong. Like that does that. You can't really understand the conservatism of the 40s, 50s and 60s that way at all. Like, nor can you understand it merely as, like the people who enforce the market, because that's not really where it comes from.

Elijah Emery: 27:32

This is all very new and you know the reason why Lash is reading this is because Reagan is a new type of conservatism, which is one out in American life at the time he's reading this, which is the fusionist between the neoconservative, the like libertarian and the cultural conservative, christian conservative, really the Christian conservative, and that's super weird, that never existed before and it's been on. What unites them, which is, you know, a super ego, a faith in the super ego. In the case of like the libertarians, i think it's also like, especially culturally, we're Christian, like Christian free marketeers. One thing to remember like the reason why they don't believe in the necessity of regulation is, in part, because they think that moral prohibitions alone will account, will, will solve the most pressing problems that come from lack of regulation.

C. Derick Varn: 28:31

Although sometimes it's also because they want it. theocracy and if the states we go be easier to impose, like I mean there's a reason like Gary Norf and Rush do need hung out with libertarian But the average, like your average normal Christian conservative who you're like does not think that.

Elijah Emery: 28:47

No, they don't think that they're like. If people are moral and act more moral than the world of competitive, you know, business will not extend to desiccating and destroying everything in American life. With that I think we've covered the party of the superhero. Should we go on to the league, the liberal ego, or leave?

C. Derick Varn: 29:09

her ego and the therapeutic ethic, which I think this one's interesting, although I do want to read what he predicts is going to happen from the party of the superhero. Go for it. A government that preaches on order but fails to guarantee public safety, to reduce the crime, writer, to address the underlying causes of crime, can no longer expect citizens to internalize the respect for law from top to bottom of our society. Those who uphold law, morality, find themselves unable to maintain order and to hold out the rewards formally associated with the usurbance of social rules. Even middle class parents find it increasingly difficult to provide secure environment for their offspring are to pass on social and economic advantages of the middle class status, which is absolutely true. Nepo babies don't come from the middle class anymore because the middle class cannot secure that much enough to ensure any division of their wealth amongst their children, and they don't have many children like, and they don't have much wealth, no, i mean So. Furthermore, i'm going to say something about American religion I've been really big on like. Even if normal religion is still around, it's utterly secularized because Christians no longer see their morality as separate from their politics, meaning their, their, their, their morality, all our religion does not really have a pool. It is. It doesn't have. It's the social order that might come from that. Separately from whatever the fads and gust of sentiment are in general society, most religious orders can no longer handle, which is why stuff like Trump doesn't matter, like And it's and, interestingly, i get annoyed with Jeff Charlotte because he thinks that the fundamentalists are always winning. But one observation that he makes is there was a shift in the kind of really a jazz religiosity of the, of the of Protestants, which was no longer constraining but actually one of like power, indulgence and forgiveness of the powerful, moving the model to like forgiving David and his battle with Saul, meaning that, like this new secularized religion totally accommodates for someone like Trump and he can be sincerely religious and not change anything about himself, which which means that religion doesn't have a moral pool. It is no longer a, it is no longer a form, it is no longer one of the components of subject formation. It's now subject to that formation.

C. Derick Varn: 31:55

I used to talk about this with Buddhism, which is a religion that I've been involved with, so I know a lot more about and like I used to complain about Western Buddhist, but it's I mean, i'm going to actually say this also true in most Asia that Buddhist moral codes have totally like, been subsumed to whatever the local dominant politics are And often incorporate like America.

C. Derick Varn: 32:21

There's like this Protestant individualism, this kind of in it. And if you're in Korea it's like feel, feel leopydie. And if you know anything about Buddhism, that make any sense. But Buddhist don't care about feel leopydie, but they do there. So you see a similar pattern And I think for similar reasons, to go all to be a vulgar Marxist about it is because most of these religions don't answer questions, are deal with needs concurrent in most people's material life in the same way, or it like it can't hold up against the pressures of atomization of community through, literally through property relations and whatnot. And the ones that do like say Orthodox Jews, various cults used to be evangelicals but they folded have a extremely strong component of social organization.

C. Derick Varn: 33:17

And they're also isolated. They have to isolate themselves like and that's hard, like even like the Amish are having trouble doing it now.

Elijah Emery: 33:25

So I think this is actually the perfect pivot, because this is what lash next touches upon in his description of the development of the liberal ego the 19th century origins of the therapeutic ethic. What he talks about is he talks about the pivot from the rebellion against against Calvinism, actually and the pivot to from Jacob Abbott to say that vindictive retribution for sin was giving way to remedial punishments administered. So the idea is that punishment for sin is now for your own good.

C. Derick Varn: 34:07

Yeah, it's corrective, as opposed to to purgative.

Elijah Emery: 34:11

Are you fun as people?

C. Derick Varn: 34:13

Yeah, what you know, and this is the little bit of lash where you can, you can feel the his his early dalliances with to go.

Elijah Emery: 34:25

I was thinking that this whole time that he really should engage more with the colonists, but right.

C. Derick Varn: 34:31

Well, he did early on. I mean you, you've read early lash to like this specific section. He's like yeah, he's not.

Elijah Emery: 34:42

Brown and Markuza. A lot of his commentary on Markuza is like answered in some ways by Foucault, like the surplus repression stuff and his the historicization of that which we'll get to is similar to a lot of elements of Foucault's project. But but, at sorry.

C. Derick Varn: 35:04

So here let's deal with the first names that are invoked. talcott Parsons, which everyone knows is a kind of conservative Max Weber I say everyone. No one knows that. if you're a sociologist and you're familiar with sociology before the 90s, you have to know talcott Parsons. But what's interesting is, like All the younger people, like people who are my age, actually are your age, do not, and talcarp Parsons is referenced and all the people we read but we don't know who he is.

Elijah Emery: 35:33

Yeah, alash, you have to know talcarp Parsons right.

C. Derick Varn: 35:37

Well, you also have to know him. For another person I read, which is John Michael Levy. Because, john Michael Revy, you use his talcarp Parsons for as an example of everything bad.

Elijah Emery: 35:49

We have the second example of that here also, which is John Dewey Lashes version of that.

C. Derick Varn: 35:55

Yeah, everyone's asked me like you're like well, lash, lash doesn't seem to understand John Dewey. I'm like no, lash maybe understands John Dewey, he just hates him. Yeah Lies, john Dewey he like that, and what's interesting to me is like that's consistent in all Periods of Lash. Whenever John Dewey comes up, he's pissed off.

Elijah Emery: 36:19

Yeah, he's. If you want to understand Lash, just like open to any random page. He's saying John Dewey is bad and accommodation of the Soviet Union must be reached.

C. Derick Varn: 36:31

Those are like through everything yeah, like we need to taunt maybe just a little bit of socialism over here and And.

Elijah Emery: 36:41

Nation of John Dewey's influence in American life.

C. Derick Varn: 36:44

And we should. We should remove all references to John Dewey from history and burn everything. I mean No, he wouldn't want to remove history, but he won't. I'm an amortized, i mean like.

Elijah Emery: 36:57

To learn about him for the purpose of demonstrating that you know, with an inattitude of genuine mourning, that we engaged in in his theories. But I do think here there's something very important, what she talks about right in this first section, which is that when he's talking about Parsons idea of the family and Dewey's idea of the school And their comparison of Democratic authority to science, they say it achieves its greatest success Precisely in assuring its own super session. And so that to him is an underpinning element of the goal of the party of the ego in terms of cultural questions to assure that it is possible for its own order to be superseded.

C. Derick Varn: 37:46

So what I find interesting about this I was thinking about Michael Sandel's, who we know lash actually engaged with when he was alive Michael Sandel's understanding of American democracy, which is a civic republicanism Slowly shifting ingredients to administrative state, and then, and his most recent revision of democracy's discontent, he actually says that that's over too. We're not even pretending to be an administrative state anymore. Basically, things are run by crisis, now Nice, and in the tyranny and tyranny of supposed merit. That's basically how he thinks things are, are viewed. And What I find interesting about here is the leap, the liberal ego And it's interesting that he does say it's liberal, after saying that we can't think of this in terms of liberal, conservative. But the liberal ego, politics is therapeutic and Reformative, but It also sees itself as values neutral, are are approaching values neutrality.

Elijah Emery: 39:05

It's it. It compares itself to science, right, it's. It sees itself as, i think, essentially procedural, which is a really important designation, and I think it's something which has a lot of relevance today in terms of the way in which Democratic politicians especially, and Democratic elite politics especially, but Republican elite politics for the most part, with the exception of, like Trump himself How they see this. They see them. I Think DeSantis is he fits into like some of this In in terms of like the faith and in expertise. Like DeSantis is basically Calling for alternative expertise. There was an article by by Sam Adler Bell That came out like today or yesterday, talking about how the project of DeSantis is the same as the project of conservatism for a while, which is the replacement of liberal expertise by conservative expertise and a new consent.

C. Derick Varn: 40:13

Yes, A new consensus. You just waited for a second a new consensus for elite politics right, which which leads to it, like mirroring its Misunderstanding of Gramsci through the long march of institutions, something that grumps She never. Actually. Yeah, we should do, but but interestingly, i think it's actually and weirdly Subraba Mari pointed this out of all people over the combat magazine that it means that they're actually Taking over the cultural institutions that are dying. Like they're like. They're like they're going. We're going to do a conservative university when universities are, yeah, shrinking rapidly.

Elijah Emery: 40:57

I mean, if, like, if they really want, you know, to win what they they, the smart ones understand They have to take over the CIA. But unfortunately it's not particularly stable to the American government to have conservatives in charge anymore because, like, because the result of Boosted tax cuts and like the elimination of regulations that businesses themselves have asked, asked for. So I was thinking about this in terms of the, the delayed gratification thing which lash talks about. So he talks about how the Rational ego, which is the basis of this party, is compared to both. It's opposed to both impulse and inherited morality, and it wants a person who's emancipated from custom and prejudice and patriarchal constraints And is basically utilitarian in its aims.

Elijah Emery: 42:06

Yeah in some way or another and in its conception of the self and its conception of the individual. John Rawls, john Rawls and My bet and are more than doing but go ahead. And the the. The whole principle of this is delayed gratification.

C. Derick Varn: 42:24

The classic, like bourgeois, individual and And can I add to that that I think appears a cultural Stuff now, like people go, like well, you know, conservatives, they're really indulgent with their children, whereas liberals aren't. This has been an observed now in two generations, like from the 90s forward, and I'm like, yeah, it makes sense, because the therapeutics all about a belief in In Mediation, a belief in meritocracy and a belief in and delay, gratification as a form of building. But it's but it's premised on a neutral system, of which Still shows up in our like people go, but this doesn't make sense. Liberals are all about like Victimization and privilege. I'm like well, notice that they said privilege, because privilege implies that there's a neutrality somewhere of which everyone could possibly have the same social access And the same social backing, if you just figured out the right handicaps to remove.

Elijah Emery: 43:35

Or.

C. Derick Varn: 43:36

Lord, everybody to the same shitty expectation I want the up.

Elijah Emery: 43:39

The objective is is procedural fairness and The assumption is that all problems are solvable and I just I have to say on, in terms of the delayed gratification, there was a game that I played when I was like you know it like eat. I'm from like a liberal eco family outside, where I was given like a choice. I was given a marshmallow And if I waited eight minutes to eat the marshmallow I would get a second marshmallow, which is like something you do to like a dog, i don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 44:12

Yeah, that was based off of something that you heard 10 years ago 15 years ago actually all the time About teaching people to lay gratification off of a test that was done in the 60s, which, if you actually followed the longitudinal outcomes of that test, you discovered That it wasn't just the delayed gratification, that part of the reason people didn't delay Defication was also that they already had certain social disadvantages and so it was rational.

Elijah Emery: 44:38

Yeah, so I I that that is a result, but I'm just illustrating that, like the belief in delayed gratification is extremely strong liberal juice. Really shining through here. Except that it's especially shining through when Lash says that Liberal education drew on the cultural capital of the past more heavily than it realized. You know that's the, that's the, the liberal Jewish connection. Yeah, it's on the cultural capital of the past.

C. Derick Varn: 45:12

I think this is also interesting because I would actually say a lot of current left Cybernet assist are guilty of this too, because there's way more behaviorism in their later Have you used?

C. Derick Varn: 45:25

Yeah, i did, yeah, and I was like I was like there's way more being other, more behaviorism and their stuff, and I'm like nobody's a behaviorist anymore. The behavior is lost. Oh, but let me, let me read this because I think it's helpful today the morality of enlightened self-interest lives on in behavioral psychology. And If you think about the positive side this is me talking if you think about the positive psychology debates that we were gonna have like 30 years From this Oh my god, is this predicted Which conceives a moral education of moral conditioning accomplished largely through positive reinforcement.

C. Derick Varn: 45:57

A behaviorist like BF Skinner Stand squarely in the utilitarian tradition when he assists that punishment, and in effective form of social control, has to give way to Non-aversive controls. Skin is released, the science can become a basis for a better moral cold in which there was no need for moral structure, resets another tentative utilitarianism, modified, as we shall see, by the overlay of 20th century progressivism, i think. I Think even amongst a lot of the left Bimperges, my friend, this is still an assumption and and This is one of the reasons I emphasize why Marxist can't be utilitarians like we believe in struggle Period. We don't think it's possible. Not to you, so A not like a society that doesn't have struggle would have to have abolished a whole lot of stuff that we don't think Current society could abolish. Nor do we think, nor do I think, that that would necessarily get rid of all forms of struggle.

Elijah Emery: 46:57

Anyway, And I don't think it would be desirable to get rid of all forms of struggle. No, which is where I agree with lash, and that's basically his conclusion. But we'll get to that.

C. Derick Varn: 47:08

Yeah, I do have to it's interesting, though, how much he talks about how this is rooted in a shift in theology.

Elijah Emery: 47:24

Sorry, I cut out.

C. Derick Varn: 47:25

Yeah, you cut out. I Says interesting about how much this is rooted in a shift in theology.

Elijah Emery: 47:31

Yeah, that's absolutely true, and I mean it does reveal, it's you know, that it's a shift in the basis of American moral life from basically theological to basically scientific.

C. Derick Varn: 47:51

Interesting. So I I find this section on a second analysis and the liberal tradition, moral optimism, to be to be very interesting, because he basically Critiques early Freudians for being too fucking liberal And to and also to to, integrated in a kind of liberal Anglicanism or or something You know. He talks about Ernest Groves and what will if we lay and Edwin whole, not names that we could hear a lot anymore. He seems to be siding with Phillip reef that, like Freud's a moralist but he has a very dismal view Of human will.

Elijah Emery: 48:40

Yeah, he's got the, the great quote. According to Freud's, a quite lot analytic therapy could only hope to substitute every day on a happiness for debilitating neurosis, and It makes people reconciled to the sacrifices exacted by civilized life Or make them easier to bear, but it's not going to cure anything.

C. Derick Varn: 49:06

He also gets on to Adler and young. Here I mean, i like Adler actually, but you know The Adler like strips out the sexual content and substitutes. You know, basically Nietzsche, which I which you know, my friend Daniel Tut will tell me is not as readily, and Freud as I think it is, i'm like Right is very, very Nietzsche and He's he's always arguing me about that because he thinks each is an uber reactionary, which I kind of agree with, and he's trying to make the case that for it isn't, which I I Also agree with, but not because he's not a Nietzsche, but anyway. And then young for moving it into mysticism and woo crap.

Elijah Emery: 49:58

Uh though, I think it's it's significant that young is like very popular today. I mean Jordan Peterson is a young again.

C. Derick Varn: 50:07

Yeah, he is um and so and it's very popular amongst these fucking conservative Christians and I say that With the, with disdain, because they don't even know their heretics. Like There is a, there's a way in which Jordan Peterson and all of his complain about postmodern neo Marxism is actually postmodernified Through symbolic reinterpretation, most of the Christian tradition. And, as I've said, like you can't even tell if he believed. Actually, peterson has the same problem as last. You don't know if they believe in God, but they seem, seem to want to Like. If they were Jewish they could get away with it, but the Christian, so Even young Ian, mysticism, in some ways, its manifestation At least, has a certain affinity with the liberal tradition moral striving and spiritual self-help. Young saw the unconscious mind that it's a tangled mess of desires, the Freudian view, but as a reservoir for collective experience of saving myths, and you do see this in. And Peterson.

Elijah Emery: 51:24

Yeah, I mean his. His whole thing is is to impose order on chaos right.

C. Derick Varn: 51:29

It's opposed order on chaos, it's.

Elijah Emery: 51:31

It is a therapeutic Conservatism he yeah, he has like the chaos dragon and all of his advice to like young men is like make your bed, treat yourself like somebody you're, you're responsible like. It's pretty good advice, honestly.

C. Derick Varn: 51:45

Except for the hierarchy stuff which is stupid.

Elijah Emery: 51:47

But yeah, but like this stuff, like make your bed, like take care of yourself, that's good advice, and What he does with it is he connects it to a broader therapeutic project and a project of, like saving Western civilization, basically, and Convincing his listeners that they are the recipients of the liberal tradition, actually the classical liberal tradition.

C. Derick Varn: 52:10

Which is some ways. So you know, i know that. What's interesting about who claims to be a classical liberal right? Because it used to be libertarians claimant. I guess they still do now, the Peterson eyes to the world claimant Kind of on a libertarian meant, but not really. My argument has always been Except for the movements to try to transcend liberalism altogether, unless you're a blood and soil nationalist who believes a god in country, you're a liberal.

Elijah Emery: 52:42

Yeah, i'm a one.

C. Derick Varn: 52:45

Yeah, like, like, and I know people hate that, but I'm like, no, like, yeah, communism is, it does like the Bimber, just plot-a-post types, as much as they hate each other, are both kind of right. The communism comes out of The liberal tradition. What my distinction from them is? I think we become something completely different. Yeah, because fascism also comes out of the liberal tradition, despite what liberals want to say, and And counter.

Elijah Emery: 53:19

Enlightenment is an enlightenment philosophy and post-modernism is a modernist way of life.

C. Derick Varn: 53:25

Yeah, totally, both of which are actually predicate. I mean, fundamentalism is actually dependent on the scientific revolution, like. All these things are like pseudo-outs, right. They meet a kind of need, and I'm gonna say a lot of today, when everyone's like. The reason why I don't call people liberals anymore as an insult, it's because I think it's always true, like Unless you're talking to someone from like India or or maybe China, and even there I'm gonna argue that there's been a synthesis with Chinese and Certainly, that's certainly in America.

Elijah Emery: 54:07

basically everyone is liberal, yeah, including the people we call conservatives and the people we call socialists, right, i, i and I think One thing Lash gets on to is Lash is also speaking here of a particularly American Conception of psychoanalysis and of the ego.

C. Derick Varn: 54:27

Yeah, if you see this, it's like we talk about young, but it's really the American understanding beyond. We talk about Carl Rogers.

Elijah Emery: 54:34

We talk about There's a Rogers that I want to, or yeah over.

Elijah Emery: 54:39

Rogers own approach to therapy, as a follower put it was quote as American as Apple pie, and quote. And he's talking about free will, total sensitivity to the client, empathy, unconditional positive regard, congruence and the importance of being real, and Discussing that every organism has an innate drive towards growth, health and adjustment, and it stressed the possibility of achieving rational control over the self in the environment. So the liberal attitude in all of this is that there's growth, health and adjustment Without any objective standard beyond scientism, and this is just gonna continue the whole time. We're talking about the, the liberal ego.

C. Derick Varn: 55:24

Yeah, i Think that's a fair point. One of the things I think we have to deal with here is Is there two forms of the liberal ego that are actually manifested in what we would now both consider out of date psychology? but both of these psychologies actually have Antisidus that are still around. Cuz humanistic psychology, i think, largely fell out of the favor by the end of the 90s. I do, i did know some people went to college for it, but I don't know anyone anymore And behavior is them is also largely fell out of favor.

C. Derick Varn: 56:04

But cognitive behaviorism And positive psychology, which is related to cognitive behaviorism and its influence, it is actually still kind of an active debate in American psychotherapeutic life And it's also interesting that it's practitioners admit that one. It's Both the psychopharmaceutical and the behavior in the kind of behavioral Therapeutic creams are overstatements. Now they have to admit that because of replication crisis. But the other issue that's actually kind of interesting Is that There's been a shift in cognitive behaviorism from a kind of super ego approach to a much softer approach. If you like read Early cognitive behavioral stuff that's coming out in the 80s. It's brutal Actually. It's like you know It takes a very stoic approach to things. It's like you know, the first thing you have to accept is like That there is no other way, there is no should. There only is what is don't. Start limiting counterfactuals and deal with now.

C. Derick Varn: 57:15

And What I find interesting is that that approach Has completely softened. I don't know anyone who practices cognitive behavioral therapy quite like that anymore, and Humanistic psychiatry has kind of like just taken on a lot of the cognitive behavioral framework, but it repositioned itself as positive psychology which has even less empirical background. In the like somebody was coming at me about, there's very little empirical background for death drive theory, and I'm like, yeah, but there's like also very little empirical background for cognitive behavioral therapy, for psychotherapeutic therapy, like like Are for any of those modalities being being applicable in all cases, like, for example, like Dialectical behavioral therapy works on like one thing. It works on like borderline disorder, which people don't even agree with. Borderline exists, so, even though it's in the DSM, told nothing.

C. Derick Varn: 58:13

I bring it up, though, because I do think this actually is a split in liberalism like I think you see you know, in the two kinds of ways liberals approach politics so there's the game versus the growth therapy is there right?

Elijah Emery: 58:32

and Then there's ego Psychology, which is like sort of within it, or is it separate? Sorry, i'm going through my my notes on this. So basically, just as an overview, let's say what the difference is between behaviorism and humanistic psychiatry. So there's There's game therapies, which is behaviorism, and growth therapies, which is humanistic psychiatry. Is that correct, vaughan? Yeah, yeah, okay. So the game therapies are like Adler and the growth therapies are like young lash says. The goal of game therapies is Is purely social. I think This part's a little dense. And then the second one is To is individual in the case of like having you grow, basically, and I think the the, the split that this shows within liberalism is a split between how to situate the individual. Do you sit, situate the individual within systems Or do you have a conception of the individual separate from that? Would you say that that's an accurate distinction?

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:12

Yeah, so whether or not the individual, is autonomous or systemic is actually The distinction here. That's really the only distinction, because there's still an assumption of neutrality. So, for example, i always point out in the privilege versus power discussion, like I like when we talk about Relationships between races and whatnot, i don't talk about it in terms of privilege and talk about it in terms of power relationships. And and that's because, even though you're framing it in in the systemic form, the privilege form assumes that somewhere Rationally in the kernel there, somewhere is the possibility in the current of a neutral relation, which I think that language is. I think it utterly betray. Like when I talk about power, like no, you both can't have power. Like Like yes, there's a, there are societies in which we could all have power, but it's not this one like so I think that's an interesting and important distinction.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:18

Even when leftist and liberal sound like they're talking about the same thing, the way they embed that and the way they talk about systems is actually very important. One thing I'd be interested to know what lash would have made of is the fact that current liberalism really does focus, even when talking about systemic problems, on individual subjective responses. Like we could talk about how much CRS is on, you know intersexual analysis, but then, when you see it actually applied, it's about, like, privilege recognition, making individual choices that are racist or anti-racist and setting up policies. You know, and everything's also in that right. It's putting down the middle of this.

Elijah Emery: 1:02:06

It's trying to situate, focus on the situation of the individual within a system, right, and leave the individual for that. But I think that's a very important thing, leave the individual for that, uh, but don't they, don't blame, because of course you know it's, it's not a moral category, it's, it's objective.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:24

Right, except that, yeah, i mean calling that objective as a category, or But that's what.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:30

I was joking about like, but yeah, i mean, i, i get, i get what this means. It's very hard to get people to like, understand this where I'm like oh yeah, there are objective things we can describe about power relations that are coded in race, and we can go to sociological aggregates meaningfully, etc. It's still important To To understand Why. Why, when we talk about or try to flatten out these differences, i mean literally one thing about, about modern CRT.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:24

I don't think it's actually true of current start early on in intersectionality Analysis, but modern CRT tries to re-collapse this Like explicitly by saying we don't need to talk about systemic racism, we don't need to talk about implicit bias, we don't need to talk about interpersonal bigotry, it's all the same thing, it's racism. And I'm like that's confusing as fuck, like that's literally collapsing self and system together into one conceptual apparatus. And one of the things I think we see in a lot of the current liberal debates is we still having this battle between the, between the behaviorist and the humanistic, but most of these movements are just collapsing them into a really incoherent um view of the therapeutic.

Elijah Emery: 1:04:11

Like I think we're. We're actually talking now about two branches of the humanistic, because I read ahead a little bit And then he's comparing these actually to skinner, who is more relevant and is more purely behavior. You know a behaviorist later and I think is a really good, interesting political example. Okay, um, so Skinner is Lash, writes. He scandalizes liberals by carrying their own assumptions and prejudices to unpalatable conclusions.

Elijah Emery: 1:04:40

It makes explicit what liberal humanists prefer to ignore that the therapeutic morality associated with 20th century liberalism destroys the idea of more Responsibility in which it originates, and then it culminates more over in the monopolization of knowledge and power by experts. Um, and this is like the thing that lashes, you know, against the whole of his career, uh, this particular strain of liberalism, which he sees as basically the culmination and the result of this strain, before that's unwilling to admit that by uh, assigning moral behavior and objective quality, what it's doing is it's monopolizing uh, you know the viable ways of living your life. Um, and it's implanting, you know, sort of a new form of totalitarianism in some way or another. Um, a milder form, but still one that tries to control every aspect of the being.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:38

So cast unseen.

Elijah Emery: 1:05:41

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:42

Like I mean the whole nudge obama liberalism, which I think that Kind of has gone away, um, but i'm not totally sure. Like biden, and the current democratic congress is so incoherent in its framework So it's very hard to tell what's actually. It's very mixed up, yeah, yeah, it's one of these things where I disagree with brennan riley, where he's like he's an Coherent neo progressive, like biden is a coherent anything.

Elijah Emery: 1:06:10

Yeah, he's got, he's got a lot of different impulses, um, which run into each other. Uh, i mean he's he's just a pure politician. uh, in comparison to, like, most of the people you know, in comparison to obama, trump and bush, who are all like weirdly You know who who were not really like go with the flow people, each in their own ways. I mean trump is like sort of like a go with the flow guy because he just like makes things up every day, uh, and you know what, however, he feels that morning, that's his politics now, yeah, but It's not particularly helpful for categorizing In terms of a psychological assessment of the political landscape.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:58

Yeah, i think this is interesting that i'm going to read this on skinner.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:02

Skinner scandalizes liberals by carrying out their own assumptions and prejudice to an unpalatable conclusions.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:07

He makes explicit what liberal humanists prefer to ignore that therapeutic morality associated with 20th century liberalism destroys the idea of moral responsibility In which it originates and that it cultivates, ultimately in a monopolization of knowledge and power by experts.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:22

Skinner is by no means a conservative. However, he shares liberal faith in the problems of modern organization are administrative and psychological, not economic and political, which I think it's interesting because, because Of the flattening out between politics and morality in and the and, and also systems as being somehow the responsibility Of an individual, but also based in the individual and manifested through the individual, but also the individual is subject to it, if you actually start pointing out the incoherence of this view, you end up triggering, ironically, moral panics, because what you've actually done Is remove the moral basis of anti-racism, anti-sexism or whatever, by pointing out, if we're consistent about this, there is no moral basis to this. You cannot shame people For this if you think they're all the same thing, which you have kind of said. You do sometimes, you know like and, and I do think this is an interesting One. Of the things I was thinking about when I was listening to this is like how much of liberal morality is Is the politics of the ego. When it fails, it flips to a super ego for like 30 seconds.

Elijah Emery: 1:08:44

Yeah, I mean I.

Elijah Emery: 1:08:46

I think that what is apparent is that Science itself will come to conclusions different than those Planted in people. Basically right, and You know, i think that that's fine because I think that, uh, human governance is not about just doing what science says. In in many cases and in fact in most cases probably, uh, but if you're basing your entire political view on being objectively correct, then that's a big problem for you, and it leads to either attempts to change science or to uh ignore it temporarily and, and you know, upend what you think of as your governing consensus or upend democracy, uh, which will result in decisions that are antithetical to, you know, the established scientific result quite frequently.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:44

So what's interesting is that leads us to our next transition. Uh, and just transition. He associates with the new left and I'm going to say I think he's kind of correct on that, but at this point there are now This is universal.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:00

Yeah, it's not just Leftist and even liberals, it's like you're gonna find, and not just even conservatives, you're gonna find micro niche kinds of conservatives that now have this politics. Um, so Basically he talks, basically, one of the things he's positing is, like you know, for both their inherent flaws, that there's a there's kind of a coherent Or an attempt at a coherent, the self undermining sense of self. Now, you know, in him the party of the super ego is going to become more and more repressive. It can't posit positive virtues. It's going to be more and more given the what we now call a negative partisanship. It's going to be a debased super ego of a hyper repressive order. You know, it's going to tendency towards what, with fordism, would be classically called neurosis.

Elijah Emery: 1:10:51

Um, The party of the ego is in the effort to make moral consensus based around science going to eliminate the idea of moral consensus at all And become purely scientific serving. Uh, and make all of these systems that people can't actually navigate on the basis of incentive.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:08

Right and and, weirdly, it's going to make a less equal Society.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:15

That it's going to make a society where the ego is less helpful right, well, but also, interestingly, a society Where, um, despite I think you can see in this, where michael sandale is going with the tyranny of merit, i mean, the thing was sandale, sandale actually still believes that maybe, you know, meritocracy is possible and good and We'll actually probably laugh at that. But He, you know, i think sandale thinks that if you had meritocracy that didn't assume a neutral administrative state, that maybe it could. But then I point out now I'm like, well, yeah, but now liberals don't justify themselves in neutral competence anymore. Not really, they justify themselves in moral competence, which is, of course, going to hyper-partisanize things. But that's to me that's out of a failure. They actually can't. They're going to scientify everything but it actually can't produce what they think they want, which is a neutral society. That's not possible. Like you can't actually fix all questions objectively. Weird I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:40

Like you know, and I think the ultimate personification of this to me, the distinacy there was fucking Sam Harris, and again, the line between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson is a thin line, but COVID made it clear where it was And you can kind of see this Like you see this therapeutic, trying to build a myth that turns into a super ego kind of, but not but it's immediately debased, like because it can't positive, positive values. All it can do is run off fear, and even in Peterson, like it's the fear of chaos. Like Peterson can't really posit a vision of the good life on its own. It's got to be the vision of a good life, and maybe all moral claims are against this. But it seems particular now that, like we're not even arguing that this is good enough to be a good life. It's like, no, this is a noble battle against utter corruption, and maybe that's a trans historical tendency, i don't know. But let's talk about the last category. Gets its own chapter.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:54

So the ideological assault on the ego which he said, which he sees as actually occurring out of a material source which I think people need to like. Remember he's still kind of a materialist And that material source is a mixture of the wealth after World War Two but the political exhaustion of the ideologies before World War Two And the state just kind of existing, like getting bigger and bigger but with no real ideological drive. And so where does the ideology come from now, you know, am I, am I like summarizing that base impulse? Yeah, i mean he's.

Elijah Emery: 1:14:42

He's saying that I thought this was kind of stupid because he like was like World War Two really like shocked people. They were like how could modernity do this? And I was like what about World War One? I mean, you know there's a lot of different things, but the difference is that I think you hit the nail on the head. Following World War Two, there's an exhaustion with ideology itself. There's a feeling that politics has to turn towards questions of administration and management, and one really brings about ideology the way we think about it.

Elijah Emery: 1:15:13

Yeah, yeah, so that's, that's the, that's the reason. So I said that and then I like added comment like much later is like okay, i'll give him some credit for this one The. But anyway, you know that following the war there's a retreat from world conscious people into family life, the silent gen lifestyle.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:34

Right, i mean it's literally and what they literally designed society to like.

Elijah Emery: 1:15:38

if you want to talk about this in a social reproduction sense, they actively designed society to accommodate that retreat into like you're going to do atomization folks, and we're literally both, unfortunately, and I think that actually what was great about this, which you were, you were pointing to, is that by writing that the new vision of, you know, the party of narcissists originates in this experience, the experience of being either parents in the situation or children in the situation.

Elijah Emery: 1:16:16

It says that the attempt to combine the personal with the political is actually incredibly tied up to childhood basically, which is why it's so fitting that so much of the discussion later is about attempts to, you know, basically, in the vision of the party of narcissists, make much of adult life more like childhood in some ways, at a basic level which, by the way, i think it's not only true and I think there's scientific evidence for this like the extension of adolescence all the well up into your third and I'm going to say this as a person who literally has role playing posters in my background But the extension of adolescence all the way up until your middle 20s.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:02

I mean, i was looking at millennial statistics and there's a huge difference And I'm in that transitional period. But I did work in high school, the people just slightly younger. To me that was rare And today that's that's becoming more common, but for about 10 years it was unheard of. Yeah, and there is an extension of credentialization And I'm not saying this as a conspiracy. I think this is a systemic thing. I don't think anyone planned this, but credentialization was a way to control the labor market.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:38

As you got flooded with applications, there were more and more people and relatively small amount of jobs that were decent. You started throwing up credential walls, which is part of my problem with the like most vulgar forms of the PMC thesis, because they're like education. I'm like yeah, education opens up jobs that you used to not have to have an education to get. Like you could become an actuary with a high school education 60 years ago, you need a graduate school degree for that now. Yeah, like, and that may be reversing and we're seeing signs that between not wanting immigration and being child labor now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:18

Yeah, i mean that it's not going to work either. I mean there's not But. But there's a reason why it's happening where it's happening to. But I think what I think here is, like lash actually kind of gets some of that about why, like in lash, sometimes.

Elijah Emery: 1:18:39

I mean he's saying that following World War Two, there was a political response that changed the economic and social environment and implanted in people a new sense of what politics should do. Right, that's pretty good, that's pretty materialist to me And it also like, if you extended further, explains a lot of the underlying elements of this. So he's writing all of this in response to, like, the 1980s and the 1970s and the collapse of, like, the New Deal consensus.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:12

Yeah, i'm going to read. I'm going to do something that we probably shouldn't do in podcast where we're interviewing. I'm just going to read a big chunk of this. Go for it. I think it's helpful from the point.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:21

From this point of view, the radicalism of the 60s represented not so much a return to political commitments after a period of political retreat as a metamorphosis of personal life into politics make love, not war. The characteristic feature of the new left derived from the attempt to combine the personal with the political, f As firestone firestone, i can't say her first name either noted in 1970s, and from its belief that the old leafletting and pamphleteering and the Marxist analysis are no longer where it's at. The new left, suspicion of large scale social organization as rejection of democratic centralism is to trust of leadership and party discipline. Its faith in small groups is reputation. Its repudiation of power and power trips work, discipline, goal directed activity in general. its repudiation of linear thinking. These attitudes, the source of so much that was fruitful in the new left and so much that was futile and set to feeding as well, originated in the contention, as the San Francisco Red Stockings put it in their 1970s manifesto, that our politics begins with our feelings.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:30

What I find interesting, even about contemporary complaints about the new left one, i have to admit the conflating hippies in the new left is a problem. Right, that was always kind of an illusion And I actually don't think lash does it, but I do think we do. But in doing and realizing that's a problem, a lot of us over correct and start pretending like all the new leftists were somehow like like that malice that you read about in Joan Didion, which is just not true, Basically Democrats, they're the people who are in charge now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:11

A lot of them start off as Marxists, but they deviate really fast, like Nancy Pelosi right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:21

Nancy Pelosi, gene Kwan, mayor of Oakland, a Jim Kwame of Oakland was like part of a very radical malice group. I mean, bill Ayers being kind of a figure for Obama to me is not an accident, and I don't mean that in the way conservatives mean it. It is actually a passing of the torch of a certain kind of politics to its obvious child in a way that isn't immediately obvious, because what is Obama's selling point Himself? He has no ideological selling point, not really. Like what do we talk about Obama's versus? well, he's a very smart man who can adjudicate like he's a brilliant speaker. He's a brilliant speaker. He has no ideological. There's no ideological trace that comes from him. Like there's not an Obama Democrat, weirdly, and the attempt to make one, which was the Kamala Harris's and Lori Lightfoot's of the world, which is to find the right demographic cipher, largely didn't work, because they don't. Some of its sexism are not going to lie, but a lot of it's. Also, they don't have his gravitas, yeah he's got pizzazz like I mean interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:46

Trump is the same way you have in the collapse of neoconservatism. Paleo conservatives have one kind of, but not really It's actually now. basically, i would say what you have now as a cult of the institution versus a cult of the individual, but both said that being manifest in the way people view individual personalities. Yeah, like, which is funny, because we feel like we're in an ideological age.

Elijah Emery: 1:23:15

Well, i think we are, But I think that the I don't. well, i don't think we're in an ideological age, but I think we're in a polarized age around our politics begin with our feelings.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:27

Right, which means that we feel intensely that there's political differences. I don't mean to be super cynical and you and I probably disagreed with this more in the beginning, although I know it's not because of my influence. I think you separately have come to some of the conclusions that there is not actually that big of a break between Trump politics and Biden politics and policy.

Elijah Emery: 1:23:53

No, i don't think that. I think that they're. they're substantively very similar, but in fact I think there is a huge break. In terms of cultural politics And I want to be I want to be very clear about that But in terms of the overall like structure of political economy that they're advocating, it's basically the same thing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:14

But it's interesting that the cultural politics is different as they are, and I agree with you, they're, they're, they're world apart. They don't really affect policy that much, except in the rear guard, which is the courts.

Elijah Emery: 1:24:26

Yeah, And you know some administration rulings, But the courts, of course, are like super, as we've we've seen recently incredibly significant.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:39

Oh, yeah, i will, particularly when when no one wants to force a constitutional crisis.

Elijah Emery: 1:24:46

that's going to happen anyway what they've made the ruling, let them enforce it. There's a section that I'm looking for which talks about how, like questions of economic distribution have, like eliminated. I think that's in the liberal section, where it's like the questions are no longer about political or economic power, they're about management and therapy, or something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:10

Right, which I think he's, which I think. What I think is interesting about the current moment is, for a second it looked like the left wing of a Democratic Party and people outside of the Democratic Party who got brought back in Like they were going to refocus that. But the? but interestingly, if you look at the movements and I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but I'm just going to say it the move, the hashtag movements of the ought teens. They start with Occupy, which is largely an economic, where gender and race are important. They're considered part, but it's an economic revolt. It's a revolt about not enough stuff changing with Obama. Obama compromised too much with the bankers. They've solidified the Democrats as kind of the liberal wing, the liberal therapeutic ring, with neoliberalism as it's dying, ironically but nonetheless Right. Then you get Black Lives Matter, which I do think has a strong material and economic component tied to race. Then you get the Me Too, which is a more professional It's material within the professions It's material within professions, it absolutely matters.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:34

This is not me saying these are just cultural questions. But what is clear is you start with the reassertion of the economic, then actually it seems like we went back through the understandings of the politics of the 90s because they also hadn't been resolved. This is not me saying it's some kind of cultural regret A lot of these have been resolved, apparently, because he's talking about them in 1984.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:57

The thing is, all these questions that emerge at the end of the civil rights movements, even though we no longer talk about them in the terms of the baby boomers as they're dying off, none of them were resolved. In the odd teens, i felt like we went through all of them and then ended up. We're talking about the most personal thing there is, which is sexual identity and gender identity. Again, it's in a social context. Again, it's an unsolved question. This is not me belittling it.

Elijah Emery: 1:27:33

This is unimportant. We're saying that this is the focus on a particular set of important issues and not a focus on a set of much broader issues which are less personal.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:50

ultimately, Which I find interesting, because the reason why we have to focus on these issues is recuperation and counterattack. This stuff gets recuperated into the therapeutic liberalism. Then, whatever the fuck we're going to talk, we have to talk about the right, because I don't think Lash foresees exactly what kind of right was going to come The Q-Ride, the QP. What's interesting is, i think, the fact that it comes out of a degenerated liberalism. in a lot of cases I take seriously that a lot of these people were true Obama voters and shit like 12 years ago. I don't think that's fake.

Elijah Emery: 1:28:42

in a lot of cases, I think that most of the people who voted Trump were McCain voters, but the most interesting elements are the people who were McCain Romney voters and then became committed partisan Democrats, and then people who voted for Obama twice and became committed like Trumpers. These are fascinating cases.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:07

I think, ultimately, we make too much out of the marginal cases. But it is in QAnon, it's telling me, because QAnon is actually where you find a lot of the people who just like Chris Bounds Also, 17% of the population believes in it.

Elijah Emery: 1:29:22

Now, apparently, chris.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:25

Bounds Wow.

Elijah Emery: 1:29:26

Chris Bounds Yeah, it's pretty awesome, so it's not really marginal. I mean, i was walking around like midtown the other day and there's like a guy with like a Q. Where we go one, we go all shirt, chris Bounds, you know, it's like pretty normal now, even in New York.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:46

Chris Bounds All right, but what's interesting is that is also what I think is we're going to find when we talk about this is QAnon actually fits this description of the new left? Chris Bounds Perfectly, chris Bounds, like in a very bizarre way, i'm going to continue reading. This is just from the politics we're feeling. Such politics can take many forms radical feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, nihilism, a cult of revolutionary violence.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:13

Cultural revolution is an ambiguous slogan. In China it involved. It was invoked on behalf of systemic attacks on intelligence and learning. The revolution against culture, let's be specific though It was, i think that's unfair. In China it was actually taxed on institutionalized, hierarchical learning of a Confucian mode. It was not just against learning as such. In fact, they actually increased schooling during the time period And the DIMR forms end. One of the things does whatever. He completely marketizes schools and doesn't pay for, like rural women, to get educated. That's a shift in policy which is amazing to me that when I hear both liberals and modern communists who sing Deng's praises like not listen to the Chinese people say about what he actually did. But anyway, in the West a critique of instrumental reason has sometimes degenerated into a Dionysian celebration of irrationality. Ah, cough cough, makuza, cough cough. Frankfurt School, cough cough. This book is almost a straightforward attack on the French people.

Elijah Emery: 1:31:27

He's so mad at Markuza. He's so mad at Markuza.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:32

I think almost I'm fairly mad.

Elijah Emery: 1:31:35

Really mean to him, especially like he has one paragraph He's like to be fair. I've taken, you know, as the basis for my own politics this entire book and 90% of it, and I think it's fascinating. I'm going to fixate now on, like you know, one thing that Markuza gets wrong consistently to discredit him.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:53

Like you know, anyway, the revolt against technological domination in poor, certain new forms of community, but also towards nihilism and adult subjectivity, as Lewis Montford called it. I think that's interesting, because this is this is something that I think people didn't see The incorporation of Heideggerian and Nietzschean elements of authenticity into the right right actually also implicates them this way, but in this time period, weirdly, heidegger and Nietzsche are more associated with the left, and what I find interesting about that is because Heidegger and Nietzsche are actually all about, you know, self manifestation, will to power, etc. Which which it's actually in some ways. I find it interesting that Lash doesn't really deal well with that, like that's out of his conceptions And I think maybe because the American right wasn't there yet.

Elijah Emery: 1:33:03

Yeah, I don't. I don't think it was a parent that it would be a problem. Like you know, he's much more concerned with, like, the expression of like violence on the everyday and people giving into their base desires. He wasn't, like yet concerned with people who were, like there were no rules, you know, like you know what I mean. I I guess that's a horrible way to put it, But let's continue for that reason.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:29

Yeah, so he talks about the neo-Froden left and you know he talks about Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm, then Karen Horney and Gregory Zilburg, who I've never heard of.

Elijah Emery: 1:33:43

He's saying that all of the neo-Froden left is bad And he's talking with the neo-Froden here prior to the new left right, to be clear, because he's saying that they're liberal.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:55

Although I mean I think that's interestingly accused Eric Fromm and William Reich of being liberal.

Elijah Emery: 1:34:00

But or he's saying that the result of their, their conception of psychoanalysts is to make it just like the same thing as the liberal reading of psychoanalysis, except in the pursuit of different social goals.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:15

Right.

Elijah Emery: 1:34:18

And then it's to Markusa Brown and the feminists, and these are like the three positions he examines.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:27

So let's talk about Markusa and Sir, plus repression.

Elijah Emery: 1:34:30

So Markusa is approaching Freud in the same way Mark's approaches David Ricardo Lash writes, And he's not, you know. So he's not, you know, unambiguously in favor of Freud. He's trying to dig through it and make it Marxist, And Markusa is attempting to historicize Freud. He's saying that there's a theory of civilization from Freud that derives the need for repression from the natural disproportion between human desires and demands of reality. He's saying Freud said that, But Markusa is trying to say that you don't have repression in existing, but in when existence is organized oppressively. So basically, the goal of this project is to say that repression is necessary to maintain patriarchal society, capitalist society, but is not necessary in and of itself, which is something shared by all three of these positions. So that's, that's like a root thing.

Elijah Emery: 1:35:45

Markusa Lash says is not really good at this, or fails to meet the demands of meet the demands of. You know what he's selected to embark on? because he falls back on the theory of the primal horde. The primal horde is basically like there's at the beginning of civilization. Civilization starts because there's a rebellion against a father who monopolizes all the women by all the sons. They eat him. It's not really important.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:13

The point is that it's just like important if you're a Lacanian.

Elijah Emery: 1:36:18

But what's important for this is that it's conjecture and it's not historical analysis, Whereas for Marx, like all of Marx's analysis of surplus originated in, like a real, thoroughgoing critique of political economy as it existed in his day.

Elijah Emery: 1:36:37

And Lash says that this, in the case of Markusa, is especially detrimental, because Markusa noticed and this is something that Lash takes from him the sort of obsolescence of the traditional form of paternalism And that in the case of fascism and Stalinism, the vision of father was very substantively altered from what it traditionally was And the emergence in all of modern society was a quote, you know society without fathers.

Elijah Emery: 1:37:12

And as a result, Lash says that the idea from Markusa that the Freudian, you know concept of man relies on the primal horde and there's a basic repression that comes from paternalism, which continues all throughout the modern world. Obviously, if paternalism no longer exists and repression still exists, repression cannot be rooted in paternalism. I think this is a pretty good overview. And then the goal from this is that Markusa says okay, the only way we can make a non repressive society is to have play, to not believe in work at all because it's paternalistic. But Markusa says that the way in which you're going to have like a purely pleasure. Organized society is. You need to accelerate technology and have a vast industrial army first.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:19

Which I think Lash misses, that Markusa's flipping hide a girl on his head.

Elijah Emery: 1:38:25

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:26

Like, like it's, it's a high to Gary and anti had a Gary and, as I'm, a Markusa, which is actually unique to him in the Frankfurt School, which is, i think, why he becomes, you know, the philosopher play, as opposed to say, overly literal readings of the dialectic of enlightenment, like, say, john Sarason, which is like we have to get rid of reification, let's get rid of all civilization altogether, which is also weirdly something that had to place around with a little bit. But I think that's interest. I mean, i think he's right about that. I just think this is where him viewing this mostly through a Freudian lens causes him to miss some things and understanding what's going on in Markusa, because there's other elements that play there. But I actually kind of agree with with the inviability of, because basically what Markusa is advocating is gay luxury, space communism.

Elijah Emery: 1:39:28

Yeah, i was going to say that, but I want to do it, which is frankly impossible And it would suck. I mean, like I want to do stuff, you know right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:40

Yeah, i mean and I also think like that's not how technology like that, like there's, there's a material element on the limits of technology, a physicalist element of the limits of technology, like all of our internet, actually requires vast physical infrastructure and huge amounts of power that that, like Markusa, just doesn't deal with And I think a lot of the proponents of gay luxury space communism also don't deal with. they only look at technology ironically from its individualistic consumer end.

Elijah Emery: 1:40:18

And I think that they're also like not really an invoke like let's be, let's know they were invoked six years ago. Yeah, And now it's like this is passe.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:28

Like we don't talk about left accelerationist anymore. They're stupid. We've moved on.

Elijah Emery: 1:40:31

Or you know, the left accelerationist we do talk about, or like they have the evil words I'm going to say they have curtailed their ambitions. It's like we're going to do left accelerationism, where we have, like, a lot of nuclear power and things are cheap, Like yeah, social democrats, we're no longer.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:53

We're no longer trying to do Aaron Bustani style.

Elijah Emery: 1:40:56

Yeah they're like we will have cheap housing, we will have cheap energy. Like you know, it's it's the renunciation of a lot of the elements of this which are utopia which actually just makes it boring ass. liberalism, which is the irony Look everybody's a liberal now, except for me, except for you. We should call you the last Marxist Farn.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:23

Gene Badgelein likes to joke that I'm the only real platypus, like a philly because I reject. I reject their tendency to see bona partism as a as an interest way to deal with the crisis of the left, because I think it's a lack of imagination on their part And which I which I know, i know I'm going to anger or they'll tell me I don't understand it, motherfucker. I have the two books in the back and I was in the group. I was in there for several years, although that part of their thought was not part of their thought. When I was in there, there was no, there was not nearly the interest in bona partism. This brings us to Brown. I find by Brown for those of you who are used to modern theorists, he means Normano Brown, not Wendy Brown, just to be clear, because I had to remind myself this was Normano Brown, because he like doesn't use his name, he just referred them as brown. I'm like, motherfucker, there's a lot of brown slash, even at the time you're writing.

Elijah Emery: 1:42:23

That's almost kind of epic. People should like do that more, where they're just like figure it out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:30

I had to, like I had to look in the back of the book when I was reading this. I think he's talking about Normano Brown. Yes, he's talking about Normano Brown, but you have to look at the index to clarify. Anyway, the pathology of purposalness. I think Brown is interesting, brown's great. I think what's interesting about this is, even though Lash likes like saying 90% of Markuza, but hates the 10% so much, that's the only thing he focuses on, you get the feeling that he has slightly more respect for Brown.

Elijah Emery: 1:43:13

He's like 98% with Brown, yeah. And then he's like but he doesn't get the conclusion. So Brown is like Markuza He's condemning purposeful activity as a substitute for deeper gratifications. And he's more consistent, lash says, because he's not advocating for luxury, gay, fully automated space communism. So Brown roots conflict and repression in separation, anxiety, not the Oedipal complex And ultimately in the fear of death. For Markuza, there's repressive modification because there's not enough resources for painless gratification. For Brown, the reason why there's repression and lack of resources is not the social organization of production, but that there's urgent instinctual demands which, like obviously cannot ever always be met precisely at the moment. So Brown is saying that repression of instinctual desires is way more necessary and common than Markuza says. And in the case of Brown it's not just a dialectic of enlightenment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:34

It's actually like fundamental to humans.

Elijah Emery: 1:44:37

It's actually fundamental to human nature in separation anxiety which contaminates the quote narcissistic project of loving the world with the unreal project of becoming oneself, oneself, one's whole world. So basically, for Brown it's all separation anxiety, which is the same thing for Lash, and in Brown's case the fantasy is absolute self-sufficiency, ie narcissism, which is what Lash also reads the fantasy as, and Lash is like in response to this Brown's reading of Freudus, a period of Markuza's in several respects. So it ends that sexual pleasure is the only object of repression. It suggests that neuroses is deeper than just like a conflict between pleasure and the patriarchal work ethic And it says that those ideas are very dependent on ideas of historical progress. And basically Brown pierces through a lot of the worst elements of the Neofrhodians and also pierces through some of the worst elements of Markuza.

Elijah Emery: 1:45:51

But then introduces his own bad element, his own bad element, and in this case the bad element, is the fact that Markuza needs to arrive at a particular set of conclusions. You mean Brown? Oh sorry, thank you, brown. So the conclusions are that psychoanalysis will result in something good and will be used to transform itself into social criticism and change human culture. And when he says change human culture because you might think, well, isn't this Lash's project? do social criticism and change human culture He means solve human culture, solve conflict, in Brown's eyes, or solve fundamental conflicts that Freud says are impossible to solve through psychoanalysis.

Elijah Emery: 1:46:42

The way Brown recovers this optimism, as Lash calls it is the is the hypothesis of a death instinct, where he redefines existence, which he said, requires repression to, to you know, have its opposite as death, a state of absolute rest. And he says that it's viable to have a situation in which you have activity which is also at rest, and for him that's play. He has a very odd definition of play, though, that he says play is pure desire, unrepressed and unsublimated, and ignores, in Lash's words, that it originates in the search for a mother substitute, tries to recapture the loss of infancy and reconciles us to its loss by enabling us to assert our growing mastery over our surroundings. So in this case, brown needs to arrive at a conclusion that mastery over the surroundings is bad And that you know repression is also bad And that you can have a situation where you're perfectly unrepressed to play.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:56

So one of the things I find fascinating, as a person has come up now where all this fruit cycle analysis has replaced this, but it's actually done the same shit, like a rigouré, actually recapitulates in a much more obscure fashion some of the arguments of Firestone and and horny, whose name is unfortunate, that's Karen horny, but it's interesting because Lash ignores Marxist feminism. I will say one of the things I get frustrated in this part of the book is Lash is being selective, like and I think he's accurate to the dominant theories of the day, as opposed to what we normally see. One of the things that we've done now is the frenchification of of everything.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:46

Yeah, you know, but we tend to see the new left in terms of its French manifestation in May 68. That's not our new left Like. That's not our new left Like, and I think, i partially think it's because the current left actually, in some deep way actually is embarrassed when this stuff is comprehensible And thus they prefer the French version because the French version is less comprehensible, partly because of our weird translations of French terms, which themselves are necessitate. I actually pointed, someone pointed out in the minute, like, all of a sudden, a whole lot of clicked. I'm like oh, some of this academic terrorism is because you have to make up new words in French.

Elijah Emery: 1:49:33

Yeah, i mean, it's like I think also like I've not read what's that like guide or the board book, the spectacle thingy Society of spectacle and then the remarks in society of spectacle I watched the movie and I'm sorry it was terrible, like I just have to say it, like I'm so thankful that our new left, even though people are now embarrassed about it, was at least comprehensible. Sorry, i'm not gonna get into dissing. guide to board.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:03

I am. I have actually said the spectacle is one of the most poorly and under theorized things has ever been thrown around.

Elijah Emery: 1:50:12

Yeah, and last uses it in culture of narcissism a little bit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:16

Yo, he even references the board in cultural narcissism.

Elijah Emery: 1:50:18

Yeah he does, but he like kind of redefines it to be like very narrowly like. There's a lot of advertising images and politics is becoming that way, which like is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:29

I mean he like limits it to like Marshall McLuhan as opposed to like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:34

Gita board where it's everything And it's kind of like I've been arguing with Bodriardians who get mad at me when I take Bodriard at face value for what he fucking says And they're like but I'm like no, but he literally said there's no like you might go. Oh, we need context And yes, the context is helpful, but in some ways I think you guys are contextualizing your way out of what he said, like you're trying to make it more complicated than the text I believe even in French actually is like and make him have more of an argument than he actually posits. Like you are fixing the absent argument through what I would actually consider ad hoc contextualization.

Elijah Emery: 1:51:18

It's not honest. It's like ambient noise, basically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:21

Well, yeah, I mean, the society is about the ambient society. One of the things about the situationist and the letterist who preceded them is it's dada rebranded as communist, which doesn't really make that much sense.

Elijah Emery: 1:51:39

Yeah, they're not our new left.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:44

No, they're not our new left.

Elijah Emery: 1:51:46

Like Tom Hayden, like stuff like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:48

SD, normina Brown, the Frankfurt School, which is German but exists here, particularly Mark, who's the one who stays. So I think, and I think the idea that, like the working class, have become had internalized capital and become repressive itself is very much that is in the American new left, that's it's not universal. And in fact I would say one of the things that Lash unfairly doesn't deal with is in the 70s how many people tried to undo that trend and they just couldn't like. It failed over and over again. But people were trying like, okay, we got to go back into the factories, we got like he mentions it offhand but he doesn't really deal with- it.

Elijah Emery: 1:52:35

He talks about it some in World of Nations but he's like it's not gonna work.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:39

Yeah, i mean he talks about that actually in World of Nations and agony of the American left, but like would he actually is writing about the new left later.

Elijah Emery: 1:52:47

Then he like doesn't give them credit for the things that they tried. He talks about the academics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:52

Yeah, he talks solely about the academics, which I think is I think one of the problems that you have with Lash is, through the course of his life, he moves from social history to academic debate, and I think that's just the nature of his job. Yeah, but he moves back to social history.

Elijah Emery: 1:53:10

Yeah, later, right after this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:14

And true and only heaven. But even then his social history is more of figures, whereas the social history and the essays that make up the agony of American left, world of Nations and neuraticals. Neuraticals is in figures, but agony of the American left in World of Nations is not really about individual figures.

Elijah Emery: 1:53:39

It's about every essay. No offense, It's about. anyway, let's get back to you.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:45

Let's get back into this. This is a more intellectually interesting, a bit more frustrating.

Elijah Emery: 1:53:49

We went off on this tangent when talking about our new left and how Lash doesn't give them enough credit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:57

Right, also that Lash sees them in the context of their Freudian manifestation. But I find it interesting what I was pointing out, though the really began this tangent is in the 90s. We have the new left come back, but it's francafied So you don't recognize it. It's actually less comprehensible. So I've come to respect that Lacanianism actually isn't that different from it's different, but it's not that different from other forms of cycle analysis, but it's phrased incomprehensibly on purpose. And even people I've talked to my Brazilian cycle analytic friends, they just admit it. Now I was like, yeah, some of this is not comprehensible And that's kind of the point I'm like, so you remystified the new left so when it was reintroduced you wouldn't recognize it, like that seems to have been an academic project of the late 80s or 1990s, like cause, that's what my teachers were coming out of And so I'm trying to think if that was my experience.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:10

I think it was done by your by the time you were a kid.

Elijah Emery: 1:55:14

Yeah, i mean we're like the millennial left, which is also the Gen Z left for those of us who are old enough to read.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:25

You're a millennial nihilist, but you still have basically the same left that we do.

Elijah Emery: 1:55:30

Yeah, i mean it's like and then also like the new. it was not really like a new left style movement. It was very focused on politics, very focused on economics, and then the cultural stuff was like kind of like the last gasp of loss, you know, of defeat.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:48

Well, to me it was like actually return to the norm. That's the weird thing, cause that's for most of my life. what we experiencing right now is the norm of left politics.

Elijah Emery: 1:55:58

Well, that's something to look forward to. Anyway, I think actually one thing we started off on this huge tangent is that Lash is not reading feminists and giving them enough credit.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:10

Yeah, I was about to say that we're about to get to the section of Freudian feminism. He seems to like Firestone but doesn't really deal with her very much actually in this section, which is weird. You will notice that Marcuse and Brown are just one figure. All Freudian feminists are lumped together. Now I also will point out that, with the exception of Firestone, these people aren't read anymore for the most part And like maybe they are in like very specific psychoanalytic schools, i think.

Elijah Emery: 1:56:45

Stephanie Engel is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:46

Yeah, yeah, that one I've still.

Elijah Emery: 1:56:48

I think I have some Stephanie Engel And he spends the longest amount of time talking about Well like Karen Honey and Claire Thompson.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:53

I had to go look them up when I read this the first time And like, cause I'm like I've never heard of these people.

Elijah Emery: 1:56:59

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:59

Like I'd only heard of Firestone, and then Engel and Dinnerstein and Chodorov, chodoro, chodoro, chodoro, nancy, chodoro, chodoro, i don't know, i have seen in print, meaning that I've read other books where they have reference, but I have not read them and I wasn't taught them. I was taught. This is what brought it up. I was taught a rigouré, i was taught Butler, i was taught Wendy Brown even, but she was new when I was in school, and then we went back to Firestone a little bit. We didn't talk about any of these Freudian feminists who weren't Lacanian Freudian feminists, which I found interesting. Like I was taught Brown, i was definitely taught Marcusa, but like this I was not taught. Yeah, so what's his critique of Freudian feminism?

Elijah Emery: 1:58:09

So his critique is basically that they ascribe things to the masculine that are just universal. So he has a couple of critiques, one of which is very good, the other of which strikes me as, like, a little goofy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:25

Yeah, the first one I found. I actually found compelling the idea that, like there's an essentialization of masculinity, that's actually more universal character traits that you can find in all kinds of people.

Elijah Emery: 1:58:35

That's actually the one I found as less compelling, because I thought he was literalizing what they were talking as metaphorical And I thought he wasn't giving them credit for that. But I also, i mean, i think it's accurate. I just think it's like kind of semantic harping.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:51

Well, the thing is he takes Freudian gender psychology stuff literally. Yeah, that's the thing That's like. That's not just true for his reading of feminist, that's true across the board. Like that was one of the things which Daniel Tut was pointing out to me and why we're lashes, actually a lot of race lashes, really progressive. But he says but unlike the French school who reads masculine and feminine principles as symbolic of like agency roles And so anyone can be anything.

Elijah Emery: 1:59:20

You also have to remember that for Freud, like a lot of his stuff, he just like you know like he'll talk. he'll say in like a letter to a friend, like yeah, you know this concept, i meet it up in a bath on a Sunday morning. That's actually true. That's how he came up with the theory of the primal horde. I know that because I've read it today in preparation for this.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:39

But anyway, I mean, would you go back and read Freud? there I was like you're just picking from myths and like universalizing them, which in a way then, when I realized that, i was like oh no wonder Young did it.

Elijah Emery: 1:59:52

Yeah, i actually I love Freud, but he's so goofy, it's so nice, all right. But the other thing, the other argument that Lash makes about this, is that the goal of the feminist project, as he sees it here, is to have a solipsistic, solipsistic whoa, a side of narcissism, where they're unifying with nature, they're asserting their dependence on nature and striving for unity, and he sees this as basically the same project as the supposedly masculine conquest of technology and conquest of nature. The goal in either case is an abolition of differentiation between the self and the world and an attempt to meet the equilibrium of the prenatal state and, in both cases, to regress rather than growing up.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:54

Yeah, this is in the section that he entitles the case for narcissism masculine and prize against feminine mutuality, which he basically says like both the things are false. They're actually basically the same thing.

Elijah Emery: 2:01:06

Yeah, i mean, i think one thing he says kind of implicitly which is tied to the thing that I said wasn't that compelling and you said was compelling? that there's feminine mutuality and masculine whatever is. he seems to suggest this is actually the society we already have, like this is not something new. This is like just the result of the fact that you're operating in a society where people have separation anxiety, where they like nature and they recognize that they're dependent on nature at the same time as they want to like conquer space. You know, he doesn't seem to think that there's anything new about the solution at the deepest level in some way.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:58

I think that's so. You know, i find the overall sensualization of gender weird, and it's because I encountered it also in a rig array, like in a lot of the Lacanian female at least a French Lacanian female I'm beginning to dig into the slobbing Lacanian women, which is another whole basket that I don't feel qualified to speak on, but there is, in which case sometimes it's metaphorical and sometimes it's literal, and it's easy. This is where I like get LA in so-called frustration with them because, like, sometimes they're making metaphorical claims that seem like they're making empirical claims and they're based on, like, empirical science and then they deduce from the metaphor a structure that they posit is real, and what I find interesting about that is that's actually less obscured in this. But this would have been highly unpopular even when I was in school. Like to talk about feminine and masculine impulses this way, like it would have been seen as gender essentializing.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:16

So maybe that's my generational bias, because I went through with, even like Freudians, we're not talking this way, and thus I never know when neo-Frodeans are being literal or not, and the one thing I can say is that, like, and the one thing I can say about the French case is there almost never. But in the German, english and American case it's actually very hard to tell. So I guess I'm more sympathetic. But I also found that I found that whole like masculine and the present feminine mutuality to be like, yeah, that like in so much of those gendered roles exist. Now you're just expanding the implications of those gendered roles to like a totalizing degree.

Elijah Emery: 2:04:07

Yeah, you're saying, like you know, get in touch with your feelings or be a girl boss, right? And I just want to like clarify what the actual pitch is from the narcissists. So, last, rights that Stephanie Engel says that the exclusive, that basically there's a goal to desire, the desire is to reconcile ego and ego ideal. The drive to return to the undifferentiated, if infantile, state of primary narcissism helps to provide the content and drive the imagination as well as the emotions that are at the heart of our creative life. Thus, an alternative to the Freudian model of emotional development is the insistence that neither agency of morality should overpower the other. This, challenged the moral hegemony of the super ego, would not destroy its power but instead usher in a dual reign. So that's the pitch And it's not. You know, i think Lash's basic perception about all of this is this is a great diagnosis of a lot of the problems with the contemporary or the liberal and the or, sorry, the super ego and the egos.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:20

Yeah, well, she does identify as liberal and conservative, although we're about to get to where he re-breaks that down.

Elijah Emery: 2:05:27

So he says this is a great diagnosis, they have horrible problems, your solution does not work.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:34

Yeah, your solution is like disillusionment of the self, are total removal of boundaries, which would, of course, lead to narcissism, yeah, and like you know, the worst kinds of narcissism, right, psychic, you know, in terms of psychic desiccation.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:53

This is one of the things that I told you like my reading of Lash is like like his understanding of what we would be. Now we're no longer in like the forwardest narcissistic, particularly the secondary narcissism of fortism, where the narcissism is manifested through your identification of yourself with your work and not as part of a larger community of what you differentiate yourself. But now he would. You know, i said total psychic devastation. I think you're actually more technically correct in total psychic desiccation. It's a flip from secondary narcissism and the kind of Freudian framework to primary narcissism.

Elijah Emery: 2:06:32

And that's what he's doing in this book, because in the last one he only talks about secondary, and it's why culture of narcissism is not as good of a book as minimal self by opinion.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:42

Yeah, it's also why it's easy to misread and just also sounds, for lack of a better phrase and to use the sexist word bitchier than minimal self. His minimal self is actually, i find, interesting. However, i'm gonna get to the point where he sounds like Jordan Peterson. We need to get there. I guess we gotta do one more thing. Purpose is, if nature and selfhood the case of the guilty conscience.

Elijah Emery: 2:07:07

No, no, no, that's after the Jordan Peterson section.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:11

Oh is that.

Elijah Emery: 2:07:13

That's like the last eight pages of the book. The Jordan Peterson section is like the end of the feminist section.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:25

Well, there's also one at the end of the page, of the page of the book.

Elijah Emery: 2:07:28

Oh really, He has like a ton of them.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:31

Like with the one where he like bemoans that we can't go back to the Christian conceptions of self. And I'm like there's no such thing as a Christian conception. It is written at the end Oh, I love the section.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:46

But let me get to it. Yeah, let's get to it. It's the end of the. This is one of the few ones where I think some of the feminist complaints. I tend to actually be sympathetic to Lash's conception of feminism because when people say he didn't take it seriously, i'm like, no, he read a lot of it closely. He's kind of, and I think in the book I'm reading by him now I didn't read before because it's not chronological And so I didn't know where to fit. It Is woman in the common life. And now I'm looking at it and going, no, i see, like he's all over the place on feminism, really Like.

Elijah Emery: 2:08:26

I mean, that is like a collection from like the whole of his life also.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:30

Right, right, which is why it's all over the place. But like I don't know. He's like he never loses his admiration for, like the most radical end of 19th century feminism, which is kind of interesting. Like because he likes the radicals in the far past but he doesn't like them now. Like he's always bemoaning that the like the moderate, conservative wing of feminism in the 19th century and early 20th century is the one at one, yeah, wait a minute Until he gets to 40 of feminism. And then he's like, but maybe it could get worse, i don't know.

Elijah Emery: 2:09:15

So he has his solution to this.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:18

Oh no, first is the cybernetics section Oh God, we've got to get to that. Yes, that's the thought, that's the point I thought you were going to talk about So anyway, let's get to that.

Elijah Emery: 2:09:26

Where is that in this, page 252. Okay.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:35

Anyway, I was looking directly out of it. It was the purpose. is that the purpose? nature of self-improvement Yes, Right above that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:42

Yeah, let's get to this The conception of oh yeah, this is gonna make some Marxists mad. Actually, i'm gonna read this whole paragraph. According to Henry Malcolm, the cultural values of narcissism lies in the non-differentiation of the self from the world. Yeah, we already talked about that. The appeal of these ideas lies in the seeming ability to address some of the most obviously important issues of the times The arms race and the danger of nuclear war, the technological destruction of the environment, the limits of economic growth.

C. Derick Varn: 2:10:14

As Barbara Gelpe contends, it has become urgently important this is a quote for the men in our patriarchal society to recognize the feminine within themselves before the untrampled combination of the masculine science, the masculine and aggressiveness of all. The metaphysical reconstruction advocated by EF Schumacher, another by a minimalist, appears to heal in the cultivation of a new sense of oneness with nature, an understanding, as Kai Curry Lindahl puts in the conservation for survival, that man is as dependent on nature as an unbarred child is on its mother. In an essay entitled Beneath the As Rebounded, gina Houston traces the environmental crisis to dualistic agony and man separate from nature. It's an enormous significance, she writes. The current crisis and consciousness occurs concomitantly with the ecological destruction of the planet by technological means. The need to reverse the quote, reverse the ecological pronger, gets urgency and direction to the mounting dissatisfaction with consumerism and competitive individualism. Humanity's survival depends on the discovery of new forms of consciousness and fulfillment. Apart from the traditional sense of consumption, control of grand eyes, manipulation, the time has come to take off the psychological self, all dormant potentials that were not an immediately necessary demand as roles beneath the, man, over nature.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:32

The ecological consciousness, according to Robert Ditch, renounces the illusion of separateness and superiority over nature. It recognizes the need for universal symbiosis with the land. As Otto Leopold put it many years ago, and Gregory Bateson, another forerunner and prophet of the ecological society, conceptions of selfhood had to be replaced by understanding the way personal identity emerges into all the processes of relationships, in the vast ecology and aesthetic of cosmic interaction. Oh my God, this stuff is comprehensible, but, oh my God, is it really? The concept of self, bateson maintain, can no longer function as a nodal argument in the pronunciation of experience, since we now understand, thanks to cybernetics, that the ecological system as a whole is more important than the individual organism that comprises it. Indeed, the unit of survival, either in ethics or in evolution, is not the organism or the species but the entire environment which the organism peds.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:32

I think people forget that ecology branched off from cybernetics. But don't tell them. But the self is a falsification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes, linear purpose of thinking or nor is the interconnecting characteristic of complex cybernetically integrated systems. So I'm just gonna point, stop here. I think it's interesting that when people go back to cybernetics they go back to Weiner, through about Stanford beer and then they stop. And I think they stop.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:09

And there's all kinds of problems with Norbert Weiner. One is like he assumes all kinds of stuff off the servo mechanic effect. That I think is not just viable And it is basically he has a BF skinner view of the composition of self which I don't think people realize because they don't read like the text he wrote with other people in the beginning. They only read like the human use of human beings And don't realize the problem with assuming, for example, that the servo mechanic effect leads to consciousness, if there's any recursion, which I think, which I actually had an argument with somebody who was like I think this limited learning stuff is gonna lead to communism. I got this from Sabine and I'm like no One thing I can tell you is right now, given our understanding of neurology, does not appear that the neurological servo or motor effect can explain consciousness, unless consciousness is totally ad hoc.

C. Derick Varn: 2:14:12

But anyway, it exaggerates the importance of conscious. Excuse me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, i skipped a lot. Okay, the self is a reification. Blah, blah, blah. Linear purpose of thinking ignores the interconnectedness characteristics of complex, cybernetically integrated systems. It exaggerates the importance of conscious control, as in flooring, towards the proper relations between thought and feeling upside down, and thus replaces the id with the ego. Psychoanalysis, in Basin's view, is a product of almost totally distorted epistemology and a totally sort of view of what sort of thing a man or any organism is. And common with variety is the scientific materialism that looks a vast and integrated network of the mind. It amounts to a monstrous denial of the integration of a whole which Lash finds to be like. Like, if you collapse, self and whole, then there's really no meaning to either one of them.

Elijah Emery: 2:15:05

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:08

Which I think is interesting. What I get from this period of cybernetics that he's writing about is why people started rejecting it as anti-human, because it did start to posit that, like you know, we're not talking about the humane use of human beings as conscious agents is the way that everyone from Norbert Wiener to Stanford Beer is, even if they're also basing that consciousness off of behavioristic assumptions, some of which are highly problematic, and people were arguing me about it, but we can talk about that another day. It's not. It's actually not even a provable case, like I don't know how you prove it, but when you get to Bates and you start seeing like, oh, they don't even think individuals are important anymore, nor is linear thinking important.

C. Derick Varn: 2:15:53

Everything is systemic, and systemic also needs to be reduced to feeling our feelings about systems, which is interesting because it takes a, it does collapse. I mean, his point here is the whole like, like technological enterprise and cybernetic theory and mutuality totally collapses into one thing Like and it's, and it leads to like the de-identification of the individual with a self and into everything which is, according to Lash, like the definition of narcissism. Okay, so that's why we moved from secondary to primary narcissists, so we moved from fortism to neoliberalism, kind of actually weirdly, although he wouldn't really make that conscious until 1988 when he writes about it and truly having Okay. So that leaves us purposeful nature itself, but the case for a guilty conscience, which I think is him, I think it's a really unsatisfying conclusion, but it's some beautiful writing.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:11

Yeah, as I say, it's beautiful. I mean I like I like anytime someone sticks it that you're gonna have a moss, i like I get glee out of that. I mean just for personal reasons, but I find his. I find it interesting that Lash's answer to this is Reinhold Niebuhr, and Reinhold Niebuhr is Obama's favorite philosopher And in some way for me this is non-irrational argument, but somehow for me this proves that Lash is wrong about the answer.

Elijah Emery: 2:17:40

Yeah, i mean MLK also quite liked Reinhold Niebuhr. So.

C. Derick Varn: 2:17:44

Well and Lash likes MLK.

Elijah Emery: 2:17:47

Yeah, so I guess I think my conclusion to this would be that Obama probably misread Niebuhr. No, i'm joking, i don't know. The reason I think that this is unsatisfying is because it lacks political content, or Ironically, he's still aware of this problem, and everybody else. And but he's not giving. He's not giving a solution. He's saying like this is a set of cultural attitudes and psychological attitudes which would serve as the basis for a better politics.

C. Derick Varn: 2:18:20

Right, but we don't have the means to bring him back, sorry, which, yeah, i find you know my friend Shalem that time, who you know, who's co-writing his book with me. He's always like well, you don't have to posit an answer to a question if the question's unanswerable, but to which I say he does try to posit an answer, it's just not an answer.

Elijah Emery: 2:18:39

It's just not an answer. I mean, I have my own reading of this, which is that a lot of this is historical commentary and it's commentary on, as a historian, the relationship with history of all of these different groups, And his attitude is like, basically, well, the goal is the operation of a good culture, which requires a healthy relationship with history, where you are both thankful for the past and you're like we're not in the past And you look towards the future And, at the same time, you don't want to change everything because you live in a culture And you know, yada, yada, yada. It's just basically like a centering of history in the process.

Elijah Emery: 2:19:27

And you can see this on the last page.

C. Derick Varn: 2:19:29

What I find interesting about this is this is almost a quasi-Marxian Berkeian conservatism. Yeah, Like, really, it's like we believe in Marx. But also, institutions exist for a reason And you know, like we should maintain them as a way to. But I'm gonna read the last three paragraphs because, like it's great writing, It's beautiful, But wow, Both the champions and critics of the rational ego turn their backs on what remains valuable in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition of individualism, as opposed to the tradition of acquisitive individualism which parodies and subverts it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:20:03

The definition of selfhood as tension, division and conflict, as Niebuhr pointed out, attempts to ease an uneasy conscience, takes a form of a denial of man's divided nature. Either the rational man or the natural man is conceived as essentially good. If the party of the ego glorifies the rational man, the party of narcissists seeks to dissolve the tension in its own way by dreaming up a symbiotic reunion with nature. It glorifies the natural man, often after redefining nature itself, however, as an aspect of some universal mind. As for the party of the super ego, it equates the conscience not with the awareness of the dialectical relationship between freedom and the capacity for destruction, but with the adherence to a received body of authoritative moral law, a hanker for the restoration of punitive sanctions against disobedience, above all for the restoration of fear. It forgets that conscience, as distinguished from the super ego, originates not so much in the fear of God as the urge to make amends. Conscience arises not so much from the dread of reprisal but those we have injured are to wish to injure. As capacity for mourning or remorse in individuals that is developed as significant in individuals, this development signifies the child's growing awareness that parents he wishes to punish and destroy are the same parents of whom relies for love and nourishment. It represents the simultaneous acceptance of dependence on fathers, mothers and natures and our inevitable separation from the primordial source of life.

C. Derick Varn: 2:21:34

In the history of civilization, the emerging conscience can be linked, among other things, to the changing attitudes towards the dead. The idea that the dead call for revenge, that their avenged experience hot the living and that the living know no peace until they placate the ancestral ghost gives way to an attitude of genuine mourning. At the same time, the addicted gods give way to gods who show mercy as well as uphold the morality of loving your enemy. Such a morality has never achieved anything like general popularity, but it lives on, even in our enlightened age, as a reminder of our fallen state and our surprising capacity for gravitate remorse and forgiveness, by means of which we now and then transcend it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:22:18

Beautiful, beautiful, full of shit. Well, it's less. Yeah, This is when I'm like there's a tendency in Lash that I know after what I call the early historical period of Lash, So we can argue about Haven in a Heartless World, but definitely liberals in the Russian Revolution, you radicals agony, American left and world nations are primarily historical texts, Like they're not theoretical texts in the way this is. They do attempt to construct things or they tend to construct things in the understanding of the things themselves. Right, like they're kind of imminent critiques of the left in terms of its own goals and own understandings and origins and the limitations of that. This moves away from that And what I find is he's so often right about the lack of materiality and these new leftists who claim to be materialists, but then at the end he's like well, we need to integrate itself and blah, blah, blah and mature cultures, And I'm like this is a myth.

Elijah Emery: 2:23:32

Like well, he's commenting on human culture, and human culture is composed in large part of myths alongside material realities, alongside the intermediate world of practical man-made objects.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:45

But he's positing a myth as a norm that is not a historical norm.

Elijah Emery: 2:23:51

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:23:52

I mean he's doing the same thing. He's like he's doing the same thing. He's criticizing with the neofrordians, with, like, the primal horde myth, Like, like, for example, the idea that God's a mercy, God's a vengeance turned into God's a mercy is not. There's a general tendency towards that and relationship towards the development of property in the actual age, if you relate the works of Richard Seifert, for example. But also that we still got the hate God, usually in the same person, Like, and that's not just in Christianity, although where it's most obvious, where you have the loving God is particularly in Christianity, because you know you have the God, that's all good, and then that creates a problem of evil which, like, sorry, Jews don't have it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:24:41

We just don't have to worry about that kind of crap. We don't have an all good God Easy way out of the question, The. There's just this positing here of like you know, look at this tendency towards revenge. But if we could integrate it, you know it'd be great. I'm like, yeah, that is a Freudian myth though itself, that the culture has moved from progressive integration, which I find interesting, because I actually think that's in conflict with Lashen 88, because because in this he's actually positing something like moral progress in that last chapter, in that last three paragraphs.

Elijah Emery: 2:25:32

I mean, I don't think he thinks moral progress is impossible. I think he thinks moral progress is distinct from what's commonly understood as progress.

C. Derick Varn: 2:25:44

Right. I find the whole thing to be a mistaken categorization. Like people, when I talk about early Lash are you here about me? from praise, i mean, i talk about late Lash I find myself agreeing with them until he gets to the answer of the question. And I'm like your answer to the question is fundamentally conservative. Let's bring back the stuff we like, but like in the mature, less shitty form of like. You know, the. We don't want the regressive punitive you know misunderstanding of Jonathan Edwards.

Elijah Emery: 2:26:13

God, we also don't want we want an attitude categorized by gratitude. I mean, this is also liberal, This is selecting, you know, doing a pick and choose.

C. Derick Varn: 2:26:27

Yeah, you want your right hard. You want your right, you want your. You want your brother's kneebler. You know Protestant liberalism of the 1940s back. That's what you want Like. That's why Reinhold Niebuhr plays such a role for him in this late work. And what I find interesting is Niebuhr's absent in his early work, which I do get why people thought maybe he converted to some kind of Protestant Christianity. But we don't have evidence for that. Like you know, i read the bio. Bio was written by a Christian. Still they still can't prove that Lash was a Christian. He doesn't really try to, he doesn't know right. So it's like is he pulling the Jordan Peterson thing? Like we must believe in God even though we don't Like, because of the social results of that. And if that's the case, it is conservative arts, it's a conservative, it's a. It's a. It's a attempt to return to a prior form of liberalism.

Elijah Emery: 2:27:26

Yeah, I mean, I think it's. it's not so much we have to believe in God. even though we don't It's, we have to want to believe in God.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:36

Even though we don't believe in God, and thus why would we want something we don't like?

Elijah Emery: 2:27:40

I mean. Well, that's what he's saying. It's the divide between between unlimited aspiration and limited possibility, or whatever it says. Uh yeah, the gulf between human aspirations and human limitations.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27:54

See to me Lash ends up mirroring through his fruityism and uh, uh, alester McIntyre.

Elijah Emery: 2:28:05

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:06

Uh, except Alester McIntyre actually does try to adopt a truly pre-liberal worldview, starting with virtue ethics and then going back like let's reinvent, let's try to get back to Aquinean ethics, which even the virtue ethics people like I was reading um, and this is by a conservative Catholic, but it's actually a pretty brilliant book Uh, and it's not rooted just in the critique of, uh, of the Lester McIntyre who like, by the way, is like one of my favorite thinkers Like I after virtue, i think is basically where I get my ethical theories from, even though I'm not a Catholic at all.

C. Derick Varn: 2:28:47

Um, but I actually think the critique that was written about the whole uh, neo Aquinean virtue ethics movement, uh before virtue, assessing contributive virtue ethics, by Jonathan Sanford, like it points out that they really haven't been able to deliver on their critique of really revitalizing uh like an Aquinean worldview. Yeah, um, which is, which is what I mean. That's why Alester McIntyre like rejects the term communitarian. Well, the funny thing about the term communitarian is nobody who gets labeled a communitarian from last yeah, from lash to a verny to anybody says they're actually a communitarian.

C. Derick Varn: 2:29:28

The only person who kind of accepts it is Taylor and Sandel. One liberal, one kind of anti-liberal but still kind of liberal. Like uh, sandel conceives of himself as like uh, like an anti-liberal liberal, left wing or something. I don't know how that works, but that's what. Like he kind of. You know, he's against markets, he's against the cult of authenticity, like he thinks. He thinks basically the liberal communitarianism of Charles Taylor is Canadian brainwraith I mean, he wouldn't call it that but like um. But then, you know, with Sandel you get a similar problem where, like there's kind of political economic analysis but then really he thinks that that political economic analysis actually fully descends from culture and not the other way around. Uh, lash is interesting to me because in a real sense lash can't. I don't think lash ever decides which one he thinks is primary. Like he always argues that the problem of populist and to some degree the problem of Marxist is they don't take cultures seriously enough but they see it entirely as epiphenomenal. But he's always portioning out how the culture of theorists aren't taking like what?

C. Derick Varn: 2:30:41

we would call social, yeah, material reality, or social reproduction, or that seriously, Um, but then at the end, what is he what? what does he posit? It's a cultural answer And I, I, uh, show him a ton of. I argued about this per private lead, but I'll add this, this argument where I said I think his problem is literally his discipline.

Elijah Emery: 2:31:00

Yeah, I mean, i, i think he has. Uh, i think he could have benefited from a background in economics or law.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:10

Um, because he outsources all that to other thinkers and, and particularly the later you get in his work, like we get more and more in cultural analysis, even though he often does see the lack of economic.

Elijah Emery: 2:31:22

I think he actually moves back to economics in the next two books. uh, pretty substantive lately, um, especially actually in revolt of the elites. Um, he's moving very strongly back into economic analysis, yeah, which it's very rudimentary.

C. Derick Varn: 2:31:41

It's like here's what trade balances are, like you know here is he goes back into economic analysis but actually, interestingly, he does what he critiques the populace for doing in his early work, like his, his way and and turn only have any's trying to redeem the populace, but he admits their faults, yeah, and the revolt of the elites. He picks up their methodology, which in his earlier life he said was too vulgar.

Elijah Emery: 2:32:10

Like the methodology of like all economics. You know like it's just like ideology as the result of economic uh.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:20

Well, he, he actually, yeah, he says that that has a tendency towards conspiracy theory, because it has a very overly simple view of follow the money, that it doesn't have a complicated analysis of that.

Elijah Emery: 2:32:33

I mean I, i, i have a lot of complaints of lashes Mets. I don't see that personally in revolt of the elites. I think that he's uh, he's trying to do this very complex interplay on elites And I assume if he had been in better health it would have resulted in like a better book.

C. Derick Varn: 2:32:49

My version of my problem with that book is like there's so much missing from it that you can kind of project what you want to make it work, That's absolutely true.

Elijah Emery: 2:32:58

Um, I mean and it's got a lot of sections which have like problems, uh, which arises from similar stuff to stuff we're talking about here, which is like his myth making, and how he gets more and more reliance on it as a means of political activation.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:11

Yeah, Every now and then I want to bring his daughter for that, but I've actually been told by people who have interviewed her that that's unfair, that he doesn't that. she didn't seem to alter the text that much.

Elijah Emery: 2:33:22

I mean, i listened to her interview with Todd a while back and it was like pretty nice. She was like Oh, my dad was nice, he cared a lot about work and people controlling their own destinies, you know like um.

C. Derick Varn: 2:33:34

Interestingly, i think her work in the nineties on like racial stuff is actually pretty good. Her current work is more, i'm despairing. Let's go back to the classics. Like you know, that's what you do If you're, if you're a classical liberal who's given up. You were grassbacked the grease in Rome, like you know. You pull the 19th century thing and you start like let's go back to the classics, but not like the like, not the classics is interested by themselves. The classics is re-understand them as part of this Western civilization project which we kind of made up in the 18th and 19th century, like. So that's actually kind of why I appreciate the the like neo-tomistic turn of like Alessandro McIntyre, because he's not trying to like, like go back to the true foundations of Western culture because he knows them while it isn't there, like um, and I think there is something like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:34:47

One thing I'm going to say is I think lash is right about something that I don't think Marxists always deal with enough, because they don't see Christianity as a political economic system, um of which prior to modernity it was um. Christendom is a thing for a reason, has an underlying political economy which is not a particularly coherent one, but I mean what is like, not like capitalism is always going on either, um, but there is a, there is a political economic order tied into medieval Christianity, um, explicitly, and it falls apart. And it falls apart. It starts to fall apart before capitalism quote capitalism but it's the beginnings of, like, our modern notions of race or moderate, like all kinds of things, start to fill that gap right. And I think lash kind of intuits that, but it's kind of a very basic, almost mythic intuition, because he's not a specialist in that time period of history, i mean, he's really a.

C. Derick Varn: 2:35:52

He's a historian of, like 19th and 20th century history. You know that's what he does, um, so you know he's a historian of the of the contemporary and what led to the immediately contemporary. Which was why I find his early book so important for leftist to read, because he does reground the American left in American political, economic and cultural trends, which most modern leftists do not do. They ground them in European, uh, economically, before all the complaint about Eurocentricism, that the predominant move of the American left from the seventies forward is to ground themselves in European thought, not an American thought, um, and not even in the intersection of American and European thought, like just trying to like what's just, you know, importation, straightforward. You know, what do we learn from theory? It's like Americans and we go to France and we just don't deal with anything Like. So that's interesting. Um, you, you know you are leftist with a mild communitarian bent, i think.

Elijah Emery: 2:37:00

Um yeah if it on you smell I'm, uh, i'm, i'm, jew, it, i'm from a Jewish family, uh, you know um and?

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:10

you're and you're you're. Rebelling against the name of the father is to not pick up their, their mid, their mid-century Jewish liberalism.

Elijah Emery: 2:37:20

No, i'm, i'm, I mean I'm, i'm not. I don't think I'm particularly rebellious in any way, actually.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:27

Ha as as per Queefs, your nihilistic generation which has nothing to rebel for or against.

Elijah Emery: 2:37:32

No, I mean, i look, i believe in stuff. Uh, you do I. I like my generation. I think that people are nice. They're doing the best they can.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:43

So here's what I think I actually really like young people right now. We're all very nice, but you're all very nice and and you're pretty moral.

Elijah Emery: 2:37:55

We could use a harder edge sometimes, I think.

C. Derick Varn: 2:37:57

Yeah, but I do think like uh, you don't believe any, you. the manifestation of not believing in anything is is actually wiggly in the niceness, because like it's reality.

Elijah Emery: 2:38:11

It's been to plurality for its own sake and totally its own sake.

C. Derick Varn: 2:38:15

Which I'm actually like. I'm a believer in poverty and tolerance. like, but not for its own sake. Like and look, i don't think that I don't think like my generation's, like my generation whether you count me as a Gen X or a millennial is a lot better. And on certain things I think there has been a marked improvement on a lack of interpersonal cruelty, which I think actually my reason for this is like well, the consequences for it are eternal now, well, anyone gets to forget it. Um, which I guess the funny thing about a society with no party of the super ego is. the internet kind of does that for us, yeah, um, but in a way that I don't know if that's super ego, it's more, uh, i, i or I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:09

I mean, I feel like the super ego and the id collapse into one thing on the internet somehow. I'm not sure how that works.

Elijah Emery: 2:39:15

That's narcissism, foreign. It just described narcissism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:19

Oh God, you're right. There's no meaningful distinction between self and other, so there's no meaningful distinction to uh. yeah, so you know I like to joke that I'm that I tried you so much because maybe, in trying to prove me wrong, you're, you'll save your generation for their from their aso.

Elijah Emery: 2:39:39

uh reality, social, but I or I try my best. But yeah, i know.

C. Derick Varn: 2:39:46

I think you are, naturally. But also do it to spite me of cause. It's always harping on how, uh, zoomers and younger millennials are like a social creatures. But notice, i'm saying a social, not anti-social. I think people need to understand the difference. I don't think that, like like Gen X is anti-social If we're going to characterize a generation meaninglessly, right. If we're going to posit a generational archetype of myth, the Gen X archetype is anti-sociality. Um, and the millennial to Z would be a-sociality, right. But notice, i just made this shit up on the fly. See this easy to do. Um, it's fun too. Like, yeah, this is my.

C. Derick Varn: 2:40:31

This is a lot of my problems with, like cyclinolic theory. It's like I can just bullshit with it. Like I can come up with categories. I can rigorously analyze the world through a lens that I made up on the fly. Like which is useful to learn. You know it's useful to learn. Like you learn analytic. Weirdly, you learn analytical rigor doing this stuff, but you're also making up your categories ad hoc as it's convenient to you. Um, so, but I do think you're right, the narcissism and the way lash means it, not in the narcissistic personality disorder way.

C. Derick Varn: 2:41:12

I want to make that very clear that lash would not think this was the same thing. Um, it's kind of a general trait of everyone after the generations he's concerned about, which is really the baby boomers and their immediate kids. Um, we are like, we are the, the generation, like I am the dividing line of after that, like almost literally. Um, you know, i'm born in the time period lash of dying, so I find that interesting because a lot of what he describes actually does remind me of the world I grew up in And then I see it now and I see it everywhere, but I'm a part of me goes, and this is part of my resistance to lash. Like you know, i love lash. He's incredibly crucial to my thinking, but I also push against them a lot Because some of these are too easy. If I can find everything now that he thinks is specific to certain time periods and I can find it anywhere is his categories too broad?

Elijah Emery: 2:42:15

Well, that's the uh, the thing he was talking about, with historicization and Markuza all over again.

C. Derick Varn: 2:42:21

Right, it's like you feel like he. he doesn't see it in himself, but he sees it in Markuza.

Elijah Emery: 2:42:26

Well, i mean, he's also not making a claim about permanency, that's, us putting these categories, for example, in someplace else? Uh, i do, i do think he sometimes fails to historicize properly, but in this case, like this, is us not historicizing him?

C. Derick Varn: 2:42:42

Right, well, agreed, but that's, that's one of the things that when I, when I teach, when someone asks me go do a speech and last, the first thing I say about cultural narcissism is it's not actually about you. You're so vain. I bet you think culture of narcissism is about you, don't you? Don't you Like, but it's kind of true because it's not about us. It's about our parents, in my case, and in your case, your grandparents, i guess. Well, I don't know, maybe your parents, i don't know, who knows?

Elijah Emery: 2:43:11

My parents are Jen Xers and my grandparents are silent Jen.

C. Derick Varn: 2:43:15

Well see, my grandparents are greatest generation and my parents are baby boomers. So he's talking about my parents like um, poor silent Jen. No one remembers them. I can't even keep them in lawshim separated. I was flipping through on switch, but, um, this is interesting. What is interesting to me, though, about generational politics? all right, we talk a lot about it. People think I'm obsessed with it, but also I kind of don't believe in it, except that I think the baby boomers is a material category, and generational politics After that emanates from that, like our social institutions all change to accommodate the baby boom. That's what drives credentialization. There's so many damn people and kids, and that's expanded on when immigration is later on.

Elijah Emery: 2:44:15

With 30 glorious years of social atomization, carbon democracy, cheap education, a viable social welfare state, you know, sort of mostly through private expenditure actually.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44:30

Ironically, it's the conservatives, who are against immigration, who relax immigration, to maintain that. I think people don't miss that. But they're like they were trying to maintain part of the economic structure of the baby boom when there weren't the people anymore. And the way to do that was well, we'll create an underclass, basically, and Europe explicitly did it with their guest worker programs. And to think that that doesn't material affect the generations after, even in our attitudes around wealth accumulation because from Gen X to your we don't know about your generation but we can assume it's going to be worse You have progressively less ability to have wealth accumulation, except for the very richest.

Elijah Emery: 2:45:18

Yeah, Median rent in New York is like 3,600 a month. Now You can't accumulate wealth with that. I mean you can't move into a house.

C. Derick Varn: 2:45:29

But my whole point that I point to people is like I have moved up in educational status and supposedly in earning power to hold standard deviations on the liberal social scale from my parents to not have the same things they have. You know, like my mother was homeless but after her first marriage was able to get together enough to buy a house. You can't imagine doing that now, like a mechanic and a waitress buying a house big enough to have multiple children in. I mean it was a shitty house, don't get me wrong. I mean it wasn't that shitty, i shouldn't talk about it. But it was a small house. It was not, it's not any house now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46:24

That's been true in Europe for a long time. So Europeans probably it's like oh, americans you are all rich. Like yeah, no, you know they're not really comparing the same things, but it's hard to imagine that now And that you know lashes description seem real. But and you're right that his cultural positing is kind of like his ideal He doesn't really think, he doesn't seem to know how you get back to it And increasingly I think in his eighties writings he's like doesn't even he, he seems to want to have it both ways actually Like.

C. Derick Varn: 2:47:04

To me that's a realistic critique of him that we see kind of the end of this book Like and that's frustrating because you know I'll rant and rave for three hours about that to Kune essay, the first and where he attacks the conservatives and second one where he attacks the left. And then I agree with him about the frustrations of people using class consciousness to just like throw out actual working class opinion and and not address working class problems. I'm totally with him on that. But the one he talks about like working class families and working trust, traditionalism, like you're making that up, it's not like that's you know, and then is like asserting it on the authority of, like anthropology says, and I'm like not by 1987. It didn't.

Elijah Emery: 2:47:52

Yeah, he's, i mean he's he's desperately trying to find a politics that corresponds to his ideal of selfhood, based on tension and aspiration and a guilty conscience, and unfortunately it really does not exist.

Elijah Emery: 2:48:14

And I actually think that the funny thing about that is, like, for a lot of people I know, or I think a lot of people who get serious about lash and there's like maybe four people in the world This ideal of selfhood does become very appealing as a personal means of personal conduct, though it's also hard to do, because selfhood is actually, you know, culturally reliant in some ways, including on the construction of a culture that surrounds a selfhood premised on a guilty conscience which doesn't exist again. But you know, like it's, it's hard to find any place doing this thing politically, which is the reason why it's so unsatisfying and so nonintuitive, i think, because if we could connect it to anything in American politics, we'd say oh okay, even though it's insane, in the same way that we say oh okay to all of the insane things from the party of the superego, the party of the ego and the party of narcissus. But this is just conjecture because it doesn't have any material base.

C. Derick Varn: 2:49:33

Yeah, that's that's, you know, that's actually correct, and I think that's that's why I've never been able to go full communitarian, even though I will also admit I have communitarian impulses. I'm like one of the things I've always been obsessed with from my point of the left is like you know what guys the right's better at building community. But I was talking to Erica Rebelez Anderson about this and we both noticed, you know, she was talking about multi-level marketing and she was actually saying, well, is it any more exploitative than than, you know, credentialization? I'm like, in some ways, yes, in some ways no, actually it's in some ways more exploited, but the risk is lower, believe it or not. You rarely you rarely long-term economically devastate yourself off of a multi-level marketing scheme Does occasionally happen, but it's pretty rare Whereas you can pretty lifetime economically devastate yourself in the bad schooling decision. That said, the one thing that we were talking about, like the social innovation of mega churches, how they were better integrated, women and stuff, stuff flashed. We're probably like and talking about how they left you and learned of that. We both noticed that it all ended with the financial crisis, like that's when that really started to break down And that's what actually, you know and I didn't push back on her with this because I actually like some for points but I was thinking, you know, that was why I thought mega churches were a sign of secularization, even though they were super innovative and better at a lot of things in traditional churches, they actually indicated that they needed to be, to continue to survive.

C. Derick Varn: 2:51:31

But I do sometimes admit that it's frustrating like conservative media tends to have a larger female audience than left-wing media, even though women are not particularly conservative. Why is that? Like you know and stuff like that, and that doesn't seem related to lash at all. Yet somehow I feel like there's something in what lash is struggling with feminism, some of which I think you can account to his perhaps sexist, very much too literal view of Freudian dynamics. But there is something there about the way a lot of the left both valorizes but is not attractive to a female audience. Like there is something in that And I can't really tell you what exactly. And it's not that there's, no, i mean, there are plenty of women on the left. But like, if you look at people who engage in leftist media projects, engaged in leftist theory, even engaged in a lot of like the political end of leftist organizing, not the social end, which does tend to. Social activists do tend to be women, do I?

Elijah Emery: 2:52:41

I mean I Did.

C. Derick Varn: 2:52:44

I cut out again.

Elijah Emery: 2:52:48

You cut out the exact wrong moment. Go ahead. I think that the squad is women, basically.

C. Derick Varn: 2:52:54

Yeah, but they're women who represent the most male demographic of politics.

Elijah Emery: 2:52:59

I'm just pointing out, I'm just adding on to what you're saying.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53:02

Like yeah yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53:04

Like with that, i've rubbed my hand around that part of me. I think it's like a defensive gesture, yeah, but I don't think it's just that Like, and I don't think it's the feminization of beta-cocked men, like that's not what I think is going on. Really, if you've ever dealt with leftist men, they're just a toxic. There's any right wing pro anyway, particularly if they're my generation. But maybe there's hope for you, the years and millennials yet.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53:37

But but yeah, i don't know what I was getting on there, but there is something about the ambivalence on a post-nuclear family life that we don't really speak to, even when we talk about social reproduction or something like we don't. I don't know, i don't, i can't articulate it, i'm the wrong person to articulate it, but it seems like that's the real part of what Lash is struggling with with this whole femininity issue is, in some ways he's right that a lot of like left visions of what a female informed world it just collapses into the same thing, and I mean today I think a lot of people would say that's a good thing, but and I don't even know that I disagree with them. But there does seem to be something not dealt with there And it's really hard to articulate, which is why I've been babbling for 15 minutes.

Elijah Emery: 2:54:37

Maybe this can be the next episode.

C. Derick Varn: 2:54:40

Yeah, actually maybe we should talk about Lash and women because this is it. And it's interesting that my female interlocutor of all the people that I talk about Lash about is the one who pushes hardest on me about being too hard on Lash about his attitudes towards women, Like he thinks. she thinks I am judging him by modern Nandi Pamby left feminist standards And I don't think I'm doing that. But but I think that I like that. that in and of itself, has always been like why am I the person who's like getting annoyed with this way he talks about women, even though a lot of times I factually, particularly in the early books, I think he's actually correct. like about what early, like what early Western feminism, And by that I mean literally Western, as in Western of the United States. like why is Utah and Nebraska and all that where women voters come out of? And it's actually a kind of conservative impulse, Yeah, like.

Elijah Emery: 2:55:44

I'm sorry, that was like a hint. It's midnight here, So good night, good night. Thank you for having me.

C. Derick Varn: 2:55:52

Yeah, thank you for talking to me for three hours. I'd agree, yep, all right, have a good evening, bye, bye.