WEBVTT NOTE Austro-Libertarian Themes in Three Prague Authors: Capek, Kafka, and Hašek 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Okay, so these three guys, Carl Czapek, Franz Kafka, and Jaroslaw Hasek, were arguably the three most prominent, well not necessarily in their own day, at least Kafka wasn't, but nowadays, the three most prominent writers in Prague in the first half of the 20th century. 2 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:38.000 They, as you can see, they all died fairly young. They all had poor health, although I think that had they all been in perfect health, it's unlikely that many of them would have lived too much past 1939, given that some nasty people came to Prague around that. 3 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:50.000 So, starting off with Czapek, who was, as you see here, unhappy with the 20th century. 4 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:58.000 When the Nazis came into Prague, they had a death list, or at least an arrest list, 5 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:04.000 but the people arrested on the list usually ended up dead, and he was number two on the list. 6 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:06.040 And they got there and said, where's Carl Schapek? 7 00:01:06.040 --> 00:01:09.360 And they were told he died three months ago. 8 00:01:09.360 --> 00:01:14.000 And so then they went after his brother, who, you know, 9 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:18.000 one Schapek is as good to get as another. 10 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:21.840 Here's a quote where he's talking about his unhappiness 11 00:01:21.840 --> 00:01:24.920 with the intellectuals in Europe at the time, most of whom 12 00:01:24.920 --> 00:01:29.440 were defenders of either communism or fascism, 13 00:01:29.440 --> 00:01:33.640 or, in some cases, both depending on convenience. 14 00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:40.200 None of these three thinkers I'm talking about 15 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:42.960 were Austro-libertarians. 16 00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:44.880 None of them were Austrians, except in the trivial sense 17 00:01:44.880 --> 00:01:47.880 of having been born subjects to the Austrian crown. 18 00:01:47.880 --> 00:01:50.900 And none of them were libertarians in our sense. 19 00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:56.560 Hasek was an anarchist, but of the communist variety, 20 00:01:56.560 --> 00:01:58.520 and the other two weren't. 21 00:01:58.520 --> 00:02:05.280 But all three of them have, I think, things that Austro-libertarians will find insightful 22 00:02:05.280 --> 00:02:07.800 or enjoyable. 23 00:02:07.800 --> 00:02:13.160 Here's a picture of Czapik's grave that I took last time I was in Prague, and you'll 24 00:02:13.160 --> 00:02:19.300 notice that someone has placed a little robot at the bottom of the grave because Czapik's 25 00:02:19.300 --> 00:02:26.480 main claim to fame nowadays is that he was the author of this book, which was the one 26 00:02:26.480 --> 00:02:32.880 When they introduced the word robot, which comes from a Slavic word meaning forced labor 27 00:02:32.880 --> 00:02:36.400 or serf labor, this is where the word comes from. 28 00:02:36.400 --> 00:02:40.920 He didn't himself invent the word, his brother invented the word, but he went to his brother 29 00:02:40.920 --> 00:02:41.920 and said, what shall I call these? 30 00:02:41.920 --> 00:02:44.800 I want to call them laborators, but that sounds odd. 31 00:02:44.800 --> 00:02:45.800 What shall I call them? 32 00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:46.800 And his brother said, why not robots? 33 00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:48.860 He said, okay. 34 00:02:48.860 --> 00:02:53.840 And so this is both the first book to feature robots and the first book to feature robots 35 00:02:53.840 --> 00:03:01.580 Most Rebelling Against Their Human Creators, and thus, all of this comes from Shoppeck. 36 00:03:01.580 --> 00:03:04.920 If I had more time, I would pause to let the science fiction geeks in the audience identify 37 00:03:04.920 --> 00:03:05.920 each of these. 38 00:03:05.920 --> 00:03:11.560 A couple of them will be trickier than the others, but time marches on. 39 00:03:11.560 --> 00:03:15.860 Actually I don't think it's, in a way I think it's unfortunate that this is the book he's 40 00:03:15.860 --> 00:03:20.120 best known for because I don't think it's anything near being his best book. 41 00:03:20.120 --> 00:03:23.760 But nevertheless, it certainly is interesting and it works on a number of different levels 42 00:03:23.760 --> 00:03:31.320 I point out here ways in which it talks about anxieties of workers and anxieties of capitalists 43 00:03:31.320 --> 00:03:37.760 and his own anxieties about mechanization and dehumanization. 44 00:03:37.760 --> 00:03:43.120 This is a quote not from the play but from the short story that was sort of a prelude 45 00:03:43.120 --> 00:03:49.120 to the play where this isn't Choppick talking, this is the villain talking about how we need 46 00:03:49.120 --> 00:03:52.800 to all the workers to become sort of soulless machines. 47 00:03:54.740 --> 00:03:58.040 I have a hypothesis as to why he might have chosen 48 00:03:58.040 --> 00:04:03.040 the MRUR, so the initials K-U-K were the symbols, 49 00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:08.920 that was the symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 50 00:04:08.920 --> 00:04:11.000 Notice on this postage stamp here, 51 00:04:11.960 --> 00:04:14.320 the letters K-U-K there stands for 52 00:04:14.320 --> 00:04:18.000 Kaiserlich und Königlich, that is imperial and royal 53 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:21.040 because of this dual nature of the monarchy 54 00:04:21.040 --> 00:04:23.480 and KUK was just everywhere all over. 55 00:04:23.480 --> 00:04:27.960 And if you lop off the top part of the letters of RUR, 56 00:04:27.960 --> 00:04:29.560 look here on the right, 57 00:04:29.560 --> 00:04:32.000 if you lop off the top part of the letters, 58 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:36.680 see how easily you get from R between RUR and KUK. 59 00:04:36.680 --> 00:04:38.600 And so it's possible that he was thinking 60 00:04:38.600 --> 00:04:42.200 that one of the many levels on which he might have meant this 61 00:04:42.200 --> 00:04:46.960 is to think of, in particular, the Austrian-Carrian Empire 62 00:04:46.960 --> 00:04:55.200 that had just dragged the Czech people into World War I, which is something I think that 63 00:04:55.200 --> 00:04:58.520 all three of these authors were interested in. 64 00:04:58.520 --> 00:05:03.200 It's one of the things that happens in RUR, one of the terrible mistakes they make is turning 65 00:05:03.200 --> 00:05:05.920 all these soldiers, these robots into soldiers. 66 00:05:05.920 --> 00:05:10.800 But he wrote other stuff too. 67 00:05:10.800 --> 00:05:15.880 In a couple decades earlier, H.G. Wells had written this book called In the Days of the 68 00:05:15.880 --> 00:05:20.960 The Comet, in which the earth passes through the tail of a comet, and the result, the effect 69 00:05:20.960 --> 00:05:27.720 of the gases, is to turn everyone on earth into a socialist. And so, of course, everyone 70 00:05:27.720 --> 00:05:36.000 lives happily ever after. It's not one of Will's best books. Even if you like socialism, 71 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:41.440 and what kind of plot is that? Earth passes through these gases, everyone becomes converted 72 00:05:41.440 --> 00:05:45.480 which is where the ideology in the story ends. 73 00:05:45.480 --> 00:05:47.080 But it was influential. 74 00:05:47.080 --> 00:05:50.880 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a book on a somewhat similar theme 75 00:05:50.880 --> 00:05:52.060 a little later. 76 00:05:52.060 --> 00:05:53.640 And so the Chopick writes something 77 00:05:53.640 --> 00:05:57.880 that I think is meant to be a parody of Well's book. 78 00:05:57.880 --> 00:06:00.200 The title in Czech means something 79 00:06:00.200 --> 00:06:07.280 like the English translation is the absolute at large. 80 00:06:07.280 --> 00:06:10.700 And what happens in the book is that they 81 00:06:10.700 --> 00:06:15.820 They discover atomic energy and they discover that what atomic energy does is it releases 82 00:06:15.820 --> 00:06:21.140 the divine essence that's the heart of all matter, and this divine essence is the absolute. 83 00:06:21.140 --> 00:06:24.820 And it has two effects, one is it suddenly makes machinery more productive, even without 84 00:06:24.820 --> 00:06:28.380 any people touching it, the machinery just on its own suddenly becomes productive. 85 00:06:28.380 --> 00:06:34.300 And second, it turns everyone into religious and altruistic enthusiasts, they all become 86 00:06:34.300 --> 00:06:41.060 from religious, socialistic and filled with love for their neighbors and the results are 87 00:06:41.060 --> 00:06:42.060 disastrous. 88 00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:49.660 So first here's what happens with production is so you get the factories of their own start 89 00:06:49.660 --> 00:06:53.780 producing masses and masses of stuff so there's this tack factory that produces these piles 90 00:06:53.780 --> 00:06:58.340 and piles of tacks but the problem is that there's no one has any incentive now to move 91 00:06:58.340 --> 00:07:02.100 stuff from where it's oversupplied to where it's undersupplied because now that everyone 92 00:07:02.100 --> 00:07:07.100 No one has become socialistic and altruistic, no one has any profit motive, and so there's no more entrepreneurship. 93 00:07:07.100 --> 00:07:13.100 And so there'll be piles and piles of goods being produced in one place, and then everyone will be desperate for the goods somewhere else, 94 00:07:13.100 --> 00:07:18.100 but no one has any incentive to move them from one place to another. 95 00:07:18.100 --> 00:07:24.100 Also, this media for overproduction hits the government printing presses. 96 00:07:24.100 --> 00:07:31.100 Now, he wrote this in late 1921, early 1922, so the Austrian and German hyperinflations were just beginning to get going around this time. 97 00:07:31.100 --> 00:07:39.100 going around this time, but they hadn't reached their really exciting levels yet, but obviously he could see what was coming. 98 00:07:39.100 --> 00:07:47.100 I have a massively inflated German currency at the top, and the Austrian hyperinflation didn't get quite as exciting. 99 00:07:47.100 --> 00:07:51.100 I have a less inflated one down there. 100 00:07:51.100 --> 00:07:58.100 What saves everything is because out in the rural areas these engines aren't in place, and so the effects of the absolute are less strong. 101 00:07:58.100 --> 00:08:14.100 and so the farmers aren't hit by this altruism and so everyone's saved from starvation by the fact that the farmers all spontaneously, without any coordination with each other, start raising their prices, led by this inner voice, as he puts it. 102 00:08:14.100 --> 00:08:27.100 However, the result of all this ideological enthusiasm is everyone has some sort of vision of what they want to convert the world to and if other people have a different vision then they end up fighting and so there's this massive 103 00:08:27.100 --> 00:08:34.100 Wars. The result of converting everyone to socialism is starvation and war. 104 00:08:34.100 --> 00:08:42.100 And then he has this quote that I thought was very similar to this quote from Rand, and so I put the two together. 105 00:08:42.100 --> 00:08:49.100 It makes these people all love mankind, but it doesn't make them actually care about the rights of any individual people. 106 00:08:49.100 --> 00:08:54.100 Here's another book that I think is also inspired by Wells' book, War of the Worlds. 107 00:08:54.100 --> 00:09:00.100 In this case, the aliens aren't from another planet. They're from our oceans. We find these intelligent newts. 108 00:09:00.100 --> 00:09:15.100 Initially, they are innocent victims. Human beings find these newts that are intelligent, and we exploit them and enslave them, and they rebel, and that's what the book's about. 109 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:36.100 I just love in particular this quote talking about the nudes had to possess official residence permits, pay capitation taxes, deducted from their food, pay for the fences that fence them in, and so forth, in all these respects they were treated like other citizens, which is equal rights of the sort. 110 00:09:36.100 --> 00:09:41.100 Then here's something in the book he wrote about gardening, but in the course of writing about gardening he suddenly says, 111 00:09:41.100 --> 00:09:42.820 Why do we have a celebration of the holiday of labor? 112 00:09:42.820 --> 00:09:44.900 Why not the holiday of private property? 113 00:09:44.900 --> 00:09:47.460 After all, we shouldn't celebrate the work we do 114 00:09:47.460 --> 00:09:49.620 so much as the products it produces 115 00:09:49.620 --> 00:09:50.820 because the value of the laborer 116 00:09:50.820 --> 00:09:53.300 consists in its producing these goods, 117 00:09:53.300 --> 00:09:54.940 not just the laboring for its own sake. 118 00:09:54.940 --> 00:09:58.100 And so, I'll leave the connection with Austrian theory 119 00:09:58.100 --> 00:09:59.980 for you to figure out. 120 00:10:01.860 --> 00:10:04.020 You know, something that reminds me of Bastiat's 121 00:10:04.020 --> 00:10:05.820 petition of the candle makers is this baker 122 00:10:05.820 --> 00:10:08.500 complaining about unfair competition from Jesus 123 00:10:08.500 --> 00:10:12.660 because Jesus is multiplying the loaves and fishes. 124 00:10:12.660 --> 00:10:14.300 The baker doesn't care about the fishes 125 00:10:14.300 --> 00:10:16.020 because he's just a baker. 126 00:10:16.020 --> 00:10:19.420 He wants to multiply fish, that's fine, but not loaves. 127 00:10:19.420 --> 00:10:24.420 He has another short story in which Prometheus 128 00:10:26.900 --> 00:10:28.500 is being accused by the government 129 00:10:28.500 --> 00:10:31.740 for various reasons for discovering fire. 130 00:10:31.740 --> 00:10:34.380 First, because it's a dangerous product. 131 00:10:34.380 --> 00:10:36.500 Second, because it's going to make people weak 132 00:10:36.500 --> 00:10:37.860 and not warlike because they just want to sit 133 00:10:37.860 --> 00:10:52.860 and how to run the fire and be cozy rather than going off and fighting, but also this is a valuable weapon and he should have just reserved it to the government instead of opening up to everyone including foreigners and ordinary people. 134 00:10:52.860 --> 00:11:03.860 He has a story in which the emperor Diocletian is trying to explain why he's against Christianity since we couldn't run the government in Christian principles because how could you collect taxes? 135 00:11:03.860 --> 00:11:08.860 How could you have slaves? How could you have war under Christianity? 136 00:11:08.860 --> 00:11:15.860 Then here's a quote from Choppick that is very similar to something that Rand says. 137 00:11:15.860 --> 00:11:21.860 Choppick is attacking people who say that instinct is creative and spontaneous, 138 00:11:21.860 --> 00:11:25.860 whereas reason is sort of cold and mechanical. He says it's the other way around. 139 00:11:25.860 --> 00:11:30.860 According to instinct, you can only do sort of robotically what your ancestors have done, 140 00:11:30.860 --> 00:11:34.140 and it's actually a reason that's creative. 141 00:11:35.700 --> 00:11:38.900 And he also has this argument in this Noetic trilogy 142 00:11:38.900 --> 00:11:43.500 he wrote that what enables us to understand other people 143 00:11:43.500 --> 00:11:45.340 despite the fact that we can only understand things 144 00:11:45.340 --> 00:11:48.600 in terms of our own natures is that we're similar in nature 145 00:11:48.600 --> 00:11:51.060 to other people and so we understand them in virtue 146 00:11:51.060 --> 00:11:53.140 of being like them and he quotes this Latin phrase 147 00:11:53.140 --> 00:11:56.300 that means understanding like by like 148 00:11:56.300 --> 00:12:00.260 And these two dudes, whoever they are, 149 00:12:00.260 --> 00:12:04.300 had expressed a similar idea. 150 00:12:04.300 --> 00:12:06.220 Mises quotes it in Greek instead of Latin. 151 00:12:06.220 --> 00:12:08.540 But it's this idea that you understand 152 00:12:08.540 --> 00:12:11.700 human action with virtue of the fact that it's of the same type 153 00:12:11.700 --> 00:12:12.660 as your own mind. 154 00:12:15.580 --> 00:12:20.180 Here's just a quote where the devil is trying to tempt people 155 00:12:20.180 --> 00:12:24.180 into imposing their ideas of order on other people. 156 00:12:26.300 --> 00:12:33.300 Chopick wrote a lot on political language and sort of quasi-Arwellian concerns about how language is misused. 157 00:12:33.300 --> 00:12:38.300 He wrote about how if you don't recognize the government, that means you can just go and kill people. 158 00:12:38.300 --> 00:12:46.300 But I decided I didn't want to recognize my local bank, and so I walked in and started grabbing money and shooting the tellers that people wouldn't take that the same way. 159 00:12:46.300 --> 00:12:53.300 He also talks about the misuse of the word we, which is something that libertarians often talk about. 160 00:12:53.300 --> 00:12:58.120 Okay, on to the next figure of our three. 161 00:12:58.120 --> 00:12:59.540 This one needs the least introduction 162 00:12:59.540 --> 00:13:01.700 because although he was the least famous in his own day, 163 00:13:01.700 --> 00:13:05.420 he's the most famous in ours, he writes a lot about people 164 00:13:05.420 --> 00:13:08.780 in the grips of incomprehensible bureaucracies. 165 00:13:08.780 --> 00:13:10.100 And there's some debate in the literature 166 00:13:10.100 --> 00:13:12.500 as to whether he's talking about political stuff 167 00:13:12.500 --> 00:13:15.020 or whether this is really just a metaphor 168 00:13:15.020 --> 00:13:19.600 for the human condition, but I think it's both. 169 00:13:19.600 --> 00:13:25.600 I'll flip past those cartoons, it talks about the way in which 170 00:13:25.600 --> 00:13:28.600 rulers don't really understand anything because they're so separated from it. 171 00:13:28.600 --> 00:13:35.600 It talks about this machine that's supposed to instruct people by inscribing their wrongs on their flesh, but it just butchers them. 172 00:13:35.600 --> 00:13:44.600 I'm going to go through some of this a bit, another parallel quote from Kafka and Mises. 173 00:13:44.600 --> 00:13:54.600 There's a suggestion, a lot of his writings, that authority doesn't really exist, that it's just some of all of us accept it and hold this authority together by our actions. 174 00:13:54.600 --> 00:14:00.600 So there's this castle, it's supposed to be a source of authority, but you can never actually find it or narrow it where it is. 175 00:14:00.600 --> 00:14:03.600 The Great Wall of China, he says, well, there's this emperor, but we really have no emperor. 176 00:14:03.600 --> 00:14:06.600 Go past the cartoons. 177 00:14:06.600 --> 00:14:11.600 And also draws parallels with World War I. 178 00:14:11.600 --> 00:14:18.480 He has a story about how we don't really know what the laws are even if we have them. 179 00:14:18.480 --> 00:14:24.240 Third guy, Jaroslaw Hasek, he was an anarchist, seems to be an anarcho-communist, it's hard 180 00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:28.240 to tell because whenever his biographer starts talking about his anarchism he starts getting 181 00:14:28.240 --> 00:14:32.520 the vapors as you see here. 182 00:14:32.520 --> 00:14:39.880 He created a fake political party urging people to vote against earthquakes. 183 00:14:39.880 --> 00:14:44.880 and also protesting it's unfair to give innocent little dogs names like Nero and Caesar. 184 00:14:44.880 --> 00:14:49.880 And I was thinking of this just the other day when last weekend there was a conference at the art museum 185 00:14:49.880 --> 00:14:54.880 and I noticed on the menu at the cafe they had a Napoleon and something on a Kaiser roll. 186 00:14:54.880 --> 00:15:01.880 He was drafted in World War I, acted effected and became a Bolshevik official for a while 187 00:15:01.880 --> 00:15:07.880 but then when he was sent back to Prague to foment revolution he just returned to his usual lifestyle. 188 00:15:07.880 --> 00:15:12.520 He has a bunch of stories, here's a story that illustrates 189 00:15:12.520 --> 00:15:17.520 perverse economic incentives where they think that criminals 190 00:15:20.800 --> 00:15:22.440 would be more likely to cooperate with officials 191 00:15:22.440 --> 00:15:25.200 if the officials are themselves former criminals, 192 00:15:25.200 --> 00:15:27.120 but then the result is that everyone has incentive 193 00:15:27.120 --> 00:15:28.840 to become a criminal in order to be made a judge 194 00:15:28.840 --> 00:15:30.720 or another official. 195 00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:32.240 Here's the story where the criminals go on strike 196 00:15:32.240 --> 00:15:33.640 and so the government goes into a panic 197 00:15:33.640 --> 00:15:35.760 because they're not needed if there's no crime 198 00:15:35.760 --> 00:15:41.560 and even consider trying to pay criminal crimes and when the government starts rioting, trying 199 00:15:41.560 --> 00:15:45.520 to get crime to come back, the riot is itself illegal and so, hooray, crime's restored 200 00:15:45.520 --> 00:15:50.520 and everything's alright. 201 00:15:50.520 --> 00:15:56.960 The very fact that you praise the government shows, you'd be absurd to praise the government 202 00:15:56.960 --> 00:16:01.760 so it shows your insincerity and see a really bad person. 203 00:16:01.760 --> 00:16:06.920 This is rather prophetic of the Soviet era that the very fact that you use niving mentally 204 00:16:06.920 --> 00:16:14.360 ill as the reason we get to keep locking you up is a case where the people suspect that 205 00:16:14.360 --> 00:16:24.200 the ruler has turned feeble-minded, but those who claim this are arrested for defaming the 206 00:16:24.200 --> 00:16:25.200 ruler. 207 00:16:25.200 --> 00:16:30.120 But then those people are arrested for defaming the ruler by suggesting that he would hang 208 00:16:30.120 --> 00:16:35.160 Hang out with people who would defame him, and finally they said just leave the feeble-minded 209 00:16:35.160 --> 00:16:39.080 ruler in place because actually it doesn't make any difference since the government isn't 210 00:16:39.080 --> 00:16:40.560 really the cause of order in society. 211 00:16:40.560 --> 00:16:47.320 Here's about a guy who can't get back into Bohemia because he's got a silver plate in 212 00:16:47.320 --> 00:16:51.200 his skull and a pig's kidney transplanted so it would violate customs while he's ready 213 00:16:51.200 --> 00:16:53.840 to get back in. 214 00:16:53.840 --> 00:16:58.320 This is too complicated a story, I don't have time for it, but it's funny. 215 00:16:58.320 --> 00:17:04.120 Here's a guy who gets in trouble because he says you should buy these portraits to the 216 00:17:04.120 --> 00:17:07.720 emperor because the emperors are having such a bad time now, we're doing badly in the war. 217 00:17:07.720 --> 00:17:08.720 This is unpatriotic. 218 00:17:08.720 --> 00:17:12.120 So he says, oh, we should buy them because we're doing great in the war, and that's 219 00:17:12.120 --> 00:17:17.200 unpatriotic because it's making light of our losses. 220 00:17:17.200 --> 00:17:20.440 Here's a guy who takes down his portrait of the emperor because it's covered with fly 221 00:17:20.440 --> 00:17:23.760 poop, but then he's in trouble for taking it down. 222 00:17:23.760 --> 00:17:27.440 When he explains why he takes it down, then he gets in trouble for that because you're 223 00:17:27.440 --> 00:17:53.440 His most famous book, The Good Soldier's Fake, is about this soldier who pretends to be an idiot and he manages to outwit all the officials who are trying to control him by pretending to misunderstand orders or by interpreting the orders literally or doing various things. 224 00:17:53.440 --> 00:18:00.440 And there's another case where the very fact that he keeps shouting long live the emperor is a sign of his insanity. 225 00:18:00.440 --> 00:18:05.440 On the left you see a couple of places in Prague that have his picture. 226 00:18:05.440 --> 00:18:14.440 And then during the communist period, this dude was the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustav Husak, 227 00:18:14.440 --> 00:18:18.440 and he told the Czech population, stop shveking. 228 00:18:18.440 --> 00:18:48.440 So the idea was that they were behaving in this schvick-like way, and in fact, when the communist tanks rolled in, they would do things like give the wrong directions to the tanks, and they'd send tanks this way and that way, so the tanks would end up firing at each other, and they took down the street signs, they took down all the street signs in Prague and piled them neatly in front of the town hall, as if this was a favor. 229 00:18:48.440 --> 00:18:55.440 This is stopped, so I'll stop because I always do what the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party says. 230 00:18:55.440 --> 00:19:06.440 Anyway, all three of these authors are well worth reading and I will leave this creepy face here to stare down at you.