Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate that, Mark, and that's the title. That was sort of a provisional title, right?
I was pulling my punches at the time because what I really wanted to entitle this was Statecraft as Sorcery, right?
Now, this was sort of a repost to George Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft, you know, probably you're familiar with his title.
But I didn't want to spook people out, right, and I hope everybody has a good sense of humor and an ability to look at these things not only critically but also with a certain grain of salt.
Well, and I also thought this was a good time for this particular topic because as we all know, everybody in this room, the Republic has ceased to function.
We are now at the very end of the historical cycle.
In fact, within two months, you will see the end of the Galactic Republic, I'm afraid,
because in two months we're going to see the final segment of George Lucas' Star Wars.
I hope everybody is enjoying the denouement and the relationship between Palpatine and
his young apprentice, Anakin, who is to become Lord Vader, as we know.
Well, seriously, does this have some relationship to reality or not?
I'm an anthropologist, right, and not a economist, right?
So what I'm going to be talking about today has less to do with the dusty tomes that are here
at the Ludwig von Mises Institute than the tomes that were written by Joseph Campbell
and which inspired the Star Wars trilogy, right?
So that's the kind of literature that I'm familiar with,
although I'm trying to present this in a user-friendly way
for people who will be looking at it from an Austrian perspective.
Now, as an anthropologist, I look at the world, right?
The same way we all look at the world, right?
Seeing it from outer space, just as we were, as it were,
in the Star Wars movie itself, the blue globe, the beautiful white clouds, the green continents, that sort of thing.
However, every time we think about an image of our world, we're not really seeing it from outer space,
we're not really perceiving things sensually, perceptually.
What we're looking at is what the phenomenologists call the nomadic object.
I don't know about you, but when I think, when somebody tells me to imagine the world, imagine the world right now,
what I think about is not that beautiful blue sky, that beautiful white cloud, the green continents, the gray deserts, whatever they are.
I see what has been called the polychromatic map. I see a world which has been divided into various states.
I see the world on a Rand McNally map, the world national geographic, and we see a seven, six or seven color map, we look at it and we see every particular part of the world has been covered with one color or another.
There are no longer any white blank spaces.
Now this is a great tragedy for the anthropologists as well as people on the ground because we used to like these white, non-state dominated areas, right?
If you look at a map of Africa, for example, here's the limited example, a map of Africa prior to 1885, what you'll see is states on the exterior, right?
on the coastal, littorial, and on the inside, you'll see a great white mass.
Well, part of that is due to ignorance.
And part of that, Eurocentric ignorance, you know, for people who are Europe bashers or whatever,
part of it is due to the fact that much of that area was not covered by states.
Much of it was covered by areas which were no longer controlled by any particular power.
in particular power. They were village societies, band societies, they might have been whatever they were, patrilineal, matrilineal, any particular social organization, but they did not have centralized states to speak of.
What they had was something which was a person-to-person networking society.
Now, you usually hear in the literature, again the anti-eurocentric literature, you usually hear about something called, again I'm using Africa as a limiting case, the division of Africa, or the partition of Africa.
That's what it looks like from the outside. For a person on the ground at the time, in that particular historical situation, they would have seen not the partition of anything, they would have seen the amalgamation.
Suddenly one would have found oneself in a huge administrative region,
which was no longer a village society or something of that nature.
You'd be seeing yourself as part of a large region, for example,
the Belgian Congo or French West Africa, this sort of thing.
And most people would say, well, where did this sort of tessellated,
What does this desolated, completely covered, polychromatic graph come from?
Well, it came from the sort of late 19th century imperialism, right?
We don't have any blank spaces anymore, right, because of that, right?
Well, maybe, right, maybe there's some place like the desert, the empty quarter in Saudi Arabia,
or not even in Saudi Arabia, maybe there's one or two oases somewhere in that region,
which are not yet controlled by a state possibly, but I suspect if they are not controlled by a state then the present Bush administration is giving them a grant to be incorporated into either Saudi Arabia or Oman or some country of that nature.
Well, it's sort of an illusion to say that this is due entirely to what is called Western imperialism.
Imperialism. Actually, the Western Imperial movement of the late 19th century was just a special case of a general movement from non-state to state societies, as we all know.
Let's forget about the polychromatic map. Let's look at a map which is partly shaded and partly blank, where shaded regions constitute state regions, blank regions constitute non-state regions.
If you go back far enough, let's suppose, prior to the European-centric period,
let's suppose you go back to the time prior to the voyages of Columbus, right?
Say, 1400, something like that, you'd see the same thing.
You'd see these shaded regions gradually encroaching into the non-shaded regions.
Or if you take, again, getting away from Europe-bashing,
let's talk about Chinese imperialism, right?
Everybody knows that Tibet, the celebrated case of Tibet, has been taken over by China.
Does that mean that Tibet did not have an aggressively expanding state prior to the Chinese takeover?
No, of course. State building had already occurred in Tibet.
There was also already a nascent Tibetan theocracy prior to the Chinese incursion,
which was long, long before even the communist government.
So, when we're talking about states, we're talking about, unfortunately, something which seems to be endemic and insidious in the development of whatever economic or cultural regime we're talking about.
It would be nice to think, for example, that the state was the result of some particular ideology.
So for example, if the state was an invention of Confucianism, we would see state organizations spreading out gradually from China.
If it was an invention of Christianity, some sort of Erastian heresy or something like that, we'd see it spreading out from the central Roman Empire or something.
Of course, that's not the case. We see parallel developments of the state. And people have known this for a long time.
We have very good theories about what the economic conditions are which permit the organization
of a state.
Probably most of you are familiar with the work of people like Carl Wittfogel, the hydraulic
hypothesis, the idea that a particular group of people, a clan or a tribe, gets in control
of the headwaters of a large riverine civilization and then manages to organize it.
Another example, places which are not river basins in the old world, there's been similar
research on Mesoamerica, Peru, sometimes this is called the circumscription hypothesis,
resources in a limited area, again, can be surrounded, fortified and controlled by a
particular group, which then imposes this organization.
That's the, as it were, the ecological view of the origin of the state.
I'm not going to talk about that today because that's already been developed quite a bit.
What I wanted to talk about today was the psychology of obedience.
What is it which is making people susceptible to this kind of encroachment on their freedom?
What is it which allows them to be manipulated in this way?
I don't see ecological hypotheses as being anything more than a necessary condition for
the origin of tyrannical or hierarchical societies, rather there's something in the human mind
which allows them to be manipulated.
Now you may take issue with me on this, but I'm just going to state this as the hypothesis.
So we have, first of all, technological conditions, right, and ecological conditions which allow
the establishment of a state.
The second, we have a species of people, right, the human beings, who somehow are susceptible
to being made into a state.
Now this is a strange way of thinking about things, but think about it for a while.
Human beings are the only mammals that have a state.
That doesn't seem to make sense, does it?
We usually don't talk about things that way.
It sounds like I've made a misstatement.
If we look at insects, for example, they seem to have nice hierarchical organizations.
They're always used in animal allegories for states and so forth.
We talk about queen bees and that sort of thing.
We talk about lions who are kings too, but actually that's more of a loose metaphor than
if we're talking about an insect society.
So what is it?
What is it that makes people susceptible to authoritarianism?
One thing is that if we are talking about authoritarianism, is authoritarianism the
same thing as tyranny?
There's a literature, and probably some of you have read this, a literature on the authoritarian
Libertarian Personality. This is a rather good article. J.J. Ray wrote this in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. This was the winter of 1980, Libertarians and the Authoritarian Personality.
Now he was writing it in a political context. He was writing it in the context of somebody who is making an accusation, a partisan attack on another kind of subcultural element.
You are the authoritarians, I'm not authoritarian. But that's not really the point.
If we're withdrawing from the idea of partisan attack and we're looking at the origin of the state in a, well, not a scientific, because I'm going to come around to this and want to criticize the notion of scientism.
But if we're looking at things in as objective a way as we can, what is it in human beings which allows them to be coerced?
Well, that brings us to human sciences.
And that's the next thing I wanted to criticize.
What are the human sciences and is it possible to have such a thing as a human science?
My feeling, and this is just my feeling, this is what I'm basing all my ideas on,
is that there really can't be such a thing as human science.
That human science is a misnomer.
What we have is a study of human beings who can be described, either verbally or pictured in some sense.
But the notion of human science is essentially hot air.
It's hot air because we are talking about things which are not exactly determinable,
the same way that physical science can determine physical phenomena.
And there's three problems with this. First of all, the pseudoscientific nature of the human sciences, I'm talking about sociology, I'm talking about anthropology, I'm talking about psychology, I'm not talking about economics, this is a different thing.
Their pseudoscientific nature distorts our idea of what a, of what human nature is.
Secondly, the theories that we have in sociology and in anthropology are essentially collectivized, they're pre-collectivized.
They've derailed the dialogue on the relationship between liberty and coercion in a way that stacks the card in the direction of collectivism.
And most of you are familiar with the development of science literature.
You know that sociology traces its roots back to French positivism in the 19th century,
Comte and Durkheim, right?
Anthropology is more of a mixed bag, right?
I'm a legitimate anthropologist.
I had my training in that very data-intensive sort of school,
even though I'm talking on a high level of abstraction now.
Anthropology to the extent that it has a theoretical basis.
Culturology goes back to neoconscientism in the late 19th century, of course based in Germany.
Both of these theoretical foundations, both the sociological foundation and the cultural foundation,
were accepted uncritically and paradigms for research were developed out of that.
Now, some of the data collection and the things that were discovered during the process of
exploration and description during the 20th century were excellent.
That's not a question.
My criticism is simply that they were biased from the beginning because they had a scientific
rather than an artistic view of human nature.
In other words, I'm saying that people who are interested in liberty, and that includes
Austrian economists, should be thinking more like postmodernists.
Now, maybe you don't like postmodernists.
Maybe you've heard a lot of bad things about postmodernism.
Well, I have, too, and I don't like it.
It's cancer, a lot of it, right?
And the authoritarian personality theory is a paradigmatic case of this sort of collectivist
cancer which is turned into, it's actually turned into what we today call, not postmodernism
but political correctness, right, political correctness.
So Theodore Adorno, the man who developed the concept of the authoritarian personality,
The man who developed what was called the F-scale, right, this was a test which develops, which is supposed to explicate your degree of whatever, authoritarianism, right, or the F comes from fascism, right, these are supposed to be the same things.
If you're conservative in your tastes, right, if you're oriented to local communities, right, if you are xenophobic, right, well, these things may or may not be good things, but this is an indication of your proclivity towards authoritarianism.
Well, that may be true in its own sense, but it's essentially a partisan indictment, it's not an honest attempt to get at what it is in human beings which makes them susceptible to coercion.
Instead of looking at attitudes, it would be better to look at the way human beings function, right?
Not necessarily the way that economists look at the outcomes of the market, right?
Right? But looking actually the way that phenomenologists look at consciousness, look at thought processes, that sort of thing.
Well, if we are phenomenologists, we're looking not only at outcomes, we're also looking at nomadic objects.
We're looking at things that are inside people's minds, right? An idea, right? A color, a shape, right?
Some memory, something of that nature.
And these things, as abstract as they may seem,
have a tremendous effect on human behavior.
What we can't say is we can't say because we
know one of these objects is inside somebody's mind
that they're necessarily going to behave one way or the other.
What we know only is that it's like in physics.
I'm criticizing people for being scientific,
but now I'm resorting to a physical analogy.
In physics we have the probability cloud and all sorts of things are going on in the probability cloud and then what we have is something which is an outcome, which may or may not be determined by the shape of that probability cloud, okay?
Well, I was thinking that if we were to reject the positivist ideas, right, which sociology and anthropology were based on,
Unfortunately, anthropology was not entirely based on anything.
Anthropology was the science which was composed out of the various shreds
which were left on the cutting board floor after all the other sciences were developed.
That gave anthropologists a sort of empirical bias, but it also freed them up from bad theorization.
The bad theorization is essentially the attempt by contemporary social so-called science to imitate physical science.
This begins with August Comte in the early 19th century.
Well, maybe it doesn't begin with him, but he's the representative thinker.
If we go beyond that, if we go prior to him, prior to the Enlightenment,
We see ways of thinking which did not conflate science with art.
If we go back to the 16th century, we're going to see people like Machiavelli,
again an unpopular thinker amongst lovers of freedom, but a person who is very perceptive,
A person who essentially spilled the beans on how domination actually works in a political context.
Unlike Castiglione's court here, he comes out with a very naked and raw appraisal of how you get power, how you stay in power, how you make sure that it is passed on to your descendants.
Does he call this science? No, he does not, of course.
of course. He calls it a kind of book of advice. He calls it a handbook, as it were, but it's
not really science. The vogue for scientism does not really manifest itself in the Renaissance
mind. This is a later, post-enlightenment sort of thing.
The second person, this is again a sympathetic person from the libertarian point of view,
would be Labuetti. Labuetti also is an exposer. He's somebody who is able to tear away the
mask of legitimacy on the political institutions, but he's not very analytical. Labuetti's work
is a beautiful little rhetorical work on how people are induced into the hierarchy of the state, right?
And what he says in terms of human nature is he comes up with a very simplistic sort of two-part model, right?
Again, this is just art. This is just a handbook for freedom fighters. It's not an attempt to make a science of society.
And he says there's two kinds of people. There's knaves and there's dupes, right?
If you get further and further into the core apparatus of the state, you're a knave.
If you're farther from that, you're a dupe.
And that's all he says.
As far as I can tell, he doesn't really come up with a theory of the psychology of obedience.
He doesn't really develop a robust anthropology, what I would call an anthropology, which incidentally
is not the same as what we call anthropology today.
by anthropology I mean anthropologie, the science or the theory of what constitutes a human being.
If we wanted to go beyond that, if we wanted to go into an idea of how people are adjusted in terms of art,
I would suggest another Renaissance thinker, and this is a man that most people aren't very aware of,
And this is Bruno, right? Giovanni Bruno, right?
And Bruno is usually noted by people in science histories and so forth
as a predecessor of Galileo Galilei, right?
He's usually, in fact, most people sort of confuse the two, you know,
they don't remember whether Galileo was actually burned at the stake or not.
Well, that wasn't true, of course. He was warned not to talk about heliocentric cosmology, and then he was let off for a while.
Bruno actually was. Bruno preceded him, and allegedly he was burned by the Inquisition, actually, for preaching a heliocentric universe.
Well, actually that's not true. He was burned for other, rather more plausible reasons.
There's a whole history behind that. If you're interested in that history, I would recommend to you the works of Dom Francis Yates, a very interesting historian of the European and particularly the English Renaissance.
Well, Bruno was a very curious fellow, and he also had an anthropology, not in the positivistic sense, but in the sense that all Renaissance or scholastic thinkers would have had an anthropology.
And it was based on the idea of bonding. Now, bonding is a very vague word that we use all the time these days.
We talk about peer bonding, we talk about bonding between spouses, we talk about generational bonding,
the bonding of people that go out for the Auburn football team and they get to be buddies and so forth.
It has a good connotation in that respect and I think fundamentally it's a good word.
It's not a negative thing if you say bonding.
Bonding, you know, these days most people recognize. We're talking about a very sort
of pristine sort of virginal idea, right, that applies to all sorts of situations everybody
would be in. However, if you read Bruno, when he talks about bonding, he's really talking
about two things, right, which are more or less, well, synonyms if you think about the
The different applications of two words. First of all, enchantment, and second is seduction.
Okay, so he's talking about the fact that people, without any sort of rational contract,
without any sort of, what should we say, without any sort of formal introduction to each other,
without any sort of formal explication of the contractual terms of the relationship,
just by being in each other's presence, just by continued association,
began to subconsciously develop an affinity with one another, right?
It's a very good thing.
Now this may upset people, right?
It may upset certain kinds of libertarians.
It might, I suppose it might conceivably upset certain people on a libertarian,
not a libertarian, but a religious basis,
because the man who came up with this idea was after all
burned at the stake by the Inquisition and I think he was the only person in the world to have been
excommunicated by the Lutherans, Calvinists and the Catholics. He was not a popular guy but he was
an interesting thinker. What he managed to do was come up with a theory which was extremely vague,
which we would normally think was a bad thing. We think of a concise hypothesis which
Lends itself to measurement is a good thing, whereas a vague, wordy sort of conversational hypothesis is not, right, but he was able to come up with it, and interestingly enough, right, if we think of bonding, this idea of what used to be called enchantment or seduction, today we would call it things like subliminal influence, hypnosis, whatever, the people who are upset by this idea no longer so much
... religious people as they would be the kind of libertarians who take a rationalistic view of human nature, right, the Prometheans, right, I suppose the best example of the Randians, right, people who would like everybody to be completely rational, to engage other people in a contractual relationship, not a tacit relationship, right.
He's talking about tacit relationships, and it's a model which involves three things, right?
What are the three things?
Every bond involves an agent, a bond, and a patient.
So we have two people and one thing which is acting as a media between the two.
Again, to quote my favorite movie, Star Wars, there are always two, a master and a disciple.
So, we have this strange sort of sorcerous idea, which Bruno is talking about.
And it's a general theory. When he talks about the agents, he's talking generally about agents.
He's not assuming that people are benevolent agents.
On the other hand, he's not assuming that people are benevolent agents.
He's not assuming that the agents are interfering with the other person's life,
necessarily through duplicitous means, but it might be.
So it could be on any level.
When he talks about the bonds, and this is most interesting,
But he's not talking exactly the same way that a modern behaviorist would talk about
reinforcement schedules.
Again, it's a much more discursive, conversational concept, one where he's not running off to
mathematize the model, right?
It's not like he's counting behaviors or counting whatever, right?
But the bond itself may be either something sensual, something tangible, something very
concrete or it may be what I'm calling a nomadic object, right, in a phenomenological sense.
It may be an idea.
It may be an aesthetic representation that we carry around in our head.
For example, the polychromatic map I talked about originally.
It might be something like that.
When we come to the patients, this is a very interesting idea, the patients may be accepting
the bonding willingly, they may be accepting a benevolent influence willingly, they may
be accepting it unconsciously.
Now some people are out there thinking, well, what does this all have to do with Austrian
economics?
After all, Austrian economics is a very clear theory, right, praxeology, which only involves
Patients, on the other hand, by patients I don't mean exactly our usual usage of patient,
which is a person under confined medical conditions, although, in fact, right now in the news we
have an interesting example of a human being, who is in the center of a medical life, issues,
University, who is not acting, who is receiving actions, and yet that person is considered
a human being and has an important function, not in praxeology, but in a general theoretical
anthropology, which is very important.
So if we wanted a robust anthropology, again, not in the sense of this combination of ethnography,
and the various other disciplines which you find in an anthropology department today.
But in terms of an anthropologie, a robust anthropology,
consideration of the human condition as patients as well as agents would be very important.
Now there's a whole literature on this too.
Again, not one that would be of much interest to the economist, I'm sorry.
But in the medical sphere, you have a whole development of literature on people who are homopatients.
Again, maybe people who are from Germany will know people like Victor von Feisicher and so forth.
This is a big thing.
The robust anthropology that might be led towards in terms of a general theory of bonding
would include both the actor and the active, what I'm calling the patient, right?
And generally speaking, there's nothing particularly sinister about this.
It's just how we live life, right?
We don't live life as titanic Randian individuals, right?
We live life as simultaneously agents in some contexts, as patients in other contexts,
bonding with our peers, with our family, with all the other various situations and scenarios that we have to live with going through life, right?
There's nothing wrong with it. It's a very pristine, very virginal, very beautiful idea and very necessary, right?
Without tacit relationships, we couldn't have families, we couldn't rear children, right?
Because there's always an element of the tacit and the coerced in family relationships, is there not?
And this is even recognized by Boetti in spite of his great and extreme libertarianism, right?
He says that although in society in general we want to have a society which is free of tyranny,
in our actual families up to the point of maturity we're quite willing and it is quite necessary
to live in a bonded relationship.
What he doesn't say is, of course, it continues after that,
because after being an agent and a patient,
or after being a patient at any rate in a family relationship,
you then become an agent or patient in a romantic relationship.
Again, this involves tacit, hypnotic, as it were, subliminal kinds of relationships.
And very good, you know?
Who would want to do without that?
and very necessary for meeting all sorts of people, some of whom perhaps we're interested in romantically
and even would like to get married to. That's the good part. So one never really escapes from this
bonded type of relationship. However, and this is where Bruno comes in, there is also a dark side,
Back to the Star Wars scenario, okay?
And the dark side, interestingly enough, comes out historically
when Bruno starts publicizing the fact that these kinds of operations, right?
The seduction and the subliminal persuasion that he's talking about
can be used for amoral purposes as well, right?
The fact that human beings use these in their families
and use them in their peer relationships
and use them in the ordinary interactions of social life
is, I think, a strong point for looking at human relations in this way.
And the reason is that evolution makes no leaps.
There are no leaps in nature, right?
We can't suddenly get induced by some master psychologist, by some orator, by some demagogue.
He cannot use his powers unless one is already predisposed to the message that that person
has presented to us.
So whatever these objects are, whether they are nomadic objects or whether they are sensuous
They pre-exist in our mind prior to being approached by a demagogue, and then the demagogue of course uses that bonding media as an in to whatever authoritarian system is being concocted in that particular point of history.
Again, these may be ethnic symbols, they may be moral symbols, they may be visions of gratification, whatever they are.
But the key point is that there's a sort of sophisticated slide between the original bonding and the original social context in which the symbol arose
And the symbols deracinated transportation into a completely different context, at which point the demagog is able to key into that.
So we have the dark side, right, as well as the light side.
The strong point of the theory being that it shows how a normal state of affairs eventually evolves into an abnormal situation.
Well, that's Bruno. Poor old Bruno, right? He gets crucified or whatever, burned at the stake for saying too much in the wrong context, right?
And I had further elaborated on this. Why am I talking about this crazy guy who lived in the 16th century?
Well, we'll leave him in peace for a while, but if we start with something as vague as bonding, right?
And even though it's vague, it's very charm is the fact that it then lends itself to further ramification, right, in the context that we want to use it.
And I think it's fairly clear to everybody here, the reason why I want to use this is to come out with some sort of a strategy for liberty, a strategy for getting rid of the tyrannical kind of bonding, right?
So I developed this into a four-cell model, and I have it on the other handout here.
This is my idea, feel free to criticize. You can criticize Bruno too, but he is not listening.
So we have in the four-cell, and this is not a public choice thing, believe it or not,
Permissive vs. Restrictive
The permissive and personal bonding, hedonic bonding, and this is pretty much everybody can figure out what's being talked about here.
This is sort of the Abraham Maslow kind of life sciences, philosophy of need, being satisfied by some person or group of persons,
The agents satisfying the needs or the wants, in a tangible, experiential sense,
although they could also be, they could also be nomadic objects which are being used for bonding,
mind candy, something of that nature, cartoons, poetry, something that people enjoy,
I think I didn't mention this, but actually one of the curious things about Bruno's theory was that he said that the higher up in the level of abstraction that you go, the more susceptible people are to bonding.
In other words, a very physical, sort of, analistic sort of being would not be as sensitive to enchantment, right, and seduction as a noetic, a highly intellectual being, right, a very interesting idea.
So, again, it's a general theory in that sense, right, in the sense that no analytical distinction is being made between nomadic objects and sensual objects.
The second cell, again, is restrictive and personal.
I'm calling this, and I'm sort of going out on a limb here with a neologism,
I'm calling this thumic bonding.
Now, thumic comes from a Greek word meaning indignation, right?
And again, we're talking about conceptual things more than sensual things.
Oh, they could be in a sense sensual, right?
Ideals, Pride, Discipline, Identity, Cognitivism, Other Orientation
People's sense of identity and pride trumping their desire for needs
Again, nobody is in one cell or another, and no society is in one cell or another
Athens vs. Sparta, The Athenian Drama, The Athenian Society of the Good Life and Pleasure,
Theumic Bonding, The Spartan Pride, The Spartan Dignity, The Pleasure Being, in a sense, no
pleasure, the pleasure being the pleasure taken in one's own asceticism.
And neither of these, I think, is pathological, right?
And the application is that in any culture, right, well, some cultures go in one direction,
some cultures go in another direction.
In our culture, which they say is now having a series of culture wars, right, we have representatives
of both, right?
If you look at a man who actually was one of the sources of Theodore Adorno's views on
personality, if you look at William Reich for example, by the way both Reich and Adorno
I believe were communists, and they're both communists in Germany, Adorno never really
recanted but Reich eventually sort of saw the light and he found out not only was he
He was persecuted by the fascists in Germany, he then got persecuted by the communists and
then he left for Scandinavia, he was persecuted there and finally came to the United States
and was persecuted here, so he was an all-around libertarian martyr.
He has very plausible ideas, the idea that if you're loose about things, if you're relaxed,
If you're comfortable with yourself, if you're comfortable with relating to people on a physical level, of course it involves sexuality, you're less likely to be authoritarian.
I think some of the more plausible ideas in Theodore Adorno's authoritarian personality are based on a sort of twisted and biased version of that.
Well, that's one point of view, not necessarily the correct one, and we all are familiar in the culture wars with people who represent that point of view here in the United States.
The other, of course, is that people are altogether too loose, right? We need to become a little more uptight about things, that we should be more restricted, you know?
So we have the William Wright view, and then we also have sort of the Dr. Laura view,
and all these other doctors, Dr. Laura and Dr. Dobson and Dr. this and that,
and saying, you know, reading the Riot Act, saying, no, don't let those kids go.
Take them out to the woodshed. Give them a few whacks.
Who is right? Which ones? Which ones are the origin of tyranny?
This dialogue can go on almost endlessly and will never really come to a satisfying view.
And the reason is that I don't believe it's a scientific question.
It's a question of art.
It's a question of values.
It's a question that I think economic Austrians could understand is essentially non-judiciable
at that level.
My view is sort of a pox on both your houses that both of these things are capable of being
The Civil Box, Bread and Circuses, Infantilization, Infantilization, Infantilization,
Postmodernism as a social typology, rather than what I would call the good aspect of postmodernism, which is the critical assessment of postmodernism.
And the other, of course, based on the Huxley Bonding, is based on the fictional presentation in the novel Brave New World by Huxley, Orwellian Bonding, again, everybody knows what I'm naming that after, again, bonding on a sumic basis, you know, ideology, terror, serfdom, totalitarianism, here you have
The kind of ideal state which is set up by Osama bin Laden after he's conquered the world or whatever.
The state which is based on pride and anger, on the fact that it is not succumbing to the want and needs of human nature,
not bonded to sensual things or to intellectual things which are pleasurable like poetry,
but rather bonded to its own moral statements, bonded to its own aestheticism and so forth.
Now, what's the point of all this? Why did I come up with this four cell non-public choice model?
Well, I think it's a useful way of looking at things. I think it could solve a lot of problems.
If we're taking the general idea of bonding and then seeing how it permutes into various cells,
We can see that blaming one another, restrictive conservatives, blaming permissive liberals, liberals, again, not in the classical sense, but in our contemporary cultural sense, for society has some cogency, but it's potentially wrong, potentially wrong-headed.
Again, the permissive liberals, as in the case of people who picked up on the idea of
the authoritarian personality, criticizing conservatives for narrow-mindedness, xenophobia,
all sorts of other things, again, it's a plausible idea, but it's by no means conclusive, simply
It's not susceptible to a scientific view, as something would be if it was purely measurable or countable or if this were a behavioral model rather than a sort of proto-scientific model,
I'm trying to draw out of conversational, discursive theorizing about human nature, rather than quantifiable theorizing about human nature.
Because the hedonic bonding can transmute or metastasize into the Huxleyan bonding, and the sumic bonding can transmute or metastasize into the Orwellian bonding, or vice versa.
By way of dialectical reaction, the Theumic bonding can give people proclivity to escape from that kind of environment
and become susceptible to bread and circuses, a hedonic bonding.
People may become disgusted by their own late Roman Empire or whatever.
You know, send in the Saracens, you know, let's send in whoever, right? The Vanarola, right?
Let's get rid of this, let's get rid of the art, right? Let's get rid of the culture, let's get rid of the pleasure, let's go back to Puritanism, right?
So what you get, unfortunately, is the old one-two punch, right?
Very often, instead of authoritarian structures that have been set up by hedonic bonding or themic bonding, annihilating each other,
they created mutual, sort of reciprocating demand for more and more, and one sees this in history, right?
I would like to see both of them regressing from the civil level, right?
But that doesn't seem to be what's occurring in most of the historical scenarios.
Okay, so that's the advantage of looking at this sort of old paleo-science.
Is there a disadvantage to looking at this? Well, maybe I should let you have your comments.
I would say, first of all, that the idea of agency
and patienthood, as it were, does create a sort of danger, right, because people may be inspired by this way of thinking to concoct all sorts of conspiracy theories about who is the agent, who is the patient, right.
It's a short road to insanity and, after all, Bruno himself was a kind of sorcerer and many people are quite willing to conjure up all sorts of bizarre ideas about agency, who is, you know, manipulating them or who is manipulating society, whatever UFOs or whatever rogue elements from some country who are using hypnosis or whatever.
My feeling is that it's endemic and there's always a conspiracy.
Everybody is sort of a conspirator.
So it's just a good general view of human nature.
And from there, it provides us with sort of a rhetorical and noetic tool that we can use to discuss society,
realizing that we are all subject to bonding in our natural social environment
and that since nature makes no leaps, right, is precisely the noetic and the sensual bonds which make it possible for demagogues to manipulate us, to draw out precisely what we want and force us into a civil version of bonding.
And so we're left finally, unfortunately, with Star Wars and Anakin turning into Darth Vader, right, and all the various pains and hurts that he experienced.
We'll find out, I guess, a couple months, right, what happens to him. It's not going to be pretty, right?
But think about this. The science of, not the science of politics, but the art of bonding is what makes people human and what makes them inhuman in the sense of giving us the potential of tyranny.
And that's it. A strange talk, I'm sure, on anthropology in the philosophical sense.
I wasn't talking about Margaret Mead, although that's another interesting story.
And also about the Renaissance, a very, very important year, which I wish more people were interested in.
Mining, not in necessarily looking at it for pleasure, but in mining in a sort of, what would you say,
Robert Graves had an interesting word for it, right? He called it the analytic method, right?
Going back and assuming that you had the same worldview as people in a particular historical epic, right?
and bringing back, like the archaeologist, something which is of value, which may be reapplied.
Okay, well, that's it.
And we have a couple of questions.
Mark, you described this at one point as being anti-public choice,
and I know you did spend some time at George Mason.
Yeah, yeah.
Did you butt heads with people?
No, I didn't. I'm very polite. I never butt heads.
No, but I was, yeah, of course I read the literature and I took some, I took some courses with James Buchanan and so forth.
It doesn't seem to be particularly anti-public choice, you're just discussing this on a different plane.
Right, right, yeah, yeah.
It's a fairly narrow economic view that could either fit within...
Right, right, exactly, right.
Yeah, it's great work as far as it goes. It just sort of fell under what I consider the desirable anti-modernist, post-modernist rubric of not imitating other sciences when you're dealing with something particular.
Now, fortunately, public choice is sort of one level beyond ordinary scientism, in the sense that the science which is being imitated is already a legitimate human science. It's economics, right? It's not in the same category as, whatever, behaviorism, whatever.
I found this incredibly fascinating and revealing. It was very, very interesting. I remember the first time I was given the authoritarian personality idea was in a class I was taking on personality disorders.
And I remember they were describing an authoritarian personality and feeling people were looking at me.
I wanted to ask about how you classify the problem of nationalism. Mises seems to have, over the course of his writing, and after World War I, he was describing a kind of nationalism that leads to freedom in the sense that you have an attachment to a kind of local attachment, a transcendent, artificial attachment to the nation state.
How would you account for the idea of nationalism?
When we're talking about a bond, the agent, the patient and the bond, I want to dispense
with the idea that there is such a thing as a nation.
What is there is the idea of the nation.
The idea of the nation is a sort of noetic object, which may metamorphosize in one direction
or another.
So if we're locked in, as we must be, if we follow a Durkheimian sort of sociological perspective,
if we're locked into believing that there are such things as an objective nationality
or an objective state or whatever, there's really nothing to be done about it.
Rather, the nation itself is an idea, so as an idea, it follows the same law.
The nation can be a sort of personal thing, it can be an extended family, again, almost
like 19th century anarchist federalism, something like that, we had all sorts of federations
which then grouped into other federations, but it was all networking, it was all personal
in that sense. And the ideas of the collective were still ideas. Now that can sort of metamorphosize
into something which is more cruel and coercive as well. So if you don't think of the nation
or the ethnic group or the tribe or whatever it is as something which is out there but
But as something which is sort of inside, which has been implanted into you, that implant
can either be something very beneficial, it can be good cellular tissue for bonding with
other people in a large geographical area, or it can be something sort of cancerous and
metastatic, depending on the historical context.
And my feeling is when the symbol is fairly closely related to the environment and circumstances
which created the symbol, in other words when the symbol stands for something fairly concrete,
it's less of a, well it's still a bond, but it's less of a sort of free rider amongst
Human Minds, right? When it becomes just a stereotype symbol, it tends to become more
dangerous, right?
Mark, we're out of time, but I want to ask you my question.
Okay. Oh, please do. Everybody.
It's my seminar.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts about strategy for breaking the bad bonds that people have developed,
I'm thinking, of course, in the United States, too, bad ideology. What can be done, maybe your thoughts on that?
Yeah, that's a good question, and I wish I had an answer for it.
Again, in the cultural wars, it's said that war is the health of the state. We've all heard that.
Unfortunately, it's turning out the cultural war is also the health of the state.
Because the cultural war involves people reacting, people with different bonded implants reacting to one another in a way that further reifies their own bondedness.
What the cure for that is? Well, the first thing is to realize that it's happening.
Exactly what the cure for that would be. I'm still working on that one, I'm afraid, but that's one reason why I'm speaking today and hoping to throw things out.
But I don't think that it can do any harm for people to be made more aware that they are being bonded.
They can't escape from bonding. I don't think we can go to a sort of Promethean society of autarkic individuals.
I think this is one thing which has held libertarian freedom thinking back,
is that it has been allied to this kind of Randian or Nietzschean idea, right?
So one accepts the fact that one is bonded to community and to other people, right?
Bonds which you originally were subjected to as a patient, right?
But now you may be an agent imparting them to other people.
But once you look at it that way, I think it makes you a little bit more tolerant, for one thing.
And you realize the subjectivity, you realize that it's a value just like anything else.
And again, I'm trying to soften things up with this model and get perceptions of ideology and social groups a little more flexible.
are flexible, and I don't think that can hurt, it's sort of chicken soup for the soul in that respect,
chicken soup for the bonded soul, but that's not really a solution, is it?
I mean that's just sort of an amelioration of some sort.
Okay, well thank you.
I was just thinking the other day that a lot of the religious right that is going on right now, and its demands, and its public presence, and its political priorities and all that,
This strikes me as, in part, a counter-reaction to the sort of libertine spadism of the mind,
you know, the go-go, and so you have a religious right coming back, and we're fed up with the Beckerans and the Kansans, and now it's tough times.
I was just thinking, this is really going to produce, once again, another reaction.
And people at some point are saying, you know, what's good about these two effects?
And there you have the slip going back and forth between the two times of Huxley and Orwellian plenty, and it's really volcanic.
So, so, yeah. And what will happen, for example, in Iran, after people get tired of the Alekola,
will they go to a just and libertarian society, or will they go back to, who knows, you know, some sort of Marxian model, I don't know.
But it's, again, yeah, it's a sort of a dialectical problem, I mean, not necessarily dialectical.
The word has been abused, but it's not an intrinsically bad word, you know, the idea of reaction and counter-reaction.
One thing that I've seen in economics is that when you reveal to people that they're being manipulated in the system, it's like a bright light that goes off in their mind.
It's very hard to get it across, but for example with the Central Bank and the Federal Reserve and what they do with the money supply and interest rate.
If you can come up with a good enough explanation to get the point across that basically these government bureaucrats are manipulating us and our money and our economy behind the scenes and how they go about doing that.
that's true that's true however there's a caveat to this this is that it's true as
long as people retain their grasp on rationality if people believe that they
are manipulated by forces which are totally beyond their control they will
will turn to the irrational and then that's where you start getting your conspiracy theories,
your pogroms and so forth.
If you're doing a good enough job to show people that this is not a particular group
of bankers that are doing this, but this is a structural tendency of all central bankers
to do this, then if that gets across, it's a very good thing.
The problem with the asymmetrical model, right, which I think is the right model for understanding
human society, right, the patients and the agents and the bonds in between, the problem
is it can be abused, and remember, this comes from Renaissance paleo-science when they actually
did believe in demonology and so forth, you know, and whatever, the devil made me do it
or whatever. But in the modern context, in the Renaissance, of course, it was one step
forward and two steps back in the sense that they got rid of people's literal ability to
demonize other groups of people. But at the same time, they came up with the collective
social subject in terms of the collective will, you know, Rousseau's and subsequent
Jacobin Theory.
But the ability to see agency and paciency as reciprocal things, which are endemic in
society, I think is, yeah, it's very educational, right?
As long as it doesn't carry off into a kind of paranoia, which it can be, right?
And that's really the problem.
How do you have a theory which involves what I would like to call the paralogical, which
does not veer off into normative mythology, right? That's the problem with the existentialism
crazed in the mid-20th century. People had given up on whatever it was, Marxism and so
forth, and they turned immediately to the irrational, immediately to despair. So we
So we have to have a theory of these paralogical bonds without giving up on the logos, the logical normative basis on which we're constructing the whole model, right?
It's sort of like Freud. I mean, he was talking about paralogical phenomena. He always made his students, whenever they were joining the psychoanalytic school,
made them wear a ring with the image of the owl of Athena, the owl of Minerva, I guess it is, not Athena, on their finger to make sure that we're dealing with these monsters, we're dealing with these paralogical phenomena, but we aren't normatively becoming irrationalists.