WEBVTT NOTE The Authoritarian Personality: Myth or Mistheorization? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate that, Mark, and that's the title. That was sort of a provisional title, right? 2 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:19.000 I was pulling my punches at the time because what I really wanted to entitle this was Statecraft as Sorcery, right? 3 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Now, this was sort of a repost to George Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft, you know, probably you're familiar with his title. 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:41.000 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. 5 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:52.000 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. 6 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:57.000 We are now at the very end of the historical cycle. 7 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:06.480 In fact, within two months, you will see the end of the Galactic Republic, I'm afraid, 8 00:01:06.480 --> 00:01:13.760 because in two months we're going to see the final segment of George Lucas' Star Wars. 9 00:01:13.760 --> 00:01:20.480 I hope everybody is enjoying the denouement and the relationship between Palpatine and 10 00:01:20.480 --> 00:01:26.560 his young apprentice, Anakin, who is to become Lord Vader, as we know. 11 00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:34.000 Well, seriously, does this have some relationship to reality or not? 12 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:39.280 I'm an anthropologist, right, and not a economist, right? 13 00:01:39.280 --> 00:01:46.960 So what I'm going to be talking about today has less to do with the dusty tomes that are here 14 00:01:46.960 --> 00:01:53.120 at the Ludwig von Mises Institute than the tomes that were written by Joseph Campbell 15 00:01:53.120 --> 00:01:57.120 and which inspired the Star Wars trilogy, right? 16 00:01:57.120 --> 00:02:00.640 So that's the kind of literature that I'm familiar with, 17 00:02:00.640 --> 00:02:05.280 although I'm trying to present this in a user-friendly way 18 00:02:05.280 --> 00:02:09.680 for people who will be looking at it from an Austrian perspective. 19 00:02:09.680 --> 00:02:14.240 Now, as an anthropologist, I look at the world, right? 20 00:02:14.240 --> 00:02:17.200 The same way we all look at the world, right? 21 00:02:17.200 --> 00:02:21.040 Seeing it from outer space, just as we were, as it were, 22 00:02:21.040 --> 00:02:31.040 in the Star Wars movie itself, the blue globe, the beautiful white clouds, the green continents, that sort of thing. 23 00:02:31.040 --> 00:02:39.040 However, every time we think about an image of our world, we're not really seeing it from outer space, 24 00:02:39.040 --> 00:02:42.040 we're not really perceiving things sensually, perceptually. 25 00:02:42.040 --> 00:02:47.040 What we're looking at is what the phenomenologists call the nomadic object. 26 00:02:47.040 --> 00:02:55.040 I don't know about you, but when I think, when somebody tells me to imagine the world, imagine the world right now, 27 00:02:55.040 --> 00:03:06.040 what I think about is not that beautiful blue sky, that beautiful white cloud, the green continents, the gray deserts, whatever they are. 28 00:03:06.040 --> 00:03:15.040 I see what has been called the polychromatic map. I see a world which has been divided into various states. 29 00:03:15.040 --> 00:03:33.040 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. 30 00:03:33.040 --> 00:03:37.040 There are no longer any white blank spaces. 31 00:03:37.040 --> 00:03:49.040 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? 32 00:03:49.040 --> 00:04:01.040 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? 33 00:04:01.040 --> 00:04:09.040 on the coastal, littorial, and on the inside, you'll see a great white mass. 34 00:04:09.040 --> 00:04:11.040 Well, part of that is due to ignorance. 35 00:04:11.040 --> 00:04:17.040 And part of that, Eurocentric ignorance, you know, for people who are Europe bashers or whatever, 36 00:04:17.040 --> 00:04:21.040 part of it is due to the fact that much of that area was not covered by states. 37 00:04:21.040 --> 00:04:29.040 Much of it was covered by areas which were no longer controlled by any particular power. 38 00:04:29.040 --> 00:04:46.040 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. 39 00:04:46.040 --> 00:04:54.040 What they had was something which was a person-to-person networking society. 40 00:04:54.040 --> 00:05:11.040 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. 41 00:05:11.040 --> 00:05:22.040 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. 42 00:05:22.040 --> 00:05:27.040 Suddenly one would have found oneself in a huge administrative region, 43 00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:32.040 which was no longer a village society or something of that nature. 44 00:05:32.040 --> 00:05:37.040 You'd be seeing yourself as part of a large region, for example, 45 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:42.040 the Belgian Congo or French West Africa, this sort of thing. 46 00:05:42.040 --> 00:05:49.040 And most people would say, well, where did this sort of tessellated, 47 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:53.040 What does this desolated, completely covered, polychromatic graph come from? 48 00:05:53.040 --> 00:05:57.040 Well, it came from the sort of late 19th century imperialism, right? 49 00:05:57.040 --> 00:06:02.040 We don't have any blank spaces anymore, right, because of that, right? 50 00:06:02.040 --> 00:06:09.040 Well, maybe, right, maybe there's some place like the desert, the empty quarter in Saudi Arabia, 51 00:06:09.040 --> 00:06:16.040 or not even in Saudi Arabia, maybe there's one or two oases somewhere in that region, 52 00:06:16.040 --> 00:06:32.040 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. 53 00:06:32.040 --> 00:06:39.040 Well, it's sort of an illusion to say that this is due entirely to what is called Western imperialism. 54 00:06:39.040 --> 00:06:51.040 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. 55 00:06:51.040 --> 00:07:05.040 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. 56 00:07:05.040 --> 00:07:11.280 If you go back far enough, let's suppose, prior to the European-centric period, 57 00:07:11.280 --> 00:07:19.120 let's suppose you go back to the time prior to the voyages of Columbus, right? 58 00:07:19.120 --> 00:07:21.920 Say, 1400, something like that, you'd see the same thing. 59 00:07:21.920 --> 00:07:27.760 You'd see these shaded regions gradually encroaching into the non-shaded regions. 60 00:07:27.760 --> 00:07:32.320 Or if you take, again, getting away from Europe-bashing, 61 00:07:32.320 --> 00:07:34.800 let's talk about Chinese imperialism, right? 62 00:07:34.800 --> 00:07:41.100 Everybody knows that Tibet, the celebrated case of Tibet, has been taken over by China. 63 00:07:41.100 --> 00:07:47.600 Does that mean that Tibet did not have an aggressively expanding state prior to the Chinese takeover? 64 00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:52.000 No, of course. State building had already occurred in Tibet. 65 00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:58.600 There was also already a nascent Tibetan theocracy prior to the Chinese incursion, 66 00:07:58.600 --> 00:08:02.600 which was long, long before even the communist government. 67 00:08:02.600 --> 00:08:19.600 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. 68 00:08:19.600 --> 00:08:25.600 It would be nice to think, for example, that the state was the result of some particular ideology. 69 00:08:25.600 --> 00:08:33.600 So for example, if the state was an invention of Confucianism, we would see state organizations spreading out gradually from China. 70 00:08:33.600 --> 00:08:44.600 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. 71 00:08:44.600 --> 00:08:49.600 Of course, that's not the case. We see parallel developments of the state. And people have known this for a long time. 72 00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:58.600 We have very good theories about what the economic conditions are which permit the organization 73 00:08:58.600 --> 00:08:59.600 of a state. 74 00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:04.960 Probably most of you are familiar with the work of people like Carl Wittfogel, the hydraulic 75 00:09:04.960 --> 00:09:11.440 hypothesis, the idea that a particular group of people, a clan or a tribe, gets in control 76 00:09:11.440 --> 00:09:17.360 of the headwaters of a large riverine civilization and then manages to organize it. 77 00:09:17.360 --> 00:09:24.420 Another example, places which are not river basins in the old world, there's been similar 78 00:09:24.420 --> 00:09:33.960 research on Mesoamerica, Peru, sometimes this is called the circumscription hypothesis, 79 00:09:33.960 --> 00:09:39.520 resources in a limited area, again, can be surrounded, fortified and controlled by a 80 00:09:39.520 --> 00:09:43.180 particular group, which then imposes this organization. 81 00:09:43.180 --> 00:09:48.700 That's the, as it were, the ecological view of the origin of the state. 82 00:09:48.700 --> 00:09:54.420 I'm not going to talk about that today because that's already been developed quite a bit. 83 00:09:54.420 --> 00:09:58.000 What I wanted to talk about today was the psychology of obedience. 84 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:06.240 What is it which is making people susceptible to this kind of encroachment on their freedom? 85 00:10:06.240 --> 00:10:10.860 What is it which allows them to be manipulated in this way? 86 00:10:10.860 --> 00:10:17.100 I don't see ecological hypotheses as being anything more than a necessary condition for 87 00:10:17.100 --> 00:10:25.900 the origin of tyrannical or hierarchical societies, rather there's something in the human mind 88 00:10:25.900 --> 00:10:28.840 which allows them to be manipulated. 89 00:10:28.840 --> 00:10:34.440 Now you may take issue with me on this, but I'm just going to state this as the hypothesis. 90 00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:42.400 So we have, first of all, technological conditions, right, and ecological conditions which allow 91 00:10:42.400 --> 00:10:45.440 the establishment of a state. 92 00:10:45.440 --> 00:10:52.000 The second, we have a species of people, right, the human beings, who somehow are susceptible 93 00:10:52.000 --> 00:10:53.480 to being made into a state. 94 00:10:53.480 --> 00:10:57.560 Now this is a strange way of thinking about things, but think about it for a while. 95 00:10:57.560 --> 00:11:01.180 Human beings are the only mammals that have a state. 96 00:11:01.180 --> 00:11:02.660 That doesn't seem to make sense, does it? 97 00:11:02.660 --> 00:11:05.060 We usually don't talk about things that way. 98 00:11:05.060 --> 00:11:06.940 It sounds like I've made a misstatement. 99 00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:13.180 If we look at insects, for example, they seem to have nice hierarchical organizations. 100 00:11:13.180 --> 00:11:16.620 They're always used in animal allegories for states and so forth. 101 00:11:16.620 --> 00:11:19.060 We talk about queen bees and that sort of thing. 102 00:11:19.060 --> 00:11:26.860 We talk about lions who are kings too, but actually that's more of a loose metaphor than 103 00:11:26.860 --> 00:11:29.500 if we're talking about an insect society. 104 00:11:29.500 --> 00:11:30.780 So what is it? 105 00:11:30.780 --> 00:11:38.940 What is it that makes people susceptible to authoritarianism? 106 00:11:38.940 --> 00:11:49.340 One thing is that if we are talking about authoritarianism, is authoritarianism the 107 00:11:49.340 --> 00:11:52.220 same thing as tyranny? 108 00:11:52.220 --> 00:11:58.820 There's a literature, and probably some of you have read this, a literature on the authoritarian 109 00:11:58.820 --> 00:12:14.820 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. 110 00:12:14.820 --> 00:12:30.820 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. 111 00:12:30.820 --> 00:12:37.820 You are the authoritarians, I'm not authoritarian. But that's not really the point. 112 00:12:37.820 --> 00:12:53.820 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. 113 00:12:53.820 --> 00:13:04.820 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? 114 00:13:04.820 --> 00:13:09.820 Well, that brings us to human sciences. 115 00:13:09.820 --> 00:13:12.820 And that's the next thing I wanted to criticize. 116 00:13:12.820 --> 00:13:18.820 What are the human sciences and is it possible to have such a thing as a human science? 117 00:13:18.820 --> 00:13:24.820 My feeling, and this is just my feeling, this is what I'm basing all my ideas on, 118 00:13:24.820 --> 00:13:28.820 is that there really can't be such a thing as human science. 119 00:13:28.820 --> 00:13:30.820 That human science is a misnomer. 120 00:13:30.820 --> 00:13:40.820 What we have is a study of human beings who can be described, either verbally or pictured in some sense. 121 00:13:40.820 --> 00:13:45.820 But the notion of human science is essentially hot air. 122 00:13:45.820 --> 00:13:53.820 It's hot air because we are talking about things which are not exactly determinable, 123 00:13:53.820 --> 00:13:59.820 the same way that physical science can determine physical phenomena. 124 00:13:59.820 --> 00:14:16.820 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. 125 00:14:16.820 --> 00:14:26.820 Their pseudoscientific nature distorts our idea of what a, of what human nature is. 126 00:14:26.820 --> 00:14:37.820 Secondly, the theories that we have in sociology and in anthropology are essentially collectivized, they're pre-collectivized. 127 00:14:37.820 --> 00:14:50.820 They've derailed the dialogue on the relationship between liberty and coercion in a way that stacks the card in the direction of collectivism. 128 00:14:50.820 --> 00:14:54.820 And most of you are familiar with the development of science literature. 129 00:14:54.820 --> 00:15:02.820 You know that sociology traces its roots back to French positivism in the 19th century, 130 00:15:02.820 --> 00:15:05.820 Comte and Durkheim, right? 131 00:15:05.820 --> 00:15:08.820 Anthropology is more of a mixed bag, right? 132 00:15:08.820 --> 00:15:10.820 I'm a legitimate anthropologist. 133 00:15:10.820 --> 00:15:14.820 I had my training in that very data-intensive sort of school, 134 00:15:14.820 --> 00:15:19.820 even though I'm talking on a high level of abstraction now. 135 00:15:19.820 --> 00:15:25.820 Anthropology to the extent that it has a theoretical basis. 136 00:15:25.820 --> 00:15:33.820 Culturology goes back to neoconscientism in the late 19th century, of course based in Germany. 137 00:15:33.820 --> 00:15:45.820 Both of these theoretical foundations, both the sociological foundation and the cultural foundation, 138 00:15:45.820 --> 00:15:50.540 were accepted uncritically and paradigms for research were developed out of that. 139 00:15:50.540 --> 00:15:57.100 Now, some of the data collection and the things that were discovered during the process of 140 00:15:57.100 --> 00:16:02.340 exploration and description during the 20th century were excellent. 141 00:16:02.340 --> 00:16:04.100 That's not a question. 142 00:16:04.100 --> 00:16:11.140 My criticism is simply that they were biased from the beginning because they had a scientific 143 00:16:11.140 --> 00:16:16.740 rather than an artistic view of human nature. 144 00:16:16.740 --> 00:16:21.740 In other words, I'm saying that people who are interested in liberty, and that includes 145 00:16:21.740 --> 00:16:25.660 Austrian economists, should be thinking more like postmodernists. 146 00:16:25.660 --> 00:16:28.500 Now, maybe you don't like postmodernists. 147 00:16:28.500 --> 00:16:31.820 Maybe you've heard a lot of bad things about postmodernism. 148 00:16:31.820 --> 00:16:35.860 Well, I have, too, and I don't like it. 149 00:16:35.860 --> 00:16:38.420 It's cancer, a lot of it, right? 150 00:16:38.420 --> 00:16:46.300 And the authoritarian personality theory is a paradigmatic case of this sort of collectivist 151 00:16:46.300 --> 00:16:54.980 cancer which is turned into, it's actually turned into what we today call, not postmodernism 152 00:16:54.980 --> 00:16:58.620 but political correctness, right, political correctness. 153 00:16:58.620 --> 00:17:06.980 So Theodore Adorno, the man who developed the concept of the authoritarian personality, 154 00:17:06.980 --> 00:17:24.980 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. 155 00:17:24.980 --> 00:17:42.980 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. 156 00:17:42.980 --> 00:17:59.980 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. 157 00:17:59.980 --> 00:18:06.980 Instead of looking at attitudes, it would be better to look at the way human beings function, right? 158 00:18:06.980 --> 00:18:11.980 Not necessarily the way that economists look at the outcomes of the market, right? 159 00:18:11.980 --> 00:18:19.140 Right? But looking actually the way that phenomenologists look at consciousness, look at thought processes, that sort of thing. 160 00:18:19.140 --> 00:18:27.380 Well, if we are phenomenologists, we're looking not only at outcomes, we're also looking at nomadic objects. 161 00:18:27.380 --> 00:18:34.020 We're looking at things that are inside people's minds, right? An idea, right? A color, a shape, right? 162 00:18:34.020 --> 00:18:37.380 Some memory, something of that nature. 163 00:18:37.380 --> 00:18:42.300 And these things, as abstract as they may seem, 164 00:18:42.300 --> 00:18:44.900 have a tremendous effect on human behavior. 165 00:18:44.900 --> 00:18:47.260 What we can't say is we can't say because we 166 00:18:47.260 --> 00:18:50.340 know one of these objects is inside somebody's mind 167 00:18:50.340 --> 00:18:54.820 that they're necessarily going to behave one way or the other. 168 00:18:54.820 --> 00:18:58.780 What we know only is that it's like in physics. 169 00:18:58.780 --> 00:19:00.980 I'm criticizing people for being scientific, 170 00:19:00.980 --> 00:19:03.660 but now I'm resorting to a physical analogy. 171 00:19:03.660 --> 00:19:19.660 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? 172 00:19:19.660 --> 00:19:32.160 Well, I was thinking that if we were to reject the positivist ideas, right, which sociology and anthropology were based on, 173 00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:35.160 Unfortunately, anthropology was not entirely based on anything. 174 00:19:35.160 --> 00:19:41.160 Anthropology was the science which was composed out of the various shreds 175 00:19:41.160 --> 00:19:49.160 which were left on the cutting board floor after all the other sciences were developed. 176 00:19:49.160 --> 00:19:58.160 That gave anthropologists a sort of empirical bias, but it also freed them up from bad theorization. 177 00:19:58.160 --> 00:20:09.160 The bad theorization is essentially the attempt by contemporary social so-called science to imitate physical science. 178 00:20:09.160 --> 00:20:13.160 This begins with August Comte in the early 19th century. 179 00:20:13.160 --> 00:20:16.160 Well, maybe it doesn't begin with him, but he's the representative thinker. 180 00:20:16.160 --> 00:20:21.160 If we go beyond that, if we go prior to him, prior to the Enlightenment, 181 00:20:21.160 --> 00:20:29.160 We see ways of thinking which did not conflate science with art. 182 00:20:29.160 --> 00:20:39.160 If we go back to the 16th century, we're going to see people like Machiavelli, 183 00:20:39.160 --> 00:20:46.160 again an unpopular thinker amongst lovers of freedom, but a person who is very perceptive, 184 00:20:46.160 --> 00:20:56.160 A person who essentially spilled the beans on how domination actually works in a political context. 185 00:20:56.160 --> 00:21:11.160 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. 186 00:21:11.160 --> 00:21:15.160 Does he call this science? No, he does not, of course. 187 00:21:15.160 --> 00:21:23.560 of course. He calls it a kind of book of advice. He calls it a handbook, as it were, but it's 188 00:21:23.560 --> 00:21:32.720 not really science. The vogue for scientism does not really manifest itself in the Renaissance 189 00:21:32.720 --> 00:21:37.520 mind. This is a later, post-enlightenment sort of thing. 190 00:21:37.520 --> 00:21:43.400 The second person, this is again a sympathetic person from the libertarian point of view, 191 00:21:43.400 --> 00:21:54.920 would be Labuetti. Labuetti also is an exposer. He's somebody who is able to tear away the 192 00:21:54.920 --> 00:22:07.920 mask of legitimacy on the political institutions, but he's not very analytical. Labuetti's work 193 00:22:07.920 --> 00:22:17.520 is a beautiful little rhetorical work on how people are induced into the hierarchy of the state, right? 194 00:22:17.520 --> 00:22:24.920 And what he says in terms of human nature is he comes up with a very simplistic sort of two-part model, right? 195 00:22:24.920 --> 00:22:32.920 Again, this is just art. This is just a handbook for freedom fighters. It's not an attempt to make a science of society. 196 00:22:32.920 --> 00:22:37.520 And he says there's two kinds of people. There's knaves and there's dupes, right? 197 00:22:37.520 --> 00:22:42.060 If you get further and further into the core apparatus of the state, you're a knave. 198 00:22:42.060 --> 00:22:46.040 If you're farther from that, you're a dupe. 199 00:22:46.040 --> 00:22:48.360 And that's all he says. 200 00:22:48.360 --> 00:22:54.240 As far as I can tell, he doesn't really come up with a theory of the psychology of obedience. 201 00:22:54.240 --> 00:23:01.880 He doesn't really develop a robust anthropology, what I would call an anthropology, which incidentally 202 00:23:01.880 --> 00:23:04.300 is not the same as what we call anthropology today. 203 00:23:04.300 --> 00:23:12.300 by anthropology I mean anthropologie, the science or the theory of what constitutes a human being. 204 00:23:12.300 --> 00:23:21.300 If we wanted to go beyond that, if we wanted to go into an idea of how people are adjusted in terms of art, 205 00:23:21.300 --> 00:23:30.300 I would suggest another Renaissance thinker, and this is a man that most people aren't very aware of, 206 00:23:30.300 --> 00:23:36.300 And this is Bruno, right? Giovanni Bruno, right? 207 00:23:36.300 --> 00:23:45.300 And Bruno is usually noted by people in science histories and so forth 208 00:23:45.300 --> 00:23:49.300 as a predecessor of Galileo Galilei, right? 209 00:23:49.300 --> 00:23:53.300 He's usually, in fact, most people sort of confuse the two, you know, 210 00:23:53.300 --> 00:23:58.300 they don't remember whether Galileo was actually burned at the stake or not. 211 00:23:58.300 --> 00:24:09.300 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. 212 00:24:09.300 --> 00:24:23.300 Bruno actually was. Bruno preceded him, and allegedly he was burned by the Inquisition, actually, for preaching a heliocentric universe. 213 00:24:23.300 --> 00:24:27.300 Well, actually that's not true. He was burned for other, rather more plausible reasons. 214 00:24:27.300 --> 00:24:44.300 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. 215 00:24:44.300 --> 00:24:59.300 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. 216 00:24:59.300 --> 00:25:09.300 And it was based on the idea of bonding. Now, bonding is a very vague word that we use all the time these days. 217 00:25:09.300 --> 00:25:17.300 We talk about peer bonding, we talk about bonding between spouses, we talk about generational bonding, 218 00:25:17.300 --> 00:25:23.300 the bonding of people that go out for the Auburn football team and they get to be buddies and so forth. 219 00:25:23.300 --> 00:25:31.300 It has a good connotation in that respect and I think fundamentally it's a good word. 220 00:25:31.300 --> 00:25:34.300 It's not a negative thing if you say bonding. 221 00:25:34.300 --> 00:25:39.500 Bonding, you know, these days most people recognize. We're talking about a very sort 222 00:25:39.500 --> 00:25:46.220 of pristine sort of virginal idea, right, that applies to all sorts of situations everybody 223 00:25:46.220 --> 00:25:52.720 would be in. However, if you read Bruno, when he talks about bonding, he's really talking 224 00:25:52.720 --> 00:25:59.740 about two things, right, which are more or less, well, synonyms if you think about the 225 00:25:59.740 --> 00:26:05.740 The different applications of two words. First of all, enchantment, and second is seduction. 226 00:26:05.740 --> 00:26:11.740 Okay, so he's talking about the fact that people, without any sort of rational contract, 227 00:26:11.740 --> 00:26:20.740 without any sort of, what should we say, without any sort of formal introduction to each other, 228 00:26:20.740 --> 00:26:26.740 without any sort of formal explication of the contractual terms of the relationship, 229 00:26:26.740 --> 00:26:31.140 just by being in each other's presence, just by continued association, 230 00:26:31.140 --> 00:26:36.040 began to subconsciously develop an affinity with one another, right? 231 00:26:36.040 --> 00:26:37.740 It's a very good thing. 232 00:26:37.740 --> 00:26:40.540 Now this may upset people, right? 233 00:26:40.540 --> 00:26:43.740 It may upset certain kinds of libertarians. 234 00:26:43.740 --> 00:26:49.340 It might, I suppose it might conceivably upset certain people on a libertarian, 235 00:26:49.340 --> 00:26:51.640 not a libertarian, but a religious basis, 236 00:26:51.640 --> 00:26:54.340 because the man who came up with this idea was after all 237 00:26:54.340 --> 00:26:59.300 burned at the stake by the Inquisition and I think he was the only person in the world to have been 238 00:26:59.300 --> 00:27:07.620 excommunicated by the Lutherans, Calvinists and the Catholics. He was not a popular guy but he was 239 00:27:08.420 --> 00:27:16.100 an interesting thinker. What he managed to do was come up with a theory which was extremely vague, 240 00:27:16.100 --> 00:27:24.180 which we would normally think was a bad thing. We think of a concise hypothesis which 241 00:27:24.180 --> 00:27:54.180 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 242 00:27:54.180 --> 00:28:17.180 ... 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. 243 00:28:17.180 --> 00:28:26.180 He's talking about tacit relationships, and it's a model which involves three things, right? 244 00:28:26.180 --> 00:28:28.180 What are the three things? 245 00:28:28.180 --> 00:28:37.180 Every bond involves an agent, a bond, and a patient. 246 00:28:37.180 --> 00:28:43.180 So we have two people and one thing which is acting as a media between the two. 247 00:28:43.180 --> 00:28:51.180 Again, to quote my favorite movie, Star Wars, there are always two, a master and a disciple. 248 00:28:51.180 --> 00:29:02.180 So, we have this strange sort of sorcerous idea, which Bruno is talking about. 249 00:29:02.180 --> 00:29:10.180 And it's a general theory. When he talks about the agents, he's talking generally about agents. 250 00:29:10.180 --> 00:29:14.180 He's not assuming that people are benevolent agents. 251 00:29:14.180 --> 00:29:17.180 On the other hand, he's not assuming that people are benevolent agents. 252 00:29:17.180 --> 00:29:23.180 He's not assuming that the agents are interfering with the other person's life, 253 00:29:23.180 --> 00:29:29.180 necessarily through duplicitous means, but it might be. 254 00:29:29.180 --> 00:29:31.180 So it could be on any level. 255 00:29:31.180 --> 00:29:36.180 When he talks about the bonds, and this is most interesting, 256 00:29:36.180 --> 00:29:42.660 But he's not talking exactly the same way that a modern behaviorist would talk about 257 00:29:42.660 --> 00:29:44.140 reinforcement schedules. 258 00:29:44.140 --> 00:29:51.260 Again, it's a much more discursive, conversational concept, one where he's not running off to 259 00:29:51.260 --> 00:29:53.860 mathematize the model, right? 260 00:29:53.860 --> 00:29:59.900 It's not like he's counting behaviors or counting whatever, right? 261 00:29:59.900 --> 00:30:06.180 But the bond itself may be either something sensual, something tangible, something very 262 00:30:06.180 --> 00:30:13.940 concrete or it may be what I'm calling a nomadic object, right, in a phenomenological sense. 263 00:30:13.940 --> 00:30:16.640 It may be an idea. 264 00:30:16.640 --> 00:30:20.500 It may be an aesthetic representation that we carry around in our head. 265 00:30:20.500 --> 00:30:25.500 For example, the polychromatic map I talked about originally. 266 00:30:25.500 --> 00:30:27.500 It might be something like that. 267 00:30:27.500 --> 00:30:34.900 When we come to the patients, this is a very interesting idea, the patients may be accepting 268 00:30:34.900 --> 00:30:41.100 the bonding willingly, they may be accepting a benevolent influence willingly, they may 269 00:30:41.100 --> 00:30:44.420 be accepting it unconsciously. 270 00:30:44.420 --> 00:30:49.500 Now some people are out there thinking, well, what does this all have to do with Austrian 271 00:30:49.500 --> 00:30:50.500 economics? 272 00:30:50.500 --> 00:30:55.380 After all, Austrian economics is a very clear theory, right, praxeology, which only involves 273 00:30:55.380 --> 00:31:04.740 Patients, on the other hand, by patients I don't mean exactly our usual usage of patient, 274 00:31:04.740 --> 00:31:10.780 which is a person under confined medical conditions, although, in fact, right now in the news we 275 00:31:10.780 --> 00:31:18.540 have an interesting example of a human being, who is in the center of a medical life, issues, 276 00:31:18.540 --> 00:31:25.380 University, who is not acting, who is receiving actions, and yet that person is considered 277 00:31:25.380 --> 00:31:31.940 a human being and has an important function, not in praxeology, but in a general theoretical 278 00:31:31.940 --> 00:31:35.300 anthropology, which is very important. 279 00:31:35.300 --> 00:31:42.180 So if we wanted a robust anthropology, again, not in the sense of this combination of ethnography, 280 00:31:42.180 --> 00:31:49.680 and the various other disciplines which you find in an anthropology department today. 281 00:31:49.680 --> 00:31:54.180 But in terms of an anthropologie, a robust anthropology, 282 00:31:54.180 --> 00:32:01.680 consideration of the human condition as patients as well as agents would be very important. 283 00:32:01.680 --> 00:32:04.180 Now there's a whole literature on this too. 284 00:32:04.180 --> 00:32:08.180 Again, not one that would be of much interest to the economist, I'm sorry. 285 00:32:08.180 --> 00:32:18.180 But in the medical sphere, you have a whole development of literature on people who are homopatients. 286 00:32:18.180 --> 00:32:25.180 Again, maybe people who are from Germany will know people like Victor von Feisicher and so forth. 287 00:32:25.180 --> 00:32:27.180 This is a big thing. 288 00:32:27.180 --> 00:32:34.180 The robust anthropology that might be led towards in terms of a general theory of bonding 289 00:32:34.180 --> 00:32:40.180 would include both the actor and the active, what I'm calling the patient, right? 290 00:32:40.180 --> 00:32:44.180 And generally speaking, there's nothing particularly sinister about this. 291 00:32:44.180 --> 00:32:46.180 It's just how we live life, right? 292 00:32:46.180 --> 00:32:50.180 We don't live life as titanic Randian individuals, right? 293 00:32:50.180 --> 00:32:57.180 We live life as simultaneously agents in some contexts, as patients in other contexts, 294 00:32:57.180 --> 00:33:08.120 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? 295 00:33:08.120 --> 00:33:15.580 There's nothing wrong with it. It's a very pristine, very virginal, very beautiful idea and very necessary, right? 296 00:33:15.580 --> 00:33:23.220 Without tacit relationships, we couldn't have families, we couldn't rear children, right? 297 00:33:23.220 --> 00:33:30.260 Because there's always an element of the tacit and the coerced in family relationships, is there not? 298 00:33:30.260 --> 00:33:38.420 And this is even recognized by Boetti in spite of his great and extreme libertarianism, right? 299 00:33:38.420 --> 00:33:45.540 He says that although in society in general we want to have a society which is free of tyranny, 300 00:33:45.540 --> 00:33:51.460 in our actual families up to the point of maturity we're quite willing and it is quite necessary 301 00:33:51.460 --> 00:33:55.140 to live in a bonded relationship. 302 00:33:55.140 --> 00:33:57.780 What he doesn't say is, of course, it continues after that, 303 00:33:57.780 --> 00:34:01.220 because after being an agent and a patient, 304 00:34:01.220 --> 00:34:04.980 or after being a patient at any rate in a family relationship, 305 00:34:04.980 --> 00:34:09.940 you then become an agent or patient in a romantic relationship. 306 00:34:09.940 --> 00:34:16.260 Again, this involves tacit, hypnotic, as it were, subliminal kinds of relationships. 307 00:34:16.260 --> 00:34:18.660 And very good, you know? 308 00:34:18.660 --> 00:34:20.580 Who would want to do without that? 309 00:34:20.580 --> 00:34:28.180 and very necessary for meeting all sorts of people, some of whom perhaps we're interested in romantically 310 00:34:28.180 --> 00:34:36.180 and even would like to get married to. That's the good part. So one never really escapes from this 311 00:34:36.180 --> 00:34:47.300 bonded type of relationship. However, and this is where Bruno comes in, there is also a dark side, 312 00:34:47.300 --> 00:34:49.940 Back to the Star Wars scenario, okay? 313 00:34:49.940 --> 00:34:56.100 And the dark side, interestingly enough, comes out historically 314 00:34:56.100 --> 00:35:03.540 when Bruno starts publicizing the fact that these kinds of operations, right? 315 00:35:03.540 --> 00:35:09.460 The seduction and the subliminal persuasion that he's talking about 316 00:35:09.460 --> 00:35:14.660 can be used for amoral purposes as well, right? 317 00:35:14.660 --> 00:35:19.940 The fact that human beings use these in their families 318 00:35:19.940 --> 00:35:21.700 and use them in their peer relationships 319 00:35:21.700 --> 00:35:27.140 and use them in the ordinary interactions of social life 320 00:35:27.140 --> 00:35:32.180 is, I think, a strong point for looking at human relations in this way. 321 00:35:32.180 --> 00:35:36.820 And the reason is that evolution makes no leaps. 322 00:35:36.820 --> 00:35:40.100 There are no leaps in nature, right? 323 00:35:40.100 --> 00:35:49.940 We can't suddenly get induced by some master psychologist, by some orator, by some demagogue. 324 00:35:49.940 --> 00:35:58.540 He cannot use his powers unless one is already predisposed to the message that that person 325 00:35:58.540 --> 00:36:01.740 has presented to us. 326 00:36:01.740 --> 00:36:06.980 So whatever these objects are, whether they are nomadic objects or whether they are sensuous 327 00:36:06.980 --> 00:36:26.980 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. 328 00:36:26.980 --> 00:36:39.980 Again, these may be ethnic symbols, they may be moral symbols, they may be visions of gratification, whatever they are. 329 00:36:39.980 --> 00:36:54.980 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 330 00:36:54.980 --> 00:37:06.980 And the symbols deracinated transportation into a completely different context, at which point the demagog is able to key into that. 331 00:37:06.980 --> 00:37:11.980 So we have the dark side, right, as well as the light side. 332 00:37:11.980 --> 00:37:21.980 The strong point of the theory being that it shows how a normal state of affairs eventually evolves into an abnormal situation. 333 00:37:21.980 --> 00:37:32.980 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? 334 00:37:32.980 --> 00:37:40.980 And I had further elaborated on this. Why am I talking about this crazy guy who lived in the 16th century? 335 00:37:40.980 --> 00:37:46.980 Well, we'll leave him in peace for a while, but if we start with something as vague as bonding, right? 336 00:37:46.980 --> 00:37:55.980 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. 337 00:37:55.980 --> 00:38:09.980 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? 338 00:38:09.980 --> 00:38:17.980 So I developed this into a four-cell model, and I have it on the other handout here. 339 00:38:17.980 --> 00:38:24.980 This is my idea, feel free to criticize. You can criticize Bruno too, but he is not listening. 340 00:38:24.980 --> 00:38:31.980 So we have in the four-cell, and this is not a public choice thing, believe it or not, 341 00:38:31.980 --> 00:38:48.940 Permissive vs. Restrictive 342 00:38:48.940 --> 00:38:58.940 The permissive and personal bonding, hedonic bonding, and this is pretty much everybody can figure out what's being talked about here. 343 00:38:58.940 --> 00:39:11.940 This is sort of the Abraham Maslow kind of life sciences, philosophy of need, being satisfied by some person or group of persons, 344 00:39:11.940 --> 00:39:20.260 The agents satisfying the needs or the wants, in a tangible, experiential sense, 345 00:39:20.260 --> 00:39:26.020 although they could also be, they could also be nomadic objects which are being used for bonding, 346 00:39:28.660 --> 00:39:35.700 mind candy, something of that nature, cartoons, poetry, something that people enjoy, 347 00:39:35.700 --> 00:39:53.700 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. 348 00:39:53.700 --> 00:40:10.700 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. 349 00:40:10.700 --> 00:40:19.700 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. 350 00:40:19.700 --> 00:40:25.540 The second cell, again, is restrictive and personal. 351 00:40:25.540 --> 00:40:29.300 I'm calling this, and I'm sort of going out on a limb here with a neologism, 352 00:40:29.300 --> 00:40:31.220 I'm calling this thumic bonding. 353 00:40:31.220 --> 00:40:36.100 Now, thumic comes from a Greek word meaning indignation, right? 354 00:40:36.100 --> 00:40:43.140 And again, we're talking about conceptual things more than sensual things. 355 00:40:43.140 --> 00:40:45.540 Oh, they could be in a sense sensual, right? 356 00:40:45.540 --> 00:40:53.540 Ideals, Pride, Discipline, Identity, Cognitivism, Other Orientation 357 00:40:53.540 --> 00:41:08.540 People's sense of identity and pride trumping their desire for needs 358 00:41:08.540 --> 00:41:14.540 Again, nobody is in one cell or another, and no society is in one cell or another 359 00:41:14.540 --> 00:41:24.540 Athens vs. Sparta, The Athenian Drama, The Athenian Society of the Good Life and Pleasure, 360 00:41:24.540 --> 00:41:34.540 Theumic Bonding, The Spartan Pride, The Spartan Dignity, The Pleasure Being, in a sense, no 361 00:41:34.540 --> 00:41:39.540 pleasure, the pleasure being the pleasure taken in one's own asceticism. 362 00:41:39.540 --> 00:41:42.820 And neither of these, I think, is pathological, right? 363 00:41:42.820 --> 00:41:49.020 And the application is that in any culture, right, well, some cultures go in one direction, 364 00:41:49.020 --> 00:41:51.640 some cultures go in another direction. 365 00:41:51.640 --> 00:41:59.220 In our culture, which they say is now having a series of culture wars, right, we have representatives 366 00:41:59.220 --> 00:42:02.860 of both, right? 367 00:42:02.860 --> 00:42:10.460 If you look at a man who actually was one of the sources of Theodore Adorno's views on 368 00:42:10.460 --> 00:42:18.220 personality, if you look at William Reich for example, by the way both Reich and Adorno 369 00:42:18.220 --> 00:42:23.760 I believe were communists, and they're both communists in Germany, Adorno never really 370 00:42:23.760 --> 00:42:29.240 recanted but Reich eventually sort of saw the light and he found out not only was he 371 00:42:29.240 --> 00:42:36.280 He was persecuted by the fascists in Germany, he then got persecuted by the communists and 372 00:42:36.280 --> 00:42:40.560 then he left for Scandinavia, he was persecuted there and finally came to the United States 373 00:42:40.560 --> 00:42:46.320 and was persecuted here, so he was an all-around libertarian martyr. 374 00:42:46.320 --> 00:42:55.360 He has very plausible ideas, the idea that if you're loose about things, if you're relaxed, 375 00:42:55.360 --> 00:43:09.360 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. 376 00:43:09.360 --> 00:43:21.360 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. 377 00:43:21.360 --> 00:43:30.360 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. 378 00:43:30.360 --> 00:43:44.360 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? 379 00:43:44.360 --> 00:43:49.360 So we have the William Wright view, and then we also have sort of the Dr. Laura view, 380 00:43:49.360 --> 00:43:55.360 and all these other doctors, Dr. Laura and Dr. Dobson and Dr. this and that, 381 00:43:55.360 --> 00:44:00.360 and saying, you know, reading the Riot Act, saying, no, don't let those kids go. 382 00:44:00.360 --> 00:44:03.360 Take them out to the woodshed. Give them a few whacks. 383 00:44:03.360 --> 00:44:10.360 Who is right? Which ones? Which ones are the origin of tyranny? 384 00:44:10.360 --> 00:44:19.560 This dialogue can go on almost endlessly and will never really come to a satisfying view. 385 00:44:19.560 --> 00:44:23.160 And the reason is that I don't believe it's a scientific question. 386 00:44:23.160 --> 00:44:24.160 It's a question of art. 387 00:44:24.160 --> 00:44:25.160 It's a question of values. 388 00:44:25.160 --> 00:44:33.080 It's a question that I think economic Austrians could understand is essentially non-judiciable 389 00:44:33.080 --> 00:44:35.080 at that level. 390 00:44:35.080 --> 00:44:39.980 My view is sort of a pox on both your houses that both of these things are capable of being 391 00:44:39.980 --> 00:45:09.980 The Civil Box, Bread and Circuses, Infantilization, Infantilization, Infantilization, 392 00:45:09.980 --> 00:45:16.980 Postmodernism as a social typology, rather than what I would call the good aspect of postmodernism, which is the critical assessment of postmodernism. 393 00:45:39.980 --> 00:46:09.980 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 394 00:46:09.980 --> 00:46:17.980 The kind of ideal state which is set up by Osama bin Laden after he's conquered the world or whatever. 395 00:46:17.980 --> 00:46:29.980 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, 396 00:46:29.980 --> 00:46:35.980 not bonded to sensual things or to intellectual things which are pleasurable like poetry, 397 00:46:35.980 --> 00:46:42.980 but rather bonded to its own moral statements, bonded to its own aestheticism and so forth. 398 00:46:42.980 --> 00:46:49.980 Now, what's the point of all this? Why did I come up with this four cell non-public choice model? 399 00:46:49.980 --> 00:46:55.980 Well, I think it's a useful way of looking at things. I think it could solve a lot of problems. 400 00:46:55.980 --> 00:47:04.980 If we're taking the general idea of bonding and then seeing how it permutes into various cells, 401 00:47:04.980 --> 00:47:24.980 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. 402 00:47:24.980 --> 00:47:33.500 Again, the permissive liberals, as in the case of people who picked up on the idea of 403 00:47:33.500 --> 00:47:40.220 the authoritarian personality, criticizing conservatives for narrow-mindedness, xenophobia, 404 00:47:40.220 --> 00:47:48.860 all sorts of other things, again, it's a plausible idea, but it's by no means conclusive, simply 405 00:47:48.860 --> 00:48:07.860 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, 406 00:48:07.860 --> 00:48:20.860 I'm trying to draw out of conversational, discursive theorizing about human nature, rather than quantifiable theorizing about human nature. 407 00:48:20.860 --> 00:48:33.860 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. 408 00:48:33.860 --> 00:48:43.860 By way of dialectical reaction, the Theumic bonding can give people proclivity to escape from that kind of environment 409 00:48:43.860 --> 00:48:53.860 and become susceptible to bread and circuses, a hedonic bonding. 410 00:48:53.860 --> 00:49:00.860 People may become disgusted by their own late Roman Empire or whatever. 411 00:49:00.860 --> 00:49:07.740 You know, send in the Saracens, you know, let's send in whoever, right? The Vanarola, right? 412 00:49:07.740 --> 00:49:16.140 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? 413 00:49:16.140 --> 00:49:21.900 So what you get, unfortunately, is the old one-two punch, right? 414 00:49:21.900 --> 00:49:33.740 Very often, instead of authoritarian structures that have been set up by hedonic bonding or themic bonding, annihilating each other, 415 00:49:33.740 --> 00:49:43.500 they created mutual, sort of reciprocating demand for more and more, and one sees this in history, right? 416 00:49:43.500 --> 00:49:49.980 I would like to see both of them regressing from the civil level, right? 417 00:49:49.980 --> 00:49:55.980 But that doesn't seem to be what's occurring in most of the historical scenarios. 418 00:49:55.980 --> 00:50:02.980 Okay, so that's the advantage of looking at this sort of old paleo-science. 419 00:50:02.980 --> 00:50:10.980 Is there a disadvantage to looking at this? Well, maybe I should let you have your comments. 420 00:50:10.980 --> 00:50:17.980 I would say, first of all, that the idea of agency 421 00:50:17.980 --> 00:50:34.980 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. 422 00:50:34.980 --> 00:51:00.980 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. 423 00:51:00.980 --> 00:51:06.980 My feeling is that it's endemic and there's always a conspiracy. 424 00:51:06.980 --> 00:51:08.980 Everybody is sort of a conspirator. 425 00:51:08.980 --> 00:51:11.980 So it's just a good general view of human nature. 426 00:51:11.980 --> 00:51:20.980 And from there, it provides us with sort of a rhetorical and noetic tool that we can use to discuss society, 427 00:51:20.980 --> 00:51:28.980 realizing that we are all subject to bonding in our natural social environment 428 00:51:28.980 --> 00:51:47.980 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. 429 00:51:47.980 --> 00:52:00.980 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. 430 00:52:00.980 --> 00:52:06.980 We'll find out, I guess, a couple months, right, what happens to him. It's not going to be pretty, right? 431 00:52:06.980 --> 00:52:25.980 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. 432 00:52:25.980 --> 00:52:33.980 And that's it. A strange talk, I'm sure, on anthropology in the philosophical sense. 433 00:52:33.980 --> 00:52:38.980 I wasn't talking about Margaret Mead, although that's another interesting story. 434 00:52:38.980 --> 00:52:47.980 And also about the Renaissance, a very, very important year, which I wish more people were interested in. 435 00:52:47.980 --> 00:52:58.300 Mining, not in necessarily looking at it for pleasure, but in mining in a sort of, what would you say, 436 00:52:58.300 --> 00:53:04.380 Robert Graves had an interesting word for it, right? He called it the analytic method, right? 437 00:53:04.380 --> 00:53:13.420 Going back and assuming that you had the same worldview as people in a particular historical epic, right? 438 00:53:13.420 --> 00:53:21.220 and bringing back, like the archaeologist, something which is of value, which may be reapplied. 439 00:53:21.220 --> 00:53:23.520 Okay, well, that's it. 440 00:53:27.320 --> 00:53:30.520 And we have a couple of questions. 441 00:53:30.520 --> 00:53:35.020 Mark, you described this at one point as being anti-public choice, 442 00:53:35.020 --> 00:53:36.920 and I know you did spend some time at George Mason. 443 00:53:36.920 --> 00:53:37.920 Yeah, yeah. 444 00:53:37.920 --> 00:53:39.420 Did you butt heads with people? 445 00:53:39.420 --> 00:53:43.020 No, I didn't. I'm very polite. I never butt heads. 446 00:53:43.020 --> 00:53:53.020 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. 447 00:53:53.020 --> 00:53:59.020 It doesn't seem to be particularly anti-public choice, you're just discussing this on a different plane. 448 00:53:59.020 --> 00:54:01.020 Right, right, yeah, yeah. 449 00:54:01.020 --> 00:54:05.020 It's a fairly narrow economic view that could either fit within... 450 00:54:05.020 --> 00:54:08.020 Right, right, exactly, right. 451 00:54:08.020 --> 00:54:25.020 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. 452 00:54:25.020 --> 00:54:47.020 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. 453 00:54:47.020 --> 00:55:04.020 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. 454 00:55:04.020 --> 00:55:09.020 And I remember they were describing an authoritarian personality and feeling people were looking at me. 455 00:55:09.020 --> 00:55:38.020 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. 456 00:56:08.020 --> 00:56:18.020 How would you account for the idea of nationalism? 457 00:56:38.020 --> 00:56:48.260 When we're talking about a bond, the agent, the patient and the bond, I want to dispense 458 00:56:48.260 --> 00:56:53.700 with the idea that there is such a thing as a nation. 459 00:56:53.700 --> 00:56:57.780 What is there is the idea of the nation. 460 00:56:57.780 --> 00:57:04.460 The idea of the nation is a sort of noetic object, which may metamorphosize in one direction 461 00:57:04.460 --> 00:57:07.140 or another. 462 00:57:07.140 --> 00:57:13.940 So if we're locked in, as we must be, if we follow a Durkheimian sort of sociological perspective, 463 00:57:13.940 --> 00:57:19.020 if we're locked into believing that there are such things as an objective nationality 464 00:57:19.020 --> 00:57:24.260 or an objective state or whatever, there's really nothing to be done about it. 465 00:57:24.260 --> 00:57:32.480 Rather, the nation itself is an idea, so as an idea, it follows the same law. 466 00:57:32.480 --> 00:57:41.680 The nation can be a sort of personal thing, it can be an extended family, again, almost 467 00:57:41.680 --> 00:57:50.760 like 19th century anarchist federalism, something like that, we had all sorts of federations 468 00:57:50.760 --> 00:57:56.320 which then grouped into other federations, but it was all networking, it was all personal 469 00:57:56.320 --> 00:58:05.320 in that sense. And the ideas of the collective were still ideas. Now that can sort of metamorphosize 470 00:58:05.320 --> 00:58:16.880 into something which is more cruel and coercive as well. So if you don't think of the nation 471 00:58:16.880 --> 00:58:24.000 or the ethnic group or the tribe or whatever it is as something which is out there but 472 00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:29.680 But as something which is sort of inside, which has been implanted into you, that implant 473 00:58:29.680 --> 00:58:34.880 can either be something very beneficial, it can be good cellular tissue for bonding with 474 00:58:34.880 --> 00:58:41.760 other people in a large geographical area, or it can be something sort of cancerous and 475 00:58:41.760 --> 00:58:47.200 metastatic, depending on the historical context. 476 00:58:47.200 --> 00:58:57.540 And my feeling is when the symbol is fairly closely related to the environment and circumstances 477 00:58:57.540 --> 00:59:03.120 which created the symbol, in other words when the symbol stands for something fairly concrete, 478 00:59:03.120 --> 00:59:13.200 it's less of a, well it's still a bond, but it's less of a sort of free rider amongst 479 00:59:13.200 --> 00:59:20.080 Human Minds, right? When it becomes just a stereotype symbol, it tends to become more 480 00:59:20.080 --> 00:59:21.080 dangerous, right? 481 00:59:21.080 --> 00:59:24.080 Mark, we're out of time, but I want to ask you my question. 482 00:59:24.080 --> 00:59:25.080 Okay. Oh, please do. Everybody. 483 00:59:25.080 --> 00:59:26.080 It's my seminar. 484 00:59:26.080 --> 00:59:27.080 Yeah. 485 00:59:27.080 --> 00:59:38.080 What are your thoughts about strategy for breaking the bad bonds that people have developed, 486 00:59:38.080 --> 00:59:47.080 I'm thinking, of course, in the United States, too, bad ideology. What can be done, maybe your thoughts on that? 487 00:59:47.080 --> 00:59:51.080 Yeah, that's a good question, and I wish I had an answer for it. 488 00:59:51.080 --> 01:00:03.080 Again, in the cultural wars, it's said that war is the health of the state. We've all heard that. 489 01:00:03.080 --> 01:00:07.080 Unfortunately, it's turning out the cultural war is also the health of the state. 490 01:00:07.080 --> 01:00:24.080 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. 491 01:00:24.080 --> 01:00:30.080 What the cure for that is? Well, the first thing is to realize that it's happening. 492 01:00:30.080 --> 01:00:43.080 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. 493 01:00:43.080 --> 01:00:51.080 But I don't think that it can do any harm for people to be made more aware that they are being bonded. 494 01:00:51.080 --> 01:00:59.080 They can't escape from bonding. I don't think we can go to a sort of Promethean society of autarkic individuals. 495 01:00:59.080 --> 01:01:04.080 I think this is one thing which has held libertarian freedom thinking back, 496 01:01:04.080 --> 01:01:10.080 is that it has been allied to this kind of Randian or Nietzschean idea, right? 497 01:01:10.080 --> 01:01:19.080 So one accepts the fact that one is bonded to community and to other people, right? 498 01:01:19.080 --> 01:01:25.080 Bonds which you originally were subjected to as a patient, right? 499 01:01:25.080 --> 01:01:30.080 But now you may be an agent imparting them to other people. 500 01:01:30.080 --> 01:01:36.080 But once you look at it that way, I think it makes you a little bit more tolerant, for one thing. 501 01:01:36.080 --> 01:01:41.080 And you realize the subjectivity, you realize that it's a value just like anything else. 502 01:01:41.080 --> 01:01:54.080 And again, I'm trying to soften things up with this model and get perceptions of ideology and social groups a little more flexible. 503 01:01:54.080 --> 01:02:01.080 are flexible, and I don't think that can hurt, it's sort of chicken soup for the soul in that respect, 504 01:02:01.080 --> 01:02:06.080 chicken soup for the bonded soul, but that's not really a solution, is it? 505 01:02:06.080 --> 01:02:12.080 I mean that's just sort of an amelioration of some sort. 506 01:02:12.080 --> 01:02:17.080 Okay, well thank you. 507 01:02:17.080 --> 01:02:30.080 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, 508 01:02:30.080 --> 01:02:39.080 This strikes me as, in part, a counter-reaction to the sort of libertine spadism of the mind, 509 01:02:39.080 --> 01:02:47.080 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. 510 01:02:47.080 --> 01:02:55.080 I was just thinking, this is really going to produce, once again, another reaction. 511 01:02:55.080 --> 01:03:01.080 And people at some point are saying, you know, what's good about these two effects? 512 01:03:01.080 --> 01:03:09.080 And there you have the slip going back and forth between the two times of Huxley and Orwellian plenty, and it's really volcanic. 513 01:03:09.080 --> 01:03:15.080 So, so, yeah. And what will happen, for example, in Iran, after people get tired of the Alekola, 514 01:03:15.080 --> 01:03:24.080 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. 515 01:03:24.080 --> 01:03:33.080 But it's, again, yeah, it's a sort of a dialectical problem, I mean, not necessarily dialectical. 516 01:03:33.080 --> 01:03:43.080 The word has been abused, but it's not an intrinsically bad word, you know, the idea of reaction and counter-reaction. 517 01:03:43.080 --> 01:04:00.080 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. 518 01:04:00.080 --> 01:04:09.080 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. 519 01:04:09.080 --> 01:04:26.080 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. 520 01:04:26.080 --> 01:04:43.440 that's true that's true however there's a caveat to this this is that it's true as 521 01:04:43.440 --> 01:04:48.120 long as people retain their grasp on rationality if people believe that they 522 01:04:48.120 --> 01:04:52.720 are manipulated by forces which are totally beyond their control they will 523 01:04:52.720 --> 01:04:58.000 will turn to the irrational and then that's where you start getting your conspiracy theories, 524 01:04:58.000 --> 01:05:00.000 your pogroms and so forth. 525 01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:05.860 If you're doing a good enough job to show people that this is not a particular group 526 01:05:05.860 --> 01:05:11.000 of bankers that are doing this, but this is a structural tendency of all central bankers 527 01:05:11.000 --> 01:05:17.000 to do this, then if that gets across, it's a very good thing. 528 01:05:17.000 --> 01:05:23.600 The problem with the asymmetrical model, right, which I think is the right model for understanding 529 01:05:23.600 --> 01:05:29.440 human society, right, the patients and the agents and the bonds in between, the problem 530 01:05:29.440 --> 01:05:35.200 is it can be abused, and remember, this comes from Renaissance paleo-science when they actually 531 01:05:35.200 --> 01:05:40.880 did believe in demonology and so forth, you know, and whatever, the devil made me do it 532 01:05:40.880 --> 01:05:49.760 or whatever. But in the modern context, in the Renaissance, of course, it was one step 533 01:05:49.760 --> 01:05:55.280 forward and two steps back in the sense that they got rid of people's literal ability to 534 01:05:55.280 --> 01:06:01.720 demonize other groups of people. But at the same time, they came up with the collective 535 01:06:01.720 --> 01:06:08.840 social subject in terms of the collective will, you know, Rousseau's and subsequent 536 01:06:08.840 --> 01:06:13.160 Jacobin Theory. 537 01:06:13.160 --> 01:06:22.640 But the ability to see agency and paciency as reciprocal things, which are endemic in 538 01:06:22.640 --> 01:06:27.640 society, I think is, yeah, it's very educational, right? 539 01:06:27.640 --> 01:06:34.860 As long as it doesn't carry off into a kind of paranoia, which it can be, right? 540 01:06:34.860 --> 01:06:36.360 And that's really the problem. 541 01:06:36.360 --> 01:06:42.440 How do you have a theory which involves what I would like to call the paralogical, which 542 01:06:42.440 --> 01:06:50.120 does not veer off into normative mythology, right? That's the problem with the existentialism 543 01:06:50.120 --> 01:06:56.320 crazed in the mid-20th century. People had given up on whatever it was, Marxism and so 544 01:06:56.320 --> 01:07:01.720 forth, and they turned immediately to the irrational, immediately to despair. So we 545 01:07:01.720 --> 01:07:14.720 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? 546 01:07:14.720 --> 01:07:24.720 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, 547 01:07:24.720 --> 01:07:43.720 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.