Communism starts as a doctrine, that's all I can say, by the way, there's a great book on it, it's a marvelously written book,
a famous book by Norman Cone called Pursuit of the Millennium, it's in paperback.
He writes about these guys in loving, quote unquote, loving detail.
Now, obviously, there's a proper attitude of contempt and hatred, sardonic hatred, the suit of the millennium.
It starts apparently with an extremely influential, extraordinarily influential, earlier than that, heretic, late 12th century Italian mystic, Joachim of Fiore,
Born and lived in Calabria in southern Italy, became an abbot and also a hermit, let's see his...
He lived in 45, 1202, late 12th century.
The thing about Joachim of Fiore, you have to realize, he was not just a lone nut.
He was extremely influential and he almost converted a couple of popes.
In other words, he was just this close to translating this to orthodox Catholic doctrine.
Basically what he said was...
Well, first of all, you watch the idea of the prophecy. You have to look at the Bible to find out the prophecy of the end of the world, etc., concentrating, of course, on the book of Revelation.
And it came to the conclusion that history was destined to move through three successive stages. There are always three, by the way, in all these things.
It's very much, again, like the Plotinus thing, the first stage is unity with God, and the second stage is alienation. This is a different version, but more advanced, so to speak.
The first age was the age of the Old Testament, okay, so we have the age one Old Testament.
This was the age of the Father in Holy Trinity, it was the era of the Father or the era of
the age of the Law.
We have the Father and the Law, we call that Theonomic, the Theotokos, also ruled by fear
and servitude.
The second age, ushered in by Jesus, was the age of the Son, okay, so this is the New Testament
The Age of the Son, Christian Era, which is the age of faith and submission, and then is coming, inevitably and soon, the Third Age.
This is always the age to watch out for, the Age of the Holy Spirit.
This is an all hell breaks loose, so to speak.
The Age of the Holy Spirit, the era of perfect joy, love and freedom, and the end of human history.
And, of course, the era of perfect joy and freedom is also the end of property.
Nobody has any property, nobody works.
See, we envision the Kingdom of God on Earth, very few people go about working.
It's never part of anybody's real utopian vision.
So, nobody works.
Norman Cone puts it, paraphrasing Jorachim of Fiora,
the world will become, quote, one vast monastery in which all men will be contemplative monks,
wrapped continuously in mystical ecstasy until the day of the Last Judgment, unquote.
Now, the interesting thing, the reason why this would, quote, work, unquote,
The first thing you talk about communist utopia is who works, how do they allocate economic
resources and all that stuff, who does all these things.
The answer is, they don't have to do any of that because all men would be pure spirit.
The body would have moved it away or disappeared, it's everybody's pure spirit.
If you're pure spirit, you don't have to worry about economics, you don't have to worry about
labor, property, food, all these things disappear and everybody's pure spirit chanting praise
to God.
That sort of solved the economic problem. There ain't no economic problem because there's no bodies.
Unfortunately, the other communists came later. Marx, for example, obviously, did not believe in pure spirit,
and so he faced the economic problem, which Joergam avoided.
So, again, so you have the whole thing, the whole pre-Marxist, so to speak, era.
The first age is the age of primitive communism, and then you have the second age,
the age of the sun, the age of class conflict and class separation,
and then finally have the realm of perfect freedom, total communism, and no division of labor in the end of human history.
You don't have to have any labor at all, obviously.
As with many chili-asts or messianic types, you all can be sure that the date of the advent of the third age, the final age,
was going to be soon, but not too soon.
We didn't make the mistake of Miller, the Miller license, saying it's going to be October 22nd, 1844.
It said it would be about 50 years from now.
50 years is a good time because it makes everybody hopped up, and yet it's not soon enough to be attested quickly
in the Third Age, by a cadre of vanguard order of people who will usher in this Third Age,
And when the Franciscan movement, Franciscan order started around this early 13th, the
rigorous Franciscan, the wing, the rigorous wing I mentioned just last night, the anti-property
wing or the pro-property wing, many of them felt that they were the Fiori, they were the
Joachimites, they were the people destined to usher in the final age.
A new ingredient comes into this whole witch's brew, and I call it that, around the same
At the same time, at the end of the 12th century, a little bit later than Joachim, the University of Paris, which in those days was the great center for theological studies, a learned professor of theology, a favorite of the French royal court,
He came up with this doctrine, it was following the Amorites, whose followers became the Amorites, the Amorites movement.
Amorites doctrines were condemned by the Pope, he almost converted the Pope, and forced the public recantation, and he died shortly thereafter.
The Amorites were students of theology in Paris, usually his students or students of his students,
and they influenced many people and distributed many popular works of theology in the vernacular,
The Amorians believed they had very similar doctrines, they added some more spice to this.
In the old times, they said each age had its own incarnation, where God is incarnated in man.
The first age, Abraham was the first incarnation.
The second age, of course, Jesus was the incarnation.
The question is, who would be the incarnation of God in the third age?
Well, obviously it was them, the Amorians. They were the incarnation of God in the third age.
And it usually is, by the way, with the third age types.
They become the big father, the messiah, fulfill human history, end it and fulfill it, fulfill it and end it, I should say.
So they consider themselves as their own incarnation. In other words, they proclaim themselves as living gods, the embodiment of the Holy Spirit.
And of course, they start out as a divine elite, but eventually everybody would become, especially after various tribulations or whatever, everybody would become the Holy Spirit, living gods.
In the early 14th century, 100 years later, there comes another group, various groups
who are sort of decentralized, continuing this tradition called the Brethren of the
Free Spirit.
The Amorites, by the way, were wiped out, the Amorites were mostly wiped out.
But anyway, it continues on, bubbles underneath.
Germans call them Luftmenschen, in other words, people of the wind, they're sort of like hippie
types of wandering around, no fixed abode, no fixed means of support.
And they added another important ingredient, the ingredient which we mentioned with Plotinus,
the reabsorption into God on the final stage.
You have the communism stuff and then you have the reabsorption, the final unity.
They also added a new elitist twist.
The brethren of the free spirit had two types of people of their brethren.
The crude in spirit, who would have to die first, and the glorious minority,
This minority, namely themselves in leadership, were subtle in spirit, who could and did become reabsorbed and therefore living gods in their own lifetime, where they already had their own individual reabsorption, and therefore they would be eternal gods.
This minority was of course the brethren themselves in their leadership, who achieved a status of divinity by years of training, self-torture, visions, and so forth and so on.
Free Spirits are a form of the antinomian heresy, namely that some people regard them as impossible for them to sin.
Anything they do can't be sinned by definition, because they're already divine.
And whatever they do is necessarily moral and perfect.
And of course, the free spirits, like other antinomies, are tempted to demonstrate their freedom from sin by doing all sorts of sinful things.
And there's a catch with the free spirits. Only minorities, I said, were divine.
These were the leadership of the free spirit. The rank and file was destined to become God. They were striving to make it. They'll make it eventually.
And there was only one sin for all these people. In other words, all the other sins were out because they're living gods and so forth and so on.
For example, Nicholas of Basel was one of the top free spirits, had his own cult. So the rank and file is there's only one sin ever. That's disobeying Nicholas of Basel, right?
Because Nicholas of Basel is God, that's it. Any disobedience before the sin form should be met by immediate punishment.
So, each disciple took an oath of absolute obedience to Nicholas of Basel being a living God. This is, I guess, true of most of the other pre-spiritors.
So, in return, so everybody, every member of the Nicholas of Basel group took an oath of complete obedience to Nicholas of Basel in return for which he granted them freedom from all sin, because he was God.
In an ultimately neatly packaged circle. And what about the rest of mankind outside of the cult? So, their role was to be exploited, used and exploited by the elect.
And so along with this came a solving institution of private property.
In other words, to them communism was essentially theft.
In other words, the idea was that the elect could steal property and money from anybody because they were the elect.
They were divine, and therefore to them communism essentially meant everybody, your goods are my goods.
So the Bishop of Strasbourg summed it up, 1317, summed up their doctrine.
They believe that all things are common, once they conclude a theft is lawful for them, for them, of course.
I think other people stealing from them, they wouldn't look on very benignly.
For example, Johann Hartmann was a free spirit Abbot from Erfurt in Germany.
He said, a truly free man is king and lord of all creatures.
All things belong to him and he has the right to use whatever pleases him.
If anyone tries to prevent him, the free man may kill him and take his goods.
So, free man being one of the elect.
And one of the favorite sayings of the Brethren of the Free Spirit was,
Whatever the eye sees in covetous, let the hand grasp it.
The great moral theory.
Then we have, in the early 15th century, we have the final ingredient for all this.
The extreme wing of the Tamborite movement, which is itself the left wing of the radical wing of the Hussite movement,
which bubble up in Bohemia, the pre-Protestant group in 15th century Czechia,
Which blended, by the way, religious struggle against Catholic Church, nationality, Czechs
versus German, class, artisans versus the patrician, sort of a blend of all three of
these things, the tabloid movement.
The extreme wing of the tabloids added to this, they adopted all this stuff, added something
else, the duty, the divine duty to exterminate all heretics, which means everybody except
themselves.
So the last days are coming soon, the final days, and the elect must go out and stamp
out sin by exterminating all sinners.
The easiest way to stamp out sin, of course, is to exterminate the sinners, which means all non-table rights, at the very least.
So, the sinners are enemies of Christ, and, quote, a curse would be the man who withholds his sword from shitting the blood of the enemies of Christ.
Every believer must wash his hands in that blood. Having that mindset, of course, they didn't stop at intellectual destruction.
In addition to killing all non-heretics, they would burn all non-heretical things, like books, images, paintings, libraries, and so forth, and so on.
and so on. Besides, you like to have no need for books. When the King of God on Earth arrives, there will no longer be, quote, need for anyone to teach another. There will be no need for books or scriptures and all worldly wisdom will perish. I guess all people too. There's a general destruction of everything, theft and general destruction. And of course, again, the tabloids were going to return to a lost age, an alleged lost age of early communism. Everything was great. Society with no private property. And of course, in order to do that, you have to exterminate the cities, which are centers of sin and avarice and luxury and greed.
of Merchants and Landlords and virtually everybody else.
And after we elected and established the Communist Kingdom of God on Earth in Bohemia by revolutionary means,
it was then spread out to the rest of the world.
Now Bohemia, today Bohemia, tomorrow the world.
In addition to that, they were very consistent in Communism.
This is true, by the way, of Communists in general, which has sort of been dropped out of the literature.
Also, Communism of women, personal bodies,
The Kabbalite preachers, left-wing preachers, taught that everything would become, including wives, there'd be no marriage, etc., etc.
They found that one of the first things the Hussite Revolution breaks out in 1419,
in the same year that the left-wing Kabbalists got together and captured a town called Usti in northern Bohemia.
They renamed it Tabor, which I guess means Jesus in the Mount of Olives or something, right?
There's some biblical New Testament reference with Tabor.
And they renamed this town Tabloid, and they installed tabloid-like communism, so to speak.
Engaging in a communist experiment, owning everything in common, dedicated to the proposition,
quote, that whoever owns private property commits a mortal sin, unquote.
All women were owned in common, true to their doctrines.
If husband and wife were ever seen together, they were beaten to death or otherwise executed.
A form of execution can lead to your imagination.
They also believe that they, they believe in the unlimited right to consume from a common storehouse.
The Senate of the Moderate Taborites were of course very much against this. They said that the many communities never think of earning their own living by the work of their hands were only willing to live on other people's property and to undertake unjust campaigns for the sole purpose of robbing.
Anyway, with alienating everybody around them, the peasants and everybody else, the Taborite, the Usti experiment quickly collapsed.
The idea is picked up by other groups. One group is the Bohemia Adomites, who added another special contribution to this great movement.
The Adomites, again, like the Free Spirits, believe they're a living God, superior to Christ.
And one of the reasons why they were superior to Christ is because Christ is dead and they're still alive.
This is one of the least convincing reasons I've ever heard. At least short-sighted, certainly.
Again, not only are all goods strictly owned and common by the Adamites, the marriage was considered a heinous sin.
The community was compulsory for the Adamites, since the chaste were unwilling to enter the Messianic Kingdom.
Any man could choose any woman at will, and one would have to be obeyed.
Also, the Adamites went around naked most of the time, imitating the original state of Adam and Eve, the alleged original state.
Also another peculiar thing, you know, the government has a famous quip that whatever in the 20th century or whatever is not prohibited as compulsory.
Well, the atomites both make public security compulsory and restricted, because it was compulsory, but only under the permission of the atomite leader, who was named Adam Moses.
And so, in order to engage in the public security, you have to have his permission.
Again, like all these other guys, the atomites regarded it as their sacred, divine mission to exterminate all the unbelievers in the world.
So, wielding a sword as a marvelous image, I think, wielding a sword until blood floods
the world and the height of a horse is bridle, and this is, it's high, something like that.
They were God's size sent to cut down and eradicate the unrighteous.
These groups began to use the agricultural image of a scythe, I am God's scythe, and
And, at any rate, they were finally crushed by the moderate Hussites, moderate Haberites,
as you might expect, and they were robbing and killing everybody they could, selling forth
a commando raid to rob and kill the unrighteous.
They were finally smashed.
But again, it keeps popping up, and we get now to the Anabaptists.
This is after the Reformation comes and lets loose a lot more of these people.
I could easily spend the rest of the hour talking about the Anabaptists, but it's rich in narratives and examples.
It really starts with Thomas Muenzer, who was a first coercive Anabaptist, a communist Anabaptist, M-U-N-T-Z-E-R, or the Umlaut.
It starts off as a young priest and then becomes a Lutheran, who's quite learned in the scriptures and the writing of the German mystics.
Luther launches the Reformation in 1520, he's there, and Luther recommends him for one of the top pastorates, he then continues on, as a matter of fact he meets a bohemian, one of the old bohemian movements, a weaver named Nicholas Storch, and Storch converts him to the old tabloid doctrine, and Menzer picks it up and says, okay, I'm the prophet, and he goes from one city in Germany to another, usually getting kicked out, but getting more and more followers,
The Duke seems like a real dimwit to me because he's preaching his doctrine, he lays it all out, he tells the Duke, the Duke and the princes have an obligation to exterminate the unrighteous.
And then he says, if they don't do it, if the princes fail in this divine obligation, then we will have to rise up.
As he puts it, a sword shall be taken from them if they resist and let them be slaughtered without mercy.
He was marching with his, the peasants, and he was the, the princes and the landlady's had a huge number of cavalry and artillery, had a lot of firepower, the peasants had practically nothing, had no arms.
And he tells the peasants, he gives his last flaming speech, holding on to his naked sword, Monsignor, and he says, don't worry about it, because God had promised me personally, personally promised me victory, and he would catch all the enemy cannonballs in the sleeves of his cloak, and God would protect them all.
This is the strategic moment that he spoke, just as he got to the peroration of a rainbow that emerged in the sky, and the rainbow was considered the symbol of his movement, sort of like an early rainbow coalition.
And that was it. That was a sign that he would be triumphant. Of course, the whole gang was slaughtered. Peasants, him, whole business.
But at any rate, he misinterpreted the sign, I guess. And so other followers popped up, and finally we get a town.
of Town, of course, get a real city, I mean, 10,000, which is a big city in those days.
They get a city in northwestern Germany called Minster, I had difficulty in myself distinguishing
between Minster and Minster, but anyway, Minster was dead by this time, and Minster was the
final, I think, a year's experiment in compulsory communism. This was the 1530s, I think, 1532,
1334, around that period, sort of a climax of the compulsory and the Baptist movement.
And when they capture Minster, all the good guys, so to speak, leave, I mean, they have
The Theory of Money and Credit
The best way to get control over a population is to outlaw money.
In other words, they confiscate all the money. From then on, anything which you receive is received by the ration and kind of the beloved elect, namely equality. It's all equality, of course, but some are more equal than others, as we all know.
And the elect were running everything. The elect decides who gets how much food and whatever against the bad imagined situation.
Because you can't really have total totalitarianism unless you abolish money and the state then provides you with every coin of their wisdom and large S and benevolence, right?
The money, by the way, was all confiscated and used for Bokkelsen and Cadre to buy stuff
from the outside world.
So first they stole any Catholic Lutherans or whatever else was around.
There was also, for a while, this compulsory marriage of only the elect, and then there
was a little bit of rebellion against that.
They finally swung to the other side about three months from the compulsory marriage
to compulsory promiscuity for everybody.
Communism women again came in.
But he took it like a duck takes the water, as a matter of fact. He immediately, very quickly, had 13 wives, as a thing, thereby unifying theory and practice.
Anyway, Mathis, by the way, the reason why Mathis was the original absolute leader of this group, he got too, he got filled with too much hubris,
and he was convinced at Easter that God had ordered him and a few people to rush out and defeat the bishops' armies, and he rushed out there and put their books, all hacked to pieces.
The Theory of Money and Credit
I mean, like, definitely anything, quarreling, nagging, anything that's kind of like...
So, instead of the great age of capital punishment, there's also compulsory polygamy, because most of the men had left, leaving the wives and children behind.
So, it was about three to one ratio of women and men, in most of the time. So, compulsory polygamy was at least technologically feasible.
And by the way, here's a great thing, I'll wind up on Mockelsen on this note.
He starts with equality and poverty and all that, he winds up, he takes all the confiscated money, transforms it into gold and jewelry, he and his court, he and his queen and his nobles, whatever they call themselves, the elect, all of fantastic luxury stuff, living in fantastic luxury where everybody else is literally starving, totally desperate, and there's reason for this, because a few people I guess are a little bit edgy about this, how do you explain, here we have absolute equality, absolute communism, how come these guys are living in luxury, so that's why it's been very interesting,
So that was, I guess, the end of compulsory communist experiments.
The thing we have to remember is that left-liberal historians and Marxist historians,
dealing with this issue, how do they react to these people?
I mean, excuse me, any rational person would react in total horror,
because of the Bacchusinian movement on Earth. They love them. They're great people.
Why do they love them? Well, one, they were communists. No question about that. They believe in communism.
They carried that. And two, there was a mass movement, a popular movement of the people.
No question about that either. Most of these people were real-life losers. No question about the fact that there was a lower-class movement, a working-class movement, a peasant movement, whatever you want to call it, and a, as Marx would have called it, I guess, should have called it, a lumpen-politarian movement, a movement of marginal types, and it was a communist movement. Therefore, it's great. It's really kind of interesting to read historians, left-wing historians, talking about these people. They love them. It's a setting stage for the rest of history. Communism again pops up again.
and Compulsory Communism and a baptism for most people, for this time.
It pops up in the French Revolution, just before the French Revolution, things are being
overturned in general.
We have a secularized version of this, but not all secularized.
We know, of course, that Marx was an atheist, but there was a real conflict, a real dispute
until the very end, until 1848, really, at the time of the Communist Manifesto, a real
dispute between Christian communists and atheist communists.
They both really agree on everything except the groundwork.
The atheist version, the secularized version, which of course we know about, it's called
secular.
And the communist version, which was the Christian version, which was that they are the prophets,
the same stuff we're talking about.
I'll just do a little bit on that.
One problem, of course, the atheist communists had, what we call the agency of social change,
it was how is this brought about, how is communism being brought about?
For religious, for post-millennial types, it's easy, God brings it about through history,
it's inevitable.
The Messiah returns, or the Prophet returns and makes it a BAP.
For atheists, however, we have a real problem.
How is this brought about?
You can't rely on God or the Third Age anymore.
Who's going to bring it about?
And most socialists are communists.
By the way, socialism and communism was very billowing all throughout Europe in the 1830s and 40s.
All sorts of socialist groups, Owenites, Fourier rights, a whole bunch of stuff.
But anyway, all these people said, well, we educate the public, essentially educationists.
But that, of course, was not suitable for Marx.
Marx, Marx wanted to show it was inevitable, quote, scientific, unquote. It's got to come
about, it's got to come about, it's inevitable to creed by history, and of course bringing
in Hegelianism, alienation of the dialectic is allowed to do it. He found his alleged
inevitability, which gave him a leg up on everybody else, so it's kind of a lie on people's
will. There were also communist groups in the 17th century, Civil War in England, I
The two big philosophic communists, so to speak, before the French Revolution, Mabley and Morelli, Mabley was an aristocrat, and interestingly enough, the brother of the great laissez-faire utility theorist, Condellac, his name was Mabley de Condellac or something, Mabley was a sort of aristocrat, of course, and spent most of his time, he wrote in, I guess, 1709 or 1885,
in the 18th and 1750s, I believe.
And he wrote a lot of stuff, it was Alexander Gray.
By the way, now we get to socialism.
There's a whole bunch of books I can recommend.
One of the great works is by Alexander Gray.
Ritty, Perceptive, Sardonic, called The Socialist Tradition.
He's also very good at Ricardo and so forth,
and there's other books.
There's two books, one is called Development of Economic Thought,
which is a short book by Gray,
which deals very well with stuff, Ricardo, et cetera,
and a larger book called The Socialist Tradition.
He wrote from the 1930s to the 50s.
This is what he says about Mambley was, he says Mambley's works are, quote, deplorably
numerous and extensive, unquote, extremely prolific, tangled kind of stuff.
He wrote his collected works, he was very popular though at the time, collected works
ranged from 12 to 26 volumes, depending on the edition, which came out in four different
editions after he died.
In other words, he died in 1785, by the time the French Revolution was coming out, four
different editions of 30-volume work, extremely popular.
I remember a man who believed he was egalitarian, he believed that all men are perfectly equal and uniform, all men are one and the same everywhere, totally uniform.
He professed to discern this large truth in the laws of nature, and he advocated communism.
His problem was, of course, the problem of who does the work, as it used to be said in my day, under socialism, who carries out the garbage.
If companies own the common and each person is equal, who's going to contribute to the common store?
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
communism.
They, of course, did not talk about a calculation debate, that was of course Mises' contribution
much later.
The other one was when we give them ribbons or medals, this is the Che Guevara-Matte-Tung
solution.
You don't give them more money because everybody's equal, we give them a lot of ribbons, hero
of the socialist revolution medal and things like that.
That would provide the incentive to do the work.
Got a quote from Alexander Gray's magnificent critique of that.
He says, the idea of the rule may find its driving force in a birthday honors list.
The King's birthday honors list, giving the king, if necessary, 365 official birthdays
in the year, occurs with pathetic frequency in the more utopian forms of socialist literature,
although perhaps few are so badly bitten with the notion as is Mabley.
So Mabley calls him distinction to give higher, bigger medals for more work and so forth.
And he said, Gray said, but obviously if any were wiser or depraved enough to say that
they preferred indolence to a ribbon, there would be many such that would have to be allowed
How to continue to lead idle lives, sponging on their neighbors, perhaps someone at last
to tame the ribbon might burst into a blaze of laziness, in a world they might without
distraction save a bit of pleasure which accompanies this consideration.
Mabry's world, in short, is expected that work will be done by all, without intermission,
in the hope of a distinction to come, or in gratitude for a distinction already received.
He then goes on to say that as you hand out more and more distinctions, the value of each
distinction becomes less.
Every third guy down a block has a medal.
What good is it?
Then he says, further he says, manly does not say how or by whom his distinctions are to be conferred.
It is assumed, and always is assumed, says Gray, that there will be universal and unquestioning belief that the fountain of honor has sprayed us refreshing waters on all the most deserving and our none but the most deserving.
This naively innocent faith does not exist in the world as we know, nor is it likely to exist in any earthly paradise that many may imagine.
A general or a civil servant kept waiting on duty in the queue for the night of the bath.
They find his youthful order replaced by a summoner's of hope deferred and zeal made flag.
In other words, he might start resenting the fact that this guy down the block's got his ribbon and I ain't got my ribbon whole of it.
And Maverick does not consider these natural human traits.
Anyway, but at bottom, Maverick was a realist and he said, it's not going to work.
He said, I love communism.
Basically, he said, there's no hope for its victory because they won't be able to...
Man is not good enough to solve this problem, to be a new socialist man, as a Marxist would later say.
So you're basically a pessimist, and therefore not really inspire or stimulate the revolutionary communist movement.
On the other hand, you had Morelli. We don't know his first name.
An unknown figure, writing in 1755, and a Frenchman who, again, worked on one of the five editions in a few years.
Morelli was an optimist. No, no, we can't establish man will be good enough to establish communism,
Because man is, this is of course a Rousseauan or vulgar Roussealization thing, all men are
good and beautiful and benevolent and will work hard and direction and so forth, only
institutions are evil, especially of course the institution of private property.
How you can have, I mean institutions are created by good men, how they can be evil
is something none of these guys ever talk about, inner contradiction.
So for Morelli, the administration of the communist utopia would also be easy, and this
is the beginning by Lenin's famous statement, all you have to do is administer resources
and so be a record keeper. You don't need entrepreneurs, you don't need allocators, you have to do some list stuff, like a bookkeeper.
And Morelli, I guess, originated this idea. Why don't you just have a minister of labor and you just enumerate everything, list things and list persons and that's it. That's all you need.
But then he says, being a pessimist on human nature, even though an optimist on, an alleged optimist, is chiefly prepared to employ brutally coercive methods to keep all of his so-called good citizens in line.
And also, no differences in doctrine will be tolerated.
Philosophical and religious doctrine is absolutely prescribed.
No differences tolerated.
Children are not to be corrupted by any, quote, fable story or ridiculous fictions, unquote.
No fairy tales.
No fiction at all.
Fiction might be unsound.
All trade or borders be forbidden by inviolable law.
All buildings are to be the same.
The Theory of Money goes into this whole architectural thing. Everybody's got to live in the same barracks, group in equal cloth, all clothing and be made out of the same fabric, etc., etc. All occupations are signed by the state.
Anybody attempting to change these laws will all be sacred and inviolable forever, eternal. Anybody trying to change or advocating change is going to be isolated and incarcerated for life.
Co-Gradualism, summing up, talking about all these guys, marbling, moraleing all the socialist-communist utopias, including Marxism, he says,
You are known as a group.
We have here writers who set out to describe the ideal state and reveal its functioning through ideal institutions.
And in all cases we are sure there never was such a happy population.
Yet in fact, no utopia has ever been described in which any sane man without any conditions consent to live,
if he could possibly escape.
During the French Revolution, the Babuff movement comes down as a key thing, as an organized movement to achieve, a revolutionary communist movement to achieve these ideals.
Caius, Gracchus, Babuff, the conspiracy of the equals.
By the way, all this stuff is an exciting book on the history of the movement and socialist movements and their interconnections and ramifications.
He's not totally sound on all the theories he's talking about, but he's excellent on the history of all these things.
As footnotes about eight different languages, James Billington called The Final of the Minds of Men, huge book, massive work and he shows how each of these people influence each other and pops up in different places and sets up a revolutionary movement and excellent stuff and some very obscure but important communist characters in the 1830s and 40s.
Bob Buff was the organized leader, Bob Buff was the organizer, the Lenin, so to speak, of this movement during the French Revolution, 1790-93, that whole period.
Perfect equality, perfect communism, et cetera, et cetera, abolition of property, communal storehouses, all the rest of it.
And by the way, they'd be kind of superiors because they'd have to be running everything, obviously, in an equal setup, he admits.
Everybody's controlled from birth to death.
And he's very strong on punishments.
All of the punishments were described in loving detail
about what's going to be done to the centers and heretics
and people who disobey orders.
All meals will be eaten in public in every commune,
compulsory attendance for everybody, for community members,
and he can't travel without permission of the administration,
et cetera, et cetera.
He was also against private entertainment,
be strictly forbidden.
Quote, lest imagination released from the supervision
of a strict judge should engender abominable vices
All of Divine Revelation, because he was an atheist communist, would be banned by law,
no belief in it.
Anyway, he added to it, and as an organizer of the movement, rather than a theoretician
so much, he said that we have to complete the French Revolution by total upheaval, brûve
est-cement total, total upheaval and total destruction of all existing things, so that
out of this new and perfect world could then rise up out of this total rubble.
As usual with these guys, the destruction was fairly clear, the new and perfect world was kind of cloudy, even though they merged eventually.
As Bartholomew wrote, the plebeian manifesto, which was sort of the ancestor of the first manifesto, ancestor of the communist manifesto by about 50 years,
he winds up in his plebeian manifesto, he says, may everything return to chaos, and out of chaos may there emerge a new and regenerated world.
As Alexander Gray comments on this, he says, what is the desire of the annihilation of all things, trusting that out of the dust of destruction a fierce city may arise,
The Key to Marx was, I discovered that I was trying to read through Marxism and working
in my book, trying to winnow out from the 10 million words that have been written on
Marx and my Marx, what's all of that.
I finally came to the conclusion that the key to Marx was a commie.
You might think this is a fairly trivial conclusion, but it isn't, because I haven't read the
solo book which has been highly touted, but I understand that he doesn't even mention
In the book, Marx starts as a millenarian communist, atheist version, and then he tries
to find the handle.
He's not interested in convincing people and all the rest of it.
He wants to come to the conclusion that it's inevitable, that the father nature of the
credo, whatever, is going to come inevitably.
That's the so-called scientific aspect, scientific socialism against utopia, scientific, quote
unquote, because the inevitable laws of history, the credo, will come about.
Morality then becomes swinging in with the inevitable.
It's not that Marx is anti-morality, it's that he favors that the moral meant anything which furthered the communist revolution,
inevitable revolution, and the immoral is that which blocks it or stops it, or restrains it, I should say.
So it's the idea of mankind is to help the law and the inevitable.
It's Marx's famous metaphor of becoming the midwife of history.
As Alexander Gray points out, a lot of obstetrical metaphors in Marx.
So Marx starts off with a commie, and then he tries to find the handle of why it's inevitable and what's going to come of that.
And the handle consists of an integration, a very interesting integration, of Hegelian and the alienation stuff.
He starts off in life as a left-hegelian, the dialectic alienation and the rest of it.
And later on, trying to find the economic hand, and then he gets to the class struggle and alienation and class conflict.
And then when the class complex stage, why does capitalism inevitably emerge in a socialist revolution, communist revolution, and then reliever theory of value comes in very late in this thing as part of a handle on theory of crisis and all that, the impoverishment of the proletariat, to show why it is that the proletariat will rise up and smash the capitalist class.
Marxism grew up in Europe not knowing anything about the communist stuff, about so-called
humanist aspects of Marx or Hegelian aspects.
Kowski, who became Engels, anointed this leading disciple, Karl Kowski, in Germany, didn't
know that Marx had any moral theory at all, he just thought that Marx was scientific and
an economist and tried to bring in some morality, I think Darwin or something like that.
He didn't know anything about this.
The question is, why did Marx and Engels suppress the publication of this material, the so-called
early Marx, the humanist, humanist, I think he said it was a certain sort of sardonic
aspect to it.
And we'll see, I think, why it is true, because I don't think anybody would have bought it.
Not too many communists or proletarians would have bought the whole package if they knew
about it.
After the humanist stuff came out in the 1930s, and Marxists began to look at it, then it
It became sort of a conflict between the so-called humanist Marxists.
By that time, the labor theory of value was becoming discredited.
Very few Marxists now believe in labor theory of value.
Even John Robinson and people like that have abandoned it.
Then they started lashing out at the alleged humanist early Marx, alienation, all this
sounds very trendy, et cetera, not quite realizing that.
Even more totalitarian than the so-called scientific economist Marx, or maybe realizing
it at any rate.
I think there was a split that Althusser and Sweezy and these people said, no, no, the early stuff was irrelevant. He wasn't really a humanist.
Basically, it was only one Marx, and the one Marx was pretty monstrous.
And it's a combination of the communist vision, the humanist vision, plus the later stuff, the economic stuff, which is essentially trying to find a route to the inevitable communist books on all this.
I'm going to start even earlier with Karl Marx. I think it's just as important. It's just been neglected even by Karl Marx.
He deals with the communist part and how Marx arrived at it and the Hegel, Hegelianism, and so forth and so on.
That's some other pretty good stuff. Bruce Maslach, of all people, who was sort of a Freudian cycle Bible historian,
has a very good book on the meaning of Karl Marx. It came out a year or two ago.
But I'm going to start even earlier with Karl Marx. I think it's just as important, which has been neglected, even by Tucker, did some of this.
It's not realized that early, early Marx, before the humanist, before the economic philosophical manuscript, before even the official communism in 1843-44, Marx begins life as a messianic Christian.
This has been totally overlooked. We all know that Marx was of Jewish descent and his father converted to Lutheranism, a sort of very modest form of Lutheranism, a sort of compulsory conversion shortly before Marx was born.
But it has not been realized that Marx in high school was a Christian, a dedicated Christian of some sort, and also his school graduation essay in high school in 1835 was on a side topic that he was quite ardent about.
The Union of the Faithful with Christ
And in this union, and he talks about, I think, certain hints of the Hegelian messianic stuff,
of the unity of the blob, he talks about the mystical necessity for a union with Christ
to end God's rejection of man, this is already not really orthodox Christian, as far as I'm concerned,
it's really the beginning of this whole alienation reunion stuff, very early,
in other words, he was 17 years old at that point.
He also wrote in the late 30s and early 40s while he was a student at the University of Berlin,
I'm learning about Hegel. He also wrote some poems, which I think is very revealing.
I really think that they sort of foreshadow Marx's broad system.
Poems have not been stressed by historians.
Majlis talks about it, and Robert Payne in his book, The Young Call of Marx, talks about them.
I'm going to read you a couple of standards from the poems, and I think they're very significant.
The basic emphasis on these poems was,
I mean, usually it's been dismissed by historians as, wow, just romantic
trash or whatever. I don't think it's so trash. I think it's really pretty revealing.
The basic themes of these early Marxian poems were one, megalomania, the desire of Marx
for total omnipotence, and two, hatred of God for being greater than he is, basically.
In other words, for creating a world where he didn't.
And again, therefore, for destruction of the universe.
So I'll quote you a few things.
This is from this poem, Feelings.
The hatred of God of creation.
For example, he said, I hate all the gods.
Anyway, this poem, Feelings, has the following two stanzas.
Worlds I would destroy forever, since I can create no world, since my core they notice never, Heaven I would comprehend, I would grow the world to me, loving, hating, I intend that my star shine brilliantly.
And by the way, Bakunin, who was a communist anarchist at the time, I think it's important here to refer to Bakunin and Voltaire. Voltaire's famous phrase, Voltaire was a skeptical atheist, I guess.
There's a difference between militant atheists and skeptical atheists, and Marx was a militant atheist, as was Bakunin.
Moter's famous phrase was, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to create him.
But Kuhn's retort to that is, I think, even more interesting and revelatory.
Namely, if God did exist, it would be necessary to destroy him.
I think you should ponder that for a minute. I think that's behind much of militant atheism.
In any way, particularly interesting is poetic drama called Ulan M, which Marx wrote.
The hero is Ulan M. And Ulan M. has a soliloquy in which he pours out his hatred for the universe.
I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind, as it is, having no purpose safe to happen, to be ruined so that there should be something to ruin.
If there is something which devours, I'll leap within it, then I'll bring the world to ruins.
The world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality. Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away.
And then sink down to utter nothingness, perish with no existence. That would be really living.
It's an interesting inner contradiction, as the Marxists would say. You really live and destroy the whole world.
A rotten world holds us fast and we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,
eternally chained to this marble block of being, and we, we are the apes of a cold god.
And finally, my final phrase here is a poem called The Fiddler.
He says, with Satan I have struck my deal. He chokes the signs, beats time for me. I play the death march fast and free. I like the free part.
I think it's very revelatory considering Marx's later doctrines and so forth, thirst for destruction with a new world somehow emerging, vaguely emerging afterwards.
Just one other quote on communism before we leave it, on the idea of unity of all people, unity of God, as I mentioned Chesterton's critique of Annie Besant last night.
and I found that Annie Boudin was a Fabian Socialist and a Theosophist, sort of a Neo-Buddhist.
Chesson writes, according to the Missus of Byzantium, the universal church is simply the universal self.
It is the doctrine that we are really all one person, that there are no real rules of individuality between man and man.
She does not tell us to love our neighbors, she tells us to be our neighbors.
The intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity is that for the Buddhist or Theosophist, personality,
and these individual personalities are full of man, but the Christian is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.
I think that sets it off very nicely.
As I say, I think the, I believe the theory of value and all that stuff is all, this is all peripheral to Marx's basic thrust.
The, his aim of the withering ray of the state, which is attractive to, I guess, some libertarians, what he did is he took that, he took the phrase even,
The famous phrase of what was supposed to exist in communism of the government of men should be replaced by the administration of things is really a phrase coined by a French libertarian theorist called Lundweier.
They were talking about the weathering of the way of the state into a laissez-faire world, a market world, in which there would be no government, just administration of things.
There it makes sense. It makes no sense.
One of the reasons it makes no sense in the communist version of it is because instead of having private ownership, you have communal ownership.
So if some kind of communist makes some decisions for allocation of resources, of course he
assumes that communism will be in superabundance if you don't have to really worry about it.
If there isn't superabundance, somebody's got to allocate, and the whole world then allocates
some resources in some way, and of course what you inevitably have is a group of people
calling themselves representatives of the proletariat or whatever, actually doing the
allocating, you're back to exploitation of man by man, etc.
So once you assume a one-world communal collective ownership, you don't really wither away the
The State, although you can call it the People's Statistical Bureau, not a state. This is by the way what Colonel Gaddafi does in Libya.
People don't really know it. According to Colonel Gaddafi, there is no government in Libya, and there's only a People's Statistical Bureau and People's Statistical Congress.
You can call the thing anything you want, but the state under any other name will smell as lousily.
Another key thing that marks the division of communism, I can't leave it at that, the key thing about communism is there is no division of labor. The division of labor is smashed.
Alienation is the division of labor, it's a key part of alienation.
The unity of man with man means everybody does everything.
Everybody's sort of all around dilettante.
Marx's famous phrase in the critique of the GoFundMe program,
you know, you spend, everybody will spend two hours in the morning,
I don't know, being an artist, another two hours working in the field,
another two hours doing this and becoming a critic, another two hours.
And so that's life is sort of one big dilettante, paradise.
And he said the cattle will be reared for two hours in the evening,
to which Alexander Greylor towards the capital might have to have some objection to that.
Casual, a brilliant two hours in the evening.
So division of labor has been the key to the concept of communism, the end of the division of labor.
One of the reasons, I really can't leave this.
One of the reasons why I think Marx did not publish any of this stuff, and Engels didn't either,
is because Marx admitted, I think I found this very interesting and surprising,
After the Marvellous Proletarian Revolution, Communism comes in two stages, not just the
socialist and communist stage, which is the Stalinist vulgarizing of it.
The first stage, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is what he calls Royal Communism.
This is before you get the higher communism, the ultimate communism, where there's communal
ownership and everybody's happy and so forth and so on.
And in Royal Communism, the description of Royal Communism is pretty horrifying.
In other words, it would be difficult, I think, to inspire the proletarian communist movement.
The first stage is royal communism, which he says is inevitable.
He says that royal communism will be the acme of human greed and envy.
He says everything that anti-communists talk about when they talk about communism.
Envy of unrampant theft, universal theft, universal destruction, and so forth and so on.
And he says about royal communism, he's egalitarian, envy of unrampant.
And again, he has communism women coming in.
In the same way as women is to abandon marriage for general prostitution, universal prostitution,
so the whole world of wealth, that is the objective being of man, is to abandon the
relation of exclusive marriage with the private property owner for the relation of general
prostitution with the community.
And he says it's really a monstrous setup, the personality of man will be negated, as
he says, general envy constituting itself as power, as the disguise in which greed reestablishes
itself and satisfies itself, etc., etc.
But then, so his description of a communist world, at least the first stage, is just as
horrifying as any anti-communist description of it.
But then you see what happens is with the Aufhebung, the magic dialectic, it's suddenly
transcendent and bingo, you're going to have a world of pure communism and harmony and
all that.
I think it's really...
I don't think anybody's going to sort of commit their lives to rural communism.
And I think that's one of the reasons why he and Engel have never published it.
Anyway, so there's no division of labor and with...in the world of Yolk and the Fiora
and everybody's pure spirit, you can sort of see how it might work, because it would
to not work in a world where bodies are around as an economic problem.
By the way, Paul Craig Roberts, before he became a supply sider, wrote two very good
books on this, Alienation and Marxism and something else, and he describes key to alienation
being eradication and division of labor.
That's the key to Marx's goals.
And what happens is when communists took over in Russia, as Roberts points out, they try
to establish war communism, eliminate money and so forth and so on, so-called war communism,
The Theory of Value
What is it? First of all, he says values are equal. The first mistake. Since the price
of something is equal to something else, since the Wonder Bread costs $1.09 a loaf, this
means that somehow the loaf and the bread are an equal value. Bread and the money are
equal value, or something else is $1.09 a loaf, or $1.09 is equal value. So he immediately
says there's an equality of value. That's the first mistake, since we know Austrian
subjectivism is the fact that there's any exchange at all means there must be an inequality
of Value. Both parties value the product unequally. In other words, if I buy a newspaper for a quarter, it's not that I value the quarter equally with a newspaper, since a newsstand dealer doesn't value it equally. Otherwise, why bother exchanging it all? What's the point of exchanging if it's both the same thing anyway? So the point is that both have a reverse inequality. I value the newspaper getting in the Washington Post or wherever higher than I do my quarter, and the newsstand dealer of course values the quarter higher than keeping the Washington Post. And we have a double reverse inequality
This creates the condition for exchange, for profitable exchange for both parties, for both parties' benefit.
So there's no equality of value. Quite the opposite, there's a double inequality.
It's the first problem in Marx's formulation.
Then he says, well, they have equality of value between these two things which are of the same price.
So what is equal about them? What is there in these things which are equal?
They're not of equal weight, that can't be it. Not of equal volume, that can't be it.
And finally he works to the thing that must be equal quantity of labor after a certain next of Jesus.
and at that point you really don't have to read the rest of it because you have about four or five fallacy gold pile on top of each other and then of course there's a problem how do you get you know how do you how do you arrive at different prices you have same quantity of labor and all the rest of it there's a whole bunch of problems with labor theory value which you need not go into von Boehm-Bawerk had a famous reputation with Marx's theory of value and theory of prices which is available in addition a separate edition it's called Karl Marx and the Clothes of the System unfortunately what happens is always when
The Marxists refuted. The Marxists have a fallback position. It's very much like a religious cult.
If Marx makes a whole bunch of predictions or a whole bunch of statements, which turn out to be wrong, he doesn't change the terms of the argument.
He'd say, well, he didn't really mean that. And so Marx obviously meant, he meant to explain the price system by his labor theory of value.
But it turns out he couldn't explain it. The Marxists say, well, he didn't really mean prices. He just meant value in some mystical, inherent sense.
And that's one way to wash that out. You can't really refute it at all.
A second thing, Marx's famous prediction of why it is we're going to have an inevitable
proletarian revolution, is that the workers get worse and worse off, the impoverishment
of the working class, and they finally rise up in desperation. So it's obvious through
history, in the 19th century and 20th century, the workers are getting better and better
off, so it doesn't just refute Marx's key prediction about why the proletarian revolution
Revolution is inevitable, so Marx's fullback position was he didn't mean absolute impoverishment,
he meant relative impoverishment. He meant that workers, even though they might be much
better off than they were 50 years ago, were still less well off than Rockefeller or Bunker
Hunt. So you change the terms. I can't see anybody really engaging in bloody revolution,
committing a life of bloody revolution because you only have one swimming pool instead of
five. Somehow that's the so-called relative deprivation. This is, by the way, the gimmick
by which everybody's always, you know, always have a huge number of people under the poverty line,
keep redefining the poverty line. Poverty doesn't mean subsistence, it means whatever, TV sets,
if you don't have a TV set, they're not called impoverished, you know, under the poverty line.
And so you keep pushing the so-called poverty line up, so you always have at least a third
of the population impoverished. You can never eliminate poverty because there's always some
guy with five yachts instead of one. So by the way, somebody asked me about Tom Sowell's book
on Marxism. I think it's a highly inflated work. Not only does he talk about communism,
which is the key, he also criticizes von Bawerk and absolute deprivation from the same Marxist
position. He takes the Marxian line that he didn't really mean it, and he really means
relative deprivation. He wrote the book when he was still in Marxist. If you look at Searle's
footnotes, there's nothing after about 1965, which is a key to the composition of the book.
In the early 19th century, the 19th century, 1820s approximately, the pietist movement
The others were all sort of deists, which means that God is a great clockmaker, so to speak.
God created the world, created the national law, and then left, and then everything runs by itself, sort of.
Christianity then is revived in the early 20th century United States and also in Europe,
but I'm not going to make a dramatic analysis about Europe.
By pietism, which is a new form of Christianity, I mean brand new, through the revival movements,
which we're now fairly familiar with, those days was a big new thing,
Where you arrive at Christianity through a mystical experience, emotional, mystical conversion with revival meetings and rolling on the floor, speaking in tongues and so forth and so on.
You're born again. We need not just a regular baptism, but another baptism, a baptism of the Holy Spirit, a second baptism become necessary.
With this new form of post-millennial pietism, swept Protestantism, almost taking over almost completely, especially in the North, especially in Yankee country.
I find Yankees as being a cultural group who originated in rural New England, not so much
Boston or the city, but rural New England, rural Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc., and
then emigrating, they were big migrants, emigrating westward into upstate New York, western New
York, northern Ohio, the famous eastern reserve area, northern Indiana, northern Illinois,
okay, this is a Yankee country.
And the Yankees were always compulsory conformists, one historian called Yankee imperialists,
The Yankees took this like a duck takes the water, this new form of priatism.
Essentially the new form of priatism was as follows, creeds are not important, whether
you're a Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, it doesn't make any difference, as long as
you're a Christian.
Law is unimportant, the Bible is unimportant, the key thing is the sort of personal relation
with God.
and this is by the way the origin of the YMCA movement, all the inter-denominational movements because the divisions between Protestant churches are unimportant.
Each individual then is sort of naked to his creator, in other words his personal relationship with God and man, and the church is unimportant too.
Whether you're a church member is really unimportant or which church you belong to is unimportant.
In the Yankee wing which is called evangelical pietism, different from the southern pietists became sort of quietist types.
In order to achieve your born-again conversion, you don't bother anybody, no political implications.
Evangelical scientists believe, as part of the scientism, that you can't be saved unless you maximize the salvation of everybody else.
Key, in other words, it's not just you like to have a missionary thing and bring everybody else to the Word.
More than that, it's your divine duty, otherwise you won't be saved, to try to maximize everybody else's salvation.
In order to do that, in order to maximize everybody's salvation, you have to eliminate
sin, temptations versus occasions for sin, and so forth and so on.
And so very quickly, of course, they became big status, because they used the government
as sort of a shortcut to stamping out sin, and try to create the conditions of this,
to save these individuals' souls by hoping that they're stamping out sin.
And so what you have from the very beginning of fiatism, from 1830s until 1920s, really,
The whole 19th century had a situation where all these guys were constantly spending their time trying to outlaw sin on a local and state level in the United States, meaning anything which interferes with your theological free will.
These were theological free willers, so that anything which clouds your mind, so to speak, and interferes with your free will should be outlawed.
This meant, in practice, demon rum, number one, liquor. Liquor is evil. They broadened the definition of sin. One Catholic opponent of this said they made sin what God did not.
So anything liquor is simple, because liquor clouds your mind into future theological free will.
Liquor is evil. Anything on Sunday except going to church is evil. It must be stamped out.
So drinking liquor on Sunday is how the ultimate evil is, like a double whammy.
There's nothing more simple than drinking liquor on Sunday.
And the third thing, of course, is the Roman Catholic Church, where everybody's enslaved,
the agents of the Vatican, and the Pope is the Antichrist.
So the idea is to stamp out liquor, stamp out Sunday activities, and stamp out Catholicism.
Catholicism.
They couldn't stamp out Catholicism exactly, directly, constitutionally.
They tried their best.
They had to restrict Catholic immigration in various ways.
And once the adults, they said, well, the adult Catholics are doomed, but you get the
kids.
There's a famous cry of the pietists, well, it's, Christianize the Catholics.
And the way you do it is get the kids into the public school system, prevent parochial
schools, outlaw parochial schools, get the kids into the public school system, then Protestantize
them, or pietize them.
And so the whole public school system, the real thrust of the public school system was
pietists, was Protestant pietists.
All these guys I've hated for years, like Horace Mann, the whole public school movement,
their real motivation was pietists. They wanted to get these guys, they wanted to crush the Catholics and Lutherans,
who were the German Lutherans in particular, who were formalists, the liturgical Christians.
And you get them by getting the kids into public schools and Protestantizing them.
In many cases, in many jurisdictions in the United States, for example, you could not be a public school teacher unless you were a Protestant church member.
This is going on on the local and state level for a hundred years.
What happens is that the Catholics, as they come to the United States, and the German Lutherans, as they come to the United States, are horrified.
First of all, the Germans, both Lutheran and Catholic, have marvelous customs, charming customs.
After going to church on Sunday, the whole family repairs to a beer garden with a brass band and so forth.
And here they are sitting in a beer garden, minding their own business, and these are these wasp fanatics to send a bottle of sin, sin, double sin, crush, kill.
So this is, this conflict is going on a local state level of a hundred years. I mean, these guys are hopped up.
So what you have then is the party system that developed in the United States until 1896, from 1830 to 1896, the party system, the political party system, is a one-to-one correlation between fighters versus liturgicals.
In other words, those who believe the church is important for salvation is the church, joining the church, obeying the law, the sacraments, or whatever.
There's total conflict here. The liturgicalists consist of Catholics, German Lutherans, and old-style Calvinists, by the way.
and the left, who hated the revival movement and the pietists, became allied with the Catholics.
And so what you have, you have a political party system with a one-to-one correlation,
the Whig Party and then the Republican Party with straight pietists.
And the Democrat Party was liturgical and never the twain met.
And so what you have is a total fantastic ideological conflict between Republicans and Democrats,
everybody hating each other's guts.
And there were no independent voters, no floating vote.
Nobody ever, no Democrat would ever vote Republican, vice versa.
What they do is, if your guy wasn't militant enough, he just didn't vote, he just stayed home.
And usually elections are very close, and so the idea in the campaigns is not to sell out the field of the elections and the tenors,
but the idea is to be as militant as possible and get your guys to vote.
And so in the campaigns, the politicians were even more hard-core than they were the rest of the time.
It must have been a wonderful world to live in.
And the thing is, the way it works in economics is that these guys, the economic creed was sort of a generalized consciousness from the religious creed.
In other words, the Republican leadership and the Whig leadership would tell their people look, just as you need big government on a local level to stamp out sin and liquor and dancing and things like that, in the same way you need government on an economic and national level to stamp out cheap foreign products and cheap foreign people and increase purchasing power by inflation, by printing more money and so on and so on, and high tariffs. In other words, there's a direct relationship between the big state on the national economic level and the local level. In the same way, the Democratic leadership will always say to their liberals,
will tell their people, look, the same lost SOBs are trying to outlaw your
liquor in your parochial schools are the people trying to prevent, keep out cheap
foreign products and special privileges and decrease the value of your
savings on inflation. And so this is how people got hopped up. This is why I have
illiterates writing books and pamphlets on gold and silver and banking. I can't
get my own students into this stuff. Those people writing pamphlets, they're all hopped
up. The reason they're all hopped up is the original religious motivations. In this
In this situation, unfortunately, one of the blank moments in American history came in
the Democrat Convention of 1896, when the Democratic Party, the great liturgical, known
as the Party of Personal Liberty, by the way, the Democrats were known as the Party of Personal
Liberty, both of themselves and other people, and Republicans were known as the Party of
Great Moral Ideas.
And so the Democrats, in 1896, were taken over by the extreme pietists, one of the cataclysmic
events, by various reasons, by that time the South, which was always the first Democrats
since the Civil War, the South had become, southern pietism was transformed into prohibitionism
and Evangelicalism, which it had not been before, and the mountain states were created.
You know, can you imagine how many people there were in Idaho?
There are no people in Idaho now. Can you imagine how many people there were in 1890?
These states, these phony states were all created by Republicans. They knew they were pietists.
Most of these people were pietists and they wrote Republicans.
And within the Democratic Party, they were pietists, and so Brian, one of the most evil people in American history,
William Jennings Brian, was able to form a coalition between the southern pietists and the mountain pietists
The Democratic Party had been the political embodiment of laissez-faire and libertarianism,
liberalism.
There is now no longer any political party to reflect this.
Both parties are now pietists, more or less.
And so this was a power vacuum for experts, intellectuals, progressives, et cetera, to
take over.
Results we all know.
This leads into a couple of these progressive intellectuals I can't ignore, both philosophers
and economists.
The progressive movement was a pure pietist movement.
As a matter of fact, everybody who might be testers involved in this thing.
The Progressive Party Convention, for example, in 1912, was not the only progressive movement.
There were the extreme versions.
Teddy Roosevelt, who was an old-time progressive, began his career as police commissioner in
New York, smashing saloons.
In this group consisted of the following people, the rest of the progressive convention.
Morgan Partners, who was extremely important, I can't get into all that.
Morgan-Portnus, JP Morgan-Portnus, pietists, ministers, social workers, intellectuals, economists, political scientists, social workers, shrinks, I mean, almost everybody can think I was involved in this thing.
Roosevelt's acceptance speech was called the Confession of Faith, and in his speech was punctuated by hymns singing, pietist hymns, follow, follow, follow, Jesus, where they substitute the word Roosevelt for the word Jesus, amen, and finally,
Elizabeth went up by famous preparation by saying, I'd be standard armageddon and we'd battle for the Lord.
So there's fantastic religious and pietist imagery here.
What you have is all these guys, all these progressive intellectuals, from John Dewey, Richard T. Ealy, all these people, every one of them, it's bing, bing, bing.
They all grew up in pietist homes or rural New Englanders or rural New Yorkers, whatever, all Yankees.
Usually their father was a preacher or their mother was a gold-over preacher.
They usually kept a very strict, sabbatarian home.
In Rome, nothing was done on Sunday except praying, et cetera, and they wind up, they
have a social, post-millennial plight in the gradual sense, not the sense of killing everybody
immediately, which we talked about before, but gradually, sort of evolutionary, where
the government takes over and the government becomes God's major instrument.
There's a great phrase which Ely repeats, and it was all these guys who repeat, Ely
was the founder of the American Economic Association, by the way, a very progressive status intellectual.
The phrase is, government is God's major instrument of redemption, through government, through
They see, it's very easy for these guys to become secularists, for all they said was,
we have the kingdom of God, and we'll establish some government.
Pretty soon, God sort of drops out, and you've got the government, why worry about God?
You have a sort of gradual secularization, but post-millennialists sort of die out.
By 1920, the world died out, because the world becomes straight people who know and love,
you know, social, gospel ministers and all the rest of it, I mean, people who are essentially
non-theists.