May 6, 2025 • 54 mins
These Fools explore the archetypal meaning of history’s most famous dictator, whose name is synonymous with humanity’s darkest potential. In a competitive field, why do we uniquely associate Hitler with evil? A phenomenological review touches on rhetoric, black magic, the meaning of moral courage and individual responsibility, and ultimately, meaning itself. Have yourself a good listen.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:15):
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thanks. It's spring in Philadelphia and
I can't complain. 70s T-shirt weather.
Nice, nice. Yeah, we're looking at 80 today,
and if I was outside, I wouldn'teven need to be wearing this.
Yeah, but yeah, that weird inversion time when the house
(00:38):
switches from heating to cooling.
Yeah. But yeah, so I'm got that spring
thing happening, so I'm good with that.
Nice, you were just mentioning to me that an idea came to you
in the night. I can't wait to hear about it.
Well, you know, in our last conversation that we had with
(01:00):
Allison, we, we hit a territory that got designated as deep
water. And I thought that that that's
kind of like a, a signal that there's something worth
unfolding there. And so I started thinking about
it and basically what I thought we should do to explore it was a
(01:24):
a phenomenological sortie unfolding Adolf Hitler.
OK. The same the thoughts one has in
the middle of the night. Yeah.
So maybe you could Orient our listeners to what the deep
waters were. Well I I want to work up to
(01:46):
there. OK.
And then, and then maybe they can go back and see if they can
figure out what the deep waters were.
OK. It's kind of.
I know it's a backwards way to do it, but but what what I
thought I wanted to do was a sort of a phenomenological
unfolding of Adolf Hitler because of because he perfectly.
(02:12):
I'm interested not in the historical Hitler, but I'm
interested in the psychological cultural phenomenon of Hitler
and and what has sort have happened around that psycho
culturally. Is this the egregore of?
(02:34):
Hitler I I think this is something a little different.
I think that it's hit that Hitler might actually be the
manifestation of a different energy through history.
OK. Because, you know, the idea of
(02:55):
of a phenomenological investigation is one that we
kind of unfold from the inside. We unfold from the subjective
experience of the event or the object of inquiry.
That's kind of the way we think about phenomenological
investigations. So if I think about Hitler with
(03:20):
that thinking cap on, I know it looks like a normal cap, but I I
start to ask myself some questions.
Why does Hitler represent what Hitler represents?
I mean, we've got a man here that ruined a complete style of
(03:40):
mustache, at least for the next two, 300 years.
We've got a character that epitomizes something and I say
something because there is a a zone there because he represents
slightly different things to different people.
But still there is this like archetype going on there.
(04:02):
And what is that? So I start to unfold that what
was what's my subjective experience because yeah, he
killed a lot of people. But honestly, if I to believe
history as it's popularly told, really Stalin kind of outdid
him. Well, and maybe Mao out did him
(04:24):
both and I. Think Mao is reported to have
outdone both of them. So if we're going to do it a
calculus kind of thing, somehow he's got something else going on
there, right? And if we were thinking of just
pure cruelty, right? Well, to do that, we're going to
go somewhere like Wallachia, right, And talk about Vlad the
(04:47):
Impaler, You know where, where the, the, the bad ass army
didn't want to go through his territory because there were
upwards of 20,000 people impaledon stakes.
They call it the forest of corpses, right?
So it's like, I mean, literally,it's the thing that horror
(05:09):
novels are made of. But Hitler's got something else
going on there. And I started to ponder that
this is, you know, because in the middle of the night, I'm
fighting for space from the dogs, right?
We're doing that sumo, that horizontal sumo.
(05:31):
Anybody familiar with pack life knows what that's like?
Not the connotation horizontal sumo usually has, but.
I guess that's true. That's true.
I I was just shooting that skeetthere.
So but so I started to think, you know, is there anybody else
who kind of would be up there with with Adolf in this what it
(05:54):
is to be the this archetype Hitler thing?
And honestly, they the person that left to mind just maybe not
a huge leap because he had a swastika tattooed on his third
eye. Of course, the Charlie Manson
and I. And so when I, when I start to
(06:15):
ponder that why, what is the threat that Adolf Hitler
represents? And it it because same like
Charlie Manson and Hitler honestly put me in a locked room
with either one of them, maybe both of them in our prime.
(06:37):
I, I'm certain I'm the only one walking out of that room, right?
There's a lot of people in the world I would not consider going
in that room with. But these guys, they don't scare
me that way, right? Like a few, I mean, Hitler's no
problem, right? And Charlie Manson, he's not a,
(07:02):
he's not a, a, a, a, a physically threatening
character, right? He's a little guy.
But you know what they call Charlie Manson?
I, I saw in one of these documentaries, you know what
they call him in prison and why they don't like him, They call
him a mind fucker, right? So I start to unwind this and I
(07:26):
start to think, well, when we think going back to Hitler, what
do we think of when we think of Hitler?
Now everybody, different generation maybe has different
exposure, but in my generation it may be still in yours.
What you see of Hitler is not him driving tanks, it's not him
(07:48):
whipping or torturing people, it's not him doing a physically
threatening thing. But what is he doing?
We always see him doing oratory.Have you noticed that we see him
(08:08):
standing in front of the the huge crowds and he's working it
right? And you don't even have to know
German, but you know, there's something is going on here,
right? So the conclusion that I come to
is that Hitler and Manson don't scare us the way that things
(08:30):
outside of us scare us. But they scare us, in fact,
because they scare us of ourselves, because they
represent someone that makes rational, normal people do
(08:50):
unspeakable, unimaginable things.
And the fear is that they could actually bring that out in
ourselves. This is my theory, right?
So what does this flash me to when I see or when I imagine
Hitler up there wildly gesticulating?
(09:12):
I also, I think of Huey Long. If you've ever seen any of the
black and white photos of Huey Long, and he's this is in the
days of oratory where you didn'thave a megaphone, you didn't
have a microphone, and you were speaking to a huge group of
people. Now, Hitler probably had
microphones, but Huey Long, as Irecall, didn't.
And so he was shouting so everybody in the back row could
(09:32):
hear him and he and he was smallto them in the back row.
So he would wildly wave his arms, you know, and so people
could see what he's doing. An oratory for most of history
was thus was speaking and by extension writing.
But it was this idea of a, of a physical expression.
(09:56):
And what it is basically is rhetoric, right?
So now what a lot of people, they know about rhetoric and
they know about Socrates, and then we've talked about
dialectic. But what they don't understand
and what we haven't really rhapsodized is the the
(10:17):
unfriendly relationship, let's say, between rhetoric and
dialectic. And the reason was because
dialectic rhetoric for people that hear the word, I guess the
most common way we hear that word is probably in the form of
the phrase a rhetorical question, where we're asking a
(10:38):
question that we don't expect people to answer.
We're just asking it for for theinfluence of the sound of the
presentation rather than expecting an actual question.
But the idea of rhetoric is an old, old idea, I think.
Pericles is one of these characters back in the the war
(11:00):
between Sparta and Athens gave afamous eulogy of all the dead
Athenians and with the idea of moving people so they would
continue the war so they would triumph over Sparta, which I I
believe they they didn't. But, but, but for folks that
aren't familiar with rhetoric, rhetoric is, is very nearly
(11:23):
identical to the idea of persuasion.
And the reason that Plato and orSocrates by extension, Plato had
such a beef with rhetoric is because he said that rhetoric
gives no care for truth or justice.
(11:43):
It's purely persuasion. So what?
So what Adolf Hitler really represents on some level is the
power of persuasion, the power of rhetorical persuasion,
traditionally delivered through the human voice.
(12:07):
But during the time of Hitler, athing happened that was
technological, not unlike our time when we have new
technological things. And the thing that had just
happened in the 20s was the movies, right?
But they wouldn't talk yet. And one of the things that
Hitler did was he had a lady, Helena Riefenstahl, I think your
(12:33):
name was, who created a movie for him called a Call A A, A
Call to Will. Was it?
Or the Triumph of Will? I actually wrote it down, The
Triumph of Will and another one called Olympia.
And what these were, were rhetorical devices enhanced
(12:54):
mechanically, technologically toinspire people not to reason,
but to emotion. And you know, it's interesting
when people, when we decide we're going to let them make
judgments for themselves, we do it.
We caught, we say they've attained the age of reason.
(13:17):
We don't say they've attained the age of emotion because we're
born with emotion. We start out screaming, right?
So, so by Plato and what's what's interesting with Plato or
Socrates, he didn't just say that rhetoricians lead us astray
by lying. He said that they did a form of
(13:41):
enchantment of the soul, which pushes it almost a little closer
to black magic direction, right?We're actually talking about
enchanting people and engaging them in a way that's not
necessarily about truth or aboutjustice, although it may be.
(14:05):
Both Aristotle and Plato allowedfor the idea of true rhetoric,
but I think with true rhetoric, we call that teaching, right?
It's when it's, it's when it's not true rhetoric, right?
It, it, it when it's persuasion for the pure benefit of the
person doing the persuading, right?
(14:27):
And that's where the slippery slope begins.
And that was kind of where the deeper waters were of issued.
Because the way that we do this is we don't just harness, we
don't just harness positive emotions, which is what Pericles
did. We're Athenians and we
(14:48):
Athenians, we have higher idealsand that makes us better.
America used to do that, right? We have democracy and we
champion these virtues and thesevalues.
You know, that's the positive side associated with your cause.
But the other thing you do, which Goebbels and and the the
(15:09):
Nazis did, of course, is you take negative emotions and you
associate those with the other team.
There's a famous quote, it's either Goring or Gobbles where
he says, of course it's understood that the people never
support war. So you have to associate the the
pacifists with exposing the country to danger.
(15:33):
So you balance their fear, theirlower emotion against their
higher emotion to seek peace over war.
You literally play their lower emotions over their higher
emotions. And that's why one of the
observations that I have about moral courage that links up with
this idea of increased responsibility falling on the
(15:56):
individual more now than it everhas in history.
Is it because it means not just speaking truth to power as we
spoke about, but it also means speaking truth to our peer
group? Because as we said, you know,
the slippery slope of morality is usually not one that we slide
(16:18):
down alone. Usually we have peers there that
are supporting it that we might actually have to exert a type of
courage. And, you know, it's much easier
to speak truth to power if poweris those motherfuckers, right?
Because of course, you and all your friends and everyone that
(16:41):
shares associations with you shares that value.
So it seems like courage, but it's a small courage.
On the other hand, to speak truth to your peer group when
you are potentially, you know, on a very different line than
your peer group takes a type of moral courage.
(17:04):
It takes a prioritization of truth or justice or knowing
what's right over all those other emotions like wanting to
belong, wanting to have acceptance, wanting
reinforcement, all of those things.
So to me, that's kind of what that's the personality
(17:24):
challenge, you know, and that's why both Confucius and Aristotle
said we strive at this, we work,we work over a lifetime to build
that. And that this dovetails into
that idea of coming to completion.
We don't necessarily start therewith those push up muscles
strong. We kind of go through a process.
(17:47):
So anyway, that's sort of is my my intro to the phenomenological
dissection of the Adolf Hitler phenomenon.
Meme. Yeah, the meme, you know, now
it's not my favorite mustache. I'm not feeling the loss
personally, but it's interestingthat that association is still
(18:10):
so strong. You know, like so anyway.
I've been dowsing here as as you've been kind of unfurling
this topic for whether whether I'm with your assessment kind of
each step of the way. I thought the the choosing
(18:33):
Charles Manson was really interesting because that
wouldn't have occurred to me. But, and that might be a factor
of our age difference because, you know, he was, he was in jail
and and kind of like a just another mass murderer slash
serial killer, charismatic, culty guy.
(18:54):
And and there were others who are just as interesting.
But I can I can understand the connection in a way, especially
because you you ended up at oratory and rhetoric.
But but I was thinking that to me, Hitler represents a dropping
of the facade. And he may not be differentiated
(19:18):
from from Stalin and Mao, but the United States also wasn't
involved in trying to deal with Stalin and Mao nearly as
viscerally as it was Hitler. And so so it's understandable
that the that the imprint relating to Hitler would be
(19:39):
stronger. The UK also same can be said.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. But but I kind of, you know, the
the symbolizing what happens if the constraints are let go.
And you know, a lot of my associations in ceremonies with
(20:04):
Nazism are methamphetamine fueled complete lack of
compassion. Reptilian.
Reptilian and and so you know kind of dropping the facade or
dropping the mask or yeah releasing the collective shadow
(20:29):
right in in a way that you know I'm sure I'm sure we've seen
before and even we've seen sincebut we had a connection to that
one as Americans and and myself as Israeli and Jewish.
I don't know how you know how non Jews might see it
differently. I certainly imagine there's,
(20:50):
there's some variety there, but where it's like this shit's
real, you know, like the, the, the human capacity for, for
violence and, and to inspire violence in others to your point
is very real and must be taken very seriously.
Well, let's see. It's the, it's the inspiring
violence in others. Because like, that's where I saw
the connection with Manson. I'm not sure he actually
(21:11):
murdered anybody. He did.
I think he made others murder. Maybe there's a strong word, but
yeah. Well I mean that's the claim for
sure. That's why he gets the epithet
Mind fucker. There's something I wanted to go
back to if, if you're, if you'reup for it, You mentioned black
magic and, and I think you said enchantment rhetoric as
(21:35):
enchantment is getting into the realm of black magic.
And I, I find it hard to draw the line where bad behavior ends
in black magic begin or something like that.
And I, I wondered if you want tospeak to that a little bit.
Well, I think it has to do maybewith the application of the will
(21:56):
and the the basic phenomenal. The mystery here is this
connection between mind and the things of mind, the realm of
mind and matter and the realm ofmatter.
You know, that's the that's the mystery of an artist.
They take an image from mind andthen they manifest the thing,
(22:19):
right? Whether it's a building or a
piece of jewelry or a song. There's that crossing the
barrier, which I would, which I'm going to argue later on in a
couple weeks is synonymous with crossing the chasm.
But. Well, and and it's also like the
the transition from the probabilistic to the
(22:39):
deterministic universe. Right.
That happens only in the now, right?
So but someone mucking about, maybe not fully aligned with
their will, but their will kind of scatter gun impacting others.
(23:01):
Is that fundamentally different from somebody who intentionally
actually, you know, what just jumped to mind is January 6th
because I, I could buy that Trump might not have known that,
you know, things might get a little out of hand.
And, and, and, and I think it's likely that there were all kinds
(23:24):
of complicating factors like a lot of FBI agents in the crowd
and stuff like that. It seems like that's a lot.
Of narrative control, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
But but, you know, I think your argument, had Trump used oratory
intentionally to incite people to storm the Capitol, cause
(23:48):
mayhem, death, destruction, undermine democracy, etcetera,
that might have gone into the realm of black magic.
And I'm guessing that you think what he what he did since it the
will might not have been totallyclear.
And like the, you know, there's some messiness there that that
maybe it didn't. So yeah, maybe.
(24:09):
Well, you know, that you're the traditional way that it's
thought about, and I've heard versions of this in both the
Eastern and the Western traditions is that the average
person is not really capable of great evil or great good because
their capacities are undeveloped.
And that you sort of go up a ladder in developing capacities
(24:33):
and that you hit a certain pointwhere you either go left or you
go right. If you go right, you become a
sage or a St. If you go left, you become in
the Chinese tradition. That's where they call mogwai,
right? Which people from that movie
will might recognize. Right.
Gremlins. Yeah.
Gremlins. Yeah.
Which means a demon. So, you know, there might be
(24:57):
people that haven't actually studied to climb that ladder,
but they might have certain natural capacities through
obsession or or fixations or inheritance or I, you know, I
don't know all the dimensions. To this the rap about
methamphetamines in particular destroying the soul and and
(25:21):
making you open to possession. And remember, I didn't say
enchantment of the soul. That was Plato.
We're talking 350 BC, so this isnot a new thing.
And you know, with this idea of enchantment and using song or
(25:42):
chance to in to engage people, to entrap people's soul, right?
And I mean, when you have, what's the way to put this?
When a con man is working a mark, they know when they have
rapport, they know when the person is.
(26:06):
What would the colloquialism be eating out of their hand, Right.
Yeah. Like a salesman knows when they
have an easy sale, right. It's the same sort of thing.
And so. So, yeah, I mean, there's a
phenomenon there. This is, I think related to
constant antology where he says we can't use people as a means.
(26:28):
Well, any of these things that have to do with manipulating
people's consciousness in any other way than teaching, which
is to say with the strictest relationship with truth and
justice. Like like Aristotle's definition
of good rhetoric. Anything in that category Plato
considered some form of witchery, as in we know words
(26:54):
are powerful in ways that we don't recognize all the time.
Now, if you have been along withus this whole ride and you were
back at episode 1 where we uncovered the idea of the
semantic world and we sort of pointed at that, which itself is
a sort of a phenomenological tool, right?
It looks at our subjective experience, how we go about it.
(27:17):
You'll realize that language is the currency of that world,
language and image and human emotion, right?
So if somebody can work that, then they can actually have
effects over your semantic reality.
And we see like they've done experiments.
(27:37):
And that was one of my points isthat, you know, with Helena
Riefenstahl, one of the things she was one of, you know,
producing propaganda films for Hitler.
She was also the vocal, the voice piece for the how could we
have known excuse argument. So so anyway, there's AI guess
(28:04):
there's some sort of a relationship there.
Well, the other thing I was thinking about that's like kind
of corollary to the claim is what about the crowd?
And, and you, you, you said something earlier that that I
(28:26):
found really interesting that isalong the lines of the
responsibility on the individualfor moral courage has never been
greater than it is today. And I, I don't remember
discussing that, you and I, and,and I'm not sure if I agree with
it, but it makes sense because we're in this period of
(28:49):
emergence and we have to figure out how individuals manifest in
the context of the collective good.
And, and that's a hard problem. And it is.
So it would make sense that the tension there might be greater
than ever. I'm curious to hear more of
what, why you think it's greaterthan ever.
(29:10):
But but where I'm going is, well, what about the crowd?
And we see a lot of examples today of people not not only
failing to speak truth to their peer group, but even failing to
recognize that that might even be to their moral benefit.
(29:35):
And and and and I think Douglas Murray titled one of his books
The Madness of Crowds. And, you know, obviously we saw
that during the Third Reich and,and, and we see it in ways today
also. We'll see.
That was kind of my point earlier, was that it in Hitler's
day, they were just to sort of like stumbling on this
(29:56):
technology of how to really amp up the power of rhetoric.
So now you can do movies, right?Well, every technological
advance in communications has a corresponding advance in its
rhetorical impact, which means it's persuasive ability, which
also means it's for good or I'll, who knows.
(30:20):
So, so I mean, that's why it's not like I wish that dialectic
had made the advances that rhetoric has made.
Oh, that's interesting. What makes you think it hasn't?
Because I would think that the same technological capabilities
(30:41):
would fuel any like I, you know,we see debate out in the out of
the world. Like, you know, there was just
this Douglas Murray and David Smith debate on, on Rogan's
podcast that we, you know, 20 million or 40 million or
whatever. That's why, that's why I say
that, because debate is not dialectic.
(31:04):
OK. Debate is interlinking rhetoric,
right? And it and it's competitive, and
there's a winner and a loser, purportedly, but dialectic.
Not benefited by technology also.
Well, I think because we're not in the habit of it, because we,
(31:24):
because we haven't taken our Platonic vitamins, because we
haven't grown in moral capacity.And where that came, you know,
there's a lot of theories about that, whether it was the
interaction of the church or whether God is dead or it's
technology or it's. But the reason that I say
there's a story through history,you know, it's kind of that
(31:47):
Hegelian idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit, that
something's been happening across history through time that
started with the Greeks because there were a lot of people back
in the ancient Greek times. We're not talking about, we're
talking about the Greeks becauseof this idea of democracy and
the a new role for the individual.
(32:09):
And then we have the Reformation.
Well, the Reformation doesn't just mean that the church is
gone. The hinge pin of the Reformation
is the doctrine of the universalpriesthood.
That means the priest is no longer an intercessory between
you and deity. You, as an individual creature
of God, have your own relationship with God.
(32:31):
Well, that's power to the individual.
You don't need to confess to thepriest.
You have your own relationship to the to the deity.
Well, then we have the the French Revolution, the American
Revolution. We have egalite, for God's
sakes, fraternity and liberte. Yeah.
Like, like when has that been the case, right?
It's always been kings, it's always been warlords, it's
(32:54):
always been the the people that game the system.
And that's like gravity to this whole enterprise, right?
Is that that that calling back to the lower emotions to that
will to receive to that creatureNess rather than creator Ness.
And so that ultimately pulls down all these efforts to fly,
(33:17):
right? And so with the American
Revolution, we see that same idea, that now it's not just
that the kings have granted me these rights.
These rights are inalienable andthey come from God, right, which
is a metaphysic, right? But that idea is that now this
(33:40):
metaphysic empowers the individual, the judgement of the
individual as well as the actionof the individual.
And that means that if we have that power, that political
power, we have to have the moralresponsibility that goes along
with that political power. And, and before I can act on
moral courage, there's an important part of this
(34:02):
conversation I'm not sure we gave a good treatment to.
I have to have a certain degree of moral clarity because
understanding must precede action.
And that that understanding is reason based, not emotion based.
Because if it's emotion based, Imight be the victim of rhetoric
(34:27):
and not seeing the thing for myself.
Perpetrator. Or the perpetrator, right.
And in a difficult but importantpoint is that is the is the my
personal rejection of this noblelie idea.
And that is it. If I were to use rhetoric to
convince you of something that even though you don't understand
(34:49):
it yourself, I'm convincing you of the good thing or the right
thing, that somehow like I've manipulated you, but I've
manipulated you for good. Like I lied to you to get you
off the railroad tracks. You know, I, I, I told you the
house was on fire so that you would run out so that I could
(35:09):
point to the stars. Some argument like that, right?
And I don't know that that bearsup under inspection.
This is the first time I kind ofbubbled up with this microscope
on it. But but there's some question
there about that. And my instinct is to say, and
maybe this is a Buddhistic impulse, that it's all about
awareness and and that action that's doing the right thing for
(35:34):
the wrong reason is as bad as doing the wrong thing for the
right reason. We need the right thing for the
right reason. Yeah.
My my reaction was, was I think if if we were to throw the E
ching on that kind of question, we would likely get back
something about that. We have to let things play out.
(35:56):
We have to give people the spaceto learn their own lessons.
We have to know when to keep a distance and when to participate
like that kind of stuff. Not Oh yeah, yeah, you should go
in and and and lie to save them.Right, right, right.
In the village to save it. I think is is maybe the allegory
that that you land on when takento an extreme.
(36:19):
Where you end up? Yeah, yeah.
The logical extreme. Yeah, yeah.
And at least we saved the patient, kind of, but not
really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I and I
think that that's the, you know,this is again, we come back up
on that moral question. Does one have principles or does
one try to do some impossible invisible calculus, A
(36:42):
consequentialist calculus, to make excuses for one's best
hopes and. And when you say moral clarity,
I think you've defined that in the past as something like
acting with a mindfulness about how our actions impact others.
(37:10):
Yeah, acting with wisdom, discerning and applying
universal principles and values to foster personal growth,
well-being, and the greater good.
I was reading that. Yeah.
Yeah. And you know where this idea of
phronesis that we can't formulate it as a set of rules,
(37:31):
we just can't do that. That's part of what Heidegger
and Being in Time is about, is you're not give up the fantasy
that you're going to figure thisall out because you're not.
You're going to have to learn tolive with that somehow.
You can see where you ended up with SART following in his foot
track steps, kind of the beginning of existentialism.
(37:53):
But yeah, I mean, where do thesethese transcendental,
transcendental values come from if if not personal experience
somehow. So that's why I like the idea of
for me, again, it comes down to hermeneutics.
How do we not misunderstand? How do we not misinterpret?
(38:17):
If we can really know that we'renot misinterpreting, then we
will do the right thing. And that means that we need to
have the, the, the best balanced, the the best picture
of the coast of Norway, You know, that in our semantic
world, so that our semantic world gives us the greatest base
(38:38):
with which to harmonize the whatthe individual peace under
observation to, to, to resonate it clearly.
And that's what was inherent in the genius of the Indian tribes
way of going about their businesses.
You know, I was on a jury with acouple guys from the Navajo
(39:00):
tribe and it was a six week trial.
So we spent a lot of time together, a lot of time just
hanging out because we couldn't talk about the case.
So we just, you know, literally just hanging out.
And so I said to him, what wouldyou do in the traditional way to
solve a problem like this, you know, to make a decision of a
community decision. And he said, well, we'd all get
(39:22):
around to the chapter house and then everybody get a chance to
talk. And then the old people would
tell us what the deal was, right?
It's like we all bring our pieces and then the old people
which hold the collective hermeneutic pot of the whole,
like they're the holders of the of the cultural whole or
(39:47):
coherence. And from the wisdom of that
collectively held coherence, they tell us how this piece fits
into that picture. And then that's what we do now.
He didn't say it that way. There's just said the old people
tell us what to do. Yeah, there's a scene and Dances
(40:08):
with Wolves where the what? I don't remember which Native
American tribe that is that Costner is hanging out with,
but. The Lakota.
Yeah, they're sitting in a circle figuring out what to do,
and each person says they're peace.
Young, old, you know, doesn't matter.
And and that clip was used in myfirst exposure to dialogue
(40:34):
because it sort of represents inorder for us to have shared
understanding, we have to get everybody's perspective in the
middle of the room so we can allget a look at it.
Everybody's holding a piece of the potential shared
understanding and and they they actually have to be integrated
for shared understanding that take place.
(40:55):
So yeah. And and see, one of the dangers
of that is misunderstanding thatto be the relativistic universe
where all truths are equal and there's no right point of view.
That's exactly wrong. In fact, the right point of view
is like that mystical one in a hole in 1G shot.
(41:15):
And we're trying to accumulate better and better and better and
better and we need it all. We don't need it all to lose the
idea of better. We need it all to distill better
out of it. And that's why the elders
represent a different resource than the the new people, the
young people, because they've got all of this experience to to
(41:38):
resonate the new piece against, right.
They've read so much of the book, they know how that next
collective page goes. And if they're elders in a
collective situation, like a tribe, they they literally hold
that hermeneutical base collectively, like they hold a
(42:00):
cultural understanding together that exists separate from anyone
individual that makes it up. And that's really what a
heritage is. It's not just a, it's not just,
oh, we have fun stories about this and that.
No, we've got frameworks for thought, right?
(42:20):
Which is a theme that I will be revisiting later in the month.
But we've, but these frameworks enable us to take the new and
the unique that just got spit out by the possibilistic
universe and to understand what are the potential results of our
actions based on how we face it.And that's the, that's the key.
(42:43):
What do we do? What do we do right in that
American pragmatic way? So, yeah, there's a, there's a
thing at work there. And so if we have this idea of a
cultural understanding and we'vegot all this stuff and we're
trying to build it, 'cause now we're much bigger than a, than
an Indian tribe and we've got a much more complicated collective
(43:08):
semantic world. It's now got mechanized
narratives dumped into it in industrial levels, hyper, hyper
novelistically imprinted, right.And the human system
collectively is going like, whoa, right.
We got like an information shotgun here.
(43:32):
And, and you can feel a lot of the race going, you know, just
from that shot. And but that's why I'm I'm I
think it's a critical time to make that distinction
internally, phenomenologically, what is our subjective
experience of how things pull usto action and from what center
(43:58):
those things pull us? Are we pulled by self-interest?
Are we pulled by our love of truth?
Are we pulled by our duty? Are we pulled by our fear?
Are we, you know, all those things who, who and what do I
let take the wheel and steer today's rock'n'roll reference.
I think it's is it Incubus Dr.? Is that the?
(44:21):
I don't know. OK, I'll dig it out.
Yeah, sometimes I let the wheel that I let the fear take the
wheel and steer. But then I realize I should be
the one behind the wheel. Good job, folks.
Good job. That's the story.
And and what's the other one? That that this other way of, of,
(44:44):
of making decisions seems to have a vaguely haunting appeal
or something. There's a line like that.
And if that's great, haunting mass appeal seems to have a
haunting mass appeal. Yeah.
Well, that's that mechanism thatwe're talking about.
And again, if more if if we're dependent on in history with
(45:06):
civil rights and and the vote and all of these different
things to to to have the power to exert moral force, then we
have to have that responsibilityto to to maintain a desire for
moral clarity and to be willing to pay a certain price for it
(45:26):
and to be willing to kind of understand what is the
complications there? What are the things I put on the
altar? That's the courage part of moral
courage, right? Is the yeah, I'm just going to
do what you got to do what's right, Because what was that
quote? To know what's right and to not
do it is the lowest act of cowardice slap.
(45:48):
You know, it's like a, that's like one of the chocolates with
across the, you know, the the flip flops.
The abuela's favorite weapon of choice.
What aches, Yeah. What aches could be, Yeah.
(46:12):
Yeah, made out of car tire rubber, right?
That could. That'd be the Central American
version, yeah. Yeah.
So I'm wondering if there is a circling back to the
phenomenology of Hitler that kind of puts a bow on the topic,
(46:34):
at least for today. So, so I guess I'm like we
talked about what, what Hitler represents and the relationship
of that to how we how we go forward with this individual
responsibility for moral clarity.
(46:55):
Maybe the maybe that responsibility being greater
than it ever has been before. And I and I can see for also for
reasons of the stakes being higher in some ways, right?
The stakes being higher and the tools being used against it
being more refined and more moredeveloped.
And but also, this is what immunizes you against Hitler's.
(47:20):
It isn't that you stop some outside Hitler from springing
up, does it? You know, like the science
fiction stories of. Get him your inner Hitler.
You have to stop your inner Hitler.
You know, like Wilhelm Reich wrote a book called The Murder
of Christ and his point what he was writing about is that how in
(47:41):
each human being Christ is remurdered.
We murder Christ within ourselves.
And so the lesson of the resurrection, that's where the
resurrection needs to happen. And how does that happen?
Well, we walk back into righteousness.
We get right with God. We, we become what it is by
(48:06):
divine intent to be. All the all that stuff, all that
spitting up the apple, that was the fall from grace.
And so, but, but you know, I mean, and now it is more
pragmatic and now it does come from more directions.
And if the stakes are higher than ever, there's more human
life out there. There's more suffering to be had
(48:28):
than ever before. There's.
Are there people out there that you think kind of emulates the
wrong word that epitomize this dealing with their their inner
Hitler? Well, I mean, I think that
(48:49):
that's that is what the spiritual path really is about.
That's what the. I'm wondering in the public
sphere, if you see that at all. Oh, there's another rock'n'roll
reference there from Jack Johnson.
Where are all the where of all the good people gone?
(49:09):
You know that song? Yeah, I don't see him on the TV
shows. Well, that's why we need this
new medium thing, you know, and why we need modeling these new
behaviors. And it might just take a, you
know, a new set of fools to do that.
(49:31):
But I think it is something thatwants to happen.
And maybe that's that's what, you know, like we talked about
the eyeballs that show back up on the fruit flies.
There's something about the plansays eyeballs are going to be
part of this and by whatever mechanism that those eyeballs
got back in there, right? And it it could well be that
(49:52):
that the same is the case. I mean, I trust that it is the
case with the the fulfillment ofhuman potential and the human
incarnation, because it has to do with this is an interesting
thing coming out of Heidegger. And that is that it's something
about the nature of being as it manifests in human makes us
(50:13):
question what is being as it manifests in humans, which is
this consciousness conscious of consciousness, which is a very
special state, which the argument is something's trying
to happen. And that we can.
Here's a good quote from TerenceMcKenna.
He said, you know, that it does seem like that nature is moving
(50:35):
in this direction, which was forhim was the eschaton.
And he says it's not something that you're going to be able to
screw up with your Volvos and your Cuisinarts.
That was just a particular when he spoke in Santa Fe years ago.
And it, it, it, you know, what's, what is he saying there?
He's saying that, you know, you have your lower emotions and
(50:57):
your higher emotions. You have your impulse and push
stuff everything into your mouth.
And you also have your understandings of truth and
justice and beauty and your actions.
Every day, your decisions danglebetween those two sets of
impulses. So every day you have the choice
and and the, you know, you mightlook at OK, well, I want to try
(51:22):
to make the choice the right choice because that's still a
very externally oriented understanding of it.
You don't do right in the world just because you, the world
needs right to be done in it. You do right in the world
because it's an expression of your realization having
manifested to another higher degree.
(51:43):
You've become more chunsu. And so that is just what you do
when that's who you are. And that's why I think ethics is
very tangled up with identity and what this relationship
between mind and matter. What do we as responsible
(52:04):
bridges between those two? What do we pull through?
That's what we make us right. That's how we persist through
time. 1st we make it us and thenwe make it manifest in the
world. We're like a portal for the
transmutation of mind into matter.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
(52:24):
And for the imbuement of matter with meaning, right, Which is
like adding end dimensions to it, right?
When something becomes meaningful, it's far more than
what it is in a natural science sense, right?
You got your grandfather's pocket watch.
This is more than just a bunch of brass, right And why?
(52:49):
Well, there's nothing a machine is going to tell you why?
Because your grandfather carriedit through the hardest times of
his life, but he never pawned itor because, you know, it had the
engraving from your grandmother in it and he carried it in the
trenches in World War Two or something.
You know, like, like the, the, the human experience through
(53:12):
time is one of the things that degenerates meaning.
And it's, you know, so this is part of our unique nature.
This again, this Aristotelian idea that we want to be what it
is to be a human that is uniquely human, which is to, to
really absorb and, and to live out of meaning.
(53:33):
And that is your anti Hitler pill.
You're not going to invent a machine and you stick all the
babies and you see whether the Hitler light lights up or not.
You're not going to be able to do scientific brain scans,
right? You have to, you have to
understand the mechanism hermeneutically.
(53:55):
You have to understand the whole, how this part is playing
its role within the whole and and you got to use your whole
brain to do that, which is that whole other fun topic.
Well, maybe that's a place to pause.
I think so. And yeah, I don't have anything
(54:19):
else other than to tell people that we have some cool stuff
coming up. Stay tuned.
So tell all your friends, your acquaintances, that guy on the
street who keeps following you around.
Any old fool? Any old fool?
Cool. Great.
Thank you, Brian. We'll see everybody later.
(54:40):
Bye bye.
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thanks. It's spring in Philadelphia and
I can't complain. 70s T-shirt weather.
Nice, nice. Yeah, we're looking at 80 today,
and if I was outside, I wouldn'teven need to be wearing this.
Yeah, but yeah, that weird inversion time when the house
(00:38):
switches from heating to cooling.
Yeah. But yeah, so I'm got that spring
thing happening, so I'm good with that.
Nice, you were just mentioning to me that an idea came to you
in the night. I can't wait to hear about it.
Well, you know, in our last conversation that we had with
(01:00):
Allison, we, we hit a territory that got designated as deep
water. And I thought that that that's
kind of like a, a signal that there's something worth
unfolding there. And so I started thinking about
it and basically what I thought we should do to explore it was a
(01:24):
a phenomenological sortie unfolding Adolf Hitler.
OK. The same the thoughts one has in
the middle of the night. Yeah.
So maybe you could Orient our listeners to what the deep
waters were. Well I I want to work up to
(01:46):
there. OK.
And then, and then maybe they can go back and see if they can
figure out what the deep waters were.
OK. It's kind of.
I know it's a backwards way to do it, but but what what I
thought I wanted to do was a sort of a phenomenological
unfolding of Adolf Hitler because of because he perfectly.
(02:12):
I'm interested not in the historical Hitler, but I'm
interested in the psychological cultural phenomenon of Hitler
and and what has sort have happened around that psycho
culturally. Is this the egregore of?
(02:34):
Hitler I I think this is something a little different.
I think that it's hit that Hitler might actually be the
manifestation of a different energy through history.
OK. Because, you know, the idea of
(02:55):
of a phenomenological investigation is one that we
kind of unfold from the inside. We unfold from the subjective
experience of the event or the object of inquiry.
That's kind of the way we think about phenomenological
investigations. So if I think about Hitler with
(03:20):
that thinking cap on, I know it looks like a normal cap, but I I
start to ask myself some questions.
Why does Hitler represent what Hitler represents?
I mean, we've got a man here that ruined a complete style of
(03:40):
mustache, at least for the next two, 300 years.
We've got a character that epitomizes something and I say
something because there is a a zone there because he represents
slightly different things to different people.
But still there is this like archetype going on there.
(04:02):
And what is that? So I start to unfold that what
was what's my subjective experience because yeah, he
killed a lot of people. But honestly, if I to believe
history as it's popularly told, really Stalin kind of outdid
him. Well, and maybe Mao out did him
(04:24):
both and I. Think Mao is reported to have
outdone both of them. So if we're going to do it a
calculus kind of thing, somehow he's got something else going on
there, right? And if we were thinking of just
pure cruelty, right? Well, to do that, we're going to
go somewhere like Wallachia, right, And talk about Vlad the
(04:47):
Impaler, You know where, where the, the, the bad ass army
didn't want to go through his territory because there were
upwards of 20,000 people impaledon stakes.
They call it the forest of corpses, right?
So it's like, I mean, literally,it's the thing that horror
(05:09):
novels are made of. But Hitler's got something else
going on there. And I started to ponder that
this is, you know, because in the middle of the night, I'm
fighting for space from the dogs, right?
We're doing that sumo, that horizontal sumo.
(05:31):
Anybody familiar with pack life knows what that's like?
Not the connotation horizontal sumo usually has, but.
I guess that's true. That's true.
I I was just shooting that skeetthere.
So but so I started to think, you know, is there anybody else
who kind of would be up there with with Adolf in this what it
(05:54):
is to be the this archetype Hitler thing?
And honestly, they the person that left to mind just maybe not
a huge leap because he had a swastika tattooed on his third
eye. Of course, the Charlie Manson
and I. And so when I, when I start to
(06:15):
ponder that why, what is the threat that Adolf Hitler
represents? And it it because same like
Charlie Manson and Hitler honestly put me in a locked room
with either one of them, maybe both of them in our prime.
(06:37):
I, I'm certain I'm the only one walking out of that room, right?
There's a lot of people in the world I would not consider going
in that room with. But these guys, they don't scare
me that way, right? Like a few, I mean, Hitler's no
problem, right? And Charlie Manson, he's not a,
(07:02):
he's not a, a, a, a, a physically threatening
character, right? He's a little guy.
But you know what they call Charlie Manson?
I, I saw in one of these documentaries, you know what
they call him in prison and why they don't like him, They call
him a mind fucker, right? So I start to unwind this and I
(07:26):
start to think, well, when we think going back to Hitler, what
do we think of when we think of Hitler?
Now everybody, different generation maybe has different
exposure, but in my generation it may be still in yours.
What you see of Hitler is not him driving tanks, it's not him
(07:48):
whipping or torturing people, it's not him doing a physically
threatening thing. But what is he doing?
We always see him doing oratory.Have you noticed that we see him
(08:08):
standing in front of the the huge crowds and he's working it
right? And you don't even have to know
German, but you know, there's something is going on here,
right? So the conclusion that I come to
is that Hitler and Manson don't scare us the way that things
(08:30):
outside of us scare us. But they scare us, in fact,
because they scare us of ourselves, because they
represent someone that makes rational, normal people do
(08:50):
unspeakable, unimaginable things.
And the fear is that they could actually bring that out in
ourselves. This is my theory, right?
So what does this flash me to when I see or when I imagine
Hitler up there wildly gesticulating?
(09:12):
I also, I think of Huey Long. If you've ever seen any of the
black and white photos of Huey Long, and he's this is in the
days of oratory where you didn'thave a megaphone, you didn't
have a microphone, and you were speaking to a huge group of
people. Now, Hitler probably had
microphones, but Huey Long, as Irecall, didn't.
And so he was shouting so everybody in the back row could
(09:32):
hear him and he and he was smallto them in the back row.
So he would wildly wave his arms, you know, and so people
could see what he's doing. An oratory for most of history
was thus was speaking and by extension writing.
But it was this idea of a, of a physical expression.
(09:56):
And what it is basically is rhetoric, right?
So now what a lot of people, they know about rhetoric and
they know about Socrates, and then we've talked about
dialectic. But what they don't understand
and what we haven't really rhapsodized is the the
(10:17):
unfriendly relationship, let's say, between rhetoric and
dialectic. And the reason was because
dialectic rhetoric for people that hear the word, I guess the
most common way we hear that word is probably in the form of
the phrase a rhetorical question, where we're asking a
(10:38):
question that we don't expect people to answer.
We're just asking it for for theinfluence of the sound of the
presentation rather than expecting an actual question.
But the idea of rhetoric is an old, old idea, I think.
Pericles is one of these characters back in the the war
(11:00):
between Sparta and Athens gave afamous eulogy of all the dead
Athenians and with the idea of moving people so they would
continue the war so they would triumph over Sparta, which I I
believe they they didn't. But, but, but for folks that
aren't familiar with rhetoric, rhetoric is, is very nearly
(11:23):
identical to the idea of persuasion.
And the reason that Plato and orSocrates by extension, Plato had
such a beef with rhetoric is because he said that rhetoric
gives no care for truth or justice.
(11:43):
It's purely persuasion. So what?
So what Adolf Hitler really represents on some level is the
power of persuasion, the power of rhetorical persuasion,
traditionally delivered through the human voice.
(12:07):
But during the time of Hitler, athing happened that was
technological, not unlike our time when we have new
technological things. And the thing that had just
happened in the 20s was the movies, right?
But they wouldn't talk yet. And one of the things that
Hitler did was he had a lady, Helena Riefenstahl, I think your
(12:33):
name was, who created a movie for him called a Call A A, A
Call to Will. Was it?
Or the Triumph of Will? I actually wrote it down, The
Triumph of Will and another one called Olympia.
And what these were, were rhetorical devices enhanced
(12:54):
mechanically, technologically toinspire people not to reason,
but to emotion. And you know, it's interesting
when people, when we decide we're going to let them make
judgments for themselves, we do it.
We caught, we say they've attained the age of reason.
(13:17):
We don't say they've attained the age of emotion because we're
born with emotion. We start out screaming, right?
So, so by Plato and what's what's interesting with Plato or
Socrates, he didn't just say that rhetoricians lead us astray
by lying. He said that they did a form of
(13:41):
enchantment of the soul, which pushes it almost a little closer
to black magic direction, right?We're actually talking about
enchanting people and engaging them in a way that's not
necessarily about truth or aboutjustice, although it may be.
(14:05):
Both Aristotle and Plato allowedfor the idea of true rhetoric,
but I think with true rhetoric, we call that teaching, right?
It's when it's, it's when it's not true rhetoric, right?
It, it, it when it's persuasion for the pure benefit of the
person doing the persuading, right?
(14:27):
And that's where the slippery slope begins.
And that was kind of where the deeper waters were of issued.
Because the way that we do this is we don't just harness, we
don't just harness positive emotions, which is what Pericles
did. We're Athenians and we
(14:48):
Athenians, we have higher idealsand that makes us better.
America used to do that, right? We have democracy and we
champion these virtues and thesevalues.
You know, that's the positive side associated with your cause.
But the other thing you do, which Goebbels and and the the
(15:09):
Nazis did, of course, is you take negative emotions and you
associate those with the other team.
There's a famous quote, it's either Goring or Gobbles where
he says, of course it's understood that the people never
support war. So you have to associate the the
pacifists with exposing the country to danger.
(15:33):
So you balance their fear, theirlower emotion against their
higher emotion to seek peace over war.
You literally play their lower emotions over their higher
emotions. And that's why one of the
observations that I have about moral courage that links up with
this idea of increased responsibility falling on the
(15:56):
individual more now than it everhas in history.
Is it because it means not just speaking truth to power as we
spoke about, but it also means speaking truth to our peer
group? Because as we said, you know,
the slippery slope of morality is usually not one that we slide
(16:18):
down alone. Usually we have peers there that
are supporting it that we might actually have to exert a type of
courage. And, you know, it's much easier
to speak truth to power if poweris those motherfuckers, right?
Because of course, you and all your friends and everyone that
(16:41):
shares associations with you shares that value.
So it seems like courage, but it's a small courage.
On the other hand, to speak truth to your peer group when
you are potentially, you know, on a very different line than
your peer group takes a type of moral courage.
(17:04):
It takes a prioritization of truth or justice or knowing
what's right over all those other emotions like wanting to
belong, wanting to have acceptance, wanting
reinforcement, all of those things.
So to me, that's kind of what that's the personality
(17:24):
challenge, you know, and that's why both Confucius and Aristotle
said we strive at this, we work,we work over a lifetime to build
that. And that this dovetails into
that idea of coming to completion.
We don't necessarily start therewith those push up muscles
strong. We kind of go through a process.
(17:47):
So anyway, that's sort of is my my intro to the phenomenological
dissection of the Adolf Hitler phenomenon.
Meme. Yeah, the meme, you know, now
it's not my favorite mustache. I'm not feeling the loss
personally, but it's interestingthat that association is still
(18:10):
so strong. You know, like so anyway.
I've been dowsing here as as you've been kind of unfurling
this topic for whether whether I'm with your assessment kind of
each step of the way. I thought the the choosing
(18:33):
Charles Manson was really interesting because that
wouldn't have occurred to me. But, and that might be a factor
of our age difference because, you know, he was, he was in jail
and and kind of like a just another mass murderer slash
serial killer, charismatic, culty guy.
(18:54):
And and there were others who are just as interesting.
But I can I can understand the connection in a way, especially
because you you ended up at oratory and rhetoric.
But but I was thinking that to me, Hitler represents a dropping
of the facade. And he may not be differentiated
(19:18):
from from Stalin and Mao, but the United States also wasn't
involved in trying to deal with Stalin and Mao nearly as
viscerally as it was Hitler. And so so it's understandable
that the that the imprint relating to Hitler would be
(19:39):
stronger. The UK also same can be said.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. But but I kind of, you know, the
the symbolizing what happens if the constraints are let go.
And you know, a lot of my associations in ceremonies with
(20:04):
Nazism are methamphetamine fueled complete lack of
compassion. Reptilian.
Reptilian and and so you know kind of dropping the facade or
dropping the mask or yeah releasing the collective shadow
(20:29):
right in in a way that you know I'm sure I'm sure we've seen
before and even we've seen sincebut we had a connection to that
one as Americans and and myself as Israeli and Jewish.
I don't know how you know how non Jews might see it
differently. I certainly imagine there's,
(20:50):
there's some variety there, but where it's like this shit's
real, you know, like the, the, the human capacity for, for
violence and, and to inspire violence in others to your point
is very real and must be taken very seriously.
Well, let's see. It's the, it's the inspiring
violence in others. Because like, that's where I saw
the connection with Manson. I'm not sure he actually
(21:11):
murdered anybody. He did.
I think he made others murder. Maybe there's a strong word, but
yeah. Well I mean that's the claim for
sure. That's why he gets the epithet
Mind fucker. There's something I wanted to go
back to if, if you're, if you'reup for it, You mentioned black
magic and, and I think you said enchantment rhetoric as
(21:35):
enchantment is getting into the realm of black magic.
And I, I find it hard to draw the line where bad behavior ends
in black magic begin or something like that.
And I, I wondered if you want tospeak to that a little bit.
Well, I think it has to do maybewith the application of the will
(21:56):
and the the basic phenomenal. The mystery here is this
connection between mind and the things of mind, the realm of
mind and matter and the realm ofmatter.
You know, that's the that's the mystery of an artist.
They take an image from mind andthen they manifest the thing,
(22:19):
right? Whether it's a building or a
piece of jewelry or a song. There's that crossing the
barrier, which I would, which I'm going to argue later on in a
couple weeks is synonymous with crossing the chasm.
But. Well, and and it's also like the
the transition from the probabilistic to the
(22:39):
deterministic universe. Right.
That happens only in the now, right?
So but someone mucking about, maybe not fully aligned with
their will, but their will kind of scatter gun impacting others.
(23:01):
Is that fundamentally different from somebody who intentionally
actually, you know, what just jumped to mind is January 6th
because I, I could buy that Trump might not have known that,
you know, things might get a little out of hand.
And, and, and, and I think it's likely that there were all kinds
(23:24):
of complicating factors like a lot of FBI agents in the crowd
and stuff like that. It seems like that's a lot.
Of narrative control, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
But but, you know, I think your argument, had Trump used oratory
intentionally to incite people to storm the Capitol, cause
(23:48):
mayhem, death, destruction, undermine democracy, etcetera,
that might have gone into the realm of black magic.
And I'm guessing that you think what he what he did since it the
will might not have been totallyclear.
And like the, you know, there's some messiness there that that
maybe it didn't. So yeah, maybe.
(24:09):
Well, you know, that you're the traditional way that it's
thought about, and I've heard versions of this in both the
Eastern and the Western traditions is that the average
person is not really capable of great evil or great good because
their capacities are undeveloped.
And that you sort of go up a ladder in developing capacities
(24:33):
and that you hit a certain pointwhere you either go left or you
go right. If you go right, you become a
sage or a St. If you go left, you become in
the Chinese tradition. That's where they call mogwai,
right? Which people from that movie
will might recognize. Right.
Gremlins. Yeah.
Gremlins. Yeah.
Which means a demon. So, you know, there might be
(24:57):
people that haven't actually studied to climb that ladder,
but they might have certain natural capacities through
obsession or or fixations or inheritance or I, you know, I
don't know all the dimensions. To this the rap about
methamphetamines in particular destroying the soul and and
(25:21):
making you open to possession. And remember, I didn't say
enchantment of the soul. That was Plato.
We're talking 350 BC, so this isnot a new thing.
And you know, with this idea of enchantment and using song or
(25:42):
chance to in to engage people, to entrap people's soul, right?
And I mean, when you have, what's the way to put this?
When a con man is working a mark, they know when they have
rapport, they know when the person is.
(26:06):
What would the colloquialism be eating out of their hand, Right.
Yeah. Like a salesman knows when they
have an easy sale, right. It's the same sort of thing.
And so. So, yeah, I mean, there's a
phenomenon there. This is, I think related to
constant antology where he says we can't use people as a means.
(26:28):
Well, any of these things that have to do with manipulating
people's consciousness in any other way than teaching, which
is to say with the strictest relationship with truth and
justice. Like like Aristotle's definition
of good rhetoric. Anything in that category Plato
considered some form of witchery, as in we know words
(26:54):
are powerful in ways that we don't recognize all the time.
Now, if you have been along withus this whole ride and you were
back at episode 1 where we uncovered the idea of the
semantic world and we sort of pointed at that, which itself is
a sort of a phenomenological tool, right?
It looks at our subjective experience, how we go about it.
(27:17):
You'll realize that language is the currency of that world,
language and image and human emotion, right?
So if somebody can work that, then they can actually have
effects over your semantic reality.
And we see like they've done experiments.
(27:37):
And that was one of my points isthat, you know, with Helena
Riefenstahl, one of the things she was one of, you know,
producing propaganda films for Hitler.
She was also the vocal, the voice piece for the how could we
have known excuse argument. So so anyway, there's AI guess
(28:04):
there's some sort of a relationship there.
Well, the other thing I was thinking about that's like kind
of corollary to the claim is what about the crowd?
And, and you, you, you said something earlier that that I
(28:26):
found really interesting that isalong the lines of the
responsibility on the individualfor moral courage has never been
greater than it is today. And I, I don't remember
discussing that, you and I, and,and I'm not sure if I agree with
it, but it makes sense because we're in this period of
(28:49):
emergence and we have to figure out how individuals manifest in
the context of the collective good.
And, and that's a hard problem. And it is.
So it would make sense that the tension there might be greater
than ever. I'm curious to hear more of
what, why you think it's greaterthan ever.
(29:10):
But but where I'm going is, well, what about the crowd?
And we see a lot of examples today of people not not only
failing to speak truth to their peer group, but even failing to
recognize that that might even be to their moral benefit.
(29:35):
And and and and I think Douglas Murray titled one of his books
The Madness of Crowds. And, you know, obviously we saw
that during the Third Reich and,and, and we see it in ways today
also. We'll see.
That was kind of my point earlier, was that it in Hitler's
day, they were just to sort of like stumbling on this
(29:56):
technology of how to really amp up the power of rhetoric.
So now you can do movies, right?Well, every technological
advance in communications has a corresponding advance in its
rhetorical impact, which means it's persuasive ability, which
also means it's for good or I'll, who knows.
(30:20):
So, so I mean, that's why it's not like I wish that dialectic
had made the advances that rhetoric has made.
Oh, that's interesting. What makes you think it hasn't?
Because I would think that the same technological capabilities
(30:41):
would fuel any like I, you know,we see debate out in the out of
the world. Like, you know, there was just
this Douglas Murray and David Smith debate on, on Rogan's
podcast that we, you know, 20 million or 40 million or
whatever. That's why, that's why I say
that, because debate is not dialectic.
(31:04):
OK. Debate is interlinking rhetoric,
right? And it and it's competitive, and
there's a winner and a loser, purportedly, but dialectic.
Not benefited by technology also.
Well, I think because we're not in the habit of it, because we,
(31:24):
because we haven't taken our Platonic vitamins, because we
haven't grown in moral capacity.And where that came, you know,
there's a lot of theories about that, whether it was the
interaction of the church or whether God is dead or it's
technology or it's. But the reason that I say
there's a story through history,you know, it's kind of that
(31:47):
Hegelian idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit, that
something's been happening across history through time that
started with the Greeks because there were a lot of people back
in the ancient Greek times. We're not talking about, we're
talking about the Greeks becauseof this idea of democracy and
the a new role for the individual.
(32:09):
And then we have the Reformation.
Well, the Reformation doesn't just mean that the church is
gone. The hinge pin of the Reformation
is the doctrine of the universalpriesthood.
That means the priest is no longer an intercessory between
you and deity. You, as an individual creature
of God, have your own relationship with God.
(32:31):
Well, that's power to the individual.
You don't need to confess to thepriest.
You have your own relationship to the to the deity.
Well, then we have the the French Revolution, the American
Revolution. We have egalite, for God's
sakes, fraternity and liberte. Yeah.
Like, like when has that been the case, right?
It's always been kings, it's always been warlords, it's
(32:54):
always been the the people that game the system.
And that's like gravity to this whole enterprise, right?
Is that that that calling back to the lower emotions to that
will to receive to that creatureNess rather than creator Ness.
And so that ultimately pulls down all these efforts to fly,
(33:17):
right? And so with the American
Revolution, we see that same idea, that now it's not just
that the kings have granted me these rights.
These rights are inalienable andthey come from God, right, which
is a metaphysic, right? But that idea is that now this
(33:40):
metaphysic empowers the individual, the judgement of the
individual as well as the actionof the individual.
And that means that if we have that power, that political
power, we have to have the moralresponsibility that goes along
with that political power. And, and before I can act on
moral courage, there's an important part of this
(34:02):
conversation I'm not sure we gave a good treatment to.
I have to have a certain degree of moral clarity because
understanding must precede action.
And that that understanding is reason based, not emotion based.
Because if it's emotion based, Imight be the victim of rhetoric
(34:27):
and not seeing the thing for myself.
Perpetrator. Or the perpetrator, right.
And in a difficult but importantpoint is that is the is the my
personal rejection of this noblelie idea.
And that is it. If I were to use rhetoric to
convince you of something that even though you don't understand
(34:49):
it yourself, I'm convincing you of the good thing or the right
thing, that somehow like I've manipulated you, but I've
manipulated you for good. Like I lied to you to get you
off the railroad tracks. You know, I, I, I told you the
house was on fire so that you would run out so that I could
(35:09):
point to the stars. Some argument like that, right?
And I don't know that that bearsup under inspection.
This is the first time I kind ofbubbled up with this microscope
on it. But but there's some question
there about that. And my instinct is to say, and
maybe this is a Buddhistic impulse, that it's all about
awareness and and that action that's doing the right thing for
(35:34):
the wrong reason is as bad as doing the wrong thing for the
right reason. We need the right thing for the
right reason. Yeah.
My my reaction was, was I think if if we were to throw the E
ching on that kind of question, we would likely get back
something about that. We have to let things play out.
(35:56):
We have to give people the spaceto learn their own lessons.
We have to know when to keep a distance and when to participate
like that kind of stuff. Not Oh yeah, yeah, you should go
in and and and lie to save them.Right, right, right.
In the village to save it. I think is is maybe the allegory
that that you land on when takento an extreme.
(36:19):
Where you end up? Yeah, yeah.
The logical extreme. Yeah, yeah.
And at least we saved the patient, kind of, but not
really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I and I
think that that's the, you know,this is again, we come back up
on that moral question. Does one have principles or does
one try to do some impossible invisible calculus, A
(36:42):
consequentialist calculus, to make excuses for one's best
hopes and. And when you say moral clarity,
I think you've defined that in the past as something like
acting with a mindfulness about how our actions impact others.
(37:10):
Yeah, acting with wisdom, discerning and applying
universal principles and values to foster personal growth,
well-being, and the greater good.
I was reading that. Yeah.
Yeah. And you know where this idea of
phronesis that we can't formulate it as a set of rules,
(37:31):
we just can't do that. That's part of what Heidegger
and Being in Time is about, is you're not give up the fantasy
that you're going to figure thisall out because you're not.
You're going to have to learn tolive with that somehow.
You can see where you ended up with SART following in his foot
track steps, kind of the beginning of existentialism.
(37:53):
But yeah, I mean, where do thesethese transcendental,
transcendental values come from if if not personal experience
somehow. So that's why I like the idea of
for me, again, it comes down to hermeneutics.
How do we not misunderstand? How do we not misinterpret?
(38:17):
If we can really know that we'renot misinterpreting, then we
will do the right thing. And that means that we need to
have the, the, the best balanced, the the best picture
of the coast of Norway, You know, that in our semantic
world, so that our semantic world gives us the greatest base
(38:38):
with which to harmonize the whatthe individual peace under
observation to, to, to resonate it clearly.
And that's what was inherent in the genius of the Indian tribes
way of going about their businesses.
You know, I was on a jury with acouple guys from the Navajo
(39:00):
tribe and it was a six week trial.
So we spent a lot of time together, a lot of time just
hanging out because we couldn't talk about the case.
So we just, you know, literally just hanging out.
And so I said to him, what wouldyou do in the traditional way to
solve a problem like this, you know, to make a decision of a
community decision. And he said, well, we'd all get
(39:22):
around to the chapter house and then everybody get a chance to
talk. And then the old people would
tell us what the deal was, right?
It's like we all bring our pieces and then the old people
which hold the collective hermeneutic pot of the whole,
like they're the holders of the of the cultural whole or
(39:47):
coherence. And from the wisdom of that
collectively held coherence, they tell us how this piece fits
into that picture. And then that's what we do now.
He didn't say it that way. There's just said the old people
tell us what to do. Yeah, there's a scene and Dances
(40:08):
with Wolves where the what? I don't remember which Native
American tribe that is that Costner is hanging out with,
but. The Lakota.
Yeah, they're sitting in a circle figuring out what to do,
and each person says they're peace.
Young, old, you know, doesn't matter.
And and that clip was used in myfirst exposure to dialogue
(40:34):
because it sort of represents inorder for us to have shared
understanding, we have to get everybody's perspective in the
middle of the room so we can allget a look at it.
Everybody's holding a piece of the potential shared
understanding and and they they actually have to be integrated
for shared understanding that take place.
(40:55):
So yeah. And and see, one of the dangers
of that is misunderstanding thatto be the relativistic universe
where all truths are equal and there's no right point of view.
That's exactly wrong. In fact, the right point of view
is like that mystical one in a hole in 1G shot.
(41:15):
And we're trying to accumulate better and better and better and
better and we need it all. We don't need it all to lose the
idea of better. We need it all to distill better
out of it. And that's why the elders
represent a different resource than the the new people, the
young people, because they've got all of this experience to to
(41:38):
resonate the new piece against, right.
They've read so much of the book, they know how that next
collective page goes. And if they're elders in a
collective situation, like a tribe, they they literally hold
that hermeneutical base collectively, like they hold a
(42:00):
cultural understanding together that exists separate from anyone
individual that makes it up. And that's really what a
heritage is. It's not just a, it's not just,
oh, we have fun stories about this and that.
No, we've got frameworks for thought, right?
(42:20):
Which is a theme that I will be revisiting later in the month.
But we've, but these frameworks enable us to take the new and
the unique that just got spit out by the possibilistic
universe and to understand what are the potential results of our
actions based on how we face it.And that's the, that's the key.
(42:43):
What do we do? What do we do right in that
American pragmatic way? So, yeah, there's a, there's a
thing at work there. And so if we have this idea of a
cultural understanding and we'vegot all this stuff and we're
trying to build it, 'cause now we're much bigger than a, than
an Indian tribe and we've got a much more complicated collective
(43:08):
semantic world. It's now got mechanized
narratives dumped into it in industrial levels, hyper, hyper
novelistically imprinted, right.And the human system
collectively is going like, whoa, right.
We got like an information shotgun here.
(43:32):
And, and you can feel a lot of the race going, you know, just
from that shot. And but that's why I'm I'm I
think it's a critical time to make that distinction
internally, phenomenologically, what is our subjective
experience of how things pull usto action and from what center
(43:58):
those things pull us? Are we pulled by self-interest?
Are we pulled by our love of truth?
Are we pulled by our duty? Are we pulled by our fear?
Are we, you know, all those things who, who and what do I
let take the wheel and steer today's rock'n'roll reference.
I think it's is it Incubus Dr.? Is that the?
(44:21):
I don't know. OK, I'll dig it out.
Yeah, sometimes I let the wheel that I let the fear take the
wheel and steer. But then I realize I should be
the one behind the wheel. Good job, folks.
Good job. That's the story.
And and what's the other one? That that this other way of, of,
(44:44):
of making decisions seems to have a vaguely haunting appeal
or something. There's a line like that.
And if that's great, haunting mass appeal seems to have a
haunting mass appeal. Yeah.
Well, that's that mechanism thatwe're talking about.
And again, if more if if we're dependent on in history with
(45:06):
civil rights and and the vote and all of these different
things to to to have the power to exert moral force, then we
have to have that responsibilityto to to maintain a desire for
moral clarity and to be willing to pay a certain price for it
(45:26):
and to be willing to kind of understand what is the
complications there? What are the things I put on the
altar? That's the courage part of moral
courage, right? Is the yeah, I'm just going to
do what you got to do what's right, Because what was that
quote? To know what's right and to not
do it is the lowest act of cowardice slap.
(45:48):
You know, it's like a, that's like one of the chocolates with
across the, you know, the the flip flops.
The abuela's favorite weapon of choice.
What aches, Yeah. What aches could be, Yeah.
(46:12):
Yeah, made out of car tire rubber, right?
That could. That'd be the Central American
version, yeah. Yeah.
So I'm wondering if there is a circling back to the
phenomenology of Hitler that kind of puts a bow on the topic,
(46:34):
at least for today. So, so I guess I'm like we
talked about what, what Hitler represents and the relationship
of that to how we how we go forward with this individual
responsibility for moral clarity.
(46:55):
Maybe the maybe that responsibility being greater
than it ever has been before. And I and I can see for also for
reasons of the stakes being higher in some ways, right?
The stakes being higher and the tools being used against it
being more refined and more moredeveloped.
And but also, this is what immunizes you against Hitler's.
(47:20):
It isn't that you stop some outside Hitler from springing
up, does it? You know, like the science
fiction stories of. Get him your inner Hitler.
You have to stop your inner Hitler.
You know, like Wilhelm Reich wrote a book called The Murder
of Christ and his point what he was writing about is that how in
(47:41):
each human being Christ is remurdered.
We murder Christ within ourselves.
And so the lesson of the resurrection, that's where the
resurrection needs to happen. And how does that happen?
Well, we walk back into righteousness.
We get right with God. We, we become what it is by
(48:06):
divine intent to be. All the all that stuff, all that
spitting up the apple, that was the fall from grace.
And so, but, but you know, I mean, and now it is more
pragmatic and now it does come from more directions.
And if the stakes are higher than ever, there's more human
life out there. There's more suffering to be had
(48:28):
than ever before. There's.
Are there people out there that you think kind of emulates the
wrong word that epitomize this dealing with their their inner
Hitler? Well, I mean, I think that
(48:49):
that's that is what the spiritual path really is about.
That's what the. I'm wondering in the public
sphere, if you see that at all. Oh, there's another rock'n'roll
reference there from Jack Johnson.
Where are all the where of all the good people gone?
(49:09):
You know that song? Yeah, I don't see him on the TV
shows. Well, that's why we need this
new medium thing, you know, and why we need modeling these new
behaviors. And it might just take a, you
know, a new set of fools to do that.
(49:31):
But I think it is something thatwants to happen.
And maybe that's that's what, you know, like we talked about
the eyeballs that show back up on the fruit flies.
There's something about the plansays eyeballs are going to be
part of this and by whatever mechanism that those eyeballs
got back in there, right? And it it could well be that
(49:52):
that the same is the case. I mean, I trust that it is the
case with the the fulfillment ofhuman potential and the human
incarnation, because it has to do with this is an interesting
thing coming out of Heidegger. And that is that it's something
about the nature of being as it manifests in human makes us
(50:13):
question what is being as it manifests in humans, which is
this consciousness conscious of consciousness, which is a very
special state, which the argument is something's trying
to happen. And that we can.
Here's a good quote from TerenceMcKenna.
He said, you know, that it does seem like that nature is moving
(50:35):
in this direction, which was forhim was the eschaton.
And he says it's not something that you're going to be able to
screw up with your Volvos and your Cuisinarts.
That was just a particular when he spoke in Santa Fe years ago.
And it, it, it, you know, what's, what is he saying there?
He's saying that, you know, you have your lower emotions and
(50:57):
your higher emotions. You have your impulse and push
stuff everything into your mouth.
And you also have your understandings of truth and
justice and beauty and your actions.
Every day, your decisions danglebetween those two sets of
impulses. So every day you have the choice
and and the, you know, you mightlook at OK, well, I want to try
(51:22):
to make the choice the right choice because that's still a
very externally oriented understanding of it.
You don't do right in the world just because you, the world
needs right to be done in it. You do right in the world
because it's an expression of your realization having
manifested to another higher degree.
(51:43):
You've become more chunsu. And so that is just what you do
when that's who you are. And that's why I think ethics is
very tangled up with identity and what this relationship
between mind and matter. What do we as responsible
(52:04):
bridges between those two? What do we pull through?
That's what we make us right. That's how we persist through
time. 1st we make it us and thenwe make it manifest in the
world. We're like a portal for the
transmutation of mind into matter.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
(52:24):
And for the imbuement of matter with meaning, right, Which is
like adding end dimensions to it, right?
When something becomes meaningful, it's far more than
what it is in a natural science sense, right?
You got your grandfather's pocket watch.
This is more than just a bunch of brass, right And why?
(52:49):
Well, there's nothing a machine is going to tell you why?
Because your grandfather carriedit through the hardest times of
his life, but he never pawned itor because, you know, it had the
engraving from your grandmother in it and he carried it in the
trenches in World War Two or something.
You know, like, like the, the, the human experience through
(53:12):
time is one of the things that degenerates meaning.
And it's, you know, so this is part of our unique nature.
This again, this Aristotelian idea that we want to be what it
is to be a human that is uniquely human, which is to, to
really absorb and, and to live out of meaning.
(53:33):
And that is your anti Hitler pill.
You're not going to invent a machine and you stick all the
babies and you see whether the Hitler light lights up or not.
You're not going to be able to do scientific brain scans,
right? You have to, you have to
understand the mechanism hermeneutically.
(53:55):
You have to understand the whole, how this part is playing
its role within the whole and and you got to use your whole
brain to do that, which is that whole other fun topic.
Well, maybe that's a place to pause.
I think so. And yeah, I don't have anything
(54:19):
else other than to tell people that we have some cool stuff
coming up. Stay tuned.
So tell all your friends, your acquaintances, that guy on the
street who keeps following you around.
Any old fool? Any old fool?
Cool. Great.
Thank you, Brian. We'll see everybody later.
(54:40):
Bye bye.
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