Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Well, why don't we go ahead and get started? Um, Rob is a senior fellow at the Atlas society, uh, known to many of you in the audience. He, uh, is the author of, so who is John Galt anyway, a leader's guide to Atlas shrugged. Uh, he is of course the author of the <inaudible> letter and is widely published in a variety of publications, um, including the Federalist. And, uh, Rob, tell us a little bit about our topic today.
Speaker 1 00:00:39 Um, yeah, so the topic is the magical realism of the left. And, uh, I want to talk about what you mean by magical realism. So one of the big, uh, insights I took from Iran's, uh, writings, one of the big insights she had is the extent to which a lot of the conflicts that we think are about politics. Aren't really about politics. They're about something beneath politics, something below politics, something much more philosophical, including in many cases, something that's very sort of abstract and, um, uh, uh, um, a very high level abstract, fundamental elemental issue in philosophy, something for metaphysics and epistemology, and that's where I'm really coming from. But the magical realism aspect here now, metrical realism is a term I took not from philosophy, but from literature, it's a school of literature that came out of, uh, Latin America, as I recall. And it evolved the idea of, of, of having magical events happening, uh, in real life as if they were just real things that happen.
Speaker 1 00:01:47 Now, it's, it's distinct from the fantasy genre. So it's not like, uh, you know, my kids are right now immersed in reading Lord of the rings and Jr everything JRR Tolkien. But with token, you know, from the beginning, you're in a fantasy world, you're in a, you're not in the real, you're not in Kansas anymore. You're not in the real world. You were in middle earth, you're in a world with wizards and dragons and, and what have you. So, you know, you're not in a realistic setting. So the magic fits into it. The non-realistic setting magical realism is a school of literature, was the idea of setting things in the real world in ordinary life. But then inserting into that various sort of magical events that would happen, uh, just be accepted as, as if they were real things that were happening. They're not fantasies, they're not dream sequences as if magic is, it's just a normal part of everyday life.
Speaker 1 00:02:36 And it probably has some sort of roots that I don't fully understand in Latin American culture. But, uh, it's when I think of it, I think of it a lot as a metaphor for the way the left often approaches politics and economics is the idea that, you know, here we are living in the ordinary role, ordinary world of supply chains and, um, uh, you know, mortgages and, and, uh, production and all the normal parts of an economy. But they have the idea that there are certain points that we should just say, Hey, here's an exception to the law of cause and effect. Here's a magical place at which we could just sort of assert that because we want something to be true. You if enough people really believe there, oh, there was a, there was a, I was thinking in this regard, there was a magician in the seventies.
Speaker 1 00:03:26 If somebody can remember his name was Doug Henson or something like that, but he was had this sort of hippie-ish matter of, you know, if you really believe the magic will be real, it was very seventies kind of thing. He was basically the guy that Penn and teller spent their whole career, basically making fun of this guy because there, you know, the whole thing of their magic act was magic's not real. It's all a trick. We're going to show you how the trick is done. And then once we show you how it's done, we're going to do it in a completely new way. That's even more mysterious, but you know, the premise behind it all, is that the magic isn't real well, this, this magician from the seventies, with the guy who had this sort of hippy-ish, uh, sales pitch of, well, no, if you really believe in the magic is real, and that's sort of what you could see as a driving force between a lot of policies that we debate.
Speaker 1 00:04:13 I've got just going to run it and run that I'm very quick list of examples. Then we'll go open up for discussion. So one of the examples is a new thing you may be hearing from the left, which is the slogan, is that poverty is a choice. Now what they don't mean by that is they don't mean that poverty is an individual choice. They don't mean that by choosing not to work or not acquire skills, a person is, you know, a person is suffering poverty through the result of his own choices or failure to choose. What they mean is under a massive matter of public policy and our national level. That the only reason people are poor is because we have not. We've been, we've cruelly, not chosen to make the choice, to give them lots of money in welfare. And if we just made the choice to spend, you know, billions and trillions of dollars on welfare, then nobody would be poor.
Speaker 1 00:05:04 And lots of love what you can't argue with that. Right? You know, if you, if you give everybody a check for $30,000, uh, you know, ever give everybody $30,000 a year, then they're no longer poor, but obviously, you know, the premise here is that there there's nothing. In reality, there's no limits imposed by the nature of economics or the nature of, uh, the, the monetary system that says that you can't just throw lots of money at people and make everybody rich. You know, th the, the fact that you have to produce the wealth first and that you have to look at what are the conditions required for the production of wealth before the wealth can then be distributed to everybody. And that is not a consideration. You just simply print the checks and send them out. And that's what I mean by the magical realism, the magical thinking that's being used behind a lot of their policies.
Speaker 1 00:05:56 Now behind that of poverty, as a choice idea is the idea is something called, uh, MMT modern monetary theory, uh, which would probably be better, uh, described as medieval monetary theory, because for, for all of the science, that's evolved behind it. But it's the idea that they've come up with a whole rationalization that basically says you can print as much money. You see, like you can keep the printing presses running day and night. It's not going to cause hyper inflation. It's not going to cost disaster. And therefore that's why there's no limits to how much you can, you know, hand out Mulford to people because there's no limit to how much money you can print. And there was a chemist who is a leading economist, so-called economist who promoting this, who put an argument, says, well, look, you know, a carpenter, a tape, a ruler, can't run out of inches.
Speaker 1 00:06:48 And therefore we can't run out of money. And the clear thing there, I wrote a piece about this a while back about the Platonism, you know, how Plato's theories are considered these very abstract things, but here they are popping up in real life. Cause it's, it's the platonic view of concepts that an inch doesn't refer that entry first to Amir abstraction. And so therefore, since it refers to a mere abstraction, you can have as many inches as you like, as opposed to the Aristotelian view or the objectivist you, which is that an inch refers to an actual length of some real thing in the real world. So a carpenter can run out of inches. I've, I've done it as a carpenter. Uh, you couldn't run out of it. Uh, you can, you can. Uh, my, my example is you could build a cabinet so big.
Speaker 1 00:07:35 You can't fit it into the doorway of the room. You want to put it into, I'm not necessarily saying I've done this, I'm just saying as possible. Uh, and, uh, so, you know, if interest refer to real things in the real world, or if dollars are for, to real wealth of the real world, then of course you can run out of them. But if you have this pie in the sky, magical realist viewpoint, aided and abetted by a platonic view of what an abstraction is, then you have the idea that well look, dollars and inches. They're all just abstractions. Therefore there's no physical limits to what I can do with now the last example I want to give, um, I've got, I've got more to go into it, but I wanna open to, uh, uh, discussion the last example I wanted to give of the sort of magical realism or magical thinking of that's that's endemic to today's left is, uh, the method that they often use as a political method for getting across the, for trying to achieve their agenda.
Speaker 1 00:08:36 And this has come out, I think very starkly in the wake of last week's election here in Virginia, where I've been watching on Twitter, because Twitter is where the sort of the progressive left has its high of mind on Twitter, right? It's it's where they do. It's it's, it's the Borg, but for, uh, for Sergeant fans, it's Borg, but for the, the, for the progressive left, this is where they go on. And they, they plug into the, uh, the hive mind and, and develop a sort of work together, develop their opinions. And the big thing they've been working on, you can sort of watch this happening on Twitter. For those of us unfortunate enough to have to spend time there is that it was really all about racism. This is really just, you know, uh, white women, white, suburban, uh, non-college educated women in Virginia are afraid of change and people in rural Virginia they're afraid of change.
Speaker 1 00:09:29 And they're just motivated by racism and all this stuff about, uh, what's being taught in the schools or about the schools being shut down for COVID all the things that people say are the reasons why voters turned against the Democrat. Those aren't the real reasons. It's really just that they're racist. Now, just as a matter of politics, if shouting at people and calling them racists worked to convince people to get voters over to your side, the left would have won long ago, but it's this thing where the more, no matter how many elections they lose to this exact approach of just reflexively, shouting racist at people, no matter how many elect elections, they lose to it, no matter how much it fails as a means of persuasion, they keep going back to it because this really gets to what's behind this sort of magical thinking.
Speaker 1 00:10:19 They go back to it because it fits with the desire of what they want things to be of how they would want things to work. They have a certain self image that they want to preserve, and a certain idea that, well, my ideas are ideas are really very popular and everybody loves them. If it's only, if it weren't for these chocolate racists, they have a narrative that they've created to sort of excuse the, the failure of their actual ideas to, to appeal to anyone. And they use that sort of magical thinking of, I can keep doing the same thing over and over again. If I just shout louder, it will work. They use that same kind of magical thinking that they're using in all of their policies. They use it in their politics because it fills the gap. And here's, I think there's the fundamental, it fills the gap between the ideal, the way they think things should work and the actual reality of how they do work. And to fill that gap, you adopt that magical view that while something somehow will fill this gap between what my ideology tells me is the way the world should work. And what's actually happening out there in the actual results in the real world.
Speaker 0 00:11:29 Very interesting. And I wanted to, um, that everybody know we are going to record this, uh, so we can get it up on our podcast platform. Um, and I'd love to invite anybody up onto the stage that has a comment or perhaps Jason or, uh, professor Salzman have, um, a comment on what Rob just shared, I'm particularly interested in, what are the dynamics that are enabling this kind of magical thinking? Is it, is it a post-modern rejection of objective reality? Is it a philosophical? Is it, is it, um, it's like psychological?
Speaker 1 00:12:22 Well, one thing I'll throw in there, I think epistemology epistemologically. So for those not inducted to this of histology is the study of basically how we think, how we know how we gain knowledge. And it, uh, I, I mentioned in passing Platonism, so Plato had this idea, uh, in Greek philosopher, uh, 2,500, roughly 2,500 years ago. Uh, he had the idea that abstractions have a real existence of their own that, uh, that when you form a, an abs, an abstract idea, uh, a concept that you are not simply making an observation about things, real concrete, real things in the real world, you are actually intuiting the existence of abstractions as real things in another reality. Now there are very few people left who are actual literal Platonists in that sense, but he had this long influence in philosophy. And in the way people think about abstractions to the idea.
Speaker 1 00:13:27 And the influence is basically to them to regard abstractions as like separate things of their own and not as something always in Dell blue tied to real life concrete. Um, and so that leads to this sort of argument about, well, we can't run out of money for the same reason that, uh, uh, you know, uh, a carpenter camp there there's no, you can't run out of inches, right? Cause inches just adapts traction. It's a unit of measurement. And if you have like, let me expand the Mike's functioning explanation earlier, if you regard an inch as something that refers to real things in the real world, right? That's a unit of measure, it refers to the measure, it's something you would use to measure. It would refer to the length of actual real things in the world. Like, you know, a piece of lumber is if you have an eight foot long piece of lumber, it's 96 inches long, right?
Speaker 1 00:14:19 There's a very, it's a specific thing with a specific length. You can run out of inches. You know, if you would need something that's 98 inches long, you've run out of inches because you have a 96 inch long board. Um, so the, you know, the, the, the, if you think view the abstractions as referring to real things in the real world, it gets you connected to all the actual limits and the concreteness of what the cause and effect and the trade-offs and the limits are of the real world. Whereas if you view abstractions as well, you know, we can, you gotta have as many inches you like, because it's just an abstraction, then you will begin to view it as something that is unconnected from the constraints of the real world. And that's how you, that's literally how you get something like modern monetary theory.
Speaker 1 00:15:11 Like we just deal with just, well, no problem. We're running out of money. We can just print more money because you're not viewing money as money. Like just as an interest, a measurement of the length of a real thing in the real world, money is the measurement of wealth. It's a measurement of how much wealth you have, how many goods and services you have at your disposal in the real world. And in the real world, it's clear, it's obvious that the amount of goods and services that you have produced that you have available to you are going to inherently be limited, that you can, you know, no matter how processor you are, there's always a limit there's already always, there's always a point beyond which you don't have anymore. And so, you know, but modern monetary theory is based in this idea that no money is just an abstraction.
Speaker 1 00:15:55 It doesn't refer to real things to the real world and therefore we can produce as much as we want of it. So I think it's, it's, that's the epistemology of what to ask directions, refer to how do you even use abstractions? How are they connected to the real world? I think that's one of the major things that's driving it. Um, and then the other thing I would say is driving it, I think I've mentioned the gap between the ideal and reality is what people are trying to fill in with this sort of magical thinking. And I think the big gap between ideal and reality that people are struggling with is altruism. Everyone accepts the philosophy of altruism as the essence of morality, um, and you know, or at least for the past a hundred, 150 years, they have. Um, and, but the problem is, is they keep trying to think that therefore a perfectly altruist system, one in which, uh, you know, we disconnect work from, uh, wealth from work in which we can, you know, uh, we assumed that everyone would just keep working and producing wealth.
Speaker 1 00:16:59 And then, you know, it could be given away to people who have not worked to produce wealth, that this will work. This is the ideal system. When we have to make it work, they've been trying to make communism work again and again and again for, for several hundred years now. And in order to make up that gap between the ideal that, you know, our ideal tells us this should be the ideal system, and then the reality tells us, but this fails in reality. And in reality, things work completely differently. In reality, the world runs on rational self-interest in order to make up that gap, they have to, they have a strong motive to come up with these sort of bogus arguments like modern monetary theory to sort of say, no, really somehow this can work. Jason, please.
Speaker 2 00:17:49 Hi, thanks Rob for that. Um, this is very interesting as someone who teaches, uh, contemporary epistemology and also more particularly Wentz the systemology, um, I like what you're saying, and I completely agree with, with the metaphor of the magical realism, at least one would say with Plato who asserted that universals exists of a particular set at least play to had some dignity, I think, and here's the thing too, I find in Plato is that one still has to proceed the particulars, like a chair, like a cat, um, before one can have any kind of approximate knowledge of the universals that exists in this noumenal realm, the realm of the forms, but at least pay to have the, the respect for human perceptive for, for the fact of how human perceive phenomenon to say that in order to understand universals, even though they exist over particulars, you still have to perceive the literal cat that exists on her own earth. Maybe when you get to Hades, then you can see the actual form of Katniss. But, uh, so today's, today's leftist, I think, want to even deny that, um, they just pass it something like poverty as an abstraction without having you perceive yourself for a moment,
Speaker 2 00:19:12 Could you mute yourself?
Speaker 2 00:19:19 Um, they want, they don't know what they don't even want to assume that you'd have to perceive the, the particular ways in which you would perceive, uh, the, the various iterations of, um, poverty in order to come to universal abstraction of poverty. So I think that's true. And then what you were saying about altruism, I think is, um, you know, I think what Ron would call the fallacy of this, the frozen obstruction, where you, if my memory serves me, correct, you substitute a particular concrete for the, the bigger class of actions, like to which it belongs. Like I'll like substitute an ethics for the wide obstruction of upset, I'm sorry, specific ethics of altruism for something like ethics. Um, but I really liked the, so that's a fallacy, the frozen abstraction, which the left is guilty of. I'm not sure that I would put that in the same campus, magical realism, but I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2 00:20:19 And I just, I love, I'm just loving what you're saying here because, um, I don't think Play-Doh was played, uh, might've been guilty of magical realism, but at least he did posit the fact that one has to go through, um, the process of perceiving the particulars, um, before one can have even an inclination or an approximation, an imperfect here on earth, once we're in our corporate reality or bodily of the universals today's left is just deny that we are corporeal creatures and just sort of positive abstraction itself and deny that and put it, put it, put it over on us without saying, without insisting that we perceive the particulars lead to something like let's say poverty or inflation inflation.
Speaker 1 00:21:08 Well, I think, you know, the, the most conspicuous example of this sort of complete subjectivism today is this idea of, uh, your identity being something that you can just simply feel. You feel you have a certain identity and you declare it now. Uh, one of the weird one things coming up right now, and I'm about to post something in my newsletter about this, but I've become a cross coming over articles right now. So it's, it's, this is going to get weird quick, but so apparently what's going on. The latest trend is you have men declaring that they are transgender and therefore declaring that they're women, and then insisting that it's bigoted for lesbians, not to want to have sex with them, because then, you know, if, if I declare I'm a woman, therefore you should be attracted to me, uh, including even if they still have the male sex organs.
Speaker 1 00:22:03 So, and so genital preference is considered a form of bigotry. And so it's basically like men have finally found a socially respectable way to pressure women to have sex with them. And that is that you have to declare you identify as a woman and then, uh, lesbians are obliged to sleep with you. It's deeply weird, but it's a real thing. And I've been noticing art, finding articles about this, about, uh, lesbian women complaining about this new phenomenon, but it all comes from this idea that your gender identity and your, I, you know, what you declare yourself to be as a person. It can be completely unmoored from any physical facts about you and completely dependent on how you feel and, uh, you know, your subjective sense of who you want to be today. Uh, and that's an it pro and a perfect example of the sort of magical thinking of that, the idea that it's purely subjective now played out by the way, Plato, I cut a lot.
Speaker 1 00:23:02 Pillow played a lot of slack for a couple of reasons. One of them is he was only the second real philosopher, right? So the, the, the, the fuel, the philosophy really begins in its modern form begins with Socrates, who is Plato's teacher, and he's the second guy to come along. So, you know, the fact that he makes a bunch of big errors, uh, errors that he picked up from, you know, the Greek environment, he was in a lot of that's from Pythagoras, the stuff about abstract, you know, Protagoras thought numbers were real. So the idea of abstractions being real things was something he picked up from this Greek context he came from. So I cut them a little slack, but the big reason I cut him slack, and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago with, you know, telling people to read plater to own the libs.
Speaker 1 00:23:44 And this is something somebody pointed out recently about the sort of the woke phenomenon, Damon linker, who's a well-known writer putting this out about the whole phenomenon of wokeness says the real problem with wokeness is not that they change the distribution of terms or try to change the standards or something's accessible today. That wasn't, uh, it wasn't acceptable or something is unacceptable today. That was acceptable, you know, uh, two years ago, it's not that that's all changing. He says, it's the way it changes is the fact that it's done basically by the Twitter mob without discussion or debate. And that's the big reason why I go, I have a whole Play-Doh in higher regard, which is he was following from Socrates example where everything he argued is in the form of a dialogue it's people getting around and talking and debating and disagreeing, and that that's how you would arrive at these discussions.
Speaker 1 00:24:38 And that's also something apples that came from the Greek context. Um, so I recently read something by Xenophon is that a fan was another student of Socrates who, uh, went on to become a sort of a mercenary soldier had this huge adventure, uh, where he would, he in 10,000 Greeks went off to fight for a Persian prince, ended up trapped, basically, you know, a thousand miles behind enemy lines in Babylon and had to fight their way back out. And so he tells the story of this great adventure in a book called the anti-virus. Um, and the funny, the thing I've fascinated about in the Ana bosses is you have these 10,000 soldiers and very early on a bunch of their officers are killed by the Persians. So they have to officers. So what do they do? Well, they do what Athenians they do with the Greeks.
Speaker 1 00:25:28 Do they form an assembly and they get together and they, you know, they're the, the, the, the leaders that remain go up and they give speeches and they make these decisions by debate and discussion and, you know, general consensus among the group. So this is so deeply embedded in the Greek, uh, culture that Plato came from this idea that, that, you know, any, any decision you make, you do, you call an assembly and we have a debate and we have a discussion. And that's, I think what makes Plato sort of head and shoulders above a lot of what goes on today, which is that the idea is that you have to talk all of this out before you can, before you can do anything.
Speaker 2 00:26:08 I have a question I want to ask before we move on, but that's a, this is not an observation, which is just a, this is follows up on Jennifer's question. I'm just sort of piggybacking here on Jennifer's question. Why is it, do you think that people sort of, um, reverse the, the actual process by which they perceive reality? That is the perception of particulars, and then through a process of rather intricate inductive reasoning, they come to, uh, postulate and, uh, uh, uh, an obstruct, uh, an, uh, a universal, uh, as an abstraction. Um, so for example, most people today, of course, know that most educated people know that it is chromosomal markers that designate sex, not genitalia, not, you know, any kind of morphological feature that we could point out like breasts or whatever that is chromosomal markers, but yet, um, they are willing to try to dispel the normal processes by which they observe reality.
Speaker 2 00:27:15 Is it for the sake of expediency? Is it for the sake of power? Is it for the sake of, um, political gains that, and maybe this is, well, this is probably, I don't know if this is the question that was psychologist private, because it is a question for you as a philosopher. Why, why are people deliberately, um, doing an inverse, uh, process here in terms of their own methods of forming abstractions in the real world? That is, if you ask them to give, giving you a count of holiday form, the concept furniture, of course, they would be able to give you that account, but they're going against their own epistemological process. Um, is this conscious, this is, this is what I think Jennifer was getting Jennifer God, is it conscious? Is it, um, is it that they're just hoodwinked and, or is it that it's just a lack of awareness on the part of individuals? Vis-a-vis how they actually perceive the world around them?
Speaker 1 00:28:17 I think it's a lot of different, it's different things, depending on the person you're talking about. But I think one of the key things here, and I think it's sort of, I like to view it as something that's inherent in the process of human development, that you get, you, you come equipped, you know, you find yourself as an adult. When you reach the age where you're able to think about these things, you find yourself already possessed of this whole range of concepts, this whole range of conceptual knowledge that you, you have gained through experience and through thinking, uh, to some extent or another, uh, if you are at all on active thinking, you, you, not everything, your head is just, uh, you know, an empty symbol that you, you copy. It's most, most of the, a lot of the concepts you use, especially the everyday concepts you use are things you have learned through actual experience through an actual inductive process.
Speaker 1 00:29:14 But you're not aware of that. You, you, you learned it in a way that you weren't aware of the steps by which you formed that obstruction. So you come into a world as an adult when you were eight people sort of start thinking about these higher level issues. You come furnished with all these concepts that you don't really know where they came from and how you got them. And that's totally normal. You know, it's a normal process of development because being able to then rise to that higher level of, of, of introspection and abstraction to say, okay, here are these ideas I have, where did I get those ideas? How do I, how do I make sure those are grounded in, uh, inductively in observation of reality, that is a much more sophisticated thing. It has to wait until you already have a bunch of a bunch of concepts and abstractions already to work with.
Speaker 1 00:30:06 And that's why, you know, when, when we're talking about Plato and Socrates, that's why when they come along in ancient Greece, you know, through 2,500 years ago, sock, she starts going around and asking people. So this concept of justice you have, where did you get it? Where does it refer to? What does it really mean? And everybody's like, astonished like, well, what are you talking about? And it seems incredibly subversive because you know, they've gone, you know, it is, it's that natural process of human development that you end up with a bunch of concepts and abstractions that you use, including very high level stuff about the nature of reality and the nature of morality. And you use these concepts, but you have to then ascend to this higher level of thinking too. And hopefully you have got a teacher, somebody like Jason, who's going to help you do this in college.
Speaker 1 00:30:53 Who's going to help you ascend to this higher level of thinking of asking, all right, where did those concepts come from? What are they referred to? What are they based on? And we'll give you some tools to help you figure that out. But if, if you don't have that and most people don't get that, then the concepts are just sort of there. And you either, you either take them for granted or when somebody comes challenge challenges them, you don't really know necessarily how to describe them or defend them or explain them. And, you know, if somebody gives you a motive, like, you know, conformity or being part of a group or feeling virtuous, somebody gives you a motive to overthrow some basic concept that lots that you think ought to be very well founded in reality. But if they give you motive to overthrow it, and you don't have a clear idea in your own mind of how was this concept formed?
Speaker 1 00:31:48 What is its basis? What is this concrete foundation, then it's going to be very easy for you to be swayed by that motive of, oh, well, you know, if I say silence is violence, which is something that makes no sense whatsoever. But if I say that and it makes me feel virtuous, and it makes me identify with a tribe of good people who are opposed to these bad people over there, that motive will have power. If you are not, if you don't have that, that foundation and that basis in a clear idea of what concepts these concepts mean and where they came from. So I think it's a totally natural part of human development, but then it's exploited by, you know, bad philosophy and people with bad motives.
Speaker 0 00:32:33 Also, it could be a function of, of tribalism, of, um, people really only listening to those with whom they agree, uh, something that Thomas soul talked about, envision of the anointed, having your feedback loop interrupted, um, which, you know, allow you to kind of go further and further out into, uh, magical thinking land.
Speaker 1 00:33:06 Yeah. And I think, I think it's a reciprocal thing between that, because I think if you, if people were taught because people are not, uh, are not taught at all, any idea of how it is that the concepts we have are pro can be, can even be properly grounded in reality, what are, how are they in D how do you go in and inductively pur describe the basis for a concept. And I think that gives you the sort of a lack of an anchor, right? If you had that inductive understanding of how concepts are formed and how do you prove something, how do you, how do you introspect to see what an and observe to see what the basis of your knowledge is? If you did that, you would have this anchor to reality. And if you don't have that anchor, then you're ready to be pushed around by all the other forces of tribalism and the feedback loops and all of that. So it's there, it's sort of like a Cipro reciprocal relationship between, between those two factors that the one feeds on the other,
Speaker 0 00:34:10 I wanted to also recognize a few other people in the room. Um, we have from socio dot Atlas, uh, it CEO, and to Nella Marti and, um, Vanessa chorus. Uh, I'd love to hear from aunt Anella. Uh, we were talking earlier about the origin of this metaphor that, um, that Rob's using magical realism, uh, in terms of literature, um, looking at some of the Latin American writers, um, who wrote about, uh, stories that took place in the, in the real world yet, there were kind of exceptions to reality, magical elements of it. And I'd be interested in hearing whether or not there's a connection between, um, between that, that culture and that, uh, that literature and whether or not this, uh, magical realism also shows up in, um, in Latin America where you have some very obvious, very immediate, very recent examples of, um, of how these ideas don't work, how, what happens when you keep printing more and more money, or what happens when you promise, you know, that you're going to redistribute wealth without, um, without any regard to, to its production.
Speaker 1 00:35:35 I was sad to see that seems to be coming back in Nicaragua.
Speaker 0 00:35:41 Yeah. So, uh, and tell us, and to know if you have a moment we'd love to hear from you. Um, we also have professor Richard Salzman, one of our senior scholars, um, Patrick reason over one of my, uh, my, he is my, my main creative partner in, um, the, the video work that we do at the owl society and several of our supporters in the room. Um, and I'm going to try, Richard is joining us. Yay.
Speaker 4 00:36:15 Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer, Rob. Uh, good stuff. I just a question about, what do you think about the, um, I mean, magical to me sounds upbeat. Um, you go to way, um, you go to a magic show when you're a kid, there's the wonder of it, there's the pomp and circumstance of it. And, um, so if we were to, you know, distinguish it from you say utopian from dystopian, trying to now connect it to what you're saying, namely, a epistemic Knology contemporary epistemology, where people are not attaching their ideas to reality. Uh, but also the idea that the magic show is being run by some expert up on stage, and they know more than we know, and that's okay with us as long as they're delivering the goodies. And it's a sort of Santa Claus, Santa Claus thing as well, but I thought you thought you might have on at the, at the same time, a cultural phenomenon we're seeing today of not respecting the experts, not respecting those in the know the populism of we plebes know better and yet, and yet also the contradiction of yeah, but, but give us a good magic show, print some money for us and waive your wands and, and, uh, you know, make this, and maybe even the escapism of it, Rob, if people are really thinking the world's going to hell, there also is this escapist element, right.
Speaker 4 00:37:48 Of boy. I wish I think things are going to hell, but I hope we're in heaven or any of that make any sense?
Speaker 1 00:37:57 I think I chose magic, partly because of that sense of, you said the sense of wonder and that, you know, the, the positive aspect of it, you could see the appeal of it, right? So the idea that, well, look, we've been banging our heads against the wall, trying to figure out how to end poverty. And it turns out a simple, you just wave a magic wand or print lots of money. Um, I, there was a guy named Noah Smith. Who's a sort of economists who is sort of specializes in this. He occasionally assessed some interesting stuff, uh, some anti-PC stuff, but then he'll go off on these flights of poverty as a choice. And, you know, if we just printed it off money and, and, and, you know, we just handed every, you know, this, the, the, the, the, uh, pandemic era, uh, benefits, you know, where you just gave people suddenly like $5,000 shows up in your bank account, just that proves that if we just kept doing that and did it even more generously, there'd be no poverty in the United States.
Speaker 1 00:38:52 And we can get rid of it completely. It's just, you know, it would just like waving a magic wand and you could see the wonder of it. It's like, oh, we know this big intractable problem created by, you know, that that's in the nature of reality, but we can just poof make it go away. Um, but I think, you know, the, I've done a lot of thinking about the nature of magic because, you know, my kid, I said, my kids are into these books and it's, it's very, it's totally harmless when it's a fantasy book when it's Harry Potter or Lord of the rings or something like that. But in Harry Potter, the essence of matter, I think about what is the essence of magic? The essence of magic is the idea that a thought or wish a fragment of consciousness, like getting cantillation or a spell a thought, a wish and intention can have its own direct efficacy, right?
Speaker 1 00:39:39 You know, that thoughts and, uh, wishes and intentions can have a lot of efficacy if they're turned into actions. Right. But the idea that, that, that a fragment of consciousness can be its own independent thing that has its own direct efficacy in causing something to happen in the world, uh, is really the essence of magic. And that's sort of what's going on here is, is that if we just, you know, if we just pretend hard enough, uh, what was it? Doug Kenton was the guy's name. I'm trying to remember Doug Henning. It's something like that. You probably remember it.
Speaker 4 00:40:15 So it's not. And also Bob, I think it's not just this suspension of disbelief, which has another way of saying, please believe me, it's it's like, uh, this also you talked about the Twitter mob, this whole phenomenon of people cowering before mobs absolutely inexplicably to me. I don't understand why anyone cares. However, if we link it up to what you're talking about, this suspension of disbelief has to be as universal as possible for these people. You know? So when you're in a magic show, right? If there's anyone in the back row saying, I know how he did it, I know he did the rabbit. They, it ruins the whole show, right? So there can't be any dissension. There can't be any disagreement. So this desire to sensor, the one who's saying the emperor has no clothes, or that's how we found the rabbit in the hat and make this may explain why they're so intent on rooting out anyone who calls open the trick or something like that. Right. So that they are trying to push a fantasy world. It's not really a utopia, it's a dystopia, but I'm beginning to see now it's possible that maybe this explains why they're so intent on getting rid of, um, opposite views, because then the whole room doesn't believe the act. I don't know if that's too far fetched
Speaker 1 00:41:33 Or not. No, I think there's something to that though. I have to say, I think Penn and teller proved that you can have the guys up on stage telling you it's all a trick and have it still be amazing entertaining. Cause whole there was the base, the basic, the pure essence of a Penn and teller performance was they would take, they do a magic trick and you'd be, oh, that's amazing. That, that seems like impossible. How did they do that? And then they'd show you, well, here's how it's done. And then actually show you all the elements of the trick. And then they do it again in a way that's completely different. That even more and explicable, and they wouldn't explain the second one. And that's sort of the appeal of it is even more ingenious, but you know, all the time they're tricking. You
Speaker 4 00:42:18 Notice also if you go to the medieval ages, it's miracles, not magic. And the prophets do the miracles, but that, but in today's world, you say, okay, we have more secular world. This is secular miracle ism or something like that. You know, the magic is just, you know, like very, very scientific, almost slight of hand. You really, people really practice this. I mean, they have to practice it. And, but it's, it's the same thing, the miracles of the medieval age, but dazzled people. And now the magic does, but it's not really you're right. It's not really the magic show. It's the magic of look where the welfare state holds up. It's not, look, it's not a house of cards.
Speaker 1 00:42:56 Well, I think it's rhetorical magic cause so, so you mentioned this idea of populism and people not following the experts. This is a problem then some of that is out there, but some of this I see as a problem of there's a niche for experts who are there to be the wizards, right. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right. They're there to be the wizards who, I don't know if anybody gets the pay, no attention to the man behind the curtain reference anymore.
Speaker 4 00:43:24 Of course, of course wizard. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:43:28 What we do, but, uh, the, the youngsters might not. Uh, but, um, the, yeah, the six age, you know, the movies almost a hundred years old now, uh, but the, uh, uh, they're the wizards, they're the ones manipulating this thing. And there's a, there's actually a, quite a lucrative gig, uh, or at least an influential gig to be made out of being the guy who basically creates the mumbo-jumbo in the incantations. Here is the sophistical explanation for why, as you know, as for me as a kid, you know, I, you get a degree in economics and then you go out and you offer sophistical explanations for why. Yes. We really can print an unlimited amount of money and it's not going to be a problem.
Speaker 4 00:44:13 But also Rob, remember just before the curtain is pulled aside by, I think Toto is the card member though, just before that they rip the three of them repeatedly go in there. And there's this booming bombastic voice of this huge, ugly fate, right. In the smoke and the, and it's authoritarian and it, you know, go get the, whatever the witch's broom or something. And, and at one point, or if he starts objecting and he's a silence, silence, they, what, they're, what they're, um, being treated with is this very authoritarian, uh, you know, I'm going to tell you the way it is, follow my dictates, even if they seem crazy. And yes, one of the joy of that scene is then you realize this is just all buffoonery. But when you look, when you look today at the Twitter mob and the Twitter mob, which is the version of silence, silence, and no more from you, uh, you know, little girl from Kansas, we know better than you. There's, there's more of that scene than we've seen.
Speaker 1 00:45:20 Yeah. I think, you know, I've, I've, I've argued before about the distorting effect that social media has because it, it, because of the large numbers involved. And I talked about this with regard to corporations, right? The reason why they cave in, when you know, Twitter, some people on Twitter start complaining about something that a corporation has done and they cave in and apologize, you know, instantly. And it's because you have a lot, I think you have a lot of executives who are from the old pre-internet age, where if 20,000 people send you a letter, they actually write you and mail you a letter to say, they disapprove of you. That means there's this massive groundswell of disapproval. Whereas 20,000 people re-tweeting something on Twitter is just, you know, another day it's nothing it's, it's, it's it required, you know, these people gave two seconds of thought to it and went onto something else.
Speaker 1 00:46:11 So it's really something that you should ignore. But, you know, and I think for individuals too is, say, know, if you have 40 people yelling at you, like, how could you possibly do this? Oh, that's horrible. You would normally think, oh my God, what did I do wrong? Whereas it's 40 random strangers on Twitter who don't know you and who live a thousand miles from you. And are you posting under an anonymous pseudonym? Uh, and maybe, you know, coming from a bot factory, uh, uh, a troll factory in Russia. So their, their opinions are actually meaningless, but your psychology is oriented towards taking that seriously. So I think people have to sort of get a climatized to the fact that yeah, a lot of people yelling at me at Twitter, it means nothing.
Speaker 2 00:46:58 I
Speaker 4 00:46:58 Think,
Speaker 2 00:47:00 I think also that there's a, in order for the magical realism to work, there has to be a gaslighting. I think, um, the there's a great gas lighting of the American people that has to take place in order for the magical realism and the S the verge, or rather the sabotaging of the process of perception to take place. You have to be guests gas lit I think is a correct grammatical gas. That is a correct formulation of the term. Yeah. That has to,
Speaker 1 00:47:30 I guess, like, is this from the Synthroid interesting Vogue in the last 10 years or so? I didn't hear it that much before, about 10 years ago. Uh, but it's a great term because you know, it comes from this old movie where the guy convinces the, the, this, this guy convinced us, his wife, she's going insane, uh, or tries to give us his wife. She's going insane when in fact she's not, she's just trying to get her to not notice this, the Phorest plot he's involved in. Um, so it's this idea of trying to convince you that the things you're actually observing, seeing, and observing aren't really happening. And we saw a lot of that after, you know, in the last week after, uh, the Washington and Virginia, uh, the new thing now is, uh, uh, woke ideology, woke us some critical racial, racial theory, all of that, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1 00:48:11 It's not a real thing. It's all completely made up by the right. Uh, and you know, it's, it's, it's a complete invention that they came up with to win, elect, to win the election, but it's fake. And you're going to people who are experiencing this. I mean, my kids are getting assigned stuff from the 16, 19 project in their classes at school. So, you know, this is actually really happening in people's lives, but you're telling them, no, this isn't happening. It's all in your imagination. It's all made up. Uh, so yeah, that gaslighting, that miss sort of mass attempt at Gasol, I don't think it's going to work very well, but that mass attempt at gaslighting is part of this. Um, you know, interesting, the critical race theory thing is really interesting what's going on right now, because they're basically, it's interesting that, that basically once the public figured out that this ideology exists and then the public decided we, we discovered this ideology exists and we really don't like it.
Speaker 1 00:49:06 The people who are advocates of that ideology then basically tried to dissolve their own ideology. They tried to say, well, no critical race theory doesn't really exist. It's not really a thing, it's it? And it becomes a fuse and it just sort of disappears. And the minute you try to touch it and nail it down to something specific, it, it, they, they, you know, it sort of, it, it, they tried to make it dissolve and it's not a real thing. And I think it's fascinating because it reveals the confidence they have or the lack of confidence they have in their own ideas. You know, I think all of us here, you know, we're, Objectivists, I've, you know, this, it's a, it's a term that has existed for philosophy for 60 years, rough, more or less. And that, you know, I've set an objective as all along.
Speaker 1 00:49:49 I can tell you exactly what the doctrines I can refer to somebody to, uh, you know, the Iran standing on one foot summary of it. If they want a simple, short thing, I have never felt the need to win under examination, sort of make it diffuse and make it go away. And I think it's really revealing that, you know, w this, this critical social justice or critical race theory ideology is a real ideology, and you can go read the foundational texts of it, and you can study them and you can teach them. It's a real thing that exists, but the minute it comes to the notice of the public and, and, and meets with public disapproval, they to sort of pretend it doesn't exist to dissolve it away and, and, and, you know, uh, uh, um, make everything ambiguous. And I think it indicates the lack of confidence they have in that idea and your, and the ability to sell people on it without the Twitter mob, booming silence as Richard put it.
Speaker 5 00:50:47 Uh, John McWhorter just wrote a book about a CRT being a religion, which kind of ties it all together. You know what I mean? I think sometimes CRT, people will say the consistency itself is some sort of manifestation of like, you know, male, white patriarchy or something. Uh, anything that doesn't make sense. I see this, uh, the, the magic thing when they talk about, you know, sometimes girls being magic or having super powers. And I think some of it just to try to, you know, be positive to girls, but it they're, they're still using that language of magic and mysticism. And I think we see it in real life, as well as Atlas shrugged, when they say, you know, it'll work if you just want it to work. So
Speaker 1 00:51:36 It's just, it's a choice. We just choose to do this and it'll happen. Uh, and by the way, I, uh, I have not read big border's book, but I read, I haven't read the final version of it. I've read a number of the essays in it as he was first publishing them, uh, on sub stack. And it's really good stuff. Um, uh, I, for years I've fought the best person on these issues was, uh, one of the best people. This is used issues was, was Shelby Steele who identified a lot of this years ago in a book called the white guilt. It's a late night written in the late nineties. It's very, very useful, but I think McWhorter is sort of doing that in the updated form for the specific ideologies of today and identifying this all as a kind of, you know, these are sacraments, these are incantations. These are, you know, motions you go through and words you speak and rituals that you go through, uh, in order to achieve a kind of religious, like sense of, of absolution or sanction.
Speaker 0 00:52:32 And the very best person on this issue is our very own professor Jason Hill. I'm holding in my hand right now, uh, his latest book, what do white Americans? Oh, black people, racial justice in the post, in the age of post depression. So we're going to talk more about that on a, on a future, um, clubhouse chat and price. We'd love to hear from you. And I love,
Speaker 6 00:53:03 I would say, I would say overall, whether or not white people, oh, black people morally is almost irrelevant. Okay. Because actually you don't owe us anything and we don't owe you anything. We just happened to be on this continent together. We happened to be in south America together. So that's, that's what I do that you don't know us anything, and we don't owe you anything that was about that. We're just here. Now. I wanted to get to the magical realism. I think you guys made a lot of good points, but I wanted to wonder if there's also a magical realism on the right. And specifically with the rejection of the scientific revolution. Um, as far as people's attitudes towards the vaccines, the exploitation of anti-vaxxer sentiment as a means of, uh, political leverage, which of course actually goes against the kind of scientific objectivist, um, basis of, of, uh, viral, um, you know, science and specifically the innovations with the RNA technology. Um, so that's my comments, but yeah, you don't know us anything and we don't know you nothing.
Speaker 1 00:54:06 Oh yeah. I, I think that, uh, no side has a, a monopoly, a bad behavior here. I mean, you know, all of this stuff is out there in the culture and you're going to see it on the left and then you're going to see equivalence of it on the right. The biggest equivalent of that I see on the right is, um, there's this new nationalist wing of conservatism and sarabah Mari is sort of the leading guy on that. And I've, I've in, in commenting on some of, I reviewed one of his books and comments on, on his stuff that behind that, there's this idea. I mean, he really has this concept that yes, we're going to basically restore papal authority and the, you know, the old European system of throne and altar under Lou under the, under Louis the 14th, we're going to restore that somehow in America, of course you can't restore it in America because it was never here at America and, and the, you know, in the first place.
Speaker 1 00:55:00 But, um, you know, has this idea that we're, that is he advocates, these sort of authoritarian means to impose the conservative religious values on the public square, but it's so obvious to the rest of us, that the idea that if you created more authoritarian power for the government to dictate what kind of architecture is going to be built and what kind of ideas is going to be taught in schools, that his side is not going to be the one that controls that, you know, that if he, if the more that his fantasy, that somehow as I put it, he wants to short circuit the process, the process of persuasion that he wants to persuade everybody to impose. He want, he wants to impose his ideas, but in order to get people to agree to the system that would actually impose his ideas, they'd already have ETFs have to already go through that process, persuasion to bring people over to his side.
Speaker 1 00:55:58 So it's just as wish of, like, I wish I lived in a more religious society, one in which religion dominated the public square, I don't. And therefore I'm going to come up with these, you know, authoritarian fantasies, but those are also sort of magical thinking. So if you go to what he actually proposes, it's all sort of magical thinking that somehow we're going to create this authoritarian way of imposing, uh, you know, uh, traditional Catholic values, but with no realistic means for how that's actually going to happen. So it's a fantasy of here's the world I would like to exist. And here's how I think that world would be wonderful and it would be fine. And if you'd ever be, be better off and it's all just, you know, magical wishful thinking, there's no realistic thinking has been done in terms of what would that world actually look like? What would the results actually be and how would you possibly get there? And I think the upshot is he's scheming to create a lot more government power over ideas and government power over values that it's just going to end up being used by the other side, to go to oppose wokeness on us.
Speaker 0 00:57:08 Great question. And that takes us to the top of the hour. So, um, I want to thank our senior fellow Rob Sinski. Uh, thank professor Salzman, professor hill. Um, and all of you who joined us today. Um, I want to let you know, uh, that we are going to be back on Thursday, same bat time, same bat channel for an ask me anything with, uh, professor hill. And we can talk a little bit more about his book then tomorrow I'm going to be having our weekly webinar. Our guest is, um, professor Alan Dershowitz talking about his new book, the case against a new censorship. Um, please follow us on social media, uh, check out the Atlas society website. You can sign up for updates and, uh, stay in tune with the, the events that we have both on clubhouse and, uh, on, um, various other platforms and in real life, um, we just came off of deals about really spectacular, uh, annual fundraising gala honoring Peter teal in Malibu. Um, price. Nice to meet you. You may want to check out a couple of our webinars, including one that I did with Michael Saylor on Bitcoin. Um, as well as another one with regards to some of your comments on, um, on COVID and vaccines with, uh, with Scott Atlas. So I'm going to close the room. Thanks everyone. And hope to see you again tomorrow or Thursday.
