Jordan Peterson vs. Karl Marx vs. Breadtube.
27 April 2019 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
of course Marx believed that in a
capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people issue number one was inequality too much money in too few hands capital accumulation his response is one shift the topic from an economic inequality to hierarchy to claim that hierarchy is inevitable for men and beasts three claim that hierarchy has nothing to do with capitalism anyway it's quote unquote much deeper again people used to say that about slavery while they had slavery in the Bible it's much deeper it's not just a problem with ours is that yeah this misdirection number for claim the people of deeper psychological and emotional problems anyway yeah we may have those problems anyway but look we this is a problem we want to solve two-five complain that marx isn't interested in man's struggle with nature it is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed those people who are at the bottom those creatures who are at the bottom speaking say of animals but it is not the case that wolves in a pack become more and more unequal over time there's a hierarchy among among lobsters how about the bees you know the queen bee just totally irrelevant and totally stupid the people who own property won't even use residential property not even getting to commercial they get richer and richer and the people who pay rent get poorer and poorer well yeah but you know wolves well yeah but you know bees so what human beings struggle with themselves with the malevolence that's inside themselves with the evil that they're capable of doing with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them so his style of misdirection really reminds me of a lot of Buddhist monks but as preachers have known where whenever they get a challenging question could even be about something like slavery they just go back to a set of well-worn kind of moral and ethical generalizations that they know the high Hensel sympathize with like oh yeah well um you want to ask me about capital accumulation and social inequality and economic inequality getting worse more Stern ah well you know the real struggle is within yourself to people the audience not not pick up on this how deeply dishonest this is a lot of our conversations about politics revolve around a very simple distinction between right and wrong good and evil true and false you know what you're talking about you don't and when you're dealing with Jordan Peterson the main question you have to ask is is this relevant or irrelevant is this salient or not is this coherent or incoherent so I'm going to talk about briefly a brief example illustrating how profoundly incoherent his criticism of Karl Marx says that it really just makes no sense his line of reasoning on Karl Marx then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Karl Marx has meant in my own life but now for something different Jordan Peterson of course Marx believed that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations now the problem with that is it so much the fact of so there's the there's accuracy in the accusation that that is a eternal form of motivation for struggle but it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes' it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se which as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree are clearly not only human constructions so he said it himself briefly but then he immediately goes off-topic becomes incoherent starts misdirecting and misleading eyes he says the problem is capital accumulating in the hands of fewer and fewer people all right no capital is not just money capital is the ability to make money so that can be in the form of an investment capital especially as Marx discusses it also includes ownership of the means of production there's a Marxist phrase you own the factory you own the trucks that deliver things whatever it is okay so this is a very dynamic very powerful form of inequality it's not just income inequality and over generations over even a period of 100 years in equality gets worse and worse and worse a really quick thought experiment here guys this is a really good economics 101 thing let's say we begin with a completely equal society where everyone is paid the same wages they do different jobs but we just pass a law there's a minimum wage there's a maximum wage everyone in society makes $15 an hour but some people own apartments and some people rent apartments let's say it's 50/50 50% of people own all the apartments and 50% of people pay rent what happens over 100 years the 50% of people who pay rent get poorer and poorer and poorer and the 50% of people who are receiving the rent money the landlords get richer and richer this is one variable now why because of capital this is the title of Karl Marx's book that's capitalism what it's all about right this is a property ownership and rent it's very simple form of capital hey how about owning a gold mine how do you think that works I think inequality works overtime with a gold mine some people get richer and richer some people get poorer historically these days the conditions for gold miners are a lot better than they were 200 years ago we even just the old old San Francisco Gold Rush and made it made some people rich it made a lot of people poor ok so this opens with him acknowledging the problem Karl Marx is trying to address is unequal capital accumulation but less than one minute later that clip was less than one minute less than one minute later he is misrepresenting the problem as the mere existence of hierarchy something he sees as more ancient than capitalism and something that exists already in relationships between wild animals ok but hierarchy and capital accumulation are not the same thing he's misdirecting he's deceiving the audience intention or not it's deeply incoherent and dishonest SRI's doing here so real quick thought experiment the military has hierarchy but everyone in the army could be paid the same way whatever you can just say hey everyone in the army is gonna get $100,000 a year it doesn't matter $50,000 here whatever it is you'd have one wage for everyone right or if not the inequality still has nothing to do with capital or investment right so even if you have a situation in the army where the lowest foot soldier the guy who operates the machine gun is paid the same amount as his captain or if they have different wages doesn't matter still it's not a situation where the captain of the military the commander is getting richer and richer because he's employing or exploiting the lower ranks of the soldiers because they pay rent to him or he owns the trucks that deliver the bread oh yeah hey like a taxi company he owns the cars and they be really do the driving so they get paid a wage when he makes all the profits because he owns the taxi company owns the cars and they merely get paid an hourly wage that's capital that's inequality created by small numbers of people open capital so again military has hierarchy but not capital accumulation there are two completely different things guess what lobsters don't have calculations lobsters don't have banks and bank loans and they don't pay rent there's none of any of the features of capital society that Carl Marx is criticizing so yeah you know what there's inequality among still wolves and there's an equality in the Army there's inequality you could have again doctors in the hospital great you could have a whole Hospital everyone earns the same amount of money or you could have a hospital where the surgeon earns more than the the nurse but either way it's not the case that the the doctor is exploiting the nurse that there's capital ownership with the doctors that say I own the equipment so you have to pay me whatever it is is different and we're not gonna get a director honest answer out of Jordan Peter that's the next problem is that well the ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed and then it predated human history itself so the question then arises why would you necessarily at least implicitly link the class struggle with capitalism given that it's a far deeper problem Karl Marx does not uniquely link class struggle to capitalism and Peterson is probably not intentionally lying here but he is deceiving the audience Karl Marx describes the whole of human history going back to ancient Greece and Rome in terms of class struggle this is an extremely repetitive and obvious theme in Marx's writing it isn't something subtle or contested okay and in fact this reflects the extent to which Marx's work really is inspired by and derivative of Aristotle and now it's also you understand that this is a deeper problem for people on the Left not just for people on the right it is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed those people who are at the bottom those creatures who are at the bottom speaking say of animals but those people who are at the bottom and that that is a fundamental existential problem mmm yes a fundamental existential problem but it is not the case that wolves in a pack become more and more unequal over time oh yeah you know moose moose in the woods are not equal right because there's hierarchy among among lobsters how about the bees you know the Queen just totally totally stupid I'm sorry so what do you think oh yeah well you know um you know it's a problem that in Japan the people who own property won't even use residential property not even getting to commercial they get richer and richer and the people who pay rent get poorer and poorer well yeah but you know wolves well yeah but you know bees so what it's irrelevant well yeah but you know this is more ancient than capitalism so what that's the problem we're talking about yeah you know what they had landlords in ancient Rome to guess what this is the problem we want to talk about and this is one of the things that still makes Marx a little bit relevant today in the 21st century not not so terribly wrong in my opinion but hey um some people read Marx some people read Aristotle some people read both um so what is he doing here he's claiming that these problems are really quote unquote existential problems gee that sounds like it's just a problem you don't want to solve or you don't want to take well you know the rent is too high in Tokyo and like you know people making minimum wage live these terrible lives well yeah but you know look at B's look at me think think about it actually really okay okay I think we'd rather rise up and have a revolution and establish a minimum wage or elect Bernie Sanders and if it's the pitiable wage or lower the cost of red thanks thanks for your advice about the wolves and the bees homey so what you're also claiming the hierarchy not economic inequality and not capital cumulation but just bare hierarchy is an inevitable aspect of life on earth for man and beast so what would you accept the same argument if it were offered as a justification of slavery if somebody were discussing the economics and legality of slavery would you accept the argument you said oh well there will always be inequality just look at the animal the other thing that Marx didn't seem to take into account is that there there are far more reasons that human beings struggle then their economic class struggle even if you build the hierarchical idea into that which is more comprehensive way of thinking about it human beings struggle with themselves with the malevolence that's inside themselves with the evil that they're capable of doing with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them so his style of misdirection really reminds me of a lot of Buddhist monks but as preachers have known where whenever they get a challenging question could even be about something like slavery they just go back to a set of well-worn kind of moral and ethical generalizations that they know the audience will sympathize with like oh yeah well you want to ask me about capital accumulation and social inequality and economic inequality getting worse more Stern ah well you know the real struggle is within yourself the audience not not pick up on this how deeply dishonest this is like you know is this just mr. misdirection nobody would accept this as a coherent argument on slavery democracy or any other topic so what if what if you was responsive well you raised the specific issue of slavery well you should realize that slavery is just one problem people are struggling with those that's the word he uses just one problem I mean they're also struggling with all kinds of dark malevolence within themselves well yeah right but this was supposed to be a response on the issue of slavery right well you raised this one specific issue of North Koreans having the right to vote but that's just one problem what about what about the darkness of the human heart what about psychological problem what about the malevolence that our souls were starting with yeah right well what I'm interested in today is the future of North Korea and what all of us are interested in is how we're gonna cope with social inequality poverty poverty is really the issue here whether we're gonna call on Karl Marx as a source textbook for that we're not and we're also actually always at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in mark so this is all he wants to do he just wants to try to derail the conversation this is only like two minutes it's his lecture he's like drilling himself repeatedly issue number one was inequality too much money in too few hands capital accumulation his response is one shift the topic from an economic equality to hierarchy to claim that hierarchy is inevitable for man and beast three claim that hierarchy has nothing to do with capitalism anyway it's quote unquote much deeper again people used to say that about slavery well they had slavery in the Bible it's much deeper it's not just a problem with ours is that yeah this misdirection number four claimed the people of deeper psychological and emotional problems anyway yeah we may have those problems anyway but look we this is a problem we want to solve two five complain that Marx isn't interested in man's struggle with nature aha this is worse than being totally irrelevant this is pure misdirection it will work equally as well as an excuse for anything else and when I say equally well I mean equally poorly if human beings have a problem it's because there's a class struggle that's essentially economic it's like no human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome and we have to solve that problem continually and we make our social arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that as well as to as to there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto that any of the likes a hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together I might have a positive element and that's an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems we have to organize ourselves in some manner and you have to give the devil his due and so it is the case hierarchies dispossessed people and that's a big problem that's the fundamental problem of inequality but it's also the case that hierarchies happened to be a very efficient way of distributing resources so what is the difference between the organization of the military and the organization of a school what is the difference between the organization of a hospital and the organization of a nightclub what is the difference from the organization of a casino and the organization of parliament a goldmine a hairdressers salon a taxi company what's the difference between the organization of the production of works of art the way a painter works in a studio and the organization of a shipping dock how are we gonna organize our society these are really meaningful and deep questions you know do you want to live in a society where the majority of people most of the time are making decisions on the basis of dire economic need or what say oh well you know once you solve the poverty and dire economic need people are still going to be wrestling with these dark psychological problems and interval levels yeah great let's get to that let's get to the point I've lived in third-world countries you know what you're right people really don't have much time to reflect off their psychological problems and they're dark you know in term Elevens when you know their whole lives are just dominated by the struggle that put bread in their mouths yeah great idea and it's finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that biological anthropological data on that are crystal clear you don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in human society primarily by exploiting other people it's a very unstable means of obtaining power so so that's a problem so the audience laughs so so that's a problem the audience laughs for good reason Oh nobody gets rich by exploiting other people anymore I've never read this is 2019 who gets rich off the exploitation it's very unstable you know you shouldn't no you shouldn't become multi-millionaire by exploiting other people it's very unstable of course Marx that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people was this problem solved was this problem even addressed I mean he opened by at least sincerely defining that one problem inequality means too much money in too few hands capital accumulation etc did we learn why Marx was wrong about this issue or any issue in the opening argument no we did not we just got a bunch of completely incoherent and self-indulgent crap shirred used to accept video I guess you just do a separate video I don't know um my parents were communists my parents were Marxists reading Karl Marx was supposed to be a big deal for me in a sense it was my mother didn't just respect Marx she was a little bit afraid of Marx like the way she even handled the book and talked about the book you could tell she thought this really had the power to corrupt people and dominate your life and totally change who you are and stuff and maybe those because that was her own experience or maybe this goes back when she was a communist when she was surrounded by their far left-wing people she saw the way their lives changed now is it too much to say their lives changed because of that book you know what they read that book maybe they talked about their own lives in terms of well this is what I was like before I read Karl Marx and then in university that read Karl Marx their whole life change for whatever reason I remember my mother really regarded Marx that way with this kind of it really was like a hallowed Bible Das Kapital that she was very in some ways proud of in some ways afraid of and she was kind of worried about what would happen to me when I finally read Marx you really picked up the vibe there my father's attitude a little bit different my father was both more of a Stalinist and more of a Maoist and that he from its kind of the later thinkers and communists a big deal and but before I read Marx I basically read all of the major economic thinkers that he was derivative of because I knew that in the history of economics really the major discoveries and major breakthroughs or before Karl Marx and then Karl Marx was a figure who's kind of like a commentator drawing together those observations and making a political platform at it so I read Adam Smith I read Ricardo I read the the truly classical economists the the guys who were really before liberalism meant anything I've read some of the later liberal thinkers to guys like okay I'm not gonna list off all the various ad this I had this very solid foundation in classical economics including Malthus and the critique of Malthus which is a big deal in Marx's capital so I was already familiar with that including the fable of the bees by Mandeville it's another major text in the history of economics I really had this this background and reading that stuff in the first books most of those are the first books in the English language ever to advance those ideas they explain their ideas clearly unlike more advanced economic textbooks that is the they really had to explain to their audience at that time what they meant by basic terms and concepts and they how they discovered what they discovered in terms of really creating the the foundations for classical economics and that created the platform for Marx's you know peculiar movement so when I finally read Karl Marx it was laughable to me I thought Marx was an incredibly dishonest incredibly shallow author who was intentionally misleading his audience who was trying to take some of the simplest concepts in economics and make them baffling and trying to make his audience kind of wonderstruck by very simple ideas about price and wage and inflation and production and where does value come from he has I mean as a stylist he manages to make it quite you know exciting to talk about economics I guess that's I guess that's the main impact as I yet some people read it and they read it with no prior background in economics and they felt like wow this is the first guy to ever figure out really basic questions about wages and labor supply and money supply and prices and inflation and this this kind of thing but no Marx didn't discover any of it and he doesn't even do a competent or honest job providing you with an intro to economics 101 textbook what he does is he writes in this the highly dramatized way about what are very simple very boring facts of economic life and he does it in a way to try to manipulate you and radicalize you the the most fundamental idea of Marx's Das Kapital is everything is going to get worse and worse there's nothing you can do to make it better the conflicts he describes between worker employer and employee etc there's no way to have ameliorative positive approach to it the only solution is incredibly violent revolution that is both the implicit and explicit thesis throughout the whole book so you can make that kind of instance your argument with anything you could imagine today someone writing a book about global warming that way where they only give you one side of the story they say these are the problems this is how terrible and terrifying they are there's no way to improve it technologically there's no way to improve it democratically there's nobody this is that and their thesis implicitly or explicitly as there has to be some kind of terrible revolution that that destroys capitalism I think actually there are there are some people who are ecological extremists who write that style and at most points in Marx even if you just understand the the basic rudiments of economics whenever he presents a problem as impossible to solve like well no that's why we have minimum wage well no that's why we have labor unions well no that's why we have democracy and and we can discuss these problem that's why we have health and safety standards in factories that's why we have law courts where if your hand gets crushed at the factory you can sue your employer and be given enough money to live the rest of your life because get your hand crushed that kind of lawsuit is especially in the economic case today it's a very fundamental part of the the developments of the American economy and workers rights when IV it hasn't a lot of it hasn't come through union organization but actually came through so-called frivolous lawsuits that really created workplace standards and transformed the way factory work happens in America and transformed many workplaces in many ways um so at every point in reading Karl Marx I was just wincing and I just felt I was reading a totally insincere book that that really um you know really was written by someone who regarded his audience as a bunch of idiots and that the tragic history of the world shows that to a large extent you know he was right now i I do not sympathize with my own professor talk about guys who are alive today but quite elderly who were caught up in Marx mania and I known many I've known so many people with PhDs who are overawed and impressed by Karl Marx and their professors in many different departments and then they spend the rest of their lives making excuses for Lenin for Stalin for whatever it is it leads them into a way of thinking where all kinds of other evils outside of Marx are justified just by the respect and admiration they feel for Karl Marx and what he did basically in this one book in Das Kapital so again to me simply that is very very alien if you are amazed by the quality of the writing of William Shakespeare that really doesn't justify anything else except for William Shakespeare and I think again it is on that level that Marx has to sit on the bookshelf you just have to look at him as this highly eccentric literary figure who you know put together a concoction of social themes and literary themes and yes yeah I mean most of the stuff Marx writes about he doesn't know as much as a Wikipedia article about Karl Marx writes about the history of India Marvis knows nothing about the history Minnie writes for the history of China - what he writes even about the history of medieval Germany he wasn't an expert on this even by the standards of his own day this one time he was incredibly ignorant of all these things he also was at best and educated Lee for assembled economics I think even that is flattering him he was a dilettante but obviously what he wrote was in some sense a literary masterpiece you know people read texts like that's capital and Communist Manifesto and were swept up with this incredible sense of excitement and it's really sad and tragic to reflect that it is not excitement based on optimism it's not excitement based on reading a book that tells you hey the world can be a better place poverty is a problem we can solve you know like Bernie Sanders telling you you could have a minimum wage you can have cheap health care you can have affordable university you could have peace instead of war it's actually based on the sickest form of pessimism of Commerce selling you everything is going to get worse and worse and worse until one day there's this unbelievable you know in turn a scene form of warfare class war and the horrible reality of class war is exactly we all saw play out in the history of the Soviet Union Russia China Laos Vietnam that's all did I mention Cambodia [Music]
capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people issue number one was inequality too much money in too few hands capital accumulation his response is one shift the topic from an economic inequality to hierarchy to claim that hierarchy is inevitable for men and beasts three claim that hierarchy has nothing to do with capitalism anyway it's quote unquote much deeper again people used to say that about slavery while they had slavery in the Bible it's much deeper it's not just a problem with ours is that yeah this misdirection number for claim the people of deeper psychological and emotional problems anyway yeah we may have those problems anyway but look we this is a problem we want to solve two-five complain that marx isn't interested in man's struggle with nature it is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed those people who are at the bottom those creatures who are at the bottom speaking say of animals but it is not the case that wolves in a pack become more and more unequal over time there's a hierarchy among among lobsters how about the bees you know the queen bee just totally irrelevant and totally stupid the people who own property won't even use residential property not even getting to commercial they get richer and richer and the people who pay rent get poorer and poorer well yeah but you know wolves well yeah but you know bees so what human beings struggle with themselves with the malevolence that's inside themselves with the evil that they're capable of doing with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them so his style of misdirection really reminds me of a lot of Buddhist monks but as preachers have known where whenever they get a challenging question could even be about something like slavery they just go back to a set of well-worn kind of moral and ethical generalizations that they know the high Hensel sympathize with like oh yeah well um you want to ask me about capital accumulation and social inequality and economic inequality getting worse more Stern ah well you know the real struggle is within yourself to people the audience not not pick up on this how deeply dishonest this is a lot of our conversations about politics revolve around a very simple distinction between right and wrong good and evil true and false you know what you're talking about you don't and when you're dealing with Jordan Peterson the main question you have to ask is is this relevant or irrelevant is this salient or not is this coherent or incoherent so I'm going to talk about briefly a brief example illustrating how profoundly incoherent his criticism of Karl Marx says that it really just makes no sense his line of reasoning on Karl Marx then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Karl Marx has meant in my own life but now for something different Jordan Peterson of course Marx believed that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations now the problem with that is it so much the fact of so there's the there's accuracy in the accusation that that is a eternal form of motivation for struggle but it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes' it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se which as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree are clearly not only human constructions so he said it himself briefly but then he immediately goes off-topic becomes incoherent starts misdirecting and misleading eyes he says the problem is capital accumulating in the hands of fewer and fewer people all right no capital is not just money capital is the ability to make money so that can be in the form of an investment capital especially as Marx discusses it also includes ownership of the means of production there's a Marxist phrase you own the factory you own the trucks that deliver things whatever it is okay so this is a very dynamic very powerful form of inequality it's not just income inequality and over generations over even a period of 100 years in equality gets worse and worse and worse a really quick thought experiment here guys this is a really good economics 101 thing let's say we begin with a completely equal society where everyone is paid the same wages they do different jobs but we just pass a law there's a minimum wage there's a maximum wage everyone in society makes $15 an hour but some people own apartments and some people rent apartments let's say it's 50/50 50% of people own all the apartments and 50% of people pay rent what happens over 100 years the 50% of people who pay rent get poorer and poorer and poorer and the 50% of people who are receiving the rent money the landlords get richer and richer this is one variable now why because of capital this is the title of Karl Marx's book that's capitalism what it's all about right this is a property ownership and rent it's very simple form of capital hey how about owning a gold mine how do you think that works I think inequality works overtime with a gold mine some people get richer and richer some people get poorer historically these days the conditions for gold miners are a lot better than they were 200 years ago we even just the old old San Francisco Gold Rush and made it made some people rich it made a lot of people poor ok so this opens with him acknowledging the problem Karl Marx is trying to address is unequal capital accumulation but less than one minute later that clip was less than one minute less than one minute later he is misrepresenting the problem as the mere existence of hierarchy something he sees as more ancient than capitalism and something that exists already in relationships between wild animals ok but hierarchy and capital accumulation are not the same thing he's misdirecting he's deceiving the audience intention or not it's deeply incoherent and dishonest SRI's doing here so real quick thought experiment the military has hierarchy but everyone in the army could be paid the same way whatever you can just say hey everyone in the army is gonna get $100,000 a year it doesn't matter $50,000 here whatever it is you'd have one wage for everyone right or if not the inequality still has nothing to do with capital or investment right so even if you have a situation in the army where the lowest foot soldier the guy who operates the machine gun is paid the same amount as his captain or if they have different wages doesn't matter still it's not a situation where the captain of the military the commander is getting richer and richer because he's employing or exploiting the lower ranks of the soldiers because they pay rent to him or he owns the trucks that deliver the bread oh yeah hey like a taxi company he owns the cars and they be really do the driving so they get paid a wage when he makes all the profits because he owns the taxi company owns the cars and they merely get paid an hourly wage that's capital that's inequality created by small numbers of people open capital so again military has hierarchy but not capital accumulation there are two completely different things guess what lobsters don't have calculations lobsters don't have banks and bank loans and they don't pay rent there's none of any of the features of capital society that Carl Marx is criticizing so yeah you know what there's inequality among still wolves and there's an equality in the Army there's inequality you could have again doctors in the hospital great you could have a whole Hospital everyone earns the same amount of money or you could have a hospital where the surgeon earns more than the the nurse but either way it's not the case that the the doctor is exploiting the nurse that there's capital ownership with the doctors that say I own the equipment so you have to pay me whatever it is is different and we're not gonna get a director honest answer out of Jordan Peter that's the next problem is that well the ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed and then it predated human history itself so the question then arises why would you necessarily at least implicitly link the class struggle with capitalism given that it's a far deeper problem Karl Marx does not uniquely link class struggle to capitalism and Peterson is probably not intentionally lying here but he is deceiving the audience Karl Marx describes the whole of human history going back to ancient Greece and Rome in terms of class struggle this is an extremely repetitive and obvious theme in Marx's writing it isn't something subtle or contested okay and in fact this reflects the extent to which Marx's work really is inspired by and derivative of Aristotle and now it's also you understand that this is a deeper problem for people on the Left not just for people on the right it is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed those people who are at the bottom those creatures who are at the bottom speaking say of animals but those people who are at the bottom and that that is a fundamental existential problem mmm yes a fundamental existential problem but it is not the case that wolves in a pack become more and more unequal over time oh yeah you know moose moose in the woods are not equal right because there's hierarchy among among lobsters how about the bees you know the Queen just totally totally stupid I'm sorry so what do you think oh yeah well you know um you know it's a problem that in Japan the people who own property won't even use residential property not even getting to commercial they get richer and richer and the people who pay rent get poorer and poorer well yeah but you know wolves well yeah but you know bees so what it's irrelevant well yeah but you know this is more ancient than capitalism so what that's the problem we're talking about yeah you know what they had landlords in ancient Rome to guess what this is the problem we want to talk about and this is one of the things that still makes Marx a little bit relevant today in the 21st century not not so terribly wrong in my opinion but hey um some people read Marx some people read Aristotle some people read both um so what is he doing here he's claiming that these problems are really quote unquote existential problems gee that sounds like it's just a problem you don't want to solve or you don't want to take well you know the rent is too high in Tokyo and like you know people making minimum wage live these terrible lives well yeah but you know look at B's look at me think think about it actually really okay okay I think we'd rather rise up and have a revolution and establish a minimum wage or elect Bernie Sanders and if it's the pitiable wage or lower the cost of red thanks thanks for your advice about the wolves and the bees homey so what you're also claiming the hierarchy not economic inequality and not capital cumulation but just bare hierarchy is an inevitable aspect of life on earth for man and beast so what would you accept the same argument if it were offered as a justification of slavery if somebody were discussing the economics and legality of slavery would you accept the argument you said oh well there will always be inequality just look at the animal the other thing that Marx didn't seem to take into account is that there there are far more reasons that human beings struggle then their economic class struggle even if you build the hierarchical idea into that which is more comprehensive way of thinking about it human beings struggle with themselves with the malevolence that's inside themselves with the evil that they're capable of doing with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them so his style of misdirection really reminds me of a lot of Buddhist monks but as preachers have known where whenever they get a challenging question could even be about something like slavery they just go back to a set of well-worn kind of moral and ethical generalizations that they know the audience will sympathize with like oh yeah well you want to ask me about capital accumulation and social inequality and economic inequality getting worse more Stern ah well you know the real struggle is within yourself the audience not not pick up on this how deeply dishonest this is like you know is this just mr. misdirection nobody would accept this as a coherent argument on slavery democracy or any other topic so what if what if you was responsive well you raised the specific issue of slavery well you should realize that slavery is just one problem people are struggling with those that's the word he uses just one problem I mean they're also struggling with all kinds of dark malevolence within themselves well yeah right but this was supposed to be a response on the issue of slavery right well you raised this one specific issue of North Koreans having the right to vote but that's just one problem what about what about the darkness of the human heart what about psychological problem what about the malevolence that our souls were starting with yeah right well what I'm interested in today is the future of North Korea and what all of us are interested in is how we're gonna cope with social inequality poverty poverty is really the issue here whether we're gonna call on Karl Marx as a source textbook for that we're not and we're also actually always at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in mark so this is all he wants to do he just wants to try to derail the conversation this is only like two minutes it's his lecture he's like drilling himself repeatedly issue number one was inequality too much money in too few hands capital accumulation his response is one shift the topic from an economic equality to hierarchy to claim that hierarchy is inevitable for man and beast three claim that hierarchy has nothing to do with capitalism anyway it's quote unquote much deeper again people used to say that about slavery well they had slavery in the Bible it's much deeper it's not just a problem with ours is that yeah this misdirection number four claimed the people of deeper psychological and emotional problems anyway yeah we may have those problems anyway but look we this is a problem we want to solve two five complain that Marx isn't interested in man's struggle with nature aha this is worse than being totally irrelevant this is pure misdirection it will work equally as well as an excuse for anything else and when I say equally well I mean equally poorly if human beings have a problem it's because there's a class struggle that's essentially economic it's like no human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome and we have to solve that problem continually and we make our social arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that as well as to as to there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto that any of the likes a hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together I might have a positive element and that's an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems we have to organize ourselves in some manner and you have to give the devil his due and so it is the case hierarchies dispossessed people and that's a big problem that's the fundamental problem of inequality but it's also the case that hierarchies happened to be a very efficient way of distributing resources so what is the difference between the organization of the military and the organization of a school what is the difference between the organization of a hospital and the organization of a nightclub what is the difference from the organization of a casino and the organization of parliament a goldmine a hairdressers salon a taxi company what's the difference between the organization of the production of works of art the way a painter works in a studio and the organization of a shipping dock how are we gonna organize our society these are really meaningful and deep questions you know do you want to live in a society where the majority of people most of the time are making decisions on the basis of dire economic need or what say oh well you know once you solve the poverty and dire economic need people are still going to be wrestling with these dark psychological problems and interval levels yeah great let's get to that let's get to the point I've lived in third-world countries you know what you're right people really don't have much time to reflect off their psychological problems and they're dark you know in term Elevens when you know their whole lives are just dominated by the struggle that put bread in their mouths yeah great idea and it's finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that biological anthropological data on that are crystal clear you don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in human society primarily by exploiting other people it's a very unstable means of obtaining power so so that's a problem so the audience laughs so so that's a problem the audience laughs for good reason Oh nobody gets rich by exploiting other people anymore I've never read this is 2019 who gets rich off the exploitation it's very unstable you know you shouldn't no you shouldn't become multi-millionaire by exploiting other people it's very unstable of course Marx that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people was this problem solved was this problem even addressed I mean he opened by at least sincerely defining that one problem inequality means too much money in too few hands capital accumulation etc did we learn why Marx was wrong about this issue or any issue in the opening argument no we did not we just got a bunch of completely incoherent and self-indulgent crap shirred used to accept video I guess you just do a separate video I don't know um my parents were communists my parents were Marxists reading Karl Marx was supposed to be a big deal for me in a sense it was my mother didn't just respect Marx she was a little bit afraid of Marx like the way she even handled the book and talked about the book you could tell she thought this really had the power to corrupt people and dominate your life and totally change who you are and stuff and maybe those because that was her own experience or maybe this goes back when she was a communist when she was surrounded by their far left-wing people she saw the way their lives changed now is it too much to say their lives changed because of that book you know what they read that book maybe they talked about their own lives in terms of well this is what I was like before I read Karl Marx and then in university that read Karl Marx their whole life change for whatever reason I remember my mother really regarded Marx that way with this kind of it really was like a hallowed Bible Das Kapital that she was very in some ways proud of in some ways afraid of and she was kind of worried about what would happen to me when I finally read Marx you really picked up the vibe there my father's attitude a little bit different my father was both more of a Stalinist and more of a Maoist and that he from its kind of the later thinkers and communists a big deal and but before I read Marx I basically read all of the major economic thinkers that he was derivative of because I knew that in the history of economics really the major discoveries and major breakthroughs or before Karl Marx and then Karl Marx was a figure who's kind of like a commentator drawing together those observations and making a political platform at it so I read Adam Smith I read Ricardo I read the the truly classical economists the the guys who were really before liberalism meant anything I've read some of the later liberal thinkers to guys like okay I'm not gonna list off all the various ad this I had this very solid foundation in classical economics including Malthus and the critique of Malthus which is a big deal in Marx's capital so I was already familiar with that including the fable of the bees by Mandeville it's another major text in the history of economics I really had this this background and reading that stuff in the first books most of those are the first books in the English language ever to advance those ideas they explain their ideas clearly unlike more advanced economic textbooks that is the they really had to explain to their audience at that time what they meant by basic terms and concepts and they how they discovered what they discovered in terms of really creating the the foundations for classical economics and that created the platform for Marx's you know peculiar movement so when I finally read Karl Marx it was laughable to me I thought Marx was an incredibly dishonest incredibly shallow author who was intentionally misleading his audience who was trying to take some of the simplest concepts in economics and make them baffling and trying to make his audience kind of wonderstruck by very simple ideas about price and wage and inflation and production and where does value come from he has I mean as a stylist he manages to make it quite you know exciting to talk about economics I guess that's I guess that's the main impact as I yet some people read it and they read it with no prior background in economics and they felt like wow this is the first guy to ever figure out really basic questions about wages and labor supply and money supply and prices and inflation and this this kind of thing but no Marx didn't discover any of it and he doesn't even do a competent or honest job providing you with an intro to economics 101 textbook what he does is he writes in this the highly dramatized way about what are very simple very boring facts of economic life and he does it in a way to try to manipulate you and radicalize you the the most fundamental idea of Marx's Das Kapital is everything is going to get worse and worse there's nothing you can do to make it better the conflicts he describes between worker employer and employee etc there's no way to have ameliorative positive approach to it the only solution is incredibly violent revolution that is both the implicit and explicit thesis throughout the whole book so you can make that kind of instance your argument with anything you could imagine today someone writing a book about global warming that way where they only give you one side of the story they say these are the problems this is how terrible and terrifying they are there's no way to improve it technologically there's no way to improve it democratically there's nobody this is that and their thesis implicitly or explicitly as there has to be some kind of terrible revolution that that destroys capitalism I think actually there are there are some people who are ecological extremists who write that style and at most points in Marx even if you just understand the the basic rudiments of economics whenever he presents a problem as impossible to solve like well no that's why we have minimum wage well no that's why we have labor unions well no that's why we have democracy and and we can discuss these problem that's why we have health and safety standards in factories that's why we have law courts where if your hand gets crushed at the factory you can sue your employer and be given enough money to live the rest of your life because get your hand crushed that kind of lawsuit is especially in the economic case today it's a very fundamental part of the the developments of the American economy and workers rights when IV it hasn't a lot of it hasn't come through union organization but actually came through so-called frivolous lawsuits that really created workplace standards and transformed the way factory work happens in America and transformed many workplaces in many ways um so at every point in reading Karl Marx I was just wincing and I just felt I was reading a totally insincere book that that really um you know really was written by someone who regarded his audience as a bunch of idiots and that the tragic history of the world shows that to a large extent you know he was right now i I do not sympathize with my own professor talk about guys who are alive today but quite elderly who were caught up in Marx mania and I known many I've known so many people with PhDs who are overawed and impressed by Karl Marx and their professors in many different departments and then they spend the rest of their lives making excuses for Lenin for Stalin for whatever it is it leads them into a way of thinking where all kinds of other evils outside of Marx are justified just by the respect and admiration they feel for Karl Marx and what he did basically in this one book in Das Kapital so again to me simply that is very very alien if you are amazed by the quality of the writing of William Shakespeare that really doesn't justify anything else except for William Shakespeare and I think again it is on that level that Marx has to sit on the bookshelf you just have to look at him as this highly eccentric literary figure who you know put together a concoction of social themes and literary themes and yes yeah I mean most of the stuff Marx writes about he doesn't know as much as a Wikipedia article about Karl Marx writes about the history of India Marvis knows nothing about the history Minnie writes for the history of China - what he writes even about the history of medieval Germany he wasn't an expert on this even by the standards of his own day this one time he was incredibly ignorant of all these things he also was at best and educated Lee for assembled economics I think even that is flattering him he was a dilettante but obviously what he wrote was in some sense a literary masterpiece you know people read texts like that's capital and Communist Manifesto and were swept up with this incredible sense of excitement and it's really sad and tragic to reflect that it is not excitement based on optimism it's not excitement based on reading a book that tells you hey the world can be a better place poverty is a problem we can solve you know like Bernie Sanders telling you you could have a minimum wage you can have cheap health care you can have affordable university you could have peace instead of war it's actually based on the sickest form of pessimism of Commerce selling you everything is going to get worse and worse and worse until one day there's this unbelievable you know in turn a scene form of warfare class war and the horrible reality of class war is exactly we all saw play out in the history of the Soviet Union Russia China Laos Vietnam that's all did I mention Cambodia [Music]