Political Identity and Desire: Faraday Speaks.

I used to start my videos by saying no
intro new outro just real talk but if you say that at the start of every video then saying no intro becomes you're in Tripoli I'm gonna play this clip and then give you some commentary at the end of it when we talk about politics it's important that we don't just talk about what we believe that we don't just talk about what we know we don't just talk about the decisions we make but that we also talk about the role of desire what it was we wanted or yearned for that drove those decisions and the guy you're about to hear from has been quite honest in making a video it's a smash hit video and I understand why where he talks about his own descent from being a kind of mainstream left-of-center progressive kind of person to being an alt right racist on the verge of the right fascism you know eventually as I was looking through all these videos this little video is youtuber popped up in my sidebar and you know had an interesting like click beta title and it was something about the truth about therapy or it was it was something you know something to do with depression and self-help and bettering yourself and looked interesting to me and clicked on it and it was this Canadian you to her and I think you guys know Warren going with this Stefan resonated with me Stefan resonated with me because Stefan had shared the same experiences that I had shared Stefan he had a traumatic childhood he had issues with his mother he had issues with the rest of his family he had issues with the society around him he was angry society around him that never stepped in and did anything to help him to help him escape from that childhood pain and that trauma that he carried with him and these were all things that I felt is so true to me then he talked you know he he started talking about how he was able to get out of it and you know and basically like he blamed a lot of his situation on liberalism my mind I set him up as an authority figure I was uneducated and when he would feed me this information about history and about you know what he saw as scientific facts and this theories his social commentaries because of the benefits that I'd gotten from him and the pain that he'd relieved from me I built I assumed I assumed he was honest or at least at the very least I assumed that he was correct and you know it happened so fast you know I started out as a libertarian Miami when I would provide Stefan's content before that I was a liberal if then as I listened to stuff on it picked up libertarian ideas which transitioned into you know anarcho-capitalist ideas and but what well what happened was I would get to a point where you know I wanted the libertarianism because I wanted a free society but did I realize that well we can't have a free society if there isn't social cohesion and there isn't a strong structure to bind us together and I started to believe that we needed strong borders and we needed a national identity and we needed to raise the birth rates and to me it wasn't necessarily white birth rates I saw it more as like we needed more intelligent people having children and then as I as I started to learn more as I listen to people like Jared Taylor or you know Molyneux have started putting out a lot more race content talking about race I race an IQ talking about the bell curve and you know they use this term called race realism and the idea is that there's differences in the races depending on where they evolved in the world and that you know these are inexplicable these are were they're immutable you know they're tied to biology and that we can't escape them necessarily and so I bought into that and because of that I started to see society as a product of this company you know the the combination between culture and race and race being so important because it's tied to IQ collectively ethnicities around the world tend to act differently they tend to have different incomes they tend to have differential stability they tend to have different rates of criminality they tend to have different rates of different accumulations of assets they tend to have different levels of education you go on and on and on now if there's any genetic component to that and I believe that there is nobody knows too sure it's just a belief then you cannot run a high IQ society with low IQ people so this young man has had the courage to come out and really give us a diagram of his own downward spiral as he lazily clicked from one YouTube video to the next and made a series of political set decisions that drew him from mainstream left-of-centre liberal progressive values down down down into darker and darker more authoritarian ultimately more racist view of the world and he puts emphasis on how easy and effortless this was for him because of the nature of social media because of the way YouTube presents all this to you and his own unquestioning and unsophisticated character when he embraces at this time I also give him a lot of credit that he describes very well his emotional frame of mind what it was he wanted what it was he yearned for what it was he felt dissatisfied within his own culture and its own family in his own upbringing in his own education in his own career what it was that put him in this ID in a receptive emotional state okay I think it's very very important than when we talk about politics when we talk about our own political autobiographies to put it that way that we have a sense of the role of desire that desire is something tremendously important apart from knowledge or belief what we know and what we believe to a very large extent is something we are born into I think we've got to deal with four categories here one there are the political beliefs the political ideologies that were born into there are the political ideologies that we did not choose ourselves but that our parents chose for us and then at some stage at some age of our lives we become the ones to blame whether we reject those and take on new ideologies or if we conform to them but at some point it's not just that your parents were Republicans if you're 25 years old and you're still in the Republican Party it's become your choice even if choice you made the first place right and of course a large percentage of us question and reject the political assumptions are our parents had we joined some other political party take notes so this this is the first distinction the ideologies we chose for ourselves and the ideologies that are chosen for us and the second distinction I want to make here is the tricky distinction between religious and secular political beliefs because the problem is that political beliefs they're binding and they transform our lives in a profound way that really does resemble religion if you don't believe it google the history of communism real quick and guys if you didn't know my parents were communists my parents weren't moderate moderate communists my parents were communists extremists and obviously I mean this this young man does a good job of describing in these subtle steps towards racism scientistic racism the completely phony and insincere race in IQ debate that's shaped the way you perceive the whole world not just issues like immigration but obviously the history of Empire and history of the British Empire thirst or the French Empire colonialism why the map of the world is the way it is why people in Australia and America speak English and not indigenous languages there's a lot built into this it's a worldview that's kind of corrosive and it changed the way he perceived himself he mentioned also by the way he used to have friends that were gay and friends that were black friends that were races other than white and he said even though there was never an open a mutual rejection as he got more into this political ideology they picked up on the vibe and those those friends all stopped talking to him which is also interesting so again it's like it is like joining a religion if I converted to Mormonism the people who helped me even if I even if I didn't reject them they didn't reject me they would pick up on the vibe and you know slowly you find yourself in a situation where all your friends are just your fellow believers so I mean religious ideology and political ideology they are profoundly similar but there's an important difference as follows religious ideology often makes people feel that they're part of a marginal fringe group even whether or not they are the leaders that are important to you if you're a white person who converts to Hinduism the politics you care about those political leaders are not being affirmed in their importance in the newspapers on the radio the news on TV and if you're let's just say you're a white Australian who gets into Hindu Transcendental Meditation and then joins one of the big big churches of Hinduism that have been repackaged and popularized for a white audience you're suddenly drawn into a world of political and religious ideological concerns that are either not mentioned in the newspaper at all or are just barely sneeringly mentioned in the newspaper once in a while when there's a controversy about corruption or sexual exploitation of cult members or something like this and you are always going to feel a sense of embarrassment just because the people you consider important political leaders are regarded as marginal as people of no importance in the mainstream political discourse right and that's really inverted for explicitly a political ideology so when I was raised in in communism even if the newspapers were criticizing the leader of China even if the newspapers were criticizing the leader of the Soviet Union this is before 1989 they were still showing their photos on the front page they were still being covered on the news every night it was being said again and again these are the most important people in the world these are the most important questions of ethics and politics and economics that the questions being raised by communists that they really mattered and the questions being raised by your crazy Hindu temple or your cult group they're not on the news that way they're not in the newspaper in that way and children raised in those ideologies I think even if they were true believers they feel that sense of embarrassment that when they go to school or when they go to the grocery store they know ok now I'm out in the real world where my ideology doesn't matter where most people it's not even that they're against my cult group it's not even that they're like against Mormonism or against Hinduism it's just like who is what do you what these questions you care about in your leaders they don't matter in the real world and political leaders explicitly political ideologies they do matter in the real world so look what has changed with the emergence of social media has the barrier to entry gotten lower yes people no longer have to actually go to the library and get out a copy of the communist manifesto people don't have to Rio I guess they never did though I mean I guess in the old days there were other forms of outreach where you know the Communists would come to you and they try to convert you and bring you into a groove I mean in a sense look I was gonna say it's easier because all you have to do is sit there and click on YouTube videos but you know what in a sense more of the work is being done by you by the ideologue by the victim of this ideologies like in private you alone have to do all the work and have to do all the thinking nobody's coming nobody's coming to do it for you so I wrote about this years ago but there's this sense in which the model of the cult is becoming more and more self-directed that people become on a minuscule scale their own little cult leader where they're the one putting together the ideology they're the one making these choices and choosing and putting it together and it is quite a contrast to the way the explicit leader of a communist cell would recruit people in the old days let's just say in the 1960s it is a contrast to the way the leader of a Hindu cult group would go out and recruit people and where they would really know they would have a face-to-face relationship with the leader of the cult group whether it's Hindu or or communist where they would physically receive a pamphlet on paper from those people and then soon enough once you join the cult you might be one of the people standing on the street handing out the pamphlets and trying to recruit people the loss of the face-to-face interactions and the loss of any kind of relationship with a charismatic leader and the loss of a relationship of authority let's never forget that there's no one telling you what to believe or what to do that instead you get to put together your own bird's nest you get to put together the bits and pieces you you choose that's also a part of this guy's story he mentioned specifically that once he got into this right-wing fringe group he never believed the anti-semitic element of it as his choice you know so if you join an old-fashioned cult there were no choice like that either you're joining or you're leaving where it's it's become porous and self self selected that way I think that this kind of examination whether it's directed inwardly or directed outwardly like whether it's a young man like this reflecting on himself and why he made these choices or if it's directed out and we're criticizing criticizing the organizations that are recruiting people this way we're just criticizing the YouTube channels that are influencing people this way I think what it ultimately has to lead to though is the examination of the desire that leads people in and guides them through this this process what did you want what was it you yearned for and I'm not even presuming it's something dark and terrible and dangerous you know maybe you were yearning for a sense of community maybe you wanted to have colleagues maybe you wanted to have equals who would not just agree with you but also disagree with you and debate what you felt were the major social issues of your time maybe you wanted to feel like you were part of the solution and not part of the problem when you looked around at the society you were part of I remember that meant so much to me when I was a kid about ecology it was like there's just these huge problems with ecology and wanting to feel like you know is there some way I can connect to deforestation living downtown in a major city like with deforestation is this huge problem how can i connect to it and you know I really failed you know but I remember yearning of - wanting to feel connected to those political issues and I see that I see that with people not just young people middle-aged people it could be anything it can be human trafficking it can be any any social issue that for some reason really gets to them then they have this yearning you know can they sign up for something can they join a group can they go to an event so they feel connected to this issue and they feel like they are part of the solution and not part of the problem you know so those are not necessarily dark destructive bad urges but it comes down I think ultimately to a sense of an awareness of that desire try to have a more precise understanding of the desires that guided you into this and now that you're on the way out of it now that you're just more enlightened as to what your options are well what are you gonna do what are you gonna do in the next five years to make the world a better place and yeah you know what look maybe for a lot of us the answer is instead the humbling and humiliating you know nothing at all but at least with with a precise awareness of what those desires are you're not gonna end up being a puppet for some ideale gee that's offering you ultimately the gratification of those unexamined then at that time [Music]