Democracy vs. Communism, Athens vs. Sparta ❸ The Truth Crab Interview.

so folks uh we're talking about
communism now this is an interesting topic this is a topic i've been kind of thinking about reading about and seeing certainly a resurgence well at least with my the the channels that i am tapped into i'm seeing a resurgence in i guess i would say like the mains not even the mainstreaming of it but it seems like you know there was a time in the 80s whatever where tommy and communist and before that as well it's just this very like you don't want to be that it's a bad thing slowly over time it's like i don't know what it is exactly but it seems like the general view on the on the concept is really softened and now with a lot that's going on in the world i'm seeing a lot of like i guess reinvigoration of people being interested in these ideas and i suspect a lot of them don't quite understand exactly what the historical factors are and what it actually all leads to or has led to in many cases stuff so i kind of want to just um talk about some basics because i feel like you have a lot more to say about communism and i'm pretty interested in the topic so can we just start with the basics and like can you tell me and these other folks in here from your perspective can you summarize communism into fairly simple terms as if you're explaining this to like a teenager sure and i'm happy to do so i just say uh in case there are any communists or people who consider themselves communists watching this you know i do have a human heart i can sympathize with their reason for being communists um even though i am about to explain to you why communism is bad and evil and wrong um there's a documentary right now on netflix about a cult group and i haven't seen the documentary but in the promo for it what they mention again and again is that the reason people had for joining this cult the reason they had it for believing in this cult was that they wanted to make the world a better place they were trying to do good and so the particular cult is called nexium i've heard that a lot from people who joined scientology and then scientology destroyed their lives so a lot of people go into these movements with genuinely good intentions it doesn't mean it's a good movement it doesn't mean what they did afterward was good so i'm not impugning i'm not insulting anyone's intentions even if some of you have literally signed up for and joined you know communist parties i know the types of intentions people had when they first got involved and in the case of my own parents obviously they were old enough that they remembered world war ii and the vietnam war totally different political context they in their own minds had good intentions but that led to them making excuses for terrible evil things the beginning of the story with communism is before karl marx communism existed as a concept and a movement prior to the career of marx and engels although marx is such a huge influence that we almost never talk about communism as it existed before karl marx in the period before karl marx actually a lot of the people who call themselves communists and communards were devout christians they were people who believed in refusing money and a lot of them were actually influenced by a very famous book by thomas moore called thomas moore's utopia thomas smith's utopia is one of the most influential books in the history of western civilization and like you know if you haven't read it you've read other authors who were influenced by it now i would mention thomas more's utopia was even influential in japan it was even influential in communist china over mao zedong himself now thomas more zootopia concludes with a condemnation of money that the fundamental problem with society is money itself that if we could have a society without money we would have a paradise and there were many different communist theorists i'm saying theorists here because i'm really talking about people who wrote books not the people who actually started communes who are also interesting and most of those people were crazy christian fundamentalists just like today like there were people who went away and said okay i'm going to start an ideal community they were all almost all spiritually guided people but the people who were uh in the city writing books publishing calling for revolution and and profound economic change um a lot of them shared this apprehension that somehow money itself was the root of all evil karl marx takes the decisive step of saying the problem is not money the problem is money creating money which he terms capital so marx's concept of capital of capital investment is that you reach a point in the development of society where the ruling class the rich people are no longer farmers they're no longer soldiers like in a dark ages sense or the roman empire or something but that the rich people amass money and through things like the stock market through investment and through gaining interest in the bank money seemingly just produces more money and that this is the root of all evil um so okay most fundamentally then from the beginning even before karl marx you know what is communism communism in principle is a rejection of economic reality for some other ideal and that's why so many of the people involved are very idealistic they may be christian they may be you know jewish muslim or what have you generally the impulse that unites communists together is the idea of couldn't we just reject all of the cultural assumptions of our society couldn't we just go into the countryside and get some land and start farming and start out on our own start it all over again and people do that you can live in a cave you can start your own farm and you start to encounter step by step all the facts of economics that communists wanted to ignore you can make your own shoes for everyone living on your commune to have handmade shoes using materials and labor within your commune isn't 10 times more expensive than shoes from a factory in china it's not 100 times more expensive it's a thousand times more expensive now you've got a commune that refuses to buy anything and refuses to use money and your children have no shoes you know so you know how does your commune provide health care or so on and so forth if you do this step by step you're going to start learning the real facts of economics that all the non-marxist and non-communist thinkers have have embraced so this is a short and i think fairly sympathetic uh description of communism the less sympathetic reality is that marx invented and profounded this tenet pardon me tenet this axiom that all social progress all change is accomplished through violence and his philosophy his path to communism his path to progress unlike even other theorists who were alive during the same generation with marx was to say that it's only through violence and then it's only specifically through the violence of the lower social class destroying the upper social class that history can progress and all kinds of other wacky ideas have spread it up around that including the fundamental hostility to democracy it doesn't make a whole lot of sense so out of that we get with various steps in between the reality of modern communism which is still here with us on youtube today unchanged that what they need to do is form a vanguard fight a revolution kill the rich etc etc this is the unbelievably ugly reality of communism again you see on twitch you see on youtube you see everywhere and it's important to keep in mind that contrast wait a minute guys didn't this start with us as teenagers thinking we could go in the countryside and buy a plot of land and start farming and make our own shoes and not have to use money didn't this start with i mean today people don't read thomas morris utopia they don't need more centuries ago they did but didn't this start with some kind of utopian ideal in that sense in thomas moore's utopia that we can do better than the society we can get rid of the greed and oppression of the society and then you have the unbelievably oppressive and terrible reality not just of what communism is as a as a government but what communist revolutionary movements are in 2020 here and now all right let me uh interesting let me uh i want to kind of feed that back to you a bit through my own filter and let me and i want you to let me know if you think i'm getting stuff wrong or why won't you return to stay with us so is it from my perspective both from what you're saying just from my previous understanding of it communism is a response to bad conditions generally right it's like communism wouldn't have come up if utopia already existed as you just you're kind of describing it with this book as having sort of utopian roots and maybe even not beyond roots it's it seems to be a utopian philosophy was it would you say that's correct yes yeah and the the very earliest phases of communism which still to this day communists go back to is the contrast between athens and sparta this is still still the is in marx but in general you're going to find it in marxland and stalin you're going to find in all kinds you're going to find it even in the critics of communism talking about communism as the new sparta the idea that sparta was a society with no money where nobody ever touched money or nobody ever bought things is completely false it's a fiction but it was a widely believed fiction and the idea that whereas athens had democracy but it was a society built on commerce and greed and democracy it was kind of the capitalist democracy but that sparta represented something pure um uncontaminated by the use of gold coins and this kind of thing that there was this alternative way to build a society i don't think any of them would quite say sparta was a utopia but it is a utopian way of thinking about sparta and that's still with us yeah so that that contrast amazingly has for more than 2000 years come up again and again it's been reinvented again and again yeah okay so so it's a response to bad conditions so another thing i want to mention for people who don't know hey all kinds of people who are communists here on youtube live in wonderful conditions i don't even i don't even presume that i mean people are leaving living happy bourgeois lives um in california and they become communists there are people in switzerland who become communists so no i think that idealism can appeal to people who are born rich it can can appeal to all kinds of people sure okay but wouldn't wouldn't that if those people that are say born rich that are sympathetic with communism wouldn't that spring from a sense of solidarity or empathy for those people that are under bad conditions generally isn't it usually like somehow connected to that so great great question and i say i'm not trying to demonize anyone here um one of the major leaders of the uh cambodian communist party who went on trial um recently he went on trial just a few years during my lifetime um you know uh his name was pronounced deutsch okay great so comrade deutsch as he's remembered you know when he was asked why did you decide in the first place to become a communist he gave the most honest answer you're ever going to hear he had a bad week where he confessed to a girl that he was in love with her she'd been something like a classmate she'd been somebody known for a long time and she laughed at him and rejected his advances and his bicycle was stolen and he was standing there with his bike lock or whatever his bicycle used to be he was standing there looking for his stolen bicycle and he thought this society is bad and evil and wrong there's got to be a better way and he packed up and left the city and joined the communist party which at that time meant he joined armed rebels with guns in the jungle and he ended up you know torturing people to death for the regime as you as you may know he went on to commit terrible atrocities for that regime so you know i'm not saying that's a ridicule everyone a lot of us will know what it's like to have their bicycle still won a lot of us will know what it's like to be rejected by a girl you've got a got a crush on um you know obviously my own parents provide them with a case study but i mean their reasons for embracing communism i see as very human in this sense and and to be self-critical like my reasons why i got involved with buddhism would be would be very human in the same way you know i i i do sympathize with those reasons but put it this way i think absolutely nobody gets involved in communism because they in a detached way read karl marx's economic theories and think this is the way to help the poor nobody in their right mind could do that you'd be much more likely to join the catholic church if you wanted to help the poor and i say that as someone who who is not catholic and doesn't support the catholic church so i had this this is a little anecdote but i had a friend really close friend of mine who briefly this is ages ago when i didn't really even have an opinion but i remember him sort of talking about communism and he was in a really bad place like his job was terrible and he was just really frustrated with society and i remember that was the moment i never heard him talk about it after but there was just like a week or something where i heard him talking about it just thinking like wouldn't it be great if this and this and this and we all had the same thing we all when we're all getting enough to struggle so like that's kind of how i've always identified it as in general obviously there's exceptions all over the place but in general that communism is attractive to people that are disenfranchised with things like capitalism and just the state of society and for that reason it's not as common for somebody who's let's say comfortable in life to really identify with this well i'd say it depends on what kind of ego you've got when you believe in something like communism and those in the islands can think about how many other kind of hippie beliefs today are like this also all of a sudden you believe in this secret magical truth that makes you feel superior to your own school teachers that makes you feel superior to your boss at work that makes you feel superior to your own parents and grandparents you you get it and they don't really get it man they don't really know what's going on a lot of conspiracy theory thinking is like this so that can be extremely appealing to the ego again depending on what kind of character you are in my father's case um you could say he was a failed actor or he was someone who had a very small amount of success as an actor he did earn his living as an actor for a couple of years he cared a lot about getting attention from women good reason to be an actor by the way don't do it for the money you know he cared a lot about being important and being the center of attention and immediately before my father became this extreme communist he was a christian extremist he had apparent of being a so-called christian existentialist preacher so there are some people who will switch from one cult belief to another because that cult belief serves the same function for their ego right like hey you know do you want to know what it is to be saved you know here's this preacher who's going to tell you how things really are the secrets of the universe the afterlife whatever it is they have the invisible key that unlocks these mysteries you've never understood communism really does that for people and i think that's exactly why it's having a resurgence now when in every other way it's been totally discredited so just give really short example i mean you asked about this kind of thing earlier when i was a kid my parents presented communism to me and i just assumed oh so communists have a better way of organizing farms i was very interested in farming not worth saying why and like the minute i went to the library and got a book explaining how farms were organized in the soviet union is this a joke like this is much much worse and by the way these books were pro-communist these were not these are not like indictments otherwise like this is unbelievably worse than the way agriculture is organized in canada england france italy or you name it like you know so there's this promise that this is the secret to the universe but if we ever look at just empirical reality how farms work why people were starving to death in in communist countries and even when they weren't starving that the farming system was you know really more awful than feudalism um you know that puts the lie to that optimism but it appeals to human optimism and appeals to this kind of ego trip letting you feel that you're superior to your own school teachers okay so lychee's in the chat a little while back was kind of asking for some clarity on uh this definition because it's a hard thing to pin down uh what communism is and i think there's also like a lot of the stuff it's an element of subjectivity so we're interpreting it to a degree but one of the questions she asked is about the differentiation between personal uh and private property from what i understand and i'll let you explain this because i'm sure you know more about this particular thing my understanding is that communism is intrinsically against private property yeah yeah that's that is true um you know marxism per se basically says i mean marxism is a more narrow category than communism there are many types of communism but marxist orthodox communism basically says that what they want to take away is ownership of the means of production a term you're going to hear a lot if you're getting into communism so that would mean ownership of the machines that are used in assembling a car ownership of the factory ownership of the farmland ownership of the tractors that are on the farmland but individual people can still own toys for their children they can still own clothing for themselves it's not a total prohibition on uh on owning tangible things in your own home it's not quite as monastic as that with that having been said though any group of communists who are really serious and sincere about getting rid of money entirely they pretty much do eliminate anything you can own and cambodia is a great example of that i mean really in cambodia nobody owned anything um the the extent of the poverty people were reduced to it's it was kind of as close as maybe as close as we've come in the 20th century to people not owning anything aside from the clothes on their back the kind of omni slavery where almost everybody except the leadership of the communist party was was really in a state of slavery yeah so i think a lot of people probably myself included or at least in the past more so kind of have a hard time understanding the differences between like marxism and leninism and communism and socialism and all these things and maybe let's not get into that because it's such a huge topic but just to let's just make it clear that we're we kind of have to generalize a bit i think when we're talking about this stuff like you've kind of mentioned like strict marxist communism these other things but could do you think you could somewhat succinctly explain marxism versus communism versus socialism uh sure okay so let's do them in the reverse order socialism is about debating where we draw the line between the public sector and the private sector so in some countries right now if you pick up a phone and make a phone call many countries around the world the actual phone service is provided by the government so this is to say the government actually built the wires that connect your phone call to other people you are using a government service you may even get a phone bill from the government or it could be providing you for free in many countries around the world you may be getting electricity provided to you by the government you'll be getting water health care many many things are in the public sector sphere and let's be clear public means government that's what it means so it's kind of a euphemism to say public sector instead of government sector or state sector or another really blunt term is the command economy all right now why is it command because ultimately it tends to resemble the way the military is run if the government has its own electricity company it's not that different from working for the military working for the government's electricity company as opposed to working for a private company so uh again within canada even within the last 50 years a lot of those things have shifted around what things are uh public utilities government what things so socialism fundamentally and simply is a debate about where do you draw that line communism really by definition means that you want to draw the line as far as possible to one side of the chart as far as possible to the left i guess you could say so that almost nothing is private sector no again as i just mentioned marxists will say hey you can still own clothes you can still own toys for your kids you can still do stuff in your private life but um they would not a communist by definition does not want private ownership of a car factory attractor anything like that so when you start with the definition of socialism now so right now in the united states of america a socialist like bernie sanders is saying hey he wants to move the line so the whole health care system becomes government it's now debatable i'm not going to get into the details of exactly what bernie sanders is promising because anyway that is probably the reality of what bernie sanders promises even if he doesn't doesn't really say that and you know fair enough many countries in europe they have moved the line where you know the you know health care is a government service and then to see communism is putting the line all the way over um and then i think you know very simply you know karl marx is just one author but he is the single most influential author you know in in the development of modern communism i mean you know who today is really talking about uh louis auguste blanchi so louis auguste blanchi while karl marx was alive he said they are the real communists that blanchy and his followers they were the real communists unlike karl marx and angles that they weren't real communists it's an interesting quote so there were other communist leaders with other ideas about about communism and who were also going out and making revolution louis gaspunki he spent a lot of his time in prison and he ended up dead but i guess all of us do eventually anyway uh so there were other names there were other people you can read but the the significant footnote about karl marx is that he presented himself as an economist and what he has to say about economics is just horseshit i think that's a relatively succinct answer okay interesting so i wanna can i give you i wanna like kind of give give like a breakdown of my understanding of what happened with the russian revolution as just like a case study to what happens with communist revolutions and i want to get your perspective if i'm summarized if you think of summarizing it accurately i think i'm missing something because this thing i've been pretty interested in lately the russian revolution so like my my general and it seems like this is parallel to other revolutions communist revolutions that have happened similar sort of outcomes have occurred but my understanding is that it's it starts with discontent and in russia it was sort of the oligarchy i think you would say just sort of the ruling the powers of the bee at the time which were it was like a monarchy and mixed with some sort of uh pretty uh totalitarian government i think and they we didn't have a lot of freedom you weren't allowed to practice politics openly for example all these restrictions it was a very repressive society a lot of reason to look for a utopian ideal and then slowly this com this karl marx stuff and the communism started bubbling up and the idea was look at these capitalists and these rulers being such [ __ ] we need to take them down and then and then we take them down and take down the system of capitalism we'll be able to figure out something better than it will even though we don't have all the background and all the systems and everything set up in place we'll be able to create everything new more or less we'll do it better surely and then they were able to convince people of that they were able to sort of violently do that and take over more or less and then once they did all these utopian ideals were sort of put like they were forced to like okay now you got to actually do all these things that you were talking about and that's where things went to absolute horror because it turned out that they did not have these abilities and so led to sort of administrative administrative catastrophe let's say all of these multitudes of examples famines and what have you various classes were demonized murdered and all these things and replaced with less competent people which led to sort of long-term economic and human catastrophe and similar sort of stuff has happened in other countries that's so that's just my brief understanding of it's really summarized of russia and again i think it parallels a lot of other sort of communist revolutions that i've looked at but i wonder am i getting stuff wrong from your perspective yeah i i would disagree with the first chapter of what you said in terms of the origins i don't think we disagree much with the disaster that comes after in chapters four five and six or whatever but maybe the first three chapters i would disagree with you about um in many many ways the decades leading up to the revolution were a very optimistic time in russia the sense in which they were not an optimistic time can be summarized with one word war so russia was involved in a series of really terrible wars actually you know what keeping all the way real war and genocide so there's genocide going on too which is kind of another story but with the significant exception of war and genocide it was a period of tremendous optimism about the future and keep in mind the world was a small place it wasn't difficult for russians to go back and forth between their own rather backward country and places like germany and france and they really could see how quickly they could catch up with where western europe was already at and the technology the pace of technological change was tremendous at that time russia also had this unimaginably enormous empire stretching all the way east of vladivostok and beyond we never forget that a land border with japan and so on you know so no there was a time of of tremendous optimism in many many ways and you could even say that optimism led into uh the transition to communism however they had a problem with losing wars and at that time the main war they were losing was the one with the germans but they also had war with poland and many other um aggressors uh certainly their problems with japan never ended until the end of world war ii so they had war with japan they had war with they had wars to control korea with china it was this enormous empire you know they had wars about um the control of uh alaska and hawaii there were russian counties and why this is an unbelievable world empire that's forgotten um that russia really i'm you know i'm not glorifying it but yeah the british empire took over a lot of the world with the russian empire they took over a lot of the world in that period also and indeed part of that optimism just to keep in mind it just has to do with things like the discovery of electricity you know just say it's not that they invented it but society was changing and modernizing in this in this inspirational way and the russians saw the way in which they could approve you could say some of these same things about japan during the springtime in terms of optimism um what you can never forget is this before the bolsheviks took over there were elections and the bolsheviks lost so even wikipedia will give you the election results so there was all this optimism they deposed the royal family of the tsar and then they had this transition relatively peaceful transition considering they were at war continuously during this time they had this transition to having democracy elections and a parliament and the winner of the elections was called the socialist revolutionary party they were a far left party but not as extreme as the bolsheviks not violent communists not insane marxists they were socialists and you can tell from the name they weren't even moderate socialists they were far left socialists the whole history of russia would be different if lenin vladimir ilyich lenin could have just accepted his role as one of the minority parties in politics and sat in parliament and gave speeches and debated what the future of russia could be but that's not what they did the bolsheviks hunted down and murdered every single member of parliament they hunted down and murdered everyone who voted to support the socialist revolutionary party who were a very large percentage of the population the unbelievable violence of what's normally referred to as the russian civil war rather than the russian revolution really it's the same thing or two periods of time and the same thing um that violence is so extreme because the elections proved the vast majority of the population were anti-bolshevik they were against the bolsheviks even though they did they were optimistic in general about left-wing ideas of making rapid progress of having some kind of change in society what they wanted was to have a pluralistic socialist democracy similar to the ones they were familiar with at that time already in western europe and that's not what they got instead they got the dictatorship of lenin lenin gets shot in the head um he doesn't die right away from being shot in the head but he knows his days are numbered he's never really the same again after he gets shot in the head lennon writes his will and you know the next guy in the commander's seat is stalin and stalin is so terrible that people seem to remember lenin as if he wasn't too terribly bad but in fact lenin was absolutely unbelievably terrible too so yeah that's my way of telling the story and i mean the the big difference is putting the emphasis on that on that election and the election tells you a lot about communism and the way in which it is based on the refusal to accept the vote of 50 or 51 of the population and it's accepting the violence of having a small minority force everyone else into a totalitarian system run by communists so me and you know the sort of aftermath i don't know who's watching right now but for those who don't once this regime stalin and his regime sort of took over so the bolsheviks for those who don't know bolsheviks was that was the party the at the time that took over eventually bolsheviks became just the communist party i believe uh yes yeah they continued using both terms but yeah sure bolsheviks are the commerce party yeah sure so like a lot of horrible things happen but i mean like one of the biggest ones was was the um collectivization of agriculture so there was this no correctness wrong here but there was this notion that they needed to like jump forward technologically and that the way to do that was let's collectivize all agriculture in russia let's kind of put all the farms together essentially and control them like from the top down rather than them having independence and so that was the plan and then the way that they enforced that was to single out somewhat competent profitable farmers and murder and torture them and replace them with less competent people leading to an atrocious famine where hundreds of millions tens of millions if not 100 mil i don't know the exact numbers but many many millions of people starved to death and many millions of people nearly starved to death and had all kinds of consequences after and it's really one of the most grotesque things i've ever read about or heard about um and yet nobody seems to know about it in just modern day canada and america so what i'm leading to well for me to start there did i get anything horrendous again oh wait so i agree i think we agree on chapters four five and six we agree with that stuff yeah by the way i didn't disagree with i know i know it was it was really like a lack of community because i guess sure no it's a huge challenge to summarize something this enormous is a huge challenge and i i don't think anyone else summarizes it the same way i summarize i have total respect for you go on yeah okay so that that i've read the gulag archipelago and i've read a bunch of stuff about that era it's about the famine and ukraine and all these other things and it's it's haunted for i've read a while ago and i've sort of been re getting into this topic with the stalin biography that i've been reading and it really like resonated with me and kind of horrified me initially just that it happened and now i'm getting a little i guess like do you see any pair what i'm getting to is do you see any parallels to that that russian revolution and the events preceding it to what's going on in america right now and do you think it's do you think i'm reaching to have a sort of abstract concern that some other kind of hostile takeover with horrendous ramifications could be you know the differences are certainly more striking than the similarities what what's most troubling to me about the united states of america is that we've got another period of history in which people seem to think that being right is the only thing that matters um so in other words people put a lot of emphasis on moral superiority rather than say having a pragmatic attitude to talking a problem through and looking at different approaches and trying them out and seeing what works so what you've just said about transforming agriculture in russia if you had you know 50 people in a room and you just sort of asked okay what do you think we can do to transform agriculture in russia and you got some suggestions and then you had a pragmatic attitude like okay well let's try that on a couple of farms and let's try that in a couple of farms and let's meet up again in six months and talk about how it's going and this thing's not work like you know improving agriculture doesn't have to involve mass murder like it's it's so it's so mind-blowingly obvious and you could say a stable improving education or something but there's a tyrannical attitude that begins with i'm morally right i'm morally superior to everyone else in the room anyone who's going to question my judgment and my decision on this deserves to even be imprisoned or tortured and so on and then that proceeds from there logically and takes what might be a kind of harmless idea about how to improve improve agriculture and enslaves and ruins the lives of enormous numbers of people you know force them to do this in a in a tyrannical way and i i just say i mean i'm using agriculture as an example because it's so banal it's so it's so boring it's so uninteresting there's nothing dramatic about improving agriculture it doesn't have to be this way um i would say the only thing or the main thing i can see that americans in 2020 have in common uh with the revolutionaries of that era is this sense that what matters is my personal moral superiority is that i'm right and that my being right entitles me to um you know a kind of carte blanche um totalitarian agenda i do think that's a widespread sentiment uh in american culture and i would say you even see that in things like the approach to global warming you know the people once who have adopted this attitude that they're morally superior because they're trying to save the world and you're not i see that playing out but otherwise i think there were very very few similarities one that i draw people's tension because you can forget it almost all of the extreme protests we've seen implicitly amount to protesters demanding that the government solve their problem for them saying we want the government to do this we want the government we want the government to do a better job that's fundamentally unrevolutionary you know what's revolutionary is when you get out and solve the problem for yourself and say you don't need the government it's much more dangerous you know so i don't see anyone in the political spectrum you know in any significant numbers left right or center who are doing anything other than complaining and expecting the government to solve their problems for them uh and to give a really simple example you know drug addiction so people sometimes protest they want the government to do this or that about drug addiction when people start just doing it when people are saying hey we know the solution drug addiction we're gonna we're gonna do it we don't need the police that's revolutionary and that's that's more dangerous interesting so the the uh the other side of this issue for me because i've i i felt like uh especially at reading i'm literally reading about the russian revolution right now and stalin taking power and all this stuff like that so it's on my mind and i'm drawing these parallels but i'm also really questioning these parallels and i've also been noticing that a lot of uh let's say republicans or whatever are talking about communism as the new as like another boogeyman basically where i'm like i'm just seeing different things where people are like oh the democrats are communists they're going to take a kind of like an extreme version of what i was just sort of mildly proposing could be a concern whatever but i'm seeing it sort of being talked about like and and i'm wondering do you think that that thing that i described the you know the parallel that somebody might draw do you think that that could be used as a sort of way of weaponizing or sort of weaponizing communism as a way of like demonizing the left from the the right they could go oh you guys better not watch out for these activists on the right they're going to you know it's going to be like russia all over again whatever do you feel like that's a narrative that could be pushed forward uh so you know i saw a video recently on sargon of akkad's youtube channel i very rarely look at sargon of a cad and he was in exactly this way demonizing the far left as as if they were already an armed revolutionary force um taking over the government this kind of thing so it was it was exactly the type of thing you've described without repeating what you've just said you could call it red baiting or fear-mongering about the far left and the example he gave to prove his point a quote from a live stream i think it was on twitch of a group of these communists who are pretty famous on on youtube it was four people talking while playing the massively multiplayer online game fall guys and not body shaming anyone here but these were fat lazy people playing a video game and you know chatting over live chat while they were doing it and yes there was some revolutionary rhetoric in there but it's like sargon i think you're kind of missing the forest for the trees here like the main thing to recognize is that these are fat lazy video game addicted people who are sitting around saying stuff that reinforces their own sense of moral superiority and what i've just said about the far left you could say about so many people on the far right you know people on the far right they're playing video games too they're smoking marijuana too they're doing cocaine and sleeping with prostitutes and living this life of total self-indulgence um you know like i mentioned you know part of what made cambodia so violent is just that buddhist background and to come back to deut whose story you've already known comrade doy he went on to torture huge numbers of people that was his job he was a full-time professional torturer what do you want to say you know when he made that decision somebody stole his bicycle and he thought that's the last straw he's gonna go and join the revolution he came from a cultural background and personal background where he thought he could put on a backpack and walk barefoot into the jungle and really live with personal hardship really sleep under a mosquito net you know and i have some experience in that climate in those jungles sleeping under a mosquito now i remember a friend of mine who was a buddhist monk said uh what white people don't understand is that the forest is not quiet here there's the noise of wild animals all night you know the animals are really active through the night and the tropics you know but you know just that kind of resolution just that image of being a man who's willing to go and live in a cave you know that did that did draw on the buddhist background and i'm not saying it's a good thing i mean it's part of why it was so bound to so extreme the people i see whether on the left or the right um you know they're soft and they're soft because they're the video games they're addicted to drugs this is their life this is who they really are i don't put that on as like a footnote i think that's integral to who they are and um that makes a lot of those debates you know just seem kind of silly and ridiculous i'm not honest okay so that kind of leads me to the next question which uh is kind of about like i mean there's so many different issues going on right now um big issue like you know we don't even the election there are things all these all these kind of like talking points in relation to it healthcare and a million different things that are a lot of people are talking about and i feel like it's hard for the average person to distinguish which of these issues are important and which of these are just kind of like once there's like pr just people kind of inserting things into the narrative that are into the news cycle or whatever that so i wonder from your perspective you know we've kind of just identified in your in your opinion the far left extremists let's say aren't you don't consider them to be too much of a threat due to their general softness um what do you think is a threat like what what are you concerned about of all these things going on what do you sort of prioritize as like one of the major issues that you you're kind of looking at with a bit of a worry yeah so look uh this would be a great one to do as a final question because this this is perfect this perfectly brings us back to like the first questions you asked me what i'm worried about is stasis what i'm worried about is complacency what i'm worried about is conformities and what i'm worried about is the perpetuation of the status quo um so i have friends who ask me this kind of question and some of them kind of ask me like what do you think the worst case scenario is if trump gets reelected and i sit back for me the worst case scenario is that everything stays the same for me because i said the very beginning i am a dissident i am a radical in many ways i'm more radical than bernie sanders i'm not a status quo person politically i'm just a very pragmatic down to earth person i'm not an idealist i'm not an ideologue but the kind of pragmatic change i want is connected to my profound dissatisfaction with the site so like just to just to give like a really brief example because it may seem too abstract like some people complain university is a rip-off very common very comfortable right i am someone who is not just complaining when i say university is a rip-off university is an experience at the core of the formation of people's identity in the society they're putting them on their career path it changes people's lives and i see the university system as something that is changing people's lives for the worse that it's kind of bankrupting society as a whole that is making beggars of us all like yeah i i think the university system is a ripoff but i really want to do something about it i don't want to just smoke marijuana and play video games right i mean it may seem shallow but if you really actually want to change the education system when you really actually want to change the world then you start to become a dissident so for me the the greatest greatest danger is that nothing changes when i did an evaluation this is now four years ago something like that three and a half years ago when i did an evaluation of the trump tax cuts there were all these left-wing people who were saying that the trump tax cuts were so terrible there was such an economic disaster that was going to bring about the downfall of american democracy and i did the math you know i have a background in both political science and economics and looking at the numbers i said nope that's wishful thinking the trump tax cuts they're bad but they're not bad enough to change anything like you can have the trump tax cuts and everything can keep on going the same way it's been before people do this same kind of wishful thinking um about climate change that somehow we're facing a crisis so grave so profound so obvious that it's going to force a radical transformation of society people the same thing i talked about this recently with veganism and your health like oh the health effects of eating meat and drinking milk are so bad that it's gonna force this transformation of society no nothing's gonna force it society is gonna change when people are positively motivated to make a change and no sooner we can go on having one [ __ ] you know uh president after another you know bill clinton george w bush obama trump we can go on bombing afghanistan forever and never go bankrupt and never improve democracy and never learn the lessons of history it is totally possible to sustain the iraq war and the afghanistan war and the current levels of deficit spending forever and ever it's the revolution isn't gonna happen by itself like there aren't some there isn't some powerful force that's gonna transform our society you and i we now watching this youtube video we have to make the change why did the french revolution happen a revolution that the communists rarely claim some do why did the french revolution happen right didn't happen because of poverty right the the so-called poor people in paris were the most privileged people in all of france france itself was the wealthiest most opulent country in all of europe economically everything was going great the french empire was doing better and better the french revolution happened in the way that it did when it did because people actually had new ideas they actually had new ideas and aspirations to make a better society you know and some disasters ensued and some massacres ensued but yeah you know people get new ideas they get motivated to make the world a better place and then things change you know something something happens in reality you know the constitution of canada was written during my lifetime what's called the the patriation of the constitution it's not some ancient document people look up to as something sacred and hallowed the way americans do in france their constitution was written after world war ii but we have these deeply conformist attitudes that nothing can change that no better society is possible not even to the extent of being willing to look at denmark and switzerland you know look it's it's already radical to say hey we have something we can really learn from denmark we could do something better to look at these examples or japan or taiwan and say hey there's something we can learn from other countries and other cultures we really can fundamentally do better for our citizens and we can do to better people so no for me you know the the greatest threat to the status quo is just the continuation of the status quo um we can have another president like george w bush or like obama who fundamentally changes nothing at all you can't look at the systems we have in place right now whether parliament or united states congress to bring about this kind of change we have to look to ourselves and by my own definition as i've already said that does make me a radical that does make me a distant that does make me someone who is perhaps a little bit more dangerous than bernie sanders that doesn't have to be the last question if you want to end it there it's great or if you want to switch topics i'm happy to talk about anything at all