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Oct. 16, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:19:39
Enemy of the State

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You know how he got these scars?
But the backstory keeps changing, and so there is no backstory.
I mean, who knows how he got those scars?
I think there's this common thing in Hollywood movies, but probably art of all sorts of genres, where we want the villain to have this grotesque backstory, and that kind of explains it.
It's like, oh, he was abused as a child or something like that.
But I always find that actually to be a little bit cheap.
Yes, I agree.
But one of the interesting things about the Joker is that he has no backstory.
No one knows who he is.
And so he is kind of pure in his way.
He lies in that scene where he's talking with Harvey Dent.
And he says, you all are schemers.
Gordon's a schemer.
The mob has their schemes.
You have their schemes.
Look where that got you.
And he's obviously being...
Ridiculous on one level, because he is the most masterful schemer of all time.
I mean, his schemes have three layers.
You know, you solve the first riddle, then there's this new one that, you know, he wants you to solve the first riddle, but there's another element to it.
And then there's a whole other element to it.
You know, he's plans within plans.
He's amazing.
But he is kind of, so he's being a little bit ridiculous or maybe lying to himself to a degree, but he is being kind of like pure and honest where he just acts and he just has a scheme.
Like he wants to bring about...
He wants to overturn society and make everyone like him, make everyone murderous and grasping and sick and twisted, but not for any reason, certainly not for any political reasons.
He is a pure anarchist.
You're right.
What's interesting is that he's never complaining, and that's really...
It's really refreshing, so to speak, to see someone really owning his acts.
I mean, he's not blaming anyone for what he did.
And he's more interesting than Liam Neeson's character was talking about rolling back crime and corruption.
He just wants to...
Yeah, and it's like he wants to do works of art, actually.
That's why you don't...
When he says that Gossam needs a better class of criminals, you don't find that kind of criminal very easily in the news.
I mean, he's like an artist.
He just wants to make maybe not something beautiful, but something great with...
I think that's definitely Jack Nicholson's Joker from the Tim Burton film, where explicitly he thinks of himself as an artist, and he's making these grotesque, living tableau of mutilated women, and he's painting the art with spray paint and all this.
I think that's definitely true, and that probably is an aspect of Ledger.
But I think in the Nolans world, I think he really is, he's a pure anarchist, and he wants to destroy political order.
And he wants to show that...
In social order.
In social order, too, yeah.
And he wants to show that, you know, deep down, everyone is an animal.
And that...
You know, the political order of Harvey Dent or the kind of, you know, subterranean, dark political order of Bruce Wayne and Batman that we're all animals underneath.
It is this just kind of pure, unadulterated anarchy, anarchism.
And I guess it is in a way a...
Our nightmare of a libertarian, you know, where usually the criticism of libertarianism, which might have a large kernel of truth to it, to be honest, is that, oh, you know, but if we didn't have the government, you know, we'd all just be eating each other.
And, you know, and that's, you know, it's funny.
This movie was created from a kind of right-wing criticism of libertarians, you could say.
Because this movie definitely, I think The Dark Knight is an authoritarian film.
I think its message ultimately is that anarchy and libertarianism is evil, and that we very well might need to break the rules to save the rules.
And even classical liberalism, because we have to break the rules.
Yeah, we have to break the rules.
When you take the vote, the vote on the boat, you know, on the ferry boat, when they vote and they can't reach a decision, it's one of the best criticisms of democracy on film, actually.
I don't want to break the flow, but I'll just throw in that the one thing in the film that bugs me a little bit that I noticed when I watched it in preparation for this was the scene where he burns the money.
Like, I know, okay, I understand that with that scene, they're trying to communicate that he's really hardcore and he's a real idealist.
He's not just a criminal.
But realistically, how does he run his organization without any money?
I mean...
With lunatics.
Yeah.
Yeah, because there's a link with the first, you know...
With Batman Begins, because at some point, all the lunatics from Dr. Cranes, you know, mental institutions are freed with some kind of, you know, electronic gate system that fails.
And then he recruits them all.
And actually, one of the shooters at, you know, the parade that tries to shoot the mayor, one of them is obviously of a mental institution.
And actually, what's more interesting is that he's got a Jewish name, but that's maybe a coincidence.
And, you know, he doesn't really need to pay them because they're all crazy.
And I don't know.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that's one of Nolan's explicit points, and that's why he has the mob in there, and the Joker is not part of the mob.
Because in Burden's film, which I like, I mean, I think there's some good aspects to it, you know, Jack Napier is this kind of trumped-up mobster, and he's like a super mobster, and a flamboyant.
Which was big in New York in the 80s.
Yeah, definitely.
Like these Gucci gangsters, they called them.
I think he was kind of modeled after them.
Yeah, definitely.
In that film.
Yeah, he was kind of modeled after a flamboyant capitalist, maybe even Donald Trump, one could say.
Who knows?
Well, also, there were actual gangsters, like John Gotti, you know, who, like, everyone knew what they were, but they embraced the line blade anyway.
I kind of saw Nicholson as being sort of, like, modeled after them.
Yeah, no doubt.
But I think within Nolan's world, it's different because the mob, you know, as they say, like the mob, I think Alfred says this, like the mob in desperation, they turn to someone they didn't understand.
And so the mob are about money.
I mean, they want their 5% and they're not going to do anything that isn't profitable.
They're just kind of like a, they're capitalists just...
On the illegal front.
But he is different, and so they can't understand him.
And I do think that burning of the pile of money thing was just one of the best scenes, because it expressed visually this divide.
And it's like, we need a higher class of criminals.
We need pure anarchists who are going to take down the whole society.
At the end of the day, the mob are parasites.
They just kind of leech off hard-working small businesses and stuff.
They're just these kind of bad guys who benefit from the system.
But the Joker is a true criminal in the sense that he wants the whole system to be brought down.
And just like, it does seem like every villain in this Nolan...
And that seems to be the thing at the heart that he and his brother fear, is that they sense that there's some big question or there's some big threat to social order in the 21st century.
And you need a Batman to take it down.
And you're going to ultimately need to break the rules and lie to people and maybe engage in a...
I don't know how you can, you know, I mean, look, this is not a, some people can say this is, oh, this is a conservative, a lot of people have said this, these are conservative movies, they're against, you know, particularly with Bane, he's like a Occupy Wall Street kind of person.
But you have to understand that the way in which this is a conservative movie, or a conservative series.
And it's a very, you know, it basically, I think Nolan's message, and I don't, again, I don't necessarily like this because I feel like I've been opposed to a lot of these things throughout my political career, but I mean, Nolan's message is basically the people ultimately can't be trusted.
They are animals and they will resort to chaos if you let them.
And that you need to break the rules in order to save the rules.
And we might very well need a massive surveillance state in order to keep an eye on the public.
I mean, it's a profoundly authoritarian, you know, you could say George Bush era film.
I was just going to say the whole deal with the surveillance.
When, you know, Morgan Freeman, you know, who's always God, even if he's not actually playing God.
Right.
You know, it's like, oh, you know, it's far more dangerous to have this surveillance system set up than to have the Joker loose in this city.
Like, that's such a Bush-era liberal argument.
Right.
I mean, I have to say, I happen to agree.
I mean, I don't think surveillance is good, although I thought they...
They overdid it a little bit in that scene.
Because, I mean, like, the Joker's about to kill thousands of people, and he's going to stand on, you know, we shouldn't have this machine.
It's evil.
You know, I thought it was a little bit heavy-handed, but...
Don't we criticize the surveillance state because...
We are not part of it.
We criticize the surveillance state because we don't like the people in charge, rightly.
We think they're awful, they don't have our ends, they're destroying our culture and heritage and things like that.
Also, I don't think that all this stuff that they do actually does the things that they talk about, like preventing terrorism.
I don't think that's really what it's about.
Right, right, right.
I agree.
In the film, in the Nolan film, the good guys are very pure.
They're trying to save the society.
I don't really believe the people who came up with Homeland Security and behind the NSA and everything.
I think any public good that happens is incidental to their actual reasons for wanting to have these powers.
I might very well agree, but I think my point is that if we were involved in the state, wouldn't we be making the same arguments?
I mean, if we're dishonest with ourselves?
I would hope we would be somewhat...
Wouldn't we be like, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.
We've got to get the bad guys.
Come on.
none of this wishy-washy crap.
Look, it is what it is.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, and I'm not saying it's bad that we do have people like...
Yeah, but only when it's useful.
Right.
I mean, we've been under mass surveillance for years and they can't catch people who are.
You know, all these guys who did, we don't know about Nice yet, but these guys who did the Bataclan shooting, I mean...
The police had a fight on them, but since they're busy spying on everyone, they can't really deal with the really dangerous guys.
Just the year before, no, the year before the year before, so in 2013, there were all these demonstrations against gay marriage in France.
And I know people where, you know, their phone was tapped.
Not their phone, but the line was, you know, being spied upon by the police.
And of course, there were no dangerous types.
It was more boring, conservative guys.
And the police were really investing time and workforce and resources into spying on Catholic conservatives.
And at the same time, there were Muslim terrorists, terrorists.
You know, staging mass shootings in France.
So I agree with you that the state should not be...
Because I like Snowden and the other guy, Julian Assange, because, you know, they play a role in the unraveling of the current order.
But when you really listen to what Snowden would like as a society, it's...
I really don't find anything in common with them.
They're just, you know, temporary allies because they're pointing in the right direction.
But I agree with you on the other hand that, yeah, it's necessary to have surveillance.
One thing is true is that the way it's used now is not really useful.
I totally agree.
I mean, we're all on the same page.
I guess I'm just kind of making the philosophical point.
And it's what you just said, Romain, in the sense of, like, I agree.
I admire Snowden.
I admire Sange, at the very least, for their bravery and boldness.
They're sort of like benign jokers, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
They are kind of joker figures, undoubtedly.
Especially Assange, actually.
Right.
More than Snowden, with Libertarian.
Yeah, but they do seem to have, you know, their worldview does seem to be extremely naive.
The way I would also describe it in the sense of the surveillance state is, to go back to Schmidt, I'm going to Schmidt, I'm calling him on Schmidt a lot these days.
That's good.
Back to Germany.
Yeah.
That could be the name of the broadcast.
But what he would probably add, the way he would say, the way he would talk about this if he were alive is that one of the reasons why we dislike...
the surveillance stuff is because it's spying on everyone.
And so you do have this sense of, is my computer webcam, which I'm looking at right now, is this actually looking at me?
Why would anyone want to do that?
I'm just here, you know, working on the computer and picking my nose.
Like, I don't, you know, but I don't want anyone to...
I think it's also because, you know, the world we live in is this post-American world where you are a citizen.
You're not part of a race or a people or a tribe.
You know, everyone could be a citizen.
And so we, in a way, have to spy on everyone.
And the state...
Because it's based on liberty and freedom and human rights and blah, blah, blah.
It can't have an enemy.
It is a liberal world where you can't declare enemies.
You can't say, well, the Islamist world's different than us.
They can't come here.
They've got to leave if they're here.
You can't say that.
In this world we live in because of the basic aspects of these states that we live in.
And so it has to spy on everyone.
It's like in the airport where it's like, can't you just use profiling?
Don't search a nine-year-old girl or a 90-year-old woman.
Just search.
You know, Muslim men between the ages of 20 and 40. And, you know, why don't you do that?
And we say that, but it's like to do that would be to go against its values, which are abstract liberalism.
Yes.
Everybody has to be treated the same.
Right.
And so we all have to be surveilled.
We all have to be searched at airports.
Well, I remember a few years ago, well, actually more than a few years ago, this would have been not long after 9-11, John Dingell, who was the...
I think he'd been in Congress for something like 50 years at that time.
He was going through an airport and he had an artificial hip from a war injury he had sustained.
And it kept setting off the metal detector.
So they actually took him aside and strip-searched him.
On one hand, you're kind of like, okay, at least they're sticking to their principles.
But on the other, it's like, was that really a valuable...
Use of resources to strip search a congressman.
And also, we'll spend trillions of dollars on this crazy airport security and surveillance state, whereas we could just spend a few million and just do it tightly targeted.
Or just ban Muslims.
Sorry, but...
We could just do things for millions of dollars, but because we believe in liberalism so hard, we're going to spend trillions of dollars doing this ineffective nonsense.
But anyway, it's a movie, so it's an idealized form.
And it's a Hollywood film, so it's not going to stray too far from the liberal line.
No, but it also kind of shows that authoritarian personality with all of us that we ultimately want a Batman spying so that he can catch the Joker.
Well, but wouldn't you say, I mean, we discussed this in the last podcast, and I think all three of us agreed that we identified much more with the League of Shadows than with Batman.
The Joker is a little bit harder for people like us.
To identify with, but when some of the lines that they make Bruce Wayne slash Batman say in the film just make you grimace, it makes me want to root for the Joker.
What do you mean?
You're wrong, Joker.
Gotham is full of people who are good.
Ready to believe in good.
It's so ridiculous.
But also, let's face it, I think you would agree, Richard.
I mean, we do want chaos in order to kind of break the system.
I mean, maybe unlike the Joker, I don't believe in a permanent state of anarchy, chaos.
I think we can achieve something better that still has some kind of social order.
But I think you and I would agree.
Oh, I totally agree.
But we're tactical anarchists, you could say.
Yes.
But the Joker really is an idealized anarchy.
And that's why you should respect him.
But the Joker is obviously a terrifying figure.
You know, if we were in charge of the government, we would have him arrested.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can't have somebody like that just blowing things up.
But yeah, let's...
Let's go there.
I think there are a lot of other aspects of the film that I want to talk about, but you can't avoid this appallingly sentimental scene in this movie.
But I think also there's a flip side to the scene.
Because there's a way that you're supposed to see that scene, but then there's kind of like the real message that seems to be conveyed.
And I'm of course referring to the scene with the two...
The two ships, the two ferries, that one is full of these, what is it, Blackgate prison, all these convicted felons, murderers, rapists, so on.
And the other is full of the good people of Gotham.
And, you know, the Joker rigs both boats with...
He seems to like gasoline tanks.
That's his weapon of choice.
It's pretty simple.
Maybe there's something to that.
It's all about oil.
The 2000s, wars for oil.
Who knows?
Maybe not.
So the Joker basically wants to prove how awful people really are and that both bloats are going to blow each other up and so on.
And they're going to willingly commit murder and so on.
But you reach this hugely sentimental aspect of the scene where the good people, the bourgeois Gothamites...
You know, the police say, look, we're not doing this.
We're not going to just kill these prisoners.
But then the bourgeois Gothamites are kind of like, well, hold on now.
You know, they made their choice.
You know, they're going to do the same to us.
Let's do it to them first.
You know, kind of thing.
And then Nolan gives this wildly sentimentalized vision of the prisoners, where you ultimately have this good Muslim, or apparently this big black, you know, Mike Tyson.
He's the magic Negro.
But they're praying afterward.
It just struck me as that it was kind of Muslim-y, but who knows?
Maybe he's a Christian.
But, you know, they're like, I'm going to do what you should have done, you know, an hour ago.
And he throws the detonator out the ferry window.
I thought that was a little unrealistic.
I mean, at least maybe it's my own Hollywood idea of what prisoners are like, but it seems a little unrealistic.
Yeah, but he is a magic Negro, and he's this, like, force of pure good, I guess, after he was converted in prison.
But I think what's interesting, and why I think this scene is redeemable, why it's not just pure sentimental garbage, is that you don't depict the people as...
The bourgeois Gothamites as ultimately good.
It would be one thing if you did some scene where one guy wanted to blow up the other boat, but the rest of the Gotham people were like, no, it's against our principles.
We might have to die, but what's worse?
Breaking a principle or death?
This kind of thing.
But you don't have that.
Basically, all of them want to kill the prisoners, understandably, but they're afraid to go through with it.
They can't.
And so the one person that Nolan focuses on, you know, is this middle class Republican voting, you know, businessman or something.
And he's like, well, I'll do it.
But he doesn't have the courage to actually do it.
He doesn't have the courage to act.
And so what it's basically saying, you know, the way most people read that scene is that, oh, we are inherently good.
And that's how Batman reads it.
He goes, oh, Gotham, it's full of goody-goody liberal assholes, just like me.
But he's wrong.
What basically it's full of is cowards who are afraid to act.
And so Nolan is actually giving a profoundly pessimistic view of bourgeois people.
It's Nietzsche.
Yeah.
Actually, it's pure Zara Swastra.
You know, when he says that the only difference, of course I'm paraphrasing and it's more complicated than that, but he says that the difference between an honest person and a criminal is the fear to be hung by the state, actually.
It's really what happens because you have this guy who is depicted as a businessman, but he really looks a kind of nasty person, not really better than a criminal, and he doesn't dare switch the bomb because he just fears he's going to go to jail or even be executed.
And so what it's showing is that democracy is, you know, you can have democracy, but at the end of the day, you have to have an authority act.
And at some point, someone's got to be exceptional and make that decision.
I mean, again, I'm being very schmitty in here.
But even if you want to vote on something, at some point, some sovereign entity has to act in an exceptional way.
The state can commit murder because the state does not play by the rules that we all do.
And so, you know, the state could say, okay, I agree.
This is rationally the better idea.
We should kill the prisoners.
Let's do it.
But the state is immune from normal laws.
But if that kind of, yeah, I agree.
The way he's depicted, he looks kind of like a petty bourgeois guy or some kind of, maybe kind of sleazy or greasy guy.
But he would ultimately have to be prosecuted if he did that.
So, you know, it's like you have to have the state that breaks its own laws.
And this is the contradiction of sovereignty itself, which is that the state creates laws, but then the state itself breaks them.
But in a way, the Enlightenment found a solution with the separation between executive and legislative powers.
So when you have to vote on a long-term law or bill or solution or decision, you can have a parliament, you know, discuss for months or even years actually on something.
And then if you have to react in the minute or the hour, you need the executive power.
And the American system was supposed to be fairly balanced between the two because you have the president.
Who can decide to strike, but then if it gets permanent, he has to get a vote by the Congress.
But even this system doesn't work, actually.
Batman would be a kind of president figure, but he fails as well.
Which is, of course, the theme of the third one, but we'll talk about it later.
Well, I have to say, in this scene with the boats, I always thought the Joker is showing a little bit of the liberal side himself, because it's sort of an experiment in order to prove that people are inherently bad, which is basically like Thomas Hobbes, who, of course, is one of the founders of liberalism, that we have to have these...
Well, okay, maybe I'm taking it too far, because, of course, Hobbes' argument was that that's why we need...
Society is in order to keep that in check.
Hobbes is a transitionary figure.
I think Hobbes is a founder of liberalism.
I agree with you.
But he's kind of in that transitionary stage so that when we look back at Hobbes from the 21st century, he looks like an authoritarian reactionary.
But if you look at Hobbes from the 10th century, he's clearly pushing towards...
A liberal conception.
Because Hobbes' conception is that it's a war of all against all, but in order to secure our rights as individuals, we come together to form the state.
So it's a radically liberal, Lockean almost, notion.
But again, when we read Hobbes, we see some of these aspects of the Leviathan and the sovereign state that it's like, oh my god, this is like fascism or something.
But that's in a way to misunderstand him contextually.
I was a little bit surprised that somebody who's an anarchist would want to conduct such an experiment to try to prove that people are inherently bad.
At least to me, it doesn't seem entirely consistent, but it's still a great scene.
Or maybe not inherently bad, but they're inherently selfish.
Maybe that's a better way of putting it.
Which itself is, I mean, of course, that's the basis of capitalism right there.
Yeah.
But capitalism can't really work if there's not some sovereign entity creating the order.
You know, like private property.
We all have a sense of private property.
A dog has a sense of private property.
This is my bone.
They mark territory by urinating.
Tons of animals do this.
We do have that animalistic concept of private property.
But this notion that I can own one millionth of the Apple corporation by purchasing one share through E-Trade, this is so abstract.
It's ridiculous in a way.
And so it's a total construct.
And so the only way that our abstracted notions of property could ever function is when there is one sovereign entity that creates an order.
So it's like you need violence and you need the state in order to have any kind of semblance of society.
But it's not natural.
Like capitalism and property and all this kind of stuff.
It's not like that would arise naturally.
I think libertarians are just totally, completely out to lunch when they say things like this.
Even the individual.
Yeah, the concept of the individual does not exist without the state.
Yeah, because nature is tribal.
And, you know, all this state of nature thing...
Which you can find in Hobbes, Locke, and later you have Rousseau in Switzerland and France.
These guys had the excuse of not knowing what prehistoric times were, but when you look at how humans lived, it was only tribes.
The individual didn't even exist, actually.
Even the alpha guy of the tribe.
He was not really an individual because, of course, he could lay all the women and take the best shares of the mammoths.
But at the end of the day, he was responsible for his people, which a libertarian would deny, actually.
He would say, no, I'm only responsible for myself.
And someone who would do that in the Ice Age would die in maybe 48 hours.
Oh yeah, this notion that we were born free, but society and politics put us in chains.
Bullshit.
Rousseau.
Exactly, Rousseau.
Yeah, exactly.
Rousseau.
Rousseau should be put in...
You say it more correctly.
Yeah, Rousseau.
One of those French...
Is that a town in Texas?
Well, it is, but I'm referring to an evil French philosopher who believed in surrender and not eating hamburgers.
And you can't trust such a fellow.
But anyway...
Yeah, alright.
So, do you want to talk more about, do you want to leave that aspect?
This whole movie is about sovereignty.
I mean, the whole, Nolan's whole trilogy is about sovereignty, in my opinion.
But I guess we can talk a little bit about Batman and Dent, or do you want to add something?
Well, I was just going to say, you mentioned violence, and I mean, one of the interesting aspects of the film, although it's a classic trope for this kind of film, and also Westerns, is that At first, Batman is the savior, but of course he has to use violence in order to restore the social order, as you said, and then he ends up becoming the criminal because the bourgeois state can't absorb somebody like Batman.
I mean, he can't be regularized.
I mean, I know you can say in the context of the film he's taking the fall for dents, but still, I mean, in the symbolic sense, I think that that's important.
You know, he begins as the savior but ends as the criminal because the state, you know, just can't process, a liberal state anyway, can't process somebody like the Batman.
Well, I think this is the degree to which this film is tragic, is that?
Because, you know, it's a funny thing about Nolan's Batman.
And we talked a little bit about this when we were discussing Batman Begins, is that in the Burden era and in other...
Depictions of Batman.
It's deeply psychological.
Bruce Wayne just has to become Batman.
This is the shadow side to himself.
The unconscious side to himself is that he wants to dress up in fetishistic leather costumes and go beat up people.
Like a Watchman.
Yeah, yeah.
But I think Christopher Nolan's Batman is very different because his whole suit and things like that, it does have a Halloween costume-like aspect to it, but it's all very practical.
He is basically the military-industrial complex.
But he doesn't want to be Batman.
He almost feels guilty that he's Batman.
And he ultimately wants Batman to go away.
There's some of these lines where when Bruce Wayne is speaking with Rachel, where he says, you know that time...
Let me find the exact quote.
He says, you know that time when we wouldn't need a Batman?
It's coming.
You know that day that you once told me about when Gotham would no longer need Batman?
It's coming.
And so Bruce basically wants to overcome himself.
He wants Batman to go away.
Because he's a liberal.
Exactly.
He doesn't want somebody like Batman to have to exist.
Absolutely, yeah.
And so he's like a reluctant user of violence.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Richard.
It's so typical of present-day Hollywood movies and TV shows that the hero always has to hate himself and have a dark past and be at war with himself.
The hero of 50 years ago who just stands for something and is upright and pure, that doesn't exist anymore.
I mean, the hero always has to be a split personality with a dark past and regrets his own actions.
I mean, you see this time and time again in Hollywood these days.
I see they're sort of trying to fit Batman into that mold.
I like the film and I think it works, but it is very typical.
I love these films.
I just try to be critical of them.
I would say I would return to this hero that I've talked about before, the John Wayne's Ethan character from The Searchers.
It is important that Ethan is who he is, but he is also...
Very similar in this way of someone who is compelled to use violence, but almost has a sense of a certain, at least with society, there's a certain sense of guilt about it.
At the very end of that film, he is shunned, effectively.
The very famous ending of The Searchers is that everyone else goes into the house, they go into the domestic sphere, but Ethan, John Wayne, who is this violent, almost Indian-like figure, like a true warrior, has to...
Well, that's how a lot of Westerns end.
The cowboy who wins, he has to leave town at the end because then he is the destructive force that's left once all the bad guys have gone away.
Right, he's killed all the bad guys, but then he's still bad.
And he can't be tolerated.
I think that's basically how Nolan slash...
Bruce Wayne feels about Batman.
I think even Harvey Dent says this, Batman doesn't want to do this forever.
He's just waiting for someone to rise up and do this in a public, civic duty kind of way.
To run for Congress.
Right.
Whatever.
Yeah, I mean, literally.
He's running for DA, but, you know.
Dent refers to Rome, and in Rome, there could be a dictator.
It was perfectly compatible with the laws, because it was maybe, I think it was for one year, that full power was granted to this dictator, and he had to use it for good, because...
To do good because otherwise it could be executed at the end.
But actually, in all systems, you have similar measures that exist.
But Dan's point is that Batman is just doing what the state should do and doesn't dare do or doesn't want to do.
The most fascistic scene in the film, I think, because what does he say?
Because then Rachel says, well, but the last guy who did that was named Caesar and he never gave up his power.
Doesn't Dent say something like, well, you either become the villain or you die as a hero?
I'm like, that's such a fascistic.
At the end of that, Bruce says, okay, Harvey, I'm sold.
So basically, Bruce was like waiting.
He was almost baiting him to go there.
You know, and it's almost like, but wait a second, you know, banning all Muslims?
You mean we're going to deport people and break them?
Well, so be it.
That's what we have to do.
And it's like Bruce is just waiting for him to say that.
And then once he does say that, once he reveals his authoritarian personality, then Bruce is like, all right, I'm going to use my other capitalist friends and we're going to...
Yeah, because he's got a green light.
Yeah.
Because the G.A. says so.
Exactly.
It's this weird thing where Batman is like the shadow of the state in these films, in Nolan's films.
Not in other ones.
I think Nolan's...
This is why I think these are kind of like a...
It's a masterpiece of sorts of pop art because it is unique.
And in this film, it's like Batman is the shadow of the government.
And so the government is above board and public and doesn't wear a mask, but Batman represents this shadow self.
Especially his armory.
You know, all his weapons and the mass surveillance system, it's all kind of shadow contracts.
Yeah.
That Wayne Enterprises is doing, but not officially, because it's in secret buildings.
And it's of the books, actually, as one of the characters notices, you know, the man who wants to blackmail Bruce Wayne and Morgan Freeman.
I never remember the name.
Lucius Fox.
Oh, yeah.
Lucius Fox.
He's basically just playing Morgan Freeman.
So every weapon is something they are just testing to, you know, then apply it to the army.
You know, the Kevlar uniform and all these things, they just want to bring it to Iraq, but first Batman has to see if it really works.
Yeah, he is the military-industrial complex.
I mean, that's what Batman represents.
I think there's this ironic aspect that, again, I think people don't really see it this way because we know that Batman's good, and so we understand and we're always giving him our sympathy.
But in the film, Bruce Wayne creates a ruse of an alliance between Lao and his Chinese company.
And Wayne Enterprises.
And the only reason he does it is because he wants to look at their books and basically see what illegal mob activity is going on.
But the irony is that when the little accountant looks at Wayne Enterprises' books, he's like, holy shit.
You guys are funding a totally illegal, violent paramilitary in Gotham City.
And, you know, it's this, again, it's kind of like, only I can be exceptional.
You know, we can be corrupt because we're good, but, like, other people are corrupt.
Ooh, we better investigate that.
But, yeah, I mean, there's this, at the end of the film, you know, after Harvey has gone nuts and he's become, you know, Harvey Two-Face, he's become just, like, pure violence, he says to, and it's, again, very, Profoundly Schmidian.
It's a Schmidian movie.
He says, you thought we could be decent men in an indecent world.
And he's talking to Gordon, Commissioner Gordon.
You thought we could lead by example.
You thought the rules could be bent but not break.
You were wrong.
The world is cruel.
And the only morality in a cruel world is chance.
So he is kind of almost aligned with the Joker.
He's like, you can't be good in this world.
We all are awful.
And so what I'm going to do is seek just pure revenge.
I'm going to kill your kid in front of your face.
I'm going to kill all these bad mobsters.
And the only thing that is holding this together is chance.
It's the flip of a coin.
But before that...
You know, his coin had two sides that were identical heads.
It was a mendacious coin.
He never really went on chance.
He would always say, like, oh, flip on it, ha ha ha.
But it was, again, making that point that the state has to make its own luck.
You know, the state has to lie.
The state has to be exceptional in order to keep up this ruse of society.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, that's, well, we've talked about it already, but yeah, that's the contradiction inherent in democracy, of course.
I mean, well, and also what we were talking about with Batman, I mean, the Joker actually predicts it, you know, when he tells him earlier in the film, he says, oh, they'll have to cast you out.
Like a leper.
Yeah, I mean, of course he ends up doing it voluntarily, but perhaps it's because he knows it's going to happen sooner or later anyway, so he's just like...
Okay, I'll just embrace this.
Yeah, the Joker was very insightful there.
Because Batman says, in that scene, in the interrogation scene, Batman says, you're just a thug who kills for money.
And the Joker says, you're not one of them.
Yeah, he says, don't say that.
You're sounding like them, but you're not one of them, even if you want to be.
That's really profound, because it shows who Batman is.
Batman is just trying to act like a cop.
He's like, ah, he's a thug who does it for money.
But no, the Joker doesn't do it for money.
That's the whole point.
And he's like, look, all of these guys that you're trying to act like, they're just going to cast you out.
You are a freak.
And they might lank you now because you're doing the dirty work that they are either...
Unwilling to do or incapable of doing.
You're doing it for them.
But the second they don't find you useful is the second you are going to be a criminal and they're going to hunt you down.
Yeah, which of course is absolutely true.
Yeah.
In the more recent Batman v Superman, Ben Affleck's Batman just says, he's like, Alfred, we've always been criminals.
I don't know, do you want to talk about that Batman's one rule of not killing?
It's almost like it gets to this aspect that deep down even Batman's a liberal.
Yeah, he doesn't even kill the Joker.
Yeah, which is just completely stupid.
He saves the Joker.
It's a reference to Tim Burton's movie because in the first one, Batman...
Let him fall from this high, is it a cathedral or a very tall building?
And this time, you think it's going to be a reference to Burton, but then there's a kind of flip.
He manages to make him hang from the building and say that he should be in a padded cell or something like that.
Yeah, under the control of the right authorities.
And, you know, when we discussed Batman Begins, we said that, you know, when he's in China or somewhere in Asia and he shows mercy to a criminal and then maybe 50 guys, 50 good guys die.
And at the same time, I mean, the Joker has killed maybe at this point.
Tens or hundreds of people.
And it's really important for him to make him live so he can rot in a cell.
It's madness, actually.
But it's a very socially conscious sort of thing to do.
He's got to be sensible to the people.
You've got to go before a judge.
Again, all these judges are corrupt.
We've got to prove that.
It is funny that he didn't save Ra's Ra's Shal Ghul.
Yeah, but he's really cowardly in this scene because he says, I'm not going to kill you, but I'm not going to save you either.
Right.
But he literally saves the Joker.
Again, he can't pull the trigger.
Right.
Yeah, and he saves the Joker, right?
But it is that just liberal soul to Batman.
I've heard some people talk about, oh, he doesn't want to use a gun because that reminds him of his parents' death.
And I get that.
It's too Freudian.
Yeah, right.
But that's kind of a psychologicalization of Batman, which makes sense in its way.
But in the Nolanverse, Batman can't kill for this deep moral reason, that Batman is a liberal.
Batman ultimately believes in the potential in every human being.
Again, it's kind of crazy.
It's a paused Batman.
Have either of you ever read the comics of Batman?
Yeah, I mean, I used to read them when I was a kid.
I read them all the time.
Does Batman kill people in the comic books?
Well, he did early on.
At some point, this all changed, where there was this no-killing rule, and there were oftentimes kind of artful ways of making him not kill someone.
But early on, in the very first Batman comic, he throws people into chemical vats.
And he has killed in the comic books.
A lot of people were mad at Zack Snyder for having Batman just shoot people with his gun on a plane.
I don't know if you guys saw Batman v Superman, but he flew the Batwing and just blew the thugs away.
You know, thinking about it.
So it's definitely a different version of Batman, but, you know, it's actually, it's totally legitimate.
The very early Batman would just kill with abandon.
And similar, like the Shadow, the character that probably most inspired Batman, I mean, he carried revolvers, or not revolvers, but he carried guns and would just blow criminals away.
You can tell that he first came about in the 30s, right?
Yeah.
And people wouldn't have thought anything back then.
I mean, oh, they're bad guys.
Yeah.
Exactly.
We've become soft.
But I think Nolan, you could say to his credit, he turned that into an ideology.
You know, where it's like that is his one rule.
And so even Batman's liberal at some level.
Of course, he gives the code to Morgan Freeman so that the Patriot Act device, whatever it is, self-destructs.
I mean, come on.
He's only a liberal, but he's basically a Bush-era Democrat.
We'll use this once because it's a bad man.
But after we get rid of the Joker, all of the cowardly liberals of Gotham will be free.
Yes, because we must honor people's right to their privacy.
That comes before anything else.
Right.
It makes you appreciate James Bond, too.
Granted, he didn't do this at the end.
At the end of the last movie, he said, I'm out of bullets, he doesn't kill Blofeld.
But at least the James Bond of old, he'll just...
Push someone off a cliff or just shoot them in cold blood.
There is something masculine about willing to do it.
He's licensed to kill.
He takes pleasure in killing the enemy at the end of the film.
There's something about Nolan's Batman where he can't do that.
He can't take pleasure.
You could imagine a scene where Batman grabs the Joker and just throws him to his death.
Because they're in a construction site.
Or gets Ra's al Ghul and just strangles him with his bare hands.
That would be interesting and something that James Bond would do.
But this, again, the Nolan Batman, he's just this liberal at some level.
And he's almost sexual.
Because he doesn't have sex unlike other versions of Batman, like Michael Keaton, for example.
He doesn't have sex and he doesn't kill.
And it has a relation between the two as we, you know, it's heroes and senators, but it's also what you find in A Clockwork Orange, for example.
He can't defend himself, but he can't have sex either.
Yeah.
He's the perfect liberal white man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's an allegory of the late Western man.
I think we...
We see him have sex in the whole trilogy only once with...
Talia.
Yeah, Marion Cotillard's character.
I had forgotten the name.
And it's only because temporarily he's not Batman or Bruce Wayne either because he's just a bum at this point.
That's a good point.
The one time he's able to consummate something is when he loses both identities.
Yeah, when he's not overburdened by all his two responsibilities as Bruce Wayne and Batman.
Right.
Because he's neither at this point.
But when he's Bruce Wayne and Batman, he's always holding out.
He's like, one day...
Yeah, he's important.
One day, Batman won't be necessary.
And then we'll have sex.
Maybe I'm in the friend zone now, but maybe...
We can lay tons of bitches.
I could ask for her consent and then we could make sweet love.
I would ask her before I take each action.
Is this okay?
Can I call you back in three days?
I didn't buy dinner in order to have sex.
Trust me.
I truly love you.
Well, you know, if you wouldn't mind, maybe we could go back to Wayne Manor and, well, you know.
He's just this infinite man.
It's true.
That was actually a comment Nietzsche once made about Wagner's operas.
He's like, notice that in Wagner's operas, no heroes are ever shown having sex.
And he says that's because they can't.
Right?
He criticized Wagner for having heroes who weren't too pure.
Yeah, exactly.
But if you think about the other...
That's why Wagner is so different.
If you think about other operas, like a Verdi character, a Rossini character, or...
Bizet's Carmen or something.
It's all about sexual energy and frenzy and stuff like that.
But yeah, in these kind of like idealized pure people, they're angels without genitalia.
But yeah, I mean, look, we're kind of joking about this, but I think the reason why it's funny is because it's so true.
It seems to get at the essence of his character.
Yeah, and only Nolan's character.
Well, he's a knight.
He's a dark one.
Oh, sorry.
Right.
Yeah, he is a knight.
No, he's just in other versions.
Michael Keaton is not...
He's a kind of outcast for Batman, but I like this guy.
But at least he has girlfriends.
Yeah, he kills some thugs.
Especially the main ones, because he also kills a penguin.
I'm not sure.
I don't really remember the second one, but it's only Nolan's.
Yeah.
So that's why it really sets this trilogy apart from the other comics and movies.
And I think there was a series to a TV series.
And I think he used to kill criminals in this series, too.
So it's really about Nolan.
I do believe it's particular to Nolan.
I think in the 1990s Batman the Animated Series, I don't believe he kills.
Even the older one, because there was a new one, and maybe one which was made in the 80s or 70s.
I'm not sure I was a kid when I was watching that.
Yeah, it might be different.
But whatever the case, this is something that's...
With Nolan's version, it's intense.
He doesn't make it just a passing aspect of Batman.
He almost makes it the core of his being.
It's that lack of consummation.
You can't kill and you can't have sex.
A loss of essence.
Yeah.
But it is like this almost Puritan vision.
It's very, very weird.
You know, Albert, the one thing I have to do is deny them my essence.
Right.
Well, we didn't get it.
One of the funny things about Batman is that he's always accused of being flamboyantly gay.
And there's always been something to that.
Actually, when comics were being censored and persecuted by the government, they weren't literally censored.
They kind of engaged in self-censorship.
They stopped doing horror comics and things like that.
But one of the most favorite things, I believe the man is named Wortham, who is a Jewish Freudian intellectual who was attacking comics, you know.
It's kind of odd in a way, but he was always accusing, he goes, he accused Batman of depicting homosexuality where, you know, Batman and Robin, you have this bachelor living with a young ward and they dress up in costumes and things like that.
And obviously things like Wonder Woman, there's clearly an S&M aspect to all those images of tying people up, you know, a dominatrix.
So, I mean, you know, there's...
There's a kernel of truth to all this, but in the 60s Batman, Batman was certainly not gay, but there was this camp flamboyance aspect of the whole thing.
But in the 2000s Batman, in Christopher Nolan's Batman, there is this almost puritanical, totally non-sexual aspect to the character that's rather odd when you think about it.
Well, although, on the other hand, in the Nolan film, we do see him with all those Russian ballerinas and so forth.
I can't believe he doesn't have sex with them.
Well, do we know that, though?
I don't think he does.
I think it's all for show.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of unclear.
And the ballerina flirts with Harvey Dent, actually.
Yeah.
In front of him, and he doesn't even object or say anything.
Of course it's because he's in love with Rachel.
Although she's not as cute as Katie Holmes.
I was going to say that.
Yeah, she's really ugly.
It's a big come down from Katie Holmes.
Although I have to say, Katie Holmes is such an annoying person.
Her line readings just remind me of some annoying office bitch.
She's always nodding.
You know, when she speaks and it's really bad acting.
Yeah.
Listen, Bruce, you just don't understand it.
The system is broken.
These people out here, like, some of the just annoying, like, self-righteous liberals.
You know, I remember there was one thing where she was, like, she wanted to get into where Arkham was.
She was like, I am an assistant district attorney.
Like, she's just such a bitch.
Glillenhall, who I guess is related to the Jake Glillenhall, what is her name?
Yeah, yeah.
I would say she's definitely not as attractive, but she's definitely not as annoying and bitchy.
She's kind of a warm personality.
You know, I generally like her.
Although, to get back to the sex thing, that's one way in which the Nolan films are very unrealistic, because I've got to believe if Rachel...
In real life, there was actually a Batman and actually a Rachel, and she found out that this guy was the secret superhero.
Of course she would want to have sex with him.
I mean, that's just the dynamic.
I mean, it's so unrealistic.
Oh, I can't be with you while you're doing these things.
I mean, that's so...
At least for one night stand.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
But in a way, it's realistic that she doesn't want to really be with him.
Because at any point, he could die or be, you know...
Yeah, but what John's getting at is they like the bad boy.
They want to be with the alpha.
They don't want to be with the beta.
Yeah, but I've been reading all these blogs for a while.
And when you take a deep look, which these guys don't...
You see that you have many women, even attractive women with badass, maybe not in their early 20s, but later.
And eventually it's with these guys that they have children.
And, you know, a few years back, Jack Donovan said that his alpha friends, I don't know if they were...
Heterosexual, but his alpha friends were banging strippers with condoms on.
I find this more to the point than manosphere things from liars.
I can't believe you're criticizing the manosphere that produced such philosophically deep articles like 10 ways to screw Thai women.
The sixth one will make you...
You won't believe the sixth one.
All these clickbait articles.
I've been reading that and there's truth to it but it's only superficial truth.
Betas ultimately do reproduce themselves.
It's like...
Whatever we want to say about cucks, like a typical Christian or Mormon living in Utah who's totally goofy and hates Donald Trump and votes for Ted Cruz and brings in refugees and blah, blah, blah.
Whatever you want to say about them, I guarantee you they have more children than most of alt-right Twitter combined.
Yeah.
Which is maybe dysgenic.
It could be.
You know, it is the beta that are stable, but then to get back to some of the themes we're talking about, it's ultimately the beta that is totally incapable of confronting an enemy as well.
You need the alpha.
Yeah, exactly.
You need both to have a society.
Yeah.
I don't know if we can tie it to the Nordic and Hunter-Gatherer series, but there's something like it.
You need exceptional figures like Batman, but you couldn't build a society on it.
And when comes the time to defend it, you need this character.
But when it comes to paving roads, it's better to have the guy on the boat, you know this ugly guy Yeah, because they pay taxes.
It's actually, yeah, pave roads, build hospitals.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think that's...
We need to have a complex vision of society and not a kind of abstract and idealized and a bit silly vision of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think we need a multilayered society.
I think Nolan is saying that...
You know, that there is going to be this exceptional force that is Batman that undergirds society and that society has to break its own rules in order to maintain them and so on.
I just think it's...
I think it just makes me raise an eyebrow, makes us skeptical from the context in which these films were made.
Because these are Bush-era films.
Yeah, like the Batman's the 9-11 Batman.
Like, okay, we have to go and defeat the enemy, but as soon as that's accomplished, you know, then we come home and become liberals again.
Yeah, exactly.
It was sort of the whole idea behind the war on terror.
Well, I guess it still is to an extent, although people aren't believing it quite as much.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I do think there is a connection between Bane as like a...
A conservative's nightmare of Occupy Wall Street or something.
These are conservative films, maybe in a good and a bad way.
But again, if I were to say, if there's a message to Nolan's, to The Dark Knight in particular, but the whole series...
It is that you have to lie.
Sometimes the truth isn't good enough.
You're going to have to lie.
You're going to have to break rules in order to maintain rules.
There's got to be hypocrisy.
Maybe hypocrisy is a good idea.
When we hear the word hypocrisy, we instinctually say, oh, that's terrible.
No one should be hypocritical.
So on.
But I think this movie is actually a...
A grand defense of hypocrisy.
That Harvey Dent has to be hypocritical.
Harvey Dent was at his best when he was lying for Batman and saying, I am the Batman, take me away.
He was basically saying, I'm going to sacrifice myself so that Batman can do his dirty work.
You know, Bruce Wayne has to wear a mask.
He's the good capitalist that maintains order by breaking the rules and illegally using arms and brutalizing criminals and so on.
I don't know if hypocrisy is the right word, though, Richard.
I'm using it ironically, believe me.
Well, I was thinking, I think Schmitt is a better way of understanding because there's the exception.
Which he considered to be, well, not just democracy, but he considered to be essential to the functioning of any state.
I agree.
I'm saying that sometimes you don't want to always say what you do and do what you say.
Oh, yeah.
In a way, we as liberals, because we're marinating in this world just as much as anyone, that's so hypocritical and so bad.
But I think Nolan is offering a kind of wisdom that you have to be hypocritical.
You can't do what you say and you can't say what you do.
You actually have to lie.
And it's kind of funny because there's this irony where...
At the end of the film, Batman says, like, you know, I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be.
And, you know, so I'm willing to be portrayed as a villain and be portrayed as a murderer, even though Batman never murdered anyone.
There's this irony of needing something and deserving.
Because Batman says, I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be.
And so, basically, I will sacrifice myself.
I'll become a villain.
I'll...
I'll take the blame for these murders that I didn't commit, because that's what Gotham needs.
And then he actually says sometimes they deserve more.
Gordon says he's the hero that Gotham deserves, but does Gotham deserve this hero?
It's this way that you need a lie.
Maybe the vision of Harvey Dent that they leave Gotham with, that they're lying about, remember?
They're covering up a mass murderer.
I mean, we forget this.
We go away from the movie feeling so good that, oh, this is such a great film.
They just engage in a massive cover-up of a serial killer at the end of this film, effectively.
And that's Harvey Dent.
Eight years later.
Yeah, and they continue it.
And so, does Gotham really deserve this?
I mean, it does seem that, like, what Nolan's really saying is that Gotham needs a lie.
Yeah.
Because it's based on lies, but once you become adults, you understand that it's necessary.
Right.
You can't have a society without lies.
I think there's something childish, just utterly childish about libertarianism.
With Christianity?
Well, with Christianity, don't put words in my mouth.
Yeah, but it's a Christian problem.
Yeah, but with liberalism...
This idea, you know, in Siena, in Tuscany, in Italy, you have a famous fresco with the good and bad governments.
And I'm sure you can find it on Wikipedia.
And so the bad government, it's really a renaissance thing.
It's late 15th or early 16th centuries.
Or maybe a bit earlier, because the renaissance actually began in Italy.
And you have the bad government with a badass guy.
You know, trampling on everyone, raping and stealing and plundering.
And on the other hand, you have a kind of Santa Claus figure with everyone is nice and it's almost as if they are giving free hugs.
And it's prosperity and charity and so all the, you know, the Christian illusions.
And, you know, it's like Batman.
You want to...
To live under tyranny, because maybe it's more realistic.
It's not that you cherish crime.
It's just that the so-called good government fresco is a lie, and it's impractical.
And also, Batman is himself a subterranean figure.
Literally.
Yeah, I mean, if you think of all these comic book characters as kind of gods, you know, Batman would be maybe someone like Hades or Asbestos or something.
Like he's this dark Smith God and he's a bat.
I mean, so yeah, I think in a way there, to go back with that allegory of good and bad government, like it's showing you the two sides.
It's Harvey Two-Face.
It's a white knight and a dark knight.
In order to have this idealized vision of hope and charity, you're going to need a surveillance state and a badass to go crack skulls Or a crusader.
Yeah.
The Crusader or the Inquisition or, you know, all these things that saved Christianity from itself or Christendom, which is more...
Right.
Well, you need a Charlemagne.
I mean, where would Christianity be without Constantine or Charlemagne, both of whom you could say are radically un-Christian figures?
Yes, I think so.
Especially Constantine.
Yeah, I mean, Constantine never understood Christianity.
There's evidence to believe that, and, you know, as a symbol of the cross.
Through which you won a battle.
I don't know if he ever was touched by the message of Jesus.
But even Charlemagne was someone who was willing to use brutality in order to protect Christianity.
But you can't...
Christianity would not have survived.
I mean, if you only had Christians throughout history as living the ideals of Jesus.
I mean, yeah, they wouldn't have made it out of the first century, I don't think.
Right.
And later, Islam would have prevailed, actually.
If you didn't confront it.
Right.
But if you turned the other cheek or loved your enemy or so on, you would just simply be trampled.
And so, I mean, I guess this kind of gets to that.
There has to be this hypocrisy that you can't always say what you do and you can't always do what you say.
And the society functions with both.
We need our kind of smithy god, which, sadly, in the context of the Nolan film, is the military and the industrial complex.
Military and industrial complex.
There are times when you have to do evil in order to do good.
I mean, what is it?
Rand Paul, like the Joker, basically.
You know, like...
He wants only chaos!
Yes.
Well, you were making the libertarian connection before, so there you go.
Yeah, I think absolutely.
Of course, he says his ideal is Gattaca, so I don't know.
That's a pretty far cry from the Joker.
His ideal?
No, he criticized Gattaca.
I thought I read, this is a while ago now, but I read an article where he was supposedly giving a talk somewhere and he was talking about Gattaca.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no, no, you missed it.
He was talking, he was like, I think it was actually in the context of being pro-life.
He was actually saying, you know, we've all seen the movie Gattaca.
That's what happens when liberals take over or something.
We'll have eugenics.
And, like, safe, happy societies full of smart people.
That would be terrible.
But, anyway.
I guess we'll put a bookmark in it.
We've been talking for two hours.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're starting to talk about Rand Paul and Gallica now.
Do you want me to send you, Richard, maybe...
I can send you the link.
Yeah, I found it on Wikipedia.
Okay.
The allegory of good and bad government.
So, do you agree with me that the tyranny looks more compelling than the good government?
No, none of us here would agree with that.
The way I would say it is that I would look at it in the way that Nolan is.
There's this...
We have to tell most people that the world is about hope and charity, but to be wise conservatives in a deep sense of the word, we have to recognize that you need a little tyranny for the hope and charity to survive.
So I think in a way that the allegory of good and bad government, it's not either or.
It's very Christian to say either or.
I think that's an essential aspect.
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