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March 17, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:00:11
“Neoliberalism Is Dying” (With Dr Cornel West) - #093 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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I'm going to go ahead and get the last of these.
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In this video.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there you Awakening Wonders!
Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
I'm thrilled to say it's Friday and every Friday we have an in-depth conversation with free thinkers, radicals, disruptors, prophets and shaman.
Today is a particularly special show for me today because as you know I've been on a mainstream media tour of America having complex conversations about the division between left and right.
The division between different cultural groups and the exacerbation of that conflict by different media outlets.
I am craving an opportunity to have a conversation with a cast-iron advocate for compassion.
I'm craving a conversation with a deep thinker with an open heart.
Today I'm joined by Dr. Cornel West.
Big money and big military have become what the monarchs and the oligarchs were many hundreds of years ago.
Dr. West is a political activist, philosopher, and an outspoken voice of the left advocating for compassion, togetherness, unity, love.
They have power that's unaccountable.
How can we bring about a new unity when people are living with so much fear?
We need a truthful analysis.
And the analysis has to be one in which it focuses on the precious lives of poor and working people, no matter what color they are, wretched of the earth from around every corner of the globe.
But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
During his career he's held professorships and fellowships at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Paris.
We're only going to be on this channel for the first 10-15 minutes, then we're going to be exclusively available on Rumble because I am going to speak freely to Cornel West in my attempt to bring people together from across a wide variety of communities using freedom of speech, Not to double down on hatred, not to use language that's about discrimination, but to use language that is about unity.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
It is a privilege to finally welcome Dr. Cornel West.
Hello, sir.
Oh, my dear brother, and I salute you there, brother.
You're the real thing, though, man.
You got the courage to be yourself, you got the courage to take a risk, but most importantly, you're a truth teller and a witness bear.
Thank you for saying that.
It's so kind.
I was a little bit scared to meet you because I've been going on a lot of right-wing media, what are called right-wing media outlets.
I watched you of course on Joe Rogan and we've been trying to get you as a guest before that.
I've looked at some of your master class philosophy course.
I admire you a great deal and when I talk about Liberal politics, progressive politics, when I talk about the left, one of the voices that I hold in my head and my heart is yours.
And I've began to feel that liberal media has become so disconnected from the people that they're supposed to represent, that the British Labour Party have become disconnected from the people they're supposed to represent, that the Democrat Party is no longer a voice of bringing people together, but in my view uses cultural issues to drive people apart and are disingenuous even in their apparent support.
...of previously and, let's face it, currently oppressed cultural groups.
Dr. West, what do you think is happening in our culture?
What is our duty in media spaces?
How can we bring about a new unity when people are living with so much fear?
Thank you.
I think we need two things, my brother.
One is we need a truthful analysis.
And the analysis has to be one in which it focuses on the precious lives of poor and working people, no matter what color they are, wretched of the earth from around every corner of the globe.
But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
Military and military complex.
The militarism abroad, and Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big money.
Big money and big military have become what the monarchs and oligarchs were many hundreds of years ago.
They have power that's unaccountable, unanswerable, and irresponsible.
And it's so easy to get caught in issues of race and gender and sexual orientation.
It's very important.
White supremacy is vicious.
Male supremacy is vicious.
Homophobia, transphobia are vicious.
Anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian.
They're ugly.
But if we lose sight of what is going on in the American empire, in the Russian empire, in the Chinese empire when it comes to highly centralized forms of power, an authority that's crushing everyday people and ordinary
people, we don't have the right kind of analysis.
But you also need vision.
And this is where your stress on spirituality is crucial, on morality, indispensable.
Why?
Because people are feeling nihilistic, they're feeling impotent, they're feeling helpless
and hopeless, and they're feeling as if there's nothing we can do.
That's not true.
Ways of awakening, ways of spiritual and moral renaissance can take place.
They have taken place.
When?
When you got courageous brothers and sisters, artists.
Like yourself, truth-tellers, like so many others, the Chris Hedges and others, trying to be honest, the Matt Tiabes and others, trying to be honest and saying, look, neoliberalism is dying.
One of the big...
Neobaptism is escalating.
The American empire is wrestling with spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in part because
centralized power at the highest levels of our economy and tied to military with its
politicians bought off by big money and war profiteering elites are making citizens feel
as if they are nothing but consumers, nothing but commodified entities.
So that truth-telling and the visionary work becomes crucial.
And that's what I've seen you do over these years, though, brother.
I'm telling you, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
Thank you for saying that, because your praise is a meaningful balm at a time where I've felt, if not attacked, because I also get a lot of love, I come from the world of entertainment, so I'm somewhat praise-oriented, I have to be honest.
But I have felt, sometimes, I've felt, am I doing the right thing?
Is this the right way to conduct this conversation?
You've brought up so much, even in your first response there.
I've been considering for a while that materialism, rationalism, and post-enlightenment values have led inexorably, even if inadvertently, to a state of nihilism such as you describe.
It's very difficult with populations of scale to instantiate a centralized set of values, ethics, and meaning, and it appears with this divisiveness that I feel that somehow the culture is benefiting from has become worse and worse in recent years.
A few just like placeholder arguments to consider, Cornel, as we hopefully advance our conversation, sir, is my friend Adam Curtis, the documentary maker, who said no one ever made a left-wing case for Brexit.
No one has, and I would add to that, no one has ever considered what the emotional timbre of Trump was, what it is that he reaches in people, what it
is beyond the rhetoric and divisiveness, what it is within that emotional quality that
is reaching people.
Given that this is a contemporary news show that we are streaming right now, it's worth
bringing up an issue that's becoming somewhat defining of our time, the January 6th insurrection.
It seems impossible to say that both those events and the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of the murder of George Floyd are in a sense a demonstration of the problems that centralised authority will always bring about.
Until we have a time where people that corral around these separate issues, these separate publics, if these separate publics cannot recognize that ultimately they have to confront the same authority, we will not experience the kind of unity that both of us apparently crave.
How do you think we have to frame the conversation, both for people on the neoliberal establishment left, But also for people that identify with patriotism and what are called these days right-wing politics so that we can overcome and not only accept but love and embrace cultural difference in order to meaningfully confront these forms of centralized media, political, financial and military authority that are thriving in this climate of division, sir.
Yeah, I think we always want to begin with a fundamental commitment to wrestling with what it means to be human.
Because when you get to our deep humanity, that functions at a level that is much more profound than what color, than what gender, what sexual orientation.
While we're all wrestling with organized greed at the top especially, but across the board.
We're all wrestling with various forms of hatred and self-doubt inside of us.
We had to be honest and candid with ourselves, just as we're honest and candid with the powers that be.
That's precisely what the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr., then the Fannie Lou Hamers, and the Ella Bakers, and the John Coltrane, then the Aretha Franklin, and I would listen to a little Loose Ends, and I would listen to a little Soul to Soul for my British connection here.
What?
When you listen to that music, my brother, it touches your soul.
The soul is always deeper than what color you are.
It's deeper than your gender.
That's why the arts become important.
That's why you love Richard Pryor.
That's why if Pryor was alive, he'd love you.
He'd say, oh!
This brother's the real thing.
He's like George Carlin.
He's telling the truth coming from his soul, but unique voice.
Now, of course, the voice of black, the national anthem of black people is what?
Lift every voice, not lift every echo.
We're not going to be an extension of an echo chamber.
Neofascist, right wing, neoliberal Democratic Party, both of them Not just inadequate.
Both of them are major obstacles at this point for the empowerment of everyday people.
So that again, the spiritual dimension, the moral sensitivity becomes important.
And then, for example, when you go to Trump's people and you say, lo and behold, they're not homogeneous.
They're heterogeneous.
Some of them are racist.
Some of them are less racist.
Most of them catch in hell.
Most of them are wounded economically.
Most of them feeling as if they have been losers in the corporate globalization in the last 50 years.
They are right about that.
We got to bring serious critique to bear on any kind of white supremacist, male supremacist, homophobic or transphobic sensibilities that they might have, but also recognize they are human beings just like us.
And the fundamental question is the question that you've wrestled with, and I've wrestled with, What does it mean to be a wounded healer rather than a wounded hurter?
If you're wounded and then you're going to somehow demonize the vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful, you're going to end up with a right-wing populism Rather than a progressive populism, or most importantly in the language of Shell and Wolin.
My dear brother Bernard Harcourt, his new book on the cooperative movement, on Nancy Fraser's cannibal capitalism.
What are they talking about?
Solidarity!
But you can't have solidarity unless you have analysis and vision enacted by persons like yourself and others that say, you know what?
I'm going to put myself out here and try to exemplify the very thing I'm calling for.
Wow.
Yes.
Thank you.
Like Eric Fromm's edict that the priest espouses the word, but the prophet must become the message.
You must live it.
That's it, brother.
That's it.
That's exactly it.
One of the things I enjoy about learning from you, Doctor, is that your analysis and discourse begins at a point of good faith, not from a point of misanthropy.
This idea of acknowledging personal vulnerability as a starting point for our conversation, I feel, facilitates a more fruitful and potentially Beneficial conversation around the necessary cultural issues that you've identified around race and misogyny and exploitation.
I spoke once to the British footballer who is black, John Barnes, who's a brilliant footballer for Liverpool and a few other teams, Watford, like in the 90s and experienced therefore the kind of boulders, brass, bare-faced racism of Britain in the 80s Where, like, people were throwing bananas and all that kind of stuff.
Barnes, though, was from a colonial background.
I believe he maybe was born or grew up in somewhere like Trinidad, maybe.
Or maybe Jamaica.
I'm not quite sure.
He played for England.
He was English.
But his father was in the military.
So from a class perspective, He was not growing up in the estates like many black footballers of that era and he said he'd had a different perspective on race as a result of that and his way of explaining the subject of race that he offered he said that when talking to
impoverished white people in the UK, he said that in addition to the suffering that you experience as a result of inequality and poverty, black people, as we still say in this country, of your class face additional suffering.
I feel somehow that this openness is a way of progressing and advancing the conversation, rather than being entrenched in ossified oppositionism.
That, as you say, there has to be a spirit of healing, and I don't sense that in the misanthropy of the mainstream.
I think the starting point for both sides is, you know, whether it's a Christian idea of the original sin, which I heard a few commentators use, actually, Cornel, in your country, Or, a kind of more atheistic, materialistic perspective of damnation, derived, I suppose, from the nihilism that individualism ultimately leads you to.
If our consciousness is just a side effect of biochemical processes, then nothing means anything anyway.
Take what you can get.
This idea of infusing vulnerability and love, and indeed spirit, into the conversation is necessary, but sometimes it can feel, by its nature, Ineffable, and in a time where there are less and less traditions to lean into, you know, New Ageism can sound diffuse and sass.
How do you give it the cojones, the necessary stones that spirituality has to bring to the conversation, the kind of God that we need right now?
How do you stop it sounding New Age, limp, and lacking in the potency we require?
Mmm, what a beautiful question, though, brother.
Good God, you have a way of asking these profound queries, and I appreciate it, too.
That one, I do begin on a very, you know, blue note, because I'm coming from a blues people, you know what I mean?
And the blues is catastrophe lyrically expressed.
So you begin with catastrophe, but I don't allow it to have the last word.
So I'll begin on a blue note.
Most of human history has been a history of hatred and greed and envy and resentment and domination and subjugation.
That's just what it is.
Thank God that there's always been a cloud of witnesses every generation going all the way back to Africa.
The very beginning.
Every generation has been a group of people that have said that, in fact, in the name of integrity, honesty, decency, generosity, courage, vision, we're not going to allow domination, subjugation, hatred, greed, and resentment to have the last word.
Those are the ones Who have been the unacknowledged legislators of the world that use the language of Shelley.
Those poets who use, and by poet I just mean any human being who uses imagination and empathy to authorize a better future than the nightmarish present.
And presently, in our own particular moment, where the nihilism is so real, with so much of secularism.
And secularism at its best has been very important.
It brought critique to bear on forms of authority.
King's authority.
White supremacist authority, male supremacist authority, the authority of bosses, the authority of bullies.
Secularism played a very important role, but it got devoured by commodification.
It got devoured by materialism.
That's why Martin King said, materialism, poverty, racism, and militarism are the four forces sucking The life energy's out of democracy.
That's Martin King.
Those four.
So what do we do when we say, okay, how do we become and remain clouds of witnesses in our own day based on those who came before?
We can go back to the Greeks with Antisthenes against slavery, Diderot and France against imperialism.
It could be Miles Horton White brother, vanilla brother, with Martin King and Rosa Parks, struggling against white supremacy and American apartheid.
It could be, we go to Britain, look at Ruskin, look at William Morris, look at the New Left Review, look at Russell Brand.
We could do the whole thing, Stuart Hall.
Paul Gilroy, there's always been a cloud of witnesses saying, let us try to ensure that there's possibilities of solidarities against these structures of domination and these forms of bondage, psychically and spiritually.
And in our day, it's the nihilism, the great Rabbi Heschel used to say, the largest movement in the modern world is nihilism.
That's Rabbi Heschel.
And what he meant by that is meaninglessness, hopelessness, lovelessness, touchlessness, all of the things that numb us.
All of the things that reinforce callousness.
All of the things that reinforce indifference.
And indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself.
It becomes a ways of life.
So what has happened, especially in the American empire, is The professional managerial class, which cuts across conservatives, liberals, right across the board, they're not only the winners, they've become so arrogant, they've become so condescending, they've become so haughty.
In America, only 34% of Americans even go to college.
So the vast majority never set foot in college, but corporate media is all professional managerial class.
All the discourse is pressure managerial class.
So they live in a silo.
It's a parochial context.
It's a provincial circumstance, and they think that's the world.
It's like thinking the university is the universe.
Please, get off the crack pipe!
There's everyday people out there.
There's ordinary people out there.
And they're suffering.
They have been the major losers across race, across gender, across region, and across national lines.
Because we know this is a global capitalist project that we're bringing critique to bear as it connects to American empire, Chinese empire, Russian empire, and so forth.
And we have to be very honest about it.
What I love about you, though, brother, is that You tried to be morally consistent.
That you can be in solidarity with the Ukrainian brothers and sisters and still have a critique of the U.S.
empire vis-a-vis NATO.
And what the United States would do if missiles were in Mexico and Canada.
You know they would blow it to smithereens in a minute.
And you say, well, Putin's a gangster.
Yes, he is a gangster.
But American gangsterism is also part of the story.
And the question is, how do you be consistent in that regard?
Now, as you know, you know, that's what got Martin King in trouble.
That's what got Big Gregory in trouble.
That's what got Moms Mabley in trouble.
I'm thinking of the artists as well as the spokespersons.
And you say, OK, you know, bring the trouble on.
You come from Sister Barbara, your precious mother, strong, strong as she can be.
She brought in the world this young brother Russell.
Strong as he can be, up and down, on the mountaintop, in the valley, but still fortified, still ready, still humble, still learning, still growing, still maturing.
I'm exactly the same thing.
I come out of Irene, brother.
That's my mama.
Oh, yes.
I'm still a cracked vessel trying to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart.
Yes, I am.
But most importantly, I want to be a force for good.
Give it all my crackness, I wanna be a force for good.
That's Russell too.
It is humbling to be reminded that in the end we are just our mother's children
and that not everyone knows the privilege of love, a mother's love in particular,
that need be transcendent of race or class or nation or language.
Mammalian at its core, beyond even our particular species and right back into our genus.
Sometimes these systems, Cornell, of taxonomization, it seems to me, are what need to be shed for the forward motion to be Enjoyed when you talk about Martin Luther King, I think, too, of the imperature of that movement, Mahatma Gandhi, and how when he spoke politically, it came always from a place of great spirit and embrace of Islam and Hinduism and
Christianity and how his political views in particular the post-colonial vision for a unified yet somehow it sounds to me at least anarchic India and I mean it obviously in the literal sense autonomous self-governing communities maximum democracy maximum freedom all of these things seem impossible even to envisage if we don't have principles And the principles are not accessible if we don't have love.
And the love is impossible when you're immersed in nihilism, when your life becomes all but numb screens and the potential of purchase, when that's all that you are offered, or even coveting that, if you're not in an economic class that can afford it, or if you're in the economic class that's mining the cobalt for it.
There has to be, I think, recourse, as you say, To genuine principles.
I feel it must be significant that these leaders have always had some kind of access to God, even amidst their fallibility for to be human is to be flawed, and like you said, we are all cracked vessels, and as Leonard Cohen would say, that's how the light's getting in.
He said, too, glue your soul to prayer, glue your soul to prayer, moment to moment, never forget who you are.
But Vandana Shiva, who I much admire, says that we are experiencing the desacralization of the public conversation, of the political conversation, of the resource conversation, that we are being led politically and economically by people who Do not recognize the sacred, who recognize only materialism.
That it's a deeper philosophical conversation than republicanism or democratism or whatever the ism of that is.
It reaches down, down, down into the philosophical essence.
Like, what do you prioritize?
That which is measurable, or the felt ineffable?
And as soon as this stuff has to be politicized, manifest, organized into systems, of course it has to become rational and logical and material at that point.
We know that politics ultimately is about resources, but how can you make decisions about resources without some kind of recourse to the spiritual?
Without some deep-held values.
And it seems like it's an attack on that that we are experiencing.
That nothing really means anything.
A kind of celebration of idiocy.
An elevation of a kind of scintillating, fast-paced, saccharine, pink dumbness piped in.
So it's difficult to feel or think.
You know, it's hard to follow the line.
It's hard to follow the line.
And it's also hard to popularize ideas that can seem esoteric.
One of our duties, I suppose, isn't it, Cornell, is to, those of us that have a facility for language, and evidently a facility for thought, to ensure that we remember where we're from and where this message is most needed, and how they will receive it.
How do you, how do we do it?
That's right.
And to always attempt To exemplify what one is enunciating.
You see, examples are the go-kart of not just judgment, but the lens through which one views the world.
That's why it's very important in my own language, I always talk about John Coltrane's Love Supreme, not because it's a great song solely, but because it specifies a way of life, not just for him, You know, the great James Lawson used to say, he's still 94 years old, he was very close to Martin King, and he said, here we got a black freedom movement that never uttered a word of hatred for over 20 years in the face of institutionalized hatred.
You know how hated black people have been in America?
What kind of spiritual formation goes into a movement that says, we refuse to hate you back?
How come we don't want to get in the gutter with the gangster?
How come we don't want to reinforce the cycle of hatred?
How come there's enough hatred in the world, we don't want to make a contribution to it?
Not because we're cowardly, we're willing to live and die, but rather because we want to take it, as Sly Stone would say, higher!
We won't take it to a higher level.
And that's not empty, that's not vacuous platitudes.
Because as we move toward ecological catastrophe, nuclear catastrophe, it becomes a matter of life and death of the species, of how do we shatter Cohorts and chilly souls and numbed minds that are so egotistical and narcissistic, concerned only with now, only with the next moment, only with power, and saying, no, there's got to be something deeper.
And all you got to do is say, well, look in the eyes of your daughter.
Remember the smile of your grandmother.
Listen to a little music.
It could come from the vanilla side with the Beatles.
It could come from the chocolate side with Muddy Waters or Luther Vandross.
Or it could come from Curtis Mayfield.
But listen to that music.
Let it soak your soul and say, isn't that Touching something deeper than just the titillation of the protons and neutrons that are bouncing up against your body.
Something else is happening.
Now, I do believe that secular brothers and sisters, they have access to this.
Chekhov, who was my favorite literary artist of all time, he was agnostic.
I'm a Christian.
But he got more love in him than most Christians, I know.
But he's a secular brother.
Prophetic Jewish folk.
Rabbi Heschel.
Prophetic Muslim.
I don't exist without Malcolm X. I know your relation to Malcolm.
I've seen your magnificent reflections on Malcolm.
I don't exist without Malcolm.
He's Muslim to the core.
I'm Christian to the core.
We go hand in hand.
Ambedkar, the great Dalit freedom fighter.
He's Buddhist!
Bell Hooks, my dear sister.
It cuts across religion, culture, gender, race, but it also goes the other way, which is to say what?
The gangsters and the thugs and the cowards come in all colors.
Come in all genders.
Come in all sexual orientation.
Becoming all transcendent.
It's a human thing all the way down.
And the fundamental question is, what kind of human being are you going to be?
Well, it's a short move from your mama's womb to tomb.
That's what it comes down to.
What kind of person are you going to be?
Are you going to be candid with yourself?
I've been reading Montaigne's essays.
Honesty.
James Baldwin, American Montaigne.
Candor about himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
19th century U.S.
Montaigne.
Honest about, frank about himself.
That's the most difficult thing.
And I was talking to your wonderful producer, Brother James, before you came on, and he was raising the issue of, uh, the issue I'd raised about freedom.
Now, do human beings really want to be free?
This is Dostoevsky's challenge and the brothers Karamazov.
Maybe freedom is too heavy a burden.
Maybe it's too much.
Maybe they'd rather follow the Pied Piper and be told what to do.
They want authority.
They want to be dictated to.
They want the various neo-fascists or authoritarians to tell them what to do.
And there's something to that.
There is something.
Don't ask.
It ain't no joke.
There is something to that.
But the only thing that breaks that kind of fear is a deep love.
That's the only thing that breaks the back of fear.
That's why when you talk about love, it's not some kind of mamby-pamby, you know, empty talk.
No, it's the most powerful force, even though it appears to be the most weakest and feeble.
I see that we have a duty to exemplify the principles that we would recommend others live by to be the change.
I recognize and understand this.
I am continually aware of my ongoing complexity.
The compromises that I make with myself, the conflict that I feel in myself, how hard I find it to live by the book sometimes, in major ways, in minor ways.
I find it hard to remain in a transcendent yet connected state.
I get drawn.
I get drawn by desire.
I get curtailed by fear.
I get caught up in selfishness.
Even sometimes when I feel enlivened and invigorated by the success of connection, there's something in me that wants reclamation.
Some lower case self snatches back from the higher case self.
I wonder how, after all of what must have been considerable inner-odysseys, you have
found yourself comfortable in Christianity.
I admire much C.S.
Lewis and his journey from atheism to loving Christ.
On the, briefly, as you touched on Baldwin, I felt like what I enjoy is the, why would
you create, what does it indicate about a culture that it creates the category of, in
his words, negro?
What is being cast there?
What is not being held in the soul?
So I wonder if you can talk to us about the archetypes that might underlie divisiveness, condemnation and othering in a culture.
Also, sir, what in particular the refuge Christ has provided?
Yeah, in my own case, you know, it has to do with being a particular human being shaped by a particular West family coming out of Shiloh Baptist Church on the Choctaw side of Sacramento, California.
We all have our various histories.
That shape and mold us and the circumstances over which we have no control.
I didn't choose my precious mom and dad.
I didn't choose my precious brother Cliff, Cynthia, Cheryl, my sisters.
And thank God they turned out so magnificent.
So I'm going to be a love child for the rest of my life because of these gifts that I received.
But to be a fallible, fallen follower, of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus of Nazareth is to be very critical of dogma, very critical of doctrine, very critical of institutional religion.
That's what got him crucified.
He went into that temple, ran out the money changers, 400 Roman troops protecting that temple, the largest edifice west of Rome, ragtag disciples, most of whom betrayed him and the major one denied him three times.
Peter, whose body is the basis of the church, who denied Jesus three times.
So you don't have high expectations of an institution whose foundation denied Jesus himself, even though he bounced back in his own way and himself was executed.
But all it means here is that you find a particular example.
This is why the great Spinoza, you know, one of the great intellectual explosions of early European modernity.
Jewish brother, excommunicated from the Jewish community.
You read what he says about Jesus.
It's the most powerful stuff you'll ever want to read.
Why?
Because he just sees something in this example.
Now Jesus, I don't think, or we Christians never have a monopoly on truth or beauty or goodness and so forth.
There's a lot of other examples that we can invoke in this regard, you see?
But that's the particular one I was exposed to and that's the one that sees my soul and that's the one tied to my vocation.
That's the one tied to my calling.
That I made a promise 62 years ago, I would be faithful unto death and being a follower of this Jesus.
And it's inseparable from the love of my mother, the love of my father, the love of family, so that then Jesus is within that larger matrix.
What Edmund Burke, one of the great conservative philosophers and theorists, called one's platoon.
So that one's orientation for life is not just one of cognition, but it's one of affection and conviction.
So when I think of Jesus, it's not just cognition.
It's not a game you play about whether you believe in God and whether you believe in Jesus and whether you can find evidence that allows you to infer that you have a logical conclusion.
Okay, the evidence is always underdetermined.
But when you're talking about Jesus with me, you're talking about the songs that I heard in Shiloh.
You're talking about my mother's prayers in the midnight hour.
You're talking about my own crises, and how I make it from day to day, and the prayers that I sit up on horizontally to that Jesus, and I tried him out, and I found him strong enough to sustain me.
See, that's existential.
That's not logical at all.
Somebody could call it, oh, Brother West, you full of superstition.
Well, call it what you want.
Okay, I appreciate it.
You can say the love of my wife is superficial too, but it's concrete too.
The love of my kids is superficial too, it's superstitious too, but I'm willing to live and die for them.
Well, it is what it is.
I got to make choices in life.
And everybody makes those kind of choices.
Muslims do, secular folk do, agnostic folk do.
There's always something beyond the evidence.
It's always something that's super sensible, beyond the senses.
And it's something that's super natural, not in the fundamentalist sense, but it goes beyond just nature.
And Wordsworth will provide that with you, even as the great romantic poet and lyrical ballad.
It's something within nature that's beyond nature.
Yes!
And what is it?
Ineffable.
You mentioned it.
That raid on the ineffable that T.S.
Eliot talks about in his poetry.
What is the raid on the ineffable?
The vulnerability of each of us to wrestling with meaning that goes beyond the evidence.
And we all need some structures of meaning and structures of feeling and structures of perception that allows us to live a life.
To live a life in such a way that all of our efforts were not just in vain.
It had impact on people.
It had impact on us.
And that's a beautiful thing.
And it's an endless process.
We fall on our faces, we bounce back.
We fall on our faces, and we bounce back.
That's part of the beauty of it all.
Do you hold yourself accountable within a community, within your family, in prayer?
This idea of archetypes that underlie known and measurable reality, accessible there perhaps through prayer, perhaps.
Is this where you find fuel and is this where you Find succor and refuge.
This ongoing negotiation with selfishness.
That raid on the ineffable, man, that's blown me away.
Raid on the ineffable, that's really, that's really blown me away.
Because I guess where I am now, Cornell, is I've just like, like, where I find myself is trying to have conversations that are complicated conversations.
But I know that what underwrites it is something that's quite simple.
I know that there is a message that can be heard.
I know there is.
And I suppose, is it, do you feel like it's being played out internally?
Do you think that it can be handled simply?
It can't just be a coincidence, can it, that many of these great people we've mentioned devoted themselves to simple routines, ceremonies and rituals through family, through the love of children, through the love of animals and nature.
Is it to be found mostly in our quotidian behavior rather than in our high ideals?
Does it matter less where we find ourselves in the abstract than where we find ourselves
behaviorally day by day?
I felt sort of served by that, you know, when I was talking to people that five, ten years
ago I thought I wouldn't have conversations with on news networks that I thought I'd never
go on and I felt Christian principles and Christian spirit and humanity there.
And like to, as they say in the 12 steps, to look for the similarities, not the differences.
To be able to accept differences between people as a sort of a, as a starting point to find joy, true joy in diversity.
Not to weaponize it or turn it into a badge that can be used to underwrite financial and commodifying endeavors.
I suppose what I'm, you know, it's really encouraging and beautiful to talk to you, I suppose, because I know as much as I can know.
I know where you're coming from, and I know what you're not.
And it's nice to hear my mother's name said, you know, in a conversation.
It's nice to hear my daughter's recall.
I can see her in you, brother.
I can see her spirit in you.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And for so many of us, We don't want to be honest and candid in the ways in which the best of who we are is often manifest in what has been put in us, what has been poured into us, in contexts people know not of.
But those are the things that we also fall back on in our darkest hour.
In our night of the soul, and we know that without those, that kind of pouring in of Irene and Clifton and me and your mother and father, all of those things that go, it's not just mom, but mom's at the center of it, because you got friends!
Who make a fundamental difference.
And you've got ancestors, not just relatives.
That is to say, you've got Lenny Bruce in you.
You've got those you choose your ancestors to fall back on that you never really knew.
And that becomes crucial and it's in the everyday.
It's in the commonplace.
It's in the quotidian.
It's in the preciousness of those sliced stone called everyday people.
Different than the abstractions, different than all of the obtuse academic formulations that are tied to professional managerial jargon, professional managerial smartness.
No, we're talking about the wisdom of everyday people.
We're not talking about the superficial smartness of the professionals or the experts, most of whom are willing to sell their souls for a mess of pottage in a minute.
Because they don't have a spiritual backbone.
They don't have a spine.
They just have big degrees and big status and big titles.
So what?
There sometimes seem to be some dreadful ingenuity in the system, how the spirit of the 60s and those civil rights movement and all that optimism somehow got distilled down into individualism.
I wonder, Cornell, how we wrestle with this culture.
I wonder if we, for simplicity's sake, say that there is something deep rather than inert at work in there somewhere.
Like, it feels sometimes deliberate.
The ingenuity of it, the way that it can sort of somehow reform, like Mephistopheles, every little moment of hope once more into commodity.
I wonder how we recapture that spirit.
I wonder how we resurrect our shared mythology and our shared ancestors.
How we respect individual identity, cultural difference and community.
Whilst acknowledging the necessity for new confederacy, new unions, if we're ever to confront the centralised power that you and I have been discussing through this conversation.
It seems that we need to bring forth a new universal, while recognising now that within the culture, diversity, identitarianism and individuality have come to the forefront.
How do you think that we, how can we respect this, the individualism is out of the bottle now and it's not going back in.
People are never again, I don't think, going to see themselves as members of a parish.
How do we, how do we respect that and bring people together?
Where do you think is the interface for new union and how do we, how do we present that necessity in a culture that seems to be again and again doubling down on the vision within diversity rather than communion within
it.
Part of it is the individualism is very different than individuality.
The individuality for me has to do with the Hebrew scripture.
Each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God.
I would even go as far as to say sentient beings need to be respected in serious and substantive ways as well.
So that our conception of the sacred has to be one that's over against the market, over against transaction, as my brother would say, over against manipulation.
Individualism was always already co-opted by the market.
It's possessive individualism, the language of C.P.
McPherson, the great political theorist.
Possessive individualism has always been tied to the market.
And that's the commodification of everything.
Everybody's for sale.
Everything is for sale.
Which means what?
Survival of the slickest, which means the 11th commandment, thou shall not get caught, becomes the only rule.
Say anything, do anything, just don't get caught.
And when you get caught, lie.
When you get caught, escape.
Flight.
There's no integrity whatsoever.
But there's also the tribalisms that we have to pierce.
You see, this is why, even during the time of Brother Obama, when people were coming at me so harsh, how could I be so critical of a black president?
Hey, if he's dropping drones on innocent people, he's a war criminal.
Hey, if he's tied to Wall Street and allowing homeowners off, then he's justifying a certain kind of crime against humanity.
Embezzlement, all their crimes, not one go to jail.
And let everyday people get caught, they go to jail.
You have to pierce it.
Same would be true with our Jewish brothers and sisters.
Their critique of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
It's a moral and spiritual critique.
It's a crime against humanity.
Same is true with our Muslim brothers and sisters going on in Iraq right now.
You got Muslims killing Muslims.
How come?
Because the Mullahs are gangsters.
And they're killing these precious young Muslims.
We have to have a moral critique that pierces through our tribalisms and our clannishness, as it were, and be in contact with the humanity of folk.
And that's why, again, though, brother, you know, voices like yourself, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold, because, you know, when you talk about hope, Hope itself has been co-opted by the market.
So there's a sense in which we need a moratorium on talking about hope, but we need to stress on being a hope.
You see, you are a hope in your example.
You don't need to talk about hope.
You gotta embody the hope.
You enact the hope.
People can see the sunshine flowing from your soul.
That's what it's all about.
We grew up in church.
This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
That's what they talk about.
I'm gonna let it shine.
Now, I was in Shiloh Baptist Church.
We talked every Sunday.
If the kingdom of God is within you, then everywhere you go, you ought to leave a little heaven behind.
What kind of heaven behind are we leaving?
You can be secular and leave heaven behind.
You can be agnostic and leave a heaven behind.
Indeed, because that heaven has to do what?
Something tied to a love and a joy.
Something tied to a community, a conviviality, a fellowship, and a sistership that accents the best of who we are as human beings.
Not just as tied into the identity categories that are weaponized by neoliberal policies that reinforce careerism and opportunism and make the empire more colorful from top to bottom and make the hierarchy more colorful and more gender Inclusive, yes, we agree with that.
But if it's the same system, if it's still centralized power, if it's still a hierarchy imposing itself from below, then folk are still catching air.
That's the kind of voices we need.
That's the kind of movements that we need.
And thank God, we all haven't been completely smothered.
We haven't been completely erased and eliminated.
What happens when you lose your spirit, you know?
What happens when you feel down?
What if you feel that you've failed yourself or let yourself down?
What do you feel?
Where do you turn to, then?
What do you do, like, if you talk short with someone?
Or if you cover, or you lust?
Or you err?
Where do you go to, then?
Yeah, I think that one, that's always going to be the case.
So that one's never surprised by evil outside or inside oneself.
One's never paralyzed by despair, be that despair response to what's external or internal.
So the last thing you ever want is paralysis, but you do want honest analysis.
And that lust, that desire, I mean, this is why You know, Dorothy Day, the great Vanilla sister, Catholic sister, wrote a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., for the Catholic workers.
She's one of the great left-wing Catholics of the 20th century.
She wrote a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., one line, Martin Luther King, Jr.
learned how to die daily.
And she's building on the Jewish brother, Paul, who wrote those powerful letters in the New Testament for Christians.
Christians must learn how to die daily.
And dying daily means what?
Radically trying to reconquer every day the hatred and greed and envy inside of oneself so that one can move day to day and week to week a little stronger, more fortified with a fuller armor.
But that dying daily is a perennial process.
There's no purity here.
There's no pristine status here.
No one is free of spot or wrinkle.
All of us are, in some sense, in what Samuel Beckett called the mess.
Or what I would call, following George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, the funk.
All of us in the funk.
And it's in the funk you find love.
It's in the funk you find freedom.
It's in the funk you find integrity.
It's in the funk you find community.
And what's at the core of that?
Humility.
If you're not humble, that's already a sign that you need more spiritual work.
That is a more optimistic take on the idea of original sin, that it doesn't feel mired in pessimism or a kind of fatalistic, humans are broken, like the serpent has already won, we unwound from that reptilian helix and we're nothing but mouth.
The idea that while there might be a wound in a floor, while we may have been cast out of the garden, the garden is still within us.
There's still the possibility of redemption.
And so much of our puritanical culture, and I like to hear you decry that puritanism, is stripped of redemption.
Stripped of the necessary fulfillment that that idea of original sin must entail in order for it not to be an incredibly pessimistic worldview, an almost self-hating and self-denying and ascetic view.
I enjoy the voluptuousness of your rhetoric and Warmth and inclusivity of the love, but still not letting people off the hook.
It's not like a fluffy blindness.
It's a kind of awake acceptance that it's in me.
It's in me, like Solzhenitsyn said.
The line's in me.
The line between good and evil is within me.
It's within me.
It's in the positive-negative charge that's necessary for all energy to exist anyway.
And it seems like people are denying the starting point.
How can we have the same conversation when people can't accept the starting point?
The starting point of, sort of, optimism.
Wounded optimism.
Like you said, a wounded healer rather than a wounded hater, I think is what you said.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, Cornel West.
You give me a lot.
A distinction, my brother, between optimism and hope.
Now, this is my own Christian sensibility.
Because as you know, the virtues of faith, hope, and the greatest is love.
But optimism is still a bit too tied to the evidence.
Optimism is subject to a certain kind of secular appropriation that's solely about evidence, evidence, evidence, given the authority of science.
Science has this very important role to play, but it can't answer the why question.
But hope is something else, you see.
Hope is something that is inside of you, so that no matter what the evidence says, Russell's gonna be this loving person no matter what.
Brother West is going to try to be this loving person no matter what.
It creates its own evidence by trying to be in the world over against the darkness.
It tries to cast a light in that darkness, not because the evidence leads toward optimism, but because the hope itself creates its own evidence by being an example of what it prefigures in the end.
And that blues, though, brother, because the blues is not pessimistic.
The blues is not optimistic.
It is full of hope.
Nobody loves me, but my mom and she might be jiving, too.
That's the key of the blues.
That's B.B.
King.
Now, that's not an optimistic formulation, but the brother got so much style.
He got smile.
He's playing Lucille.
You can hear Son House.
You can hear Robert Johnson.
You can hear Ma Rainey.
You can hear Bessie Smith in his guitar.
The tradition is inside of him, just like that rich tradition inside of you and inside of me, inside of all of those who are listening, if we would be attuned to it.
That's hope for me at its deepest level.
And that's why I'm a little suspicious of pessimism or optimism.
I'm a prisoner of hope.
I like that.
I suppose even syntactically and semantically, etymology of optimism is like optimal.
It's about utility and use and function.
And I feel that if you can find utility in love, it's the truth in love, the truth of a unitary force, which is even cosmologically true in the most moot myth of our physical conception, the Big Bang, which contains all unity in the head of a pin.
Me, you, and everything once contained in the smallest, spaceless of spaces.
An absolute God.
And then all you have to accept is, is there something atemporal and aspatial beyond the framing of of our animalistic experience, likely born somewhat of
biography and our understanding of inception, conception, expiration.
If you, once you reject that there isn't only the animal, there isn't only the limitation
of senses, that our potential for knowledge is curtailed and contained, but knowledge
itself is limitless, then once again hope has to be invited back in, faith has to be
These are not cavalier values, these are not superstitions, they are blunt cosmological realities that have to be accepted, unless you're saying that we live within the tiny units of that which can be discerned and measured through varying lenses.
That's exactly right.
Ooh, my brother.
Ooh, it is just a joy to be in conversation with you because you grasp on a very deep level what I've been talking about all these years.
I was listening.
I've been paying attention.
A lot of people that are watching this right now, we stream live to a small audience of members before we broadcast more wisely.
Some people are going so far as to say that you're sexy, Cornel West.
They're objectifying you live on the line!
Real church, says Dawn.
Kelly P, thanks for taking us to church today, brother West.
And Uncle Russ, says Kelly P.
People are loving it.
People are loving your beautiful evangelism.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I've waited a long time to meet you and I feel that it's a privilege.
I feel enlivened.
I feel a little healed by the conversation because I reckon I came in a little tired.
a little anxious and overworked, a little worn out, even a little fearful if I may say,
of being judged because I hold you in high esteem and I feel like, oh no,
I hope Cornel West's not going to say it's wrong that I went on Fox News or that I've been trying
to be as objective as anyone can be, as I can be, about complex issues. I really appreciate
the kindness that you've shown. No, you just keep doing what you're doing brother.
You treat every human being as an end full of dignity and sanctity.
Continue to tell your truth and bear witness and remember when you have what you have.
Which is integrity, honesty, and decency.
You can go into any house.
White House, crack house, your friend's house, Fox house, CNN house, MSNBC house, left-wing house, and still be the Russell who you are when you enter and when you leave.
But you're listening, and you're trying to grow, and most importantly, you're true to your calling.
You're true to yourself.
You remember Sly Stone say, thank you for letting me be myself.
What's he talking about, brother?
Wow.
Thank you.
Thanks, Dr. Cornel West.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
You can find more about Cornel West's work by going to cornelwest.com, where you can learn, as I have done, how to incorporate high-minded philosophical principles, the great swathes of academic knowledge, into heartfelt heartfelt spiritual rhetoric and indeed that most craved of
modern words, principles, principles.
Next week on the show, my guest is Graham Hancock. Sign up to Locals to be in with a
chance of joining me live at Stay Free Studios for a live recording with Graham Hancock in
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This Monday I'm joined by Glenn Greenwald.
That's exciting.
See you Monday then.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
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