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July 26, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:56
3760 Why Cultural Marxism Matters | Olavo de Carvalho and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So, we talked recently to an intellectual in Brazil, and we got pouring in requests to talk to this fine gentleman you see before you, and we're here from momentarily, Olivo de Carvalho.
And he is a Brazilian journalist, philosopher, and the author of 18 books, which makes me feel just a little bit lazy.
And website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter will all be in the show notes.
Olivo, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure. With regards to, I think, the biggest issue facing the West and facing Christian societies, which is this creeping Marxism, creeping communism that has been gathering momentum since the post-Second World War period and I think has only accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Of course, everyone said, ah, we beat the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union has fallen, therefore we've won against communism, which I think is...
A mistaken perspective.
I wonder if you can tell us how it's playing out where you are.
You are right. Communism was not destroyed.
It only changed its strategic framework.
From the 60s onward, they changed the proletarians by the minorities.
So it's not proletarians against bourgeois anymore.
It's minorities against majorities.
This is only a strategical change.
Communism was not destroyed and did not change substantially.
And there is another difference.
The mega-billionaires all started supporting actively the left in the whole world.
And this makes a huge difference for everybody.
Everybody believed that with the new strategy, they would create an equalitarian society, a society where everybody would have equal rights.
But owing to the billionaires' participation in this scheme, we have now the most hierarchical society ever, because this billionaire elite You cannot attain them.
You cannot do any harm to them.
They are completely, let's say, omnipotent.
They do whatever they want.
And all the left works for them.
Right, because in a free market, you can, through hard work and intelligence and resolve, you can cycle through the classes.
And in the free market, as we saw in America in the 19th century, classes tend to be rags to riches to rags.
In three generations, there was a constant cycle.
But once you get a big, powerful government that can control significant aspects of the economy, the wealthy simply co-opt the government to protect themselves against competition from the poor and competition from overseas.
Of course, and this alliance between the state and the mega billionaires is almost indestructible.
And they are all against free market.
They hate free market. Oh, and you can see that sometimes with the Republicans in America as well.
Now, it seems to me that the original promise of the communist dictatorship, the dictatorship of the proletariat, was that you would get a greater economic output, greater economic productivity than the capitalist West.
Now, from the 1920s onwards, it became very clear that not only did you not even remotely compete with the West, that you destroyed vast sections of your own economy and, in fact, your population under a communist dictatorship.
Now, of course, rather than give up the ideals, the ideals, I think, are all about power, not about economic productivity.
That's just the bribe that you're offered.
We'll make you rich if you obey us, if you submit to us.
They switched from an economic argument, particularly in the 1960s, like after the crimes of Stalin came out.
the cult of personality and all of the gulags came out under Solzhenitsyn's writings and so on.
They switched from an economic argument to, as you point out, to race, to environmentalism, and to cultural decadence.
And I wonder if you could help people understand that shift, because a lot of the younger listeners to this show have never seen Marxism except in its sort of race-baiting, gender-baiting, environmentalist, and culturally debasing form.
But this new strategy was already proposed by the Hungarian philosopher Georgi Lukács in 1910, around 1910.
And the Soviet elite didn't accept it.
But later, I believe what happened was this.
When the Soviets invaded Germany, the offices of Ludwig von Mises were in the eastern part.
So all his archives fall in the hands of the communists.
They have been reading this and saying, oh, this guy was right.
Communist economy is impossible.
He demonstrated this in a very simple way.
If there is no free market, things have no price, and if there is no price, you cannot make a calculation of price, and so the planet economy is impossible.
This is very simple and very true.
So I believe they got persuaded.
And they said, we have to create something new.
And then they invented this proposal that is not economic anymore, it's social and psychological.
And how does the Frankfurt School fit into this, which has, I think, done a lot to infiltrate the West, particularly the media, the news, and the campuses, of course.
And as you point out, it has a kind of decadence to it that is materialistic and hedonistic and kind of gross, and was not allowed under Stalin's Russia at all.
Georgi Lukasz is not generally known as a member of the Frankfurt School, but he was, in fact, the creator of the Frankfurt School.
And all the others didn't add too much to his thought.
He said, everything that we saw appearing in the 60s was already in the works of Georgi Lukash, especially the book History and Class Consciousness, a very important book in the history of prominence.
And this people of the Frankfurt School only gave some aesthetical adornment to Georgi Lukash's thought.
And so what was the purpose for these Marxists to take over the culture?
What was their end goal and end game?
Control people's minds.
The thing that is most difficult to control is economy.
So they said, well, you always thought and control the economy.
Let's change the position.
We give some freedom to economy and control everything else.
We control the culture.
We control education, we control the press, we control people's minds, and there is also some economic freedom that will not do us any harm.
As in China, in China you have a certain margin of economic freedom, but the society is put under total control of the government and other aspects, especially psychological.
And the degradation of internal standards of morality, which we'll get to sort of the left's war on Christian morality in a sec, but the degradation and corruption of people's internal moral standards does seem to lead to me...
to a loosening of restraint, particularly sexual restraint.
And what that means, of course, is you get a lot of moms who have kids but know father to provide for their kids, which makes them a huge base for the expansion of state power.
You get addicts of various kinds who are told that, you know, drugs are cool and hip and so on.
And you get people who don't add to their human capital because that's considered to be bourgeois and stifling your creativity.
So there's a lot of loosening of self-restraint which creates a lot of chaos in society and then the government steps in and says, hey, we can help you with all of that.
You just have to give up property.
Of course. From the moment you decide to exploit every psychological insatisfaction, individual insatisfaction, there are no limits anymore.
We have to destroy everything because Everybody has some complaint against something.
This guy is unsatisfied with his wife or with the sex in which he was born, and so on.
You have to change everything and destroy everything.
But in order to understand the things, you have to go back, always to go back to Georgi Lukas.
Georgi Lukas didn't care the least for morality.
He used to share his wife with another guy.
He was an immoralist.
And all this thought in the 60s was deeply influenced by him.
Right. You've got a good narrative or a good way of explaining how some of the Marxist ideals jumped the Atlantic Ocean, of course, from Europe in the Second World War and post-Second World War period and landed particularly in American universities.
And then, of course, with the GI Bill, what happened was all of these soldiers went into the universities, newly populated by these Marxist ideologues, and this was a particularly virulent way that the virus of leftism spread throughout America and is still continuing to escalate now.
Yeah, but Americans imported this guy.
They imported Max Horkheimer.
He was the leader of the Franklin Sloan And Theodor Adorno and Habermas and all the others.
And Habermacusi, especially Habermacusi.
And they infected America with all this poison.
This guy, all of them, as philosophers, they are very mediocre.
But as political figures, political characters, they were very powerful.
They influenced a lot of people, especially in the book The Authoritarian Personalities.
Which demonstrates scientifically that America was exactly the same as Nazi society.
And many people believe in this.
This is a huge stupidity, but many people believe it.
Why do you think Why do you think that American intellectuals were so strangely uninterested in pushing back against this Marxist infiltration of their intellectual life?
And in particular, I'm thinking that in the realm of politics, particularly in the realm of the Foreign Service and so on, you at least had someone Like Joseph McCarthy to push back against some of this narrative who had a great deal of support from the American population.
Was there anyone that I'm not aware of in North American or American intellectual life who saw this danger for what it was in the post-war period and pushed back against it?
Well, Americans are generally mistaken about themselves because America has great philosophers, not only pragmatism.
Pragmatism is only a part of the panorama.
You have a guy like Josiah Rice.
Did you read Josiah Rice? He's an absolute genius of philosophy.
He had a pragmatical start, but then someone had the idea to send him to Germany to students.
He absorbed the works of Friedrich Schelling, who was also a great genius.
And a guy who understood everything that was happening in the field of philosophy at the time, he saw all the monstrous character.
of the Hegel's heritage and so on.
He was aware of everything, but Schelling was not a lucky guy because when he was young he had a big success, but then he had a love affair with the wife of Friedrich Schlegel, the historian, and this was a scandal and he got Far from the university for 40 years.
When he came back, he had changed into a huge genius.
But nobody paid attention to what he was saying anymore.
His two greatest books called Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology were only read in the 20th century.
Now, they are disclosing this now.
And now they are seeing How deeply Schelling understood the historical process created by Hegel and then later for Marx.
He didn't know Marx would work but knew Schelling very deeply knew Hegel very deeply and he saw this would not be a good thing and Josiah Royce was a disciple of Schelling and I believe he understood that the basis of society is human loyalty He wrote a wonderful book called The Philosophy of Loyalty.
He was raised in the West, the West of shootings and so on.
And he saw the importance of loyalty as a basis that cemented society.
This is very similar to the idea by Alain Perifitte, the former Minister of Justice of the government.
In the book, The Society of Trust, La Societe de Confiance.
It's a very great book.
And Schelling and Josiah Royce had anticipated this idea.
One of the most important basis of the free market society is loyalty and trust.
Not universal distrust, as the Frankfurt School proposes.
Well, these Frankfurters had at least a virtue.
They were sincere. They created something, they call it negative dialectics.
And they didn't propose anything.
They want only to destroy everything.
They were sincere. And they really did it.
What is the path that you have traced between the Marxist infiltration of American higher education, or Western higher education for that matter, and what extremities we now see?
In the American left's dominance of universities, you know, the tearing down of statues, the banning of Shakespeare from the curriculum, this sort of endless war against white males, affirmative action and race baiting and gender baiting and so on.
What is the path so people who are considering university, which, you know, was a fairly unquestioned benefit in the past and now I think has some challenges in terms of justifying the cost benefit.
What is the path between the post-war period and what people are seeing now in North American campuses?
Well, the situation is a little paradoxical, because by one side you have this multitude of agitators and crazy people, drugged young people, and so on.
And by another side you have the multi-billionaire elite that controls them.
So, this is a constant in history.
The highest powers make an alliance with the underdogs.
The underdogs to control everything that is in the middle, that is the majority.
This is very, very intelligent scheme and very difficult to stop.
And this is what's happening in America.
You see George Soros and Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, all these people orienting and commanding these anarchists in the universe.
And the people is pressed in the middle, they squeeze it in the middle of this double pressure.
Pressure from above and pressure from below.
This is the same strategical scheme of the communist movement with another symbolic content.
It's not economic insatisfactory anymore, it's sexual insatisfactory, social insatisfactory, psychological insatisfactory and so on.
But this is the same scheme.
Pressure from above and pressure from below.
And there is this very frustrating doublethink or hypocrisy on the left where They use freedom of speech to promulgate their own theories, but then when other people come to criticize them, there's this shutdown of freedom of speech.
And they understand the value of freedom of speech for their side, but the intolerance of the supposedly diversity-worshipping group, the intolerance and hostility and, in fact, hatred towards opposing viewpoints that they're, I think, clearly not competent to debate on rational or empirical terms, seems to be playing out In a sort of endgame scenario in Western universities at the moment.
I believe it is something worse than hypocrisy.
You should read the book by the Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, Andrew Lobaczewski.
Do you know him? No.
Well, this guy has been studying the Polish elite, communist elite, for 40 years.
And he verified all these people were psychopaths.
All of them. All the elite are psychopaths.
And he discovered that when a country is governed by the psychopathic elite, everybody around gets hysterical symptoms.
What is hysteria?
Hysteria is to believe not what you see, but what you say.
You say, you listen to it, and you persuade yourself.
So you live in a parallel world.
A world created by your own words.
And Of course, these mega-billionaires and most people in the government are all psychopaths.
They have no morality, no sense of duty or good and evil, etc., etc.
And they contaminate other people, but these people, the militants, the masses, don't get psychopaths.
They get hysterical.
And all those guys in the universe are hysterical.
So they are not properly hypocritical because they don't They don't know they are lying.
They perflate themselves.
And this self frustration is purely hysterical.
I recommend his book, Dr.
Lobachev's book is called Ponerology.
From the Greek word poneros that means evil.
So Ponerology is the study of evil in politics.
It is a very important book.
Dr. Lobachev could not find a publisher in the United States.
He published his book in Canada.
Well, this is interesting, too, because I've seen this for the last year or so.
There has been this leftist narrative that Donald Trump is somehow illegitimate because Russia hacked the election, and they've been looking and turning over rocks, and every now and then they find something that they think means something, and it turns out to mean very little, if anything, at all.
But they seem to be convinced of this.
And I just read recently, there was some TV show that 93% of its time was dedicated to just this repetition, this repetition, this repetition of this mantra of, you know, Russia hacked the election, Donald Trump's in collusion with Putin.
And this kind of repetition invites, to me, a kind of craziness.
It invites people to live in a world of words, not of facts.
And of course, it's much easier to manipulate words than it is to manipulate facts.
Yes, I have an axiom that says this.
When these people of the left, they commit a crime and you are too lazy or too coward or as any other reason not to punish them, they will be punished for another similar crime.
Listen, Mr. Trump is making a big mistake.
He wants to reform the country.
He has very good intentions, very good economic ideas.
But he wants to do this before he destroys his main enemies and assure he has the control of the state machine.
So it's the same thing as sawing a tree without having a saw.
It's this impossible.
I think he's figured...
I mean, I think he's known this for a while, but I think this is one of the reasons why he is focusing on CNN and some of the other networks at the moment, because I think he realizes that when you have this entire...
class of people who are incredibly influential, who are all dedicated with reframing everything you do in the worst conceivable light of lying about what it is that you do, of whipping up hysteria against what it is that you want to do, then I think you realize you're in a battle of ideas.
And of course, our goal as thinkers is to try and keep the battle in the realm of ideas because, you know, once it takes to the streets in clubs and guns, then thinkers have to sort of step aside and let rougher sorts take over.
And I think he's getting how much needs to be reformed in how information is transmitted to the American public.
Yes, but CNN is the hand of the morse.
It's not his brain. His brain is...
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and all these mega-billionaires.
And I have a theory that politics is never a fight of ideas.
It's a fight against people.
Because ideas by themselves, they do not.
If you don't have a guy in a position of power where he can take the series and make things happen, nothing happens.
So we have to neutralize only, not only certain ideas but certain people, Americans have all the elements to send Obama to jail.
He committed a lot of crimes.
Why they don't punish him?
If you don't punish him, he will punish you, because he knows he is at risk.
And I think also with the left in the West, They're being driven by so many people have ended up dependent on state power, on the state power to redistribute the income of the productive.
And I think that the argument is not about ideas fundamentally.
The ideas are a cover for the resource transfer, the resource acquisition.
The guy who was the...
Bank robber doesn't want security cameras installed.
He doesn't want, you know, fingerprint activated safes.
He doesn't want the people behind the counter to be armed or anything like that.
He wants the theft to be as easy as possible.
And I think what's happened is now, formerly it was ideas that created the transfers that created the population dependent on those transfers.
But once you have that population, the ideas become to some degree irrelevant because you now just have like half of Americans significantly dependent on the state for their income.
No, it's not about left or right.
It's just about, I really, really want to keep having my free stuff because I've made really bad life decisions that need to be subsidized by other people.
We are going toward a society where everything is controlled, either by the state or the great forces, the big forces.
Everything. The ideas, the feelings, the interpersonal relations, and so on.
Your speech, what you can say, what you cannot say, And this is a utopia that's much more fearful than communism itself.
They are trying to create the perfect dictatorship.
Because the...
Listen, in the Middle Ages, if you were controlled by a feudal lord, you knew where he lived.
And he had no arms, no weapons that were so better as yours.
He had the sword, you had the Sight.
Sight. Had a sight.
Or an axe. So, he was not so distant.
The powerful people are not so distant from the common people.
But nowadays, both the people in government, as the bidwriters, they are invisible.
They are unattainable.
And so, they have absolute power already.
People don't know anymore who commands them.
And they cannot do anything.
They are like gods in Olympos.
Invisible. They are in a cloud of invisibility from which they control everything.
You see, these people from the Bilderberg group, for 30 or 40 years, most people didn't believe the Bilderberg group existed.
It was completely invisible.
In Brazil it was the same thing because they created an organization called the Sao Paulo Forum that gathered 200 leftist organizations, some of them legal political parties and some of them bands of drug dealers, all together to plan a new life, socialist life for the continent.
For 16 years, all Brazilian media denied it existed.
I was the only one. Pay attention to the Sao Paulo Forum.
No, this is a theory of conspiracy.
This only ended when the founder of the Sao Paulo Forum itself, Lula da Silva, confessed that it existed and confessed that, oh, it was Sao Paulo Forum who put our friend Chávez in power.
Then everybody woke up, but it was late.
For 16 years they denied everything, as people denied the story of Barack Obama's documents.
Big media is an instrument of this big money people and the government.
If you control the flow of information, you control people's behavior.
Of course, not It's not, let's say, a material control.
It's a statistical effect.
Right. I have increasingly begun to look at the left's behavior as a confession of a devilish hatred towards Christianity.
This seems to be, and it's something that was obscured to me for many years, both because of a lack of information and my own ideological limitations.
But if I'm right in looking at it this way, I wonder if you could help my audience, a lot of whom are atheists, understand what the left's goal is in the opposition to Christianity and how the argument goes that Christianity is essential, as the Founding Fathers pointed out, for a free society.
Again, we have to go back to Georgi Lukács.
In approximately around 1910, He tried to convince the leaders of the communist movement that our problem is not capitalism.
It's Christian civilization.
We have to destroy it first, because it's Christian civilization that protects capitalism.
If we don't destroy the civilization, capitalism will be eternal.
At first, nobody believed him.
But bit by bit, the communist leaders were persuaded that he was right.
And so the hate of Christianity is not without a reason.
Christianity is the main obstacle to everything.
First of all, Christianity is an obstacle to a life that's turned only to terrestrial objectives.
The Italian ideologue Antonio Gramsci used to propose what he called the total terrestrialization of thought.
Human thought cannot go beyond the limits of Earthly life.
Because if it goes beyond, people start having ideas, and if they believe God, they become brave, they don't care to be martyrs, and so on.
But if people's lives are limited to a terrestrial perspective, they think only of their belly, and they become cowards and easy to control.
This is their idea.
Right. And particularly if hedonism takes over and you think of your belly and your sexual life, and if those in charge are, as you say, psychopaths and sadists, then their hedonism is controlling you and your hedonism is involved in not fighting against that control.
So it's like a perfect storm of escalating oligarchies.
Of course, when a guy gets hysterical, he believes anything.
He was born as a man.
He wants to believe he's a woman.
It's okay. But then he changes his mind.
No, I'm not a woman anymore.
I'm a man. Oh, it's okay.
Everything is okay.
You can have sex with a five-year-old boy and say it's love.
How can it be a love?
It is not directed to a person, but to an age.
To a certain stage of his physical development.
If it was love, you could go on loving him when he was 40.
Can you practice pedophilia with a 40 years old guy?
Of course not. So when the guy reaches a certain age, the lover abandons him, leaves him, and gets another one of the same age.
And so all these concepts are completely crazy.
But if you are hysterical, you can believe anything.
Anything you say, you believe.
Well, sorry to interrupt, but it's a funny thing that has struck me as well that, of course, Christianity is foundational ethic in many ways, is the acceptance of free will.
And if you are on the left, there's a lot of environmental determinism that comes out of the left, you know, whether it's, you know, you're defined by your race or your gender or your class and so on.
And they promise you freedom from the determinism of what used to be in the past economic determinism.
Now, of course, in Christianity, you have free will through the soul.
The problem is, of course, when you strip the divine and the soul out of the universe, it's easy to look at human beings as robots, you know, as just another piece of physics that happens to animate itself.
And that takes away people's responsibility.
Then if you're poor, well, you know, you're poor and you end up at the bottom in the same way that a rock dislodged from a mountainside ends up down in the valley.
It's not your fault.
It's just an action of physics.
And then there is this desperate desire to overturn this inevitability.
And I think that this question of free will remains foundational to the left's opposition.
Because whenever I talk about the difference between the voluntary poor and the involuntary poor, like the people who are poor through no fault of their own, who I think should deserve charity and help, and the poor who are poor as the result of bad decisions, as the result of poor choices.
as the result of bad habits, say, that they won't overcome, people get really angry on the left when you talk about the possibility that the poor might, to some degree, be responsible for their own condition.
And I think it takes away that determinism That they love so much.
Now, of course, the central planners are considered to be free if this determinism, they have free will, and so it's all contradictory and nonsense.
But this is, I think, when I became a public philosopher, I spent a lot of time fighting for the concept of free will with a lot of people who were either leftists or atheists who fought enormously hard against this concept of free will.
Do you think that is what they're fundamentally fighting against when it comes to Christianity, or is it something I'm missing?
Well, in the Christian and classical frame of reference, free will is only a part of the total structure of reality.
But in this new conception, free will is everything.
You can do whatever you want.
So there are no limits.
And I can ask, how do these people, these leaders and mega-billionaires and so on, these intellectuals, manage to persuade people of such stupidity?
The secret is this.
Psychopaths have an abnormal psychological aggressivity.
There are lots of psychological power.
They intimidate people by their very eyesight and their ways of speaking.
So, Rauchel Marcus used to ask, after all, will you believe me or your own eyes?
Psychopaths make people believe me, not their own eyes.
And this is the mechanism of psychopathic prostration that turns people into hysterical.
From the moment you start believing what you are saying and not you are seeing, you are hysterical.
And you can believe anything.
And this is the mechanism.
They are controlling lots of people.
Right? This dirty trick of psychological aggressivity.
Will you believe me or your brown eyes?
Oh, you, you, you. Right.
Now, it's, to me, a somewhat tragic coincidence that at a time when the left has dominance over so many cultural and educational institutions – we talk about higher education, but they have, of course, taken a significant control over primary schools, kindergartens, junior high schools, high schools, and so on – at the same time that the left has so much strength – The Catholic Church, in particular, seems to me to be faltering considerably.
And, you know, whether Pope Francis has been captured by globalists or whether there's some other motivation that is going on, naivety, I don't know.
But this, you know, when the enemy is strong and those who are charged with defending the West seem to be in a peculiar position of weakness that does not bode very well, in my view.
You know, the Soviets, they start...
He infiltrated people in the Catholic Church in the 30s.
And it took a long time to generate the effect.
You know a book by a lady called Bella Dodd, The School of Darkness?
He was one of the KGB agents that worked in this operation.
Infiltrate people in the Catholic Church.
He said, I myself infiltrated 3,000 people there.
And there were many thousands of agents working in this.
So, now in the Catholic Church, you cannot know who's who.
I take a precaution.
I don't trust anybody. I go to the church, I see the mass, I pray, and I go running.
I run away. I don't talk to anybody.
Because I don't know.
This guy can be a danger of the KGB. We never know.
I don't know even if the Pope is a new Pope, because there is Reasons to suspect that he was put in the chair of St.
Peter by George Soros and others.
There is a Catholic tradition in this newspaper called it The Remnant.
They are publishing a lot of stuff, very serious stuff about this.
So people ask me, well, this guy is the Pope, or he's not the Pope.
If the truth will depend on me to answer this, she's lost.
I don't know.
Nobody knows. I mean, the Church has the extraordinary power of excommunication to threaten those who seem to be working hand in glove with the leftists to destroy Western civilization, and the Church could have an enormous amount of power in solving that.
But yeah, as you say, I mean, whether the Pope was placed there or not, it's hard to see how it would be different either way in terms of how he's acting.
Can you imagine the consequence for the Catholic law?
When millions of people are receiving the communion from the hands of the communicative guys, this is so fearful, so terrible, that people have got scared to imagine.
They don't want to think of this because this is too bad to be true.
But it's true. I have been calling some bishops here as communicators.
One day they answered, nothing.
They're quiet. For you're not a bishop, you are excommunicated.
I said this to many of them.
They cannot answer anything.
They know they are excommunicated.
Now I wonder if you could help, we'll close this conversation off, which I really appreciate.
I wonder if you could help people understand Your journey to where you are in terms of a free market advocate, a passionate defender of Western civilization values, which I would argue is just moral values as a whole for the most part.
But you didn't start here.
You started at a very different place.
I wonder if you can help people understand your journey to where you stand now and the positions that you hold now versus when you were younger.
Well, when I was young, I belonged to a leftist organization for some time.
Not because I was persuaded of Marxist theory or something.
At that time, we had a military dictatorship, a right-wing military dictatorship.
Everybody wants to fight the dictatorship.
The most logical channel to do it was some leftist organization.
So they managed to organize their resistance to the dictatorship.
But they stayed there for a very short time because I started reading other things.
I studied a lot of Marxism.
For eight years, I dedicated my life to studying Marxism.
And I studied so much Marxism that I had the idea, well, in order to understand a theory, you have to understand what is against it.
What is you fighting against?
So I started reading people on the right.
I said, well, they were right.
This is the problem. And this is why they don't want you reading those people.
This is why they'll pull fire alarms and shut down the conservative speakers.
From a public point of view, you cannot read The Human Action by Ludwig von Mises and don't perceive he's right.
He's not right in everything, but in his critique of socialist economies, he's perfect.
There is no answer to this.
And this is, I believe, what happened. This communist in Eastern Germany They have been reading Mises' papers.
And they said, oh my God, this guy is right.
What will we do now?
They could not give up the power to create new pretexts.
Right. Of course.
Yeah, no, I mean, they change whatever props up the high seat of power.
I mean, they need to stay up there.
Whatever props it up, they don't mind what's underneath as long as they stay on top.
Marxism changes many times.
You know, they start saying that there are the structural classes and there are the ideologies of each class.
And this changes so much that one recent Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau says, the revolutionary propaganda creates the class it says to represent.
This is the opposite of Marxism.
A theory that can be changed, it's opposite.
It's very strange.
Well, I mean, of course, the Marxists, people call it scientific, which to me, if you have to repeatedly call something scientific, I'm just going to assume it's basically mystical and irrational.
Of course, in Marxism, the Marxist revolution was supposed to happen inevitably in the most industrially advanced And it would happen because capitalist production would diminish and fall off in this sort of economic Malthusian sense.
But of course what happened was capitalist production took off and the Marxist revolution ended up being imposed by force on the least economically developed countries, such as in the time China and of course Cambodia and Cuba and the big one of course Russia.
And so they had a whole bunch of problems with the fact that the empirical data Proved the opposite of the predictions and expectations of the theory, which, of course, in a sane universe has you cast aside the theory and look for a new one.
But again, if you're just using it as a tool or a lever to climb up the ladder of power, you don't care how you get to the top.
No, Marx used to say that social revolution cannot happen before capitalism reaches its highest development.
And when does this happen?
Marx doesn't say anything.
Capitalism can go on developing, developing, and communism has never come true.
And this is really what happens.
Capitalism, as well as Marxism, can change its versions and finish by saying the opposite he was saying in the beginning.
Also, capitalism can develop in so many different things and continue to be capital in some way.
Now we have a It's still capitalism.
And we have a total control of the masses by the media, the educational system, etc.
But it's still capitalism.
Or it's socialism. We don't know anymore.
Well, of course, when people can't think in this supposedly capitalist society, but the educational system is organized along almost exclusively socialist lines, it's hard to say that the lack of thinking is a product of capitalism when it comes out of the socialist organization of government schools all the way from shortly after birth into your early twenties sometimes, or beyond. These people continue to speak against the dominant threats, but they are the dominant threats.
No problem. Right.
Well, I really want to thank you for your time.
Your books are fantastic and people we can link to some of your videos that are available in English and, of course, the other ones.
But I really want to thank you for your time and for the work that you're doing.
It's fantastic to hear how well you are spoken of by my Brazilian audience and others who love your work.
And I'm really glad for the introduction.
We will put your website, YouTube, Facebook, and below, but I'll have a Di Cavallo, I really, really appreciate your time.
Thank you so much. It was a great joy for me, a great honor to be with you.
I appreciate your videos so much.
I believe I saw all of them.
They're fantastic. I love them.
And go on with the good work.
God bless you. Thank you very much.
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