A Larger Organizing Intelligence with Charles Eisenstein
Is a larger organizing intelligence happening in our country? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discusses the environment and spiritualism in depth in this profound podcast with Charles Eisenstein.
Is a larger organizing intelligence happening in our country? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discusses the environment and spiritualism in depth in this profound podcast with Charles Eisenstein.
Time | Text |
---|---|
I'm here, as people probably have guessed by now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | |
There's nobody I'd rather talk to, Charles. | |
You have one of the most interesting minds that I've ever encountered. | |
It's really, really brilliant, and I love your books. | |
And particularly, I think your climate book is probably the best book written on climate, and it's so nuanced and unusual and beautiful. | |
But you and I also, we spoke, I think, about a year ago on my podcast, so Yeah, I remember that podcast. | |
If we really want to change things, we've got to step out of this conflict dynamic because it's just a logjam. | |
You have to figure out a different way to do it. | |
A lot of the stuff you talk about, if you try to summarize it, it sounds almost corny or kind of fluffy, but actually it's quite practical as we're now figuring out and And it's being effective people on both sides want to hear about solutions rather than just more tribalism. | |
One of the points I make in the book is into why am I an environmentalist? | |
It wasn't because I got scared. | |
It wasn't because I calculated that bad things were going to happen to me or to us if we didn't do anything. | |
What made me into an environmentalist was experiences of beauty, of love, of loss, of the things that I loved, of grief. | |
When I was a kid, I remember I was standing with my father. | |
We were holding hands even. | |
I was little. | |
And we were looking at a flock of birds, a big flock of birds. | |
And that's when he told me about the passenger pigeons, whose flocks would go from horizon to horizon for hours and hours, darkening the sun, and that they're extinct. | |
And that really hit home for me. | |
I cried that night in bed. | |
And I'm wondering if you have any experiences like that, because you're known first and foremost, or should be known first and foremost for your lifelong environmental work. | |
So is there an event like that that made you into an environmentalist? | |
I mean, I had the same thing that you did. | |
I heard about the passenger pigeons when I was young and the dodo bird and learned that the dodo bird, you know, I knew that dinosaurs had gone extinct, but it was so disheartening to me and troubling to me that in art, In the last hundred years, the dodo bird had gone extinct. | |
And I was like, how could people let that happen? | |
It was something that I experienced as kind of a theft, an assault on our rights. | |
And then I had... | |
There was a stream that I, you know, when I was growing up, I was in McLean, Virginia, which at that time was a very rural community. | |
It was kind of a, it was farm and horses and, you know, the shop downtown was the saddle shop and the feed store. | |
And, you know, it was really a rural community, which is hard to imagine. | |
Imagine today, because now it's just kind of a suburb of Tyson's Corners, a pavement stuck between Washington, D.C. and Tyson's Corners. | |
I grew up in the 50s, and it was Eisenhower's highway program. | |
And they built the first of these highways. | |
It was called Dolly-Madison, and it was connecting to this web of interstates, practically through our backyard, through a neighbor's yard. | |
And that was a place where my brothers and I used to go every afternoon when we got off of school to catch salamanders and bullfrogs and green frogs and crayfish and mud puppies. | |
And we would spend, you know, particularly in the springtime, we would spend hour after hour in that stream and in the pond turning over rocks. | |
And then, you know, the bulldozers came one day and plowed it under. | |
And I experienced that as this, you know, momentous sense of loss. | |
There was a net, there was a tree there, a snag, where there were great horned owls that nested every year. | |
And I took one of those one year, climbed the tree and took him And Ray, you know, raised him and he was like a member of our family. | |
But all of those, you know, those little places were sacred to me. | |
And when the first cars started driving on the highway, my brother and I went up on the hill and threw rocks at them because we felt like, you know, it was an invasion. | |
And we got caught and got punished and the whole event was kind of dramatic for us. | |
And then, you know, I went to work for commercial fishermen on the Hudson when I was older, when I was 29 years old. | |
I went to work for the fishermen, and they had had the same experience. | |
We had a booming fishery on the Hudson, 350 years old. | |
It was many of the families I represented, and it was a very diverse group of fishermen. | |
There were blacks and whites and Hispanics, but many of the people were the descendants of Of the Dutch fishermen who had been fishing the river since Dutch colonial times. | |
And it was a traditional gear fishery. | |
They used the same fishing methods that the Algonquin Indians used to talk to the original Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and then pass down through the generations. | |
It was a terminal fishery. | |
In other words, you know, you have these huge masses of menachemus fish, of striped bass, of sturgeon, herring, alewaves, blue crab. | |
I come into the river to spawn. | |
And that's really the place where you need to regulate fisheries because then you can count, you know, the recruiting stock and you can calculate how many you need for the next year and make sure. | |
And the fishermen, depending on what the stock was like, they would lift their nets one day a week or two days a week so nobody would fish the river to allow what they call recruiters, which were the breeders. | |
And to preserve the free flow of the river during that point. | |
And so it's the perfect way to kind of regulate a public fishery where everybody agrees to do it. | |
And you can actually count all the stocks. | |
You're not catching fish out in the ocean. | |
And so it had been this incredibly well regulated fishery for 350 years. | |
They had a business model that worked. | |
And then the General Electric Company dumped its PCBs in the river, and Penn Central Railroad dumped oil in the river and made the shad taste of diesel so they couldn't sell the fish anymore. | |
And they were under assault from big polluters who were breaking the law, but they had the political call to get away with it. | |
And I recognized at that point that dynamic which really would define my career, which was, you know, this dynamic of agency capture. | |
The story of losing the stream where you and your brother played when you were kids, that's such a defining image of childhood, finding frogs and turtles, you know, and playing in the water. | |
What makes me sad, and I have a loss like that as well, the place where I grew up, for the same reason, you know, a highway came through. | |
But what makes me even sadder now is that a lot of kids never even have that to begin with. | |
Because childhood has migrated indoors almost completely. | |
And children rarely have time outdoors that's unsupervised. | |
And even if the parents shove them outdoors, there's not other kids playing outdoors in the kingdom of childhood. | |
You know, this is something, it's related to the decline of community. | |
It's related to the decline of public life. | |
It's related to the rising levels of fear. | |
And it transcends any political conversation, really. | |
Like when I talk to, it doesn't matter, liberals, conservatives, anybody, Yeah, we don't know our neighbors anymore. | |
So yeah, but that experience of loss, I shared the experience of losing the place I loved to an audience. | |
And a woman said, Oh, come on, Charles, don't feel sorry for yourself. | |
We've all been through that. | |
And I was like, yeah, that's exactly my point. | |
What is so precious we've lost. | |
And as a substitute for real experiences in nature and real connections, we have these technologically mediated online experiences. | |
Like the fishermen you were talking about, why were they able to maintain a fishery sustainably for 350 years? | |
It was because they were in relationship to it. | |
Over generations, they knew the fish. | |
And that kind of relationship, you know, even if it hadn't been destroyed by the polluters, when the industrial fisheries come in, they're completely oblivious to that. | |
You know, the things that I mourn also is just the thrill of finding a box turtle, you know, which I don't think my kids have ever seen a box turtle, a wild box turtle, which is, you know, I would catch maybe one or two a week and You know, it was such an extraordinary creature because, you know, the color, every one of them was completely different in the color scheme. | |
And they're all these very brilliant colors. | |
And then they had this very interesting lifestyle where they kind of, you know, they have a territory. | |
And those were all disrupted by the highways because the territories were intersected and the box turtles kind of run over. | |
But they were, you know, common enough that you could find them. | |
If you went out looking for a box turtle when I was a kid, you could find them. | |
And then, you know, I talked in my speech in Boston about what the puddles were like. | |
You have these kind of intermittent ponds and streams where the, you know, salamanders are bred and the frogs are bred. | |
A frog and a salamander can't breed in a fish pond because the fish will eat the eggs and then they'll eat the tadpoles as soon as they're born. | |
So the only place they can really flora, they lay their eggs, is in these intermittent streams that dry up during certain times of the year. | |
And so they won't support fish populations. | |
And so, you know, those were sort of critical areas. | |
And then we got big rain storms and thunderstorms in the springtime in Virginia. | |
And the mud bottles would form on the road in the ditches and the rivets in the road. | |
And those would be loaded with tadpoles and frogs' eggs. | |
And they'd just be bubbling cauldron of life when I was a kid. | |
And I just, you know, I loved that. | |
I loved finding them, bringing them home, raising them. | |
And The aquariums until they turn into frogs and then releasing them. | |
And my kids will never see that. | |
They'll never see the explosions of color that I saw when I was a kid when I walked into the garden and there were monarch butterflies and swallowtails and all these different species of butterflies. | |
I could go out any day with my butterfly net and catch butterflies. | |
Today, you know, you can't do that. | |
You know, you and I talked one time about the bug smears on the windshield. | |
Driving in Virginia particularly, driving in the springtime, you had to periodically get out and scrape the bugs off the windshield and off the head of the car. | |
You have to drive with your windshield wipers on sometimes. | |
Yeah, and that's gone. | |
People will say, well, who cares? | |
It was just bugs. | |
That's a good thing. | |
But that's the whole foundation of life. | |
They were the first ones... | |
All then, you know, all the other life depends on them. | |
And, you know, the other, the big losses and songbirds that, you know, my kids will never see. | |
It's really, to me, they don't know what they've lost. | |
And it's that... | |
That fabric, that tapestry of life. | |
St. | |
Augustine talked about it and said, he talked about the idea that God talks to us most eloquently through creation. | |
And that creation is like that every rock is a word, every brook and every leaf is a phrase or a lesson that God has for us. | |
There's something that we can learn from just sitting and observing nature, that we can learn about our creator. | |
And when we destroy that, we destroy this critical part of our relationship with God and the capacity to imagine, the capacity to understand, to comprehend through observations. | |
And Augustine compared it to a tapestry. | |
The entire tapestry shows the face of God. | |
And that through all of these different vectors, through leaves and flowers and grasses and wandering animals and fisheries, and that, you know, today we're pulling the strings out of that tapestry and it's getting more and more ragged and, and bare and, and dull. | |
And, you know, the colors are muted and the stars are not even visible anymore. | |
So no wonder we're attracted to the garish colors and fast-moving images of, you know, the internet and entertainment media. | |
So just to slightly change the subject, so you're so acutely aware of this loss and then spent so many years basically fighting corporate polluters. | |
And I wonder, you know, so often loss and grief, when it's not fully processed, can turn into rage, can turn into blame. | |
And, you know, you've been very much a crusader. | |
But now I sense that you're undergoing kind of a transformation, you know, where, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you recognize that the crusade against evil isn't enough to solve the problem. | |
So maybe you can tell me a little bit about Or your theory, why do these corporate polluters, why do these government agencies, why are they committing so much evil? | |
Is it because they're full of evil people? | |
What's the explanation? | |
I mean, I think they're locked in a system that they can't get out of. | |
And, you know, human beings have the capacity to blind themselves to the consequences of their actions if those, if seeing, if recognizing the consequences will affect their salaries. | |
You know, I think it was H.L. Mencken or maybe Upton Sinclair, you know, pointed out something to that effect that, you know, you can't convince a man of a fact. | |
If the existence of that fact It is going to affect his salary. | |
And so people have a way of talking them into, you know, creating narratives that justify behaviors that are very, very destructive. | |
And then they're all locked in systems that incentivize, you know, these quick returns from destroying things that And nobody really wants to lose. | |
And there's an economic rule called tragedy of the commons that says that each one of us, if left to our own devices, and where the only motive is self-interest, that it is always in our self-interest to catch the last fish in the ocean. | |
Even if that fish is booming or bursting with eggs and able to perhaps replenish the species, we still won't let them do it. | |
We're going to eat that last fish because that's what self-interest says. | |
And somehow we have to step away from self-interest and embrace a communal model. | |
And it's really, it's like a transformation of the kind that you described at the beginning of this when you said you didn't become an environmentalist out of fear. | |
You became an environmentalist out of love. | |
It's interesting because I read Carl Jung's biography about a year ago, and he was the son of a preacher. | |
Who was very brilliant and who was very accomplished. | |
But his father had this very, you know, sort of angry God and he had the conventional, he had the rhetoric down for conventional religion that was fear-driven, that was anger-driven, that was kind of a... | |
This angry paternal model of God who is a punishing God and lecturing people in his Sunday sermons about the fire and brimstone version of hell. | |
And that's why people should behave, because otherwise they were going to endure this nightmare for all of eternity. | |
But Jung himself had these very authentic spiritual experiences from when he was a very young boy, like maybe three or four years old. | |
He began having these very vivid dreams and these experiences of synchronicity that he interpreted as God kind of intervening through the laws that he had set up, the natural laws to set up, that he was intervening and breaking those laws in order to kind of notify that he was intervening and breaking those laws in order to We're all of eternity. | |
Us as individuals that, you know, I'm here and there's something higher than all these natural laws that I've set up. | |
And Jung had this very beautiful kind of love affair with God from when he was a little kid, which is an authentic spiritual experience. | |
And his father died a very miserable... | |
Father in the end lost all of his faith and died this very kind of miserable death. | |
You know, an empty... | |
One-dimensional twilight zone that he was living in that was filled, driven by, sculpted by anger and fear. | |
And Jung himself tried to get through to his father on multiple occasions, but his father just couldn't hear it. | |
He was blind to it. | |
And that, I think, is the difference. | |
It's the same kind of, it's a metaphor for, you know, are we going to be, for the way that you think about the environment, was Is that the only way we're really going to save this is if everybody falls in love with it again? | |
You know, fearing some distant graph is going to show them that doom is going to come in 10 years, which nobody actually believes, you know? | |
Yeah, they've been predicting that for 30 years, that doom is going to come in 10 years. | |
Well, you know... | |
To the defense of people who predicted it, it actually is happening. | |
I mean, we're losing things now because I still spend so much time in nature. | |
See the changes, you know, from climate as well. | |
Yeah, that's the thing, though. | |
The doom isn't happening to us. | |
It's happening to other beings. | |
By objective measures, if you don't include mental illness and addiction and so forth, by objective measures, we're just fine. | |
It's nature that's suffering. | |
And for me, this idea that someday we're going to die, too, if we don't change our ways is actually kind of dangerous. | |
Because it's suggesting that the reason we should change our ways is primarily what will happen to us. | |
And so it plays into the basic paradigm of the instrumentalization of nature that uses it and exploits it for self-interest. | |
And requires that we deny what's actually human nature, which is to love and respect and honor and hold sacred the beings around us. | |
And that's why I've been advocating for, you know, a change of strategy and rhetoric in the environmental movement to really tap back into that fundamental biophilic impulse. | |
From the beginning of my career, I kind of instinctively followed that course because I remember I remember there was a time when, you know, I had worked simultaneously for NRDC and for the fishermen at Riverkeeper. | |
You know, I was dealing with people who had real lives rooted in, you know, wearing waders up to their hips in mud and water, removing fish from nets, and that the joy of You know, | |
an 11-foot sturgeon with 200 pounds of caviar in it, which we have in the Hudson, or a full net of shad, or just of catching eel on the weekend and catching goldfish for collectors and exploring all these hundreds of species of fish that we have in the Hudson. | |
There's a fish that paves the tiles the bottom Of the Hudson called hog chokers that looks like a hairy flounder. | |
And then we get all these tropical fish that come up, you know, from on the Gulf Stream that they still think they're in Belize, you know, until the winter hits. | |
We get, you know, really the, you know, extraordinary tropical fish. | |
And they were so in love with the river. | |
And that's what motivated them to basically devote their lives to saving it. | |
And I was basically captured by that dynamic And spent my career, you know, working with people who were protecting places that were sacred and habitats that were sacred and their livelihoods and communities. | |
And at a time when the environmental movement was increasingly getting caught in climate, which, you know, I believe that the climate is changing. | |
I believe it's carbon-induced changes and methane and other molecules that are trapping heat. | |
You know, that's physics. | |
By the way, I'm not believing necessarily all the climate modelers and everything, but I read the documents that Exxon's scientists produced back in the 70s. | |
Exxon hired scientists who were the best carbon. | |
They knew more about the fate of the carbon molecule in the environment, and they prided themselves on that than any scientist on Earth. | |
And they wrote memos to the executive board of Exxon saying, if we continue to burn carbon, we are going to eat the globe. | |
And by the way, it's going to be a good thing for Exxon because it will melt the polar ice cap and there's a lot of oil in there that we can't get at now and we should be ready to get at it after we've melted the globe. | |
Well, they wrote letters saying that to their chief executive officer of Exxon. | |
So it wasn't just a bunch of hippie scientists or paid government scientists. | |
It was people who knew about carbon. | |
I don't know enough about carbon. | |
I know there's large amounts of people. | |
Scientists who, you know, are terrified of climate change, but I was seeing the impacts of carbon on my, you know, that the fish were now filled with mercury, and the mercury, every freshwater fish in America has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh, mainly coming from coal-burning power plants. | |
That alone is enough to... | |
The high peaks of the Appalachians, the waterways on those are basically all sterilized from acid rain. | |
We are acidifying the ocean, which to me is more frightening than climate change. | |
You acidify the ocean and the whole fabric of life, you know, all of those little zooplankton require, they need to mobilize calcium out of the water column and they can't do that in order to make their shells, in order to do it. | |
You know, I mean, I've researched this topic front, back, left and right, you know, in writing my book. | |
And what I came to is that the things that we need to do most, we have to do whether or not the standard global warming narrative is right. | |
And you just named an example of that. | |
The coal, the mercury, the particulates, the mining that destroys ecosystems. | |
What I also came to is that the most important thing to do right now is to preserve any intact ecosystem from development, from mining, from drilling, and also to restore and regenerate, especially agricultural land. | |
And if we do that, it's actually not even that hard to completely solve the climate crisis if you agree that it is caused by carbon emissions. | |
And if you don't agree about that, it's still a good idea because it restores aquifers, it restores biodiversity, it restores soil productivity down the line. | |
Everybody wants healthy food. | |
Everybody should anyway. | |
So, you know, but yeah, you're right. | |
If we do regenerative agriculture, we create a carbon sink like nothing else on Earth. | |
And that, you know, is better than, you know, all this geoengineering carbon capture stuff that is just causing more problems. | |
It's crazy to think that we can fix, you know, their Earth with plumbing. | |
So I'm going to shift gears here. | |
Something I've been kind of curious about, you know, both of us were, I would say, COVID dissidents who resisted and publicly criticized various aspects of the COVID narrative. | |
You know, there came, like people sometimes ask me, you know, Charles, how did you stay sane? | |
You know, how did you stay upbeat when all that was going on and when you were being denounced, you know, and deplatformed and stuff? | |
And I'm like, how do you know that I stayed upbeat? | |
Yeah. | |
I've actually went through some periods of darkness, you know, and even like a really deep kind of doubt where I had moments of, you know, maybe the world isn't crazy. | |
Maybe I'm crazy. | |
Maybe society hasn't gone mad. | |
Maybe this isn't Maybe I've been wrong my entire life about everything I've written on. | |
And I spent actually months, in some cases, not writing anything and really getting back in touch with what I knew directly. | |
As opposed to, like you were saying before, people believe whatever story is convenient for them to believe, not only for their financial gain, but also to maintain the integrity of their worldview and their self-image. | |
So I'm curious, I'd like to kind of ask you the question, like, how do you stay so positive and upbeat and energetic? | |
Because I experience you as... | |
A rock-solid leader, someone that I could lean on in those moments where I'm in doubt. | |
So what's your source of solidity? | |
You know, I would say a couple of things. | |
One is I have a real kind of spiritual discipline, which is I really rely on 12-step meetings, and I was going to nine a week during the I've been doing that for 40 years. | |
And, you know, because that's where I get kind of spiritual renewal and confirmation and validation, and also the opportunities for service that you get through that, which is really what keeps people sane. | |
You know, if you're feeling depressed or if you're feeling disconsolate or uncertain or anxious, the one thing that will transform that immediately like magic is if you try to help somebody else. | |
And you get a lot of those opportunities in 12-step programs. | |
I do meditation every day, so that centers me spiritually. | |
It's like, you know, I did a lot of whitewater kayaking. | |
And a lot of first descents on big rivers all over the world. | |
And when you're scouting a rapid, you climb a bluff above the rapid and you look at it for a long time and make a plan. | |
You make a line, how you're going to get through it and the moves you're going to have to make. | |
And then you try to stay on that line. | |
And if you can do that, you're going to be okay. | |
And a lot of times you'll wash out and then you're at the mercy of the river. | |
And that's what, to me, meditations are like. | |
It's like sitting still and planning your day and say, how am I going to stay spiritually centered during this day? | |
And these difficulties, asking for help, you know, and then trying to say, okay, when I speak to this child, I'm not going to get angry. | |
I'm A business partner or whatever, I'm going to do it in a way that's calm and not give in to anger or fear or whatever. | |
And so, you know, that helps me a lot. | |
And of course, a lot of times you can't stick with your plan. | |
You end up washing out and then you're, you know, but you get another chance the next day. | |
God's given us. | |
The gift of time, but he cut it into these manageable units called days. | |
And every day you can start over and try to do better. | |
And then my family is really important to me. | |
My family had a much harder time During the pandemic, because of me, because of my, you know, resistance and skepticism, you know, ended up, in some cases, hurting them, you know, in their lives. | |
And that, to me, was the most difficult part of it. | |
But otherwise, I just, you know, I tried to just stay spiritually centered. | |
And as long as I do that, I feel like I can bear anything. | |
Have you been able to maintain a meditation practice during the rigors and the daily intensity of the campaign? | |
Yeah, I have to. | |
It's not an option for me. | |
You know what I do, Charles, I do a hike. | |
I do a walk meditation. | |
So I hike every morning in the wilderness and I do my meditations then. | |
And I have a discipline that I go to that I've been doing for 40 years and it just works well for me. | |
You know, it keeps me centered for most of the day. | |
By the end of the day, you know, everything gets ragged. | |
I have a friend who says that the devil sleeps late and it's really easy to be a good person in the morning. | |
But, you know, by late afternoon, you know, he's putting on his, you know, his dress coat and his tuxedo and spats and lots of... | |
And it just becomes more... | |
It becomes harder and harder as the day goes on. | |
That'd be a cool campaign promise. | |
I promise that I will meditate every day throughout my presidency. | |
I don't think we've really heard that from a candidate. | |
Part of me right now is just the very fact that this conversation is happening portends a Profound shift in American consciousness. | |
I can't imagine in prior elections these topics being talked about, frankly, by a major candidate. | |
Some kind of change is in the air. | |
I believe. | |
I've kind of given up hope on politics. | |
I thought that, okay, the change is going to have to... | |
And this is actually still true. | |
It's not either or. | |
It's both and. | |
But the superficial level of politics, who's in charge, who's president, that's going to change last. | |
And the change is going to have to come from the inside, from the gradual hollowing out of the defining stories of our civilization. | |
And maybe the last thing to change will be the most superficial level. | |
And so I pretty much given up, you know, I certainly had no intention of participating in electoral politics at all. | |
I mean, of course, not as a politician, I'd be terrible at that. | |
But even, you know, as being involved in a campaign as I am now. | |
But I think like a lot of people, a new hope has awakened in me. | |
And in conversations, I'm finding so much resonance in. | |
It's like the hope never quite died. | |
A year or two ago, I wrote an essay called The America That Almost Was and Yet May Be. | |
And it was about the JFK assassination and actually your father's assassination as well. | |
And I basically said, well, for one thing, that a certain... | |
I can't remember actually exactly what I said, but the idea is that there was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving toward greater and greater virtue. | |
And by the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was underway, and we had in JFK an anti-imperialist president who was picking up where Roosevelt and some of his more radical cabinet had left off, who wanted to dismantle the British Empire and not Take over its helm. | |
JFK wanted to support independence movements around the world. | |
He was an anti-imperialist and wanted peace with the Soviet Union and to scale down the military industrial complex. | |
And imagine all of that wealth that hadn't been devoted toward war, Johnson's war on poverty could have succeeded. | |
We would be living in a completely different, if we hadn't been trying to assert dominance over the world by violence for 60 years. | |
And had turned all of that resource toward the healing and flourishing of America. | |
Imagine where we would be right now. | |
And that timeline was cut short on November 22, 1963. | |
And then following that, the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in that period. | |
And I feel like maybe that timeline hasn't died. | |
Maybe we can pick up that thread. | |
And it's so significant that Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. | |
It's one of the synchronicities that speak to or speak from a larger organizing intelligence in the world. | |
Yeah, the way that I look at that history is you had Eisenhower give that famous speech, which was the most, probably looking back at it now, it may be the most important speech in American history. | |
There's probably five in that category that I would, you know, point to. | |
Winthrop's speech on the slip of the Arbella in 1608, in which he said, you know, the City on the Hill speech, and then the Gettysburg address. | |
You know, Roosevelt's speech in 1932 about the only thing we have to fear, fear itself. | |
But probably Eisenhower's speech is the most important because he warned America against the emergence of a military-industrial complex. | |
And he was, you know, the leading general in World War II, the commander of all the Allied forces. | |
And for him to say the biggest threat to democracy is the rise of the military-industrial complex... | |
You know, he was the perfect person to say that message. | |
It wasn't Adlai Stevenson. | |
It wasn't Henry Wallace saying the message. | |
It was, you know, it was a war commander. | |
Why didn't he do anything about it? | |
He could have, you know, he was... | |
He could have done it when he was, but, you know, he wanted to. | |
And that's one of the reasons he started relying on the CIA so much, is because he did not want to go to war with the Soviets, and he believed that. | |
You know, empowering Alan Dulles that Dulles could somehow keep him out of war and then giving Dulles the capacity to make these little wars all over the world and kill people and fix elections. | |
You could do it without, you know, confronting nuclear war. | |
But, you know, so then my uncle comes into office and has a three-year hand-to-hand combat with his military brass and his intelligence apparatus to keep us out of war, which he successfully does. | |
And he, my uncle... | |
You know, a week before he dies, he signs a national security order ordering all 16,000 troops out of Vietnam. | |
They weren't combat troops. | |
He wouldn't put in the combat troops. | |
They wanted him to put in 250,000. | |
He sent 16,000 military advisors and said it's their fight. | |
And if they can't win it, it's not our fight. | |
But immediately after he died, Johnson revoked that order and then sent, you know, after the Duncan Gulf incident a year later, sent the $250,000, ultimately $500,000 over. | |
And $56,000 would never return, including my cousin George Skakel, who died during the Tet Offensive. | |
And many, many other people that I knew at that time, and I'm sure that you knew too. | |
So we had that trauma, and that added, you know, that was another trauma that pushed us down the road to the military-industrial complex. | |
And then, you know, the last big trauma was 9-11, which kind of sealed the deal and turned America into a surveillance state at home, you know, an imperial state abroad, a Of constant, unending, forever wars. | |
I had a conversation, actually, this morning, a long conversation with Joel Pollack, who is the editor-in-chief and kind of, you know, a co-founder with Andrew Breitbart's. | |
Why would I be talking to a guy from one of the big conservative newspapers? | |
But he was saying the same thing. | |
He was saying that you just said that we need to go back to that time and that fork in the road when John Kennedy was killed. | |
And he said to me that Trump kept saying, make America great again. | |
And a lot of people thought, oh, he means go back to the 1950s and Jim Crow laws and all that. | |
But most people, when they say, make America great again, are really thinking of the time during the Kennedy administration, the time up to then, And that fork in the road that we took, you know, when my uncle died. | |
And then my father comes along and he runs against the military industrial complex. | |
That's his issue. | |
He's running against the war and then he gets killed. | |
So that trauma and then the trauma of Vietnam and 9-11 pushes down the road in that war. | |
And what Pollock said to me, and I had this wonderful conversation with him where, you know, we ended up, Figuring out the values that we really shared rather than the issues that keep us apart, the tribal issues, which both of us can retreat to anytime. | |
We were really talking about what are the things we have in common, what are the things that we can... | |
Build a common bridge for all Americans to cross these kind of tribal divides and become one people again. | |
How do we do that? | |
And, you know, that's what he said to me. | |
He said, when he thinks of Make America Great, it's going back to that time, to the time we took that fork down this bad road, down the road to Imperium and National Security State. | |
Yeah, that's beautiful. | |
And I know a lot of people resonate with that. | |
So many people are sick of the vitriol, you know, and the venom that characterizes, like everything's people shouting at each other and trying to incite as much indignation and outrage as possible against the horrible people on the other side. | |
And that's another reason why I've been so much attracted to this campaign, you know, to your candidacy. | |
Like, you're not doing that. | |
And it's not out of some restraint. | |
It's because that's not your truth. | |
That kind of, let's vanquish the evil people and dance over their humiliated corpse. | |
You know, like, that's not what you're doing. | |
Like, you really sincerely, every president gives lip service to it. | |
I'm going to be the president of all the people, Republicans and Democrats. | |
But I've seen you again and again actually put that into action. | |
I mean, I think we're ready for it. | |
I think people are so tired of the division which has even penetrated to their families. | |
I mean, are we really that different in our basic values? | |
And if not, how have we been maneuvered into spending 99% of our energy fighting each other and almost 0% actually changing the disastrous course of our society? | |
It feels almost orchestrated, all of this vitriol towards each other. | |
It was part of what they used to call the birthplace. | |
You know, they called it that during the Civil War in the South, the elite class, which was called the Bourbons, which were like the Yankees of New England. | |
They were the Bourbons. | |
The aristocracy kept the blacks and whites fighting each other and hating each other because it then allowed them. | |
them to be manipulated, the ruling class, the elites, to basically strip mine their wealth, their assets, their rights, and while they were in the battle against each other. | |
And I feel a lot of times like that's what we're living in that today, that all of this, these, you know, like you say, the orchestrated anger and indignation that is just part of the daily, you know, drill that CNN is telling us that we need to do that and Fox News, drill that CNN is telling us that we need to do that and Fox News, that we need and that the people who are getting the advantage of that are the advertisers and the upper elites. | |
Is there any final thing you'd like to say before we... | |
You put me on the spot. | |
I've enjoyed the conversation. | |
I always love talking to you, Charles. | |
Yeah, likewise. | |
Thanks so much for taking the time. | |
I'll be talking to you soon. |