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Aug. 24, 2022 - Viva & Barnes
01:18:32
Sidebar with Michael Millerman - Viva & Barnes LIVE!
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Time Text
There will be no intro video tonight, people.
When it rains, it pours.
I've never had so many computer problems before.
Is my audio good?
I need to make sure I'm not glitching in and out with the audio.
Let me just wait.
Is the audio good, people?
Once bitten, twice shy, third time, you no longer donate to PETA.
Let me see if the...
Let me just make sure everything in the backdrop is good.
Lag.
Okay.
Late and Rakeda, and I get that joke now.
Oh, man.
Let me see something here.
Let me see.
Okay.
It's fine.
Audio's good.
Fine.
No Esperanto today.
Esperanto.
Okay.
People, this is going to be phenomenal.
I'm so good with accents.
I know when someone is Canadian and from Montreal.
Michael Milliman is on tonight.
I don't understand the world that we live in when one is attacked and maligned for having an interest in modern philosophers, modern philosophy, and translating modern philosophy.
We're going to go into this in greater detail with Michael himself.
But it's...
We're living in bizarre times where liberalism means censoring discourse, where tolerance means not allowing certain discussion because it's intolerant.
Liberalism and tolerance for that which we like and agree with and shunning everything that we do not want to hear.
The funny thing is I was doing my homework on Michael Milliman, watched his stream from yesterday.
Talking about Andrew Tate.
If Millerman has not gone into a deeper dive of Andrew Tate, it might shape his opinion on Andrew Tate, but probably not his ultimate opinion of Andrew Tate, which is in a free, democratic, philosophical-loving society, discourse is allowed and it's not shunned.
You don't get demonized for it.
And I had no idea Millerman had such a history.
We're going to do this.
This is going to be good.
But before we do this, okay, so everything looks good.
I see Millerman and Barnes in the backdrop.
There was one thing I wanted to check.
By the way, I figured out what was wrong with my camera.
I was on 360 low definition and not 720 HD.
The framing is what it has been.
That's not a stain.
That's caulking.
Don't wear merch when you're trying to do bad repairs to windows.
Speaking of censorship, just learned that YouTube just gave Dr. John Campbell a strike.
I'm against their censorship, but I take that one personally.
Chet Chisholm, we're going to get into it.
And this is the perfect segue.
Superchats, YouTube takes 30%.
We're simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
Yada, yada, you know the shtick, you know the spiel.
I did it less than four hours ago.
No election fortification.
No election fortification.
Turn the TV off!
Okay, I'm back.
We have no love for affiliation with ties to someone who's been put on a no-fly list, a Russian philosopher, Dugan.
We're going to get into it.
Can you see me now?
Why do you keep freezing?
I'm going to go ahead and blame the kids.
Okay, it doesn't matter.
I'm going to bring in Michael, Robert.
If I go black...
They can carry on the conversation.
It's the kids.
They're watching some stupid television show.
Okay.
Michael, sir, how are you doing?
Doing well.
Great to be with you.
Dude, this is going to be amazing.
Let me bring in Barnes.
Let me get the screen set up here.
We're going to go like this.
I'll go on the bottom so that when I blame the dog, he's under the table.
If you hear anybody with gas, it's the dog.
Audio levels, mic check.
Robert, how are you doing?
Good, good.
Michael, let's hear your audio.
Hello, hello.
If you need it louder, that's fine.
No, no, I'll bring it up.
I'll bring it up.
Automatically adjust volume.
Okay, and then we're going to see what everyone says.
Need more bandwidth.
Yeah, that's what we need.
We need kids to stop watching TV.
iPad and iPhone at the same time.
Okay, we're live.
This is going to be fascinating.
Michael, I've been doing my daily rundown, looking for scandals, looking for history.
I think I found some.
But for those who don't know who you are, 30,000-foot overview before we get into childhood, earliest memories, and how you got to where you are.
So, in effect, I'm a former academic.
I did my undergraduate in philosophy at the University of British Columbia, then my PhD in political science at the University of Toronto.
But along the way, I took an interest in the question of the relationship between philosophy and politics, and so I started doing some translation work.
As I'm sure some of your viewers know, part of that translation work was on Alexander Dugan.
Aka Putin's brain, the most dangerous philosopher in the world, etc., etc., etc.
A long list now of qualifiers.
And because of that work, I was blacklisted from academia, in effect.
So I still graduated from the University of Toronto with my PhD.
Then I did some independent things.
Then I opened my own online school of political philosophy, millermanschool.com, where I teach the books and courses that I think are...
Vital from the canon of political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and so on.
But that's really what it is.
My interest in philosophy and politics is what drove me through academia and out of academia and into independent teaching.
Yeah, I think I'm trying to remember where I came across.
Maybe it was like about a year ago or so.
And I think it was related to the...
Because you do some YouTube videos.
For your school of philosophy, online school of philosophy.
My brother's a philosophy professor at the University in New York.
Upstate New York University.
I think they called themselves University of Brockport.
They used to be State University of New York at Brockport, but everybody's got to have fancier names these days.
You can't be State University.
You've got to have some fancy phrase.
Memphis used to be Memphis State.
Now it's the University of Memphis.
Whatever.
He does some political philosophy aspects to his work and research as well.
I forget how I came across it, but it was always very interesting work.
In particular, it became It seems to me increasingly people have a lack.
People in positions of power have a lack of strategic empathy, which you've talked about quite often.
And it's disturbing to me.
To me, if you're in the State Department, you're in the intelligence branches, you're in aspects of the military that are making intelligence decisions, particularly that may lead to or be about or concerning conflicts around the world, you need to know how the other side thinks.
In law, we're taught to be the adversarial process.
We're taught to put ourselves in the other party's shoes in order to be able to be an effective...
But now, strategic empathy is immoral.
It's now bad to employ.
And we're seeing the consequences in a range of disastrous politics and policies around the globe as so many people in the West refuse to employ a critical technique that's necessary to actually make good decisions.
Regardless of what, and distinguish between strategic empathy and morally and politically agreeing with who it is you're trying to understand.
You empathize for strategic purposes.
That doesn't mean you have to agree with the desired outcome or outlook they may have.
Sadly, not enough people do, but you've done a very good job of doing that.
But first, as Eva likes to go into some of the familial backstory, you've got an interesting familial backstory.
Parents from the Soviet Union escaped from Moldova.
Moldova is right next to part of the Ukrainian conflict, potentially, with Transnistria and the rest.
What was that like?
I mean, I'm always curious about people who know anybody who've lived in the Soviet Union.
What were your parents' experience?
And why did they choose to leave or escape?
Well, there's a back story there.
And I don't know really all of the details of their lives that well, to tell you the truth.
But they were...
So my dad is Jewish.
My mom is not.
So I'm not technically Jewish, although I sort of am.
You know, people who accuse me of being this or that, it's difficult.
Actually, there are some technicalities and some nuances in that question.
Let me just ask, do you need me to turn the mic up?
I know someone said...
Turn your mic up a little bit.
Yeah, you're quieter than us.
Is that better or no?
Keep it going.
Let's see what happens.
Is that better?
That's better.
Go to 11. It's got to go to 11. Okay, good.
Yeah, so my dad was Jewish.
My mom and her background are German, actually.
So there's maybe some of the interest in German philosophy comes from that.
I'm not exactly sure.
But it was hands-off in the household.
So we didn't have religion, really, or ideology, really, in the household.
We weren't raised to be Christian or Jewish or anything.
It was pretty much hands-off, I would say, for most of my early childhood.
The big influence for me was that I have an older brother and an older sister.
And it's the books that they had around the house that made the biggest impression on me.
And I think that had an impact on what I ended up studying.
So the books were...
Kind of your run-of-the-mill psychology, esoteric, occult, psychoanalytic, beatniks, okay?
Some of that kind of stuff, right?
So a hodgepodge of literature like that.
And what really attracted me was existentialist philosophers, psychoanalytic of a certain kind, and definitely mystical.
So I didn't have a plan to go to university.
We weren't the kind of household that, weirdly, You know, made it all.
Well, actually, it's complicated.
My dad had saved up money for our education, but then they divorced when I was 15. So in effect, my experience from my perspective was that there wasn't a road laid out for academic studies, whatever was going on behind the scene.
But I took this immersion in mystical literature that I had just as a kind of accident.
I combined it with my own proclivities, temperament and experiences.
And at some point I took it to academia when I was just, you know, finally decided I might as well go.
I started studying philosophy and there was this just like big bang moment where I saw aha.
Mysticism and philosophy have a kind of integral relationship that both sides are missing.
The mystics don't quite understand the need for conceptual rational articulation and the philosophers don't quite see the need for completing.
Conceptual rational articulation with an effable moment of spiritual self-transcendence.
So I was like, okay, you know, this was philosophy 101, first year undergraduate, this accidental combination.
And that set me down a road where I've been interested in the relationship between philosophy and mysticism, and then at some point, politics as well.
So how these three things fit together.
But yeah, but the childhood education...
It was the hands-off approach, I think.
My mom, for example, when my parents divorced, she gave me a lot of latitude.
So I was able to be somewhat experimental in what I thought, in how I acted, in what I believed, in how I lived.
And some of that probably has mapped over into my intellectual habits as well.
So I don't mind straying outside of your typical, well-established lanes intellectually.
In fact, I think that there's a lot to gain in straying outside.
But that's probably a function of those influences.
So a little bit of the Jewish, a little bit of the Russian, because from the former Soviet Union, a little bit of the German, plus the Canadian, which has something, you know, the whatever makes a person Canadian.
You know, at the time, I think that left its mark on me as well.
With these other influences, then bang, you put that all in a pot, you stir it, and somehow that's what I channel in my work.
Two things.
So you're the youngest of three kids.
Is your father still alive?
Because you said was.
Yeah, so both my parents are still alive.
My mother, so they divorced when I was 15. I moved to the United States.
I finished high school in Michigan.
So that was an interesting experience because, you know, everybody sensed the Canadian accent and that was pretty uncomfortable.
That was the first thing they noticed.
I'm like 6 '8", so they noticed that I'm tall.
But then, you know, the moment I opened my mouth, they noticed I'm Canadian.
Did you say 6 '8"?
Yeah, that's right.
So, but not really particularly, you know, I played on the basketball team, but I wasn't the star.
So that's not the point.
So I went to Michigan, parents divorced.
My mom, this was pretty important for my intellectual autobiography, I would say, or, you know, the important moments of the development of my thought.
My mom became a Mormon, so she moved to Salt Lake City and she became just a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints.
And during this process, because we didn't have religion in the household growing up, and then I went with her when they divorced and suddenly we had some religion entering the life, right?
Entering the household, creeping in through her conversion and all of that.
I took an interest in theology and religion in a new sort of way with the intent primarily of refuting it.
So this was pretty important because I picked up a book on atheism.
I think it was called The Case for Atheism.
And what struck me about that, I talked about this recently in another conversation, but I'm going to repeat it because it's, you know, in a way, decisive for me.
I read this book, The Case for Atheism, and there was something about it that was so weak that it had the opposite effect of telling me, man, if this is the case for atheism, clearly there's something that the atheists are missing.
And there's a very strong swing Now, that doesn't automatically mean becoming Christian, becoming Mormon, Catholic, anything else like that.
but it meant that the question that was closed for me suddenly became open for me and uh and in some way If anybody knows, I have an interest in the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
My book is called Beginning with Heidegger.
One of the main reasons I'm interested in Dugan is because he calls Heidegger the deepest foundation of his fourth political theory.
And there was something in that moment of the gap in the atheist argument that's structurally similar to something that attracted me in Heidegger, which was an effect that you have to distinguish types of being.
So I won't reproduce the arguments, but something about the atheist argument, from that particular book, I'm not saying every atheistic argument ever advanced, but for me personally at that moment, there was a kind of insight that, hey, there's an ontological level of argumentation here where you have to distinguish between types of being, and they're just totally missing it.
So maybe the mystical stuff had prepared me for that, I'm not exactly sure.
But anyway, that had an impact.
But yeah, my parents are still alive.
They probably think it's pretty crazy that my work on Dugan has brought me into the public light to a certain extent, the university cancellation, all the rest of it.
But hey, that's life, right?
That's what happens.
I've always been pursuing a set of questions and interests.
I still do that.
And it's not easy for people who are looking from the outside, who don't have the thread connecting everything, to make sense of how it all fits together.
What was your experience like?
You're at the University of Toronto when a lot of political correctness is starting to take over, starting to influence a lot of Western institutions, where suddenly we don't study, not only is the idea of strategic empathy rejected as somehow immoral, but also that...
You can't evaluate, consider, contemplate, discuss certain thinkers solely based on the perceived political consequence of those thinkers.
What was that whole experience like?
So it's an amazing question, and it's such a wild issue because University of Toronto is not your typical, or at least it wasn't your typical...
Ideologically captured institution, I would say.
Because, and I'm going to say why, in the Department of Political Science, some...
Okay, I have to give you some backstory here, okay?
On the field of political science where I studied, and then I'll tell you a little bit about my particular case.
So I was in a department of political science, and there's subfields in political science.
Some are like super empirically oriented.
Others tend to be more philosophical.
I was in the subfield of political science called the political theory.
That's where you raise the big philosophical questions about politics.
What is politics?
What is law?
What is justice?
What's the relationship between violence and law?
All of those kinds of questions.
And in the field of political theory, there are schools.
You have your postmodern neo-Marxists, leftists, classical liberals, and all that.
So one school, the school that takes most seriously the study of alternatives in our narrow field, is the followers of Leo Strauss, the Straussians.
And there were some prominent Straussians who had taught at the University of Toronto.
Thomas Pangle.
Alan Bloom.
And these are people who are giant intellects, who are the real deal when it comes to the serious study of political philosophy.
So I was stepping into an environment that had some illustrious history in light of epic thinking.
However, the people who were there that I studied with, there were some sort of deformed, misbegotten freak shows compared to those outstanding luminaries.
So there are so many parts about what happened with the Dugan case that are incredible to me.
But one was that it was at the time of the 2014 conflict.
So it's a living philosopher, a living issue.
It's a war that was going on.
And all the pressures that professors may feel to...
Like, if it's an old issue and you're reading old books and everybody's dead, somehow you might feel freer.
All the more so when it has no bearing on life today.
But when it's a living thinker, a living issue, and questions that have a lot of bearing on life today, suddenly these people put their tail between their legs and screwed away.
Like rats.
So as you can tell, I'm not really happy with what happened there.
But the amazing thing too, okay, so many parts of the story.
I'll tell you one.
The people who were on my dissertation committee.
Who agreed to have me include Dugan in a study of receptions of Heidegger, which is the topic of my dissertation.
After I gave a TV interview on Canadian TV, which sort of blew up as far as Canadian TV interviews can do, blew up.
After that interview, they resigned from the committee.
They tried to pull my funding.
They tried to sabotage my reputation.
They tried to sabotage up to years later the new composition of my committee.
And these were people who positioned themselves.
This is important because it helps us to understand.
These are people who position themselves as defenders of free inquiry.
So the people who gave me the rough ride, they weren't your typical advocates of cancellation.
They were your typical defenders of free inquiry.
However, some inquiry is freer than other inquiry.
If you're studying a Russian conservative or something like that, forget about it.
Free inquiry only applies to a very...
Small realm of state-certified and ideology-certified thinkers.
And if you go outside of that domain, then all bets are off.
The person who didn't resign from my committee, the person to whom I credit with seeing my project through to the end, was a leftist, a left-wing anti-liberal.
So how these things fall into place is really weird.
But the important thing was the hypocrisy.
Of the supposed champions of liberal democracy?
The unwillingness to think through an important living alternative?
Like, what are you going to do?
Not read Dugan?
Not study the Russian perspective?
Not try to understand it?
That's idiotic geopolitically.
It's idiotic academically.
It makes no sense philosophically.
It goes against everything these people purportedly stood for.
And they just caved.
So that was eye-opening for me in every way.
Because it blew apart my illusions about academia.
It showed me that don't be so...
Don't be so sure that just because someone's on the left or on the right or a liberal, they care about philosophizing, thinking, seeing the big picture.
Not at all.
It's unpredictable where people will land there.
But the unwillingness to take seriously a living alternative was just jaw-dropping.
And we're missing the boat now, too, I think, with some Chinese thinkers, some Iranian thinkers, some other thinkers around the world, where if you want to understand those regimes, you should have a department of people translating the works of their greatest thinkers instead of censoring people who are even raising the question.
Well, that gives you a sense of it, I think.
We're going to get into that.
Actually, I have two questions for precision.
You're born in Canada or are you born in Moldova?
I was born in Canada.
Okay.
In Windsor.
In Windsor.
The second thing, look, when you say, this is a total parenthesis, but when you say your mother went and became a Mormon, that strikes me as like Happy Gilmore-esque when the mother was so against hockey she moved to Egypt.
You say there was no religion in the family.
But that seems like an act of protest if I'm either projecting or reading too much into it.
Was that an act of protest from the marriage for your mom to go become a Mormon from a dad who was Jewish?
Oh, my understanding, and again, I didn't really poke around in the whole backstory, but my understanding is that after the divorce, when you lose your husband and somehow you lose your city and your family and whatever else, She was approached by missionaries, you know, and the message that they shared with her resonated with her.
And off you go with that.
So I don't think the Jewish story is a whole other part of the picture, as it probably always is, both for Jews and non-Jews.
But yeah, I don't know, and to the extent that I know, I don't think so.
But what it did do was, you know, put some element of Christianity into the realm of my day-to-day life.
And I think also I would say that the German side of my family, to some extent, has this, you know, they probably lean more towards the Christian inner life, you know, than the world of the Jews or the world of the philosophers.
So I just consider it, I just chalk it up to...
These subtle influences as far as its effect on me and her story, I don't really know, besides what I've said.
But clearly, you know, the message resonated.
Listen, I think there's a place in our lives for a higher realm that we're not always open to or aware of.
Some people get in touch with that realm because they were born in a religious tradition.
Some people get in touch with that realm because they encounter religious.
Messengers.
You know, so for her, that's what happened.
She found a religious tradition that way.
And there you go.
And speaking of sort of mystical thinkers, one that's on the agenda is, of course, Alexander Dugan that got you in all the controversy.
What led first?
I guess two different components.
One is for most of the audience still probably has no clue who Alexander Dugan is.
Yes.
He has been put on the public display because of the assassination of his daughter this past weekend by apparently a Ukrainian assassin, according to the Russian government.
And he may have been a target of it.
A particular obsession in Ukraine during the conflict and a range of other issues.
But first, could you give people just a basic overview of Alexander Dugan?
And then secondly, what initiated your interest in studying it?
Yeah, I have to just take one quick step back, okay, for the sake of a clear conscience.
I was pretty insulting towards the people at the University of Toronto who turned their backs on me.
Obviously, I still feel pretty passionately about what happened, but I have to say that the questions involved, like if you're a professor and you say, I support free inquiry, and then you have a student who starts doing something that really makes you uncomfortable, there are legitimate questions that can arise about the limits even of free inquiry under some context.
When it's decent, you know, take Plato and Plato's...
We consider Plato to be one of the pillars of the Western tradition of philosophy and political philosophy, and there's a defense there of censorship.
So it's not like everything always has to go, you know, and people may draw their lines where they do.
So I just want to separate, you know, my personal frustration at what happened with the possible legitimacy of some of their objections.
Now, that said, we turn to Dugan.
Dugan is a Russian political philosopher, ideologue, and activist.
He's been active since the 80s, when he was in certain circles at the time of the Soviet Union's impending collapse.
And he continued to be a very prolific theorist, writer and activist in the ensuing decades.
He's become particularly famous as the ideological mastermind of Putin's anti-liberal, anti-Western ideology.
And there are some good reasons for that.
Easy to see and some difficult to see.
But in effect, he's, at least in the West, I think we could say, the most famous Russian philosopher who's not a liberal or anti-Putinist.
And there are some details of his political philosophy that are worth studying generally and some parts of his political philosophy that are topical whenever something happens with Russia like has happened now and in 2014.
And what led to your initial interest in it?
Okay, so I told you I had this background interest in mysticism.
I was walking around the library stacks one day, and I had a book catch my eye.
So this was back when, you know, do people still wander around library stacks?
I don't know, but at the university...
I got a lot of dangerous ideas doing that.
Yeah, well, there you go.
I was strolling through the library stacks, and a book jumped out at me.
It was on a Russian mystic.
I think it was called Vladimir Solovyov, Russian mystic.
So this guy, he died in the year 1900, same year Nietzsche died.
He was a Russian mystical philosopher.
So I took this book off the shelf.
This was my first exposure to the history or the presence in Russian thought of a mystical, philosophical, mystical, theological tradition.
There's a rich group of authors like...
We won't go through the names, but this guy, Vladimir Solovyov, was the first who caught my eye.
So that's when I began to take an interest in Russian mystical philosophers.
And because my family's from the former Soviet Union, we had some Russian growing up in the household, I decided I'm going to brush up on my Russian skills and I'm going to start translating Russian philosophers into English before I knew who Dugin was.
So I started practicing a little bit with the Solvyov guy.
Then I formally proposed a translation project at the University of British Columbia when I was an undergraduate.
And the person who said yes, he said, find a contemporary and an old philosopher.
So we'll do like, you'll translate this guy, you'll translate that guy.
This part one of the story, okay?
So it's in that context that Dugan came up for me.
So here's the second part of the story that explains it.
I...
He was a huge follower of, and can remain a big defender of, this guy Leo Strauss.
Leo Strauss is a scholar of the history of political philosophy.
He's the gold standard.
So if people don't know who he is, they should look him up.
The first thing they'll see is that people accuse him of being the mastermind of neoconservatism, and like the person who told neocons to lie.
To the people so that they can go invade Iraq and get a bunch of oil.
But in fact, he's just an outstanding scholar of the history of political philosophy.
So I had an interest in Strauss.
And that led me to this journal called Azure.
Now it's defunct.
Journal of Jewish Ideas.
And there I read an article on Dugan.
Great article by a guy named Yigal Liverant.
Okay, if people look it up.
It's called Alexander Dugan, Prophet of a New Russian Empire.
I read that article and...
A bunch of things connected for me.
So Dugin was like Russian.
So I told you I was just starting to translate Russian thinkers.
He was presented in the article as a kind of philosopher king.
So you can't understand the Kremlin unless you understand Putin.
He, excuse me, unless you understand Dugin.
He's sort of the philosophical expression of the Russian soul.
So that was pretty fascinating to me.
He had some background interest in mystical or occult circles.
That was a factor, as I explained to you.
And I googled him.
I looked him up and I found a five-minute talk of his at the time.
This was like 2000, probably 2010 or 2011.
Found a five-minute talk of his on this idea called the fourth political theory.
I watched that video.
I looked up his Russian Wikipedia.
I saw he's got a book called the fourth political theory and bam, I pitched it to my supervisor.
I said, this looks interesting.
I watched this guy's video.
It resonated with me.
Gave me some clarity and insight.
Philosopher, mysticism, Russian, contemporary.
Boom.
So he said, okay.
And I started translating him.
And this was 2011-2012, just as Putin was announcing the creation of the Eurasian Union.
And here, as it happens, I was translating the work of the philosopher of the Eurasian political project.
So my supervisor was like, every time I brought him a new piece of the translation, he was really excited about it.
He's like, this is what's...
You know, this is what's going on.
This is like Putin's ideology.
You're bringing it into English.
He was keen on it.
So he asked me, have you talked to Putin about getting it?
Excuse me, sorry.
Have you talked to Dugan about getting it published?
I hadn't crossed my mind in a million years.
I said no.
I said you should.
Can I stop you for just one second?
Just explain what the Dugan philosophy, the Eurasian philosophy, I mean, I don't even know, and I've been looking it up all day.
So very simply, okay, very simply, it rejects the idea.
That there's one model of progress and of political order for the whole world.
So, in a nutshell, Dugan argues you had three political theories battling in the 20th century ideologically.
Liberalism, communism, and fascism.
Usually he says fascism slash Nazism.
Okay, so first political theory, second political, third political theory, and their variants.
Fascism was defeated.
You had...
The Cold War, a bipolar world, ideologically, liberalism, communism.
Soviet Union fell, you had a unipolar world, liberalism.
The whole world became, by default, ideologically liberal.
Even if somewhere, in fact, it wasn't, liberalism became the last ideology standing.
It won the war of ideologies.
And in this unipolar moment, or end of history, All that remained politically was to take the rest of the world up to the standard of liberal democracy.
That's it.
If they're not there, that's because they're developing or backward or third world.
And all that there is to do is make them liberal.
Voila!
Okay?
So this idea of a unipolar, liberal, hegemonic world, Dugan says, must be rejected.
For various reasons.
So, he says, So, he says, So, he says, The unipolar hegemon.
Therefore, you can't just have anybody who declares themselves to be a Pole be a Pole because they'll lack the actual sovereignty that you need or the actual wherewithal, the power that you need to establish yourself in the world.
So his model, Eurasianism, you could say, is a model of a few civilizational poles that oppose the unipolar world like China, India, Russia, those kinds of things.
And they will each have their...
He's very interested in the way they differ philosophically, sociologically, psychologically, okay?
So in all of those ways.
That's roughly Eurasianism.
It's anti-liberal, in some sense anti-Western, anti-progressivist, anti-woke.
Now, here's where it gets confusing because some people are like, hey, that sounds pretty good.
Like, I'm also anti-woke, you know?
I'm also pro-tradition, you know?
Like, for example, he says...
Woke liberal progressives have buried Western civilization.
They've tried to destroy it.
They're making it impossible to read Plato, Aristotle, Dante, the Bible.
And you think, well, you know what?
Yeah, they are.
There's something to that.
But Michael, let me stop you there.
I made a joke that, you know, what if liberalism has always been fascism or Nazism in disguise?
What if all of these are just variations of the same human condition?
Liberalism is intolerance.
Fascism is intolerance.
They all try to bury history.
Like, it's not just liberals that did that.
Yeah, so many good points here, too.
We have, in general, what all ideologies share in common.
The fact that they share something in common doesn't yet tell us that they're identical, and it also doesn't tell us that it's possible to live without some ideology, without some worldview, without some model of the world, whether it suppresses something and releases something else.
So one of the merits, in my view, of taking Dugan seriously, the problem of Dugan.
I don't mean just following him.
I mean, like...
What does he make us think about?
Is what is the human condition?
Because he forces us to go back to the classical political philosophers.
He forces us to consider that, listen, liberalism has said there's only one human condition.
You're liberal or you're subhuman, basically.
You're liberal or you're not yet liberal, okay?
And everything that falls under that, you have to be a man without qualities, you have to be an individual, atomized, or the left liberals know you're reducible to some sort of group identity.
What about the transcendental aspect?
What about some other aspect?
What about all the other accounts of what it is to be a human being that get left off the table?
So now we say, in the comprehensive spirit of...
We're not sure what the human condition is, for sure, right?
Because there's been some smoke and mirrors, it's hard to access, it's been covered over by ideology, by programming.
So what if we have an operation of trying to remove the ideological filters, let more of the full human experience come to light, and then try to figure out what we can include and what has to get left out for there to be decent political order?
Because it's always been the case.
Go to Plato's Republic.
In Plato's Republic, when Socrates is having a conversation with these other people, they ban the poets from their just city.
So they're constructing in speech what a just city or a just political order would be like.
And in order to have justice, they have to expel poetry.
Now, it's slightly more complicated, but the point is that political community requires some decisions, what's in and what's out.
And Socrates has this line, not to go into all of the details, where he says, look, if a poet came to our city with the most beautiful verses, but they undermined our law, we'd have to send them away to another city.
So there can be some things that are part of the human condition, that are very beautiful, very important.
But that still somehow are not compatible with good, decent political orders.
So there's like a huge range of genuinely philosophical questions here.
And this is the real risk of over-ideologization.
That all of those serious questions, we don't get to see them.
Again, to mention Plato's Cave, we've just, you block my vision here, block my vision here, chain me to the cave, feed me shadows, tell me their realities, and that's my life until I die.
Philosophy has always been about...
Turning around and trying to see what's going on behind the scenes.
So when Dugan addresses that question, Viva about the ideologies, he's in fact says liberalism, communism, and fascism are all modern ideologies.
They're constructed on the specific character of modernity.
And even that has blocked our access to the full human condition.
So in some sense, Dugan's political philosophy is anti-modern.
It's not just anti-liberal.
It's anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-fascist, on the basis of the fact that it's anti-liberal, excuse me, anti-modern.
So there's like, there's this huge set of operations that we actually have to work through conceptually and argumentatively.
And my problem with a lot of the anti-Dugan rhetoric, which you can sort of understand, if you're going...
Okay, top-down, in my view, is where you start from, like, the big questions, you know?
What's at stake here?
The human being, the human order, you know, political life, all of these things.
Bottom-up is, you know, my family member was just killed by a Russian bomb.
Dugin is the legitimator of Russia's war.
In effect, then, his hands are bloody, and he's guilty.
For the death of my family.
You know, if you're in the middle of a hot war and there's an ideologue who's justifying the acts of your opponent or enemy, the same passion that I feel towards my university supervisors for such a low-stakes, trivial act, like they're rejecting, you know, my work, imagine now someone has killed.
Your friends, your neighbors, your family.
So in a hot war, it's hard to think clearly in any case.
So you sort of can understand the anti-Dugan animus.
But it just so happens that he's also a door into questions that we can't avoid.
We can't avoid them whether or not there's a war in Ukraine because they're questions that concern us here and now.
One of the interesting things to me about the West response to Dugan...
Aside from the lack of meaningful inquiry to understand his relevance or what he actually is articulating, is this, you know, they commonly just attach a label to him that doesn't even make sense if you have read any of Dugan.
And the most common one being, you know, that he's neo-fascist, that he's neo-Nazi, that he's, you know, so what do you think is the origin of that?
And can you describe how that label doesn't really describe?
Haven't you been called it?
I'm sure.
That you guys have been called neo-Nazis.
I'm sure you've been called neo-fascists.
Beaver's the troublemaker.
I'm totally...
I got called a Nazi yesterday on YouTube.
And I don't buy into the half-Jewish, full-Jewish, whatever.
I'm Jewish by birth.
You're 6 '8", I'm 5 '6", and I look like this.
I got called a Nazi on Twitter yesterday.
Yeah, it happens.
It happens.
People are just impassioned sometimes.
Yeah, so as I think everybody knows who's watching this, on one level, everybody gets called a fascist today, everybody gets called a Nazi today, if you veer a millimeter to the right, probably, of the ideological consensus.
So that's the first thing, okay?
There's a good article in im1776.com today by Daniel Miller about the history of that anti-fascist accusation of the left, you know, how you use this to just automatically discredit your enemies.
And by the way, If you can legitimate calling all of your enemies fascists and you can legitimate fascists are so much the scum of the earth that they should be cancelled or killed, well, you're not very far from legitimating the killing of your political enemies.
We've seen that you can...
Cancel your political enemies.
That happens all the time now.
But, you know, we're not too many steps away from car bombing your political enemies in the West, I think, if you follow out the logic of delegitimating people with this title.
So that's step one.
Step two, okay, is Dugan a quote-unquote neo-fascist?
Well...
Stop, stop, stop.
Yeah.
Neo-fascist.
I mean, just define the term.
So, whatever...
Okay, well, the people who...
Make these accusations.
They rarely themselves define the term.
Here's, I think, the helpful way of approaching things.
People may differ, okay?
And there are many ways of approaching it.
Here, in my view, is a helpful one.
The first book of his that I translated, by the way, I co-translated, okay?
There's a backstory there, but I want to give credit to the co-translator.
So the book is called The Fourth Political Theory.
I'm one of the co-translators.
It came out in 2012.
The book, The Fourth Political Theory, says specifically anti-liberal, Anti-communist, anti-fascist, all three have lost their wherewithal, their relevance, their power, they're mistaken, they're modern.
They don't see something that's important.
So he says, this is a crucial part of the argument of that book.
Most people think only in terms of those categories.
So if you're not liberal and you're not on the left, by default, you're a fascist.
And when I first heard that, I thought, you know what?
That sort of explains how everybody is being called a fascist, who somehow criticizes liberalism, not from the left.
You know, it's a process of elimination, and then you end up by default with fascism.
But what Dugan says in that book is, let's put an end to that.
We have the fourth political theory, meaning you can oppose liberalism not on fascist grounds, not on communist grounds.
And initially, it has only that negative significance.
Not one, not two, not three.
Opening up a breathing room, opening up a space of possibility for thinking about politics without those ideological alternatives.
And then he turns to his positive project.
So what might be the substantive subject matter of this theory?
And he goes through a set of philosophical and conceptual operations thinking that through.
So my exposure to his thought was explicitly his rejection, his reasoned, solid, persuasive rejection.
of fascism as a political theory.
And moreover, his very clear delineation of his own theory from fascism.
So for example, one of the things that I translated in 2012 was like a table, you know, spreadsheet type thing that said, okay, here's liberalism, here's communism, here's fascism, here's the fourth political theory.
Here are like 30 variables and here's what they have in common and where they're distinct.
So in some places, fourth political theory is like You know, like this part of liberalism or like this part of communism, like this part of fascism.
And in these areas, it may be completely distinct.
In other words, you have to, you know, go somehow to that level of detail.
But people who accuse him of being a fascist, they mean sometimes a few things.
Number one, he is not a communist.
So that's like automatically he's a fascist.
He's not a liberal and he's not a communist.
So therefore, he's automatically a fascist.
He supports a hierarchy.
So therefore, he's automatically a fascist.
He supports state power.
Therefore, he's automatically a fascist.
He's not primarily an individualist.
Therefore, he's automatically a fascist.
He draws on Italian and German thinkers.
Therefore, okay?
It follows.
You see?
These kinds of things.
So if you support tradition, traditionalism, authority, hierarchy, in some sense, if you support, if you oppose, now from the point of view of what he opposes, if you oppose The global homo-ideological project, you're a fascist.
And so on and so on and so on.
So they, okay, now, I'll make a stronger case.
I'll steal man, as they say, the accusation.
There are some times where he has expressed himself as apocalyptically pro-war.
Okay?
Like his own version of an end-of-history thinker.
Just a different kind of end-of-history than Fukuyama's or than the liberal model.
He has expressed himself with the most heated rhetoric about certain parts of Russia's wars, especially in relation to particular moments, but even more generally.
So he is opposed to all...
He doesn't like independent Ukrainian national state ideology.
I guess he never has.
So any nationalist of that kind, any Western thinker of that kind, has always been the target of his...
Really heated, passionate activism, rhetoric, and attention.
So there are reasons where you can say, yeah, he's an enemy, he's this, he's that, he's an opponent.
My view as a political scientist or as a student of political theory and political philosophy is that whenever we're trying to think about political affairs, we have an obligation to ourselves to think carefully.
So that means that if he has said, His political theory is distinct from fascism.
Usually what people say is, oh, you know, that's like a criminal saying that he defines himself as innocent.
So in other words, they reason that Dugan defines himself as not fascist in order not to be smeared with the accusation of fascism.
There's like, in my view, very little evidence, if none, to support that.
That's my view.
So an alternate explanation or thesis is that the reason he calls himself something other than fascist is because As a political theorist, he doesn't share the basic presuppositions of fascist political theory.
In some sense, if you include the fact that he's a theorist and a philosopher, things get more complicated because it's the task of theorists and philosophers to work through these conceptual divisions.
But yeah, the Steelman case, he's too pro-authoritarian.
He denies individual liberal rights, they might think.
He's imperialistic.
You know, all of his influences, from Heidegger to Evola, even to Plato, are all like, from their point of view, totalitarian, statist, authoritarian, vertically oriented ideologies of fascism.
I want to get into some about Heidegger and Strauss as well, how some of these people are being mischaracterized now as well.
Let me just interject.
I'm sorry.
I don't like to interrupt.
Let me just interject for one minute just to make something super clear.
I'll be brief about it.
Like, fascism is a political theory of the state, okay?
We don't need to go into all the details, but people should understand that...
Behind the scenes of our ordinary opinions, there are concepts.
Like, for example, the concept of the state, the concept of a social contract, the concept of rights, of property, okay?
All of these kinds of things.
So fascism as a political theory is a political theory in part of the state.
Dugan is an anti-state thinker.
He rejects the doctrine of the state.
Doesn't mean that what he accepts is, you know, unicorns and roses, that you have to love it or accept it.
But the order of operations is describe it correctly and then evaluate it.
If we're trying to understand, how else can you do it?
Exactly.
And that's a good statement to bridge into what I wanted to get into, which was you talk a lot about strategic empathy.
Can you describe what that is and why it's critical both to understand what someone else thinks, but also it's a critical understanding when you make decisions in government, society, civilizations, etc.?
Yeah.
So the basic idea here, we're trying to understand People, the way they understand themselves.
Now, strategic empathy in the study of texts means you try to understand the author the way he understood himself.
Principle of Straussian reading.
Strategic empathy, I would say, in the political realm means you try to understand the other political actors on their own terms so that, you know, it's kind of like, I would say, a kind of neuro-linguistic programming type approach, you know?
If I know that there's a word that triggers you, Or that doesn't trigger you.
That can put you in this state or put you in that state.
I have some extra leeway in my work with you, in my interactions with you.
If I don't know that some words trigger you or don't trigger you, then I'm just shooting blank.
I'm shooting blind.
You know, I'm shooting blank, so I'm shooting blind.
I don't have as much...
I don't have the degrees of freedom to operate in my own interests.
That I would have if I knew your mindset, your mentality, your points of reference, what gets you going.
So in some sense, strategic empathy politically would be like, let's see what gets them going really clearly.
How do they see us?
How do they see themselves?
In what terms do they make sense of what's going on?
And how can we speak into that?
In a way that's aligned with our interests.
Instead of what often happens, being completely oblivious to how they understand themselves, talking and making a total mess, shooting yourself in the foot, and making everything worse.
So, you know, it's not like we want to learn about them because we want to become acolytes or worshippers or followers, but governments, you know, policy makers...
The analysts and all of that have a vested interest in understanding their partners, their international partners, the way they understand themselves.
It's like being diplomatic about it somehow.
So I would say that's strategic empathy.
Kind of funny to me.
I've been writing on this topic for another purpose, and I saw that General McMaster...
Some time ago, former General H.R. McMaster, he'd written a piece on strategic empathy that I just want to mention here because it somehow is an example of how not to do it in a way, okay?
So his article said a lot of Americans are becoming like isolationists.
They don't want to get involved in expensive wars abroad.
And, you know, in some way you can understand that, but we can use strategic empathy.
To point out all the pro-democracy protesters in authoritarian countries.
Bring the message of the pro-democracy protesters to our isolationists and sort of get them back out there fighting for democracy.
That's what General H.R. McMaster said as a use of strategic empathy.
So, okay, maybe, right?
Maybe that's one form of it.
But the form that I have in mind is not that you look at what you already want to see, the pro-Western democratic activists on the streets, but you look at the thing that's harder to see, the mentality of the other party, especially the other party in power.
So again, there are some people who have been writing about...
That's an example.
We should be studying those books, reading them, translating them, you know, so that the concepts and categories that the other person uses, we're aware of.
It's like if someone was playing chess.
And you knew his go-to moves.
You've studied his previous matches.
You know he's more likely to do this and not to do that.
Or you're playing basketball.
You watch the tape.
How did they defend?
How didn't they?
What kind of mood are they in today?
What's going on?
All of that, you do it because it gives you an edge.
So at the very basic utilitarian political level, we need an edge.
And strategic empathy gives that edge.
More than that, I'll just say one more thing.
Besides the utilitarian level, there's also what we learn in the process about the issues.
But for sure, there's a utilitarian defense.
I want to bring this up because I don't know if they meant this ironically.
Strategic Empathy, Mein Kampf.
And I was literally going to make the reference Das Boot, which was the 1981 submarine movie about World War II from the perspective of the Germans.
You can make the movie, you can like the movie, you can watch the movie to understand the perspective without adhering to the underlying belief.
And Mein Kampf might get me in trouble.
I don't think that should be cancelled, banned, or whatever.
People should understand it in order to make sure that it doesn't happen again and to address the grievances that people have.
But is that what people mean by strategic empathy, Michael?
you understand or listen to in order to position, appreciate, and one might even dare say respond to or address the concerns.
Is that what it is?
And does it get transformed into sympathizing, promoting, and legitimizing the beliefs?
So, there probably is a risk of sympathizing.
You know, we have to just take seriously the fact that if a person is exposed to a counter-argument and they find it compelling, There's a risk of sympathizing.
So it's not like a risk-free operation.
But I would say that if you're in policy or in politics or you're somebody who can do something about all these things and you're pretty clear on your interests, what you're hoping to accomplish on yourself, like you're comfortable in your...
Self-identity, whatever that happens to be, right?
Like, I know I'm an American patriot.
I know I'm a Canadian patriot.
I know I'm going to defend constitutional checks and balances.
I know I'm going to do this.
And you can recognize that it would be helpful to study the other side, you know, then you can do it.
But I wouldn't say that it's like a risk-free operation that everybody should just jump into straight away.
Like, in order to read something carefully, in order to be clear about what you think, in order to be able to operate like this, it's...
There's risk, okay?
So I don't mean to suggest that it's easy, it's always safe, or it's for everybody.
But if you're in politics, if you're responsible for war and peace, if a bad step here could lead to the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands of people, if it could reshape the world order for decades or centuries, what's safe?
There's risk.
And you better make the effort.
So I'm not saying nobody in government is doing this, you know, but I will tell you that I had personally on the Dugan front, I would consider him to be a thinker who's relevant for understanding Russia.
And I had interest from private business.
I never had interest from government.
And I would say that that tells you that private business understands that something is at stake that's important to them in a way that the government...
Did not understand that something was at stake that was important to them.
So I think that it's a missed opportunity there.
That's what I would say.
Now, there are some cases where you're powerful enough that it doesn't really matter.
You don't need to understand the other side.
You dictate the terms.
It's just their neck, your boot.
And that's the end of the story.
You don't need to try to feel it from their perspective.
But when there are serious powers in the world that you have to coexist with, then maybe it's worth making that kind of effort.
Well, and I think, you know, you study it broader, you'd find that a lot of mistakes made by leaders throughout history is a lack of understanding of the other party that you see it happen.
I mean, even, say, like Britain and Ireland, you go through the Irish Rebellion and what worked and why it succeeded and the rest, you find out it's mostly British overreaction.
Over and over and over and over again.
Had they not done so, chances are it wouldn't have gone the course that it did.
The latest example of that has been the utter incapacity.
To really understand any place outside of the West by Western leaders, in my view, since the 1990s.
Just to complete and just bumbling.
You can agree with their moral philosophy, their political objective.
They're utterly incompetent.
The way I tend to put it is they have Kissinger's lack of a moral compass, but they've combined with it Kissinger's a lot less intelligent younger brother.
They don't have the intellectual course to go with it.
And then that's how you get really disastrous.
World War I. It's a classic example that four empires disappear in 10 years because they couldn't understand what was going to likely happen because they never understood the other side of the equation.
And we've seen it.
And this is a good bridge into a question about Eurasian because a lot of mistakes were made about interpreting what would happen vis-a-vis Putin.
What the Russian people think and a lot of other things.
And the net effect now is that what was simply a sort of philosophy project, the idea of a Eurasian-BRICS alliance, is now people are discussing this in regular, everyday geopolitical circles as they see what's happening in terms of currency, as they see what's happening in terms of military alliance, as they see it in the rest.
You've seen India, a lot of the Indian coverage has been more aligned to the Russian perspective than the Western perspective.
Could you explain how Dugan's idea of a sort of Eurasian land-driven power base, how that might translate in the contemporary world, but give some basic, because we're seeing this term now come up in more colloquial places, but without a lot of the ideological or intellectual context for it.
What does Dugan mean by a Eurasian counterbalance, its own polar?
So, the first step is that Eurasian means a viable alternative to Western.
So, you know, that means some informationally viable, economically viable, educationally viable, militarily viable, strategically viable alternative to the Western Pole.
Basically, the United States and its allies and their shared interests.
So all of the work that you would have to do as an organization, as a bloc, across those various sectors, forms of economic integration, all kinds of trading, military agreements, defense agreements, and things like that, the levels that have been most interesting to me personally that I know best, because I can't speak so much, for example, about the economic side.
Of the Eurasian Union or about this economic dimension of the multipolarity.
It's just not my area of expertise.
I don't know as much about it.
But in education, in ideology, in power and in philosophy, the idea there is there have to be regional blocs that are sovereign with respect to the Western powers.
So that's the project.
Whatever serves that falls under the umbrella of Eurasianism.
We could say, to give you the opposing term, whatever doesn't fall under that is, quote-unquote, Atlanticism.
So that's sort of the dyad.
Atlanticism is the ideology, values, order, structure, power, and all of that of the West and its allies, understood in their contemporary form.
And Eurasianism is opposition across those various domains to that.
Why it can be sometimes, I think, hard for people to know where to place themselves in relationship to all of this is because you may like something that Eurasianism says about education, philosophy,
and theory, namely that the woke Western liberal Atlanticist poll is denigrating it, if not destroying it, and at the same time not want your political So,
again, not against the United States, but against the dominance of liberal Values, system structures, and so on.
So when there were, at the UN, when there were the votes about, if you remember, the West is saying the global community, right?
The global community has voted against Russia.
Well, the global community represented, like, I think less than 50%, you know, of the world's population.
And so that idea that there are huge populations and huge centers of power.
That are trying to establish some degree of civilizational sovereignty.
That is, in a sense, Eurasianism, and it captures these various aspects.
My own view is that what we can learn the most from is this idea that civilizations can interpret themselves otherwise than we interpret ourselves.
That they have different political theories, different philosophies, different levels of understanding.
Now, I have to say something about this really quickly.
The typical Western liberal also sometimes says, yes, there are pluralities of ways of knowing.
And there are so many pluralities of ways of knowing that science is like, math itself is, we're rejecting math and we're accepting some other kind of math, like a feminist math.
So you might say, hey, what's the difference between the Western liberal acceptance of many different ways of knowing, many different sciences, many different maths, and multipolarity?
And it goes back to the question that, One is serious, comprehensive, well-grounded, and somehow broad like that.
But the Western liberal one says, I only like the victimized others.
So I'll consider...
I had a professor at the University of Toronto.
I knew a professor at the University of Toronto who was one of these left liberals who loves the other.
She loves the other.
We've got to study others.
Others are great.
Forget about ourselves.
We've got to do everything about the others.
But when it came to a Russian conservative traditionalist imperialist authoritarian other, wouldn't even read the titles of his books.
So that's the difference.
The broad Eurasian multipolarity, it tries to give everybody in some sense their due.
That is its theoretical merit.
And it comes with whatever political threats it comes with.
Michael, I want to ask you a couple.
I don't want to look like I'm avoiding the hard questions.
I brought this one up earlier.
How do you interpret Dugan's free speech matches to genocide Ukrainians?
Now, I don't know the context.
I presume I understand what's being implied here.
I presume he has either just, not justified, but rather explained it, I'll say in neutral terms, in terms of the history of the world.
Do you know what this question is referring to?
I think so.
So in 2014, there was a video clip of Dugan saying, And you can find this clip and people refer to it.
Usually it's a very quick way to be effectively dismissive of him.
There's a video clip where he says, kill, kill, kill.
Okay, like kill, kill, kill.
They say, oh, this is Dugin saying that you should kill all Ukrainians.
Or this is Dugin calling for genocide against Ukrainians.
That, as you can, I'm sure, imagine.
Leaves out the relevant context of the clip entirely.
Now, I'm not justifying, okay?
I'm not taking sides.
I'm just trying to tell you that there's a context to the clip, which is that in Odessa, 2014, May 2nd, there were some Russians who were burned in a building, okay?
And Dugin is addressing the death of those Russians in the building.
He says in that video clip, for what it's worth, he says...
I'm part Ukrainian, he says about himself.
I have ancestors who were Ukrainian.
He says, this scum regime, the Azov Battalion, etc., etc., etc., the people who burned the Russians alive in that building, they're the ones that we should kill, kill, kill.
So I'm not excusing.
I'm not justifying.
I'm just saying it's not like he said all Ukrainians should be wiped off the face of the earth.
I hate the Ukrainian people.
In fact, in that very clip, He says, Ukrainians, I think it's in that very clip, he says, Ukrainians are a wonderful people.
It's this group that has taken power that has just, as I say, in the immediate context, burned Russians alive.
They're the ones who are breaking from the great Ukrainian people, and they're the ones that he says, you know, under the circumstances, kill, kill, kill.
So, again, I'm not saying that's, you know.
You don't necessarily want to hear a philosopher that in other contexts you admire saying about anybody, kill, kill, kill.
But the context is important.
I'm not telling anybody where to land on the question, but I think the background is important.
So that's what he says about that.
And look, I wrote a piece for Compact magazine recently on the death of Daria Dugin and the attack on Salman Rushdie and the attempted assassination of Dugin, Alexander.
And here I just want to make a related point, which is this.
If we're thinking about politics, especially like the big political concepts, somehow they do have an edge to them.
Like if you're an internationalist, you are against national states.
And that means that anybody who loves their national state is, you know, they're affected by your internationalism and vice versa.
If you're a defender of states, you're maybe, you know, You're an edge, a hard edge against people who hate the state and who want to have like an international society.
So in other words, all political thinking comes with a sharp edge that has this possibility of violence, of war, and of death in a way built into it.
Because that's the realm of politics, you know, of the political, I should say, to be more precise.
So on one hand, we don't want to blunt the edge of political thinking.
So that it no longer has anything political about it.
And on the other hand, we don't want to say everybody whose concepts have an edge suddenly becomes fair game for destruction or annihilation.
Like, is it himself a combatant?
So even though there's a war of ideas, and ideas do enter into combat and conflict in a way that has real political significance, it's still somehow different from...
The war of physical killing and weaponry.
I don't want to say Dugan's concepts are harmless.
Nobody's affected negatively by them.
They have no political relevance.
Not at all.
On the opposite side of the equation, liberal political concepts also are destructive of peoples and states and traditions in some cases.
Communist political concepts are destructive of peoples.
And so on and so on in some cases.
That's the nature of a political concept.
But I don't think he was calling for genocide against Ukrainians, if you watch the clip and understand Russian.
Yeah, and there's been a wide range of allegations.
I mean, he tends to use inflammatory rhetoric in the political space.
And so consequently gets a wide range of allegations.
Same with his daughter.
There was deliberate misinterpretation of what his daughter had said meant to somehow rationalize assassinating people because of their beliefs.
Um, it's extraordinary.
And it's a, and there's this Ukrainian kill list going around wide range of people are on that list.
Glenn Greenwald is on that list.
Senator Rand Paul is on that list.
We're unleashing some very dangerous forces in Ukraine.
We've been doing it for...
Listen, people, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I really want to make the point that people have to be careful about unleashing those demonic forces, those devils, unleashing them.
Okay, it's like, God forbid they should be unleashed anywhere.
And yes, it's absolutely horrible that there are wars and that there are deaths and that innocent people die.
Thousands of families have lost their lives I'm not apportioning guilt.
I'm just acknowledging human suffering.
But there's a real risk, in my view, if we're not careful to check it, that before you know it, that kind of thing will be happening in the United States and Canada.
Because when people condone it, when they turn a blind eye towards it, when they stay silent about it, and when they allow you just to connect the dots, what did...
Okay, maybe I'm being unfair to him, but when Sam Harris said in his recent interview that in order to get Trump, it doesn't matter if there's a body of dead children in the basement.
It doesn't matter, right?
Any crime, any crime justifies getting Trump out of the picture.
So at some point, people are going to take that reasoning.
Any crime justifies taking, you know...
The people we've accused of being neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, white nationalists, this, that, and the other thing.
So all the name-calling is a step towards the legitimation of violence.
That's the worst-case scenario.
Now, I grant a large degree of latitude for ordinary political rhetoric, including calling people names, okay?
Like, names that don't have to be rooted in political philosophy or political theory.
Like, there's a large degree of latitude for just saying, you know, Things about people.
But when you start sowing the seeds that legitimate political violence up to and including, if cancellation's on the table, you just get the sense there are some left liberals and maybe some others as well who just wish they could get away with car bombing their enemies in the United States and in Canada.
And God forbid it ever gets to that point and we should make sure that it doesn't.
Speaking of which...
So I know we were sort of a little bit over the length of time anticipated, but I don't want to hold you too long.
But your way of resisting a lot of this stuff and doing your own independent work and dealing with the cancel culture has been establishing your own schools, your online school.
So I wanted you to talk about what you do in the online school.
There was also a question from our locals live chat as to where they can find any books or other...
Is there one place they can go to find the various publications you've done over time?
And then the other question from the locals, Chad, is why do you think so many of Western political elites obsess, or what do they fear the most about the ideas that Dugan simply announces?
Why is there this obsession such that Canada put him on a sanctions list?
In other words, what is it this little political philosopher who's got a beard like Rasputin, but is not the Rasputin some people in the West make him out to be, Why are they so scared of him?
So that's the last set of trilogy of questions.
Okay, I think they see him as against liberal democracy, which, to be fair, he is.
As legitimating a geopolitical opponent, Russia, which, to be fair, he is.
And as taking a side opposite the side of their values, to a certain extent, and alliances, which, in a way...
He is.
So there's some merit to that opposition on a political level.
It's just not the whole story.
But I think, you know, that's their concern to an extent.
They don't want to have what they call, quote unquote, Russian misinformation or Russian disinformation or Russian propaganda or anything that undermines the mainstream of state ideology and orthodoxy.
And that's not unprecedented.
The reason Socrates was killed is because he also didn't want to fall into line with the ideology and orthodoxy of his political community.
States want to defend their territory ideologically, and they have an interest in doing that.
And we have an interest in making sure that they're getting it right, not missing something important.
So that's why people consider him a threat at the state level.
About my school, so as I hope to have conveyed over the course of this conversation, I'm pretty passionate about the importance of the history of political philosophy, from Plato to Aristotle, medieval political thinkers, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
And so I teach them in my school.
I have in-depth courses where we go through books.
Plato's Republic, there's a course on it, Aristotle's Politics.
And I teach Leo Strauss and Dugan, thinkers who help us to see the nature of political things clearly.
And that you may not be able to study at a university, either because they're being left off of the syllabus because they're not talking about race and gender, primarily.
And also, just as a matter of convenience, there used to be professors at places like the University of Chicago where you'd want to go and study with, but what if, you know, a lot of my students are professionals in tech, in law, or they're retired, they're not going to go take a class with somebody they don't even like what the universities have become.
But they like what they once were.
So I try to capture that in this school.
High-quality instruction in the history of political philosophy.
I'm on Twitter, M underscore Millerman.
That's where I do most of my social media.
I have a YouTube channel.
And the core for everything, if people go the long version, michaelmillerman.com, and the easier version probably, duganbook.com, you'll see both my books, one on Heidegger, one on Dugan, and my school, my social media YouTube channel, and all the rest of it.
So that's where you can find me, and I hope the people watching this do go there.
Now, I'm going to bring this up because one person said no evidence that a Ukrainian had anything to do with Dugin's assassination.
ARJH says it's absolutely proven it was a Ukrainian Nazi woman who car-bombed Dugin's daughter.
She was also caught on camera.
I don't know.
I would not make categorical statements one way or the other.
But, Michael, if I may just ask one question.
Dugin.
Where does he get financed, funded, remunerated from?
Is he state-sponsored or does he actually succeed by selling books and, I don't know, speaking to us?
Like, how does he make a living doing this?
So, I don't know the details.
I only can tell you the one thing I've heard, which is that he has a billionaire backer, Konstantin Malofaev, I guess is his name.
And, you know, they had worked together on Sargrad TV and presumably worked together on other projects as well.
But as for the details of his financing, I don't really know.
That's the one prominent financier that I've heard brought up in relation to him.
And they share a kind of religious, patriotic, No, all anybody needs is one billionaire backing them.
And Michael, life in Montreal, man.
I mean, I knew you were Canadian, didn't know you were in Montreal right now.
Is it getting worse?
Getting better?
Is it going off the deep end?
In my view, it's much better.
When I moved here, it was under lockdown.
Everyone was in masks.
Nothing was open.
Now it's such a beautiful city, beautiful people.
I love to have the terraces open.
And, you know, I love Montreal.
It's a beautiful city.
People who haven't been here should visit it.
I consider it to have gotten much better since the time that I moved here, which was in the middle of the lockdown.
Now someone wants to wear a mask.
They do.
Nothing like that is enforced.
And I love it.
Winter's coming, though.
I'd be glad to go somewhere else for the winter.
I was going to say, wait until September.
Wait until the CAC, the Coalition Avenir de Québec election in October.
Michael, Robert, we're going to end this.
We're going to do our little wind-up afterwards.
Phenomenal.
Michael, you'll send me all of your links.
I'm going to pin them in the pinned comment.
This was like a throwback to philosophy at McGill.
Exchanging ideas and talking about this stuff, it's never occurred to me what it feels like to be a living philosopher.
Especially in a world gone mad where it makes your daughter a target for political assassination.
Actually, one last question.
What do you think is going to be the fallout from the assassination?
Some of it you've seen, I think, with the statements Putin, Lavrov, UN, other things like that.
It's not going to be good for anybody.
It's going to make everything...
I would say that...
It just has people dig in their heels further.
Besides that, I can't speculate.
Alright, let's do it.
Michael, Robert, stick around.
Everyone in the chat, you just got a 101 in philosophy and it was fantastic.
If anyone's thinking, study philosophy, study law, get into YouTube, move on.
Okay, stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes to everyone in the chat.
Thank you very much.
Phenomenal.
Enjoy the rest of the night, peeps.
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