Real Clear
Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler joins Real Clear.
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We discuss the pressing psychological issues facing modern society, particularly among its youth, while drawing lessons from Marcus Aurelius on resilience and stoicism. The conversation explores the impacts of technology, urban planning, and cultural dynamics, highlighting the need for individual agency and practical engagement in overcoming today's challenges.
• Psychological disorder and lack of consensus in society
• Difficulties faced by today's youth in coping and resilience
• Importance of personal responsibility and practical engagement
• Fragility of technological infrastructure and risks involved
• Critique of the "15-minute city" and its implications
• Exploration of sadomasochism in current political culture
• Potential for reconciling divides within society
https://www.kunstler.com/
Welcome back to Real Clear everybody. This is Lucas Klein. I have the pleasure of talking with James Howard Kunstler. Jim has been on the podcast before. He's one of my favorite authors and he's written such books as the Geography of Nowhere as well as the Long Emergency. They're very much worth a read. I consider Jim to be quite a profound social observer and sort of a social psychologist in a way. If you listen to his analysis, he has very subtle and very dynamic interpretations as to what he sees going on in society. So tune in. You can go to realclearpodcastcom or click the link below to listen to the full episode for free.
Speaker 1:June, good to have you back. I'm uh always happy to talk to you and we were just chatting prior to hitting the record button about uh, marcus aurelius and his thoughts on decomposition and transition to the other side, and I was describing to you my bicep injury over the summer. I tore it off the bone and it was a loud but thankfully painless event, and I was wailing about my ailing to you and my aging and so forth, and you brought up Aurelius.
Speaker 2:John Mark Gazzarelli, 2nd century AD, roman emperor, who was also a great general and warrior, and he compiled a book of foundational beliefs, which has been published under the title Meditations Marcus Aurelius Meditations, his meditations, marcus Aurelius' meditations, and they're very useful, especially to anybody who is in extremis about his moment-by-moment life, because it's a great guide for how, without a whole lot of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, how to simply kick back and understand that we live in an eternal present and much of what distresses us is illusory, and that we gain a lot from being stoical and not complaining, doing our duty to ourselves as much as to our loved ones, kin and anyone else in our orbit, and so I recommend it. It's a short book, it's basically a book of aphorisms, short bursts of wisdom, and especially to young men especially who are floundering around in this peculiar era that we're living in that has so devalued young men.
Speaker 1:What made you want to pick up meditations? It's not a common thing to read, really.
Speaker 2:Oh, because a lot of people I correspond with have been making reference to it. I hadn't gotten to it over the years and I finally wanted to get to it. I hadn't gotten to it over the years and I finally wanted to get to it. It's a great, worthwhile read.
Speaker 1:One problem is, joe, I've got a lot of things I want to complain about. We have to complain about a few things. I'm in Southern California, the governor and the mayor and the entire state just let the Palisade burn to a crisp. It'll be a challenge to see how we combine meditations and Aurelius' stoicism with what's going on up there, and I know you've written a lot about it on your substack, or at least some about it, and I'm going to link to your substack below. You can also find it through Kunstlercom and I encourage people to visit either or both of those links. They lead to the same place.
Speaker 1:Jim has been prolific through the years and obviously is well-versed on many things, including stoicism and the rest. So one of the things I like about you, jim, is you're hard to predict and you're not easily definable. When I could talk with someone who I can very easily predict their answers and define them, I get pretty bored talking to them and I get pretty frustrated. It's not a fun conversation, but with you it's hard to know what's coming around the bend. Tell us about your thoughts on society right now broadly and what you're paying attention to, where your kind of first factor of thinking is going, if I can put it that way well, what interests me the most is the degree of collective psychological disorder that I see around me.
Speaker 2:Now we thought that, you know, we're living in an era where it's very hard it appears to be very hard for people to think straight, and the result of that is you end up in a culture without a consensus about reality, and that is a very dangerous place to be.
Speaker 2:A very dangerous place to be For one reason if you can't construct a coherent consensus among a large group of people who consider themselves a nation or a people, what is happening? Then you can't create a consensus to plan for the future or even plan for the short term about what you're going to do, about anything. So that has been very problematic in every way. But especially, you know, I'm a little preoccupied these days with the problems of young people who are facing such greater obstacles than I ever did in my adolescence, which was difficult enough, just going through adolescence, you know, post-adolescence and really becoming a grown, autonomous adult. It seems to me that it's extraordinarily hard these days, and therefore it's hard for young people to even imagine the future, let alone coherently plan for it, and they're surrounded by adults who don't know what the hell they're doing what do you see as a a peril of the upcoming generation, a specific peril, both maybe materially as well as psychologically?
Speaker 2:Well, really simply an inability to cope on two basic levels the practical level of being able to accomplish something, learn how to do practical things to make a living, to fix anything in their orbit that needs to be fixed, to take care of business on a regular, everyday basis. And number two, psychologically, you know, to find a way to lead a purposeful, rewarding life.
Speaker 1:A meaningful life. Could I add a meaningful life? Could I add to that, perhaps, a resilient?
Speaker 2:life. There you go. Yeah Well, resilience being that characteristic that you have to make corrections in your life, because everybody makes mistakes, and sometimes they're very bad mistakes with bad consequences, and you need to make corrections as intelligently as possible. And if you're unable to do that, if you're not resilient, you're going to be a failure, you're not going to launch, you're going to be in deep trouble. And I see just a lot of. You know a nation full of people who, who can't cope, and uh, but I mean, there are a lot of people out there who who can and and uh, it may be, uh, you know a little less than half of the population, and that's just a heuristic Um, but uh, so there's, you know, there are millions of people who can cope, who can take care of their business and fix the stuff of their life and and, um, find some way to command their own place in human relations.
Speaker 1:Well, there's people the central planning such that the individual is not supposed to cope on their own.
Speaker 2:They're supposed to rely back and fall backward and look to a central planning figure and agency to take care of their relatively autonomous needs for that, of course, has been the screen and the cell phone, because we seem to be in a situation where so many people, and especially younger people, just receive instructions all day long from their phone about what they have to do next. It does their thinking for them do. Next it does their thinking for them.
Speaker 2:That doesn't seem to be a very good situation.
Speaker 2:So I think we're, in the larger picture, kind of in a race between a comprehensive social collapse or socioeconomic, political collapse in essence, a collapse of our civilization and the technological dangers and hazards that we've introduced into our lives, for example, the most obvious one being, if we do end up, in a terrible economic and political uh, crisis.
Speaker 2:One of the things we have to worry about is the electric grid, and you know, the internet depends entirely on the electric grid and to some extent vice versa.
Speaker 2:Now, after all these years, the electric grid depends on the internet, as do many other, do many other public utilities of various kinds sewage treatment, water treatment, everything that's going to pose tremendous problems for people, and it's the most fragile system that we depend on in our mega system of subsystems, all the things that we depend on, like energy, production, transportation, manufacturing, supply lines, the professions, the law, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So the electric grid's very critical, and one of the things that amuses me a lot is all the chatter about Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin, of course, depends utterly on a reliable internet and a reliable electric depends utterly on a reliable internet and a reliable electric If any, you know if any of those things end up in state of intermittent even just intermittency, not just shut. But I mean there are a lot of countries in the world today, even ones that aren't that backward, who have a surprisingly intermittent electric service. Anyway, I think we're in a bit of a race between a lot of things not working and a lot of if I can use a profanity what I refer to as the fuckery that is being induced through digital communications.
Speaker 1:Last time you were on my pod you called it mind fuckery. Yeah, that's one subset of fuckery. I'll add that Bitcoin also relies on human imagination. Human imagination, yeah. But, jim, is it accurate to say that you are um, you are anchored in your own personal life around Jeffersonian agrarianism and that you see humanity spiraling out of control the further it gets away from Jefferson's philosophies?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure that I'd even you know put it, put it in such a high-flown way what I am anchored to. I do lead a purposeful life. I'm not necessarily preoccupied whether Providence has put me in that position or not. I've been a writer for 50 years professionally and I'm in a position now, you know being really quite old, to still have quite an audience and quite an opportunity to communicate with a large number of people, and I feel very fortunate about that. It allows me to feel that I'm leading a purposeful life. At the same time, you know, I'm entirely dependent on the air. I write books, you know, end up coming in as a hard copy artifact that might be around for maybe another 50 years. And I'm living in a little homestead with gardens and chickens and I stay active and fruit trees and I'm involved for at least half the year with the natural cycles of growing and harvesting and that takes a lot of energy and keeps me in shape. And so there it is.
Speaker 2:I'm fortunate because I launched in a pretty poor way when I was in my 20s. I had a very rough time from the age of about 17 to 24. I think that's what I'm going to learn. Oh, I had terrible anxiety problems that were somewhat induced by the war that I was in with my mother and my father, rather than difficult personality, and I had a hard time becoming an autonomous adult. I wrote a book a year ago, published a book about a year ago called Young man Blues Notes on a Nervous Adolescence yeah, and I first started having anxiety problems.
Speaker 2:The first time I smoked marijuana in high school, I had a terrible, and even after I stopped smoking marijuana these episodes kept repeating as they will and I kind of programmed my brain in that one incident to behave a certain way and it was hard for me to get out of it.
Speaker 2:To get out of it. But I must say that what I learned along the way was that there's nothing that helps with anxiety and depression more than focusing on taking care of your own business. You know, what doesn't help is wringing your hands, thinking about your personal history and trying to figure out how you were injured by those around you. That doesn't help buying groceries, learning how to make a buck, figuring out how to get along with women, learning a lot of things that are useful to do. I mean, if you think of all the time that young people spend just focusing on their own depression and anxiety when they could be figuring out how to fix a lawnmower or or andrew gillis, prior's uh book was a bad therapy, or she uh resounds the same, the kind of message that you're, that you're uh voicing here.
Speaker 1:The only thing that I would add as a differentiation in my own position here and my audience knows that I'm a psychoanalyst and psychologist I think that you're right and she's right, uh, except to the extent that it's very helpful to understand the, the programming in one's mind, the sort of scripts that run uh subconsciously, so that people can have an appreciation for how they interpersonalize their history. That would be the purpose of trying to understand how you've been injured, so to speak, or how you've been, I would say, affected and molded by your developmental history with your parents and socially and internally. It's not so you can endlessly melt into a sort of self-gratifying delivery of sympathy for dysfunction, but so you can take a greater, wider, more accurate grasp of the way that you interpersonalize and internalize problems. To that extent, I think understanding historical injuries is important. I would just call it psychological formation.
Speaker 1:A lot of people walk around with what I would call what other analysts, like Stern and so on, would call unformulated experience.
Speaker 1:Freud called it a dynamic unconscious, but the modern contemporaries call it unformulated and pre-reflective, meaning that there are strip, sound and sort of ways of being that simply transpire automatically and which cause great dysfunction, both personally and relationally. The purpose of insight would be to dredge those up into consciousness and tangle with them. I don't think you'd be able to do that, but I think what you're probably opposed to and I don't want to take words in your mouth here, you tell me if I'm wrong what you are opposed to is, um, what psychotherapy has become, which is so unfortunate? And it's just this empathy machine that you sit in front of and that endlessly reflects your personal uh, preferences and avoidances and does not challenge you to grapple with who you've become, which is not just some passive recipient of life's misfortunes. It's also full of nasty bits and irresponsible bits and all kinds of things that you can improve on your own accord. What do you think of that, jim?
Speaker 2:Well, I basically agree with you, and I would put it this way, at least in the way that I encountered this dynamic, is that it basically has to be guided by some framework, and the first framework that I found that was useful was Eric Byrne's framework. He was the author of a popular psychology book in the 19th century called Games, people Play, but he was also, more to the point, one of the founders of psychological movement called transactional analysis, and what that furnished for people was a way of understanding a fairly simple framework for their own behavior with other people, which was are you coming in any given transaction? Are you coming from a child's position, a parental position or an adult position? And there were two subsets of the child and the parent. There was the nurturing parent and there was a punitive, abusive, punishing parent. And for the child, there was the playful child and there was the needy, incompetent child, incompetent shell, and the adult version was simply the executive function in your brain, and so part of the training in that dynamic was to understand where you were coming from and to encourage you to come from the appropriate place. You know, when you're in the bedroom with your lover, it's okay to come from the playful child position when you're in the kitchen with your girlfriend. It's not good to come from the punitive parent position in any given. You know, clash and anyway.
Speaker 2:That allowed me to understand a lot of where I was coming from, where other people were coming from with me, and Eric Byrne, as the author, did a marvelous job of putting a spin on all that by naming the games that people play in those positions. Like what are the? The games that people play? Is he called kick me and it's basically that the person begging to become a victim. You know it's like a person who took me sign on his back. We all know people who are like that. Well, begging to become a victim. It's like a person who can take me sign on his back. We all know people who are like that.
Speaker 1:Well, that's really in line with my views, because I think one of the most common relational games as you would call it, what I would call it is a personality type as well as a relational system, a sadomasochism. This is one of the unfortunate things about psychoanalysis sort of fading into the background with all these modern pop site, you know, facile, overly simplistic models that most people um pursue these days, is it?
Speaker 2:they are, so I'm sure one that I just described doesn't, isn't?
Speaker 1:it doesn't sound that fast thought well, um, for a psychoanalysis it would be, but it's very useful on a practical level. What I'm talking about is therapists operating in private practice and helping people, so to speak. They're so profoundly undertrained these days Almost nobody is an analyst anymore, and that's unfortunate. Anymore, and that's unfortunate, uh. For instance, they don't even really understand what sadomasochism is and that it is the most common relational system and probably the most common personality type that we have walking around. The modern therapist doesn't even understand that paradigm at all. So tell us about the kick me game. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:The the kick. Tell us about the kick me game. I'm sorry, the, the kick me game. Oh, the kick me game. Well, as I just said, it's not that complicated, it's a personality type behavior that we've all seen. You know, there's people who seem to ask for trouble, who seem to ask to be mistreated. You know, asked to be considered a loser, and it's like they wear a sign on their back. And you know, asked to be considered a loser and it's like they wear a sign on their back. And you know, we all know people like that. Another game was called let's you and Him Fight, and that should have sort of been sort of self-evident, and another one was called Courtroom. You know, lying of it.
Speaker 1:I can imagine that's the sort of dueling of the super egos, right yeah, of the moral Making a case against your adversary. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because your wife, your lover, your mother, your boss, your coworker whoever it is your friend, it usually takes place and is codified most, most solidly around the ages of nine to 12. That's when kids are forming their most solid representation of right and wrong. You'll notice, if you do like play therapy, which I used to do with kids when I saw kids in my practice around up to eight or nine if you. You know, if you don't pay attention to the board game, they're always cheating. But you know, if you don't pay attention to the board game, they're always cheating. But you know, around nine, 10, up to 12, they catch you. If you cheat, you know, and they tell you that, that you need to stop that and they have very specific rule and they're internalizing moral structures. I, you know. I I wonder what we might branch this off into society.
Speaker 2:I want to mention one other thing though, the other thing that influenced me a lot. When I was about 23, I came across Harry Brown's book. Harry Brown was a libertarian, a lot of times a professional libertarian, who was also a finance guy, and he ran on the libertarian ticket for president much later on year 2000 or something like that. But much earlier in his life, in the 70s, he wrote a book called how I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, and there was a basic idea there that really got me, which was his understanding that the world is really a giant marketplace and that you know, if you feel that you have failed at something or that something's not working for you or you're you know you can't make it make something happen in your career or anything like that, you just get up and go to the next place, the next market, the next person, the next, the next opportunity, the next opportunity, and don't let that stop you. And I just found that very valuable and I codified it into my own rule for a living, one of Kunstler's social theories, which is maybe number one, which is that out of any room of a hundred people, 99 of them think that they're the only one who doesn't have his shit together.
Speaker 2:The whole world full of people who are terribly insecure and and end up in one way or another not knowing what they're doing. And of course, then there's a hundredth person. Who knows if people are, 99 are correct.
Speaker 1:What's really funny is I'm thinking of I do some executive consulting and also some personal consulting outside of my clinical work and for people who are going into large groups to have speaking engagements. It usually helps them to be reminded of just how narcissistic and self-focused most people all people are, in a sense that when you step up to the podium to speak, almost everyone in the audience is focused on themselves, hardly on you. You're lucky if you get them to really pay attention to you.
Speaker 2:I've been in that position at the podium a lot. You're lucky if you get them to really pay attention to you. Is that sort of position?
Speaker 1:I've been in that position at the podium a lot you must have 15 achievements at harvard and other universities around all over the place yeah, your previous work, uh, specifically around the geography of nowhere, which I'll link also to the bottom, the book, one of my favorite books. It was so prolific at as well as prophetic. Does that book? Do you think that book or the Long Emergency is more relevant to what we're seeing up in Los Angeles today?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because the Geography of Nowhere was largely about the fiasco of suburban development on the landscape of America and the profound implications it had for our future and the social, economic and economic problems that it brought about. And what's happening now is really curious. I became associated with the New Urbanist movement in the 1990s and this was a group of architects and city officials and developers who wanted to really reform the way we developed property in America and towns and the rules for, for May, creating towns so we could have much better communities, walkable communities, places where you had a choice of you know walking or you know rolling around in the car. And um, they did a great job. Over the next 30 years they they became a very popular movement. They reformed a lot of town and city codes all over America. They built great demonstration projects like Seaside and Florida and many others.
Speaker 2:But now what's going on that's so curious is, within all the political turmoil, there's been an idea introduced called the 15-minute city, and it seems to have emanated from the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab and a lot of kind of sketchy characters who people are very, very paranoid about.
Speaker 2:And so the 15-minute city is supposedly a walkable city, a walkable community or neighborhood and that's how it's sort of set up. But it has overtones, as they explain it, of control, surveillance, digital surveillance, closed-circ circuit cameras everywhere. So people are now identifying the walkable community as a 1984, paranoid human habitat and unfortunately they had conflated the whole thing with Sorry, my mic got unplugged. Whoops, no worries, I can hear you, my mic unplugged from the USB port. They've conflated the 15-minute city proposed by the WEF with as being the ideal way to live, that they're going to make it ever more difficult to overcome that problem that we have in America, which is just how we have smeared all of human activity over the landscape and made it very difficult to form communities that really are integral working communities. To form communities that really are integral working communities, you know they encourage people to, to, to read the geography of nowhere.
Speaker 1:When, when I read it, I was just, it was like you were narrating experiences and perceptions that I hadn't yet formed fully and distinctly. Um, it, it, it. I remember, uh, at one, one part of your book where you're describing really a perverse, horrifying situation in suburbia. I was actually reading this when I lived up in a suburban Oregon and for people who are, I realize, most of my listeners, most of anybody's listeners, are probably listening from the suburbs and hey, folks, look, it's not a disparagement of your choice of living or your default place of living, but we have to be able to tangle with the realities around us and so just toughen up and listen to it. It's fine.
Speaker 1:I was driving around, or walking around, and I saw the actual evidence that you were describing. I saw the front yards that are actually just designed to be a patch of grass to signify nature, but are too small to do anything on. And then I saw the little lanterns that were made to look like they're a wrought iron feature of an old school English neighborhood, but they're not. I saw the front porches they're too small to actually see them, but they're meant to just give the impression of a neighborhood entree or viewpoint, and then I saw the front of every house, which is actually a home for cars that you talk about, all of those things you talk about. That's a bitch. He's right. This is all just. It's all just a construction to present an illusion, and but no one knows each other. They all scurry into their homes. They hardly know one another's names.
Speaker 2:This is thick, um so, anyways, that was my first initial visceral impression of your book yeah, and either, you know, there are a lot of people who, like you, all over the country, who were having a very hard time articulating what it was about their daily surroundings that was so, uh, damaging to your, just your cognition, and you have this soul, even, I'd even say soul, yeah. So you, yeah, of course, um, and you know, what you're describing is what I will have referred to as a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country, yeah, and and notice, notice that it reached its most elaborate incarnation during the age of television, when everybody was watching cartoons. It's been a very unfortunate thing, and the new urbanists tried to get us away from it and unfortunately, the organization, the central organization of that movement, has been sort of taken over by wokery in the last five years. In what way, jim Well, to put it bluntly, it's been unfortunately subjected to feminist leadership, which has turned it into another one of these empathy machines that can't focus on anything other than sob stories about marginalized people, sob stories about marginalized people, and they'd gotten completely away from the whole heart of the story, which is how do you define a human habitat that meets our neurological, psychological, spiritual and economic needs and our aesthetic needs, because we need beauty in our lives too, and our aesthetic needs, because we need beauty in our lives too. We need to be surrounded by things that remind us that the human project is worthwhile, and instead we're just surrounded by parking lots, muffler shops and other things that are not worthy of our affection. So it's a deep problem.
Speaker 2:The leadership of the CNU, the Congress for the New Urbanism, has kind of taken it off the rails and now they're confronted with that other problem I described, which is a terrible cultural problem for them, for us, and it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Cultural problem for them, for us, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Now, apropos of Los Angeles and the fire, we're going to be faced with the prospect of rebuilding. It's going to be extremely difficult even to replace the stuff that was there in the form that it was before. You're going to be seeing also process fights over what that physical form might end up being different than what it is now. You know the whole thing is extremely problematical, even starting from the fact that the terrain of political, the terrain of Pacific Palisades, does not really lend itself to, you know, good town planning. You know the whole thing is on this one big sloping mountain.
Speaker 1:You see, like zoning wars ensuing absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're going to be proposals to allow people to build apartments in places that were single-family whole neighborhoods, and you're already hearing uh, the outcry about about that and about, um, having anything but single-family homes there. There are plenty of ways of integrating multifamily housing with single-family houses and having it come out beautifully, but I don't think that they're going to successfully resolve the arguments over that anytime soon and that will further delay things being built. And then you know there are, I think, two other major larger problems involved. One is that we are probably entering a period of significant social disorder.
Speaker 1:Tell me, about heart of the story.
Speaker 2:Well, I wrote a book called the Lung Emergency, which the theory behind it was that we were probably heading to some kind of a collapse, and you know, in short, this would result in a much lower standard of living and a lot of things that we depend on not working very well, whether it's the law, the electric grid, the police, anything in our daily lives and we predicted this with your most recent sub-stack, I believe, didn't you?
Speaker 1:Or one of your most recent?
Speaker 2:Well, I wrote out my annual forecast in January or December. Yeah, that's just a yearly chore that I have to do, and but you know, I I still think that, all things considered, we're probably heading into a period of significant disorder. It'll, it'll, largely be driven, I think, by financial and cultural and economic disorder. First, you know, because our finances are in such terrible condition and they're just primed for some sort of a tree wreck which would, you know, in practical terms result in the destruction of the currency, of financial markets, you know, stock markets, bond markets, our ability to deal with our debt, and all of these very fundamental financial problems that underlie our ability to have a modern, advanced economy. And so the upshot would be we're probably going to have a modern, advanced economy, and so the upshot would be we're probably going to have a less advanced economy, and that means that we're going to have to live very differently.
Speaker 2:I see that coming up and I've written about it a lot. So there's that and the social disorder that will arise out of that. You have a bad enough economic situation where people can't feed their families and their money is worthless. Things like hyperinflations or even bad and sub-hyperinflations are very damaging to the social fabric and things really start to go off the rails socially and culturally. And so much is off the rails culturally right now, after a decade of wokery, which basically means forcing people to accept absurd ideas.
Speaker 1:That's been such a spectacle as an inspector to try to grasp. We've been thinking about this over time what caused wokery?
Speaker 2:Largely the sadomasochism that you talked about, and I'll tell you exactly how Go ahead. Well, is it? The? You know, the, the woke progressive factions in america really were not so much about, you know, policies or or ideas. What they were really about was punishing people who who objected to being pushed around by them, and they took great pleasure. That's the key to it. They took tremendous pleasure. They got a tremendous reward from punishing their enemies and canceling people and ruining their lives.
Speaker 2:If it had been within their power, they would have acted like the people in the Spanish Inquisition and, you know, put them in thumbscrews and tortured them and torn them apart. If they could. Now they couldn't quite, you know, our law was sturdy enough, so they didn't get to that. But they did everything short of that in terms of ruining people's lives, and I think they did it with great relish, and I think it was the primary animating force behind their behavior. Not any of this, you know. It had little to do with whether transsexualism was, you know, a desirable thing in society or not. It was just more about ruining people who objected to it.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. You're taking a framework which is looking at the symptoms wokeness but then trying to dig under as to what's producing the symptoms, and that is a psychoanalytic task, and that's what the value of social psychoanalysis is.
Speaker 2:But I might ask you, since you brought up the question of sadomasochism where do you see that playing in contemporary life?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the way that you describe the problem requires no extension of mind. It's very well done. I like to think of sadomasochism or of masochism at the level of the individual, not as a desire for suffering necessarily, although that does exist, and it's certainly not consigned to sexuality. Most people when they hear sadomasochism they think of sexuality. It's really not what it means. Most robustly you could say say people are, despite their, their better nature, drawn to the front that they don't like it necessarily. Some do, but not all. But they're rather drawn to it and that means that they have a, a way of relational being, a sort of automatic code that unfolds where the manner of connection that they believe is possible requires its siths upon its thina kwanangas, the fond of suffering.
Speaker 1:Why that has somehow concentrated on the woke left is really, really fascinating, and I don't think I fully understand why it has. But it's possible that because the the liberal left, classical liberal left has a a rather large vulnerability to sadomasochism and that is called openness the liberal left has. It's one of its greatest strengths, but it's also one of its Achilles heels. Openness is the entrance point for the destruction of autonomy. If you're open to everything, then you can discern nothing meaningful. The problem of liberalism as an experiment in America is that it did not protect its own boundaries through the negation of impulses in assailants, so to speak.
Speaker 2:So you end up with two problems right there.
Speaker 1:One of them is impulse control and the other one is no boundaries, a representative of child and adolescent impulses. One of the greatest struggles of development in those phases of life is the toning down and and um subordination of of aggressive impulses. Well, aggressive impulses happen to be the main mechanism of the delivery of sadomasochism, and so the modern left has made itself very vulnerable to, to destructive urges, because it refuses to negate child and adolescent impulses, namely aggression um, and I don't think that this is, this is just a kind of technocratic way of putting, of putting down what everybody else intuitively understands by the the way.
Speaker 2:I think that that accounts for the horror, their horror, of Donald Trump, because among the many things that Donald Trump represents is the idea of daddy's in the house.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, daddy is the one who needs to control the adolescent aggression and rage and impulses of the children yes, he, he dared to say no in a in a quite a vivid way, and, um, since we're so regressed as a society along these lines, that's one of the reasons there, I agree with you, one of the reasons there has been such a backlash against him on the heart of anybody left the center. I'd say, another reason that he is so despised in certain factions of our society is based on the psychology of envy, because we began this episode talking about paucity of resilience. Talking about paucity of resilience, well, uh, anybody who is factually observing donald trump has to recognize, whether they love him, hate him or otherwise, that he is unbelievably resilient. Um, psychologically, unbelievably resilient.
Speaker 1:I'll never forget, in 2016, I was um sitting in one of my psychoanalytic training classes at the institute and, um, there was a world-renowned forensic psychologist who was sitting with us. He's a, he's a local member, um, and he had remarked on and he's no fan of trump at all, really, really doesn't like him at all, but was discussing trump's remarkable resilience, um, and it's just psychological resilience, and you can see the other members of the Institute just bristle that he even dared to say anything that could possibly be construed as a positive about Trump. Um, you know so and I digress here, but the the problem is absolutely that this vulnerability through excessive openness or what I would call distorted empathy, has produced a kind of humanism portal virus, of fuckery, to use your term has taken a hold and and worked and produced a cult, a kaleidoscope social landscape. I think that's what the weird fixation on trans has been. Um, I don't think it has anything to do with historical transsexuals or transvestites, um, because they've existed for a lot of time.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, in my experience, most of them just want to be left alone.
Speaker 1:They're mine too, the, the classical ones, if I could put it that way. It's an odd term, but you know the old school trans people. Really, their whole aim was not to be in the public spotlight. Yeah, and I think we're all focused on this. I want to get your ideas here, jim, or I think we're also focused on this, because it's so weird that it, as a story trend, that it's kind of like the, the shining specter of something that represents, um, what's what's happened in an undergirding, tectonic way in society well, the most vivid, the most vivid, uh, illustration of it is the drag queen story hour right, and the whole idea there was.
Speaker 2:There were several ideas there, actually. One of them was these drag queens were not simply men dressed up as women. They were men impersonating women as monsters, and I think that a lot of observers did not fail to notice that, that it was not simply a presentation of a man bethinking himself, a woman pretending to be a woman. It was a woman pretending to be a woman. It was a man pretending to be a monster, placed in the presence of children, doing something that seemed psychologically very damaging to them.
Speaker 1:Doing something sexual, very often twerking. Having them put bills in their G-strings.
Speaker 2:Having them put bills in their G strings but basically demonstrating that, you know, basically demonstrating that mother was a monster and and uh, yeah, you know who? I haven't I'm not a psychologist and I haven't treated anybody with sex problems, but one must imagine that a lot of these people had a uh and, but anyway, it was, it was, it was mostly done, um, not as an exercise in empathy but as an exercise in insulting much of the American public by by doing something so absurd right in their face.
Speaker 1:Now, Jim, this is what I want to ask you. That's a very good and astute and subtle observation of yours, and you had a similar one last time I talked to you and it was that people wearing their pants around their ass you know, late 90s, early 2000s, that was like men becoming little boys. You have these really astute social observations. You just made one about the drag queens representing a sort of monster, mommy, and so on. It's a great observation, but the question is why did society go along with it? The question is why did society go?
Speaker 2:along with it. Well, because the woke Democratic Party had its hands on the levers of power.
Speaker 1:They had gotten their hands on the levers of power. Finally, with the 2020 election, the conscious I dare dare say conspiratorial, but conscious and directed kind of aim in in the back well, because they held the, the levers of power.
Speaker 2:They were literally able to punish people who didn't go along with their program, which meant, you know, not going along with the affronts to your common sense they did. What we saw over four years was a huge amount of malicious prosecution just at the official legal level, but just an awful lot of also casual ruination of people's lives. For you know, for for agreeing with the absurdities that were put in their face. So, yeah, they, they, they got the levers of power. Now they have lost the levers of power, and what we're seeing now is really strange, because they seem to be so lost I'm talking about the Democratic Party. Now they seem to have no idea what to do with themselves. Now that they have lost the levers of power, how they're going to present themselves to the rest of America going forward, what their leadership is going to be? You notice, they have absolutely no leadership. They've got nothing.
Speaker 1:Well, that was the last presidential cycle. Anything with good leadership would not have allowed Biden to begin with and certainly would not have coronated Kamala Harris the worst presidential candidate I had ever seen in my lifetime.
Speaker 2:a collective bad psychology, a bad zeitgeist, a bad era, a poisoned era, and we've seen it historically many times in the medieval witch episode and the rise of the Nazis and the Stalinists and the Maoists. Societies go through these convulsions and they seem for me coming out of the most extremely stable seeming 1950s and 60s. As a child and young girl, it's been stunning to watch my own country fall into one of these historic hysterias. But that's exactly what happened. You know, the country basically lost its mind, and not only that, but the people who were the craziest were the ones who got power.
Speaker 2:Can I just go ahead? Well, but they screwed it up very, very rapidly. Obviously they went too far, too fast, too badly, and then they got whomped. And now that's over and we're going to go in another direction. I do wonder a little bit about what's going on in the background, because they've been awfully quiet. You kind of wonder what characters like Norma have gotten in store. You know, in terms of, you know, law-faring, the incoming Trump regime and other and God knows what other kinds of fuckeries you know are scheming to spring. But it looks to me a little bit like they're on the run.
Speaker 1:I hope very much that it doesn't turn into a revenge subtle that the new administration doesn't follow the precedent of the old and go after its enemies.
Speaker 2:I think they're going to be very careful and judicious about how they sort this out. I do think that it is important probably for inquiries to be made about how some things happened and we'll see whether those inquiries lead to prosecutions or grand juries or something like that. I don't think that. I certainly don't want it to get out of hand and turn into a reverse witch hunt, but I'm fairly confident that that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:I would like our politicians to return to some extent to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, the Moxie boxing rules, you know, sort of gentlemen's fight, and um, that's probably best for the rest of us to some level. Um, jim, I want to reorient here and we don't have a terrible amount of time left. Um, you know, is society at this time, are our perceptual capacities redeemable, or are we living in a world now where there are basically two societies, two americas living within its borders? You could define it by red, state or blue. I don't think that's the most accurate way to do it. You could probably describe it by um city, rural. That's a bit more accurate. Um, however you divide it there, I think most people understand that there are two different kinds of citizens, broadly and grossly, with, uh, distinct operating systems, perceptual operating systems. Do you you think that those two types of citizens can get along and talk anymore and connect?
Speaker 2:They're having a very hard time now and I do see the whole woke matrix collapsing. Woke matrix collapsing Unfortunately, you know, when we've been through 10 years of the most astounding chronic dishonesty official, you know institutional dishonesty that we've ever seen in America, and to overcome that is going to be difficult, but I think we're in a position to do that. They have largely been responsible for distorting reality. Obviously, the censorship of the past five years especially has been very damaging to people's basic ability to understand what's going on around them. For example, you know we had the COVID-19 affair and the vaccines that came out of that and you know the information about how damaging and ineffective the vaccines were was simply not allowed to be disseminated in the public arena. It was deliberately squashed by the US government and the people that they used and delegated the power to in social media and in the regular media. So Americans were not getting the news. They didn't hear any of that and they developed the false understanding that, you know these things were good for you.
Speaker 2:And now we've got an enormous public health crisis going on, with basically an epidemic of turbo cancer and other problems that people are having with their bodies and their immune systems and, you know, at a cellular level.
Speaker 2:So that's you know. That's something that tells you that you know, if a large number of people subscribe to ideas that are just not true, you've got a big problem. And so much of what was going on on the left in America was based on things that were not true, whether it was the existence of countless genders, or whether it was a good thing to not have any control of the American border, you know, or any of the other things that have been going on, whether it was a good idea to support the insane Ukraine war. All of these insane things have been going on and you know we've been asked to swallow them and people have a lot to answer for. I don't quite understand how the news media got sucked into playing that role that they did of supporting every dishonest thing that went on over the last two years. I mean, since they really have that is their stock of trade Stock and trade has got to be, you know, reporting reality, and if they give that up, they got nothing. That's all they did have.
Speaker 1:Well, they had to give it up, so you and I can take up the mantle. You know, I mean, that's really where it's gone. It's less like this that's true.
Speaker 2:I mean, it went to the, it went elsewhere and you know their, their business models are just cracking up Places like the Washington Post. They just can't sustain themselves anymore. But there's been a lot of mystery in this, but you know, largely it had to do with institutional misbehavior and you know, and the wrong people getting their hands on the levers of power. The sadomasochistic narcissist cluster B maniacs in our country got their hands on the levers of power and they managed to do a lot of damaging things to the country and it took a while for enough people in the country to recognize what was going on, despite all the gaslighting. And you know, they made a decision and they swept them out of power. Now we have reason to believe or to hope that we'll see, you know, different behavior and perhaps some seriously corrective behavior. But we remain in very, very dangerous economic and financial straits and that can go off the rails at any time and create additional disorder for us.
Speaker 1:Succinctly and robustly and widely put James Howard Kunstler. Read his sub stack listed below, as well as his books. Get smarter. Read his books, they're really worth it. Jim, always good to have you on Great to talk to you.
Speaker 2:It's been a great conversation, lucas, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.
