Our National Psychosis | Jeff Deist

hey what a week for our sacred democracy wow you know it's so sacred that just a few thousand votes in a few states here and there could have turned it from sacred into profane couldn't it real easy but no as long as it goes a certain way it shows the wisdom of the crowd we're generally told that there are three particular benefits to democracy and one one of those benefits is a peaceful transfer of political power so that's increasingly being questioned but mises wrote about this way back in the 1920s he said this is why we need democracy he wrote about it again in the 1940s in human action he said well this allows us to change from one government to another without violence that's largely been true in the 20th century in in the uh uh 70 odd years since he wrote that that's largely been true but two of the other reasons that we're told to revere democracy i think are not true and one of them is that it creates a compromise some sort of down the middle policy so that the far left doesn't get anything everything it wants the far right doesn't get everything it wants but somewhere down the middle there's a happy compromise we all get a little bit of what we want and of course we've seen that's not true at all the whole country is at each other's throats and what we really have is a sort of bureaucratic and oligarchic over class and just a bunch of average regular people like us who are unhappy with the results of democracy so i don't see any great compromises coming from it and then of course probably the worst excuse for democracy is that it represents some sort of consent of the governed so in a country of 330 million people that becomes entirely meaningless and i think we all get that so i hope many of you i don't know have read hans herman happens democracy the god that failed came out in 2001 if you haven't had a chance to read it i wish you would unfortunately we don't know the rights to that book and there'd be a six dollar paperback of it but nonetheless well worth purchasing well worth reading yeah online there's a pdf online which may or may not be pirated not by us that's the market baby so if you have a chance to look at that book every chapter reads very well as a standalone chapter i encourage it there's a great chapter and they're disabusing you of conservatism and all these other things but the introduction of that book is all about what hopper sees as the turning point uh of world war one when we went from what we might call the old right which was a real liberalism rooted in property and self-determination into mass democracy and so world war one hapa says is what changed everything and it's where uh we decided that you know all the benefits of enlightenment rationalism and the industrial revolution would start to fray because we would turn them over into democracy and one thing he points out is that prior to woodrow wilson you remember a year ago we were talking about edward bernays who is woodrow wilson's propagandist who came up with the phrase make the world safer democracy prior to wilson's war in world war one most wars were actually territorial they were about you know turf and so world war one hypothesis was the first truly ideological war in human history and that's the result of mass democracy and wanting to impose democracy on other countries our way of life on other people so not coincidentally hoppa points out there were actually far more civilian casualties from starvation and disease then soldier casualties on battlefields in world war one wonder how many people know that and he says this is not a surprise this is what happens when you have total wars as opposed to regional or territorial wars so also because of ideology the ideology of democracy there couldn't be any compromise or uh you know uh with the germans there could only be total surrender humiliation punishment reparations and so we all know what came a few decades later that so hapa's book is about the results of mass democracy it's all about results so we think of the marketplace produces goods goods and services governments produce bads papa says they produce bad things they take from us and they make things worse so what do we get from democracy in terms of results well we get bad politicians we get bad voters with high time preferences we get bad policy we get war taxes regulations surveillance cultural degradation the whole nine yards but the other thing we get in terms of bads which the state produces in a democratic system is we get this centralization of state power you know hapa describes we had thousands upon thousands of city-states and principalities and territories which used to make up europe and now today they've turned into these managerial super states like we think of the modern germany for instance and in the united states they turned 50 states you know we used to say these united states well we didn't but our grandparents used to say these united states it turned 50 states into basically what are glorified federal counties shabby glorified federal counties i might say and it also put about 330 million people with wildly diverse interests uh under the boot of just a few thousand people in washington dc and sometimes it's even fewer than that sometimes it's you know five or seven supreme court justices so we we think about democracy producing bad results but what hoppa's book doesn't talk about and what is so fascinating to me especially this week is that what about process we think about the results of democracy what about the process it turns out the process is lousy too you know you know it produces another kind of bads which is in that takes the form as we see this week and as we certainly saw in 2016 of a national psychosis this sort of emotional breakdown of people who are emotionally invested in in government and politics in the winter of these elections and so it's it's this this kind of division which we're living under is actually another bad result of of democracy but from the process side so we have this election result still in limbo i i think that biden is going to prevail in however you want to call that prevailing but we have maybe a hundred million or more americans whose entire psychological well-being over the next couple weeks is bound up in this process over which they have no control you know a few tens of thousands of people in a few swing states will determine two completely different narratives for the next few years right it'll be like well you know our sacred democracy uh the americans were too smart to be fooled again by this uh strange orange reality show con man you know and they they wisely chose joe biden or it'll be you know america's is this fascist uh reprobate state just a few tens of thousand votes are going to make the difference in that narrative that doesn't make any sense to me so the process doesn't work the process itself is dysfunctional and millions of americans like us they just don't accept the process as legitimate anymore you know any any part of it from the vote counting to the recounts to the campaign spending and the pacs and the dark money groups you know to the voter registrations the mail-in ballots the deadlines the some of these dubious electronic systems i always think you press the button and behind it it's like that game operation you know where the cloud's nose just light up and it doesn't go anywhere i i don't know you know you press the little button who knows where it actually goes right might just be a bare wire back there and and so you know there are people are also not going to accept the recounts and legal challenges the whole process and if you think about it would actually be hard to design if some sadist wanted to design a process every four years that would produce more bads than our current system i don't know how you do it division hatred distrust waste and yet all of it at the end of the day settles nothing it doesn't produce some sort of lasting compromise or sense of finality to it you know the next four years are going to just be one side saying not my president all over again so the process does do one thing though for the state is it hides the bad results right the process becomes the thing so we're so preoccupied with politics and these votes we forget about what we ought to be thinking about the overseas wars the debt the devaluation the surveillance all the results side of democratic voting so the question becomes what do we do that's always the question that's always the frustration that's what people ask me over and over and over what should we do where do we go you know first of all you have to start with this everybody in this room has an advantage when it comes to this national psychosis everybody in this room has some natural antibodies i think to this whole thing we've already recovered right we're already immune we we understand and recognize what millions of americans are just starting to understand namely that it's not just that mass democracy doesn't work but that it can't work so we don't have any illusions that's our benefit that's our bonus we have a head start so to speak on this national psychosis and i really think that's a form of power which we all ought to employ in in our personal lives and in our emotional well-being so a couple weeks ago my wife happened upon a an essay from 1978 by vaclav havel the czech dissident leader who is also the first president of the czech republic after the fall in 1989 and this essay is called the power of the powerless so it was new to me uh my friend pete quinones told me last night that it's actually been circulating uh among certain in blogosphere for several years so i thought i had stumbled on something but it's uh really a fascinating essay about 80 pages and so he's writing this in the 70s when that when the former czechoslovakia is still under soviet domination but not as much soviet domination as the ussr itself perhaps so i'm reading this essay and vaclav hobble is also a literary guy and a poet so he's a tremendous writer and you guys should all find this the power of the powerless easy to find so i'm struck by the fact that the parallels between the eastern bloc situation he's describing the former soviet bloc and the atmosphere in the u.s today are so striking and i don't mean to imply that we face anything close to the hardships that they did but but it's striking it's still striking and it's ominous it is happening here and we can feel it i think we can feel it not everything can be verbalized and intellectualized sometimes it's just a feeling so the good news is that he's writing this as a dissident in 1978 and um you know not too much later there was actually a happy outcome in the creation of the first czech republic so sometimes when things look particularly dark maybe you got to keep on moving forward and something good is going to happen if you do so so hobble talks about how the czechs didn't live under what we think of as a a form of actual physical dictatorship it was sort of a soft totalitarianism in other words he says well you know it took the form of this almost hypnotic secularized religion where the the metaphysical and existential realities of the world they succumb to ideology and that's what we think of when we think of the the soviet union right we think of people who tried to just command uh human energy into something new to to actually to create a new man and also to ignore for example the laws of economics that this could be willed that this could be done by fiat or by legislative action and so uh when we think of communism we think it it ignores certain underlying metaphysical realities and and realities of human nature that was one of the big criticisms of soviet communism so he says well you know this is happening here but he talks about how people would just sort of purposely lie to themselves and their friends and family to remain in good standing in both society and with the party in czechoslovakia and and again the analogy today i'm sure you've seen this going around is that two plus two equals five right you know does two plus two equal four well it depends because mathematics like everything else there's not some hard science or something whereby or some branch of logic where we just simply describe a reality which already exists and which is underlying and we're trying to grapple and figure it out no no no two plus two might equal five depending on your outlook depending on your identity and the circumstances and maybe the color of your skin or your religion or the country you come from of course this is a recipe for disaster this is a recipe for eliminating any basis of social cooperation amongst us for having markets for having prosperity and of course it results in just somebody having to have the power to enforce two plus two equals five so ideology enforced by the state becomes the only animating force in society so uh however gives an interesting example he demonstrates this two plus two equals five mentality by talking about how in in czechoslovakia shopkeepers would dutifully put up the little sign that says workers of the world unite they would just sort of dutifully do this like back in the day people used to put up pictures of the presidents in their living rooms and if you travel to foreign countries oftentimes people still do that in latin america in turkey you'll see uh pictures of erdogan and sometimes you'll see pictures of ataturk on the walls so people revere these figures so he said you know nobody actually believed this workers of the world unite right the grocer didn't do this because he means it it was just an act of rote conformity on his part it was a signal it's a signal of acquiescence and since all the other shops do it you do it too right this is what it meant to to be a green grocer in uh czechoslovakia 1978. and we see this in tamir in america today we see the same kind of signaling the same kind of acquiescence of things like masks or some of these um you know uh you know uh some of these goofy signs all lives matter or black lives matter or back to blue or this that these these are signals and people put them up in their yard there's that one that says this house believes x y and z and it's this sort of hectoring thing which is supposed to prove you know what a great person you are in that house so we have the same thing happening in america today so again you know most people in this room though are prepared to be dissidents today most people in this room are not willing to just go along with this stuff and most people in this room already consider themselves the real resistance not not the fake kind where you have all the support of the political parties and the mainstream media and academia and hollywood in corporate america that's not a resistance so we're already past any of these illusions about democracy or politics or constitutionalism you know we've i i would argue that we've reached the point where loving our country requires us to identify and begin to separate the various nations which are within it i i think there's nothing more important today and so if you get an opportunity to read hapa's book i think you will find it enlightening i think you will you will identify a lot of the problems that which he identifies and i think you will come away with a better understanding of of really how what a radical experiment mass democracy really is it's not what we imagine it to be there's no sort of 5149 electorate which gives anything legitimacy because oftentimes votes are one with fewer than 51 percent sometimes bill clinton became president because of ross perot with with less than 51 percent of the electorate even the the reagan revolution in 1984 where he won every state 49 states except for i guess mondale's uh minnesota am i right and the district of columbia 49 state route something like 60 40 in the raw numbers and yet what we think of is an absolute landslide one of the biggest victories in electoral history in the united states for president he had something like 24 percent of all americans vote cast an affirmative ballot for him so if you begin to look at the numbers a little differently you begin to question all of this and you begin to wonder where it came from and you begin to hope that people can start to think again a little bit more about having 50 states in other words what happened last tuesday was there were 50 national 50 state elections there wasn't one national election there were 50 state elections yes people were voting on who's going to hold the national office known as the as the president but it wasn't a national election those are two different things so i want to leave you with this great quote from havel he says i'm quoting him ideology is a specious way of relating to the world it offers human beings the illusion of an identity how many libertarians get their identity from goofy libertarianism it offers human beings the illusion of an identity of dignity and of morality while making it easier to part with them i told you this guy's a poet it is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence their trivialization and their adaptation to the status quo i think that's just an absolutely phenomenal uh way to put things because i really believe that liberty in the political sense is not an ideology which you impose on other people it's the absence of ideology it what it's what happens when you leave people alone when civil society and marketplace are allowed to function and flourish it doesn't need to be imposed on everyone on anyone it's it's the state which is the imposer and of course it's the natural condition of social cooperation mises almost called his book human action his magnum opus social cooperation he says the only way you can organize society peaceably but we have no choice all of us here today but to recognize that millions of americans millions upon millions of americans maybe a majority of americans simply don't see the world the way we do that's a fact so the goal of this national psychosis which they produce and impose on this every four years is of course demoralization more than anything don't let that happen thanks very much [Applause] you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 14,984

Rating: 4.909925 out of 5

Keywords: nation, US, America, psychosis, Jeff Deist, Mises, politics, demoralization, freedom, property, peace, anti-politics, strategy, election, 2020, state, government, Cathedral, national, culture

Id: tsm7W_knD7U

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020