totalitarianism

There are many types of dictators, from so called "benevolent" ones to the kind who rule with an iron fist. There are also many ways they can come into power, and they don't all include violence. Learn all about dictators past and present in this classic episode.

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A true honor to speak with Jung Chang.

She is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (sold 15+ million copies worldwide) and Mao: The Unknown Story.

We discuss:

- what it was like growing up during the Cultural Revolution as the daughter of a denounced official

- why the CCP continues to worship the biggest mass murderer in human history.

- how exactly Communist totalitarianism was able to subjugate a billion people

- why Chinese leaders like Xi and Deng who suffered from the Cultural Revolution don't condemn Mao

- how Mao starved and killed 40 million people during The Great Leap Forward in order to exchange food for Soviet weapons

Wild Swans is the most moving book I've ever read. It was a real privilege to speak with its author.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Growing up during Cultural Revolution

(00:15:58) - Could officials have overthrown Mao?

(00:34:09) - Great Leap Forward

(00:48:12) - Modern support of Mao

(01:03:24) - Life as peasant

(01:21:30) - Psychology of communist society

About this interview: C.J. Hopkins is an American politcal satirist, playwright, novelist, and columnist living in Berlin. During the Pandemic C.J. took aim at overwrought official rhetoric, interpreting a lot of the coronavirus response as an opportunistic, authoritarian power grab by the global neoliberal project. C.J. has been critical of lockdowns, mandates and the use of emotional terror as a propaganda tool, to essentially strip us of our liberties and freedoms. C.J. talks about how he lost friends and colleagues because of his views, and refused to self censor. If anything the "new normal" has made him even more outspoken. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Links - Website C.J. Hopkins X C.J. Hopkins X

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Can liberalism survive the horrors of our modern world?

Will Lloyd is joined by John Gray political philosopher and author of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. They discuss how Thomas Hobbes seminal work Leviathan can be reinterpreted in the 21st century, particularly in the contexts of Russia, China, and the liberal West.

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Today we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes from this year, with the prolific writer Margaret Atwood.

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. The seductions and dangers of genetic engineering. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising culture permeating more and more of our lives. Atwood — the author of the Booker Prize-winning novels “The Blind Assassin” and “The Testaments,” as well as “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake” and, most recently, the essay collection “Burning Questions” — was writing about these topics decades ago, forecasting the unsettling world that we inhabit now. Pick up any one of her 17 published novels, and you will likely come across a theme or a quality of the setting that rings eerily true in the present day.

This is especially true of Atwood’s magnum opus, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which takes place in a future America where climate change, droughts, a decaying economy and falling birthrates lead to the rise of a theocracy in which women called Handmaids are conscripted into childbirth. The repressive regime she created in that novel, Gilead, has been endlessly referred to and reinterpreted over the years because of the wisdom it contains about why people cooperate with — and resist — political movements that destroy the freedom of others. And as recent weeks have shown, we’re far from the day when that wisdom becomes irrelevant to present circumstances.

We discuss the deep human craving for stories, why Atwood believes we are engaged in “an arm wrestle for the soul of America,” what makes the stories of the Bible so compelling, the dangerous allure of totalitarian movements, how the shift from coal to oil helped to fuel the rise of modern consumerism, why she thinks climate change will cause even more harm by increasing the likelihood of war than it will by increasing the likelihood of extreme weather, how our society lost its capacity to imagine new utopias, why progressives need to incorporate more fun into their politics, why we should “keep our eye on the mushroom,” Atwood’s take on recent U.F.O. sightings and more. She even sings a bit of a song from the 1950s about the Iron Curtain.

Mentioned:

Art & Energy by Barry Lord

Book recommendations:

War by Margaret MacMillan

Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, Coral Ann Howells and Brooks Bouson.

Bret Speaks with Mattias Desmet on the subject of mass formation, a topic Mattias has spent a great deal of time exploring and has written a recent book on (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), linked below. They tackle this process from their differing backgrounds of expertise and discuss what it suggests about our path into the future.

Find Mattias’ book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Totalitarianism-Mattias-Desmet/dp/1645021726/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1657654629&refinements=p_27%3AMattias+Desmet&s=books&sr=1-1

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Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:10) Sponsors

(05:32) What is mass formation?

(09:55) Modern masses Vs ancient masses

(15:10) Conditions for mass formation

(31:00) Desirable evolutionary reason for mass formation

(39:20) Evergreen mass formation

(43:00) Mass formation is a state of madness

(47:15) Bret and Mattias disagreement

(54:25) What if Hitler had won

(01:01:36) Mass formation is a symptom

(01:03:20) Love and rationality

(01:07:50) Is mass formation rational?

(01:12:32) Individuals who stood up during pandemic

(01:18:58) Woke mass formation

(01:29:40) Importance of words and language

(01:34:11) Isolation during the pandemic

(01:36:35) One mass formation after another

(01:42:40) Unease across the population

(01:45:22) Reductionist mechanist materialist ideology

(01:59:30) Wrap up

Rod Dreher is a senior writer and editor for 'The American Conservative.' He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: 'Live Not By Lies,' 'The Benedict Option,' and 'The Little Way of Ruthie Leming,' as well as the books 'Crunchy Cons' and 'How Dante Can Save Your Life.'

In this episode, Rod Dreher and I discuss his latest book, 'Live Not By Lies,' the continuous emergence of Communism in the West, ideology as a substitute for religion, the importance of courage, and more. Thanks for watching.

—Links—

Follow Rod Dreher on Twitter: https://twitter.com/roddreher

Read Rod Dreher's articles: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/rod-dreher/

Order Rod Dreher's books, 'Live Note By Lies', and others on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Rod-Dreher/e/B00JV2IX3O%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share.

—Chapters—[0:00] Intro

[1:25] Live Not By Lies

[2:32] A Story from Communist Czechoslovakia

[4:55] Our Old Idea of New Totalitarianism

[9:13] Czeslaw Miłosz and "The Captive Mind"

[12:26] The Appeal of Communism

[14:50] The Weaponizing of Original Sin

[18:36] Applying the Story of the Kulaks

[22:43] The Emergence of Woke Capitalism

[27:37] The Line Between Good and Evil

[29:48] Solzhenitsyn's Rules for Responsible Conduct

[31:31] Scapegoating and False Morality

[37:28] The Fragility of American Elites

[42:06] Vaclav Havel, The Myth of the Green Grocer

[48:34] Fighting for the Right to Be Unhappy

[56:37] Ideology as Substitute for Religion

[1:00:56] Heroism as Anti-Ideology

[1:09:52] Preparing for Persecution

[1:12:33] A Message from the Church to Men

[1:13:39] Courage

[1:18:04] Rod Dreher, "Live Not By Lies"

[1:20:07] Jordan Peterson's Daily Wire+ Deal

[1:21:15] Daily Wire+ Intro

[1:21:54] History of Rod Dreher's Religious Belief

[1:27:08] Sexuality as the Last Temptation

[1:32:45] Kierkegaard's Three Stages of Life

[1:34:45] Journey Through Catholicism

[1:36:36] Becoming an Orthodox Christian

[1:45:00] A Respite from the Political

[1:48:11] The Purpose of Prayer

[1:50:23] The Jesus Prayer

[1:54:36] Closing Comments

#roddreher #livenotbylies #aleksandrsolzhenitsyn #jordanpeterson #communism #christianity

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The experience of reading Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in the year 2022 is a disorienting one. Although Arendt is writing primarily about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, her descriptions often capture aspects of our present moment more clearly than those of us living through it can ever hope to.

Arendt writes of entire populations who “had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” She describes “the masses’ escape from reality” as “a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.” She points out that in societies riddled with elite hypocrisy, “it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”

It’s hard to read statements like these without immediately conjuring up images of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Donald Trump’s presidency or the QAnon faithful. But that’s exactly the point: The reason Arendt is so relevant today is that her diagnosis doesn’t apply just to the Nazi or Soviet regimes she was writing about. It is more fundamentally about the characteristics of liberal societies that make them vulnerable to distinctly illiberal and authoritarian forces — weaknesses that, in many ways, have only become more pronounced in the 70 years since “The Origins of Totalitarianism” was first released.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Her writing — including her most recent book, “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” — is focused on the resurgence of autocratic movements and governments around the world, and why members of Western societies have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favor of strongman leaders, conspiratorial movements and authoritarian regimes. And in the introduction she wrote to a new edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Applebaum argues that Arendt’s insights are more relevant now than ever.

So this is a conversation that uses Arendt’s analysis as a window into our present. Applebaum and I discuss how “radical loneliness” lays the groundwork for authoritarianism, what Putin and Trump understand about human nature that most liberals miss, the seductive allure of groups like QAnon, the way that modern propaganda feeds off a combination of gullibility and cynicism, whether liberalism’s own logic is making societies vulnerable to totalitarian impulses, why efforts by populist politicians to upend conventional morality have held such appeal in Western liberal democracies, how the ideology of “economism” blinds Western liberals to their own societies’ deepest vulnerabilities, what liberals need to do differently to counteract the rise of global autocracy and more.

Mentioned:

“Review of Adolph Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’” by George Orwell

Book Recommendations:

Cuba by Ada Ferrer

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

In this 121st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.

This week, we discuss the newly published Together trial on the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating Covid, and the media’s response to said publication. We discuss mass formation, as detailed in Mattias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (not “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” as Heather said during the podcast; that is the name of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 tome). We discuss the left’s eagerness to be on the side of science, when it suits them, and we mention Solzhenitsyn. And we discuss the need for evidence-based medicine.

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Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.

*****

Q&A Link: 

Mentioned in this episode:

Reis et al 2022. Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19. Published 3-30-22 in NEJM (the “Together trial”): DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2115869

Analysis of the Together trial: https://ivmmeta.com/#togetherivm

And another: Phil Harper: The Can’t Add TOGETHER trial: https://philharper.substack.com/p/the-cant-add-together-trial?s=r

And another: Alexandros Marinos: https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1510087867178971148?s=20&t=4J-uY8tXETqMcXgrjcHvyw

And another: Chris Martenson: https://twitter.com/chrismartenson/status/1509518451458691075?s=20&t=Py5D1lbBuqcLC8DQOCE2AA

The English translation of Mattias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, is available for pre-sale now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1645021726

The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Totalitarianism-Hannah-Arendt/dp/0156701537

Chelsea Green Publishing: https://www.chelseagreen.com/shop/new-releases/

&

Mass formation also known as mob psychology or crowd psychology, is the study of how individual behavior is influenced by large group of people.

RFK Jr discusses mass formation in this episode with Dr. Mattias Desmet, author of "The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

0:00:00 - Opening

0:33:18 - 1984

1:26:40 - The Jocko Underground Podcast (NEW)

1:43:08 - How to stay on THE PATH

1:54:38 - Closing Gratitude