 One which I'd like to talk about, you mentioned in the article, I can't remember exactly the context actually, but you mentioned, because I see this all the time, even among objectives talking about this, and this is the idea that there's some conspiracy of cultural Marxist who are on the left, who are taking over and they're these really, and of course Jordan Peterson feeds this and a lot of the critics, the good critics, some of them are good, the nihilistic left, are using this term cultural Marxism as if it's a thing, as if it's some group out there that's actually doing it, and of course it's linked to the Frankfurt School and everything, which is real, the Frankfurt School is actually a real school of ideas, really bad ones, but so talk a little bit about how you see cultural Marxism in the context of conspiracy theories. I mean, so I haven't studied this as much as I'd like to, and I want to look more into it, I read the Frankfurt School Marxists way back in grad school and I haven't done it since then, they're definitely a version of Marxism, they're a more New Left version, so if you look at this here with Herbert Marcuse, there was an article about him in an old issue of The Objectivist, and he was one of their members, and it's significant that there's a change between the old left and the new left, is no longer looking to focus on how can we nationalize industry and have technology and progress, they're instead, they're cultural in the sense that they're looking to the existing forms of culture that they think are oppressive like the media and entertainment, and so there's a bridge between that and the various forms of postmodernism, but, and again, I should stop talking because it's not something I've looked at closely enough, I do think that that School of Philosophy has had a lot of cultural influence, but the idea that the real players behind the scenes are any kind of Marxist these days is the part that I take the biggest exception to, I mean, you could loosely call the Marxists in that, in that sense, they're not the real players behind the scenes, they're not the real players behind the scenes, I mean, you could loosely call the Marxists in that they're on the left in some sense, but really to call the politicians and the activists, Marxist is to give them too much credit because Marxism is a sophisticated intellectual construct, and this is something that Rand would have said, she would have said that it gives you a conceptual understanding of the world as a whole, and the Marxists, they're looking for international proletarian revolution where workers from all over the world... They want people to be happy, supposedly, right? It's integrated towards a purpose, it has an actual purpose. Whereas today... Yeah, I mean, I think what we have today, the activists on the left who are pushing for the policies that people are criticizing rightly, they're not following any kind of ideological program. I think that the obsession with various forms of identity politics, which may well have been encouraged by the New Left Marxism of the 60s, they're not working with any ideological agenda that tries to find common bonds of humanity among people, they're fracturing into these pressure groups based on ethnicity and sex and name whichever intersectional category you want. There's no worldview there, there's no ideological... It's a default on ideology. It's a complete disintegration of knowledge and of ideology, there's nothing integrating, there's nothing uniting, it's all differentiating. And I should mention a plug here for we're doing this conference, this student conference in November in Atlanta on tribalism, and what I and Rand had to say about it, and there's a lot that she had to say about it, but the idea that people are fragmenting into these groups on the basis of very superficial characteristics, perceptual level characteristics that pack them into groups, she sees as an inevitable outcome of collectivism where people no longer have confidence in the power of their own mind, their power to make choices as individuals, they're going to bond with people, they're going to get together into groups for safety, especially in a mixed economy where they're pitted against each other into different economic pressure groups. And when reason loses its efficacy in their minds, they'll bond on the basis of the most superficial traits like race and sex and ethnicity and so forth. And I should mention something else I want to do some work on in the near future is I think there's a strong connection between tribalism and conspiracism. I think that... And there are even hints about this in Ayn Rand's own work, especially if you take a look at her essay Selfishness Without a Self, where she's talking about the tribal lone wolf, which is the person in effect who wants to be in a tribe, but has been kicked out by all the all the major tribes. And so he sees himself alone against the world and he sees that the world is a conspiracy against him. I think that that tribal lone wolf mentality, which is a particular kind of anti-conceptual mentality of the tribalist, that's part of the reason why we see a lot of the conspiracism around us today and part of the reason why we see it on both sides of the political spectrum. Yeah, there's an interesting book that Daniel Pipes wrote years and years ago, before 9-11 even, and it was about conspiracy theories in the Muslim world. Yeah, I've heard of this. And of course, the Muslim world is right with conspiracy theories. Everything has to be explained by some, in a sense, mystical force because you know the Jews or something, because they've abandoned reason. So everything is fake. So everything has to be some external element that's happening. So everything has to be somebody else's fault. I mean, I think a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric about the Mexicans and about the Chinese is conspiracy-like, because it's this idea that, no, no, your actions didn't do anything wrong. Somebody is doing it to you. Somebody is causing America to be less great, not any decision Americans made that could be. And it's similar to the Middle East mentality of, we can't think these through. There has to be just a simple explanation that comes from outside. It's all emotionalism. This is possibly an opportunity for a segue, because something else I want to write on someday is how the most complex conspiracy theory of all time is religion. God is the big powerful being behind the scenes who's manipulating the world. And it uses all the same kinds of arguments, too. I mean, there's things people don't understand about how the way the world works. And so it must be some consciousness that's manipulating things to be that way. Yeah, no, it serves exactly the same purpose. It serves to explain the inexplicable to people. It's motivated by fear, fear of their known, fear of not understanding, fear of things they don't get.