 So towards the end of Albert Jane Knox memoirs of a superfluous man, he kind of covers a lot of different topics. He covers marriage, feminism. He says some really funny things about the literature of the period. He has more statements about education. And there are gems in there. There's absolutely wonderful observations, just so keen and fighting. But this last part of the book was also, it seemed a little disorganized. It was a little bit less interesting to read, which is another reason to listen to this video, because I've distilled out what I think are some of the best parts, and I'll read them to you. He comments on establishing the journal The Freeman, which has been resurrected in recent years, but it was founded by Albert Jane Knox as an experiment, quote, to see whether such a paper as we had in mind could be produced in this country. I did not believe it could be. I doubted there was enough latent literary ability of that grade to supply us with contributors. I was soon proven wrong about that. Then, second, we proposed to see whether the quality and character of the paper could be successfully held up from issue to issue. He has a funny anecdote about his management style. He said that people would come and ask him, Mr. Knox, what should we do about this decision that needed to be made, whatever the decision, and he would say, I would look at him in a vacant kind of way and say, I didn't know, hadn't thought about it, couldn't just say at that moment, how would you do it, so and so. Well, probably that's all right. You might take it up with the other people and see if they have any ideas. In this way, they soon stopped looking to me for direction, and he says he was well into his second year with this magazine, and he overheard one of his coworkers telling someone else, oh, don't talk to Mr. Knox. He doesn't know anything about that. Mr. Knox doesn't know anything about anything. Go and talk to Ms. X, and he says he was very happy about that, very proud of that. When we came down to business, he definitely asked, oh, this is a new writer that they were hiring. The writer definitely asked what our policy was, and did we have any untouchable sacred cows? I said we certainly had. We had three of them, as untouchable and sacred as the Ark of the Covenant. He looked a bit flattered and asked what they were. The first one I said is that you must have a point. Second, you must make it out. And third, you must make it out in 18-carat impeccable idiomatic English. But is that all? Isn't that enough for you? Why, yes, I suppose so, but I mean, is that all the editorial policy you have? I assume that this writer was used to working for papers that were under the thumb of some oligarch or politician, and they had sacred cows, you know, certain issues or businesses that they couldn't touch. I think the paper closed down after about three years, and about closing it down, he makes another, Albert J. Knoth makes another statement that's confusing, I think, to me and would be confusing to most modern-day libertarians. He says, he relates it to a story that he once heard about Thoreau, or by Thoreau, which by internal evidence should certainly be authentic. I thought I do not know what it is, though I do not know that it is. When he took up his father's trade of pencil-making, he worked at it diligently until he had made the definitive pencil, the pencil which in every respect was beyond his power of improvement. Then he shut down the shop and made no more pencils. He was a superfluous man in the pencil-making business. A month ago I was dining with one of the country's great industrialists when something that was said led up to this story of Thoreau, and I told it. The industrialist promptly said he thought Thoreau was a fool. There I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive philosophies. Economism, which would insist that having made the perfect pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money, with which to buy more material and make still more pencils to sell for money and buy still more material and so on, because the making and selling of the pencils is the whole of life. And he goes on about a second philosophy that was demonstrated. But I just wanted to read that part because this is very contrary to I think most modern-day libertarians. I mean, making a perfect pencil is one thing. How about making an almost perfect pencil and then putting it in the hands of as many writers as possible? Isn't that a noble cause? I mean, clearly Albert J. Nock is offended by the sort of pursuit of money and abandonment of everything spiritual. But this is, I still think his example puts him at odds with the most modern libertarians today. So he closed down his journal in the same sense. This story is like a metaphor for his journal. He said he made a great journal, couldn't improve it any further, and so decided to close it down. He goes to Europe, complains that the best restaurants are shutting down, he returns from Europe, and then he criticizes contemporary writing in the way that we all strive to criticize writing, namely in a way that demonstrates our intelligence and exquisite good taste. He was writing about sort of this post-modern style that had afflicted fiction. About the writers, he says, they seem to be having such a glorious, disorderly, this irresponsible good time out of tasseling the poor old austere alphabets that one could not be stepmotherly with them, even in one's heart. Specimens of subjectivity in exilis furnished by Proust, Laforgue, Dujardin, and practitioners of the quote, stream of consciousness and quote principle. One's presumption upon any society from which such work could emanate and get itself accepted were inescapable. That is such a subtle, finely put insult that I'm going to read it again just to make sure that I got it. One's presumption upon any society from which such work, meaning stream of consciousness literature, could emanate and get itself accepted were inescapable. The only thing I could arrive at concerning the literary produce of the 20s was that one was the one which I had already long entertained. This is a very subtle point and it's interesting to me as a writer that art goes rancid when art, when it becomes consciously this or that and that the one invincible and implacable enemy of art is the writer's self-consciousness, his preoccupation with the subjective. Writers sometimes produce a work of art, perhaps great art, with no intention of doing anything of the kind and every intention of doing something else. They do it in pursuance of some purpose, in pursuance of some purpose. This is nieces, this is praxeology, but the relation of that purpose to art is fortuitous and in their pursuance of it they do not deliberately bind themselves to making their work illustrative of any wire-drawn formula or theory of art. On one hand the widespread of frail and futile literacy had set up a great demand for frail and futile literature. On the one hand publishers had become one of the country's major industries and the ensuing competition was so sharp that each house had to keep its presses going at full speed in order to live. It was a case of print or die. With all of them in an effort to capture a share of the market furnished by the faintly literate and the operation of Gresham's law set the general standard of what was printable. As someone put it, a good book from a publisher's point of view was a book that as nearly as possible looked like another book which had sold a great number of copies. Okay, really funny criticism of the publishing industry. I love what he says about art and writing and pursuing a purpose and not being self-conscious. He misstates Gresham's law as I talked about in video number one. And I also just think he's at odds that the market can't support good literature as well as bad. But anyway, my distaste for the fantastically exaggerated literary exploitation of sex, sex attraction, sex relations soon ripened into utter disgust. My complaint was primarily that writers acting under the obsession were attempting an impossibility. They were trying to make too grotesquely much out of too pathetically little. The standard English novel of the period according to a disgruntled English critic consisted of 200 pages of smooth and easy prose leading up to an act of adultery and then 80 pages of more smooth and easy prose leading down again. The fiction of the period specialized in presenting sex attraction, sex emotion, consistently at their lowest level. The neolithic masses of mankind are psychically incapable of experimenting the emotions of sex at any level but the lowest level. And having become dimly literate, they would naturally require the level of depicted experience to be not above that of the actuality with which they are acquainted. This being so, the objections raised on moral and social grounds seemed exorbitant and did not interest me. So there was criticism of the raunchy literature or by 1920 standards, launched literature but he said they didn't interest him because this is what the masses are capable of. So negative he is. But I guess this is before Amazon, this is before Goodreads. This is when there were gatekeepers. I mean there still are gatekeepers in the publishing industry but nothing like today. He segues then from literature into a very lengthy social commentary. Surprisingly he was anti-marriage, he called it unnatural and this is surprising to me because today most people who are kind of the conservative libertarians, the aristocratic libertarians that they see marriage as a hugely important institution and rival to the state but he considered it unnatural. He thinks gender equality is silly. I was all for equality of the sexes before the law but the left wing doctrine of quote natural equality and quote impressed me as profound nonsense. Women like the females of any mammalian species are in some respect superior to their males immeasurably so and in other respects are distinctly inferior. These qualities of excess and defect are complementary and the practical thing is to adjust one's personal sex relations and correspondence with that natural arrangement. He does a lot of comparison between French feminism on one hand and British and American on the other saying the French women were superior because they didn't even want to vote for example and they looked at it all skeptically. He also compares an older period of feminist advocacy which I was entirely unaware of to the present day. As I mentioned in the original video of this series, this is largely one half of a conversation. He takes knowledge of these issues for granted and he takes your knowledge of many authors for granted and many literature ideas. He just assumes you know them and keeps going. On women's suffrage he says, I thought it would do no good and no harm. The only effect it could have would be to increase the preponderance of the mass vote. Albert J. Nock, I'm not aware of him being accused of racism. A term that I recently discovered was coined by Leon Trotsky. He was accused of antisemitism. In this book he does comment about Jewish people. There's nothing that I think one could be offended at because this is a taboo topic that makes me interested. He said, I refer to the authentic Hebrew culture and tradition. America opened its doors wide to this oriental people and the Jews have made many important contributions to our civilization and the Shem's law has seen to it that the most important are those for which they get the least credit. He talks about the silly notion of the melting pot. He says that this notion of a melting pot encouraged Jewish people in a preposterously superficial and impracticable attempt to occidentalize themselves, meaning to westernize themselves. And this attempt entailed a self-chosen disparagement and sacrifice of their culture. Our society has lost incalculably by this and aside from the cultural damage to the Jews themselves, I believe the social consequences of this will be most unfortunate for them. He does not elaborate on this, on what was this westernization of Jewish culture that happened in America. I know he started writing a book about Jews from his perspective but never finished. And I guess the fact that it's a little bit taboo to talk about Jewish culture and Jewish people if you're not Jewish, that seems to be unchanging in the world. The Jewish person resents vehemently any discussion of his people's status as an American minority and he is alone among minorities in pursuance of this holy irrational policy. This morbid sensitiveness is not without reason certainly and its reason is plain. I had the idea of writing a small book which show exactly what in my judgment in terms of the problem are. And he goes on about immigration. He says over long periods America has been taking great masses of unacceptable population off Europe's shoulders. I don't know, maybe he's talking about like Italians and Irish, I know they were resented, but he was taking unacceptable populations off Europe's shoulders, partly to satisfy industrialists in search of cheap low-grade labor and partly from motives of a highly questionable humanitarianism. These immigrants caught great streams of money to flow out of America to the folks at home and up to 1914 many came only with the intention of going back for the rest of their lives as soon as they had got together enough money for the purpose. I think this is a little glimmer of protectionism which had Albert J. Knock been alive today. He would have learned all about over the internet and corrected himself. Surveying the plight of minorities in Europe I was reminded of the appalling consequences of political intervention upon the problem of the, he uses the word Negro minority in America. The effect of emancipation by fiat was never better put than Mr. Dooley. It turned them out of the pantry and into the cellar. It discharged upon the country a huge avalanche of industrial specialists, probably single crop agriculturalists with nothing to do and no provision made for getting anything to do. So he talks about just this huge mass of people with very, very low skills and he doesn't say it but also no property. And then this is a statement about the 14th and 15th amendments that I don't fully understand to that issue. He says the 14th and 15th amendments were a device deliberately contrived by Ben Wade, Ben Butler, Thad Stevens and their co-beauties to perpetuate the dominance of the Republican Party representing the economic interests of the industrial north. I don't fully understand that unless I do hear some people saying that the 14th and 15th, the 14th amendment was an attack on the Constitution and I might have to ask Uncle Google to elaborate on that. He has a general principle about relations between different races and he calls for voluntary, you know, you should be able to associate with whomever you want, just like any libertarian would say, but contrary to what many libertarians would say, he also believes that you should be able to disassociate yourself from anyone you want. First, that the principle of equality before the law be maintained without subterfuge and with the utmost vigor. Secondly, that this principle be definitively understood as carrying no social implications of any kind whatsoever. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following said Shylock, I don't know who Shylock is, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. If I choose to associate with Negroes and they choose to have me do so, whatever the terms of the association may be, I am within my rights and so are they. If I insist on other forming, if I insist on others forming like associations, I exceed my rights. If they insist on others of my race forming them, they exceed their rights. So voluntary integration, voluntary segregation is what Albert J. Knott calls for. The most agreeable and improving social relations, which I have enjoyed of late in America, have been with a coterie of Jews living in Pennsylvania. If they had found me unacceptable and had excluded me, the doctrine of equality would have suffered no infringement. Nor would it if a Negro hotelkeeper or Jewish restaurateur had turned me away. Nor if a white proprietor of a theater had refused to let it for a performance by Negroes or Jewish actors or actresses. I think the libertarian community needs to have a long heated discussion about immigration. Okay, then he talks about Meta... Like again, in this part of the book, he's jumping from topic to topic. He talks about metaphysics and recounts a few experiences in his life that seem to defy science. One was called... what was it called? Table turning. I've heard of this, where you have someone sit in a chair and everyone does this little ritual. I think there's a chant involved and then everyone puts their fingertips on the chair and then it lifts as if there's no way to it at all. And he said that he experienced that and then they tried it without the chant and it wouldn't work. And he mentions a few of these. He says there was some Russian opera singer who managed to produce a blast of cold air from his fingers. And he talks about seeing just some really creepy face, some really creepy person first in church. And he had what sounded like a panic attack when he saw this man looking at him and then he saw him again in the street months later after he had forgotten the incident. And he had the same sort of panic reaction. He just puts those out there, doesn't speculate much about them, maybe just acknowledging that there are things beyond our understanding. At some point, a little bit later, he quotes Jefferson. I think this is Thomas Jefferson and I think this quote is great for these little metaphysical episodes. Thomas Jefferson said that he's happy to rest his head on a pillow of ignorance. I don't mean to adopt the non-realist, non-rational worldview, but we have only so much time to use our reason and we have to make decisions about where we apply our reason. So I really like that quote and I've used it since reading it. Rest my head on a pillow of ignorance. From these metaphysical experiences, he very naturally transitions into a discussion of religion. And I love this discussion so I'm going to quote it at length. The history of organized Christianity is the most depressing study I ever undertook and also one of the most interesting. I came away from it with the firm conviction that the prodigious evils which spot this record can all be traced to an attempt to organize and institutionalize something which in its nature is incapable of being successfully either organized or institutionalized. I can find no respectable evidence that Jesus ever contemplated either. By all that is known of Jesus, he appears to have been as sound and Simon pure and individual as Lao Zey, Chinese name. His teachings seem to have been purely individualistic in intent. I would say he had no idea whatever of its being formulated into an institutional character nor a doctrinal hurdle to be got over by those who desirous of being called by his name. Pro Jesus Anti-Church. Organized Christianity has had the same fate which has beset all mankind's attempts at organizing itself around some great and good social purpose. Constantine I, the Roman Emperor, like all good politicians which he was, foresaw the future of Christianity and established it as the official religion of the lower empire. His object was political, not religious. He was out to establish a regime of political absolutism and he saw that an official religion could be made an extremely useful instrument not only for helping him on in that purpose but also for keeping people docile under absolutism when it was achieved. So he gave the organization considerable wealth, a great deal of prestige and put it on its way to being what Mr. Middleton Murray, I don't know who that is, called a good wife to the state. The church under Rome was a good wife to the state. Ever since then Christian organizations has pretty diligently fulfilled that function wherever it has been established by the state or subsidized by tax exemption. Constantine's act gave Christianity a social cachet making it eminently respectable and fashionable. One small point of disagreement only for a period is the Catholic Church in medieval Europe was a huge rival to the state. It was an alternate source of power and alternate source of identity and Hans Hermann Hoppe brilliantly describes the reformation as a huge step backwards for liberty because you went from having these two circles of power, the church and the state as sometimes rivals to having states united with their own national churches. Blew my mind that observation. I think he's 100% right. For the most part I think for most of history I think Albert Jane Knox observation is sound that the church was a good wife to the state. But I think after the fall of Rome and what arose in medieval Europe was a church that was a huge rival to the state. I also agree with, I'm really inspired by Albert Jane Knox sort of appreciation for Jesus as an individualistic, as a preacher of an individualistic philosophy and a good example setter. I do not find any evidence that Jesus laid down any basic doctrine beyond that of a universal loving God and the universal brotherhood of man. There is no report of him having discussed the nature of God or laying stress on any other God's attributes or that he even ever said anything about them. He also exhibited a way of life to be pursued purely for its own sake with no hope of any reward but the joy of pursuing it. A way of entire self renunciation giving up one's habits, ambitions, desires and personal advantages. The doing of this would establish what he called the kingdom of heaven, a term which as far as anyone knows he never saw fit to explain or define. As I understand it heaven and hell, it's not at all clear from Jesus' teachings that there's a heaven or hell in the sense that we understand it of a, he goes on. At the beginning of the fourth century organized Christianity showed a pattern set not by Jesus but by Gresham's law, a pattern essentially Jewish but sophisticated by some mythraic accreditations. That's another question for Uncle Lugel to unravel. It had reverted to the Jewish conception of a particularized and bargaining God. That I understand that God is you negotiate with him. Yeah, and he's very active in making decisions that's like Old Testament stuff. And of a redeeming Messiah. This Christian Messiah however was Jesus who was God's only son and with a third being called the Holy Spirit was an integral part of the Godhead. It had reverted to the old metaphysical idea concerning blood sacrifice but blood atonement, refining them somewhat in the transference. It also reverted to an elaborate system of ritual ceremonies and then professional priesthood and it took over the mythraic Sunday. One would be hard put to find that Jesus ever had in mind any forecast of anything like this. There is certainly no suggestion of such a forecast anywhere in the gospels. Nevertheless organized Christianity is still set in this pattern and hence the question whether or not one is a Christian is not in most cases I believe susceptible of a categorical answer. For myself I would not pretend to give any kind of answer. My impression is that in the course of a couple centuries Gresham's law supplanted a stark and simple doctrine of practice by a stark and highly complex doctrine of belief. It replaced a simple doctrine of practice with a highly complex doctrine of belief and how far the two can be reconciled I should say depends on the individual's powers of self persuasion. I can do nothing whatever with reconciling them. Albert J. Nock is ready to throw the whole church out the window. He writes, if all the mass of organized post-polling Christianity's metaphysics were proven true or false tomorrow, I do not see that one's view of the historic Jesus and his teachings would be in the least affected. Organized Christianity is in a poor way. It has come into disrepute but far more into general disregard. It has lost the power of making itself feared and has gained no power of making itself loved. Its ancient prestige has dwindled to the point where Epstein's law can no longer do any business with it. That means Epstein's law he says men will always pursue their self interest in the easiest possible way. Its officials are uneasily aware of this and some of them are looking about for a new apologetic which shall be enabled the church as they call it to recover its lost ground. I can conceive of a post-polling church going to destruction carrying with it the whole cargo of metaphysics with Gresham's law has loaded on it yet leaving the historical Jesus standing before society in a clearer light than ever. You can throw out the whole church, the whole hook line and sinker, and then Jesus, Albert J. Nock believes, will remain a better example than he has been in a very long time. His way of life is not to be followed because he recommended it or because he was virgin born or was part of the Godhead or could work miracles or for any reason then that experience will prove that it is a good way, none better, if one have but the understanding and tendencies of purpose to cleave to it, neither of which I have and I believe very few have. Here once more is where the hard gritty common sense of the Jew comes out in his instinctive recourse to the apologetic of experience. He quotes, what is he quoting? I'm not sure what he's quoting but he quotes, O taste and see how gracious the Lord is. It was all the signal merits of the Cambridge Platonists that they recognized experience as the sum total of Jesus' own apologetic. Smith, in his discourse on the method of attaining to divine knowledge, urges it in more impassioned language than any of the others, with the possible exception of Cooverwell. The soul itself, half, I think he's quoting, I don't know who these people are, I looked some of them up as I was reading but I don't remember. The soul, this is another quote, the soul itself half in sense as well as the body, and therefore David, when he would teach us how to know what the divine goodness is, calls not for speculation but sensation. Taste and see how good the Lord is. The stultifying ineptitude of orthodox cringing approach to God as in the prayers we all repeat and the hymns we all sing. Mr. Epstein's view was based on his Pauline assumption of the dichotomous man that the man of two selves, one divine, the other bestial. And he thought the progress on the way of life recommended by Jesus is better, this is important and really interesting and practical everyday advice that we can all take to heart. Man is dichotomous split in two, one half divine, the other bestial. And the thought that progress in the way of life recommended by Jesus is better made by an energetic strengthening of the former, strengthening of your spiritual side, then by direct efforts to repress and weaken the latter, the bestial side. Whether or not the basic assumption be sound, I believe that the method is eminently sound and that in laying stress on the opposite method, organized Christianity has brought a great deal of avoidable and nervating and rather cruel distress upon those of its adherents who took its pretensions seriously. He says the church messed up by repressing the bestial instead of awakening the spiritual. As Mr. Epstein, who Albert J. Knox quotes quite often was a personal friend of his, it's not some historic writer. Mr. Epstein said, I think he was, I'm pretty sure he was, I suddenly worried that I misstated. If not, then he was a contemporary writer of Albert J. Knox's time. Mr. Epstein said, when the bestial side gets the better of it for the moment, as it will every now and then, and you go wrong, don't bother over repenting and nagging yourself about it. Let it go, forget it, to hell with it. You put your energy harder than ever on building up the divine side. Don't try to repress the bestial side. He quotes some French. Should I attempt it? Il faut cultivre notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden. We must cultivate our garden. With these words, Voltaire ends his treatise called Candine, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense than the entire bulk of 19th century hedonist literature can show. The only thing that the psychically human being can do to improve society is to prevent, is to present society with one improved unit. Wow, fantastic. The only thing that a psychically human being can do to improve society is to give society one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method, which Jesus apparently regarded as the only whereby the kingdom of heaven can be established as a going concern. That is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one on that 40 minutes. I think that last is a good lesson for libertarians, because we are so popular to so often criticize, criticize bad news, bad news, bad news. And I think one reason that Jeffrey Tucker is just such a star, I think so highly of him, is that he celebrates the successes. And this is important. He's building up the spiritual side of human interaction, the divine side, instead of just like seeing all this bestial, barbaric behavior of the state of the way people just cling to the state. And I think he's doing it right, and I think we can all benefit from this advice. Incidentally, it was Jeffrey Tucker, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Property and Freedom Society Conference in 2012, who recommended to me this book personally. And it was dynamite. The book is so dense. Honestly, I'm embarrassed by the length of these videos. I'm going to make a fourth one. I'm just embarrassed by how much of them I feel like I need to read to you guys or comment on, but it's still pretty awesome. And making these videos helps me remember them. It helps me absorb the material a little bit better, and I want to remember them. So stay tuned for number four. If you got this far, you are really awesome. Ciao.