 40 here. So there is a new BBC series getting aired on HBO. It's called The Luminaries. It's a novel published in 2013. It is set in the Goldfields of New Zealand in 1866 and won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. Okay, so very prestigious and it runs over 800 pages. So it was like the longest, longest such publication, longest book to win a Booker Prize. So it made me think, do we sufficiently love our thought leaders, our public intellectuals? Oh, my old buddy Riccardo is here. Hey, maybe I'll be able to get a good stream here with a little back and forth blood sports or tennis, intellectual tennis game here with Riccardo. His emotional honesty always outdoes mine and invariably produces good live streams on my part. So I could have called this live stream the de Tocqueville of the de Tocqueville of New Zealand. But I was afraid that would not get many any hits. Yes, I read that 30 tyrants article in tablet mac and I found it really weak. So let's let's talk about it. So the 30 tyrants, the deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta by Lee Smith. So who the heck is Lee Smith a journalist? All right. So American journalist and author. Yeah, how did I know Luke would find it weak because it alleges some some global conspiracy that the elites are trying to perpetrate on, you know, honest, God fearing Americans. That's where he actually looks going to hate this. Okay, so so his his first book. Okay, what was his first book? It was the plot against the president. And then his follow up book was the permanent coup how enemies foreign and domestic targeted the American president. So this is like example a one I've been prepared to discuss this article all week. I just haven't gotten around to it, you know, what with the pressing importance of discussing the free Brittany situation. But this is why I vastly, vastly, vastly prefer the work of academics to the work of journalists. So and documentary film like makers like Adam Curtis. So Lee Smith is a bit like Adam Curtis. I think Lee Smith makes some good points. And I think Adam Curtis makes some good points. But they take they take one perspective on a situation and then hype it. All right. And they simply don't have sufficient knowledge. Or they just they're facing career incentives to, you know, hype, hype their insights into something larger than is really there. So Lee Smith, Adam Curtis, Richard Spencer, you get very exciting material will all three of these intellectuals that much more exciting to listen to than I am, because they invariably see far more to reality than is really there. And it's so much more exciting when you can listen to a perspective that that, you know, vastly inflate something, you know, way beyond what's actually there. So okay, the 30 tyrants by Lee Smith, and he starts off with a with a nice, a nice, you know, classical illusion. And this is something that that plebs and journalists compared to academics of plebs. And mid tier intellectuals. I mean, myself, right? I'm no rocket science. I've never tested for IQ score above like a 124. But we to try to class ourselves up. We always love to, you know, quote something by Aristotle, or some classic source, right, to try to make a cells appear, you know, more classy and more limited than that we really are. So here he starts out his article in chapter five of the prince. Niccolò Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those that is defeated in war. The first is to ruin them. The second is to rule directly. And the third is to create a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you. And he gives the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens after defeating Athens after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. So the upper cast of the Athenian elite was already contemptuous of democracy. So Athens lost to Sparta, the military quasi proto fascist state. And the Athenian elite, this defeat confirmed for them that the Spartan system was preferable, that you need an aristocracy, you know, ruling over the plebs. So to me, the most important way of understanding the left, right distinction is that the left values puts a great premium on equality while the right understands hierarchy as normal, natural and healthy. So with this understanding of the left, right political distinction, you can see political distinctions going back to ancient Athens. So the modern left, right dichotomy only goes back to the French assembly at the end of the 18th century. But this definition of left and right, this works going back thousands of years. So you have parties that emphasize equality, and you have parties that emphasize aristocracy and hierarchy. And of those two orientations, I am on the right, because I believe that hierarchy is normal, natural and healthy. And I'm much more comfortable with aristocratic rule than rule by the masses. So those are my inclinations, and that's why I'm on the right. So the pro-Sparta oligarchy set up an oligarchy in Athens where it used to be a democracy. And so the Athenian government that took over in the wake of Sparta's victory became known as the 30 tyrants. So essentially 30 major aristocrats in Athens began governing Athens for the benefit of Sparta. So Lee Smith is a columnist for Tabletmag, and the column, like you have to understand everything in a genre. So I am working in a live stream genre here, where I'm just sitting down talking to the camera, I'm not using OBS. So it's just me riffing, me reading, me riffing, me responding to comments. That's a particular genre. All right, you can't expect the same exactitude of my speech as you would with even a blog post, right? And let alone if I was submitting an article for publication in Los Angeles Times, then there'd be an editor going over very possibly a fact checker. Okay, so Ricardo's got some questions. Okay, the Democratic Party is the hierarchy party now. I don't believe so. The Democratic Party is the party of the elites. But it is not the party that says that hierarchy is no more natural and healthy. So the Democratic Party officially stands for equality. The Democratic Party puts far more emphasis on equality. Now elites have embraced that ideology for their own reasons. But you'll see in Democratic Party rhetoric and in Democratic Party legislation, they put far more emphasis on equity and equality than do Republicans. Republicans by and large don't talk about equity. Now the rhetoric might make appeals based on equality, but in practice, the opposite seems true. I have to think about that more. So no, no, I don't identify with the Democrats. They're destroying social mobility. I'm not sure I have anything on that right now. So Lee Smith here, he's working within a particular genre. The genre is writing a column for a tablet magazine. And so the column is a little bit like the essay genre. And by the way, I never learned how to write an essay. Now, I'm like a porn star who never learned how to give a hand job. So when you write an essay or a column, usually you have a thesis statement and then you provide examples. And then you restate your thesis thesis at the end. So when you're writing a column, usually you're trying to get across one idea and you try to make it if you're writing for a popular publication. So tablet mag is upper middle brow, but it's not an academic publication. So when you're writing for a middle brow publication, a publication for the masses, you're going to try to make it as emotionally exciting as possible. If you want academics by and large just write for themselves. A blogger who can't pen an essay is hardly a blogger at all. I'm not sure. See, I don't write essays and I've written some pretty good blog posts. But I never mastered the particular genre of writing an essay. And the downside of my blogging so much for the past 22 years is that I've had very few opportunities to write for other people. So I would have, of course, I would have benefited from having an editor. I would have benefited from being a professional writer with a professional journalism organization. It would have instilled in me discipline and skills that you don't get just doing things on your own where you have no editor. It's infinitely easy to deceive yourself that you've done a good job. So when people read my blog posts, they often feel like they're a vast you know, they're vast disconnections that I just like throw up this idea and just throw up that idea. And I made, you know, very little effort on transitions. But it's just kind of like stream of consciousness. And I think there's a lot of power to those critiques. Now, there's a downside to the column genre. And that is it, you're trying to be dramatic, right? You're trying to grab and hold the reader's attention. So an academic does not need to grab and hold the reader's attention. He just needs the respect of his peers. So generally speaking, academics only write for other academics. Generally speaking, academics have no interest in popular applause as a very, you know, gross, gross generalization. So the advantage of this is that they're not, they're not playing to the plebs. No, they're not playing for popular acclaim. They only interest in the acclaim of their peers. So let's talk about public intellectuals. So here are the hierarchy levels of the public intellectual according to an essay I stumbled upon. So normally, if you're an academic, you only write about areas of your expertise. Because if you write about things in which you don't have expertise, you're very likely to be exposed to the people from whom you most want respect, which is your fellow academics. So generally speaking, academics only write for academics in their own area of expertise. Then if you become successful enough at that, and think of like Norm Chomsky here, he started out as I think a linguist, right? That's someone who's a philologist, someone who studied words and the development of language. And then he became so successful, he started to expand from writing just about the subject area in which he had expertise. And then he started writing about his discipline, how it related to the wider world. So this is like, this is like the intermediate step between being a scholar and being a public intellectual. The public intellectual sounds off on all sorts of things, which he has very little expertise. So try to think of this one British dude with a funny name. He started off as a scholar, but then he became such a hack, like John Yu, the Bush administration lawyer who justified torture, got a post writing at UC Berkeley's law school, and he publishes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal about 1840 American elections in which he has no expertise. But once you've crossed a certain line of hackery, it becomes virtually impossible to go back to being taken as a scholar. So if you're truly gifted scholar, you may receive opportunities to apply your area of expertise to the wider world, to the social, cultural and political world around it. So this would be like James Watson and his famous book, The Double Helix, Steven Weinberg's essays about science, culture and religion, New York review of books, Gerald Early's book, The Culture of Bruising, Steven Pinker's op-ed in the New York Times about, say, the deeper meaning of President Clinton's use of language in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Then level three. Oh, Malcolm Gladwell is the hack, only ever been a hack. And you'll have less understanding of the world after reading Malcolm Gladwell than before. Like, just absolutely useless. Then level three is by invitation only. That's when you become so successful in those first two levels that you're invited, you know, to speak for $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, $100,000, $250,000 a pop on all sorts of issues in which you have no expertise. So Albert Einstein, once he became famous, he started giving public addresses on religion, education, ethics, philosophy, world politics, even though he had no expertise in any of these areas. So Gloria Steinem, Lester Thoreau, Norm Chomsky, Carl Sagan, EO Wilson, Steven J. Gould, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, Camille Puglia, Steven Pinker, these are all like public intellectuals. So the public intellectual discourses at length on topics that he doesn't really have much knowledge of. So the public intellectual describes the intellectual, usually a scholar, participating in the public affairs discourse of a society in addition to his academic career. So he may have a specialty in 17th century Hungarian poetry, but for whatever reason, he's become so famous, he's now invited to give his thoughts on nuclear arms control. So without having any necessary expertise, the public intellectual, you know, addresses all sorts of problems of society. And he's expected to be this impartial critic who rises above the partial preoccupations of his own narrow profession of scholarship and engages with global issues of truth, judgment and taste. So according to Edward Said, the true public intellectual is always an outsider living in self-imposed exile and on the margins of society. So public intellectuals by and large are useless because they're famous, but they're talking about things of which they have no knowledge. Who is that Harvard intellectual? He's a classic story, someone who started out, yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson, never even level one scholar, like always just, you know, mediocre scholar, but through affirmative action and this tremendous dirt of black scientists, he's been able to play the game to becoming a public intellectual. He's different in that he never had any scholarly accomplishment in the first place. Who's that Harvard professor who got in trouble for saying that homosexuals have no stake in the future because they don't have children? And he's a little bit on the right and he makes a lot of documentaries. Damn, it's going to come to me. Yeah, so you can be a good communicator. Like Mike Enoch is a good communicator. Eric Stryker is a good communicator. Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, these are great communicators because there's a certain gift with communication, which is completely not correlated with merit. All right, one could be wonderfully gifted at communicating things that are stupid. Glenn Lowry is a true scholar who is also a public intellectual, but he seems to be fairly careful in his pronouncements. So he's both a true scholar, a true academic, and he's also a public intellectual who has not beclowned himself. So for example, most public intellectuals, they become so famous that they pay no price or very little price for being wrong on all sorts of things, so long as they don't transgress any of the newly sacred taboo, say, regarding transsexualism or homosexuality. Yeah, communication is its own skill and it's completely different from merit. Yeah, most scholars, most writers are not gifted at giving a talk or extemporaneous speaking. It's hard to read books and practice talking to other people at the same time. Then there are thought leaders. So thought leaders usually are not scholars, they're usually not even intellectuals. So an intellectual is someone who makes his living engaging in ideas. So let's say I was able to make my living doing what I'm doing now. I would be an intellectual. So if you can make your living discussing ideas, you're an intellectual. An intellectual, according to Wikipedia, is a person who engages in critical thinking research and reflection about the reality of society who may propose solutions and thus gains authority as a public intellectual. The intellectual usually has three traits. They are educated, meaning they're erudite. They are productive. They create cultural capital in the fields of philosophy or literary criticism, sociology, law, medicine, science, etc. And they're often artistic. They either create cultural capital through critique and criticism or they create art in the form of literature, music, painting, or sculpture. Okay, so let's go back to Lee Smith here, the 30 tyrants in Tablet Mag. So his last column was about Thomas Friedman remarking about the exact moment that American elite decided that democracy wasn't working for them. So it is interesting how the elite universally hate the internet because it's not sufficiently moderated and censored. So we've had this information explosion in particular over the past 40 years, where with more and more information, the more and more shortcomings we see in our institutions. So also with more and more information, the semi-monopoly the certainly elite institutions had over information has been dissolved. So the need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy corporate manager to reconsider the Republican Party. They have left the party. And so the disenchanted elite has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. Okay, so have American workers truly been impoverished? Now, yeah, real wages for unskilled labor have not increased over the past 60 years, but most workers are not unskilled. They are above that minimum level. And so I don't think globalism is all about impoverishing the workers because remember, globalism comes with a cost free trade comes with a cost it reduces wages, but it also reduces the prices for goods. All right, so China was ascended to the war trade organization in 2001. And then the Chinese as a result of that just cannibalized our manufacturing base. So why did our elites or why did America trade with an authoritarian regime and send China millions of American manufacturing jobs thereby impoverishing working Americans? It's a good question. And his answer is because it made them rich. And I think that's only partially the answer. I think it both made them rich, but they also saw it as, you know, the right thing to do because it would create cheaper goods that would make for more efficiency. And they said that China they saw China's big productive efficient and its rise was inevitable. The American workers hurt by the deal deserve to be punished. Right now, he can't he can't come up with any examples of that. So this is the other weakness with a with a columnist is that they can and this is why I don't I don't benefit from reading Z-Man. So when you read Z-Man or you get all these assertions that are essentially unforeseeable and frequently no evidence, it's just pronouncements. So here's the column and he's saying that American elites made this deal with China. And they thought that American workers who would be hurt by these deals with China deserve to be punished, but it provides zero evidence. See, this is like this is the type of writers, intellectuals, I can't stand. You make an incredibly provocative comment that American elites thought that those American workers hurt by a deal with China deserve to be punished. But then he provides zero evidence for that, you know, incredible assertion. If you can't be bothered to provide any evidence for your incredible assertions, I just find it hard to take you seriously. Now, I should spend I should spend more time with this Lee Smith article. Essentially, he says he says that the Chinese intellectuals, the China bought off our elite that made them rich, and thereby devastated devastated the American worker. For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of aggregating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on Americans. This is just gross. The American officials purposefully destroyed our economy for the sole purpose of aggregating more power to themselves. What's your evidence for that? That they did it for the sole purpose of aggregating more power for themselves. I see our elites and our workers and everyone in between as similar to me in that we all have pro-social and anti-social impulses. So American politicians grappled with the challenge of COVID-19 and I'm sure they did some good things and they did some bad things and in time we will get more clarity. But the idea that what drove our responses to COVID was a desire to hurt to destroy the economy. I mean, that's absurd. That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives. He provides no evidence that Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives. I believe they thought they were saving lives. Now, they may be right or they may be wrong, but this is why I just find this kind of writing gross. He can't be bothered to provide evidence for these incendiary assertions. The Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes. I want to hold those politicians to account for their bad decisions, but do you really think that Governor Andrew Cuomo deliberately wanted to murder thousands of Americans and that's why he proposed these policies? I think he erred. I think he was wrong. I think he deserved to be castigated, but this is just gross to say they intentionally set out to murder thousands of Americans. As with Athens' anti-democratic faction, America's best and brightest long ago lost its way. Okay, I should think about this article more, but what really led me to stream right now is the luminaries. It's coming up on HBO Max and won the Booker Prize in 2013 for the author who is just 28 years of age at the time, Eleanor Catton. She's a relative of Bruce Catton, the American historian and journalist who wrote all those wonderful books about the American Civil War. I read so many of them when I was 11, 12, 13. Anyway, in January 2015, she said that the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were led by, quote, neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture. They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet to be able to have the life they want. I feel very angry with my government. So that's what I wanted to discuss. So this created like an enormous backlash because she said this when she was just 30 years of age. And so there's all this discussion about how New Zealand is a cultural desert. We've got one essay here, Anger, Apathy, and Anti-Intellectualism in New Zealand. So the reason that this story hit all the news outlets in New Zealand was that New Zealand was mentioned in an overseas publication in India. So there's this widespread belief in Australia and New Zealand that these cultures are not sufficiently hospitable to public intellectuals. But my point is public intellectuals are useless. People sounding off on things they know nothing about, they don't consistently have a good winning percentage. It's like you send out as your lead batsman in a cricket match. You just send out a couple of randos. They're not going to do too well protecting three wickets against balls, flung at them at 90 miles an hour. Opening batsman requires a particular skill. And so to the idea that scholars who have established themselves in one area can sound off to the public benefit on all sorts of things they don't know anything about is just absurd. And so there are all these discussions in New Zealand about this woman, Elizabeth Catten, calling a public intellectual a traitor is the sort of thing you'd expect to hear on Fox News. She got caught a traitor because she had a job teaching for a public institution teaching writing. So she was partially subsidized by the government. Therefore, many people thought she should not get to criticize the government. And the common sense conclusion is the vile refrain. If you don't love it, leave. The self-serving vitriol of these wrong right clowns drowns out the most interesting implications of what Elizabeth Catten was really talking about. Fundamental problem here is that New Zealand doesn't invest enough in growing strong and stable institutions to nurture and develop its next generation of thought leaders and public intellectuals. Well, thought leaders and public intellectuals by and large are useless, even though I probably have pretenses pretenses to to be such. And such pettiness and lack of subtlety is a hallmark of New Zealand politics and you could say the same thing for Australian. Now that the cult of neoliberalism is collapsing in and of itself, re-emerging is a ruthless, uninformed pragmatism. New Zealand's political and business leaders are almost completely unmoored from any attachment to theory or ideology. Well, is that such a bad thing? So really saying that the people with responsibility are making decisions on the basis of what works rather than according to ideology. And there are all these complaints. There's no room for arts and culture in this assemblage of mediocrity. There's a tremendous amount of self-hatred in Australia and in New Zealand. I think it's like the dark side of the Anglo mentality because Anglo is like the least ethnocentric of any people in the world. They're the one people in the world with with belief in universal morality. And the downside of that is that they are particularly susceptible to savage self-criticism. And so this writer says in in the early 2000s, I worked on Te Adara, the official government-sponsored encyclopedia of New Zealand. I hope that the launch of this encyclopedia would provoke intelligent criticism and debate about cultural nationalism and the role of the government in promoting New Zealand history. So historically, the study of history has been very closely associated with nationalism. If there's any controversy regarding this encyclopedia, I thought it would come from the explicit bicultural architecture of the encyclopedia, which might have implied that English and Maori were the only legitimate components of New Zealand identity. The actual controversy turned out to be different. I got attacked by all these ridiculous libertarian bloggers that we were wasting taxpayers' money. The sense of pride I felt at having been involved, bringing this treasure trove of social history to a new generation of school kids, was tempered by the connexion of these right-wing ideologues. I was part of a hated Wellington elite, so Wellington is the largest city in New Zealand. I think New Zealand are about five million people in New Zealand. I was complicit in squandering precious tax dollars on frivolous crypto-socialist pet projects. This happens over and over again in New Zealand. So there may very well be a bent towards pragmatism on the part of Anglos and a suspicion of intellectuals, and intellectuals don't tend to like this. So you'll see with English, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and English and American scholars, academics, that when they write academic papers, they prefer to focus on the specific and the empirical. And don't elaborate a whole bunch of overarching theories. While the German, French intellectuals are the opposite, they love to propound these vast overarching theories, and they have much less interest in empirical particularity. But this happens over and over again in New Zealand. Genuinely deep, dark, and interesting debates are kicked aside by venal and petty squabbling that only serves to divide and subjugate the intellectual and creative class. So definitely I think there's a suspicion of intellectuals in the Anglo world, and intellectuals don't like that. It's authoritarian and illiberal to imply that by accepting government funding, one forfeits the right to criticize the government. So intellectuals want to be subsidized by the government so that they can criticize the government. New Zealand is so small, everyone knows each other, everyone comments on each other's business. You can't escape politics, because everything you say and do can and will be politicized. There is no escape from politics. Everything can be politicized, meaning it can be boiled down to the friend-enemy distinction. So New Zealand's Prime Minister Muldoon cackled in a mid-1970s TV interview, New Zealand is the most intimate democracy in the world. So this lack of separation is a disaster for writers, public intellectuals, scientists, and independent critics. Honesty is stifled by interlocking circles of groupthink. New Zealand has failed to develop cultural institutions with strong roots that can withstand political pressures. These are like really common laments by the creative class, what's called the creative class or the intellectual class in Anglo countries. We need institutions who will nurture respect for social criticism. They want to be funded by the government to criticize. The sort of organizations that would provide stable career paths and prospects for a broad and diverse community of world-leading intellectuals, artists, and writers. They just have to be held on the left. The explosion of blogging social media use in New Zealand hasn't made these circles more transparent and open, or made social criticism and literature more accessible. Wellington is the world capital of the sub-tweet. Did you know that? Over the past few years, I've run into a number of expat kiwis from all walks of life. In Berlin, they describe themselves as cultural outcasts and sexual refugees. In London, they spoke acrimoniously about New Zealand's low-wage economy, lack of opportunities for career growth, and exorbitant levels of student loan debt. So the creative class and the intellectual class are really good at complaining because they're gifted with words. In Australia, intellectuals are not so articulate and forthright, but they're often more purposeful and permanent. What's interesting is how few of these people have lost their accents and how fascinated they still are with New Zealand and what it means. Being in New Zealand is a malady, a kind of madness. So the people who settled in New Zealand were so universalist in their morality that they were like these Anglo bishops in New Zealand who thought that it was morally wrong to care more for your own kids than for, you know, the kids of strangers thousands of miles away. Most people don't like confusion and complexity. They want to see patterns. They want to, they want to dodge difficult contradictory thoughts about nationalism. Kiwis want to believe in a renaissance, moving beyond stortifying colonial identity that emerged in the 20th century. The spiritual and cultural emptiness facilitated by the neoliberal reforms and globalization has given rise to a property hungry middle class with no interest in shaping, sustaining the long-term future of the country or curating its heritage. The burning desire to fill that void may have been part of the reason why the generation of kids growing up under neoliberalism eventually lurched so suddenly towards cultural nationalism. The cultural nationalism, right, that that should provide lots of government funded subsidized jobs for the creative class and for intellectuals. So New Zealand intellectuals like typical Anglo intellectuals describe their own country as a hollow society. When New Zealand jettisoned a lot of government bureaucracy and brought in the free market in the 1980s, he says the money men tore down our awkward state society and left nothing in its place. New Zealand is a hungry, the famous natural landscape. New Zealand is a far more beautiful country than Australia. The landscape in New Zealand is stunning. That's where they shot Lord of the Rings. Famous natural landscape is not enough to lift us from our spiritual poverty. We crave connection to the rest of humanity, to the greater history that we still don't feel a part of. We want to be known to be influential and important. Our greatest fear is there's nothing particularly special about New Zealand. So there's something of a cultural cringe in New Zealand and Australia, a sense that their own culture is inferior. This is why New Zealanders have tried to coerce this novelist, Eleanor Catton, into being a cultural ambassador. Guardians of nationalism do not have a monopoly on being inspired by these islands. Then he complains about the spectacle of Kiwi Bogans. So Bogans are like crass, working class people. Kiwi means New Zealander who have completely given up on New Zealand, drive around the Gold Coast in Australia in big black v8s plastered with the cultural detritus Kiwiana, New Zealand. They're arm seared with the obvious tattoos. New Zealand is a nation where millions of people are encouraged to care more about a trademarked corporate rugby brand and to have a genuine ethnic and cultural identity.