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[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Danny Roudy of DannyRoudy.com and today I'm talking with painter, philosopher, biologist, Raymond Peat. In this half hour long episode, we'll talk about the history and origins of authoritarianism and how the philosophy is baked into our cultural, political, and medical systems. In addition to thanking Ray for talking with me today, I'd like to thank my patrons for making this show and all the content I produce possible. If you would like to become a patron, please go to patreon.com/dannyroudy. As always, please do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
And in the spirit of William Blake, the true method of knowledge is experiment. Without further ado, here is the show. [Music] Hello. Ray. Yeah, hi. Hey, how are you? Good. [Laughter] Thank you so much for doing this. I've been interested in this topic for a while and I had a chance to read through "Public Passivity and the Screw" and I thought it was fantastic and I kind of made some notes about that, but if you—I don't have any specific direction I wanted to take the show, so if you have like a thought—
Was that a section in a newsletter or what was it? It was September 2003 and I have it in front of me here. You kind of summarized it and you were like, "I wrote this several years ago, but each month there was something more topical to send out." Oh, yeah. We don't have to go strictly through that, but I was thinking like authoritarianism, when you talk about it, it seems to be an ambiguous term to a lot of people. So I thought before we got into kind of the weeds,
you could talk about what it means to you and then your general experience with it, maybe growing up and scientifically. Academically, there has been a study now for, I guess, about 50 years. Bob Altemeier's book, "The Authoritarians," which came out— I guess he put it on the internet maybe five or ten years ago— and Bob Dean, the Watergate lawyer, became a fan of it and helped to publicize it because it was about the psychology of political authoritarianism primarily. His main focus is on what he calls the right-wing authoritarians.
In my understanding of it, which started long before that, it was the intuitive thing of seeing that in the culture, there is the unreasoning submission to the ideas of anyone in power and conformism around what is taken to be the power-enforced authoritative doctrine. In reacting to Bob Altemeier's version of it, I have seen that in some ways publicizing these traits of the right-wing authoritarian, you might be adding to the confusion somewhat. One of Altemeier's images for how this can be conceptualized comes from Theodor Adorno, a group at Berkeley who made the subject popular,
I think it was in the '60s when they were getting famous for it. Adorno's image was that it's the posture for riding a bicycle, bowing from the waist up and kicking from the waist down. In other words, submission to authority of the power of those above you, knocking down anyone that's below you to keep them below you. Bob Altemeier says that it isn't a very good image. He used questionnaires and got really clear results, but then other people using a scale of social prestige-seeking, power-seeking, identified people rather than conforming and fitting
into wherever they find themselves on the scale. They are only driven towards rising. You can think of the sociopath or the psychopath who cares about nothing but winning and isn't satisfied until they come out owning everything and controlling everyone. Over the last 50 or 60 years, there have been various sociologists who look at different parts of the psychology of politics and society. And ideas like "interdirected" and "otherdirected" that was popular in the '50s, that you can fit into the idea of submission to authority and aggression against those below you in power.
But the "otherdirected" doesn't necessarily limit itself to this authoritarian scheme. People can be "otherdirected" while they're trying to achieve something. Like the people voting for Bernie can look to the movement and try to integrate themselves into a movement to see what can be optimized. So they're being told that if they blend themselves into the Democratic Party, they can improve that idea depending on their directedness. And the "interdirected" idea is that you're sort of spring-loaded in childhood to go in a certain direction. So the people who say, "If I can't have Bernie winning the election,
we'll maybe go off and find something just as good or better and vote for Jill Stein or the Greens or such." So "interdirection" can push you forward on a consistent line where the "otherdirection" can be looking for compromise and such. So it can be either forward-directed or simply authoritarian. And throughout the 20th century, for example, Freud said, "Repression is a good thing," fitting into the system. And from the time I was, I guess, in high school, people were saying, "You have to work within the system."
And my first thoughts on that were imagining what they were saying, that if you cooperate in the system for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, look at the pile of criminal activities you have participated in, then you'll have the power to do something. And the first thing you do, you're out of the system. So you have a huge accumulated pile of bad stuff. And then the first chance you have to do good stuff, you might get a sizable, noticeable achievement,
but it's always going to be smaller than what you did in the opposite direction, getting there. So I wasn't sold on the idea that you have to work within the system because it's really just a way of buying people into the system, telling them that maybe someday you would be able to do some good. Freud really allied with the oppressing class and he created this idea of the ego mediating between the id and the superego. It has to balance these forces, but he really came down on the side of the superego,
smashing the id when necessary. And around 1929 or '30, Wilhelm Reich realized what Freud was doing, and he believed that Freud was very conscious of the rightness of Reich's position, that you're never going to have a healthy individual as long as they're being oppressed. He believed that Freud simply wanted to save his movement from Nazism and make it able to survive by giving in to the oppression. From the 1920s, Reich was saying that there's an emotional plague all through the world, not just fascism, but it's the plague of authoritarianism.
And at first he said education and medicine, psychiatry, can cure people of this, but then next thing he realized was that first you have to cure the doctors and the teachers of the emotional plague. I think Reich was essentially right, but I think it really is more than just an emotional plague. I think it's something like a historical, intellectual, epistemological plague built into the way we believe knowledge works. Did it originate from Plato and Aristotle? Do you see like an origin for this type of oppressive society?
Yeah, as soon as I started looking into encyclopedias and such, trying to find explanations, I think it goes even before Plato. Parmenides and Zeno, they were the Greek school located in southern Italy, the Eleatics, and they argued that there is only one reality and it doesn't change, doesn't do anything. There is no movement. And someone as smart as Bertrand Russell praised the subtlety of Zeno's paradoxes and such, but Russell was struggled for years in what seems like very stupid arguments, but he was smart enough to work himself out of that set of paradoxical mental activities
that Western philosophy had been trapped in for 2,500 years. And Plato essentially gave in to the Parmenides school of thinking that at least the knowledge part of existence, which is the real part of existence, is unchanging, eternal, and perfect. And really was making worse of the crude ideas of Parmenides. And Aristotle really acknowledged some of the reality of Heraclitus. Heraclitus said everything flows exactly polar opposite of Plato and Parmenides, that nothing moves. Heraclitus said that's what it is, everything is moving. And reason, meaning, steers everything through everything. So it wasn't a jumbled random movement.
It was a developmental process which as a whole is steered by meaning. Aristotle tried to formalize this using some of the concepts of Plato, but putting it into a sensible scheme in which he had different kinds of causality, including the final cause principle, which is that things are moved according to meaning or intention. The universality of motion has no randomness in it. Everything is meaningful. Everything can be seen in terms of the first cause and the final cause and the various causes consisting of their nature.
So that for Aristotle, laws were derived from the nature of things. They weren't in some other eternal world like for Plato. Well that goes back to the newsletter. You say laws were written in the past. And since the past isn't accessible, it's almost as though a foreign power ruled from a distant imperial capital. Maybe this goes back to your writing on Blake, and you say that that's a representation of the past, and it's trying to retain the past into the current view of things.
Is that the problem with not only these laws, but politics maybe in general? Oh yeah. The Platonic idea is creating a false reality for everything that we have in our memory. Seeing everything in terms of the past, something that we have at one time generalized, and then saying that's absolute and unchanging. And what it does is to say that all of these current events are random happenings. They don't contain the meaning in themselves. They only get the meaning from these generalizations, and those are all eternal, out of time.
And this was taken up in the physics with the idea of randomness, the assumption of randomness, which can then be treated statistically. But it's a belief about current events and the nature of substance and experience that it's proclaimed to be of a lower order and essentially lacking meaning or purpose. And so the mathematical statistics is needed to make sense of it. And this was Parmenides' doctrine, was that you had to be indoctrinated into his school and learn his language of mathematics before you really were a citizen or a human being.
Using knowledge in this frozen, abstracted sense to identify the value of a person. And so Plato argued for tyranny, that the people who know would have the power, and the power would be logic and mathematics. When this was put into action by the physicists, they proclaimed themselves, those who did physics were those who knew the ultimate fundamental truth. When biology wanted to gain status, they said they would model themselves on the true basic science of physics. And so to find the eternal ruling class elements of the world, the physicists looked for timeless, unchanging atoms.
The individual atom had no unique features, no history, and was an absolute and pure Platonic thing. But the only way they can be treated is by assuming that all of their later developments, their movements, all of these are meaningless and random and have to be described only statistically. And in modeling biology on physics, the equivalent of the timeless, unchanging atom was the timeless, unchanging gene. Again, the soma, the body that we experience, was said to be basically just mortal junk that would be cast aside every generation
while the immortal germline collection of genes was what was really important. And this was developed very closely with people like Herbert Spencer, who identified that even Darwin was a racist that believed that English plants and animals and people were the best in the world. [laughter] You mentioned psychopaths before, and in the KMUD interview, in the quote you mentioned the Dulles brothers, and I think you were alluding to a book by David Talbott called The Devil's Chessboard. Was that correct? Yeah, I think that's his name. You mentioned Reich before, and the connection with Dali,
and the persistence of memory in Dali's shift, integrating himself into the fascist culture, and you mentioned it started in about 1945. I was curious just to unpack that and your thoughts on the CIA and the Dulles brothers and anything else you had to say about it. Well, 20th century history pretty much involved the Dulles brothers. They were working with Hitler and with the fascist Germans right from the beginning, and one of them was declared to be an enemy agent, and the German government had put their American properties in his name,
and so the U.S. government, to confiscate the U.S. properties, identified him as an illegal foreign agent, but that didn't take away from their prestige or power, because Roosevelt himself was a great admirer of Mussolini, even after he took office he was saying what a great statesman Mussolini was. And so fascism wasn't a bad word until they needed to go to war on the side of England to save the British Empire because Hitler had double-crossed the West, and he wanted to knock out England and take their empire,
where the West had figured that he would take over the Soviet Union, and then the British Empire and the American Empire could expand. Well, going back to saying the Dulles brothers shaped the current predicament we're in, do you see authoritarianism as a pathology? Like this is basically a sickness, and people are imposing their sickness. Is that a good way of looking at it? Yeah, in a sense. A philosopher I think would say it's a sickness of method or of conclusions, but if you look at it historically, Parmenides and Plato and Hegel,
all of these people were part of the ruling class, and it was the purpose of their thinking that way, even though that probably seemed spontaneous and truthful to them, it happened to be that it was a way of defining who deserves power and defining their class as an eternal, justified controller of property and power. The idea of class was very conscious in most of history, and in the 20th century, one of the tricks of the ruling class has been to teach the public that there are no classes in America.
I had a professor in graduate school when I was in 1959 or 60 talking about the effect of class in literature. He interrupted me to say, "In America, we have no classes." It's truly either a mental disease or defect of some sort for people to grow up and study and be able to say something like that. It's because the ruling class learned to manipulate language and control the people that they need to be controlled. They don't want to necessarily define them as useless rubbish, which they believe they are, unless they can get away with it.
But if they can make the people feel that they are equals with the royalty and keep them happy while they're living like garbage, that's the best thing for them. So they have taught people that in America there are no classes. People who are really in the bottom 30 or 40% of income call themselves middle class, and people who are more or less in the middle income range think of themselves as being in the upper 5% or such. Everyone seems to have this sort of escalated delusion of where they are in the social hierarchy.
It almost seems like any movement is infiltrated by authoritarianism. For example, even your own work, I'm sure to your complete horror, people use that in an authoritarian sense. Is the environment essentially bracketing our current progress as a civilization right now, or how do you look at it? Yeah, environment in every sense. There are penalties of many sorts for getting out of it, and rewards of various kinds for reinforcing it. I first heard about Nicole Foss' ideas of degrowth. I think you forwarded that to somebody through email once, and I thought it was extremely interesting.
Do you think there will be an inevitable, as she would call it, degrowth in our society and moving back to a simpler direction? No. There will be a rejection or loss of much of the trashy part of our culture, but there is no need to go as far as she suggests going back to isolated tribalism. What's unifying, what's creating the one-worldism at present is a really degraded sort of concept of human interaction and the interaction between people and their environment. It's all based on this polluted kind of philosophy or religion.
It's a religion of emptiness and abstraction that is telling people that this is all there is. But leaving out all of these promotional, consumerist, economic functions, if you simply stop having wars and stop crooked advertising and stop promoting consumerism through schools and the way university research is directed and funded, if you simply stop the craziest practices, what will be left will still be international, but without suppressing the individual flavor of ethnicities and so on. The natural interactions and trade, I think, will keep a unified world economy existing
without, even if Tofs is right about the peak oil, my opinion is that the world is creating petroleum about as fast as it's being used and it just takes a while to refill the wells after they're pumped out. But even if she was right, there are alternative sources of power that can keep a really high-level culture going more or less permanently. At present, I think it's something about a dozen species being extincted every day. That's an idea of what progress means in this current period.
And if you stop that kind of progress, it's like you stop falling into a hole. And as soon as you stop falling, then you can see what kind of possibility is really there. So increasing the people's knowledge, ability, and power could restrain the authority of power? Yeah, making people conscious of the lies that they're having imposed on them. That involves things as drastic as the saying that most of the theoretical physics that we're taught to admire has been very, very clever technical adaptations with a gigantic, fraudulent hierarchy of mathematical theories built on that.
A little bit of empirical technical stuff has been given a mythic sort of importance because it's used economically and in war. But the implications in theory I don't think are at all what we're being told by the theoretical physicists in Europe and America. Obviously you focus a lot on food. Do you think that's a way in to shift the consciousness of the people towards lower serotonin if that relates to somebody's authoritarianism? Yeah, first a person who is chronically sick and malnourished just doesn't have much energy or stamina to study and be critical.
So first you just have to stop poisoning yourself by eating what the government and dieticians are selling as a healthful diet. And once you have the strength to read and think, then you realize who is doing what to you. And you start investigating the food industry, the agricultural production industry, the science industry that supports the agricultural imposition, and the political system that justifies the medical and agricultural economic imposition. All of these are very clearly wound together in a system to maintain class dominance. It's very healthful to eat lobster once in a while,
but you don't see dieticians or the government recommending that. It started in the 1930s depression with the government having a three-tiered diet. One to prevent starvation in the very poor, one an economical diet to get along on very little, and then at the top a healthy diet. And if you look at the bare survival and economic minimal diet of the Great Depression, the dieticians in the 1960s and 70s adopted those survival diets as the healthy diet. Lots of beans and grains as the basic diet.
Do you think that was on purpose in a form of control? Yeah, part of it was that the government had been buying milk, dehydrating it, making cheese and butter to keep American farmers working to support the prices. So they were warehousing huge amounts of powdered milk, cheese, and butter, and giving them away first as foreign aid, and then the precursor to food stamps was to have, I think, every month, a giveaway to poor people of cheese, eggs, powdered milk, and so on.
And in the 70s, there was a big movement to stop helping the poor people in other countries, as well as the poor at home. And one of the arguments that came up in the pseudoscientific dietetic community was that people outside the United States hardly ever can tolerate lactose, so you should stop giving them powdered milk. And that argument against people, only certain white people can tolerate lactose, that was heavily promoted as a racist change of foreign policy against foreign aid and food aid in general.
Sending them beans was okay, except we didn't need to support the price of American beans that way. Do you think this tendency to be authoritarian, or as Altameyer would have said, right-wing authoritarian, even though it's a semi-confusing term, do you personally see it more in Americans versus other places? I know you've mentioned Mexico as a different type of environment and being a little more cheerful. Do you think that's largely because of the history of the U.S. and how things got flushed out? A lot of it is the specific policy choices of the government and corporations
indoctrinating Americans in a certain way. And one of my main criticisms of Bob Altameyer is that he has focused on the right-wing authoritarianism, and it would be okay to call it right-wing if you define right in the sense of the fascism that Winston Churchill and FDR subscribed to. Americans generally think of FDR as an extreme leftist president, but definitely his admiration for Mussolini says there was no leftism at all. He said what he was doing was saving his class, saving the ruling class, because there was such a threat of revolution in the United States.
So he was saving capitalism, and that would, I think, fit in as, you could say, modified fascism. It was an inventive way of keeping the corporations lightly out of sight, letting them buy the various regulatory agencies, but keeping them out of the executive for their own good. He was fixing the economy with Keynesian economics, which the people who organized a coup in 1933 to get him out, they considered even the borrowing and spending to be a communist plot of government.
They wanted to get Roosevelt out, but what he was doing was using finance to prevent revolution. And immediately the Dulleses, when it came out that Alan Dulles was working closely with the Nazis at the end of World War II, Stalin informed Roosevelt that his spies were aware that Dulles was collaborating with the Nazis, and Roosevelt, his comments suggested that he thought maybe Stalin had gone crazy to tell him such a thing. But within two or three days, Roosevelt surely would have found out that Stalin was right,
and that would have put Dulles in line for the war crimes trials. But luckily for Dulles, right at that moment, Roosevelt chose to die, saving Dulles from criminal treason prosecution. And the powers in the Democratic Party who had connections both with Adolf Hitler and with the DuPont gang that had organized the 1933 coup attempt, they were in charge of the big city Democratic Power Party machine. And they knew that Harry Truman had expressed himself many times as wanting Hitler to go fight the Soviets.
And since that was the preferred American policy, they had installed him as vice president in 1944. And so Roosevelt's death in '45 not only saved Dulles, but it put Truman in position to continue the pro-Nazi policy. - I have a project paperclip where the top Germans were not only helped move to Argentina and adjoining countries, but a lot of them were brought to the US, the scientists in particular. - It seems like Dulles was involved in a lot of sketchy stuff like MKUltra, and I know you've talked about LSD and its effects on the physiology,
and that somewhere somebody said that LSD made you crazy and they outlawed it. Do you see him as an integral part of suppressing, I don't know if I want to call it the drug culture, but that specific substance? - Oh, for sure. One of the people who invented the idea of communist brainwashing, saying that when prisoners of war had confessed their crimes and wanted to stay with the enemy, he said that proves that they've got amazing powers of brainwashing.
And I think it was two or three days after a big speech on that, he approved the MKUltra project for testing LSD and other drugs to see if they could wipe out a person's moral restrictions and give complete power over them. - Do you see the disestablishment of medicine as a central tower to turn over, to enable the people to resist the authoritarian ideas imposed on us? - Yeah, for example, you could still have very strong government control, but if it was rationalized so that, for example, a person had to pass a test,
had to know certain empirical facts before they could get a license, they would have to know something about blood circulation and how respiration works and such things so that they wouldn't inject things into the wrong part of the patient. But with just a reasonable control, you could open up the whole field so that you would have not only more accessible medicine, but also better medicine. It would give people a choice between rational and irrational treatment. - If you were thinking of an optimal society, would it include medicine or government at all?
I guess I'm interested in your position on that. - Tolstoy and Kropotkin are my oldest political influences, I think, people who had explicit ideas. And one of Tolstoy's lines was that a person should be ashamed to use government power. If you have an organization that has deleted for maybe five years or ten years, if you have simply deleted the threats and the craziness that presently is saturating our culture, I think you would very easily have a powerless society that would function without visible power.
There's a town in Andalusia, Spain, which I think was 1989 they elected an anarchist mayor. And it's just an amazing town. They've reelected him ever since. And they gradually, piece by piece, expropriated unused land. And within just a very few years of his first election, they had eliminated poverty, eliminated the town police, and had everything cleaned up. And that's still going now 25 or 30 years later. I think that's an example of how any place can work if you just remove the most horrible, oppressive parts of the system.
- We'd probably end there, but Ray, thank you so much. That was amazing. Not for the podcast, essentially, but I'm actually--this is the end of my stay in San Francisco. I'm going to head to San Miguel de Allende on July 1st. I thought I'd mention that. I think Sequiris, is that the artist that you enjoy there? I think some of his big stuff is there. - Oh, yeah. I don't think he ever finished a mural in San Miguel. I've always wanted to see that.
I heard about the process of starting it and the conflicts that interrupted it. - Awesome. Yeah, I'll send you a picture because the prices in San Francisco are just too crazy right now. - Okay. - Thank you so much again, Ray. Total pleasure. I appreciate your time. This should be up probably in one or two weeks because of the move. But again, I appreciate it. Thank you, and I'll talk to you soon. - Okay, great. Thank you. - Okay, bye, Ray. - Bye. [music] - That's going to conclude this week's episode.
I'd like to thank Ray again for talking with me today along with my patrons for their support of the show and making all the content I produce possible. As always, if you enjoy the show, please hit that Like button on YouTube and leave any comments or constructive criticisms below. I always say this, but the listenership of this podcast is exceptional, and I sincerely appreciate it. I'll be back with a new episode soon. If you're not already following the content on Facebook or Patreon, check that out, and I think you'll enjoy it.
Take care, and I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye. [music] [silence]