The Devil In The Details with Mark Pellegrino pt.2
Mark promised me to say a lot of embarrassing things…let’s see if part two has some ;)
No spoilers anymore. But a few slices of politics and philosophy here.
Rose - Okay, so let's go deeper into things now. So, we live in scary times, where we can feel like we can't debate ideas. How does that make you feel? And do you believe there's like a secret formula to fight this?
Mark - Yeah, so I am constitutionally against the idea that there are ideas that can't be discussed. All ideas have to be on the table, no matter how shitty they are. If you live in a free society, the way you know right from wrong is by being persuaded. Somebody has to appeal to your mind. That means you need contrast, right? You understand concepts by contrast. And so you have to have that shitty idea that's abhorrent and disgusting, and you have to explain why it's abhorrent and disgusting with opposition ideas, ideas that are better. Now people have decided that there are ideas that have no place at all in the realm of ideas, they can't be discussed. I understand the feeling, of course, because the ideas that they're pointing to, like racism and fascism, Nazism in particular, are all disgusting and despicable notions. But people need to know why they are, and this idea of crushing conversations, because we don't like the content of the conversations, is bleeding over into a crushing of dissent, and it's bleeding over into narratives that are being established. And if you're outside the narrative, they label you with these terrible concepts in an attempt to crush dissent. So it's becoming very authoritarian. And open societies are not like that. Okay, so one of the major conversations I had, very uncomfortable conversations I had on Twitter, was people claiming there was a woman by the name of Nina Turner, who's an ex-Congresswoman in Ohio. She tweeted out a video of a couple of silly-ass Nazis on a street corner, like on a sidewalk, with their stupid sign, peacefully demonstrating. And there was a whole feat of violence against them. They should be punched, they should be kicked, they should be beaten, they should be shot, and they should have the fear of God put in them. All of which I sympathize with, right? Because if you believe that ideology, you're a creepy, fucked up person, there's something seriously wrong with you. But if you're peacefully standing there simply you're advertising your ideology or talking about your ideology punching is not the appropriate thing to do so you can't punch them unless they are trying to punch you and because Nazis in the past have punched other people or people like you doesn't give you the moral authority to punch a peaceful person who holds their ideas what it gives you the authority to do in a free country is persuade them that their ideas are bad. And if you can't persuade them, persuade the people around you that their ideas are bad. You don't use violence against others in a free country. You use ideas against others in a free country. And so we've fallen away from that completely in this notion of correcting historical wrongs. We now think that anything that smacks of the historical wrong looks like the historical wrong, suggests something that may be quite similar even if it's, you know, not really, but somehow identifies with that historical wrong, must be crushed, and that's leading to a whole school of historical revisionism. Now historiography isn't honest anymore, it's leading to a school of science that isn't honest anymore, it's leading to a school of politics that's filled with demagogues and people who are intentionally causing strife and conflict between people, who are intentionally trying to stop dialogue between people on both the left and the right in America. And that's despicable. That's not liberal. So America now has a political world dominated illiberal, some of whom call themselves liberals, but they're all illiberal. The left is illiberal, the right is illiberal, and there are people in this in the center going, I hate both of these people, what the fuck am I going to do now? The conversations are crazy, how can I enter into these conversations? Because if I do I'm going to get hurt.
R - Yeah, because you're either left or right, and if you, you know, bet against the right, oh, you're left, if you don't vice versa, it’s so annoying.
M - Yes, they try to place it, you know, I've been accused of being a leftist by the right, I'm accused of being a rightist by the left because they don't understand anything but their tribes. They don't understand the concept of an objective truth, and that they're not, that they aren't espousing an objective truth, they're just defending their tribe. But I think the antidote is to speak out against it. The more silent you are, the more power it gives them. I remember I said in one of the meet, not the meeting, did I say it in the meet&greet today or did I say it at the Q&A, that the first, the anteroom of hell in Dante's Inferno...those who chose not to take a side in a moral issue when their choice would have made a difference and so the people who stand on the sidelines and let these maniacs run roughshod over rational people and bully them the ones who stand on the sidelines and don't speak up, they're in that first-hand room of hell as far as I'm concerned. And they're making the world worse. Because you have to stand up against irrationality and insanity wherever you find it. Even if it means they're going to de-platform you, or they're going to call your producer. And they have. They've tried to call people that I work for and tell them all kinds of lies about me. Because they don't care about the truth. They're destructive human beings who just like tearing things down.
R - They literally formed an opinion about you, but they didn't search or try to understand that.
M - They form an opinion about me because I don't use their language, I don't buy their narrative, and so they make presumptions about my moral character that they really should be making about themselves because they're the ones who are pretty bad. And then they try to act on that, and that's the worst part. But the solution isn't to give in to them. The solution isn't to say, oh, I'm sorry, because I'm not sorry, because I know I'm right. I know you think you're right, but you're not, and here's why. And to not give in, to not give one inch, if you're morally in the right, you have reality on your side, to give an inch to evil makes evil win. And so you can't. Even if I have to go to the fucking poorhouse because they decide to cancel me, they can fuck themselves, I will tell the truth as I see it. And when I tell the truth, it's not just me spouting a feeling, it's something I've thought about. It's something I've attempted to connect the dots around, right? I just don't pick up bromides or popular sayings and then ingest them without really thinking about them too much, without digesting them, and then spit them out into the world because I know I'm gonna get a lot of likes, right? I say what's true even though I know some people are going to go, fuck this. But the truth has to be said. Somebody has to stand up for it. And there's no easy way to do it. You can't avoid it. You have to fight.
R - OK, so unpopularity, liberty on Twitter. It can be such a pleasing platform, but Twitter is not feeling too much appealing right now. What is your opinion about that?
M - Yeah, I mean, it's not, because there's a certain group of very active, nihilistic people who have control of the medium. Not the medium itself, but certainly they control the discussions and so it can become quite toxic. As you probably saw from the run-in I had the other day with that professor.
R – Yeah, I read that.
M - You should see what he was saying in DMs. He's just a horrible man. He's just not a good man. These aren't good people and they're using confusion and chaos. They're using a lack of confidence and moral authority. They're using self-hatred and self-doubt to exploit for their own advancement in the world, for their own moral stature, and to gain moral stature. And when you question all those narratives, they call their droogs on you to try to intimidate you into silence. I'm not going to be intimidated into silence.
R - Collectivism vs. Individualism seems to be a constant struggle these days, and it's definitely toxic. We’re like stuck with this idea of these two groups. When do you think it all started?
M - I mean, it all, unfortunately, you know, anthropologists and psychologists and thinkers for many, many, many years have supported the idea that collectivism is good. And they say it's rooted in our genes. From the time we were apes in the savannas of Africa, we needed this sort of what they consider collectivism, interconnectedness, and interdependence on one another to survive. The group mattered for our survival. Individualism came along, you know, in the 17th and 18th centuries, okay, two hundred and some odd thousand years after people had been populating the earth and has had a brief span of, you know, 400 years on this planet. And from the very beginning, it was intermixed with this primordial notion of collectivism. And it's never quite escaped the gravitational pull of collectivism enough to gain dominance in culture for very long. It did in the late 17th and mid to late 18th centuries, we had the American, the Enlightenment in England, the American Enlightenment here, the bloodless revolution in England here that bled over into the concept of universal rights, not just the rights of Englishmen, but universal rights, and intellectual sort of liberation that happened here in America and that was short-lived because there were other there were you know Locke was an Enlightenment philosopher but so was Rousseau right and Kant and these philosophers had a much deeper impact on the culture as a whole and they were Rousseau was a primitivist who didn't like civilization and thought it was corrupting. And his whole notion of the body politic is imbued in most people who think the body politic, the collective, really does have a superior moral weight to the individual. And Kant was terrible in his abuse, his critique of reason, of morality as not being a system of values that the mind comes up with after integrating facts of reality, but that they're just in you. There are these imperatives that you sort of know and that you must follow irrespective of what reality shows you. All those are terribly damaging concepts that grew up alongside individualism and sabotaged it from the very beginning. So, I mean, from the very beginning, we had a sense of, you know, your life, your right to your own life, and your right to the pursuit of your happiness as a moral goal. And they were articulated as ideas but never lived up to them. And in America, we had social institutions like slavery and gender issues, you know, of oppression of women, the oppression of women that, you know, that came from the old world as a holdover from the old world that was living contradictions of this individualistic ethics that never allowed it to completely spring free. And now we have the same problem. The people who stand for individualism, the anarchists and the libertarians of the world, don't know what individualism is. They're acting in rebellion against collectivism, but it's all emotion-based, it has nothing to do with reason, they don't know where reason and rights fit together, they don't know how reason directs the individual's life, they don't know why it's important to individualism, so they're losing, and so now what we have is a battle between collectives, just like we did in the 1920s and 30s. Fascist versus communist, fascist versus, statist versus, two different types of collectives battling each other for moral supremacy. And nowhere in there are just little fringe elements of people saying, no, none of those are right, the individual matters. So, yeah, and so the difference, I think, you alluded to collectivism as the belief that the group has moral supremacy over the individual, and individualism says the individual is the source of values and the proper beneficiary of values.
R - And why do you think life scares people so much?
M - Because it's scary and it takes a lot of responsibility and that's also the reason that they turn to irrational ideologies and philosophies and to groups for comfort. When you're not thinking you need groups to tell you what to do.
R – And religion too.
M - Religion can be a part of it. It offers an explanation for things and a way of looking at the world and interacting with other people that can give you comfort. But it relieves people of the... it's scary in part because people want to be relieved of the responsibility of thinking. The world isn't so scary when you're thinking when you're “thinking” being. The world's scary when you're not when you don't have control of your consciousness, and when you rely on other people to tell you what's right. And that's not like an egotistical statement, like nobody can tell you what's right, only you can know what's right. No, you learn from people all the time, but you have to digest what they’re saying and you have to compare and contrast what you know in order to get to whether or not what they’re giving you is a helpful contribution or not, right?
R – I agree with you. That's the thing I think people literally just hear these ideas but don't think, they don't like to grasp that information so that's the problem.
M - People are mostly reacting to very superficial statements that they endow with meaning because it fits their prejudices, it fits their feelings, but they haven't thought beneath it. They haven't gone underneath their feelings to see if their feelings are even justified if they're right or do they reflect something wrong. Because your feelings are just values, values that you've decided either consciously or unconsciously are good, but they don't, that doesn't necessarily mean they are objectively good, right? I mean I've seen enough people online who like say you know you should kill billionaires. We're talking about human beings that they have dehumanized and they have a whole mythology about the way the billionaire has made his fortune off the backs of the poor. It's a mythology that they've gotten from Marx, and they can't get it out of their heads. You can show them statistics till you're blue in the face. You could talk about how one creates wealth and how Marx was wrong about how wealth is created. You could talk about what the price of labor is and what it really represents, and you could do that till you're blue in the face, and it does not matter. Their feelings of being unjustly exploited and used are what matter more than the truth. And it gives them a certain amount of moral stature to think that they're fighting on the side of the good when they say, we should kill billionaires, billionaires shouldn't exist. You know, this is popular now.
R - Yeah, it's like people just like people with money. It's so irrational.
M - It's ugly. It's really ugly when you think about it. I'd love to sit down, you know, with one person who actually has that feeling and get down underneath it. Usually, they think you can't get rich without doing something bad to somebody. I know a lot of rich people. I know a lot of people who aren't rich. I know people who are on you know SSI. A lot of people on SSI are a lot more morally corrupt than any rich person I know. And I don't know a single rich person that got rich by not working a hundred hours a week and just being good at what they do. And that's not to say that there aren't people out there who don't fall through the cracks or fit that description. There are.
R – Obviously.
M - But, you know, when you get a guy like Jeff Bezos, who, when he got a windfall, somebody gave him, what, $300,000 or something? Somebody gave him a certain amount of money. I don't know how much it is. And they, and all the naysayers out there, the haters of billionaires out there were like, well, look, he got this big investment. And my response to them is, OK, now you turn that amount of money into a $3 trillion business. Go. You know a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny percentage of human beings will be able to do that. I mean, it's almost a coincidence that you know people that win the lottery and they win like 80 million dollars or a hundred million dollars are poor in ten years. I mean it happens more often than not turn a hundred thousand dollars into a trillion, you're a fucking genius that ain't easy so you know I think I think if people read even Tom Sowell's basic economics if they read a little Mises, if they read some of the Austrian economists, they would be much more responsible voters and they wouldn't be putting their economic lives in the hands of jackass politicians who do not know what they are doing. As if driving us into fucking debt the way they do is not proof enough that they have no idea what they're doing. At least if you educate yourself in a modicum of economic principles, you'll probably vote in a very different way, or not vote at all.
R - Speaking about the vote, this is not written, but this is an interesting question that I just remembered. Would you change the system of voting in America? It's quite different from where I came from, so I was wondering, what are its flaws, what would change, how do you make it?
M - There are a lot of people now who think that democracy is the answer. Democracy is one of the worst things, it's the worst form of government there is. All it is, is majority rule. Majority rule means the minority has no political voice at all. And it also means they don't protect rights because the majority rules. The proper form of government is one that protects rights. The right to your life, the right to your property, right? And that kind of government we've come to find is a representative republic, where you balance elements of the population out against each other to defray the potential power of each branch of government, each part of the social system. So you have the House of Representatives that represents the people, they're directly elected, they hold the purse strings, but they are checked by a Senate that's supposed to be wiser and more considerate, they have a longer term in office. You have a president that is now elected by everybody in the United States, the only elected person that represents the whole of the United States. It used to be elected by electors only. So state legislatures chose the president, so it was an indirect democracy. Now we have a direct democracy, but the direct democracy itself is balanced by the electoral college. The reason for that is to give the smaller states a voice in the political process. If you didn't have the Electoral College balancing out New York, California, and Massachusetts, the major cities on the East and West Coast would elect who the President was and only their narrow interests would matter and the other 39 or 40 states would be flyover country. So the Electoral College is the means by which we equalize power. And I wouldn't change that at all. I don't care. The only major issue I have is the stranglehold that the two-party system has over American politics. Now, technically, there are only two ways of looking at the political realm, right? The collectivist and the individualistic. But neither party represents anything but collectivism now. They just differ in the collective that they stand for. So there is no individualist choice out there. If there were, then I think all those people who tend towards individualism would go there. And then we could have a true two-party system. So I mean, the election-type reform that I would make is taking the national fist off the regulatory state away from the election process. All you have to do is make sure people who vote get their vote counted, you know, and make sure that the Electoral College does its job. But you, I don't think, and I think that they should, if they separate state and economics so that there's no regulatory state, then people can donate as much money as they want to whatever candidate they think is good. Right now, all of that stuff is convoluted and crazily complicated, and they need to simplify it, right? I mean, the Constitution is... How long is the Constitution? Two thousand words? I mean, it's not long. You know, the Declaration is a short... the short document and the purpose of that is to make the law completely comprehensible to anybody who wants to read it. That was the Founders' original idea. You shouldn't have to read these omnibus bills that Congress is passing now. They're 20,000 pages long, written in legalese, nobody reads them, nobody understands them, that's corrupt. That's a source of corruption. So simplify the electoral system. It should still be by state. Each state should make its own rules. I like that. That means the states are independent. They're independent of the federal government. It should be that way. The federal government shouldn't have a hand in, you know, telling the states how to do their thing. They should leave them alone and just make the funding process less complicated. Let everybody give however much they want to, a political candidate of their choice, and open it up more, make it more liberalized.
R - I hope to do it, can achieve that one day.
M - Well, it's more than talk, you'd have to actually study out exactly how to do that, and it would require a lot of regulatory reform in the government first before you could even hope to change the election process.
R - Humor, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about humor. I think there was like an episode on TDO where you guys talked about humor. And I thought, why not make a reality check about its value? So what are you going to say about that?
M - Yeah, humor is important and objectivists, I think, are afraid of humor, right? They're so serious and they don't think it's appropriate to laugh at values. And they're right. You shouldn't laugh at values, you shouldn't laugh at the good, but you should certainly laugh at the evil. You shouldn't lampoon and make fun of the anti-valuer, the nihilist, the clown. That's worthy, that's life-affirming to do that. And you can use humor to teach, you can use, because philosophy is hard and politics bores people, you know, and or it makes them agitated, you know, and so you need a delivery system for these things that's sweet, it makes it go down easier. And so humor can be part of that. Telling stories, the way the left is very good, they're very good at telling stories, that's why they...
R – People fall for it.
M - That's why they dominate the storytelling world right now. Now, people who are in the Liberty Movement who want people to be free and not to be tyrannized, have to be able to tell stories as good as these folks do without preaching to them. And humor is a way of doing that, right? Laughter is good. It's good, especially, you know, it's good for your soul. It's good to see irony in things and to understand irony. It's good to laugh at bad things, even better than crying. And it's good to even laugh at yourself. Many objectivists take themselves so seriously, they can't laugh at themselves, because they think it's, they use humility and being, that's too humble and self-effacing, which of course, in my philosophy, is a bad quality. Humility is to intentionally downplay your virtues. And why would you want to downplay your virtues? If you have virtues, be proud of them. They're good. It means you're doing something right in the world. Don't poo-poo yourself. Don’t diminish yourself in front of other people. There’s no reason to. Your stature, however good you are, or whatever you do, don’t diminish anyone else one whit. If they feel that, that's on them.
R - Yeah, not on me, because you're not responsible.
M - You're not responsible for that? I mean, I think you have to be respectful and courteous to anybody until they prove that you shouldn't be. But there's no reason you can't say, you know, I love or I'm good at this or I believe that this virtue is worth upholding. You can do that stuff without diminishing another human being who thinks differently than you. So, yeah, I just think objectivists feel like they're being self-effacing if they laugh or they're being humble and they don't want to do that. Well, you're not doing that. You can still laugh at it. You're laughing at yourself, you have perspective too. You know you're not perfect even if you strive for it. You know you're not the best that you could be even though you're striving for it. And sometimes it feels good to laugh at the fact that you're not there yet, even though you want to be there. Right?
R – Damn right.
M - Better than beating yourself up against the world and telling the world that it should lower its standards for you because you can't reach those standards and you're super unhappy about it and fuck it, there's a lot of, you know, I look at guys on the cover of men's health they fucking, you know, eight pack and like that's beautiful, that's awesome, I would like to be there, well I don't know that I could ever be there again, you know, at my age but I think it's great to hold that as an ideal, even if it's airbrushed in there. It's still an ideal, it's still beautiful, and I can still aspire to it, and it would make me better. I may not look like that, but I'll be a better me as a result, right?
R – I understand what you’re saying.
M - You see what I'm saying? I don't have to get neurotic about, you know, standards of beauty that we have, and those standards of beauty aren't necessarily just arbitrary or cultural. Some of them are actually, you know, some of them are actually objective and you can figure out which ones are which. It's not rocket science.
R - Yeah, I mean, but apart from that, I think those beauty standards, actually, I think I told you that I really would like to you to make a reality check about aesthetics and beauty. I think that would be an interesting point, even though because of the society that we live in sometimes I think it's a little shallow,I mean I’m fashionable I like these fashionable things, but I like to be good at my skin, so I do these things to make me feel good. Yeah, and I think that's a natural thing. So there's nothing wrong with you to you know aspire to achieve that because in the end, it's making you feel good. Even though you don't achieve that, the process and the path are what matters.
M - Yes, aspiration is good. And I think as a culture we're losing our aspirational edge, right? We don't want to aspire anymore. It's like every job now, you should make a living at every job. It's not like you start anywhere. It's not like you start and then build into a career. You're supposed to automatically, just because you exist, somebody's supposed to make you their ward and take care of you. And I think that's an infantilization of people that is very dangerous. And I see people clamoring for it all the time. I'm like, well, you're giving away your life, you’re giving away your responsibility for your life to a bunch of criminals in government. And you're going to get what you deserve if you do that. You'll get it. It'll come. The chickens are going to come home to roost. C'est la vie.
R - The last three questions. So right now, what's the thing that's bothering you so much? Like a topic or anything?
M - I mean, just what bothers me most is the intense tribalism that's out there. How each tribe sneers at the other and thinks that it has a monopoly on the truth when neither of them does. They have pieces of the truth that they exaggerate for effect and that they use to exploit the base within their own tribes, but neither of them holds the complete truth. In fact, both of them reject the truth outright. And so that bothers me. It bothers me that those narratives are the most popular and the most listened to. And the people with the real voices, the real stuff that needs to be heard, are on the fringes that nobody's hearing. They're either getting algorithmed out, ratioed out or drowned out in the noise. I mean, I know my mentor, Yaron Brook, he's been doing a podcast for a couple of years now. It's got 37,000, a mere 37,000 followers. But what he says is the most rational stuff out there, it's the most interesting take on current events, politics, psychology, philosophy out there. And then you get a douchebag like Vought, you know, who's just a raging communist pig who has no sense of integrity, no sense of truth. He's got two million followers. His bile is being spewed out all over the world. I watched him debate my mentor, and he lied as he would lie. My guy would say one thing, and then this guy would act like he didn't say it, and unabashedly, unashamedly misrepresent what was said. It was just so disingenuous and so sick. And these sick voices have the ear of our culture, right? I mean, the alternative to this insanity in the woke political world is Jordan Peterson, all right? And there's aspects of the woke world that are actually worth listening to. There are aspects of what Jordan Peterson says that are worth listening to. But Jordan Peterson is a negativist. His worldview is so despicably dark and filled with, it's not filled with intellect, it's not filled with reason. There are aspects of it that are. It's primarily mystical, and it's looking back on traditions and narratives, and it's so dark, it manifests itself in a dark way and it bothers me that darkness is everywhere. And nobody wants the light anymore because the light requires responsibility and work and thinking and things that, oh I'd rather not do that really, do I have to do that? Do I have to think? I'd rather have instantaneous knowledge. I'd rather pray about it and make it better that way. You know, they don't, you know, life, they don't like the toil that life is.
R - Like the long term, in the end, people don’t do that anymore, it's like a thing now in society, and to care about the consequences, they want it now, and that's pretty much about it. People don't live long term, they do these things short term.
M - Yeah, no long-term. All human life is long-term.
R - So, after finishing, politics is indeed a favorite topic and why? Why it's important and why some people think it's the least important topic.
M – In a free society politics would be the least important topic, some people think it's the least important topic. Because all the politicians would do is make laws that keep you free from violence. That's it. That's all they would do. In the semi-free societies that we mostly have, and the unfree societies, I mean, the semi-free societies that exist now that pass themselves off as social democracies, or capitalist quote-unquote countries that are not really capitalist. And in the unfree countries that are most of the world, politics is extremely important because the politician has control over your life. You've actually given it to him through the regulatory state. You said, please regulate my life. I don't know what's safe for me because I don't want to read labels. I don't want to do research. I'd rather have you do that. And so it started out that way, and it's now, of course, once the government takes one power, it has to take another and another and another and another. And the more they claim to be able to give you things that you don't have to work for, the more people become inured to the idea of, I don't have to work for this. This is a right. I should just have it. And so now the person you elect affects your life for real because you are now dependent on the tit of the government. That means that not the government, that means all the people they're stealing from in order to give you the benefit. And so now they matter and they shouldn't. They're the most unimportant people in the world. They're ignorant. The only thing they're really good at is stirring shit and some of them are articulate. Some of them know a little bit of history, most don't. And they shouldn't be taken seriously at all, but they are. And they have control over whether you start a business, over whether you franchise your business, over your licensing, over the amount of money you make. And if we go to digital currency, over the type of lifestyle you lead. They have no right to that at all. So, politics is important because we've ceded too much power to politics. And I want it to become the most unimportant topic in the world. But we have to take our agency back. We have to take our agency back for that.
R – Thank you, Mark. To close the interview, what projects do you have in your future?
M – So hopefully season 2 of “American Rust” will go well in order to get a season 3, I do Reality Checks – if you want to see those just go to my Twitter page and it’s pinned to my profile and there’s a bunch up there with controversial topics; short to 3/5 minutes philosophy explanations for topics that are controversial, I’m starting a new series on my YouTube channel, it will be like a new around the character Herb from Minnesota, which I think it will make it funnier, and of course, I’m on the Daily Objective usually on Mondays and Thursdays and TVTalk on Friday, where we talk about Objectivism and Politics – in Entertainment, that’s what I got going so far. Let’s hope I can keep it up.
