712 – Topics

00:03 How did we get here? historical developments in Western culture since 1945, idea of Nazism was totalitarianism based on racial ideology, cancel culture in 2021, traditional Canadian cultural celebrations all locked down, winning the war and losing the peace, new tyranny fuses race with class, Marxism in Western culture, freedom in the French revolution originated in the enlightenment, man an end in himself, free will, preserving freedom without drifting into tyranny, rise of equality as value competing with freedom, who gets to define equality, inalienable rights, the totalitarian urge originates with the intellectuals, father of totalitarianism was Rousseau, how to reconcile two views of humanity

13:45 From freedom to equality: reconciliation of freedom with equality, Rousseau’s general will, breaking the chains of oppression, imposition of the general will, conditions of the general will, establishing order within anarchy, equality and freedom, equality as a collective notion, intellectuals and elites as separate from society, representation of ‘we the people’, constitution not the source of freedom, freedom is an inalienable right, constitutions set limits on governments, non transferable nature of individual rights, The Mayor of Casterbridge, proper formula was life liberty and property, property replaced by pursuit of happiness, contradiction of slavery, Marx’s labor theory of value, acquiring property as consequence of freedom, equality is an abstraction, the issue of power

28:45 Marxist Utopia: trading the blessings of freedom for equality, Britain votes for socialism immediately after World War II, unintended consequences of choosing socialism, security and power, greatest victor of war was communism, Stalin and the Soviet empire, communism posing as freedom fighters, Soviets as an ally of Western powers, Churchill and the iron curtain, Western societies penetrated by communists, rise of democratic socialism, Western support of Hitler as a balance of power against communism, working class parties as the spearhead of revolutions, the Utopian ideal, ends and means, dictatorship of the proletariat, rise of Leftist parties in the West, communist penetration of the Democratic Party, McCarthyism, Pierre Trudeau as intellectual of the Left, equality as dictated by the state, defining oppressed and oppressor, racial and gender identity to define oppressed and oppressor

44:15 The grasshopper and the squirrel: utopia as counter to human nature, capital and labor, utopia as a transposition of the Garden of Eden upon the world, avoiding the necessity of toil, individuals naturally unequal in attributes, forced equality, people who are indolent vs people who become capitalist, the grasshopper and the squirrel as a parable of human nature, saving and investment becomes capital, redistribution of capital from those who earned it to those who did not, unequal choices and consequences, the New Deal introduces policies of redistribution, Trudeau introduces equality of cultures, multiculturalism, from culture to race, white culture, all of these ideas come from Marxism, the binary notion of oppressed and oppressor

59:42 END