← The Pete Quiñones Show
The Pete Quiñones Show
Shifting Paradigms w/ Darryl Cooper and John Fieldhouse
01:10:42
71 Minutes PG-13 Darryl and Dr. Fieldhouse join Pete to discuss the main theme in Thomas S. Kuhn's groundbreaking book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." This was episode 1351...
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Want to welcome everyone back to the Pinono show. Got a couple gentlemen hanging out with me today. Daryl Cooper. How are you doing Daryl?
- [01:41]
A
Doing all right, brother. Always great to be with you.
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B
Dr. Fieldhouse, how are you?
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C
What's up bud?
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B
Doing good, doing good. So this came about because Thomas and one of Thomas's series he mentioned at the end of an episode, Thomas Kuhn and Dr. Fieldhouse contacts me and goes, oh, you should see the notes I have on Kuhn and Daryl. Darrell's up on Kuhn, so why don't we do an episode about him. And that was about six months ago and as, as things happen, we're finally doing it. So I'll let Mr. Now that we've
- [02:23]
A
got a little break in the news, you know, this is a good time to kind of like
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B
what's funny is I just recorded with Jay Burton. We did a review of Michael Cimino's 1985 movie the Year of the Dragon with. Yeah, so it's like we don't want to talk. We don't want to talk about current events.
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A
So this is why I want like a Caesar to show up or some kind of like, dictator, just so that we can get back. Like, I want to interview Steve Bannon and just talk about like black magic and ancient occultism and stuff. I don't want to talk about this crap anymore. Come on.
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B
Yeah, I want to do my hockey podcast so bad.
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A
But did you see that new Nashville Predators logo?
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B
Yeah, yeah, please. Yeah.
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C
Oren posted. Yeah.
- [03:14]
B
All right, Dr. Fieldhouse, lead us off here.
- [03:17]
C
Okay. And like we said, this has absolutely nothing to do with Iran. So real quick, Thomas Kuhn, for anybody who's just checking in, what's it about? It's about his work. The. The structures of scientific revolutions and how it influenced how both scientists and non scientists and laymen think about the concept of paradigm. He's the guy who gave us the term paradigm shift. So, yeah, if you've done any kind of grad school dealing with theoretical science or theoretical social science or theoretical version of any discipline that wants to preten science, even though it absolutely is not, there's a good chance that he was the first book that they made you read in that grad school program. And famously, at least in my program and a lot of other ones, they don't really give you like the CliffsNotes introduction as to why this guy matters and why his works matters. They just sort of give you this book which is again, very opaque because he's. Or at least fairly opaque because he's writing for other academics and sort of like the professor sort of acts like Yoda, where we're gonna go and do these things and maybe somehow we figure out how it matters. Or like Mr. Miyagi somehow, if you trust him, cleaning his cars for him will eventually turn you into a bare knuckle biter. So, yeah. So real quick, Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996, again, he was in. He was an academic who's primarily known as a historian of science. Of historian of science. He went to. Trying to remember where he went to one of the Ivy Leagues and he studied physics. He graduated 1943 from his undergrad. He went and got his master's and his PhD after that. Then he was in the scholars program. I have to look again at what school that was. Excuse me, Harvard Fellow program. Which basically allows a newly minted PhD to go and for the two years or whatever, do whatever research they want on whatever field they want. But you got to show up and teach X number of undergrad classes, which is a good deal, especially since, you know, being in school just got him out of World War II, which is an interesting thing I'd almost want to ask him myself. And, you know, kept him out of the post war draft. So more than anything, I think that was probably why he chose that. But he was given the task of doing a history of science class for non science majors. Some of them were undergrad historians, A lot of them were just guys with general liberal arts. But generally these were people who were not interested in going to a regular academic bachelor of science, physics or hard science programs. And one of the things he found teaching these students that he was the feedback he got that was very interesting is most people, most laymen especially have this idea of just continuous linear progress in the history of science. Though a lot of us acknowledges there are times where things step back when we tend to think of those as dark ages. And much like Spangler, even though I don't think he directly cites Spangler at all, Kuhn provides a conceptual model where he understands that, you know, it's not just continuous progress. We go through a series of changes in worldview, what he calls paradigms, in which we cycle back and forth between a new framework, a new conception for understanding how the world works, followed by a series of, that I'll go into detail with, of what he calls normal science, where we do regular incrementalist investigation, experimentation, followed by periods in which we get more and more data that doesn't align with that previous model, conceptual model, followed by a crisis in which, you know, we're trying to figure out, hey, why don't these models work? What are the competing models? Followed by a new paradigm, as it were. Excuse me. So, yeah, those are the biggest things. His book Structures of Scientific Revolutions, published 1962, there's three or four different further editions. All the editions published in his lifetime, he famously included brand new forwards, introductions to each of the book on top of the previous introductions there. Partly because he was very unhappy the way people interpreted his work. The best example is his work is seen as sort of foundational to postmodernism, to the idea that there isn't actually a truth, there's just competing frameworks, different conceptual models. And, and he made it very clear that he wasn't a Kunian. You know, famously he said, look, I'm Not a Kunian, even though, you know, that perspective, that position was named after him because he said, look, yes, there are different conceptual models, but he understood that there is some capital T truth out there and that hopefully science, if we're doing it properly, gets closer and closer to that capital T truth. Even though, yes, we will have conceptual models there. So that's probably the quick and dirty summary of his work and why he matters.
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B
Got anything, Darrell?
- [08:42]
A
Oh, yeah, I've always. You mentioned Spangler and when we first started talking about Kuhn a long time ago, I mentioned that Spengler was somebody who. Not exactly somebody that you could say Kuhn's elaborating on or dialing in on, but that they run very well in parallel with each other. If you think about Kuhn's idea of mental models, which is. How does he put it? I think he says the mental model is if you're putting together a puzzle, it's the picture on the box. This is the analogy that he uses. And as you're starting to put together this puzzle, as you pull the pieces out one by one, Spengler, he had this concept of the, er, idea, which is, it's this, you know, you can give it linguistic definition, but really it's much more of a symbolic, conceptual, non verbal principle that exists within the soul of a civilization and all of the people in a civilization, that is, it informs all the manifestations of their various creative, powers. Right. And everything that they do create, it sort of drives them in the direction of bringing this ur idea into the world, toward its apotheosis, basically. And so an example of that, he would say, if you think about the Greeks, for example, the Greeks, he points out, Spengler would point out that you have the Greek focus on sculpture as an art form and much less on painting. Obviously they did paint, but, you know, they didn't have deep perspectival painting. It was much more on the solid sculpture with an emphasis on proportion. That fits very well into the emphasis that they gave to music, you know, that was so central not only to their sort of their, their taste in art and everything, but their basic understanding of religion and the world because. And specifically string music. And that's because, you know, proportion, the relation between proportion and tone is like, you know, very obvious in string music. Even their mathematics, you know, until the era of like major cultural exchange really picked up, they lacked a zero in their mathematics. They understood fractions, like really in terms of parts of physical, whole objects. They only, as far as exponents, they only had to the second and the third power because those were things that related to calculating area and calculating volume. And so everything was very much this idea of the solid body that is in the foreground. You know, he talks, Spengler talks about how they're, how they're religious. Temples were like these squat kind of solid units with very little interior space relative to the size of, of the structure itself in comparison to say like the cavernous mosques or cathedrals that you know, would be built in other civilizations. And so, you know, Spangler makes a point that like all of these things are manifestations of this same sort of like this vaguely felt like core idea that exists in the Greek soul. And everything that they're doing is sort of working that out. And that's sort of, you know, you could, you could think of that in, in similar terms to Kuhn's analogy where you know, they have this, even if they can't quite see it visually, like it's, they still have this picture on the COVID of the puzzle box that's sort of, it's in there and everything they're doing is trying to take a piece of a puzzle and like create this picture out of it. And you know, that's one of the great things about Kuhn is obviously he's a physicist and he's very focused on the history of science, but I really think his ideas are very, very widely applicable to other fields as well.
- [13:01]
C
Yeah, very much so. And that's one of the things we talked about in the past is much like Spengler, like he said, he's somebody like he does not embrace the sort of knee jerk view of linear progress that we just inherently have in the west. At least until we, we identify it and we think about it. And much like Spangler, one of the things that he, he does very much is he's, he provides a framework for looking at your own models. How we see the world, why we see it that way, which is a necessary prerequisite before you can evaluate or discard an obsolete model. Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas style games on my phone at the same time. Drink in and a blackjack in the other. It's all at spinquest. Over a thousand games including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for
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- [14:09]
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- [16:11]
C
a saying about mental models is, look, every model is wrong, some are useful. And when they say every model is wrong, they're saying as if just like a Boolean logic search where you have, you know, A and B and C, but you have all those contingent requirements, which means if you have any one of those billion contingent requirements, you know, suddenly that thing is not correct, right? Not in the perfectly logical sense. But that thing might still work as a heuristic for how we intuitively understand the world or some phenomenon. And moving on from that. One of the things that John Boyd. Because a lot of why I got into this is not just because I was made to read Kuhn like everybody else, but John Boyd, the strategist, the Air Force officer, he actually cites Boyd as one of the sort of starting points when he tried to create an interval or integral conception for warfare and strategy. And one of the points that's brought out of Boyd's work is, yeah, every model is wrong in the sense it's not perfectly accurate and all the contingent things. But probably a more accurate way to say is every model is incomplete. And once you understand something as being incomplete, it gives you the permission to sort of evaluate why we think that way without necessarily painting somebody into a conceptual corner where they're going to reflexively fight back against any person who challenges them. If that makes sense.
- [17:34]
A
Yeah, it's one of the reasons that ideology, while it's very often incredibly helpful and often necessary to map the world around us and understand what's going on, it also has a tendency over time to pull people into it and sort of calcify and solidify their thinking so that it's like when you talk to a lot of people, right, left, center, doesn't matter. They could be our guy. A lot of our guys are like, this doesn't matter.
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B
Like, this is.
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A
Unless you really, really take steps to get around this. The tendency tends to be you start listening to somebody and you realize that they're not actually really thinking and telling you what they think. Right now, what they're doing is they're describing their mental model to you like they're describing that, you know, whether it's ideological or just whatever the field might be is they're just sort of reciting that to you and defending it against anything you might say. And it's much less of a sort of. Iterative model of continuous improvement, which is what you need for any activity that doesn't have a total end state, like a total win condition where the game's over, something where the game really doesn't end and things are changing all the time. And so your job job is to take in new information, fit that into your mental model, adjust accordingly, and do that in ways that ideally, like, if you have a learning system, whether it's in an individual or a learning organization, a military or a society as a whole, you know, the. The ideal situation is new information comes in and you have a system to uptake that, distribute it, make adjustments, kind of on the fly. In reality though, what ends up happening is there are vested interests in the model that, the paradigm that currently exists. And again, this is. Kuhn talks about it in the scientific fields, but it's true everywhere. And so there's resistance to new information and there's resistance to making those changes. And what ends up happening is, you know, the, the, the data that doesn't fit into your model. Right. The data that your model can't explain starts to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and it builds up pressure until finally it spills out in a disorderly way because you just, you failed to learn over time. Right. Like, just as I'm talking right now, maybe because of the, the history podcast I've been, I've just been putting out, I think about like the armies in World War I. You know, we went like a whole century where there was radical technological change, you know, heavy artillery, machine guns, like barbed wire, all these things that became so important on the battlefield in World War I. But there hadn't been like a lot of these sort of smaller brush fire wars and just like enough like large scale open conflicts that people could learn from and watch and observe. And so when it finally came, there were all of these unlearned lessons that had to be learned, you know, between August and December 1914 to everybody's, you know, extreme detriment. And so, you know, that's, that's something again, it's one of the reasons that Kuhn is so interesting to me is that it really is something that you can apply at almost any level, at any scale, you know, from the individual on up to a whole society and organizations, you know, in between those.
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B
That was something I was going to bring up, was talking about the 19th century. You look at any war that would have been fought in the early 19th century, you have single shot rifles, people still using black powder, and then 100 years later, you're watching planes fly overhead and people are dropping explosives out of it. Fast forward 30 years, you're incinerating entire towns in Japan. So is it that if Kuhn wrote this in 1962, he's seeing it in the late 50s? Did it take that drastic a scientific change seemingly overnight, but only in decades to have someone come to this conclusion? I'm sure there were proto Kuns in the past, but the, it seems like that kind of scientific innovation would just give everyone pause. Anyone who was thinking about these things.
- [22:20]
C
Yeah, I mean, part of what he talks about is just the fact that we, we very often can't, we don't remember just how much scientific progress, both in terms of applied science, but in theoretical sciences happened from, you know, the last couple decades of the 18th century up until the first couple decades of the 20th century, you know, into the 1960s. The field of electricity, just studying electricity as a sub field of physics, you know, was only beginning in the late 18th century. People like Benjamin Franklin proving that, you know, lightning is a form of electricity, which I'm still not sure how he did that without shocking himself to death, but he. One of the things Kuhn sees is how we had competing fields of understanding different aspects of physics, but electricity in particular. And he talks about part of the issue is what's called incommensurability. And one of the issues, when you have competing paradigms like we did for much of the 19th century, we had different conceptual worldviews that conflicted with each other in terms of describing physics. Very often these different frameworks, they can't really talk to each other. Like Daryl said, people become resistant. Because part of the problem is the core terms that we use can mean radically different things in one framework versus another. So like one of the examples Kuhn gives is the old Aristotelian model of the universe, our solar system, where, you know, everything rotates around the Earth, versus the Ptolemaic idea where, you know, the Earth rotates around the sun. One of the points he brings up is just the term of what the word earth meant in the old Aristotelian terms, by definition could not rotate around the sun because it was immovable. Right? It's just like when you see people actually do the models of, you know, the biblical conception of the solar system, and it's like they don't see the Earth as a ball, you know, usually it's a flat, you know, thing sitting in the ether, you know, in which, you know, everything not just rotates around it, but just the dimensions. The physical, you know, perspective of Earth is basically either unknowable or it's meant to be beyond our ability to understand it. So big. So, yeah, intercommensurability terms may not mean each other, mean the same thing from one group to another, which means that a lot of times certain paradigms, certain worldviews can't be reconciled directly with each other. And one of the points I brought up just in discussions in the last week, I know with you, Pete, was the term politics, right? That word means slightly different things in the English speaking framework versus what it means in the German language, German language framework. So some of the concepts, like when Clausewitz says war is the extension of politics by other means. And an English speaking American would say automatically that's bullshit. Because war is a primal force. Though one of the things that needs to be understood is again, politics means something radically different in German social science theory where it means something more like the act of governance itself. And I'm rambling here, but those are some of the issues that fill a huge part of Kuhn's book is the increments of ability, meaning people have two different conflicting worldview. It's not just that they can't talk through their issues, but the words mean radically different things. So essentially they're talking past each other every step along the way.
- [25:57]
A
Doesn't he talk about. I can't remember if this was from Kuhn himself or if it's just something that I thought of while reading it or read when I was reading about him specifically with like the Ptolemaic vs Copernican Astronomical mental models or paradigms rather as data starts to accumulate that kind of lets people know there's something wrong with the Ptolemaic model. Like there's some problem here because we can't account for all of these things that we're beginning to be able to measure and that we're, that we're seeing. Oh, I have had no luck lately. Wait, Lady Luck Ritzky.
- [26:38]
D
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- [31:58]
C
I was going to say before, I know Pete's about to say something is I said Aristotelian and Ptolemaic and you're right, it's Ptolemaic and Copernican.
- [32:08]
D
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- [32:39]
C
But yeah, I mean we could say this is an example of increments ability where people are talking past each other. But I think the bigger issue is like you said, it's, it's an intentional cutting off of feedback. I know one of the things you and I have talked about and other people like Bill Buford have talked about is a lot of people who have a background in things like strategy and you know, anti aircraft system in the stuff have not talked a whole lot about Ukraine just because there was so little reliable information coming out at any point that it wasn't really clear what was going on. So much of what we knew was intentionally if not propaganda was just to the point that it's like the only time I see any documentaries with Americans talking anything about combat in Ukraine. It's when they developed this new, supposedly impenetrable line of defense that nobody will ever get through. And I always get blocked because I said, you know what? They said the same thing about the Maginot line. And that's a lot of it is we have a conceptual framework at least to what dominates the institutional military, especially the acquisition side, which. Which is concerned not just about fighting the last war, but they really want to fight World War II all over again with, you know, beautiful, you know, sci fi systems. Never mind that a lot of these systems didn't do particularly well in Vietnam. They don't do particularly well against drones. And all these systems, as I've talked about, just the issues with doing an invasion of a major country, you know, take a long time to get someplace because we now build tanks that are so big that they can't be transported down normal roads without shutting off, you know, some lanes of traffic. So, yeah, it's all those things. It's. It's real easy to isolate yourself from external feedback if you're not going to allow it to come in, if you have the position of authority that's protected and people are going to let you get away with. And, you know, the point that, you know, like Pete said, that, you know, information builds up because of disasters. It's one of the concepts I always like in Zen Buddhism, in Japanese. Zen Buddhism is called satori. And the way it's sometimes translated by people who do Japanese martial arts is it's the kind of enlightenment that can only be attained by being punched in the face. And that's usually what happens. That's when militaries reform is you get disaster. A bunch of people die and the state is destroyed. And suddenly, suddenly, consequences matter. And part of why a lot of my work, in terms of just talking about things like strategy and conceptions of how human beings are led, is ultimately, I think we have a senior leadership class both in uniform and out in the United States, that wants to isolate itself from feedback. And sooner or later, the bill comes due. Sooner or later, reality becomes real. And I don't want people like me and you and my neighbors to be hurt when that happens.
- [35:32]
A
Yeah, you see a good example of that all the time. This is like a known phenomenon in MMA where you'll have these guys who are shredding everybody in, like, the smaller promotions, maybe they get into the UFC in their first few fights, as they're working their way up they're just smashing people. And you think, this guy's the next champion. I mean, this guy's just. Nobody's ever going to beat this guy. And then he runs into somebody who sort of doesn't. Doesn't fold under the initial onslaught. And what you sort of figure out is, oh, this guy is not only the best dude in his gym, he is by far the best guy in his gym. He bullies everybody in his gym all the time. And as soon as they get confronted with somebody, they not only don't have answers, they very often just fold mentally because they're just. They haven't gone through that process of getting punched in the face. You know, that confrontation with reality that forces you to sort of reckon with, you know, limitations and have to actually find those other places that you're going to need to go.
- [36:35]
C
Yeah. Just like I tell people, if you're the smartest person in the room, more often than not, you're not hanging out with the right people.
- [36:42]
A
Yeah,
- [36:45]
B
yeah. This is something that I've said a lot over the years is a lot of the problems that we have in society right now is most people haven't taken a punch to the face. And a punch to the face does change your paradigm. It changes you. And people have grown up in a. People have been raised in an environment where they've been protected, where they didn't. You know, I mean, I ran the streets and when I was a kid, and there were many situations where I'm. I don't know how I'm alive because, yeah, I put myself into a situation where it's like, well, I get hit by a train, I get hit by a bus right now, things like that. But when you live in a managerial framework, when everything is Burnham's description of managerialism, it is to the least amount of risk to destroy, to change the environment you're in, the structure you're in. And that kind of, you know, the, you know, what we saw with COVID Covid was another one that I think opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact that the people who are, quote, unquote, professional scientists are nothing but managers. It was the guys who, you know, had clinics in California, little clinics that were doing videos that had figured out exactly what was going on, how to take care of the best way to. To fight what was going on, because they weren't stuck and they weren't. They didn't have that position where they had a fear of loss in that managerial position. And until you have something that causes a Paradigm shift, you're not going to have change. And I don't think we. I think the only change we had, even coming out of something like Covid, obviously we haven't had a paradigm shift hard enough to bring us out of. We're always fighting the Cold War when it comes to the military. But I don't think. I think the only thing that came out of COVID is that normal people realize that it's basically the medical system. Everything is bs, but it hasn't changed the medical system and how they operate, the presuppositions that they operate upon and their. They're basically cya. Everything is about CYA when it comes to these people. So, yeah, I mean, it's. Sometimes it literally takes a punch in the face and a punch in the mouth to change things.
- [39:28]
A
One of the things that.
- [39:30]
C
Go ahead sometimes several times.
- [39:34]
A
One of the. This plays into something Spangler does as well, where, you know, he talks about as a society matures and it works, you know, it's working through like it's past the really explosive period of creativity where there's this newer idea and they're just, you know, you see all these, you know, like, he talks about, like Mozart and Beethoven, for example, right? And says, you know, Beethoven wrote stuff as good as Mozart, but, man, Mozart threw that stuff off like it was nothing. And Beethoven had to torture his soul to get one of those things out. Because, you know, after a while, as you're trying to, you know, as the tree is branching out into smaller and smaller twigs, it's a lot harder to find those.
- [40:18]
C
Those.
- [40:18]
A
The. The room for. For improvement and, And. And original creative expression, you know, that hasn't already been done before. Like, there was a period of time where we weren't just inventing, you know, writing great music, we were inventing orchestral music. You know what I mean? Like, this is just like the formative period of explosive growth. And as you get more and more mature and a lot of these modes of creative expression, science, politics, start to become more institutionalized and mature as well. Then, just like Burnham says, I think Sorel even talks about this a bit. Like, you reach this point where, you know, the skill that's being selected for is how. How good are you at operating within the system? And how do you know the rules of the system well enough to, like, manipulate them to your benefit so that you rise and that once you get into that place, then you really do run into that wall where in spang. This is the Spanglerian point of it. You run into that Wall where people look around and say, man, like I could work my whole life and you know, maybe not come up with anything like really new and original like in this field of expression that I'm into. And that's when they start to turn around and look and you start to see this is not something that's just a modern Western phenomenon. You see it in other historical cultures as Spengler describes as well. That's when you start getting into this deconstruction period because you still can turn back on the forms that have already been expressed and created in your own society and start to critique and tear those apart and pull them, you know, pull at the various threads and you know, and see what holds together and just tear things down. In other words, like, that becomes just. It becomes the path of least resistance to being able to put out something at least that is a creative expression. The consequence being, of course, that what you end up doing is sawing off the branch that you're sitting on.
- [42:18]
C
Yeah, there's a couple things I could say about that. And even the example of art form, I would take this to most, you know, that we're most exposed to is the novel film, right? Because Spengler said the novel was the only art form in Western civilization that still had real vital creative energy. When he wrote the Client of the west and he said that he really saw film as like an extension of the novel into a visual medium. And even then we could take all the, you know, sort of ancillary things like short stories is like a version of that. And the same way, you know, television was sort of the same concept applied to film. So yeah, it's like again, all three of us are like late Gen X. We remember Even just the 80s, right. Just how much energy there was in creativity and film and books. You know, half of why guys my age you'll get people who are just won't shut up about comic books is there was a time with this cheap, you know, crappy little entertainment thing actually had some real entertainment value, real creative value. And you know, our special effects have gotten infinitely better, but nobody has a fucking story to tell to the point that, you know, it's like every movie that's brand new is like the same thing except, you know, it's about wokest egalitarianism. And the stuff that's really good is like when we had the Dune film is like, well, let's go take this older story and bring it back and applied to the military sphere. That's also very true, right? Especially Peacetime standing Army. Right. It tends to reward people who color within the lines the best, you know, and that's great. But again, that's sort of like the whole monitor version of leadership, which does not win wars and it doesn't solve problems when there's actually problems, you know, that come up in real time on the battlefield. Because, again, one of the things I was told, One of the things I tell everybody and I ever been tasked to mentor is if you're a troop leader, you're an officer, you exist to solve problems that don't have solutions, because if it had a written solution, your sergeant would have fixed it before you, and you would have found it out, you know, at roll call the next day. And that, again, that's part of why you see so many disgruntled people from our generation who left the military after being deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. More than anything, it's. They couldn't go back to dealing in an environment in which coloring in the lines was more important than actually training troops and preparing for success. And that rambling answer is, we see that in front of us so much, and again, everything has turned into deconstruction.
- [45:08]
A
I like that advice to officers. I've heard you say that before, and it's really excellent. I actually relate it to. It reminds me of something that Roger Scruton said in the intro to one of his books, books where he's talking about the difference between conservative and progressive or conservative and liberal political philosophy being based on the idea that, you know, the progressive or the liberal, I can't remember which one he used, you know, has this idea of politics. Like, there's this thing we're trying to achieve, this place we're trying to get. And politics is the mean by means by which we move to that place. And the. The basic conservative outlook on that. And again, we don't really even have these anymore, for the most part. But, like, so don't think I'm talking about Sean Hannity or whatever is that, you know, there's no. There's no end to this thing. Like, there's no big finale at the end of the story where we all win the game of society or something like that. No, the whole goal or the whole purpose of politics is much more like the purpose of a friendship. It's like the whole goal of it is to make sure we're still friends tomorrow. Like, that's the goal of a friendship. There's no purpose to the friendship. I'm not your friend. Because we're trying to Do X, Y and Z. Like we might try and do X, Y and Z because we're friends and we want something to do together. But the purpose is to keep the thing going, you know, for another day.
- [46:32]
D
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A
Spinquest is a free to play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. And when we start thinking in terms of end states, when we're talking about systems and processes that really don't work that way, I mean, that's also how you end up in really, really dark. You can talk about like politics. I mean, that's when you can end up in some very, very dark places. Like you think about like the Bolsheviks, right? Their whole idea is like, there is an end state and we're going to get to that place, period.
- [47:28]
C
Human nature be damned.
- [47:30]
A
Yeah, exactly. And that, because once we get there, then, you know, all sins are forgiven because, you know, the only people who are left, we understand why we did it. And I mean, you kind of have this, honestly, to a degree, I think this mentality has taken over the Zionists in Israel as well. You know, they are not playing the game as if they're going to have to still live next to these people tomorrow. You know, they're acting as if like there's some, there's something that they can accomplish and it's just going to be the Thousand year Reich and they don't have to worry about, you know, whether about these people ever again. And you can get very apocalyptic in your outcomes when you start thinking that way.
- [48:10]
C
Yeah, ignoring human nature becomes very destructive no matter what your political philosophy.
- [48:18]
B
Well, one thing that I do like to point out to people is how in the past war has been fought and that there has to be honor and you have to have respect for your enemies. That doesn't, that doesn't count for the Bolsheviks. I mean, these people, there was no, this wasn't a state. This wasn't two states facing off. These are people who like, would live in your building and their goal was to kill you. They wanted to kill you. They didn't care how many people needed to be killed. Talking about a very recent event Is if your first act in an act of war is to take out the leadership, well, the. You're going to have to negotiate at some point. And if your first thing to do is take out the negotiators, then to me, you're no better than the Bolsheviks because you're not looking for an end, you're looking to destroy. Your whole goal at this point is to create chaos as they did. As. And I know by the time this comes out, Daryl's episode may be public, the second episode of Enemy, but it just goes. That episode describes the situation in Germany and how they weren't. The Bolsheviks weren't seeking to take over Germany to restore order. They were seeking chaos and murder and destruction, and that's all. If your first act is to say, okay, we're going to decapitate the leadership, that just tells me that you are looking at another. You want another Libya, and you want it to be complete chaos for the people on the ground. And like I said, I'll reiterate that you're really no better than the Bolsheviks at that point.
- [50:06]
A
Yeah, and it plays into this. You know what we were saying about deconstruction, about that just will to destroy when there are no, like, easily available, like, obvious paths to create, people default to tearing down. And that's really sort of the political manifestation of that. You know, for all. All of the Marxist claptrap that the Bolsheviks would. Would spew when you actually watched them in practice, you know, the entire thing was driven by a hatred for everything that already existed and what came after. I mean, this is one of the reasons that, you know, people will say to this day that real Communism hasn't been tried, even though there's been 50 different versions of it. And, you know, the reason is because the system is not that important. You know, like, yeah, okay, sees the means of production. We've all read Marx, we all went to the Sorbonne or whatever. But like, you know, the actual, like, Vietnamese Communism doesn't have to look like. Russian Communism doesn't have to look like. It doesn't matter. Like, the end state really doesn't matter. What matters is it's this motive energy that's going to allow you to tear down all of the things around you that you hate. And the reason that you hate them is because, you know, they were created during that period of time where there were truly great men, you know, who were just. They were. They were able to create things that are, if not impossible, are almost impossible within the constraints of, like, the society as it exists in the, in the more mature sort of institutionalized phases, stages. And so you look around and you see all these things that seem to have been built by giants. And you know, you can really have one of two responses to that. That's like a reverence for tradition, you know, and a sort of gratitude for your inheritance or you know, the, I guess you'd say like the ego driven side of it or very individualistic side is to be. To feel it as an indictment, you know, and an accusation against yourself and your own inadequacies and wanting to tear that down.
- [52:11]
C
Yeah, I was going to say first that the same people who say the communism never been tried think that every single right winger to the right of Hillary Clinton is. Or fascism. Yeah, yeah. So all those things, I mean the biggest thing I would say that is frequently lost is I think leftist, rightist, whatever. Most people understand an eco ecosystem, you know, a complex system in nature is a complex thing with many different parts that we don't necessarily completely understand and that damaging it could have long run effects that we can't necessarily predict. Therefore we want to have a minimalist approach, a small C. Conservative approach. The leftists who believe that also seem to think that human nature is infinitely malleable and that there is no structure of the society outside of the organizational chart of government as it exists today.
- [53:10]
A
What you end up with when you have a situation like that where,
- [53:16]
C
especially
- [53:16]
A
when they have institutional power as they have in our society since the Second World War, is that the resistance they're able to mount to any new systems of thought or new ideas that are trying to account for the ground reality that the current paradigm is not accounting for. They have like real means of power to suppress that and drive it underground. And when that, you know, when that starts to happen, you kind of actually, you know. I got a good quote from one of my favorite books, Chantal Del Sol's book Icarus Fallen. She says any refusal to acknowledge reality merely forces it underground. Suppressing conflict does not make it go away, but rather allows it to come back in less visible and more perverse forms. As soon as a clandestine form of thought or existence opposite to its official or legal counterpart appears and develops with any degree of tenacity, we can be sure that something essential is involved. There's every reason to suspect that our dominant thinking in institutions must therefore be based on a misguided, if not downright free false anthropology. As soon as an underground world becomes organized on a large scale beneath the official world, as soon as a vast unspoken world develops behind the dominant discourse, one can be sure that a profound disequilibrium looms. And again, like when I remember, when I read that, even when I first read Del Sol's book, it reminded me of Kuhn. And I think maybe that was because you and I had recently talked about Kuhn or something, but, but it fits in there very well. There's that period of disruption that he talks about where the pressure that's building up from all of the unaccountable data, it puts everybody into the place where I think we are right now and have been for some time, where almost everybody looks around and they're like, yeah, this is not going to work very much longer. This can't possibly go on. It doesn't matter. You're right, left center, you have institutional power, power you don't or anything. Everybody's just kind of looking around like, yeah, this thing's not working anymore. And yet, you know, that's a period of like profound opportunity, but profound danger as well, and certainly profound anxiety, you know, for individuals in societies as a whole.
- [55:44]
C
Yeah, that gets back to the issue very much so comparing to Kuhn with the idea of, you know, I can go through the cycle again if we want, if you consider to consider it relevant. But the big thing is we have that disruption period because, you know, facts don't exist in the, the earlier paradigm. At some point we have competing paradigms that, that is sort of the conflict period before, you know, a new paradigm is adopted. And that's absolutely where we are. It's like the current social political zeitgeist, you know, that many people say dare not speak its name. We know it's based upon egalitarianism, despite the fact that, you know, in every single way people aren't equal because they're not the same. Right. I'm not six foot tall. I don't have a 150 IQ. My dad's got both of those things, but I don't. So, you know, I, in that sense, I'm definitely not as good as him. And that's just the way the world is, because we're different. But anything that's anti egalitarianism is something that's going to be vehemently, militantly opposed, just reflexively in so many different levels. And because our system, you know, claims to be egalitarian, though the same system, you know, basically says the chuds, people like us are inherently less equal. So everybody's equal except for us. You know, everybody's as good as a man, except for a man. Everybody is, you know, as normal as straight people, except for straight people. Meanwhile, we have a society where nobody wants to protect anybody, nobody wants to produce anything, and nobody makes children anymore. And we pretend like this is going to continue on forever and that this isn't coming towards a chaotic collapse. But yeah. Happy birthday, America. It's time to celebrate and play your favorite Las Vegas casino games by American owned spinquest.com what's better than fireworks and American pie? Hitting a blackjack in the palm of your hand and you won't lose your fingers. Over a thousand games, including slots and live dealers and 30 coin packs are on sale for 10 spinquest.com buy American players.
- [57:46]
A
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- [57:55]
C
That idea of just a false anthropology, a. An incomplete or, excuse me, a blatantly wrong idea about human nature. And I'm one of those people who thinks that, you know, very much that human nature is real. It may not be something that we can directly model, we may not completely understand it, but it's sort of like the weather. You know, we can have models that are better and worse, and we can try to understand it, but very much our. Our main model for human action has to include the understanding that people want what they want and it may be different from us. And a lot of times all we can understand about another group of people or another person is how what they want is different than yours. And, you know, there's more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt up in any one of our philosophies. And that's more than anything. The establishment pretends to have all the answers to everything. And, you know, it's hubris, it's myopia. It's just that willful disconnection from external facts is so much at the heart of just the rot in authority establishment today.
- [58:53]
A
Yeah, it's interesting how the way you just described egalitarianism, especially as it exists under our mature institutionalized civil rights regime, is that in a weird way, the institutionalized version of it is an admission of its inverse. By pointing out or by making the case that there's only one group of people and it's a definable group by various characteristics that are not in need of institutional help to make their way through the world, it's almost an admission of the superiority of that group, even though it's not intended that way.
- [59:36]
C
Inevitably it becomes a declaration of that group as the enemy. So instead of acknowledging them as better or worse, they define them as just the outside, that thing that is permissible to be destroyed. And it's like the original Germanic language word for outlaw literally meant somebody who was outside the law, somebody who wasn't protected by the law. And very quickly, that's what the dominant American culture is becoming.
- [60:03]
B
It's not a coincidence that as Marxism grows and as Marxism spreads, that the ancien regime has to be done away with, that we have to fight wars to destroy monarchy, because monarchy, even bad monarchy, points towards stability, points towards an eternal something. I think, as you said in the last episode, that some of these European names were like the Pacific and like the Atlantic. They. They stood a top time at that point. And with their destruction now we. Well, I don't even know if you can call it a paradigm shift to echo Kun. You don't have a shift. You have destruction, which eventually will lead to some. Something will lead to order eventually. I do believe that. So I believe Yaqui believed that, and I do believe that too.
- [61:17]
C
Yeah, I'd almost say it's like the paradigm shift was a century ago. I mean, essentially the institutional left, which to include Marxism. But I mean, as Paul Gottfried said and Thomas has said, the problem with critical theory and, you know, social mark, cultural Marxism is it's not really Marxism, even though it's derivative and, you know, is sort of descended from those things. So it's. It's something more than that. It's something worse than that, that sometimes we can't really name. But that I think that paradigm really became dominant post World War I, because again, with the ending of the. The Habsburg monarchy, the ending of the Hohenzollerns in Germany. Germany, you basically had the elimination of any monarchy with one or two exceptions in which the actual executive authority was, you know, in the person of the. The monarch. And yeah, there are lots of countries that have kings, but in a parliamentary state, for the most part, with few exceptions, you know, the king has as much authority as the. The president of. Of Israel. Nobody gives a shit. Right. It's a. It's where you put a politician that is neutral enough across the spectrum that you want to keep from ever holding real authority in the future. And that's, in many ways that's kind of what, you know, functional monarchies, functional and air quotes are today. It's the one thing that the British monarchy is most concerned with is they're not engaged in politics. And as I point out, you know, the German, the continental understanding of politics is a little bit broader, a little bit slightly different than the Anglo American one where, you know, a German theorist would historically say, no, there's no such thing as an apolitical monarchy because to be the ruler is to exercise politics, to exercise decision making authority. And yeah, that paradigm really changed, I think, Post World War I, with a few exceptions. And you know, it's sort of like we're living in the crisis that was sown 100, 150 years ago.
- [63:22]
A
One of the things, you know, one of the problems with conservatism in general and something that it always runs into is, you know, you see this today, you saw it after the First World War. You know, it's interesting how you go back there and you look around and you're like, there's basically like, everybody's a socialist. Like literally everybody, even the right wing fascists, right, call themselves National Socialists. Mussolini was a socialist, you know, in name before he was a fascist and all these things. And you say, well, why is that? And it's because when the old regime falls or starts to come apart or the contradictions start to pile up to the, to the point where, you know, people are, are starting to flee the sinking ship and look for other options. You know, the conservatives, they're always busy trying to plug the holes in the hull. Like they're invested in the status quo, in the institutions as they exist in one. Those things are gone. There's this period of time where everybody, except for the people who were tearing the ship down and poking holes in the hole, everybody else is kind of looking around like, what do we do now? You know, and it takes some time to sort of formulate that and figure it out. And there's this period of time where the destroyers have basically free reign, you know, and I think that, I mean, I really think that we're heading toward, you know, again, to say conservatism is something different nowadays. But like, you know, once Trump, Trump is removed from seen, we have this quote unquote movement that is so invested in just the personality of this one man that even if he goes and rallies for somebody in an off year election, nobody's showing up unless he's on the ballot. They just don't care. And once he's taken off the scene, he built his entire model on delegitimizing the entire right wing in America before that. And once he's gone, you're going to have this period of time, I think, think where we better get our act together pretty damn quick because the other side is going to have free reign for a period of time until we do and we need to start formulating now. And I know, like, Pete, you know, you're very engaged in this, which I really appreciate is like, these are questions we need to start asking now. You know, this isn't something where. And it's. And that's why, you know, the National Socialists understood this. The, the fascists in Italy, just all across Europe understood this, except maybe in Spain, and even a lot of them there did as well, which is that your job is not to bring back or preserve the old order. If that's the case, you're going to be the dude just bailing buckets of water out while the dude is setting fire to the sails. And you better be building another boat. And that's got to be the goal at a time like this, because it's going to be a lot harder to do, you know, once, once we're underwater.
- [66:14]
D
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- [66:44]
C
Yeah, Guillaume Fai's book, I mean, on the subject. He said he's not. He's not a reactionary, he's an archaeo futurist. What are the actual core principles and bring them into the indefinite future. The quote I was going to say was from the Big Lebowski, which is, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but it is an ethos. And I'm sure we'll get interesting comments on that. But obviously I'm not a Nazi. But the point is, effective right wing movements, when they did exist, had a definite thing they were for. I'm not knocking conservatism. I really see myself as a paleo conservative. But so much of what is the right in American culture and politics is largely defined by being antithetical to the left. That's actually establishment, and it's okay. But if all you know is what you're against and not what you're for, you know, you're not really in the driver's seat. You're just reacting to somebody else.
- [67:42]
B
Yeah, there's. You can't just build an ark, okay? I mean, you have to build an ark at this point. But you have to know that, you know, at the end of that 40 days when you land what comes next. And I think that's what a lot of people are. They're waiting around for somebody else to figure out. And I think that's what it's going to take. Something I said about six months ago, I actually emailed it to myself and forgot about it. And then I was texting with a friend the other day and I said, basically, we need a visionary. There is nobody who is standing up and going, okay, this is the vision of the future. This is the way we think that we can go forward and that we can thrive. Now, who's behind it? Who's going to get behind it? And you need a visionary, you need a founder. In tech, they call it a founder for our guys. I don't know that anybody has stepped up to figure that out yet. To be the dreamer, to be the person who is, you know, who's like, okay, this is exactly what it's going to look like.
- [69:01]
C
Yeah, I think part of isolating anybody with an anti establishment perspective in the last decade or so has a lot to do with that. They may not come out of institutional academia, but a lot of times they're definitely people who are educating those establishments. They may not be the institutional command element of the military, but they usually come out of the military or the civil service or something like that. And part of connecting or disconnecting, like Darrell said, all the people who are in any way opposed to that establishment paradigm is it makes it really hard for those people to be in a situation in which they could create a vision and actually disseminate it and actually get any kind of buy in, not to mention the external feedback required to sort of revise that vision into a workable model. Because America does a good job producing really crazy people who know how to fix the world. And most of them are on the corner. And that's kind of the model. I agree with you completely. And I don't necessarily have a solution other than I know a future leadership cadre for whatever comes next is going to invest a lot of time and energy into producing a vanguard. What kind of vanguard? That's up for debate, but that's where we're at. And the only place I've seen any kind of interesting work on this whatsoever has been in, you know, fiction, really? Science fiction and fantasy.
- [70:25]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that the right is going to have to figure out, and it's something that I don't see any evidence of so far, at least for the most part is got to learn how to follow. You know, I mean you've just. The right. Is great at producing would be generals and not a lot of people who are willing to follow anybody else. Especially if the, you know, if the person that they're following deviates from, you know, something like even the slicers. There's just a lot of ego involved that makes it very difficult. And this is something that all the great movements of the past that really did create, you know, long term lasting, like wide scale change. Whether you want to talk about from, you know, the spread of Islam to communism under Lenin, I mean Stalin under, you know, the reason that he won out over Trotsky or one of the reasons is he just understood, maybe as a former seminarian and as somebody who grew up Christian, he had a better understanding of the need for the sacred in a movement like that. You know, when he took Lenin's body and embalmed it, you know, and basically turned it into this religious relic, I mean it was something, you know, it exhibits. Even though he might have been, you know, a professed atheist, that he understood something at least very fundamental about human nature and human, human needs and you know, short of a, of a real religious figure like that, like somebody that sweeps people off their feet with enthusiasm and emotion and everything, you know, people are going to have. I mean, this is somebody that, John, you and I like know just from being in the military that like, you know, you have to accept that the ship sinks unless we say sir, yes, sir to an officer that we think is a moron. Sometimes it's just how the whole thing has to work or the whole system falls apart. You don't get it anywhere, accomplish anything. And I think that, you know, the right is still like very, very childlike in that way. You know, a lot of people who, who are unwilling to follow is a lot of ego and we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to move past that, I think.
- [72:31]
C
Yeah. One advice I give to any person who's gonna be in a position of authority and I realize this is like the 10th time I've used that phrase is if you're not, you can't command yourself. You're never going to command somebody else. And a lot of times I tell people who are, you know, who talk about seriously and I appreciate this, you know, especially very religious people who want, you know, turn their sons, maybe their daughters as well, but their sons into future leaders in that hypothetical world where we're going to is what to do, you know, to turn them in that kind of leadership leader. I said, you know, first off, historically, that's what the Boy Scouts were for, and it's been taken over the. But there are all times of several, you know, good competing alternative scouting organizations on the old model. They're actually very good. But the other thing I tell people is your son needs a dog. Because if a son can't lead and take care of and actually get a dog to follow him, he's never going to get soldiers to follow him when they're being shot at. And I'm not necessarily categorically critical of every person on their own, our side, but as Darrell said, there's some very meticulous work that is not always fun, that goes into producing effective organizations, following as well as leading. And there's not. Right. Any cheat code to get around that. Right. You got to do it well.
- [73:49]
B
I mean, those people can be a part of it, be a part of building it, or they can just be following it later. You know, I mean, either way, they're going to benefit from it. But, you know, I'd rather be a part of knowing, even if I'm not part of the leadership cadre, that. That I'm helping to build it and bring those people together who can make those decisions. Yeah, yeah. That goes to ego. You know, it's like I. I don't. Look, I'm. I'm too fucking old to. To have an ego at this point. It's like I want to. I want to live out a peaceful life. And, you know, in three years, I don't want to be the first podcaster arrested and thrown in a fucking hole with an IDF soldier. As an IDF soldier, as my fucking jailer.
- [74:31]
C
Exactly. And the two things about that. Part of the problem is guys who can't cooperate, as Darrell said, they're not even going to be a part of it. Right. Because they're why some things fail when nobody can cooperate to an end. And the second thing is leadership in some ways is fractal. Look, not everybody's going to be a general. Not everybody's going to be an emperor. But start off being the person who's actually a leader in your household, but in your community. So many functions have broken down local society, like just people taking local political offices. Virginia being the ultimate example. You know, the Democrats swept more than anything because the Republican Party, Virginia fails to put quality candidates up there because they don't give a shit about winning. They care about getting contracts from the. The national Republican Party. But, yeah, you may not be an emperor, but you may have to be somebody in a position of authority in your local community and whatever level. You know, a proper education, the way it was traditionally understood in classical republicanism, like the people who created the United States of America, is you need to be prepared for whatever office and tasks in war and peace that's required of your community. And I'm not going to pretend that I'm like a great example of that, but I've come through certain pipelines that were interested in developing that, and we need a concerted effort on that because I think ultimately that vanguard strategy of producing leaderships for the future is integral into whatever is done to build the future tomorrow.
- [76:01]
A
On that note, fellas, to quote the great Thomas777, I got to raise up.
- [76:07]
B
All right, well, I'll sign us out here. Darrell, tell people where they can find your work and your awesome new episode.
- [76:16]
A
Yeah, look up the Martyr Maid podcast wherever you get podcasts. If you want to support the show because you just like it so much, then go to the substack, which is subscribe.substack.com the new series is called Enemy the Germans War. I just put out the third episode just earlier this week.
- [76:36]
B
All right. And Dr. Fieldhouse, we appreciate you joining us to share your, share your vision and your the information that you've written about Thomas Kuhn. Thank you.
- [76:51]
C
Yeah, I appreciate it. Like I said, more than anything is you don't really need to read all of Kuhn. A good Cliff's notes is good enough. And if I didn't do that here, I can always add to the future. I've got a substack that at some point I'll start posting to, but definitely read. Listen. Subscribe to Pete. Subscribe to Daryl and Dark Enlightenment. Those are the best guys I know. So thank you.
- [77:14]
B
Appreciate you both.
- [77:15]
C
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A
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