Episode 152: Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy in America (PEL Live!)

0:00 Alan: Welcome to this afternoon's discussion and live recording of a podcast by the Partially Examined Life. My name's Alan Harlam. This event is co sponsored by Brown University's Swearer Center for Public Service and the Creative Scholars Project. For those who don't know, the Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. As someone who did philosophy for a living for some time and then thought better of it, I'm a great fan of PEL and especially appreciate the combination of seriousness and levity that Mark, Seth, Wes and Dylan bring to the philosophical texts they discuss.

In an era where the reading and discussion of such texts has become a highly professionalized academic activity, confined largely to university seminars, the Partially Examined Life does a great service by bringing philosophical conversation back into a broader agora of intellectual and public life. With the presidential election only 12 days away and our national politics offering up a particularly remarkable and toxic brew of populism, bigotry, intolerance and authoritarian ideas, today's session, entitled the Problem with Democracy Can Freedom and Equality Coexist, which will focus on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, could not be more timely.

So I give you then the Partially Examined Life.

1:31 Unknown speaker: Thank you.

Thank you.

1:43 Mark: You are witnessing the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast live. Our question for episode 152 is something like what are the dangers inherent in democracy and and what qualities of American culture and institutions mitigate or exacerbate these dangers? And we read sections of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in america, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Folks can listen to more episodes and get the book and all that stuff@parcelexamlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, broadcasting to the omnipotent majority from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

2:18 Unknown speaker: This is Seth Paskin freely associating around a common interest with other self interested people. In Providence, Rhode island, this is Wes

2:26 Wes: Allman and I forgot to do one

of those clever intros.

2:30 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, minimally despotic, R.I. mildly. Mildly.

2:37 Unknown speaker: Mildly despotic.

2:38 Dylan: Mildly despotic.

2:39 Mark: There was a request that we read the ground rules. Number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd know what I was talking about if you'd heard my extensive, very private discussions about this book with Sean Hannity. And number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining. Wes wanted to make sure that we didn't go too off track this time. So he wanted to give an uninterrupted. You've never done this before. An uninterrupted short description of the plot, the goings on, the scene. Set the scene for us, Wes.

3:21 Wes: Okay, I'll try to do that, Mark. Paint your verbal magic.

3:25 Mark: No one will interrupt you while you do it.

3:29 Wes: It'd be a miracle if that happened on this podcast. But yeah, I thought so. We are all going to do something a little different. We'll give some opening statements about the reading and I'll just begin by giving a little background. So we are talking about this massive two volume book published by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 and 1840.

3:49 Unknown speaker: So those volumes of Democracy in America were published separately.

3:53 Wes: They're based on his observations of American society and its political and civil institutions after spending about nine months traveling around America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, who ended up writing this book about the same trip called Marie or Slavery in the United States, which is also Marie. Really fascinating. And for listeners, we're going to be using the University of Chicago Press version, referring to those page numbers. De Tocqueville was a Frenchman. What's his interest in America? Well, in Europe at the time, aristocracy was dying and there was a transition towards democracy and democratic institutions. This actually scared de Tocqueville. In fact, in his introduction, he says

4:35 Unknown speaker: he's terrified of democracy.

4:37 Wes: So the question is why? Why is he so terrified of democracy? Well, he thought that the monarchies and aristocracies actually had some good things about them, and he didn't think of them as inherently tyrannical or despotic, although I think we might be as good denizens of a democracy inclined to think that way. He actually thought that the nobility, the fact that there was a nobility in an aristocracy to serve as a counterweight to the monarch meant there was a kind of check on tyranny. And there were other social aspects to aristocracy that helped provide that check as well.

So with the advent of democracy, and especially what he calls the equality of conditions, the increasing equality of socioeconomic conditions, wealth, class, social rank and education, the effects of those things are not always good. And in France, it had been creating a lot of conflict. And what de Tocqueville wanted to know is whether or not America had some sort of lessons learned about democracy and Also in going to America and seeing democracy in a pure form, in a sort of form where there were habits and customs and mores in the society tied to the institutions, he thought that France and Europe could learn something from that.

So the things that terrify de Tocqueville more specifically, because you might think, well, if there's no monarch, if there's no king, what's so potentially terrifying, well, there's the possibility of something called the tyranny of the majority in a way that could be more powerful than a king, because potentially it doesn't have the same counterweight. And then there's groupthink and there's the materialism caused by equality of conditions, which can lead to individualism, which sort of weakens the populace and makes them less able to resist tyranny.

Those are some of the things he's worried about and sort of the broad sketch of what he thinks is a solution. What he thinks exist in America as institutions that actually help democracy thrive despite some of these drawbacks have to do with people undoing some of the effects of equality of conditions, including undoing the sort of way individualism and the way that separates people. So civil associations as well as political associations will loom large. For de Tocqueville, in a way, it's just about people getting together to work on things, to work on common goals together.

That in a way can temper any tendency in democracy towards despotism or tyranny.

7:03 Unknown speaker: Seth, you want me to go next?

7:06 Mark: You're the one with something written on a piece of paper, so please.

7:10 Unknown speaker: There was a debate about whether we should write opening statements. I did not get the memo that we were not supposed to. So I'm going to begin with the end. This is the last paragraph of the book. Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions within them are not equal, but it depends on them whether equality leads to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism to prosperity or misery. To me, this is the problem statement of what we're going to be doing for the next hour and a half or so in America in 2016. Are we in social bondage or are we free? Do we treat ourselves and our peers in a way that promotes justice, the

7:48 Wes: justice that equality promises?

7:50 Unknown speaker: Do we rise up out of the isolation of our private lives to address public concerns and participate in public affairs? Enough. Which was a critical thing for De Tocqueville, as Wes said. I'm sure we'll touch on this. I just want to tell you personally a little bit about my experience reading this It's a tremendously engaging and readable book. It is deep without being pedantic. It is broad but very well structured. He manages to generalize from first person experience without sounding parochial. This has been called the greatest book on both democracy and America, and I don't think it's worth arguing that point right now.

It's. It is saturated with keen observations and insights that are as relevant today as they were in 1835. So while we consider his thoughts with respect to America, the America that we now inhabit, I ask you to consider that Several days ago, 181 years after De Tocqueville laid out his concerns about the democratic age coming to Europe, resistance to it and the threat posed by it, the leader of the Armenian opposition party announced his optimism that democratic change may come to Armenia next year. To which I say, Yerevan forever. That's all I have to say.

9:07 Mark: For those listening, Seth Paskin just removed some clothing.

9:12 Dylan: Dylan taking off on Seth's theme of how it personally affected him, I wanted to read a quote from the chapter called on the Philosophic Method of the Americans. To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions and up to a certain point, from national prejudices. To take tradition only as information and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better. To seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be changed to the means and to see through the form, to the foundation.

These are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans. He also calls us, surprisingly, Cartesian. He says America is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are the least studied and the best followed. When I read de Tocqueville, I just feel really, really American. He talks about our do it yourself nature, our Cartesian pragmatism, our institutions of government and press and education, our materialism and the dangers of our capitalism. And in every one of those, I feel like I'm looking in the mirror in my personal life and then in what I see around me.

And so that's for me the most valuable reason to read to Tocqueville's because he doesn't provide exact answers for those things. But his diagnosis is so acute and he thinks through what the challenges are. And at one point he says that he's not a friend of democracy, but he's also not an enemy of democracy. So it's a little bit like Sitting down with someone who is basically on your side but isn't afraid to point out some real challenges. And he does so in a way that really resonates, I feel, really American.

11:08 Unknown speaker: Where's your American flag T shirt?

11:13 Dylan: It's in my soul.

11:16 Mark: So, interestingly, though, he saw the passage from aristocracy to democracy as irreversible, something that he had to warn the world about. It's something that earlier thinkers had just written about as. As maybe this ideal to shoot for. And he thought this was actually already in place. His goal here was he was talking really not to Americans, certainly he was talking to other. He was an ancestral aristocrat, and he was talking to other aristocrats and sort of warning them, saying, well, this is the way things are going all over Europe, and we can learn something from a little bit from the way America is doing it.

He does stress how a lot of what's going on in America is a result of the particularities of the people that came over here, that they were Puritans, that they. They didn't come over here as aristocrats and have a revolution. You know, that's not what the Revolutionary War is about. How much of the land and the fact that you could just move out to another area played into the creation of the American spirit. So not all of these lessons, he thinks, can be applied directly to Europe. And in fact, some of the more interesting parts of the book, in volume two especially, he's.

He's more talking about. That's sort of the more philosophical half of the book, is less observation of here are how things are going in America and more here how things inevitably go with democracy because of human nature. He's sort of a little more generalizing. The line that we've heard here is these observations of the American spirit are so accurate, it would be very surprising if observations made of people in the 1830s would really apply exactly now. And certainly a lot of the specifics, he seems to think that the fact that Christianity was an unargued backbone of society, that people just didn't even reflect on it.

They didn't discuss it. There was no hunger for publishing atheist tracts or anything like that. That was one of the things that was a necessary counterpoint to how democracy could go haywire. And the fact that we don't have, well, you still can't become president and be an atheist, but maybe within a decade, you know, we're not that far off of that, and certainly we don't have the consistency of culture that he thinks is actually necessary for the society to be healthy. So some of the observations he makes about us do feel like, yes, they could still apply in 2016.

Some of them are interestingly off. You know, apart from the fact that he predicted that if the south seceded that the central government is too small and could never do anything about it. So for sure they would win. You know, for sure we'd have two countries. He predicted a race war. He, he had a lot of things to say about Andrew Jackson and how he was doing at the time. So this is entertaining just to read as old fashioned punditry, you know, to parallel people we see on cnn, Fox News, whatever. Now I want to make sure that we hit sort of hours or as an agenda for the evening.

Wes ran down some of the problems we had. I made a little list of six. So he mentioned the tyranny of the majority. That's the big one. What he has to say about that mostly in book one is actually not even that new. He sort of takes a lot of it from Locke. And yes, he, of course it's mitigated by the separation of powers, decentralization, other things like that. He thinks it's more of an issue. It is not really addressed by separation of powers in the Constitution the way the Federalist Papers would have you believe. Second is the dangers of individualism.

Wes mentioned dangers of materialism, too much pursuit of material things which then could lead to materialism as anti religion, the danger of conformity of thought, the danger of a leveling schoolmaster state. And then I just discovered he actually did predict the danger of emergence of a new aristocracy from industry. That just the fact that you have bosses and workers, that everybody starts equal. The whole premise is egalitarianism, like democracy, is unavoidable.

15:13 Unknown speaker: It is the Geist of the world.

15:15 Mark: And you're not going to be able to go back to any sort of aristocracy. But the fact that he left a hole in there and very accurately predicted this 99% phenomena that we're seeing now, which was not really in his observations of the present day that he was making here, is interesting. So do we want to start with the tyranny of the majority stuff?

15:33 Unknown speaker: You know me, I'd rather start from the beginning.

15:35 Wes: That's what I was going to suggest

15:37 Unknown speaker: and work our way through.

15:38 Dylan: I concur.

15:39 Unknown speaker: I think we should talk about what he means when he. What he means when he says we are tyrannizing.

15:44 Dylan: Mark so we are satisfying your question mark?

15:47 Mark: Mark well, just to clarify, we read way too much of the book to cover Certainly in an hour.

15:51 Unknown speaker: No, I'm not going to walk you through.

15:52 Wes: I think we want to talk about equality of conditions and freedom and what those two things mean.

15:57 Unknown speaker: Intentions.

I agree. Go ahead. Well, the important thing is we have to start by understanding the premise that he's defining equality of conditions and equality against aristocracy. So his notion of what equality is in a democracy is, we would call it today maybe equality of opportunity or at least some rough concept of that, where the idea is that anybody in America can enter into a concern of their choosing, they can bond with any other people to start a business, to start a religious organization, to do something like that. And this is not something that people in France under an aristocratic regime were capable of doing.

Obviously, people who were in the peasant class or whatever just didn't have the opportunity. They couldn't go build businesses, they couldn't take over the reins of control of the state, they couldn't run for office. And so equality for him is really a social. It's a social level of social equality. It means equality of conditions from the premise of starting. Not necessarily doesn't mean everybody has the same intellect, doesn't mean you have the same capabilities or anything like that, but it means you have the same, in a sense, ability to go and make something of your life from where you stand.

17:06 Wes: That's.

I really thought he was talking about socioeconomic conditions. What's interesting about is that he never really defines equality of conditions. It only comes out in context. And I think it comes out in the introduction. He Talks of the 700 year history of increasing equality in Europe. And the kinds of things he talks

17:24 Unknown speaker: about are, for instance, the rise of

17:26 Wes: the clergy, the rise of lawyers, trade and finance, science and the arts, education. There are these things that have these leveling effects. And I think ultimately it's about power. But I think when we break it down, it has something to do with wealth and education and things like that. So even though you're right, I think it's not that equality of conditions means that people are perfectly equal. They're still rich and poor in American society. It's just that the gulfs between people are not so vast as they are in an aristocracy. And in aristocracy you have nobles who are so wealthy and powerful, they are like states unto themselves.

18:04 Unknown speaker: And they can act that way, they

18:05 Wes: can do massive things by themselves. There's none of that. And everything's been leveled down essentially in America.

18:13 Unknown speaker: Yeah, but the way that the nobles get to be wealthy like that is hereditary. And the reason the clergy is important in France Back in the time is that anybody from any caste, any state can enter the clergy and get that kind of power. So that's what he's basically looking at Americans saying there are no more hereditary ties. Anybody can essentially do anything because there's no structure in place that can gives wealth automatically to one small set of people versus others.

18:37 Dylan: The big bracket, of course, the race relations. Right.

18:41 Wes: Yeah, he does. I did read the slavery and chapters.

18:44 Dylan: I mean, he has a whole section

18:45 Wes: on slavery, which are fascinating, but. Yeah, yeah, we didn't.

18:49 Dylan: But when he talks about those equality conditions, one thing that I found when I read it is it's a little bit like talking about democracy in Greece. Right. It's democracy for whoever's on the in group.

18:59 Wes: One thing to keep in mind though is that he makes a claim that equality of conditions and freedom are two different things. You could be under complete despotism and have equality of conditions. In fact, monarchs tended to try and level out power and wealth and things among their subjects because that gave them more power. So you can have people who are essentially not free as long as they are socioeconomically equal, which obviously slaves aren't.

19:22 Unknown speaker: They can enjoy equality of conditions.

19:24 Wes: But some of it has to do with simply quality of life, things like that.

19:28 Alan: Yeah.

19:28 Mark: One of the things he says right off the bat, which folks that will have heard the podcast we did Edmund Burke in the episode before this, who is another guy that stresses that under a monarchy we don't really think of rights existing under a monarchy. But that's the way it was set up certainly in England was as a constitutional monarchy, the people were given certain rights. Just that's where de Tocqueville is coming from with this, that he sees rights and democracy as coming from different places.

19:54 Unknown speaker: It's.

19:54 Mark: It's not that we all voted and we've decided that we should have these rights. It's a matter of democracy by its very nature. If the majority says, eh, that's not really a right, the majority can change its mind. And so having actual inalienable rights is something that is foreign to democracy as far as he's concerned.

20:12 Dylan: But in fact it's one of the antidotes to it.

20:14 Wes: Right.

20:14 Dylan: That's one of the big things that allows for you to avoid tyranny majority and to make very strong case for rights, which is another reason why the institutional structures of the judiciary ends up being really. I think we see that ourselves, where the institution of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights there end up being structures that temper majority tyranny. At least that's the way Tocqueville would view it.

20:44 Unknown speaker: Yeah, that's a good point. Just drawing a distinction between thinking of democracy as a social movement or a historical movement versus a political. I think we just immediately nowadays when we say democracy, we think of a political system. But for him, it's a historical movement that's been happening for 700 years and it just means more. Less of this and more of this. And then. Yeah, the political structure is independent of that.

21:08 Wes: And he uses. Sometimes it's almost like he's using democracy in a, quote, quality of conditions interchangeably.

21:14 Dylan: Yeah, he uses the phrase democratic people

21:16 Wes: and quality of conditions. Those are conditions. And then democracy we think of as involving institutions. But for him, they're strongly related.

21:26 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, it points to how much context and conditions matter in the American case. For him, some of it he attributes a kind of purpose to the structure and other he. He attributes sort of the context of democratic society allows for the structure of the democratic republic of the United States to happen. And there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem there in that. I think he would agree that you can't just take those institutions and put them anywhere and have a democratic republic work the way America does. And you can't have the democratic society be successful without having those institutions.

22:09 Wes: Yeah. This is what he says in his introduction. The way democracy is advancing is it's left to its sort of undirected savage instincts and it needs to be directed. How do you do that? Well, you need changes in laws, but you also need changes in ideas and even in customs and also personal habits. People actually individually have to be habituated in a certain way, have to be certain types of people for democracy to actually work. What he's looking to America for is the ways in which democracy isn't simply an institution, but it's sort of embedded in habit and custom so that it can actually work.

22:47 Mark: So, for instance, you'd be more likely to have a tyranny of the majority. You'd be more likely to have the majority abusing its power if they had just been freed from oppression.

22:57 Unknown speaker: Yep.

22:57 Mark: If you have the situation in Iraq where the one party is ousted and the other comes to power and they've got a grudge. And he is glad that that is not something that happened in the U.S.

23:07 Unknown speaker: did that happen in France?

23:11 Mark: Just give it a more contemporary.

23:14 Wes: Yeah. So De is aware of the fact that. Yeah, the fading aristocracy in his country and the other classes are. There's a lot of mutual enmity. There's a lot of envy and resentment. And that just doesn't happen in America because it's not. The democracy didn't arise in America out

23:32 Unknown speaker: of this sort of internal revolution.

23:34 Wes: Even though we got rid of England.

23:36 Dylan: It wasn't a democratic revolution.

23:37 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

23:38 Wes: It's not like there's this huge aristocracy that's left over in America.

23:41 Mark: But you're saying doesn't. You're saying present tense doesn't. As of 1835, what are we looking at right now? If we're going to talk about 2016? This is what the whole outsider thing is, that there is fundamental de facto industrial, business aristocracy. There's the system, and there's all of us downtrodden people, whether you're on the left or the right, that want to upend that system. So even though that wasn't left over from an official, you know, there was no law that said it's a de facto aristocracy, we've got a lot of the same hostility.

24:13 Dylan: Well, and so that issue that Wes brought up, the fact that in an aristocracy, you just have an impediment to moving around within that society, and that in de Tocqueville's diagnosis of America, that one of the great advantages is that you had a kind of mobility. And so what you're pointing to is that the complaint right now between the 99% and the 1% is that lack of mobility.

24:36 Wes: But I think the difference is, here's a chapter on the way Americans are sort of. They're materialists. They like comfort, they like material things, and they like those sorts of pleasures.

24:46 Unknown speaker: They have an insatiable taste, and it's insatiable.

24:50 Wes: So basically, you get a little bit, and then no matter how much you get, it's never enough. So you're always pursuing. You could always have a nicer car, you could always have a nicer house and so on. You're always pursuing that American dream, and it's never enough. In an aristocratic society, lower classes have no. First of all, they don't have any experience of such comforts. And so it's not like they get addicted and they have to keep upgrading their drug and there's no hope of moving up, and so they don't have

25:16 Unknown speaker: to worry about that.

25:17 Wes: The aristocrats, on the other hand, are. They're so used to wealth and a certain lifestyle that it's not an aspiration for them, it's just a way of life. And in fact, it's easier for them to give it up than it is for the middle class to give it up. It's easier for an aristocrat to be a self denying ascetic and to give up the finer things in life than it is for the middle class. Which I thought was an interesting.

25:40 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

25:41 Mark: Although he couples that with an observation that even at that time, talking about

25:45 Unknown speaker: the great leveling forces of public opinion,

25:47 Mark: one of the main topics here is that even the rich did not flaunt it in the way that was very

25:52 Unknown speaker: common in the old world.

25:54 Mark: That the habit of the people is to kind of keep relatable. And he just, oh yeah, the rich

26:00 Unknown speaker: and the poor will join each other

26:01 Mark: and talk in the street like, yeah,

26:03 Dylan: no one builds a Versailles.

26:05 Mark: Exactly, exactly.

26:06 Unknown speaker: All throughout the book when I was taking my notes, it's like when he's, he's got. This, by the way, is a quote factory. I mean you just, you could literally every paragraph is like quotable. And if Twitter was just slightly more than 140 characters, man, my feed would have been burning up the last couple of weeks. But every time he's got one of those bold statements I put in here and then it's kind of off to the side, say, still true, still true. That one is definitely not true.

26:31 Wes: Wait, what's not true?

26:32 Unknown speaker: The idea. He says, he says in America, the rich constantly interact with the poor every day. They don't flaunt their wealth or whatever. You know, they're just like, they just kind of. Because they understand that they have this common concern of some sense.

26:43 Dylan: We have gated communities now.

26:44 Unknown speaker: The first thing that popped in my head was the sound of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. What's that guy's name? Robin something or other. Do you remember that television show, Robin Leach? And I thought, gross excess consumption has become a virtue. And those people, you don't think that's just so 80s?

27:00 Mark: I think that there's. I was thinking of the Silicon Valley liberal rich kind of thing that like they actually do.

27:07 Unknown speaker: You're right, you're right. The gold statues are definitely an 80s Trump esque kind of thing. Now we have Google buses that just drive autonomously through the middle of neighborhoods and keep the new elites away from the hoi polloi. You're allowed to react, by the way, negatively or positively.

27:26 Dylan: One thing that seems really different is the universality of community interaction and the level of local activity and that rootedness. And for me, I find myself even

27:41 Unknown speaker: in my own community.

27:42 Dylan: I have lots of links that are significantly outside. I'm sort of web connected to many, many places in the country and many my family members are around and my friends are around, and so my local ties are just much less. And that is very different than what the way he describes America.

28:02 Wes: One of the interesting things about this book is that these sort of like the answer to the question of how you prevent tyranny in democracies is very kind of ordinary in a way, because a lot of it has to do with association. The effect of democracy is actually to separate people. And the solution is to bring them together because it's only when they're together that they have the power to resist tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. So there's ways they're brought together, are through being involved politically. But he doesn't even think that's the main part. It's really just through any types of civil institutions, associations, basically. So I was thinking, like, could be any trade association or anything that you belong to that is your participation in the rebellion against the potential tyranny in the society.

28:48 Dylan: And it's also an act of freedom. That was the other big part of an association.

28:51 Wes: And that's what freedom is.

28:52 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. It's that act of freedom of association. That was where it was the ennobling part of your soul. Because one of the things that he's really concerned with is that along with the tyranny of the majority is this mild despotism is really kind of just losing your soul. Is that he feels like there's something about the democratic soul that is just really unadmirable. And there isn't the ambition, the desire to improve oneself that he associates with aristocracy. But he sees association as the activity of our own freedom to assert ourselves, to be willful creatures rather than merely one of the herd.

29:29 Mark: Just about the social improvement thing. He does talk about Americans having a definite sense of progress, that there is perfectibility, really toward perfection in a way that he didn't think was present in an aristocracy. On the other hand, we all have that. We share that sentiment. So we're being conformists in our thought that there is progress.

29:50 Unknown speaker: This really.

29:50 Mark: He reminded of Nietzsche a lot here and made me think that even though

29:54 Unknown speaker: Nietzsche was a little more historically removed

29:56 Wes: from this time, even uses the phrase herd animal at once.

29:59 Mark: Yes, yes. Had this idea, had some sort of sentimentality about feudal times left over, that at least in an aristocracy there were some really great people. And Tocqueville at least says, well, okay, I know that most of the people were oppressed and that was bad. And so from God's point of view, raising a few down and Living many, many up. That's better overall. And I'll try to look at things from God's point of view.

30:24 Unknown speaker: That is one of the greatest parts of this book, I have to say. That was fantastic. So let me ask a question to everybody here. How many people voted in their last local election? Okay, so I'm preaching to the choir. So this other threat of democracy is that it creates individuals out of people. It isolates them. So he talks about in an aristocracy, when you have a heredity. When you have a heretical.

Heretical, Heretical.

How's that? Hereditary. A hereditary system. If you're in that hereditary system, you have concern and care for your ancestors, and you have to be concerned about your offspring. And there's a certain class that you have a connection to too, because you jointly have a responsibility in the structure to resist the power of the monarchy and to provide for those below you. Those that are below you have to look up to you for something. In other words, we're all connected somehow, even if those bonds are not what we.

31:15 Wes: They're hierarchical bonds. They're very tight, very tight.

31:18 Unknown speaker: And they do create a sense of community, some sort of sense of community. He says when there's equality of conditions and anybody can marry anybody, and heredity doesn't matter anymore. And if you want to join with Jane to start a business and. And Bob to start a trade association and Fred to play cards, you just go ahead and do that.

31:37 Dylan: Cats and dogs living together.

31:38 Unknown speaker: Cats and dogs living together.

31:40 Wes: The main thing is you don't have any obligations to each other. Right. In a hierarchy, there's lots and lots of obligatory ties. Those are the links that keep people together.

31:47 Unknown speaker: But the point being, what this does is this complete disconnection. Democracy disconnects you from any formal ties to other people. And the threat is you can just go off and do your own thing. If you don't want to get together with people, you're by yourself. And if we have a whole society of people who are just hanging out by themselves or maybe with their families and they're not interacting with other people, that's when the danger comes that somebody might step in and say, I can make everything better for everybody because I can do everything I am great. My stuff is the best. It's going to be huge.

Right.

32:21 Wes: Check out my Twitter feed.

32:23 Unknown speaker: What he thinks is this voluntary participation in associations that we've been talking about is. Is the way Americans have an antidote to that threat. And it starts with participation locally. And which is why I asked about this, because he thinks that politics is the association par excellence. You learn from politics how to have

32:41 Wes: civil associations and social associations.

32:44 Unknown speaker: And at this time, the United States was very distributed. We didn't have a strong central government. So it's very important for people to get together locally to solve problems. And that's how we fight the tyranny of the majority. And that's how we learn how to associate with each other. And I think that if you ask me what's different between his day and our day is a lot of those problems don't exist anymore. We have a much stronger central government. There's no more land, no place to escape to. I live in Austin, which has a lot of local issues that are hot burning issues.

And we have development versus the Save the Salamander coalitions and traffic problems. So our local elections have a lot at stake and the participation is pathetic given what's at stake and how many people want to sit around and complain about it. So this has given me a new way to put people in their place when they talk shit to me.

33:29 Dylan: So I just.

33:30 Wes: What's interesting is I think he would be okay with political apathy if it

33:34 Unknown speaker: didn't lead to civil apathy.

33:37 Wes: He talks a lot about how political associations are sort of this training ground for civil associations. But in a way the civil associations are more important because they're more self sufficient and because they are outside of government. If you want to know what replaces the aristocratic noble in a democratic society, a good democratic society, it is the civil association. Those are the nobles now. Those are the things which could give you enough money and power and labor to actually do big things and to

34:11 Unknown speaker: resist the powers that be.

34:13 Wes: Being involved in government is one thing, but being involved in these other associations I think is really important as well.

34:18 Dylan: Yeah, it's part of what he calls self interest. Well understood is the antidote to the individualism that Seth was talking about.

34:26 Wes: We'll say something about that.

34:27 Mark: Yeah, yeah, I've got his definition here.

34:29 Dylan: Yeah, we have to use those terms because that's like the most famous thing. Habits of the heart, self interest. Well understood. They were done.

34:35 Unknown speaker: Yeah, nanny state.

34:37 Mark: This is before the self interested, well understood part. Just the problem with individualism. He contrasts this with selfishness. They're not quite the same term. Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self that brings man to relate everything to himself alone and to prefer himself to everything. That's a universal human trait. Individualism, he thinks, was sort of a

34:57 Unknown speaker: new thing at his age.

34:58 Mark: A reflective and peaceable sentiment that Disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.

35:15 Wes: So self centeredness is about not being involved in public affairs.

35:18 Unknown speaker: Well, self centeredness is neither of those terms. Individualism.

35:21 Wes: No, he uses the phrase self centeredness. So individualism, there's two components. There's self centeredness and then there's intellectual self sufficiency. So the intellectual self sufficiency is just. I'm not looking to authorities for my ideas. I can generate my own. And then the self centeredness is this withdrawal, this tendency towards withdrawal from public life, which is not, like you said, the same as selfishness, which is just withdrawing from everyone caring only about yourself.

35:47 Mark: Which what Seth was saying about people ignoring the local issues, that I think is the more immediate threat from tyranny is not the fascist father figure coming in and I will solve all your problems. That is something he talks about, but it's just more I've retreated into myself. And so that just leaves the government to do whatever it wants, that people

36:05 Unknown speaker: will just ignore it.

36:06 Mark: And so, yes, despotism comes about that way because nobody is actively joining together to fight it.

36:12 Wes: And that's exacerbated by materialism because people will tend to concentrate on their getting rich and doing well or their careers or things like that.

36:20 Unknown speaker: And so that increases this tendency to withdraw and.

36:24 Wes: Yeah, some despot to come along, and especially if they promise order and prosperity,

36:30 Unknown speaker: that's one way that despotism.

Yeah, despotism is one manifestation of the threat. It also opens the door to rule by the minority. So the small group that makes politics, their profession, can take over and do things like, I don't know, redistrict, stuff like that that maybe the majority would not.

36:47 Wes: Well, he calls this the factions. Yeah, the despotism of factions.

Yeah.

36:51 Unknown speaker: So if you're spending all your time locked into yourself or chasing material goods and you're not involved in public life through some sort of association, you are paving the path to be tyrannized by a minority or by a despot.

37:04 Dylan: This is a way in which he has a different take on Madison's concern in the Federalist. Madison is looking to disrupt majority tyranny by saying, well, look, there are so many factions out there that we'll set it up so that the factions will fight it out with one another, but nothing will rise to the top. And De Tocqueville is diagnosing that, well, because of equality, then you'll have this burgeoning apathy that will then allow certain factions to take over. I had a question for you guys. So he says about individualism, that individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment rather than depraved sentiment. And it reminded me of when we talked about in Aristotle about vice versus incontinence. So that individualism was a kind of incontinent soul.

37:54 Mark: I think you got it the other way around. So individualism is the judgment, whereas incontinence is not a failure of judgment. Incontinence is a failure of action.

38:02 Unknown speaker: Right.

38:03 Mark: You know, you shouldn't eat the cake, but you eat the cake anyway because

38:05 Unknown speaker: you have a weakness of the will.

38:07 Mark: That's more like selfishness is just being depraved. I don't know.

38:11 Unknown speaker: Well.

38:11 Mark: Well, it's not only one question.

38:12 Wes: Usually with Aristotle, the answer is yes and no. It is a problem of judgment.

38:16 Unknown speaker: And it isn't.

Yeah, maybe we shouldn't.

38:18 Dylan: Maybe they didn't align exactly right.

38:19 Unknown speaker: Maybe we shouldn't bring Aristotle into the conversation.

38:23 Mark: Although we have to point out that these concerns about turning the majority are started with Aristotle. And a lot of, you know, what went through Locke and got to Tocqueville was this initial. What Tocqueville is adding is the actual observation of democracy, you know, paying much

38:39 Unknown speaker: more attention to the details of how

38:40 Mark: things are structured rather than just worrying in the abstract something could happen. Although really both of them are in Tocqueville. It's a very big book. So there's lots. He points out a couple of cases in particular, there's a footnote that picks out a couple cases of these journalists that were against the War of 1812, and they got dragged out and lynched because the majority was in favor of it. You know, nothing was going to stop

39:00 Unknown speaker: that, even though lynching is illegal even then.

39:03 Mark: And then also the. What state was it? It was in one of the northern states that blacks had the right to vote, and yet they didn't. And he asked, well, why? Because they'll be harassed if they come out to vote. Because even though it is legal for them to vote, it's the majority sentiment. So it's not even just the majority making laws.

39:22 Unknown speaker: It's about the majority sentiment.

39:24 Mark: That is the real tyran means that they're not going to be able to

39:28 Unknown speaker: exert their rights according to the law.

That's actually one of the most poetic. I keep saying there's all these poetic and great parts in this book because there Are. But he talks about how this is one of the ways that he says the monarchy, a despot monarch, is actually a little bit better for people because they're like, it's violent, but it's limited. As long as you kind of stay out in the countryside, he's not oppressing you every given day. And you can talk smack. You can go to your friend's house and you can be like, yeah, I hate this guy, or, I hate this woman, or whatever. But he says when you have a democratic institution where there's a majority point of view, you're afraid to talk because you might be at dinner.

And if you don't hold the majority view, you could get rousted, you know, or kicked out or ostracized from your society. And it made me think of Foucault talking about how punishment was internalized, you know, in that. Listen to our episode on discipline and punish. It's hard as a modern person, being very American, myself, having grown up here, kind of inculcated in all the American virtues, to have somebody argue that monarchies have advantages for somebody who would be like me.

40:33 Wes: Right. Because I'm Jewish.

40:34 Unknown speaker: There's no hereditary monarchy anywhere that I would ever get to be a part of.

The fun part.

You know, the fun group so well.

40:40 Wes: Yeah. That's one of the surprising things. He thinks there's more freedom of speech and independence of thought in an aristocracy.

40:46 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

40:47 Wes: Too dangerous to speak out in a democracy.

40:49 Dylan: The right kind of aristocracy.

40:51 Unknown speaker: Right, yeah.

40:52 Wes: An aristocracy that isn't tyrannical, which is usually the case because of the way

40:56 Unknown speaker: the balance of power works.

40:59 Wes: And it's too dangerous to speak out in a democracy. You can nominally speak out.

41:03 Unknown speaker: Yes, there's freedom of speech and yes,

41:04 Wes: there's this sort of illusion of a freewheeling public discourse. But in reality, what you do when you speak in a democracy is you define yourself as part of certain factions, and some of those factions are not going to be able to join certain associations or institutions. You are effectively ostracized from certain parts of society. Once you define yourself as belonging to a certain faction by saying certain things.

41:30 Mark: I was initially going to say, this is one of the points that doesn't seem so accurate now, because I was thinking of the particular things that were

41:37 Unknown speaker: forbidden at the time that he says

41:39 Mark: they don't have to worry about atheists in America.

41:41 Unknown speaker: It's not that there aren't atheists, it's

41:43 Mark: just that there's no appetite for publishing stuff. Atheism is not going to corrode the

41:49 Unknown speaker: not state, he believes in separation of

41:51 Mark: church and state, but the culturally pervasive

41:53 Unknown speaker: religion that he thinks helps support the

41:56 Mark: society because there's this kind of taboo against expressing anti religious sentiment. So even though you're going to find individuals that hold these, they're not going to be able to create anything. And so of course that particular issue, we have much more plurality in freedom to talk about that kind of thing. But we still of course have the same thing that if you at the dinner table with the extended family or you know, start saying, well, I think, you know, consenting sexual relations between adult males and teenage boys like they did in ancient Greece, I think that that's okay. Like if, if you actually took that, you would be ostracized in exactly the same way.

42:28 Unknown speaker: These.

42:29 Wes: And it's not. Yeah, it's not just from your family,

42:33 Unknown speaker: although I've wanted to ostracize marks many times.

42:36 Wes: But it's, it's really. So it's not like, yes, there's so many different factions within American society. You can always find a niche, you can always find a place.

42:44 Unknown speaker: Right.

42:45 Wes: But what you say, and if you're writing op eds, you know, on one side of the partisan divide or another, you have limited employment opportunities, you've limited the kinds of associations you can join just by having those sorts of opinions. There are actual social consequences, not just your family avoiding you, but it limits your path within society. So I thought that was interesting. I was thinking the same way. Is this really an issue today? And I think the more I thought about it, I thought, yeah, but is

43:12 Mark: that unique to America at all? I mean, I would think anywhere there's going to be some taboo beliefs like that, that if you express them in the wrong circumstances that you're going to be ostracized. Yeah. This doesn't seem uniquely American at all.

43:25 Wes: No, but it's. The difference is in a democratic society, everything depends on the association. Those are your nobles and the strength of those associations depends on what happens in the press. So he talks a lot about the, as the sort of, the ways in which we can find like minded people and connect with each other. So the other part of this is, and I think he thinks there's a tendency in aristocratic society to defer to expert opinion, whereas in democracy, part of the Cartesian thing is we just rely on our own reflections and we are suspicious of authority. But what ends up happening by default is that majority opinion becomes the dominant

44:06 Unknown speaker: opinion, it becomes the go to.

44:08 Wes: And so it leads to a sort of a lack of free Thinking, a lack of independence of mind.

44:13 Unknown speaker: That is unique, I think, to a democracy. So that's a lot of related things, but that's.

Yeah.

44:20 Wes: Well, I don't know if that addressed

44:21 Mark: a chapter on the philosophical approach of Americans and the fact that we are

44:26 Unknown speaker: the intellectual version of this individualism that

44:29 Mark: you're talking about, that it's this I really recognized. Well, there's two aspects of it. One is, is that he thought Americans of his time were super non philosophical. That, you know, the average French citizen, I guess might have at least had some familiarity with the philosophers that were big in France.

44:48 Dylan: This was a hit book.

44:49 Unknown speaker: Yes, this is.

44:50 Wes: This is still. This is still true.

44:52 Dylan: Absolute bestseller from what I can tell.

44:54 Wes: This is still true in Europe. But the average educated person knows much in Europe, knows much more about philosophy

45:00 Unknown speaker: than the average American.

Right.

45:02 Mark: He characterizes Americans, though as following a philosophy implicitly, that is the Enlightenment philosophy of Descartes. That, you know, everything is a. Trying to find the quote here. Anybody have that?

45:16 Wes: I don't, but the idea is that you don't need footnotes, you just need reason. You just need to be able to think things through and you don't have to appeal to precedent or authority to make your point.

45:29 Unknown speaker: I think Dylan said it in the introduction. Nowhere is he less well read. Less read, but more put into practice. Something along those lines.

45:37 Mark: Each person withdraws narrowly into himself and claims to judge the world from there. That follows the economic. I'm going to ignore politics. I'm going to stick to enriching myself and my family. Yeah, I know just as well as whatever experts, I can figure out what the correct move on Mosul was just by hearing about it.

45:57 Unknown speaker: It's a matter of common sense.

45:59 Mark: And he does explain that. He thinks that what comes out of this is the idea that we think that everything is explicable, that nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence and that Americans deny what they cannot comprehend. It gives them an innate distaste for the supernatural which is only countered by the fact that they all already have this religion built in at the time at least.

46:21 Dylan: So it's an interesting thing that I recognize both in myself and I guess I suppose that because I'm American is this sense of. I call it the do it yourselfness. There's all this kind of aspect that he notes in Americans, that they think they can do everything alone or on their own. And that spirit is very empowering. But it has these challenges to it. It's part of the motor for innovation and the expansion to the west and the development of capitalism, all kinds of things are real strengths because of that spirit. But it has these faults which it just turns out that, no, you're not always the smartest person in the room. And it turns out that thinking things through and getting the opinions of other people matters. And the one thing that I found that I had to juxtapose it with is that there is this tendency in America.

47:14 Unknown speaker: You start on your own and you

47:16 Dylan: gather your own opinion about it, but you might get other people together and then you say, well, this is the right way and you might gather a kind of expertise in it and follow it that way.

47:26 Mark: It's not necessarily everybody thinks they're the

47:29 Unknown speaker: smartest person in the world, but we

47:30 Mark: feel like I just got to call it like I see it. That's just, that's where I am right now. And so on, whatever the issue is, there's always going to be somebody out there that knows more than I do, but I have to be able to act. So it sort of goes with the pragmatism that you have to use your own intellectual judgment and that lets you act more rapidly.

47:47 Dylan: I don't feel like even then that Americans would maybe in the do it yourself sense of building their own house, they would, but they wouldn't say that about, I'm gonna just go do a bowel resection on you. Because I'm the guy who. I've never done a bowel resection, but I know how to do it. Even then, I don't think they would. They would say that was, I'll at

48:05 Unknown speaker: least look it up on WebMD.

The important thing about this, there's the intellectual component, but there's also the active component that ties in this notion of associations.

48:14 Wes: There's a great quote in here where

48:15 Unknown speaker: he says something like, where in France everybody would stand around looking to the government to put the roof on the house, and in England they would appeal to a lord. In the United States, they just self organize and go fix it. It's the notion of not appealing to an authority to solve a problem. It doesn't mean that we think we

48:31 Wes: can solve all problems by ourselves, but

48:33 Unknown speaker: it does mean that we think it's incumbent on us to go solve those problems.

48:36 Wes: At least that's the.

48:37 Unknown speaker: It ties into that notion of American ingenuity or stick to itiveness. But the downside of that is when I see somebody else doing really well and I go, man, I could do that. And I don't recognize my own limitations and failures.

48:51 Wes: There's a lot of People that we

48:52 Unknown speaker: don't look into ourselves to figure out like what we can and can't do.

48:55 Wes: So there's a lot of people that

48:56 Unknown speaker: go try to make themselves rich or they go try to do this and they just fail constantly, over and over again because they don't realize that they're not that great.

49:05 Dylan: Part of it is there is some distributed sense of specialty, right? And a kind of jack of all trades version of it. So it's not that there isn't a sense of knowing how to do something. It's that the self organized aspect that you get together and say, well, someone there knows how to build a roof and they don't have to be, you know, the best absolute person, but they basically know how to do it and then you can do it together. But there's also the fact that a lot of people know a little bit about a lot of stuff, right? Because you know, just think about being out in the west or being a farmer or whatever. You have to know a little bit about a lot of stuff in order to get that to work. So it's. Your society isn't structured so that you are really specialized in one thing that

49:48 Unknown speaker: you do and then you rely on

49:49 Dylan: other people to do those things.

49:51 Wes: There's kind of a paradoxical result here which is that there's this can do it iveness and there's the sort of facility with reasoning, that Cartesian aspect comes out of this. But I think the point of this second chapter is that this distrust where most societies you sort of defer to experts or defer to people in certain classes on certain opinions. In America we think we're getting it from ourselves. We think we're sort of self reliant. But really the default opinion we're actually expressing is simply the majority opinion.

50:23 Unknown speaker: We're actually engaging in groupthink.

50:25 Wes: So the dividing line between, yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm being practical and reasoning about things and getting it done. Between that and I'm just, you know, not thinking, it's hard to tell. So it's an interesting paradox in American society and it's a kind of paradox that runs through the whole book because many of the things that actually create problems for us and make democracy sort of lend itself to the possibility of tyranny also provide us with solutions.

50:52 Unknown speaker: So for instance, like self interest, there's on the one hand the materialism and

50:57 Wes: self interest are a problem.

50:58 Unknown speaker: On the other hand, the kind of

51:00 Wes: self interest, the kind of habit and

51:03 Unknown speaker: custom self interest in the United States, the Self interest, well understood, I think

51:07 Wes: he calls it, actually is helpful.

51:10 Unknown speaker: I know you were going to talk about that before, Dylan.

51:12 Dylan: I just brought it up because I think it's directly related to the free association and the kind of freedom that we get, the activation of our wills.

51:19 Wes: So I think in an aristocratic society

51:21 Unknown speaker: there's an idea of virtue and selfless devotion to virtue. And that's what makes people do things or do good things, great things. On the other hand, it's tremendously hypocritical. Everyone's a hypocrite in that society because no one's being as virtuous as they pretend that they think they ought to be. What replaces that in American society is sort of pragmatism, an idea of the intersection of personal interest and public interest. So it's not just about being selfish or self interested. It's this idea that there's what Smith called an invisible hand.

It's this idea that by acting on our own interests, we are actually serving the public good. Those two things actually align with each other. And he thinks it's more practical. He thinks you actually get more done that way. So you don't have as many highs or as many lows. You don't have as much great people doing great things or depraved people, but you have this nice middle ground. In a functioning democracy, the part of

self interest, well understood though, is not simply being a good capitalist and this will somehow benefit everybody, but it's also on a moment to moment basis, making little sacrifices, sort of keeping yourself a good citizen, helping out others.

52:29 Mark: And it's really the thing that moralists,

52:32 Unknown speaker: since Plato have been trying to convince us. You know, we just again talked about Aristotle recently in terms of happiness, that really to be happy, really to pursue your own interests does involve fellow feeling for others, it does involve helping others. And he thinks this is a useful thing. You know, this is a pervasive thing in America. It's a useful thing in fact, for any democratic system to have because it's better than pure individualism that decays to actual selfishness. And even if you have to just tell people, have them believe on faith, he thinks this is true. He talks about Pascal in this respect,

53:06 Mark: that part of my self interest is going to heaven.

53:10 Unknown speaker: So the self interest, not just of if I help my neighbors and restrain myself, then I'm going to be happier here, but I'm also going to be happier in the next life. That that's one of the bulwarks that Christianity thinks. That's really the Key thing is to keep people focused on life after death. And that that is part of pursuing your self interest. Being virtuous in a traditional sense because of the afterlife.

53:32 Wes: Yeah. He thinks there's only so much that self interest can do, right.

53:36 Unknown speaker: Towards making people do good things.

53:38 Wes: I mean, like you said, he thinks in a way, Americans think of themselves

53:41 Unknown speaker: as always acting on self interest as lending itself to the public good. But really there's genuine altruism. People just generally enjoy doing nice things for other people and they also love the good. But you need some sort of non materialistic doctrine. He says it doesn't have to be an afterlife necessarily. He talks about reincarnation or even just something lofty and platonic. But you have to have something to resist people being entirely materialistic. Otherwise he thinks it breaks down.

54:10 Wes: Okay, I got it.

54:11 Unknown speaker: This is like the seventh time I've said this, but this is like my

54:14 Wes: favorite part of the book. This is a quote.

54:16 Unknown speaker: In the United States it is almost

54:17 Wes: never said that virtue is beautiful.

54:19 Unknown speaker: They maintain that it is useful and

54:21 Wes: they prove it every day.

54:23 Unknown speaker: It's this idea that the reason I'm honest is not because being honest is a good thing. It's because if I wasn't honest, then the next time I did business with

54:30 Wes: this guy, he wouldn't trust me.

54:31 Unknown speaker: And then I get a bad reputation, right? And it's virtue as utility. And what he says is in aristocratic

54:37 Wes: societies they see virtue as beautiful. Even though he says there's that utility aspect is kind of underlying it in some respect.

54:43 Unknown speaker: Self sacrificing, right?

54:45 Wes: You hear this, it's this, follow your self interest and your self interest is to be virtuous.

54:50 Unknown speaker: You immediately think of Adam Smith, the invisible hand of the market, right?

54:53 Wes: The rational self interested economic agent goes

54:56 Unknown speaker: out and they try to negotiate the best deal. But by working all in my own

54:58 Wes: self interest, we all get together and suddenly wealth is created. You know, hooray, hoorah.

55:03 Unknown speaker: You can almost see this as an analog and you're like, oh well, to

55:06 Wes: Tocqueville's giving the social or virtue form of the invisible hand. But Adam Smith wrote a whole big book called the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

55:15 Unknown speaker: And his moral theory is not based

55:17 Wes: on rational self interest at all. So for those of you who are still in school, who are interested, there's a dissertation or at least a master's, maybe even a seminar paper to be written about the relationship between de Tocqueville and Adam Smith on this. Now, with respect to what you were talking about, the doctrine of self Interest,

well understood, is good for getting us to do most good things. But there are things like, how do you convince someone to go die in a war?

55:41 Unknown speaker: Right? There are things which transcend that.

55:44 Wes: And in aristocratic societies, it's, well, there's an afterlife.

55:47 Unknown speaker: You'll be rewarded in another world. He still thinks you need something this immaterialist, right? Maybe religion, maybe Plato, maybe.

55:55 Wes: So this idea of this afterlife, right, or some religious notion. You said even reincarnation would be better. He says, given the choice between materialism,

56:04 Unknown speaker: which is the belief that everything is

56:06 Wes: material, when you die, you're worm's food. No afterlife, no soul.

56:10 Unknown speaker: He says, I'll take metempsychosis because I'd

56:13 Wes: rather believe that the soul exists and

56:16 Unknown speaker: lives on in a pig than it

56:17 Wes: doesn't live on at all.

56:19 Unknown speaker: Because he thinks you got to have something to hold on to. Because the danger of a combination of individualism, equality, and chasing after material goods leads you ultimately to circling back on yourself. And this notion that all you want

56:34 Wes: is goods and services and experiences will lead you to believe that it's all in this world.

56:39 Unknown speaker: So we need the idea of an

56:41 Wes: afterlife, or at least some religious notion to counterbalance the fact that the trend is going to be towards us just believing that this is all there is.

56:49 Unknown speaker: And you should go get as much as you can, as fast as you

56:51 Wes: can, for as long as you can, because when it's over, it's over. And that's why religion is necessary.

56:56 Unknown speaker: But aren't there other public sentiments like patriotism or devotion to your community?

57:02 Dylan: I mean, this goes back to what

57:03 Unknown speaker: Wes was pointing to, that these associations, or maybe more strongly, these external commitments that you have that you invest your life into something bigger than yourself.

57:14 Wes: He liked patriotism. He thought it was a good thing.

57:17 Unknown speaker: Sure.

57:17 Wes: Should we move towards closings and then

open it up to them?

57:20 Unknown speaker: Let's do the Q and A first.

57:21 Wes: Let's get the audience involved in the new discussion. It's a discussion.

57:24 Unknown speaker: Yes.

Anybody want to jump to the mic?

Thanks for being here. You were just talking about Adam Smith a little bit, and I know you've covered them podcasts previously. You've also covered Thoreau, Emerson. I mean, they're related. They're American philosophers. I know de Tocqueville didn't have a very high opinion of American philosophy at that point in time, and I was wondering if you were reminded of anything in your readings of anything that Emerson and Thoreau had built upon or maybe indicated in their own writings.

57:54 Wes: Dylan.

57:56 Mark: I was just trying to remember what Year is Emerson. Is it around the same time?

57:59 Dylan: Emerson's later.

58:00 Unknown speaker: Okay, so there really wasn't much American philosophy yet.

Really.

58:03 Mark: He talks about it as if America was really part of England culturally.

58:07 Unknown speaker: And so it was the part that was assigned to go out and deforest. And then the intellectuals at home could keep doing that. So that's the way that America did not become totally barbaric. Even though they did not have a lot of homegrown philosophers, its citizens were too busy running around doing other things. As far as the comparison to what Emerson and Thoreau eventually had to say, obviously the self reliance, you can see the American spirit as he's describing it through those folks. Well, and he does talk about pantheism, of how pantheism is a danger, something that the simple American minds that think they understand everything, they like to oversimplify everything. They like general notions. And so the idea that there's not even a difference between us and God,

58:49 Mark: that would be something that would catch on.

58:51 Unknown speaker: And so Emerson's spiritualism is some form of that. It seems like he would not.

58:55 Wes: Here's a quotation. If America has not yet had great

58:59 Unknown speaker: writers, we ought not to seek the reasons for this elsewhere. No literary genius exists without freedom of mind. And there's no freedom of mind in America.

59:10 Wes: And then he goes on to say you could be more of a dissenter

59:12 Unknown speaker: during the Inquisition than you can in America.

I think that he would see Thoreau and Emerson as signs of the kinds of problems that you have with individualism. Emerson's emphasis on self reliance, the pantheism that you mentioned then also, even with the civil disobedience that Thoreau embodies, going

59:33 Dylan: off and living in a hut for a year. I don't think de Tocqueville would diagnose

59:38 Unknown speaker: it as having enough interaction with civic life. It's not civic oriented enough. So you would see it as very American.

59:45 Wes: You raise a really good point though.

59:47 Unknown speaker: We went into the Brown bookstore today. I'm fairly certain Brown was around when

59:51 Wes: he was traveling around here. Was it around 17 something when it was founded? The university was here.

59:58 Unknown speaker: Right.

59:58 Wes: Maybe there's other parts of the books where he talks about all the great institutions of learning that he visited, but

1:00:03 Unknown speaker: it doesn't look like he bothered to go. He didn't go to Brown or Harvard.

1:00:06 Wes: He was at Rhode island actually, in our reading.

Yeah.

1:00:09 Unknown speaker: So he didn't make a concerted effort to find out what the intellectual life of America was.

1:00:14 Wes: He was focused on the commercial aspects more.

1:00:16 Unknown speaker: And the president at the time was Andrew Jackson, who might, pending the outcome

1:00:20 Wes: of the November 8 election, been the least intellectual president.

1:00:26 Mark: Yeah, he really saw.

1:00:27 Unknown speaker: Andrew Jackson is very much like Napoleon.

1:00:31 Wes: They had similar haircuts.

1:00:36 Unknown speaker: Hi, I'm Fred from Pennsylvania and I was wondering what you guys think to bring it back around to 2016. How much of this book by Te Toqueville is his own myth? And what I mean by that is he came here for nine months with his friend. He was supposed to be studying the penal system here. If you were lucky, you know, how far could you travel in a day? Everything was by horse. I was looking at some secondary sources and people were kind of trying to rain on the parade that he even had much of anything to say about this country because he didn't see hardly any of it.

And I was just wondering if you thought about that aspect of his time here and how much of it is made up in his own mind. When he was talking about certain forces happening at that time. He didn't really foresee the power of the Industrial Revolution happening. There's just many different aspects to that. And I was wondering what you thought about that.

1:01:33 Wes: Well, unfortunately, the stuff we read was

1:01:37 Unknown speaker: more his generalizations about things and not the specifics.

1:01:42 Wes: So I dipped into some of his

1:01:43 Unknown speaker: chapters on slavery and Native Americans and

1:01:47 Wes: actually it's really fascinating. They're just all kinds of interesting anecdotes

1:01:51 Unknown speaker: about people he's run into and what

1:01:53 Wes: they had to say, and scenes from

1:01:56 Unknown speaker: American life at that time.

1:01:57 Wes: I don't know how much of that is in here, but somehow I got the sense, wow, De Tocqueville, in a

1:02:02 Unknown speaker: way knows more about America even now than I do.

1:02:06 Wes: So nine months, a nine month road trip around America, I haven't done that, and I certainly haven't done that. And trying to be a reporter or

1:02:13 Unknown speaker: a social scientist or trying to quiz

1:02:15 Wes: people and find out as much as

1:02:17 Unknown speaker: I can about American life as possible. Usually I'm just a tourist when I

1:02:20 Wes: travel, so I couldn't say whether or

1:02:22 Unknown speaker: not how much of this is just his fantasy and how much he really did see. Someone here may know more about that in his biography.

But besides traveling around, he also did a lot of reading and got documents from individual localities and stuff like that. Especially in the first volume, there's basically a bunch of statistics of stuff that he used to sort of analyze.

1:02:44 Wes: The first volume is not as fun because there are too many facts. So that's another. This is more evidence that he knew something about.

1:02:53 Unknown speaker: About the geography and the amount of lumber that is shipped from Here to.

Right.

1:02:57 Dylan: Yeah.

1:02:58 Unknown speaker: But that said, I mean, there's certainly things that he. Well, Mark mentioned, you know, that he makes predictions based upon what he observes that aren't quite right.

1:03:07 Dylan: I think a little bit like what

1:03:08 Unknown speaker: Wes mentioned, the idea of being an investigative reporter. You know, there's parts that you're going to get wrong and parts that you're going to get right. And he's trying to make some generalizations both about democracy and about America. He's doing both of those things because he's speaking not exactly to America. He's speaking to mainly a European audience and thinking about aristocracy and the motion of democracy in countries, in the world. And so he's thinking about both those things. So there's times where I'm reading along and I'm thinking, well, you know, this is sounds like America, but not exactly right. It turns out, actually he's thinking about democracy and doing some political theory kind of work and then say, well, now America in that particular form of democracy, you know, has these things in common, but these balances.

So one thing would be interesting to know is because when you read it, it's like, well, this is just a laundry list of every stereotype of Americans, you know, And I assume that the stereotypes come from this. Like, it's from his analysis that we

1:04:05 Wes: developed an idea of what it is

1:04:07 Unknown speaker: to be an American back into types of lives Americans live.

1:04:12 Wes: But anyway, so to what extent is

1:04:14 Unknown speaker: he sort of repeating stereotypes that already exist?

Or did he define the stereotypes?

1:04:19 Mark: He says they wear loud shirts and

1:04:20 Unknown speaker: they take lots of pictures. Just one more thing on that. It's interesting that even if this was a myth, the fact that it's been canonized. You know, I heard Reagan used to quote from this a lot.

1:04:31 Mark: There are lots of elements in here

1:04:33 Unknown speaker: that really feed into really from both the left and the right political spectrum that if you're doing an analysis of where our political talk comes from, whatever he might have made up, it became part of the fabric because of this popularity, this book.

1:04:48 Wes: So that's kind of crazy. One last point about that. This would be a very different book if he'd spent all his time traveling around the south at that time.

1:04:55 Unknown speaker: There is plenty about the south that

1:04:58 Wes: he chose not to describe the American character based on what he saw in the South.

No, he. Well, he contrasted.

1:05:03 Mark: Yeah.

1:05:06 Unknown speaker: Bringing it back to 2016. I wonder if you could comment a little bit about this phenomena, that a relatively small group of people can create a kind of momentum that can get someone like Trump can get the nomination. The Tyranny of the minority, perhaps, and maybe speak a little bit about how the spectacle that's involved that distorts this process or doesn't and ultimately paralyzes the political system. Are we solving problems in the most efficient way? And maybe if this is some kind of dialectical process or something that is progressing towards something, maybe speculating a little bit about where we're going with all this and is this ultimately a healthy kind of part of the process and the right people will win in November and we'll be better off for it and we'll have a richer, better country, or are we the country going down the tubes?

Is this the end of the world? I mean, maybe speculate a little bit about where we're going from here or

what would Tocqueville say?

1:05:58 Wes: What would Tocqueville say?

1:05:59 Unknown speaker: Yeah, maybe just to focus it a

little bit, but don't give away who it is you're for.

Oh my.

1:06:07 Wes: So to begin with, Tocqueville has a very strong opinion about participation in public and civic life that I think you can see the rise of these smaller factions that have taken over control of political machinations or whatever as indicative of the fact that the majority of people who profess a certain point of view are not participating. I mentioned that earlier, but I think that's a big part of it.

1:06:31 Unknown speaker: But I think that's also indicative of

1:06:35 Wes: a change in the tone or the way in which political association was viewed back then, or the way he saw it in America and the way we see it now. So there's a place where he talks about it might have been early on where he says elections in America, people say the most vile things about each other, they're terrible.

1:06:52 Unknown speaker: But afterwards everybody comes together because we're

1:06:54 Wes: all still part of this community and we have to get work done.

1:06:56 Unknown speaker: So it's kind of like at one

1:06:59 Wes: step removed, do you say that this person is the devil and that they're going to do terrible things because afterwards they're still part of your community?

1:07:06 Unknown speaker: And that spirit of what we used

1:07:08 Wes: to call the spirit of compromise, you know that Even in the 80s, when you had Reaganism and all this, there was still that notion of conservatives and progressives still work together regardless of who gets elected, that to me seems to be gone or in peril.

1:07:23 Unknown speaker: And I think part of that is because the machinery of what politics has become, politics as a way of governing

1:07:32 Wes: the nation and solving problems for a community has become a tool to create

1:07:37 Unknown speaker: this enrichment of well being and create

1:07:39 Wes: this divide via industry that Mark alluded to earlier, we don't see government as a communal or social association. We see it as a tool to achieve a personal end, whether it's direct or indirect. You're either getting money from somebody who's trying to get you to pass regulations to let them pollute, or you're just the polluter.

1:07:58 Unknown speaker: Right?

1:07:58 Wes: I mean, one of those two things. That's an extreme example.

1:08:02 Unknown speaker: So in my mind, this election will not change any of those things.

1:08:06 Wes: It may give some more life to

1:08:08 Unknown speaker: the idea that we are stronger together and that there is some value in

1:08:14 Wes: association and community as opposed to divisiveness. And you can broaden that locally or broaden out to the world stage, but it also may be a Brexit.

1:08:25 Mark: I think he would have a lot

1:08:26 Unknown speaker: of things to say about how things have broken down in ways, some of which he predicted. So one of the things he really emphasizes as a remedy against the problems with democracy is the amount of voluntary associations that we enter into. We have basically equality conditions. We can't just, we're aristocrats that can just order a lot of people around. It's very natural for them to latch on other people and join to try to make a difference in the community. And you can think of a lot of.

1:08:52 Mark: Apparently we still, America has a pretty

1:08:54 Unknown speaker: high rates of volunteerism. However, I just think that he doesn't make a very sharp distinction in talking about these forms of association between commercial associations and purely volunteer associations. And like for us, we are now an llc. We give some money to some people that we pay to do things. Like, you know, that's the kind of mix that maybe was more common back then. It's the difference between let's go and have a bowling league or let's go and clean up the village or whatever. And a commercial association was not consistently as sharp.

But now it seems that more and more, and this is something he was afraid of that because we have a desire for well being because Americans are so hip to that. He was afraid it was more the central government was going to say, oh, I can provide all those needs, don't even worry about that. And this would become this schoolmaster state. He might as well have said nanny state.

Tutelary is the word he uses.

Tutelary state.

1:09:48 Mark: But it's not the government so much

1:09:50 Unknown speaker: that's doing so much of that. Although lots of folks on the conservative side can bring up. There are many passages in Tocqueville that you could use to say, oh, Obamacare

1:10:00 Wes: is crushing our spirits.

1:10:03 Mark: The fact that if I can't hold

1:10:05 Wes: chapter on Obamacare and here, which is

1:10:07 Unknown speaker: amazingly, amazingly prescient, that if I can't

make little decisions, if government takes little decisions away from me, then how can I be sure that it's not going to take big decision? You know, he's concerned mostly not with the federal government, which he thinks is by design weak. It's the state governments that didn't. You know, this was before. What was the court decision that said, no, actually the Bill of Rights applies to the states.

Oh, Marbury versus Madison. I think it was before this.

This is before this.

1:10:30 Wes: Okay.

1:10:31 Dylan: Yeah.

1:10:31 Mark: But that was still kind of a

1:10:32 Unknown speaker: live option, that the state governments, the local governments might be too intrusive. The local governments he wasn't that worried about, because a neighborhood association was the worst they can do to you. Even if they're being tyrannical. You can't have that on your lawn.

1:10:44 Mark: But it's not been the government so

1:10:45 Unknown speaker: much that it's coming in and we'll provide all the needs. It's big businesses, which are very different than voluntary associations, even the kind of businesses that he was familiar with. So the fact that we have so many things that we. The kind of criticisms that you more often hear now of what's wrong with the modern age of we're so impatient. He had versions of all those things in here. But now the mechanical apparatus of providing us with things has gotten so advanced. You know, he predicts that this will lead to tyranny again. It's not been so much. The power is split up in a way that he would actually kind of like.

1:11:18 Mark: But I don't think he had very

1:11:20 Unknown speaker: clearly in mind a handful of giant corporations and also the government, you know, according to his analysis, I think that they have made us more apathetic, more helpless, that there's such a big difference between what Apple can do and what

1:11:33 Mark: me and a couple of my friends getting together, you know, and starting a business can do. That that is so sharp that we

1:11:38 Unknown speaker: end up shrinking our sense of efficacy smaller and smaller.

1:11:42 Wes: But here's what hasn't changed, and here's what's still in effect in 2016. It's exactly the same. We are all individually weak, but if we join together, we have power.

1:11:50 Unknown speaker: And the issue is that we look at Facebook and we go, I cannot

1:11:55 Wes: believe that they're doing this.

1:11:57 Unknown speaker: Then we look at Facebook and go, oh, my God, did you see that baby giraffe? Instead, what we should say is, I can't believe they're doing that. Let me find all these other people

1:12:06 Wes: that are outraged and let us organize.

1:12:08 Unknown speaker: I think that apparatus that you can do that still exists in this country.

The tragedy of the commons isn't a new idea. Right. Tragedy of commons comes from the idea of everybody's taking their sheep to the commons and having them eat all the grass. And it's well before the Internet, it's well before our political institutions. It may be exacerbated now that we have maybe we have more individualism. It's easier to be individualistic now than it was for de Tocqueville's time. I'm not 100% sure about that. It's very hard to get people devoted to relatively abstract things. I mean, something like climate change, even as much as you try to see it every day, it's slow moving and abstract in a way that's hard to just get people fired up about it.

Right.

1:12:52 Dylan: Yeah.

1:12:53 Wes: Another thing to keep in mind is

1:12:54 Unknown speaker: that when de Tocqueville praises civil associations, it's not because. Yeah, it's all these good causes. And even though that's a nice thing too, and those things can get done,

1:13:05 Wes: it's because they serve as a counterbalance

1:13:08 Unknown speaker: to another sort of power. They are seats of power.

1:13:11 Wes: So any sort of civil association is

1:13:12 Unknown speaker: a seat of power that provides balance to other seats of power and prevents evil from being done. So on the one hand, there's an aspiration to the good, to the maximal good for society. On the other hand, there's this worry about preventing outright evil, preventing tyranny, preventing the worst thing that could possibly happen. And I think he's more concerned about

1:13:32 Wes: how do we set things up to prevent the worst thing from happening.

1:13:36 Unknown speaker: Then he's thinking about, well, how do we get the best.

Yes.

1:13:39 Wes: And some of those ways, I mean,

1:13:40 Unknown speaker: we hear all about in our social studies classes. So for instance, just the administrative fragmentation of America is a good thing for him.

1:13:49 Wes: If you had a centralized government, there's

1:13:51 Unknown speaker: more power to actually do good things. There's more power to do bad things.

1:13:54 Wes: But in America, the fragmentation of administration

1:13:57 Unknown speaker: between federal government and states and localities, De Tocqueville likes that because that kind of fragmentation spreads power out and prevents tyranny.

1:14:06 Dylan: Yeah, it enhances freedom and prevention.

1:14:08 Wes: And in a way, one of the

1:14:09 Unknown speaker: costs is that it's harder to get good things.

1:14:12 Wes: It's like you have checks and balances,

1:14:14 Unknown speaker: Congress and the judiciary and the executive and looking at the Federalist Papers. And de Tocqueville realizes this too, in a way. Gridlock is not a bug, but it's a feature.

1:14:24 Wes: Obviously there are huge costs to that

1:14:26 Unknown speaker: because we could get a lot more done and a lot more good things done if that weren't the case.

There is a herding camp mentality. Right.

1:14:32 Dylan: Where in order to really get things

1:14:33 Unknown speaker: done and be efficient, you have to get lots of individuals walking in the same direction. That's sort of what the problem is. Right. But de Tocqueville doesn't see that the great solution is to have a centralized power because it leads to despotism, because you just drag people all in the same direction.

Part of all this is that democracy is an ideal or an idea. And then you have your government, which is the application of that idea, and then you have the bureaucracy that arises from the government existing. Each of those things is intention. I was just curious how big the United States federal government is in the order of a couple million people. And then if you add in all the state and local governments, and then if you add the military, you're talking like maybe one in seven or eight Americans is part of the bureaucracy. How does that gum up the works?

1:15:27 Mark: I don't think he thinks it gums up the works at all.

1:15:29 Unknown speaker: I think he.

Well, it didn't in 1835. That's what I mean. But now, like, is there any point where it just starts to collapse under its own weight?

I suppose it depends on the nature of the relations that if it is really top down and everybody's just different cogs in this big machine, that's maybe not fulfilling what he wants, which is people on a local level engaged in civic activity.

1:15:51 Mark: If everybody, oh, the government has too many people.

1:15:53 Unknown speaker: Well, those are mostly people working in their own communities on local issues or something like that. He would love that.

He would love.

If 100% of people were part of the government. You could never have too much of that.

1:16:04 Wes: Yeah.

1:16:04 Unknown speaker: He would probably end up framing the

1:16:06 Wes: answer to both of these questions in terms of freedom, because freedom is the equivalent in the political sphere as equality is in the social sphere for him. So it would be a question of

1:16:16 Unknown speaker: identifying whether the mechanisms for freedom.

1:16:18 Wes: What have we given up and what are we getting in return? And is that balanced? I think that's how it would end up getting cashed out for him somehow.

1:16:26 Unknown speaker: I wanted to bring up one issue, since you're talking about freedom and equality here. We didn't really talk about specifically what he thinks the relationship between them is, which is sometimes characterized as. This is what the whole book is about, that we think freedom and equality are the same thing and they Kind of do come together as a historical movement, but they're quite different. Right. Equality conditions existed way before freedom. We were saying part of this historical story is that it's kings stamping down the aristocracy. So it's just the monarch, and then everybody else is approximately on the same level. So you had equality before you have freedom. He thinks actually people want equality more than freedom. They want equality in freedom, and if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.

1:17:07 Mark: They will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but

1:17:09 Unknown speaker: they will not tolerate aristocracy.

1:17:11 Mark: So I was trying to think about

1:17:13 Unknown speaker: that, how that connects to what's going on now. I had a hard time because what we consider freedom has gone through so many permutations and, oh, is Obamacare restricting my freedom? Is corporate interference restricting freedom? There's a lot of things, you know, and certainly he was aware that freedom doesn't just refer to freedom from governmental powers. And he was very much concerned with this grip of common opinion that he talked about. Was, despite what I said about, there are still taboo subjects that you can be ostracized about. It seemed it was much more uniform that you can use the Internet, whatever.

You can find a subculture that's into whatever deviant belief that you have. And we very much have a different model, this John Rawls liberalism model, where laws are supposed to be kind of neutral with relation to the various beliefs that we might have. And that extends much more widely, so that we don't really agree anymore with Tocqueville. You know, some politicians will argue this, that certainly we don't need a unified religion that's pervasive everywhere. Tocqueville knew that there are all different kinds of Christianity, but the fact that they're all Christianity, that was enough to be like one of the bulwarks that we need to keep society together.

You could maybe point at different things. When people are concerned about, is Trump going to deny the election results, it's because he's breaking a social more that, like Tocqueville, thought that there were certain social mores that were necessary to keep democracy afloat. That's, I think, where some of the angst about that is coming from, that it's not just that we have certain laws. It doesn't matter if Trump admits that he lost or not. If he loses, he loses. But, no, we think it's not just the law. It's that there are certain mores that we have to have in common still.

1:18:53 Mark: So there are all these things that he's addressing about freedom that don't just

1:18:57 Unknown speaker: have to do with governmental power, which when we talk about freedom, I think we more do think about governmental power. We don't think about, you know, people talk about freedom in terms of freedom from political correctness. So there are places in our dialogue where we acknowledge this. But it seems that fundamentally different, different connotations will come to us than would to him. When he talks about freedom and equality, we barely talk about at all. We talk about this in terms of the 99% and the oligarchy of the rich. But what are we really shooting for? This seems to be one of the

1:19:26 Mark: things that, again, I think is harder

1:19:29 Unknown speaker: for us to see, maybe because we're closer to it now or we just have a. Too much has happened historically so that, you know, I think Tocqueville in France, since liberty, equality, fraternity, that was one of the things right from the start in French Revolution was one of the things that they were really concerned about having fought with an aristocracy. We're so used to equality of conditions being the foundation of our whole society that we don't explicitly think that much about. You know, he's getting ahead of me that it's more underlying that you could

1:19:57 Mark: interpret the reaction that Trump is tapping

1:20:00 Unknown speaker: into as very explicitly against elites of all sorts. You know, so what is that but a call for more equality, a call against aristocracy?

1:20:09 Wes: So first off, let's say that in the spirit of what he was asking people to do, this book represents a public good from de Tocqueville. He went outside of himself and tried to share with his fellow countrymen a view of what he saw in America for their betterment and probably contributed to a national conversation that has gone on. We're still reading him 180 years later.

1:20:31 Unknown speaker: We didn't read any section about where

1:20:33 Wes: he talks about what he thinks specifically about the way that the government is constructed in the United States.

1:20:37 Unknown speaker: But this idea that there's a balance

1:20:39 Wes: of powers and the political institutions of the United States are robust and were built for resiliency over the long haul. I think what he offers in this book is essentially a prescription for the same thing in the social sphere.

1:20:53 Unknown speaker: And the way I diagnose today in

1:20:56 Wes: Tocqueville terms is a look at a breakdown of the balance of powers in the social sphere, which can be articulated in the phrase the system is rigged. Now, whether you think it's rigged because you have skills that are suited for a factory in some place, and you think it's rigged because capitalists have shipped your jobs overseas, or whether you think it's rigged because you're 23 and you have over six figures of debt from trying to get a mandatory education so that you can get a career because you can't get a job if you're competing with all these other people.

Either way, it's because of the breakdown of these social conditions in these social institutions that were meant to maintain the balance of the civil society and the fact that the founding fathers were prescient and that our political system is still very robust and working is the fact that people are still spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get other people elected.

1:21:51 Unknown speaker: If it wasn't worth anything, they wouldn't

1:21:53 Wes: be spending the money to do it.

1:21:54 Unknown speaker: All right, thank each and every one

of you for being here.

1:21:57 Wes: Thank you for being and putting up with this.

1:22:00 Unknown speaker: Good night.

Good night, everybody.

Hey, folks, hope you enjoyed the live show. Just so you know, there's video of that whole thing on our YouTube channel. If you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and look at the post corresponding to this episode, you'll see we have embedded it right there. Hey, within the next week we will have a blog post up at partiallyexaminedlife.com where you can pre order the 2017 wall calendar featuring art by Corey from Existential Comics. For our closing music, I again want to highlight one of the artists that I've had on my Nakedly Examined music podcast. I talked to Nick Van Eede, whom you definitely know, maybe not by that name, from the 80s band Cutting Crew.

1:22:40 Mark: I just died in your arms tonight,

1:22:42 Unknown speaker: that very popular song. Well, this is a song called Shot of Democracy from the 2005 Grinning Souls album. I hope you like it. I hope you go check out nakedlyexaminedmusic.com for my episode 10 with Nick Van Eede where we discuss some of his other songs.

You will know less than you you will see unless we want you to. And all the stuff on the news it goes on and on and on we got some new crusade step in line there are souls to save this is a home of the brave to come out Come on, come on Gotta fight with a million Christian soldiers come by you One more thing I have to share with you Got out of, got out of get outside, get out. I heard your leaders and peers it all be your family but that's not the way we do it here. You need a shot of democracy smartphone royal we got that coming out of our ears right? I just put my my flag in your soil. And a million Christian soldiers. One more thing I have to share with you. Picture Jesus on one bedroom wall

he

seems to live and look a lot

1:25:41 Mark: like your

1:25:44 Unknown speaker: Sometimes I think I hear him say to me it's time to come home We've a million Christian soldiers coming for you and there's one last thing I have to share with you we got outside, got outside get outside, get our outside, get our side. I have to share with. It.