Episode 170 Second Opinions: Leftists on “Society of the Spectacle”

0:06 Mark: Hey, you're listening to the Partially examined life, episode 170 after show or part three. Something we talked about Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and I'm here with Seth Paskin and some special guests to weigh in on how inadequately we treated the book. I mentioned at the end of that recording that I wanted to run this past. I felt a little bad that maybe we don't take these radical leftist things as seriously as some of our listeners might like. So we wanted to get some representation from other podcasts that you might want to check out. Doug, you've probably run your podcast the longest. Introduce yourself.

0:41 Douglas: My name is Douglas Lane. I'm the publisher of Zero Books and I do a podcast for Zero Books called Zero Squared. I've been doing a podcast longer than I've been doing it for Zero Books. I used to do a podcast called Diet Soap and I'm some sort of dirty commie probably.

0:56 Mark: And you've had Zizek on your show recently?

0:58 Douglas: I did have Zizek on my show not so long ago. It was a big score. It was a big moment. I felt like I could stop for doing podcasts after that. It's all been downhill from there and

1:08 Mark: we have intended to have you on as a guest for many years and just there are too many topics competing and never got around to picking something.

1:16 Douglas: Well, I'm glad to be on something

1:18 Mark: like your podcast now, Brett, introduce yourself and your project.

1:22 Brett: Yes, I'm probably the amateur here. I just started my podcast, Revolutionary Left Radio this March. I'm definitely a Marxist organizer here in Omaha, Nebraska. I'm a fan of the show. I've been a fan since I was an undergrad in college as a philosophy major. So I'm really excited to be on and hopefully I can contribute in my own little humble way.

1:40 Mark: And a previous guest from many years ago that we were happy to have return. Derek, introduce yourself.

1:46 Derek: Hi, I'm Derick Varn. I am a podcaster, mostly on Zero Squared and from Alpha To Omega. But I also do my own podcast, Symptomatic Redness, and appear on other things like the Sectarian Review and some Christian podcast. I don't even know how that happened.

2:04 Douglas: And you're also a reader at Zero Books and a poet.

2:07 Derek: Yeah, I'm a reader at Zero Books and a poet who has a book coming out next year from Unlikely Books. And I'm a dirty commie. In fact, I'm commier than Doug. That's usually how I like to.

2:18 Mark: But however, you're best known, of course, for being on our Saussure slash Levi-Strauss Derrida episode whenever that happened.

2:26 Derek: Yeah, five years ago.

2:27 Mark: Glad you're still doing it. And yeah, you hadn't had the Symptomatic Redness podcast at the time there. We've since had your co host Amog on a year and a half ago to talk about Hegel with us. So glad to have you back. Well, where should we start, Seth? Do you want to give us an agenda or throw out a question to the guys or.

2:46 Seth: You know, I guess my question would be the way we approach things. We look at the text and we try to let the text speak for itself. And so it's possible that contextually we didn't do the things that we should have done to correctly set the stage for the context in which Debord was writing, how the Situationists sort of functioned in that time period and how they came about historically and how they maybe died off historically, and whether he's actually relevant today in modern Marxist thought. So I think people can listen to the episode to get sort of more of the exposition of the text and kind of how we took it. But I'd like to kind of open the floor first with just how important is Debord? How important is this book? How is he perceived? How does he fit in kind of the different strains of Marxism and so forth?

3:33 Brett: Yeah, I mean, I could start off with just some basics before I hand it off to the other guys. I think I'll begin with like two main points that you guys touched on in the original episode, but I think are important to kind of rehash. I mean, in my opinion, you know, society, the spectacle arises out of Debord applying three fundamental Marxist concepts. The concept of alienation, concept of ideology, and the concept of commodity fetishism. They all overlap, but he's really taking those fundamental Marxist concepts and applying them to post industrial late capitalism.

And then the second point, as far as his tendency, as far as what role he plays in Marxist thought, you guys were kind of talking about him and Orwell and making comparisons there, there. I would just like to flesh that out a bit. I think Debord stands firmly in the libertarian Marxist tradition. It's not a term that's used often and some people are confused by it because the way the term libertarian is used in the American context is very different than it's used in European context. But libertarian basically means anti authoritarian and emphasis on democracy.

And Orwell, I think, was not as heavily influenced by Marxism at all. He was more anarchist, more democratic socialist. In the section of this book where Debord really dives in, he makes it a point to critique anarchism, Leninism, Trotskyism, social democracy and orthodox determinist Marxism. And I think that firmly puts him in the libertarian Marxist tendency fields.

4:52 Douglas: I'd like to address that question of how important Guy Debord and the Situationist in this particular book, the Society, the Spectacle is today for the contemporary left. And I think perhaps he is less relevant today than he's been in decades. I think after Occupy, Occupy Wall street was perhaps the last moment where you could truly see the influence of the Situationist project on American politics. And now I think we really are seeing a resurgence of social democracy and a different kind of approach to socialism, one that accommodates itself to remaining within the capitalist system much more than Guy Debord aimed at doing.

The other thing I would point out, just as kind of a personal aside, maybe, is that I came to the left largely through reading Debord. This is back in the early 90s, and, you know, I live in Portland and have been here for a long time. Portland, Oregon. So in the Pacific Northwest Guy Debord and the situation overall were, I think, very influential, at least, you know, in zine culture and fringe anarchist circles. The Marxism in Debord was mostly misunderstood or not really recognized. And he was taken up as a kind of anarchist thinker at that time.

The other thing I'd want to do is maybe kick a question over to Derek. I wonder to what degree we can say that Debord was influenced by Lukács more than Marx.

6:18 Mark: If you're going to name drop Lukács, you'd have to explain. You'd have to give the thumbnail encapsulation.

6:23 Douglas: Well, I was hoping to handle bar.

6:26 Derek: I actually don't think that Debord was that influenced by Lukács. I think it was influenced by Heidegger, and I think he was influenced by the artistic movements and the existentialism in France. But the reason why it comes up is Debord's focus on consciousness and particularly workers consciousness and false consciousness, which doesn't really come up in Marx, that comes up later in a lot of early social democratic writings. And when I say social democratic, I don't mean like social democracy in Sweden. I mean the early Communist party before it. Was that because he talks a lot about false consciousness. And that notion as consciousness is something like is reified and separate, really comes out of Lukács's class consciousness in history. Hold on, let me look. Make sure.

7:10 Mark: What is Lukács's first name?

7:12 Seth: I just.

7:13 Derek: Gregori.

7:14 Seth: Is he Hungarian?

7:15 Derek: Yes, he's Hungarian.

7:17 Seth: Okay, I got that right.

7:19 Douglas: He's quoted in section in chapter two, right at the top of the society spectacle.

7:24 Derek: He was a Hungarian who kind of flirted with the humanist wing of the, you know, sort of left Communism, but ended up being a Stalinist anyway. So his major work that gets quoted and is referenced here is History and class consciousness, which does get quoted in society a spectacle. But I actually don't think it's the most important thing.

7:47 Seth: Thing.

7:47 Mark: All right, so you're saying the notion of false consciousness, that was in Marx though. Right? But this was more developed by subsequent folks.

7:53 Derek: It's in Marx as like a throwaway notion related to alienation and abstractification. But the idea that like, you are being fooled into wanting something that you shouldn't want, that's not really so much in Marx. That's later. It was a way to explain things like trade union consciousness, which means like valuing the work site over the larger revolution, or why people didn't vote in their class interest all the time and so forth. That's what that theory really was trying to address.

8:24 Mark: So it's Marxist apologetics of why won't you unite you workers? Or why are you satisfied with something less than total revolution? Why are you. There has to be some sort of. I think this really gets at the heart of what we hosts are often accused of not getting when we read these leftist figures, is that, you know, I feel like if anybody is not just going through the motions, it's people that think about philosophy. Hopefully that's been kind of our job. So to think that somehow we're still being completely bamboozled by the system and we can't even see it.

And we would. Maybe this is a good one to start with, Brett, because I, you know, one of the things that made me think about this as we were doing our political episodes earlier this year is you had things up on Facebook regularly that were kind of taking that position. Did I characterize it correctly on the previous discussion, where Trump is not such an aberration. He's just a symptom of an overall horrendous system. And so the solution, if you vote for either one of the major parties, you're sort of getting bamboozled, and there's just something fundamentally corrupt in the system.

9:25 Brett: Yeah, I do think that's right. And I think many thinkers have touched on this basic concept that Marx himself underestimated the ability for the capitalist system to adapt to sort of the demand. So a lot of the radical unionism and the Marxist and anarchist influence movements throughout the centuries, you know, in the Industrial Revolution and whatnot, a lot of those influences were absorbed into the system, and it helped perpetuate the sort of social democracy, the New Deal, those reforms. Capitalism was able to take those grievances and turn them into reforms.

And then through the accumulation of wealth and through. Capitalism is really good at amassing massive amounts of wealth and resources. And so it has more ability to sort of pay off the working class, give them homes and cars and cell phones and TVs. And by doing that, there is sort of an ability for the people at the top of the capitalist pyramid to maintain power, maintain their control over the entire global system, and stave off revolution from the bottom. I think Marx misunderstood that. And I also think Marx thought that the Industrial Revolution would be the big thing that altered the productive forces to such an extent that it made revolution inevitable.

And that clearly wasn't the case. So I think you do portray it right. I think the system is getting sicker and sicker. I think neoliberalism is sort of synonymous with late capitalism, and it's starting to really bring down the quality of life for workers, even in the first world. And so I think we're starting to bump up against the limitations of the system, and both parties are starting to feel inadequate in that context.

11:00 Douglas: I want to jump in and just say that something I wrote in all caps at the top of the notes that I took for this conversation, which is that the main thing to understand about Debord's critique is that he is not only critiquing capitalism per se, but I think he is very much trying to explain why people aren't overthrowing the system. But he's taking for granted that you have some basic understanding of Marx's critique of capital and a lot of these concepts. And then he's trying to show how the economic foundation of society creates these conditions in the culture that then keep people, the working class, from seizing the means of production and transforming society. And so if you take him to be critiquing society first, man and foremost, then you miss that turn he makes where he's really explaining how society reproduces itself and why people don't change their conditions.

12:01 Derek: I think we're gonna have to deal with the fact that leftists don't agree on anything. And to go back to false consciousness for a second and what it plays in here, because it does play in a lot, it gets mentioned over and over again. That doesn't come from Marx at all. I just looked it up. Up. It's only mentioned once in Engels. The exact mention. I'll read it to you. Ideology is a process accomplished by a so called thinker. Consciously it is true, but with a false consciousness, the real motive forces impelling him to remain unknown to him. Otherwise it is simply not part of the ideological process.

Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. That's it, that's what explains it. So the idea is your ideology is a well thought out system that actually hides your interest. Now again, Marx doesn't seem to think that there is some of that kind of implied in commodity fetishism. But for the most part, if you read Das Kapital, he seems to think that most people act in their immediate interest, as if their immediate interest and their long term interests are separate. If you try to, for example, just not work, even though working's alienating you from your labor, you don't eat, so your immediate interest is to work, so you eat.

I mean, it's that simple.

13:19 Douglas: And the other thing is, even capitalists don't act in their own long term interest, but only in their immediate interest, which sets up a lot of problems for capitalists in society. It's not just workers who are stuck thinking short term and individually. And the whole genius of Marx is that he can explain the totality of this beyond any one player's individual consciousness.

13:43 Derek: Right.

13:43 Seth: So what I don't want this to become is kind of like an exposition on Marx and the difference between Marx. The question was. So we have this guy who wrote this book in 1967. There's a whole bunch of violent crazy shit going on in the late 60s all across the globe. Right. But manifested in Paris and obviously in the United States and other places. We have this book where this guy is diagnosing what he. The way we positioned it in the podcast was it's bringing together Marx and Marshall McLuhan in some respect. And the question I originally posed was to what extent is this guy Relevant?

Is he an extremist? A lot of times we don't know when we do because we're focused on the text. We don't know if we're reading somebody who's central to the theme or influential or not. Let's not figure out Marx vs Lukács as far as influencers. But was this Guy important? Was he not important? Was this work important? Was it not important? Because, you know, I listened to a recording, feel like it was the London Review of Books about how influential this work actually was. How many people actually read it and got revolutionary or anarchist, as the case may be.

14:52 Douglas: I've written a novel where Guy Debord is a character. It takes place in May of 1968. And one of the reasons that Guy Debord continues to be read and continues to be revered was because he seemed to be very influential in France at that time. And actually his theory seemed to spark a major uprising and a major student and worker strike in May of 1968. And, you know, he worked with students at Nanterre to do some publications and develop their own theoretical line and. And they published a little tract called on the Poverty of Student Life about a year or two before the major strikes happened. And that shut down, really, almost all of France. Millions of people ended up on strike in May of 1968. So the question was Debord influential? Probably not as much as he claims to have been, but I think it's clear that he was influential.

15:52 Unknown speaker: And.

15:53 Douglas: And the reason he continues to be influential is largely to do, I think, with the fact that the left has sort of mythologized this failure of May 1968. It's the great last chance, the last moment we can remember in our lifetime where we really almost had those bastards on the run. You know, we were going to take society and transform it into our socialist utopia by, you know, marching in the streets and throwing paving stones at cops and creating great art and, you know, having free sex and love. And that was, you know, of course, it's the 60s, the European 60s. So, yes, he was influential, I would

16:30 Brett: say, as somebody that's. I'm 28 years old, I'm operating right now, organizing in my community, doing all of that. I think if you go up and ask the average leftist today, who is Guy Debord? They wouldn't know. I don't think that his influence has left at least an explicit mark on the left. Maybe there are contributions that he made to critical theory and to the development of thinking on the left that is kind of absorbed into a broad amalgam of leftist ideas. But I think at this moment, with the millennial generation at least, who are active on the streets, I don't think that Debord is necessarily an explicit influence on very many people. And that might be pessimistic, but that's just my take from my experience.

17:13 Mark: Can you say just a little more, Doug, about. You said that Occupy had something in common with the Situationist International movement in a way that subsequent things.

17:23 Douglas: The way I trace it is that Karl Marcus wrote a book in the 90s or 8990 called lipstick traces in which he made a case for the Situationist having had a very large influence on the genesis of punk rock, especially through the Sex Pistols. So that book then influenced my generation, some of us anyway, the hipsters, to be interested in Debord and the Situation themselves, rather than just the Sex Pistols, especially someone like me was never cool enough to actually be part of any punk scene. If I could read this book, right? So that's how the kind of cultural influence of the Situation has happened.

And then a magazine called Adbusters was formed and the people involved with that came out of that whole milieu around punk rock and alternative lifestyles and anarchism. And they were the ones who called for Occupy to happen. Originally in 2011, you know, Occupy was born out of a magazine that was really run by middle aged lefties and

18:26 Derek: you had some of the same tension. So what was happening in is that a lot of the communist parties related to Stalin have really kind of stalled out. And the unions had long standing ties to them, but they weren't seeming to be as active on other issues that involved civil rights, immigration, Algiers, all these actually are coming up in the background. The Situationists are one of the factions that are important in that, but they're not the only one. I mean, there's a bunch of Maoists who also broke with the official parties who were big in 68, and there's a bunch of social democrats who were too.

The Situationist International is sexy. And I do remember hearing a lot more about him in the 90s. I also read Lipstick Traces when I was in high school and got a copy of Society a Spectacle and all that when I was like 17 years old. So I think it was more influential maybe even 10 years ago. So yeah, I don't think the average leftist now knows of the. Or if they have, and they might have heard of Society of Spectacle maybe, but they definitely probably haven't read it. It's just interesting if you look at that time period. Why Debord stays has to do with how catchy some of those aphorisms are, particularly in French, because, I mean, these things got spray painted on the sides of buildings and stuff.

But it makes it seem like they had a lot more influence probably than they actually, actually did. Most of the unions who got involved with the students probably never heard of SI in France either in the late 60s. Well, I don't know.

20:00 Douglas: At Nanterre, I think people had heard of the SI where the student strike started in 68.

20:06 Derek: But when the workers got involved in the strikes is when really things heated up. And I don't think they would have heard about SI at all. I mean, why would they have known about avant garde art movement?

20:14 Mark: So whether or not the specific, specific historical connection between this text and different factions of the left, despite how strong or weak that may be, it seems like some of the overall approach that is exemplified in this text, whether Debord initiated it or was just, you know, one of many in the Marxist tradition that voices this. It's the false consciousness thing that we talked about. And part of that is the additional emphasis on consumerism, which, given the way this came out, the culturals touched on. To me reading this was Charlie Brown's Christmas was oh, Even My Dog gone commercial. It was very fashionable at the time. And so having that comparison makes me sort of think that, yeah, this is sort of a hysterical exaggeration, that, yes, our consumer society is set up so that if you are not careful, anywhere you turn, somebody just wants to take all your money.

21:06 Douglas: This is why we were talking about Marx so much at the beginning, is because, look, what Debord was doing was cutting up Capital and a bunch of other things, texts, and trying to rearrange it into a new theory. So when he's talking about the commodity, he's not talking only or even primarily about a consumer product. He's talking about a way that we create the world. He's talking about as much about production as he is about the market. So he's not just talking about the commercialization of Christmas. He's talking about the way that ways of life, modes of life have been subsumed by a capitalist order where people who used to work their own land are now wage workers.

And, you know, people used to live in rural communities are now in cities and their only leisure is consuming the same products that everyone else does. And there's where you get the consumption. But it's not mostly about consumption, I don't think.

22:01 Mark: Well, certainly there's a huge emphasis in here. About how consumerism has, you know, we are already selling our daytime to the capitalist machine in the time of Marx. And that was the problem that you're pointing out in terms of the shifting to wage labor. And that's a huge problem by itself. But that what is pernicious about this late stage capitalism, it doesn't just let you go home at the end of the day is that as we tried to describe and Seth, I think gave some good examples of this, our entire culture, the way that we think about lifestyles, has become commoditized.

And some of this you can talk about just in terms of, of modernism. What he had to say about space and time being very uniformed and kind of the overall modernist turn, if I'm using that term correctly, of yes, everyone will live in boxes, everyone will eat the same thing. So we're very familiar with this kind of critique, especially from that time period, which seems a little bit of a relic that changes in communications. And this whole move to the postmodern, culturally and philosophically, et cetera, seems to have lessened the fear perhaps, I think that we're all going to be living in exactly the same little box house.

The Little Boxes song, that whole fear.

23:12 Derek: I do want to talk about something that you have to kind of understand the extrapolation debord's doing from Marx and from actually from Hegel to really get where you're going here. If you look at Aphorism 18, Chapter 1, I like the Knabb translation because it's free. When the real world is transformed, formed in the mirror images. Mirror images become real beings, figments that provide the direction motivations for hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to use various specialized meditations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch. The most abstractly easily deceived sense in the most readily adaptable to generalized abstraction. In the present day society, that would

23:55 Mark: be mediations, not meditation.

23:56 Derek: Meditations, but yes, but the spectacle is merely a matter of images, not merely matted images, not even images plus sounds. It is what escapes people's activity. Whatever else their practical considerations correction, it is the opposite of dialogue. Whenever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself. That's coming out of this notion of abstractification in Hegel and Marx. So history makes itself known, and as it makes itself known, and it also abstractifies itself. And that abstractification or reification, probably a better way to think about it becomes manifested in symbols and fetishes.

And so the representation substitutes for the relationship. That's a fundamental idea in Das Kapital. Marx is getting that from Hegel, and that's what Debord is saying. But he's saying now that that's gone beyond, like, commodity relationships and gone into the totality of life, and that representations, like, become dominant.

24:53 Brett: This makes me think of almost as if the spectacle has intensified over time. The dawn of social media, the mediation of relationships. Social relationships are increasingly. They're being mediated through social media and profile pics and memes and a sort of crafted representation of who you are and what your life is that's being presented to other people. And. And so would you guys agree with me that, like, Facebook and Twitter is an example of the spectacle in 21st century society, or is that too simplistic?

25:23 Douglas: I would think that it certainly is an example. Yes, I would agree with you. But I think that the trouble is that Debord wants to say more than he's actually able to say. As I read this again, and I was a huge fan of Debord when I first read it in the 90s when I was young, thought it was great and I hadn't read any Marx at that point, the board wants to say something about how we need to grab hold of history and shape it ourselves. And when he says we, he doesn't mean abstract we. He means the working class. The people who actually do the work to make things in society need to be able to control society and shape history.

And when he's talking about the world becoming abstracted, what he mostly means is that it's further and further away from our hands, that we simply accept the way the world is unfolding as passive observers rather than trying to take the helm of history. Debord would not be satisfied by hiking around. I mean, maybe he would, maybe this is a problem. But he shouldn't be satisfied with hiking around with Jack Kerouac looking for the ultimate experience as an individual of some direct, mystical thing. What the board wants is for the working class to shape history and to shape reality.

That's important to keep in mind. It's not as though we could turn away from consumer society and just start living off the grid because we're just as far away, we're farther away than ever. If we do that from shaping history and from taking control of our society, we're still well within the spectacle. Even if we turn off every WI FI device we have and eat dirt every day or whatever to pick up

27:07 Derek: A little more on this. Debord thought that the spectacle was inescapable and that seems to be tied to his suicide.

27:15 Seth: Spoiler.

27:18 Derek: I was frustrated in reading this again. And like, I, like Doug, loved it when I read it when I was young. And how much the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus moves around in a way where it's hard to pin down exactly what it's doing. So I can quote you that thing where I understand what he's doing and how it relates to Marxism, but then we can go just a few paragraphs later and get something like, the spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and it ultimately expresses nothing more than its risk for sleep. That's not really the same thing as what the spectacle was a little while ago.

27:54 Mark: It's not the same as the generalized abstraction.

27:56 Derek: He's moving from a poetic definition to a very like Hegelian philosophy specific definition into these other things. And I do think it kind of reads like Marxist apologetics. He's making good points, but he's not making them in a clear way.

28:09 Mark: Can you just clarify if we're going to say that this abstraction. I know that Hegel was against the abstract in general, which of course is ironic to many of his readers, like Kierkegaard, who then thought Hegel himself was hopelessly abstract. But say a little about what if we can put it in a minute or less abstraction.

28:28 Derek: And the reaction against it is what he sees as a dialectic move's history. Abstraction becomes clarified by the movement of the absolute against historical power. I don't really know what that means. So in Marx, I feel like I

28:40 Seth: do know what it means.

28:41 Derek: In Marx, relationships of dominance are hidden a lot of times through exploitation, and that exploitation is hidden by mediating the relationship with something symbolic. So you mediate it with money as opposed to just taking your stuff. And that mediation is how I hide the fact that I am not giving you as much for your labor as your product is worth. And this also hides all other sorts of oppressions and domination in society. But the main one that Marcus concerned with is that as this becomes more and more abstractified through money, you can't see the relationship you have to your boss and to people who live off your labor. And Debord, that becomes like a model for the entirety of the way we mediate our social lives through media. And it's not clear exactly what the relationship is to, like, standard abstractification, commodity fetishism and Marx.

29:35 Mark: This is related to the alienation from labor that I used to make Things myself on my farm. And that was all very concrete. And once I'm instead doing something for money, and maybe I don't even, I'm even doing a part of something, I'm on an assembly line, then I become alienated from the product of my labor. That's the same thing as saying that the work itself has become abstractified. And then I could see how he would want to extend this again through consumerism in the complicated way that Seth had described it in our main discussion about how just your whole lifestyle and social relations become similarly abstractified, similarly alienated. Alienation and abstraction are pretty much the same thing, right?

30:18 Derek: Yes.

30:19 Mark: Okay.

30:19 Douglas: My understanding of Hegel is that the abstractification and alienation is not always a bad thing. It's actually what drives the progress of history towards the absolute. That every step of the way where you think you have some concrete, sensible, direct experience, every time you find an abstraction that is a good thing because it makes you reconfigure your understanding and ultimately society in the world. So for Hegel, my understanding is that the absolute is to firmly grasp as a society the power of this abstractification, to recognize it as something that society itself is doing that's not being done to it. But I'll have to admit the one part of Hegel that really confounds me is the absolute. I think perhaps the reason it does so is because as a society we haven't reached it. So. But that's maybe a cop out.

31:18 Mark: So the total self reflective understanding of the society of itself, like which is what Debord is shooting for in wanting worker class consciousness. The people need to become conscious of the social forces that are at work. And so that makes society no longer this blind monster moving along where social processes have even gotten divorced from the original logic that produced them and are just these self propelling, hideous entities that, you know, is what the spectacle represents. And the rest of us are lulled to sleep by the spectacle. That's what the waking up is about, is something like the Hegelian absolute.

31:55 Brett: Yeah. And in 88 aphorism, 88, he says the bourgeoisie came to power because it is the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by becoming the class of consciousness that directly speaks to what you were saying, Mark.

32:09 Mark: So Seth, what is still hanging unanswered for you?

32:13 Seth: They answered my initial questions for sure. I mean, I think now we should turn to the text a little bit more.

32:18 Mark: Yeah. What are things that in the text or that we commented on that you feel needed emendation, correction. Something else that you noticed when you

32:28 Brett: guys were discussing this question kept popping up. And maybe it's something that since we have Doug and Derek here, we can flesh this out a little bit more. Is this question, I think Wes continually brought it up, is it possible to live authentically, even outside of capitalism? Wouldn't the image centric illusion of social interaction and some remnants of the spectacle still remain? And I think that is something that was not really fully addressed in the episode. It was kind of left as an open question. And I think that's something that maybe we can address here.

One thing that I would argue is this sort of Buddhist or maybe anarcho primitivist critique of the human mind, Marxist traditions, bring it back to the advent of capitalism and ideology and all this anarcho primitivist, which I am not one. But it's worth pointing out they take the criticism beyond capitalism back to civilization itself and the creation of the symbolic mind. And the basic argument is that the human mind itself is programmed, sort of take a symbolic turn to distance itself and almost alienate itself from direct experience of reality through symbolic language, symbolic culture, this distancing between the actual human animal and everything around it, it through the veil of language and symbolism.

So I wonder, and I'm going to toss this question out to anybody who thinks that they can take it, how much of this is structured by capitalism and alienation and how much of this cuts deep into the human psyche itself and will merely changing the material conditions of a society fully eradicate some of the alienation that Marx and Debord are talking about?

34:02 Derek: I think authenticity is a false problem. No, I think it's a major problem for Debord and it's a major problem for a lot thinkers between like say 1945 and 1970. I mean, Adorno dealt with it too. He didn't really think authenticity was anything but jargon. And a lot of people who were around si, not necessarily SI members themselves, did become primitivist.

34:24 Douglas: John Zerzan is a primitivist. He's probably the primitivist. He was an influence on the WTO protests in 99, at least he claimed to be the primitivist. Love the si and they love this book. And that's because there is a strain of that kind of questing after authenticity that can lead you to a point where you give yourself a lobotomy, you know, and to try to destroy all symbolic thought in the mind. But I think the board, if you ever met John Zerzan, would Be disgusted. Of course, he was disgusted by most people he met. But I think he would be particularly disgusted by the Pacific Northwest primitivist ideology.

Because for the board, as much as he might have gotten some of Marx wrong, it was still important that what is necessary is to grab hold of history and to shape the world. And that's why he keeps returning to thought and not being asleep. And that kind of thing is because he wants the working class to not only be the hands that shape the world, but also the mind that shapes the world. World that directs its own activity. So, you know, if you're looking for authentic experience, you can't have it as an individual consumer or an individual of any kind by yourself.

You can have it as an individual, but it'll have to be inside a society that has been profoundly altered through some sort of revolutionary moment which we might call for Hegelians the moment of the absolute or for Marxist. So it would be the moment in which the worker sees the means of production for themselves and change the means of production.

35:58 Derek: One of the influences on the board that we have to deal with is that he tried to recombine SI did as a whole, actually Max Stirner with Marx. And anyone knows about Max Stirner, who's the egoist who thought everything was a spook and it was distorting your view of the world. I don't think Stirner gets referenced directly and sided spectacle. But you do have these things at the end of the book that are actually hard to read if it's talking to an individual or not. So if you look at 221, the self emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material basis of inverted truth.

This historic mission of establishing truth to the world can be carried out neither by isolated individuals nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de alienating form of realized democracy. To the councils in which practical theory verifies itself in its own actions only. There are individuals directly linked to history there where the dialogue is armed itself to impose its own conditions. So he's saying that it's not individuals, obviously, but he.

You won't actually say the working class.

37:12 Mark: Well, that's why I was trying to connect that to Hannah Arendt. In our discussion of her. We talked about how ultimately it's only sort of as authentic political actors that we are fully human. And it seems to reflect very much that same sentiment.

37:27 Brett: I also would mention when you mention of egoism, when you talk about Max Stirner, when you talk about anarcho primitivism, you're talking broadly about the post left. And that is a break from Marxism. That is a move, in my opinion, in an individualist direction. Anarcho primitivist, through meditation or through rewilding egoists, through insurrection, they kind of focus the spotlight on the individual. And that ambiguity at the end of this book precisely is what lends itself to that sort of individualism. And oftentimes the very individualism that we're discussing here is a major role in ideology of capital.

Capitalism generally. It wants to atomize people. It wants to break them down into individual consumers with individual desires precisely because it serves the capitalist structure. Collective action is the threat. And if I can just convince you that, let's take climate change for example, I can convince you that by changing out your light bulbs and using energy efficient appliances is how you combat climate change, well then the capitalist system can keep humming along and you can feel good about yourself by exchanging, changing your light bulbs.

And so this sort of individualism versus collectivism is a tension that is present all throughout this book and throughout the left overall. I think.

38:34 Derek: Yeah, it comes up again in Adorno's resignations, which he wrote at the end of his life, where he talks about, it's unclear to him whether or not the left is asking people collectively to pick themselves up basically by their bootstraps as opposed to individuals, and that it doesn't really work either way. And one of the things things to remember about this time period is most of the leftists from the 60s got really depressed. They weren't just post leftists like Jacques Camatte, who I'm pretty sure actually knew Debord was also coming out of that. And by the end of the 60s he was going from invariant full, you know, communism all the time to we need to run out into the forest as a collective and leave the world because we can't fight these people anymore.

39:17 Douglas: I just want to point out here though that in that paragraph you quoted me that you said he won't name the working class. I think he does name the working class precisely because he says that the historic mission to establish the truth can only be done by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by

39:34 Derek: reducing all power to alienating forms of realized democracy. Though that's not what Marx would say.

39:42 Douglas: No, I know, I don't agree with his solution. But he said saying, yeah, the workers council is the form that this will be what runs the new form of production.

39:51 Derek: But why won't he say That, I mean, this is the reason why I'm saying this. He deliberately organized students, not workers. If we also look at the context of what he actually did, it's not clear that he thinks the working class is still that class. Oh my God, we're getting into this like Marxist arcana. Make Seth puke.

40:10 Seth: Well, we're not making me puke. We're reinforcing stereotypes about what conversations between leftists are, are because they're true. I've been thinking this for about the last 20 minutes or so that one of the conceits of our podcast is we're bouncing what we read and the theory, the ideas, whatever they happen to be against kind of our lived experience. So there's a sense in which we're always trying to return to, does this have meaning? Is it influential? Does it compel you? Is it persuasive? And one of the things about this text to me was it felt like a pretty spot on diagnosis of another number of things that we're experiencing 30 or 40 years after this guy wrote the book.

And I don't want to minimize that fact by getting into abstruse arguments about whether such and such a person, you know, held this view or that view. It sounds a lot like, to some extent, theological arguments amongst Catholics, right? The Eastern Greek Orthodox versus. And the bottom line is this guy is basically putting out the thesis that the machinery of post industrial consumer capitalism has manufactured culture and society and media and everything in such a way that the entirety of our existence is mediated by images built, controlled, tossed away and renewed by that very mechanism.

And that strikes me as an exceptionally powerful critique that needs to be reckoned with.

41:37 Douglas: I think that one other thing to point out about what he did and what's so great about him or why he's still influential is how. How he created this critique and what the SI did. Overall, this is not a regular book. This is a book that's chopped up text from other books to a large extent. And we live now in a mashup culture. So if you want to look for the influence of the si, I think you could find it in our aesthetic and our mood and our attitude towards the world, especially those who want to be critical of the world, that this approach, where you sort of mock and same time embrace the media environment you're in, was very influential.

And I think it continues today in things like Vaporwave online that you can find. People will take old pop songs and digitally manipulate them and stretch them out and sort of make them ugly and unlistenable. Almost. And at the same time, you can tell that there's this nostalgia for the 80s and these kids that never were around or barely around in the 80s. And another example would be, like, Negativland, which is a 90s example. I'm dating myself here. But they would also create these collages, and they talked about culture jamming and trying to become the media environment you occupy.

All of that stuff comes sort of from the situation.

42:59 Derek: On some level, we seem more mediated by screens and whatever than we ever before, but it's not superimposed on us anymore. We're superimposing it on ourselves. If you look at the way Facebook works, it's not like you're a passive recipient of these images of which you create your identity to represent yourself to the world. Later, you actively create your identity to represent yourself to the world that then gets sold back to you, that then you sell again. I mean, like. And it's much more atomized, but it's not homogenized at all. Culturals get more and more niche and niche. And that's not exactly what this is describing.

43:33 Douglas: Oh, yeah, he gets a lot of stuff wrong in that regard because he's writing from the standpoint, really, of the 50s, which is when the SI started. He calls for participation in ways that just ring false to me as I read it again.

43:46 Brett: I also wonder when you talked about this notion of creating the context of mockery, to what extent this movement had on irony and the ironic detachment that's so prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s and still today. Many of the memes that are created on the Internet are highly ironic. And it's like this mocking, this sort of prankster or ironic detachment from the realities of the situation almost is deflating. It almost doesn't give a constructive way forward. And I think Debord was a big influence on David Foster Wallace specifically. And David Foster Wallace really brought this critique of irony to the fore and really worried about. I just think it's an interesting way to trace DeBoer's influence in Infinite Jest, for example, but David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest, in the desert scenes between the two.

44:32 Seth: I forget their names, but is that after page 333? Because that's as far as I got.

44:38 Brett: Yeah, I actually managed to read the whole thing. And in one of those scenes, there's actually explicit talk about the mediation of personal relationships between images. And so if the culmination of. Of this effect was really this sort of ironic detachment, then maybe it's ultimately a bad thing that's at least one way of looking at it.

44:56 Mark: It just calls to mind to me Camus myth of Sisyphus so if you want to say Debord was influenced just as much by existentialism as he was by Marxism, that whole idea of we can't actually escape the spectacle. And as Doug was saying, even trying to go primitivist, I'm just going to say no when they try to take my money. Like I was saying, you know, if the, the problem is excess commercialization, it sounds like, then go live on a farm, live more simply unplug your devices. But if even that is not going to remove us from the spectacle, then the only solution would be to somehow be in it, but be in it ironically, to be aware of what's going on, to sort of skate within it.

So that yes, I realize that you have sold me these shoes that I think are so cool and I'm identifying with, but I. But I do so intentionally and in fact maybe I'll even go around wearing a Burger King cap or an ironic 711 T shirt or something like that to just show how superior I am to the consumerist system even while I can't avoid but participating in it and

45:55 Derek: creating a new market.

45:56 Brett: Exactly.

45:57 Derek: I actually was thinking about one of these books, my experience of it and reading it now. Seth, you kind of indicated this to you in a way in your episode that as you begin, began with it, it seemed really, really trenchant. But as you go through it, it becomes kind of like you feel like maybe he's trying to have it both ways. That's kind of how I experienced this. Like I feel like at one end you have this artistic celebration irony, you can't escape the spectacle, you can just use it against itself, blah blah. And then you have this other more kind of classical revolutionary. We can break it all down by manifesting the class consciousness, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I actually feel like those two things are very much in tension with each other and they're not really reconciled in the tax.

46:36 Seth: I think that's a fair characterization. I mean there were parts of me in reading this and in thinking every day about my experience as a card carrying member of the dominant ideology, that there are times when I think the only way out of the reality of modern existence is a creative act, like a truly revolutionary creative act. I don't think in terms of politically necessarily, but like creating something artistic, performative creation that is in itself completely unbeholden to norms. So I'm sympathetic to that in a lot of respects. And Then I think, well, is it really within the power of an individual to overcome the constraints of so many different threats?

Not just, hey, this is, you know, you, birth school work death. But there's the art world and there's this and there's that. And, you know, I get pessimistic. And recently I was on a trip to New York, I was on a business trip, and I brought my wife, and we were visiting friends of hers, One of whom is a punk rock drummer in Brooklyn. And when I say punk rock, I mean, this is a guy who didn't have a bank account until two years ago, you know, and the only reason he got a bank account is because. Because he started creating pictorial art and people were just trying to give him money and he had no way to take it.

Like, it's just his life. And I thought, you know what? You fucking can beat the system. It's possible. Now, whether he gets, you know, ultimately absorbed by the art world and somehow Adornoized or whatever, I don't know. But revolution takes place in individual acts, small individual acts, and how they come together or don't to create some kind of collective consciousness or class consciousness, I'm not entirely sure. But right now I'm on the side of it is possible to step outside of the spectacle. Now. We did just do an episode. We did just record last night, as a matter of fact, an episode on the book by Robert Wright, why Buddhism is True with Robert Wright.

And there's an interesting potential argument to be made that mindfulness meditation is a prescription for the malady described by Debord as a Marxist, as well as, you know, the Buddha, desire and suffering, they're all part and parcel of the same thing, which would be awfully fucking weird if the Buddha diagnosed the suffering thing 2000 years roughly before Marx came out with his critique of capitalism. It's quite an anticipation.

49:09 Douglas: I just want to tell you. I really appreciate what you're saying, and when the revolution happens, I will do my best to keep Varn at bay and keep you out of the Gulag.

49:19 Seth: I appreciate that.

49:20 Brett: Your friend that you were talking about, he's still got a bank account. And so the power of the spectacle, the power of the capitalist system, is precisely that it can inevitably absorb you and make you work for it. It can even absorb the most pointed critiques of the system into it and profit off of it. And so that is sort of the problem that I have personally with this notion that individual moves can really be revolutionary. They can only be revolutionary maybe to you emotionally or to you specifically. But the overall system will continue to perpetuate itself.

My two main influences would be Marxism and Buddhism. So I totally understand that Buddhism offers a way out of this system, out of the personal mind being entrenched in it. But I'm just not sure how we can connect up that individual activity with a collective activity. That is truly revolutionary. And that's kind of where I'm at.

50:12 Mark: Everyone will sit on the same meditative mats. We will all sit in straight lines.

50:16 Derek: You shouldn't laugh. It actually was a social proposition at one point. Like someone actually really did suggest that. But I'm also a former novice monk even so, yeah, Bhikkhus. No, actually samanera. But I wasn't a bhikkhu.

50:32 Seth: Can I just say, like, you guys are getting me all energy energized and excited. It, what I just heard you say is that any individual act, any individual act of, let's just call it rebellion against the spectacle. And I'm trying to recall, I don't have my, I have my notes in front of me, but I don't feel like looking at them about where I think Debord talks about whether or not you can actually rebel or not against the spectacle, but the idea of transcending it or escaping it in some respects. If you're saying that any individual act can't be necessarily political, but it might be psychological, the question is how could multiple people who are engaged in an act of psychological disobedience almost or psychological emancipation from the spectacle, how could that forge together?

And it is the case that I don't believe that meditation affords that. In fact, one of the criticisms that we've had of Buddhism through our number of episodes on it and all that is that it, it doesn't seem to provide a meaningful path for a social philosophy, a political philosophy. I mean, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But it's very difficult to get away from self emancipation to. It's hard enough to even get to an individual moral action, much less to collective political action. Right? But the challenge is that the dominant system, capitalism has that means in the form of, of capital and prices.

It has a mechanism, right? It has a metaphysical and epistemological construct and then a vehicle for trading off and evaluating values and negotiating values amongst people so that you can identify with others. And the question is, what is capital and what is the pricing mechanism for people who are trying to self emancipate.

52:21 Derek: There really isn't one for self emancipation because there's. If you want to get. I don't want to answer this the way I'm inclined to because I'm going to live up to every negative stereotype of a leftist ever. Because there's really no way to deal with abstract value without obscuring parts of its necessity. I mean, one of the things about prices is that if the price was actually priced in a way where all sides exchanged equally in their best interest, no one would ever make any money. So there has to be something obscured in the, in the abstraction.

I mean, that's like, that's what Mark says is it does transfer information. Markets do. I mean, like, markets aren't really the problem with capitalism. Markets are way, way, way older than capitalism. The problem is the way the wage relationship changes all that, including the market. Market itself. That's really the issue. And we lived in a world where like, everybody made their stuff and sold their stuff for prices and the prices went out. We wouldn't produce very much because we wouldn't have enough labor to do it, but we also wouldn't be alienated from our labor in the same way.

I mean, markets aren't the issue. And I think when a lot of Marxists talk to people who aren't Marxist, we're not even talking about the same thing. When we say capitalism, I don't think

53:37 Douglas: I want to jump into, to say something too. Which is the reason why leftists sound like we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is because when you've read Marx's Capital and you've taken it in, what you realize is that the problem with capitalism isn't primarily a matter of attitude, isn't a matter of whether or not you have good or bad people. It's like there's a technical problem and it has to do with how things are made and how people are compensated for how things are made. It doesn't matter how nice a boss you have, that technical problem is going to remain.

And then working out like exactly what the ramifications of that technical problem are. And the problem is the production of commodities or the commodity form, to put it in such a way that no one will understand what the hell I'm talking about. Arguing about that is the key to a lot of real Marxist debate and trying to figure out what the ramifications of that commodity production and is. And I'll just name one of them and try everyone's patience. But the thing about wages, the problem with wages is not so much that the capitalist is secretly calculating how much the worker made and then giving him some fraction of that.

The capitalist gives the worker the actual price. What he really should give him for the basket of commodities are all the things that the worker needs to be able to survive and come to work again the next day. And that can be varied because some societies are much more productive and have a much higher standard of living. But the point is that the relationship between the work you do and the price that you charge or your wage is not at all direct really. You're given a fair day's wage every single time that you're given enough that you can come to work again the next day because you're given exactly the amount you need to be able to buy the things you need to survive.

So I just say all that in a way of saying, like when you're looking for a price for things, you're well within the realm of capitalism. Just from the start.

55:44 Mark: Well, so this is why half of the Marxist picture of the alienation that we have towards our work, that is the part that I tend to focus on, that we had the whole new work episode and that's been sort of my political pet project. And specifically within that prescription, there's no call for revolution. In fact, it's very anti Marxist in this way that if you think of revolution is necessary, then something has gone wrong with your thinking. And I think part of that is for exactly the reason you're talking about. You don't have to get rid of markets, you don't have to get rid of the mass production even.

You just have to remove the chain from people's necks. You have to, whether it's through a guaranteed minimum income or something else, so that people can still produce things and sell them. And the pricing system works the same as it always has, but we start with a floor so that we really. All economic activity becomes optional. You can do more of this and people will always be. You would still expect motivation would be very high to keep improving your standard of living or something. But if just to live that we were no longer tying the price of labor to.

This is how much I have to pay you. As you were just saying, Doug, so you can live to come back and work some more that like no people's basic living expenses. We've developed enough robots and things, we've gotten so clever about automating systems that we can take care of people's basic needs in this way and everything beyond that. So you can kind of leave capitalism in place. You don't have to dismantle the banks, you don't have to do any of these radical things because just freeing people will by itself really change the dynamic of how capitalism is lived.

So in that sense it's not necessary for us to overthrow escape the spectacle and escape the cultural change. In terms of getting away from consumerism, one would expect come with the experience of no longer. I've been worked to death by my job and when I come home all I can do is sit on the couch and watch TV and I'm so depressed that I will go to the mall and spend more money. And it's that dynamic that drives consumerism and that drives that. Once you take the leash off of us, then what the board is looking for in terms of authenticity, at least that will be available.

57:58 Derek: That may be true, but it really does depend on how you see these fundamental interactions as being coded and what you think is possible within that logic. And that's where all these debates come from. And that's fine. I mean it's exhausting. Trust me, there's nothing more unfun than debating with leftists all day becomes habitual and actually depression causing and probably this

58:23 Douglas: kind of debate though is not so depressing.

58:25 Derek: It's when you talk to people who aren't just totally immersed in your world so you can remind yourself that you're actually talking. Like these ideas have consequences beyond like whether or not 50 Marxes on a pin equals one Engels most of

58:38 Douglas: the time it's the problem with leftists is that you encounter someone who says something that you don't agree with or you think isn't quite matching up to your understanding of Marx or whatever. And rather than saying no, I think you've gotten this wrong. It's like, yeah, you're a scumbag and you know, obviously a collaborator and immoral swine.

58:58 Seth: As we would say last night. There is an affective component to your judgment about the world.

59:03 Douglas: Right.

59:04 Mark: All right, well, I think we're reaching the end of the time we wanted to allot to this. Can you sum up, extrapolate from what we were just talking about to give us some closing sentiments. You want to start, Doug?

59:14 Douglas: Yeah. Well, I'll just say something about Debord, which is that if you wanted to meet. My understanding is if you wanted to meet a leftist who wrote was most typical in regards to being sort of a backbiter and not exactly gentlemanly or nice, probably Debord would be the man to meet. The SI started with I don't know how many members, but by the time it was done it was him and his wife. That was it. Everyone else had been cast out the organization. So, you know, it's not as though the board's track record as a political organizer is anything to admire or emulate. But it was only that despite, you know, his personality, I guess he created some really interesting works and had other people around him create interesting works that we can turn to today.

1:00:00 Derek: I would say that if someone really wants to get into this kind of thinking, I really think actually studying the history around May 68 is really interesting because it really kind of mirrors a lot of the unrest we're seeing right now, now. And it's one of those times where there's a big kind of shift in thinking and we're going through what seems to be kind of an ugly shift in thinking too. And it can go any number of ways. So I always find looking at the past really helpful for that, even if I don't necessarily find those ideas to be exactly perfectly accurate and sorry that we lived up the stereotypes. The end.

1:00:38 Brett: I do think that there are some important parts of this book. If the book as a whole has certain contradictions, predictions that can't be reconciled, I do think that there are pieces that we can grab out of it. For example, one quote that really stuck out to me, he's talking about the similarities between the spectacle and religious fetishism. And he says, waves of enthusiasm for a given product, moments of exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism. When he says stuff like that, it reminds me of Black Friday stampedes and iPhone releases.

So there is still something that's very much relevant to our modern world. But ultimately I compare these works of philosophy to the Marxist saying, philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world and the point is to change it. And so when I'm examining works of Marxist philosophy, I ask, has it changed the world? And I think it's a yes and a no in some respects. And insofar as it gave rise to punk movements and the Sex Pistols, which, which gave rise to hardcore scene and the first anti racist actions were taking place in hardcore scenes fighting Nazis and white supremacists.

And insofar as David Foster Wallace and Slavoj Zizek was influenced by him, I think there is still relevancy in today's world. So I think there's a lot to be gained. Although the book as a whole might not be as relevant as it was in 68.

1:02:02 Mark: Thanks to all three of you, as well as to Seth for Rejoining me, Seth was so energetic on our full group discussion. He was very excited to be able to talk a little more.

1:02:11 Seth: I need to do a 23andMe DNA assessment to find out if I have any marks.

1:02:19 Unknown speaker: Oh, that's funny.

1:02:20 Douglas: You can get that removed, I guess, if you do. Well, I hope it was. It was fun for everybody. I enjoyed it and I'm glad to come back and, you know, live up to stereotypes anytime.

1:02:30 Mark: All right. Good night, everybody.

1:02:32 Seth: Good night.

1:02:32 Derek: Good night.

1:02:33 Brett: Good night, everybody. Thank you very much.

1:02:34 Unknown speaker: Much.

1:02:44 Derek: And I'm not going to stop saying it until every one of you open your eyes.

1:02:59 Unknown speaker: I'm only saying to wake up. Hope and hatred escapes us Though we say from the past up they know we're slaves to the great ones so I pray that you open eyes and don't define truth from the propaganda Our foes divide just know the lies controlling lives the my machine is a home device known as the television so they can sell the business prescriptions and depictions of the poster crimes with an oversized box of pixels Mesmerized they lock you into the stress of times and block your whistle Cause they fear the movement and our plots official the clear illusions that they try to fit you inside an issue that has nothing to do with the reasons that we fly our missiles But I know if I can venture you'll hide a pistol Cause the enemy isn't your fellow but your high official so decide it's in you to know the real and discover they can't ever tell you how you're supposed to feel Wake up, wake up.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Open, open your eyes. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Open, open your mind, your mind. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Please don't, please don't be blind. Wake up, wake up, Wake up, wake up. Open, open door. I'm only saying to wake up. Hope and hatred escapes us as so we sway to the bass drum Knowing they can't disgrace us I stay one step ahead in case they come to shoot an instant war with the evils that are busted through My written scores are for people that just want the truth A little force that proceeds into something cruel I'm now the messenger One from the vast lineage trooper like William Cooper the truth of the past witnesses beautiful wrath through from the blackness till we penetrate the shadow Celebrate the coup like it's glass and soon the truth will amass the fools are collapsed and government will crumble in the ruins and fluids from facts it's my duty to blast the pipe dreams Break the core and stop the prophecy.

From 1984 Orwellian Fellowships of brotherhood's established Illuminati Freemason Nothing good is fasted. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up, wake up. Open up. Open your eyes, your eyes. Wake up, Wake up, wake up, wake up. Open, open your mind. Your mind. Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Please don't, please don't be blind. Wake up, wake up, wake up, Wake up. Open, open. I'm only saying to wake up. Knowing they hope to change us. Only praying we break up the social states in the poker faces. I'm so enraged when I see the sheep all like zombies walking.

It's freaking lethal. They beat and bleed you and lock your coffins. You'll find me often depressed. Instability. Killing me because so many people I love are still asleep. And fill the streets in hopeless directions. Broken connections to frozen collections of nothingness. I'm fucking pissed. But I'm trying to keep a positive mind. Dropping a rhyme. Hoping to transform this damn war Like Optimus prime is. Adopt the design, show that we demand more. I stand for the truth and nothing but the realest truth. So feel the truth in your system and feel the truth in your minds.

And wake up and witness what they can do to your lives. I'm making suggestions, it's for you to decide. I'm refusing to die, slave, wasting life away to shoot the tie. Wake up, wake up. Wake up, Wake up. Open, open your eyes. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Open, open your mind. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. Please don't, please don't be blind. Wake up, wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Open, open your eyes.

1:06:43 Derek: And finally remember this.

1:06:45 Unknown speaker: That history.

1:06:46 Seth: Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, history night never ends. The last page is never written.

1:06:52 Mark: History is always being rewritten.

1:06:54 Seth: And its best passages are not written

1:06:57 Douglas: by the princes or the presidents or

1:06:59 Seth: the prime ministers or the popes. The best passages are written by the people. For all their faults, the people are all we have. In fact, we are they.