Ep. 225: Simone Weil on War and Oppression (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 225 is something like, how do circumstances oppress and dehumanize us? And we read two essays by Simone Weil, the Iliad, or the Poem of Force from 1939, and Analysis of Oppression written around 1934. For more information, please visit. Partially Examination. This is Mark Linsenmayer close to hot baths in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Seth: This is Seth Paskin gazing longingly over the wine dark sea in Austin, Texas.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, the plaything of necessity in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:40 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey attending Patroclus funeral pyre in Middleton.

0:45 Corey: And this is Corey Mohler being crushed under the inescapable dominion of the blind force which hangs constantly over me, threatening me at every moment to extinguish me, to rend away my flesh and to turned me into a mere thing in Portland, Oregon.

0:58 Mark: Welcome back, Corey.

1:00 Corey: Good to be back.

1:01 Wes: Welcome.

1:02 Seth: I was just in Portland.

1:03 Wes: Yeah, for the Proud Boys March.

1:06 Seth: No, sorry to take my child to the zoo. That was a slightly different agenda.

1:13 Dylan: I just sent my child to Portland for college.

1:16 Corey: Where's he going?

1:17 Dylan: He's starting his sophomore year at Lewis and Clark, correct?

1:20 Seth: That's right.

1:20 Wes: Oh, it's a good town.

1:21 Seth: It's a great town.

1:22 Dylan: It is a good town.

1:24 Corey: Is all right.

1:25 Wes: It's all right. It's not as good as Seattle. That's what people said to me when I was there. I'm like, this place is great. Like, you should see Seattle.

1:35 Mark: Simone Weil. Which I realized that was the pronunciation, or at least a pronunciation upon watching the documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil. But I think for Americans, while we'll.

1:47 Wes: No, let's say Weil. Just because I looked at a bunch of stuff online and every lecture or podcast you can find, they pronounce it as Weil. So I don't.

1:57 Mark: Simone Weil. All right, Simone.

2:01 Wes: Vay.

2:04 Mark: So, Corey, you had suggested Weil. Do you wanna give us your background on her or why you thought she was interesting?

2:11 Corey: Well, she led a super interesting life. When she was about five years old, she refused to eat sugar out of solidarity with the soldiers in World War I because they weren't getting sugar on the front. So she was always kind of super morally committed person. Then she went to school with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. That's sort of how I found out about her. After school, she became highly committed to politics. She went and worked in factories to find out about the lives of the workers. She joined the anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, tried to pick up a gun, even though she was sort of a sickly, clumsy person, couldn't really help much.

But she tried to literally put her life on the line in this civil war, as a lot of intellectuals and writers and stuff did, and worked in the French Resistance, you know, led this super interesting life. So I sort of wanted to read more about her and find out about her ideas.

3:06 Wes: Did I not suggest her a while back as well to you guys?

3:10 Mark: Probably.

3:11 Wes: This Iliad Poem of Force essay is one of my favorite things.

3:15 Mark: So I didn't know much about her, and I thought, just seeing the title of this and looking a little about it, that, oh, well, we haven't covered the Iliad yet or something, so does it make sense to cover this? But it's really not about the Iliad. You know, my second reading, I just skimmed really quickly over the quotes from the Iliad that take up so much of this essay. And, like, you lose almost nothing. Like, she uses it purely as illustration. I mean, it's an interesting comment on the. On the Iliad, but, like, it doesn't matter that we haven't covered that separately. And in fact, her take on it seems like it's so idiosyncratic that we should just see it as a way of her elaborating her political philosophy. Which made sense then for us to add another political philosophy essay from earlier rather than reading more perspectives on the Iliad, say, for this episode.

3:54 Wes: Yeah, I think we should do the Iliad. Reading her essay made me really excited to reread the Iliad since I haven't read it since I was 17. It is a really beautiful. First of all, it's a beautifully written essay, and it is a commentary on the Iliad. And, I mean, I think it's a really insightful commentary on the Iliad. But, yeah, it is also a commentary on the very idea of power and force and war and things like that, and fits very well with the other reading we did on the analysis of oppression.

4:26 Dylan: She makes Hobbes seem so much more interesting than he was when I read him before, even though Hobbes never comes up at all.

4:33 Wes: Right. The beauty of nastiness and brutishness, or

4:37 Dylan: the idea that there's something fundamental about that claim that Hobbes made about human existence being a war of all against all. She essentially has that point of view in the article, but from a decidedly kind of different point of view on it in a different conclusion. She doesn't go for the Leviathan. Exactly.

4:57 Corey: Yeah. I think she feels like even with the Leviathan or with the social contract theory, in advanced society, you still are

in a war against all.

Unlike Hobbes, you're not really overcoming it.

5:08 Dylan: That's right, you don't overcome it. And her task for ameliorating it is focused completely differently as an interpretation of the Iliad as a way of talking about it was completely different than I've ever heard about it. And that's not saying a lot. I'm not an expert on it, but I just found it very interesting and provocative and as an essay, a kind of beautiful way to present this notion of force and power underlying human interaction. Especially to bring the poem of the Iliad, which is so foundational in at least Western culture, and show it being manifest there preeminently, I thought was just kind of masterful.

5:51 Mark: I noticed the connection with Hobbes not just so much in talking about force in the nasty, brutish and short character of existence, but just in talking about force. And then in the other essay about oppression as being the result of mechanical forces acting in society, acting basically from nature through human interactions. It's a little ambiguous. And this is kind of leaves just something I wanted to explore today of whether I'm thinking this in terms of like when we did our suicide episode and we read Durkheim, and Durkheim was asserting that the sociological was its own kind of analysis, that you didn't have to talk about human psychology, you didn't have to talk about moral psychology.

In particular, you could talk about the dynamics of human relationships on sort of a higher level when you're talking about masses of people. So I see some of that here when she's talking about the concept of force as being something brute that makes us into objects sort of being pushed around. And likewise, you know, why oppression, whenever there's a revolution, the old oppressors just get replaced by new oppressors. And to figure out how to get out of oppression, you would then have to do some sort of sociological or sort of the geometry of virtue.

She even talks about in certain places, this higher level analysis. There's something that's beyond the vision of us as individuals, just looking at our own motivations in unknotting the problems of force in war and the problem of oppression in society going forward. And that's why these things are so difficult.

7:23 Corey: Right. And I think with the essay on the Iliad in particular, one thing that you have to keep in mind is that she was writing this in, like, 1942, right when the Germans had occupied France.

So a lot of the background where

she's talking about force totally washing over society, destroying the intellectual output, destroying the artistic creativity and all of that, being powerless in the face of force, is that this was literally happening right. Right now. The Germans had come in and destroyed everything. And this was before the war had even ended. So she literally didn't know whether or not Hitler was going to win. So it was a very bleak time in history and sort of a hopeless time.

And I think a lot of the

themes in the book reflect the realities of what she was experiencing during this period.

8:13 Dylan: One thing I like about noting that is she articulates that through any kind of interaction socially, whether it be sort of the relationship of, in capitalism between bosses and workers, in the case with the Iliad, between the two sides in that great conflict, it imbues our living and the role that society has with us. She, you know, articulates how this is sort of a characteristic of society so that you don't have to say, well, your only access to it isn't, oh, I have to have been through some great conflagration like World War II. You can see it in all sorts of other interactions.

8:51 Seth: It's structural. She tries to make the connection, or she at least argues for the connection between force and the development of economic interaction between individuals. She does talk about reinterpreting the Iliad as the greatest poem of force in the Western canon, because it shows the effects of force in society without any moral valuing, I guess you could say. Like, it shows the effects of force on both the aggressor and the suppliant, and how it wanes back and forth, you know, between the two, you're successful or you win in one phase, and then you're on the run in the other.

And she thinks that it doesn't introduce a notion of hierarchical value between the oppressor and the oppressed, that it's just baldly shows that force is an abstract force that works on everybody. So even if you think you're a controlling force as an oppressor, you're in effect, being oppressed by force as well.

9:49 Corey: Right.

And to relate it to the Iliad, one thing that she points out is that in the Iliad, about pretty much every character has about 10 minutes where they sort of think they're the master of the universe, and they think they're governing and directing force to their will. But you read about Another five pages and everything flips around, and suddenly they're the ones suffering the anguish that force causes.

And the reality is, sort of everyone

thinks they're in control of force, but nobody is. Force is controlling everyone, and they're all destroyed by it. And one of the things I liked is that she pointed out that whenever something totally inexplicable happens, like the decision making is just totally confused, she says the gods interfered at those moments. And the reason that Homer has to write that in is because the decision making is so bizarre and. And irrational. Like, you think, why don't they just leave? Why doesn't Agamemnon just go home? Wouldn't they all be happier and more rational and satisfied if they just left? But they never do. And to sort of introduce any kind of agency, the gods have to be used as an explanatory device. But in reality, the gods aren't in charge. Nobody's in charge. Blind force is in charge. And everyone's just caught up in the sort of the machinery of war itself.

11:07 Mark: Well, blind force does actually then act through human psychology. And so toward the end of the essay, she gets more overtly psychological and says stuff like just that. Once you've committed yourself to this action and horrible things start happening, then to be reasonable and cut your losses would amount to admitting the horror that is gripping you. And so we can't do that. And so we are essentially just made into creatures of this blind force that just pursue. War has become. This means that's supposed to be, you know, to accomplish some action has become an end, has become something that is autonomous.

11:49 Wes: I think the idea is that war is so terrible. To tolerate it, you have to inoculate yourself. You have to intoxicate yourself with force. So the idea of giving up and the idea of a reasonable peace at some point, of coming up with a treaty or something like that, it's not tolerable because it's already cost you too much, which is the soul itself. You've essentially destroyed yourself. There's no reasonable peace that can compensate after that. The only thing that is going to compensate is the complete destruction.

12:20 Dylan: That's only an apparent compensation, right? Because the way force is working is that both sides are being transformed into things, in her analysis. And the activity of force is, I want to say, dehumanizing. But removing the human individual element from the social interaction. War is one example of that. But both sides, the winner and the loser in a particular battle or even a particular war, are still rendered as significantly less than human beings in Both cases, right.

12:55 Corey: And I talked a little bit about

how this was being written under the German occupation and sort of the backdrop of World War II. But I actually think that World War I is a far better example of this. And she had been alive during World War I too, of course. The war itself sort of, kind of took control of everyone. And halfway through the war you're like, why are we even doing this? Why are millions of people dying? There'd be battles where like 500,000 people would die to what, gain a few yards? It was like totally pointless.

Like you said, what's the point of

sacrificing all these people? Victory is not even worth the sacrifice. What you're going to get when you win isn't worth the sacrifice. So why are you doing it? But in order to kind of make meaning of it, you have to carry on, you have to have victory because victory is the only way to embed the sacrifice with meaning. So at that point it's obvious that sort of the act of war itself is taking over everyone's decision, decision making. And even the people who think they're making decisions really are just as powerless as the soldiers. But like you said, you just can't stop. You have to carry on through to the end. Otherwise it sort of just makes the sacrifices pointless. Even though in a way they're pointless anyway.

14:06 Wes: Yeah, she gives a few different aspects of the intoxicating self perpetuating quality of force. And one of them, as we've mentioned, there's no way to. Given the amount of destruction, there's no way to cut your losses. But there's also the sense of feeling indestructible. War being initially a game, this fantasy, when you're embarking on your ships with all of your arms and the opponent is very far away, you can have this idea of yourself as sort of invincible and the thing that's opposing force is almost being non existent. And so there's this tendency to overextend with force, the way she puts it, is exceeding the measure at one's disposal that leads to doing things which inevitably the chickens come home to roost.

So you're sort of mad with power, you do merciless things and then the goddess Nemesis comes back at you. So in 195 she says this retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic. So she gives all these great examples in the Iliad where the Greeks are ready to flee for instance, and Hector prevents them from doing that. Points where people could just said, okay, it's over, someone has won. But instead the battle is prolonged.

15:25 Mark: Yeah, I think it's really ultimately nihilism that she's afraid of the same thing that when your fallen comrades, when your friends die, then you want to join

15:34 Wes: them, you become competitors with them.

15:37 Mark: Rivalry and death.

15:38 Wes: Yeah, rivalry and death.

15:40 Dylan: And there's something very sensible about it, especially to Mark's point about avoiding nihilism. Right. You're imbuing the world with value, and you're giving value in that act. The idea is you're giving value to their lives, and you would rather Mark value of your own life by laying it along theirs rather than having there be no value at all.

16:01 Mark: See, I was interpreting it the other way, which is that my friend has died. What the hell is the point? Might as well die too. Like, it's not. I will consciously make their sacrifice meaningful by also sacrificing myself. No, it's just like too much in to go home as the survivor would be just as horrible as anything else. So.

16:20 Dylan: But the way of putting it, that that means that the battle cry of the survivor is a battle cry of suicide rather than of maintaining their own valor. At least in the Iliad. While there are a lot of people who careen into battle even in the face of it, it maybe even being a lost cause. It's not that it's a suicide in the sense of a nihilistic giving up.

16:46 Corey: Right.

But carrying on with the theme of force, turning people into things. It's not so much that they're turned into nihilists, but the common soldiers and even the people in charge are sort of turned into instruments of battle and instruments of force. Their conscious directiveness is sort of stripped away from them and they become just small things in this great tide of battle. And they. They have kind of no choice but to charge into battle and to kill and to die, because you're in a battle and there's nothing else that you can really do in that moment. So you are turned into sort of an instrument of force, and your humanity becomes totally stripped away. And that's how you're turned into sort of a thing.

17:26 Wes: Just to connect this to Dylan's point, because, Dylan, I think you're pointing to the sense in which there's a thematic element to call back to our episode and to Plato. There's an element of prestige and power, and this is something she'll concentrate on more in the other essay that drives all of this that the psychology of power is running all of this. So she talks about. For instance, the one example she gives in this essay is of Hector standing before the gates, ready to stand his ground and driven essentially by the idea of prestige. If he goes, he could slip back into Troy, but then the women would laugh at him and it would be only shame that keeps him going for a little while. But in the end, even that's not enough because he runs away from Achilles. And then he begs him, Achilles, for his life. And so in the end, he even he is reduced to a suppliant.

18:18 Seth: Yeah. The calculus of the way this works is that force initially exerts itself as, let's call it, quote, man, unquote, or human kind or human beings or something against nature. So she characterizes nature as inanimate, uses the trope of a stone. You have the inanimate object, it has no soul. And you have man that has a soul, and he's trying to dominate nature. That's how force manifests itself in quote, unquote, primitive societies as she describes them. And then what happens is, at a certain point, when you move beyond subsistence, where you're just trying your best to claw existence and survival out of nature, and then you start doing things like storing up more than you can immediately consume, and you get into a situation where you have a surplus.

She's pulling out a Marxist analysis here. Then you start having interactions between human beings or between man and man. And in fact, man takes the place of nature. As soon as we essentially get to the point where we can overcome nature by virtue of surplus, then we start interacting with other human beings. And then other human beings become the thing that force compels us to try to dominate or be dominated by. And this is the analysis she's trying to bring to light because she's asking whether it's possible to conceive of a society of interactions between human beings where force does not manifest oppression or being oppressed.

The key thing here is that just in the same way that we treat nature as a thing vis a vis our somehow elevated status against it, when force begins to manifest and control the relationships between human beings, then human beings begin to be treated like things. They get turned into things, either by virtue of being killed, in which case you're literally turned into a thing, or by virtue of power relations, relations of force like violence or monetary control or technological superiority, which essentially put the oppressor in the position of treating the other as a thing.

It's just a living thing, as she says, a Soul trapped within a thing.

20:37 Wes: So yeah, the thematic element or the psychology of power also turns the oppressor or the victor into a thing. In the end, she compares the suppliant is a thing in the sense of being passive matter, something analogous to passive matter. And the employer of force is analogous to pure momentum. And so it's just as thing like in that sense. And I think the connection here is that once you get into the psychology of that, the will to power, let's put it that way, has a thing making quality to it, I think in part because it completely obscures action based on pleasure or a conception of our own good, or any of the things that we would normally think of as proper motivations for action. Power, in a way, seems to stand outside of that to the extent that it somehow inhabits us as opposed to being properly part of us or issuing from us.

21:31 Corey: Right.

And she talks about how sort of the institutions of power have rules that are based often just around the structures of the institutions themselves. Like she says, we overcame nature by creating a surplus. And all a surplus really means here is farmers can grow more food than they need themselves. And this allows for other things in society besides farmers to exist. So armies need a surplus. You need a certain advanced level society to have armies. But then what do armies go around and do? They go and they raid other societies. They get loot and slaves and, and gold.

But what do they do with that? They kind of bring it back into the army and they recruit more and more soldiers. So it's sort of in the nature of armies themselves to kind of grow and grow and grow, because that's what armies do. It's sort of like how companies kind of do that too. Like a capitalist company, what they do with the profits often is reinvested in the company. So highly profitable companies will become bigger and bigger and bigger. Even though is that really the right thing to do? Does anyone want to do that? Does the company themselves even want to spend the money that way?

It's not really in their control. It's just the nature of companies to reinvest in themselves and grow. But armies sort of do the same thing and they grow and grow and grow and eventually they get too big and they run out of places to conquer. Like she talked about this happening with Rome. The Roman army was so huge and that it got so big it ran out of places to conquer and it couldn't sustain itself. And then it totally collapsed from the bureaucracy. So sort of in the nature of some of these institutions to grow so Big until they just destroy themselves and nobody really was in charge.

It's the institutional structure itself that's causing this kind of behavior.

23:09 Dylan: I'm not sure that the way she characterizes not a will of its own in the sense of an organism, but a dynamic that has a direction of constant expansion. Like you're saying, Corey, that in the end becomes naturally self limiting because it consumes all of its resources or whatever. So it follows this natural analogy of evolution or of organisms taking over all the resources.

23:35 Corey: It's sort of like a locust swarm or something. Locust swarms will eat all the crops

and they'll just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

And then guess what?

All of a sudden there's no more

crops left to eat and all the locusts just suddenly die at once.

23:49 Dylan: That's right. And that's why I think there's an analogy with will, but because there isn't something that's doing the willing. So it looks like will because it has an action and a trajectory like capitalism. Right, and locust swarms. But it isn't a will in the sense there's nothing that's doing the willing with an actual direction. In particular, it's not, for lack of a better term, thinking about what it's supposed to do and making judgments about advantage and disadvantage. It's just expanding in this dynamic of force. And then in some ways her solution is having a way of regulating and getting some kind of a consciousness to that activity, a way of directing it that is super added on top of the force.

24:33 Wes: It's pretty clear that she wants to talk about individual psychology and the way that drives this. So it is an individual psychology of power. What happens once you're in society? If people weren't seeking power or to maintain power, I think these problems would be either maybe nonexistent or ameliorated. That becomes the new obstacle.

24:55 Dylan: Yeah, and I think that works exactly right, because it's just like the swarm of locusts. It's a swarm of individuals that are oriented towards power, but it turns into a kind of environment that doesn't have its own will, but it exerts its own force. I mean, that's what's interesting about the way of talking about it is it folds back on itself. So the individual are motivated by a psychology of power, but then the very interactions that are created by those individuals amongst one another has its own activity back upon them.

25:29 Wes: So the way she puts this on 157 at the bottom of this first full paragraph is nevertheless privileges of themselves. Are not sufficient to cause oppression. What she means there, it's a matter of differential power between the strong and the weak. So anyway, nevertheless, privileges of themselves are not sufficient to cause oppression. Inequality could be easily mitigated by the resistance of the weak and the feeling for justice of the strong. It would not lead to a still harsher form of necessity than that of natural needs themselves, were it not for the intervention of a further factor, namely the struggle for power.

It's not just enough that one class in society is more powerful than another. She seems to think compassion on the one hand and the resistance of the less powerful on the other would do away with that. There has to be a further dynamic, which is what she calls here the struggle for power.

26:22 Corey: And tying this in, she does a lot of Marxist analysis into capitalism, or maybe more broadly, just anything that's competitive. So capitalism in her opinion, can't become non oppressive in and of itself or by itself because capitalist firms compete with each other for dominance of the market. So you can't really have this compassionate master dynamic. It just can't end up existing. So if you think like of a typical capitalist company, like a car manufacturer, and you have one company where the CEOs have these feelings of benevolence and they want to give freedom to their workers, they want to pay their workers as much as possible.

They let the workers decide what kind of cars to build. They let the workers decide how they want to organize their work, and they pay them very highly to keep them happy. And then you have another car company where the CEO is sort of like a brutal dictator. He drives his employees as hard as possible, he pays them as little as possible, and he's always threatening to fire them to make them work weekends longer hours. Well, at the end of the day those cars are going to be cheaper and he can produce more of them and he will win in the marketplace.

This is why sort of the structure of the marketplace itself ends up dictating the brutality, not the choices of individuals. Marx, when he talked about capitalism, he didn't think the problem with capitalism is that the capitalists are sort of evil guys. He wasn't a moralizer. It's the structure of capitalism itself that oppresses the workers, not the individual CEOs or bourgeoisie or whatever. At the end of the day, the marketplace sort of dictates these behaviors. The peaceful, loving, compassionate company will go out of existence. The brutal company will survive.

And if someone wants to come up and challenge that company now, they almost have to be more brutal than they were and pay their workers even less.

28:10 Dylan: It's not that brutality is incentivized, but that the crass thing is you need to make more people money and you need to do that with less stuff. So the source is you have to keep growing. There's no such thing as having enough. You have to constantly keep growing. That leads to choices that you have this brutality.

28:33 Wes: And the idea is that growth is required in order to preserve power. 158 is where she starts getting into all this. On the one hand, you have to defend your power against rivals and on the other against inferiors. Once you have power, the necessity to preserve it takes over and that leads to the necessity to expand it, expand it outward against rivals, and then to make sure that those who don't possess it don't take it away from you.

29:03 Seth: Yeah, that's not an incentive and that's structural. When you try to wield force, you wield it within a specific domain. And the force itself compels you to try to maximize the extent of your control over that domain. Because if you don't, somebody else is going to exert it for you. And if you manage to get to the point where you have complete control over the domain that's circumscribed for you, you have to expand beyond that. And there's an interesting component to this where she hints at it. Essentially the idea is that within the sphere of control, within the sphere of the things that you understand, if you're in control of technology or the church or politics or violence, whatever, epistemically you understand exactly what's there.

And it's just a logical progression for you to try to maximize your control over that sphere. But when you then hit the limits of that and you expand out, you're less certain. You make an educated guess. But this is where plans go awry and the seeds essentially of kind of like a self destruction appear that you're compelled to go beyond the borders of what you understand and control. And so you take actions that ultimately can result in your demise. You see this when you're talking about either geographical borders and conquest in terms of politics and nations, but you also see it in terms of businesses.

When a business maximizes the market that they can capture, they have to either create new markets or they have to go into existing markets. Right. And that's when you start seeing acquisitions and giant conglomerates being formed and they're trying to aggregate all of this power. It's the natural motion of force in the economic system that we live in.

30:45 Wes: Although I think this analysis is meant to be very fundamental. She's trying to think about any society where there are systems of production that have gone beyond hunter gatherer. In other words, that sort of production requires a concentration of power. As she'll say, coordination requires that there be certain people in power and certain people not certain people directing things and certain people directed. This is a more fundamental power dynamic that you'll see across different sorts of systems. And then the question is, what way is there beyond this? It's partly a critique of Marx. I mean, in the end, seems to be very despairing about what can we do about this.

31:24 Dylan: But the reason for that fundamentality is it's a characteristic of the individual human beings. Like you were pointing out before, Wes, this feature of society is born out of us as individuals. So that link between force as being at play in individuals interactions. Sort of the state of nature with respect to nature itself, you see the same kind of operation of force. Once human society graduates into interaction of multiple people dynamic remains, except that there's a new manifestation of that force. But the source of that is out of people.

32:04 Wes: Yeah, I think Seth is right as well. Right. The word is structural. In a way, it's larger than people, but in a way it is sourced in what she calls power seeking. And the fact that power seeking has no limit and becomes its own end. Because ultimately power seeks to preserve itself indefinitely, which is impossible. So it becomes its own blind end. That psychology, you see, that manifest itself structurally as well. So I think it's true to say it's both. The power thing is structural and larger than any given individual. But that there are elements of individual psychology that lead to all of this.

32:42 Mark: So she says on page 151. The causes of social evolution must no longer be sought elsewhere than in the daily efforts of men considered as individuals. I was trying to think of how her talk of structural dynamics. How somebody like Hayek or somebody would rate what she has to say. Because she does say, as you pointed out, I think, Wes, that this idea of coordination. She specifically in the oppression article says for there to be coordination between individuals, there has to be somebody, some individual who has in mind, okay, you do this and you do that, and who actually organizes them.

And I think that once you get to a high enough level, that's actually not the case. That this is kind of the Hayekian thing. We had Russ Roberts from EconTalk that he always is talking about this. That there actually is no individual that has the various actions of these coordinated people in mind. And that's the dynamic. That's how he analyzes. Hayek, analyzes this Darwinian picture. But I think Weil is focusing on how Darwin's explanation of population dynamics ultimately comes down to which you could see in Adam Smith too, like that if everybody's acting selfishly in accordance with their self interest regarding jobs or whatever, Weil has a much more negative picture of human nature than Smith does.

Such that I think this analysis of us as driven by power, as opposed to like she says, it would be great if people actually were driven by self interest in this sort of conscious way. Because as Smith outlined, that doesn't lead to just unlimited rapaciousness. That's not the Smithian model. So I buy Wes's analysis here that, you know, she is talking about the macro, but she thinks the macro comes sort of directly out of the micro. And if you want to say what's the solution based on that? This is not in the reading, but this is, from what I understand for overall thought, it would have to be something like retreat into private reflection.

If force makes us into things and oppression makes us into things, it's because they are taking away our ability to step back and reason as individuals. And so it's that kind of meditative. This is exactly coming out of what we were talking about last time with Kierkegaard, to authentically be an individual. This is why I would say Weil is. I don't know if she ever took this up, but certainly Camus loved her, thought she was great. So whether she ever toyed with the notion of whether she's an existentialist or not, this is where I see that coming through.

35:07 Seth: To connect that back to the theme that I had before where we talk about the first stage is man against nature. The second stage is man against the individual.

35:13 Wes: Let's spell out just the Darwinian analogy just in full, because it's kind of an interesting thing. The daily. What we've talked about is the daily efforts of individuals that corresponds to mutation or variation. In this analogy, men are human beings. They have their temperaments, their needs, a whole bunch of other different factors. And they are innovators. And they're very diverse, right? So you get a lot of different experiments in different ways of living and different ways of dealing with the environment around them. And then you get the natural selection part of this, which is the conditions of existence, of society.

Societies will be destroyed unless certain things happen. And that includes, just like natural selection does, it includes the environment, it includes the things that we have to do as organisms. But Also, it includes the social environment. And she lists a bunch of things including capital equipment, armaments, methods of work, warfare. All those things become selective forces. So you do get, even though there's this concentration on the micro, you do get a dynamic between selective forces, which in a way are the more macro part, and then the individual, each individual which corresponds to, again, the Darwinian variation.

These are the things that will get culled or enhanced by the larger forces.

36:33 Corey: So maybe let's just read this quote that I really like where she introduces

this sort of Darwinian metaphor. She says Lamarck's famous principle. And Lamarck is just sort of a pre Darwinian evolutionary theorist for the people

who don't know him.

Lamarck's famous principle, as unintelligible as it is convenient, the function creates the organ. Biology only started to be a science on the day when Darwin replaced this principle by the notion of the conditions of existence.

So Lamarck thought, for example, that like,

human beings have sort of a need

for, say, blood to be circulated throughout

their body, and that need itself through evolutionary processes creates a heart.

37:13 Dylan: A great example is the reason that the giraffe's neck is long is because it needs to eat leaves of trees that are very high, right?

37:21 Corey: So the functional need for eating leaves created the long neck, not the other way around. And this is how people even sort of talk about evolution today.

They say, like giraffes evolved in order to.

To eat tall leaves. But Darwin banished all of this kind of thing. He banished any kind of teleology from evolution. And he said only the brute facts of existence and survival kind of drives it. So evolution isn't headed towards anything, not even tall necks, much less any kind of grander vision, like the improvement of a species towards some kind of greater species. And society sort of works the same way. It doesn't go anywhere towards anything. Institutions that exist, they only exist because they survived. That's the only reason for their existence in a sort of an evolutionary sense.

They're not designed, they're not moving towards anything. So in this sense, she's sort of against, like Hegel and Marx, she thinks society doesn't necessarily move towards anything. What survives is simply what survives. And I think you could sort of take this example of religion that maybe people sort of know arguments like this where, where you take a Darwinian metaphor for two competing religions as part of their belief system, the followers are sort of required to aggressively convert non believers, right?

They believe that all other religions are

evil and should be wiped out.

There's another religion that it's competing with.

And it's part of this religion to keep all their rituals secret from foreigners. It's part of this religion to not convert people. They don't want other people worshiping their gods and they don't believe that when you die, anything special happens, whether you believe or don't believe. If these two religions exist in the same area and you take over a long period of time, like 5, 600 years, you already sort of know which one's going to win based on the structure and the beliefs of the religion. Truth itself isn't the causal mechanism that causes the belief to spread.

39:12 Mark: So Corey is summarizing Dan Dennett's Breaking the Spell so folks can look at our episode on New Atheism if you want more information on that. But you were giving that as an example of Darwinian thinking, so.

39:22 Corey: Right, as an example. And I'm not giving this example to make fun of religion, far from it. Simone Weil was very religious herself, but her point is that literally everything works like that. Using the same metaphor, think about two societies. If there's a society that's very aggressive, builds war machinery, invades other countries, attempts to dominate the earth, and there's another society that's just peaceful, they don't have any weapons and they're next to each other, which society is going to win? So she has this question of, like, why have we never abolished oppression? Well, part of it is because societies that don't abolish oppression might literally just beat in a competitive environment societies that attempt to abolish oppression.

40:02 Wes: I saw this differently. Assume there were only one society and no competitor societies. I thought this was talking about dynamics internal to a society. So, for instance, you know, on 151, shortly after she says the. The causes of social evolution must no longer be sought elsewhere than in the daily efforts of men considered as individuals. Which I'm saying corresponds to the mutation element of things. Temperament, education, routine, prejudices, etc. Then the natural selection part of this. It's not a matter of competition between this society and other societies.

The way she puts it, this warp and woof of incoherent efforts, the mutations, anything whatever, wouldn't produce anything in the way of social organization were it not that chance found itself restricted in this field by the conditions of existence to which every society has to conform on pain of being either subdued or destroyed. And the reason why that's important is she's critiquing Marx and the idea that oppression is a function of, you know, first of all, it's an extension of the struggle against nature. And it's a matter of larger class dynamics, which, let's say, have their origins and the relations of production and ultimately in these material conditions.

And there's a historical directedness to all of that. The countervailing picture that she's painting here is that oppression is woven in at a much deeper level into the fabric of any society. And it all starts with the ways in which individual efforts get curtailed by the necessities of a society even continuing to persist.

41:47 Dylan: Yeah, the conditions for existence. So I agree with you completely, Wes. And I think that the examples, Corey, are good, but I think that those examples are operating sort of at the animal level in the Darwinian example, not at the natural selection level. So that her analysis is really doing the Darwinian version. That is saying something about that. The existence of natural selection in terms of where she articulates in terms of the conditions for existence is what's going to determine the playing field on which societies compete. And in this case, further articulating those conditions for existence, that force and power dynamics are what is the lever of that selection.

42:30 Wes: Yeah. So you don't need a competing society. All you need is people working to subdue these external constraints that could destroy them. And then you get a division of labor and a concentration of power. And once that power is concentrated, it becomes self perpetuated and focused on itself as an end and naturally expands itself. So you get this situation in which it almost seems necessary that these oppressive power dynamics come into play.

42:58 Corey: Right.

I think it's just sort of easier to imagine cleanly two competing forces.

Just like with evolution, we often like

to imagine that there's two competing species with different traits.

But most of these evolutionary forces sort

of happen internally to a species or internally to a society or whatever it is. But the larger point is that the characteristics that cause an organism or like an institution or a society to survive are sort of divorced from what makes that organism or society good. Organisms don't become better, they become what they become. Institutions and societies are sort of the same way. There are so many forces outside of their control that their individual directiveness is sort of stripped away. Yes. The people at a company under capitalism, they have an individual psychology and they make individual choices.

But largely they're subject to these massive forces beyond their control, like the global market pressure and stuff like that. And what happens is the companies that survive just sort of have characteristics that allow them to survive in that given context of society. So those characteristics are not necessarily the characteristics that Anybody on earth wants, they're totally separate.

44:12 Dylan: Part of that is what those conditions for existence are. So the way that this would get changed would be at the individual level, the way in which those conditions for existence, those incentives could get changed itself. I really liked Corey's analogy, or he brought up the example of the locust swarm because it's an example of a self organizing phenomena, right? So that swarm of locusts isn't determined in shape or motion by anything other than the individual activity of each of the individual locusts. And so it's a condition of how they interact with each other and sort of the rules of their interaction that govern the organization of the whole.

And the only way in which you would have something different come about is if you change the way in which that individual locust was interacting and the rules by which they were interacting with other locusts, then you get different shapes, you get different kinds of behavior. You might get something that wasn't nearly as organism like, you might. And the same kind of thing is happening in the self organizing aspect of society between individual human beings that that interaction is being governed. I see in her analysis as being the kinds of human beings, the kinds of people we are, are governing that social interaction and it has this feedback mechanism back up on us.

But that the only way that would change is if the way in which individuals interact with each other were to change.

45:45 Wes: Yep, she says, I'm 152. The enlightened goodwill of men acting in an individual capacity is the only possible principle of social progress. Basically, she's saying in this whole paragraph, look, if it's all historical necessity, if it's all just, you know, a matter of these larger forces that we can't control, then we might as well just sit back and watch, you know, and that's the Marxist picture. And that's always been a tension in Marx. If this is all just a necessary development from the feudal to the capitalist to the communist, then why write a manifesto and why try to exert control over that process? It just happens inevitably. But if she's right, then it's a matter of figuring out, all right, what's the least oppressive organization that we can possibly get and then how do we get there?

46:26 Corey: So if the only way to change this is to reorganize society in a radically different way, I think we should talk about why the people who attempted to do so failed so miserably. For her, especially the French Revolution and

46:39 Dylan: the Russian Revolution, her point is not that you have to have new rules of societies. You have to change the people themselves. Individuals have to change how they interact with each other. There isn't any way in which you'll have rules of society that will fix that.