Ep. 250: Simone Weil on Human Needs (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So let's turn to our second need. Liberty. Read the relevant quote.

0:04 Seth: Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

0:08 Wes: It'll turn out that there's Always rules that limit liberty. Right. This is sort of a staple of any discussion of free will as well. Which is to say that it doesn't make sense to say that freedom of any sort is simply arbitrary, willing or acting on arbitrary whims. There's always some sort of rules. And the question is where those rules come from. In this case, when the rules come not from a hostile source of authority, but they're rules that you can internalize as part of your conscience. There's a freedom to. Even though they're effectively limits to our behavior. Liberty is a matter of the fact that they're internalized and that I can act on something that comes from within.

0:50 Mark: Within, I guess I do want to look forward a little bit to the third essay that we're going to talk about. Theoretical picture of a free society. Just in that most of it is an analysis of liberty, of an analysis of what freedom would mean. It has to be a real phenomenological thing that it's not just having choices. Right. If all the choices suck, it's not great. But it has to be. The way she puts it in that is a connection between your reasoned deliberative plan and then putting those into action like that is what makes us feel free. The more we can do that, the more we can on the one hand, think about stuff, come up with plans, make choices and then actually have that realized in the world.

That is, it ultimately comes down to not only freedom of thought, reason, you know, which is what sort of Aristotle would point to or even Dan Dennett is. That's his thing. Now that insofar as we're not automatons, Dewey just said this. But can actually bring the intellect to bear. That is half of it. But then it's also true just power, the concrete power to bring things into effect. Any more quotes from this section? I mean, it's only two pages in this essay or one page really on

1:56 Seth: the point that Wes made about the rules, Mark, and your the power to affect them. She makes the point that the rules should be understandable. Broadly right. They shouldn't be so complicated or numerous that they could be understandable. But it's also important that people understand not just what the rule is telling them to do, but the reason or the justification why the rule is useful and important. And it kind of goes back to plugging into the notion of obligation. Like it's much easier to fulfill your obligation to others with respect to a restriction on your own liberty if you understand why that rule is in place. Just a nice little Side note, she connects it to the notion of goodwill.

2:37 Wes: Those who are lacking in goodwill or who remain adolescent are never free under any form of society. Society. So this goes towards conscience. And I'm not sure if she used. Yeah, she does use that word. So these are things that you're habituated into doing. They are not alien impositions from without. And if you don't grow up, then the rules always remain external to you. You cannot be free. You're always acting under compulsion.

3:00 Mark: Essentially, the rules should emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction. Again, kind of defining what makes for a good collective, that it feels like it is yours. It is something that you are assenting to.

3:15 Wes: Under these conditions, the liberty of men of goodwill, though limited in the sphere of action, is complete in that of conscience for having incorporated the rules into their own being.

3:23 Mark: This all sounds very rational until it gets threshed out in the freedom of opinion section later.

3:28 Wes: Yes, we'll take a left turn there. It's a fun one. It's a really fun one.

3:34 Mark: The parallel to this, then, is we need liberty, but we also need obedience. Obedience is the next one, which I think involves not only being obedient, but also having others at least sometimes be obedient to you. Is that how you read this?

3:48 Wes: I didn't read it that way, but maybe I missed it.

3:50 Mark: Okay, let's start where she starts, because that's a consideration from later in the section that I was wondering about.

3:56 Dylan: Obedience is a vital need of the human soul. It is of two kinds. Obedience to established rules and obedience to human beings looked upon as leaders. It presupposes consent not in regard to every single order received, but the kind of consent that is given once and for all with the sole reservation, in the case of need, that the demands of conscience be satisfied.

4:17 Mark: It sounds here like she's actually okay with a republic or, you know, a representative government of any sort, because you don't have to assent to every single thing. As long as they're making rules that are going to not make you turn against your conscience. Not against your conscience, but against obligation. As long as they're going to not scream, screw up the order requirement, then as long as you assent. It seems like government is not problematic in this one.

4:41 Dylan: In fact, if you don't have it, it's an illness. But the key is the consent. Consent, and not fear of punishment or hope of reward, constitutes, in fact, the mainspring of obedience. So that submission may never be taken for servility.

4:53 Wes: And then the very important point that ultimately the consent is the whole hierarchy itself should consent to a government goal so that whoever's on top of the hierarchy is not outside of this domain of obedience. They are obedient in turn to that goal.

5:10 Mark: Well, and before I say government is unproblematic here, we got to remember that the collectivities could be of any level. And in the theoretical picture of free society, she actually describes her like, kind of like teams of contractors, people that get together to do Habitat for Humanity or something.

5:27 Dylan: Unions.

5:28 Mark: Yes. Small groups where the power is understandable. And even though some people are going to be in charge regarding certain things, that's because the other people recognize them as knowing what they're doing and they're consenting to it. But really, everybody at every step is able to say, is this the way we should do it? There should be a small enough group to have deliberation. So obedience seems like it's an ingredient, but it's got to be compatible with liberty, as was described before. You know that you have real choices. And even though she says consent given once and for all, I wouldn't take that in a Hobbesian sense.

6:03 Wes: Well, she qualifies that herself, right?

6:06 Seth: Yeah, she does. There are reservations. Consent is not final nor absolute.

6:12 Wes: But what's interesting is that she's not just saying that obedience is necessary to the social order. She's saying that we actually need it. And if in a tyranny, the deprivation is not just of liberty, but it's of this opportunity for obedience, we would lose something essential if we lost the opportunity for that.

6:34 Mark: Yeah, obedience with consent.

6:35 Seth: Obedience is a subset of liberty in the sense that it's the freedom to choose to follow orders or to follow rules or to follow a leader. And if you're not given that choice because you're forced to do something, then something's missing in you and something's missing in the societies. So it's really just liberty cashed out in terms of social hierarchy.

6:57 Wes: Yeah, that's very good. Because as we saw in the liberty section, it's meaningless to say that liberty is freedom from constraint. Right. So it's got to be a kind of obedience. For instance, Leibniz or many other philosophers. Reason, Responsiveness. Right. It's a matter of being obedient to the considerations of reason or to the truth or something like that, so that you. You can't really cash out liberty except in terms of obedience.

7:23 Dylan: This is one of the ways in which she's brilliant about thinking about the relations between individuals and society is. While they're distinct, she's very articulate about these connections that are part of the structure of both the structure of the human soul and the need for obedience and to be obeyed. But also that goes directly to how a collective is formed and the relationships between the individuals in that collective.

7:56 Wes: Yeah. The way in which a tyrannical power deprives people of obedience is it just. It makes you do things out of fear or for reward. And once you're acting in that way, you're no longer saying to yourself, I'm doing this because it's right. I'm doing this because it's good. Good. Or I'm doing it because I'm interested in the truth. You deprive people of those very motivations. Evading terror is all that one can think about in those circumstances.

8:25 Mark: Top of page 117, it says the effective rulers, rulers though they may be, have somebody over them. On the other hand, they are able to replace each other in unbroken continuity and consequently to receive each in his turn that indispensable amount of obedience, duty, him. This is the thing that made me think that if you talk about obedience being due to someone, could it be that obedience is something that we not only need to be on the bottom of, we need to be obeying, but as a way of moving to our. Our next one responsibility. That having people with consent obey you, that actually is something that we do occasionally need as part of power structures, as part of just our way of being social animals.

9:05 Wes: Well, she will say that, right? I think in responsibility.

9:08 Mark: Let's move to it. Yeah.

9:10 Wes: Okay.

9:10 Mark: Initiative and responsibility, to feel one is useful and even indispensable are vital needs of the human soul.

9:16 Wes: And ultimately, it means being in a position to make decisions about not merely one's own interests, but the interests of others. So that's the sense in which I take this to have something to do with obedience in others.

9:32 Dylan: It's part of contributing to the collective. This isn't in the context of being responsible to your own soul. It's being responsible for activities which connect you to other people.

9:43 Wes: So one of her examples is youth movements, Right. It's part of the motivation for team sports. I don't know. That may be a stretch. Or for sending the kids to do that.

9:51 Seth: This one feels a little confused to me now that we're circling back to it. Initiative and responsibility, to feel one is useful and even indispensable. And then she says, in the case of the unemployed person, Even if he receives assistance, you know, to be able to feed and clothe, there's a complete privation of responsibility, for he represents nothing at all in the economic life. And the voting paper, which represents his share in its political life, doesn't hold any meaning for him. So, as Dylan said, it's participation in the society, but it's somehow reflected back on the individual as a measure of their power. Right. Their ability to put their thoughts into action. And that action could be in the form of work, satisfying work, which in this case she's, I think, means really not the work itself, but the ability to support oneself through work.

10:42 Wes: Well, she will also say, though, that for his need to be satisfied, it is necessary that a man should often have to take decisions in matters great or small, yes, affecting interests that are distinct from his own, but in regard to which he feels a personal concern. So this is part of what you get out of employment. Right. You show up to the office and you have objectives which are the objectives of the organization. You get to be on a team,

11:05 Seth: but that's independent from deliberation and collective around policy or like a political or social engagement around if you're part of a church or a community association or a family and you are taking decisions that interest other people in that collective. She seems to be saying that if you aren't productively engaged in some kind of work, you can't feel useful in the body politic as a whole.

11:29 Dylan: I was wondering about this. Useful in the body politic. I take it to be kind of a psychological insight that that need to feel useful is part of the food for our soul. So, you know, fulfilling that responsibility or having responsibility, it's manifest in the connections that we have in the collective. But it's part of the need of our own soul to have that connection, to feel useful.

11:52 Seth: Yeah, I think it's broadly speaking, whether it's participating in the economic life or participating in the various aspects of all the collectivities that you're a part of, it's feeling that there's a level of participation where your contribution matters. But in the case of an economic, it's not just participation that your participation matters, but it's the benefits that you accrue by virtue of being able to support yourself and your family or buy things or build things or. Or something along those lines.

12:24 Mark: This does seem like a good point to bring up the topic of how basically is she a liberal or conservative? Because she's has just a weird idiosyncratic view that cuts across those things that I think it said the intro that, you know, she cares more about the laborer than the most socialist. She has more of a concern for order than the most monarchist or whatever. And so responsibility is something that. She seems a little more in line with what we normally, as Americans mean by it. Which the conservative is going to focus on what you're talking about, Seth, of being able to.

I don't want to just receive handouts. I want to support myself and my family. And that'll give me pride and responsibility. Whereas you could interpret this in a more, I want to say, socialistic way of. Yeah, even when we're part of a collectivity. We don't want to just be cogs in the machine. We want to have. Have saying power. We want to make choices. We want to be responsible and needed in things in a way that capitalism doesn't necessarily provide for. And merely supporting yourself on an income certainly doesn't recommend that. She says the manual labor is in a scarcely better position than the person who's unemployed.

13:33 Wes: Yeah. Communism wants to give us a certain salutary relationship to our own work, to our own labor. And. And if you're simply unemployed, it doesn't do that. So it's not just a matter of having a robust welfare state. Although I think obviously she'd be in favor of that.

13:50 Dylan: It's a theme throughout all of these essays. And the importance or the nourishment of physical work, of physical engagement with the world of manual work, which is sort of, I guess, touched on without being fully articulate. And like so many things, there's a kind of tension there. Right. If there's too much of it, it's deadening of your soul. Right. You don't have any activity of mind in it. But on the other hand, none of it at all means that you're not engaged with the world.

14:19 Seth: That's a great point. She does take this from Marx, where she talks about how a feudal. Like a craftsperson who owned the production of, say, the shoe from the beginning to the end. As opposed to being on an industrial line where all they do is add the leather to the sole somehow now is more fulfilled in the creation, the output of their production. But thematically, it's freedom to use your mind and to turn that into action, meaningful action for yourself. So if you live in a society where you're not permitted to think freely. And then translate those thoughts into actions that help benefit others or benefit yourself or improve the society, then you don't have responsibility.

You're not fulfilled. If you're not free to rationally choose to obey the dictates of the society or whatever, then you're not fulfilled because you don't have obedience, and so on and so forth. She has a very, very clear sense of the nourishment of the soul is about the soul's ability to express itself in terms of action. Which gets to this notion of physical manual engagement with the world. It's not purely theoretical. Mathematics is great, great. But most mathematicians have hobbies too, where they build until they build something with it, or they like to put an ad on their house or mow their yard or something.

There's still this need to physically connect with the world and with others that expresses itself.

15:41 Dylan: Well, in fact, she goes further than that. I think that the actualization of the mathematics through technology is, in fact, fundamentally important to it. Just as an aside, this whole idea made me want to. To see if we could get a podcast with Matthew Crawford, the guy who wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft. He just came out with a new book about driving, about the importance of driving to our souls.

16:06 Seth: Reach out to him, see what he says.

16:08 Mark: So this section ends with, in the case of every person of fairly strong character, the need to show initiative goes so far as the need to take command. So there we go.

16:16 Wes: Yeah, this is what I was thinking about with your need to make others obey.

16:22 Mark: Everybody should have the ability to take advantage of your ability to command at certain points of your life.

16:28 Wes: This is true, right? This whole leadership thing, there are specific satisfactions that come from being in a leadership role. In fact, it really contributes to the sense that your life is meaningful.

16:41 Dylan: Yep. And that you're creating your life. That Nietzschean theme of your life is a creative act is part of what's on, going, going on.

16:48 Wes: I also think being able to tell other people what to do is actually. It could be corrupting. But if you really are interested in the welfare of other people or an organization or an ideal, and you are in that role changes you pretty fundamentally as a person. And it's a different sort of satisfaction than you get from just being the technical person on a team, let's say, as opposed to the.

17:13 Mark: Yeah, I'm going to have to have you guys come in on Tuesday night

17:16 Seth: to record part three.

17:17 Dylan: Okay.

17:19 Seth: Yeah.

17:19 Wes: Yeah, okay.

17:21 Seth: I find this interesting, the circumstance that I find myself in personally in my role at work right now. I'm not a leader in the sense that I have a title, but I've taken on a role as kind of a program manager or program coordinator. And what I find is there's a need for leadership in the sense of being able to coordinate action to create a greater outcome. That if you have five people and they all have fidelity to their individual responsibility, think of it vertically. But there's a need to accomplish something horizontally. Where they have to interact.

And they have no obligation by virtue of the hierarchy to each other. Right. There's a role for leadership to be able to accomplish the outcome and bring these people together, to work together. Even though they have no incentive and no reporting structure that demands that that be the case. And I find myself in that situation all the time. In fact, it might even be the characterization of my. My entire career is I'm constantly being put in a position where we're trying to accomplish something that the hierarchy and the rules and the incentives don't align.

Like, don't support. And I'm trying to be persuasive and convince people to not align to any of those three things, but do the thing to accomplish this thing. And so there's a sense in which I cast that as leadership that I think is. I understand. Like, it makes some sense to me about taking command in those situations.

18:45 Dylan: It manifests itself as kind of true leadership. Right. Because you have the people there obeying you without the force of hierarchy necessarily.

18:54 Seth: I think about that all the time. Obey your master.

18:59 Wes: There's the other way in which in that position, you try to be. I forget where else she says this. But you become the representative of something else. So that you're not simply enforcing your own own particular proclivities. But you're trying to be helpful. Or there's a goal that you're trying to achieve, a shared goal. Or you're interested in the good of others or the good of an organization. So that's a really interesting psychological exercise. Because power is corrupting. It's not always easy to disentangle one's personal interests from some larger interest. So it's really good for you to be able to exercise, let's say, that part of your soul where you're doing that sort of disentanglement, trying to be just, all right, equality.

19:46 Mark: So, yeah, we got equality and hierarchism. So we're going to fill out what we've set out here. Equality is a vital need of the soul. Consists in a recognition at once public, general, effective, and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs. That the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being. Because this respect is due to the human being as such. And is not a matter of degree

20:07 Dylan: the thing that leaps out immediately in this whole section is that equality here is not quantitative.

20:13 Mark: In what sense?

20:14 Dylan: It's not about how much stuff you have or your abilities. The way she characterizes it is about respect. But there is all sorts of other aspects in which people and entities are unequal. It's a very specific kind of equality.

20:31 Wes: And she even uses the phrase equality of opportunity, which is a favorite phrase now of libertarians and their response to a focus on social justice and what they would call an equality of outcome. But as you move on, you'll see that there is a sense in which certain equalities can't be rectified. Someone's always going to be the worker and someone else is going to be in a more privileged position. But there are ways to balance that out. And one of the ways, for instance, is to, to rectify the way status is distributed in a society. So you create honors, you want to create a society in which it's a matter of honor to be a miner, for instance, and it's a matter of honor to have various other roles. Each different role in a society gets the respect that it's due. I don't know if you'd say equal amount of respect, maybe you would, but the respect that it's due, we might

21:25 Seth: end up spending the rest of the time just talking about this section, as far as I'm concerned, because it's a very rich vein. She says it follows that the inevitable differences among men ought never to imply any difference in the degree of respect. Equality is about respect, but there is inequality. And there needs to be a balance between equality in the form of respect and inequality in terms of things like social status and possessions and capabilities and talents and so forth. And so she introduces that idea by talking about opportunity. The idea that we should have a society where anybody, regardless of what their talents or individual capabilities are, has equal opportunity to go reach some sort of self creation and fulfillment.

And she also talks about a social hierarchy where there's upward mobility, but there's also downward mobility. So like you could for example, be a Kennedy and instead of going into politics, you become a sorghum farmer. And there should be no loss of respect with respect to that, but there's certain inequality. That's fair. Which is to say, the higher up on the social hierarchy, the more power, the more responsibility, the more command you have, the more severe your restrictions and risks and punishments should be.

22:42 Wes: That's one way of achieving this balance that she talks about.

22:44 Seth: Yes, exactly.

22:46 Mark: She even cites Spider Man. She says, as Spider man says with great power. She would have said it. Had she only lived longer, she would

22:57 Dylan: have had a cameo appearance in the next episode.

22:59 Seth: It's funny because the chapter's titled Equality, but it really is about equality and a sort of sense of necessary inequality. That's what makes reading her. So you think you're going one direction and like Mark said, she crosses the spectrum. But the idea that she thinks that somebody who has very little power, very little control and commits a very minor crime, crime could be punished more severely than somebody who has lots of power and lots of control and commits a very big crime, which happens all the time in our society. Right. She thinks it should be inverted. I don't know if I agree or disagree with that, but I think it's true that inequality in the form of punishment, which is another section we'll get to, maybe not today. It's unequal in a bad way as opposed to unequal in a good way.

23:41 Mark: I can't believe that both of you brought Wes and Seth brought up this equality of opportunity stuff, but that you, you weren't whiplashed by what she said at the bottom of 118. She said, yeah, of course you want equality of opportunity, but when such a combination acts alone and not as one factor among others, it ceases to constitute a balance and contains great dangers. So she would not be an American conservative who just says equality, opportunity, that's the whole thing. And then the argument is just over, do we actually have real equality opportunity or not?

24:07 Wes: But she is saying this is not a matter of redistributing stuff. And it's not a matter of engaging in the delusion that some people are not going to be in a more privileged position than others, that it's not the case that someone's going to be the boss and someone's going to be the worker. Some people are going to be more educated, some people are going to be less. Those sorts of inequalities are fixed. And so the overall social equality has something to do with the ways in which those things are balanced out. As Seth just mentioned, that involves the fact that social rank can be an aggravating circumstance stance in crime or that exercising public functions, being in positions of authority should carry serious personal risks.

But the way I think she principally balances. The thing that I would focus on again is the question of status, because this is something that current political debates are focused on. The talk about privilege and so on are focused on the ways in which equality of opportunity is undermined. If you, you have a Society which designates certain groups as lesser than and even if it's not overtly discriminatory, behaves in that way and undermines the status of a certain group. And this could be for race, but it could also just be for certain job types looking down on the lower classes, looking down on certain types of jobs, so that the restoration of status is here what they is arguing for.

Or in other words words, worrying about status and balancing out actual material inequality with equality of status is what Weil is worried about. And it's also a big part of the current discussion in this society.

25:45 Mark: She can't be just fundamentally denying or ignorant of the big Marxist point that social conditions to a large extent determine attitudes. She said herself in the first essay we discussed that as a matter of fact, whoever is put over, you know, is the person who's in command gains a sense of superiority. Whoever's obeying gains a sense of inferiority. And the way that you would lessen that, as she's spelled out in her section on responsibility, is that maybe that command should be limited. It should be something that happens in parts of your life, but not in other parts.

And again, I'm bringing in her theoretical picture of a free society idea of small groups where there's a lot of autonomy among members. Everybody understands the organization. So I do think that it's not just equality of opportunity means we go with the meritocracy. And the problem is we just need to change people's attitudes within the existing meritocracy. No, you're not going to be able to do that unless you do have some structural changes. They're just not going to be the sort of that the extreme communist of what's the Kurt Vonnegut short story of all the smart people must have things to scramble their brains and all the strong people must wear heavy weights to slow them down to the.

You know, it can't be that kind

26:59 Wes: of like leveling my general sense from reading her, and I might be wrong, I would have to read more, but is that she doesn't think that meritocracy is something that can be eradicated from society or that these sorts of inequalities can actually be eradicated. It's not a Marxist vision where everyone can essentially be a fisherman in the morning and then do something else in the evening.

27:23 Seth: God, I hate that phrase.

27:24 Wes: I don't know if that's right, but that's the general impression I've gotten from a point we.

27:28 Seth: I feel like there's a couple answers still here in the Text. I'm going to read a selection here. This is page 119. The needs of the soul. So, Mark, this is intended to respond to some extent to what you were saying. So, to begin with, for a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it, to know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact that it's not any consolation, but it's an additional motive of bitterness. According to the individual character, some can be thrown into a state of depression, while others could be encouraged to commit a crime.

So this is where she's basically saying, even if we have equality of opportunity, if there's somebody who recognizes they can't take advantage of that opportunity, they're just going to become bitter. Right. And get depressed or commit a crime. So then in social life, a sort of aspirator towards the top is inevitably created. That makes the point I made earlier about going. Being able to go up and down the social scale. As she says, this sort of equality, upward mobility and downward mobility, if allowed full play by itself can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing.

So it's actually threatening to have completely fluid, to have equality of opportunity so deeply entrenched that you can equally aspire to the top, but equally fall to the bottom. She says there are less clumsy methods of combining equality with differentiation. The first is by using proportion. Proportion can be defined as the combination of equality with inequality. And everywhere throughout the universe it is the sole factor making for balance.

28:58 Wes: The means of balancing are. Seth, what you've mentioned, which is the increase in personal risk and positions of authority and social rank being an aggravating circumstance and crime. And then ultimately again, towards the end of the essay, it's one of the important balancing features is status.

29:16 Seth: She talks about that. And she says another way you could make equality compatible with differentiation would be to take away, as far as possible, all quantitative character from differences. This is the redistribution of wealth, I guess, to some extent. Although.

29:29 Wes: No, no.

29:30 Seth: You don't believe that. No.

29:32 Wes: Well, yeah, I don't think so.

29:33 Seth: Okay.

29:34 Mark: Quantitative character is paying different people different amounts. That's exactly what that is.

29:38 Wes: I don't think so.

29:39 Seth: Okay, what do you think that means? Wes, read some more quotes.

29:43 Wes: So this is on page 120. So where there is only a difference of kind, not in degree, there is no inequality. You guys might be right, but let's just figure it out. No equality at all by making money. The sole or almost the sole motive of all actions. The sole or almost the sole Measure of all things. The poison of inequality has been introduced everywhere. Everyone, I think, has to have enough. But I think the idea here is really about the way money is valued in a society, not so much about how it's distributed. So that if we think, oh look, Elon Musk or whoever, the way money is valued in this society is, it's seen as evidence of moral worth or evidence of, of being better than the more money you have, the better you are. It's another status thing. We have to eliminate that sort of association.

30:28 Dylan: The mentioning of proportion. Seems to me that even if she would be completely in agreement that there's going to be gradations of wealth that are perfectly fine, is that she would be on board with the conversation that, look, there ought to be a sort of reasonable proportionality between, between the quantitative wealth of the highest and the lowest or how much the CEO makes versus how much the line worker makes. So to the extent that there are concerns about that gap getting wider now than it had been 30 years ago, she would be on board with that.

31:04 Wes: She probably would be. She probably would be on board with concerns about wealth inequality or income inequality. I just don't think that that's what she's talking about in this section. I could wrong, but that's just. I don't see evidence of that anywhere.

31:18 Mark: I just have to clutch to the distinction between. Here she's saying what human needs are. Later we can have a conversation about what to do to fulfill these needs. That's the most charitable way that I can read this because so much of what she's saying, my practical side, like, you know, this whole section resonated as Elizabeth Anderson, you know, who we had on the show. But she's entirely practical. Like she's making concrete policy decisions at every freaking step and does not have what I'm perceiving in Weil here as a first, let's do the psychology and then we can have the policy discussion.

I don't see how. Oh, we really need to make sure that the people on the lower end of the spectrum get respected just as much. And also we need to make it so that just like people can rise in society, we also need to make it so that the already very powerful and wealthy can lose that power and wealth. Like there's no way that the power and wealthy are going to let that happen. Like either of these things happen, happen.

32:13 Wes: But I think the points here are really important because the equalization of material resources doesn't solve one of the principal problems in society, which is the Unequal distribution of status. And in fact it could aggravate that. That's the thematic problem, right? That's the thing that leads to nationalism and all sorts of other isms. If you don't solve that problem, you're going to have a lot of trouble.

32:36 Seth: Yeah.

32:37 Dylan: At the bottom of 120, she's pretty explicit about your exact point, Wes. Equality is all the greater in proportion as different human conditions are regarded as being more nor less than one another, but simply as other. Let us look on the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. And let the material hardships attaching to the miner's condition be counted in honor of those who undergo them.

33:03 Seth: This is where she talks about money being the measure in the previous two paragraphs up that was already read. It's that if you use money as the measure of equality, so minister or capitalist entrepreneur makes more money, the miner therefore has more worth. She says in that same paragraph at the end, where there's only a difference in kind, not in degree. There's no inequality at all. She's not saying that people should make the same amount of money necessarily. There is some sense of. We have to talk about distribution of wealth in terms of physical needs and soul needs.

But what she's saying is if you look at the work that's actually being done and the way in which somebody translates their intellect into action physically to create output, and you just say what a miner does is respectful in itself and what the minister does is respectful in itself. Or the entrepreneur, the guy who made the sock company that gives one free pair for every pair for everyone that's purchased, and you take money out of the equation and you look at the activity itself, then you're looking at two totally different things and so they can't be compared with each other.

You can't create an inequality because there's no common measure. Money basically has become a universal medium by which you can compare things with each other. That's what it's for. That's the purpose, that's the role that prices play.

34:19 Wes: So for instance, I have friends who are willing to be super woke and totally into identity politics. But if you push them on the issue, a simple issue, like should a busboy make the same amount of money?

34:33 Mark: I knew the busboy was coming up.

34:35 Wes: Sorry, how many times have I brought that up? Is that well?

34:37 Mark: But that's exactly what was influencing me by saying, yes, I think she agrees with you about this, but go ahead.

34:42 Seth: Why is it not a bus girl why is it not a bus trans person?

34:47 Wes: Right. I've said this to people. There's no reason a busboy should make less money than a CEO, which is something I believe as a libertarian socialist. Now that doesn't mean that I think we should have laws that enforce equal wages between them, because I don't know if that's socially and economically possible. I'm open, open to it, but I don't know. But there's absolutely no ethical, moral case to be made for anyone to have anything more than anyone else. But the reason why this gets people's hackles up is because, well, they'll say certain things like, but I worked really hard to go to Harvard and do all the things that put me into this position.

And so I deserve more money for this. And I'm like you say to them, well, you don't think that the busboy has all their life worked just as hard as you. They may not have done it at Harvard because really this is not about money. This is about status. This is about the amount of prestige attached to certain jobs. That's the idea that they actually cannot give up. They may express that in terms of hard work and how much money is due, but really, no matter how woke they pretend to be, they really will have a lot of trouble giving up the idea that the job of a busboy should be just as prestigious as say a university professor.

36:04 Dylan: But don't you mean something different than that, Wes?

36:06 Seth: Yes.

36:07 Dylan: You just moved from making as much money to be just as prestigious.

36:10 Wes: Well, that's what I'm saying is that one is just a stand in for the other.

36:14 Dylan: It is effectively. But it would be one thing to say that they ought to make more money than the busboy because they worked harder. There's another that what if they made as much money but the prestige was a lot higher, that the currency of status was different, that money.

36:28 Seth: What if the prestige was equal?

36:30 Wes: That's what I'm saying.

36:31 Seth: If the busboy was respected the same way as the CEO, but the CEO made more money.

36:37 Dylan: But prestige is different than respect, right?

36:39 Seth: Well, we're not into honor section. We're still on the equality section.

36:43 Wes: Well, this is semantic. I think we're thinking of two different forms of respect.

36:46 Dylan: The only point I'll make is that respect is different than prestige. And the respect that I hear her talking about is the respect and consideration due every human being. Because this respect is due to the human being as such and not a matter of degree.

36:59 Seth: Right, okay, that's fair. I get that.

37:01 Dylan: That has to do with respecting them as individual ends in themselves and all that kind of thing. And that's not the same thing as prestige or honors, right? Just because I give somebody respect from the standpoint of them being an autonomous human being, doesn't mean that I have to honor them as equally as someone else who did something more honorable, or that there's any incongruity between saying that being the leader of a company of 10,000 people is more prestigious than being a ditch digger.

37:33 Wes: Her point is that there is some incongruity. I'm agnostic on the degree to which I agree with that. But she is suggesting that we need to give all these different the miner just as much prestige as the poet or mathematician. She says that let us look at the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. She uses the word honor. The miner's condition to be counted in honor of those who undergo them. So using the word honor and prestige synonymously, and this is a type of respect, and these two types of respect interfere with each other.

So the type of respect that is just the universal liberal type of respect, where I say you're an end in yourself and I respect you as a person, you have certain rights. And then the question of status and prestige, those two things, yes, they're different, but unfortunately, socially they have implications for one another. And yes, people do look down on other people with jobs that they consider to be low status jobs. And I think whether it's possible or not, if we are to think about an ideal society, if we are to imagine an ideal society, we do have to imagine one in which there is not a disparity in status between those different occupations.

The status stuff has to line up with the basic, basic respect for personhood stuff.

38:50 Seth: I feel like this is a Gordian knot here, but I feel like equality comes from respect. And she talks about honor. You mentioned you used the word prestige. I'm not 100% sure that that maps entirely under what Weil is saying, which is not to say that it's not right, but she's trying to say if you look at the profession of miner and you look at the profession of minister, they are two completely different things. They're unrelated, they have completely different activities, vocations, risks, all that sort of thing. And if you just look at them as other, then you can respect the one and respect the one.

You can accord respect to both because they're completely unrelated. When you introduce the notion of value in the form of compensation for these Activities and the miner gets paid pennies on the dollar compared to the minister. And you say the minister then has more value, has more worth. That's where you introduce the notion of inequality. Now the question of is the notion of prestige, as Wes has described it, attached to our notion of money? Can you disassociate prestige from money? I think you can. I don't think these are good examples for that.

I think there are prestigious vocations where we don't even really know what people make or what they're worth, but we associate certain kinds of prestige and so forth.

40:05 Mark: Being a podcaster, broadcasting to the world, people assume, sure, of course, that we're high status individuals.

40:11 Wes: So what I'm trying to say is the prestige does not follow from the compensation. The compensation is different because the prestige is different.

40:17 Seth: Okay, well, I'm not sure I believe

40:20 Mark: that, but I would like us not to have that discussion. Let's get the next two sections out and then we can see if you have any more thoughts on, based on what she has to say about hierarchism and honor. So, hierarchism. Hierarchism is a vital need of the human soul. It is composed of a certain veneration, a certain devotion towards superiors, considered not as individual nor in relation to the powers they exercise, but as symbols. What they symbolize is that realm situated high above all men, whose expression in this world is made up of the obligations owed by each man to his fellow men. See, this just really is like religious gobbledygook to me. Like, I don't clearly see how this maps on to the hierarchism and prestige as we've been talking about it.

40:58 Seth: It maps back where she talks about responsibility.

41:02 Wes: Well, you don't need religion. You just see people as symbols of an ethical ideal or a social ideal.

41:08 Seth: She says back in the notion of order, the first part of the section, she says the head of the state should be a symbol.

41:14 Wes: It's in the obedience section where she's saying that the whole hierarchy becomes sick unless the monarch is also subordinate to a greater goal.

41:25 Seth: Right.

41:26 Dylan: Obedience being a necessary food of the soul. Whoever is definitely deprived of it is ill. Thus any body politic governed by a sovereign ruler, accountable to nobody, is in the hands of a sick man.

41:36 Seth: Right.

41:37 Wes: And the accountability is to the ideal.

41:39 Mark: I saw Downton Abbey as well, exemplifying this, where there's definite class. And some people are very snooty about the classes, but like, the good characters are the ones whether they're on, you know, in the servants or among the nobility that are living in the manor, they talk about the value of this enterprise, of having this abbey as a symbol, as an ongoing institution. Its purpose is to actually serve the town. It's very hard to come by a job, so it's actually doing the servants a favor. Like, oh, if we get rid of the abbey, what are all those servants are going to be out of work.

And the servants are themselves working fully participating at least the head servants as the honor of the abbeys that stake in everything that they do. And you know, that seems like a great model of something that's super hierarchical, but seemed like it would pass Weil's tests at least, if only the good characters attitudes were involved.

42:31 Seth: I think this is another place where Weil's crossing over a variety of political spectrums, or whatever you want to like points of view comes into play. We already know that she thinks collectivity is a necessary evil and that collectivity necessarily involves superiors and inferiors, at least in forms of submission, and that you need to be obey and you need to be able to choose to obey. And all this, and all she's saying here is, what she says is it is composed of a certain veneration, a certain devotion towards superiors not considered as individuals, but as symbols.

What they symbolize is that realm situated high above all men and whose expression in this world is made up of the obligations, which is where we started this whole conversation. So in other words, hierarchism is really not a function of like social order in terms of command and obedience, but it's fidelity to assemble, to recognition of something higher than yourself as. As embodied in an individual. And this is the place above all, Mark, where her religious, Catholic, whatever mysticism might come into play is that you might say, like, this is where the hierarchy is.

Not necessarily. We're not talking about the president or ministers or whatever so much as we're talking about priests or pope or that sort of thing. But it's the idea that you recognize that you're subordinate to these obligations, and insofar as those are manifested in the forms of individuals in the society, then you can essentially submit yourself to them. But it's really about submitting to the ideal.

43:58 Wes: This is kind of reminiscent of Burke, right, where he argues against simply getting rid of hierarchy in a society because he will claim that hierarchy is the only way that large numbers of individuals can actually be linked together in any meaningful way. Most of our relationships are not going to be personal. There's only room for a few personal relationships. And the only Way to be linked to a larger whole is in terms of some sort of function. And function is inherently hierarchical. Each of the parts serves the functioning of a larger whole. And then it gets reflected in actual hierarchies among individuals. Because large collectives don't function without it.

44:39 Mark: I at least like the fact that she's talking about symbols here. As being the only legitimate object of devotion among their subordinates. A consciousness on the part of the superior of this symbolic function that that makes it a matter of conscious concern. It does not apply to lobsters. You cannot line her up with Jordan Peterson and say hierarchy is just natural. And so it is unavoidable. No, this is actually something that is sublime. That only us rational folks can really have the proper kind of hierarchy. That maybe the natural kind of hierarchy that's merely somebody subordinating somebody else, as in slavery. That is everything that's brutish. She wants to overthrow that kind of hierarchy in favor of. Of again, something adopted with consent. With full exercise of our human potential.

45:26 Wes: There are reasons why there are hierarchies in social animals. But it's not like it's an accident.

45:32 Mark: All right, honor. Who wants to read the beginning of honor here? What's the relevant quote? 121.

45:37 Dylan: I'll just read the beginning. Honor is a vital need of the human soul. The respect due to every human being as such, even if effectively accorded. Is not sufficient to satisfy this need. For it is identical for everyone and unchanging. Whereas honor has to do with a human being considered not simply as such. But from the point of view of his social surroundings. This need is fully satisfied. Where each of the social organisms to which a human being belongs. Allows him to share in a noble tradition enshrined in its past history and given public acknowledgment.

46:09 Wes: Let me read a quote that justifies my association of prestige and honor on the next page. It's also around all oppression creates a famine in regard to the need of honor. For the noble traditions possessed by those suffering oppression go unrecognized through lack of social prestige.

46:24 Dylan: It's true.

46:25 Wes: I think we kind of got at this a lot with our discussion. The busboy example and all that.

46:29 Mark: But I feel like it's really talking about honor as being something within an endeavor. We should have more professional organizations that recognize the great work that people have done within those professions. That we should have more of those we should have. Have, like fishermen doing their contests or miners doing their contest. In the same way that we have, you know, with literary and artistic achievements. It's not about comparing the honor of a busboy to comparing the honor of a CEO. It's about comparing the honor of various busboys.

47:00 Seth: Nah, I. Yeah, I don't think I agree with that, but no, I don't either. This is another place. How she manages to impregnate such short paragraphs with so much meaning or so much potential meaning. Okay, let's go back to read. Deprivation of honor attains in its extreme degree with the total deprivation of respect reserved for certain categories of human beings. In France, this affects, under various forms, prostitutes, ex convicts, police agents, and the subproletariat composed of colonial immigrants and natives. Categories of this kind should not exist.

Crime alone should place the individual who has committed it outside the social pale, and punishment should bring him back again inside of it. So this is not a let's compare the busboy to the CEO. It's by virtue of connecting somebody to a collectivity which is defined in some way. Prostitute, native, whatever. It deprives them not just of respect, of their individual dignity by virtue of categorized. But you essentially then create categories of honor or dishonor which just like redoubles the effect. So this is actually worth. It's an amplification.

48:14 Wes: It is also about occupations, right? So social prestige of aviation versus miners and fishermen. The incredible heroism displayed by miners and fishermen barely awakes an echo among miners or fishermen themselves. So this really is about equalizing prestige among different occupations. And that actually is possible. I'm thinking about the Deadliest Catch, right? Was that on A&E, where, I don't know, certain types of exposure to what? I think that increased the prestige of that sort of commercial fishing. When people see that, it actually, you know, I might have been confused by her calling fishing heroic if I hadn't seen that show. So the more we know about such things, the more we might attach some honor to them. But the basic point I want to make is this includes the. The equalization of prestige between professions.

49:02 Seth: I don't disagree with what you were saying. I think in this section she takes it beyond profession.

49:09 Wes: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I mean, prostitute is a profession.

49:13 Seth: Prostitution. But being a native, a colonial immigrant is not a.

49:17 Mark: Well, can we take prostitution for a second? That is. No, get rid of that as a concept. Redefine it as sex worker. Give awards just like Deadliest Catch. Work on showing that actually there are degrees of skill within that.

49:34 Seth: And risk.

49:35 Wes: Yeah, I think what you're revealing, Mark, is there's actually two, because some people would object to that. They would say prostitution's exploitation is unhealthy, reflects a lack of psychological health. And so if that's true, then we have two different things going on here. One is the equalization of prestige among certain occupations, and the other is just refraining from dehumanizing or seeing as less than certain whether it's racial groups or any other sort of group. And I think those two things are actually. Well, they're related, but different. I have to think about it.

50:12 Seth: Do you have respect for the individual who's chosen a life or been forced into a life of prostitution? And then to what extent do you honor that choice or that person? But I think nothing in Weil talks about compassion. There's very little of the way of fellow feeling.

50:33 Mark: I don't think that's the case. I'm not sure if she uses that word, but that whole. How could you possibly see someone starving next to you and not do something? I forget which of these essays that's in.

50:43 Seth: It's an obligation, and it's about. She doesn't talk about a feeling of illness. It's this. I don't disagree with you, Mark. I'm just saying she does not cast it in terms of an emotional component to your psychology that somehow, like, surprisingly for somebody who became a Christian mystic.