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1. 00:00 No text people will sacrifice their prosperity their livelihood their well-being their family their freedom and even their lives for two things actually for a modiccom of intimacy or the illusion of intimacy and in order to protect what they perceive as immutable values
2. 00:28 this is axiological defense so to speak No text so people will do anything they would die for these things and the thing is that we have two types of politics we have charismatic politics and we have institutional bureaucratic politics and the history of the world is a battle
3. 00:49 between charismatic leaders and with their charismatic politics and institutions with their bureaucracies with their impersonal um kind of procedures and forms management and so on and so forth and people perceive bureaucracies as heartless even as merciless definitely
4. 01:12 as impersonal there's no intimacy with a bureaucracy whereas there is fake intimacy with a charismatic leader this is at the heart of the celebrity culture this fake intimacy people crave intimacy they want to be seen they want to be to participate in in various kinds of
5. 01:37 processes including historical processes they want to conceive of themselves as agents of change they want to make a difference this imbuss their lives with meaning and unfortunately modern politics which are essentially bureaucratic verbarian politics don't
6. 01:56 give you that they don't give you that there are there's this wall of regulations and rules and directives No text and forms that you have to fill in and then the machinery because it's a machinery the machinery chews you out and chews you and spits you out and and
7. 02:16 you're processed like so much raw material you're it's it's objectifying bureaucracies are very objectified and people people want to avoid this dehumanization the only way to do that is to destroy undermine and challenge the institutions in a rebellious and defiant way and via
8. 02:37 the agency of a charismatic leaders so world history is a p pendulum between charismatic politics and institutional politics and people gain a modicum of for intimacy fake fake integration fake a fake sense of being apprehended or being seen by someone when they adhere to a
9. 03:01 charismatic leader and this is exactly the essence of cults in a personality cult and so today we live in a period where there is this battle between charismatic politicians and institutions No text and what happens is when the system delivers when the system improves prosperity
10. 03:26 enhances well-being delivers outcomes when the system is efficacious and efficient when the system is there for you however impersonally when everything is smoothlined and streamlined and so on this creates resentment and hatred this is a great irony in human history people resent
11. 03:49 people hate systems that work for them because these systems are not personal enough these systems in these systems they feel unseen it's a it's a form of grandiosity actually whereas people prefer charismatic systems of governance which are usually very inefficient and
12. 04:13 inefficacious and very self-destructive and lead nowhere within short to medium term and so it seems that people truly choose self-sacrifice just in order to experience acceptance in an inroup just to to have this sensation of belonging of and of being seen and so this is this
13. 04:40 is where we are today and the second axis the second issue is values the defense of cherished values against competing values if we look at the history of the United States there is this constant tension between liberal progressive values and conservative
14. 05:02 traditional values religious values and No text this tension has led to one civil war in the 1860s and another one which is seems to be imminent because the United States is an artificial creation and has attempted to do the impossible to integrate conflicting value systems
15. 05:23 within a culture that is riven and shredded and fragmented by these internal dissonances this is not going to work it's not going to work and the United States constantly oscillates between institutional politics and charismatic politics charismatic
16. 05:45 leaders in the United States take the country usually in wrong self-defeating self-destructive directions and this is remedied by a period of institutional conformity and and governance and so this is where we are today where people rebel against faceless heartless merciless
17. 06:11 um exacting demanding institutions regardless of what is what these institutions deliver which is great great outcomes and they rebel against institutions because these institutions embody and raify values which they reject and which they perceive as
18. 06:30 threatening on the one hand these institutions dehumanize and objectify people within vast machine-like bureaucracies which are inexurable and which grind on regardless of human idiosyncrasies and even human suffering and we're never going to resolve this
19. 06:52 because if we want to deliver good efficacious efficient outcomes we need to do it on a vast scale and this requires the sacrifice of the individual and if we don't care about outcomes if all we care about is community a communal sense and in-group versus
20. 07:16 outgroup and values and so on so forth then we need to compromise and we need to sacrifice our and we need to reduce minimize our expectations as to the possible consequences and outcomes of such chaotic fuzzy systems of governance led by charismatic
21. 07:39 leaders within personality cults we are doomed to choose between tyrannical um bureaucracies and charismatic ideological leaders and there's no middle ground and no solution has come forward to mig to somehow reconcile these two and as long as these
22. 08:02 are the only two ways of governing ourselves that we came up with we're pretty doomed hence anarchies anarchy and various isms attempts to square the circle the circle of the human soul human psyche because on the one hand we crave a father figure we crave the
23. 08:26 intimacy of a group and on the other hand we expect we have expectations we want to be we want to be the recipients of health care and education other services and so on these two don't go together