On Violence I | Crises of the Republic

Hello everyone and welcome.

This is reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Burkowitz, the podcast of the Hannah Arendt Centre for

Politics and Humanities at Bard College in New York.

The Hannah Arendt Centre provides an intellectual space for passionate, unsensored, non-partisan

thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Arendt published numerous books and in this podcast we read them with you.

My name is Yada Mada and I'm the Director of Academic Programs here at the Arendt Centre.

It's my pleasure to welcome Roger Burkowitz, founder and academic director of the Centre.

Every Friday, Roger Burkowitz hosts a virtual reading group for all of our members.

Together we have been reading Arendt since 2014.

This episode is based on what we are reading in our reading group.

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Our current book is Crisis of the Republic, first published in 1972.

In this work Arendt examines moments of political moral breakdown in modern democracies.

Analyzing how power, authority and responsibility are tested during times of war, deception,

civil disobedience and constitutional crises.

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In our hand it over to Roger who's going to close read and analyse the next chapter for us.

Welcome.

My name is Roger Burkowitz.

I'm the founder and academic director here at the Arendt Centre at Bard College

and thrilled to be with you today for our virtual reading group.

We are continuing to read Arendt's book, The Crisis of the Republic or Crisis of the Republic.

A book that is ever more timely.

We've planned these beautifully.

We read the essay, Civil disobedience right along the time that the events in Minneapolis were transpiring.

And now we are on to her essay on violence at a moment in which not only are we experiencing civil unrest

but also debate around the use of AI in violence.

And of course a war which has just started in the Middle East.

So these topics are not irrelevant.

Let's just start there.

And yet we should also remember that the essay that we're about to read was written in 1969

and published in the New York Review of Books.

So it's not written for today.

That doesn't mean it's not relevant.

I think it is, but we should be wary of just assuming a one-to-one relevance.

This is one of Arendt's, I think, wider, more widely read essays.

And we're actually, you know, just for quite quick little advertisement.

We're actually hosting a conference on violence in April at the Arendt Centre.

Two days, April 23rd and 24th.

Jess Feldman, our postdoctoral fellow, is running that.

And Jess, maybe you can put a little information in the chat about the conference.

But that should be an exciting two-day event.

This essay, as I said, is popular.

It's mostly read for part two.

So the essay takes place in three parts.

Part one, part two, part three.

Part one is what we're going to talk about today.

And it's probably the least liked part of the essay.

And often the most criticised part of the essay.

But also I think the least understood part of the essay.

I call it violence and its instruments.

The second part of the essay is on the difference between power and violence.

And this is the most liked and most read part of the essay.

And then part three, which argues that violence is separate from power,

is the culmination of the essay.

And we'll read that as well.

I have broken the essay up in our discussions in three parts in these three different parts.

Because I think it's so complicated.

And I think it's an essay that is often, you know, people take it, take one or two things from it.

But they don't try and understand it as a whole.

And you could say, well, if you're one understand,

whole why are you breaking up into three parts?

And that's a good question.

But I'm hoping that in slowing down and reading it part by part,

we'll be able to give it a kind of attention that is not usually given to this essay

and try and show the way in which the three parts actually hold together.

And that's going to be my effort to do so.

It is, it's one of the most, one of our essay's that's most connected to real events.

Right?

And you'll see that in the footnotes.

And also in the appendix and the appendices.

There's like 20 something or almost 30 appendices written in this essay.

And I'm not going to be talking about them for the most part as we read.

But I hope in the Q&A, some of you will bring them up because they're,

they're really where she is addressing, you know, other people in articles and newspapers

and speeches talking about some of these issues.

And I can't, it's just too complicated to bring everything into it.

But I hope you will bring up specific events that she's talking about

and allow us to talk about them and consider them.

So what is the essay on violence about from 1969?

I think that you can understand it.

If you take a look at, if you're just doing the crisis of the public edition,

page 132, which is the last page of part one.

So we're reading today part one, the last page of part one.

And in that, in that, on that page,

our rent asks, she says, if we look on history in terms of a continuous chronological process,

this is in the last paragraph on page 132, second sentence, right?

If we look on history in terms of a continuous chronological process.

So look at history as things going chronologically in a process.

Whose progress moreover is inevitable, right?

And this is a thesis that she is clearly against, does not believe in.

But she thinks it is the Marxist thesis.

And she thinks it's the thesis of many of these social scientists who she's engaged with,

who think that things follow one after the other.

She says, if we look at history as a process,

violence in the shape of war and revolution may appear to constitute the only possible interruption.

It's a very compelling and simple idea, right?

If history is a process, right?

If you think that the world is a system and that everything happens, you know,

because one thing follows the other follows the other,

and we can't stop it.

And it's just inevitable almost.

Then she says, violence, right?

In the shape of war and revolution might be the only way to interrupt the process.

It's like the way to put a wrench in the machine and the gears.

And she says, if this were true,

if only the practice of violence would make it possible to interrupt automatic processes

in the realm of human affairs,

the preachers of violence would have won an important point, right?

If it were true that A, things happen in a process,

and B, violence is only the only way to stop the process,

then those who preach violence would have an important point.

She says, however, it is the function, however, of all action,

as distinguished from mere behavior,

to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically

and therefore predictably.

And this is her general argument that she begins in the human condition with

and has been so important in her work,

that it's not only violence that can interrupt the processes of history, right?

Human action, acting together, collective action,

could be civil disobedience, could be non-violence,

it could be a great speech, it could be a union action,

it could be a new political party emerging,

whatever it is, all sorts of action is capable of interrupting the processes of history

and making changes.

And so a big part of what she wants to argue here is that you don't need

to turn to violence, to inaugurate political change.

In fact, she wants to almost make the opposite case, right?

That violence is not the highest form of political action,

which she thinks that a lot of these preachers of violence are arguing,

but that violence is actually a substitute that appears

when we give up on political action because power throughout society has collapsed.

And so the core intellectual distinction of the essay in part two

and part three between power and violence, right,

is set up by her critique of the preachers of violence here in part one,

who she thinks are presenting violence as a necessary way of acting

to make political change in the world,

but she's actually saying, A, action can work without violence,

and B, violence is a symptom of actually the impotence of political action.

A violence appears where power and politics no longer work,

where they're in jeopardy.

And this is the ultimate, I think, thesis, one of the main

theses of the whole essay, but certainly what she's trying to present here in part one.

So in doing so, our aunt is really attacking two of the deepest assumptions

of modern social science, right?

And this is the theme of hers, right?

The first is that the idea of history operates according to laws or processes, right?

She's going to contest that.

And the second is a liberal, sometimes Marxist faith in the inevitability of progress.

Right?

If these two assumptions, right, of that history as a process,

and that it is a process leading to progress,

that the arc of history bends towards justice,

if these assumptions collapse,

then the whole justification for both technocratic governance,

which leads us along the steps and processes of history,

and for revolutionary violence to sometimes break that system

and to inaugurate a new and better system,

both of those start to look much less convincing.

And this is our aunt's hope, is that they will look less convincing,

and that the world will become open to both the unpredictable initiative

of human beings acting together, such that, secondly,

we see history not as a process,

but as a web of unpredictable human action.

And in that world, violence is not the engine of history.

It is assigned the genuine political power has broken down.

All right.

That's a general overview of sort of the place of part one in the essay.

I'm going to now walk us through part one,

a little bit more, you know, step by step.

And, and let me say, this is a tough essay to follow, right?

If you read part one and you're like,

what in the world, you're not alone.

This is, you know, our aunt is a brilliant writer,

but she can be an infuriating writer.

She's brilliant in that she's able to condense incredible ideas into epigrams

and aphorisms that are powerful.

She's neat chain in that sense.

But at times, her work works around the issue,

and this is one of those essays where it's often hard to find a co-parent through line.

And yet I think we can, if we, if we look at it, we can, we can make some sense of it.

So part one overall, I call violence and its instruments,

and the first part of part one,

I'm going to break it into a number of parts to try and make it accessible.

The first part, she begins with a factual observation about the 20th century,

which I think is also relevant for the 21st century.

And she says in the 20th, 20th century, two things have changed.

One is we live in a century of wars and revolutions.

Well, we just started another war.

That hasn't stopped. We've had many revolutions.

In fact, this war is designed to bring about a revolution,

whether or not that has any chance of success or not, we'll see.

But it is still a century of wars and revolutions.

And the second is that the technical development of the implements of violence

has reached a point where political goals can no longer justify them.

She's clearly thinking here when she's writing this of things like nuclear weapons, right?

But also of carpet bombing.

We may think today of drone warfare, which can just, you know,

come into people's lives and put a stake through someone's heart or,

or AI, which could, you know, in a sense destroy an entire city,

kind of food supply, caught off water and electricity, starved people,

things like that.

The point is that technology has radically expanded the scale of destruction that is possible.

And so war, which once had a political logic, right?

War was politics by other means.

Now, the means of war are so destructive that they overwhelm the ends.

They annihilate the political world itself.

And this is the crisis with which she starts the essay that violence is a technical means.

It's an implement that she starts there.

But violence has grown so enormously destructive that it's hard to justify its political use.

I mean, what would it mean to use nuclear weapons?

Right? What would it mean to unleash biological warfare, warfare that destroys an entire population?

What would it mean to use AI to, in a sense, starve an entire civilization?

And so the argument she's making is that the technological means overwhelm the ends that could justify violence.

And that this is always possible in a means ends logic.

And she suggests that this may mean that war becomes increasingly unlikely.

Now, you could say, oh, we just started a war that seems like she's wrong.

Well, what she means is total war, right?

War that is willing to use the means we have at our disposal.

And one thing we realize is we're generally not willing to use all the means at our disposal.

There are plenty of weapons we have that we don't use.

And so she would think these more as Putin calls it like military actions or whatever.

But war, there are means that just seem almost unjustifiable to use them.

Okay, that's the first move of the essay.

The second part of part one of the essay is that the intellectual response to the, in a sense, irrationality of the means of violence attempts to rationalize violence.

And it does so by mistaken calculation for thinking.

Right? So the point is that under these circumstances where violence is so wildly destructive, she says there are few things more frightening.

This is on page 108.

Few things more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades.

She's talking about people with PhDs, people who work for the Rand Corporation or the Heritage Foundation or Brookings or whatever.

People who come in and try and game out what it would mean to use AI in a war or what would it mean to have a blockade and starve a people whether in Taiwan or Ukraine or Iran or whatever.

And she says the trouble with these people is not that they're cold blooded enough to think the unthinkable, but that they do not think.

What does she means by that?

She's saying that they calculate what would happen if we do this, what would happen if we do that?

They create hypotheses upon hypotheses.

They have hypotheses leads to a fact, which then we think is a fact, which births a holster similar new hypotheses and new facts, which forgets the speculative nature of the enterprise.

Her point is that the danger in these theories are not only that they're plausible, but that they take their evidence from present trends from things that they see in the world.

And because they have a consistency, right, we say, well, if this happens, this happens, this happens, this happens.

They have a kind of what they have what she calls a hypnotic effect.

They put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else, but our mental organ for perceiving understanding and dealing with reality and factuality.

That's on page 109.

Her point is that in Vietnam, you had these new mandarins, these people who put out these reports, and they somehow thought that if they could control the facts and control the reports, they could control the events and make something happen.

They believe that we could somehow rationalize the war and make the war come out the way we wanted it to.

And yet she thinks events are beyond our control.

She also sites this wonderful review by Richard Goodwin, the unthinkable and the unanalysable from the New Yorker.

This is again, she's talking about things she's reading on a daily basis.

It's a review of Thomas Shelling's arms and influence.

Some of you may know Thomas Shelling, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize at economics for precisely the theory, the game theory analysis that aren't here as criticizing.

Shelling tries to analyze what it would mean to win a nuclear war using game theory and rational choice modeling and escalation scenarios.

And she says these kind of things to think what would it mean to win a nuclear war?

And he comes up with these brilliant insights like using nuclear weapons increases the danger of a wider war, which Richard Goodwin says this sort of funny in a way.

And RN says that these are symptoms of pseudoscientific political analysis.

This of course is someone who won the Nobel Prize for economics.

And what Shelling is famous for is thinking about the unthinkable.

But what our aunt is saying is this kind of thinking about the unthinkable is not thinking it's calculating.

And she cites as sort of a final nail in the coffin of this.

Putons famous phrase, one of my favorite phrases.

The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statements, statements, prudence.

So in this second part, she's really interested in how these extraordinary new means of violence, the implements of violence, lead a whole new class of mandarins who take over the defense department and the social, you know, and much of government and much of the think tanks.

Lead them to think that they can somehow make this thing countable, make it meaningful.

And they actually hypnotize themselves and ourselves and put us to sleep.

She then shifts right in a third part of this introduction to the intellectual tradition that she says legitimates violence philosophically.

And there's a history to this, right? There's people like Klausfits, who I already said is formula is that war is a continuation of politics by other means.

The idea is that the violence of war is rationalized and legitimated by politics.

There's a certain Marxist revolutionary theory, which treats violence as the midwife of history.

History is happening and violence is simply a way to hurry it up.

And then there's thinkers like Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, who glorify violence as liberating and creative.

And she says all these theories share a deeper assumption, which is that violence has a kind of world creating or transformative power.

And she wants to push back against this idea. For our end, violence can destroy, but it can't really create new political orders.

This is similar to an argument we confronted in the essay lying in politics, and also her essay truth in politics, where she says, look, power can create new lies that are believed, but it can't in the end create truth.

Because if power creates a truth, there will be new power that will fight that truth.

And there's no way to stabilize truth just with power. In a similar way, aren't to saying that violence can destroy, but it can't build.

She then moves to this account of the student rebellions from the 1960s and the student glorification of violence.

And these are very nuanced pages, and I think need to be read carefully.

She begins by saying, let's grant the moral seriousness of the students, that what they did required real courage and action.

And that who would have expected, after the 1950s, this time of utter conformity, that young students would engage in a moral crusade like the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.

And so she gives them that credit, and she, as many of us know, who know of her time in that, her actions in that time, she was very sympathetic with many of the student movements.

But she says, why did it happen? And she says, you know, it's a global phenomenon. It happened all over the world, and you can't come up with, you know, all these things, all these particular reasons that people gave,

you know, once fits the US or one fits California, one fits Germany, one France, but how do you understand this worldwide global phenomenon?

And she has this, I think, haunting answer, in some sense, that this new generation of students who growing up in the 60s are those who hear the ticking of the bomb.

They are going to grow up with technology that all technologies could be weaponized, all technologies could ruin the world.

And that the sense of the future and the sense of that there might be a future, especially in a world of nuclear weapons, is something that they don't share.

I don't think today people feel that same way about nuclear weapons, but I think AI is having a similar impact on many young people today.

I mean, as someone who teaches young people, you know, everyone thinks, oh, all these young people want to use AI, that's not my experience at all.

In my experience, many of my students are scared to death of AI, they don't want to touch it, they resist it.

Because I think it's horrifying, it's terrifying to them, it teaches them that they may not exist in five years, that humans may not exist.

And it's out of this psychological environment, which I think was similar to the way that young people in the 60s saw nuclear weapons, where action becomes more important than the results.

Violence becomes attractive because it creates the feeling of action, even if that action doesn't accomplish anything.

I wrote a piece a number of years ago on politics and protest, in which, you know, I looked at a number of theorists of anarchism and protest.

People like Simon Critchley and David Graber and Jean Jacques Ronciet.

And these are people who basically say that the only way to experience freedom today is through protest, not through building new institutions, because institutions are always oppressive, but always protesting.

And Arant was very suspicious against that view, I mean, that's the argument of my essay.

But here, Arant is saying that too many of these young people come to see action as valuable for its own sake.

And this leads to the glorification of violence that Arant now is critical of, and that she critiques primarily in Jean Paul Sartre, also France Fanon.

Sartre writes about violence as purifying, as transformative, as existentially authentic.

Violence becomes a way to experience agency to feel alive.

It proves that you're not a cog in a bureaucratic society.

And for Arant, this is deeply mistaken, right? Violence may feel like action, but she thinks it doesn't actually lead to genuine political action.

She then considers a number of points that Sartre emphasizes in Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth.

And once you'd be very careful here, Arant is defensive about Fanon.

She says Fanon is better than Sartre and better than most, because she reads the whole book.

And if you read the whole book, The Wretched of the Earth, you know that in the last chapter, Fanon is actually very critical of the capacity of violence to create agency.

But most people only read the first chapter, especially today.

And Sartre, she says, really only read the first chapter.

And he elevates up, idlers, and gangsters, and says things like hunger without dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.

Which, of course, Fanon did say, but Sart emphasizes it in a way that Fanon didn't.

And Arant thinks this is crazy, right?

No real proletarian thinks that hunger without dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.

She calls this a romanticization of violence that appears in Sartre reading a Fanon.

And she says, rests on a misunderstanding of politics and social reality.

And this leads her to one of the more controversial elements of this text, one that I think has led this first section to be misreads so badly and often dismissed.

Where she says that it's especially white people who are susceptible to this glorification of violence, right?

She says that white student radicals are often detached from concrete social interests.

They don't represent a class or an oppressed group or an economic movement.

And so their rebellion becomes theoretical and symbolic.

It is often inspired by ideological narratives.

And this detachment from concrete interests makes the violence more tempting.

And it becomes a kind of dramatic gesture rather than a strategic political goal.

And she contrasts that with black power, which she says is different.

She says that black power movements are actually grounded in real material interests.

They need things like civil rights, political representation, economic equality and protection from violence.

And because these movements, she says are tied to concrete goals, their use of violence remains instrumental and limited and less glorified as it is for white people.

And thus the black claims of power and violence she thinks are actually more successful and more widely understood as part of a real class struggle.

And that makes them more politically rational, even when they engage in violence.

But the deeper problem that our aunt is here struggling with is that the student radicals confuse violence with action.

They believe that violence proves that they have agency.

Whereas for our aunt, as I've said, violence destroys an action is what creates.

What's really going on here and in the last section of the essay, I just want to turn to that and she should now makes this transition to the question of Marxism.

And she says why does why do these glorifiers of violence who are talking about not politics, but sort of an existential glorification of violence.

Why do they still speak the language of Marxism when they're so far from Marx?

She says Marx's historical theory places its faith not in violence, but in historical processes, namely the development of the productive forces and class contradictions.

Violence for Marx is only a midwife. It's an instrument that might accompany the processes, but it doesn't actually have value in and of itself.

The student radicals, however, right, are actually arguing that violence itself is good.

And yet, and so she says they're not really Marxist at all, right?

They believe that history unfolds. They no longer believe that history unfolds like Marx did through objective social processes.

And so what's going on here and she says the what's going on is that we've changed our understanding of progress, right?

We once believed in historical progress in the 19th century. Marx thought that there was a progress that the arc of history bends towards justice.

But if there is no historical process, guaranteeing change, if the world is about to end with nuclear war or AI, right?

We don't really care about progress. We just want to feel good and violence can help us feel good.

Violence becomes, in a sense, a creator of a kind of sense of power.

And this is the position that Aaron worries about in his sart and phenomenon.

And so just to end up, if the 19th century saw a belief in progress and violence as a midwife of history, the 20th century collapse, she's the collapse of progress, the collapse of a future.

And violence is reimagined as a creator of history. But our end views both of these as misunderstandings for her.

It is not violence which can interrupt historical processes and create but action.

And that's what she's going to try and develop in the latter two parts of the essay where she tries to distinguish power from violence and say the confusion and the collapse of power and the violence has prevented us from understanding that we actually still have power.

That we still have the power to build and create new public worlds.

Yes, thank you. I'm trying to understand how power and violence connects to her notion of crisis in plural.

Her overall title is Crisis of the Republic. We had the notion of crisis in her earlier books between past and future origins of totalitarianism.

And so this chapter responds to the crisis of those days in the 60s.

Yet none were nuclear debates, a student civil rights movement, a technocratization of the means of war, all that.

Now today the crisis of today are very often framed in terms of poorly crisis or meta crisis.

The idea of multiple distinct crises such as geopolitical, technological, environmental, social, not only occurring simultaneously but also interacting with each other.

So that crisis amplifies each other, producing outcomes that are much more severe than the sun of the individual crisis.

So my question is her idea that the use of violence is a sign that power has broken down.

That idea is so strong that I would very much like to understand what would it mean her thinking about the lack of transformative power of violence or that use of violence is the sign that power has broken down.

What would this mean for what Adam tools and so many others call pulley crisis or meta crisis.

What would it mean for the crisis and the amplification of crisis today in your view?

Thanks. Thanks, Burma.

Yeah, I think there's a number of ways this essay speaks to the crises in the plural of the republic.

One is we didn't talk about it, but in so far as she does think of war as politics by other means and as the ultimate rotsio of politics through violence.

In that sense, she thinks that most nation states and the old European nation states give into that idea because they're stuck in an idea of sovereignty in which you need to exert violence in order to defend your sovereignty.

And she says that the only place that doesn't necessarily need to embrace that kind of violence to defend its sovereignty and independence is the United States, right.

This isn't an apparent parenthetical bracket in our in our edition on page 107 to 108 where in parenthesis, she says the United States of America is among the few countries where a proper separation of freedom and sovereignty is at least theoretically possible in so far as the very foundations of the American Republic would not be threatened by it.

And so she thinks that in America, at least you could in principle as a republic as a federalist republic allow for different competing ways of life within the republic.

And also that foreign treaties which become part of the constitution are law of the land would mean that you could create treaties and and and and sense expand the sovereignty of the United States.

In a way that she thinks the countries of Europe cannot do, but she thinks that of course the United States has has refused that tradition and become more of a sovereign imperial state.

That's one way to understand it.

Another going I think deeper into the text and it's where you were headed is to say that for her, if you're going to create a republic of freedom, right.

A constitution of freedom as she talks about in chapters four and five of on revolution, you're going to have to multiply power and you're going to have to engage in and allow citizens to engage in participation in government in a way that allows them to actualize their power and be free because to be free is to is to act collectively and have power for her.

And that means that you're going to have to provide institutions in society that allow for power to be exercised in so far as we are glorifying violence and rep and confusing violence with power, she thinks we don't do that.

And so in so far as a republic for her is the constitution of freedom.

She thinks that the turn to violence at the expense of power is a crisis of freedom and a crisis of politics.

Well, this is going to be the sort of core of her argument in part three of the text and I think it's it's where it's where this text is going, right, which is that you in a republic, you have to allow people to exercise power, but not violence and and that's the and that's going to be the distinction she's going to make.

Lee. Yeah, thank you. My question is, does a rent believe that the violent rebellions always fail? I mean, she was, you know, some of the people she includes in this essay sought, for example, if an own, you know, they lived through the Algerian war, the Algerians had a choice between slavery essentially and freedom.

And they had to resort to violence in order to get their freedom. The war took eight years as a result of one, one million Algerians lost their lost their lives, but in the end, they, they became independent.

So my question is the Algerian conflict ended before a rent wrote this article in 69, the war lasted basically from around, I don't have the exact dates, but you're somewhere around the 1955 to 62 and it essentially took the goal to bring some wisdom and clarity into the whole situation.

Thanks, Lee. Yeah, I mean, so a couple of things, right? One is just about the Algerian war, right? I mean, Fanon himself doesn't think that the Algerian revolution succeeded, right? If you read the full book, you realize that by the end, you know, he thinks that, unfortunately, the Algerian revolutionaries who then come to rule Algeria are caught in the war.

They don't stop in many of the same modes of oppression that the French were. And, you know, aren't in our empty in language, right? This is the idea that a liberation is not the same as a revolution.

A revolution is the constitution of freedom. Now, what your question, you know, asks, and it's a good one Lee is, can violence lead to a revolution, right?

Clearly, violence can lead to a liberation, can it lead to a revolution? Our end doesn't say no. And in fact, she will say that some violence may be necessary to offer a revolution.

Maybe, maybe not. Well, we'll get there, you know, she should, and she says sometimes violence can happen, and it leads to a new foundation. But, and this is the, this is what she's talking about in part three of this text, and we'll get there in a couple of weeks.

But the overarching argument she makes is while violence sometimes can be productive and sometimes can lead to the foundation of freedom, more often than not, violence leads simply to more violence, right?

More often than not, violence ends up, you know, not being able to found freedom, but leading to resentment and anger so that other people then commit violence, and then this cycles of violence continues.

And, and so she's not, I mean, one of the, one of the things about this book, this essay, it's a long essay. So it's also publishes a book. It's not pro violence or anti violence.

She's trying to analyze the way in which violence works and how it can and how it can't found freedom. And what she says is, you know, it can be useful, and we'll get into this like in part three, she talks a lot about this, but she thinks more often than not, it's counterproductive.

And, you know, I think if you read the whole of, and again, I mean, one of the sad things to me about the fun on industry in the United States today is that 90% of people who talk about fun on don't read the whole book.

Now, if you read the whole book, yeah, I mean, he still supports violence and he's not against it, but he offers a lot of examples of the way violence doesn't work.

And while, and how it corrupts the very revolution that it was in the name of, and how it psychologically damages the people who engaged in it.

And so it's a much more nuanced and thoughtful book than I think, unfortunately, his friends and his supporters in the academy today, give it credit for being.

And that's why I think our rent is actually more supportive, you know, more defensive of phenomenon, which he really doesn't like is salt and his sort of radicalization of phenomenon in the introduction.

Is that helping? Leah, I think.

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. There's been a critique of rents, views of salt that he.

The question is, did he ever read sorts of a critique of dialectical reason rather than just the introduction to the to the book on phenomenon, which he, which he basis are all given on, but that's another topic.

That's another topic, exactly.

George, I have a question about the thoughtlessness. I mean, you know, we do have enough violence nowadays to talk about it. So that's, that's good.

But the thoughtlessness part, you know, it's easy to attribute it to thoughtlessness because then thoughtful people such as we can think about it and create it that way.

On the other hand, is what's going on in the Middle East right now?

Being called, what is it? Operation epic fury. Is that thoughtfulness, thoughtlessness or is that deliberate catch?

That's what's happening. That is the thing we're being provoked.

In a sense, we're deliberate catch into into going and critiquing it intellectually to to to extend us how we're doing.

But meanwhile, there's some very, very thoughtful stuff going, whether it's good thoughtful stuff or whether this is just a manipulative thoughtful stuff is a question.

But one thing they're not is thoughtless and that says they may be morally thoughtless, but that's a question too, because there's half the country or almost half the country.

Part of the country doesn't agree, but I think calling a thoughtlessness is the easy way out of that.

You know, that's, it's a good point. I mean, what I was calling thoughtless was the idea that we would be able to win easily, right?

I think it's interesting in the in the in the in the right in the Maga coalition, which is a fascinating coalition will deserves to be studied for many, many years.

You have pretty divergent views that are held together. You know, one is you still have, you know, some, you know, old style Republican conservative hawks.

And then and you have people like Marco Rubio, sort of in the middle, and then you have, you know, people like JD Vance and people from like Papu canons, old camp and his, you know, who are really ice, you know, I don't like to call themselves isolationist, but they want to call themselves not interventionists.

And I think Trump has to hold that whole coalition together. And I think his hope was that this would be a quick war that didn't cost a lot.

And I think it was on the model of Venezuela. I think he was somewhat, you know, enthralled by what happened in Venezuela.

And I think he, and I think there's a number of people in his administration and in the Pentagon and others who presented a way in which this could be done and could work.

That's all I was saying. And I think that that's the kind of brain trusters that, you know, are throughout our government and our, and our system that aren't as I think talking about, which she calls a kind of thoughtlessness.

It's not a moral thoughtlessness. That's not her point. It's that it's a, it's that it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bastion.

Somehow an unreal thoughtlessness that somehow we can calculate what's going to happen and what's likely to happen.

But it stops being what's likely going to happen and it becomes what's going to happen. And we actually convince ourselves that we're smart enough to know what's going to happen.

And unfortunately, it doesn't usually work out that way.

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