Exploring Complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien's Works: A Conversation with Alexander Prashauser

It's one of the fun parts of climate change , so I'll try to see that in consideration as we talk Um . How did you get into the works of jrR talking Um ?

So , um , they told , they told me that I would probably not understand it all , but they still gave it to me and I read through it and Um , yeah , as they said , I didn't understand it Um completely , but it was very , um , very informative and um , a short while afterwards the movies came out and I was I was negative on the movies even before that .

I was kind of talking with a hated this and so on and so on , um talking with a hated this and so on and so forth , um and um , but I saw them and I had to admit that they were pretty good .

But one thing that I noticed , um , even back then , was that I've always had a very abstract imagination , a very sketchy imagination , and the movies just completely supplanted my um imagination of the lord of the rings .

So afterwards I just had the images of the movies in my head , in my head , and Even back then I noticed that um film is kind of a more I guess you call it reified um medium when it doesn't leave you as much space for the imagination . It also doesn't require as much um conscious effort and um . Although I very much liked them back then , I always um .

I always resented them for that reason and that resentment grew over time and nowadays it's um actually pretty strong , because I still can't the image get , get the images of the movies completely out of my head . I still can't really find my own imagination for talking and I think um . That's somewhat sad , but in any case um .

In my um puberty , in my early youth , I started to read the cinema still marillion and um . I very much enjoyed it . I've always liked um ancient myths , um . I liked to read the um Yorgoni , um by Heysiot . I always enjoyed um , just um understanding um how people conceived of the world , um in kind of the mythic approaches Um .

For that reason I preferred it to um Horméa , although I never read the originals of Horméa , um and um . I also enjoyed Norse myth I and I liked all kinds of myth . I think actually um Age of mythology and some other video games .

Um Kind of helped along with that because um there was a lot of lore about Egyptian myth and um Norse myth in these Um and those are kind of the big mythic um complexes that we still draw from Um . I think it's a bit of a shame that other mythic systems have been largely forgotten , that um .

I'm always trying to um , trying to find some pieces of other myths . Um and yeah , talking drifted away from um , from me for a while . After that I started to read other literature . I read um the Dune books . I also enjoyed the Dune books , um and um , all kinds of other things , um , but it always stayed , stayed in the back of my head and also um .

I didn't really know what else I've talked in was out there . I um , I only knew the book of uh , the book of lost tales , which had been translated into German , but um I was . I was in no way prepared for that , because those are really more scholarly works , scholarly works um , um and so for a long time I didn't really read um other talking .

And one thing that happened to me , which I think happened to a lot of my generation , is that um tv shows kind of um Kind of supplanted my love for books , um for a long while . And I um , you know , with um the golden age of television , as they called it , um the wire and these opranos and um all of that um .

But at some point I came back to talking and I think um a significant part of that was um that there is um some really good um treatments of talking on um youtube there um some really good channels , um and um . I'll maybe give some recommendations later , but I think we'll probably save that for the end . Um and um .

Through these I Gained a newfound appreciation of talking and over time I noticed that um I had become bored of modern literature for um a while .

Um at this point I noticed that in fact there were um restrictions on modern literature that most people don't um notice and take um just have completely naturalized , but that are really um , that are actually really um that limit um the potential of literature itself , um and that have been um that have been ranging , raining um in literature for um for at least

the time of um seven tests , um and um , and so , yeah , I grew um very bored with all of this .

Um , science fiction was a small exception , but um I always came back to talking and over time I just noted that my appreciation of other things Lessened and my appreciation of talking was renewed each time , and each time I could um notice new things and um new facets of the work , and I think it's a really deep work and a really um really important um piece

of literature . And when I say the work , what I mean um is talking's work , considering its entirety , or at least the work pertaining to um Middle Earth and surrounding materials , so not just um the Hobbit and the Lot of the Rings , but also the Simerillian and um also um the entire history of Middle Earth and all the other um um supporting materials .

My mom , being both a hippie and a Catholic , was was very much into Tolkien and , um , I , I I was somewhat luckier than you as far as like the movies not supplanting my imagination of what those books were , although I'm sure that it has changed it , because I was 20 when the movie came out and I had grown up with two different sets of prior Lord of the

Rings movies , both of which being not the Rankin and Bass ones aren't bad . Um , the Backsheet one is kind of crazy . But since they since they had very different portrayals of the key characters , neither one of them really like solidified in my head .

And so when Peter Jackson's movies came out , uh , they supplemented things , but they didn't like replace my idea of what the books were .

But I think if I had seen those movies just five , ten years earlier , if I'd had just been a little younger , that would have froze it right there , um , and , and I agree with you on on that that there's something about the nature of cinema and television and about visual media , because it fills so much stuff out that forecloses a lot of imaginative capacity .

Now , I think you know , one of the interesting things about those movies is like , after the movies came out , like a whole lot of Tolkien's scholarly work gets republished .

Um , the Lost Tales , his , uh , his translations of um of various old English and Icelandic text , um , uh , people started using his his translation of Beowulf again , which is which had largely fallen out of favor when I was uh , studying all that , and so I I do have Peter Jackson to thank for for a whole lot .

Um , um , and the Salmarillion before the Peter Jackson movies was something we all talked about on Harsh Tones , because when I picked it up as a kid and then I read most of my Tolkien between ages of like six and 16 , originally Um , and I also interestingly read Dune about the same time .

Those were my two big book series and and uh , it's interesting to compare them because both in both cases you have Suns publishing other work , but at least Christopher Tolkien never had the audacity to go and write a whole lot of Salmarillion Tales on his own that are significantly worse than what was published .

Um , but , but I went back through it and I got fascinated with the Salmarillion because when I approached it as a kid , it like and I think I was about 15 when I tried to read a version of it it read like both the Bible and , like you know , translations of Beowulf , like it was . It was just totally alienating to me .

And then when I approached it after the movies came out I think it was probably about 25 years old Um , I found it fascinating . But by that time I had , like I had actually studied some Anglo-Saxon , um and uh , some some uh , german literature and I had gotten through the Bible .

So , like , it was a much easier haul and I found the themes in it kind of interesting .

Um , then , you know , as I got more and more into left-wing stuff and and and for people wondering why are they doing a show and JR talking on a socialist channel , um , I started moving away from the Tolkien work , not just because I considered it juvenilia , although a little bit of me did .

It was also because , um , I was kind of convinced by a lot of people and this is still a talking point that since Tolkien was uh a kind of theologically conservative Catholic , that he was somehow a reactionary Right and then , like , liking Tolkien uh Tolkien was was kind of a way to uh , you know to , to ignore , like you know , reactionary fantasy stuff in

your milieu . Um , over the last decade I have really changed on that . One , I think the idea that we have to read authors based off their politics is kind of frankly silly . But but two , I don't think you can reduce uh Tolkien's work to to any of that at all . Like , I think it is .

Uh , even if he was uh politically conservative and I don't know even the the . I've studied his life now too , I'm not even sure I can say that exactly . Like , I mean , um , the man kind of seemed to be a very close to an anarchist . Um , uh , that that there's still a whole lot to gleam from the Lord of the Rings .

And even if Tolkien was kind of a reactionary which again we've already we've already said I don't necessarily believe that um , why should we leave his work to only to them Right , like , why should we only let reactionaries have the classics , mythic works , works of fantasy literature that are quite rich ?

Um , and one of the things about that , as I mentioned with my mom , is , in the United States at least , tolkien's popularity didn't come from like conservative Catholics , and it wasn't originally his children's literature either . Hippies really liked Tolkien , like , like a lot and so , and that had a big influence on a lot of stuff .

Um , later on , like it changes the sort of sorcery genre eventually it changes , it even changes Dungeons and Dragons , but so so for those of you who know my hobbies , know there's a lot of intersections here .

But uh , I think that going back through particularly the Somerillian and and um the Children of Heron , which is kind of like drafts of other stuff that could have been in the Somerillian um , I have learned to really appreciate Tolkien as uh , tolkien as uh as a thinker who we can pull from , and like the idea , for example , that the dwarves are just anti-Semitic

stereotypes are that his views of , of like what a good society was , was basically right , right ways . I don't think that that's totally fair anymore . Anyway , I wanted to get your response to that because you're also a person who thinks that we can pull from this kind of literature on the left , um , even if the authors themselves are not leftist .

can't um put down a separating line between um the private man and um the works themselves , because , um , if you only restrict yourself to things he published , you are missing out on a big part of the legendarium .

If you um include um all of the history of Middle Earth , um , but don't include the letters , there's still important stuff in the letters , so you kind of have to consider the letters too .

But then basically you have already the opinions of the man himself , um in the letters Um , but at the same time he was very um , he was very insistent that you shouldn't um just read his works as some kind of um immediate political commentary or something that they can reflect on the world , but um shouldn't be read as an allegory .

You know he had a famous distaste for allegory that he said um allegory was the conscious um attempt by the author to make a story that um represents something , um represents some kind of point or something , um , whereas um .

He preferred applicability , um , which is if people go to the works and read them and um try to find out how they can apply them to the real world from their particular perspective . Um and he actually um , he actually um , put that within the um . He contrasted here the , um , the will of the author , with the freedom of the reader and um .

So in this sense um , this is kind of a liberatory concept , um , but also you can't just narrow down talking to freedom , although freedom plays a really big role , um in um talking and um . I do actually um , I think he is . I have a slightly different definition from uh to um , of reactionaries from yours , although related Um to me .

Reactionaries , um just want to go back to um a point in time before um , capitalism , and I think um , this can be um , um , this can um go um in the kind of um , a kind of temperamental , temperamental direction , um and the kind of political direction Um .

Of course the two are related , um , and I do put talking in um into um , the camp of being temperamentally reactionary to uh , according to that definition , but not politically so Um and actually being politically not unaware , but um , um very cynical about um , any possibilities for the world , um getting um , um getting better or something , um , um , at least from

what I can lean on his politics , although he was very reluctant to go into that Um , um but um . I also want to mention that um um the Shire , and I think this is um . This is kind of kind of a parallel that came to me um when I um also considered um him in relation to Catron .

You know my fascination with Catron and um the distinction that Platteblut's draws between bourgeois society and capitalism and the Shire . Of course Tolkien didn't um want the Shire to be understood as some kind of ideal society . That wasn't what he was after , but it was a kind of society that what he temperamentally um preferred

. I think Um , though with with its downsets , but also it is very akin to um early bourgeois society . You still have some nobility , but it is um , um very sparse and um .

You have um some kind of class collaborationism , um , although we can really only say that um from the relationship between Foto and um and Sam Um , and you have very flat hierarchies , um .

You have some kind of political organization which is even um a democracy , at least in parts , because the mayor gets elected and it's possible for um , a kind of lowly worker um , to become mayor , if only he accompanies his master to basically hell um and goes back Um .

So it's um , it's actually very similar to um early bourgeois society , um , and I don't think think , of course , that Tolkien intended that consciously .

I think um , he was just um within the shire , kind of sketching something he loved which was um the disappearing English countryside , and I think within that countryside were the last traces of this early bourgeois society , and he kind of picked up on that um subconsciously and um , yeah , of course there are um many things one can say about um , about kind of um

, the um in a right sense political aspects of Tolkien's work , um , and we'll probably get into some of those um , but yeah , that's my immediate reaction to um , to the things you were saying .

It's not like it is mythical and it is based in myth , but it's not . It's . It's not even primarily like like Arthurian legends or something like that that he's pulling from .

He's pulling from a mixture of his immediate society , the society of the English countryside in the 19th and early 20th century , the , the shifts of , of industrialization , which he saw the end of and was pretty horrified by the effects of World War I , but then also like pre , even medieval , like basically what we would call antique myths , so Icelandic sagas ,

anglosaxon sagas , germanic writings , etc . And also .

I mean it makes sense , given his profession , but there's a whole lot of like classicism that goes into some of the stuff . So I find it very interesting , particularly since there's been a tendency amongst certain kinds of groups to read him the way they might read his compatriot , cs Lewis , who was purely an allegorical writer for the most part .

I mean , like , like the Chronicles of Narnia are so veiled , lead , the allegorical that it's just even as a child I think I realized that like , oh , aslan , jesus , okay , like , so it's interesting where , when people try to do that to the legendarium are the Silmarillion , they're going to have a hard time . Actually , it just doesn't really work the same way .

So I think it's interesting and I think it's right to point out that , like , even when you're dealing with a fantasy construction of like antique myth that's retold that like tokens also not trying to hide that he is including things like the transition from what we would call early bourgeois to industrial bourgeois society , like that's part of what he's he's writing

about . He's not . I don't think he's so much . I mean , yes , there is like Catholic moral teachings in these books , but like he's not really trying to make an allegory for like biblical things that much .

And it took me a while to understand that when I was reading him because I have been like always Catholic and you know , hanging out with CS Lewis , so of course this is going to be an allegory and like it's not at all . I can't . Like I tried for years to make the allegorical readings work . You kind of can't . So why do you think there's been so much ?

Why do you think there's been a tendency on the left to to just classify ? I mean , I've literally heard people call him a Nazi , which I think is crazy . But to kind of write him off is a reactionary and fantasy literature and mythic literature as a whole as reactionary genres are concerned .

I mean , we have to admit that he was very pessimistic about the notion of human progress and also that is , his entire legendarium is interwoven with a kind of a kind of refusal to capitulate to materialism .

Of course he was mainly thinking about materialism in the metaphysical sense , but also there is not really a lot of , or pretty much any any historic materialism or things of that nature , and I think that that makes them suspicious and also they would like to discount it because well , again , it kind of goes against the whole progress narrative and also it expresses

a kind of sadness that has been there for from the beginning of modernity onwards , about the vanishing of fairy and the longing for fairy . And I don't think that , I don't think that they can really deal with that because , well , because it goes against the notion that humans can just be entirely rational creatures .

And yeah , if you , if you have to question that , you have to question a whole bunch of stuff .

And you know , I like to , I like to contrast that with Star Trek , which I think is of like modernist art , maybe the one that has the elicits the the most similar kind of passion from people and which kind of portrays somewhat utopian society , particularly in next gen , which might be what I consider the best expression of it , and but the thing is that it's

very cerebral and it's very , it's very white , not in the racial sense , but in the sense of the color palette . Literally is very white . The measure of a man , as they like to call the episode , is rationality .

It's not capacity for emotions , which , of course , animals also have emotions , but I do think that rationality without emotions is , is an empty , is nothing really , it's just a tool for their views by others and ultimately it's it's not a future that I want to live in , which says a lot about me personally , of course , but I think also it shows that there's

still a lot missing and a lot of things that we have lost along the way , even in this idealized future , and I think a lot of those things are in talking and , yeah , I think again , this makes people particularly modernist suspicious of him .

I don't think like there's generic progress Actually , this is a difference between me and Chris Patron . Like we talked about regression and I agree that regression happens , but to understand regression we also have to understand , like what progress was towards , why it was ever considered an idea in the first place and what it was aiming towards .

And it can't be just like generically well , things are getting better at , like Allah , stephen Pinker or something like that , because I just don't think there's evidence for that .

And one of the things that I find interesting if you get into Tolkien , despite , you know we can talk about the classical thinking , because the classical thinking is declineist , everything's declining . Christian thinking is more interesting , it's more cyclic , but like things were good , then they were bad , but they will be good again .

The Somerillian's worldview I do think there's some , while I'm just warning about reading as allegorically Catholic , I do think like Tolkien's idea about , like the fallen nature of humanity . You can't ignore that when you're reading , particularly the Somerillian . But even the first age isn't great .

I mean , this is literally what happens with the fall of Númenor , that the realm of the primordial realm of Ferri the Valinor gets removed from the world and from then on the elves are leaving and it's getting more and more just , human and rational and kind of the register lowers .

You can tell that I'm a little bit embarrassed by this , but I remember thinking that , like oh for Tolkien and his mythic version of the world , we are entering the beginnings of something like what we are hobbits are becoming more and more human , dwarves and elves go away , and he's just saying the mythic registers is fading away and we're becoming more and more

what we would consider human . And he does seem to be like a tragedy for him in that .

But there's also , I think it's interesting that he does not see that as like the Star Trek vision of the future , the antiseptic , everything kind of looks like a hospital plus an iPod , and he also , for example , he doesn't seem to be like extolling primitivism or anything like that , like , oh , we should go back to what primitive humanity was like he .

I don't even think he thinks that's possible , right , I mean , you know , what do you make of all that ?

It was particularly fun to live in like and of course antique society for him was already pretty late and we have to remember that he , even till the very end , was very , very insistent on the fact that this was fictional but also in some sense true , because of course he kind of was a Platonist in his approach to world building , in that he literally believed

in the , in subcreation , so that the world that he , on the one hand he believed that he discovered the worlds that he wrote about , and also he believed that maybe , or maybe it's better to say hoped that maybe they were real in some sense or at least would become real through the fire of the spirit or something In some sense , not of course in the most most

immediate physical sense , but in some sense . Sorry , I lost my train of thought , but yeah , he was , he was sad about it and he , he wrote down his sadness .

I'm trying to figure out exactly how I should ask you this , but like I Find it interesting that a lot of people I know , who are humanists , for example , really buy into the Star Trek vision of the universe , not to pick on him , but like that's like Doug Lane was gonna eventually write a book about how Star Trek led him to socialism , etc .

And I always found Star Trek to be Incoherent . By that I mean like like every time it tries to imagine a future , it also really can't . It's still really rooted in the day and and it's really optimistic , except everything about it is based on like well , it's optimistic , except that that's boring .

And so we always has to violate everything that we supposedly believe in the society , like Constantly the whole show is premised on it . And so for me , who I'm also a humanist , but I had an , I've had an interest in science my whole life and I've also sort of like rejected that scientistic notion of Of what the future could be . Like it .

Just I don't think that . You know . If anything , I my favorite Star Trek is deep space nine , which is in some ways the biggest violation of the spirit of Star Trek , like . So and I like Star Trek as a kid I watched , you know I grew up watching next generation like it was on television when I was like at the same time I was reading a token .

But what is there anything about working in the quote rational sciences like math , that makes you actually doubt them .

to it . And of course it is very . It is done through the application of the mind and so it's not and it's not really . It is creative , but it's not creative in the same way as , like writing , a book is or something . There is a profound difference , but still there are different kind of temperaments that are driven to mathematics ? I do think there is .

They are mostly of a certain type , but it's very difficult to really describe what the commonality is . But there are very , very Science-minded persons that are driven to mathematics , but there are also a great amount of romanticists .

Go ahead , go ahead and I think , for instance , even you could say that about Kotendijk and a lot of mathematicians start to doubt science and Kotendijk also very much became anti-scientific in a way , and also he considered just science to be , to be destructive and , at least within capitalism , and At the very end or towards the end , to be to be a work of the

devil in a way , at least certain sciences . So there is something within mathematics that is not , that doesn't align with , for instance , engineering in the same way .

But also I wanted to mention that this is actually something that made me , that made me dissolutioned with , with science fiction , which is that at its core it's kind of based on a lie , which is that the universe out there really is a magical and wondrous place , which is what . What next gen , for instance , is all about .

And and the first gen , star Trek that , yeah , we have kind of discovered everything on earth and we've cataloged everything and it's all we know . We know it all , but we can go out into the universe and there are lots of species that we can interact with .

There are like almost omnipotent beings , like Q and the Q , collective or continuum , and and there are all of these Fantastic , fantastic creatures that we can meet and interact with and actually they are much more foreign To humans than anything we could imagine , which is kind of a problem for storytelling , because you can't really imagine Regions , you can't imagine

but they but they are out there and we can meet them and talk to them and really when we actually look at the universe , it's very cold , it's very empty , there isn't any sign of life and if you actually do the equations kind of the Drake equation is a vast oversimplification .

It's absolutely possible that we are the first species , the first intelligent species with the capacity to develop technology and such to , to come into existence within within the known universe and Maybe within several universes , if you assume that there are parallel universes and that the probability for life , to , for intelligent life that's capable of producing technology ,

to evolve , is Actually much , much lower than we've ever , we've ever thought . And in any case , if there was , if the galaxy really was beaming with life in the way that , for instance , star Trek wants to make us believe , or at least hopes in its core , then we would have already seen it .

So really there is vast emptiness out there and this desire for , for , for a lot of science fiction , is actually driven by the desire for fairy manifesting again and trying to become aligned with what we know about science . But Really it's always based on a lie because it never can take science for what it is .

Yeah , but also I think I do think we can't just discount materialism , obviously , otherwise I wouldn't be interested , interested in Marxist thought , but I'm hoping that the situation gets better Once we get through matter in a way , once we

really understand it .

And I think if we actually consider you notice , I've written it to you a few times about If we really consider not Not just the developments of front quantum mechanics that started in the at the beginning of the last century , but the current developments in string theory and m theory and such , I think actually there is a bit more magic than we have Then we

would have given it credit for .

So before people Get mad at me about that , but I I tend to actually see it as quasi metaphysical and I suspect that you would , that you might say , yeah , so what Exactly ? Exactly we're getting beyond physics , right , and so you know , I think , of my responses , I don't really have a response to that .

If we're agreeing that it might be metaphysical and also you know that we're talking about something that contains science , has science in it for sure .

I mean , no , I'm not what , I'm not saying that that like m theory and brain theory or anti scientific , but that they might be beyond how we currently understand science , like and any of them , at scientific methodologies .

And I've also become I think you might have picked this up for me , I don't know if people know this I used to be a very strict Demarcation line of science person .

In fact , I wasn't even sure if I considered math Part of science like , and I've I've kind of backed away from that because the more I thought about , like the Vienna school and the various attempts to define science , the more I get to what there's .

There's a bunch of things that I can see that they share , but there's not one thing that I could say is a line in any case , like falsify , even falsifiability is not really a line in Science like , because probability , if you , if you're being strictly logical , messes that up , you can't truly falsify anything .

And so and so People who will hear this will go like oh but , but yes , you can . I'm like , really you can't , like like can't , logically you can't .

But he would always come up to me and what's good , Well , you're not really a leftist because you have a tragic view of of humanity , like and and one of the things that I .

I think this is kind of not an appealing Call to people , but for me to go , you know , I don't want to see the tragic view of humanity to to people who Are , like , pro-capitalist or whatever . For one thing , I don't think capitalism is a , it's a particularly has a particularly tragic view of humans .

But to the idea that any of us who have like , well , the idea , you know , there's nothing we're ever going to have that's going to be completely de-alienated and totally rationally functional , like , I don't think that will ever happen .

There's too many contradictions , both in a strict sense and in the kind of Hegelian sense that emerge in any social system , for us to say that like it's purely rational and while I do think that people like , say , david Graber , underestimate the effects of like Social inputs and geographic inputs and whatnot , and physical material limitations in development of societies

, because they seem to think that you can just think it into existence , I do think , however , we shouldn't discount thought as one of the Even material inputs into how societies develop .

And Because I do think , for example , when we look at like egalitarian societies that are what we would call like pre-modern , and most of these are hunter-gatherers , immediate subsistence hunter-gatherer societies , but not all of them they do have to come up with With like social and mental strategies to enforce , to kind of mentally enforce equality , and sometimes it's

even violent . But I think it's interesting because when you read someone like Tolkien and someone who's like really dealt with ancient literature , that becomes a lot clearer about like okay , we have to actively Incocate humility in the people . They're not gonna just have it . We have to .

Like maintaining a relatively egalitarian society like the Shire actually takes a lot of work and it's really easy to unbalance , and I think that kind of Of like reality check is is important for socialist to have , even if it comes through Literature , speculative imagination and that sort of thing , because that's that's part of how we're modeling our narratives in our

world , whereas I think , like you're right , this the the Star Trek vision of the universe is is basically Infinite progress , forever , and the universe is a magical wonderland full of cool beings and everything is also kind of like us , even though we're not yeah , even though we , we're trying to like it's totally not human , but ultimately it very much is , and

it's like I Find this to be not . I do find that to be , quite frankly , the more fantastical preposition , like so you know . But let's get into tokens politics . One of the things that I find fascinating about about Tolkien , it's , for example , he , he really does distrust political power .

It's hard to find , not just in the Lord of the Rings but even in the mythic cycle , that has massive political power . That does that . Problems do not flow from that .

Yeah , and that actually comes up in the new Shadow , which was the sequel , that to the Lord of the Rings , that he kind of began and the the greatest , and I don't exactly remember if he phrased it in that way but that the greatest weakness of humans is the fact that they just become Disatiated with what they have so quickly and that they are always , that

they are always looking for new things , that what is what is Common is never enough for them . And this theme of all would have replayed within , within that work , which is one of the reasons for why he didn't continue it , because even he thought it was a bit too tragic .

But yeah , in general he also has a very , he has a very dim view of Of the capacity for systems to remain free of corruption . Basically , every , every system that at least that's that's populated by humans in his , in his work , is always , is always , always , gets always corrupted , and from time to time they can be repaired , but usually that's only temporary .

It's really . It's very similar actually to to the iron law of oligarchy oligarchy . I don't know if he knew about that , I doubt it , but it's just . I think it's actually something that is Common to a lot of conservative thinking and it's , I think , a valid , a valid objection .

And yeah , on the other hand , he had a very hit also a very Was very skeptical of attempts to kind of For stall decline .

I mean , that was not not really a sin , but it was one of things that the elves did that wasn't really maybe all that great , that they were trying to prolong their time in Middle Earth and with that , of course , prolong the wonder of fairy and the realms that they had , which were quite wondrous , and of course that resulted in the rings of power being made

and in Saran Taking coming to power anew , or at least grasping for power and new and destroying lots of things in the process . And ultimately they could only , they could only achieve greater salvation by letting go of their own , of their own realms and by fading .

So this theme is also very strong in his works and I think that actually that actually echoes some of the things you were talking about with Oswald Spengler Also .

I don't think that talking new about Spengler , but again , it's just some a kind of pattern that that conservatives often think in terms of civilizations rising and then then getting getting their day in the limelight , basically , and then fading away . And talking to you was that this is just something that happens .

It's it's kind of tragic in a way , but it's also not something that you should try to try to counter , or otherwise You'll end up doing things that might be even worse than the things that that you were trying to prevent .

I mean this .

The case study of Numenor is really interesting in a lot of ways , but of course , when the Numenorians Eclipsed and started to become too dissatisfied with their lot in life and in particular with the fact that they still had to die , they started to , they started to see themselves as kind of superhuman , which they had capabilities that other humans didn't have , but

they saw that as a license to subjugate other humans and and start start an empire in a way that perhaps might be at least some kind of a Consciously influenced by the British Empire . But that's only speculation on my part , I want to make that clear .

And of course it only hastens the downfall and it makes the decision of the wall out to ever give them , to ever give the amelioration Amelioration of from suffering or from death , at least for a while Mistake and it renders , it renders this choice tragic .

But I what I will say seems to be a fair criticism of Marx and Ingalls is that maybe they did ultimately have a wiggish view of history . I don't know .

I know that , like my analytical Marxist friends , for example , they definitely do and they also believe in , like trans historical , like constant drive for a human , for improvement on accumulation , as like essentially human , whereas I think my entire life I've had a more cyclic view of , of civilizational history .

That that is optimistic in the one sense that I do think we do learn from each prior cycle of , of of an empire civilization and thus things are actually improving both scientifically and in some ways socially , but that they're not that that it's not going to innately stay that way and that a lot of attempts to try to keep it that way end up doing a lot of

damage .

And one of my critiques of like a , of like the entirety of , I'm not gonna say Western , I'm gonna be so arrogant as to speak for Europe here , but like of like Anglo-North American society , so the American , so the United States and Canada , is that in some way both sides of our political spectrum have a kind of impossible sense of maintenance like that .

One has a kind of progressive liberal view , the other has like a make America great again view , but both of them have a view of like nearly infinite at least stability and A resentment at the client that doesn't try to even deal with it in a realistic way or Mitigate it in ways , that kind of accept that parts of it are gonna happen no matter what .

And I think that's kind of made my society a little bit crazy like . And it shows up in the kind of wild emotional Privilege and swinging that comes around and attempts to just impose like pure analytic rationalism on it . I'll allow what someone like the people from last wrong do .

What they really end up doing is hiding their emotionality and subsuming it and like Not being totally honest about what and why they want , not being totally honest about , you know , some of their arguments that are based on reason or not really reason at all . They're based on a whole lot of presepositions and One of the things I think , the less should do .

You know in so much that we are worried about , like the development of society and workers power and all that is Is actually kind of you know I think Matt MacManus actually was about this to , to not have Such a gleaming View of human nature , are totally panetian idea that there isn't one or that .

Like you can forever starve off Infrapee , even though I realized , like technically speak in we're not in an anthropic system because of the Sun .

I Guess one of the reasons why , why I just talking about toky and appealed to me , is I would like a , a left-wing form of thinking that was More willing to Deal with that in its psychological conceptions , more willing to like not try to promise the end of history , you know , not try to promise that we're gonna get beyond all these Contradictions or whatever ,

but we're gonna deal with what's coming up . And we know that . For example , like I'm a big per , you know . I guess this shows up in my talks about complexity theory , because I'm like at a certain point , when people are like , well , what can we do about complexity ? And I'm like simplify , that's really your only option , or it's going to be done for you .

Things will just fall apart . Like what you can't do is like try to maintain everything at their current levels and Be able to run the system . I don't think that's possible and I know that . Like there's a I know that of all the episodes have done in the last couple of Months .

I think this one's the one it's gonna get the people , because I'm like I think some of what people are going to be able to do , I think some of what people want , and they ask me questions . For I'm just like you can't do that , like it's not that , that's not even .

I'm not saying you shouldn't dream , but like this idea that we're gonna have infinite energy forever , infinite human growth and our society is just gonna get progressively better and better . There's no historical evidence for like we don't have a society on on earth that's ever done that .

We know , we know a few things about mathematics , but we don't know if there's other things besides mathematics outside of the universe . All we have is all we have is what we see and what we can reason about , and that is that is necessarily an incomplete picture , and I do think that it is . You know .

You know that I do think that is actually necessary for there to be an outside of the universe , because I think everything in Every internal structure also has an external , a kind of external expression , and this holds for the physical universe itself and holds for every structure . So so I don't think we have reason to believe that there's an outside .

We don't really have any concrete reason to assume that there is a concrete afterlife after that , but we Don't know that it's not the case , which is more than in the other direction .

There's a I guess I'm expressing a sympathy for like why mythic views of the world exists , like I actually things like there's a reason why it exists and it's not just Error , human irrationality or whatever .

Like it is a way of both coping and inculcating certain ideas , often about human limitations that we we don't want to necessarily always deal with and I Don't want to . I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist . I don't want to sound like a total crank , I'm not even a psychoanalyst , but I sometimes do think they're .

This refusal to accept these things is leading people to be extremely unhappy and and to be frankly Unable to be the kind of subject that a left would need . I mean , a lot of leftists come to me with Like , what can I do ? And my first sponsors like okay , get involved in an organization , get social .

But also like , frankly , improve yourself because you're not in any shape right now . Like and you know that could be for most people it's mental . For some cases it's mental and physical , and I'm like

it .

This really does like , if you want to do this , you really have to improve yourself , not because , like , not because of like this abstract sense of , like you know , self-help or whatever , but because , like , if you're part of a group , you have an obligation in a way , to be functional in your best self and and and Not , you know , and , if anything , try to

use that other than like self-care or whatever to motivate you to take care of yourself , like , like people , you know people actually tend to do better on things like Maintaining their health or maintaining mental balance if they're doing it for more than just their own gratification .

And I know that's like kind of against this current point of quote per , you know , you know bourgeois society , but I think like , like that's part of the damage of alienation is , like you start you , you stop believing that there's any reason to keep yourself up , that there's the total self ownership isn't like enough motivation to do anything , and it's one of

the one of the things that I Really found fascinating about the Lord of the Rings is Privation and Lord of the Rings . Now , this is a very Catholic idea of people , but I think it's it is . I think it is still useful for leftists to have that privation and alienation . And Lord of the Rings is usually the way that evil's gonna get you like .

If you look at Gollum , for example , like you know , gollum is , is a self-destructive addict . And how did he get that way ? Well , you know , he severed .

He severed his relationship with his own community and and , and there's nothing beyond that , once that's done , other than his own guilt and shame that can maintain that and at least his sense of self fragmenting . And you know , ironically , the the more selfish he is , the more fragmented his sense of self gets .

And you know people might push back on me , oh , that's a pre scientific understanding of , of human psychology , but I'm like it , I don't know .

It mirrors a lot of what I see , even in this , in the psychiatric literature Like if you , if you like , you want to break somebody , isolate him , like , and it'll shatter their sense of self of it eventually , like , and I think you know , I think Tolkien deals with that realistically , where something like Star Trek just doesn't deal with it at all .

And so you know , you know , maybe this is me justifying my own , my own taste as a child , and there there was a point in my life where I got very tired of Tolkien s literature and got really into gene wolf , another arguably reactionary Catholic .

But you know , one of the things I realized about reading gene rule for about weeding Frank Herbert and , and I will say this , all these people could be considered conservatives .

But Herbert's also interesting too because , for example , a lot of people over read the white savior narrative stuff and Herbert because Herbert thinks the savior is a questionable Concept like that . A singular savior is almost always gonna be bad .

But there's a sense in Frank Herbert that , like you know , yes , empire is emerge and yes , we get , they're kind of normalized but also like anti imperial Imperial struggle is no way to get rid of that . Imperial struggle is noble .

And we know from his personal , you know politics , that while he had a very weirdly Conservative view of , like American development , he also was utterly sympathetic to local indigenous peoples in ways that was actually super uncommon , like . There was a book he wrote where , like a key figure , a Sacrifices himself .

You know , a white figure sacrifices himself so that a , so that an indigenous community can make a point and liberate itself , and it's seen as a , it's portrayed as a morally justified good , and so one of these things , with a lot of these , can work more quote conservative , unquote writers and I think reading them in terms of modern , modern political conservatism

is not helpful but Is that they ? They actually do have an understanding of like why humans feel the need to be liberated , when it might be just that they're not blind to that ?

And I Think a lot of I'm also gonna get in trouble for saying this but a lot of like mid 20th century progressive science fiction or whatever I've always found just to be a bad literature like it to me .

A Lot of the people in that kind of literature and here I'm not just thinking of a of Star Trek , but I'm thinking of like Isaac Eisenman's Foundation series , a series that I like but like I'm like none of the characters in that world are believable to me . I just they seem way too simple .

And so and I know there's , I know there's like progressive leftists who are mad at , for example , like you know , the new literary turn and science fiction in the 70s because it became a lot more like literary fiction and fantasy about its view of like human progress and whatnot and the problems with that .

But it's always struck me that that was a much more realistic view anyway . So you know , what do you mean ? I mean , I guess this is kind of the final question , but and then we can talk about sources of people wanting to get into Tolkien beyond the text . But what about ? You know , we've talked about Tolkien's sense of like , sadness and his view of like .

Even human relationships are flawed because of , you know , the contradictions and the fall in nature of man . And I'm not telling leftists that they need to take on like a Catholic view of original sin or something . That's not what I'm arguing here .

But I do think we should actually look at the way contradictions emerge from human systems as probably more tragic and unforeseen and in some ways not entirely avoidable than we are . And and then we currently do and if we did , we'd be able to better understand and deal with things .

Like you know , reactionary shifts and politics are limits to growth , not over promising on technology and stuff that we just that , we pretty much have no idea how we do and can't probably do anyway just something that like has a more realistic view of planning , a more realistic view of human cooperation .

And I'm not saying that that we should like become primitivist or even necessarily what people think to growth is a means , but that we should incorporate this into our worldview . And what ways ? And what other ways maybe we haven't touched . You think Tolkien helps with that .

meaning of that for meaning in life and just enjoy it . And these answers are profoundly dissatisfying because they work if you're happy or if you're at least decently comforted , but if you're really suffering , they don't work at all .

And one of the things that we've had to learn from liberalism is that we really can't aggregate and disaggregate experiences , meaning that we can't just deal with aggregate happiness and aggregate suffering , or something like that , which which I have seen people do a lot of the time when they consider these questions .

But really we have to consider individual experiences and then we have to think about , for instance , the baby that is left out by the Spartans in the woods to die by being eaten by a wolf or maybe by starving . These beings will know nothing , but just hopeless misery , not just in the sense that they are hopeless , but that there is no hope for them .

And well , if we're progressive we can say that . Well , maybe we can get to a point where we can eliminate these kinds of cases , where at least we might not get rid of all suffering , at least we can get to a point where for each human life is worth living in the end .

But one of the things that even liberalism doesn't allow itself to consider is that we can't even aggregate nature in this way , so we can't talk about the environment or nature or something , and be honest to the liberal idea , because we have to consider animals , each one of them in isolation , as a , not an individual , but a being itself .

In the talking of plants he always talked about his fondness for plants and normally I discount the arguments about like consideration for animals in terms of , well , don't you consider plants ? Because I think they are just a cup out to not really have to consider them . But maybe there is a point to that and we have to consider the experiences of plants .

Even I don't know , and I've always held that . My ethics has always come from the idea that we have to kind of use the golden rule , but modified in the sense that we consider empathy to the extent that we can understand that the being that we empathize with actually has these experiences .

So we can't just give animals like the right to vote because they don't have rationality , but they have the capacity to feel pain . And if you truly consider that , then life becomes very hard to justify .

And in particular , you have to think candy suffering of a few beings justify , be justified in terms of a lot of other beings , or maybe not all that much other beings , depending on where you see historical development , the contentness of some other beings .

And usually when you phrase this question in this way , then most people would say that of course not , of course you couldn't do that . You can't just justify the suffering of a few by the pleasure of the many or whatever .

But if you deny this , then it leads to you to some very hard considerations and you might even consider whether life is something that should be maintained . And I think that was always my approach to Buddhism , that it touched on this and that it kind of that . Its answer was kind of no , that life is a kind of prison that we have to escape from .

And even if we arrive , personally , at a point where we are content , then there is still there is still too much suffering and in particular , buddhism kind of keeps its boundaries through karma , because karma acts both as a kind of guard against its most radical tendencies , in the sense that you can't just kill yourself or you can't , but you'll just wake up in

another cycle and probably you'll be a squirrel or something and it will be even worse . And on the other hand , if you reincarnate often enough , you'll probably get enlightened at some point . So it's not all that bad . But if you truly secularize this , then there is really .

Then being dead actually implies being enlightened , implies being out of the cycle of Dharma .

And if you think about this truly and deeply , then you might arrive at the consideration that , and if you consider the capacities of industrial society that the Buddha just couldn't consider , then you're , then it's entirely possible to arrive at the conclusion that it's actually a moral obligation to end life , to do an omniside , to just destroy everything .

And we might actually have already the capacity for this with nuclear weapons . But of course you can think about this even further and you think that if we are the first sentient species that we know of , then we have the moral obligation to stop life from evolving wherever we can .

So actually we shouldn't just nuke the planet but we should build my thought experiment giant Dyson beam that is capable of sterilizing all worlds in its vicinity and then kill ourselves with it . And I think actually , from a Buddhist perspective , there is not much that is wrong with that , because it's not really a liberal philosophy .

It doesn't consider the desire to live something that is a reason for keeping a thing alive . It's just in terms of suffering and the suffering murder inflicts and the fact that even the murdered being isn't really excluded from the cycle of Dharma . Again , but if you can come omniside at one moment , then there is not really any suffering that results from this .

So there isn't really a problem in that sense and I think this is actually an entirely rational conclusion and one of the few ones that can be considered that is honest in that regard .

And of course this is where Thomas Legatis thought leads to , which is why he's one of the few authors that I also appreciate from the last century , although even he didn't consider it to that extent . But in any case , this is one answer . Another is to just kill off the compassionate impulse within you , or at least try to .

I don't think it's that easy and it might lead to all sorts of psychological pathologies , but that is what I see as the Nietzschean way , and I think that is also an answer that is workable , or that at least is coherent .

Let's say that , and then I guess you can add , maybe in the gland , where he says well , sure , this is true about nature , but soon will all be machines , and machines will kill everything else , and machines can reprogram themselves to not feel suffering , and so this way we can escape , which I think is also fairly coherent .

And all of these solutions , it's fair to say , are not to my liking . It's not what I consider to be even just healthy philosophy to live with , not for the individual nor for society .

And I think Tolkien actually has , through his concept of Estelle , of hope , as I described it , of hope that the physical dissonance of this universe is to be completed by a metaphysical consonants , again through a kind of metaphor , through music wherein it makes actually sense , and that once we all get to appreciate creation in its entirety , and not just from our

particular perspective , which of course is an ill-everose thought , but nevertheless that we'll all see that it has been good and that it was better for the universe to have existed than to have not existed .

And this is for me also a conception that is workable , although of course something that can be just taken over straightforwardly , because Tolkien had kind of the advantage of still remaining within Christian thought , which is a luxury that a lot of us just cannot have .

And the left has also a kind of answer for it , I think , which is just a progressive answer of well , we'll solve that problem and then we'll solve that problem and eventually we'll get to a point where humans don't just suffer hopelessly but it doesn't even get to the stage where it can seriously consider the same for animals .

And I don't know , and thinking about that would be a much more radical thought , which I think Adorno , the later Adorno , touched on in his aesthetic theory somewhat . But I don't know if there can even be a leftist answer , and this is maybe my doubt , my kind of skepticism towards progressivism in general .

I don't know if there can even be a leftist answer , but I think it would suit the left well to at least consider the problem honestly .

I think if you ran a society off of that it would be a disaster . But I have to say that I haven't actually found it like . I haven't found a way to argue against that other than to say this is why this kind of rationalistic view of the person doesn't really work right , because you know it does lead you to , like you mentioned , the death drive .

I can't think of a better expression of the death drive than that is like the drive to end all life .

However , I've also been increasingly moved and I know , I know I'm going to get accused of being happy for this , but being increasingly moved for , like we have to think about the reality of more than humans .

I find every day I want to eat less meat and while I know that to some degree , even that's not entirely rational , there's a whole lot of , you know , there's all kinds of animals that would still be naturally murderous because of their evolutionary pathway , etc .

That I just I do think like , oh yeah , viewing nature as an organic super being whole is not helpful , but like I should actually consider more , like , what are we doing with all this ? Can we actually consider more than just human life ?

And , in our ability , can we encourage kinds of agriculture that are not as dependent on animals and maybe even better for , for , like , the general landscape ? Can we really do that ? This is why , like degrowth socialism , I don't love the framing . I don't love it makes it sound like we're going to give up technology and stuff , and I don't think that .

I don't think humans even can do that . Like I think we would develop my answer to primitive as well . I think we'll just do this all again if you do that , like , unless you figure out a way to lobotomize us , and then you might as well argue that we should destroy our life back to where , right ?

So , yeah , I've actually done some of the same thought experiments and and my answer has tended to be like no , we just there's got to be a way in which , if we we see values and virtues , we have a way of like considering this and considering these other things and thinking about like , okay , why ?

Why is there a human tendency toward animism , right , the belief that , like , all these things have human like characteristics and whatnot ? And we see that multiple societies is not that these societies were all vegetarian , but they did have , like , in some real sense , an idea of like .

Well , we have to limit this , you know , because these other things are beings and whatnot and we have to appease them . And it led to some weird things , including and maybe not up , maybe not even dropping things like human sacrifice and stuff that I wouldn't necessarily want .

But I do have to ask myself , because I tend to think most things that are human have existed for a reason and most of those reasons actually are not , in their first instance , stupid . So like , why were we like that ? Why is that ? Why does that seem to develop in so many different kinds of people who've existed in so many different kinds of areas ?

And maybe it's because we actually do kind of and ain't we get that ? And as we progress technologically or whatever , we get alienated from that and just make excuses for why we don't consider the , the well being of other beings and humans . I mean , we barely consider all kinds of humans and there is a , there is a countervailing tendency in people .

I view this in , like you know , in anthropological terms , in the terms of like symbolic kinship , where we're always expanding who we count in the circle , but also always contracting it simultaneously , and I think one of the one of the things that one of the things that I think left this should do and this is and I don't think this is , I don't think this is

a liberal conception of society , but it's like we should be thinking about ways to expand this as big as we can , knowing that it'll never contain everything in everybody , because the very ideas that we're using to expand it are going to divide people , like that's just .

And then when you start including the non human you know , maybe even the concept of non human persons right , like the , this will get radically more complicated because , you're right , not everything can reason like us , not everything does .

But you know , I've been on a while like we should at least consider cessation and primates persons that we have every bit of evidence that they have as complicated reasoning and social structures as we do and they aren't trying to kill us all . So like we can get away with it .

I think , my , I think I think you're right that the Nick land conception is coherent , but I also think it's wrong about what life is .

So you know , but I do think I do think you're right that and this goes beyond , like workers , autonomy and stuff like that , which is stuff I believe and for people I'm not abandoning that here but I do think sometimes we should ask ourselves these kind of like hard thought experiments , that something like .

And I think that the question can get you to actually like , try to embody and play out , because it will , it will get you to to change maybe what you know .

You know , I think , in terms of virtual like , what virtues you prioritize and which ones you don't , and what , what , what should progressive less be including in their calculations and what should they not ?

And then back on people who have , like per methane view of the world , who just do not consider animal well being at all , like it's just not something to care about . And , yeah , I just Like I might prioritize the human over the animal , but I increasingly don't think we can just simply do that Like . So , yeah , I'm definitely with you on that .

I think this is a very thought provoking conversation . So , alex , is there anything you'd like to plug as we finish up today .

I did one kind of presentation where I outlined my mathematical theory , which I think is very worthwhile to watch if you're into mathematics and if you have a certain knowledge of it . But other than that , not really . You know , there were a lot of aspects we haven't touched on . It's a shame , but yeah , I agree , it has been a good conversation overall .

fascinated with Ketrone , but part of it's because you're kind of fascinated with a dorno , but you seem to be also kind of at war with a dorno too .

Actually I was obsessed with Adorno and as I've aged and studied more , I find him a more problematic figure that I used to , and not just because he maybe worked for the CIA , like , yeah , the evidence for him actually having worked for the CIA is pretty thin , but yeah , but I think that I find there's something highly problematic about him for lack of a better

word yet also like he was thinking about things in a way that so few people at the time were willing to do . And so I do think he's you know , he's a what I like . Like I don't consider him maybe as much as Nietzsche .

You know I think of Nietzsche as like my most serious enemy , like he's like he's like he's the enemy that's sparring with and maybe incorporating and learning from .

But also realizing he's an enemy is like the thing that a leftist should do , because , like that's to me , he's like , well , he's kind of the most evil , like he's the evil , genius version of stuff that we have to deal with . But I also think Adorno .

I would consider Adorno a frenemy , someone who I don't want to entirely throw out and who I don't think has anti-leftists at all , but who's thought maybe we should really parse and maybe not just either totally reject or just blindly accept what seems to be the two primary options . Is we don't deal with him at all what a Marxist .

Or he's the best thing that ever happened . We're just gonna accept everything he says , a lot of other Marxists , and I think not to be all Aristotelian , but I think the true fly somewhere in between those two polls . Thank you so much and I'm gonna have you back on .

I always am fascinated with our conversations and I maybe would like to talk about some of your other articles sometimes too . So I'll be in touch so we can plan out one or two more visits .

And there is Tolkien Lore , who doesn't do as much graphical splendor but who also has some really good deep understanding of talking and also a lot of he manages to disentangle at least the storytelling aspects of the movies from the books to some extent . Girl Next Gondor used to do that too , but sadly her videos got taken down .

And if you're really into Tolkien and you want to do some deep study of his works , there is Sigmund University , which came out of the Tolkien Professor podcast and they really managed to do a little university out of that , which I find hugely impressive , and I think it's also something we can organizationally learn from .

And yeah , they have done episodes of all kinds of Tolkien's works and currently they are doing a deep dive into the Lord of the Rings . They are currently a podcast episode like 270 with one and a half hours each , and they're still not in Moria which might be the most thorough exploration of any work of literature done by a community .

Once it's finished probably not currently , but it will really take the guy a lifetime and I'm really thankful for him to dedicate his life into the way . And other than that , there's a huge body of literature . You can find lots by just Googling .

There are particularly interesting , might be to your listenership Tolkien Among the Moderns , which has a very strong Christian band , but also Tolkien and Modernity , which has two volumes and which both treat Tolkien as a reaction to Modernity and the connections he has with other modernist figures and such .

And there is , of course , thomas Shipley's work and , in particular , author of the Century , and Varelin Flieger has done a lot of academic work on Tolkien . But that's once . You're really into this stuff . Yeah , I think that those are the resources apart from the books themselves , of course that I want to talk .

Like I decided when I set up my room not to put my Marxology shelf behind me because I thought that was lame . But over there I have like four or five books on Tolkien over there with my Gene Wolf Scholarship . So it's fascinating .

And if you're going to listen to stuff on YouTube and podcast , and I think sometimes it's better to listen to this stuff or stuff about ancient myth and religion than it is to get into the political stuff . And it's not because I'm an escapist either .

It's because sometimes I think like this stuff does less damage to your brain , whereas some of that political stuff it can take you in bad places . And it's not because I think people shouldn't be political . That's not my argument at all .

Whereas podcast , podcast art , there's also plenty of bad political podcasts , don't get me wrong . But there's more good stuff out there and my show does better on the podcast world than it does on the YouTube world and that makes sense . Like I'm not making interesting animated videos , although I've thought about it . I have thought about it .

I tend to write you back with like Like I'm really interested in what you have to say and that's it , and people who have worked with me know that that's how I tend to write , so I'm glad to always have you on and actually talk about what you're thinking about . Thank you so much . Have a great day , Thanks , Bye .