Pathologies of Powerlessness

If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup. — Opening quotation

Introduction

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 570, Pathologies of the Left, with Ben Burgis, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Thursday, April 29th, 2021. So this will be a fairly short introduction. I’m just going to read to you a little bit from the beginning of Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left by Ben Burgis.

Chapter one, “Lenny Bruce Can’t Save Us”. In April 2020, the comedian, Louis C.K. donated $2,800 to the presidential campaign of Joe Biden. That itself was neither interesting nor surprising. C.K. seems to be a pretty boring centrist Democrat. In November 2016, when he was at the height of his popularity, he went on Conan O’Brien’s show to give his analysis of the election. “If you vote for Hillary, you’re a grown-up. If you vote for Trump, you’re a sucker. If you vote for anyone else, you’re an asshole.” My politics, writes Ben, are not CK’s politics. I enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, and I have long-term political horizons that go well beyond anything Bernie was talking about in that campaign. I’m a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I was willing to entertain tactical arguments that leftists should vote for Hillary Clinton in swing states to stop Donald Trump, but I recommended at the time that any voter who was planning to take this advice wear rubber gloves to the polls. CK, on the other hand, told Conan O’Brien that he didn’t even regard Hillary as the lesser evil. “I think she’s great. I’d take her over anybody,” What is interesting is that the Biden campaign gave back the money. Historically, Biden hasn’t been very picky about out donors. In 2019, he infamously attended a fundraiser held by the founder of a fossil fuel conglomerate the day after he participated in a CNN town hall on climate change. During his decades in the Senate, he raked in an enormous amount of cash from credit card companies headquartered in his home state of Delaware, even though he must have known that this created at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interest when he championed a bill that made it harder for ordinary Americans in debt to those same companies to declare bankruptcy. He drew the line at C.K? Why? In 2017, C.K.’s fellow comedian Tig Notaro announced that she was cutting ties with him, and made a vague reference to allegations of sexual misconduct. Reports from several other female comedians then established that C.K. had a pattern of asking female colleagues for permission to masturbate in front of him. Sometimes they thought he was joking, but then he would actually do it. All of this raises some complicated questions about consent. These women weren’t his co-workers or subordinates. As stand-up comics, everyone involved was essentially a self-employed small business person. But some of them may have been sufficiently intimidated by his fame or eager for him to support their careers that they went along with this behavior that made them deeply uncomfortable. It would be hard to imagine anyone thinking these factors were sufficient to make meaningful consent impossible if CK had asked a less successful female comedian out on a date and they’d started a conventional romantic sexual relationship. So it’s reasonable to wonder whether at least some of the way that the incident was received has less to do with well-thought-out norms about consent than the fact that CK’s particular kink was an unusual one that most people find distasteful. On the other hand, I can’t deny that my own gut instinct here is to think that what he did was indeed fairly problematic. Still, whatever you make of the tangle of ethical issues, the bottom line is that Louis C.K.’s sins involved masturbation. Joe Biden was one of the loudest voices on the Democratic side of the aisle calling for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Well over a million human beings died in that conflict. In a sane world, Louis C.K. would have been the one who would have worried about people associating him with Joe Biden. Biden, having done something unfathomably worse, doesn’t excuse anything C.K. did. But the fact that the Biden campaign was clearly worried about how Democratic voters would feel about the donation tells us something about how seriously many American liberals and leftists take the business of morally evaluating comedians. At least C.K. was cancelled because of something he did outside of his comedy sets. Dave Chappelle is reviled by many progressives for doing exactly what comedians are supposed to do. He explored the ambiguities of hot-button social issues by telling jokes. Chappelle kicks off his 2019 special, Sticks and Stones, by singing a bar from Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.”. “You motherfuckers can’t tell me nothing. I’d rather die than listen to you.” After a couple of stories, and a little bit more singing, he pivots to the meat of the special, telling the audience that he’s going to do two impressions. The first is of the Founding Fathers of America, when the Constitution was being written. “Hurry up and finish that Constitution, nigger, I’m trying to get some sleep.” Before the second one, he tells the audience that they’ll have to guess who it is. “Duh, hey, everything away from you, and I don’t care what I find out. It could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now, if I find out you’re fucking finished. Who’s that? That’s you. That’s what the audience sounds like to me.” The point here isn’t exactly subtle. When Chappelle’s eponymous show was airing on Comedy Central in the early 2000s, his most memorable skits included one skewering the Bush administration for lying about Iraq. One, about reparations and a role reversal skit about the two-tiered justice system that brutalizes poor black people for committing petty crimes, while giving rich white bankers and Enron executives a slap on the wrist. Later, in Sticks and Stones, he goes out of his way to talk about his support for various liberal causes. If the point of the second impression was to signal that he was going to be telling a lot of jokes about what’s often called cancel culture, the point of the first one, a pretty unmistakable middle finger to the sensibilities of conservatives who revere the Founding Fathers was to remind the audience that he was going to be satirizing cancel culture from a perspective still located firmly within their side of the political spectrum. Many of Chappelle’s critics either missed the point or decided that it was a distinction without a difference. They consistently interpreted the jokes in Sticks and Stones in the most uncharitable way possible. The special does contain some fairly edgy humor. In one bit, he cheerfully describes himself as a victim-blamer, saying that when he heard that Michael Jackson had allegedly molested children, his first reaction was to ask, “what were they wearing?” Besides, he suggested Jackson’s alleged victims had been lucky. He speculated that more than half the audience had been molested, but, “it wasn’t no goddamn Michael Jackson, was it?” A few critics had a sufficiently tone-deaf and literalistic reaction to the joke that one wonders if they knew they were watching a comedy special. But most of the ire directed at Chappelle, both in the ocean of tweets that called him garbage, hot garbage, transphobic garbage, and so on, and in the reviews that trashed Sticks and Stones in publications like Vice and Salon, focused on a joke about what’s sometimes called transracialism.

And then Ben goes on to talk about Rachel Dolezal. And if you don’t know that name? Well, Google it. Last name, D-O-L-E-Z-A-L. But I’ll stop reading there and we’ll get into my conversation with Ben Burgis about his book, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Canceling comedians

KMOBefore you called in I was just reading to the — I think zero people on the stream. I didn’t announce that I’d be streaming so there’s no reason for anybody to know to come in and check us out. But I was just reading from the very beginning of your book canceling comedians while the world burns — a critique of the contemporary left, which something I really appreciate about Zero Books titles. It’s readably short like that, so I read it in a couple of sittings and then I went back and I reread Mark Fisher’s ““Exiting the Vampire Castle”” because you mentioned it so often in the book, I have not gone back to reread. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Ron Johnson, but that’s not his name. What is his name?

Ben BurgisIt’s Jon Ronson. Yeah, I always get that mixed up too, because it’s like the spelling is weird. There’s no H in the Jon, so it sort of looks like it should be Ron Johnson, but yeah, Jon Ronson.

KMOIt lends itself to Spoonerism.

Ben BurgisFair enough.

KMOYeah, but I did read that when it was fresh, and I’ve heard him do some audio work, you know, on the same topic. So that’s all pretty well cemented in my head. I guess what I would do is invite you just to say a few words about the genesis of this book and what you are hoping to accomplish. And then I want to read one paragraph from it.

Ben BurgisSo the book kind of came about at the end, like I got the idea for it at the end of 2019 because I was enormously frustrated by a lot of what I saw, certainly in the online left — not just online — and as I was kind of writing it, you know, going into the early 2020, a lot of those frustrations were really peaked right. So I’ll I mean just two small examples: one that’s mentioned in the book and one that’s not So, one that’s mentioned in the book. That happened, you know, as I’d already started to write it, but you know it’s exactly this sort of thing that frustrated me and, you know, and kind of like made me want to write. You know, write about this topic is that when the Bernie Sanders campaign was in full swing, you know, before that door of political possibility, you know, slammed shut last spring.

You know, Bernie was endorsed by the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan. He said, you know, in a very Joe Rogan-ish way, he sort of said, yeah, you know, I like Bernie, I think I’ll vote for him. And you know, the Bernie campaign did what it would. Would have been like political negligence not to do, which was to cut it into a clip and put it out. Say, hey, you know the most popular podcaster in the world, somebody who has a vast audience of not very political people, often has endorsed the campaign. This is great. We should shout it from the rooftops. And I saw a lot of response, and some of this response, to be fair, was ginned up by bad faith actors, supporters of other campaigns and so on. But also I saw a lot of people with that little you know Democratic Socialist red rose emoji in their Twitter handle who were buying into this, saying: oh, this is terrible that you know that Bernie Sanders accepted and touted the endorsement of this terribly problematic person, Joe Rogan.

And it’s something that really hit me, because if the way that endorsement — or semi-endorsement, you know — came about was that there had been some sort of process of negotiation whereby Bernie Sanders had to, like, drop a couple points from his platform in order to secure the Rogan endorsement, then I might understand where the pushback was coming from. Said: oh no you know, not going to pay for trans people’s. You know health care after all. Then you know: okay, fair enough.

Speaker uncertainOr Rogan, just couldn’t hang with 15 an hour, which you know. Yeah, never said anything of the sort.

Ben BurgisYeah, no, he hasn’t. I mean he’s. He’s somebody who, I think, like a lot of people who are not as fixated on politics as you know, I am, maybe as you are you know, I think Rogan spends at least as much time thinking and talking about psychedelics and comedy and mixed martial arts and half a dozen other subjects you know, as he does thinking about politics. So, like a lot of people like that he has political instincts to things, he has political reactions to things, but they haven’t necessarily cohered into an internally consistent worldview. So sometimes he has what I’d regard as very good takes. Sometimes he has what I’d regard as bad ad takes and you know he could potentially land in a few different you know directions politically you know like there are various endorsements he could have made.

That wouldn’t have shocked me although on stuff like 15 an hour or health care those tend to be the sort of subjects that I think often bring out. You know what I think of as his better takes but yeah, if he’d said no, sorry, birdie, I’m only willing to endorse you. If you bring it down to 12, then you know, then I would get. I would get the outrage. But this, he got this for free, right. There was no negotiation, there was no give and take, this was just. Hey, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people. You know I like this guy, I think I’m going to vote for him. And if you think that’s a problem that saying that — fantastic, thank you, Joe, welcome aboard — is a problem, then that, to me, starts to raise a question about what you think politics is for.

Because if you think the purpose is to bring about concrete changes in the real world by doing things like winning elections, which definitionally involves having more people vote for you than for the other candidates, then this seems like-.

KMOPeople who don’t share your favorite color.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly that, like you know, like most voters are not going to agree with you on 100 percent of everything, almost you know, like, just that’s, like almost an a priori truth, that like it would be fantastically unlikely that you would win an election where every single person who voted for you had all the right takes and all the right values and all the right everything but the point is that you try to get more of them to vote for you so you can then take power and implement your policies. And if that’s the goal, then this seems like an unmitigated good. But if, as I suspect for a lot of people in practice even if this isn’t how they’d like to think about it — the goal of their politics is to feel good about the kind of moral stand that they’re taking against the various injustices of the world to feel like they’re taking the right kind of stand, like they’re displaying the right kind of commitment, then, unfortunately, I think stuff like this starts to make a lot more sense.

And then you know you mentioned So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and “Exiting the Vampire Castle” which are two kind of classic texts about what has, in the years since — since the Fisher essay came out in 2013 and the Ronson book came out in 2015,- has often come to be called, you know, cancel culture, at times call-out culture, and, whereas I would argue that’s like a much broader cultural phenomenon, that there are like much bigger economic and technological reasons why that’s happening, I think, in terms of its specific manifestation on the left, I think that it connects with what we’re just talking about, because if you fundamentally see politics as an issue of exhibiting and convincing other people — maybe convincing yourself that you have all the right moral commitments, rather than a concrete effort to change the world, then unfortunately, it makes a lot of sense that you would start spending a lot of time interrogating other people’s moral commitment.

You know say, okay, well, you know you want to stand next to me here, but like are you? You know? Do you really have the right stuff in your innermost soul? And I think that this is what leads to a lot of hysteria about extremely minor political differences. I think it’s what leads to a lot of reaction to even, you know genuinely bad, you know, takes not by saying, oh well you know, such and such person had a bad moment you know. But by saying that the such and such person just fundamentally is bad. In this way that they’re showing you who they are.

KMOThey’re essentially bad.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly and I think that oftentimes that really lends itself the sort of combination of these specific pathologies, the left and the look, these larger cultural trends stemming from you know various economic and you know technological factors we could get into that it lends itself to this really ugly and toxic moralism, which would be the other you know the other incident that you know that I think about one that happened actually, you know just as the sort of genesis of the book was coming about, which has to do with Jordan Peterson. So Jordan Peterson is somebody I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing. In fact, I’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve been doing what I do as far as public facing political work. I think he’s very wrong about many subjects that interest me.

And I’ve been very aggressive about pointing that out. But in the fall of 2019, Jordan Peterson went to rehab, you know, for a benzo addiction that had started because he, I think you know because of medication that he was taking — and self-medication maybe, I’m not sure exactly — you know that after a spiral of depression that I think had started because she’s since gone into remission. But you know, but I you know, his wife, I think, had a cancer diagnosis at that time, and so I tweeted, I think, what should have been the most uncontroversial thing that I’ve ever said, which was: I obviously couldn’t disagree more with Jordan Peterson, but I wish him nothing but the best. I hope he gets the help he needs, or something like that. I remember the exact wording, but it was along those lines.

Speaker uncertainWe’ll talk about Twitter.

Ben BurgisOh good lord, Twitter and the response to this from like more than a few people. I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate, I think it’s oftentimes, you know, it, could you know? There are like really 10 people persistently yelling at you and you know they’re, and it feels like a million. It feels like a million, you know, but it was somewhat eye-opening for me because there were also, you know, people participating, who, you know who I’d known slightly and the response to some quarters was, oh, my god, Ben you are you know, you’re praising or you’re showing solidarity with this bigot Jordan Peterson, literally just by saying that I felt bad for him because he was struggling for addiction and I with addiction, and I hope he got the help that he needed. And I found that example really astonishing.

And this is something and this like dragged on for a while. Actually, one of these people — since at the time, you know, I was doing a weekly segment on the Michael Brooks Show and Michael also co-hosted Majority Report — Somebody actually called into the Majority Report to complain about this whole incident and how it handled it. To his credit, Sam Seder’s response was to make fun of the premise of the call. He at death, like that. That you know he doesn’t know me right. Well, what would somebody call into the show to complain about me? But it’s a very like something like that. I mean, obviously, I think that’s in terms of what brought it about one of the most sort of luridly insane instances but I think it’s in a very small way, I think it’s very revealing of a bigger thing, which is the way that this kind of left moralism — and again, there are many analogs to this outside of the left, but you know the left is what primarily interests me as a leftist.

This kind of left moralism is one, I think ends up in some pretty vile places. You know which you tend to get when you have sort of snowballing displays of you know moral contempt and you know and denunciation in any context. And two just on a pragmatic level, and this is my primary interest in the book. I think it’s the kind of thing that would make most people not want to have anything to do with us, for obvious reasons, and I’m very concerned about the way that it seems to me that some people — and we can argue about how many people we’re really talking about, but I think some people are certainly a very loud subset of people who basically agree with me politically on paper don’t really seem to even be registering or thinking about the question of how anything that they’re doing is going to impact their ability to actually carry out a political project in the real world. The focus, as far as I can tell, just doesn’t seem to be about that.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Pathologies of the left

KMO20 minutes into this conversation. I will say that anybody watching the video can see I’m talking to Ben Burgis. But for you listening to the audio version Ben teaches philosophy. He writes books for Zero Books, including his most recent canceling comedians. While the world burns, a critique of the contemporary left, you are going to be teaching a course for Renegade University.

Ben BurgisYep.

KMOAnd you also write for Jacobin.

Ben BurgisThat’s right.

KMOWhat have I left out?

Ben BurgisThat’s, that seems, well, actually almost comprehensive. The one thing I’d add is that I host a podcast, a YouTube show called Give Them an Argument.

KMOWell, it’s simply assumed these days that everybody has a podcast.

Ben BurgisYeah, fair enough.

KMOYou don’t really have to say that. It’s like, oh, yeah, this is Ben. He breathes air. He does a podcast.

Ben BurgisYeah, he’s got two thumbs.

KMOFair enough. All right. Well, so much that you’ve given there. And much of it is, I just love this paragraph. I mean, as I say, it’s a short book. It’s very digestible. But you packed a whole lot of your thesis into this paragraph at the top of page 23. You wrote,.

The larger subject of which canceling comedians is a representative example. Example is a cluster of left pathologies that includes everything from the revival of tankie attitudes — ie knee-jerk apologism for every authoritarian regime that makes use of socialist rhetoric and symbolism — to hysteria about minor political differences within the left, to the bad habit of framing disparities between different groups primarily in terms of introspective psychodrama about unearned privilege, as if the absence of oppression were something that had to be earned. There are good arguments against all of these things in principle. What I’m most concerned to show, and what follows, though, is that they’re all symptoms of the failure of the contemporary left to strategically, to think strategically, instead of turning politics into a moral performance. In other words, I’m interested in convincing my friends and comrades to stop acting this way, because I don’t want us to lose.

So I think this is probably a good idea to talk, or a good time to talk, about Mark Fisher. And while you mentioned “Exiting the Vampire Castle” a lot in this book, to the point where you can just abbreviate it VC, yeah, the reader is supposed to know what you mean and it’s clear what you mean. I think Mark Fisher is also the articulator of a notion called capitalist realism. What is capitalist realism?

Capitalist realism

Ben BurgisYeah so capitalist realism. Capitalism is a sense that the sort of economic conditions that we have, the current system, is just inevitable and inescapable, and I think that the distinction to make is that it’s not quite the same thing as enthusiasm for capitalism. Capitalism that’s compatible with it perhaps, but it certainly doesn’t require that and, you know, and maybe doesn’t even most often manifest in that and instead, the idea is just that capitalism has won so completely, so thoroughly that it just the idea of challenging it in some way just seems sort of silly. So you know, so it could be that there are. You know that there are various bad things about it and everybody knows that they’re bad, but at the end of the day it’s like complaining about the weather, that sure we wish that didn’t, you know didn’t happen, but what are you going to do, Right, that’s just life.

KMOThere is no alternative.

Ben BurgisYeah, there is no alternative. Exactly. The Margaret Thatcher quote, which I think connects to the larger story that I want to tell in the book in maybe a couple of ways, but the clearest one is in terms of thinking about how it is that the left got this way, because I mean — certainly not going to claim that it’s monocausal — I think that oftentimes, in fact, I think if it wasn’t fed into by different sources, some of the stuff wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem, probably. But I think at least a major cause of the problem has to do with the fact that the serious left has been wandering around in the desert for so long that even people like Bernie Sanders in the United States or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, who I regard, as you know, good honorable left social democrats spent the vast majority of their lives as extremely marginal backbenchers you know, until the last few years, when they sort of had a moment in the sun and certainly anything more radical than that was completely off the table.

So if you think, for example, about my friend, you know, my friend, Daniel Bessner when he talks about Noam Chomsky, who’s somebody who I admire, I know Daniel admires him but there is this kind of absence in a lot of Chomsky’s work. That Daniel Bessner points out that there’s never a point where you’re reading some book by Noam Chomsky where, like on page you know 193, he’s gonna say: okay, so if a socialist government came to power, here’s how it would solve the problem that I’m talking about. Or you know, here’s how it would interact with this you know foreign policy thing or whatever. And the reason for that is that during the crucial, you know decades of Chomsky’s, you know work and activism that would have just seemed goofy, that would have seemed like saying: all right, when I’m officially enthroned as the emperor of the galaxy, here’s what I’m going to do.

So I understand why not, but I think in a very small way it’s revealing about the fact that for so long the left, certainly in societies like the United States and the UK, I think to some extent in a more complicated way elsewhere, but the anglophone left is what I’m most familiar with — has been so far for the levers of real power. You know in almost any sense. You know the labor movement, you know which is traditionally, you know the kind of ground troops of, you know of any kind of successful left movement — has been in serious decline line for several decades. At this point, and because of all of that, I think that it’s very natural that we’ve started to think of left politics less as a project for changing the material world than as this kind of symbolic performance of moral commitment, of taking a stand.

Which I, you know, I, like you know. So there’s a video that you can find on YouTube of Michael Albert talking about the phrase fighting the good fight, which I’ve always loved, and in the video Albert is making fun of that phrase and he says: look, I don’t know why I’d fight the good fight if I didn’t think I was gonna win. I mean, like, otherwise, why are you spending your time fighting? I mean, just go to the beach, you know, do something else, you know. But I think that it’s that historical backdrop that forms a lot of the bad habits that I’m objecting to, because even if now — and I think that one of you know one of the blurbs on the book, it might have been Mikey Utrecht [name unclear; spelling unverified], I might be getting my wires crossed, but one of them uses the phrase is the doors of political possibility.

You know swinging open. And you know as much as I appreciate the blurb, I think that’s probably a. I think that’s probably a considerable overstatement, right, like? I think that what’s happened in the last decade is that the doors of political possibility for the left have maybe started to open a crack, right. That there has been some opening.

KMOAnd, by the way, that phrase does not appear in the back of the book.

Ben BurgisOh, yeah, it’s not in the back. I think it’s one of the ones at the beginning, but it’s. I cannot stress how unimportant the issue of who used this phrase. In a blurb is but in any case it’s. Even when the door of political possibility started to open a little bit, I think that a lot of those bad habits were maintained and they inform a lot of what I’m talking about. So like. For example, in the second chapter of the book I talk about these notorious clips from the DSA convention: two years ago. Where.

KMOThat was a doozy of a montage that was it Tucker Carlson put together.

Ben BurgisYes, yeah, exactly so it’s. You see a speaker going through a long list of rules that includes no strong scents and something called the chill out room and no clapping. You have to do, you know, I guess, audio podcast. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m sort of wiggling my fingers. And because, after all, out of you know, however many 1500 people there delegates that could, you know, one can’t rule out the possibility that there are three who have some sort of condition where they’re unusually sensitive to loud noises, so nobody’s allowed to clap. In another clip you see a different speaker sort of following up on the no clapping thing and saying that you can’t, that the whispering and crosstalk in the room is a problem, and he starts his harangue with the phrase is hey guys, yeah, which then inspires somebody else to object that hey guys, is gendered language and taking a step back. Okay, is Tucker Carlson cherry picking the worst moments? Sure, of course he is. He didn’t. There are lots of other things. What’s that?

KMOHe did not invent them. He did not invent them. Those were not actors.

Ben BurgisThat. That is the crucial distinction right, that he’s cherry-picking the worst moments, but the worst moments were there for him to cherry-pick.

KMOAnd what is a Twitter pile-on and canceling, if not cherry-picking, somebody’s dumbest or, you know, weakest statement in a whole lifetime of making you know, pretty acceptable statements?

Ben BurgisYeah, absolutely, and yeah, in fact, this sort of accepted party line in many quarters on that is that, well, no see, but those are the statements where they’re really revealing themselves. You know it’s mask off, you know when they say that stuff. So, yeah, it does seem like there is a kind of performative contradiction of the views of some people, who might be more than happy to condemn people for their worst moments in Twitter pile-on, while at the same time objecting that their political enemies you know, focus on their worst moments. And what really struck me about these clips is, first of all, as you said these are not actors. These, all these things happened and, in fact, not only are they not actors, but this isn’t like hidden camera footage. This, you know, DSA was streaming this to the world to anybody who wanted to watch it, and everybody knew that.

So the people and you know, sure you can say these are the, you know, a few of the most intense people, and many people in the audience, I’m sure, in fact, I know were — were silently. You know, thinking many of the same things that you know, that I thought when I watched the footage and but I’d argue that a big part of the problem with a lot of this stuff is that the people who have more reasonable reactions to it, have every incentive in the world not to talk about it. Because you know, you’re starting a big annoying fight over something that you see as kind of a side issue. If you do right, nobody — joins DSA so they can, like fight with crazy people about whether clapping should be allowed. They presumably care about you know, getting everybody health care and stopping imperialist wars and all these other vastly more important political goals.

But the effect of that is to leave the — you know, the field to the lunatics and allow those people to be the most visible representatives of the left. And the other thing that really struck me in watching all of this — you know, this kind of competitive one-upsmanship that it’s like hey guys, no, talking across, talking hey guys, it’s gendered language — is that it seems like the goal is at best, to sort of win some very small victories in, like within this left bubble, right, you know. And the question of how to balance that against anything any kind of concerns about the larger world again just doesn’t seem to come up. I mean, if it occurred to anybody you saw, speak to those clips — that this would play very badly to 99% of everyone who watched it, that certainly didn’t seem to impact their behavior.

And I think I mean there’s a way A that you can see this more sympathetically, to a point where you can say: okay, look, maybe you’re very frustrated about a lot of things in the real world And, as I think is very often the case with the left, act stupidly. You might think that what might often be going on is that you’re going from things that would be very heavy lifts to things that are very easy and achievable. So out in the wider world, decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, it’s still very difficult in many cases to get landlords and whatnot to accommodate disabled people in entirely reasonable ways. But you can get like DSA to do any kind of accommodation you dream up and you’ll win that argument. So that’s way easier, right?

Why not do that? That? Or you know, which I think is kind of the same thing that happens, you know, certainly thinking about last summer, you know, after I wrote the book, you know, since it takes a while for these things to go through the you know the wheels of publishing, but, you know, if you think about the police violence protests last summer, which I think you and I were talking about — this us a little bit last time, we talked I think that you can see something very similar there, where people you know are originally inspired to do what they do because they have the world’s most legitimate grievance about something that’s happening in the larger world that the you know that you know. George Floyd, you know, had a cop you know, essentially step on his neck for nine minutes until he died while he was begging for his life, and the problem, though, is that actually changing the way that policing works in the United States is incredibly difficult, whereas, like you know, harassing someone to you know issue a symbolic — you know — declaration that I don’t know, this climbing gym — you know, supports Black lives, or something like that — is the easiest thing ever.

So it’s not really that surprising that efforts that were originally about the very hard thing end up being diverted into the very easy thing, but it’s also something that’s incredibly counterproductive and it should be resisted.

Powerlessness

KMOSo I think you’ve alluded to this point repeatedly, but you haven’t stated it explicitly, but you do in the book. And that is that a lot of these, what you call pathologies of the left are motivated by feelings of powerlessness on the left. I mean, what are the chances that, you know, your little protest is going to get the U.S. to pull troops out of Afghanistan? Right. You have zero prospects of victory in that. In fact, it doesn’t even occur to you to try to, you know, work for it because you’ve adopted this capitalist, realist mentality. But here’s this guy over here who said something that I can deliberately misconstrue as being racist and I could maybe get him fired right that would be a victory.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly, and I think that I think this is one of the major causes of this right, not just of sort of mission creep on the left, like we’ve been talking about, but I think that this is a one of the causes of the canceling trends in American culture in general that you know, we live in a society where most people rightly feel fairly powerless. And oftentimes like yelling at people online trying to get people fired is a way that you can feel like you’re impacting the world. And then, when you put that together with the fact that the — you know, the feedback loops built into to for-profit social media companies platforms are very bad and often incentivize our worst behavior, you know why spend the 10 seconds to glance over the rest of someone’s timeline to see if you’re interpreting something correctly?

Would you, could, you know, get the endorphin rush of all those likes and retweets from the pile-on you’re starting right now? And then you put that together with the fact that most Americans work in non-unionized at-will workplaces where they are rightly very worried about being doxed if that comes up, and you get this incredibly toxic brew of again. I know some people don’t like the phrase because they’ve associated it with the right, you know, because of the sort of way that it becomes processed and in day-to-day partisan nonsense, but you know, but I think what’s generally being talked about with the phrase cancel culture, I think, is more or less this cocktail of factors.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Marie Kondo

KMOHmm. I’m being told that people can’t hear my voice in the chat here. So let’s give them something to look at. Let me ask you to read this headline here from the Daily Mail and comment on it.

Ben BurgisOh man, All right. Author Barbara Ehrenreich is slammed as a racist for quote criticizing Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo for not speaking English — unquote, and says her popularity is a sign of America’s decline. As a quote superpower unquote, which the first thing to point out about this is that the second part is more or less literally true. That’s either, you know, I think, very close to the exact wording of her tweet, the second half of that conjunction, but apparently the Daily Mail headline writer didn’t think that would inspire enough outrage, as it was that if they just had the part of it that actually accurately represented what she said in the tweet, then people might not understand that it was a bad and racist tweet. So they had to throw in the criticizes Marie Kondo for not speaking English part, which is not actually a part of the tweet, and they even have to explicitly spell out, just to make sure that nobody misses this, that it was a racist tweet.

So, yeah, these are the original tweets. So the first one was: I will be convinced that America is not in decline only when our decluttering guru, Marie Kondo, learns to speak English. And the second is: I confess I hate Marie Kondo because, aesthetically speaking, I’m on the side of clutter. As for her language, it’s okay with me that she doesn’t speak English to her huge American audience, but it does suggest that America is in decline as a superpower. And then.

Speaker uncertainSorry, that’s the dumbest thing you can do. She apologizes to the mob.

Ben BurgisSorry to anyone who offended by my tweet about Marie Kondo. Sometimes my attempts at subtle humor just don’t work.

Speaker uncertainAll right you suppose that saved her.

Ben BurgisAnd then finally, at the end of the series of tweets, she tries really earnestly spelling out why the misinterpretation is so ridiculous. And she tweets: yikes. I do not mourn the decline of American empire and, in fact, have campaigned for it for much of my life, and I heartily encourage the use of languages other than English everywhere, at all times. Lives. So to in fact, also under there, by the way, I see in the caption on the Daily Mail piece, there’s under the last tweet: there’s something that I think is almost as offensive as the racist tweet: mischaracterization, which is: Ehrenreich 77 is a liberal political activist. She’s absolutely not a liberal. She’s a. She’s a lifelong socialist. She was she. She was one of the main leaders of something called NAM, the New American Movement, which kind of came out of like SDS, the New Left, and then in the 80s it merged with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become DSA, of which she was one of the original co-chairs, and she was on the letterhead up until 2017.

At the previous convention, that got rid of the honorary co-chair system, but she was there for decades in that role And, in fact, when that merger happened, that created DSA, she was initially somewhat wary of it because she understood herself to be to Harrington’s left That, even though you know, even though Harrington was, you know, had been a peacenik about Vietnam and even though you know Ehrenreich, you know, was a democratic socialist, was very critical of, you know, capital C communism as existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. She was still concerned that Harrington, in her mind, was too associated with a version of democratic socialism that she thought gave too much credence to the American side of the cold war. And that was one of her big concerns about that.

KMOLet me cut you off. Let me just say she has serious leftist bona fides and she has serious left. 30 year old reporter. You know, a 30 year old reporter was a child when this book Nickel and Dimed came out. And this is probably her best known book. She’s written several after, but none made the splash that this one did. And in this book she herself got down into the trenches and went and got jobs doing things like housekeeping at a hotel and waiting tables and actually lived the life of somebody making minimum wage, Although she admits she gave herself the advantage of a place to live and a car as starting positions. And then she wrote this book about what her experiences reveal. But if somebody who’s 30 now, you know they didn’t read this book at age seven, right, you know. So they see that somebody else calls her a racist and they’re like: yeah, racist. Twitter author: Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ben BurgisAnd if you already think you know that she’s a racist and you’ll see the first tweet or two in that series and you’ll read it through the filter of that assumption and then that means that you’ll understand anything she says afterwards as a attempt at, like, damage control, because she was caught after being revealed in her essential racistness. And then you end up with that article and it’s astonishing because Barbara Ehrenreich has been opposed to American imperialism since I don’t know the Nixon administration. So if you know that, then when you see her say in a tweet that you know America is in decline as a superpower, you would not interpret that as, oh, Barbara Ehrenreich is bemoaning the fact that America is in decline as a superpower. She wants it to be a more powerful superpower, power which is obviously just not her view.

I mean, it’s a throwaway observation. You know she, the Marie Kondo craze was going on. She was talking about it in kind of a light-hearted way, as may be indicated by that phrase. I’m, I hate it, Marie Kondo, because aesthetically I’m on the side of clutter and she. She made a kind of throwaway observation that it said something about declining American imperial arrogance, that so many people were willing to watch the show with subtitles, which they certainly wouldn’t have been willing to do a few decades ago. She so she obviously did not think what is interpreted as meaning but I think that the dynamics of this, there are a lot of incentives for people, once one of these pile-on has started, to not look for more charitable interpretations of what someone has said, to in fact, look for the most uncharitable interpretation of what someone has said.

Because if you let the thought enter your mind that, yeah, I wonder, maybe they didn’t mean it like that, or maybe even if they did mean it like that — which again I don’t think would apply to the Barbara Ehrenreich case — but even if they did mean it like that, maybe this is just a bad moment, not a revelation of just what they’re globally like. But if you let these thoughts enter into your head, then suddenly you have to start feeling bad about the fact that a thousand strangers are yelling at this person and denouncing them as a racist or a fascist or whatever, online, because, of course, that’s a very unpleasant thing to do to somebody. And the fact is also — and this is, you know, the part of the book where I brought up Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, you know, because the thing that is oftentimes left untalked about in all of this is that exercising power over people like doing something that causes you know others to suffer and — and you know, sort of displays your ability to make other people suffer is something that people don’t do as a public service. They do it because it’s fun and.

The transitive property of problematicness

KMOWas it you that gave the example of the stoning, where somebody might participate in a stoning even if they didn’t know who the person who was being stoned was.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly.

KMOHow does that? How does that flesh out what? What is that?

Ben BurgisYeah, so one of the real quick the. There’s. There was an example that I talked about in the book of the left-wing trans youtuber Natalie Wynn. Who.

KMOAka ContraPoints.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly who was on in this example she’s on, she’s. This is about her second major cancellation which was about a video where she gave about three seconds of voice work. To somebody in Buck Angel, who is a trans man kind of icon from a previous generation and has been alleged to be bad in various ways that you know that we don’t need to recite all of right now, but the crucial point is that, even if you think, for the sake of argument, that Buck Angel is an extremely terrible person none of the ways that he’s alleged to be bad are ways in which ContraPoints is alleged to be bad but that doesn’t matter.

Speaker uncertainBecause of the transitive property.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly, it’s the that. Well, she gave a few seconds of voice work in a video — I think he was. He was reading a quote by John Waters: it to this bad person, and then, when people got mad at her for doing that, she didn’t apologize and denounce him and refused to have anything to do with him in the first place. Therefore, yes, by the transitive property of problematicness, you know Natalie Wynn is now equally problematic and people were denouncing her in extremely over the top terms. You can watch her video called canceling, where she has like a montage of the things that people were saying about her and a lot of that’s what you’d expect. You know she’s trash, she’s a bigot. She should be deplatformed. But I thought the most interesting moment in it was where somebody in one of these denunciations, referred to Buck Angel as angel buck, which is who this person was.

No, they had no idea who the original person was, who. They were all mad at her for not renouncing. And that’s when I started thinking about this analogy about stoning, right. So if you imagine, like a theocracy where there’s some sort of religious tribunal that sentences people to death by stone of stoning, but then any like patriotic citizen can, like pick up a rock and, you know, join in. And you know you might imagine people joining in with lots of different motivations and you know they probably genuinely believe in most cases that the tribunal knows what it’s doing. So if the person’s being stoned, they must have done something really bad and then there might also be these more unsavory, you know, motivations that have to do with the fact that stoning people can just be fun and very often somebody who might have this mixture of motivations might not even be completely sure what the person is supposed to have done, but that’s okay, they’re still enjoying being part of the crowd of people who are righteous.

And, by the way, I know that I can easily imagine somebody watching this or hearing this and saying, okay, Ben, calm down. You know this. Like, Natalie Wynn was not executed, she was yelled at a bunch on Twitter. And fair enough. But I do think that there is a kind of double standard that often operates in these cases where, in some context, the very same people are very attuned to psychological harms. That, if somebody.

KMOThe no clapping people.

Ben BurgisWhat’s that?

KMOThe no, yeah, clapping. You know the no strong scents in the chill out room people.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly, might in the same breath say, well, she’s not dead, so she wasn’t really canceled. Yeah, exactly, and in fact very often the very same people, when people that they like are subject to this kind of online cancellation, they do have a problem with it. And at that point it’s targeted harassment. That’s the phrase for cancel. Culture doesn’t exist. But also sometimes people I like are subject to it and I want something to call it and yeah. It seems to me that in these other contexts, the ones that you mentioned, you know they’re very attuned to psychological harms. If somebody you know is subject to, you know, to sexual you know, like unwanted dms, you know to some sort of, you know, sexist or racist harassment online. You know the fact that sure they could just log off right is not really taken to be a reason to think that these aren’t real harms.

But somehow, in cases like this, we’re supposed to pretend that human beings are built such that for most of us, you can have like a thousand people calling you all the most terrible things that you can think of online and that it won’t bother you.

KMOWhich we all know that a comment from some rando can haunt you for years, like you’ll be thinking for years about what I should have said, what I could have said. It’s like oh. I want to go back to that moment and you know, now I have my riposte at the ready, you know.

Ben BurgisYeah, absolutely, and I think, and often, at times, it’s particularly bad and damaging if it’s from people who you basically regard as being on your side.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

After the conversation

KMOAll right, that was Ben Burgis. Now I want to conclude here with another reading from Ben’s book and with a thought. First the reading. I’m working up to the thought, reading from page 50 in canceling comedians while the world burns: a critique of the contemporary left. Ben Burgis writes:.

Heresy hunting. Frenzies have taken place within political and religious factions that have actually held state power. The Salem witch trials and Mao’s Cultural Revolution are obvious examples. A variety of factors, best explained by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and cognitive of scientists, are clearly at work in inspiring and sustaining such frenzies. One small factor relevant to the current online iterations of this phenomenon, which Jon Ronson discussed in the end of his book — So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — is that social media sites that let people see how many people have liked their comments psychologically disincentivize users from questioning narratives popular in their groups. You get instant reinforcement for signaling loyalty to your tribe and its preferred view of things. That said, the specific way in which contemporary leftists tend to tear each other apart over the pettiest possible nonsense has a lot to do with the fact that it’s been a long time since we got anywhere close to the levers of real-world political power. One thing that all of the flaws of the contemporary left I discuss in this book have in common is that they’re symptoms of what I’ve come to think of as the pathologies of powerlessness. [wording unclear; heard “consciousness”]

That’s the reading. Now the thought. I’m not going to look up the quotes verbatim. You’ll recognize them, even if I get the wording not quite right. Nietzsche said that when you look into the void looks into you. Or maybe it was the abyss. Yeah, it’s the abyss. Or, you know, when you hunt monsters, you become a monster. If you define yourself in opposition to something, you become the mirror image of that thing. And I have no intention of defining myself in terms of my opposition to the pathologies of powerlessness on the left or cancel culture. Lest I go the way of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, One America News Network, or whatever it’s called, since Donald Trump has departed the scene, all of those cable news outlets have seen an enormous drop in viewership, like 40% drop in viewership.

Because people, I think people just got tired of the whole circus. And now that Trump is gone, you know, and now particularly now that he’s off Twitter and he can’t, you know, drive the news cycle just from his smartphone, what do they have to talk about? I mean, what are the Rachel Maddows of the world have now that Trump is gone? They’re trying to put Tucker Carlson into Trump’s place to say that Tucker Carlson is the new Trump, that he’s as bad as Trump ever was. Was, I’m sorry, Tucker Carlson is not big enough to fill Trump’s shadow. That ain’t happening. But what do they have on the right? Or what do they have on the right that they’re willing to use? Culture war stuff. Dr. Seuss. And you know what? Most people don’t care.

They certainly don’t care enough to continue to watch cable news. You know, during the Trump years, cable news was a battleground. On the center left, it was, you know, they were all attacking the president, touting conspiracy theories about him. And on the right, you know, he was, he could do no wrong. And he had to be defended from the evil, corrupt mainstream liberal media. And from the evil leftists to control the levers of power in cyberspace. But now that Donald Trump is gone, on. I mean, Joe Biden is just not very exciting. I think that’s part of his charm. I think that’s part of his winning formula. I think that’s how he could sit in his basement and do very few interviews and do very little campaigning and just win by default. That, and I know, maybe a little chicanery with the mail-in ballots.

I’m not going there though. So if you define yourself in terms of something that you oppose, the worst thing that could happen for your bread and butter bottom line is that the thing that you oppose collapses and leaves you just sort of scrambling for purchase, windmilling your arms, trying to keep your balance and not fall right on your face. So it is good to cultivate a variety of interests.

Continuing on the Vault

KMOThat said, the conversation with Ben Burgis is not over. It will continue and conclude on the next episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast, which is, of course, the part of the C-Realm podcast project that generates income for me and which sits, consequently, behind a paywall. Now, it’s not the only part of the C-Realm project that generates income for me because some people still do provide one-time donations through PayPal, and sometimes they come at a very helpful instant. As happened this past week, somebody gave a very generous donation that kept my PayPal balance from going below zero. This person asked to remain Anonymous, and I will respect their wishes, but thank you very much, Anonymous. And for those of you who would like to support me and get the stuff behind the paywall, just go to Patreon.com slash KMO, and I put up a lot of stuff on my Patreon feed for free.

You know, it’s not behind a paywall, anybody can see it, but of course, I’m putting it there for cynical reasons. You might go there to look for free stuff, and on the 4th, 5th, 20th time that you do so, you might think, hey, what if I did pony up? You know, not forever, maybe just for little while to see what’s behind the paywall. I wouldn’t say no. And speaking of pimping my activities and my projects, there is always the webcomic GEBB, G-E-B-B, the Greater Earth Betterment Bureau, geb.io [web address as heard; spelling unverified], which now exists in print form. You can’t quite order the print comics just yet, but you can certainly get it on Kindle and Comixology. Just go to Amazon and search for GEBB comic [heard “GebComic”]. And also today, this very day, the 29th of April 2021, will be my first NFT drop.

These are artwork that has been converted into non-fungible tokens or NFTs on the blockchain. Not the Ethereum blockchain, which is what I’ve been trying to get into for a while now, but on the Cardano blockchain. So Cardano is a different cryptocurrency. It’s something that was started several years ago by one of the co-founders of Ethereum. And, you know, it’s not just a vehicle for speculation. It’s only worth like $1.30 right now per coin. It’s going up slightly. I think I bought in at $1.13. Not exactly rich just yet. But the best thing that’s happened about it for me is that I have gotten together with a group called Atelier. They’re like a NFT or crypto art gallery. They mint the tokens for me, so I never had to figure out how to do it. They pay for that, which with Ethereum, that would have cost a lot of money.

With Cardano, it doesn’t cost much at all. But most importantly, they’re doing the marketing, the outreach, you know, getting the word out on social media that, hey, here’s this artist who’s got some cool artwork and you’re interested in NFT investment opportunities anyway. Way. We’re going to drop some NFTs today. Well, actually, they’ve been doing it for days now, trying to build excitement, but it’s coming to fruition at 6.30 p.m. pacific time, I think, this evening. So I would very much appreciate it if you would just take a look at the site, see what’s there. So again, the crypto platform is Cardano, and it’s art. So the website, site, while not super easy to remember, will at least make sense. It’s KMO, that’s me, KMO.cardanoartist.io. KMO.cardanoartist.io. I would appreciate it if you would check it out and, if possible, spread the word.

All right, and the last thing I’ll say is check out my Instagram account. Account. I put up new artwork there most weekdays. My Instagram handle is KMOptimal, K-M-O-P-T-I-M-A-L, KMOptimal. All right, I’m out. I’ll talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

No footnotes. Remaining uncertainty is marked in place.