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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:06 - Santa and the White Pill
4:00 - Marxism and Anarchism
19:18 - The case for socialism
23:28 - Human nature and ideology
31:50 - Cynicism
47:35 - Twitter
52:16 - October Revolution
55:26 - Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin
59:51 - Communism
1:23:38 - Suppression of speech
1:45:34 - Twitter Files
1:52:37 - Self-publishing
2:05:57 - Kulaks and starvation
2:43:12 - The Great Terror
2:51:30 - Lavrentiy Beria
2:57:55 - Joseph Stalin
3:06:30 - Iron Curtain
3:18:59 - Ideologies vs leaders
3:22:51 - Emma Goldman
3:27:11 - White pill moments
3:38:34 - Hope for the future

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The following is a conversation with Michael Malice.

This is a special holiday episode, and it is made extra special because it's announcing the release of Michael's new book called, "'The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil." Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas in politics and philosophy, and we have a lot of fun disagreeing.

But there's no question that he has a deep love for humanity and puts his heart and soul into his work, especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book.

So I ask that you support him by buying it at white pill book calm That should hopefully forward to the Amazon page As always we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit without coordinating For the chaos that makes life so damn interesting.

This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love, which is the best way to celebrate the holidays.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malice.

We probably should have coordinated this better, shouldn't we?

Have you, since this is a Christmas special, a holiday special, Have you been a good or a bad boy, Michael, this year?

the book, Grendel Hicks, his autobiography starts with, I was a good boy and he wasn't a very good boy.

I'm trying to think of what bad things I've done.

Okay, wait, that's not, that was, that was

So this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote.

Which is, I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being 1 of the first people to read it.

don't know if nervous is the word, but you are the first person who has read it that I am speaking to about it.

It's basically a story of evil in the 20th century, and throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope.

So there's the blue pill and the red pill.

There's the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical, maybe apathetic, just giving up on the world, given that you see behind the curtain, and given that you don't like what you see, given that there's so much suffering in the world, you give up, that's the black pill.

And the white pill, I suppose, is even though you acknowledge that there's evil in the world, you don't give up.

So if you're listening to this, and you're a fan of this podcast.

Whitepillbook.com and if you don't know how to spell we'll probably have a link that you can click on.

So for people who also don't know, Michael Malice is not just a troll, not just a hilarious comedic genius who hosts his own podcast, but he is an incredible, brilliant author.

Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography, Kim Jong-il.

The New Right, A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics.

That's the story of the extremes of the United States political movements.

And then the anarchist handbook that's talking about the ideologies, the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism.

But on top of that, you're now going in, going into the darkest aspects of the 20th century with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill.

So Let me ask you, let's start at the beginning.

At the end of the 19th century, as you write, the terms socialist, communist, and anarchist were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably because the prophecy Marxist society was 1 in which the state had famously withered away.

There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look like in practice, but 2 things were clear.

First, that socialism was both inevitable and scientific, the way of the future, and second, that the capitalist ruling class were not going down without a fight.

So what are the key points of disagreement between the socialists, the anarchists, the communists along that, at that time?

At the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the possibility of the century laid before us that eventually led to the first and the second World War.

The idea when the Industrial Revolution came and Marx was very much a product of Industrial Revolution era thinking was, okay, now that we have technology, now that we have science, we can scientifically manage society.

We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson and this kind of idea of progressivism that we could use technology and kind of not, capitalism in their view, unfettered capitalism was wasteful.

If we produce just exactly what we need and you have these people, engineers, they're engineering society, then everyone will be happy and you won't have to have any suffering or waste.

So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella.

It's not used in the term that it means today of necessarily state socialism.

It just meant the idea of having society scientifically run.

So you had a huge argument, they're different wings, you even had it from the beginning with Marx versus Bakunin, because Marx was for obviously state socialism, the absolute state running everything.

Although even with Marx and Engels, it was a means to an end.

After man is remade in his very nature, then the state withers away and everyone's equal and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation.

He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted to have kind of like workers collectives and things like that and ultra localized control.

It's just that some people viewed the state as a convenient, effective intermediate state.

Well, I think at least Marx and Maxwell, and there were plenty of others who just regarded it, you know, have the state owners, have the workers control the production via the state.

I think you want it on this side so people can see you.

I want it, you know like when you have like hair

And then I just glance flirtatiously towards the camera sometimes.

The bad, The bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them.

And now I glance flirtatiously after that.

there were other socialists who did not regard this kind of end times where the state would do it the way at all.

And there were various strains in between where you'd have some capitalism and some socialism.

The concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking.

The Labour Party came out of the Fabian Socialists in Great Britain.

Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing.

And then when that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise, meaning we're gonna get to socialism slowly in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog.

And also the big part of this thinking at the time, this is again the late 19th century, is the idea that there's going to be a worldwide workers' revolution.

It wasn't going to be that, you know, in 1 country, you know, it was going to happen and then all the other countries would be capitalists.

The idea was, all right, like the workers in Germany have more in common with the workers in America than the workers in Germany have with the capitalists in Germany.

So the idea is, all right, like the working class all over the world at 1 point, they're gonna be like, we're being exploited.

We're getting injured and so on and so forth.

We're just gonna overthrow our chains and we're gonna run everything ourselves.

We're the ones running it already anyway.

And we're doing all the work, so why shouldn't we be getting all the benefit?

What's the role of violence in all of this?

So the Fabians, for example, in Britain, who were all socialists, they were very heavily of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box, we can advocate and agitate and get the people to be voting for their own self-interest and furthering the state at the expense of the capitalist class.

Then there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists who were like, if voting changed anything, they wouldn't let us do it.

And the only way to have a revolution is to have a revolution, to kill, to overthrow, to seize these factories and this was a big argument and it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end?

Is it legal to be giving speeches advocating for violence and revolution?

Johan Most, who I discuss in the book and in the Anarchist Handbook, he published a book in the 1800s about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs.

And this is a big free speech concern at the time because now anyone in their own house can make a bomb and kill lots of people.

And this is something that was happening with enormous frequency at the time.

And people tend to think, because we have these kind of prejudices, or we only remember what's happening now.

But this was, I mean, World War II, oh, excuse me, World War I got started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

There were lots of people, McKinley's another 1 who I discuss in the book, his assassination, there was lots of violence happening very regularly and with the creation of dynamite, it kind of exponentially became more dangerous and threatening.

Even now on Wall Street, there was a bomb that went off, I think in the 1920s And the shards of shrapnel are still in the JP Morgan building, I believe.

Do you ever think, if you were alive during that time, what you would be doing?

Which parties would you attend figuratively

thing that was so interesting back then is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge Lujan, and she ended her days in Taos, New Mexico.

And she had an apartment on 9th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a chateau salon, and everyone got together and talked.

And you'd have Emma Goldman, who was an anarchist, Margaret Sanger, who invented Planned Parenthood and advocated for birth control.

And you'd have the people from the Wobblies, the hardcore labor unions.

And everyone kind of, Ed Sheeran Mencken didn't attend, but he was friends with them all.

So there was this very weird, with the birth of modernism in art and in kind of modernist thinking, there was this idea of like, all right, like this was the first time where you could be intellectual as a class, where there really was this space for people who are thinkers.

And they just sat around being like, all right, what are we gonna do with ourselves?

And you had it in modern art, you had it in literature, you had it in politics.

So it was a very exciting time where people were like, all right, everything is now on the table, what are we gonna do with this?

And they very much were aware that this was a break with the pre-Industrial Revolution kind of farmer labor era.

Do you see, do you think for you violence would be compelling?

But second, I just- Dynamite doesn't care about your size.

And I think, I don't know, but to me, violence is the kind of thing where you think you're running it, but it's running you.

Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song.

So whenever I hear even contemporary times where people are advocating for violent actions.

It's like, when you start a fire, you're not like, I'm just gonna burn down this house.

And there's many cases over and over of people who are building bombs or trying to assassinate someone or things like that.

And it ended up literally, literally, literally blowing up in their own face.

So, and violence doesn't really work necessarily because if you have an assassination, you're not assassinating the presidency.

If you take out a president, there's another president instantly there.

You replace them with someone who now is in a position to crack down and retaliate with even more violence.

So It's, the calculus for me isn't there.

But I mean, I don't know if I'd be able to have the space to be, I certainly wouldn't have the space to be a podcaster or like a media personality.

To some extent it was in the 1920s with the Algonquin Roundtable and all the people from the New Yorker magazine.

It was very much a weird kind of situation to be a thinker.

I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right?

Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me.

Cause you wouldn't do Einstein, cause he was an immigrant.

No, you wouldn't have been a Tesla-like figure.

There's already a Tesla, so you wouldn't literally be Tesla.

See, Michael doesn't only make funny things, he also explains them for you.

All right, I'm downgrading you from a 9 down to an 8.

And if you keep talking like this, a 5 is a real possibility.

All right, so the kind of vacuum that's created with violence is usually filled with a harsher figure.

So you don't think violent revolution ultimately leads to positive progress in the short term?

The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example.

And overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully, was a positive example.

But again, when violence happens, people get scared and they want the violence stopped immediately.

They were like, bring this back to normal.

And they don't really worry about things like civil liberties or things like that.

It's a very, And then it also creates this space for invasion from foreign sources or demagogues, you know, like, oh look, they're killing us in the streets, now you gotta support me.

I remember somebody told me that, I forget where it was, but they told me that from the very beginning it was obvious that communism is an evil system, or a system that leads to evil.

And to me at least that's not, if I had to put myself in the beginning of the 20th century or at the end of the 19th century, that's totally not obvious.

They are trying to elevate humanity, the basic worth of a human being, of a hardworking human being, of the working class, of the people that are doing the work and the striving and just really trying to build up society with their own hands.

So I guess the question is, can you see yourself believing in that, in the ideas of socialism and communism?

Yeah, Let's say if you were living in Russia.

So first of all, I don't think anything is obvious in politics.

It's not obvious that humans have rights.

It's not obvious that liberty is better or the markets either.

Whether you're for a welfare state or you're for more free markets, not that those is obvious, both of them involve enormous amount of thought and background information.

So when someone says something is obvious in politics, they really mean something is apparent.

Well, it's not apparent on its face that if we all get together and promote a society based on equality and we all chip in, that it's gonna really be good for everyone.

I mean, that to me is the promise of communism.

And it was also very appealing to many people because it was new.

So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways.

You have people getting fired and then they have no recourse.

You have women with 10 kids and they can't feed their kids, infant mortality, you don't have sanitation, you don't have food, everyone's illiterate and uneducated.

And then you're saying, look, if we all chip in together, everyone will have clothes, everyone will have food, everyone will be educated, everyone will do their part, it's gonna be rough in the short period.

That's a very compelling case to be made for communism.

It's really easy in many ways when something hasn't been tried to make it sound compelling because you just talk about how great it's gonna be and then no 1, people are always arguing about how like Venezuela and Sweden, like, oh, you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden, you don't want to be like Venezuela.

The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela, they voted for Sweden.

So it's, I think, and the thing with communism, especially at that era, it was very much a, correlated with people who are too smart for their own good.

Because they had the idea that if we're just put in charge, instead of these like business people or these heirs to great estates, if the people who are smart and get it, like us, I don't mean you and me, like the people at the time who were advocating for it.

Once we're in charge, since we're good people and we want what's best for everyone, we're going to make sure everyone's taken care of.

And they always talked about how much they cared about the little guy.

And so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot.

And they're like, look, if the guy in charge is very much concerned with the little guy, he's not gonna slip between the cracks and it's just gonna be absolutely great.

And we don't have to worry about, you know, you know, the capitalist class just basically exploiting people and having these huge estates while these people can't even feed their own families.

Since we have a little bit of momentum, can you steel man the case for socialism?

I don't know if it's, I don't know if there's a rhyme and a similarity to those, to socialism as implemented at that time and what could possibly be implemented today, but maybe you can dance between the 2.

The steel man argument for socialism is if you have everything up to private industry, you do not have a guarantee that someone won't fall between the cracks.

And the other concern is, in any other context, if someone is, let's suppose, mentally ill, right, through no fault of their own, or someone's handicapped, you know, they can't feed themselves, or mentally disabled, or something like that, If you have everything up to charity, some, you see this with like endangered species, right?

The species that are cute, it's easy to raise money for them and protect them.

Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no 1 cares about, you can't raise money for it.

There's people's interests are to what they find interesting.

So if someone is someone who's like not socially appealing in some way, whatever capacity, they're going to fall between the cracks and they're screwed.

Under socialism, if you have a government taking care of everything, no 1 is left behind.

You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low and the worst of the worst are still going to make sure that they're not starving the street or just left behind.

So that is a big moral case to be made for having the state running everything.

In terms of economics, it's a lot harder, but the argument there would be, it's why, it's not fair, a term which in my view does not actually have a good meaning, but it's not fair that because you were born a Rockefeller and I was born in Poland, that you never have to worry about food for the rest of your life, whereas I have to worry about paying for a doctor for my kid.

Like you won this lottery when you're born and now I have to be screwed and I have to respect all your property, why?

So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism.

And the other argument is, if you have a media apparatus that is operated under profit-seeking principles, it is going to feed into people's worst qualities, most basic animal-like qualities and sensationalist qualities, and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control.

Whereas if the government, which represents all of us, is running things, then everyone will have a right to have their voice heard and won't be manipulated.

What about the reaching towards the stateless version?

Sort of because you espouse the ideas of anarchism, it kind of has the same conclusion, which is reaching towards the removal of the state to where we, I guess, have some distributed reallocation of resources that are quote unquote fair.

But the thing is the Marxist vision of the state withering away and becoming anarchism, it's really kind of like the underpants gnomes, because it's like- Tell me more.

You have full communism, the state's running everything, including education.

Step 2, question mark, step 3, anarchism.

So their idea was that after enough time, the nature of man himself was going to change.

And then the government would be superfluous because we would all be equal and we would all naturally or socially, whatever term they would use, want to act the part that we would need to do.

And in fact, Reagan had a great joke about this where there were 2 commissars, I think, in Moscow.

And 1 of them, they're walking around, they're going, is this it?

The other goes, oh no, it's gonna get a hell of a lot worse.

So, you know, that's kind of the counter argument to that.

Do you think culture, society can change the nature of man?

You don't think this idea that, for example, America's been founded on, that all men are created equal, that that idea can't permeate the culture and thereby change how we see each other, how we think of the basic worth of a human being and thereby change our nature.

That's epigenetic, I don't think that changes the nature of man.

I think, for example, if I say someone, at which I agree with, that someone is innocent until proven guilty, they're not literally innocent.

They're regarded in a legal context as innocent, but that person is or is not a murderer, a thief, or so on and so forth.

So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal, but as Thomas Sowell pointed out, a human being isn't even equal to himself over the course of a day.

Twins who are genetic clones are not equal to 1 another.

So it is a important thing legally, and it's a good yardstick, but it's not literally true.

But don't you think that law becomes ethics?

So we, that idea of justice starts to, we start to internalize it, that we just, the way we behave, the way we think about the world?

No, I think it's a complete red herring, because no 1 is...

Because people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers, or their in group to out group.

So in terms of if you're gonna have equality, that means it's gonna not matter to you whether someone is your mom or someone down the street, and I don't see how that will ever become the case.

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Michael Malice: Christmas Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #347