Michael Malice is a political thinker, podcaster, and author. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- Gala Games: https://gala.games/lex
- Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit
- BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off
- MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off

EPISODE LINKS:
Michael's Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelmalice
Michael's Community: https://malice.locals.com/
Michael's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5tj5QCpJKIl-KIa4Gib5Xw
Michael's Website: http://michaelmalice.com/about/
Your Welcome podcast: https://bit.ly/30q8oz1
The Anarchist Handbook (book): https://amzn.to/3yUb2f0
The New Right (book): https://amzn.to/34gxLo3
Dear Reader (book): https://amzn.to/2HPPlHS
Podcast (Round 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIk1zUy8ehU

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:32 - Animal Farm
3:34 - Emma Goldman
6:39 - Albert Camus
8:09 - How to be a hero in Nazi Germany
15:15 - Camus on Existentialism vs Nihilism
21:17 - Cynicism is a lie
26:24 - Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union
46:43 - Lex and Michael argue: can most people think on their own?
58:21 - How Lex and Michael use Twitter
1:07:43 - Life is beautiful
1:10:46 - Returning to Ukraine
1:12:39 - Michael is now an underwear model
1:16:45 - The Anarchist Handbook
1:18:32 - Tolstoy was an anarchist
1:31:14 - Anarchy debate between Lex and Michael
2:00:22 - Why Michael doesn't vote
2:17:37 - Austin and New York
2:26:13 - Alex Jones

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malice.

Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I'm proud to call him my friend.

He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all the time.

And now enjoy this conversation with Michael Malice in the Tupac Galofi language that I'm increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of.

So Animal Farm by George Orwell is 1 of my favorite books.

It's an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

So for people who haven't read it, it's animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become as bad or worse than the humans.

So comrade, if We lived on this farm, in the book Animal Farm.

Would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey Benjamin, the raven Moses, the humans, Mr.

I'm gonna go with the Milton answer, which is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, right?

It's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs.

At the very top, so the leader, the main pig, Napoleon, versus like the-

I would say it's not, sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think Orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.

I mean, it could very easily be read as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler or many of these others.

1 of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of many of these undisputably left-wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on totalitarianism, totalitarian communism.

And the 3 I can think of top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time are Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell being the third.

Something that leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don't have the exact quote off the top of my head, but something to the effect of, every word I have written should be taken as a defense of democratic socialism against totalitarianism.

So people like Truman was obviously very hardcore in many ways, anti-communist.

We like to parse things out, you're gonna laugh, into binary fashions that left good, right bad, or right good, left bad.

But historically speaking, it does not fall away into these camps as easily as people would like.

And I think it is important for those of us, it takes a lot more courage to fight the right from the right or to fight the left from the left because in a sense, a lot of your countrymen or your fellow travelers are gonna regard you as a traitor to the cause.

So every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these 3 figures among others, who not only, even if they hadn't done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that all of us can learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a role model.

I- What was the nature of their opposition to totalitarianism?

So Emma Goldman, she was an early anarchist figure.

You know, we'll talk about her later, I'm sure.

She got deported from the United States with her partner in crime, Alexander Berkman, literal crime, he tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's main man in the Pittsburgh Steel Mill strike.

She got deported to the Soviet Union and they're like, oh, you want socialism?

Because at the time the anarchists were regarded as socialist, go choke on it.

And she's there and she was watching in great horror what was going on.

And she actually went to Lenin's office And she goes, this isn't what we're about.

The revolution is about the individual and free speech and everyone working together to further society.

And he told her that free speech is a bourgeois contrivance and regardless, you can't have these circumstances in the midst of a revolution.

And when she left the Soviet Union, she went to Britain.

And at the time, before 1917, there was a lot of discussion among socialist circles about what would the revolution look like, right?

Would there be the Bakunin anarchist model?

Obviously the Bolsheviks ended up winning, But even then it wasn't obvious because there was the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and what people, you and I know what those words mean, but Bolsheviks were kind of funny because Bolshe means bigger and Menshe means smaller.

It was sarcastic that they were called Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were called Bolsheviks.

And Lenin destroyed all his foes in a very merciless way, obviously.

Beforehand there was the idea like, okay, we have all these cockamamie ideas, we have to work together, we don't know what it's going to look like for the cause.

Then as soon as he sees power, he's like, yeah, yeah, we're not doing that kind of pluralism anymore.

So she left the Soviet Union, as did Berkman.

She wrote a book that they titled, My Disillusionment with Russia.

And I remember this 1 anecdote, which I'm gonna discuss in a forthcoming book, where she goes to Britain and the British were very red at the time.

They really had something called the Fabian Society, which was the predecessor to the British Labor Party, which were like, all right, we're going to get rid of liberalism and have a socialist kind of nation.

And she gave talks and there was this 1 time where she gave a talk and she started and there was a standing ovation.

By the time she was done, you could hear a pin drop because she dared to look at these people in the face, something they'd been fighting for all their lives and saying, we've been to the future and it works.

And she's like, guys, this is worse than the czar.

Newspapers are being shut down if they have heretical views, so on and so forth.

And she was just even more of a pariah than she had been previously.

So she deserves huge accolades in that regard.

I brought her up when we were talking about with our conversation with Yaron Orwell.

I think you don't need me to explain what he has done and continues to do to use fiction to demonstrate the horrors of a totalitarian state.

And Camus, who might be my all-time great lighthouse, so to speak, in terms of being a man of conscience, you know, he joined the Communist Party, and for a lot of people in the States you hear, oh, you joined the Communist Party, so I need to hear.

He was a communist, all you need to know.

He joined the Communist Party because they were the main ones fighting the fascists in France and other locations.

And he took Nazism as did many others, of course, very, very, very seriously.

He wasn't some committed communist, but this was just his mechanism to take on, you know, be part of the underground in Vichy France and so on and so forth.

So he had the quote, which is ascribed to him, which is kind of a misquote.

Howard Zinn is the 1 who actually said it, that it is a job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

And he very much felt, if you read his speech when he won the Nobel Prize, I forget, it's in the 50s, where he goes, it's basically the job of writers to keep civilization from destroying himself.

I don't think I'm ever going to be a man on the level of Camus and what he's accomplished, but I think that vision of it is the job of writers to be the conscience and to point out, this is the leftism at its best, when you're giving voice to the voiceless, when you have the machine of the state crushing and marginalizing people, and they might not be educated, literate, or have any power at all, he's the guy who's like, you are ruining humans, these humans matter, and I'm not going to let you look the other way and act like you don't know what you're doing.

So in this time, whether we look at the time of fascism or we look at the fictional animal farm, what's the heroic action then?

There's a bunch of different heroic actions, some more heroic than others, not just for the, you know, hero is the wrong word in terms of like effectiveness.

What's the effective action, I guess, is what I want to ask.

As a writer, as a thinker, as somebody with a mind, what's the heroic action?

That's a tricky question because a lot of times in the West heroism is regarded as intertwined with martyrdom, right?

So it's kind of this idea of like, you have to speak to, Camus always talked about, let justice be done till the heavens fall.

This is a common kind of motto among people with conscience and that you have to do the right thing, even the consequences might not be what you like.

And I think that is a good loose definition of heroism.

So if you meet, I'll give you 1 example of heroism.

This was on Twitter and I really feel bad that I don't remember the guy's name.

This was the line to Auschwitz, I believe it was.

There's the Nazi guards keeping everyone along.

I think if you were under 12, they killed you or something, there was some age limit where some kids were killed or some were not, there was some circumstances.

And he asked the mom how old this kid was.

And she realized what this Nazi was telling her even in that circumstance, and it ended up saving the kid's life.

So I think heroism in this context is defiance and standing true to values of liberalism, humanism, and venerating the sanctity of human life.

I think that, and I think it's also important to pick your battles.

I don't think if he got, that Nazi over there, got in a bullhorn and said, "'Hey, this is the rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's not going to help anyone do anything.

So I do think people a lot of times attack me for my anarchist views.

It's like, oh, would you call the police?

I got an argument with Tim Pool because there was that couple, I think it was at Missouri or Illinois when they had their guns and they were being arrested and they basically took a plea deal and he said, you should have fought.

I go, it's a lot easier to say you should fight, but we don't know what circumstance someone is under.

What these totalitarian regimes did very, very well, as you know, is if you were a target and they can't get through to you, that's fine.

You can sit there, Lex, and gird your jaw, and you can stand up to all the torture.

Cool, what are we gonna do about your wife?

1 thing Stalin did, he made it a law that kids 14 and up could get the death penalty for certain crimes.

So after that, The rule was from the NKVD, if you were interrogating someone, they would have death warrants for the kid's child on the desk visible.

So I'm interrogating you, asking you to admit to some crime that you're not committed, and those piece of paper, it's Svetlana, she's got a death warrant, you're going to admit to any crime you want.

So this is something Americans This is even the case right now in North Korea, which I know you had Yeonmi Park on, it's something I talk about a lot.

Let's talk about instead of the hypothetical, but this is happening right now on earth.

The great leader Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, said class enemies must be exterminated 3 generations.

So when people talk about individualism versus collectivism, Rick Santorum from Ascender says the family is the basic unit of society.

So if someone does something wrong, 3 generations have to pay the price and you often don't know who it is that got you all in trouble, there's not a trial.

This to Western minds is something almost incomprehensible.

It's a lot easier to be brave when it's just your skin.

There's something when it's, yeah, when it's your child, your loved ones, every man becomes a coward.

But also what bravery is there for me to write an essay for the Guardian to say, I don't vote.

There's no possibility of consequences to me.

This is the wonderful thing about living, excuse me, in a free country.

It would take a lot of courage to be in the Soviet Union and say, I'm not going to vote.

So I think heroism in the sense of kind of the suicidal stuff and taking a stance with no consequence is a bit overrated.

There is some aspect, like the way I think about heroism is something like you said about the Nazi soldier, which is quietly, privately in your own life, live the virtues that you want the rest of the world to live by.

So like without, like writing about it is not as heroic as living it quietly.

I sometimes give talks on networking and I tell the kids, if you know someone's in town and it's their birthday with nothing to do, take them out.

And I say, I do this for selfish reasons and everyone laughs and I go, think about it this way.

The guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.

Like you have that capacity to be that person and you're making that day feel special.

What's the cost, dinner, 30 bucks, 25 bucks?

So it's very disturbing to me how often people have opportunities to slightly move the needle and make things a bit better at almost no cost and they just literally don't think in those terms.

And 1 of the things Camus talked about, he's often described as a existentialist, which he did not like that term, he regarded himself as an absurdist, is the idea that we're basically blank canvases.

And this isn't something that is dangerous, this is enormous opportunity, and you have the ability to become the kind of man or woman that you admire and want to be.

You don't have to be, I don't know, George Washington or 1 of these great heroes of all time, but everyone out there has the capacity, capacity, excuse me, to be a hero to their kids or to be a hero to maybe some, there's nursing homes and there's old people who are lonely.

I think that you take in a dog that's on its last legs.

These are, not Terry Shepard, I'm blanking on his name.

These are things that people do that aren't heroic in the sense of Superman, but that I find admirable extremely, and I think are very underrated because these people aren't championed.

Is this some kind of weird, passive aggressive indirect way for you to tell me that I should take you out for your birthday on Monday?

Without failure, we would not have triumph.

Can we stick on the Camus absurdism versus existentialism?

In your ideas about anarchism too, it seems like those are somehow intricately connected because existentialism is connected to freedom, and freedom is connected to anarchism.

Sure, but I mean, Sartre was a defender of the Soviet Union.

He said explicitly about things like gulags, like even if it's true, we shouldn't talk about it.

So what people don't appreciate is how human beings can have contradictory ideas in their minds at the same time.

So 1 would think, okay, someone's a Democrat, they think ABC, therefore they can think DEF.

People that have all sorts of contradictions and it's not at all clear and they'll have a clean conscience because the human mind is very sophisticated and is capable of doing this.

So Sartre, you would think he's this radical individualist, this sense of ultimate freedom, but he's defending the Soviet Union.

Camus, on the other hand, would probably be, was very much like a social Democrat.

He didn't really talk about what politics should be so much as it shouldn't be.

His essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, is 1 of the great masterpieces of all time, an attack on the death penalty, not in terms of no one's evil or it's wrong to kill murderers, but in terms of what does it do for a society.

If you have someone who takes a person and locks them in a room and says, in 2 years, I'm going to murder you, and you lock them for that.

We regard this as someone who's a complete monster, but that's what the state does with the death penalty.

And he challenges us to think, is this the kind of people we wanna be?

And again, he's saying, I'm not saying killing a murderer is wrong, I'm not saying evil is wrong.

His entire career was dedicated to fighting the concept of evil.

But are we the kind of people who want to be doing these things that in any other context we regard as torture or deprave?

So I'm much more of a Camus person than a Sartre person.

So he was probably against war in that same way.

So I don't, I have to admit, I don't know much about the political side of Camus.

Well, and I don't think his political side is that interesting or relevant.

What I find, sorry to interrupt you, what I find fascinating about Camus and what I think about on a daily base from him is his insistence that you have to live a life based on conscience, that you have to be accountable to yourself when you put your head on the pillow at the end of the day and ask yourself, did I live a righteous life with integrity, true to my values?

Did I not needlessly cause harm to innocent people?

Did I, if someone is weak, am I using that as an opportunity to exploit them or to harm them?

Or do I feel a bit of sympathy or empathy for this person?

Because maybe they didn't have circumstances that were as beneficial as other people had.

Well, how does that fit absurdism where everything is absurd, nothing has meaning,

So he regards not, his philosophy explicitly said is a response to nihilism and a attack on nihilism.

He regards cynicism as the worst value people can have and I agree with him 100%.

A lot of times people call me cynical online and I push back very, very hard because to be a, you know, I had this quote in the New Right where I said, I'd rather be naive than a cynic because a cynic is a hopeless man who projects his hopelessness to the world at large.

Camus, this is the metaphor I use and I find it very inspirational.

I thought it was in his work, but I guess I thought if it described it to him.

You imagine you go to a mountainside and you see a blank canvas on an easel standing in front of this mountainside.

1 people be like, why is this blank canvas here?

Whereas the other type of person will be like, there's a blank canvas here in this beautiful countryside, what a great opportunity.

I can paint this river, I could paint that bird, I could paint my friends or myself in the background.

Infinite choices, and this is a gift that I have been given.

And I think that also ties very heavily into what I was, I went to yeshiva as a kid, which is Jewish school.

What we were taught incessantly, how to look at life is this beautiful gift that God has given you and that God wants you to be happy.

He wants you to live to the fullest in a moral way.

I remember the first time I went into a church and they were asking questions about the Jewish concept, the afterlife, they weren't familiar with Jewish thought.

And it took me a second because I didn't really have answers.

And then I remembered what we were taught, which is let's suppose you're at this banquet with the best chef on earth and the table's so heavy because you've got steaks and you've got chicken and you've got sushi and the wine's flowing and you've got your Dr.

Pibb and the store brand, everything you want.

And you're looking around at this amazing bounty, right?

And then you turn to this best chef on earth and you're like, oh, so what's for dessert?

I mean, the offensiveness of that is just so insane.

Like I promise you, if I could deliver this meal, the dessert's gonna be okay.

So this focus on the afterlife when we've been given this amazing gift on this earth is a very kind of different mindset from both the Jewish tradition as I've been taught and the Camus mindset.

Obviously Camus was an atheist, didn't believe in an afterlife.

But this concept that life is meaningless, but that means you have that opportunity to find value, to seek for truth, to seek for happiness.

And Camus has this quote, it's ascribed to him, it's like a meme, I've never found the source, so maybe he doesn't really say it.

But he says, maybe it's not about happy endings, maybe it's about the journey.

And I think when you have that mindset, and as you and I, I think you and I both found this, because neither of us when we were kids thought we'd be doing this, right?

Yeah, but now that we're fortunate enough to do this and that we're blessed enough that there's people who find this of value and interest and we could pay the rent doing this, there's not a day that goes by where I don't think you and I think this is pretty absurd, but it's also pretty wonderful and as a consequence of us thriving, it also shows other people that happiness is possible on this earth And I think cynicism is the lie.

It's not just the worldview, it's a lie that happiness is not possible on this earth or it's only possible if you sell your soul and you're like a bad person, you screw other people over.

You know, as you said, my birthday is coming up.

I've been feeling just a lot of really great things have been happening very, very recently.

So it affects me very heavily emotionally, especially when I see the response it gives to like the kids.

So it's 1 thing to say, this is what I'm for, but when you can provide proof of concept that what you've been advocating does result in positive responses.

I got a message from this kid who had tried to kill himself a year ago.

And then he was like, look, I found your work.

And now I realize I'm going to make something of myself.

I should be in the garbage, but I'm gonna try to be a standup because I have opportunity on this earth.

Even if he fails as a standup, you know, he's still such, whatever he does, washing dishes, there's no shame in that.

Is it so bad to have a crappy job and a girlfriend who you don't really like, but as compared to the alternative of like, I'm gonna kill myself, this is heaven.

Well, I think there's beauty to be discovered in all of it, in all of those experiences.

So, but at the same time, so I often think about, I just recently reread The Idiot by Dostoevsky.

That's why when I say I'm an idiot, I often think about Prince Mishkin, that kind of idiot, which the world sees you as naive.

I don't think I'm naive, but I tend to see the good in people and the good in every moment.

And in fact, especially in what we do, often the intellectual is supposed to be cynical.

This is very much an urban elite educated mindset where if you write a book about someone who's, let's suppose a drug addict or a prostitute, that has heft and that's valid.

But if you're writing a book about like a love story, you know, 2 people fall in love and they're in roller coasters or carousels, that's less legitimate.

I hate that, I hate that so much because the message it gives to people is you have to choose between thriving and happiness and silliness and seriousness and depravity.

And I'm not saying that drug addict prostitutes to pray, but they're basically their worldviews, if it's, unless it's dark and twisted, it doesn't really count as art.

And I despise that mindset, that subtext.

So the internet and people around me often will call me naive because I don't know.

I think the word they want is innocent, don't you think?

No, but innocent in that you genuinely in your heart, I know you fairly well at this point, believe that goodness is possible and that people can, if not be good, at least be better than they were yesterday.

See, even the word naive or the word innocent presumes that there's not wisdom in that.

Presumes that somehow that's, oh, isn't that beautiful to live that life of a child who sees the world with these bright eyes and is hopeful about the future, but just wait until they grow up and realize that reality is much harsher than they think.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200