A Geek History of Time - Episode 64 - Far Side of Absurd Government Part II

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

And while we have a through line that states, Authorial intent means dick, right? I don't want to have to have the same haircut, you have dad. Sorry, I'm pretty... Harry, mother. Aww. So was this before or after the poster and you vomiting all over the couch? For those of you that can't see, Ed's eyes just crossed. It is fucked up.

But it's not wrong. This is a keyk history of time. Where we connect NERRY to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I am a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. As I mentioned last episode, currently on what I refer to as contractual unemployment for the next several weeks. And in my own life, biggest news I would say is that today I actually had the opportunity to, or I had an excuse. I'm not going to say I had the opportunity. I had an excuse to walk around the parking lot of my apartment complex with

an ignited lightsaber. My son wanted to go outside and play swords and a good friend of the show and my oldest friend Bishop O'Connell gave me an ultra sabre lightsaber as a belated birthday present. So this was my opportunity to go out and play with that with my son advantages of having kids. Yes. Right there when you're a dork. Who are you? I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin teacher who is also on a fourth sabbatical for the next two months. And I have no updates like that

because we've gone through the lightsaber phases already. But I- Wait, wait, stop the end. The phase ends. Other interests come up. Yeah, but it's a lightsaber. I know, I know. And my son asks me about them from time to time, but okay. But, but yes, my daughter is designing her own world in D&D and actually called me today from her mom's house to ask me if I thought that the treasure hoard that she rewarded the players with because my daughter, my eight-year-old daughter is now DMing, but she called me to ask about the amount of magical items for second-level

characters in the hoard. So who, who, who, okay, who are her players? Her mom. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And her mom is to her credit doing as best a job as she can, not having grown up with D&D like you and I have, and I applaud all of her efforts to that. Okay. Because it's, it's going wonderfully for my daughter as a result.

Well, that's, that's really, that's Europe. I have said in the past that your daughter is awesome. And like, oh my God, both of your kids, I don't want to sell your sons, you're both of your kids are absolutely amazing. And in very dramatically different ways, Absolutely amazing. And it had very dramatically different ways. Your daughter is so much the future of my tribe.

Yeah. That like, oh my God, you're like the pericostity. Is it pericostia or pericostia? Or is it either one? I'm gonna stick with pericostia, because it sounds more bookish. The the pericoste involved in all of that and the you know I just want to check am I doing this right is like yeah. Oh my

God okay I'm totally standing your daughter right down my own head. Oh she's phenomenal. Yeah. So that's that's what we had to do today. All right. All right, and she's learning how to shoot a bow when she's at your house. So, like, all of that and a bat ass. All right, cool. Whereas my son is like learning how to read animals better.

Just picking up on like picking up on cues from the, okay, absolutely. Just telling me about it. It's cool. So between the two of them, they make a ranger. Yeah, well, and that's funny thing. And Julia actually told me today. She's like, wow William really does have animal handling Yeah, he does So when when last we spoke we were talking about the far side which of course meant we had to talk about Albert Camus This time, yeah, I'm gonna quibble with you.

We weren't yet talking about the first side. We were still talking about absurdism. Yeah. Like briefly, like you mentioned it. And then we went off on a tangent about, you know, French playwrights and philosophers, including one of them who like I should have fucking heard of, but had, yeah, sure, hey, yes, oh

My god, you just exposed this massive hole in my education Well this time you know all of all to all of our listeners is this ignorant pillow like oh my god All right, so anyway, well this time. We're gonna start with Jean Paul S Sart. And uh, yeah, French existentialism. Here we go. Buckle in hell is other people. Did he say that? No exit, right? Was that Sartre?

I don't think that was Sartre. I don't know. Oh, no. Yeah, who really? Yeah, that wasn't. That wasn't. No, it's. Um, play. Oh, it might have been might have been. Yeah, yeah, no,

it's a job. I'm sorry. How is other people? 1944 existentialist French play? Yes. Okay. So it wasn't saying that it was one of his characters saying that it was one. Yes, they're saying that in the play. Hell is other people. Okay. Or it's the interpretation of what the lesson of the play is because it's a group of characters stuck in this room that they can't get out of and like, oh my god, they're driving each other nuts. So it's like that upset Twilight Zone. Yeah. Well, it's like that episode Twilight Zone and it's like the entire premise of the good place. I haven't seen the good place. Oh my God. Okay, as an existentialist, you need like,

I wouldn't call myself that, but I probably my overlap with that is far greater than with anything else. Yeah, I'm going to say for somebody who's, for somebody who's view of the universe is as heavily influenced by existentialism as yours is. True, true. Fair? Yeah. I'm going to say, I'm going to say, you really need to watch the good place because the first season is, if no exit was a sitcom.

Oh, OK. Well, let's get into the last funny stuff about Sart. He did get into the French Army. And then he was a POW for nine months in St. lag 13 D. Oh shit. Yeah. Yeah. And during that time, he wrote his first play. You know, like you do when you're a prisoner of war. The very next two things I said was, of course, he did. He's French. Yeah. And it was about Christmas. And also while he was there, he read Heidegger's Being and Time, which was an attempt to explain the concept of being.

Because he's French, right? So in April of 1940, I guess it was German. Yeah, that's what you would have access to reading in a stay lag. Yeah, good point. Yeah, so in April of 1941, he gets released from the stay lag due to bad health

and he came back to Paris. Which at that point, okay, say the year again? 1940 with April 41, so yes. Okay, yeah. Okay, so yeah, it was under occupation. So they were like, yeah, sure, you could go home. Whatever the fuck you don't care. We don't have you on our books over here,

you're gonna be over there, someone else's command. So he becomes a teacher and he replaces a Jewish teacher who'd been forbidden to teach because it's Vichy France. Lovely. Mm-hmm. He, along with other authors and some students, started the socialism and liberty underground group. Because what else is a French playwright going to do in Vichy France?

Start a lot of cigarettes. You that too. Yeah. Start was always quick to suggest assassinating French collaborators way more than he was when it came to assassinating high command German invaders. Because the betrayal committed by the OK. Yep. I can I can see. Yeah. I can see the, I can see the thought process. And also, if you, well, and if you look at the French history after World War II, especially

with the Marianns and just the punishments and all that, but also, if you think about it, if you want to attack the infrastructure of invasion, you do attack the collaborators because the Germans will care less about them, so they won't take it as seriously. There will be fewer reprisals, the reprisals will be lesser, and they won't see the decay that's occurring because you're cutting out those parts that they don't see.

Okay, great, on a strategic level, that's all awesome, but on an emotional level, no, no, no, those guys invaded, but you motherfuckers. Yeah. You mother fuckers right there. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I, I, Lord knows we've talked about that enough, but, you know, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quibble a little bit on that in that I think they qualify as the real enemy too. Yes. Like if it was, if it was, if it was one group of the free French attacking another group of the free French, then yeah, I'm totally down with that analogy, but this is, no, no, we're the free French and we're attacking the motherfuckers who literally sold us out to the Germans. Yeah, there's that, but there's also multiple ways to resist, you know, some people can

only resist by breaking all the pencils, other people are resist by, you know, clipping wires, but keeping a front. So I mean, there's, but it's also France. There's a long history of people attacking people in the face of an invasion. Oh yeah. That's kind of their thing.

Yeah, well, and I'm trying to figure out how to, how to, there's an idea in my head that I'm trying to figure out how to articulate, but the French in particular, because of their position within the canon of, of Western European cultures and, and their particular ideation of their own language and culture and everything else, language and culture and everything else. I think their capacity for feeling betrayed by their own might be heightened. I'd say that it's a cultural touchstone. Yeah, because, you know, I mean, there's, there is, there's literally a bureau in France

that gives the thumbs up and thumbs down for neo-lojisms in French. Very true. And so their language is the sacrosanque important thing and French culture and French music and all of the stuff. And like it was a huge big deal for the students in, I wanna say,, 68 when they were writing in France, when they were picking up cobblestones thrown out of a police. A big part of what

they were angry about was cultural imperialism from the United States, like that was a huge issue for them. In a way that like we as Americans as a melting pot culture and as a a society that freely steals from anybody that will let us get away with it. Yeah culturally speaking we just like don't understand the idea of this you know purity of culture kind of idea. And so to to a group of people who have that kind of attachment. To their tribal identity. So to a group of people who have that kind of attachment to their tribal identity, the idea that you would collaborate with this group of, like,

historical invaders. Historical invaders. Because this is the third time in three generations. And yeah, yeah, like every generation, the Germans march in here and we've got to try to find a way to fight them off. And you motherfuckers are gonna like roll over and be like, well, you know,

they're giving me a bigger apartment and giving, you know, I get a, that's a uniform I get to do all this. Like for anybody in that society who isn't a collaborator, the level of primal fury, like the identitarian, yeah, I mean, there is a very particularly French kind

of aspect of identity that I can totally see being part of, and starch would probably have argued, no, no, that wasn't part of it at all, but like, no, no, dude, this is the water you're swimming in. Yeah. As we say all the time, and, no, dude, this is the water you're swimming in. Yeah. As we say all the time and like part of his, part of his, you know, wanting to hit those guys first, had to have been influenced by that.

Yeah, I don't doubt that at all. Now, eventually this underground group dissolves and he goes back to being a writer, thinking that he's gonna have a more lasting impact than as a resistance fighter. He wrote, being in nothingness at this time. And I dare you to go ahead and read it. It is important, and it's also 600 plus pages long, and it is dense as shit.

Yeah, it's good Lord. You thought Melville was just boring. Yeah, Melville was just boring. No, no, being in a, Melville is tough to get through just because it's time considering there are so many fucking words. Yes. This is the disadvantage of having so many fucking words, also having been in another language, also being a rich

treatise on a new philosophical concept. You can't just read through it. It is a text that requires active cognition. While you have to be thinking while you are reading it. I have not tried to read the whole thing. The bits I have read are like three paragraphs at a time. You know, in a college philosophy course and that was enough to have me go, you know what? I'm going to try to take from this what I can and I'm going to move on. Yeah. Because, like, oh my God, because I'm not a philosophy major and this isn't something,

you know, you know, and I'm more interested in, you know, the, the, where, where all of this philosophical rubber meets the road in terms of who did what, why, how, and, you know. Well, in speaking of where it hits the road, he also writes something called Paris under the occupation. And this is as a critique of the use of decorum specifically to oppress. And the gist of this essay was that the German soldiers used politeness to shame the French into accepting occupation. Here's a quote. The Germans did not stride, revolver in hand through the streets. They did not force civilians to make way for them on the pavement.

They would offer seats to old ladies on the metro. They showed great fondness for children and would pat them on the cheek. They had been told to do, they had been told to behave correctly and being well disciplined, they tried shily and conscientiously to do so. Some of them even displayed a naive kindness which could find no practical expression. And because, so that's his quote, about what was going on there, and because so many Germans had learned French, when they would ask parisians and their German accented halting French, the parisians would help them out

of embarrassment because they didn't want to be impolite. Okay, so you've got that dynamic. Yeah, wait. Okay, wait. Okay. Everything I have heard from anybody as an American tourist who's ever visited France, who's tried to speak French, is that parisians don't do that. Like my father, okay, the example immediately comes to mind because, you know, family. And this might not have been in Paris.

I don't know where this was, but in France, with my mother, tried to order in French and was told by the waiter order in English, because his pronunciation was so bad. Well, you're from here. You're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here.

So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. So you're from here. I get what it is that Sarge is trying to say, but he's wrong when he says that they weren't marching revolver in hand. He's making a point about they didn't have guns in their hands, but they had fucking guns. They did. And, and I'm going to go to Heinlein now.

An armed society is a polite society. The Germans were the ones with all the guns. So they were forcing everybody to be polite to them because if you weren't, there was a chance they were going to show up and they were going to shoot you in the fucking head. Well, that threat doesn't necessarily have to be spoken for it to be understood, and you can then use that push toward decorum and keep in mind this was the 1940s, different generation, but you can use that decorum then to continue to push your agenda, which is what he's pointing out. Sart said that the decorum, the correctness of the Germans trying

to be polite to those that they occupied under the explicit threat of violence, blossomed a moral corruption in many pre-easions who used the Germans to corrum as an excuse to remain passive, which is ultimately being complicit. Okay, so he did okay, he did, he did address my... Absolutely. Okay, yeah. Simply, what we're saying here is this is tone policing with literal guns.

Yes. Okay. Simply trying to live day-to-day existence without challenging that decorum and being rude to the men with guns, that actually helped the occupation in trench further. And that occupation aided the new order in Europe, which was fascism.

And it used French pressivity and complicity of ordinary people as the lubrication that kept fascism humming along. So in the same way that you, if you weren't actively against, if you weren't actively doing something against the occupation, you were for it. Yes. Is, is essentially the same as what we, what we are now seeing in our own side here in

the United States in 2020, which is if you are not actively anti-racist, then you are racist. Yes. which is if you are not actively anti-racist, then you are racist. Yes. And with this reality, there were over 32,000 informers living in Paris alone. Intellectuals could no longer discuss at cafes like they once had, and friends would often disappear. Okay. 32,000 informers in Paris.

What was the population of Paris at the time? In the millions. Okay, so that's 2% of the population. I'm not. I mean, I've kind of liked that one. I'm not that good with percentages, but yeah. But a couple of percent. Potentially.

Yeah. Which, and I'm not saying it, to try to downplay anything, I'm just trying to get an idea of the scale of the issue. Okay. Yeah. Um, 30, okay, wait.

Yeah. 32,000 that show up somewhere on a, on it, because I mean, the Germans were, okay, I'm gonna have to take a momentary side track here. Okay. I'm gonna segue for a second but I promise I'm gonna get back to this. What's remarkable about the Nazi regime is, I mean so many things, but from a historical standpoint, they kept such exacting fucking records of everything. They were, they were anal retentive about keeping track of everything.

So when you give me a figure of 32,000 in formers, it's roughly one percent, by the way. Okay, okay, well, that's enough. That's that's enough that there are enough of them that you never know. Whether or not you're safe. So. And again, I wasn't I wasn't asking for that to try to minimize anything. No, I think I think that percentage is a very significant number. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, but, but what what I what I find remarkable about the reputation of the Germans and the Nazis are kind of the apex or nadir depending on how you want to put it of this is we talk about the precision of German engineering and all of this. The thing is, all of that is Prussian. All of that is Prussian.

Until the 1890s, until, sometimes short, until German unification under Prussian rule, because prior to that, they were the Holy Roman Empire. But until German unification, Germans in the rest of Europe had a reputation as being red necks, and these kind of boisterous barbarians, ask anybody in the rest of Europe about Bavarians as opposed to Prussians and They're gonna know what you're talking about and Prussians are gonna be the ones that have a stick up their ass and

Bavarians are the ones that like yeah, no, they make really great beer, but Jesus Christ don't let them drink too much of it because holy shit you know and in the early modern period, especially Germans, Germans were the red decks of fucking Europe. So, so I find it remarkable that when you tell me, we know there were 32,000, I'm sure there's rounding involved, but when we know there were 32,000 informers in Paris alone, it's because a bunch of fucking Prussians were keeping exacting records about who it was that they had working for them. Yes. Which meant there were a whole lot of people after the war who at best were unemployed and

at worst went the fuck away. Yeah. So, here's a quote, he says, one day you might phone a friend and the phone would ring for a long time in an empty flat. You would go round and ring the doorbell, but no one would answer. If the concierge forced the door, you would find two chairs standing close together in the hall with German cigarettes on the floor between the legs. If the wife or mother of the man who had vanished had been present at his arrest, she would

tell you that he had been taken away by very polite Germans, like those who asked their way in the street. And when she went to ask what had happened to them at the offices and the avenue Focke, or the Rude S'Wassan French place, she would politely, she would be politely received and sent away with comforting words. Number 11, Rude S'Wassia, that street was the headquarters of the Gestapo in Paris. Now Camus had once said of Sart that he was a writer who resisted not a resistor who wrote. Okay. Sart was in many ways the banner bearer for existentialism, as we've said. In it, he stated that man no longer has inherent meeting. This wouldn't be another word for essence, but that his existence being enabled a man to define his own essence.

And he was what I call a stern optimist, thinking that people spent too much time and energy coming up with excuses for why they don't act. And if you look at occupied France, that's how he's broken it down. He breaks life down like this. Life is a struggle to give oneself meaning, but meaning itself is man made. So in order to make one's life meaningful, one must act as though they are legislating for all of humanity. He said, in fashioning myself, I fashion man. Okay, so, okay, so this gets down to the, to the very basic philosophical question. You just tagged it basically. Existence versus essence.

Does essence preclude existence or does existence preclude essence? Precede, not preclude, but yes. Precede, sorry, I'm two beers in. So proceed, which one, which comes first, chicken to the egg? He says existence. He says existence. He says existence. Yes. A coin is, of course, would say essence.

Any deist would probably say essence. What I find remarkable about the rest of all of that is that the conclusions that he comes to sound very much like, and I feel terrible, that I don't remember the name of the rabbi. But there's a story that goes around on, or quote, that goes around on social media, and it's a long quote, which is why I say story, where a noted rabbinical, telmodic scholar gets asked by a student, Rabbi, what is the purpose of an atheist? Okay, so this is presumably about you asking his teacher, you know, somebody who doesn't

believe in God, what is what's the purpose of this? And, and the answer is wonderful. And I've, and I've, and I've, I've taken it, I've, I've incorporated it into my own, my own outlook on the world, my own spirituality. The, the answer of the rabbi is, a, an atheist does not do the right thing because he believes God expects him to. He does it because it is the right thing. God has put us, all of us, in the world to do the right thing. So when you see a situation where something needs to be done, don't merely pray. Think, if there was not a God for me to pray to what would I do, and then do that, because that's what

God wants you to do. Yeah. And so, I mean, coming from obviously like almost opposite ends of the spectrum in spirituality wise, yeah. In spirituality, I find it remarkable and kind of faith in humanity restoring that that starter came came to that kind of conclusion that no, no, the right thing is the fucking right thing. And everything, everything you're telling yourself that is an excuse not to do the fucking right thing. Yeah. Is a failure on your part. And of course, you know, he need to you know, and you need to own that. And you need to own that.

Yes. And of course, he didn't believe in any kind of idea of sin or the soul or anything like that, but it was still, no, no. You have a choice to do the right thing or not do the right thing. So you're saying that answer is, and the answer is still do the right goddamn thing. So you're saying that answer is, and the answer is still do the right goddamn thing.

So you're saying that a person living on an occupation of a fascist regime is going to come to the same conclusion whether or not there's a spiritual component to it. They, I'm, seems to be from, from my own, from my own point of view, I'm going to say they fucking should. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean,, I mean, that's the illustration of those two stories. Now, after the break, we're gonna get into the nuts and bolts of why he thinks what he thinks. But I would just point out that just like with Kamu, he comes up to three parts to this struggle.

They're just gonna be called different things and they're gonna take on different aspects. But that's coming up after the break. So here we're going to go to commercial. Hello Geek Timers, this is producer George, interrupting this podcast to let you know that we have space available. This space could be used to promote your product, book, event, group, even wish a special, someone happy birthday. If you're interested in using this space, please contact us on Twitter via private message at Geek History Time.

All right, now we're back from the break. So when we left off, I was going to break down the three parts to the struggle under SART. The first one is abandonment. And actually come to think of it, I think I put them in alphabetical order. But abandonment, you are alone in your choice. You do not, as a Marxist, want to claim or to get to fall. You don't want, let me put it this way, as Marxists want to claim, you do not get to fall back on history to guide your choice. You don't get to say morality

is history, you do not get to claim that. You also do not, as religious folks will claim, get to fall back on religion to guide your choice. You do not, as a humanist might claim, have a particular nature, be it cowardice or courage for or against any of your choices. You are making a choice, so you have to own it. Okay. Abandonment ultimately leads us to anguish. And this is where he and Camus kind of have some overlap. He says that anguish is that moment when you realize that you are not just making the choice for yourself, but for all of humanity. And this will lead you to realizing the gravity of your decision as it relates to other people's liberty.

Anguish leads to despair. Your choices will make humanity. And every single choice worth making will do this. And and as such your choice will have Consequences and those consequences will absolutely matter to other people and that's what we have to do And if you accept all of these three things you will truly be free according to start Man, yeah, stirners that's the middle metal. It is. That is fucking metal. And like you said, punk rock time. Yeah. And like you said, I think in the last episode, it makes it sound like Debbie Downer stuff,

but actually Sart, Sart saw this as the most wonderful thing. Now, the reason why is because like I said, he's a stern optimist. Now, if you go back and you look at the time in which he read, the time in place in which he wrote these things, it all makes sense if you consider that a five feet tall sickly Jean Paul Sartre was walking down the street and approached by a gray uniform Nazi occupier who politely asked him how to get to Rue Dill, Rue Day, fill in the blank. You are all alone. If you're polite and you're correct, of course,

you help him. But in so doing, you are literally helping fascism. Your choice might well have the consequence of sending him to someone else's house, whom he's going to arrest, have tortured, etc. It could well be that that person, the polite, gray uniform Nazi arrests, has information that is vital to the resistance and now they got him because of a choice that you made. Or you could simply say that you don't know. But by saying that you don't know, you are still complicit. You're still not striking a blow against the Nazis, you're merely forcing that decision

on someone else, because now he's going to have to ask someone else for directions down the street of Rudeville in the blank, because you chose not to make that choice. Or you could flat out tell him that you're not going to tell him. Now that likely means that you're going to be arrested and tortured and killed, and that's some serious fucking anguish. If everyone would just not cooperate with the Nazis, there are a lot more parisians and there were polite gray Nazi uniformed people. And they can't possibly kill all of Paris. And if they do, they're devoting resources from

other fronts which may well bring about the end of the Nazi world order a lot quicker. And whatever choice you make, someone is going to get hurt, whether it's you or someone else. And no matter how polite the gray uniformed Nazi make, someone is going to get hurt, whether it's you or someone else, and no matter how polite the great uniform Nazi is, someone is already being hurt by his occupation. That's a violence that already is pre-infasciate there. It is a violence that is in the water. And so you must decide, you alone must decide how much more violence are you going to allow, and with that total freedom comes total goddamn responsibility. Wow.

So yeah, I definitely see why people think I'm an existentialist because that resonates with people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can totally see that resonating really deeply with you. Yeah. I'm gonna... I get again, just like I said with Camp, I understand the line of thinking. Get the logic is the logic is totally consistent. I think speaking as a historian,

I think there as a historian, I think there's a certain, I don't know what, Jynes Iquat, I don't know what word, Ridd that I bring up that. I don't, I don't want to say naivete, I don't want to say adolescence, but it does have an absolute kind of flair to it. Yeah, that feels a little adolescence. There's an absoluteism that sounds like, you know, 15-year-old me having discovered, you know, well, I just wouldn't cooperate. It's like, I just, I'm cooperating. Like, kids, the kids, like, I know I've vented to you about this before about my seventh graders when I talk

about slavery in the Roman Empire or whatever. Some smart ass always wants to be like well you know what if you like you know picked up a weapon you know fought against you know what if you what if you try to kill your owner then you you were dead. Yeah. And your family would be dead. And they'd buy more slaves. Like you're not, you are not any smarter or any stronger or any tougher than any of the people that lived in history. And I actually, I get very, very flatly

and very calmly, forceful about first time anybody brings that up. Like, well, you know, if they tried to put me in the in the Colosseum as a slave, I did, I did done, whatever, no, you wouldn't have. Right. Let me explain why you wouldn't have. Yeah.

And I think there's a certain element of that here. Now, of course, he's living in it, though. He's living in it. And so his philosophical and his emotional reaction to it is going to be that much more like, no, no, no, no, look. We have a choice. We had a choice. And the people who made this choice the way they did,

you know, there's their, there, when you're in that situation, I can understand the starkness of that. Yeah. I can, and I can get that. But with the, with the privilege of, you know, hindsight and the big picture Camus also said again, he was a writer who resisted not a resistor who wrote like yeah at at there were several people Camus especially later said that it's possible that start was trying to Rehabilitate himself in his own eyes by coming up with this philosophy Okay, and I completely get that there have been a number of times where I did not answer the call as it were. Oh, yeah, not step in bravely. Well, you know, shit, there's any number of times,

I mean, you know, on a daily basis in our lives, there's any number of speaking as a Catholic, like this is this is part of this is part and parcel of the theology is there's gonna be all of these times that you Felt short in the mark. Yeah, like we're human. That's like that happens and and I can totally understand wanting in retrospect to be like no, no, man, we had a choice. We collectively, each of us individually had a choice. And the anger and everybody else and the anger at yourself motivating that kind of philosophical development,

evolution totally makes perfect sense with that being said. evolution totally makes perfect sense with that being said. I think the number of Grayclad Germans there were in Paris probably could have killed maybe not all of the Parisians, but a shit ton of them without. Could have, but I don't think would have. I do think because you had the commander who was in Paris, who refused the order to destroy Paris on their way out. Granted.

You had a lot of Franco files who were German soldiers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's layers to that. Now, if you put together these two philosophies, Kamu and Sart, you'll see that there's this weird gleeful nihilism that comes about. And then let's add to that atomic bombs. Because in France, post-occupation, post-war, they were right next door to an ideological and well-armed battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union.

By 1949, both had atomic weapons and both were willing to blow up the world to make sure that they kept the world safe from the other one blowing up the world And France and England and everyone but especially France would all cease to exist entirely specifically because of a conflict that had everything to do with them and at once had nothing to do with them They literally had no power to actually decide their own fate post occupation literally had no power to actually decide their own fate, post-occupation. So, absurd as you say. Yes. So Sartz existentialism is still liberating, and you could still get killed, even while being liberated.

And Camus' absurdity was still liberating, and it could still easily lead to your annihilation. And yes. Well, absurdity was the word for what the fucking world looked like if you were French during this time period. Like it's a bad sick, ugly, dark joke. Yeah. Like, and you do nothing about it. So you might as well.

So you might as well laugh. So always look on the broad light side of life. Okay, so there are plenty of theater of the absurd playwrights, but my favorite is Eugene Einesco and so I'm going to focus on him. He was a Romanian French playwright who lived out most of the war in France, despite growing up in Romania. The first play that he wrote was the Balte soprano, which is kind of his, he's most well known for that. Some people like who like to sound smart, they'll say it's the rhinoceros, but it's totally the Balte soprano. He was inspired by his own efforts to learn English by assimilation. Now this way of thinking is that you learn to repeat phrases

over and over and over again, and eventually you'll get to learn the language. But he's going through, and he's thinking, I'm not actually learning English. I'm just learning how to use the words in a very contrived set of circumstances. Now, the best part to him was that he was actually learning to state truths

that are un-arruable. The ceiling is up. There are seven days and a week. So to him, what strikes him is that these things were so per se true. How much more was actually like this in language, in interactions. So language then becomes a series of meaningless sounds, which it is, it's arbitrary sounds, to which we attached meanings by way of agreed upon truisms, and none of it makes any goddamn sense.

So you thought Plato's cave would just fuck to imagine the talk balloons of the shadows in that allegory. And you're starting to scratch the exact title for it, not in French, or in French, because I think in French it was something like learning English or something like that. But essentially, in that play, we're all just repeating sounds that we've agreed have meaning. And through that, the meaning happens, but if you really look deeply at it, there's no damn meaning to any of it. Now, go back to applying that to the politics between the different countries.

Apply that to politics between countries with nuclear arsenals and apply that to politics between countries with nuclear arsenals who are led by men who aren't directly elected by the very people that they're willing to destroy in order to keep them safe. And just for fun, the rest of the world is even farther removed from those decision-makers. Great.

So language as such is absurd. Political language doubly so to borrow from ZFI Bibobrox. And thus, the only thing that one can really do is point out the absurdity of it all. So you've not even gotten to the point of acceptance. Now you're playing the part of a critic. You're just pointing out the absurdity. You are so removed from the reality that you are so removed from the actual shadows that

you're pointing to how silly the whole thing is. Look at the changes that it's changed up in a cave. Because that's the only thing I could deal with. Exactly. And if you remember the prisoner's dilemma, yes, right? That whole fucking thing is absurd because the most rational thing will lead to total annihilation.

So you actually have to hope that your leaders are not acting rational. And what kind of world do you live in where you have to hope your leaders are not being rational? So Yeah, in a world of work common sense. Well, okay, I'm gonna back up sure sure. So so you say You got to hope that your leaders are not acting rationally. Yeah the real places I got out of poly side. Yeah, I was going to say we should probably break down.

Prisoners still have. Prisoners still have. Prisoners still have. So you and I. You and I. You and I. We get arrested for a crime. Yes.

And we are each of us given the choice of setting up separately from each other. Separately from one another. Yes. Captain Separat rooms, we have no way of knowing what each other are doing. Yes. If you flip on me, you get away. Yes.

And I go to jail for 10 years. Right. If I flip on you, the reverse, same deal. If neither of us says a word, we both go all over free. Right now. We each we each well, most time surf. Yeah. We get we get time surf. We get something. Yeah. There is there is there is a cost to shutting up. Yes. Now now you you are coming from. Well, hang on hang on on let's let's let's look at that a little more So if I flip on you and you don't then I get I get a reward and you get

All the punishment right okay, and vice versa Right flip if we both flip we both go away yes If neither of us flips we get there's a negative consequence, but we get time served. If only one of us flips. And so the best, yeah, the best individual outcome for each of us is I flip and you don't. Down here's the thing. You're from what you just said.

Your statement about hoping that our leaders are not rational. Right. It's based on the idea that we hope our leaders are not rational because obviously the best outcome is I rat on you. Right. I stab you back and I get away scot free and you face all the consequences.

Yes. But that's also the most rational course for me. And if we're both acting rationally, we're both fucked. Yeah. You die, the girl rational course for me. And if we're both acting rationally, we're both fucked. Yeah. You die, the girl dies, everybody dies. Yeah. Ah, classic lines.

So, but the thing is that that depends on how there is an information gap. I don't know if gap is the right word. But I think that's the right word because language. If, if, if, because there is a rational reason not to flip, which is the computer models, flip, which is the the the computer models, the the black box, not really AIs, but you know, game, right computers that they've done to run this, I figured out the best thing to do if you're doing an iteration or you're doing a series of tests, is cooperate, cooperate, cooperate until the other guy says, fuck you. And then get him first over fuck him over after that.

And so everybody has a vested interest in everybody cooperating with everybody else. As long as we're talking about a long-term game as opposed to a one-time. game as opposed to a one-time interaction. I'm going to call a little bit of that out. What that modeling necessitates is hope. Well played. And so that will play the thing that's going to lead all of us dying to go back to Camus right So yeah, so in a world where common sense and human survival is in direct Contravention to official policy the authority and charge of those things Is absurd as is our acquiescence to it. Therefore, humanity has become puppets, speaking lines that aren't ours to people who aren't listening.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, puppets. Yep. Puppets is your ray. Yes. Puppets. Remember what he had to do in 1896? Yeah. Yeah. And that was when the people did have a say. But in 1950, we are way past that point. But that's absurdity. Ian Esco hated John Paul Sart.

He hated it. Yeah, because he accused Sart. Sart is a problematic some bitch. First off, Czar is, you're gonna love this. He's wall-eyed, short, and a hell of a lady's man. Okay, back up. Yeah. Hold on.

Hold on, I'm not sure if we're Frenchmen. Hold on, hold on. Okay, wall-eyed. Yes. Okay, I'm gonna hold on hold on hold on. Okay, walleye. Yes. Okay, I'm gonna say, so, and I'm gonna have to segue again because it's the only way to get around to this. So, Mrs. Blalock and I met online.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And I'm 5'6. Okay. Depending on my shoes, half an inch taller, half an inch shorter, but call it 5'6. Sure. Which, you know, solidly, I'm going to say 20% of the dating profiles I looked at, tell me not to bother messaging them because I wasn't 5, 9, yeah, 5, 10, whatever.

That's, that's, That's just being short. Wall hide implies a whole other level of disadvantage in the mating game. So you're saying that there's such a thing called height privilege? No, I'm not gonna go that far, but I'm gonna say that. Okay, cool. Cause being six feet tall,

I'm always just above there. Like, don't bother me unless. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. But, but like, my personality still fucks me out there. Well, like we said the last episode, there are systemic issues involved. But yeah, mistakes were made.

Mistakes continue to be made. And it's, you know, but, but, but, um, so, so what this proves, uh-huh, is that, um, being, how tall again, five under five feet? He was five foot even. Yeah. Okay, five even.

Yeah. Okay, five even. So five foot even and wallide means he had to play a hell of a game. And he did. Like pick up, like the PUA guys on Reddit all need to pack it up and go fucking home. Yeah. Because whatever it is they're trying to do. No, no, no, no, no, no, start figuring it out six years beforehand. And like, no, no, whatever he was doing, that's what you need to do. Oh, yeah. Because if we're coming to that, well, one of his partners was Simone de Bovié.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, we'll buy you an initial later, right? But yeah. And, okay. So, so now there's also the issue that, you know, we're talking about a generational thing where like what to them was just

You know the way everybody is comes across to us as being you know like demonically sexist. Yeah You know, so there's all of that. Yeah so Sart is well in Es Inesco, rather, accused Sart of loving communism, which he did, while ignoring what the USSR and the PRC was doing to different peoples. He, in fact, wrote the play rhinoceros specifically as a critique of men like Sart who were blindly loyal

to a brand and ignoring what that brand was actually representing. Which makes sense when you think about the fact that Einesco was Romanian and French. He saw the awful impact of fascism on his people in both places. And later he saw the awful impact of Stalinism and Soviet communism on his people in Romania. Now, okay, so question. Sure. UNESCO and search were contemporaries. They lived at the same time.

As did Camila. Okay. Okay, and so I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say that if Sart ever responded to UNESCO, he was going to say, well, what Soviet Union is doing isn't really communism as it should be. I think Sart would have been more like you're you're playing into the Western imperialistic dogma, that kind of thing. Oh, okay.

Because Sart was closer to Marxism than was chemo. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But here's what Ian Esco said of Camus and Sart. Ian Esco strikes me as the guy who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room because he knows what's wrong with both sides. But he actually was calling out what was wrong

with both sides. Oh, okay. All right. So here's what he says of Camus and Sart. He says, I have the feeling that these writers who are serious and important were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves as an almost irrational visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them, it was still rhetoric, eloquence. So, Ionesco is clearly focused on language and its use, and it's like each man took the

baton a little farther in the relay, but then turned around and scorned the other ones who were behind him for not carrying it further. Okay, which is French leftism. French leftism, just kind of leftism. Okay. So there's no coincidence as to the rise of technocracy in Europe either. And the increased computerization of the world beginning in the 1950s. It had already started to hurt humanity during the Holocaust with IBM's computer cards helping that along. So, as I said before, it's the 1950s.

Gary Larson is born. Obserter's theater is coming to the four half a world away. Martin Eslin, the man who would coin the term theater of the absurd would write this in 1955. So Gary Larson's five years old, when this is in the intellectual troposphere. The theater of the absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency to bring it face to face with the harsh facts

of the human situation as the writers see it, or as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly. Precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions of comforting illusions

may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the theater of the absurd does not provoke tears of despair, but the laughter of liberation. You know, there's a certain level of stoicism. Like I'm getting a Marcus Aurelius vibe. Impiricism. I'm saying. Yeah, I think there's more empiricism than it is Marcus Aurelius, quite honestly. I think this is, you're born, you're going to die.

These are given facts. Now, what are you doing with it? And by the way, rationality won't save you. And that's why I think it's empiricism or the stoicism. Okay, all right, okay. Political action will not save you. But you can die as authentically as you can. Now, it's, it's not just theater that's pulling away from politics, by the way. If you look at abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollock in the 50s, it becomes the only real acceptable form of expression in the 50s, it becomes the only real

acceptable form of expression in the art world. Everything else is just too politically charged. And at this point, I would point out that this is true largely for mainstream culture as well, because there is a whole lot of people all throughout the world actually fighting for their own liberation. Obserred as many of them may find that, their struggle itself is a valuable one and deserve note. In the United States, the civil rights movement is being led by black Americans who have just watched our country fight to end fascism, but still allowed its abuses at home. Most of Africa is on the path toward its own liberation

from the former empires, as is most of Asia. But the fact that America, the great arsenal of democracy with a capital D, previously carved away from an empire, was now popping up these fascistic taterships, was fighting fascism one minute, and then giving it money in the next minute, that's pretty goddamned absurd. So by the time Gary Larson is in the world, that's what's going on in art. Okay. Now as a boy, Gary Larson read Mad Magazine, which had its own little spin on irreverent absurdism.

It was one of the very few periodicals which still was allowed to satirize what society was doing specifically because it was ghettoized in the kid section as we've said a number of times. Yeah, mad magazine was considered dog-er-al, but because it was marketed towards children and young adults. Thus, it is satire. It's satire, it's subversion, It's of convention, all flew under the radar, especially when it turned into a magazine. And I'm going to end this episode with a couple quotes about Mad Magazine. And then we'll stop there.

And I promise the next episode, we'll actually talk about Carrier Larson a lot more. So in the New York Times in 1977, here's what they said. The skeptical generation of kids that it, Mad Magazine shaped in the 1950s, is the same generation that in the 1960s opposed a war and didn't feel bad when the United States lost for the first time and in the 1970s helped to turn out

in administration and didn't feel bad about that either. It was magical. Objective proof to kids that they weren't alone that in New York City on Lafayette Street, if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, bringsmanship, and toothpaste smiles. Mads consciousness of itself, as trash, as a comic book, as the enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise thrilled the kids. In 1955, such consciousness was possibly nowhere else to be found. You know who Tom Hayden was, right? Yes. Okay, political activists of the 1960s later on a politician, he said, quote, my own radical journey began with Mad Magazine.

It's, and that's what he's reading. And again, it's going over people's heads, but he's reading it at the age of eight and nine, guess what I was reading at the age of eight and nine. Mad Magazine. It's not where his books are. No, no, Mad Magazine and the far side. Another literary luminary had this to say about mad.

Quote, by the time, by now they knew that the nuclear survival pamphlets had lied, Rod Sirling knew a lot more than president Eisenhower. There were even jokes about the Adam bomb in mad, a gallows humor commenting on its own gasliness by not fitting in a joke momentarily interrupt the world. Uh, but after the joke, you recognized it was a joke, and went back to the entire world that the joke broke. But what if it never came back again, and the little gaps stayed there and became everything? And finally, quote, for the smarter kids of two generations, mad was a revelation. It was the first to tell us that the toys were being sold were garbage, our teachers were phonies, our leaders were

fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything. And that's what Gary Larson is reading as a kid. And that's what he's watching. That's, well, what he's watching is anybody's guess, but he would have had access to plenty of westerns, some family sitcoms, the Twilight Zone, and a few other things. When he was 12, Gary Larson lived through the 13 days in October that brought the United States and the rest of the world by extension closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before. By the time he was 13, JFK was shot on TV, and so was his killer days later. There were air raid drills on the regular, as well as duck and cover drills.

Movies about mutation, the impact of radiation, as well as all manner of horror monsters. You have all that stirring around, and add to it, his older brother scaring Gary regularly, he thoroughly grew up in anentially terrifying and ultimately absurd times. And that's where I think I want to leave it for this episode. So you've got all of this, you've got, you've got Camus absurdism leading to existentialism, leading to theater of the absurd, where you go from accepting that there's no hope to where you go from accepting that there's no hope to living that there's no hope and making a moral choice to, it doesn't matter what choice you make, you're going to die based on a decision made by someone else

who's trying to save you. And that's what he's growing up in. And then he's reading Mad magazine, which is sending up on that all of the time. Okay. So, all right. I'm going to, that's a hell of a foundation. Okay. Yeah. I'm gonna end this time by, well, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with an age-old question. So far, what have you gleaned? If you want to keep your powder dry, I understand. But no, at this point in the conversation, I think the underlying themes that I'm kind of taking away from this is R. Number one, just because it's immediately in my brain, nobody ever takes a cartoon media seriously. Like, nobody in the West ever takes cartoon media seriously, no matter how often it gets proven to be like a legitimate

art form and like a carrier way for messages. You know, mad magazine, comic books, all of it are like, yeah, oh, it has kids stuff. Right. And it winds up being, you know, partly because it's liberated by that from having to be taken seriously. It's able to get away with doing shit But you know on top of that it winds up being a more powerful Medium than then anybody use a credit for I Would definitely agree to that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense And then you you know, beyond that,

the universality, I mean, you know, chemo, any anescu and, and, uh, uh, start all come down to this idea of choice. Mm-hmm. There is this incredible emphasis on, you know, no, no, no, no, you're making a decision. Whatever you do, however you choose to do things, if you choose not to make a decision, you're still making a choice. Like, and the weight of that is, you know, people talk about, you know, Catholic guilt,

but like existentialist guilt feels like it would be so much worse. Like, it is. You know, like it is pardon me, but like holy cow man, the the the amount of weight and emphasis being put on no no man, you you are like there there is no there is no overarching mystical arc of the universe you are you're it Absolutely a hundred percent totally responsible not only for whatever the fuck happens to you But the whole timeline yep from here. Yep, like I'm thinking about what an existentialist sci-fi story would look like and and Like mentioned of quantum timeline has to be part of it. So, you know, I mean, if you are not only responsible for their consequences to yourself, but to anybody else affected by your decision, Mm-hmm. Then that is some, you know, English research.

Well, yeah, that's like, oh my God, I'm completely blanking on the science fiction writer's name, but doing Android's dream of electric sheep. As a Moff. No, no, no, no. My brain wants to say Harlan Ellsson, but I know I'm completely wrong. Hold on one second because I got to look it up. But it is, it is the kind of, you know, not only your decision,

yeah, there you go. Thank you. It is, it is some really seriously, Philip K Dick level, no man, you made this decision and so you spawn not only one timeline but six different timelines. You know, like, oh my god. You know, and there's a part of me that kind of wants to look up, you know, what are the post existentialist responses to this? You know, philosophically speaking, just to try to see how it is that other moral philosophers dealt with that. But yeah, so I mean, that's pretty much

those are my two biggest things is, you know, we come back one more time again to Cartoon Ghetto. Yep. And existentialism is like the doom metal of philosophy. Like. Yeah, it's, there is a crushing, oppressive weight to it morally. I don't think you get with many other religions because with the other religions, you get the reward of an ever after and community.

Yeah. Well, and again, look at what it was born out of it was born out of you know Nazi occupied France of a Vichy regime that was totally on board with this new world order so yeah Okay, um, yeah, I'm gonna share with you my favorite far side cartoon this time. Okay, so my favorite one and it's it's a single panel But it gets broken up into I want to say six and it's a single panel, but it gets broken up into, I want to say, six. And it's a guy standing there. UFO, next panel at lands, next panel creature gets out, next panel punches him, next panel

it's getting back in, next panel it takes off. And at the bottom it says, Harold never knew what hit him. Yeah. Harold never knew what hit him. It doesn't get more beautiful than that to me. That's pretty UNESCO. Yeah, it really is. I love it. I just always loved that one. I do like that.

That's good. So, all righty. So, where can people find you to send you their favorite existential Farsight cartoon? Well, if you want to do that, you could reach me on Twitter at E.H. Blaylock. You can reach me on Instagram at MrBlaylock, MR Blaylock. at Mr. Blalock, MR. Blalock. And now, still haven't posted anything other than my one short little video, but if you wanna find me on TikTok,

you can also find me in the same place, MR. Blalock. How about you? You can find me at duh. Harmony. That's two inches in the middle. On both the Twitter and the Instagram. You can also find me every Sunday night on twitch.tv forward slash calling it in the ring with Johnny Taylor where we look at various wrestling matches and we discuss the kind of the history and the artistry behind it as well as its impact on the industry and

Every Tuesday night you can find me on twitch.tv forward slash capital puns with Daniel Humberger and Mark Berg as we sling dad jokes back and forth A la eight mile. So it's basically a roast battle with puns. It's a lot of fun. And then... So yeah, since you bring up dad jokes, aren't any of the other participants,

I mean of the ones you name, because you have guests on, but of the core group. No, I'm the only dad. You're the, okay, I just wanna check that. Okay, the others are in a perpetual state of rest of development. So, in other words, they're comedians.

But yeah, and then if, I don't think this will come out in time, sadly. But if this does come out in time, August 2nd, I will be on the UK pun off again. So over across the pond. So you'll be doing the same thing with people who speak a different dialect of our language. Yeah, but they actually let you prepare ahead of time, whereas ours is much more spontaneous. It's kind of fun. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I get my really long form puns in there. So it's a lot of fun. So, yeah. So, so what you're saying is you're doing your darn just to tarnish our international reputation that much more to the best of my ability. Absolutely.

Okay. Yeah. Because Lord, right. So for geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock and until next time, keep rolling 20s. Bummer of a birthmark, hell.