(Upbeat music)
- (Michael) What’s up Wisecrack, Michael here. I have a confession to make about the team here
at Wisecrack, we’re obsessed with cults. Documentaries ABOUT cults? Even more so.
Now to be clear, we have no interest in joining one, as they are usually very bad and cause lots
of psychological, and often physical, harm to people. So it’s probably no surprise that we’ve
been mainlining episodes of The Vow, the recent series exploring a cult called NXIVM and it’s
“judo-champion at 11” figurehead, Keith Raniere. Who sucks and was just sentenced to 120 years
behind bars for some truly horrific crimes. For the uninitiated NXIVM is one-part multi-level
marketing scheme where you pay thousands of dollars to take leadership classes in hotel
conference rooms, and five-parts a cult where people wore different colored sashes
and sometimes branded themselves with Keith Raniere’s initials before sleeping with him.
Now this all grabbed my attention because people like to call Raniere a philosopher:
- (Michael) And according to the university that gave me a PhD and the people who published
my book, I am too! No judo skills though I was pretty good at volleyball in high
school. So join me as I suspend my critical judgement and see what this
“smartest-man-alive” has to say. And maybe in the process we can figure out how a great big
creep convinced everyone to mutilate themselves for the love of knowledge. Let’s go!
- (Michael) Says the grown man in the white sash. So this sounds straightforward enough,
if a little vague. The thing that comes up again and again is that Raniere has this cool
new form of ethics and it’s gonna transform the world. Many of his followers refer to him as:
- (Michael) But superlatives aside, what does that even mean? Luckily,
philosophers love defining terms. Most broadly, ethics defines good and bad behavior.
For the Ancient Greeks like Plato or Aristotle, this meant living a virtuous life. For your
more modern utilitarian theorists, it’s the idea that we should take actions that will bring the
most happiness to the most people. Another big player, deontology, argues that any “good” act
must be applied universally - there’s no exceptions like “lying is bad except when I’m
lying to save a loved one from a murderer.” And of course there’s someone like novelist Ayn Rand,
who thought the pursuit of one’s individual happiness was the only truly ethical position.
- (Michael) There it is - Raniere shares Rand’s individualist vision for the world.
But I don’t think reading the Fountainhead makes you the CEO of ethics anymore than
reading The Old Man and the Sea qualifies you to join the cast of Deadliest Catch.
- (Michael) Now, if we’re going for “people who pursue their own happiness” should run society
well… this basically already exists in the form of every venture capitalist and
Karen at a Starbucks. Also, if we’re going for “plagiarized Ayn Rand,” there’s plenty
of people in elected office who already espouse her views. So not much to see here.
- (Michael) Ok, finally, getting a little more specific. This isn’t a brand new idea.
For example, philosopher Immanuel Kant thought any real ethical act had to be disconnected from
emotions, so it’s not about feeling like something is the right thing to do, it’s about knowing
something is the right thing to do -- even if you absolutely do not feel like doing it. And to an
extent this seems to be what Raniere is getting at. But the crucial difference is that for Kant,
these ethical acts have to be grounded in the principle of humanity, meaning that we never use
human beings as fodder for some bigger goal. So uh, we're still saying it's a no go on sex slaves.
- (Michael) Worst summer camp ever. But there's nothing too controversial here. Sigmund Freud,
the guy who made you feel creepy for loving your mother, might say that civilization helps us shove
our instinctual desires into a deep pit so we can make the society-loving part of our brain happy.
And other philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that the nature of human civilization was
putting the strengths of individuals together to collectively achieve greater things.
So Raniere’s definition is both uncontroversial and kinda boring. Alright what's next?
- (Michael) They say philosophy begins in condescension. But unlike handing out colorful
sashes to your underlings, this is actually a cool idea. It’s also something most first-year
philosophy students would recognize as “not very original.” Friedrich Nietzsche, who didn’t even
know what volleyball was, described something like this as “love of fate.” Basically, he imagined
living your life on repeat,Groundhog Day style, to the end of eternity. If that sounds like a bummer,
you’re probably not stoked on your life choices or on the prospect of repeating
them forever. But if you truly embrace your life and your actions, you might be stoked
to do it all over again and again and again. Raniere’s idea is just a rhetorical twist:
instead of pondering whether you’re going to suffer eternally as you relive your choices,
you instead just get to meet the person who made the best version of themselves. So,
I mean, sure. But both Bill Murray and Nietzsche said it better. Moving on!
- (Michael) This looks like he’s really getting into the “philosophy of why you
never never question me.” And it’s interesting, as Raniere is veering into the territory of what we
call postmodernism, or, perspectivism. These theorists argue that there is no such thing
as a fixed or objective truth, but that truth is dependent on our experience and perspective,
and that different individuals could have different experiences of the same events.
This idea has been explored by Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard to advocate
that we be skeptical about just how amazing and all-knowing human beings can actually be. People
in this camp, to varying degrees, argue that there is no one objective truth that transcends culture,
context, or perspective. But this doesn’t mean: “whatever is true for me is my truth, you dig?”
Instead, it means that we need to be humble enough to acknowledge that different people
will have different perspectives imbued with their own biases, even when experiencing the same event,
text, or discount buffet. So no one truth or interpretation is absolute. Of course,
for context - here, Raniere is using this idea to gaslight a group of women
carefully expressing their concerns about his behavior. And that’s *absolutely* not cool.
- (Michael) So, we can just say it now right? This guy is a piece of ****? I
think we can just see it, you see it, I see it, we can just say it. So, what he's doing
here is playing mad libs with postmodern language. For philosophers like Derrida,
postmodernism was a way to re-think how certain we can really be about human knowledge,
it was not a way to tell people they were “wrong” for feeling abused or victimized.
Raniere is peddling in exactly the type of bullshit that postmodernism has been
criticized for by those who, frankly, didn’t read the books. So what else does judo-man have for us.
- (Michael) Ok, um... I almost don’t want to give this idea the time of day, but he seems to be
veering into the realm of someone like Thomas Hobbes, who thought the human state of nature
is one of all out war where we do whatever we can to eat, screw, and survive. However,
philosophers ranging from Plato to Aristotle to Kant to contemporary figures like Alain Badiou
have argued that to think of ourselves as crass animals is to miss what makes humans interesting,
namely, our capacity for reason and our ability to seek truth. Kant says that if we were just meant
to eat, sleep, and screw, then nature did a shitty job at designing us, because we’re also neurotic
and curious and anxious and reflective, all things that don’t really help our animal survival. Even
primatologists, who study the behavior of primates gorillas and stuff, reject the idea that primates
are just murderous violent freaks. There’s plenty of evidence that our thumbless cousins also work
together and have hot consensual relations. So Kant, actual scientists, and many others would say
that Raniere’s overidentification of humans with primitive “beasties” is woefully inadequate. It
also creates a dangerous paradigm in which people can do really bad things and justify it because
they’re just “hungry ***** beasties.” Okay we’re almost done, but we have one more gem to consider.
- (Michael) Wow - dude wrote a fable.
- (Michael) Hmm. Sounds kinda like a cult leader who collects blackmail on his followers.
- (Michael) Okay, where to begin with this one. First of all, he didn’t “write a fable once.”
He’s as much Aesop as he is “not a sociopath.” The basic gist here is, powerful people use that
power to lord over others, but, they often need the powerless to maintain their own power. Not
an original, or new, or special, or interesting idea. But philosophically, it’s a watered-down
version of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, which is a “fable” that explains the structure of human
consciousness, and also, everything else. For Hegel, the master lords over his slaves to feel
powerful, and their recognition of him as the master confirms this feeling. But eventually,
the slaves realize that they actually do a lot more than their master and that without them,
he’s basically useless. And the master realizes that he’s actually dependent on them to feel
all-powerful and special. So, voila, we have a reversal of power. Now for Hegel, this explains
a concept called mutual recognition, where both sides realize their mutual interdependence.
For Raniere, this means that, um, if everyone in his cult walked out he’d be left powerless? But
they haven’t, so everything’s chill? So what have we learned by suspending our judgement
to momentarily consider the “philosophy” of a real life piece of shit? Well, Raniere’s modus
operandi seems pretty simple: step one, take some relatively basic, uncontroversial ideas, step two,
re-phrase them to make yourself sound smart and original, and step three, use these “original”
ideas to justify your sadistic and manipulative agenda and convince your followers to do stuff
like sever ties with their loved ones and enter into master-slave relationships with
their “friends.” Interrogating the tradition for insights into how to live a good and virtuous life
this is not. Well, that’s it for our philosophical journey into the mind of a sociopathic cult
leader. And hopefully this is a good reminder that if someone is trying to get you to pay lots
of money to join their “philosophical movement”, you should run as fast as you can in the opposite
direction and never look back. Seriously. If a philosophical education is what you seek,
simply visit your local library, we mention books all the time in our videos,
go check them out. And please let us know what you think of this new format in the
comments - we just wanted to try something fun, which is something we all need these days, right?
Huge thanks to our patrons for all your support. Hit that subscribe button like it's the lever
that keeps your train from going anywhere near Albany. And as always, thanks for watching. Later.