Ezra Klein

And this is something these people, the followers of Heidegger and Heidegger himself, to a great degree, all forget.

It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own religion.

The many find solace in meaning, only in submission.

It is good that this is so, and they shouldn't be made to feel shamed for it.

So much of the modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission.

The long chain of being is held together by command and obedience.

And this is really the core politics of this book and a lot of these, which is that we have ended up in this Christianized, you know, liberal democracy that believes in equality and in doing our subverting and denying politics.

the hierarchical dominance and obedience structures of nature.

And this will start getting into this real discussion of masculinity.

I guess the argument they would make, let me try to steel man this, is of course they don't like John Rawls because we don't live behind the veil of ignorance.

and acting as if we do, and ordering society as if we do, turns out to have this fundamental problem, which is that it subverts the natural way men are supposed to be, which is it is the expression of these competitive, aggressive, ambitious, even violent instincts, which, maybe we didn't realize it at the time, but we now know, are a

potent driver of civilizational progress, and we fall into stagnation and decadence when they are thwarted.

That's what I understand them to be saying.

When you talk to them, I mean, is that what you hear or is that a misread?

I think it's worth dwelling on this for a minute.

And I've had Richard Reeves on the show who's written a lot and done a lot of work on this.

One place a lot of these ideas have magnetized towards because it acts as a genuine, true justification for the idea of something being wrong.

is that there is something going wrong for men and boys.

I mean, we talked a few minutes ago about falls in testosterone and sperm quality.

I mean, that's measurable and strange, and it's been going on for many decades now, and we should, I think, think about it and worry about it.