Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling

speaker
460 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America · 8 Apr 2025 podcast
And so I gave a course precisely on this subject, the difference between conservatives and reactionaries. great kids from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon.
And then there was an afternoon program where it was, you know, it was just flag-waving, own the libs, all these odd tech types who came in from Silicon Valley, futurist types, some of them talking about René Girard and all the rest. And it was just... And the kids themselves noticed it.
They said, you know, we're getting whiplash here, going from reading Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott in the morning and talking about DEI in the afternoon as if they're connected. It's one thing if, you know, you go to your study and study the great books and then you go out for the fight. But there's this impression that these things have to connect. And it was a big disappointment.
I had some hope that maybe it would work out, but it's not.
Well, just to give a super quick phrase of the book, it's something I began...
working on 25 years ago when I gave a lecture at Chicago on this theme and was picking at over the years, the book is really about the human desire not to know and what the psychology of that is and what the implications are for our beliefs about the soul and God and spirit, how we think about children and innocence, how we think about coping with the present and imagining a more perfect past.
But the core of the book, the beginning of it, is kind of not so much an argument as an unveiling of the complicated psychology or the psychological forces that we're beset by to know and not to know. And so Aristotle says everyone wants to know, which is true. But the will not to know is really not explored much in the philosophical tradition. But it shows up in literature. It shows up in myth.
So I begin with the myth of Oedipus, who wants to know and doesn't want to know what his relation is with his mother-wife. And then St. Augustine, we move to the present. So it's a kind of, I call it a ramble through some of these issues. On a theme that no one seems to pay attention to.
Yeah, well, part of it is we couldn't get through the day if we didn't. An example I...
use in the book is imagine if everyone had an led screen across the forehead that where you just had a tape of what they were thinking at every moment and if you engage with them they're thinking about you and you're reading about yourself and they're reading about your reaction to them works out on this podcast everybody's just hearing what i'm thinking at every moment but maybe as a society level that might not yeah right
But you couldn't even develop as a self that you could know if yourself is nothing but the result of all this information coming in. So there are all sorts of things we block. You know, we don't want our movies to be spoiled. We wrap presents up. Don't want to go to the doctor if you feel like you have a, for some people, yeah. For some people, do you want to know the sex of your kid?
So there are all sorts of ways in which we, certainly at my age, walking past a shop window is a very charged thing. I've got to suck my stomach in and hold my head in a certain way that it looks like I have more hair than I do. So we do it in life. But what happens is that at the much deeper level, we find it hard to cope with just the human condition. And we find it hard to cope with death.
We find it hard to cope with uncertainty in particular. And so we don't quite know how to regulate our own curiosity or make sense of this desire. Some people are just naturally curious. We all know them, right? They're always looking stuff up online and looking at documentaries. And then there are people who generally think they don't need to know more than they do.
And then there are people, and they're the interesting ones, who are really resistant to new information, right? They have their views about things. This is my view about vaccines, and it's not gonna change. And so I think about how people get into that sort of position. When it comes to politics, you can see how this would work itself out ideologically.
But I also think we live in a special period, and that's what you mentioned. I've learned a lot from the books of a Polish sociologist now dead named Zygmunt Bauman, B-A-U-M-A-N-N, that your listeners may or may not know. And he wrote a number of books with the word liquid in the title, the first one, The Liquid Society. He was a former Marxist, and he had this deep idea, which is that
Marx's and Engels's idea of everything solid melting into air was for them a tragedy. They believed in solidity. And what they thought was that the sort of atomization of life under capitalism was unhealthy and we needed to move to a more stable, just society, which would be after the revolution.
But we find ourselves living in societies not where, as in archaic societies, that the institutions we're born into exist where we die, or in a situation where maybe one or two things change. But we've created a world for ourselves where everything is changing all the time. And with the internet, we're aware, potentially, of everything going on everywhere at all moments.
We're not built to cope with this. We're not built to live this way. We're sort of built to live on land, and instead, we're all suddenly on surfboards, and the waves keep coming, and we're just trying to stay afloat. And in that sort of situation, This will to ignorance comes out as a kind of healthy one, too, that people can't make sense of all this change. And so they shut down.
They have certain views about sex and gender. Case closed. They have certain views about old America. Case closed. Certain views about tariffs. Forget the evidence. Right. That's the situation we're in now.
Yeah, and the more information we get, the more we feel we don't control our environment. And that's frightening. And the tech futurists, they have this idea that, well, we're going to know so much. But a lot of what we have to know is what other people are like. But other people are changing all the time. And they're changing because things out in material life are changing.
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