Michael Shellenberger
speaker
1,228 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 18 Feb
Michael Shellenberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And gentlemen. Yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're—this really—I mean, this is why I was so excited to talk to you, Jordan, because I think—well, we talked last time also about narcissism and nihilism and— I think since it's almost been a year and we've been working on our book still that gets at these issues, I think we have a better picture of what's happened.
And you – first of all, when you have your liberal democratic civilization with respect for human dignity and human equality and free speech threatened, you get more grounded. I mean I've been –
I was concerned around the ways in which the most civilized people, the elites, have been undermining civilization since really my first and second book, both on the environment and homelessness, undermining, for example, the security of a city, making cities dangerous again. We just saw in Los Angeles, I've been writing about defunding the police for years.
We just learned in Los Angeles that they had been defunding the fire department. That's how far the degradation of civilization had gone. And I knew as soon as it happened that there would be voices right away who would say that there was nothing that could have been done about it because humans were doomed by climate change. How could we possibly protect ourselves from a fire?
I mean, who could ever imagine there being fires in the most fiery part of the United States, right? Like, I mean, it's insane. But I think we have a better picture now, Jordan, too, where, you know, you get this really precious, I mean, just this tiny moment of this thing we call the Enlightenment.
Of course, it comes out of 1,500 years of Christianity, but we get this period, really, 17th century, 18th century, really, 18th century, right? Where there have been all these wars and everyone's, you know, Hobbes and everybody's tired of them. And they're like, we have to have order. You have to have civilization.
Then Locke comes in and amends that and says, you also have to protect the citizenry from each other. But you have still a picture of what it means to be a citizen, right? And it is tied to this idea of being a gentleman. And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin.
But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes, you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation. Yes, but there is this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe. Which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor, and it came with some intense responsibilities. And you're in service. So you sort of say, what is it?
The gentleman is in service of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing. There's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness here.
As we've talked about before, that gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, we get to the crisis of meaning, we get to nihilism, the death of God. We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism.
They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism, and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the early 90s, and then fully comes to its just deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that there was this forgetting, there was a hubris that we didn't need these thousands of years of inherited virtues and values anymore. The hedonism manifests, you know, the feeling of power is sort of the ultimate hedonistic thrill. And as you said, it's empty, and it's also completely free of all of the wisdom of these past traditions.
I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think by definition, has in it that lesson of the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of all men, right? You know, be careful when fighting with monsters that you not become one. You see the speck in your neighbor's eye. Beware of the attractions of power. Right.
The true wisdom traditions are always emphasizing our mortality, warning of hubris, emphasizing humility and honesty and these really simple basic virtues. And yes, do they change over time? Of course. But yet they also mean the same thing. That all gets forgotten, and so you get this kind of secular post-Cold War establishment. And I mean, you know, just exactly what it sounds like.
Media, university, foreign policy, intelligence community. Because remember, the intelligence community is full of very intelligent people, and they're the children of light. Just exactly what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against in his famous... lectures from the 1940s that liberals imagine they're children of light. They can do no harm. We're just going to go into these countries and help them.
Just going to go in there and help them. Then we're going to help them decide who to get elected. And you got married to some of the darker forces, which was the CIA and starting to try to control who gets elected in Italy and then in Greece. And you go all the way from the 40s on. And, you know, it has a huge moral victory with the fall of communism. You know, the U.S.
foreign policy has this huge moral victory. We then have 9-11 and a kind of You know, an early sense of moral righteousness, and then it descends into the horrors of Iraq. And then, frankly, we went and overthrew a bunch of governments in the Middle East, surreptitiously, Eastern Europe. And it was a maniacal, I think it was just a power trip, as we would say.
These guys are getting off on their power. And so that when Trump gets elected, I mean, they just couldn't. They just couldn't allow a nationalist and populist to just rule. They just couldn't allow it. They had to invent this elaborate story about how he was Hitler and it was fascism and it was and there was going to be, you know, this was just like, I mean, it was insane.
There was like no evidence to support any of it. It was a complete projection of their own totalitarian fantasies on Trump. And, I mean, it's just out of Shakespeare.
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