Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells and this
is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number one forty-five.
In this episode today, we will talk about a book
that is part and parcel of a larger tetralogy.
I love that word. That means four books. Right? Not
just not just a trilogy, a tetralogy. This book,
stands as a cultural, political, and moral commentary
on a world that was in the progress of passing away,
but had not yet been completely swept away by
war, economic strife, and as we were talking about just
before, we press the record button today, social
incoherence. This tetralogy this
tetralogy is part of a larger narrative describing British and Western
transitions during a typically unpredictable
third turning period. And in case you've forgotten what a third turning
is, I'm going to go ahead and pull the definition from William
Strauss in your Neil Howe's book, from the nineteen nineties, The
Fourth Turning, where they describe what a third turning is, and I
quote, the mood of this era, they say, is in many ways the
opposite of a high. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while
individualism is strong and flourishing. The authors say highs come
after crises when society wants to coalesce and build and
avoid the death and destruction of the previous crisis. Unravelings come
after awakenings when society wants to atomize and
enjoy itself. And the
period that is described in this book today, in Parade's End,
in this novel, is a period of
unraveling.
This is a eighty year cycle. Right? The eighty year seculum
cycle that dominated the West that began at the end of the
American Civil War and ran all the way to the end of World War two.
And this book tracks the travails and relationships of men and
women in a world where colonial assumptions were strong,
but were beginning to unravel. They were beginning to be
questioned. By the way, this book,
this tetralogy, was translated into a five episode show on
HBO, that showed up about twelve years ago.
And it features a love triangle, and repressed Victorian,
Edwardian elements. While reading this
book, I was reminded of yet another very British show that was popular back
in the day, that I didn't watch. It was yet another
cultural touchstone shared by many that sailed on by me, like a
cruise ship moving through the North Atlantic.
Today, we will be summarizing and analyzing the themes and
larger lessons for leaders from what is probably the consummate narrative
of the pre World War one world. Harades
End by Ford, Maddox Ford.
Leaders, how does one lead in a world that is unraveling
underfoot faster than you can make decisions about
what directions or even what answers
or what actions to take.
And today, we will be joined, by our guest cohost
yet again in our now fourth season of
the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, regular
guest cohost Libby Unger. Hello, Libby. How are you doing
today? Hello, Jesan. I am
spectacular. So last time we talked,
it was last year, before the, the
presidential election in The United States. Now we are in
2025. The world has not ended,
dare I say, although some people would claim that it has. And,
yeah. I don't know. We're reading, we're we're gonna read, we're gonna read and look
at Parade's End. Even
before I jump into the book, I know normally we jump into the book, but
I'm gonna break it up a little bit differently, this time.
The the copy that I have has a great, Pre Raphaelite, you know,
cover. It's an open source copy. You can get, copies of Parades
Inn floating around everywhere. It's an open source book, because it's been in,
been in the public, public domain for, now a
hundred years.
And this book is dense. Right? And it's a tetralogy. Right? So it's four books
in one. I will be honest. I did not read all four books.
I read the first one and a little bit of the second one, and then
I I called it good, primarily because the
type was so tiny in the copy that I've got, because they tried to
cram all four books together. And so they made it, like, eight point type, and
I have elderly eyes. I finally reached the point where my eyes are
elderly. Finally reached Switch to the the Kindle.
Well, this is what this is what all my friends say, but I'm I'm a
sucker for the physical book. I am I'm a sucker for the physical book still.
What did you think about this book? I just wanna get that off the table
right off the bat. If you're gonna read any excerpts, if you're gonna read anything,
what did you think about this book?
I actually really enjoyed it. But Okay.
I think I just love being pulled
in to hearing about the history
of the time. And,
World War one, I had a great grandfather who was
at yeah. Did the trench warfare and came back.
And the visualization
and the feel that you get from the book just makes it very
real. And, I think I
just am yearning for
that feeling of tangible life
that, you know, we're really devoid of unless you really go
go searching for it now. Like, living life in a digital
age, we were talking about, you know, the current is
it fifth gen warfare that we're experiencing? And
then thinking just as recently as, you know, a hundred and
ten years ago, you know, our grandfathers were
fighting in the trenches. You know,
but a hand to hand, you know, warfare. And that's,
it's hard to fathom and imagine, but I enjoyed it.
I also enjoy seeing and
reading about how little human nature really changes. Our
clothes, they change,
and the way we speak and what we, you know, and how
we express ourselves may be different, but, fundamentally,
you know, we still at our essence are the same. And
so the women coming through like,
if I didn't know this book was written in 1919
or 1920, I would thought that this was a nine
2020 version Mhmm. Or depiction of
1919. Yeah.
It's so there are some authors,
and I I was reminded of this when, when I
read this book of some of the books that I read in my English
literature class in college. Right? The one English literature
class that I took. And, and, yes, indeed, I
yes. For folks who are wondering, yes, I did get an a in that class.
But, when we would read Victorian literature,
particularly victor post World War two Victorian literature,
it was written from a perspective that was very,
Not triumphant. That's not the term. Mhmm. The
it it was very it was written from a perspective that was very
that was still creating or still insisting
that the pre World War one world was was a
paradise. Right? And that the post World War one
world was where was what you get on
the other side of losing paradise. Right? There were
and there were and I was also reminded the second thing that I was reminded
of when I read this book was of how many authors and
poets and artists just ground out, just
died in the song and died in the Western Front.
You know, how many voices just were clipped like
roses on a spring day, right, in
an attempt to get, you know, four yards
of four yards of dirt. Right? And
I read a I read a an article or a blog
post, about the anniversary of World War
one, sort of as a connect as an anecdotal well, not
anecdotal, but as an extra add on to this book because, normally, I'll read, like,
research around the book, and I'll try to find out a little bit about the
author. We'll talk about Ford Maddox Ford today and his his life.
But, one of the points that was made in the article that I was
reading was that World War one is still a war that
is not yet fully comprehended by Americans,
because it was probably the last European war,
genuinely Europeanly European led World
War. Right? Mhmm. The others argue it's made that World War two was a
European led war, but that was much more global in its scope.
Right? Because all everybody sort of jumped in the pool on that. But
for World War one, the British, the French, and the Germans really
did, and the Russians, really did
bang it out, right, on the Western front. And, yes, there were
other there were other, fronts that were opened. Like, we've
read DH Lawrence. We've read Seven Pillars of Wisdom on this podcast.
I'm a huge fan of DH Lawrence,
Lawrence of Arabia. So we read about Lawrence of Arabia. We read
about his adventures in in in Arabia.
We I'm aware of Churchill, and his
his challenges in serving in the British military in,
in, Greece. Right? And
in that area of Southern Europe during World War during World War
one. And then, of course, the Americans
came over, you know, you know, sort of at the end, and
were sort of a fresh injection of blood and of bodies
into something that let's say
what you want about pre World War two Germany.
They did have a point
that they were never fully defeated on the battlefield.
They were correct. They weren't fully defeated on the battlefield until
the Americans came along and gave the British and French a shot of bodies that
they needed.
And so you can see where I can see where German resentment
around that and the romanticization of the period
going into World War two from coming out of World War
one allowed someone like the
Weimar or allowed the Weimar Republic that allowed Hitler to sort of come along and
do this thing. Right? And so I tell I say
all that to say this. This book is about the British
experience with World War one, both in a pre World War one world
and then a post World War one world. It had it has that sense
of Victorian romanticism.
But for all of the problems that Britain had in World War one in the
trenches of Western Europe, they didn't lose one
colony.
And no one ever comments on the irony of that. Like, they didn't stop being
colonial colonialists. They
didn't they didn't they didn't lose one colony. They didn't surrender one colony.
They saw no need to. They still had the Rudyard Kipling
white man's burden attitude. Like, that that didn't fully get
beaten out of them until World War two. And then even why did it
get beaten out of them in World War two? Well, it got beaten out of
them because they couldn't Churchill couldn't figure out a way to
beat the Germans without the Americans.
He couldn't figure out a way to pull it off. And if
they could have pulled it off, if they had had enough men immaterial to beat
the Germans, not just to take a pounding in London
with the blitz, but if during World War two, they had had the men immaterial
to push the German machine back to
Berlin, the British would have marched through Northern France
all the way to Berlin, and they would have wrapped up that war in a
heartbeat. And the French would have come along, you know, as an
after thought, that would have made de Gaulle very unhappy. But he
was in he was unpleasant just in general. So nothing was gonna make
him happy. But, he was incapable of being
happy. But, but but I
think that's why. I think that's that was the that was why it got beaten
out of them because they were so demoralized that they couldn't they couldn't do the
thing that they would have done or would have tried to do historically.
This is where my, my knowledge of history is
perhaps a little limited. But so,
it sounds like because all of the men and materials were
focused on Europe that weekend, both the
French and the British, presence in their colonies,
like in India, for example, or in. Right? And so
that was the opportunity that, like, India
took to push the French out. Yep. Yeah. And
French to or in the French colonies took to
push the French out as they were in a weakened state,
men, materials, money, forced by World War two,
and that's what's forced the decolonization.
Yeah. I mean, the Gandhi
so Gandhi really didn't
and and my timeline's maybe screwed up, so people can correct me on this.
But Gandhi really didn't get on his anti British
kick until, after World War
two. Right? And you're right. Like, the
British had no and it had no they had nothing
for that. Right? The French I
was explaining this to my wife the other day, because she was like, how did
Pol Pot happen? Because she didn't understand how Pol Pot happened. And I said
Pol Pot happened because of the Khmer Rouge
and because of the Vietnam War. And the reason the Vietnam War happened was
because Ho Chi Minh, who was educated, if I remember
correctly, in France in Marxism,
saw an opportunity post World War two to
drive the French out of what was formerly known as Indochina,
and the Americans underneath Eisenhower, after the whole
Suez Canal disaster, decided, you
know what? We're not gonna help the French out.
We're just gonna sort of let them flop around there in Southeast Asia. We'll send
some advisers, but we're not sending troops. And the French desperately
wanted us to send troops in '57
to Vietnam. Well, what would later become Vietnam, which was known as French
Indochina at that point to protect French colonial interests there. Because the
French were like, we can't we can't lose this colony. But by that point, it
was starting to unravel I think it was starting to unravel anyway. And they were
about to have a bad problem in Algeria, which they couldn't get around,
and that's it. Like, that began they've that began their
their their beating of their retreat out of Asia and Africa.
You know, the long sunset of the French empire.
Which, by the way, interestingly enough, we were talking about geopolitics before we got
on this. I suspect in the
next twenty five years, the French will be running the European
Union, and they will be just as shady gangsters as they
are twenty years from now as they are right now. And they'll be running it
for their own interests. Because I don't see any but I
don't see any I don't see any other in the current geopolitical climate, I
don't see any other power on the continent that will be able
to to push the EU in a particular direction. The germ
the Germans can't do it. Why not Germany? Mhmm. Why not Germany? Because
the Germans are fractured. They're fractured internally. Their party politics
are fractured internally. They can't even agree on
whether or not to build a coal fire plant.
Yeah. I mean, they, that is
true. Over the last ten to fifteen years, France has done
a pretty good job at building its business base.
They've also using nuclear. You know, you're wondering
if they did play five-d chess with Germany because Germany
fully the, got out of
manufacturing. They ruined themselves with the climate
crisis. Yeah. Mhmm. Climate change by, you know, through
deindustrialization, through getting rid of
all not allowing nuclear, not allowing their coal plants. I
mean, it it's it does feel like self sabotage.
And, you know, and someone's benefiting from it. It's not
the Germans. And you never you never
hear, with the exception of a
few challenges that the French had in the mid
early two thousands with their ghettos, where
the Muslim immigrants are all pushed unceremoniously.
They got a real ghetto problem, like a Cabrini Green level ghetto problem.
But they don't ever talk about that, and they don't ever talk about it. They
don't ever talk about dealing with it. They don't ever talk about fixing it.
And partially, this is because of the French character, I think,
where if you don't speak the language, you're not French. And even if you do
speak the language, it doesn't matter, you're still not French. Like, they have a real
clear idea of what's French and what's not. What's French is anybody who was
in France. What's not is everybody else, period.
Doesn't share if we doesn't matter if we share the same skin color, doesn't even
matter if we speak the same language. And and, I could
speak with a little bit of authority on this. I had friends who were from
Liberia who spoke sub Saharan French. Yeah. And then when
they would go to France, the French people in France would say they weren't speaking
French correctly. And it would drive my Liberian
friends crazy. You see the same dynamic with people from Quebec.
Right? Like, the Quebecois, when they go to France, when they
go to Paris, the the Parisians have nothing for them. They think they're
degenerate, you know, savages
because of the language. And so France, even though
no one speaks French globally, it's not it's not a global language
anymore. They have a very
strong and definitive idea around their language of who's in and who's out,
and they have no problem telling you either. I
gotta pull a Murray on you.
Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Pull a Doug Murray on me. Go right ahead. Go
right ahead. I'll be whatever that libertarian guy's name is.
Just from your reading and your conversation.
I'm sorry. I couldn't help but bring in Charles Murray.
Sure. That being said,
there is something to be said about how the French
play politically, and they always seem their elite,
anyway, always seem to come out unscathed. Like, the way that they
played World War two when they house Mhmm. And they house the,
they supported the Nazis. Mhmm. The way
you know, they there has always been a,
a north an African issue. At least, I remember my friend,
yeah, French literature class when I was actually reading French literature and
French Mhmm. In high school, and we would talk about they would talk
about the. Mhmm. Yeah. And that
was, you know, how they
spoke about the Africans who were in the country, and there was always,
tensions. Mhmm. But they do have a very powerful
narrative that keeps the attention off of them
Mhmm. And on, you know, and on,
you know, UK and German and US.
I don't know if you're follow with Kansas. I went
to Macron at all.
But she's being sued only like,
they can't find any lack of facts in what she's
saying. They're just doing their on
it being inconvenient. And so it
is whether what she's saying is true or
not, I don't really care. It's the drama, and it's the
legal it's the when you watch how
laws are used and applied Mhmm. Like, is it on
the facts or is it on the inconvenience? The
inconvenience. Yeah. Right? Right. So the French do have
an interesting way of always coming
out with their institutions intact,
at least in the last hundred and fifty years
in Europe, not Mhmm. Not not with the
colonization. Yeah. No. They they but
they traditionally seem to have struggled with
not seem to have. Traditionally, the French struggled with their
colonies. You can see that in how
they engaged around Haiti, and
also, how they engaged or disengaged
with the Louisiana Purchase, you know, which Napoleon
the only reason Napoleon sold all of that was because he needed money That was
great. To go gallivanting around Europe, and,
you know, drive the, drive the British crazy. And, you know, the old joke
about the European Union is, and I I always remember this, the
French in, the Germans down or no. The the
French up, the Germans down, and the British out or something like that. Like,
that was the old joke about the about the European Union.
And, it's true. You know, the French wanna the French
wanna run things. So They
they're the I mean, they really are. The joke from World War
two is the ad for the
French army gun. Dropped
once, never used.
I should I should laugh. I should laugh. Anyway okay. That's
terrible. I should laugh. But it's true. I know,
but they do. And so I'm thinking about how many like, they were it used
to be the language of diplomacy. Right. How embedded are
they still in UN and, you know, in a lot of these,
international, you know, organizations.
Yeah. The Germans, you don't have as much of the
diplomacy factor. Right? They just like the brute
brute force. But you gotta wonder. You gotta you gotta
wonder. Well and well, and the British seem to be uninterested
currently, in
asserting asserting themselves in any
well, to go back to the book for just a minute, because we will
get back to the we will get to the book, folks. We will get out
of geopolitics. We'll get to the book here in a minute. But, the British
seem to have abandoned whatever.
No. Not even abandoned. The British are going through a
process of having to rediscover what it means to be
British. I agree. I don't know
what's gonna come out of the other side of that,
when I look at the problems that Kiersten Mar
is having given just talking about. And I'm
gonna say it out loud. You know, gangs of Muslim men
raping women and other pathologies,
and he can't talk about them as the prime minister
of Britain. And then you have a conservative party
that split, with Nigel Farage doing the best
he doing his best Donald Trump impression, which doesn't really work there,
because now is probably not the moment for it. But doing his
best Donald Trump impression, And it's parliamentary politics,
which is also a big mess. I I don't like parliaments. I don't like I
don't want I don't like countries. I don't like the parliamentary system of government for
a whole variety of reasons, and this is the big one. You have no
cohesive understanding. At least in United States, you have polarization. You
have a co cohesive understand people people on one side or another have a cohesive,
and they may be maybe ideologically, what do you call it,
floating out to sea, pulling out into the well, yeah, under the Pacific,
the Atlantic, or the Gulf Of America. That's a little tweak there,
folks. They may be that in America, but at least
you've got two poles. In a parliamentary system, everybody's out
to sea, and you're trying to make, what do you call
it? You're trying to make allies and alliances,
and it and it ended it falls apart ten seconds from now. And so
Starmer won because the conservatives couldn't get their crap
together. And also, let's be
clear. Boris Johnson wrecked the party
like he did. His behavior wrecked the party. And so what are you gonna do?
But but the British have to
discover what it means to be British if they are going to mount
any sort of resistance to a French led European
Union, and I don't know that they're gonna be able to do that in the
next twenty years. Yeah. I think the I think the
takeover by Europe is well, you know, is well underway, and I
know we've done that before we started this podcast today.
I do think once Britain, did
Brexit, you know, the attack
Mhmm. Became exponential, and that's where you're seeing all the
immigration issues. All their institutions are cracking down
on free speech. You know, the fact that you couldn't speak about
these rapes, is just, you know, kind
of heartbreaking that the government was, you know,
facilitating it or supporting it by virtue of keeping
it, you know, quiet. Right. Yeah.
With The U US is the last
standing vestige of any sort of,
freedom for the world. And thank god we have the ocean
between us, but I don't I don't think
there is coming back for UK anytime soon.
Mhmm. Yeah. I think it's gonna be really hard. And, I mean,
best case scenario, you wind up as Canada.
And that's your best case scenario, Canada and Europe. Or worst case
scenario, this is the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario, you wind
up as a vassal state of of of
France. Normally, I would say Spain, but they
haven't been relevant in a hundred and thirty years, so
forget them. But, yeah, you wind up as a
vassal state. And, you know,
Europe needs a, Europe needs a fortress and a port.
And so, you know, England's good for something as an island.
Yeah. And it it always was. The only thing that could help them maybe is
William, ascending. Yeah. You know,
and bringing back, you know, some young blood
and some royal legitimacy. I think with the queen
dying, that was the end of that
reign and the traditions, and no one takes trial
seriously. You know? Well, William
does have he does have the William does have the correct looking
wife. I will grant him that. For a man with no hair who
should just go bald, just shave it off, dude.
Stop holding on. You will get so much more respect.
Look at you American. I am an American. You dad gum right. Like an
American and not even Korean.
You're dad gum right. Look. Look. Look. Alright.
Is that any segue? All I know is you put all you you all y'all
put your old man on the money. That's all I know. You got an old
man on the money staring at me now. Every time I go to Canada.
And before, it was an old lady staring at me. Come on now. What are
we doing? All I think of, Charles, is his big stubby,
like, bloated sausage fingers. Oh. Oh,
okay. Yeah. That's the segue. Now we're gonna go to the book. Thank you. Let's
go. The book. Let's go to the book. Go to the book. Let's start
with the book. Oh, so we're gonna
pick up with, we're gonna pick up with, what I'm
picking up with? Look at my script here. Here we go. Okay. So we're going
to pick up with the first book, some do not from Parade's End. We're gonna
start with our first section here. We're gonna be introduced to a fellow
named Macmaster. Okay? It's gonna get you a little bit of,
understanding of what we're doing here and a little bit of understanding of the
voice, the drive, the, the
the tone of Ford Maddux Ford.
In the train from beneath his pile of polish dressing and dispatch
cases, Tiejens had thrown his immense kit bag with his own
hands onto the guard's van. McMaster's
McMaster looked across at his friend. It was for him a great day.
Across his face were the proof sheets of his first small delicate looking
volume, a small page, the tight black, and still odorous. He had
the agreeable smell of the printer's ink in his nostrils. The fresh paper was still
a little damp, and his white rather spatula had always slightly cold
fingers was the pressure of the small flat gold pencil he had purchased especially
for these corrections. He had found none to make.
He had expected a wallowing of pleasure, almost the only sensuous pleasure he had
allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman
in an exiguous income was no mean task. But to wallow in
your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savor of your own shrewd aukeness,
to feel your rhythm balanced and get sober, That is a pleasure beyond
most and an inexpensive one at that. He had had it from
mere articles on the philosophies and domestic lives of such great figures as
Carlyle and Mill or on the expansion of intercolonial trade.
This was a book.
He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office, they were mostly
they were mostly born and not vastly sympathetic. There was a
sprinkling too. It was beginning to be a large one of young men who had
obtained their entry by merit or by sheer industry.
These watched promotions jealously, discerning nepot
nepot increases of increment and clamoring amongst themselves at
favoritisms. To these, he had been able to turn a cold shoulder.
His intimacy with Tianjin's permitted him to be rather on the born side
of the institution. His agreeableness, he knew he was agreeable and useful
to sir Reginald Ingleby protecting him from in the main from
unpleasantness. His articles had given him a certain right to an
austerity of demeanor. His book, he trusted to let him adopt
an almost judicial attitude. He would then be the
mister McMaster, the critic, the authority. And the first class departments
are not averse to having distinguished men as ornaments to their company. At any
rate, the promotions of the distinguished are not objected to. So McMaster
saw almost physically, sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the
with which his valued subordinate was treated in the drawing rooms of missus
Lemington, missus Creasy, the honorable missus Lemus. Sir
Reginald would perceive that for he was not a reader himself of much else other
than government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making the easy path of
his critically gifted and austere young helper. The son
of a very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbor town, McMaster had very
early on decided the career he would make. As
between as between the heroes of mister
Smiles, an author enormously popular in McMaster's boyhood, and the more
distinctly intellectual achievements open to the very poor Scott, McMaster had
had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad may rise to
be a mine owner. A hard gifted unsleeping Scott's youth pursuing
unobtrusively and objectively objectionably a course of
study and of public usefulness will certainly achieve distinction,
security, and the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the
difference between the may and the will, and McMaster
had no difficulty in making this choice. He saw
himself by now almost certain of a career that should give him at 50 a
knighthood, and long before that, a competence, a drawing room
of his own, and a lady who should contribute to his unobtrusive fame. She
moving about in that room amongst the best of the intellects of the day, gracious,
devoted, attributed once to his discernment and his achievements. Without
some disaster, he was sure of himself. Disasters come to men through
drink, bankruptcy, and women. Against the first two, he knew
himself immune, though his expressed expenses had a tendency to outrun his
income, and he was always a little in debt to Tianjin's.
Tianjin's fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so
certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women and arriving at a
stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution,
be considered as a legitimate feature of his life. He had to fear a rashes
of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he
needed, he knew to exactitude. Tall,
graceful, dark, loose gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval featured,
deliberate, gracious to everyone around her. He could almost
hear the very rustle of
her garments.
Ford Madox Ford,
the son of Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Maddox Hilfer,
was actually, no. I'm sorry. Not the son. Full name,
Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Maddox Hilfer, was
born 12/17/1873 and died
06/26/1939. He was an English
novelist, poet, critic, and editor. Ford is now
remembered primarily for his novels, The Good Soldier,
published in 1915 as we were talking about World War one,
The Parade's End Tetralogy, which we're reading today, published between 1924
and 1928, and The Fifth Queen trilogy, published
between nineteen o six and nineteen o eight. Ford was born
in Merton in Surrey to Catherine Maddox Brown and Frances
Hoefer or Hoefer, the eldest of three. His brother was
Oliver Maddox Hoefer, and his sister was Juliette Hoefer, the wife of
David Soskis and mother of Frank Soskis. Soskis.
Soskis. British names.
In November of eighteen ninety two, at age 18, he became a
Catholic, quote, very much at the encouragement of some
Hoffer relatives, but partly, he confessed galled by the quote,
unquote, militant atheism and anarchism of his English cousins.
Ford was involved in the British war propaganda at the after the
beginning of World War one and at the beginning of World War one.
He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau managed by CFG
Masterman along with Arnold Bennett, GK
Chesterton, who we've read on this podcast, John Galsworthy,
Hilaire Belock, who we'll be reading next year on the podcast, and
Gilbert Murray. Ford,
Maddox Ford, was a very British writer who,
led a very interesting life. So he got married early
at 19 and then proceeded to basically have
mistresses and lovers the entire course of his marriage. His
wife refused to divorce him, which was
interesting even though he petitioned her for divorce several times.
She refused to grant his petition and just stuck around.
Primarily, it is believed because as a writer herself,
she did not want to lose the
cache of being associated with Ford, Maddox Ford.
The other thing about him, which is interesting, which you can find in his Wikipedia
write up, is that he was a mentor and an
advocate for younger writers who came out of World War one.
Hemingway,
what's his name? Scott Fitzgerald.
So where I'm reading Tinder is the Night right now. We'll cover that on the
podcast here in a little bit. That's coming up. Again, Libby will come
back to to talk with us about that. But he he
helped those those young, writers who
were a generation or generation and a half younger than him and who had been
through the the terrible exigencies of
World War one. He helped many of them become
famous writers. As a matter of fact, he did so much
for these young writers that he has quoted in his Wikipedia article as
complaining one time, that he was not gonna ever get the kind of
credit that he deserved, for the other writers having
the kinds of careers that they wound up having as a
result of his advocacy for them.
Warren Maddox Ford died on the cusp or died at the
cusp of the beginning of World War two and probably saw it coming,
and probably stared in slack jawed horror
at Europe going down, the road of war
again. But he also was a writer like
Hermann Hesse and and others who tried to make sense
of what happened, in the collapse of
the Victorian and Edwardian world from his perspective in
the trenches of World War one.
We already talked a little bit about sort of what we could get from the
book, but what lessons maybe, Libby,
let's talk specifically a little bit about this. What are some lessons we
can glean from parades and overall,
and maybe even also from the literary life of Ford Maddux Ford?
I like I liked it a lot
again because it revealed
a lot about, like, the human condition that is
timeless. One of the themes
that I've had with you in the, you know, in our past
podcast is that you have to stick with your values,
and what's important to you regardless of
what everyone else is doing.
And, you know, and teachings
is human and did have, you know, did have
out of marital, like, sex. Right? But
he ended up, quote, unquote, doing the right thing.
And throughout the story, he's
or throughout the story, he instead
of sticking with the commanders back in London
and, putting forth war plans that
he believed to be wrong and, you know, and to purse and,
mediocre, he was he would go to the front lines
and fight there because he did want
to be able to influence them in a direction
that he believed to be the right the right way, and he was willing
to put his life on the line. Yeah. So
what I really you know, and he the the
challenge I had with him was he wouldn't when people would
try to shame him or lie about him,
He didn't stand up for himself.
And that to me, I, you know, I
had a bit of a challenge with because,
you know, if you're gonna stand up for what you believe in, don't do it
just silently and let others abuse you
through the lies. Like, you do need to stand up for yourself.
Mhmm. But,
as someone who has worked with the c
suite my, yeah, my entire career,
one of the and actually less so over the last five
years because it's just you know, I don't really
think you drive much significant change at that level, and
I think it's become harder and harder as people are more
focused on saying the right things versus doing
the right things. And it's really just about posturing and
positioning regardless of the outcomes to others
and more just for financial reward to myself and my
peers. Yeah. And so as I watch
someone who he could have stayed,
back and dictated, you know, to
the troops, you know, where what they should do or not, he didn't believe,
you know, in in endorsing the mediocrity
Mhmm. And ultimately, causing
the death of others unnecessarily. You know, in
modern day, I look at big
businesses and their,
mediocrity and, push for
status quo as actually killing the soul
of of workers. Now I can make the case
for many workers that they don't have to accept that, that they can
go out and start their own businesses or find other companies. But
when work is a means to make it
living versus, like, some of us who's lived
for work, you know, that is a risk that many
are don't feel they can take when, you know, they have to
when when they're taking care of their family and being
a part of a community or pursuing other interests. So
there is a parallel between the modern big business,
and the pursuit of mediocrity while espousing, you
know, self importance. Mhmm. And,
you know, and how was you know, chose to
fight in the trench war Mhmm. Upfront
versus, you know, accepting mediocrity so that he would be
accepted in society. There's a great line in a Pink
Floyd song, and I can't remember the name of the song right now. I should.
But it's on Dark Side of the Moon,
where, they, the band sings forward they cried
from the rear, and the front rank died. And I always think of
World War one when I hear that line. Right? Because all the generals
well, the second line of the song. The generals sat, and the lines on the
map move from side to side. Right? Now Pink Floyd, of course,
was writing this song about, you know, we're in the twilight of
Vietnam. And so I'm sure they were thinking about that, but
it applied way the heck more to World War one
and to our conversation,
a little bit ago. The the
the the ways in which and Ford Maddox Ford saw
this in the war propaganda department. So he wrote about this from experience.
Right? The ways in which
the way in which the war was fought, and I've often said this about World
War one, it was the first
modern war fought with
modern equipment and modern techniques, but the
people fighting the war had a and the people
prosecuting the war. And you see this in John Keegan's book,
about the history of World War one. The people fighting the war and the people
prosecuting the war had a pre World War one mindset.
Mhmm. They still had a mindset that was focused on and you could just sort
of sense it. It was an eighteenth century epaulettes
and swords and horses kind of mentality,
but you have tanks and propaganda and
gas and, you know, machine
guns and trenches and barbed wire and
bombs and you you know, like, you've got all the modern
things. Right? But you insist
that to your point about Tingyens, you
insist that your mindset still be stiff upper lip
Victorian. Mhmm. And you don't seem to understand that the
machine gun and the
gas and the biplanes
have all sort of pushed that to a different spot.
And the only way you're really gonna understand that is if you get out of
the back of the you get out of the rear with the gear and you
get to the front. And too many generals,
heck, too much of the command structure in World War one just wasn't about that.
It it took me to about
02/2021 to 02/2022 to just
realize that this separation of the
top from the front Mhmm. The bottom
is, like, so great and, you know, a tail,
you know, as long as the test of time, right,
that we have
elites making decisions that are,
well, I don't know. Maybe in, you know, in the wars, you know, in the
middle ages and such, you know, you did have kings out there fighting with
the troops, and it was much more barbaric.
And so they understood the reality of it a bit more.
But now you you just have
the elite who don't feel the consequences of any of their
decisions, and the bodies are just
are just, you know, names in a book and not real lives.
They have no idea what's going on out here. Yeah. And they couldn't, especially,
yeah, even now technologically,
you know, how even though we know what's going on, we're
still divorced from the humanity of it. Right. Right. Well,
and that's and that gets you. But war is but war is not an easy
thing. Yeah. Right? No. There's got we can't,
I I don't wanna get into moral justification of any war,
because it all depends on the side that you're sitting on. Right.
You know, but what does
matter is, that
you're dictating how others should
fight a war and you're too divorced from the reality
of it. And I personally admire
folks who could Mhmm. Sit in the halls
of, you know, Winnetka or
Princeton, New Jersey or, you know,
Manhattan and say how we should, you know,
fight, you know, fight wars, and they're completely
devoid from the reality on, you
know, in the war zone. Or it's not again,
it's not much different than corporations either. Right. You know,
where executives are real like, they used
to care. Mhmm. If you're climbing the
ladder, how people were trained, you know, were treated. And then once they're
at the top, you know, they no
longer care, and they just want people to work harder and longer for lower
wages. Well, in well, in there's a certain sense
as well, and you see it in and we're gonna talk about it in this
next section. You see it in the interpersonal relationships between which is one of
the things that struck me about this novel, the interpersonal relationships between men and women
before the war pieces began. Like, that to me is the one of the
three pillars that Arades End is is set up around. Right?
And you talked you've talked about Tijen's
marriage to, to Sylvia, then, you know,
the one up miss one up, and we're gonna talk about all of that and
how that sort of began to begin to unwind.
Tigen's never had an idea. I won't say never.
So what is interesting to me about the book is that
Ford, Maddox Ford, wrote Teejens as a Teejens
as a real human being with
an internal struggle about whether or not to stay married
to a woman who, quite frankly, was
not the best human specimen. Let's just let's just be let's
just be clear about that. But
but also, he's he's trapped
or maybe not trapped. I shouldn't use that term. That's a very
postmodern idea. He is bound
well, well, the postmodern man doesn't want to be
bound by tradition. I was listening to a preacher talk about this on
Sunday. The postmodern man doesn't wanna be bound by tradition.
The postmodern man believes that he is individual, and that he
is this individual consumer and that he can make individual choices.
The problem is every single individual choice that you make is the same as every
other individual choice that everybody other individual is making. So you're actually not an individual.
You're actually not a free thinker. Like, if I see somebody with, like, a free
thinking bumper sticker, I know exactly what kind of things those that person
thinks. Exactly. Yeah. It's just like the just like when I
see somebody with a coexist bumper sticker on the back of their car. Like, come
on. I I know what you believe. I don't even need to I don't need
to ask you.
So for a postmodern person, a postmodern reader, they will
read Parade's End, and they will not understand why
Tijens just didn't get divorced from his wife and just go do what he wanted
to do. But he was bound by traditional Victorian
morality. He was bound by being
a man inside of traditional Victorian
morality where the rules for men and women were fundamentally
different. And this is where you get into miss Wannop. I love how how Maddox
Ford introduces her as a
feminist, what we would call progressive. But a feminist
progressive, you know, I just wanna get the vote, and if I just get the
vote, everything will be fine kind of kind of person. And
sitting on the back end of a hundred and twenty years of that, I just
started laughing. I did. I literally started laughing at the way that that that she
was introduced. Because if you could've gone back and told her what would happen from
her just getting the the vote in Britain, she would have, like,
quit the whole thing right off the bat. Well, that that
was the others there's two other storylines in there,
two other takeaways that also to me
say, hey. Fundamentally, human the human condition or
human nature hasn't changed a whole lot. And the one is with,
Sylvia. Mhmm. You know, she has everything
handed to her. And when life is too easy
and you don't have something a purpose, Mhmm. You know, far too
many people just like to create chaos and noise and stories.
Mhmm. And so, you know, she she
actually if you think about it, it's this
7¢ that I, you know, that we've seen,
over the last ten years also play out on the left. Like, I never followed
the seven deadly sins. Like, you know, it was a movie seven was about as
close as I understood it, and then I watched what's happened over the
last, like, you know, five to ten years,
on yeah. In the American progressive, and it's about, you know,
gluttony and, you know, jealousy
and, you know, all of vanity.
Vanity. You know, you've got pride and gluttony and gel all of that.
Right? And, you know, when you when things are easy and you
don't have a way to direct yourself from a purpose perspective
either, like, you have to work to put food literally put food on
the plate, you know, where people
go. And she she wanted attention. She,
you know, and she did have you know, negative attention is
better than none at all. Right, and so the
way that she acted out is how you see many
people when it's too easy and they're bored
without purpose, act out. And then Valentin
is yeah. Again, I think this book was written in
2020, and it was 1919.
Yeah. She's all about you know, men don't you know,
you know, men don't respect women and think we're so smart,
and we just you know, and we need to get the vote. And once we
get the vote, I'm gonna be happy, and then she gets the vote.
And it's the classic thing that we all learn is that it's
not the milestone, it's the journey. Because that
the joy you have when reaching a milestone is fleeting and
ephemeral, And she realizes it's
actually the quality of relationships that
would bring her enduring, you know, happiness. And
that's also what teaching like, institutions
are important, but not blind obedience to
institutions. You need to use the institution that's
right for you and go into it with the right
intention, and that's marriage. Right? Like, he ultimately
goes into you know, he, you know, takes
an l, divorces, and then goes into it for love.
But blind obedience to institutions is the lesson,
and that's what the fourth the fourth four turnings to me are
all about. You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Good intention, then someone comes in. Yeah. It's kind of like,
what? They say shirt to sleeve to shirt sleeve in three generate.
Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you're building something, the intention
and the people that are building it with you because
it's hard work Mhmm. You know, I think there's good intention. It's when you
start to get the administrators and the managers who are leeching off
the work where you start to bring in,
the bad players. And then you get to the third generation, and it's
mostly bad players because all the meetings been sapped out of it, and it's
just, you know, financial
financial cow that they use until it's all depleted,
and then you get into the next cycle where you have to rebuild all the
institutions, tear them down and. Open. Exactly.
Exactly. Well, let's, no. That's that's good analysis.
Yeah. Let's, let's get back to the book. Let's get back to
parades and we're still in the first this first chapter. Now one of the things
you'll note as you read parades and, in particular, if you
depending upon the size of the type of the copy that you have,
you will note that the chapters are long. Right? The
chapters are dense. There's a lot packed into, into each chapter. And
so and and then the books are dense. Right? So it's
divided up into parts, and then the parts are are collapsed together into books. And
each part is each part is a each part is a
meal. Right? And it comes again. It is
written in a way just from to talk about the writing of it a
little bit. The writing style of Ford Maddox Ford is
very much a pre modern
Victorian style of writing, similar
in similar in-depth of meaning to the Raphaelites,
and to the, into the the
writing efforts of folks like,
Alfred Lord Tennyson, and others, who are writing,
in that long eighteenth century in Europe. Okay.
So back to the book, back to
Parade's End. I'm gonna pick up with I'm gonna bounce around a
little bit in this section, because this is,
this is Sylvia talking, a little bit
here. There's Sylvia? No. No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. This is gonna be Tishan's and miss Wannop. So we already sort
of, you know, brought up, the,
the the young lady. And, well, we're gonna meet her, we're gonna meet her
mother. We're gonna start with that. K?
Being too well brought up to interrupt, she waited till he had said all he
wanted to say. Then she exclaimed,
let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a great deal of
you. You're going to be a mascot too like your father. I
suppose you are. You saved me from the police yesterday. So pause.
In the narrative,
the daughter, Valentin, was in a, was
in
a contratomp, for lack of a better term, a protest.
And, she ran across a golf course, Her and another
young lady named Gertie and were being chased by the British constables
across the golf course, a private golf course, and,
Tigin saved her from the police. So that's what she's referencing there.
K? So back to the book. I suppose you think you saved me from the
police yesterday. You appear to have saved my mother's neck today.
You appear too to be going to make £20 profit on a horse deal. You
say you will, and you seem to be that sort of person. £20 is no
end in a family like ours. Well, then you appear to be going,
to be the regular Belle Ami of the Wannop family.
Tijin said, I hope not. Oh, I don't mean, she said, that you're going to
rise to fame by making love to all the women of the Wannop family. Besides,
there's only me. But mother will press you into all sorts of odd jobs.
There will always be a plate for you with a table. Don't shudder. I'm a
regular good cook. Cuisine bourgeois, of course. I learned
under real a real professed cook, though a drunkard.
That meant I used to do half the cooking, and the family was particular.
Ealing people are. County counselors, half of them, and the like. So
I know what men are. She stopped and said good naturedly, but do for goodness
sakes get over it or get it over. I'm sorry I was rude to you,
but it is irritating to have to stand like a stuffed rabbit while a man
is acting like a regular admiral Crichton and cool and collected with the
English country gentleman air and all. Tietjens winced.
The young woman had come a little too near the knuckle of his wife's frequent
denunciations of himself. And she exclaimed,
no. That's not fair. I'm an ungrateful pig. You didn't show a bit more
side really than a capable workman must who's doing his job in the midst of
a crowd of incapable duffers. But just get it out, will you? Say
once and for all that, you know the proper pompous manner. You are not
without sympathy with our aims, which you disapprove, oh, immensely
strongly of our methods. It struck
Tianjin that the young woman was a good deal more interested in the cause of
votes for women than he had given her credit for. He wasn't
much in the mood for talking to young women, but it was with
considerable more than the surface of his mind that he answered.
I don't. I approve entirely of your methods, but your
aims are idiotic. And then
jumping forward a little bit, they are talking about,
the the laws that they need to change and sort of what the vote will
do. And then, and then here we go. He says,
or she says, look here. Don't be one of those ignoble triflers who say the
vote won't do women any good. Women have a rotten time. They do
really. If you'd seen what I've seen, I'm not talking through my hat. Her
voice became quite deep. She had tears in her eyes. Poor women
do, she said, little insignificant creatures. We've got to change
the divorce laws. We've got to get better conditions.
You you couldn't stand it if you know what I know. Her
emotion vexed him for it seemed to establish a sort of fraternal intimacy that he
didn't, at the moment, want. Women do not show emotion
except before their families. He said dryly, I dare
say I shouldn't, but I don't know, so I can't.
She said with deep disappointment, oh, you are a beast, and I shall never beg
your pardon for saying that. I don't believe you mean what you say, but merely
to say it is is heartless. This was another one of the counts
of Sylvia's indictment, and Tensions winced again. She explained,
you don't know the the case of the Pimlico army clothing factory
workers, or you wouldn't say the vote wouldn't would be of no use to women.
I know the case perfectly well, Tisha said. It came under my official notice, and
I remember thinking there never was more signal instance of the
uselessness of the vote to anyone. We can't be thinking of the same
case, she said. We are, he answered. The Pimlico
Army Clothing Factory is in the constituency of Westminster.
The undersecretary for war is a member for Westminster. His
majority at the last election was 600. The clothing factory employed
700 men at £1,
6 an hour, and all these men having their votes in Westminster.
The 700 men wrote to the undersecretary to say that if their screw
wasn't raised to Bob, they vote solid against him at the next
election. Miss Wannop said, well then. So, Tijen said, the
undersecretary had the 700 men at 18 fired and took
on 700 women at 10p. What good did the vote do the
700 men? What good did a vote ever do anyone?
Miss Wannop checked at that, and Tijen's prevented her exposure of his
fallacy by saying quickly, now if the 700 women, backed
by all the other ill used, sweated women of the country, had threatened the
undersecretary, burned the pillar boxes, and cut up all the golf guard greens
around his country house. They'd have had their wages raised to half a crown next
week. That's the only straight method. It's the feudal system
at work.
They go on and on around this area, and
this is sort of the way in which
Tijins and miss Wannop are, engaged
with each other at least initially. And I I point that out because
well, for a couple of different reasons. One of the things
that you see in, Parade's End is the
relationships, as they are between men
and women. And they are fractured or fracturing
during that time that Ford Maddox Ford is writing about,
in the '19, well, in the pre World War pre
World War one world, and then they would fracture even more when fewer
men came back home from the trenches of World War
one. And so where there is a
vacuum, nature will fill it. And nature did fill that
vacuum, and women did get the vote in
Britain. Later
on, hundred years or so down the road, we now live in an era
where more women than men publish and read fiction.
We've also wound up in a spot where the promises of early twentieth century
feminism have been fully realize have been as fully realized as they are
probably ever going to be. Yes, we talk a lot in our
country, a lot about glass ceilings and,
and pay inequalities between men and women. But the
statistics, do show, and this has been shown repeatedly,
that when men and women do the exact same job at the
exact same educational level with the exact
same institution, well,
men and women's salaries are on par with each other and have
been for quite some time. Where they are not on par, and I'm
going to check everybody who's gonna send me an email on this, where they are
not on par are in the dirty jobs that men will do that
women never will. I can
count on my number of no hands how many
female garbage men I've ever
met. Okay.
These two facts, where the promises of early twentieth century feminism
and the reading of fiction intersect, among
others, have caused interpersonal relationships between men and women in
2025 to be at an all time low if you read the
reports from the ever online Intelligentsia.
I don't date. I'm married quite
happily, and I cannot imagine being out
there now. It's got to be
just incredibly difficult to
connect, with people.
And it is more made more incredibly difficult
by not only the facts of the last hundred years,
around feminism and around interpersonal relationships, but also by the
facts of technology. Technology impacted war, but it also impacted
interpersonal relationships, and it continues to do so, by the way.
And the fact is, in real life, men and women are failing as they
always have, and we see this actually, exemplified in
that little section of parades in that I read. Men and women are failing at
the most basic skill that everyone needs to be successful at in the world,
and that is the skill of negotiation.
But you cannot negotiate with somebody if you do not understand or are
not curious about how their brain works. And that
lack of curiosity between men and women,
the seeds for some of that were laid almost a
hundred years ago. So the question
that I have so we're gonna make this personal a little bit not personal to
Libby or personal to myself, but personal to us as readers, is I think
you can I think you could find out about people's mindset from reading
fiction? That's why we're reading this this very dense book.
This book is identified as literary fiction. So how can
reading literary or highbrow fiction help men and women
in navigating their interpersonal interactions now in the
year that we live in now, Libby? How can that how
can that help? Or can it help? Or are we too far
gone for it to help? By the way, men don't don't nearly read as
much fiction as women do. And the idea is
that and I I listened to an author talk about this. He said that,
what's interesting is not only are men not reading literary
fiction, there isn't nearly as much published
literary fiction by men in the market today. And
he said that book publishers made an intentional
decision in the early two thousands to
abandon the male market. And now
boys and men who were formally pushed into
video games and into Netflix and all of that,
are now even dropping out of those spaces. So what can we
learn what can men and women learn from literary fiction about how to deal
with interpersonal their interpersonal relationships?
One, I it's I'm surprised that there's
been such a big decline from men reading litter
literary fiction. Mhmm.
It has always surprised me how much
women will read fiction and they don't read,
nonfiction. And I specifically look at that from,
you know, a a professional perspective
as well as just understanding history and our
place in history. Mhmm. I find that it
kinda speaks to this need to escape,
and live in fantasy. I don't know. But,
it has always struck me as a bit odd, how few
women will actually read nonfiction. Mhmm.
But I do think there's a lot of men who will read
fiction, like short stories and, you know, and that type of thing, but they
must be getting it through other other means and mechanisms.
Well, apparently and in the interview that I was listening to that covered this or
where the guy talked about this, the author talked about
it. He's been writing books for twenty years now,
and he said that even twenty years ago when he was first entering
the publishing world Yeah. They were talking about or
publishers were talking about how to get the mail market. Right? How
do we get the mail market? How do we get the mail market? But he
said over the course of the last twenty years, what's happened is there was
a wholesale abandonment of that market. And now, weirdly enough, in
2025, he's now getting called back into conversations about how
to get the mail market. Yeah. But
it's it's these conversations are being driven by people who
don't fundamentally understand the mail mind and don't have a curiosity about
it, or just think that you could just, like, to your point,
layer some nonfiction over it, and it'll be good. Like, we'll call it a good
thing. You know? Yeah. And he he
he the interview that I was listening to, the individual was talking about this or
the perspective of, of boys reading. So there's
a massive drop off with boys reading starting around the ages of between 10
and 13. Boys just stop reading. Now formally,
they were going into video games or into, like, or into,
like, Netflix shows. But he's like he said, if you look at the statistics on
that, even Netflix consumption and video game consumption is
starting to decline among the 10 to 13 year old male group.
And he said most he said what most people are doing is they're doom scrolling
on their phones, and they're either if they're young boys, they're looking
at pornography. And if they're young women, they're engaged with,
they're engaged with simping, basically, for pornography
through OnlyFans. And he said, that's it. That's what everybody's doing. That's
what I wondered as if it was the porn. Yeah.
Yeah. And they're getting yeah. Yeah. The
combination of porn versus video streaming and, and all
that, but my guess was it was porn, which is unfortunate.
But,
the I find fiction is just
valuable. Is a a val a valuable
vehicle to learn in an unthreatened and unverifiable
way. Mhmm. Right. Yeah. Right?
And, you know, through stories, you get to learn about
different lives and ways of thinking,
that you can't like, that unlike nonfiction,
like, it's debatable, and fiction is just one per yeah.
It's just a story. Right. And what I
like about this you asked
is, for me, you're
learning that there is no one simple answer and what's,
you know, what one,
marriage or being single or, you
know, you know, professing a
different gender or sexual orientation. Like, none
of those things are necessarily going to be answers.
There's complexity with every one of those situations. Mhmm.
You know? And so,
the answer to feminism like, when I was
growing up in the seventies, it was just about being professional
and being able to, like, learn and grow to the top of a
company, but still are interested
in family. Yeah. It it wasn't about a negative perspective on
family. It wasn't a negative perspective on having children.
And feminism has been taken to such an extreme
now that it's all
about just being individual and not needing someone
else. You don't even hear it about career aspiration.
It's it's just about me, me, me, me, me.
And so the it has been taken to the ultimate
extreme. And I think women are finding
that the me, me, me isn't satisfying, especially when
you don't balance it with anything that is of meaning.
Like, at least from a career perspective, I knew where I was going and what
I was trying to accomplish. And there was some goal at
the end of it, and I didn't I pursued it because it felt good.
Mhmm. Right. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And,
and I grew up with a divorce in a divorced household, and I
did want to have kids. But my parents had me when they were 23 and
far too young, in my view, for ambitious
parents to have kids. So I wanted to wait until I was in my, you
know, into my late thirties or forties so I could actually spend time with them.
So, you know, for me, the feminism
wasn't about not needing anyone or
not having kids. It was about the freedom to pursue
the same things that men are able to pursue,
but not demonizing the other, yeah, the other
sex, or institutions. Like,
I didn't understand marriage, but that's me.
Like, I wanted Kurt Russell fully gone. You know, I still wanted
a partnership, but I just had a different definition of it.
And I didn't look at my friends who were getting married and go, oh my
god. You're losing yourself. You know? Right. Now
yeah. But the lesson to me is
that there is no one right model, and to
pursue one with certainty about what
it will mean to you, is
about is a bit scary. And you can learn through fiction,
like, the pros and cons of a lot of different lifestyles. Right?
Like, the woman who doesn't Yeah. You know, so
for the suffragette, you know, who realized just the
boat wasn't up. Or and she
could find happiness. Or, like, Megyn Kelly
is like, you can't have it all. It's just you know?
And you can have it all at once. So stop believing people who say you
can't have it all at once. I do. But, yeah, there are other
people who choose to have it all at once throughout their
life. You know? Like, I'll focus on work now. Right.
And then family, can't go back to work. But there's not one right
model. The reality is life is complex. People
are complex, and you're gonna have to learn from your for
yourself what fits for you. The challenge with
modern relationships right now is women freaking demonized
men and told them that they were worthless. You know?
So it wasn't just that I wanna be independent. It's
that you stuck, and I'm gonna push you down to
elevate me as opposed, you know, with all of these
identity type politics and societal games. It's
only, you know, at when it only when you can rise only by
pushing someone else down, it's not gonna successful.
And that's what the western western civilization has
promoted for the last thirty years is that women can only
elevate by pushing others, you know, by pushing others down.
And once they get there, they realize that
it sucks to just be me without, like,
a family and men around. And this and it does
actually having strong men and a partner
is really meaningful and valuable. But they've they've
created conditions where men are going to Europe yeah. Or going to Asia to get
wives because I wouldn't marry I wouldn't marry an American
woman. I'll tell you that much. I wouldn't
marry a woman.
And I wouldn't marry, but that's
me. But I can understand.
Mhmm. You're like, I'm just Asian. Because women here
suck. They don't know what they want. Well, the
and the the thing is and I don't I think Tien
Ts is sort of trying to be gentle about it as most men
usually do try to be gentle with women.
Yeah. And and and and one of the ways that men
try to be gentle with women is is is trying to be verbally gentle
with them because, like, if you well well, there's good
reason for that. One of the things that one of the things that I that
I note consistently is that
and I do say consistently is that men spend a lot of time
mediating conflict between other men. You
just you just do. Like, that's because because here's the thing. Here's the thing.
If I am in a, you know, in a discussion
or something with another man, right,
and it escalates to a certain point,
like, we can always go outside and fix it. Like, we have that
physical thing that we can do. That that's always the cul de sac at the
end of the at the end of the at the end of the road. Right?
I don't have that so you avoid it. Oh, we do everything
we possibly can to avoid that. Everything we possibly can. Because if I'm
spending half my time just getting in and out of fist fights, like, that's Yeah.
It's just not it's not productive. Right? Okay. And by the way, it takes us
between the ages of 10 and, like, 18 to sort of
figure that out. That's usually where that learning occurs.
Okay. But with women, you're not gonna
go out and and, you know, you're not gonna fist fight a woman. Like, come
on. Like, even even in our degraded era, you're still not going
and I'm I'm I'm I'm looking with a cocked eye. I am. I'm
keeping a cocked eye on all the transgender stuff,
but I'll leave that aside. That's another that's a different kind of thing for a
different kind of day. That's not part of this conversation. In interactions between men and
women, pure classical interactions between men and women, men do spend a
lot of time being verbally gentle with women because we don't
want to escalate to a particular spot. Now the reason and
you see that in Ting Jin's engagement with, with miss
Wannop. Right? Like, he was going to give her the facts about
the the army factory fire, but
he was trying to give them to her in the in the
gentlest, most judicious way possible,
in order to encourage understanding and in and in
order to reduce or minimize the opportunity for
conflict. Okay. Fast
forward all of that to a hundred years to where we are
at now, and
think that
there are
some optimum traditional ways to do that? For sure. And am I
a proponent of those optimal traditional ways? For sure. Because I think they hold the
society together. Yep. But it's only be by having those
optimal traditional ways of holding things together that you get to have the outliers.
Okay. Now
where we are at, from my perspective, as a person
who's standing outside of all this, right,
is that
if you if you fundamentally to to to the point earlier, you
fundamentally lack curiosity about how another
person thinks, then you are then you are automatically
putting yourself into a world of trade offs. And this is what men don't tell
women, by the way, but every man knows this. The world is
a vicious series of trade offs.
Yes. It's a brutal series of trade offs. And every man knows this
starting around six or seven, actually. We don't know the
term trade off, but that's what we know. We know that there's there's certain things
you can do, and there's and and this the level of brutalness of those trade
offs just continues to escalate throughout your entire life until you hit a certain
point where you're like, okay, I don't wanna make any more of
those trade offs. I'm gonna go do this thing in the other direction, and here's
what you find out as a man. Everywhere you go, there are trade offs.
Everywhere. So for instance, I'll use myself as an example.
I played rugby for many years. Rugby is a brutally hard sport.
Great, but brutally hard. Right?
And I played late in my twenties and into my
thirties, and I messed up my body, messed up my
knees, whatever. I've I've you know, I was never gonna be a pro rugby player
going to Europe and playing rugby. It wasn't gonna happen. Right? And that's
a trade off. So why would I do something that's hard in breaking
down my body? Right? Well, because I enjoyed it. Right? But I
knew I was trading off something in the future, and I was willing to make
that trade off. Right? I was willing to live with that negotiation.
And there were the movie
Invictus sticks with me. Right? With Matt Damon. Right? There were
movies that demonstrated fiction, that demonstrated those
trade offs in a really interesting way. There were books
that illustrated that trade off in a really interesting way around rugby.
What fiction does is it demonstrates those trade offs
in a way that allows people to not have to go out and
experience the thing. And you need trade offs,
and you need trade offs for both men. So men understand that the
trade offs that men make. For women, so the women understand the trade offs, that
they are going to have to make it. By the way, I'm not a proponent
of women quote, unquote, having it all because, quote, unquote, frankly, no one can
have it all. That's talk about seven deadly sins.
That's one of those, let me be even more old school. That's one of those
lies from the pit of hell. Let me be even more old school.
There are always inherently trade offs that you're making. Always. You've
just accept you've just accepted when you say that you have it all,
like, Megan Kelly says she has it all. It's the trade offs were worth it
for what she's defining as it all. As it all. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And
trade offs. And, I would agree
that in this in the feminized society that we now
are living under, there is not a desire
to recognize trade offs and or that things
need to be negotiated. Like, shoulds,
when you do everything based on should or feels
Mhmm. You're inherently accepting trade offs without
talking about them. Right. Yep. You
ultimately have to wait until you reach a
catastrophe before something is done
about it. And so the field should rolled,
almost leads to an asymmetric decline and
event, whereas, you
know, you and I are both are in business. Mhmm. And
in business, you're always if if you're running a good business,
you're always having to make hard trade offs. Mhmm.
And one of the things that I've observed
as women become,
almost a majority in the workplace versus
a minority, that when
someone is wanting to discuss trade offs and or
scenarios, and it's a male, that
women will feel that's threatening and
mansplaining. And so you're
bringing in kind of this should feels role
in a world where you need to be able to
have conversations about trade offs. And this is where the
negotiations aren't you know, I see it manifest in
the workplace, and it it moves into the you're
bringing in household dynamics almost into the work. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. And I don't wanna bring household dynamics into the workplace. Like, when I'm at
the work when I'm at work, I wanna make great product
that people are willing to pay for, that we have
partners that wanna work with us. We have employees
that know that they're valued and, you know, and thriving. They're
not coddled, but they're challenged and excited about being
at work. And it's an economically viable business that doesn't
require external investment in order to survive. Mhmm.
In order to have that end to end
optimal excellent scenario, you're making trade offs
across about what matters from a product
design perspective, what matters with respect to the partners
you choose and how you support them. Yeah. Everything is about
hard trade offs. And we've
in this world where we've had too much capital free flowing,
not a lot of accountability, The
absence of trade offs being made constantly
in the business is being shown as mediocrity
everywhere. I mean, you can't buy anything that will last, you know, longer
than it takes to walk out a store. Right. Right. Well
and and and you I love it how you said you don't wanna bring
home dynamic or not you don't, but we are bringing home
dynamics into the workplace. I've been I I've I've been
struck by an idea over the last, I would say, maybe
four to six months that I've had. It's sort of a recent revelation,
or maybe it's just me finally coalescing a bunch of ideas in my head that
it feels like a revelation, but it's really not. I've just been having these random
ideas through these random conversations on this podcast. But it's this
idea that we're asking certain institutions to carry more
weight than they were designed to carry. So the workplace
was not designed to carry the weight of the home, and the home was not
designed to carry the weight of the workplace, by the way, just as
and and communities and churches aren't designed to
carry the weight of the workplace. They're designed to be a
partner with that, but they're not designed to carry the weight of
that. Right? And so the decline
of institutions
hasn't caused people to need those institutions less. It's just caused
individuals, and and enough individuals get together and it's
collective at that point. But it's caused individuals to move the
the emotional and psychological weight
to places where it wasn't meant to carry that
weight. And you see this in, like, the institution of marriage, for instance. Like, you
see that there where, you know, men and
women used to have separate
spheres spheres spheres spheres spheres of friends.
And that was fine because the marriage has a
relationship and to be the container for everything
to everybody or to those two people inside of that container. But
in our modern world, you know, you and I'll put this on
men. I I work with men, and I have I have
worked with men in the past who will literally say, my wife
is my best friend. And I'm like,
that's a lot of weight to put on your wife. That's a lot of weight
to put on the institution of marriage there. And what if she can't handle that?
And I presume the same thing happens with women. You
know? And so so I think we've gotta have a
reordering because we're at the end of the fourth turning, and now is the time
for reordering. I think we have to have a reordering of how we
think about these institutions. And, yes, maybe a return to
old things. But if you don't wanna return to old things, then a renegotiation
to something new. And that renegotiation, I think fiction has to be a part of
that renegotiation. Yeah. I mean, there's there's no doubt that the
breakdown of the family structure well, first is women going
into the workforce. Yeah. I'm I'm the product of, you
know, the lock yeah. The what is it? They they
Oh, the latch key kids? The latch key kids. Yeah. And it you know, in
some way, it was fabulous because we had to be self sufficient. Right? Mhmm.
Yeah. Because our parents weren't
home. A good model of what
being a responsible citizen was too.
Mhmm. But you had
the raising of children move to schools, and
schools have to take over that burden. Mhmm. But
the family structure no no longer was. And then it's just
natural that folks who rely on
the schools will not expect the next institution being
work Right. To carry forward. I will say that
one of the reasons, like, marriage never quite appealed to me
is because it wasn't business enough. Right? It's like
because it was too emotional. It was just too emotional. Yeah. Right? I'm
like, no. This is a partnership. We can
discuss the different like, I'm fine. I we might decide
through negotiation that I carry more like, I
do more of the traditional feminine things, and he does more of
the traditional male. But to me, it was like
I'm not an emotional I'm not an emotional,
like, woman, and I don't want a man who expects me to
be, like, an emotional woman that you can't
talk to. Like Right. I watch all of my friends,
male friends, walk on, eggshells around their wives. I
was like, what?
You know? And then I hear women say that they're men things that I would
never dream of saying to someone
I loved. Right. My observations
are clearly, you know, biased in my my observations.
But that's why I always liked work
is because, you know, you knew what each other's agenda was, you
knew what the goal was, and you're willing to have tough conversations.
Mhmm. And now the workplace isn't a place where you can
have tough conversations because it's become too
feminized not I feminized doesn't mean it's because
women are there. It's become feminized. Right? Because you could have
men who have feminine and
heterosexual men who have feminine energy. It's
like, no. No. No. It feels good. It feels right.
You know, move on. But, there's a
lot. Technology is a piece of it.
Social is a piece of it. But, yeah, the
we need a we need a correction, and moving to the family
structure is Yeah. Is an element
Well, we we need a we need a correction. We need a re we need
a renegotiation of the weight. You know? We just we just do. We need a
renegotiation of the weight. And maybe Anything. Maybe that will happen.
You know? Anything that starts out with condemning the other
is not gonna work. Right. Yeah. No. Exactly. Yeah. No.
Exactly right. Something positive that we're working towards, and that's
what otherwise, I'm gonna be black pilled.
Well, well, back to the book. Back, well, back to the book.
Back to Parade's End. So we're going to pick up with,
we're gonna pick up with, father Consett, Sylvia,
and Sylvia's mother. So Sylvia is
Tianjin's wife. I'm going to
use a particular word here to describe Sylvia. She is,
estranged. I love that word. That is
very much a Caucasian American English
word. I have never heard a minority
person in America use the word estranged. I've never heard that. I only ever hear
Caucasians use that term, or use that word. And I don't
know why that is, by the way, but I just it's something that I've noted
in my own very talking about sample sizes, Libby, my own very small
sample size. Go ahead. They're like that seems
like pretty normal word to me. I know. Right. It seems exactly. But I've never
I only ever hear
I do. The word I'm sorry. Nowadays is utilize.
Everyone's using utilize instead of use. I was like.
Oh, yeah. That's another don't get me started on that. That's
one battle at a time, Libby. Absolutely. I can't be fighting I can't be fighting
everywhere all at once. We try. I
tried, but I can't. I have only so many troops. It's okay to
demand. You know, I I played risk with my children this
weekend. Found out that my middle daughter apparently is a ruthless military
tactician. I did not know that. But now I know. So now I now I
know what I'm getting into. But, I did wind up in a spot
where I was literally fighting her on every front, everywhere, all at one
time. Ace.
And this is the first time she'd ever played risk. I was like, oh, wow.
I guess we're I I guess this is the thing we're doing now. I guess
we're doing this. Oh, boy. Now you wonder what what game
she's been playing with you. Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Exactly. Guess I said at the end. I thought I was
on to you. So
sure. I'm not so sure. The entire fifth last fifteen years have to
be, reexamined. We gotta reexam. We gotta reexam. We gotta reexam the
whole thing. Alright. So we are going to pick up
with a long conversation. I'm gonna read bits and pieces of it that I think
are relevant for our conversation today. So Sylvia
is, like I said, Tingen's, estranged wife.
Then you have missus Satherweight, who is Sylvia's mother, and
father Conset, who is their
religious adviser, a good old
fashioned well, I believe he would be
Anglican if I'm not mistaken, because they are
English. Alright. So let's pick up in some do not.
Father Constance, Sylvia said to her mother, has been renewing his social circle.
It's not, father Constance said, amongst the dregs of the people that you must
live if you don't want to hear of the dregs of society.
Sylvia stood up. She said, you'll keep your tongue off my best friends if
you want me if you want me to stop and be lectured. But
for mister Vanderveck for missus Vandervecken, I should not be here. I
return to the fold. Father Constance exclaimed, don't say it,
child. I'd rather have help me. You had gone on living in open sin.
Sylvia sat down again, her hand listlessly on her lap. Have it your own way,
she said, and the father returned to the fourth sheet of the telegram.
What does this mean? He asked. He returned to the first sheet. This here,
accept resumption yoke, he read breathlessly.
Sylvia, missus Satterwhite said, go and light the spirit lamp for some
tea. We shall want it. You'd think I was
a district messenger boy, Sylvia said as she rose. Why don't you keep
your maid up? It's a way we have of referring to out, to
our union, she explained to the father.
There was sympathy enough between you and him then, he said, to have bywords
for things. It was that I wanted to know. I
understood the words. They were pretty bitter by
words as you called them, Sylvia said. More like curses than kisses.
It was you who used them, missus Satterwhite said. Christopher never said a bitter
thing to you. An expression like a grin came slowly
over Sylvia's face as she turned back to the priest. That's mother's tragedy,
she said. My husband's one of her best boys. She adores him, and he
can't bear her. She drifted behind the wall of the next room, and they
heard her tinkling the tea things as the father read on again, beside
the candle. His immense shadow began at the center and ran along the pitch
pine ceiling down the wall across the floor to join his splay feet in their
clumsy boots. It's bad, he muttered. He made a sound
like, worse than I feared,
Except resumption yoke, but on one rigid conditions. What's
this? Socially, it ought to be a p, especially
regards child, reduce establishment, ridiculous. Our position,
remake settlements and child's sole interests, flat knot house, entertaining
minimum, and prepared resign office, settle Yorkshire. But imagine
this not suit you child. Remain sister
Effie. Open visits both wire of this rough outline.
Provisionally acceptable in the case. We'll express draft general position Monday for you
and mother reflect upon follow self Tuesday. Arrive Thursday.
Lobscheid go wipe shot fortnight on social task discussion Thursday limited
solely, comma, emphasized, comma, to affairs. That means, missus
Satterwhite said, missus Satterwhite said, that he doesn't mean to reproach
her. Emphasized applies to the word solely. Why'd you take
it? Father Consett asked. Did he spend an
immense lot of money on this telegram? Did he imagine you were in such trepidation?
He broke off. Walking slowly, her long arms extended carrying the
tea tray to carry the tea tray, over which her wonderfully moving face
had a rapt expression of indescribable mystery. Sylvia was
coming through the door. So he's reading the telegram that,
the Tizjens, sent to Sylvia.
She serves the tea. They go back and forth a little bit. And then
Sylvia start missus Satterwhite starts here. Have a cup of tea, father, while
it's just right. I believe Sylvia is the only person in Germany who knows how
to make tea. There's always behind him the Roman collar and the
silk bib if you don't believe in him, while the concert went on. Yet he
knows 10, a thousand times more of the human nature than ever you can.
I don't see, Sylvia said placably, how you can learn in your slums anything about
the nature of Eunice van der Wijken or Elizabeth b or Queenie James or
any of my set. She was on her feet pouring cream to the father's
tea. I'll admit for the moment that you aren't giving me high jaw.
I'm glad, the priest said, that you remember enough of your school days to use
the old term. Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank
down again. There you are, she said. You can't really get away from preachments. Me,
for the pure young girl, is always at the back of it. It isn't, fa
the father said. I'm not one to cry for the moon. You don't want me
to be a pure young girl? Sylvia asked with lazy incredulity.
I do not, father said, but I wish that at times you remember
you once were. I don't believe I ever was, Sylvia said, if the
nuns had known I'd have been expelled from the holy child. You would
not, the father said. Do stop your boasting. The nuns have too much sense. Anyhow,
it isn't a pure young girl. I'd have you behaving like a Protestant deaconess
for the craven fear of hell. I'd have you be physically healthy,
decently honest with yourself, young devil of a married
woman. It's them that are the plague and the salvation of the world.
You admire mother? Missus Tigeons asked suddenly. She added in
parenthesis, you see you can't get away from salvation. I mean, keeping
bread and butter in their husband's stomachs, the priest said. Of course, I admire your
mother. Missus Satterwhite moved a hand slightly.
You're at any rate a league with her against me, Sylvia said. She asked with
more interest. Then would you have me model myself on her and do good works
to escape hellfire? She wears a hair shirt on lent.
Missus Satterwhite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She had been
trusting the father's wit to give her daughter's insolence a run for its money, and
she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough, he might at least make
Sylvia think a little bit about some of her
ways.
Sylvia Satterwhite is
part of the same way that, Valentine,
is on the other end, and so is Tensions
and McMaster and the priest. All these characters
are all part of the unraveling of social structure
in Victorian England in
the late, eighteenth century.
One of the challenges of understanding
and unraveling is looking at it through a lens of fact.
And we have talked a lot about the facts of World War one, the facts
of feminism, the facts of business. We talked a lot about that. But it's also,
showing it through works of fiction, and and works of fiction show the unraveling really,
really well. Matter of fact, for my money, and one day we'll do a whole
podcast on this show, for my money, the best show
that demonstrates the unraveling of America at the later
end of the twentieth century was NYPD
Blue. Sing Me a Song, O Muse, Spin Me a Tale of
Andy Sipowicz, was a great show.
And television and movies took over from novels
and plays to explain culturally the shared sense of imbalance
during that last unraveling as
they did during the unraveling described
in Parade's End. Cultural unravelings
are always confused with cultural chaos of attorney that comes after them, but that's
because human beings don't like uncertainty, and they seek to make sense of, adapt
to, and to change the world as quickly as
possible. Even Ford Maddox
Ford knew this. He actually stated that his purpose in
creating the parades and tetralogy was, quote,
the obliviating of all future wars, unquote.
He saw the world unraveling into World War one, and he wanted to stop
it from happening ever again. He wanted to use the
novel as a tool to be able to do that. Not
nonfiction, not essays, not poems, but the novel is a form to
do that. Now you could reasonably say that he had a hammer
and everything you saw was a nail, but a lot of us do
that. We're wrapping up. We're
coming around the corner here. We've talked a long time with Libby about this
book, and I wanna thank her for being on the podcast. I'm gonna combine a
couple of different things together that we have here today, and we're gonna
close out in the next few minutes.
This is an important question, I think, for our time as well. We just talked
about the rebuilding of institutions, and Libby is a a big
proponent on this show of building for the good.
She loves that. You know, building for the good thing. Right? Building for the the
good ending or the good institution.
But here's a question for us to sort of end. How
can a leader lead their people when the traditions and the institutions and
the social structures around them seem to be falling apart? How
how can they actually what's the actual practical thing that a leader
can do to guide people through the morass?
You know, part of this part of the question then part of the answer to
that question that I found anyway from my part is the leader has to
have a vision of some sort. Pick a North Star and
just go with it. And sometimes you gotta be ruthlessly
inflexible in order to make that happen.
But I don't know. Maybe Libby has maybe Libby, maybe you have a better idea
than I do. So how do you lead, you know, when things are unraveling, when
things are falling apart?
It does it does start with a solid vision,
and building towards the future. But you also have to be
comfortable, kind of applying, like,
agile practices to,
building, you know, near term and delivering mentally,
allowing yourself flexibility, to adjust
based on a changing landscape, but enough direction so
that, you know, teams know where you're heading. So
that vision for the future, continue to run the business as you know
it, tweaking around the edges, and then iterating towards
that future. Businesses always
have to deal with ambiguity, around
your customer preferences, the, you know,
macroeconomics, microeconomics.
You know, there's always a lot of different factors. But as long as
you have a strong vision,
and flexibility in how you're delivering
incrementally while continuing to run the business and
deliver great things, I think you're in a good position.
Scenario planning. Hey. I'm a strategist. I
also started in investment banking. So you always have a
good financial model to run scenarios,
and you, like, you're always measuring how
you're doing against, you know, those three different outcomes
and how you need to adjust operations and investments accordingly.
But to me, by having that strong vision as well as the
ability to adapt proactively and not
reactively, you're well positioned
to navigate navigate change.
So which temperament you're a strategist,
financial strategist, which temperament would you bet on for the
next twenty five years in America as we turn out of our fourth
turning and go into a dawn? Donald Trump calls it a gold
golden age. Right? And maybe it will be, maybe it won't be. I don't
know. None of us have lived in that
time yet. In twenty five
years, I'll be, if the good Lord allows it, I'll be 70.
What kind of temperament wins the next twenty five years in America? Is it
more like miss Wannop? Is it Sylvia? Is it Tijen's?
Is it the groveling the
groveling Mc McMaster? Like, who who wins the future?
Who wins the future to build those institutions with that vision? Who sets
that? It's with, like, you know,
some, you know, some modifying of the edges.
Okay. Why why him? Why does that temperament win?
I said, why does that temperament?
Because he's the he has a vision for what he
believes things should be, and he's willing to
work, you know, towards them kind of
without letting the noise,
you know, too much read too much direct him.
If it if you McMasters hadn't been a snake,
I actually probably think McMasters is
more aligned because he's, like, trying to
trying to build towards the future, and he sees, you know, the value
of his leadership, you know, from a society
perspective, but he sells his soul along the way. So that's not right. Like,
so I don't really see any of these characters. Yeah. To me,
it's a hero and builder mentality. So,
not right now, we have cosplay of
heroics that we've seen for the last, like, ten years.
But we're moving towards what a true hero is who's coming in and
building the institutions that we need in order to be
successful. When I say building for the
good, you know, a lot of people have
words and meaning assigned to good Mhmm. That I
wanna be very explicit about. It's not about,
it's about making hard trade offs about what you can and
can't do that will provide
good institutions, that provide goods and services
that, you know, people need and are willing to pay
for. It's providing a work environment that enables
people to thrive and not just settle.
You know, these are about institutions of excellence
where they're economically sustainable and viable on their own merit,
and they grow on their own merit, and
not out of just perceived polish and virtue.
Mhmm. Mhmm. I
think you got something there. I think I think that's
a good spot to stop, so I think I'm gonna stop there. Thank
you, Libby, for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for taking the time
to read Parade's End. I would encourage everyone to go out and pick it
up, and to kinda make your own decisions about
who gets to win the future. And with that,
well, we're out.
Well, hello.