Beautiful. All right. Leadership
Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 174 with
Libby Unger. A Farewell to Arms
in 3, 2, 1.
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,
and this is. Is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books
podcast, episode number 1
74. The
most famous quote from the book that
we are going to discuss today
is as follows. And you can follow along with
me if you have a copy of the book. You'll. You'll know what I'm.
What I'm quoting here when I, when I get through this, and I
quote, if people bring so much courage to this
world, the world has to kill them to break them.
So of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone.
And afterward, many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break, it kills. It
kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave. Impartially,
if you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you, too.
But there will be no special hurry.
Close quote. The last
few weeks on the show, if you've been following along the last few
episodes, we have been discussing with various guests
war, war making. And we've been attempting
to pull apart the psychology of the people who we ask
to fight wars, particularly the psychology of the
population that we ask to fight a lot of our wars.
The psychology of young men. This
is a worthwhile pursuit, as the author Sebastian
Younger made a note of in his book War, because
we will not get anywhere close to peace on earth and goodwill towards
men as we come up to the holiday season without some
acknowledgment of the violence inherent in the very
act that makes nations and. And people, and even
nation states. Now, at
the end of our cycle here, before we go into the holiday
season and cover our holiday books, we have come to
the fictionalized portion through the work of
our author today.
Now, he didn't actually fight in the war he wrote about.
Instead, he was part and parcel of a generation of young men
who. Who were broken by the war in which he served, by
what they experienced in the war and by the ways in
which the stability of the old European
aristocratic sense was shattered by the
cataclysm of a war that could probably have
been avoided. Today, as
we close on our yearly meditations,
we the Art of War and its Aftermaths, we
will discuss the themes of A Farewell to
Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Leaders. The world breaks all of us
when and if we let it.
And today on our show, we will be joined once
again by Libby Unger, back from
episode number 148 where we discuss Tender is the Night
by that other giant on the Mount Rushmore of authors of the lost generation,
F. Scott Fitzgerald. How you doing, Libby? How's it going?
Great. Fantastic to see you and be back.
Yeah, good to see you. Good to see you back. It's been a little bit,
but we're going to go ahead and and jump into jump into A
Farewell to A Farewell to Arms.
So when we look at this book and the version that I have
is is the Hemingway Library edition
published by Simon and Schuster. By the way, Farewell to Arms
is now in the public domain. So you can go get a
go go download it off Epub or
oh gosh, Project Gutenberg or any of those other any of those open
source deals Open source Open source
sources for for books. Because
you know, it was published in the, in the 1920s and initially
published in the 1920s and and it has now gone into, it has now gone
into public public domain. So again, the version that
I have has a, has an introduction and a forward
forward by Patrick Hemingway, an introduction by Sean Hemingway.
And then there's the novel. And then what makes this very interesting
is that there are early drafts, alternate endings and a list of titles
that are. That's in the back. And so the version that I have is
rich with a lot of extra information and extra
knowledge that that Ernest Hemingway brought to
brought to his his writing. And we got a chance to look at his,
look at his work. So when you open up the
book, you get into chapter one and chapter one sets the scene,
Chapter one, book one sets the scene for where we are.
With Hemingway's writing. And one of the things that you,
that definitely jumps out to me about this book is
that he sets the setting
for what we are about to do in a very rich and descriptive
fashion. He describes the summer
of the year, the plane, the village that he was living in.
He describes, you know, the big guns in the, that were being drawn on
motor cars going to the front. Of course,
Hemingway served in the, in
the, the emergency medical Corps basically for the Italian army
during during World War I and was an ambulance
driver. Okay. During that time. And so it's very much
written from the perspective of an individual who was a non
combatant and yet was asked to
pick up the pieces after combat was over.
And so you get a sense not only of
the war itself and how it is conducted in a way that you
don't get with John Keegan's First World War. Right.
Matter of fact, Keegan probably would have put Hemingway's work in A Farewell to
Arms, in with Eric Remarque and All Quiet on the Western
Front and other writers who he would probably
say, because they were not historians and they were
people on the ground, they had a very
subjective look, you know, at the war. They weren't
objectively focused. It is definitely subjective. I mean, Hemingway,
Hemingway's cynicalness, Hemingway cynicism, Hemingway,
Hemingway's bitterness, Hemingway's alcoholism.
All of this comes through, you know, in the beginning
part of. Of A Farewell to Arms.
And it sets the tone for where the book is going to be
headed as he, you know, suffers an injury
due to a. Due to a shelling that occurs
and then goes into a hospital situation and of course meets
the nurse. Well, he meets the nurse early Catherine Barkley,
but he meets the nurse, falls in love. All of these themes
are set up in the first three chapters of
Farewell to Arms. And it is a master class
in setting the tone for a novel
as you go forward. As a matter of fact, I'll just read very
briefly something that jumped out to me in. In
chapter two. Right. So just very briefly here. The next year, there were
many victories. The mountain that was beyond the valley and the hillside where
the chestnut forest grew was captured. And there were victories beyond the plain
on the plateau to the south. And we crossed the river in August and lived
in a house in Gorigia that had a fountain and many thick shady trees
and a walled garden. And it was starry of vine purpl the side of the
house. That's just one sentence. Okay, like
Hemingway is known for having short, pithy sentences, and that definitely is in
this book. But the descriptors are written in that long,
flowing. Late 19th
century prose that's designed, that was
designed to appeal to an audience that was not
cinematic. Yet cinema hadn't really
developed as a thing and of course TV didn't exist and there was no
social media. So we weren't talking about short attention span theater folks here.
Hemingway was writing for.
The main character in A Farewell to Arms. Frederick Henry is
characteristic, or was characteristic of many young men of Hemingway's generation who fought
in World War I. He does not want to be found derelict in
doing his duty. He doesn't really have the strength of will to say
no to his duty either. And that definitely
comes through in the first book. Nor does he find himself
willing or able to say no to the forces that compel him. And that's where
the cynicism comes in. Katherine Barkley, the English nurse
and love interest, is not. Is in the Same cultural
and psychological situation, but she's weirdly free
in ways that Frederick is not. And that definitely
comes through. Frederick has little interest in the
war, as I already said, as it is being conducted by the generals and
being reported on in the newspaper. This lack of interest reflects the
facts of war changing for the people waging it on the ground versus those who
conduct the movements of the people from the rear or
from the parliament. His boredom, which
also comes through in the very first chapter, I mean, Frederick Henry as
a stand in for Ernest Hemingway, is bored. He's bored with the war.
He's bored with people getting blown up. He's bored with the reporting.
He's bored with going and seeing, pardon my use of the term, but
seeing the whores in Italy. He's bored with the drinking, he's
bored with the whole thing. Right? And all
that boredom comes to a head when again he meets
Catherine after being forced into inaction by a shrapnel injury
from a trench bombing. One
which, by the way, he gets a medal even though he didn't really do
anything. And this is the
cynicism, this is the thing that undergirds A Farewell to
Arms and undergirds the approach to A Farewell
to Arms. And so I guess that sets enough of the tone to where we
could start having a conversation here with Libby.
So. And by the way, this is one of the books that she really wanted
to get on the show and talk with us about, expressed a lot of interest.
In, in dissecting this and breaking this down. So. So Libby, I guess maybe
our first question to you, or my first question for you to sort of kick
us off here and move this from a monologue to a dialogue
is for you. What was the most interesting theme
out of A Farewell to Arms?
Thank you. And you know, Hemingway,
I love just kind of as I, I did F.
Scott's Fitzgerald, but for different reasons. And he
always describes as human nature.
And reality as it is, not as we wish it were,
but not in a cynicism way, but as you kind of said, in
a theatrical way. And the,
the theme that resonated the most
was kind of that meaninglessness and brutality of war
that, you know, the front lines and with that
those on the front lines see but,
you know, feel they have no way to escape. And then those
kind of in charged and far removed from
the. The brutality of war make it
appear to be something that should be
celebrated and honored. And the,
the breadth of space between.
Those leading the war and those actually at the front lines.
And that feels Very resonant, you
know, with life today.
That many of us started to see with great
clarity beginning in around 2020.
Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I think that.
Well, I mean, we, we kicked off our whole
coverage this, this sort of cycle with John Keegan's the First
World War. And I am consistently,
I've said this before on the show, I'm consistently fascinated by World
War I because I think it sets the template
for a lot of the modern sort of, and even postmodern.
Ways in which we've structured the world. And I think we're, we're transitioning
out of that, going through. We're going through a once every 80 year transition, which
is also once every 100 year transition. And so we're going to go into something
new. And World War I represented the breakpoint in
my brain between the old world, particularly the old
world of the Western aristocratic colonial world, which finally
fully collapsed at the end of World War II. But that was
the first real shock to the system. Right? And it
set up this idea that.
In order to be a soldier at war, you had to be somewhat cynical, right,
about. What was
happening in war or that the people
who were in the rear, who were claiming that this war was being
fought with honor were in reality, you know, engaged in some other
political shenanigans. Right. It also set up
for me, I loved it, how you talked about the breadth of space
right, between those at the front and those in the rear, and of
course, the lack of understanding that civilians have
for war. So a lot of this,
a lot of the themes that we live with in
2025, well over 100 years later
now, I mean, they're just der. They're just the things that we understand,
they're just, they're just sauce for the goose. And Hemingway,
along with Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos and Ford Maddox
Ford, we covered Parade's End, you and I did,
you know, and yes, to a certain degree, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude
Stein, you know, those, those authors as well, laid
the foundation for how we think about the modern world. And so World War I
is an incredibly impactful war that gets almost no
play. And Hemingway was right. I mean, he was right
in there with it. Like he was. So, I mean, it was, it was a.
It was a crucible in crucible act for him at the age of 18,
to go off and, and, and participate in a war.
By the way, the United States hadn't yet, you know, declared war on Germany. So
he wasn't fighting for the United States. He was going off like A lot of
Americans did. And either fighting in Canada or fighting with the Canadian
military, or fighting with the British military, or in his case, driving for the
Italians.
Yeah, go ahead. You had a thought. Why? Well, why do you think World War
I doesn't get the play?
Well. I think it's. I think it's really
complicated and because that's always
usually get out. And it's also very
simple. So the media capture
that we have in this country is around World War II
because for people
who are more progressively minded, World War II is a
cleaner war. And for people who
are more conservative minded, World War II is a cleaner war. But
World War I was a war of aristocrats and
colonialists, people who
were monarchists. It was the. The end of the old
school class system in Europe. Well, I shouldn't say
end of it, but the transformation of that into something more modern.
It is also a war that. Where the
first parts of industrialization. We talked a little bit about this with Tom Libby.
In one of our episodes, but the first parts of industrialization really
came to the forefront. And there was no way to make that,
at least from an American's mind, there's no way to make that honorable. Plus,
America entered the war late, so it's not part of our national
mythology. We weren't attacked except by
U boat. U boat warfare that the Germans engaged in.
But the Germans never, like, they didn't try to blow up, you know, the Statue
of Liberty, you know, in or. Or Ellis
Island. Right. They weren't, they weren't. They weren't aggressive the way the Japanese were
at the end of World War II. Yeah. So I think World War
II has everything, regardless of which political side you're
on. And so I think it presents a much
cleaner narrative than World War I. I think you're right about
the narrative side of it, that it's a clear,
crisper narrative. World War II
around good, bad, you know,
modern enemy versus, you know,
historic enemies that are less.
Around the aristocrats and, you know, and colonialists,
although they're trying to bring that narrative back now.
But there were many. I mean, a lot of Americans
died in World War I. And, you know, and
it was basically suicide that we were sending.
Sending them into with that trench warfare.
So maybe it was that we didn't have the
technologies because the technology didn't. You know, the reason we were doing trench
warfare was because, you know, our
offensive technology didn't align with what
the defensive technologies were. And so we weren't coming out with
you as masters from A global
perspective. I was also wondering if
some of it might just have to do with, you know, just generate, you know,
generational knowledge, and we can only go back one
or two generations before we don't have anyone who lived it, who
could speak about it. You know, so that kind of
gets lost in history. But I do think the narrative piece is.
Is. Is. Is easier with good and
bad in World War II. Plus we add more television
that could be used to shape the message.
That we wanted. Right.
So I think that's probably a piece of it, but, yeah,
anyway. Well, and I also think.
I also. I. I did want to touch on your
cynicism. I don't know that it's about cynicism of war. I think it's
skepticism of war. And we're seeing that.
Play out today in. In great
detail. And I think it has to do
with the fact that the narratives can't be controlled anymore.
And we can see. We have
visibility to that. What the front lines are seeing
around the wastefulness and meaningless.
Meaninglessness of war.
We weren't able to see that in as quite as rapid,
as pervasively in detail as we are today.
So I would.
So this leads to something bad is not in our. In our.
In our notes here, but it is. It is a door that I
want to open with you. Okay. I want to ask you this question. So Tom
and I were talking about this in our episode
170. It was 173.
Yeah. The last episode for this one. Yeah. In the Earth is All that Lasts,
which is about the. The tribal war. Tribal warfare that
occurred between the United States cavalry and the Lakota
tribes in the. In the American West. Right. And
the idea. And we talked a little bit about this, but technology.
Right. So technology of. The technology
of the Gatling gun. Right.
Basically allowed the U. S. Cavalry
to. Not to put too fine a point on it, but kill a lot of
tribal warriors. Right. It also
allowed that technology allowed
northerners to kill a lot of southerners in the American Civil War, by the
way, a war that no one in Europe. I would say no one. Very few
folks in Europe paid any close attention to. Even though if you look at the
history of the Civil War, you look at how the Civil War was fought, it
was sort of a proto setup for everything that happened later on in
World War I. But anyway,
the Europeans thought that they had to corner on warfare. We were just a bunch
of provincial Americans that were fighting war that didn't. They didn't care about. Okay, that's
fine. No no, no, this is. That's cool. Well, you know,
it didn't help the British bankers, so, I mean, why would they care?
So anyway. I'm not going to go down that road,
ladies and gentlemen. You can, you can go with me down a little bit later
on. That's another episode altogether. But the point that Tom and I were making about
technology is that as we have progressed over 100 years,
technology has gotten better and the number of
casualties in war has decreased. So, for instance,
the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Platoon in the Korengal Valley
in 2007-2009 lost 50 guys in the
Korengal Valley, a valley that. And this was in Sebastian Younger's
book War, a valley that the British,
the Russians, and even Afghan, even people in Afghanistan, tribes
in Afghanistan wouldn't go into that valley. We went into that valley,
we held pieces of that valley, we beat Taliban
fighters. And we only lost 50 guys.
Forget the, Forget the, the morality of it for just a minute. At a
military level.
That'S astounding. That's astounding. And when you read
war, what you read about is young men
firing off, you know, the 50 cal. And I've.
I fired a 50 cal before. It's, it's kind of an amazing weapon.
And it gets so hot that they have to. They have to pull it
apart and they can reassemble it in the middle of a
firefight and keep right on going, which is just
nuts. That's just. That's just nuts. Insane, right? And only lose 50 guys
over the course of two years, by the way. Now, that's not to say that
every death was not meaningful and every death was not impactful,
but if that valley had been attempted to be taken in
World War I, you would have lost thousands of guys.
Thousands. It would have been like the Somme. The British lost 60,000
soldiers at the Somme. Insane. An
insane number of people. Like, if we lost people like that in war.
Please give me a break. We wouldn't tolerate it. And so what
we see, and this is what Tom and I were talking about, I wonder if
over the course of the next 20 years, as drone technology, cyber
warfare, even robotics comes more online
and becomes more acceptable. I, I wonder if the
American appetite for war will continue to decrease
as our technology, our technological, you
know, comes. Becomes so much. Our technological prowess becomes so
much larger. And
fundamentally, will we.
Well, guys like Hemingway, just being anachronism, you know,
part of a past that, to your point, no one can remember
and that now doesn't matter. And I, I don't Know, and
Tom and I couldn't really come to a conclusion on that.
But I do see that happening.
Or if I follow the trend lines and look at the patterns, you know what
I mean? I. I
think it. Does the appetite for war decrease?
I don't. You have to look at what the
underlying reasons are for war. I just think what we're seeing is a
transformation of. Of what it is and what the
expectations are, you know, from a
war as a defensive or offensive.
Act. And with drones.
In theory, if you don't have a defensive mechanism
against it and there, you know, and your enemy has a
stronger offensive mechanism, then our appetite could
increase. Right. Like, if we're. If we're getting
attacked with. With drones and have, you know.
And are sterile. Against
being able to fight back, you know, then, you know, then we would have an
appetite for it. But the. I think the bigger question
is, do we have an appetite for fighting ourselves
or using someone else to fight on our behalf?
And that I. Yeah, that. I don't know.
When I worked at a defense contractor in
2010, obesity
was a massive national defense crisis.
If you look at where we are today in 2025,
obesity is an issue, but you have a lot more.
National defense elements for a national defense crisis,
which goes to. The
entitlement, laziness, all those types of things that you tend to see in the
fourth turning. You know, that
they're trying to fight with the disinformation, you know, disinformation,
you know, campaigns. Because we know we have a national
defense crisis. That's great. Yeah. That's not about the physical
will. It's the emotional, you know, the emotional will
to fight. So I took this further than just
the technology piece. No, no, no. It
really did. Right. Yeah. No, no, I think it all. I think it all plays.
As long as you have the right. As long as you have the offensive
posture, as long as your offensive
posture. Is greater than your
opponent's defensive posture, then you're
fine. But if we have an asymmetric
risk. You could see a lot of
Americans wanting, Wanting more.
Well, and. And that asymmetric risk, it's interesting that you brought up
that term because one of the things, One of the doors
that World War I opened up was the
door to. The front lines
being in a city or among a
civilian population. And we have marched
ruthlessly to the logical conclusion of this.
When, as I brought up a couple episodes ago,
when in the most recent
Russia, Ukraine war, the Russians are parachuting into the
Ukrainian airport and Ukrainian people were just
Shooting them out of the sky.
That's the civilian well. And you see this with cyber warfare.
Exactly. See this with. Oh yeah, you see this with drone warfare.
So that, that, that. What are we now, fifth
generation? I guess now fifth generation asymmetry,
where the population of a country
is just as much of a viable military target
as its material, as its land, as its
possessions, as its economic system, as its communication system.
Da, da, da. Now just pushes the front,
and you talk about obesity, pushes the front.
Directly into the house of all those people who are obese and have no will.
And, and I don't know what you do with that. I don't
know how that all plays out.
I do know that at some point we have
to sort of.
Acknowledge it, I guess. I don't know. I actually
think maybe there's a bigger question that just gets
into nihilism and.
You know, is have people kind of.
Lost that will to even want to fight to
live? Right. So war ultimately is
driven by a willingness and a desire to
survive and to protect.
Right? Yeah. So
that will get. That gets into some of the other questions that we've teed up,
which is, you know, why do. You know, why do we go to
war? Why do men, you know, why do men fight?
And you know, do we. Have we lost that
2mil 2 billion year wiring? Has that
been overwritten to a place where we
have a lack of will to. Or
will to fight and to, to survive?
Did I. So, I mean, for you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no. It's never, it's never too far. No, no, no, no. It's never too far.
Might be too far for the listeners, but it's never too far for me. No,
no.
No, I. So, okay, you talk about 2 billion year
old wiring. Okay.
You can't override that with a thousand years
of civilization. It. It just doesn't work. The numbers at
scale don't match. Right. And so
I do think people do have the ability to fight
to live. I also think that.
And we saw this during, most recently during COVID
this was the test. We saw this most recently during COVID We
saw the separation between
people who were. Willing to
go along with whatever the system said. We're talking about systems here in a minute.
Whatever the system and the man said versus people who were
like, hell no and get away from me right
now. To your point, I did think, and I've talked about this with other guests
on the show, I did think that
pre2020, I thought exactly what you're thinking. I Did think
we're done. Like we don't have it in us anymore. And then Covid
came along and really pushed people and we found out who was going to
stick and who was going to allow themselves to be
pushed. And that was incredibly enlightening at a
whole bunch of different levels. And you and I have talked about this on the
show. We don't need to go into Covid again. But like, that was incredibly
enlightening for figuring out who was going to stick and who wasn't.
And so my question is not is that 2
billion year old wiring gone away or ground
down because we have TikTok or whatever
or, you know, doordash. My
question is, what is the crisis that's big enough.
For that wiring to come out? Because it is all
still in there. Exactly. It's all. It's all still down in the
basement. It's just. It's kind of close
the loop on this. It's just buried underneath layers and layers of
postmodern, intellectual, emotional and psychological fat.
And what is the thing that's going to cut through the fat and
get to the. Get to the core of that?
Because I do think men. Physical contact. Men. Right.
Yeah. Right. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, I do martial arts.
I have a long background in martial arts. I have a long background in. In
the fighting arts and the combat arts and combat sports. And combat, you know, and
combat. But. But what do you call it?
Tactical sports and things like that where it's like real physical and.
Yeah. You know, I'm also an intellectual. And at the end of the
day. Well, at the end of the day, at some point, you know
my favorite line from Oppenheimer, At a certain point, you have to move from theory
to practice. You got to go into the thing.
And going into the thing. Is.
For modern people is very hard. It's very hard to push them into the thing.
And for. And even for Hemingway's generation, and I didn't bridge into this part. This
is the last point I'll make on this that we can go back to the
book, but on Hemingway's generation. So they began the
trope of the lost generation, which of course Gertrude Stein tagged them
with. But it was. This was the trope of.
People who were so exhausted by the trauma of Name your thing here
in the blank. Which for them it was World War I, which was a genuinely
traumatic event. Um, but you could put the
Russian Revolution in there, or the 1918 Spanish
flu, or the collapse of the
Habsburg Empire or the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
or whatever Gallipoli. You put whatever the hell you want in that blank.
But they began the trope, or the trope began there, of
this traumatic thing has happened to me. Now my entire life is off the rails.
Now I can't deal. And.
The reason the lost generation was able to produce artists is because
I think artists and industrialists and family
people, because they sell enough of the old wiring to just sort of power through
that. What we're missing is the old wiring
on the old resilience to power through the things to do the things.
That's the other trope that came out of World War I that has now become
refined in our time. You know, now we're down to.
I have ADD and so I can't work an entire day because
I got to go home at like one o' clock or whatever.
And I picked an innocuous one there. There's plenty of other examples I could pick
that are less innocuous than that. But I don't want to get Libby
in trouble. Yeah.
I always get in trouble with you. But
I actually, I kind of agree with you that what we've seen over the last.
Like five years and more specifically the last three
or two, is that group that
appeared.
I wouldn't say unmotivated, but complacent.
Let's just put complacent and going along.
My perception was that they was maybe more 80% of
society. But as they're kind of faced with a
reality that doesn't appeal to them
and their fight instinct and survival instinct
starts to kick in, I actually think we're down to maybe about
30%. You know, and that I like
the world as it is. You know, there's no there. There's,
you know, there's no you, there's. It's futile to try to change it.
You know, yada yada, yada. Those are the folks that's like
the Leviathan fighting for life is like. They're so
hell bent. Excuse my. My English. They're so hell
bent on maintaining the world as it
is. But they'll be
pushed with new elements of reality that get their
survival instinct, their base survival
instinct moving. So that will ultimately change again.
Right. Well, and I also wonder if we are. I mean, we're the first generation
that's able to. We're literate enough with enough
communication technology to talk to each
other. To your point about narrative breaking, narrative structures earlier.
In ways that.
Yes, people were literate in the past. So they didn't have the communication structure. Right.
Or they had the communication structure, but they didn't have the literacy.
Right. We are, in the last 25 years, we're at
that apex of, like, the. The literacy. Enough
literacy and communication, enough of a communication
structure for people to begin to break narratives. Right. To
your point about. About sort of narrative control
and the 30% of people who. Who are still
thinking that the narrative
control lies in the past, with
past levers being pulled to ensure
narrative control, those people are being disrupted, being disrupted left. And right.
Now. The thing is, you have narrative control. Well, no, first
you have K fabe, which is happening of all the time. You have a
psyop that's going on all the time. Then you have the
narrative that's underneath the psyop, whatever that narrative
is. And it's kind of hard to fight through the psyop, the signal versus the
noise, as they say in business. Right? And you got to find the
signal inside of the noise. Once you get that, then you got to go below
that and figure out what the real problem is. And so the challenge is
not. I think in our time, the challenge is not literacy, because people can read
the words, but the challenge is comprehension.
Can they. Do they understand what they're reading? And that's sort of
where I. That's sort of where I get off the boat, you know?
Yeah, it does get too complex. I mean, you just have to be able to
kind of try to inoculate yourself from, if you know
how persuasion. What the persuasion tactics are, you can
start to see them, and then. Then that helps a little,
right? It does. It helps a little bit. You know, we're all human.
We're all human. I do think in today's
world, not as many Bolsheviks would be killed.
No, no. Because they would have woken up sooner,
right? Oh. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. I mean. Oh, my
God. I mean, like, on the one hand, Lennon would
have had a field day with Twitter.
Yeah. Oh, my God. You give that guy a phone and the ability to tweet,
that guy's unstoppable. Well, no, he. He would be perceived as
unstoppable. But then you give Trotsky a podcast
for a while, right? But Trotsky was much more of a podcast guy. Like, he.
He. He would have gone off and done all. And then your.
Your. Your. Your. Your sort of.
You're sort of. Your sort of rando, kind of
unpredictable element is Stalin, because I don't know where he would have
fallen out. I have no idea with that guy.
But, you know, you. You look at
the Russian Revolution as An example, you know, one of the knock on effects of
World War I or knockoff effects, right.
It. It is. It's really hard to hold a revolution today
in any part of the world. It's really hard to hold a revolution.
And it's not because the revolutionary elan doesn't exist. It
does. The elon still exists. It's still there. But.
Well, we're seeing this right now with
the. The mayor elect of New York City. I wasn't going to talk about
this guy at all, but like, this is the example, right? He's got the revolutionary
law and he's got the beard, he's got the youth, he's got the, the appropriate
jacket, you know, whatever, it's fine. And
the thing is, the 30 of people who control things in New York City are
still going to bring them in the back room and back and knock them around
exactly like. And they're going to tell them what's
what and then they're going to throw them back out front, right?
And be like, go ahead and do the song and dance because we're telling you
to do the song and dance. And that, that cynicism,
right. Or maybe skepticism was a term used. I'll use the term skepticism.
The skepticism.
Is beneficial and, and the skepticism is what saves the
Bolsheviks from being killed. I think that's what. Exactly. That's
what, that's what prevents them from being. From being killed. So.
All right, all right, let's. Yeah, let's get back to the
book. Back to A Farewell to Arms. Let's go back to the book. So
we're gonna pick up in book two.
And each book, I mean, there's five books in, In. In a Farewell Arms,
it's divided up into five parts. And so we're going to pick up in chapter
22, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna just
read just a little bit of a piece here, a couple paragraphs. So.
Frederick, the thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway character,
had. Had been out and
he. He.
He was in bed with jaundice, right? He'd acquired jaundice. This was after
he had been. Had. Had his surgery and was beginning to
recover and go through physical therapy for the shrapnel wound.
And now we have this. And I pick up one day while I was
in bed with jaundice, Ms. Van Campen came in the room, opened
the door into the armoire and saw the empty bottles there.
I had sent a load of them down by the porter, and I believe she
must have seen them going out and come up to find some more. They're
mostly vermouth bottles, Marsala bottles, Capri bottles, empty
Chianti flasks and a few cognac bottles. The porter had carried out
the large bottles, those that had held vermouth of the straw covered
Chianti flasks and left the brandy bottles for the last.
It was the brandy bottles and a bottle shaped like a bear which had held
kumal that Ms. Van Campen found. The bear shaped
bottle enraged her particularly. She held it up. The bear was sitting
up on its haunches with its paws up. There was a cork in its glass
head and a few sticky crystals at the bottom. I
laughed. It is Kumel, I said. The best Kumel comes in those
bear shaped bottles. It comes from Russia. Those are all brandy bottles, aren't they? Ms.
Van Campen asked. I can't see them all, I said, but they probably are.
How long has this been going on? I brought them and brought them in
myself, I said. I have had Italian officers visit me frequently and I've kept
brandy to offer them. You haven't been drinking it yourself, she said.
I have also drunk it myself. Brandy, she said. Eleven empty bottles of
brandy and that bare liquid Kumel. I
will send for someone to take them away. Those are all empty ball. Those are
all the empty bottles you have for the moment. And I was pitying
you having jaundice. Pity is something that is wasted on you. Thank
you. I suppose you can't be blamed for not wanting to go back to the
front. But I should think you should want. You would want to try something more
intelligent than producing jaundice with alcoholism.
With what? With alcoholism. You heard me say it. I
did not say anything. Unless you find something else, I'm afraid you will have
to go back to the front when you are through with your jaundice. I don't
believe self inflicted jaundice entitles you to a convalescent leave.
You don't? I do not. Have you ever had John dismiss Van
Campen? No, but I have seen a great deal of it. You notice how
the patients enjoyed it, I suppose. Just better than the front.
Ms. Van Campen, I said, did you ever know a man who tried to disable
himself by kicking himself in the scrotum? Ms. Van
Campen ignored the actual question. She had to ignore it or leave the room.
She was not ready to leave because she had disliked me for a long time.
And now. And she was now cashing in.
I have known many men to escape the front through self inflicted wounds.
That wasn't the question I have seen self inflicted wounds. Also
I asked you if you had ever known a man who had tried to disable
himself by kicking himself in the scrotum. Because that is the dearest sensation to
jaundice and is a sensation that I believe few women ever experienced.
That was why I asked you if you had ever had the jaundice, Ms. Van
Camp, and because Ms. Van Camp had left the room
later Ms. Gage came in.
That little piece there from chapter 22 of A Farewell to Arms.
Sort of sets up my next couple of points here.
So Frederick.
Had a drinking problem, right? But even more so
than that. And Ernest Hemingway was a thinly. I.
I read this about him in the Wikipedia article that I read
up on him just to sort of refresh myself on Earnest, thinly disguised
alcoholic his entire life. Right. He really did
swim in the booze.
And by the way, it's a critical element to all
of his books, whether it's in our time, the sun also
Rises all the way out to For Whom the Bell Tolls and
even the Old man in the Sea. Right.
Alcohol was the lubricant that, that Ernest Hemingway liked.
In the case of Frederick Henry here though, having
a problem with the man was really at the bottom of the alcoholism. And having
a problem with the man is nothing new.
Bucking good advice from elders and traditional constructs is nothing
new in the world of youth either. Both Catherine and Frederick and
Catherine's nurse friend Ferguson, who was
responsible for maintaining Catherine's morality through
tears, pushed back even against the traditional
morality of their own era that demanded marriage
in the case of pregnancy. By the way, Catherine does wind
up pregnant in this book and in the story
and it is elided over. And
you don't really. No, I won't say you don't really. If you understand
something about the nature of relationships between men and women, then you understand exactly
what happened because there is no new thing under the
sun. Now Catherine, one of the things that jumped
out to me and I pointed this out to my wife interestingly enough, who is
very passionate about neonatal and early childhood
care and was also my wife was also an art teacher for many
years and all this kind of stuff. And so one of the
things I pointed out to her as I was going through this book was the
amount of drinking that Catherine did. And she had
consumed a lot of alcohol in her pregnancy. A lot.
And it isn't clear this is the primary driver for
spoiler alert. The baby dies. The baby's death.
But even back in the day, fetal alcohol Syndrome. And I had my
wife tell me this was, was a thing like people did actually know what that
was. And all these barriers and boundaries
in tradition, wisdom, sexual behavior and carousing. Hemingway
astutely observes and documents the rejection of all of them, while
portraying those that serve as guardians and gatekeepers as stuffy, quote
unquote, out of touch hypocrites, or even weirdly enough, as attempted
murderers. The people who tried to shoot him when he
escaped the, the carbon Ari who were going to send him back to the front
and then jumped into the. Jumped into the water to escape.
And so it comes to this question which we are at, at the end of
the Fourth Turning, as Libby just brought up. And I think it's a question that
the, A Farewell to Arms at the end of that
last Fourth Turning opened up a revolution that now we are
at the end of, at the end of this fourth Turning.
And the revolution is one that has torn down tradition
and has torn down wisdom. Even the conversation that I was having with the
client before, a kind of like a client before I came on to this, this
episode today, before I recorded this episode today, was around
fundamentally, how do people who are older mentor people who are younger
when, when the people who are younger are so radically different.
Now than they were in the past. So
I guess the question is, let's start with this one. Tradition, right?
Living. What, what is the role of tradition?
Like. Tradition matter. Why should we
care? We're coming up on Thanksgiving. I mean, we have very
few national holidays. I've said this in America, we probably really only have two. We
have July 4th and Thanksgiving. That's really the two.
Other than that, we've kind of thrown out everything else.
We, I, I mean, I personally, I struggle to celebrate my birthday.
Like, you know, like what.
We, we are, we are a revolutionary country in that way, where we have
eschewed all traditions and everything's new all the time. And
yet traditions provide an anchor
when everything else is going to hell. And, and Hemingway's
generation was the first generation, even before the 60s generation that
questioned all those traditions, questioned all those bromides, questioned all that
wisdom and said, hell no, we're going to do something else. You know, because this
war was so traumatic. That was the thing. This war was so traumatic. We have
to go do something else. Now we're at the
logical end of that again. So can we.
Does tradition still have a role? Can we recapture traditions? Can we remake
traditions? This is one of my how do we build coming out of the Fourth
Turning questions. So go Ahead. I'm
rambling a little bit here, but go ahead.
I, yeah.
I agree that tradition.
Brings about an element of certainty and cycles.
That are important just from a perspective of predictability,
you know, and they add stability in a world that is constantly
changing. Change is a constant that we
can't control. So they offer a realm of stability
on the most basic level and predictability around like
cycles.
But I look at tradition more around principles and
practices that have been tested and tried.
As mechanisms and guidance for a
life that you, that you a thriving life versus just in
a surviving life. You know,
and many, you maybe not
expressly but implicitly just are seeking
to survive and put policies out to help people
survive, like the homeless, you know, like homeless,
homeless. It's just about surviving but not thinking about policies
that will help people thrive. And so for
me, you know, like religious traditions
or community traditions are those
things that will help us to thrive if we follow, you know, if we
follow them principles and practices.
And if we don't follow them, you know, life may be a
bit harder and more challenging. So
I, I read that and interpreted it more around principles
and practices. I think, you know, I.
The, the story and lessons of the seven,
the seven deadly sins. Like I've brought that up before,
but that never has become more of a
practical lesson around why those seven deadly
sins can destroy a society. But what
you see at, you know, where we and the Western world are today
is those seven deadly sins, you know, aren't
explicitly, you know, celebrated and
embraced, but they're ex, implicitly celebrated and
embraced based on a lot of the policies that we see that our
governments, politicians, media, et cetera,
push. So
do you simply, you know, traditions and
practices should be about elements.
Elements of life that offer some predictability, that
reduce the downside, reduce downside
risk around challenges in life and help
you and it, and help, if
you follow them, move you towards a life where you can
thrive. So people who are,
let's talk a little about class for a minute. Yeah. People who are in a
certain class in America will
make public pronouncements about certain things,
particularly around traditions that, to your point, are focused
around principles and practices that reduce the downside.
They will make certain statements about those principles and practices.
And yet when you look at their lives, there's a massive disconnect between
those statements and the way they live. So case in point, I'm going to give
you an example. You will have a Hollywood couple,
and I'm just using Hollywood as a cultural example, who
will say something like, oh,
God, I love this. We won't get married until
everyone can get married. Okay, cool,
fine, whatever. Which is the. The stupidest
public statement you can make. But okay, the people made that way back with prop.
Whatever it was back in the day with California with gay marriage. Right. Okay.
Co. And then
the people who say this will go get
married. At the county clerk's office
or something like that. I don't know. And they will
treat their marriage as a. As a traditional
marriage where they wouldn't drop the word
divorce if you paid them
more than they get paid to show up on a Hollywood movie set.
They'll be married until they kill each other. And you
talk about narrative collapse. The part of the cultural
narrative collapse is the elites.
In entertainment and
culture, even in politics, you see this, Although not as
much, but it's there. Business.
You were a business podcast, too, right? They will talk
a good game about what everybody else should do,
but the rewards on the principles and practices they want to keep for themselves. And
I'm not the only person pointing this out. I mean, I think Charles Murray's running
around. I think he's got a new book out. He's running around doing the interview.
The interview. You know, fold
a roll. Talking about this in his new. In some book that he's written.
Doug Wilson, the theologian out of Moscow, Idaho, has pointed this out. Before,
the elites were cultural gatekeepers, and they pulled up all the gates and ran into
the field and set them on fire. But then they built new gates around
their own houses. You've also seen this in the last few
years with conversation around immigration. Right?
You know, the people who want immigration or the people who want to pay Esmeralda
to come and babysit their kid, but.
But they don't care that Esmeralda is taking the job
of some working class woman down the street because it's a
class issue, right? Not a Esmeralda issue.
Okay. I'm saying all that to say this. How do
we. How do we rebuild traditions around principles and
practices? If to your point about the seven deadly sins, if even the
elites won't even say, hey.
I understand that LGBTQ people want to get
married. And based
on traditional morality. The morality. I'm living
with my wife or my husband and our 2.3 kids, and we
won't get divorced unless, like, until Jesus comes back, just
to use a metaphor here. What'S working
for us is the principle and practice that should be working. So
it's nice that there's all these other people out here on the edges, but the
Principle and practice. We're. And by the way, you could look at our lives. We
have millions. We live in this big house. We're on vacations to cattle,
cattle, whatever in Italy every year. Whatever. We have
the things. So if you want to have these things, you got to live this
life. But no, no, no, no, no. That's not what the elites say. What the
elites say is, and, and Hemingway's group with
the lost generation was kind of the same thing. You know, what the elites say
is, oh well, you can live this sort of debauched. He.
But the actual practice of their lives is not
that. And that's part of the narrative collapse
that people are seeing, I think. And I don't know how you construct
traditions inside of that narrative collapse. I don't know how you rebuild out of that.
I think it's one part of it. Yeah, I, I agree
it's one part of it. And I don't think. Yeah, the answer is
necessarily. Yeah, I mean it is rebuilding the
traditions, but more importantly, it's exposing the
hypocrisy. You know, I, I always bring up the
USC. Interest. Entrance
exam. You know,
entrance exam scandal. Less should
be right. You should pay less attention
to the people being convicted of the crimes and more
about how it's another example of
laws for thee and not for me. So
the principles of making school available to all
is great until my daughter can't get in. And then
I'm going to make sure that I, I cheat the game and
grease the. Grease the school skids of my friends
in high places so my kids get into. Take that
valuable space. You know, from someone
who probably had more merit and was more deserving of
it. You know, so for me it's more about exposing.
Kind of these hypocrisies and.
Demonstrating that, you know, one is. Yeah.
Yeah, first then you
discredit the folks who are saying
these things that are popular and.
In the elite circles, you know, it's
luxury beliefs types of things. Right. Yeah. You expose
them for not being what. They say.
Not, not practicing the
true. The good things that are practicing the good things that they
espouse and violating the
good things they espouse because it's inconvenient. You know, I will
talk about the left doing this the most, which is they love
laws when they favor them
and then they fight laws and want to change the rules when
they're inconvenient. Right. I mean the, the right does it. But
you can always go back to. Yeah, the Bush
Gore election and mid game they wanted to change
all the rules because they weren't going to get the outcome that they wanted. Right?
Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, but I think at the
end of the day.
Every, if we focus on outcomes, focus on
people who are doing well in life. And I look at doing well
in life as am I satisfied and
happy in my life. First look at who they are.
Then you look at the attributes of their life.
Did they have a good education? Do they have challenging jobs? Do
they. Participate in, you know, in
community and, and in service of others instead of in service to
self? Do they have children?
You start putting together, you know, studies
that say, hey, who are those who are actually satisfied with
life? And then look at those who are
unsatisfied in life and start looking at the different
factors and how they express community,
how they express, express.
What kind of education they had, what type of family life they had.
And you can start doing a correlation, right? We'll
start to say, hey, maybe some of these traditions,
principles and beliefs that, you know, that
have been. That
you are viewed negatively from the, you know, the cultural elite
are actually the things that work for you and make you
a happy, successful person.
So one other thought I had on this, while you've been talking,
if you hang out in any online. Area,
you've probably seen this. I have a feeling it's, it's filtering
out everywhere. It's not just in the quote unquote, alt right spaces,
whatever the hell that means, because other people are starting to
write. I know, 80% of the country.
I know, I'm, I, whatever, I roll my eyes too. So you and
I are both of the same generation, right? Yeah. And,
and so there is a generational thing that's happening here and
I wonder how much of this is. Part
and parcel of, to your point about hypocrisy.
Right. So one of the things that frustrates me about putting out hypocrisy, it drives
me absolutely crazy, is I could spend an entire
career pointing out the hypocrisies of
political or social elites. I, I could spend all the,
all day doing that. And.
While interesting and probably valuable, this is my problem
with like Matt Walsh on the Daily Wire or
even Bill Barr to a certain degree, although he's kind of backed away from that
because he's going in a particular, different, particular direction on hbo.
But pointing out hypocrisies.
While interesting. Doesn'T lead
to where the space where I'm at. No, for me, I
view it as another form of deconstruction. Right. Which again is
fine. You need it. And. And I
wonder how much of this is going to naturally end as
we get to. And this is where the online thing
comes in. Now we get into the. The online
anticipation of the end of the baby boomer generation,
because if you go to certain spots online, the amount
of.
And as a person who's Christian and as a person who.
Who believes in the Old Testament ideas
and New Testament ideas, that maybe it might be a good idea to listen to
your elders who actually have wisdom. The throwing out with the baby of the
bathwater of the boomer generation I see happening in a lot of online
spaces.
It's one of those things that makes me internally pull up short,
because while I understand the gripe
with the boomer generation, my mother's a boomer, my
father was a boomer. Like, I mean, I understand, I get it.
Wishing them dead. So that
these traditions, right, so that these traditions can somehow be
rebuilt in this magical vacuum.
Is. Is silly in the extreme.
And yet I see some of this penetrating out and I'm like, what
are we doing here? And I. I wonder if this is just the natural
sort of cycle part, right? Yeah, Well, I wonder if this is a natural sort
of cycle part, but I also wonder if it
isn't a bit of. A bit of
an inability to do the thing that happens after deconstruction, which is
the hard part of proposing, like you just did,
proposing this is how we actually build to your point. And you
say this in every single episode. I'm sure you're going to say towards the end
today when I ask you your final thoughts. How do we build for the good?
Right. How do we move forward for the future? Right.
You could deconstruction, point out hypocrisy. I'm sorry, I've used that three times. You can
point out hypocrisy all of the time, but it
doesn't just lay at one generational, one generation's feet. It's
everywhere. And we got to be intellectually honest about that.
Yeah, but the way the, the way that it is addressed, this is
kind of done in a fragmented, unstructured
way with, like, identifying, you
know, the, the hypocrisy or inconsistencies,
you know, of one individual, you know,
instead of stepping back and looking at a full system and
just saying, like, it, you
know, what they're saying and what they're doing
are two different things. What they're. Why don't we focus on
what they're doing and the outcomes that we're getting and the
outcomes that we're getting from what they're doing. Doing are not helping
society. And I measure that by are we thriving?
Can we thrive without government intervention? Right.
Yeah. And then what are those
things that we are actually doing that
are consistent with people's words that are having the outcomes that we
would measure. That, you know,
outcomes that demonstrate a thriving society. And we have
to, we have to define what thriving means. But one of the
elements is that I feel empowered.
To create a life in which I
can provide for my family, I can provide
for my community. And
jobs that are challenging and
pay me what I'm worth. At the end of the day,
a thriving society is one that can thrive without government intervention or
minimal and, you know, government intervention. I
think we should do a study. I think, I think we should, we should partner
and we should do a study. I think that that's worth looking at because. Right.
I, I wanna.
Because one of the things, one of the things that the struggles that I'm having
right now is you get that, you know, they'll call them the woke. Right.
I don't know what it is. But, you know,
whenever there's a single answer or single solution
like marriage or religion, you're missing
like the nuance and you're shutting people
out. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm
not saying that, like, let me be very clear. I
do think that I'll be very clear and very
simple. Yeah. I do think that if you choose to have children.
The best way to raise those children
is in a two parent
male and female household.
Agree. Which provides stability for those children.
Because children, for two reasons. One, children don't care
about adults. Pathologies.
Like. Let me be very clear about that for people listening to the show. I've
never really said this on the show before. I've never really kind of gone into
it this way. But I do say this in my private life to people.
Children don't care if your marriage is on the rocks.
They don't care if you don't like that person that you married. They don't care
that you woke up yesterday and you wanted to strangle that person with a pillow.
They don't care. Children care about none of that. Children care about
stability and safety and security.
And in order to impart traditions to people, in order
to impart wisdom to people, in order to impart, as
Libby just said, principles and practices to people that will be
replicated across time, we must give those people
stability and security. Now, does life happen?
Sure. People find love and people lose Love and
people grow old and people die and people fall out of
the. Fall out of the romantic feeling and people fall back into it and people
get fat and people lose their hair and people have weird diseases and,
and you know, people have health, health, health, health, health, health struggles
and people, I don't know, fall down and have accidents
that are completely and tragically unfortunate. And we used to
have a tragic view of human nature where we said, yes, all of those
unfortunate things will happen, all those unfortunate edge cases will happen, people
will get, go have a lot of money and people will go bankrupt and people
will have no money. And it. All of that stuff, while
interesting.
Doesn'T matter if we want to preserve the stability of traditions across time.
What matters if we want to preserve the stability of traditions across time is.
Two parent male and female married couple raising kids.
Now that seems reductive to our modern ears
and to Libby's point, there are other factors that
slide into that economic, social,
class based, racial. All of
these other factors come in. And yes, we should
nuance all those other factors out, understanding
that the core principle underneath is.
One parent, two parents, married,
raising kids like this is the core principle underneath. And so,
and so our single mothers doing. Our single mothers doing yeoman's work for
sure. Because we always have to say this. The single mom's always entering in.
Oh yeah, single moms are doing yeoman's work for sure. Okay. And.
Is it a tragedy that women make more than
women, not, not all women, but some women make more than men and men resent
them for it? Sure, it's a tragedy. Is, is
abuse emotional, psychological, physical. Is that something that we have to deal
with, we should deal with as a society and culture and talk about between men
and women? Absolutely. And guess what? The only incubator that you're going to
actually be able to have those conversations in where those conversations are actually going to
be meaningful and build on traditions to solve some of those problems is going to
be the incubator of a two parent family.
I don't know why this is controversial. Well,
because it oversimplifies. It oversimplifies what
the root causes are with respect to why we don't have,
you know, two family, two parent households
anymore. And sure, and it's most of that
taxation and public policy and things like that. It is, but those things
are really important. And when you get into the hypocrisy of,
you know, like the elite who will say, you
know, you don't, women like you don't need
to be married, you don't need to have children, you know, go
out and just sleep with everyone and get a job and take care
of yourself and you know, and men do the same
way. Yeah,
yeah. There's no run right answer. But the
solutions are hard to
stomach for groups that on one side of the
fence they think that addressing housing
affordability or single family
households is through government funding
and taking on more debt and all that kind of thing.
And then the, you know.
You know, that's who we have to deal with more is
around a lot of the liberal policies. Oops, sorry, did I lose
you? I think we did. You froze.
Is that me or you? Oh, there you go. Go
ahead. Okay. But I'm all, I am
all for the dual, you know, the
two parent household with one, you know, with one
income, you know, one head of household. What we
have to deal with is why we
no longer can have a single head of household able
to. Right. So this is where I want. These are the policies that we need
to address. Right. The other is around
housing affordability. It isn't a 50 year
mortgage. That is essentially leasing. It's how
do you reduce the cost of a house
through, you know, through regulation, like
reducing regulation, changing codes, all that kind of fun stuff.
The government answer and the rich people's answer
is the one that keeps them employed and keeps you at their
tit, which is. Right, the tax.
Yeah, tax guys, bankers, they all want you to take on more
debt because they make a hell of a lot more money. The regulators make a
lot of money by staying employed. Not necessarily a lot of money,
but they're employed by managing regulations.
You know, lawyers and accountants all
make a lot of money by having a lot of complexity, you know, in the
system. So affordability has, you know, the
government's answer. And a lot of the.
People outside of the homeowner are incentivized to
just provide you, you know, provide you access with debt and not actually,
you know, and not actually make homes more
affordable by reducing overhead and regulations and
all the different codes that add costs to your
house so you can't afford it. Then we look at
wages and we have the H1B visa.
You know, not crisis but argument that's
going on right now. And any of us who have been in tech
know that it's a labor arbitrage. Oh yeah,
right. It, it's, it isn't, you know, it should it. If
you were to use it the way that it was initially intended, it was
for highly skilled
individuals to come in, like the guys who are leading
Google right now. Like that. Yeah. You know,
a lot of, you know, a lot of the tech folks are
high skilled individuals from
formerly third world countries, but it's a labor arbitrage
for 99 of the H1B visas so
that companies can make a lot of money for their shareholders,
increase and expand all of their margins. And they
say that it's because the, the American workforce doesn't want to work,
but they're not willing to pay the wages that we deserve
and are required in order to live in the US
So we have a lot of compounding issues that
make it harder today than 20
years ago, than 40 years ago, than 50 years ago to have a
single head of household. Correct? Yes,
we do. And the, the mitigating
thing under all of those issues.
At the end of the, and maybe this is the, maybe this is the tension.
Right. I've been thinking about this since you've been talking, because none of what you're
saying I disagree with. I, I, absolutely no one's articulating
it. And fighting for it though. Right, right, right, right, right. It's, it's sort
of like the. The old story of the,
the blind or the old tail fable, whatever, of the blind
folks touching the elephant and one thought they were touching a tree trunk and one
was touching a rope or whatever and sails or whatever. Okay. And they
didn't realize they were all touching the same thing. Right. There
are multiple, just like with, with every single other sort of
problem that we have, there are
multiple.
Categories of distinctions inside of the problem. Right. Which creates the nuance.
And you have to figure out which category or which distinction you're going to, you're
going to work on. Right. And so I get that. I, I absolutely agree with
that. And the counterweight or counterweight or the
thing on the other side of that is still.
The individual. And what, what disturbs me most
is. And this is sort of my critique
of folks who are critiquing the boomer generation.
You still have to make individual decisions in the face of
all those headwinds. You still do. And the best individual
decision that you can make, again, this is the big if,
if you want to raise children, which is up to you, by the way.
That's not up to the state. That's still not up to. We don't live in
the Handmaid's Tale, no matter what Margaret Atwood may think.
Please give me a break. We don't live there. People still have agency.
People still have the ability to make decisions.
You still have agency with your sexuality, with Your reproductive
whatever, all that. Okay. And actually, weirdly enough, in this time in our
culture, you have more agency than ever before in the history of the world, both
men and women. It's kind of ridiculous how much agency you have.
And so the best individual decision you
can make is still the reductionist one. It really still is.
If you want to go down the road now, now, if you don't want to
go down that road, let me speak to all those folks who don't want to
go down the road, the Bill Maher folks who are listening to this right now.
Let me speak to you. If you don't want to go down that road, I
am okay with that. It is not for everybody. Please don't do
it. But then I don't want you to lecture me
about what I'm missing about your hedonistic lifestyle. I don't want
to hear it. Exactly. It's. It's almost no one
right way. There's no one right way. But there's also a principle of.
It used to be. It used to be we. What was it that we
used to call homosexuality? Like back in the 19th century, Oscar Wilde was
famous for saying this. The love that dare not speak its name. Right.
Well, okay. Well, now we have all kinds of loves that won't shut
the hell up. Exactly. And love.
Leave it in your bedroom. I don't want to worry about it. I don't care.
Right. I would rather you spend your time and your energy.
If you don't want to put it towards
children. Fine. Put
it towards fixing any of the multiplicity of problems. I would
personally start with the tax policies that cause
the warping of the economic structure, the economic incentive
structure in the United States that actually has led to the loss
of a single parent. Or not. I'm sorry, single parent, Single head of household income.
Because it's really the tax problems that have really led to all this. But we'll
leave that aside for just a second because I'm fairly reductious when it comes to
that. That leaves that piece there. But anyway, go pick any of
the multiplicity of things that Libby just talked about and work on those. Work on
those for the next 50 years if you want. Housing. I
absolutely agree with Libby. The. How the. The. The area of the country in which
I live. Housing prices have increased 113
over five years. Now, a
lot of that is driven by local property
taxes and assessments. So it's not
the federal government, it's the local
city councils, it's the unsexy school
boards, it's the local
propositions. It's those kinds of areas that you got
to get involved in. And so if you don't want to have kids,
cool, don't have children, go fix that in your local community.
And I don't want to hear that you're renting and that you don't care and
property owners need to give me free rent and Da, da. No, no, no, no,
I don't want to hear it. Take your energies and focus it on
that or focus it on, I don't know.
The fixing the policies around, around
developers and how the regulations, to Libby's point, how they have to
basically spend 60 cents on every dollar covering for regulations
and the other 40 cents they actually have to now figure out how to split
to actually build a house. You want more single family dwellings? That's the
problem. You got to fix it. By the way, those regulations are at the state,
local and federal level and the vast majority of them are at the
state and local level because states still determine real estate pricing
and local holidays still determine real estate pricing. In the United States of America
anyway, we have a nationalized housing yet. Yeah. So I think we're
in violent agreement. I think we are too on all
fronts. But you know, too often the way
things are presented. Not just in social media
but in any types of conversations, are highly
focused and singularly focused around what the
right answers are and not like barriers to
the, you know, to being able to achieve some of these
right answers. The.
Yeah, but I, and what they say is that
politicians follows culture. You know, one thing
I've been hearing from a lot of my friends who have, you know, kids in
high school and college, which is hard to believe because I'm not old enough
to have friends who have kids in high school and college, but
that they are. You're starting to see kids get engaged,
you know, in college. You're seeing a
lot more of the. And I,
I, I, I don't know what all the, the drivers are, but they have like
these pinning ceremonies that my mom used to have. Yeah.
When she was, you know, in college. And now you're seeing them again
like in, you know, in the 19, 20 year olds, you
know, so they may, yeah, this might just be that natural
cycle kind of playing out. But once people want
to have the single head of households or be able to
have a parent that stays home, park time and has a house that they can
afford, you'll start seeing them calling on their local
politicians and others to make changes. What we
need are voices like Carol Roth's and my own.
That's, you know, I'm not at Carol Roth's level clearly,
but it's talking about what are the different types of policies
that could be put, put in place to make things affordable. And it's not more
government, it's less government. Well, this gets to what
we're about to talk about with young men. So we're about to make this transition.
So one of the things that I.
I think is a long term play in America is
the. Re.
Engaging or revivifying maybe of engagement
around, around young men. This is, this is something that's critical, I
think, to getting this up off the ground in a whole lot of ways. This
is, this is nuanced and multi, multifaceted.
And A Farewell to Arms kind of opens up the door a little bit for
us to have this discussion. So let me, let me go back to the book
here. We're gonna move on to
chapter 27. And in book three.
Frederick winds up in a little bit of, in a little bit of trouble.
And he, he is.
He has a little bit of a problem, right? In chapter 27.
He, he's. He's taking a, a load
basically through and through an
advance. It eventually, eventually becomes a retreat in essence.
And um, attempts to go off the road with his, with his
ambulance, his motor coach and winds up basically in a
ditch, right? And. Or winds up in a bad, a bad situation
with, with his other two compatriots who are also ambulance drivers,
right. And eventually he tries to rescue them.
He tries to, he tries to bring them through
and it becomes a real Donnie Bro Rock, right,
that he's, that he's going through, which of course winds up eventually with
Frederick Henry deserting his position in the
Italian army, meeting up with Catherine and then
escaping to, escaping to Switzerland.
But there's something here that I, I want to point out here and it's a
conversation that he's having with, with a fellow named, a fellow named
Gino. And Gino is a. Well,
he's, he's also one of the drivers in,
in the, in the, in the ambulance corps.
And oh, by the way, I did. I've not brought up the character. I should
have brought the character earlier of Rinaldi. Rinaldi's the great surgeon. The great
war surgeon. Right, the war surgeon character. I also by the way,
watched the movie of A Farewell to Arms and had Gary Cooper in it from
like 1930, 20 something or whatever.
That Farewell to Arms needs to be updated for, for today's time.
They need to go back and that's a movie you need to remake and bring
and bring back to today. But I
listened to the radio. Yeah. Farewell to
Arms with Clark Gable. And it was
the original. It is. Listening to it was so fun.
I could place myself at the radio listening to it. It.
That's awesome. I gotta go find that. I love. I love old time radio shows.
I love all that. By the way, I also watched the. The movie
with. With my 8 year old son and it
was interesting. That movie actually hit him harder than most
things. And not because he got all the.
The intricacies. He didn't. But like he was like, oh wait, the guy just like
the baby died and the mom died and that was. He's like oh, that was
terrible. And they didn't actually. This is the thing in the movie. It's a movie
from the 1920s. So they didn't actually show anything. Right. They just
intimated all of it. So there's no graphic anything. It's
just all emotive intimation. And it hit my eight year old like.
Like we. This way. We had two days worth of conversation off of that.
So anyway, don't let your 8 year old see A Farewell to Arms with Gary
cooper from the 1920s. Don't let that happen. Anyway,
so back to the book. So Gino's talking with him and he's talking about the
Russians and Napoleon and working out military problems
in the frontier. And he's talking
about food, of course, because he's a wandering epicurean. Frederick.
Frederick Henry is. And then we have this.
I want to read this piece. So
Frederick is responding. Yes, I said it can't win a war, but it can
lose one. They're talking about food, right. And the
geno responds, we won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has
been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words of
sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain.
We had heard them sometimes standing in the rain, almost out of earshot
so that only the shouted words came through. And had read them on proclamations that
were slapped up by Bill posters over other proclamations
now for a long time. And I had seen nothing sacred. And the things
that were glorious had no glory. And the sacrifices were like the stockyards at
Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury him.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear. And finally only the
names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way
in certain dates. And these with the names of the places were all you could
say and have them mean anything.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or
hallow were obscene beside the concrete. Names of villages,
the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and
the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said
things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I
understood his being a patriot. He was born one.
He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.
That's one of those moments inside of a chapter where Hemingway
drops in some of the ideas that we've been talking about today
in a much more literary fashion. The skepticism around
war, the skepticism around honor and glory. But also
he's dropping in something I think is critical to the understanding
overall of A Farewell to Arms. He's dropping in
the. The growing maturity of. Of a.
Of a young man who's been through some experiences moving from
a place where those experiences were sold to him one way and
continue to be sold to him one way. And now he's realizing what he's
actually bought off the shelf.
As I put in my notes, it's exciting to kill people and break things. And
this is of course the thing that people are all that young men are sold
on when they go to war. But that excitement and energy,
when the system of controlling those energies corrodes and the
substitutes are hedonistic and self serving, that excitement and energy
have to go somewhere. We don't really
know why Hemingway went to war to be an ambulance driver. Maybe he didn't. And
I love this quote from, from Keegan in the First World War. Maybe he didn't
want to be found wanting in his commitments to honor and duty. Maybe
he was bored and stifled in Oak Park, Illinois with his mom, whom
he had constantly problems with in his dad, who eventually,
many years later, would commit suicide. Maybe he
wanted adventure, which again is something that a lot
of young men want. Ernest Hemingway had this great
quote about war. He said this. When you go to war as a boy, you
have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get
killed, not you. Then when you were badly wounded, the first time you lose
that illusion and you know it can happen to you.
Hemingway was injured in the war and he did lose
his illusions, as a lot of young men do. And,
and that gets to the link that ties this to Sebastian Younger's
war. The First World War and even to the Earth is All that Lasts. By
Mark Lee Gardner. Young men. Young men are still
the ones that march off to war. Young men are still the ones that we
demand fight wars. Yes. We are making
tacit moves in our culture, as are the Canadians and the great Britons,
towards conscripting young women. We are sort of wandering culturally in that
direction, and I am not in favor of that.
I'll just go on record as saying that I think that's an
incredibly bad idea. And will
have incredibly negative consequences if we do go down that road.
But it does follow logically, as I
said in the Earth at All that lasts episode 173.
It does follow logically from girl
bossing and feminism and everything else. It
follows logically on why not conscription?
And yet. And yet.
Young men are still the ones that we are going to look at out of
the corner of our eyes if they don't jump in front.
If young women are conscripted, young men will still be the ones who will be
thought less of and their status will be reduced. We see this
happened in every. This has happened in every major war that any country has ever
fought in. The young men who allow the young women to go do that
thing are thought of as being less
not only among their own patriots, their own peers,
but also among the young women and not the ones who are
necessarily being conscripted and going to war.
Why am I going down this road with this thought? Because we have to
answer the question, and it is a question for. For Libby,
as we sort of round the corner here on this episode.
Why do young men
fight? Now, I
grew up without brothers. I. I grew up in a. I grew up in a
family of sisters. So, I mean, I fought my sisters a little bit
here and there, but at a certain point.
Like, you just. You're not gonna hit a girl. Like, that's just. That's how I
was raised. Like, it's just not gonna happen. Right. And. And there was a narrow
window where we could tussle between like 8 and 10.
But the narrow. I mean, that. That window's long since closed.
And. And I have an older sister who's like seven years older than me. And
we did get into it. Like, seven years was like, that was. That was enough
to where, like, okay, now we're gonna have some even playing field. But even that
stopped. I mean, please give me a break. So I
never had a brother. I didn't. I
didn't learn necessarily all that stuff about male. Male
relationships until I was into my 20s and 30s and the
nature of that and the complications of that and all that. I don't know
what your experience was being raised Libby, and what you came up in.
But I have some ideas on why young men fight. But I want to know
what yours are. Why? Why do they. Because we have to kind of figure this
out so we can figure out how to channel these energies into
maybe other productive things other than just war.
As I cited earlier. It's a 2 billion year,
you know, wiring. Yeah.
Driven by the desire to live
and protect. First starting with oneself,
secondly, with one's seed. So
in the world, in a time when.
That. Has less need or,
you know, there's less practical purpose for that direction, you
know, we live in a safer world and protecting your seed is, you know,
is not necessarily physical. We still have
that desire and that energy to protect
is still there. You know, testosterone
is, you know, is, it's genetic through
the DNA, hormones, all of that.
I had a brother. Who
yeah was younger than me and you know, and we had at it.
But I think what I my understanding
and you know, and even I had two younger brother, I have three
younger brothers. But my understanding with most
guys is that once they get hit and it hurts.
You know, they kind of stop, you know, really egging on
the others to fight and it becomes more. Oh yeah, right.
Because once it gets real, it's like I kind of know what the
power I have and what others have. And
that's a good tension to know always is
that, you know, fighting kind of sucks but I'm willing to do it
right. You know, women don't have that
as, as much and
that, you know, women actually, if you've seen a
girl fight, like they're 10 times worse than a guy fight.
Oh yeah. There's no, there's no governor on it. That's what I. There's
no governor. There's no governor. I don't. And I, there's no
governor on it. I don't understand it. Like we, we can go into that
for the most part. But most women keep
it to words and not physicality.
But men have a DNA driven need
to fight. That energy needs to be directed
when there's no need to protect anymore. And that's what
sports are. Right. That's
what you know, as you do what Joe Rogan does.
What you know, Adam Corolla
is every single day you challenge yourself
physically. And
your redirect. There's two things that are done by that.
One is you get the physical release that you need,
you know, instead of having it pent up.
But two, you also know
what you can, your body can be put through so you
walk with more confidence in this world.
Around, you know, kind of your power and all the risks out there.
You have a sense of what a relative risk is to you
and, you know, what you're willing to, you can put yourself through
and survive. Most people who don't put themselves through any sort of
physical, like, act every day, I find those
to be the most to don't understand risk at all
and are, you know, are kind of live in fear
that all risks are similar and don't have the ability to
like, distinguish one type of risk from another. But
that's a, that's a nice little segue that I wanted to take,
but bring it back to why do men fight? And then how do we, you
know, how do we direct it? You know, direct that internal energy.
It's not stifling it and telling them to sit and be quiet. It's not
drugging them with add, you know, adhd,
drugs. It's about getting physical
in a constructive way that's empowering and
productive. So I
think, remember I said at the end of our last sort of segment there,
I said I was going to tie this into, into something that I see happening
at a more of a. Economic
level. Right. So, yeah, over the
next three to four years.
To the end of this, this current administration and, and maybe a little bit into
the next one, because it takes a little while for a
differing party administration to unwind whatever the previous administration has done.
And certain things can't, certain bells can't be unrung.
But the bell that I think has been rung by
the current administration in the White House.
Is the bell that if taken
to its logical conclusion and allowed to actually
be the thing. It is the bell that will,
that will redirect young men's energies towards
work. And I'm not talking about work in
education or healthcare or finance or consulting.
While those areas are interesting, I came out of education myself.
While those areas are interesting, those are not the areas
that Libby is talking, that Libby sort of tangentially is talking about even that
I'm talking, I'm talking about manufacturing, construction,
the trades. Those are
areas where, like in my backyard,
if an AI company is going to build a
data center, they're going to need grown men
to move concrete around. And by
the way, are those grown men going to be immigrants or
Americans? That's a whole other kind of discussion. But it
is part of the discussion. And at the end of the day,
it's still going to be young men moving concrete around. I don't care what you
talk about egalitarianism.
I have known in my life and I have seen in my life
very, very few women on construction sites.
It's 90% men.
And it's 90% young men.
Because your body collapses. My dad did
construction for a little while, my stepfather did construction for the
majority of his career. Your body just collapses.
It just, it just can't handle it. And so
those energies have to be directed to Libby's
point into a place that's fruitful. And I can't think of a more fruitful place
for those energies to be directed that into the building of a
base in America that's not located in some place
like, I don't know, China, just to pick an
example, or Vietnam or Laos or Korea.
And by the way, I'm not ignorant of the fact that we will still have
global, global, you know, global manufacturing, global industry
and things like that. I'm not ignorant to that fact, but reassuring
American manufacturing is definitely something this administration
clearly is taking very seriously. And that's with tariffs and
a whole bunch of other different things are going that are, that are happening. I
think the knock on effect from that will be to Libby's point,
reactivating that 2 billion year wiring
that still is, is inside of, is inside of young men.
Now with that being said.
I guess the other question is.
And Younger brought this up in his book War. He said this.
I brought this idea. And it is also reflected in A Farewell to Arms.
Young men need to be in a place where there's no possibility of
booze, no possibility of women. There's just
the, the work you do and then that's it. And I think we
as a culture. I don't know how I'll
frame it as and I don't know how I don't know how we as a
culture construct those kinds of environments where men can focus like that
outside of a military structure. I have long thought
that we need to bring back single gender or
single sex learning environments. I've long been in
favor of that. I, I don't think I, I don't think that's
a. I think we've got with a pendulum has swung so far in the opposite
direction. I don't think bringing that pendulum back to the other direction is going to
be detrimental in any kind of meaningful way. At least
not current, not. No, no, sorry. The detriment won't be seen
from that pendulum coming back in that way for long, until
long after we're gone. So folks that are going to live there could deal with
that then. My point is.
Rejiggering hierarchical Structures and understanding that
male hierarchies matter quite a bit and that male
hierarchies are determined by, to Libby's point.
Force and the exertion
of sometimes pain. These things
are things that we need to reiterate. I think we need to reiterate
to young men. And I think it's going to
happen, but I don't think it's going to happen because of a public policy
decision. I think it's going to happen because of just economic
circumstances and cultural circumstances. I think there will be a shift
there. I don't know what you think about that, but.
No, I, I agree. The loss
of vocations or the shaming of vocational work,
I think was a big detriment to our young men. There's
a. Yeah, there's a lot.
The whole elitist shaming of people who work with their hands, to
me is just. It's very sad.
Just because you want to work from your hand, with your hands and find it
more fulfilling than working in a cubicle at a,
at a laptop doesn't mean that you're stupid
and have less than. Or even if you're, you know, or even, you know,
the corner. Corner office is the big exec.
And there are. Yes, I think
some of the most gratifying work is creating and building
things that last and endure. And you do that through
vocational work much more so than, you
know, through these digital, you know, digital companies that are out
there. I think both, both are, Are beautiful.
But the shaming of the vocational work, I think has done a
lot to destroy, you know, men and redo
and not provide that creative physical outlet
that's productive and fulfilling, and
bringing that back will be very, very positive.
I agree. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we've. We've reached the end of our time here together.
So let me. You know, you're all
you are you. Your, Your classic thing is talking about building for the good. That's
sort of your, Your classic thing when you come on this show.
How can leaders, you know, business leaders, cultural leaders,
begin the process of restoring what we've lost as a culture?
We've kind of had a love. We said we were in violent agreement. I love
that I might borrow that we're in violent,
violent agreement about many of these areas.
There may be some disagreement, but I think we probably agree more than we disagree.
We might disagree in the, in the minutia of the details, maybe, but. But
not in the overall broad swath. But how do
leaders who, to your point, maybe are
building a carpentry Business. Right. In our listing today. Or
are aiming at the corner office and are
seeing these young men and young women, but
specifically for today, these young men sort of milling around, you
know, coming in, going to work, doing their work,
and then going home, playing video games, watching porn, coming back, wash,
rinse, repeat. Right. How do we. How do we
as leaders, male and female leaders,
connect in order to build and in order to
restore what we may have lost as a culture. How do we do that in
order to build for the good? Yeah. And, you
know. Yes. My recurring theme is like, model
the good. Don't get
distracted with the noise about what can't be done. Focus on
what can be. And as the leaders,
our power is in questions. And are we
asking the right questions? And I have up on my wall,
like, what did you create today?
What did you create today? Then other
questions. What did you improve today? Not necessarily not with
yourself, but in the world. What did you build?
What did you create? What act of kindness did you show
today? Yeah. And so those are probably
three great questions to ask. And
just focus on, you know, there. It doesn't have to
be big. It's small. Yeah. Small moments that compound
and will help you.
Model for. For the world what. Where
we need to go and what needs to be done.
I love that. I would add, as well as we
close. I think
leaders have to employ the power of
observation to see where those
moments are. This is more than just curiosity.
Right. This is a combination. Observation is a combination of curiosity and
comprehension put together
and then able to. Push that forward
and see where the possibilities are, not
necessarily in a process or a system, but where the possibilities are
in people, where the possibilities are in
relationships. If we want to mentor people who
are younger than us, we have to build relationships with them.
That is one of the things that's weirdly lacking in A
Farewell to Arms. There's a relationship,
obviously, between Frederick and Catherine. That's the driver of the novel.
But there's little relationship between the
organizing elites of the war, even down to the
generals and the lieutenants. There's very little relationship between
them and the men actually fighting. And
this is something I think that, again,
leaders have to be consistently aware of around how they're building
those relationships, how they're valuing those relationships, and how they're making those
relationships meaningful. And it starts with observation,
a combination of curiosity and comprehension.
And. And that is how I think we will be able to
channel the energies of young men, channel the energies of young
women, and be able to restore
and rebuild.
For the next turning at the dawn of the next turning,
which is where I think we are at right now.
I would like to thank Libby Unger for coming on our podcast today.
Always a pleasure to talk with her. Always a pleasure to have her on.
And, yeah, you're welcome. And. And with
that, well. We'Re out.