Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200

The following is a conversation between me and Michael Malice. Michael is an author, anarchist, and simpleton, and I'm proud to call him my friend. He makes me smile, he makes me think, and he makes me wonder why I sound so sleepy all the time. And now, enjoy this conversation with Michael Malice in the Ədaləc language that I'm increasingly certain I'll never quite able to get the hang of.

Hello, comrade.

(laughs) Ələy gəlmisiniz?

(laughs) So Animal Farm by, uh, George Orwell is, uh, one of my favorite books. It's an allegory about, at least I think, about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution of 1917. So for people who haven't read it, it's, uh, animals overthrow the humans and then slowly become as bad or worse than the humans. So comrade, if we lived on this farm in the book Animal Farm, which animal would you most rather be? Uh, would it be the pigs, the horses, the donkey, Benjamin, the raven, Moses, the humans, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the dogs, or the sheep?

Um, I'm gonna go with the Milton answer, which is it's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, right?

It's better to rule in hell-

To-

... than serve in heaven.

Yeah, so I would have to go with the pigs. So I guess I'd be a cop. Um-

At the very top, so the leader, the main pig, Napoleon, versus like the-

Snowball and the others.

Yeah.

I, I would say it's not s- it's, uh, sure it's an allegory about the Russian Revolution, but I think, um, Orwell's point was this is broader towards most totalitarian dictatorships.

Yeah.

I mean, it, it, it could very easily be read as an indictment of Mussolini or Hitler or many of these others. Uh, I'm a huge, um, George Orwell fan. One of the things that I think people on the right need to appreciate is the courage of many of these ind- undisputably left-wing voices who were the strongest ones to take on, uh, totalitarianism, totalitarian communism, and the three I could think of off the top of my head who are all in my top 10 heroes of all time are Emma Goldman, uh, Albert Camus, uh, and Orwell being the third. You know, something that, uh, leftists like to throw in the face of people on the right who constantly invoke Orwell is that Orwell said, and I don't have the exact quote off the top of my head, but something to the effect of, "Every word I have written is in, should be taken as a defense of democratic socialism against totalitarianism."

Mm-hmm.

So, uh, people like Truman, you know, was obviously very hardcore, in many ways anti-communist. Uh, we like to parse things out, um, you're gonna laugh, uh, into binary fashions that, you know, left good/right bad or right good/left bad, but historically speaking, it w- does not fall away into these camps as easily as people would like. Um, and I think it is important for those of us... It takes a lot more courage, um, to fight the right from the right or to fight the left from the left because, in a sense, a lot of your countrymen or your fellow travelers are gonna regard you as a traitor to the cause. So I, I, every chance I get, I will sing the praises of these three figures, a- among others, who not onl- even if they hadn't done what they had done, just lived just amazing lives that all of us can, uh, learn from and admire and regard as somewhat a, a role model, so, uh...