[CLIP] Rod Dreher: The Seductive Appeal of Communism | American Thought Leaders

Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher of the 20th century, said that when a society loses the desire to know the truth, that is a precursor to totalitarianism. And I think that has happened on both the left and the right. Remember how I said a second ago that after the attack on the Twin Towers, I was so driven by passion that when people, conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, said we shouldn't rush into this Iraq war, I wanted to dismiss him. I really didn't believe that the only way you could oppose the Iraq war was if you were a coward or a fool. And I was the fool. And I've had to think about that. It's one of the most defining moments of my life as a public intellectual, is thinking about how I allowed myself to be lulled into support for a bad war. One of the books I read when I was doing research for Live Not By Lies was a great book from 1953 by a Polish intellectual, Czesław Miłosz, called The Captive Mind. And Miłosz had been a communist and an intellectual, but he defected to the West. And he was trying to explain from his experience in Poland as a Polish communist, how intelligent people could be seduced by communism, by ideology. And one of the things he said really stuck with me. He said that people in the West believe that the only way anybody can accept communism is if they're terrorized into it. He goes, that's not really true. He said communism is a lie, but it speaks to this deep craving people have inside themselves for meaning, for purpose, and for solidarity. And he said, unless people in the West understand that appeal of communism, they're never going to be able to fight it. Well, what Miłosz was talking about with communism is just generally true about human nature, I think. We all want to feel meaning, purpose, and solidarity. And right now, when society seems to be shattering into a million, billion pieces, we become so desperate for a sense of meaning, a sense of connection with other people, that many of us cease to put the pursuit of truth in the front of our affairs as we ought to. And instead, we start seeking solidarity with those who make us feel comfortable and like we belong. And so to go back to the Putin point, I've seen this too on the right. I'm an Orthodox Christian, which means Russian Orthodox, too. And I've seen so many people come up to me and say, oh, you're Orthodox, you must really support Putin. Conservatives who want me to give a good word about Putin, I said, no, I don't support Putin. I hear he's been terrible for the Russian church because it's become corrupted by power. And so I tell people, don't just project our own American culture wars onto foreign people. I spoke to an American diplomat once in Eastern Europe, the former communist countries, and he told me the worst thing he has to deal with, with fellow Americans coming over, whether they're on the left or the right, is they project American political fights and their culture war onto European situations when they don't really fit. It's an egotistical thing in a way, Americans trying to say that this is really all about us, their fights. This is really fascinating. One thing I was talking about a little bit earlier, I'm going to take a little bit of a tangent. I'm just curious what you think about it. Clyde Prestowitz is here at this conference. We're going to do a sit down. I've had him. I think he has a brilliant, brilliant mind on China and trade and so forth. His observation, he worked in the Reagan administration on the trade side with Japan, and what he observed was, the Americans would come to Japan and say, free trade, free trade, free trade. And the Japanese would smile and say back, free trade, free trade, free trade. But what they would actually do is very strong, hardheaded industrial policy that allowed them to grow massively. And communist China watched what Japan did and thought, these Americans are crazy. And these Japanese, they're very smart. We're going to do what they did, which is essentially what they did. And this is what you just described reminded me of this picture that Clyde has painted. Yeah. It's the mindset. I'm old enough to remember, as I was in college, when China began to open up under Deng Xiaoping and so forth. We believed it like it was a law of gravity that, of course, China is going to become liberal and democratic because you can't get rich without being liberal and democratic. Well, they showed us all wrong. And I don't think that there's been a sufficient reckoning among the American intellectual elites for how wrong we were about China. And what the reckoning should be is simply that we talked ourselves into believing what we wanted to believe because it justified what we wanted to believe was true. But the real world is not like that. When I go back to the buildup to the Russia-Ukraine war, I think John Mearsheimer, Professor Mearsheimer, was right when he was talking about how certain moves by NATO and the United States made Russia feel threatened about Ukraine, bringing Ukraine into NATO. Again, I underline, this does not justify what Russia did, but our hands aren't clean. I think we in the United States, especially in our leadership class, tend to think that whatever we want to do is good simply by the fact that we want to do it. When I've been in Europe this past year, year and a half, I run into people in the former communist countries, older people, people who remember the Cold War, and they inevitably say to me, what happened to you Americans? I say, what do you mean? And it's always the same thing. We used to look up to you as a beacon of freedom, as a beacon of sanity, as a place of hope for us. And now we look at you and you're sending us gender ideology. You're trying to force us through your businesses and through your State Department to accept transgenderism and accept this redefinition of the family over and over. We look to you as a threat to us. What can I say to these people? They're right. They're completely right. But in Washington, they tell themselves, and among American elites and the NGOs and academia and the media, they tell themselves that we, with our liberal ideas, are the harbingers of progress. We are enlightening these poor benighted natives. It's cultural imperialism, but when a liberal does it, they don't see it that way. It's remarkable. This is the thing. It's like every propagandist, and Russian propaganda is case in point, will use the best tools it has at its disposal. In America, and frankly in the West, we have a lot of exposure with bad ideas that can be used by propagandists against America and the West. It doesn't change the fact that it remains a much better system. This is the thing I think a lot of people don't grasp. But in these propaganda clouds or fogs, you can start losing sight of reality, basically. That's true. I think, and this is what I fear with the coming of the metaverse, that we in the technologically advanced West are going to be drawn into these online pseudo realities and come to prefer that to actual reality. That just sets us up for being conquered and exploited. I remember when I was in high school, or junior high actually, this was the late 70s, early 80s, long before the internet. I was so unhappy in school. I was picked on, I was bullied, as happens to a lot of people in high school. I started playing the game Dungeons and Dragons, which is a very intensive and imaginative game. I really loved it. But I remember lying in bed one night, realizing that I was spending more time thinking about the life of my character within the game than I was about my actual life. And it kind of scared me, because the fake life that I'd created with this character was more appealing, because in this fake life, I was strong, I was good looking, I had lots of friends, all the things that I wasn't in my real life. That comes back to me a lot whenever I read about the metaverse and how people, especially young people who are raised on the internet, find themselves coming to believe that reality is something that can be completely constructed. They're confusing the difference between fake reality within artificial intelligence and online with the actual flesh and bone world. I think that this confusion has a lot to do with why transgenderism has exploded among this generation that was raised on the internet. I think they believe that all of reality is fungible, as it is online. And I think that this is something that the propagandists, those who wish to rule over us, will exploit in the future to neutralize any opposition to what they want to do. It's going to be like Brave New World. They're going to pacify us by drawing us into the metaverse to neutralize us so we don't object to what happens in the real world. But when you start talking that way, you get really radical. And yet, when we see what's happening every single day, it makes you realize that things are accelerating. There's a quickening going on now, and I don't think most of us are ready for it.