Episode 351 – Born on 3rd Base with Steve Hall

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. You know what, Let me say something.

I have been both on the walking the streets, homeless side, and I have sat in graduate school and taking classes to earn a doctorate that I never finished. Thank you, divorce. And I have had great jobs where I felt like I was king of the hill.

And then I have been laid off for extended periods of time, wondering when they’re going to take my house away.

Crawling on the floor, looking out the windows to see who’s knocking, to see if they’re going to issue a, you know, “we’re going to take your home from you kind of thing.” I have been on both sides of this.

I, you know, grew up where my father thought, “you know, son, maybe you should get into asbestos removal because I hear they make good money and they have benefits.” He didn’t mention the fact that they usually die young and they have cancer and things like that.

But he didn’t really have high hopes for me because I was a disaster.

And a lot of us in this country, the United States, are disasters and have bought into the self-made man belief that we alone are masters of our universe and that we alone are the reasons for our failures. And it’s all been beaten into our heads.

From an early age, from elementary school to the TV shows we watch, to you name it, just about every way, shape or form, we have been taught that it’s our… We are responsible for all of our success and we are responsible for all of our failures.

And when I was homeless and when I was depressed and when I was thinking about taking my own life out of sheer desperation of how in the world can it ever get better, you know, I was reminded of the American dream, that anybody can make it here, that anybody can do this stuff. And for years, as I was getting my MBA, I thought, maybe there’s some truth in this. Had kind of bought into what turns out to be a ginormous lie.

Sure. There’s a little bit of a lottery to this.

Sure, every once in a while, someone breaks through and screws up the sauce for everyone else to say, “see, I made it so everyone else can.” Sort of like the weird idea that when Barack Obama got elected that, well, “hey, look, anyone can become president. Look!” All these lies that we buy into have really informed our politics.

They’ve informed our worldview, they’ve informed the way we treat one another. We see those with lots as gods, as the immortals of society, the demigods, the Hercules, the people that are the makers.

You know, after all, the rest of us are just takers. The Ayn Randian belief system that has permeated society and it just became such a puss-ey cesspool of lies.

Just a big ginormous cyst on life that just shed that nonsense. I realized that society is made up of a lot of different things, but one thing it is not made up of is the self-made man.

The self-made man is a lie that we have taught people to keep them from complaining, to keep them from whining, to keep them from asking for better from their government, to keep them from asking for better from their employer, to keep them from asking for better in life. Just to “you can do it if you just put your mind to it.” Hard work, you name it.

And as I’m sitting here grousing about this in my social media life, in my activist life, in my life, trying to research these things for this podcast and for our nonprofit, lo and behold, my good friend Steve Hall. ProfHall1955 on X to be exact. But he’s much more than that. He’s an author, you name it.

And let me just tell you a little bit about him in a moment, but I want to read a quote that he put out on Twitter, X whatever you want to call it. The other oligarch platform.

He said, “You know, with the new oligarchs running things, we’re swamped with irritating rags-to-riches American dream propaganda. Here’s a WC Fields story I used to tell the students back in the day when most of them had heard of him.

A young feature writer gets a scoop interview with Fields. ‘When did you come to town?’ She asks. ‘Many years ago, my dear,’ he replies. ‘What did you bring with you?’ ‘All I had was a pole in a bag tied on the end.’

‘Incredible.’ She gushes. ‘And now you’re a big movie star. You own your own movie company, six hotels, a department store, and this big house, Mr. Fields?
You’re the embodiment of the American dream.’ And he says, ‘that’s right, my dear,’ he replies. She asks some more questions, thanks him profusely gets up to leave.

‘Just before I go,’ she says, ‘what did you have in the bag on the pole?’ ‘Three quarters of a million dollars,’ he replies, and the rest is history.” And that, my friends, is what brings my guest, Steve Hall to this podcast.

And for those of you who don’t know Steve Hall, Steve Hall is a professor emeritus of criminology, worked at the universities of Teesside and Northumbria and Durham. He’s a polymath who has published in fields of criminology, sociology, anthropology, history, economic history, political theory, and philosophy.

And I could go on and on and on. He was the author of The Death of the Left with his co-author Simon Winlow.

And let me just say, beyond that, he has become a dear friend and somebody who I rely on very often to help me understand things that are just a little bit baffling to me. And so that’s why I’m bringing him on today. Hopefully our conversation helps you all see the things for what they are.

And this also, and I didn’t fully understand this before I set this podcast interview up, but this apparently delves deeply into his research as well. So I can’t wait to hear more from Steve. And so with that, going forward, I’m not going to call him Professor Stephen Hall.

I’m going to call him Steve. And I’m Steve. So you’re being bombarded by Steve’s today, it’s the Steve Show. Welcome to the show, Steve Hall.

Steve Hall:
00:07:01

Hi, Steven. Thanks for inviting me yet again.

Steve Grumbine:
00:07:04

Absolutely. But I so appreciate you. You’re not one to sugarcoat things and I like the way you get to the point.

We don’t agree on everything, but we agree on damn near an awful lot. And I find your insights and wisdom to be absolutely refreshing. You heard the WC Fields story that I quoted from your tweet.

Why don’t you lay that out to start with and then we can go deeper.

Steve Hall:
00:07:30

Sure. Well, I can do my best. It’s a hugely complex cultural process that a few people have written about in the past and quite insightful ways.

We’re talking about what CB McPherson called… this is an old guy from back in the day before postmodernism and post structuralism told us that the fragmented world is better than the old world coherent worlds we left behind when McPherson coined the term “possessive individualism.” It’s this notion that the individual is him or herself.

No one else can influence this pristinely independent, rational individual in total possession of their own faculties, their own visions, their own dreams, and responsible for everything good that happens to them themselves. They’ve done it all.

They’ve done everything themselves they did with the minimum of help, maybe a good parent and a couple of good teachers who influenced them and imparted a little bit of wisdom here and there, but basically everything is good that’s happened, they’ve done themselves. It’s the same. It’s John Galt‘s character, the entrepreneur responsible for everything good in the world.

It’s this ambitious and possessive individual. So this is the myth that we’ve been brought up, particularly in Britain and America. Perhaps less so on the continent, certainly less so in the East.

Many cultures in the East have a far more collectivist approach.

And we read that collectivism, don’t we, as authoritarian or totalitarian, because we don’t like to see large numbers of people doing things in a coordinated, coherent way, helping each other too much. Because that belies our belief in this incredibly self sufficient and independent individual.

And the history of this is fascinating and it’s about a belief in ourselves.

And I think the one way we talk about heterodox economic positions, which I know we agree are of such vital importance if we’re going to transcend a neoliberal order that is starting to collapse and cause an awful lot of misery and damage. And we’re talking about potential world war, we’re talking about dereliction of specific areas in Britain and America.

We’ve, you know, the deindustrialization process is left behind, areas of the completely derelict and poverty and all the rest of it. We know these things that are happening. We know that this is real. It’s not some left wing ideology.

This is reality for many people and these positions are incredibly hard. But we can’t get people to believe in them.

And the fact that neoliberalism itself is a belief system is something that I’ve heard said from many heterodox economists. They know it’s a belief system, but what is that belief and where did it start? How deeply is it entrenched in each individual?

And how do we start to prise it out of individuals who believe in themselves so fervently and so deeply?

Steve Grumbine:
00:10:45

So let me ask you something, Steve. Within this space, what do you suppose is making this push to the rugged individualist become like not just the backstory, but like the fore story?

This is the front story now. This is the be all, end all. How did we get here?

Steve Hall:
00:11:06

It’s a long and fascinating story. Part of my research, we explored neoliberal capitalism from the viewpoint of criminologists.

That was a very revealing viewpoint because he could argue that an awful lot of the financial activity that goes on in elite circles behind closed doors, the media make excuses for them. But a lot of that is criminal or zemiological as we call it, harmful. And maybe some of it should be criminalized.

You remember when the Icelanders put some of these bankers in jail short selling all this. We should criminalize. This is, you know, something that we’ve thought about for quite a long time. So we approached it from that.

And what we found was an economists at Cambridge at the moment and psychologists are working together on this notion called the zero sum mindset.

It’s a sort of the worst side of the prisoners, the old prisoners dilemma metaphor where you basically think the worst of everyone, but everyone out there is going to do their worst, so you better do your worst as well. And then we end up in a zero sum game.

And they’re exploring this as the culmination of the cultural processes that have been operating over the last 40 to 50 years. I’m old enough to remember a different world, a world where individualism was still quite prevalent.

It was still people like to believe they’re individuals, are hard workers, but there was just more of a collective spirit as well. There was a balance in the old Keynesian era. And I’m not saying that Keynes’s ideas will lead us to nirvana. They won’t. We know that.

We know we need something a lot firmer than Keynesianism. This is what both Keynesians and MMT people are talking about. But I remember a different spirit.

There was a balance of collectivism and individualism and that’s been lost. The idea that the collective is a support system, it’s a system of influence, it’s a system of democracy.

And that the idea of a subsidiary democracy system. I know you’ve spoken about that in the program before, which is something I find quite appealing. I can’t remember the guy’s name.

I think it was Michael. [He] wrote a book on subsidiary democracy which I found very, very useful.

We can’t reconcile these ideas with this spirit of individualism they have now. The problem is that this goes back a lot longer than Ayn Rand and a lot longer than anyone really thinks. But we’ve traced it back.

It was a bit of a grim journey realizing how old this is and how deeply entrenched it is in our culture. Now I can take you through that process if you want. It’ll take me a few minutes, but I can do that if you want.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:47

I think we should go through it because we spoke a little bit about this offline and I know that there are some elements of this that maybe don’t hold water, but the concept of cultural hegemony creating the concept of commonsense, this is all just common sense. This is just the way it is.

And so forth, has permeated society through all means of, whether it be institutions, whether it be sitcoms, whether it be the churches, whether it be whatever. These things creep into our life in every way, like water finding cracks in the dam.

And we all just assume these things are just true, they’re just the way it is.

Steve Hall:
00:14:29

We do. We certainly do. And [Italian communist Antonio] Gramsci gave us some very, very illuminating insights into this process.

But I think why you went slightly wrong was to suggest that this is imposed from the top. And it is. You see this in the mass media.

You have this ownership and control debate we’ve had in social sciences for decades now, who owns the mass media which they are pushing this idea into people’s heads all the time. But the problem is it’s already there. It’s already there in the nervous systems, in the neurological systems of individuals, in their souls.

Thatcher said she would change the soul of Britain. Well, that was her ambition.

And to some extent she succeeded because she turned Britain from a balance of collectivism and individualism into a really hard nosed individualist society from the 1980s. That belief and that emotional attachment to individualism has been there for a very, very long time.

A philosopher, Larry Seidentop, located in Christianity itself.

Of the three revealed religions, Christianity is the most, or will lead us to the most individualistic worldview, which it also did during the Protestant Reformation. Max Weber, of course, the sociologist, famously called this methodological individualism.

And that juncture in history, I’m simplifying this a lot, but what happened basically was that God was relocated from the heavens. His word passed down through the institutions of the Catholic Church, relocated from there into the individual. God was inside each individual.

And that idea has been there since the beginning of Christianity. They thought the Protestants, they were returning to the roots of Christianity, primitive Christianity, et cetera, returning to its roots.

But what happened, I think well before that, and I’m going back to the 11th century, I think this started in England and it caught on in America because America was largely English after the invasion of America by the Europeans. Yes, English culture was a very strong. When the Native Americans were illegally and immorally relieved of their land.

And I think that was an awful period in history. But the English culture was the dominant form. And that’s obvious because it adopted the English language, not German or Swedish or French.

What happened in English culture, I think is quite fascinating.

And I have a term for this, which I call the pseudo pacification process, and that England, and eventually Europe and America, because England was the first industrial revolution, spread through Scotland. Wales involved as well, of course, on the Northern Ireland, eventually, after the Ulster settlements.

England was the root of this individualist culture.

What happened in the 12th century was that the law of primogeniture, which had been restricted to the aristocracy, the upper classes in Europe, was spread throughout the social structure. Now, primogeniture means the firstborn son inherits the land and the estate of the parents, doesn’t it?

And it’s prevalent in some of the parts of Africa as well. But look at the extended wars in England.

What happened then was that the sons and daughters of the parents of the landowners, or sons and daughters even of the tenant farmers and of the peasants, had to strike a very, very subservient relationships with their parents in order to get their inheritance. But by guaranteeing that to the firstborn meant that it split up the family unit.

The family unit had, throughout what we call, loosely, the Dark Ages, since the, you know, the decline of the Roman Empire, through that Carolingian period, all the way through into the 12th and 13th centuries. That period, the family unit became the principal economic and defensive unit.

Families are both of the upper class of the estates and also peasants in their own tenant farms.

So primogeniture split that collective because siblings became rivals and they stopped trusting each other, and they tried to curry their parents favors. They would even sometimes arrange the death of older siblings so that they could inherit.

But most of them decided that the family unit was no longer for them. And we got this huge urbanization process. So in England, we get these market towns springing up. We also have changes in agriculture.

The domain system starts to fall apart. We have technological progress. All this stuff the Marxists talk about is correct.

But underneath this, we have this splitting up of the family collective into rival individuals in a way that was exciting, but at the same time worrying and quite difficult. Moving out in what we call the urbanization process towards these. Into these market towns and trying to make it on their own.

The American dream was born in the fields and market towns of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Steve Grumbine:
00:19:52

Wow, that’s a bit of history there, isn’t it? This is ingrained quite deeply.

Steve Hall:
00:19:58

Well, it’s been a long, long time, Steve, and we should not underestimate how deeply this is ingrained. At the same time, we shouldn’t turn to despondence.

We shouldn’t become despondent about this and start thinking that we can’t change it because the culture was changed there and the culture will one day change again.

I’ve spoken to a few Chinese academics, a few Russians, Iranians and from more collectivist cultures and they simply don’t understand this degree of individualism. They don’t understand it.

Some of them, people like [Russian expatriate chessmaster Garry] Kasparov and people like this are beckonels, renegades against the Russian culture who become highly individualist.

It’s highly seductive because it promises freedom, it promises riches, it promises opportunities, it promises all of these things that collectivist culture can some extent repress. It’s seen as a great leap for freedom, an exciting part of the journey. But it’s almost like a sort of teenager, isn’t it?

Looking to leave the family branch out, experiencing things for the first time and getting really excited about it. But the problem is you’re supposed to grow out of this initial excitement. You’re not supposed to retain it for the rest of your life.

And to see 50, 60, 70 year-old Brits and Americans talk about this culture in the same excitable teenage turn. You see this with the likes of [oligarch Peter] Thiel, don’t you? And these tech oligarchs are excitable teenagers.

And this is because of course that there’s no external culture restraining or altering or modifying these teenage dreams. And that I find rather scary.

Steve Grumbine:
00:21:50

You know, one of the things that’s really been driving me insane.

I’ll just be just a regular working class bloke for a minute, talking about my interactions with regular people, not some hoi polloi, high end thought process. But I’ve got friends who got a tip on a stock, they managed to get out of the military just in time to get a million dollar handout. Here you go.

Or their mother or father died and handed them a bunch of money, whatever. At the end of the day though, they believe this is their doing, they are good and that anybody can do this.

So there’s this idea of born on third [base], thinking they hit a triple and the unfortunate fact is that it doesn’t hold up.

When people try to live out that dream, etc, they come crashing down to reality that all they did was get a ton of student debt that they’re going to have to pay the rest of their life.

They bought more house thinking that the house was going to be their nest egg, only to find out that taxes and other, you know, slights of hand with fees from banks and fees from brokers and so on and so forth, have taken almost all the equity when they do sell, or you know, to be able to replace it. They bottom line is that there’s this weird belief that anybody can do this because look at me.

And the reality though is that they were gifted it, they were given it. They are an anomaly. They are not the standard bearer. And their politics and everything else stems from, “You’re not taking from me. Don’t you dare think you’re taking from me my hard earned tax dollar or I worked hard on Friday night.

You should have to work hard too. How dare you not pay your…

You know, it’s this weird kind of I want you to suffer, but anybody can do this, but I want you to suffer because you’re not going to take from me. It’s all mine. But in reality, it was given to them. They were born into it. I’m curious, is that go back to the old English law there of the firstborn son?

I mean, where does this come from?

Steve Hall:
00:23:58

I think it does because we’ve used this notion that we call aristophilia. You know, F. Scott the general explored this beautifully, didn’t he, in American culture and Thorsten Veblen and talked about the leisure class.

We like to believe that we’re one step away from aristocracy and that lifestyle is available to all of us. It’s fallacy, of course, because of course we can’t all live those lifestyles and that amount of land and it would require an infinite earth.

It’s a crazy dream. But that aristophilia is what drives people forward. But when you think about and what you’re talking about is that most people fail.

You look at the actual figures of Americans earning a good living from investment. For us, our figures are quite small.

You look at American pensioners who are benefiting from a very good private pension that Larry [Fink] and his pals at Blackrock look after and best all over. That’s quite small. In fact, an awful lot of pensioners in America have one thing… Social Security.

I don’t have the figures to hand, but it’s a greater amount of that sort of condition. So despite the failures and despite watching everyone else fail around them and seeing lots of failures, they like to focus on the winners.

The winners could be winning today. The inheritance of people who are carrying forward inheritance.

Well, they just say, “well, we won in the past, at some point our ancestors won and we are benefiting from that. So do the same for your family.” When I talk to Americans, I say, “I’m doing this for my family.”

So they’re setting up a dynasty, you know, the setting of an inheritance process moving forward. So you have to ask yourself this belief is so strong, it’s so emotionally internalized, emotionally entrenched. Well, what’s the analogy here?

What sort of person sees failure, keeps on failing, see other people failing, and really only the occasion of person winning, but yet keeps on believing and keeps on going. Who are we talking about here? We’re talking about the gambler [Yeah] and my team. I have a wonderful research team.

I’m retired now and they’re taking over. They’re much better than me, these younger people like Tom Raymond, Emma Arms, Simon Winlow, of course. And these people are fabulous.

Social researchers, polymaths, philosophers, historians, everything. We encourage this multilateral, this interdisciplinary approach in our team.

And they’ve been looking at gambling and they see the zero-sum mentality, they see history, they see the cultural mores that we’re used to. All apparent and all in glorious detail in the gambler.  [economist John Maynard] Keynes talked about animal spirits, didn’t he?

We were only talking about the speculation that fueled the Wall Street crash in 1929. He coined this wonderful term.

Keynes was probably, and I’ll say this, it’ll annoy a lot of people, but of the time, probably the only economist worth reading because he understood not just the mathematics, the system dynamics, but he understood human beings. He read as much Shakespeare and Goethe as he did assembling mathematical models. And this is what we’ve got to get to.

We’ve got to find ways of communicating with individuals to move them out of the gambling, zero-sum mindset into an approach in which more people win and eventually where we can all be winners. Go on.

Steve Grumbine:
00:27:18

It’s funny you say that because we are in the US and I don’t know how similar or dissimilar this is from the UK and elsewhere, but we have got lotto machines, so we’ve got all kinds of lotteries going on constantly here. There’s gambling on everything from sports gambling to anything. Anything that you can put a wager or a parlay on, there’s gambling going on.

Because the way that we’ve been told, hard work and so forth doesn’t get you anywhere. It literally keeps you trapped at the bottom.

The only way to break through is hopefully win some million-to-one odd and somehow or another break through this fantasy land. But you nailed it with the gambling. This is why cryptocurrencies and things like that are so exciting to people.

The idea that I can go ahead and place a bet and my bet will pay off in spades and I will suddenly be on the other side of the ledger living the good life.

Steve Hall:
00:28:17

But let’s be honest, you know, gambling and hard work are by no means incommensurate.

If you look at the products and work ethic and you look at investment, which is a gamble, because you know most of these investors are so risk averse now, they won’t take risks and they rather buy up an asset strip rather than taking risks in industry, et cetera. You look at the two things, they go together. When the gambler runs out of chips in the casino, what does the casino owner go?

“Right, you run out of chips. Now go away and work and bring some more.” This link, this is the circular process. I must work hard, I must work hard, then I must invest.

This was enshrined in Protestantism, this idea of working, saving, investing, taking risks. And it’s the mentality of the, let’s call it the worker/gambler hybrid. And the two things go together.

So, I mean, I’ve known, you know, actual gambling addicts who were some of the most hard working tradesmen I’ve ever come across and very, very capable. Unfortunately, I had one working on my house a few years ago.

He used to disappear and I used to say, “you think I don’t know where you’re going, don’t you?” He said, “oh, you got me worked out, have you?” I said, “yeah, but I’m not going to tell you how much I have you worked out.”

Got him coming back because I’m sure he was interested in hearing what I said about what I’d worked out about him as he was in finishing off my house. So that kept him coming back.

Sometimes he would come back with a huge squad of guys that he’s paid from his winnings and do two months work in a week, you know what I mean? And then he would disappear for a week and then come back.

It was an interesting psychological game of cat and mouse, which I eventually won, I won’t tell you how, and got some superb work done on the house. Probably a little bit less than what I would have paid another firm, but it was gambling.

It was this huge idea that all of a sudden there will be a windfall.

I work hard, I’ll accumulate money, then I’ll gamble it on something that will simply, like Elon Musk’s rocket, send me off to another place where I’m going to be a member of Veblen’s Leisure class.

Intermission:
00:30:16

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Hall:
00:30:39

I remember talking to a guy.

We used to do this horrible thing called art texting when I was a young man and I was actually a musician, but I used to do odd jobs during the day, make a little bit more money.

And I said, you know, driving along in his knackered old van towards the next job, this art text is where you put this sort of plaster up on the ceiling and you stipple it with this brush. And it looked absolutely horrible when that fashion died quickly. And I remember I said, “what’s your ambition?” And I said, “what do you want to do?”

He said, “absolutely nothing.” He said, “I want to put myself in a position where I don’t have to rely on work, I don’t have to rely on anyone else. I’m totally on my own.

I have my own finances, I have my own means, and I’ll go where I want and I’ll live a life of…” I’ve met some of the people as I grew older who had made it. I met them in France and Spain, and they were all drunks.

They were living on their own or with their partners.

They were meeting some people occasionally, but they said they were living very isolated lives as expats in Gibraltar and Spain and transit places, you know, warmer places than you. Warmer than you know. Well, it’s not difficult to find somewhere warmer than north of England, I’ll be honest.

And they thought they’d made it by becoming more isolated. Well, you can trace this back to the 12th century, where by becoming isolated was the route to success.

Becoming an isolated individual willing to work hard and willing to take risks and gamble was the way that you would create your own space outside of this disintegrated space of the family and the community.

The family and the community were systematically disintegrated by the introduction of these new laws of primogeniture and to some extent to enable the company in law as well. So this again, very old culture. You can see in the English, in the way they dress and the way they live the urban…

You can see this in seaboard Americans as well, can’t you? In New York, in Boston, places like this, they love this urban environment. They think that they’re so superior, they’ve made it into the urban way.

They can use their wits and their intellect and they can use their little connections that they meet in the bar every night and might occasionally have sex and then, you know, go home and live these sort of isolated lives, and then they find someone, they raise a family, but the family lives in a fairly isolated life, and they see each other as competitors. And that is our culture. Began in England, I think. I haven’t explored other parts of Europe.

I think that the Swedes actually adopted Protestantism a few years before the English. That’s something that people do tend to forget, and I think it’s quite common in Nordic culture as well. This sort of mentality.

I think if you look at the Nordic seafarers, the famous Vikings, going out and adventuring and making your own way, life was part of that culture, too. I’d like to look at that more, but I don’t have time. Still, looking at the English and American cultures keeps me busy.

But the point I’m trying to make is this.

I’m rambling on about history and everything and probably boring people to death, but the point I’m making is this is so deeply entrenched that what we must offer is a total narrative of difference, and we have to be positive about it. We can create a much better world for everyone by adopting certain specific economic policies, and that’s the base of it.

I still agree with the Marxists that the economy is the basis of societies, and we can do this as collective units. We don’t have to live in each other’s pockets and live in a commune or something. Particularly smelly places. I remember them from the 1970s.

We don’t have to live in communes, but we have to have a collective spirit, a civic spirit. And you see that in some parts of America. You see that mainly away from the cities, in the more rural towns.

You see, I think it’s based on the wrong premises, the wrong traditions, but that collective spirit can emerge, and I can have a beautiful existence for a while before it simply fades away and could come together.

The miners in Northeast England, particularly on the Durham Cove field where I was brought up, had this incredible collective spirit of looking after each other because they faced danger underground every day, and they relied on each other, and that lasted best part of a century. It was a wonderful thing to behold. It’s a wonderful thing to grow up in.

They didn’t have any idea of superiority, even if the one guy might be a, you know, shift manager or a foreman, the other guy might be an ordinary worker, but they depended on each other. The ordinary worker could save the life of the shift manager underground, yeah?

Steve Grumbine:
00:35:16

Yeah.

One of the things that you brought up a minute ago, which is just bouncing around in my head like a ping pong ball is the idea that we see each other as competitors, as opposed to collaborators or friends or comrades, really genuine camaraderie. We see one another as competitors. And in that space, if you see someone as a competitor, your goal is to win, because winning is everything.

And there’s books written on this everywhere. And I gotta tell you, I love sports. I watch football, hockey, baseball, soccer, anything. If there’s a way of competing, I enjoy watching it.

But there is an element there where that mindset, while it can certainly bring out the best in us in sense that it makes us hone our skills and focus our talents and so forth, it also alienates and it also divides and it also creates a spirit of rugged individualism that leaves some okay and tramples most.

And I think to myself, you know how you and I really came together and since we met, really surrounded ourselves with heterodox economic minds. And for me it was largely the modern monetary theory community.

But within that space though, the concept of getting people to, quote, unquote, “wake up,” to smell the coffee, to understand the economics, that their self defeating ideas here are wrong and they’re rooted in a false self, a false consciousness, a false, you know, fake news. And so I’ve talked about this in various interviews and I would like to really dig in heavily with you because of your research.

But the idea that we’re gonna win people over with facts, the facts will win the day. I am somebody driven to know the truth, but most people are driven by feels and vibes and beliefs. And it’s this…

They don’t have to be real, they don’t have to do anything. They could be completely bullshit, but they have these beliefs. And those beliefs we’re not fighting.

I, I have one friend who particularly fights with me constantly about the idea that, you know, they believe we just have to educate. And I believe that there’s an awakening that has to occur.

The awakening is the dissolution of beliefs, or at least overcoming the beliefs to get to the other side somehow.

Steve Hall:
00:37:52

Absolutely.

Steve Grumbine:
00:37:54

And it’s like the alarm clock. So what are your thoughts on that?

Steve Hall:
00:37:57

Well, we’ve researched this in another aspect in the dimension, if you like, of our research in neuropsychology and neuropsycho-analysis, which this thing exists in the sense that individuals adopt belief systems, internalize belief systems, but also become part of the belief system themselves. They become active reproducers of the belief systems when those beliefs answer a number of primary questions. Now this gets very, very deep.

We’ve done an awful lot of research. You can read about it in our latest criminology book, Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Advances in Ultra-Realism.

We call our position realism. The bottom of the psyche is what we call the molecular question.

That every organism, even viruses, which are effectively dead, they’re a little bit like some of the White House staff, are effectively dead. And yet the molecular question still exists. The molecular question is to stay or go.

It’s the old punk song, shall I stay in this environment or move to another one? That is at the deepest level. And we think. I wouldn’t like to…

I wouldn’t like to assert this as a fact that we think we’re exploring the idea that metaphysics itself and the whole metaphysical universe of religion and secular philosophy and everything, the demand for metaphysics is, that’s how deep it is. That’s where it comes from. The molecular. What we call the molecular question.

Should we stay with this system, stay in this place? Or should we go somewhere else? Or should we try something that might be better? And we also think that the notion of suffering is very…

You mentioned suffering before, and the notion of suffering is central to this question. How it’s answered, how it’s approached. How much will we suffer if we stay? Will we suffer if we move? Will we suffer more?

And you know that the right wingers have this technique where they’ll always convince the majority that they’ll suffer more if they move to another system, that this is the least worst. I remember Churchill when he said, “yeah, this system we have, democracy is a terrible system, apart from all the others, which are even worse.”

This least worse thinking is absolutely endemic in American culture. It was, you know, Fukuyama’s notion of the end of history and the movie. This is as good as it gets, remember? Yeah, this isn’t great.

This isn’t great, but it’s better than anything else. It’s better than socialism, communism, authoritarianism, and all of the nasty things that, you know, the connotations that Americans are taught.

Other systems are bad. This one’s not great, but it’s workable and we can improve on it, and we can keep improving it.

So this idea of staying against that, it’s always delayed by saying, “you’ll suffer more if you move.” And then you say, “well, how much will we suffer? How long will we suffer? What will it take?”

You can see the original Pilgrim fathers and the original immigrants to America who didn’t realize how much they were going to suffer. They were dropping dead of illnesses and they were being attacked by natives. Quite rightly, of course, encountering wild animals and food shortages and all sorts. They didn’t know how much they were going to suffer, so they just moved. And then they thought about the suffering later.

But writing ideology works by constantly reminding us of how much we’re going to suffer if we make any moves. And most times in the past where we actually alleviated suffering.

Roosevelt, for instance, 1933, I probably reminded you about this before, but he cut the murder rate in half in four years, the homicide rate in the US simply by getting people back to work. Criminal gangs legalizing alcohol again. And it cut this gang membership down. People stopped murdering each other.

People got back to work and had better things to do. And the murder rate was cut down from around about ten and a half per 100,000 to four and a half per 100,000 those four years, 1933 to 1937.

So he made things better, and we’ve got to convince people that these things can be a lot better for a larger number of people. As a classic English democratic socialist of the Benite tradition, I think we can make things better for everyone. We might not equalize society.

And, you know, if you invent something and sell it on the market and loads of people want to buy it, what are you going to get rich? Well, I don’t really care about that. If it’s an item that really helps people and makes their lives better, I don’t really care about.

I do object to gamblers, financiers getting rich simply by gambling their money and other people’s money, I do object to that. But productive work, I don’t object to. So I’m not a communist, I’m a democratic socialist.

Believe in a mixed economy, the sort of economy that’s being very, very successful in China at the moment. And, but I think we could persuade people that that’s possible only at the emotional level. It’s no good throwing factoids at people.

I don’t think we should stop thinking about economic modeling and stop thinking about the dynamics and how that we might express them mathematically, for instance. And I think that’s still important. But I don’t think that should be at the forefront of our narrative and the forefront of our discourse.

We need an emotional story.

We need emotional narrative about how we could make things better and how the state is not necessarily this inefficient monstrosity weighing down on people’s individual ambitions.

And, you know, quoting Mariana Mazzucato, you know, the [Italian-] British economist who wrote extensively about the entrepreneurial state, the state that can be an entrepreneurial enabler in the sense of collective enterprise, in the sense of entrepreneurial activity that could benefit people and move us forward. So I think that we need a narrative. We need a narrative that’s optimistic, upbeat, and convinces people that we can make their lives better.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:51

You know, it’s interesting, I was reading a book totally will feel unrelated to this. I assure you that it in of itself very literally may be unrelated, but I believe can be extrapolated to be quite related.

And that is ironically, Che Guevara‘s book Guerrilla Warfare and understanding the way the guerrilla fighter had to be part of the people without the people, they were the water. The guerrilla could not survive without the people. And yet at the same time, it had to be very, very disciplined and tight and so forth.

But that was from a guerrilla warfare perspective. When you think about regular people in general and communicating with them. The idea is that…

And it’s hard for me to remember this because there’s a part of me that realizes that an alarm clock is never fun. Nobody enjoys an alarm clock. I don’t care how beautiful the message may be on the other side of it, the alarm clock is always offensive.

But in reality, though, the idea here is that he said, “hey, listen, we’ve got to be deeply courteous to the people. We have to endear ourselves to the people.

We have to make sure that they realize that our struggle is their struggle and their struggle is our struggle.”

And, you know, make sure that they ultimately keep a positive, upbeat, not berate and beat down the peasants and the others in the community, but win them over to solidarity.

And I found that very interesting because you think about the kind of tactics that it will take to win the day, given how deeply entrenched some of these more fascist, individualist ideas which are permeating all of society at a much more higher pitch these days.

Steve Hall:
00:45:36

Absolutely, yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
00:45:38

I mean, obviously if you knew, you would have already done it.

But I guess at some level just ideate how do we get a tough wakeup call message mixed with a very vibrant, positive, hopeful message, while living in a timeline that feels almost apocalyptic.

Steve Hall:
00:45:56

I think that the problem we have is that under [former Cuban President, Fulgencio] Bautista, of course, Cubans were living in absolutely miserable existence, repressed and enslaved in some cases. So I think we don’t have that work with.

We don’t have that abject poverty, you know, so the promises we have to make are making it better than it already is. And we do have a trimmed down welfare state.

People are kept just far enough off the bottom to get involved in any sort of revolutionary or rebellious activity, they’ve done that very well. You know, some people argue that was the fundamental purpose of the welfare state, but they get that balance.

I mean, Simon Winlow, I think, has written quite extensively about an enlightened catastrophism and that was a term coined by the French philosopher Jean Pierre, I think Jean Pierre Dupuy  or Jean Claude Dupuy, I can’t remember, but Dupuy (D-U-P-U-Y) and he talked about enlightened catastrophism [catastrophisme éclairé] in the sense that we have to tell people that if they don’t move, things here are going to get a lot worse. At the same time, tell them that as we move there will be some suffering.

And I have this argument with some of the MMT guys that the bond markets, because we allow them to the bond markets and the forex [foreign exchange] markets can attack  the currency and create a lot of problems if we allow them to. And I do agree with MMT guys that it’s only because our politicians allow them to do this. But they’re the politicians we have, unfortunately.

So there might be some suffering, but that suffering will lead to something better than what it is now.

The problem is, you know, the people who are doing quite well out of this system as it is, they’re a big problem because they don’t really relate to other people they think talking about originally they think they’ve got there by the sweat of their own brow, they’ve pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and achieved that individually. So they don’t really have an awful lot of sympathy for those who are falling behind. That’s they’re problem.

But what we have to do is that we have to talk to people who are not doing so well, those people with more empathy and see people around them not doing so well. And we have to convince the right people it’s no good talking to the wrong people all the time.

I think this is the mistake we make on social media a lot, just arguing with people. It’s not worth arguing with some people, you know, I just say, “well look, your belief is too strong. I’ll move on and I’ll talk to people who will listen.”

That’s the majority, I think, the majority, the swing voters, the non voters, the people that go the way.

There’s the left as well, of course, the traditional left, the postmodern left is a huge problem because I think they see liberalism as something that can be improved along intersectional lines without any structural change. We know they’re a problem. We’ve written that in that book The Death of the Left. And other people have written about it as well.

Steve Grumbine:
00:48:43

Yeah.

Steve Hall:
00:48:44

So we know they’re a problem. But out there there is a majority. I’m convinced there is a 50% plus majority of people who are thinking, this is not great, this isn’t very good.

I’m seeing people suffer. I’m under stress myself. I have to do four jobs to earn a living. My mortgage is too expensive, my rent’s too expensive, I don’t have any disposal [-able income].

I’m working, slaving away for next to nothing. This is just a waste of time. There are a lot of people out there who are in those sort of conditions and we have to get across to them two things.

One, that it will be catastrophic if we stay in this situation, and two, we can move.

This is the molecular question, and that’s the one that takes a lot of moving, because this is entrenched right down to the depths of the psyche, the neurological system, not the mind, the brain, not the conscious cognitive aspect, right down in their feelings and their emotions and their body, that they’re worried that we will suffer more if we move somewhere. It will end up like, you know, East Germany or North Korea or whatever.

They’re always using these analogies and we’ve got to convince them that there will be some suffering on the way, but that suffering will be time limited. Because for what we have gathered from neuroscience is that we are tuned to put up with some level of suffering over a certain time period.

This idea of deferred gratification, which has been very successful for the right, is based on that principle that you’ll suffer initially, that you go through hard training. It’s like sports.

You go through hard training, you’ll have a load of defeats, you’ll make a fool of yourself, but you’ll get there eventually as you improve your game. And we’ve got to use that as well by saying, “this will be catastrophic where we are.

There’ll be some suffering moving, but we’ll get to a better place. And we will guarantee that we can move to a better place if we move from what we have now: Neoliberalism.” I think that’s the way to approach it.

If we get that balance, we could start to attract more and more people into that sort of thinking.

Steve Grumbine:
00:50:40

I want to say one final thing to kind of lead up to us going out here, because we only have a few minutes left.

But one of the things that really caught me off guard was in [V.I.] Lenin’s State and Revolution, I’m digging deep into all these different thoughts, I’m not trying to recreate them, but I am learning from them because at some point in time, they had a better understanding of getting the people together than we do today.

And one of the things that I found fascinating was the idea that a lot of the discourse these days, especially with what I would consider the [live action role playing] LARPing left, where the role playing, you know, the 18th century, 19th century debates and 20th century debates and things that are long past, not necessarily consequential to today, that don’t really have a vision for today, they just think that they’re going to snap their fingers and voila, we have a revolution, and voila, we have communism. But that’s not what Lenin said. And Lenin was quite, you know, pointed that you can’t expect to go from this to that overnight.

All this stuff is something that takes a very long time. It’s, it’s a game of patience.

Steve Hall:
00:51:52

Yes.

Steve Grumbine:
00:51:53

And really, ultimately, you don’t know how long it’s going to take. And it’s not going to start off, quote, unquote. I’m not saying you like this or not.

I’m just saying it’s not going to start off, you know, fully automated “communism.” It’s going to start out. People are going to be very, very still, you know, unequal. And, you know, there’s still going to be money.

The way that, you know, you know it today, it’s still going to be there tomorrow. There’s still going to be a lot of the things you think aren’t going to be there today that are going to be there tomorrow.

But eventually, as discipline kicks in, as we learn more, as we work and collaborate and we work for the dictatorship of the proletariat, in his words, we’re going to watch the state wither away.

So these things, even in leftist spaces, if they read their theory, if they pay attention to their theory, they know that these things are transitional. They’re not something that you just jump to.

Steve Hall:
00:52:49

They certainly are. But I also think Lenin read, you know, it was intelligent enough to realize how lucky he was, how lucky they’d been in a sense of
it wasn’t a great look in terms of to the people’s benefit. But don’t forget that they’d had a terrible time. The Russians under the Tsar and under the kulaks hoarding grain. And there was starvation.

There was an awful lot of unrest. And the army was away fighting in the east. The army wasn’t there. That revolution was looking.

And then they had four years of a civil war, which they eventually beat the White army, beat it back. So they’d done their suffering. They’d done that suffering. And then Lenin said, “We can now make this better.”

And you’re right, he said the change from now on would be incremental. Remember those arguments about the new economic policy up till Stalin’s time?

Should we stick with small local markets for a while and see if we can change things incrementally? So all of these arguments were being had about the incremental change, but they have been initially looking.

We don’t have that luck, which would be bad luck for the working class. And it might just shift them over to the far right. There’s a nationalist that right there. That’s the problem.

Steve Grumbine:
00:54:07

Oh, my God.

Steve Hall:
00:54:08

And let’s not wish that upon ourselves that we don’t want the situation to deteriorate to the extent that we might have a fascist reaction rather than the move towards socialism. We have to work with where we are. We’re not in Lenin’s time. We’re in the middle. We’re in a welfare state.

People aren’t suffering, the majority aren’t suffering as much as they did in the past. We have to convince people that things might deteriorate slightly for a while until they get better.

And then you hear that from sports coaches all the time, don’t you? Things might get a bit worse first, and then we start improving the team, we start getting better.

So we have to get this balance right, and we have to talk to people as they are today, in the situation that they are today. I think it was Alain Badiou, wasn’t it the French theorist, who said, “there’s no such thing as ethics. There are only situations.”

There are situational ethics within the parameters set. You know, heinous crimes like murder, et cetera. But in that central ground, there are situations and we are in a specific situation.

It requires a specific type of politics, a specific narrative, and we have to get that right. The problem, of course, and I mean, you’ve probably heard of the terrible problems.

Your party, the New British Party, is experiencing birth pangs which might explode before it ever becomes a thing. It might fall apart. I hope it doesn’t, because, you know, a lot of people invested a lot of time in it.

But all of these factional arguments, these dogmas that we hear on the Left, we’ve got to just get rid of these, and we’ve got to adopt what we call in our world, teleological pragmatism.

In other words, we have to have a purpose, an end, and we have to be pragmatic towards that end in the sense of working towards it incrementally and convincing people that any suffering on the way will be temporary and we can make things better. And we have evidence of that in the present and in the past, that we can actually make the lives of the majority a lot better than they have been.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:05

Very good. All right, Steve, tell everybody where they can find more of your work.

Steve Hall:
00:56:09

Well, all over the place. It was Chris Williamson I was speaking to the other day. I didn’t realize how prolific we’d been. And our team’s not all down to me. I do write with other members of our wonderful research team. And I’m very proud to be a member of, sort of regarded as the grandfather, but I don’t think so.

I think the momentum has been created by other members of the team, too. Just look at Ultra-Realism, our website, Ultra-Realists. We have published in a number of areas. We’ve actually got a Wikipedia page.

I had to put the Wikipedia. Well, I had to put the Wikipedia page up. It wasn’t me. It was another member of the team.

We had to put this Wikipedia page up because artificial intelligence was misrepresenting our position so much that we thought we’d have to put something on the net.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:56

That’s right.

Steve Hall:
00:56:57

So we put it up there. And now artificial intelligence has improved, but only because we’ve told it how to improve.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:05

All right, listen, I want to thank you. The only thing that I would have liked to have brought up.

We don’t have time for this, but I do want to throw it out there for future consideration, was that Gramsci also investigated thoroughly, why was it different in Russia than it was in Italy? Because just because they had a revolution there. And a revolution there didn’t net the same thing, did it? You had… it’s kind of speaking to your point that we could have fascism.

Steve Hall:
00:57:32

We certainly could.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:33

We could have something entirely different that we don’t like. So it’s very important to understand these things and really do the study and…

[Absolutely] Steve, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this with me today. So I’m going to go ahead and take us out here. Folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of this podcast, Macro N Cheese.

I’m also the founder of the Real Progressives nonprofit that sponsors this podcast. I’m thankful to have guests like my guest Steve Hall here who spend their time graciously with us.

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So without further ado, I bid you adieu on behalf of my guest, Steve Hall, myself Steve Grumbine, and the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
00:59:14

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