birthrights conversations of great minds i'm joined by morris berman an actor and a academic and an humanist cultural critic who specializes in western cultural and intellectual history he has a degree in mathematics and cornell university in a ph d. in the history of science from john hopkins university morris berman has written extensively about the state of western civilization in the legacies of the european enlightenment and the historical place of modern american culture his latest book is why america failed it is the third volume of his trilogy on the decline of the american empire in it morris berman examines america's commitment to economic liberalism and free enterprise going as far back as the late sixteenth century and concludes that this ideology combined with technological progress was an inevitable recipe for creating the demise of the american empire as we are experiencing it today he served in the faculty of a number of universities in the united states canada and europe and he clearly

resides in mexico where he writes for a number of publications worldwide it's my pleasure to welcome boris berman from our los angeles studios so welcome back welcome to the program thanks them thanks for having me thank thank you for joining us first off it seems that most people who hear your message can't get past their own despair at the lack of hope you will offer i mean you and i have talked a few times over the years about several of your posts and back in ninety six i wrote a book titled last hours vengeance on night they came to similar conclusions about how our culture is infected with a cancerous mental illness although i personally hold a sliver of hope that either through or after our crash we may rediscover the lessons of ancient societies and incorporate them into our world then you set this up with your appraisal of was america's in such trouble how we got here virtually from birth of our nation. yeah that's the whole question you know the book is as you said it's the third in

a trilogy and still less by him and the thing that i was after in this book was i was past issuing warnings about what was going to courage just assume we had failed and i was doing a post-mortem. and the analysis i came up with is that this actually goes back to the late sixteenth century. you know the one of the sparks for the book was reading in another book by molten mcdougall at the university of pennsylvania he wrote a book a few years back called. freedom just around the corner and what mcdougall says in the book is from the late sixty's century. the people that came to the american continent were centrally hustlers and american english is the only language in the world that has two hundred synonyms or related words for the word swindle and when

two americans get together including today. they are the two americans have an angle and they're trying to suss out the other person's angle and promote their own . so basically he says what we have from the here got is a nation of hustlers now there is a sunny side to the the up side is the yankee can do mentality the sort of you know we can take this on and all that but the downside is that it's sleazy that if everybody's trying to get one up on the next guy and it's all about competition. then finally what you have is the war of all against. the metaphor that i have for this is you know the story of the donner party that got involved in cannibalism in the high sierras in eight hundred forty seven because they were snowed in for months and. it's probably an apocryphal tale but supposedly

a native american scouting reckon a sense of mission observe them from a distance and saw this cannibalism and when they reported back to base camp and the rest of the tribe wanted to know they'd ever seen a white person for the rest tribe wanted to know you know what these gringos were about the report was just four words they each other and there could be the alternative title of this book and they ate each other could be the epitaph of the united states because basically what has been emphasized all along is one particular thread of competition and really hustling the original title of the book my publisher was going to let me use it because i figured it would sell six copies the original title was capitalism in its discontents and i was interested in the discontents i was interested in the alternative tradition the tradition that had

a spiritual component like the rowan emerson and runs really from captain john smith and sixteen sixteen right through vance packard and john kenneth galbraith and lewis mumford and jane jacobs and jimmy carter and jimmy carter in many ways was the alternative traditions last stand it's speech he gave in annapolis in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine basically said you know you've got to find something deeper in your life than just accumulating consumer goods of course the american public was interested in that they voted him out of office and they voted in a a buffoon i mean really a buffoon who basically said you can have it all and you should this is what life is about accumulating goods and so from nine hundred eighty one we've been doing what we've been doing since the last sixteenth century but sixty century but we've been doing it with a vengeance and the result is first nine. than we're other countries finally

don't like the fact that we manipulate their lives you know for our own political economic purposes that was a reactive event and then the crash of two thousand and eight of course because if you have this degree of a speculative bubble which is hustling to the max i mean the nth power sooner or later it's going to crash as a result my own analysis of the united states is pessimistic in the sense that there's no place for the united states to go really everybody is a hustler in the united states that's all we know how to do and the this is no way to live it's empty in every sense of the word except material and then finally. the system crashes and we can't seem to get out of it because we don't understand anything else i mean paul krugman for example has called neo liberalism a zombie doctrine because although it's discredited itself it's still promoted you

know what i mean this is the idea is is still laissez faire casino capitalism and the only people that are saying man this is a pile of baloney the occupy wall street folks but there's but there are those voices out there saying that i. know one hand just a moment ago you were paraphrasing hobbs' from leviathan and the war of all against all from his longer quote about the nature of human society before the iron fist of government or church came along to help save us. and and that you know hobbes's worldview arguably he began the modern conservative tradition by suggesting that humans are all flawed and evil and that without without that restraining force that it would be the war of all against or and yet in one of your earlier books that i read i believe we did. just on the radio show years ago. the zation of the world

and i remember in that right chairman of the rijn chant of the word unite you talked about how. at that time how you believed in in the subsequent lightman writers if i if i recall this correctly lochan reso and whatnot that people are actually fundamentally good at their core the that is what traditional societies and what you refer to now as steady state or stable societies proved to us and. if so and if western civilization is an aberration not the norm is there hope that humanity will rediscover or return to the norm of a truly yesterday stakeholder you. right i have i mean the thing is if you read dark ages of america which is the book for example before in the sequel before why america failed. i basically said there's no hope for america i just don't see it

but i'm an optimist in the sense that there's hope for the human spirit in the human race because you know entropy is always followed by the attempt to reorganization and i believe that and so my my real feeling is that there will be you know i light at the end of the tunnel it's just not going to shine on american soil it's going to have to be somewhere else because we really don't know how to do anything else hobbs after all as a seventeenth century figure was very much a product of his time and louis hearts in the book liberal tradition in america which was published in one hundred fifty five had the idea of what he called fragment societies those are societies that build up entire world views and ways of life just from a fragment of a european or british culture and his argument was that the united states of taking one particular fragment that is the sixteenth and seventeenth century which was the or middle class which is very entrepreneurial very hustling very you know go

getting capitalism cabalist type of world view and they didn't corporate the rest of what england stood for they just took that one fragment and they made it the united states in fact i don't care i'm going. well you know i mean hobbes is basically reflecting the class yeah well what i was it says that that was that was the big debate between jefferson and hamilton was hamilton was promoting that hustling view of america and jefferson was saying no wait a minute look at the indian tribes and he read his his autobiography or his his journals about the native americans and you know how is it possible that they're there they're happy they work for a few hours they have wonderful families they you know. on and on but it but beyond that it's seems like this country has rebooted itself a number of times each time out of collapse the the first arguably being the

american revolution and then the civil war about eighty years later we had a collapse and a reboot a restarting of our society and then in the nineteen late one nine hundred twenty s. about eighty years later another collapse in a kind of reboot of our society and here we are eighty years later on the in the middle of a collapse it looks like to me don't you think it's possible that the rate that that the reboot coming out of this collapse might move in the direction that you were writing about earlier and and i'm curious well it what you think you know absolutely i can now that i know it's a good question but the trouble is that it's never rebooted in the interaction in other words if you go to the war of independence and you talk about the reboot. it was it emerged from the war of independence as really a very every shift society and people like washington wrote you know john adams wrote in his diary i've never seen such an ever issues people in my life and benjamin rush said this country is going to destroy itself in an orgy of self

destruction he was two hundred years too early but. the what what the read who was in the direction of increased hustling i would argue the same thing for the civil war you head let's put slavery aside just for a second then i under. then that might be hard to do but you have basically a leisurely society a not hustling society a society that has been called neo feudal and which was crushed by the north and in a rather violent way scorched earth policy and never recovered the south is still bitter about that and i i understand that and what you had then was the dynamo of northern capitalism then when you have the gilded age and the crash if you're that what emerged for a time was a modification of capitalism but franklin roosevelt's real historical role was to

save capitalism this guy was no socialist and he was only in it was a capitalism by giving a few crumbs of the working class in the middle class and it worked and now we have you know i mean if all of those things hadn't been in the direction of increased hustling we wouldn't have two thousand and eight upon us and the reason that we do is that we have had all the you know the derivative derivatives and credit default swaps and all those kinds of computer tricks which is a very advanced form possible and to make a very small number of people extremely wealthy and the rest of us scrambling for what's left and so if we reboot now the chances are in my opinion it's going to be in the direction of more of the same and we're going to be a villain i have my support for us is enormous i mean i hope it grows in several thousand to several million but the likelihood of

a real profound change or a revolution in the united states is that is something that's going to come from the right not from the left let's let's let's dig our that a little deeper and just a second we've just a very short break here worse they were speaking with morris berman will be back with more of this conversation. this edition of conversations with great minds with morris from and just about. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to create through get through it if you hadn't made who can you trust no one who is you know you with the global machinery see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called sackfuls when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

well the bags conversations the great minds tonight i'm speaking with author and scholar of wars. and morris back to back to this point. you just talked about the right and the rebuilding coming out of the right. the the great depression hit the united states and germany alike and we had f.d.r. as a president and they had hitler as

a chancellor and we kind of saw how that worked out is that what you're talking about. well the german case i don't think is really analogous because the thing that made hitler possible was this immense inflation that hadn't struck hadn't hit the united states by a long shot in other words when you have to turn in several billion marks for four to buy a loaf of bread you know you're in trouble and a nation will do anything and elect anybody cue avoid that increasing spiral because it means starvation we were not in the same i mean there were a lot of people hurting in the united states but we weren't really in the same so what is a real thing i'm right happen here. you know they it's the interesting thing i mean the way it happens i think it was george orwell on my right who said when fascism comes to america it will come in the name of freedom it was exercising. or upton

sinclair yeah maybe maybe. and that's what the tea party is about it's not only a phony populism it's an authoritarian populism because what they really want is this you know corporate control of america their i mean they they must bitch and moan about the elites but they're interested in the type of corporate formation and so the the railing against there just doesn't cut any real ice and the the the form it will take i mean the claim for freedom is really a claim for something very repressive so that there's a possible foreshadowing of it and the i mean you know douglas dowd the economist at cornell for many years in one hundred seventy four he wrote a book called the twisted dream which was what he thought of the american dream that it was a mistake from day one and the one of the things he said is which i

think is is dead on is that accurate for the united states country and ited states to go through toward socialism is really going against the grain enormously against the grain i mean it's really an uphill struggle but for it to slide and he meant the democratic caucus socialism is not part of soviet union i have no sympathy for there either but for the country to go to a slide toward the right toward fish isn't this a whole lot easier because there were already on it but a theme that's what a platonic receive opens up yeah no plutocracy absolutely and arguably a club soccer see as well and. you know i could go through all that and share with you a long list of our failings and moral failings i'm just curious how. well for example the vikings were feared all across europe i mean they regularly raided

england and great to pillage their way across much of europe for hundreds of years and now the norwegians are considered among the most peaceful and and democratic socialist the capital t. capital folks or maybe civility. in the world same of the swedes the these horrible warriors did it take the absolute destruction of world war two just so reboot them and move them in a democratic socialist way and in a more progressive way and cause them to reject you liberalism and mike you know is there anything out there that might cause a similar transformation in america that could cause us to embrace the values of of northern europe. i think there is but i don't think it's on the immediate agenda in other words let's talk about scenarios for a change one would be a revolutionary scenario from the left i don't see that as having any possibility

in the united states in order for that to happen the police and the and the military have to defect or at least be neutral and they're not going to be they're going to be like they treated the protesters of us they're going to spector spray them and tear gas them and beat them and they know where their bread is buttered you know so i don't think there is a reasonable scenario the second is that. things continue to decay whether the tea party through the tea party or the continuing problem with the economy people are going to get jobs one out of five people are unemployed in the united states or underemployed and they're not going to find jobs according to all the economists for about ten years as things get worse and worse this is tim will continue to crash and that would be i would say

the roman empire model this is the one i think is the most likely one for the united states and what i think then happens is on the far side of that when you really have no choice and you're not merely on the edge of the abyss which is where we are now but you're in it. there are certain alternatives begin to have an appeal for example a society based on barter a society that's highly decentralized this is cited it's not preoccupied with science and technology so much there is already a major secessionist movement in vermont now you can laugh at it and you can say that i think rightly that if they declared their independence in iraq i lived there i really i knew those people but there is some of that quite. mrs naylor an emeritus professor of economics at duke for example i mean these are not dummies these are quite astute kinds of characters and their attitude toward the united

states is that it's spiritually bankrupt which you know always that is a no brainer and so then the question becomes what will happen if they declared for example their independence from the united states right now it would take about two hours of the marines to arrive in downtown burlington and put the whole thing down but in twenty to thirty years secession is the might be possible they are in vermont actually kind of doing that incrementally i mean peter what. peter welch is the congressman who was the governor. in any case he was no he's the senator the governor the new governor was elected on the platform of a singles single payer statewide health care system and he got it passed he got it through the legislature he signed it i mean there are they're going their own way really seriously really fast and trying to get a waiver from the federal government to do it. so could that be i mean that's they have what happened is this catch one thirty years ago and it spread all across

canada. right but you know canada remains. you know a consumer capitalist society what's happening locally might be a different issue and i have high hopes for a place like vermont you know them and essentially they're saying boy when you look outside our borders it's pretty awful especially when you look down to washington and wall street and so i mean this is this might be a direction but this is a slow process that takes a lot of time and partly it's making a virtue out of necessity what do you do when there's no money to go around what do you do when you can't get any employer well you know you start difference different systems on a local basis just to survive and i think we're going to see a lot more of that but i don't think there's going to be any kind of fast. recovery and although as i said i'm really supportive of o. ws i just can't see them sweeping the entire nation i don't know what

success would look like in that case and. so you know i my guess is if i had to make a prediction is that it will settle into a kind of permanent teachin where you can go and study the alternative tradition that i trace in this new book why america failed it's to me it's a great tradition but it never could have a voice it was always ridiculed or marginalized there's no way you know there's no way you know i mean let's face it for every copy of why america failed that i managed to sell and coulter will sell at least ten thousand books i mean this is the reality is are out and she's got the billion to change dominant culture is how do you get an alternative voice you know my answer is by and large you don't you know and i'm ok with that i'm not ok with that on one level because i think that the alternative voice from as i said from john smith the jimmy carter was

a very important one. and the reason we failed was that we never allowed it a real voice it was always marginalized to our detriment so we became this extremely fragment society it's lopsided society and frankly we're now tipping over more sperm and we have two and a half minutes left here i'm curious why have you you've left the united states to move to mexico i believe that's right let's here is where i was of us who live still who remain and why yeah go ahead go for it just going to say there are a lot of places i could move to i knew i had to get out of the united states i had nobody to talk to it was quite depressing. so when looking around i really wanted to move to a place that still had elements of a traditional culture in other words were things like friendship community the craft tradition. i don't know that kind of gracious slowness

still existed and i found it but it has to go has an incredible you know iraq's political system and you've got thirty four families that basically on the contrary it's. you're talking a lot of the local i know that i know i know i know about drugs you know i'm not a prophet can pace i know i know the whole series scenario i don't have some romantic vision of you know this this totally successful society but it's not a total failure either and frankly in the pa i find it very gracious and in the pockets of within that society. it's a it's a wonderful place to live but honestly and when when when american friends of mine say if you have any regrets about moving to mexico i say yes i regret that i didn't move there twenty years before interesting and i you know my experience of living in a small town vermont was it was kind of very similar to that in the in the minute that we have left any any advice i realize that you kind of given up on america but any

advice for those of us who have left who who have chosen to remain here. yeah i mean since since i don't think revolution is a real possibility it's that from the right there are two things you can do one is you can immigrate like i did the other is to follow the pattern i laid out in the first book in the trilogy which is called the twilight of american culture i developed the concept of the new monastic option and the new monastic individual and this is a person who stays but is determined to die with his boots on he's not going to tolerate this culture and he's not going to live the way they want you to live with it with a cell phone stuck to your all the time rushing around and trying to make money there that kind of life is repulsive to him or her and they're going to do something different especially in the way of cultural preservation i found that

absolutely fascinating i mean idea and i just mean these groups will be basically informed enclaves to say we have to do something different we are all i were flat out of time i'm sorry that i will turn the i'm sorry to chop it off here but we're out of time but i mean it was it was it that was a brilliant book to thank you so much for being here with us tonight and thank the invitation of the thank you and to our viewers in los angeles area don't miss morris berman's book signing event tomorrow night at seven o'clock pacific at the pico westwood barnes and noble bookstore on the west side of billion and watch this conversation again as well as all the conversations the great minds go to our website conversations with great minds. as the big picture first night for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to tom hartman dot free speech to org or to also check out our two you tube channels there are links to tom hartman dot com this entire show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes and we have a free thom hartmann i phone i pad app to be absent in some speed back to twitter atomic or store. and tag your.

oh i'm. so.