A Few Thoughts on Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Opening Reflections on Current News, Political Turmoil, and Local Responsibility

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris. It is good to be here, it is good to be back. I feel like I haven't been gone really but it's just I haven't done a podcast now since I think last Thursday if I'm not mistaken and so it's been a few days.

I had a busy weekend and I have a lot of news stories that I want to talk about, I saved. I don't think I'll be able to talk about them all because the news cycle is going so fast and there's bigger things that are going on.

In fact, just before I pressed the record button, people were sending me news stories about the FBI raiding Donald Trump's home, which is unbelievable in my mind. I don't even, I'm going through the files in my mind on history and I'm thinking when has this happened for an ex-president to be raided by an intelligence agency.

I heard on the radio this morning 87 ,000 new IRS agents are being hired too by Joe Biden. Now, I haven't seen anything indicating the reason for this, but if experience is any guide during the Obama administration the IRS was weaponized against Tea Party groups and so my trust level is about shot, it's not there anymore, it doesn't even exist when it comes to these bureaucracies and to have that many more IRS agents being hired just tells me that what we've been seeing, what we saw, what we're seeing right now tonight with this one agency, the FBI, is happening in other agencies and it's, it is the weaponization of the bureaucracies against political opponents.

It's totalitarianism. That's the word for it. It's totalitarianism. That's what we are in and we're in a soft totalitarianism heading for, I think, much higher levels of it and we just need, we need to pray.

We need to be as involved as we can be while maintaining the responsibility that God has for us. We don't want to sacrifice our families or the things that he's given us as primary concerns to pursue politics, but we need to be involved somewhere and, in fact, that's part of, I think, being responsible, protecting our families.

We need to be involved on some level somehow. I know voting is the bare minimum, but it's, local governments especially are going to be very important, I think, moving forward. Your local police, you know, I was thinking about this just the other day.

I was driving and I saw a BLM, you know, house, BLM signs and everything and then right next to them was Back the Blue and it just, it sparked in my mind this thought about that whole time period in 2020 and it's still, obviously, that battle's still going on, but it was really raging that summer of 2020, two years ago, and one of the things that I thought, and I think this is true, is that the left doesn't, they're not against the police.

They don't have a hatred for the police. I'm talking about the institutional left, those who have authority and power in leftist institutions or leftist operating in institutions with lots of power. They love force.

They love the police. What they don't like are local police. In other words, they like it when there's groups, institutions, agencies that swear allegiance to them and do their bidding. They love that and use force against their political opponents.

They love that. In fact, that's central to what they're about. Obama wanted to create a national police force as well-funded, he said, as the military. What they don't like are local police. They don't like policemen whose duties and allegiance, loyalty is to local people, the people that they actually serve on the ground and it's so important right now to maintain and to expand.

We must expand federalism and localism. If we don't have local communities that we can rely on, that we can be part of and help and we're isolated, then that's when we become vulnerable. So maintaining local police, I actually just am remembering a church that I heard about.

I met a member from the church who said that at their church, they have a co-op where people at the church, they have farmers and various people who work in different industries and they've kind of come together in their own co-op for trading, for just in case something happens, they'll have food.

They'll have some of the services they need are right there in that local area. And so I think that's a great idea. That's kind of what we need to be thinking about as we move forward in 2022 and beyond.

Scary times in some ways, but God is still in control. So remember that. Remember, he's given you a place. He put you here for such a time as this. And so it's exciting. It's not just scary. It's also exciting and it's important and we'll see what happens.

Announcing the Book Discussion and Upcoming Retreat

So that's happening right now. But I want to talk today actually about Karl Truman again. We're going to talk about rise and fall of the modern self, rise and triumph. Sorry, rise and triumph of the modern self.

And there was a couple announcements that I wanted to give you before I jump into that. The first is just, let's see if I can pull this up for you. I believe I have the technology. Here we go. The first is a men's retreat, men's retreat with Dr. Russell Fuller.

I uploaded a video on this and I haven't put it as part of the audio podcast. So if you're listening, you can go to the YouTube channel and check that out or Facebook or Rumble. I have it posted there as well.

But it's just a little promo for the men's retreat shows you a little bit about where we're going, what we're going to be doing. There were some questions though on this that I wanted to answer. So here's the signup sheet.

It looks like this. It's a signup genius. I'll put the link in the info section for this video if you want to go check it out. And I'll repeat some of the things I said, but I want to answer some questions too.

So what I said was, we're going to have a phenomenal retreat and you're going to want to come. If you're a man and you want to be around like-minded men, you're going to definitely want to try to come.

And let me sell it to you this way if I can. I'm shameless about selling this to you. So this is how I'm wired. And I would assume most men are actually wired this way. You have an option, let's say. You can go to a conference, an indoor conference.

You can meet people. That's great. I think that can be fun. You get to listen to some speeches that you can probably download from the internet later if you wanted to. And so you travel across the country and you do some networking.

Nothing wrong with that. Now, I've done that. I've gone to the conferences like that. I'm not critiquing that. I've spoken at conferences and things and there's a place for that. However, especially if it's nice out and it's a place that I can go and then later I can listen to the same lectures, I'm not as attracted to it.

I'm just not. Because I'm thinking, what other things could I be doing? I'd rather go outdoors, if it's nice especially, and have a really good time in the woods or doing something I enjoy. If something you enjoy is going to a sports game, go to a sports game.

Whatever that is for you. I think of cycling. I think of hiking. I think of fishing. I think of outdoor things. And take a few Christian buddies. Just have a good time. Have some fellowship. Maybe grill some meat that night.

I mean, to me, I would take that every day and twice on Sunday. No, not Sunday. Sunday we go to church. Anyway, I would take that, though, over an indoor men's conference. It's just me. And I think most men are like that.

I have that feeling. And especially conferences that go on for three or four days and you're inside. I guess some people, you know, that may be how you're wired and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think most guys, though, they'd rather be doing something.

I've noticed if you're around a campfire, people open up more. They'll look at the fire. There's, I don't know, there's just something about it. You're involved in activities together. You're not just sitting and talking.

You're doing stuff. And that's what I think we're going to be doing. That's what I want to do. That's what we're planning on doing at the men's retreat. So it's not just going to be, we are going to have great teaching.

Dr. Russell Fuller is going to be there. And it's going to be phenomenal, I'm sure, because he's great. He's an expert on Old Testament. He taught it for years. And he's going to be talking about Jeremiah with us.

But we're also going to be doing some outdoor stuff. And it's in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, late fall, probably just past peak. So there still will be some colors on the trees. It'll be pretty.

It'll be starting to get cooler. But there's going to be plenty of stuff to do. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to have fires at night. We're going to be boating and hiking. And I think they have a rock climbing wall there.

And so that's the kind of thing that we're going to be doing during the day. If you want to, you don't have to. I mean, you can do whatever. We'll have enough free time to get to know each other. And the other thing is, this isn't one of those huge conferences where you step in there and you don't know anyone.

It's capped at 100 people. So if you want to come, I would suggest signing up. Just go to the link in the info section. It's going to take you to Signup Genius. And it's pretty straightforward. You can just RSVP right there.

Now, let me just explain how this works. Oh, and by the way, I should say, if you're a pastor or a men's group leader or something like that, then this would be a great thing, especially if you're in a surrounding state.

Maybe get the men in your church involved and say, hey, can we maybe take a Friday off? Let's go to the Adirondacks, hear Dr. Fuller and meet some people. I'm going to be there. I know AD Robles says he's coming.

Dr. Russell Fuller is obviously going to be there. We'll see who else shows up. I think it's going to be really good. So October 28th through 30th. Now, here are some of the questions I got. The main one being, John, how do I sign up?

I've gone to the website and what do I do? Well, the instructions are actually right there, but I can understand some people's confusion because most conferences or retreats, you're going to be able to pay right there and confirm that you're well, here's how you confirm with this.

And it's old school, OK? The reason it's old school is because this is the first time I've done this and I was only planning on doing this for people in my church. And I thought maybe a few from the podcast might want to come.

Well, now I'm finding out, wow, there's a bigger demand than I thought. So if this goes well, which I have full confidence it will, and this is a big success, then next year we may do it again and I may make a bigger deal about it.

We'll see. But we may have a whole item or a whole mechanism for taking your payment and everything. But this year, first time, I'm going simple and it's old school. Now, here's how it works. You go to the website and you can scroll down and it says, will you be attending this event?

RSVP now, just click on that. And it's that easy. We have 28 confirmed right now. OK, you just click on that and you're in now. How then you say, well, how do I pay? It's one hundred and seventy six dollars to attend.

How do I pay for that for two nights? What would that be? Five meals, I think. How do I pay for this? Well, it's old school. You're going to be sending a check. So I put the address right here to pay, send checks to Grace Bible Church.

And there's the address itemized Ben's Retreat. So when we get that check at Grace Bible Church, the church secretary will look at it or whoever might be me, I may be looking at it. Whoever whoever ends up handling this, we'll see your name.

We'll compare it to the list and we'll just check off paid. And that's as easy as that. If we don't receive anything by the beginning of October, I'm going to be reevaluating, OK, who hasn't paid and you'll be hearing from me.

And if, you know, if you haven't paid, you may just lose your spot. So that's how it works. You just mail in. I know it's old school. I know who does that anymore. Mail checks, mail letters. Well, we do now.

There is another way you could probably do it online. You could go to GraceBibleNewYork .org and I would really suggest please try to do it with a check. But if you're really against that, send me an email and let me know you're doing this.

But you can go and you can make a donation to Grace Bible Church through the website, just a digital donation. And I think there's an option you can itemize for men's retreat. Just let me know. It's it's without getting into the details.

It's a little more complicated so we can handle it. But we would prefer I would prefer at this point a check if possible. So that's how it's going to work. And if you signed up, you're on the list. And it's filling up fast.

So you're going to want to get on there. Okay, so the last announcement is I wanted to just let you know about if you haven't heard yet about Equipping the Persecuted. It's a great organization. They're doing missionary work, but also what most call humanitarian work, but supplies, bulletproof vests, food, walkie talkies, all the things that Nigerian Christians need.

They're providing those things. And it's just a great Christian organization. They preach the gospel, but they also are helping some of these needs of our brothers and sisters in Nigeria who are being viciously attacked on a weekly basis, monthly basis, sometimes daily, depending on how hot it is over there by terrorists.

And so you can help your brothers and sisters in Nigeria by donating to Equipping the Persecuted. Simply go to equippingthepersecuted .org. Okay, well, let's talk about the book now. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

The subtitle for the book, I'll hide my image so you can see. It's called Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution. And you can see in that that Carl Truman is leaving something out in a way.

There's actually a number of things I want you to just see from the title and the subtitle. And I'm not saying this is a mistake necessarily, but it's odd to me. And I want to point out why it's odd. This is the first thing that stood out to me because I kept thinking when I was reading it, okay, when's he going to get to the BLM stuff?

When is he going to get to CRT? And the book came out in 2020, so that stuff had been around for a few years. 2015, I think, was when BLM started. So why did he not get to that? And the subtitle is The Road to Sexual Revolution.

So that's what he's talking about. Now, the title, though, is Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. You think if it's something as big as the modern self, it would be able to explain how we think of ourselves today, right?

If you think modern is current or the present way that people think of themselves, which I'll get to that in a minute because there's a philosophical meaning for modern as well. And it's confusing. It's just confusing.

But anyway, if we're just assuming it means the current self, how people think of themselves, well, that's pretty big, right? Race, ethnicity, these things are really big deals that would be great to have some information on from a Christian understanding, wouldn't you think?

I mean, that's kind of big. I mean, I was talking the other day about on the podcast, this new Lord of the Rings, this series that Amazon's putting out. I actually, by the way, read the Lord of the Rings last week, all three of them.

And I have some thoughts, but I won't share them now. All that to say, man, the Amazon, it made me dislike the Amazon series even more, at least the trailers and reviews that I've seen, because they're taking Tolkien's work and they're taking descriptions of things Tolkien's talked about, and then they're just making their own thing up.

And the reason they're doing it, though, is important. The reason they're doing it, they'll take like a princess, let's say, or a character that is described by Tolkien as glowing white, that kind of thing.

And they'll make that person black in the series. Now, is that a sin? Is that wrong? I mean, not necessarily, but why are they doing it is the question. Why is it that 16 of the population is represented in like 98 of the commercials on television?

I got a friend who does some of these commercials. He says that it's really important for the companies. They figure out who's going to be in the foreground, in the background, and you'll see more prominent positions even in those commercials are given to ethnic minorities.

Why is that? Well, that's something that Carl Truman's book, I don't think, gives you an explanation for. In fact, I don't think you could really... His paradigm for sexuality doesn't make sense, in my opinion, of the stuff we're seeing with race and ethnicity.

And that's one of the weaknesses in my mind is that there's a commonality between those two things, namely that they're both viewed as social constructs, but Truman doesn't see them in terms of a socially created identity.

He sees them as, as the subtitle says, expressive individualism. So there may be a misdiagnosis going on here. It may be that Truman says some very true things, which I think he does, but he's missing something that actually is the puzzle piece that would make more sense of what's going on today.

And that's kind of, that's my contention. And I want to say this up front. There's some things I'm still working on in my mind. When I read something, I kind of, I think of the aftertaste that I get. I marinate in it.

And I'm still marinating on this. I don't really know exactly what I think about everything in this book because I think there's some good things too. But there are some things that I am sure are off.

And I'll try to let you know what those things are as we get to it. I also want to give a shout out to Hiram Diaz. Hiram Diaz, I'm going to put the link in the info section. Lots of links. You're going to get that link.

You're going to get a link to my slideshow for this. If you're a patron, at least. You're also going to, if you go to the info section, find the link to the retreat. So yeah, lots of links. The links for Hiram Diaz's articles on this will be there.

I couldn't find anything critical of this book except Hiram Diaz. That was it. And he has what I think is, it's worth reading. He has seven essays worth reading critiquing the rise and triumph of the modern self.

And I'm not saying that you'll necessarily even agree with everything he says, but it's worth interacting with. And it's the only person I know of who has interacted with Truman in this critical way. And I borrowed, I've taken some of his critiques and I've given them to you.

He actually helped me answer some of the questions that I was asking, like, when's he going to get to BLM? Why doesn't this make sense of that, of race and ethnicity? So let's keep going. Let's talk about the book in a little more depth here.

Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Missing Piece in Truman's Diagnosis

Reading, I think, this book, Republicrat, helped me in understanding rise and triumph of the modern self. And the main reason for that is that I understood where Karl Truman was coming politically. And once I understood where he was coming from politically, usually, like I said, with politics, they spring out of these religious worldview philosophy, these deep embedded first principles.

And so if I understand someone's politics, often, at least if they try to be consistent, you can understand a little more about their metaphysics, epistemology, and all of that, their philosophy. And there's no exception here.

So if, in fact, Karl Truman is a communitarian, and I'll talk about what that is in a minute. And if you might, for in layman's terms, soft socialist, perhaps, if he is that, then his critique of the modern self or what he thinks the modern self is, he would have a consistent view, at least.

He would have a view that his politics, his communitarian politics, and then his metaphysics are going to be consistent. And they explain each other in some ways, at least they make sense of one another.

And so it helped me to understand his politics a little bit first. So here's a summary of some of the arguments or the problems he identifies and then the narrative or the kind of the argument he makes here.

Now, the problems he identifies, number one, he talks about this individualism. He says that prioritization of the individual's inner psychology, we might even say feelings or intuitions for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.

He says that that's a problem. And he blames Rene Descartes for this. He blames Jean-Jacques Rousseau for this. This romanticized kind of view eventually that developed of the self, that there's corruption in the world, there's bad things out there, but internally, you can trust yourself.

You can believe in yourself. You can follow your star. Now, this was popular in Disney movies in 1930, well, 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, right? This is the modern self, I would say, in the sense of modernism.

Now, his title, The Modern Self, I think most people reading it, layman reading it, think he's talking about the current self or the self that most people conceive of today, the present self. The self that's popular.

But it's possible he's also talking about the self of modernism. And it seems that way because modernism would be associated with individualism more so. And that's what he's critiquing here. And so the missing piece in my mind is there's not a lot said about postmodernism in the book.

I think it's mentioned like three times, but he doesn't critique it. And there's some missing pieces. In fact, when I wrote my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, I had to try to make sense of the present state of affairs and the commonalities between them and what led us to where we are.

And I gave you a historical progression. You can get the book, go to worldviewconversation .com and get a signed copy. You can go to Amazon and get it. But Carl Truman and I aren't writing about the exact same thing, but there's some...

We're in the same orbit in some of what we're writing. And that's what made me realize to some extent that, wait, there's things that I wrote about that Carl Truman's not even addressing. Why is that?

Because it would make sense of some of the things that are happening today. And so one of the things he focuses a lot on is this inner psychology, feelings, intuition, but this inner self. And that's to blame for what's going on today, what people think of when they think of, I'm a man or a woman or a gay straight.

You know, when they think of their sexuality, who are they authentically inside, being their true authentic selves, right? That's what he's saying. And it's this obsession with who they are internally and ignoring then external things that would perhaps indicate who they are, like their body, like their biology, for example, being one of them, or like other people, the community being another.

Those are the two primary things he identifies. And apply this though, just for one moment, just apply this to the BLM stuff, okay? Would we accept someone, in fact, there was someone who did this, who tries to say, you know what?

I didn't have the quote unquote black experience. I grew up in the suburbs of, I don't know, Columbus, Ohio. And now I'm going to be the BLM chapter head. I'm gonna run for or head up somehow some black civil rights type organization.

Now, what would we do with that? Well, in the society today, that would be rejected. Well, why would that be rejected? Well, and the reason is, is because, well, that person doesn't have the experience.

They didn't live in the community. They didn't have the experiences with whatever it might be, the police or the drug problems or, you know, whatever it is that this experience that you're supposed to have in order to, really, it's an experience of oppression in order to gain that special knowledge, the standpoint theory, okay?

That knowledge that you have that others don't because they're not, they didn't walk in your shoes, in your skin. So that's a much different argument because when someone uses the same kind of logic that we would think is often used to justify, let's say, transgenderism, and they say, well, I can be whatever I want.

I'm a black person when they're white. Well, it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? That's a question. I don't think Karl Truman really grapples with as much. I don't see it in the book. And the reason is, the thing that would make sense of both these things is that, and you hear this all the time, race is a social construct.

Gender is a social construct or is fluid. You hear that society, these hierarchies or hegemonies in society are what define who we are. And identity politics, the whole basis for that, which is really, I think, what Karl Truman's capitalizing on, because people are, they're seeing identity politics and they're running to books like this to explain it.

Identity politics takes what are considered to be these negative pejoratives. So you're oppressed, you're worth less, you're not as important. You have barriers that we're gonna, society puts there because you're in this oppressed category, whether that be because of your disability or how much weight you have on you or your gender or your dietary restrictions, perhaps, or we know the whole panoply of things that are considered to be inhibitors or make you a victim.

So those things, all of those things in identity politics are then turned around to be positives. So black is beautiful, right? Gay pride, right? We're not ashamed of this anymore as the Christian hegemony, the white Western Christian hegemony says we're supposed to be.

Now we're standing against that and we're doing so, we're kind of like self-actualizing, but we're doing so by taking these roles that have been assigned to us by the hegemony, by the power structure, by the community, and then we're actually reorienting the hierarchy so that now those who are on the bottom are on top and those who are on the top are on the bottom.

That's the whole point of intersectionality. So the more oppression you have, the more people should listen to you, the more privilege you should be able to get distributed to you from the people that have the privilege because it was just arbitrarily assigned to them by society, by the hegemony, by, so that's all what I'm talking about right now is all community-based or that may not be the best term to use, but it's not individualistic, it's more corporate.

It's a conception of the self that sees itself primarily as part of a community and perhaps more importantly as against or a certain interpretation, this hierarchy, this hegemony, this overarching culture.

So it sees itself in that particular place. So it's within a framework of oppression. So that's what we're seeing today. And it's with the LGBT, it's with the BLM stuff, it's really with a lot of the things we're seeing is this identity politics that's become weaponized and it's the individual or the self is seen as defined by an overarching narrative of some kind, a hegemony of some kind.

Now that overarching narrative is not objective is where post-modernism comes in. It's not an objective truth. It's not rooted in objectivity. It's arbitrary. But nonetheless, it's there and it must be combated somehow.

And so when someone says, it comes out as, I'm gay or I'm transgender or whatever. I think initially, especially, this argument was given because it was more acceptable, especially to the baby boomer generation.

It was because it seemed to be rooted in some kind of an objective reality that this is who I am inside. It's modernism more so. I am a woman trapped in a man's body or vice versa. And so my true self is this internal thing.

I mean, it's just like when we were told that, hey, all we want is marriage. We're not gonna devalue your marriage. We're not gonna make your kids do anything. We're not gonna attack you in any way. All we want is the right to be married and that's it.

We'll leave you alone after that. And of course, once they obtain that right, within about two seconds, the activists wanted to have transgender sports and that kind of thing. I mean, it didn't take that long.

It was a matter of years, just a few of them. And we are where we're at today with this controversy over sports. And so it wasn't true. It just wasn't true from the beginning. They wouldn't stop there.

They didn't stop there. And a lot of the tactics, I think that had been used have been subversive to some extent. To me, that explains why that was used. I wanna ask you a question though. When was the last time you heard someone say, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body?

When was the last time you actually heard that? I don't hear it much. That's not the language. And I'm not saying no one uses it, but that's not the language that's popular to use today. What's the language that's popular to use?

I'm transgender, okay? I just am. I am transgender. And what's the next thing? What's the very next breath? And I'm oppressed. And if you say anything about it, if you try to correct anything about it, your speech is violence against me.

It's just happened to a congressman. I forget which congressman it was, but I was watching some committee hearing and it was some transgender activists who said, if you question whether or not men can have babies, if you question that idea, then you are committing violence against trans people.

I mean, that is truly happening today. That's not a myth. So whether you're black, white, green, whatever, whether your gender is male or female, or you're some kind of, you think of yourself as transgender or something else, it's all a social construct today.

It's all just how society conceives of you is yourself. And that's why it's such a problem if society doesn't affirm who you are, then if the narrative, then that's oppression. That's not the narrative we want.

Because if society confers to you an identity, then that is your identity. The truth is in, it's not objective, it's within society. That's what I'm seeing today. It's public opinion matters so much. The Twitter mob matters so much.

You don't even see debates hardly anymore. We live in post-modernism at this point, but you're socially constructed. You're the product. There is no objective you, this rooted you. You're just the product of all these other forces that are at work, that are having an effect on you.

And so anyway, that piece of the puzzle to me is missing from Carl Truman's critique because he just wants to say it's all individualism. It's just whatever I feel inside is who I am. And I'm not saying that the feelings don't play a role here.

They certainly do. What I'm saying though, is that today, it seems like more often than not, it's not, it's either not feelings or it's not just feelings that we, that serve as the objection to biblical morality.

It's more than that. It's socially derived identities and whether or not there's an oppression value affixed to them. So if there's an oppression value affixed to the identity of transgenderism, then that becomes this protected identity that it's to someone's advantage actually to have.

And they have that identity, not necessarily because of some rooted by, in fact, most of them don't even really care about that much. It's not because of some rooted biological feature. In fact, it's becoming more and more, even with these sex reassignment surgeries and stuff, that the people that are doing them are, they think of themselves as women.

Let's say it's a man that is going to have a sex reassignment surgery, let's say. Sometimes they're doing these surgeries and it's not because they're trying to bring their body objectively, bring their body into conformity to what deep down they think of themselves and what they are.

Like they're a woman trapped in a man's body or vice versa. They're doing these surgeries because they want to bring their bodies into conformity to an experience. Notice the difference here. What Carl Truman is saying, and I know I've barely started this critique, so I'm gonna have to zip through the rest of it, but what Carl Truman is saying here is that it's inner psychology.

But what you hear a lot of the people who are making these transitions say is they have an experience. Which thing determines who you are? Is it inner psychology or is it experience? One's more internal.

One's more external. Experience is as you interact with the world, this is who you come to understand yourself to be. You're the composite of all these different interactions, all these different things that take place in communities.

And so that's the difference. And that's what you have to understand is Carl Truman is giving you what I see to be a problem, but he's not. He's giving you a diagnosis of this that isn't actually, it doesn't conform to what's actually happening on the ground out there completely.

So let's keep going though here. I wanna read for you some stuff. Maybe I'll skim some of this. He says, the idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is a commonplace today. And he blames then consumerism or he says late capitalism.

Now, one of the things with Carl Truman, I saw it in Republicrat, this book, he uses capitalism, consumerism and the free market interchangeably as if they're all the same thing, which is incredibly sloppy.

I'm just shocked as a scholar, he would do this because capitalism originally, Das Kapital, right? It was a denigration really against commercialism was the word that was used at that time, but commercialism and then it became, well, commercialism and the free market.

Now, commercialism from, if you understand 19th century economics, commercialism and the free market are two different things. Commercialism would be more, that term at least eventually became used as kind of like a substitute for crony capitalism.

That's what we call it today. It's hard because these terms keep changing. But Karl Marx, the Marxist critique is that it's all the same basically. It's just, it's caring about, it's consumerism. It's caring about stuff, caring about money, letting that drive your entire economy, that concern.

And the thing is though, Carl Truman sounds like them when he makes these critiques. I've had Marxist professors. Karl Truman sounds like them because they would be the sloppy by just throwing these things around.

And they're not the same thing necessarily. And so he says that consumerism or late capitalism fuels this notion with a message to its customer as king and of the goods we consume as being basic to who we are.

So you are what you buy, I guess, or that is your self-actualization process. You become the God of your own universe based on what you buy. Let's see, he says, you have the power to transform yourself by the mere swipe of a credit card.

Possession of this thing, that car, that kitten, that item of clothing will make you a different, a better, a more fulfilled person underwritten by easy credit. Consumerist self-creation is the order of the day.