The True Meaning of "The Lord of the Rings" [REMASTERED]

Stefan Molyneux

In this 8th anniversary remastered interview, Stefan Molyneux and Dr. Duke Pesta discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," exploring the impact of World Wars on themes of heroism and morality. They analyze the symbolism of the One Ring and contrast characters like Frodo with collective failures. This conversation encourages reflection on the enduring lessons of courage and integrity within Tolkien’s works. Tune in for a compelling exploration of his literary legacy.  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025

Transcript

00:00:00Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux here with a good friend, Dr. Duke Pester, a tenured university

00:00:03professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school

00:00:08offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.

00:00:12For more from Dr. Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org. Dr. Pester,

00:00:20thank you so much for taking the time today. Good to be with you again, Steph.

00:00:23One podcast to bind them. So we're going to do the Fellowship of the Ring. It's really something.

00:00:32Now, my history with this book is long and tumultuous. I first read The Hobbit back when I was

00:00:37playing Dungeons and Dragons. I read Lord of the Rings. I've read it, I think, twice. No, I've read

00:00:43it three times, actually, sort of end to end. I've read The Silmarillion, read the other stuff,

00:00:48read his biography, read, like, it really is an absolutely fascinating study in just about every

00:00:53single conceivable human dimension, which is why it is the second best-selling story in the English

00:00:59language. What's your history with the work? I read it. I had a very fortunate education. I went

00:01:05to a very good Catholic school when I was a boy before they became corrupted. And we got, we read

00:01:11in my sophomore year of high school, I read all three of the novels. The Lord of the Rings read The

00:01:16Hobbit. And I, like you, did what you did. I went and read The Silmarillion, read all the supporting

00:01:21documents, just fell in love with it. And so, and I, you know, a lot of people have issues with the

00:01:27movies. Whenever the movie's on, my wife gets so mad at me. The movies are very flawed and imperfect.

00:01:33But every time they're on, no matter what I'm doing, I just stop and watch. I'll stand there for

00:01:37an hour and watch it. So much so that I'm now very conversant in all the ways the movies divert from

00:01:42the books. But I still find even the watered-down movie version, it's absolutely captivating.

00:01:47Well, they made 48,000 different weapons just for the movie. I mean, the amount of craftsmanship

00:01:52in it, like every time I watch it, I'm looking at the backgrounds almost now. Like they, they went

00:01:58and planted gardens in the Shire location for a year before they started shooting just to make it

00:02:03sort of look lived in and grown and natural. And well, we can, we can talk about some of the

00:02:07differences later, but do you know much about Tolkien? Because I mean, he's steadfastly rejected

00:02:12political or contemporaneous interpretations of his work. To me, it's pretty hard to ignore the

00:02:19fact that he fought in World War I, that his kids were on the front in World War II, and that the

00:02:26book was written, I guess the first three chapters were written just before the Second World War broke

00:02:30out, and then it was finished after the Second World War. There were, of course, times in the Second

00:02:34World War where he had no time to write anything. To me, it's impossible to imagine that both his

00:02:40experience in the First World War and his son's exposure and his general knowledge of the Second

00:02:45World War would have no effect on this cataclysmic battle story between good and evil. But what's

00:02:50your familiarity with Tolkien's life, which I think is an important place to start?

00:02:55It is. And Tolkien is a very idiosyncratic, curmudgeonly writer and interviewer.

00:03:00Hey, hey, we just call him British, okay? We just, it may be eccentric, maybe. Otherwise,

00:03:07just plain British. Sorry, go ahead. But he was British in the Victorian sense of the word. He

00:03:11despised industrialization, mechanization. And one of the things I love about Tolkien,

00:03:16I, you know, Steph, I am no echo warrior by any stretch of the imagination, but conservative

00:03:21contains within it the word conservation. And Tolkien really loved nature. About your direct question,

00:03:28though, I think that all the things that you just pointed out that we find in Tolkien's work,

00:03:32at one point or another, he both repudiated and embraced, depending upon who he was talking to,

00:03:37what time of his life he was influenced by. But it is absolutely clear, he even acknowledged at the

00:03:42end of his life, the major role that the horrors of World War I played in his stories. And he lost

00:03:48many of his friends, and many of his students then ended up fighting in World War II, as same thing

00:03:53happened for C.S. Lewis. And so these were just absolutely catastrophic points in their lives.

00:03:58The Hobbit was finished in 1937. His publisher wanted a sequel. He tried to turn in the Silmarillion

00:04:05as part of the sequel. The publisher read it, didn't understand any of it, and rejected it.

00:04:11At which point, Tolkien began to work on The Lord of the Rings, which was written between 1937 and 1949.

00:04:18And the rest is history. There are certain other themes I think we can talk about as we progress

00:04:24through the hour. But I think that's kind of the backstory for us. The other thing I think that's

00:04:29important is, one of the things that's amazing about Tolkien is, not only did he speak at least

00:04:3520 languages and invent a large number, his fascination with languages was actually the

00:04:39motivation, according to his claim, his motivation for the books, that the stories were made to provide

00:04:44a world for the languages that he was fascinated by from being a child. But I know that you're, of course,

00:04:50involved in homeschooling. One of the things that's amazing about Tolkien is that he was,

00:04:54in fact, homeschooled by his mother after his father died in particular. It's just amazing to

00:04:58me that he was able to be that creative, that imaginary, that fluid with language, that successful

00:05:04as an academic, without being exposed to the wonderfully mental fertile fertility issues inherent

00:05:10in public schools. Really, really quite a remarkable feat that he overcame just being homeschooled

00:05:15to be that successful. Now, Tolkien, I have a friend, a fellow scholar who made the observation,

00:05:21I think it's brilliant, that you look at Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis did a thousand things well. I mean,

00:05:27he was an apologist, a scholar. He wrote beautiful literary criticism, children's novels, science

00:05:33fiction. Lewis did a lot of things brilliantly, but J.R.R. Tolkien did one thing better than anybody

00:05:41in perhaps history ever did it. And that was to create a completely self-contained, not just a

00:05:47story, not just novels, but novels that were themselves and characters that were surrounded

00:05:52by all these different levels of physical and metaphysical worlds, right up to the gods and all

00:05:58the way down to the most tiny details. You mentioned at the beginning of our talk here today that now when

00:06:02you watch The Lord of the Rings, you watch all the back stuff. I do too. And you think about how

00:06:07meticulous, one of the best things about those movies is how meticulous Jackson was in trying

00:06:11to set the scene. And yet it pales in comparison. This is where any film version is destined to fall

00:06:16down because no film version can be as fertile as the human imagination when it's rightly plugged in.

00:06:22But as fertile and as careful as Jackson was, I mean, Tolkien just at every level was a perfectionist.

00:06:30You mentioned the languages, the languages he, not just the ones he spoke, but the languages he

00:06:35invented whole cloth for his Middle Earth. And he, two things Tolkien said that I think are

00:06:40absolutely fascinating. One, he considered his work mythopoetic. That was his word for it.

00:06:46That we are going to create a real live mythology again using poetry. And his language fixation,

00:06:53he called a glossopoeia, right? That these were the two driving functions behind his, behind his

00:06:58universe. And that's why they're so full. He didn't start on the lowest level with a plot or a

00:07:04character. He started with the universe. He started with the gods. He started with the lesser gods,

00:07:09the Ainur. He started with the idea of how this world that he was going to come to write about

00:07:13was invented in the first place, how it evolved over eons on eons and how the gods interacted with

00:07:18creation. Staggeringly, in a way, it's biblical in its implications of how Genesis to Revelations it is

00:07:27from beginning to end and every aspect of the kitchen sink thrown in there as well.

00:07:30Right. Now, to me, I'm going to sort of put forward a very sort of brief hypothesis about

00:07:36how the stories may fit together with some of the major influences in his life in the 20th century.

00:07:41And let me know what you think. So very briefly, I sort of view The Hobbit as the First World War

00:07:46and Lord of the Rings as the Second World War. One of the fascinating things about The Hobbit,

00:07:50which perhaps we can do a separate show on, is normally in heroic myths, when you defeat the

00:07:55monster and you get the treasure, that's the end. One of the fascinating things about The Hobbit is

00:08:00when they get the treasure and they defeat the monster, in a sense, their troubles only just begin

00:08:05because then you have the battle of the five armies. Everybody's trying to get their piece

00:08:08of the treasure and so on. And to me, that is really fascinating because that to me was a story

00:08:15of the First World War. The First World War, of course, the death count after the First World War

00:08:19with the Spanish flu, with a weakened population and a highly mobile population of soldiers going back to

00:08:24their homelands. The death count after the First World War was even greater than the war itself,

00:08:3120 million versus 10 million. And of course, the disastrous Treaty of Versailles set the stage,

00:08:36set the groundwork for the Second World War. So to me, there's a lot in, you think you've defeated

00:08:43the monster, but you've really sown the seeds for future conflict and combat. I think there's a lot

00:08:48in that, in the First World War. Also, he went to war, Tolkien himself, with the idea that it was

00:08:55good versus evil. As he spent time in the war, in the First World War in the trenches, his first day

00:08:59of combat was the Somme, the worst day to that date in British military history with 19,000 killed and

00:09:0738,000 wounded in one day. But he quickly realized that there was good and evil on both sides. And of

00:09:14course, because he was, he came from a very upper class background. His father was a banker, he was

00:09:19born in South Africa. But then he was thrown together with his troops. There was a rigid class

00:09:24structure in the British military at the time, generally people who were university went to

00:09:28become officers, he was a communications officer. But he was thrown in and saw a lot of the virtues of

00:09:33the working class of the soldiers of the grunts, as I guess they would be called in some

00:09:38locations. And I think that helped inform him in terms of, there's a class structure in the Shire,

00:09:44right? I mean, Bilbo and Frodo are kind of upper middle class guys, they don't seem to have a whole

00:09:48lot of calluses, they don't seem to get a whole lot of actual work done. But he sees great virtues,

00:09:53of course, in Merry and Pippin and Samwise and so on. I think that comes out of those experiences. And

00:09:59it's not a direct parallel. But I do think that the war to end all wars, which then sets a stage for a

00:10:06future conflict that's even worse, to me has something to do with First World War and Second

00:10:10World War.

00:10:11I think that's very well said. It's a great thesis. That would make a great scholarly article. It's a

00:10:15wonderful idea. I think parallel, running parallel to that, and I'd never thought of that before. But

00:10:20you also have this country-city aspect, that you think about World War I and World War II, what sets

00:10:26them apart from almost all the other wars in a major way is how scientifically and technologically

00:10:32advanced they were, how machine-driven. By the end of World War I, you had the prototypes for the

00:10:38first, that were beginning for the first jets. You had tanks in play. You had this chemical gas being

00:10:44used. And as a country boy, as a man who lived and loved country life and despised the clutter and

00:10:51the noise and the pollution of cities, I think what you see in The Lord of the Rings, both in The Hobbit

00:10:56and the Lord of the Rings, is this embrace of the city. For Tolkien, the boys who won World War I and

00:11:02consequently won World War II weren't just the boys that were educated on the football fields of

00:11:07Eton. They were also the boys who came from these country boroughs and these country towns, and they

00:11:11brought with them. I think that's where Tolkien found his goodness, that despite the rigid class

00:11:16structure, his own not going to fancy private schools, I think he saw in the boys in the

00:11:22trenches, who the politics were way above them, but they were country boys at heart. They weren't

00:11:27sophisticated. They weren't technologically savvy, but they were the ones that had the moral spine

00:11:32and ability to push the conflict the right way. And one of the themes that I see across The Hobbit

00:11:40and The Lord of the Rings is stone versus... Stone is everywhere. Stone versus machine. And one of the

00:11:47major themes is the movability of the heart. Do hearts turn to stone, as in the cases of Saruman and

00:11:54the cases of the orcs who start with stone hearts? Or do they melt and become human again? And you have

00:12:00this wonderful going back and forth between the countryside and the landscape in those books,

00:12:06and then the cities, right? Whether they're orc or goblin cities or whether the cities of men,

00:12:10the cities of elves. And it's interesting that the elvish cities are all rustic and rural. They're all

00:12:15trees interbind in columns, as opposed to the dwarves whose everything is stone, right? And so

00:12:21there's this wonderful give and take between... At one point, the ant, Treebeard, the fascinating

00:12:27ant character, he says that Saruman, when he's corrupted, has become concerned with nothing but

00:12:33rock and stone and wheel, right? And so you think about in the imagination of Tolkien, how horrified he

00:12:39was, not just by the excesses of industrialization, but how that can be militarized. And there's a

00:12:45wonderfully, to me, it's also a dystopia. The Lord of the Rings is a dystopian warning about what's

00:12:52coming. If we continue to put our faith not in nature, not in natural, the basic kindnesses,

00:12:58and in many ways, the old religious pieties, we haven't mentioned yet, Tolkien was devoutly Catholic.

00:13:04He was the one who used his apologetics to bring Lewis somewhat back into the fold of Christianity.

00:13:10And even though he denied, he did not like allegorical readings of his book, he certainly,

00:13:17and later in line, got a great quote we can talk about later, he certainly understood at the end of

00:13:21his life how much his faith, too, influenced what he was trying to accomplish in those books.

00:13:25Now, he was so old school that when the mass began to be transferred from Latin to English,

00:13:30he would still very loudly respond in Latin. He was very old school when it came to Catholicism,

00:13:36which is fascinating, really, in that C.S. Lewis, of course, created a much more directly

00:13:41allegorical to Christianity text in the Chronicles of Narnia. But it's almost like Tolkien created a

00:13:48competing mythology that had much more of its roots in not in Judeo-Christianity, but in Anglo-Saxon

00:13:53law and history. Of course, he was the former scholar of the ancient poem Beowulf. And during his

00:13:58life, they actually, because Beowulf, of course, ends with the king who fights the dragon being buried

00:14:02with his treasure in a ship. And then I think it was in the 30s, 33, they ended up actually finding

00:14:08this ship and digging it all up. So it brought a great reality to it. The one thing that is really,

00:14:13to me, annoying about Lord of the Rings is the damn ring. I mean, it's the most powerful thing

00:14:20in the known universe. What does it do? It whispers a lot. It hides in streams. It eats the souls of

00:14:29hobbits to extend their lives for a half millennia. And it makes you invisible in the most annoying,

00:14:35conceivable way. So you're invisible to normal people. But the Nazgul, who are not just the

00:14:41baby boomers who want their retirement pensions, which they haven't paid into. That's another story.

00:14:44But the Nazgul, it makes you perfectly visible to evil while making you invisible to good people.

00:14:49So the ring to me, of course, is the central. It's the MacGuffin, right? It's what everyone wants.

00:14:53It drives the story. But let me tell you what I think the ring is. Oh, oh, oh, this is going to be

00:14:58so exciting. Okay, I've been thinking about this all week. So I'll try and keep it brief.

00:15:02The ring is not a weapon. What does it do? It doesn't do anything. It's like Gandalf with his

00:15:06magical powers that only show up once in a blue moon, right? Like he can blow up entire bulrogs

00:15:10and so on. But he ends up poking a stick at a goblin anyway. So the ring is not a weapon. The ring only

00:15:15has influence. The ring is incredibly slow acting and the ring works on the minds of people. And the ring

00:15:23allows somebody in charge to whip up and inflame great armies of hatred. And then when the ring

00:15:30is destroyed, the armies then just kind of stand around dazed and end up going back home. So the

00:15:37ring to me is sophistry. And when you look at the 1930s, when the seeds of the story were really

00:15:44germinating, you saw the rise of Hitler, who for all of his great evils was a fantastically,

00:15:49terrifyingly great orator. And the war of the second world war was the war between Churchill

00:15:54and, uh, uh, Churchill and Hitler in terms of oratory. Sorry. I'm sorry if I was talking over

00:16:00you. I, I just didn't, uh, it was a fantastic pun germinating. I just wanted to pause over that for

00:16:04I'd never thought about that. Don't even get me started on the ring being a Wagnerian opera,

00:16:09which is German. Anyway, that's a whole other, that's a whole other thing. And so to me,

00:16:13if you look at the Germans and the Japanese, you saw a race or a group of people driven insane

00:16:20by the rhetoric and the eloquence of wartime leaders, right? Emperor Hirohito and, uh, and

00:16:27Hitler. And what's fascinating to me is these people who were so full of hatred that they were

00:16:32willing to, to march to their death, to, to fly, uh, zeros into the side of, uh, uh, American warships

00:16:40in, in kamikaze style. And the fascinating thing about the Germans and the Japanese is when those

00:16:46leaders were brought down, when Hitler committed suicide, when, uh, Hirohito's power was, was

00:16:50curtailed, like the orcs, when the ring destroyed, they become pretty peaceful. The Germans become

00:16:55peaceful and productive. The Japanese become peaceful and productive. And if you look at the

00:17:00power of words, Hitler beforehand was whipping the Germans into this war frenzy, which worked and paid

00:17:05off. And Hirohito was into this war frenzy after the war in Germany, there was a minister of finance

00:17:12who completely revamped the economy, made it free market, uh, curtailed the inflation, inflationary

00:17:17spiral of money printing and so on. And the Germans became peaceful. So in the absence of this rhetoric,

00:17:21in the absence of this civilization shredding blast of syllables, people become peaceful. And

00:17:28the hobbits, you know, it's clearly England. England had been a peace for, I guess, since

00:17:33the end of the Napoleonic Wars, or to some degree even, well, anyway, it had been generations since

00:17:38England had gone directly to war. And a lot of the common sense of the hobbits, to me, comes out of

00:17:44the resistance to rhetoric. Why, what is the opposite of rhetoric? Well, it's philosophy. It's, uh, it's,

00:17:49um, what is the opposite of sophistry is Socrates. And if you look at the skepticism of Hume and the

00:17:55common sense of John Locke, a lot of the other British philosophers, it gave them a strong resistance to

00:17:59this kind of rhetoric. Whereas the florid style of German, uh, art and, and, and opera and, you know,

00:18:05Nietzsche and, um, uh, the sorrows of young Werther and so on, they came very emotional and very

00:18:11passionate and very susceptible to this kind of manipulation. So to me, the ring is a very powerful

00:18:17device that drives war and control over the ring is control over rhetoric. And it is in the destruction

00:18:23of rhetoric and the destruction of the ring that the maddened masses are freed of their bloodlust and

00:18:28can turn to more peaceful ends. Yeah, I think that's great, great, great. And you know, I,

00:18:32that that's a wonderful surmise. And I think if you go back to the Silmarillion again, I think we

00:18:37could see the origins of that train of thought there. If you think about the Ainur, the, the divine

00:18:41beings created by the one God in this mythology, uh, Eru Iluvatar, he created a number of lesser gods

00:18:48called the Valar. And what they did is they, they dreamt, they, they began to sing songs, they made

00:18:53music. And what, what Eru, the God did is he took each of his lesser gods song and wove them together

00:19:00into themes. So creation, the, the good creation of the one good God is music. It's the, that's

00:19:07another opposite of sophistry, isn't it? Music and harmony versus the noise of war. And the one main

00:19:14enemy in all of this world, the serpent in that particular garden of Eden, if you will, was a, was

00:19:19one of the Ainur called Melkor who sang disharmony, disharmony. He wove into the harmonic themes of the

00:19:26other Valar, his discordant themes of evil and wickedness and selfishness. And the Eru, because

00:19:32of his commitment to free will, let those themes be wound in too. And his subordinate Melkor was

00:19:38Sauron, his lieutenant. And when the rings were made, uh, Sauron put much of his own power into the

00:19:46ring. In other words, the ring, and this is, I think, fits your thesis brilliantly. The ring becomes

00:19:51a ventriloquism for him. It's like, it's like ventriloquizes, it doesn't speak at all, but its

00:19:56power to lead, to, to lure, its power to conceal, its power to deceive is the power that was put in

00:20:02it by Sauron himself. And so in that regard, it's exactly right. And the other irony about what you

00:20:07said is for all of its persuasive power, the ring never says a word, obviously. Right. But that's the

00:20:13influence of Sauron. And you may remember too, from the Silmarillion, Melkor, the, the, the Valar

00:20:19that was, uh, in charge of all the evil in, in the Silmarillion, uh, he's the one that through

00:20:25words, through language, deceives the elves, the primary elves into betraying the Valar and then

00:20:31having them get banished to middle earth. So there's an Adam and Eve quality to this, just like the

00:20:36serpent in Adam and Eve with his sophistry, uh, forces Adam, compels Adam and Eve out of their free

00:20:42will to eat the apple. So too, you have a very similar thing that happens between the gods

00:20:46that are created by Iru Iluvatar and then Melkor and then the free will of the elves. So it's really

00:20:52as a remarkable continuity. And maybe to wrap this up and let you talk, um, I wanted to get this quote

00:20:58on the page because at the end of his life, he's talking about the influence of faith and the biblical

00:21:03stories on his universe. They weren't Christian worlds. He called it, I love this phrase. He called

00:21:08it sub-creation that what the mind of man does is not create. All we can do is sub-create, take the

00:21:16world, the powers, the gifts, the languages that God has infused into the, into our reality and to

00:21:22use them to sub-create worlds that mirror his own. And here's what he said at the end of his life,

00:21:27quote, the Lord of the Rings is of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work

00:21:32unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in and I have

00:21:39not cut out practically all references to anything like religion, to cults or practices in the imaginary

00:21:46world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. And what I love about

00:21:51that is there is no overt religion in my story because my entire story is infused with those same

00:21:57religious values. In other words, Tolkien saw himself not as a storyteller, but as a creator,

00:22:02just like God had created the narrative that we all operate in, in the material world.

00:22:09Okay. Can you expand a little bit more on that? I find because the absence of religion is really

00:22:13quite powerful. There is a form of, in a sense, ancestor worship. When you look at Gondor and the

00:22:17lineage of the kings and so on, which has sort of an oriental aspect to it, but it's true. I mean,

00:22:23who sits in praise, who, you know, who goes to church? I mean, where are the churches in this

00:22:29world? So he actually, was that a conscious decision to remove formal elements of organized

00:22:33religion? I think so. I think the organized religions are, but the fallen manifestations

00:22:39of an idea behind religion. And what he wanted was a religion that was immediately present. Think

00:22:46about the elves. I mean, the Eldar, right? The children of the stars. The elves live in a kind of

00:22:50constantly spiritual state. Their ability to heal, their ability to communicate almost without

00:22:55speaking, the powers that they have. In a way, it's kind of an animated religious universe.

00:23:02There are, as John Milton said in Paradise Lost, this is a temple. This is not a temple anymore on

00:23:06a hill or in Jerusalem. The human heart becomes a temple, right? In Milton's great revelation in

00:23:12Paradise Lost. And I think that's what Tolkien was playing with. And keep in mind, too, that in our

00:23:17fallen world, right, where angels no longer walk and demons conceal themselves, theoretically,

00:23:22and where churches become necessary markers on the landscape, so to speak, our psychic landscape.

00:23:28In the world of Tolkien, and the world of the elves in particular, it's not that kind of a fallen

00:23:34world. The spiritual, the Valar walks. The Valar is there in reality. In a way, it's almost kind of

00:23:39quasi-animistic and pagan. The religious virtues haven't waned from creation yet. And so everything

00:23:46in the universe that Tolkien creates is sort of alive with religion in a way, or at least the

00:23:51spiritual is a better way of phrasing it. Right. His relationship to state power, to me,

00:23:57has always been quite fascinating. It is, in preparing for this chat, I watched some of the

00:24:03footage of the First World War men sailing off to war, cheering, throwing their hats in the air.

00:24:08You know, I remember this quote that really struck with me from when I was a kid. Some guy in the

00:24:11First World War, excuse the coarseness of the language, but it seems fairly appropriate to

00:24:17the situation. But he said, you know, when I was a kid, I thought that war was like riding up a hill

00:24:21on a horse, waving a sword with an equal chance for victory or loss. But as it turns out, in the

00:24:28First World War, war meant some asshole with a button 20 miles away, pushing it and you being

00:24:33disintegrated. And that, I think, the desperate desire for there to be a war with clear demarcations

00:24:40of good and evil shows up repeatedly in The Lord of the Rings. There's no ambiguous war. There's no

00:24:48like, well, we thought Sauron had weapons of mass destruction. We invaded his country. Turns out he

00:24:52didn't. And, you know, now we're the bad guys. And I think the fact that most of his childhood,

00:24:58I think all but one of his childhood friends died in the First World War. It's the same thing with my

00:25:02family history. Out of five brothers of my ancestors, four died on the front in the First

00:25:07World War. And I think if we sort of go with the rough idea that the ring represents a kind of

00:25:14sophistry, when you combine sophistry with state power, you draw the most passionate and eloquent

00:25:22orators towards the control of state power. And that, to me, is one of the great problems of having

00:25:29this massive, virtually all-powerful state, certainly more powerful than any states in history

00:25:34have ever been with surveillance and military technology, having this power at the center

00:25:39of society means that those who control language can control the state, and therefore language can

00:25:46directly control trillions of dollars of resources around the world. And that is truly, I mean, this is

00:25:51what the left is doing, is trying to redefine language in service of power. And I think, for me,

00:25:57one of the most powerful things in Lord of the Rings is this connection between a sophistry and

00:26:04state power and armies. And that, to me, is one of the reasons why uniting sophistry with the state

00:26:13produces this eternal darkness. And the destruction of sophistry is the end of evil. You know, the old

00:26:17saying that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. Sophistry calls everything

00:26:21by their wrong name. And it calls war glorious. It calls theft taxation. It calls indoctrination

00:26:27education. It redefines everything. It calls the natural deviation of results in society automatic

00:26:35bigotry and injustice and so on. It's constant. It calls voluntary exchange coercion and coercive

00:26:41exchange voluntary. It redefines everything. And to me, the battle is between the philosopher who wishes

00:26:49to deny people the power of the state. And to some degree, that's Gandalf, who's constantly telling

00:26:55everyone, you can't use the ring. You can't use the ring. The ring will destroy you. You can't use

00:26:59the ring. And people who want to use sophistry to defeat sophistry always seem to lose. They join the

00:27:04enemy, like Saruman, gazing into the heart of Sauron and then ending up Chamberlain-style or, I guess,

00:27:10leader of France-style or Mussolini-style, coordinating and being corrupted by and becoming a vassal of

00:27:17the Sauron-Hitler character. But if this relationship between language and political

00:27:23power, to me, Sauron is a king. He has an army. He has, and he controls through influence, not through

00:27:30direct might.

00:27:32Yeah, and that's exactly Boromir's fate, isn't it, on the quest? He wants to take the ring. He's the

00:27:37primary advocate among the ringgoers, the fellowship, to take the ring back to Gondor. So,

00:27:43we, Denethor, his steward, can use the same sophistical powers to defeat it. And that's the

00:27:50perfect definition of Mordor, isn't it? The idea that Sauron lives alone. He has one army. He has

00:27:56one vision, one eye, right? It's all singular in purpose, while the armies of the West are scattered,

00:28:03right? There's a loose alliance between Rohan and Gondor. The dwarves won't speak to the elves. And you

00:28:09have that wonderful scene in Rivendell, when Lord Elrond of the elves is trying to get them all to go

00:28:14on this, and they're fighting with each other. That really does sort of reify, doesn't it, what

00:28:19you just said? You think about the allies, the scattered nature of the allies in World War I and

00:28:23World War II, right? The Americans holding back and providing covert aid and military equipment,

00:28:31but kind of hanging back. And the vacillating way that the Western allies kind of got in and kind of

00:28:37didn't get in and committed and didn't commit. And then the other side, you have that radical focus

00:28:42that is driven by language and sophistry. And so the way I sum it up, too, is another beautiful

00:28:49example of what you just said for me, is you've got the Tower of Orthanc with Sauron, who becomes

00:28:54corrupted. And Sauron's corruption, the wizard, is typified by his ability to use voices, right?

00:29:02To speak through people. You remember how he bewitches King Theoden of Rohan,

00:29:06and speaks through him and uses that power. And what ultimately pulls down the stone and metal

00:29:13tower of Orthanc are the living, walking shepherds of the forest, the trees. Sauron is glib and quick

00:29:20talking and deceptive, and he is translucent in his ability to change shape. These trees,

00:29:27these ants, I should say, are rock solid. They're inflexible in their worldview and morality

00:29:33and their language. Unlike the quick-speaking deceivers, Grima Wormtongue, for instance,

00:29:39unlike the quick-speaking deceivers, it takes the ants ages to speak sentences, right?

00:29:47Well, the Saxons have always been slow to anger, as the old story goes, as the old poem goes.

00:29:51That's right. But it's a radical slow motion of the... Maybe one way to defeat sophistry,

00:29:56Tolkien is saying, is to say things slowly. We ants never say anything quickly. Anything that's

00:30:02worth saying, he says, takes a long time to say. Well, in Sauron, we're getting slightly ahead,

00:30:06but just to sort of follow up that analogy, the Sauron man is literally in an ivory tower.

00:30:12You know, and of course, Tolkien lived his life for decades as an academic and was probably quite

00:30:16frustrated at the unwillingness of academics to engage in a sort of cratic dialogue with the

00:30:21citizen. I mean, when was the last time society had an emergency and there was like a red phone?

00:30:26It's like, man, we got to get that academic philosopher on the line. We got to answer this stuff.

00:30:29I mean, it never happens to you. Robert Obama? No!

00:30:35But, so he's literally sort of way up from the ground and he's living in this realm of

00:30:41abstractions, which is what sophists do. They manipulate abstractions rather than things.

00:30:46And through manipulating language and abstractions, they get people to manipulate and deliver the

00:30:49them things. But the trees, the ants, what do they have? They are trees. They have roots.

00:30:54They go deep. They're not up there in the clouds. They're not up there in language. They're

00:30:57actually, their roots infest the earth and they get their nourishment from the earth,

00:31:03from the sun. They get their elements. They get their nourishment from the elements,

00:31:06from the real world. And they can't afford sophistry because they have roots and that's

00:31:10how they survive. They survive according to their own efforts rather than the efforts of others.

00:31:15Now, this relationship, if we're sort of going to play this out as a hypothesis, you know,

00:31:19that the ring is sophistry and its relation to state power, the one thing that I remember being

00:31:24quite surprised at. And I'll just read a little letter that, um, Tolkien wrote to his son in

00:31:281943. This is from the book, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. He said, my political opinions lean more

00:31:35and more to anarchy, philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control, not whiskered men

00:31:41with bombs or to quote, unconstitutional monarchy. And of course, that's what the, in the return of the

00:31:46king, which we can talk about another time, that's sort of the, the end state. Now he goes a little

00:31:50further than I would, but I mean, this is the times he was living in. He goes on to say,

00:31:54I would arrest anybody who uses the word state, capitalized, in any sense other than the inanimate

00:32:01real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights, nor mind. And after a

00:32:05chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate. If we could go back to personal names,

00:32:11it would do a lot of good. He said, government is an abstract noun, meaning the art and process of

00:32:16governing. And it should be an offense to write it with a capital G, or so to refer to people.

00:32:21The most improper job of any, many, even saints, who at any rate were at least unwilling to take

00:32:28it on, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the

00:32:34opportunity. There is only one bright spot, and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men,

00:32:39of dynamiting factories and power stations. I hope that encouraged now as patriotism,

00:32:43I hope that encouraged now as patriotism may remain a habit, but it won't do any good if it

00:32:47is not universal. So this idea, anarchy meaning without rule, without rulers, not without rules,

00:32:54everyone thinks that anarchy is being corrupted by sophists to mean, you know, chaos and professors

00:32:58with bike locks smacking people in the head and throwing garbage cans through Starbucks windows

00:33:01and so on. But the idea of having a self-organizing society without rulers, where people participate in

00:33:07the generation of social rules, which are negotiated and continually refined according to the successes

00:33:12or failures of the day, to me, that's quite fascinating that he was a staunch Catholic who

00:33:18had a great suspicion about any form of state control and wrote a story about how power corrupts

00:33:27and destroys and power must be destroyed in order for men to become free.

00:33:33Yeah, that's great. You know, this is something we can think about. I don't know,

00:33:36you and I haven't talked about this. I don't know if you've ever watched the Game of Thrones.

00:33:39I'd like to. I've heard it's a little rapey.

00:33:43So it's something one of my friends calls that hobbit porn, but

00:33:47Oh, scrubbing that out with a mental bus of lie. Okay.

00:33:53There's certainly I've watched enough of it. And I actually read some of the books and

00:33:57there's a useful comparison here. You've got J.R.R. Tolkien and you've got G.R.R. Martin.

00:34:03One's writing high fantasy in the 30s and 40s. The other is writing, for lack of a better word,

00:34:07political fantasy today. And I saw an interview with Martin a couple of years ago. He made the

00:34:13argument that the one thing that bothered him about Tolkien was that Tolkien was not the least

00:34:17bit interested in politics, that there is no political parties, that Tolkien didn't take on

00:34:23major social justice issues in his book. I happen to think that's a great, that's the great glory of

00:34:29Tolkien, that he's talking about much larger universals than he's talking about the modern

00:34:35obsession with social justice aspects of writing. In fact, I think what Martin does isn't fantasy

00:34:40literature. If you know anything about those, and I know a lot of your audience will, and I've got

00:34:45to say by way of prefacing this, I find the J.R.R. Martin, I find the Game of Thrones HBO miniseries

00:34:51to be somewhat interesting. There's some interesting characters, there's some nice devices. The books

00:34:56are like, and everything else, his books are better than his movie, the movies. But having said that,

00:35:00there's something very, very intellectually and emotionally bankrupt at the core of Lord of the

00:35:06Rings and of the J.R.R. Martin books. And it's what you just said, Steph, that it's a Game of Thrones,

00:35:12that the purpose of the Game of Thrones is nothing more than to get the ultimate throne. It's exactly

00:35:18what Tolkien rejected, right? Aragorn taking the throne of Gondor at the end, he's not taking anything.

00:35:26He is reclaiming what has been his hereditarily, going back 27 generations to Isildur, right?

00:35:33But in the Game of Thrones, every character, every creature seems to be at the service of this kind

00:35:39of real Machiavellian realpolitik. Whereas Tolkien's Lord of the Rings leaves us with a sense of the

00:35:46fantasy sense of the possibility of duty and honor, dignity, equality really meaning something,

00:35:54versus what you get in the watered-down modern version of the story, in a way, which is nothing

00:35:59more than a lot of naked bodies, a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, and sheer Machiavellianism.

00:36:06What religion there is in the Game of Thrones is cynical and manipulated. The followers of those

00:36:13religions are worse than the monsters vying for thrones. Tolkien, on the other hand, so in other words,

00:36:19I see what Martin's doing is not fantasy lit at all. It's reality lit in a way. Whereas what

00:36:25Tolkien's doing is a higher order thing. And I think the reason for that is because of this

00:36:29mythopoetic universe that circumscribes the Middle Earth, right? That Middle Earth has its origins in

00:36:36Tolkien's version of heaven. And there is an order and a plan. There are, and you said it before,

00:36:41there are right and wrong. There are better and worse. There are better moral choices. So there's no

00:36:46ambiguity between who's evil and who's good. But the ambiguity is in the individual hearts of Frodo

00:36:52when he doubts himself or is tempted by the ring. Or in other characters who despair or who

00:36:58begin to fatigue Boromir's failure, right? To defend the hobbits on one hand and to take the ring back

00:37:05to Gondor on the other. And even within the good characters, you do find these smaller psychomachias,

00:37:11right? These battles for the soul. Aragorn has his dark moments. And so it just,

00:37:16the world of Tolkien rings so much more, as much as I can enjoy as a kind of sword and sandal

00:37:23soap opera, the Game of Thrones, there is something much more compelling and deep about

00:37:28what Tolkien did.

00:37:30No, no. Medieval soap operas with boobies, I mean, don't get me wrong. I have nothing

00:37:33against it in principle, but it lacks the grandeur and the majesty. I think it's also very hard for us,

00:37:40Dr. Pastor, to figure out or to really understand in terms of Tolkien's upbringing.

00:37:44I mean, the one thing that's fascinating about the Shire, what's not mentioned? There's no mayor.

00:37:50There's no political system. There's no government. There's no court. There's no jail. Everybody just

00:37:55works things out among themselves. There's never any mention of this. It's all socially enforced

00:38:00through ostracism and so on. It is an anarchist paradise. And as, of course, is most people's fear

00:38:07about an anarchist paradise, it ends up in trouble, which we'll get to when we get to the third book.

00:38:11Like, but growing up, he was born in the late 19th century. Oh, sorry. Yeah, he was born and growing

00:38:19up as a child, he would have had no particular view of the state. Like, you can't really go around

00:38:25anywhere these days without seeing the state in some form or another. You know, even if it's just

00:38:29the state works. I mean, he grew up in a place, probably weren't any roads. It was a little village.

00:38:33Everything was self-contained. There was no idea. Well, I need something. I got to call my

00:38:37congressman. You know, I got to call my local political representative. It was very much

00:38:41self-contained as far as that goes. So, he grew up in a pastoral paradise and the British

00:38:48countryside. I mean, I had aunts and uncles who lived in the countryside and I would go out and

00:38:53visit there from the, you know, stinking armpit cesspool sometimes of London. And it is, it is

00:38:59absolutely, you know, God's green acre. It is, it is a paradise on earth out there. The sort of

00:39:04exploration, the, the, the animals, the friendly locals and so on. It really was, I really,

00:39:08to me, the Shire really speaks to me as sort of my own childhood experiences of, of, of roaming

00:39:13and exploring and learning about nature and developing a very powerful affinity through

00:39:18nature in that process. But the idea that you have this local paradise without a government

00:39:26and governments were like, what, one twentieth the size back in his childhood than they are

00:39:30now. Now they're everywhere, of course, you, you can't get away. But back then he would

00:39:34have grown up with very little concept of any kind of centralized government. And then

00:39:37what was his first real exposure to government? Well, it was being drafted or it was going

00:39:43to war and everyone going to war and then watching what governments did in France and, and the

00:39:48disassembly of, of 10 million largely innocent souls who followed rhetoric, who followed the

00:39:54glory of war. I remember as a kid learning about the first, the second world war, England's

00:39:58finest hour. There was a nostalgia and, and a love of it. Now that has been pushed back

00:40:02against a lot by, um, pacifists and leftists and so on, which I don't entirely disagree with

00:40:07at all. But I think growing up with no state, seeing the first real example of state power

00:40:12being the destruction of the old order in Europe, I think would have given him some leanings

00:40:18towards, well, let's explore a society without a state because then we don't have a ring to

00:40:22destroy.

00:40:23Yeah, I think that's great. And in the books, Jackson cut it out. There is kind of a mayor of

00:40:28Hobbiton. There is a, a mayor figure who's in charge loosely of the community, but he's

00:40:33more of a, a figurehead and he's laughed at and he has no real authority. So even, even

00:40:38those, those, that's what minimal structure you have. Uh, it's always treated as a joke

00:40:43in, in the Hobbit.

00:40:44He's like, I think he's more like a council elder because he doesn't seem to have the

00:40:47power of the courts, the police and jails, uh, to, to deal with people who disagree with

00:40:52him. He seems more like a sort of a council elder than, uh, what we would call a modern

00:40:56politician, a modern man. He wasn't elected either necessarily. So, and the other thing

00:41:00you got going on and what you just said, I think is really good is it's globalism, right?

00:41:04I mean that, that, that what really bothers Tolkien is this increasingly coalescing globalism,

00:41:09right? That what does Sauron want to do? He wants to make one universal government over

00:41:15all of middle earth that controls every aspect of it. And it enslaves, it drives, you remember

00:41:19the wonderful scene that really gets, does get cut out of the Lord of the Rings at the end.

00:41:23There's only a little vision quest of it. Uh, the scourging of the Shire chapters in the

00:41:28actual Lord of the Rings. There is an actual instance when the Hobbits come back from Mordor,

00:41:34they come back from saving the world and they find their own town overrun. They find the Shire

00:41:39overrun by, uh, uh, wicked men, uh, being governed and moved by Saruman, uh, in his weakness, in

00:41:48his fall. And it's a horrifying chapter because the, the Hobbits have to organize them. They

00:41:53don't want to do it. They're under the heel of these men. But when Meriadoc and Pippin come

00:41:58back and, and having drunk what the Ents drank in the woods, you may remember that they've grown

00:42:02bigger than Hobbits. And so the real heroism of the Hobbits, you could argue goes beyond the

00:42:08saving of the universe. That's a big deal. But when they, after that people forget and Jackson

00:42:14admitted it, they have to go back and they have to liberate the Shire because Saruman has now used

00:42:20wicked men to enslave and to punish, to murder some of the Hobbits. And they little, it ends up

00:42:26with the death of both Saruman and Grima and the liberal, and many, many of these wicked men are

00:42:31killed by these Hobbits. So there's this weird sense. And I wonder, based on your thesis about

00:42:35World War I and World War II, I wonder if it's kind of not like going back to London, going back,

00:42:40excuse me, going back to rural England after fighting at the Somme, after fighting in World

00:42:47War I and finding much of what used to be undisturbed countryside torn up in order to militarize

00:42:53much of the resources, much of the timber felled to be able to fight that war, going back and

00:42:58finding that you didn't leave the, you don't get, you don't get to leave the war in Mordor.

00:43:03You don't get to leave the war in France. It's, it's scarred your world. It's scarred your

00:43:08village too. Well, I, I would push back against that though, because it is the evil people who

00:43:15are doing it, not simply the need for resources. I mean, the rebuilding after the war has been

00:43:19shown on, I think quite a bit before, but I, if my sort of thesis or if this thesis has

00:43:26any legs, you know, one additional leg we could bolt onto the bottom of the millipede, so to

00:43:29speak, would be this, would be to say that what was being fought against in the Second World

00:43:36War? Well, what was being fought against was collectivism, was tyranny, was socialism,

00:43:42right? I mean, you, you, you had the Cold War, of course, you had the socialists, the communists

00:43:45in, in the USSR. You have, of course, the National German Workers Socialist Party, right? The

00:43:52Nazi Party. It has to be shortened to Nazis so that the word socialism doesn't get associated

00:43:55with Hitler. That's a standard bit of sophistry, right? There annoys me and it always has and

00:44:00will to my dying day. But I would say that the great tragedy of the Second World War, you

00:44:06know, the war is always lost after the war, fundamentally. That was really the case with

00:44:10the First World War as well, right? You, you, you defeat, uh, the, the, your enemies and

00:44:16then you have a disastrous peace treaty that sows the seed for the next war. You go across

00:44:21and you spend 40 million lives trying to destroy socialism and what happened right after the

00:44:27Second World War in England? Um, Churchill, for all of his faults, um, who was a free market

00:44:34guy who was a small government guy, who was a love Western civilization kind of guy? Well,

00:44:41he was voted out. And who was voted in after 40 million lives were spent fighting socialism?

00:44:47The socialists took power. The socialists took power in England. The socialists in particular

00:44:51took power in, um, well, of course, the communists took power in, in, um, uh, China and the socialists

00:44:57took power in India. And, um, this to me was one of the great horrors of you go off and you

00:45:03fight this great evil, you come back home and the evil has taken root. And this, um, the idea that we

00:45:09can defeat bad ideas with weaponry alone is again, one of the great delusions. And I think one of the

00:45:15great shocks of, you know, his, his sons were out there in the Second World War facing death every

00:45:19day. And I would assume as a Catholic and as an anarchist, he did not like, uh, socialism as it

00:45:26increases, uh, government and reduces free will and seeing the socialists move in after spending 40

00:45:32million lives trying to defeat socialism. I think that had a lot to do with why the Shire was so

00:45:36corrupted when they came back. I think it's a great point. Um, you could also turn that around and,

00:45:41and there is something to be said about Tolkien's argument that the Shire folk, uh, when these wicked

00:45:47men show up are unable to defeat them until those who've come back, right? Until Mary, Pippin, Sam,

00:45:55until Frodo have had the experience they've had on the other side of that. Uh, it seems as if the,

00:46:00the, the, the Hobbits are dead, Hobbit towns, the Shire's destined for, for slavery. Uh, there's

00:46:05something about these people who've left the, and that's one of the great themes of the book too,

00:46:10uh, that all who wander are not lost, that the entire story is a journey that staying sometimes

00:46:17in the Shire. And if they had stayed in the Shire, the Shire certainly would have fallen to Sauron.

00:46:22It would have become worse even than it was under Sauron. But this idea that the journey,

00:46:27that you have to get up and go, you have to make the, that's the old epic theme, right? That the

00:46:32epic hero has to wander. And they wander. And there, whatever horrors they encounter, mechanized

00:46:37horrors on the road to Mordor, when they come back, they're changed, uh, the Hobbits. And it's,

00:46:42if not for the change that's wrought, uh, through, for lack of a better word, through war, if not for

00:46:47the change that's wrought in our four Hobbit heroes, uh, the, the, the chains on, uh, Sauron's chains on

00:46:54the Shire might not be broken. So there's this idea, and it, Gandalf ties that together. When,

00:47:01before he and the other elves sail to Valinor at the end of the book, sail to the Grey Havens,

00:47:07right? Uh, they leave Middle-Earth. It always struck me, Gandalf's comment to the, to the crying

00:47:13hobbits, right? Who had just liberated their own Shire, uh, that I will not stop you from crying,

00:47:19that not all tears are an evil, right? That you can't, I think Tolkien's recognition from the start

00:47:25that, that kind of bucolic innocence, that almost pseudo-romantic innocence, we talked about the

00:47:32noble savage, right? That almost pastoral romanticism of the shepherd's life. Tolkien,

00:47:37Tolkien did see through it. I mean, that, that it just doesn't stay. Nothing, what is it, Hopkins

00:47:42that said nothing green can, nothing gold can stay. That this, that the world was passing as it was in

00:47:47the, in the, the, the Lord of the Rings, passing from one age to the next. And there's a lament for it.

00:47:53The time of the elves is over, right? Tolkien knew it. The time of those country elves is over.

00:47:59Uh, and you can lament that, you should celebrate that, but there is this looming, what's next?

00:48:05That's always part of the equation, too. Yeah, the elves have always struck me as a kind of

00:48:09aristocracy, and of course, in England, that would be a very strong force. If there was to be an

00:48:14unwinding of state power, the aristocracy would lose their power, and we see this throughout the

00:48:18books, that the elves, in destroying the ring, they destroy the powers that give them, uh, their, um,

00:48:23magic in the world. And they're willing to do that. That's why there's great sorrow. There's no way for

00:48:27the, for the elves to win the war. Uh, because if the ring is destroyed, they have to leave Middle

00:48:33Earth, because they will have lost their, their power and their magic. So, and that, to me, is,

00:48:38uh, part of it. The, the aristocracy was on their way out in England, uh, no matter what. If socialism

00:48:42took over, they'd be out like the Romanovs, uh, and if, uh, free markets took over, then, you know,

00:48:48sort of Downton Abbey style, they would lose their, um, privileges and their monopolies and so on.

00:48:52Um, but let's touch on Gollum, who is, of course, a, a fantastic, uh, fascinating, uh, power. I just,

00:48:59I wonder how many of Tolkien's friends were actually heroin addicts. I don't know where he

00:49:02got this character from, but I think Gollum, this one, one quote that struck me from the first book

00:49:09with, with Gandalf, where he says something along the lines of Gollum, uh, both loves and hates the

00:49:14ring as he loves and hates himself. So to me, looking at social justice warriors, they're to me

00:49:20embedded in sophistry, but with no direct access to power. And if the ring is sophistry, then

00:49:26Gollum is swallowed up in sophistry, but has no direct power, and that is why he wastes away.

00:49:33Now, of course, Sauron has great powers of sophistry. His sole power, like the ring, is to control the

00:49:39minds of others, but he actually has power. And I think, to me, this is obviously going to be a bit

00:49:43of a stretch, and we'll find out if there's immortality if, uh, Tolkien comes back to life tonight

00:49:47strangles me in my bed for this overreach. But, um, I view Gollum as sort of the modern social

00:49:53justice warrior, because when you think about it, the social justice warriors have a terrible fear

00:49:57of power. They see power and exploitation and, and, and corruption everywhere they look. They see

00:50:03patriarchy, they see racism, they institutionalize this, that, and the other. They have this terrible

00:50:08fear of power, which is like Gollum's terrible fear of the ring. But they also have this unholy lust

00:50:14for power and love of power, in that they want to promote politicians to have the immense powers

00:50:20to fight against all of these imaginary evils. And so, to me, they're embedded in sophistry,

00:50:25they don't have power, they waste away, and they end up both loving and hating themselves.

00:50:30They hate themselves because they are corrupted by sophistry, and they are mere useful idiots

00:50:34by those seeking to expand state power. But they also love themselves too much, in that

00:50:39they refuse to submit to necessary debates and self-criticism. So, I do see kind of a line,

00:50:43and social justice warriors, everyone thinks they're a modern phenomena. They're absolutely

00:50:47not. We go all the way back to Miletus with ancient Rome. But to me, these people who are

00:50:52used by those in power, and used up by those in power, who think that they're doing good when

00:50:56they're actually in the service of evil, that, to me, is a very powerful way of looking at where

00:51:02Gollum's coming from.

00:51:04Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. And I also think that there's, on top of that,

00:51:07there's a real psychomachia, battle for the soul going on in Gollum. There is, even,

00:51:11there are shreds of his former, I was going to say humanity, hobbitanity. There are shreds of

00:51:16his former hobbitness, that even late in the book still can materialize. And if you're going to

00:51:23make the argument, I think it's a good one, that there are certainly aspects of Gollum that have

00:51:27been appropriated by social justice warriors. Social justice warriors don't realize the degree to

00:51:32which their words are controlling them. They are not controlling their words. Social justice

00:51:36warriors don't, words don't mean what they think they do. The things that the social justice

00:51:40warriors say they want, their definitions aren't really, they don't know how to define words.

00:51:46But the problem with that is that Sauron is the same, right? Sauron is a social justice warrior

00:51:51with power. He's what Stalin became, right? You think about the failed life of, I always think of

00:51:56Stalin when I think of Sauron, that failed life, that way he was going to be a priest in a seminary,

00:52:03and just the bile and hatred that promotes somebody to that kind of rapacity and violence

00:52:10and bloodlust, all in the name of a cause, right? Killing 40 million, starving to death 40 million

00:52:17Ukrainians and calling all Soviets comrade, my goodness. There's something there that it's a

00:52:23lesson for us. If Gollum had gotten the ring back, here's an interesting thing. At the end,

00:52:29after everything that had happened, if instead of the ring being destroyed, what if Gollum did get

00:52:34it? Is it possible after everything that had happened, that that ring would have elevated it

00:52:40at that point, Gollum, to something, maybe not the equal of Sauron, but certainly something formidable,

00:52:45in the same way that if Frodo keeps it, or if Gandalf had gotten it. So I think you, I like the way that

00:52:51this argument is mediated by your definition of what the ring might stand for, because it magnifies

00:52:57that hollowness in people. And that hollowness is oftentimes, think about it, first time we see

00:53:02Gollum and the Lord of the, in the Hobbit, it's a riddle game, isn't it? They're playing word games.

00:53:08And so you have that wonderful, that wonderful expression, the very first time they're going

00:53:12back and forth with the ring about riddles. And so, in that sense, I think it makes a, it's a really

00:53:17nice, fine point to this, that Tolkien, for all of his asseverations, he absolutely is, his masterwork

00:53:26is bound up as much in the times he lived and the political struggles, religious struggles of his day

00:53:32as it is in the grand medieval epics like Beowulf.

00:53:35Right. And I think if, if Gollum had gotten the ring, I think he would have had a ble, a brief flash

00:53:45of power, and then he would have been killed for the ring. And the reason I say that is, again, if we're

00:53:49looking at the ring as, as power and, um, uh, state power in particular, sophisticated control of the

00:53:55state apparatus, we can see this over and over again. This is why social justice warriors foundationally

00:53:59have this kind of James Taggart from Atlas Shrugged style death wish, because if they get their way,

00:54:04they're going to be the first to go. Right. This is the, you know, if whoever is useful in promoting

00:54:09the dictator to power is generally the first to go, uh, when the dictator gains, gains power. And so if,

00:54:16if Gollum had gotten the ring, um, then Nazgul would have found him and would have torn him apart

00:54:20to get the ring. And he would have got the death. He was going to die either way. He was going to get

00:54:23the death. And if he got the ring, he would have died. And to not get the ring is a fate worse than

00:54:27death for him. And I think as sort of people like, um, Trotsky and so on, like the people who vied

00:54:32for power and failed, well, he ends up in Mexico with an ice pick through his head, uh, from, from

00:54:36agents of Stalin. And so this to me is one of the great and terrible things that happens is that

00:54:42through their lust for power, the leftist, uh, manipulators of language end up in the service of

00:54:48power and end up ugly, uh, and end up divided against themselves, end up without a moment's peace.

00:54:54You know, it's funny. I was thinking just the other day, there's an old saying, and I think it's

00:54:58not true for all women. It's like the mind of a woman is a torture chamber, you know, worried about

00:55:03everything, concerned about everything. Oh, my daughter, my kid's too late, too close to the lake

00:55:06or whatever. But the mind of a social justice warrior is a kind of torn up living hell because

00:55:10there's evil everywhere and there's power structures everywhere. And there's always an injustice to be

00:55:15combated and there's always enemies to be fought and so on. And that to me is the torture that we see

00:55:21in Gollum where there still are shreds of humanity because, of course, the social justice warriors

00:55:24do believe in their own sophisticated bubble that they're saving people from power and corruption

00:55:29and meanness and they're protecting the, the, one of the most vulnerable among us. I always use that

00:55:34phrase vulnerable among us, like there are just people who are made of jelly and can't touch the

00:55:38air without getting electric shocks. And this is a kind of torture, whereas the minds of people who

00:55:43are actually doing solid real good in the world, you know, helping people learn how to reason,

00:55:48helping people learn how to think, helping people learn how to think critically, helping people to

00:55:51get in touch with, you know, their honest, authentic selves or find deeper meaning. To me, there's not

00:55:57all of this terrifying power structure everywhere. I mean, I clearly identify where the power structures

00:56:01are and I clearly identify the best way to oppose them, which is philosophy as opposed to sophistry.

00:56:06But I think that tortured relationship that Gollum has with himself, with power, with everyone

00:56:10and his form of humanity is to me, you know, that he's been so used up and carved out by those in

00:56:18pursuit of power. He's merely a vehicle for the ring to get back to Sauron. He's, the ring does not

00:56:22care about Gollum. Like he's never later picking up the phone saying, hey, how's that Gollum doing?

00:56:27You know, I did have him for half a millennia and, you know, I'm worried about the guy. He's like,

00:56:30he's just a purulator to get him back to Sauron. The ring doesn't care about Gollum and the

00:56:35sophist doesn't care about the shock troops on the street, the social justice warriors. He's going to use

00:56:40him to get power. And if the power is attained, um, the, the people who help get him there are

00:56:45usually the first to go. And that is kind of the death wish I think that Gollum represents.

00:56:49Yeah, I think so. And I think that Gollum, uh, remember that when he lost the ring,

00:56:53he was captured by Sauron and tortured to give up the name of, of Baggins.

00:56:57I assume that's just an analogy for higher education.

00:57:01But any, but then he was set loose, right? He was set loose by the, the, the, the jails of

00:57:06Mordor to go out there and see if he could hunt down the ring. Uh, and I'm sorry to interrupt,

00:57:11but that's very much like Winston Smith who can be freed after O'Brien tortures him, uh, into

00:57:15Stockholm syndrome bondage with, uh, big brother. And so once you've tortured people enough, you can

00:57:20set them free, which is why once you propagandize people enough, you can still have a first amendment

00:57:24because they can't fundamentally use it. Right. And, uh, Orwell was writing 1984, his dystopia right

00:57:30while Tolkien was writing his too. And, and I think what differentiates them is that Tolkien,

00:57:35you can look at half the Lord of the Rings, Sauron, the Orc, Sauron, Gollum, you could look at half

00:57:41the Lord of the Rings as dystopian. But what I love about the Lord of the Rings and, and is,

00:57:46it makes it to me a more ultimately humane work than anything, uh, really that was written during

00:57:51the age is the idea that you do have hate. And I think that's it for Gollum. He hates himself.

00:57:56These social justice warriors really hate themselves. They, they've bought the idea that

00:58:01people who look like them are responsible for every evil in the world, that if it weren't be,

00:58:05if it weren't for people like them, the world would live in harmony. They've bought all these,

00:58:09they've ingested all these lies. They hate themselves. And the only way they have to deal

00:58:13with it is to force other people, right. To conform to what they think should be done to qualify

00:58:18themselves. The other side of that though, and that's the story of every dystopia, right. In the 20th

00:58:23century, the other side of it is that you have real love and honor and duty. You have, um,

00:58:28you have nobility. Uh, you, that's the other side of it that you don't see in some of the dystopias.

00:58:32And Tolkien's right. That the only way to, to create a viable society or to create a viable self

00:58:39or a viable government is to start with love, not hate, to start with understanding and compassion,

00:58:44not violence and control. And when you think about it, there's no sex in the Lord of the Rings.

00:58:50There's love, there's romance, there's marriage, but there's absolutely no sex. And furthermore,

00:58:54the, the, the, the, we can call them the good powers, right. The powers that oppose Mordor,

00:58:59uh, they're constantly not letting Gollum be killed, right. Gollum, if he gets the ring,

00:59:05he's going to, if he, to, to get the ring, he'll pluck your eyes out and eat your heart.

00:59:09But that wonderful scene, again, when Gandalf is talking to Frodo before Frodo has even met

00:59:14Gollum, he's just frightened of Gollum because of what his uncle Bilbo had told him.

00:59:18And they're being followed by Gollum in the mines of Moria. And, and, uh, Frodo says,

00:59:23I, I, I wish the ring had never come to me. I, if it were up to me, I, I wish my uncle Bilbo had

00:59:28killed Gollum. At which point Gandalf looks at him very seriously and says, do you? There are many

00:59:34alive who deserve death. And there are many who have died that deserve life. Can you give it to them?

00:59:40Frodo Baggins. Don't be so quick to deal out death and judgment. My heart tells me that even a

00:59:47creature like that has some role to play. And whenever they're catching the enemy or where,

00:59:52or when Sauron, where Grima is, Theoden, Aragorn makes Theoden let Grima go. There's too much blood

00:59:58that's been shed already. Don't kill him is the constant refrain, right? There's this merciful

01:00:03aspect of things too. And I think that very often, uh, we, we focus on, I, when I was younger,

01:00:09I used to love the blood and guts, the bad, even the movies. I love my favorite of the three movies

01:00:13is The Two Towers because I just think those battle scenes are, are so magisterial in some

01:00:18ways, but there's the other side of it too. Uh, there's mercy, there's clemency, there's

01:00:22love, there's understanding. And, and I, I think that the West, it's one of the, it's also

01:00:27why oftentimes the West, whether it's the West in the Lord of the Rings books or the West

01:00:32in World War I and World War II. Uh, I think that's why there's much less unanimity about how

01:00:37to proceed. Uh, it's the authoritarianism of the other side that drives those wars to begin

01:00:43with. Well, we're not going to be collectivists, so we have to be rational because it's the

01:00:47only other thing that can unite us. And the last thing, I know we've got a bit of a hard

01:00:50stop here, but the last thing I wanted to mention, uh, is, um, the positive virtues that

01:00:56are shown in the story have always moved me greatly. It's one of the few novels where

01:00:59I've wept, that and the Wettner scene from Atlas Shrugged, but the loyalty and the certainty

01:01:04by which the hobbits stick by each other is truly astounding. They're the one group that

01:01:08never turn on each other. Uh, everyone else, the men, the elves, they have their infighting

01:01:12and so on, the dwarves, of course, but they don't turn on each other. And it's really

01:01:15great to see male affection without homosexual overtones, which has been the great barrier

01:01:20to male solidarity in the modern world. Oh, you like this guy, bro, man. Like it's just,

01:01:25oh, it's just terrible and, and keeps, uh, male hearts apart from each other and, and

01:01:29leaves us divided and set against ourselves. But one thing that's really been powerful to

01:01:33me and it's, I got from the book very early was that, um, most stories, like think of

01:01:38superhero movies, which are plague these days, but superhero movies are, well, if you have

01:01:43these superpowers, you can fight evil by, you know, throwing buses at buildings and

01:01:46crap like that. But what is necessary? These hobbits can't fight. Oh, they, they, they don't

01:01:51have magic really. They, they don't have any particular strength other than a dedication

01:01:56to virtue and a strength of will and resolution. And the idea that it is in a sense, the small,

01:02:01the personal, the individual acts of kindness that can do a lot to save the world to me is

01:02:05very powerful. There are the gods fighting up there, but the battle is fundamentally

01:02:09decided by people just like you and I, by people who are not great magic magicians or

01:02:14powerful warriors or, you know, whatever, rich people with great sportsmen. It is decided

01:02:19by the fundamental integrity of the quote, little people and the courage of the little

01:02:25people. It invites people into the story of virtue in a way that superhero movies just

01:02:30don't.

01:02:30Right. And I, you know, to go back to where we started, I too get very emotional about

01:02:36the, the, those aspects of it. It's, it's in a way, this is where I think that quote

01:02:40from Tolkien about his, how his religious sensibility infiltrated his books. It is, it's, it's kind

01:02:46of a, the, an archetypical, archetypal Christian narrative in the sense that the weakest, not the

01:02:52strong, it's the weak. The emphasis is on sacrifice, not on power. The weak, the character

01:02:58that is the physically, martially weakest is the one who has to shoulder that burden. And

01:03:04that burden, it, it draws him and it pains him. It's a constant, I oftentimes look at

01:03:09the struggle of Frodo. It's the one thing we don't talk enough about and the movies doesn't

01:03:13make it and the movies try to make something out of it. It's while all these major battles

01:03:17with swords and weapons are being waged by these massive armies on cavalry horseback, he's

01:03:23got his own private art war going on with that ring and what the ring wants and how the ring

01:03:27weighs him down and how the ring pulls him. And, you know, that private battle, I think

01:03:32is more ultimately moving than all of the, the heroic escapades of soldiers and horsemen.

01:03:39I mean, it's, it's, it's one small hobbit versus the compacted power of the evil God that

01:03:46has decimated elves. That is like you said, decimated men that has torn apart middle earth, forced

01:03:51the Valar to reorder the way the civilization, the, even the landscapes looked. And so that, that

01:03:57very prime, primal battle between the individual versus the global, right? On a very microscopic

01:04:05level, you've got a hobbit and you've got a ring that represents the will to one power

01:04:10and the hobbit wins. And there's all sorts of lessons throughout history, certainly way

01:04:15beyond the Christian narratives that tie into that. It's just a universal theme. It's a fairy

01:04:21tale theme, isn't it? A jack in the beanstalk or the, uh, the, the farmer's son who goes

01:04:26out and does great things and becomes, uh, the next King by default. And so I think that

01:04:31to me is ultimately what I take away from it, that after the battles have quieted, after

01:04:36men and elves have done what they can, it's still about the individual conscience, uh, versus

01:04:41this pull, the worldly pull, uh, to become Gollum, to become hateful in your rhetoric, to

01:04:48become part of collectives that are going to be themselves destructive. It ultimately

01:04:52comes back to the one individual. Ayn Rand was right. When will people realize that the

01:04:57smallest minority in the world is the individual? And I think that's the great lesson.

01:05:02Let's close off with a little quote because if Tolkien was a small to no government conservative

01:05:06and therefore identified with the hobbits and therefore was resistant to the lure of power.

01:05:11It's a quote here, but what's interesting about Tolkien, one sign that there's more economic

01:05:14message to these texts than people realize is that the Soviet Union banned all of Tolkien's

01:05:19writings. It is not often known, but we tell the story at the end of the book about these

01:05:22great days during the collapse of the Soviet Union when thousands of civilians poured into

01:05:26Red Square and there was this question about what the tanks were going to do. And in the

01:05:30middle of those crowds, a sign popped up that said, Frodo is with us. And that's when

01:05:36a lot of Americans found out that in fact, the Soviets had been passing around this sort

01:05:40of contraband, mimeographed version, bad translation of the Lord of the Rings for decades. And

01:05:44anything that's banned by communists is good in my book. Dr. Pesta, thank you so much for

01:05:50your time. Just wanted to remind people, please go to fpeusa.org to check out these individual

01:05:55classes and a complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school. Always

01:05:59a great pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much for the brain candy.

01:06:02Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this book with you. I appreciate it and look forward

01:06:07to these talks more than you know.

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