A Brief History of the CIA

Alright, everybody, welcome to Theory Underground, and to this special short course from our good friend Matthew Stanley on. The theory and history of the Deep State. I'm going to be, mobile and listening while working around on the farm, hopefully. And so I just want to turn it over to you now, Matthew, but I'll say first that this is a really exciting year for a lot of reasons, obviously. We've got a lot of new life.

Here at the farm during this time. I'm on paternity leave. Julian is here now with us. That's my firstborn son. And, it's exciting because out of all the collaborators that I've had, with Theory Underground over the last 3 years, Matthew's one of the ones who's the most fatherly, or he's the most of a theory dad, you know? And so in that sense, I look up to him, and I applaud him, and I've learned from him. And I also just discovered recently that we're, like.

equally crunchy, at least, insofar as we practice certain weird, crunchy, but I think based, child-rearing practices. And so, looking forward to having them all back out here at the farm in the near future, and also, I'm excited that they are now our, virtual neighbors, next-door neighbors, living in Mon… Basically Montana, I guess technically Wyoming, but, you know, being at the wagon box, you're very close to us now, and so… I think there's something really special growing here, and I think that this kind of calm, cool, collected, and everybody pay attention here. The word sober is very important. Sober analysis of power in the 21st century is an epistemological question.

And it's a philosophical question, and it's an ethical question, and it's a political question, and it's an economic question, and it's also a question of ideology critique. At the level of freeing yourself from things that you take for granted that you don't even know you signed off on, all of that is absolutely essential.

If you care about all of that, it becomes absolutely essential that you think about the things that Matthew has been studying and that he is here to share with us. So, with that, virtually, figuratively, and literally, put your hands together for Matthew, Stanley.

Thanks, Dave, I appreciate it. I always enjoy having this opportunity, and I'm also excited that I can fill in and give you a break while you're focusing on things that are really, really important, like your little man. So, excited for you and Ann and for Julian. Looking forward to being out there in August for TUCon and Cannon Fest. That's gonna be exciting, and we'll, we'll be driving from Wyoming instead of flying our usual flight, so that's gonna be fun as well. For those who don't know, I recently moved to Story, Wyoming to run the lodging and events at the Wagon Box.

It's a 20-acre property here where we host events with online communities and political groups and people who are just thinking collectively about how to meet the challenge of our situation. You can also just come out and enjoy the creek and the sun and watch deer. It's also a place with a lodge and cabins, and we've got wall tents and things like that. So, if you're looking to get away.

write something. I live here, and would love to connect with you. and help you, kind of, pursue whatever creative work you're working on, or if there's an event you want to do. With that said, I'm kind of in the middle of a big life transition, but we're starting to settle into things here at the wagon box and our new home.

And… This seminar is something that I've been… I've been kind of working… it's been kind of digesting for a little while. I did a ton of reading last summer about this topic, and it's been sort of gestating, and I've been thinking about it. And feeling like I want to design a seminar, I feel like there's a lack of understanding around this history, and that it could just be a useful service to other people.

So… Yeah, I'm calling this a brief history of the CIA, Concepts for a Theory of the Deep State. when he was asked about what… how he would replace Obamacare, Donald Trump said that he had the concept of a plan. So that's kind of what we're working on, a concept of a plan. A concept of a theory, if you will, to try to understand.

how can we talk about the deep state in a way that is, like Dave said, sober? It's reasonable, it's useful, it's, not paranoid. We're trying to develop what is a theory of the deep state that we can defend reasonably, I think, and actually put to use I focus on how the deep state is kind of an implication of our theory of the state. So a lot of what this is going to be about is, one, there's going to be a history.

you know, we're going to be learning the history. I want to make sure that you've got… that you come away from this course with a working understanding of the history of the CIA, and that you can kind of orient yourself in time, that you know key events, that you know names, all these sort of things that is involved in just kind of understanding history.

I didn't write a PhD on this, so there's people who know more about this than me, and I've benefited from reading them, and I will definitely provide a a bibliography, I've got, like, a reading list of stuff I've read, stuff I want to read, and that kind of thing, so I'll be providing that for TU students as well. But I want you to have a working understanding that is going to put you miles ahead of the average person who just hasn't studied it at all.

But the other thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at political theory and concepts that we can abstract from that history and use to either think about our present moment, or we can look at other moments in political history and see connections as well. So the CIA is both interesting in its own right, its history is, It's involved in many countries across the world, and there's stories of espionage and betrayal, and all kinds of… there's violence and negotiation, so it's… it's sort of… It's spicy, it's interesting, there's lots of great stories there, but there's all… but the history itself it's not the final word on what the deep state is. We're using this history as a way to think about abstract concepts that can be useful in other contexts. So, that is kind of how I use a lot of history. I love history, I love the stories, I love the names, because it makes things really concrete.

And it connects us to what came before, but history is also a great way to think about concepts and theories that can then be used in other contexts as well. So… Let's see… to jump into this… Yeah. A rough structure of kind of where we're going to be going from here. Today we're going to be talking about, kind of, like, opening remarks, specifically looking at putting the CIA in the context of the national security state in which it developed in which it was embedded. So we're putting… we're… Doing the theoretical and historical context for the emergence of this agency.

And then, over the subsequent weeks, we're going to be looking more in depth at the history, so next week is going to be much more about the early history, especially under Alan Dulles. Frank Wisner leading the clandestine services, then I'll be looking at, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, these kind of figures. So… The whole entire course is really gonna focus on the emergence of the CIA in 1947, of course, is a prehistory with the OSS, we'll talk about.

But really, sort of up through the 70s, 80s is really as far as we're gonna go. I might make a couple comments about the 90s as well, but really, I want to focus on what is at least 50-ish years old. I don't know if anybody has watched the… the conversation that Dave and I had, but… The reason we kind of focus on that period is just, one, because we know more about it.

But two, because I think it's easier to kind of get a more accurate picture, then, of what was actually going on, as opposed to getting ourselves lost in speculation about stuff that's a little too close. You know, whether jet fuel, you know, melts steel beams or not is not going to be a topic of discussion during this seminar. I think those things are just a little too close for us to really be able to dig into them and understand them well.

I suspect that we're probably not going to hit… Judah, stop that. You do not hit other people. Sorry about that, guys. My kids and my family are all here, so… We're gonna be focusing on what we can establish much more clearly. So let's step into things. The CIA in American history. The CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, is an agency of the federal government that was established by Harry S. Truman.

by the National Security Act of 1947. So, the CIA was created in 1947. relatively recent in human, in human history, but also in American history as well. It hasn't been around, and in fact. America is… was sort of behind in terms of its involvement in espionage. When we look at the history of espionage, we actually see that it was Britain and Russia who have been doing espionage for centuries longer than we have. In fact, espionage in Britain was first officially undertaken as a state, like, as an official state function under Elizabeth I in the 1600s. So… Americans, as usual, are very latecomers to the game, although that doesn't stop us from being very confident about our abilities. So… when we develop… when we launched an intelligence agency, we had to develop… we had to lean heavily on, especially the British agency MI6, and we also leaned heavily on Israel's Mossad.

they are a constant source of intelligence for us, and early on, the CIA was very, sort of, like, we don't really know what we're doing, and brought in a lot of MI6 agents in order to train and develop programs. However, the prehistory of the CIA is this, service called the, The OSS. And… of course, right at the moment that I need to recall it, I'm blanking on what that means… on what that stands for, but it's the Office of Strategic Services.

Which was developed during World War II, as basically, like, FDR was looking around, and we were in a world war, and he's like, we don't have any intelligence agency at all, we need to put something together now. And so they basically put something together as fast as they could, and we'll be looking at that more. But the OSS existed first, and that was sort of the experimental pilot.

for what would become the CIA. It was closed down at the end of World War II, and there was some debate about bringing it back, but ultimately, Truman is the one who, when he signs the National Security Act in 1947, establishes the CIA, and that Security Act is extremely important because we're going to be focusing on How the security state Emerges, which is this idea of the state, which is focused on the concept of security.

Whereas before it was focused on other concepts, which we'll talk about. So… The CIA is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, so it's, like, a little up the river from Washington, D.C. It employs a little over 20,000 people, as we are aware. You can imagine a lot of these things are secretive. There's people they employ directly, there's people that they give money to in foreign countries that we don't know about.

The budget is estimated at around $15 billion a year, but we know that that's not accurate, because there's programs that are classified, as well as, from the history of the CIA, we know that they have access to hidden accounts. that there's dark money that's used, that off the books, and that there's also… the CIA, in a number of times and places, has owned private companies which were not accountable to the government. So they… the CIA has either owned directly or owned a controlling stake in private organizations that had no That have no reporting responsibilities to the American public. So we… and… we don't fully understand how those were used, we can get into some of the history of that, but we know that there's money flowing through the CIA, and that is used, that we have no way to know about or track.

So… a key thing to understand about the CIA is that it is not a law enforcement agency. So the Central Intelligence Agency is not like the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigations. is a law enforcement agency, which means that their job is to identify people who are committing crimes, people who are breaking the law, apprehending them, bringing them to justice, prosecuting them. The CIA doesn't have any of that responsibility. They're not enforcing laws.

they're not making laws either. What they're doing is carrying out their mandate that was given to them, which is to gather and collate and to report intelligence to the President and the National Security Council. So, their job is I'm sorry. Sorry about that. We may be getting a few interruptions. I haven't figured out, like, a good studio where I…

These are good.

I haven't figured out, like, a good spot away. I'm on a Starlink connection, and this is a comfy spot. But, we'll see. Maybe the kids will go play somewhere else. So… CIA is not a law enforcement agency. Yes, the mandate is to gather intelligence and to report that intelligence. This was why Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency, and this gets into the fact that there's actually… the CIA is not the be-all, end-all of American intelligence.

So… as usual, the CIA is not the first intelligence agency that the U.S. has had. In fact. every branch of the military, starting in the Civil War, had an intelligence agency. So, historically, intelligence has been spread across all of these different agencies. The Army has its own intelligence, the Navy has its own intelligence, and they're not talking to each other. Of course, there's This gets into all the history of how the different military branches are constantly trying to negotiate getting more funding, who's more important, all these kind of things. So there's this constant kind of pull between the land and the sea.

And then at this time, there's actually the inclusion of airplanes and plane power is starting to kind of shift this equation, too. So all of these branches have their own intelligence gathering agencies, and they're not talking to each other. And the president looks around, he's like, I don't know who to talk to, I don't know how to get intelligence from them.

I'm getting contradictory reports, or I don't know how to make sense of it all, there's just too much of it. And so what he does is he establishes the Central Intelligence Agency to serve as the leader of the intelligence community. The intelligence community is all of these different agencies, the Department of Defense, the different military branches.

And it's specifically the person who runs the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, who was given the mandate to essentially be the lead of the intelligence community, to gather all these things together, to make them intelligible, to sift through it and be like, here's what matters, here's the story you need to know, and here's why we're saying what we're saying.

And the president wanted that on his desk every day because he didn't have that. He didn't have an ability to get that picture. Now, how did the CIA get into all of these clandestine operations? That's gonna be a story for next week, but the short story is that there's a little clause in their mandate, that basically creates a loophole for them to sort of do whatever they want, and it was sort of an unfortunate accident. I don't think that Truman or whoever drafted it really understood exactly what they were doing.

But this specific clause allows them to do any activities related to intelligence gathering, and they basically take Their entire operations just ram it through this loophole. And create the clandestine service, which allows them to move from just being people who are gathering intelligence, who are on-site, who are listening and collecting information, to people who are actively involved in changing the situation themselves. So… there's an interesting sort of Kantian problem there of, like, the knower. Like, when the knower gets involved in the situation that they're knowing.

how do they start altering the situation? That, I think, is an interesting question in and of itself, and the CIA runs up against that problem, because as they get involved in the situations that they're supposed to be gathering intelligence on and understanding. Their own presence and activities and priorities begin to change and affect the very situations they were supposed to be.

understanding and synthesizing for the president. So, this role of the Director of Central Intelligence actually no longer exists, just to be fair, just to be, completely clear, George Bush abolished the Director of Central Intelligence in, I believe, 2004, and replaced it with the Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard is currently the Director of National Intelligence.

I do not envy her position. it's basically like being the Director of Central Intelligence, but you're not even in charge of an agency, so you're in charge of just hurting all of the intelligence community, and getting them to tell you what they're working on and all of their information, but without having any actual, authority or reports who are working under you.

Sounds terrible, but that's the way it is. the Director of Central Intelligence didn't have a lot more success either. As you can imagine, there was a lot of resistance within the intelligence community. to these kind of newcomers, who their new job is to gather all the other people's intelligence, be the leaders of this community. So… part of why I say all this is that you need to realize that the CIA is not the beginning and end of the intelligence community. In fact, there's a whole… entire community of intelligence gathering and varieties of agencies that I haven't studied too closely that are also involved in this process. So we can't just identify the deep state, for instance.

If we wanted to be. If we wanted to be really simplistic about it, the idea that, oh, the CIA is the deep state is far too simplistic, because the CIA isn't even the whole of the intelligence community within the United States. It was simply the newest agency that was created to try to wrangle and centralize that intelligence.

Hence the name. So, what I think… but what I think the history of the CIA can show us, it can give us a window into how power works in… within… like, deep within the bureaucracy of the national security state. It helps us see how decisions get made, how strategies get formulated and pursued. It shows us the mechanisms that people use To affect outcomes.

And so, in that sense, it's extremely helpful, not to give us a complete picture, but the picture it gives us is highly representative, I think, of what we should be thinking about. and the… the types of things that are going on. So when we see something similar, we go, oh, I understand, kind of, what's going on there, because I know that this mechanism is there. I know that people have, operated this way in the past.

And I'm being a little bit abstract, because we're gonna make it concrete through the history here, but I'm just trying to set things up here, so… So the rest of my talk is going to be focused on this idea of the national security state, and trying to contextualize the Central Intelligence Agency, which, as we said, was officially created in 1947.

But to understand what that really meant, of what this agency is supposed to do, and like, why it ends up doing the things that it does, in the future, we have to put it in the context of, one, massive change that's taking place in the United States, especially around the structure of the state itself. In the early 1900s, basically from, like, World War I to World War II.

And then we place that change within the broader context of how states in general are changing in the world, from basically, like. to be super simplistic, just to pick a peg. Like, the Treaty of Westphalia in the 1600s is sort of a… academic, signpost of, like, here's when we kind of think that modern states and international orders started to emerge, for instance. So.

I'm gonna be bringing in Foucault here. Hopefully, you have watched my Intro to Foucault lecture, and this won't be, like, the first time you've heard it. I'm gonna be giving it a little bit more, kind of, historical bones here as well. But… we need to understand the CIA as actually just one component of a broader change within the American state, because this National Security Act created a number of other agencies as well.

The most important one is the National Security Council, the NSC. and the National Security Council. I haven't studied it as closely as the CIA, but the NSC is basically this… is a small council that is supposed to be, this advisory council that is able to, understand… it kind of has eyes on the whole situation. And it is developing policy and strategy and having conversation constantly in order to advise and make recommendations to the president about how to pursue the security of the nation.

So there's a ver… there's both… there's civilians, there's people from the military, Secretary of State, the Department of Defense, all of these… all of these different departments. The Vice President is also on the National Security Council as well. And so… what you've got is this informal… it's informal in the sense that it doesn't have, like, the direct authority to implement its own policies and recommendations.

But… it is composed of powerful people who are constantly reviewing the state of affairs, and they are making, you know, they're in constant conversation with the president as well, making recommendations, and really setting strategy for, how the state goes about what is the… how do we pursue national security? And so… This idea of national security comes about, As a confluence of a lot of different trends that are starting to come… that are coming together in the early 20th century. Of course, there's… we could point to so many micro-trends, but I'm gonna point out, I'm gonna point out 6 big ones that are all coming together that are creating the situation where the American state is fundamentally changing. It's changing from the state that was created at the American Revolution.

It's changing from the state that was created, after, you know, during Reconstruction. it's undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the transformation that it's undergoing in this period is the state that we have today. The way that it was reorganized, the key agencies and the policies and the directives. have given us the state that we have today in America that you and I have to live under.

So these changes are really important for us. It's also important to realize that the American state has changed. We don't live under the same state that was created at the Revolution, or that Abraham Lincoln forcibly pulled together again with the Civil War. There's new agencies, there's new policies, there's new way of doing things, there's different lines of authority, there's new mandates that, people are acting on. There's also technological change, which is… we'll be talking about. So… During this early half of the 20th century.

Europe is ripping itself apart. We've just… they've been through World War I, which the U.S. got involved with, and some people disagreed about whether to get involved in World War I. The U.S, to this point in time, had taken a heavily isolationist policy. America was this massive continent. We were focused on the frontier. We were focused on things in the Caribbean and South America. We had a colony over in the Philippines. We were… there was an isolationist policy, going back to Monroe.

about, like, we just focus on our hemisphere, and the Europeans focus on their hemisphere. And so, in some way, World War I was a… change of precedent. where America, which was kind of this sleeping giant. an industrial powerhouse, but had gone through civil war and mostly kind of kept to itself on the international stage, got involved in Europe's affairs. And… basic… I mean, sort of saved their asses, if we're just being honest here. The, these old colonial powers are struggling, they're starting to fall apart.

over the next, basically 50 years, they're going to decolonize, which the CIA is going to be heavily involved in that decolonization process as well, which is… a lot of what this history is about, actually. So, Europe is ripping itself apart with World War I. We're also seeing the rise of fascism in Europe. We're seeing, after World War I, Germany is economically destroyed.

populists like Hitler and Mussolini take advantage of this opportunity, and fascism is on the rise in a number of very powerful countries. I mean, Germany and France are really the two poles of continental Europe. And so what's happening is people are starting to have to they're figuring out how do we relate to these new countries who are heavily industrialized, but they are developing a different way of approaching the social body. It's more disciplinary, it's more focused on things like the national interest, these kind of questions.

And so. various groups are figuring out, how do we relate to this? How do we compete with this is, like, the real question that's underneath this. Because what's happening is Germany and Italy, they're socially organizing much more effectively. And so liberal democracies are looking at this and they're going. they are way more productive and organized and disciplined than we are. How are we going to be able to compete with that? They're starting to worry.

Because, you know, there's a possibility of another war. There's aggression, there is also just… everybody's already militarized, and they're continuing to build up, and rather than demilitarizing towards peace. So there's this heightened tension of how do we relate to these new countries who are better organized than us and highly militarized.

There's, of course. the USSR as well, there's this whole question of communism. What do we… how do we relate to communism? I'm not gonna go too deeply into that, but it's just… it's a question. What's happening is liberal democracy is encountering competitors for the first time, and it's going, whoa, how do we compete with these competitors? Because they're more disciplined than we are, they have a coherent idea of national interest, they're militarized.

And, they have a clear set of values. how are we going to compete with this in an open society, where we make decisions as a collective? We've got high levels of transparency, And we can't, you know, we've got a free market, and we're not forcing people to do things. People get to make decisions about how they want to live their lives. So this is kind of the challenge that's being… That they're encountering, and one thing that's going on, therefore, is that a new international order is emerging.

We saw with Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century, like, the… this attempt at, like, an early UN, we see the League of Nations is kind of this early attempt, which the U.S. never actually joins. But… as America steps into this international role that it didn't previously have, where it's seen as this industrial powerhouse, it was the deciding factor in World War I, it's, become extremely wealthy through innovation, through oil.

all, you know, railroad, all these kinds of things. there's this new idea of, like, liberal democracies need to, band together, and we need to create an international order where there's rules of play. There's… you know, we agree on rights, we agree on things like rules of engagement in war, and we create venues for being able to work out international conflicts in a way that's not just we go to war with each other. And so Woodrow Wilson and a number of other folks are instrumental in trying to push America out of its isolationist stance that it's had for so long, and to take a leading role in the new international order that's emerging.

And finally, what we're dealing with underneath all of this is technological change. So… This new international order and these, wars that have happened, are only possible because of rapid technological change. So we're moving from the speed of paper and horse, and then Starting, you know, railroad in the late 1800s. we're moving to the speed of the telegraph, and the radio, and then eventually the television, and the telephone. So… as military technology becomes more deadly, we've got planes, we've got tanks, all of these, you know, particularly planes were a really big deal. New munitions, we've got, Norbert Wiener, developing cybernetic.

theory. as a… as a part of developing new weapons, which are, like… like, part of what Norbert Wiener is doing. is designing an anti-aircraft gun that can track and self-correct its own aim. So this is how he develops cybernetic theory, and this is happening right during World War II. Because… so we're getting rapid change in information technology and military technology simultaneously. So you've got this pressure cooker, where there's political change, there is death and destruction from war, there's the deadliest weapons humanity's ever known, and now we can communicate instantly across miles, and even across the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the situation that prompts people to realize we need to change our state. One, because we're being forced to change by the speed of technological innovation. But also, we need to adapt to this new international order that's emerging that we are sort of leading. There's powerful groups that are like, we need to be a part of setting the example and the rules that are going to define this next order.

But also, we are becoming a military powerhouse. And so, we need to figure out how does our state adapt to compete effectively in this new environment against fascism, against communism, and take on the newest innovations and changes, and take a leading role in the international world. That is all prelude. and context to the change that's happening, and all of this comes to a head under FDR, who's the longest-serving president in American history. He serves four terms, doesn't actually quite finish his fourth term, he passes away.

But he serves 4 terms, and FDR… is this figure who ultimately changes the state, and he really redefines what it means to be the president, and he redefines the American state for, up to now. Really, FDR is probably the most consequential figure, for understanding our political situation. And in fact, he's the reason that we put… that we created the two-term amendment, because he had garnered so much power for himself for the presidency. And of course, had put it to good use in terms of the New Deal, in… the New Deal is the reason that we were able to get out of the Great Depression.

And roll it back, but the… the New Deal also vested a lot more power into the federal government and shifted the balance of power, especially towards, one, the president, but also the establishment and reorganization of the federal bureaucracy. That's a whole another class, and, like, another research project that I'm sort of very… I'm on the early parts of. I want to… Explore that reorganization of the federal bureaucracy and the establishment of agencies and professionalizing of political careers.

The Department of Forestry is particularly interesting in this respect. That's probably where I'm gonna start on that research. But just the idea of… There's a federal agency For agriculture or for forestry, and you now have a… you now have professionals who work in the government on, these areas of society. the professionalization of things that used to be either in the private sector, or they were just a part of private lives.

that power, it's really under the New Deal and FDR when those things get fully organized into the way they are now, and all that power gets centralized there. And so FDR is, over the course of about you know. 15 years. is heavily in con… you know, his political career prior to that, he's also involved in these conversations of trying to negotiate what's the best way to reorganize the state to be internationally competitive? And of course, the military and the State Department and all of these major players, they're all jostling for influence. Academics are proposing frameworks for how we think about things.

a book that I was reading recently really brought this together for me, and… it talked about this shift from the idea of the national interest to national security. So how did we get this idea of national security? The idea of national interest was really popular in the early 20th century. It's, I mean, this is what Hitler runs on. This is what fascism runs on, this idea of a national interest. And the idea of the national interest had been tried in America.

But what this, this book that I was reading called, Creating the National Security State. was talking about is that the idea of national interest actually didn't take root in America very well. It was… it was viewed with suspicion by most ordinary people, even as some elites tried to push this idea of a national interest.

Most Americans were suspicious of it, for a number of reasons. There's a natural American, just kind of, like, native suspicion of centralized power that is just kind of in our blood, in our culture. But there was also… you have to remember, people lived through industrialization and then the Great Depression, so they'd watched how private business interests had championed the so-called national interest, but had only enriched themselves and ended up making everybody's lives worse.

So there was a general suspicion about whether the elites really understood the national interest, and if the agenda that they were proposing was actually in our national interest. Further, national interest was sort of associated with fascism at this time, because it was those nations who were talking in these terms who were Militarized, authoritarian, and that kind of thing.

So… The elite need to define a different framework. And the framework that was proposed and sort of competed its way to the top is the idea of national security. And you can see how there's this distinction between the national interest and the national security. The national interest has this idea of the benefit of the whole.

That there's, what is good for the nation as a whole. It's about, benefit, it's about gift-giving, not in some sort of vague sense, but in the sense of, like, there's abundance. Whereas national security, it almost is more like… like, national interest almost has this, like, upside, like, let's raise the upside and the level of flourishing. Whereas national security has, as its focus, this, like, protect against the worst case, protect against the downside. It has this idea of… There's threats out there, how do we prepare to… how do we understand and prepare to counter those threats?

And so it's this move from, like, a… in some ways, it's kind of, like, positive of how do we increase flourishing to how do we protect what we have. But there's also something indefinite about security, because there's always threats, and so you're always engaged in this activity of trying to understand your situation, have a theory about your situation, and then constantly trying to position yourself in relation to it.

This movement to security, I would argue, is actually… the general trajectory of states, since we're just saying Westphalia, basically. And this is the work that Foucault is trying to do. He's showing how we move from this model of the sovereign as It's the king who is essentially this force of negativity that, takes your life, takes your taxes, it takes your… takes your sons to war. It's a purely negative power of the ability to subtract from your life.

It's this violence, this scary negativity that lingers around the edges and at the, kind of, thresholds of life. That you can kind of come up against is the king who executes you and takes your life, and that's where his power is fully on display, his sovereign will to be able to take your life or not. We then… On the extreme end, we move into societies of security.

where… Power is now no longer exercised in this negative way, where it exists at the edges of the threshold of life, but power now resides in every aspect of life, trying to promote and understand and tinker and manipulate with all of the elements that make up our existence. So… It's the public health officer who is trying to understand everything about the diseases that are endemic to a particular population, using interventions to try to change rates of, you know, to raise vaccination rates, to lower rates of certain diseases.

Everything's kind of… Viewed as a system that you are both trying to understand, but you're also making interventions in it to try to manipulate the effects that are inherent to the phenomenon themselves. So this movement of security is about Gathering intelligence about those situations. Devising interventions, making interventions, and then sort of checking the effects of the interventions through a new round of intelligence gathering.

So at the heart of security is this work of gathering intelligence, because you're constantly figuring out what is the nature of the situation that we're in? You need to get information about what's going on. So there's this constant flow of data that you then need to work through, synthesize, and turn into some… into a theory. You've got some sort of a paradigm that helps you understand how to orient in your environment.

The state is kind of moving from… one, the king's body to something like an organism. An organism is constantly taking in information through its senses. Kind of locating itself in space, identifying threats. And then it's adjusting to its environment. And then it's got that new round of information. Carl Friston calls this the free energy principle.

organisms are constantly trying to reduce free energy in the system, which free energy is, like, uncertainty. You're constantly trying to make your paradigm conform more and more to the data that's coming into your system, so that you've got a more accurate picture that you're orienting to. And so, the security state… In order to carry out strategies of security, it needs this central node for intaking information to develop a theory of the situation, so that it can then orient itself, adjust, decide what interventions to make, what strategies to pursue.

And you can see how now it's obvious that you need a central intelligence agency. Now you need some sort of brainstem that all of the sense-making systems are running into in order to run that up the flagpole, digest it, and have kind of the executive function. the executive function here, but also the president as the executive function, making decisions and calls about foreign policy.

About what laws to push in Congress and these type of things as well. So… the reason that we don't get the security state until this particular moment in history, I think, is because technological change hadn't progressed far enough. So we see, like, Foucault spends a lot of his time analyzing states in the 18th, 19th centuries.

We see things like on medicine and psychiatry and law and punishment. He's looking at these in these older contexts because that's where they first emerge as distinct sciences that have a political import to them. the doctor can… the doctor's testimony can now be used to incarcerate somebody or not. That means that the sciences now have a political meaning to them.

Foucault identifies where that first emerges. that's… he calls that, though, a disciplinary society. It's not… It's no longer the older society of kingship. But it's not yet a security society. It is a society that has this ambition. To be a security society, of, like. It's… it's interested in why do people commit crime?

But it cannot quite answer that question yet, because it doesn't have the information technology to be able to do that. So a disciplinary society is this intermediary form between the older models and the newer model. The disciplinary society says, okay, we can't understand exactly how to intervene in the current system to manipulate it in the direction that we want.

But we do understand how to apply control to particular variables to try to lock them in the position we want them to be in. So, you can force the prisoner to get out of bed at 8 o'clock every day and will go on a particular routine. You can't necessarily… you don't have the theory yet of how do we actually change their mind and their subjectivity and how they relate to the world, to where they won't relapse when they… when they leave prison, but you can begin to inculcate kind of a certain level of consciousness, through the application of discipline.

until the information technology changes could catch up, it wasn't possible to have a security society. Information needs to… you need to be able to gather lots of information really fast through automated streams, and you have to be able to process that information. But when you're moving at the speed of paperwork and human minds and horses, you don't have the scale and the speed to be able to gather and process information in a way where a whole state Or a society can orient itself to the complex environment.

Hi, sweetie, I'm not available right now, okay? We can talk later, okay? Alright, I love you, sweetheart. Yeah, sweetie, I'm not available right now. We can read later, okay? Yeah, I know So, to me, like, I think that basically this ambition to security was always present in the trajectory that states have been developing.

But it was because of technological limitations that that progression was retarded. So you can't get to, the necessary scale and speed of information processing until you get telegraphs, until you get radio, until you get, eventually, the computer. And it's now that we live in the computer age that I think, like, we're fully able to go to that security model that we're living in and trying to navigate today. But… the first half of the 20th century is where that model becomes possible in a new way. It wasn't possible before.

it's now possible. It's not… It's not, in its ultimate form until we get the computer, but it finally becomes actually possible, whereas it wasn't before. And so… This is where we end up with a state That has a security mindset of information gathering, developing a paradigm, and then acting on it for the sake of How do we manipulate our environment and the mechanisms and the trends within it in order to achieve security, which is going to be protecting ourselves?

I also think that there's this shift away, like, in national interest, there is more of this broader picture of, like, the whole nation as benefiting, whereas the idea of national security smuggles in this idea of it's about the state's self-preservation. No longer is it necessarily about the society preserving itself, because even the society is sort of a threat to the state as well, under the security model. The security model has to investigate its own society, even, in order to understand there's enemies within society itself that have to be understood.

it… the focus narrows to the state's own self-preservation. That's actually what national security entails. And so… We end up with a newly organized state in the early 20th century. that has new depths to it. And this is where we begin talking about the deep state. Aaron Good proposes a tripartite, theory of the state. Where there's a public state, there's an administrative state.

And there's Deep State. the public state is the, like, publicly elected, visible leaders. That's, you know. That's Congress. It's the President. It's the Vice President. It's all… it's even the people that the President and the vice president appoint, to some extent. They're the ones who publicly perform what we imagine when we think of the state. You know, it's what you learn about in American government class, of how does a bill become a law? That's how the public state functions.

There's a new… with the… in the… at the very end of the 1800s, this is emerging. But it's really in the 20th… early 20th century where we now get the administrative state, which is the massive bureaucracy, the machine that's churning underneath the public state. Which is 99.9% of the state currently. The federal government Over 99% of employees are not elected by the people.

In fact, they're not even directly appointed by anybody who's elected by the people. They are people who are hired, just like you and I are hired at a company. And their jobs are to develop and carry out policy that has been handed down from the public state. But they have the ability to interpret and apply that policy, and they can even generate their own policy. So, like, a high-level policy is given, for instance, of do this.

An agency that's given that mandate then says, okay. how do we effectively do that? Well, then they develop their own set of policy, which is how they are going to meet that mandate. So you can think about the Environmental Protection Agency. You know, say your particular division is given the mandate to protect public well water.

Then, like, the specifics of how to do that are not provided in the bill. the… your agency then goes, okay, this is our mandate, how are we gonna do that? You now develop policy that ordinary people who have public wells have to abide by, but nobody drafted or voted on those policies. You developed those policies because you were given the authority to develop and enforce policy.

Because that policy exists in order for you to carry out the mandate you were given, which is this high-level mission. So, a lot of the policies and regulations that we're subject to are not necessarily laws that You know, your congressperson drafted and voted on, it's policy that is developed and enforced, and it could be theoretically changed if, you know, there was a different head of that agency.

So, so… What we have… is an administrative state, which is largely composed of bureaucracy. It's proposed of… it's composed of professionals who work in their role for 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years before they retire, and they outlast every administration. I mean, we've got… you've got people who are working in the Trump… underneath the Trump administration, who've been in government since Clinton was president.

Even more. And these people are just there, doing their thing. They're private individuals. We don't know about them. We don't know their stories and these sort of things. And their… their private discretion has public implications. So… This is how we end up with the administrative state, where the machinery of government is constantly churning, and then there's this kind of ceremonial, high-level kind of kabuki theater that happens at the top.

The deep state… in Good's view, and I'm gonna kind of try to argue for I'm gonna argue for this kind of way of approaching it, is basically… it's the interface where the, so here, I'm… to try to get this right, I wrote down a sentence, and let me see if we can… we can unpack this. Winery, please stop that, sweetheart.

The deep… I want to understand the deep state… As the sovereign interface where public and private interests converge. And they negotiate on how to exploit the unaccountable vector of power that sits at the base of the administrative state. So, deep within the administrative state, there's agencies that have more agency, if you will, to set, kind of, the overall strategy and directive, and to engage in unaccountable actions. The CIA is one of these agencies that's highly unaccountable. Their budget… parts of their budget is classified. A lot of what they do is classified.

And… they rarely suffer any sort of, like, consequences or review for their actions. In fact, they even, we know from history that they do… that they mislead the president about what's going on, or certain pieces of information. So, these agencies are highly unaccountable. They exercise power, though, which means that they are a vector for people to influence and to use them. The CIA is a tool An unaccountable tool that has a mandate, it has resources, and it has personnel, and it can be used for achieving certain ends.

And so the deep state, I think we can understand it, first of all, as a mechanism within the state. It's that unaccountable, sovereign. Vector that you can exercise power from, if you're able to influence it. And it… it's only possible because we have a state that has depth to it, which has a bureau… which is a bureaucratic machine with a ceremonial state on top of it. Which… The ceremonial state is not nothing.

But its influence is sort of at the level of, like, looking out at the horizon and trying to, like, you know, set the chart the overall course for things. But the true power resides in those who are there for a long time within the state. Next. who are operating over… the course of decades, who are able to set and enforce policy, who are able to… they're the ones who propose the strategies, and they develop the strategies that then later get turned into law, that then Get, implemented as policy.

So… Because we have that mechanism. that is not accountable to voters. It's very opaque, you know, we can know the budget. The budget gets passed every year, but who are the individuals who are exercising this power? How do they make their decisions? I mean. If you've ever worked in a company before, you know how decisions get made, and they get… there's conversations at the water cooler, there's emails back and forth, there's meetings, and this whole elaborate process happens where eventually the group kind of develops a consensus and converges on a decision.

Same thing happens in departments in the federal government. And yet those have massive implications for our lives. So… I want to propose there's, like, two ways of thinking about the deep state. There's thinking about the deep state as, like, the who. And there's the what. The deep state as a what, is a mechanism. It's this unaccountable vector of power that can be exploited, and it's where public and private interests kind of intermingle.

The deep state as a whom? is… What a lot of the heat and light is about on the internet. And I want to leave that to just say that it is a clandestine network of networks, which is composed of both public and private. Interests. It's this network of network that's somehow, invisibly, influences political outcomes, financial policy, military strategy, all of these kind of high-level outcomes that happen in the world.

It is a network of networks. It's fractious, But it's basically… If you could map it, it would just be a map of the elites, the global elites, of elite networks within different countries, and how those elite networks intermingle with each other. the nonprofits, the NGOs, the universities, the businesses that they use to interface and coordinate with each other, how they move capital around the world.

If you could have a perfect map of the deep state, it would actually just be the world's elites and their… their networks of connection. we don't have the ability to map those things. But I think we can just understand that that's how it works. And when we look more at the history of the CIA, we can see the mechanisms for how that coordination happens and the effects that take place.

So the who… Is the network of networks, and the what Is the unaccountable vector for power. And I'm a little bit more interested in the unaccountable vector of power, because I think that it is, like, a necessary correlate of understanding how our state works. If you understand how our state works, then you see, oh, there has to be a deep state.

Because there has to be some sort of a central core that is not accountable To the voters that exercises sovereignty to protect the state and its interests. There has to be some sort of point where, the state self-justifies. It engages in Criminal activity that is not criminal because the state does it. The state is able to self-authorize itself to break its own laws, because it is in the interest of national security, because if the state didn't engage in that behavior, it would be… it would abolish itself. And so you sort of have to resolve this conflict of.

this activity is illegal, but if I don't do this activity, I will be destroyed. So, under the principle of absolute self-preservation, and that the state's existence is better than its non-existence. It's able… there has to be a point of sovereignty that basically just embodies that paradox and says, we act for the sake of society's security.

Whether, and it does not matter what we do, we cannot do wrong, because we are authorized to even do wrong things. And this is basically how this… how many in the CIA come to understand their work, is that basically, yeah, we do bad things, but we're allowed to do them because they're actually for the good of everybody else.

And they need to be done. So that's kind of one of these kind of central self-justifying ideologies that ends up operating within the CIA, and I think that's an effect of working within this sovereign node in the government where the state Resolves its own paradox in order to maintain its own sovereignty. So I've been talking for, like, an hour now, and I really appreciate your patience. This is kind of bringing the theoretical background to a close. And next week, we're going to be going into the early years of the CIA, looking at, briefly at the OSS, and then looking at especially, things under Alan Dulles, who's, A really important figure.

I'll just say that much. And we'll be looking at, kind of, the initial forays of the CIA into how do we engage the USSR. How do we engage global communism? As the existential threat. faced by Western liberal democracies, And… How the chessboard of the world is… breaking up and changing in the wake of World War II, with decolonization, with, Europe rebuilding.

With the rise of communist China. the non-aligned movement, and there's a lot of new players, and so the USSR, the Chinese… the Chinese Communist Party, which both has a relationship with the USR, but also has disagreements with it. the whole world is changing, and the CIA, as this central, self-preserving node of the national security state.

begins to both gather intelligence, but also actively inject itself into situations to influence those outcomes because of the core security strategy that the state has decided upon. And in fact, the CIA even has a higher fidelity to this strategy than they do to the president, the publicly elected official, because they pursue this strategy Even against the president's wishes.

As we're going to see. So there's this level of where they are willing to operate in a way that is sort of rogue, and to them, the president is somebody to be managed, and to maintain the relationship with. But he's not the person that they ultimately answer to. Ultimately, they answer to themselves and their understanding of their mandate.

So I think I'm gonna go ahead and kind of… Close the lecture there. And I'm happy to take any questions or chat about things. If you've got questions about where we're gonna go or anything that I explained, I know I covered a lot of… theoretical ground. I try to repeat myself as I talk, and to, like, highlight points again. If I say it again a different way, it can kind of connect in a new way for people who maybe heard it the first or the second time differently. But please let me know if there's anything unclear, or if it raises new questions.

I'm trying to be… pretty systematic and build a case for my understanding of what's going on. But there's still things that need more clarification, like, you know, we're not… I'm not getting into the question of, like, what is sovereignty? I'm sort of operating with the… Schmidian line as just kind of a helpful heuristic of sovereign as he who decides on the exception. That's… I'm using that, but the truth is that I haven't done deep research on, like, trying to justify whether that really is the best, paradigm or not. So that's also open to questions and interpretation as well.

Thank you. So yeah, guys, we've got a little bit of time here for some Q&A, assuming you don't have to run off immediately. I know you've got events going on there at the Wagon Box right now. How long do you think you got? 10? 20 minutes, do you think?

I had a full 2 hours blocked, but.

Okay, cool. Well, then, in that case, we should ask the kinds of questions that get Matthew to… to really… go deeper on any one of these issues. Here's what I would like to start off with, and please, everybody, raise your hands. Otherwise, I'll just talk the whole time. Please, you know, get in the queue. It's the little button, if you click React from a browser, it gives you the hand-raising button. There's also a way to do it for mobile, it's not in front of me right now, but you should be able to see it. I wanna start with this, author.

who talks about the three levels of the state, the public, the administrative, and the deep state. And, I kind of… I was hoping you could kind of give us his name again, and then bring up, The… the main… books, and then I'm curious, you know, as far as, like, where he's working from, what he's adjacent to, kind of just… you know, I want to take this author as, like, a springboard into this material, because, you know, anybody coming in from the conversation that we already had.

the Jakarta Method and, you know, Foucault are just two really solid ways in, but it sounds like this person in particular is really good as well, and so I'd definitely like to, at least within the next couple days, binge some of his work, and I'm wondering where to jump in.

Yeah, I ran across Aaron Good's work, I found his book, he's basically got one book out, it's called American Exception. And I highly recommend it, I actually think it's a great way in. Like, the Jakarta Method is a great way in as well, but American Exception is a little bit more recent. And it's very readable. it's also, like, you can tell that he did… it's basically a thesis, a PhD thesis that he rewrote.

to be, an accessible book. And what I like about it is that he's trying… he's trying to do deep state studies, but he is constrained by being in the academy, and so he actively does really good work. to position this… these studies within the broader field of political theory, of, like, you know, he's bringing in C. Wright Mills, and he's talking about other theorists, who are known names and who are very accepted and sane within the Academy, and he's showing how, hey, this deep state question It's not some weird conspiracy theory, it actually has, one, it's got precedent, but it actually fits within the general constellation of commonly asked questions within the field.

And so, Aaron Good does a good job of, like, putting together what is, like, a very sane and academic way of approaching a question that can produce a lot of hysterics. So I really like his work. It also takes a really good question that's very, sort of. both innocuous and very interesting. At the outset, the book is basically about, like.

why is American policy, foreign policy specifically, so remarkably consistent across all of the administrations? since FDR, essentially. Why does, like, the fact that the president keeps changing not really seem to change dramatically the overall foreign policy that our state takes? And so he just takes that question and begins to dig into.

The underlying mechanisms for that. That leads him into this understanding of the deep state. And all of these mechanisms I'm talking about, like the National Security Council, the CIA, And, How does foreign policy get set? How does a consensus develop? And why do these things keep happening? You know, why do things happen to presidents, rather than the presidents making things happen?

So, I really like Aaron Good's work, and I recommend him. He has a Patreon, and he's got a… he's got a… like, an independent podcast called American Exception. He basically is sort of doing the independent scholar thing as well. He did his PhD at Temple University, actually where Justin Murphy did his PhD in political science. I don't know if they overlapped, it would be interesting to ask, but basically, Aaron's doing the independent scholar thing through Patreon, and doing, constant analysis on the deep state.

So, I, I support him and think his work is really solid, and Hard time staying up on, like, his prolific podcast production, but find his work to be valuable.

Mmm… Alright, and I will, open up… A document for people to collaborate on a Sarutu brief on Aaron Good's book that I will make available within the next 48 hours. What you can do right now is request access to this document, and then check back on it within the next 48 hours, or just reach out to me for the link again. I just shared the link there in the chat, and when I say a brief.

It's… it's a new practice at, for Cerutu, Socianalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground. The idea of a brief, it's kind of like a debate brief. Except that it's scholarly. And so what a debate brief does is it makes it so that you have all the arguments and all of the major facts, put together in a very condensed and useful way. But a scholarly version of the brief, which is something I've been developing.

I wasn't taught it at the university, which is hilarious. But the… but what it does is it… instead of just telling you all the facts, it backs it up with the primary sources and the Chicago citation, for every one of those quotes that backs up every one of those major. movements in the actual text. And then my goal is to kind of keep doing this as we move forward, week after week, so that at the end of June, we'll have a really cool collection of works that we can all use in our own research and writing.

Thanks, Dave. That's a cool practice, and looking forward to being involved. Caden, thanks for raising your hand.

Here we go, okay. First off, thanks for that lecture. That was really great. This is… like, this topic specifically is what got me into history and politics in the first place, so it's really cool seeing another approach to it. What you were saying, too, you had mentioned that there was something that you wanted to… dive deeper into, or do another writing about… can you… do you know what I'm talking about? Could you restate what it was that you were mentioning?

Yeah, I think that what we're doing here is we're showing the emergence of the deep state, but in the tripartite distinction, the administrative state came first. And so I'm interested in this question of how does a professional civil service and a political bureaucracy arise? Because that was… originally, the US… the American state did not have that, and that was something that developed over the course of the 1800s, especially towards the end of the 1800s, and leading into the early… 20th century.

and then culminating with this reorganization under FDR. I'm really interested in this question of how do the different Agencies get set up, and… why are they set up in a particular way? And how does the way that they're organized affect the way that they go about and do their work? Are they better or worse at it? And how do they get this unaccountable power to set policy. We have the idea of, like, people who are professionally in politics, like, who are professional, that there's a skill called governance that you can learn and be a professional at, and then you work in the government in a way that's not elected.

And, it, yet nonetheless, is exercising political power. There's a whole history there. And I was mentioning the… the Department of Forestry is a particularly interesting case, because Gifford Pinchett, who was kind of the lead on founding this Department of Forestry, he went over to Europe and learned about forestry, this newly emerging science from… in Germany and France.

And he brought that over to the U.S, and he founded the first school of forestry in the U.S. at Yale, and he kind of creates… he creates the idea of the forester in the United States. There was no forester, there wasn't a professional position or a science of forestry. Forestry was actually in the Department of Agriculture, because trees are plants, you know? You grow trees, and trees grow, so you… it's a part of agriculture. And he creates this, concept of a professional Who has a specialization in how you manage forests, and he pushes for the government to create this agency that now applies the techniques of management to these hyper-objects called forests. And… and the foresters who do this, There's this shift where, like, people who spent all their time in forests now foresters are trained early on in the science of forestry. They're not people who've spent 20, 30 years around forests, or who have grown tree stands. They're now immediately trained in this new science, and now they're the ones going out and telling local people how to manage their forests.

So, that whole history, to me, I want to understand that better, of where did the administrative state, this whole massive bureaucracy that exercises political power in a way that is not directly accountable to voters.

Okay, right. It was jogging my memory of… I first came across it as a podcast, but then I found the paper that the guy was talking about. This is by a… Guy named Joseph Postel. And it's titled, The Decision of 1946, the Legislative Reorganization Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. And so it's kind of at the tail end of, maybe the emergence of the administrative state. It… is maybe more where it kind of crystallizes in Congress. But this was coming to mind a lot when you were getting into, your definition of the administrative state.

And so I just wasn't sure if, If these two laws were something that was on your radar already, or if it's something that… Might also kind of be complementary to what you're thinking about.

Thanks, yeah, if you could, put that in the chat or email it to me. Totally. I'm kind of calling this the Wild Professionals Research Project after my talk that I gave at to UConn last year of, like, rewilding the professions, I'm looking at… I'm interested in this project of… How did we get professional gov… governance.

how did we get these, agencies? Because there is a history here, you know? These agencies didn't exist before, and the idea of a forester didn't exist before, and it was created, and it was advocated for, and it became real because it now exercises effect on the world. And the way that these things happen are, like you point out, somebody drafts a law. Usually there's long conversation leading up to it, usually there's a confluence of forces, there's different people negotiating for power, there's trends that people are trying to adapt to. But all of that history, I think, is interesting, because the administrative state, I have a hunch that it's probably not… the state that the Founding Fathers envisioned America having, you know? And so there's something interesting about how did this come about.

And I think Foucault is giving us kind of the high-level philosophical trajectory of, like, actually, this is a development of the state's form itself, especially as the state is dependent upon technology. But how that transformation happens in any particular country is going to be completely unique, because it's going to be a result of that people's character and their history and of contingent… various contingencies and all that kind of thing. And I think we're all American here, and so that that really matters to us of how did our country become this way? Where did this come from? Because the state we have now is not the one we started with.

I would drop… there's another… there was a really great piece in American Affairs that kind of helped bring this together for me. And I'm gonna see if I can find it. But American Affairs is a great journal that I recommend. It's a quarterly public policy journal that's It's on the right, but it's sort of on this, like, It's sort of on this, like, data-driven national policy, industrial policy sort of direction, where it's, like, quasi-critical of capitalism, but, like, is very interested in understanding, kind of, the mechanisms of just how things work.

It's, just try to pull it up. If anybody's got another question, they can think about that, but I, I'm gonna try to grab that piece. Let's see… Here we go. Here we go. Personnel is Policy, the Fabric of Government Organization by Kevin Havik Horst. Yeah. This was really interesting. I think it would be interesting to talk with this guy, actually. I would like to… Have a conversation with this author.

But, yeah, so this piece is really helpful, in my opinion. This.

Well, I would love… I would love to bring… him on for a guest lecture, then. Or, or, or, like, a course interview? It doesn't have to be a lecture, but it could be, like. Either a guest lecturer, or he just visits the group, you know what I mean?

Yeah, and this is kind of, like, the other research project that I just don't have time for, but I'm, like, maintaining it as, like, this is a research question that's important, and that I want to understand better, and there is some good research on it. I've talked with Google Gemini and, like, done, like, a deep dive on, like, a bibliography.

And started to pull together some texts that are important on this, but a lot of the people who've worked on it are either really old or retired. And, so, yeah.

Cool.

Welcome back, JJ. Thanks for joining us, little man.

Yeah, he says, I've been listening the whole time. I've been fascinated. I've been nursing and going potty, and listening to… listening to this lecture. It's really cool.

Jackie actually has been listening with me the whole time. He probably listened more than me, I was more distracted than he was, probably.

The nature of the mother's brain is to be distracted, unfortunately. Is, Hard to set your focus on one thing when little pieces of your body are running around in the world.

I just, bought a copy… related… I just bought a copy of, Warriors and Warriors, on Audible, which is apparently a book about the sexes, so… that's for another deep line of research. I'm trying to go popular versus academic, American versus sort of, you know, deeper anthropological and historical takes on gender and sexuality. Anyway… More questions. Anybody else got some questions?

Ann, what do you think about all this Deep State stuff? Have you thought about any of this stuff before? How much is this, Blowing your mind, you know. Any questions about it?

I think from… this just goes to, you know, show how great our American school system is at teaching us any of this, but I think, like, just at the very beginning, finding out the CIA wasn't even established until the 40s. It's like. it's like, that makes sense. Historically, I've just never thought about it. Like, how new… It is. So yeah, I'll have to re-listen for sure, because I was a little distracted, but yeah, this is all super interesting, how it all plays out in our history.

And I totally affirm that, because that was also a revelation for me, like, I basically picked up this stuff as, like, I just don't know anything about this. And so I just started reading, and that was also… I was like, oh, wow, it is really early. And then you learn that there was this OSS before the CIA, And you're like, oh, there was, like, a thing before the CIA, you know, that became the CIA, sort of. You know, and then it's just all of these details and just the reality.

It's just more complex than you could ever imagine, but that's basically the fun of it, you know?

you know, I know that you'll be bringing in some Yasha Levine later, and he has a whole chapter on the rise of cybernetics, and but you, you know, you're talking about Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, a little today, and about how his research came out of… Trying to get missiles to autocorrect, was that what it was?

Yeah, anti-aircraft guns. They were designing anti-aircraft guns that could autocorrect, their firing based on feedback.

Yeah. Yeah, and kind of on that note, I actually… I didn't remember that, but wasn't… wasn't he also… wasn't a huge part of the development of early cybernetics? About sort of mapping movements of the Viet Cong in the jungles of Vietnam? Was that… was that… was that also part of it? Was that him, also?

That was not Wiener.

It's okay.

It would have been in the 70s, but… Levine talks about how Vietnam was an early testing ground for cybernetic principles, used by both the CIA as well as DARPA. So, that was how they, yeah, the CIA involvement in Vietnam could be entirely its own lecture. And, frankly, I wish that this wasn't, like, a four-lecture seminar, because I feel like I actually made it harder for myself.

By doing that, eventually I want to develop this into, like, a 12-week course that somebody could just take, you know, and, like, basically just, like, buy it off the shelf, essentially, out of curiosity. That would be the hope, because I really think that there's so much detail here. To go into.

well, we might have to commission a sequel and a triquel, you know? So, you know, I think what you're developing here is something that you could just keep running with for the rest of your life. It could be your thing. The thing is, is you have other things, and so it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, my problem is accumulating things. You know, that's… like I've mentioned, I've got the other research project, and then I've got at least two other research projects as well that, you know, I want to pursue. My problem is accumulating research projects, and this is one that actually progressed a decent amount, and so I want to be able to share about it, and… Maybe that's because it's just… it was probably easier because the history, honestly, is really interesting. Like, there's also a lot of, there's memoirs written by CIA guys who, like, tell the story. Like, there's one called In Search of Enemies.

about a guy who's directly on the ground in Angola, Working with the various, militias. and how we were backing certain militias, and how, the USSR was backing other militias, and Cuba ended up sending troops, but we were never officially at war. And… like, we weren't even supposed to be there anyways, like, the president didn't just want us there. And so… but, like, the whole story of, like, being behind enemy lines, and working with these militias and flying back and forth between Washington and, you know, being inside these meetings is, it's just gripping, you know?

Hmm… Yeah, it's the kind of stuff that you can make actual movies about. whether it be documentaries or action movies, like, all of it is… is… is good stuff. You know, it's good… it's… it's empirical, it's historical. but it directly hashes out in actual theory. And kind of the way I was thinking about that through a Heideggerian.

existential structural phenomenology, would be the move from the ontic to the ontological, and how There's this weird way that Heidegger, once he becomes famous and protective of his teaching, and then at the same time more or less sells out his project to a political idi… ideologue kind of position. He starts really writing things off, as Onticle.

You know, so, you know, you kind of put me onto Binzvanger, Binzvanger, recently. That whole project, he just goes, oh, it's onticle. He's not… he's not, you know, tracking this ontological distinction. And it's like… Yeah, yeah, that's 740 pages of… useful psychiatric and philosophical anthropological work into the phenomenology of love. It doesn't have to track the ontological distinction, Heidegger, that's your thing. Other people can have other things, buddy. And, anyway, so with that said.

I'm actually starting to really question to what extent I'm… ever gonna be loyal to Heidegger, because I don't care about maintaining the ontic-ontological distinction, and prior… in a way that prioritizes the ontological over the ontical. In a day and age where it seems like people… it's not that they forgot the question of being, it's… no, they forgot the question of what it is to be a human, and that's… his springboard into his life's work, but it's essentially something he abandons. And so, in abandoning it, you know, guys like Plessner, and Schieler, and Binswanger, and all these other philosophical anthropologists, like Arnold Galen, get overlooked. And, so, with that said.

I'm very interested in the human… the human question, and who are we? What are we? I think it's a lot deeper than people tend to… to… to suppose, and that period of… of research is really important. So, using that sort of, that period, the ontic… Fruitfulness of actual history, where it's far enough in the past that it's actually not so highly contested anymore.

you kind of touched on this at the beginning of your lecture. While at the same time being recent enough that there's actually, like, a documentary record and enough living people who've been arguing about these things, that the debate's not necessarily over. And not everything's been lost on it. It's fruitful for providing us ontic springboards, which is more or less, guys, the same as saying empirical springboards, into the deeper questions about, like, but what does that tell us about the human and its political reality? It's… and so, you know, from there, you can do more cross-cultural broader scale, zoom-out kind of things, but, you know, there might be things that are true for Americans that were true for Babylonians and Egyptians, and maybe even for some hunter-gatherer tribes.

There's also gonna be things that are unique to us, but we can't even begin to have that conversation if we don't start with an onticle reality that is fruitful and, like we said, it's far enough away, but it's not too far away in our recent history. And then from that, we do this bigger elaboration. If we know that, then we know this, you know? There are certain things that we can deduce or infer about the human on such a basis that gets us to some kind of an ontological take on the human.

Yeah, I'm a… I'm a big proponent of just getting really immersed in the details for a while, and actually letting yourself get into the flow, and get really curious about something, and to learn it from end to end, and… Because it's through those ontic details, the empirical details, that you actually engage in a real encounter.

You know, like, there's this, there's a tendency, I think, of the intellectual, obviously, to over-intellectualize life, where you skip over the details, or you skip over the reality of things as they are, in order to jump straight to the big idea and the deep thought that is, like, the real, real thing. But I think that that's also a fantasy and illusion.

Like, you could argue that a certain empirical framework is illusory. Sure. But, like, also jumping over things as they are, jumping over things in their singularity will also lead you to something that is equally unreal, some untested, vague idea. And I think Hegel's philosophy is all about this, about, like, being and nothing.

are these familiar things that are just sort of, like, deep thoughts that are vague, actually, because they don't have any concreteness to them. So getting into history is, in my opinion, one of the most fruitful and fun ways to get really concrete So that you can actually start to think with things that have edges to them.

Where you can start to churn up and develop ideas that really are useful, because they came from and come back to things.

Yeah, and this is… this is, not really the… the… I'm not gonna blame our… our theory elders, the ones who are still living, like Zizik, or who recently, passed away. I'm not gonna blame them for this, it's… it's… I think it's a little bit more like a… you know, they're a product of specialization. Someone like ZJK is really good at being sort of post-specialization and more of a generalist, but at the same time, how he's inherited in the world of the internet and pop culture Is by people who are into boutique consumer demographics, and the ones that capture him, the ones that he speaks to.

They're either, like, guardian liberals, or, they're some kind of Marx-adjacent theory nerd, and those consumer demographics Aren't particularly interested in anything real. Like, they really just want him to do, the analysis of whatever the recent Pixar is. Like, that's what they want from him. You know, oh, develop your concepts and hone in on these concepts using cultural artifacts that are… innocuous. Like, actually nothing burgers. And let's just go ahead and ignore those things that are actually fascinating, that nobody's talking about, that we actually can talk about pretty certainly at this point, like this class.

So it's kind of on us to go the next step.

I think of the meme where, like, the class, the Simpson meme, where the class is, like, surrounding Bart, and they're like, say this thing, say the thing! And he's like. And they're like, yeah, you know, like, that's, like, the Zizek relation. Like, Zizek has become Bart in the situation of, like, do you want coffee without cream or coffee without milk? And everybody's like, yeah, he did the thing, you know? Yeah.

We need to be thinking, you know? And that's what he says, too, is like, maybe we've tried to change the world too much, and now it's time to think about it again. And I think the CIA is this perfect example of an agency that has tried to change the world too much without thinking.

Hmm. Mmm. And then there's the deeper epistemological question of, like, is it… Can it think? Could it think? You know? What would it mean for the CIA to think, right, when it's internally divided in the ways that it is? Like… Is that, you know, is there a subject? Like, what kind of a subject might be Given to it, you know?

Well, it's such a fascinating analogy of thinking about Yeah, like, think about the CIA as the internal subjectivity of the security state, you know, is this interesting analogy, because What you have is the meeting of… the private interests and idiosyncrasies of human beings, what, what, Nick Land would call monkey business.

And the meeting of the state as a technology, and all of the technological apparatuses of information technology and war and weapons, like, the whole body of technological consciousness is hitting and meeting human monkey business, you know, Alan Dulles' private view of himself as a debonair spy who engages in international hijinks and then comes back home and enjoys a whiskey, you know, down in Foggy Bottom, you know, like, there's that. And then, like.

big corporations who want to overthrow X dictator because he's trying to appropriate their land for the poor in his country. and other government bureaucrats who are concerned about XYZ, you know, like, there's this whole amalgamation of individuals and orgs who have these interests that are very particular idiosyncratic, private.

And they are having to negotiate with the whole body of technological consciousness. Through this singular vector, That is able to exercise unaccountable power. You can all… you could think about the technological consciousness as, like, drive. And then you can think about idiosyncratic human interests as ego, perhaps.

I don't know, maybe security is… the overall security strategy is superego, I don't know. Because the funny thing, about the security strategy that the state has… that the American state has pursued For the past… 75 years. Is that it has made itself demonstrably more insecure.

Right.

Is that precisely through pursuing security, it is constantly creating instability, which generates more insecurity. Prime example. We fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1990s. It is then… Islamic radicals in the 2000s who… attack the World Trade Center, and we go to war with the very people we armed in Afghanistan to defeat the USSR. We end up fighting them for 20 years.

We created the very enemy that we sought. to destroy, Ostensibly, under security. And so there's something kind of Freudian about the security strategy, where it says, I want security, I want security, and it keeps making the world less secure. It's this… this replication compulsion.

I'm not sure if this is going to be too speculative or conspiratorial, though, but I'm just wondering to what extent, as a research question, it's even on the table here to be asking if the security state is just a legitimation narrative for… Something else that's going on between elites at the level of… globalism versus nationalism. You know, like, when we think of elites and what they're divided on, that's one of the major things that they're divided on. And if we think that these intelligence agencies are made up of those elites, and that they are also divided.

It would stand to reason That there is a concerted push for the liquidation of nations, and that requires massive destabilization. Like, it requires massive destabilization, and people actually have to become more or less numb to constant destabilization in order to remake the world to make it more efficient, and… Capital, amenable, etc.

Part of the problem that… we're dealing with is that the United States basically after World War II, came into a world where it was basically handed the role of being the supreme power. Because everybody else had burned themselves to the ground. So it's like, you wake up one day and you find that you're the only person with all… with both hands and your legs still intact. And it's like, well, I guess I'm the superior, you know, organism in this context. And you then get… you build a system to benefit yourself as the four-legged individual, as opposed to the two, you know, the zero-legged individuals.

And eventually, that system stops working because they reproduce, they get, you know, they get their legs back, blah blah blah, all these sort of things. And now you're addicted to the system where you're on top and you're in charge. And so, actually, you have to keep creating instability to create the need for yourself.

And…

This is an argument that Emmanuel Todd makes in his book, after the… something, I have to look it up. But Emmanuel Todd's a French demographer. He wrote this in, like, 2002.

After the Empire?

After the empire, that's it. And it's this fascinating argument from a French tomographer who was pretty prescient. He saw a number of trends that people are… he saw a number of trends that people are talking about now. He saw them way before anybody started talking about them. But his argument, basically, is we're just going to continue to see increasingly erratic behavior from the United States as a way to justify its own ongoing global supremacy, where we create instability precisely to, cause people to rely on us.

Now, unfortunately, what we're seeing in our current context is we create instability, and we actually don't have the military power to follow through on being the reliable security partner. So we start a war in Iran. and we can't actually keep the UAE and Qatar safe, and now their infrastructure's decimated, and they're pulling their investment money out of our AI companies and pension funds.

Because we promised them security that we couldn't deliver on. And so… Yeah, this, this problem of the unconsciously creating problems for yourself. It could be a part of, like, a broader strategy. But it's just fascinating that it exists with the CIA's internal ideology. Is that of relentlessly pursuing national security.

by starting wars and under… and taking… and causing coups and, creating more enemies. Basically. I mean, the memoir I mentioned earlier called In Search of Enemies. is a very prescient title, because it's like, we need enemies. So we have to go, like, either search them out or create them. And unfortunately, we've been successful.

Hmm…

Well, it's the top of the hour, so I think we could probably wrap up here, and you know, JJ's starting to fall asleep again, so I think that's a pretty good signal. I got it.

That's how you know.

How you know? It's, JJ's nap window's coming to a close, so I think we're, I think we can call it here.

Sweet. Yeah, and everybody, that Google Doc, for the brief. on the American, exception book, as well as a doc, we're gonna run on that American Affairs. And then I might even feel compelled to do the same for After the Empire, but basically these… each of these briefs will loop back into this course itself, and I'm developing, alongside all that, in that document, the actual transcript for people who want to go over that. And so, yeah, we're trying to get more rigorous this year, as Daddy Dave kicks into a super responsible mode. So, Matthew, thank you, this is killer. I'm so stoked for this.

Great. I've been enjoying it, I appreciate it, and thanks, Cade and Nick, for showing up. It's nice to have a live audience, and of course. JJ, for listening as well, I appreciate it.

Also, Anne.

And Anne. Thank you, Anne, for, whatever attention you're able to lend us. We appreciate it.

Yeah. Cool, man. Alright, have fun.

Have a great day, everyone. And to future folks.

Take care.

Thank you.

Stay up.