In this captivating episode of the podcast, host Stefan Molyneux is joined by Dr. Duke Pesta, a tenured professor and the academic director of the Freedom Project Academy. The two engage in an extensive discussion exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal works, particularly "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," while reflecting on the intricate connections between Tolkien's life experiences, his literary creations, and broader historical contexts.
Molyneux and Pesta journey through their personal histories with Tolkien's literature, sharing how early encounters with these works shaped their views on civilization, morality, and the human condition. They recall their engagement with Tolkien’s epic tales, underscoring the compelling themes of heroism and sacrifice that resonate throughout the narratives. Molyneux details how he first approached Tolkien's universe during his youth while playing tabletop games and quickly became enmeshed in the intricacies of Middle-earth.
At the heart of the episode is a deep analysis of the influences of World Wars I and II on Tolkien's writings. The hosts explore how the devastation of war and the nature of good versus evil are intricately woven into the fabric of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." They discuss how Tolkien's own experiences in World War I, mingled with the profound loss of friends and the trauma of conflict, heavily inform the moral undercurrent of his stories. Pesta argues that these wars, with their harrowing realities, prompted Tolkien to depict a struggle between darkness and light, presenting a world where heroism is summoned not only from grand gestures but from the resilience and moral fortitude of ordinary beings.
As they unpack the symbolism of the One Ring, Molyneux posits that it represents the seductive nature of power, drawing parallels to contemporary discussions of language and rhetoric in politics. They make intriguing connections between Gollum's tortured existence and modern figures entrenched in social justice advocacy, highlighting how those consumed by power dynamics risk losing their essence, much like the character of Gollum.
Pesta and Molyneux further delve into the contrast between the personal journeys of characters like Frodo, who bear the weight of immense responsibility with courage, and the collective failures often portrayed in warriors of the realms, who may succumb to infighting or corruption. Molyneux reflects on the absence of organized religion within the narratives, contrasting it with the essential spiritual and moral frameworks that underpin Tolkien’s anti-heroic yet noble quest.
Throughout the episode, an existential thread emerges, focused on the struggle for personal identity amidst chaotic external pressures—a reminder of the timeless battle between individual moral integrity and collective ideologies. The discussion concludes with a sense of melancholy and optimism; the heroes of the Shire return transformed but faced with the scars of their experiences, suggesting that the lessons of courage, loyalty, and personal sacrifice remain vital in today’s world.
This enriching conversation, rich with philosophical undertones and reflective insights, not only celebrates Tolkien’s literary contributions but also evokes a broader contemplation of humanity's eternal conflicts. To hear this illuminating dialogue, tune in to the episode that promises to leave you pondering the depths of courage both in fiction and reality. For more information on academic programs, visit fpeusa.org.
0:12 - Introduction to Tolkien's World
4:27 - Tolkien's Life and Impact
10:19 - Themes of War and Class
14:54 - The Ring's Influence
22:13 - Religion and Spirituality in Middle-earth
25:49 - Language and Political Power
31:03 - Nature vs. Sophistry in The Lord of the Rings
33:01 - Anarchy and Society
35:26 - Fantasy vs. Reality
38:03 - Tolkien's Pastoral Paradise
40:37 - The Role of Government
45:19 - War and Its Aftermath
48:30 - Gollum and Power
56:05 - The Nature of Evil
58:59 - The Power of Mercy
1:04:30 - The Individual's Struggle
1:05:10 - Tolkien’s Message Against Tyranny
[0:00] Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with a good friend, Dr. Duke Pesta, a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
[0:12] For more from Dr. Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org. Dr. Pesta, thank you so much for taking the time today.
[0:22] Good to be with you again, Stef.
[0:24] One podcast to bind them. So we're going to do the Fellowship of the Ring. It's really something. Now, my history with this book is long and tumultuous. I first read The Hobbit back when I was playing Dungeons and Dragons. I read Lord of the Rings. I've read it, I think, twice. No, I've read it three times, actually, sort of end to end. I've read The Silmarillion, read the other stuff, read his biography, read like, it really is an absolutely fascinating study in just about every single conceivable human dimension, which is why it is the second best-selling story in the English language. What's your history with the work?
[1:02] I read it. I had a very fortunate education. I went to a very good Catholic school when I was a boy before they became corrupted. And we got we read in my sophomore year of high school. I read all three of the novels. The Lord of the Rings read The Hobbit. And I like you did what you did. I went and read The Silmarillion, read all the supporting documents, just fell in love with it. And so, you know, a lot of people have issues with the movies. Whenever the movie's on, my wife gets so mad at me. The movies are very flawed and imperfect. But every time they're on, no matter what I'm doing, I just stop and watch. I'll stand there for an hour and watch it. So much so that I'm now very conversant in all the ways the movies divert from the books. But I still find even the watered-down movie version, it's absolutely captivating.
[1:47] Well, they made 48,000 different weapons just for the movie. I mean, the amount of craftsmanship in it, like every time I watch it, I'm looking at the backgrounds almost now. Like they went and planted gardens in the Shire location for a year before they started shooting just to make it sort of look lived in and grown and natural. And well, we can talk about some of the differences later, but do you know much about Tolkien? Because I mean, he's steadfastly rejected political or contemporaneous interpretations of his work. To me, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that he fought in World War One, that his kids were on the front in World War II, and that the book was written, I guess the first three chapters were written just before the Second World War broke out, and then it was finished after the Second World War. There were, of course, times in the Second World War where he had no time to write anything. To me, it's impossible to imagine that both his experience in the First World War and his son's exposure and his general knowledge of the Second World War would have no effect on this cataclysmic battle story between good and evil. But what's your familiarity with Tolkien's life, which I think is an important place to start.
[2:54] It is. And Tolkien is a very idiosyncratic, curmudgeonly writer and interviewer.
[3:00] Hey, hey, we just call him British. Okay. Maybe eccentric, maybe. Otherwise, just plain British. Sorry, go ahead.
[3:08] But he was British in the Victorian sense of the word. He despised industrialization, mechanization. And one of the things I love about Tolkien. You know, Stef, I am no echo warrior by any stretch of the imagination. But conservative contains within it the word conservation. And Tolkien really loved nature. About your direct question, though, I think that all the things that you just pointed out that we find in Tolkien's work, at one point or another, he both repudiated and embraced, depending upon who he was talking to, what time of his life he was influenced by. But it is absolutely clear, He even acknowledged at the end of his life the major role that the horrors of World War I played in his stories. And he lost many of his friends, and many of his students then ended up fighting in World War II. The same thing happened for C.S. Lewis. And so these were just absolutely catastrophic points in their lives. The Hobbit was finished in 1937. His publisher wanted a sequel. He tried to turn in the Silmarillion as part of the sequel. The publisher read it, didn't understand any of it, and rejected it, at which point Tolkien began to work on The Lord of the Rings, which was written between 1937 and 1949, and the rest is history. There are certain other themes I think we can talk about as we progress through the hour, but I think that's kind of the backstory for us.
[4:27] The other thing I think that's important is one of the things that's amazing about Tolkien is not only did he speak at least 20 languages and invent a large number, his fascination with languages was actually the motivation, according to his claim, his motivation for the books, that the stories were made to provide a world for the languages that he was fascinated by from being a child. But I know that you're, of course, involved in homeschooling. One of the things that's amazing about Tolkien is that he was, in fact, homeschooled by his mother after his father died in particular. It's just amazing to me that he was able to be that creative, that imaginary, that fluid with language, that successful as an academic without being exposed to the wonderfully mental fertile fertility issues inherent in public schools. Really, really quite a remarkable feat that he overcame just being homeschooled to be that successful.
[5:17] Tolkien. I have a friend, a fellow scholar who made the observation, I think it's brilliant, that you look at Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis did a thousand things well. I mean, he was an apologist, a scholar. He wrote beautiful literary criticism, children's novels, science fiction.
[5:34] Lewis did a lot of things brilliantly, but J.R.R. Tolkien did one thing better than anybody in perhaps history ever did it. And that was to create a completely self-contained, not just a story, not just novels, but novels that were themselves and characters that were surrounded by all these different levels of physical and metaphysical worlds, right up to the gods and all the way down to the most tiny details. You mentioned at the beginning of our talk here today that now when you watch The Lord of the Rings, you watch all the back stuff. I do too. And you think about how meticulous, one of the best things about those movies is how meticulous Jackson was in trying to set the scene. And yet it pales in comparison. This is where any film version is destined to fall down because no film version can be as fertile as the human imagination when it's rightly plugged in. But as fertile and as careful as Jackson was, I mean, Tolkien just at every level was a perfectionist. You mentioned the languages, not just the ones he spoke, but the languages he invented whole cloth for his Middle Earth. And two things Tolkien said that I think are absolutely fascinating. One, he considered his work mythopoetic. That was his word for it. That we are going to create real live mythology again using poetry. And his language fixation, he called a glossopoeia, right? That these were the two driving functions behind his universe. And that's why they're so full. He didn't start.
[7:02] On the lowest level with a plot or a character. He started with the universe. He started with the gods. He started with the lesser gods, the Ainur. He started with the idea of how this world that he was going to come to write about was invented in the first place, how it evolved over eons on eons and how the gods interacted with creation. Staggeringly, in a way, it's biblical in its implications of how Genesis to Revelations it is from beginning to end and every aspect of the kitchen sink thrown in there as well.
[7:30] Right. Now, to me, I'm going to sort of put forward a very sort of brief hypothesis about how the stories may fit together with some of the major influences in his life in the 20th century, and let me know what you think. So very briefly, I sort of view The Hobbit as the First World War and Lord of the Rings as the Second World War. One of the fascinating things about The Hobbit, which perhaps we can do a separate show on, is normally in heroic myths, when you defeat the monster and you get the treasure, that's the end. One of the fascinating things about The Hobbit is when they get the treasure and they defeat the monster, in a sense, their troubles only just begin. Because then you have the battle of the five armies, everybody's trying to get that piece of the treasure and so on. And to me, That is really fascinating because that to me was a story of the First World War. The First World War, of course, the death count after the First World War with the Spanish flu, with a weakened population and a highly mobile population of soldiers going back to their homelands,
[8:26] The death count after the First World War was even greater than the war itself, 20 million versus 10 million. And of course, the disastrous Treaty of Versailles set the stage, set the groundwork for the Second World War. So to me, there's a lot in, you think you've defeated the monster, but you've really sown the seeds for future conflict and combat. I think there's a lot in that in the First World War. Also, he went to war, Tolkien himself, with the idea that it was good versus evil as he spent time in the war, in the First World War in the trenches. His first day of combat was the Somme, the worst day to that date in British military history with 19,000 killed and 38,000 wounded in one day. But he quickly realized that there was good and evil on both sides. And of course, because he was, he came from a very upper class background. His father was a banker. He was born in South Africa.
[9:20] But then he was thrown together with his troops. There was a rigid class structure in the British military at the time. Generally, people who were university went to become officers. He was a communications officer. But he was thrown in and saw a lot of the virtues of the working class, of the soldiers, of the grunts, as I guess they would be called in some locations. And I think that helped inform him in terms of there's a class structure in the Shire, right? I mean, Bilbo and Frodo are kind of upper middle class guys. They don't seem to have a whole lot of calluses. They don't seem to get a whole lot of actual work done. But he sees great virtues, of course, in Merry and Pippin and Samwise and so on. I think that comes out of those experiences, and it's not a direct parallel, but I do think that the war to end all wars, which then sets a stage for a future conflict that's even worse, to me has something to do with First World War and Second World War.
[10:11] I think that's very well said. It's a great thesis. That would make a great scholarly article. It's a wonderful idea. I think parallel, running parallel to that, and I'd never thought of that before.
[10:20] But you also have this country-city aspect that you think about World War I and World War II, what sets them apart from almost all the other wars in a major way is how scientifically and technologically advanced they were, how machine-driven.
[10:35] By the end of World War I, you had the prototypes that were beginning for the first jets. You had tanks in play. You had this chemical gas being used. And as a country boy, as a man who lived and loved country life and despised the clutter and the noise and the pollution of cities, I think what you see in The Lord of the Rings, both in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is this embrace of the city. For Tolkien, the boys who won World War I and consequently won World War II weren't just the boys that were educated on the football fields of Eaton. They were also the boys who came from these country boroughs and these country towns, and they brought with them. I think that's where Tolkien found his goodness, that despite the rigid class structure, his own not going to fancy private schools, I think he saw in the boys in the trenches who the politics were way above them, but they were country boys at heart. They weren't sophisticated. They weren't technologically savvy, but they were the ones that had the moral spine and ability to push the conflict the right way. And one of the themes that I see across The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
[11:41] Is stone versus stone. Stone is everywhere. Stone versus machine. And one of the major themes is the movability of the heart. Do hearts turn to stone, as in the cases of Sauron and the cases of the orcs who start with stone hearts? Or do they melt and become human again? And you have this wonderful going back and forth between the countryside and the landscape in those books, and then the cities, right? Whether they're orc or goblin cities, or whether the cities of men, the cities of elves. And it's interesting that the elvish cities are all rustic and rural. They're all trees interbined in columns, as opposed to the dwarves, whose everything is stone, right? And so there's this wonderful give and take between, at one point.
[12:25] The ant, Treebeard, the fascinating ant character. He says that Saruman, when he's corrupted, has become concerned with nothing but rock and stone and wheel, right? And so you think about in the imagination of Tolkien, how horrified he was, not just by the excesses of industrialization, but how that can be militarized. And there's a wonderfully, to me, it's also a dystopia. The Lord of the Rings is a dystopian warning about what's coming. If we continue to put our faith not in nature, not in natural, the basic kindnesses, and in many ways, the old religious pieties, we haven't mentioned and yet Tolkien was devoutly Catholic. He was the one who used his apologetics to bring Lewis somewhat back into the fold of Christianity. And even though he denied, he did not like allegorical readings of his book, He certainly, and later in line, I've got a great quote we can talk about later. He certainly understood at the end of his life how much his faith, too, influenced what he was trying to accomplish in those books.
[13:25] Now, he was so old school that when the mass began to be transferred from Latin to English, he would still very loudly respond in Latin. He was very old school when it came to Catholicism, which is fascinating, really, in that C.S. Lewis, of course, created a much more directly allegorical to Christianity text in the Chronicles of Narnia, but it's almost like Tolkien created a competing mythology that had much more of its roots in, not in Judeo-Christianity, but in Anglo-Saxon law and history. Of course, he was the former scholar of the ancient poem Beowulf. And during his life, they actually, because Beowulf, of course, ends with the king who fights the dragon being buried with his treasure in a ship. And then I think it was in the 30s, 33, they ended up actually finding this ship and digging it all up. So it brought a great reality to it. The one thing that is really, to me, annoying about Lord of the Rings is the damn ring. I mean, it's the most powerful thing in the known universe. What does it do?
[14:24] It whispers a lot. It hides in streams. It eats the souls of hobbits to extend their lives for a half millennia. And it makes you invisible in the most annoying conceivable way. So you're invisible to normal people, but the Nazgul, uh, who, uh, and not just the baby boomers who want their retirement pensions, which they haven't paid into. That's another story. But the Nazgul, it makes you perfectly visible to evil while making you invisible to good people. So the ring to me, of course, it's the central, it's the MacGuffin, right? It's what everyone wants. It drives the story.
[14:54] But let me tell you what I think the ring is. Ooh, ooh, ooh, this is going to be so exciting. Okay. I've been thinking about this all week, so I'll try and keep it brief. The ring is not a weapon. What does it do? It doesn't do anything. It's like Gandalf with his magical powers that only show up once in a blue moon, right? Like he can blow up entire bulrogs and so on, but he ends up poking a stick at a goblin. Anyway. So the ring is not a weapon. The ring only has influence. The ring is incredibly slow acting, and the ring works on the minds of people. And the ring allows somebody in charge to whip up and inflame great armies of hatred. And then when the ring is destroyed, the armies then just kind of stand around dazed and end up going back home. So the ring, to me, is sophistry.
[15:40] And when you look at the 1930s, when the seeds of the story were really germinating, you saw the rise of Hitler, who for all of his great evils was a fantastically terrifyingly great orator. And the war of the Second World War was the war between Churchill and Hitler in terms of oratory. Sorry?
[15:58] I'm sorry if I was talking over you. I just didn't know. It was a fantastic pun, germinating. I just wanted to pause over that. I'd never thought about that.
[16:05] Don't even get me started on the ring being a Wagnerian opera, which is German. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. And so to me, if you look at the Germans and the Japanese, you saw a race or a group of people driven insane by the rhetoric and the eloquence of wartime leaders, right? Emperor Hirohito and Hitler. And what's fascinating to me is these people who were so full of hatred that they were willing to march to their death, to fly zeros into the side of American warships in kamikaze style. And the fascinating thing about the Germans and the Japanese is when those leaders were brought down, when Hitler committed suicide, when Hirohita's power was curtailed, like the orcs, when the ring was destroyed, they become pretty peaceful. The Germans become peaceful and productive. The Japanese become peaceful and productive. And if you look at the power of words, Hitler beforehand was whipping the Germans into this war frenzy, which worked and paid off, and Hirohito was into this war frenzy. After the war, in Germany, there was a minister of finance who completely revamped the economy, made it free market, curtailed the inflationary spiral of money printing and so on. The Germans became peaceful. So in the absence of this rhetoric, in the absence of this civilization-shredding blast of syllables
[17:27] People become peaceful. And the Hobbits, you know, it's clearly England. England had been a peace for, I guess, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, or to some degree even. Well, anyway, it had been generations since England had gone directly to war. And a lot of the common sense of the Hobbits, to me, comes out of the resistance to rhetoric. What is the opposite of rhetoric? Well, it's philosophy. What is the opposite of sophistry is Socrates. And if you look at the skepticism of Hume and the common sense of John Locke, a lot of the other British philosophers, it gave them a strong resistance to this kind of rhetoric, whereas the florid style of German art and opera and Nietzsche and the sorrows of Jung-Werther and so on, they became very emotional and very passionate and very susceptible to this kind of manipulation. So to me, the ring is a very powerful device that drives war and control over the ring is control over rhetoric. and it is in the destruction of rhetoric and the destruction of the ring that the maddened masses are freed of their bloodlust and can turn to more peaceful ends.
[18:30] Yeah, I think that's great, great, great. And you know, that's a wonderful surmise and I think if you go back to the Silmarillion again, I think we could see the origins of that train of thought there. If you think about the Ainur, the divine beings created by the one god in this mythology, Eru Iluvatar, he created a number of lesser gods called the Valar. And what they did is they dreamt, they began to sing songs they made music and what.
[18:55] Iru the god did is he took each of his lesser gods song and wove them together into themes so creation the good creation of the one good god is music it's the that's another opposite of sophistry isn't it music and harmony versus the noise of war and the one main enemy in all of this world the serpent in that particular garden of eden if you will was a was one of the inur called Melkor, who sang disharmony. He wove into the harmonic themes of the other Valar his discordant themes of evil and wickedness and selfishness. And the Eru, because of his commitment to free will, let those themes be wound in too. And his subordinate, Melkor, was Sauron, his lieutenant. And when the rings were made, Sauron put much of his own power into the ring. In other words, the ring, and this is, I think, fits your thesis brilliantly, the ring becomes a ventriloquism for him. It's like ventriloquizes, it doesn't speak at all, but its power to lead, to lure, its power to conceal, its power to deceive is the power that was put in it by Sauron himself. And so in that regard, it's exactly right. And the other irony about what you said is, for all of its persuasive power, the ring never says a word, obviously, right? But that's the influence of Sauron. And you may remember too from the Silmarillion.
[20:17] Melkor, the Valar that was in charge of all the evil in the Silmarillion, he's the one that, through words, through language, deceives the elves, the primary elves, into betraying the Valar and then having them get banished to Middle-earth. So there's an Adam and Eve quality to this, just like the serpent in Adam and Eve with his sophistry forces Adam, compels Adam and Eve out of their free will to eat the apple. So, too, you have a very similar thing that happens between the gods that are created by Iru Iluvatar and then Melkor and then the free will of the elves. So it really is a remarkable continuity. And maybe to wrap this up and let you talk, I wanted to get this quote on the page, because at the end of his life, he's talking about the influence of faith and the biblical stories on his universe. They weren't Christian worlds. He called it, I love this phrase, he called it sub-creation.
[21:09] That what the mind of man does is not create. All we can do is sub-create. Take the world, the powers, the gifts, the languages that God has infused into our reality and to use them to sub-create worlds that mirror his own. And here's what he said at the end of his life, quote, The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in and I have not cut out practically all references to anything like religion, to cults or practices in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. And what I love about that is there is no overt religion in my story because my entire story is infused with those same religious values. In other words, Tolkien saw himself not as a storyteller, but as a creator, just like God had created the narrative that we all operate in in the material world.
[22:08] Okay. Can you expand a little bit more on that? I find that because the absence of religion is really quite powerful.
[22:14] There is a form of, in a sense, ancestor worship. When you look at Gondor and the lineage of the kings and so on, which has sort of an oriental aspect to it, but it's true. I mean, who sits and prays? Who, you know, who goes to church? I mean, where are the churches in this world? So he actually, was that a conscious decision to remove formal elements of organized religion?
[22:34] I think so. I think the organized religions are, but the fallen manifestations of an idea behind religion. And what he wanted was a religion that was immediately present. Think about the elves. I mean, the Eldar, right? The children of the stars. The elves live in a kind of constantly spiritual state. Their ability to heal, their ability to communicate almost without speaking, the powers that they have. In a way, it's kind of an animated religious universe. As John Milton said in Paradise Lost, this is a temple. This is not a, the human heart becomes a temple, right? Within Milton's great revelation in Paradise Lost. And I think that's what Tolkien was playing with. And keep in mind, too, that in our fallen world, right, where angels no longer walk and demons conceal themselves theoretically, and where churches become necessary markers on the landscape, so to speak, our psychic landscape, in the world of Tolkien, and the world of the elves in particular, it's not that kind of a fallen world. The spiritual, the Valar walks. The Valar is there in reality. In a way, it's almost kind of quasi-animistic and pagan. The religious virtues haven't waned from creation yet. And so everything in the universe that Tolkien creates is sort of alive with religion in a way, or at least the spiritual is a better way of phrasing it.
[23:53] Right. His relationship to state power, to me, has always been quite fascinating. It is, in preparing for this chat, I watched some of the footage of the First World War men sailing off to war, cheering, throwing their hats in the air. You know, I remember this quote that really struck with me from when I was a kid. Some guy in the First World War, excuse the coarseness of the language, but it seems fairly appropriate to the situation, where he said, you know, when I was a kid, I thought that war was like riding up a hill on a horse, waving a sword with an equal chance for victory or loss. But as it turns out, in the First World War, war meant some arsehole with a button 20 miles away, pushing it and you being disintegrated. And that, I think, the desperate desire for there to be a war with clear demarcations of good and evil shows up repeatedly in The Lord of the Rings. There's no ambiguous war. There's no like, well, we thought Sauron had weapons of mass destruction. We invaded his country. Turns out he didn't. And now we're the bad guys. And I think the fact that most of his childhood, I think all but one of his childhood friends died in the First World War. It's the same thing with my family history. Out of five brothers of my ancestors, four died on the front of the First World War. And I think if we sort of go with the rough idea that the ring represents a kind of sophistry.
[25:16] When you combine sophistry with state power, you draw the most passionate and eloquent orators towards the control of state power. And that to me is one of the great problems of having this massive, virtually all-powerful state, certainly more powerful than any states in history have ever been with surveillance and military technology. Having this power at the center of society means that those who control language can control the state, and therefore language can directly control trillions of dollars of resources around the world.
[25:50] And that is truly, I mean, this is what the left is doing, is trying to redefine language in service of power.
[25:56] And I think for me, one of the most powerful things in Lord of the Rings is this connection between sophistry and state power and armies. And that to me is one of the reasons why uniting sophistry with the state produces this eternal darkness. And the destruction of sophistry is the end of evil. You know, the old saying that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. Sophistry calls everything by their wrong name. And it calls war glorious. It calls theft, taxation. It calls indoctrination, education. It redefines everything. It calls the natural deviation of results in society automatic bigotry and injustice and so on. It's constant. It calls voluntary exchange coercion and coercive exchange voluntary. It redefines everything.
[26:44] And to me, the battle is between the philosopher who wishes to deny people the power of the state. And to some degree, that's Gandalf, who's constantly telling everyone, you can't use the ring. You can't use the ring. The ring will destroy you. You can't use the ring. And people who want to use sophistry to defeat sophistry always seem to lose. They join the enemy, like Saruman, gazing into the heart of Sauron and then ending up Chamberlain style or, I guess, leader of France style or Mussolini style, coordinating and being corrupted by and becoming a vassal of the Sauron Hitler character. But if this relationship between language and political power, to me, Sauron is a king. He has an army. He has, and he controls through influence, not through direct might.
[27:32] Yeah, and that's exactly Boromir's fate, isn't it, on the quest? He wants to take the ring. He's the primary advocate among the ringgoers, the fellowship, to take the ring back to Gondor. So we, Denethor, his steward, can use the same sophistical powers to defeat it. And that's the perfect definition of Mordor, isn't it? The idea that Sauron lives alone, he has one army, he has one vision, one eye, right? It's all singular in purpose, while the armies of the West are scattered, right? There's a loose alliance between Rohan and Gondor. The dwarves won't speak to the elves, and you have that wonderful scene in Rivendell when Lord Elrond of the elves is trying to get them all to go on this, and they're fighting with each other. That really does sort of reify, doesn't it, what you just said? You think about the allies, the scattered nature of the allies in World War I and World War II, all right, the Americans holding back and providing covert aid and military equipment, but kind of hanging back and the vacillating way that the Western allies kind of got in and kind of didn't get in and committed and didn't commit. And then the other side, you have that radical focus that is driven by language and sophistry. And so the way I sum it up, too, is another beautiful example of what you just said for me is you've got the Tower of Orthanc with Saruman, who becomes corrupted.
[28:55] And Saruman's corruption, the wizard, is typified by his ability to use voices, right? To speak through people. You remember how he bewitches King Theoden of Rohan and speaks through him and uses that power. And what ultimately pulls down the stone and metal tower of Orthanc are the living, walking shepherds of the forest, the trees.
[29:18] Saruman is glib and quick-talking and deceptive, and he is translucent in his ability to change shape. These trees, these ants, I should say, are rock-solid. They're inflexible in their worldview and morality. And their language, unlike the quick-speaking deceivers, Grima Wormtongue, for instance, unlike the quick-speaking deceivers, it takes the ants ages to speak sentences.
[29:47] Right? Well, the Saxons have always been slow to anger, as the old story goes, as the old poem goes. That's right.
[29:52] But it's a radical slow motion. Maybe one way to defeat sophistry, Tolkien is saying, is to say things slowly. We, Ents, never say anything quickly. Anything that's worth saying, he says, takes a long time to say.
[30:04] Well, and we're getting slightly ahead, but just to sort of follow up that analogy, the Saruman is literally in an ivory tower, you know, and of course, Tolkien lived his life for decades as an academic and was probably quite frustrated at the unwillingness of academics to engage in a sociocratic dialogue with the citizen. I mean, when was the last time society had an emergency and there was like a red phone? It's like, man, we got to get that academic philosopher on the line. We got to answer this stuff. I mean, it never happens. No. But um uh where so he's literally sort of way up from the ground and he's living in this realm of abstractions which is where sophists do what sophists do they manipulate abstractions rather than things and through manipulating language and abstractions they get people to manipulate and deliver to them things but the trees the ants what do they have they are trees they have roots they go deep they're not up there in the clouds they're not up there in language they're they're actually they're they're their roots infest the earth and they get their nourishment from the earth, from the sun.
[31:03] They get their elements, they get the nourishment from the elements from the real world, and they can't afford sophistry because they have roots. That's how they survive. They survive according to their own efforts rather than the efforts of others. Now, this relationship, if we're sort of going to play this out as a hypothesis, you know, that the ring is sophistry and its relation to state power, the one thing that I remember being quite surprised at, and I'll just read a little letter that Tolkien wrote to his son in 1943. This is from the book, the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
[31:33] He said, my political opinions lean more and more to anarchy, philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs, or to, quote, unconstitutional monarchy. And of course, that's what the return of the king, which we can talk about another time, that's sort of the end state. Now, he goes a little further than I would, but I mean, this is the times he was living in. He goes on to say, I would arrest anybody who uses the word state, capitalized, in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights, nor mind. And after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate. If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. He said, government is an abstract noun, meaning the art and process of governing, and it should be an offense to write it with a capital G, or so to refer to people, the most improper job of any many, even saints, who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. There is only one bright spot, and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men, of dynamiting factories and power stations. I hope that encouraged now as patriotism
[32:44] I hope that, encouraged now as patriotism, may remain a habit, but it won't do any good if it is not universal. So this idea, anarchy meaning without rule, without rulers, not without rules, everyone thinks that anarchy is being corrupted by sophists to mean, you know, chaos and professors with bike locks smacking people in the head and throwing garbage cans through Starbucks windows and so on.
[33:02] But the idea of having a self-organizing society without rulers, where people participate in the generation of social rules, which are negotiated and continually refined according to the successes or failures of the day. To me, that's quite fascinating that he was a staunch Catholic who had a great suspicion about any form of state control and wrote a story about how power corrupts and destroys and power must be destroyed in order for men to become free.
[33:32] Yeah, that's great. You know, this is something we can think about. I don't know, you and I haven't talked about this. I don't know if you've ever watched The Game of Thrones.
[33:40] I'd like to. I've heard it's a little rapey.
[33:43] So it's something one of my friends calls that hobbit porn.
[33:46] But scrubbing that out with a mental bus of lie.
[33:53] There's certainly I've watched enough of it. And I actually read some of the books. And there's a useful comparison here. You've got J.R.R. Tolkien and you've got G.R.R. Martin. One's writing high fantasy in the 30s and 40s. The other is writing, for lack of a better word, political fantasy today. And I saw an interview with Martin a couple of years ago. He made the argument that the one thing that bothered him about Tolkien was that Tolkien was not the least bit interested in politics, that there is no political parties, that Tolkien didn't take on major social justice issues in his book. I happen to think that's a great that's the great glory of Tolkien, that he's talking about much larger universals than he's talking about the modern obsession with social justice aspects of writing. In fact, I think what Martin does isn't fantasy literature. If you know anything about those, and I know a lot of your audience will, and I've got to say by way of prefacing this, I find the Game of Thrones HBO miniseries to be somewhat interesting. There's some interesting characters, there's some nice devices. The books are like, and everything else, his books are better than his movie, the movies. But having said that, there's something very, very interesting. Intellectually and emotionally bankrupt at the core of Lord of the Rings, of the G.R.R. Martin books. And it's what you just said, Stef, that it's a Game of Thrones, that the purpose of the Game of Thrones is nothing more than to get the ultimate throne. It's exactly what Tolkien rejected, right?
[35:22] Aragorn taking the throne of Gondor at the end, he's not taking anything.
[35:26] He is reclaiming what has been his hereditarily going back 27 generations to Isildur, right? But in the Game of Thrones, every character, every creature seems to be at the service of this kind of Machiavellian realpolitik, whereas Tolkien's Lord of the Rings leaves us with a sense of the fantasy sense of the possibility of duty and honor, dignity, equality really meaning something versus what you get in the watered-down modern version of the story in a way, which is nothing more than a lot of naked bodies, a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, and sheer Machiavellianism. What religion there is in the Game of Thrones is cynical and manipulated. The followers of those religions are worse than the monsters vying for thrones.
[36:17] Tolkien, on the other hand, so in other words, I see what Martin's doing is not fantasy lit at all. It's reality lit in a way, whereas what Tolkien's doing is a higher order thing. And I think the The reason for that is because of this mythopoetic universe that circumscribes the Middle Earth, right? That Middle Earth has its origins in Tolkien's version of heaven. And there is an order and a plan. There are, and you said it before, there are right and wrong. There are better and worse. There are better moral choices. So there's no ambiguity between who's evil and who's good. But the ambiguity is in the individual hearts of Frodo when he doubts himself or is tempted by the ring. Or in other characters who despair or who begin to fatigue Boromir's failure, right? To defend the hobbits on one hand and to take the ring back to Gondor on the other. And even within the good characters, you do find these smaller psychomachias, right? these battles for the soul, Aragorn has his dark moments. And so it just, the world of Tolkien rings so much more, as much as I can enjoy as a kind of sword and sandal soap opera, the Game of Thrones, there is something much more compelling and deep about what Tolkien did.
[37:29] No, no, medieval soap operas with boobies, I mean, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against it in principle, but it lacks the grandeur and the majesty. I think it's also very hard for us, Dr. Pastor to figure out or to really understand, in terms of Tolkien's upbringing,
[37:45] I mean, the one thing that's fascinating about the Shire, what's not mentioned? There's no mayor. There's no political system. There's no government. There's no court. There's no jail. Everybody just works things out among themselves. There's never any mention of this. It's all socially enforced through ostracism and so on. It is an anarchist paradise.
[38:04] And as, of course, is most people's fear about an anarchist paradise, it ends up in trouble, which we'll get to when we get to the third book. But growing up, he was born in the late 19th century. Oh, sorry. Yeah, he was born and growing up as a child, he would have had no particular view of the state. Like, you can't really go around anywhere these days without seeing the state in some form or another, you know, even if it's just the state works. I mean, he grew up in a place, probably weren't any roads. It was a little village. Everything was self-contained. There was no idea. Well, I need something. I got to call my congressman. You know, I got to call my local political representative. It was very much self-contained as far as that goes. So he grew up in a pastoral paradise and the British countryside. I mean, I had aunts and uncles who lived in the countryside and I would go out and visit there from the, you know, stinking armpit cesspool sometimes of London.
[38:57] And it is, it is absolutely, you know, God's green acre. It is, it is a paradise on earth out there. The sort of exploration, the animals, the friendly locals and so on. It really was, I really, to me, the Shire really speaks to me as sort of my own childhood experiences of roaming and exploring and learning about nature and developing a very powerful affinity through nature in that process. But
[39:21] The idea that you have this local paradise without a government, and governments were like, what, one twentieth the size back in his childhood than they are now. Now they're everywhere, of course, you can't get away. But back then, he would have grown up with very little concept of any kind of centralized government. And then what was his first real exposure to government? Well, it was being drafted, or it was going to war and everyone going to war, and then watching what governments did in France and the disassembly of 10 million largely innocent souls who followed rhetoric, who followed the glory of war. I remember as a kid learning about the Second World War, England's finest hour, there was a nostalgia and a love of it. Now, that has been pushed back against a lot by pacifists and leftists and so on, which I don't entirely disagree with at all. But I think growing up with no state, seeing the first real example of state power being the destruction of the old order in Europe, I think would have given him some leanings towards, well, let's explore a society without a state because then we don't have a ring to destroy.
[40:23] Yeah, I think that's great. And in the books, Jackson cut it out. There is kind of a mayor of Hobbiton. There is a mayor figure who's in charge loosely of the community, but he's more of a figurehead and he's laughed at and he has no real authority.
[40:37] So even those those that's what minimal structure you have, it's always treated as a joke in the.
[40:44] I think he's more like a council elder because he doesn't seem to have the power of the courts, the police, and jails to deal with people who disagree with him. He seems more like a sort of council elder than what we would call a modern politician.
[40:57] Right, a modern man. He wasn't elected either, necessarily. So the other thing you got going on, and what you just said I think is really good, is it's globalism, right? I mean, that what really bothers Tolkien is this increasingly coalescing globalism, right? What does Sauron want to do? He wants to make one, universal government over all of Middle Earth that controls every aspect of it and it enslaves, it drives. Remember the wonderful scene that really does get cut out of the Lord of the Rings at the end. There's only a little vision quest of it. The Scourging of the Shire chapters. In the actual Lord of the Rings, there is an actual instance when the hobbits come back from Mordor. They come back from saving the world and they find their own town overrun. They find the Shire overrun by wicked men being governed and moved by Saruman in his weakness, in his fall. And it's a horrifying chapter because the hobbits have to organize them. They don't want to do it. They're under the heel of these men. But when Meriadoc and Pippin come back, and having drunk what the Ents drank in the woods, you may remember that, they've grown bigger than hobbits. And so the real heroism of the hobbits, you could argue, goes beyond the saving of the universe. That's a big deal.
[42:11] But after that, people forget, and Jackson admitted it, they have to go back and they have to liberate the Shire because Saruman has now used wicked men to enslave and to punish, to murder some of the hobbits. And it ends up with the death of both Saruman and Grima, and many of these wicked men are killed by these hobbits. So there's this weird sense. And I wonder, based on your thesis about World War I and World War II, I wonder if it's kind of not like going back to London, Going back to rural England after fighting at the Somme.
[42:44] After fighting in World War I and finding much of what used to be undisturbed countryside torn up in order to militarize much of the resources, much of the timber felled to be able to fight that war. Going back and finding that you don't get to leave the war in Mordor. You don't get to leave the war in France. It scarred your world. It scarred your village, too.
[43:09] Well, I would push back against that, though, because it is the evil people who are doing it, not simply the need for resources. I mean, the rebuilding after the war has been shown, I think, quite a bit before. But if my sort of thesis or if this thesis has any legs, you know, one additional leg we could bolt onto the bottom of the millipede, so to speak, would be this, which would be to say that what was being fought against in the Second World War? Well, what was being fought against was collectivism, was tyranny, was socialism, right? I mean, you had the Cold War, of course, you had the socialists, the communists in the USSR. You have, of course, the National German Workers Socialist Party, right, the Nazi Party. It has to be shortened to Nazis so that the word socialism doesn't get associated with Hitler. That's a standard bit of sophistry right there, annoys me, and it always has, and will to my dying day. But I would say that the great tragedy of the Second World War, you know, the war is always lost after the war. Fundamentally, that was really the case with the First World War as well, right? You defeat your enemies and then you have a disastrous peace treaty that sows the seed for the next war. You go across and you spend 40 million lives trying to destroy socialism. And what happened right after the Second World War in England? um
[44:30] Churchill, for all of his faults, who was a free market guy, who was a small government guy, who was a love Western civilization kind of guy, well, he was voted out. And who was voted in after 40 million lives were spent fighting socialism? The socialists took power. The socialists took power in England. The socialists in particular took power in, well, of course, the communists took power in China, and the socialists took power in India. And this, to me, was one of the great horrors of you go off and you fight this great evil, you come back home, and the evil has taken root. And the idea that we can defeat bad ideas with weaponry alone is, again, one of the great delusions. And I think one of the great shocks of, you know, his sons were out there in the Second World War facing death every day.
[45:20] And I would assume, as a Catholic and as an anarchist, he did not like socialism as it increases government and reduces free will. And seeing the socialists move in after spending 40 million lives trying to defeat socialism, I think that had a lot to do with why the Shire was so corrupted when they came back.
[45:38] I think it's a great point. You could also turn that around. And there is something to be said about Tolkien's argument that the Shire folk, when these wicked men show up, are unable to defeat them until those who've come back, right? Until Merry, Pippin, Sam, until Frodo have had the experience they've had on the other side of that. It seems as if the hobbits are, the hobbit town, the shire is destined for slavery. There's something about these people who've left the, and that's one of the great themes of the book too, that all who wander are not lost, that the entire story is a journey, that staying sometimes in the shire. And if they had stayed in the shire, the shire certainly would have fallen to Sauron. It would have become worse even than it was under Sauron. But this idea that the journey, that you have to get up and go. You have to make the trip. That's the old epic theme, right? That the epic hero has to wander. And they wander. And whatever horrors they encounter, mechanized horrors on the road to Mordor, when they come back, they're changed, the hobbits. And if not for the change that's wrought through, for lack of a better word, through war, if not for the change that's wrought in our four hobbit heroes.
[46:51] The chains on, Sauron's chains on the Shire might not be broken. So there's this idea, and Gandalf ties that together. Before he and the other elves sail to Valinor at the end of the book, sail to the Grey Havens, they leave Middle-earth. And it always struck me, Gandalf's comment to the crying hobbits, right, who had just liberated their own shire, that I will not stop you from crying, that not all tears are an evil, right? I think Tolkien's recognition from the start that that kind of bucolic innocence, that almost pseudo-romantic innocence, we talked about the noble savage, right? That almost pastoral romanticism of the shepherd's life. Tolkien did see through it. I mean, that it just doesn't stay. Nothing, what is it, Hopkins that said, nothing gold can stay. That the world was passing, as it was in the Lord of the Rings, passing from one age to the next. And there's a lament for it. The time of the elves is over, right? Tolkien knew it. The time of those country elves is over. And you can lament that, you should celebrate that. But there is this looming, what's next? That's always part of the equation, too.
[48:07] Yeah, the elves have always struck me as a kind of aristocracy. And of course, in England, that would be a very strong force. If there was to be an unwinding of state power, the aristocracy would lose their power. And we see this throughout the books, that the elves in destroying the ring, they destroy the powers that give them their magic in the world. And they're willing to do that. That's why there's great sorrow. There's no way for the elves to win the war.
[48:30] Because if the ring is destroyed, they have to leave Middle Earth because they will have lost their power and their magic. So, and that to me is part of it. The aristocracy was on their way out in England, no matter what. If socialism took over, they'd be out like the Romanovs. And if free markets took over, then, you know, sort of Downton Abbey style, they would lose their privileges and their monopolies and so on. But let's touch on Gollum, who is, of course, a fantastic, fascinating power. I just, I wonder how many of Tolkien's friends were actually heroin addicts. I don't know where he got this character from.
[49:04] But I think Gollum, this one quote that struck me from the first book with Gandalf, where he says something along the lines of, Gollum both loves and hates the ring as he loves and hates himself. So to me, looking at social justice warriors, they're to me embedded in sophistry, but with no direct access to power. And if the ring is sophistry, then Gollum is swallowed up in sophistry but has no direct power, and that is why he wastes away. Now, of course, Sauron has great powers of sophistry. His sole power, like the ring, is to control the minds of others, but he actually has power.
[49:41] And I think, to me, this is obviously going to be a bit of a stretch, and we'll find out if there's immortality if Tolkien comes back to life tonight and strangles me in my bed for this overreach. But I view Gollum as sort of the modern social justice warrior, because when you think about it, the social justice warriors have a terrible fear of power. They see power and exploitation and corruption everywhere they look. They see patriarchy. They see racism. They institutionalize this, that, and the other. They have this terrible fear of power, which is like Gollum. Terrible fear of the ring, but they also have this unholy lust for power and love of power, in that they want to promote politicians to have the immense powers to fight against all of these imaginary evils. And so, to me, they're embedded in sophistry, they don't have power, they waste away, and they end up both loving and hating themselves. They hate themselves because they are corrupted by sophistry, and they are mere useful idiots by those seeking to expand state power, but they also love themselves too much in that they refuse to submit to necessary debates and self-criticism. So I do see kind of a line, and social justice warriors, everyone thinks they're a modern phenomena. They're absolutely not. We go all the way back to Miletus with ancient Rome. But to me, these people who are used by those in power and used up by those in power who think that they're doing good when they're actually in the service of evil, that to me is a very powerful way of looking at where Gollum's coming from.
[51:03] Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. And I also think that there's, on top of that, there's a real psychomachia, a battle for the soul going on in Gollum. There are shreds of his former, I was going to say humanity, hobbitanity. There are shreds of his former hobbitness that even late in the book still can materialize. And if you're going to make the argument, I think it's a good one, that there are certainly aspects of Gollum that have been appropriated by social justice warriors. Social justice warriors don't realize the degree to which their words are controlling them. They are not controlling their words. Social justice warriors don't, Words don't mean what they think they do. The things that the social justice warriors say they want, their definitions aren't really what they don't know how to define words. And but the problem with that is that Sauron is the same, right? Sauron is a social justice warrior with power. He's what Stalin became, right? You think about the failed life. I always think of Stalin when I think of Sauron, that failed life, that way he was he was going to be a priest in a seminary. And just the bile and hatred that promotes somebody to that kind of rapacity and violence and bloodlust, all in the name of a cause, right? Killing 40 million, starving to death 40 million Ukrainians and calling all Soviets comrade, my goodness.
[52:21] There's something there that it's a lesson for us. If Gollum had gotten the ring back, here's an interesting thing. At the end, after everything that had happened, if instead of the ring being destroyed, what What if Gollum did get it?
[52:35] Is it possible after everything that had happened that that ring would have elevated at that point Gollum to something, maybe not the equal of Sauron, but certainly something formidable in the same way that if Frodo keeps it or if Gandalf had gotten it? So I think I like the way that this argument is mediated by your definition of what the ring might stand for because it magnifies that hollowness in people and that hollowness is oftentimes, think about it, First time we see Gollum in The Hobbit, it's a riddle game, isn't it? They're playing word games. And so you have that wonderful expression the very first time they're going back and forth with the ring about riddles. And so in that sense, I think it's a really nice fine point to this that Tolkien, for all of his asseverations, he absolutely is, his masterwork is bound up as much in the times he lived and the political struggles, religious struggles of his day as it is in the grand medieval epics like Beowulf.
[53:35] Right. And I think if Gollum had gotten the ring... I think he would have had a brief flash of power, and then he would have been killed for the ring. And the reason I say that is, again, if we're looking at the ring as power, and state power in particular, sophisticated control of the state apparatus, we can see this over and over again. This is why social justice warriors foundationally have this kind of James Taggart from Atlas Shrug style death wish, because if they get their way, they're going to be the first to go.
[54:06] Right this is the you know if whoever is useful in promoting the dictator to power is generally the first to go uh when the dictator gains gains power and so if if golem had gotten the ring um the nazgul would have found him and would have torn him apart to get the ring and he would have got the death he was going to die either way he was going to get the death if he got the ring he would have died and to not get the ring is a fate worse than death for him and i think as sort of people like um trotsky and so on like the people who vied for power and failed, well, he ends up in Mexico with an ice pick through his head from agents of Stalin. And so this, to me, is one of the great and terrible things that happens is that through their lust for power, the leftist manipulators of language end up in the service of power and end up ugly and end up divided against themselves, end up without a moment's peace. You know, it's funny. I was thinking just the other day, there's an old saying, and I think it's not true for all women. It's like the mind of a woman is a torture chamber. You're worried about everything, concerned about everything. Oh, my daughter, my kid's too late, too close to the lake or whatever. But the mind of a social justice warrior is a kind of torn up living hell because
[55:11] There's evil everywhere and there's power structures everywhere and there's always an injustice to be combated and there's always enemies to be fought and so on. And that to me is the torture that we see in Gollum where there still are shreds of humanity because of course, The social justice warriors do believe in their own sophistic bubble that they're saving people from power and corruption and meanness and they're protecting the most vulnerable among us. I always use that phrase vulnerable among us like there are just people who are made of jelly and can't touch the air without getting electric shocks.
[55:40] And this is a kind of torture, whereas the minds of people who are actually doing solid, real good in the world, you know, helping people learn how to reason, helping people learn how to think, helping people learn how to think critically, helping people to get in touch with, you know, their honest, authentic selves or find deeper meaning. To me, there's not all of this terrifying power structure everywhere. I mean, I clearly identify where the power structures are, and I clearly identify the best way to oppose them, which is philosophy as opposed to sophistry.
[56:05] But I think that tortured relationship that Gollum has with himself, with power, with everyone, uh, and his form of humanity, uh, is to me, you know, that he's been so used up and carved out, uh, by those, uh, in pursuit of power. He's merely a vehicle for the ring to get back to Sauron. He's, the ring does not care about Gollum. Like he's never later picking up the phone saying, hey, how's that Gollum doing? You know, I did have him for half a millennia. And you know, I'm worried about the guy. He's like, he's just a purulator to get him back to Sauron. The ring doesn't care about Gollum and the sophist doesn't care about the shock troops on the street, to social justice warriors. He's going to use them to get power. And if the power is attained, the people who help get him there are usually the first to go. And that is kind of the death wish, I think, that Gollum represents.
[56:49] Yeah, I think so. And I think that Gollum, remember that when he lost the ring, he was captured by Sauron and tortured to give up the name of Baggins.
[56:57] I assume that's just an analogy for higher education.
[57:01] But then he was set loose, right? He was set loose by the jails of Mordor to go out there and see if he could hunt down the ring.
[57:09] And I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's very much like Winston Smith, who can be freed after O'Brien tortures him into Stockholm syndrome bondage with Big Brother. And so once you've tortured people enough, you can set them free, which is why once you propagandize people enough, you can still have a First Amendment because they can't fundamentally use it.
[57:27] And Orwell was writing 1984, his dystopia, right while Tolkien was writing his too. And I think what differentiates them is that Tolkien, you can look at half the Lord of the Rings, Sauron, the Orc, Sauron, Gollum, you could look at half the Lord of the Rings as dystopian. But what I love about the Lord of the Rings, and it makes it to me a more ultimately humane work than anything, really, that was written during the age, is the idea that you do have hate. And I think that's it. For Gollum, he hates himself. These social justice warriors really hate themselves. They've bought the idea that people who look like them are responsible for every evil in the world, that if it weren't for people like them, the world would live in harmony. They've bought all, they've ingested all these lies. They hate themselves. And the only way they have to deal with it, is to force other people, right, to conform to what they think should be done to qualify themselves. The other side of that, though, and that's the story of every dystopia, right, in the 20th century. The other side of it is that you have real love and honor and duty. You have nobility.
[58:29] That's the other side of it that you don't see in some of the dystopias. And Tolkien's right, that the only way to create a viable society or to create a viable self or a viable government is to start with love, not hate, to start with understanding and compassion, not violence and control. And when you think about it, there's no sex in The Lord of the Rings. There's love, there's romance, there's marriage, but there's absolutely no sex. And furthermore, we can call them the good powers, the powers that oppose Mordor.
[59:00] They're constantly not letting Gollum be killed.
[59:04] Gollum, if he gets the ring, to get the ring, he'll pluck your eyes out and eat your heart. But that wonderful scene, Again, when Gandalf is talking to Frodo, before Frodo has even met Gollum, he's just frightened of Gollum because of what his uncle Bilbo had told him. And they're being followed by Gollum in the mines of Moria. And Frodo says, I wish the ring had never come to me. If it were up to me, I wish my uncle Bilbo had killed Gollum. At which point, Gandalf looks at him very seriously and says, do you? There are many alive who deserve death, and there are many who have died that deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo Baggins? Don't be so quick to deal out death and judgment. My heart tells me that even a creature like that has some role to play. And whenever they're catching the enemy or when Saruma, where Grima is, Theoden, Aragorn makes Theoden let Grima go. There's too much blood that's been shed already. Don't kill him is the constant refrain, right? There's this merciful aspect of things, too. And I think that very often we focus on, when I was younger, I used to love the blood and guts, even the movies. I love, my favorite of the three movies is The Two Towers because I just think those battle scenes are so magisterial in some ways.
[1:00:19] There's the other side of it too. There's mercy, there's clemency, there's love, there's understanding. And I think that the West, it's also why oftentimes the West, whether it's the West in the Lord of the Rings books or the West in World War I and World War II, I think that's why there's much less unanimity about how to proceed. It's the authoritarianism of the other side that drives those wars to begin with.
[1:00:43] Well, we're not going to be collectivists, so we have to be rational because it's the only other thing that can unite us. And the last thing, I know we've got a bit of a hard stop here, but the last thing I wanted to mention is the positive virtues that are shown in the story have always moved me greatly. It's one of the few novels where I've wept, that and the Wettner scene from Atlas Shrugged, but the loyalty and the certainty by which the hobbits stick by each other is truly astounding. They're the one group that never turn on each other.
[1:01:10] Everyone else, the men, the elves, they have their infighting and so on, the dwarves, of course, but they don't turn on each other. And it's really great to see male affection without homosexual overtones, which has been the great barrier to male solidarity in the modern world. Oh, you like this guy, bro, man. Like, it's just, oh, it's just terrible and keeps male hearts apart from each other and leaves us divided and set against ourselves. But one thing that's really been powerful to me, and it's I got from the book very early was that most stories, like think of superhero movies, which are plague these days, but superhero movies are, well, if you have these superpowers, you can fight evil by, you know, throwing buses at buildings and crap like that. But what is necessary? These hobbits can't fight. They don't have magic, really. They don't have any particular strength other than a dedication to virtue and a strength of will and resolution. And the idea that it is, in a sense, the small, the personal, the individual acts of kindness that can do a lot to save the world, to me is very powerful. There are the gods fighting up there, but the battle is fundamentally decided by people just like you and I, by people who are not great magic magicians or powerful warriors or, you know, whatever, rich people, great sportsmen. It is decided by the fundamental integrity of the, quote, little people and the courage of the little people. It invites people into the story of virtue in a way that superhero movies just don't.
[1:02:30] Right. And, you know, to go back to where we started, I, too, get very emotional about the those aspects of it. It's it's in a way, this is where I think that quote from Tolkien about his how his religious sensibility infiltrated his books. It is. It's kind of an archetypal Christian narrative in the sense that the weakest, not the strong, it's the weak. The emphasis is on sacrifice, not on power. The character that is the physically, martially weakest is the one who has to shoulder that burden. And that burden, it draws him and it pains him. It's a constant. I oftentimes look at the struggle of Frodo. It's the one thing we don't talk enough about. And the movies doesn't make it. The movies try to make something out of it. It's while all these major battles with swords and weapons are being waged by these massive armies on cavalry horseback, he's got his own private war going on with that ring and what the ring wants and how the ring weighs him down and how the ring pulls him. And, you know, that private battle, I think, is more ultimately moving than all of the heroic escapades of soldiers and horsemen. I mean, it's one small hobbit versus the compacted power of the evil god that has decimated elves, that has, like you said, decimated men, that has torn apart Middle-earth, forced the Valar to reorder the way the civilization, even the landscapes looked.
[1:03:56] And so that very primal battle between the individual versus the global, right? On a very microscopic level, you've got a hobbit and you've got a ring that represents the will to one power. And the hobbit wins. And there's all sorts of lessons throughout history, certainly way beyond the Christian narratives that tie into that. It's just a universal theme. It's a fairy tale theme, isn't it? A jack-in-the-beanstalk or the farmer's son who goes out and does great things and becomes the next king by default.
[1:04:30] And so I think that to me is ultimately what I take away from it, that after the battles have quieted, after men and elves have done what they can, it's still about the individual conscience versus this pull, the worldly pull to become Gollum, to become hateful in your rhetoric, to become part of collectives that are going to be themselves destructive. It ultimately comes back to the one individual. Ayn Rand was right. When will people realize that the smallest minority in the world is the individual? And I think that's the great lesson.
[1:05:02] Let's close off with a little quote because if Tolkien was a small to no government conservative and therefore identified with the hobbits and therefore was resistant to the lure of power.
[1:05:11] It's a quote here, but what's interesting about Tolkien, one sign that there's more economic message to these texts than people realize, is that the Soviet Union banned all of Tolkien's writings. It is not often known, but we tell the story at the end of the book about these great days during the collapse of the Soviet Union when thousands of civilians poured into Red Square and there was this question about what the tanks were going to do. And in the middle of those crowds, a sign popped up that said, Frodo is with us. And that's when a lot of Americans found out that in fact the Soviets had been passing around this sort of contraband, mimeographed version, bad translation of The Lord of the Rings for decades. And anything that's banned by communists is good in my book. Dr. Pesta, thank you so much for your time. Just wanted to remind people, please go to fpeusa.org to check out these individual classes and a complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school. Always a great pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much for the brain candy.
[1:06:02] Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this book with you. I appreciate it and look forward to these talks more than you know.
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