If you've been listening to Team Human, then you've heard about our sponsor, Groucho. The folks who find you people in your area to do dinners and salons with, well, they've turned out to be not only a supporting sponsor of the show, but also a team human utility. That's right. So many team human people have been using the app to find others where they live that Groucho has ended up facilitating team human dinners in cities across the US. And there's people in a bunch of places looking for others to gather with. That's right. Team Human people in Alameda, Albany, Autobahn, West Sussex, Brooklyn, Burlington, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Grayson, Hutchinson, Lafayette, Libertyville, London, LA, Maverin, Medusa, Montreal, New York, Newcastle, Sandy Ago, O'Wassel, Philadelphia, Portland, Prescott, Richmond, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, SIO, Stores, Toronto, Wichita. So if you're on team human in one of those places, I'm looking to find the others, go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman, use the code teamhuman for half off the first month. And even if you're not looking for team human others, fill out the form and see who the curators find for you. That's mygroucho.club/teamhuman. You're on team human, conscious intervention in the machine, where we help people abandon the weak cowardice of the gladiatorial spectacle to embrace the empowered passion of working and playing together. Being human as a team sport, I'm Douglas Rushkopf, and you're on team human. Support us on Patreon, get ad-free versions of the show, tickets to live events, and more. I want to talk about might makes right. And why this philosophy of life is being promoted right now, why it doesn't genuinely explain the natural world, and why a civilization based on those principles isn't truly a civilization at all. So like many New Yorkers, I'm still kind of buzzing from our recent victory. No, I don't mean the socialist Democrat candidates backed by Zora and Mamdani, that won their primaries, although that was interesting and cool. And I'd argue much less about Mamdani's charisma or endorsement than the genuine ground swell of people who see the potential for a civics that supports human flourishing. Government can be about even more than beating up people in the street, preventing them from getting health care, or poisoning their ground water for the benefit of tech billionaires. But no, I'm not talking about that. I mean the New York Knicks winning the NBA finals after 52 years of heartache. The town went crazy with everything going on around us, the war, the atrocities, ice, extreme weather, voter suppression, trillionaires feeding our water to AIs, artificially enforced divisiveness. It felt so good to have something in common for a whole city to be on the same team, an inkling of team human. And during the whole run up to the finals, I'd get in conversations with strangers on the street, black, white, young, old, rich, poor, male, female, and other. We all had permission to talk with each other. The Knicks served as social currency. That's a term I actually made up back in the '90s for topics that give us an excuse to interact. It can be some authority or skill you have, like telling jokes or knowing facts that make you interesting at a party. But it can also just be touch points that allow for social contact. After one game, I got in a conversation in the street with these two guys about the magical rituals we'd all do to ensure wins. And I explained how when things get really dire in a game, I switch from TV to radio. And sometimes it makes the difference. And then they can call this other guy over some other stranger. And they say, "Oh, this guy talking about me, "this guy listens to the Knicks on the radio for luck." Like I'm the old guy, right? And old guy notwithstanding we were all together in a way I hadn't experienced in a while. Particularly in today's polarized landscape, people seem afraid to talk at a bar or a barbecue, let's say find out they're on opposite sides, like, "Hatfield and McCoy's, "and then they're just gonna have to draw guns," right? So the night we won the championship, everyone went outside into the streets as if on cue. NYC does carnival. Traffic halted, everything halted, as everyone celebrated the opportunity to celebrate together. It was madness, it was love. Now very next night, very next night, on the South Lawn of the White House, a different sort of sporting event took place. The UFC owned by Trump, Alabama White, and my former literary agency, William Morrison Devar, and broadcast exclusively by Trump, ally Larry Ellison's Paramount TV, of which Trump is a shareholder, and for which his administration cleared $111 billion takeover of Warner Brothers along with CNN, just a week or so prior, right? The fighters meanwhile received their winning bonuses in cryptocurrency issued through Trump family's world-liberty financial, but unless interested in the conflict of interests here, then in the interest of conflict. This whole thing was a throwback to the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome. In a case, you missed it, a giant arena was erected on the South Lawn, dwarfing the White House itself. They called it the claw for the giant steel superstructure over it. It was neon and lasers, Joe Rogan announcing, Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires attending, fighters fighting, and winners running over to President Trump in the first row and bowing to him and receiving his approval, good fight, right? Yes, it was his 80th birthday celebration, but this was more like the attention of two-year-old gets at his birthday party, or more to the point, a Roman emperor, right? In those times, like in ours, the games were intended as a form of propaganda. They usually held games in times of war when the public was getting impatient with the slow returns on expensive campaigns, right? If Anthony was losing battles in Africa, the taxpayers funding it all would still get a reward in the form of a day of matches. The emperor sums up or down after a match decided the fate of the vanquished fighter and reinforced the emperor's godlike power over life and death. They knew what they were doing. We know this because regional leaders were not allowed to hold death matches within a few months of an election. It gave them too much authority and too much of an advantage. But even more than a chance to aggrandize the emperor beyond satisfying the sadistic, malignant narcissism of an emperor or would be emperor like Trump, gladiatorial contests are meant to affirm the underlying ethos of an authoritarian society. Might makes right. Military force, wealth, or violence dictate the law, overriding abstract morality, right? The abstract morality is all those laws, all that trickery devised by intellectuals and lawyers and Jews to protect immigrants and minorities. The kinds of ideas now getting officially listed as terrorism and leading to long prison sentences. The fights, they celebrate a world where the strongest guy, the best fighter gets the glory, the girls, and the gold. Ideally, the biggest winner at the end of the day, the last man standing is a Roman or a white dude or whoever represents the national bloodline. The original games, they made this explicit. They'd start with a round of animals against animals, then female slaves against animals, black men against females, and so on, all the way up in their schema to white against white. The games offered an opportunity to see those racial hierarchies play out in their bloody fullness. And retrieving the spirit of the games if not the actual death matches, right? It retrieves these same sentiments and ideologies. I watched some of the matches at my friends place. He couldn't get the Paramount channel to stream on his TV, even though he'd pay for it. So we watched through one of those illegal sports streaming websites called something like Crack Streams, something like that. It ended up even more of an anthropological deep dive because the website had a lot of fun.
a chatboard attached to it. In trigger warning, that board was vile. I mean, I've been living in a pretty insulated life lately, I guess. The most popular word in the chat was the N word, where when it wasn't words for Jews, Gays, or women, several users kept posting 3D swastikas, composed entirely of text characters. But most of the conversation had to do with whether the Jewish fighter would beat the black fighter, an argument which hinged on the pros and cons of the various racial tropes associated with each, right? Each species of sub-human. Get what I'm saying? Can a Jew use this or that of his known qualities against these other attributes that any black fighter would have? Or will he lose because of this quality or that? The loudest voices there actually just complained about having to watch a match between two of the inferior races. That is, until the biggest interracial match of the evening between a stensibly white, actually half-Mexican, American Josh Hockett against this black heavyweight and one of Donald Trump's favorite fighters, Derek Lewis. And after Hockett won with a TKO, he got interviewed by Joe Rogan in the ring. And as if trying to win Trump's favor, he said, shout out to Trump for having the balls to put some shit like this on. And then he thanked his lord and savior, Jesus Christ. And then, as if he hadn't done quite enough to appeal to the emperor, he added the complete non-secretor, Michelle Obama is a man. He just shouted that thing out. It was crazy. And Joe Rogan, he was holding the mic. He didn't even break his grin. And the chat stream they went wild. One of their own had the guts to say they're notiest. Most racist sexes Trump be thing possible. And he later, like the day later, he told a podcaster that he meant it as a compliment because well, you know, she knows how to work hard like a man when the time gets tough, you know, the tough keep going. He said he was also celebrating America's greatness through a demonstration of freedom of speech. Beyond the racism and transphobia in Syracal 2008, Alex Jones conspiracy theory, the statement in the ring was a bizarre adolescent version of might makes right. I won this fight, so I get to say something crazy, like performing a daring act in front of a cult leader in order to prove devotion, ho get up to the anti-ondipravity, all to get daddy Trump's approval by modeling his crude verbal impulsivity to him and to this culture to sign a masculinity. But it's also a reflection of the core tenet of this whole approach to life, sex, race and geopolitics might makes right. The very opposite of what defined human evolution and what makes a civilization actually work. I was explaining this to my friend with the illegal stream and he actually disagreed. He said, when you think of it, it's always been might makes right. I didn't think I'd like getting sponsors for team human, but turns out the ones who actually want to sponsor us totally get what we're about, like Groucho, which uses technology as an antidote to social isolation, handling all the logistics for twice monthly gatherings between you and a hand curated cohort of collaborators. It's as if Groucho were informed by the ideas we share on this show from face-to-face interaction, to bottom-up community, to localism, to the value of eccentricity over conformity. Groucho curates people as if they were being selected for an artist's colony, not clones, but compliments and contrasts, ingredients for a collaborative stew. They also take care of all the logistics from dinner reservations to conversation starters. Just go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman for half off the first month. Answer some questions about yourself in your own time and let the humans at Groucho do the rest. Use the code "teamhuman" for half off the first month and enjoy your dinner and new friends. And this guy was something of an intellectual. He wrote real books and he's smart. Even if the COVID error restrictions had pushed him over to dark side enlightenment thinking, his point was that even when we have apparently cooperative agreements between us or our nations, they're really just the result of someone having overpowered someone else. It's always might make right, same as it ever was. But in practice, that's just crazy. Trump believes it. He thinks he has unlimited power and his vocal ramblings lately, he asks stuff like what wouldn't Napoleon do or until of the Hun? After his invasion and kind of coup of Venezuela, he came to believe he had unlimited power. And his failure in Iran hasn't convinced him otherwise. Of course, we went to war only to turn a ran into a dominant regional power with a chokehold on the passage of global oil while also encouraging Israel into a possibly suicidal overreach. Turns out, treating the rest of the world as enemies who will submit if we show a willingness to unleash our power does not actually work. Nor does social Darwinism a bastardized misinterpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution, which holds that everything's in competition with everything else. The fittest individual survives in the battle and is better for it. It doesn't take into account cooperation at all. The most prevalent feature of the most evolved species, like trees, is that they've learned to facilitate the lives of many others or even benefit from them. Trees are homes to thousands of other species, from liken to squirrels, many of whom provide services in return. Trees have had time to learn how to shift from simply protecting themselves from others to collaborating with them. Humans were quite new as a species compared with trees and humans of this civilization even newer than our indigenous elder siblings, which is why we're just learning how to get along with things. The retreat into might makes right whether supported by iron, rands, science fiction stories or the feeble efforts at machismo caused by Mark Zuckerberg is a step backwards toward middle school. Michelle Obama is a man and the mist guided notion that collaboration weakens everyone, flies in the face not just of morality but of science. When Elon Musk in his illegally appointed role as commander of Doge, shut down USAID, he said it was not just an apple with a few worms inside, it was a festering ball of worms in the shape of an apple. He said it was a radical left political sirep. In other words, it's not just that USAID was corrupt, it's that the very mission of sending aid to stop aids and Ebola was corruption of the god ordained principles of might makes right. Sending them vaccines or worse eradicating one of those diseases altogether is cheating. It's tipping the scales on the might makes right competition. It's disadvantaging those who've already attained their trillion dollar lead. It's the kind of charity that Peter's heel calls Satanism because it redistributes assets that could be used for an ubermensch's ascension to the inferior sub-humans unnecessary survival. Lands it. The most prestigious medical journal in the world estimates that defunding USAID will lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. According to Harvard University, the number of deaths caused by the sudden retraction of aid led to 1.6 million just by April. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is threatening to sue representative Rokana for quoting those figures on the house floor. But it's not just them who suffer and die. Them is us. You don't want them getting Ebola, not when 15 million people in the world travel by plane every day. It's not just their babies who die of AIDS if we don't send medicine. It's our scientists who lose the ability to observe its modes of transmission and end the threat to everyone. Employing might make right logic against Greenland and Denmark, alienates Europe and makes America weaker, just like using UFC
logic to teach kids to be bullies doesn't make them safer on the playground? Even if it makes one kid the strongest kid safer for a moment, he's now got to watch his back all the time like a silver back male awaiting the next challenger. But that's the whole point under authoritarianism. These violent foreign policies model our interior culture. They create the atmosphere of constant threat that leads people to seek the protection of the authority. That's what the endless meaningless wars of Orwell's 1984 were about. The enemy without is no less important than the enemy within. To authoritarians, cooperation and collaboration themselves are the enemy. If people aren't afraid of each other, they won't revert to this childish playground behavior. We must be kept competing with each other in constant danger from outsiders, immigrants, different races, or even just those who question all this violence. At best, might make right is a temporary stage for societies that have gotten imbalance. But once you win, the first thing you do is you put down your weapons and rebuild a cooperative society. Jamie Will, he just wrote a piece about how America was founded on the ideal that as soon as you win the war, you return to your farm. After your president, you go back home and live a normal life. That's what the Enlightenment taught. Orwellians can make the world less cruel, slowly but surely optimizing for everyone's pursuit of happiness. I tend to look at it more almost geographically. The world may be violent, so you need a standing army of some kind. But you have that army on the perimeter so you can enjoy an entirely less might make right reality within. This is the very definition of civilization, a way to cooperate and collaborate together in big groups instead of fighting over stuff. This means we can spend less of our energy on battles and more on music and love and science and children. That's what we can teach our kids. Not the fiction that might make right is the natural law. Civilization is how people learn to work together for the benefit of all. It's more advanced than might makes right. Not wimpere, not repressive. It's the indigenous American tribes who let a council of women choose a male chief, always with the power to veto his choices or to select a different one if he got out of hand. And if he wouldn't step down, the people would just leave. As for our relationships with the rest of the world? Well if it's truly barbaric out there, you marshal some resources to defend the perimeter and seek out other tribes or nations with whom to forge alliances. The more alliances you have, the fewer enemies you need to worry about and the less relative power they have. That's what institutions like League of Nations, a world court and the United Nations were for. And they get bureaucratic and boring and even co-opted by big money. Yes. But at least they're principled on something other than the logic of organized crime families. So you make alliances, cooperatives and communities within and without. And if they don't get too mired in capitalism, they end up smarter, living in greater abundance and with more resources to spend on defense and more allies to come to your side if it becomes necessary. Not people to come help you invade someone else as Trump thinks it works, but people to help defend if someone's trying to invade you. When we succumb to the prision yard logic of might makes right, we enable and empower the sociopath. We don't have to suffer sociopaths as the richest and most powerful people in our society. That's more a function of our choices, our values, our refusal to forge solidarity and mutual aid than it is their intrinsic power as mighty individuals. They are our rotten fruit of a might makes right non-civilization. You know how I've been saying lately that this civilization is dying and we have to learn to act as dolas for its passing as well as dolas for the birth of whatever comes next? Now let me amend that. It's not civilization that is dying, but this anti-civilizational logic and the criminal anti-human enterprises that have grown in its poisoned soil. So no, don't avert your gaze, look at it. This is not life. Mixed martial artists deserve better than to serve at the feet of an 80 year old sadistic child, bastardizing a keto and jujitsu as evidence of their very opposites. What would Bruce Lee think? Or Muhammad Ali? Even for whom fighting was not a battle of might makes right, but the transformation of violence into spirit, past, into future, boys, into men, them, into us. Thanks for being on Team Human. You can support this project by becoming a supporting member of the team at patreon.com/teamhuman. Add free versions of the show, access to our community and events, and a lot more. If you've got a business or organization, you can advertise it right here by becoming a sponsor. Just email us at
[email protected]. If you can't do any of that, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Team Human is produced by Joshua Chapatine, edited lovingly by Luke Robert Mason, and I'm Douglas Rushkopf. You've been on Team Human, our last best hope for peeps.
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