Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think about when they actually take power in government? I think about ideas like Marxism and how that evolves into the Bolshevik Revolution and how that takes hold in its implementations. Or you can think about Nazism and with Hitler where it goes from a small number of people that get real excited about a thing and then somehow just becomes viral and takes hold in power, and then that has its consequences. When I think about this sort of historical path of communism and the logics and dynamics of communism, in many ways it has some echoes with Rand in that the ideology in its purest form is almost… It’s a rationalist ideology of some ways. It’s an analysis of history and how things are supposed to be. I think you mentioned Hannah Arendt. I think she is one of the most penetrating analyses of communism, which she really puts in category, like it’s a logical ideology. Logic leads inexorably to its conclusions, and then experience crops up and experience is different. And what does a cult of rationality do when it hits experience? Well, it tries to bend experience to its will. That, I think, is really the story of communism writ large. The question though is why does it catch fire? Why does it draw people into political allegiance? I think in the case of communism, it’s this dream of a more ethical world, dream of equality, dream of the powerless rising up against the powerful. That’s drawn in so many. Then you had the whole edition of Leninism, which gave a international cast to that and helped people think about what are the relations between poorer and richer countries and what can we expect out of them and what might happen. Gave us a framework for thinking about that in a time when the world was becoming more interconnected and those differences were becoming more obvious. Fascism to me is unleashing more something dark and primal within people, and it’s more a permission structure to indulge in that that is normally not there. Those impulses are normally channeled or held down, and it seems that when the fascist regimes come into power, they give people permission to let those forces out. I think on communism, going back to that lecture that Ayn Rand gave, I think what rings true to me a little bit is that what fuels it is a kind of… Maybe not resentment, but envy towards the have-nots versus the haves. And there’s some degree to wish Nazism has the same envy towards some group, resentment towards some group. Given the environment of hard times, hard economic times, combined with a more primal, just envy of not having and seeing somebody who has it and just constructing a narrative around that. That can become a real viral idea.…

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