Financialized Nihilism - The Downfall of the American Spirit and Baseball post-WWII

00:01

Hey y'all, so I'm gonna weave some stuff together here. Should be another pretty big episode. What I'm gonna talk about is the culture of baseball and the culture of the baseball card. So we talked in a multivalent way about how baseball itself is representative of the spirit or the soul of America as its primary cultural heart center.

00:29

And then again, through the baseball card, we've talked about everything from the T206 to Topps to the T3. We've traced the entire narrative, the construction and assembly of the early baseball card, going back into the Old judge, the dead ball era photography, the manufacturing innovations, as well as the industrial innovations that allowed for

00:56

the early baseball card to come into being — as it was finding its identity through baseball in industrial modern America. It's a multivalent nesting doll situation where baseball itself is representative of emergent American culture and identity, which really crystallizes in the 50s post World War Two, as well as the baseball card. Representation within representation. So

01:24

what I'm going to talk about here is really the social, political, and economic forces and factors which lead to the deindustrialization of America. And what I mean by deindustrialization is speculative currency — which in the 70s, the gold standard disappears and it turns to the petrol dollar, as well as a speculative mindset, which is what you see today in terms of Bitcoin and social media. It's the dematerialization

01:55

of American culture and society by way of gutting the manufacturing and agricultural backbone which built the real spine of American civilization, culture, empire; political and spiritual self. Social media, Instagram. All of these things that rely on screens and projections. It traces in a lot of ways back to Hollywood in a cultural archetypal sense. It's away from the material grit foundations of baseball. So I have some primer notes here. I wrote: industrialization is what built the United States.

02:21

Post-World War II, the United States becomes the world power. This is the epicenter of global power. This is the victor of the victors, the victor of the allies. I was watching this talk by a lecturer whose name is is Jiang Xueqin on American empire. He makes this statement that — I'm pulling it together and I'm interpreting it from the entire lecture —

02:48

America deindustrializes, seeking ease and perpetual growth through this post-World War II consolidation of world global power. Worker power, which again is the backbone of American industry, American industrialization and modernization, it peaks right at World War II with war production: the production of planes, the production of various different materials and machines that went into the war effort themselves. This is a manufacturing empire.

03:17

This is a productive, active empire. And this is mirrored in the industrial labor history of baseball itself. People like Mickey Mantle or Walter Johnson, these are miners and farmers and factory workers. But post-World War II, worker power is slowly but steadily shifted to financial sector power. And when Reagan comes into play, you have this deep privatization as well as

03:43

subtle progressive outsourcing of industrial labor to foreign countries. The manufacturing center, which was led by these hyper-industrial cities like the steel city of Pittsburgh or Detroit with cars — is gutted. These were very, very productive epicenters of American social and political culture.

04:07

You think about the Midwest — the farming industriousness of the American early agriculture and mid-century agriculture. They're using farming machines to increase industrial production of foods, well as cotton, as well as corn, etc. Again, Dizzy Dean comes from a corn farm. You gotta piece these things together because the culture of baseball...

04:34

is a sort of mimesis. It's reflected in and reflecting the very roots of the foundation and soul of America itself. And so when we're talking about a gutting of this soul, we're talking about how and when and why worker power disappears and financial sector power appears in terms of Wall Street, in terms of speculative currency, in terms of betting on stock markets. This is rife with baseball history too

04:58

in terms of gambling. Everyone from Pete Rose to Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker are suspected of gambling, Hal Chase. This is the underpinning and the undergirding of American culture as well as baseball culture. Speculative grabs at political and financial power. You have people like Al Capone who attend the baseball games in the 30s and is friends with Hall of Famers like Gabby Hartnett. There's an

05:25

idea here, one of the famous Capone quotes, I'm kind of paraphrasing it, is that the rules and laws of America are to benefit the aristocracy or the people in power, and beyond that, there are no rules and there are no laws. It’s a lawless plutocracy of those who grab the stakes and impose restrictions on the ‘without’ class. The rules and laws created by the aristocrats of American civilization don't apply to those people. This is a well founded statement that extends back to the broken treaties early American governments made with the native people of this country; furthermore, in the hypocrisy of the Constitution’s primary statements about equality and the real political truths of gendered and racial inequality, rights, and slavery at the time of America’s founding. The lawless terrain of financial and political power is something that's known and understood as far back as the 30s and even further back into the 1910s with the gambling and with the...

05:52

betting on games; with players who are trying to accumulate labor power, whereas the owners of baseball are monopolizing the currency, the energy of the institution of baseball itself. Remember, this is the time of Eugene Debs; there’s a strong, strong movement toward labor power in the rapidly industrializing trust and monopoly environment of American civilization itself at the time. The balances and stakes of real political power are deeply threatened by extreme, privatized interest. The many without; the few with. There's a lot of financial and cultural backing that goes into baseball as it becomes America's pastime. Baseball itself is a terrain for America’s political stakes. And yes, when you look within the lens and prism of baseball there's a huge, huge, huge labor disparity. People like Walter Johnson almost shifted over to the Federal League in 1914 and 1915.

06:22

And a lot of the big players do — Joe Tinker and Three Finger Brown, Eddie Plank — because of this opportunity that the Federal League offers, which is better pay. Better contracts for these star players who had to depend on baseball, Major League Baseball previously. It offers another opportunity, another option to create financial success. And this is to say nothing for the absolute exclusion of black players from baseball — monopolizing opportunities to advance socially and politically in baseball to ‘whites’ only. So you can see the narrative and the timeline that I'm tracing here — when we get to...

06:51

this post-World War II period, it's this gradual financialization and financial management power. People begin to manage excess in the United States. This becomes the locus and desire center of political power. It is how you accumulate and advance political power socially. It’s managerial — not labor based. You have countries like China or Russia where financial interests are funneled back into the United States because the US dollar becomes the global international currency. There's an emergent managerial financial class which is speculatively betting

07:17

currency and speculatively betting this massive financial influx of wealth in the United States and what it leads to is a conceptual gutting of the backbone of society. It's a sort of deep-seated sedentary laziness or celebrity culture. It becomes flat and empty. Its imagistic. There’s no grit. There’s no blood, sweat, soil, soul — investment and building in the flesh. There's no real force, there's no real thrust behind the images that are created,

07:46

produced, and consumed. It's a dream culture because the backbone of labor disappears. Labor power that defined the country and struggled to power in the country; was required of and in the country to construct its real political possibilities and realities — which it now takes for granted out of the emergence of a political greed which was rooted deep in the soil all along. This is the slavery that built the plantation empires. The Chinese slavery that built the railroads. The child labor that ran the early factories. The enslavement of women to marriage contracts — wherein only then would they gain even a semblance of political and social rights. The genocide of the indigenous peoples of the country. The enslavement of Mexican labor from the south to harvest crop in the mid 20th century; as industry expanded, the outsourcing of industry to ‘cheaper’ centers of production in China, South America, and otherwise — where people would work for less to make the products the aristocracy of America would consume. The entire infrastructure of American society and civilization is built by the exploitation of labor. And for a brief period, there’s a sense that labor in America could and would win. And this was true for the average factory worker or laborer in mid-century America. Social and political advancement was possible because of the consolidation of labor power in the country. But post-WWII, all of the manufacturing industries in the United States are slowly but surely outsourced; this rapidly accelerates with Reagan. They leave — stripping labor power domestically to create more outrageous and excessive profits for rapidly divisive and dividing class interests. From a rich and wealthy country, consolidation of power is driven away from labor; further into the hands of those with the most. They can outsource, so they do. So you have these entire towns and cities, these mining towns up in the Appalachian, the Rust Belt, you have factories in Pittsburgh and Detroit, the steel factories, the car factories. This is the reason why these entire former industrial superpowers regionally decline.

08:14

It leaves these gutted empty towns because the jobs are gone, the manufacturing is gone, the mining is gone, so there's no one there. This is an entire ecosystem. It's a cultural shift toward financialization, which is speculation, and away from the backbone, which is manufacturing and the active construction of the culture. I wrote, it's an eco-cultural overstimulation of excess.

08:40

which leads to philosophical and cultural underpinnings of nothingness. And then I said, refer to Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Dizzy Dean, Ed Walsh, and Stan Covaleski. So I'll get to Gehrig later probably, but Ed Walsh and Stan Covaleski, they have statements that they make. Some of them I think are captured in the Ken Burns documentary; others I've pulled from other resources. They basically say the same thing. I came from a mining background from when I was very young.

09:08

And there were basically two options. I would live and die in the mines or I'd become a successful baseball player. And this was the popular sentiment of this time. There were no options, right? They would come into baseball and they'd be playing with guts and grit on display because this is the real fabric and foundation of American culture. Post-World War II, you lose that. It's a culture that's become fattened on the excess of

09:38

war, the spoils of war, so to speak. And it's lost the legendary American spiritual quality of grit. This is very powerful. It's the legend of baseball, the legacy of the American spirit, the rising through trials. People like Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige, or Walter Johnson. These are people who come from very, very humble industrial agrarian backgrounds. Mickey Mantle. His father was a miner. He's from the mines.

10:06

These are people who rose through powerful, powerful personal trials. This is the kind of summoning of the Herculean impulse in the traditional Greek mythological sense. This is glory and legacy through sweat and toil, through the overcoming and surmounting of trials. And it's played out on the baseball field for all to see, feel, experience, and deeply resonate with. Because this was the larger spiritual condition of the emergence of America itself — resonating and reverberating across the entire nation at the time. This is what creates the mythic legendary quality of early baseball. And by early baseball, I mean really everything from the

10:35

early 1900s up to really the 60s. And what I'm talking about there, it's so crucial that it ends in the 60s. A lot of the last great Topps baseball cards are from the 60s, the iconic designs. And why do I say that? I say that because once we get to 70-71, you have the loss of the gold standard — it becomes the petrol dollar because the US is beginning to overextend itself into speculative debts. The center of value and values shifts and is shifting. The key word here that I keep generating is speculative.

11:05

It's the whole missions to the moon so to speak. It’s Alexander driving further and further into India; abandoning the core of his empire. You can see this cultural, economic, philosophical excess that's manifest from the spoils of the war, spoils of post-war. This is really the spoils of massive political power. It rots and corrodes the insides of America. It’s greed, excess, the desire for more. It poisons the soil, the grounded root of the spirit of the soul of the country. The inner spirit of America, which is this factory, industrial, agricultural, agrarian grit — is and always has been because it is grounded — this is people who are built through trial, they're built through physical circumstance. Their bodies are built. Strengthened.

11:34

They're built through this kind of, it's sort of like the metaphor of the shaping of the diamond through the pressure and the coal, right? It's the inner spirit of America. This hardness and strength through trial. Through raw circumstance and the forging of the diamond and the glory. It's gone from the game. It disappears. And you have this very flat, flashy, egotistical, massive contract, inflated asset environment. This again could be summed up quite simply as celebrity culture. Ruth is a harbinger of this in many ways. The home run as candy. You trot around the bases. It’s again — in a very deep and profound way — an excess of power. And again, what that leads back to, it's similar with baseball cards — you could say the junk wax era through plastic designs and superficial qualities printed at previously unheard of rates — or whatever you wish to call it.

12:03

You could say the struggle over these increasingly inflated contracts and currencies that run through baseball. Baseball becomes this blown up, financialized empire. But it loses, you lose this quality that's manifest. And I will say people like Mantle or Maris are almost sort of the last few. And yet you still see it here and there, particularly from people who emerged from the Caribbean in modern baseball, or from other international countries.

12:33

Players who emerge and emerged from circumstances that require real trial. The industrializing, spirit of American grit that used to be manifest most prominently domestically is actually now much more deeply manifest in a modern sense internationally; through international players.

12:53

This is an asset holding empire in the post WWII, modern sense. And what I mean by that is when people hold assets, they invest themselves into these assets and these assets themselves become proxies for real presence and engagement with life. It's a dead zone through which people live. The objects become their life. There’s a Dorian Gray quality to it. And measuring the value or the quality of the objects, they transfer their life source or their life force into these objects. You have a desacralization that happens corporately, culturally, economically, politically — out of the desire to further advance already booming growth and profits for the corporate enterprises which were built from the domestic labor power of America. You remove worker power by leveraging international outsourcing of labor and factory jobs, you force American labor into a weakened position. And this is the vast majority of the cultural contribution in terms of policy and political backing by already wealthy asset holders and corporate shareholders in the Reagan era. Extract the power of labor to build empire, then offshore empire to advance the ever growing greed margins of this microscopic class of individuals — its a recipe for the gutting of an entire civilization to enrich a meager few.

13:22

In the modern American civilization, what a modern American civilization and culture is, where the power is, is in speculative finance and asset holding. And what that creates is a very, very, very stagnant, complacent civilization and culture. The assets fluctuate. They remain still. It’s a grave. There's no engagement on the real field of life. There's no real presence on the field of life, which requires that level of being here now, right? Being in the present. The grit of the Cobb slide; the turmoil and struggle of the Ed Walsh complete game; the fury of the Bob Gibson fastball. These are qualities that are spiritual qualities. They’re conspicuous in a way that isn’t easily summed or pronounced. You notice an absence of this. It’s gone from the game. Instead is the plasticine wrapped body and contract. Replaced is an inflated, financialized diamond.

13:51

This presence is flowing in that moment and devoting oneself to the practice. The game is played with the real and true stakes of life. And that’s what makes it mythic and heroic. This is true legend in the Grecian sense. And that's where I'd bring in Gehrig as a sort of spiritual, warrior monk-like force on the diamond in terms of his perfection of the game. His polishing, his practice. His discipline and devotion. This is someone who came from very, very, very impoverished and destitute circumstances and became one of the greatest legends of American culture that exists in the 20th century. What I'm trying to summon back here is that essential grit would be the reintroduction

14:19

of the pre-modern, pre-mortem, industrializing human spirit. This is what built the great cities of America. This is what built New York City. This is what built Pittsburgh and Detroit. It's the human American spirit back from the dead of this flat, fat, bloated modernity, which is just speculative currency. It's asset holding, asset management, gambling, speculative betting, the dopamine shocks from social media, et cetera, you name it. It becomes immaterial. It’s a false spiritualization. It rises toward nothingness thinking this is godliness. It attempts to lose the body; in doing so, becomes neurotic, lost, desperate. It loses the real ground; the real flesh, dirt, and sheer earthly fabric and garments of the spirit. The game is played in the dirt. It’s Hercules wrestling with the hydra. It’s Jacob wrestling with God. We are incarnate; we are on the field of play of life. We are called and we are called to play here and now in this moment. This is real athletic life; the real trials of ascendancy.

14:47

What I called it in my notes is a financialized nihilism. What happens when you actually leave the field of life and reality and you retreat into the speculative assets, speculative betting, It's people who own houses all across the United States or whatever other sort of acorn, asset accumulation. It's overblown, overextended, it's no longer human. Daresay — no longer even remotely natural, or attuned to and with nature. It creates this softness of a financialized society and it's the loss of the grit which is manifest so clearly and devotionally in early baseball as in reality.

15:15

So my core claim is to restore that grit because it's the essence and it's the project of life itself. What's left when you lose that is just empty images and you see that the loss of the essence in the baseball card because these early baseball cards hold a deep quality of spirit, of soul, right? They capture this industrializing, enterprising.

15:40

striving spirit that's so present in American baseball. They capture this struggle even in the most cartoonish ways because they're conjuring forth not just each individual player — but these sets in their design quality, I'll say Goudey or the Diamond Stars set — they're conjuring up the mythic spirit of baseball. They're deeply devotional, attuned, artistic relics and artifacts.

16:07

But what's left when you gut the spirit is just empty images. And I think you can see that in the plasticized turn of the baseball card post 60s. They become less WPA paintings and portraits of presence; and they become more spectaclized, overblown plastic sheen…

16:36

hyper mass produced, almost like empty paper caskets for the spirit and soul of baseball. So when you're managing the wealth of foreign and domestic interests, that management actually becomes the power system and power structure of the culture of the civilization itself, you just basically have a glorified bank. And so when you're living in a glorified bank,

17:06

It's a very sterile, hyper-transactional immaterial. It's based on looking at graphs that document the ups and downs of the stock market, whether things are operating on fear and greed. You lose this really, really rooted earthy connection, whether that, again, that's through mining or through the forging of steel or through farming. These are all very earth-centered.

17:32

Deeply — in an earth sense — domestic practices. These are very grounded practices that involve a spiritual discipline of repetition and presence. Ritual engagement with the real circumstances of nature, the body; of life itself. It's the same way of understanding the principles of how farming works, right? You have to work with moon cycles, you have to work with seasons, and you have to be aware of what works when and what time. A hyper-financialized speculative currency culture or civilization doesn't live in the material world. It's an entire conceptually backed empire

18:02

that's based on an emptied concept of money. Again, I'll gesture back to the gold standard and then the oil standard, which explains a lot of what happens post 1970 in terms of the US's interests in very oil rich areas of the world. It’s a question of where the values are located; where the heartbeat and center of the civilization itself is manifested. The US becomes a global project of political power. Post WWII, it wants to expand its already global dominance. Set the US dollar as the world standard currency; extend, extend, extend. The moon, China, you name it. It’s this demonic greed of rapidly consolidating global political power. And it poisons the roots at home. It guts the very ground which it stands on, which opens up to a yawning spiritual abyss of empty power, currency, spirit, and thrust of the empire. So I say the last great mythic baseball card is 1967.

18:28

I think it really, really does capture the last of the great early modern baseball cards. And then you experience this deep devaluation through a plastic spectaclization of the baseball card. It doesn't happen immediately, right? But it happens, it happens slowly. The baseball card becomes the vehicle for a demonic, speculative, slot machine soul. It loses its mythic heroism, as does baseball itself; as does the heart of America. It’s poisoned. So this is what I'm observing. It's a cultural problem that's manifest through

18:55

this and I trace it through the baseball card as well as baseball history. It's manifest through the early 1900s — you experience this radically formative period, constructive period of the American identity — which is primarily forged through its encounters that it has in the global warfare. And it emerges in the 1950s as a

19:20

country that has undergone a massive transformative period over 50 years, 50 years of near consecutive forging of the American identity through not only industrialization but through global turmoil. And so you have this period of trial and I think when you look at that period, right, you have these figures like Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, or Shoeless Joe Jackson, or Walter Johnson.

19:50

You name it. Look at 1900 to 1950, even into the 60s. There's a certain quality of epic history that's present there because what the spirit of baseball is at that period of time is the spirit of America, which is being forged through trial. And you see that manifest on the baseball diamond in the character of a figure like Joe DiMaggio.

20:15

It's someone who's incredibly humble, incredibly present and focused on the diamond. And everything is devoted toward the cultivation of the practice of baseball. It's a very spiritual, grounded, present state of being. It's almost entirely non-egotistical. He circles the bases with his head down. He’s focused consistently on the moment. I look at someone like Lou Gehrig, who I also think is similar. Christy Mathewson is a great example. Jackie Robinson.

20:42

These are people who are very spiritually grounded people. They emerge from these circumstances of great trial and they forge the spirit and soul of America. They become these mythic figures that really represent American culture on the diamond of baseball. The grit, the presence, the humility, the devotion to the ground. We are building cultural foundations. We are forging. These become our great mythic heroes of American culture and civilization. And you see at this turn with our two last

21:11

figures of self overcoming on the diamond — Maris and Mantle — look at where they come from. Maris, from an immigrant family, who has to overcome this great prejudice against him in the city of New York as he chases and overcomes Babe Ruth's record — even against the golden son of New York baseball at the time, Mickey Mantle. And then Mickey Mantle as a figure right next to Roger Maris emerging from a mining family who becomes this great epic and even tragic figure of baseball

21:41

through his achievements and his struggles. There's a great, great, great rich depth there to the sport of baseball in terms of human figures that overcome great struggle on the diamond. The roots are as deep and rich as any epic story in human history. The stories of self overcoming in figures like Mantle and even Ruth are epic mythic heroism on a scale that almost if not surmounts the Homeric. This is what's so important because American culture and the American civilization at large looks at baseball as a lens and a prism for what it is going through and what it is overcoming. So figures like Jackie Robinson or...

22:10

Lou Gehrig become a manifestation of the larger cultural and political social phenomenon of labor, of industrialization, of agriculture, of integration. The struggle for belonging, self definition, identity; the rise into the power and the glory in a transcendental sense. Money is nearly a poor approximation for the legend that is constructed and the toil that is surmounted here. How else can you sum up true, true deep, deep wealth? The wealth of souls? Dizzy Dean coming from a farming family or Walter Johnson coming from a farming family. These are real, crystal clear, present representations, embodiments of the American spirit as an industrializing force. It's the heart center and the heartbeat of the country. They are the heroic embodiments of an entire culture’s striving, an entire civilization’s striving and glory as a push into birth of a sort of Roman totality of history.

22:40

But when you take away that labor power and you replace it with a financialized, empty images of conceptual currency, there's no more industrializing spirit. There's no more agricultural spirit. You empty the power from these real places. This is what built the country of America. And this, the labor power is what founded this nation.

23:08

And then you replace it with a financialized structure that's playing with foreign assets, foreign interests, and foreign asset management. It's not even to generate a profit off of these assets, but it's to speculatively bet them and play with them. They're like chess pieces on a conceptual board. That's what creates, again, I'll go back to the term I used. It's financialized nihilism.

23:37

What I mean by financialized nihilism is that the real values, the real sweat and toil and body of the American civilization at large has been emptied out and replaced with an empty image machine currency that has no real human being beneath it. And that's what I'm saying is so incredibly dangerous. It appears to be a consolidation of power in the hands of political elites, but what it really represents is the destruction of the real power which undergirds any civilization or culture. It’s the power of the real mythic striving and belief of the collective toward a mutual, collective artistic — spiritual — participation in the fabric of building something together, here, now, at one and at once. And that's what represents the fall of the American empire or the fall of the American spirit because

24:07

— you can see very clearly. I'm just going to say there's no one like Mickey Mantle that ever appears again in the history of baseball. And it's the same thing with Jackie Robinson or Satchel Paige. And the reason for that is because American culture has irrevocably changed. Once you get to the point of 1971 and the loss of the gold standard, I mean, it's gone. Even as soon as the end of the 60s, it's gone. And the reason for that is because of this massive influx of wealth that becomes

24:36

a conceptual pivot point for the American spirit itself. It becomes less about generating force wealth, spirit, presence, and action into a sedentary removal of self and complacency; the representation of life into and as asset structures and speculative grids. Here — we have to ask ourselves, in almost a philosophical way — what is real wealth? What is real success? A spirit of laziness and emptiness

25:02

that is created by this massive influx of wealth and this softening of the culture and the loss of the real spirit of grit that's present. What happens is that it becomes this culture of over consumption and excess. And so there's this greedy spirit that really manifests and becomes ever more prominent in a way that perhaps we don’t have context for ever before in human history.

25:32

Just to look at this in energetic terms almost, this greedy spirit that manifests — we can make more money at the top by outsourcing labor, by outsourcing our industries, by outsourcing farming to countries and areas where we can pay substantially less and thus make more as the owners of these corporate empires. And that's what I mean by financialization. It's an emphasis on corporate profit at all costs and a turn toward a conceptual grid. It’s not aqueducts, its digital graphs on how international labor is expanding corporate profit margins. You have a corporatized empire. The work and the real sweat and body is elsewhere. And this also — interestingly enough — coincides with the star power in baseball emerging in a larger and larger force and sense from international players.

26:02

A financialized empire is very different from an industrial empire or an agricultural empire. The latter is based on very real rooted production. They're building skyscrapers, they're building bridges. They’re farming and producing from and on the land. There's funding and backing that's going to domestic and local farming. These are the industries and practices that are actively growing and enriching a region, a real place and environment. And accordingly, these are things that are being taken seriously as the foundations and roots and soil of the nation. When a nation is divorced from that —

26:31

from that real political circumstance due to the greed of a corporatocracy which seeks to expand its personal private influence at all costs (ie, an offshoring of an entire industrial and agricultural empire for increased profit margins), when that divorce happens —

26:46

when that divorce happens, you lose the human underpinnings of a civilization. It is emptied of itself. That's what is gutted. The manufacturing's gone, the agriculture's gone, the labor’s gone — because we can just outsource it to cheaper labor sources, or we can outsource it to cheaper foreign interests. It's the same way that wealth as foreign interest enters into America, and America becomes an asset-managing empire. So it's import and export

27:14

of these foreign interests. Who does this benefit, and what does it ultimately do to the grounded, functional, civilizational fabric of a nation, of a place? A gutting of the American spirit is something that should be taken very seriously. But how do you see or qualify or quantify that? One way is to look at baseball. Because when you look at baseball, you're talking about the death of a cultural form, which once held great, great, great spiritual power. DiMaggio, Mantle, Robinson, you name it.

27:43

Right? We could go down the list. Josh Gibson. These are figures that… civilizations come and go. I talked about that culture is what a civilization really creates. That's what remains. This is the legacy and spirit of civilizations. It’s the human. So when we talk about Greece, we talk about Plato or Aristotle, or we talk about Homer — culture is what remains. And so we're examining baseball

28:12

as the primary cultural output of America. You don't want to kill the spirit of the medium, right? It's like the spirit of the artist. And the spirit of the artist, when you kill that in a civilization, you have nothing left. Because that's what actually depicts the real mythic struggle. It's like Homer writing the mythic underpinnings of Greek civilization. That itself is the beating heart and the spirit and the soul of any civilization. Its the collective heartbeat. Its the engine, the rhythm that builds any Rome.

28:38

Empires rise and fall, but that's something that people look back on for centuries and millennia. It’s what powers us to movement; to aspiration; to thought of spiritual ascendancy as a cultural medium at large. It’s our heroic reflection of the spiritual self. What that is, is it's the essence of humanity, manifest through the prism or the lens of that specific social or cultural phenomenon, that place in time in human history. Many different forms of it. It could be theater, could be baseball, it could be wrestling, it could be the Olympics, it could be philosophy, it could be literature, it could be art, right? These are all things that — they're the essential steward,

29:08

the soul and the spirit and the heart of history, human history. And that's what we're looking at, talking about preserving, being present with — because if you don't have that you have nothing. And again when I said financialized nihilism… you create that, it's over. Because what you've done is, it's similar to how debt functioned in the Roman Empire. You create a

29:37

financialized bureaucracy that empties the real labor power, I mean the real manual force and presence of humanity within a civilization or a culture, you've gutted everything about it that makes it possible. It’s something akin to the complete enslavement of the human spirit and soul and collectivity which actually powers and makes any given empire possible. Possible and meaningful, these terms go hand in hand in this situation. Emptied of drive, nothing is possible. So that's my hand here. I think I'll leave it there, and I'll catch you on the next one, alright?