Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophies This. We have a Patreon page that supports

the show, an Amazon banner that doesn't, and a website can go to to learn more about both of those

things. It's www.philosophiesthis.org. Today's episode is the rest on Marcus' work, Aeros and

Civilization. I hope you love the show today. So let's assume for a second that Marcus is right,

that in a country where many of the citizens see freedom as the fundamental thing the United States

embodies, in reality, the population's actually living under an advanced version of monopoly

capitalism that sort of metastasized and taken control of everything from art, to politics, to

government, with all this amounting to what's probably the most clever, insidious, totalitarian

system in history. Let's say you're living in that. How would you know that you were living in it?

What sort of clues would you see around you if you did? Would you even notice them if they were

there? Or would you frame who you are so much in relation to that totalitarian system that nothing

would ever seem out of the ordinary to you? Herbert Marcus would probably say that if you want to

figure out the answers to these questions, maybe it'd be useful to put yourself in the shoes of

a member of an overtly totalitarian society just to see what's similar. Let's say 1930s,

Nazi Germany just for the sake of the example. What would it be like to be a citizen living under

the Third Reich? Well, one thing's for sure, if you're the government, for any of this Third Reich

business to be going on for any length of time, one thing you're going to need is approval from

the population to continue doing the things you're doing. Now, in totalitarian societies, this is

typically done by having some sort of propaganda machine in place that gets people thinking about

their lives and their countries placed in the world in a distorted way. I mean, it often gives them

a piece of reality, a version of it, but it obscures important other things so that they never get

the full picture. So that's the thing about propaganda. There's layers of nuance to it. Like,

...