Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You are listening to New Discourse's Bullets, where I give a short bullet point like summary of a single issue relevant to woke that we all need to understand so we can beat it.

I want to talk about

the problem with the friend enemy distinction in politics, which goes by many names. Friend enemy

distinction is the formulation given by the Nazi jurist or legal theorist called Carl Schmidt.

He wrote it in a book called The Concept of the Political. In 1932, the year before he became a Nazi, once he became a

Nazi, he uses the friend enemy distinction to justify Hitler's totalitarian state. And no uncertain

terms is, is that true? So it is absolutely the case. It's also the people versus the enemies of the

people that we hear in Maoist communism. It is

the oppressor versus oppressed of Marxism overall. It is also the loyalty and disavowal that you

see in radical Islam. So the same idea that there is a group of friends who is opposed to a group of

enemies,

and that's the intrinsic ordering principle of the either political or social universe,

is in fact this thing called a friend-enemy distinction.

To be a little bit more formal about it, just very quickly to summarize,

Carl Schmidt in his book,

the concept of the political, where he explains this, says that there are existential conflicts

underlining all of politics. Underneath all politics, everything that's a political situation,

if it can be called political, is the threat of an existential conflict, a group of

enemies who wish to destroy your way of being that requires you to band together as friends

in order to protect yourself from it, necessitating fighting and war or violence if it comes to

that. But other political positioning and

maneuvering is all, if it's actually political, this is Carl Schmitt's argument, is all part of this

...