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Thanks for listening to this episode. If you want updates on when new episodes are released, as well as occasional philosophical recommendations of good stuff to read, follow the podcast on Instagram at Philosophize This Podcast, all one word. So towards the end of the last episode, Ortega began painting a picture of our responsibilities as human beings.
He talked about the need for us to do the work of truly understanding our circumstances. He talked about the relentless pursuit of coming into contact with the boundaries of our circumstances, to test those boundaries, being both brave and humble enough to embark out into the unknown.
You know, as he put it, having the theoretical heroism to question our biases, constantly willing to sacrifice our own theoretical framework for one that might bring us a little more clarity about the world around us. He talked about all this. And we ended last time starting to entertain a certain kind of rebuttal to Ortega's work from a personality type and a voice that is no doubt all too familiar to us. It's the kind of person that makes a case that is perfectly reasonable on the surface. What if I don't want to spend every second of my life thinking about stuff all the time?
What if I just want to relax in my life a little? And look, it's not like I'm some completely oblivious person, you know, lazing about on my beanbag chair, rollerblading to the fridge every day. No, I'm a working professional. I have expertise in this world. I actually operated a pretty high level at my job. Who cares if after a long day of work, I want to watch a little Netflix, play some games, berate some people on social media. Who really cares about any of this?
It's just when it comes to this business of always improving, always questioning. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me a good documentary. I'll read a book every once in a while. When a general curiosity about the world starts to turn into calling into question the actual theoretical framework I use to make sense of things, I just don't care. In fact, what kind of person even does? That neurotic grind of never feeling satisfied with yourself...
Look, I'm going to say something controversial here. I am satisfied with myself. I think I'm a good person. I think I'm an educated, smart person. And at the end of the day, my opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. And simply by virtue of existing, I have rights. I deserve a seat at the table when it comes to any level of cultural participation. And it's at this point that our tour guide Ortega might scream and throw off his safari helmet and tell us all to stand perfectly still right now.
because this person's vision is based on movement. Careful, he would say, because what we're looking at here may be a prime example of the greatest infestation into the mindset of Western democracy that we've ever faced. What we're looking at is an example of what Ortega called the mass man.
He's seen this creature before. Someone who, quote, for whom to live is to be in every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves, end quote. In other words, to Ortega, this is often the type of person that emerges when someone's born into a Western democracy where they've inherited an unprecedented level of freedom, but are completely unconcerned about the responsibility that always comes along with being given freedom.
People, Ortega says, that on one level are more learned than ever before, more educated, but at the exact same time more uncultured than ever before. Super smart when it comes to performing skill-based methodological knowledge at their careers, but not caring at all how all that fits into the larger picture of things. A dangerous infestation of entitled, spoiled, unqualified, mediocre people.
that through some sick distortion of the idea of equality on top of it all, feel entirely self-satisfied in their mediocrity. Now, it's a little harsh, Mr. Ortega. Maybe you're freaking out about nothing here. Before you have a full-blown conniption fit, how did any of this happen? I mean, there's no way we just started churning out mediocre people one day. And of course we didn't just start one day, he would say.
There's always been mediocre people. This is nothing new. And before we go any further, I don't want anyone to misunderstand Ortega here. He's not talking about mediocre people or the masses from a sociological point of view or socioeconomic. He's talking about the mass man as a type of psychology that traps people from all walks of life. You can be a billionaire and still be thinking with this mass mentality.
Every generation has had their version of mediocre people. And every generation has had the thinkers of their time that have had uncharitable views towards mediocre people and their views on the nuances of the world. But Ortega would say something changed towards the end of the 19th century. We changed the way that we structure our societies. And in doing so, we gave mediocre people a level of respect towards the legitimacy of their opinions that we've never really seen before throughout history.
Like if you're a mediocre person, you are living through a golden age. There may be no greater time for you to have ever lived than right now. It's crazy. Think about it. In today's world, you can be sitting around a table with a bunch of educated people having a discussion about some serious issue that's facing the world. And you can add up the amount of time you've spent really thinking about this issue and have never thought about it for more than five minutes.
And it's amazing. You can open your mouth at that table, and those people have to take your opinion into consideration as though you are an equal. Well, that's one perspective, I guess. Social media in today's world. Let's say you got thoughts about how the world works, and you've never really spent that much time at all even trying to remotely understand it. Not a problem. Now you got a platform to say whatever you want, and other mediocre people will probably like your posts.
You could self-publish a book in today's world. Other mediocre people will buy it. Or take it would want us to consider how different the world is for the ordinary person from the way it's typically existed throughout history.
He'd also want us to consider how this relates to his perspectivism from last episode. With Grandma Beatrice believing we're all fluffy seeds floating in the breeze next to a sycamore tree. And at a certain point, for the sake of our own sanity and the progress of the species, we gotta say, no, we're not all fluffy seeds, not everyone's perspective is equally developed, and we should commend the people who have done the work to challenge the limitations of their perspectives and expose themselves to more experiences.
The fact of the matter is, we are not all equal, Ortega would say. There are people who have just put in more work than other people when it comes to developing their understanding in certain areas of life. And if we truly value equality, then Ortega would say certainly. We should always make sure that people are treated equally under the law. But we are not the same. And whenever we try too hard to convince everyone that we are all the same across the board, society is going to suffer as a result.
Once again, he would say this level of consideration for the ordinary person comes as a result of 19th century classical liberalism and a heightened focus that then comes on equality. And don't get him wrong. This is a great time to be alive to Ortega. Equality is good. Democracy is good. It's all good. But what society has turned into is something entirely different. Every silver lining has a cloud.
This isn't democracy anymore, he would say, when equality is fetishized rather than prioritized. What we have now is what he calls hyper-democracy, and this has had very real effects on the way society is structured. Some examples of the most general way this hyper-democratic attitude manifests is in the massification of everything. Mass production, mass media, mass education, mass culture. These are things we can witness in our everyday lives. For example, under the dictates of mass culture,
Everyone is a critic. Everyone has an equal say in whether something was good or not. You go out to a restaurant with some friends, and it doesn't matter whether someone even cares about food, if food's their biggest passion in the entire world, or if they're literally eating ham and cheese Hot Pockets for every meal. Everyone has a say. Everyone gets a Yelp review. And everyone's input deserves equal time.
Ortega is going to say this is nonsense. For us to preserve all the good things that we want to preserve about equality as a central focus of society, we don't got to play this game where everybody's opinion is equally valid regardless of their experience. You know, you may want me to be your resident philosophy podcaster, but you wouldn't want me to be your brain surgeon. You don't want me being your interior decorator picking out your curtains. You don't want me being the drummer in your favorite music group.
Jose Ortega might say it like, you know, you watch someone who spent 20,000 hours of their life playing the drums, mastering their craft. And it's not controversial to say that there's just a clear difference between that person playing and a five-year-old banging on some pots and pans on the kitchen floor.
The master of their craft is just better. To deny this, to appeal as some do to total relativism or total egalitarianism, everything is equal, to deny this would be to deny the possibility that we can put in effort and arrive at progressive levels of understanding about things. And the same dynamic applies across society in many different areas where we see this phenomenon of massification.
We love equality. We want to flatten out the hierarchies that exist within society, understandably. I mean, look at the situations they've created in the past and present. But Ortega would want us to consider what we're potentially losing when we engage in that process. Because when everyone's a critic, when everyone's opinion is just as good as everyone else's, then in the white noise of all these equally legitimate opinions...
we lose the opinions of people who may have dedicated their lives to understanding culture and its various levels of refinement. In other words, the true critics out there get lost in the noise. The massification of culture has contributed to this.
Another example, mass religion. When everyone is a Christian, simply by virtue of showing up to church on Sunday, then we lose the distinction between a Christian that spends every day living a life of spiritual development and someone who just shows up, says a few Hail Marys on Easter Sunday, and then goes home and beats the elderly.
This is something Kierkegaard was very concerned about during his time. Both are technically Christians, right? Both are spiritual people. But we lose the moral exemplar in that ocean of self-justified mediocrity.
To Ortega, it really does become a quantitative versus qualitative distinction. Quantitatively, we are way more inclusive now to the average person. Way more people can participate in activities across culture. And that's a good thing at one level. But by flattening out society, we lose something on the qualitative side of things. Another example of this: mass education. Now, quantitatively, we have more people than ever before going to university gaining technical expertise.
but qualitatively. How many of these people are going to school because they're passionate about educating themselves, because they want to be part of a tradition that's valuable to maintain for the entire world we live in? And how many of them are going to college because that's simply the next checkbox on a list given to them by their parents? Or because they just want to get a job somewhere?
Again, quantitatively an improvement, qualitatively something to consider. Now, for the sake of moving forward, if we can accept that distinction, if this is really going on, then the next question you gotta ask here is what specifically has been lost to Jose Ortega and why is it necessarily such a bad thing? The word that Ortega would use to describe what's been lost is what he calls aristocracy. We have systematically removed aristocracy from society.
See, since the dawn of civilization, thinkers have tried to answer the very basic question that's at the heart of political philosophy: Who should rule? The answers to this question have obviously varied, but almost always a common through-line from all the other human beings that have lived throughout the years is that the wisest decision here is to say that not everyone is fit to be the ruler of a civilization. The drunk guy in the corner got a lot of ideas, but none of the ones we want to implement.
The clown making balloon animals. Skilled? Yes. But maybe not the one we want leading us into the promised land. People throughout history have understood this, and the strategy's generally been to have a small subclass of people that are more fit to rule. For the sake of this conversation here today, we can refer to these people under the general category of the aristocracy. Now of course with our modern democracies, we don't want anything to do with an actual aristocracy. Kind of the point of a democracy is that it's ruled by the many, not by the few.
So we flattened the aristocracy out and gave the keys to society over to the hands of the masses. In other words, in the same way everyone's a critic now, now everyone's capable of sounding off on how the entire civilization should be moving forward. Doesn't matter how much they've ever thought about it. Doesn't matter if they even care. And in the same way great critics will get drowned out by the mass sea of critics, Ortega fears that great rulers will get drowned out by the mass sea of rulers that we now have.
He says, quote, "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select." End quote. So an example Ortega might want to insert at this point is to consider the people that throughout history have inherited the keys to society. Think of a son of an aristocrat in the feudal system. Think of the son of a dictator. In a more modern context, nobody ever wants to work for the boss's son, right? Nobody wants to work for some guy who, through nepotism, became the assistant manager at a Dairy Queen.
And why don't we want to do that? Because, generally speaking, they're probably a moron. They didn't earn anything that they were given. Daddy handed him the keys to the swirly ice cream machine. And then what did he do with it? He created a blizzard of chaos. With freedom needs to come an equal amount of responsibility. This kid was given an inordinate amount of freedom without the wisdom of earning it and knowing the responsibility that has to correspond to it.
Well, if the son of a dictator is the spoiled child of history, then the masses are the spoiled child of modern democracy. Ortega literally calls them spoiled children, and this is what he means. The masses have inherited, by dint of birth, unprecedented rights and opportunities, unprecedented institutions that took many years of careful, intelligent planning to create,
and by the way are going to require even more than that to maintain. And these people are not just unqualified to do the job, they don't care about getting better at the job, and they're completely ungrateful for everything that they've inherited. But they're told that they're great, like a spoiled kid from a horrible parent. They have this attitude of self-love, but no knowledge of the history that constitutes what an individual self even is to Ortega. They wave around technology that's taken thousands of years to produce,
without the slightest bit of understanding about what it took to bring it into existence or what responsibility now comes along with it. They're just mad when it doesn't load fast enough. But it may be worth it to press Ortega here a little bit more. I mean, it's worth asking, why is this self-satisfaction that people have necessarily so toxic? What do I care if people live in little self-created echo chambers where they think they're smarter than they really are? And this is where Ortega would say, just think about what these people start to closely resemble.
These people, and the way they approach their entire role in this world, start to look a lot like fascists. A sort of fascism of mediocrity, if you will. And if you think he's still being extreme here, he's saying this stuff in the year 1929. Look at the world since then. So it's worth investigating. Why did Ortega think these people seem to foreshadow a coming wave of fascism? Well, let's look at some similarities between the mass mentality and the fascist mentality.
For one, he would say, the masked man sees no reason to appeal to any sort of external source of justification for the legitimacy of their ideas. Their ideas are validated simply by virtue of the fact that they are currently in their head. Like, it's in my head right now, so it must be good. Then in turn, this type of self-satisfied ordinary individual just never sees any reason to seek out new ideas and challenge what they already think they know.
And so do many fascists, Ortega would say. Another example: the mass man devalues history and the history of ideas, like a fascist. Doubt this, just look around you. You can hear all sorts of perfectly normal, reasonable people say, "Why would I ever spend my time studying things like history or philosophy?" Like, what do I care if Ben Franklin built a staircase 2,000 years ago? What do I gotta be some expert political philosopher to know how to move the country forward?
In fact, you know what your problem is? Person that studies history or philosophy? You're living in the past, man. I'm living in the here and now. And when I get off work in the here and now, I just want to watch some Netflix and the news and stuff that's actually relevant to my life. Why history? What's going on in both these examples, Ortega says, is that the mass mentality exercises an attitude of their "predominance" over the world, just like a fascist would. In other words, because their ideas never really have to be tested up against other ideas,
They don't ever really got to consider all the other types of people that exist out there. So they effectively become bulletproof against nuance of any kind. And this creates a psychological climate, Ortega says, almost a petri dish-like environment for fascist ideas to work their way in slowly and fit in neatly to this mental framework that these people already got going on.
the mass man's entire life then becomes self-destructive. Because the very things that gave rise to the mass man, the mass man progressively undermines through their very existence. Ortega calls this type of thinking something beautiful. He calls it the mass man imposing a type of spiritual barbarism on the world around them.
He says, quote,
This new barbarian is above all the professional man, more learned than ever before, but at the same time more uncultured, the engineer, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist." And make no mistake, he would say, this sort of self-satisfied spiritual barbarism, no matter how innocuous it may seem on the surface, is inevitably going to lead to more actual barbarism. One of the chilling predictions he makes in the book is that the more you see a rise in the level of the mass mentality that's out there,
the more you'll see a rise in the level of violent political protests. So the answer to this problem is obviously complicated to Ortega. But one of the things he knows we have to do is to find a way to reinstate the aristocracy into society. Now, he's not talking about reinstating the class systems of the past or having aristocrats governing over people. No. And he's not calling for the qualified people of the world to go out there and make everyone feel stupid so you can put the mass man in their place.
No, remember from last time. I am I and my circumstance. This is a very personal existentialist quest that we're all on. And reinstating the aristocracy is going to be part of the personal responsibilities that we have to ourselves as well. Reinstating the aristocracy, for Ortega, is going to mean having an increased personal sense of moral obligation and an increased pursuit towards self-improvement. Living life with this approach every day is to live life in total opposition to the mass man.
But more than that, Ortega thinks we'd be wise to accept that society just is aristocratic. A society is no longer a society when it is not aristocratic. The only thing that's left at that point is degradation, slowly, until it eventually comes co-opted by a fascist group or collapses entirely. In order to remain healthy, society needs this distinction between people that are actually challenging their prejudices and these self-satisfied people living in an echo chamber that they constructed for themselves.
So knowing that, to the person at the beginning of this, in the last episode, who says that the person who's constantly refining their values, constantly striving to improve, may be living a life of neuroticism. Here's where Ortega might say back to that, yeah, again, call that neuroticism, but your approach, my friend, is just downright dangerous. I'll take neurotic self-doubt over dangerous self-satisfaction any day of the week.
Now it should be said, if you wanted to take some steps to try to live more with this self-imposed aristocracy in your life, there aren't many things more important for you to start taking seriously to Ortega than to start developing a comprehensive understanding of the history that you are living in. Start taking history very, very seriously, he would say. But why?
We heard last time that Ortega asks us to consider our existence not in terms of being immersed in circumstances, but instead to consider the idea that you actually are your circumstances. Well, quick thought experiment here: no matter how old you are,
One way to see yourself is as a collection of moments sprinkled across time. What I mean is, you know, last week you stubbed your toe on a chair and now you have a little cut on your toe. That's a part of you. You grew up in England. That's a part of you. You got married at the age of 23. That's a part of you. I just mean that who you are is a complex aggregate of moments and decision points that have gone on over the course of your life. These things come together to define you in many ways.
I mean, again, you are your circumstances, right? Well, think of a moment in your childhood that has had an impact on who you are as an individual all the way up until right now. Jose Ortega might ask, "What really is the difference between that moment in the history of your life and any other moment in history?" Say, the founding of the country that you grew up in. I mean, in many ways you could say that the founding of the country that you grew up in has had a much greater impact on who you are than almost every event of your life.
Hopefully it's obvious where Ortega's starting to go with all this. So many people think the events of their lives define who they are, and that the things that happened in the past are a totally separate timeline of events. Things that just happened to a bunch of strangers who used to be alive. Optional reading. I mean, I guess if you like history, read history. But otherwise, why bother? History is a repository of the unlived memories that make up who you are.
Jose Ortega says, quote, "Every concept referring to human life is a function of historical time," end quote. Meaning that to understand who you are, to understand anything human for that matter, Ortega, is to understand the history that underlies the thing.
And for sure, we have the events of our life and they're very near and dear to us and we've experienced them directly. But we have to acknowledge the reality that every human life is a life, quote, enclosed between other lives which come before or which are to come, end quote. This is a different way of viewing the existence of a person through the lens of what he calls an autonomous historical agent rather than viewing people through the lens of biological natural selection, a very physical realm.
A lot of scientists and philosophers during the time of Ortega thought that the key to understanding the human being, or individual people, was going to lie in understanding some kind of human nature that was at the foundation of it all. But Ortega wasn't buying this. He was extremely skeptical of what he called the quote, terrorism of the laboratory. Stop being so fixated on trying to find the nature of everything empirically. Maybe you can find the nature of physical objects that way, but not people. Human beings don't have a nature, Ortega said. They have a history. To
To understand individual consciousnesses, including your own, you have to understand your position and orientation on the continuum of history. Now, real quick, what does he mean when he says history? Because we run the risk of just throwing that word around and people thinking Ortega means you should just study your relationship to King Arthur and Cleopatra, a sort of storybook version of history that's the way a lot of people end up relating to history after high school.
But instead, try to think of history as simply human motives, human actions, human reactions to other human motives and actions. See Ortega might say that just as words have etymologies, these etymologies that extend back thousands of years sometimes, and each piece of that etymology constitutes part of what that word is when it's used today, human beings have etymologies as well. Your life and actions are constituted by the history of human actions.
That's not all though, because just like when you examine the etymology of a word, and by studying its usage over time, you can spot totally reasonable explanations for why the word was used differently across generations, across cultures. History, for the select minority of people that are willing to study it diligently, history has a reason that can be uncovered as well. So why should we be taking history very, very seriously?
A hallmark of modernity is a feeling of sort of disappointment about the history of human thought. For all those years we thought we had these expert theologians and philosophers getting to the truth about the universe, come to find out it's all relative, it's all historical, it's all nihilistic. Man, that can be disappointing. But another way you could look at that, Ortega would say, is that if everything human, including your life, is ultimately understandable through analysis of history, and we just seem to have figured that fact out,
What a new beginning. What an opportunity to take on this challenge and see what possibilities the future might hold for us. So in closing, Ortega would definitely say that equality is something that we need to protect. But this leaves the very open-ended question: What specifically is the essence or the texture of the equality that we're trying to protect?
Revolt of the Masses was a book by José Ortega not aiming to comprehensively answer that question, but more accurately to say that no matter what we decide true equality is in the grand scheme of things,
It seems pretty obvious that it's never going to be protected best by a bunch of self-satisfied, spoiled rich kids born into modernity, wielding around this freedom and equality and technology and social conditions with absolutely zero understanding of the history involved to bring it about, with zero interest in ever learning, disrespecting the past, unbounded by egalitarianism, ungrateful for how the world got here, don't even realize how destructive what they're doing actually is.
If Ortega is screaming anything at us about how to live better as people, it would be that we should participate in human history. Don't be the masked man. Don't be the mere buoys that float upon the waves. Challenge your circumstances. Get out into that world that you can never really escape anyway, and actually, actively, find a way to participate. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
