Thinking Systematics - critical dialectical reasoning

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:01]So, welcome to another Michael Roberts YouTube interview. And today, it's a pretty exciting one for me, anyway. I've got two participants, two authors of a new book which is called Thinking Systematics.

[00:00:19]And it's by Murray Smith, who you can see, at least on my screen, top left. Murray is emeritus professor of sociology at Brock University, which is in Ontario, Canada.

[00:00:32]And Tim Heaslip is a PhD student at York University, which is also in Ontario.

[00:00:38]And they've written this book about the nature of critical dialectical reasoning and its relevance to the modern world today, and of course to the case for socialism. Um, but it's called Thinking Systematics. So, the first question I must ask is what is systematics? Because I'm sure for many of you as they don't really know what you're referring to here.

[00:01:04]Murray, I'll defer to you. I guess I'll take a crack at that.

[00:01:08]I could give you a very long answer.

[00:01:10]I'll try to make it very brief.

[00:01:13]Essentially, what we had in mind in calling the framework, the cognitive framework that we're advocating in the book, Thinking Systematics, is because one of the most salient features of this overall cognitive strategy that we're advocating is that it's necessary to undertake an analysis or an understanding of any particular question or problem in a systematic way, which among other things involves taking things step by step.

[00:01:47]And we believe that this approach that we've developed is potentially a popular one. It's one that can be, I believe, uh made accessible to a larger public.

[00:02:02]I'm not sure our book is really accessible to a very large public. I have to say that.

[00:02:08]Although we've we've tried to make it as uh transparent as possible.

[00:02:13]But, you know, Marx once said that the educators must themselves be educated.

[00:02:19]And one thing that's always struck me is that certainly Marxist educators are not always very good at educating.

[00:02:27]There's another side to this when Marx said educators have to be educated is also, I think, implying that most educators think that solutions can be found to our major problems simply through education. We hear this all the time.

[00:02:43]What we need is more education.

[00:02:46]Well, we now have one of the most well-educated, in the conventional sense, populations globally in the world.

[00:02:54]And yet we're confronting are in no way being uh addressed in an intelligent way, either by our leaders, by much of the intelligentsia, or by ordinary people, unfortunately.

[00:03:09]We're seeing a huge groundswell of stupidity, if anything.

[00:03:14]That needs to be countered.

[00:03:16]Um and this is our modest attempt to find a way of countering, developing some schemes, if you like, or some exercises, some habits of thought, which will encourage people to look at the major problems, the major major perils of our time, in a way which can yield some satisfactory answers.

[00:03:37]I mean, you call it Murray, I'm saying critical dialectical reasoning, as opposed to other forms of reasoning.

[00:03:45]Uh in what way is it different from what used to be called formal logic, which is logical reasoning, or other forms of reasoning, uh common sense is the one that usually comes up.

[00:03:57]In what way is critical dialectical reasoning in your book more superior and more useful to us than the other ways?

[00:04:07]Sam?

[00:04:08]Oh, okay. Well, I'll begin by saying that the biggest difference between a dialectical approach and formal logic is the dialectics is the logic of change, whereas formal logic is static. And so right away we have a very dramatic difference there. Another significant difference is we talked about this in the very first chapter of the book is that formal logic, if it starts from false premises, will still provide you with a a a can conclusion that that is logically logically follows from these false premises. Dialectical logic includes more comprehensive notion of what it means to think including our our interaction with nature and our empirical element rather than just the rationalistic um formal logic, right? So we give the example of Socrates. It's a great growth that was attacked example, but it still applies that if Socrates is a man and he is whether Socrates is a god and gods are divine, Socrates is divine, but we know that Socrates died, right?

[00:05:14]So that logic follows sorry, that conclusion follows logically formally logically through through that system. It doesn't follow through dialectical thinking cuz we can appreciate that this uh this this beginning this premise is untrue. Socrates is not neither a god nor nor immortal, right? So that's a significant difference. There are significant differences. Also another huge difference is because it's the logic of change because dialectics is the logic of change, we're talking about development, of course, right? This is foundational Um, of course occurs across time.

[00:05:47]And it it also includes the the debates that are going on in the world. That we we believe that most positions will have a you know, to use Marty's phrase from the beginnings of capital, it'll have a rational kernel to it. And part of we encourage people to do through the book and through the method that we develop is to encourage people to uh pull out these rational kernels and and compile them arrange them such that they all sort of are incorporated within one's own understanding that they develop.

[00:06:19]Marty, do you have anything to add to that? I assume you would. Anything else, Marty? You want to add?

[00:06:24]Again, there's so much to be said potentially, but >> [laughter] >> but yeah, I mean the the problem with formal logic, and I think this was even pointed out by Hegel, who of course is someone we cite fairly often because he was the most important figure in kind of developing a dialectical understanding and a new dialectical logic in the modern era prior to Marx and Engels.

[00:06:52]But his approach of course was idealistic, but he did at the same time say that at one point that, you know, logic to be useful one must be pay attention to its content.

[00:07:06]What I think he meant by that was that if the content of your logical analysis is faulty uh based upon uh presuppositions or premises that are incorrect then the formal logical method, the formal analytical method can actually lead you very very far astray.

[00:07:30]Um this is in strike striking contrast, this whole approach is in striking contrast to the idea that one must move from initially at least, we have to move from the to the abstract, and then from the abstract back to the concrete.

[00:07:47]Uh we are confronting concrete realities in the world all the time.

[00:07:53]And it's a very complicated world.

[00:07:56]How does one make sense of this? The formal analytical method involves, very often, slicing off different pieces of that concrete reality, analyzing them separately.

[00:08:08]Marx's approach, the materialist dialectical approach, is to say all of these all of reality is unified and interconnected.

[00:08:19]And the task of the analyst, or the dialectician in this case, [laughter] actually, is to find the connections between the various elements of reality that comprise the concrete.

[00:08:32]Um so, we develop this kind of notion, again, uh hopefully in a in a popular way that can be grasped by large numbers of people.

[00:08:40]We have it in a >> in capital, that's exactly what Marx does. He says, "Look, these are the situations that working people face.

[00:08:47]We've got inequality, [clears throat] we've got poverty, we've got crises, but they're they're linked, and there's a abstract basis to them, if you like, or uh that we can analyze and they link these things together. If we can understand what that is, then we can go back and analyze the reality more effectively and come up with uh a real understanding of what's going on, rather than just looking, as you say, at bits.

[00:09:11]I'm saying, "Well, there's a crisis, so it must be down to what that's caused by some recklessness by the the bankers, or we have an environmental crisis, that's caused by something going on with the pollution." We don't have a We don't have an overall view of what's going on in social reality if we look at it bit by bit. Would you agree that I've understood what you're saying in that sense? You're precisely right, yes.

[00:09:34]And just one more point, Um it's really important to find a way of combating what you call common sense.

[00:09:43]What we're advocating is in a in a in a very real way anti-common sense.

[00:09:48]Okay? We say that in the book quite explicitly.

[00:09:51]The traditional notion of common sense though is that you more or less accept things appearances of things and take those appearances as your starting point.

[00:10:03]But this is inadequate. It leads to impressionism. It leads to um a faulty understanding of reality.

[00:10:12]Uh because you know, as most people understand, appearances can be deceiving.

[00:10:19]Uh Hegel however, and Marx too I believe, instead of just taking a a radically skeptical approach because of that well-known phenomenon of appearances being deceiving, they insist that yes, appearances can be deceiving, but they are also, in the words of Hegel, the the fact is that reality shines forth through those appearances.

[00:10:46]It's by So, the more we understand the appearances and the interconnections between these appearances, the better, more concrete will be our analysis or overall understanding of what we're what we're dealing with, with the totality if you like.

[00:11:03]So, yeah, in Marx's case, famously what he does is he he he's trying to find the simplest abstract concept and it's and it's actually something that's not just a concept, but something that's real within the kind of society in which we live.

[00:11:19]Sort of the most basic economic cell form, you know, of capitalist society. He says it's the commodity.

[00:11:28]And we can derive so much of understanding from an analysis of that of the commodity and not just what it is but how it constitutes in certain sense the DNA.

[00:11:43]Right? Of the overall social and economic system that we find it in.

[00:11:48]So, Marx says, "Okay, we have to start with the with the right kind of abstract concepts and then through a process also of empirical investigation and analysis reconstitute the totality in all its concreteness."

[00:12:05]Well, I mean, all of the criticisms made of uh dialectical materialism on the sheerest conception of history is that it's teleological. For viewers, by that I mean, it's sort of determined by the bias of the uh person who's presenting it. He says, "This is going to happen.

[00:12:21]It's inevitably going to happen." And then therefore you can build a whole load of stuff around that which justifies that. When really you ought to look at it empirically. You ought to look at the at all the different appearances of reality and weigh them up uh in a in a more scientific way rather than this uh dialectical way which is clearly uh imposing upon reality rather than explaining it.

[00:12:48]That would be an argument presented against dialectical critical reasoning, I think. But what do you think?

[00:12:54]Either of you.

[00:12:58]I guess I'll take that one, Arnie. Um Yes, I mean, Bertell Ollman, who's a well-known Marxist political scientist and philosopher of a sort, wrote a whole book called The Dance of the Dialectic, which I would recommend.

[00:13:15]Something that certainly influenced my understanding of dialectics, Marxist dialectics in particular.

[00:13:21]Um and we sort of ran with that and talked about it's dialectic of the abstract and the concrete.

[00:13:31]So, we need the point is we we abstract concepts, despite what common sense people might think or insist on, abstract concepts are absolutely necessary to our thought processes. We all use them.

[00:13:45]The only question is is what kind of abstract concept? Is it really adequate to the task of understanding various problems?

[00:13:54]And a lot of abstract concepts can only lead into a kind of blind alley.

[00:14:00]When we we speak of the dialectic of the abstract and concrete, we're talking about how we have to move towards from more abstract concepts to a richer set of abstract concepts. And that can only be done through empirical investigation.

[00:14:16]So, there's this constant, you know, interplay between abstract conceptual development and empirical investigations.

[00:14:27]Scientific uh materialist uh investigations of the reality that we're analyzing.

[00:14:34]This is all a little bit esoteric, I know. So, Yeah. I think you're I think you're much of your audience is pretty sophisticated, so I That That helps out because um I'm working on this as well because this I mean, for a lot of people uh the dialectical materialism or even philosophy in general is a quite a difficult subject for them to deal with, uh including me. So, we we need to draw out as what we can um the relevance of this to what we're looking at, the problems of the world, our everyday life for that matter. Um uh what are the How do we find the truth in anything, the objective truth in anything, rather than what we get at the moment is all kinds of opinions and ideas. I mean, I just have to go and listen to Truth Social on X every day and I can get a whole range of contradictory ideas and explosions.

[00:15:32]And how do I feed through that to find what the hell is going on when President Trump speaks?

[00:15:38]Can dialectical reasoning help us with this?

[00:15:43]That's a good question.

[00:15:45]>> [clears throat and cough] >> If I could return to the science question for just a moment, uh I I wanted to say something that sort of passed by, but I I of course, as readers of your blog and as watchers of your videos know, you're doing this. You are doing this scientific work. You Marx of course built on the best economic science of his time.

[00:16:06]Of course science has economic science has has a since then, but they've also of course as we any Marxist would know, they've left the labor theory of value and various things from classical political economy, the interest in classes for instance behind.

[00:16:20]And of course that's a loss. And so rather than simply advance or have been stages of elements where they've regressed, right? And so what we're advocating in terms of science, and I should also add that the social sciences, Marxists in the social sciences have done great work for the last century and a half. And there's a great deal of this science that's still involved and we're constantly trying to uh advance upon that, right? And that's the first thing I'll say. And I'll throw it to Murray if he wants to talk about Trump and dialectics or how he I I suggest we approach that, but um good luck with that, Murray, because it's very difficult to decipher sometimes where the rational truth Sorry, the rational kernel is in what Trump's saying, right? So Yeah.

[00:17:03]>> [laughter] >> To put it mildly. Yeah. Well, maybe that's that's a bit bit of a problem for nobody to solve, I think, about Trump's reasoning. But >> [laughter] >> Um Yeah. Uh But how would you how would you approach this problem or something?

[00:17:16]How would you reason things out?

[00:17:18]Does this book tell us how we as rational beings at least can reason more effectively so that we can understand what's going on in the world?

[00:17:30]Well, that's why we wrote the book to try to develop some a kind of a systematic approach to improving people's ability to discover objective and reliable truths.

[00:17:45]You know, about the about the world that they're confronting.

[00:17:49]We are facing many many perilous situations, crises, very sharpening contradictions within reality itself that generate those crises and those those problems, but which also create opportunities for social change.

[00:18:08]Um So, to It's not just a question of grasping reality or having a better understanding of reality, but also knowing how to act on it.

[00:18:19]Uh again, you know, we we we take one of Marx's famous theses of on Feuerbach that uh the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways.

[00:18:30]The point, however, is to change it.

[00:18:34]We completely historicize with Marx on Marx on that point, but the task we set ourselves in this book is to suggest some ways in which we can address another very pressing need facing humanity and which that and that need is to be able to think more clearly, more more systematically, more scientifically.

[00:18:58]And so, we've adapted one of Marx's famous aphorism to the notion that the philosophers have only inter- uh uh interpreted uh knowledge production or understanding or consciousness in particular ways. The point, however, is to actually improve it. Mhm.

[00:19:22]And we do provide a number of of uh sort of schemas, if you like, uh to encourage that in individual human beings and to encourage the educators to take their students down these roads, these pathways, because they are, I think, very, very crucially important to develop an adequate understanding of reality.

[00:19:45]Um and there's so many at the present time there's so many different things impeding that road, you know, throwing up obstacles in that road to understanding, to an an adequate understanding.

[00:19:56]Um and social media is one of them.

[00:19:59]Mhm. Um what what Trump calls, laughably, fake news, which quite often is actually pretty accurate news when it's about him.

[00:20:09]>> [laughter] >> It's It's critical of what he's saying.

[00:20:13]But there is an enormous amount of misinformation certainly in circulation.

[00:20:18]And there is a certain kind of vogue within the intelligentsia, according to which, you know, the idea according to which um we can't really grasp uh objective reality, that there is no such thing as objective truth, that everything is simply relative.

[00:20:36]Mhm. A kind [clears throat] of relativistic approach to the theory of knowledge is very deeply entrenched. It has been for very for centuries, but it's taken on new forms in in recent times with postmodernism and poststructuralism and so on.

[00:20:49]Um and not surprisingly >> saying here, guys, is there is a reality. It's an objective reality. It's not a figment of our imagination. It's not fake news. There is a reality. The question is how to understand and get to that reality so that we can then >> [clears throat] >> from that progress to improve the situation for everybody. Right, we can't just throw our hands up and say, "Okay, well, you there's so many different perspectives on the world out there. How do we adjudicate them? How do we decide which approach is is better?"

[00:21:24]Uh and there but there are ways of making those judgments, you know? And the more the better more educated one is about, you know, the realities of the world in an empirical sense, too.

[00:21:37]Right? That's absolutely vital. I mean, if you're if you're not if you're not if you're indifferent to the material world, to empirical analysis, to what the facts indicate about any particular problem that we're trying to tackle.

[00:21:52]If you're indifferent to that, and you're simply falling back on a kind of faith-based mode of thinking, right? That, you know, our way of life is the best of all ways of life. This is the best of all possible worlds. We can't possibly conceive of, you know, making a great leap forward into a better world.

[00:22:13]Uh these are essentially paralyzing notions.

[00:22:17]The [clears throat] kind of skepticisms that are are rife in our society at this time.

[00:22:22]I mean, it's understandable because there is a lot of misinformation being circulated. That's true. So, you do have to be on guard that the information that you're taking in Um Tim Tim's I think specializes in understanding the Oxford School of Economics. And maybe the School of Economics refuses to look at any empirical facts of reality. It considers it works everything out from the the logic that it adopts from a few premises, which is exactly the opposite, I think, of what we're trying to argue is the way to go forward here.

[00:22:53]Mhm. Mhm. Uh no, you're you're quite right. They often um praxeology, right? To use Ludwig von Mises' term. Uh It's all about how how people should should act in the abstract and so forth. And yeah, they they definitely don't necessarily interact with reality or they continue to say the same things.

[00:23:14]Despite reputations like the disaster in Argentina these days due to me there, right?

[00:23:20]Um But yeah, I I look at not so much as an economist as a sociologist and reasons that are leading people to it.

[00:23:30]The primary reason is what you study. In my opinion, falling profits and the accumulation drives down profits. They would frame accumulation as you know, development of zombie companies and malinvestments, but aside from this narrow >> use any empirical evidence to justify their position.

[00:23:47]>> Well, exactly, right? And it's just at a logical level just to stay on their level, anyone could see that competition produces winners and losers. You you look at a sports league, the worst team in the EPL is still a great bunch of soccer players, right?

[00:24:02]The guys that lose the Super Bowl are great American football players. And where is this thought in in their theory? It's absent, but when you confront folks who who adhere to this, who endorse the Austrian school, um what I typically find is not neither empirical evidence nor nor uh nor even a a good rationalistic argument. It's it's basically a refusal and a blind faith fideism as Mises would say in in the system itself, which is odd because in the next breath they'll they'll make criticisms that a century ago might have been in the mouth of of socialists, right? About uh unemployment, about widening inequality and so forth. And uh they'll It's it's an odd combination. So I I see the Austrian school I know we're getting a little far away from the book right now, but I see the Austrian school as on the one hand a product of falling profits, accumulation, over accumulation.

[00:24:59]On the other hand, the sociological factors are are really my focus, so >> [clears throat] >> I Now, in your book, to summarize, you say that perhaps the most important uh aspect of critical critical reasoning, and what it leads you to, is to a what you was called scientific socialism by Engels and >> [clears throat] >> in particular, but also Marx.

[00:25:23]Uh Why is that come the most important factor that you've you bring out in your book as being important to us understanding the nature of critical reasoning?

[00:25:40]Well, I think the way we put it in the book uh more specifically is to say that scientific socialism and also historical materialism are really the uh um height in a certain sense of critical dialectical reasoning.

[00:26:00]There are other examples of critical dialectical reasonings reasoning historically, certainly in philosophical circles, but uh the materialist dialectic is something that was of course uniquely developed by uh a few great thinkers of the 19th century, mainly Marx and Engels, but also I would add to that list Joseph Dietzgen as well, whom we quote a couple of times in the book as well.

[00:26:28]German artisan um philosopher who was very active in the both the first and second Internationals.

[00:26:36]Um and you know, Marx and at one point called Dietzgen our philosopher. I don't think he wanted to be called the philosopher of the movement.

[00:26:46]>> [laughter] >> Cuz he kind of had a disdain for philosophy as he I didn't know about Dietzgen. That's very interesting. Yeah.

[00:26:53]But uh yeah, at a congress uh of the First International where where Marx was speaking, he actually gave a shout-out to Joseph Dietzgen indicating that yeah, we love what you're saying, you know, we love your how you're dealing with a lot of the great philosophical questions. And of course, we know Marx himself didn't address a lot of a lot of those questions directly. He left that to Engels. Mhm.

[00:27:16]>> [clears throat] >> Um most of his philosophical writings were from his youth and they're critiques of various philosophical systems. He promised to develop a short kind of course or uh work on on dialectics, materialist dialectics, but he never got around to it.

[00:27:34]He never got around to doing a lot of things he wanted to do, [laughter] unfortunately.

[00:27:38]But yeah, so yeah, we do see of course historical materialism and scientific socialism as being sort of the apex, the the height of the critical dialectical reasoning enterprise and the best examples of it.

[00:27:53]Um but we also don't want to to be very honest, we don't want to raise the red flag too off too early in the book. We want to kind of draw people in uh to uh a number of other kinds of concepts first to see their limitations, to see that for example, the limitations of formal logic which Tim described I think very well.

[00:28:14]Um and also the the need to combat um blind faith as sort of the foundation for trying to solve problems or trying to understand the world.

[00:28:29]Uh fidiistic approaches.

[00:28:32]Um which are not just to be found in the religious domain, but can be found in contemporary journalism.

[00:28:40]Uh even in the social sciences and humanities, certain things simply are taken for granted.

[00:28:45]And they're accepted as unchallengeable truths that one proceeds from.

[00:28:51]These are the premises that lead to conclusions that are wrong.

[00:28:57]Um but they appear to be very logical people accept you know, the premises.

[00:29:02]>> Human nature is one, isn't it? Human nature. Well, that is one, certainly.

[00:29:06]Yes. And human nature man man man, not usually woman apparently, but man is selfish and compete and will do each other in and that's the nature of of humanity. Can't be changed. It's eternal.

[00:29:23]It's in our DNA to use the phrase.

[00:29:27]You know, we also apply this to some economic questions. We tackle a number of questions of interest to people who are who are concerned with political economy.

[00:29:37]Uh the theory of imperialism, for example, uh citing your work among others.

[00:29:43]Um but also uh the theory of value.

[00:29:46]Hm. And um what causes crises under capitalism.

[00:29:52]You know, it's one thing Ken Mayers said something earlier that I think is very important to emphasize and that is that we are not of the view that that that we have a monopoly on all knowledge or all truth. We do We don't take that position simply because we have this this methodology at our disposal and I think we're pretty good at applying it.

[00:30:13]Doesn't mean we're necessarily going to be arriving at the correct conclusions.

[00:30:17]There are no methods, logical methods at least, that are going to lead indubitably to the objective truth on a particular subject.

[00:30:25]So, one can learn from other schools of thought. You can even learn from the the Austrian school.

[00:30:32]>> [laughter] >> In some ways the Austrian school is less blind to certain facts about the operations of the capitalist system than the Keynesians are. They accept crises are an inevitable in a way. Exactly.

[00:30:44]Exactly. And they they they see nothing wrong with that.

[00:30:46]>> [laughter] >> Whereas the Keynesians say, "Oh, we've got it. It's a necessity.

[00:30:51]All right. We're going to moderate them.

[00:30:52]We have we found the mechanisms whereby we can attenuate these crisis tendencies of the capitalist system.

[00:30:58]You know, and you know, people like von Hayek and and Friedman and so on come along and say, "No, you're just sort of postponing things." And in a certain sense, even Keynes agreed with that, right?

[00:31:09]>> [laughter] >> And you know, what was his famous expression about we don't live in the long run or something like that. So, we don't have to worry about the consequences of a growing, you know, debt this [laughter] that In the long run, we're all dead.

[00:31:26]Yeah, in the long run, we're all dead.

[00:31:27]That's exactly the way it is. Exactly.

[00:31:29]Henry Hazlitt had a nice not so pithy comeback. He had a nice comeback where he says, "The the long run is constantly also happening." That the short run is the short run, you know, so Uh >> There's a short terms.

[00:31:41]>> [laughter] >> That's that's actually more pithy than what Hazlitt said. Yeah, that's quite good. And um Yeah.

[00:31:48]So, guys, okay. So, thinking systematic.

[00:31:51]So, you've got couple of minutes now.

[00:31:55]Convince the reader or the potential reader what they should be looking for and why they should read this book.

[00:32:01]You've got Both of you have a quick minute or so.

[00:32:04]Okay, I'll go first, Murray. I'll let you gather your thoughts for a moment. I I guess what I would say the strength of Marxist thought in general and we try to bring this out in our book is is that Marx shows you how to connect the dots from various realms of society to one another.

[00:32:19]We know that Marx is a materialist. He's a monist. So, all of the elements of the world are related to one another. And what we often fail to do as a contemporary society, I mean, what contemporary society often fails to do is get out of our little niches and make broader connections. Marx was all about these broader connections and we try to encourage people to do that to see how something like well obviously economics connects to other things or to see how something like fidiistic or religious or simply faith-based thinking was we were talking about the Austrian school and their faith-based thinking how it is in that realm and because people become accustomed to it in various realms they apply it to new realms and it limits their thinking rather than allowing them to think more critically, more open-mindedly and so forth. And Murray, I'll pass it over to you.

[00:33:13]Okay, I just want Yeah, by way of concluding I just want to mention that we started to divide the book into three main sections. The first section is called thinking systematics and that's where where we kind of elaborate on our basic methodological approaches, critiques of other other forms of problem-solving and so on.

[00:33:34]Um and providing a little bit of a brief history of philosophy in the process.

[00:33:40]The second section is called taking the social seriously.

[00:33:45]And that's really what I want to sort of emphasize which hasn't been emphasized so far in in our discussion.

[00:33:52]Thank you. And that is that you know we are we are implacably opposed both of us, Tim and I, to dualism which is very very common in the social sciences and humanities today. It's not necessarily that all that influential any longer in philosophical circles, by the way.

[00:34:12]And not just I'm not just talking about Marxist philosophical circles, but most modern philosophers reject dualism.

[00:34:21]But it's rife in the social sciences and in the humanities.

[00:34:27]And we offer an explanation for that.

[00:34:30]The reason why dualism is so popular is that it is promoted by very powerful forces in our society which are trying systematically to to misdirect people away from any kind of serious analysis of the social.

[00:34:46]So all solutions to every problem have to be either of a natural scientific or technological character on the one hand or they have to involve simply a change in people's thinking, their subjectivity, their values, their their morals, their attitudes towards things, their life.

[00:35:05]>> I'm going to have to interrupt you because we I've used up my time. So um Oh, okay. But but we will definitely um