Ray might also be called an Ilichian socialist.
It's worth mentioning that this term is interchangeable with 'Illichian-Kropotkian anarchist'.
01:46:12
Haidut: Let me ask the question which Danny didn't, but it's right there, somebody asked, is Ray Peat a communist? And I know it's a very loaded word...
Danny Roddy: ...well I thought you answered it already, that's why I didn't ask it.
Haidut: ...no there was another one,
whether he's a Social Anarchist but somebody asked directly is Ray Peat a Communist? There you go.
RP: I'm not sure what the difference is, if you define either of them very thoughtfully, there's not really any difference, you want to get rid of tyranny and you want to have cooperation, and the idea of communism essentially goes back to Christianity as the main source of those ideas and it has developed a lot of historical confusion around it, but the christian beliefs are at base, you could say that they're predominantly communistic.
Haidut: Didn't William James say say that Christ was a communist or something along those lines?
RP: A lot of people have, yeah, because of the his attitude towards money changers and the common person, even the outcasts of the system, he was definitely a bottom-up person and you can call that anarchism or communism either way.
Haidut: Do you think it's possible to have Christianity without the involvement of the church and by the church i specifically mean corrupt structures like the Vatican with their history of child abuse and financial machinations and supporting the Nazis and everything else?
RP: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting books on Christianity was Wilhelm Reich's book the murder of Christ and he gets much of his guidance from the new testament.
01:29:00
Danny Roddy: Okay, does Ray identify himself as a social anarchist
in the sense of excluding rent sinking, forming worker cooperatives, freeing the individual from authority, collectivism, direct democracy, mutual aid, et cetera?
RP: No, I think organization —if it's allowed to develop... — the systems have been very quick to kill any incipient organization, but to the extent that they can spontaneously come into existence you'll have consumers, cooperatives and producers cooperatives and the organization will be what suits the people on the ground-level but if that's allowed to develop, it will develop and they will find the best way for these ground-level cooperative organizations to cooperate on a larger and larger scale, so I think that's a natural course of development. If they could... if some of these spontaneous cooperative groups could somehow take over the state then you'd have the problem of maybe the consumers having more control than the producers but if it goes up from the ground up you're going to have to solve the problems of each level of organization as they come about so I don't think there's any any problem with evolving even a world level state as long as it's based on these spontaneous surface level.
Haidut: Is there any truth to... I mean the way it at least looks to me, is that the social structure in the political structure are in a sense a metabolite of the health of the people that are building them so if the if the people are relatively healthy they can thrive under a variety of systems without them being exploitative and you know and degenerating into the worst that a particular system has to offer,
so instead of worrying about a specific political system, wouldn't be the most prudent thing would be to just sort of like optimize or maximize individual health and then see what kind of structure emerges from there?
RP: Yeah, because different cultures, for example military-oriented cultures are... there's evidence that they are very tightly connected with child abuse and body mutilation and repression of sexuality in in children,
those things are closely tied with sadistic group policies and sadistic war-making —head chopping and so on— and those... you don't want one of those societies to take over a larger government, it has to be a basically indulgent social organization that doesn't oppress its own children.
Haidut: But in a group of healthy people that sort of society wouldn't form to start with, my concern is that as soon as we say 'oh we should prevent that sort of culture taking over', and then establishing itself, then, the only way to fight such a vicious thing, is through basically other kinds of violence which ultimately tends to be kind of self-defeating, because if you continue this conflict long enough even the good peaceful culture will eventually militarize itself, through this constant conflict that has been going on so it seems to me that the only way to ensure a sort of like semi-stable existence of a large group of people is make sure that as many of them are as healthy as possible and then a natural or naturally non-exploitative order should arise.
RP: Yeah, the the problem is that an urge to conquer tends to lead to conquest, and that involves such things as being hostile, outline good food for example, the conquest can take the form of establishing a medical system that doesn't allow preventive methods, says everything has to be focused on killing the pathogens, cutting out the defects and so on,
so the society that asserts the importance of being healthy is itself in danger of offending the sadistic cultures and stimulating oppression from them.
Haidut: So I guess there is some some truth to the saying that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom even for healthy people.
RP: I think so. Until two or three generations you might outgrow the sadistic tendencies that have been inculcated for so long.