The Social Reformer and the Demon in Democracy

<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>00:01</time>
<p>Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, Shorts. There's no co host on these Shorts episodes. We have extended the time on these shorter episodes from five to six minutes to fifteen to twenty minutes for this season. This is so that these Shorts can serve as introductory episodes released ahead of our weekly longer form episodes.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>00:31</time>
<p>But don't worry, I will still let you know my observations, ideas, thoughts or rants about the literature, philosophy, psychology, and even the theology of leadership. Particularly as we prepare for the restoration of leadership and leadership principles during the next historical high in America. Why these episodes? Well, because listening to me talk about leadership for now around fifteen-twenty is still better than reading and trying to understand yet another business book. Even that business book that you bought with that famous person's name as the author, but you haven't applied any of the principles from that book to your leadership practices, at least not yet.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>01:22</time>
<p>God save us from the tender mercies of the social reformer. The person who views people and their behaviors in the world and finds them to be abhorrent or not in line with his or her personal vision of how those folks should act eventually shrouds his desire for control of individuals in the veil of the social reformer. Such a person is not is not, I say, a pragmatist. He does not want to merely, quote unquote, do what works. He finds the solutions and trade offs presented to him by people in the past to be wanting.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>02:02</time>
<p>He seeks to remake the world in the image of his feelings right now. And overwhelmingly, the types of people who are social reformers wind up in entertainment, media, the creative arts, journalism, and, of course, these days in our time, politics and government. The mindset of the social reformer is that he, and sadly, ladies, it is almost always a he, cannot reform the people around himself that are one degree away from himself to any degree. So, of course, he must reform the overall society by any means necessary. This ideation, this personalized ideation of getting to utopia is littered with the ideas, the failed ideas of thinkers, revolutionaries, anarchists, and, of course, in our time, terrorists.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>03:02</time>
<p>The Islamicists and the socialists carry the exact same DNA. The anarcho libertarian and the Marxist radical overlap, not necessarily in ideology, but in core temperament. The desire to rule and the overwhelming need to be loved while also being worshipped by people considered to be inferiors in social class, status, intelligence, or even in wealth drives the social performer ruthlessly to ever greater heights of personal frustration as they wrestle with the demon that they cannot defeat ever that lives all the way down in the basement of democracy. So thus, we turn to our author this week, the gentleman who wrote the book that we are going to be covering in the podcast episode this week, Upton Sinclair, the author of our book, oil. Upton Sinclair, born 09/20/1878 and died 11/25/1968, was an American author, muckraker journalist, and a political activist.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>04:27</time>
<p>He was also the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. More on that later. Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Upton Beale Sinclair senior and Priscilla Hardin Sinclair. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism, consistently shadowed his son's childhood and, of course, pushed his son towards vegetarianism and asceticism in all manner of behaviors. His mother, Priscilla Harden Sinclair, was a strict Episcopalian who disliked alcohol, tea, and coffee.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>05:07</time>
<p>And if you think this is going to be a problem, well, you're right. His mother's family was very affluent. Her parents were very prosperous in Baltimore, and her sister married a millionaire. Upton's father, however, was from a highly respected family in the South, but the family was financially ruined by the civil war, the end of slavery causing disruptions of the labor system during the Reconstruction era, and extended agricultural depression, which caused his father's family to decline. Thus, the alcoholism, and eventually when Siclair was a teenager, his father wound up selling shoes.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>05:51</time>
<p>Imagine the tensions in that marriage. An autodidact, who began reading books at the age of five. Sinclair started public school late at the age of 10, but by the age of 14, he had caught up, and he had entered the City College of New York and had begun his life's passion. He had begun writing. Through the writing of jokes, dime novels, and magazine articles in Boys Weekly and Pulp magazines, he was able to pay for his tuition to the City College of New York.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>06:25</time>
<p>Finding his groove and his talent, he was on his way. By the way, he made so much money writing and had such a precocious talent writing that by the age 17, he was able to afford a house for his mother and his father. During the course of Upton Sinclair's career, he wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. And in opposition to his mother's influence and wealth, he turned his talents, his public talents anyway, away from lauding and celebrating the American dream, the rising up by your bootstraps kind of thing that he himself had done. And instead, he turned his talents to socially reforming what he perceived, I'm sure, as an American nightmare.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>07:24</time>
<p>His quote here is illustrative. By the way, Al Gore used this exact same quote, in his biography or not biography. I'm sorry. His, his climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth, based on his book, An Inconvenient Truth. And there is no more or no greater a social reformer in our postmodern era around the myth of climate change than Al Gore.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>07:53</time>
<p>And I quote, the American people will take socialism, but they won't take the label, close quote, from Upton Sinclair. By the way, Sinclair proved to be correct. He was active during a time in America when socialism, particularly democratic socialism, and leaning into communism was seen as the correct way to, ameliorate and to balance out the great sins of the capitalist, not only robber barons, but also all of their subsequent ilk post World War one. In that interwar era between World War one and World War two, the socialists did win the argument. They just won it using the Democratic Party, and they won it through the election primarily of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who a president who did more to advance the socialist agenda in The United States than any other president in twin in the twentieth century other than LBJ.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>09:12</time>
<p>Back to Sinclair for just a moment. Sinclair's work was well known and popular during the first half of the twentieth century, but like most social reformers, his work reads from the jungle to oil and various books in between as an anachronism of its time. So even though he was popular in the first half of the twentieth century, his work fell out of popularity as the century continued to advance. Remember I mentioned the California governor thing. Yeah.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>09:43</time>
<p>He ran for governor in 1934 on the socialist ticket. And as a result of running on I'm not you're not not on the socialist ticket, on the democratic ticket. And as a result of running on the democratic ticket, he was divested of being in the Socialist Party. By the way, he was opposed by many of the folks in Hollywood who were in the film industry. And later on, he blamed his loss, for governor on the machinations in smoke filled rooms of such individuals.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>10:20</time>
<p>But there was gonna be a consolation prize for Upton Sinclair as there always is for the social reformer. He won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and, of course, later on towards the, decline in the decline and towards the end of his life, he was lauded as a major social reformer by the political left in The United States Of America and ultimately globally. By the way, man had three marriages. Okay? And, a couple of kids.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>11:16</time>
<p>So what are we to think of all this as we get ready to cover our book Oil by Upton Sinclair, a book that is the basis for was the basis for the 2007 film starring Daniel Day Lewis and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood. Well, when individuals in a free society can make a choice to either be bound by the dictates of the past and tradition or to be, quote unquote, free to, quote unquote, choose the short term path of the satiation of hedonistic appetites, what the late twentieth century and early twenty first century have shown us is that individuals will pick and they will choose. This makes their behavior unpredictable based on what they say, but not so unpredictable based on what they actually do. Past performance, it turns out, is indicative of future results many times when it comes to human behavior, particularly individual human behavior in the short term. But in the long term, in terms of history, tradition, and civilization, individuals band together in groups, and groups tend to trend towards behavior that produces optimal outcomes designed for the long term survival of the group.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>12:36</time>
<p>The social reformer, of course, knows this instinctively, though they cannot articulate it, and believes that such optimization can be jumpstarted to pass through all the hard parts, the friction and the resistance from individuals on the way to a utopian future. The skeptic, and I am a skeptic, knows that there is no jump starting anything and that the friction, the resistance, and the hard parts, from individuals that eventually drive the collective crazy are baked in to human nature, and they cannot be voted out. They cannot be suppressed away or even hedonistically soothed for a long time. This fact of human nature, this fact of it not being able to be either narcotized away, algorithmized away, or satiated away, or even repressed away, redirected away, or just killed. This fact of human nature, I believe, fundamentally angers the social reformer from Charles Dickens to Upton Sinclair and from Karl Marx to Al Gore.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>14:00</time>
<p>The dedicated controller of other people's behaviors because of whatever challenges and arguments they can't win in their own lives against the people closest to them drive this anger. I'm not the first person to point this out. If you read Paul Johnson's work, on this, the historian Paul Johnson's work on this, he wrote a a great book called Modern Times where he looked at the actual personal behavior of folks like, well, not just folks, social reformers like Rousseau and Marx and others, if you look at their personal lives, if you look at and look beyond the writing of the utopian words and the idealistic visions for the future, you see men who cannot even control their own lives. This fact of human nature, this, dare I say, human sin, to use a very old word, is the demon in the basement. It is the one that social reformers wrestle with, and it defeats all the attempts of reformers to make a new man through democracy, but also through totalitarianism, fascism, communism, and, of course, Upton Sinclair's favorite flavor of control, socialism.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>15:31</time>
<p>Of course, to defeat such a demon, the social reformer would have to believe that there is a transcendent god at the opposite end at the top of the hierarchical ordering of the world because it all can't just be in the basement. Right? And the social reformer would have to bend the knee in humility to that god and acknowledge their own limitations. Sing me a song, o muse, of the rage against god of the Social Reformer. And well, that's it for me.</p>
<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>16:33</time>
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<cite>Jesan Sorrells:</cite>
<time>17:07</time>
<p>And thank you for your support.</p>