Reporter: You look very youthful.

Bunge: That's because I avoid alcohol, tobacco, and postmodernism.

Just finished watching "My Zinc Bed." Recommended. It's a filming of an intelligent stage play by David Hare. About addiction, communism and capitalism. Two of the main characters are addicts. The third is a communist and a capitalist at the same time. That's one thing I liked about this. It knows that economics is not determinative, that it's not destiny as Marxians like to think. We are not machines, and humans are far more flexible and dynamic than machines currently are.

But the more important questions raised are about addiction, desire and creativity, for which no simple answers are offered. Hare never bored me, either, and I continually wanted to see what his intelligent protagonists would say next. (Rather than what they would do next. No "action sequences", thank goodness.)

It's sad, really. Marx wanted only good things for humanity, yet look what happened. Not much different from Jesus, I guess, who was also probably a good man. But scuzzy pols and idealogues always abuse whatever they touch. Nowadays people concerned about the humanization of capitalists resort less to Marxian ideas than to the "Austrian School". I have Ludwig von Mises' magnum opus, , on tape. What I've listened to is very original and fascinating. At first blush it sounds very Rosenfelsian to me. (Eventually, some Rosenfelsian ought to find out.) Sadly, I haven't had time to listen to all the tapes. Mises shares with Rosenfels the belief that a comprehensive and reliable framework for all knowledge about human nature is still possible. You'd think this idea would be common sense by now, but deconstructionists would laugh if you tried to explain it to them. It's much more fun to keep your head up your ass and sell farts.

But Mises doesn't buy many other popular notions either, such as logical positivism. Most lab coats are still positivist and don't even know it. Most of them are mere tools of the evil sort of capitalists, like pharmas, and they don't seem to know that either. Not a very knowledgable bunch, these tools.

The problem with logical positivists is that they claim to defend the importance of the so-called "scientific method" in all enquiries, but somehow forget to use it in their own. Since their theories aren't falsifiable, they're ultimately speculation, not science, or at best philosophy. These are very educated and progressive thinkers, of course, and their quest is honorable. But their claim to have proven the universal applicability of the "scientific method" is wishful thinking. Do you need the "scientific method" to discover whether, if you wake up tomorrow, you're still alive?

It's taken me 40 years to understand why most people don't intuitively grasp the importance of our ongoing search for a science of human nature. I've had to get used to the fact that even most intellectuals are actually unspeakably ignorant. Not merely eggheaded, but pigheaded.

Paul always knew that eggheads were the wrong audience for his stuff. That's why he romanticized the ordinary masses. Sadly for the both of us, we learned that ordinary masses have no interest in the history of ideas. That's why the Ninth Street Center collapsed only a few years after he left us. They enjoyed hanging around a great thinker but, despite their pretension, had no intention of actually learning anything from him. He once told me that they were just "feathering their own nests" and that I was the only one even remotely interested in the history of ideas or in what he called "objective power".

Ordinary people do have a legitimate interest in being psychologically healthy, but they're happy to parrot whatever they're told by shrinks — which makes me think that all they really want is to believe that someone, somewhere has figured out their problem, and that they aren't unique and alone. Shrinks are as valuable as snake oil. Only recently have ordinary people started consciously to get psychological support from peers in social networks. Paul loved helping the Center gang, as I did, but they never suspected that his approach was anything but orthodox psychiatry with one tiny difference: he liked gay people.

Maybe it would help if someone made a glowing documentary about Paul. Of course it would. It would take too much falsification and romanticization for me to be involved in such a project with anything like a clear conscience, but I wouldn't strenuously object if this was all some well-meaning film maker could come up with — any more than Philip Pullman objected to the simplifications in the movie version of "The Golden Compass". All public intellectuals learn to stroke their admirers no matter what they think of them. Just look how they behave at book signings. It's a compromise, yes, but no more damaging I think than giving a decent tip to a waiter you don't like. We have to find ways of being generous with all sorts of people in this world, otherwise people will never feel at home with cosmopolitan centers, open borders, and free speech.

Paul's ultimate legacy, if everything goes right, will be that these ideas will have become the "common sense" of this world and the man himself will be forgotten. Even in 1966 when I read his first two books I knew that no one would ever remember his introductory statements. "Why is he repeating all this utterly obvious stuff?", I wondered. But he just wasn't taking any chances about being misunderstood. And hopefully, in a few hundred years, all the rest of Rosenfels will have become "utterly obvious stuff" too. Ordinary people have no need to read Bohr or Einstein, after all. Kids just turn on their cell phones and "express themselves". They neither know nor care that only after the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics had been established could our vast electronics industry take off, or that only after special and general relativity both had become the common property of physicists everywhere could their beloved GPS devices come to be. And there will always be the latest Laura Bush to remind them that, "Well, evolution is just a theory, after all. And stem cell research? It's obvious these scientists don't know what they're talking about." But smart people, even eggheads, will know who Paul was and marvel — for at least 5,000 years.

And kids will learn from experience as they always do, not from Rosenfels, and of course not their parents. That's why I like cultural exchange programs, such as when families from different countries swap their kids for a year so they can be safe while they're going to a foreign college. They learn more from their adopting family than from any formal education. Kibbutz living was a good idea, but it wasn't multi-cultural enough. Post-modernists now place quotation marks around words like 'reality,' insisting that the old notion of objective knowledge has become obsolete. Multiculturalists are for new curriculums not on the basis of factual accuracy but on the basis of 'self-esteem.' Truth and knowledge replaced by opinion, perception, credibility. Spin doctors use pseudo-events and photo-ops to market virtual reality of versions of themselves to the public. To the post-modernists the critic counts, not the author.

— Alfred Kazin, 1993

Smart people will always be curious about the origin of the great discoveries. That's what the Great Books movement was supposed to be about — until some corporate guys decided to market a set of books to people who didn't read. I heard on a radio interview recently that Great Books sets are common on eBay — all in pristine condition because no one ever read them. They sure look impressive in a bookshelf, though.

But a happy few continue to read and study these books, and even this set. When Mortimer Adler got kicked out of the academic system, he was hired to edit the Great Books series, and he is still respected by smart people. It was Mortimer who, in the 40's, gave a speech at Columbia and told these professors they were more dangerous than Nazis. Gotta love an intellectual with balls. They scare the shit out of the rest of them and make me laugh. He meant professors in the humanities, of course. Which is not to say that professors in physics are always enlightened. But is. Everyone should read . (See also .) The twits at loved it — every word — primarily because it made no sense whatever. Alan caught the bastards red-handed! And the fact that their only response was that "Sokal should be ashamed of fooling us" shows that these people will never take responsibility for their own folly. It's always the fault of someone else who "fooled" them. Guess what, guys? Smart people know the ropes and don't get caught off guard. I'm quite sure that Social Text loves frauds like Susan Sontag, Sandra Harding, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, too.

I watched a documentary about Jacques Derrida a few years ago. (Sometimes I call him Derridoodoo, which I admit is very childish of me.) It was repulsive in ways too numerous to count. His wife is a charlatan too. She's a psychoanalyst who greets her patients in a Japanese kimodo to achieve a hypnotic effect. What fun it is to seduce the gullible.

Doodyhead didn't believe in communication, which I don't mind, but he wouldn't shut up about it, which I do. He could have learned a lot from That Was The Year That Was by : Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.

Buying degrees in the social sciences is as corrupt as buying indulgences used to be. So is grade-grubbing. Only honest seeking can ever ever break through the unknown and the dogma which attempts to conceal it. The teachers of tomorrow will more likely be those few who are repulsed by universities and academic nonsense, yet haven't lost their belief in the existence of truth. This movement will originate in people who have gotten kicked out of the academic system yet keep their faith.

Just thinking about these people makes me angry. But don't worry. I've learned to handle it. I've had to deal with this crap all my life. And I'm in good company. It would be a great mistake to assume that all women in academia were nutbags, as Camille Paglia has demostrated for many years. "Quite regularly, 'my eyes glaze over' when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."

— Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy & Education, November 22, 2002.

"If you really feel, Look, it's too hard to deal with real problems, there are a lot of ways to avoid doing so. Once of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don't matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against deaing with the world as it actually is. There's plenty of that going on, including in the left. I just saw some very depressing examples of it in my trip to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. I was there to talk on international affairs. There's a very lively, civilized intellectual community, very courageous people who spent years in Nasser's jails being practically tortured to death and came out struggling. Now throughout the Third World there's a sense of great despair and hopelessness. The way it showed up there, in very educated circles with European connections, was to become immersed in the latest lunacies of Paris culture and to focus totally on those. For example, when I would give talks about current realities, even in research institutes dealing with strategic issues, participants wanted it to be translated into post-modern gibberish. For example, rather than have me talk about the details of what's going on in U.S. policy or the Middle East, where they live, which is too grubby and uninteresting, they would like to know how does modern linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text. That would really fascinate them. But not what do Israeli cabinet records show about internal planning. That's really depressing."

— Noam Chomsky, interview with David Barsamian, 1994