This was a great conversation that is absolutely worth the ~100-minute running time. Catherine eloquently and brashly discusses a lot of the topics and themes that she presents in her broadside against the PMC (Professional Managerial Class). I've included a bunch of cleaned-up transcription from the video. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia6m3pIIS2k" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Ia6m3pIIS2k" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Doomscroll / Joshua Citarella" caption="Catherine Liu: Trauma, Virtue and Liberal Elites"> At about <b>12:00</b>, Catherine says, <bq>I was like what are you doing girl? Like, how are you like assimilating your sexual assault, which is really bad a private thing---you haven't even told members of your family and your closest friends---and this political situation? Like, why are you doing this? And I realize young people, who are media-savvy in a certain way---and I admired her political instincts always---are understanding, it's like clickbait; it's like drawing you in. [...] What I would say is it's almost a pass key to authenticity, that you get when you say 'this has happened to me.' When I saw this---I've had a pretty like crazy childhood---and I when I saw this and I saw the look on her face, I was like, one: you really did go through something; and two: you should not be doing this on Instagram Live. It does not help you therapeutically. If I were a Mom, I'd be like 'what are you doing?' you know? I mean, she's fine; she survived it. But <b>I think that there's a kind of online, massive, social-media convention about leveraging and instrumentalizing your suffering to accentuate your brand.</b> I hate to be so crude about it but that's what it has become. And one of the things about all of these women---Winfrey, AOC---is they say 'I'm telling my story so that other women don't feel alone.' And they say 'me too' ... like this can become a movement and this can be healing. You know what? <b>Telling your story as a billionaire, in Oprah's case, does not heal anybody.</b> But you're selling a narrative of trauma and recovery. Where does actual recovery take place? Maybe actually in real life suffering, not through an app, not through broadcast. The real hard work of therapy---that fewer and fewer people want to do or and fewer and fewer therapists know how to do [...]</bq> At about <b>23:30</b>, they say, <bq><b>Joshua:</b> There also seems to be a rising class resentment towards the PMC, particularly among working people---but kind of from everyone---and to certain degree I don't blame them. I don't like people who are richer than me. Like, I want their stuff, too. <b>Catherine:</b> Who are bossy. Who are telling you that they're better people than you. <b>Joshua:</b> Telling you how to behave, yeah. And there's a real cultural resentment of this professed moral superiority and that's in the title of your book even---<i>Virtue hoarders</i>---why do they feel the need to have this moral superiority? Why are they hoarding The virtue? what value does that give to them on a really primitive, psychological basis? <b>Catherine:</b> <b>I think it's to disguise the guilt about how much better their lives are than the working class</b>, and the divergence between the lives that you can have you know in a coastal-elite environment and the lives of the great majority of Americans, who are working class who live in the smaller cities and the rural areas. They've been basically abandoned by the public institutions that we live in. [...] So it sucks. It sucks, this inequality. But, if you're a liberal PMC person, you're like, no, you want like, equity, right? You want everything to be rationalized and you want to stop suffering, you know, they're always like, 'raise awareness of suffering,' 'help people,' and so <b>they have this veneer of wanting to help people, but it's very clear that [...] they're protecting their privileges at every single level and how do you justify having such a good life when most Americans are really suffering?</b> You have to put a moral patina on it and this is a very, very Protestant thing. [...] I think Calvin and then John Kelvin and Benjamin Franklin can all be the authors of is this idea: that <b>God rewards the industrious and the virtuous, so if we have more wealth, it's because we work harder and we're more virtuous---and that's how the PMC acts.</b></bq> <bq>[...] look at their <b>environmentalism: it's all consumption-based; it's not production-based.</b></bq> At <b>26:44</b>, Catherine says, <bq>The layers of administrative BS, that the average American worker who works in a larger organization has to deal with now, has just expanded exponentially. <b>Even as your work gets shittier, your working conditions get shittier---maybe you're not getting your raises---the HR-like language of liberal sort of self-promotion as enlightened, this is just proliferating in ways that we could not imagine.</b> Even your boss---was always bad but alien---but now your boss wants to care about you. And that's like a different level of like invasion, and evil. Your boss wants to change the way you think about everything.</bq> At <b>46:10</b>, Catherine says, <bq>How do we take down Blackstone? It's very complicated. I don't think the young callow leftist today, the average, even understands the complexity of capitalism and how it needs to be dismantled. So, I think there's actually a lot of boiling discontent among the working classes, but how are we going to translate that into execution, into governmentality. We've been so enamored with anarchism and our bullshit, you know, like, <b>larping politics, that we're like 'yeah let's burn it down! Defund the police.' Like what do you do the day after? We don't have anyone ready for the day after. Because we don't respect work, actually. The left doesn't respect work. It's like a deskilled revolutionary.</b> [...] So, we go back to these professors who have retreated into the institutions and one thing that I would say that what I do agree with you on in terms of the assimilation into their own self-interest is <b>they're really happy about culture wars because it makes them feel really important.</b></bq> At <b>53:00</b>, she says, <bq>This goes back to what I was going to say about JD Vance and Josh Hawley: is that there's enough rural history in their backgrounds or wherever they live to say we just need to give American families that kind of independence again, like homeschooling, charter schools, not help them, but reinvigorate the work ethic. And that the government programs have taken away people's ideas of autonomy and that that is what is destroying the working class. <b>That's actually literally what JD Vance is saying: like, social programs make people lazy and drug-addled. Not the collapse of the industrial economy, or the dumping of 30 million oxycontin pills in West Virginia, Ohio, and Appalachia.</b> No, it's actually dependency. We have a phobia about dependency that really, turned dialectically in a positive way, would be about strengthening independence of mind. But <b>the more these people try to do away with industrialization and go back to this sort of autarkic yeoman ideal, the more they are actually kneeling at the feet of people like Peter Thiel because they're actually captured by the right-wing corporate capitalist.</b> <b>And those right-wing corporate capitalists, they're libertarians.</b> Like this is the heart of American libertarianism. It's like, no government, no dependency, everyone gets their little whatever, their little plot of land, and then you can turn it into Microsoft, or you can, you know, lose it all at the casino. But <b>it's your activity, it's your choice, it's your individual responsibility.</b> So, I'm saying that they come from this historically positive moment, that they've turned into a kind of corruptive version of a kind of nostalgic world, and they're not actually facing the realities of industrial capitalism, because we are so codependent. We're codependent on each other, codependent and interconnected in ways that the yeoman farmer never was. Let's just think about the Interstate Highway Program. Is every libertarian going to build their own highway? No. This is a giant federal project, but <b>when you were a yeoman farmer, you cleared like enough of your forest, so you could get connected to the road of the town, like you made your own road. Like doing your own research, that day is gone.</b></bq> At <b>55:40</b>, she says, <bq><b>The Chinese elites---the Chinese PMC---they're so used to having people do everything for them---South Asians and India, too---like, your cook, your driver, there's just so many people, what we call low-wage people, and you---Latin American elites are the same way---it's so freaking corrupting.</b> I'm like, please, I just want to do my own thing. Like, I'll go shop and like carry my bags, and these are my small American gestures like I'm an autarkic human farmer, I don't want you to carry my bags. I know it's, but it makes me not Chinese, right? People are like, oh just call a driver. I'm like, I can rent a car; I'll drive myself. I know how to drive. But <b>this kind of like, farming out to other people, this sense of like other people do my labor for me so I can think clearly, that is very feudal and aristocratic.</b> And we were against that. That's what makes America powerful, great, speaking of that's what makes America great. Again. So <b>let's revive some of that like deep radical egalitarianism.</b></bq> At <b>01:20:30</b>, <bq><b>Catherine:</b> <b>Mellon supports this kind of like environmental humanities that rebrands nature writing and even landscape painting into environmental art. And environmental humanities. They love that stuff.</b> It's like you can't just be someone who's like doing landscape painting or you can't be someone who's like doing nature writing. Now you're like involved in the anthropocene. I mean, I can laugh and be like really bitter about it, but these are thought leaders. So this is why people might be nostalgic for monarchism, because actually Mellon is king of the humanities. They're just pretending to be a liberal quasi-democratic organization with a board of directors, whatever. And you know, who else is like this? The MacArthur Foundation. <b>The MacArthur prize is---they're trying to dictate the cultural direction and they often do and it's a cabal. So I think the monarchist might be like, let's just make the cabal institutionalized, with crowns and rights and ritual.</b> <b>Joshua:</b> literally, that's what they say is: let's just formalize it. It already works like this, so let's just let's just make it official. <img attachment="catherine_liu.jpg" align="right" caption="Catherine Liu"><b>Catherine:</b> Maybe I'm a monarchist. <b>Catherine:</b> Nobody will come out and say what I've said about Mellon because everyone's hoping to get a Mellon grant, so I'm just going to say it right now. <b>The people in the professoriat right now, if you want to ascend to higher rank, like, in the court of Mellon, you have to like genuflect, you have to conform to what their program is</b>, you have to look at how they're configuring the humanities and the arts... <b>Joshua:</b> You have to use the language of the court <b>Catherine:</b> You have to use their language of the court, so this is a court society. And it is so feudal because power has been---and money and capital is concentrated so deeply in One Foundation, right? There are other competing foundations maybe, but none can touch the Mellon at this point. So oftentimes, <b>I feel like people in my class, who have tenure and you know who should be exercising academic freedom, they're taking the knee for Mellon.</b> They may not consciously know this, but there's---in the early oughts, it was transnationalism, it's you know, they're key words that you have to shape your research---and I don't want to be like too cold-war paranoid but <b>it is totally anti-marxist, anti-materialist. Do not talk about labor; talk about identity.</b> [...] I have the sense of my class as <b>a class that's supplicant to the capitalist class stepping on the heads of the working class even as we pretend to be like liberal caring people.</b></bq>