Austro-Libertarian Themes in Three Prague Authors: Capek, Kafka, and Hašek

0:00Okay, so these three guys, Carl Czapek, Franz Kafka, and Jaroslaw Hasek, were arguably the three most prominent, well not necessarily in their own day, at least Kafka wasn't, but nowadays, the three most prominent writers in Prague in the first half of the 20th century. They, as you can see, they all died fairly young. They all had poor health, although I think that had they all been in perfect health, it's unlikely that many of them would have lived too much past 1939, given that some nasty people came to Prague around that. So, starting off with Czapek, who was, as you see here, unhappy with the 20th century.

0:50When the Nazis came into Prague, they had a death list, or at least an arrest list, but the people arrested on the list usually ended up dead, and he was number two on the list. And they got there and said, where's Carl Schapek? And they were told he died three months ago. And so then they went after his brother, who, you know, one Schapek is as good to get as another. Here's a quote where he's talking about his unhappiness with the intellectuals in Europe at the time, most of whom were defenders of either communism or fascism, or, in some cases, both depending on convenience.

1:37None of these three thinkers I'm talking about were Austro-libertarians. None of them were Austrians, except in the trivial sense of having been born subjects to the Austrian crown. And none of them were libertarians in our sense. Hasek was an anarchist, but of the communist variety, and the other two weren't. But all three of them have, I think, things that Austro-libertarians will find insightful or enjoyable. Here's a picture of Czapik's grave that I took last time I was in Prague, and you'll notice that someone has placed a little robot at the bottom of the grave because Czapik's main claim to fame nowadays is that he was the author of this book, which was the one When they introduced the word robot, which comes from a Slavic word meaning forced labor or serf labor, this is where the word comes from.

2:36He didn't himself invent the word, his brother invented the word, but he went to his brother and said, what shall I call these? I want to call them laborators, but that sounds odd. What shall I call them? And his brother said, why not robots? He said, okay. And so this is both the first book to feature robots and the first book to feature robots Most Rebelling Against Their Human Creators, and thus, all of this comes from Shoppeck. If I had more time, I would pause to let the science fiction geeks in the audience identify each of these. A couple of them will be trickier than the others, but time marches on. Actually I don't think it's, in a way I think it's unfortunate that this is the book he's best known for because I don't think it's anything near being his best book. But nevertheless, it certainly is interesting and it works on a number of different levels I point out here ways in which it talks about anxieties of workers and anxieties of capitalists

3:31and his own anxieties about mechanization and dehumanization. This is a quote not from the play but from the short story that was sort of a prelude to the play where this isn't Choppick talking, this is the villain talking about how we need to all the workers to become sort of soulless machines. I have a hypothesis as to why he might have chosen the MRUR, so the initials K-U-K were the symbols,

4:06that was the symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Notice on this postage stamp here, the letters K-U-K there stands for Kaiserlich und Königlich, that is imperial and royal because of this dual nature of the monarchy and KUK was just everywhere all over. And if you lop off the top part of the letters of RUR, look here on the right, if you lop off the top part of the letters, see how easily you get from R between RUR and KUK. And so it's possible that he was thinking that one of the many levels on which he might have meant this is to think of, in particular, the Austrian-Carrian Empire that had just dragged the Czech people into World War I, which is something I think that all three of these authors were interested in.

4:58It's one of the things that happens in RUR, one of the terrible mistakes they make is turning all these soldiers, these robots into soldiers. But he wrote other stuff too. In a couple decades earlier, H.G. Wells had written this book called In the Days of the The Comet, in which the earth passes through the tail of a comet, and the result, the effect of the gases, is to turn everyone on earth into a socialist. And so, of course, everyone lives happily ever after. It's not one of Will's best books. Even if you like socialism, and what kind of plot is that? Earth passes through these gases, everyone becomes converted which is where the ideology in the story ends.

5:45But it was influential. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a book on a somewhat similar theme a little later. And so the Chopick writes something that I think is meant to be a parody of Well's book. The title in Czech means something like the English translation is the absolute at large. And what happens in the book is that they They discover atomic energy and they discover that what atomic energy does is it releases the divine essence that's the heart of all matter, and this divine essence is the absolute. And it has two effects, one is it suddenly makes machinery more productive, even without any people touching it, the machinery just on its own suddenly becomes productive. And second, it turns everyone into religious and altruistic enthusiasts, they all become from religious, socialistic and filled with love for their neighbors and the results are disastrous.

6:42So first here's what happens with production is so you get the factories of their own start producing masses and masses of stuff so there's this tack factory that produces these piles and piles of tacks but the problem is that there's no one has any incentive now to move stuff from where it's oversupplied to where it's undersupplied because now that everyone No one has become socialistic and altruistic, no one has any profit motive, and so there's no more entrepreneurship. And so there'll be piles and piles of goods being produced in one place, and then everyone will be desperate for the goods somewhere else, but no one has any incentive to move them from one place to another. Also, this media for overproduction hits the government printing presses. Now, he wrote this in late 1921, early 1922, so the Austrian and German hyperinflations were just beginning to get going around this time.

7:31going around this time, but they hadn't reached their really exciting levels yet, but obviously he could see what was coming. I have a massively inflated German currency at the top, and the Austrian hyperinflation didn't get quite as exciting. I have a less inflated one down there. What saves everything is because out in the rural areas these engines aren't in place, and so the effects of the absolute are less strong. and so the farmers aren't hit by this altruism and so everyone's saved from starvation by the fact that the farmers all spontaneously, without any coordination with each other, start raising their prices, led by this inner voice, as he puts it. However, the result of all this ideological enthusiasm is everyone has some sort of vision of what they want to convert the world to and if other people have a different vision then they end up fighting and so there's this massive Wars. The result of converting everyone to socialism is starvation and war.

8:34And then he has this quote that I thought was very similar to this quote from Rand, and so I put the two together. It makes these people all love mankind, but it doesn't make them actually care about the rights of any individual people. Here's another book that I think is also inspired by Wells' book, War of the Worlds. In this case, the aliens aren't from another planet. They're from our oceans. We find these intelligent newts. Initially, they are innocent victims. Human beings find these newts that are intelligent, and we exploit them and enslave them, and they rebel, and that's what the book's about. I just love in particular this quote talking about the nudes had to possess official residence permits, pay capitation taxes, deducted from their food, pay for the fences that fence them in, and so forth, in all these respects they were treated like other citizens, which is equal rights of the sort.

9:36Then here's something in the book he wrote about gardening, but in the course of writing about gardening he suddenly says, Why do we have a celebration of the holiday of labor? Why not the holiday of private property? After all, we shouldn't celebrate the work we do so much as the products it produces because the value of the laborer consists in its producing these goods, not just the laboring for its own sake. And so, I'll leave the connection with Austrian theory for you to figure out. You know, something that reminds me of Bastiat's petition of the candle makers is this baker complaining about unfair competition from Jesus because Jesus is multiplying the loaves and fishes. The baker doesn't care about the fishes because he's just a baker. He wants to multiply fish, that's fine, but not loaves. He has another short story in which Prometheus is being accused by the government for various reasons for discovering fire.

10:31First, because it's a dangerous product. Second, because it's going to make people weak and not warlike because they just want to sit and how to run the fire and be cozy rather than going off and fighting, but also this is a valuable weapon and he should have just reserved it to the government instead of opening up to everyone including foreigners and ordinary people. He has a story in which the emperor Diocletian is trying to explain why he's against Christianity since we couldn't run the government in Christian principles because how could you collect taxes? How could you have slaves? How could you have war under Christianity? Then here's a quote from Choppick that is very similar to something that Rand says. Choppick is attacking people who say that instinct is creative and spontaneous, whereas reason is sort of cold and mechanical. He says it's the other way around.

11:25According to instinct, you can only do sort of robotically what your ancestors have done, and it's actually a reason that's creative. And he also has this argument in this Noetic trilogy he wrote that what enables us to understand other people despite the fact that we can only understand things in terms of our own natures is that we're similar in nature to other people and so we understand them in virtue of being like them and he quotes this Latin phrase that means understanding like by like And these two dudes, whoever they are, had expressed a similar idea. Mises quotes it in Greek instead of Latin. But it's this idea that you understand human action with virtue of the fact that it's of the same type as your own mind.

12:15Here's just a quote where the devil is trying to tempt people into imposing their ideas of order on other people. Chopick wrote a lot on political language and sort of quasi-Arwellian concerns about how language is misused. He wrote about how if you don't recognize the government, that means you can just go and kill people. But I decided I didn't want to recognize my local bank, and so I walked in and started grabbing money and shooting the tellers that people wouldn't take that the same way. He also talks about the misuse of the word we, which is something that libertarians often talk about. Okay, on to the next figure of our three. This one needs the least introduction because although he was the least famous in his own day, he's the most famous in ours, he writes a lot about people in the grips of incomprehensible bureaucracies.

13:08And there's some debate in the literature as to whether he's talking about political stuff or whether this is really just a metaphor for the human condition, but I think it's both. I'll flip past those cartoons, it talks about the way in which rulers don't really understand anything because they're so separated from it. It talks about this machine that's supposed to instruct people by inscribing their wrongs on their flesh, but it just butchers them. I'm going to go through some of this a bit, another parallel quote from Kafka and Mises. There's a suggestion, a lot of his writings, that authority doesn't really exist, that it's just some of all of us accept it and hold this authority together by our actions.

13:54So there's this castle, it's supposed to be a source of authority, but you can never actually find it or narrow it where it is. The Great Wall of China, he says, well, there's this emperor, but we really have no emperor. Go past the cartoons. And also draws parallels with World War I. He has a story about how we don't really know what the laws are even if we have them. Third guy, Jaroslaw Hasek, he was an anarchist, seems to be an anarcho-communist, it's hard to tell because whenever his biographer starts talking about his anarchism he starts getting the vapors as you see here. He created a fake political party urging people to vote against earthquakes.

14:39and also protesting it's unfair to give innocent little dogs names like Nero and Caesar. And I was thinking of this just the other day when last weekend there was a conference at the art museum and I noticed on the menu at the cafe they had a Napoleon and something on a Kaiser roll. He was drafted in World War I, acted effected and became a Bolshevik official for a while but then when he was sent back to Prague to foment revolution he just returned to his usual lifestyle. He has a bunch of stories, here's a story that illustrates perverse economic incentives where they think that criminals

15:20would be more likely to cooperate with officials if the officials are themselves former criminals, but then the result is that everyone has incentive to become a criminal in order to be made a judge or another official. Here's the story where the criminals go on strike and so the government goes into a panic because they're not needed if there's no crime and even consider trying to pay criminal crimes and when the government starts rioting, trying to get crime to come back, the riot is itself illegal and so, hooray, crime's restored and everything's alright. The very fact that you praise the government shows, you'd be absurd to praise the government so it shows your insincerity and see a really bad person. This is rather prophetic of the Soviet era that the very fact that you use niving mentally ill as the reason we get to keep locking you up is a case where the people suspect that the ruler has turned feeble-minded, but those who claim this are arrested for defaming the

16:24ruler. But then those people are arrested for defaming the ruler by suggesting that he would hang Hang out with people who would defame him, and finally they said just leave the feeble-minded ruler in place because actually it doesn't make any difference since the government isn't really the cause of order in society. Here's about a guy who can't get back into Bohemia because he's got a silver plate in his skull and a pig's kidney transplanted so it would violate customs while he's ready to get back in. This is too complicated a story, I don't have time for it, but it's funny. Here's a guy who gets in trouble because he says you should buy these portraits to the emperor because the emperors are having such a bad time now, we're doing badly in the war. This is unpatriotic. So he says, oh, we should buy them because we're doing great in the war, and that's unpatriotic because it's making light of our losses.

17:17Here's a guy who takes down his portrait of the emperor because it's covered with fly poop, but then he's in trouble for taking it down. When he explains why he takes it down, then he gets in trouble for that because you're His most famous book, The Good Soldier's Fake, is about this soldier who pretends to be an idiot and he manages to outwit all the officials who are trying to control him by pretending to misunderstand orders or by interpreting the orders literally or doing various things. And there's another case where the very fact that he keeps shouting long live the emperor is a sign of his insanity. On the left you see a couple of places in Prague that have his picture.

18:05And then during the communist period, this dude was the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustav Husak, and he told the Czech population, stop shveking. So the idea was that they were behaving in this schvick-like way, and in fact, when the communist tanks rolled in, they would do things like give the wrong directions to the tanks, and they'd send tanks this way and that way, so the tanks would end up firing at each other, and they took down the street signs, they took down all the street signs in Prague and piled them neatly in front of the town hall, as if this was a favor. This is stopped, so I'll stop because I always do what the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party says.

18:55Anyway, all three of these authors are well worth reading and I will leave this creepy face here to stare down at you.