S2. Chapter 18: We Got the Guillotine, You Better Run

Why do powerful men keep fantasizing about public punishment?

Lloyd Dobler riffs on “The Guillotine” by The Coup, written by Boots Riley, using the song’s provocation to examine how structural violence gets normalized under capitalism.

In Chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu suggests that when a society forgets the Great Tao, fear hardens into spectacle—and power starts mistaking cruelty for strength.

This episode was sparked by comments from Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, who recently fantasized publicly about executions—revealing how surveillance culture, masculinity, and insecurity collapse into performance.

This isn’t about public safety. It’s about dominance. About billionaires debating punishment while profiting from systems that make fear scalable.

A guided meditation for men unlearning escalation.
A Taoist reminder that real power doesn’t need an audience.

From the edge of empire and the center of self—this is The Tao of Lloyd.

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Transcript

Welcome back, for chapter 18.
I’m Lloyd Dobler. Yeah, the kid from Say anything is all grown up, middle aged with this podcast, The Tao of Lloyd, where I take one chapter of the Tao Te Ching at a time and use it like a spiritual Molotov cocktail to toss through the Overton Window so, together, we can loosen its hinges before it turns into a prison door.

The Guillotine. The song by the band The Coup (if you saw the film Sorry to Bother You, also directed by Boots Riley, its on that soundtrack) not the actual execution device associated with the French Revolution, was my most listened-to song in 2025. 

Boots Riley’s catchy lyrics sound to me like an agit-prop revolutionary musical I’d love to see produced. I mean who wouldn’t want to hear these lyrics on Broadway? Don’t worry I won’t try to sing them but here is a snapshot

“They got the TV, we got the truth
They own the judges and we got the proof
We got hella people, they got helicopters
They got the bombs and we got the, we got the
We got the guillotine
We got the guillotine, you better run”

Riley and The Coup use the guillotine as a metaphor to name structural violence and refuse to keep pretending capitalism isn’t already violent, and uses provocation to point at who benefits from that violence.

Anyway…

The Guillotine is also the song I found myself playing on repeat on a run recently after reading that the co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, posted on twitter: "If I'm in charge later, we won't just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others."

This man made his fortune helping police departments, intelligence agencies, and border enforcement see more, track more, predict more.

He got very rich building tools that turn human behavior into data and data into justification.

And now he’s fantasizing out loud about executions.

This is what happens when money insulates a nervous system so completely that it mistakes cruelty for clarity and spectacle for strength.

Joe Lonsdale, Palantir co-founder, calling for public hangings is not about public safety. It’s about toxic masculinity with a trillion-dollar infrastructure. 

And if this were really about safety,
we’d be talking about healthcare.
Housing.
Addiction treatment.
Living wages.
Community support.

But that’s not what this is.

This is about being seen as powerful.

Because real strength doesn’t need an audience.
Only insecurity does.

The company Joe Lonsdale co-founded, Palantir, doesn’t make communities safer.
It makes surveillance cheaper.
It makes suspicion scalable.
It turns human lives into nodes, networks, and probabilities—
and then sells that abstraction to police departments and border agencies
who are already trained to escalate.

It’s not “Minority Report.”
It’s worse.
It’s probable cause as a subscription service.

They always say they’re protecting “the vulnerable.”

But the vulnerable didn’t ask for gallows.

They asked for dignity.
They asked for food.
for housing.
for healthcare.

Instead, they got billionaires debating execution logistics while monetizing the systems that guarantee inequality in the first place.

Public hangings aren’t leadership.
They’re admissions of failure.

(Breath.)

Which brings us to the reading and meditation portion of the chapter;

(Bell chime. Ultra calm.)

Okay.

Let’s slow this down.

Close your eyes.
Or don’t.
I’m still not your guru.

Take a long, slow breath in through the nose…
and let it go.

Like someone just confused punishment with safety
and you don’t feel like correcting them today.

Good.

This is Chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching:

When the Great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body’s intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.
(Bell.)

And that was chapter 18, of the Tao Te ching. 

Patriotism is what shows up when power is scared.
It teaches men to confuse dominance with devotion—like loving something means controlling it. Lao-tzu’s saying real care doesn’t need a uniform, a slogan, or permission to be gentle.

And if you’re a man listening to this—especially one trained to escalate—here’s the work.
Feel the surge that wants to dominate the rooms you are in.
The heat.
The impulse to harden, to win, to make yourself undeniable.
Don’t obey it.
Don’t moralize it.
Just stop long enough to break the spell.
That interruption is the muscle.
The pause is the moment between the in breath and the exhalation
That pause is the strength you were never taught—
the ability to hold power without discharging it,
to end a cycle instead of proving you could’ve crushed it.

Public punishment isn’t a return to order.
It’s what happens
when a society forgets how to hold itself together
without fear.

There’s a reason the guillotine still scares people.
Not because of blood—but because it names power.
The state’s guillotine was bureaucracy with a blade: violence pretending to be neutral, procedural, inevitable.
When The Coup invokes it, they turn the image upside down.
Not as a threat.
As an accusation.
A way of saying: the system is already killing people—slowly, legally, profitably—and your horror only activates when the metaphor points upward.
That’s the tell.
The guillotine in that song isn’t a plan.
It’s a refusal to keep calling structural violence “order” just because it wears a suit and files paperwork.

Here’s the part we can’t dodge.

Violence doesn’t end when the state gets louder.
It ends when fear stops being profitable 
when we build a world where safety comes from stability,
not from threatening people in public squares.

Authoritarianism isn’t strength.
It’s what happens when a society forgets how to care for people
and hires men with weapons
to make that failure look like order.

So when a billionaire dreams out loud about public hangings,
the Tao doesn’t argue.

It just quietly asks:

What disappeared
that made you think
this was strength?

From the edge of empire
and the center of self —
this is The Tao of Lloyd.