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Speaker 1: Meaning a live man, I like it, Man letting, butterfly,
flattening wave, big down in on the force, Man gonna
cause a tree fall, letting five thousand mile away. Man,
nobody seen, nobody.
Speaker 3: That you know me?
Speaker 4: No, man, don't like you.
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Speaker 4: That's the man.
Speaker 6: Don't like you.
Speaker 4: Down on PENO don't.
Speaker 5: I know?
Speaker 6: All right?
Speaker 5: Kevin Deanna, Welcome back to Jay Burdon show. How you
doing Man?
Speaker 6: Good to be here? Good to be here?
Speaker 5: Well, look you and I are going to break are
at as of yet unbroken stream of a doomer real
politique analysis to be giant nerds and talk about Warhammer
forty K.
Speaker 6: So if you could, there's nothing else, there's nothing else
to talk about. I mean, this is this is a
fundamental thing. Warhammer forty K is the Western mythos. People
are like, oh, you know, the Golden legend, and you know,
where does Western culture come out? No, it builds up
to forty K. And as one person put it in
our hearts, we all know it's real. And all we're
doing at this point is just picking teams one hundred percent.
Speaker 5: I mean, look like you can't be in these circles
without you know, imbibing the memes for a little bit
of context. Obviously I'm a good bit younger, and so
so I got into this in kind of the twenty tents.
I'm sure people have this similar memory of you know,
going to middle school and there would be just sort
of books that floated around, you know, and so you
might read at the time, you know, someone's copy of
The Hunger Games that's been through fourteen different people before
you got it. And so I think it was like
the third or fourth book in a series about the Ultramarines.
So it made no sense to start in the middle.
But I remember reading it as a kid and was
just blown away, like I never read anything like this,
this sort of dark, grim, doomed, technically sci fi world,
and it really grabbed me. It got my attention, and
so that was sort of my entryway to it, and
I sort of you know, waxed and waned over the
rest of my life and got really into it again.
I'm in college, you know, sort of after and not
to get too much into the nerd stuff, but there
was a major shake up during that time, and so
watching you know, this thing that I love it that
I hadn't really impacted the way that I think change
in a way and it's continued to this day. It
was sort of an interesting moment where for many other people,
you know, they were big into Star Wars, and when
that went woke, it sort of affected them, didn't really
bother me in the same way. But this is the
one where you're like, oh no, that's close to my
soul because as we'll get into the values of this setting,
and that's really what it is, are deeply, deeply reactionary.
It is a post liberal world in much the same
way that Frank Herbert's done is so I'll kick it
back to you, Kevin.
Speaker 6: I think Margot did a thing on that too. I mean,
what's interesting about Warhammer forty K for those people, those
few who probably have no idea what in God's name
we're talking about here? When the god and bird's name
we're talking.
Speaker 5: About those way it sets basically, Yes, it is two categories.
Speaker 6: Like I still don't know where my kids came from.
I don't know how any of this stuff worked.
Speaker 5: Well, it's like that the you know, the concept right
of like the born again Virgin and it's like, oh,
you've made years ago and then you discovered wargaming and
you're like, you know, there's something to be said for it.
Speaker 6: There are only there are only two types of people.
Because there is a war gaming store here where I live,
and I went in there once and it was just
like horrifying, you know, looking at the crowd. But then
everybody else, I know, especially the people who are more
into tabletop I mean they're all huge, I mean they
all they all loved more than I do and everything else,
And it seems to be in predominantly veterans, predominantly like
people who are into stereotypically masculine things, and it really
does seem to be, especially with tabletop gaming. It's only
one of those two types. You're either just genetic debris
on a level that it's just depressing to see, or
you're almost a stereotype of really what a space marine is,
almost like a caricature of like what it is to
be a tough guy and everything else. And this is
like your way of I don't know if it's like
an escape from it or an indulgence in it or
whatever else, but it's it's only those two things. And
this is one of the things that we have to
talk about when we talk about settings, when we talk
about fandoms, even before we get into Warhammer forty k itself,
because I feel like this is what happened to just
about everything. If you referenced Star Wars earlier, Star Wars
when I was young, because as you pointed out, I'm
much older than you, Star Wars was a kind of
thing that like normal people were into back then. There
were those books Air to the Empire Timothy's On, which
is where you got Admiral Thraun. You had all these
people playing the video games and everything else. This is
before the prequels and all the rest of it, and
you had normal people into this stuff and playing war
games and figuring out like how this universe worked, and
like studying it and telling their own stories with it
and everything else. And then this became a political battleground
and there was almost no resistance to what happened because
it was just so purely an ip And now Star
Wars basically is just sort of a setting that's an
excuse for left wing identity politics activists to shove in
racial minorities, sexual minorities, whatever else. And like whatever story
this originally was, whatever setting this originally was, it's just
been completely subordinated to the political thing. With warrem or
forty K it's very different because Star Wars, even if
you look at the original three movies, it's basically boomer history, right,
I mean, like War two in space, it's just World
War two in space, and you know, we've got like
a centralized empire and we're the rebels. And then even
in the sequels, somehow the rebellion wins. But then when
we come back and visit these things years later, somehow
the rebellion is still the rebellion, and the first.
Speaker 5: Right away, right to that point, there is a there
is a reverse reading of the sequel trilogy right the
most recent ones, which is actually very interesting on exactly
that point of winning the war, doing the thing, as
you know, millennials are one to say, and still being
forced to cast yourself as a rebel. There's there's an
interesting comparison to our own empire, right the American empire
or the post war consensus, And that is a great
essay that I should write and will never do it.
So if you're listening, there's a free idea for you.
But sorry, Kevin, I interrupted.
Speaker 6: No, but that's core to the point. Actually, I think
it was with the person who I think made this point,
and this is a long time ago before the alt
right was even a thing. Was Richard Spencer pointed that
out where he said that the funny thing about these
is somehow the rebels are still the rebels, and it's
because fundamentally liberals are never comfortable with the idea of
they are the ones wielding power. It's this forever rebellion
against the man. They're never actually in charge. I mean,
I'm sure like Tim Walls presiding over this empire of
corruption that we're seeing developing in Minnesota. I'm sure he
tells himself every night that he's fighting the establishment, he's
standing up for the little guy, he's standing up against
the billionaires. He can never actually have power, even like
Gavin Newsom probably tells himself the same thing, or certainly
the people who support him. What's interesting about Warhammer forty
K is Warhammer forty k is decidedly not that if
we imagine that that liberalism, the way people operate today
is sort of this eternal rebellion against like nineteenth century
European Christian aristocrats, under whose rule none of us have
ever actually lived. Warhammer forty k is sort of a
stereotypical version of it. It is the old world. It
is in fact the British Empire, but it's in space.
And what are the values of this empire? What are
the values of this imperium? They are the values of hierarchy.
There are the values of aristocracy. They are the values
of militarism, the values of authority. The only reason you
can't call the imperium of man fascist is because it's
too complicated and disorganized to even be fascist. It's something
closer to like space feudalism, and in a more chaotic
way than even the Imperium of the Doune universe. And
what's interesting about Warhammer forty K before we even get
into what the core of the setting is. It's another
one of these great examples where there's this whole debate
about whether it's meant to be satirical or not. It's
another one of these things where I guess, just like Doune,
they clearly wrote with an element of satire, but the
logic of the story inevitably takes you to a certain point.
The whole point of Warhammer forty K, to get into
the setting a little bit, is you have this guy,
the Emperor, and he wanted to create this spacefaring empire
of humanity that was united by secularism, atheism, science, essentially
reddit in space. And what we found out is that
that is not actually the true nature of reality, that
in fact, there is a supernatural realm, it is altogether evil.
This leads to this giant conflict which basically cripples both
the Emperor and the empire that he led, and leads
the Imperium, which is the Empire, to a ten thousand
years of basically technological stagnation and bureaucracy and superstition. But
what is interesting. So there's the satire like, oh, it
used to be this thing and now you're living in
the superstitious, backwards empire. There's a sovereign who's on a throne,
he doesn't really do anything. Nobody even knows if he
really talks or not. I mean, if you're a British leftist,
you can see how clever this all is. But of
course the logic of the story also leads you to
other conclusions, Well, why if this empire is so backwards
and stupid, why is it essentially ruled the galaxy for
ten thousand years? Why do people keep fighting for it?
Why are people keep being attracted to it? And the
problem is that the logic of the story sort of
ends up proving that, yeah, even this caricatured system that
we've come up with actually makes sense, at least in
the universe that we've set this thing in. And so
then you have to deal with the question of, well,
why is it that people think this is something to
be attracted to? And then if you start writing books
about it, you start writing military stories about heroes, whether
it be space marines, who are these superhuman warriors, or
whether it's just ordinary guys fighting terrifying aliens or demons
or traders or whatever else. You have to explain, well,
what is it that these people think that they're fighting for?
And eventually you have to make them inspirational and inspirational
and admirable, and eventually people start rooting for them non ironically.
And this is sort of where Warhammer forty k ended
up that I think it may have started out with
a number of different motivations. Part of it probably was satire,
part of it probably was just kind of lighthearted comedy,
part of it probably was deadly serious, and part of
it was just an excuse to have rules for a
table talking. But what ended up happening is it became
a greatly beloved setting precisely because it was maybe the
only popular fandom where, let's call it, the old fashioned
values were being whatever the original intent for all intents
and purposes were being unironically put forward as and this
is a good thing, and so people started getting attracted
to it and adopting it. And I think what ended
up happening was as it became more and more popular,
and as more and more people started accessing it. The
people who originally started the setting and the people who
originally started the companies moved on in this new generation
that's coming in realized that they have a problem, and
that problem is that you cannot in a situation whereas
Curtis Yarvin says, everything is a political background, you cannot
even have a fictional setting be allowed to exist like this.
It is subversive. It is a political threat in some ways.
If we take the example of the society we have
now as almost like a counter to the imperium the
traditionalist empire Warhammer forty K Warhammer, the existence of the
fictional Warhammer forty K universe is itself heresy to a
liberal democracy.
Speaker 4: I'm doctor Erwin Gill, consultant pediatrician a children's Health Ireland.
In my line of work I look after children who
suffered traumatic brain injuries. In the last year, I've seen
more than twenty children who have sustained a serious brain
injury after a full writing an escooter. Many parents don't
know it is illegal for children under sixteen to write
an ees scooter. The average day in hospital for these
children was nineteen days. These are serious injuries and some
with lifelong consequences. As someone who sees injured children on
an all too regular basis, I'm asking you please do
not allow any child under sixteen to write an e
scooter a message from Children's Health Ireland on the Road
Safety Authority.
Speaker 6: Because if people start indulging in this, even as a fantasy,
eventually they're going to start thinking some thoughts about, well,
wait a minute, what's so great about the system we
live under now? And that can't be tolerated. And so
what we've seen over the last what maybe ten years
is a very deliberate, specific effort to try to subvert it,
to try to chase out existing fans and to try
to import an entirely new fan base. And I think
what people are not quite getting is they say, well,
you know, won't go broke, but there's very little evidence
that's actually true. I mean, all the people who got
involved in breaking Star Wars and turning it into what
it is today, they themselves got paid off pretty well.
And sure Disney may have lost a lot of money,
but Disney is still a big company. They can afford it.
I think fundamentally what is taking place here is a
cultural battle more than any particular business decision. And frankly,
it's a battle that's actually kind of important in the
cultural sphere because I can't think of another setting or
another fantom that unironically puts forward hierarchical right wing values
in the same way Warammer forty k does.
Speaker 5: There are several things there. If we're talking about the
kind of core illiberal conceits of the Warhammer universe, perhaps
the central one is the existence of absolute evil. And
this isn't the kind of mustache twirling, you know, rob
a million dollars from the bank, but it is Hell
is real. Hell is another dimension, and the things that
people do in the material world echo into the ethereum,
they echo into this sort of alternate dimension. And so
private individual choices, you know, your sexual degeneracy, your gluttony,
they can quite literally open a portal to Hell.
Speaker 6: And so there's this.
Speaker 5: Extreme violent moralism where heretics are burned, whole planets are
genocided because the consequences are so high, And so you
have a situation where the struggle is not for who
rules the galaxy. The struggle is does your species exist?
And unlike as we see in many other settings with aliens,
or settings with other kind of factions. There is no
accord to be made. The aliens want to eat you.
They want to chop you up into a little bit,
so they want to torture your soul for all eternity.
There is no deal to be made here. It is
a binary which will survive. And this is something that
obviously liberals are very uncomfortable with the idea of a
definite in group and out group struggle. It is completely
and totally all consuming and all defining. And you mentioned
again the sort of doomed nature of humanity in this
setting where it's been this long, slow decline from their
globe three days, and I realized this is there's signaling
to be a change. I pretend that it doesn't exist,
because that is the setting, right, The setting is, you know,
humanity is dying. The phrase you've heard grim dark comes
from you know that this sort of paragraph that to
put at the beginning of almost everything involving Warhammer. In
the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,
and there is only war because there are all of
these different groups bent on one another's destruction, but behind
all of them, bigger than all of them. Is this
the seeping force of evil chaos again going back to
the contrast between order, which is an unlimited good, and
chaos were even a small amount, even one little compromise
ultimately poisons you and damns you. And that sort of
uncompromising system where you can justify genociding an entire planet
to prevent the loss of trillions more, that's it's something
that people are very uncomfortable with, and that's why I
think you see that sort of reflexive pivot to oh
it's satirical, Oh, it's all a joke. And sure like
you can point to examples, you know, where they're poking
fun at British politicians or certain elements of you know,
nineteen eighties British culture, and that's certainly there. But as
you've said, the logic internal to that universe leads you
to a place where it is no, humans are good,
Humans ought to exist, and given that premise, you can justify,
and in this setting you do justify almost anything. For example,
the Space Marines are traumatized child soldiers where the induction
is like ninety eight percent fatal failure. Right, They're literally
taking children, shoving them into a science experiment and hoping
to out of every hundred survive let alone. You know,
these sort of like nightmarish industrial planets, you know, so
poisoned by industry that the you know, the water is
toxic and people eat recycled corpses. It's it's grim, but
given the stakes, given the survival of the species, that
sort of action is justified. And again that sort of
deflection to parody or that deflection to satire is there
is a charitable way to make that argument, but when
it is employed nine times out of ten, it is
so I don't have to consider that this is justifiable.
This is a part of the human experience, This kind
of like galactic rosen Kreeg.
Speaker 6: If you will, yeah, I mean the point about satire,
I think the first inquisitor. So, for example, one of
the great things, there's an inquisition, right, what is the
ultimate thing that has power in the imperium in as
far as anybody does other than the emperor himself, it's
this thing called the inquisition. What does the inquisition do?
The inquisition can blow up an entire planet, as you
point out, because if it falls to chaos, that's actually
worse than everybody done. And the words of one inquisitor
in one of the games. Some may question my right
to destroy a planet with ten billion souls, but those
who truly understand, no, I have no right to let
them live. And that's actually that's not like cartoonish evil.
That's like a perfectly logical thing to say given the setting,
like that is actually the correct thing to do. But
then again, if you go back, if you look at
who was the very first named inquisitor in the setting,
he was literally named Obi Wan Clouseau, which tells you
like the kind of influences that these guys had when
they were making this game. But the problem is, once
you have a universe like this, and once you start
explaining the logic of it, even if you have a
joke here and there, it takes on a certain internal consistency,
and that internal consistency presents political problems for you later
if you're trying to reconcile it with the all consuming
ideological and moral system in which we live today, particularly
in today's United Kingdom, where insofar as this thing took
influences from the British past, because as I pointed out,
in many ways, the imperium is sort of the British
empire in space. Those things are now universally a symbol
for evil in modern day England. It's not you can't
go around being like the empire was a good thing,
Like you may very well end up with prison or something,
depending on how you phrase that argument directly. And so
they have this problem because if you sat down and
looked at the setting and said, well, why is it
that the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable? Which is how
GW itself phrases what the Imperium is, even though it's
by no means the bloodiest regime even within that universe.
But let's take that as a premise that it's meant
to be a nightmare, that it's meant to be a
bad thing. Well, how did it last ten thousand years?
And the answer is because not just because the story
required it, but also I think it gets to something
pretty disturbing about human nature, which is something I think
it was Chris Hedges pointed out, which is war as
a force that gives us Meaning, what is the greatest
thing you can do if you want to try to
reduce suicide rates? What is the greatest thing you can
do if you want to give a society a sense
of mission and purpose and make ordinary people feel like
their lives matter. You make them fight a war, and
you make them fight a war that never ends, and
you make them fight a war for their own survival
where there's an existential enemy with whom no negotiation is possible,
and even if negotiation was possible, it's classified as heresy,
And so you're not going to do it anyway. And
guess what, if you have a society like that, life
may not be very good, but you don't have that
same compulsion to just blow up the home whole thing,
the same way that we see, frankly, the Boomers did
when they were handed the most luxurious society that ever
existed in human history. It solves a lot of the
existential problems, and that by itself is kind of disturbing,
But within the logic of the universe, not only does
it make sense, not only is it righteous, but it
has a certain carryover to our own world, where you
have people within our own society, usually the very same
people who praise the values of liberal democracy and tolerance
and all the rest of these things to the sky.
But they're also the same sorts of people who will
say things like, would it not be better for humanity
not to exist because this world is full of suffering
or capitalism or something like that. Isn't it irresponsible to
bring a child into this world? Isn't it irresponsible to
continue to exist? If we're hurting the environment? Wouldn't it
be better if humanity was just gone altogether? The counter
to that is essentially a system that depends on faith,
that depends on will, that depends on militarism, that depends
on existential conflict, not just because the story requires it,
because it's a war game and you can't just it
wouldn't be a very exciting wargame of once I just
gave up, but also because within this thing, within this universe,
you also don't even really have the choice of just
giving up, Because in this the existence of an afterlife
is taken absolutely, at least to us, the viewers or
the readers or the players, we know this to be
objectively true, and we also know there's some dispute on this,
depending on which bars of the lawyer you look at.
But for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of
people who have ever lived, the afterlife is horrifying. There
is no salvation you just go and your soul is
eaten by demons and you suffer, and that's all there
is to it. So that's what you're fighting against. You're
not just fighting against objective evil. You're fighting against eternal
suffering for every man, woman and child whoever existed. And
that fundamentally is what the Emperor set himself against. So
people will say things like this god emperor of the setting.
While he's authoritarian, Well he's arrogant, where he's hierarchical, whether
he's militaristic, he makes these mistakes. But yes, what is
he opposing here? And he's the only one who ever
really opposed it? So what side do you take here?
This is I think the problem that GW and a
lot of the younger writers who maybe got into this
game because they thought it was edgy or fun or
whatever when they were younger. But now in a political
age where everything has to be just from the official
orthodoxy that presides throughout the West, you can't let this
thing stay as it was. It's too subversive. It raises
too many questions if people are on ironically celebrating the
way the imperium does something, or even ironically do it
using a meme, making jokes about heresy, making jokes about
a terminatus, which is when you blow up a planet
to keep it from falling to chaos, even making jokes
as we've seen recently where one of the chaos gods
is called Slenesh is a god of perfection and excess,
and unfortunately it also tends to be linked to sexual degeneracy. Well,
I mean that kind of became a shorthand term for tranees.
And if you look at the old lore from even
fifteen years ago, it has taken absolutely for granted that
the devotees of this evil god are obsessed with sexual
degeneracy and tend to have this androgynous appearance, and in
many cases are literal transvestites. You can't have that, you
can't have thirteen year olds reading that, you can't have
people making those jokes now. And so I think what
has happened here is more than with Star Wars, where
it just sort of happened organically or because some younger
people wanted to make a name for themselves by inserting
left wing identity politics into it. I think in this
you have a deliberate effort from people at the company
and people who involved in it, saying we cannot let
this thing exist as it has always existed. It is
a political threat. In some way, we are actually bad
people by letting this go forward. And if you think
I'm overstating the case here, which some may say, but
what I would counter is that in twenty twenty GW
actually put out a statement and they said the Imperium,
this fictional setting that they put out with books, with
all these heroes and space marines and all these people
that we're supposed to look up to. According to the
stuff that they put out, the Imperium runs on hate.
This fictional setting. The good guys of the setting is
in fact hate is in fact Nazis is, in fact
fascism is in fact evil. But we do not We're
put this out there, but we're good people. We believe
in the orthodoxy of the age. You can indulge in
this sort of thing as sort of a dark fantasy,
but don't get into it too much. And of course
the reaction from basically the community was based to make
fun of them, because if the Imperium runs on hate,
then why are you putting out books like lionizing these people.
I think what they've done in the year since is
they haven't quite squared that circle of how you have
a regime that is supposed to be the counter to
everything you as a good liberal belief. But what they
do now is they essentially still conceived, well, the imperium
runs on hate, but it's also defended by brave girl bosses,
and every soldier's a black woman, and actually there are.
It's very sexually diverse, so essentially you have the Fourth
Reich in space, but it's a racially and sexually diverse
Fourth Reich, which somehow makes it okay. And that kind
of seems to be the compromised thing that they've come
up with, but in reality we all kind of know
what it was, which was basically it's old School of
Europe with certain values, especially those charged by religion in space,
and so people who are going to be attracted to
it are looking for those types of things, and you
have this very strange situation where the things that make
it popular and the things that make it relevant in
a culture where people are sort of desperately searching for
this are also the things that make it. I don't
think it's too strong to say despicable in the eyes
of the people who actually control the IP I think
more than even more than a politician. We always make
fun of, like how nobody hates Red state voters the
way like a Republican politician does. I'm not sure there's
another thing where somebody truly hates their own fans, truly
hates their own customers, like on a deep personal level,
wishes they would suffer, wishes they would just go away.
Then Games Workshop does towards the types of people who
are really into Warhammer forty K.
Speaker 5: Well, and that's sort of an interesting point because you know,
they're all these catch phrases you know that kind of
come around from this setting. You know, you you again
have statements about you know, hate and intolerance, right, you know,
basically saying you know, like hate will be my shield,
and dramatic proclamations like that, and again, within the logic
of the setting, it is entirely true, because there's this
postmodern element to forty k that I find really fascinating,
where human will quite literally has the power to morph reality,
both in the kind of like the etheric world you mentioned.
You know this this god Slenesh, who was literally birthed
was not one of the originals because you know, elves
and space got really freaky. It quite literally were so
degenerate that they created this sort of satanic Eggregor. You
know that this sort of it took life of its own.
And similarly, when you when you talk about something like
hatred or contempt in this setting, it quite literally becomes
ar It quite literally will protect you from contempt exactly.
And there's a whole thing I just real quick, I
just want to reference it. There's my favorite character, literally
in all fiction is Gregor o're Eisenhorn, who is one
of these inquisitors who sort of doubt those books are
so good. Oh they're so good, I put them up
against anything. But one of the characters that you come
to meet in his adventures is a guy who used
to work for him and then becomes an inquisitor in
his own right, raven Or, And in some sense he
becomes almost like a theologian in this universe, not just
an inquisitor, but he's the one who develops this idea
of the armor of contempt, which then is used by
people all the time in other books, and you see
it referenced in video games and in the game itself.
What is the armor of contempt? The armor of contempt
is a way you steal yourself against chaos and its tentations,
where basically you despite it's not hatred, I mean you
can you can hate someone you once loved, right, I mean,
the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifferent. But
the armor of contempt is where you have such disdain
for something that, even if they're offering you something that
is objectively better, you have such you look down on
it so greatly that even its superiority or even its beauty,
is itself proof of why it should be despised. And
so this is the way you steel yourself against it.
Where there's literally nothing that these things can these these forces, chaos, aliens, enemies,
even societies that maybe like peaceful liberal democracies but don't
worship the God emperor, you look on them with this
sort of disgust and contempt. And that's how you keep
your soul pure.
Speaker 6: Well what is that? I mean, it's just another way
of saying tolerance or open mindedness is in fact opening
the doors to corruption and heresy. Now, how do you
square that message with everything that we've been brought up
to believe in? Here? And you can say, well, you know,
obviously it's a fictional setting. We do not actually have
like chaos, God's waiting for us in the afterlife, although
some might take issue with that. But I think it's
more that as you see this larger crisis of faith
in Western society. And I don't mean the death of Christianity.
I don't mean like God is dead in the Nietzsche sense.
I mean in the sense that there seems to be
a palpable sense of panic among Western elites that liberal democracy, multiculturalism,
the rule of law, the post war consensus itself, that
these things are no longer working, that they're not just
under threat from the right. And obviously they hate these
people and they're going to blame us for it. But
I think in some sense they're sort of a creeping
terror that they understand their system doesn't work anymore. I'm
always struck by how these signs of decline that they
talk about in the Warhammer forty k universe to show
how the empire is stagnating. Keep in mind this was
all written like a couple decades ago. Most of it
the idea of declining intelligence among the population, and that
there's everywhere that there's corruption, that public infrastructure just doesn't work,
that you need to use bribes and to get anything done.
That ordinary life is just this frustrating ordeal because you
can't actually accomplish anything anymore because every single system is
breaking down. Well, frankly, that sounds like ordinary life in
the West. I mean, the dystopia that supposedly results from
authoritarianism sounds an awful lot like ordinary life under liberal
democracy today, which I think would have been unimaginable to
people even twenty years ago. And I think that's one
of the things that's sort of driving this very strange
and bitter battle within the fandom, where you have people
saying like, we actually need to sort of stomp this
thing out, We actually need to burn down this thing
that was created and rebuild it entirely, because we can't
have people thinking in this direction. And even though it
is fiction, I think in some sense like they're right.
I mean, the idea of sci fi has always been
kind of dangerous, and it's always been right wing in
some sense because it allows you to put forward It's
one of the few ways that you have where you
can put forward a different world that operates under different
moral premises, and you can see how it operates, and
that is a thought experiment that you really can't have
people indulging in a liberal democracy today if you want
to keep this system going.
Speaker 5: Well, and to that point, it was I can't remember
his first name, but you know Greer has that quote
where he says, you know, look look for the grave
where they buried God. You'll find progress lying next next
to him. And you know there is a It is
sort of a fascinating thing because ultimately, like the t
loose of liberalism, is this sort of presentism as Lewis
or Chesterton would have called it, or you know, Whig
history is moldbug equipped, where it's this idea that you know,
technological and social progress and liberation is this ever right
word graph. Things are always getting better, it's always amazing,
and the past is horrible and racist and those people
were dumb savages. But the problem is is you've mentioned
it's like, well, what happens if in a setting like
forty k or even in our own there are things
our ancestors built we do not understand, we no longer
have command over them. And sure it's not quite as
dramatic as an Italian peasant, you know, shepherding his sheep
under the ruins of the aqueduct. But you start to
look at that and you're like, well, okay, like this
God of progress is dead, it is no longer alive,
that it can no longer produce miracles. You know, it's
like the oracle when you know, the fumes no longer work.
And I think that that terrory you're identifying is very
accurate because ultimately, and this is again one of the
big lessons of forty K, is that every conflict is
a war of belief. Every conflict takes on a sort
of religious element. And when even you are starting to
suspect that maybe your God is dead in the forty
K context, that maybe you know, the giant, you know,
mechanical monstrosity that this their corpses sitting on, he's not
even just resting. He's actually dead. It is simply just
a machine. Where do you go from there?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 6: I mean, that's one of the things. And it's interesting
you point that out. I mean, there's a big thing
there where one of the interesting things that has happened
in terms of Lord, and it was never really stated.
I mean, in fact, there was quite a bit contradicting it,
but it was definitely suggested by some of the earliest
people saying it was, let's think about this image of
the God Emperor you have seen. For those of you
who still might not know entirely what's going on, you've
seen images of this skeletal figure on this giant throne,
which is really this almost mechanical monstrosity that is the
God Emperor, near death on the golden throne, and he
a thousand souls are sacrificed to him every single day
to kind of keep him in this state of undeath,
let's call it forever. And one of the things they
sort of suggested or hinted at in older law was
there's actually nothing there except maybe like a remnant that
keeps certain things going. But there's no longer anything there.
And so in some sense, the taunts of the enemies
of the Imperium that is the corpse God was actually correct,
and that you're basically sacrificing people for nothing. And you
can see sort of the left wing theme inherent to that.
You know, you're sacrificing people for these outdated ideas, You're
sacrificing people to keep a hierarchy built on fear going
and going and going. But what we've seen in recent
low in recent books is, in fact, no, the god
Emperor is very much alive. He is there, he's actually
doing stuff. He's actually getting more active, and while he
can't quite get up from the throne and run around yet,
he is acting in the universe. And also these threats
are real. One of the other things they also did
is one of the old kind of bits in Old
Warhammer forty k lore was basically if you saw a
demon saying you saw the objective existence of the other realm. You,
even if you had fought against these things and defeated them,
if you were an ordinary person, you and your family
and everybody else was probably going to get killed by
your own government because it was just too dangerous for
people to know about this stuff. Now in newer stories,
the Empire, so to speak, has admitted like, no, this
is it, Like these things are all all all your nightmares,
They're real. We're fighting them, We're at war with these things.
It is a literal holy war in a way you
could not have imagined. But the implication of that is
this system is no longer just being held up by
fear religion is not some crazy excuse just to uphold
the social hierarchy the way people would talk about like
Roman Catholicism and pre revolutionary France, where it's just a
cynical ploy to justify some people having more than others.
It's like, no, this is this is all real, This
is one hundred percent true. Those crazy religious guys, they
were totally right. And that puts ann spin on the
whole setting where you have this, you have multiple things
happening at once, sort of in universe and in our
universe that are very interesting because in our universe they're
trying to deconstruct it away from the sorts of values
that initially attracted people to it, because they don't want
people saying like, well, look, actually, hierarchy has a certain
value to it. Actually authority has a certain value to
a tradition has a certain value to it. People are
not equal. Tolerance is not a good thing, at least
not in all cases, Like you need to actually have
something that you consider sacred and beyond question if you're
going to survive as a society. They're trying to get
rid of all that, but at the same time they're
also seemingly justifying the way the imperium operates more than
ever before. We're even the most retrograde institutions like the ecclesiarchy,
which in many ways is a very British satire of
the old school Roman Catholic Church, with all its ceremonies
and uniforms and complicated hierarchies and everything else. What we're
finding out is basically they were right about everything, and
we actually need these guys more that even the most
remarkable repression that people used to make jokes about is
nothing compared to the stakes that humanity actually faces. And
even these superhuman guys from the past, these prime marks.
We don't need to get into that, but these sort
of legendary figures from the past who used to be
a myth, who were kind of coming back to save
the empire in its darkest hour. That even these guys
are not able to just snap their fingers and turn
everything into a secular, rationalist, scientific utopia the way that
they might want to. That even they are beginning to
adopt the logic of the system and saying no, actually,
we kind of have to keep the imperium rolling the
way it goes, because this is actually the nature of
reality and this is what the situation demands. It's a
very strange thing, and I think this is why this
battle within the fandom is so bizarre, because they've abandoned
the satirical left wing element that used to be quite
strong within it. At the every same time, they're sort
of introducing more obnoxiously woke elements, particularly in regards to
sexuality and race.
Speaker 5: That's sort of an interesting point there, right, is that
they're out of one side of their mouth trying to,
you know, reaffirm that, you know, all of these these
values are completely irrational, but they are confirming more and
more that quite literally, if you don't say your prayer,
Satan will rape you for all eternity. Like that is
within the things that they are saying equally true. And
so you can understand why this reaction has been so incoherent,
because the way that they're trying to push this is
simply reaffirming the genuineness of this this setting. There's an
element I want to go back to this your point
about the ultimate futility of kind of scientific rationalism. So
we've mentioned there's Warhammer forty thousand. A large part of
the events that involves sort of the setting up of
this empire occur ten thousand years early. You're in a
previous era. It was vaguely mentioned. It has been established
more concretely kind of in the past twenty years plus
or minus. So you have, you know, a setting where
the emperor is a man who walks around. He's sort
of this depending on who you trust, sort of this
kind of I guess, expression of the human spirit. Right,
he is an aggregor in some way.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in some ways he's sort of There are various stories,
and we don't need to get into the organs of
the emperor. But but there was a point where in
some sense he was a man and he he was
he was limited in some sense, he was very powerful,
but he was not a god. And it is also
made clear that as a man, even if he is
a kind of gestalt consciousness of various things, even if
he's whatever as a man, things like love, things like friendship,
things like thing, humor, things, irony, things that I like
that I don't like, tastes, the ordinary pleasures like taking
a glass of wine. These are things he can relate to.
And so you have I mean, again, there's there's a
very strong element of this is completely unimaginable in a
non Christian society. Like writing this, there is an element
here where it's like, instead of God becomes man in
order to save man, this is more a story of
like man becomes God.
Speaker 5: And with that, ironically enough, the force protecting human humanity
becomes inhuman. You know, it sort of sheds those vestiges.
But what's so interesting is that the Emperor is very
much a tragic figure and follows the same kind of
beats of you know, traditional Greek or Roman tragedy, because
you know, his hubris, his idea of creating this galaxy
spanning empire built on a lie. And the lie is secularism,
which is again a profoundly exactly a profoundly a liberal point.
Speaker 6: A point even the Imperium, even the Great Crusade, even
all the space Marines. And this has made very clear,
there's this all right, it's very hard not to be
like launched into the whole thing. But for people who
have no idea what's going on, and make this very simple.
The thing that put the Imperium in the state it
is now, the thing that put the Emperor sort of
crippled on the throne was this civil war that happened
where essentially nine of his sons turned against him. And
the best way I can describe it is imagine what
would happen in the New Testament when Satan goes to
Christ and says, shows them the kingdoms of the world
and says, all of these will be yours if you
bow down and worshiped me. What happens if Jesus says yes.
That's essentially the conflict that sets up the Warhammer forty
k universe. That's what happens in thirty the year thirty thousand,
which sets up the Nightmare of forty thousand. And what
is clear, and because they wrote all these books explaining
the whole conflict and everything else, and what's remarkable about
it is that all the things that define the imperium today,
the complicated hierarchies, the fact that there's an emperor who
cloaks himself even while denying God's walks around in golden
power armor with all these sacred symbols and everything else.
The fact that there's an aristocracy, the fact that it's
defined by militarism and conflict. All of these things were
meant to be temporary and what the end goal essentially
was was liberal democracy and secularism. And what you kind
of learn is that you can't get there because that's
not true. It's a lie now in this sense, in
this universe. I mean it's a lie because you know,
there's this other dimension and there are like evil gods
that live there, and we have to deal with it
one way or another. But we can't just lie about them.
They make themselves known. But on the other hand, there's
also a deeper, more troubling thing which I think the
writers who were all, you know, good liberals, I imagine,
are sort of dealing with, which is is there something
inherent in the structure of liberalism that undermines itself? Is
the idea of insisting that there is no god? But
science does that even undermine itself? Because one of the
great themes you see over and over again is that
man has an inherent need for faith. And what is
the great irony of Warhammer forty K The Emperor as
a man launches a literal, galaxy spanning crusade dedicated to
the imperial truth. What is the imperial truth? There are
no gods. If you deny that, your culture gets wiped out.
And how does it end up with he himself worshiped
as a god by all of humanity.
Speaker 5: Right, and again that is the sort of great irony
of it is that it Again, there are a million
different authors, in a million different sources of this. But
one of the reasons that his son, his favorite son,
betrayed him is in fact because he saw irrefutable evidence
that the spiritual world existed. My father has lied to me.
The Imperial truth is a lie. If that central premise
is a lie, then let the galaxy burn. Right as
the line goes, and there's another fascinating character another for
those who aren't aware, imagine if this is sort of
one of the lesser apostles, like I imagine if Thomas,
you know, became a Satan worshipper. This character of Logar, right,
who is as you know, a faithful servant, He is
the propaganda department, the guy who goes around and converts
the masses. Well, when he turns, he becomes again this
sort of demonic figure, right, literally ascends to demonhood and
irony of ironies. He is the one who writes the
book that becomes the Bible of the imperial And so
there's this tension where even this arch devil. Right, the
sort of embodiment of Satan sees that truth more so
even in a corrupted way than the previous existing empire.
And that's what's so fascinating, right. The and the reason
this is one of my favorite characters is because he
views the world as entirely consisting of wars of belief,
where the currency is worship, it is attention. As people
on the internet, we're quite aware of this fact now,
but again, ultimately is a contest of wills. In this setting,
it's literal because there is a psychic power derived from worship,
derived from even non humans thinking about a thing. But
in a current political setting or just human political setting,
now it is equally true.
Speaker 6: It is a war of belief.
Speaker 5: And so you know that these kind of precepts we have,
as you know, people raised in you know, kind of
liberal modernity, that there is a debate that there is
sort of this you know, genteel discussion that might be
true within a group, but between groups. Civilization is incommunicable,
These value systems are incommunicable, and it is a zero
sum game where one win in one loses. And you
can see why that premise is. I mean, it's a
stake to the heart of aggressive liberal modernity, and it
cannot be allowed to exist in that way. And so
I mean, yeah, when we talk about the deliberate destruction,
there are a couple things, like one of the creeping
early ones was the re emergence of technological progress. Now, look,
some of this is cynical to sell more plastic dolls
to you know, men in their forties, you know, like, oh,
the new stuff came out, you've got to get it.
But also let's acknowledge that this is a major departure
the idea that, oh, no, you can bring back technological progress,
we can advance again. Then you started to see, as
you mentioned the incredible diversification of Earth's armies, right, humanity
is a life or death struggle, and we're still throwing
one hundred and ten pound women into the meat grinder, right,
and then most recently, and this won't necessarily make sense
out of context, but there's been a huge push for
gender representation in context where it makes no sense. For
ex instance, we've mentioned the kind of ghastly process of
creating a space marine. You're quite literally making a science
experiment out of a nine year old boy. But always
from the beginning is the idea. Well, of course, if
you were going to spend the equivalent of multiple aircraft
carriers worth of resources to create a semi human killing machine,
well you want to produce the best one. So they've
always been male. There's kind of super space marines. We
won't get into. They look like bananas, but they're even
special or for those who aren't familiar with forty k
it is sort of like Chinese history in the sense
that every number has like three extra zeros onto it,
and you just have to kind of get over that.
But again, right, this was a big departure where they said,
oh no, no, they've always been women all the time.
You just didn't know that yet. We hadn't told you yet. Again,
doesn't necessarily matter a ton from the perspective of a
tabletop game. You know, you make your little guys, you
can do what you will with them. But again we
see that privileging of or that deliberate desire to quote,
you know, to quote the I think it was Brown
who said this, right to rub their nose in diversity
versus idea that like, oh that thing you like, I'm
gonna ruin it for you. I'm gonna mark it with
my mark, because again, the values inherit to the system
are deeply odious. They are completely one hundred and eighty
degree reverse to even kind of a tepid nineties liberalism,
let alone this sort of gay race communism. But I'll
throw it back to you, Kevin.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean there is. Let's to be objective about it,
and I try to. I think one of the things
that's important for those of us on the far right,
because let's admit it, we're not beyond left and right,
we're far right. And one of the things that it's
important to keep your mind somebody who's been doing this
for a long time and not go insane if you're
on the far right is to have a sense of
irony about the whole thing, in a sense of objectivity.
And let's be honest about what Warhammer forty k is.
I mean, it is a power fantasy for men, for
young men, especially because what is the core of it,
really the idea? What is the faction everybody wants to be.
They want to be the space Marines. What are the
space marines? They're eight hundred pounds and have three lungs
and two hearts and are killing machines with super reactions.
And oh, by the way, because of the weird process
that these things go through, they don't they're not sexual
really in any way, so you don't deal with girls.
So it's basically just you and your friends having space
adventures for centuries. And when you're eleven is that too
much to ask for? Kevin Well, I mean, that's that's
like when you're eleven years old, or when you're you know,
like in my case, forty two going on eleven, Like
that sounds like the greatest thing of all time. And frankly,
I mean not to make a joke about it, but like, actually,
if you're if you are like a married father, like, yeah,
you're playing with your twelve year old kid or whatever.
You're going in this thing. You're playing a video game,
you're playing the tabletop whatever. Like YEAD is kind of
like an escape to childhood and like sort of the
little adventures you would you would come up with when
you were a little kid. Like this is why people
do these things. So it is a power fantasy. And
there is an argument where you say they've written all
these books, they've written all these codexes, codex's or the
books that tell you about the history of these guys
and everything else. They've written all this lore lore that
is so complicated and so detailed that there are people
whose entire career just consists on making these like four
hour videos every week about various elements of Warhammer forty
k lore. I mean, you could probably major in this
as like a college degree. But then, and this is
a quote one of the leading authors then says, also,
there's no but there's no such thing as canon now,
and we've written all these books describing how these units
are developed or some of these characters that you know
and love, But then we're just gonna kind of throw
out something on social media, which is, yeah, none of
that matters, none of that exists anymore. Actually that's not true.
Actually I just changed it. And what's really You can
try to justify it in universe. You can try to
justify it to make the lower consistent, but of course
it has nothing to do with that. What's actually happening
is I think a twofold process. One is the more
corporate decision, where whether they're getting pressure from investors, whether
it's just because it's the United Kingdom and they really
believe this stuff at least at the higher corporate levels.
They're trying to push these sorts of inclusive policies because
they have to or we think it's a good business decision,
and so that's just kind of trampling the storytelling and
whatever else. But I think the deeper thing, and I
think what's really driving it, is that we see another
kind of power fantasy taking place, which is you have
people coming in who did not create this thing, same
thing we saw in Dungeons and Dragons, same thing we
saw in Star Wars, same thing we saw in all
these different fandoms who are in it, who say now
it is mine, and I'm going to change because that
gives me power over this thing. And I'm not just
gonna do it because it makes me feel better. I'm
gonna do it because it makes you feel worse. And
you certainly see this with a lot of the sort
of social media personalities and journalists and people write about
this stuff where they'll it's sort of like Anita Sarkisian
with gamer Gate, where she even said like, oh, well,
I hate video games. I don't like video games, I
don't play any of this stuff. I don't like this stuff,
but I'm gonna make this my career. Why she didn't
say this part, but why am I going to make
this my career to screw it up for the people
I don't like? And I've said it before and I'll
say it again. I think the strongest force in politics
is spite. And ironically, this is something that you see
in more number forty K and all of a lot.
Negative emotions are much stronger than positive emotions in the
imperian and I think in real life as well. And
spite allows you to do things that lovingly protecting something
that you created does not in the long run negative entropy.
I mean again, this is very forty K. In the
long run, entropy does win out over order, or McIntire
writes about this in the total state. In the end,
chaos does win. In the end, everything you leve will burn.
And you can do your best to defend against this
kind of stuff, but what can men do against such
reckless hate? And you have this situation where you have
people you can talk about gatekeeping all you want, but
you can't gatekeep an ip that somebody else owns. And
so the situation that people who have been longtime fans,
who care about the lore who have grown attached to
certain characters, who who are attached to what my co
host on Grim Dark Enlightenment, which is another podcast to do,
Chad calls the texture of the whole thing, the thing
that makes it internally consistent, that gives its meaning. These
things are being stripped away not because it's necessary for
the story, but precisely to destroy the story, and because
you have people coming in who are deliberately trying to
destroy it and then move on to the next thing,
because they are fundamentally incapable of seeing anything outside the
political values of our own time. And I think this
is something that you and I and maybe right wingers
generally get, which leftists don't. It's actually a disadvantage. You
and I can enjoy something beat, a song, beat, a poem,
be it, a story, beat, a movie from a left
winger whose values are horrific to us. But I can
understand the perspective of the character within it. I can
understand where they're coming from. I can try to put
myself in their place and see how this plays out,
and maybe even relate to it on some level like
empathy in the truest sense. For the people who talk
all the time about empathy. I do not think leftists
are capable of doing that. I don't think they have
a theory of mind for people who have values other
than themselves. And so when you have this universe that
is so different from ours in terms of its values
and in terms of the way it operates and everything else,
they can't help but react to it with hostility. They
can't help but think, well, how can we break this
thing down and turn it into the same stuff as
everything else, Because they're not This was built by people
who were indulging, were creating in a kind of fantasy.
And I think what you have now is you have people,
especially in the fantasy realm in terms of books, in
terms of games, who are actually incapable of fantasy in
the truest sense. They can't help but see things just
as an expression of whatever the politics or the values
are in the here and now. And I'm sure there
are a lot of people out there who are at
war with Warhammer forty K because they think in some
sense that they took all those memes about Donald J.
Trump being the god emperor like seriously, and they think
by screwing this stuff up that they're somehow taking vengeance
for twenty sixteen in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's an interesting point, and again it is sort
of the It is sort of a reflection of what
you say in this universe, right, that evil is not
motivated by a misunderstanding, is not motivated by material concerns.
Even it is not the you know, stealing a stealing
bread to feed my starving child. It is a hatred
for anything that is not itself. It is a desire
to and you see this with multiple factions, right, explicitly
the kind of most alien, the tear in it, the
idea to make everything, quite literally of the same mass,
to make it all one thing. And to your point again, right,
the deep irony of these people criticizing this world for
lacking empathy and then reaching into it to break it
and smash it in whatever way they need to to
bring it under their totalizing control.
Speaker 6: It is.
Speaker 5: It is sort of darkly ironic, right. They have in
a way they understand the message more so than the
guys who actually under stand the message. They live it.
You simply understand it, and it's sort of dark to
think about it that way. But uh, yeah, I think
it's it's there's something to do that comparison.
Speaker 6: Well, this is the nature of chaos and setting, and
I mean, this is one of the things where obviously
people are gonna be like, Okay, you know, it's a
setting whatever else. But there are some of the lessons
you sort of see playing out in this because again,
the people who wrote these sorts of stories, you have
to take it seriously on its own terms. If you
can write a book about this stuff. And some of
the books are I mean, obviously some of them are
just sort of what they call bolter porn, where it's
basically guy running around shooting stuff. Some of them, frankly
aren't very good. Some of them are quite good, especially
the ones that talk about the spiritual nature of chaos
and the spiritual battle and everything else, because you have
to get into the the nuts and bolts of this thing.
You got. You gotta figure out like how it actually works,
why would people fall to this thing? And one of
the things that you see in it. And this is
also true of the nature of chaos in Warhammer Fantasy,
which was the more Middle Aged version of the Middle
Ages version. I should say this that you would also
see now it's a total war game, so that's getting
sort of like a new birth of life. Is chaos
is self destructive. It's not like it can't. It's going
to win inevitably, but at the same time, and it
can also never win. To bring this back to where
we started, the idea that they can never actually hold power,
they can never be conscious of themselves holding power. The
point of the great game is just to keep being
played forever. The point of destruction is that it's an
end in itself and to tear down that which exists.
And if you point out, well, yeah, but at the
end of it, none of this stuff is going to exist.
If chaos does destroy the material realm, that's the end
of the material realm and there's nothing to fight over anymore,
and that's the end of it. And maybe even the
chaos gods themselves would die off because there'd be no
more emotions coming in. But they don't think that far ahead,
or they don't care. If you want to talk about
a a purely alien thing like the tyrannids. The Tyrannids
are sort of these bug creatures that want to eat everything. Well,
if they eat everything, there's not gonna be any food left,
and they're all going to starve to death, It doesn't matter.
They have this compulsion to keep going and going and
going like this, And it's sort of the same thing
when you look at I mean, this is where I
get accused of making a stretch, but I'm gonna stand
by it. This is where leftism goes in real life.
I mean, what was the compulsion to destroy Rhodesia and
turn it into Zimbabwe? What was one? What was the
great victory? Here? There was nothing left but a ruin.
But nobody learned anything from this, and nobody admits that
they were wrong. The point was to turn it into
this ruin. And the people who did that just moved
on to the next thing, and they're going to move
on to the next thing after that. And you see
the same thing happening in our own country and in
Europe and Australia and everything else. It's not people who
are saying things and you see this with conservatives all
the time that well, your policies are going to lead
to lef's wealth or safety for the people that you
claim to care about.
Speaker 5: Sacrificing ten thousand people to korn will decrease the gi right, Like, yes,
that's the point.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the point of destruction is destruction. The point of
sacrifice is to sacrifice. I mean it's not. The point
of tearing something down is to tear it down. Like
that's it. There is no greater thing here and in
a way, and this also gets I think, to the
nature of chaos and stuff. It does give you a
terrible power, and it does give you this this ability
to do more than normal people can. Because actually, I
think of all people I think back before, I think
he really lost it when Richard and Nani wrote that
essay on why is Everything Liberal? And one of the
things that he pointed out is that liberals just simply
care more. And one of the examples he was giving
whither on social media or in that essay was how
you have these people who will spend like sixteen hours
a day editing Wikipedia articles to make sure that they
can smear this guy or that guy, making up sources,
doing all these complicated things to create citations, all the
rest of it. There, It doesn't matter how dedicated it
we are. You and I are never going to act
like that, and you're never going to get normal people
to act like that. How do you fight that? How
do you fight neurosis? On that level, the answer is
you don't. And this is sort of the power of chaos,
like that being driven by a purely negative thing in
a way actually makes you more powerful than fighting to
defend that which you love. I mean, the idea of
hate is actually stronger than love. Is something that's a
disturbing premise within forty k that unfortunately, I think all
you have to do is sort of look around the
real world and you see, well, maybe there's something to that.
One other thing that's in it too, is when we
talk about the nature of chaos. I don't want to
get into the chaos gods or what they are and
everything else. But for people who are thinking what's ther
relevance to this, think of a chaos god. In terms
of an addiction. When you have a real addiction, you know,
choose life. Why would I do that when I have heroin.
When you have a real addiction, whether it's to a drug,
whether it's to a person, whether it's to a particular
thing that you're dedicated to, it solves so many problems
for you. In a way, there is no existential despair.
You know exactly who you are, you know exactly what
you have to do. You are in service to this thing,
and your life is organized around this thing, and in
many ways it allows you to accomplish some incredible things
in service to this thing, depending on what it is.
And this is basically what chaos does. It creates. As
the title of one of the books in the horrorce Heresy,
it's called Slaves to Darkness. And in the afterword of
that book, the author, I think it's John French, writes
about what it is to be a slave to darkness.
It is to be glorified and yet lose one's own will.
And in many ways it makes you a slave, but
in another way it makes you stronger than ever. And
in some ways I think that's sort of what leftism is.
You abandon the private attachments that I think many of
us would define the purpose of our lives by. Certainly,
if you look at the way, like a true revolutionary
one hundred years ago was driven with the idea that
there the revolutionary has no private attachments, he has no morality,
he has no god, He lives entirely in service of
the revolution. In one way, that's being less than human,
But in another way that makes you so much greater
and so much harder. To fight, and weirdly enough, I
think that using a supernatural metaphor for this in terms
of chaos is actually the best way to explain how
does true liberalism, how does true leftism operate in the world.
It's being a slave to darkness, it's being a servant
of chaos.
Speaker 5: Well, and I think that, like, look, you know, the
phrase grim dark has sort of become a byword for
this kind of ultimately doomed struggle against entropy. But what
I think is so deeply attractive about you know, many
of these characters is that despite the fact that the
battle is ultimately hopeless, yet they fight on that there
is this sort of opportunity for heroism and for transcendence
even in the face of ultimate failure. And I think that,
you know, as you've said earlier, right, ultimately and entropy
wins out. You know the famous you know, the famous
oak door you know from the analogy, right, they will,
you know, burn your oak door down. It's like, well,
regardless of if it's burnt or not, eventually it turns
to dust. The oldest door in the world is one
thousand years old. It's not that long in the grand
scheme of things, But yet that fight is still worth fighting.
It is something that needs to be done store on
a long enough time span. We're all dead. But yet
through your sacrifice, through kind of growing yourself on the pire,
you know, and there are many instances of this, you know,
this sort of like almost like caliban esque behavior, you know,
driving a bomb and to the you know, to the
evil base and blowing it up. These kind of suicidal
bravery is redemptive. And I think that, you know, when
we're talking about this, it sort of is slavery is
a given. You are enslaving yourself to something. There is
no chance for freedom. But you can either make yourself
a slave to darkness or a slave to either this
sort of like odentic great man who may or may
not even be alive. And those are your two choices,
there are only two, but one of those is still better, right,
not better is more effective. But like within the bounded
rationality of the human species existing, your choice has been made.
You can either answer the call or not. And I
think that that clarity of moral focus, that idea of
having something to give yourself completely and totally too, where
there is no you know, there's there's no moral gray area.
There is what I think many particularly young men, find
appealing about that, because that is, you know, a quest
I can give myself to. Now you mentioned you know
space greens, and they're they're obviously they wear armor. They
are sort of this idealized knight. You know this this
you know, kind of warrior monk, you know, ascetic, you know,
martial class. But and with that comes the quest, right comes,
you know, the search for is is often a plot device,
some sort of relic, but also, right, the idea of
you know, honor, the idea of and there are so
many flavors of this that is impossible to make, you know,
specific claims here without getting into much too much autism
for my listeners. But that idea of, you know, effectively
giving yourself to something greater, and I think that, you know,
in an era of extreme individualism, that idea of sublimating
yourself completely to something bigger than you is sort of intoxicating, right,
It's sort of a as you pointed out right, it
is you were in some ways it seems as if
almost identity and meaning are inversely related. You can have
one but not the other.
Speaker 6: That's yeah, there's a I mean one of the greatest
characters in the whole setting is Sigismund. Sigismund is former
first captain of the Imperial Fists, and he becomes the
founder of one of the chapters that you'll see a
lot the aesthetics, the memes are everywhere. The black templars,
so they've got them Maltese crossed, they've got the black armor.
They think they look like what they are, their crusaders
in space, their their main ship is called the Eternal Crusader.
And there's a very interesting passage in one of the
books Saturda ny and I Believe, where he's fighting a
very tough opponent without getting into it too much, and
it taught about how in his own mind because again
he's a he's a son of the Imperium, as it was,
so he believes reason, he believes in science, he believes
in the imperial truth. He's fighting this long war, he's
seen all these terrible things, and he's gradually come to faith.
And he's come to faith in an empire where the
very idea of faith is still technically illegal, and not
just illegal, but in some sense treason. And what he
sort of comes around to the thing that sort of
gives him inner peace is this idea that he's walking
along this road, this long road, and the road has
no end. The road actually doesn't even have a purpose.
The purpose of doing it is the act itself, and
the only thing that he has to think about is
just what is the next thing to do? And once
he defeats an opponent, the only thing he has to
worry about next is well, who is the next opponent
who's a threat to the throne that I can lay
down before it? And the author talks about this, you know,
sort of a from our point of view, from the
god Od's eye point of view, that there's like a
terrible nihilism implicit in all this, which even like the
chaos guy that he's fighting sort of sees and is like,
this is more anti human than what I am and
sub sense. But from another perspective, it's also sort of
inevitably where you end up, because I think that the
great tragedy of and this gets to the whole irony
that you pointed out, which is the whole story of
forty K In a way, the starting point, or at
least the starting goal of what the Emperor wanted to
accomplish was basically us now this kind of society operating
on these sorts of principles secoism, rationalism, reddit in space basically,
but where does it lead? You get people when you
have a society where people are asking questions like who
am I? How do I find myself? What am I
doing here? Like I think Socrates was completely wrong. I
think knowledge of oneself is actually a sign of decadence.
I mean, this is actually it's a very bad sign
when you have to start asking yourself these questions. You
should just know these things. And one of the interesting
things about forty k is it's sort of that's basically
the great lesson for all these things, because the people
who who stick to to duty, to tradition, to mission,
to purpose, these are the people who sort of go
on to be the heroes. And what is the number?
And you know this too as somebody who's read some
of this stuff, What is the one thing? What are
people searching for when they take the first step toward chaos?
What is the one thing they want more than anything else?
They want freedom, they want autonomy, they want they don't
want to be in this society where it's hierarchical and
they're not in supreme command. It's unfair. They want fair.
It's like, you know, Joker says in Batman, you think
about chaos, it's fair. And what does that lead to?
The search for autonomy, the search for freedom, the search
for fairness ultimately leads you to a form of slavery
that is far more absolutely than anything that God Emperor
could impose on you. And that's sort of the great
lesson of this whole thing. And in a weird way,
this was so funny about like where this setting is
now they're inserting like the wokeness is definitely there in
comical ways that are almost like it's the kind of
thing we would make up, Like, oh, there's this one
chapter space marines that are basically vikings in space. They
are all these books and stories about them, and all
have like blonde hair, blue eyes, because you know they're
vikings in space. But now it turns out like, oh,
actually all these ones are black for some reason, We're
going to have female you know, super soldiers in this
one thing. Every the Imperial Guard, which is just like
the ordinary people who are fighting all these terrible things
in older books. It talks all the times about how
co ed units are relatively rare and most of them
are obviously men. Now, of course, it seems that every
single unit is co ed, and it seems like all
the commanders and super soldiers are ninety pounds women, because
of course they are. These sorts of things are now
basically everywhere, but on a deeper level in terms of
like how the setting actually plays out, strengthening the more
dare I say, theological justifications for why the Imperium has
to operate the way it does and why it's actually
the good guys. They've sort of repudiated what they said
only a few years ago. They're no longer saying the
Imperium runs on hate. What they're saying now is that
the Imperium is, in a way sort of a rather
than a grim dark, a more noble, bright faction where
a brave team of racially and sexually diverse humans take
up arms against evil. Like that seems to be where
this thing is going. And it's a very strange thing
because they're simultaneously deconstructing the whole setting and taking away
so many of the things that made it great, but
at the same time they're also building up the main
faction as morally good in a way that it just
wasn't before. I mean, before you would say, basically, they
have to be this way because they're in a tough universe.
Now it's getting increasingly difficult not to just say no, actually,
they're just the good guys.
Speaker 5: Can't we just do that here?
Speaker 6: Right? I mean? And that's just it. And people will
say things like well, I mean, if you say, well,
look at all the racial and sexual stuff, it's like, okay,
well look at Starship Troopers the book, not the movie.
Well even in the movie too. I mean, what is
the great reveal if you've ever read Starship Troopers the book,
what is the great reveal at the end of that
thing that this guy we've been falling around, Johnny Rico,
speaks Tagalog, which means that he's probably he almost certainly
is Filipino. So you've been following this Filipino guy the
whole way through. And people will say things like, well,
you know, it's fascist, it's hierarchical, it's militaristic, and it's like, yeah,
maybe it is all these things, but you know what,
it's not. It's not racist because it's this global unless
you want to call it like the human racist thing.
And you have this global system where it turns out
that you have all these different people of different races,
all serving under one flag, and it's operating in this hierarchical,
arguably authoritarian way. But when the only thing that people
really seem to understand is like wrong with let's call
it fascism today, is that it was somehow like racially discriminatory,
like that was the big problem with fascism, then it
becomes harder to argue against, like, well, why exactly is
the imperium bad? I mean, I think like when a
lot of these things were being written in the nineteen eighties,
say nineteen nineties, the idea of an overwheeming corrupt bureaucracy
and religious superstition dominating everything you did, the idea of
living under its atalitarian state, that by itself was seen
as bad. You know why was Nazism bad for the
same reason that fascism was seen as bad or Soviet
communism was seen as bad. Because you weren't free, because
you were in number. You were just an input in
this system. And as they say at the beginning of
all the forty K books, the universe is a big place,
and whatever happens, you will not be missed. But now
we've sort of lost that because we already live in
a system under liberal democracy when we're just a number.
I think all of our experiences in with COVID showed
us that all this talk about individual rights and freedom
and autonomy was always nonsense, And so what do you
have to fall back on. He basically had this stuff
about race and sex, and that's the essence of what
it is to be a good person or a bad person.
So I think what GW is kind of done is
and the people who own this IP have kind of done,
is they've soft pedaled the things that used to make
the imperium unattractive because they're justifying it in some sense.
And then they're just kind of increasing more diversity. But
even though increasing more diversity undermines the lore, arguably makes
less compelling and all these sorts of things. Insofar as
people today have a morality, I think it's basically whichever
side is more diverse is basically the good guys. I've
noticed in quite a few movies, like say, Gangs in
New York, there'll be a black character who has been
inserted for really no reason that makes any logical sense
within the story, But I think he's only there to
tell the audience which side are the good guys and
which side are the bad guys, because if you wasn't there,
they would have no idea.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's an interesting comparison could be done. And this
is not only well past the scope of this discussion,
but a digression that is probably not worth our time
going into comparing and contrasting the worldview of Ordy k
and James Cameron's Avatar franchise because they were almost completely
and totally opposite to one another. Because I watched the
most recent film, it was awful. I don't recommend it
in the slightest. But one of the really funny things
is that James Cameron genuinely hates humans, and so he
is trying to, as a you know, a good liberal
who lives in New Zealand, trying to you know, make
this about, you know, racial diversity, because obviously the aliens
are coded as tribal. I'll leave it at that. But
the problem is they're literally going up against a diverse
one world government ruled by a woman, and the within
the within the universe. The justification is to genocide those
people so that one race of aliens can take over, right,
their planet didn't didn't.
Speaker 6: I'm blanking on the on the woman's name. Is that
Danny Newton, the black woman who plays one of the characters,
or I think it's a I think it was. I
don't know if it's the right character. That's why I'm
blanking on the actor's name. But she's made a statement
being like and she's talking about one of her like
alien characters. She's like, well, the problem is that she's
a racist. Like she's even saying, like, the aliens are
actually the racist here, which you could say that's sort
of a not the main point, but the problem is
when that is the focus of all modern morality. Well,
then by your own standards, the humans are the good guys,
aren't they, Because like, why should like one race of
these aliens be able to wipe out everybody else and
enjoy this planet? Why shouldn't everybody be able to come
and enjoy this planet, especially when it seems to be Again,
I haven't seen it, but from what I can tell,
isn't there this whole thing where basically the humans are
sort of making themselves into these aliens now and like
having romantic relationships with them, Yes, and that's that's the
problem here.
Speaker 5: That's a problem because they're moving here, and they're assimilating,
and they're this is the logic of the movie. I'm
not inserting my own values here. They are corrupting the
genetic purity. So like if you, if you slightly changed
the phrasing, this could have been written by Gebels like this.
This is It's basically like ultra racist, libtard sci fi
in a way that I don't think Jams Cameron is
particularly smart enough to understand the conclusions of his own arguments.
But the more I've been thinking about this movie, the
more I like it, because it is one of the
greatest pieces of misunderstanding your own arguments I've ever seen
in cinema, probably the only good thing about that. But Kevin, dude,
we're over time. This has been a ton of fun, man.
I feel like there's there's a lot more to discuss.
But where could people find you, dude?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean people can find my stuff on and
stuff about it at Identity Politics, on Rumble and Odyssey,
and of course I'm over at American Renaissance amren dot com.
But of course what really matters to me, like the
thing that I like, actually care about, of course, is
Warhammer forty K. So my friend Chad and I have
a show, Grim Dark Enlightenment. We've got four episodes so far.
You can find that on I post every new episode
on x and we'll be doing a substack for that too.
We'll have more content and everything there. And interestingly it's
called again Grim Dark Enlightenment, and interestingly you brought it
the last Avatar thing. One of the jokes that I
made of the last episode was it was basically like
the most racist white guy ever and then it's POC girlfriend.
It's all. I was like, oh, actually, this is just
like a documentary about like the founding members of the
alt right, so.
Speaker 5: Quite literally, and this is why this movie blew my
mind because.
Speaker 6: The villain of this, I feel, I feel seen.
Speaker 5: The villain of this is obviously, you know, the most
racist man alive with his POC girlfriend. But every thing
he does is in service of the human race. We're
all one color human and it is again the he's
he's ultimately a bio essentialist in the sense that he
believes he has the spirit of a jacked white boomer
trapped in the body of flue alien and what matters
is that is what matters. And I think that the
the weird way in which he is more liberal in
that way that he believes that his soul, his spirit,
his his culture matters more than his biology. And then
the movie is like, screw that guy, stab him with sticks.
We're more phrasist. Is incredibly funny to me. Yeah again,
and I don't see it. That irony is not worth
four hours, but but it is important and that I mean,
then I'll shut up. As the last point I would
make is that we're at a point now where a
lot of the unspoken premises of liberalism, because every system
has its own internal contradictions, right, and the internal contradictions
of egalitarianism are now playing out in a way that
they can't be concealed anymore. I mean, what is the
thing I say over and over again in identity politics,
everybody's a blood and soil and nationalist for the people
they actually like. We are now seeing this all the
time where the same people who are screaming about the
evils of racism are saying it is cultural appropriation if
you make tacos or something and you're white. I mean,
it is bled around to it is looped around to
the point where we have racial essentialism now being championed
by the very same people who previously told us that
race does not exist, and to bring it back to
where we really began. I think this is sort of
the grand narrative of Warhammer forty k More than the
battle between order of y chaos, which I think is
at the root of every great mythology, More than even
the question of traditionalism and hierarchy or anything like that.
The great fifty thousand year story of that universe is
essentially that liberalism contains within the seeds of its own demise,
and you will end up in a post liberal society anyway.
And that's a terrifying conclusion that I don't think a
lot of people can allow to be indulged in, even
as a fantasy. No, certainly, because again, it is the
death of progress, It is the death of the animating force.
And once your own people have recognized that, let alone
your enemies, you are done. Your God is dead again. Kevin,
this has been a ton of fun, man. I know
we were joking about this being the most important thing
in the world, but I'm so burnt out on politics
that I've just decided to not be a political shown
till I decide to be interested in politics again. So
it just be like the fourth media analysis episode in
a row to my viewers. If you're annoyed by that,
go listen to someone else's podcast. There are many out
there as far as my stuff, The Jay Burdens Show, Apple,
Spotify YouTube. If you want the episodes early in ad
free for me a few bucks, you can do so
on Patreon, Substack or gum Road. I know it's a
little bit annoying, but it helps keep the lights on.
It pays my mortgage, and look, I think it comes
out to twenty cents an hour for my episodes early
in ad free, which is not bad anyway. That's where
you can support me. Oh, check out Axios Remote Fitness Coaching.
My sponsor, who I forget to mention, Jad's very good
at what he does. Who's actually just helping me make
a custom program this morning. The app's really good.
Speaker 6: He's one of us.
Speaker 5: You should support him. Kevin, I appreciate it. Everyone at home,
keep your head up. I can't last forever. Good Night,