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dot com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back
to the Peaking Yona Show. Mike Maxwell from Imperium presses back.
How you doing, Mike, I'm doing very well.
Speaker 2: It's been a little while since we've talked, and I'm
really looking forward to this one.
Speaker 1: Well, it seems that we talk when you put a
book out, personally put a.
Speaker 2: Book that probably was the last time we talked, actually.
Speaker 1: And so let's jump just jump right into this. You
have a new book out, Tribal Future of the West.
As soon as I as soon as I got the
overall theme, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, this is
definitely something I want to I want to talk to
Mike about. So if you don't mind, I'm just gonna
I'm just going to start because there was a bunch
of there's a bunch of topics we can hit here,
so let's start with this. Basically, it seems like the
overriding theme is that Western sovereignty is understrain and it's evolving,
that there's an evolving nature of it. So how did
you start noticing this?
Speaker 2: Well, the book has quite a long prehistory. Actually, one
of our guys who's actually a co host of mine
on hearth Fire Radio, which is a podcast network that
we've built, he said to me. You know, this is
sort of the culmination of a lot of what Imperia
has been doing for a few years, putting out books
like the the Guetano Mosca book about about the mafia,
putting out the I mean, the Ancient City. That's when
we put out ages ago, you know, Chris Bond's Nemesis,
that's another old one. A lot of the stuff has
sort of been moving in this direction, and I think
what I've tried to do here anyway, what I've tried
to do is put the pieces together. So it really
started as a series of observations over course of years,
little things, little cultural cracks that turned out to be
the edges of much bigger pattern, I suppose. So the
first one I've been blogging about on my substack for
a long time called I call it the Archaic Revival.
And for years I'd been seeing the return of like
primitive and Gothic aesthetics, the reappearance of pre Axial age
forms of thinking. So this is like before the era
of the you know, the Buddha and Zoroaster and everything like,
these very ancient tribal forms of thinking. The decline of abstraction, universalism,
and even aesthetically too, like things like the rise of
modernist aesthetics in the twentieth century. This is not something
that's just started happening yesterday, right like Picasso to me
looks very primitive, the Vorticists, and even to a degree,
Surrealism looks very archaic and primitive to me.
Speaker 3: So I've noticed.
Speaker 2: I noticed that first, and then of course I came
to grips with Karl Schmidt and his friend enemy distinction
completely rejects this idea of liberal idea of a glo
global village. He is kind of like a twentieth century
thinker that describes a very ancient political reality, which is
that politics is about who you stand with and who
you stand against. And once you see this, I mean basically,
what he's doing is he's giving us the analytical, analytical
framework through which we can understand tribalism. Ultimately, another thing
I started noticing and reading the Moscow book was a
big eye opener for this, but I sort of noticed
it a little bit earlier too, is that criminal organizations
have been acting kind of like many states.
Speaker 3: There was a sort of.
Speaker 2: Aha moment for me realizing that these substate actors actually
wielded what you might call sovereign functions, and my understanding
of sovereignty comes out of absolutism. That would be a
little bit of a digression for.
Speaker 3: Now, but basically.
Speaker 2: The idea is that the sovereign stands above the law.
And I noticed that there were certain non state actors
that basically do that.
Speaker 3: They decide the exception with.
Speaker 2: In their own little remit, their own little geographical area.
And the tipping point for me for understanding this was
a documentary about the Golden Dawn in Greece. There was
a woman that was being interviewed, and this was during
the Eurozone crisis, around twenty fifteen, and she said something
that stuck with me. She said that during this Eurozone crisis,
the police stopped responding because there was too much going on.
And then she said, so we started calling the Golden Dawn,
And that line kind of hit me. It appeared to
me that even in a supposedly modern European democracy, sovereignty
had actually evolved overnight, not to the state, not to
an NGO, not to a technocratic bureaucracy, but to a
local and straightforwardly tribal organization, you know. And then this
was kind of the beginning of really the thesis crystallizing
in my mind over a period of years that sovereign
functions appear to be leaking downward and outward and just
everywhere away from the center. The center, that is to say,
the official power in society. The sovereign is losing capacity.
And you see these archaic forms of order resurfacing, of
which the dissident right is one in terms of its
the revival identitarianism seems to me something very ancient coming back,
and you get what can really only be described as
tribal authority filling the vacuum. Now by this, I don't
necessarily mean guys running around in loincloths with spears and
things like that. But what I mean is a personalist,
face to face loyalty to a set of people, or
a loyalty to a concrete group, as opposed to loyalty
to an idea, loyalty to an abstraction, including an abstraction
of the nation. Now, the nation is somewhere between tribalism
and liberalism, but we might get into this. It's sort
of an unstable halfway house between one and the other.
And now it seems like we are moving away from
this globalized, abstract propositional identity politics towards a more straightforwardly
tribal politics. So when I started talking about this, because
I've been talking about retribalization for about two years now,
people thought it was like kooky or larpie or overblown
or whatever, and maybe Mike's just being metaphorical about tribes.
But I really wasn't. And this view that I've come
to is not based on like it's not a nostalgia
for the ancient world. This is about hard analysis of
long term trends of elite fragmentation, of the collapse of
our shared realities, what I've called the epistemic divorce of
just the physical and material capacity that has declined, and
the rise of what I call in the book these
para sovereigns, para sovereign actors.
Speaker 3: There's a huge.
Speaker 2: Like, what we're seeing today is essentially a perfect storm
building to power and command and sovereignty and imperative away
from the nation state. And I think that this is
something that is going to come on astoundingly fast. A
lot of people are going to be taken by surprise.
And what I want is for people to see it
before it happens. So that's really what this book is about.
Speaker 1: What will you say to people who would point to
civilizations that still exists that are somewhat cohesive, like China.
Whenever tribalism is brought up or secession or city states,
people always point, well, China is not falling apart over there,
They're not splitting up. They will just with them being
a jugger, not they will just roll over you and
eat you.
Speaker 3: Up right, Yes, And China.
Speaker 2: Is what I would call a centripetal force, right, They're
a force that is pushing things back to the center
in the West because an external foe is a very
very strong force to like muster people together. It's a
big part of why states came into being in the
first place at of feudalism. And China itself is obviously
very cohesive.
Speaker 3: It's on the rise.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's a good counterpoint here, like because at
first glanced China kind of looks like the anti tribal
future itself. It's this hyper centralized leviathan with a cohesive elite. Right,
They've ironclad discipline in the CCP, a powerful surveillance state,
they've got a deep industrial base, and many other things
going for them now. I would point out first that
China is strong today because it never really liberalized, right,
like there was a sort of there were overtures made
towards this in the nineteen eighties with Dungjoping, But much
of what is eroding the West is the product of
liberal individualism, and this forms a big portion of the
analytical framework of the book. China does not have what
we might call the epistemic divorce, this idea of no
shared truth, like the collapse of grand narratives and the
fragmentation of people into epistemic silos. They don't have that.
They also don't have elite fragmentation. Their elite is very cohesive.
They don't have mass migration, they don't have minoritarian politics,
their national identity is quite strong. So it never really
accepted the premises of liberalism, but rather it maintained a
single elite narrative, a very high degree of censorship and
a strong bureaucratic oversight, and a very very limited degree
of pluralism. So this delays the devolutionary pressures that are
hitting the West because they're going to hit the West first,
but doesn't actually eliminate those pressures. China is facing its
own centrifugal forces. These are the forces pushing outward and
pushing things away from each other. China is still in
its high centralization phase, maybe where the West was in
the mid to early to mid twentieth century or something.
But there are several factors I would say that would
indicate future strain in China. China's social contract. You might say,
I don't like that term, but in any case, that's
maybe just a vestigial libertarianism thing for me. I just
don't like the idea of the social contract. But anyway,
everybody knows what I mean. Their social contract is based
on prosperity. And in China today growth is starting to
collapse and the middle class is under substantial strain. They've
got a property bubble that kind of makes puts hours
in the shade. It is absolutely like I was in China.
Speaker 3: I did a.
Speaker 2: What do you call it, like a layover in Guangzhou
a couple of years ago, and for various reasons, the
flight was delayed, so we had to we had to
go get a hotel in the in the city, and
this is like, you know, this is not Beijing, This
is like, you know, not many people that speak English
in the city. Right, It's like it's a gigantic megalopolis,
but it's a very Chinese place. And I noticed, you know,
they gave us a one, like a twenty four hour
visa to leave the airport because they're a serious country
and you have to follow the rules.
Speaker 3: So they gave us a.
Speaker 2: Twenty four hour visa and we went did a little
bit of exploring around this city, and I noticed that
there was just an absolutely colossal, colossal amount of building.
This was about now that I think about, it was, yeah,
about three years ago.
Speaker 1: Something like that.
Speaker 2: And there is just it's the property bubble there is
absolutely astounding and they and economic factors or economic indicators
are showing that there's a slow down happening. And just
like our property bubble, it depends upon perpetual asset inflation
and things. There is just their economy doesn't add up.
Speaker 3: Basically. You know, they're.
Speaker 2: Doing amazing things, and I have great respect for what
the Chinese are doing, but it is not a healthy economy,
nor is ours of course. Now, also, China has amographic problem.
It's a somewhat of a different problem than the West has,
but their birth rates are catastrophically low, and because of
the one child policy, China is aging faster than any
society has in history.
Speaker 3: It has a huge, huge, you know.
Speaker 2: Like you look at that population curve, it's got a
huge top heavy curve at the very top, and it's
got this China actually, I believe their population is now
shrinking and they have an elderly population, which you know,
this feeds into the economic problems because they have lower productivity,
they have higher welfare costs, and they have younger cohorts
that are restless and overburdened. And so this is a
potent centrifugal force. And the other thing about China is
that they are quite regional. The coastal China is effectively
its own world, right, It's not that different from the West.
I mean, it's different in many ways, but it's you know,
it's still it's rich, it's globalized, it's connected, it's yeah,
it's not dev os Man, but they have their own
sort of version of that. Whereas inland China is poorer,
it's very much more rural and more tribal. Effectively, there
are two Chinas economically and culturally, so this creates a
kind of social cleavage. Which is going to be very
hard for them to paper over. And also they have
ethnic cleavages as well. Within China, this huge country with
billions of people, there are powerful ethnic nations.
Speaker 3: They have the Hui, they have.
Speaker 2: The Tibetans, they have the Uigers, and these people have
never fully assimilated. And these are latentable identities that are
really only held in place under coercive pressure. And China
also has a problem that I call elite overproduction. It's
not my term, it comes from Peter Turchin. And this
means that China, and this is a problem with the
in the West too, is producing much much more, many
more educated aspirants than elite positions. And this is a
civilizational warning sign. It's almost a predictor of fragmentation, of
elite fragmentation, and that means societal fragmentation. So this centralization
today that they're undergoing may actually mask does mask quite
a few forces that will later yield fragmentation. And even
at its most centralized, China still has built in tribal elements.
There are clan networks there, there are regional patronage systems.
Wealth structures are concentrated still in families very much they
have their own, you know, local criminal syndicates, some of
which govern in tandem with the central state, right, and
they still have like informal governance at the village level,
especially obviously in the rural inlands. So they do have
tribal substrates that are kind of sitting underneath the surface
of this what looks like a very modern state and
China's authoritarian strength. The thing about authoritarianism is that it
doesn't fragment slowly what we're seeing in the West, which
is a kind of authoritarian but it's a very soft authoritarianism.
Hard authoritarianism tends to splinter very suddenly when the strong
center breaks. When that happens, and actually I go into
this about ancient China in the book, you get the
reassertion of power by regional bosses. These factional alliances will
harden very quickly into sovereign actors. Ethnic minorities will begin
to push for autonomy. You'll get criminal underworld elements that
flourish and then become actual governors in their own right.
This happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
this has happened repeatedly in Chinese history. This is not
something that is hypothetical. Happened with the end of the
Han dynasty, the end of the Tang dynasty, the collapse
of the yuang Yuan, and the warlord era. Even in
the twentieth century after the Qing dynasty fell, and even
after that, even after the imperial period, with the fall
of the nationalists on the mainland, right with Mao himself,
that was an instance of a kind of tribalism. So
China's political cycle has always oscillated between this imperial center
and warlordism. And so anyway, I'm kind of going on
for a long time here, But in the big picture,
China looks like a very anti fragmentation power. But and
it may actually, as I say, act as a centripetal force,
pushing went Western states to unify out of fear of
their rise. In the medium term, China is facing a
lot of the same pressures that we are in the West,
demographic collapse and elite overproduction and things like that. But
it will face these same pressures later and perhaps more
violently in the long term. I don't think China is
at all exempt from this cycle of sovereign devolution. If anything,
it embodies this classic imperial pattern maybe better as well
or better than any other society. So it's under the
surface you get these deep structural vulnerabilities, and I think
it's only looking at it in the short term where
it looks strong.
Speaker 1: That was a good diversion though. I think that helps
a lot when you can look at something that's different
from the West and see that it's suffering the same issues.
So I wanted to move on to institutional decay in
the West, and one of the things that you brought
up was it just bureaucracies are inefficient and technocracy has limitations.
I think the bureaucracy is pretty clear to people. But
when you say technocratic limitations, that seem to butt up
against the people who are screaming about Palanteer and Peter
Thiel and a panopticon, which may be something that they
try to go towards. But are you saying that you
you doubt whether they're they're going to even have that
ability at this point?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I definitely do. Now.
Speaker 2: In framing this thesis, I I've tried to be very
very careful because the title and the general scope and
thesis of the book can very easily sound alarmist, and
that is absolutely not what I it's not what I want, right.
But and so as a result of that, what I've
tried to do is I've tried to consider there's a
whole chapter on, you know, on counter arguments, and there's
a separate chapter on like centralizing forces. So you know,
maybe we should talk a little bit about technocratic governance
and what it is actually and why it works and
also and then I think will be in a position
to understand why it will actually fail.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So the man in the.
Speaker 2: Street tends to think that the West is run by politicians,
but in reality it's handled by technocrats.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is something that James Burnham explained gosh, like eighty
years ago now or something like that. Right, this is
the Weberian administrative state that's run by regulators and scientists
and financial experts and bankers and things like that. Right,
it's the whole idea that no matter who's elected, you
still have this machinery that keeps society running.
Speaker 3: And for decades it did actually keep things running. Right.
Speaker 2: But in the long arc of history, technocracy is a
temporary phase. It was really powerful in the twentieth century, right,
because you had these huge bureaucracies institutions were fairly stable,
At least in our backyard, they were fairly stable. You
had like expert based governance and things like that, And
technocracy's strength came from like, technocracy is something the Jordan
Peterson's and Stephen Pinker's and.
Speaker 3: Those folks of the world.
Speaker 2: They think of technocracy as like the ideal form of
governance or just like what good governance looks like, because
of course you will listen to the experts. Of course
we want to have the smartest guys in the room
running the show. But technocracy is actually it's really a luxury.
It's actually something that we can afford. And you need
a lot in place to make technocracy work.
Speaker 3: You need to have high trust.
Speaker 2: You need to have a society of very, very high trust,
so that people believe in the experts, so that when
Anthony Fauci says something, people listen instead of viewing him
as an enemy or a mouthpiece for their political opponents
or for their ethnic opponents or.
Speaker 3: Something like that.
Speaker 2: Right, So you need that high trust is very important.
You also need a very complex society because just by
the very nature of technocracy, you need specialists. Essentially, that's
what it is. It's the rule by specialist. So you
need a modern economy, you need very large and well
maintained infrastructures and things like that. You also need prosperity.
This is really important.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Prosperity is like you know, when technocracy delivers prosperity, this
you know, feeds into high trust, right like when when
things are good, people will trust the experts and trust
the science, and they'll get vaccinated and they will you know,
they'll be happy with very large and expensive public works
projects and things like that.
Speaker 3: I guess what else do you need here?
Speaker 2: You need fundamentally, you need a coherent elite. You need
a managerial class that all speaks the same language. So like,
technocracy is kind of like this, the centripetal heart really
of the modern state. It binds society together through competence
and predictability and this continuity no matter who comes in,
even if it's an evil Trump, you know that the
deep state is going to keep things rolling. Now, there
are some problems. The main problem is that we have
declining competence, and this is being driven by factors that
it's not just that we've made bad decisions. It's not
just that we have put the wrong people in positions
of power. There are systemic pressures that are pushing down
competence over time. This is something that doctor ed Dutton
talks about in his books, which is the decline of intelligence.
We are now on average fifteen IQ points less intelligent
than we were in the Victorian age. That's like the
difference between well, a technocratic elite and a school teacher
or something like that, you know what I mean. So,
and this is according to him, and I actually agree
with this, driven by the relaxation of Darwinian pressures. So
basically we've just like, it's too easy for us, there's
no competition and all of that, right, So we are
objectively getting less intelligent, whatever the cause is. And not
only that, but the bureaucracy is now drowning in its
own proceduralism. It's too big, it's too rigid, it moves
too slowly, and it is now basically unable to deliver
basic results. And this corrodes its moral authority. So you know,
we have this declining legitimacy that is coming in and
because as their performance worsens, the trust that I mentioned
upfront declines, and people are no longer just willing to
accept what Anthony Fauci says, right, because well, we can
see what happened in twenty twenty whatever, so that was
all about It was not about public health. So this
citizens no longer accepting what the technocratic elite, the managerial
elite says, brings in this epistemic divorce thing, and the
question comes up, who's like, whose data are we looking at?
What experts do you we mean when you say trust
the science, which science, right, because quite obviously there are
certain their entire branches of science which are now effectively fiction, right,
like things like you know, sociology and well, genomics is
still pretty hard science, but even it is, well it's
too dangerous, you know what I mean? Like whose models
are we falling following? And this has led to the
replication crisis, which I think it's very interesting. It was
a huge story about two or three years ago, but
nobody's talking about it anymore.
Speaker 3: But that's not.
Speaker 2: Because it's been solved. It's just because of the very
nature of academia itself, which is essentially there. They fetishize novelty,
They want the newest, and like anything that is overturning,
like established norms, gets funding and whatever is like, you know,
proving what we've known forever is ignored. So anyway, the
competence is declined the legit and as a result, the
legitimacy has declined, and the decline of legitimacy moves into
this epistemic fragmentation. And meanwhile, the bureaucracy as it has matured,
has become too complex. There's too many agencies. They all
have like overlapping mandates, and they compete with each other,
and they're all careerists and they have the wrong incentives,
and this is driving internal factionalism within the elite. These
bureaucracies have become totally sclerotic. They have competing priorities, and
when these agencies, like the bureaucratic agencies, when they pursue
these competing agendas, this is when the center dissolves. You know,
Like our guys tend to look favorably or at least
less unfavorably upon the third Reich, you know. But they
also they had this idea at the time where what
you would basically do is set a number of different
agencies to try to achieve the same goal and sort
of let them fight it out and may the best
man Win. It was a kind of application of Darwinism
to bureaucracy, and that didn't turn out very well because
you need to coordinate. So this is driving these you know,
overlapping competing priorities are driving elite fragmentation. And once elites fracture,
the bureaucracy becomes this battlefield. It no longer is about governing.
It's about maintaining and protecting sinecures and even AI itself,
which is supposed to be this panacea, like AI is
supposed to solve all of our problems. It doesn't actually
do that with this managerial priesthood. And so anyway, they
have basically lost the public mandate and they cannot outcompete
these para sovereigns, these smaller, more agile para sovereigns that
govern on the ground because they're slow and they're rule bound.
These para sovereigns are more agile and adaptive and they
can improvise and things like that. The bureaucracy has no legitimacy.
It can't really operate very well in this mosaic environment
of different factions, different peoples, different folks, different para sovereigns,
and it will never survive an elite civil war, and
it also cannot survive a collapse of material capacity or
like essentially us becoming less wealthy over time. But that's
a whole other tangent. So anyway to wrap this up,
there's a number of converging factors that will overcome technocracy.
As these para sovereigns become local providers in their neighborhood,
identity will become primary again, and elites will turn against
each other. This is already happening. The administrative state is
losing its capacity and as a result, its legitimacy is evaporating.
And so I really don't think that technocracy is going
to fix the problem.
Speaker 1: Well, let's stay on paras sovereigns. How do you see
this tribalism that's growing. How do you see technology helping
them and protect themselves? Because you know, like I mentioned,
if you have a small a smaller state is more vulnerable.
I mean you could argue Switzerland in places like that,
who are just friendly with everybody, and yeah, they they
have some businesses that other countries don't house, But how
would you see them protecting themselves? And because I think
that is the way the way you get people to
embrace your your vision and your leadership is you have
to be able to feed them and you have to
be able to protect them. So how do you see
that working out in the future.
Speaker 2: Right, So, in terms of protection, what we're talking about
fundamentally is one of the most important sovereign functions, and
that is monopoly of force, right, or perhaps slightly more dramatically,
we could say the ability to wage war. One of
the important elements here I think to understand is how
war has changed over time. And this is a whole
chapter in the book because it is so important. I mean,
this is basically how we monopolized force, and the twenty
first century is very different than how we monopolized it
in the seventeenth century or whatever. So just very quickly
to kind of sprint through this idea of the generations
of warfare. Security experts recognize five generations, and obviously the
first generation came first. This was in the you know,
the sixteen hundreds and lasted until about the Napoleonic era.
The Napoleonic Wars were really the high point of this
form of sovereignty, which is lion and column where you
get this rigid battlefield geometry you get, you know, men
lining up in these massive formations, and this kind of
warfare required a very large state. So this was one
of the material factors that began the centralization process, the
move from feudal baronies and things like that to nation states,
because only nation states can mobilize and coordinate force at
a scale that was required to win these battles. Now
this changed a little bit, but it kind of changed.
It changes some interesting ways. Right about World War One,
which is when we get the second generation of warfare,
which is trench warfare or artillery warfare the name of
the game for first generation. So again going back to
this Napoleonic era, was maneuver you could maneuver, the more
you could win. All of a sudden, when this new
style of warfare comes in, this like heavily mechanized style
of warfare in World War One, it's no longer about maneuver.
In fact, maneuvering becomes very difficult, and that's exactly part
of the problem. It becomes about attrition all of a sudden.
Now the war is about grinding people down instead of
outflanking them. And it's also and this is kind of
the decisive thing about the second generation, it's about having
an industrial base. The only way that you can fit
out these armies and supply them with what they need
is by having industrial capacity. So this drove further centralization
because of course, you know you need to not only
do you need a nation state, but you need an
industrial nation. So that's the second generation of warfare. The
third generation comes in late World War Two and this
is blitzkrieg warfare, and so very interestingly again we go
back to maneuver as being decisive, just like it was
in the first generation. This is still very mechanized, but
now is about speed and outflanking the enemy and gaining
the initiative and everything like that. And of course it
technologically it requires a yet larger state, so it's even
more centralizing in some ways. But also a change starts
to happen in warfare here because it is more improvisational.
The command structure now has to be a bit more flexible.
Speaker 3: Now you have to.
Speaker 2: Basically give more decisive power to the maybe not at
the level of the general, but at a much lower level,
like you know, commanding on the ground people that are
actually just giving direct orders to lower level units. So
the monopoly of organized violence is starting to loosen a
little bit, and it loosens very very much in the
next generation, which is the fourth, and that is guerrilla warfare.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The paradigm here is Vietnam. Of course everybody thinks of
that when they think of guerrilla warfare.
Speaker 3: But this is where.
Speaker 2: I mean, for the first three generations, the central state
was favored asymmetrically. Now it starts to go in the
other direction and favor these smaller non state actors. Because,
of course, in guerrilla warfare, you don't really actually know
who the enemy is. I mean, the enemy could be
that civilian that's just standing over there with an ied,
So the battlefield becomes more abstracted. It could be anywhere.
It's in the cities. And what's more, in gorilla warfare,
now legitimacy becomes really really decisive. Part of the reason
why the US was unable to win in Vietnam is
that people just were sick of it. People just said,
you know, what are we even doing here? And this
sapped the will to fight and it was a big,
big problem. So legitimacy becomes much more important than it
has been before, and para sovereigns, these smaller scale forces
thrive because they don't need tanks or air forces, and
in fact, having a tank doesn't actually help you at
all against a gorilla insurgency because you don't know who
you don't know who people are, or they're agile, and
they can disable these things very like you know, the material,
very easily. Tanks don't work that well in urban terrain, right,
So things are starting to change again. It's very interesting
we go back to attrition as the main strategy of
how you win war. You don't need to win, you
just need to not lose, right, which is very easy
for these decentralized groups. So the centralization actually becomes a
bit of a vulnerability here with fourth generation warfare, and
even so with law fare and bureaucracy, because these things
are slow and they they are a bit of a
drag on states and being able to act. Now, the
fifth generation warfare is something even more decentralized, more abstracted
away from the battlefield, because this is informational warfare. This
is warfare as economic warfare, This is warfare as misinformation
and sapping the opponent's will to fight and polluting his
informational environment with subversive propaganda and things like that, and
this is really the way that warfare is kind of
waged today. It's you know, very very different now, so
it's kind of evolved in a way that actually asymmetrically
favors small guy and even anonymized actors.
Speaker 3: This is the reason.
Speaker 2: Why the security state is so worried about misinformation, because
misinformation is a is actually a threat to state security
because misinformation can cause cascading effects in the economy and
things like that, you know what I mean. And you know,
also when people don't believe the same things when you
get the rise of like AI people take for example,
those horrific revelations about Trump and the Epstein files that
we've all heard about, terrible stuff. All that's going to
happen is that his base is just going to say, oh,
that's fake.
Speaker 3: They lied.
Speaker 2: And even if there was like video that came out
about like what he was supposedly up to, they're just
going to say, oh, well, that's a deep fake.
Speaker 3: So it's like.
Speaker 2: Impossible for the central authority to make itself decisive essentially
to force people to believe what it needs them to believe.
It's impossible for them to gain control over narratives and
things like that. And this is because of the way
that warfare has changed. Warfare is now more abstract than
it ever has been. Of course, it still requires force,
it still requires violence, It still requires men with boots
on the ground wielding guns and things like that.
Speaker 3: But even that is even that in.
Speaker 2: Terms of like these guerrilla insurgencies, that is, the central
state no longer really has this decisive power like it
once did. So I mean the like, just the fact
that the state has like military power and reserve doesn't
actually necessarily make it. It doesn't necessarily make it the one
that's going to be able to exert sovereign authority because
that now the way that you monopolize violence has changed.
So you're going to see the rise and you are
already seeing the rise of these paras sovereign threats. These
you could imagine something like criminal sovereigns. We just saw
this week in Mexico, an explosion of violence over corruption
relating to the car tells because the cartels are a
para sovereign and the Mexican government can't really do anything
about it, and people are sick of it, and so
the legitimacy of the state is collapsing. This you know,
the problem ostensibly is over corruption, but really what the
problem is is over the retreat of the state. People
feel like the state has abandoned them to these cartels.
So that's one pair of sovereign that can straightforwardly go
toe to toe with the state. There was actually an
instance a few years ago where the son of cartel
warlord l Chopo was. The state tried to arrest him,
and the cartels basically said no, you're not doing that,
and they essentially sprang him, not from jail, but they
were able to push back and prevent him from being arrested,
which is quite a striking turn of events. I mean,
could you imagine something like that in the nineteen fifties
in America? I certainly couldn't. Now, of course, Mexico is
not America, but all the same structural factors are converging,
so criminal sovereigns are going to increasingly take bites out
of the state's sovereign capacity. You've got ethnic enclaves, religious enclaves,
takes something like what's it called Dearborn Michigan or whatever.
What would it take to remove those people and to
turn that back into what it looked like ethnically in
the nineteen sixties, it would take a degree of force
that I just don't think is possible today. So those
people are effectively able to know, they're able to rule
and decide the exception in their own little area. And
then got like smaller things like militias or volunteer battalions
or armed factions and things like that. And we haven't
even really talked about things like you know, cyber criminal syndicates,
which themselves cost the state billions of dollars annually, hybrid sovereigns,
like alliances between political and criminal elements with like you know,
communal elements and things like that. I just you know,
the idea of centralization or the nation state, the Westphalian
nation state coming back, that's a real that's a real
bear market in my opinion.
Speaker 1: I guess the question would be is how do you
break people of nationalism, the idea of nationalism with populism
comes nationalism and populism has swept and I think populism
is just a a bridge to you're talking about a
more tribal future. But what do you do do you
make do you describe nationalism as something smaller, remind them
it has a nation as it's people. It's not really
a structure. What has to happen this? Do we need
a serious crisis in order to help people to understand
that a nation of three hundred and fifty to four
hundred million people is insanely and you're an insane person
if you think it's possible, even right now or especially
in the future.
Speaker 2: Well, this is something that goes outside of the scope
of the book, because the book is essentially a map
for as it says in the title, for the future, right,
it's a descriptive work. It's doesn't give prescriptions.
Speaker 3: Here's what we should do.
Speaker 2: But that's a good question, that's a fair question.
Speaker 3: And so I mean.
Speaker 2: Nationalism, So we have to understand kind of like where
nationalism has gone and where it's gone wrong. It was
the great centralizing force of the modern era from the
eighteenth to the twentieth century. It fused millions of strangers
into these unified, continent spanning nations. It replaced what we
had before, which were these local loyalties, and it replaced
those with a single national community, really in some ways,
an imagined community. I know nationalists won't really like that,
because you know, they are fighting back. And here's the thing.
Speaker 3: I'm not.
Speaker 2: A nationalist. I'm a post nationalist, but I'm not anti
nationalist because I think that the vision of nationalism is good.
Speaker 3: I think that.
Speaker 2: I mean, we published, we publish works by Martin Selner,
we published books, works by other nationalists. It's a noble
and good thing. But nationalism only works when society shares
the same narrative world right. Once you get this loss
of shared truth, once elites begin fragmenting, once demographics become
too heterogeneous, then the central narrative no longer holds. So
what As mass nationalism declines, As the era of large,
unified national cultures declines, the nation state loses its integrative power,
and people fragment into essentially what you might call micro nationalisms.
People become more regional in their nationalism. Now they might
think of them themselves not as British but as Scottish,
or not as a but as Texan, or not as
Spanish but Catalonian. So that might be they might break
into these regional nationalisms.
Speaker 1: Well, Spain is Spain has had that for centuries. That's
one of their problems.
Speaker 2: But it may it may formalize. Right, they tried, They
tried to formalize. They had those Catalonian they had the referendum, right,
So so people may see themselves more as like regionally nationalists,
or they may see themselves as ethnically nationalists, like in
a more Balkan style micro nation environment, they might become
more ideologically nationalists. But I think that that's actually way waning. Essentially,
what's going to happen and what has been happening, is
that nationalism is shrinking into what we had Imperium called focushness.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is the This is essentially the preferencing of more
on the ground identities, the more fundamental pre political identities,
over the less fundamental. So focusedness is the preference for
your family over your clan. It's the preference for your
clan over your tribe, and the preference for your tribe
over your nation. And it's also the preference of your
nation over humanity. So focusedness is essentially a more ontologically
fundamental kind of nationalism. It's like the precursor to nationalism.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's about this deep sense of belonging to a particular people.
And this is not just ethnic, it's also to the land,
to the stories, to the customs and to your ancestors ultimately,
So it is also ethnic. It's a way of being,
and it's a way of orienting yourself and organizing yourself
into this long intergenerational chain that inherits things like ways
of speaking, symbols, seasonal rituals, communal memories, and ancestral reverence
and things like that. This is the most personalist, situational, embodied,
and non abstracted ideology imaginable, and in fact, it's hard
to even think of it as an ideology. It's as
much an ideology as like loving your own mother over
some other person's mother is an ideology. It's really just natural.
It's just nature, you.
Speaker 3: Know what I mean. So this is what's This is
the future.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the tribal future because there are
structural determinants that are moving us in this direction. People
want to belong to communities. They want to have continuity
with the past. They want to keep their stories and
pass their stories down to their children. They want to
have a connection with their ancestors. They want rootedness ultimately
is what they want. They want to be rooted to
a place, rooted to a folk, and as abstraction like
the abstraction of the nation, but also conceptual abstraction collapses,
people turn inward to this more focush layer. So when
as states fail, you're going to see the rise of
this patchwork mosaic of folkhoods and people are returning to
these smaller, older, and really more human units of identity.
So I think, like for us, like you know, as
we see the writing on the wall, as we see
the way the direction that the wind is blowing, it's
really imperative for us to purposefully and you know, just
just to turn in this direction before others do. Because
it is really those small scale, agile factions with extremely
high solidarity and in group identity and preference that are
going to be the most anti fragile in what I'm
calling the tribal future. So I think we just basically
need to become more focush and because the ones who
do will be the ones to survive. These focish tribal
units are kind of like the hardy pioneer species after
a forest fire that sprout early and become the beginnings
of these like great oaks that will eventually grow up
into nations. Because it is a cyclical, it is a
cyclical model.
Speaker 3: It's a cyclical vision.
Speaker 2: So the people who embrace that first, I think, are
going to do the best in the.
Speaker 1: End, well to something practical while we still have what
would be you know, term like hybrid sovereignty where formal
states still exist but people are breaking off into into
their tribes. What do you think is the best way
to avoid you know, that existing monopoly on violence coming
down upon you to crush you.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean, how how can you avoid the
eye of of suron. That's a tough one because kind
of really the more consistent you are in doing these things,
the more it's going to turn its eye toward you,
because of course, the imperial center sees what direction things
are going. I believe that what I'm saying here is
known and in fact from what I understand, you know,
listening to some of the interviews with David Betts. Actually
just I devote a chapter in the book to David Betts,
who is a security analysts on a lot of podcasts
this year, to say some of the some very similar
things to what I've been saying for years. They're aware,
the security state is aware that this tribal future is coming,
and they obviously don't like it, they would like to
avoid it, but there's really very little that they can
do because things are moving at the structural level against them.
So if you stick your head up too far, then
you're going to get batted down, right. And I think
that there are some very well meaning guys and very
noble men in our midst who are copying it right
now because they're essentially coming out to you know, they're
basically coming out with it. They're being that, they're being
the angle, the eternal Anglo that believes that open debate
and saying things plainly will is the way to go.
But I'm afraid that I think that we have to
be a little bit more closed about it, right. But anyway,
building what so as for like avoiding trouble, I think
you just have to be sensible. You have to be
not terribly public about doing these things and building intentional communities.
But that's ultimately what you have to do is build
those intentional communities, to establish kindreds in your local area,
to to really just truly try to be try to
like just get to know your neighbors. And ultimately, I
mean this is part of why I myself am a pagan.
Not only do I believe in the myths and the
you know, the Not only do I accept the commands
that come out of it, but also I think it
has a practical use because establishing these kindreds is ultimately
going to allow us to, like as our children grow
and intermarry with each other. This is what new folkhoods
are built out of. I think we're going to go
into a period of time that is not technologically but
perhaps socially analogous to the migration period after the Fall
of Rome, where all of a sudden you got all
these new peoples that came into being. But what normal
people can do to survive in this future is to
basically strengthen their immediate circle of kin and friends and neighbors.
Because in a devolutionary world that I see on the horizon,
the most important resources trust, local networks are going to
matter more than distant affiliations. So normal people must invest
in family relationships. You've got to get to know your neighbors.
You've got to build those reciprocal friendships that can then
grow into these intermarriages later on, like intergenerationally. So you've
got to take part in local community groups. I think
what everybody who isn't contaminated with a public profile. Should
be doing is essentially infiltrating local governance at the local level.
I think people should be trying to run for mayor
getting into your low counsel, these sort of things, and
cultivate those mutual help networks with everybody that you can,
because an intact social circle will outperform any institution in
a crisis.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Another thing that.
Speaker 2: You need to do is to develop practical competency. And
this is something that you know, I myself having you know,
learned Latin or done all these like esoteric like weird things.
Maybe this is kind of I should be taking more
of my own advice here, but I.
Speaker 3: Think you really you need to do that.
Speaker 2: You don't need to become a prepper, but you have
absolutely need to take a basic first Aid COY course. Sorry,
you need to take a basic first aid course, which
is something that I've done as a parent. I think
everyone should do that. You need to become financially literate,
You need to learn how to save, You need to
obviously become solvent. You need to maybe maybe you need
to downgrade your living standards, and maybe you need to,
like you know, if you are not financially solvent. You
need to get that happening. You need to learn how.
You need to learn some basic home maintenance. You should
learn how to garden. You should learn how to grow
some food. You should develop some basic self protection skills.
You should learn how to fight and wieldforce, and become
situationally aware as well, which is just as important. You
should maybe log off the internet a little bit more
often and learn how to network face to face and
shake hands and look people in the eye and get
them to trust you, because then you'll be able to
organize men. And organizing men are very very This is
essentially the main skill, right, because that is the best
resource there was. There's a really wonderful anecdote of a
a clan chieftain in like you know, early modern Scotland,
I believe it was, that went to visit a noble
or something like that, and here he is like walks
into the nobles you know estate, looks around and sees
all this wonderful you know, glassware and everything that's you know,
all these big beautiful acouterments and things like that. And
he looks around and he says, I've got much nicer
candle holders than you at my place, and you know
they exchange words. And then the noble came to visit
him at one point, and he said, would you like
to see my candle holders? And you know, he snapped
his fingers and out came his retinue of fifty guys
each holding candles. Right, that is the most important resource.
Men are the most important resource. So you need to
learn how to organize people, how to command respect, how
to give orders, and very importantly, how to take orders.
What else can you do if you can try to
not rely upon a single point of failure. So, as
I said, be financially solvent, get yourself out of debt
as quickly as you can. That's going to be harder
than for most people. It's going to be hard for
most people because most likely, like if you're lucky, you've
got a mortgage, and some people not even. But try
to get out of debt if you can, or as
much as you can, try to diversify your income streams,
try to get some side hustles going. That's essentially what
I did with Imperium Press, and now it's my job.
Try to get some savings if you can, at least
keep small emergency reserves of cash, of funds of food
and things like that. Having redundancy for the essential items
is really good medical stuff, food, communications, things like that.
You don't have to be a survivalist and I don't
have a problem with guys who are you just need
to be somebody who has options, you know what I mean?
So and yeah, just like, try to embed yourself in
a local community. Try to join local associations, join a
religious community, whatever that happens to be. I mean, if
you're a Christian, join a church, start going to church,
Start going to their events, start participating, start getting to
know people, attend the local events. Support your neighborhood institutions
or build them, or at least just introduce yourself to
your neighbors, you know what I mean. And volunteer volunteering
like you know, I mean.
Speaker 1: Friend of mine, let me let me answer ject. A
friend of mine said. One of the easiest ways to
do it is if you live in an area that
has a historical preservation society, volunteering with them, especially if
you're young. They're probably all going to be over sixty.
They're going to be excited for you to be there,
and they'll have plenty for you to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and perhaps, in fact, more likely than not, these
are going to be guys who are connected, who have resources,
who are.
Speaker 3: Somebody, you know what I mean. So that's really good.
Speaker 2: Volunteer at places like that in meaningful ways, and be careful,
be very careful about being publicly labeled in like digital
tribal extremism.
Speaker 3: I know that this.
Speaker 2: I don't regard myself as an extremist at all. In fact,
I think what Imperium Press is doing is historically the center.
We are historically normal, and it is the managerial class
that are the extremists. But if you are not already
participating in the conversation publicly, then don't make yourself into
a public target. But if you are, you know, if
you if you are a brave person, if you are charismatic,
and you can you don't have to be Brad Pitt.
But if you can, like dress yourself, look nice, present, well,
we need you, we need you to join us here
as you know, as as media personalities on our side
of the fence. But some people, in fact, most people
should probably not be doing that. Most people should not
be binding their identity to to those like to these
kind of networks at least not publicly. You should be
listening to what we have to say because we almost
uniquely know the score, unlike you know anywhere in the mainstream.
Essentially right, So, yeah, do all those things. Do all
those things. Strengthen your immediate circle, develop your practical abilities,
reduce your vulnerability to institutional failure. Get into your local
community and invest in the next generation. Have children, and
have many of them, and have them early, and teach
them to be resilient and emotionally stable. And teach them
who they are, where they come from. Teach them who
their ancestors are, what their heritage is, Have rituals, tell stories.
Don't give them too much access to screens. Build these
institutions close to home, and stay mobile and be adaptive
and flexible. And you know, being tribal doesn't mean being violent.
It doesn't mean, you know, getting a bunch of tattoos
and going out and you know, training as a militia
in the woods. Although tattoos are awesome, But in any case,
you don't have to form yourself into a war band
roaming the street. You just have to identify at the
more local level, establish tighter communities, and you know, established
personal ties over bureaucratic ones, so hopefully some of that
advice is useful.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's probably where we should end it. Remind
everybody about Imperium Press and where they can find the book.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, thank you very much, Pete. I really appreciate
you having me on here. You guys can find the
book at imperiimpress dot org. And if you like podcasts,
check out my check out my podcast platform heartfire radio
dot com. I also have a podcast, Culture Dads. That's
culturewe a k culturedads dot com. Those are all my links,
and once again, i'd just like to say a heartfelt
thanks Pete. It's been awesome talking to you, and I
hope guys get something out of the book.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you. Mike, thank you. Take care,