Speaker 1: Meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly flapping
his wing.
Speaker 2: Dig down in the forest. Man, it gonna cause the
tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man, nobody seen nobody.
Speaker 1: You don't need to know many story and.
Speaker 2: You got directed like that. That's way man. Don't blackly
dang on the panel. Mann.
Speaker 1: All right, aren, welcome back to the Jay Burden Show.
How you doing that?
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm excited to have you back on now. I
just want to say before we get into it. Uh,
we are recording this on the afternoon where I think
everyone learned exactly what Christy Nome's husband gets up to
in his free time. That's really funny. I don't know
if there's a whole lot of commentary deep political philosophy
to it, but it is amusing. It's an info hazard.
Search at your own risk, but it is kind of funny.
In all seriousness. Arn, we are here to talk about libertarians.
As I said before we went live, I think that
many libertarians have been taking a victory lap after the
war in Iran. Oh, we told you so. You should
never have tried to get involved in politics. You should
never have casted a vote, cast a vote, because this
is what happens, right, you should simply be like and
then the kind of you know, vague prescriptions of whichever
chapter of libertarian you're speaking to come up so or
before we launch into it. I'm just curious. Did you
go through the sort of infamous libertarian stage, and I
guess if you could, what has been your should we say,
relationship to that school of thought?
Speaker 2: Well? I never went through the I need to read
you know, a bunch of meases and hayek and know,
swear off the state and cap phase of politics. I think,
like a lot of conservatives, especially in you know, the
the two thousands, I was sold this idea that perhaps
the future of conservatism was somewhat libertarian. That obviously we
had lost on the issues like gay marriage and abortion
and other you know, kind of the culture war as
it would eventually be called, and so what we really
needed to do was focus on economics and free trade
and these things, and ultimately that's what would make the
right work. We had guys like Neil Bort's and Herman
Kin who were libertarian adjacent and would talk about, you know,
getting rid of the income tax and these kind of things.
And that was the winning agenda for the right. I
bought into some of that for a while. It quickly
became clear to me that wasn't the case. Now every
time I say this, a bunch of libertarians run around
screaming their heads off. Oh, that's not libertarian, that's not
real libertarian. The GOP never a libertarian. There's no trend
towards libertarian in the GOP. But like obviously, this was
relatively a large switch from the religious right, and it's
understanding that we had and perhaps the eighties or earlier nineties,
and so I think it is fair to say that,
however imperfect and in not illogically pure, the kind of
drift to libertarianism was in the Republican Party. It was
a real phenomenon. It did really exist. We were told this,
if we're not adopting libertarianism as such, at least our
messaging on social issues should be more libertarian. And that
was what was gonna, you know, take us into the future.
As long as your gay neighbors can have gun rights
and you know, ultimately push for free trade, that's what
was going to make right wing politics work. I think
we've seen pretty much the collapse of that understanding, I
think we've seen a resurgence in the idea that perhaps
right wing governments can be interested in the good of
their people, and that the culture war isn't it actually
a winning issue as opposed to a losing issue. Again,
I'm sure many libertarians will, you know, kick back at
the idea that this is the structure of kind of
where the party was going, But it's very clear that
it is swerved back the other way. In some places,
you know, to to I think you know, our profit,
in other places, to our detriment. I think you might
be muted on that one.
Speaker 1: This is a professional podcast, ladies and gentlemen, But I
think I have a very similar sort of relationship with
the philosophy because at a certain time where it seemed
as if the right in America had well and truly
been routed during the Obama Reich, there was sort of
this question of, well, what do we do now? And
I think that for a brief period of time, if
you were a right winger constitutionally right, that's what you
felt deep in your bones, The relatively safe place you
could stand was well, I'm a libertarian. I believe in
freedom of choice, and so I believe in the freedom
for you to you know, get gay, married, or to
have an abortion, and so we don't touch those sort
of subjects that are quite hot. But also I, you know,
get to keep gun rights. I don't want to live
around certain types of people, whether stated or unstated. And
so for a while it was sort of a spot
on the slippery slope where you could hang out right,
a way to talk about politics without you know, being
subjected to a rant about you know, racist rednecks, right,
sort of a third position. But the problem is, and
I think many of us realized, and that's why there
are so many post libertarians or you know, people who
pass through that is that you realize very quickly that's
a losing prospect. You don't win there. You are simply
ushered to one side at best. And I think that's
part of the reason why so many people left it.
Right we saw during COVID very dramatically, well, that doesn't work, right,
The state will get you. And so at the most
basic level, I'm going to title this something you know, clickbaity,
like the five questions libertarians can't answer, because I do
have five general objections that I have seen no convincing
answer to And look, there are good libertarians, you know, obviously,
you know Tom Woods and Scott Horton. I'm not talking
about them, but I think the most fundamental right if
we assume that libertarianism is this philosophy or tendency that
puts individual choice right, some form of self determinism at
the center. Right, the best society is the one where
you were constrained by the least things, you were the
most free. Well, an important question is, well, what is
freedom right? Is this a universal right, a sort of
right granted to you by God. You will hear that
idea even from some self described conservatives. Or is it
specific and cultural? Is it the product of a tradition?
Because one, when we talk about freedom, we're basically talking
about a Western conception.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Sure, other peoples at times have advocated for their self determination,
liberation from a ruler, but it's sort of a different thing.
And even in the Western tradition, there are many different
versions of freedom. So, for instance, right when the gulls
are rebelling against Caesar for liberty, what do they mean?
Are they big fans of, you know, gay marriage? Are
they big fans of, you know, all of the sort
of you know, things that we associate with libertarian conventions.
I mean now that I say that running around naked
with funny hats is pretty close to it. But in
all seriousness, right, clearly this is a different conception of
what freedom is. This is a through line in Western thought.
But we've seen many different permutations of even the society
we see so often in constitutional conservative and libertarian means
that of the American founding? Is that a libertarian society?
On one level? Well, I mean, yes, you know, you
didn't have a lot of taxes, but a sodomy was illegal,
there were blasphemy laws. It's sort of ridiculous on its face.
So i'll throw it to you, arin, Right, what do
we make of that question of well, what is freedom?
And how is it sort of twisted in the kind
of you know, Twitter dot com version of what libertarians think?
Speaker 2: Well, one of the problems with libertarianism is that it
is itself a universalist ideology, and as with all universal
universalist ideologies, it tends towards utopianism. So while libertarianism pretends
to take on this hard realistic edge of just well,
this is how market forces work, and this is just
the science, and this is the way it is. Apology
is just terrible. The libertarian anthropology is deeply flawed in
this understanding that freedom is simply an absence of official
government control by something called the state TM, and if
we just get rid of the state TM, then people
will live in some kind of spontaneous order and everything
will be good. And this is what we're looking for
from life. Now. It's very interesting because there's actually a
perfect answer to this, and it sits inside the libertarian tradition.
Bertrand Jujuvenile is a guy I reference all the time
because he's one of the most important and underappreciated figures
in political theory. And he wrote a book on power
and another one on sovereignty, which are just absolutely critical.
They're actually even put out by Freedom Press, a libertarian
you know, imprint, and he's often cited inside the libertarian tradition,
or at least the class of liberal tradition. He's literally
the basis for Hans Hermann Hopp's Democracy The God That Failed.
Like if you like Hoop, if you've thought his arguments
against democracy were persuasive, congratulations they were stolen directly from
Bertrand di Juvenal and I say this with like the
greatest admiration for hop because like only the great seal
from bertrand di juvenal, like this is not me slandering him.
I say all that to point out that this guy
is really well grounded and is somebody that like especially
Mesa's style, libertarians rely on without recognizing that they owe
him the intellectual lineage that they do. And inside on Power,
Dijuvenile makes exactly the point we're making now that radical
libertarianism and radical communism were always destined to meet in
the center. They were always destined to create the same outcome.
And his point is that what we're looking for is
not just radical freedom. What we're looking for is order liberty,
and liberty in the classical sense is the freedom to
pursue the good as your society understands it. It is
an Aristotilian concept that it is only inside our interactions
with other political entities that we can grasp our role
and we can recognize our or we could realize our liberty.
That is what creates liberty, is having a shared understanding
of the good and having the ability to pursue it.
In fact, in on Sobiergty di Juvenal goes a step
further and says that it is not the power of
the government that makes a man free or not free.
It is that the government acts in accordance with the
general understanding of the good. People who are asked to
only pursue that which they already inherently understand through their
traditions and their folk ways and their religion as virtuous.
They are people who are free. That feels now natural
to them. Even if they can never achieve exactly what
they set out, they feel those goals to be ones
that are in alignment with what they already want to pursue,
and so the government encouraging them or bolstering the pursuit
of something they already agree with, does not feel oppressive.
It feels liberate. What really makes people feel oppressed is
a government or a state that tries to force them
into doing things they don't agree with, things that they
do not see as virtuous, things that do not work
inside their tradition, their understanding of the good. This is
what tyranny ultimately is. It's not the abuse of government power,
it's not the exercise of government power. It's the use
of government power to force peoples into a way of
being that does not complement them, that does not attain
that ultimate good that they are aiming for. And so
when we're talking about liberty, what we need to understand
is it's not about the government having more or less power.
It's about the government working for the good of people,
the collective understanding of where we should be as a people,
as a nation. If it's doing that, we feel liberated.
If it doesn't, we feel constrained. That's why even if
a group of people fights for their liberation from another nation,
so they can immediately impose a bunch of religious restrictions
on top of themselves, which is exactly what America did.
We feel like that's our independence day because we are
now free not to do math or you know, get
gay married, but to live in accordance with a religious
tradition and our understanding as a people.
Speaker 1: Well, on that point, I think that this misunderstanding of
power you also see in my second objection, which is
how do you bring out how do you bring about
rather in campus dan right, how do we get to
a libertarian society? Because the answer is, well, I will
simply behave as if I were already in such a society.
That will spread and bring about that reality. This is
the point that Moldbug makes back when he was still Moldbug.
Where he goes from that that sort of desired end
state of spontaneous order, right, a truly liberated society where
you know, what state as it exists is in line
with the people. Right, there is no feeling of tyranny
or disconnect between the state and those rules. And he says,
of course, well, if that's what you want, speaking, shall
we say slightly hyperbolically, you should be a fascist, right,
You should want to crush disorder so that order can exist. Now,
this comes from his understanding of that duality of order
and chaos. He believes, and as did many before him,
this is not D and D right, You cannot be
chaotic good. Chaotic chaos is synonymous with evil. An order
that which is necessary, you know, for a functional society
is a good and what steps you need to take
towards that are good steps. Now, I think it's important
to say that this misconception that in order to achieve
an end you should act as if it already is
the case. It runs rampant through education and child rearing.
Right in our last episode, it's never quite stated this way,
but the idea is, well, I want X y Z
child to be a functional adult. So if I just
treat them at age four, how I would one of
my coworkers, one of my friends, Well, then they will
become that. Clearly that doesn't work, right, We've all been
to the supermarket and seen a mother trying to reason
with her three year old. Doesn't work. Sure, you or
I might feel very embarrassed that we are causing a
scene at a local coals. You know that we're screaming
and crying and throwing things A three year old does not.
You have to act in a different way so that
later down the line you can pull back. Right, you
don't have to have that insane level of top down control.
And to that point, when we look at libertarian societies,
you know what are often tauted as you know, a
successful functioning society full of spontaneous order. Well, how do
the people act? Right? Do they act like modern libertarians
from a certain perspective? Maybe right, they don't have a
policeman over their shoulder. But what got them there?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Was it this kind of insane you know, porkfest style
libertine event? No? And I mean you can look at
you know, the opposite example, right, is O Block the
most free place in America? Well, sure, arn, if you're
interested in you know, like you're squeezing off thirty rounds
from you know, a glock switch out of the back
of your hell cat. Maybe, But if you're actually interested
in having a business, you're interested in walking wherever you want,
a very basic level of freedom. That's not free for you.
But you look to places like, up until recently, something
like England, right, kind of the pre Tony Blair version. Well,
you know Victorian England, We'll go to that. Well, functionally,
you have an immense amount of freedom. You can walk
wherever you want. You know, infamously women walked around London
late at night without being bothered. Well, how did we
get there? One of the most punishing criminal justice regimes
in history, right, hanging people, sending them to Australia. It
was what many moderns would call fascistic. I go back,
as we mentioned multiple times to the American founders, right,
a society much freer than ours. But again, if you
stole a horse, they hanged you. You could not be gay.
Gay marriage was I mean, it would be comical to
explain it. You cannot create a libertarian society by acting
as a libertarian. And so the question is, okay, even
if you are, you know you have that end goal,
you have that vision of society. Well it's not how
you should act now, you should be much like Crothbard
was closer to the end of his life, right encouraging
the cops to send in the hounds, right to stamp
out disorder, because disorder is inherently in tropic It will
make it impossible for rational spontaneous order to exist because
quite simply, it is not safe to do so. So
are That's a bit of a monologue for me, but
I'd be curious to get your thoughts as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, back to what you're saying there with Moldbug. It's
the problem is that libertarians have the order reversed once again.
Their anthropology is bad. They think that if people are free,
then spontaneously they will become virtuous. If libertarians are even
interested in virtue, which sadly very often they are not,
they will say, well, if people are free, they will
act virtuously. They will create this ordered society once they
are free. But this is the inverse of what actually happens.
As Moldbug lays out, humanity starts in a state of war.
Then you move to a state of order. Then you
move to a state of law, and if you're very,
very lucky, then you move to a state of liberty.
And it is only after going through those steps that
you achieve that final state. And if you do not
go through this process, you cannot expect that final state
to emerge. Libertarians say, I don't need the state, I
don't need the thing that brings order. I don't need
the thing that ends the war. I just need the
last part of that, and I will therefore then generate
out all the benefits. But that is just observably false.
We see this over and over again that as long
as you say people are allowed to take certain actions
that they seemed themselves as being free to take, they
actually reduced the amount of order, and therefore the liberty
inside it is virtue that creates liberty, not liberty that
creates virtue. And if you don't spend time with the
population cultivating that virtue, you simply cannot bring about the
type of society that liberty that libertarians want. So, for instance,
Alexis de Tokville famously observed that the reason that America
was basically allowed to more or less self govern, as
we often put it, is that actually it didn't self
govern at all. That it was all of these smaller
civic organizations, the church, the guild, the you know, the community,
you know organization, these things came together and created a
straight from which American society could emerge. And because people
had a loyalty to their union, or to their church,
or to their community, or to their club, or to
their fire brigade or all these other voluntary associations, the government,
the official state TM didn't have to take very many actions.
And again this is what bertrand Juvenile echoes in on power,
that is, these alternative spheres of sovereignty that limit the government.
In fact, he takes at another level and says, it
is not the constitution and it's checks and balances that
ultimately limits the government. It is the fact that those
checks and balances of the Constitution are meant to represent
different social forces that actually brings limitation on the government itself.
And so if you don't have a virtual society and
which people enter into these voluntary organizations and see themselves
as beholden to them and see power to them. Then
there is no social force to push back against the
central power of the state. And we can see that
as those intermediate forces, the family, the church, the community,
have eroded, we've required more and more government to step
in and take action. But it's not the loss of
you know, it's not the removal of government that creates that.
Freedom is the imposition of order from virtuous people spontaneously.
But you can't have that until you have virtuous people.
You don't get those just because you were liberated in
some way. If you do not enhance the character of
the people, you simply cannot live in the way that
libertarians would like. And so that's why, for instance, neo
reactionary theory has always been authoritarian on the outside, libertarian
on the inside. This was the post libertarian realization that
a libertarian order, while desirable, can only come through authoritarian means.
And that's kind of the realization that occurred after they
really looked at all the libertarian theory. This is a
beautiful worldview that only exists when a certain type of
environment is produced, and the only way to produce that
is through strict amounts of authority, often handed down by
the state.
Speaker 1: So arin if anyone in the audience is perhaps interested
in reading a book about the relationship between the state
a total state, one might even say any sort of
intermediate institutions. How you know it's in the state's interest
to push out, yep, such organizations. Where could they find one?
Speaker 2: Well, I just happened to have written one, which you
know you can find. It's coming out soon and it's
secondition paperback with an extra chapter if you want to
enjoy it. But the Total State or mctyre, it's an
Amazon bestseller in a couple categories, so you know, make
sure to pick that up if you want to hear
a little more.
Speaker 1: That was entirely planned. By the way, this is the
whole reason we're doing this episode is just to show
the But in all seriousness, this leads into let's just say,
this is like a secret sixth point that I should
have mentioned in the notes and then didn't, which is
that libertine behavior right, living as a libertarian, having a
approximately libertarian society produces people who are not suited for liberty,
and that leads us to another large objection here, which
is libertarians presupposed, at least from what I've seen that
at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of need is liberty, right,
that that is what all men are striving for, what
all people want. And maybe that was true. We can
put a pin in that at a previous point in time.
Very clearly that is not true today. As the total
state has grown, as it has taken more and more institutions,
whether it is marriage, the rearing of children, education, out
of informal social structure and into the realm of the
political well, we very clearly see people want that. They
want security, They do not necessarily want maximum liberty. You
may remember several years ago there was a pandemic, and
well what happened. Did the masses rise up? Did people say,
you know, I will not be confined to my home? Well,
clearly not. The majority of people went along with it.
And sure there were relocations within the US to escape
the excesses of the COVID regime. As someone in Florida,
you're note out aware of that. But nonetheless we understand
and we're seeing it on almost a daily basis. The
average American does not desire liberty, at least in the
sense often meant by libertarians. And so if you have
a universalist ideology, right, an idea for everyone all at once,
and not even and everyone, but just almost everyone disagrees
with it. Well, what is to be done there?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Your universalist ideology has failed to attract the universal man.
So I'm curious, arn, do you see that most Americans,
most people period desire this sort of rootless conception of liberty.
If not, what do people seemingly ask for in politics?
Speaker 2: Yeah? There is again, once again, like just this complete
failure of libertarian anthropology. The idea that all human beings
are just born with this innate desire for liberty has
been proven incorrect over and over. It. In fact, it's
something we generally scoff at now at this point, right, Oh,
Thomas Jefferson hiding in the caves of Afghanistan. Right, But
this is still something that while libertarians will laugh at
this implication and foreign policy will still basically pick up
this assumption when it comes to human organization. Well, of
course we can't force you know, liberal democracy on the Afghanis,
But of course every human being actually yearns to be
free and looks for libertarian ideology and existence. As you
point out, this is just absolutely not true, and you
can evidence is if only because the ideology of communism,
well equally ridiculous and universal, has always had more adherents
than the ideology of libertarianism. If libertarianism was so much
truer to human nature, you think it would just naturally
went out in that old marketplace of ideas, and yet
it never does. In fact, reliably, if we look at
the libertarian quadrant of the political compass, we find it
is the place with zero voters, It has almost no support,
and pretty much every bit of polling and data finds
that libertarians are the least likely to actually produce any
kind of popular movement. And that's for a very simple reason.
Most people can't live this way. And you know a
lot of people have made the joke that classical liberalism,
and therefore libertarians, which is its spiritual descendant, it was
made for one hundred and thirty iq Anglos. It works
for a society of one hundred and thirty iq Anglos.
To the point where my buddy Carl Benjamin has put
it this way, classical liberalism is Sharia law for the English,
which I think is a pretty good formulation for how
to understand this. So we have in libertarianism is not
a universal understanding of you know, human behavior, but a
very specific understanding of how a very particular set of
people and a specific culture can conduct itself. And this
is the problem is so much of libertarianism is based
on this idea that because you have understood economics at
some level, well, I have Kinsian economics, and this is
the magic bullet. It explains the world. It's just Marxism,
it's just inverted Marxism. It's just materialism for you know,
the guy who wants to make money and do drugs.
It doesn't. It has this anthropology that says, well, people
are driven by these material causes, and as long as
you arrange the material underlying material cause this is correctly,
this will produce the society that you're looking for. I've
studied the economics, and that is the universal science that
will allow me to understand all human beings. What we
see is that's absolutely not the case. And if you
don't tailor your understanding of your social organization to the
people it's actually organizing, you lose. Which is why again
people like Bertrand to Juvenil to the extent they are
in any way libertarian or inside the libertarian tradition are correct,
because they're the ones who are saying no, you have
to actually look at the people you're governing. It matters
what their folk ways are. It matters if you want
to create liberty in the society, you must align it
with the way of life of the people who are
actually going to be subject to the rule of the state.
You can't just go around saying, well, because I think
in this abstract sense that everyone should be able to
spontaneously order their life, I'm just going to impose that
on the world because what we see reliably, and this
is always the problem libertarianism is that while they advocate
for a total removal of state and vault, the only
places where they ever make gains are the leftist ones.
Right Like, they help push open the door for gay marriage,
they help push open the door for drug legalization, but
they never push open the door for anything that's actually
going to conserve society. They never happen to push away
the welfare state. Oh, they never happened to push away
public education. They never win any of these battles. The
battles they win are almost exclusively ones that help degenerate
society because they're pushing an open door in those situations.
And so this is why we never end up creating
the society they're looking for, because they never bother to
look at the people they're actually trying to create the
society for. They start with the ideology and then they
just try to universally apply it to whatever people they
happen to have any level of influencer control over.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you brought that up. The shared materialism
between Marxism socialism, you know, the kind of softer version
in libertarianism. From a certain perspective, they have the same peleology,
the same sunum bonum, right, the kind of ultimate goal
which is material abundance. Right. The difference between you know,
gay space communism and then you know in Campistan and
the Stars, it's really not that different. And when presented
in that marketplace of ideas, you know, which is going
to win out the the story of socialism, which we
understand is not true, but the idea of you know,
you will have these things taken care for you. You know
you will not have to pay for this, you will
not have to pay for that. And sure, hypothetically you
might not be able to make seven figures, but most
people can't do that. Most people don't want that. The
social safety net sounds great, you know, that is a
certain degree of freedom, right, freedom from worry. Now, let's
look at the kind of story presented, you know, of
the of the ancams. It's this idea that you know,
I will be able to become guy earning seven figures
by finding the best workers, you know, the best eight
year olds to you know, man my meth plantation. It's like, well, okay, sure,
but again, remember you were playing for people who are
or let's be honest, more often view themselves as exceptional
and desire that same material abundance, but only for that
right they think that they will and it is you know,
materialism plus a certain amount of social Darwinism is what
you often see as well, the idea that simply we
will create a society where it will all sort itself
out right, the best will rise to the top. You know,
they will be you know, drug lords and crypto scammers,
and they will live in you know, this kind of
again very truncated version of gay space communism, right, not
particularly like they don't say to communism, but effectively unlimited abundance,
right with full freedom of personal interaction, and one we
have to ask is that a good end goal for society?
That is a separate question. You and I would say no.
But also we have to address the factor that it
is much much easier to convince people of the original
formula of materialism than it is. This what we would
say kind of like Anglo innovation, right, And so to
kind of carry through another part of this, when we're
talking about the libertarian's horrible anthropology, and this is exactly
why I wanted you on, right, is a very core point,
which is the man who wants to rule always beats
the guy who wants to be left alone. And when
we're talking about power, this conception of power, that power
must be avoided, that you must take the ring up
the ring being power of course, up Mount Doom and
destroy it so that you can be left alone, is
shot through libertarian and conservative thought, right, This idea of
I just want to be left alone. The problem is,
of course, there are people who don't want to leave
you alone, and they want that way harder. And you
see this anytime there's you know, a riot in the offing,
anytime there's one of these disruptive, irritating events, you get
the argument of try that in a small town, right
that you know, someone will show up and put a
stop to it. And the problem is they don't. It
is irrational for any one person without the States backing
to do that. You know, even in the case of
Kyle Rittenhouse, who you know, successfully avoided going to jail
for the rest of his life. One that was a
fairly miraculous situation on multiple levels, but two that was
a near run thing. He almost got sent to, you know,
stabbed with the screwdriver sorts of prisons, as we've seen
with other enemies of that part of society that does
want to rule your life, that does want to step
on you. And so this conception that I will simply
retreat certainly is very Anglo, right. You see that in
lands Cracker Factory. It is sort of our tradition. But
fundamentally it doesn't work. It doesn't let you have that
society effectively.
Speaker 2: In order to.
Speaker 1: Establish that sort of unity between the ruler and the
rule that creates liberty, well, you got to have a
guy in power. Otherwise, as the you know, as the
the sort of mocking you know, anti fook graffiti says
they will step on you, right, with a picture of
the you know, the jack boot on the on the snake.
And I don't want to be rude about this, but
history is on my side. We've seen this over and
over and over again, and this tactical retreat does not
produce any sort of long term results. The best you
can hope for is approximate win. Right. I live in Massachusetts.
I prefer to live in Idaho, fair enough, and you
can do that. But if that's all you're doing, that's
the only game you're playing of I just want to
be left alone, you know. I only want power so
that I can destroy power. At best, let's a loser mentality.
And the whole time that that cope has been in vogue,
let's just say what last twenty thirty forty years? Pick
your number. The question is, well, has the country gotten
more or less free? And by all but a few metrics,
the country has gotten dramatically less free. Ar And I'll
let you speak.
Speaker 2: So as you point out, Nick Land has laid this
idea that kind of the classical liberal and the Anglo
Protestant tradition from which classical liberalism, you know, arose this
response repeatedly whenever it's been pressured. Whenever it's come to
blows over whether we should one side should rule the
other and impose its will, the answer has been exit, right, flee,
Flee from England to the United States. When you get
to the United States and things in Massachusetts or New
York become too constrict, a move to the Midwest. When
they get too constricting there, head to the you know,
further west, to the wild West. And we just kept
escaping to frontier to frontier to frontier in order to
kind of avoid this issue. You can see this so
much in of course, the American founding, where once the
issue slavery becomes central, you just see you know, different
peoples going west and trying to kind of incorporate more
and more of the states into their ideology, until eventually
there's nowhere left to run and the states have to
clash over this issue. Right, one side is going to
dominate the other. One side is going to rule. And
let's be really clear. The North decides to rule, it
kills a lot of people, It crushes the governments, It
imprisons the governments that of different states that avoid it.
It throws the constitution in the trash. Lincoln decides that
you don't need habeas corpus er in these other legal
traditions that came from classical liberalism, because ultimately, the question
is who's going to rule and who's going to dominate,
and the answer is the North. And as much as
you know, any good Southerner like you or me understands
the War of Northern Aggression as a violation of constitutional principles,
it doesn't matter. We're still under the rule of the
Union at this point, right there is no conversation anymore
about how we really have these rights in the Tenth Amendment.
No one cares. The Tenth Amendment is sitting in the trash.
It doesn't matter. And things like COVID and others just
continue to reinforce this point, and so it quickly becomes clear.
And this is one of my most hated tweets of
all time. I've gotten this response to you know, I
hate that. I think you're right about this, about this
tweet more than anything else I've ever said, which is
the side that wants to win always beats the side
that wants to be left alone. Because as painful as
it is in the American mind to admit that, it's
so obviously true that it's simply undeniable. And once you
recognize that truth, then you recognize that while at some
point the idea that investing the government and let with
less power was a noble understanding, it was something that
was foundational to our way of being as Americans over time. Instead,
what that schibbalith has become is a way to control
conservative America. Oh well, you're the side that thinks we
shouldn't have government power, right, Well, then it would be
a violation of your own principles to take government power
or to use government power. If you happen to win
an election, at best, your job is to sit there
and sit in place, or maybe you know, diffuse some
level of government power for a little while. And then
the other guys come into power and they do the
thing that's in accordance with their principles, which is to
rule you with an iron fist. And so if one
side says power is good and I can do whatever
I want with it, and I'm righteous for doing so,
and one side says power is bad and if I
attain it, then I'm a bad person. And if I attain
it and use it, I'm basically hitler. Well, which side
is going to win in a contest of power. The
answer is glaringly obvious. And so what we're going through
now is really just the painful forcing every single idiot
who has bought into this to ultimately admit that this
is true, right, And this is the difficulty. This is
why I'm so hard on libertarians. You know a lot
of people, you know, Oh, you give libertarians so much heat,
you must hate them. No, I love libertarians. The problem
is that libertarians are so close to understanding the truth,
but they can't get over the last hurdle. They are
not They have not made that post libertarian switch, that
NRX switch, of understanding that the very society they want
to achieve could only be achieved through the acquisition and
exercise of power. It is only through absolute authority that
they can create the level of liberty they are attempting
to achieve. And that's really the barrier that we have
to understand. If you are not looking to rule, if
you're not looking to impose even a libertarian order on others,
they will impose their way of life on you. And
there's simply never some kind of detente in which you
live the way you want and they live the way
they want.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: If you are forming a society without a state, and
they are forming a society with centralized state authority, then
one day the state with centralized authority will come knocking
on your disorganized state and they will win. And we
see it over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Will you see that in the history of the American right.
Many have said, and there's a great deal of truth
to this, that America does really have a right wing
tradition in the same way as other countries. The contention is, effectively,
America is a contest between two different types of progressives.
Now not necessarily looking to litigate that at this moment,
but if we look at the origin of what we
consider to be the Republican Party functionally, we have to
go back to FDR. Right, that's where this and let's
be honest, also, the Libertarians sort of get their start
because you have a pre existing order, right, and at
least one large portion of this was very pro what
we consider a big business in high finance. And when
FDR comes in rules like an American season, starts changing things,
you know, violating the previous understanding of the constitution, Well,
this force builds up in opposition and They're referred to,
depending on who you ask, as sort of the old right,
you know, pre uh, you know, pre FDR, kind of
that desire, and so you see people like you know,
Garrett Garrett who sort of defected from one side to another.
But these are seminal figures. They influenced, you know, Goldwater,
They influenced the kind of nation American right, and so
I think it is relevant to say, well, what did
they do? How successful were they? I have a great
deal of affection for these men. I think they were right.
You know, FDR was not a good guy, and he
didn't do good things to the country, but we're still
living in the house that FDR built. Obviously there's a
dramatic change in the sixties with you know, how we
understood the purpose of this nation. But fundamentally our government
looks much much, much more like FDR's version than the
government ten years before he ever showed up. Fundamentally, that
that process that or sorry that that protest you could
say against FDR, this American dictator, well it failed because
he was in charge.
Speaker 2: He had power.
Speaker 1: He could successfully remake the ground on which we play politics.
And sure, those guys who wanted to go back to
a previous version where the state was small, where many
things were not regulated. They were right, that would be better.
I think the country was better before him on any
number of metrics. But fundamentally, if you don't have power,
it doesn't matter because power lets you not only make changes,
but define to crib aligned from Tom Woods right, the
three x five card of allowable opinions, you have set
what is acceptable for generations. And so fundamentally, if you
are unwilling to assume power, you are relegating yourself to
a statu of eternal loser. You were also letting your enemy, unopposed,
remake the fabric of society. And this matter is quite
a bit going back to earlier in our conversation, because
remember what determines liberty, what determines tyranny is that relationship
between the ruler and the world. Are they aligned? And
if you, like FDR was able to do successfully socially
engineer your society, right, you put in all of these
programs that have now become entitlements. Social security is a
great example for generations. That is simply part of what
it means to be in America. You reach sixty two
and you collect social security, well, for any number of reasons.
If that, if you have decided that needs to go away, well,
all of a sudden, the vast majority of people, you
are a tyrant. You're taking away grandma's retirement, You're taking
away her ability to support herself. And is that true
in an absolute sense, right, comparing tyranny to Genghis Khan. No,
of course not. But functionally, by failing the contest, by
being driven out of power, you have allowed your enemy
a massive hand up for the next iteration of the game. Right,
going forward, you are not simply stuck at a fifty
to fifty anymore. If this is tug of war, you're
on your tiptoes on the line. And so the idea
that you can simply continue to give up, continue not
to fight, and then well, at some point in the
future things will get bad enough clearly not. That's not
how it works. And so this this assumption about politics,
you know, this assumption about power, is deeply, deeply buried
in both and I'm using these terms semi interchangeably because
on this issue at least they are aligned Libertarians and conservatives.
They need to get rid of this because this is
why you always lose and as Arun said earlier, this
criticism is not coming from a place of personal hatred,
far from it. These are my people, this is who
I grew up around. But if I want those people
to have a certain degree of liberty, right to escape
or to sort of throw off this tyranny, well someone
needs to have power and someone who shares those values.
That is the only way out of this, because otherwise
it will be someone else making that decision. But no
matter what, no matter the situation, a decision is being made.
It is not simply left up to kind of trends
and forces the market whatever. That means. Power and politics
are a function of human organization. There's no way to
get around that, no matter how ichy or gross you
think that is. And if you're not in power, someone
else will and they will impose their there's set of
values on you. There's no way around that. One more thing,
I think, and we've been dancing around this partially due
to the fact that I, as you've probably noticed, arn Am,
not the most organized podcaster, is the sort of floating
target of what is or what constitutes a libertarian society.
Because these guys will very accurately make fun of socialists
and Marxists, they will say, hahaha, real communism has never
been tried. But of course the next question is, well, like,
where is your ideology been tried? Right, where do we
find a version of your society working out? And so arn,
I'm curious to get your thoughts on and Kapistan has
never been tried. Sort of argumentation that tends to happen
when you actually try to, you know, dig down on
this issue.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that often they'll cite something like the
United States, as you know, early in the United States
is an example. But as you've already pointed out, that
version of libertarian society came with, you know, anti blasphemy laws,
and you if you brought up game erriage, they'd probably
execute you as a heretic. And you know, these these
are not things that modern libertarianism can even really broach.
Which is one of the main problems with libertarian as such.
One of the issues that we could run up almost
immediately with anytime you have a conversation with libertarian is
the minute you point out a flaw, they say, well,
that's not real Libertarians, by which they mean there are
at least nineteen different splinter groups of libertarianism, and you
happen to have not identified the exact boutique brew of
libertarianism that I have my head, and so therefore any
objection you have, we'll run up against one of the
thirteen niche little things that I believe, and therefore cannot
be accurate. And to be fair, any you know, movement
has its splinters. Obviously, if we think of ourselves as
conservatives or right wingers, we would also be looping in
with a lumped in with guys like Lindsey Graham or
something with which we disagree quite quite fervently. So I'm
sympathetic to that. But it is a real issue, and
that whenever you have a discussion with libertarian the question is,
you know, the first thing you should ask is which
libertarian are you? Because there's at least twenty different varieties
I can think of off the top of my head,
and they don't agree with each other on a lot
of things. Some of them are open borders, some of
them are pro pedophilia or child trafficking. Some of them
think that you can have like really strict contracts that
allow you to you know, segregate society inside libertarian society.
The differences are vast to the point where they basically
share nothing. And so saying the word libertarian society is
you know, it's nothing. It means nothing. It has no content.
And so if Greg Guttfeld and Bill Maher can both
call themselves libertarians, what does the word even mean? Right
like that? That's a huge issue. So the first problem
is you can't even nail them down on what a
libertarian society would be. But then if you look on like, okay,
what versions of like hyper capitalistic libertarian societies are successful? Well,
you got to look at a place like Singapore, right, Well,
what Singapore got going for it? Is it free? Well,
in many instances, yes, is orderly. Oh yes, very orderly.
But they'll lasso cane you in the streets for spitting gum.
You know, they'll they'll they'll execute you for smuggling marijuana
into their society. So it's the inverse of libertarian in
certain areas, which is what allows it to be successfully
libertarian in every other area. The only reason that Singapore
can be a multi ethnic, multi religious, capitalistic paradise is
because it's willing to beat you to death if you
don't follow the rules. And so this is what you
know libertarianism requires in the real world. Again, this is
the NRX understanding of libertarianism, authoritarianism on the outside to
allow for libertarianism on the inside. But there's another problem
that libertarians never really want to face, which is scale, which,
to be fair, is a problem that no one wants
to face, which is why it's my number one hobby horse.
When you don't think about how scale impacts your society,
you don't take into account critical aspects of your social organization.
So for a while there, you know, we had a
situation where governments were so disjointed that a single person acting,
you know, with a enough initiative, could create large amounts
of wealth and a large prosperity for themselves and the
people around them. But as societies have scaled up, we've
seen that the ability to do that shrinks, and it
doesn't get solved just because your society is libertarian and
another isn't. A good example would be medieval Europe. Many
people call this medieval anarchy, which might sound crazy to people,
but if you talk to actual libertarian scholars, many of
them will tell you that actually, the you know, feudal
Europe was more libertarian then modern societies because there was
no central government, not because they didn't desire a central government,
not because they were ideologically opposed to central government, but
because after the devastation of the Roman Empire, there was
simply no force that could unify the different areas of
Europe underwent authority, and so we developed a system where
feudal lords, barons and counts and these other dukes would
ultimately secure an area for themselves through violence, and then
eventually you would have a higher warlord, a king, and
he would kind of unify those barons under him. But
still there was a high degree of autonomy in any
given region because there was simply no way for the
king to ultimately impress compel behavior from his different barons.
Most of the time, it was more of the king
as a first among equals, trying to convince his different
nobles to give their banners to his cause, rather than
some almighty emperor who was weighing down on the four
of any given piece of his society. And it wasn't
until we started to see the modernization and increase of
scale that we started to see what we think of
now as absolutism. And again, while absolutism is distinctly something
that is monarchical. People like bertrand Jujuvenile I think credibly
point to its development as actually an inevitable step towards
modernity in which the state would unify under what we
think of now as liberal democracy. But it couldn't have
happened until you had kings powerful enough to centralize their
power inside their entire kingdom to the point where that
medieval anarchy fell away. So you had moments where in
that anarchic structure, a quasi libertarian existence was reasonable. But
once you saw the absolutism start to solidify in these
European nations, less and less it became clear, or more
and more it became clear that this libertarian existence was
no longer viable with these larger states. This is Alul's
famous tank problem. Once you have the leveon mass, everybody
has to have the leveon mass. Once you have control
of propaganda in your state, everyone needs to have control
of propaganda in your state. And this is the great
revolution in managerial styles. This is what James Burnham was
pointing to that yes, you have technically fascism and liberal
democracy and communism, but FDR and Stalin and Hitler, We're
all trying to do the same thing. They're all trying
to bring mass production and mass consumption and the mass
understanding of politics under centralized control. They simply gave different
political formulas for the same outcome. And so whether libertarianism
or not as achievable, it's not something that any given
area or group of people gets to decide, because you're
not the only actors. It's nice if you have a
nice libertarian society. But if China decides that they're collective,
quasi communists, fascistic, neo you know, capitalistic empire, whatever we're
calling it. If they decide that they're going to roll
you over, well, what are you going to do? Do
you have the production to outrun a billion plus people?
Do you have the military might to stop an empire
of that size? Is your libertarian advantage through three free
market economics and the ability of people to choose what
they want? Is that going to stop China from rolling
you up like a carpet? Probably not, And so it
doesn't matter ultimately if you want to be a libertarian society.
If your neighbor has collectivized to the point where they
can crush your libertarian society, just like we saw in
feudal Europe. Well, then it doesn't matter what you want
as an individual, baron or count. And that's again something
that libertarians never factor in when they're thinking about their
ultimate society.
Speaker 1: And the problem of scale, I mean, really is that
is the rub that's what makes conversations about modern politics
so difficult. And one of the things that I have
and many others have noted is the fact that you're
seeing within America sort of a great re organization where
people are moving from you know, Republican voters from blue
states are moving to red states and sort of vice versa. Right,
we see people polarizing, and at least a large part
of that, and I don't want to, you know, overemphasize
that trend is the fact that it's almost impossible to
get what you want on you know, a specific issue
by issue basis from national politics, right, like even issues
like you know, gun control. Right, yes, sure, you know,
the Democrats, you know, whine and moan about that, but
the probability of federal level gun control is relatively small, right,
it seems to be sort of a dead issue, whereas
in blue states or recently blue states, well, you can
have you know, Britain levels right if you want, and
so seemingly if you are passionate about that issue or
any others, the solution is we'll move to a smaller place,
move to a place where you can create a consensus
around it. Right. But steering this whole ship of you know,
four hundred million people is incredibly difficult to do. Now,
that doesn't mean it can't happen, right, clearly, you know
we have federal level laws at any given moment that
are making life difficult. Not my point, but the problem
of how to make this massive scrotic machine do anything
is yeah, Look, it's felt by everyone, right, We understand
that it's very difficult to actually get this ship to
move one side or the other. Well maybe more one
side than the other. But that's a discussion for a
different day. So Arn, thank you so much for coming on.
This was a very fascinating discussion. I enjoyed it greatly.
People are interested in you. We've mentioned you have a
book now coming out in a second edition, but where
else can people find you?
Speaker 2: Well? Thanks always a pleasure to be with you, Jay,
And of course people can catch Jay Burden regularly on
my show on the Blaze. You can go to Blaze TV.
You can head to YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey. Of course I'm
on places like Spotify, any podcast network, Apple, all those things.
You can always find me there.
Speaker 1: Well great, those will all be linked in the description
as far as my stuff. The Jay Burton Show available Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you want to listen to podcasts what I do now.
If you want to support me and avoid all those
irritating ads, you can head over to Patreon, Substack or
gum Road get the episodes early and ad free again. Aaron,
it was a pleasure. Never went home. Keep your head up.
I can't last forever. Good Night six