1
00:00:00,640 --> 00:00:03,600
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Pekenonas Show. I am here with

2
00:00:03,839 --> 00:00:07,080
Orrin McIntyre. How are you doing, Orrin doing great? Thanks

3
00:00:07,080 --> 00:00:10,199
for having me again. Well, last time you were on

4
00:00:10,240 --> 00:00:12,880
it was differentman Beyond the Wall podcast and a couple

5
00:00:12,919 --> 00:00:17,160
of changes have been made and some new people listening in.

6
00:00:17,280 --> 00:00:19,399
So why don't you tell everybody a little bit about

7
00:00:19,399 --> 00:00:20,000
what you do?

8
00:00:21,519 --> 00:00:26,000
Speaker 2: Sure? My main thing is YouTube. I have a YouTube channel,

9
00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:28,960
though I've also got an Odyssey and a Rumbolt channel,

10
00:00:29,160 --> 00:00:34,359
and the main focus is kind of political theory. I

11
00:00:34,439 --> 00:00:36,320
go over a bunch of different stuff. I'll do the

12
00:00:36,320 --> 00:00:38,679
news of the day sometimes or what's going on, but

13
00:00:39,439 --> 00:00:42,479
my main focus is kind of looking at political theory

14
00:00:42,520 --> 00:00:47,600
and using to analyze different situations that are going on today.

15
00:00:47,640 --> 00:00:50,840
And then I also do a decent amount on Twitter

16
00:00:50,880 --> 00:00:53,320
and gab and other stuff. So everyone could check that

17
00:00:53,320 --> 00:00:56,520
out if they're that out, if they're interested, excellent.

18
00:00:56,880 --> 00:01:01,000
Speaker 1: All right. So on Twitter the other day a lot

19
00:01:01,079 --> 00:01:04,560
of people were talking about all these videos come out

20
00:01:04,599 --> 00:01:07,159
that are just like absolute insanity. You hear all these

21
00:01:07,200 --> 00:01:13,799
stories about just what seems like wey mare Germany level perversion,

22
00:01:14,120 --> 00:01:19,879
and somebody was asking why is this happening? And how

23
00:01:19,920 --> 00:01:25,040
did we get here? And everything? And a common trope

24
00:01:25,159 --> 00:01:28,480
in like NRX circles and I reaction circles is while

25
00:01:28,560 --> 00:01:33,079
the Enlightenment was a mistake, and I was trying to

26
00:01:33,239 --> 00:01:36,640
give my explanation to that to somebody, and they were like, well,

27
00:01:36,680 --> 00:01:41,079
we'd really like to hear more. They weren't completely dismissing it.

28
00:01:41,120 --> 00:01:44,519
They legitimately wanted to hear more. But two hundred and

29
00:01:44,560 --> 00:01:47,760
eighty characters is two hundred and eighty characters. And the

30
00:01:47,840 --> 00:01:50,000
last time you were on I asked you, I said,

31
00:01:50,040 --> 00:01:53,159
what do you think is like the hallmark of make

32
00:01:53,280 --> 00:01:57,760
somebody a neo reactionary? And your response was that they

33
00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:02,519
questioned the Enlightenment. So why don't you talk a little bit?

34
00:02:02,599 --> 00:02:06,400
Can you like describe what you think the Enlightenment was,

35
00:02:06,959 --> 00:02:10,159
how it came about, what kind of moment it was?

36
00:02:11,879 --> 00:02:15,599
Speaker 2: Sure? I mean, we you know the for us now,

37
00:02:15,680 --> 00:02:18,520
the Enlightenment is an origin story, right, It's kind of

38
00:02:18,520 --> 00:02:24,120
the origin story of modern civilization. And the story that

39
00:02:24,159 --> 00:02:28,039
we kind of like to tell ourselves about the Enlightenment

40
00:02:28,360 --> 00:02:31,560
is that through most of human history, people were ruled

41
00:02:31,599 --> 00:02:38,000
by superstition and emotions. They were closed minded, They just

42
00:02:38,159 --> 00:02:42,560
kind of went with this kind of caveman esque you know,

43
00:02:42,719 --> 00:02:49,360
power and anger and tribalism. And then somewhere in you know,

44
00:02:49,439 --> 00:02:54,120
the sixteen seventeen hundreds, we developed this miracle of science,

45
00:02:55,319 --> 00:02:58,639
and science allowed us to kind of enter into the

46
00:02:58,800 --> 00:03:04,680
modern age of mankind, and we became more rational, more reasonable.

47
00:03:04,840 --> 00:03:08,560
We stopped believing in these ancient myths. We started, you know,

48
00:03:08,599 --> 00:03:12,919
becoming more in control of our emotions and systematizing things.

49
00:03:13,439 --> 00:03:17,599
And by taking this process of science and taking kind

50
00:03:17,639 --> 00:03:21,039
of the wondrous things that it had done in medicine

51
00:03:21,240 --> 00:03:24,840
and physics and all these other things, we could take

52
00:03:24,879 --> 00:03:29,240
that same process of kind of scientific thought and apply

53
00:03:29,360 --> 00:03:34,599
it to the social as well. We could create social sciences,

54
00:03:34,680 --> 00:03:38,280
and we could apply it to things like you know,

55
00:03:38,840 --> 00:03:41,080
I mean, philosophy had always been around to some extent,

56
00:03:41,120 --> 00:03:43,759
but we started seeing a more systematic attack of things

57
00:03:43,800 --> 00:03:49,319
like philosophy, sociology, psychology, and of course the big one

58
00:03:49,400 --> 00:03:52,039
that we talk about with the Enlightenment and government is

59
00:03:52,199 --> 00:03:57,439
of course political science. We start applying a scientific rationale

60
00:03:57,800 --> 00:04:03,000
to governing. Idea is that if we can kind of

61
00:04:03,080 --> 00:04:07,080
take get rid of the medieval aspects of it, right,

62
00:04:07,439 --> 00:04:10,680
men had been ruled by those who had been put

63
00:04:10,719 --> 00:04:13,879
in power by God and the Church had had a

64
00:04:13,960 --> 00:04:16,720
huge say in their lives. And if we could kind

65
00:04:16,759 --> 00:04:22,639
of remove that, you know, those deities, those that metaphysical idea,

66
00:04:22,680 --> 00:04:27,399
and we could ground our governance in the more rational age,

67
00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:32,720
then we would produce better results. And that's I think

68
00:04:32,839 --> 00:04:36,319
kind of the origin that most people think of when

69
00:04:36,319 --> 00:04:39,120
they think of the Enlightenment. You know, we see the

70
00:04:39,199 --> 00:04:44,800
death of the old monarch or or emperor or you know,

71
00:04:44,920 --> 00:04:47,879
sultan or whatever, and we move into the age of

72
00:04:48,959 --> 00:04:54,720
the republic, democracy, liberalism, and all of this stuff, of course,

73
00:04:54,920 --> 00:05:02,480
coincides with big scientific discoveries. They coincide with the industrial revolution,

74
00:05:02,879 --> 00:05:05,279
and so it's very easy to tell us the story

75
00:05:05,480 --> 00:05:11,600
tell ourselves the story of both scientific and moral progress. Right,

76
00:05:11,600 --> 00:05:15,519
We're not just more enlightened people when it comes to

77
00:05:15,600 --> 00:05:19,560
our ability to cure disease, but those things also came

78
00:05:19,600 --> 00:05:22,639
along with the ability to kind of properly manage our

79
00:05:22,680 --> 00:05:24,959
society and set it up in ways that we're going

80
00:05:25,000 --> 00:05:27,920
to benefit everyone. And we're going to be more enlightened

81
00:05:27,959 --> 00:05:30,439
about our understanding of others and our ability to live

82
00:05:30,519 --> 00:05:35,120
together and advance in morals. And so I think that

83
00:05:35,360 --> 00:05:38,920
is for most people what the Enlightenment means. Now, obviously

84
00:05:38,959 --> 00:05:45,240
for academics, for historians this has different connotations. But I

85
00:05:45,279 --> 00:05:47,920
think in general, when you're talking to the average person,

86
00:05:48,560 --> 00:05:52,000
that's kind of the general impression they have of what

87
00:05:52,040 --> 00:05:53,720
the Enlightenment is and what it brought us.

88
00:05:55,639 --> 00:05:58,160
Speaker 1: What is your opinion on the Enlightenment? That sounds like

89
00:05:58,160 --> 00:06:01,680
the Wikipedia version of the answer, So what is your version?

90
00:06:02,720 --> 00:06:06,680
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, in many ways, obviously advancement in science

91
00:06:06,839 --> 00:06:09,839
did come right, and so that that's the part that's undeniable,

92
00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:13,040
and the part that I think in many ways covers

93
00:06:13,199 --> 00:06:16,279
over then some of the other things that happened in

94
00:06:16,319 --> 00:06:21,639
the Enlightenment. Because if you want to look at the Enlightenment,

95
00:06:21,680 --> 00:06:24,079
there are plenty of people who are pretty happy about it.

96
00:06:24,120 --> 00:06:28,439
There's of course a general move towards this, there's a

97
00:06:28,480 --> 00:06:31,720
general celebration of what's going on, but there are also

98
00:06:31,839 --> 00:06:34,160
some pretty severe critics. And if you want to look

99
00:06:34,199 --> 00:06:39,120
at two really good contemporary critics of the Enlightenment, I

100
00:06:39,120 --> 00:06:43,839
would say that Joseph Demastra and Thomas Carlisle are probably

101
00:06:44,199 --> 00:06:48,439
two of your best sources, because they're both writing very

102
00:06:48,480 --> 00:06:51,959
close to the source. They're either you know, during the

103
00:06:52,079 --> 00:06:55,399
Enlightenment or kind of right right as it's transitioning in

104
00:06:55,639 --> 00:07:00,759
we're really transitioning into liberalism politically, and kind of this

105
00:07:00,920 --> 00:07:04,680
broader understanding and unlike some of the people like Burke

106
00:07:04,800 --> 00:07:08,639
right most people who talk about the French Revolution in

107
00:07:08,680 --> 00:07:11,279
a negative way and believe it or not, it's still

108
00:07:11,399 --> 00:07:12,920
up in the air for a lot of people as

109
00:07:12,959 --> 00:07:15,000
to whether or not the French Revolution was a negative.

110
00:07:16,040 --> 00:07:17,759
But a lot of people who talk about the French

111
00:07:17,800 --> 00:07:21,000
Revolution in a negative way will look at someone like

112
00:07:21,120 --> 00:07:25,040
Burke and say he's the best critic of the French Revolution.

113
00:07:25,160 --> 00:07:27,240
And it's not that there's nothing valuable in Burke, but

114
00:07:27,399 --> 00:07:29,360
at the end of the day, Burke is still a liberal.

115
00:07:29,399 --> 00:07:34,000
Burke is not comfortable with where liberalism went. He's kind

116
00:07:34,040 --> 00:07:37,199
of your first conservative right, and that this is where

117
00:07:37,240 --> 00:07:41,800
a lot of conservatives trace themselves to Burki. Burkey and

118
00:07:41,879 --> 00:07:46,279
conservatives they still see themselves in the liberal tradition, but

119
00:07:46,319 --> 00:07:48,480
they think it went too fast, It went too far,

120
00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:51,759
it broke too much too quickly. People weren't ready for it,

121
00:07:52,759 --> 00:07:55,279
and so a lot of people will turn to Burke.

122
00:07:55,360 --> 00:07:57,160
But if you really want to see people who are

123
00:07:57,360 --> 00:08:01,439
cutting to the quick they're attacking the base for these

124
00:08:01,560 --> 00:08:07,319
kind of changes in governance and morality. I think guys

125
00:08:07,399 --> 00:08:11,160
like Demester and Carlisle are very valuable because I don't

126
00:08:11,199 --> 00:08:14,120
think they're I don't think they're on board with what's happening.

127
00:08:14,160 --> 00:08:16,600
It's not a matter of oh, we did this too quickly,

128
00:08:17,160 --> 00:08:19,199
or you know, I don't like some of the acts

129
00:08:19,199 --> 00:08:21,920
that were taken, but I understand the general movement direction.

130
00:08:22,360 --> 00:08:25,800
These are very These are very serious attacks on the

131
00:08:25,800 --> 00:08:30,000
core ideas of kind of the Enlightenment and liberalism and

132
00:08:30,199 --> 00:08:34,120
the idea that we are making political and moral advancements

133
00:08:34,200 --> 00:08:34,879
during this time.

134
00:08:36,759 --> 00:08:40,519
Speaker 1: Can you point out a couple of Carlyle's points about

135
00:08:41,600 --> 00:08:44,480
why he looked upon it as a negative?

136
00:08:45,320 --> 00:08:49,200
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, I think you'll find in both Demestra and Carlisle.

137
00:08:49,320 --> 00:08:55,080
Demester little more because he's a more orthodox Catholic as

138
00:08:55,159 --> 00:09:02,120
where Carlisle has a more of a unique relationship with Christianity.

139
00:09:02,639 --> 00:09:07,679
But both men are very concerned about the secularization of society.

140
00:09:07,759 --> 00:09:12,279
Both see that as a very serious problem, and they

141
00:09:12,320 --> 00:09:16,720
think that the secularation secularization of society is going to

142
00:09:16,840 --> 00:09:21,960
leave people without a guiding light that people, especially you

143
00:09:21,960 --> 00:09:23,840
can look at guys like to make sure they're dunking

144
00:09:23,919 --> 00:09:26,799
on people like Rousseau saying, you think you can just

145
00:09:26,919 --> 00:09:30,840
build society out of nothing, you can just a priori,

146
00:09:31,279 --> 00:09:35,000
you know, design a constitution, design a people. But that's

147
00:09:35,039 --> 00:09:38,480
not how these things work. You know. The people are

148
00:09:38,639 --> 00:09:44,639
endowed by their creator, not with inalienable rights in their understanding,

149
00:09:44,840 --> 00:09:50,039
but with characters, certain characteristics, certain nations, certain peoples, They

150
00:09:50,039 --> 00:09:53,080
have a particular way of being, and those things work

151
00:09:53,159 --> 00:09:58,759
themselves out through their political institutions and constitutions. And it's

152
00:09:58,799 --> 00:10:02,080
not something you can build from the ground up. And

153
00:10:02,159 --> 00:10:07,879
Carlisle attacks many different things. He attacks the industrial revolution,

154
00:10:08,279 --> 00:10:14,240
he attacks the democracy, and he does this because he

155
00:10:14,320 --> 00:10:18,679
feels like we're cheapening what man is and where man's

156
00:10:18,679 --> 00:10:20,960
purposes is going to come from. You know, he looks

157
00:10:21,080 --> 00:10:25,240
at the things that are necessary for industrial revolution and

158
00:10:25,440 --> 00:10:28,600
he makes some critiques that in some ways might sound

159
00:10:28,639 --> 00:10:32,159
marxianto some people that you know, people are going to

160
00:10:32,200 --> 00:10:35,639
be removed from the value of their work, that we're

161
00:10:35,759 --> 00:10:41,200
killing the craftsmen in order to obtain efficiency at doing

162
00:10:41,240 --> 00:10:46,840
something lesser, and because we're training the average person to

163
00:10:46,960 --> 00:10:50,879
produce a product that they have no attachment to and

164
00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:55,960
to transition from a craftsman to a mere laborer. This

165
00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:58,120
is going to detegrate the average person. This is going

166
00:10:58,200 --> 00:11:01,279
to remove them from the value of their work, and

167
00:11:01,320 --> 00:11:05,159
it's going to degrade them morally. He also says that

168
00:11:05,559 --> 00:11:10,279
because we are in this mindset, we enter into what

169
00:11:10,519 --> 00:11:14,840
he calls like beaverism, which is basically just working just

170
00:11:14,879 --> 00:11:18,120
to work. And he's not against work. This is guy

171
00:11:18,159 --> 00:11:21,759
with a pretty Protestant worth work ethicic. He is pretty

172
00:11:21,759 --> 00:11:25,080
clear that he thinks work is essential and that if

173
00:11:25,120 --> 00:11:28,279
you're not working, you're not being a valuable human. But

174
00:11:28,399 --> 00:11:32,279
he feels like by trying to make everything more efficient

175
00:11:32,519 --> 00:11:37,679
and more alienated, we are becoming more animalistic. We're simply

176
00:11:37,720 --> 00:11:41,360
working because it's instinctual to generate the things we need,

177
00:11:41,879 --> 00:11:47,639
rather than elevating ourselves through mastering skill and becoming the

178
00:11:47,759 --> 00:11:50,759
kind of person that can wield those skills in a

179
00:11:50,799 --> 00:11:55,279
way that betters ourselves in society. He also says that

180
00:11:55,679 --> 00:12:00,799
the attempts to rule through kind of this industrialization, this

181
00:12:00,919 --> 00:12:04,519
general attitude of industrialization, leads us to a type of

182
00:12:04,639 --> 00:12:08,240
leadership where we're simply turning people. And he of course

183
00:12:08,279 --> 00:12:12,919
didn't have this kind of verbiage at the time, but

184
00:12:13,240 --> 00:12:16,240
turning people into numbers on spreadsheets. He has this kind

185
00:12:16,240 --> 00:12:20,200
of a beautiful phrase he calls the condition of England

186
00:12:20,440 --> 00:12:22,879
question and he says, you know, this is not something

187
00:12:22,960 --> 00:12:25,879
you can quantify with numbers. This is not something you

188
00:12:25,919 --> 00:12:30,440
can put into an almanac or into a ledger. You know,

189
00:12:30,840 --> 00:12:34,759
you can't simply add up the GDP or you know,

190
00:12:34,840 --> 00:12:39,639
the productive value of an individual or a business or

191
00:12:39,679 --> 00:12:44,919
a country and determine its health. There's more to what

192
00:12:45,039 --> 00:12:49,039
a country is than simply its material output or its efficiency.

193
00:12:49,840 --> 00:12:54,000
And then, of course when it comes to democracy, Carlisle

194
00:12:54,120 --> 00:12:56,799
was very much not a fan. Carlisle was such not

195
00:12:56,840 --> 00:12:59,320
a fan that he was angry at the monarchy in

196
00:12:59,360 --> 00:13:02,759
England at the time time for basically just being a

197
00:13:02,799 --> 00:13:06,440
shill for Parliament. He said, basically, we've robbed ourselves of

198
00:13:07,720 --> 00:13:10,639
a monarch and instead all we have is someone who

199
00:13:10,679 --> 00:13:14,639
basically rubber stamps what the Parliament does. And the Parliament

200
00:13:15,200 --> 00:13:19,399
is again ruling in theory in the name of the people,

201
00:13:19,879 --> 00:13:24,799
but is often pursuing simply the interests of this new

202
00:13:24,840 --> 00:13:29,440
industrial class, maybe the precursor of what we would call

203
00:13:29,480 --> 00:13:33,559
a managerial elite today. And he opines for kind of

204
00:13:33,600 --> 00:13:38,960
this aristocracy that used to exist, that wanted to be holistic,

205
00:13:39,159 --> 00:13:43,320
cared about the entire good of the people, and saw

206
00:13:43,399 --> 00:13:47,440
itself as kind of the caretakers and cultivators of the

207
00:13:47,480 --> 00:13:51,360
good of those that were under them, rather than people

208
00:13:51,360 --> 00:13:55,519
who are simply trying to basically reduce the people into

209
00:13:55,559 --> 00:14:00,000
widgets and cogs in a machine that can more efficiently produce,

210
00:14:00,120 --> 00:14:04,440
use material and increase the numbers so that you know,

211
00:14:04,679 --> 00:14:10,360
we could see better spreadsheets, better ledgers, and so he says,

212
00:14:10,399 --> 00:14:12,919
you know, the condition of England has to be something

213
00:14:12,960 --> 00:14:17,720
that we understand as a spiritual good, as a heroic good,

214
00:14:18,120 --> 00:14:22,879
as something that is beyond simply the measure of, you know,

215
00:14:22,960 --> 00:14:25,799
how the average person is living, though he points out

216
00:14:25,840 --> 00:14:30,440
that that itself has not really increased that much when

217
00:14:30,480 --> 00:14:33,320
you look at, you know, how people live in the

218
00:14:33,320 --> 00:14:36,799
cities as compared to how they used to live prior

219
00:14:36,840 --> 00:14:41,080
to the industrialization. So that's just an overview. Of course,

220
00:14:41,480 --> 00:14:46,080
Carlisle's is very dense. You have to read him, at

221
00:14:46,200 --> 00:14:48,799
least I have to read him slowly and many times

222
00:14:49,120 --> 00:14:51,159
to kind of pull what you get out of him,

223
00:14:51,200 --> 00:14:54,000
and you probably didn't get at all even the second

224
00:14:54,080 --> 00:14:57,480
or third time anyway. So it's someone that is takes

225
00:14:57,720 --> 00:14:59,480
I think, a good amount of time, but is well

226
00:14:59,480 --> 00:15:01,879
worth your investment for kind of what he brings to

227
00:15:01,919 --> 00:15:02,360
the table.

228
00:15:03,120 --> 00:15:04,600
Speaker 1: We're in the nineteenth century, and I want to go

229
00:15:04,639 --> 00:15:07,840
back to the eighteenth for a second. I think a

230
00:15:07,919 --> 00:15:12,919
lot of people would no matter what your opinion is

231
00:15:13,120 --> 00:15:17,919
on the American Revolution, the majority of people believe that

232
00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:21,720
it was a good thing. I think that one of

233
00:15:21,799 --> 00:15:26,519
the problems that you would meet when you're talking about

234
00:15:26,519 --> 00:15:30,120
the Enlightenment is there are a lot of people will

235
00:15:30,120 --> 00:15:34,039
say the lighten the Enlightenment inspired the American Revolution, but

236
00:15:34,960 --> 00:15:38,080
if you tell them that it also inspired seventeen eighty nine,

237
00:15:38,559 --> 00:15:41,360
you know, the French Revolution, they won't be able to

238
00:15:41,399 --> 00:15:44,759
get that. Can you put those two together? How the

239
00:15:44,840 --> 00:15:48,879
Enlightenment would have been responsible for both?

240
00:15:50,399 --> 00:15:55,399
Speaker 2: Sure? I mean in both cases we're looking at a

241
00:15:57,360 --> 00:15:59,919
I guess it's how you want to trace that lineage, right.

242
00:16:00,080 --> 00:16:01,639
There are a lot of people who will trace it

243
00:16:01,720 --> 00:16:03,679
through Protestantism, and I don't want to get into that

244
00:16:03,679 --> 00:16:06,639
because that's a whole nother that's a whole nother discussion,

245
00:16:07,360 --> 00:16:09,519
not of all of which that I agree with. I

246
00:16:09,559 --> 00:16:12,279
guess I'll start by saying this. A lot of people

247
00:16:12,799 --> 00:16:16,799
who have a problem with the Enlightenment have a problem

248
00:16:16,840 --> 00:16:21,639
with the American Revolution, mainly because they say the king

249
00:16:22,200 --> 00:16:26,120
was the rightful authority over the Americans and they didn't

250
00:16:26,159 --> 00:16:28,960
have the right to rebel. I have a slightly different tact,

251
00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:31,080
and it might be wrong, but it's mine, and so

252
00:16:31,159 --> 00:16:33,240
I'll say it before we go any further with that.

253
00:16:34,240 --> 00:16:37,679
I think the American Revolution is I don't want to

254
00:16:37,679 --> 00:16:40,480
say good or bad, because it's a past event and

255
00:16:41,919 --> 00:16:44,159
what do we have a say on it? But I

256
00:16:44,519 --> 00:16:48,519
would say that it's justified, not necessarily from its Enlightenment basis,

257
00:16:48,519 --> 00:16:52,320
which is surely what the founders at that time did, right.

258
00:16:52,360 --> 00:16:57,279
They just took large chunks of Locke and used it

259
00:16:57,320 --> 00:17:02,000
to justify their, you know, their separation from England. But

260
00:17:02,240 --> 00:17:04,519
I think they lost it because the king kind of

261
00:17:04,559 --> 00:17:07,119
lost the mandate of Heaven over his empire. It was

262
00:17:07,160 --> 00:17:12,079
not being ruled properly. The empire had frankly grown too large,

263
00:17:12,160 --> 00:17:15,880
and so often, as with any Tower of Babel, was

264
00:17:16,039 --> 00:17:21,319
bound to collapse when the provinces were governed poorly. So

265
00:17:21,400 --> 00:17:23,759
I have less of a problem with the American Revolution

266
00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:28,559
than many kind of reactionaries, I guess, because I think

267
00:17:28,640 --> 00:17:33,000
that that's kind of the natural cycle of far flung

268
00:17:33,079 --> 00:17:38,240
provinces that are poorly governed. But the American Revolution most

269
00:17:38,279 --> 00:17:44,920
certainly was founded in Enlightenment ideas, though it definitely had

270
00:17:45,559 --> 00:17:49,559
a more measured understanding. It was certainly more Lockean than

271
00:17:49,599 --> 00:17:53,240
it was Rusoian, and both of them were working from

272
00:17:53,279 --> 00:17:57,359
what we would call the Enlightenment tradition. But Locke still

273
00:17:57,519 --> 00:18:00,000
had what I would say is a fair amount of

274
00:18:00,240 --> 00:18:05,240
Christianity in it and a lot of the And I

275
00:18:05,240 --> 00:18:08,160
think this also goes to the kind of people who

276
00:18:08,200 --> 00:18:15,039
came to America. They were mostly Protestants fleeing, and they

277
00:18:15,079 --> 00:18:19,680
were there because they wanted to practice there sometimes rather

278
00:18:20,640 --> 00:18:24,160
you know, kind of kooky versions of Christianity for some

279
00:18:24,200 --> 00:18:26,839
of the real radicals, but they were all there because

280
00:18:26,839 --> 00:18:30,720
they wanted to be Christian more not less. As where

281
00:18:30,759 --> 00:18:33,240
when you look at the French Revolution, and of course

282
00:18:33,240 --> 00:18:36,319
for so they're looking to throw off the authority of

283
00:18:36,359 --> 00:18:39,799
the church entirely that both were looking to escape the

284
00:18:39,839 --> 00:18:44,440
Catholic Church. But Americans were looking to escape into Protestantism,

285
00:18:44,839 --> 00:18:48,880
the French were looking to escape into basically atheism, right,

286
00:18:48,880 --> 00:18:52,400
they crowned they literally crowned the God of Reason in

287
00:18:52,480 --> 00:18:56,519
Notre Dame Cathedral. And so if you're looking for why

288
00:18:56,559 --> 00:18:59,960
they could both come from the same root of Enlightenment

289
00:19:00,599 --> 00:19:04,640
but end up in pretty different places, I think the

290
00:19:04,799 --> 00:19:10,640
answer tends to be who was rebelling the foundation of kind,

291
00:19:10,759 --> 00:19:13,720
where they're starting part of their liberalism, and where they

292
00:19:13,759 --> 00:19:16,240
wanted to end up. I think that while they both

293
00:19:16,640 --> 00:19:19,480
started from the idea of this liberal tradition of throwing

294
00:19:19,519 --> 00:19:27,880
off monarchy, having popular sovereignty, generating constitutional republics, they were

295
00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:32,839
looking for very different results, even though they kind of

296
00:19:32,839 --> 00:19:34,480
had the same starting goal.

297
00:19:36,759 --> 00:19:40,599
Speaker 1: When you look into the eighteen hundreds, what do you see,

298
00:19:40,839 --> 00:19:44,000
as I mean, you already talked about the Industrial Revolution

299
00:19:44,160 --> 00:19:50,240
and how Carlisle talked about it politically, what kind of

300
00:19:50,440 --> 00:19:54,359
movements did you see in the eighteen hundreds that were

301
00:19:55,920 --> 00:19:59,880
popping up that looked to be inspired by the Enlightenment.

302
00:20:00,880 --> 00:20:04,759
Speaker 2: Yeah, and here's where I don't I don't want to

303
00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:08,799
bill myself as someone I'm not. I'm not. I have

304
00:20:08,839 --> 00:20:11,680
a decent grasp of history, but I'm not a historian,

305
00:20:12,279 --> 00:20:17,720
and I don't have like an encyclopedic knowledge of the

306
00:20:17,759 --> 00:20:21,440
eighteen hundreds. And so while I've read a good bit

307
00:20:21,480 --> 00:20:25,119
of political philosophy from the era and tracing it through,

308
00:20:25,960 --> 00:20:29,200
I don't want to pretend like I have a general

309
00:20:29,799 --> 00:20:33,440
or have a specific understanding of all the different political

310
00:20:33,480 --> 00:20:36,640
movements that were moving as forward. But from what I

311
00:20:36,680 --> 00:20:41,000
have read from people of that era, it seemed that

312
00:20:41,759 --> 00:20:48,640
the mandates were shifting away from the idea of kind

313
00:20:48,640 --> 00:20:53,359
of more absolute monarchies and of course towards parliamentary monarchies.

314
00:20:53,599 --> 00:20:55,559
And at this point, as it got to the late

315
00:20:55,599 --> 00:21:01,200
eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, basically perfunctory monarchies where the

316
00:21:02,079 --> 00:21:05,839
monarch had little to know power and it was almost

317
00:21:05,920 --> 00:21:11,000
all in the power of the parliaments. And if you

318
00:21:11,079 --> 00:21:16,799
look at guys like Mosca who were writing about this transition,

319
00:21:17,400 --> 00:21:20,519
they said that, again, a lot of this comes from

320
00:21:20,720 --> 00:21:25,279
your industrial revolution, the fact that your merchant class is

321
00:21:25,319 --> 00:21:30,240
on the rise, right, kind of your aristocracy is losing power.

322
00:21:30,319 --> 00:21:34,400
Your merchant class is gaining power. The new money is

323
00:21:34,440 --> 00:21:39,559
moving into these parliaments, and it's kind of demanding more

324
00:21:39,680 --> 00:21:43,279
and more political rights from the monarch. And so your

325
00:21:43,319 --> 00:21:47,319
power is being drained out of the monarchy into the parliaments,

326
00:21:47,319 --> 00:21:52,200
and the parliaments are less aristocratic and more mercantile. And

327
00:21:53,079 --> 00:21:57,319
it's because the industrial revolution is allowing them to create

328
00:21:57,440 --> 00:22:00,759
basis of wealth that had not exist. And this is

329
00:22:00,799 --> 00:22:03,960
an ongoing process, right, this has been happening for hundreds

330
00:22:04,039 --> 00:22:06,839
of years. The merchants have been gaining more ability as

331
00:22:07,200 --> 00:22:11,480
the ability to increase trade and production have come from

332
00:22:11,559 --> 00:22:16,000
better sailing technology, different trading technologies, and then of course

333
00:22:16,079 --> 00:22:21,640
mass production leap frogs this process. And so you're seeing

334
00:22:21,759 --> 00:22:28,240
you're seeing people who basically our leadership had been warlords

335
00:22:28,559 --> 00:22:32,319
more or less. Right, kings were originally basically warlords and

336
00:22:32,359 --> 00:22:37,640
their aristocrats, their lieutenants had been you know, ruling over

337
00:22:37,680 --> 00:22:42,039
sections of their land. And so your aristocracy was fundamentally

338
00:22:42,079 --> 00:22:47,240
the martial cast and of course the Church assisted them

339
00:22:47,440 --> 00:22:51,000
kind of in that ruling. But as the Enlightenment came

340
00:22:51,160 --> 00:22:57,319
and the need for specific marshal training drained away, because

341
00:22:57,359 --> 00:23:01,000
you started produce weapons that the average person could wield

342
00:23:01,359 --> 00:23:03,559
once you you know, this is this is famously why

343
00:23:03,599 --> 00:23:06,519
the Pope tried to outlie the crossbow, right, you know

344
00:23:06,559 --> 00:23:10,160
about this with the pope crossbow. Yeah, So, so you know,

345
00:23:10,200 --> 00:23:15,000
the the increase in martial technology was reducing the need

346
00:23:15,279 --> 00:23:18,160
to have a specific martial class because you could take

347
00:23:18,200 --> 00:23:22,119
the average person and turn them into a relatively effective soldier.

348
00:23:22,160 --> 00:23:24,799
And so you no longer needed to train people and

349
00:23:24,920 --> 00:23:27,160
have them earn their you know, be able to you know,

350
00:23:27,279 --> 00:23:30,160
create their own armor, and spend lots of time learning

351
00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:33,680
how to fight. Instead, you could just shove a crossbow

352
00:23:33,720 --> 00:23:35,839
and then a musket into the hand of the average

353
00:23:35,880 --> 00:23:38,799
person and they could mow down the guy who had

354
00:23:38,799 --> 00:23:41,400
spent his entire life learning how to to fight from

355
00:23:41,400 --> 00:23:45,079
the back of a horse. And so the ability of

356
00:23:45,200 --> 00:23:49,880
merchants to acquire wealth and gain status without needing to

357
00:23:49,920 --> 00:23:56,559
have marshal prowess again entirely shifted the dynamic of the

358
00:23:56,799 --> 00:23:59,440
you know these politics, and it allowed for these more

359
00:23:59,519 --> 00:24:04,079
nationalist movements, of course, to also take hold. Because you

360
00:24:04,200 --> 00:24:09,039
no longer had the need for kings and kingdoms, people

361
00:24:09,079 --> 00:24:14,119
started emerging more as nation states rather than you know

362
00:24:14,200 --> 00:24:17,599
being the you know, being a people who were under

363
00:24:17,839 --> 00:24:21,759
the protection of a particular monarch. And so all of

364
00:24:21,839 --> 00:24:25,759
these things work together to shift the attitude away from

365
00:24:25,799 --> 00:24:30,480
the more medieval understanding of society towards something we would

366
00:24:30,519 --> 00:24:37,759
recognize as kind of that post Enlightenment society today.

367
00:24:36,480 --> 00:24:42,799
Speaker 1: Why are monarchies so denigrated? You pretty much can ask anyone,

368
00:24:43,359 --> 00:24:47,759
and even people who you know, read political theory now

369
00:24:47,880 --> 00:24:52,119
they may ye, people read the political theory normally that

370
00:24:52,960 --> 00:24:58,720
confirms their bias. But was this something that just had

371
00:24:58,799 --> 00:25:07,000
to happen in or to institute democracy and Enlightenment values? Liberalism?

372
00:25:07,640 --> 00:25:10,640
Speaker 2: It's certainly part of it. Again, I think it's hard

373
00:25:10,680 --> 00:25:13,799
to separate, and this is always, you know, we're always

374
00:25:13,799 --> 00:25:16,759
in danger of one lens, and so I think it's

375
00:25:16,799 --> 00:25:20,440
important to kind of take the totality of what's happening there.

376
00:25:21,200 --> 00:25:24,640
Democracy and liberalism are absolutely part of it. But again,

377
00:25:25,160 --> 00:25:30,279
the economic system is changing and the scale of things

378
00:25:30,279 --> 00:25:36,200
are changing, not just economically but governmentally. The mass state

379
00:25:36,319 --> 00:25:38,519
is on the rise, and you can read a bunch

380
00:25:38,599 --> 00:25:41,960
of guys like James Burnham and Sam Francis on this

381
00:25:42,079 --> 00:25:46,839
kind of thing. The ability of you know, the sovereign

382
00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:51,839
to basically govern large amounts of people had to increase,

383
00:25:52,359 --> 00:25:56,440
and that meant we needed a different story. A lot

384
00:25:56,440 --> 00:25:59,039
of people assume that, you know, the king just got

385
00:25:59,039 --> 00:26:03,160
to order everybody around, and in some ways that's true.

386
00:26:03,200 --> 00:26:07,559
He had more direct and obvious power than we see today.

387
00:26:07,880 --> 00:26:10,640
But the king was only one man and he was

388
00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:14,920
asking from many and when the king wanted something, it

389
00:26:14,960 --> 00:26:17,680
was often seen as something for the king, not for

390
00:26:18,000 --> 00:26:22,559
the nation. And so when the industrial revolution came and

391
00:26:22,599 --> 00:26:26,039
we needed kind of mass production and we needed the

392
00:26:26,079 --> 00:26:30,160
mass state, in order to justify the mass state and

393
00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:33,319
the things that the mass state required, we needed a

394
00:26:33,400 --> 00:26:36,839
new story about kind of where power came from. And

395
00:26:36,880 --> 00:26:40,599
so this is where the mass mandate becomes very useful

396
00:26:40,960 --> 00:26:44,359
because you might be able to say we're not doing

397
00:26:44,440 --> 00:26:47,119
this for the king, but it's very hard to say

398
00:26:47,200 --> 00:26:49,519
that we're not doing this for the nation and for

399
00:26:49,559 --> 00:26:51,519
the people. You're part of the people, right, How can

400
00:26:51,559 --> 00:26:54,960
you turn down the will of the entire people? And

401
00:26:55,039 --> 00:26:58,640
so the will of the people became a very useful tool,

402
00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:03,039
and this is why we see in many ways the

403
00:27:03,160 --> 00:27:08,160
rise of democracy also coincide with mass mobilization of militaries,

404
00:27:08,240 --> 00:27:12,200
right total warfare. We see the Leveeon mass in France,

405
00:27:12,240 --> 00:27:16,359
and we see every nation basically start to realize that

406
00:27:16,400 --> 00:27:18,880
they're in an arms race for power. Right, if France

407
00:27:19,240 --> 00:27:23,079
can bring you know, forget you know, twenty thirty forty

408
00:27:23,160 --> 00:27:25,920
thousand people, If France can bring an entire nation of

409
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:29,680
men to bear arms at any time, and we now

410
00:27:29,720 --> 00:27:33,279
have these arms that can be mass produced and they

411
00:27:33,279 --> 00:27:37,400
can turn your average man into an effective killing machine.

412
00:27:37,880 --> 00:27:43,160
Then the ability of a society to compel its entire

413
00:27:43,240 --> 00:27:49,319
population to fight becomes very important. Suddenly, drafts and compulsive

414
00:27:49,319 --> 00:27:53,359
military service become pretty much an essential part of the state.

415
00:27:53,480 --> 00:27:56,160
And how do you justify that. Well, it can be

416
00:27:56,200 --> 00:27:59,279
difficult with a king, but we find that democracies are

417
00:27:59,440 --> 00:28:03,440
far better are at compelling those things. So why did

418
00:28:03,480 --> 00:28:05,920
you denegrate a monarchy? Well, I mean there are a

419
00:28:05,960 --> 00:28:09,200
lot of reasons. Of course, many monarchies had grown decadent,

420
00:28:09,279 --> 00:28:14,160
Many monarchies had grown inefficient. Again, many monarchies had proven

421
00:28:14,200 --> 00:28:17,319
that they could not govern empires of the size that

422
00:28:17,359 --> 00:28:21,160
they had cultivated. Some of that is again just due

423
00:28:21,200 --> 00:28:24,720
to the you know, the degradation of that particular monarchy,

424
00:28:24,960 --> 00:28:26,839
but again a lot of it was due to the

425
00:28:26,880 --> 00:28:30,599
massification of the state, the need for the mass state

426
00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:34,480
to come to power and the military and production that

427
00:28:34,599 --> 00:28:37,839
all of that required. So again, I think part of

428
00:28:37,880 --> 00:28:40,319
it is is just a founding story. It's a narrative

429
00:28:40,319 --> 00:28:42,880
we tell ourselves, well, you know, we need to Look,

430
00:28:43,480 --> 00:28:47,039
we freed ourselves from monarchies, we freed ourselves from the shackles,

431
00:28:48,039 --> 00:28:51,079
became these more enlightened people. We're no longer relying on

432
00:28:51,480 --> 00:28:53,920
the divine right of kings. We're now looking at the

433
00:28:54,039 --> 00:28:57,480
rational discourse and the marketplace of ideas where the people

434
00:28:57,640 --> 00:29:01,000
choose their leaders. That's all part of the story too.

435
00:29:01,079 --> 00:29:04,599
But of course I think there's also those economic and

436
00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:07,960
cultural engines that are required to kind of move things

437
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:13,240
towards the total state that we saw take place during

438
00:29:13,240 --> 00:29:13,839
those times.

439
00:29:15,079 --> 00:29:19,079
Speaker 1: It does seem like the marketplace of ideas that just

440
00:29:19,200 --> 00:29:23,160
that phrase one that's just to get personal for a second,

441
00:29:23,240 --> 00:29:29,200
is I cannot stand. It's just horrible. What if the

442
00:29:29,240 --> 00:29:32,680
marketplace gives you know, Marxism, you know, it gives you

443
00:29:32,720 --> 00:29:35,519
the Bolsheviks. I mean, is that something you just take.

444
00:29:36,839 --> 00:29:39,880
It does seem that the whole idea of the marketplace

445
00:29:39,920 --> 00:29:46,519
of ideas is easily traced for the Enlightenment, right, m Yeah.

446
00:29:47,359 --> 00:29:49,559
Let me ask you this, because I know you said,

447
00:29:49,839 --> 00:29:54,799
you know, I'm not going to assume all the historical

448
00:29:54,880 --> 00:29:58,319
knowledge and putting that, but I'm sure when you look

449
00:29:58,480 --> 00:30:05,119
at like the right of Marxism and up through Bolshevism

450
00:30:05,359 --> 00:30:10,720
nineteen seventeen onto Maoism. I'm sure that's easily traced. Is

451
00:30:10,759 --> 00:30:13,400
that a reaction to the Enlightenment or is it directly

452
00:30:13,440 --> 00:30:14,480
from the Enlightenment.

453
00:30:15,519 --> 00:30:18,960
Speaker 2: Well, I mean there's certainly bits of both in there, right,

454
00:30:19,079 --> 00:30:23,200
So it's you can certainly see the you know, the

455
00:30:24,599 --> 00:30:27,599
going even further with the discarding of God. Right. It's

456
00:30:27,640 --> 00:30:31,279
not just that religion is something we need to outgrow,

457
00:30:31,599 --> 00:30:34,599
but it's like actively poison, right. It's basically it's something

458
00:30:34,599 --> 00:30:36,559
that was used to control the masses and we need

459
00:30:36,599 --> 00:30:40,240
to discard it. The Enlightenment is also very core to

460
00:30:40,279 --> 00:30:45,480
Marxism because Marxism is fundamentally progressive, right. It s it

461
00:30:45,559 --> 00:30:50,000
sees itself as the rule, something that can rule the

462
00:30:50,079 --> 00:30:56,519
new Age. Right. It's it's basically, you know, Marxism it

463
00:30:56,799 --> 00:31:00,279
wants everything to be managed. It is very much a

464
00:31:00,319 --> 00:31:04,319
managerial state. It wants to use science and logic and

465
00:31:04,440 --> 00:31:07,599
reason to you know, figure out the exact amount that

466
00:31:07,640 --> 00:31:10,480
everybody needs and the exact amount of work and output

467
00:31:10,559 --> 00:31:13,640
and all these things. And by making sure that we

468
00:31:13,680 --> 00:31:17,559
have effective management at every level of labor and distribution

469
00:31:17,759 --> 00:31:20,279
and all these things, we will produce kind of the

470
00:31:20,319 --> 00:31:26,000
optimum outcome. So it is very much tied to the Enlightenment,

471
00:31:26,920 --> 00:31:30,720
but it is definitely breaking from liberalism in some pretty

472
00:31:30,759 --> 00:31:35,759
fundamental ways. It does acknowledge some of the problems with

473
00:31:35,880 --> 00:31:39,720
the industrial revolutions, some of the effects, though weirdly enough,

474
00:31:39,759 --> 00:31:43,400
it has a hard time explaining why they're bad, Like

475
00:31:43,559 --> 00:31:45,680
I mean, it doesn't. I mean, you know, Marx goes

476
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:48,119
around making moral statements all the time, but it doesn't

477
00:31:48,119 --> 00:31:50,799
really have a good grounding for them, right, and pretty

478
00:31:50,839 --> 00:31:53,759
much all those situations. Again, I'm not going to pretend

479
00:31:53,799 --> 00:31:56,160
to be a scholar on Marx. I'm not going to

480
00:31:56,119 --> 00:31:59,119
you know, maybe he makes a grand argument that no

481
00:31:59,160 --> 00:32:03,119
one has ever shown. I haven't read all of Dos Capital,

482
00:32:03,319 --> 00:32:06,359
I don't know all of the Marx But every time

483
00:32:06,480 --> 00:32:09,000
I talk to people, every time I talk to Marxists

484
00:32:09,599 --> 00:32:14,079
about this, they always produce quotes that they to me

485
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:16,119
that they feel like are going to reveal like the

486
00:32:16,160 --> 00:32:22,160
morality of Marxism or his moral basis, And they're always horrific.

487
00:32:22,599 --> 00:32:25,400
They're always terrifying, and I just kind of look at

488
00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:28,680
them and I wonder, does this sound moral to you?

489
00:32:28,759 --> 00:32:34,240
Does this sound like a moral justification in grounding? Because

490
00:32:34,440 --> 00:32:37,319
you know, they just don't have any metaphysics, and so

491
00:32:38,160 --> 00:32:42,240
it just often feels hollow in that way. But I

492
00:32:42,279 --> 00:32:47,039
think you can certainly say that Marxism is both a

493
00:32:47,240 --> 00:32:50,920
you know, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, but also a

494
00:32:50,960 --> 00:32:54,960
severe reaction to some of the aspects of the Enlightenment.

495
00:32:55,039 --> 00:32:58,440
And again you can see some of those same criticisms

496
00:32:58,480 --> 00:33:04,000
echoed in people like Carlisle, which is why some people

497
00:33:04,079 --> 00:33:07,960
will label Carlisle as a socialist. But I think that

498
00:33:08,240 --> 00:33:13,359
it's okay to to understand that there are problems and

499
00:33:13,559 --> 00:33:19,119
issues with kind of our understanding of capitalism and what

500
00:33:19,319 --> 00:33:24,960
has happened, while realizing Marxism is not the answer to

501
00:33:25,039 --> 00:33:27,880
that problem, and and realizing that is a road that

502
00:33:27,960 --> 00:33:32,799
is incredibly evil and dangerous, while it may have some

503
00:33:33,400 --> 00:33:36,599
relevant critiques towards, you know, some of the things that happened.

504
00:33:38,319 --> 00:33:42,759
Speaker 1: So if we come forward after World War One, it

505
00:33:42,839 --> 00:33:48,680
seems like the managerial kind of aspects that like a

506
00:33:48,720 --> 00:33:53,640
Carlisle would talk about seem to be almost become formalized

507
00:33:54,240 --> 00:33:58,319
in the West. And I think that Burnham probably talked

508
00:33:58,359 --> 00:34:02,160
about it and best in managerial Revolution. But is that

509
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:04,000
what you see do you see like the new deal

510
00:34:04,440 --> 00:34:09,679
things like that as basically cementing that that we're going

511
00:34:09,719 --> 00:34:12,920
to be ruled by a managerial elite now going forward,

512
00:34:13,079 --> 00:34:17,079
and you'll have a vote, but will it count?

513
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:21,440
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think this is where Burnham is really indispensable, right,

514
00:34:21,480 --> 00:34:24,599
I mean, everything about the managerial state isn't perfect. He

515
00:34:24,679 --> 00:34:27,639
certainly makes some guesses that end up being wrong, but

516
00:34:27,719 --> 00:34:33,079
he has some really powerful insights into Rather than breaking

517
00:34:33,079 --> 00:34:39,679
the world into liberalism and fascism and communism, Burnham understands

518
00:34:39,719 --> 00:34:42,320
that what's on the rise of managerialism, and what you're

519
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:47,880
getting is three different formulations of managerialism, and one might

520
00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:50,000
be better and one might win out over the other,

521
00:34:50,199 --> 00:34:54,119
but either way, the managerial elite is on the rise.

522
00:34:54,880 --> 00:34:58,199
And so that's certainly what we're seeing across the board

523
00:34:58,320 --> 00:35:03,239
in all three of those kind of governmental formulas is

524
00:35:03,280 --> 00:35:09,800
that they are all focused on bringing forward more planned economies,

525
00:35:10,199 --> 00:35:14,559
uh more more data. You know, we we if you,

526
00:35:14,800 --> 00:35:16,599
if you're in the business world or any kind of

527
00:35:16,599 --> 00:35:19,400
world like this, now you use these data driven strategies,

528
00:35:19,480 --> 00:35:23,800
data driven results. Right, everybody loves loves that kind of catchphrase,

529
00:35:24,400 --> 00:35:27,119
but that's what these are. All these people are obsessed with, right,

530
00:35:27,159 --> 00:35:30,639
They want to bring the scientific method and kind of

531
00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:34,400
and and this and using managerial expertise to kind of

532
00:35:34,440 --> 00:35:38,519
squeeze every at last little bit out of whatever their

533
00:35:38,599 --> 00:35:42,000
system is. And that's the one thing that unifies all

534
00:35:42,079 --> 00:35:46,199
of these systems, no matter what their individual differences and

535
00:35:46,559 --> 00:35:49,880
on how they're going to implement that, all of them

536
00:35:50,039 --> 00:35:52,800
are are kind of planning to use this strategy at

537
00:35:52,880 --> 00:35:59,000
this managerial strategy. Uh. And again, Burnham is basically just

538
00:35:59,119 --> 00:36:03,400
secularizing a lot of Carlisle's critiques. So it's certainly not

539
00:36:03,440 --> 00:36:06,679
a one for one, but I think in many ways,

540
00:36:07,320 --> 00:36:12,960
ironically he's taking a more rationalistic approach to many of

541
00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:16,760
those same insights and problems that Carlisle and others had

542
00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:18,599
raised in a previous age.

543
00:36:20,079 --> 00:36:23,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, my friend Aaron and I did a reading of

544
00:36:23,519 --> 00:36:27,960
chapter three of Managerial Revolution, the Theory of the Permanence

545
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:31,280
of Capitalism. We had done that right after we had

546
00:36:31,360 --> 00:36:34,519
done a six part reading of State and Revolution by Lenin,

547
00:36:35,280 --> 00:36:41,719
and that one really got some people going talking about

548
00:36:41,800 --> 00:36:48,119
unemployment and unemployment being a real factor in looking at

549
00:36:48,159 --> 00:36:53,119
the wondering whether capitalism even existed at this point. And

550
00:36:53,119 --> 00:36:54,920
I think he wrote this in forty it was released

551
00:36:54,920 --> 00:37:00,960
in forty one and yeah, I mean really calls into

552
00:37:01,079 --> 00:37:04,360
question what people are calling capitalism and what people are

553
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:06,119
actually defending these days.

554
00:37:07,199 --> 00:37:10,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you see Sam Francis really picks up that

555
00:37:10,639 --> 00:37:15,840
torch in Leviathan and its enemies, right He he says, basically,

556
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:19,920
what Burnham was onto was that we transitioned away from

557
00:37:20,039 --> 00:37:24,880
kind of this bourgeoisie capitalism into this managerial capitalism. And

558
00:37:24,960 --> 00:37:29,800
they really are very different animals. That they are very

559
00:37:29,840 --> 00:37:36,159
different structures. While while they seem to share some uh

560
00:37:36,199 --> 00:37:40,079
you know, or they have some similarities, they they fundamentally

561
00:37:40,159 --> 00:37:44,559
have different motiva motivations that the rich family is very

562
00:37:44,559 --> 00:37:49,920
different from the highly educated professional manager. They have different

563
00:37:50,039 --> 00:37:53,039
understandings of what their goals are, why they're doing what

564
00:37:53,079 --> 00:37:57,159
they're doing, their their duties to the people that work

565
00:37:57,239 --> 00:37:59,960
for them and for those that they govern, and they're

566
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:05,199
relationship with other elites. And so while they both might

567
00:38:05,320 --> 00:38:09,880
share characteristics that we would call capitalistic or you know,

568
00:38:10,199 --> 00:38:13,679
they might qualify as capitalists to someone from the outside,

569
00:38:14,360 --> 00:38:18,400
they are pretty fundamentally different systems. And there's a very

570
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:23,599
big break when you start seeing those managery elites come

571
00:38:23,679 --> 00:38:26,880
to power and we're really operating under something that is

572
00:38:26,960 --> 00:38:31,119
very different than we understood capitalism to be in you know,

573
00:38:31,239 --> 00:38:35,079
the the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds.

574
00:38:36,639 --> 00:38:40,639
Speaker 1: How do you understand the difference that people make between

575
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:45,320
a republic and a democracy. You know, that's obviously something

576
00:38:45,360 --> 00:38:49,559
that you hear on the conservative right whenever anybody mentions

577
00:38:49,639 --> 00:38:52,880
the term democracy, and a lot of people might be

578
00:38:52,960 --> 00:38:55,199
able to say, well, you know, we can talk about

579
00:38:55,239 --> 00:38:59,159
republics because the Greeks had republics, the Romans had republics.

580
00:39:01,360 --> 00:39:06,679
The republic that we're talking about today that we have allegedly,

581
00:39:07,920 --> 00:39:10,719
how does that did that come out of the Enlightenment

582
00:39:10,840 --> 00:39:14,280
or is that a sort of a bastardization of something

583
00:39:14,280 --> 00:39:16,000
in the past that you see.

584
00:39:16,679 --> 00:39:22,079
Speaker 2: So certainly the idea of republics existed prior to the Enlightenment.

585
00:39:22,760 --> 00:39:26,039
When they point to you know, Greece and Rome, you

586
00:39:26,079 --> 00:39:29,480
can certainly say that was the case, but they were

587
00:39:29,599 --> 00:39:37,920
very fundamentally different in that there was that's the best

588
00:39:37,960 --> 00:39:41,559
way to put this. The idea of the propositional nation

589
00:39:42,960 --> 00:39:46,440
is something that is very much a Enlightenment or post

590
00:39:46,599 --> 00:39:52,280
Enlightenment idea. One of the things that made democracy as

591
00:39:52,440 --> 00:39:55,280
if we want to call it that. In Athens. A

592
00:39:55,360 --> 00:39:59,480
thing was that, you know, there's a very small amount

593
00:39:59,519 --> 00:40:03,400
of people who could vote in this way, right, it's men,

594
00:40:03,760 --> 00:40:07,840
it's men with blood ties directly to Athens. The idea

595
00:40:08,239 --> 00:40:11,320
that someone could move to Athens and you know, two

596
00:40:11,360 --> 00:40:15,320
years later be determining what the government of Athens would

597
00:40:15,360 --> 00:40:18,719
do for its people would have struck the Athenians as

598
00:40:18,840 --> 00:40:24,320
absolutely insane, right, They would not have recognized the authority

599
00:40:24,559 --> 00:40:29,800
of that. Part of what made Athenians worthy of voting

600
00:40:29,840 --> 00:40:33,400
and government was that literally they had been you know,

601
00:40:33,440 --> 00:40:37,400
that they had the blood and dirt and soil of Athens,

602
00:40:37,639 --> 00:40:40,239
you know, kind of in them. That that's what gave

603
00:40:40,320 --> 00:40:43,880
them the authority to kind of make those decisions. And

604
00:40:44,360 --> 00:40:46,840
if you look, if you want to jump forward again

605
00:40:46,960 --> 00:40:51,400
to kind of our understanding of the modern republic, even

606
00:40:51,559 --> 00:40:55,800
our understanding of the republic has altered significantly. Like you said,

607
00:40:55,800 --> 00:40:57,480
a lot of conservatives love to say, and I did

608
00:40:57,519 --> 00:40:59,199
it too. I did it all the time when I

609
00:40:59,239 --> 00:41:01,800
was more of a normal conservative. Oh this is this

610
00:41:01,840 --> 00:41:05,280
isn't a democracy, this is a republic, which is technically

611
00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:10,280
true but is obviously not true, you know, de facto, right,

612
00:41:10,360 --> 00:41:14,880
like when the United States started or at least once

613
00:41:14,920 --> 00:41:17,800
we signed the constitution, after the Articles of Confederation, you

614
00:41:17,840 --> 00:41:22,199
could make the argument that you had a republic because

615
00:41:22,800 --> 00:41:26,559
basically one half of one third of the government was

616
00:41:26,599 --> 00:41:29,880
actually elected by the people, right, and the Senate wasn't

617
00:41:29,920 --> 00:41:34,079
elected by the average person. The president was elected by

618
00:41:34,239 --> 00:41:40,800
the electoral College. The judiciary obviously you know saying, you know,

619
00:41:40,960 --> 00:41:44,119
was not voted on, and so really you only had

620
00:41:44,199 --> 00:41:47,400
the House of Representatives as being anything we would recognize

621
00:41:47,400 --> 00:41:51,719
as some kind of democracy directly. And again, even then

622
00:41:51,920 --> 00:41:55,119
it was a very small comparative number of people who

623
00:41:55,119 --> 00:42:00,400
had the franchise. But just as Rome, as it got older,

624
00:42:00,519 --> 00:42:04,119
expanded its franchise, we tended to do the same. And

625
00:42:05,119 --> 00:42:09,280
as you move further and you have leaders who want

626
00:42:09,320 --> 00:42:11,880
to expand the franchise more because it allows them to

627
00:42:12,079 --> 00:42:16,760
offer more power to outside forces, that allows them to

628
00:42:16,840 --> 00:42:20,400
come to power over more established forces, you tend to

629
00:42:20,440 --> 00:42:23,199
start to see the republic degrade. And the same thing

630
00:42:23,320 --> 00:42:29,119
again with America. You had you know, again, Mosca says

631
00:42:29,159 --> 00:42:36,920
that America started as a republic. But because we have

632
00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:42,239
this idea, basically, when we look at sorry, I'm trying

633
00:42:42,239 --> 00:42:48,760
to trace my history here, when we look at philosopher,

634
00:42:50,199 --> 00:42:52,840
separation of powers, checks and balances. I don't know why

635
00:42:52,840 --> 00:42:56,960
I can't remember his name all of a sudden bontescue.

636
00:42:57,000 --> 00:42:59,760
When we look at Baron de Montesque, who was a

637
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:06,679
big who's a big inspiration for Madison and the and

638
00:43:06,719 --> 00:43:10,159
the founders who were creating the constitution. A lot of

639
00:43:10,239 --> 00:43:14,320
people think that the great part of kind of his

640
00:43:14,400 --> 00:43:19,079
design is just these three branches. Right, we have three branches,

641
00:43:19,119 --> 00:43:21,800
and we separate the power into the branches, and they

642
00:43:21,840 --> 00:43:23,440
check and balance each other, and that's kind of what

643
00:43:23,599 --> 00:43:29,199
keeps power under control. But actually it's you. What Moscoe

644
00:43:29,239 --> 00:43:31,559
says is the thing is not so much on the

645
00:43:31,599 --> 00:43:34,920
mechanical design. People get too caught up with the mechanical design,

646
00:43:35,199 --> 00:43:37,559
and what they don't understand is what really kept power

647
00:43:37,599 --> 00:43:41,599
and control was the different forces in society. Each one

648
00:43:41,639 --> 00:43:47,199
of these branches in theory is supposed to be under

649
00:43:47,239 --> 00:43:50,719
the monuscue idea bringing something different to the table. The

650
00:43:51,119 --> 00:43:56,159
aristocracy has a different interest than the monarchy, and the

651
00:43:56,159 --> 00:43:58,920
monarchy has a different interest than the church, and that

652
00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:03,679
has a different interest than a merchant. And having representatives

653
00:44:03,679 --> 00:44:08,000
from each that's what actually sets power against power. That's

654
00:44:08,039 --> 00:44:13,079
what actually brings all of society's different interests together and

655
00:44:13,280 --> 00:44:17,519
working together to then create something that's beneficial for the

656
00:44:17,559 --> 00:44:21,880
general people. It's not just fundamentally the three different branches.

657
00:44:22,039 --> 00:44:25,679
And since America basically decided to just turn every branch

658
00:44:26,039 --> 00:44:28,800
more and more democratic, right, we wanted to have more

659
00:44:28,840 --> 00:44:31,719
direct votes on so we made you know, the direct

660
00:44:31,760 --> 00:44:34,760
election of senators, and then we made it so that

661
00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:37,199
the you know, presidential candidates were no longer picked by

662
00:44:37,239 --> 00:44:40,679
their parties, but were but you know, we had primaries,

663
00:44:40,719 --> 00:44:43,920
and we basically just ratchet up the democratic process and

664
00:44:43,960 --> 00:44:47,599
exposed every branch to the same process. What we got was,

665
00:44:47,719 --> 00:44:51,440
rather than different competing forces, that and that's what really

666
00:44:51,519 --> 00:44:54,800
makes a republic kind of work in theory. What we

667
00:44:54,880 --> 00:45:00,960
really got was one homogeneous democratic mass selecting leadership at

668
00:45:01,000 --> 00:45:03,800
every point. And so you no longer had interest checking interest.

669
00:45:04,159 --> 00:45:08,079
You just had one flat democratic impulse that could be

670
00:45:08,159 --> 00:45:12,199
manipulated easily through things like media. And that's why we

671
00:45:12,320 --> 00:45:15,639
have more of an oligarchy than we have anything else today,

672
00:45:15,679 --> 00:45:19,360
and we certainly don't have any anything that really truly

673
00:45:19,400 --> 00:45:20,599
resembles a republic.

674
00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:24,880
Speaker 1: All right, let's get to the point where we start

675
00:45:24,920 --> 00:45:30,159
to upset people. So started this off talking about how

676
00:45:31,559 --> 00:45:35,519
I was saying on Twitter that when you see drag

677
00:45:35,599 --> 00:45:41,159
queen story hour, when you see somebody being appointed to

678
00:45:41,280 --> 00:45:44,840
the head of the head nuclear person in the government,

679
00:45:44,920 --> 00:45:50,559
who I mean, I don't even want to say, And

680
00:45:52,159 --> 00:45:57,400
when you see what we're seeing in this what you

681
00:45:57,440 --> 00:46:00,840
wouldn't have seen what was hidden in the shadows you

682
00:46:00,880 --> 00:46:06,000
know centuries ago, that this is because of the Enlightenment,

683
00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:11,440
and that it the reason why government would endorse it

684
00:46:11,480 --> 00:46:14,159
comes out of the Enlightenment. And people are like, well,

685
00:46:14,239 --> 00:46:17,480
that doesn't make how would you square that circle? How

686
00:46:17,519 --> 00:46:21,639
would you square a circle like that? So, I mean,

687
00:46:21,639 --> 00:46:25,440
it seems very obvious to me from everything you just said,

688
00:46:25,519 --> 00:46:29,599
how it comes forward to that. How do you explain it?

689
00:46:31,760 --> 00:46:38,880
Speaker 2: Well, So, in our attempt to secularize government, in our

690
00:46:38,920 --> 00:46:43,400
attempt to remove you know, the you know, we remove

691
00:46:43,480 --> 00:46:47,079
the divine right of kings, and we move the mandate

692
00:46:47,199 --> 00:46:49,760
out of the hands of heaven and into the hands

693
00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:55,920
of the people, right, and we also then endorse you

694
00:46:55,960 --> 00:47:01,079
know kind of this science, this scienceientific type government, this

695
00:47:01,239 --> 00:47:04,480
expert based government. This is always the answer to everything,

696
00:47:04,599 --> 00:47:09,519
is making things more rational, more objective, more scientific, And

697
00:47:10,159 --> 00:47:12,880
this is where Karl Schmidt is really good. He talks

698
00:47:12,920 --> 00:47:18,760
about the problem of liberalism being that basically liberalism promised

699
00:47:18,920 --> 00:47:23,679
to remove in many ways politics, right. It said, look,

700
00:47:23,719 --> 00:47:29,679
we all disagree on religion. We disagree on who is God,

701
00:47:29,800 --> 00:47:31,960
and even when we agree on who is God, we

702
00:47:32,000 --> 00:47:37,159
disagree on the pope or Protestantism or you know, different aspects,

703
00:47:37,360 --> 00:47:39,920
and we go to war about this stuff all the time.

704
00:47:40,039 --> 00:47:43,239
So what if we just kind of shoved all that

705
00:47:43,280 --> 00:47:45,960
stuff in a broom closet and we could put the

706
00:47:46,280 --> 00:47:49,480
big questions, the big metaphysical questions, to the side, and

707
00:47:49,559 --> 00:47:54,039
instead we could just say, okay, here's like the minimum

708
00:47:54,079 --> 00:47:58,280
morality we all need, and we could operate on that basis.

709
00:47:58,719 --> 00:48:00,760
And that's a pretty good pit for people who have

710
00:48:00,800 --> 00:48:02,880
been fighting religious wars for a long time. And it

711
00:48:02,960 --> 00:48:06,119
also works in a lot of advantages when we look

712
00:48:06,159 --> 00:48:08,960
at again the economic situation, because people wanted to be

713
00:48:08,960 --> 00:48:12,119
able to trade, they wanted to be able to facilitate

714
00:48:12,159 --> 00:48:16,039
economic advancement. And when you don't have to clash over

715
00:48:16,599 --> 00:48:20,480
you know, metaphysics and existential questions all the time, you're

716
00:48:20,519 --> 00:48:23,480
more likely to be able to trade and benefit from

717
00:48:23,519 --> 00:48:26,960
each other. So that all sounds great, but the problem

718
00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:31,719
is that we start to then believe as we transition

719
00:48:31,800 --> 00:48:35,079
away from rule of kings and you know, monarchs and

720
00:48:35,079 --> 00:48:39,199
aristocracies and mandates from heaven and God, we start to

721
00:48:39,239 --> 00:48:43,280
believe instead in systems. Right, we believe in the system

722
00:48:43,400 --> 00:48:46,480
of democracy or republic, whatever you want to call it.

723
00:48:46,760 --> 00:48:51,039
We we in constitutional government. We think that we've constructed

724
00:48:51,440 --> 00:48:56,199
a constitution and it's like this beautiful machine you know

725
00:48:56,320 --> 00:48:59,719
that's been It takes you know, the human nature into

726
00:48:59,760 --> 00:49:04,519
a out and it balances things, and it's been engineered

727
00:49:04,519 --> 00:49:06,440
in a way where basically we no longer have to

728
00:49:06,480 --> 00:49:10,639
place our trust in one person who's been divinely invested

729
00:49:10,679 --> 00:49:14,960
with power, because well, instead, we've rationally engineered a system

730
00:49:15,079 --> 00:49:19,119
where we can use human nature kind of against itself

731
00:49:19,159 --> 00:49:22,280
to create a self governing system. And it just kind

732
00:49:22,280 --> 00:49:25,400
of runs like like this great root Goldberg machine, you know,

733
00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:28,440
once we get it started, it's very complicated, but it

734
00:49:28,480 --> 00:49:31,719
works great, and it kind of just will go forward

735
00:49:31,760 --> 00:49:36,039
in perpetuity. But the problem with that is it lulls

736
00:49:36,119 --> 00:49:41,199
us into this idea of an objective, neutral space where

737
00:49:41,360 --> 00:49:44,440
no one's values are dominating, and in fact, we even

738
00:49:44,559 --> 00:49:48,000
create this idea of separation of church and state right where,

739
00:49:48,800 --> 00:49:51,039
and of course it means something very different to us

740
00:49:51,039 --> 00:49:53,239
today than would have meant to any founder. But the

741
00:49:53,280 --> 00:49:58,159
modern conception is basically that like, you can't use any

742
00:49:58,280 --> 00:50:01,559
kind of religious values in the p public square. Well,

743
00:50:01,599 --> 00:50:05,159
that becomes a real problem as the public square grows,

744
00:50:05,400 --> 00:50:09,360
or the guy i should say, the government square grows,

745
00:50:09,440 --> 00:50:13,119
right when the government becomes in charge of educating children,

746
00:50:13,199 --> 00:50:16,960
when it becomes in charge of deciding what goes on television,

747
00:50:17,960 --> 00:50:23,599
when government gets involved in every aspect of people's lives,

748
00:50:23,599 --> 00:50:29,280
from child custody to business, and at every point religious

749
00:50:29,320 --> 00:50:32,719
values are not allowed to be the basis of decisions.

750
00:50:33,199 --> 00:50:38,440
What we are told is that instead there's like this secular, rational, objective,

751
00:50:39,079 --> 00:50:43,320
neutral set of decisions being made. But of course that's

752
00:50:43,360 --> 00:50:46,719
not true. And that's what Schmid says is liberalism just

753
00:50:46,880 --> 00:50:50,559
hides the fact that in the background, someone's values are

754
00:50:50,599 --> 00:50:53,760
still operating, someone is still in control of the system.

755
00:50:54,000 --> 00:50:57,920
We never just have this kind of blind watchmaker who

756
00:50:57,960 --> 00:51:03,119
sets things and has them run. Instead, there's always someone

757
00:51:03,199 --> 00:51:07,840
whose values are being applied to our decisions, and over

758
00:51:07,960 --> 00:51:12,000
time we've started to see who those are. Right. It

759
00:51:12,079 --> 00:51:15,239
used to be very difficult, but over time it's starting

760
00:51:15,280 --> 00:51:19,440
to be clear to people that when basically what you've

761
00:51:19,440 --> 00:51:23,119
created is this progressive system, right, and all of its

762
00:51:23,199 --> 00:51:26,480
values are supposed to be secular. They're all supposed to

763
00:51:26,519 --> 00:51:29,039
be non religious, they don't have a holy book, they're

764
00:51:29,079 --> 00:51:31,280
not tied to a church, there's not a lot of

765
00:51:31,280 --> 00:51:34,880
official doctrine written down, and so they're supposed to be

766
00:51:34,880 --> 00:51:38,480
able to operate in this marketplace of ideas in this

767
00:51:38,559 --> 00:51:42,239
government space because they're secular and all the religious ideas

768
00:51:42,280 --> 00:51:44,679
are not. And what you're creating is basically like this

769
00:51:45,119 --> 00:51:49,559
super predator, right, as Curtis Yarvin does a great essay

770
00:51:50,440 --> 00:51:54,679
about how Dawkins got polled, and it kind of explains how, basically,

771
00:51:54,719 --> 00:51:57,880
you know, Richard Dawkins famously hates religion, but he has

772
00:51:57,880 --> 00:52:00,679
a religion of his own, and his religion religion is

773
00:52:00,840 --> 00:52:07,119
just kind of this hyper Protestant, hyper puritanical progressivism. But

774
00:52:07,159 --> 00:52:10,280
the progressivism is allowed to dominate all of the public

775
00:52:10,280 --> 00:52:13,960
spaces because it's technically not religious in the sense that

776
00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:17,239
we understand religion and all the other value structures are.

777
00:52:17,800 --> 00:52:21,519
And so now why do we see all this degeneracy, right,

778
00:52:21,519 --> 00:52:26,400
Why do we see all these people who have really

779
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:31,480
bizarre fetishes and understandings, and you know, they want to

780
00:52:31,559 --> 00:52:33,760
change the gender of children. Why do we see drag

781
00:52:33,840 --> 00:52:37,920
time Story hour everywhere or drag queen story are everywhere?

782
00:52:37,960 --> 00:52:40,280
Why do we see this? Because that's been the only

783
00:52:40,360 --> 00:52:43,599
value system that's been allowed to operate in the public square.

784
00:52:43,639 --> 00:52:46,920
We actively pushed all the other value systems out to

785
00:52:46,960 --> 00:52:50,159
the side. Sure you can technically be Christian and whole power.

786
00:52:50,400 --> 00:52:54,679
Sure you could technically, you know, have another religion and

787
00:52:55,079 --> 00:52:58,840
be in charge, but you are not allowed to apply

788
00:52:58,960 --> 00:53:02,559
those values. And the progressives are so at every turn.

789
00:53:02,760 --> 00:53:05,159
They are the only game in town. They're the only

790
00:53:05,199 --> 00:53:09,159
ones who are actually being allowed to exercise their beliefs

791
00:53:09,159 --> 00:53:13,199
and apply them. And since there are always beliefs being exercised,

792
00:53:13,239 --> 00:53:16,599
there is no such thing as a neutral value, neutral moral,

793
00:53:16,679 --> 00:53:20,840
neutral space. They are always winning. And that is why

794
00:53:21,400 --> 00:53:25,840
that comes slowly but surely from the Enlightenment. It doesn't

795
00:53:25,880 --> 00:53:29,239
seem inevitable at the start, but when you are removing

796
00:53:29,400 --> 00:53:33,400
all other religious influence from the situation, it is the

797
00:53:33,559 --> 00:53:34,800
inevitable conclusion.

798
00:53:35,800 --> 00:53:39,679
Speaker 1: Well, you said that it comes out of liberalism, and

799
00:53:39,800 --> 00:53:43,440
that's if you read I think my favorite Burnham book

800
00:53:43,480 --> 00:53:48,119
is Suicide of the West. But a lot of people

801
00:53:48,159 --> 00:53:52,119
will say, well, that didn't come from classical liberalism, making

802
00:53:52,159 --> 00:53:55,280
the distinction of classical your free markets and you know,

803
00:53:55,440 --> 00:54:00,239
not modern day liberalism, which is who knows what it is.

804
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:03,559
I mean, you have neoliberalism, you have whatever. All the

805
00:54:03,920 --> 00:54:08,159
all these things on the left was, how come classical

806
00:54:08,239 --> 00:54:09,599
liberalism didn't work?

807
00:54:11,559 --> 00:54:14,480
Speaker 2: Well, you can see, you know, these people will deny

808
00:54:14,559 --> 00:54:18,679
that that progressivism came from classical liberalism. But if you

809
00:54:18,920 --> 00:54:23,239
scratch them just slightly, you scratch your classical liberal you'll

810
00:54:23,239 --> 00:54:26,639
find a progressive in the making. Right. We saw this

811
00:54:26,880 --> 00:54:30,039
especially in the last few months. You saw two people

812
00:54:30,119 --> 00:54:35,360
who were from kind of this classic classical liberal school, uh,

813
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:41,599
Douglas Murray and Claire what's her name limit? Yeah, from Quillette.

814
00:54:42,039 --> 00:54:44,519
There are both people who are in this I d

815
00:54:44,800 --> 00:54:49,119
W classical liberal sphere, right, and in both cases they

816
00:54:49,920 --> 00:54:54,400
went on these huge rants about how basically the right

817
00:54:54,599 --> 00:54:58,599
is is starting to try to impose its own values

818
00:54:59,119 --> 00:55:03,480
and they are basically far more worried about the return

819
00:55:03,679 --> 00:55:06,119
of the right than the current direction of the left,

820
00:55:06,159 --> 00:55:09,679
which is insane. Right, Like anyone who looks at what's

821
00:55:09,760 --> 00:55:12,400
going on. Knows that the left is incomplete and total control.

822
00:55:12,400 --> 00:55:17,119
They dominate everything culturally and basically legally politically. At this point,

823
00:55:17,519 --> 00:55:22,039
the right has almost no institutional or cultural power. But

824
00:55:22,280 --> 00:55:25,880
still the arch enemy of every classical liberal is actually

825
00:55:26,480 --> 00:55:30,039
the return of the right. Right the right actually thinking

826
00:55:30,079 --> 00:55:33,679
that it should start imposing its values, it should start

827
00:55:34,039 --> 00:55:38,800
acting in a way that asserts its understanding of morality.

828
00:55:39,360 --> 00:55:42,639
That is the biggest threat to the classical liberal. And

829
00:55:42,719 --> 00:55:46,559
that's why, like I said, as these people might argue

830
00:55:46,599 --> 00:55:48,920
against wokeness, they might want to keep it the nineties

831
00:55:48,960 --> 00:55:50,800
as long as possible. If only we could go back

832
00:55:50,800 --> 00:55:53,239
to nineteen ninety five, it would be the greatest thing

833
00:55:53,239 --> 00:55:56,559
in the world. But if at any point you say

834
00:55:56,559 --> 00:56:00,599
to them, actually, this neutrality never existed, and trying to

835
00:56:00,599 --> 00:56:03,840
go back to this point of neutrality will only guarantee

836
00:56:04,280 --> 00:56:07,719
that we continue down the path of progressivism, they lose

837
00:56:07,760 --> 00:56:12,400
their minds because because it's their greatest enemy is actually,

838
00:56:12,440 --> 00:56:15,119
at the end of the day, not progressivism. It's the

839
00:56:15,199 --> 00:56:19,039
idea that the right might at some point find its courage.

840
00:56:19,400 --> 00:56:21,599
That's what they're worried about more than anything. And I

841
00:56:21,599 --> 00:56:25,480
think classical liberalism fails because it's just telling itself the

842
00:56:25,519 --> 00:56:29,400
same lie, you know as liberalism in general, that oh,

843
00:56:29,599 --> 00:56:33,199
the things I believe are neutral, they're objective, they're scientific.

844
00:56:33,559 --> 00:56:36,599
I don't have a religion, I don't have a worldview

845
00:56:36,920 --> 00:56:40,239
viewpoint that informs all of these things. I can set

846
00:56:40,320 --> 00:56:43,199
up a totally rational system by which all decisions can

847
00:56:43,239 --> 00:56:45,760
be made, and I never have to come in conflict

848
00:56:45,760 --> 00:56:49,280
with other people because we can always optimize every outcome

849
00:56:49,440 --> 00:56:53,559
for every group and every person. That's the pitch of liberalism, right,

850
00:56:53,639 --> 00:56:56,000
is that there's this there's some path that we can

851
00:56:56,039 --> 00:56:59,840
all travel down that benefits everyone. And that's a great

852
00:57:00,360 --> 00:57:04,679
pitch because it makes everyone put away their secretary, their

853
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:09,159
sectarian interests. And if you have interests you want advance,

854
00:57:09,239 --> 00:57:11,599
the best thing to do is to explain to your

855
00:57:11,920 --> 00:57:14,840
opponents that they don't have interest that they need to advance,

856
00:57:15,360 --> 00:57:17,440
because then you're the only one playing the game.

857
00:57:19,239 --> 00:57:24,800
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you say that because the when people

858
00:57:24,880 --> 00:57:28,800
talk about like even right libertarians, right libertarians will say

859
00:57:29,719 --> 00:57:34,679
anarchists anarcho capitalists, Well, if we just get to anarchy,

860
00:57:34,840 --> 00:57:40,199
then everyone can go their own way, and it's it

861
00:57:40,320 --> 00:57:44,679
seems like you're basically saying that that is just another

862
00:57:44,960 --> 00:57:51,199
version of classical liberalism and just allowing progressivism to to thrive.

863
00:57:52,760 --> 00:57:55,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always hard when you get into the anarcho

864
00:57:57,079 --> 00:58:02,119
libertarians because the anarcho capital because some of them are

865
00:58:02,159 --> 00:58:04,559
Hoppy in and some of them aren't. And one of

866
00:58:04,559 --> 00:58:07,880
the things you know that hop understands is very much

867
00:58:07,920 --> 00:58:11,320
that no man is an island, right, and that a

868
00:58:11,400 --> 00:58:15,239
community needs to police itself morally if it's going to

869
00:58:15,559 --> 00:58:18,960
be able to maintain in liberty. And so even if

870
00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:24,119
you're still operating inside this liberty based framework, you still

871
00:58:24,119 --> 00:58:28,599
need to understand that. Sorry, but you're not the only

872
00:58:28,679 --> 00:58:33,039
person in life. And this is why so often libertarianism

873
00:58:33,119 --> 00:58:36,920
is a philosophy for you know, sixteen to twenty five

874
00:58:36,960 --> 00:58:40,440
year old guys, because they live in this world where

875
00:58:40,480 --> 00:58:43,559
they don't have families yet and they don't have significant

876
00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:49,639
attachments to their community because they've kind of been derascinated

877
00:58:49,679 --> 00:58:55,119
and animized, and they don't see the problem with just saying, well, yeah,

878
00:58:55,119 --> 00:58:56,679
at the end of the day, just let everyone do

879
00:58:56,719 --> 00:58:59,960
what they want. But as soon as you have social time,

880
00:59:00,239 --> 00:59:02,639
as soon as you have a family, as soon as

881
00:59:02,679 --> 00:59:05,320
you have children that you care about, and you want

882
00:59:05,400 --> 00:59:08,960
to see carry you know, something good into the future.

883
00:59:09,360 --> 00:59:13,159
You realize that it matters, It matters what other people think,

884
00:59:13,280 --> 00:59:16,239
because even if you are somehow able to go your

885
00:59:16,280 --> 00:59:18,440
own way and create a good family on your own,

886
00:59:19,400 --> 00:59:21,719
kids have to be friends with someone, They've got to

887
00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:24,280
marry someone, you know, your wife has to spend time

888
00:59:24,320 --> 00:59:27,159
with people like the people you love and carry about

889
00:59:27,480 --> 00:59:30,280
have to exist in a society. And if you have

890
00:59:30,320 --> 00:59:32,719
to exist in a society, the idea that everyone can

891
00:59:32,800 --> 00:59:36,079
just go their own way is a problem because actually,

892
00:59:36,480 --> 00:59:39,119
what your neighbor does does affect you, and more importantly,

893
00:59:39,320 --> 00:59:43,280
affects your children and your grandchildren. And that's when you

894
00:59:43,400 --> 00:59:46,199
understand that this doesn't really work the way you'd hoped.

895
00:59:47,079 --> 00:59:50,199
Speaker 1: Yeah. I make the point all the time on Twitter

896
00:59:50,280 --> 00:59:54,960
when people start talking about schools, you know, government schools,

897
00:59:54,960 --> 00:59:58,960
Prussian schooling, anarchists and libertarians to scream, well, just homeschool,

898
00:59:59,000 --> 01:00:02,840
homeschool your kids. I'm like, it's great, you're going to

899
01:00:03,039 --> 01:00:07,719
raise this kid who is not going to be indoctrinated

900
01:00:07,840 --> 01:00:13,679
by this progressive philosophy. Hopefully. I mean, who knows what.

901
01:00:14,199 --> 01:00:17,119
I guess it would depend on what your homeschooling curriculum is.

902
01:00:18,360 --> 01:00:21,119
But your neighbor's not, and your neighbor is sending their

903
01:00:21,239 --> 01:00:26,559
kid to the government school to become a soldier for progressivism,

904
01:00:27,079 --> 01:00:29,639
and you don't think that that's a problem. You don't

905
01:00:29,679 --> 01:00:33,199
think that maybe you should be doing everything you can

906
01:00:33,400 --> 01:00:38,440
to take over or be a major influence, a major

907
01:00:38,519 --> 01:00:43,960
lobbying force on education locally so that you don't have

908
01:00:44,000 --> 01:00:48,880
to put up with that. It's so detached that, well,

909
01:00:48,920 --> 01:00:50,519
as long as I take care of my home, I

910
01:00:50,519 --> 01:00:52,840
don't have to worry about my neighbor. Well that's not

911
01:00:53,079 --> 01:00:54,360
how this all works.

912
01:00:56,480 --> 01:00:59,119
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you look at even the most successful people

913
01:00:59,119 --> 01:01:01,440
with this kind of thing, right, look at like the Amish. Right,

914
01:01:01,880 --> 01:01:06,199
even these people who have been relatively successful in creating

915
01:01:06,199 --> 01:01:10,199
a cloistered society that, let's be honest, can only exist

916
01:01:10,719 --> 01:01:13,880
because basically it's allowed to exist, and if at any

917
01:01:13,920 --> 01:01:17,360
moment people decided to stop it from existing, they'd have

918
01:01:17,440 --> 01:01:19,679
no way to stop it. But even these people who

919
01:01:19,719 --> 01:01:23,480
have basically done the most you can do in our

920
01:01:23,559 --> 01:01:27,039
society with kind of isolating themselves and their values and

921
01:01:27,199 --> 01:01:30,599
going their own way, still understand that a it's incredibly

922
01:01:30,679 --> 01:01:33,559
necessary to care about your neighbor in a community like

923
01:01:33,599 --> 01:01:37,280
even though they've partitioned themselves, they are still very very

924
01:01:37,320 --> 01:01:40,079
serious about their neighbors and caring about them and being

925
01:01:40,079 --> 01:01:43,960
involved in their lives and what they do. And also

926
01:01:44,280 --> 01:01:48,119
they understand that they basically give their children this rum

927
01:01:48,159 --> 01:01:51,800
spinger right this period to go out and experience the world,

928
01:01:51,840 --> 01:01:55,559
because just knowing that it exists out there will probably

929
01:01:55,559 --> 01:01:57,719
be too much of a temptation. And they know that

930
01:01:57,719 --> 01:01:59,440
these kids have to like come back and make an

931
01:01:59,480 --> 01:02:04,039
active desis decision to push that aside and make this

932
01:02:04,079 --> 01:02:06,880
incredible decision to kind of return to the fold and

933
01:02:06,920 --> 01:02:10,440
become part of that community. So even these people who

934
01:02:10,480 --> 01:02:14,239
are highly successful at least in some ways in doing

935
01:02:14,280 --> 01:02:16,960
what people would want to do by kind of partitioning

936
01:02:16,960 --> 01:02:20,960
off and going their own way, still recognize the incredible

937
01:02:21,239 --> 01:02:25,239
influence that the mass culture has and realize that if

938
01:02:25,400 --> 01:02:29,400
they don't expose and teach their children how to basically

939
01:02:29,800 --> 01:02:32,400
walk away from that and return back to their way

940
01:02:32,400 --> 01:02:34,800
of life, then it will always be there and will

941
01:02:34,800 --> 01:02:37,280
always be a temptation that will basically pull them away

942
01:02:37,280 --> 01:02:40,480
and destroy them. And so even the most successful people

943
01:02:40,480 --> 01:02:44,239
at this recognize that you just can't completely cut yourself

944
01:02:44,280 --> 01:02:47,679
off from the idea and the values that are happening

945
01:02:47,760 --> 01:02:51,280
around you. And like you said, you can homeschool your kids,

946
01:02:51,320 --> 01:02:54,360
and I don't blame anyone for rescuing their children from

947
01:02:54,840 --> 01:02:58,559
public school system, but you have to understand that they

948
01:02:58,599 --> 01:03:02,440
still live live that are going to be informed by

949
01:03:02,480 --> 01:03:07,000
the values and decisions made by those around them. And

950
01:03:07,039 --> 01:03:09,320
that's just in the moral case. That's not even talking

951
01:03:09,400 --> 01:03:13,599
about the inevitable political costs of just withdrawing entirely from

952
01:03:13,599 --> 01:03:16,000
society and hoping that the state doesn't come for you,

953
01:03:16,039 --> 01:03:18,079
which they will.

954
01:03:18,320 --> 01:03:21,880
Speaker 1: All right, let me finish with this. So philosopher chat

955
01:03:22,079 --> 01:03:26,039
this morning tweeted, starting to think the anarchists might have

956
01:03:26,079 --> 01:03:30,719
the right idea, and you responded, your first gulp of

957
01:03:30,760 --> 01:03:34,960
a nepti bureaucratic government will make you a libertarian anarchist.

958
01:03:35,000 --> 01:03:38,159
But at the bottom of the glass, monarchy is waiting

959
01:03:38,239 --> 01:03:42,039
for you. You want to talk a little bit about that.

960
01:03:43,039 --> 01:03:45,719
Speaker 2: Sure, So I'm ripping off and I forget the scientist.

961
01:03:46,039 --> 01:03:49,320
There there's a scientist who said, you know, your first

962
01:03:49,440 --> 01:03:54,039
your first gulp of science, will you know, make you

963
01:03:54,119 --> 01:03:57,639
like an atheist, a materialist atheist. But at the bottom

964
01:03:57,679 --> 01:04:02,320
of the glass God is waiting for you. And you

965
01:04:02,360 --> 01:04:06,039
know what I'm saying there is, basically it's your first

966
01:04:06,119 --> 01:04:11,239
reaction to understanding things in a deeper level is often

967
01:04:11,840 --> 01:04:15,559
a low resolution one. We don't think of ourselves as

968
01:04:15,639 --> 01:04:18,480
going through that same journey as like a child does, right,

969
01:04:18,519 --> 01:04:22,880
But oftentimes the first time a child has things ripped away,

970
01:04:22,960 --> 01:04:26,320
like the veil of security or the veil of simplicity

971
01:04:26,400 --> 01:04:30,760
ripped away, they we think of them as like going

972
01:04:30,800 --> 01:04:34,360
through this process of becoming more mature. But in any ways,

973
01:04:34,440 --> 01:04:37,760
actually their response is very immature, right, And it's very understandable.

974
01:04:37,800 --> 01:04:39,679
We all went through it. I went through it absolutely

975
01:04:39,960 --> 01:04:42,239
looking at government and saying, well, the problem is all

976
01:04:42,239 --> 01:04:45,599
these people being involved in lives. The problem is that

977
01:04:45,639 --> 01:04:49,000
the government always makes terrible decisions. And so the obvious

978
01:04:49,039 --> 01:04:53,639
solution is just removing the government, right, like, just put

979
01:04:53,639 --> 01:04:57,719
it in a position where the good succeed, hard work succeeds,

980
01:04:58,559 --> 01:05:01,559
people make voluntary decisions that and the cream rises to

981
01:05:01,599 --> 01:05:05,280
the top, and then you know, uh, and then just

982
01:05:05,639 --> 01:05:07,719
kind of you know, devil take the high moost, right,

983
01:05:08,519 --> 01:05:11,840
and and that's a very understandable and common response, but

984
01:05:11,880 --> 01:05:18,679
again it's also very immature. It's it's the solution to

985
01:05:18,840 --> 01:05:23,559
bad government is not no government. The solution to bad

986
01:05:23,599 --> 01:05:28,000
government is a better better understanding of the duty and

987
01:05:28,119 --> 01:05:33,000
responsibility of the government and the state. It's a better

988
01:05:33,199 --> 01:05:38,559
understanding of how to align the the good of those

989
01:05:38,599 --> 01:05:42,320
that rule with the good of those who are being ruled.

990
01:05:43,119 --> 01:05:47,639
Because simply removing the controls, simply removing and and and

991
01:05:47,840 --> 01:05:52,400
stripping away the state, doesn't actually put us in the

992
01:05:52,440 --> 01:05:54,719
situation you want it to be. It doesn't actually put

993
01:05:54,800 --> 01:05:57,320
us in the state where each person makes their own decision.

994
01:05:57,400 --> 01:06:01,039
Because again, no man is an island. We are social creatures,

995
01:06:01,079 --> 01:06:04,920
we are political animals. We will exist in a society

996
01:06:05,000 --> 01:06:08,199
that will happen, and someone will be in charge of it.

997
01:06:08,280 --> 01:06:11,039
And so the answer is not to attempt to rip

998
01:06:11,079 --> 01:06:16,400
away you know, sovereignty is just never destroyed. Sovereignty is

999
01:06:16,440 --> 01:06:19,960
always conserved. Someone will be in charge, and so the

1000
01:06:20,440 --> 01:06:23,840
more mature reaction is not to attempt to rip away

1001
01:06:23,880 --> 01:06:28,239
all controls, rip away all understanding of authority, but instead

1002
01:06:29,159 --> 01:06:33,000
have a better understanding of what constitutes a moral and

1003
01:06:33,119 --> 01:06:37,400
beneficial authority under which people can be placed. I think

1004
01:06:37,440 --> 01:06:40,320
in many cases that is monarchy, though as I later

1005
01:06:40,320 --> 01:06:43,039
got into the thread with another person, I agree again

1006
01:06:43,360 --> 01:06:46,960
with Joseph Demaster, who said that there is no one

1007
01:06:47,079 --> 01:06:51,559
perfect form of political of politics, there's no one particular

1008
01:06:51,679 --> 01:06:56,199
perfect form of government. Again, he believed that each each

1009
01:06:56,519 --> 01:06:59,880
civilization has been stamped by God with a particular care,

1010
01:07:00,760 --> 01:07:04,199
and that the character of the people will inform the

1011
01:07:04,239 --> 01:07:09,880
best formation of their government, and the constitution and government

1012
01:07:09,880 --> 01:07:14,280
that eventually comes to be formalized will be a reflection

1013
01:07:14,840 --> 01:07:18,039
of the nature of those people. That doesn't mean that

1014
01:07:18,039 --> 01:07:20,119
there aren't bad forms of government, and that doesn't mean

1015
01:07:20,119 --> 01:07:22,599
there aren't superior forms of government. But I don't think

1016
01:07:22,599 --> 01:07:26,159
that necessarily like monarchy, is just the solution for every person.

1017
01:07:26,599 --> 01:07:31,239
But I do think when we look at this decentralized

1018
01:07:31,400 --> 01:07:35,760
theocratic oligarchy that currently runs our civilization, it's a disaster.

1019
01:07:35,880 --> 01:07:38,880
And I understand the temptation to then say, well, then

1020
01:07:39,039 --> 01:07:42,039
just tear away all government, throw it all in the trash,

1021
01:07:42,159 --> 01:07:45,159
and then just let people go their own way. But

1022
01:07:45,239 --> 01:07:48,840
I think that's kind of the first level reaction. I

1023
01:07:48,880 --> 01:07:52,760
think over time, the more you spend looking at this problem,

1024
01:07:53,280 --> 01:07:56,039
then I think you eventually make the journey to understanding

1025
01:07:56,079 --> 01:07:59,679
that it's not about obliterating the state or government. It's

1026
01:07:59,719 --> 01:08:03,880
about finding the best way to put people under a

1027
01:08:04,000 --> 01:08:07,159
more moral and competent authority that is invested in the

1028
01:08:07,159 --> 01:08:07,880
good of the people.

1029
01:08:08,679 --> 01:08:11,800
Speaker 1: We will end it right there. Why don't you plug again?

1030
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:15,239
Just in case anybody decided they wanted to fast forward

1031
01:08:15,280 --> 01:08:16,520
through the intro or something.

1032
01:08:17,199 --> 01:08:21,880
Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely you can find or in McIntyre. You can

1033
01:08:21,960 --> 01:08:25,800
just search that in YouTube or Twitter. I've got a

1034
01:08:25,840 --> 01:08:28,720
link tree on my Twitter and on my YouTube videos.

1035
01:08:28,760 --> 01:08:30,640
I've got all the links to just everything else. I've

1036
01:08:30,680 --> 01:08:34,680
got a gab, I've got Odyssey for the video and

1037
01:08:36,039 --> 01:08:38,680
Rumble if you want to go to alternative platforms. There,

1038
01:08:39,279 --> 01:08:41,479
I've got a merch store and a subscribe store and

1039
01:08:41,520 --> 01:08:43,119
all that stuff if you want to support. So just

1040
01:08:43,199 --> 01:08:45,520
all that stuff you can find when you search or

1041
01:08:45,520 --> 01:08:47,199
in McIntyre, YouTube or Twitter.

