Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Pekenonas Show. I am here with
Orrin McIntyre. How are you doing, Orrin doing great? Thanks
for having me again. Well, last time you were on
it was differentman Beyond the Wall podcast and a couple
of changes have been made and some new people listening in.
So why don't you tell everybody a little bit about
what you do?
Speaker 2: Sure? My main thing is YouTube. I have a YouTube channel,
though I've also got an Odyssey and a Rumbolt channel,
and the main focus is kind of political theory. I
go over a bunch of different stuff. I'll do the
news of the day sometimes or what's going on, but
my main focus is kind of looking at political theory
and using to analyze different situations that are going on today.
And then I also do a decent amount on Twitter
and gab and other stuff. So everyone could check that
out if they're that out, if they're interested, excellent.
Speaker 1: All right. So on Twitter the other day a lot
of people were talking about all these videos come out
that are just like absolute insanity. You hear all these
stories about just what seems like wey mare Germany level perversion,
and somebody was asking why is this happening? And how
did we get here? And everything? And a common trope
in like NRX circles and I reaction circles is while
the Enlightenment was a mistake, and I was trying to
give my explanation to that to somebody, and they were like, well,
we'd really like to hear more. They weren't completely dismissing it.
They legitimately wanted to hear more. But two hundred and
eighty characters is two hundred and eighty characters. And the
last time you were on I asked you, I said,
what do you think is like the hallmark of make
somebody a neo reactionary? And your response was that they
questioned the Enlightenment. So why don't you talk a little bit?
Can you like describe what you think the Enlightenment was,
how it came about, what kind of moment it was?
Speaker 2: Sure? I mean, we you know the for us now,
the Enlightenment is an origin story, right, It's kind of
the origin story of modern civilization. And the story that
we kind of like to tell ourselves about the Enlightenment
is that through most of human history, people were ruled
by superstition and emotions. They were closed minded, They just
kind of went with this kind of caveman esque you know,
power and anger and tribalism. And then somewhere in you know,
the sixteen seventeen hundreds, we developed this miracle of science,
and science allowed us to kind of enter into the
modern age of mankind, and we became more rational, more reasonable.
We stopped believing in these ancient myths. We started, you know,
becoming more in control of our emotions and systematizing things.
And by taking this process of science and taking kind
of the wondrous things that it had done in medicine
and physics and all these other things, we could take
that same process of kind of scientific thought and apply
it to the social as well. We could create social sciences,
and we could apply it to things like you know,
I mean, philosophy had always been around to some extent,
but we started seeing a more systematic attack of things
like philosophy, sociology, psychology, and of course the big one
that we talk about with the Enlightenment and government is
of course political science. We start applying a scientific rationale
to governing. Idea is that if we can kind of
take get rid of the medieval aspects of it, right,
men had been ruled by those who had been put
in power by God and the Church had had a
huge say in their lives. And if we could kind
of remove that, you know, those deities, those that metaphysical idea,
and we could ground our governance in the more rational age,
then we would produce better results. And that's I think
kind of the origin that most people think of when
they think of the Enlightenment. You know, we see the
death of the old monarch or or emperor or you know,
sultan or whatever, and we move into the age of
the republic, democracy, liberalism, and all of this stuff, of course,
coincides with big scientific discoveries. They coincide with the industrial revolution,
and so it's very easy to tell us the story
tell ourselves the story of both scientific and moral progress. Right,
We're not just more enlightened people when it comes to
our ability to cure disease, but those things also came
along with the ability to kind of properly manage our
society and set it up in ways that we're going
to benefit everyone. And we're going to be more enlightened
about our understanding of others and our ability to live
together and advance in morals. And so I think that
is for most people what the Enlightenment means. Now, obviously
for academics, for historians this has different connotations. But I
think in general, when you're talking to the average person,
that's kind of the general impression they have of what
the Enlightenment is and what it brought us.
Speaker 1: What is your opinion on the Enlightenment? That sounds like
the Wikipedia version of the answer, So what is your version?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, in many ways, obviously advancement in science
did come right, and so that that's the part that's undeniable,
and the part that I think in many ways covers
over then some of the other things that happened in
the Enlightenment. Because if you want to look at the Enlightenment,
there are plenty of people who are pretty happy about it.
There's of course a general move towards this, there's a
general celebration of what's going on, but there are also
some pretty severe critics. And if you want to look
at two really good contemporary critics of the Enlightenment, I
would say that Joseph Demastra and Thomas Carlisle are probably
two of your best sources, because they're both writing very
close to the source. They're either you know, during the
Enlightenment or kind of right right as it's transitioning in
we're really transitioning into liberalism politically, and kind of this
broader understanding and unlike some of the people like Burke
right most people who talk about the French Revolution in
a negative way and believe it or not, it's still
up in the air for a lot of people as
to whether or not the French Revolution was a negative.
But a lot of people who talk about the French
Revolution in a negative way will look at someone like
Burke and say he's the best critic of the French Revolution.
And it's not that there's nothing valuable in Burke, but
at the end of the day, Burke is still a liberal.
Burke is not comfortable with where liberalism went. He's kind
of your first conservative right, and that this is where
a lot of conservatives trace themselves to Burki. Burkey and
conservatives they still see themselves in the liberal tradition, but
they think it went too fast, It went too far,
it broke too much too quickly. People weren't ready for it,
and so a lot of people will turn to Burke.
But if you really want to see people who are
cutting to the quick they're attacking the base for these
kind of changes in governance and morality. I think guys
like Demester and Carlisle are very valuable because I don't
think they're I don't think they're on board with what's happening.
It's not a matter of oh, we did this too quickly,
or you know, I don't like some of the acts
that were taken, but I understand the general movement direction.
These are very These are very serious attacks on the
core ideas of kind of the Enlightenment and liberalism and
the idea that we are making political and moral advancements
during this time.
Speaker 1: Can you point out a couple of Carlyle's points about
why he looked upon it as a negative?
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, I think you'll find in both Demestra and Carlisle.
Demester little more because he's a more orthodox Catholic as
where Carlisle has a more of a unique relationship with Christianity.
But both men are very concerned about the secularization of society.
Both see that as a very serious problem, and they
think that the secularation secularization of society is going to
leave people without a guiding light that people, especially you
can look at guys like to make sure they're dunking
on people like Rousseau saying, you think you can just
build society out of nothing, you can just a priori,
you know, design a constitution, design a people. But that's
not how these things work. You know. The people are
endowed by their creator, not with inalienable rights in their understanding,
but with characters, certain characteristics, certain nations, certain peoples, They
have a particular way of being, and those things work
themselves out through their political institutions and constitutions. And it's
not something you can build from the ground up. And
Carlisle attacks many different things. He attacks the industrial revolution,
he attacks the democracy, and he does this because he
feels like we're cheapening what man is and where man's
purposes is going to come from. You know, he looks
at the things that are necessary for industrial revolution and
he makes some critiques that in some ways might sound
marxianto some people that you know, people are going to
be removed from the value of their work, that we're
killing the craftsmen in order to obtain efficiency at doing
something lesser, and because we're training the average person to
produce a product that they have no attachment to and
to transition from a craftsman to a mere laborer. This
is going to detegrate the average person. This is going
to remove them from the value of their work, and
it's going to degrade them morally. He also says that
because we are in this mindset, we enter into what
he calls like beaverism, which is basically just working just
to work. And he's not against work. This is guy
with a pretty Protestant worth work ethicic. He is pretty
clear that he thinks work is essential and that if
you're not working, you're not being a valuable human. But
he feels like by trying to make everything more efficient
and more alienated, we are becoming more animalistic. We're simply
working because it's instinctual to generate the things we need,
rather than elevating ourselves through mastering skill and becoming the
kind of person that can wield those skills in a
way that betters ourselves in society. He also says that
the attempts to rule through kind of this industrialization, this
general attitude of industrialization, leads us to a type of
leadership where we're simply turning people. And he of course
didn't have this kind of verbiage at the time, but
turning people into numbers on spreadsheets. He has this kind
of a beautiful phrase he calls the condition of England
question and he says, you know, this is not something
you can quantify with numbers. This is not something you
can put into an almanac or into a ledger. You know,
you can't simply add up the GDP or you know,
the productive value of an individual or a business or
a country and determine its health. There's more to what
a country is than simply its material output or its efficiency.
And then, of course when it comes to democracy, Carlisle
was very much not a fan. Carlisle was such not
a fan that he was angry at the monarchy in
England at the time time for basically just being a
shill for Parliament. He said, basically, we've robbed ourselves of
a monarch and instead all we have is someone who
basically rubber stamps what the Parliament does. And the Parliament
is again ruling in theory in the name of the people,
but is often pursuing simply the interests of this new
industrial class, maybe the precursor of what we would call
a managerial elite today. And he opines for kind of
this aristocracy that used to exist, that wanted to be holistic,
cared about the entire good of the people, and saw
itself as kind of the caretakers and cultivators of the
good of those that were under them, rather than people
who are simply trying to basically reduce the people into
widgets and cogs in a machine that can more efficiently produce,
use material and increase the numbers so that you know,
we could see better spreadsheets, better ledgers, and so he says,
you know, the condition of England has to be something
that we understand as a spiritual good, as a heroic good,
as something that is beyond simply the measure of, you know,
how the average person is living, though he points out
that that itself has not really increased that much when
you look at, you know, how people live in the
cities as compared to how they used to live prior
to the industrialization. So that's just an overview. Of course,
Carlisle's is very dense. You have to read him, at
least I have to read him slowly and many times
to kind of pull what you get out of him,
and you probably didn't get at all even the second
or third time anyway. So it's someone that is takes
I think, a good amount of time, but is well
worth your investment for kind of what he brings to
the table.
Speaker 1: We're in the nineteenth century, and I want to go
back to the eighteenth for a second. I think a
lot of people would no matter what your opinion is
on the American Revolution, the majority of people believe that
it was a good thing. I think that one of
the problems that you would meet when you're talking about
the Enlightenment is there are a lot of people will
say the lighten the Enlightenment inspired the American Revolution, but
if you tell them that it also inspired seventeen eighty nine,
you know, the French Revolution, they won't be able to
get that. Can you put those two together? How the
Enlightenment would have been responsible for both?
Speaker 2: Sure? I mean in both cases we're looking at a
I guess it's how you want to trace that lineage, right.
There are a lot of people who will trace it
through Protestantism, and I don't want to get into that
because that's a whole nother that's a whole nother discussion,
not of all of which that I agree with. I
guess I'll start by saying this. A lot of people
who have a problem with the Enlightenment have a problem
with the American Revolution, mainly because they say the king
was the rightful authority over the Americans and they didn't
have the right to rebel. I have a slightly different tact,
and it might be wrong, but it's mine, and so
I'll say it before we go any further with that.
I think the American Revolution is I don't want to
say good or bad, because it's a past event and
what do we have a say on it? But I
would say that it's justified, not necessarily from its Enlightenment basis,
which is surely what the founders at that time did, right.
They just took large chunks of Locke and used it
to justify their, you know, their separation from England. But
I think they lost it because the king kind of
lost the mandate of Heaven over his empire. It was
not being ruled properly. The empire had frankly grown too large,
and so often, as with any Tower of Babel, was
bound to collapse when the provinces were governed poorly. So
I have less of a problem with the American Revolution
than many kind of reactionaries, I guess, because I think
that that's kind of the natural cycle of far flung
provinces that are poorly governed. But the American Revolution most
certainly was founded in Enlightenment ideas, though it definitely had
a more measured understanding. It was certainly more Lockean than
it was Rusoian, and both of them were working from
what we would call the Enlightenment tradition. But Locke still
had what I would say is a fair amount of
Christianity in it and a lot of the And I
think this also goes to the kind of people who
came to America. They were mostly Protestants fleeing, and they
were there because they wanted to practice there sometimes rather
you know, kind of kooky versions of Christianity for some
of the real radicals, but they were all there because
they wanted to be Christian more not less. As where
when you look at the French Revolution, and of course
for so they're looking to throw off the authority of
the church entirely that both were looking to escape the
Catholic Church. But Americans were looking to escape into Protestantism,
the French were looking to escape into basically atheism, right,
they crowned they literally crowned the God of Reason in
Notre Dame Cathedral. And so if you're looking for why
they could both come from the same root of Enlightenment
but end up in pretty different places, I think the
answer tends to be who was rebelling the foundation of kind,
where they're starting part of their liberalism, and where they
wanted to end up. I think that while they both
started from the idea of this liberal tradition of throwing
off monarchy, having popular sovereignty, generating constitutional republics, they were
looking for very different results, even though they kind of
had the same starting goal.
Speaker 1: When you look into the eighteen hundreds, what do you see,
as I mean, you already talked about the Industrial Revolution
and how Carlisle talked about it politically, what kind of
movements did you see in the eighteen hundreds that were
popping up that looked to be inspired by the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and here's where I don't I don't want to
bill myself as someone I'm not. I'm not. I have
a decent grasp of history, but I'm not a historian,
and I don't have like an encyclopedic knowledge of the
eighteen hundreds. And so while I've read a good bit
of political philosophy from the era and tracing it through,
I don't want to pretend like I have a general
or have a specific understanding of all the different political
movements that were moving as forward. But from what I
have read from people of that era, it seemed that
the mandates were shifting away from the idea of kind
of more absolute monarchies and of course towards parliamentary monarchies.
And at this point, as it got to the late
eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, basically perfunctory monarchies where the
monarch had little to know power and it was almost
all in the power of the parliaments. And if you
look at guys like Mosca who were writing about this transition,
they said that, again, a lot of this comes from
your industrial revolution, the fact that your merchant class is
on the rise, right, kind of your aristocracy is losing power.
Your merchant class is gaining power. The new money is
moving into these parliaments, and it's kind of demanding more
and more political rights from the monarch. And so your
power is being drained out of the monarchy into the parliaments,
and the parliaments are less aristocratic and more mercantile. And
it's because the industrial revolution is allowing them to create
basis of wealth that had not exist. And this is
an ongoing process, right, this has been happening for hundreds
of years. The merchants have been gaining more ability as
the ability to increase trade and production have come from
better sailing technology, different trading technologies, and then of course
mass production leap frogs this process. And so you're seeing
you're seeing people who basically our leadership had been warlords
more or less. Right, kings were originally basically warlords and
their aristocrats, their lieutenants had been you know, ruling over
sections of their land. And so your aristocracy was fundamentally
the martial cast and of course the Church assisted them
kind of in that ruling. But as the Enlightenment came
and the need for specific marshal training drained away, because
you started produce weapons that the average person could wield
once you you know, this is this is famously why
the Pope tried to outlie the crossbow, right, you know
about this with the pope crossbow. Yeah, So, so you know,
the the increase in martial technology was reducing the need
to have a specific martial class because you could take
the average person and turn them into a relatively effective soldier.
And so you no longer needed to train people and
have them earn their you know, be able to you know,
create their own armor, and spend lots of time learning
how to fight. Instead, you could just shove a crossbow
and then a musket into the hand of the average
person and they could mow down the guy who had
spent his entire life learning how to to fight from
the back of a horse. And so the ability of
merchants to acquire wealth and gain status without needing to
have marshal prowess again entirely shifted the dynamic of the
you know these politics, and it allowed for these more
nationalist movements, of course, to also take hold. Because you
no longer had the need for kings and kingdoms, people
started emerging more as nation states rather than you know
being the you know, being a people who were under
the protection of a particular monarch. And so all of
these things work together to shift the attitude away from
the more medieval understanding of society towards something we would
recognize as kind of that post Enlightenment society today.
Speaker 1: Why are monarchies so denigrated? You pretty much can ask anyone,
and even people who you know, read political theory now
they may ye, people read the political theory normally that
confirms their bias. But was this something that just had
to happen in or to institute democracy and Enlightenment values? Liberalism?
Speaker 2: It's certainly part of it. Again, I think it's hard
to separate, and this is always, you know, we're always
in danger of one lens, and so I think it's
important to kind of take the totality of what's happening there.
Democracy and liberalism are absolutely part of it. But again,
the economic system is changing and the scale of things
are changing, not just economically but governmentally. The mass state
is on the rise, and you can read a bunch
of guys like James Burnham and Sam Francis on this
kind of thing. The ability of you know, the sovereign
to basically govern large amounts of people had to increase,
and that meant we needed a different story. A lot
of people assume that, you know, the king just got
to order everybody around, and in some ways that's true.
He had more direct and obvious power than we see today.
But the king was only one man and he was
asking from many and when the king wanted something, it
was often seen as something for the king, not for
the nation. And so when the industrial revolution came and
we needed kind of mass production and we needed the
mass state, in order to justify the mass state and
the things that the mass state required, we needed a
new story about kind of where power came from. And
so this is where the mass mandate becomes very useful
because you might be able to say we're not doing
this for the king, but it's very hard to say
that we're not doing this for the nation and for
the people. You're part of the people, right, How can
you turn down the will of the entire people? And
so the will of the people became a very useful tool,
and this is why we see in many ways the
rise of democracy also coincide with mass mobilization of militaries,
right total warfare. We see the Leveeon mass in France,
and we see every nation basically start to realize that
they're in an arms race for power. Right, if France
can bring you know, forget you know, twenty thirty forty
thousand people, If France can bring an entire nation of
men to bear arms at any time, and we now
have these arms that can be mass produced and they
can turn your average man into an effective killing machine.
Then the ability of a society to compel its entire
population to fight becomes very important. Suddenly, drafts and compulsive
military service become pretty much an essential part of the state.
And how do you justify that. Well, it can be
difficult with a king, but we find that democracies are
far better are at compelling those things. So why did
you denegrate a monarchy? Well, I mean there are a
lot of reasons. Of course, many monarchies had grown decadent,
Many monarchies had grown inefficient. Again, many monarchies had proven
that they could not govern empires of the size that
they had cultivated. Some of that is again just due
to the you know, the degradation of that particular monarchy,
but again a lot of it was due to the
massification of the state, the need for the mass state
to come to power and the military and production that
all of that required. So again, I think part of
it is is just a founding story. It's a narrative
we tell ourselves, well, you know, we need to Look,
we freed ourselves from monarchies, we freed ourselves from the shackles,
became these more enlightened people. We're no longer relying on
the divine right of kings. We're now looking at the
rational discourse and the marketplace of ideas where the people
choose their leaders. That's all part of the story too.
But of course I think there's also those economic and
cultural engines that are required to kind of move things
towards the total state that we saw take place during
those times.
Speaker 1: It does seem like the marketplace of ideas that just
that phrase one that's just to get personal for a second,
is I cannot stand. It's just horrible. What if the
marketplace gives you know, Marxism, you know, it gives you
the Bolsheviks. I mean, is that something you just take.
It does seem that the whole idea of the marketplace
of ideas is easily traced for the Enlightenment, right, m Yeah.
Let me ask you this, because I know you said,
you know, I'm not going to assume all the historical
knowledge and putting that, but I'm sure when you look
at like the right of Marxism and up through Bolshevism
nineteen seventeen onto Maoism. I'm sure that's easily traced. Is
that a reaction to the Enlightenment or is it directly
from the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean there's certainly bits of both in there, right,
So it's you can certainly see the you know, the
going even further with the discarding of God. Right. It's
not just that religion is something we need to outgrow,
but it's like actively poison, right. It's basically it's something
that was used to control the masses and we need
to discard it. The Enlightenment is also very core to
Marxism because Marxism is fundamentally progressive, right. It s it
sees itself as the rule, something that can rule the
new Age. Right. It's it's basically, you know, Marxism it
wants everything to be managed. It is very much a
managerial state. It wants to use science and logic and
reason to you know, figure out the exact amount that
everybody needs and the exact amount of work and output
and all these things. And by making sure that we
have effective management at every level of labor and distribution
and all these things, we will produce kind of the
optimum outcome. So it is very much tied to the Enlightenment,
but it is definitely breaking from liberalism in some pretty
fundamental ways. It does acknowledge some of the problems with
the industrial revolutions, some of the effects, though weirdly enough,
it has a hard time explaining why they're bad, Like
I mean, it doesn't. I mean, you know, Marx goes
around making moral statements all the time, but it doesn't
really have a good grounding for them, right, and pretty
much all those situations. Again, I'm not going to pretend
to be a scholar on Marx. I'm not going to
you know, maybe he makes a grand argument that no
one has ever shown. I haven't read all of Dos Capital,
I don't know all of the Marx But every time
I talk to people, every time I talk to Marxists
about this, they always produce quotes that they to me
that they feel like are going to reveal like the
morality of Marxism or his moral basis, And they're always horrific.
They're always terrifying, and I just kind of look at
them and I wonder, does this sound moral to you?
Does this sound like a moral justification in grounding? Because
you know, they just don't have any metaphysics, and so
it just often feels hollow in that way. But I
think you can certainly say that Marxism is both a
you know, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, but also a
severe reaction to some of the aspects of the Enlightenment.
And again you can see some of those same criticisms
echoed in people like Carlisle, which is why some people
will label Carlisle as a socialist. But I think that
it's okay to to understand that there are problems and
issues with kind of our understanding of capitalism and what
has happened, while realizing Marxism is not the answer to
that problem, and and realizing that is a road that
is incredibly evil and dangerous, while it may have some
relevant critiques towards, you know, some of the things that happened.
Speaker 1: So if we come forward after World War One, it
seems like the managerial kind of aspects that like a
Carlisle would talk about seem to be almost become formalized
in the West. And I think that Burnham probably talked
about it and best in managerial Revolution. But is that
what you see do you see like the new deal
things like that as basically cementing that that we're going
to be ruled by a managerial elite now going forward,
and you'll have a vote, but will it count?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think this is where Burnham is really indispensable, right,
I mean, everything about the managerial state isn't perfect. He
certainly makes some guesses that end up being wrong, but
he has some really powerful insights into Rather than breaking
the world into liberalism and fascism and communism, Burnham understands
that what's on the rise of managerialism, and what you're
getting is three different formulations of managerialism, and one might
be better and one might win out over the other,
but either way, the managerial elite is on the rise.
And so that's certainly what we're seeing across the board
in all three of those kind of governmental formulas is
that they are all focused on bringing forward more planned economies,
uh more more data. You know, we we if you,
if you're in the business world or any kind of
world like this, now you use these data driven strategies,
data driven results. Right, everybody loves loves that kind of catchphrase,
but that's what these are. All these people are obsessed with, right,
They want to bring the scientific method and kind of
and and this and using managerial expertise to kind of
squeeze every at last little bit out of whatever their
system is. And that's the one thing that unifies all
of these systems, no matter what their individual differences and
on how they're going to implement that, all of them
are are kind of planning to use this strategy at
this managerial strategy. Uh. And again, Burnham is basically just
secularizing a lot of Carlisle's critiques. So it's certainly not
a one for one, but I think in many ways,
ironically he's taking a more rationalistic approach to many of
those same insights and problems that Carlisle and others had
raised in a previous age.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my friend Aaron and I did a reading of
chapter three of Managerial Revolution, the Theory of the Permanence
of Capitalism. We had done that right after we had
done a six part reading of State and Revolution by Lenin,
and that one really got some people going talking about
unemployment and unemployment being a real factor in looking at
the wondering whether capitalism even existed at this point. And
I think he wrote this in forty it was released
in forty one and yeah, I mean really calls into
question what people are calling capitalism and what people are
actually defending these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you see Sam Francis really picks up that
torch in Leviathan and its enemies, right He he says, basically,
what Burnham was onto was that we transitioned away from
kind of this bourgeoisie capitalism into this managerial capitalism. And
they really are very different animals. That they are very
different structures. While while they seem to share some uh
you know, or they have some similarities, they they fundamentally
have different motiva motivations that the rich family is very
different from the highly educated professional manager. They have different
understandings of what their goals are, why they're doing what
they're doing, their their duties to the people that work
for them and for those that they govern, and they're
relationship with other elites. And so while they both might
share characteristics that we would call capitalistic or you know,
they might qualify as capitalists to someone from the outside,
they are pretty fundamentally different systems. And there's a very
big break when you start seeing those managery elites come
to power and we're really operating under something that is
very different than we understood capitalism to be in you know,
the the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: How do you understand the difference that people make between
a republic and a democracy. You know, that's obviously something
that you hear on the conservative right whenever anybody mentions
the term democracy, and a lot of people might be
able to say, well, you know, we can talk about
republics because the Greeks had republics, the Romans had republics.
The republic that we're talking about today that we have allegedly,
how does that did that come out of the Enlightenment
or is that a sort of a bastardization of something
in the past that you see.
Speaker 2: So certainly the idea of republics existed prior to the Enlightenment.
When they point to you know, Greece and Rome, you
can certainly say that was the case, but they were
very fundamentally different in that there was that's the best
way to put this. The idea of the propositional nation
is something that is very much a Enlightenment or post
Enlightenment idea. One of the things that made democracy as
if we want to call it that. In Athens. A
thing was that, you know, there's a very small amount
of people who could vote in this way, right, it's men,
it's men with blood ties directly to Athens. The idea
that someone could move to Athens and you know, two
years later be determining what the government of Athens would
do for its people would have struck the Athenians as
absolutely insane, right, They would not have recognized the authority
of that. Part of what made Athenians worthy of voting
and government was that literally they had been you know,
that they had the blood and dirt and soil of Athens,
you know, kind of in them. That that's what gave
them the authority to kind of make those decisions. And
if you look, if you want to jump forward again
to kind of our understanding of the modern republic, even
our understanding of the republic has altered significantly. Like you said,
a lot of conservatives love to say, and I did
it too. I did it all the time when I
was more of a normal conservative. Oh this is this
isn't a democracy, this is a republic, which is technically
true but is obviously not true, you know, de facto, right,
like when the United States started or at least once
we signed the constitution, after the Articles of Confederation, you
could make the argument that you had a republic because
basically one half of one third of the government was
actually elected by the people, right, and the Senate wasn't
elected by the average person. The president was elected by
the electoral College. The judiciary obviously you know saying, you know,
was not voted on, and so really you only had
the House of Representatives as being anything we would recognize
as some kind of democracy directly. And again, even then
it was a very small comparative number of people who
had the franchise. But just as Rome, as it got older,
expanded its franchise, we tended to do the same. And
as you move further and you have leaders who want
to expand the franchise more because it allows them to
offer more power to outside forces, that allows them to
come to power over more established forces, you tend to
start to see the republic degrade. And the same thing
again with America. You had you know, again, Mosca says
that America started as a republic. But because we have
this idea, basically, when we look at sorry, I'm trying
to trace my history here, when we look at philosopher,
separation of powers, checks and balances. I don't know why
I can't remember his name all of a sudden bontescue.
When we look at Baron de Montesque, who was a
big who's a big inspiration for Madison and the and
the founders who were creating the constitution. A lot of
people think that the great part of kind of his
design is just these three branches. Right, we have three branches,
and we separate the power into the branches, and they
check and balance each other, and that's kind of what
keeps power under control. But actually it's you. What Moscoe
says is the thing is not so much on the
mechanical design. People get too caught up with the mechanical design,
and what they don't understand is what really kept power
and control was the different forces in society. Each one
of these branches in theory is supposed to be under
the monuscue idea bringing something different to the table. The
aristocracy has a different interest than the monarchy, and the
monarchy has a different interest than the church, and that
has a different interest than a merchant. And having representatives
from each that's what actually sets power against power. That's
what actually brings all of society's different interests together and
working together to then create something that's beneficial for the
general people. It's not just fundamentally the three different branches.
And since America basically decided to just turn every branch
more and more democratic, right, we wanted to have more
direct votes on so we made you know, the direct
election of senators, and then we made it so that
the you know, presidential candidates were no longer picked by
their parties, but were but you know, we had primaries,
and we basically just ratchet up the democratic process and
exposed every branch to the same process. What we got was,
rather than different competing forces, that and that's what really
makes a republic kind of work in theory. What we
really got was one homogeneous democratic mass selecting leadership at
every point. And so you no longer had interest checking interest.
You just had one flat democratic impulse that could be
manipulated easily through things like media. And that's why we
have more of an oligarchy than we have anything else today,
and we certainly don't have any anything that really truly
resembles a republic.
Speaker 1: All right, let's get to the point where we start
to upset people. So started this off talking about how
I was saying on Twitter that when you see drag
queen story hour, when you see somebody being appointed to
the head of the head nuclear person in the government,
who I mean, I don't even want to say, And
when you see what we're seeing in this what you
wouldn't have seen what was hidden in the shadows you
know centuries ago, that this is because of the Enlightenment,
and that it the reason why government would endorse it
comes out of the Enlightenment. And people are like, well,
that doesn't make how would you square that circle? How
would you square a circle like that? So, I mean,
it seems very obvious to me from everything you just said,
how it comes forward to that. How do you explain it?
Speaker 2: Well, So, in our attempt to secularize government, in our
attempt to remove you know, the you know, we remove
the divine right of kings, and we move the mandate
out of the hands of heaven and into the hands
of the people, right, and we also then endorse you
know kind of this science, this scienceientific type government, this
expert based government. This is always the answer to everything,
is making things more rational, more objective, more scientific, And
this is where Karl Schmidt is really good. He talks
about the problem of liberalism being that basically liberalism promised
to remove in many ways politics, right. It said, look,
we all disagree on religion. We disagree on who is God,
and even when we agree on who is God, we
disagree on the pope or Protestantism or you know, different aspects,
and we go to war about this stuff all the time.
So what if we just kind of shoved all that
stuff in a broom closet and we could put the
big questions, the big metaphysical questions, to the side, and
instead we could just say, okay, here's like the minimum
morality we all need, and we could operate on that basis.
And that's a pretty good pit for people who have
been fighting religious wars for a long time. And it
also works in a lot of advantages when we look
at again the economic situation, because people wanted to be
able to trade, they wanted to be able to facilitate
economic advancement. And when you don't have to clash over
you know, metaphysics and existential questions all the time, you're
more likely to be able to trade and benefit from
each other. So that all sounds great, but the problem
is that we start to then believe as we transition
away from rule of kings and you know, monarchs and
aristocracies and mandates from heaven and God, we start to
believe instead in systems. Right, we believe in the system
of democracy or republic, whatever you want to call it.
We we in constitutional government. We think that we've constructed
a constitution and it's like this beautiful machine you know
that's been It takes you know, the human nature into
a out and it balances things, and it's been engineered
in a way where basically we no longer have to
place our trust in one person who's been divinely invested
with power, because well, instead, we've rationally engineered a system
where we can use human nature kind of against itself
to create a self governing system. And it just kind
of runs like like this great root Goldberg machine, you know,
once we get it started, it's very complicated, but it
works great, and it kind of just will go forward
in perpetuity. But the problem with that is it lulls
us into this idea of an objective, neutral space where
no one's values are dominating, and in fact, we even
create this idea of separation of church and state right where,
and of course it means something very different to us
today than would have meant to any founder. But the
modern conception is basically that like, you can't use any
kind of religious values in the p public square. Well,
that becomes a real problem as the public square grows,
or the guy i should say, the government square grows,
right when the government becomes in charge of educating children,
when it becomes in charge of deciding what goes on television,
when government gets involved in every aspect of people's lives,
from child custody to business, and at every point religious
values are not allowed to be the basis of decisions.
What we are told is that instead there's like this secular, rational, objective,
neutral set of decisions being made. But of course that's
not true. And that's what Schmid says is liberalism just
hides the fact that in the background, someone's values are
still operating, someone is still in control of the system.
We never just have this kind of blind watchmaker who
sets things and has them run. Instead, there's always someone
whose values are being applied to our decisions, and over
time we've started to see who those are. Right. It
used to be very difficult, but over time it's starting
to be clear to people that when basically what you've
created is this progressive system, right, and all of its
values are supposed to be secular. They're all supposed to
be non religious, they don't have a holy book, they're
not tied to a church, there's not a lot of
official doctrine written down, and so they're supposed to be
able to operate in this marketplace of ideas in this
government space because they're secular and all the religious ideas
are not. And what you're creating is basically like this
super predator, right, as Curtis Yarvin does a great essay
about how Dawkins got polled, and it kind of explains how, basically,
you know, Richard Dawkins famously hates religion, but he has
a religion of his own, and his religion religion is
just kind of this hyper Protestant, hyper puritanical progressivism. But
the progressivism is allowed to dominate all of the public
spaces because it's technically not religious in the sense that
we understand religion and all the other value structures are.
And so now why do we see all this degeneracy, right,
Why do we see all these people who have really
bizarre fetishes and understandings, and you know, they want to
change the gender of children. Why do we see drag
time Story hour everywhere or drag queen story are everywhere?
Why do we see this? Because that's been the only
value system that's been allowed to operate in the public square.
We actively pushed all the other value systems out to
the side. Sure you can technically be Christian and whole power.
Sure you could technically, you know, have another religion and
be in charge, but you are not allowed to apply
those values. And the progressives are so at every turn.
They are the only game in town. They're the only
ones who are actually being allowed to exercise their beliefs
and apply them. And since there are always beliefs being exercised,
there is no such thing as a neutral value, neutral moral,
neutral space. They are always winning. And that is why
that comes slowly but surely from the Enlightenment. It doesn't
seem inevitable at the start, but when you are removing
all other religious influence from the situation, it is the
inevitable conclusion.
Speaker 1: Well, you said that it comes out of liberalism, and
that's if you read I think my favorite Burnham book
is Suicide of the West. But a lot of people
will say, well, that didn't come from classical liberalism, making
the distinction of classical your free markets and you know,
not modern day liberalism, which is who knows what it is.
I mean, you have neoliberalism, you have whatever. All the
all these things on the left was, how come classical
liberalism didn't work?
Speaker 2: Well, you can see, you know, these people will deny
that that progressivism came from classical liberalism. But if you
scratch them just slightly, you scratch your classical liberal you'll
find a progressive in the making. Right. We saw this
especially in the last few months. You saw two people
who were from kind of this classic classical liberal school, uh,
Douglas Murray and Claire what's her name limit? Yeah, from Quillette.
There are both people who are in this I d
W classical liberal sphere, right, and in both cases they
went on these huge rants about how basically the right
is is starting to try to impose its own values
and they are basically far more worried about the return
of the right than the current direction of the left,
which is insane. Right, Like anyone who looks at what's
going on. Knows that the left is incomplete and total control.
They dominate everything culturally and basically legally politically. At this point,
the right has almost no institutional or cultural power. But
still the arch enemy of every classical liberal is actually
the return of the right. Right the right actually thinking
that it should start imposing its values, it should start
acting in a way that asserts its understanding of morality.
That is the biggest threat to the classical liberal. And
that's why, like I said, as these people might argue
against wokeness, they might want to keep it the nineties
as long as possible. If only we could go back
to nineteen ninety five, it would be the greatest thing
in the world. But if at any point you say
to them, actually, this neutrality never existed, and trying to
go back to this point of neutrality will only guarantee
that we continue down the path of progressivism, they lose
their minds because because it's their greatest enemy is actually,
at the end of the day, not progressivism. It's the
idea that the right might at some point find its courage.
That's what they're worried about more than anything. And I
think classical liberalism fails because it's just telling itself the
same lie, you know as liberalism in general, that oh,
the things I believe are neutral, they're objective, they're scientific.
I don't have a religion, I don't have a worldview
viewpoint that informs all of these things. I can set
up a totally rational system by which all decisions can
be made, and I never have to come in conflict
with other people because we can always optimize every outcome
for every group and every person. That's the pitch of liberalism, right,
is that there's this there's some path that we can
all travel down that benefits everyone. And that's a great
pitch because it makes everyone put away their secretary, their
sectarian interests. And if you have interests you want advance,
the best thing to do is to explain to your
opponents that they don't have interest that they need to advance,
because then you're the only one playing the game.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you say that because the when people
talk about like even right libertarians, right libertarians will say
anarchists anarcho capitalists, Well, if we just get to anarchy,
then everyone can go their own way, and it's it
seems like you're basically saying that that is just another
version of classical liberalism and just allowing progressivism to to thrive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always hard when you get into the anarcho
libertarians because the anarcho capital because some of them are
Hoppy in and some of them aren't. And one of
the things you know that hop understands is very much
that no man is an island, right, and that a
community needs to police itself morally if it's going to
be able to maintain in liberty. And so even if
you're still operating inside this liberty based framework, you still
need to understand that. Sorry, but you're not the only
person in life. And this is why so often libertarianism
is a philosophy for you know, sixteen to twenty five
year old guys, because they live in this world where
they don't have families yet and they don't have significant
attachments to their community because they've kind of been derascinated
and animized, and they don't see the problem with just saying, well, yeah,
at the end of the day, just let everyone do
what they want. But as soon as you have social time,
as soon as you have a family, as soon as
you have children that you care about, and you want
to see carry you know, something good into the future.
You realize that it matters, It matters what other people think,
because even if you are somehow able to go your
own way and create a good family on your own,
kids have to be friends with someone, They've got to
marry someone, you know, your wife has to spend time
with people like the people you love and carry about
have to exist in a society. And if you have
to exist in a society, the idea that everyone can
just go their own way is a problem because actually,
what your neighbor does does affect you, and more importantly,
affects your children and your grandchildren. And that's when you
understand that this doesn't really work the way you'd hoped.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I make the point all the time on Twitter
when people start talking about schools, you know, government schools,
Prussian schooling, anarchists and libertarians to scream, well, just homeschool,
homeschool your kids. I'm like, it's great, you're going to
raise this kid who is not going to be indoctrinated
by this progressive philosophy. Hopefully. I mean, who knows what.
I guess it would depend on what your homeschooling curriculum is.
But your neighbor's not, and your neighbor is sending their
kid to the government school to become a soldier for progressivism,
and you don't think that that's a problem. You don't
think that maybe you should be doing everything you can
to take over or be a major influence, a major
lobbying force on education locally so that you don't have
to put up with that. It's so detached that, well,
as long as I take care of my home, I
don't have to worry about my neighbor. Well that's not
how this all works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you look at even the most successful people
with this kind of thing, right, look at like the Amish. Right,
even these people who have been relatively successful in creating
a cloistered society that, let's be honest, can only exist
because basically it's allowed to exist, and if at any
moment people decided to stop it from existing, they'd have
no way to stop it. But even these people who
have basically done the most you can do in our
society with kind of isolating themselves and their values and
going their own way, still understand that a it's incredibly
necessary to care about your neighbor in a community like
even though they've partitioned themselves, they are still very very
serious about their neighbors and caring about them and being
involved in their lives and what they do. And also
they understand that they basically give their children this rum
spinger right this period to go out and experience the world,
because just knowing that it exists out there will probably
be too much of a temptation. And they know that
these kids have to like come back and make an
active desis decision to push that aside and make this
incredible decision to kind of return to the fold and
become part of that community. So even these people who
are highly successful at least in some ways in doing
what people would want to do by kind of partitioning
off and going their own way, still recognize the incredible
influence that the mass culture has and realize that if
they don't expose and teach their children how to basically
walk away from that and return back to their way
of life, then it will always be there and will
always be a temptation that will basically pull them away
and destroy them. And so even the most successful people
at this recognize that you just can't completely cut yourself
off from the idea and the values that are happening
around you. And like you said, you can homeschool your kids,
and I don't blame anyone for rescuing their children from
public school system, but you have to understand that they
still live live that are going to be informed by
the values and decisions made by those around them. And
that's just in the moral case. That's not even talking
about the inevitable political costs of just withdrawing entirely from
society and hoping that the state doesn't come for you,
which they will.
Speaker 1: All right, let me finish with this. So philosopher chat
this morning tweeted, starting to think the anarchists might have
the right idea, and you responded, your first gulp of
a nepti bureaucratic government will make you a libertarian anarchist.
But at the bottom of the glass, monarchy is waiting
for you. You want to talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: Sure, So I'm ripping off and I forget the scientist.
There there's a scientist who said, you know, your first
your first gulp of science, will you know, make you
like an atheist, a materialist atheist. But at the bottom
of the glass God is waiting for you. And you
know what I'm saying there is, basically it's your first
reaction to understanding things in a deeper level is often
a low resolution one. We don't think of ourselves as
going through that same journey as like a child does, right,
But oftentimes the first time a child has things ripped away,
like the veil of security or the veil of simplicity
ripped away, they we think of them as like going
through this process of becoming more mature. But in any ways,
actually their response is very immature, right, And it's very understandable.
We all went through it. I went through it absolutely
looking at government and saying, well, the problem is all
these people being involved in lives. The problem is that
the government always makes terrible decisions. And so the obvious
solution is just removing the government, right, like, just put
it in a position where the good succeed, hard work succeeds,
people make voluntary decisions that and the cream rises to
the top, and then you know, uh, and then just
kind of you know, devil take the high moost, right,
and and that's a very understandable and common response, but
again it's also very immature. It's it's the solution to
bad government is not no government. The solution to bad
government is a better better understanding of the duty and
responsibility of the government and the state. It's a better
understanding of how to align the the good of those
that rule with the good of those who are being ruled.
Because simply removing the controls, simply removing and and and
stripping away the state, doesn't actually put us in the
situation you want it to be. It doesn't actually put
us in the state where each person makes their own decision.
Because again, no man is an island. We are social creatures,
we are political animals. We will exist in a society
that will happen, and someone will be in charge of it.
And so the answer is not to attempt to rip
away you know, sovereignty is just never destroyed. Sovereignty is
always conserved. Someone will be in charge, and so the
more mature reaction is not to attempt to rip away
all controls, rip away all understanding of authority, but instead
have a better understanding of what constitutes a moral and
beneficial authority under which people can be placed. I think
in many cases that is monarchy, though as I later
got into the thread with another person, I agree again
with Joseph Demaster, who said that there is no one
perfect form of political of politics, there's no one particular
perfect form of government. Again, he believed that each each
civilization has been stamped by God with a particular care,
and that the character of the people will inform the
best formation of their government, and the constitution and government
that eventually comes to be formalized will be a reflection
of the nature of those people. That doesn't mean that
there aren't bad forms of government, and that doesn't mean
there aren't superior forms of government. But I don't think
that necessarily like monarchy, is just the solution for every person.
But I do think when we look at this decentralized
theocratic oligarchy that currently runs our civilization, it's a disaster.
And I understand the temptation to then say, well, then
just tear away all government, throw it all in the trash,
and then just let people go their own way. But
I think that's kind of the first level reaction. I
think over time, the more you spend looking at this problem,
then I think you eventually make the journey to understanding
that it's not about obliterating the state or government. It's
about finding the best way to put people under a
more moral and competent authority that is invested in the
good of the people.
Speaker 1: We will end it right there. Why don't you plug again?
Just in case anybody decided they wanted to fast forward
through the intro or something.
Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely you can find or in McIntyre. You can
just search that in YouTube or Twitter. I've got a
link tree on my Twitter and on my YouTube videos.
I've got all the links to just everything else. I've
got a gab, I've got Odyssey for the video and
Rumble if you want to go to alternative platforms. There,
I've got a merch store and a subscribe store and
all that stuff if you want to support. So just
all that stuff you can find when you search or
in McIntyre, YouTube or Twitter.