Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekenana Show.
I am here with Curtis Yarvin. How are you doing
pretty good? We are here to read a chapter that
our mutual friend academic agent wrote in his populist delusion
book about James Burnham.
Speaker 2: Under is this under his real name? Yeah?
Speaker 1: He wrote it under his real name is Nima Parbini
on the cover. Yeah, it sounds sounds like it sounds
like a gay Italian porn star.
Speaker 2: But you know it does it? Does it? Maybe Indian
Italian something like that.
Speaker 1: But it's aptly titled Managerial Elites. And I'm just going
to start reading and stop me whenever and comment when
you think you can add, when you can add to it,
because obviously I wanted to talk to you about Burnham
because it's Burnham. All right, I'm gonna get this up
in the screen, all right, Chapter seven, Managerial Elites. In
the nineteen thirties, James Burnham had one of James Burnham
had been one of the leading American exponents of Trotskyism.
Speaker 2: He's Troutschism to the fourth I believe.
Speaker 1: However, in the nineteen forties he broke decisively with Marxism
and accepted the basic validity of the Italian elite theorists
Mosca Pereto and Michelle's, to whom he had been introduced
by Sidney Hook. In nineteen forty one he published his
most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, not his guests, not
his best book, but what's go on? I know you're
trying to make one even the most popular. So in
nineteen forty one he published his most famous book, The
Managerial Revolution, which argued that Marxism had misconstrued the true
nature of the revolution that had taken place. It was
not the proletariat who overthrew Bushwick capitalism, but a new class,
the managerial class.
Speaker 2: So what always bugs me, what always bugs me about
Burnham is that he doesn't understand the difference between a
manager and a bureaucrat. I would say that essentially, in extremes,
a manager is a commander and a bureaucrat is essentially
a judge. And so there's sort of all throughout the
man Duro Revolution, and it'll be like complaining about this
as you go along. There's basically this confusion between these
two very very different roles. Now it's a social class.
We can sort of definitely say that they have something
in common. But that's a separate point, so let's go on, okay.
This book created an intellectual storm at the time of
its publication, and was reviewed very widely, not only by
academic journals but also by mainstream newspapers. Two years later,
he followed it up with The Machiavellians, in which he
explored the ideas of the elite theorists, together with George Sorell,
and from which I have already drawn. Burnham was read
by and profoundly influenced George Orwell, who was chilled by
his amoral, scientific view of power. Burnham's outline of the
managerial state inspired both Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty. His
colly realist view was said to be the model for
both the character O'Brien and the book The Theory and
Practice of Holigarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein in the latter.
In the nineteen fifties and beyond, he became part of
the conservative establishment in the USA, helping William F. Buckley
found National Review and becoming a leading advocate of a
tough line against the Soviet Union during the Cold War,
to the extent that now Burnham is sometimes called the
first neo conservative. Later in nineteen sixty four, he published
a Suicide of the West, in which he in which
he is severely critical of liberal attitudes and assumptions, which
he argued are naive to the point of being suicidal.
Anything there you want to keep going? No, keep going
here we will focus on the core ideas. Not sure,
I mean, let me step back for a second. I'm
not sure. Naive is a rather simple word for the
suicidal nature of these suicidal ideas. Let me just flag that.
And I'm not really sure that's the way it's described
in Suicide of the West either. But let's go on. Okay.
Speaker 1: Here we will focus on the core ideas of the
managerial revolution, rather than the entire body of his thought.
It is obvious to anyone familiar with the elite theorists
that Burnham had fully internalized the teachings of Mosca, Peretto
and Michelle's. So as not to repeat ourselves, we will
take their conclusions as granted and suffice only to show
what is original in Burnham. In nineteen sixty Burnham wrote
a short article called Managing the Managers, which condensed his
core thesis to just five pages. This is very useful.
This very useful summary will serve as a guideline throughout.
Before starting, it is important to emphasize Burnham's explicitly Machiavelian frame.
There is little optimism in Burnham's view of human nature.
Of all the thinkers we are considering, he was the
one who most emphatically and avowedly wore the mantle of Machiavellian,
seeking to write only about what is is, not what
ought to be. He embodied what Thomas Soul might call
the constrained or tragic vision of man. Niccolo Macchiavelli once
said that human appetites are insatiable, but the thing that
they desire most is not wealth but power.
Speaker 2: I mean, let me let me, let me let me
just step in for there for a second. I mean
you could almost say wealth is a form of power,
and that money is the ability to tell other people
what to do. The I think that you might actually
perhaps a better comp for power here is sex, because
it's sort of like both power and sex give you
this feeling that you're literally your genes are likely to
be passed on. I mean, the powerful, you know, the
chief chimp, is like much more likely to reproduce than
some like insol omega chimp, right, you know. And and
so there's this sort of sense of power feeling really
really good in a way, and because it feels really
really good, it is frequently mistaken for something good. And yeah,
I just a note on that.
Speaker 1: Okay, Burnham's fundamental view of human nature was a Hobseene
struggle driven by an almost Nietzschen will to power. Perhaps
this is nowhere more evident than in Suicide of the West,
when he argues that the liberal assumption that mass education
would solve the problems of yesteryear is wrong headed. The
nineteenth century liberals overlooked and the twentieth century liberals declined
to face the fact that teaching everyone to read opens
minds to propaganda and indoctrination, at least as much as
to truths.
Speaker 2: A step ahead to the next one, no one truly
strives for the public good, but rather seeks to increase
power and prestige for himself and his click. Okay, that's
a vaguely correct model, but I think that it's sort
of it's not really necessarily psychologically or true in a way.
It's like when I think of, you know, the immortal
question that we can never know the answer to. You know,
what are progressives thinking? It's like asking, you know, Vickenstein
had this thing where he was like, you know, if
a lion could speak, would we understand it? You know?
And and sometimes you know, I there's there's a sort
of gap there that kind of sunders you know, the
sort of two kinds of thinking, and I see it.
It's it's a sort of very like it's it's of
course narrower than the gap between sort of the person
and the lion. But there's basically a way you can
sort of everyone has a bit of that inside them,
and the sort of the best way I can find
understand it is to sort of think about sort of
rural thoughts to kind of activate you that still make
you like warm in a way, like there must be
some Just find one, find one, Find a liberal thought
where you're just like, oh, maybe it's something that's actually good.
Sometimes these things are actually good. There's plenty of lib
stuff that's actually good, and you know, just find find
one that feels like really good and just like kind
of you know, feel that thought in your body, man,
you know, and the and that's sort of the feeling
of being a lib and it's sort of like the
feeling of you know, changing the world, making an impact
on the world, doing a good thing for the world,
doing a good thing for people like you. Thus power
and prestige for himself and his click is sort of relevant.
It's like, you're not really when you're striving for your click,
you know, even sort of in an unconscious way, you're
just like, we are good. The things that make us
feel good are good, and so you're basically you know,
you're you're. I mean, prestige is just status. It's the
thing that gets chimpanzees laid. Power is a little more
you know, Prestige is one of the benefits of power,
but one of the you know, the definition of power
is sort of a little more obscure. I think that
one way to say, to rewrite this sentence, to sort
of make it ring a bell with everyone out there
trying to write their college application essay and decide what
they mean, you could say, you know, no one truly
strives for the public good, but rather seeks to matter,
you know, like, and it's it's sort of that sense
of mattering that is what the chief chimp matters, that
make it chimp. You know, one day they went on
a raid and somebody lost track of them and they
never saw them again, and it was like three days
before the rest of the chimp's noticed. Right, but the
chief chimp right matters, right, you know, and that's a
himpoo matters. And so that sort of sense of kind
of translating what you know, these two sentences kind of
mean and how they produce what we know in love
is progressivism today is sort of you know, it's not
the sort of Burnham is kind of wrong about any
of this stuff. It's that he's sort of he doesn't
go quite deeply enough into like what is actually going
on here, How are these people thinking, how are you
know what is sort of in the minds of these people?
And what's in the minds of these people is that,
you know, the sense that if you matter in some way,
then there is an idea that mattering in this way
is sort of connected to good. Let's say, for example,
that the way in which you wanted to matter was
to you know, deface all, you know, statues of Martin
Luther King's one way of mattering, and then another way
of mattering is to deface all the statues of Roberty Lee,
and you know, you can feel that the person who
it's it's even you and I are as conservatives, are
much emotionally closer to the person who deface the statue
of Roberty Lee. It's easier to see in a way,
it's easier to understand that person, and that person obviously
is much more important because those statues get defaced and
the other ones don't get defaced. So you know the
sense that basically, you know, if you look at what
teaching everyone to read opens the minds to what teaching
everyone to read basically creates a marketplace of information for
the information that these minds want to see and hear.
And these minds want to see and hear things in
general that make them feel like they the audience matter,
you know, Slava Ukraini, Right, you know, basically, you know,
suddenly it's not a baseball game anymore. It's not the world.
It's a war. But you know, the sort of somewhere
in today's like understanding of politics, like you know, the
war in the Ukraine, and you know the World Cup
and Eurovision kind of all blend together in a way.
They're all sort of this like kind of fan spectacle thing.
And so the sense that basically the ideas that blossom
in these minds like the bacteria that turn into you know,
big blobby things on your plate of agar, the ideas
that blossom in in this this you know, basically fertile
science experiment that you've created by you know, letting telling
everyone they can read anything and teaching them in fact
to do so. Is you know what blossoms in that
is basically ideas that feel like believing in this idea
helps you matter. And of course this is the same
thing as like Mosco's political formula, because then you can
basically say, okay, you know, it matters that I'm like
rejecting Roberty Lee. It matters that I'm defacing this statue
because it will help my African American countrymen lead a
more dignified life, you know, by remembering that these statues
of their oppressors are not among them or something you
have that some connection to something that's good, that's done.
And you know, at the end of this, basically everyone
who knew Haven is going to Yale, you know, and
the or something like that, right, you know, And and
so this connection the thing about psychologically feeling the need
to matter. Is that this connection can be a little diffuse.
Nobody really reality checks it. Nobody wants to know if, hey,
maybe spray painting a statue of Roberty Lee won't do
anything for black lives at all, right, you know, but
that's sort of that possibility. You know. It's like when
when he says there's little optimism in Burnham's view of
human nature, he's talking about basically the lack of the
sort of rosy glow that kind of leads from these
things that are conventionally said to like matter in a
good way, to like what you can do and what
you can believe, and like you know, and and sort
of the reason that I go kind of deeply into
this is that I think it underscores sort of how
hard the problem is and how you know, it's sort
of intrinsic, not just to quote liberalism in this kind
of stalinist progressive sense than we have, but really essential
to classical liberalism, to liberalism in the nineteenth century of
the uh, you know, view of the word. This is
a disease that afflicts the free and open marketplace of ideas.
And so yeah, that's my that's my little interjection there.
And when I was reading Suicide of the West, I
made sure every time that I read the word liberal
to make sure to put a classic in front of it.
M M, because he was something there's something to be
said for the coinage shit lib. I mean, it's really
rude and disrespectful and unpleasant. But there's sort of a
reason it's kind of caught on. It's this like sort
of directly fecal binding, like I will not let this
word twist loose from my grasp, you know, I will
accompany it with the most disgusting substance on earth. I
don't know. It's you know, it's for those who like
that sort of thing. It's the sort of thing they like.
But I'm going please.
Speaker 1: Live hard work for a while. Shit lib works a
lot better now, it will be it will be around
a lot longer. Yeah, all right, sorry, John.
Speaker 2: No problem.
Speaker 1: Burnham thus harbored no illusion that a particular form of
society agrarian, theocratic, or feudal, much less socialist, liberal or democrat,
could adequately adequately restrain the appetite for power. Like Mosca,
he recognized the need and utility of a political formula
which can apparently motivate men by appealing to their sentiments.
But like Peretto, he essentially viewed all ideologies as thinly
veiled justifications for the interests of power. However, unlike Peretto,
he saw psychology as the decisive factor. Burnham retrained, perhaps
retained perhaps from his Marxist origins and economic emphasis. As
we shall see.
Speaker 2: Obviously, I also see psychology as a decisive factory.
Speaker 1: Where the analysis of power and the ruling class has
conveniently rested in the government itself. Burnham saw the managerial
class operating across the so called public private divide and
in every large organization. In effect, the bureaucrats who emerge
in Moscow and Michelle's through the iron law of oligarchy,
come to control every institution and then come to recognize
each other as an identifiable class with common interests, with
common skills, interests, beliefs and goals. All right, I think
that basically, if you're looking for a parallel and admittedly
this is falling down in the present sort of military,
if you're looking for a parallel between Just like Burnham
was an intellectual, he did not know anything about the
business world or how business works or any of that stuff.
It was basically as far from him as like the
Vampire of Japan. And so you know, understanding basically that
you know it's true that you can get sort of
so called bureaucracy. You can get outposts of very bureaucratic
bureaucracy and like HR departments and so forth in the
private sector. You can also have things in the public
sector which are run basically by command. But the main
difference is basically organizations that run on a command true
top down basis verus versus organizations that run on the
basis of procedure. And so if you basically look at
essentially the essential principle of capitalism when it's functioning normally
is on the command basis, and the essential principle of
bureaucracy is the procedural basis. Now, the procedures can be
manipulated and bent in various ways to actually sort of
exert kind of personal power or like little mafias do things,
but basically, at least the way it's supposed to operate
in a procedural, basically organization, everyone who works there has
some procedure that they're supposed to be doing. If they
encounter an exception that they don't understand that doesn't fit
in their procedure, they kick it up to their quote manager.
But their manager is not a commander. Their manager is
an exception handler. And so when weirder and weirder things happen,
it goes all the way up to the you know,
the whoever the desire is. And in the federal government
that ball can go all the way up to the president.
The president is making a decision, but you might as
well be a magic eight ball, and those can make
decisions to in the private sector, when you're a commander
or in the military, in an effective military, at least
when you're a commander, you have what it's called mission orders,
which says, basically, you're a captain, you want to take
you know, you want your lieutenant to take a hill.
You say, lieutenant, take that hill. You don't say how
he takes the hill.
Speaker 2: Heishi or they or are the reserve takes the hill.
You You just say take the hill. And that basically
that top down command structure allows sort of every every
commander to have essentially absolute authority within their specific domain,
which creates much much more flexibility, and it creates it
creates a different mindset, so that basically if you go
if you go to Prida, I guess we're not going
to deeply into preto here, but you know, he has
this theory of residues of basically sort of the lion
personality and the fox personality, and you know, the the
lion the lion is commander and the fox's bureaucrat. And
so basically when he uses this word manager in the
Mannery Drill Revolution, he's kind of confusing kind of lion
roles with fox roles. Now, as for being an identifiable class,
there's clearly this sort of college educated upper class thing
which is like a thing, right and uh the like,
and it certainly is trained by the same institutions, and
it sort of gets the same kind of recycled ideology.
But really, like you know, to say, the active heads
of the bureaus are the managers in government the same
and nearly the same in training function, skills, and habits
of thought as the managers in the industry is basically
his central thesis in this book. And unfortunately his central
thesis is just played wrong. Okay, all right, let's keep going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm fine with that.
Speaker 3: I mean you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're here to talk about Burnham because I don't
think anyone I know knows more about him than you.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker 1: In the new form of society, this is quoting now.
In the new form of society, sovereignty is localized and
administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the rules, issue
the decrees. The shift from parliament to bureaus occurs on
a world scale. The actual directing and administrative work of
the bureaus is carried on by a new man, a
new type of man. It is specifically the managerial type.
The active heads of the bureaus are the managers in government,
the same or nearly the same in training, function, skills,
habit of thought as the managers in industry.
Speaker 2: See if he pulls like every time, he's sort of
constantly spicing up his discourse by drawing this kind of
broad connection, which really fails, you know. I think in
its time, to be fair, the corporate middle manager and
the career civil servant were probably a little more similar
to each other. Perhaps it was an age of big
you know, big staging at companies and like very dynamic.
Young bureaucracies may look a little more like each other,
but you know, if he drew lines from the civil
servants to the professors who educate them, he'd be drawing
I think, much more defensible lines, but please go on. Okay.
Speaker 1: Thus, power seems as if it is decentralizing, but in
fact is concentrating and consolidating itself in a more diffuse
way across every possible institution. Note in society, if we
use Juvenile's idea of power centers being like castles, which
center power needs to capture, central power needs to capture,
the managerial class quietly takes over government while capturing every
castle to create an extremely broad central power base which
has the appearance of being made up of disparate and
separate spheres of influence. When Burnham talks about managers in
industry and managers in government, it brings to mind the
corporate middle manager and the career civil servant, but he
actually has in mind a much wider range of people
than that. Senior executives at board level. At board level
in corporations, for example, the CEO are very often managers
paid employees beyond the mid ranking civil servants, top level
advisors of every stripe, senior diplomats, communications directors, and so on,
are all managers, even the politicians themselves who sit in
parliamentary democracies. We might picture someone like Tony Blair or
Angela Merkel take on a distinctly managerial air. However, the
scope of the yeah, yeah, get.
Speaker 2: Say the next one.
Speaker 1: Okay, However, the scope of the managerial class is wider
still than this. It is not simply those who work
in and around corporations and government, but in all major
institutions across society.
Speaker 2: May keep going yeah, I mean no, let me you know,
So what we're really identifying here in a way is
sort of what forms a class is kind of two
things and or three things. It's it's or four things. Well,
there's race, let's not get into that. But then there's
basically parental inculcation of traditions, and there's institutional inculcation of traditions,
and there's work. So you know, what's common basically across
this class is, and what's to a great extent managed
to homogenize this class is simply the modern American educational program,
where basically, in order it is true that to get
you know, whether it's a private sector you know, a
job or a government job, you have to basically go
to the same institutions and basically excel at the same institutions,
and so basically the ideology or sort of the you
know even just sort of the idea of like how
to do things that is prevalent in those institutions becomes
a thing. I mean, you know what people will find
often this may have changed since since my younger days,
but you know, the like usual experience in a top
quality company of like a new high level CS grad
is that they sort of usually had to be taught
which way which end is up, and if they were
a PhD, they had to basically be taught which end
is down, and like the PhDs required much more retraining.
So you know, it's it's like there is still this
commonality in this sort of you know, these institutions create
social groups. There's the group of people who graduated from
the school of that school or whatever school. So you know,
to sort of overlook that as a class I mean,
that is a kind of classforming thing. It's just that
sort of the kind of tasks of being I mean,
the reason why being a bureaucrat is like being a
professor is that they're sort of both kind of fox positions.
They're both positions which work by exercising influence rather than
sort of command and decision and sort of all of
the lion prince, you know. Basically, one of the things
that's often cited is kind of the downfall of the
late Roman Empire was that it had this rigid separation
between being the career of being a general and the
career of being a bureaucrat, and a lot of bureaucrats
and they were all quite unmanly, and you know, there's
no one like Caesar who is a general, a writer
and an administrator. And so when you have this separation
between basically lion careers in fox careers and bureaucrats are
all sort of very very bored foxes, basically, you know,
you have a problem. But yeah, I think that's the
you know, the lion fox separation. It's just what Burnham
miss is. So I'm sorry, I'll.
Speaker 1: Stop at chapter No, that's good, you're good. Chapter three
on this I already recorded with Aaron McIntyre, who you
met when we did a stream together. Yeah, and we
went he goes deep into deep into foxes and lions there.
So what you're talking about is not going over anyone's
head if they listen to that episode chapter three.
Speaker 2: So all right, excellent, let's get going.
Speaker 1: It is worth quoting Burnham at length here. Within the
huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the labor beureauocracy
consolidates its position as an elite. The elite is sharply
distinguished in training, income, income habits, and outlook from the
ordinary union member. What's great is that these people still exist.
Speaker 2: But I don't think they actually do anything at all,
So maybe it's a third kind of career.
Speaker 1: The trends extends to the military world, the academic world,
the nonprofit foundations, and even auxiliary organizations of the un
of the un armies. Of the un armies are no
longer run by fighting captains, but by Pentagon style managerial bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: That's a bit more true than it was eighty years ago.
Speaker 1: But within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen about deliberating
administrators in the forties. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Proliferating administrators have
risen above students, teaching, the teaching faculty, alumni, and parents
their power positions.
Speaker 2: This isn't this is this isn't. This isn't. From the man.
This is much later. This is because you wouldn't be
talking with the United Nations in the middle, right, right, right, Okay, yeah,
this is still this is probably written in the sixties,
I think.
Speaker 1: But well, this is from the from Managing the Managers.
He mentioned that the one that he wrote in nineteen
sixty to update to consolidate and do a consolidation. So yeah, yeah,
all right, and yeah I noticed that there's.
Speaker 2: Still there's still forty one. Yeah, yeah, there's still been
some proliferation of administrators since nineteen sixty one. Statistics will show.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry going, The Great nonprofit foundations have been transformed
from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic basis of managerial
administrative power. And I should read everybody. Everyone should read
Renee Wormser's foundations, their power and influence. He was the
chief council of the only Congressional committee that ever actually
investigated the Great Foundation. Please keep going, I'm writing that down.
I'll the worm Sir W. Worm Seer. United Nations has
an international echelon of managers entrenched in the secretariat.
Speaker 2: When was the last time you heard about the United Nations?
Isn't that amazing? It's still there. It's just like ticking
along sitting there in Turtle Bay. But like, basically it
used to be so relevant. You had these fiery speeches
at the United Nations. I believe the Chief Justice of
the US actually stepped down Arthur Goldberg to become the
ambassador to the UN felt to be a very high
profile position. And it's just like avoid it's incredible. But
as far as I know, they're still spending money and
parking their cars illegally, but.
Speaker 1: And taking up really expensive friggin riverfront property right there.
Speaker 2: I know, I know it could be given to the
home of the underprivileged, but that's exactly what I was thinking, exactly,
turn Turtle Bay into a kind of a Kowloon walled
city of homelessness. Would see, like, what is the record
for how many you can pack into you know, I'm
sorry going Actually.
Speaker 1: There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of
the verse institutional fields. For example, for example, managers in
business are to stockholders as labor managers are to union members,
as government managers are to voters, as public school administrators
are to tax payers, as university and private school administrators
are to tuition payers. And fun contributors. Yeah, it's just
very going. When Burnham was writing, the managerial class had
not fully consolidated its powers, so the truth of what
he is saying was not readily visible to all but
the most astute observers. Detractors would often focus on irrelevant
details and incorrect predations while missing the bigger picture. At
the time of writing, in the twenty twenties, when all
these organizations appear to speak with one voice when none
dare to disagree, the truth of Burnham's analysis appears so
obvious as to seem trite. In fact, the scope now
extends beyond what even he envisioned, to encompass practically every
major church denomination too.
Speaker 2: Do they still have, you know, denominations or is it
just all like the Church of like pride flag?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean yeah, technically legally there was from my
research back in way back in two thousand and one.
In two thousand and one, there was fifty thousand Protestant
denominations registered in the United States that had to double
their triple by now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, yeah, well, well, and they're all lit
and well, at least you know, three quarters of them
are our pride flag in the other quarter is QAnon.
But sorry, going pretty much these are true religions, but
I exaggerate, this is exaggerations. I mean, it's only twenty
twenty two. It's only twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Even the Holy Roman Empire has been paused, all right.
So indeed, where Marxists believed that the decisive factor in
history and society is ownership of the means of production,
Burnham argued that the relationship between ownership and control has
been severed due to the rise of limited liability corporations,
which SCA Bond shows were always illegal creation rather than
a facet of the free market.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't I don't know what rat hole
we're going down here, But like I feel like basically
Burnham knows about as much about limited liability corporations as
he does about like, you know, deliver of the lobster.
I mean, but like, I mean, I think it's green deliver,
But I yeah, I just yeah, anyway, Yeah, let's let's
let's let them say more about public corporations and then
have have my opinion there.
Speaker 1: Okay, So quoting the divorce of control or power or
power from ownership has been due in large parts of
the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family,
or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the
common shares of a corporation, the legal owners could control
its affairs, even if they no longer actually conducted the business.
The operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents. But
when the enterprise became more vast in scope, and at
the end at the same time the stock certificates became
spread in small bundles among thousands of persons, the managers
were gradually released from subordinations to the nominal owners. The
facto control passed for the most part to non owning managements.
Speaker 2: All Right, all right, all right, all right, all right,
hold up, hold up, hold up. So you know, basically,
I feel like there's something that this motherfucker does not
know about business. And I've worked in a number of businesses,
I've done business, I've started businesses of owned businesses, and
and like there's something really basic the of the nature
of business. And I think, not not just James Burnham,
but like most people like fundamentally at a certain level,
just don't understand, which is, they don't understand the purpose
of a business, like the purpose of a business, and
really it's like any business. The purpose of a business,
I know, this will come as a shot, is to
make money, like you know so so. And what's important
about this relative to this question of ownership is that
the whole concept of if you imagine businesses having like
other like nefurious purposes. Let's say you pretended that your
purpose was to make money, but your real purpose was
to conquer Internex Mexico. You know, then you'd be like
sort of pretend or turn the world into paper clips
another fine Internet example. You know, you'd be pretending to
make money, but you'd actually be engaged in this other thing.
And presumably this other thing would be the direction of
the owners. So the owners, you'd have a little cabal
of people of this company that pretended to be mining
gold but was actually plotting the invasion of Baja. Let's
just say Baha, you know, and they would be doing
gold mining things, but also like bah and invading things, right,
you know. Whereas the thing is that every company does
something different, Every company has a different sort of purpose.
In companies in the olden days used to be defined
by corporate charters that limited them to a specific purpose.
Anything else was held ultra virius or out of bounds.
That concept is something of a dead letter. Your gold
mining company that starts selling dental flaws. But even if
it starts selling dental flaws, its purpose is selling the
flaws will be to make money. So what makes a
company work really well is the reason. It doesn't matter
who the owners are or how many bundles amongst thousands
of persons. The you know, the ownership is spread among
the interest of all of the owners is completely aligned.
They're not cared to change the world or like create
environmental sustainability or whatever. They're here to make money. And
because they're all here for exactly the same purpose, it's
like a laser, it's like coherent light. Their purpose is
completely aligned. I've always you ever seen it like a
European company in like Spain or something, and instead of
you know, co or ink after it has the letters
say do you know what essays stand for?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: What is the stand for? It stands for anonymous society,
and it's a what a corporation is is an anonymous society.
So first of all, it doesn't matter who the fucking
owners are, Okay, they're they're just the people who get checks,
you know, and the only way it matters is basically
if they look at the company and they're like, something
is not going on right here. We're not invting ba Well,
forget the baha. No, this is we're not mining enough gold,
like maybe the CEO is stealing half the gold, and
then they can step in and do something. So the
second thing to understand about corporate governance is that it
has two layers. It has a board and it has
the shareholders. The shareholders elect the board. This election is
almost always completely meaningless. Actually, if even the board is
involved in managing the company, something is probably fucked. And
if the shareholders are involved, there's like war in heaven
or like a proxy battle or like something is just fucked.
And you know, but in a smaller company and a
little bitty company like the kind I've been involved, it
means if the shareholders involved, it means something is fucked. Okay,
So in the normal and even if the board is involved,
something as fucked. The role of the board is really
should be like what does Mark Zuckerberg's board do? Like, Actually,
Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute ruler. His board has no
power over him at all. So basically they just meet
and say hi, Mark. You know, nice job. Maybe they
have some thoughts and views, but it doesn't matter. You know,
Google's board. What's the name of the president of Google,
Sandeep or something. Yeah, yeah, and he Google's board actually
has control over him. But you know, obviously he's doing
a fine job. Stock keeps going up, revenue keeps going in,
web keeps getting shittier, So it's fine. But I mean,
the web keeps getting shittier is an effect I'm convinced
of Google. But it's not Google's intent. It's not like
invading It's an externality. It's not an intentional externality like
invading Baha. So the thing is basically, in a normal company,
there are no acts of intentional externality that flow from
the owners, whether it's one owner or you know, all
the everyone on the Nasdaq, there's sort of no intentionality
that goes into the management of the company. The only
reason why you have anything but the top down hierarchy
from the CEO or president or whatever down is basically
do it act as an accountability layer in case the
CEO loses its touch or gets a brain tumor needs
to be replaced. For some other reason. And so you know,
from the CEO down, it's simply an army. And just
as an army's I mean, an army has much more
complicated tasks than a company, because the company's job is
just to make money. An army is like, well, do
I conquer this? Do I conquer that? Do I build
you know, peace? Do I make it? Does it and
call it piece? You know, like, none of those questions
of purpose are relevant for the company. Its goal is
just to make money. And so this is something very
fun mentally different from sort of anything that exists in
these kind of procedural bureaucracy systems and oft okay, all
right onward.
Speaker 1: In effect, Burnham's key insight was to apply Michelle's iron
law of oligarchy to shareholders and corporate managers and then
to apply the same logic to every other organization.
Speaker 2: Murray Rothbart, the great Murray Rothbard, I think he had
a number of laws. But what of Rothbard's laws, which
ironically may have affected Rothbart to some extent, was that
everyone puts most the most attention into the thing that
they're the most wrong about. Because Burnham was literally right
about everything else except for this. But like but that's
his key insight. I'm sorry, going okay.
Speaker 1: Burnham's conception of the behavior and methods of managerial elites
owes a lot to Michelle's. They look after their own
interests at the expense of those whom they are supposed
to represent.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, see, see, if you're working, you know
that's true in a bureaucratic elite, in a corporate elite. Basically, no,
anyone who's a middle manager at a business is well
aware that the purpose of business is business is to
make money, and so basically like looking after your own
interests in that sense, it's like with taking kickbacks from
like your purchasing manager or something like. That's something that's
sort of basically non existent. I would go further and
say that what Burnham is doing is he's basically taking
all of the bad press that has already by this
time been aimed at evil corporations, and he has this
aha moment and he's like, what if we we could
redirect that at these fucking bureaucracies by calling them the
same thing. It's just a typical rightist like three cushioned
pool shot that like just lands the eight ball in
the corner pocket.
Speaker 1: Quoting ting cuball okay, so scratch okaya quoting. Once the
managers consolidate their position within an institution, their objective interests
no longer fully correspond to the entrants interests of the
other groups involved voters, owners, members, teachers, students, or consumers.
At a decision on dividends, mergers, labor contracts, prices, curriculum,
class sized, scope of government operations, armament strikes, et cetera.
May serve the best interests of the managers without necessarily
contributing to the well being of the other groups.
Speaker 2: See the reason why. You know this is true in
every group except the sort of corporate structure. The corporate structure.
It's not true in because basically corporate, you know, like
the military discipline of actually having to win your wars,
corporate discipline of actually having to make money sort of
keeps organizations tight, so they actually unless they're you know,
this breaks down a little bit in like really gross monopolies.
I think really gross monopolies are gross, But in like
a normal capitalist environment, everything is basically has you know,
is sort of there's no slack in that because that
slack should be sort of instantly sucked out into profit.
And so you have these organizations where basically people are
just used to like executing shit without slack. And then
you go over to the post Office and you're like,
why is this different, right, you know? And it's different
because the whole theory of the post Office as managers too,
the post Office is a corporation. Okay, it loses a
little bit of money. You know, who else loses money? Uber? Right,
you know? But Uber isn't run like the post Office.
And you know, and but maybe if you made Uber
a government department and give it one hundred years to mature,
it would be run like the post Office. And in fact,
I'm pretty sure it would be. And so like that
that difference of you know, basically, for the managers to
be pursuing their own self interest is a kind of slack,
which are basically tense. You know, organization that's running efficiently
is it's not going to do any more than a
car that's running efficiently is not going to like belch
like gasoline fumes at the tailpipe all right onward.
Speaker 1: Their ends are almost entirely self serving and self justifying,
focusing on problems that expand their control and power.
Speaker 2: Again, this is the case of the problems are like
successful memes that make people, make people feel important, going
back to earlier like you know, yes, I'll let you
keep going.
Speaker 1: Because talk about talk about the progressives.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right?
Speaker 1: Quoting managerial activity tends to become inbred and self justifying.
The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for
the sake of its managers, not the managers. For the enterprise,
a high percentage of the time high percentage of the
time of the managers and their staff is spent on
housekeeping and other internal problems. Self justifying managerial control tends
to keep a live operations which have little social purpose
other than to nourish an enclave of managers. This is
conspiculously true of govern Many acute, expensive, prom expensive problems
which our society faces, for example, in agriculture, radio, TV, railroads, finance,
et cetera, are largely manufactured by the managerial agencies founded
to solve them.
Speaker 2: Go on okay.
Speaker 1: Here, one might think of the issue of climate change
or the response to the COVID nineteen pandemic. In both cases,
every solution to the problem entails expanding the remit of
the managers, creating new jobs for managers and instituting new
power centers from which managers can control the masses.
Speaker 2: Stop there. So basically, when you say every solution to
the problem, again, if you just kind of flip your
lens slightly and say, an idea will be seen as
a solution by bureaucrats in a network like this, an
idea will be seen as promising if it offers that
capacity for expansion. So if you can basically pose it
as a solution to a problem which is within the
remit of some small oligarchy, and it also sort of
is an idea that has impact on within that oligarchy,
if it lets you expand your remit and create new
jobs and institute new power centers, it will be seen
as a very sweet idea whoever discovered And you know,
the best ideas are like America, Like someone discovers this
idea and then just like a whole flock of professors
can like descend on it, right, you know, and you
know there's sort of space enough for everyone. This is
like the dream idea. Normally it's pretty cramped, and so
that sort of way of thinking about it is like you're, like,
where do the ideas of these solutions come from. Where
does the idea in COVID nineteen or the idea that
really created COVID nineteen that we have to go around
and collect all the back coronaviruses. Where does that idea
come from? Why is that a popular idea? And why
once we collect them, do we have to genetically engineer
them to be more dangerous? And you know, and so
the idea, you know, it would seem that among virologists,
whose purpose in life is to control viruses, that gain
of function experiments would be the opposite direction from you
might be more interested in like loss of function. Like
this is literally how you create a traditional vaccine is
by you know, partly loss of function, right, And so
the fact that you're studying like gain of function is
like why is that so exciting and interesting? And and
you know, eventually it creates like it's not that the
people who are doing these experiments were like, we're going
to create a pandemic and then we're going to get
more money because we're the virologists and it's a virus pandemic.
But that's in fact sort of the feedback loop that happens.
That literally happened. I mean, we're spending more money than
ever on finding the back all all the back coronaviruses
is like fucking pokemon out there, you know, and we're
training them, so you know, and so you know, the
like the fact that these ideas of solutions basically prosper
in a liberal marketplace of ideas or within the expert
marketplace of ideas, especially because you know, nobody in virology
cares what like you know, Linda Lean Topeka thinks of virology.
It's the expert network that matters. But within the expert network, basically,
the idea that here's this kind of research that everyone
is funded to do and that looks very, very impactful
is like, actually bad is not going to be a
popular idea. And the idea that like you know, who
the heck prospers in an academic career by like killing
the guy in the I office is funding like doesn't
work that way, you know. And you may not be allies,
you may not be working on the same grant, but
at least you'd better be a team player. And so
just the very nature of these oligarchies tends to promote
these kinds of basically oligarchical political.
Speaker 1: Formulas onward in addition, the managerial class is anti democratic
in practice, though not in rhetoric. Managerial predominance tends towards
regimentation and the suppression of active democracy. The rising power
of a managerial group is in a given institution is
in fact usually equivalent to a lessening in whatever form
of democracy is relevant. In other words, the power of
the stockholder, voter, member, consumer, faculty, tax payer, etc. Decreases
as the power the manager increases. The combination of managerial groups,
as when there is a collusion between labor and business management,
means the decline of democracy in the conjoined fields. In
this connection, we must remember that totalitarium is totalitarianism is
nothing more than an integrated front of managerial groups, achieved
either by mutual agreement or unilateral coercion.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, there's a silver lining in every cloud,
I mean, you know, but the yeah, I mean, you know,
it's like, I mean, if you can imagine democracy on
the scale of even a small institution, I mean, like,
imagine a restaurant in which the diners vote on the food.
Imagine a restaurant in which the staff votes on the food.
And that's just a restaurant, you know, Imagine a movie
which is made by the votes of the cast and
the crew. Right, you know, this would be like some
ridiculous sixties experiment and it would be like unwatchable, just
improv of the fucking thing, you know. And so the
sense of basically like again, he's sort of I think
what Burnham adopts in later life is something that happens
to some pundits who become important. They basically are like, wow,
people are actually responding to my words and making decisions
because of them. And I'm gonna instead of writing sort
of or like looking as coldly as I can to
see what is true, I will be like, what will
be the useful, powerful, effective thing to say? And so
the reason why Burnham doesn't look too closely into is
like bogus manager of bureaucrat sort of analogy or like
why he's like, oh, this is anti democracy? Well, democracy
is the cult of the age. So I'm going to
rate that it's anti democracy. And that's like, you know,
bad is like, you know, it's beneath him in a way.
It's like beneath the author of the Machibellians. Okay, they're
also practically they are also practically impossible to dispense with
going to the interchangeable nature of managers. Even today, though
individual managers and business can lose their jobs, a napoleonic
campaign is needed to get rid of a corporate management group.
As for government or educational administrators and trade union officials,
a nuclear explosion would hardly be enough to dislodge them. Yeah,
so the latter is certainly true. It would have to
be a big, big explosion.
Speaker 1: Firing one manager will simply result in another one taking
his place. He will have the same managerial taste, interest, ideas,
goals and so on as the last one. You can
just read bureaucratic there. And that should be a specific
warning to the people in the proposed Knicks administration who
are working on the schedule f problem. Go on, why
did this change come about? For Burnam, it is no
great secret quoting There is no mystery in this shift.
It can be correlated easily enough with the change in
character of the state's activities. Parliament was the sovereign body
the limited state capitalism. The bureaus are the sovereign bodies
of the unlimited state of managerial society. Indeed, much of
the managerial revolution is devoted to contrasting capitalism, by which
Burnham means the small state, laissez faire bourgeois capitalism of
nineteenth century with managerialism. The differences between capitalism and managerialism
manifest themselves in their respective ideologies. Capitalist societies promote individualism, opportunity,
natural rights, especially the rights of property, freedom especially freedom
of contract, private enterprise, private initiative, and so on. These
ideas justified profit and interest. They showed why the owner
of the instruments of production was entitled to the full
product of these instruments, and why the worker has no
claim on the owner except for the contracted wages.
Speaker 2: I mean, but sorry, going going, I mean, so one
of the you know, the trends of the time is
this sense of like big and bureaucratic is good. It's
sort of like the like like remember like the Japan
is taking over everything, business craze in the in the eighties,
like black Rain, you know, like and so basically there's
this sort of thing that is like looks back at
kind of eighteenth century capitalism and also sees it as
kind of more of an abstraction, whereas in fact it's
just like large bodies of men being commanded in a
military style just to make money, not to conquer and like.
And so the extent to which that is that rather
than the sort of classical liberal ideology, things that he
talks about are kind of the essence of nineteenth century
business and though he doesn't realize it, you know, because
of this kind of fad for twentieth century business as well.
Speaker 1: Go on, Burnham notes that where these were once progressive
slug in nineteen forty one, they are recognized as revolutionary
and as the cry of the cries of Tories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an important that's that's that's an important point.
So basically one of the things you know, classical liberalism
in say that you know, the old Manchester day is
going back to like the really the first half of
the nineteenth century that is always basically a left wing
standpoint that is basically striking down sort of thrown altar
and monopoly. And so there's just this you know, because
it's sort of a destructive force of these old powers
that be in its nature it's inherently destructive. Of course,
once the old powers are gone, you know, and new
powers arise, that force can is also an acid to
those new powers, and so it becomes a right wing force.
That's why, that's why we perceived capitalism as right wing
now and one hundred and fifty years ago is left wing.
I'm sorry, gonehead.
Speaker 1: In contrast, managerialism is oriented away from the pre an
individual and towards the public collective, away from free enterprise
and towards planning, away from providing opportunities, and towards providing jobs.
Less about rights and more about duties. One must remember,
you got something, yeah, yeah, No, keep going. That's just
what I was, just a phantomst wrong, Okay. One must
remember here that Burnham did not only have the United
States in mind, but also the Soviet Union in Nazi
Germany as managerial states. The Soviets and Germans were more
blatant in their messaging than the Americans, who felt the
need to pay lip service to the older ideologies. In
a passage that seems shocking to read today, perhaps owing
to eighty years of propaganda between nineteen forty one and now,
Burnham notes that the masses in Britain, France, and America
simply did not want to fight World War II for
the elites, that their messaging was tired and outmoded, and
simply failed to animate the young men, despite mass unemployment
at the time. He contrasts that with the picture in Germany,
where the mass is enthusiastically supported Hitler. He argues that
that it is shallow and absurd to imagine that mass
support for the German war effort was down to terrorism
and skilled propaganda alone. Rather, the cause was genuinely popular.
I think this is I mean, maybe it's like exaggeration.
I think it is correct that World War Two is
more popular in Germany than at first and with the Allies,
especially as the Germans started up by winning. I would
say important to remember that in World War One the
war is much more popular than World War Two.
Speaker 2: Just worth noting, Okay, I'm boying.
Speaker 1: In France, meanwhile, the masses were passive and did not
have the will to fight because democracy and capitalism were
not causes that animated them whatsoever. He points out the
awkward and undeniable fact that both Britain and the USA
had to resource to the draft rather than relying on
millions of enthusiastic and willing bollum tiers at a mass
at a time of mass unemployment. However, managerialism ultimately had
a globalizing tendency and totalitarian character. As Burnham warned in
nineteen sixty, the directing managers of each nation should preserve
a healthy remnant of national individuality from becoming dissolved into
the global managerial state that looms under a variety of labels.
As the ideal goal of a total managerial society. However,
it seems that Burnham's thinking retains a residually Marxist economism,
whereby material conditions ultimately create the need for ideologies, or
in Marxist jargon, the bases create the superstructure, the base
creates the superstructure. The process by which capitalistic firms become
managerial is driven initially by economic and practical concerns, and
only latterly by ideological ones. Burnham argues that managerialism comes
about initially because of the economic need for startup capital,
especially in times of contraction in which the interest rates
are high and investors are risk averse, such as during
the Great Depression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'll just leave that one like, Yeah,
I wouldn't. I wouldn't even know where to start to
try and refute that argument. It's a piece of the
nineteen forties that just hasn't really worked out intellectually. I'm sorry,
going all.
Speaker 1: Right, so quoting the internal crisis of entrepreneurial capitalism compels
the expansion of the state. Massive amounts of new capital
cannot be mobilized from private sources and must come directly
or indirectly from the government. The manager is indispensable to
the technical processes of processes of modern production. Find cooperation
with the state and the use of its co coercive
monopoly valuable for the continuation of production and for their
own interests. Here, the defender of entrepreneurial capitalism might object.
Can argue that a firm might raise funds by floating
themselves in the stock market as an ipo, in other words,
issuing shares in exchange for liquid capital. But the publicly
traded company relies on the state for its for its
legal status, and automatically comes under increased regulation and managerial oversight. Furthermore,
in practical terms, control over such companies is often handed
over to managers. Okay, I mean this is like sort
of there's a like broad rightness here maybe, But really
what's controlling the publicly traded company is that it relies
on the press, which really uh, you know, for its
pr status. And we live in a press run state,
and so basically where you know, the two forms of
governance that really drive things are the press and basically, uh,
you know, the what Christopher Calwell calls the Second American Constitution,
but it's actually like the fifth by which I mean
like the law of protected classes. And then so the
you know, right in a way, I'm not sure the
like yeah, I mean like regulation doesn't matter. I don't know,
but like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's sort of a little doubling down here.
Let's let's keep going, okay.
Speaker 1: For example, one of the great American tycoons, Henry Ford,
died in nineteen forty seven. Although his son Edsel had
technically been the president of the Ford Motor Company from
nineteen nineteen until his death in nineteen forty three, Henry
had always assumed de facto control over the company. The
board and the management had never seriously defied him. The
Roosevelts administration had developed a plan to nationalize the Ford
Motor Company should Henry becoming capacitated. Thus, he resumed direct
control of the firm before his death. Owing to his
old agent declining mental health and somewhat jul what's going.
Speaker 2: On, curs, I'm just raising.
Speaker 1: My Before his death, owing to his old age and
declining mental health and somewhat kajold by his wife and
daughter in law who owned controlling controlling stakes in the firm,
he agreed to hand over the day to day affairs
of running the Ford Motor Company to his grandson, Henry
Ford the Second It was soon losing nine million a month,
and the corporate manager, Ernest Our Ernest Our Breach, that's ironic,
was hired to become executive vice president and then board chairman.
The Ford Motor Company became publicly traded in nineteen fifty six. Thus,
even though the family, the Ford family retained a forty
percent ownership of this company, it can be said to
have fully transitioned into being a note of managerialism after
the death of its founder, Henry Ford, who once commanded
it as a visionary entrepreneur and leader.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the separation between basically, you know, when you
separate kind of family or concentrated ownership, you know, companies
like uh, you know Facebook today from say a company
like Google whose ownership is distributed. You see that there's
not a whole lot of difference in behavior between Facebook
and Google. There's a little bit of difference with basically
someone like Elon Musk who sometimes does maybe kind of
have some ulterior motives, except he doesn't seem to want
to buy Twitter unfortunately. But the you know, maybe there's
some motives there, I don't know, but sort of the
you know, again, the sort of the obsession with this
kind of Robert Baron muck Ricker storyline where which is
just this really tired storyline even by the forties, where
basically you're like, oh, the evil Robert Baron, you know,
like is plotting to invade Baja, you know, to find, hey,
anyone up there have some Baja Baja Baja vehicles. It'll
be like storm Storm Area fifty one, except storm Baha.
But the yah you're hard to hear first but on
the peak and show but storm Baha. But yeah, I mean,
you know that there's there's a difference between those things.
Is sort of not particularly great in a way, and
so yeah, he's just he's just barking up the wrong tree.
On the difference between sort of managerialism and I mean,
Ford is still a perfectly a fishing company that efficiently
makes cars and really hasn't done anything else besides make cars.
Its cars maybe a little less exciting than they were
after the death of the Elon Musk of cars, but
the you know, they're still perfectly good cars. It's not
like for his transition entirely into making like experimental theater
or something. It couldn't because basically those strings are tight, right,
you know. Whereas the Ford Foundation, I guess we're about
to get to the Ford Foundation. By the way, you
mentioned I think ernest Our Breaches is a really cool name.
But I recently met someone living in Austin who has
the coolest name of all the time. He's actually an academic,
he writes. I think he's written for like City Journal
or Manhattan Institute or something like that. He works on homelessness,
and as well he should, because his name is Judge Glock.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, exactly.
Speaker 2: Isn't that amazing? That's so awesome that you didn't even
make it up? Judge, Yeah, yeah, oh wow, yeah, yeah,
it's an old Swiss name apparently. Anyway, I fucking brilliant,
you know, not not even artificial, or so I'm told. Anyway.
The same can be said for the going.
Speaker 1: The same can be said, and doubly so for the
Ford Foundation. Shortly after Henry Ford's death, Henry Ford the
second signed a document stating that the Ford family would
exercise no more influence over the Foundation than any other
board member. He regretted the decision for the rest of
his life. Since then, the Ford Foundation has supported a
most exclusively left wing progressive causes that would make Henry
Ford a well known social conservative, that's to say, at
least mildly mildly putting it to turn in his grave.
For example, between nineteen seventy and twenty ten, the Ford
Foundation gave forty six million, one hundred and twenty three thousand,
one hundred and thirty five dollars to LGBT causes alone.
This is typical of how managerialism captures institutions and turns
them against their original purposes. For managerial ones, see when
you get all the way over on the other side
of the aisle, managerialism. Managerial is just another euphemism for communists,
right and basically, well, he says, that's surely afterward, I guess.
But like if you hear if when you're you're talking
in this sense, you hear the word managerial. Just substitute
communist and it will make perfect sense. In fact, you
could do it as you read.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Here left wing progressivism and communism are synonymous, since the
solutions of the former always involved the expansion of the latter.
To stay with the to stay with the example of
LGBT causes. These may seem remote from somebody from something
as technical as communism, but consider the armies of HR officers, diversities,
are as, equality ministers, and so on that are supported
today under the banner of LGBT LGBT and used to
police and control enterprises. The philanthropic endeavors of the Ford
Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to
set up new power centers for communism under the guide
of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Jesus, it does work.
Speaker 2: Oh my God.
Speaker 1: Similar case studies can be found in the issue issues
as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change,
mental health, and the management of the COVID nineteen pandemic.
The logic of communism is to create invisible problems which
can an effect, never truly be solved, but rather can
permanently support commune jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard
such as unconscious bias, training, net zero carbon, the ratio
of men and women on executive boards, or whatever else.
In the communist state of the Soviet Union, we hold on, well,
don't we do that? In the managerial state of the
Soviet Union, such managers would simply be called the Commissars
of the CPSU. In the communist state of the United States,
they will simply be called things like Equality, Diversity and
Inclusion Officer for Ford Motor Company. But their function is identical.
In both cases, their post and its duties are backed
by the full force of the law of the law
in the state. The latter is an example the fused
political economic apparatus Burnham describes in the end, Franklin, eleanor
Roosevelt did not have to nationalize Ford. Even if the
US government and the Ford Motor Company have the ostensible
appearance of being separate entities, in actuality, they move as one,
expouse the same values, enforce the same compliance policies, and
so on, as if they were two sub departments of
the polit bureau. Well, they don't make the same kind
of tough trucks, you know, I mean the uh you know,
like imagine, imagine if the Department of Transportation had to
make the F one fifty right, you know, I mean right, right, right.
And so you know, the thing is that where you
see these little communist colonies in these basically capitalistic enterprises
are hr PR sort of stuff like that that basically
kind of take over the brain of the corporation and
kind of team it a little bit to you know,
provide jobs to protected classes, you know, to make it say.
And do you know there's this huge list of corporations
that have fire filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court
asking the court to be more n I don't mean more,
I mean I mean to take race into account when
designing its admissions, you know, the I mean yeah, right.
So these are clearly these kind of little colonies where
most of the cells are still you know, the host,
but like the cells from the alien thing that goes
in here, you know, are kind of doing most of
the work of having.
Speaker 2: Creating two subdepartments of the polyp Bureau, but they're very
different departments.
Speaker 3: Go on.
Speaker 1: Thus we can see that although to thus we can
see that although to retain the Marxist lexicon, the economic
base determines the ideological superstructure. In Burnham, communism also uses
the ideology ideological superstructure, which is to say, the slogans
of social justice or climate change, et cetera, to expand
its economic base and therefore its control. God damn it,
that works too well.
Speaker 2: If you go. If you go to Google and grams,
which lets you graph the use of words and phrases
across time, and graph the use of words of the
phrase social justice, which means by themselves these words mean
almost nothing. If you grasp the use of the words
social justice from say, eighteen eighty till twenty twenty, you'll
be impressed. Okay, wrote it down Papava.
Speaker 1: The role of public relations in general is somewhat taken
for granted and Burnham and reduced to propaganda, even though,
as we saw earlier, he was acutely aware of the
power of the press to brainwash the public. He was
also aware that the United States had come to be
dominated by Preto's foxes, who rely almost exclusively on persuasion
to get their way. This aspect of communism takes a
subordinate role in Burnham's work, but is massively expanded upon
in the work of Samuel T. Francis, which we will
explore shortly. While Burnham worked chiefly in the diagnostic mode,
he makes some suggestions as to how Western societies might
escape communist totalitarianism. In fact, this is the central thesis
of his new of his next book, The Machiavellians, Burnham
had a belief in a pluralistic society in which the
powers in which power restrains power.
Speaker 2: I think he's also wrong about this, although he doesn't
spend actually most of his time in The Machiavelians talking
about the solution. He just wants you to think that
there's one out there and that it's not grim. You know,
saying power restrains power is like in the classical political science,
the political science of Greece and Rome, the phrase for
basically competing powers would be imperium in imperio. That is
sort of power within power, and it's generally held to be,
you know, a design fallacy. And usually power doesn't restrain power.
One power conquers the other power and then since that
sets it up as a front man or a yes
man rather but sorry gone.
Speaker 1: Thus his solution to it was to communist totalitarians say
to set managers from different spheres against.
Speaker 2: Commissars, commissars, bureaucrats. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, from different or
we could just go back, we can go back to managerial.
I think we've made the point. Let's go back to Bagaria,
all right.
Speaker 1: Thus, his solution to managerial totalitarianism was essentially to set
managers from different spheres against each other as to prevent
them from uniting. The only way to manage the managers,
in short, is to keep them busy enough managing or
countervailing each other to guarantee that they won't unite and
spend all their time managing the rest of us. This
is substantially the same solution as Moscow's juridical defense and
separation of powers. However, as Jugenell's work shows historically, and
as history since Burnham was writing has shown, this is
easier said than done, because power is logic always tends
towards centralization. And it seems to me that the managers
have a vested interest in convergence at the time. What
do you yeah, I mean yeah, they don't. Like they
sort of they converge because their thoughts naturally converge because
they have the same ideas. Really, it's like if you
expect the house, you know, if you expect one, you know,
Harvard to be left wing and Yale to be right wing,
what you will find is that the managers in Harvard
and Yale cannot be said against each other because they
all believe the same thing, despite the fact that they
don't work for each other. And so really you're just
your your pluralism is.
Speaker 2: Not getting you anything. And I think that that's what
the h the author this this Pervini chap is getting it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, like what is the what would be the
main difference in ideology between like Tony Blair and Facebook?
Speaker 2: Is there one? I'm sorry you see yeah? No, yeah, no,
I didn't hear anything. Oh you're not hearing it. No,
it's because there isn't one. There's it's nothing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, exactly. Great podcasting here, guys, very deep, Verry,
we go very deep on this podcast.
Speaker 2: Man. Sometimes we say nothing.
Speaker 1: I know where, I know where.
Speaker 2: I am wanting to keep going, I keep going, keep
I found it. I'll tell you nothing.
Speaker 1: At the time of writing, they have achieved total global
dominance across all institutions. It strikes me that of the
possible rival nodes of power, only to have the potential
to resist this total dominance. The first or the kolopp class,
or if you prefer the independent middle class or petit
bourgeoisie wait wait wait.
Speaker 2: Wait, or it said petite with any bourgeoise, which means
little oh yeah, little yeah, yeah, I know. Just OK.
Speaker 1: Sorry, actually, this this isn't a finished copy. This is
one of that he sent me before.
Speaker 2: That was because is funny. But the first or the
cool do you prefer the sorry? Yes, the first of
the Kolott class, or if you prefer the independent middle
class or petite bourgeoisie, who are non managerial, disparate and
are not as yet organized as a minority interest group.
The second are managers at the level of national government
whose power represents a threat to global managerialism and therefore
must in the long run, be conquered and dissolved as
so many feudal castles. So long as armies are loyal
to nations rather than to global governance structures or supernatural
supra national organizations, that remains at least the foreseeable chance
that a power struggle may emerge between the traditional apparatuses
of nation states and the power centers of globalism. At present,
they are united. But if history tells us anything at all,
it is that they can change quickly. Yeah, that doesn't
seem very likely. I mean, you know, like imagine the
Pentagon pulling like a military coupe. I mean, the Pentagon
can't even invade Barbados, you know. I mean, he probably
invade Barbados, but you know, the Bahamas might be hard.
It would probably take a few days. He would probably
take a few days. Right, they'd have to clear everything
through jags, you know. But yeah, I keep going.
Speaker 1: On this score. In the Machiavelians. One thing Burnham does
add to the elite theorist is his own idea of
how revolutions take place. There is revolutionary change one when
the elite cannot or will not adjust to the new techno, technological,
and social forces. Two when a significant proportion of the
elite rejects rule, rejects ruling for cultural and esthetic activities.
Three when the elite fails to assimilate promising new elements.
Four when a sizable percentage of the elite questions.
Speaker 2: Legitimacy of its own rule. Good luck with that.
Speaker 1: Five when elite non elite reject the mythological basis of
order in the society, and finally six when the rule
in class lacks courage to employ force effectively.
Speaker 2: So I really mostly work on the basis of I
would guess one, four, and five. Maybe there's some like
three involved, but really four. You know, you laugh at
four for as a sweet spot. Four is where it's at.
Speaker 1: Man, It's you know, it's forest for forrest would brought
down the Soviet Union. Yeah, you know, it's just one
of those things that like when you read it, it
seems so absurd, but then when you look at history,
you're like, they actually do that. Four and five is
the is the core, man, It's like, it's it's central.
It's also good for the non elite to reject the
mythological basis of order in the society. Like you know,
it's like our society is supposedly run according to this
like piece of paper you know, from like two hundred
and fifty years ago. Like none of the actual parts
of the government are like basically mentioned a piece of paper,
but like we keep on keeping on. But you know,
the like yeah, it's just it's it's like when you
you know, when you're like, oh my god, they're violating
the constitution. That's like this basically fundamentally deferential, non revolutionary
form of descent. You know, I think Lenin said somewhere that,
you know, when he realized that the goal was not
to seize the levers of the machine but to smash
the machine, he really had he had anything going. And
so you know, questioning the legitimacy and rejecting the mythological
basis of order are not grasping the levers of the machine.
They're they're smashing, you know, the machine. So in a way,
Lenin is Lenin really emerges as the foremost theory of revolution.
Here with no surprise. Go to the next point, which
is really really good. Okay, it is notable that of
these six criteria, only one considers the discontent of the masses,
and even then it is only half of the point,
or in other words, five and a half out of
the six criteria concern the elites.
Speaker 2: The discontent of the masses is bs. It almost never
has an effect. If you just if you actually starve people,
they'll become like quiet as mice. It's it's like, you know, actually,
the more you know, there's this whole system of you know,
bullshit in the American political tradition that are like, the
more oppressed people are, the more you know, likely they
are to rise up and seize power. It's the opposite.
The more oppressed they are, the less likely they are
to rise up and sees power, And the worse their
conditions are, the less they'll be interested in contending for power.
Last two and a half years of should make a
lot a lot of things clear to a lot of people,
especially that a lot of the political ideology that most
people are holding on to just isn't for like kindergarteners.
It's like, yeah, so it's embarrassing. It's like you're you're
a grown man, you're a grown woman, Like why do
you care about this stuff? Yeah? All right.
Speaker 1: When considering our current situation on your and aagerial dominance,
we might say that the current elite do adjust to
new technologies, still have it insatial, satiable appetite to rule,
to not question their own legitimacy and believe their own myths.
Speaker 2: We're working on it. We're working on it. Like, yeah,
cut us a break out of you sorry, go on,
so far, so good.
Speaker 1: However, to go through the six points again, they are
at risk of mismanaging new technologies if they are too
forceful in their climate change agenda. People accustomed to driving
their own cars and enjoying other methods of travel, and
who are used to eating meat at affordable prices are
likely to revolt should these luxuries be suddenly removed. Nobody revolts,
like they're back to discontent of the masses.
Speaker 2: Ship It's like yeah, no, I mean yeah, yeah. They
had no problem being locked and no one revolted over
being lockdown. So you know, there were some people complained
a little bit. I think in Australia there was a
little pushing and shoving at some point, you know, yeah,
the penal penal and it was the penal colony just
showed itself to be they like being prisoners, yeah, somewhat
so and then and they may find some elite backing
by vested interests who still want to make money from
the massive industries associated with them. They have also not
yet found a way to manage the new social forces
unleashed by widespread resentment against mass immigration and other facets
of globalism that led to the Brexit vote in the UK,
Donald Trump in the United States, and so called populism
in Europe, most recently embodied by the meteoric rise of
Eric Zamore in France, who was who has flank Marine
lapenn by being more radical in his rhetoric to chat.
But what I like is that all of these things
are politically dead. Actually they have thrown away. It's easy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean what I saw Zamor, I was like,
when I heard him, I was like, Okay, that's not
He's not going anywhere. So the current tactic of simple
branding such people as beyond the pale insurrectionist, fascists and
nauseum has not worked in any respects since you know.
Speaker 2: Peter, since twenty fifteen. You know, Peter, when you're a dissident,
I just got to say one thing. It's really important
to keep your hand off your dick. Since twenty fifteen,
all right, keep going. In fact, four years of such
relentless rhetoric from the corporate media results it in a hand.
You can quote you can quote me on that. You
can quote me on that, but gone, oh man.
Speaker 1: In fact, four years of such a relentless rhetoric from
the corporate media results it in.
Speaker 2: Okay, corporate media, corporate media. This is an example of
exactly the same thing that Burnham is doing. He's like
taking this like stupid equation from this like illiterate like
you know, propaganda narrative. The corporate means bad. Therefore if
we call the media corporate, will mean they're bad. Actually,
like you know, there's nothing that's corporate about them in
a sense, they're disguised government departments and they're actually you know, bureaucracies.
You could say the official media. Even that's tingentious. I
just I like just saying the prestige media. But corporate
media is actually leading people down the long rat hole
because just they've you know, they've spent fifteen years going
to movies like corporation bad. You know. It's just like
in the Third Reich, you'd be like Jew bad, Jew bad,
Jew unscreened, Jew bad. Right, you know, it's like this,
like you know, and so this thing of like leveraging
these stupid two minutes hates, you know, crap is just
intellectual laziness and it should be stricken from the earth
with the red pen.
Speaker 1: In fact, four years of such a relentless rhetoric from
the corporate media resulted in the hated Donald Trump increasing
his total votes by over fourteen million people, which would
have been a resounding victory had he not been against
the most popular, the most popular presidential candidate of all time.
Speaker 2: Is he trying to say something? Here is just like
some subtext.
Speaker 1: Let's go on, I'm reading this in AA's voice when
he's being like that sarcastic.
Speaker 2: Do you want me to do some reading? I could
do some reading. I could. Do you want me to
do some reading? If you want to gut the populist
phenomena are perhaps the symptom of are perhaps a symptom
of the fact that communist dominance and dominance and convergence
will increasingly seek to dissolve the nation stated as an
obsolete unit. Indeed, globalists use separate separatist groups such as
the S and P in Scotland or the Catalan Independence
Movement in Spain, as battering rams against the national governments.
It's very interesting to notice when so nationalist parties are
either basically communist or fascist, but not like in between,
and they're appear to actually just simply be two meanings
of the word nationalist, because the meaning that refers to
the Catalan Independence movement is not the same that refers
to Hitler I'm just saying or trump in juvenili In
terms of globalist constanitute the center and separate as the peripheries.
The national governments are the subsidiaries whose feudal castles must
in the long run be destroyed. Okay, this is just
like too fertile a metaphor. I think, so long as
national governments maintain standing armies, it is possible to imagine
scenarios in which they may turn on the globalists. For example,
the populations will not brook the punitive carbon taxes that
globalists wish them to enact. Here we are in you know,
social social descent. You know again, the political incentives to
side with dissidents against globalists may be too strong for
leaders to resist. You know, I don't think the I
don't know how long the Orebone regime in Hungary will exist,
But I don't think the cause of them is carbon taxes.
I don't think that's their main issue down there in Hungary.
I could be wrong, but in any case, basically there's
plenty of Hungarian globalists. The globalists are going to win.
They always win. Like this isn't even it's just a
question how long.
Speaker 1: Do you want to read some Yeah, this is actually
the last paragraph, so awesome. The elite are also actively
turning away promising new elements, which is simply to say
talented people with the wrong political views, skin color.
Speaker 2: Or gender.
Speaker 1: Either of these people are not hired in the first
place because of the affirmative action programs and increasingly absurd
diversity quotas, or they are hired but later sacked for
transgressing the regime in some way.
Speaker 2: What color? What color? Would this never mond? Go on?
Speaker 1: In the long run, this will create an entire class
of disaffected well would be elites who will put their
who will put their skills and talents towards their eventual overthrow,
especially if they feel locked out of what would have
been their career path in a normal and well run society.
Speaker 2: I think everybody's locked out of a career path in
this abnormal and poorly run society. But go on, but day,
this is good. This is good.
Speaker 1: Furthermore, around thirty percent of people have turned decisively against
the elites in the past few years. Taken together with
disaffect it would be elites, these dissonances form a non
elite who increasingly reject the mythological basis of order in
the society where the basis is some empty managerial slogan
of social justice that becomes a precondition to enter the
workplace to.
Speaker 2: These these are your infamous dark elves, right, yeah, yeah,
Notice how well the communist slogan or social justice works there.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say that which brings us
finally to the question of force and whether the managerial
foxes are prepared to use it. Whether the oh which
brings us finally to the question of force, and whether
the communist foxes are prepared to use it against the
dissident population. Time will surely tell. But according to Burnham's criteria,
while the manager while the communist elite may look secure
and united, now they are faced with a threat that
cannot be managed using their usual tricks of persuad, says,
the people who constitute that threat have become actively hostile
to their increasingly patronizing message. Force will become necessary, and then,
as Oswald Spangler once put, it will come, will come
the hour of decision.
Speaker 2: Here I gotta read that last sentence for you man,
I gotta, I gotta force will become necessary, and then,
as Oswald Spangala once put, it will come Zallah of decision.
I was down in Austin recently and I was taking
an Uber ride and the driver was some Mexican guy
who looks really Mexican, and I have a little bit
of a Spanish and one of Austin's local disabled population.
You're doing a really weird thing with your background, like
your Internet. It's it's unerving. You know, this is actually
my house here, but you know the uh but I
like the what does it say on your shirt?
Speaker 1: It's a gas station shirt, it's from It's from Sun
Studios where all this record it used to be buildings.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Anyway, I'm in Austin and I'm talking to my
to my Uber driver in Spanish, and one of Austin's
local mentally disabled populations kind of drifts through the intersection
in this mildly leath away and you know, I just
said to this guy, I'm like, in Leveda, I'll go
on those bases. Quanto look sola plussybd dot for essay
it's left. Well, I don't, I don't. I don't think
you need my dad Spanish to understand that. I'm like,
it's left words. And he looks at me and he's like,
it's where gentle force, beautiful, happy force, you know, the
force of the surgeon and not the butcher, the force
that cleans and heels and you know, doesn't leave ugly
piles of bodies lying in the street, but force. Uh,
you know, I think that's the in a way, it's
like when you try to imagine a way out of
the solution of the armies of bureaucrats. It's not violence
that you need to imagine its force. And these are
very very different things. It wasn't violence that brought down
East Germany and had simply lost the force to cohere.
It was kind of just sucked almost like you know,
a planet being sucked into a black hole by West Germany.
We don't really have a West Germany. But the the
sense of basically this, you know, you can see how
prophetic he is in his sort of sense that basically
the kind of the core challenge is this loss of
faith and this loss of like respect for the mythological order,
and that sort of goes along with something that I
often say is kind of the correct definition of rightism,
which is really it's not a positive belief system at all,
it's just an absence of leftism. Leftism is a phenomenon
which you can study, you know, but the absence of
anything is not a phenomenon that can be studied. I
always compared to the word gentile, which doesn't refer to
a class of could be a Hindu, could be a Christian,
all we know is it's not a Jew. And you
can't say what are the qualities of gentiles? Whereas you know,
one could say that, I mean one shouldn't you know
about the Jews? Right, you know? And so the uh,
like the you know, the sense of basically abjuring the
sort of state religion is a much much clearer and
much much more important sense of dissent than like, you know,
remember when we were kids, people are like you say,
you know, I'm a capitalist, I'm a libertarian, I believe
in this, I'm a Christian. Right No, it's like, okay,
you can't believe in those things. Those they're fine things
to believe in. But what really brings all of you
dissonance together is that basically you don't believe the shit
that's on TV. And like actually reducing and moreover, there
aren't really very very good filters for like unofficial information.
So actually just like reducing your consumption of non official
information is not a bad thing as well, just like
keep your brain like empty and ready for service basically,
and like and and so there's a sense in which, basically,
you know, there's some apocalypse of something different that sweeps
these bureaucracies away. They can't be gradually reformed. And there's
also a sense that kind of the like the state
capacity that will come and do this is in the
private sector in a way, which is sort of why
the kind of unification of bureaucrats and managers is so misleading.
It's like when you look at, for example, the Obamacare
healthcare sign up shut site, which I harp on. At first,
they tried doing it with bureaucrats, and many of those
bureaucrats were in the private sector, because it's the way
DC's Beltway Bandit contracting system works. They basically were like,
we just spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to
do this thing with bureaucrats. Let's give up, let's do
it with managers instead. And they did it with managers
in it cost a few million dollars in a few weeks,
and so like there's a really radical difference in competence
there that maybe wasn't necessarily there in Burnham's day, and
like the difference has only grown greater and like more important,
and you're just really really lucky to be living in
a country that does have this, I mean, capitalism, especially
all startup you know, any kind of highlight dynamic area
of capitalism is kind of a school for kings in
a way. It's a school that basically teaches, you know,
you know, a non trivial number of like very capable
human beings to basically organize a large number of other people,
up to tens or even hundreds of thousands on a
single task. And if you compare, you know, let's imagine
imagine that, you know, people are like Afghanistan the graveyard
of empires. You're like, okay, sure, imagine that if you
basically took the management structure of Apple and you gave
Afghanistan to Apple, and you were like Tim Cook, your
new name shall be Khan, Tim Cook and Tim Khan maybe,
and you shall do with Afghanistan as you will, And
you got to conquer the place first, because we fucked
it up so badly that the Afghans are back in church.
But you know, the do with Afghanistan as you will.
Let's see where you are in twenty years. And then
you said to the people who to try to, I
guess not conquered, but of course liberate Afghanistan. You will
be like, you're now in charge of liberating Apple. You're
the new management of Apple. Let's see how far you
get with that. And you know, then we'll take a
look at our like iPhones in twenty years, and are
Afghanistan in twenty years, And I'm betting that basically probably
the iPhone would be outsold by something made in Afghanistan
and designed in Afghanistan and the like. And so this
is this huge disparity in competence is one of the
things that Burnham wrote about when he wrote about revolutions.
It's like there's sort of no obvious way for this
competence to switch over and instead of you know, affecting
just oney tiny new website of a government, to be like, no,
we're actually going to do the whole thing the Silicon
Valley way. But once you do that, just like you know,
it'll be like the end of inception. Like buildings will
be sliding into the sea everywhere, you know, and nobody
will get hurt, and you don't need to hurt these bureaucrats.
These are not violent people, right, think about it, you fire.
You know, one of my favorite you know, policies which
I point to it, you know anytime I can is
just dissolve the American Empire by basically laying off the
State Department and bring all the embassy's home, close the
t rooman buildings, shut the whole thing down. Okay, you've
got fifty thousand people who work for this organization, you know,
fifty thousand people. You know, how many divisions is that
in army terms? Is that five divisions? Like you think
about this and you're like, holy shit, this is a menace.
These are like laid off you know, FS four's or whatever,
could like, you know, seize Georgetown, and having seized Georgetown,
they'd set up picket lines. And then there's just like nah,
I know, these people both go home, right, both tender gardens. Right.
There's fifty thousand people, probably seven hundred of them on
a gun, and you know, two hundred of them have
ever been in a fistfight, and and you know three
of them have ever killed someone, you know, and and
and like you know, I mean Actually, that's the great
thing about this sort of late stage bureaucracy is that
actually it could just be pushed. It's humpty dumpty. It
can just be pushed off the wall and it'll just
fall and people don't understand that at all. But yeah,
that's my rant. Was that enough ranting at James Burnham?
It was beautiful Viva Niva, Niva the gay Italian dude,
Nima the gay Italian porn star. Yeah, that's right, that's right,
that's right, that's right. He's hung like he's hung, He's
hung like a cassowary. But all right, give you plugs.
I'm Curtis Jarvin. I write a gray mirror. I'm usually
not this vulgar, and that's gray mirror at dot substack
dot com. That's grey when with an a the American way.
And thank you so much for having me on. And
let's do this skin sometime. Thank you, Curtis.
Speaker 1: Take care, all right, tutt I want to welcome everyone
back to the Peginiana Show, returning Evelyn.
Speaker 5: How are you doing ohm good?
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, No problem.
Speaker 1: We are here to do chapter eight in the Populous Delusion.
It's called Elites and ideology, and it concentrates on the
teachings of Samuel T.
Speaker 2: Francis.
Speaker 1: You're pretty familiar with Sam, right.
Speaker 5: Oh, yes, But my experience with Sam Francis, I think
is a bit I did it backwards, so I wasn't
really familiar with him as the as a writer for
I think it was National Review and the other outlet
that I think it was Buchanan run for a while
that he wrote for, and I knew, I know he
wrote for some more kind of radical fringe stuff as well,
right from the like the eighties through the nineties, and
I've latterly can have found that stuff. But for me
it was I think I was listening to some I
think it was Edward well Shannink, the guy now that's
one of the editors for the Chronicles magazine, and he
was on somebody's stream. I think it might have even
be one academic Agents or something, and he was like, Oh,
what's the one book You've got to read there? The
question was something that he was like, Sam Francis is
Levi Ethan and its Enemies. And I thought that's interesting.
I'll give that a read and bought this big paper
paperback hard back eight hundred and forty page tome, having
only just been slightly familiar with Burning before it, so
I really dip myself in the deep end. But it's
been one of those books, but like some of the
really good Austrian works, where I'm always coming back to it.
Anything I'm looking at tangentially, I'm always like, well, did
Sam Francis mention something about this? And more often than
not he normally does. He has the same sort of
ability as Rothbard to sort of see through time, as
it were.
Speaker 1: It'd be really good to get a PDF and be
able to search it for things, because I've looked for
I've looked online for a PDF of it and I
can't find it.
Speaker 5: I think I have one. I can say to you,
all right.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 1: You send us your telegram, all right. So the way
we've done the way I'm doing this with everyone, I'm
gonna read it, stop me anytime to comment, and we'll
just go from there.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: You can interrupt me. Even a AA was interrupting me
mid sentence and it was fine, you know.
Speaker 5: As his book, after all, I suppose it was literally
interrupting himself. And I've wrote the boatway, I'm sure that's
how he rationalized it.
Speaker 1: All right, let's get this up on the screen for people.
All right, I'm gonna start reading Chapter eight, Elites and Ideology.
Speaker 2: Samuel T.
Speaker 1: Francis appears to have written Leviathan and Its Enemies in
nineteen ninety one, because this is when he dated its preface.
He did not publish it during his lifetime. He died
in two thousand and five, and it was found by
Jerry Woodruff, who was given a box of three and
a half inch computer floppy disks, one of which was
labeled in Sam's handwriting Leviathan and It's Enems Complete, dated
three twenty seven, nineteen ninety five and containing word perfect
five point one text files. It was published in twenty sixteen.
Francis had been a firebrand paleo conservative journalist who wrote
regularly regular syndicated columns as well as speeches.
Speaker 5: It's one of the things I've I really took on
from being at the mess Institute the other week. Thank God,
there are people who when these sort of writers that
we venerate pass, does someone make sure to go through
the stuff, Because from what I've seen and heard, and
I've obviously read the big preface and stuff, myself to
the book. No one, you never told anyone about it
or anything. Really, it would just it would have died
with him and we'd never have that book. Could it
not been for you know, Jerry Woodruff, he are going
through Sam Francis's old stuff just to see what you
had lying around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and talking about the mesas Institute Newman figuring
out Murray Rothbard's handwriting for conceived in Liberty, chapter volume
five for the progressive era. Yeah, I mean, these are
things that were just I guess he didn't tell anybody
he was writing of them, and then they're just found
years later. So thankfully, thankfully someone found him.
Speaker 2: So all right.
Speaker 1: It was first published in twenty sixteen. Francis had been
a firebrand paleo conservative journalist who wrote regular syndicated columns
as well as speeches for Pat Buchanan. He was an
early victim of canceled culture for his politically incorrect statements
about race, and was fired by The Washington Times after
an attack by the neo conservative Denesh Desuza. He was
known for his sharp analytical insights, blistering rhetorical style, and
a barbed wit. Posthumously posthumously, he was blamed or praised,
depending on who was writing as the intellectual basis for
the rise of Donald Trump, whatever traverses surrounded him in life,
Intellectual history will record Francis as a much more important
and influential thinker than Desuza or any neo conservative writer
at the National Review. However, Eliathan and its Enemies features
none of Francis's signature colemics, and it is written in
a more coally analytical mode.
Speaker 5: Again, I really like the constantly bashing Desuza and just
never letting people forget that that happened. But as I
always think, it's strange when the left picks, you know,
these sort of almost somewhat obscure and kind of dead
thinkers on the right sometimes is the key influence for
X thing happening? You know, in the case you're Donald Trump.
How many of us would maybe not have got round
to reading Sam Francis if it wasn't for the fact
that this was claimed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for as much as they love power and they are,
they are conniving sometimes it really does come back to
bite them in the ass.
Speaker 5: So all right, so they've never heard of the streis
on the fact.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Francis had long been a protege of James Burnham,
having written a monograph on him in nineteen eighty four
that was republished in nineteen ninety nine. Leviathan and its
Enemies can largely be read as a nineteen nineties update
of the Managerial Revolution. Francis had fully internalized the thought
of the elite theorists and of his mentor, and much
of the book covers terrain that we have already traversed. Thus,
what is of interests us here is what Francis adds
to Burnham, or else where he disagrees with him. One
important dimension of Leviathan and its Enemies is that it
has the benefit of fifty years of hindsight since Burnham
wrote The Managerial Revolution, during which time many objections were
raised against the managerial thesis. After restating Burnham's central arguments
at some length, Francis devotes considerable space to dealing with
the chief counter arguments that were raised since nineteen forty one.
The foremost of these came from Wright Mills, whose book
The Power Elite, published in nineteen fifty six, constituted the
main left wing rebuttal to Burnham. The chief contention was
that although the managerial function undoubtedly exists. Propertied elites maintain
a controlling ownership over firms. For example, you got anything
to say, Well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is I mean, it gets slightly further into
a different point, but it is something I'd always considered,
and I think it's also something Burnham touches on at
one point, where there is almost a sort of democratizing
effect that happens in major industries as they become legislated
to the point where by for either because of getting
around legislations or trying to have a bigger market cap
or whatever excuse to give for it, they basically have
to sell elements of the company off to the public
and then the public elects a board to run the company.
So there isn't you know, as He's going to go
on here and describe Forward as a sort of owner
or owner entrepreneur sort of character where he and I
think it even relates to point the next quote really well,
when he built a factory, he had to homestead it.
He had to think logistically about how it was going
to integrate into a local economy, and a way where
someone who's just you know, on the managerial board of
Forward nowadays doesn't have to give to hurt some of
that because the as what we're going to get into
and describe a little bit, the revolution of massive scale
has already happened. So they enjoyed democratized industry as opposed
to the sort of homesteading, entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial industry you
would have had even in the turn of the century.
Speaker 1: But even so in Burnham, in manager or in manager
or Revolution, some of the things that he says about
corporations really hadn't come true yet. You know, Jarvin talked
about how it's it almost seemed like he was projecting
some of his trotsky I passed onto corporations at the time,
where corporations really hadn't at that point fall into managerialism.
It was more like a it was more like a
foreshadowing when you look at it. I mean, they still
most corporations at that time were still pretty top down
in nineteen forty one.
Speaker 2: So all right.
Speaker 1: For example, when I discussed Burnham, I used the example
of the Ford Motor Company of a firm transitioning from
the entrepreneurial to the managerial. However, as I noted, the
Ford family maintains to this Day a forty percent stake
in the company. In addition, William clay Ford Junior, the
great grandson of the founder, currently serves as executive chairman,
having previously acted as President, CEO and COO. Mills argues,
therefore that there is no distinct break with the old
regime of entrepreneurial elites, and thus Burnham's managerial revolution is
a mirage. Burnham would argue that in the case of
William clay Ford Junior, he trained as a managerial elite,
having attended Princeton and MIT, and is thus a professional
manager whose roles have been literally interchangeable with executives from
Boeing and elsewhere who do not carry the Ford name. Francis, however, argues,
it is largely irre Quoting Francis, it is largely irrelevant
whether the property illite acquires managerial skills, takes an active
part in managing corporate enterprise, or has assimilated non propertied
elite managers into its own class and interests. What Mills
and his disciple, William G. Dumoff and their school do
not sufficiently perceive or appreciate thoroughly is that the interests
of the property elite have changed substantially with the revolution
of mass and scale. The propertied elite or grand bourgeois
of the bourgeois order. Of the bourgeois order may not
have changed significantly in family composition, and certainly it retains
wealth and status. Its economic interests, however, have changed from
being vested in the hard property of privately owned and
operated entrepreneurial firms, usually comparatively smaller scale, to being intertwined
with and dependent upon the de materialized property of publicly owned,
state integrated managerial, managerially operated mass corporations.
Speaker 5: It's a word salad, but it's brilliant, and I very
much like the point that both Francis and Burnham heavily
focus on and sort of almost as them channeling a
bit of Kazinski or Alul when they really heavily narrow
in on the revolution of mass and scale, and that
not one is of course a fundamental prerequisite for you
to have the managerial class, otherwise there'd be no role
for them in society. But furthermore that that fundamentally changes
the incentives of human behavior, not just in a universal sense,
but up and down the chain when it comes to
people who are elites or people who are not their
incentive structures are not as they wear when say, for example,
the principles of classical liberalism were not out and the
seventeen hundreds or eighteen hundreds as much different than to
look at, especially as Francis looks on, you know, not
just the start of post war sort of consensus liberalism,
but towards its end and the turning of the millennium.
Speaker 1: In other words, whether or not a man of the
propertied elite, such as William clay Ford Junior takes an
active or passive role, his interests are now synonymous with
the managerial regime, while those of his great grandfather were
in many respects antagonistic to it. Francis argues that a
family such as the Fords are now entirely dependent on
managerial capitalism for their continued existence as property elites, and
are thus, in the final analysis, subordinated to the system.
The propertied elite, the grand bourgeoisie thus do not retain
an economic interest in acting as the leader of the
bourgeois order and define and defending its ideologies, values and itsitutions.
It's material interest push it towards defending the complex of
managerial interests.
Speaker 3: See.
Speaker 5: I think this is sort of where you can almost
see the influence that Rothbard had on Francis, where he's
almost sort of discussing here that you know, in that
very basic economic sense, if you promote business by subsidy
and cronyism, then you'll get more business by cronyism and subsidy.
Whereas if business is just fueled by entrepreneurial elites, then
they will want to spread and recruit other entrepreneurial elites
and creates. You know, if you if you pay for
more of it, you're going to get more of it,
If you pay for less of it, you're going to
get less of it, and that that continues and compounds.
Speaker 1: Then, of course, though is if you're those managed, those
entrepreneurial elites are not people who run companies, so you're
going to have to hire people to run your company,
and that's when the managerial elites come in.
Speaker 5: But that's that is of course a consequence of the
revolution of mass and scale.
Speaker 1: Yes, all right, yeah, it's great when you read Francis
because he didn't know his economics, so all right, this
perfectly explains why virtually none of the so called grenden
bourgeoisie have taken a firm stance against what is today
called woke capitalism, whether they are propertied elites or not.
Executives who dare take a stance against the office managerial
ideology are quickly removed, as was the case with Tripwire
Interactive CEO and co founder John Gibson, who was forced
to step down just fifty three hours after tweeting his
support for a ban on abortion in Texas. Similarly, John Shatner,
the founder of the Papa John's pizza chain and a billionaire,
was forced out of his own company by the board
after making racially insensitive comments on a conference call in
twenty eighteen. And let's just remember that he was just repeating,
like he was quoting. He wasn't like giving his opinion,
he was quoting something.
Speaker 5: And is this a new version of the high middle
low dynamic? You offend the great saints of progressive ideology.
And for that, you, as the middling CEO, co founder
your businesses rejected this disempowered so that the low progressive
causes of whatever charity or group or Bank of America
or whoever, as it's pushing hr policy and your work
can feel good about themselves.
Speaker 1: Brendan Ike was forced to resign after only eleven days
a CEO of Mozilla when it was found he had
donated to a political campaign against gay marriage, and employees
launched a social media campaign to oust him. I might
continue listing examples such as these almost indefinitely, but there
can be no doubt that Burnham and Francis are correct,
while Mills and Damof are wrong about whether power finally
rests in the hands of the managers or the owners.
The managers have privacy. If an owner does not adhere
to manage your ideology, if the company in any way
depends on managerial capitalism, they will find themselves removed in
short order. The second objection to Burnham with which Francis
deals is the idea that the managerial elites are not unified,
but rather a plurality. In fact, such objections were also
applied to the work of Mills and his followers. Francis
had in mind the work of Robert Dahl, David Truman,
John Kenneth Galbreth, David Reisman, and Arnold dem Rose. As
we have seen, Francis largely deals with this by acknowledging
that while entry into the elite is possible, its narrow
and exclusively managerial character, which emphasizes special qualifications and skills
and practice, gives it a uniformity that is rare in history.
He points out, citing Mosca, that the old capitalists, entrepreneurial regime,
and even the old feudal system were much more diverse
in terms of the makeup of the ruling class.
Speaker 5: It seems to almost be more heavily drawing on Alul here.
It's quite funny actually, if you read the preface to
Alul's Technological Society, which was written in fifty four and
I believe the managerial Revolution is forty one, yes, correctly so.
But in that he's sort of briefly mentions in the
forward that Burnham's basic idea of managerialism gets very close
to his idea of technological sort of society and the
sort of I think you would sort of the autocratic
nature of technique as it were, And he says that
this is one of the closest approximations. But you can
see that in this sort of description here Francis is
then sort of pulling on the same kind of thread.
He's recognizing that once you have a sort of this
this replacement of the qualitative or the quantitative, you then
have formulas and techniques that are more uniform for performing
different taxts in society. That this continues on, continues on
to what a lul calls like the one best way,
which is this striving for the perfect technique to achieve
whatever goal, and the same sense that the Austrians would
think of economizing, but saying there's another side to that coin,
whereby constantly striving for the one best way means that
you create this strange class of alien people who have
pursued the one best way and saying this case business management,
and they have no relation to the people that they
actually have working under them or living in the society
around them, because they're sort of just these bizarre, technically
inclined freaks with no other skills really outside of that,
the laptop classes people might call them.
Speaker 1: The third objection came from libertarians of the Reagan era,
who argue that the managerial regime is being eclipsed by
the rise of newly minted entrepreneurs. Today, mind's may instinctively
turned to a man like Bill Gates, or perhaps the
Silicon Valley types such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk,
and Peter Seal. But virtually none of these billionaires are
entrepreneurs in a manner that say Henry Ford was. They
each made their fortunes by playing the system of the
managerial regime and exploiting the fusion of the state and
the economy in one way or another. But even if
there should spring forth a genuinely innovative and entrepreneurial firm,
sooner or later it becomes co opted and is transformed
into being part of the regime apparatus. Francis cites the
example of McDonald's. A more recent example might be Google.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it's a private company brew.
Speaker 1: Hey, they can do what they want and they do.
I mean, how much, really, how much is Musk? I
would really like to know his net worth? What percentage
of that is just from government contracts, because it's basically
how he built his wealth and Bezos two.
Speaker 2: I mean, was this.
Speaker 5: All leverage and sheer wealth? And none of it's really
none of it is real, none of it's tangible. It's
all written in debt for the most part.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Correct.
Speaker 1: Francis's major contribution to the general Corpus of elite theory
is in his emphasis on the role of ideology, where
Burnham emphasized the fusion of the state and corporations, as
he put it, managers in government and managers in industry.
Francis immediately recognized the importance of a third category of
managers involved in opinion formation, which he called mass public
relations or mass organizations of culture and communication. These include, quoting,
not only the media of mass communication, one of the
most important instruments by which to manager really elite disciplines
and controls the mass population, but also all other mass
organizations that disseminate, restrict or invent information, ideas and values
and values advertising, publishing, journalism, film and broadcasting and broadcasting, entertainment,
religion and education, and institutions for research and development. Indeed,
the mass organizations of culture and communication, which generally lack
the coercive disciplines of the mass corporation and the mass state,
are able to provide disciplines and control for the mass population,
primarily through their use of the devices and techniques of
mass communication. All the mass cultural organizations that function as
part of the media the media of mass communication, and
they constitute a necessary element in the power base of
the managerial elite.
Speaker 5: Lenin levels of propaganda awareness.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And I mean could you imagine what he
would be saying now?
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think he'd be seeing anything different, because
he's so he's so on the money nearly, you know,
thirty years ago from where we are now. It's just
that he must have had a much more discerning eye
than your average person nowadays. That it took the whole
nonsense of COVID for them to even think about how
there is you know, both explicit and implessit propaganda messaging.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean, I would love to see his articles
during COVID, especially during like twenty twenty, especially during the
summer of riots and murders. Sam would have had a
lot to say about that.
Speaker 5: Fully lost his head.
Speaker 1: Francis was keenly aware of the ideological component of the
managerial regime, and his insights owe much to his deep
understanding of the cultural turn in Marxist literature after Antonio Gramsci,
whom he cites, however, guess something.
Speaker 5: No, I'm just I'll let it carry on, ohkay.
Speaker 1: However, like both Burnham and Peretto, Francis saw ideology as
mere justification for power, usually coming after the fact as
a means of consolidation and control. This is to say
that he saw the use of theology as almost entirely cynical.
In his afterwards Viathan and Its Enemies. Paul Gottfried shares
this revealing passage about his own fundamental disagreement with Francis,
quoting Sam, and I would argue about his skepticism concerning
whether elites accept their hegemonic ideas. In other words, whether
elites really believe their own ideology. In his understanding of
circulating elites, values and ideal in his own I'm gonna
do that again. In his understanding of circulating elites, values
and ideals were mere instruments for achieving practical goals. They
advanced the interests of those seeking positions of authority. Sam
would quote with pleasure of the Italian economists and sociologist
Vilfredo Pareto that those involved in the power game would
exploit whatever ideas and visions were most attractive to the
masses in a particular culture. But according to Sam, these
elites would approach the myths as nothing more than latters
for their own assent.
Speaker 5: I'm going to have to ask it of curiosity, what
side do you see yourself pH on and that sort
of distinction, because I know I'm ever the cynic, but
it seems to pay well being.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: I'm probably on sam side. I think a lot of
these elites have. They're the only ideology they have is power,
and you know, more than money power, I think it's power.
Speaker 5: Ideology is just a it's just a technology to them,
it's a technique.
Speaker 1: And they'll change ideologies. They don't care there was Some
of them will. Some of them will if it means
that they stay, they don't get circulated out, they will
change their ideology.
Speaker 5: Well that's I think part of the reason why we
have so much issue, especially when people start to really
dip their toes into this kind of stuff and will
are the neoliberals? Are the liberals or the socialists? Or
they are the neo conservatives. We have all these sort
of bizarre terms that really when you try and identify
each one's you end up with crossover between them all
to the point whereby you're not really identifying the fact
that these people have a subset of ideas, but that
there is a subset of ideas that they're willing to
interchange at any moment in time.
Speaker 2: Really, yeah, agreed, one hundred percent. All right.
Speaker 1: This is in fact the old disagreement between Moscow and
Pereto about whether ideas affect history restated Godfreed occupies the
Mosca position, while Francis takes the Pareto position. However, all
four thinkers would ultimately agree that the ideological function cannot
be ignored in any analysis of power. The culture, even
down to the everyday beliefs of the masses, must at
some level reflect and buy into the political formula of
the ruling class. Vital Vital. Francis, however, recognized, perhaps more
than any other thinker, that under the managerial regime, the
ideological vision must be totalizing. That's that's a word totalizing,
which is because it's not.
Speaker 5: That's confusing you.
Speaker 1: Exactly, which is to say, no vestige of the previous
regime can be allowed. He illustrates the point in a
much livelier way than in Leviathan and Its Enemies in
two pieces that were republished in the collection Beautiful Losers,
The Culture Doctor King and Equality as a Political Weapon.
In the former, good Good Well.
Speaker 5: I was going to say, as I mentioned earlier on
this that these are two essays I'm quite familiar with,
as I've done a stream on them already. But the
Beautiful Losers, I think is probably if you're not one
for reading giant books of people you've never really heard
of before, which is an understandable position, you're if you
can find a copy. There are some still floating out
there of like new old stock copies of Beautiful Losers.
We managed to get one for a relatively fair price,
and it's a great Probably, it's a better way to
get familiar with Francis. Probably he's a bit more sort
of polemic and the motive is compared to the sort
of more burn Them esque. You know, he's so clinical
and leviias and its enemies that you might be confused
for supporting the Manjieru regime. As Burnham did as well.
Speaker 1: In the former The Culture of Doctor King. He spots
in what has now become almost a commonplace insight that
the ideology of the managerial regime takes on an almost
religious air, with its own sacred heroes and symbols, as
embodied in the figure of Martin Luther King. While the
symbolic significance of Christmas is fair game to debate, debate
politically every year. No such freedom is afforded to the
annual celebration of Martin Luther king Day, which must be
observed with solemn reverence and can only ever be about
one thing, the righteous struggle of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 5: No, I think, if I remember correctly towards this is
the start when he's talking about you know, or just
like Christmas as well, doctor k R. Martin Luther king
Dy or whatever you're first to as it comes a
sort of or comes with all the unloading of us
us sorry, the unloading of a sorted junk, which instantly
makes me think of you know, the way that like
b l M and LGBT and all these different movements
becomes so quickly commodified, and a way that these legacy
brands with these sort of reputations that wouldn't be respected normally.
Can you know, like Nike can jump on making shoes
for however that guy was that took the knee and
whatever else. Yeah, you know, and all of a sudden
they've got all the clout. It's this. It's the same crap,
and they've been doing it since the eighties.
Speaker 1: In a blistering conclusion, he writes Martin Luther King's legacy,
as its keepers now is profoundly at odds with the
historic American order, and that is why they have They
can have no rest until the symbols of that order
are pulled up root and branch to say that doctor
King and the cause he really represented are now part
of the official American red. Indeed the defining and dominant
symbol of that creed, which is what both houses of
the United States Congress said in nineteen eighty three and
what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward, is
the inauguration of a new order of the ages, in
which the symbols of the old order and the things
they symbolize can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which
they are as mute and dark as the gods of
Babylon entire, and from whose cold ashes will rise a
new God, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and
exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath
his beneath his feet, and perceives the glory of the
new Lord. That is such amazing writing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's some interest and stuff as well.
Then we can look at again the way that progressives
or people we would think of as progressives can can
jump on any subset of ideas and threw away any
other subset of ideas instantly. You know, Martin Luther King
now would be would be canceled because he was a heterosexual,
black man, and he was a misogynist and what you know,
we've probably toxic and all these other phrases that would
be giving him a bigger yikes as it were, because
he was a Christian. However, in nineteen eighties, he was
the pinnacle, you know, he was the symbol of progressivism.
And now they would you know, it's only been fifty
years and they basically turn around and spit on him.
It shows you how, as you said, how purely focused
on power these people are. That you know that there
are people alive nowadays who probably played a part in
getting this whole campaign going in the eighties and would
turn around and either lie to you straight in the
face then or now, or probably both situations about what
their causes are and what their goals are, because at
the end of the day, it's just all about power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden is
the author of you know the crime bill, that famous
crime bill. I mean the things he's said in the past, no.
Speaker 5: Big shot lawyers of us Chauta in variety.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also you know about the black community stuff that he said,
and now he says, if you don't vote for me,
you ain't black.
Speaker 2: It's just.
Speaker 1: I love politics. It's so oh god, it's so great.
Speaker 2: All right. Moving on.
Speaker 1: What may have seemed like hyperbole in nineteen eighty eight
is is an observed daily reality in the twenty twenties,
when statues of everyone from Confederates to Founding fathers are
physically torn down by state backed feral mobs with a
full approval of every major corporation, university, and media outlet.
In twenty twenty, after the Black Lives Matter protest riots
murders following the death of George Floyd, massive statues of
Floyd were erected in many public places across the USA,
while Edinburgh University renamed David Hume Tower to forty George Square,
citing eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher's racist views.
Speaker 2: Well, how do you feel about that? Is this guy?
Speaker 5: We'll see, I'm I'm not the biggest fan of David Hume.
Speaker 2: Either right, but still.
Speaker 5: No, that's true. I suppose been the lesser of two evils.
I think it's it's very much. I mean the examples
as using here are the same sort of thing that
Francis and even Rothbard then want to talk about. You know,
when things like the l E riots happened, they just
had sort of big enough gonads at the time to
point at that and talk about it, and the way
we do with BLM nowadays.
Speaker 1: Even back then was that thirty years ago thirty two
years different time for Francis, such displays do not signal
anything more than the victory lap of the new of
the new order over the old order, which must be
emptied of all significance.
Speaker 5: I'm claiming that victory lap line because I can remember
me and Scrump we're going over the that that MLK
s A in the video when A was a the
chat replying to something, we specifically use the laying the
victory lap of the new order or something like that.
I would see the fact that since World War Two,
progressivism has just been has just been doing sort of
ritual humiliation, sort of ceremonies and engaging in sort of
celebrations because the world died anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Inequality as a political weapon. We see Francis's essential
cynicism as regards actual belief in the doctrine of equality.
He seeses on a passage in Peretto, the sentiment that
is very inappropriately named equality is fresh strong alert precisely
is fresh strong alert, precisely because it is not in
fact a sentiment of equality and is not related to
any abstraction, as a few naive intellectuals still believe, but
because it is related to the direct interests of individuals
who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their
favor and setting up new inequalities that will be in
their favor, this latter being the chief concern.
Speaker 5: I think that's such an amazing passage from Perai Olier.
It's hilarious to think that in your economics degree you'll
normally learn about parareo, but you'll never learn about that
stuff that he wrote, where he's political economy, right, and
not just we just get the boring stuff and production possibilities,
frontiers and paratal maximality and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Moving on, one may think of any number of affirmative
action programs as an example of this, but It also
brings to mind the central logic of the juvenile, the
juvenilian alliance between the high and low. The high can
always promise to liberate the low from oppressors by promising
to transfer advantages to them. Francis sees that this is
little more than a cynical power ploy, quoting in the
twentieth century Egalitarium. Egalitarianism has been used principally as the
political formula or ideological rationalization by which one emerging elite
has sought to displace from political, economic, and cultural power
another elite, and in not only rationalizing but also disguising
the dominance of the new elite that is brutal.
Speaker 5: It's the thing that separates both Francis and burn Them
from so many other American thinkers is that they drew
so heavily on the elite school or the elite theorists
as they're called nowadays, and that, you know, you can
read as much stuff on theocracy or the old world
as you want, but there is something about the contents
of elite theory. The basic sort of statements it makes
about human nature are eternal, it seems, and that once
you've really tapped into those, you can sort of skip
a lot of things politically that other people would maybe
focus time and energy on reading or engaging with. Because
you've actually you've got the cheat codes, you understand how
the game works.
Speaker 2: You're not just there.
Speaker 1: I'm writing books on things that don't matter.
Speaker 5: What else are books for.
Speaker 2: Excellent?
Speaker 1: Francis points to the behaviorism of BF. Skinner and others,
the belief in human beings as equal blank slates, differentiated
only by their upbringing, as one of the chief strains
of egalitarianism in the twentieth century, quoting egalitarian egalitarianism played
a central role in the progressivist ideological challenge, and the
main form it assumed in the early twentieth century was
that of environmentalism, not in the contemporary sense of concern
for ecology, but in the sense that human beings are
perceived as the products of their social and historical environment,
rather than of their innate, mental and physical natures. Indeed,
the ideological function of progressivism in delegitimizing bourgeois society was
accomplished by its identification of the society itself as the
environment to be altered through social management.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, this is the great sort of build up
and thing you need to hold in your head as
you come to some of the other parts from Francis
and Gottfried as well on the therapeutic state, because you
first need this sort of environmental view, which then allows
you to sort of solutishly transition into a medical or
socio psychological view where there is more and more quantitative
data that replaces the qualitative data that people used to
use for decision making processes the lowest level right up
to the top, and is one of the themes that
sort of is drawn out more throughout this chapter is
that sort of the illusion of democracy basically allows the
elites to build a wall of expertise around themselves, the
techniques and sort of specializations that people the average person
couldn't grasp, and as it was saying before it, it
creates this alien class of people who just cannot integrate
into the society that they are actually orchestra it's no
one under the products we get. The mass media we
consume seems so misplaced because it's made by people who
have never lived in the real world as ourselves. I mean,
I think this is something even Eric Ritter von que
out Laden goes on at great length when he talks
about again the same notion of quantitative sort of data
and dealing specifically with the utilitarianism, and you would just
have these sort of dictatorial men of science. You're roaming
around rearranging and socially managed managing the world. Is he
so fit because it was for the good of science.
Speaker 1: The logic of environmentalism or behavioral behavioralism thus always points
in the direction of ever increasing managerial control, since it
is society that must be changed, and such change can
take it can only take place through management. I really
hope people are understanding what this is because this, to me,
this is one of the this may be the most
important part of the book, because I mean, this is
what really speaks to me, because this is what you
were seeing now. I mean, this is so clear now
that you can just if you cannot understand this and
not see it in today's society, you're just completely blind.
Speaker 2: And I don't know where. I don't know where.
Speaker 5: The only thing I think that's a little bit of
the chapter's messing is just a little twist of alul
on the end.
Speaker 1: Or uncle ted.
Speaker 5: Why not both.
Speaker 1: Francis locates. Edward Burnetz is one of the chief culprits
for inculcating this view among the elites in the nineteen
twenties and nineteen thirties. Quoting Edward Burnez, a nephew of
Sigmund Freud, also helped develop behaviorist psychology, psychological techniques for
the managed economy, and the science of public relations, which
he helped found treating all people as mechanically identical, writes
historian Stuart Ewan, Bernese called for the called for the
implementation of a mass psychology by which public opinion might
be controlled.
Speaker 5: That's the most important element to any form of mass
propaganda is first getting the mass to recognize itself as such.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good. Good quote from me, I said, good quote.
Speaker 1: What is striking if one turns to Berne's as naked
and unapologetic elitism in public relations. He speaks openly about
the engineering of consent and Warren's leaders against following public
attitude polls. It's explicitly because they might hinder the progressive agenda,
quoting society suffers when polls to inhibit leaders from independent thinking,
from anticipating change, or from preparing the public for change.
Polls exert pressure that may places that may play society
under what Jefferson called the tyranny of the majority and
throttle progressive minority ideas.
Speaker 5: They say this.
Speaker 2: What is by that?
Speaker 1: Brene's does not see public opinion as something to be followed,
but something to be managed and, if necessary, transformed, preferably
by using his services and expertise. Burne's fellow elitist, Walter Lippman,
was at Harvard class of nineteen thirteen.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that's it. He was there with John
what's his name, the communist that went to Russia. They
did the moments about Yeah, I think John Reevey. Yeah, yeah,
they were. They graduated together. Funny that shocking. Brene's fellow.
Brene's fellow elitist, Walter Lippman, was skeptical about the extent
to which public opinion even exists, other than as a
fabrication of the media as a pseudo environment, and wrote
a book on the topic called The Phantom Public. It'd
be look at the name of that.
Speaker 5: It's just one of the whole thing with nases of
interesting as well. Is someone I think I should probably
know more about than I do, but I sort of
a brief understanding of what he's about, and some of
the stuff he was up to. But you basically worked
for Withdrow Wilson directly to engage with propaganda campaigns in
South America so that they would adopt and allow the
building of American factories and go work in them so
that the American war effort could be fueled by cheap
South American labor. And then after the war is basically
tasked with, well, take that stuff and then just push
it on the American people war propaganda at peacetime.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his book, His book Propaganda is very short. It's
an easy read. It I read it in less than
two days, so right, it over two days. It begins
with the Portrait of the Disenchanted Man, which is a
neat summation of the passive masses quitting. The private citizen
today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator
in the back row who ought to keep his mind
on the mystery on the mystery off there, but cannot
quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow
affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually,
taxes annually, and wars occasionally remind him that he is
being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these
public affairs are in no way convincing, convincing ways, in
no way convincing way his affairs. They are, for the
most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed
at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by
unnamed powers. As a private person, he does not know
for certain what is going on, or who is doing it,
or where he is being carried. In the cold light
of experience, he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction.
He reigns in theory, but in fact is not governed.
Speaker 5: Me Another passage drepin in Kaczynski.
Speaker 1: Oh, where do you find your surrogate activities?
Speaker 2: People?
Speaker 5: This is one of the things I actually had. I
think we're getting towards the end here anyway, if I
remember correctly, But it's one of the things I had
sort of note is, and I think it's something Francis
kind of draws on towards the end of Levitan and
his enemies. He's sort of basically pausing the question of
you know, are the surryge activity he's no longer good enough?
Is the post bourgeois proletariat not willing to accept, you know,
faulty orders from sham captains, as Carlyle would say.
Speaker 1: But Lipmann does not, as one might imagine, lament this fact,
but rather uses it as a call for a reign
of experts. One might say, in a manager a managerial elite.
He says, I think, I think it is a false ideal.
I do not mean as an undesirable ideal. I mean
an unattainable idea, ideal bad only in the sense that
it is bad for a fat man to try to
be a ballet dancer. An ideal should express the true
possibilities of its subject. When it does not, it perverts
the true possibilities. The idea of the of the omni
competent sovereign citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal.
It is unattainable, the pursuit of it is misleading. The
failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's sort of very hard to disagree
with him there, especially when he's tapping into the this
idea that the passive actor and the mass, or as
a little would say, that the individual alone in the mass.
You know, it's such a bizarre and novel possession to
where man used to be before that there really is.
You know, it must have been at the time felt
like unlimited opportunities to mold and shape and organize men.
As use of it as someone who was part of
this class of experts.
Speaker 1: Lipman solution is simply to do away with democratic fictions
and let the elites go on with its task of
managing their affairs. Yeah, as long as they're good man,
as long as they're good leads, and I realize, as
long as they're my friends. The thesis of the public,
of the phantom public does not assume that men in
action have universal purposes. They are denied the fraudulent support
of the fiction that they are agents of a common purpose.
They are regarded as the agents of special purposes, without
pretense and without embarrassment. They must live in a world
with men who have other special purposes. I have no
legislative program to offer, no new institutions to propose.
Speaker 2: There are, I.
Speaker 1: Believe, immense confusions in the current theory of democracy which
frustrate and pervert its action.
Speaker 5: I mean, there is a surprising amount of write and
from the kind of laft wing possession. When you really
start reading, you know, people's like doctoral thesis for politics, philosophy, economics,
degrees or whatever, and they will talk very much in
a similar tone about, well, the people think democracy should
work properly, and we know it can't work like that
because society it would basically fall to the ground. So
how do we just keep the illusion going.
Speaker 2: Onwards?
Speaker 1: The role of the public is simply the rubber stamp
which party of the elites gets to govern, even if
there is little difference between the choices on offer quoting.
Although it is the custom of partisans to speak as
if there were radical differences between the ins and outs,
it could be demonstrated. I believe that in stable and
mature societies the differences are not profound. If they were profound,
the defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion.
An election would be catastrophic. Whereas the assumption in every
election is that the victors will do nothing to make
life intolerable to the vanquished, and the vanquished will endure
with good humor policies which they do not approve. That's
pretty much gone out the window now I'm going to
keep going. In the twenty twenties, it is perfectly clear
that according to Liptman's criteria, the USA is no longer
a stable and mature society. Lipmann viewed the masses as
a bewildered herd whose opinions needed to be managed only
by a specialized class whose personal interests reached beyond the locality,
in other words, by men like Edward Bernez. However, it
strikes me that this narrow vision of democracy as a
mere rubber stamp of rule, a rule by experts who
engage in perception management, is running towards its death rows.
This is primarily because the Internet a modern Gutenberg press,
has destroyed the ability of it leads to control narratives,
which is causing them to become more desperate, coercive, and brilliant.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if I entirely buy that theory. Fair Enough,
you can use the Internet to attack the elite politico
formula of we are truth. But you can't use the
internet to do is to demonstrate the falsity in the
letical formula that we the elites, are still in power
no matter what you put on the Internet, which in
a certain sort of way in terms of propaganda, fair enough,
you might feel that you've engaged in the psychological component
of rebellion, but you're not physically rebelling against the elites.
So the organizational component, that arguably the more important component
to any propaganda campaign, it still works. It's still there,
it's still got you, and it's.
Speaker 1: Midst Basically, what you would hope is that rising elites,
elites that were on your side at least, that your friends.
We're doing this, we're using the Internet as a Gutenberg
press to realize.
Speaker 5: Oh no, I'm not saying we shouldn't. I'm just saying
I don't think in and of its own is enough,
and that a lot of the time and energy is
spent trying to fight the regime on the Internet actually
just confirms the regime's position of power because you spend
all this time and energy trying to fight them and
they've not gone any right, at least not yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is I guess we'll repeat it for the
million time during this reading, at these readings, is we
need to raise up our own elites, many elites, or
our friends as more people come to see them as
unmistakably totalitarian in nature, and as the gap between elite
and popular values wide widens, it is only a matter
of time until we see a circulation of elites because
the manager or regime is failing precisely at the moment
of its apparent victory. Lab I actually believe that at
this point.
Speaker 2: I see it.
Speaker 1: I mean it might not be in my lifetime, but
these things don't happen overnight. They may take a generation
or two. And I think I see, I see movement.
Speaker 5: Well, I think the most important part and something is
is pointed out a number of times, and I'm not
quite happy to see him putting out the same message
as that you need to watch for containments you refer to,
you know, don't allow the people who are of the
distance right now to be co opted when the regime
puts on a conservative mask for a year or two
to sort of release a bit of pressure and angst
people after they've been agitated for decades towards leftists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's leftists take power and they don't
really care about anything doing anything else except getting more power.
While they're in there, they're just building and building upon power,
and real conservatives and real right wingers don't do that.
And even the fake even the regime republicans, they don't
do that because they're just controlled that position for the regime.
Speaker 5: So well, I think earlier in the Equality is a
Political Weapon article, it actually makes the point that, you know,
one of the main reasons Conservatives were useless of fighting
communism during the Cowar period, and if you ignore the
fact that maybe the Conservatives were in Khutze for a
number of different reasons, is to notice that they took
their egalitarianism on face value, and they argued with them
as if they believed in a galitarianism, which if you've
read your lean and your angles, you know they don't
believe in a galitarianism. They just see as a goal
with a way, as you know, in the way that
Francis even describes earlier, he's of cutting the heads off
all the stems of grass so there's nothing left, and
flattening every hill.
Speaker 1: A near perfect illustration of this failure of narrative control
took place in early January twenty twenty two. On December
thirty one, twenty twenty one, Joe Rogan interviewed doctor Robert Malone,
the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, the
author of nearly one hundred peer reviewed papers with over
twelve thousand citations for three hours, during which he highlighted
many unanswered questions about the COVID nineteen vaccine. In addition
to the interview, doctor Malone leads a coalition of over
sixteen thousand doctors and scientists dedicating to speaking truth to power.
Madava Sti, MD, who also holds a degree in electrical
engineering from MIT, then asked whether this was the most
important interview of our time. The interview was promptly banned
by YouTube and Twitter, who suspended any any attempts to
upload it, and doctor Malone was personally banned from Twitter.
Defenders of the regime, such as doctor Dan Wilson, whose
video was pushed to the front of the algorithm by
Google managers and perception, quickly denounced doctor Malone as having
gone full anti science.
Speaker 5: See I'm not too sure what to think of the
whole Robert Malone escapade, because if I remember correctly, when
he was on Robin's podcast, he had quite a lot
of what maybe referred to as the Boomertruth regime about,
and that he constantly used a sort of analogies or
similars referred to the mid century chairmans because those people,
of course, or the height of evil for what they
did in the nineteen forties, and that you can't question that.
So as much as he is against the current elites
in the vaccine, is willing to still go with the
sort of false notion that you can speak truth to power,
which I don't think ever happened in history. Power speaks
to truth and truth goes away and you have new truth.
And the fact that he's only willing to question such
a small portion of it. It's the same when you
look at anyone who's sort of part of the anti
woke grift. Fair enough, they might be against ridiculous trans policy,
or they'll be against the grooming staff, or they think
BLM's taking it too far, but they always fall back on,
you know, consensus liberalism. I mean, that was one of
the points I found interesting about the MLK sort of
pieces that, as I said earlier, on the left is
already dispensed with MLK because it's not useful to them anymore.
And the only people that to MLK nowadays are right
wingers that for some reason they're making sevil rights arguments.
Speaker 1: Well, they have to prove that they're good people, that
they're not racist.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, the democrats are the real racist guys?
Speaker 1: Such a great argument. Great imagine if the roles were reversed.
Speaker 5: Imagine f the shoe was on the other foot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, God legacy mainstream media outlets quickly set to work
to debunk doctor Malone, who, despite his obvious credentials, was
said to have no academic credibility by experts and reported
breathlessly by twenty something journalists and well known and once
respected newspapers. I'd argue with that whether they were once respected.
Then CNN ran a piece hosted by Brian Stelter entitled
is the media out of Touch with the country? Over COVID.
Stelter's colleague Oliver Darcy said, a lot of the media
does seem, as I look at it and travel the country,
to be very out of touch with people. I mean,
if you travel the country, people are not really living
in the same bubble. It seems that the media is messaging.
It seems that the media is messaging toward and so
I think this is an issue because if people are
tuning out what's going on in cable news, if we're
not messaging towards general population, then they're just ignoring everything
and living their lives and we're really not and we're
not really getting the information that they need to them.
Speaker 5: See, this is me really tapping into my inner scenic here.
This is not people from CNN having a moment of clarity.
This is people from CNN engaging in a limited hangout
as they try and make you ignore the idea of
it's not the fact that they're messaging towards a different bubble,
as they're messaging people to try and move into that bubble.
It doesn't exist already. That's why the media messaging is
there for it, because they're trying to create it. Right,
seem to have the causality of their own work backwards.
I'm I'm sure they wouldn't make such a selly mistake
like that.
Speaker 1: Again, all right, From the standpoint of what we have
been discussing as regards managerial elites, this episode is remarkable
for at least three reasons. First, it is obvious that
doctor Malone and has banned sixteen thousand doctors and sciences
are managerial elits by the classic Burnham definition technical experts,
and they have broken decisively with the regime over its
management of the pandemic. Second, Joe Rogan's podcast has become
more watched and listened to than CNN or any other
legacy media outlet, to the extent that one might question
whether the labels alternative and mainstream are still appropriate. Third,
the managerial master is of persuasion openly complained about their
message about that their messaging is not working and that
in effect, no one is listening to them. If only
the White House or CNN could hire Edward Burnees, maybe
things might be different. But one suspects that even if
Bernes himself was managing this, he could do nothing about
the loss of monopoly control over information flow that has
been caused by the Internet.
Speaker 2: Do you I mean the.
Speaker 1: Problem I have with that is that it almost seems,
and you know, it almost seems like he's writing to
the bubble because most people are not going on the
Internet to debunk what they're seeing, you know, what they're
what they're seeing on Twitter, and that's you and me
doing that. You know, it's AA doing it. It's you know,
our it's our crowd. But the average person who you know,
quote unquote just wants to grill, is not going I
don't think they're going home and searching the internet and
looking to debunk what they're seeing on the news. Maybe
they don't believe it, maybe they think it's fake news,
except of course, if it's if it has to do
with Ukraine. But the don't get me started. The but yeah,
I question how many people are actually doing this considering
the regime just is going on.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, you can, you can tell straight away.
I mean, how many people actually sit down and spend
the time to read political works and go straight to
the source. And you know, well, what did what did
Carl Schmidt actually have to say instead of just reading
academic papers when they call him a Nazi? You know
what did he actually have to say? It's such a
small number of people. And I think it's I think
it's if anything, it's it's nice to a is writing
to that in group. He's talking to, you know, the
vanguard as it were, as you say, people like ourselves,
if we, if we could do ourselves a hubris to
adopt such a label, because you know, we are pushing
the forefront of specifically these set of ideas that he's
discussing here. I mean, I think this, this chapter in
and of itself, even though it's not the final one
of the book, does a fantastic job of wrapping up
a lot of the themes that people will have picked
up on at the start.
Speaker 1: I hope sure, because when you're reading the early chapters,
there's a lot of theory. There's a lot of things
people aren't going to get. They're going to read it,
read a page and maybe say, I don't really know
what I just read. I'm just going to push on.
And I think AA does a great job of when
he presenting the theory at the beginning of the chapters,
and then as the chapter goes on, it becomes more
practical because well, I don't know if it becomes more practical,
it just becomes He's writing it easier, saying, okay that
everything I said back there, that kind of you know,
maybe doesn't make sense to you. I'm breaking it down
for you here. And I think that's what Francis this friend.
What the Francis chapter and that Paul Godfrey chapter does
is it takes the whole book and it goes, this
is what's happening now, and just so we can show
you that elite theory is real. Look at what's happening now.
It's impossible to argue with I mean, people still want
to argue with it, but that's because they're holding onto
their ideologies like a religion.
Speaker 2: So yep, all right.
Speaker 1: Let us return to Francis, who longed for a revolution
from the middle and saw its scope in what he
called the post bourgeois resistance, made up of the middle class,
including coolots or petite bourgeois, the lower middle class, and
the working class. This is straightforward. This is a straightforward
Foxes versus Lions or class one residues versus class two
residues analysis derived from Pereto's strong influence on Francis's thinking.
Speaker 5: Quote quickly before you get into the core there. This
is also something that Len and his friends spent many
hours arguing over was the fact that the self employed,
the handy man, the man that was self taught in
some kind of practical skill, was the most reactionary force
that existed, even more so than massive sort of conglomer
international organizations of capital and whatever else, because they were slow,
they were lethargic, and they ultimately weren't connected to the
soil and the way that as some sort of self
employed tradesman.
Speaker 1: As Yeah, I've had conversations with people call themselves Marxist Leninists,
And it's very rare that you actually have a conversation
with a real Marxist leniness. They always turn out to
be woke bluegi progs. But the but when you do
talk to them and you let them know, hey, I'm
self employed, I work for myself, and they immediately think,
you know, this is someone that we can talk to,
This is someone that we can recruit. This is our
natural you know, someone naturally who would be drawn to us.
If you're not, they're mad. They get mad if you
are self employed. If you were you know, just a
normal cool locket, just the guy who works owns owns,
you know, a company that he works for on him
by himself, and drives a pickup truck every day. If
you are not down with them, you become their enemy
very quickly.
Speaker 5: But those people own their own cap or why would
they want to do that to them?
Speaker 1: All right, go back a little bit. This is straightforward
Foxes versuss or class one residues versus Class two residues
analysis derived from Pereto's strong influence on Francis's thinking, Quoting
post bourgeois groups manifest hot hostility not only to the
ideology of the soft managerial regime and to the psychic
and behavioral patterns of its elite, but also to the
manipulative style of dominance that characterizes the elite, and the
tendency to acceleration on which the elite relies for the
preservation and enhancement of its power the managerial. The managerial
use of manipulation and acceleration not only alienates post bourgeois
groups culturally and morally, but also threatens their economic position
and social status. When commentators say that Francis predicted the
rise of Donald Trump, it was for passages like this,
in which he perfectly encapsulates the essential problem. It does
not appear that Francis was aware of Juvenile's work, but
he spots the alliance between elite to the underclass, particularly
its non white is, particularly its non white components. Although
Francis could not have foreseen the rise of the Internet,
he recognizes several vulnerabilities in the managerial regime. Drawing from Mosca,
he views the fact that the elite are monolithic and
uniform as being a weakness, which is ironic giving their
famous slogan diversity as our strength. Quoting the formal mechanisms
of mass liberal democracy, regular elections, competing political parties, Universal suffrage,
and legal and political rights do not significantly mitigate the
monolithic and uniform concentration of managerial power, the despotism of
the regime, its tendency towards a monopolization of political, economic,
and cultural power by a single social and political force
of managerial and technical skills, and the expansive, uniform and
centralized nature of its power is a direct consequence of
the contracted composition of the elite and the restriction of
its membership to elements proficient to managerial and technical skills.
The narrowness of the elite that results from this restriction
insulates it from the influence of non managerial social and
political forces and reduces their ability to gain positions within
the elite from which they can moderate, balance, or restrain
its commands. Their exclusion from the elite contributes to the
frustration of their aspirations and interests, and encourages their alienation
from and conflict with the elite, and the destabilization and
weakening of the regime.
Speaker 5: What a paragraph I mean home? More quickly and concisely
could you sum up a sort of analytical view of
the poweradynamics and as he says, mass liberal democracy, and
I mean it.
Speaker 1: Just goes to show that you read that and then
you look at something like, Okay, a bunch of ideologues
are going to take over a bureaucratic organization. Well, how
do if a bunch of ideologues take over a bureaucratic organization,
what's the easiest way to fight back against, you know,
to neutralize the influence of those ideologues, the organization has
to be run by bureaucrats. Ideologues aren't managerial. You need
managerial people, and managerial people come in. Eventually they're going
to end up being in charge and dictating with the direction.
Speaker 5: See I think they move one and the same though
that one tends to follow the other either in both directions.
That managerialism and an organization allows for science and social
science specifically to then inform more and more of its policies.
And then from that you have a natural tendency to
walk crap anyway, because that's what dominates and has dominated
the intellectual social sciences for decades. So it's almost kind
of like the point earlier about you know, what do
they believe in the ideas and are somewhat irrelevant because
it's just the fact that the act and the way
that they do anyway, that is the important part.
Speaker 1: Last paragraph. This destabilization takes the form of decomposition and
fragmentation in the social order, which we have undoubtedly witnessed
in the three decades since Francis was writing. Since the
manager or regime is soft and frequently does not actually
solve problems, but ops rather simply to manage perception or
engineer consent, it seems likely that the de facto Balkanization
will begin to occur in both the USA and Europe.
So called no go zones in which the authorities have
essentially given up policing, have already emerged in major cities.
While these have to date occurred in non white areas
populated by the underclass as postboys. While white populations become
more disaffected by managerial elite rule, and even if they
come to distrust the authorities themselves, it is perfectly possible
that de facto autonomous no go zones could occur in
white areas too. In the USA, both the Trump and
Biden presidencies have been characterized by widespread state level non
compliance with federal and executive edicts. If half the country
declared that the president is not my president. No matter
who wins the election, the regime has a serious problem
on its hands. As I have mentioned previously, the current
strategy of simply writing off thirty percent or more of
the population as undesirables simply cannot serve. In Moscow's terms.
There is a lack of moral unity between the rulers
and the rule, and historically this situation has not and
will not persist for long.
Speaker 5: We can but only hope.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I'm wondering. I wonder just how many
people have checked out like they just don't care. You
know what percentage is that? I remember a couple of
years ago, what was it like forty five to forty
eight percent of the population here didn't vote in I
think twenty sixteen or twenty twelve election.
Speaker 2: So, you know, if the.
Speaker 5: Guide go to say, but as if we learned the
important lesson from the previous chapter for Michael's that the
total number of what you have in your group really
doesn't make much of a difference and the mass will
always be there. I mean, I put it in why
I think my speech on van Guardism for a normous
event a while back that the mass is a sort
of indistinguishable quantity in society, but it reflects the centrality
of our cultural products. And it doesn't mean that it's
always seventy five percent of people that consume it are
twenty five percent, but the some number and it's enough
to make it look like there is a consensus. And
that's you know, in the passage we were looking at
where Leppmann sort of try to suggest that public opinion
doesn't even really exist, it's just constructed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and well, I think the point of bringing up
the amount of people who aren't voting is, I mean,
these are in worse terms, These are people who are
either apathetic or they could be angry, and that doesn't
bode well for the regime. So I'm looking for hope,
I'm looking for the white pills. I'm looking for the
white pills and all of this, because you know, it's
it's very easy to get black pilled over all this
until you understand it, and once you understand it, once
you grasp it, and once you once you know how
power works, maybe there is that, you know, that denial
phase where you're just like, well, you know, there's the
denial phase. No, no, we can't work, and then there
is the you know, you're you're like, well, I mean,
how we can't raise up people like this? And then
you realize we're just going to have to raise up people,
raise elites.
Speaker 5: Well, That's the thing I've always found sort of very
comforting actually is that when people, you know, they they
work out what's going wrong and they realize that a
lot of things are actually arguably possibly a bit hopeless.
But what it means is that your choices of what
you can do to affect action are actually quite slim.
And once you understand the core goal, which is developing
and raising a new class of elites, then that's all
you need to do, and you just need a headlong
stick into that with whatever resources and time you have,
And that becomes a lot more as I say, maybe
it's the best word, the confidence inspiring, maybe because then
you know the path that you're supposed to go on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's the problem. I think that I've
had some people that contacted by some people and say
not say that they were black pilled, said that people
had listened to like the first chapter one, chapter two
with with Stephen, and then they looked more into elite
theory and that it blackpilled them. And you know, it's like,
this isn't black pilling. If you figure out, once you
figure out how it works, that's not black pilling. Then
you just have to come up, you know. And you know,
especially like libertarians, they're so good at diagnosing. Well, this
also gives you how you fix it too, because libertarians
have that. You know, it's that whole South Park thing.
It's like collect underpants, you know, question Mark profit. It
gives you that middle, it gives you what's in the middle.
Speaker 5: Well, see, I don't know, I've kind of I find
the elite theory stuff very easy because you know, again
stepping into the depths of hubris, it's kind of how
I've just always seen and understood humans anyway. On a
fundamental level, we are not all the same. We are
not equal, and that means that we are not equal
in capacities to organize, which is possibly the most differing
fundamental capacity in people as a whole. As your ability
to organize allows you to be an entrepreneur, be a
political actor, be an elite as it were.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you can organize, the problem is as as
this book is laid out, is the masses are unorganized
and underfunded or not funded at all. So there's your
that's what you have to do. And you know you're
not the masses aren't going to organize. It's going to
be what you call, you know, what you reference as
a vanguard, and the van the vanguard will organize. The
vanguard will find the elites. Maybe the elites are among
the vanguard, and you raise up those elites and then
you go to work and you know it's it may
not you know, and I'll talk to libertarians again, it
may not happen in this lifetime. But you're not going
to get in Capistan in this lifetime.
Speaker 2: You're not hope.
Speaker 1: One thing you can hope for is you get like
close to something approximating like a hoppy and covenant community
or private city or private law city or something like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's something I said to a lot of
people over the course of the week. It means, as
you when there were sort of the issues of culture
and other sort of things would come up, and then
they would they want to crawl into this sort of
libertarian safe space of not having all well, I'm indifferent
on these things. I just think you shouldn't be able
to enforce your values blah blah blah. And also I
said to them, well with you know, I love the
picture Austrian economics paints, but without radical political action, you're
never going to have the canvas for it.
Speaker 1: It's a good way of putting it. That's we should
probably end on that. I suppose you're gonna do any
better than that one.
Speaker 2: I don't think.
Speaker 5: Peak already.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 5: I will say, though, if if people haven't already, do
pick up a copy of A's book, and then if
you want to become part of the real vanguard, go
grab a copy of Sam Francis Levis and Its Enemies
before it becomes possible to buy, or hit me up
for the archive pdf link.
Speaker 1: I will I will hit you up for that because
I'll probably end up doing that, probably use it more
as a reference so that I can control f on it.
Anything else to plug.
Speaker 5: Just that you can find me on the YouTube channel
scrump monkey. And then I'm sure, if possible, you could
throw the link for the telegram channel where people can
find me in the description.
Speaker 7: Or wherever else.
Speaker 1: I can absolutely do both of those. Right, Well, thank you,
thank you, thank you. Ee take care you too. I
want to welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show, returning
Pedro Gonzalez.
Speaker 2: How are you doing, Peedra?
Speaker 3: I'm well, how are you doing?
Speaker 2: Very well? All right?
Speaker 1: We are here to read and comments on chapter nine
of Nima PARTYNI is the Populist Delusion, and this one
is called the Therapeutic State, and it goes over the
writings of Paul Gottfried. And you are an editor at Chronicles.
I believe that Paul is the senior editor at Chronicles.
Why is Paul special to you?
Speaker 3: I think he's he's like the most underrated living scholar
of our time who really understands the issues in a
way that other people don't. Paul's level of learning is unusual.
You certainly don't see it on the mainstream, right, someone
who's actually an intellectual in the true sense. And I
think his his his ability to entertain an actually diverse
array of ideas and thinkers, even those that are considered
controversial at Carl Schmidt, and then apply what he learns
in a way that's that's relevant, you know, even ten
years after the fact. In this case, we're going to
be talking about after liberalism and manage Ualism the Politics
of Guilt. These are not new books. These are books
written a decade or so ago, and the insights from
them are still as relevant or more relevant than ever. Actually, so,
Paul is an unusual luminary, I think in a good way.
Speaker 1: Well spoken, well spoken. I've had him on to talk
about fascism and anti fascism, and I've had him on
to talk about stress and the neocons. So yeah, it's amazing,
amazing what he knows. All right, So, just like all
the rest of the chapters, I'm going to read, I'm
going to share screen, put this up there, and you
stop anytime that you feel like you need to comment,
and I'll do the same.
Speaker 3: Okay, sounds good already.
Speaker 1: Chapter nine, The therapeutic State. In theory, the role of
government is not for the sake of its own power,
but for the benefit of the people it is supposed
to serve. If a government does not serve the people,
then it must be transformed until it does it does so,
or be overthrown and replaced with one which does. However,
in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, published in two
thousand and two, Paul Gottfried argued that the modern managerial
regime had completely inverted this theoretical relationship. Rather than transforming
itself to serve the people, the managerial regime seeks to
transform people in the service of its system of atomized
corporate consumerism.
Speaker 3: I think you already see here a kind of radical
break between Paul and mainstream conservative commentary on this, right
in the sense that Paul understands that we no longer
live in a constitutional republic. And if you get your
takes from your typical conservative pundent, they're arguing that either
we still do but it's endangered, or that we know,
like Mark Levin or something like that, right, like you know,
this is this is against our constitution or something like that.
Like you already see that Paul already begins from like
you know, ten steps down the road, where he's saying,
our regime is fundamentally different from from what what it
was initially conceived, as it no longer actually serves anything
that that's like a social good, and instead it exists
to transform people, to to engineer a specific type of subject.
So you, like, just in the first you know a
few lines, you already see why Paul is, why why
his insights are so radically different again from your average
conservative who either thinks that we do live in a
constitution or republic and therefore, you know, it's not okay
for the FBI to or in mar A Lago, because
that's somehow that's a violation of constitutional rights, which is
in theory true but in reality irrelevant. Besides the fact, right,
or the people that think that you know, uh, we
need to vote in the next election in order to
save the constitutional public that's endangered, Paul is saying it's
dead and gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And also he's crushing anybody's hopes of oh, we
still have a free market things like that.
Speaker 3: It's just that's right, I mean, that's that's again that
you don't hear this from the typical conservative, the idea
that basically that there's something bad about capitalism, that there's
something bad about our culture of consumerism.
Speaker 2: So yep, all right.
Speaker 1: It drives ever more closely towards what juvenile saw as
the final destination. It ends in the disappearance of every
constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in
the denial of every pre eminence which is not approved
by the state. In a word, it ends in the
atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private
tie linking man and man, who's only bond is now
the common bondage to the state, the extremes of individualism
and socialism meet. That was their predestined course. How yeah,
go ahead.
Speaker 3: I think I actually just wrote a piece about neo conservatism,
and this is something this is something that I kind
of touch on, but from a different direction. And basically,
like the the new neo cons like Barrio Weiss and
Douglas Murray, who conceive of themselves as kind of breaking
with the left, they kind of see themselves as good liberals, right,
And in many cases that's what a lot of conservatives
see themselves as, that the true conservative is actually trying
to preserve the liberal order, the proper liberal order, right.
And like the average Bari Weiss reader, and like Bari
Weis herself, there was there was an article reasoning to
give you a concrete example about like the problems with Hollywood,
and this article it talks about how like in the past, uh,
there was this kind of noble crusade to root out
white racism in Hollywood, UH, to break what what the
author called the white Wall. But then Trump get selected
and a mass hysteria descends upon Hollywood and then everything
is bad, and basically there's no sense of maybe these
things are connected, maybe are are crusading for social justice
and individual individualism at the same time was a kind
of contradiction. And in the comments are like that too.
The comments are like, I was always you know, like,
as someone who's worked in the entertainment industry, I was
always opposed to racism, but you know, this stuff just
goes too far. And I talk about this in my
piece because it's something that James Burnham mentioned too, that
basically this tension between individual freedom, uh, the ability to
kind of you know, live whatever life you want, and
social justice are at odds because social justice requires uniformity,
like we have to get people to act a certain
way on the basis that certain behaviors are discriminatory and
they exclude others, right, or they stigmatize others, And so
that means that there's not really a whole lot of
room for individualism if you believe in social justice, because
individual thinking, individual types of behavior can be threat can
threaten let's call them certain sacred groups, right, whether the
minorities or people that are transgender, or whatever. And the
point that everyone from Paul to Burnham to Juvenile has
made is that that ultimately this kind of like what
we're seeing now, it's not like, oh, it's liberalism abandoned
in Matray it. It's like, no, this is the logical
conclusion of these two tensions resolving themselves.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: I mean, other people go back further to Rousseau, that
we're living what we're living in right now as a
kind of Rousseau and totalitarianism, or where any kind of
dissonance is unacceptable and it has to be crushed. So
in the words liberalism and leftism, it's not like they're different,
like you know, Dennis Praeger would would would argue or
something like that, like, no, these things are actually related.
Speaker 1: You very much see this in the BARRYE. Wise, Douglas Murray,
the id W types. Yeah, I just see them as
infiltrators to keep basically conserve liberalism, conserve progressivism.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: However, Gottfried identifies the root of this not in managerialism
per se, which is simply the vehicle through which it
and its ends are achieved, but in two proximate causes multiculturalism,
which is to say, the prevalence of minority groups whose
political efforts go towards neutralizing the culture and institutional particularities
associated with a majority out group, and a religious and
cultural phenomenon owing itself chiefly to a progressive perversion of
mainline Protestant churches that manifests itself as white guilt.
Speaker 3: David French concrete example of this. This is actually what
got San Francis in trouble in the nineties. He wrote
a column in the Washington Times, and he was he
was basically mocking this Southern Baptist church for for apologizing
for slavery. Basically, this this idea that that Christians today,
you know, in the nineties, have any kind of responsibility
for something like slavery, right, and and also the idea
of of kind of like permanent group guilt. It seems
to completely contradict the idea of of for you know, forgiveness,
of forgiveness in this Christian sense that we can be
absolved of our sins. Instead, what we're saying is is
that actually entire races of people have this kind of
permanent original sin that that will not only taint them,
but also like every subsequent generation of white people carries
this sin, and San Francis just argued like, this is absurd.
It also seems to violate like Christian ethics and history,
and that column actually got him in trouble. He was right,
of course, like everything he said in that column is correct,
but it was just seen as of course it was.
It was construed as a an apology for slavery, which
is which obviously that's not what it was. But the
the funny thing is is that that was considered a
hot take at the time, so hot that you know,
like I said, it got him in trouble and it
contributed to his firing from the Washington Times. But today
we there's like a unanimous agreement on the right, even
like the mainstream right, that yeah, this actually seems to
be a kind of bizarre Christian deformation, the politics of
white guilt, like that is a totally mainstream view now.
Whereas it got a prominent intellectual who was talking about
this in the nineties, it got him in trouble and
ultimately contributed to him getting fired.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, Denesh to Susan, sure, this results in
an atmosphere to which white people must submit in self
abasement and atonement. For past sentence. It necessitates the grafting
onto administrative states of therapeutic and punitive agencies for forming
social consciousness and chastising those with defective sensibility. That is
a quote and a half right there by. Now, political
correctness and its causes are well worn themes. It has
also become a common It has also become a common
It has also become commonplace to identify modern social justice
and its dominant theme of white guilt as a kind
of religion. Godfrey dearrived at such conclusions at least twenty
years before most commentators, as did Sam Francis, whose work
we have already explored. The specific causes are incidental to
our purposes here, but it is worth listing them. Godfried
sees the issue as predominantly American, arising from the so
called melting Pot and then exported to the rest of
the anglosphere from the mid nineteen sixty sixties onward onwards,
who came to imitate the crusade against discrimination then being
waged across the Atlantic. In the American milieu milieu, the
key groups are the so called wasps, white Saxon Protestants,
who have allowed their mainline churches to stray very far
from biblical teachings to general sermonizing about the dangers of
bigotry and an alliance of minority grew which include Jews,
Irish and Italian Catholics and blacks. Gottfried locates at the
heart of the issue the feminization of Christianity, the fusion
of a victim centered feminism with the Protestant framework of
sin and redemption. It is not difficult to see a
perverted form of the Calvinist doctrine of absolute depravity in
contemporary social justice rhetoric.
Speaker 3: I think that that that thesis that basically radical social justice,
whatever you want to call it, that it was not
a European import to the United States. That this is
actually something that we, by we, I mean the United
States kind of conceived and then ultimately exported. That also
is is that's a controversial opinion, right, Like a lot
of a lot of conservative punditry revolves around this idea
that basically everything was fine, but then some you know,
like some German idealism or whatever or Marxism got imported, uh,
and that ultimately brought us to where we are now,
that that basically it was the import of foreign ideas.
But Paul seems to believe that actually there this tendency
was already present in the United States, that there or
there's something here that made the ideas particularly virulent and destructive.
And I mean this goes against like even even institutions
like like the Claremont Institute, right they they take the
view that that actually, our problems are mostly imported from German,
from German thinking and German German uh views of of
like the social sciences and stuff like that. Paul is saying, no,
like this is actually a homegrown problem. And it's funny
because you recently had the French government talk about this,
that that basically the like woke ideology is coming from
the United States to France and that they view it
as a kind of threat to the stability of the
French regime because essentially it threatens to delegitimize the French government,
the French state by doing what it's doing in the
United States, which is saying that the entire you know,
French society is built on racism, on the exploitation of
minority groups and stuff like that, where for the United
States it's more about slavery. In France, it's more about colonialism.
But the French government has said like this is on
the one hand a threat, an existential threat to French society,
and on the other hand, an American import. I think
that point doesn't get enough attention because it's worth chewing on, right,
Like why is that? Like what is this? My mind
goes to. I think his name was William Lloyd Garrison,
the abolitionists who burned the Constitution, and kind of I
think you referred to it as like a deal with
a devil or something like that. And I think that
you always had this kind of radical tendency that was
it seemed like it was there's always this kind of
millenarian tendency in the United States. Not in the average American,
but there is always this kind of faction in the
US that had this kind of millenarian radical social justice
can't And I think Paul's really the only person that's
I think, tried to explore this.
Speaker 1: So all right, gone back to reading the author in
the first the author's writing in the first person. Here,
I recall being at an international conference in twenty seventeen
which a world famous feminist renaissance scholar at Columbia undoubtedly
a wasp, spoke for almost half an hour in unmistakably
religious terms about her shame at being white. In truth,
I could not bear witness to this act of public
penance and left the conference hall after ten minutes. Gottfried
does not solely lay blame on Protestantism gone awry. He
also points to the political games played by minority groups. Gottfried,
who is Jewish, notes the double standard, for example, of
Jews who combined strong nationalist feelings for their own group
and for Israel with the advocacy of open borders, alternative lifestyles,
and extreme pluralism for their host countries. That's quoting Gottfried
right there. Elsewhere. Around the time he was writing Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, he noted the weaponization of
social justice rhetoric by Jewish groups against the chief against
their chief political rivals, the white Christian Right. Quoting Gottfried,
but seeking out block alliances with blacks and other marginalized
groups is thought to help American Jews in another more
significant way. Like gays and feminists, blacks are valuable for
those who perceive the white Christian right as their major
enemy and as the prime source of American anti Semitism.
I would urge Professor Foreman to look at the Anti
Defamation League's nineteen ninety four publication The Religious Right, The
Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America as an illustration
of how leading American Jewish organizations perceive their self interest.
It is by declaring solidarity with blacks and others thought
to be on the left against the predominantly Southern based
religious right, racist theocracy, holocaust denier, and anti abortion are
becoming interchangeable terms in American Jewish tirades against the Christian Right.
Remaining firmly tied to blacks is therefore seen as necessary
to preserve Jews against the real enemy, the one they
fear and detest most, whether or not it poses a
real threat to their individual or communal existence.
Speaker 3: Paul has said elsewhere. I think that he thinks of
this this strategy backfires, that it actually increases I mean,
we're so past like Balkanization, but basically that's exactly what
it does. It actually increases conflict between groups in the
United States more than it resolves anything. I mean, But
I mean, I think Paul's like one of the few
people that has written about this subject and is willing
to kind of, you know, make these points. But anyways, yeah,
I mean, this is this is like probably Paul's one
of the most controversial things that he writes about as
only probably he code or would be willing to. I mean, yeah,
it's it's this is it's it's a difficult subject.
Speaker 1: So he still gets called the Nancy Semite anyway.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, I think he had family that was
killed by the Nazis too, I think, but it's just
uh yeah, I mean he was to his credit, he's
even willing to discuss these things.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's part of the therapeutic state when you're
getting accused of things that are absurd. However, Gottfreed notes.
Gottfried notes that other minority groups have played these political
games too, including Irish and Italian Catholics. Of course, good
students of elite theory would not be surprised in the
slightest that in a multicultural liberal democracy, tightly organized special
interest groups should come to dominate the disorganized majority. This
is Moscow's law. What troubles Gottfried most is the manufacturing
of consent that we have seen discussed, that we have
already discussed has been pathologized and even medicalized. This is
where I'm gonna say, just stop and say that when
some of us say, especially Orrin McIntyre's really be you know,
says this a lot and has almost become famous for
saying that these people just not going to leave us alone.
The people who want to be left alone are always
going to be defeated by the people who aren't going
to leave us alone. Have no intention of leaving us alone.
So I think that this section right here, this is
starting to talk about that where anyone who thinks that
this leftist ideology is they're somehow going to overcome it politically. No,
that's why these people don't care about politics. That's why
these people will raid the compounds of former presidents. That's
why these people will push the mutilation of children.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think this is actually the most interesting part
of the chapter, the basically the clinicalization of disagreement.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He suggests that since the nineteen sixties, the behavior modification
and social engineering programs or the managerial state, have relentlessly
fought against discrimination in promoted diversity, using the looming image
of the Nazis or the ghosts of slavery and the
segregationist South as cudgels in a permanent slippery slope argument.
He identifies three tactics that are routinely employed. First, the
tendency of media and other opinion makers to stress that
consensus has already been reached, for example, over immigration or
multicultural programs. In the UK, the BBC would routinely engage
in this form of gaslighting on its flagship debate show
question Time. They would routinely present a panel with four
pro immigration voices against a lone anti immigration voice. The
studio crowd would cheer the pro immigration voices and boo
the anti immigration voice. This serves to isolate the viewer
at home watching the show who may be against immigration,
by creating the perception that their stance is held by
a despised minority. In fact, from nineteen sixty four to
twenty seventeen, over sixty five percent of the British public
opposed immigration, according to the British Election Study. The media
nakedly employs a persuasion tool known as social proof in
a bid to make the public more accepting of mass immigration.
I mean you've wrote on You've wrote on this on immigration.
Speaker 3: I mean yeah, I think the point about social proof
reminds me of something else that I've written about, which
is called, well, it's this idea of like socially constructed phenomenon.
It's like mass shootings. Right, there's this idea that is
constructed by the media that basically, like the there are
that all mass shooters are white, right, that they're all
this this implicitly right wing white person. But obviously that's
not true. Like the high profile things that we see
on TV, like you know, they happen to these uh,
these like white schizophrenics or whatever, but they make up
a minority of the total population that is responsible for
mass shootings. And uh. The study that I was citing
to make this case actually argues that on the one hand,
you have this this thing, uh, these socially constructed perceptions
of of uh, social problems, and on the other hand,
it actually results in a kind of like misdirection of
resources that because we're because our attention is focused on
you know, what seems to be this this boogeyman of
like you know, the white mass shooter, our attention and
efforts are directed towards essentially like you know, increasing our
our like anti discrimination regime, like the social engineering to
stamp out like supposed you know, white femism, white rage,
as general Mark Milly calls it, right, But it's a
complete waste in the sense it doesn't it doesn't actually
solve anything. It basically creates a problem that doesn't really exist,
and then pours resources and energy into addressing that. Then
ultimately all it really does is kind of expand the
size and scope of the manager regime. You have a
more invasive state that needs to root out, you know,
the causes that supposedly contribute to this problem of the
white mass shooter, right, and they're there. I mean, you
could argue, like I actually believe in this that there's
actually something that's driving people insane about modernity and making
them commit these kinds of shootings. But it's not like
white racial resentment or something like that, like I think
it's I think it's actually much worse than that. It's
something about the way that the way that we live
period today makes people I think nihilistic. But that's much
harder to solve than you know, the supposed boogeyman of
like of white extremism. That's that's much more serious. You're
talking about something that is like baked into the cake
of the modern West, and you can't really, you can't
really solve that, Like there's no think tank that can
address that problem. Right, But these socially constructed narratives like
this social proof, I think, is an example of that
completely divert our attention and resources to things that are
that ultimately serve no one except for the managers. If
that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought you were going to start talking about
industrial society in its future, right there? For a second,
All right, let's move on. The second tact that Gottfried
identifies is employing the past as a club. By harping
on the real or a man evils of the past,
Proponents of state controlled socialization appeal to the guilty conscience
of their listeners and furnish occasions for exhibitions of public righteousness.
Such exhibitions have become by now so routine and widespread
that they have gained the label virtue signaling. Who hasn't
seen somebody post on social media that they're opposed to
slavery in twenty twenty two?
Speaker 3: Thank you for just yeah, it's just thank you for
letting us know that you're against slavery. That's great.
Speaker 1: It's very brave, very and stunning. However, the third and
most insidious method is to treat the unwanted behavior as
a form of sickness, to depict unfashionable thinkers and retrograde
views as pathological. Gottfried is rightly perturbed that the implications
of treating dissent as a form of mental illness, which
requires psychiatric remedy. That pathologizing tendency has its overt postwar
roots in the work of the Frankfurt School, and specifically
Theodore W. W. Adrano's The Authoritarian Personality Type. Gottfried gives
a full treatment to this text in his early book
After Liberalism, to which multiculturalism in the Politics of Guilt
was a sequel Elsewhere he is it pains to point
out that, contrary to certain right wing conspiracy theories, which
suggests the injection of Frankfurt School thinking into Western institutions
as a Marxist plot hatched from Moscow, that Adorno was
sponsored by an emphatically liberal but also anti Soviet sponsor,
the American Jewish Committee. In other words, this is not
subversion by liberalism by communist agitators. This is the logic
of managerial liberalism. Played out to its natural limits.
Speaker 2: Got anything to say about that?
Speaker 3: No, I think that's I think again, it gets at
this this idea that that these are imported ideas, right.
Uh that No, actually this this actually seems to be
something that is home grown. Uh. And I mean managerialism.
Managerial liberalism is a good term to sum this stuff up.
But I think that the next part is what I
was like, I said, this is this is the part
that I think is really really fascinating and I wanted
to talk about.
Speaker 1: So let's do it. And after liberalism. Drawing on Thomas
Thomas Oz, right, I think so okay and Christopher lash
he charts how the fields of psychiatry and psychology gave
rise to a new expert class whose role was to regulate, alter,
and normalize behavior to conform to their requirements of managerialism.
Quoting the invasion of government and the courts by behavioral
scientists has produced what Thomas ZoZ calls the therapeutic state.
Psychiatrists and social psychologists have been given social status, according
to ZoZ, and their moral and political judgments, though not
always founded on hard empirical science, are taken to be expert.
These experts today can affect decisions about the responsibility of criminals,
the right to control property, and the custody of children.
Psychiatric theologians have been able to impose their private political
opinions as scientific truth, and ZoZ cites the fact that
the American Psychiatric Association now defines the involuntaryment, treatment, and
incarceration of mental patients as health rights. ZoZ also observes
if people believe the health values justify coercion, but that
moral and political do not, those who wish to coerce
others will tend to enlarge to caateggory of health values
at the expense of moral values. Health values have also
become socialized through a global managerial culture since nineteen seventy
sixty and added Nations through its imperial through its International
Covenant on Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights, has elevated the
enjoyment of the highest standard of mental health to a
sacred entitlement. Henceforth, henceforth, governments must ensure a sound state
of mind as a human right.
Speaker 6: I think this whole thing is so important, and I
think the most obvious example of this idea of psychiatric
theologians is today is transgenderism.
Speaker 3: And I don't think we really appreciate this point enough.
There was a case recently in Arkansas where a judge
ruled that Arkansas cannot enforce a ban on gender transition
therapy for for kids, and obviously that the justification for
that is that basically these medical interventions, so the so
called medical interventions, are life saving. And we're going to
get into Fuco here in a sec and I actually
think you're better off reading like Fuco at this point
than John Locke in order to understand, like the modern
manager regime that that basically, uh, these claims that like
gender transition therapy are are life saving and therefore necessary,
and you can't stop you can't. You can't even like
through the through the legislative process. It's it's it's not
okay to prevent kids from getting access to this stuff.
It's delivered in the like the neutral language of science,
which gives this facade of exactly that this is just
objective truth. This is what the what the the the
academic institutions of medicine have decided is simply true. It's
not political at all, but obviously it is. Every institution
is political. It's absurd to think anything else, but that
is precisely why this stuff is so pernicious. That you
have courts and social workers and all these people that
have the power to deprive you of your children, of
your property, or even your freedom, who are grounding their
arguments in what are supposedly kind of objective ethical concepts
like best practices for care and things like that. It's
extremely pernicious. And again, Paul's one of the few people
that talks about this.
Speaker 1: It's so dangerous and it's so scary. I mean, these
people they can pick you up and there's nothing you
can do. They can do anything to you that they
want to force medicate. Yeah, there was a time I
was reading about somebody, somebody I've talked about in this
podcast before, who actually committed suicide because he was in
fear that they were going to lobotomize him.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, yeah, yeah, So all right.
Speaker 2: It is interesting.
Speaker 1: It is interesting that this analysis of relationship between the
field of mental health and power has a parallel on
the left in the work of Michelle Fuko. Fuko pointed
out how the medical or clinical gaze obscures the functioning
of power because of the morally neutral language of science. However,
as much as Fuku is added to university reading lists
and read by undergraduates. It seems that no one at universities,
least of all those on the left, ever stops to
question the relationship between power and pulp and public and
mental health in the current paradigm. One might suggest that
this is because they now see themselves in power. Instead
of using Fuco to criticize the current paradigm, they seem
to remain frozen forever analyzing the culture of the nineteen
fifties and deconstructing the last one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, That's that's the irony of of I
guess modern political scientists who are kind of bathe in
Fucoian concepts but don't really seem to apply them to
the existing paradigm and existing power structures. Right, they continue
applying them to the past, and the past always provides
a justification for kind of reshaping the future. Like I said,
I actually think at this point you would get more understanding.
It's probably more constructive to read people like Fuco at
this point in order to understand like the problems and
how power works in the world that you know, people
like Fuco made. Then you know, reading like Locke and
kind of pretending that we still live in this like
you know, nineteenth century role constitutional republic or something like that.
I think I think Foucaut was himself like a sexual
deviant and a terrible human being, but his insights on
power are actually are really useful. And I think that
for Foucaut, he was writing as someone who viewed himself
as kind of out of power, right, And so when
you're someone who views themselves as part of the of
a marginalized community, because Fucau is he was gay, and
but not just that, like he was part of this
French group of intellectuals that signed a petition for abolishing
age of consent laws in France. Like the guy was
messed up, but as an outsider who kind of sees
all of these these taboos and taboos exist for a reason.
But all of these kind of these things that make
people behave and think and act a certain way as
as basically kind of constraints on your own individualism. Uh,
then you're going to want to figure out how these
how these power structures work and how to dismantle them.
And for someone who is you know, on the outside,
that makes sense, right, But I think the reason fouqu
is useful to the right right now, is that we're
the ones that are on the It's kind of it's
a it's a paradox right, the right, which is for
so long identified with like institutions like the military and
law enforcement and stuff like that, we're on the outside.
We have no control over institutions anymore. The institutions are
not conservative, they're not right wing. You are in the
You're basically in the shoes that people like fuc were in.
And that's why it actually behooves you to understand how
the regime actually works, rather than how we've been told
it does or how we would wish it did work. So,
I I mean that that's my that's my uh my
position on you know why, actually you should read for Go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Fuko wrote books on prisons, wrote books on medicine,
how medicine was being handled in the modern time. I mean,
we know he was a deviant. A lot of that work, though,
is is spot on, especially especially in light of today. Okay,
so all right, we are quoting Gottfried here. Christopher Lash
explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the
managerial elite won moral acceptance despite that it claims to
be providing mental health, we're always mental health, We're always
self serving and highly subjective. The therapeutic class offered ethical
leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional
well being as both a social good and the overcoming
of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists
have been able to impose their absence stes upon a
culturally fluid society. In The True and Only Heaven, Lash
explores the implications for post war politics of the authoritarian personality.
A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodor Adorno, abandoned his
earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent
of governmentally imposed social therapy. According to Lash, Adorno condemns
undesirable political attitudes as prejudice, and by defining prejudice as
a social disease, substituted a medical for a political idiom.
In the end, Adorno and his colleagues relegated a broad
range of controversial issues to the clinic to scientific study
as opposed to philosophical and political debate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is another aspect of this particular
section of the chapter that I think is really really important,
really fascinating that this dissent disagreement is no longer merely
a difference in opinions. It's it's pathologized. It's indicative actually
of a social disease. I think that's that's you really
saw this play out with like the arms armchair psychology
that people performed on Trump while he was in office, right,
Like and these like popular psychology magazines, people writing about,
you know, what what makes Trump tick? And it's always
something like fascism, right, or what makes his his base tick?
Whi's always something like fascism. It always seems to come
back to that. But the point is is that these
people literally don't accept viewpoints that are that that they
don't hold. It just can't be that way. It has
to be indicative of some kind of pathology. Right, If
you don't like like transgender activism or like LGBT activism,
it's probably because you're posed. Right, If you don't like feminism,
it's it's because you hate women. It's like there's if
you don't like if you think that we should have
borders in immigration restriction, it's because you hate immigrants and
brown people. Like it's always it always actually has to
be just a kind of surface level, a symptom of
some deep seated pathought, some sickness that needs to be
cured by therapy and social engineering. Uh. And what's important
about that is that it means that they're never just
going to accept differing views. And I think that somehow
this is connected also to our foreign policy, this idea
that that there's only if there's only one set of
acceptable political views and social views, then it follows that
there's probably only going to be one acceptable form of government,
right in all other governments that are not that are
existent threats to you, and they have to be reconstructed.
And like you see this and they're like the rhetoric
of like neo conservatives and foreign policy. Uh, every every
every geopolitical thing today is always like a contest between
autocracy and liberal democracy. Right. We literally can't leave countries
alone that that our foreign policy establishment does not see
as liberal democracies. Why because because it's unacceptable. It's unacceptable
that there could be another form of government, another another
consensus in other words, on government. It's just not acceptable.
And the same thing obviously applies to domestic politics.
Speaker 1: If you want to support the show head on over
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Wall dot com forward slash support and thank you. One
of the reasons why when the troops are leaving Afghanistan
you see pictures coming out and reports of George Floyd
murals in Afghanistan, and that schools we're teaching gender studies
in Afghanistan, they have to export that to they have
to export that there. And it's it's a religion, it's
it's very evangelical in nature. Moving on, As per Karl Schmidt,
there are no neutral institutions, including medical and psychiatric institutions.
If the managerial state makes anti discrimination the moral center
of its political formula, then discriminatory views are diagnosed as
mentally abnormal. In such a regime, unconscious bias training is
mandated at most workplaces and for employ coloyees of the state,
despite empirical proof that it does not even achieve the
behavior modification at which it aims by admission of the
British Government. The UK Cabinet Office's written statement on unconscious
bias training, ostensibly written in the neutral language of science,
concludes by reaffirming its commitment to the political formula of
the therapeutic state, equality, diversity and inclusion. The Civil Service
will therefore integrate principles for inclusion and diversity into mainstream
core training and leadership modules in a manner which facilitates
positive behavior change. Here is an open declaration that the
state is engaged in positive behavior change as a central
mission at the time of writing. The former UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair, speaking in an interview at CNN, said
it's an indicator of how broken politics has been that
the issue of vaccination has become should become political. I mean,
it's just a question of science. One might ask mister
Blair how the issue of having one's body penetrated by
a foreign object by order of the government could ever
not be political.
Speaker 3: This Paul talks about this and after liberalism that basically
like the clinicalization of everything that in the early and
mid twenties, say the mid twentieth century, you have, I'm
my actually having going to give a timeline for this
stuff because it's I haven't I haven't absorbed it enough.
But basically, what Paul argues in general is that psychiatry
arose initially in the United States is something that was
used to address things like alcoholism and domestic violence. Right. So,
in other words, Paul suggests that, Okay, in the beginning,
this stuff might you know, probably did have some merit
in kind of correcting deviant behavior. But then something happened
and progressives, the progressive movement in the United States and
its adherents basically started to view things like psychiatry not
as correctives, not as a kind of something that we
use to treat people who are behaving in a way
that's bad, you know, like an alcoholic or something. Instead,
we can actually use it to socially engineered society a
certain way, in other words, to foster a certain kind
of populace or citizenry that actually, I mean, we say citizenry,
but really you're talking more about like subjects, right, And
I think it reminds me of this this idea that
Michelle fu Cooh had that basically in the seventeenth century,
you had this this kind of this emerging new type
of power that he called biopower. That basically the moment
that rulers, the moment that sovereigns took it upon themselves
to kind of concern themselves with the the the welfare
of the population through through things like not just you know,
obvious things like medical services and things like that in
public services, but also even I mean, like I think
fu CO even includes like census keeping, kind of like
the moment that we started to put people on Excel
spreadsheets or whatever the seventeenth century equivalent of that is, right.
And then obviously onward from that, the moment that we
started to do that, something happened where regimes began to
concern themselves with fostering a kind of way of life.
That power before that was what the CO called subtractive,
So power before that, the way that you experienced it
was the regime would take things away from you. It
would take your life away from you, it would take
your freedom away from you, it would take your your property.
Way it still does those things obviously, right, but then
this new type of power, biopower, starts to it's a
it's a it's a kind of prestrict prescriptive power that
the regime is that regimes going forward started to cultivate
ways of living. And I think this is this is
a really fascinating concept, and I think it's something that
they're right, doesn't think about enough. Uh, this whole idea
of social engineering. I think we do and we don't.
But I mean, I think Paul's treatment, I'm kind of
I'm butchering right now, but Paul's treatment and after liberalism
is it's really incredible because I mean, even I think
even you see the effects of these things and the
way that conservatives have conversations where they make distinctions between
like sex and gender without realizing that all of this stuff,
even even the words that we use it all right,
it all derives from these institutions that have been totally
captured and turned against us, to the extent that we
don't even realize that we're still kind of operating within
the language that these people have created in their paradigms.
When we're trying to refute, like leftists or something like
that about how like, you know, sex is real and
biologically grounded or something like that, we still will use
words and concepts that are developed by these people. I
don't know if that makes sense, but.
Speaker 1: Just conservatives are conservative conserving liberalism and progressivism.
Speaker 3: It's worse than that, I think, actually, but yeah, correct.
Speaker 1: But simply for somebody who you know, doesn't really follow
and read a lot of what we you know, a
lot of what we do is basically there. It makes
its way in, It makes its way into everything. It
insinuates its way even into your thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think even this idea of like like
it's just science, right, it's a question of science. I mean,
even that a great It's funny. I was thinking about
this the other day. Ask someone what is receptivism? So
ask someone who's like pro criminal justice reform, you know,
pro defund the police or whatever, and ask them what's uh,
because obviously they'll they'll tell you that, like, you know,
recetivism programs work. These programs where we're like, you know,
dangerous criminals can rehabilitate themselves by like washing dogs in
prison and stuff like that, that it works. And see,
just ask them a simple question, because there's so certain
that recetivism has been reduced, right, So you ask them,
like what is recetivism and they'll tell you, well, the
likelihood of someone to reoffend once they get out of prison,
But that's not true. In Ohio. Recetivism is not that straightforward.
Like if you get out of a prison and you know,
in a particular county and you grow across the state
state line to like Michigan, and you can and you
commit a crime there and you go back to prison.
As far as the Ohio Corrections Department is concerned, you're
not a recetivist because you committed that crime in Michigan.
And I think that gets at this problem of like, well,
it's science, it's empirical, objective data. How could you argue
with that? It's neutral in other words, but obviously nothing
is neutral, like your truth claims that you think are
founded on objective, empirical fact are not because they are
laundered through institutions that are politicized, like every institution is.
And so you actually, I mean, if you really think
about this, you might even go crazy, because what basically
what we're saying is is that, like the foundation for
truth does not really stand on anything in Western liberal
societies today except for basically just you know, the opinions
of people who are insane and unfortunately also in power.
Speaker 2: We will move on.
Speaker 1: It is important for us to grasp here the salient features.
The salient feature of Godfreed's analysis, which is not merely
to say that the managerial state has developed and adopted
this ideology and those tools of mast manipulation to justify
its own power, but also that has developed them as
a political political weapon. Quoting Gottfried, the political class has
adopted inclusiveness and diversity as a political instrument as a
means of controlling a society it has set about reshaping.
The diversity machine is a mechanism of state power that
operates without anyone being permitted to notice its coercive nature.
Therapeutic regimes are packaged in a way that disguises their
resort to force both the left and establishment right. In
the United States, the states which misrepresent political life have
helped to make this concealment possible. Thus, insidious efforts at
social engineering are shrouded in a cloak of benevolence. In
managerial double speak, Flatly, coercive programs are cast as vehicles
for empowerment. One is reminded of when Bob Dylan says
good intentions can be evil. Both hands can be full
of Greece. You know that sometimes satan comes as a
man of peace. Every moral revolution expands the realm of
managerial control. The government, now in place searches out radical
forces in order to break down non inclusive behavioral patterns
and to subjugate citizens. Those who favor such a course
for individual or collective reasons will empower the state to
pursue it. The most blatant example of this in recent
years has been the borderline insane push to recognize transgender
men and women as being indistinguishable from what from so
called CIS men and women.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but no, that's you keep reading. I'll comment after
the JK Rolling thing, Okay.
Speaker 1: The public maintenance of obvious fictions and falsehoods signals allegiance
and obedience to the regime and serves no other function
whatsoever than to punish dissonance. The most famous example of
this has been the attempted unpersoning of the otherwise pristinely
political correct, politically correct liberal JK. Rowling for her alleged
transphobia controversies around You want to do it now?
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, no, I think this is I mean, this
gets it kind of the point that we were discussing earlier,
where I mean, and I've been guilty of this too,
just kind of out of laziness. But it's kind of
like the marriage thing, right, Like the moment that you
start referring to marriage as traditional marriage to make a
distinction between traditional marriage and you know, non traditional marriage
or you know, gay marriage or whatever, you've already kind
of lost because you've already had to make that distinction
and you've created a second category. And Patrick Denen is
actually very good at pointing this out when it comes
to marriage, but it obviously it applies to much more so.
The moment that you start saying SIS women or CIS men,
or even biological men and biological women. The moment that
you do that you've you've kind of created, You've implied
that there is a second category of women, and that
these other people that occupy this category are not really women,
but maybe they are in one sense, you know what
I'm saying. And I think that conservatives and in a
much more absurd level, this this applies to the idea
that you know, you have some of these so called
good liberals and some conservatives too, who oppose, you know,
militantly transgenderism and kids, but are actually fine with the
idea of transgenderism as a concept. For for consenting adults
who understand the implications of what they're getting into, so
they actually accept the most important premises. And I think
Rolling kind of falls. I mean, she does, and she
doesn't like she you know, she she's rejected the idea
that men who mudiately themselves can become women and all that,
but Rolling accepts a lot of other premises that kind
of made this whole thing inevitable. And in my view,
a lot of the stuff derives from feminism, the idea
that we should essentially destroy distinctions between men and women.
It's kind of coming back to bite people like Rolling.
But anyways, Yeah, I think the language thing is important.
That's the part that caught my eye about this section.
The whole cis men or biological men, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Controversy surrounding her failure to abide by the new managerial
edict to recognize biological men who take hormone supplements and
wear skirts as women and biological women who take testosterone
supplements and wear masculine clothing as men has led to,
among other things, a school dropping her name from a building,
and her virtual erasure from a twenty year Harry Potter reunion.
In two thousand and two, Gottfried predicted correctly, as it
turned out that the ever widening chasm between the equality, diversity,
and inclusion doctrine of the therapeutic state and the lived
reality and beliefs of most ordinary people would result in
a populous backlash against managerial overreach. He claimed that the
regime faces a paradigm crisis in which the gap between
its democratic and liberal self descriptions and its imposed social
policies would become too obvious to escape notice, and therefore
the efforts to justify these policies with archaic terminology or
human rights rhetoric no longer illicit widespread belief. At the
time of writing. A recent study by the University of
Chicago has found that forty seven million Americans are said
to believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen. Twenty
one million believed that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.
Sixty three percent of people agree with the statement that
African Americans people or Hispanic people in our country will
eventually have more rights than whites, a belief sometimes called
the Great Replacement, and fifty four percent agree that a
secret group of Satan worshiping pedophiles is ruling the US government,
which is the key belief in the QAnon movement. A
more recent poll has found that one in three Americans
believe that violence against the government is justified. Mosco's warning
that no ruling class can remain a ruling class for
as long as for long if the masses do not
buy into its political formula seems to ring ever louder.
Speaker 3: Now, I think, I mean, you see this playing out
in all these warnings that there are two articles that
stand out that recently were published, and I think one
was in the Associated Press. But it's like, you know,
more people that have before living in their own reality
or basically the faith or yeah, I guess faith in
American institutions is plummeting institutions that are responsible for like
creating consensus, right, And I don't know. I think I
generally want to agree with Moscow that that basically ruling
classes historically have required people to buy into the political
formula in order for them to stay in power. But
something about the our contemporary problems seem difficult and might
have just something to do with the level of comfort
the average person enjoys, you know, like as angry as
you're like your boomer Republican gets about what Biden is doing.
Not not just boomers, this is not just like a
boomer problem, but like you take someone who's like super
super angry about what Biden is doing, and they still
will participate in things that contribute to all these problemroblems
that they think are ruining society. I think the most
obvious example of this is probably like like sports, right,
like watching professional sports. Like there are so many conservatives
who are addicted to watching professional sports obsessively, knowing that
their money and their attention and their emotions are being
invested in something that is totally opposed to the things
they claim to hold dear. You know, like pretty much
every sports institution is like that, supporting BLM, supporting transgenders
and stuff like that, And every time that you like
buy a jersey or watch a game or something like that,
you're supporting those things even though you don't agree with
the political formula. Right, you reject the political formula when
it's presented to you, but then you continue doing things
that actually support the system to which the political formula
is part. And I think that that is I mean,
we've always had bred in circuses right, that's that's nothing new.
But something seems uniquely bad about contemporary bred and circuses
in our ability to or in its ability to make
this whole thing possible. That people could be simultaneously, you know,
angrier than they've ever been since the Civil War, but
still seemingly incapable to really do anything constructive with that anger. Yeah,
so I think it's a unique problem. I think, like
I said, I agree with Moscow, but I also think
that there's there's like something new has been added to
the mix that makes all of this worse.
Speaker 1: There is an article came out today from our friends
over at National Review showing that twenty teams in the
MLB Major League Baseball, are donating up to six figures
and some into six figures for youth gender transitioning.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's weird to me that people are like, wow,
this is outrageous. It's like, yeah, this, Why are you surprised?
It's outrageous that you're surprised by this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Moving on where Francis took his cues,
chiefly from Burnham and Pereto. Godfried's chief influence was Karl Schmidt,
and in particular the primacy of the political the idea
that we could ever reach the end of history has
been shown to be nonsense. But Godfried stresses that a
peculiar feature of therapeutic managerialism is its need to maintain
the fiction of consensus. Previous ruling classes had no such
requirement and had more actual diversity of opinion within their ranks. However,
to function properly the therapeutic state requires the downplaying of
genuine political differences. The sorts of characters who attend the
Davos agenda hosted by the World Economic Forum, the most
elite men today speak in the language of consensus. One
such character, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, who manages
over seven point five trillion in assets and who can
name the US Federal Reserve as a client, uses phrases
such as public private partnerships and stresses that it is
important for CEOs across all business to be unified. It
has never been more essential for CEOs to have a
consistent voice. Although he speaks in gushing terms about the
power of capitalism, it is quickly clear that Fink's message
is managerial and at his vision for a quasi command
economy in which the controllers have capital dictate the investment
agenda for the future, quoting every company and every industry
will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world.
The question is will you lead or will you be led.
We focus on sustainability, and not because we're environmentalists, but
because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients. Divesting
from entire sectors we're simply passing carbon intensive assets from
public markets to private markets will not get the world
to net zero. When we harness the power of both
the public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things.
This is what we must do to get to net zero.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I like, I'm probably one of the best
things about this book is the fact that it really
drives home this point that this idea that you're still
living in the world of like nineteenth century Leslie Fair
capitalism is subsurb you know. And it's funny because like
you still hear this on the like on the so
called dissident, right, Like you'll still hear people kind of
be critical of the I guess you could say the
anti capitalist rhetoric from people like myself, right, Like, basically
there's this concern that maybe we're going too far with it,
you know, going after corporations and things like that. But
it's like, no, we're actually not going far enough. And
when people like Clarry Think are telling you that we
need to kind of have this this increased partnership between
public and private sector or not, the partnership is there.
He's just saying that we need to mobilize together. The
so called capitalists are telling you that they're not really capitalists.
You know, Like, I don't know why we're arguing about this,
and I think obviously the more correct terms managerialism. That's
the kind of economy that we live under. So I
don't know. I think liberals complain that we live under
capitalist society. Conservatives claim that we live under socialism or
something or communism. No, it's actually it's a fusion of
both of those things. It's called managerialism.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: Simply put, this is not capitalism. This is agenda setting,
whereby one of the most powerful executives in the world
announces five year and ten year plans for what the
future will look like in an almost entirely top down
managed economy. The language of consensus conceals the truly political
character of what Fink is saying. In fact, he has
the temerity to start his letter by saying that COVID
quoting Fink now. COVID nineteen has also deepened the erosion
of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many
Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges
for CEOs. Political activists or the media may politicize things
your company does. They may hijack your brand to advance
their own agendas. In this environment, facts themselves are frequently
in dispute but business. But businesses have an opportunity to lead. Thus,
when he sets his net zero carbon agenda later, it
is cast in the politically neutral language of inevitability, but
in actuality, his letter contains an explicit threat. If CEOs
do not get on board with this agenda, they will
be left behind. They will be identified as the enemies
of progress, and someone, perhaps someone whose company owns half
the exchange traded funds in the world, might see to
it that these enemies no longer have a seat at
the table. In theory, the market decides, but in practice,
men like Larry Fink decide a company can now be
sunk regardless of its actual success with consumers, simply through
investor activism. Likewise, products that have little to no market demands,
such as Beyond Meat can be thrust onto the shelves
despite continually failing to sell. Appalling sales figures have not
stopped massive corporations such as McDonald's and Chaf's pushing beyond
meat plant burgers to the front and center of their
menus using the full bite of their advertising budgets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think this is get to another important point,
which is the idea that go woke, go broke is
a thing. It's not. It's a myth, it's a it's
a cope. Again that conservatives. I keep hammering conservatives because
that's that's that's like my audience, right, I'm trying to
all these people that you mean, well, but it's wrong
that yeah, that if places go woke, you know, no
one's gonna want to buy your stuff. Correct, no one
is going to want to buy you know, or actually
in time they will. I mean, that's just how this
stuff works. Like You've got celebrities on the left and
right and in the middle that are promoting this kind
of stuff like Beyond Meat. I don't know where you
would put vitallic the ethereum guy on the spectrum, but
you know, he tweeted a picture of himself eating they're
protein bites made out of crickets and so like. Unfortunately,
at some point in the future, like this stuff is
going to be pushed on more and more people, regardless
of the cost, because they believe in it. I think
you can't discount that the power of belief. And I
always try to make it a point to say, like, look,
there are two people in the world, cynics and ideologues.
Synics do it for the money. Idiologs do it because
they really believe it, and oftentimes they work together because
what they want to do in the direction they want
to go overlaps. And I think the ideology part helps
to explain why go woke, go broke just doesn't work,
like they are willing to lose this money. There's this
quote I think it was I read it in Breitbart.
I don't know where it's originally from, but it was
some market some marketing big way from Nike, who was
talking about the losses that Nike had posted after Nike
went woke and you know, make colon colon Kaepernick, it's
poster boy. And this marketing guy just said, well, we're
not worried about it because we don't think that, you know,
the future of Nike is old white guys, old angry
white guys. And so basically they're willing to lose millions
of dollars because they think in the long run they're
going to win because they believe in this stuff. And
I mean, yeah, so I think it's important to basically
get that out of your head. Like the cavalry is
not going to come like no one's the market is
not going to save you. The invincible hand is not
going to come down and crush beyond me. Like, it's
just not going to happen. You have to do things
that you have to figure out how to do these
things yourself.
Speaker 1: And there is the chance that if people start abandoning
Nike left and right and go to New Balance, maybe
a Larry Finkin or some of his friends decide to
wage war on New Balance.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's right, New Balance. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, capitalism, Yeah, that's what we have. Yeah, what wonderful?
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: Most of this attempted engineering of consent by the therapeutic
regime serves the purpose of identifying Schmidtian friends and enemies.
The list of enemy terms which serve to expel you
from employment and society at large continues to expand. Sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe,
client deny, are, unvaccinated, and so on. These are all
markers of ideological impurity which serve to dehumanize. Ideologically conscripted
armies tended more and more to demonize their targets. Those
who resisted the ideal embodied by one's nation were no
longer viewed as human in thinking, in thinking, or in fact.
In the twentieth century, this resulted in catastrophic total wars
between managerial states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the USA, under the neo conservatives continue to crusade to
spread liberal democracy to all parts of the world and
to dissolve any vestiges of outmoded tradition with a missionary zeal.
As these efforts were frustrated, and as populations evermore started
to turn against such poormongering, the missionary zeal turned inwards,
where in the nineteen nineties and two thousands, so many
airsats Hitler's resided in Serbia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and
so on. In the twenty twenties, they are at home
not simply the despise Donald Trump, but also his supporters
and now people who refuse to submit to the prescribed
remedies of the COVID nineteen pandemic. In time, it will
no doubt encompass meat eaters, people who wish to drive
petrol fueled cars, and so on. The question remains whether
society can function while around thirty percent of the productive
population are demonized and dehumanized in this way. This has
never been achieved in history by any ruling class. Stalin
and other subjects Tator simply opted to eliminate their enemies.
Speaker 2: Through brute force.
Speaker 1: They were willing to do so to consolidate power and control.
Managerial elites seem unwilling to use such force, and instead
must rely on increasingly transparent games of perception management. At
least by the estimation of gar Woods, speaker at the
World Economic Forum in November twenty twenty one, our current
ruling elites seem to be aware of their own unpopularity
at an at an event called the Great Narrative, she
said at Davos a few years ago, the Edelman Survey
showed us that The good news is the elite across
the world trust each other more and more, so we
can come together and design and do beautiful things together.
The bad news is that in every single country they
were pulling, the majority of people trusted the elite less.
Of course they have to come together. They see the
writing on the wall.
Speaker 3: I mean again, it's importantly, they're not deterred by it.
They like they're they're confident that ultimately they're going to win.
They've got the resources, they've got the brains, and then
they're not really experiencing any push But I mean, the
only this is like the the thing that's difficult to discuss,
especially in the United States today, is like the only
people that are really kind of pushing back on these
Western liberal eat the bug elites are countries like Russia
and maybe even China, right, And I think it it
is a very strange position to be in. And maybe
I think this also contributes to the establishment's fear of
figures like Donald Trump and obviously Victor Orbin because they
represent i mean, setting aside like Russian and China, Guys
like Orbon and Trump represent the possibility of of of
an alternative. So yeah, yeah, I mean this this is
something that's been on my mind a lot because I
had a conversation with my friend who's German, and you know,
he grew up his whole life hating Russia, and his
family hates Russia to this day and and and he
just told me, like I He's like, he's not a
Russell phile, and neither am I. But he basically just said,
like I can't help but think that that somehow, like
the West is on the wrong side of history here
one ironically, and that's not to say that Russia is
on the right side, but basically, like it was like
he was trying to understand why he felt like he
had a stake in Russia not losing this war in Ukraine,
and he like, I mean, he was like tortured trying
to explain this to me, right, because it goes against
everything he believes. But he's just saying, like, I feel
like the same people that want to crush Russia are
the ones that want to crush me. And and it
just it was really interesting, this this talk that we had,
and it's been on my mind a lot, because again,
this is someone who hates Russia. He would never live there.
He doesn't like Putin. He like I said, he was
raised hating Russia, but here he is saying like, I
feel like if they if they lose, somehow I do too.
But he's also not rooting for Russia. Obviously, I mean this.
I think this is actually on a lot of people's minds.
But obviously it's just not something that you could openly
discuss with most people because they just wouldn't understand it.
But I think there's a non insignificant part of the
population that kind of feels this way.
Speaker 1: So even myself, I'm of the age where I grew
up during the Cold War and that was our enemy.
And now I'm looking. Now I'm looking, and I'm like,
you know, I hear Putin give speeches, you know, to
crying Stalinism, to crying Marxism, and to crying the West,
and I'm like, all right, I'm not supposed to like
this guy. But basically, the way he talks about this regime,
he would be one of the people that Paul talks
about who is targeted if he lived here and he
was American.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you have to remember that, at least initially,
Trump had talked about normalizing relations with Russia. Yes, and
that was a huge it was I think that was
a huge factor in the establishment's hate for him. Yes,
because again it represents the possibility of of a of
a different world order, right, a different political consensus. And yeah,
I mean again, this is something that you simply don't
really here discussed in the West, or at least in
the United States, because of the of the consensus that's
emerged on this. I mean maybe in other places Hungary
you hear it more often, but I mean, yeah, I
think the I mean, the consensus is like it's overpowering
at least from the from the institutions of elite opinion making, right.
But yeah, it's an interesting point.
Speaker 1: We got one paragraph left here. The World Economic Forums
Global Risks Report for twenty twenty two lists social cohesion
as a major concern and notes that a recent poll
in the United States, for example, found division in the
country to be voters' top concern. They expected it to
worsen in twenty twenty two. While Gottfried in two thousand
and two was unwilling to predict their ultimate demise. It
seems to me that unless the current ruling class is
prepared to become openly coercive and use force. It will
be overthrown once country elites become organized enough to do
so in every region and locality. You want to what's
your opinion on that, because I mean, that's probably probably
the most controversial is we're soon these people are going
to be overthrown, and so many people just can't see it.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't. He doesn't say soon.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, he doesn't say.
Speaker 3: It's it's also an if, it seems to me, which
is is another way of saying if if these if
the current ruling class you know, doesn't change its approach,
it will be overthrown. So I think there's there's it's
obvious some contingent on certain things happening right and falling
into alignment. I don't know. I'm not really at black pilled,
so to speak. I don't. I don't think that it's
I don't think that their victory is inevitable. I think
that this is I made a thread about this recently,
and I it was well received, but I also got
a lot of hate for it. And basically what I
was saying is that the people who I think are
actually radical, who are on the dissident right, and for me,
the dissident right was like I you know, probably starting
in twenty sixteen, started to kind of get introduced to,
you know, like the radical right and like reading guys
like Buchanan and Gottfried and San Francis, and so that
was a dissident right for me, basically like the paleo
conservative authors because they are which is separate from like
the online right. This gets confusing really fast, but the
point that I was making was that like basically the
dissident right, the radical right, has attained a kind of
purchase in the mainstream. What I mean by that is
that you have some people and institutions in the mainstream
that have kind of like have buy in to the
ideas the dissioned right. Like you've got people who are
totally mainstream basically saying the same things that only the
dissident right was saying a few years ago, like immigration moratorium,
dismantle the FBI, you know, basically like decapitate government leadership.
I don't mean literally, I mean like mass firings and
things like that, which you know is something that like
that you're hearing about now, Like Axios did that story
about how the trumpministration is going to like fire a
bunch of people and staff them with loyalists and stuff
like that. Like the fact that these ideas are becoming
mainstream means that like, like, like I said, the DR
has a kind of buying on some level. And what
the dissident right has done for a long time is
is basically just kind of point out problems and basically
notice patterns and things like that, things that like no
one else is willing to notice. And my thread was
basically saying, like we can still continue doing those things
and noting these problems, you know, like like the Proud
Boys were crushed by the feds. Antifa, which is far
more violent, you know, can openly do armed patrols in
like Red Texas like that. That's a problem that no
one is really talking about. So then, but the next
thing that we have to do is actually figure out
how to come up with actionable solutions to these things.
You know, how how could states actually repress Antifa and
make it so these people cannot publicly organize? You know,
how how could you how could you prevent institutions from
forcing or normalizing transgenderism in society and the like I've
been accused of being like a Rhonda Santi Shill. I'm
just but what the reason I talk about him and
write about him so much is because I see a
governor that's actually using power effectively. So like threatening to
revoke the beverage license of a place that serves alcohol
where you have transgender like strippers, you know, prancing around
in front of little kids. It's like, okay, you want
to do that, Okay, then we'll take away your beverage
license and effectively destroy the business. Like I think that's
the kind of stuff that we should be thinking about
and actually implementing, not just like writing, you know, based
basically kind of statement legislation, which Republicans do this whole time.
Like here's my draft of this piece of legislation that's
never going to go anywhere, for like term limits, Like
we don't actually have to play that game. Like we
have governors, you know, we have people. We already have
people in positions of power, and as we get more
of them in positions of power, how can we actually
do these things in a way that is consistent with
what Parbini is describing. And that's kind of what I'm
really interested in focused in now, is is actually organizing
and going beyond the pattern recognition, problem recognition part and
then actually starting to implement solutions.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: The other example that I use for DeSantis is his
whole thing with Disney, just basically stripping them of their
special tax privileges in Florida for taking the side of
transgender against the against the uh not only what the
governor wanted to do, but also what like normal people
in Florida want, which is, uh, you know, getting transgenderism
out of schools.
Speaker 1: So yeah, one thing though that the right needs is
they need to change their minds. They really have to
start embracing the fact that there's power out there and
they need to use it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Historically it's just get in there, we'll tweak a little bit,
and all they end up doing is basically continuing the regime.
Speaker 3: So there's a great example of this last thing I
said is we're both doing out of time. But the
there's a guy named Mark Elias and he's like a
Democrat election lawyer, and he's he's really a kind of
legal field marshal. This guy oversaw an army of lawyers
that was respond for something like two hundred pre election
lawsuits that basically made it easier for Democrats to win
in key states by removing restrictions on things like mail
and voting and absentee ballots. And so that was before
the election, right, And like this is the other thing too,
for conservatives who understand them me, because they don't have power,
they kind of like they look towards like, you know,
kind of incredible explanations for why things didn't go their way,
like dominion or something like that, right, like the like
servers in Germany and like shootouts in Spain and stuff
like that. Actually it's guys like Mark Elias who are
secretly like waging lawfare and like changing election laws in
your states without you ever knowing about it. Right, And
so that was before the election. And then after the election,
Elias led an army of lawyers that successfully thwarted like
sixty four attempts by Trump's legal team to investigate election
irregular We where is our Mark Ollias on the right?
Why don't we have someone like and like it's funny,
I've made this point to people who are conservatives and like, well,
Mark Ollias is a sleeze bag. He's ruthless, And I'm like, yeah,
so where's my sleeze bag, ruthless right winger, you know,
who's extremely competent. And I think that's it's funny because
no one, although the initial reaction people is always kind
of like, oh, that guy's a dirt bag. Once I
explain like yeah, but he's effective, no one has disagreed
with me, like yeah, actually we do need people like
Mark Olias, these people who are just totally ruthless, you know,
stone cold killers, just.
Speaker 1: Being being content with having a seat at the table
that just has to go out the window. I mean,
it's I mean, I can't even know anymore. Plug what
you want to plug and wind this. I know, we
gotta we gotta go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well you can. You can read my column three
of a Partisan at Chroniclesmagazine dot org. And then I've
got my substack at contrad out substack dot com and
my Twitter actually I'm on Twitter, getter gab and other
places under the same handle. In meriticus, E M E
R I T I C U S. I think earlier
I said psychiatry in the nineteenth century. If I did,
that was a mistake, Paul. And the point about psychiatry
is in the twentieth century, with the progressives so I
just wanted to. I was thinking about that and I
was like, no, psychiatry wasn't a thing like at the.
Speaker 1: Time it was for Freud, early twentieth century.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. I appreciate it. All talks about. Yeah,
I're getting all thanks.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecanona Show
for chapter ten, the very last chapter. I'm here with
Charlot Magne. How are you doing, Charlie very well?
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 1: And Ryan turnip Seed. First time on the show, even
though we've hung out in real life a couple of times.
Speaker 2: So how's it going.
Speaker 7: It's going very well. How are you, sir?
Speaker 1: Doing good? Doing good? Why don't I just throw this
chapter ten up since this is basically a summary and
it's going to take less than five minutes, and then
we're going to have a discussion of an overview of
the book after that, So let me share this real quick.
All right, I'm going to start reading like I've been
doing that through this whole thing. Anybody either of you
wants to stop me and comment, I don't care if
it's mid sentence, just do it. Feel free, all right?
Start reading now? Chapter ten conclusion, the thesis of this
book has been that democracy is and always has been,
an illusion in which the true functioning of power, where
an organized minority elite rule over a disorganized mass, is
obscured through a lie that the people is sovereign. I've
called this the populist delusion because of the power of
the other lies that this central lie conceals, chiefly the
myth of bottom up power or people power, and the
entirely inaccurate view of history this lie creates. There is
never a substitute for the tightly organized minority. This fact,
Mosca's law is the key lesson of the Italian elite
theorists Gaetano Moscavilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michel's. I believe that
the outbreak of populism in Europe and America that started
in twenty fifteen was significantly stemied due to a view
of power and the functioning of Western systems that was
wholly wrong, which is to say that the people who
made up those populist movements believed rearticulations of a false
political formula that they were taught in their Civics or
history classes at school. I think I'd go a step
further than that. I would say that the leadership, the
people who presented themselves as to populist leaders, the Trumps,
the or Bonds of the world world, they just they
actually believe in democracy.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: They're not going to be able to get anything done
within the system the way it has been, the way
it has been structured.
Speaker 7: Right, and quite expressly so. And they also believed in
this sort of like meritocratic view that the system worked,
which is why Trump hired people that were absolutely disloyal
to him but appeared to have the expert qualifications. You know,
It's why staffed his foreign policy side of things with
warhawks and complete backstabbing neo cons because they looked on
paper the most qualified, but they were not the most loyal,
and that's not how this stuff works fundamentally, right.
Speaker 8: It was clear that, you know, as mister Pravini wrote
in the book, very few presidents have actually achieved sovereignty,
one of the few being FDR. And it was clear
that President Trump believed that he would in fact have
sovereignty merely by winning the election, which was definitely not true.
And that fundamental misunderstanding is really what destroyed his presidency
more than the fact that his supporters believe that because
even if his supporters had believed that myth, as is
made clear in the book, if the president understood that
he was not sovereign merely by winning an election, things
would have been different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Moving on the myth of social change
being a bottom up phenomenon pervades our culture and thinking
it is the essential fiction of the nineteen sixties counter
culture and the worldview of the baby boomers. Whereas AA
would put it, it's just Boomer truth regime. And as
as soon as we can destroy that, the better. Sooner
we can destroy that, the better it is worth returning
to the four myths of liberalism that helped to perpetuate
this worldview, myth of the stateless society, that state and
society were or could ever be separate. Do you have
any problem with that, Charlie.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 8: And this actually sort of leads into while I was
planning on offering some criticisms of anarchism. I know we
still have a few libertarians or anarchists in our mysts,
and including mister Carson, you know, who I respect greatly.
But to me, that the ideal of trying to separate
the state from society or any of these other factors,
like the economy. As you're about to read, it just
doesn't make sense as a goal or ideal. I mean,
I understand the anarchist or libertarian impulse towards freedom, and
of course that's a totally reasonable concept for an American
to pursue. But I think strictly speaking, the idea of
anarchy is a bad idea that ideal to hold in
your head, simply because it's completely impossible politically like it,
having ideals that aren't achievable by man in a religious
sense is fine, like the idea of Christianity. No one
can be perfect like Christ, right, But in terms of
our political, or economic or social ideals, they should, I believe,
be rooted in something that's actually achievable. I don't want
to jump the gun here too terribly.
Speaker 1: Well, let me then, let me let me finish read
in the four and then I'll let you I'll let
you jump in. Yeah, okay, so I'll read one again.
Myth of the stateless society, that state and society were
or could ever be separate. Myth of the neutral state,
that state and politics were or could ever be separate.
Myth of the free market, that state and economy were
or could ever be separate myth of the separation of
powers that competing power centers can realistically endure without converging.
So do you want to jump in there or do
you want me to keep reading?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I actually just very quickly. I actually was going
to challenge myself this time and try to defend the
whole or not the whole thing, but at least parts
of the anarchistic worldview, even though I myself don't fully
subscribe to it. I don't believe by any measure of
the measure of the belief system. But the initial things
I remember when this first came out and he talked
about the you know, four myths of liberalism before anyone
had really even read the book to find out what
exactly he meant, and he said that you can't separate
the state from the market, you can't separate the state
from society and all this other stuff. And the first
thing that my mind initially jumped to was sort of
like the enlightened absolutism. You know, the ruler cannot be
separated from any of the outgrowths of society, the sort
of a sort of Prussian system, and that's not really
what's being articulated here, And I was very happy because
of mister Parvini has done an absolutely splendid job at
a you know, throwing clear, concise definitions out this whole book.
And I think it's like, you know, right at the
very start of one of the chapters he defined state is,
you know, a minority that rules over a majority, where
the majority has to be ruled, you know. So it's
not exactly the typical definition you would get for state
from an anarchist or someone like that. So while it
is still infeasible because you're not going to get rid
of a class that rules over anyone else, it's not
exactly going fully in the other direction either. You can
still have great amounts of autonomy as you do see
in history, while still you know, repudiating these four myths.
Here at the end, I figured I would throw that
in there, just sort of as a the these things
are much more strict in definition than they might immediately
seem if you haven't read the full book.
Speaker 1: Well, one thing I would like to say here, because
we are basically talking about anarchism, and I'm on Facebook,
but I'm on one of those famous vacations that I
always get for thirty days, so I can't respond to
things that I see that are absolutely annoying. But one
of the common refrains when it comes to statism, you know,
the you know something that they like libertarians and anarchists
like to use as a pejorative other than as a
descriptor of somebody's beliefs. They one of the common things
they'll say is, oh, you need a you want to state,
because why do you have to use violence against peaceful people?
And it's a good bumper sticker. I like bumper stickers.
But you know, I would ask are these people peaceful?
Are is it general public peaceful? And I think a
lot of them would say, oh, they would be peaceful
if it wasn't for the state. So the state is
basically the boogeyman for everything it is. It's to be
blamed for everything. It's to be blamed for human nature.
And you know what I would say about you know,
and then they'll say, well, you know, if we had
if there was no state, and you know, the market
controlled everything and everything was based on economics, you know,
if somebody got violent, we could just put together, you know,
a bunch of people could get together and they could
just nip it in the bud right there. And it's like,
I don't know about that, you know. I mean, people
have a tendency to tribe up, and one tribe is
going to and this is just what history tells us.
Is stronger than another, is going to be more powerful
than another, is going to be more violent than another,
is going to be willing to commit total war against another.
And I'm not saying the state is here to stop that.
I'm just saying that making the broad claim that without
a state things would be better than they are right now, well,
first of all, you have no evidence of that, it's
a complete theory. And second of all, making that claim
is really childish. If either of you want to push
back on that at all, I'm willing to listen.
Speaker 8: I can, I guess in some ways to defend anarchism,
I mean anarchism, anarcho capitalism. These are fine to have
as political myths. You know, there's no real problem with
using those in order to help organize people. But in
terms of the organizers, the elite, if you will, actually
attempting to organize your minority at the elite level around
the concept of anarchism doesn't actually make any sense.
Speaker 2: And the book.
Speaker 8: The book actually makes an interesting comment earlier in regards
to how capitalism worked. You know, when in this era
when we had free we basically had free markets by
force because the capitalist ruling class came into being and
made the society capitalist. Right, it was made to be
that way. It wasn't just sort of that way in
some natural sense. So you know, this is something I've
mentioned before. I mean, you can you can basically have
your sort of anarcho capitalist ideal in a in a
very approximate sense if you simply have a elite class
ruling somewhat paradoxically implementing that system, right, but you still
have to actually have the state if you will implement
anarcho capitalism, which is somewhat of a contradiction. But according
to the theory of this book, which I think is
very well demonstrated, that's simply how it must be. And
people who style themselves as some sort of anarcho capitalist
elite in the sense that they have some intent to
organized for political power, say like a Ron Paul or something,
they have to operate with.
Speaker 7: That recognition, right, and that might even start looking very
similar to what a lot of people who claimed to
be hoppy. And I'm not going to speak for Hoppa
himself just because he puts out such a wide volume
of works that I'm not going to try to summarize it.
But the people that claim to be hoppy and tend
to advocate for a system that sounds very similar to
what a state is being described as in this book.
Because you have to remember, whenever, whenever in the like
page twenty, or whenever it is in the first chapter,
whenever you introduce the concept of a state, it's not
presumed to be some modern system that you can go
look around today. There's no like DMV that is necessary
in the definition of the state. You know, there's no
sort of underclass of you know, lump and proletariat needed
to staff. It's that's necessary the concept of the state.
It is literally just the organized minority that has to
rule over the majority, and that is a fact in
day to day life. And then that definition is an
extrapolaid to apply to these four spheres of society that
people try to separate out of that state. But you know,
speaking from earlier on in the book, and that's just
most books typically will have the basic axioms or the
basic ideas early on in the book that you can
then always refer back to to try to apply that
out of things not explicitly stated in the book. So
a lot of hopi ins probably would look at the
description of how the state, the minority that rules over
the majority, how this book says it comes about, and
look on it very favorably. That it is both you know,
it is voluntary, just because the nature of man necessitates
that you can't literally just or someone to do absolutely
everything you want them to. There has to be some
element of voluntary action in there. But then also because
of the nature of man, it requires people to organize socially,
it's coercive in that way, you know, you are tied
to that sort of natural need. So people that I
argue for covening communities, that argue for contractual communities and
all this other stuff, those types of anarchists that I
tend to see is much more real, probably wouldn't find
that much to object to in this which is, you know,
it repudiates sort of the pie in the sky anarchistic
thought that Pete definitely goes off against quite often from
what I can tell. And it also sort of affirms
the more realist tendencies within these people whenever they see
how things actually function, which is why these four myths
are being stated here. Even though on the surface, if
you have not read the book and you just kind
of plunge into it right here, they might look very
sort of status the pejorative term, if you are to
use it, But in reality, when you read through this book,
it is just affirming very real facts that you know,
actual realists, libertarians or anarchists have come to grapple with
for the past few decades. You know, this is a
if anything, it's sort of a codifying of those lessons
that have been learned, is.
Speaker 2: What I mean.
Speaker 8: Just as a point of interest, Hansumanhappa does cite the
juvenile extensively in Democracy The God That.
Speaker 7: Failed, Yeah, and Rothbard sites I think all three of
the Italians used in this book quite extensively in all
of his essays.
Speaker 1: And Happa would definitely say that you're looking for in
building these communities, you're looking for pillars of the community
or what he calls natural elites. So yeah, I was Yeah.
I also wanted to say I've said this a few
times that you know, we could have Enkapistan tomorrow if
the elites wanted it. But then if you're looking at
the elites that are there now, you have to question
why they would want it. You know, you're these people.
We want our friends in charge. I mean, that's pretty
much to me. The message of this book is there's
always going to be a state, and we need our
friends in charge of it.
Speaker 2: We need people who.
Speaker 1: Think like us and desire the things that we want,
or else we have what we have now. So all right,
I'm gonna keep going. So talking about the formats, let
us with each of these.
Speaker 2: In turn.
Speaker 1: The myth of the stateless society permeates the two competing
ideologies of the twentieth century liberalism and socialism at their
extreme ends in a narco libertarianism whether left or right,
and communism. Mosca and Michelle's demonstrate that this is fundamentally
wrong headed because minority organization always prevails, from the level
of a tribe to the level of global government. Humans
are simply put the political animal, and what is called
the state is simply the fact that there must be
there must be the political function, that there must be
the political function in any society go on because I
think we probably beat that one to death. The second
myth that the state is separate from its laws and
institutions is shown to be false by Karl Schmidt, who
demonstrates that despite liberal pipe dreams, there is no escape
from the political Even though the cloak of neutral or
scientific language can be used to mask the ideological content,
every institution will bear the mark of the dominant political formula,
which acts as a kind of theological holy writ. If
the political formula is equality, diversity, and inclusion, there can
be no other official bodies or laws that do not
conform to it.
Speaker 2: Samuel T.
Speaker 1: Francis shows that the managerial elites will not stop their
social transformations until all relics and vestiges of the old
and despised bourgeois regime are replaced by the new religion
at every level of culture down to your local museum.
Paul Gottfried shows that this is even taken to the
domain of science and medicine, to the extent those who
resist a political formula are diagnosed with mental disorders. Comments, well,
I guess it just this really hits hard because.
Speaker 8: We were all brought up with the myth that we,
you know, we live in a free country. We have
free press, and all of our ideas are free. But
of course that's just not true at all. Everything that
people you know, we have democratic opinions, right, we don't
have like free speech, we have democratic speech. You're not
allowed anywhere because of the law to you know, promote fascism,
for example. If you try to do that, you're going
to get in serious trouble almost immediately. And this this
book just viscerates the idea that the press and the
ideas we have or sort of these free ideas that
weren't instituted by some sort of political formula by the state.
All of the institutions we have are not free institutions.
They're democratic institutions, at least in terms of the formula.
And it's this is really important to hit home for
people who read this book who aren't actually, you know,
familiar with these ideas, sort of disabusing yourself of the
myth that all of the ideas that you've been taught
are sort of free and not tied to some sort
of political formula. That's that's a really important aspect of
this book that sort of runs alongside the main concepts of.
Speaker 7: Elite theory, right and like even a minor point to
add on to that, because a lot of right wingers have,
especially in the last few years, well understood the idea
that it's not just what does legally dejure the government,
but it's also things like the media. It's things like
the press, the public schools, and all this other stuff
that is what that is what forms, you know, the
idea of the government, this monolithic entity that will just
control every facet of your life, whether or not they
legally have to answer to the president of the leader
of the deep state, or depending on who you talk to,
you know, whatever boogeyman is hiding under the under the rug.
The The contribution here that I don't see many people
on the right talking about is, you know Paul Gottfried's
point about the doctors that will diagnose you with mental
illness if you dare to go against this political formula,
this or the political reality that just sits in front
of you, they'll give you They'll call you mentally deranged.
They will have all these medicines or magnetic treatments for
your brain, perhaps if you remember that story, to make
you less xenophobic. They will have all these different pills
prescribed to you if you somehow become so disaffected that
you look depressed, or any of these other clinical diagnoses.
It's not just things that you would naturally associate as
being political or legal in nature. It is literally science
itself that has to fall under the formula as well.
It is total, much more total than most people talk about.
Speaker 1: Charlie mentioned the mentioned fascism that you can't even talk
about fascism. And we saw this Georgia Maloney who got
elected in Italy, and we were on the live stream
last night I was doing with Thomas. Someone asked him,
you know how close she is to mister big chin
Man from the nineteen twenties, and Thomas said, her message
is no different than Tony Blair's in nineteen ninety seven
coming to coming to power, because she's no Tony Blair
had the same message. So to try to compare him
to to to call it fascism is really a is
exposing that therapeutic state that Paul Godfrey talks about, is
that there's something wrong with this woman. And you know,
I'm I'm at the point where I think that you know,
they may just read readin state lobotomies to try and
help people get past us.
Speaker 7: I mean, that's what was the the certain scientists from
a Middle Eastern country of origin. We're developing magnetic treatments.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: You know that famous story that everyone freaked out about.
I mean that might you might as well just lobotomize
people at that point. But even just to hammer the
point home, you're told from a young age, you know,
trust your doctor on these medical ideas and all this
other stuff is no different than trust the government to
carry out the will of the people. At this point,
it's such a political organ it's no different.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: Non The third myth that the state and the economy
could ever be separated, the myth of the free market,
is the central tenet of classical liberalism. Bertrand the Juvenile
shows that since the political comes prior to any economy,
the economy itself can never and will never escape politics.
James Burnham shows that lays fair was simply the political
formula of the capitalists who gained power in the nineteenth century.
But this, because of the practicalities of mass and scale,
gave way to managerialism and the fusion of corporate interests
and the state. We have seen how even the economy
in the managerial state is a top down process. The
consumer is not sovereign. Despite the slogans, the manager class
used the roles of executives at large corporations and financial
institutions to set directives and mission statements for the foreseeable
time horizon. The reason organizations such as the UN and
the World Economic Forum can announce their visions for Agenda
twenty thirty is because the economy itself is managed now.
As Charlie and I come from libertarianism, and Ryan, I
believe you are a economics major right now.
Speaker 7: Right yes, and entrepreneurship. I am studying under a pair byolence,
so then you know this is all.
Speaker 8: I was never a libertarian for the record, were you not?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 8: Never definitely close, close around maybe twenty fifteen or something,
but never quite there.
Speaker 2: Where were you on Austrian economics?
Speaker 8: I mean, I think, as mister Borvini would say, I
agree with the Austrian economics is one hundred percent correct
in terms of how human action functions. But it's not
a political formula. It's the it's the objective description of
human economic action, much like elite theory is the objective
description of human power.
Speaker 1: Well, what do you think about the statement here that
either you can take this that because since the political
comes prior to any economy, the economy itself can never
and will never escape politics. Do you believe that's true,
that the political will always because there are a lot
of people out there and they call themselves an archo
capitalists who believe that you can actually build a society
off of economics.
Speaker 8: Well, come before is sort of a strange turn a
phrase in a way. I mean, these things always exist simultaneously.
If there's human beings, they're going to be making economic
decisions and they are going to be making decisions regarding power.
So these things always exist simultaneously, and economics is a
description of how humans trade with each other. But power
is always going to be able to supersede that. You can,
of course have power sort of as the earlier chapter
alluded to or stated directly, when you have a capitalist
ruling class, you can allow the economy to operate freely,
but that's always at the behest of power. And you know,
power is always going to come into being as soon
as you even have a small tribe of people. So
you know, if you have only one person even he again,
Pravini even mentions the Robinson Crusoe situation somewhere earlier in
the book. You know, if you just have one person
or maybe two people on a deserted island and there's
no real power relationship, you're not going to have a tribe.
Having a tribe of two people, I guess you could
technically call it a tribe. But only in these weird
edge cases does do power relationships not emerge to subsume
economic activity. So, yeah, I fundamentally agree with his debunking of.
Speaker 2: The third myth. You got anything right?
Speaker 7: Sorry I can, yeah, sorry. So the only the thing
that I disagree with is the idea that the political
becomes political organization. The political sphere of life precedes economic
the economic sphere, just because it's both of them are
fundamentally social. And it seems strange to me to say
that in every single case power relations will precede exchange.
But this is this could ultimately just be seen as
hair splitting, because it's ultimately going to end up the
answers at the same time they will come about, which doesn't,
you know, absolve any of these ideas. Is from the
criticism here. It's just it's more just the the certainty
that this that political life precedes the economic. Now, with
all of that, the JAB at consumer sovereignty at the end,
I can understand why he would take it, just because
most people have so distorted it to mean that the
consumer just directs and controls everything, when in reality it
is simply just can the consumer choose to purchase or
not purchase, or withhold money or not even do they
have different options, just can they choose to purchase at
its very base, meaning uh, this is still true. But
then you do end up with the question does that
mean they're actually sovereign? Well, depends on what you mean
by sovereign. I understand the JAB why he takes the
JAB there. I don't think he's necessarily attacking the properly
understood concept there. But for all intents and purposes, the
sort of pop definition of it you would get like
a business class or a marketing class by all means
that has still been debunked. But at least here I'm
not exactly forced to purchase pepsi or Coca cola. I
can just not purchase either, which under the traditional definition
doesn't mean that I still have sovereignty. Now, you know,
in the coming future, where there might be a you know,
a political commisar standing on the grocery aisle enforcing a
diversity quota in my purchases, then I might need to
start purchasing which case, now you can you can debunk it,
but this is a economics autism and hair splitting. But
I might as well be thorough if we're going to
if we're going to treat this seriously.
Speaker 1: Sure, And if you look at the so trying to
separate in the early colonies there the early colonies, they
had there was a great degree of freedom that they
had from the crown. Being three thousand miles helped a lot,
but they You read Patrick Newman's book Cronyism, and he
starts in sixteen oh seven, And what you're seeing is
you're seeing that whenever, it doesn't matter if you're just here,
if you just showed up on a boat and you're
with a bunch, the croniism always exists. And to try
to and I hear people and I probably used to
say this all the time, so you can probably find
audio me saying it that a free market would solve
that problem. Free market could actually make it worse. I mean,
there could be just much more collusion in laissez fair
of companies coming together. I think the idea that monopolies
won't happen because people could just people would be able
to start a company that morning, because there are no
regulations against starting a company. If I had a big company,
I would just buy that person out. I mean, I
would offer them so much money that they would be like, okay,
well it would take me years to make this amount
of money, So this is what I'm to do. Yeah,
So the right, the idea that the that competition is
going to solve every problem and laisse faiir is going
to solve every problem. And I think we've said this,
I've said this numerous times, like, really, the the freest
market that you see now is basically the black market,
and even the black market, their prices are going to
be dictated by the prices in white markets.
Speaker 7: So right, and then, of course, just to hammer the
point home, you will come back to sort of the
other autistically economic talking point of well, if there is
a monopoly that naturally comes about, does that mean it's bad?
Could be it could it could be our friends run it,
so it's good. It could be that it's someone we
are ultimately indifferent about that runs it and they just
do it well than okay, fine, Really, realistically and politically,
this is only a bad thing if it's our enemies
running it. And if they do actually have a genuine
monopoly just because they are good at what they are doing,
that's when it becomes a bad thing. But and other
is keeping with the realistic analysis, you don't just have
to economically challenge them. There are other ways to challenge
those sorts of those sorts of people, right, And I
think it's going attest.
Speaker 1: To and I think a government that actually did protect
the rights of the people, only the most autistic of
anarchists would be against it, you know, that protected our rights,
that where the military was just there to make sure
that we were safe, that the police were there to
make sure we're safe. You know, I don't know, I
don't know's it's hard the world, especially after the last
two and a half years, and really try to nail
down why there are some people who are still talking
about statelessness and talk about it on a I mean,
that's their main talking a point instead of it just
being like the North Star or something like that. All Right,
I'm gonna go to the fourth myth. The fourth myth
is that there is a separation of powers in a
liberal democracy, which is to say that there are checks
and balances between the various branches of government. This is
largely collapsed by the incisive analysis of Schmidt and the
process of powers tendency to seek to conquer feudal castles
identified by Juvenil. It is worth noting that at least
three of these of the thinkers covered Mosca, Burnham and
Juvenil himself favor a system by which centralization or the
convergence of power centers is held in a kind of
equilibrium through a constant struggle, even if in practice they
recognize the extreme the extreme difficulty of achieving this. I'll
go on if no one has anything to say while well,
it appears that populism largely failed, not because it was
not supported by the masses, but because of political naivete.
That does not mean a circulation of the elites is
not due. As the lies and manipulations of the managerial
regime become more and more visible to a public that
has become widely skeptical of our current global globalist elites
and the system that supports them, agitation for significant change
will continue a pace. Attempts to maintain official narratives and
maintain free and fair elections will become more difficult. Please
I want this. I wanted them to build a wall
around the Capitol after January sixth. It strikes me that
the system that then faces many possible points of failure,
which include de facto Balkanization, the need to the need
for more explicit coercion, and the use of force, a
high low middle mechanism whereby national governments become the middle,
while supernational globalist governance structures become the high and local
regions become the middle. Bioleninism, or in other words, degradation
of the elites and exclusion of people of superior skills
and talents causes the ruling class to become complacent and
or inept eclipse by foreign powers.
Speaker 7: There is one more that he leaves out, and this
just could be because I didn't read clearly enough, or
it could be because it was infeasible at the time
of writing this. And it is the fact that the
sort of managerial method of organization that we're operating under.
We accept that thesis by by Burnham because he he
operates under the assumption that it works more profitably for
the people in power than any other organization method does.
And what you're currently seeing, especially only in the last
couple of months, is that that might not actually be
the case, because you have to you have to wonder
how much money do they need to print? How many
foreign governments do they need to coerce to keep the
dollars there was as the global reserve currency. How big
can this bureaucracy get with their you know, autistic specializations
of management where you'll have like a manager for like
specific emotions and like a in a uh in a team,
and then you have a manager for uh, you know,
interrelations between groups. You know, how bloated can this get?
And then you know how much sort of financial black
magic and wrangling can they do before you've had one
bubble that popped way too big and it just brings
everyone down. That is to summarize all of us.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 7: It could also be as well that the sort of
managerial method of organization is collapsing in on itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, something, Charlie, what I will say is the yeah,
And he says in the next paragraph. At the time
of writing, we were seeing all five of these in
their nascent state de facto balkanization. We saw that pretty
clearly with the COVID regime in a couple states, most
notably Florida, the need for more explicit coercion and the
use of force, no more so than the way the
January sixth tourists were handled and FBI raiding mur A Lago,
the home of a former president. Real kind of banana
republic kind of things. Bioleninism. I mean, look at some
of the people that are in charge right now. I mean,
I could you can even say, you can even look
at the vice president of the United States.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just got right.
Speaker 7: And look at the universe where they turn out their elites,
just by the methods that most state universities organize. And
with a lot of these sort of backlash the private
universities are getting it is unfeasible to hold high standards anymore.
At public universities, they have this sort of quasi sort
of ymar esque democratic system where the students kind of
rate their professors, and if the professors get too low rating,
their pay gets cut. They get barred from teaching these things.
And you need to teach in order to keep employment
you get barred from tenure and all this other stuff.
And then in private schools where they have much more
control over their classrooms, well, you know, students just write petitions.
You get enough protected classes to sign on to the
petition to where it makes the media headline. Then the
professor just gets fired. Wholesale, the elite their centers for
churning out new elites are actively lowering their standards by
design and opening themselves up to just being completely hew classed.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be everything though. I
don't know if there is a field that is resisting
the sort of slide and standards, but it just takes
a couple of things for the current elite to just
be completely outclassed and humiliated and for them to just
lose their mandate, yeah, to be unfeasibly seen as rulers.
Speaker 8: I want to add to what you said earlier about
the managerial method possibly becoming less profitable. The way I
gauge what's happening right now is that the managerial method
is becoming more and more profitable for the governing elite,
which are the managers, but it's becoming more profitable for
a smaller and smaller segment of them. So I think
we are we're getting to the point where the managers
are benefiting, but only the very very upper ash lawns
of the managers are really seeing the benefits of all
of the monetary inflation, inflation and other things we see
going on.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, do you think that there is a war
because of that? There's a war going on between the
elites right now? You know, you point, you can point
to Roe v. Wade being overturned, a number of gun decisions,
things like that. It seems like there are some people
working in the background who are working against the wishes
and the goals of the ruling elites right now.
Speaker 8: Right because most of the managers are now effectively just
being treated like the coulus. So once we're at the
point where, you know, I think it's inarguable that the
inflation and other regulations we've seen have been of insanely
high benefit to a tiny amount of people. But when
you're only actually benefiting a small part of the ruling
class like that, you're actually going to get your to
elite forming. So the counter elite may very well form
out of the disaffected managers, which is exactly what you
would expect based on the theses of this book. So
that's where we ought to look to for being saved
from this horrible system is the disaffected managers.
Speaker 7: Right, And just to bolster that point, just around here
sort of in you know, the periphery of the empire, Fevill, Oklahoma.
You know, planes land with not a lot of development,
no real structure or centers of anything except for maybe Tulsa.
All the people that literally do manage in these large corporations,
especially the oil stuff around here something very key to
your current system of elites, whether they realize it or not. Basically,
all of the managers absolutely hate what's happening, but they
just don't have an alternative. So you know, there is
a there is a sort of group and a potential
minority coalition there to latch onto. And basically all you
have to do is say, you know, we aren't even
necessarily going to change much. We just aren't going to
make you do the retarded crap. And you've already got
a segment for a sort of organized uh, one of
the groups in a minority coalition that's ready to just
go on, and a very key one at that. They're
you know, the managers in the managerial system.
Speaker 2: All right, let me, I'm pretty sure I'm finishing this
up with this last paragraph. Yep, all right, last paragraph.
At the time of writing, we are seeing all five
of these things in their nascent state. The political pressure
from the public unelected leaders due to the sheer unpopularity
of the policies enacted, may may eventually cause them to
break decisively with globalist elites. This remains likely so long
as nations maintain standing armies. Strong indications in France and
elsewhere seem to make it almost inevitable that there will
be at least there will at least be a nominal
struggle for national sovereignty against globalist overreach. The political capital
spent on the COVID nineteen pandemic will exacerbate this, especially
given the economic hardship it seems to be bringing. European
populations may have a stated preference to achieve net zero
carbon by twenty thirty, but in practice it is extremely
unlikely that elites will be able to push ahead with
their utopian visions without violent protests. As a situation worsens,
people will become more serious and organize. Having learned from
the populist experiences between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty. Elites,
of course, always have an option to reverse course in
a bid to reverse these trends, but one suspects that
they believe that they believe their own visions, which with
a missionary zeal, I don't know that I agree with that.
If they do not, the will to power is such
that their less forever greater control will not let up
until power is taken from them by a better organized
elite with a political formula better suited to the populations
they are supposed to serve. I strongly doubt that this
new elite, when they emerge, whether by democratic means or otherwise,
will be able to break decisively enough from liberal and
democratic myths to do what is necessary to keep Western
nations from experiencing certain disaster in the future. However, after
decades of chronic mismanagement from the current managers, perhaps all
we hope for is a vaguely sensible replacement for a
few years whose interests will be closer to those of
quote unquote the people.
Speaker 8: I wonder to what extent he still believes everything in
that paragraph, because I've seen academic agent, you know, put
forward his belief that they're sort of rolling back some
of the worlds aspects of green and woke and everything
in some of his studies of Tony's Blair. So I
wonder if he would I wonder if he would disagree
now with some of the things he wrote. There just
an interesting question to ask.
Speaker 1: Have you have either of you seen that the World
Economic Forum, one of the books that they recommend is
Robert doctor Robert Murphy's Modern Money Mechanics.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but that is a good point, and I think
that almost everyone was sort of overestimating the extent that
they were just fully and plastically committed to going along
with everything that they've been pushing the elites, because all
it took was, you know, one threat like winter isn't
even here yet for most of Europe. It took one
threat of a winter of extreme discontent, and suddenly you
get various supposedly hardline green governments going back and redefining, saying, well,
I guess natural gas and nuclear power could be back
on the menu again there, I mean, mostly green, and
then you get all of a bunch of other I
believe it's sort of like the smaller countries, especially Denmark
comes to mind, where they're left wing party, fitting with
Fitting with sort of like the Danish left wing traditions
is taking this chaotic wave as an opportunity and starting
to close down their border again, trying to preserve Danish demographics,
even though I believe in the past you would have
a lot of these Danish left wing parties going out
in support of immigration because it's the popular thing to say.
You know, I think that a lot of people might
have overestimate, including potentially me. I don't quite remember what
I said on this topic for the last few months.
I think everyone might have overestimated the extent to which
they are committed the sort of missionary zeal that is
written in the book here.
Speaker 8: I want to add two because he mentioned something again
that's really important, which is understanding what the middle actually
is and the juvenile and model of high low versus middle.
Notice how he again frames the national governments as the
middle here, and it's really important to understand in that
frame that middle doesn't just mean middle class. In the
American system to some extent does map to that, but
it's a much concept than just the idea of middle class.
And that's just interesting too because it highlights the importance
of having national governments that are opposed to globalism, as
globalism is the final convergence of all the power centers
to the point where there will be no there'll be
nothing left to converge on. So that's a really important
point to consider, is that we need to make sure
our national governments are in fact not acting as not
acting complicitly in the globalist system, and are actually attempting
to act in the interest of the middle.
Speaker 1: Well, one of the interesting things about that last paragraph
is he talks about people basically growing weary of the
government and questioning the government and Ukraine north Stream too.
All this it's you know, Germany is looking like they're
going to have a very rough winter, although I've heard
that their reserves are only down like three percent, so
it looks like they can get through the winter, thankfully.
But there is hope. It's just one thing that you know,
you get from reading this book is Okay, so who
sweeps in as the hero of the day, who sweeps
into what elites are going to solve this problem? You know,
I've said I don't know publicly or privately, but seems
like really the one elite that I look at, who
seems to be the closest to being on our side,
and I don't trust him at all. Is Peter Teel.
He's the only one who's giving money to people that
we agree with and pushing certain ideas that I think
a Blake Masters is saying the right things. I mean,
he's been associated with Teal for a very very long time.
So yeah, I think the one thing that this book
really helps you to understand, and you can even mix
this in with Happa, is you're looking for elites. You're
looking for elites who are who share your values. And
I think that's the white pill from this book. The
white pill is that you don't have to start a revolution,
you don't have to pick up arms. That may happen
by default in certain areas, but the white pill is
you raise up the right people and you can have
what you want, and these people can be overthrown.
Speaker 8: And in terms of the national governments, again, one of
the interesting things that happened recently is you know, the
Nord Stream Too pipeline was destroyed, and it seems like
basically everybody just assumed the Americans did it, which would
be inconceivable safetime, right like that would be the last
thing you would think is that the Americans did it.
And now we have other American allies, so to speak,
basically just assuming, even if they don't state it out right,
that America was behind an act of terrorism essentially on
European countries.
Speaker 7: Ryan, I have unless you guys have anything else to
add on that topic, because I was going to switch
over so slightly. Alright, So he does mention in here
sort of like a black pill that he just slips
in right at the end of the conclusion. He says
he's strong doubts that a new elite, when they emerge,
for whatever means, will be able to break decisively enough
from these myths in order to save the West. Basically,
this is strange to me because I know he is
very well read on the Bolshevik movement in Russia, and
if you look at every single thing that they were
telling the populace, that they were telling the elites that
they got on side, that they were telling foreign governments,
it was absolutely nothing like what they actually had planned
and executed. There were some moments where they would go
out to the crowd and basically tell them directly what
they would do if they were in government, and they
actually came to pass, but there were just a quite frankly,
a lot of lies that they would throw out to people.
You know, it would be much more democratic. They promised
much more popular sovereign rule through Russia, which in reality,
they did absolutely everything they can because they that they could,
because they understood the system here, that this popular, this
popularly sovereign system that they implemented was absolutely under the control.
They knew how the game worked. But nonetheless they would
still promise to people it would be a golden democratic
age that would descend across Russia. So you can have
elites that can preach these myths in order to get
people on side and all of that, and you can
even paint the actions that they will take to look
like they are still following these popularly held myths that
you cannot break from with the population, but you can
still just completely contradict them through very i don't want
to say subversive means, but a sort of very hidden means,
if you will. Yeah, because everything that the Bolsheviks promised,
for instance, to keep with that definite, to keep with
that example, they did carry it out. They did bring
democracy to Russia and all of us. It's just that
they so knew the system they were going to work with,
that it was there was no choice, quite obviously, quite famously,
So you can do the same. I don't think this
is the black pill that he's making. It doubt to
be at the end here.
Speaker 1: I also think that people are starting to read things
that they haven't read in the past. You know, I've
heard Blake Masters talk about Ted Kaczynski and yeah, I
mean for somebody who's running for Senate to do that is,
you know. And I've actually seen a couple of right
wing voices talking about Yaki. So sure, maybe these people
aren't elite. I mean I think to me, a Blake
Masters is an elite. I look at him as for
better or for worse. I mean, we don't know who's
you don't really know it's in somebody's heart. But at
least these are people who are quoting you know, they're
not quoting Jonah Goldberg. You know, they're quoting people who
have who think differently and also who are able to
diagnose the problems of the day at a very deep level.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I entirely agree there. So, And not only do
we have that what you just mentioned, and not only
do we have what I just mentioned there, but our
side seems to be the only one actively courting competent people.
I think I never actually read or listened through this,
just because every single time the subject has come up,
I've been in exams or men terms. I think that's
the concept of the base draft. You know, get the
highly confident people that agree with you to just either
when they get kicked out of the industry, or coerce
them to leave the era. Sorry, convince them to leave
the industry. You know, you will have the only confident
people left. And it doesn't matter how technically or on paper,
how well positioned your elites currently are. If they're your enemy,
if they're incompetent, they are just going to fall apart.
You know, if they can't play the game, if they
cannot secure their position, if they can't use their position,
they can't stay there. Especially if you're better, someone always is.
So that's the that's the sort of three things I
would use to repudiate this hidden black pill that he
just throws in at this very last paragraph of the book.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, I guess in order to back up the
black pill, one thing I don't see happening in terms
of this based draft is the coup locks or the
middle or really just not organized, not organizing at all.
That's really the mission right now, I think for people
like us is to actually get that organization kickstarted, because
it's really not happening. And sort of all agreeing on
ideas and meeting and having streams like this isn't organization, right.
I mean, it's it's sort of leading in that direction.
But actual real organization is when you have a group
of elites actually leading some sort of minority and aggregating
their ability to exercise influence, be that through money or
some sort of social position they have. You actually have
to have an elite utilizing that collective people power, and
we really don't have that happening at all. We have
a sort of intellectual elite who do streams like this, right,
but that's a far cry from actually organizing any of
the people who might be listening right now.
Speaker 7: Right at least not officially, we don't have people actively
taking stock of what talents do we have, what resources
do we have, what money do we have available? And also,
again at least not officially, we don't have people saying,
on this date, we are going to do this at
this location, we don't have actual plans being organized and
carried out and execute we If you took it so broadly,
you can say that's happening on these streams. But then
the definition is so broad it doesn't mean anything because
these streams aren't actually you know, we aren't showing up
to these streams with the intention and talking about how
we're going to win feasible power at this location at
this time for this purpose. That would be absolutely brilliant
to do, but it's not quite what we're geared towards.
It's not what audiences want and all that, and it's
not our purpose here quite frankly. So whenever we talk
about we need people to actively organize, it means on
that level, be it sort of at the project head,
sort of like the grand planning, or at sort of
like the to use corporate language, the team level. You
know your five people, how do you get how do
you keep this plan in motion? You know what can
the six of you do?
Speaker 1: So it's hard when you when the Pagans and the
Christians are fighting against each other, and then the Protestants
and the Catholics are fighting against each other. We have
a pretty good example of people who put their put
their religious differences aside to come together and defeat a
force in their country. Well except one religion that they
that had to go. But they came together and they
just said, well, we have a foe here, and it's
it's more important then, it's it's more important than our
than our religious differences than we need to come together.
And the more the more I see that the fighting
just over.
Speaker 2: Oh well, the.
Speaker 1: Pagans are like, well, look what Christians have done in
the past, and Christians like, oh, look what Pagans have
done in the past, look at the children that are
being sacrificed.
Speaker 3: Now, on this note, I.
Speaker 8: Would put forward that it might be the case that
certain enterprising Americans are actually working to tackle this problem
more directly in the near future. So maybe pay attention
to this fhere if you're interested in that.
Speaker 2: Very much.
Speaker 1: So yes, all right, I'll give each of you a
chance to say a last word if you want, and
promote anything you want.
Speaker 2: So Ryan good.
Speaker 7: First, Well, just to summarize my thoughts about the book,
and you know, I probably could do a much deeper
reading that doesn't have to be done in the course
of a couple of days or so, but I was
genuinely very impressed, and I had a feeling I would
be coming out and saying that. But it reads very clearly,
there's very precise, very direct, the definitions aren't vague, and
it's a it's genuinely uh, I want to say, entertaining,
But it's fulfilling to read. It's so great book. Go
read it, easy to find, easy to pay for, and
contribute to a person that most definitely is acting in
your interest at least ninety five percent of the time,
that is safe a friend. And with that being said,
though with a lot of the things that the being
that are being articulated in this book, you might go
into it thinking that it is just a one giant
black pill. You know, you have to use shadowy means
to fight these shadowy elites that are in these official
position positions that can't be assaulted. It's not that there's
a lot of a He does a good job at
making this just cold practicality. You can go home and
use this, uh, this book that we just read to
your advantage. Uh, not like in some sort of psychopathic
Machiabellian sense, like go get a promotion at work. But uh,
you know, you can use this to actually see what's
going on in politics and do something yourself, because a
lot of the people that we have in our sphere
would be absolutely perfect to do these political organizations that
we keep talking about. We just don't get, probably because
we don't know how to we're scared to move first
something like that. It's not that difficult. This book makes
out abundantly clear that you just need to be competent.
We have competent people. You need to be tightly organized.
That is definitely very possible. You need to have a
political formula that's and that's not beyond us to come
up with. If we don't just choose one that's out
there already, so our situation is it could be infinitely worse.
We have everything we need, We have everything that we
can organize with. All we just need to do now
is act, really act and plan and execute. So that's
that's my final thoughts really, especially since we're doing the conclusion.
Speaker 8: Charles, I must say that there was a moment about
a third of the way through the book where I
just thought, Wow, this is an absolutely stellar book, which
is actually pretty rare. This is an excellent scholarly work.
It's well sourced. The bibliography, the all important bibliography is
stuff full of references. Don't let the size of the
book to see view it's small, but actually compressing the
core ideas of all of the intellectuals into a short,
readable form that really delivers the core concepts from all
these works, these tens of thousands of pages of works,
is a huge achievement. This is absolutely a book that
you should read and buy. I'm actually thinking about buying
ten copies and handing them out at my local city
council because the book is really that good. I mean,
it's only a little more than one hundred pages. You
can read it in one setting if you want, and
it is actually amazing that Nima Parvini was able to
do what he did in this book and compress all
of these enormous texts into something very concise that has
a very clear narrative from beginning to the end. So yeah,
I'm not just saying that because he's a friend, and
it really is an excellent work. It might be in
a technical level, the best book that Imperium Press actually
has on their site. So yeah, I found it remarkable.
Speaker 1: And thank Mike from Imperium Press for not only publishing
this book, for publishing a host of amazing books and
being able to put works together into you know, like
Demeestros Volume one, to be able to put all the
most important writings into one. He's doing amazing work over there.
Do you have anything to plug, Charlie, I.
Speaker 8: Would just check out my substack. I'm doing my my
book notes series and just publishing on there regularly. I
have uploaded a couple of short videos to my YouTube
channel lately. But yeah, if you want to support me financially,
the substack is the place.
Speaker 3: To go for that.
Speaker 8: And I do try to put out worthwhile content for
the readers there. And I'm just I'm just finishing up
my c I a theme which I is basically all
composed of books that Thomas seven seven recommended, which were
all very good. So if you're interested in a learning
about the history of the CIA, I'm about to publish
the fourth article, the fourth paid article on my sub
stack in a week or two, So Charlemagne dot substack
dot com.
Speaker 1: Awesome, All right, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me.
And this this was great love, not as an insults
at all. This was way beyond my expectations.
Speaker 2: This was freaking amazing. Thank you,