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Head on over to Freeman Beyond the Wall dot com,
forward slash Support and do it there. Thank you. I
want to welcome everyone back to the Peekenona Show. Mike
from Imperium presses back.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Mike, I'm doing very well, Pete, it's
nice to be back on the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. The time difference is quite something. Let's
set this up for this time on this day, and
that day is my day. I don't know, you figure
out what day it is for you kind of thing.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's something I'm used to now. The triangle
of death is trying to organize an Australian and American
and European guests all at the same time, which I've
had to do many times, so I've had a lot
of practice at it, so I'm pretty I've got a
handle on it at this point.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the culture Dad stream that you did that
I was on that. That must have been a fun one.
You had people coming in from all all different time zones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was blast. Actually, that was a great episode.
I had a lot of fun without it.
Speaker 1: That was a lot of fun. All right, let's get
down to this. Because when you told me about this,
I looked at the title and I was like, Eh, okay, okay,
I like it. I like the term thug. I like
what it sounds like. And then I started looking into
it and I was like, oh wow, Mike did something
that no one's done before. And I'm impressed. So lets
just tell everybody a little bit about about your new book.
This is a book that IMPERI impresses putting out that
you wrote that. Mike Maxwell wrote the Cultured Thug Handbook.
So yes, where did this idea come from?
Speaker 2: It actually came from Speaking of Culture Dads. It came
from my broadcast partner on that podcast, Dave Martel, and
it predates Culture Dads. So it goes back a number
of years.
Speaker 3: Actually.
Speaker 2: Basically, Dave and I had been He has another show
called The Bog, which went on hiatus for a little while,
but at the time he was doing it, it's back now,
and I had been on a number of episodes on
that show. So Dave and I kind of knew each other.
We'd been podcasting together, you know, I'd guessed on his podcast,
you know, two or three times or something like that.
We were friends. And at the time this was back
in oh, probably twenty twenty, so I was really hitting
the podcast circuit very hard. I'd been on a lot
of different podcasts, and I was starting to kind of
get a reputation for being the guy that can break
down complicated concepts in pretty plain language.
Speaker 3: It's just yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I always that I believe
is that if you can't explain something basically in like
an ELI five way, then you probably don't really fully
understand it. So that's something I've always tried to do,
really to test my own knowledge and also to be
able to communicate it is is to be able to
explain it in you know, just plain language. So that's
what I tried to do on podcasts, breaking down all
kinds of things from you know, very alien ideas from
the archaic world like the Roman world all the way
to you know, political concepts like the state of exception
or the friend enemy distinction or throneness or all of
that stuff. There's a number of concepts in this book.
And so before there was a book, Dave suggested to me,
He's like, Mike, why don't you just write like a
little pamphlet thing, you know, like a couple of paragraphs
for a bunch of different ideas, like big brain ideas
in our thing that we could just give to guys
and they could just you know, it would be a
short thing or whatever, you know, fifty pages and it
can kind of serve as a little ideological introduction manual
for people, and I thought, oh, that's a great idea.
But I also at the time, I kind of thought
to myself, I'm sure this has been done before. So
I kind of started looking into it, and of course
I found that it hadn't been done before, which was
really surprising. So I took this idea and I squirreled
it away and I started making First of all, I
started making a list of, well, what concepts would I
want to talk about? And, as with anything, what began
as an idea of okay, well, let's do like a
you know, ten or twelve of them or something like that,
let's make them each one page long. That kind of
grew in scope to what the book is has eventually become,
which is forty five separate concepts, one hundred thousand words.
So you know, it's quite a much more substantial work
than it began as. But anyway, I started making a list,
first of all, and then the list kind of organized
itself into excuse me, three natural categories. The first is
so there are three sections in the book, and the
book the first section is what I call the ten
Step Program. The idea of the book is that it
explains radical right wing concepts. But it does so in
a way that you can basically give it to somebody
who's pretty much uninitiated. And I wouldn't give it to
a Keith Olberman or a Rachel Maddow. I think that
it would just they light their hair on fire. But
if you give it to an intelligent layman, somebody who
is ideologically neutral, or especially somebody who has seen what's
been happening for the last couple of years, maybe the
last five or six years, and is not happy with it.
Somebody like that who's kind of sick of the woke ideology,
sick of all of the like you know, liberal fetching
over Trump and all that stuff. If you give it
to that person, it pretty much will get them to
where we're at. But it has to start from square one.
So that's what the first section is. I call it
the ten step programs, Like you're in alcoholics anonymous or something,
and you have to be weaned off of this like
poisonous ideology that we call liberalism. So it starts basically
from just noticing that in Trump's first term that even
though he was ostensibly the boss, even though he was
the executive, he wasn't able to really do anything, and
it kind of takes that and it explains what we
call the state of exception, one of these really actually
quite deep concepts. Sorry, it explains that in light of
his failure, basically, and it takes that, and then it
builds up from there over the next nine chapters after
into basically explaining what liberalism truly is, which is I
mean the TLDR is that liberalism is the most extreme
ideology that's ever existed in the history.
Speaker 3: Of the world.
Speaker 2: It is it's fundamentally a form of amnesia, and even
more fundamentally than that, it's not even an ideology. It's
really more of a symptom of the end of a society.
So it kind of gets you from let's just say
where Jordan Peterson is at to that point over the
course of ten chapters. So it's pretty ambitious. That's the
first section. The next section after that explains a number
of illiberal concepts. So it's taking things that you know,
we understand and use in our discourse regularly, things like bioleninism,
things like the progressive stack, physiognomy, and a number of
other things, very often ideas that have been coined by
people who are alive today, and it just basically, you know,
it lays out those concepts so that you can kind
of understand what people are talking about in our sphere.
And then the last section, which is actually the second half.
Speaker 3: Of the book. It makes up the book.
Speaker 2: The book is what I call the Big Ideas, So
it chronologically starts from the ancient world and it uses
one like absolutely epical thinker for each chapter to illustrate
a concept. So one of them, it begins with Homer
and the concept of eucophilia, which is basically the love
of home.
Speaker 3: It's the opposite of well, it's.
Speaker 2: What liberals call xenophobia, but like framed in a way
that's like it's positive and it's kind of like the
foundation of everything. So it starts from Homer and explaining
zenophilia in the context of the Odyssey, and it moves
through to like another Again, it's quite a few different chapters.
We do a chapter on the Book of Job and
the Bible. We do a chapter on Confucius and the
rectification of names and so on and so forth, all
the way to the contemporary era. I think the last
chapter is on Alistair McIntyre and his book after Virtue,
where we explained the epistemic dependence of rationality on tradition.
So it's a very very ambitious book. In its scope,
it is, of course an overview of these concepts. But
in this overview, I try to pack in a lot
of really sort of really good aphorisms and really deep
interpretations of these ideas that just kind of give you
a little bite that you can then follow in a
different direction.
Speaker 3: And all that.
Speaker 2: There's a big bibliography, lots of you know, once you've
done the book, there's lots of places you can go
with it. So that's kind of as succinct as I'm
able to give an overview what the book is.
Speaker 1: Yes, and that was a good description when I told
you today, I went through the ten step program and
I saw the first four as like one block where
you're basically you can you can look at the first
four state of exception, deep, state of cathedral, high low, middle,
high low versus middle, and you can explain. And I thought,
you used perfect. Why wasn't Trump in power the last
time that he was when he was president? Is well,
I mean he didn't. Somebody makes decides the exception and
he didn't do it, and then you just went through
and you know, we're able to show just basically how
government works. And as I'm as I'm reading this, I'm
I'm just floored because, first of all, none of these
is is longer than a than an article like a
substack article, and you explain it perfectly. I think that
the first thing I thought was someone who doesn't really know,
someone who maybe maybe saw a you know, got a
glimpse of about in video on YouTube, could pick this
up and really start to start down the path. You
think that's you think I got that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I appreciate that, you know, you that's that's
your take on it, because that means that I've succeeded. Basically, Yes,
you're right. The first four chapters form a block where
it starts from just noticing that Trump failed and that
he wasn't really in power, although on paper he was,
and it sort of takes that and it then explains
how how the government really works and how power actually operates.
So the first is the state of exception, where the
sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. That's
the famous formulation by Carl Schmidt, but obviously that wasn't
Trump so Trump wasn't the sovereign. Okay, so what was
the sovereign? Well, the next chapter is the deep State,
so it explains in that chapter it gives a sort
of basic overview of what a deep state is and
the fact that the deep states have existed in every
society going back to the ancient world. But I don't
spend too much time sketching out what it is because
I think most people understand it. What I explain mostly
in that chapter is how it operates and like how
it works. So from there we move on to the cathedral,
which is basically it's a neo reactionary concept that in
a nutshell means that like what the cathedral is basically
the continuum between the public and private sphere. It's the
idea that there is no real public private distinction. So
the deep state isn't just the government. The deep state
is also Twitter, well not anymore, but it was Twitter.
It's Google, it is Harvard, it is the Ford Foundation,
the Open Society, the Foundations, you know, it's NGO's big
tech universities and.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: The other fourth one I mentioned is, yeah, it's just
basically it's so the government. If you think of the
government as sort of bleeding into the private sphere. There's
a gray area between those those those different things. You
will understand the cathedral and then the next chapter after that,
because I mean, this is all great, but it doesn't
explain how this soft power gets translated into hard power,
and that is reserved for the fourth chapter, which is
the high, low versus middle concept of how power works.
So basically, the we think of the high as the
center or the let's just call it official power. Let's
just you know, the government to put a bookmark on it.
The middle is all of the intermediary powers, so it's
everything outside of government that also wields power. We could
think of things like prominent individuals in the ancient world, clans,
you know, the unions, the church, all that stuff isn't
part of the government, but it does. It's kind of
like the government deputizes it to do things, or it's
you know, possible that it could be in tension with
the government and want to get free of the government
and actually do its own thing. So the government basically
has a bit of a tense relationship. The high has
a tense relationship with the middle in this picture, and
the low, which is everybody else outside of elite circles
is basically deputized to keep the middle in check. So
the government deputizes an underclass to keep things like, you know,
to keep the church down, to keep unions in check,
to keep prominent people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump
in Czech things like that. It's kind of the reverse
of the Meme view of history, where you know, the
elites of all stripes basically stomp all over the little people.
So this high low versus Middle explains how the riots
in twenty twenty were able to actually operate, where basically
what you had was the deep state in concert with
the cathedral deputizing an underclass of you know, whether it's
minorities or sexual minorities or you know, women and things like,
people who are ostensibly have little power in society. It
basically takes those people and it kind of activates them
to work in the service of its own power. So
that's kind of how the high Low versus Middle operates. Now,
the first four chapters, as you mentioned, are kind of
black pilling. So the first it just explains, and this
is necessary, right, You're if you're going to do radical surgery,
it's going to hurt a little bit. So this is
what we kind of have to do for the first
couple of chapters. The next chapter after that, there's a
little bit of a term and it goes to no
bless obleege. So this is an idea basically that the
term means nobility obligates, and this is something that liberalism denies.
It thinks it's not possible, which is why it's sort
of allergic to power, at least open power. And so
this chapter on no bless Obleege explains how a functional
society works. How does a society that's not, you know,
dilapidated and falling apart and all of that, how does
that work? While it works on the principle of no
bless oblief. So there's a bit of a turn there,
and the next several chapters kind of explain in positive terms,
like what a real society actually looks like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me get to that, because there's a couple
there that well, there's one there that I had to
go back and read over. But uh, one that I
really wanted to go over is because I'm reading and
are you familiar with's book The Demon and Democracy? Have
you ever heard of it?
Speaker 3: I'm not.
Speaker 1: I read it again. It's a Polish. Polish guy just
basically shows how democracy and communism are basically the same,
how they operate in the same exact way, and his
his thoughts on it. There's a lot of indoxa in there,
So why don't you talk about that, because that's I
think people will look at that, that term and be like, well,
what is that? And then they'll look at it and
it's because it's something will never going to learn under liberalism.
It'll be it might be something they have to read
a couple of times. So can you talk a little
bit about that?
Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah.
Speaker 2: In this book there are a few kind of you know,
fifty cent terms. There's some pretty big words here to
describe things that we all understand, and a lot of
them are Greek, so this is one of them. And
doxa are it's a concept that comes out of a
book by Aristotle called Topics. Actually it's in a few
of his books. But so what in doxa are our
opinions or starting points for reasoning that are? You know,
they're either held by reputable people or they're kind of
handed down by the tradition. They're basically the the root assumptions,
the bedrock assumptions, the axioms that we begin from. And
the question is how do we get those? How do
we get these assumptions? Because what liberalism tells us, Because
I mean, I've gave some pretty uncharitable interpretations of what
liberalism is a bit earlier, but to be a little
more charitable to it, what liberalism is is it's the
idea that the abstract individual, reasoning from his own premises
is the epistemic authority. Right, So the epistemic authority is
not a book that we've inherited from time out of mind.
It's not a tradition that's been handed down through the
ages or anything like that. It's the brilliant individual that
sort of begins from his own self generated premises and
then is able to kind of move the world and
change the world on that basis. So you would think
of somebody like a Newton, or a Kant or a Darwin,
although Darwin's an interesting case that we might get to later.
Speaker 3: All of these rational.
Speaker 2: Individuals are, you know, they're they're the epistemic authority. And
the idea behind liberalism is that each of us individually
is able to evaluate the deepest truths by simply considering
them in light of our own reason. So that's liberalism.
Put as charitably as I possibly can. What in DOXA
are basically is as I said, they're those assumptions, but
they're not assumptions that you generated yourself. They are the
assumptions that are arrived at through long intergenerational experience. So
you your reasoning is only as good as your premisses. Right,
If you begin from false premisses, your reasoning is not
going to be valid, no matter how sound it is.
Like you may draw the logical conclusion from those premisses,
but because the premisses don't actually attached to anything real,
your reasoning is going to be flawed. So the question
then becomes, how do you get these premises? Well, by definition,
an axiom is not rational, right, because it's not it
doesn't actually it's not justified by anything. It's pre rational.
It's just a brute fact. It's just something that is there,
posited with no further justification. So there's a kind of
there's a kind of problem with the rational individual reasoning
from his own premisses because then you have to basically say, okay, well,
you know each of us individually as the highest epistemic authority.
Does this really seem like a solid way to begin,
as opposed to let's just say the things that have
worked for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And
of course, when you sort of explain it clearly like this,
it's very it's obvious that the premises that have whethered
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are the place
to begin. So where do we get these? And we
basically get them from tradition and the whole INDOXA chapter
is me kind of explaining.
Speaker 3: Why it is that the.
Speaker 2: Oldest and the most solid and the most established, like
the most long established axioms are the ones that we
want to go go with. And I give the analogy
of the vampire. So the reason why the vampire is
scary isn't just because he's going.
Speaker 3: To suck your blood. It's because he's old.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, It's because he's been there forever. It's because
he has just sat in his castle for centuries and
centuries and just like all he does is read and
acquire knowledge. And basically, if you're somebody who believes in
like rationality and science and everything like that. I mean,
all science really is is it's an intergenerational empiricism. It
is I mean, science is empirical in its very nature,
and that empiricism just means drawn from experience. What science
does is it takes you know, empirical data and it
integrates them into a framework that then explains the world.
But it does so in a way that it passes
that down over time. So Newton has the idea, well,
Newton first believes in the Aristotelian physics of motion, but
then he comes to understand that that's not the case,
and he comes over with his laws. He believes that
everything's made of corpuscles, all this stuff, and you know,
because that explains reality better than the alternatives, that becomes
the stand. But then over time we realize that there
are some things that Newton can't account for. Then relativistic
physics comes in and so on. Like this whole process
is basically like taking an empirical like a set of
data and interpretations that explain that data, and then handing
it down to the next generation. It gets refined over time. Basically,
what I'm saying is that science is a tradition, and
tradition is really the paradigm for epistemic authority. It's not
the rational individual, it's actually the tradition. So in DOXA
are really the hard one starting points, those axiomatic beginnings
that are clawed out of the muck that you get
basically from long, hard, cruel and bitter experience, and what
liberalism wants to do and rationality and modernity sort of
in general, it just wants to roll all that away
every generation, which is exactly the opposite of what we
should be doing. So basically in DOXA chapter isn't justification
of tradition but using an Aristotelian term.
Speaker 1: Okay, you had mentioned Darwin and when I saw this,
when I read the title of the chapter, I was like, Okay,
this should be interesting. But the way you approach this
is different. You want to give now one of the
reasons I have no problem. I think I don't have
a problem asking you. Do you get the idea that
this book is going to be one of those books
that a lot of people buy and give to people.
Speaker 3: I hope, so, yeah, it's kind of designed for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a feeling that this book is going
to be like one of those books that people are
going to buy like ten at a time and be
like handing them out and telling people. Don't pay attention
to the fact that it's four hundred it's over four
hundred pages. You can read it in bite sized chunks,
and you know, especially the ten step program, which is
just so concise and so perfect without a side Darwin,
talk a little bit about what you're writing, what your
thoughts are of mentioning Darwin at this point after in DAXA.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, so.
Speaker 2: This is the chapter that follows the one that I've
just explained. So from the end of that sort of
like that four chapter run of like negative I don't
want to say negative negativity, but it's like a negative
vision of the world. It's like, this is how the
world works, and it's terrible and we can do better.
And then there's a little there's a turn with the
noblesse Oblige chapter. Over several chapters, we kind of get
to understanding that tradition is actually the way that things
need to work, and in fact it's it's it's the
way that things always do work. It's just a matter
of like we can deny it and then just be
like silly and way off track, or we can accept
it and then we can actually get come to grips
with the world. So what this chapter on Darwin explains
is basically that what traditions are is a they can
be traditions can be understood in the context of natural selection.
So what traditions are fundamentally is natural selection having operated
on institutions and beliefs, and as I sort of alluded to,
or as I mentioned in the explanation before, traditions have
weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So these
are things that have been sort of honed in the
crucible of like hard and cruel and bitter experience. They
are something that we should take very seriously and be
very very reticent to abandon, even when they seem like
they're doing the wrong thing. Joseph de Maiestra, who is
one of my favorite writers, gives an example of of
like dynastic monarchy, so non elective monarchy right where the
first of all, monarchy is something that most people don't
take remotely seriously as a political principle today, but the
idea that monarchy is something that can be inherited, like
that the kingship can be inherited is just it's so
outside of anything that we would ever believe in today
that it's almost like ridiculous. It's like a punchline. You know,
when Jordan Peterson's yelling about merit, he's explaining he's basically
saying that he's saying the opposite of this, right, But
the thing is we should step back for a second
and just look at the situation from an objective perspective.
The fact is that this form of monarchy, as ridiculous
as it seems, as much as it doesn't comport with reason,
has built the world. It really has built the foundation
of everything up until the day before yesterday, And so
we should probably be a little bit humble because really
just being like remotely right wing in your orientation is
about it's really about epistemic humility. What we need to
do is take a step back and say.
Speaker 3: Well, why is that?
Speaker 2: And you know, but before we even arrive at a
justification of it, it's important just to notice that it
has built everything. So maybe there's something that tradition knows
that we don't. Maybe there's something there that is actually
it's so deep and so difficult to understand that it's
kind of inaccessible to our reason. So what these you know,
ideas are, what traditions are, is something that is that
natural selection has basically operated on for a long time
and is selected for because it's adaptive.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Another way we could putt put it is that we
have the slow organic growth of traditional folk ways. And
another thing that Maestra says is that these organic folk ways,
the fact that they have grown up slowly over time,
that they've evolved over time, is actually a reason why
we should take them seriously. Because you know, something like
the French Constitution of seventeen ninety one, right, which is
after the French Revolution, this constitution that was supposed to
be written across the face of reality for all time
with a great trumpeting fourth of praise and long deliberations,
longer revisions and so on and so forth. This Constitution
of seventeen ninety one, which was a conscious attempt to
start from scratch, This constitution, which is, you know, this
epical shift that was supposed to last forever, only lasted
a year. And we've had like fifteen of these things,
fifteen French constitutions since then. So maybe the idea that
we should just like dig everything out and start from scratch.
Maybe we should have a little bit of humility and
say that's probably the wrong approach. And what Meestra gives
us in the Work of Circumstances, which is his term,
is the opposite, basically that the slow organic growth of
institutions over time is evidence of its being solid. Basically, Maestra,
at the time he counter revolutionary, in the wake of
the French Revolution, meister really really did not have any
respect for these French constitutions. He thought that the English
Constitution was the bee's knees. He was really like, he
thought that that was awesome because the English Constitution, unlike
say the American Constitution, doesn't have a set of framers,
it doesn't have somebody who wrote it, because it's so
old that it is just organically evolved over time in
a way that comports with the folk soul of the English.
It fits them like a glove because it's grown up
organically over time. And what I explained in this chapter
is first of all, that that can be reconciled with
Darwinism or natural selection. As I mentioned, I've explained what
this is the Work of Circumstances, and I also explained
later in the chapter that this comports very nicely with
ideas of divine law. So whether that's Pagan divine law,
the Roman idea of or even the Vedic idea of rita,
or the Christian idea of providence, that this is basically
the will of God made manifest in the world by
slow organic growth, where God uses the people who write
the law or who speak forth. You know, the tradition,
God basically uses them as circumstances. The men themselves don't
write the laws. The men themselves are circumstances employed by
the divine to write the laws. So this is this
chapter is probably the one I think that people are
going to be the least familiar with the concept. But
I think because there hasn't really been a word for
it's something that's kind of been under the surface in
the radical right for a long time. But I think
this is basically what people mean when they say that,
you know, we need to have an organic society, we
need to have traditional folk ways that you know, what
is ancestral to us is right for us. I think
what they're basically saying is a comb that could be
filtered through a Darwinian lens. A traditionalist lens or a
divine law lens. And that's really what this chapter is about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the word that I was that kept coming
into my mind was organic when when I was reading it.
All Right, so we talked about liberalism, and so part
two is called illiberal concepts. And then when you look
at the titles, some of those people may automatically go, well,
wait a minute, these look like things that are a
part of liberalism. Now, so let me let me pick
one out. You have the proposition nation. How is the
proposition and illiberal concept?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Okay, So the proposition nation is the idea that what's
the best way? How can I put this?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: So the proposition nation is the idea that membership as
a part of the nation. So to be let's just
say American is to hold a set of beliefs, right,
is to affirm a set of propositions. Now, of course
that in itself is completely liberal, there's nothing illiberal about it.
But to understand it clearly is basically to understand it
it's falsehood. So I give an example in this chapter
where there's like an exchange between Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher,
which is a pretty good uh, a pretty good summary
or crystallization of a confrontation between an illiberal and a liberal.
So what happens in this exchange between Powell and Thatcher
is that there's a disagreement on whether one owes a
loyalty to values or ideals or to one's people. And
what Powell says is he says, I would fight for
England even if it was communist, and Margaret Thatcher it
was just like her brain through a divide by zero exception,
it didn't understand, like it could not actually grasp this concept.
And she says that's nonsense. If I send British troops
overseas to fight, it's going to be for our values.
And Powell says, values can't be fought for, they can't
be destroyed. They are anything like that. They exist outside
of time and space. And what you're really fighting for
is your people. And so this is a great this
is this is a great crystallization of the difference between
a liberal and an illiberal. So the liberal will at
the end of the day fight for ideology and the
illiberal will, at the end of the day fight for
something concrete and embodied their own folk. It's it's as
though I mean Thatcher had basically just been confronted by
the difference between American republicanism, which is what she's all about,
and English conservatism or Toryism. So propositional identity is something
that is like when you when you understand what it is,
clearly it is not a good thing. It's basically something
that can't hold your society together. And in some ways
this is probably the point, because of course the sovereign,
when it's malignant, wants to keep the country weak so
it can continue to rule over it, and wants to
keep people divided so that they can't challenge its authority.
And this is what happens. When your identity is a
set of propositions you can't be argued out of. I mean,
you can be argued out of any propositional identity in theory.
I mean, some people just attach themselves to an ideology
and never budge. But the fact is that on average,
and this is what we care about. We don't really
care about exceptions. It is part of another chapter. We
care about what happens on average, which is why stereotypes work.
But on average people who their whole identity is wrapped
up in let's just say I'm a conservative, or I
believe in freedom of speech, or I believe in this
and that and this and that, like I believe. If
your identity begins with I believe, then it's something that
you can be argued out of. And that's fundamentally a
weak identity. Nobody will ever argue you out of. You
know who your mother and father are, or what color
your skin is.
Speaker 3: That is a strong identity.
Speaker 2: And also the proposition nation itself, so is like the
idea that our countries are just like a set of
values that are to be affirmed and nothing else. That
no matter who you are, like who you were born to,
all your throneness, the idea that that doesn't matter at all.
That matters is belief is kind of a halfway house
to globalism. So there is a very very large contingent
of people on the supposedly on the right who are
basically civic nationalists. This is really what civic nationalism is,
is this propositional identity, which is not really nationalism at all.
It's just sort of incipient globalism. It's sort of like
an intermediate stage on the way to globalism because you know,
take for example, the propositional identity that is America. Right,
If you ask a civic nationalist what the actual beliefs
are that America represents, he's pretty much just going to
give you the tenets of liberalism. You know, he might
he might say something like, you know, it's about individualism,
limited government, popular sovereignty, all these different things, right, and
then ask the same not the same person, but ask
a person from Britain or a person from Canada, or
a person from South Korea, for example, what what the
propositions are that underlie their societies, And it's still going
to be liberalism, it'll just be in It won't be
distinguishable that these propositional countries are indistinguishable from each other.
So at that point, if you have basically an identical
list between these different countries of what they're about, then
I mean the globalist is just going to turn around
at that point and say, well, why do we have
different countries? And he's going to be right to do that,
at least beginning from right from the perspective of starting
from that assumption. So there is really no principled way
to defend countries at all if they're propositional. So basically
you are if your identity is affirming a set of propositions.
You kind of have to be globalist, so the proposition
nation turns out to actually be a contradiction. Civic nationalism
is not nationalism. It's just globalism that hasn't got there yet.
So this is the reason why I put this chapter
in here, and why I frame it as an illiberal
concept because if it's understood clearly, it actually spells the
end of nationalism. So it's a fake kind of nationalism,
and it's important that we hold it up.
Speaker 3: For what it is.
Speaker 1: There's another one in here. Another term that a lot
I like to throw it around, a lot of people
like to throw it around, is under a liberal concepts
is a narco tyranny. And I'm sure we have there
are billionaires on Twitter who are talking about a narco tyranny.
So it's a concept that more and more people are
getting getting are familiar with now, So how do you
how do you label that under liberal concepts?
Speaker 2: So anarcho tyranny is a term that was coined by
Sam Francis, which kind of gives it some illiberal bona
fides to start with. But it's a term that I
actually I thought was pretty stupid when I first heard it,
because I thought it was supposed to be basically like
an actual ideology, like anarcho communism or anarcho capitalism or
something like that. But it's obviously just a brute contradiction, right,
And the way that, the way that Sam Francis explains
it is that it is both anarchy, you know, the
failure of the state to enforce laws or the if
not the failure maybe the abnegation of its responsibility, and
also tyranny, which is the enforcement of laws unjustly or oppressively.
So that seems kind of weird. What kind of a
you know, what kind of a Hegelian move can you
make to reconcile those those two. But basically, anarcho tyranny
is about punishing the innocent and protecting the guilty, right,
It's where you get anarchy. So the government institutes anarchy
when it's supposed to, where it's supposed to keep order
and punish criminals and so on and so forth. But
it's also tyranny, so you know, government overreach basically where
it's supposed to leave people the hell alone. You know,
it's the synthesis of those two things. It's punishing things
that are normal and right, like going to church, and
you know, believing in all of these you know, old
and outdated concepts like things like patriarchy, ethnocentrism. It's cracking
down on all these things tyrannically, but it's also just
letting criminals like run through the street. Thomas Carlisle had
a really good term for this. He called it anarchy
plus a street constable. And that's a great way of
framing anarcho tyranny. It's it's both negligence on the one
hand and malice on the other. It's like the worst
of both worlds. So I give a lot of examples
of anarcho tyranny in this chapter, one of them being.
Speaker 3: Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I was gonna interrupt, but no, please go.
Speaker 3: On, okay.
Speaker 2: So one example that I give because I'm a Canadian
is the introduction of legislation by the Liberal government in
twenty twenty one where criticism of Muslims and homosexuals would
earn one a twenty thousand dollars fine at the same time.
And I think pretty much like in a space of
a month or so, there was a an academic in
a university in Canada that called for the end of whiteness,
and we all know what that means. It's not like
the end of an abstraction. It means the end of
white people. So on the one hand, you have people
it's impossible to criticize people who are in your country
because they were taking advantage of the negligence of the government.
But on the other hand, it's illegal also to defend
the native stock of your country because it's in the
process of being erased. So that's that's a good example
of anarchotyranny. It's again punishing the innocent and protecting the guilty.
Another good example is the Sackler family right with Purdue Pharma,
who basically created the opioid crisis that we all understand.
Speaker 3: Don't you really need to go into that. Who were.
Speaker 2: You know, they were prosecuted, but they were also later
given legal immunity to lawsuits. So they're basically like prosecuted
and convicted or whatever, and they were given legal immunity
because of of course they had been convicted already. But
at the same time they were allowed to declare bankruptcy
and before they did that, they with through ten billion
dollars from the company so none of these people individually
personally had to declare bankruptcy or lose any money. It
was just a company that was liquidated and they all
individually got off basically scot free. So that's another example
of anarchotyranny. I give lots and lots of them. There's
probably about like five or six different ones like that.
Speaker 3: That I give.
Speaker 2: But there's lots of other ways that anarcotyranny works as well.
One of them is by having a and you know, Pete,
you and I are both sort of ex libertarians, and
this is one where we kind of got to give
libertarians at least a little nod here. One of the
most effective ways that anarco tyranny works is by having
a massive, complex network of vague, unclear, contradictory, and obscure
like laws and regulations. So basically, you know what happens
is that you were always guilt of something, no matter
what you do. As soon as you step out your door,
there's some sort of law that you violated, and the state,
basically because of because this massive Kafka esque network of laws,
the state has to choose which ones to enforce, and
of course that choice is made not on the basis
of reason or fairness or justice. It's made on the
basis of like political expediency. So you think back to
the I think it was in about twenty twenty twelve
or something like that, where the IRS it came to
light that the IRS had just like completely targeted conservative
and right wing groups and left liberal groups alone. That's
another example of anarchotyranny is basically using the law in
that way.
Speaker 3: It's like the haphazard.
Speaker 2: Application of law for political reasons. Anyway, this whole chapter
basically is framed in the context of the Floyd riots
of twenty twenty, when the government basically turned a blind
eye to not only like lighting everything on fire, which
is bad enough, but doing that at a time when
supposedly there was this like civilization ending pandemic happening. They
basically said, Okay, normal people, you've got to stay in
your house because there's this big pandemic. You've got to
wear the mask, you've got to toe the line, you've
got to bend the knee and kiss the ring. But
all of these anti fut protesters, well, they're allowed to
run rampant on the streets. We're allowed to have these
huge protests with tens of thousands of people, because actually
it's not really COVID that's the health emergency. Racism is
the health emergency. So we got to let these people
run free, light everything on fire, smash all your windows,
destroy your businesses, overturn the election, all that stuff. We
got to let that happen because we basically just have
political ends to serve. So antarcotyranny was the reason why
this term has started to become it has currency today
is really because of that situation with the George Floyd riots.
Everybody saw it. It was the first time that it
was completely out in the open and just undisguised anarchotyranny.
So now you've got people on Twitter talking about it
because thankfully Elon Musk has purchased it, and now there's
at least one place that you can say a few things.
So antarcotyranny is an illiberal concept because it basically just
explains how liberalism is totally negligent in its application.
Speaker 3: Of the law.
Speaker 1: All right, So in the first two sections you pretty
much tear down liberalism.
Speaker 3: Show how.
Speaker 1: Show how it operates, and then show the concepts that
are byproducts of it. Basically and then once you once
you figure this all out, it's like, okay, so what
are the answers? And Part three is called the big Ideas?
And I'm just going to pick one out for the
for the sake of time here and some that something
that might jump out at someone who's looking at the
scanning through the table of contents and just smack them
right in the face. Regna Redbeard's Might is Right?
Speaker 2: This one. I like this chapter. I like this chapter
because it's actually pretty nuanced. I mean, all the chapters,
I mean, none of them are really like not nuanced,
but this one, especially because might is right seems like
the most monstrous idea imaginable to anybody, including us. Right,
and we're of course accused of having a Mite is
right ideology, of stomping all over the week and everything
like that. The radical ride is supposedly a boots stamping
on a face forever, et cetera, et cetera. Right, But
of course we don't believe that might is right because
that means that basically, what might is right means is
that whatever it is that's that has won deserves to win,
which makes kind of morality impossible, you know what I mean?
If the like uber Mensch basically stands beyond good and evil?
Then how is it like isn't Doesn't that just mean
that like we're just making stuff up, you know what
I mean? Like that there are no values beyond the individual.
This seems to be completely at odds. Excuse me, completely
at odds with what we said before about tradition and
everything like that. But when you think about it a
little more deeply, might is right? Actually?
Speaker 3: Has?
Speaker 2: It's not dismissed so easily, I guess, because first of all,
you at least have to have a morality, has to
have force in order to be moral at all, because
what would a morality look like that in principle even
can't be enforced. This is something that was mentioned in
that chapter on Darwin, is that for a thing to
be good, it has to exist, and for a thing
to exist, it has to be strong in the first place,
right Ragnar Redbeard who is this anonymous author? Basically this
book is quite interesting. It's a very poetical exposition of
the idea that the strong should.
Speaker 3: Rule over the week.
Speaker 2: And this is something that seems completely at odds with
all morality. It seems like a Nietzschean Ubermensch thing that's
just like completely overturns, like you know, any additional ideas
of morality. But if we actually look at traditions, if
we look at the actual traditions that are embodied in reality,
we do see this. We do see some echoes of
the idea that strength is moral. For example, one of
the chapters that I go into earlier in that section
is on the Book of Job. Excuse me, The Book
of Job is my favorite book in the Bible by
a long shot. I really like this because it tries
to grapple with the problem of theodicy, which is the
problem of evil. It tries to grapple with that in
a way that is the most convincing out of any
other solution that I've seen given that's typically given to
the problem problem of evil being basically that you know,
if God is both is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good,
then why is there evil in the world. This is
a hard question for especially for like a monotheistic faith.
But I think the Book of Job gives a convincing answer,
and that answer basically is sit down, stop asking questions.
Where were you when I built the foundations of the world,
which is kind of a crazy thing to say, like
it's it's almost a non answer. But when Job so,
we're most most people are familiar with the Book of Job.
Speaker 3: There's a.
Speaker 2: Pious man by the name of Job who is struck
down unfairly apparently by you know, basically, it's a wager
between God and the devil or the adversary. Uh, it's
a wager between God and another divine intelligence or something
like that, where the adversary basically says, look at this
man who's really pious. Do you think he would still
be pious if you if you didn't reward him? And
they sort of enter into a wager. God punishes Job
until Job curses him, and then Job basically says, God,
why are you doing this? This is totally unjust. And then,
in a very interesting answer, what Job says is he
doesn't give a reason. God doesn't give a reason, He
doesn't give a justification. He says, where were you when
I laid the foundations of the world, Which is a
very interesting thing because the subtext there is basically, how
can you question the ultimate authority? Because it doesn't even
make sense to question the ultimate authority because the ultimate
authority is also your starting point, your end dox on
for being able to challenge anything morally. You see what
I mean. It's kind of like taking the government to court.
It doesn't really make sense. So anyway, that's the book
of job. I think this is a wonderful illustration of
the sort of the knots that you can get tied
in with trying to like establish morality outside of the divine.
But the subtext there is basically that strength or power
or authorship is the sort of basis of moral authority.
The reason why God's will is unquestionable is because God
is the author or the creator of the world. And
now we don't just get this idea in the Old Testament.
We also get it among the Greeks as well. There's
a famous exchange between the Athenians and a smaller Greek
people called the Millions in the Peloponnesian War. So basically,
the Peloponnesian War was a war between Sparta and Athens
for mastery over all of Greece. The Melians were a
they were a colony of Sparta, but they tried to
remain neutral, and of course they ran up against the Athenians,
and this neutrality didn't really save them. So as the
Athenians were conquering the Melions, they said, basically you get
the famous line, the strong do what they can and
the weeks suffer what they must. So the Melians are
trying to appeal to natural law, They're trying to appeal
to morality and just be like, you know, why are
you conquering us. We've done nothing wrong, And the Athenians
say because we can, basically, and the Melians come back
and they say, well, you know, you shouldn't. You shouldn't
step all over the idea of natural law because it
might protect you at some stage later. And then the
Athenians turn around and say, if you were in our place,
you would do the same thing. So it's like, this
is pretty harsh and hard to understand from a the
standpoint of modernity. But when the chips were down, even Athens,
which is this cradle of philosophy and humanism and democracy
and all these wonderful ideas that the modern world takes
for granted, even Athens was happy to revert to a
might is right an idea when it comes to war.
So speaking of war basically, what might is right? Another
way of putting might is Right is that there is
no what we might call law of nations. So the
law of nations is sort of international law. It's what
people today call the rules based order, the laws of
war and everything like that. What might is right is
saying is there are no laws of war. Basically, there
is no higher court than war. And you know, liberalism
tries to dispute this, and it does so very famously
in the aftermath of World War two, right with the
Nuremberg trials. But it's kind of ironic that the only
way that liberalism can do that, The only way that
liberalism can say no, there are laws of war and
you have to obey them. The only way that it
can do that is by winning a war. You see
what I mean. It's really ironic that way. So this
idea of the rule of the stronger or might is
right can be found in ancient times and it can
be found in modern times. I give another example in
this chapter of the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, which is
perhaps the most clear expression of might is right, because
what the Mandate of Heaven is is basically that the
ruler who sits on the throne is justified, and you know,
his sovereignty is basically is justified by the fact that
he is sitting on the throne, on the dragon throne.
So it basically is in some ways kind of the
ultimate conservative principle, because what it says is that whoever
rules over you is justified in ruling by virtue of
the fact that they are there. So this is kind of,
you know, it kind of gets us back to the
idea that like, well, doesn't this mean that, like you know,
there is no morality apart from force, And you know,
for that matter, what good is it to us in
the radical right who are completely out of power?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: But another interesting thing about the mandate of Heaven is
that it was it was at once in China, used
to justify the emperor, but on the other hand, it
was also used to justify rebellion, because of course, if
the rebellion succeeded, that means that the mandate has passed
to the usurper right. So in some ways, it's it's
kind of this like souper dangerous tool or weapon that
can both be like it can be the strongest justification
of tradition and the established order, the status quo, but
it can also be the strongest justification of revolution and
usurpation and everything like that. So it kind of feels like, well,
maybe we should just put it away. But at the
end of the day, it's kind of like, I mean,
all ideologies kind of rest on it, you know what
I mean, when all arguments for wokeness and intersectionality and
third wave feminism and all that, because these are such
thin and flimsy ideologies. At the end of the day,
the you know, feminist libtard is going to say, well,
if our ideology is so.
Speaker 3: Wrong, why did it win right?
Speaker 2: And you know, there basically is no comeback from the
classical liberal. And when the classical liberal, you know, of
the let's just say of the nineteenth century, looks at
Christianity and says all and all Christian arguments like from
Joseph de Maistre to you know, Louis Bounald to Ludwig
von Holler, all of these counter revolutionaries, all these you know,
counter enlightenment thinkers were just had so much better arguments
than any liberal, which is to kind of make them
seem like children. And by comparison, at the end of
the day, the classical liberal would then turn around and say, well,
if Christianity was so great, why did we defeat it?
And this can go back further and further and further
and further every revolution. At the end of the day,
will you know, when it's really pressed, it will fly
to this idea that if our thing wasn't so good,
why did it win. So the chapter doesn't really come
down and say might is right is a good thing
or might as right.
Speaker 3: As a bad thing.
Speaker 2: It just says at the end of it that these
are hard questions. Might is right seems to be much
more foundational than people think, and that the one thing
that we can kind of take away from it is
that we should have a nuanced idea of it right.
We shouldn't reject it out of hand because you know,
it's something that's super ancient. It goes back a long
long way, so that in itself means that we should,
you know, maybe take a second look at it kind
of thing.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that was a that was a great
little little lesson there, and just I wanted to mention
people will say, oh, well, job is the Old Testament.
If anybody wants to read read the same thing. Read
Romans chapter nine in the New Testament and you'll get
the same exact argument there. And it's one of the
reasons why when I was in seminary, people didn't like
to talk about Romans chapter nine because it seems very
it seems very Unchristian. But well, I really appreciate this
and the book is looks fantastic. It's probably once I
once I started going through it, I was like, this
is a book that I I'm excited about and I'm
definitely looking forward to giving it to some giving it
to some people and handing it out. Definitely the gift
kind of material there. So tell people where they can
get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we've made a very simple url you can
go to. It's just imperiumpress dot org slash ct that'll
get you there. And if you if you want to
buy some additional copies for friends, we now have a
book discount, so I think it's fifteen percent off if
you buy three or more. Maybe it's five or more,
but anyway, it's just like a pretty hefty discount for
a handful of books. And if you want to buy
ten or more you get twenty percent off. So we've
already had a bunch of people that have bought place
bulk orders. This would make a really really good gift
for some people in your life that a lot of
the audience knows. It may not be the thing that
you want to give to your like CNN watching Boom
or Dad, although maybe I don't know if he's open minded.
But you know, for those folks that are at your
gym or your dojo, or you know, at your church
group that are you know, just starting to come to
grips with the questioning the narrative, Basically, this book is
a really good way to kind of not just get
their feet wet, but to really get them pretty far
into into our way of seeing things now.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: The language doesn't pull any punches. There's a little bit
of vulgarity in there, just sort of shop talk. It's
sort of meant meant for the boys, really, although I'm
sure women will appreciate it as well. It's also religiously neutral.
I myself am a pagan, but it's not a pagan book.
It's not a Christian book. It's just really an illiberal book.
There's lots of reference to all of our traditions all
throughout the West, lots of examples that pulled from the Bible,
lots from classical Greece and you know, the North Sagas
and things like that, as well as more modern examples.
The book is kind of written in the wake of
twenty twenty as well, so it's something that is for
a lot of our guys. I think it's going to
have a very out appeal. If you go to imperiumpress
dot org slash ct H, then you'll find it, and
I think it's going to go a long way.
Speaker 1: Like I appreciate it. I always I always enjoyed talking
to you. I always learned something.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, thanks for having me, Pete. I
really enjoyed it. H