Speaker 1: Aaron, what's happening? Man?
Speaker 2: We don't seem like the kind of guys who really
like to read a lot, so this is this is
getting weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't read so good, them words as hard.
Speaker 2: So you had the idea for doing this one, I
will read it. But so tell me why did you
want to do chapter three of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution?
Speaker 1: So I knew that we wouldn't have enough time or
willpower to do the entire thing. I I would, I
would make that my life's work and my my magnum opus.
But chapter three really stuck with me, mostly because of
my my background and my my near group and in group,
you know, in the in the libertarian sphere, and uh,
I I never really considered the fact that you know,
I I've always had that binary brain of it's it's
either capitalism or socialism. And you know, I've I've kind
of adopted the uh, the way I thought that socialism
is encroaching, and you know, it's not, it's not anywhere
near what like somebody like Lenin would would view as socialism.
But yeah, I mean, and particularly for this book, when
when when we were reading uh uh State and Revolution,
m hm. The sheer amount of things that Lenin called
like just called it. Uh. I mean throughout that reading,
it was like he was spot on with a lot
of things. And uh, throughout my incomplete reading of this,
I'm still in the middle of it. Uh. Every page
has something that I can immediately point to, a tangible
aspect of something I deal with every day and be like, yeah,
Burnham called it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I read it this afternoon because it's only it's
only a night nine pages, seven, eight or nine pages,
and yeah, I was stopping constantly because I was just like,
oh man, I have to ponder that. I really have
to ponder that. So all right, well, I mean we
usually do like twenty five or thirty pages and it
goes so stop anytime I'll start reading.
Speaker 1: It, okay, absolutely, all right.
Speaker 2: Chapter three, The Theory of the Permanence of Capitalism by
former Trotskyite James Burnham. During the past century, dozens, perhaps
even hundreds, of theories of history have been elaborated. These
differ endlessly among themselves in the words they use, the
causal explanations they offer for the historical process, the alleged
laws of history which they seem to discover, But most
of these differences are irrelevant to the central problem with
which this book is concerned. That problem is to discover,
if possible, what type, if indeed it is to be
a different type of social organization is on the immediate
historical horizon. I will pause to say that this book
was released in nineteen forty one, so he's positing what's
going to happen, and he probably start he probably wrote
this in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: And he's kind of setting you up, especially you know,
us US libertarians or former libertarians of what I'd consider
myself to be. So when you're reading this, whatever definition
of capitalism he's using, he knows it's not real capitalism, bro,
and he doesn't care. It's capitalism and its totality, whatever
your definition is, that's what he's talking.
Speaker 2: About with reference to this specific problem. All of the theories,
with the exception of those few which approximate to the
theory of the managerial revolution, boil down to two and
only two. The first of these. The first of these
predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite but long time,
if not forever. That is, that the major institutions of
capitalist society, or at least most of them will not
be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will
be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution
predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by managerial society,
the nature of which we'll be explained later. That in fact,
the transition from capitalists to managerial society is already well underway.
It is clear that although all three of these theories
might be false, only one of them can be true.
The answer that each of them gives to the question
of what will happen what will actually happen in the future,
plainly denies the answers given by the other two. If
then the theory of the managerial revolution is true, it
must be POSSI will to present consideration sufficient to justify
us in regard to in regard the other two theories as.
Speaker 1: False, they're all mutually exclusive.
Speaker 2: Right. Such demonstration would by itself make the theory of
the managerial revolution very probable, since apart from these three
there are at present no other serious theoretical contenders. I propose, therefore,
in this in the following chapter, to review briefly the
evidence for rejecting the theory of the permanence of capitalism
and the theory of the socialist revolution, and we're off.
Oddly enough, the belief that the capitalists society will continue
is seldom put in theoretical form. It is rather left
implicit in what people say and do, and in the
writings and sayings of most historians, sociologists, and politicians. Nevertheless,
there is little doubt that the majority of people in
the United States hold this belief, though it has been
somewhat shaken in recent years. When examined, this belief is
seen to be based not on any evidence in its favor,
but primarily on two assumptions. Both of these assumptions are
flatly and entirely false. Here we go. The first is
the assumption that society has always been capitalists in structure,
and therefore presumably always will be. In actual fact, society
has been capitalists from a minute fragment of the total
of total human history. Any exact date shows in its
the beginning of the good.
Speaker 1: How many times have you seen people cite instances of
I guess, right wing anarchism, anarcho capitalism throughout history.
Speaker 2: I mean it always seems forced.
Speaker 1: But yeah, extremely like real, you.
Speaker 2: Know, medieval Iceland, medieval Scotland. Yeah, I mean Ireland. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, those are the two two ones that come
to mind as well, and or like uh yeah, so
I guess what I'm getting at is it's always forced. Uh,
capitalism has only existed since maybe the late eighteenth century.
Speaker 2: I mean some people may say the Hanseatic League, which
goes back further, but I mean on any grand scale
in the West. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, if if you if you compare it to
what's what's that, uh, mercantilism. Yeah, uh, that's it's very
hard when you start differentiating between capitalism and mercantilism. It's
always kind of a uh, there's there's shape of each
when you get into that sixteenth seventeenth century and before.
Speaker 2: All right, moving on any exact date chosen as the
beginning of capitalism would be arbitrary. But the start of
capitalist social organization on any wide scale can scarcely be
put earlier than the fourteenth century AD, and capitalist domination
must be placed much later than that. The second assumption
is that capitalism has some necessary kind of correlation with
human nature. That's man, yep, yeah, I've been I was
reading John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on government. Got it down
here somewhere, and his argument for why government is necessary
is the exact same intro is the exact same argument
that anarchists or lays fair economists make for why lays
fair would work.
Speaker 1: Self interest yep, self ownership, private property or private property
is an extension of self ownership. And that's kind of
an appeal to human nature that I hear a lot.
Speaker 2: All right, So the second assumption is that capitalism has
some necessary kind of correlation with human nature. This, as
a matter of fact, is the same assumption as the first,
but expressed differently. To see that it is false, it
is not required to be sure just what human nature
may be. It is enough to observe that human nature
has been able to adapt itself to dozens of types
of society, many of which have been studied by anthropologists
and historians, and a number of which have lasted far
longer than capitalism.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's unreasonable to kind of in part
into your belief system of history.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. With these assumptions dropped, the positive case for
the view that capitalism will continue doesn't amount to much.
In fact, has hardly even been stated coherently by anyone.
But apart from this lack of positive defense, we can,
I think, lists certain sets of facts which give all
the grounds that a reasonable man should need for believing
that capitalism is not going to continue, that it will
disappear in a couple of decades at most, and perhaps
in a couple of years, which is as exact as
one should pretend to be in these matters. These facts
do not demonstrate this in any way that mathematical or
logical theorem is demonstrated. No belief about future events can
be demonstrated. They simply make the belief more probable that
any alternative belief, which is as much as can be
can be done. This is in parenthesis in what follows,
for reasons which will become evident later, I do not
include references to Germany, Italy or Russia. Okay, The first
and perhaps crucial evidence for the view that capitalism is
not going to continue much longer is the continuous, continuous
presence within the capitalist nations of mass unemployment and the
failure of all means tried for getting rid of mass unemployment.
The unemployed, it is especially significant to note, include large
percentages of the youth just entering working age I.
Speaker 1: Mean, pause, You're right, there is that applicable to today.
Speaker 2: It's applicable to every moment of every conscious moment of
my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep. Mass unemployment now not in the traditional sense
that people are looking for work and they just can't
find jobs because there's no there's no productive positions for
them to fill. But if you look at today, this
call for universal basic income, universal health care, this this
emphasis on work life balance, I think that's in response
to not so much people being unemployed through no through
no fault of their own, but this general drive towards uh,
not having to work for your basic necessities is stemmed
from the fact that there's just not a whole lot
of people working and and at the same time, there's
not a whole lot of people looking for work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I would. Yeah. I don't know if
I have anything to add to that. Yeah, okay, cool,
I'm gonna move on. Continuous mass unemployment is not new
in history. It is in fact them that a given
type of social organization is just about finished. It was
found among the poorer citizens during the last years of Athens,
among the urban proletariat as they were called in the
Roman Empire, and very notably at the end of the
Middle Ages, among the dispossessed serfs and villains who had
been thrown off the land in order to make way
for capitalist use of the land. I pronounced that, right, villains,
I recognize that from Marx I think, so, yeah, yeah,
what is a villain hold on? I'm trying to remember now.
I looked it up once. I read feudal tenant entirely
subject to a lord, so basically close enough to a serf.
Mass unemployment means that the given type of social organization
has broken down, that it cannot any longer provide its
members with socially useful functions, even according to its own
ideas of what is socially useful? Hey, uncle ted, how
are you doing? It cannot support these masses for any
length of time and idleness, for its resources are not
sufficient the unemployed.
Speaker 1: That's where the Marxists would disagree. They would say, no, no,
we have the resources. They're just not being diverted to it.
You know, They're being diverted to socially unnecessary production.
Speaker 2: Right. The unemployed, however, on the fringe of society on
the one hand, like a terrible weight dragging it down
and believing it to death. On the other, a constant,
irritant and reservoir of forces directed against the society that
is brutal. Man experience has already shown that there is
not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment.
This is nineteen forty one, so eighty years ago. Eighty one.
This is indeed becoming widely admitted among the defenders of
capitalism as well as many spokesmen of the New Deal.
Even total war, the most drastic conceivable solution, could not
end mass unemployment in England and France, nor will it
do so in this country. Every solution that has any
possibility of succeeding leads directly or indirectly outside the framework
of capitalism.
Speaker 1: That that right there, like just really hit home. When
you have an ideology and you're trying to apply an
ideological solution to reality. You're and let's say it's let's
say you're an anarchic capitalist, for instance, You're trying to
game out ways to apply solutions. The law of unintended
consequences will take effect, and there's really nothing in the
anarcho capitalist toolbox that can fix mass unemployment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean they will say that, you know,
the freer of the market, the more jobs will be created,
and you will have one unemployment. I mean, you'll have
zero percent unemployment. Sorry, yeah, yeah, and the only people
who at that point, the only people who will work,
who won't work, or people who can't work. Yeah, I
mean I think that's pine in the sky.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's what I'm saying. The the solutions
applied to reality, if you take it, if you're in
a capitalist framework, all of your solutions that are within
that capitalist framework, there there's no uh, there's no solving
it within it.
Speaker 2: Well, I think some may argue that because you're in
an anarcho capitalist society and there are no entitlements, no welfare,
no nothing like that, that people will be compelled to work,
that they'll be forced to work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's true. I've always kind of envisioned, uh
not not not trying to straw man, but an anarcho
capitalist society is like that ten thousand leak con shines
more more of a corporate structure where you know, the
cons Herman Hopp covenant communities. If you take the idea
of a covenant community, will there be unemployment in a
covenant community.
Speaker 2: And depends on it depends on the constitution of the
covenant community exactly.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, So I mean either way, it's it's it's
a nice I love it. That's where I come from,
and I would love to see that implemented. But I
guess what constitutes mass unemployment would depend on the covenant community.
Speaker 2: Two. Capitalism has always been characterized by recurring economic crises,
by periods of boom followed by periods of depression. Until
a dozen years ago, however, the curve of total production
always went higher in one major boom period than in
the boom proceding. It did so not only in terms
of the actual quality of goods produced, but in the
relative quantity of the volume of goods compared to the
increased population and plant capacity. Thus, in spite of the crises,
there was a general overall increase in capitalist production, which
was simply the measure of the ability of capitalist social
organization to handle its own resources. Since the World Crisis
of nineteen twenty seven through twenty nine, this overall curve
has reversed. The height of a boom period relative to
population and potential capacity is lower than that of the
preceding boom. The new direction of the curve is, in
its turn, simply the expression of the fact that capitalism
can no longer handle its own resources.
Speaker 1: And again, uh, for all the mesessians listening, that boom
and bus cycle. We know it's due to the expansion
of credit. But you know Burnham, Burnham incorporates central banking
into his view of capitalism.
Speaker 2: Well, he's also living in the real world. He's talking
about what's happening now. And yeah, you can already hear
people screaming, well, that's not real capitalism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that boom and bus cycle. I mean again,
like I love, I love an cap theory, but there's
really nothing inherently, there's nothing to inoculate, say, a covenant
community with a bank with a currency from a boom
and bus cycle, because credit credit in and of itself
isn't isn't tied to any type of ideology.
Speaker 2: Well, what I would like to say here is that
it looks like Burnham is making like he did say
he did make an immediate kind of prediction. The first
sentence of part three here is the volume of public
and private debt has reached a point where it cannot
be managed much longer. Okay, so some people would say, okay,
how are we still how are we still going well?
I mean maybe they adjusted, they bring in a Paul
Volker or someone like that to get it through. But
what I want to say more about these timeframes is
it's hard to predict when you know something is going bad.
When you know something is going wrong, there could be
somebody out there who has already figured out how to
let how to keep that wrong going. For a long time,
there were a lot of people talking about the fall
of the Roman Empire in the first and second century.
It took a couple more centuries. It does not discount
the arguments that they were making, no, not at all.
Speaker 1: And applying it to now, if you view the United
States as the beacon of capitalism and Enlightenment values and
all that, you can you can see its evolution or
de evolution from its from its inception to right now.
And you know, capitalism even, you know, even when deregulation
and all these good libertarian policies were applied sparingly throughout history,
it wasn't enough to manage the decline.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read the first sentence again and keep going.
The volume of public and private debt had reached a
point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt,
like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing bloodstream of capitalism,
and it cannot be shaken off. Bankruptcies, which formerly readjusted
the debt position of capitalism, hardly make a debt in it.
The scale of bankruptcy or inflation, which could reduce the
debt to manageable size, would, at the same time, as
all economists recognize, utterly dislocate all capitalist institutions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, going back to HAPA, any institution,
whether it's a nation state or a company or covenant community,
any institution is own to just that high time preference culture,
of which leads to that racking up of unmanageable debt.
And that kind of segues nicely into I'm why I'm right.
Speaker 2: Wing, all right. The maintenance of the capitalist market depended
on at least comparatively free monetary exchange transactions. The area
of these, especially on a words a world scale, is
diminishing towards a vanishing point. This is well indicated by
the useless gold hoard at Fort Knox and the barter
methods of Russia, Germany and Italy. I believe if you
were at this in forty or forty one, it was
released to forty one. We get Breton Woods in five years, right,
I think breton Woods is forty six. Oh done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the mortal wound to the whatever whatever gold
standard we had left.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it was a forty four summit. So yeah,
the uh try to explain Breton Woods. The best I
can is basically what it meant was that. Okay, So
the delegates agreed that the gold standard would create a
fixed currency exchange exchange rate, so there'd be no fluction.
There'd be no fluctuation, no market. The agreement also facilitated
the creation of immensely important structures in the financial world,
the IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction in the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is known today as
the World Bank. So that's your Breton Woods. And yeah,
you're you're right, there's no what did you.
Speaker 1: Say, No more market no more yeah, no more market
forces affecting the exchange rate.
Speaker 2: Yep, all right. Four the maintenance of the capitalist market
depended on, at least comparatively I already read that one.
Since shortly this is part five, Since shortly after the
First World War that there has been in all major
capitalist nations a permanent agricultural depression. Agriculture is obviously an
indispensable part of the total economy, and the breakdown in
this essential sector is another mark of the incurable disease
afflicting capitalism. No remedies and how and how many they
are that have been tried produce any sign of cure.
The farming populations sink in debt and poverty, and not
enough food is produced and distributed while agriculture is kept
barely going through huge state subsidies.
Speaker 1: I don't know if today we have a problem of
not enough food being produced, but I know that I
just don't know a whole lot about the agricultural industry
right now, but I know one thing I do know
is that it is propped up entirely by state subsidies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, somebody is screaming right now though, that that
FDR had them destroy food in the thirties so that
he could keep prices high to affect supply and demand.
But that's what you have under capitalism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a solution well within the bounds of capitalism.
You know, a private entity can do that just as
well as a public one.
Speaker 2: Dan, no man, only the state's evil. Only the state's evil, dude.
Capitalism is no longer able to find uses for the
available investment funds, which waste in idleness in the account
books of the banks. The mass unemployment of private money
is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than
the mass unemployment of human beings. Damn, this mass unemployment
of private money, that's a really good phrase.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it strikes a uh, I know, it strikes
at my Mesessian sensibilities.
Speaker 2: Both show the inability of the capitalist institutions any longer
to organize human activities. During the past decade, in the
United States, as in other capitalist nations, new capital investment
has come almost entirely from the state, not from private funds.
Speaker 1: Yep. And uh even now, I mean with with the
literal trillions of dollars sitting in futures and uh, you know,
investment portfolios and assets and all that, can we honestly
say that it's being employed in any sense in a
beneficial way to society. And this is where you get
kind of people varying off and going towards Marxism.
Speaker 2: Seven. The continuance of capitalism was, we saw, dependent upon
a certain relationship between the great powers and the backward
sections and peoples of the earth. One of the most
striking developments of the past fifteen years, which has been
little noticed, is the inability of the great capitalist nations
any longer to manage the exploitation and development of these
backward sections. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the
relations between the United States and South America. The United States,
in spite of its imperious necessity for the nation's very survival,
has not and cannot devise a scheme for handling the
economic phase of a temisphere policy. Though during the past
few years and above and above all during the war
the road has been wide open. Nothing gets done here. Again,
the only workable schemes are compelled to leave the basis
of capitalism.
Speaker 1: Which is war and color revolutions, Yeah, publics and all that.
Speaker 2: This is why, if you ask somebody, you know, how
did the United States get out of the Great Depression,
they've been taught to say, well, world War two, you know,
Because I mean, honestly, if war is the greatest thing
for the economy, we should just be blowing up our
own buildings and bridges just constantly Oh yeah, infrastructure, man
Capitalism is no longer able to use its own technological possibilities.
One side of this is shown by such facts as
the inability of the United States to carry out a
housing program when the houses are needed and wanted and
the technical means to produce them in abundance or on hand.
This is the case with almost all goods. But an
equally symptomatic side is seen in the inability to make
use of many inventions and new technical methods. Hundreds of these,
though they could reduce immeasurably the number of man hours
needed to turn out goods and increase greatly the convenience
of life, nonetheless sit on the shelf. In many entire
economic sectors, such as agriculture, building, coal mining. The technical
methods today available make the usual present methods seem stone age,
and nearly every economic field is to some degree affected.
Using the inventions and methods available available, would, it is
correctly understood, smash up the capitalist structure. Technological unemployment is
present in recent capitalism, but it is hardly anything compared
to what technological unemployed would be if capitalism made use
of its available technology.
Speaker 1: He just talking about achieving post scarcity through automation and
all that, and uh, you know, we we have that today.
We have the means to automate almost every facet of
the production process in any industry. And uh, you know,
this is where we get into the managerial state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these facts also show that capitalism and its rulers
can no longer use their own resources. And the point
is that if they won't, someone else will. Nine As
symptomatic and decisive as these economic and technical developments, it
as symptom hold on, here we go. As symptomatic and
decisive as these economic and technological developments is the fact
that the ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies, have become impotent.
Ideologies we have seen, are the cement that binds together
the social fabric. When the cement loosens, the fabric is
about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched the
world during the past twenty years can doubt the ever
increasing importance of the bourgeois ideologies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, impotence.
Speaker 2: So already Humble bragged about this on Twitter. I was
hanging out with Jarvin, who basically has gotten people to
read Burnham, and I asked him about this quote, because
this is a quote that a lot of people use
to say that Burnham was not against ideologies. He says,
ideologies we have seen are the cement that binds together
the social fabric. So what I asked Jarvin was, are
ideologies for the plebs and the people who are in power,
who desire power, who understand power, understand that ideology is handcuffs. Yeah,
he seemed to agree with that. So you seem to
agree that the powerful will push ideologies upon people and
say this is what's going to hold you, this is
what holds us together while they are While they are
I have no ideology whatsoever, even if they're telling you
they have the same ideology as you and they're just
doing as they wish with the power that's been granted them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, particularly bourgeois ideologies like monarchism or or liberalism or
you know, any of those. Those those I'm not saying
that to you know, as a as being mean or anything,
but uh, you know, if if your middle class abides
but by a general ideology like say liberalism in the
United States, and then they have you know, different disagreements
and factions scattered throughout, you could still have a cohesive society.
If half your society is communist and the other half is,
you know, liberal, then that's when you're going to see
things like Russia, things like Germany, things like Italy, China.
Speaker 2: Yep, I'm going to read that again. Ideologies we have
seen are the cement that binds together the social fabric.
When the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate.
And no one who has watched the world during the
past twenty years can doubt the ever increasing impotence of
the bourgeois ideologies. On the one hand, the scientific pretensions
of these ideologies have been exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology
are not yet much as sciences, but they are enough
to show every serious person that the concepts of the
bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, or not
universal laws of nature, but aret best, just temporary expressions
of the interests and ideals of a particular class of
men at a particular historical time.
Speaker 1: That was a punch and look out to me too. Yep,
we're all just dust in the wind man.
Speaker 2: It does not matter how non scientific or anti scientific
and ideology may be. It can do its work so
long as it possesses the power to move great masses
of men to action. This, this the bourgeois ideologies once
could do, as the great revolutions and the imperial and
economic conquest prove, And this they can no longer do.
That's so spot on, It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Are you going to die for libertarianism? You are you ready, comrade?
Speaker 2: I'm ready to die to end these lockdowns. When the
bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the Sar and this day
and land by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism
that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people.
All possible discounts for the effects of Nazi terrorism must
not delude us into misreading this brute fact. Ben, that's
a paragraph right there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Esz.
Speaker 2: Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that France fell so
swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi
war machine. That might have been sufficient in a longer run,
but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal
military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly
because its people had no heart for the war, as
every observer had remarked even through the censorship from the
beginning of the war, and they had no heart for
the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were
appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts.
Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and
unworthy ideals, but they must at least believe in those ideals. Man, Yeah,
he's just throwing haymakers.
Speaker 1: No, I was. I was. It's kind of a like
a you know, a blue collar trope that like the
French are pussies and cowards and all that. But you know,
when I read that paragraph, I was like, you know what,
He's absolutely right, there was. They're no different than anybody else.
They just weren't moved. They didn't have they didn't have
leaders worth following, they didn't have beliefs that resonated with them.
And uh, now that's why we're having a retention crisis
right now in our military.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, say the French were pussies in seventeen eighty nine. Well,
nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideology is more apparent
than among the youth, and the coming world, after all,
will be the youth's world. The abject failure of voluntary
military enlistment in Britain. In this country tells its own
story to all who wished to listen. It is underlined
in reverse by the hundred of Distinguished Adult Voices, which
during nineteen forty began reproaching the American youth for indifference,
unwillingness to sacrifice, lack of ideals. How right these reproaches
are and how little effect they have? Man, do you
do you see how inconsistent you're thinking?
Speaker 1: Is?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Come on, man, it's like, yeah, it's like telling
a leftist that they're inconsistent.
Speaker 1: I just think when I read that, I was like,
I just just wait a few months, when you know,
Pearl Harbor happens, then I like, I honestly don't know
if we would have even needed a draft. Yeah, but
that's not so much them being motivated by any type
of patriotism or you know, love of liberalism and democracy
and all that. That's it was a revenge thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it has nothing to do with ideologies or
that's what they've been able to manufacture. With the terror wars.
Speaker 1: They saw how effective Pearl Harbor was, and uh, you know,
depending on depending on where where you sit on that
they created more or they you know, literally created more.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, if you can't sell love of country
or anything anymore, but then let's sell that. You know,
the Commis are encroaching Korea and Vietnam, the Commis are croaching,
encroaching Grenada, the radical Islamic terrorism, Iraq War one one
and a half two, Great Afghanistan nine to eleven. Wherever
you stand that nine to eleven. In truth, the bourgeoisie
itself has in large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies.
The words begin to have a hollow sound in the
most sympathetic capitalist ears. This too, is unmistakably revealed in
the policy anditude of England's rulers during the past years.
What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement but
a recognition of bourgeois impotence. Oh Man going after Chamberlain
bad Huh. The head of the British Government's traveling to
the feet of the Austrian house painter was the fitting
symbol of the capitalist loss of faith in themselves. Let
me read that again. The head of the British Government's
traveling to the feet of the Austrian house painter was
the fitting symbol of the capitalist's loss of faith in themselves.
Speaker 1: The Austrian house painter.
Speaker 2: Wonder who that is. Every authentic report during the autumn
of nineteen thirty nine from Britain told of the discouragement
and fear of the leaders in government and business. And
no one who has listened to American leaders off the record,
or who has followed the less public organs of British
of business opinion, will suppose that such attitudes are confined
to Britain. All history makes clear that an indispensable quality
of any man or class that wishes to lead to
hold power and privilege in society is boundless self confidence.
Other sets of facts could easily easily be added to
this list, but these are perhaps the most plainly sympathetic,
a symptomatic sorry. Their effect, moreover is cumulative. The attempted
remedies for them experience shows only gravity only aggravate them. Sorry.
They permit no other conclusion than the capitalist organization of
society has entered its final years. Let me read that
last sentence of the body of that again. All history
makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or
class that wishes to lead to hold power and privilege
in society is boundless self confidence. It's I mean, can
is there any way you can argue with that?
Speaker 1: Not at all, not recently. No, And you know, whether
you're talking about Trump or you know, the Four Horsemen
or whoever else, I mean boundless self confidence like just
having having the ability to be persuasive to the masses.
You could be speaking you could be speaking Chinese and
you know they'll they'll follow you. Well.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's one of those things that I remember
middle school teacher telling me, you know, and we didn't
have the Internet at this time, so it was kind
of hard to find. But he's like, if you can
find a video of Hitler speaking, you won't even have
to know what he's saying. You will be moved.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that's hard for you know, to hear when you're
in middle school and you've already had, you know, a
good ten years of indoctrination into the you know that,
oh my god, Hitler. No, No, there's no way, and
then you like listen to him and speak and you're like,
holy crap. And then it.
Speaker 1: Becomes the joke like say what you want about Hitler
but you know, fantastic orator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, say what you want about Ussolini with those trains
right on time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, if you if you kind of
apply that that idea to our sphere or former sphere
or whatever, it's something that even even the leadership like
at the top can't can't really make that happen. Like, yeah,
the whole boundless self confidence thing. I mean, when you're
in a leadership position and you're trying to move people
like you can't you can't be self deprecating, you can't
be speaking a language like you know that comes off
to normal people like you're some type of bug man.
You know. That's that's why populism's taking a grip, both
left wing and right wing populism is taking a grip
right now. It's because they have fantastic, relatable, persuasive orators.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or tweeters or what was the last time he
saw Anthony Sabattini put something out that was like slightly cringe.
I don't remember. People who don't know Anthony Sabattini is
a state senator in Florida who would be nice to
see on the on the big stage just because he
has no filter whatsoever.
Speaker 1: What's uh, what's going on with Matt Gates?
Speaker 2: I don't know. They're trying to they try to take
him down with that whole thing and everything. But I
though was mentioning something this weekend about that about Matt Yeah, he.
Speaker 1: You can tell that it's bullshit because the Republican Party
as a whole has not at all distanced themselves from him, right,
it's only the people that have like said anything. We're
like the you know, the anti Trump Republicans that didn't
like him to begin with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and them too.
But that's that's how I can kind of gauge what's
bullshit or not, because you know, the top leadership of
the party isn't saying anything. They're treating him exactly the
same as they were before, so you could be rest
assured that they don't have anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a hard hitting essay because when you
define capitalism properly, because there is no free market lays fair,
and there is not going to be a free market
lays fair, at least not in our lifetime, and people
can make, you know, you can make the argument that
when I was reading it, I was thinking, oh, well,
you know, if you're in the black market, it's free
and everything. It's like, well, it's really not that free.
I mean, you like literally might have to protect yourself
with with a lot of firepower, protect your business, and
you never see best You never see best Buy running
drive bys on brands Mart. So yeah, but capitalism. If
you're going to use the term capitalism now, and you're
going to use it in any other way than something
that is pure theory, just use it. It's amazing to
me that the same people that will say, you know, well,
real capitalism hasn't been tried, will argue that capitalism has
gotten out gotten a billion Asians out of out of
poverty in the last thirty years. Yeah, and that I say, well,
that was neoliberalism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then it becomes like, oh, I don't like that.
Speaker 2: Though, because it was neoliberalism, and it really was. I mean, stop,
you know, I mean, neoliberalism is horrible when you look
at idea, you know, when you look at it from
an ideological perspective. But they did get a billion people,
a billionass out of out of poverty in the last
thirty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If you view the onset of capitalism as you know,
the old school medieval burgers sezed literally seizing power and
solidifying private property rights from the King that that that
that kind of gives you a historical perspective, and eventually
that system of private property rights, you know, seizing private
property rights, seizing free markets. You know that that came
at a cost. And now we're entering an era where
you know, it's it's evolving into something else, whether it's socialism, fascism,
or as Burnham pos, it's a managerial state. Regardless it is,
it's fundamentally departed from, you know, the liberal ideal of
what capitalism is.
Speaker 2: Well, what we did find was that managerial, the managerial
state is a lot better than what South Korea had before.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, able to drive able to drive a lot of
people out of cap out of poverty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, it's it's another thing, like you know,
I I would rather have a managerial state that you know,
I share values and a culture with than a libertarian
utopia of like blue haired opese trannies that you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that just reminded me I need to
ask just the Jeff Dice, the question all that I
got write this now, do you still believe I just
think of one of his famoue, one of his famous
quotes from a few years ago, and I want to
see what he has to say now that COVID and
everything is completely insane. But the yeah, I mean Burnham Man,
there's something in every friggin reading. And what's funny is
this is I'm doing this with you and very well,
I'm going to release this next is my next episode,
the very next episode. Maybe myself and Buck Buck Johnson
reading Samuel Francis's chapter out of this his review of
Suicide of the West by Burnham. This is Sam Francis
Thinkers of Our Times James Burnham, where he basically does
a commentary on every James Burnham book I have. I
went and bought another one of these because I'm tearing
this up so bad. I just wanted to have one
because this is right now, this is the book I
can't put down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm you know, going from Lenin to Burnham,
it you can tell that he was kind of in
that sphere at one point because he has the same
polemical writing style and uh like it's actually very easy
to read. You know, you have to kind of learn
a different language when you're reading like the Orthodox Marxists,
but with Burnham it's it's kind of more you know,
there's a lot less learning curve. No, no learning curve
for me really, But yeah, I would highly recommend any
any Burnham content. But I'm just happy to read be
reading The Managerial Revolution right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after you read, if you can get Lenin down,
you don't have to get it down perfectly, but just understand,
you know, have a good grasp of it. Reading Burnham
is a lot easier.
Speaker 1: He was at he was.
Speaker 2: Head of, he was head of like a Trotsky like
organization or something like that. I mean, the guy was
deep in it and then just took a did a
huge yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the next chapter it's like on the on
the coming transition to socialism or whatever, he goes into
the fact that workers as a class are very malleable ideologically.
There's no guarantee that they're going to fulfill their Marxist
destiny of you know, uh, seizing power and bringing about
a communist society. They might seize power, but it it'll
look like, you know, either Nazi Germany or Russia or
you know something else.
Speaker 2: Well, even Lenin knew that, and that's why Lenin wasn't
an internationalist like Trotsky. Yeah. Yeah, it was four and
Stalin picked up on that that too, and then of
course later things got things would awry after you know,
certain people got into power and they were like, oh,
we gotta we got to expand this a little bit.
Good luck with that. That's when you were that's when
you realize the world doesn't want this. And when I
say the world, I'm talking about the people. People of
this world do not want this.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was like when what's his name, I can't remember
the American journalists, he's like the only American who's buried
in uh, buried in the Kremlin or in the tomb there.
He John Reid, I think it was when he went
to Russia pre revolution and he was telling Lenin and
he's like, the American workers will will stand with with
the Russian workers, and it's like, no, they won't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's smoking crack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's not smoking crack. It's like you're he's
literally lining to him, yeah, to get you know, to
get him to he was trying to get him to
go forth, to push harder in what he was doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Some of those Americans that went over there were way
more hardcore than a lot of even Lenin's inner group,
because you know, Lenon had guys in his inner group
who were like, is this gonna work? Yeah, back to
my farm, everything will be fine. Or we could just
go back. Let's let's get this war over so we
can go back to Germany and Switzerland. You know they
were living the good life there for for a decade
and a half.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, German intelligence agencies were fucking like rock stars,
fucking making it rain.
Speaker 2: Anyway, got anything to plug?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can find me on uh not the latest
episode of Timeline Earth due to a scheduling dispute, but
uh yeah you'll you'll eventually find me on Timeline Earth.
And uh, I hope to keep keep doing little tidbits
like this. I'm kind of entering a transition phase in
my professional life and uh taking a taking a step
back from content creation, but uh, you know, I'm always
available for a guest spot, and uh, especially for you.
Speaker 2: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show.
Has this guy ever been on the show before? It
was just oh Aaron from Timeline Earth. Yeah, I mean
many times.
Speaker 1: Hey you don't you're my co host.
Speaker 2: That's so awesome. All right, let's get to it. I
asked you on today so that we could talk about
Sam Francis. This is actually the book, the print version
of Sam Francis's. Basically it's a review of every James
Burnham book. So every book that James Burnham wrote, he
has a he does ten to fifteen pages on it
to explain what it is and what are we looking
for today? We're gonna do the Machiavellians nice And I
know you read it, and also you said that you
that you thought about when you when you started reading
this review, which was what's it called, Crisis of Modernity?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Crisis of Adernity Modernity by Augusta del Nocee.
He's an Italian philosopher born in nineteen ten died in
seventy six, I think, and he's just another one of
those people that basically called it well before anybody else
was calling it. He identified the pretty much the flow
of history from from liberalism into kind of what we're
experiencing right now, which is its logical endpoint, and it
really resonated with me. I've also in preparation for this episode,
I also read a lot of Heidegger and I also
went back into, uh, the managerial Revolution, just to get
me into a Burnham mindset.
Speaker 2: Cool cool, all right, well, let's get this up on
the screen and start reading. I love it, all right,
So this is taken from I don't even know what
this text takes it from, because this this text actually
I can't find in PDF anywhere. It was never made
into a PDAF. I mean maybe if someone has it,
they can send it to me. But I just found
this on archive and it had this section of the
Machiavelians in it. So yeah, let's just go and stop
any time. So this is Sam Francis reviewing the Machiavellians
by James Burnham. I think machi Villen's written in forty
one or forty two, a year year after manager or Revolution.
So all right, the managerial revolution has grown out of
Burnham's dispute what Trotsky in the nineteen thirties, and was
an answer to Trotsky Stalinist Russia was not a deformed
worker estate, but a new kind of society that Marxism
had not anticipated, managerial society. Yet, despite Burnham's political and
intellectual break with Marxism significant fragments of Marxist ideology, I've
remained with him and seriously marred his statement of the
theory of the managerial revolution. In The Machiavellians Defenders of Freedom,
Burnham eradicated many of his remaining Marxist preconceptions, formulated a
general theory of human political behavior, and restated the theory
of the managerial revolution in terms of this theoretical framework.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's definitely a uh, not so hidden critique of Marxism.
You can definitely tell you he's one hundred percent away
from Marxism right now, even though that's kind of where
he started.
Speaker 2: It's good to have you on here if we're going
to talk about Marxism, because I think we've we've probably
done a bunch of episodes on Marxism together, haven't we.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a few books, few few readings.
Speaker 2: All right. In his first book, which had begun with
a long epigraph from Machiavelli's letter, Burnham had revealed a
scathing contempt for what he called ideology. Although he recognized
the social need for ideologies as set as sets of
beliefs that hold societies together, he had dismissed them as
unscientific beliefs that were uncontrolled by facts. Manager of Revolution,
page twenty eighty five. This discrepancy between logic and reality,
between the verbalized form and the concrete meeting meaning is
one that is a persistent theme in all of Burnham's writings,
and one that he explicitly developed in the Machiavellians. Burnham
found in Machiavelli and in the four political theorists of
the twentieth century, whom he described as Machiavellians, the foundations
of a realistic method of social and political analysis. Contrasting
the theological and metaphysical political philosophy of Dante Allegaris in
Demonarchia with the historically and empirically grounded approach of Machiavelli.
Burnham developed a fundamental distace between the formal and the
real meaning of a statement. The formal meaning of a
statement is the meaning which is explicitly stated, but which
serves to express in an indirect and disguised manner what
may be called the real meaning.
Speaker 1: Some it's an interesting metaphysical development. I love it.
Speaker 2: This is quoting, but.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, keep going.
Speaker 2: Quoting By real meaning, I refer to meaning not in
terms of the fictional world of religion, metaphysics, miracles, and pseudohistory,
but in terms of the actual world of space, time
and events.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, metaphysics is like the lens in which
we view reality and truth. So I don't know, Like,
just the managerial Revolution is something I really got into
of Burnham's and uh I was about seventy five percent
satisfied with it, and not just because it's a little outdated.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's what most people think. Most people
say that it's a great book, but a lot of
people complain, well, he didn't get his predictions correct and everything.
It's like, well, I mean, yeah, you're in the middle
a war had just started. It's kind of hard. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The real meaning, then, is the empirically discoverable and verifiable meaning,
the only meaning that has value for expressing the truth.
In Machiavelli, Burnham argued there is no distinction between the
formal and real meanings because Machiavelli explicitly stated his goals
and meaning, did not attempt to disguise them, and took
pains to verify them empirically and to make them clear.
Whether this is an accurate presentation of Machiavelli or not
is not particularly important to the political theory that Burnham developed.
His purpose was not to write a learned treatise on
Renaissance history and philosophy, but to allow rate on empirically
sound method of analyzing human political affairs. The tradition of
political thought by Burnham labeled machiavellian did indeed derive many
of its ideas from the sixteenth century Florentine But whether
this was an accurate derivation and whether Machiavelli himself would
have endorsed Machiavellianism are separate and secondary questions.
Speaker 1: I've heard that critique before. Would Machiavelli have agreed with Burnham?
And uh? I don't know enough about Machiavelli the actual
person to say whether or not he would, But I
do know that you know he he did see the
usefulness and in veiling your agenda.
Speaker 2: The four thinkers whom Burnham discussed in detail in The
Machiavellians were George Sorel, Robert Michel's, Gezano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pereto.
To at least some extent, all four saw them sells
as the errors of Machiavelli. Like him, they were all
concerned with the problems of political power, not with how
to justify power. Nor with the external forms and appearances
of power, but with how men actually use, pursue, attain,
and lose power. Like Machiavelli, all four were profoundly conscious
of the radical discrepancies between the formal disguises of power
in rhetoric, ideology, and institutions and the terrible realities of
power in the actual history of men. It's something that
I can't stress enough is that people can talk about
their ideology, their political ideology all they want, but when
it comes down to ruling. And there's a great quote
from Francis in the book in the review of Suicide
of the West, where he says, ideology never makes It
never exists in reality because it's formed in a vacuum
outside of reality. So basically, once it's introduced to reality,
it just gets punched in the you know, it gets
punched in the mouth and everything goes out the window.
Speaker 1: No, it's a it's a transcendent end goal to point
to channel revolutionary or reformist energy into UH, into a
transcendent goal. That's all. That's all ideology is. It's UH.
Like like you said, it doesn't exist in reality, is
purely metaphysical.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and another thing that he that Francis says in
the review of Pseudo Suicide of the West is that
basically ideology is there for the masses. They need to
concentrate on something while the Machiavelians are actually ruling. Yes,
so he gives them something to feel good about. It
gives them an identity. You know, something that I've been
talking about on the timeline a lot today is how
people make their political h their political ideology, their identity.
So he gives them something to feel good about. But
then they wonder their whole lives. How come what? You know,
this guy was talking about my ideology when he was
run when he was running for office, and then he
gets into office and my ideology doesn't materialize. Why.
Speaker 1: Well, A really useful tidbit that I got from Burnham
from the Managerial Revolution is that, uh, you know, in
order for an ideology to become dominant, people at the
masses have to be willing to die for it. And
that's kind of how you know that capitalism or liberalism
or even socialism slash Marxism will not be the dominant
ideology any at any point in time, because it's been
a while since people were willing to die for it
or willing to kill for it, even at least not
in mass, not any not in any great extent. But
you know, that's that's kind of the lens that I
view acceleration trying to predict accelerationism from, is what are
some things that are pop that are popping up now
that maybe might be inspirational enough to for people to
kill or die for. Well, well, but sure, the Machiavelians
are are definitely willing to die for it, or at
least try to send people to die for. But yeah, nowadays.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about israeliself. You know what we've seen since
October seventh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, willing to kill for it absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't think they're willing to die for it.
I think they're definitely willing to drop bombs for it. Yeah,
but it seems like the Huthis are willing to die
for what?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, I mean any any sect of islam Is
you can usually find some flowers in there to pluck.
Speaker 2: Thirdly, like Machiavelli, they believe that through the observation and
study of the history of power relationships, a set of
generalists about power and men's usage of it could be formulated.
In other words, that historically grounded science of power, not
a philosophy or ethical theory, was possible. That's why whenever
you have these libertarians I was dealing with today on
the timeline, who are like, oh, so so you believe
in an imaginary line and you don't want people to
cross it. Why do you love violence? Because I do?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean it's like and then I realized when they
were when people are making that asking that question, why
do you have a problem with this? It's very feminine.
It's it's long. It's like literally long housing. It's like
they've they've been completely long, long housed, and it's created
their ideology and they're.
Speaker 1: Questioning, Well, since the twenties, we've kind of since we
started getting into psychoanalysis like Freud and all that. You know,
have you noticed that everything is positive as a psychoanalytical diagnosis?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, Why are you It's it's always it's never
about are you doing this for?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Did you do this to acquire land? Did you go
to war to acquire land? Did you go to war
to do this? It's always what's wrong with you? Why
would they do this?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Even like in the UH, even like the etymology
of words like transphobe that sounds like a mental illness
that you know, eighty years ago would have got you
put in put into an asylum. And that's where we're
still looking at that today. That's still the norm today
is everything is psychoanalytical, everything is scientific, and uh, you know,
when you when you talk about good and evil to
a leftist or a really committed liberal, it's not that
they don't believe in it, it's just that that exists
outside of their metaphysics. And because they don't believe that
this is something I learned from denote or this isn't
believe it, believe it or not, this isn't an original
thought I had, But they don't. They don't have in
their metaphysics anything that exists outside of science or psychoanalysis.
So when you talk about good and evil or uh,
you know, these these things that we always have understood,
we we white people have always understood as universal metaphysics
that you and I can engage in a conversation and
be reasonably assured that you know, we're gonna we're gonna
abide within a certain framework. That's completely out the window
with them, because they just it doesn't compute. They're like,
why are you talking about that? Why are you asking
that question?
Speaker 2: It's it's like you by asking the question, you have
a mental illness. You're There's just nothing you can say,
isn't it isn't problematic?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it either list it's a confusion or a disgust response,
which you know we kind of get from them too. So,
all things being equal.
Speaker 2: I was noticing, you know, Stone Toss got doxed yep,
and when I saw there are people openly celebrating it
on Twitter, and I'm like, this is the most feminine
thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yas queen. Yeah, a ninety nine post thread.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I saw that. Could you imagine taking it?
Speaker 1: I can't wait till he does a comic about it. Yeah,
all right.
Speaker 2: Behind these common beliefs was a body of common assumptions
about the nature of political man and human history. The
Machiavelians saw political life as constantly in flux, so the
process of change is repetitive and roughly cyclical, quoting the
recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent
core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability
of all governments and political forms follows in part from
the timeless human appetite for power. Really need to make
my after teal, I really need to read Disquisition on
Government by John C. Calhoun because he talks so much
about stuff like this.
Speaker 1: HM.
Speaker 2: Because of the recurrent patterns of change, history moves in
cycles and is not a uni linear progression. The repetitive
cycles make possible a science of human political behavior. What
men have done before, they will do again in the
future and within the limits. It is therefore possible to
predict their behavior through analogies drawn from history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, unless you believe in like that we
exist in post history.
Speaker 2: Machiavelli and his followers saw men in general as evil quote,
all men are bad and ever ready to display their
vicious nature whenever they may find occasion for it. The
Machiavelians depicted human beings as in satiable in their desire
for power, wealth and pre eminence, but also as irrational, prejudice, ignorant,
and easily deceived by others as well as by themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Mosca specifically criticized and rejected the optimistic progressivism as of Rousseau.
It reminds me of who is it Spangler or optimism
is cowardice.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Peretto devoted much of the six volume six volumes, Six volumes.
Parretto devoted much of the six volumes of the Mind
in Society to exposing human irrationality and appetitive motivations.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna lie to you. I've tried to read
original works by Pareto and I could not.
Speaker 2: He's really tough to read.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: I have the I have a couple books, a couple
of smaller books on the elites, and man, it's it's
a slogsome times.
Speaker 1: No, you just it's like he introduces a bunch of
mathematical concepts and I can't. I can't do it. I
can't follow that. I'm not that smart. Sorry.
Speaker 2: Sorell explicated the role of myths and falsehoods in providing
a unifying force for political action, especially violent action. Michelle's
throughout his work on political parties, showed how minorities continually
monopolized power by deceiving and coercing the mass membership. Yep,
A lot to be said about that right there. The
emphasis on human evil and irrationality is central to the
Machiavelian argument Burnham and the Machiavelians saw politics and to
a large extent, of human condition in terms of the
savage and incessant struggle for power at all levels of society,
regardless of how this struggle might be disguised by language,
symbolism and institutional forms.
Speaker 1: And see this is where I think Burna kind of
retained a little bit of his Marxism, or at least
his Hygelianism. Is you know, when you're talking about what
does that say, regardless of all of this struggle might
be disguised by language, symbolism and institutional forms. I don't
think that Burnham took too much, didn't give enough account
for things that exist outside the dialectic, when, especially in
his critique of socialism, it was still very scientific, and
it was still very focused on you know, material and
economic uh economic dialectic struggles just not not resolving in
a way that Marxist prescribed it would, you know, with
dialectical materialism. But another thing I learned from Denotie is
that they really didn't give any attention to the more
abstract things like you know what what he just mentioned,
you know, language symbolism, institutional forms, aulture, religion, and just
things that exist outside of you know, empirical science.
Speaker 2: There's other ideologies that we may be, another ideology we
may be familiar with who fails to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: I assume, yeah, yeah, I mean it's there's I hate
to say, I hate using this word, but it's nuanced,
which doesn't really say anything.
Speaker 2: Driven by insatiable app insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men
seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others.
This struggle invariably results in a minority coming to power,
monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and
honorific resources, and excluding and oppressing the majority. Thus is
formed an elite peretto ruling class mosca or oligarchy Michelle's
that rules the majority and exploits it for its own
benefit through force and odd The rule of elites and
human societies is inevitable, and therefore oligarchy is the only
possible distribution of power. What what Michelle's called the iron
law of oligarchy.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you had asked me if I agree
with that five ten years or yeah, ten years ago,
now I would have would have called you a statist.
Speaker 2: Now you just you become a realist and then in
the eyes of some that means that you're immoral.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, this is this is scientific. It is
it is. It is an observable fact that power is
always concentrated and select few individuals, and they're not very
nice people.
Speaker 2: We know science, they're not They're not libertarians. We know
science is racist. So yeah, there is no end to
oligarchical rule. Although one elite may lose its power in
power indeed always is its power, sooner or later another
minority takes its place through what Pereto calls the circulation
of elites, and the record of this unending rise and
fall of ruling minorities in human is human history.
Speaker 1: So one thing I wanted to pick your brain on
having listened to your episode with uh Catgirl Kulak today,
is I wanted I wanted to ask you what do
you what do you suspect will be the circulation of elites?
If if, or when his his predictions of a full
on collapse by twenty thirty, what what does that circulation
of elites look like?
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it It may break down regionally.
You may have new elites stepping up, or you know,
most of the time, it's it's existing release elites. You
just they just you know, it's like people have said,
because we've been talking about the PayPal mafia and how
you know, we see them as trying to make a
move right now and push the elites out and take over.
And you know, someone made the comment, well, they're already
a part of the elites, you know, t Loans, Palins here,
all these countries. But I think Aaron McIntyre made a
really good point today. He said the elites always come
from within. I mean Caesar wasn't. Caesar wasn't an outsider.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: Pin o Ch. You know when you have when you
have radical change. You know p o Ch was not
I mean he didn't come in from another country. He
was in the military. He was somebody that everyone knew.
The circulation of elites always happens from the inside. So
if you're thinking that your neighbor, you know, is going
to be an elite, unless you write, you know, do
like Kappa the teachers, and you do it locally and
you you know, find a natural elite and you raise
them up to you know, take over and help to
change a locale. Then you'll know that this person is
coming in from outside. But I mean at the national level,
at a government level, at a oligarchical level, it's always
going to be from the existing elites. They're just going
to move in and they're just going to switch them out,
and you're just going to hope that it's going to
be they're going to be more in your favor than
the previous elites. But if everything does fall apart at
twenty thirty, I mean, all I see is people will
be begging for anybody. And I think that the person,
you know, whoever has set themselves up with the most
with a rhetoric of we're Americans, we should be proud
of our heritage. We can take our heritage back. We
don't have to put up with it, we don't have
to put up with us. I think that is that's
the person who is more going to be to circulate
in and out, and who's somebody who they may potentially
look to in order to try to get them out
of that situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the reason why this would be so unprecedented,
if I mean, one of the reasons why the main
reason I think about is when I think of a collapse,
I think and I think of a power vacuum, and
who fills that power vacuum. It's whoever has the most
hard power and whoever has the most energy behind them.
And right now, well, you know if theoretically a few
years before collapse, there's a lot of energy stored right
now and it's just waiting to burst. So if his
prediction is correct, man, that's going to be crazy, because
I think people right now are just you know, the
only thing stopping them right now is you know, they
have a job, they get to you know, they have
a family. They may not have access to a whole
lot of hard power. But man, like, wouldn't that be
just uh, his historically unprecedented collapse.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, Charles Haywood believes that with the way
the regime is attacking Elon Musk, He said at the
end of a recent podcast he did that he thought
that Elon Musk may turn to basically creating his own
private security force, which would be his own his own
private army.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but then again, like this is a fine, this
would be uh. The the match point would be a
financial collapse, which implies that the dollar doesn't really have
any value anymore. So now it just becomes like you know,
depending on how hard it is a barter system, who
has the most assets to barter, who has the most
who has the most trade.
Speaker 2: Well, here's the thing is the people who are going
to rule, the people who would roull after a after
a collapse, or the people who've already been planning for
the collapse.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And I would assume that there are people already in
in elite positions who have already have an idea of
what a new currency would look like and things like that.
So I mean, I think that's.
Speaker 1: Where it goes well for us. No, No, not at
all for my suburban asks.
Speaker 2: All right, these conclusions are bleak, and the Machiavelians saw
little ground for hope of democratic emancipation. Modern democracy they
interpreted as a special kind of disguised oligarchy based on
commercial and industrial power, and not fundamentally different from early
kinds of elitism. Mosca and Pareto in particular, saw socialism
as no more than an illusion that threatened to subordinate
all of society to an elite based on the power
of the state. To Michelle's, oligarchy was an inherent part
of social and political organization, a doctrine that was most
common to most of the Machiavelians, in which Burnham emphasized
was the concept of what Moscaw called the political formula,
Pereto called derivations, and surrel called myths. According to these writers,
elites do not hold power simply through force and intimidation.
They formulate doctrines that rationalize or justify their control in logical, moral, theological,
or philosophical terms. These doctrines, political formulas, derivations, or myths,
or as Burnham called them in the Managerial Revolution, ideologies
act as social and politically integrative forces, and are often
quite sophisticated and complex in their structures. Most members of
a society of a society, elites as well as non elites,
believe them and to at least some extent, take them seriously. Nevertheless,
I think less and less, don't you agree? Don't you
think people? I would say elites more so than any
But I think more and more people even just walking
around basically or just at the at the end of
their rope, where they're just when it comes to ideologies
and they're just like, I'm just got to take care
of myself.
Speaker 1: I think what separates maybe our our side from the
normies and from the other side, is that, Uh, we
don't view ideology as an ends. We view it as
a means. And uh that's that. I don't know, I
got nothing else on that, but yeah, that's pretty much
that's it. It's a mean, it's a means to it.
It's a means to an end, you know, pointing, pointing
the masses in a direction, propaganda, you know, channeling energy
towards a certain outcome. That's that's all. Going towards a
means to a desirable end that we would like or
we hope happens, or we hope to get somebody in
there that can make it happen, you know, if they
happened to if it happens to be of a particular ideology, like,
it's really of no consequence to us. Now, call it
Christian nationalism, call it fucking white nationalism, ethne whatever, like,
as long as most of our desired ends are going
to be fulfilled, Like we know that, we don't have
the luxury to pick and.
Speaker 2: Choose most members of a society's elites as well as
non elites, I believe them. Nevertheless, despite their sophistication and
large number of adherents. These ideologies are not to be
regarded as scientific in purpose or content. Their purpose is
not to express or explain reality in a way that
can be proved or disproved, but to provide a rationalization
for the existence and power of the dominant minority. The
fact that ideologies are not scientific, and that those who
believe in them do so for non rational reasons means
that it is useless to criticize ideologies in terms of
verifiable facts or logic. All you have to do is
just make fun of them.
Speaker 1: Mock them, yes, dehumanize other eyes, whatever you want to
call it, I do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ideology is impervious to such criticism because belief in it
is dependent on non rational factors such as self interest
or emotion. The fact that an elite itself usually believes
in most or all of its own ideology also means
that no elite can be entirely scientific in its own
thinking and behavior. Any elite must always, to some extent,
be the victim of its own myths. Burnham argued that
the Machiabelians the Machiavelian science of power could provide a
non ideological framework for an elite, but he was highly
skeptical that any elite could for long make successful use
of this science.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good on his part, because I mean, when you
think of any great man that ever arose, it's exactly
what it said. They talk the talk as far as
ideolology goes. They may have even believed some of it.
But uh, you'll take any great man and none of
them were pure, purely ideological in practice.
Speaker 2: Well, well, think about this, and I know people are
probably sick of me bringing him up, but Bouck Kelly.
I only know two things about bout Kelly. I know
that he hates crime and crack down on it. And
he likes bitcoin. Yeah, that's the only I mean.
Speaker 1: I know that he ideology, which is no great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he doesn't. I don't know that he has
an ideology. He first ran for president in a far
left party, he got kicked out of that had to go,
I mean, bounced all around, you know it. All all
I can judge him on is what he's done. Yeah,
you know, I mean he's kissed the wall. Yes, his
his wife has some sephardic in her. Yes, Yeah, I
know that that's that That means that you're just waiting
for the other shoe to drop. He's going to disappoint
you because he did that. All I can judge him
on is what he's done so far, and everything he's
done so far looks pretty damn good to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't. We don't have the luxury of having
the expectation of even a somewhat pure great man that
comes and you know, sweeps, sweeps whatever this is away.
We know, like, like take Musk for example, he's probably
the most likely candidate to fight the fight the current
regime and maybe went out. He's on the right track.
But uh, you know, he's definitely not ideological. He wants
to get to Mars, that's about it, and anything that
stands in between him and that goal needs to be
swept away. That's that's not an ideology either.
Speaker 2: No, No, that's he has a goal. That's it's all right.
Burnham and the Machiavelians tended to interpret all of social
and political reality in terms of the doctrine of the elite.
For them, the nature of the elite is largely determinative
of other social, economic, political, and cultural institutions. Institutions that
are not consistent with the perceived interests of an elite
are abolished or discouraged, while those that are are or
would be consistent with its perceived interests are created or promoted.
Quoting from the quoting from the book. From the point
of view of the theory of the ruling class, a
society is the society of its ruling class. A nation's
strengths or weaknesses, its cultures, its powers of endurance, its prosperity,
its decadence depend in the first instance, upon the nature
of its ruling elite. More particularly, the way in which
to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what
will happen to it, requires, first of all, and primarily,
an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political
science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes,
their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes. The important that
the Machiavelians attached to the elite or ruling class resembles
and to a degree parallels Marx's emphasis on economic forces
in interpreting history. Yet the Machiavelian theory of elite is
a broader doctrine than that of Marx, and allows for
consideration of non economic and non material forces in understanding
men in history, far more than Marx.
Speaker 1: Did, yeah, which is very difficult when you factor in
all of the other you know, non non scientific factors
that go into going to studying the history of a
of a nation, a culture of people. You know, it
gets so far beyond dialectics. It's insane. It's hard. That's why,
that's why predicting things is so fucking hard. There's too
many goddamn factors.
Speaker 2: Nevertheless, because Burnham and the Machiavelians saw politics in terms
of a struggle for power, and the struggle for power
was central to the nature of an elite and to
all other social relationships, it would not be inaccurate to
describe Machiavelianism as a kind of political determinism paralleling the
economic determinism of Marx.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, do you think there was
really a struggle for power? You know, I think I
think it's roundly agreed circuit. Somewhere around twenty twelve is
when we kind of had this turning point into what
we have now, which is just like gay trans Soviet Russia.
But before that, I mean, we told there's been a
lot of talk about how great the nineties was and
how you know, how basically unified we were, how basically
free and prosperous we were, and how happy we were.
I think there's something to that. The culture was definitely
different the ruling class. Do you think the ruling class
was different then? And then we had maybe not even
a struggle that got us to where we are now,
and that kind of defined the nature of why they're
so incompetent because they didn't have to struggle for it.
Speaker 2: Well, I think Thomas makes a really good point about
the early nineties, is the nineties, especially the first half
of the nineties, is that it was it was kind
of anarchy. There was and you know, I know that
the anarchists watching, they want me to make an argument
that anarchy's good because it means without rulers. That's what
it means, without rulers.
Speaker 1: Shut the fuck up, you know, we mean the normal Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we mean the definition that everybody agrees upon. Oh
but that's democracy. Yeah, go fuck your mother. I mean
people getting the amount of crime people get. I mean,
there's a reason why basically Juliani had to unleash an
army onto the streets to stop crime in New York.
It had reached And here's the thing. The people who
talk about the nineties being this great. They're usually leftists,
they're usually people from the left side. Well, why was
the nineties great? Because they could get away with doing
all the degenerate shit that they wanted to. They weren't
judged for it. It was fine. I mean, I knew
people who, yeah.
Speaker 1: It was live and let live, but also live and
let live to like to be, you know, kind of
kind of more on the right than you are allowed
to be now.
Speaker 2: Well, and not even that, because you think about the
pat Con movement where they would go they were going
after right wing militia groups, and you know they don't
even talk about that, like half of those militia groups
that they took down that black.
Speaker 1: Still you still couldn't be that far to that it's
still illegal to be that far to the right. But
you know, you could call your friend a fag, or
you could like, you know, you could say the N
word and nobody would like, nobody would freak out about
it amongst your peer group. Now, not so much, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, but it was, it was. It was heaven for
one like James Lindsay. He got away with doing all
the degenerate shit he wanted to, and far right wingers
were being cracked down upon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep. And the other question I have is do
you think that would be the defining factor of say
the eighties Reagan years into the nineties, was the switch
between tough on crime and then you know, prison and
mandatory minimum sentencing, prison reform, mandatory minimum sentencing, this transfer
over to a softer approach, a more I don't know,
socially informed approach.
Speaker 2: It's hard for me to say that. You know, in
the eighties, I was not That wasn't something that I
would have been able to really pay attention to. I
have to think about history, and you know, I'm not
going to be able to give a personal a personal
opinion on that. But I mean, really the problem in
the eighties was I mean, it was just the crime
was insane and it was just so matter of fact.
It's just you accepted the fact that there was all
this crime going on, and it's not like now where
you know, you have social media. Everybody's like, look, you
got these Soros DA's and they can go out and
commit crime all they want. If you try and stop them,
you go to jail. You know, you have people who
put up flyers who get two years in jail, someone
rapes a twelve year old, they get, you know, fifteen
months probation. You can talk more about that now it's
you can learn more about it because of social media,
but back then it was, you know, harder. You'd really
just have to go back into books and study the
history on that. But I can't really, I can't really
answer that question properly. But you know, being an adult
in the nineties and living through the nineties, Yeah, man,
I knew people who were you know, odeed, killed themselves,
got hung up on got hung up on on oxy
really early. I knew people got hung up on meth
real early on in the in the whole game. You know,
I knew people in I mean from when I was
a kid. I knew people like my dad worked with
the guy whose wife was the first recorded crack victim
in New York City.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah huh.
Speaker 2: And they were white.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so it is.
Speaker 1: It is pretty great, all right.
Speaker 2: It should also be understood that Burnam and his mentors
were not arguing for elitism in the sense of aristocracy.
They were not arguing that elites should rule the majority
because their members are better, more virtuous, stronger, more intelligent
or wiser than most men. They were arguing for the
sociological inevitability of minority domination, for the impossibility of majority rule,
and democracy in any literal or meaningful sense. I mean
democracy now. To me, when people ask me what democracy means, now,
I just tell them either whatever the region is pushing, sodomy, transgenderism.
I mean, that's basically what democracy is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's it's great to see, you know, the
the inherent contradictions between democracy and liberalism kind of play
itself out on the left, especially with this uh, Palestine
Israel thing going on. It's you could if you view
it through that lens, democracy versus liberalism. It's it's just
amazing to see, and it's only going to get better.
Speaker 2: The fact of oligarchy, they argued, was founded on an
empirical and comparative study of history, on the biological and
psychological realities of human beings and on the nature of
human society societies. It was a fact that could be
neither ignored nor altered, and moral approbation or criticism of
the fact of oligarchy is irrelevant to its truth. Yet,
elites are not permanent, and the laws that govern the
change and the company position and the rise and fall
of elites were an important theme for Burnham and for
Mosca and Pereto, to whom he devoted most attention. Mosca
had recognized in all elites and aristocratic tendency by which
they tend to restrict or encourage entrance to or exit
from their ranks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's another battleground. Is everybody wants to be
everybody wants. Everybody's chasing status. That's why you have people
going into two hundred thousand dollars in debt to go
to Harvard. That's so that they can have that degree
and enter the ranks of the elite, or at least
the near group of the elite. And it's it's going
to be really funny if we have a collapse.
Speaker 2: When the restrictive aristocratic tendency is predominant, society is stable
and may begin to stagnate. When the democratic tendency is predominant,
society is in flux, with many innovations, social and political crises,
cultural ferment and perhaps disorder, chaos and revolution.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaking of the transition between the nineties to the early.
Speaker 2: Aughts, Parretto himself went further and developed a psychology of
elites that is at the root of his theory of
the circulation of elites. Parreto distinguished between derivations of ideologies
and residues, which are constant universal psychological instincts or impulses.
Among the six classes of residues that Parreto recognized, the
two most important were those of class one, the instinct
for combinations. In class two, group preference, group persistence.
Speaker 1: And then there's four more. And that's why I couldn't
read Parreto.
Speaker 2: If you read AA's book on the one I read
on the Populist Delusion, he does a really good job
of summing it all up very fast, in a very
short in very short chapters. These were excellent. Yeah, yeah,
it's a great book. I'm retarding these residues. Pereto specifically
correlated with Machiavelli's distinction between the fox and the lion
among rulers. Just as a ruler who's a fox relies
on cunning, deceit, and verbal and intellectual skills, elites whose
members are driven by class one residues tend to synthesize
arbitrary elements of their experience. Class one residues include behavioral
patterns such as those of magic, philosophical system making, and
financial manipulation. Elites that contain primarily verbalists, intellectuals, and administrators
will exhibit a high proportion of Class one residues and
will try to preserve their own power and resolve problems
through verbal, administrative, and manipulative behavior rather than through the
use of force. They thus correspond to Machiavelli's foxes. Quoting
from the book Machiavellians, they live by their wits. They
put their reliance on fraud, deceit, and shrewdness. They do
not have strong attachment to family, church, nation, and traditions.
They live in the present, taking little thought of the future,
and are always ready for change, novelty, and adventure. They
are not adept as a rule in the use of force.
They are inventive and chance taking. Well, yep, we'll talk
a little bit about that for in a second.
Speaker 1: I remember an episode from way back where I forget
if it was you or your guest, implied that we
are our elites are entirely comprised of foxes. There are
no lions, and maybe it was Trump, maybe it's a lawn,
But they're definitely, they're they're the lions right now, the
only two. Right.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean you do have the people in power
now who are using force. I mean, yeah, true, so Biden,
it's so pretty soft. Yeah well, I mean you're throwing
people in jail, and that's you're destroying people's lives, in
their livelihood and everything. A lot of people would rather
be dead than have that happened to them. But the
you know, you have to wonder what stage in civilization,
what stage in what stage in elite theory you are
when the foxes start to use.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean I guess, you know, exiting the
animal analogy. It's when they're sufficiently threatened or when they're
sufficiently fragile.
Speaker 2: I think it's a fragility more than anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The residues of class two group persistence correspond to the
lions of Machiavelli. For those who exhibit a high proportion
of class two residues quoting are able and ready to
use force, relying on it rather than brains to solve
their problems. They are conservative, patriarch loyalty tradition, and solidly
tend super individual groups like family or church or nation.
Where are these people.
Speaker 1: I know who's going to cut the Gordian knot please.
Speaker 2: I don't know who these people are.
Speaker 1: I've heard about them from Class two.
Speaker 2: Revenues or psychic forces that tend to sustain and perpetuate
existing combinations. They are sociologically conservative, while those of Class
one are sociologically innovative. That's an interesting word. A healthy elite,
according to Pereto, will have an equilibrium in the distribution
of these psychic types within it, but under certain conditions
an imbalance will result. That's what we're seeing now. That's
what that's that's what it is now because the ones
who would be the ones who would commit violence would
be the lions, and they have no lions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all foxes, yep the wall and seeing what see.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, if too many Class two residues accrew in
the elite, it will rely excessively on force and will
fail to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances and challenges.
If too many Class one types come to predominate, as
Peretto believes was happening in the late nineteenth century, the
elite and its society will become soft, unstable, corrupt, and disorderly.
Although the society may produce a very high level of
cultural expression. Oh now, saying that. Worst of all, however,
the society will be unwilling and unable to use force
to protect itself from either internal external challenges.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I don't think we're anywhere like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's yeah, this, that's not here. While the foxes
of class one predominate in the elite, the lions of
class two are concentrated in the non elite and may
use force against the foxes in rebellion and other forms
of violence. External enemies may also commit aggression against the
societies ruled by foxes, and in any case, because of
the lack of qualities of group persistence, a society led
by class one types will have few psychic resources for
mustering endurance and sacrifice.
Speaker 1: Yeah that, there's no energy to direct in any type
of revolutionary social change.
Speaker 2: Elites that are imbalanced by too many class one or
class two residues are unstable and are likely to be
overthrown or replaced. They tend to create the conditions that
lead to their fall from power. The rise and fall
of elites and changes in their composition Pereto called the
circulation of elites. Normally, a healthy elite will be in
continual but slow circulation, admitting new members and expelling or
ostracizing old and decament elements. When the circulation occurs too rapidly,
or when one elite is suddenly and entirely replaced by another,
the result is revolution the theory of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that. Yeah. I mean, before this, I'd
never heard it placed that way. I've I've heard a
lot of explanations for what constitutes and what causes revolutionary
social change. But I mean, I guess you can. You
can explain it in many different ways and still come
out with the same, no right answer.
Speaker 2: I think what we may be seeing now, and this
isn't an original idea. I don't remember who maybe heard
it from Orrin, is you have an overproduction of elites
because and I would say it's because the money supply
has been increased and expanded so far that you have
so many people that have acquired insane amounts of wealth. Yeah,
and they basically become elites, but they are not the
kind of They're not impressive at all. There. You know,
if you have too much of something, if you have
if you produce too much of something, and it happens
too fast. You know a lot of times you're just
going to have defects all over the place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if everybody's an elite, then nobody's an elite, and
you go from there.
Speaker 2: The theory of elites, as developed by Moscow and Pareto
and endorsement expounded by Burnham, was by no means an
argument for the monopolization of power and privilege by an
established few. Indeed, Mosca and Pareto were emphatic that healthy
elites should alter in composition slowly and regularly, and that
they should not become homogeneous or monolithic. Mosca, in particular,
as well done these points and developed a method that
went beyond the descriptive analysis of Machiavelianism to a normative
mode of analysis by which elites and the societies they
ruled could be evaluated. Although the rule of elites unelected
and unrepresentative is inevitable, Mosca argued that the internal structure
of elites is an important means of distinguishing them. All societies,
according to Mosca, are composed of contending social forces, groups
that have interests and values associated with particular kinds of activities. Agriculture, industry, education, religion,
the army, et cetera. Within these social forces, there are
hierarchies and differentiations of power, wealth, merit, or geographical locations.
The most significant social forces become part of the elite
and pursue their particular interests and values within it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess to a degree. I don't know if
that's particularly applicable now, but yeah, well, yeah, there are
the hierarchies have been flattened so much because, like you said,
we're over manufacturing. I mean, other than like you know,
the top levels of the state or the deep state
or whatever, or or the illuminati, like you know, the
everything below that is pretty much there's not a whole
lot of difference other than what industry they're in or
geographic location. That there's not really a whole lot of
difference in what defines them.
Speaker 2: When, according to Mosca, there is a multiplicity of independent
social forces within the elite or ruling class such that
no one force has sufficient power to exclude or exploit
the others, then a de facto condition of juridical defense obtains.
Mosca's concept of juridical defense is approximate to what is
more generally known as the rule of law. Because of
the mutually balancing and restraining action of the social forces
in the ruling class, no single force or faction can
accumulate or exercise arbitrary irregular power. Each social force and
the groups and individuals composing or attached to it, protects
itself from exploitation by the checking power it holds against
the others. Even though this system of socio political checks
may not be formally reorganized in recognized in law, it
can still exist and be a substantive restraint on tyrannical power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is kind of a parallel rule book for
when you hit a certain amount of asset value.
Speaker 2: Mosca's concept of juridical defense owed much to both Machiavelli
and Montesque, as well as to the exponents of the
classical theory of the mixed constitution. Unlike Montsque, however, Mosca
did not limit his idea of checks and balances to
the formal and legalistic component of the government, but extended
it to the substantial, concrete or real component social forces
within a ruling class.
Speaker 1: So that's another thing I see, and I don't know
to the degree that it affects, you know, really rich
people that we would probably call elite. But the what
is it the mixed constitution idea where you have you
have the rule of law, but there's also other rules
that everybody kind of agrees to follow. That has been
just withering away on the vine on purpose. Everything is
legalistic now, everything is everything has to be codified into
an employee handbook or an HR department or something like that.
And I think that's a function of just managerialism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, managerialism is so I mean, there's nothing more managerial
than law fair.
Speaker 1: We were talking about how how pernicious law fair is
and just how how it's so common now for people
to weaponize bad faith interpretations of you know, contracts of laws,
of agreements, even informal ones, and that was kind of
never the case before. And I suspect it has something
to do with demographic changes, and you know, the ripple
effect of them affecting you know, cultures that were or
otherwise you know, not exhibiting that behavior. But even amongst
our social class, you know, it's it's it's still it's
so pernicious now, where even five ten years ago, I
at least in my experience, everybody kind of agreed functionally
agreed on, you know what, like what makes for an
agreement or a contract or you know, an address of grievance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, once you start getting into you start importing all
sorts of different cultures, you just you're not You're not
going to have any unanimity.
Speaker 1: And and I think it's also a function of just
the true economic state that we're in that despite what
the graphs say, I don't have the luxury of you know,
risking five thousand dollars deposit with a shittily written contract
that I may or may not get back if you
don't show up, Because now I have to worry about that.
Speaker 2: This departure from the formal to the real was part
of the Machiavelian tradition, and Moscaw thus welded it to
the classical tradition of mixed constitution. In Burnham's words, juridical
defense can be secure only where there are at work
various in opposing tendencies and forces, and where these mutually
check and restrain each other. The product of juridical defense
is liberty. The specific forms of juridical defense include the
familiar democratic rights, security of private property, security against arbitrary arrest,
freedom of religion, discussion, and assembly. Moreover, the multiplicity of
social forces participating and sharing power in the ruling class
leads to a high level of civilization and an efflorescence
of cultural life.
Speaker 1: Yes, because in order that, in order for that to flourish,
there has to be something outside the state. And I
think that's the commonly accepted definition of liberty, which is
kind of anything outside of the public anything in like,
any informal actions you take is an act of liberty.
And uh like there's you know, it may not it
may not be formalized into law, but it's it's definitely
uh a cultural change where that particular type of liberty,
the important type of liberty that we like is uh
just going away now in a in an informal manner.
Speaker 2: By way of contrast, the monopolization of power by one
social force leads to its unchecked power and to a
low level of civilization as other social forces with other resources, values,
and skills are excluded and exploited. Using the concept of
juridical defense and its antithesis, Moscow was able to evaluate
different kinds of polities depending on the internal structure and
composition of their elites. The worst kind of government would
be the uniform regimes in which the unrestrained power of
a single social force prevents all others from obtaining power
and distributing to the public culture. The best kind of
government to both Mosca and Pereto was the representative, middle
class aristocratic parliamentary governments of the mid to late nineteenth century.
This type, however, was threatened by the rise of mass democracy,
new classes of wealth and power, and socialism yeah yeah.
These forces, to both Mosca and Pereto, threaten to upset
the delicate balance that underlies the juridical defense and to
impose a monolithic regime on modern society. It should be
noted that this normative measure of governments is fundamentally modern,
and as such it follows Machiavelli and Monuscue. The best
regime to Moscow and Pereto is not that in which
the virtue of the citizen is most developed, but that
in which the security and liberty of the citizen and
the commonwealth are best parton. Although Mosca and the Machiavelians
were influenced by Aristotle, Cicero, and the pre modern tradition
of political thought their primary concern was not, as with
the earlier school, the ethical realization of man and society.
The special contribution of the Machiavelian tradition, however, is the
establishment of a criterion of normative judgment of regimes based
on empirical rather than on transcendental grounds.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think deyl Notche would disagree with that slightly.
Speaker 2: Burnham accepted this Machiavelian formulation and its fundamental to his
entire career as a political thinker. His primary concern, like Machiavelli's,
was to establish a verifiable methodology for the analysis of
social and political affairs, but he was also concerned to
discover a realistic means of evaluating judging political institutions and behavior.
Speaker 1: Oh nothing, this is just explaining kind of the etymology
of how we came to regard regimes.
Speaker 2: He found both in the Machiavelians, and it was the
limitation of power that remained for him the primary political ideal,
quoting the Machiavelians are the only ones who have told
us the full truth about power. The primary object in
practice of all rulers is to serve their own interests,
to maintain their own power, and privilege. No theory, no promises,
no morality, no amount of goodwill, no religion will restrain power.
Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither
bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in
the basic use which they will seek to make of power.
Only power restrains power. When all opposition is destroyed, there
is no longer any limit to what power may do.
A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be evalent only
by accident.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll see. I think, uh, I think this assumes
that uh, you know, it assumes a base uh human nature,
even amongst the elites that I don't know if is
applicable today, especially, you know, given given the uh just
a radical departure and competence from his time to ours,
and then also kind of the growth of uh you
know ai ai assistance.
Speaker 2: In the managerial revolution, Burnham had developed a model for
explanation of current world events, the depression, the rise of totalitarianism,
revolutionary changes in social and economic structure, political behavior, and
intellectual and cultural fermentation. The chief problem with his presentation
of the theory of the manager or revolution was its
over reliance on Marxist economic determinism and analogies drawn from
the Marxist interpretation of history. The Machiavelians, however, were not
economic determinists, and their interpretation of history was far more
flexible than that of Marx. Burnham therefore undertook to restate
the theory of the managerial revolution in terms of the
Machiavelian analytical framework. According to the Machiavelian model, an elite
or ruling class suffers a crisis of power under certain circumstances.
Burnham retained in the Machiavelians the essentially economic definition of
the old elite as a capitalist, bourgeois or entrepreneurial class
that owned and operated the means of production. However, the
economic forces and relationships were not the central factors in
bringing about the crisis of the old elite and the
rise of a new one. The rise of new social forces,
especially technological developments over which the capitalist or entrepreneurial elite
has no control, has made its institutions and ideologies obsolete
and less useful for preserving its power. The old elite
has also undergone a psychological, intellectual, and moral denigration, degeneration.
It shows little faith in its own ideology and institutions,
and it exhibits Mosca's aristocratic tendency and a crystallization of
its membership, interests, and activities instead of a dynamic, innovative expansion. Finally,
the entrepreneurial elite is tending to abandon political and professional
pursuits in favor of cultural and leisure activities. It is
drawn to humanitarian and irrationalist ideologies that undermine its own rule,
and it shows an increasing reluctance and inability to use
force effectively. The Class one or fox like residues of
Paretto are accumulating too heavily in the entrepreneurial elite. In
opposition to these signs of decadence is the aggressive, efficient, dynamic,
and sometimes fanatical character of the rising managerial class. It's
self a new social force, quoting from the machiavelians, the
production executives and organizers of the industrial process, officials trained
in the manipulation of the great labor organizations, and the administrators,
bureau chiefs and commissaurs developed in the executive branch of
the unlimited modern state machines, and that the and that
the managers may function the economic and political structure must
be modified as it is now being modified, so as
to rest no longer on private ownership and small scale
nationalist sovereignty, but primarily upon state control of the economy
and continental or vast regional world political organization.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I don't know about all that, but
I think we were talking about this yesterday. The line
between ownership and control is continually being blurred. And that's
one of the one of the ways you know that
we live in a managerial state. It is, you know,
the the owner of my business has very little control
over it other than the hiring and firing of me,
and like, I pretty much make command decisions every day
in his stead, and he gives me the like his
only function is to provide capital and give me the
thumbs up or the thumbs down. And that's not a
capitalist definition of ownership at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Viveka has been talking about this when it comes
to the president. He said that anybody who gets elected
should be in charge. So the person who gets elected,
I mean, and let's face it, he uses the term
managerial all the time. He talks about, you know how
we're a managerial state. He's read Burnham. He knows all
of this, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just how how when when you have such
a complex technologically complex and and personnel, Uh, I guess
he humanly complex and to he like, you know, the
the executive branch. How how how does the president exercise ownership?
Speaker 2: Well, he has to be able to basically be able
to hire and fire whoever he wants.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, yeah, that's part of it. Absolutely. I think
that's the best you can do. You know, going back
to Charles Haywood's episode on on Elon Musk, Elon Musk
will walk walk around a plant and make it no
less than a hundred command decisions during that visit, And
like that's how he actually exercises ownership to whatever degree,
you know, the physical limitations of time give him and
so like he's kind of a different beast too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, he needs the person needs to be in charge,
needs to FDR is the perfect example of it. FDR
was a king, He was a dictator. All the power rested,
all the power in the government rested in him. Nobody
did anything any thing without his say. So, this vast
reorganization will require the use of force, military machines, and
soldiers far more than did the old capitalist society. Hence,
the ruling class of managers will include more allions or
Class two residues than did the entrepreneurial elite. The political
formula of the managers will be democratists and will appeal
to the emotions and material once of the masses, but
the political reality will be autoautocracy, what Burnham calls bonapartism
represented by the Nazi, Stalinist and New Deal political style
and ideologies will prevail over the constitutionalist, decentralized parliamentary governments
of the capitalist era.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's you know that the ignorance of managerialism as
the defining feature of our time right now is really
the biggest obstacle towards getting the normies to at least
a little bit closer to being able to effectively analyze reality.
Speaker 2: Ideology stands in the way of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it doesn't have to, because most normies aren't
ideologically either. They just don't know this. We need to.
We need to wake them up, bro, And like, not
not because you know, we we hope to seize power anything,
but just because it's it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 2: Well. AA makes makes a point in this book that
if you wake up. Then if the normies get get
waken woken up too much, and too many of them
get woken up, then you suffer the you suffer revolution. Yeah.
And we're not talking We're talking about France, not not American.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The tendency of bonapartism and of the managerial class is totalitarian.
The managers want, need, and find valuable a state that
is unitary and all powerful. Intermediary and non political institutions
and groups are denounced and undermined if they do not
support the rising managerial powers. Not only does the managerial
class need an extended and oipotent state for its own
internal and international policies and goals, but also the crisis
of the Depression and the Second World War gives it
the opportunity to create one. Hence managerial propaganda. It denounces
the entrepreneurial class and its supportive institutions churches, non politicized
labor unions, small businessmen, schools, the opposition press, local political institutions,
the Congress itself, and seeks to portray them as reactionary,
parochial and responsible for the present crisis and its misery.
Only by destroying and moving beyond these obsolescent forces. Can
the crisis be resolved? Burnham was not happy. Do we
stop there? I mean, you just describe reality. Bro Burnham
was not happy about the totaltarian vector of managerial society
private capitalist ownership of the economy. He wrote, quote meant
a dispersion of economic power and a partial separation between
economic and other social forces in a manner that prevented
the concentration of an overwhelming single social force. Today, the
advance of the managerial revolution is everywhere, concentrating economic power
in the state apparatus, where it tends to unite with
control over the other great social forces, the army, education, labor, law,
the political bureaucracy, art and science. Even this development too,
society especially now, Yeah, this development too, tends to destroy
the basis for those social oppositions that keep freedom alive
the entrepreneur. The entrepreneurs are therefore correct to argue that
the New Deal and other managerial policies were a threat
to freedom. But the entrepreneurial former formulas of market capitalism,
a limited state, and national sovereignty had lost their credibility
In any case, the debate between the conservative see, that's
something that people just don't realize people who are for
market capitalism, a limited state, and national sovereignty understand that
they don't. They're not willing to accept that it's lost
their credibility, and they they think.
Speaker 1: That they don't understand where we are right now in history.
They don't know where they're at. We're past that, where
you're now, and like those days are over, they're not
coming back, yea, and.
Speaker 2: To constantly you know it, well, no, this is the
way things are done, this is the way things should be.
That this is what guarantees the most individual freedom. Bro,
We're beyond it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Freedom.
Speaker 1: My favorite question for them to do?
Speaker 2: What freedom to do? What I had I wouldn't even
say who it was, but I had a libertarian in
my d MS today who's just freaking out. He's like,
why are there so many libertarians who argue for like
that the most heinous stuff and stuff that's illegal and
not only illegal, but would be considered immoral by the
majority of the West at least, is okay?
Speaker 1: Well, they they took a legal theory and turned it
into an ideology. Like somebody said that in one of
the threads. I was like, yeah, pretty much, Dave.
Speaker 2: Dave had a thread today said that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was Dave. Yeah, you took a legal
theory like a dry what's supposed to be a dry
not fun legal theory, and turn it into your entire identity,
like good job. You are just a piece of human
trash that will never yet and you will until until you.
Speaker 2: Stop and the inevitable end of your of your theoretical
whatever is talking about whether possession of childborn is a crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's why, like, if if they were, I
shouldn't say they're pieces of trash that will never amount
to anything, because then I just wouldn't care. But it's
the the the proactive part of libertarianism is making sure
that you and more importantly, your children are propagandas to that.
And they're just you know, they're not as bad as
leftists because they don't hold any power whatsoever. They're just
like I wouldn't I wouldn't let them babysit my kids.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the biggest problem with it is is
that these free market principles, and these these free principles
are so easily the language of that is so easily
adopted by people in power, and then.
Speaker 1: It's it's so Jewish it's.
Speaker 2: So easily adopted by people in power who will say, oh,
look we have free trade, and it's like, well, no,
but that's not real free trade.
Speaker 1: We're shipping in, Yeah, we're we're shipping in sex toys
for your toddler.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then and then free trade has never been tried.
Why are you using that term? And it's like, well,
because it's so easily everything, everything you come up with
canon will be used against you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, everything will be manipulated, which, you know, if
they want to know how, then they should watch this episode.
Speaker 2: In any case, the debate between the conservative spokesman for
the old line capitalist class and the Marxist and the
democratics utalitarians who defend the rising managerial class as a
debate and ideology and myths that express a contest for
control over the despotic and bonapartist political order, which they
both anticipate. The apologists for the managers would destroy all
liberty and juridical defense in pursuit of utapianism, and the
apologists of traditional capitalism are simply whistling in the wind.
For quote, it is in any case impossible to return
to private capitalism.
Speaker 1: See yeah, I mean, one thing I have to hand
it to, you know, uh, whether conscious or not Malthusians
is that they're not utopian. I gotta respect him for
that what everybody else seems to be and maybe quote
of the episode, Hey, at least they're not utopian.
Speaker 2: Yet. Burnham was not entirely pessimistic about the survival of
some liberty. He suggested that some social opposition might persist
or develop, the would or develop that would create a
balance of forces in the managerial elite, and he also
hoped that the principles of the Machiavelian science of power
would inform the new ruling class of its real interests
and of the utility of liberty. Now, anybody who's like
out there, anybody who's out there promoting liberty and everything,
just read that and went that's me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, it's very much limited to utilitarianism. And
that's also kind of a product of man. Uh, the
shift to utilitarian I guess utilitarian metaphysics is is a
product of the rise of revolutionary Marxism and that energy
being transferred, the revolutionary energy being transferred into the managerial class.
They're all it's all utility. How many utils will will
you generate if I give you a stimmy check? Oh? Well,
a utils? Okay, you're getting a stemmy check. How many
utils will I generate if I put a bullet in
your head?
Speaker 2: M He developed alliant defense of liberty and juridical defense
on the grounds that they actually enhanced the cohesion, strength,
and flexibility of a society rather than limited the Machiavellians problem.
Probably Burnham's most widely misunderstood book. George Orwell appears to
have seen it in a blueprint for the Double Think
of nineteen eighty four. The sociologist David Spitz took a
similar view of the book and included Burnham as an
anti democratic ideologue. The very subtitle of Burnham's book, Defenders
of Freedom, should be sufficient to refute this misinterpretation, and
it may be that some critics of the book have
not read far beyond the subtitle.
Speaker 1: That's me, that's me.
Speaker 2: With every book, it is true that Burnham described the
coming society and the starkest language. Yet this style is
typical of Machiavelli and his disciples, and is appropriate to
their claim to realism and disavowal of ideology and sent cements.
Speaker 1: So I've actually never read The Machiavellians. But does Burnham
adopt a different style than say, The Managerial Revolution, Like,
is it a noticeably different tone?
Speaker 2: Well, no, he has a very distinct way of writing.
I mean, if you if you read The Managerial Revolution,
you read Suicide of the West, I mean it's the
same you know, it's the same person writing it.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, I thought I thought he switched
up his tone, which would be insane, That.
Speaker 2: Would be nuts. It is difficult to see how any
familiarity with the contents and arguments of The Machiavelians could
overlook Burnham's exposition of the theory of juridical defense, his
criticism of managerial political tendencies, or his own defensive liberty.
The fact that many critics have missed these points suggest
that Burnham's discussion of ideology applies to the authors of
such criticism. And that's what mister Samuel Francis had to
say about The Mafia Villans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean it's I like these kind of
critiques that aren't really critiques, it's just an an exposition
of it. And I I try to do that myself
with some original works, and it never works so well
for me because I'm just not that eloquent.
Speaker 2: Now it's.
Speaker 1: I do podcast reviews in Milwaukee tool reviews.
Speaker 2: It's one of those books that when you read it,
you're going to have.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's one of those books that if you're a if
you're a hardcore ideologue, you may not read. You may
not get it the first time. Yeah, you may have.
It's one of those things that a couple of years
down the line, maybe something that was like somebody told
me at the beginning of twenty nineteen to read Jarvin's
Why I'm Not a Libertarian? And I read it, and
I'm like, a couple of good points in here. I
don't care. Twenty twenty rolls around. Yeah, twenty twenty rolls around.
Everything happens. We start getting into the summer, yeah, and
you know, cities are on fire, and you know, I'm like, yeah,
let me read that again. And I'm like, oh, oh, yeah, okay,
And then I read it again like a year ago,
and I was just like, this is this makes more
sense than anything than anything I've ever read as far
as a critique of a critique of libertarianism.
Speaker 1: I did try to I did try to crack the
managerial Uh not the Machiavellians back in the day when
Jarvin was talking about it, and I couldn't get through
it because I just I was in that same phase
like this. None of this resonates with me. None of
it's particularly interesting or prescient. And now as we're reading this,
I'm like, all right, I wish I talked more, but
like I'm too busy agreeing with it.
Speaker 2: Know, it's there's a way. There's a way you want
politics to be, and there's where what politics is now.
And if you want politics to be a certain way,
you're going to have to take You have to take
power and do it.
Speaker 1: At the at the very least, you have to acknowledge
that the only form of society you're ever going to
be in some form of an oligarchy, which is a
huge hurdle for a lot of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's well, there may be a white pill in there.
If you really understand elite theory, if e LA, if
you embrace it, if you realize that it's always a
small group of people in charge, there's a chance that
you could actually be a part of a group that
gets those that helps to get those people in charge,
people who are on your side, who at least you know.
It's like we've been talking about with the pay Pal mafia.
It's like, do I think the guys in the pay
Pal mafia agree with me? Probably not. I mean there's
probably maybe a couple of them. But are they do
they hate me? No? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: And if you're young enough, especially now where everything is politicized,
and you're young enough, you can orient your life towards,
at least your material life towards you know, getting involved
in industries that no matter who's in charge, like especially
if it's the elites you think are going to be
in charge or you like, you can be a beneficiary
of a of a of a circulation of elites, if
not from the current ones. That's kind of my whole
shtick is like, get get into an industry or a
career that is circulation of elites proof. Like not recession proof,
because we're done with we're probably done with recessions, but uh,
circulation of elites proof.
Speaker 2: Oh and there are a lot of those, you know.
I have people who contact me all the time now
and say, you know, it's like finally got myself to
the point where I'm pretty sure that you know, no
matter what would happen, I'll always be able to turn
it and come and and I mean that's that's important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, a certain level of self sufficiency
and uh preparedness. Absolutely I am woefully and you know
I'm trying to have a kid and all that too.
And you know that I'm telling you that episode I
listened to listen to today with a Cat Cat Girl
Koulak kind of broken mind, just putting me in a
real bad mood all day.
Speaker 2: You came into the group I recommend it to the listeners.
You came into the group chat and you were like,
all right, I'm gonna kill myself now.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh man, all right, well let's let's end this. Uh
where can people find your work when you do work?
Speaker 1: So you can find me at bt W A Underscore
turns on x formally not as Twitter, and you can
find me every single Wednesday live on Timeline Earth.
Speaker 2: All right, thanks Daron, appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yep, thank you for having me