Mysterium Fasces Episode 50 — Nihilism
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 1 minute
Words per Minute
151.63162
Summary
In this episode of Mysterium, we discuss a topic that's long overdue: Nihilism, the belief that there is no inherent meaning to the universe outside of oneself, and that there's only relativity as a means to understand the world. In this episode, we're joined by writer and philosopher Hunter Wallace (AKA "Oblivious Dissent" in the League of the South) to discuss this topic.
Transcript
00:03:56.480
It's a pleasure to be joining you once again, dear listeners, for another episode of Mysterium.
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Now, we're going to be addressing a topic today that's long overdue.
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And with me, I've got a guest that I've been trying to get on the show for a while,
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depending on the nom de guerre of Occidental dissent in the League of the South.
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So thanks, Hunter, for coming on. It's a real pleasure.
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That's it. Yeah, the perennial and difficult plague, for sure.
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So, yeah, so obviously to all of our listeners as well,
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I hope it was all blessed for you and you were able to spend the time with your families and so on.
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So I also wanted to apologize for the lack of regularity of production of these podcasts,
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and that's going to continue for the next couple of weeks,
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but hopefully after that we can get into something a little bit more stable.
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So today we are going to be talking about, as the show title intimates, nihilism.
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Now there's many, many different directions that we can take with this,
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but I figured that it would be probably the most useful kind of to open up
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with talking about what exactly nihilism is and how most people come into contact with it.
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And so, you know, nihilism is formally speaking belief in the lack of anything,
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or nihil means nothing or the abrogation of existence.
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And so it's the idea that life itself has no inherent meaning,
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or there are no inherent intrinsic goals to life.
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Now, obviously there are many different kind of forms which this can take.
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People have all of their kind of individualized, nihilistic coping mechanisms,
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And I would contend very seriously that nobody is actually nihilistic.
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Everybody leads their lives with certain purposes and goals and ends in mind.
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But this is what the claim of nihilist is, essentially,
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is that there is no inherent meaning to the universe outside of oneself.
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And thus, universal meaning is impossible, and there is only relativity.
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This worldview should probably be very familiar to most of you who are listening to this podcast,
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because this idea, this reign of relativity, is essentially the dominant worldview of the West today.
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It has completely embraced and succumbed to nihilism by the long onslaught of liberalism.
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So, do you have any open statements you'd like to make on this, Hunter?
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I'm sure you've got loads of thoughts here on the big topic.
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If I had to describe nihilism, well, formally, it's the belief in nothing.
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But, like you said, we all live our lives with goals and purposes in mind.
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It's just that, if I could characterize it, it's more popularly...
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The popular version is the belief that there's no transcendental order.
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And that you should be free to live your life, I mean, however you see fit.
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Because, you know, morality can't be rationally justified and is baseless.
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If you go back to the 19th century, when we first started discussing the rise in nihilism,
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I mean, it was diagnosed as a condition that was, you know, in the future.
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It's happening now, most famously by Nietzsche.
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For example, there used to be a concept called free love, right?
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And free love is the idea that, you know, people should be able to act on any impulse whatsoever.
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Whenever they want, there is nothing sinful about it.
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And it just goes to show, I mean, that is what was, you know, considered a radical idea in the 19th century.
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In the course of the 20th century, you know, became completely internalized into our culture.
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And as far as this touches upon our movement, I mean, you have a lot of people coming from an irreligious background who, you know, were born in, like, say, a suburb who never had anything resembling a religious education, a moral education.
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And, you know, that's had a huge impact on, you know, the alt-right and increasingly, you know, on white nationalism amongst the younger generations.
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They don't have, like, a, you know, they can't, like, explain what morality is.
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And they don't feel bound by it, is how I put it.
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And so that's what it comes back to, is that under nihilism, there's essentially the legitimation of all opinions that are useful to the paradigm of whoever's setting the language.
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We've talked about this a lot on Mysterium Fascics before.
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But the thing about worldviews is, and this is central to the idea of nihilism, is that whether or not you are aware of having a worldview, you have one.
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And we talked about this in philosophy, in an episode we did recently on philosophy, is that the very nature of life is that there's the assumption that your existence has meaning.
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You have to move day to day as if, you know, your words and your thoughts and, you know, your memory over time has some sort of coherent hold to it or, you know, or else it just devolves into absurdity, which is what nihilism is.
00:10:01.620
And so the problem with this is that many people can embrace nihilism wholly or in part without actually confessing it, you know, without saying, I am God or there's nothing, nothing is real.
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And act upon nihilistic presuppositions without really understanding that that's what they believe and how they think.
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And so this has always been what Mysterium Fascics has been trying to do is to point this out to people in these different elements of the worldview, which many times are just presupposed, just assumed.
00:10:30.560
And they act based in extremely complicated, long-term fashions based on these presuppositions, which elaborate themselves disastrously over time.
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So I think, yeah, you're banging on there, Hunter, is that the big problem is the reason why nihilism is so important now is because it's just, it's so, you know, we're steeped in it, we're died in it from the very moment of our conception, unless you're raised in kind of a radically non-mainstream household.
00:10:55.620
So, I mean, a common refrain you hear these days is that, you know, my life is meaningless.
00:11:04.040
And that's, you know, not kind of like a nihilistic view that it's just been, and we have extremely high suicide rates.
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The suicide rate, especially for young white males, continues to increase as whatever was, you know, left of our traditional culture continues to evaporate.
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And people are raised without any sort of guidance in our society.
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It's, they've, if I could describe it, they've been liberated from our culture and our culture is eroded.
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And, of course, you know, like you were saying, everyone, you know, human behavior is, is naturally goal oriented, right?
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So, I mean, and everyone who says, you know, I mean, you can't avoid having a world, a worldview.
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You have to, you interpret, you know, you have to have some kind of framework to interpret your actions, even if it is a poorly conceived one.
00:12:05.660
And, but yeah, but yeah, like the main thing like that, you know, triggered this, this whole thing is just, at least on my website, the reason I started talking about it is because, you know, I would notice how things I took for, for granted.
00:12:25.380
Like, um, I would see someone in action and I would see a person and they would be exhibiting, as far as, you know, I was concerned, courage or bravery, which is a moral virtue, one of the most important moral virtues.
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And these other guys, you know, would see that and, you know, they would, would not even grasp any moral dimension to the, um, to the action.
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They would interpret it solely in terms of optics or something.
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And then it just struck me is like how obsessed these people were with appearances, as opposed to being completely devoid seemingly of, you know, any moral understanding of behavior.
00:13:10.700
And then, and that's why, you know, I started writing about it because, you know, I really do think the, all, at least as far as the alt-right goes, maybe not, um, some of the older white nationalists, the broader white nationalist movement, you know, lacks, I mean, tellingly lacks a moral framework.
00:13:29.400
And this is what, uh, we've described in this over and over, racist liberalism.
00:13:33.440
Uh, and we use this term because these people, um, are liberals in the sense that they don't have a transcendental worldview.
00:13:40.600
And they accept the presuppositions of the Enlightenment, which are essentially, uh, universe dominated by mechanism, cause and effect in the tyranny of concentrated power.
00:13:52.260
And so, um, they take these presuppositions, uh, and the big problem that we run into, of course, is, you, you point out rightly, is that, that this worldview, uh, is alienating in its, uh, self-destructive.
00:14:02.940
It's Zoroboros, you know, to use the, the occult understanding.
00:14:06.780
And so, as it devours itself and hollows out the social capital from its, um, predominant functionary class, that is to say white males, it's necessary for it to, to continue.
00:14:16.700
Of course, they become alienated, you know, if nothing is real, nothing's true.
00:14:21.140
And indeed, this nothingness is to be, uh, enjoyed or, or savored in kind of this, um, spark and fire of, you know, hedonistic passion.
00:14:31.860
I mean, it, it, you can begin to see why young men begin to feel hopeless.
00:14:36.620
And the difficulty is, uh, with the far right, there's been this kind of explosion of movement and energy in the last couple of years, as this latest generation of disaffected youth is rebelling from this system and rebuking the, the titan, which is, you know, crushing the life from their soul.
00:14:53.760
But the difficulty is that as so many reactionary movements are, it is reactionary, uh, an unprincipled reaction.
00:15:01.620
It's just based on, on going to the opposite extreme or cleaving onto, um, the vestiges of what they can make out to be something as, as wholesome and, and real.
00:15:12.380
As something that brings them meaning above themselves, transcendental meaning.
00:15:15.820
And so for most people are in worst, not for most people, but people in the racist liberal faction, this becomes, uh, you know, identitarianism or white nationalism, whatever term you want to call in group politics, which is certainly, obviously this is a nationalized podcast.
00:15:37.220
I get, I get the sense that they, um, you know, what passes for morality these days is a bunch of, you know, pretty much just, you know,
00:15:45.800
ginned up, made up bogus sins, which didn't even exist a century ago.
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The first one was racism and now there's sexism and nativism and, um, homophobia and transphobia and all the, all these moral failings, which are, you know, just transparently made up.
00:16:08.580
I mean, you, you're, it's, it's more, this is what's called morality because it's what you're supposed to believe.
00:16:14.180
And if you don't, then, you know, you're a terribly immoral, hateful, um, person.
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There's, there's no argument made to justify these beliefs.
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And, and it's, it is, this sort of thing has become, you know, more and more and more explicitly anti-white.
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I think that a lot of these guys are coming from the very, I would say, um, irreligious background, a very maybe deracinated suburban background who were isolated, who meet each other on anonymous internet forums, you know, have kind of rejected.
00:16:52.300
They've, they've rejected that, but they don't, they don't really know what to replace it with.
00:17:00.160
Um, and so they just kind of act on, you know, their impulses, their emotions, their, their, their resentments.
00:17:07.200
Um, because, you know, they're kind of nihilistic in my view.
00:17:11.860
And I mean, there's a whole, we can get, we can get into the, um, the whole story of that.
00:17:17.440
And I can talk about my personal kind of transition of the last 17 years.
00:17:24.420
I kind of came from a similar place, um, growing up, but I, I grew out of it.
00:17:39.120
Well, you know, growing up in my youth, you know, I was raised as a Methodist, but I was
00:17:48.500
My father was always, you know, very much into biology and what, what I would go, you know,
00:17:56.540
when I was a kid, I would go hunt dinosaur bones and stuff.
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So I knew, you know, all about like the age of the world.
00:18:02.060
I was all into Darwinism and, um, evolution and stuff.
00:18:09.600
And, you know, I was kind of like these kids when, you know, I came of, came of age and
00:18:13.100
around my early, late teens, early twenties, I was started out, you know, kind of grasping
00:18:20.680
And I instantly rebelled against this, um, politically correct, um, culture, which I just
00:18:31.680
I mean, this idea that just to say that, um, race, to say that, to say that racial differences
00:18:38.460
exist and blacks might not be equal in every respect to whites, um, that's considered a moral,
00:18:47.560
well, that's considered racism, but that, but, you know, that also conflicts with, you
00:18:55.820
Honesty, you know, was a moral virtue and, you know, I couldn't make sense.
00:19:00.860
Well, you know, we're supposed to be truthful about things.
00:19:04.900
Um, I kind of, I kind of, I kind of had it like an intuitive, uh, a basic intuitive sense
00:19:09.840
of what was right and what was wrong, even though I couldn't articulate it.
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Um, and honestly, you know, I, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't reconcile, okay, well, they're
00:19:19.920
saying, you know, racism is a moral, I'm being taught this and to do, to, to say that it's
00:19:25.880
a moral and to say it's not true is to deny the evidence, to be a dishonest, uh, person.
00:19:34.920
And, and of course, I think the first thing I got into was, um, Nietzsche around my early
00:19:44.100
I, you know, I found his books and for years, um, read into that.
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And from there I read, you know, a lot of Heidegger and, uh, Foucault and I read, you
00:19:57.040
know, a lot of classical philosophy too, you know, Aristotle, Plato, but, um, you know, I,
00:20:04.920
you, you read Nietzsche and, you know, he talks clearly about, you know, how moral sentiments
00:20:09.540
have evolved over history and how there's, uh, a number of different, um, moral traditions
00:20:17.320
and what was, you know, the, the, the morality of, you know, his time was also very specific
00:20:27.100
And there's, and there's a lot of truth to that, but, you know, I didn't think Nietzsche
00:20:29.520
really, I mean, he didn't, he didn't, he was, he was better at criticizing, um, you
00:20:37.800
know, what he was against than he was in advocating, uh, solutions.
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And so always, like I said in the article, like, you know, you always had like some lingering
00:20:49.600
Um, you could recognize a moral action, even though you couldn't explain why it was moral
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And eventually, you know, I was into philosophy.
00:21:02.140
This is early on in my internet career, the first five years from like 2002 to 2007.
00:21:09.320
And I came across a book by a Scottish philosopher named Alistair MacIntyre.
00:21:14.720
The name of the book was After Virtue and it's, and I recently reread the book and, um, uh,
00:21:22.940
posted a little brief review of it on my website.
00:21:27.460
And MacIntyre talks in the, in the, it's a huge historical arc of how, you know, morality
00:21:34.440
was one thing in antiquity and the middle ages.
00:21:37.820
And then as we get into the modern era, um, starts becoming unglued and then it suffers
00:21:45.160
a, what he describes as, you know, a catastrophe during the scientific revolution when any, when
00:21:51.220
anything, you know, resembling Aristotelian teleology was discredited and modern philosophers
00:21:58.560
tried to build, you know, modern philosophy without teleology, um, that would kind of mirror
00:22:06.820
And that project as MacIntyre eloquently described in his book was a failure.
00:22:12.780
I mean, it was a total failure and that led to the condition, the perception that morality
00:22:22.520
And from there, you know, we get to, we start getting into nihilism where the commonly held
00:22:28.120
view today is morality as a matter of personal opinion, except for, you know, the, the things
00:22:35.680
We, uh, morality is a matter of personal opinion, except for like, you know, racism, sexism,
00:22:42.660
nativism, and all these other isms, which we're absolutely supposed to believe in or else.
00:22:48.240
And it kind of brings us to where we are today and people are rejecting that.
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Uh, it was directed towards ends and, um, virtues were things that allowed you to move towards
00:23:05.300
those ends and to become a good person and a happy person.
00:23:13.660
And that's kind of brought us to our present state.
00:23:17.720
And I think that you touch on, that's the, uh, that's the critical goal of nihilism is
00:23:26.060
Um, and we've talked again on the show about telos, but the idea of, uh, of telos in Greek
00:23:32.860
philosophical thought, for those of you who are not familiar with it is not just, um, the
00:23:37.940
purpose, but there's a, uh, of something, but it's the notion that there is a grand narrative
00:23:43.920
and reason for all things that exist within the universe and that it's not dominated by
00:23:48.960
flux, uh, and constant evolution, but rather it has, uh, in and of itself an integral order
00:23:55.000
that everything within it participates in a logos, right?
00:23:59.680
Uh, cosmic order, as we've talked about so many times before on this program.
00:24:04.180
And so the, with liberalism, right, that you're talking about, uh, what it does is it introduces
00:24:10.120
this concept of, uh, kind of moral egalitarianism where one thing is just as good as another.
00:24:18.920
There's not a moral distinction that's made in reference to an overarching, uh, nomos or
00:24:26.560
Um, but rather, uh, it's based on one of two categories, the ego and its relationship to
00:24:33.320
the actions that are being undertaken, um, and, uh, utility, pragmatism, which is usually
00:24:39.120
defined as having some relationship towards the satisfaction of the ego, uh, on a mass
00:24:44.260
And so the, this, this worldview is perfectly capable of being supported by, you know, the
00:24:51.180
products of, you know, the scientific method of empiricism and of, you know, um, kind of
00:24:57.040
raw, um, you know, uh, Newtonian inertia applied to intercontinental trade, you know, late
00:25:07.860
They go hand in hand because they, they both prioritize, uh, and exalt the, uh, accumulation
00:25:14.600
of wealth and scientific knowledge of power and force for its own sake.
00:25:18.460
And ultimately what that is, is for, um, pragmatic ends and for the satisfaction of the ego.
00:25:25.420
This is the, this is the mainstream assumption in everyday life.
00:25:27.940
And, and it's so deeply ingrained in people's, uh, mentality and worldview and lifestyle that,
00:25:33.880
that there's not even a need to articulate or to explain or to express it.
00:25:37.980
And the great difficulty is that if you want to react and you want to rebel against the
00:25:41.880
system, which inculcates such an attitude, you yourself must be purged of that attitude
00:25:48.580
And that requires a very conscious investigation of the contents of your worldview.
00:25:52.740
And that's why we are such, uh, fervent Christians here, the whole point is because if you're
00:26:00.160
going to reject nihilism and you're going to embrace meaning and transcendental existence,
00:26:04.160
then you actually need to have a coherent system of, uh, philosophy and all, and theology
00:26:12.580
Uh, or very quickly you'll, you'll run into just, uh, it just comes back to nihilism basically.
00:26:17.980
Um, yeah, um, you'll try to substitute for your lack of coherent worldview with, you know,
00:26:24.020
living a life of hedonism and stimulation that leaves you, um, feeling empty.
00:26:29.860
Well, you know, as McIntyre describes in his book, and I've actually been rereading, uh,
00:26:35.160
Aristotle's ethics for the first time in many years, um, you know, Aristotle, you know,
00:26:41.220
like you were saying, like, um, you know, the Greeks believed that there was an order to
00:26:44.720
the universe and Aristotle, you know, key assumption is that, you know, man, you know,
00:26:52.000
And once you, you know, you can grasp that function in that end, then you can discern
00:26:57.700
like, um, what are the, you know, the virtues that allow you to orient your life towards,
00:27:05.080
And, you know, from what I read, you know, of Aristotle, I was just reading it the other
00:27:15.240
I think he said, um, the highest good was, um, living a lot, living a life, um, or a life
00:27:22.480
of virtue in accordance with the rational part of the soul.
00:27:27.560
And, you know, the highest, the highest good was, you know, something that wasn't, um, a
00:27:32.700
means to another, uh, another gateway to another good.
00:27:35.840
For example, wealth wasn't the highest good because we seek wealth in order to, um, be
00:27:45.060
Uh, honor wasn't the highest good because we seek honor, um, to be happy in life.
00:27:53.060
Um, there's also, uh, we don't, we, we seek, um, pleasure, you know, in order to, or we
00:28:05.040
You're trying to reach this higher order good is, is how, you know, he argued it and, you
00:28:12.880
know, socially, you know, um, in terms of morality is, is, you know, as Aristotle described
00:28:19.220
it, is that these are things that, you know, people, not, not just like, no, but like practice
00:28:30.000
Like for example, um, of course, if everyone in a, you know, society is a coward, that society
00:28:43.280
And, you know, he taught, he talks at length about this.
00:28:48.040
And so we kind of drifted away from that moral tradition and we tried to, like you said, um,
00:28:58.160
We, we, we, we, we got, we, we tried to preserve Christian morality, uh, Christian, um, classical
00:29:06.140
And we tried to put it on a, um, a naturalistic basis.
00:29:10.060
And in the process, we lost the, you know, the, the teleology of it that made it sent,
00:29:15.080
made, made the whole scheme, moral scheme, um, make sense.
00:29:18.800
And that's how, you know, when people stopped believing in that and the various, you know,
00:29:24.420
substitutes failed, that's how we got to nihilism.
00:29:31.040
And I would say theologically, this, uh, makes total sense because it's right in the first
00:29:36.140
chapter of the gospel of John, uh, that Christ is the word.
00:29:41.120
And so you cannot divorce his order and his logic and all of that, that is entailed in
00:29:48.340
For he says he is the way, the truth, and the life.
00:29:51.260
He himself being the ultimate form of the good and of the truth and of the transcendent reality,
00:29:57.580
You cannot divorce his person as a man, uh, and a God, Jesus Christ, from the reality
00:30:04.360
of that civilizational experience, uh, as it's been lived over the last 1500 years of
00:30:11.360
This, and so this is basically, uh, and this is a huge problem that I run into all the time
00:30:17.380
is the, you know, morality as utility and theology as utility.
00:30:23.500
And so this is the people, people are trying to get, you know, the benefits of a Christian
00:30:29.280
society where they recognize that religion is kind of a cohesive, uh, integrating force
00:30:35.100
that provides this logos for civilization, but they don't actually want to submit to, um,
00:30:41.880
heartfelt faith and to, uh, engagement with this reality in truth rather than in irony.
00:30:48.660
And I think this is a very, uh, typical symptom of postmodernism.
00:30:53.500
Um, yeah, um, it makes a lot, it makes a lot of sense.
00:30:58.500
Um, one thing, you know, like, you know, from what I've read and I've been able to interpret
00:31:03.960
is that the very, the very bedrock, um, of a culture of a civilization is the, the stories,
00:31:15.300
And even before, you know, before, you know, literacy, you know, we were a, a, a storytelling
00:31:20.880
people and these stories, you know, often had, you know, a moral point, a moral purpose.
00:31:27.440
And we've kind of like, um, we don't, we don't really transmit that anymore.
00:31:33.900
Like, uh, uh, a cohesive culture would be, you know, would have like a common set of stories
00:31:40.060
and beliefs and values that would be transmitted, um, through that.
00:31:45.700
And what liberalism is, is it kind of, you know, first of all, it strips, strips away
00:31:54.460
And then it kind of divides the, um, individual from his culture by, you know, making up the
00:32:02.400
story that he was born in a state of nature or, or something like that.
00:32:08.060
And magically at some point, which is completely does, doesn't make any sense and, um, never
00:32:13.980
historically existed, exchanged his rights for, um, you know, the protection of civil
00:32:21.820
society is, these are just stories that people, um, it's an origin story that, you know, liberals
00:32:27.560
tell each other and it's not one, um, that's based in fact, but like what's happened to our
00:32:33.540
culture as a result of going on two centuries of liberalism, you can see like a steady, you
00:32:40.920
know, as I've written about endlessly on Occidental descent, you see this, this steady loss of,
00:32:47.420
of cohesion, like, like the founders day, the founders of the American Republic, um, there
00:32:56.260
was a lot of stored social capital that was built up, but that's been dwindled down over
00:33:02.040
the last two centuries as these ideas of freedom and equality and tolerance and individualism
00:33:10.680
It's kind of like pride, everything apart and displace the content of our culture.
00:33:17.840
It's, um, it's, I think, I think his, I think his name is Patrick Dean and he's written a book
00:33:23.180
about this recently and I think he, I think he called it an anti-culture and as this pretty,
00:33:28.920
um, a pretty good description of what it is, we're growing up in this anti-culture, we don't
00:33:35.180
have like a, a common bedrock or a common source of authority and that's de-racinated people
00:33:45.660
and it stripped them of their culture and it set them adrift and they have to make way
00:33:52.060
and the way they make way through life is just by indulging, you know, their appetites
00:33:57.440
and their, and their pleasures and, you know, as the Greeks would have been the first to
00:34:02.040
point out, it makes them a lower, a lower type of person, um, you know, to live a life
00:34:08.620
of, of pleasure seeking was, you know, to satisfy the belly, which is, you know, the lowest
00:34:13.620
part of the soul. So, yeah, absolutely. And this is what happens. I would say that nihilism is
00:34:22.020
actually a perennial issue. I mean, and it's just that, um, the embrace of nihilism is the embrace
00:34:28.460
of death and that in the rest of our civil, in the rest of the civilizations that have ever existed,
00:34:33.920
those that have survived, survived because they embrace life in some form or another, however,
00:34:39.200
imperfectly and a philosophical and theological worldview, which is conducted to the sustenance
00:34:44.680
and maintenance of life itself. Um, that is how they are alive. Whereas, uh, nihilism comes from
00:34:51.860
man and man's social encounter with death, uh, because death, uh, acts as an, and this is basically
00:35:00.220
the argument that nihilists will give, and they are actually pretty decent, uh, if you, if you're
00:35:03.880
a materialist is that, well, death just, it's the culmination of everything. And, uh, if all you are
00:35:10.720
is your ego, and when you go to death, that's extinguished, then all of your functions and actions in
00:35:16.580
life are ultimately for naught. There's no, there's no transcendence, uh, in that worldview. And so one is
00:35:23.460
basically left to pursue the satisfaction of his own passion, whether that's through, you know, base
00:35:29.300
hedonism, uh, you know, of the more kind of bacchanalian, Dionysian variety, or that's an attempt to,
00:35:36.040
um, you know, kind of construct one's own grand narrative in relation to their ego in a Nietzschean
00:35:41.660
fashion. And, and by empowering this construct of their ego as the ubermensch, they find delight in
00:35:48.740
the, you know, passing transcendence that's offered by the exercise of their will from on high.
00:35:53.720
Uh, both of which are extremely common, uh, in, uh, our circles, unfortunately, and in, and in
00:36:00.580
society. Well, it's, it's a worldview that leads to, um, inevitably leads to moral collapse and,
00:36:07.820
you know, religious collapse and civilizational death in the longterm. Uh, it's, it's unsustainable,
00:36:14.960
right. Um, you have people like who, who do not, um, I mean, they, they don't, they don't have no
00:36:24.400
out. How would I put this? Um, wasn't it Plato? Like you said, you know, the spirit was like a part
00:36:31.000
of a soul, a soul thing, the thymus or I think that's what he called it. And people don't have,
00:36:38.320
people have been, you know, stripped of that. It seems, or, or they, or they've allowed it, you know,
00:36:42.880
to be repressed in themselves. They don't have the, I mean, an animal is sick when it, you know,
00:36:49.240
lacks the, the basic instinct to preserve its own, to take its own side, to, you know, procreate
00:36:57.400
itself. And we, we can't even, um, we can't even do that because mainly because of what's happened
00:37:04.700
with, um, our culture and this, you know, how liberalism has put down deeper and deeper and
00:37:12.640
deeper and deeper roots over the centuries. I mean, it's only, it's only been within the
00:37:17.300
last, well, I shouldn't say with the last 50 years, but then the last hundred years that
00:37:23.100
it's managed to completely invade and destroy the family. I mean, there was for a long time
00:37:29.240
there, it was kept at bay from institutions, um, like, you know, the church or, um, the family
00:37:37.140
or relationships between men and women before it went in there and absolutely, uh, sowed
00:37:43.840
chaos. And so, I mean, we're, we're, we're in the process of social collapse because we're
00:37:49.460
not, um, living our lives in a way that, you know, makes our civilization sustainable.
00:37:55.980
We are dying out as a people. Um, we don't have, like you said, we don't have a set of values
00:38:04.420
that can sustain things anymore. And that's just the inevitable outcome of this worldview.
00:38:09.880
I'm wondering, I know that, you know, Hey, are you there in some fashion?
00:38:22.620
Sorry, could you just, uh, go ahead and repeat what you just said? You just cut out there
00:38:26.020
when you, when you just began? Oh, I had a, I had a phone call. Um, but I, you know,
00:38:32.520
I was describing that, you know, liberalism is ultimately, um, leads to, um, civilizational
00:38:38.340
collapse because it, you know, it takes away the things that, you know, make the civilization
00:38:44.880
sustainable. Like, you know, the family, for example, just basic procreation, um, a desire
00:38:51.260
to, um, or living your life in accordance with higher values than, you know, just appetite
00:38:56.860
and inevitably, you know, it's going to put, so is this, I mean, we're already seeing it
00:39:03.520
in a lot of countries where like the average age is reached some insane level in Europe.
00:39:09.540
And, you know, the, the birth rate is half of even half of what this, uh, replacement rate
00:39:15.860
and, you know, migrants are just pouring in. I mean, it's this, the strain of it is going
00:39:21.180
to break at some point and we've got to, you know, be able to replace that and somehow
00:39:27.380
or people have got to, or, or else, you know, something's just going to come and fill the
00:39:32.680
vacuum and whether it's Islam, most likely in Europe or who knows here in the United States.
00:39:41.060
Yeah, absolutely. Um, but nihilism is like a phase. I mean, it's, it's going to be replaced
00:39:48.560
by sooner or later because the nihilist is just going to like, you know, die out.
00:39:54.100
Yeah, exactly. And I think that, right. That's it. Yeah. And I think to kind of address specifically
00:40:00.080
problems that we've run into with, um, like on the right or with the racist liberal worldview,
00:40:05.100
there are lots of people who will try to, um, legitimize and justify like white identity,
00:40:10.560
politics or, um, nationalism based on a purely like Darwinistic materialist racial, um, worldview
00:40:18.980
whereby, um, you know, you don't actually believe in any kind of transcendental mechanism or reality
00:40:26.180
to the universe except for evolutionary flux, which is a product of pragmatism. Um, but you acknowledge
00:40:33.900
that, you know, the, the, to see the success of your kin group and your, uh, the near genetic
00:40:39.980
material to yours is evolutionarily advantageous. And that's why you support, um, you know,
00:40:46.920
nationalism and your family and your kin community by engaging in this struggle, in this communal
00:40:53.800
fight for survival, you gain transcendence in something greater than yourself. However limited
00:41:00.120
in physical, you may believe that it is. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
00:41:03.080
Through the survival, we're echoing, uh, through the survival of your gene pool. Um, so they would,
00:41:10.020
you know, describe it. Right. They live on, they live on through, um, their, if they're homosexuals,
00:41:16.440
for example, they'll live on through their second or third cousins bloodline. Um, but you know,
00:41:24.160
that, that, that kind of, you know, the, the, the, the Darwinistic, you know, worldview doesn't,
00:41:31.220
doesn't, you know, is, it's not really, I mean, you don't really have, I mean, it's, it's ultimately,
00:41:36.980
I mean, if you take it seriously, I mean, your life is, um, pointless, right? Um,
00:41:43.360
Yeah, that's it. That's the big issue is that, um, you can't, you can't substantiate any moral
00:41:48.800
imperative for why you should be loyal to your race or to your kin group or yourself, uh, under
00:41:55.280
this paradigm. I mean, your, your fitness might be the fitness of your offspring might be increased
00:42:01.560
from breeding with, um, East Asian or, or all kinds of, you know, in need, uh, that's it. Right.
00:42:12.020
And so that's what we, uh, and this is the big problem is that people come into this and
00:42:16.280
they, uh, have not all of the, all that they've done is they've taken the assumptions of the modern
00:42:21.640
world and they've gone to the nearest and closest, uh, reaction, which is in line with the natural,
00:42:28.220
um, values for preservation of life and family and nation, uh, to legitimize these, these sub
00:42:35.060
rational impulses. I'm not saying that they're bad. I mean, obviously that's a good, uh, everybody
00:42:39.320
should have these, these instincts. But the problem is, is that they're the prop that's
00:42:43.820
used as the, uh, articulation of these instincts is just nonsense. And in fact, is lock, stock
00:42:49.620
and barrel, part of the same philosophical superstructure that's, uh, Carina's towards
00:42:54.240
the edge of death and destruction as, uh, uh, you know, in broad society today and rolling
00:42:58.760
it back a hundred years to when, uh, the liberals were racist and didn't want Negroes in their
00:43:03.740
bathhouses, uh, will not be the solution. No, no. I mean, the re the reason that we're in the
00:43:11.260
place we are now is that liberalism has kind of the logic of it is over decades, over centuries
00:43:18.500
has worked itself out and it's managed to, um, dissolve and cannibalize, um, the preexisting
00:43:26.600
culture. For example, our, in the United States, our views of race and, um, the importance of race,
00:43:32.960
the white identity and stuff like that. Um, the existence of racial differences, all this
00:43:38.920
was completely perfectly understood in the colonial era. Um, long before we kind of swallowed
00:43:46.820
the liberal worldview in the 18th century, that, that is the, um, you know, the, the whole
00:43:55.940
conquest of, you know, North America was going on, the settlement, the slavement of blacks
00:44:02.660
there. There was a lot of stuff that existed before, um, the American revolution. And as
00:44:09.040
I've argued with a lot of these guys about American nationalism, I know you've had
00:44:13.500
Hombok, Hombok on, um, what the American founders tried to do is they tried to preserve things,
00:44:20.120
elements from the past and they tried to combine it with this new, um, 18th century civic nationalism.
00:44:26.700
And, you know, that was the product of the, that was the American. I mean, it was kind
00:44:32.540
of contradictory. It was, it was racist liberalism, right? Um, but it was also, I mean, they were
00:44:39.000
also, um, most of the founders, um, or not so much the founders, but, um, the common people
00:44:45.700
that are, you know, were strong, strong, strongly, um, Protestant Christians. And, you know, the,
00:44:53.620
the incompatible, um, the ways that, you know, this American identity was, you know, fundamentally
00:45:00.080
full of contradictions and, um, incompatibilities wasn't obvious at the outset. It's excessive
00:45:07.580
generations, um, would, you know, would work out that inheritance that they would take aspects of
00:45:13.560
their identity, like the belief in, um, liberty, you know, universal individual rights. And they would
00:45:20.560
look at things like, Oh, well, um, or women not equal or, you know, um, should ever, shouldn't
00:45:28.400
everybody be allowed to vote in a democracy? And, um, if all men are created equal, you know,
00:45:34.560
how can we be racist? And, and these contradictions just worked itself out. And what happened was,
00:45:40.760
is that, you know, over time, um, the scope of civic nationalism within our national identity
00:45:47.420
widened and widened and widened, um, Americanism used to be very much, um, based on Protestantism
00:45:56.900
or was closely associated with Protestantism. That was widened to Christianity. Um, Americans used to
00:46:03.680
define themselves as English. And of course, after the American Revolution, we had to be something else
00:46:08.800
in English, and it was broadened, um, to whites. And this, this broadening, um, of course, in the 1920s,
00:46:18.340
um, we had a lot of immigrants coming from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. And the, you, there was a
00:46:26.300
reaction against that where we tried to preserve, you know, the, the Nordic dominance of America.
00:46:30.960
And then, you know, um, that was brought into Europeans. And so like this, what would happen
00:46:37.940
was, is that, um, these other aspects of national identity since the 1950s have been like excluded
00:46:44.680
or have been stripped out. Whiteness was one that was completely overthrown. Um, it wasn't long
00:46:52.320
thereafter that, um, Christianity ceased to be, um, completely associated with Americanism. And now
00:47:00.380
it's the English language. So now, now we're reduced to nothing but these liberal values. That's
00:47:06.720
who we are. We're people ostensibly, or at least white people in America, since under this bizarre
00:47:13.220
system, non-whites are allowed to have, um, you know, and nurture a sense of racial and ethnic
00:47:18.740
exclusiveness and identity. But we were supposed to be de-racinated individuals who are guilty for
00:47:24.700
various sins in the past that have been made up in the last 50 years. And, um, we're reunited
00:47:31.780
by the values of freedom and equality, which we don't even agree on. So that's our national,
00:47:39.220
that's our national identity, such as it is. And authoritarian political correctness kind
00:47:45.380
of has moved into the vacuum, especially in academia and people are growing up without moral
00:47:53.880
guidance and they're reacting against it. Like I said earlier, without having a clear sense
00:47:59.540
of morality. Yeah, absolutely. And so without this, um, at the biggest issue is not is of course
00:48:09.540
that there isn't an integrated worldview, but it's even deeper than that because the nihilism has
00:48:14.740
become so deep in our civilization, in our society. There are so many people who embrace an actively
00:48:20.100
nihilistic racialist worldview, uh, where there is no appeal to transcendental reality. You know,
00:48:26.880
people who believe in the existence of the spirit world are retards, you know, are LARPing, right?
00:48:32.880
Um, you know, and the only thing that really matters is the pragmatic results for your in-group.
00:48:38.780
And what this basically turns into is just, uh, is racial idolatry. Uh, you know, and I mean,
00:48:46.020
even less than this, because often the discursive categories of, of reasoning that are used to
00:48:50.740
identify one phenotype, one genotype group, these themselves are products of, um, of, uh, the cultured
00:48:58.980
history and of civilizational conditioning, right? You know, the, you know, we could look at American,
00:49:05.780
American, America's own racial policy to see this, uh, put into effect, right? Now, I'm not trying to
00:49:13.000
deny the existence of the white race, but always, as our convention of mysterious fascists has been
00:49:16.760
that the, you know, that, uh, blood is one important foundational and necessary part of the whole
00:49:25.860
national life, but it's just the one foundation and nobody sleeps on houses made of concrete slabs
00:49:31.940
with no walls and doors and roofs and furniture and so on. Yeah, we've, um, uh, especially in the
00:49:39.860
alt-right, you know, we've, like you were saying, you know, it's just one aspect of an overall,
00:49:45.340
an overall thing of whiteness is, and as we've recently discovered with the alt-right that, um,
00:49:52.560
a lot of these people like you, you know, we, we agree with on race, but we don't really share the
00:49:57.300
same moral views, the same, um, religious views, and there's an extreme tension there. Um, especially
00:50:05.320
with the more nihilistic elements. I mean, from a Darwinian perspective, right? Um, what a, a sea
00:50:13.660
sponge or something that's lived from a species that's lived for millions of years is superior,
00:50:18.340
um, to your race, which, you know, only goes back a couple thousand years at most.
00:50:26.200
Um, the white race, for example, was, you know, a product of, um, interbreeding with
00:50:35.280
Neanderthals and other, you know, previously unknown, um, human groups, according to the
00:50:42.900
Darwinist worldview. Um, and so like you said, it really is like, um, you know, racial idolatry.
00:50:50.720
And it doesn't even make sense from a Darwinian perspective at all either, right?
00:50:57.080
No, it doesn't. Um, that's, yeah. And that's the big problem is, uh, we can give, I mean,
00:51:02.600
I've talked before on this, the show about, um, like the Western theological loss of, um,
00:51:09.980
the tripartite soul. And, and we were talking about, you know, played as reference to the spirit
00:51:14.560
before. And the idea that, um, the dominant spiritual faculty and man is, his greatest
00:51:20.280
spiritual organ is not actually his mind, but it's the heart or the noose, which is above
00:51:25.100
the mind. And this is what is able to directly see into the world of the forms. And then it's
00:51:32.320
the mind, which processes post facto these observations. Um, and I think that, uh, this
00:51:37.820
is a really good problem that we can't, we don't have time to get into in depth today, but suffice
00:51:42.100
to say that, um, all people have this faculty in this Oregon, whether they are conscious of it or
00:51:49.140
not. And so people make inherent moral judgments based on, um, these super rational factors. You
00:51:57.340
can call it instinct or whatever, right? This is why even people who are committed, uh, moral
00:52:02.580
nihilists, you know, are disgusted at, you know, incest or something like that.
00:52:07.820
Yeah. I mean, they'll see a moral, I mean, they can, you, you might not have, even if
00:52:12.500
you are a nihilist, I mean, a lot of these people can see and recognize, um, moral actions,
00:52:17.120
even though they won't be able to, you know, articulate or explain why something they understand
00:52:27.140
Right. Exactly. And this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before is that
00:52:30.340
man is, um, well, the very nature of the, the, the very fact that you can understand anything
00:52:36.340
at all, that the words that we're saying make sense itself implies a transcendental reality,
00:52:42.680
which provides reference and meaning to these words. Okay. Okay. So like this is the fact
00:52:49.360
that we're tapping this conversation right now, and then you understand what we're saying
00:52:52.700
disproves nihilism because it means that there's meaning and it's not just absurdity. Right.
00:52:57.640
Yeah. I mean, like, I mean, do you even have, you know, a language, you require some minimum
00:53:02.800
level of agreement, um, amongst, you know, terms of vocabulary and things like that.
00:53:11.820
Where was it? Where was it going with this? Yeah. I mean, like the, getting back to one
00:53:15.740
of the big divides is that, you know, like we were, like we were talking about earlier,
00:53:20.060
you know, like, you know, the, the, the, the tripartite division of the soul and, you know,
00:53:25.900
the, the modern middle-class, um, bourgeois person, especially in our movie, their, their
00:53:33.620
lives are oriented like totally towards, um, material satisfaction and, and pleasure. And
00:53:39.200
it's like, it's really, you know, I am to the exclusion of, of higher things. And I think,
00:53:45.680
I think people do sense that. I mean, our whole culture is based on that. Like, uh,
00:53:50.060
my life will be destroyed if, uh, if, um, I don't get this job or, or something like
00:53:56.120
that. And, um, that's the kind of culture we've had is, it's a culture which liberalism
00:54:02.740
is, you know, directed at the lowest aspects of human beings, which is just, you know, pure
00:54:07.780
material words and, um, satisfaction. Whereas, you know, the Greeks understood that, um, some,
00:54:14.840
some degree of wealth, um, was necessary, but it wasn't like, uh, the high,
00:54:20.060
certainly wasn't the highest good. It was just the means to other goods.
00:54:24.560
Right. It's, it's power to affect the action and the external good. Yeah.
00:54:31.580
Absolutely. And I mean, this is, um, has been very well articulated in many circles and I
00:54:37.040
think we're going to get kind of get a little deep into like libido dominante and that kind
00:54:41.140
of stuff after the break, before the break, I wanted to square up by talking about nominalism
00:54:46.020
and getting this kind of part out of the way, um, before we continue. At some point,
00:54:50.840
we'll have Father Johnson on the show to do a full talk on nominalism. But as listeners
00:54:55.120
of the show will know, um, epistemological nominalism is the idea that, uh, there is no
00:55:04.080
relationship between an object and its referent. And what this basically means is that the words
00:55:09.760
that we use to describe reality around us and our sense experience of the different
00:55:14.840
forms and things in our lives and the mutual world of ideas that we have to describe and
00:55:20.720
to make sense of this reality is arbitrary. Uh, and it's not rooted in any sort of objective
00:55:26.360
external order. Um, but rather is just the shorthand that we give for our collectively agreed
00:55:32.860
upon sense experiences. Um, so like take for instance, you know, uh, beauty, right? One
00:55:39.900
of the classic transcendental forms, right? Um, the modern nihilistic worldview doesn't
00:55:45.020
admit that beauty has a transcendental reality to itself, uh, in, you know, of its own accord
00:55:51.080
that it has to do with certain proportions that are harmonious and in conformity with the
00:55:56.320
structure of the universe and so on. Um, but rather it thinks that this is just, uh, it's
00:56:02.100
arbitrary. It's just what pleases and flatters our ego.
00:56:06.780
Yeah, that it's a social construct is something that's, um, totally, totally made up. And if
00:56:12.140
all, if only we can, you know, train, um, people to recognize beauty is, is one thing that they'll
00:56:17.580
act upon that. Even though, you know, we have, we are born with a inborn and intrinsic sense
00:56:23.600
of, um, of what is beautiful and what is ugly just as we are, you know, we have like an,
00:56:28.540
to some degree, you know, inborn, um, moral sense, even though, even though it's not completely,
00:56:34.020
um, educated, right? I mean, it's more morality is something you have to be, um, you have to
00:56:45.700
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you there. And so, yeah, so this, this nominalism, which kind
00:56:51.520
of entered the West philosophy, high middle ages and some of Canterbury, uh, which is
00:56:57.220
originally like a Christian idea that, um, the law of God is true because God wills it
00:57:03.700
and there's, it doesn't have any accord to, um, to logos, to, to objective structure, which
00:57:09.620
is a heresy by the way. Um, but, and what's happened is that the, because the West has
00:57:14.740
killed God, they just dropped God entirely. So they've just gone full nominalism. Um, you
00:57:19.240
know, at least, at least class, like a classical nominalist theistic worldview, there's like
00:57:26.400
a arbitrary God that supports everything. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was, it was in the
00:57:32.480
original form of it. It was at least, you know, there was some acknowledgement of, of
00:57:37.520
God, even though this was a complex, um, logical argument. It wasn't nearly taken to the point
00:57:43.300
that it is today where, um, God and the authority of God is just going to drop completely from the
00:57:49.460
equation, right? Right, exactly. And so what's happened is over time, this is metastasized into
00:57:55.980
our current worldview of nihilism. And that's the thing is this nihilism, as we've said, it's,
00:58:02.320
it's an implied thing. And the philosophical currency, which this implied worldview operates
00:58:07.580
on is this nominalism. It's that like what you do, the meaning of what you do is derived
00:58:13.000
from your perception and social and the social perception of that meaning rather than inherent,
00:58:17.880
any inherent value to the actions or the effects that a value has to the ends, the telos of which
00:58:24.780
you're striving afterwards. Um, and this, if this is true, the reason why this is so important and why,
00:58:30.300
why we go into this, this, the philosophical concept is because if this is true, then that
00:58:34.820
means whoever can control the social and individual values disturbance reality. And the person who's able
00:58:41.900
to do that are the people who are the richest and most powerful. Yeah. Um, unfortunately, you know,
00:58:49.000
liberalism ends up decompiling our culture and, you know, says, um, behold the free market.
00:58:54.880
And what happens is, is that, you know, certain malicious ethnic groups ended up operating through
00:59:01.260
the free market to, you know, gain like total ascendance over, you know, our media and, um, film and
00:59:08.080
other culturally sensitive nodes of our culture and then, um, use their economic power and political
00:59:15.620
power in order to, um, manipulate our moral ideas. Right. I mean, they literally try to redefine morality
00:59:26.200
itself as it's arbitrary things like, uh, racism. I believe, um, I don't believe racism was considered
00:59:34.140
immoral in the United States and, you know, at least until after 1940, probably not even until 1960.
00:59:40.940
I don't think that was, um, the dominant worldview. So we, we had this pseudo morality that's been
00:59:47.320
imposed on us and that we almost conform our lives to, which is of no value, uh, to us. And my personal
00:59:53.960
view is that, you know, morality has always been things like virtues and, you know, conformity to, um,
00:59:59.320
natural law and, um, a moral action would be someone who's honest, right? Someone who has
01:00:08.040
adversity or someone who has integrity or someone who's, um, magnanimous or something like that,
01:00:16.460
you know, or it avoids, you know, obvious, um, sins and all this other, I mean, that's, that's been
01:00:24.440
completely dropped. I mean, so we have people today, like, I mean, according to, you know, our
01:00:28.020
understanding of morality is, are completely devoid, like almost nearly completely devoid
01:00:33.200
of morality. And they're really, you know, when you interact with them, there's some of the most
01:00:37.620
vicious, mean people. Um, they're not benevolent people, for example. Um, they're, they're just
01:00:46.540
extremely like hateful. And I'm not even, I mean, people call me a hater and stuff. I'm not like
01:00:52.420
hateful at all. Um, it's not, you know, a way to act.
01:00:58.600
Yeah, absolutely. And, um, the big problem about this nominalism is that as we've been saying from
01:01:05.840
the beginning of the episode, is that it just, it cuts both ways and it's so saturated in the
01:01:09.880
culture that people, people live this nominalistic worldview, even in the far right. And Mike and I,
01:01:15.740
I just recently recorded a little monologue. My essential contention is I don't, you can't, um,
01:01:22.080
you know, you, there's no lasting solution in this. You can't form the basis of a civilization
01:01:26.720
on these radically, totally opposed and different worldviews. Um, that, that you need, I mean,
01:01:34.740
at a minimum, you know, the recognition of like absolute divine truth and like a cosmic order and so
01:01:41.400
on. And even then, even then, if you, uh, if, even if you, you know, you believe like, you know,
01:01:46.600
Iron March school fascism, that there's this transcendental cosmic order that we're all bound
01:01:50.880
to by natural law, right. Uh, you know, even then there can be radical, radical divergences in,
01:01:57.080
in worldview and civilizational outcome based on the, do those presuppositions, right. Um, and these are
01:02:04.460
just not trivial. And this is the thing. And I mean, people, one of the, the, the things of,
01:02:08.700
of liberalism that it's, is it such a fatal conceit is liberalism itself being a product of
01:02:15.860
European Christendom in, as part of its self critique, sneers at the theological exactness
01:02:24.960
and dogmatic healthfulness of ages previously, where the theological and intellectual vanguard of
01:02:31.740
the society and the civil authorities likewise understood the dramatic and intimate relationship
01:02:37.540
between articulated theology and the implementation of that theology as part of the worldview and the
01:02:43.420
coherence of the civilization as a whole. And so they understood that minor disputes and
01:02:49.660
disagreements in theology often can have radically, radical consequences down the road, right.
01:02:55.280
Yeah. Downstream, like further downstream. I mean, things that are, you know, are just completely
01:02:59.340
academic arguments, you know, even today, like will eventually seep out and pour into, through to,
01:03:08.500
through the popular culture. Um, you know, I brought up the obvious example of free love,
01:03:13.820
for example, the idea, you know, of completely unbridled sexuality, which, you know, according
01:03:18.620
to the Christian tradition is absolutely a radical idea is completely mainstream now. Right. Um, you know,
01:03:25.160
the freakish view is that, um, the, the non-mainstream view is that, you know, morality, I mean, there's
01:03:32.080
an objective morality that should constrain sexuality. And, you know, um, if we try to impose any kind
01:03:39.320
of, um, moral scheme on sexuality, it would be, you know, um, tyrannical. That's how we'd be interpreted
01:03:47.920
today in our modern liberal society. Yeah, exactly. I mean, who are we to say that two
01:03:53.560
lesbians, um, aren't like a happily married couple or can we produce? Right. I mean, the
01:04:00.480
example I really like to use is the word love. I mean, uh, to even begin with, we've talked
01:04:05.820
about many times, you know, four different words in Greek for love and only one in English
01:04:09.500
and our one in English, we're supposed to understand, you know, uh, God so loves the world
01:04:15.160
that he gives his only begotten son to be the same concept as love is love, you know,
01:04:21.760
free love, you know, equal love. These are, this is the same thing, the same type of love.
01:04:26.980
Yeah. Love is if it feels good or do it, you know, just could do it. Um, yeah, exactly.
01:04:33.740
Although, although, although there's, you know, there's, um, is, is a strange contradiction
01:04:39.000
that runs through it, right? It was like, um, morality is a matter of opinion, but racism is
01:04:45.140
absolutely reprehensible and immoral, right? It's a huge contradiction that runs through
01:04:50.800
it. Um, you know, um, where, where was I going with this? Um, well, yeah, no, I agree
01:04:57.300
with you. And I mean, uh, I think that that's a good place to park it and we'll, we'll go
01:05:00.600
for a little break and then after we return, we'll get back into it. All right, cool.
01:05:05.600
So to our listeners, thank you for joining us and stay tuned.
01:05:15.140
It's a great separation, my friends, they have caused me by hearing their spite that
01:05:35.540
my favour was won. It's a great separation, like wise, a vexation, and they shall be sorry
01:05:51.820
Eat, drink and be jolly and care not for folly. Drown away sorrow in a bottle of wine.
01:06:01.480
Pass it to the boys in full-flowing bumpers. Play on the field to pass away time.
01:06:16.140
Farewell to Bond County, I'm bound for to leave you. Seek my heart's fortune in some foreign land.
01:06:25.240
Wear bottles and glasses, my greatest comfort. When we do meet, we will join heart and hand.
01:06:39.740
Farewell to my friends and my good old neighbours. Likewise to the girl, I will never see more.
01:06:48.400
This world, it is white and I'll spend it in pleasures. I care for no one that won't care for me.
01:06:57.740
Eat, drink and be jolly and care not for folly. Drown away sorrow in a bottle of wine.
01:07:07.620
Pass it to the boys in full-flowing bumpers. Play on the fiddle to pass away time.
01:07:18.400
My fortune is small, so freely I own it. But little I have, it is all of my own.
01:07:44.740
I might have lived longer to enjoy it with pleasure. If my poor friends had of left me alone.
01:07:54.080
Eat, drink and be jolly and care not for folly. Drown away sorrow in a bottle of wine.
01:08:03.800
Pass it to the boys in full-flowing bumpers. Play on the fiddle to pass away time.
01:08:14.740
I've money aplenty to bear my expenses. When it's all gone, I'll chop wood and get more.
01:08:27.000
When death it comes on me, I'll freely go with it. Pay up my last dues and go with it home.
01:08:36.740
Eat, drink and be jolly and care not for folly. Drown away sorrow in a bottle of wine.
01:08:55.540
Pass it to the boys in full-flowing bumpers. Play on the fiddle to pass away time.
01:09:05.080
Drink and be jolly and care not for folly. Drown away sorrow in a bottle of wine.
01:09:14.300
Pass it to the boys in full-flowing bumpers. Play on the fiddle to pass away time.
01:09:24.080
Welcome back to Mysterium Pashy's episode 50, Nihilism.
01:09:41.720
I'm your host, Florian Geyer. We're returning with our guest, Hunter Wallace.
01:09:45.260
So, before the break, I think we got into the big issues of nihilism.
01:09:51.980
And now we're going to kind of complete our little philosophical discussion and end with some solutions.
01:09:57.000
And then we'll talk about a few other issues in the head of Kalahega News.
01:10:00.320
So, I figured that we would start with talking about how the values of the Enlightenment
01:10:08.580
essentially lead to the total hedonism and nihilism that we have today.
01:10:17.220
Now, there is a brilliant, brilliant little infographic that I'm going to see if I can pull up here
01:10:21.300
and include in the description that was produced by Iron March back when they were still producing their fantastic things
01:10:29.300
and not being harassed by the Russian government, you know, as you do, as you do.
01:10:36.960
And so, it essentially, in this nice little algorithm of the liberal slash cultural Marxist views.
01:10:43.400
And it begins with the question, do you believe that everyone is equal?
01:10:46.980
Do you believe in egalitarianism, which is one of the key ideas of the Enlightenment?
01:10:52.020
And this goes back to Rousseauian and Lockean ideas of Tabula Rasa, of the blank slate, that the—here.
01:11:00.200
I'll just—I'll read through the flowchart, and the information is so on point.
01:11:05.040
I think it will more eloquently describe what I'm getting at here.
01:11:09.680
You know, belief in equality, despite differences, social equality, eventually, upon realization,
01:11:17.260
changes into a belief of equality because all are the same.
01:11:23.540
If you accept naturalistic equality, you must accept feminism,
01:11:31.260
It shifts into natural equality narrative of gender as a social construct,
01:11:36.780
implying lack of biological differences between men and women.
01:11:39.680
Attributing existing perceptions of the sexes as being artificial and beneficial to the patriarchy,
01:11:44.960
which should—the worldview of which shouldn't be changed.
01:11:50.740
And so on, if you accept this, then gender becomes unbiological.
01:11:59.160
Therefore, a man can identify as a woman and a woman as a man,
01:12:04.140
If people are naturalistically equal, if there is a consistently applied philosophy
01:12:12.680
in and of itself, it entails the very destruction of gender,
01:12:18.560
And this—you know, the great wonder, I would say, as a caveat,
01:12:24.500
is none of us ever need to make arguments by slippery slope fallacies anymore.
01:12:28.780
Because, you know, if you watch a man fall down a ridge and break his neck,
01:12:37.780
And so all you need to do is look at the history and point out where things have gone.
01:12:47.760
And so, of course—but anyway, if you believe that,
01:12:49.120
if you take naturalist egalitarianism to be seriously,
01:12:51.920
then, of course, you know, transsexualism is perfectly legitimate,
01:13:03.840
between the discrete categories of human gender
01:13:07.080
and their sexual or lack thereof relationship with each other.
01:13:14.840
then you've already come to discard the idea that gender and sexuality are innate.
01:13:18.780
And if that's the case, then it goes immediately to, like, bestiality.
01:13:32.740
you believe in this total naturalistic egalitarianism,
01:13:42.520
and all animals have a certain dignity to them.
01:13:47.420
or none of them is endowed with a special consecration.
01:13:57.040
because there's no hierarchy of animal behavior
01:14:03.700
So you can't make a justification on that set of virtue ethics
01:14:10.840
And then, of course, from gender and all of this,
01:14:22.260
Because if there's no biologically discrete categories
01:14:32.680
impact one's ability to participate in sexual activity?
01:14:44.780
It's not a question of whether there is a meaning
01:14:52.680
And so there's no greater moral value of that end
01:15:18.140
where you just go straight to having sex with animals,
01:15:20.920
I mean, we use what sounds like extreme examples,
01:15:26.880
in the long sweep of the history of liberalism,
01:15:40.200
plummeting close towards the bottom of the slope.
01:16:01.960
where there would be a revolution amongst women
01:17:20.360
your gender is stamped on every cell of your body.
01:17:27.440
transsexuals who've come to protest us at rallies.
01:17:40.380
it doesn't matter if you have surgery or you pump yourself full of hormones.
01:17:43.800
you're just living in denial artificially of your nature and stuff.
01:18:12.660
I think that what we were trying to elaborate is that the,
01:18:27.440
the mainstream of the French revolution wasn't advocating having sex with animals.
01:18:44.880
I think Voltaire would be one example and Hume would be another.
01:18:58.700
helped design the constitution of South Carolina,
01:19:07.940
strangely participated in the slave trade himself.
01:19:14.480
successive generations have taken these broad principles and it's kind of even lost touch with a lot of stuff in liberals.
01:19:29.140
And oftentimes when you have a revolutionary new ideas that are at odds with the status quo,
01:19:35.520
there's a much more limited imposition of those ideas or fleshing out of that worldview,
01:19:41.360
basically to appeal to the respectability and the normality of everyday life.
01:19:48.260
like if you're very consistent with what you think,
01:19:56.080
the revolution of 1917 was just the continuation of the revolution of 96,
01:20:20.100
And going into like Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminists,
01:20:23.620
like the actual Bavarian Illuminati who were like,
01:20:42.020
Sarah from Rose wrote a very excellent book called nihilism,
01:20:46.480
he lays out basically the classic orthodox argument that man himself,
01:20:52.220
all is constructed according to a certain nature.
01:20:54.600
And the denial of that nature does not change the reality of that existence.
01:21:02.180
is created spiritual and he's designed to have communion with something greater than himself,
01:21:07.140
something transcendent to worship that and so on.
01:21:10.260
And to engage in a dynamic relationship with him.
01:21:28.100
replaces the figure of the deity with his own ego.
01:21:39.100
And so what happens is that the desires and the whims,
01:21:42.480
the satisfactions of the ego are God to him because they are the,
01:21:50.760
And they determine the structure of his reality and the content of his beliefs.
01:22:30.360
is enough to ostracize you from the mainstream.
01:22:36.860
using the wrong pronoun in some countries is a grave offense.
01:22:58.160
the truth has absolutely nothing to do with the law and true claims may very well
01:23:35.060
non-penetrative forms of bestiality are perfectly legal.
01:23:51.780
mystery fashion is almost every episode that we don't speak in hyperbole.
01:23:56.420
And the reason why it sounds like we're speaking in,
01:24:02.840
very wild terms is because this is the nature and the extremity of the situation.
01:24:15.460
the most negative social critics of a hundred years ago couldn't have anticipated,
01:24:29.860
that was beyond the limits of their imagination.
01:25:19.740
you can look at Europe where the age ratios are just getting out of whack.
01:25:48.880
the lessons of natural law are the consequences,
01:25:55.940
natural law against banging your head against the wall.
01:26:15.340
And a lot of people just can't even understand or articulate why.
01:26:32.600
which is most pleasing and flattering to itself.
01:26:34.720
And then it seeks to impose that world view upon the world around it.
01:26:38.980
and it wants others to conform to its world view.
01:26:50.340
to match the perceived reality of those suffering from mental illness.
01:27:38.720
a male to female tranny winning the women's league and wrestling or something.
01:27:47.740
I heard about Sam Hyde's most recent victory in Texas.
01:28:02.600
That's where the tranny wrestler I'm thinking of.
01:28:12.160
desegregation of men and women's restrooms is already happening.
01:28:21.960
I've seen some stores where they used to have like,
01:28:29.180
And they're trying to get rid of that to conform to this latest,
01:28:51.760
we've really been in a permanent state of social revolution for centuries.
01:29:17.220
deconstruct and to congenerate the very foundations of the human nature in order to create a new,
01:29:24.360
kind of eschatological man and reality upon the edifices of the deconstructed,
01:29:36.280
We did an episode on this before on the distinction between,
01:29:40.180
theological revolution and political revolution.
01:29:43.480
And I think that it's very critical to make this distinction because sometimes we run it,
01:29:47.200
especially with more traditionalist Christian thinkers,
01:29:54.960
this revolutionary Jacobinism of defending the old order of monarchism and so on.
01:30:04.080
political ethos as a rebellion against natural law.
01:30:08.260
Whereas revolutionarily can mean literally just that,
01:30:16.720
if their status quo is itself a deviation from natural law and you use,
01:30:36.440
It doesn't mean that you want chicks with dicks.
01:31:17.380
even though we've been living in a permanent state of social revolution and we're just seeking relief from it.
01:31:39.220
the ego is enthroned as the sole articulating factor,
01:31:43.700
of truth in society and the legitimizing factor of,
01:31:50.800
whoever can control and influence the ego of man,
01:31:55.740
it's Christian theological worldview that it's corrupt,
01:32:03.980
that human beings are kind of shitty and they do all sorts of strange and,
01:32:10.800
even if they don't want to send to the theological implications of that,
01:32:21.780
use that moral education because it was understood that,
01:32:34.260
not live in a way conducive to civilization and,
01:32:55.200
what is good and leave it up to the individual.
01:32:58.540
And we've kind of shifted from that phase of liberalism to the phase where,
01:33:04.220
the orthodoxy of political correctness is absolutely,
01:33:15.760
Because liberalism is kind of the scum to that,
01:33:24.180
And then I think that's very critical to understand is that,
01:33:32.180
worldviews because their very essence is the negation of essence or is deviant from that,
01:33:41.440
real logos and spiritual order of the universe.
01:33:59.340
sort of a zombie that's necromantically animated.
01:34:12.080
The dark energy which propels it and which animates it needs to become ever more and more acute,
01:34:21.180
unholy and unnatural edifice onwards towards its dark ends,
01:34:25.580
And so that's what happens is liberalism can't,
01:34:32.940
because the American revolution in many ways played on things that were already organic and present to Anglo-Saxon political culture.
01:34:45.100
this is something that I've talked about many times,
01:34:48.460
And one of the things that I have a lot of common cause with Southerners and Southern nationalists is that,
01:34:54.020
we need to recognize and to embrace the organic,
01:34:59.120
and historical unique traditions of Anglo-Saxon political liberty and common law and so on.
01:35:19.120
you had the rights of Englishmen and you had the common law and,
01:36:00.400
It was the universalization of a particular local political tradition.
01:36:15.040
except that they can subscribe to just an advanced form of the same ideology of that,
01:36:18.860
the kind of the liberal enlightenment hubris of the,
01:36:37.740
the enlightenment philosophers and stuff and their project that,
01:36:59.260
the enlightenment kind of blinded us to our own traditions.
01:37:04.740
our own traditions and point of views was naturalized.
01:37:18.360
the challenge of the future and one of the reasons why I,
01:37:22.860
call myself a fascist or national socialist is because I think that there is the,
01:37:27.940
the challenge of the modern age is that we have to adopt these traditional,
01:37:33.140
to the circumstances that are afforded by postmodern,
01:37:38.080
and the great difficulty is that in a pre-industrial era,
01:37:41.180
there are all of these fairly successful perennial forms of government,
01:37:50.960
but applied differently in the modern age where we have things like mass communication
01:37:58.840
just a perfect example in the instance of the United States is I would say to
01:38:02.280
monarchists present me your sacral lineage to be anointed with the oil of the
01:38:16.880
And one thing I was curious about and I've written about in the past is that,
01:38:32.480
combine Islamic fundamentalism with modern technology over there.
01:39:22.420
the scripture and the dogma from the living tradition of the,
01:39:27.180
the community of the prophet and the civilizational military edifice that was built upon.
01:39:37.320
it's unfortunately it's because of the fall of Rome,
01:39:38.980
which happened because the Muslims conquered it.
01:40:07.920
And so whatever you've put in the void to compensate for the lack of your day,
01:40:13.620
will become your day in the sense that it is the arbitrating pole and center of your worldview upon which your interaction and appreciation of all other things are conditioned.
01:40:24.440
There's no such thing as kind of brute facts that are just there in the universe that are independently apprehended without,
01:40:34.040
Even the scientific method itself is a framework.
01:40:48.940
I've interact with those people on a daily basis.
01:41:11.000
and this is one of the reasons why I've been extremely,
01:41:25.660
I'm interested in hearing what you have to say on the subject.
01:41:31.080
my contention has always been that it's essentially,
01:41:37.300
a political ideology and worldview and just trying to give like a theological assertion to prop up,
01:41:45.080
I applaud the honesty because these guys realize that there's a necessity for that spiritualized worldview.
01:41:51.960
Savitri Devi was at least honest enough to go to India and like be a Hindu and marry a brown dude.
01:42:00.420
And then make the theological assertion that Adolf Hitler was the ninth avatar of Vishnu.
01:42:43.420
because I think that the only solution is not ideological,
01:42:47.280
because I think that there is a matter of the heart and that it's,
01:42:55.400
and the predicates that are required to sustain a,
01:42:57.960
an integrated worldview and philosophy of right and wrong.
01:43:10.840
and so that's why I think that the only thing that's capable of,
01:43:19.780
and that's what I think is ultimately like the real solution to not just our
01:43:39.280
Should we look to kings and princes to put to right the inequalities between rich
01:43:43.960
Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person's gold and
01:43:49.640
Should we beg the emperor to impose a tax upon the rich so great that it
01:43:53.500
reduces them to the level of the poor and then to share the proceeds of the
01:43:58.160
Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing and do much harm.
01:44:01.320
Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of
01:44:08.580
the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful,
01:44:11.800
while the poor who received the gold from the hands of the soldiers would feel
01:44:14.420
no gratitude because no generosity would have prompted such a gift.
01:44:24.120
Material justice cannot be accomplished by compulsion.
01:44:28.380
The only way to achieve true justice is to change people's hearts first and then
01:44:57.400
It's how we regulate our conduct between ourselves.
01:45:02.200
and industrial society has given rise to the idea of,
01:45:06.580
and it has specifically inculcated a policy of the depersonalization of the
01:45:12.460
the reduction of them to an organic formless blob to make them easier to
01:45:17.260
Whereas Christianity has always been a profoundly personal religion.
01:45:24.200
You can't give a bunch more personal of the universe and cosmology than
01:45:30.320
this emphasis on the person and the personal virtue and deification,
01:45:33.620
which is at the source of its greatness and its,
01:45:51.340
and the big thing is just that it's a mystical thing,
01:45:54.940
it's about the mystical worship of Jesus Christ and the grace that he
01:46:03.600
it says very clearly that Jesus Christ came so that men could become sons of
01:46:12.680
I'll say this and I'll give it right back over to you because I'm really keen to
01:46:17.800
This history lecture called a history of Europe from its origins by Joseph
01:46:30.520
basically from Constantine to the fall of Constantinople,
01:46:33.120
tracing the origin of the Mediterranean and Christian civilization.
01:46:39.180
when I was younger is what converted me to Christianity and what really kind of
01:46:42.720
I guess a nationalist is when I learned the history of our own civilization.
01:46:47.400
this historian is neither Christian nor a nationalist.
01:46:55.400
my point is just that the foundation of our civilization is Christian.
01:47:07.680
and the classical civilization was inherited by Christendom.
01:47:22.580
my proposal is that we return to the core values and logos of the ancient world,
01:47:26.860
which enabled it to thrive and which produced empires,
01:47:29.300
which escaped the cycle of rise and fall of civilization like Eastern Rome.
01:47:40.940
the modern incarnation of Christianity as we're all familiar with.
01:48:07.280
tracing things and trying to get at the root of things is that,
01:48:10.620
what we call Christianity in the United States has been so corrupted by
01:48:25.240
it's not like the dominant Christianity in our,
01:48:32.880
Western civilization without understanding the Bible,
01:48:36.180
without understanding Christianity and the Christian tradition.
01:48:41.640
whereas it used to be the dominant Christianity,
01:48:50.420
the churches conformed to the secular mainstream,
01:48:53.100
which as we all know is controlled by that certain group,
01:48:57.860
who doesn't even have to be named here because everybody knows who that group
01:49:14.020
that's the kind of Christianity that they encounter.
01:49:35.180
And it's kind of easy to see how people can like react to that and like,
01:49:44.300
I think Nietzsche was right in his critiques of bourgeois Christianity.
01:49:55.160
is in his prophecy and his acuteness of the understanding of the modern world and
01:50:09.260
this whole thing and the genealogy of morality.
01:50:13.920
you can look at the GM and you can look at like,
01:50:26.220
it was one of the things you got to give Nietzsche credit.
01:50:31.560
I just didn't believe that had anything to do with morality.
01:50:37.400
all these modern taboos and stuff are nothing to do with morality and we've lost touch with morality.
01:51:17.520
And we've got to find some way to make that for that to make sense to,
01:51:24.740
my proposal has always been that the one surefire thing you can do is have a family.
01:51:34.960
this podcast is serious about the survival of their people and the success.
01:51:39.460
This program is because I'm living in North America.
01:51:41.980
I usually talk about the North American context.
01:51:44.400
If you're interested in the long-term survival of the European peoples,
01:52:02.120
the real successful long-term thing you can do is you can have a family and you can
01:52:08.160
And because our worldviews are true and they're in accordance with natural law,
01:52:28.220
the seeds of a nation spring from your loins like Abraham.
01:52:35.400
some of us to kind of preserve the remnants of Western civilization and reignite the flame
01:52:51.400
hedonistic worldview is produced both in terms of,
01:53:03.720
I think it's our job to kind of like be a vanguard here and show them a viable alternative.
01:53:11.640
we went through this catastrophic phase of our civilization,
01:53:19.640
This is what morality was before it was displaced by all this other stuff.
01:53:28.260
the fall of our civilization has been precisely because there's been a failure of the,
01:53:35.540
it's because we're not willing to have our eyes plucked out over theological disputes.
01:54:10.980
I gotta jump off here cause I told this guy I talked to him at 16.
01:54:24.780
we'll omit Kali of your news and we'll just come to,
01:54:36.480
in order to pose any long-term civilizational threat against the system,
01:54:43.060
which is just as comprehensive and just as capable and just as able and more so indeed,
01:54:52.480
harmony with the cosmic order than the liberal one is.
01:54:55.540
And merely reacting against it and pursuing perceived goods on the basis of a sense of reaction is going to get us nowhere.
01:55:02.220
And it hasn't gotten us anywhere and being more reactionary than the last,
01:55:11.100
it's not victory because our problems go back further.
01:55:23.380
You don't have a serious long-term solution to our problems would be my,
01:55:30.160
unfortunately for the endeavors of religious ecumenism,
01:55:36.820
in terms of working with people on the far right.
01:55:38.300
I think that Christianity is the only long-term civilizationally,
01:55:56.560
me and you are absolutely moving in the same direction and we absolutely,
01:56:09.500
I'm in the middle of a huge research project about this.
01:56:15.260
we really got to find out a way to like sell this to,
01:56:35.400
we kind of had both of us had to kind of like seek this out on our own.
01:56:58.540
And this has been one of the most fascinating conversations I've had in a long time now.