The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 24, 2024


A System Is What It Does | Guest: The Distributist | 1⧸23⧸24


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 19 minutes

Words per Minute

180.75935

Word Count

14,454

Sentence Count

806

Misogynist Sentences

9

Hate Speech Sentences

49


Summary

Dave, the Distributist, joins me to talk about what a system is and what it does not do, and why it's important to understand the difference between a system and a system. Plus, a new cereal that has zero sugar but still tastes great.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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00:00:30.220 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:31.600 Thanks for joining me this afternoon, or actually this evening, sorry.
00:00:34.620 A little later than usual.
00:00:36.300 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:40.200 So you have these weird moments on the internet where you post something without really thinking much about it.
00:00:45.580 You just say, oh, there's something I recognize.
00:00:47.420 That's useful.
00:00:48.480 And all of a sudden, there's a firestorm that develops around it.
00:00:51.600 There's a moment like that this week.
00:00:53.160 But I think beyond just being a little bit of Twitter drama,
00:00:56.580 it reveals a really important moment that we're in,
00:01:00.200 a political moment where we have a lot of different factions,
00:01:03.100 the moderate liberals, conservatives, some of us more on the dissonant right,
00:01:07.600 all trying to look at different systems and understand things differently.
00:01:11.760 So I brought on Dave, the distributist, today to talk a little bit about that.
00:01:16.280 Thank you, Dave, for coming on.
00:01:17.780 My pleasure.
00:01:18.700 I apologize for pushing your schedule back.
00:01:21.360 This is the wages of the wage cuck life that I'm dealing with.
00:01:25.420 So I'm starting late.
00:01:26.320 And I totally sympathize.
00:01:28.480 I remember those days.
00:01:30.140 It's not so long ago.
00:01:31.900 So I hear you.
00:01:33.420 I'm glad that you made the time to come on, though,
00:01:35.280 because you wrote it's one of those moments where this thing happened.
00:01:37.800 And I was like, I need to write this up as an essay.
00:01:39.900 I really don't want to write this up as an essay.
00:01:41.760 And then you wrote it up as a perfect essay.
00:01:43.600 I was like, great.
00:01:44.480 Awesome.
00:01:44.880 I'll just have Dave on to talk about it.
00:01:46.780 That's a much better solution to this problem.
00:01:49.000 But we're going to dive into this Twitter drama.
00:01:52.960 What is what the system is or a system is what it does.
00:01:55.980 All this different, all these different ideas, guys.
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00:03:27.220 All right.
00:03:27.960 So like I said, I saw this post on Twitter explaining this idea that the purpose of a
00:03:33.640 system is what it does.
00:03:34.800 I had never seen this terminology before.
00:03:37.140 I know Dave is a computer engineer.
00:03:39.520 He's familiar with his stuff.
00:03:40.920 So he's like, oh, yeah, obviously.
00:03:42.300 I had never seen it before.
00:03:43.600 But when I saw it, I was immediately like, oh, this is like half my content.
00:03:47.940 Half of my content is trying to explain to the average conservative why these systems
00:03:53.860 don't work the way they're described, why they have alternative purposes.
00:03:57.180 I've written pieces on this previously without having the terminology.
00:04:01.240 And as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, perfect.
00:04:03.220 That's just a great encapsulation of a principle that people need to grasp.
00:04:07.860 And all of a sudden, this became a firestorm.
00:04:09.720 But before we get into the firestorm, could you explain a little bit what this terminology
00:04:13.800 means?
00:04:14.320 Yeah, so I'm not exactly sure where POSIWID or the purpose of a system is what it does
00:04:19.140 comes from.
00:04:19.780 I'm pretty sure it comes from systems and early machine learning.
00:04:24.760 But it's something that I'm familiar with.
00:04:26.700 It's like, well, these classic rules of engineering you get taught in college.
00:04:30.180 But I'm very familiar with it as an industrial engineer.
00:04:34.300 And the idea is, and this is, I think, going to be kind of a theme of this livestream, is
00:04:39.500 to really try to take ownership over what systems actually are.
00:04:45.360 So when you deal with a complex system like a machine or an assembly line, there are so
00:04:49.860 many moving parts.
00:04:51.280 And there are so many ways that it can go wrong.
00:04:53.640 That if this turns into a question about the ultimate source or the intention of what something
00:04:59.760 was designed to do, you'll never get to the bottom of what actually is going on.
00:05:03.940 It'll just be constant recriminations back and forth like you see in politics.
00:05:08.160 So one of the things that engineers, particularly in my field, are kind of what's impressed upon
00:05:15.540 us is the idea that the system you put into operation, it does what it does.
00:05:21.420 And it doesn't matter what you intended it to do.
00:05:23.120 It doesn't matter how many different complex things there are and which one went wrong.
00:05:27.420 The total effect is what you're always trying to address.
00:05:31.100 And anything else is kind of a way to skirt ownership over what the system ultimately delivers.
00:05:37.700 And I think the reason why this caught on is, well, there's kind of, there's a bunch
00:05:42.960 of weird back and forths on Twitter, as I'm sure you're aware, but the reason why it's
00:05:47.600 so useful for the right in particular is it just, it's just very apparent that the opponents
00:05:53.460 of the right, the left, and more particularly sort of the liberal centrists, have a very difficult
00:06:00.420 time actually taking ownership over social systems as they are.
00:06:05.340 They kind of deal in these very well-crafted kind of debate club arguments.
00:06:11.040 But when you actually think about what the system is, what it's intended to do, nothing
00:06:18.360 makes sense anymore.
00:06:19.540 They either end up embracing anthropology that's frankly wrong in two ways, or in one of two
00:06:27.160 ways, I should say, or they end up in a situation where if they were to take ownership, they just
00:06:32.720 wouldn't in any realistic situation.
00:06:34.580 And this particularly obviously comes up in things like, you know, disparate impact and
00:06:39.860 concepts of equity inside, you know, in between demographic groups in certain systems like
00:06:46.480 academia, especially around things like affirmative action.
00:06:50.600 So that's in a nutshell, I guess.
00:06:52.820 No, it makes sense.
00:06:55.260 And like I said, I've been, I try to apply this so often for a conservative audience because
00:07:00.100 they look at systems, okay, the education system, it's there to teach you reading, writing,
00:07:04.520 arithmetic, and instead it keeps churning out, you know, dedicated left-wing ideologues.
00:07:09.740 You know, the border patrol is there to keep people out, ostensibly patrol the border and
00:07:15.000 control it.
00:07:15.600 And yet it's cutting razor wire and letting people in, you know, we have a military, a
00:07:21.280 department of defense that's supposed to defend the United States, but it spends all of its
00:07:25.300 time defending every border, but the border of the country it's assigned to defend.
00:07:30.000 And so you have to look at those systems and say, is every one of these systems just inept?
00:07:35.700 Or at some point, do we need to own the fact that these systems do something different
00:07:39.920 than their original, than the original design or their, their, their stated purpose?
00:07:44.900 It feels like the left gets a lot of mileage over kind of taking these institutions that
00:07:49.940 once served a specific purpose, or at least labeling them with something that they're supposed
00:07:54.740 to do in one sense.
00:07:56.260 And instead it produces a different outcome and we're never supposed to notice that different
00:08:01.180 outcome.
00:08:01.540 We're never supposed to notice the fact that the system is actually routinely producing
00:08:05.180 something that benefits particular patronage network, particular groups, particular political
00:08:10.260 agendas, instead of the thing that's stated to do.
00:08:12.880 I know it's a little different from how, how, you know, people like local distance took
00:08:17.200 issue with it, but, but that's just a basic thing that I try to explain to people regularly,
00:08:22.200 but that that's a strategy by the left that seems to continuously work against the right
00:08:26.840 as it stands now.
00:08:28.360 Well, I mean, the, the left benefits from fundamentally broken systems that have no solution.
00:08:32.620 And, you know, I, I, again, I kind of using my example from the article I wrote on my sub
00:08:37.840 stack, the take, for instance, the promises of civil rights.
00:08:43.440 This is something that we, we kind of skirt around with when it comes to circles like James
00:08:47.840 Lindsay and Christopher Rufo and local distance.
00:08:50.380 And I know they're not the same person.
00:08:51.560 And I think that I regard them very, very differently because of the roles they play, but, you know,
00:08:57.880 of sensibly what civil rights promised specifically the African American community, but America
00:09:02.920 more generally was a totally integrated American polity.
00:09:07.880 That's obviously what it promised.
00:09:10.100 And our system is incapable of delivering that even with massive amounts of racial preferences
00:09:16.980 and affirmative action and disparate impact.
00:09:19.540 And, and the problem is, is that the left sort of benefits from the situation where you
00:09:25.060 have a system that can't possibly give people what was promised because now everybody in order
00:09:32.200 to participate in this civil rights system has to kind of get on board with the lie.
00:09:37.380 They have to be co-owners with the lie.
00:09:39.620 And so now you're in charge of a hiring committee at Google.
00:09:42.320 You can't just say, well, there aren't qualified applicants from these demographic groups.
00:09:47.740 Now you have to get on board with this whole idea of we're trying to do this.
00:09:51.720 And we have this, this DEI to, to filter out all the biases we know we have, because, because
00:09:57.820 the, the, the fundamental lie is, is that these systems would be totally integrated if
00:10:02.760 the standards were completely fair.
00:10:04.400 And since you can't admit that totally neutral standards and equal consideration would lead to
00:10:10.080 unequal outcomes, you naturally become co-owners of the lie, which is exactly the situation the
00:10:16.460 left continuously benefits from because the left benefits, and I know you said this many times,
00:10:20.900 this is sort of the Nick Land point.
00:10:22.640 When every single answer that can be legitimately entertained in the system is simultaneously
00:10:27.640 bullshit or wrong or a lie, then the only thing that governs a right answer from a wrong one
00:10:33.960 is discourse and litigation and dialectic, a popularity contest, which a bureaucrat pay,
00:10:41.080 endorses this idea more than any others.
00:10:43.360 This is like, you have entire academic departments that are complete bullshit.
00:10:46.600 They can't generate good results because the questions they are asking are questions that
00:10:52.320 aren't going to have answers, this side of total omniscience.
00:10:56.600 So, you know, the, the entire field becomes politicized.
00:10:59.520 And this is, this is the same effect of the left.
00:11:01.380 The, the civil rights regime has to be politicized because nobody is willing to stand up here and
00:11:07.740 own the fact the system of equal consideration is going to lead to massively unequal outcomes.
00:11:14.260 Yeah.
00:11:14.820 And this was, no, this was a weird thing because when I had Chris Ruffo on the show talking about
00:11:19.700 his book, you know, I specifically said this to him.
00:11:22.720 I said, okay, what happens when we kind of return to this theoretical, but didn't actually exist
00:11:29.840 nineties colorblind regime that, that, you know, you guys all kind of want to round, wind things
00:11:34.380 back to what happens when we actually get back to this point and then disparities still exist.
00:11:39.920 Like what, what will you do?
00:11:41.540 And his answer was, oh, well, we'll just tell people to work harder.
00:11:45.400 Like we'll just tell different groups to work harder.
00:11:47.240 I'm like, what fantasy land are you living in where that's a political strategy?
00:11:51.700 That's actually the worst solution.
00:11:53.240 I mean, like, so, you know, we all, I'm not going to stop mincing words here, right?
00:11:57.160 We all know that the elephant in the room essentially is the African-American community.
00:12:01.260 This is the principal community whose grievances were trying to be addressed by civil rights.
00:12:05.660 And that's also the community that has persistently lower outcomes than we would want them to have.
00:12:10.980 What are you going to do when we obliterate the black professional class if affirmative action
00:12:15.220 was actually gotten rid of?
00:12:16.560 And the worst possible answer is it's a meritocracy.
00:12:21.900 So, because it's not like people, are they going to forget that they're all black?
00:12:25.980 Are they not going to notice that the black professional class has been obliterated?
00:12:29.520 Are we going to forget that there was this whole history of racial animosity?
00:12:32.980 Are people going to not remember that we promised an integrated middle class?
00:12:37.140 I mean, they're going to notice this stuff.
00:12:38.840 And so the national discourse is going to be like, well, there's no African-Americans in our elite
00:12:42.940 colleges because they're not, they don't have enough merit.
00:12:45.840 Like, they weren't morally sufficient enough to do this.
00:12:49.420 That's not going to fly.
00:12:50.720 And not only is it not going to fly, none of these guys who promote meritocracy would say
00:12:55.300 that in public ever.
00:12:56.180 Now, I want to cut Christopher Ruffo a huge piece of slack here because I understand that
00:13:02.980 he is in a political position and he has to talk to funders and, without mincing words again,
00:13:10.560 you know, the boomer class, for lack of a better word.
00:13:12.920 And we have to kind of walk through a bunch of difficult realities.
00:13:16.480 And so it's not surprising that he has to be more politic about this than people who
00:13:22.640 are operating in a pure ideas space like Wokel and James Lindsay.
00:13:28.160 But, dude, I don't believe this anymore.
00:13:30.780 I don't believe that you're going to institute, you know, like Helen Pluckrose.
00:13:34.840 I don't believe for a second Helen Pluckrose is ready to get up in public and tell the
00:13:39.960 African-American community that the reason why it is effectively not represented in elites
00:13:45.360 is because they don't have enough merit.
00:13:47.420 I do not believe that she's willing to hone her ideas like that.
00:13:51.080 And on paper, they all tell me, they all tell me, oh, yeah, sure.
00:13:54.620 I read Steven Pinker.
00:13:56.060 Oh, yeah, sure.
00:13:56.900 I read the bell curve.
00:13:57.900 I understand that these problems could be fundamentally unfixable, but there's still
00:14:03.060 a total refusal to own the ultimate outcomes of that system.
00:14:09.220 You know, there's another article I wrote.
00:14:10.760 I didn't send it out because it was a little bit crude, but it was about sort of effeminacy
00:14:16.060 in politics.
00:14:17.900 And what I constantly feel like I'm encountering in sort of liberal centrist types is a certain
00:14:23.480 effeminate attitude.
00:14:24.580 Like, this is the answer that feels good, but I'm fundamentally not going to own the
00:14:29.180 consequences of this answer.
00:14:30.660 I'm just going to, you know, the system's just going to do, I know that this is the
00:14:33.720 right answer, TM, so I'm going to slap it on my solution folder.
00:14:37.980 And then when what actually happens, what I know is going to happen, happens, I just won't
00:14:42.600 be in the conversation when that occurs, right?
00:14:45.240 When the difficult fallout happens, I just won't be in the conversation.
00:14:49.480 So you see this with the progressives and trans women in sports.
00:14:55.180 Oh yeah, the right answer is that trans women are women and belong in women's sports.
00:14:59.660 So when there's a major injury or God forbid a death because of this, I guarantee you they
00:15:04.640 won't be in this conversation.
00:15:06.400 Or even Steven Pinker, who I mentioned, this is kind of a bugbear, not bugbear, but I'm really
00:15:12.500 irritated at this guy because he was so formative in my experience as an atheist before.
00:15:17.200 And he wrote the book on why the blank slate was incorrect, why the assumptions of the
00:15:23.220 blank slate were wrong, and how groups could have very different average behaviors for
00:15:29.340 a variety of reasons, some being most likely fundamentally unfixable or unchangeable.
00:15:36.120 And then the majority of the rest of his career is essentially covering up for the mainstream
00:15:42.540 diversity apparatus with, you know, some asides saying, oh guys, you really shouldn't go too far
00:15:47.540 to the point where the father of genetics, James Watson, gets his Nobel prize taken away from him
00:15:54.380 for mentioning this inconvenient fact, the same inconvenient fact that Steven Pinker built his
00:15:59.940 career writing books about.
00:16:02.240 And Steven Pinker says, oh wow, guys, you really shouldn't defenestrate the founder of
00:16:07.120 modern genetics, that's not nice. And then he goes on and writes a book about how the
00:16:12.260 enlightenment has solved the problem about open public discourse. And weren't all those Catholics
00:16:17.120 terrible for persecuting Galileo, but now we've fixed the problem and everyone can just speak
00:16:22.100 their minds in public. I mean, these guys all have the right ideas on paper. If you look at their
00:16:29.820 arguments, well, there are some holes in their arguments and we can get into that, but they have
00:16:35.040 positions that seem like they work in some kind of hypothetical reality, but there's no ownership
00:16:40.800 of the actual consequences of those realities. The inconvenient facts about how humans actually
00:16:47.320 behave and how they actually focus on group outcomes is swept under the rug. And all we have is an answer
00:16:54.980 that works for some kind of theoretically perfect system. This is not going to work in the modern world.
00:17:01.100 And I know I went on for a while there, but that's fine. No, it's, it's, it's really frustrating
00:17:07.260 because whenever you get in a conversation with these, with some of these kind of moderate liberal
00:17:12.920 or, you know, uh, conservative types, you end up getting this, this kind of hatchling thing where
00:17:17.940 it's like, oh, I don't, I don't know. Like, what do you mean? You know, what, what could,
00:17:21.860 why could there be different? What could all of this, you know, where, where could this come from?
00:17:25.660 I've never heard of this before. Oh, Hey guys, why are you assuming that African-Americans are
00:17:29.680 somehow going to perform worse than Asian-Americans? Like, why is that your automatic assumption?
00:17:35.500 Or, or, or just, or, or there's, or there's this baiting to just like, oh, well, what are you,
00:17:39.620 what are you going to say? You know, like, like, I know you're not allowed to point this out.
00:17:43.800 Like, so I'm just going to have, I'm going to stand here and wait for you to be a heretic.
00:17:47.740 I'm just pushing this conversation over and over again until I finally get to the point where,
00:17:52.320 you know, we, we have to touch this. And since you touched it first,
00:17:55.660 you're, you know, you're the one who's, who's the bad guy. I get to play the hero.
00:17:58.640 Who's maintaining the neutrality of the system.
00:18:01.280 And there's also this, there's also, this is something that's worked for ages for unread
00:18:04.840 Americans. And it always struck me as, well, when I was a shit lib and I am repent, I'm,
00:18:11.360 I'm penitent about being a shit lib, but there's always this game that blue Americans play with
00:18:17.500 red Americans. I don't even know if they know we're playing it, but it's like, it's sort of,
00:18:22.380 it's a, what is it? The Aesop's fable with, with the crow and the fox, right? And the crow has
00:18:26.260 cheese and the fox flatters the crow. Like you're, you're singing what must be so beautiful. And,
00:18:31.200 and then the crow tries to sing and the cheese falls out of its mouth. But the blue American
00:18:35.040 game is like, Oh, aren't we the greatest country in the world? I mean, you could fix this problem,
00:18:40.360 right? You could fix all these problems. I'm sure you could fix the achievement gap. Like
00:18:44.340 we're the greatest country in the world, right? You kind of flatter the, the red American side to
00:18:50.160 thinking that any problem that is like, or, you know, for instance, immigration, like we could
00:18:55.600 assimilate a million immigrants a year. We could assimilate 3 million immigrants a year. Come on,
00:19:00.160 we're the greatest country in the world. And, uh, you, you know, that, that you're basically
00:19:05.860 concerned trolling, right? There's a Christian version of this as well, right? We try to appeal
00:19:10.860 to the perception of, of infinite charity, knowing full well that this charity would require sacrifices
00:19:17.820 that we are not capable of making. We'd have to essentially sacrifice our children's future,
00:19:23.000 which is not strictly speaking, a Christian sacrifice to make it. It is, you know, selling
00:19:28.020 your children into slavery, uh, and, and lying for the sake of, of appearing beneficent is not
00:19:33.940 actual charity, um, or actual humility. Uh, but, but in, in the moment, in the argument,
00:19:40.820 the invitation by the shit lib side is always, well, you can be the righteous one. You can be the
00:19:47.100 strong one by, by endorsing the dream of, of this fully integrated society by, by saying we can do
00:19:55.080 it. And, and, you know, uh, essentially you endorse the progressive position and you become sort of a
00:20:00.320 co-owner of its implicit lies. And this is sort of the danger with, you know, again, I, I, Rufo is in a
00:20:07.420 unique position where he essentially has to hold the hands of a lot of people who, who are essentially
00:20:13.000 never going to learn that the 1960s promises are just not materializing. And I understand that he's
00:20:19.420 in a delicate political situation. I don't want to respect that, but, but for people who are
00:20:24.080 participating in the intellectual side of these conversations on Twitter, if you co-own leftist
00:20:31.280 lies, you will lose ultimately because the left does not need to play in truth. If both people lie,
00:20:39.260 the left wins, because if both people are lying, then you are in a space of pure discourse. You are
00:20:44.920 in a space of pure democracy, in which case, you know, through the Nickland effect, which I know
00:20:51.000 you've gone over many, many times, there's a question over who will rule. And that will always go
00:20:56.440 to sort of the side that is promising more for less, the side that's willing to kind of play along
00:21:02.440 with the lie, which is in this case, the progressive side, or I guess in all cases, the progressive
00:21:07.420 side by definition of what progressive is. And so, you know, I, I don't really know what to say to
00:21:15.680 this point anymore. I, people wanted me to do another essay on liberalism, like 10 unanswerable
00:21:22.120 points for liberals. I've written very, you've written variations of that essay. I've written
00:21:27.280 variations of that essay a thousand times. I don't know what the response to these points we are
00:21:32.460 making right here are. Uh, all they have is a bunch of unrealistic platitudes about how things
00:21:38.620 should be. And there's no serious dealing. There's no, a serious attempt, I think, to address what is
00:21:46.480 actually going on with all of these systems. In some sense, even with a lot of people like Pluckrose
00:21:52.780 and, um, you know, my, my friend, Dev, fat, fat, short otaku for the more online types, uh, they,
00:21:59.340 they end up making videos where they repeat the reactionary arguments. Like they, they just recap
00:22:04.100 them and then they slap on the addendum that, oh, well, we'll fix it all. I mean, you know, uh, and,
00:22:11.020 and then like appealing to appealing to sort of a sense of heroism again with the self flattery.
00:22:16.280 Right. And, um, and I don't know why I think that this is this not a responsible intellectual
00:22:22.620 position. You have to be like, it can't be like, oh, the system would work if it was fixed. Okay. But
00:22:28.740 it's not fixed and you can't fix it. And right now, if you endorse the system, you're endorsing it
00:22:35.040 because it does what it does. The purpose of the system is what it does. And we can either
00:22:41.000 double down on this after 50 years of trying, or we can try to modify our approach to addressing
00:22:47.940 the issues of the African-American community. And, you know, I think that it would be better to deal
00:22:54.480 with this problem with set asides and freedom of association and less in the mode of this,
00:23:00.340 this equal opportunities commission stuff. And I think there's a lot of avenues you could explore
00:23:05.540 to address this problem, but they, they would not be perceived as being liberal.
00:23:09.780 Yeah. It's very confusing because yeah, again, I got, I kind of was talking to Rufo about this and
00:23:16.140 he's like, well, we just create a night watchman civil rights bureaucracy. And I'm like, what,
00:23:22.000 what? Like the entire purpose of this thing is to reach into every interaction. Like it has to,
00:23:29.140 to work that that's kind of the whole point. Like you're trying to rewrite the fundamental
00:23:33.560 laws of human organization. And in order to do that, you have to take charge of basically every
00:23:40.580 interaction that people have public and private to, to alter this. And you know, that like there's
00:23:46.740 no, that's the, there's no version of this thing. That's a night. That's like having a night watchman
00:23:52.600 central planning committee, right? Like the whole purpose of this organization of the, of this
00:23:57.840 bureaucracy is to try to control everything associated with its topic. And that means you're
00:24:05.760 going to have to reach into all these different, you know, government organizations, all these different
00:24:09.680 standards, all these banks, everything on a constant basis. Even if you try to do the based
00:24:14.440 version of this or the colorblind version of this, you're never going to reduce this down to some kind
00:24:19.880 of, you know, skeletal overwatch, overwatch organization. That's just not going to happen,
00:24:24.780 but they can't imagine a scenario where the system is eliminated. In fact, they seem to be blown away
00:24:30.860 that anyone would even suggest it. Well, I mean, we have to be careful about over applying
00:24:36.860 posiwig, posiwid, because I think initially, and things, things never happen for just one reason,
00:24:44.080 right? When they come out of an oligarchy, there are true believers, there are moderates,
00:24:49.880 there are hardliners, and there are cynical people trying to exploit this. So, you know,
00:24:54.200 I think that what, what Christopher Ruffo has in mind is sort of like the propaganda version
00:24:59.060 of civil rights that was sold to white America, right? Which was fundamentally different than the
00:25:04.840 propaganda version that was sold to black America. The propaganda version of civil rights
00:25:08.840 that was sold to black America is civil rights will replace the opportunities that your community
00:25:14.380 lost due to the devastating impact of drugs, the sexual revolution, and the decline of urban safety
00:25:21.060 that happened in the mid to late sixties. This is going to be a fix for that. And hypothetically,
00:25:29.540 and actually not hypothetically, definitely this was sold to African Americans. You will be on average,
00:25:34.360 as rich as the white community. Civil rights was not sold to be like, oh, guys, guess what? You're
00:25:40.780 lucky. White people get to move into your neighborhoods now. That was not how it was sold
00:25:44.820 to the African American community. It was sold as, as, as, as an invitation to share in middle-class
00:25:52.340 wealth and middle-class prestige. And I think, you know, when Ruffo pulls this stuff out about this
00:25:57.940 night watchman civil rights bureaucracy, he's repeating sort of the, the propaganda lies that we're
00:26:04.200 told to, uh, to white America. And the thing is, is that, uh, you know, I think there's a lot of
00:26:10.840 people who believe them in 1967 or 1963 or 1953, but slowly over time, it was very, very apparent
00:26:19.800 that this could, that the two visions of civil rights were fundamentally irreconcilable. And the
00:26:25.180 civil rights bureaucracy is at this stage designed to do exactly what you are saying. It's designed to
00:26:32.320 reach into every element of people's lives, the fundamentally reverse anthropological realities
00:26:37.920 that are hard coded into human DNA, uh, to a lesser degree, potential differences between demographic
00:26:45.340 groups. And to a larger degree, people's just consciousness of ethnic affiliation. There's no way
00:26:53.440 that you're going to be able to essentially have no African Americans in elite institutions and for
00:27:01.840 the African American community not to notice that or react politically. And when they do, there's going
00:27:09.200 to have to be a new story about what it means to be an American and what it means to have dignity in
00:27:14.880 America, or there's going to have to be some kind of pardon the pun, new deal for everybody in America.
00:27:23.680 But again, we have to do this song and dance that, that, you know, people like, uh, James Lindsay do.
00:27:29.600 And I think that this song and dance where you, where you, where you kind of feign ignorance about
00:27:35.520 the ultimate consequences of implementing our policies. That's very transparent to young people.
00:27:41.200 That's very, that was a transparent to me with the original crop of neoconservatives that I encountered
00:27:46.880 when I was a progressive, that, that they weren't really interfacing with reality that this was,
00:27:52.000 it was, it's so obviously something that you're not owning, but that immediately,
00:27:58.240 that immediately kind of broadcasts itself. And I wouldn't be surprised that this is
00:28:02.640 a large reason why conservatism is just so unattractive for, for younger people.
00:28:07.920 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners,
00:28:12.480 I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with
00:28:18.960 the Italian leather handbag. Is that from Winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt? Did she pay full
00:28:24.800 price? Or those suede sneakers? Or that luggage? Or that trench? Those jeans? That jacket? Those heels?
00:28:31.280 Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners.
00:28:37.120 Find fabulous for less.
00:28:40.080 So, I know you're all about trying to reach out and have discourses, sometimes against your better
00:28:46.560 judgment, but I, I appreciate the dedication to this. Like, at some point, do you think it's possible?
00:28:51.680 Because I've had multiple long-form conversations with Vocal Distance at this point. I know you have
00:28:58.400 had one as well. And I just, and, and when he came back and immediately was like, well, you're just
00:29:05.040 doing critical theory. You know, that was his response to me, to me posting this was like,
00:29:10.160 well, well, you're just doing critical theory. This is what critical theory is. Like this is,
00:29:14.320 and it's like, do you, do you only have like a hammer? Is that why this has to be the nail? Or
00:29:20.880 do you genuinely not understand the difference here? Or, or is that like, was I just doing critical
00:29:27.840 theory? Like, is there any way that these guys are able to, because it feels like the only,
00:29:32.640 there's only two realities that are, that you're allowed to evaluate in their world. You can evaluate
00:29:38.640 the one where they're correct. And it's just about returning to classical liberalism. It's just
00:29:42.880 about winding things back a little bit. Maybe we make a tweak here or there about the promises
00:29:47.280 that were offered in certain systems or those kinds of things. But in general, it's about returning to
00:29:51.840 these, these original settings, or you look at the things, the way that the left does that,
00:29:58.080 oh, well, these disparities have to be created by the system. And those are the only two options.
00:30:02.480 You, you, there, there's no, there's no other way you can evaluate this. And so anything that's
00:30:07.440 not returning back to a kind of classical liberalism can only be then critical race theory.
00:30:14.560 How do you even break through that? Yeah. I, I, I, intellectually, I kind of can sympathize
00:30:20.240 because the Gramscian theory, I mean, Gramsci literally bases it on Moscow, right? Like you can
00:30:28.000 see sort of the, the, the post Gramsci left as being a way to incorporate political realism into
00:30:35.200 political movements in a way that it hadn't necessarily before. And in, in some sense,
00:30:41.680 the early 20th century was this golden age of hyper idealized politics that, that's slowly
00:30:46.560 been fading out over the course of our lives. You know, ultimately, I don't know. I mean,
00:30:54.640 I think to a certain degree, it's sort of intellectual laziness to call all realism, critical theory. I mean,
00:31:00.000 obviously that's the case, but I, I, I think if I were kind of to steel man, local and Lindsay,
00:31:06.320 I think they believe that liberalism is kind of a religious principle that we have to fight for
00:31:15.200 against sort of the, the, the, the forces of political realism that are trying to drag it down.
00:31:21.600 And in a sense, I kind of, I kind of sympathize with that, right? But it's not
00:31:25.360 theory is supposed to describe what actually occurs, not what we want to have happen, not what
00:31:30.960 we would ideally wish to happen. And this seems to be kind of, this is the distinction that seems to
00:31:35.680 be continuously lost on a lot of the liberals is they, they speak in complete idealisms. And so you
00:31:42.720 have, when I was in my conversation with local, I numerous times, I would just bring up sort of
00:31:48.080 uncomfortable realities about our alliance of certain nations, about how people conceptualize
00:31:55.680 ethnicity and group loyalties, about how borders have to work, about demographic change, about group
00:32:02.400 differences. And every time I brought up one of these, these are just measurable. You can just go
00:32:06.480 outside and measure the numbers on any of these things, or just observe reality, observe humans as
00:32:10.960 they are. Every time I brought one of these, these realities up, I woke up smart enough not to just
00:32:20.000 flat out accuse me of anything, but, but I could tell that he graded against these realities as if he
00:32:25.840 was grading against a sort of a religious heresy or something like that. He, he was offended that this
00:32:33.920 should, that these realities could be used as reasons for tearing down kind of, kind of the religious
00:32:39.680 project of an open society. And, you know, I, I, I can't, I can't express how much I
00:32:48.960 emotionally sympathize with that, while at the same time kind of intellectually disagreeing with it.
00:32:54.880 You know, I, I kind of, I kind of sympathize with a person who laments the end of liberalism, but, but it
00:32:59.360 ended because our society became a type of society that could no longer sustain things like this at the
00:33:06.560 level we, we have been through the decline of things like religiosity and the death of God.
00:33:11.440 And once God, I don't think God is dead, but once the concept of God is dead in your society,
00:33:18.800 then political realism is the reigning law of the land. That is what the system is. It's a system of
00:33:23.600 political realism. It's a system of who, whom, as Leonard would have, or as Schmitt would put it,
00:33:29.520 friend, enemy. That's what political realism is. And all other concepts of loyalty to principles
00:33:37.520 written in actual English language as like, you know, the, the original Protestant
00:33:42.160 legal odd autists would, would, would love of the other, the founding father's generation,
00:33:47.280 all that goes straight out the window. And it has, it's, it's been a joke
00:33:50.480 for our elite for at least 30 years. And that's the world we live in. And if your world does not,
00:33:59.280 if your theory of liberalism does not interface with that theory,
00:34:04.000 I don't care if you think you're working towards this Christian utopia of liberalism sometime in the
00:34:10.640 next hundred years, when we can fix all of the underlying problems, you need a political theory
00:34:15.600 for right now when real politics are going on and not hypothetically idealized politics.
00:34:23.040 Yeah. And this is a lot, I think of, of what Yarvin talked about. I mean, Yarvin picked up,
00:34:27.280 interestingly enough, he picked up this language in his, his kind of current, his current essay, his,
00:34:33.040 his recent essay. And he spoke about Rufo and, and kind of the fact that he's unwilling to remove
00:34:38.720 these things kind of, kind of shows a, an unseriousness about the moment. And again, I'm not
00:34:44.320 trying to bag directly on Rufo here that he was a little more unkind to Rufo than I would have
00:34:49.360 been, but then they've, they've exchanged pleasantries back and forth a few times at this
00:34:53.120 point. So they're, they're both firing broadsides. I think a little bit, I don't think Rufo's job is
00:34:58.160 to be an intellectual. I think Rufo's job is to be a diplomat and an activist. And he, he fundamentally
00:35:03.600 has to be held to different standards than people who are like Yarvin, but that's just my two cents.
00:35:07.760 Right. And you're right about that. The only, again, my only problem is then you have to be,
00:35:13.120 you have to be less, you need to be clearer about what your activism is leading to. I'm,
00:35:18.400 I'm a hundred percent with you that there's a different approach and that you have to couch
00:35:22.960 things differently. You have to speak a different language. Uh, I, I a hundred percent, a hundred
00:35:26.720 percent understand that. But if your goal is, is not again, kind of the, the demolition of this system,
00:35:32.560 uh, then that's a problem, right? Even if you, I understand you have to be more careful about
00:35:37.280 the way maybe you approach that or the way you couch that. But, but if you're, if that's not your
00:35:41.520 goal, then I think this issue anyway, but the, the, the key of his essay was the Simon says thing,
00:35:47.120 right? Because that gets to the heart of it. Uh, once your legal reforms are just a pending,
00:35:53.120 but now we're really going to do it to all the existing laws. You know, you're not dealing with
00:35:57.440 reality. The reality cannot possibly be a problem in law or a problem that the legislator has not
00:36:04.480 commanded the bureaucracy to do this because we've commanded them multiple times to do something
00:36:09.680 different than what they've done. And they have never complied with this. So the, the idea,
00:36:14.400 like the 18th century legal autism way of looking at the world where every man is as good as his bond.
00:36:20.400 And when you sign your name, you sign away your soul. Uh, this belongs to a world of, of a Christian
00:36:28.160 world, but this is not evident right now in the modern world. Force is power and power is power.
00:36:35.200 And we had to deal with that. Do you think that, you know, again, as somebody who is
00:36:42.800 constantly trying to, to reach across the aisle, constantly trying to have conversations,
00:36:46.560 do you feel like the kind of these moderate liberals or classical liberals are closer
00:36:53.200 to understanding these things than maybe a disaffected leftist or Marxist or something like that?
00:36:59.200 I mean, does, does, does their, does their investment in the system and their commitment
00:37:03.520 to making it work, uh, make, make them harder to reach, even though it feels like politically,
00:37:08.320 they're closer to a position like your, your, yours or mine. Yeah. I mean, the problem is,
00:37:15.760 well, I mean, again, there's not always one type of person who does this,
00:37:21.840 this, this group of sort of centrist liberals that, that we kind of know and love.
00:37:26.720 They're oftentimes a lot harder to reach than the left because they fundamentally feel that
00:37:31.840 they're invested in a certain kind of system working and they don't want to have that system.
00:37:37.520 They don't want to essentially declare bankruptcy on this entire mode of thought.
00:37:42.320 The difficulty is, is that kind of very conservative mode of thinking does make them think a lot more
00:37:50.160 like the donor class for conservatives and then sort of the boomer class generally,
00:37:55.840 right? The, the boomer class is highly invested in the idea that America works a certain way that,
00:38:02.560 that America works for their children, like it worked for them, but it doesn't. And, and I don't know.
00:38:09.520 I think that waking someone out of that illusion is actually a lot harder. Leftists usually have,
00:38:16.080 they oftentimes have sort of sharp grievances, but, but ones that they're much more willing to be
00:38:22.480 forthright about. And they're obviously less invested in the system as a whole. So oftentimes
00:38:28.480 they're able to entertain more radical ideas, if not for some kind of temperamental disposition
00:38:34.800 that puts them on the other side of the friend enemy distinction. Really the, the liberals going
00:38:40.880 forward, they're just fighting against time at this stage. They're coalition, their arguments make
00:38:49.200 less and less sense every year. They don't have any coherent answers to the questions either brought
00:38:56.160 to them by the left or brought to them by the right. That's one thing we have in common on the left
00:39:00.960 and the right, the distant left and the distant right. And I think their base is fading away too,
00:39:06.720 because I think increasingly young people are not buying these answers because they're transparently
00:39:12.640 apologetic and not, and not realistic and lack ownership. But my great fear is that they're going
00:39:19.280 to persist in this delaying tactic just long enough to really cause some serious damage, because we can
00:39:27.840 only take a step forward. If the funder, the funding class and, and the boomers get behind projects that
00:39:36.160 actually try to address the problems as they exist. And no one really wants to do that.
00:39:43.760 It was a really weird moment. You know, I, I went on this, uh, debate on break the rules with Peter
00:39:48.960 Boghossian. And I know that you're familiar with Peter, that you've had discussions with him before,
00:39:54.160 uh, way back. And, and I went in there prepared to have like this knockdown drag out. Okay. Why does
00:40:00.880 liberalism work anymore? Is there any hope for it? You know, I, I brushed up on all of my
00:40:06.080 different thinkers and I walked in and it was very odd. There's a, Boghossian was,
00:40:13.760 was almost defeated before I walked in the room. He, he, every time I, he's like, oh, well,
00:40:18.960 what do you think's wrong with, with liberalism? Where do you think it's failed?
00:40:22.320 I started listing off many of the things that we've, you know, we've, we've all talked about
00:40:26.160 many times and his response to almost all of them was uniformly. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I
00:40:31.440 think that's kind of become obvious. Yes. That's clearly the case. And even though we walk through
00:40:36.160 like so many of these different issues and he seemed to agree that these failures were obvious,
00:40:41.440 uh, in pretty much every area, he still constantly came back to like, but we've got to make this work.
00:40:47.840 Right. But like, I still fundamentally believe in liberalism. It's like, why you spent an hour
00:40:53.120 telling me everything wrong with it and have no, no way to address any of these problems. But the
00:40:59.280 answer is still, yeah, but I've still kind of got to, I got to hang in there at this point. I don't
00:41:03.200 know. Well, this makes total sense to me. You know, Peter Boghossian of 2023. I know Peter Boghossian
00:41:09.600 in 2013 and the Peter Boghossian of 2013 was breathing fucking fire. I remember him when I lived in
00:41:16.080 Portland, uh, you know, I, I was, you know, I said hello to him a few times, probably doesn't
00:41:21.280 remember me. Right. But I went to all of his lectures and we were ready to tear down religion,
00:41:26.400 tear down God for not being rational. We were doing street epistemology, all that stuff. At that time,
00:41:31.840 I was on the Christian side of the debate and I was kind of, uh, you know, seeing how it felt to be on
00:41:36.640 the other side of the guns for once. So it was very, very entertaining. Uh, but you know, what,
00:41:42.880 what has the atheist finally encountered is the death of his own God. Uh, Peter Boghossian and, and
00:41:49.040 indeed all liberal progressives were convinced that liberalism would be the God that essentially
00:41:56.320 captured the entire world. If liberalism dies, then we are in the belem omnis contra omnis, the
00:42:02.400 war of all against all. Uh, we, we are indeed in the nation world of chaos, uh, the will to power. And that is,
00:42:10.880 that is, if that is what atheism delivered to the world, ultimately, when it removed God,
00:42:17.440 as Nietzsche predicted, uh, then the progressive product has essentially failed.
00:42:22.480 And atheism as a project will be remembered in history as a failure and as a social pathology
00:42:29.920 that brought a civilization to its knees as it has in all ages in the past. And I, I mean,
00:42:36.640 I don't know, how would you react to news like that? Uh, how would you react to, to kind of an
00:42:44.640 upset his, his God? I mean, he set out to kill the Christian God. He killed his own.
00:42:52.000 And, uh, yeah, I, I mean, I, I kind of, I, I kind of feel, I kind of, I, I deeply sympathize with
00:42:58.080 him. Right. But, but the thing is, let's say Peter Boghossian and the rest of the liberals, I mean,
00:43:03.200 for Vogel, it's easier because he's a Christian, right? But let's say that they, they embrace real
00:43:08.880 politics and they embrace a world without liberalism. Well, well then you have to agree
00:43:13.920 to the fact that, that your moral system only works in the context of a certain religion
00:43:19.840 carried forward by a certain people. So you have to be loyal to that religion and that people. And
00:43:25.040 if they don't thrive, then all your moralism and arguments don't matter a hill of beans to the
00:43:30.400 other people and the other religions. Maybe there are some similarities. Maybe we can come
00:43:34.320 to some commonalities, but those commonalities are not going to be based on anything like reason
00:43:39.520 for which all people have universal access to. Those commonalities will be based on commonalities
00:43:44.640 of moral presupposition that are ultimately located in commonalities of religious revelation,
00:43:50.800 like CS Lewis talked about in the Tao. And, and so it's like, okay, our gods are similar.
00:43:56.240 Therefore we can have peace is not sound like Peter Bergogian's idea that you could argue everyone
00:44:02.000 into rationality when meeting them on the street. Uh, this is not that world. It never has been that
00:44:07.840 world. And, uh, you know, once we say that, then all of a sudden, uh, the world we recreate is a
00:44:14.560 world. I mean, it's like R. R. Reno and haven't finished his book yet, but it's literally the return
00:44:18.480 of the strong gods. Now, all of a sudden virtues like loyalty, like piety, like constancy, like
00:44:26.480 dedication and commitment, all of those virtues from the classic world that were kind of shoved
00:44:31.360 into the corner and that were kind of treated as a fascination of the previous time. Those become
00:44:36.240 primary for how you run a society and how you measure men's worth inside of a society. And when that
00:44:44.480 happens, then other questions, this is also the problem I say, I say to that the reason why this
00:44:48.640 can't happen, right. Is because, uh, if you started, I don't know. I mean, there's sort of a sweater
00:44:57.520 effect, right? If I were to get rid of this idea that rational liberalism could just rule the entire
00:45:03.200 world through discourse and dialectic and democracy. Once I get rid of that, then all of a sudden you have
00:45:09.120 to ask questions like, okay, so if we're a nation and our nation's power is, is, is sort of in the
00:45:15.680 people, uh, then why did we get rid of the borders? Then why did we send the jobs away? How, how did,
00:45:23.280 how did, if we're not necessarily entering into a world of scientific progress, how did we destroy
00:45:28.400 San Francisco? How did we destroy New York? How come an enormous percentage of the children these days
00:45:34.400 are born to single parents and have destroyed families? How come an entire generation of kids
00:45:39.680 is addicted to porn? And every one of those questions has a answer that essentially indicts
00:45:46.640 the liberal and progressive camp at some level historically through the past 20th century.
00:45:52.560 This cannot be a small change. This has to be a moral revolution because when you look at the
00:45:57.680 20th century through this new lens, I don't think it makes Hitler or Stalin or Lenin look good,
00:46:04.000 but it makes a lot of the heroes we had in the 20th century look like deeply conflicted characters,
00:46:10.080 uh, who were as wrong, wrong about as many things as they were right. And certainly they do not tell
00:46:16.560 the story of progress. And so what we're talking about in that stage is a total moral inversion of
00:46:23.760 what people consider valuable and what people want to invest in, in, in, in, in their time on this earth.
00:46:29.520 And, and imagine, imagine living your entire life and investing in things in, in, in, in, in the way
00:46:35.920 the 20th century told you to think of all the people who didn't have families or, or who may have broken
00:46:42.160 ties with their families in the name of these concepts. And then it turns out that, wow, actually
00:46:47.200 your family was the most important thing all along. Your nation actually mattered. The territorial
00:46:52.640 integrity of your country was valuable. The actual land where you built your cities was something that
00:46:58.480 was sacred. And the churches that you tore down and desecrated were the, the substructure that all
00:47:04.640 morality was based on. You're invalidating entire people's lies at that stage.
00:47:11.680 You know, I think a lot of ruling classes have fallen due to failed promises. I don't think ours
00:47:19.920 would be unique in that way, but would ours be unique in that it got several generations
00:47:27.120 of people at what could arguably be the height of material comfort in civilization to just hand over
00:47:36.160 everything that makes life worth living in a, in a, in a death spiral. Like I, I, I know there's, I know
00:47:42.960 there's a lot of, again, other civilizations that probably failed due to decadence, but it does feel
00:47:48.720 like ours is a very particular situation where the, the desperate need to disenchant the world, uh, rob
00:47:54.560 people of a generational contact, a place in the chain of being that simply cannot be replaced.
00:48:03.120 Even, you know, there are other, other people went through tragedies because their civilizations
00:48:09.040 fell, but it feels like our, our generations will be particularly bankrupt when the system is shown to
00:48:15.280 be a lie. Yeah. I mean,
00:48:17.920 that's for sure. I mean, increasingly the, the political dynamic is just between life and illusion.
00:48:28.720 Uh, for instance, you know, uh, my friend Bennett, and I never pronounced the last part of this name
00:48:34.240 properly, the flackery or whatever. Uh, the Bennett of the exit group, as I like to call him, he had a
00:48:41.840 conference that was a pro natal conference. Hey guys, everybody who wants to solve the problem
00:48:48.000 about why no one is having kids anymore, which is literally threatening virtually all developed
00:48:53.280 nations with bankruptcy. Let's all try to solve this problem. The attempt to solve that problem
00:48:58.960 is coded as far right wing by all of the mainstream publications that covered it. This is absolutely
00:49:05.280 nuts. Uh, not, not, not like Bennett's ideas individually, just the attempt to solve it.
00:49:12.000 And there's, there's no equivalent to solve the, the birthright crisis on the left. Uh, the, the left
00:49:18.080 is entirely consumed with maintaining illusions for as long as they can go on. And increasingly,
00:49:26.320 this will be the dynamic that plays out in politics, uh, illusion versus reality. The right is the
00:49:34.320 party of reality. The left is the party of illusion at the left of the party of, of sort of, of, of
00:49:41.200 pleasure and, and of, of putting off the hard decisions for another day. The right is about
00:49:47.680 actually having humans live on this earth and not perish by our own means or have our civilization
00:49:54.240 collapse and enter into a period of chaos. And I think that fundamentally once I think this dynamic
00:50:00.880 will solidify as the boomers in particular leave the scene, then this dynamic between the party of
00:50:07.920 the real and the party of the unreal will become more prominent. But I mean, being the party of the
00:50:15.440 real is not a guarantee of victory because of the incredible power of, of the illusions that we've
00:50:21.600 created for ourselves, both political and technological.
00:50:23.600 I think that's right. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and pivot over to the questions
00:50:31.120 of the people, but before we do, Dave, could you tell everybody where to find your excellent work?
00:50:34.720 Um, so I have a YouTube channel called the unpronounceable name, the distributist, which
00:50:40.640 I picked before I knew it would be a YouTube channel. And I have a sub stack called, um,
00:50:45.920 fiddlers green and fiddlers green at substack.com. And, uh, yeah, that my written work is there.
00:50:53.040 And the, the videos are on my channel going back to 2016.
00:50:56.880 Excellent. Yeah. Be careful what you name yourself on the internet, guys. You never
00:51:01.280 know if you'll have to live the rest of your life hearing it. So, uh,
00:51:04.240 Well, you picked an awesome name. I have to say,
00:51:06.560 All right. Uh, Paul a here says a great stream leftists would agree and just say that the purpose
00:51:15.440 of the system is imprisoning, impoverishing black people. Yeah. That was Wilkel's point when he picked
00:51:20.320 out my tweet was to say, Oh, well, this is how they would analyze the system. And they would simply
00:51:26.560 say that, that, okay, that, that is what the system does. And so therefore it's purpose.
00:51:30.960 And you kind of address that in your essay, right? Like, you know, well, I think Wilkel's specific,
00:51:35.520 uh, thing was like, well, if, you know, if, if IQ tests keep, you know, certain, uh,
00:51:40.400 groups from not getting jobs and the purpose of them is to keep certain groups from getting jobs.
00:51:44.720 And, you know, expecting that, I guess, to be the gotcha, the, the hammer to drop on everyone.
00:51:49.360 I don't know what to say. If you run a system that uses an IQ proxy for employment,
00:51:55.440 you're going to discriminate against groups of people that have lower IQs.
00:51:59.760 Like that's statistical reality. And if you have a fair criminal justice system,
00:52:04.000 you will discriminate against groups of people that commit more crimes. Now, I don't think that
00:52:09.920 that detracts from those groups dignity. I think we have a responsibility to make sure that less people
00:52:15.520 get arrested and thrown in jail to begin with, but to pretend like that's not the ultimate outcome
00:52:20.560 of our system or to sweep it under the rug. Like the African, like these communities aren't going to
00:52:25.360 not notice. Yeah. Maybe they just won't know. That seems to be the theme. Like maybe they just
00:52:28.720 won't know. Maybe we'll just, everyone will ignore it. We'll just go back and ignore it. Nobody will
00:52:31.760 know. Right. No, no, no one will know that, that African community, African-American communities
00:52:36.320 have more crime than white communities. It'll be like the eighties when we didn't talk about it.
00:52:40.080 Yeah. That does seem to be the strategy. Bolero 393 says, can't go back to French Prince now that
00:52:47.360 Jade is entangled with her son's friend. The civil rights regime always slaps, uh, uh, slaps the face
00:52:53.920 of natural inequalities. Uh, yeah, I, I don't know that I, I have enough knowledge of the Fresh Prince,
00:53:00.640 uh, lore. I can speak to this. The Fresh Prince was the perfect show because originally in the 1980s,
00:53:08.400 you had the cause like, I think the original black show was like the Jeffersons or something
00:53:11.520 like that. I never saw that show. Right. I remember the Cosby show. Yeah. And, uh, you know,
00:53:16.640 my parents used to watch the Cosby show and even back then I knew I was watching shit like propaganda.
00:53:22.800 I, I wouldn't have had words to describe it, but it just, it just basically like every white
00:53:27.920 liberals fantasy of what a black family is. Like the, the father's a doctor and the mother's a lawyer
00:53:33.760 and, and he's constantly delivering like good old fashioned Jordan Peterson lecture lectures to his
00:53:40.240 kids. Right. And, and, and you know, that's bullshit propaganda. And he, it wasn't, I don't even think
00:53:44.560 it was very popular. Maybe it was popular among black people, but I seem to remember it selling more
00:53:48.960 to a white audience. And then finally in the nineties, they got to the Fresh Prince, which is perfect
00:53:53.680 because in the Fresh Prince, the, the, the black family is incredibly professional. They're very rich,
00:54:00.800 rich. But at the same time, the dynamic that plays out is like the Will Smith character is like
00:54:06.800 from the streets, like he's from Philadelphia and a bad area. And so the tension is, this is
00:54:14.400 sort of a fish out of water. Like black people are learning their lessons and becoming incorporating
00:54:19.920 the best elements of both black and white culture. And of course, Will Smith was very charming and,
00:54:24.960 and masculine back in those days. So it was like the perfect mix, right? You'll have the best of both
00:54:30.000 worlds. Uh, but man, this is, it doesn't work like that. It's a, it's an illusion.
00:54:34.960 See, I was a family matters guy. I remember, uh, I remember Carl Winslow. Yeah. That was a working
00:54:40.040 class neighbor, uh, though, though, again, the idea that I think it's supposed to be in Chicago and the
00:54:44.300 idea that Chicago cop could buy like a, you know, a five bedroom, two story, uh, house and support like
00:54:50.640 what four kids or something. Uh, uh, another time to be sure that that was the most, uh, fantastical part of
00:54:56.860 that, uh, of that show. Yeah. I always remember. Yeah. Yeah. Like the house always looks the same
00:55:01.100 between that and full house too. Right. Like, you know, yeah, they all had exactly the same
00:55:05.200 sitcom house. I've been in those boxes by the bays. They don't look like that on the inside,
00:55:09.160 but yeah, I, the Steve, if only we had more Steve Urkels, we would solve the, the problems of,
00:55:13.860 uh, of, of, of race relations. Well, oh, I just, okay. I just figured out what he was saying.
00:55:18.440 Jada Pinkett Smith, uh, Will Smith's wife. Okay. That's, I think she was in Fresh Prince too.
00:55:22.940 It wasn't she. Okay. See, I, again, I didn't, I didn't watch much of that one. So I just, I don't
00:55:26.920 know, but, uh, I know she's in the matrix and stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. All right. Uh, Kate J says,
00:55:33.500 uh, future phase of DEI could, uh, be, uh, to make a way for our replacements. Non-white U.S.
00:55:39.620 suborned citizens will be left in the dust as well in the name of critical race theory. Thoughts?
00:55:45.780 Uh, civil rights amendment, right? Or. Oh, I did. Yeah. Sorry. Yes. Civil rights amendment. My bad.
00:55:51.100 Um, well, look, I mean, no one has suffered more in the post civil rights regime. Well, I,
00:55:57.560 I shouldn't, I, like I'm saying, being like a shit lip if I said no, it's suffered more than
00:56:01.580 African-Americans, but I mean, I won't use superlatives, but they have suffered quite a
00:56:05.940 bit. And looking at the communities that used to exist in inner cities before the 1960s, uh,
00:56:13.260 you know, it, it, it, it's sad that they're gone now and they're only going to suffer more
00:56:18.120 now that we're letting millions and millions and millions of people into this country with no plan
00:56:23.600 to support them. Uh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, but I, I don't know. I mean, the, the, I don't think
00:56:34.320 that's going to necessarily attract the, the African-American community at the Republican
00:56:38.900 party that that probably will not happen short of some cesarean figure coming to just explode the
00:56:45.620 party dynamics and rebuild it in a different way. I'm trying to remember if it was Caldwell or
00:56:52.280 Thomas soul who said this, but it was something to the effect of, you know, originally the racial
00:56:57.740 dynamics in the United States allowed the black community to have a particular space in, in the
00:57:05.660 culture. It allowed them to make certain demands because of, uh, kind of the way they had been
00:57:10.360 treated in the past, but it was, but it was justified because it was basically a, a dialogue
00:57:14.720 between two groups. Right. And they were simply asking for dignity inside a space where they were
00:57:19.560 really only one of two major groups, but the immigration shift completely destroyed that dynamic.
00:57:26.120 And there, you know, the, again, all of their causes got caught up with the causes of every other
00:57:31.500 immigrant group that came into the country. And eventually their voice simply became one of many
00:57:37.380 and their cause was simply used. It kind of pimped out to all of these other grievance factories.
00:57:42.820 And therefore there is no way to kind of cogently have that conversation anymore because there's too
00:57:47.760 many voices all kind of screaming the same language, but only one of them ever had any legitimacy to it
00:57:52.920 in the first place. And now you can't sing aloud to address it. It's conquest third law in action.
00:57:57.600 Like it doesn't just happen to white people, right? I mean, the, the managerial class that managed
00:58:02.320 the, the activist wing of, of the African-American community eventually became people who just
00:58:09.800 serve themselves. And it served that activist class to become part of a rainbow coalition,
00:58:15.400 uh, of eternal grievances and, and to never directly address the problems of separating out
00:58:22.100 separate economic zones so that, uh, Africans could thrive in, in their own areas and with
00:58:28.820 specific set outs for them, which I don't know if that would necessarily work as a solution in the
00:58:34.320 modern era, but it should be something that we should explore. Certainly.
00:58:39.000 Ronald McNugget says prioritizing merit requires forced, uh, forced dissolving, uh, uh, forced
00:58:45.640 dissolving any sex, cultural, religious, or ethnic specific institutions that allow connections
00:58:51.540 between similar people. This is what the USSR and civil rights did united in mass economy.
00:58:58.520 Oh, I keep it. That went up again. Yep. Yeah. Prioritizing merit forces dissolve enemies.
00:59:04.020 Hmm. Well, I guess so. I mean, prioritizing merit above sort of subgroups inside a nation is what all
00:59:15.840 sort of Caesarean figures do. This is something that Napoleon very famously did was to try to turn
00:59:22.000 France into whoever gets the job done is the new aristocracy type deal. And, and so this is, and,
00:59:28.900 you know, this was true in some, in some periods of Rome, this is also something that was used.
00:59:33.980 So I, I don't know, uh, certainly merit itself is, is not suspect, but the problem is, is that,
00:59:43.140 you know, this idea that we can completely divorce merit from a particular religious worldview is kind
00:59:51.580 of nuts to me. I, it's something that the founding fathers would have never, like they would have
00:59:57.400 understood that merit and virtue only makes sense in context to a certain class of religious views.
01:00:05.400 But, but I think this really is a product of imperialism. And I mean, first the British empire
01:00:10.660 and then the global American empire, there was this idea that, that somehow we discovered that
01:00:15.860 there was a stone of all morality and our system was just the system for everybody. And, uh, that was a
01:00:22.080 political formula for a while. And it eventually kind of became autonomous and, and ate these empires
01:00:27.940 alive. You know, it's interesting. Um, Christopher Lash actually makes kind of the same argument that
01:00:35.200 Ronald is making here in revolt of the elites. He says that kind of the drive to merit meant to the
01:00:43.220 kind of skim all of the talent out of these different communities. And rather than bettering
01:00:46.960 the communities in which it was originally, you know, the firmament where it was, it arose
01:00:52.200 from instead, it's all kind of skimmed off the top and pushed into these coastal university
01:00:56.580 towns and into, uh, you know, kind of, kind of the IQ shredder, uh, you know, version of
01:01:02.900 this. Uh, and I think this is also kind of what Charles Murray is saying in a crude IQ way
01:01:08.500 when he writes something like, like coming apart and a sort of debating. And so I don't know,
01:01:13.200 I feel like, um, I feel like there, I don't know if you can avoid this. Like I said, I'm
01:01:17.560 not, I'm not against merit, but, uh, there is a point here that, that constantly emphasizing
01:01:23.340 merit, uh, and, and elevating people out of their current class and focusing on kind of
01:01:29.500 the ability to climb out of current situations rather than better, better them does have a
01:01:34.360 problem when it comes to the way we kind of organize society.
01:01:37.260 Well, yeah, I mean, that's what the African-American community mean, like all these people that
01:01:41.060 we complain about constantly who are staffing these DEI bureaucracies, just imagine what
01:01:46.400 they could do to reform their own communities. And they would have done that back in the
01:01:50.840 day. They would have been, they would have been like, instead of building Google, another
01:01:56.000 DEI curriculum, they would be organizing their, their own neighborhoods or their own town
01:02:01.920 and, and fixing the actual problems there on the ground. And people would have listened
01:02:06.640 to them, you know, because they would have been, they would have been seen as the most
01:02:10.320 meretricious for their people.
01:02:14.420 Uh, TK here says Christ is King. Amen. Thank you very much.
01:02:18.860 Uh, we've got, uh, Casey Stark says, keep it, keep it up guys. Preach. Appreciate it, man.
01:02:24.020 Thank you.
01:02:24.980 Yeah, I am. So I, I hardly let you get a word in edgewise.
01:02:27.980 I get to talk on my show all the time, buddy, by all means. It's, you know, there, there's
01:02:33.980 certain people, you're not Yarvin, you know, like, you know, there's, I, I get to talk
01:02:38.560 back, but I know there's going to be 10, 15 minute breaks and it's nice. You know, it's
01:02:42.100 nice everyone. So sit back and, and get to, get to listen. You know, I watch your live
01:02:46.920 streams. I enjoy them. I know, I know, uh, what the game is.
01:02:50.140 I need to get back to that too.
01:02:52.100 Yeah. Glow in the dark here. He says merit, uh, what we need, uh, uh, merit, what we need
01:02:58.140 equals virtuous action acts. Uh, want to know something funny. The president from idiocracy
01:03:03.940 has more merit than most politicians. He, at least one of what was best for his people,
01:03:08.800 even if, uh, he had to go. Uh, yeah, I'm trying to, what was the name of the president?
01:03:14.680 Mountain Dew Camacho.
01:03:16.200 Yeah. No brilliant, uh, brilliant movie.
01:03:19.500 Mountain Dew Camacho. And, uh, here, here's one thing that Mountain Dew Camacho has going
01:03:25.520 for him is that, uh, he is a lion and not a fox.
01:03:28.900 Yes. He's a lion because he can't be a fox. And so he has very, very basic political instincts.
01:03:35.920 And, uh, that's what, that's what humans need. They need, you know, being right is meaningless
01:03:42.900 without the masculinity to actually take ownership over a situation. And, you know, I've been trying
01:03:49.860 to get a serious article out and both times I've been interrupted with, uh, with kind of
01:03:54.200 these online debates I want to do essay responses to, but yeah, you know, intellectually being
01:04:00.340 right is just not enough. It's not even half of what's needed in leadership.
01:04:08.440 Life of Brian says, uh, we essentially have diversity prison experiment where the DEI commissars
01:04:14.420 play the guards. Yeah. That's you're, you're not wrong about that, sir.
01:04:18.540 I just wait till you get, uh, trans women in women's prisons and look at really interesting.
01:04:24.920 Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
01:04:26.080 And I know I was saying that that would, that would be a very, if we had a reasonable academy,
01:04:32.080 uh, I would be, I could write, I could write four PhD theses over the course of the next 10
01:04:39.120 years when we introduce the cohort of, uh, late onset trans identifying criminals into women's
01:04:45.620 prisons because there's at least four PhD theses is worth of anthropology in that experiment.
01:04:51.160 I'm speaking like a Fox now, but, but go on.
01:04:54.840 Max Woodbridge says, uh, Hey, uh, big fan, but to be honest, I'm always left wondering what
01:05:00.160 exactly your concrete proposal is. I tend towards Lindsay ism because he clearly articulates it.
01:05:05.600 The U S constitution. I understand your peaks, but you're light, uh, you're light on proposals.
01:05:11.360 Uh, we hear this a lot, Dave, but why don't, why don't we just have a 10 point plan? Why don't
01:05:16.100 we just return to the constitution? It's that simple, right? Yeah. I, the, the, the, the sort
01:05:21.960 of simple, like return to the constitution stuff is so my friend who appears on some YouTube
01:05:27.780 channels, uh, and it's pretty, I don't know if he's ever appeared on mine, but I know him
01:05:31.380 well in real life, uh, hunger. He goes by hunger, the dime merchant. He usually appears on
01:05:35.820 Yizz's channel, another YouTuber. And he, he put it very succinctly when I saw him last,
01:05:42.140 he said, there are no honest, easy answers. There, there are no honest, easy answers.
01:05:47.580 Now I could lay out things that I could do right now as, as a dictator of the United States,
01:05:54.320 I could list off policies, but I cannot, I can't come up with you like an, uh, an automated system
01:06:00.960 of rules that will handle all future eventualities. That is not possible in highly chaotic times.
01:06:07.040 I can, I can tell you what our moral priorities would be. I could tell you what, in this instance,
01:06:12.920 what the priorities would be politically to stop things from getting worse, but I can't give you
01:06:19.640 what Carlisle called a government biased team. I can't give you a set of rules that you can whip out
01:06:25.160 and then automatically answer like chat, GPT, every political problem that comes across your
01:06:30.800 table because political problems are real political problems. Not like the fake ones we deal with in
01:06:35.780 high school civics classes are complex and they deal with a complex application of value. So I can tell
01:06:42.140 you that the priority should be God and humanity's survival, and then pursuant to those, your own
01:06:49.080 individual people and communities survival. And in that process, we could talk about any number of
01:06:55.240 plans, probably starting with solving the demographic crisis that we're currently experiencing,
01:07:00.800 but going on to many, many more things, but there's not going to be an automatic way to run the
01:07:06.380 government by scheme, steam by giving you five paragraphs of logic and saying that this applies
01:07:12.280 in all circumstances. Right. Like I can give you some pretty concrete answers. Like, yeah, there needs
01:07:17.400 to be a moratorium on immigration. There needs to close the borders. Yeah. Yeah. Close the borders.
01:07:23.140 There needs to be the demolition of, uh, you know, the civil rights bureaucracy. Like, yeah,
01:07:27.980 I can remove the universities. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Salt the earth in which they stand.
01:07:34.440 Right. Close the border. Like you can just go on, like make built, like have more housing project,
01:07:39.140 do a job creation project near those housing projects to build, to make new cities that actually
01:07:43.940 have income coming in through jobs and not through handouts. Like that would complete, that would be
01:07:48.780 like an, in this five minutes, we've created essentially a new, new deal plan that would completely
01:07:53.360 redo the economy of America and all those changes would be positive, but, but it would not be like
01:07:59.340 an automatic way to handle all governments at all times. Yeah. The, the, the whole problem that we've
01:08:04.820 run into is that we entered an age of ideology instead of caring about specific peoples and their
01:08:10.080 needs and understanding them on a, in a real level. Instead, we try to sketch out an ideology that
01:08:15.300 could universally be applied. Uh, and that, that if you're just trying to return to that kind of,
01:08:20.260 you know, Oh, here's the neutral, here's the, the, the neutral ideology institutions that will
01:08:24.780 once again, write the ship. I don't know what to tell you. I do not have that plan for you because
01:08:28.700 it's not real. And it never was, uh, Ronald McNuggets. It says, it seems like the current
01:08:33.180 merchant oligarchs prefer slow decline because, uh, changing civil rights could result in substantial
01:08:38.900 losses of wealth for them. And well, not just wealth, everything. Right. Yeah. As Dave laid out,
01:08:42.880 like when this, when this whole thing comes apart, people are going to have some questions
01:08:45.960 and, uh, and money might not be the only thing that, that you lose in that scenario.
01:08:51.320 I hope we listened to Yarp and I know people are angry at him. There's something like they're
01:08:55.340 angry at him every other week, but I really hope people listen to Yarp and to understand
01:08:59.480 that as we, I mean, I think it was less true five years ago, but increasingly are going to
01:09:06.660 encounter a set of kind of penitent leftists that kind of just want to land this, the ship.
01:09:13.800 And, and if you go up these penitent leftists and talk about how you're going to, you know,
01:09:18.720 have day of the noose or whatever, I'm sorry, that's on your channel, but like, if you, if you
01:09:22.160 start doing that bedposty stuff, I mean, you're ruining an opportunity to actually save your
01:09:29.340 community and our community, a lot of payments coming our way.
01:09:34.340 Max Woodbridge here says, can we just, uh, can we not just pair the, the civil rights, uh,
01:09:39.520 act back and remove the affirmative action? Maybe not ideal, but a realistically attainable
01:09:44.720 as opposed to the quest for the perfect. I mean, what does that look like? Right.
01:09:50.060 Well, so I, I'm going to reread the last part of my essay. The, as far as the African-American
01:09:55.480 community was concerned, civil rights was a promise of community wealth to restore the
01:10:00.980 wealth that was lost to the decline of urban America in the 19th, in the earlier 1960s.
01:10:06.080 Without that piece, you're screwing them over. And, and, because if you just scale back
01:10:14.340 affirmative action, there are going to be questions that, that knock on after that. And I'm sure
01:10:20.100 scaling back affirmative action and saying we've achieved racial equality would work out great
01:10:24.720 for Asian America and white America. And, and, and probably most of our elites too, wouldn't mind
01:10:32.300 that. Uh, but it, it creates a huge political problem for these communities that were actually
01:10:37.200 promised things collectively. Humans, especially humans in a multi-ethnic democracy or a multi-ethnic
01:10:44.600 society, always perceive things in terms of collective standing. There's this great article by Jay Burden
01:10:51.480 a few days ago about, we said, uh, social emotional patronage. Like most patronage, and this is,
01:10:58.680 this is critical. I'm, I'm kind of said it didn't get more attention because he's a relatively new
01:11:02.560 creator and they're a younger guy. So people should look for him, but this is a critical insight. And
01:11:08.260 I think I've like always, everyone's kind of thinking these things, but he put it in just the
01:11:12.020 right way. Um, the, the thing is, is that with, with these, these patronage models, the most important
01:11:18.560 thing. So, you know, if you've ever been around trans people, they'll say this thing, like trans people
01:11:23.880 are valid. Trans people are valid. You know, what I, one of my many, many talks with them,
01:11:29.480 you know, trans people are valid. Gay people are valid. Okay. Are white people valid? Are
01:11:33.800 conservative is valid or reactionary is valid or traditionalist Christian? Probably not. Like
01:11:39.180 we've got a lot of questions. Like who isn't valid? What do they even mean by they're valid? What
01:11:43.500 means that you're part of the ruling coalition, right? When you say someone is valid inside progressive
01:11:49.700 circles, what that means is you are part of the coalition of people that is ruling and we have
01:11:55.280 your back and we're going to make sure that you're not screwed over. It's social and emotional
01:11:59.200 patronage. And if you take a group that feels like it's protected and you toss them to the wolves,
01:12:05.980 you destroy their professional class. You can sign them to being entirely contained in drug riddled
01:12:13.200 ghettos. Uh, they have, they, they will be angry. And in some sense they have every right to be angry
01:12:20.500 as humans and something is going to be needed to address those circumstances.
01:12:27.740 That's right. Uh, let's see. The Bryce is right. Says great stream fellows. Dave, can we expect a
01:12:33.740 fiddler's green stream from you soon? They always make my work day much more pleasant and easier to
01:12:39.320 get through. Well, I think I might've stolen a fiddler's green stream from you guys tonight.
01:12:43.840 Dave is here instead of over there on Tuesday, but, uh, I, I, I made a resolution to myself that I
01:12:50.240 would write more this year. Uh, but I do want to get back to doing the live streams. Uh, I don't know.
01:12:55.140 I don't know if this is appropriate to talk about on your channel, but I wouldn't be the only one
01:12:59.420 who's noticed a huge decline in political YouTube and how videos have performed. Uh, I feel like we are
01:13:07.420 being throttled on the more political side. So the video essays especially are just getting nuked
01:13:13.380 from orbit. The live streams still do fine, but the, yeah, it's, it's, it's sad because you came
01:13:18.180 up doing these video essays. That's always was my favorite stuff from you. That was my favorite
01:13:22.920 stuff to make. And I'm still making them no matter what, cause I'm writing a column every week, no
01:13:27.380 matter what, but it gets harder and harder because yeah, I think it's very clear that the, the algorithm
01:13:32.900 is not blessing that content. Uh, I, I made two resolutions. I wouldn't make the two resolutions
01:13:38.560 where I'd write more. I need to, I'll do the podcast live stream as well, but I also wanted
01:13:43.740 to just do a few like actual honest to God video essays. Not like I wrote an article and
01:13:48.440 I'm just reading it to the screen, but actually do video essays. Like people will used to do
01:13:52.300 them in sort of the 2016 style and just see what would happen because I know, I know it's
01:13:59.440 going to get killed by the algorithm, but that was some of those old video essays from back in
01:14:03.640 the day, you know, those were, they were their own kind of thing. Right. I agree. A lost form to be
01:14:09.240 sure. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Johan Richardson says, surely once having received the gift of the Lord's
01:14:15.040 salvation, the unequal will be filled with humility and gratitude as sinners saved by grace and then be
01:14:20.880 at peace with whatever turns out to be their merit derived station. Yeah. Uh, that, that would,
01:14:28.200 that would be great. But unfortunately I don't think that's human nature even, even after
01:14:32.500 that happens for very short periods of time in my own life. And then I go back to being selfish and
01:14:37.640 and, and, and, and lazy again, you know, I, I feel like every time I come out of confession,
01:14:43.280 I get a good three hours of being in this state before I revert to my old ways. I mean, like this is
01:14:50.180 the dream of Sir Thomas Moore to have a conjure that can be ruled by prayers, Johan. And it's,
01:14:56.860 it's my dream as well, but, uh, this is a dream that has to be the project of, of very small
01:15:04.160 places and for very short periods of time and, and held up by, by strength and work and endurance.
01:15:10.380 It cannot be generated by an algorithm. It cannot be generated by, you know, 10, 10 weird amendments
01:15:18.080 that solve politics now and forever the way that some of the liberals imply, right? In, in real human
01:15:25.040 societies, you have to apply constant effort. It's like holding a muscle to get this level of
01:15:30.580 virtue and you're always going to slip. Absolutely. Glow in the dark says more virtue in helping your
01:15:38.540 community than running off to get a good paying job to plant trees. You will not benefit from
01:15:43.020 is virtuous. Very true, but it's also much easier to say than to do, right? It's, it's very,
01:15:48.680 especially we, we've, we've kind of seen that when people have the option, uh, that they tend to
01:15:54.260 choose the other direction. And so I think there's just unfortunate realities about kind of the modern
01:15:59.260 condition that will, will feed into that. But I think there's a, there is a lesson, uh, there to
01:16:03.840 be sure that we are learning collectively, uh, about, about community and, and, uh, being, being willing
01:16:10.220 to sacrifice for it. Uh, we've also set up their economy is so that if you're not being kind of a,
01:16:17.700 if you're not playing into the global economy, you're kind of, I mean, you can, you, there's
01:16:21.120 ways you can kind of be very, very clever and gain the system so that you can still live a comfortable
01:16:25.960 middle-class life and you can make it locally. But, you know, we've set up this economy to,
01:16:33.060 for the last 50 years, we've been punishing people who have made that decision. It's not like we all just
01:16:37.800 decided to like go to the big city. I mean, some people decided to go to the big city so they could
01:16:42.060 live the sex in the city lifestyle, but most people looked at their hometown and said, the people who
01:16:46.540 stay around here end up being, you know, end up having their lives not go well and not being, you
01:16:52.840 know, not having any opportunities. And I don't want that. I want something that looks more like
01:16:56.980 what my parents had and what my parents had cannot be achieved by staying here. And so I can't blame
01:17:02.600 people for following incentives that were perversely introduced to their society, whether they're,
01:17:07.800 black or white, you know, we have to have a lot of sympathy for that.
01:17:12.660 Agreed. And Life of Brian here says, Dwayne Alessandro Herbert, Mountain Dew Camacho,
01:17:18.760 2028. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you.
01:17:21.900 I only got the last three names. I only got the last three names.
01:17:25.300 I'm glad we probably really attributed to his greatness.
01:17:30.620 Simplar here says, just want to recommend Charles Paul Minor's third thesis on Roman institutions
01:17:36.580 and why they didn't defend the German border at the end. Dave heard my little speech on Gaul's
01:17:42.420 decline. Yeah. I can't say I'm familiar with that one. Yeah. Oh, well, yeah, this was a,
01:17:48.340 just to show our own projects here. Everyone who's interested in community building should look
01:17:53.340 into a project called basket weaving. You can DM me about it. And in our basket weaving groups,
01:17:58.140 we periodically hold, usually at smaller events, but every now and again, it's like banquets where we have
01:18:04.100 talks. It's sort of like mini conferences a little bit. And the Templar delivered a very
01:18:10.940 good speech about decline in the Roman empire and what it means to live in sort of winter a
01:18:16.500 civilization. I really enjoyed it. Nice.
01:18:20.140 Kingpild says, nothing to add, just wanted to thank you guys for this great convo. Well,
01:18:24.480 thank you, man. I got to go on Kingpild's show here recently. I was a guest on there
01:18:29.340 in the last week or so. So make sure to go check out his show. And it was a lot of fun
01:18:34.100 having that conversation. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Thank
01:18:39.360 you everyone for joining me. I know it's later than usual, but I knew it would be worth it.
01:18:44.380 Please. If this is your first time on the channel, go ahead and subscribe,
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01:19:19.820 thank you for coming by. And as always, I will talk to you next time.
01:19:27.780 Thank you.