Do Nations Destroy Families? | Guest: Darryl Cooper | 1⧸26⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 24 minutes
Summary
Daryl Cooper, host of the excellent Martyr Maid podcast on the founding of modern Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, joins me today to explain why strong family ties are not what build a nation, and why strong families are what do.
Transcript
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So you're hosting the family barbecue this week, but everyone knows your brother is the grill guy
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and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even
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the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys.
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Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with
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a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. So I was listening to Daryl Cooper's
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excellent Martyr Maid podcast on kind of the founding of modern Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian
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conflict. And during that, he went into kind of this speech about nations and families and the
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necessity of a nation to break down kind of the Klan family identity, the strong family identity and
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the tension that naturally exists with that. And I thought that was fascinating because we so often
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think, especially conservatives people on the right, we think strong families, strong nation,
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family values. This is what builds a nation. These things are synonymous, but Daryl gave a really good
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argument as to why they're not. And I wanted to get into that today. So on the podcast with me today
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is Daryl Cooper. Thanks for coming on, man. Always a pleasure, man. You're one of my two or three
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favorite things on the internet. So it's always a pleasure. We don't do it nearly often enough.
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Yeah. Feelings mutual here, man. We'll step up our schedule. Don't worry.
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So I was wondering if you could just lay this out for people, because again, this is something
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that's probably counterintuitive, especially for a lot of conservatives, that there would be a
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tension between family identity, strong extended families, and the idea of the nation and it being
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kind of patriotism, a national identity. How are those things at odds?
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Well, I guess the way to start that explanation would be to take it back to the origin of modern
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states, right? Wherever you look in the world, what you saw was a sovereign of some sort who was
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trying to consolidate power over the nobility. And you saw these mechanisms that would take place
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across the world. I mean, you would see them among the Baganda in Africa. You'd see them in Europe,
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everywhere, where you have the monarch, and in the outlying provinces, different areas are controlled
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by his various nobles and so forth. And they have actual power bases out there, people who are loyal
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to them, to their family. And so one of the things that they would do is they would take, say, the first
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son, the oldest son of each family, and bring him to court in the capital. And it would be a huge honor,
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of course. We're going to bring your young son and raise him in court so he can learn to do all the
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things he needs to do as a noble. It's a huge honor. You can't say no to it. And when you look
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back and see the universality of something like that, you kind of recognize that there's a sort of
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game being trying to break down the loyalty of these oldest sons to the provinces to break their
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connection with them and reorient their loyalty to the king, right? And so that's something that happens
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very, very early on. Now, once you get past that first layer of the nobility,
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you know, traditional societies, they don't try to break down family connection among the mass of
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the people. In fact, they nurture those things because they rely on them for self-governance.
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You know, these old states, feudal states and so forth, they didn't have the kind of resources or
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reach to go out and be a totalitarian country if they wanted to. You know, they had to rely on these
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self-help mechanisms at the village and community level in order to be able to govern themselves
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coherently. As you get up to the modern state, the total state, as you'd say, you know, you start to
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see a more direct attack on the family. And the Soviet Union is, you know, all the communist and
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revolutionary governments are perfect examples, but the Soviets are a great example of it where,
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you know, I mean, there's the hero of a young boy they built statues of because he turned his
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parents into the NKVD. You know, that was something that was lionized. Breaking down the authority of
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parents and specifically fathers is, you know, these are competing loyalty systems. And in a country like
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ours, the family loyalty system and the national loyalty system, they don't really come much into
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conflict. You know, that's sort of something in the past. Like you look at like the Hatfields and
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the McCoys, for example, you know, you had, you know, state militias who were like on the brink of
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joining that fight because these two clans were at war. And that's the kind of exactly the kind of
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thing that a modern state wants to avoid at all costs. And in the United States, we've largely
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accomplished that. And we're sort of living with the costs of that right now, because there are costs
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to it, right? Like, if you go back to, even in the modern day, if you go to an Arab peasant, you know,
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out in the countryside, in one of the less developed Arab countries, lives in a village,
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traditional life, that those communities will never and would never have produced
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existentialist philosophers, because they have absolutely no use for them, you know,
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questions of like, who am I? Why am I here? Those things are all given to you, you know, and they
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have a surplus of identity, if anything. And so, you know, if you talk to people who are from
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the Mediterranean countries, you know, Southern Italy, or Spain, or Portugal, Greece, Arabs,
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Armenians, just that whole that whole kind of zone where the extended family still exercises a lot of
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influence over all the individuals is, you know, those people feel boxed in, they feel like a lot of
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their choices for who they want to become, and what kind of person they can be, or are already so
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predetermined for them that they can't wait to break out of it. And they envy, you know, Anglo-Americans
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who see their parents once a year on Christmas, if they're lucky. And I think now, though, that the
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majority of people in the modern West, at least, have already gone through that process of
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disconnection. You know, they're finding that maybe there's a kind of freedom on the other side of
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it, but it's really the freedom of homelessness, you know. And that's the mess we're trying to clean
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up right now. Yeah, it's interesting, but that so much of this is linked to the idea of the nation
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state. You pointed this out when you were talking about your podcast, and I've been reading Samuel
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Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and he makes the same point that in the Middle East, the nation
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state never really worked, because that's not the way that they were socially organized, because the
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tribe, the clan, was so powerful. Really, you go directly from the tribe to Islam. Like, there's
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only two levels of identity there, and there's no, this intermediate nation state simply never really
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grasps hold, because they don't have that kind of infrastructure, the institutions never arose.
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And I guess that really speaks to what you were saying when it comes to dependence. You know,
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these more feudal societies or these more tribal societies, they don't have a level of complexity,
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a level of institutional power to take the burdens of dependence away from the family structure. So
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they can't destroy family identity because they require it to function. But as the state grows and
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builds these institutions, it seems to naturally unload, yes, it unloads that dependence, it frees the
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people in some sense, right? But simultaneously, it enslaves them to kind of this higher nation state
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ideal. You are freed from those communal bonds at a very low level, but more and more of your life
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gets consumed into this loyalty to only the state. Your identity is also bound there as well.
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In a healthy society, I think what you find is people's first layer of loyalty, the layer of
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loyalty that they would betray everything else for is their friends and their family. And then from
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there, it's the friends and family of their friends and family, right? Until you get out to a community.
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And now those concentric circles of concern and affection, they can go out quite a ways to the
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nation, maybe even to international alliances in certain circumstances. But the stability of all
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that is really built on the more abstract outer layers of loyalty, nurturing and supporting the ones
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closer to home. You know, you're loyal to your country, you're loyal to your community, because it
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nurtures and supports your friends and family and yourself. You're loyal to your nation, because it
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supports your community and your friends, etc, right? And that's sort of a rooted, organic, natural
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polity. When you come in from the top and establish a state, and then start trying to put together an
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identity underneath it, as we did in the United States, you know, which it never could have gone
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any other way. You know, the Anglos who settled the 13 colonies, you know, they had two choices,
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they could bring in immigrants from all over Europe, or they could give up most of what is now America to
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the Spanish and the French and everybody else, like in order to settle that territory and become the
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country we are. You know, throughout the 18th century, that immigration was absolutely necessary,
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obviously, a very different situation from what we've got now. But, you know, that we needed to
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build up the continent, we needed to settle the continent. When you don't do that, I mean, you see
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what happened in the Southwest after the Mexican American War, we really failed to adequately settle
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the Southwest, and now it's being gradually taken back. And, you know, you see, you actually see
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something somewhat similar in Russia with their failure to really adequately settle Siberia. And,
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you know, long term, I think that they probably have concerns that, you know, China's got their eye
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on some of the farmland up there and stuff. And, you know, it's not going to happen tomorrow or the
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next day, but who knows what the map's going to look like 500 years from now. And so, you know,
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in the United States, I mean, you got to think about it from just, like, we've had almost no time to
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catch our breath from the beginning of this country, right? We achieve our independence from
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Britain, and mostly in Anglo country, and obviously slaves in the South at that point. But within a
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couple decades, I mean, you have Irish and Germans flooding in, completely transforming the face of
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our urban politics and just the society in general, creating a new cleavage that didn't really exist
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before, between the Protestants and the Catholics. No sooner did the second generation of Irish and
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Germans start to get settled and a little bit assimilated and so forth, than we started to get
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Eastern and Southern Europeans, an even bigger wave coming in in the 1880s through, you know, say,
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like 1910 or so. And these people came in, came into conflict with the previous generation of
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immigrants. You have the Anglo power structure on top, trying to manage this whole thing, you know,
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to a large extent, I wouldn't say to a large extent, but to a certain extent, the early progressive
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movement was largely an Anglo attempt to contain and, and manage the chaos that was coming in as all of
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these disparate peoples were entering the country and bringing different, different ideas and traditions
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to it, you know. And, um, 1924, obviously we had, uh, the immigration law that more or less
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locked things down. And you start to see just maybe around World War II, you know, I think World War II
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did have like a profound binding effect on, on the American country. Like it was, it was probably the,
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the, the, the single strongest, uh, let's say, um, uh, the single strongest moment of American
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ethnogenesis short of the revolution itself. Right. And, you know, you saw, for example, like during
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the civil war, after the battle of Vicksburg, uh, Vicksburg didn't celebrate the 4th of July
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for like 80 years or something after that. And the first time that they started celebrating the 4th of
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July again was July 4th, 1944, about a month after D-Day. And so it, it brought the country back
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together in profound ways. Right. And all of these different people, you know, you have to remember
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that up until really the like 1950s and early sixties, all of our big cities were still broken up into
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ethnic enclaves. You know, the Irish lived over there and the Italians lived over there and the Jews lived
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over there. And they all thought of themselves as Americans, but they were, uh, they, they, they were
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all operating it at different levels of assimilation based on their attachment to their old country.
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Right. So if you look, for example, at like, uh, at the Italians, when the Italians started coming in
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in the 1880s and nineties, a lot of them would come and go, you know, the men would come over and work
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for a while, then they'd go back and buy a farm. And that would be that, or they'd come over for a
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while, but they still had extended family that they were close to back there and they'd go back
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on a regular basis. So they're much more immersed in the culture of, of the old country. And as a
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result, Italians maintained a sort of ethnic identity and not, there's also the fact that, you know,
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Italians and Jews, if you compare them to like Germans and Irish and Scandinavians and so forth,
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if you look at an ethnic map of the United States, they're still much more concentrated,
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basically within a few hundred miles of where they entered the country in New York back then,
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you know, they haven't spread out all over the country to the same extent as say like the Irish.
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And so they've been, they've managed to hold together, uh, a certain ethnic identity, uh,
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much longer than the others did. You know, I think somebody who's Irish American today might like,
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uh, celebrating St. Patrick's day, but, uh, that's about it, you know, as far as their
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attachment to the old country, especially like the political goings on and so forth of the old
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country. Um, when you, you know, when the great migration kicked off and you start getting all of
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the Northern and Western cities flooded with huge, huge, overwhelming numbers of African Americans,
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you know, especially after the second world war, it started after the first world war, but it really
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picked up, uh, during and after the second world war, you know, you started to see a lot of the
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same systemic breakdowns that we saw first when the Irish flooded in and we realized, oh, we need like
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a public school system because there's just a bunch of Irish orphans running around the streets and we
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got to civilize these people somehow. And we more, we kind of got that set up and it was working for
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the purpose it was established for. And when the Eastern and Southern Europeans started flooding in,
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the system got overwhelmed again, but we managed to put that back together and through, uh, you know,
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different cities and places did it different ways, but we did a pretty good job with that.
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And the third wave came with the great migration when all the African Americans started moving into
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the cities. And that was when you started to see the various European ethnics in their cities,
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uh, begin to step back a bit from their, their, uh, you know, ethnic identity and embrace,
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you know, whether, uh, more of an American identity or a racial identity, something like that,
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because, and you, and you really see this in, in very stark terms, you know, when, when you would
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see organizations pop up that, you know, in, in, in a place like New York where, uh, you know,
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before like New York was a very delicate balance of ethnic politics, you know, it was understood
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that if there was an Irish mayor, then there should be a Italian district attorney and a Jewish,
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you know, city council president and so forth. Like it's a very delicate balance, something that
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really is like, it was a great achievement that they managed to, to, to create a system that,
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that balanced those things. And, uh, with the, the large influx of African Americans,
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you start to see all these groups that never really cooperated so much before, or they cooperated
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from within their groups with the others, you know, start to meld together. And that really
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accelerated of course, when people started moving out to the suburbs and those ethnic enclaves all
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started to break down. And I think maybe today, you know, now that a lot of those strong identities
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have been attenuated or wiped out even, um, you know, we've kind of swung the other way from,
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you know, that surplus of identity that, uh, you know, maybe an Arab peasant might, might feel bound
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by to a real deficit of identity that leaves people vulnerable to, you know, branded identities or
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really any, anybody who's got, uh, a compelling identity to sell to them. People are really looking for
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that. And it's, um, you know, whether or not something like that can be put back together
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once it's been torn apart, I don't really know. I guess we're, I mean, we're, we're kind of in
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uncharted territory here. You know, you have to think like homo sapiens, if we've been around for
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200,000 years or something like that, for all of that until like the 1960s, you were very deeply rooted
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in a family context, a community context. And that's where your sources of meaning came from.
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It's where you're just that we're completely rooted in that it's, it's built into our biology to the
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point that, you know, if you, if you are cast out of your group, whether, you know, you're a high
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school kid getting bullied or just whatever, where you, you, you feel that you're a complete burden to
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your group or, or totally outcast, you get depressed, you get suicidal, you start to fall
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apart, like very quickly. Like people will die from that. Like they'll die early from, from the stress
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of that. And so it's built in very deeply. And so, you know, from, from the advent of homo sapiens up
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until about 1970 or something, that's how we lived. And all of a sudden, everybody, virtually everybody
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in our society has been just completely pulled out of every social context that they were pre would
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previously been rooted in and just thrown out on their own, you know, and told that this, that this
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cult of self-creation is, is going to, uh, is going to get them, you know, to, to another plane of
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existence, I guess. But, um, you know, it hasn't done that so far and, uh, yeah, I'm skeptical that it's,
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Do you think that the right has put itself in an odd place because it's so scared to, uh, to address
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the issue of identity that ironically, I think it's increased the salience of race because all of these
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ethnic nested identities, which once would have, I think, made race less of a focus because you would
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have been nested more in, in probably a particular, uh, ethnic identity. Instead, you've, you've hollowed out
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all of those intermediate institutions. There's no, there's nothing to hold onto in between kind of
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the family and these larger manipulated voting blocks. And so therefore they're wielded at a much
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wider level. And the fact that you're not willing to address what those intermediate social
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institutions are and what are necessary and how they're bound to identity means you've necessarily
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hollowed out anything that could have stopped, I guess, kind of the broad manipulation of racial
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categories. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, it's also deprived people like at the same time
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that it's, it was an attempt to lure people to identify with the nation state. At the same time,
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it's alienated people from the nation state, because once you get past that hurdle and into the state
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we're in now, nobody feels represented by the nation state. You know, I, I, you talk to people,
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uh, about, you know, most, most people in the United States, they just, they can't imagine any system
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other than, uh, you know, mass democracy or some form of tyranny. Like it's the only really two
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categories they have in their political, uh, horizon. Um, but I tell, I ask people sometimes,
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like, do you, who, who tell me that, do you really, do you feel represented by this system?
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Like is having one out of 160 million votes, is that really making, do you feel like your voice
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is being heard or anything? And I asked, you know, I, I just offer a suggestion of like,
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you know, what if you had a, what if you had a system where you didn't vote except maybe at the
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local level or something like that. But, uh, if you're a member of a labor union, that labor union
00:22:06.260
is part of a larger national union, uh, which has, you know, which is maybe part of a, say,
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a federation of labor, which has a seat at the table in government. If you're a member of a
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church, if you're a member of various community organizations and all these kinds of things,
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all of these things, uh, build up to the state and national level and have a seat at the table.
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And then those now within those organizations in your labor union or something, you guys can vote
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on whatever you want. You can run that however you guys want to run that. And wouldn't you feel like
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you're, you, you were being more represented or at least potentially more represented in a system
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like that than you would be by just having everybody go to the polls every four years.
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And I don't know necessarily that that is how it would play out. Obviously all institutions can be
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corrupted. Uh, but you know, it's an alternative that would, uh, that I think would sort of,
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it would return us a bit to that, uh, to, to a system where those, those affinities closer to home
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and those institutions closer to home are nurtured by the larger system, right? I mean,
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it would give people an incentive to join their labor union and be active in it because that's how
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you get your voice heard in government to be active in your church and so forth. And there's no
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incentive for really any of those things anymore. And all of those incentives have been taken away.
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I mean, if you look at, for example, just go back to the great depression and you imagine if
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something like that were to happen today, just the chaos that would break out in every American city,
00:23:40.260
it was just, we would not survive the depression the way we survived it back in the 1930s. In the
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1930s, you still had enough, uh, communities and, and various community organizations, churches,
00:23:53.240
and so forth that could engage in self-help so that, you know, the government didn't have any of
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these programs yet. A lot of them were put together because of the depression, uh, but they
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were able to take care of their people. And today we don't have any of those things. And because we
00:24:07.540
don't have them, you know, if it was understood in the day that if your church, your fellow church
00:24:14.860
members were helping you get past a period of unemployment, that, you know, this is something
00:24:22.760
that you're, first of all, that you're not demanding, you're asking for, you're asking for
00:24:26.940
help. They're giving you help as a member of their community. And you're, you're grateful for that
00:24:33.840
help, you know, and you understand that, you know, there's even probably, and there always was this up
00:24:39.280
until, uh, mid century, you know, a certain level of shame that went along with accepting that kind of
00:24:44.540
help, which is not good. Nobody wants to be in that situation where you feel that shame,
00:24:48.640
but we kind of have decided that nobody should ever feel that kind of shame or that kind of
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pressure. And these are, these things are rights that should be bestowed. And so instead of having
00:25:00.220
to embed yourself in a community that you might need one day, because things might, you know, the
00:25:05.220
world might turn against you. Uh, you don't have to do that anymore. You can be completely on your
00:25:09.540
own and there are bureaucratic systems in place to, to do all the things that, um, a community would
00:25:16.700
have been able to handle on their own just a few decades ago. And so it delegitimizes a lot of
00:25:21.840
those things. You know, the, a lot of the, a lot of the authority of a Catholic parish came from the
00:25:27.700
fact that it supported its members. It was, it was a, it was a community organization that you could fall
00:25:34.500
back on if you really needed it. And when those things go away, you'd like to say people should
00:25:39.680
just sort of, you know, in the case of church, just sort of have their abstract faith and that should
00:25:44.520
be enough. But in reality, you know, institutions need, they, they, they gain legitimacy, uh, through
00:25:51.380
the support that they give the people who are involved with them, you know, and the state has
00:25:56.800
sort of appropriated all those functions and all of those local institutions have been, have been
00:26:02.180
hollowed out. We hope you're enjoying your air Canada flight. Rocky's vacation. Here we come.
00:26:09.020
Whoa. Is this economy? Free beer, wine, and snacks. Sweet. Fast free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner
00:26:17.120
reservations before we land. And with live TV, I'm not missing the game. It's kind of like I'm already
00:26:23.960
on vacation. Nice. On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels. Wi-Fi available to airplane members on
00:26:31.340
equipped flights sponsored by Bell conditions apply. See your Canada.com. Yeah, this really came
00:26:36.000
together for me. Bertrand de Juvenal wrote on power. And in there, he explains the destruction
00:26:41.840
of these institutions. And it's really the illusion of independence, right? We, we, why the state is
00:26:48.840
inarguably stronger than it's ever been, but we think we're freer than we've ever been. And how do we
00:26:55.080
have this dichotomy? Well, it's because we've been freed of all those lower dependencies, right? And so
00:27:00.620
yeah, it's all, it's all just tied to the state and the state doesn't call on us that often. We think
00:27:06.260
as compared to, you know, these day-to-day ones and many people living in those traditional societies
00:27:10.080
would agree, but we don't understand kind of the cost that comes with that. I remember I was reading
00:27:15.840
the ancient city and, uh, and, uh, he's talking about kind of how Rome became more powerful. And he
00:27:22.340
says in order for the city to, to become great, the families had to be destroyed. You know, the patricians,
00:27:29.060
the power of the patricians had to be hollowed out and just, and that, that really struck me the
00:27:33.540
way that, uh, for Rome to become the empire that it was going to become, it had to destroy the civic
00:27:40.240
fabric that had made it what it was up until that point. And do you think part of the problem is that
00:27:47.420
we never noticed that transition in the same way that the Romans probably didn't notice when they
00:27:53.160
went from the Republic to the empire? We never noticed when kind of the super organism that is,
00:27:58.880
that is, uh, beyond kind of the nation state as we understood it arose. And now we've kind of been
00:28:05.540
living in a shadow, uh, you know, up to this point. Yeah, for sure. We didn't notice it. At least the
00:28:12.000
mass culture didn't notice it as it was happening. Um, you know, I think America is a very unique case,
00:28:17.700
right? Just because America was never going to be a nation state in the same way that Poland is a
00:28:26.380
nation state. I think it was just never going to happen. Like we needed to bring people in if we
00:28:31.040
were going to be able to populate this continent and pacify the native Americans and keep competing
00:28:36.080
European powers, uh, or who knows, maybe Eastern powers. Like if, if the Anglos tried to do this
00:28:41.120
whole thing themselves, uh, from coming in and just that, that, that brought that, that, that threw
00:28:48.560
American identity into flux almost from the beginning. And it's, it's been that way more or
00:28:55.240
less, uh, for our entire history with the exception, I guess, of maybe about 1925 to 1965, maybe something
00:29:05.100
like that. And so, you know, like if you look at, uh, the difference, for example, between, uh, some of
00:29:17.020
the Eastern kingdoms, uh, in, in medieval and early modern Europe and the Western and Northern European
00:29:25.000
ones, you know, if you go to Poland, Lithuania or Hungary, places like that, you have examples of
00:29:32.040
countries where, uh, the, the sovereign was never really able to break the power of the nobility.
00:29:38.680
And as a result, they never put together states with the same cohesive, cohesiveness and ability to,
00:29:45.380
to, to act powerfully that you saw in, for example, uh, like in Russia, for example, now Russia's
00:29:52.600
the far other extreme where the, the czar broke the nobility and made, you know, completely domesticated
00:29:58.920
the nobility. And that has its, its sort of downsides too, because you can get a state that's
00:30:03.980
too top heavy. And if you go to Western Europe, England's a great example, they found a sort of
00:30:08.180
balance in there. And, you know, I, there's definitely, you, if you look at, uh, at Europe,
00:30:16.440
you know, Europe's great because you kind of have this, yeah, the, the, the cohesion of states and the
00:30:21.900
strength of extended families sort of shades off from North to South and East to West, right? If you go
00:30:27.800
down to like, you look at Northern Italy, Northern Italy has been something like we might call a
00:30:33.800
nation state for quite some time. Southern Italy, you know, they had to be dragged like the South
00:30:39.280
kicking and screaming into that situation. And to this day, it's still hard for the Italian
00:30:43.780
national government to control everything that's going on in the South. You see the, like in Greece
00:30:48.780
and you see in Spain, for example, like the national government has had a lot of trouble kind
00:30:53.900
of holding things together the way a Scandinavian country or England or Germany does. And those are
00:30:59.620
countries where the nuclear family has been predominant for, you know, 1500 years, a long
00:31:06.980
time, like really long time. The nuclear family has been predominant Anglo culture in particular. It's
00:31:12.500
been, uh, it's been a much stronger force than it was elsewhere in Europe going back to 500, 600 AD at
00:31:21.220
least. And so it's a lot easier. Those are much smaller blocks you have to move around to build up
00:31:27.880
the edifice of the nation state than trying to move around these large rooted extended families who have,
00:31:33.500
uh, you know, deep ties to specific regions of their country and things like that. And, you know,
00:31:41.540
because, you know, and there's an economic aspect of this too. I mean, you know, when you have
00:31:45.300
the nation state system and the capitalist system, both of these things are like deeply at war with,
00:31:52.080
uh, local, uh, affinities and local loyalties. Right. Like it, it, it, it's a huge bummer,
00:31:59.820
uh, for McDonald's that people in India won't eat beef. Right. You know, they, they, they have to,
00:32:07.080
maybe you have to rebrand all these pork products and all these other, it's just a whole
00:32:11.320
hassle. And it would be great for McDonald's if India just gave up their religion and ate beef,
00:32:17.020
that would be so much easier, much more efficient. And, uh, you know, like the nation state,
00:32:23.920
I think is, is much more on some level is more consciously attacking those institutions because
00:32:32.220
they challenge its power. Whereas capitalism, I think kind of corrodes those things, you know,
00:32:37.560
more, more, more than that. And I mean, if you look at, uh, you know, again, to go back to the
00:32:43.220
Soviet union, you had like during, uh, the 1930s and Stalin was in charge, he had NKVD squads going
00:32:52.880
around and hunting down these, there, there were these sort of traveling, uh, bards in Ukraine who
00:33:01.080
kind of is mostly an outside of the cities in Ukraine. It was still mostly in a literate
00:33:06.100
population and the way that their cultural traditions and their sort of epic history of
00:33:11.380
themselves was passed on was through these bards. Most of them were blind and they would travel around
00:33:17.200
and tell these stories and sing these songs and so forth. And it was an institution in the country
00:33:22.400
going back many centuries. And Stalin had those people hunted down to the point that he was having
00:33:27.880
blind, blind men just killed because they might be one of these guys. Like he very actively wanted
00:33:34.260
to, wanted to break that down. Just, uh, you know, that, that, that specific local culture.
00:33:41.700
And we, you know, we can look at that and say, that's just a monstrous thing to do. And of course it
00:33:46.480
is, but it was a necessary thing to do if you were trying to accomplish what Stalin wanted to accomplish
00:33:52.920
in the Soviet Union, you know, and the long-term effects of that, you know, after 70 years of living
00:34:02.700
in a state where parent, uh, kids were encouraged to, to turn in their parents to the secret police,
00:34:10.780
where everybody worried that their neighbor or even members of their own family might be compromised by
00:34:18.040
the state that they, you know, everything they're saying to one another might come back on them in
00:34:23.400
some way. So they have to be guarded even among the people they're closest to. It broke the whole
00:34:29.260
society up into just completely atomized individuals. Like every person, they might've well,
00:34:34.180
might as well have been like floating in a space suit in space by themselves. That's how disconnected
00:34:38.400
they were. And when the state system started to fall apart, you know, you look at Russia and the,
00:34:46.020
in the post-Soviet world in the 1990s and what happened there. You know, I remember, uh, years
00:34:50.680
ago it was, I, I read, uh, a book by that investor guy with the bow tie, uh, Jim Rogers. And, you know,
00:35:00.120
he, uh, he's like a billionaire and he went and he outfitted this Mercedes, spent like 200 grand
00:35:06.340
outfitting this Mercedes with big off-road tires and like made this like really just crazy vehicle.
00:35:12.340
And he decided he was going to go on like a trip around the world. He spent like a year and a half
00:35:16.780
or something, just going all over the place. And when he was in the post-Soviet world, he said
00:35:21.640
that one of the things that struck him more than anything is that he would go to this, uh, this hotel
00:35:29.420
or this dacha, like on the black sea. And it's just a gorgeous setting. And this hotel is so opulent
00:35:35.200
and beautiful. It's just the, everything about it. And yet you would go in and all of the doorknobs
00:35:41.980
and the water faucets, they were all just cheap things that had been thrown in there because
00:35:46.400
everything else had been stripped away. And, you know, as things were breaking down and that's
00:35:51.700
what you end up with when you have a society that's completely composed of individuals, you
00:35:55.720
know, you lose the ability to convince yourself that you shouldn't just take what you can get for
00:36:02.060
yourself right now and not worry about anybody else or the future or, or, you know, anything
00:36:07.240
beyond your, your immediate needs. And so you go into this, you know, a period of, of asset stripping,
00:36:13.920
which is really like the state I think we've been in since the 1970s, you know, ever since we,
00:36:19.820
ever since we realized that there was a tremendous, like that we didn't really have to innovate or grow
00:36:26.160
our, our businesses or anything anymore, because there were just trillions of dollars to be made
00:36:31.440
arbitraging labor and regulate regulations and stuff by outsourcing all these jobs. Like why
00:36:37.020
would I, as a CEO take a risk spending, you know, a billion dollars to innovate a new product when I
00:36:43.680
can make $10 billion by shipping my factories to another country. And so that's what we started doing
00:36:48.080
with no concern for the future, no sense that, uh, you had any kind of an obligation to the place
00:36:56.360
that you were living and that you were from, you know, and, you know, it may be that that,
00:37:02.040
that, that, that mentality is sort of built into America at a very deep level, like from its founding,
00:37:08.160
you know, in the sense that, you know, in the United States, like a community has no rights. Like it's
00:37:14.400
not a, it's not considered a corporate body the way a corporation is. For example, a corporation
00:37:20.120
is a legal person in certain ways. And yet a community is not, it has no collective rights
00:37:26.080
whatsoever, which means, you know, when a business owner wants to pull his factory out of some,
00:37:33.100
some Midwestern town, he's going to move it to Mexico. The individuals in that place can complain,
00:37:39.920
but the community itself has nothing to say about it. It has no standing in our, in our system.
00:37:44.880
Um, and that's a fairly new thing. You know, the idea that even in the United States, actually,
00:37:51.700
like when I really think about it, it's sort of a new thing. You know, if you, you go back,
00:37:55.300
like I was talking about to the, the New York ethnic politics, and it wasn't exactly codified in law
00:38:01.200
or anything, but it was understood that, uh, you know, the, the Jews and the Irish and the Italian,
00:38:07.700
they had certain rights. Like they, they had a certain amount of, now, of course, those rights were
00:38:13.760
dependent on their ability to exercise power and retain, and retain them, make sure that their
00:38:19.380
presence was felt. But it got to a point where everybody did realize that it's not just that
00:38:23.800
you're a New Yorker, it's that you live on the Lower East side, you work in the garment industry,
00:38:28.140
and you know, you're, you're an Eastern European Jew, and you're part of this group that, that has,
00:38:34.460
uh, a certain, a certain place in the society with certain obligations and certain rights and
00:38:40.180
privileges. And, you know, that, that I think has been just completely lost. I mean, maybe the only
00:38:47.800
place you see it anymore, it's the only form of immigration that, you know, the left really doesn't
00:38:52.640
like is when you see them pushing back against gentrification. All of a sudden, these ethnic
00:38:56.900
communities have, you know, strong provincial rights again, that they should be able to defend.
00:39:03.240
Yeah, the, the liberation of capital, its deterritorialization means that there's no,
00:39:08.720
there, there's a complete destruction of lower time preference, because there's, it's no longer
00:39:14.020
grounded in serving anything, it's no longer particular to a people or to their welfare.
00:39:18.940
And so there's no interest by the operations of capital to, you know, to better that area. It's
00:39:24.480
only about removing the barriers and kind of removing the friction of the system and the efficiency of
00:39:30.520
the bureaucracy. And that's kind of ironic, because if you look at, you know, if you look at Marxist
00:39:36.200
literature and you read it like the, you can, you can find a lot of them like talking how important
00:39:41.800
about how important feminism is, because feminism destroys the family. And if you can destroy the
00:39:46.560
family, you can destroy the nation state and its borders and its preferences for particular peoples.
00:39:50.760
And therefore you can accelerate the, you know, the global Marxist revolution. People forget that in
00:39:58.040
order for you to get this like globalist communist, you know, utopia, you have to accelerate through
00:40:04.360
the capitalist period of destruction of, uh, of identity. In fact, uh, Marx specifically said he
00:40:11.400
was a free trade guy up to the point at which destroys national identity. And so people forget
00:40:18.280
that this is that, that it's actually a handmaiden of this process and, and, and that, you know,
00:40:23.000
Marx was actually counting on, uh, on that aspect of capitalism to, to create kind of the global utopia.
00:40:30.480
And that's kind of the next thing I wanted to ask you is one of the problems we're running into
00:40:35.520
and people can call this communism. I prefer managerialism. I think that because you can get
00:40:40.020
different flavors of it that don't have to be communist. And I think that's what so many people
00:40:43.800
have had a problem with, but do you think that this arms race of States, like you, you know, as you were
00:40:49.700
saying many States that do not go through this process of, of destruction of family identity that
00:40:55.360
don't reduce the family down to, uh, kind of that, uh, that nuclear or, or below structure.
00:41:04.160
But do you think that, uh, that reduction or, you know, the fact that if you don't go through that,
00:41:08.560
you don't become a stronger state, you, you aren't able to centralize and compete is a problem
00:41:13.880
because, you know, every state is in an arms race. Basically, you know, once France gets the
00:41:17.980
lay of a on mass, well, you better have the ability, you know, to conscript people. If you want to,
00:41:23.000
you know, you know, kind of stay in the race. If they build tanks, you build tanks. If they build
00:41:26.300
nukes, you build nukes. And eventually like your state just can't compete if you don't destroy
00:41:31.120
families, but at the same time, you're also breaking down, you know, things that you'll need,
00:41:36.440
you know, if, if you don't have a perfectly run state. Yeah. You know, it's actually very
00:41:41.500
interesting. If you look throughout history, there's this pattern that you kind of see throughout
00:41:47.060
where, uh, depending on what the dominant weapon systems are in a given, in a given time and place,
00:41:54.300
you see, uh, you see certain effects on the political and social culture of, of the people
00:42:01.940
who are, who are involved in it. So for example, like you go back to when, uh, the chariot was just
00:42:08.500
a dominant battlefield presence, you know, it was running through everybody. Chariots are expensive.
00:42:13.300
Horses are expensive. Armor is expensive. You had a very aristocratic society power, very much
00:42:18.480
concentrated at the top. Uh, same thing when you had, you know, when heavy cavalry dominated the
00:42:23.960
European battlefield, very expensive. Uh, when you look at say like ancient Greece, you had a citizen
00:42:31.140
army because their attack, their battle tactics were based on the phalanx system and they need, you
00:42:35.560
know, and granted it wasn't every single, you know, you had to be a citizen in good standing who
00:42:40.840
could, uh, afford to outfit himself as a soldier in order to be able to participate in the polis
00:42:45.640
and be a soldier. Uh, but you needed a lot of people to make that system work. And you get up to,
00:42:51.720
uh, you know, say after, especially after the 30 years war with the reforms of Gustavus Adolphus,
00:42:57.540
and then just into the early modern, uh, period of, of, of, of warfare going through like world war one
00:43:04.320
and two, you know, we drafted 16 million men, the United States did during world war II, or we called
00:43:11.120
up 16 million men to go to war, fulfill various functions. You, uh, you know, in, in that, in that
00:43:18.560
era, um, whether anybody liked it or not, like people, average people were realizing that they had a
00:43:26.640
certain amount of value to the state, that they were necessary to the state survival and the powers that
00:43:32.080
be understood that to, you know, to a large degree that they couldn't alienate these people past a
00:43:37.560
certain point because, uh, they needed them, you know, in order to be able to compete like you're
00:43:42.180
talking about. And it does feel like, you know, we may be moving into, uh, back, back toward swinging
00:43:51.080
back in the other direction right now with technology moving to the point where, I mean, even our wars,
00:43:56.240
you know, they're, they're, they're largely fought by massive, uh, weapon systems that can only be
00:44:02.040
afforded by, by nation States. That's been the case for a while, but, uh, technology that, you know,
00:44:08.460
can, can be, that, that really makes the mass conscription of soldiers, uh, pretty irrelevant.
00:44:16.540
Right. And, you know, the ability to, for a state to control and manipulate its population
00:44:24.660
in the modern age to, in order to get them to do what they want. Although the science of that has
00:44:29.560
not been perfected. And a lot of times they, uh, create effects, the opposite of what they're trying
00:44:34.340
to achieve. They are getting better and better, better at it, you know, all the time. And that's
00:44:38.500
something that I, you know, I think we should all be pretty concerned about. You know, I, when I think
00:44:43.440
about, you know, in, in, in the past, when a state became tyrannical past a certain point, the rulers
00:44:49.060
had to, had to worry about an uprising from, you know, within the population nowadays with,
00:44:56.780
you know, everybody's sort of being a cyborg by proxy with their phones and being tracked in
00:45:03.400
everything they do from where they go to what they buy to who they talk to. And just with AI systems,
00:45:10.060
building detailed personality profiles of every single individual and social profiles of, of every
00:45:16.800
single individual in the, in the society, um, you know, I think it would be, it would be very hard
00:45:23.280
to even, like to organize for resistance in any form. Right. And that's something that like,
00:45:30.580
this is, this is an important point that people talk about, uh, you know, you see this on the
00:45:35.680
dissident, right. All the time. Like we need some kind of a revolution. We need, I hope that,
00:45:39.980
you know, uh, maybe the, just some kind of acceleration is dream where things fall apart and then we can
00:45:46.220
really sort of come together and, and, and make this happen. And that is a, that is a, a completely
00:45:53.640
wrong way of, of thinking about the situation in a situation where everything crumbles and falls apart
00:45:59.160
and everything is up for grabs. It is going to be the people who are already organized and prepared
00:46:05.260
for that, uh, who already have institutions and power structures put together to, to take advantage,
00:46:12.440
who are going to come out the best in that fight. You know, you don't organize yourself. You don't
00:46:19.300
organize your community in the midst of a breakdown like that. When uprisings have happened in the past,
00:46:25.420
it wasn't just a mass of individuals who were, who, who were, you know, deciding to rebel against the
00:46:32.380
king. These were families and communities and regions that had very, very deep ties and loyalty to
00:46:38.920
one another. And they were rising up and you can kind of do that, you know, uh, without having to
00:46:44.600
worry so much about whether the king's agents are going to penetrate your organization or something.
00:46:49.080
And, uh, nowadays, like, you know, when you have people as disconnected as we are,
00:46:53.640
um, I think that breakdown is probably, is, is probably the last thing people should be looking
00:46:59.660
forward to. Well, I would think of it, it's not so much looking forward to, but I would think of it
00:47:05.320
this way. I think, I, I think you're right that there's probably not a lot of chance of any kind
00:47:12.460
of revolution or those kinds of things. I don't think that, that, that's kind of in the cards for
00:47:16.700
a lot of reasons, including the ones that you mentioned there, but I think we are testing the
00:47:21.660
limits of how the total state can control people without just burning its social capital to the
00:47:29.000
ground. As we said, you know, you're, you're, yes, you are gaining more control. Yes, you are,
00:47:34.500
you know, have these incredible systems of observation of those things, but you also can't
00:47:39.740
get your planes to like take off and land reliably. Right. And so how long can you operate
00:47:45.460
a complex network of interdependent systems while destroying your social capital? And I think the
00:47:52.800
answer to that is low. I think what's going to happen, if anything is, and this isn't an optimistic
00:47:58.740
view to be clear. I'm not saying this is the good outcome. I'm just saying it's the likely one
00:48:02.600
thing is that these systems collapse in on themselves because they simply cannot be maintained
00:48:07.360
because we, we simply refuse to educate people in important things. We refuse to have people
00:48:12.020
bound together in consequential, you know, social formations. And instead we hollow everything
00:48:17.480
out right now. The total state is more or less released and, and forgive me, cause this
00:48:22.300
is going to be a very materialistic explanation, but it's the best analogy I've got. The total
00:48:26.860
state has released a, um, a, a, uh, intellectual pathogen. They they've released a, uh, we're going
00:48:37.140
to evolutionarily select for people who can resist memetic pathogens. We we've, we've, we've used
00:48:43.960
memetic pathogens to break all possible social bonds, which is what we're seeing now. Right? Like
00:48:49.240
our version of the Soviet kid informing on their parent is the kid who informs on their parent that
00:48:56.060
they won't let them get a trans surgery. Right? Like that's, that's what we're doing. We're doing
00:48:59.880
the exact same thing. We're at the same level of, of kind of total state breakdown. Uh, but we're
00:49:05.240
just using like, you know, sexual liberation as the sledgehammer against the family instead of
00:49:10.620
something else. But like eventually all those people are just going to eliminate themselves
00:49:15.500
from the gene pool. Like they're just going to strip themselves out of, out of competition
00:49:20.000
at any level. And when they do that, like the thing that we'll be selected for is people
00:49:24.620
who are able to resist. I think that, you know, the, that, that kind of memetic pathogen and build
00:49:30.580
themselves into communities, protect themselves and, and nest themselves in a different level
00:49:35.240
identity. That's my thought. A whole nation of Amish Mormons and ultra Orthodox Jews. I mean,
00:49:42.960
I mean, you know, in, in various ways, yes. And I, and, and maybe those won't be the specific
00:49:48.020
groups that went out, but those definitely the ones with a headstart. Like, uh, I, I, you know,
00:49:52.860
a lot of the assumptions we have about the continuance of our current technological society
00:49:58.820
is the idea that we'll continue to have this artificial elevation across the globe of
00:50:05.180
infrastructure provided by the first world. But that's, this is very short. You know,
00:50:10.260
that's not going to continue, right? Like you're not going to have people shipping. Yeah. People
00:50:14.460
will still have cell phones and stuff in a lot of these areas, but, but, uh, there will not be
00:50:19.580
this constant network of, uh, you know, corporations and things holding up, uh, technology,
00:50:25.780
I think globally. And so I think in many ways that's going to collapse back into itself. And
00:50:29.180
the thing that's going to really matter is the people who were able again, to resist this stuff,
00:50:33.520
maybe the ones that could do that and adapt the technology simultaneously. Maybe the Amish
00:50:37.820
aren't the best example because they've taken themselves out of the way, you know, out of, out of the,
00:50:43.040
the field in that way, but some kind of hybrid, right? Someone who, who can live their life in a,
00:50:48.900
in an Amish style way personally, but still integrate technology in a way that allows them
00:50:53.800
to be competitive in a, in, you know, I guess a state scenario. The Yukon Federation.
00:51:00.040
You ever read Fitzpatrick's war? I can't say I have. Uh, you'd love it. It's a science fiction
00:51:04.520
book that takes place like in the 25 hundreds after America's fallen apart and an Amish like group that
00:51:11.380
does use certain limited technologies is the only one that can kind of hold it together. And they form
00:51:17.880
this whole North American empire. It's a good book. You'd like it very right wing. Um, but yeah,
00:51:23.500
I mean, you know, it's something that's very difficult to do partly because, you know, I,
00:51:30.020
what I find is, is people, especially people in cities, I should say it's less, less true outside
00:51:35.380
of cities, but most people are in cities is, is this has accelerated a lot since COVID, you know,
00:51:41.720
you see people who are borderline agoraphobic people who are socially anxious to an extreme
00:51:48.980
degree when it comes to actually having to try to break past like the initial layer of, of small
00:51:55.360
talk with somebody. Um, people have almost forgotten how to do that. And most of their human
00:52:02.100
relationships have been uploaded, you know, they're with other avatars online and their own self,
00:52:11.420
you know, the, the, the, the self that they feel, uh, is, is, has really been uploaded online to a
00:52:17.080
large degree so that your actual life is just, you know, for content mining, you know, it's just a
00:52:23.920
thing that you do so that you have things to upload and enhance your online, your online identity.
00:52:28.480
And these things are obviously not stable and they're profoundly, uh, they're, they're profoundly
00:52:34.880
vulnerable to, well, mimetic contagion, like you said, right. They're profoundly vulnerable to, uh,
00:52:42.120
just the influences of, of propaganda and things that, uh, maybe an individual who's rooted in a
00:52:48.280
community would not be so vulnerable to, you know, that the person who, who is, feels just completely
00:52:55.200
locked into their extended family and everyone's always in their business. And, you know, it's
00:53:00.140
just, you've always got some family function to go to. And it's just, you know, you, you have to go
00:53:05.240
to church every, it's just this whole range of, of aspects of your identity that are just given to
00:53:10.920
you. And that are, don't, you don't really feel, uh, are an option unless you're prepared to live
00:53:17.300
with, you know, a sense of profound guilt. Um, those people often feel very trapped. Those people are
00:53:23.500
the least vulnerable to propaganda. The least, I mean, actually, you know, a chapter, I think it's
00:53:28.280
in section three of, uh, Elul's book on, uh, propaganda. It's so good about that exact thing
00:53:33.560
for propaganda to work. You have to break down all of these institutions and leave people there by
00:53:39.040
themselves, because if they're with a bunch of other people who, uh, you know, are part of something
00:53:44.580
that has its own corporate existence, uh, not separate from necessarily, but, but, uh, its own
00:53:52.400
corporate existence besides the, whatever system is trying to propagandize it, they're going to have
00:53:57.040
defense mechanisms against it. And, uh, you know, we're, we're far down the line. And I think that,
00:54:04.580
you know, with people, uh, exporting larger and larger portions of their identity online,
00:54:13.180
you know, they're, they're, they're, that, that portion of their identity is much more vulnerable
00:54:21.400
to, to manipulation by various means. And, you know, it's, uh, yeah.
00:54:30.560
So you mentioned this a couple of times and I want to come back to it because it's, I think it's
00:54:35.740
important to what we're talking about, but just important for people in general, it's critical at
00:54:41.160
this moment. You and Lafayette Lee had an exchange and I am 1776 on American identity. And you've
00:54:50.060
brought up multiple times the way that American ethnogenesis has stalled repeatedly. Right. And
00:54:56.420
there's this weird moment because we know that multi-ethnic empires work. Like there are multiple
00:55:01.800
examples of, of multi-ethnic empire succeeding, but they almost always worked in the sense that
00:55:07.760
everybody kind of lived in their own area. Different ethnosis were divided into different
00:55:13.300
areas and they were ruled kind of by their own local authorities. And everybody just kind of
00:55:18.280
kicked things up to the empire. Like the empire could call on you to, you know, troops and taxes
00:55:23.860
and things, but they, they weren't foolish enough to try to go in and break the language and the
00:55:28.300
habits of people, unless they wanted to like literally ethnically cleanse them. That was the method by which
00:55:33.400
that was done. And so we know that there, there's a way that can do that, but the distribute, the
00:55:38.060
distribution in the United States, I don't think works that way. And we've kind of, in many ways,
00:55:43.640
already broken those identities forcefully, like it, it's both, both just through technology and through
00:55:51.320
legally, like we've legally taken action to rearrange neighborhoods and things to, to break down those
00:55:57.720
identities and those kind of social codes, social cohesion that would allow, allow America to work
00:56:03.180
that way. So what we're really trying to force is the ethnogenesis at a, at a, basically empire scale.
00:56:10.220
And, and my question is, is there a way forward for American identity that can be healthy? Is there a way,
00:56:18.760
you know, would it be regional? Would it be united as an, as a nation? Is there, or are we doomed to kind of
00:56:25.720
come apart in this way? Like, what do you think is, is the future of that given the kind of the way
00:56:31.360
of the United States form? Um, well, obviously we're at a very late hour when we're having this
00:56:39.900
conversation. Right. And I think that, you know, although we weren't an empire proper, like in the
00:56:46.100
same way, a multi-ethnic empire proper, I think that through a lot of our history, we had some of those
00:56:51.760
qualities in the sense that there was an Anglo power structure that sort of kept its hand on the
00:56:57.480
steering wheel. You know, these old families that, uh, that, um, you know, mostly in the East, but they
00:57:04.340
spread out a little later on. And, but, but there was this Anglo power structure that sort of kept its
00:57:08.800
hand on the steering wheel as all these other people are coming in. And they had various means
00:57:12.280
to incorporate talented people from the, from the ethnics. Uh, you know, that you get to go to Harvard
00:57:18.760
and join skull and bones and we teach you how to be an elite. And now you're one of us and, you know,
00:57:23.120
you're William F. Buckley or something. They had mechanisms to do that, but there was this,
00:57:28.100
this Anglo power structure overseeing everything that had a sense of proprietary possession of the
00:57:36.100
country, that, that this is something that they inherited and that they are going to leave to their
00:57:40.980
own descendants. And, you know, you, but you get up to the 1960s and seventies and for a variety of
00:57:48.440
reasons that power structure just evaporated, you know, the, the, like Nelson Rockefeller died in
00:57:55.700
1979 and he's the last Rockefeller anybody cared about because the rest, you know, this just didn't
00:58:01.480
have kids who were ready to rise to that level of leadership in the country. And, you know, a lot of
00:58:07.940
it had to do with just the age old hatred of, you know, Northern, Northeastern hatred of the South and
00:58:13.740
what happened in, you know, during desegregation and the need by the Anglo elites in the North to,
00:58:20.800
to just prove through every action that they could possibly take, that we're not them. We're not like
00:58:27.700
them. You know, we don't care about our own group. We don't care about these boundaries like they do.
00:58:32.860
And so it all got sort of coded for those people as, as a negative thing, you know, looking after your
00:58:38.600
own and thinking of yourself as part of a, a corporate group. Um, and so, you know, like today,
00:58:46.460
you know, like, I just think that, you know, if, if like a group, like the neocons, you know, these low
00:58:57.460
rent, uh, you know, fail sons who, uh, the idea that they would just move in and take over American
00:59:05.300
foreign policy back when the Harrimans and the Rockefellers and, you know, those type of family,
00:59:10.100
it never would have happened. They never would have allowed that. They would have just,
00:59:13.860
it just wouldn't happen. But since that, that power structure is sort of evaporated,
00:59:19.580
the American system is just available to whoever happens to be the most organized group who can,
00:59:27.900
who can do that. And, you know, neocons are, they're a well-organized, uh, group that, that knows how to
00:59:34.560
exercise power within a context of sort of social and political chaos like we have. And if we were
00:59:42.340
going to maintain this thing at a national level, I think it would mean having to reconstitute some
00:59:49.140
kind of an elite that had, uh, legitimacy, even if it was only through, uh, you know, a profound
00:59:57.760
understood, uh, level of power. Um, I think that's going to be very difficult to put together. I don't know
01:00:04.160
if, like, I try to think of other examples in history where that's been put together without,
01:00:10.080
you know, a total, uh, either a conquest or total upheaval in society that rearranged everything.
01:00:17.540
Um, but I do think that like our best hope probably, uh, is that we end up with some mix of
01:00:25.320
regionalism and where, you know, people go back to identifying more with their, uh, state, with their
01:00:34.320
region, with their local culture, uh, and still understanding that those things that those things
01:00:40.880
that they're a part of, uh, benefit from, you know, remaining in a, in a relationship with the
01:00:46.400
other regions of the country and working together. Uh, and that's obviously going to require,
01:00:51.460
uh, you know, severe, um, rolling back of federal power. Um, I think what's going on in Texas right
01:01:00.220
now is great. I was going to say, federal power is never going to be rolled back, um, through like
01:01:06.840
legislation or something through a form that is not going to happen. It's going to be rolled back
01:01:11.460
through confrontation or it's not going to be rolled back. That's it. You have to call their bluff
01:01:16.300
and make them do the thing they're threatening to do and then see how people respond to that and
01:01:21.900
whether they're willing to take it or not. And, you know, my bet is that this is not 1861.
01:01:27.180
You know, this is a totally different scenario where, uh, you know, people, they're not, they're
01:01:32.480
not sending the army into Texas. And if they try, then this whole thing is over. Oh yeah. And so,
01:01:38.280
uh, you know, I think that, you know, at the same time though, you know, look, uh,
01:01:45.960
some kind of peaceful devolution of, of power and identity that's important to down to a more local
01:01:55.360
or regional level, uh, doing that without hitting any of those tripwires that send us into a real
01:02:04.080
conflict. It's going to be very tricky, but it's the necessary, that that's the necessary path we
01:02:10.360
have to travel. And I think as we do it, we really have to keep in mind that, you know, America has
01:02:16.420
never really had a civil war. You know, even our civil war was really just, we broke into two
01:02:21.960
countries and had a regular war. I guess you had a civil war in, you know, uh, Missouri and some of
01:02:27.680
the places out West and other places, but you know, a civil war is Sarajevo. It's Beirut.
01:02:32.600
You don't want anything like that. You don't want something, you know, you don't, you don't want to
01:02:37.720
engage in a conflict with your neighbors, you know, that is not fought and won on battlefields,
01:02:46.080
but it's fought in like, you know, damp basements with people tied to chairs and, you know,
01:02:52.860
pliers and blow torches and you don't want any part of that. And, uh, that's, you know,
01:02:59.680
when things kind of end up up for grabs, if there is sort of a, you know, people see federal power
01:03:06.360
beginning to break and which region or which communities are going to pick up which pieces,
01:03:11.720
there's a great danger that we break out into some kind of a, some kind of conflict like that.
01:03:16.920
And I think it's something that, you know, even, uh, as members of the right, maybe especially as
01:03:21.480
members of the right, because right now, whether we like it or not, we are very disorganized
01:03:25.520
and we don't have a lot of, um, ability to, to, to exercise organized power, um, that we should
01:03:34.520
probably be avoiding, uh, any, any, anything like that pretty much at all costs. And at least,
01:03:41.420
you know, for, for the time being, again, until, until we get organized and, um, that has to start
01:03:48.160
at the local level. It has to start at the state level. It's not something that, you know, you're going
01:03:52.780
to send enough of your congressmen to, to Washington and they're going to change it for
01:03:57.620
the simple reason that, you know, the U S government is not the thing that we learned about from
01:04:02.280
schoolhouse rock back, you know, when we were kids where, you know, I'm a bill and this is how a law
01:04:07.560
gets passed and that's how our government operates. It's like, no, like 99.9% of our government is just
01:04:13.400
this giant unelected bureaucracy that runs the state regardless of who's in office who don't even have
01:04:21.140
a lot of times, particularly a lot of, a lot of respect for the people who are in office. I mean,
01:04:27.880
we saw that in the Trump years, obviously, but we see with Biden too. I mean, could it ever be
01:04:32.540
laid more bare that the president doesn't really matter with the way things are set up?
01:04:38.160
Who really believes that Joe Biden runs the United States?
01:04:43.380
I think even when like the people who elected him on some level had to be conscious that they
01:04:48.540
weren't really electing him, they were reelecting the system, you know, let's get this Trump guy out
01:04:54.040
of here and just let the system go back to being, you know, what it is. But, you know, I experienced
01:04:59.780
this when I worked for the DOD for a long time as a civilian engineer, you know, we'd be in there
01:05:04.760
in our office, in our building, and we'd get a new secretary of defense and a new secretary of the
01:05:11.760
Navy and a new chief of Naval operations and so forth. And you start to see signs pop up all over the
01:05:17.180
building. Here's a new program. It's the SNAP program, you know, where we're going to do all
01:05:22.140
these things and reform this. And after a couple of years, the secretary of the Navy would get
01:05:28.440
changed out again and all those posters would get taken down. And we just learned to ignore them
01:05:32.020
because they didn't matter. Nothing. You could change the president, everybody on down. And we felt
01:05:37.440
at most little ripples in how it actually affected the way we did our jobs. And, you know, we were the
01:05:43.960
ones closest to the ground actually, actually running the system. And it's like that everywhere,
01:05:48.600
you know, that politicians come and go. And if you're an SES employee or GS-15 at, you know,
01:05:55.560
the Department of Defense or the State Department or something, you've been there for 30 years,
01:06:00.300
a president comes in. In your career, you've seen seven presidents come and go. And you've gone
01:06:08.900
through that process that we went through in our office where we kind of realized that like,
01:06:12.440
yeah, they come and go and nothing really changes. We just are here doing our jobs. We're the real
01:06:16.660
power here. And, you know, that's the system we've got now. It's going to be difficult to break. But I
01:06:25.840
mean, we're very fortunate, you know, in the fact that whether they like it or not, you know, the
01:06:32.240
American people as a whole still have a certain amount of residual respect for things like the
01:06:41.080
constitution and these traditions so that, you know, if it does come down to an open conflict
01:06:46.100
between our elected officials and the bureaucracy, you know, I think that especially if you don't
01:06:52.540
have somebody who's as personally polarizing as a guy like Trump, although, you know, a less
01:06:58.380
polarizing person might not be willing to take on. I was going to say, I think you actually have to
01:07:02.060
have that. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody who is concerned about whether people, you know, like them is not
01:07:08.460
going to, is not going to take that fight on. But I think that, you know, I think that the elected
01:07:15.080
officials can win that fight. But it's, but it's a tough one. I mean, you're talking about an
01:07:19.780
extraordinarily entrenched power system, you know, and dislodging it is, is going to require
01:07:25.040
the same effort or just the same level of decay, which is the dark side that brought down the Soviet
01:07:31.820
Union because it's that deeply entrenched, you know? And it's like, and when I say deeply entrenched,
01:07:36.520
I don't just mean in their power. I mean, it has such deep penetration into our lives,
01:07:42.000
into our communities like that. It's going to be hard to extricate it. I mean, we have to be prepared
01:07:47.940
to take up a lot of those functions that we said had been replaced, you know, that, that communities
01:07:53.920
used to do, families used to do. And you think about like, what, why there's so many homeless people.
01:08:00.060
Okay. There's a housing crisis. There's a mental illness and drug and all of these things,
01:08:03.900
that's fine. But you go back 70 years ago, the reason there was no homeless crisis during the
01:08:10.480
depression, even like, you know, you had like certain Hoovervilles and stuff, but nothing like
01:08:14.880
we're talking about today. And it's because there's a guy wandering around the streets,
01:08:19.200
pissing himself and mumbling. And people aren't going to say like, there's a homeless guy.
01:08:23.600
They're going to look and be like, isn't that the cousin of the Smith family over there? Hey,
01:08:28.480
Smith family, when you're at church this Sunday, like, what are you doing? Like,
01:08:31.660
why is this happening? And so there was just a level of accountability and self-help that,
01:08:36.300
that doesn't exist anymore. And if we really want the things that we say we want, rolling back
01:08:42.780
these systems of power, we have to be prepared to take up the slack.
01:08:48.180
Absolutely. You know, that, that's why I think, even though many of the changes that we're talking
01:08:53.420
about would be top down in a certain way, they can't happen until the bottom up, you know,
01:08:59.860
systems are there to support it. If you don't have the communities, if you can't take back that,
01:09:05.120
I mean, you know, you're ready to send your, your, your parent to a, you know, a federal nursing
01:09:09.680
home or something. Well, no, that's not how that used to work, you know, like, you know,
01:09:13.460
and so you have to take out on a lot of responsibility, things that are really inconvenient
01:09:18.080
and expensive and difficult. The things that the state has taken off your shoulders have to be put
01:09:22.940
back on your shoulders before you can roll back many of these, these types of power. But yeah,
01:09:28.020
I think that that's exactly right. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this
01:09:32.460
up, but we're going to move to the, do you have time for a few questions? Yeah. Okay. Move to the
01:09:38.760
questions of people real quick. Do you want to let people know? I mean, I'm sure most people are
01:09:42.280
already listening to the Martyr Made podcast, but just in case, let people know where they can find
01:09:46.540
your work. Sure. Yeah. I have a sub stack, martyrmade.substack.com, or if you go to iTunes or Spotify or
01:09:53.680
whatever, you'll find the Martyr Made podcast. I also do a podcast called The Unraveling with my
01:09:59.140
friend, Jocko Willink. We talk about sort of more contemporary and, and more recent history,
01:10:07.140
I guess. We've been doing a lot of Cold War history and, and contemporary politics. So that's about it.
01:10:14.380
Yeah. Like I said, the, the, the Israel Palestinian one is a, is a much must listen to guys. Everybody
01:10:19.220
has, has to go back. Essential listening. All right. So Cooper weirdo says identity. Is that a brand or
01:10:24.640
a TV show? Yes. Very good, sir. It's, it's, it's a great question at this point. Yeah. Uh, Costas,
01:10:31.820
uh, 1983 says, is there another way to pre-order by, uh, or by the total state other than Amazon?
01:10:37.780
Some people don't want to subscribe to mega corporations, including me. Yeah, man. I'm sorry.
01:10:41.620
I totally understand that at the moment, uh, Regnery only has the distribution through, I think,
01:10:46.940
well, you've got Amazon. If you want to go to, you know, uh, Barnes and Noble or books a million
01:10:51.600
or target, you can pre-order everything there, but those are also large corporations. It'll be at,
01:10:56.260
you know, smaller bookstores upon release and you can buy it there. But at the moment,
01:11:00.340
the, the pre-releases I think are all, all the, or the pre-ordering is all through large institutions.
01:11:05.400
Unfortunately, uh, George Hayduk says we're not revolutionaries. We're reactionaries. Uh,
01:11:12.320
yeah. I mean, obviously I think that's, uh, that's true in a sense. Um, but I think, uh,
01:11:18.360
you, you have to understand that either way, the mindset has to be, you are not the establishment.
01:11:23.020
The establishment is not in your favor. Uh, and that's, that's kind of the mindset you, you know,
01:11:28.200
the problem with the conservatives has been the idea that you're just conserving the institutions.
01:11:33.340
And eventually if you can just reform the institutions enough, it'll be fine. And I think
01:11:37.660
that's a failing strategy that we've seen over and over again. Yeah. I mean, and that's one of the
01:11:42.780
reasons that conservatives and just the right in general, uh, has really found itself in a very
01:11:49.300
difficult place over, uh, sort of the more recent years, right. Is what, that's what conservatism is.
01:11:56.480
Like if you're on the right in, in a, most societies throughout most of the history of societies,
01:12:02.260
you're the ones who are defending the institutions and defending the status quo against attacks,
01:12:07.500
from, from various directions and trying to keep these things going. And so they never really had
01:12:13.040
to learn to organize. The institutions were their organization, you know? And so, whereas the left,
01:12:18.920
they're learning to organize door to door, factory to factory, street by street. And they, they have a
01:12:24.940
deep, deep infrastructure and a, and a sort of, a sort of institutional knowledge of how to do those
01:12:30.660
things that the right absolutely does not have. And then one day the, the right woke up and found
01:12:36.860
themselves completely cast out of all those institutions and realizing they have to manage
01:12:41.040
to put together a counter-offensive and they don't have the, they don't really have the experience to
01:12:45.940
do that. You know, you run into this a lot, like, you know, this is kind of what Spangler talks about
01:12:51.120
with, uh, Caesarism where like the idea that once that is, once you have a sort of internal proletariat,
01:12:59.080
you know, uh, in a toy and be sense that, uh, you know, needs to find a way to, to, uh, organize,
01:13:07.540
to push back against the power structure that is predatory against them. Um, you know, it's
01:13:14.140
extraordinary, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible for them to like really organize on an
01:13:18.800
organic level to do that. And so what they opt for, especially once all these things have broken
01:13:23.980
down, once you have, uh, you know, you're no longer living in a village, you're part of the Roman mob,
01:13:29.220
you know, and you're kind of have that you're disconnected in that way. What, you know, people
01:13:34.340
do is they come together and they invest a man or a party with the authority and, and, and they back
01:13:42.240
them, you know, not say unconditionally, but, but somewhat unconditionally to go forward and act in
01:13:49.600
their interest. And they don't ask much. You see us with Trump, you see with a lot of the people who
01:13:54.240
are most popular, you know, on the right is they don't seem in the national review types. They just
01:14:00.240
can't understand this at all. That like, I thought these people, they, you know, they voted for Mitt
01:14:04.380
Romney, they voted for John McCain and George Bush. I thought they cared about free market economics and
01:14:08.580
they cared about X and it's like, well, yeah, they kind of did. And they kind of still do, but right now,
01:14:14.400
you know, what they're like, what's, what's driving their decision-making is they can just,
01:14:20.040
it's very simple. They can look up and see that these people hate me. That guy doesn't seem to
01:14:25.580
hate me. And so I'm just going to throw in with that guy. And if he does things I don't like,
01:14:30.520
I'll complain about it or whatever, but I'm throwing in with that guy. And, you know, that's
01:14:36.300
how you get a Caesar figure, you know, a cult of personality around a person who goes in and,
01:14:40.960
you know, like Caesar himself, a second tier elite who was sort of felt, you know,
01:14:47.180
who sort of felt looked down upon by some of the upper, upper tier elites, the Octavians and so
01:14:51.900
forth. And, you know, that's very much Trump, you know, a second tier elite who maybe, especially at
01:14:59.380
the beginning, his, you know, people say he's just using the MAGA movement and the people to get
01:15:05.160
revenge against these people he's resentful toward. And maybe it did start out that way, you know,
01:15:09.820
but I think that, you know, as years go on and the same people that hate you hate him and vice versa,
01:15:18.400
you do have a sort of bonding effect. And I would be, I'd be very surprised. You have to be like a
01:15:23.580
complete sociopath, uh, to not feel a sense of affinity for the people who have stuck with you
01:15:29.280
through everything that he's gone through, you know, at this point. And, you know, I mean, that's
01:15:34.180
a powerful binding effect, you know, just the fact that how the Rex is born. Absolutely. Yeah. You know,
01:15:39.380
the fact that people can look and just say the people who have been attacking me, who hate me,
01:15:45.100
like very openly hate me, hate my family, hate my community, hate my way of life. They hate him
01:15:51.120
too. And he doesn't look like me. You know, he lives in a place with golden toilet seats or whatever,
01:15:56.340
but if they hate him and they hate me, like there must be something that, that, you know, that,
01:16:02.180
that is there connecting us. And that's powerful, you know, it's really powerful.
01:16:07.060
Yeah. This is something I tried to explain to DeSantis backers a lot. They're like, well,
01:16:11.280
he's more competent. I'm like, yes, of course, but that is not what this is about. I know you did the
01:16:15.760
same thing with the thread, you know, that you talked about, like Trump, Trump touched something
01:16:20.240
about American identity, a live wire that no one else had touched in a long time. And you can't
01:16:26.400
recapture that by just being really competent. Like that's, it's not the same thing. It's not
01:16:32.740
the key ingredient. It's, it's not policy and they, they just couldn't get past that. But
01:16:37.980
one, one thing I wanted to mention before we cut out is you were talking, well, we were,
01:16:43.800
we were talking a minute ago about the need to, you know, if we are going to replace these power
01:16:48.780
structures, which is what we say we want to do, we have to be willing to take up, take up the slack
01:16:54.280
and provide the services and do the things that the system kind of performs more or less well right
01:16:59.620
now. You know, that that's going to feel like a constriction on your freedom. Like you're going
01:17:08.320
to feel, you're going to feel in a lot of important ways, less free than you do in this disconnected
01:17:15.740
individualist society with a total, you know, a total state overseeing everything you do and stuff,
01:17:20.760
but you're going to, on a, on a day-to-day basis, there are going to be a lot more people, a lot
01:17:26.740
more, a lot more things with claims on your time, claims on your energy, you know, people who you owe
01:17:33.320
things to, you know, just in terms of what's owed between us all as, as, you know, members of
01:17:38.580
communities. And, you know, it, it, it's, it's that thing. Again, you talk to like a lot of people
01:17:45.040
from Southern Europe or, or, you know, the Arab world or something, and they feel so constricted
01:17:50.840
by their extended family networks and all these expectations. And that's, that's true. You know,
01:17:56.740
but my, my co-host on the unraveling Jocko, like his, you know, his, his main kind of slogan or
01:18:02.960
whatever is discipline equals freedom. And he means that in a lot of different ways that I'm not talking
01:18:09.200
about here, but it's, it, it really is like a, a profound paradoxical statement in a lot of ways,
01:18:14.700
you know, it's like in your individual life, a person who has no discipline, you might have the
01:18:21.840
freedom to not have to, nobody tells you to do anything or whatever, but you don't have the
01:18:26.200
freedom to do anything because you can't do anything. You don't have any agency because you
01:18:31.080
don't have any discipline. You can't get anything done. And it, you know, it applies just sort of on
01:18:36.960
this larger social level too, is, you know, the discipline being accepting the obligations that
01:18:43.420
are going to come with being a member of a community and understanding that the other alternative is to
01:18:49.640
be governed by an abstract state that doesn't care about you and might even, you know, be your enemy.
01:18:55.080
So. Yeah. The guy who's free to do all the drugs he's want is he is, does he have Liberty? No,
01:18:59.880
he's a slave to his addiction. Right. And the Liberty can only, you can, you can only have Liberty if
01:19:05.460
you practice virtue in context of a community and without the willingness to do that, then you
01:19:11.900
will always be a master to some or a slave to something to another master. All right. So Matt
01:19:17.260
Greedier says, both of you guys are awesome. Love these long form podcasts on a work day. Glad
01:19:22.560
you're listening, man. Really appreciate that. With a minute to go says, sorry about my comment over
01:19:29.600
the holidays that you call for investing in community in 2024 was like Eric Hockner telling
01:19:35.040
Berliners to join an amateur orchestra instead of bring down the Berlin wall. Yeah. I understand the
01:19:40.740
impetus, like the big action, the big victory. But, but as Daryl has pointed out repeatedly here,
01:19:47.200
if we don't build the structure on which, you know, you can, you can put a society back on top of,
01:19:53.320
you're not getting rid of the overbearing thing that is holding on everyone for all today.
01:19:58.020
Okay. Perspicacious heretic says when someone immigrates to a nation, what level of assimilation
01:20:03.140
is needed? It seems based on what you're saying, uh, where you're saying you want some, but not
01:20:08.620
completely. Well, again, it kind of depends on what you're there. There's a lot of definite moving
01:20:12.940
definitions here. Uh, but you know, most traditionally a lot of cultures understood you could eventually
01:20:19.240
move in, you know, and, and, and blend into different societies, but this was not a one year
01:20:25.600
thing or a five year thing. It wasn't, you don't just take a civics course. This was often a
01:20:29.560
multi-generational commitment. If you wanted your family to really become part of an, of another
01:20:35.400
group, another nation, you really had to commit to a multi-generational, uh, blending process.
01:20:42.280
And if you want to continue to operate a multi-ethnic empire, you can do that, but you,
01:20:46.560
I think you need to understand it in that way. If you actually do want to integrate people,
01:20:50.540
if you really actually do want to assimilate people, you need to understand it as a process
01:20:54.340
that goes on for many decades, many generations, not just something that happens because you come
01:20:59.840
in, come in and take a class and raise your right hand. Uh, yeah, I don't have a lot to add to that.
01:21:06.820
Fair enough. All right. Creeper weirdo says we could elect Jesus Christ with Fred Rogers as VP
01:21:11.920
and Judas would be on CNN tomorrow. Stop with this less polarizing poo. It doesn't matter. Yeah.
01:21:17.560
I think everyone should learn that lesson from Trump, if nothing else. Uh, K star says, uh, keep
01:21:24.940
up, uh, keep it up guys. That's what, uh, uh, what's the next martyr made episode. Do you have
01:21:30.380
a plan for the next series? Yeah, it's, uh, well, I'm still working on my who's America series,
01:21:35.540
which is a history of various episodes from the labor movement. And the next one is, it's been one
01:21:41.540
of the most fun ones to study. It's about the battle between the mob and the communist party for
01:21:47.500
the, uh, for control of the unions in Hollywood in the twenties and thirties and forties. So it's
01:21:52.480
a fun story, a lot of colorful, a lot of colorful characters. Um, a lot of, uh, yeah, deep history,
01:21:59.520
deep, a lot of deep politics of like the early 20th century, like the things that really that touch
01:22:04.260
on themes that we're talking about here, you know, and, uh, the different paths that, you know,
01:22:09.380
the, the people who had come into America over the last 70 or 80 years at that point were taking
01:22:14.260
to find their way in society. So it's, it's going to be a lot of fun.
01:22:18.380
That does sound really good. I'm looking forward to that one.
01:22:20.460
Life of Brian says, uh, left, left institution, institutional capture created a mismatch between
01:22:26.700
temperament and position left has institutions, but doesn't bother to maintain them. See the LA
01:22:31.940
times the right can't, uh, the right can't be insurgents. Uh, yeah, I would say that we can see
01:22:37.900
that the left's ability to maintain institutions is collapsing. A lot of that is their, their circulation
01:22:43.980
of elite is poor. They've blocked out everybody, uh, with the wrong, with the wrong positions,
01:22:48.780
uh, who is capable. There's an increasing number of wrong positions. And so therefore you must
01:22:53.900
necessarily be selecting for, uh, loyalty rather than talent. And that, that kind of naturally degrades
01:22:59.800
any institution. Yeah, no doubt. And then George Hayduke says, uh, not revolutionaries, meaning we can't
01:23:08.740
go as a mob and burn down the, uh, the old world, even though it's broken, a return of the King
01:23:13.680
is more what we stand for. Yeah. I think, I think that that's right. And I, I feel like most people
01:23:19.800
on the right understand this. They're not dispositionally, uh, revolutionary in that
01:23:25.360
sense. And so I think you're right that, uh, restoration is probably, uh, preferable for
01:23:30.860
most to revolution. Yeah. Sulla, not Caesar. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and
01:23:37.200
wrap this up. But once again, Daryl, thank you so much for coming on, man. It's always great
01:23:40.460
talking with you. No doubt, man. Keep up the great work. Thank you. And of course,
01:23:44.600
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01:23:48.280
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01:23:51.860
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01:24:00.780
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