The Auron MacIntyre Show - Every Argument Is an Opportunity to Rule ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 6⧸19⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.680 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.240 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.160 So all of the time, I hear about, man, Nick Land is just impossible to read.

00:00:43.240 Now, Nick Land, for those who aren't familiar, is one of kind of the core thinkers in what's called the neoreactionary sphere.

00:00:50.960 He's somebody who has really pushed the edge of what kind of many people think about when it comes to right-wing political theory.

00:00:58.320 And fair enough to those people, Nick Land is often kind of indecipherable.

00:01:02.700 He's not a light read, to be sure.

00:01:05.380 However, he does say some really important things.

00:01:07.920 And since he is so important to what I think is some cutting-edge right-wing political theory,

00:01:13.940 I think it is important to take the time and understand him, even though he might be a little more difficult than, say, somebody like Curtis Yarvin, who is already kind of difficult.

00:01:21.500 So I understand why some people might enjoy maybe having this broken down, explained a little bit in detail, going through it slowly so we can all kind of understand it together.

00:01:31.140 So I'm going to start doing that in a series here.

00:01:33.160 And to kick this off, I have hot off the heels of his very long and very impressive foreign policy stream, The Prudentialist.

00:01:40.920 Thanks for joining me, man.

00:01:41.740 Well, thanks again for having me back on so soon.

00:01:43.700 I know it's like we were just here last week, but Nick Land is always fun to cover.

00:01:47.320 Yeah, I know.

00:01:47.820 I'm glad you're able to jump in.

00:01:49.000 And I know you had to, like I said, squeeze this in after everything, but I think we're going to do a good job here.

00:01:54.200 I think we can kind of break this down and make it understandable to everybody.

00:01:57.420 But before we do that, guys, let's go ahead and hear from today's sponsor.

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00:03:20.680 All right, guys.

00:03:21.480 So we're going to go ahead and jump right into this.

00:03:24.240 So the section we're going to be reading from today is from Nick Land's essay,

00:03:29.640 The Dark Enlightenment.

00:03:30.640 This is one of his more famous works.

00:03:32.360 It's in response to Curtis Yarvin and his work over at Unqualified Reservations.

00:03:38.220 And so you're going to notice that he uses many Yarvinisms in this.

00:03:41.640 He's going to use words like the cathedral as if we all kind of already understand what they mean,

00:03:46.740 because this document is, again, in response to the work of Yarvin.

00:03:50.740 Land was himself kind of a radical Marxist.

00:03:54.840 He was well known for working with many far left academics until he kind of made this weird travel to the right.

00:04:03.980 One of those kind of touchstones for him during this was interacting with Curtis Yarvin's work.

00:04:09.200 And so he does hold Yarvin's work in pretty high esteem as he kind of moves into this.

00:04:13.900 But he's also a trained philosopher.

00:04:15.120 So he brings his own kind of understanding to what's going on.

00:04:20.520 There are many different works of Land's.

00:04:23.060 Some of them are a little more difficult.

00:04:24.360 His book, Fanged Numina, is quite a challenge for many.

00:04:28.280 I wouldn't say start there.

00:04:30.520 But some of his passages in the Dark Enlightenment or from his Xenosystems blog are ones that I think are a little easier to tackle.

00:04:38.580 We're going to kind of kick things off here.

00:04:40.220 This one is dense.

00:04:41.760 It's got some language that requires some unpacking, but it's not impossible.

00:04:48.600 It's not impenetrable.

00:04:49.560 So we're going to start right here.

00:04:51.340 So I'll just read here from the beginning.

00:04:54.260 And we're literally just going to kind of stop after every line or two and make sure that we all kind of understand what's going on here.

00:05:00.460 So in brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of unity of opposites.

00:05:05.560 This embodies the essence of dialectics.

00:05:08.060 Linden notes, but it requires explanation and development.

00:05:12.080 And this is to say further discussion.

00:05:15.660 So right away, Prudentialist, just to touch on this, we hear the word dialectic being thrown around a lot, very casually.

00:05:23.140 What's kind of the most basic definition?

00:05:24.820 I mean, we get one there.

00:05:25.700 That's pretty – that one's relatively basic.

00:05:27.640 But where does this kind of come from?

00:05:29.680 Well, I was about to say that's a pretty straightforward, easy-to-understand definition.

00:05:35.200 But I mean, dialectics kind of just comes from sort of older German philosophy, you know, and most explicitly Hegel, who is still, you know, a core tenet of a lot of leftist thinking to this day.

00:05:46.920 The classical idea of, you know, thesis, antithesis, and bringing the two together to form some sort of synthesis in towards how we understand the world.

00:05:57.760 If we want to interrogate a particular subject, a dialectic behind that would allow us to interrogate all aspects of it, apply counterfactuals, debate things out in real time.

00:06:08.060 And a much less open forum discussion, a much less Socratic sense, but far more confrontational to bring what is true against falsehood and see what can come from it.

00:06:20.080 All right.

00:06:20.640 So we're just going to go ahead and jump into our next paragraph there because I think that was a very succinct explanation from the Prudentialists.

00:06:26.520 So the sublimation of Marxism into Leninism is an eventuality that is best grasped by – best grasped crudely.

00:06:36.380 By forgiving a revolutionary – by forging a revolutionary communist politics of broad application almost entirely divorced from the mature material conditions or advanced social contradictions that had been previously anticipated.

00:06:52.680 All right.

00:06:53.020 So that sounds complicated, but it's not as complicated as you probably think.

00:06:56.320 So Marxism obviously is a very – we throw this term around a lot now, but it is a very kind of discrete philosophy, at least when we're talking kind of original Marxism.

00:07:07.940 And Karl Marx had a very particular idea about how his vision would come about, the kind of conditions that it would arise in, the kind of process that would occur to kind of lead into the events that he predicted.

00:07:22.780 And those things didn't really end up coming up about the way he thought.

00:07:28.540 For instance, in Russia, they didn't really have late-stage capitalism or the kind of kind of capitalist contradictions that he predicted would be necessary for a communist revolution.

00:07:40.920 And then one kind of happened anyway, right, Prudentialists?

00:07:43.940 Well, yeah, although I think it would be important if we weren't remiss that there were some rather wealthy capitalist interests in sort of getting Lenin and those funded over there in the late Tsarist empire.

00:07:56.260 But, yes, that's pretty on point so far.

00:07:58.840 Right.

00:07:59.140 There was an effort to modernize leading up to – and so, yeah, so some of that obviously big thing there.

00:08:05.200 But the point being is that when they're talking about Leninism, we're going to get something that's a little different from just straight-up Marxism.

00:08:13.200 We're going to get something that was more designed to kind of work inside other systems here.

00:08:21.020 Lenin demonstrated that dialectic tension coincided exhaustively with its politicalization.

00:08:29.340 And that all reference to dialectics of nature is no more than retrospective subordination of the scientific domain to a political model.

00:08:39.500 Dialectics are as real as they are made to be. 0.95

00:08:44.780 So here we're seeing that the – basically what they kind of discovered was that dialectics did not have to occur only inside this, again, very specific Marx-predicted framework.

00:08:58.020 That they could be created in almost kind of any situation through the right kind of political environment.

00:09:06.080 In fact, if you could just make sure that, for instance, certain differences in kind of nature or science, natural limitations, or the thing against which you were agitating, then you could still kind of generate that dialectic energy.

00:09:20.760 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:23.320 And I think that what's in parentheses here is rather important, especially when we consider, you know, the Matt Walsh documentary, like What is a Woman?, for instance.

00:09:32.600 All reference to the dialectics of nature is no more than subordination of the scientific domain to a political model.

00:09:38.300 And we've seen that more often than not when it comes to the issue of transgenderism.

00:09:42.180 It does not matter what our view is on biological sex, that once we've divorced, you know, ourselves from, say, social contradictions like, you know, men can't be women or even the biological reality of men can't be women, as this little paragraph here denotes, then all that we're seeing is politics subsumes the actual scientific understanding of the world.

00:10:03.860 And that makes it easier for you to control things, because it doesn't matter what your, you know, experiment or study proves, you know, there's a 98% scientific consensus on all issues ranging from, say, climate change to transgenderism, the need for, you know, gender affirming care, and dialectics are as real as they are made to be.

00:10:23.940 So it does not matter that Dylan Mulvaney looks and talks and acts like a very flamboyant homosexual man, you know, for his instance, he is a woman. 0.97

00:10:31.780 And that's really important, too, because remember, the basis of kind of classical Marxism is supposed to be dialectical materialism, right?

00:10:39.960 It's supposed to be a very scientific, very realist view and understanding of the world of kind of the way that politics is structured.

00:10:49.140 It is built, you know, this is, again, why I try to push people to understand the importance of managerialism.

00:10:54.820 It is supposed to be kind of the most objective understanding of reality around it.

00:11:00.540 But what we see here is actually the most useful part of kind of a communist advance is not that dialectical materialism, but is actually you can take that entirely out of kind of its adherence to a specifically scientific understanding of the world and still advance the dialectic.

00:11:20.580 That's still work. That politicalization and that advancement still works, even if you can kind of remove it, separate it from the scientific domain, as he points out here.

00:11:30.620 Yeah, absolutely. And I think you see this more times than not. Right.

00:11:34.680 I mean, when Paul Ryan was still in Congress, he had famously made his point that, you know, we have spent over a trillion dollars on the war on poverty and people are still as poor as ever.

00:11:43.980 And it hasn't lifted that many people out of poverty. That's a scientific reality. Right.

00:11:48.500 And how can we address to, you know, fight poverty or to address, say, you know, discrepancies and differences between groups in a way that's more effective and more grounded in fact?

00:11:58.540 Well, dialectically, as again, as we're talking about here, if you don't need to have it with Leninism, like classical Marxism, you don't need it to be exactly materialist.

00:12:10.020 You don't need to look at the raw conditions on the ground, because if you can turn up a crowd with political rhetoric, say, like former Vice President Joe Biden saying that, you know, then presidential candidate Mitt Romney is going to put black people back in chains.

00:12:22.940 It doesn't matter what great factual based argument that you have or that you're proving so hard that you're not sexist, that you have a binder full of women candidates that you want for cabinet positions.

00:12:33.020 The it can be completely divorced from reality. And politically, you know, he wants to kill Big Bird and he wants to, you know, make sure that, you know, women are back in camps or whatever.

00:12:42.080 Like that's the way that this works. And we've seen this throughout our modern political back and forth between the left and the right.

00:12:47.900 Exactly. So the dialectic begins with political agitation and extends no further than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalition, coalitional logic.

00:13:00.580 That is the superstructure. Sorry, it is the superstructure for itself or against natural limitations.

00:13:07.840 This is going to be really important here, guys.

00:13:09.900 It's practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest, broadest graspable extension as a platform for social domination.

00:13:19.880 Everywhere there is an argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.

00:13:25.260 As you can guess, that's really important because that's what we name the stream here, right?

00:13:29.180 So let's go to the beginning of this paragraph because it's so important.

00:13:31.840 The dialectic begins with political agitation and extends no further than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalitional logic.

00:13:42.400 This is something I try to explain to people all the time, so much, especially conservatives all the time.

00:13:49.800 Well, of course, it's wrong. It's not scientific. They told me they cared about science.

00:13:54.440 Well, of course, of course, that's wrong. It doesn't make everyone equal.

00:13:58.180 They told me they cared about equality. Well, of course, that's wrong. 0.89

00:14:02.400 You know, that doesn't support free speech.

00:14:04.540 And they told me that they cared about free speech.

00:14:07.380 But no, guys, this only extends as far as it needs to, only to the edge of the coalitional logic, only enough so that it advances the power of the coalition and no further.

00:14:21.720 Yeah, I mean, a really good example of this, and it's been cited before, both by conservatives and even liberals, has always been like Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

00:14:32.280 Those rules in there about, say, accusing your enemy of what you are doing or slandering about them, that is political agitation. 0.93

00:14:40.580 And it's practically antagonistic to ensure that your faction wins and that the other guy gets called a racist or a bigot or whatever goal that you're trying to accomplish in order to make him look like a hypocrite. 0.79

00:14:51.720 And you'll notice that that kind of only works in one particular direction. 0.88

00:14:55.840 It doesn't matter if you have all the facts and logic on your side, very Ben Shapiro-style, Young Americans for Liberty kind of argument against college leftists.

00:15:03.080 Those college leftists understand that they're there for political agitation, and it doesn't matter if their logic is full of scientific or realistic contradictions, because they're here for the sole purpose of changing the direction of that argument.

00:15:16.160 And it doesn't matter if you have all of those great clips where you own the libs with your arguments, because for them, it illustrates that they can wear that argument down as long as it's necessary to rule over you.

00:15:29.100 And I mean, this is the same way that we've seen the debates over everything ranging from same-sex marriage to even more recently now with transgenderism or even this new federal holiday that some people have off today.

00:15:42.220 It doesn't matter what the logic is for. It doesn't matter if it doesn't apply to everybody.

00:15:46.060 It only has to work for a small faction of people that can grasp it and then fight and punch through to get their argument on the side of victory.

00:15:53.560 And that's what it means to be on the right side of history, is that you've antagonized the politics so much that your side is one, and they've been worn down, and they accept it.

00:16:02.920 Exactly. And he'll go more into here as to kind of why this works much better for the left than for the right.

00:16:09.280 But for those who have ever heard the phrase, Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims to the left, that's from Curtis Yarvin.

00:16:18.140 But this is kind of land expanding on that concept in the Dark Enlightenment.

00:16:25.620 Remember, this passage is a response to Curtis Yarvin.

00:16:29.160 And so he's kind of breaking out and explaining in kind of a little more technical and philosophical language kind of why that observable phenomenon occurs.

00:16:39.280 So it is the superstructure for itself or against natural limitations, practically appropriating the political sphere in its broadest graspable extension as a platform for social domination.

00:16:52.000 So what does this mean?

00:16:53.460 All right. So for those who don't know, in Marxism, you have the base and the superstructure.

00:16:57.760 And the superstructure is basically like all the justification and apparatus that kind of keeps the ruling class in power, that kind of puts itself kind of above and controls kind of what's what's going on with production and everything else.

00:17:12.640 There's a lot more to it, but that's just the very quick gloss over there.

00:17:18.140 So when he says when it says it's a superstructure for itself or against natural limitations, what he's saying is that basically you can you again don't need those classically Marxist conditions.

00:17:31.460 You don't need those revolutionary conditions of late stage capitalism, all these contradictions, all that stuff that Marx predicted because you can literally set yourself against nature.

00:17:42.800 You can literally set yourself against natural limitations.

00:17:45.860 For those who are familiar with Spandrel's idea of bio-Leninism, this is kind of also gets expanded out of this.

00:17:53.320 And so by setting yourself against those natural limitations, you can basically take the sphere of the political to anything because there will always be natural limitations or always be natural hierarchies.

00:18:06.780 And if you're fighting against nature itself, if you're creating a revolution against nature itself, there's always a new place that your power needs to expand.

00:18:15.600 There's always a new place, a new thing that you need to conquer in order to bring it under your control so you can kind of create that promise to quality or whatever your promise is here.

00:18:26.900 And then this is the most important part, of course.

00:18:29.260 Everywhere there is an argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to rule.

00:18:34.760 And this is what Prudentialist was talking about there, right?

00:18:38.900 Can a man become a woman? 1.00

00:18:40.520 Well, no, right?

00:18:41.720 Like that's obvious.

00:18:42.960 Everyone knew that.

00:18:43.820 There was no contention about that fact.

00:18:46.520 So if there's no contention over that fact, there's no disagreement.

00:18:49.900 And if there's no disagreement, then there's no political power there because that's just a foundational part of reality.

00:18:56.800 That is an axiom on which everyone must then build their understanding of reality.

00:19:03.320 The right builds its institutions on the understanding that this one person cannot become an entirely different person.

00:19:12.660 They cannot change their biological sex. 0.99

00:19:14.820 That cannot happen.

00:19:16.160 And so there's no disagreement.

00:19:17.980 But if they create a disagreement, if a partitioning can be created, if a faction can be created, then you create an argument.

00:19:27.040 And once there's an argument, now there's an unresolved opportunity to rule.

00:19:32.460 Now there's something to argue about.

00:19:34.960 There's sides to be taken.

00:19:36.740 There's factions to be created.

00:19:39.300 All of a sudden, where there was no political energy, you've created political energy by kind of shattering these standard bonds, these traditional bonds, these natural bonds that were already kind of holding what would be considered maybe a right-wing understanding of the world together.

00:19:55.100 Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:56.760 And I think it's important to understand that, again, when it's separated from the material conditions, if you're not operating under late-stage capitalism, you're not looking at the actual facts on the ground of how the workers are, this means that you can abstract this to what's necessary to make your point across.

00:20:13.740 So where every argument, there's an unresolved opportunity to rule, where there's an argument, there's always going to be some underlying state of exception between you and the person you're arguing with.

00:20:23.620 So it doesn't matter that you don't believe in all of the left-wing things that they do, because to them, when there's an argument, you are generating a disagreement that says, this person is an existential threat to my existence, and I have to rule over them in order to not be killed.

00:20:38.100 And that's sort of the logic that you're going to see out of these sort of dialectics.

00:20:41.400 That's why banning transgender-affirming care by state legislatures, for us, we don't want to cast straight children. 1.00

00:20:49.180 But for sides that advocate for this, you're literally advocating for transgender genocide under their argumentation.

00:20:54.780 And that's where this is, is where there's an argument, there's an unresolved opportunity to rule, and for them, if their motivating idea is, well, we have to stop genocide, well, then they're going to do stop at nothing to make sure that that happens.

00:21:04.780 And this is how their dialectic works.

00:21:07.100 Exactly.

00:21:07.680 And that's why it's so important to always create tension.

00:21:10.620 This is something, again, the right doesn't understand.

00:21:13.100 As long as they can start, they can chip away at a monolithic understanding of something, then they've already started the process by which you will lose.

00:21:22.180 This is also why I often say on Twitter, to have this debate is to lose it.

00:21:26.920 Because by accepting that there is even a debate to be had, you end up opening up the door to this phenomenon.

00:21:35.760 So, for instance, a lot of people right now are talking about Juneteenth in the chat, right?

00:21:40.540 They're joking, you're wishing everybody a new Juneteenth. 0.73

00:21:43.180 And there are a lot of conservatives who are like, okay, well, I don't like slavery, so yeah, sure, have a holiday about getting rid of slavery.

00:21:49.020 Great, fantastic.

00:21:49.880 What they don't understand is that's not what that holiday is for.

00:21:54.420 That holiday doesn't exist so you can celebrate the end of slavery.

00:21:58.300 That holiday exists, a holiday that no one really knew, maybe outside of a handful of people in Texas, nobody really knew across the nation, suddenly got elevated out of nowhere.

00:22:10.980 Why did it get elevated?

00:22:12.160 To create an argument.

00:22:14.480 To create an opportunity to rule.

00:22:17.060 Because once people are debating about, well, Juneteenth, is it the real, I mean, is that really when our Independence Day comes?

00:22:23.400 I mean, that was independence for everybody, right?

00:22:25.220 Julio IV, that was just independence for, you know, some white slaveholders.

00:22:29.380 But Juneteenth is really independence for everyone.

00:22:31.740 And all of a sudden, even conservatives who are like, you know, who, again, are saying, I didn't like slavery, so I'm for this.

00:22:38.640 All of a sudden, they're arguing about the real meaning of Juneteenth.

00:22:41.260 No, no, Juneteenth isn't about reparations.

00:22:43.700 It's about, you know, celebrating Abraham Lincoln and the fight for the Emancipation Proclamation or whatever.

00:22:49.900 And all of a sudden, you have a situation where this thing that did not exist beforehand is already creating tension, already creating factions, already creating that opportunity to rule once again.

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00:23:33.880 Yep. I mean, that's what it's going to be down to every time.

00:23:37.780 I mean, we saw this with, like, the Fox News opinion.

00:23:40.520 There was an op-ed out from the American Conservative talking about what is the meaning behind Juneteenth or whatnot.

00:23:46.440 And it sort of tries to play this abstraction game when what its original purpose for and has been since it was declared a federal holiday in this poor attempt.

00:23:56.160 And Nick Land talks about this later on in this, in the Dark Enlightenment.

00:23:59.060 I highly recommend that you read it.

00:24:00.720 But it illustrates that they're not understanding that this is a rhetorical holiday.

00:24:05.500 This is a rhetorical tool to levy against what they perceive to be their enemy and who they want to rule over.

00:24:11.580 So, I mean, oh, no, it's not Independence Day for everybody.

00:24:14.360 It's Independence Day for us.

00:24:15.480 Our ethnic narcissism is telling us that, no, we have to abide by this.

00:24:18.940 And we're going to use it as a wedge issue to rule over us and to rule over you and to get what we want,

00:24:24.740 whether that be reparations or black-only spaces at college education and putting things down on the basis of race and making it anti-white.

00:24:32.940 That's how this is going to work.

00:24:34.560 And the quicker that I think more conservatives recognize that how these tools work,

00:24:38.540 the better off that the conservative movement would be in the U.S.

00:24:41.360 Well, and that's kind of the thing, right?

00:24:43.280 That's the beauty of this strategy.

00:24:45.300 The left are counting on a piece of human nature, which is once you see something, you want to confront it,

00:24:51.420 you want to explain it, you want to categorize it, you want to synthesize it.

00:24:55.940 You know, the dialectic process isn't just out of nowhere.

00:24:59.180 These guys didn't just make it up.

00:25:00.440 They were recognizing a truth of human nature and kind of what it wants to do.

00:25:04.640 And so when the left hang these things out there, the right just walks up to them in good faith.

00:25:10.020 They say, oh, yeah, of course, no, let's have a debate about it.

00:25:12.520 Yeah, marketplace of ideas, best idea wins, let's do this.

00:25:16.000 Not understanding that those things have been placed in front of them for a reason,

00:25:21.120 that these things are, the left understands what it's doing here.

00:25:24.580 It's very crafty about this.

00:25:26.340 And instead of just looking at every single thing that gets flashed in front of you on Fox News or on Twitter or wherever,

00:25:33.020 and saying, oh, this is something I have to debate about.

00:25:35.720 Instead, you need to take that step back.

00:25:37.640 You need to play the board and not just the piece and say, why are they putting this piece in front of me?

00:25:43.080 Why did they move that pawn there?

00:25:44.780 What does that mean?

00:25:46.100 And understand that there is more behind that.

00:25:48.400 But we could get stuck in this point all day.

00:25:50.680 We'll be elaborating it here as we go.

00:25:53.480 So let's try to get a little further in here.

00:25:55.780 The cathedral incarnates these lessons.

00:26:00.440 It has no need to espouse Leninism or operational communist dialectics because it recognizes nothing else.

00:26:08.480 All right.

00:26:09.080 Real short there, but I think pretty obvious.

00:26:12.620 Prudentialist, what does that mean here?

00:26:14.240 It recognizes nothing else.

00:26:15.980 So, yeah, what Yarvin would call the cathedral, which is typically sort of the academic media consensus, I mean, government as well.

00:26:24.820 And he sort of, I think I'm going to take it to the next sentence as well, because Leninism or the operational communist dialectics, that's what they're solely operating on.

00:26:33.760 There's no need to say that I'm a Leninist when all of my rhetoric, all of my political formulation is Leninist in nature.

00:26:40.520 There is scarcely a fragment of the social superstructure that has escaped dialectical reconstruction, you know, through articulate antagonism, polarization, binary structuring and reversal.

00:26:51.240 What he's what Land is arguing here and what I think is very observable in our political environment is, is that, you know, I don't think Barack Obama, for instance, is a Marxist.

00:27:00.740 You know, maybe he touted with Marxist ideas, you know, he talks about reading Foucault to get laid in college, but he's, you know, not someone I would consider advocating for like the proletariat revolution of that day.

00:27:11.560 But what he is advocating for is to realign society, because that's all that he has to do when he talks about fundamentally transforming the country, right, when he was elected.

00:27:20.700 And so all of our social rules, all of our bonds, nothing has escaped to this antagonism of politics.

00:27:27.980 Our definition of what a man is, has not survived dialectical reconstruction.

00:27:32.240 The United States has not survived dialectical reconstruction.

00:27:34.680 When we ask about what is America?

00:27:36.560 Well, America wasn't a nation of settlers primarily from England that made a new country for themselves.

00:27:41.340 No, it's a nation of immigrants.

00:27:42.500 And so it doesn't matter that, you know, they don't need to call themselves Leninists.

00:27:46.840 They don't need to even espouse Leninism or Marxism, because it's all that they recognize.

00:27:51.300 That's the left entropic force that the cathedral has incarnate of.

00:27:55.740 That's why Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land here kind of embodied the idea that for the left, the cathedral, the regime, whatever you want to call it, they are a force of entropy because they reconstruct everything dialectically.

00:28:07.080 They're antagonistic and everything must be broken down because, again, every time that you break something down in an argument like this, you're creating more power and more opportunity to rule over the people that you deem to be your political enemies.

00:28:20.880 Exactly.

00:28:21.540 And so when they say he says you don't need to espouse this, it's because that's the only thing that they even operate on anyway.

00:28:27.260 It's the only thing that people even understand at this point because the cathedral dominates all of these media interactions.

00:28:32.580 They dominate all these social interactions.

00:28:34.740 They dominate all these academic interactions and, of course, government interactions.

00:28:38.560 And therefore, this is what people kind of recognize as the normal social process at this point.

00:28:43.980 He goes on further to say within the academia, the media, even fine arts, political supersaturation has prevailed, identifying even the most minuscule elements of apprehension with conflictual social critique and egalitarian teleology.

00:29:00.420 Communism is a universal implication.

00:29:03.140 So like the pretentious is saying, this is this penetrated everything, every sphere of society, not just the the originally political sphere, but it's moved well beyond.

00:29:12.420 It's it's every interpersonal interaction, every religious interaction, everything in the the academia, every piece of media you consume, all of it is super saturated in politics.

00:29:23.420 And that is because that is what allows them to reconstruct everything to to put everything on this egalitarian teleology here.

00:29:33.480 Right. And that is what it basically what is what is what is what is your video game about?

00:29:38.780 It's about egalitarianism. What is religion about?

00:29:41.260 It's about egalitarianism. What is your politics about?

00:29:43.460 It's about egalitarianism. What is your art about?

00:29:45.300 It's about egalitarianism.

00:29:46.420 What is your conversation with your friend on Friday night about?

00:29:50.220 Well, it better be about egalitarianism, because otherwise he will think you're against the party because communism is the universal implication.

00:29:58.740 Guys, when I talk about the total state, this is what I'm talking about.

00:30:02.500 When I use that phrase, the total state, this is what I mean.

00:30:05.640 Right. This is this is what Carl Schmitt predicted would happen when the political penetrates all other social spheres.

00:30:13.440 This if you want to create egalitarianism, artificial equality across of outcome, across all domains of human existence, you basically have to have a totalitarian state because naturally people are different.

00:30:27.540 Naturally, people are not equal.

00:30:28.980 They might be equal before God, but they are not equal individually or in groups.

00:30:33.720 And that means that if you don't have a totalitarian state penetrating every single form of social interaction, controlling every single thought, action, piece of media that you consume, everything that you do, then there might be an opportunity for inequality.

00:30:52.260 And so the only way to continually ensure inequality among unequal people is to have total control of the state.

00:30:59.580 Absolutely right, Oren.

00:31:02.920 And again, like we take a look at the word talos, right?

00:31:05.760 That Aristotelian concept of like the the final drive or what is the final cause of humanity?

00:31:11.100 What is the thing that we all strive to be?

00:31:13.180 I mean, that's what we mean by that egalitarian teleology there.

00:31:16.620 I mean, consider how quickly we've we've seen the words equality change or even the code shift from equality to equity.

00:31:23.260 And so even those older definitions about equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity, even that has been so fundamentally reconstructed by this, you know, political dialectic that we see from the left.

00:31:35.040 Everything is about that, this fundamental reorganization of society.

00:31:38.220 And and another and again, this is why I recommend and Oren recommends you guys read Nick Land, especially this The Dark Enlightenment or some of the Zeno Systems essays, because Nick Land sort of recognizes that people are different.

00:31:49.380 Groups are different.

00:31:50.160 The way that we approach things is going to be different based upon how what we were born into, what we were socialized with, what we're exposed to.

00:31:58.080 And so when we start saying, no, everything can be equal, everything is we need to be equitable.

00:32:04.440 We need to have this sort of Harrison Bergeron style way of pulling people down so that the less abled or the less opportune or whatever choices people make bad choices, they have the right opportunity.

00:32:15.560 All that this does right is promote this sort of communist egalitarian.

00:32:20.240 Everyone's going to be equal.

00:32:21.340 It's all classless, but it never is that way in communism, as we know, because people suffer, people die and people do so.

00:32:26.900 And in Zeno Systems, Nick Land writes a great essay called On Discrimination.

00:32:31.000 And some of you might already be thinking that that's a little uncomfortable.

00:32:33.280 But what he means is, is that we discern or we discriminate between choices that are typically good for us or bad for us.

00:32:39.420 And egalitarianism is sort of a way to weaken our immune system against making rational choices that are good for society.

00:32:47.000 Should we be letting drag queens around kids? 1.00

00:32:49.120 I know your gut instinct and your brain tells you that it's not.

00:32:51.680 But the sort of egalitarian telos that is a part of everyday progressive society is trying to weaken that immune system.

00:32:58.820 So you can say, actually, no, it's OK.

00:33:01.180 Or actually, Juneteenth is actually a good holiday.

00:33:03.980 Or you get the infamous David French, the conservative case for the most leftist thing you can imagine,

00:33:09.300 because that is someone who has been infected with sort of that egalitarian teleology.

00:33:13.920 And their ability to discern and discriminate and to make wise, competent choices has disappeared entirely.

00:33:20.940 Absolutely.

00:33:21.800 All right, let's go ahead and jump into our next one here.

00:33:23.780 So more dialectics is more politics.

00:33:27.200 And more politics means progress.

00:33:30.100 He's got that air quotes there.

00:33:31.640 Or social migration to the left.

00:33:34.000 The production of public agreement only leads in one direction.

00:33:38.780 And within public disagreement, such impetus already exists in embryo.

00:33:44.840 It is only in the absence of agreement and of publicly articulated disagreement, which is to say, non-dialectics, non-argument, subpolitical diversity, or politically uncoordinated initiative,

00:34:03.060 that the right-wing refuge of things like the economy and civil society more widely is to be found.

00:34:10.580 All right, so let's go ahead and take that one from the top here.

00:34:13.260 So more dialectics is more politics, and more politic means progress or social migration to the left.

00:34:20.340 So again, Cthulhu only swims left as you debate these essential core questions, right?

00:34:26.200 Democracy, as a lot of people understand it, is a tool of leftist kind of advantage.

00:34:34.540 It will always advance leftward over time because it will always start with something that a lot of people are trying to resolve,

00:34:41.740 but eventually will end up deconstructing core things about humanity, about nature, about truth, about goodness, and will leave them in ruin.

00:34:50.560 Yeah, I mean, this is, again, where he says that every argument's an opportunity to rule.

00:34:58.060 This is how you get it.

00:34:58.980 This is why everything is subject for debate, because once you tear up baseline what we agree on,

00:35:04.000 you know, two plus two equals four, the man are men and women are women, 0.98

00:35:08.020 once those things are upended, the only direction you can really go is further leftward.

00:35:15.300 And that's, I think, our current year, 2023, is a perfect example of how well this has aged in terms of just proof of how we've socially migrated.

00:35:25.480 And just a short period of time from 2015, so eight years from, you know, the legalization of same-sex marriage,

00:35:32.000 we just want to get married, bro, to actually know we need to castrate your children, 0.98

00:35:36.500 and they should be dancing in drag queens and acting like strippers in public, 1.00

00:35:41.140 to a point where people photographing drag queen story hour events are told by police they cannot record

00:35:47.260 because there is exposed genitals around children, and that would constitute violation of child pornography laws.

00:35:52.400 That's how bad it's gotten in the last eight years. The direction only moves leftward.

00:35:56.980 It's amazing. Everyone doubted the sign, but now apparently just, you know,

00:36:02.440 publicly exposing yourself to children is no longer illegal in the United States.

00:36:06.160 It seems to be the de facto law enforcement position now.

00:36:12.040 Truly an amazing thing, but I guess entirely predictable, very sadly.

00:36:16.720 So a lot of people might look at this, and they might say,

00:36:20.020 all right, Oren, all right, Prudentialist, but, like, this means we can't have political arguments?

00:36:24.480 Like, engaging on anything is a mistake? What does this mean?

00:36:28.300 Like, how are you supposed to do any politics?

00:36:30.480 So I want you guys to look at the left right now, right?

00:36:34.200 So, for instance, Joe Rogan has been, like, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars

00:36:40.520 to try to get, you know, significant scientists to come on and debate RFK Jr.

00:36:47.040 on, you know, the pandemic and vaccines and lockdowns, all that stuff.

00:36:50.220 I'm going to be very careful with our language here, because YouTube, it's still unclear

00:36:53.520 what they're going to hit us for, that kind of stuff.

00:36:56.300 But he's trying to get the debate going, right?

00:36:58.480 And everyone on the left is like, no, no, you don't debate these people.

00:37:03.260 No, you don't talk to these people.

00:37:04.600 The science is settled. It's over.

00:37:06.040 We're standing on this, and we're not having this discussion no matter what. 0.97

00:37:09.280 Now, if these people are all crazy, if they're all bananas, right? 0.98

00:37:13.460 It's all a bunch of MAGA, you know, Trump 2024 cutards, right? 0.99

00:37:18.740 Standing up on this stuff.

00:37:20.280 Then it should be really easy for a trained scientist, someone who's at the very top of

00:37:24.860 his field, to walk in and be like, okay, this is how it actually works. 1.00

00:37:28.300 You're an idiot. 1.00

00:37:29.400 Boom. Done. 1.00

00:37:30.420 I'll collect my $100,000.

00:37:32.000 Thanks for having me on your podcast.

00:37:33.860 But everyone's telling them not to do this.

00:37:35.720 Why?

00:37:37.380 Well, because the left understands this game because they played it.

00:37:40.660 That's how they got into power.

00:37:41.760 That's how they got you here.

00:37:43.500 They know what happens.

00:37:45.000 If you want something to be unassailable, if you want something to be a core and foundational

00:37:48.880 truth, like they want the narrative of the pandemic to be, then you don't debate it ever.

00:37:55.560 You stop pretending you care about free speech and you censor everything surrounding it.

00:38:00.340 You make it unassailable.

00:38:01.580 You make it impossible for people to present any kind of other understanding.

00:38:05.400 of that core truth because they don't want it broken down.

00:38:09.120 So the left understand this.

00:38:10.720 It's not like this is some silly right wing thing that Nick Land is making up here.

00:38:15.380 The left behaves exactly like the right should have in the first place when it comes to things

00:38:20.520 like gender identity or trial transition and any of this stuff.

00:38:24.360 They behave exactly like the right should have when it touches any of their sacred cows because

00:38:30.580 they understand that having a dialectic around the issue now that they've established kind

00:38:35.180 of total control over the position and made it the default isn't something that they want.

00:38:39.900 So what we're talking about here is not some crazy idea of like right wing political theory.

00:38:47.280 This is literally just how the left operates once it has power.

00:38:50.960 And I'll hit two points on this because it's kind of important to hit home on it.

00:38:56.420 Go back in time to say the 1960s and 50s when things were far more conservative and far more

00:39:02.140 sane in this country.

00:39:03.180 You want to know how bad things have gotten in terms of this like political agitation.

00:39:07.420 When we talk about academic freedom in the United States, they mean trying to let like,

00:39:11.620 you know, Young Americans for Liberty or Ben Shapiro talk at a college campus.

00:39:16.480 When 60 years ago, there were numerous political journals and, you know, cultural, you know,

00:39:22.620 periodicals from the Saturday Evening Post to more conservative publications that were telling,

00:39:28.320 you know, academic freedom means letting communists into the schools and letting them rule over it.

00:39:33.280 And so that kind of tells you how far things have gotten.

00:39:35.800 But the other thing to keep in mind is that you might be saying, well, Prudentialist or well,

00:39:38.880 Oren, you know, there are times where, you know, if we show up and we make our,

00:39:42.260 we state our case, we can prove things and we can get them banned.

00:39:45.760 And that tends to be the case sometimes we've seen at school board meetings or protests.

00:39:50.980 And keep in mind that sometimes you will find yourself on the other end of the FBI's watch

00:39:55.640 list or sometimes even taken away and arrested by the cops when you do so.

00:39:59.060 But when you show up to these events and you go back there, it's not that you're making an

00:40:03.580 argument, showing that you have bodies willing to like stand up for your cause.

00:40:07.060 And I know it sounds kind of cliche, but Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, you know,

00:40:12.240 when you vote, you're exercising political authority or using force and force is the supreme

00:40:16.860 authority from which all of their authorities are derived.

00:40:19.240 And that's kind of an important thing, I think, to remember in this context here, whereas

00:40:23.380 they know they can't give you any ground because they might lose it and they might expose you

00:40:27.820 to people.

00:40:28.400 So they have to keep on their power.

00:40:30.000 And power means not exposing you to anyone else and using that supreme authority, violence,

00:40:35.220 state, the total state to arrest you when you try and stand up against it.

00:40:39.640 And it's important that when you look at these things that not every argument is ever going

00:40:43.720 to be in good faith.

00:40:44.780 You have to really know the person to know if they're in good faith.

00:40:47.220 And if not, well, then, you know, odds are you're going to find yourself somehow either

00:40:52.020 being logically proven by the leftist form of logic that they're right, you're wrong,

00:40:56.400 or they'll just take power away from you and convince the audience that, you know, it's

00:41:00.640 actually their cause is the right one.

00:41:02.280 It's the same reason why we've seen internet blood sports debate or die out the same way

00:41:06.360 we've seen political debates die out in the public space.

00:41:09.500 Exactly.

00:41:10.060 And that's, I think that last point is really important, Prudentialist.

00:41:13.320 Remember that you can have productive conversations with your loved ones, with your family.

00:41:18.460 Like there are things that you can do on a one-to-one or small scale kind of discussion.

00:41:23.940 But we're talking about large-scale mass politics.

00:41:27.680 And in the realm of large-scale mass politics, you're not trying to convince an individual

00:41:33.080 person who you share a culture and a tradition and a physical geographic area with.

00:41:41.140 You're trying to convince a bunch of people you've never seen and you've never heard and

00:41:45.160 they're nameless and faceless to you to kind of go in a specific direction.

00:41:49.660 And so that is a very different type of interaction.

00:41:52.540 That's why you said like internet blood sports die out because at the end of the day, they

00:41:56.620 don't do anything because the people there are completely mercenary.

00:41:59.920 They're not part of any particular religion or culture.

00:42:04.420 They don't share a particular moral vision.

00:42:06.420 There's no substrate on which to build consensus.

00:42:10.360 And so when they go after each other, it just becomes just a ruthless, snide attack of,

00:42:15.720 you know, maybe reframing things relentlessly or personal attacks, these kinds of things,

00:42:20.320 endless citations that just get refuted and then return back to the other person.

00:42:24.200 They just become boring eventually, other than people screaming at each other because

00:42:27.900 there's no hope of any kind of actual resolution in the dialectic.

00:42:32.820 And that's why when, you know, Land talks here about kind of all these, you know, why the

00:42:37.260 right seems to find refuge in all these kind of economic or other types of civil society,

00:42:43.420 because they're the ones that are still built on kind of these innate hierarchies, these

00:42:48.680 natural truths, these, these things that don't need to have discussions or debates because

00:42:53.440 they are already understood inherently.

00:42:56.260 The system doesn't work without them.

00:42:58.400 And so that's why those seem to be the refuge, the refuges of the right, which he'll kind of

00:43:03.800 explain more here in the next paragraph.

00:43:05.980 When no agreement is necessary or coercion demanded, negative or libertarian liberty is

00:43:12.120 still possible.

00:43:13.480 And this non-argumentative other or dialectic of dialectics is easily formulated.

00:43:20.540 Even in a free society, it doesn't need to be.

00:43:23.800 Do your own thing.

00:43:25.380 Quite clearly, this irresponsible and negligent imperative is politically intolerable.

00:43:31.380 It concedes exactly or it coincides exactly with leftist depression, retrogression and

00:43:39.320 depoliticalization.

00:43:41.060 Nothing cries out more urgently to be argued against.

00:43:44.400 So basically, Nick Land says they're not going to leave you alone.

00:43:49.960 Basically, the team that wants to win will never leave you alone because actually you can't

00:43:55.860 be left alone because saying I'm just going to do my own thing and I don't want to interact

00:44:00.640 with you and I don't want to debate with you and I don't want to disagree with you.

00:44:03.560 I'm just going to build my own thing over there.

00:44:05.260 That's actually way more dangerous than argument to the left because then you might produce something

00:44:10.580 good, right?

00:44:12.120 This is why we talk about building instead of arguing forever on the internet.

00:44:15.440 This is why institutions and alternatives are the right wing's way forward because by creating

00:44:21.580 something better, the right creates a far better argument than it does by infinitely getting

00:44:28.100 trapped in some cycle about debates about Juneteenth or whether or not a man can become a woman.

00:44:33.160 Yeah, absolutely.

00:44:34.220 I mean, this is the sort of I get it.

00:44:36.600 We all have this knee-jerk libertarian thing of more libertarians, I would say, than just

00:44:42.760 regular people.

00:44:43.560 I mean, most people want to be left alone and that's a respectable thing.

00:44:45.940 But when you see someone out there that kind of like jokingly chuckles and says that I

00:44:50.680 just want gay married couples to defend their legalized weed with automatic weapons, that's 1.00

00:44:56.700 the ultimate version of this negative or libertarian liberty still being possible because all that

00:45:03.220 that does is that you tacitly endorse this leftist frame.

00:45:06.880 You can frame it in your libertarian politics all that you want, but at the end of the day,

00:45:10.940 all that you've done is that you've given tacit endorsement or coordination that you're

00:45:18.380 with the left on this one.

00:45:19.840 And I mean, outside of the Mises caucus inside the libertarian party, there's no greater example

00:45:24.280 of this when they went from taxation is theft to now rent is theft, sort of the classic sort

00:45:30.000 of leftist understanding of their relationship to landlords and their money.

00:45:34.200 So it indicates that anytime that you try to go to that negative or libertarian liberty and

00:45:39.860 you just want to be left alone, that all what they do in the privacy of their own homes

00:45:42.800 is fine.

00:45:43.760 It'll stop being in their privacy of their own homes and it'll come after you real

00:45:47.200 quick.

00:45:48.320 Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:49.240 All right.

00:45:49.620 So we'll go over our last paragraph here that we're going to read for today.

00:45:55.140 Obviously, as you can tell, we're spending a lot of time with each one of these to make

00:45:57.840 sure that we kind of break it down for everybody.

00:45:59.840 So we're not going to be going too far.

00:46:01.600 Just just five or six paragraphs here, but more than enough here to kind of do in one bite

00:46:07.340 size chunk.

00:46:07.840 So at the at the opposite extreme lies the dialectical ecstasy of theatrical justice in

00:46:16.140 which the argumentative structure of legal proceedings is coupled with publicization through

00:46:21.620 the media.

00:46:22.700 Dialectical enthusiasm finds its definitive expression in a courtroom drama that combines

00:46:27.460 lawyers, journalists, community activists and other agents of the revolutionary superstructure

00:46:32.700 in the production of a show trial.

00:46:34.620 Social contradictions are staged, antagonistic causes articulated and resolution institutionally

00:46:42.480 expected.

00:46:43.620 This is Hegel for primetime television.

00:46:46.120 And now for the Internet.

00:46:47.480 It is the way the cathedral shares its message with the world.

00:46:51.540 Kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

00:46:56.520 Or well, now that we've kind of broken all that down, I think it is a lot.

00:46:59.680 Yeah.

00:46:59.900 And I think I think that that paragraph probably wouldn't have made a lot of sense to how we

00:47:04.100 started with that.

00:47:04.960 Or right.

00:47:05.920 But I think once you kind of understand each piece of it, this makes sense.

00:47:09.740 What he's saying here is the apparatus of the cathedral, all of these different nodes that

00:47:15.940 we've talked about, the media, academia, you know, the news, all of the different educational,

00:47:24.740 all the different cultural drivers, they are all moving to kind of put these, you know,

00:47:31.460 isolate a issue, a social issue, put it on trial for everyone, create the show trial atmosphere,

00:47:38.000 this, this circus.

00:47:39.740 And this is kind of the sacrament of the left, right?

00:47:44.940 To take, okay, we found a new issue.

00:47:46.600 We found a new minority.

00:47:48.300 We found a new oppressed victim group.

00:47:50.760 We're going to put that up on display.

00:47:52.680 We're going to have a grand discussion where the bigots will shout their words and the reactionaries

00:47:59.480 will shout their words and we'll fight against that oppression and we'll bring the truth and

00:48:03.520 the evidence and the, and, and we'll put it all on display for everyone to see.

00:48:07.200 And then these people will be punished in front of everyone.

00:48:10.000 The, the, the, all these different groups will work simultaneously to kind of, you know,

00:48:14.960 community activists, journalists, lawyers, they'll all work together to punish these people.

00:48:18.960 And then you'll feel that cathartic resolution as everyone kind of once again comes to the

00:48:24.280 conclusion that like liberty has been protected and individual rights have been protected and the

00:48:28.700 weak and the helpless have been, have been made whole and, and everyone has been brought

00:48:32.700 into closer equality and we've destroyed the hateful, uh, you know, bad guys who are holding

00:48:37.700 on to their, their old way of life, clinging to their, their God and their guns.

00:48:41.220 Right.

00:48:41.820 And once we, once we've done that, then we can once again, start the cycle anew and find

00:48:46.800 the next group and the next victim.

00:48:48.840 And we can, we can put this whole episode.

00:48:51.020 It's like a, it's like a, one of those, uh, crime procedurals, right?

00:48:56.140 Like it starts, like there might be a new killer, there might be a new, uh, set of evidence,

00:49:00.840 but at the end of the day, you always know how, where they're going to find who the victims

00:49:04.360 are going to be, uh, and, and, you know, that the person's going to be punished at the end,

00:49:07.900 once you get that, that really, uh, uh, uh, cathartic, uh, resolution at trial.

00:49:12.660 Right.

00:49:14.080 Yeah.

00:49:14.440 I mean, like, this is why nowadays, you know, we, we, we, we've seen this ranging from Derek

00:49:18.780 Chauvin to Kyle Rittenhouse, Kyle Rittenhouse proving the narrow exception to the rule,

00:49:22.680 but there's still a lot of dialectical damage from that, that for, for the left, right.

00:49:27.100 It doesn't matter that Kyle Rittenhouse, I mean, they, they really are upset that he

00:49:30.320 got off and was found not guilty.

00:49:32.560 What that indicates for us is that if you want to defend yourself against criminals that 1.00

00:49:38.220 are out to kill you and are trying to disarm you and kill you and you, you know, shoot them 0.78

00:49:42.560 in self-defense, uh, they want that illegal, uh, you know, a right that we have enshrined in 0.99

00:49:47.140 a lot of places with castle doctrine or the second amendment, they want that gone.

00:49:50.500 And the same way with like Derek Chauvin, it doesn't matter what the actual facts of

00:49:53.940 the ground are that he had more fentanyl in the system that would kill more than one

00:49:57.820 person.

00:49:58.640 Um, you know, the court of public opinion, this big dialectical ecstasy, this primetime

00:50:03.780 television drama on Twitter, on YouTube, everywhere that you can imagine 24 seven, constantly

00:50:09.180 litigating and re-litigating all the reasons why he was wrong.

00:50:12.960 Um, you know, it doesn't matter if you've done the right thing like that Daniel Penny character

00:50:16.760 who was, you know, tried his best to put someone in a chokehold and to ensure that they wasn't

00:50:21.280 threatening women or children, um, in the court of public opinion, he's a racist bigot and we 0.94

00:50:25.440 can't let white people defend themselves in subways or things like that. That's the nature 0.98

00:50:29.160 of this ecstasy. And so when they talk about canceling people or cancel culture, that's what

00:50:34.440 they mean here about this, uh, dialectical ecstasy, this primetime wonderful mock trial

00:50:39.480 that we already know how it's going to end. They're going to call you a racist. They're

00:50:42.980 going to find some reason they're going to go through like 12, 20 year old tweets or whatever,

00:50:46.380 and find ways to get rid of you from your public platform. And, you know, we see this sometimes

00:50:51.840 with the left and we can sometimes smile and be happy that, you know, Oh, that weird, you

00:50:56.380 know, JK Rowling or whatever is getting eaten over that. And it's so sad. But on the other

00:51:01.220 end, you know, she was part of a much earlier form of the dialectic and she stopped. And this

00:51:05.460 is the same thing with those. I didn't leave the left, the left left me. Um, they helped

00:51:10.260 perpetuate to get them where they are. And they're just upset that they're no longer a

00:51:14.180 part of the in-group because they disagree on a particular issue. And again, once they

00:51:18.340 disagree and there's an argument and you're on the wrong side of that argument, congratulations,

00:51:22.540 you're on the far right now. And that's the way that this ratchet turns leftward and leftward.

00:51:26.940 Yeah. And that's so important. So many on the right, they see that process and they're

00:51:31.020 like, Oh man, uh, we're on the verge of victory, man. Uh, all the, all these, uh, people

00:51:35.780 who are far left are now on our side and that, that means we're right around the corner. No,

00:51:39.520 you're just watching the inevitable take place guys. You're just watching this too is part

00:51:44.400 of the process that it sheds those who are unwilling to go along with the next step of

00:51:48.740 the revolution and it turns them into new enemies, which it needs in order to feel that

00:51:54.420 fire. The process can't continue unless they have more enemies. Right. And they've, they've

00:51:59.740 driven so many people into basically like just, uh, you know, being, being uninterested or completely

00:52:04.980 unplugged with some of this stuff that they have to like shave off pieces of their own

00:52:09.500 movement. So they can then burn them in the fire to kind of continue to feed the fuel.

00:52:13.420 Now the good news is eventually the revolution does eventually eat everything, I guess. Like,

00:52:19.360 yes, I guess the good news is eventually they, you know, your war with reality, you lose it. Um,

00:52:25.300 and they will destroy kind of every person who could possibly ever follow their movement.

00:52:30.380 That does eventually happen. Uh, but, but it happens well after kind of a very serious

00:52:35.820 impact on your civilization. So, uh, it's, it's, it's kind of cold comfort if you understand kind

00:52:40.800 of the end of that process is not natural. It's, it's, it will come into a natural end, but

00:52:45.400 you know, no, no one you will love will be around to see it if it does. So it's one of those things

00:52:49.600 that, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, uh, right. Can't just take for granted all the time.

00:52:53.740 Yeah. It kind of reminds me of what Nick clan sort of said. I know it's in meltdown. It has a totally

00:52:57.320 different context, but I mean, even in this leftist dialectic thing that, you know, nothing human survives

00:53:01.820 the near future. And I think you can definitely see that whether it's Mary Harrington talking about

00:53:05.920 like the cyborg theocracy, when it comes to say the transgender movement, um, who I know that you 1.00

00:53:10.380 just recently had on, um, or, you know, even when we see it today. And I mean, this isn't to just,

00:53:16.140 um, denigrate the character of some individuals that are prominently against wokeism and wish to

00:53:20.980 see a return to classical liberalism. But I mean, you look at some of the more popular figures that talk

00:53:26.520 about this, whether that be James Lindsay or someone else, and you'll see that in the past that they

00:53:30.940 were progressive new atheists of the George W. Bush era and that they defend these things,

00:53:35.320 but they think it's gone too far. And it illustrates that the dialectical environment that the left uses

00:53:40.800 here does eat their own. And they find people like James Lindsay is these quote unquote odd

00:53:45.760 bedfellows on the right. When he hates the right, just as much as he hates the woke, if not, he hates

00:53:49.920 the right even more. And it tells you that that's kind of where we're at, that the, the, the ratchet moves

00:53:54.660 leftward. Some people really miss where they used to be as the, the premier frontier fighting force in the

00:54:00.180 left. And now things have gone too far and maybe we should step back a bit and things have gone

00:54:04.300 crazy. Um, but that means that they're on the same camp as the people that they just despised five

00:54:09.540 minutes ago. And they're not your friends either, despite the fact that they may agree with you on

00:54:13.640 some points. And I think that's really important for us to keep in mind when we look at how these

00:54:18.200 word games get played, how these public theatrics happen. Um, you know, whether it be over the

00:54:23.880 Dodgers stadium and that awful sort of drag group, you know, mocking and humiliating the Catholic 1.00

00:54:29.720 church, um, you know, they're, they may not have all the fans in the stadium for it, but 0.77

00:54:34.380 for them, it's about accepting the, you know, progressive ratchet that, you know, the only

00:54:39.120 safe religion to criticize is Christianity. The only people that is okay to, to mock and 1.00

00:54:43.540 denigrate are just regular people who are sports fans that want to do things. And it tells you

00:54:47.920 that everywhere is a threat to them. When they say the personal is political, believe them

00:54:53.360 because for them, every personal action you do from your tastes and music to the movies,

00:54:58.060 to what you consume, those are all political choices to them. And that may make you think,

00:55:02.320 yeah, these leftists are really unhappy people and they are, don't get me wrong. But for them,

00:55:06.760 this is their mission. This is their egalitarian teleology. This is their end point, their cause

00:55:11.800 for human existence. And that's what they believe in. And you see this from everything from baseball

00:55:16.560 to coffee, the war on Christmas, Starbucks, the red cups, all of that. It's all present right

00:55:22.920 before you. And Nick Land, I think does a really good job of breaking this down. And that these are

00:55:27.920 tools that you can use to sort of identify, maybe I shouldn't argue about this and just recognize like

00:55:33.260 or in tweets all the time to argue about it is to lose and just recognize that you should just say

00:55:38.460 no and try and shut that stuff down as soon as you can.

00:55:41.740 Yeah. Sometimes people ask me why I repeat things so often rather than like getting into

00:55:47.180 quote tweet debates with people. And, well, I'm putting some of my Nick Land lessons into practice,

00:55:52.740 guys. And it seems far more effective, I think, oftentimes simply standing on and stating

00:55:58.540 observable reality rather than attempting to kind of create and fall into the dialectic

00:56:05.580 that many want you to. But yeah, I think this passage is really essential. I think the kind of those

00:56:11.340 realizations that the Prudentialist was talking about with political supersaturation being an

00:56:16.680 essential part of leftist control is something that I think a lot of people really need to grasp.

00:56:21.560 Again, that's when I talk about the total state, that's what I'm talking about. Something that

00:56:25.480 kind of explains why they won't just let you play video games, why they won't just let you be alone.

00:56:30.300 Actually, letting you be alone is the greatest threat they could have. Letting you build something on

00:56:35.820 your own that works, that it's objectively better, that shows everyone something that works better than

00:56:40.160 what the left is forcing upon them is the most dangerous thing that the left could run into,

00:56:44.500 not your best debate, you know, squad argument. That said, though, guys, we have one or two

00:56:52.780 questions from people over there. So we'll jump over there in just a second. Before we do, remember

00:56:57.100 that, of course, the Prudentialist and I will both be in Nashville, Tennessee this weekend at the

00:57:02.680 Skildings Conference. We'll both be speakers there. I believe there are still some tickets available,

00:57:08.660 though they are probably very few in numbers. So if that's something that you're interested in doing,

00:57:13.220 then you definitely need to go over there and grab that. Prudentialist, other than your

00:57:19.460 very impressive, long-running stream, what else should people be checking out?

00:57:24.340 Well, later this, well, I'm going to be at the conference event later with you later this weekend.

00:57:29.320 I will have a interview that will be premiering later this week with author Marty Phillips. He has a

00:57:35.360 new book out called Millennium. It's a series of short stories sort of talking about the turn of

00:57:38.740 the century, September 11th and the millennial generation. It's a really good piece of fiction.

00:57:42.840 So I look forward to interviewing him about that. And then just by all means, find me on,

00:57:48.880 you know, theprudentialist.substack.com. I'll be having a few articles out shortly as well. I'm

00:57:53.660 trying to get as much stuff out while we're out on this conference. But other than that, as always,

00:57:57.920 I'm thankful to be on here and you can find me at YouTube, Telegram, Twitter, all the links

00:58:02.180 at findmyfriends.net slash theprudentialist. Absolutely. Make sure that you're checking

00:58:06.160 out everything theprudentialist is doing. All right, let's go over here to Jake Bowen real quick.

00:58:12.160 Thank you for $5. He said, land seems to argue techno capital inevitably erodes tradition. Does

00:58:18.820 that mean a reorienting toward tradition is futile? Do you disagree with land? So yeah, Jake, this is a

00:58:27.740 very difficult question. You're right that land understands kind of the problem that traditional

00:58:35.360 cultures were kind of acted as containment mechanisms for techno capital, turned it kind

00:58:42.020 of towards the good of the people that kept it growing out of control. But kind of once those have

00:58:47.980 been removed, then you get a reaction that kind of consumes everything and bleeds over from one

00:58:53.880 culture to the next. So in many ways, land believes that this process is inevitable. This brings us to

00:59:01.240 the singularity. In fact, he kind of embraces the singularity in hopes that that helps us to escape

00:59:06.420 what is otherwise kind of a degenic continuation of humanity. I tend to think that land is right about 1.00

00:59:17.420 kind of the process we are in now, though, I believe he is wrong in some respects, or I certainly hope he 0.96

00:59:24.740 is wrong in some respects about kind of the inevitable inevitability of where that ends up. I think we will

00:59:29.940 go through this process of kind of this hyper liberalization, just kind of burning through

00:59:37.500 kind of everything, all cultures and kind of understandings of humanity. However, this is why I

00:59:43.200 also find people like Alexander Dugan very interesting. He also predicts this, but he sees

00:59:49.540 an opportunity of kind of something human to emerge on the other side of this for tradition to reassert

00:59:55.100 itself. There are things I disagree with Dugan with as well. But I don't think land is the only person

01:00:01.260 who predicted this kind of progression of events. But he's also not the only one who's kind of made

01:00:09.660 predictions about what comes after. And so I'm not sure that his solution, his understanding is kind

01:00:14.380 of the only one for what we're looking at there. But Prudential, I don't know if you want to tackle

01:00:18.500 that one at all. Oh, sure. I mean, I think that land sort of plays off of other major thinkers like

01:00:24.640 Marshall McLuhan, who talks about like the great fragmentation that would come with digital society.

01:00:28.840 The same with like Jacques Ellul and more famously, Ted Kaczynski, where he lambast conservatives that,

01:00:33.620 you know, it's really hard to preserve tradition when technology, you know, rapidly moves to a degree

01:00:38.880 that social norms change. I think that land, like you had said, or kind of just embraces this and

01:00:44.420 says, you know, coldness be my God, and let's go from there. I don't know what to make of his weird

01:00:48.940 fixation on like, you know, Calvinism. That's a talk for another day, maybe you should have him on. But

01:00:53.080 I think that you might find an answer, actually, in the argument that some people are making,

01:00:58.240 like James Polis and his great book, Human Forever, that there is ways to reorient and to have

01:01:03.480 traditions survive in the digital age. Because if not, who will catechize you? You know, your parents,

01:01:11.040 your religion, your traditions, or will it be like the algorithm or artificial intelligence that is

01:01:15.560 already shown to be increasingly leftist and egalitarian? So, you know, I would, I would argue

01:01:21.160 that not returning to tradition isn't futile, but returning to tradition and say, unless you're

01:01:26.080 escaping to a monastery and you're abandoning the world in that instance, which most people aren't made 1.00

01:01:31.060 to do, that you're going to have to have your traditions balanced with some kind of respect to the

01:01:38.380 digital age that we live in. This means that, you know, if you recognize that something is kind of

01:01:43.040 eroding your traditions or making it harder for you to fight back, say, you know, social media is

01:01:48.540 increasingly programmed to be as algorithmically addictive as possible, maybe some form of

01:01:54.380 technological assises would be necessary for that. I just, I don't think that returning to tradition or trying

01:01:59.940 to keep tradition alive in an age of techno capital is a futile effort. And I think if anything in the

01:02:05.960 midst of COVID and all of these totalitarian biomedical security state lockdowns, more people

01:02:11.660 returned to religion and tradition and farming and things like that more than ever. So they can try as

01:02:18.000 they might, but tradition, whether they know it or not, isn't going away.

01:02:22.620 Yep. I definitely agree with that. And again, if you want to, if you want to get, that's just a short

01:02:26.780 answer. If you want to get into a more technical answer, again, you can check out some of the

01:02:30.980 episodes I did on Alexander Dugan and the fourth political theory. I think we, we got into that on

01:02:37.460 a pretty regular basis. So if you, if you want a more long drawn out answer to that question,

01:02:44.560 there's a couple hours of it there for you to kind of tackle if you'd like to. All right, guys. Well,

01:02:49.780 like I said, I think that this is very useful. I think that Nick Land is again, not tackled as often

01:02:56.260 because he's a more difficult author in many ways to understand than, than Curtis Yarvin. He will

01:03:03.880 certainly never be accused of incredibly clear and simple explanations of things. And so my,

01:03:11.780 my kind of goal is to bring Prudentialists and others on to help me kind of break these down,

01:03:16.800 make it easier for everyone to kind of understand what's happening to this, these explanations.

01:03:21.060 So of course, you know, you can read land yourself and you should, but if you would like to get more

01:03:24.980 episodes where we kind of look at these, I'm going to be making that into a series. So you can go

01:03:29.460 ahead and subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show. You can of course go ahead and subscribe to this

01:03:35.740 YouTube channel, and then you can go ahead and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast

01:03:40.740 platforms. If you do that, make sure that you go ahead and give it a like or a rating or review

01:03:47.640 that helps with all the algorithm stuff. Again, of course, please make sure that you're checking out

01:03:51.820 all of the Prudentialists excellent work. And as always, we will talk to you guys next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 19, 2023

Every Argument Is an Opportunity to Rule ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 6⧸19⧸23

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