The Auron MacIntyre Show - National Identity and the Ship of Theseus ｜ 2⧸28⧸25

00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.

00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.

00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?

00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.

00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95

00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.

00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.

00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.

00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94

00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.

00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.

00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.

00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com.

00:00:30.280 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.520 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.500 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:37.000 Identity.

00:00:38.160 Discussion of it is basically forbidden, right?

00:00:41.760 It's something that's very touchy.

00:00:43.360 It's something that everyone is incredibly on eggshells about.

00:00:47.540 We've seen the left pushing its identity politics.

00:00:50.960 And so there's obviously a very toxic version of identity that can

00:00:55.920 completely railroad your civilization and make it impossible.

00:00:59.720 To function.

00:01:00.260 If you're too obsessed with identity, then you end up in horrible places.

00:01:04.520 But there's also another side of this, right?

00:01:07.340 If you completely ignore identity, which unfortunately much of the right

00:01:11.240 has done for a long time because of basically the threats that the left has

00:01:16.040 thrown out, you know, bigot, racist, xenophobe, all this stuff.

00:01:20.560 If you discuss any of that on the right, you were always torn down.

00:01:23.520 And so the right has seriously avoided conversations about this topic too.

00:01:27.660 And obviously we want to avoid the extremes of the left, but the only way to

00:01:31.940 really avoid them is to provide a healthy understanding of identity.

00:01:37.440 Without a healthy understanding, the toxic versions that the left have will

00:01:42.100 eventually go ahead and impose themselves on what is happening.

00:01:46.380 There is no such thing as a void of identity.

00:01:49.660 It will be filled by something.

00:01:51.440 And so it's better that we have a healthy, holistic, organic understanding than if

00:01:56.600 we have a artificial, uh, cudgel that the left is using to really beat the right and

00:02:02.960 the rest of the United States in the line with that said, a lot of countries now that

00:02:08.380 some of the progressive hegemony has broken, especially in the United States are

00:02:13.100 struggling with this idea of identity.

00:02:15.840 There are a lot of people asking deeper questions about what identity is much to

00:02:20.880 the horror of those who have tried to kind of bury these questions.

00:02:25.340 Again, it would be easier to just not talk about them at all.

00:02:28.180 That's certainly the safest path and the one that the right has taken for a very long time.

00:02:32.960 Uh, but that's also for the cowards, uh, which is why we're not going to do that.

00:02:36.840 We're going to have to have discussions on what this means.

00:02:40.800 What's the best way to manifest this?

00:02:42.620 How do we understand this in a way that, uh, allows us to answer critical questions while

00:02:48.860 not becoming obsessed with them to the point where it makes it impossible for us to function

00:02:53.620 as a society.

00:02:54.880 And so in a step of doing, this is going to be the, uh, need to address what actually

00:03:02.900 constitutes an identity, right?

00:03:05.580 So immediately when we look at the notion of identity, several things underlie it.

00:03:12.620 Right.

00:03:12.960 A lot of people will point to, uh, currently the, the idea of religion or values, kind

00:03:20.120 of some kind of idea ideology while we have a shared ideology and that's what drives it.

00:03:25.060 Some people will look at older definitions, traditions, folkways, uh, heritage.

00:03:30.820 These things are all going to be critical.

00:03:33.260 They're going to be tied in.

00:03:34.580 And the problem with the modern understanding is that it tends to be so incredibly ideological.

00:03:40.780 And we see this, uh, kind of permeate the American discussion when it comes to the idea

00:03:45.420 of the propositional nation, right?

00:03:47.540 Now I've already written against the propositional nation.

00:03:50.420 I've explained some of the core problems with the propositional nation.

00:03:53.320 So that's not going to be the, uh, the, the entire thrust of this episode, but we do have

00:03:58.200 to understand that the completely propositional nation, uh, is a problem and abstraction for

00:04:04.580 a lot of reasons, uh, not least of which is that while many people try to apply it in

00:04:10.660 the American context, and it feels like there's a more robust argument for identity in the

00:04:16.360 propositional nation when it comes to America, because America was a new world nation, not

00:04:21.920 an old world nation, right?

00:04:23.300 Many people had to come from Europe, uh, especially, you know, mostly European descent coming over

00:04:29.380 initially settling America, defining its identity and its understanding, but it was always a

00:04:35.300 mixture, right?

00:04:36.420 It was, uh, it was mostly Anglo, but there was always another ad mixture of others, uh, coming

00:04:42.000 in mostly from Europe, but then you added waves of Irish and German immigration and Eastern

00:04:47.220 European immigration, immigration outside of Europe.

00:04:50.740 And so over time, you know, people built up this idea of the propositional nation, uh,

00:04:56.040 that there's, there's some kind of general ideological understanding that underpins the

00:05:00.840 American experiment.

00:05:01.840 The problem is, and I don't think that even really works in the American context, but the

00:05:07.280 problem is that they continue to apply this.

00:05:10.100 And now at this point, you see the same debate happening in places that were always, you know,

00:05:16.140 European.

00:05:16.580 Uh, you look to countries like England or Scotland or Ireland, places where obviously

00:05:23.200 ethnic Europeans originated.

00:05:25.940 And even in those lands, we see a discussion about where identity is not tied to your being

00:05:33.680 European in any significant sense.

00:05:36.000 Your ethnicity should not be a factor.

00:05:37.920 There was recently a clash, uh, ironically on the trigonometry podcast.

00:05:43.160 That was kind of interesting, right?

00:05:45.240 You have, uh, the, the, uh, Constantine Kissin, who's one of the guys who kind of promoted this

00:05:51.000 idea of the woke, right, that the, what the new right is too worried about identity or, or

00:05:56.000 any of these things.

00:05:56.760 And you can't touch any of those subjects.

00:05:58.320 And, uh, and so he, you know, really kind of pushed that initially, but it seems like

00:06:03.000 he might've shifted somewhere.

00:06:04.320 At the very least he got into a altercation and exchange, uh, that puts him on a different

00:06:10.300 side of this.

00:06:11.260 He was discussing, uh, this issue with Frazier Nelson, who's, uh, I believe a times columnist

00:06:17.120 over in the UK.

00:06:18.600 And they were having this discussion and Nelson basically says, oh, well, uh, of course, Rushi

00:06:24.980 Sunak, who was the conservative prime minister at one point or the leader of the conservative

00:06:29.540 party.

00:06:29.860 And he says, oh, well, obviously, uh, he is English and Constantine Kissin says, well,

00:06:35.260 he's, he's British.

00:06:36.580 Uh, he's joined kind of this larger ideological identity of Britain, but this guy is a, you

00:06:43.180 know, and this was Constantine's, uh, uh, words, not mine.

00:06:46.660 He said, this is a Brown Hindu.

00:06:48.200 Like this is a guy from India.

00:06:49.960 Uh, you know, he, he doesn't have the religion of the UK. 0.99

00:06:54.440 He doesn't have the ethnicity of England. 0.53

00:06:57.500 He's obviously not English.

00:06:59.060 Maybe there's some larger abstraction where he's British, but he is most certainly not 0.63

00:07:02.900 English.

00:07:03.260 And this was some huge controversy.

00:07:04.900 There was a big blow up over pointing out the fact that a man who had a different religion

00:07:10.080 and entirely different racial background and origin, uh, could not be of the English ethnicity.

00:07:15.020 And actually Nelson said, well, English isn't even an ethnicity at all.

00:07:20.000 Right.

00:07:20.440 It's, it doesn't even exist if, um, if you're looking at the, you know, this identity and

00:07:28.180 that's an incredible admission.

00:07:30.700 I think that we've taken this notion of the propositional nation and we've applied this

00:07:35.620 to basically everything.

00:07:36.860 Like every Western nation has now become propositional.

00:07:40.420 The original argument was that this was unique to America.

00:07:43.880 This was about the American identity as a new world nation.

00:07:46.840 Uh, you know, it was something that was originally a compilation of different European ethnicities

00:07:51.360 and then expanded that experiment beyond Europe.

00:07:54.220 And that's what made it, you know, uh, again, singular, very different from the nature of other

00:08:00.320 nations.

00:08:00.780 Again, I don't exactly buy that, but even if you buy in to that formula, it's really hard.

00:08:06.540 If you're a propositional nation guy to look at something like England and say, oh, well,

00:08:12.340 no, this is also a propositional nation.

00:08:14.340 And yet that's, what's being asserted.

00:08:16.500 Right.

00:08:16.880 And it's being asserted because the way in which all of our governments are run and the way

00:08:22.120 that the, uh, liberal ideology has been extracted demands that there are being no closed identities,

00:08:30.040 right?

00:08:30.480 That there can be no, uh, definite identities.

00:08:33.100 Everything needs to be interchangeable.

00:08:34.640 Everybody needs to be an interchangeable widget, a cog.

00:08:37.580 Uh, there are no particular, uh, peoples that have specific ways of being understandings,

00:08:44.320 um, personalities, beliefs, that everything is accessible to everyone.

00:08:49.640 It's truly global.

00:08:51.120 It's globalism in the realist sense.

00:08:52.860 And so for globalism to continue to exist, you have to basically demolish all identity,

00:08:59.220 even the most obviously correct ethnic understanding of a European nation.

00:09:04.500 You can't have any ethnic European identity. 0.86

00:09:07.420 There is no native European, even though that can't possibly be true, but the ideology must 1.00

00:09:13.920 destroy all of those things.

00:09:15.740 Right.

00:09:16.020 And so that's why, uh, Constantine Kissin, who himself has already kind of criticized a

00:09:20.660 lot of people when it comes to the woke right and identity and all these things himself said,

00:09:24.860 no, that's a Brown Hindu. 0.59

00:09:26.180 He can't be English. 0.91

00:09:27.740 Now that doesn't jive with some of Constantine's other rhetoric, but ultimately it's obviously

00:09:32.680 correct.

00:09:33.260 Like that, that that's a easy distinction to make.

00:09:36.700 You only need two eyeballs, uh, to really draw that conclusion.

00:09:40.960 Uh, but it's something that he would have recoiled with if it probably come out of the mouth

00:09:45.300 of someone else to his credit, he's embraced this distinction.

00:09:48.480 He's, uh, and I met Constantine at, uh, the arc conference.

00:09:51.960 He was very cordial.

00:09:53.380 Uh, we got along just fine.

00:09:54.920 He took the time to talk to me.

00:09:56.180 We didn't hash everything out, but I'd like to say before we get in, this is not me just

00:10:00.160 doing a general hit on him.

00:10:01.800 We've had our disagreements.

00:10:03.460 Um, but, but he was, he was reasonable when we had a discussion together and that is so

00:10:07.740 points in his column for that.

00:10:09.240 And here he seems to at the, even if he hasn't worked out the ideological implications of

00:10:14.840 what he's saying, he seems to be acknowledging these differences.

00:10:17.960 He even said himself, look, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm Ukrainian and Russian, uh, or,

00:10:23.740 you know, by my, my child is Ukrainian and Russian.

00:10:26.200 It comes from parents of Ukrainian and Russian.

00:10:28.120 Yes.

00:10:28.280 I've been here in, in England for a very long time.

00:10:31.060 I consider myself British in this like overarching ideological extracted sense, but I'm obviously

00:10:37.020 not English and I'm never going to be English.

00:10:38.840 And my child is in English.

00:10:40.500 And that was, you know, a relatively honest thing for him to say.

00:10:44.140 Same thing came from Suella Braverman, who's a conservative MP in England.

00:10:48.920 And she wrote an article that went out in the Telegraph and said, look, I'm not English.

00:10:54.060 I know I'm not English.

00:10:55.380 I'm never going to be English.

00:10:56.880 That's not what English means.

00:10:58.440 And so, uh, there, there's a very interesting thing again in America, discussions of ethnicity

00:11:04.620 are particularly touchy because we're not supposed to believe there is an American ethnicity,

00:11:08.640 uh, at the core.

00:11:10.040 Uh, but you can't make that argument in England, at least not without being deeply dishonest.

00:11:15.360 And so many people on the right in England are having to deal with this in a way that

00:11:20.640 the right in America is not because Americans just kind of do this, you know, lame pivot

00:11:25.600 of like, well, it's not a real thing.

00:11:27.800 We don't really have a thing.

00:11:28.940 You know, we're, we're special.

00:11:30.140 We're different.

00:11:30.700 We're not like England.

00:11:31.780 We're so propositional, but you can't do that in England because it is a real ethnicity

00:11:36.460 is a, there's a native European population that originates from that region.

00:11:41.580 You can't make these same arguments.

00:11:43.560 And so people like Suella, uh, Braverman are having to say like, look, there's obviously

00:11:48.920 a real English ethnicity.

00:11:50.680 Now we can have a larger discussion and we will have a larger discussion today on whether

00:11:54.600 there's a British abstracted identity, but that very fact that they're, they have to make

00:12:00.580 a stand on the reality of that ethnic group, uh, is actually really important.

00:12:06.080 Uh, because let's just be frank here.

00:12:08.200 Uh, there's a general, uh, need to paint, uh, white societies as not being native, as not 0.98

00:12:15.840 being an ethnicity, as not being real in the sense that other, uh, societies are, uh, there's

00:12:23.020 a very, very big push to basically try to dismantle it.

00:12:26.280 It's been more successful in the United States again, because of the, the nature of the United

00:12:31.040 States and the way that it was founded.

00:12:32.440 Uh, but they are trying to pull the same thing in countries like the United Kingdom.

00:12:36.740 And there, there is some pushback here, which is a really interesting thing to see.

00:12:41.500 Cause I don't think you would have even seen this acknowledgement just say 10 years ago.

00:12:45.920 What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?

00:12:51.840 A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart

00:12:56.560 shopper and delivered to your door.

00:12:58.560 A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.

00:13:03.020 Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.

00:13:07.180 Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

00:13:11.620 Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

00:13:14.960 Instacart groceries that over-deliver.

00:13:19.440 All right.

00:13:20.100 So why the ship of Theseus?

00:13:22.440 Why, why, why do I got this ship up here?

00:13:24.200 What does it have to do with anything?

00:13:25.540 All right.

00:13:25.760 So people, for people who are unaware, uh, the ship of Theseus is a classic philosophical,

00:13:32.620 uh, uh, problem, right?

00:13:35.040 It's a classic philosophical thought experiment.

00:13:37.500 And in the ship of Theseus, and it's been brought up all over the place, but in the ship of Theseus,

00:13:43.460 uh, basically what you're addressing is the metaphysics of identity.

00:13:48.300 What makes us who we are, right?

00:13:50.780 What, what, what is an identity?

00:13:52.860 Uh, is it just the physical structure of something?

00:13:56.260 Is there an abstract metaphysical identity that rests on the physical structure?

00:14:01.780 Is it the form and not so much the material that matters, you know, Aristotle's different

00:14:07.020 causes, right?

00:14:07.800 Like what, where does identity actually lie?

00:14:12.000 And so the, the, again, for those who are not familiar, the basic, uh, formulation of

00:14:17.680 the ship of Theseus is you have the ship.

00:14:20.080 And over time, obviously any ship is going to wear, right?

00:14:25.820 It's going to go into battle.

00:14:27.080 It's going to be on the sea where in terror, you're going to have to replace things.

00:14:31.000 You're going to have to repair things.

00:14:32.580 And when you do, you're obviously changing something about the ship.

00:14:37.260 If I've got a ship in the Harbor and, uh, you know, seven boards have rotted out.

00:14:42.680 I need to change those seven boards for the ship to continue to function and be a ship.

00:14:46.900 But when I've changed those boards, have I changed the identity of the ship?

00:14:51.280 Most people would say no, right?

00:14:53.760 I'm making repairs, but the ship of Theseus is still the ship of Theseus.

00:14:58.100 Well, over time, I'm obviously going to change every board, right?

00:15:01.840 If the ship continues to serve long enough, eventually I'll swap up every single piece

00:15:07.200 of the ship.

00:15:08.560 So once I've changed the very last board, the board that was never in the ship in the

00:15:13.720 first place, have I replaced the ship of Theseus?

00:15:17.760 Now, some people will say, yes, the entire material base of the ship has changed.

00:15:22.980 And therefore it is a new ship.

00:15:25.280 Once you've gotten rid of the last piece of the ship, that was the original ship of Theseus,

00:15:30.200 you have fundamentally changed what the ship is.

00:15:33.760 More people will say, well, no, because the ship was, uh, changed slowly.

00:15:39.400 And so it's the form of the ship that matters, right?

00:15:42.660 It's not even, not the matter itself, not the particular, uh, board.

00:15:47.440 No one board was the ship of Theseus by itself, but it was the, uh, form of the ship that mattered.

00:15:53.940 And so as long as the form of the ship continues to stay the same, even if you change out the

00:15:58.500 pieces of that ship, you still have the ship of Theseus.

00:16:02.580 Others will say, no, it's the ownership, right?

00:16:05.800 It's the fact that Theseus owned the ship that makes it the ship of Theseus.

00:16:11.100 And so as long as Theseus continues to own the ship, even if the form or the material of

00:16:15.620 the ship changes, it is therefore the ship of Theseus.

00:16:19.480 Others will say, actually, no, once you change the form, it doesn't matter who the owner is.

00:16:24.860 The ship itself has changed.

00:16:26.320 Or once you change the material, the ship has changed.

00:16:29.100 You can see there's a lot of answers to this question and generally, as with so many philosophical

00:16:34.280 questions, most people say there isn't a right answer to this question.

00:16:37.780 It's a thought experience, a way for you to think deeply about how things change over time.

00:16:45.000 So what I want to do today is take this thought experiment and apply it to nations, right?

00:16:51.440 What is a nation?

00:16:52.580 What is an identity of a nation?

00:16:54.200 What makes it a nation?

00:16:55.220 And if that nation changes over time, does it retain the same identity?

00:16:59.740 Does it stay the ship of Theseus?

00:17:02.020 Is it still the United Kingdom if you replace the people of the United Kingdom?

00:17:07.660 Is it still the United States if you replace the religion of the United States? 0.97

00:17:13.400 Can you keep the form?

00:17:15.900 Can you keep the ownership of, you know, the state apparatus and, but change everything else

00:17:21.700 about those places and still have them be the same thing?

00:17:25.580 What actually constitutes the identity of these places?

00:17:30.300 So first, I'd like to say that it's important to recognize that no civilization stays the same.

00:17:38.120 And this is going to be the part that's going to anger some people who are very, very, very

00:17:43.160 tied to, I guess, what one would call the blood and soil idea of nationalism, the pure, you

00:17:48.840 know, genetic descent idea of nationalism, that a nation is just its genes being passed

00:17:55.580 down, biological reduction.

00:17:58.220 I would say that no, obviously no organism stays the same its whole life, right?

00:18:05.380 You have, uh, you, you yourself are a human being that is regenerating different cells.

00:18:11.220 You're sloughing off these cells.

00:18:12.900 You're, you're, uh, changing the, the raw material of your body the whole time.

00:18:18.340 Uh, and so in a, in a, in a very direct physical sense, we recognize that nothing that is living,

00:18:23.540 nothing that is thriving is ever staying exactly the same.

00:18:26.660 No matter how much we want to conserve a good portion of who we are in our identity, uh, all

00:18:32.120 identities that are alive, that are real, that aren't dead on a page somewhere are changing.

00:18:37.340 And so when we were to discuss national identity, that's going to be true as well, right?

00:18:42.940 No nation is going to a hundred percent be exactly what it was throughout its history.

00:18:48.640 It has to change if it's going to be alive at all, uh, morphology life cycles involve change.

00:18:55.080 And this is as true for nations as it is for individual, uh, entities, individual beings, right?

00:19:01.400 Yeah.

00:19:02.120 So no nation is going to say exactly the same before we go any further.

00:19:06.480 We need to probably also clarify what we mean by nation.

00:19:10.880 Uh, this is a huge problem.

00:19:12.020 I've gotten this before when I've discussed the propositional nation and other issues.

00:19:15.960 However, it's worth reiterating just so people don't get confused with definitions here.

00:19:20.520 A nation is a people, right?

00:19:22.680 And, and a nation and a people are a mix of factors, right?

00:19:28.260 One is heritage, but others are tradition, language, culture, folkways, religion.

00:19:34.940 Uh, these things are all things that make up our identities as nations.

00:19:39.780 Nations are distinct from states or countries.

00:19:43.700 We use them as synonyms, right?

00:19:45.200 But the nation state is a relatively new formulation of the way we understand national identity.

00:19:51.940 Um, when we decided that nations and states should be coterminous, right?

00:19:55.300 That these things should begin and end together, that nations should govern themselves.

00:20:00.260 People should govern themselves.

00:20:01.500 That was an idea, uh, that existed, uh, that has, that was, uh, that took shape.

00:20:07.140 And, uh, and a lot of people have now conflated the idea of state and nation, but they're not

00:20:13.080 the same thing throughout most of history.

00:20:15.000 Nations peoples were ruled by states, countries that were different than just the nation itself.

00:20:22.600 Some nations were states.

00:20:24.460 In fact, in some cases, in a lot of cases throughout history, the city was the state, right?

00:20:29.220 A nation could not be beyond its own city.

00:20:32.560 So the peoples of Athens were very different from the peoples of Sparta, though together

00:20:37.600 they understood some kind of shared Hellenic, uh, identity that made them different than

00:20:43.220 say the Persians, right?

00:20:44.480 So there's, there's levels of identity, but nationhood was something that was buried deep

00:20:49.640 in peoplehood was buried deep in all the way down to often the family tribe or city level.

00:20:55.580 It couldn't even be extended out to Greece as an identity.

00:20:59.320 Greece as an identity was something of a, of a superstructure on top of these smaller identities

00:21:06.500 of nationhoods, right?

00:21:08.300 So we, we want to make it clear when we're discussing the identity of nations, we don't

00:21:12.740 mean the same thing as just having the government, right?

00:21:15.780 Uh, and that's going to be important because right now, most people think of the government

00:21:19.760 as the nation, a nation is an area, a geographical area that is governed by a specific entity.

00:21:28.160 So if you're in the geographic area, area, you're of the nation.

00:21:32.560 And if you're not in the geographic area, you're not of the nation.

00:21:35.560 Of course, that's wildly incorrect.

00:21:37.400 That is not how that works.

00:21:39.260 Um, but that is unfortunately the identity that has been understood by many people.

00:21:44.780 And this is, this is kind of the, the form argument, right?

00:21:47.480 As long as it, whatever, whatever stays in this form, we have the form of the United States,

00:21:51.900 we have the form of the UK.

00:21:53.080 So if you're in this form anywhere, you are of that form, right?

00:21:57.880 That that's how it works, but that's not actually how, again, identity has worked through most

00:22:03.040 of history.

00:22:03.840 And so that is an easy point that gets confused.

00:22:06.980 So the ship of Theseus here, again, back to our original understanding, the, the, the argument

00:22:13.220 is often that, uh, there, there's, uh, purely like the kind of this genetic material lineage

00:22:19.440 that creates the identity of a nation.

00:22:22.440 Now I'm not going to completely discount that.

00:22:25.680 Like that's a, the, the heritage is a significant part of nationhood of ethnicity, right?

00:22:32.160 That, that doesn't disappear because it makes people uncomfortable.

00:22:36.080 That said, if you read perennial traditionalists, if you go back and read Oswald Spangler, um,

00:22:42.800 and I haven't, I've only read one book, uh, by Julius Avola, but I'm told that he also

00:22:47.540 held a similar disdain, uh, but both Spangler and Avola have a disdain for pure genetic

00:22:54.360 determinism, pure genetic understanding of peoplehood, uh, was for them, uh, an abomination.

00:23:01.960 It was a perversion because peoplehood was something that was much more spiritually and

00:23:07.020 culturally entwined as well.

00:23:08.300 They would never have denied that heritage played a key role in this, but it would not

00:23:13.820 have been the only factor.

00:23:15.980 And this is important when we look at history throughout the world, right?

00:23:21.380 Most societies, not all there are, there are many societies that are more closed, right?

00:23:25.720 But especially in Western societies, there's always been a certain understanding of a little

00:23:30.140 bit of permeability in the membrane of national identity.

00:23:34.520 You couldn't completely swap out half the nation, uh, and the people tied to the heritage

00:23:40.180 and have the same nation, they understood that, but there was always an ability for people

00:23:45.120 to enter in and after existing, uh, in that nation for a long time, there would be some

00:23:52.180 kind of, uh, blending that would continue the identity of the nation, but incorporate those

00:23:58.400 that have joined it.

00:23:59.300 Now I want to be clear.

00:24:00.280 This was radically different from our understanding today.

00:24:02.880 Today we're like, oh, well, if you crossed into a country and you've been around for five

00:24:06.860 years, you're a part of the nation, you're just as American as somebody who was born here

00:24:11.880 and their family has been here for hundreds of years.

00:24:14.060 You're just as British as somebody. 1.00

00:24:16.100 No, that was never the understanding throughout most of history.

00:24:20.360 Real assimilation, real joining, real weaving of peoples together to, to continue the nation

00:24:26.940 was always a generational project, right?

00:24:30.580 And this is part of the argument that people will make with the ship of Theseus, right?

00:24:34.400 If you, if you came in and switched out 75% of the boards of the ship of Theseus, it would

00:24:40.480 not be the ship of Theseus.

00:24:41.680 Pretty much everyone recognizes that, that, that very few people have that answer to the

00:24:46.260 question.

00:24:46.740 The, the answer that most people have is one of continuity.

00:24:50.200 The ship of Theseus maintains its identity as long as the parts being swapped in are relatively

00:24:57.420 congruous with those that have already existed.

00:25:00.060 And, uh, you, you can kind of shift over time, the identity, uh, slightly without losing the

00:25:07.960 entire understanding of what the ship of Theseus is.

00:25:10.340 And most people have this understanding of nationhood as well.

00:25:14.040 At least they did throughout most of history that, that peoples could become, uh, one that

00:25:19.460 there could be a weaving in of individuals who joined the group.

00:25:23.500 But this was a multi-generational project.

00:25:26.840 It's not that you would be Greek or you would be American or that you would be British, but

00:25:32.960 your grandchildren or your great grandchildren or your great, great grandchildren.

00:25:36.880 But once they have intermarried, once they've been completely immersed in the culture, once

00:25:41.140 they have adopted the religion and the traditions, once the, uh, act of existing in that society

00:25:48.000 is as much a part of them, the breathing air as, as anything else, that is when they would

00:25:53.780 have adopted this identity.

00:25:55.500 That's how they would maintain the ship of Theseus.

00:25:59.200 Even if you've switched out different parts and different boards.

00:26:07.580 All right.

00:26:08.180 That said, there's an important distinction here, right?

00:26:11.060 A lot of people will look at the body, uh, example, you know, oh, my cells are replacing

00:26:16.080 themselves, so am I still the same person?

00:26:18.380 And they'll say, yes.

00:26:19.240 And if you try to get them to a materialistic cause, they'll say, oh, well, my genetic code

00:26:24.000 is perpetuating itself.

00:26:25.900 Yes, there's different cells, but I am still me because, uh, my, the same DNA is replicating

00:26:31.540 itself and I'm still being, you know, the person that I was previously.

00:26:35.280 And so there's this level of continuity and they'll probably look at the nation and say

00:26:39.400 the same thing.

00:26:40.360 Look, there has to be heritage or you're just not perpetuating the identity of the nation.

00:26:45.420 And there's a lot of truth to that.

00:26:47.460 There, there, there is a percentage of change that can occur while you retain your identity,

00:26:53.280 but you can't turn over the whole thing and you especially can't do it rapidly or it will

00:26:57.560 fundamentally have to change the identity.

00:26:59.900 Now, the reason this becomes important is there are a couple of debates happening simultaneously.

00:27:05.360 Again, we look at the British example.

00:27:07.240 There are a large amount of, uh, what they call Asian over there in the United States.

00:27:11.540 Asian means far East, you know, Japanese, Chinese, uh, you know, uh, uh, Taiwanese, uh, Vietnamese,

00:27:19.520 like these, these are Asian people, but in, uh, the, in the European context, Asian is anyone

00:27:25.020 on the continent of Asia, which is reasonable.

00:27:27.780 Uh, but, uh, they often mean Pakistani or Indian extraction.

00:27:32.240 Right.

00:27:32.760 And so, uh, when, when they're talking about Asian men, that that's what they mean or Asian

00:27:37.400 women. 0.81

00:27:37.920 And so when you look at their kind of grappling with this issue, uh, they're trying to say,

00:27:44.080 okay, well, a lot of, for instance, uh, Indian colonials coming over are British in the sense

00:27:49.540 that the British, uh, occupied India, their culture, you know, permeated a large amount

00:27:54.560 of, uh, of, of Indian culture.

00:27:56.880 Uh, a lot of them came over and have lived in, in the UK for a long time or their entire

00:28:01.200 lives or even multiple generations.

00:28:03.240 And so there's, there's a level of Britishness there because they've adopted so much of that

00:28:08.580 culture.

00:28:09.140 But when you get down to the ethnicity, uh, are they English, right?

00:28:13.140 That was the debate that was going on.

00:28:14.880 Like, can you be English and maintain, you know, it while having, you know, this different

00:28:20.040 ethnic background and the answer for many people, even, uh, you know, people on, you know,

00:28:24.840 these, these public talk shows like Swella Braverman, uh, or Constant Kisses know that

00:28:29.400 you, you can't be English and have this different ethnic background. 0.80

00:28:33.300 Maybe British is this cultural abstraction. 0.80

00:28:35.880 We can all join, but English is not right.

00:28:38.600 And so then there becomes an important question.

00:28:41.980 Where does Britishness come from? 0.61

00:28:44.940 Right?

00:28:45.400 Let let's, let's, let's assume for a moment that Britishness and Englishness are separate 0.63

00:28:50.380 things.

00:28:50.680 Now, to some extent that has to be true because you can't have the Scottish and the

00:28:54.580 Irish and the Welsh, uh, all together without having some kind of other identity. 0.96

00:28:59.980 And this is usually what's meant, right?

00:29:01.700 English is specifically, uh, England.

00:29:04.520 And then you have the wider British identity, which is the British Isles, all these different,

00:29:08.520 uh, cultures and kingdoms that eventually came under one state rule.

00:29:12.320 Right?

00:29:12.600 So there, there's an argument for the British English distinction in that sense, but that

00:29:18.220 personality has to come from somewhere.

00:29:20.340 Right?

00:29:20.680 And we can see the problem with this attempt at abstraction when we look at say the trans 1.00

00:29:26.920 debate, right?

00:29:27.620 Because people will look at, uh, what is male and what is female and, uh, biological essentialists

00:29:34.440 as most of us are when it comes to, uh, actual, uh, sex say, no, what is male and female comes

00:29:43.380 from specific biological hard wiring, right?

00:29:46.820 It's different.

00:29:48.480 It's different.

00:29:50.220 Um, uh, at, at a very real level, you can't just adopt different aspects of this, but people

00:29:56.740 who want to muddy these waters tend to abstract it out to, to, uh, uh, uh, to gender, right? 0.92

00:30:02.680 So it's not, it's not sexual biology.

00:30:05.380 It's gender and gender is the expression of these things. 1.00

00:30:08.780 So they try to separate out, right?

00:30:10.380 It's an abstraction between gendered behaviors and biological essentialism. 1.00

00:30:15.680 And they try to make this distinction.

00:30:17.280 Now, the funny thing about this is if you paid any attention to the trans debate, the,

00:30:22.680 the gender ideology debate, and you kind of had to, unfortunately, it was literally like

00:30:26.480 state mandated, uh, at, uh, in our educational and media institutions.

00:30:30.780 And even many of our corporate institutions, if you paid attention, there was a shell game

00:30:34.580 that was played here.

00:30:35.280 Right at first, the gender activists said, no, of course, we're not talking about biological

00:30:40.580 reality.

00:30:41.740 We're talking about this, uh, culturally, uh, created identity of gender that is malleable, 1.00

00:30:48.140 not the biological reality.

00:30:50.020 However, the longer this went on and the more that they felt secure in their ability to make

00:30:56.360 this argument, they eventually flipped this, right?

00:30:59.180 The shell game got moved around and they said, oh, actually, no, there is no biological

00:31:04.100 essential agent to gender.

00:31:06.640 Actually, all of that is socially constructed to even the scientific understanding of biological

00:31:13.860 sex is itself a social construct.

00:31:17.320 And therefore both biological sex and gender are entirely malleable. 0.88

00:31:22.500 Right now, again, if you have any belief in actual male and female, that can't be true, but we need to recognize, acknowledge that that is a biologically essential argument.

00:31:33.560 For the reality of sex and we also need to be honest and say that all gender expressions are themselves a reflection of biological essentialism.

00:31:45.560 You are saying, actually, uh, if there is a real male and there is a real female in a gendered sense, those things are only connected to the biological reality of male and female in the sex sense.

00:31:57.940 And so even though every man and every woman isn't the same, obviously there's wide variations in men and women, and we don't have to necessarily cram everyone in the same box.

00:32:08.340 The majority of men hold a specific disposition and the majority of women hold a specific disposition, and that is not entirely instructed by culture.

00:32:16.560 There are real biological underlying things that drive us towards this, but I would go another step further because I'm not a materialist.

00:32:24.340 And I would say that it's not just the biological reality of sex that makes you male or female.

00:32:30.520 There's also a metaphysical aspect that makes you male or female.

00:32:35.620 And that that spiritual aspect as just as important to defining the reality that has been reflected in gender expressions.

00:32:44.440 Right?

00:32:44.740 So we take this back to our discussion when it comes to national identity.

00:32:50.680 Now, again, I'm not a biological essentialist when it comes to national identity.

00:32:54.920 I don't think that that is a healthy way to understand all nationhood.

00:33:00.720 Again, that will make people on the far right angry.

00:33:02.940 That's fine.

00:33:03.660 I'm just telling you the honest truth.

00:33:05.340 And I think I'm in good company with this.

00:33:07.080 I don't think that, again, many, many of the perennial traditionalists also would have had this problem.

00:33:13.620 They specifically expressed this problem when it came to genetic determinism.

00:33:19.640 That said, they would have never said that these things don't have an impact.

00:33:22.920 And I'm not going to say it either.

00:33:24.200 Right?

00:33:24.640 That these things do matter.

00:33:26.320 That there is a certain amount of heritage that is critical to national identity.

00:33:31.460 And that rapid change of that heritage makes it impossible to maintain that identity.

00:33:37.540 That if we change too many boards out of the ship of Theseus too rapidly, we will fundamentally change the identity of the ship.

00:33:47.040 Even if we keep the form of the ship, the form itself is not sufficient to maintain the identity.

00:33:53.780 But I'm going to make another argument that's another level down.

00:33:56.840 Because I don't think the form itself can actually be maintained sufficiently with rapid change.

00:34:02.460 So, one of the other problems we're facing in the United States, I got some blowback for this on Twitter, right?

00:34:14.740 Cash Patel.

00:34:15.680 Now, I don't know Cash Patel very well.

00:34:17.920 So, what I'm going to say here has nothing to do with Cash Patel, the person.

00:34:23.300 I've heard good things about this guy.

00:34:25.480 I've heard that he's the kind of guy that's going to go in there and clean up the FBI.

00:34:29.020 I want to make it clear, if that's true, then he is awesome.

00:34:33.420 I am glad he's on my team.

00:34:34.920 This is in no way an attack on Cash Patel as a person.

00:34:39.820 That said, Cash Patel swore in to his oath as the head of the FBI on a religious book from Hinduism, right?

00:34:51.760 From an Indian book tied to Hinduism.

00:34:54.700 Now, he did this because Cash Patel knows that he has a specific religion and ethnic identity.

00:35:03.300 And he is honoring that religion and that ethnic identity while he is serving in the United States.

00:35:12.000 Now, I would say, personally, I've been told that America is an idea.

00:35:17.180 I don't think America is an idea, but if America is an idea and you're swearing to uphold that idea, you should probably swear on a book that actually formed that idea.

00:35:26.100 And if we actually believe the rhetoric of the propositional nation, that book was not in any way Hindu.

00:35:33.640 Hinduism did nothing to form the United States. 0.99

00:35:36.780 Hindu values are not American values. 0.94

00:35:39.120 Indian culture is not American culture. 0.99

00:35:41.140 That doesn't mean that over a sufficient amount of time, someone from India cannot, after many generations, blend their bloodline and their beliefs into America.

00:35:51.260 However, I pointed out that this was not assimilation and a lot of people got very angry and they said, of course, it's assimilation.

00:35:58.940 He is, you know, he's got religious liberty.

00:36:01.580 He's got the right to do this, which is not the same as what you should be doing.

00:36:05.880 But, but, but he is just expressing these American values of religious liberty, which is another way to say there is no American values, right?

00:36:13.240 Because what I've been told, and this is really critical, this is kind of the core of my argument here, is that I have been told that America is an idea or it's, it's a proposition that we assent to.

00:36:23.940 And that this proposition is founded in the Christian roots of the United States.

00:36:29.880 A lot of people throw around the term Judeo-Christian.

00:36:32.180 I'm not sure why these roots are Christian.

00:36:34.960 Christian, particularly, right?

00:36:37.680 Judaism, a different, different religion.

00:36:39.480 I imagine if you walked up and told Ben Shapiro, he's basically just a Christian, he would disagree with you.

00:36:44.600 You know, and so I'm not sure why we, we mix those terms.

00:36:47.520 That said, these are very Christian values, right?

00:36:50.420 And that is where these ideas came from.

00:36:53.840 So if you're going to uphold these ideas, at the very least, you would need to have some grounding in these ideas.

00:37:00.440 Now, what a lot of people want to do is they want to abstract, they want to abstract the ideas that came from Christianity from Christianity itself.

00:37:13.060 We want to pull these away and say, you can hold Christian ideas without being Christian. 0.91

00:37:19.120 Now, that's certainly true, right?

00:37:21.180 There are, there are cultural Christians.

00:37:22.800 There are people of, let's say, European descent who are not Christian, but live in predominantly Christian cultures and continue to be of those cultures, right?

00:37:34.400 So it's, it's not that there can't be some level of not being entirely bought into the tradition, the religion, and yet still holding a certain degree of those values.

00:37:46.840 That certainly can exist.

00:37:48.500 That said, like the ship of Theseus, the question becomes how many people, how many leaders can we replace with Hindus before we have Hindu values instead of American values? 0.96

00:38:04.420 If American values, and many people will acknowledge us now, Jordan Peterson ran a whole conference, the whole ARC conference was a bunch of European leaders, you know, saying our values are founded on Christianity.

00:38:15.320 The Christian faith is the foundation of Christianity, the Christian faith is the foundation of Christianity, okay, but how many people can you have who don't, they don't, it's not just that they don't believe in Christianity, they actively believe in another faith.

00:38:26.360 They actively believe in another worldview that is not Christianity.

00:38:30.780 Again, there could be great things about Hinduism, but it is not Christianity. 0.98

00:38:35.180 These are distinct religions.

00:38:37.020 I want to make it really clear, you know, that Christ is true, is, is the truth, is the way, he's the path to salvation into God, and Hinduism is not. 1.00

00:38:48.140 Neither is Islam, neither is Buddhism, neither is secular humanism or atheism or Judaism. 0.50

00:38:54.860 None of these will get you to the real truth, to heaven, to a relationship with God, to an understanding of Christianity.

00:39:03.980 And so if you actively hold these other religions and you start making up more and more of the leadership class of any given country, can you continue to hold these ideas?

00:39:18.920 Again, probably for a generation or two, right?

00:39:21.320 I'm sure that Kash Patel probably holds American values to a large extent, right?

00:39:28.340 But how many generations of children raised on Hinduism with a, you know, primarily, uh, ethnic identity of another kind can perpetuate this identity?

00:39:42.080 That's a much more difficult question.

00:39:43.980 And this is the question that we are now really getting into.

00:39:47.260 This is the question that the UK is now getting into when they discuss these issues, right?

00:39:52.640 What is a British identity?

00:39:55.320 If we're, we're just going to say, okay, there's English ethnicity and identity, and that is a specific thing.

00:40:01.740 But then there's like this abstracted British understanding, and that is Welsh and it's Scottish and it's Irish.

00:40:08.800 Uh, but maybe it's also these other Commonwealth countries, right?

00:40:11.860 That that's kind of the implication now is that it expands out to, uh, you could, you could bring in Indians.

00:40:17.420 You could bring in people from, uh, other cultures, uh, Canadians, Australians, they would share this culture to some extent.

00:40:25.880 They could, they could come in.

00:40:27.340 How far away can they be?

00:40:29.240 How radically different can their culture be?

00:40:31.320 And then still be able to kind of weave themselves into the ship of Theseus, how many British, uh, people can be another religion, can be another ethnicity.

00:40:42.820 That wasn't originally part of the ship of Theseus and still maintain British identity.

00:40:48.660 That is now the debate that is happening.

00:40:51.520 And the same thing is happening in the United States.

00:40:53.680 Now, again, the key I think is change over time.

00:40:58.640 No identity is static over time.

00:41:02.780 That includes national identity.

00:41:05.500 And there will always be changes, right?

00:41:09.100 Just as different peoples in the British Isles blended together to become a more united kingdom.

00:41:16.220 Uh, there, there could be a sense in which you have people further and further outside of that, that are able to brought in, but there might also be a hard barrier, right?

00:41:26.380 There might also be hard barriers to this identity.

00:41:29.280 If you are completely unwilling to adopt the religion that gave birth to the values of the society you're trying to integrate into, can you integrate?

00:41:38.720 Can multiple generations holding separate, uh, religious beliefs and separate values continue to integrate into British or American values?

00:41:50.040 That's a real question.

00:41:51.600 And again, change over time is key.

00:41:55.440 If you allow for the understanding that membership into a nation is a multi-generational process.

00:42:02.800 That someone, you know, if I was born in, if I traveled to Japan, I would not expect the people there to call me Japanese, right?

00:42:12.900 I'm clearly not Japanese.

00:42:14.420 I would not expect them to even call my children Japanese, even if they were born in Japan and they primarily spoke Japanese.

00:42:21.320 I would not expect the Japanese to adopt them as their own. 1.00

00:42:25.820 No one would, even the most radical progressives kind of recognize the Japanese would not do this. 0.88

00:42:31.700 However, if my children's children's children are in Japan, you know, many generations have been in Japan.

00:42:40.360 They've intermarried, they've held the religion, then their entire lives, they've spoken language their entire lives.

00:42:46.900 This is the only tradition they've ever known, right?

00:42:49.200 But four, five, six generations in, eventually you did end up in a scenario where you would probably be relatively understood as being part of that nation.

00:42:59.760 And the same thing I think is true with most ethnic identities, most understandings of nationhood.

00:43:06.760 Over time, these things can change.

00:43:09.440 People can join them.

00:43:10.980 There can be a certain level of actual weaving in.

00:43:14.440 You can maintain the ship of Theseus, but again, only if you do so very slowly and you respect the boundaries of that.

00:43:23.820 There's, you should not be making, bringing new people in or radically changing the nation, your goal.

00:43:31.260 There's no moral value to that.

00:43:34.060 There's no practical value to that either.

00:43:36.980 There's just no reason to make that the goal of your country, the goal of your nation.

00:43:42.040 See how it just did the interchange.

00:43:43.400 That's how use we are to putting it in our own language.

00:43:48.380 But I think that ultimately there is a way in which we can see these changes over time and they can be natural and these nations can maintain their form.

00:43:58.980 But you cannot make that the central duty of the nation.

00:44:02.200 You cannot make that the central ideology of the nation.

00:44:05.160 And that's what it has become.

00:44:06.600 This radical need for inclusion has decided that we need to speed up this process.

00:44:12.120 We need to speed run this process.

00:44:13.420 The minute someone crosses a border, they automatically are of that nation, right? 0.98

00:44:18.180 The minute you walk into Sweden, you're Swedish.

00:44:20.540 The minute you walk into the United States, you're in the United States.

00:44:23.460 Or if you've only been there five years, you can just raise your hand and you say something about the ideology and you become that.

00:44:28.740 That is not the way that identity has ever been understood.

00:44:32.260 That's not the way that nationhood has ever been understood.

00:44:35.700 And so we should not make that our ideological modus operandi.

00:44:40.860 That should not be the way we understand our mission as a nation is to find as many people who are as different as us as possible and integrate them into the whole.

00:44:53.240 There'll be nothing for them to integrate into.

00:44:55.380 Again, I've referenced this book many times, but Samuel Huntington's Who Are We is a great book on this.

00:45:00.700 He points out that Anglo-Protestantism is the core identity of the United States.

00:45:05.700 It doesn't mean that everyone who's in America has to be Anglo or Protestant, but it does mean that if you try to change our core away from Anglo-Protestantism, if you try to make us something else, we will lose something critical about our identity.

00:45:19.800 And so we need to recognize the core of that identity and the danger of changing it rapidly while also allowing for a certain amount of change over time.

00:45:29.200 Recognizing that no nation is entirely static, no tradition, unless it's dead is entirely the same throughout different generations.

00:45:37.760 And so from generation to generation, we will add, and we will make certain changes.

00:45:43.700 However, if we want to have a continuity of civilization, a continuity of nationhood, we need to slow that pace of change very much, way more than we are doing right now.

00:45:55.200 Because if we don't, this destroys national identity.

00:45:58.960 It destroys identity period.

00:46:01.660 It destroys social cohesion and the ability to function as a nation.

00:46:06.240 And that's what we're seeing around the world today.

00:46:08.740 All right, guys, I'm going to go take a look at the questions of the people real quick.

00:46:17.540 Gabby of Limburg says, OGC NYC chapter in the making come.

00:46:23.720 Oh, okay.

00:46:24.100 So you guys are putting together an old glory club chapter in New York.

00:46:27.580 That's excellent.

00:46:29.060 A very liberal place.

00:46:30.380 So I'm sure the people there very much need, you know, the kind of structure that the OGC provides.

00:46:35.580 If you guys are unfamiliar with the old glory club, make sure to check them out.

00:46:39.140 It's a great fraternal organization that is trying to grapple with, you know, protecting and helping the American national identity, helping Americans grow that cultural power, that local organization that allows you to be reliant, find brotherhood, find people that you can count on that aren't necessarily tied to the government.

00:47:02.660 You're not entirely reliant on the state.

00:47:06.940 Thumblower says, they say we are a propositional nation, but then they admit that the left has different propositions, but are somehow still the same nation.

00:47:14.820 It's a weasel word, too.

00:47:16.840 You can just change the proposition.

00:47:18.300 You can't change ethnos. 0.56

00:47:19.820 Yeah, again, I've made this argument when it comes to my essay against the propositional nation.

00:47:25.680 I agree with you that this is often something people say out loud.

00:47:30.040 I'm a propositional nation, but they never follow the implications of that.

00:47:34.340 That's why they don't, say, try to denaturalize someone like Ilhan Omar.

00:47:37.880 She continues to serve as a representative in Congress, even though she obviously hates the United States, never integrated, does not respect the propositions.

00:47:46.020 Yet the propositional nation will not expel her.

00:47:48.860 That means you just aren't a propositional nation.

00:47:51.120 Creeper Weirdo says, not to get off topic, but did you see AA's video about putting the work away?

00:47:57.000 It's actually very good, and the critique of the War of Faith meme is interesting and worth engaging in.

00:48:01.580 You know, I started it.

00:48:02.740 I got to say, I love AA, but his hatred of America is wearing pretty thin.

00:48:08.480 I didn't finish it, honestly, because I was so off-put by just kind of how negative it was towards kind of Americans.

00:48:17.000 I'll give it another go.

00:48:19.040 Maybe he does get to the argument, and it's good.

00:48:21.580 Other people have said that.

00:48:22.900 It just, you know, I feel for what's happening in the UK.

00:48:27.160 I don't blame every person in the UK for it.

00:48:30.040 It's kind of strange that AA doesn't like what's going on in the United States, but he blames every American for it.

00:48:36.160 It just doesn't seem to jive.

00:48:38.280 And then we have Guildhelm says, related concept worth investigating is Sumner's Folkways, habitual usage, manners, customs, morals, which, through clearly biological and origin, aren't static.

00:48:53.840 Albion Seed is great for this, too.

00:48:55.660 Yeah, I'm not familiar with that particular coinage.

00:48:58.880 Well, I've heard of Folkways, of course, but I don't know who Sumner is, and so I can't say that I know the usage there.

00:49:05.660 That said, yeah, you can see this, and this is, I'm reading Heidegger right now.

00:49:10.300 Heidegger acknowledges that, you know, this is part of, you know, different peoples have these emergent understandings.

00:49:17.980 Just something as basic as how close you should be standing towards each other when you're talking, that understanding is very different.

00:49:25.340 And if you get a bunch of North Africans and a bunch of Europeans in the same room, they're going to all be trying to adjust their distance to each other because the Europeans want to stand further apart. 0.95

00:49:36.060 The North Africans want to stand closer together in order to have conversations.

00:49:39.200 They kind of have very different understandings of personal space.

00:49:41.980 And that's just a small example of kind of the way that no one came by and said, we all stand six feet apart.

00:49:49.440 The British stand six feet apart, and the North Africans stand three feet apart, and that's what makes you British or North African, right? 1.00

00:49:56.220 Like, there was no decree about this, and yet we do it naturally.

00:50:01.220 We kind of come, we have these cultural norms that we adopt, even though we don't understand it.

00:50:05.600 The matters, the customs, the habituated usages you're talking about here, these are all things that are emergent properties.

00:50:12.020 They are all obviously tied to our heritage, but one can learn them differently.

00:50:16.220 If you've been, again, a part of a culture for a long time, several generations, you probably adopt them without even noticing.

00:50:24.180 And so the idea that they're entirely biological is probably incorrect.

00:50:28.180 So it's this, you know, things that are tied in some sense to biological reality, but are also things that change over time and influenced by culture can be adopted and shifted over time.

00:50:38.960 So it sounds like those are similar ideas there.

00:50:43.040 Let's see here.

00:50:44.120 Super Joe's Midlife Crisis says, Oren, what part of the FBI is in keeping with American Christian values in the first place?

00:50:50.400 And yes, AA's anti-Americanism is getting old.

00:50:53.060 Yeah, I can't say that there's much about the FBI that is positive at this point.

00:50:57.100 I'm sure there's some need for law enforcement coordination between different states, but most states have a law enforcement agency that mimics the FBI, that they kind of does a lot of the same work.

00:51:09.640 We can probably decentralize a vast amount of that and not lose anything significant.

00:51:14.680 Skeptical Panda says, in modern America, it seems they're simply trying to steal and sell the boards of the ship one at a time.

00:51:21.580 Yes, and I think that's ultimately what happens when you try to change the ship of Theseus too rapidly.

00:51:27.680 No one values it anymore, right?

00:51:29.380 At this point, we have a bunch of elites who don't have any of these American values that we're supposed to have.

00:51:34.620 And because they're not grounded in any of the aspects of shared national identity at this point.

00:51:40.060 And so they're willing to sell every aspect of the nation, all of the boards of the ship of Theseus.

00:51:46.700 Let's see here.

00:51:49.040 Johann Richardson said, even mid-century Germans officially accepted half-heritage folks who lived as Germans.

00:51:56.020 By the way, yeah, that includes Jews, funny enough. 1.00

00:52:00.380 Lenny Reifenstahl also was an artistic authority rather than forced into a motherhood program.

00:52:08.200 Always some flex.

00:52:09.880 Yeah, again, this is just a, even the most dedicated race scientists in history didn't have this complete understanding,

00:52:17.600 or at least they didn't practice it in a lot of scenarios.

00:52:20.520 And I just think it's, the people who get like, I guess what you would call full race realist,

00:52:27.800 are missing something critical about national identity.

00:52:31.280 But people who entirely ignore some level of biological heritage are themselves missing.

00:52:36.540 And I think both camps are too simplistic and this will make both of them angry at me.

00:52:41.340 And you'll probably see both of them yell at me about this episode, but who cares?

00:52:44.860 I'm just trying to talk about the truth.

00:52:46.600 I'm not cutting a middle way because it, it makes me super rational.

00:52:50.840 And the centrist position is, is always the best position.

00:52:54.100 I'm just cutting that path because I think it's true.

00:52:56.380 And I think it aligns with most of the evidence that we see throughout history and sociology.

00:53:01.240 Robert Weinsfeld says, maybe, maybe pedantic here, but don't you need to be a Christian to be American? 0.99

00:53:07.880 If you don't want America to be Christian, you don't belong here, J friend. 1.00

00:53:14.640 Oh, I guess probably Jewish friend.

00:53:16.580 So again, I think that it's possible to probably maintain another faith and still be Christian or rather still be American on some level.

00:53:28.400 However, there's a percentage problem here, right?

00:53:31.040 You could have small doses of that in the United States and still have America in general, be an identity.

00:53:36.700 But if the majority of America became Hindu tomorrow or Jewish tomorrow or a Muslim tomorrow, it would radically change. 0.99

00:53:44.640 And we would know this when it comes to Islam. 0.98

00:53:47.280 No one has a problem recognizing that if we move, you know, the entirety of Iran to the United States tomorrow, and we started allowing all these people who have that religious belief into high positions of power, we would fundamentally change our legal structure. 1.00

00:54:04.200 We would see probably more Sharia law and all this stuff, right? 0.96

00:54:07.860 No one has a problem admitting that when it comes to Islam. 0.99

00:54:10.440 However, there seems to be some problem admitting it when it comes to other religions.

00:54:13.920 Now, I'm the first to recognize that Islam is probably more hostile to American values than maybe some other religions, but those religions are still distinct and different religions. 1.00

00:54:23.820 They still have distinct and different values.

00:54:25.960 Otherwise, people wouldn't have continued to be Jewish or Hindu.

00:54:30.280 They would just become Christians.

00:54:31.980 So there must be something distinct about those religions that means they have a separate identity and value.

00:54:36.860 Now, again, there's probably a certain percentage of the country, you know, that can probably be, you know, governed by the state, as we understand it, of a different religion and still maintain our kind of national identity as Anglo-Protestant.

00:54:53.640 Just like there's probably a certain level of other people from other countries that can come in and you still maintain it, but it's relatively small and it has to be changed over time.

00:55:04.040 You can't dump the entire contents of the Middle East into the United States or Israel and expect them to stay the same, which is why they won't let that happen to Israel. 0.71

00:55:14.600 But for some reason, we're acting like we can do that in the United States.

00:55:17.080 We can't, the same principles apply, you can't bring a large amount of people from a different religion, a different background, a different, you know, tradition and expect everything to stay the same. 1.00

00:55:27.540 And so I don't, I don't think that every single person who crosses into the United States and wants to be part of the United States has to become Christian.

00:55:34.340 I think you should a hundred percent, but I don't know if that has to be a final test of Americanism.

00:55:40.560 However, we should recognize that if we're bringing in a high percentage of people who aren't Christian, eventually we have to change the underlying values of the nation. 1.00

00:55:48.520 You can't tell me that America is built on Christian values and then have everybody be a different religion. 0.84

00:55:53.540 That's just not how that works.

00:55:55.240 If you have abstracted American identity to the point where you think you can take all the Christianity out of Christianity and still have it be American,

00:56:03.180 then you're no, you know, you're, you're, you're completely destroying the very argument of identity that you're putting forward.

00:56:09.600 It's no more artificial or rather it is as artificial as the, the progressive identity that says, oh, you can just change your gender at any moment, right?

00:56:20.000 No, you can't.

00:56:20.820 And you can't just change your religion at any moment.

00:56:22.920 You can't just change your values at any moment.

00:56:25.000 There, there are changes.

00:56:26.480 People can convert to Christianity, but that requires a whole life change, right? 1.00

00:56:31.280 It's not a simple, oh, well, I'll just slap this new bumper sticker on and keep living the same lifestyle.

00:56:36.680 If you've done that, then you aren't Christian. 0.92

00:56:38.780 That's a specific doctrine of Christianity.

00:56:41.060 You'll be known by your fruits.

00:56:42.620 The fact that you change your lifestyle, your change, your approach, your change, your values is what makes you Christian.

00:56:47.740 And so there, there has to be a certain level of walk and talk aligned with each other.

00:56:52.980 The same has to be true with American identity. 0.81

00:56:56.160 You can't just come in here and say, oh, well, I'm going to keep my religion.

00:56:59.100 I'm going to keep my ethnic identity. 1.00

00:57:00.560 I'm going to keep my language, but I'm American.

00:57:03.060 No, that can't be the case.

00:57:05.100 There has to be some level of change.

00:57:07.300 If you're going to actually be weaving yourself into this hole, if you're going to be a part of the ship of Theseus.

00:57:15.700 Blood base says powerful and thoughtful, thought provoking content lately.

00:57:19.520 Salute.

00:57:20.040 Well, thank you very much, man.

00:57:21.020 I hope so.

00:57:21.660 Again, I'm always putting this together.

00:57:23.660 You know, this is how I understand it.

00:57:25.980 I hope that it helps people make sense.

00:57:27.740 Obviously, I'm willing to talk about these issues.

00:57:30.780 I'm doing it to some extent.

00:57:32.220 Obviously, I've prepared this talk, but I'm also talking off the cuff here.

00:57:35.440 So I'm not getting everything right.

00:57:36.900 I'm sure I'm going to have to think over these issues more.

00:57:39.140 I'm trying to write a book about this now, or at least partially about this as well.

00:57:43.340 So, you know, these are ideas that I'm knocking around.

00:57:45.820 Maybe, you know, parts of this will change as I explore these concepts in more detail and try to get a firmer grasp.

00:57:52.640 But I hope that's why you guys come by, right?

00:57:54.740 Because we're doing this live, right?

00:57:56.400 You can always just go read a book on this.

00:57:58.340 I think the reason that people listen and want to be part of these conversations is they recognize that they are conversations.

00:58:03.800 These are things that are being formed in real time.

00:58:05.940 We're all trying to understand this together.

00:58:07.860 Sometimes we'll be wrong, but hopefully we're moving towards a better understanding.

00:58:11.680 And I think that's part of what people want to be a part of when they kind of listen in.

00:58:16.820 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

00:58:18.800 I want to thank everybody for coming by.

00:58:20.520 As always, if it's your first time on this channel, you need to go ahead and subscribe.

00:58:24.960 Click on the YouTube bell, all that stuff, so that you know, get the notifications when we're going live with the streams.

00:58:31.320 If you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to The Orrin McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:58:37.720 If you'd like to get my book, The Total State, then you need to do that by going to Amazon, Barnes & Noble Books, a million,

00:58:43.960 or you can probably order it through your favorite local bookstore.

00:58:46.680 Thank you, everybody, for watching again, and as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 28, 2025

National Identity and the Ship of Theseus ｜ 2⧸28⧸25

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript