The Auron MacIntyre Show - Nick Land's Case Against Democracy ｜ Guest： Last Things ｜ 6⧸22⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.200 I've got a great stream with a great guest I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.400 So I started a series where we look at the work of philosopher Nick Land.

00:00:42.780 He's somebody who had a lot of impact on the neo-reactionary political sphere.

00:00:47.420 Somebody who is really influencing people who are kind of talking about politics now,

00:00:52.520 but hasn't gotten as much love as, say, somebody like Curtis Yarvin,

00:00:56.060 because he tends to be a little harder to read, a little more difficult to tackle.

00:00:59.140 And so I'm inviting different guests on to break down passages from Nick Land

00:01:04.040 so we can better understand kind of the concepts behind them

00:01:07.500 and how they apply to the world we see around us.

00:01:10.360 Joining me today is YouTuber LastThings.

00:01:12.860 Thanks for joining me, man.

00:01:15.060 Oren, it's a pleasure to be here, and I hope I'm up to the task.

00:01:19.140 Ready to talk some land.

00:01:21.340 Yeah. Like I said before, this is somebody who,

00:01:23.940 it seems very intimidating at first, and I understand he is somebody who uses some language

00:01:29.460 that does obscure what's happening there, kind of maybe overcomplicated in sections,

00:01:34.880 but his work is really important, and so I think it's worth taking the time to kind of slow down,

00:01:40.140 take key passages, and kind of break them apart for people.

00:01:43.780 Now, today we're going to be reading from The Dark Enlightenment,

00:01:47.240 which is the same document we were reading from on Monday with The Prudentialists.

00:01:53.020 Different section, though, here. This is going to be Section 1.

00:01:56.620 Now, what's interesting about this, again, is that this document is in response

00:02:01.080 to Curtis Yarvin and his work over at Unqualified Reservations.

00:02:05.960 Nick Land was somebody who was a Marxist, was somebody on the left,

00:02:09.440 worked a lot with a very kind of radical left-wing people,

00:02:12.300 but made an interesting journey over to kind of the right,

00:02:15.760 and his interaction with Curtis Yarvin's work was a very important part of that.

00:02:21.120 Now, last thing you were telling me, you wanted to talk a little bit about kind of

00:02:24.480 your interactions with Nick Land, your understanding,

00:02:27.280 and how that kind of relates to Curtis Yarvin's work.

00:02:30.480 Yeah, yeah, and I mean, obviously, I'm a fan and admirer,

00:02:34.440 and I second everything you have to say about the man.

00:02:38.900 I think a few things to kind of put on the table before we dive into the text.

00:02:43.540 You're correct that this is very explicitly, as people will see,

00:02:47.580 a response to Moldbug directly.

00:02:50.780 He quotes from him quite liberally within The Dark Enlightenment.

00:02:55.160 And what I'd say about these two thinkers together,

00:02:59.780 and it's funny because I think both of them, they have very different styles,

00:03:03.520 but I think both probably cause plenty of readers to close their laptops or throw the book

00:03:12.680 if they have an actual print copy across the room,

00:03:16.300 because they both can be very, very dense and filled with a lot of illusions that might not be that clear.

00:03:23.900 I think both also have a pretty biting and wicked sense of humor.

00:03:27.900 I think one thing, though, that distinguishes land for me is,

00:03:34.020 this is a criticism that I think you and I share, Oren,

00:03:38.540 and I think I've heard you articulate this on a few occasions.

00:03:41.220 One of the big, and I love Yarvin as well,

00:03:44.280 but one of the big issues that some people have taken up with him

00:03:49.420 is that he's not a particularly theological thinker.

00:03:52.940 And, you know, for all of his critique of a kind of, you know, materialist, technocratic society,

00:04:03.300 he is in some ways kind of still a creature of that world, and it's denizen.

00:04:10.840 There's not a lot of kind of theology or overriding metaphysics.

00:04:16.680 I don't think that Moldbug really talks much about good and evil,

00:04:20.900 although that's not true. He does, although when he does,

00:04:24.080 he's quick to sort of formalize it and materialize it.

00:04:27.640 You know, he's got the essay, There's No Such Thing as Chaotic Good.

00:04:31.460 And he, with Moldbug, you have a thinker who sort of equates good and evil

00:04:36.240 to effective and ineffective government or order and chaos.

00:04:41.320 It's very kind of utilitarian, kind of pragmatic measurements of the good and that which is evil.

00:04:51.660 And I think with Land, by contrast, you do have somebody who's much more of a,

00:04:58.020 I think, deeply theological writer.

00:05:01.540 I think people associate horror a lot more with Land.

00:05:06.600 And I think, funny enough, he not just, doesn't just inspire philosophers and nonfiction,

00:05:12.640 but he's had a fair amount of influence on a lot of fiction.

00:05:16.480 You can see sort of the shadow and influence of Nick Land in a writer like Zero H.P. Lovecraft.

00:05:22.400 Um, Moldbug coined that phrase, Cthulhu only swims leftward.

00:05:28.240 But Nick Land is really somebody who kind of took the Cthulhu aesthetic,

00:05:33.580 kind of the Lovecraftian horror, the cosmic horror, and ran with that.

00:05:39.060 Um, and I think more fully expresses that.

00:05:42.860 Um, and I think you do have, you do have kind of a more religious thinker,

00:05:47.660 a bit more of a pessimist.

00:05:49.120 You know, the feeling that I get when I read Moldbug is, you know,

00:05:53.160 despite all of the kind of cynical and unsettling observations he makes,

00:05:58.220 you have a pretty jolly Virgil on your, on your journey.

00:06:02.080 You know, he's like reading Kurt Vonnegut or something like that.

00:06:04.760 You got somebody, he might be describing the end of the world,

00:06:07.280 but he's doing it with like, you know, a, uh, a skip in his step.

00:06:11.820 Um, I think with somebody like Land, you've got somebody that's, um, kind of stopping to

00:06:20.200 process a lot more of the, the kind of horror and existential dread and cosmic implications

00:06:28.980 of a lot of Moldbug's thought.

00:06:32.280 Um, the last thing I'll say about the two of them is I do think it's interesting that one

00:06:36.160 is, uh, an American Moldbug, of course, and another is, uh, British. 0.92

00:06:42.620 And I think it's interesting to kind of frame them as, as a European reacting to progressivism

00:06:51.760 and an American reacting to progressivism.

00:06:55.060 Because I think that that's, I don't know that, that, that somehow differentiates them

00:06:59.280 to me.

00:06:59.900 I think that, um, Land seems a bit more tied to a lot of continental philosophy in a way

00:07:05.880 that I don't think Moldbug necessarily, uh, uh, derives a lot of his, his thinking from,

00:07:12.820 but that's, that's what I have to say as sort of initial comments about how those, those

00:07:16.640 two writers relate to each other.

00:07:18.880 Yeah.

00:07:18.960 And I think that's really essential because like you said, Moldbug is of course a programmer,

00:07:23.200 right?

00:07:23.560 He's by trade, he's a computer programmer, he's a systems analyst.

00:07:26.380 And so he's looking at this, uh, you know, kind of societal decline as just a, a, a problem

00:07:33.520 to be kind of rewritten, you know, redone.

00:07:35.700 Okay.

00:07:36.040 Well, yeah, maybe humanity has fallen, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe there's a, a spiritual

00:07:40.800 death here, but that's not really Moldbug's problem.

00:07:44.280 He just wants to figure out how to kind of make the managerialism flow again, kind of make,

00:07:49.120 make the bureaucracy work again.

00:07:50.840 As where land is, I think, addressing more of what you're talking about, the philosophical,

00:07:55.660 the philosophical ramifications and the spiritual ramifications of what has happened.

00:08:00.940 Now he's not always very, in fact, he's almost never optimistic about that, but he is addressing

00:08:06.300 those in very interesting ways.

00:08:07.440 And that does bring a different lens to things that I think, um, makes these, these two works,

00:08:12.900 uh, you know, on qualified reservations and the dark enlightenment, uh, work very well together

00:08:17.640 in tandem, uh, though, as I understand, uh, you know, uh, Moldbug claims he's never read

00:08:22.020 any of this.

00:08:23.140 Yarvin claims he's never read any of this.

00:08:24.840 Uh, so I, I don't know if he could ever learn anything from land there, but, uh, uh, but

00:08:29.440 it's certainly interesting.

00:08:30.100 Yeah, I think that, I think that, you know, in some ways, maybe if you, if we have any young

00:08:34.080 Ian's listening, you might consider Nick land to be sort of Yarvin's shadow.

00:08:38.620 But if, if anybody has, has ever found certain elements of, of Yarvin's writing to be a bit,

00:08:44.220 a bit soulless, I don't feel that way about it, but I, I do think with Nick land, you do

00:08:49.500 find the soul, um, it might be absent from Yarvin's more, um, programmatic writing, but

00:08:57.500 it is, it's a dark, dark, dark abyssal soul that one finds when reading Nick land.

00:09:04.200 Well, we are about to read about zombie apocalypse.

00:09:06.720 So that said, let's go ahead and pivot to the text itself.

00:09:09.220 All right.

00:09:10.020 So we're starting here, uh, in, uh, in part one of, uh, the dark enlightenment and I'll

00:09:15.780 just go ahead and read here.

00:09:16.800 And we'll, uh, as we've done previously with, uh, kind of these episodes, we'll just stop

00:09:20.960 as, as we go and comment on the sections we're reading there and explain different, uh, different

00:09:25.980 sections.

00:09:26.500 So for the hardcore neo-reactionary democracy is not merely doomed.

00:09:30.440 It is doom itself.

00:09:32.140 Fling it approaches an ultimate imperative.

00:09:34.340 The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent

00:09:40.900 dark enlightenment devoid of its beginning of any, or devoid, uh, from its beginning of

00:09:46.400 any, uh, Rousseauian, uh, enthusiasm for popular expression, uh, predisposed in any case to perceive

00:09:53.600 the political awakening, uh, masses as a howling irrational mob.

00:09:57.980 It conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative, systematically

00:10:04.020 consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentment, and, uh, deficiencies until they

00:10:10.480 reach the level of collective, uh, criminality and comprehensive social corruption.

00:10:16.880 Uh, so, I mean, that last kind of part there sounds a lot like our current society, right?

00:10:23.280 Um, you know, private, uh, vices exacerbated, uh, you know, into what has basically just become

00:10:31.740 the entire driving ethos of our government.

00:10:35.600 You know, we, we just have, you know, we had pride month going on and, uh, Joe Biden talking

00:10:40.660 about how, you know, trans kids are the soul of our, of our nation and, uh, our, our armed

00:10:46.940 forces saluting, uh, the pride flag.

00:10:49.600 Uh, it's hard to say that, you know, that, that last sentence hasn't really come to pass.

00:10:55.340 Yeah, absolutely.

00:10:56.620 And, um, I mean, I mean, I think this is in here, here land is what, is what describing

00:11:00.980 what, what Yarvin kind of terms, the, the hedonic treadmill.

00:11:05.160 Um, again, you can kind of see there the more, uh, mechanistic kind of language that, that

00:11:09.840 Yarvin uses for something like this.

00:11:12.100 Uh, I think the big part, a couple of big points to draw out of there is, is, is, I think

00:11:17.560 what land is saying, if I could boil it down is that neo reactionaries don't flee democracy

00:11:21.860 because it, it, in some counterintuitive way limits self-expression.

00:11:26.640 It's that neo reactionaries flee democracy because it, it does allow for self-expression

00:11:32.380 and self-expression is actually, you know, not, not, not an innate good because there is

00:11:38.600 a certain kind of darkness to the human soul that, that needs to be kind of tempered and,

00:11:44.020 and restrained.

00:11:45.180 Um, I mean, for anybody that doesn't have just kind of a quick note for, for Hobbes and

00:11:51.380 Rousseau, for anybody that's not familiar with those thinker, you could thinkers, you could

00:11:54.840 sort of put Hobbes on the extreme pessimistic side of the Western canon.

00:12:01.080 You know, the most famous Hobbesian line is life is nasty, brutal, and short.

00:12:04.960 Whereas Rousseau is sort of the, the opposite.

00:12:09.000 You could put him on the, the farthest optimistic kind of, um, pro-social side of the Western canon.

00:12:15.520 You know, Rousseau's most famous idea is that, you know, man has man in his natural state

00:12:20.220 was perfect, perfectly good, um, perfectly happy.

00:12:24.520 Um, and it's, it's only through sort of encountering other people and having to deal with the state

00:12:31.960 and, and politics that, that man is, is corrupted.

00:12:35.120 So, um, yeah, reactionary, near reactionary thought, whether it's, it's Yarvin or Land,

00:12:40.220 I think is, is certainly far, far more Hobbesian than, than Rousseau.

00:12:46.540 Yeah.

00:12:47.140 And especially in understanding that, uh, the, that people will kind of eventually drive

00:12:52.220 themselves towards these ends, especially if they're acting publicly.

00:12:55.900 That's, that's always kind of a key point to remember here.

00:12:59.120 You know, this is, this is talking about in the political sphere, allowing kind of

00:13:02.880 the political action.

00:13:04.840 Uh, but he, he, uh, follows that up here by saying the democratic politician and the electorate

00:13:10.100 are bound together in a circuit of reciprocal incitement in which each side, each side drives

00:13:15.600 the other to ever more shameless extreme extremities of hooting, prancing camel, uh, hooting,

00:13:22.160 prancing, uh, cannibalism until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.

00:13:29.120 So kind of dramatic, but not unnecessarily true.

00:13:32.920 Right.

00:13:33.260 So the, the democratic politician is constantly egged on by the crowd to make more and more

00:13:40.340 concessions to more and more extreme positions.

00:13:43.380 And once the, you know, politician has been, uh, has, has kind of done that for the crowd,

00:13:49.820 then the, you know, the, the feeds back over and over again is recorded, uh, rewarded for

00:13:54.800 that.

00:13:55.020 The crowd becomes more demanding.

00:13:56.820 The politician becomes more accommodating until you just have this, uh, this acceleration

00:14:01.960 until you get to the point where the whole point is basically, I will, I will feed you

00:14:07.220 anything you want to stay in power.

00:14:09.120 And the thing that they want increasingly is just the consumption of whatever is available,

00:14:13.680 uh, at the hands for appropriation by the democratic politician.

00:14:17.520 Well, well said.

00:14:20.200 Yeah.

00:14:20.380 And I think you and the prudentialist did a good job of, of outlining that on, on your

00:14:24.320 stream as well.

00:14:25.320 Um, it's just sort of that, um, that the civil religion of, um, you know, finding the next, 0.68

00:14:33.300 uh, the next group that is repressed or the next, you know, custom that needs to be, uh,

00:14:42.660 revoked or repealed or, or, or abandoned.

00:14:44.800 And that's just this kind of ever churning mechanism of, of democracy.

00:14:50.160 Absolutely.

00:14:50.960 Uh, where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideas, the dark enlightenment sees

00:14:55.240 appetites.

00:14:56.040 It accepts that governments are made of people and that they will eat well, setting its expectations

00:15:01.340 as low as reasonably possible.

00:15:03.180 It seeks only to spare civilization from the frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch from Thomas

00:15:09.120 Hobbes to Hans Hermann Hoppe and beyond it asks, how can the sovereign power be prevented

00:15:14.660 or at least dissuaded from devouring society?

00:15:18.460 It can't, it consistently finds democratic solutions to this problem to be risible at best.

00:15:24.360 And so basically we're understanding a part about human nature here.

00:15:29.320 And this is, I think what's really essential for a lot of people when they first interact

00:15:34.240 with new reactionary thought and critiques of democracy, they're told that.

00:15:39.120 Democracy is a way to restrain government.

00:15:42.500 It's a way to control government.

00:15:44.720 It's a way to stop the growth of government power, stop its expansion.

00:15:48.800 However, Land is using some other thinkers, Hobbes and, uh, and many libertarians will be

00:15:54.980 happy to see Hoppe here.

00:15:56.240 Uh, and he's pointing out that actually, especially on the right, there's been a tradition of understanding

00:16:02.200 that democratic government is instead actually the most likely way to expand the power of

00:16:08.840 government to, uh, feed the avarice of government, uh, that a government of unchecked personal

00:16:15.680 will, will of the people will most likely simply destroy, consume, uh, all of these things.

00:16:23.560 And so the question for many of these thinkers is we know sovereignty is going to continue

00:16:28.800 to exist.

00:16:30.520 So if it's going to exist, how do we best keep it from completely consuming all of the

00:16:37.200 goods in society, completely reappropriating these things until they're gone?

00:16:41.280 And he points out that the, the, you know, uh, the democratic solutions are the most laughable

00:16:45.860 because they're not solutions at all.

00:16:47.640 They're actually accelerant.

00:16:50.940 Yeah, that's all, that's all well said.

00:16:52.960 Um, an accelerant and I think, um, uh, democracy really sort of create, I mean, he's about to

00:17:00.820 get into this in the next paragraph, but, uh, so we can just jump into that, but democracy

00:17:05.100 is, is what obfuscates power as opposed to limits power.

00:17:10.140 Um, because you don't, there's never an ultimate kind of, um, sovereign person responsible that's,

00:17:17.760 that's left holding the bag at the end of the day.

00:17:21.660 Exactly.

00:17:22.360 And so he's going to draw from, from Hoppe's, uh, explanation here.

00:17:26.160 And by the way, for our libertarian fans out there, uh, Hoppe was drawing from Bertrand

00:17:31.560 DeJuvenal.

00:17:32.500 So this is, this is kind of political theory, uh, three ways down.

00:17:36.280 It's, uh, it's Land quoting Hoppe, who is basically paraphrasing DeJuvenal.

00:17:42.160 If you want to go back and trace the, the style of this thought, but he says, Hoppe advocates

00:17:47.700 for an anarcho-capitalist private law society, but between monarchy and democracy, he does

00:17:52.920 not hesitate.

00:17:53.600 And his argument is strictly, is strictly Hobbesian quote, as a hereditary monopolist, a King regards

00:18:00.920 the territory and people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic

00:18:06.580 exploitation of his property.

00:18:09.040 So that's really, I think that's really important here, uh, that maybe that we should stop for

00:18:13.560 a second, because this is the conceit.

00:18:15.800 I think that a lot of people, um, take on when they kind of look at the American embrace of

00:18:24.340 popular sovereignty, that they're not really understanding this truth.

00:18:28.580 So Hoppe says, look, we're going to have this sovereign and the way sovereigns work is

00:18:35.460 that they treat them, the, uh, kind of territory under their control as something to be exploited.

00:18:42.280 The kind of the, maybe, maybe the Western liberal democratic defendant says, no democracy keeps

00:18:50.000 people from being exploited.

00:18:51.400 It prevents the exploitation of people.

00:18:54.480 But what kind of Hoppe is addressing right at the beginning here is that government will

00:18:58.900 always exploit people.

00:19:01.640 And so he's going to go on to explain in more detail how the King does that and how that's

00:19:06.540 different from what a democracy does.

00:19:08.280 But he says at the beginning, we can't pretend like governments are not going to do this.

00:19:12.300 They will always be exploiting the things that they own for their own advantage.

00:19:17.000 Yeah.

00:19:19.320 And I mean, I think that's the next paragraph or, and that goes into, um, kind of monarchy

00:19:25.100 and the, the hereditary monarch.

00:19:26.740 I might have some comments after that, but it's probably best to get that out on the table

00:19:31.360 first.

00:19:32.140 Sure.

00:19:32.460 Let's go ahead and get through our quote here from, we're still quoting from Hoppe here

00:19:36.200 under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear.

00:19:42.000 Rather, what happens is this instead of a King and nobility who regard the country as their

00:19:47.640 private property, property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put into monopolistic

00:19:54.040 charge of the country.

00:19:55.820 The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office, he is permitted

00:20:00.880 to use it, uh, use it to his protege, to his and his protege's advantage.

00:20:06.600 He owns it's current use, but not its capital stock.

00:20:10.560 That does not eliminate exploitation.

00:20:13.180 To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or

00:20:18.200 no regard to the capital stock.

00:20:20.520 Exploitation becomes short-sighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.

00:20:26.400 So his argument here is not that, you know, democracy gets rid of exploitation, but rather

00:20:32.020 it's a, it's a private property argument, right?

00:20:34.260 If I give someone a car who didn't work for it and didn't own it and who's going to lose

00:20:39.640 the car in the next week or two, the best thing for them to do with a car is to just

00:20:43.760 use it to make as much property or have a profit or have as much fun as they want.

00:20:48.680 Cause they don't care about the car.

00:20:50.200 If they didn't earn it, it's not theirs and they won't have it later on.

00:20:53.860 So he says the same thing is happening here with democracy, right?

00:20:56.700 You're basically just turning over to someone for a limited amount of time.

00:21:00.320 And now instead of an owner of that car, who's invested in that car, who's going to look

00:21:04.420 after that car because they have to deal with that car every day and they're going to pass

00:21:07.860 that car on to their kid.

00:21:09.360 Instead, the car is simply something, the country in this case is just something to be used and

00:21:15.000 discarded as soon as the next guy comes around.

00:21:18.300 Yeah.

00:21:18.740 And I think, you know, this is going to probably sound like a bit of a lowbrow comment.

00:21:23.020 I think all of us, you know, who've been, who've been raised, uh, you know, in, in this,

00:21:33.000 in this period of time, we've just been kind of groomed to, to understand and to view the,

00:21:38.440 the divine right of Kings and hereditary monarchy as, as just the most kind of insane, irrational

00:21:45.580 baseless.

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00:22:15.760 See your Canada.com.

00:22:19.600 Absurd notion.

00:22:20.680 You know, you've got, you've got a prince who are a princess who's, you know, probably

00:22:25.660 objectively one of the most, or at least this is how it's always deployed and depicted in

00:22:30.060 popular media.

00:22:30.740 The most spoiled and pampered and, um, underexposed human being in the world. 0.94

00:22:37.220 Probably, you know, Joffrey Lannister, probably a sociopath.

00:22:40.560 Um, who's just spent their life, uh, you know, getting, um, palm fronds waved in their face.

00:22:47.540 Why would anybody elect that person to be their monarch?

00:22:52.360 You know?

00:22:52.760 And the point that I think you're, you're making, Oren, and it's, it's kind of, once you notice

00:22:57.380 it, it's, it's a bit hiding in plain face, but you know, if you know that your child is

00:23:01.720 going to inherit the mess that you make, there's no greater incentive really for a monarch

00:23:08.680 to, I guess, treat his property or like treat his people, so to speak, with more dignity and

00:23:16.440 respect and care than somebody that's just, you know, going to hand them over to a new

00:23:21.580 dynasty.

00:23:22.260 And I know this is a bit simplistic, obviously, you know, there've been, there've been catastrophic

00:23:26.420 emperors and monarchs, but you know, the, the car analogy holds up well.

00:23:31.820 Like if I know I'm handing off my, my car is eventually going to be the hand-me-down for

00:23:37.040 my son when he finally gets his driver's license, I'm probably going to rotate the tires.

00:23:42.020 I'm probably going to, um, you know, vacuum the leather.

00:23:46.440 You're going to get those oil changes, right?

00:23:48.300 Yeah.

00:23:48.680 Yeah, precisely.

00:23:49.880 So there's actually, I think a fair amount of rational, logical, um, uh, reason that can

00:23:56.720 kind of go into that, that, that monarchist model that that's like, I'm not about to hand

00:24:02.900 over this car to my enemy.

00:24:04.820 I don't, I, so, you know, I should probably get its oil changed precisely.

00:24:10.720 And that's really important because, you know, his argument is not one of competency, right?

00:24:15.860 Because like you said, this is, we always get this cartoonish spoiled brat who, who's 1.00

00:24:20.220 never, you know, every King was just some idiot. 1.00

00:24:22.200 Who's never, you know, uh, they're inbred. 1.00

00:24:26.140 They, they can't put, you know, they can't do any math.

00:24:28.360 I can't read.

00:24:29.100 They don't know how to flush the toilet. 0.91

00:24:30.360 Right.

00:24:30.720 You know, this, this is all of them.

00:24:31.860 Okay, fine.

00:24:32.460 Even if you want to make that argument, uh, and, and, and assume that's going to be the

00:24:36.200 case, like we don't get bad democratic leaders. 0.69

00:24:39.620 Like you're, you're literally governed by Joe Biden in theory right now.

00:24:42.740 Come on.

00:24:43.240 The guy doesn't even know where he is.

00:24:44.880 Right.

00:24:45.440 You got, you got to get a guy with brain damage in the Senate who we all have to pretend can

00:24:49.880 string sentences together and knows what he's voting on.

00:24:52.920 So obviously both democratic and monarchical systems would have bad rulers.

00:24:58.080 Right.

00:24:58.480 And, and, and it's always weird because if you talk to somebody about democracy, they

00:25:02.580 get really, you know, Oh, what if you get a bad King?

00:25:04.640 But if you get 10 minutes into their talk about democracy, they hate all of their rulers. 0.90

00:25:08.380 All of them are bad.

00:25:09.820 Like, like, so they're like, well, what if you get a bad King's like, well, you think

00:25:13.660 all of your rulers are bad in the democracy, but either way, the point is that whether you

00:25:19.660 have good or bad Kings or good or bad, uh, democracy, let's say it all shakes out even

00:25:24.060 and you have an equal distribution of both.

00:25:25.800 The King is going to be invested.

00:25:27.840 It's a private property argument.

00:25:29.840 It's an incentive argument as where the, the, the democratic leader is not going to be

00:25:34.300 invested because he will be gone in a, in, in, you know, four to eight years.

00:25:38.520 And then someone else, probably his rival has to take control of it.

00:25:42.240 And that's a very different dynamic on how then you're going to treat what you're in

00:25:46.340 charge of.

00:25:48.060 Absolutely.

00:25:48.680 Yeah.

00:25:48.920 Yeah.

00:25:49.060 I mean, I think like, you know, the, the renting versus owning analogy is, works great

00:25:52.780 as well.

00:25:53.120 Like how, how, how, how, how well did you treat the apartments that you rented compared

00:25:57.880 to like your first house?

00:26:00.000 Probably rather poorly.

00:26:02.400 By comparison.

00:26:04.040 Yeah.

00:26:04.300 All right.

00:26:04.760 So we're just going to drop and jump into kind of, uh, uh, so he was quoting hop here.

00:26:09.520 Now we're going back to land's words himself, political agents invested with transient authority

00:26:15.020 by multi-party democracy, democratic systems have an overwhelming and demonstrably irresistible

00:26:21.260 incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and constant comprehensiveness.

00:26:27.840 Anything they neglect to steal or leave on the table is likely to be inherited by their 0.97

00:26:32.140 political successors who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed and who could therefore

00:26:37.740 be expected to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their foes.

00:26:42.740 So this is a really important dynamic that again, both hop and, uh, that hoppa and, uh, land point

00:26:49.220 out here that the King has to care about what gets passed on to his kids because they're his

00:26:54.880 kids.

00:26:55.200 They care about them.

00:26:56.080 They want their dynasty to continue.

00:26:58.000 They want it to move forward.

00:26:59.180 The democratic governance, not only do they not care about what's going to come next because

00:27:04.920 they won't be in charge of it, but actually the person who's going to follow this, follow

00:27:08.760 them is most likely their direct adversary.

00:27:11.480 And so anything that is not stolen, anything that is not taken by you that is not used to

00:27:17.420 the benefit of your political coalition and power going forward is basically a weapon you're

00:27:23.220 handing back to your political opponent.

00:27:25.460 Which means your incentive is to make sure that none of that goes forward, that none

00:27:30.200 of that is available to them when you leave.

00:27:33.600 Yeah.

00:27:34.240 You know, that rereading that section kind of put me in mind of, um, conquests laws and

00:27:40.420 conquests, conquests, Robert conquest, the poet, um, he had these three laws, um, of politics

00:27:47.700 and the third law, I pulled it up here, Oren law.

00:27:50.940 Law number three is the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming

00:27:56.740 that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

00:28:00.780 Um, that quote, what probably what will be well familiar to, to, you know, any near reactionary.

00:28:07.320 Um, but I think that that the nature of that, this is the mechanism, which explains that law.

00:28:12.580 The reason why it is, is governed by a cabal of its enemies is because they understand this

00:28:17.000 really is a weapon that they will eventually have to hand back to their opponent.

00:28:21.720 Yeah.

00:28:21.760 It's a principal actor problem, right?

00:28:23.200 The people who are in charge of the oversight are not actually the owners of the thing.

00:28:30.360 They're not invested in the, uh, future of the thing they're supposed to be working on

00:28:35.080 behalf of their invested in their own future.

00:28:37.180 And so they'll, they'll, it looks like they're the enemies of the thing they're operating because

00:28:41.520 they're not working in its interest.

00:28:42.780 They're working in their own interests instead.

00:28:44.840 Exactly.

00:28:46.160 All right.

00:28:46.880 So let me see, uh, whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy's hand.

00:28:53.000 Best then to destroy what cannot be stolen from the perspective of a democratic politician,

00:28:58.220 any type of social good that is, that is neither directly appropriatable or attributable to their

00:29:04.420 own partisan policy is a sheer waste and counts for nothing.

00:29:09.260 That's really important guys.

00:29:10.780 Think about the way the democratic party operates.

00:29:14.760 If this social good cannot be directly linked, cannot be directly attributed to my own partisan

00:29:21.240 policy, my own coalition, then it's of no good.

00:29:25.340 A general good of society does not matter.

00:29:28.020 That's not why I'm in power.

00:29:29.840 The reason I'm in power is to appropriate social goods to my coalition.

00:29:35.560 That is what matters.

00:29:36.920 Not the general welfare of the people or the state.

00:29:40.780 Uh, whilst even the most grievous social misfortune, so long as it can be assigned to a prior administration

00:29:48.280 or postponed until a subsequent one figures in a rational calculus as an obvious blessing.

00:29:55.240 So bad things are actually good.

00:29:57.760 As long as we can use them to blame our opponent or they can be put off until our opponents take

00:30:02.620 charge, the long range techno economic improvements and associated accumulation of cultural capital

00:30:09.940 that constitutes social progress in its old wig sense are nobody's political interests.

00:30:15.580 Once democracy flourishes, they face immediate threat of extinction.

00:30:20.340 So democracy actually destroys the need for a public good because they could, public goods

00:30:28.020 could be left for my enemy or attributed to my enemy.

00:30:31.160 And I only want goods that can be attributed to my coalition and to me.

00:30:34.860 Yeah, the, I mean, essentially democracy is just like a giant game of, of hot potato or musical

00:30:42.020 chairs.

00:30:42.520 You know, if you just think of the, the, you know, the, we, we have to exist under this

00:30:46.880 four year electoral cycle, which, you know, quite honestly, you know, four to eight years

00:30:52.560 is very, a very short amount of time to get any, you know, real measurable cultural change

00:31:01.900 to, to impact a society, especially a society as, you know, vast and complex as, as the United

00:31:08.800 States.

00:31:09.920 Um, and, and so the fact that leaders have to kind of hand off this baton every four to

00:31:17.000 eight years, um, creates just sort of an incentive structure that's, that's all out of whack.

00:31:22.760 And one other thing I, I think it's worth pointing out is with this, Oren is, is kind

00:31:27.580 of the strange asymmetry between the left and right.

00:31:30.660 And that it does, it does always seem that it's easier to stop the music when the conservative

00:31:37.700 or the Republican is in the chair and they take the heat for the, the foreign war, for

00:31:43.200 example, or, or, you know, any kind of economic downturn, um, as opposed to, um, things like

00:31:51.140 this is what kind of immediately came, came to mind, but think of like the lack of formalism

00:31:56.640 around something like racial equality or rate, you know, racial equity.

00:32:01.900 So, I mean, like since, since the 1960s, one would argue that like the left has had all of

00:32:08.520 the money and power and influence and time that they would need, you know, we're talking

00:32:13.060 half a century at this point, 50, 50 plus years to, um, write those wrongs, but because

00:32:21.760 there's no kind of formalized, there there's no King of racial equity.

00:32:27.460 And so there's no dynasty, there's no real, there's no monarch of racial justice that you

00:32:32.560 can point to and say, you should probably be overthrown because if you're the monarch of

00:32:37.240 racial justice, you're doing a terrible job. 0.94

00:32:39.620 Like you've had half a century, you haven't really delivered.

00:32:44.200 All you have instead is this massive gray blob of bureaucracy and, you know, hundreds and

00:32:51.360 hundreds of non-elected officials and professors and, you know, senators and media pundits, you

00:32:58.580 know, throwing the potato back and forth.

00:33:01.200 There's no, there's nowhere that you can't, it's plain, it's plain hide the sovereign.

00:33:07.420 Nobody has final sovereignty and therefore nobody has ever ultimately fully failed in any

00:33:13.740 given project.

00:33:15.780 Or even worse, not only have, have your, have they not failed?

00:33:20.420 It's, uh, because democracy, uh, kind of devolves this, the, the accountability down to the people.

00:33:27.400 Uh, it's not the politicians, it's not your ruling class that failed.

00:33:31.160 It's your neighbor, your neighbor elected Joe Biden or your neighbor elected Donald Trump.

00:33:35.500 And that's the person that kept the righteous revolution that moving forward.

00:33:39.800 And so not only are you not holding your, uh, your politicians, your leaders, the people

00:33:44.260 with actual power, uh, uh, uh, to account, but you're actually instead trying to hold some

00:33:50.420 amorphous blob of nameless, faceless, othered, uh, red or blue Americans as the ones who are, 0.97

00:33:56.980 who are actually at fault for what happened.

00:33:59.360 Right.

00:33:59.680 Compare this to kind of like, I don't know, the, the, I don't know, the political, um,

00:34:05.460 I guess, spirit of, of, of, of the Romans.

00:34:09.300 Like if you were a Roman aristocrat and you were like, you had the idea that you were going

00:34:13.320 to invade Britannia or, you know, Persia or Egypt, I don't know.

00:34:19.320 You'd probably, you'd probably have to say to the Senate and Rome and everybody, look,

00:34:22.800 I'm going to try to conquer this, this, this land, this people.

00:34:26.200 And if I don't, I'm going to literally like, we have the expression fall on my sword, but

00:34:30.860 that's, that's literally what the Romans did.

00:34:33.040 Like that, that is formalism.

00:34:34.760 Like either I will succeed in my stated goal, my campaign, or I will publicly execute myself.

00:34:42.880 You know, like, can you imagine, like, I don't know, I'm not picking on him, but like Bernie

00:34:46.860 Sanders, like I'm going to get universal healthcare.

00:34:49.180 Or I'm going to, I'm going to cut myself in the middle of the Senate and just eviscerates

00:34:56.120 himself for not getting universal healthcare.

00:34:58.300 Yeah.

00:34:58.480 Yeah.

00:34:58.860 Like I'm going to get us out of Syria in a year, or I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm 1.00

00:35:03.380 going to be publicly executed. 0.86

00:35:05.160 Yeah.

00:35:06.000 That is, that is formalism at its, at its essence.

00:35:09.500 Yeah.

00:35:09.740 It's, it's a very direct relationship between power and responsibility.

00:35:14.280 And it's exactly what our system avoids at pretty much every opportunity.

00:35:19.560 Now he's about to use a phrase time preference.

00:35:22.680 Many people might already know what that means, but if you haven't read a Hoppe or other libertarians,

00:35:27.240 you might not be familiar with the concept.

00:35:30.020 Last things.

00:35:30.680 Do you want to explain just kind of quickly what time preference means?

00:35:35.040 Yeah.

00:35:35.460 And I'm, if I recall correctly and stop me if I'm getting this wrong in the manner that

00:35:39.420 land is using it here, but really time preference, I mean, it's, it's often something that's,

00:35:44.620 I think done in, in kind of IQ and intelligence testing, but having, having a high, a longer

00:35:50.920 time preference is equated with, with patients planning for the long-term resource management

00:35:57.680 being able to sort of restrain your more primitive animal, animalistic desires.

00:36:04.420 There's, you know, there's the famous marshmallow test, which they conduct on, on, on little kids

00:36:09.520 where you give a little kid a marshmallow, you'll tell them, we'll get a second marshmallow

00:36:13.200 if he can wait to eat the first one.

00:36:16.420 And then after a certain period of time, you give them a second marshmallow.

00:36:19.140 Some kids accrue a dozen marshmallows, other kids just eat their first marshmallow.

00:36:24.100 And this apparently tracks on to sort of later successes in life, be they, you know,

00:36:30.220 economic, social, marital, or what have you.

00:36:34.840 So ultimately having a, having a longer time preference preference is associated with having

00:36:40.280 kind of a higher, a higher IQ, as well as just kind of a higher degree of civility, being

00:36:46.220 more civilized, being able to plan for the future more, more effectively, as opposed to

00:36:51.500 sort of living in the now and just sort of satisfying your, your immediate base desires.

00:36:58.100 Sure.

00:36:58.640 And, and, you know, uh, they're not one-to-ones IQ and time preference, but the big thing

00:37:03.460 to understand is that, like you said, time, uh, time preference.

00:37:07.100 If you have a high time preference, you're, you're preferring things to happen immediately

00:37:11.120 right now.

00:37:12.220 You're, you're unwilling to delay those things in the future.

00:37:14.820 If you have a low time preference, then you're someone who is willing to wait.

00:37:18.600 You can wait for that next marshmallow.

00:37:20.060 You can understand that, that delaying that gratification will ultimately lead to something, uh, better,

00:37:26.280 more profitable, more efficient.

00:37:27.960 And because civilization requires these things over time, a lower time preference is very

00:37:34.740 often correlated with more complexity, more civilization, more civility, just like you

00:37:40.600 were talking about there.

00:37:42.320 Uh, all right.

00:37:43.160 So we'll just dump in or jump in rather to land's explanation here.

00:37:47.260 Civilization as a process is indistinguishable from diminished time preference or declining concern

00:37:53.420 for the present in comparison to the future democracy, which both in theory and evident

00:37:59.200 historical fact, uh, uh, uh, accentuates time preference to the point of convulsive feeding

00:38:05.700 frenzy is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as it, as anything possibly could

00:38:12.220 be short of instantaneous social collapse into murders, barbarism, or zombie apocalypse, which

00:38:18.540 it eventually leads to as the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated

00:38:24.960 habits and attitudes of forward thinking, prudential human and industrial investment are replaced

00:38:31.660 by sterile, uh, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a reality television political

00:38:38.700 circus tomorrow might belong to the other team.

00:38:41.780 So it's best to eat it all now.

00:38:46.260 So there, he's just explaining that democracy, that if we want, if, if civilization is all about

00:38:52.800 low time preference, diminished time preference, where people can put off rewards into the future

00:38:57.940 and plan for the future, look to look to their advantage, the advantage of their children

00:39:02.620 and their grandchildren, the, the, the, the wider, uh, society, then democracy, in fact, uh, incentive

00:39:10.300 is incentivizes the opposite.

00:39:12.920 Uh, the politicians are immediately rewarded for consuming those goods and destroying many

00:39:20.240 of these things that were put in place because they had societal value.

00:39:26.180 I say this all the time, you know, traditions are the inculcation of very high cost,

00:39:32.360 less lessons that your society learn, uh, so that you don't have to learn them over again.

00:39:37.960 And, but, but democracy is incentivized to break those traditions, to break down those

00:39:43.460 institutions because it can generate more power, more immediate benefit for the current

00:39:48.860 ruler.

00:39:49.140 And the current ruler won't be in charge in a few years.

00:39:51.940 His kids won't be in charge, nothing that he's connected to.

00:39:54.720 In fact, his enemy will be in charge.

00:39:56.520 So you might as well go ahead and accumulate the most rewards, the most power you can by destroying

00:40:02.360 all those low time preference things that were once part of society.

00:40:08.760 Yeah.

00:40:09.360 I think the one, one, the only one other brief thing I'll, I'll add to that, Oren is I think

00:40:13.520 it does the, the idea of democracy that there's a little bit of like, uh, uncle Ted's shadow,

00:40:21.360 Ted Kaczynski's influence in both mold bug and, and land.

00:40:25.340 And if anybody's read, um, industrial society and it's, it's future, there's a often kind

00:40:31.040 of conflation or it's, it's not one-to-one, but democracy and technology sort of go hand

00:40:38.120 in hand as, um, technology is, is often something as technology improves, one is allowed to sort

00:40:46.720 of, um, discard and eschew more and more traditions.

00:40:52.080 Um, you know, we don't have to worry about, uh, you know, a technology like birth control

00:40:57.040 means the tradition of chastity is, you know, bears a less immediate impact.

00:41:03.460 You know, you don't, you don't suffer the consequences for that, um, high time preference

00:41:08.560 of premarital sex, the way that our ancestors did to use one kind of blunt crude example.

00:41:15.920 Um, and I, I land kind of touches on this a lot, but I think this is more fully expressed

00:41:21.560 in, in Kaczynski is democracy is in some ways sort of the handmaiden of technology or, or

00:41:28.440 democracy is the social apparatus that kind of clears the path or sprinkles the roll, the

00:41:35.200 rose petals in front of the feet of the technology, you know, and you were using this to discuss

00:41:41.220 specifically the political dimension of life and the, uh, shorter time preference, but just

00:41:46.960 think about, you know, we have the preference for the cell phone and, and the tweet and, uh,

00:41:52.360 you know, instantaneous information as opposed to reading the entire book over a long period

00:41:58.520 of time. There's more of a, um, fractal nature to, to all dimensions of life under democracy, not

00:42:06.900 merely the political dimension of, of, of power and, um, and politicians. Yeah. And I think that's a

00:42:14.900 really important point that you're bringing up there because a lot of this destruction of these

00:42:21.040 traditions and these time preferences couldn't exist if we didn't have the technology and kind of

00:42:26.780 the, the, the affluence that would allow society to continue despite their destruction. So you

00:42:32.280 couldn't have really destroyed local communities, families, churches, uh, the way you will have now

00:42:38.880 a hundred years ago, because there would have been no one to feed the poor. There would have been no one

00:42:43.360 to take care of the orphaned children. There would have been no one to handle all the, uh, kind of the,

00:42:48.880 all the, uh, externalities that would have occurred once you broke down these institutions, destroyed these

00:42:54.680 low time preference, uh, traditions inside of society. But now that that technology, like you

00:43:00.920 said, can, can stave off some of the worst of this impact can, can, or, or at least put it out where

00:43:07.140 you know, a lot, a lot of people now are discovering that there are serious consequences to birth control

00:43:12.140 and other things that they didn't understand previously. Uh, but they, but the damage is already

00:43:16.700 kind of done. Right. And so that you can, you can delay that, that in that consequence of short

00:43:22.500 time preference, uh, out to the point where it's no longer something that the, uh, that society can

00:43:27.920 kind of deal with because you, that technology allowed you to kind of bridge that difference

00:43:33.100 between embracing that low time preference behavior and the destruction or sorry, that high

00:43:38.800 time preference behavior and the destruction of low time preference institutions that existed before

00:43:43.400 it. Yeah. Perfectly, perfectly stated. All right. So we'll just go ahead and jump into

00:43:49.100 the next line here. Winston Churchill, who remarked in neo-reactionary style that the best argument

00:43:53.580 against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter is better known for

00:43:59.240 suggesting that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other ones that have

00:44:03.100 ever been tried. Whilst never exactly conceding that, okay, democracy sucks. In fact, it really 0.99

00:44:08.560 sucks. But what's the alternative? The implication is obvious. The general tenor of this 0.96

00:44:13.820 sensibility, uh, is attractive to modern conservatives because it resonates with their

00:44:18.640 wry, uh, disillusioned acceptance of the relentless civil, of relentless civilizational deterioration.

00:44:25.780 And with the associated intellectual apprehension of capitalism as an unappetizing, but an, an,

00:44:32.340 excuse me, an illimitable default social arrangement, which remains after all cut is catastrophic or

00:44:39.380 merely, uh, impractical alternatives have been discarded. The market economy, uh, on this

00:44:45.540 understanding is no more than a spontaneous survival strategy that stitches itself together amidst the

00:44:51.220 ruins of a politically devastated world. Things will probably get worse forever. So it goes. So there's

00:44:57.620 your Vonnegut reference. Uh, but yeah, but yeah, I, so this is a, this is a passage that I would not

00:45:04.320 have really considered before I kind of ran into Nick land here that this, this kind of attitude of,

00:45:10.340 well, democracy, but it's, you know, what else are you going to do really does work in with this

00:45:14.780 modern conservative attitude, which isn't actually interested in kind of conserving everything

00:45:19.800 because it, cause it kind of assumes that civilizational decline is always going to, is just

00:45:25.500 going to happen. And that there's really no, there's no alternative. There's no other way to look

00:45:30.480 at things. So we're just kind of stuck with this doing our best to kind of hold on to the bits and

00:45:35.980 bobs that, uh, you know, that, that are essential as long as we can until they kind of finally get

00:45:40.360 destroyed. Right. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't think I have any, anything to add to that one, but yeah,

00:45:48.040 it's just one of those that, yeah, I would not, you know, when you look at kind of modern and

00:45:51.600 conservative conservatism now, that makes a little more sense, but it's not, not something I would

00:45:56.180 have, uh, how I would have understood that Churchill quote had I, uh, before I read the,

00:46:00.480 that kind of passage land. Uh, so what is the alternative? There's, uh, certainly no point

00:46:05.560 trawling through the 1930s for one. You can imagine a 31st, uh, 21st century post, uh,

00:46:11.340 the modus society, one that saw itself as recovering from democracy, such as Eastern Europe sees itself

00:46:17.180 recovering from communism as suit Supreme Sith Lord of the near reactionaries, uh, midges mole bug. He gets,

00:46:24.100 he gets nice titles from, uh, land here. Yarvin gets a lot of, a lot of nice titles. So, well,

00:46:29.060 I suppose that's, uh, that will make, uh, one of us small bugs, formative influence influences are

00:46:34.940 Austro libertarian, but that's all over as he explains. And he's quoting, uh, Curtis Yarvin

00:46:40.320 here for those who don't know, uh, Curtis Yarvin, Mitch, a small bug. It's the same guy. It's his,

00:46:44.460 his pen name. Mitch's small bug was his pen name before he wrote under his real name, Curtis Yarvin.

00:46:49.140 Uh, so, uh, Yarvin says, quote, libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world

00:46:55.020 in which their battles get one and stay one. They wind up looking for ways to push a world

00:47:00.840 in which the state's natural downhill path is to grow back up the hill. This prospect is Sisyphean

00:47:08.860 and it's understandable why it attracts so few supporters. So funny enough, I actually got in

00:47:13.640 this argument today with libertarians on Twitter. Um, so, yeah, so, uh, I was kind of trying to

00:47:20.920 explain this very principle to libertarians that the, the, the very nature of, you know,

00:47:26.600 even though, uh, Curtis Yarvin started as a libertarian, uh, and, uh, you know, we're,

00:47:30.780 we're quoting Hoppe here. So they have respect for libertarian thinkers, obviously, but it says

00:47:36.020 the whole problem with libertarians is basically their understanding of power, their understanding

00:47:41.120 of the state, their understanding of reality wants them to basically use some force out

00:47:46.040 there. That's definitely not the state to control the state and make it stop growing without therefore

00:47:52.060 then creating a state that, that just goes back and does exactly what the state was doing

00:47:57.360 in the first place. And everybody, everybody universally simultaneously unanimously agrees not to form

00:48:04.360 a state. Yeah. Or, or I forget the quote, the quote that I, I don't even know who I'm quoting,

00:48:12.620 but I, I it's, to me, it's always the, the, just the knockdown drag out defeated, you know, defeat

00:48:18.320 libertarian argument is that phrase. Um, those who, those who want to win will always win over those

00:48:28.120 who just want to be left alone. Yeah. Those, those, those who want to win will always, uh, yeah,

00:48:33.560 they'll always, uh, win over those who want to be left alone. Absolutely. Um, all right. So,

00:48:38.800 uh, uh, we go back to land here. He's done quoting Yarvin and he says his awakening into Neo reaction

00:48:44.220 comes from the Hobbesian recognition that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or

00:48:49.740 controlled. Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never, uh, uh, condense out of science fiction. Uh, divided

00:48:56.800 powers flow back together like a shattered terminator and con, uh, constitutions have exactly as much

00:49:02.680 real authority as a sovereign, uh, interpretive power allows them to have. The state isn't going

00:49:08.760 anywhere. To those who run it, it's worth far more, uh, uh, far more or far too much to give up.

00:49:15.460 And as the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty in society, no one can make it do anything. If the

00:49:21.860 state cannot be eliminated, Mulder argues, at least it can be cured of democracy or systematic

00:49:26.920 degenerative bad government. And the way to do that is to formalize it. Uh, his approach is called

00:49:33.060 neocameralism. So you already kind of touched on this a little bit here with the need for

00:49:37.420 formalization, but this is a really critical passage. This is again, something that's very

00:49:41.980 difficult for a lot of people, small governments, certain conservatives and libertarians. I saw

00:49:46.100 somebody in a chat earlier ask, how is this any different from Hoppa then? And the answer is right

00:49:52.380 here, uh, that they basically say, uh, both land and, uh, Yarvin here are saying you can't get rid

00:50:00.240 of sovereignty. Sovereignty will always be conserved. If you try to break it down, it's a, it's a really

00:50:05.820 good imagery. If you try to shatter it, it pulls back together like the T-1000, uh, in the Terminator

00:50:11.220 movies. Uh, and so the question is not how do we destroy the state or how do we destroy the sovereign

00:50:17.040 or even necessarily how can we, uh, uh, limit sovereign with just pieces of paper, uh, assuming

00:50:24.900 that a constitution does it, does it on its own. He makes the really important point here

00:50:28.820 that the, you know, the, the constitution only really has the power that the, uh, sovereign

00:50:34.700 interpretation grants it. And so our, our way forward is not, uh, kind of these classical

00:50:40.380 understandings of liberalism where constitutions and arguments limit government, but instead formalism

00:50:47.020 is what's going to limit it going forward. Yeah. And I think that in this passage, he's really

00:50:51.640 evoking Schmidt Schmidt. There's a lot of Carl Schmidt in here. Um, I'll admit that, you know,

00:50:56.660 when I read mold bug, a lot of the, like the neocameralism stuff kind of went over my head just

00:51:03.200 cause I've never been a big economics guy. And, you know, my, my understanding is that Yarvin's alter

00:51:09.160 ego and, and, you know, favorite hero from history is Frederick the great. And I embarrassing

00:51:16.920 and shamefully don't know enough about the reign of Frederick the great to, to have all the context

00:51:22.200 as to why he's apparently, you know, the, the greatest monarch that, um, history ever, ever

00:51:28.700 produced. Um, I believe it to Ferdy Yarvin, but, um, I did not, yeah, I did not have enough. I don't

00:51:36.200 know, you know, when you first read it or if you, if you had enough reference points to understand

00:51:42.100 neocameralism, I cannot say that I was, uh, at the time when I first encountered Yarvin that I

00:51:48.320 understood, uh, Frederick the great that well, though, I think I understood, you know, cameralism

00:51:53.380 very well. And as we look at this, um, you know, you might find that you disagree with Yarvin's idea

00:52:00.420 of kind of the distributed CEO, uh, or, you know, kind of the, the CEO is accountable to, uh, I shouldn't

00:52:07.480 say distributed CEO it's, it's, uh, it's unified, but, uh, but, but as accountable to these shoulder,

00:52:12.640 these real shareholders, but the key thing here, even if you don't agree with kind of his CEO King

00:52:18.000 is the formalization. And that's the part of neocameralism that I think anyone can grasp and

00:52:23.620 agree with if you kind of understand what's going on here, but let's go ahead and just go to the

00:52:28.360 quote on neocameralism before we, we, uh, yak about it too much so we can kind of understand what it

00:52:33.500 is. So he's quoting Yarvin here again, or Mencher Smallbug again, remember same guy here. So, uh, to a

00:52:39.260 neocameralist, a state is a business which, uh, which owns a country. A state should be, uh, should

00:52:45.820 be managed like any other large business by dividing logical, uh, ownership into negotiable

00:52:51.840 shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. A well-run state is very

00:52:57.900 profitable. Each, uh, share has one vote and the shareholders elect a board which hires and

00:53:03.480 fires managers. The business's customers are its residents. A profitable managed, a profitably

00:53:10.320 managed neocameralist state will like any business serve as its customers, uh, serve its customers 0.54

00:53:15.940 efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement. So this is really simple. Uh,

00:53:23.060 it sounds complicated, but it's really simple. Uh, basically the people are the customers,

00:53:27.160 right? And you stay or go inside the state, whether or not you would like, just like you would stay or go

00:53:32.460 inside a restaurant that you want to continue free. But the food's good. I'll keep coming here.

00:53:36.340 The food's bad. I'm going to the restaurant across the street. This is Yarvin's vision of the state.

00:53:40.820 You can stay in the state. If you think he's doing a good job, you can leave the state. If you think

00:53:44.480 it's a bad job, you can vote with your feet, but you don't actually have a voice in governance. The,

00:53:50.680 uh, the CEO King that in the neocameralist state is the one who's in charge. And the, uh, the,

00:53:57.860 the actual stakeholders of the government are the ones who, uh, you select a board and the board

00:54:04.480 holds kind of that guy accountable. So it's not a King with the King does have absolute power in

00:54:10.040 the sense that he can make whatever decisions, but the King can be replaced if he's doing a bad job

00:54:14.560 and the citizens can leave. If he's doing a bad job, there's a lot more problems. And this is why I

00:54:20.320 say, try not to sit on neocameralism too much. Cause there's a lot of problems with neocameralism here.

00:54:25.820 Uh, mold bug isn't, uh, approach it, you know, kind of pointed the fact that like, well, not

00:54:29.800 everyone's going to allow people to leave their state. He's not going to, or, you know, leave

00:54:33.400 their country. He's not going to address the fact that actually leaving countries has a cost for

00:54:37.660 people. And so it's not as simple as just picking up and leaving. He's not going to address the fact

00:54:41.720 that this would fracture communities. There's a lot he's not going to address here. Again, he's thinking

00:54:45.880 in a very, you know, uh, kind of highly autistic, uh, you know, computer programmer, how to solve

00:54:52.260 the solution. It works like a business, uh, kind of thing here. There, there's some good points in

00:54:57.140 here, but, but just don't get lost and think that this is the entire argument, uh, that's happening

00:55:02.520 here. Uh, there is much more around this. Like I said, the formalism I think is, is the more important

00:55:07.220 part, but it is good to understand neocameralism as we go forward. All right. So, uh, jumping back to

00:55:15.420 land's commentary on, uh, on neocameralism. Firstly, it's essential to squash the democratic

00:55:22.040 myth that a state belongs to the citizenry. The first point of neocameralism is to bring out the

00:55:26.880 real stakeholders in sovereign power, not perpetuate, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass

00:55:33.400 enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual

00:55:38.640 rulers, the neocameral transition will simply not take place. Power will remain in the shadows and the 0.68

00:55:44.840 democratic farce will continue. So again, this is the formalism that you were talking about last

00:55:49.180 things, right? We, this, this transition away from democracy only works if the power is formally,

00:55:56.280 uh, shown to be connected to the people in charge, the people granting things that the real holders of

00:56:02.700 power were getting rid of this illusion that the average dude who is, you know, working at, you know,

00:56:08.360 his nine to five job and has, you know, a house somewhere in the suburbs is actually having a

00:56:14.160 meaningful, a degree of power over the political system.

00:56:18.700 Yeah. And, and, and I ironically, and perhaps to the counterintuitive to those of us, you know,

00:56:25.040 come of age under democracy is that, that were nine to five worker might actually, 0.96

00:56:29.840 there might be a bit more dignity to, um, admitting that lack of power under a formal system,

00:56:38.100 as opposed to, um, being kind of, um, you know, spoon fed the propaganda that you're, you're fully,

00:56:46.880 a fully enfranchised voter and decision maker, uh, within the polis.

00:56:53.040 Right. Again, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the thing that keeps your political

00:56:58.500 leaders from really being held accountable is, you know, is not that you don't get to vote. It's that

00:57:03.700 you're, you're blaming people who vote the whole time. You're not holding no one. No one is holding

00:57:08.060 Joe Biden accountable. Not that he's even making decisions. Right. But, but no one is holding Joe

00:57:13.460 Biden accountable. They're, they're all yelling at their neighbor. They're yelling at all the

00:57:16.880 Democrats. They're, they're pretending, they're pretending that the guy down your street and not

00:57:21.300 say the guy who manages the federal reserve is the one who's responsible for what's happening

00:57:25.740 to your paycheck. Right.

00:57:27.540 Uh, so, uh, we'll just jump back into the next paragraph here. So secondly, the ruling class 0.95

00:57:33.500 must be plausibly identified. It should be noted immediately in, uh, contradistinction to Marxist

00:57:39.780 principles of social analysis. This is not the capitalist bourgeoisie. Uh, I know, I know I say that

00:57:46.060 word wrong deal with it. Logically it cannot be the power of the business class is already clearly

00:57:52.060 formalized in monetary terms. So the identification of capital with a political

00:57:57.380 power is perfectly redundant. It is, it is necessary to ask rather who do capitalists pay

00:58:04.120 for political favors, how much these favors are potentially worth and how the authority

00:58:09.600 to grant them is distributed. This requires the maximum of moral, uh, the, a maximum of moral

00:58:17.340 iteration that the entire social landscape of political bribery also known as lobbying is exactly

00:58:23.360 mapped and the administrative legislative judicial media and academic privileges accessed by such

00:58:28.740 bribes are converted into fungible shares. Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to

00:58:34.800 entirely exclude them from this calculation. Although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with

00:58:39.700 their appropriate derision. Uh, the conclusion of this exercise is the mapping of, uh, of a ruling

00:58:47.180 entity that is the truly dominant instance, uh, of the democratic polity moldbug calls it the cathedral.

00:58:54.420 So that sounds really complicated. There's a lot going on there. Right. But I think it's,

00:58:58.360 it's actually pretty simple when we break it down, he's saying, look, we, we need to identify

00:59:02.360 everybody who's in charge. It's not the voters, but also the business businesses might have power,

00:59:08.040 but their power is obvious because they have money and we can all see the money though. The things we

00:59:14.880 actually need to formalize, the things we actually need to account for are the things that are the power

00:59:19.880 that is bought with that money. Why does it hold power? These, these media, these, these legislative,

00:59:25.180 uh, these administrative, all of these different functionaries, why do they have power? Why are

00:59:31.080 businesses paying them? We need to formalize that connection, right? Yeah, it's funny. It put me in mind

00:59:37.680 of like a conversation I got into a little while ago with, uh, with a liberal, because I've, I've had my,

00:59:44.280 I like, I've had my, I've, I'm so far down the, the neo-reactionary wormhole, Oren, that I forget

00:59:50.480 what concepts are like familiar or like popularly, popularly ascribed to by, you know, the, the masses,

00:59:58.660 but by the normies. And I just was, I was having a conversation of like a semi-political conversation.

01:00:03.080 And I just like, I forget the full context, but I just mentioned the term elite, like, you know,

01:00:08.800 oh, this person is an elite or like the elite. And this guy was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

01:00:12.960 whoa. Hey, no, what, what, what, what did you say? What did you call? Like, I mean, he knew and not

01:00:17.920 like the only context and framing for the term elite was like, you know, I don't know, something

01:00:23.740 coming out of like QAnon, red state, you know, troglodyte monster people. But like he, 0.88

01:00:32.380 he just had no concept of the fact that somebody can be an elite. If they're a member of like,

01:00:40.320 he would not use that word to cart, to characterize a member of the media or a tenured professor or a

01:00:46.620 non-elected bureaucrat. And to me, it's just sort of the water that I swim in nowadays. And it makes

01:00:52.440 just complete intuitive sense that like, you know, if that's, that person is an elite, like going to

01:00:58.520 college is a, is an elite factory. Or if you like, or at least if you even just want to LARP as an

01:01:05.260 elite, you have to go to college, but it's still kind of a dirty word to, to call someone when an

01:01:13.820 elite. And I think what he's saying in this paragraph is simply like elite is something that

01:01:17.620 needs to enter the lexicon the same way that aristocrat was common in the Roman empire. You

01:01:24.220 know, you're an aristocrat, you have certain privileges, you have a certain station, you have

01:01:28.060 certain formalized power. Um, yeah, yeah. And that's what we lost is the, the formal acknowledgement

01:01:34.600 of that power. Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. It's really difficult for people because

01:01:39.620 in America, especially we have, we kind of pride ourselves on that. We, that we don't have classes,

01:01:45.100 right? Like we may, we might say, we understand that there there's, there's like the low class,

01:01:50.580 middle class and upper class, but everyone just defines themselves as middle class. Like people who 0.99

01:01:54.640 make $30,000 a year and people who make $120,000 a year call themselves middle class. Right. And so

01:02:00.120 we, we think of this as a purely monetary thing. And so when we're looking at this and we're saying,

01:02:05.520 okay, no, there's a group of people, there's a class of people, there's an elite class that have

01:02:10.900 a certain set of power. They have certain types of jobs. They have certain form of culture. They have

01:02:16.140 a certain influence on society. And yeah, that middle level bureaucrat might only be making 60

01:02:21.920 or $70,000 a year, but he has way more power than a small business owner who's making double or triple

01:02:30.200 what he's making. The, the, the difference is really stark. It's not money can equal power,

01:02:36.940 but it's not a one-to-one thing. And that's why I think it's so hard, especially for people on the

01:02:41.280 right to grasp the concept of the cathedral oftentimes to, or the deep, you know, the,

01:02:47.040 the, the, I guess the deep state is, is another thing that people call it. They don't really like

01:02:50.920 that because people only think about the government side of it, not the media, not, not the, uh, not

01:02:55.760 the other apparatuses of kind of the academia and all those things that are also connected to, uh,

01:03:01.940 the cathedral, but it's really hard for people to grasp that because they have a hard time

01:03:05.540 understanding that there could be a class of people that is organized around those special

01:03:10.940 privileges, those special powers that you're talking about, even though their paychecks

01:03:15.000 might not immediately place them in a really fancy mansion or a fancy car somewhere.

01:03:20.200 Right. And so if there, if, if there was a revolution, a formalist revolution, what would

01:03:24.080 happen just to kind of tie this down and make it more tangible is like, if you were at a cocktail party

01:03:28.100 and you found yourself in a conversation with a journalist from the New York times, and you ask that

01:03:33.200 person what they did for a living, they would say, I work for the state department.

01:03:40.940 So, you know, in some way that would be, that'd be more, more of a formal, I'm a government,

01:03:46.980 I'm a government official. I write for the New York times.

01:03:49.860 Yeah. Yeah. Of course, of course I'm a government official. I work as a HR director.

01:03:56.020 Yeah. That would be a far more, that would be a far more honest, uh, way to, to formalize

01:04:01.240 and understand that, uh, the formalization of political power. Thirdly allows for the possibility

01:04:07.100 of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into freely

01:04:12.680 transferable shareholders in government corp, the owners of state can initiate the rational

01:04:18.260 corporate governance beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the

01:04:23.880 state are not precisely formalized as the max, as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.

01:04:30.260 There is no longer any need for residents, clients to have any interest in politics whatsoever.

01:04:36.340 In fact, to do, to do so would be, uh, would, would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities.

01:04:42.840 If government corp does not deliver acceptable value for the, uh, for taxes, sovereign rent,

01:04:48.880 then they can notify the customer's service function and if necessary, take the customer,

01:04:53.980 their, their, uh, their custom elsewhere. Gov corp could concentrate upon running an efficient,

01:04:59.820 attractive, vital, clean, and secure country of a kind that is able to draw customers,

01:05:04.920 no voice, free exit. So again, guys, we mostly started this with the critique of government.

01:05:13.580 Now he's getting into the possible solution. So it's probably important to, or rather the critique

01:05:20.100 of, of, of, uh, democratic government. And now he's getting to the possible solutions. It's important

01:05:25.000 to separate those two. However, you do not have to buy in to the neocameral system that they're kind

01:05:31.640 of, uh, uh, explaining now to understand the critique of government that happened prior to

01:05:36.960 this, the, the critique of democracy. You could, you could, uh, look at other solutions. However,

01:05:42.960 uh, I just, you know, I think it is worth getting into this because they are still talking about,

01:05:47.200 uh, kind of issues, uh, of, uh, democratic influence and how that was might be addressed.

01:05:52.680 So even if you're not a hundred percent on board with this CEO monarch idea, you can still understand,

01:05:57.920 uh, what they're saying about, okay, we're formalizing all these people. We're understanding

01:06:02.200 exactly who's in charge, exactly who's holds influence. We're, we're walking away from the

01:06:07.240 myth that individual people have a, uh, uh, have a serious, uh, ability to wield power through their

01:06:13.740 vote. And instead we're giving them the power that they really have, which is their kind of the

01:06:18.620 ability to kind of take their business elsewhere. Yeah. Like to select your product.

01:06:22.680 The way that you would an Apple product or something like that. I have a lot of problems

01:06:26.280 with the, um, I know it's complicated because it, you know, a lot of these are, we're talking

01:06:31.140 about mold bug through land and often lands re-articulations of mold bug are perfectly

01:06:37.520 acceptable. Um, you know, I, I do, I, I know you and I both, Oren have problems and take issue

01:06:43.700 with like the CEO monarch. I think a lot of that has to do with that, that sort of lack of a

01:06:48.520 spiritual dimension to mold bug. I think a monarch is, is more than an executive when it comes to a

01:06:53.900 people and a nation. But I do think one thing that's kind of undeniable and, and, um, is, is that

01:07:00.360 corporations as they exist today have this ability to sort of, um, thrive under the, the guidance of

01:07:09.000 an individual genius. This is sort of, I think where mold bug gets his love and admiration for Thomas

01:07:14.580 Carlisle and hero worship of just, you know, more like, you know, he talks a lot about Apple and

01:07:21.560 Apple is really, if you're talking about Apple, you're really talking about the genius of Steve

01:07:25.340 jobs and like the singularity of vision and dynamism and, and effort and genius of a Steve jobs. Um,

01:07:36.080 and you know, often genius, something that's just kind of flourishing or changes the world,

01:07:41.420 a company that kind of comes out of nowhere and just re re formulates the whole landscape,

01:07:47.480 the way something like, you know, Apple did by, by putting a, a, an iPhone in everybody's hand.

01:07:52.000 That's driven by that. That is driven by a formalized genius, visionary CEO, uh, like,

01:08:00.740 like a Steve jobs. Um, and I think a big point that they have is because like, that's,

01:08:06.100 that's exactly the type, um, gene could never succeed because of this, um, this lack of formalism

01:08:17.080 and this lack of ownership, the way that a CEO has total ownership and accountability for something.

01:08:23.740 And that's, yeah. And that's definitely, I think why Yarvin so often relates that back,

01:08:28.960 because that's the only way he, that's the only time he has really seen that in kind of, uh,

01:08:35.180 the, kind of the near past, uh, maybe, maybe CEO isn't the best way to frame it, but it's,

01:08:40.720 it's the only examples he have. He really has a people like you're talking about Steve jobs,

01:08:45.340 where they have total control and they're able, they're able to drive things in that way.

01:08:49.540 They have a, a monarchy level of control over things. And so you can, you can approve or disapprove

01:08:55.580 of their job, but you know, directly who's at charge in charge, who's at fault, uh, where the

01:09:01.380 victories and the losses come from. And so that's the kind of accountability that he's trying to

01:09:06.000 secure here in the formalization. Uh, there's another, whether you, well, one last point or on,

01:09:10.840 you know, think about it like that, like you, you can, you can like the, the Victorian era,

01:09:15.780 or you can hate the Victorian era, but it's the Victorian era, right? You know, who might have

01:09:23.040 been in charge during that time. Yeah. Yeah.

01:09:25.580 Yeah, absolutely. All right. Uh, there's another quote here in a little bit guys, but I want to,

01:09:29.520 I want to jump down to, to kind of near the end here, uh, cause it's going to talk a little more

01:09:33.800 about democracy, which is the main part of this. This is really a stream on neocameralism. Uh,

01:09:39.040 but I want to, I want to get back to where they're talking about democracy and we're also running a

01:09:42.860 little longer here. So I want us to be able to get, uh, to everything we want to talk about before we

01:09:48.260 sign off. So I'm just going to start back up with land talking here. He says in European classical

01:09:54.340 antiquity, democracy was, uh, recognized as a familiar face of cyclical political development,

01:10:00.980 fundamentally, uh, decadent in nature and primarily to a, uh, to a slide into tyranny,

01:10:06.660 uh, or in primary preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today, this classical understanding is

01:10:14.440 thoroughly lost and replaced by a global democratic ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection

01:10:21.760 that is asserted, not as a credible social scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous

01:10:27.440 popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed or, uh, of a specific historical, uh,

01:10:34.340 historically identifiable kind. So here land is just stating the fact that throughout history,

01:10:40.540 most people understood democracy as dangerous. It was not seen as progress. It was not seen as

01:10:46.260 some champion of, uh, good and the advancement of people. Democracy was understood as dangerous and

01:10:53.200 very likely to lead to social decline. In fact, uh, basically the two were often considered

01:10:58.100 synonymous. And he says that instead today, uh, these, these, uh, democratic values are basically

01:11:05.440 infused with a quasi religious tone to kind of keep people from understanding, uh, the, the,

01:11:11.560 this more classical idea that democracy is a force of entropy and not one of kind of perfect

01:11:18.600 extrapy. Yeah. It's, it's funny. One, just real quick note on that, you know, like when you learn

01:11:23.900 about Athens in school, like in grade school or high school, or just like in popular culture,

01:11:28.400 it's always like, Oh, the ancient Greeks, that's Athens. Athens was a democracy, the birthplace of

01:11:33.180 democracy. Athens was the greatest. And then when you actually kind of get around, if you're interested

01:11:38.040 in this sort of stuff to like read the original, like ancient sources and texts and contexts of

01:11:43.900 like, you know, Athens was a democracy for a hot minute. And then it got wiped out by its neighbors. 0.65

01:11:48.980 And anybody that wrote about it for the next 500 years was just basically saying, yeah, don't try

01:11:55.140 that. Did not go well. We're like, what was Athens thinking? This led to their death. Like the Spartans

01:12:03.140 wipe them out. And thank God we don't, none of us have to still deal with that Athenian democracy.

01:12:09.080 Yeah. I, I literally, so I was a, I was a teacher and I was having this debate. Like I was, I was

01:12:14.840 talking to another teacher while we were having this conversation and they're like, well, you know,

01:12:20.080 you know, and the Athenians, that was democracy. That was the birth of equality. That was the birth of,

01:12:25.420 of, of what became our civilization. So obviously that was the death of Athens.

01:12:30.080 Well, well, that, there's a funny part is like, when she goes through all of this, like why,

01:12:33.980 why Athens was better than Sparta and, and, and, you know, why it's a, it ultimately triumphed. I'm

01:12:39.420 like, yeah, except Sparta won the war, right? Like, like that did not, but anyway, yeah, it's,

01:12:46.040 it's one of those things that, that is not understood with a lot of people here. But now he jumps

01:12:52.180 into a quote from mold bug again, from courtesy of it again, which says I received tradition. I call

01:12:59.140 universalism, which is a non-theistic Christian sect. Some, some other current labels for this

01:13:04.600 tradition, more or less synonymous are progressivism, multiculturalism, liberalism,

01:13:09.780 humanism, leftism, political correctness, and the like. Universalism is the dominant modern branch

01:13:15.060 of Christianity on the Calvinist line, evolving from the English dissenter or Puritan tradition

01:13:20.120 through the Unitarian transcendentalist and progressive movement. Its ancestral briarpatch

01:13:26.880 also includes a few sideways sprigs that are important enough, uh, to name, but whose Christian

01:13:33.420 ancestry is slightly better concealed, such as Russo, Russovian, I don't even know how to say

01:13:39.020 that one, uh, uh, Benthamite, utilitarianism, reformed Judaism, uh, Comtean, uh, positivism,

01:13:48.400 German idealism, uh, Marxist scientific socialism, uh, Satrian existentialism, Heideggerian,

01:13:55.040 postmodernism, et cetera, et cetera. Universalism is, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery

01:14:01.200 cult of power. It's a hard to imagine universalism without the state as, uh, malaria is without the

01:14:07.720 mosquito. The point is, uh, the point is that this thing, whatever you care to call it is at least 200

01:14:13.880 years old and probably more like five. It's basically the reformation itself and just walking up to it and

01:14:20.180 denouncing it as evil is about as likely to work as suing, uh, Shubin Ngararath in small claims court.

01:14:29.140 All right. So now that I've stumbled through all of those pronunciations, uh, yeah, so this is,

01:14:35.120 this is kind of, uh, Yarvin's classical argument that progressivism is basically a, the atheist

01:14:41.400 de-eracination of Christianity. It's an even more extreme, uh, and even more, uh, uh, uh, kind of

01:14:49.520 unhinged, uh, version of already completely unmoored versions of kind of radical Puritan Christianity, 0.51

01:14:57.680 uh, and that, uh, basically it, it, it eventually relies on the state in order to pull off this trick,

01:15:04.480 which is kind of what we talked about earlier, uh, about how a lot of these things would not have

01:15:09.140 been possible if the state with a new set of technology had not been able to kind of step in

01:15:13.580 and take over many of these, uh, these kind of, uh, low time or, uh, high time preference costs

01:15:21.460 that came after dismantling a lot of these traditions. Yes. Yeah.

01:15:28.700 All right. We'll jump back in here for the last little bit then, uh, to comprehend the emergence of

01:15:33.980 our contemporary predicament, uh, characterized by relentless totalizing state expansion, the

01:15:39.860 proliferation of spurious positive human rights claims on the resources of others backed by

01:15:45.120 coercive bureaucracy, politicized money, reckless evangelical wars of democracy, and comprehensive

01:15:52.080 thought control arrayed in defense of universalistic, universalistic dogma accompanied by the

01:15:58.540 degradation of science into government public relations function, man. Isn't it amazing how

01:16:04.360 many of those things are, you know, this was written well over a decade ago at this point. Right. But

01:16:08.820 how many of those things are just spot on right now, immediately to our own situation.

01:16:13.240 Yeah, I know that's, it is shocking to realize how these two men like predicted everything, right?

01:16:19.460 It's like, I have to remind myself that this wasn't written yesterday.

01:16:22.840 Yeah. Yeah. You really think about like, yeah, who could have predicted, uh, you know,

01:16:26.280 going, you know, going to war against a nuclear power in, uh, in, uh, Ukraine while simultaneously

01:16:33.280 demanding that men, women are interchangeable, that they, that a man can become a woman at any time.

01:16:38.820 Oh, look, it's, it's literally just predicted right here, uh, that, that, that would be absolutely

01:16:43.040 necessary. It is necessary to ask how Massachusetts came to conquer the world as mold bug does with every

01:16:49.740 year that passes the international ideal of sound governance finds itself approximate, uh, uh,

01:16:55.600 approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by the grievance studies department

01:17:01.260 of the new England universities. This is the divine providence of the ranters and levelers elevated to 0.99

01:17:07.380 a planetary tail, tail, tail ology, uh, the consolidation, uh, and consolidating as the reign of

01:17:15.480 the cathedral. The cathedral has substituted its gospel for everyone, uh, for everything we ever knew

01:17:21.800 considerate the, uh, consider just the concerns expressed by America's founding fathers compiled

01:17:27.980 by the Liberty clinging comment number one here. And then he has just a list of anti kind of

01:17:35.360 democratic quotes from founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, a democracy is nothing more than mob

01:17:40.120 rule where 51% of people may take away the rights of the other 49, uh, Benjamin Franklin,

01:17:46.100 democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed land

01:17:51.180 contesting the vote, uh, democracy, uh, John Adams democracy has never lasted long. It soon wastes

01:17:57.220 exhaust and mergers itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

01:18:02.160 Uh, James Madison democracy has, uh, democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention

01:18:09.920 have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property and have in

01:18:15.840 general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. And finally,

01:18:21.000 Alexander Hamilton, we are a, we are a Republican government. Real liberty is never found in

01:18:25.980 despotism or in the extremes of democracy. It has been observed that a pure democracy,

01:18:31.100 if it were practical, uh, practicable would be the most, uh, perfect government experience has

01:18:36.940 proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people

01:18:42.120 themselves deliberated, never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny.

01:18:49.260 All right, guys. So we'll go ahead and wrap it up there, but yeah, last thoughts, uh, last things on

01:18:55.600 kind of the, the founding fathers argument against democracy there. Uh, I think, you know, I like

01:19:01.640 this particular section today, Oren is really great land old bug. And like you said, but in its totality

01:19:10.920 is, um, you know, his, you know, his teak of mold bug and re-articulation of mold bug. I think there

01:19:17.520 are other parts that you kind of get, this part kind of puts the mold bug before the land in a lot of

01:19:24.020 places, whereas other sections you can kind of, you, you, you get the landian philosophy and landian

01:19:31.540 contribution is foregrounded more. I'm sure you're going to be getting in at some point into more

01:19:36.260 acceleration, um, accelerationist philosophy. Um, he'll start using more of his kind of creepy

01:19:43.680 chthonic Lovecraftian imagery and cyber horror, um, theory, fiction and stuff like that. So I just

01:19:51.500 mentioned that to encourage readers to, um, if you feel like this is redundant, having read Yarvin,

01:19:58.120 um, it's, it's still well worth your time to read the totality of land because it starts to get more

01:20:03.620 and more its own thing as he, as he sort of escalates. Yeah. And that's exactly right. So

01:20:09.160 far we've, we've only read from the dark enlightenment. Um, and so the, the, which is

01:20:13.140 entirely a response to mold bug, but that is not all of Nick land's writing. Uh, for sure. He is, uh,

01:20:20.000 has, has many other things like he said, explores, uh, very interesting, uh, areas that are uniquely his

01:20:25.680 own, um, as you kind of branch out into other, uh, of his documents. But I started here because I feel

01:20:32.420 like a lot of these things are directly applicable to governments, uh, people will have already been

01:20:36.780 familiar with some of the Curtis Yarvin's arguments. And so this at least gives you some

01:20:40.180 handholds to, to kind of, uh, grasp as you kind of descend into, uh, Nick lands, uh, work, uh, you

01:20:47.100 know, once, once you get to the darker depths here, you might be a little more on your own, but, uh,

01:20:50.920 this at least gives you a little bit of little guidance. Uh, so we've got some questions of the

01:20:55.280 people over here before we switch over last things, uh, where can people find your excellent content?

01:21:00.340 Is there anything they should be looking out for? Yeah, sure. And I, you know, I, unfortunately

01:21:04.360 probably have to go bail out my wife or, and so I'm going to leave you to, to handle these, um,

01:21:09.600 these chats, but, uh, yeah, people can just search for my YouTube channel on, uh, just type in last

01:21:15.700 things. I think I come up first. I actually just, uh, launched my website, which just basically kind

01:21:21.000 of redirects people to, to, um, to, to, to YouTube. But if you go to last things.co, um, you can see my,

01:21:28.320 my fancy new WordPress page. Um, and, uh, yeah, people can find me on Twitter as well. Um, all my

01:21:34.800 stuff is usually in all my show notes. Um, but Hey, there was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on

01:21:39.680 to do this. And, um, I'll, I'll, I'll see you tomorrow. Yeah, man, absolutely. Yep. Have a good

01:21:45.120 one. All right. Take care. All right. So guys, let's jump over to the questions of the people real

01:21:51.060 quick. We've got a few, uh, Maddie ice for $5. I love last things. He's got one of the greatest

01:21:56.100 voices ever. I've listened to the Trojan horse video, uh, did with, uh, geo a few times. Please

01:22:02.000 do it again. Yeah, no geo and last things are a great duo. I've had them on for, uh, we also did

01:22:07.360 that postmodern Christianity stream, which a lot of people liked, uh, they, they work really well

01:22:11.740 together. Uh, last things is a great, uh, commentator. If you haven't watched, uh, kind

01:22:16.360 of his work, he does a great job, especially looking at culture movies, TV shows, breaks them

01:22:21.440 down in very interesting ways and intersects them with a lot of the stuff we talk about, uh, kind of

01:22:25.820 on, uh, in our spheres in these shows. And so I think you'll find his stuff very interesting. He he's

01:22:31.280 very busy guy. He's got a family. Uh, he doesn't get to publish as much as, as I think he'd like to,

01:22:36.340 uh, but his stuff is always great. So make sure that check it out. Now I'll definitely try to get

01:22:40.540 him and geo together again. Uh, super Joe's midlife crisis for $10. Thank you very much, sir. Uh,

01:22:47.560 wait, you're a teacher or, and yes, believe it or not, that was the case. How awful is the education

01:22:51.560 system from the inside? It is, uh, even worse than you think it is. Uh, it is in a very bad place.

01:22:57.460 It is only getting worse. Uh, I will probably start doing, I did one video explaining, uh, for instance,

01:23:03.680 um, uh, restorative justice, uh, which is this like wild kind of Marxist, uh, liberation theology type

01:23:11.620 of discipline that started in prisons and has made its way over to, uh, to the school system.

01:23:18.060 Uh, so I'll probably start doing more videos like that, where I kind of explain, uh, these things.

01:23:22.740 It's the, the, the audiences don't really overlap all the time. So it's hard to just be like, and

01:23:27.700 here's all the problems with schooling though, more and more of you, you know, having kids and stuff. So,

01:23:32.080 uh, maybe you'll find that stuff more interesting, but I'll talk about a little more. How many hours of

01:23:36.560 Holocaust black history did you have to teach each day? A lot, um, to be really clear, uh, most,

01:23:43.200 uh, public school students think America invented slavery. Uh, and that's the only thing America did 0.70

01:23:48.420 until, you know, about 10 minutes ago. If you, if you talk to, unfortunately, a large amount of

01:23:54.760 public school students, that is more or less their understanding of American history because that's

01:23:59.180 exactly how it's taught to them. Uh, let's see here. Ronald McNuggets for $25. Thank you very much

01:24:06.540 sir. Very generous. I appreciate that. Uh, Yarvin assumes that people are motivated solely by money

01:24:12.420 and not destruction of religious or ethnic identities. History and Hobbesian vision of

01:24:17.140 people. It shows that this would be false. We are once neutralized economic zone, uh, once

01:24:22.300 neutralized economic zone, Schmidt thought anti-human. Yeah. I think those are all pretty good, um,

01:24:29.300 kind of, uh, uh, criticisms of Yarvin. So here's the thing. So I think,

01:24:36.540 in moments Yarvin does recognize some of the stuff, for instance, I've seen Yarvin in interviews

01:24:42.100 say things like, yeah, I don't think actually that you can have a state without a church. Like these

01:24:47.620 things are kind of intertwined. I think he recognizes at some level that this is essential.

01:24:53.180 He's kind of gone with this idea that, that really basically people's virtue has been so destroyed

01:24:59.600 and their identities have been just sort of destroyed that like going forward, the only thing

01:25:03.500 we're going to have is kind of this high utility economic zone. And so the best thing you can do

01:25:09.480 is just like make the best version of that. And if you just get the democracy out of this stuff,

01:25:14.280 then it's not a problem anymore, but that, and then actually I just got done writing the last

01:25:19.380 chapter of my book. Uh, so when it comes out, you guys can kind of, uh, look at that, but I kind of

01:25:25.120 take that argument to task a little bit, uh, in that, uh, but, but basically the long and short of

01:25:30.940 it is, I think he is ignoring truths about humanity. I think he is underselling kind of some

01:25:37.000 of the spiritual and social sides of what's happened. Part of that is to be fair because

01:25:42.280 those things are way, way harder to fix and much more difficult to explain in the kind of the

01:25:50.040 rationalist way that a lot of people want. A lot of people want a political philosophy

01:25:54.960 that is nuts and bolts, hyper-realistic, um, you know, can, can be immediately mapped on to,

01:26:03.280 uh, what we see right in front of us and doesn't really engage with the spiritual, the social,

01:26:08.300 the metaphysical. A lot of people get uncomfortable when, uh, political theories start to do that.

01:26:14.920 But I think that's a mistake. Um, I think that kind of this realist Machiavellian philosophy is

01:26:20.180 incredibly useful. Obviously I'm somebody who uses it all the time, so I'm not decrying it as,

01:26:25.660 as saying it doesn't have uses, but I think that getting stuck on it and thinking that this is the

01:26:30.660 only way to view the world and the only way to understand, uh, kind of humans is dangerous. Uh,

01:26:38.040 I, I know Yarvin doesn't think that directly, but when it's the only lens you view societies through,

01:26:44.020 then I think you end up making some pretty serious mistakes when you're trying to understand how to

01:26:48.420 address things. Uh, but that said, obviously still a large respecter of his work, uh, wouldn't be

01:26:53.600 spending so much time, uh, kind of explaining these thoughts if I didn't think they had a lot of value.

01:26:59.380 So that said guys, thank you so much for coming by. I had a great stream. Like I said, last things is

01:27:04.780 an excellent guest. You should definitely make sure to check out all of his stuff. And if it's your

01:27:09.000 first time here, uh, you should go ahead and subscribe to this YouTube channel. Don't forget

01:27:14.380 guys, this also goes on to rumble and odyssey and blaze TV. So if you want those platforms

01:27:20.360 where you get, you know, you don't have to worry about censorship and those kinds of things,

01:27:23.700 you can check out the shows there as well. And of course, if you want to get these broadcasts as

01:27:28.740 podcasts, you can subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. Just go over and look at the

01:27:34.420 Warren McIntyre show there. And if you do make sure to leave a review or rating that really helps

01:27:40.180 with the algorithm. Thanks for coming by guys. And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 22, 2023

Nick Land's Case Against Democracy ｜ Guest： Last Things ｜ 6⧸22⧸23

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