Nick Land's Case Against Democracy ｜ Guest： Last Things ｜ 6⧸22⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 27 minutes
Words per Minute
172.7914
Summary
In this episode of The Dark Enlightenment, we re reading from the same document as The Prudentialists, but in a slightly different format. We re joined by YouTuber LastThings to talk about the work of philosopher Nick Land.
Transcript
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Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest I think you're really going to enjoy.
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So I started a series where we look at the work of philosopher Nick Land.
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He's somebody who had a lot of impact on the neo-reactionary political sphere.
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Somebody who is really influencing people who are kind of talking about politics now,
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but hasn't gotten as much love as, say, somebody like Curtis Yarvin,
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because he tends to be a little harder to read, a little more difficult to tackle.
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And so I'm inviting different guests on to break down passages from Nick Land
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so we can better understand kind of the concepts behind them
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and how they apply to the world we see around us.
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Oren, it's a pleasure to be here, and I hope I'm up to the task.
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Yeah. Like I said before, this is somebody who,
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it seems very intimidating at first, and I understand he is somebody who uses some language
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that does obscure what's happening there, kind of maybe overcomplicated in sections,
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but his work is really important, and so I think it's worth taking the time to kind of slow down,
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take key passages, and kind of break them apart for people.
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Now, today we're going to be reading from The Dark Enlightenment,
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which is the same document we were reading from on Monday with The Prudentialists.
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Different section, though, here. This is going to be Section 1.
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Now, what's interesting about this, again, is that this document is in response
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to Curtis Yarvin and his work over at Unqualified Reservations.
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Nick Land was somebody who was a Marxist, was somebody on the left,
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worked a lot with a very kind of radical left-wing people,
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but made an interesting journey over to kind of the right,
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and his interaction with Curtis Yarvin's work was a very important part of that.
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Now, last thing you were telling me, you wanted to talk a little bit about kind of
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your interactions with Nick Land, your understanding,
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and how that kind of relates to Curtis Yarvin's work.
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Yeah, yeah, and I mean, obviously, I'm a fan and admirer,
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and I second everything you have to say about the man.
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I think a few things to kind of put on the table before we dive into the text.
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You're correct that this is very explicitly, as people will see,
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He quotes from him quite liberally within The Dark Enlightenment.
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And what I'd say about these two thinkers together,
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and it's funny because I think both of them, they have very different styles,
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but I think both probably cause plenty of readers to close their laptops or throw the book
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if they have an actual print copy across the room,
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because they both can be very, very dense and filled with a lot of illusions that might not be that clear.
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I think both also have a pretty biting and wicked sense of humor.
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I think one thing, though, that distinguishes land for me is,
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this is a criticism that I think you and I share, Oren,
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and I think I've heard you articulate this on a few occasions.
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but one of the big issues that some people have taken up with him
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is that he's not a particularly theological thinker.
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And, you know, for all of his critique of a kind of, you know, materialist, technocratic society,
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he is in some ways kind of still a creature of that world, and it's denizen.
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There's not a lot of kind of theology or overriding metaphysics.
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I don't think that Moldbug really talks much about good and evil,
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although that's not true. He does, although when he does,
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he's quick to sort of formalize it and materialize it.
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You know, he's got the essay, There's No Such Thing as Chaotic Good.
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And he, with Moldbug, you have a thinker who sort of equates good and evil
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to effective and ineffective government or order and chaos.
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It's very kind of utilitarian, kind of pragmatic measurements of the good and that which is evil.
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And I think with Land, by contrast, you do have somebody who's much more of a,
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I think people associate horror a lot more with Land.
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And I think, funny enough, he not just, doesn't just inspire philosophers and nonfiction,
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but he's had a fair amount of influence on a lot of fiction.
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You can see sort of the shadow and influence of Nick Land in a writer like Zero H.P. Lovecraft.
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Um, Moldbug coined that phrase, Cthulhu only swims leftward.
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But Nick Land is really somebody who kind of took the Cthulhu aesthetic,
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kind of the Lovecraftian horror, the cosmic horror, and ran with that.
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Um, and I think you do have, you do have kind of a more religious thinker,
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You know, the feeling that I get when I read Moldbug is, you know,
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despite all of the kind of cynical and unsettling observations he makes,
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you have a pretty jolly Virgil on your, on your journey.
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You know, he's like reading Kurt Vonnegut or something like that.
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You got somebody, he might be describing the end of the world,
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but he's doing it with like, you know, a, uh, a skip in his step.
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Um, I think with somebody like Land, you've got somebody that's, um, kind of stopping to
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process a lot more of the, the kind of horror and existential dread and cosmic implications
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Um, the last thing I'll say about the two of them is I do think it's interesting that one
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is, uh, an American Moldbug, of course, and another is, uh, British.
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And I think it's interesting to kind of frame them as, as a European reacting to progressivism
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Because I think that that's, I don't know that, that, that somehow differentiates them
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I think that, um, Land seems a bit more tied to a lot of continental philosophy in a way
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that I don't think Moldbug necessarily, uh, uh, derives a lot of his, his thinking from,
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but that's, that's what I have to say as sort of initial comments about how those, those
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And I think that's really essential because like you said, Moldbug is of course a programmer,
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He's by trade, he's a computer programmer, he's a systems analyst.
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And so he's looking at this, uh, you know, kind of societal decline as just a, a, a problem
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Well, yeah, maybe humanity has fallen, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe there's a, a spiritual
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death here, but that's not really Moldbug's problem.
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He just wants to figure out how to kind of make the managerialism flow again, kind of make,
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As where land is, I think, addressing more of what you're talking about, the philosophical,
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the philosophical ramifications and the spiritual ramifications of what has happened.
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Now he's not always very, in fact, he's almost never optimistic about that, but he is addressing
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And that does bring a different lens to things that I think, um, makes these, these two works,
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uh, you know, on qualified reservations and the dark enlightenment, uh, work very well together
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in tandem, uh, though, as I understand, uh, you know, uh, Moldbug claims he's never read
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Uh, so I, I don't know if he could ever learn anything from land there, but, uh, uh, but
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Yeah, I think that, I think that, you know, in some ways, maybe if you, if we have any young
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Ian's listening, you might consider Nick land to be sort of Yarvin's shadow.
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But if, if anybody has, has ever found certain elements of, of Yarvin's writing to be a bit,
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a bit soulless, I don't feel that way about it, but I, I do think with Nick land, you do
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find the soul, um, it might be absent from Yarvin's more, um, programmatic writing, but
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it is, it's a dark, dark, dark abyssal soul that one finds when reading Nick land.
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Well, we are about to read about zombie apocalypse.
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So that said, let's go ahead and pivot to the text itself.
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So we're starting here, uh, in, uh, in part one of, uh, the dark enlightenment and I'll
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And we'll, uh, as we've done previously with, uh, kind of these episodes, we'll just stop
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as, as we go and comment on the sections we're reading there and explain different, uh, different
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So for the hardcore neo-reactionary democracy is not merely doomed.
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The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent
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dark enlightenment devoid of its beginning of any, or devoid, uh, from its beginning of
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any, uh, Rousseauian, uh, enthusiasm for popular expression, uh, predisposed in any case to perceive
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the political awakening, uh, masses as a howling irrational mob.
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It conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative, systematically
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consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentment, and, uh, deficiencies until they
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reach the level of collective, uh, criminality and comprehensive social corruption.
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Uh, so, I mean, that last kind of part there sounds a lot like our current society, right?
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Um, you know, private, uh, vices exacerbated, uh, you know, into what has basically just become
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You know, we, we just have, you know, we had pride month going on and, uh, Joe Biden talking
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about how, you know, trans kids are the soul of our, of our nation and, uh, our, our armed
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Uh, it's hard to say that, you know, that, that last sentence hasn't really come to pass.
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And, um, I mean, I mean, I think this is in here, here land is what, is what describing
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what, what Yarvin kind of terms, the, the hedonic treadmill.
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Um, again, you can kind of see there the more, uh, mechanistic kind of language that, that
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Uh, I think the big part, a couple of big points to draw out of there is, is, is, I think
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what land is saying, if I could boil it down is that neo reactionaries don't flee democracy
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because it, it, in some counterintuitive way limits self-expression.
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It's that neo reactionaries flee democracy because it, it does allow for self-expression
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and self-expression is actually, you know, not, not, not an innate good because there is
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a certain kind of darkness to the human soul that, that needs to be kind of tempered and,
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Um, I mean, for anybody that doesn't have just kind of a quick note for, for Hobbes and
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Rousseau, for anybody that's not familiar with those thinker, you could thinkers, you could
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sort of put Hobbes on the extreme pessimistic side of the Western canon.
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You know, the most famous Hobbesian line is life is nasty, brutal, and short.
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You could put him on the, the farthest optimistic kind of, um, pro-social side of the Western canon.
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You know, Rousseau's most famous idea is that, you know, man has man in his natural state
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was perfect, perfectly good, um, perfectly happy.
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Um, and it's, it's only through sort of encountering other people and having to deal with the state
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and, and politics that, that man is, is corrupted.
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So, um, yeah, reactionary, near reactionary thought, whether it's, it's Yarvin or Land,
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I think is, is certainly far, far more Hobbesian than, than Rousseau.
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And especially in understanding that, uh, the, that people will kind of eventually drive
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themselves towards these ends, especially if they're acting publicly.
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That's, that's always kind of a key point to remember here.
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You know, this is, this is talking about in the political sphere, allowing kind of
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Uh, but he, he, uh, follows that up here by saying the democratic politician and the electorate
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are bound together in a circuit of reciprocal incitement in which each side, each side drives
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the other to ever more shameless extreme extremities of hooting, prancing camel, uh, hooting,
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prancing, uh, cannibalism until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.
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So kind of dramatic, but not unnecessarily true.
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So the, the democratic politician is constantly egged on by the crowd to make more and more
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concessions to more and more extreme positions.
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And once the, you know, politician has been, uh, has, has kind of done that for the crowd,
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then the, you know, the, the feeds back over and over again is recorded, uh, rewarded for
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The politician becomes more accommodating until you just have this, uh, this acceleration
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until you get to the point where the whole point is basically, I will, I will feed you
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And the thing that they want increasingly is just the consumption of whatever is available,
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uh, at the hands for appropriation by the democratic politician.
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And I think you and the prudentialist did a good job of, of outlining that on, on your
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Um, it's just sort of that, um, that the civil religion of, um, you know, finding the next,
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uh, the next group that is repressed or the next, you know, custom that needs to be, uh,
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And that's just this kind of ever churning mechanism of, of democracy.
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Uh, where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideas, the dark enlightenment sees
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It accepts that governments are made of people and that they will eat well, setting its expectations
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It seeks only to spare civilization from the frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch from Thomas
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Hobbes to Hans Hermann Hoppe and beyond it asks, how can the sovereign power be prevented
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It can't, it consistently finds democratic solutions to this problem to be risible at best.
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And so basically we're understanding a part about human nature here.
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And this is, I think what's really essential for a lot of people when they first interact
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with new reactionary thought and critiques of democracy, they're told that.
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It's a way to stop the growth of government power, stop its expansion.
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However, Land is using some other thinkers, Hobbes and, uh, and many libertarians will be
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Uh, and he's pointing out that actually, especially on the right, there's been a tradition of understanding
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that democratic government is instead actually the most likely way to expand the power of
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government to, uh, feed the avarice of government, uh, that a government of unchecked personal
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will, will of the people will most likely simply destroy, consume, uh, all of these things.
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And so the question for many of these thinkers is we know sovereignty is going to continue
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So if it's going to exist, how do we best keep it from completely consuming all of the
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goods in society, completely reappropriating these things until they're gone?
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And he points out that the, the, you know, uh, the democratic solutions are the most laughable
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Um, an accelerant and I think, um, uh, democracy really sort of create, I mean, he's about to
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get into this in the next paragraph, but, uh, so we can just jump into that, but democracy
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is, is what obfuscates power as opposed to limits power.
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Um, because you don't, there's never an ultimate kind of, um, sovereign person responsible that's,
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that's left holding the bag at the end of the day.
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And so he's going to draw from, from Hoppe's, uh, explanation here.
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And by the way, for our libertarian fans out there, uh, Hoppe was drawing from Bertrand
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So this is, this is kind of political theory, uh, three ways down.
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It's, uh, it's Land quoting Hoppe, who is basically paraphrasing DeJuvenal.
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If you want to go back and trace the, the style of this thought, but he says, Hoppe advocates
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for an anarcho-capitalist private law society, but between monarchy and democracy, he does
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And his argument is strictly, is strictly Hobbesian quote, as a hereditary monopolist, a King regards
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the territory and people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic
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So that's really, I think that's really important here, uh, that maybe that we should stop for
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I think that a lot of people, um, take on when they kind of look at the American embrace of
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popular sovereignty, that they're not really understanding this truth.
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So Hoppe says, look, we're going to have this sovereign and the way sovereigns work is
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that they treat them, the, uh, kind of territory under their control as something to be exploited.
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The kind of the, maybe, maybe the Western liberal democratic defendant says, no democracy keeps
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But what kind of Hoppe is addressing right at the beginning here is that government will
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And so he's going to go on to explain in more detail how the King does that and how that's
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But he says at the beginning, we can't pretend like governments are not going to do this.
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They will always be exploiting the things that they own for their own advantage.
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And I mean, I think that's the next paragraph or, and that goes into, um, kind of monarchy
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I might have some comments after that, but it's probably best to get that out on the table
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Let's go ahead and get through our quote here from, we're still quoting from Hoppe here
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under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear.
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Rather, what happens is this instead of a King and nobility who regard the country as their
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private property, property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put into monopolistic
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The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office, he is permitted
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to use it, uh, use it to his protege, to his and his protege's advantage.
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He owns it's current use, but not its capital stock.
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To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or
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Exploitation becomes short-sighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.
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So his argument here is not that, you know, democracy gets rid of exploitation, but rather
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it's a, it's a private property argument, right?
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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
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use it to make as much property or have a profit or have as much fun as they want.
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If they didn't earn it, it's not theirs and they won't have it later on.
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So he says the same thing is happening here with democracy, right?
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You're basically just turning over to someone for a limited amount of time.
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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
00:21:09.360
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.
00:21:18.740
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
00:21:47.120
We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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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
00:22:30.740
The most spoiled and pampered and, um, underexposed human being in the world.
00:22:37.220
Probably, you know, Joffrey Lannister, probably a sociopath.
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Um, who's just spent their life, uh, you know, getting, um, palm fronds waved in their face.
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Why would anybody elect that person to be their monarch?
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
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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
00:23:22.260
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.
00:23:49.880
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
00:24:04.820
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
00:24:20.220
never, you know, every King was just some idiot.
00:24:26.140
They, they can't put, you know, they can't do any math.
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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.
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Like you're, you're literally governed by Joe Biden in theory right now.
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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.
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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?
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But if you get 10 minutes into their talk about democracy, they hate all of their rulers.
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
00:25:29.840
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.
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And then someone else, probably his rival has to take control of it.
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And that's a very different dynamic on how then you're going to treat what you're in
00:25:49.060
I mean, I think like, you know, the, the renting versus owning analogy is, works great
00:25:53.120
Like how, how, how, how, how well did you treat the apartments that you rented compared
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
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
00:26:59.180
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
00:27:11.480
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
00:27:25.460
Which means your incentive is to make sure that none of that goes forward, that none
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.
00:28:23.200
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
00:28:37.180
And so they'll, they'll, it looks like they're the enemies of the thing they're operating because
00:28:42.780
They're working in their own interests instead.
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.
00:29:10.780
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.
00:29:29.840
The reason I'm in power is to appropriate social goods to my coalition.
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.
00:29:57.760
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
00:30:42.520
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
00:31:09.920
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
00:32:39.620
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
00:33:01.200
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
00:33:15.780
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,
00:33:59.680
Compare this to kind of like, I don't know, the, the, I don't know, the political, um,
00:34:09.300
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
00:34:34.760
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
00:34:58.860
Like I'm going to get us out of Syria in a year, or I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm
00:35:06.000
That is, that is formalism at its, at its essence.
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,
00:35:30.680
Do you want to explain just kind of quickly what time preference means?
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
00:36:16.420
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,
00:36:34.840
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.
00:36:58.640
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
00:37:12.220
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.
00:37:20.060
You can understand that, that delaying that gratification will ultimately lead to something, uh, better,
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
00:37:43.160
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.
00:38:46.260
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
00:39:12.920
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
00:39:49.140
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.
00:39:56.520
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.
00:40:09.360
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
00:44:08.560
sucks. But what's the alternative? The implication is obvious. The general tenor of this
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
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
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,
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
00:57:27.540
Uh, so, uh, we'll just jump back into the next paragraph here. So secondly, the ruling class
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,
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
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
01:09:25.580
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.
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,
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
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
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.