00:00:35.480Well, The Blaze has this fantastic series called The Cover-Up
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00:01:26.180all right guys i am probably not the only person who has noticed that there is an increasing
00:01:32.840interest in a return to religion very specifically christianity in the west now i want to believe
00:01:39.560that this is a religious revival i pray for religious revival because i am myself i believe
00:01:44.700in christian but i also recognize that there are parts of the historical cycle that seem to be
00:01:50.120playing themselves out here many of the people talking about returning to religion seem to put
00:01:55.160first the idea that the religion undergirds something important that we've lost and not so
00:01:59.600much their own personal faith in Jesus Christ or the resurrection. And that got me thinking about
00:02:06.320Spengler's idea of the second religiousness and what a civilization looks like when it tries to
00:02:11.900recapture that metaphysical animating spark that really ignited its spread, but ultimately finds
00:02:18.540itself in this kind of end of the cycle. Joining me to talk about this is, well, the only man who
00:02:24.440I really want to discuss Oswald Spangler with. Morgoth, thank you so much for coming back on.
00:02:30.500Nice to be on again. Just before we went live, I was saying I take old times doing a Spangler
00:02:35.580stream. We haven't done one for a long time. Yeah, we had to blow the dust off of the Decline
00:02:41.560of the West copies here. I think it's important, like you and I were talking about, it's so easy
00:02:46.980with the kind of the churn of the news and people wanting to get the new thing out there
00:02:51.340to abandon some of these thinkers that we had been looking at previously or to pass them by
00:02:56.960because there's something that everyone else is talking about. But of course, the whole point is
00:03:01.760that these are timeless understanding. The reason that you read people like Spangler is the broad
00:03:07.660view of history that they bring to this. And so even as you look into other thinkers or you get
00:03:12.680focused on current events, it's important to tie it back into the theory to this understanding that
00:03:18.100we've been cultivating so that you don't lose this that ultimately we're hopefully weaving
00:03:22.880something together that will help us better understand what's going on not just having
00:03:27.000entertainment that we blow through every time we get to a new thinker a new author a new way of
00:03:31.600looking at things yeah that's right and the the the second religiousness is an interesting one
00:03:38.200because it's it you it gives you a sense of uh optimism and as usual spangler takes it away
00:03:45.940but in a way which is a little bit different to the rest of it so obviously it comes
00:03:52.400deep into the winter of the civilizational cycle i think because it's been a while like
00:03:58.480it's important to just maybe there's some people who haven't been exposed to spangler but
00:04:04.060he basically compares the life and death of a civilization a lot to uh the the growth of a
00:04:12.180tree or a plant where it has this springtime vigor and then it expires itself and it gets
00:04:18.880itself fully formed and then it heads into the winter autumn and the winter so it's all about
00:04:24.200seasons and cycles and the second religiousness comes in very late it's basically it's the last
00:04:32.620act it's it's when once you're into um winter and um it comes in alongside caesarism as well
00:04:41.740and i was reading it before and just when i went into the text and i noticed that he says it is
00:04:46.680actually a few many generations but he was writing this uh in the early 20th century so it's you know
00:04:54.720i think we're kind of just entering that now and i think what will be interesting to touch on is
00:05:00.160that i do see a lot of signs of that as well so how we how he actually comes into this is that if
00:05:07.080you then go on to the the cycle itself you you have to think that we've been through a religious
00:05:14.500phase we've been through the civilizational phase where it expanded which was kind of like this
00:05:20.720summer but then when you head into autumn beginning in the summer you get rationalism
00:05:26.060and it kind of comes to dominate and overwhelm everything and this informs how people actually
00:05:34.980exist in the world the being is a word that spengler uses a lot and likes um and there's
00:05:41.800being and becoming becoming and being and things like that and the the second religious list comes
00:05:49.140in when the the rationalism has played itself out that it doesn't have any more fruit to bear
00:05:57.480that doesn't have it doesn't have any more uh interesting ideas to deliver and i think we
00:06:04.120there's a lot of signs uh around us that this is this is actually the case like this is this is
00:06:10.380we are kind of just going into this yeah this is actually one of my bigger videos on spangler on
00:06:17.740the channel as i pulled out a part of this though we're gonna have a much broader discussion on it
00:06:22.980today but one of the more interesting things that he talks about as he looks at the society that is
00:06:28.140moving towards the second religiousness is he explains that the people the civilization have
00:06:35.000basically become exhausted with reason that reason has become too exact too constricting
00:06:41.780The certitude that it brings is too confining, and people long for that moment of the animation, the spirit, the motivation, the wildness that existed earlier on when the civilization was more spontaneous and more driven by its vibrant nature, its vitality, rather than its cold logic.
00:07:04.280And that once you've been locked into this cold logic, you start to cry out for something else.
00:07:09.680And he even goes and makes a very interesting and important prediction, which is that we will walk away as Western peoples from science because science is too exact.
00:07:24.480But also, and very interestingly, something that people don't think about very much, science is not this thing that you unlock permanently.
00:07:33.160It's not like some tech tree in a video game where once you achieve the standard number of things that meet the threshold, you just always have access to that level of science.
00:07:45.140Science is something practiced by cultures.
00:07:47.960And if you don't have a culture that is cultivating the greatest minds for the specific purpose of practicing science, then you might have the theoretical knowledge locked away in books somewhere.
00:08:01.300But people don't spend the time studying those books. They don't spend the time applying themselves to the practice of that science. And so while you might have discovered these things in the scientific way, you're not going to continue to practice them.
00:08:15.360And I think we can see that pretty much across the West.
00:08:18.800I mean, from the fact that we already have people calling into question science as a Western idea, right?
00:12:36.300But I think it's also important to say that
00:12:38.740without the basis of rationalism and empirical truths,
00:12:44.580you begin to get this, things begin to get unmoored.
00:12:48.040And one of those, I would say, is just this complete scepticism.
00:12:51.480You could say that, for example, conspiracy theories are all this kind of this idea that there's a hidden hand navigating everything, navigating.
00:13:02.320So you begin to see these strange things.
00:13:05.000And the hallmark of it is that it isn't entirely based in empirical truths or rationalism and is more intuitive or sort of faith based.
00:13:15.640And all of this is like the compost, what the second religiousness will be.
00:13:21.480Now, the most healthy, of course, would be returning to just Christianity.
00:13:26.500But as you said earlier at the beginning, that has to come from inwards and not as a kind of sort of reactionary response because society as a whole is going to hell in a handbasket.
00:13:40.040Well, that's why I think that Spengler's understanding here is so interesting because he actually lays out the transition into kind of some of the cults that we're talking about here.
00:13:50.040So, you know, he kind of puts himself at the beginning of, I think, the you could say the materialistic cultish precursor to the second religiousness.
00:13:59.400So he says that in a period of materialism, as you start to approach the second religiousness, but you're not there yet, you get this period of kind of stylish cults that aren't very serious.
00:14:16.720they don't draw on any deep spiritual tradition of the people they're more like these really
00:14:22.140cosmopolitan uh fashionable uh elite moments and you know he starts pointing to kind of all the
00:14:29.440different occult practices that were starting to pop up in his time and kind of urban environments
00:14:35.060he looks at the cult of isis back in the roman republic and he says like these are things that
00:14:41.020ultimately were like really shallow uh they're just as shallow as the materialistic stuff and
00:14:46.000they aren't really taken deeply seriously but they kind of run through your society and i think you
00:14:51.460could see that certainly uh through the different kind of like weird small urban cults we see pop
00:14:57.680up uh you know especially i think of several different ones in america from different you
00:15:02.860know like sex cults that have popped up or different occultist understandings uh that have
00:15:08.020popped up uh you know the you could even look at maybe something like silicon valley and what
00:15:13.000they're doing now trying to synthesize at some level uh you know a level of christianity with
00:15:18.500kind of this techno futurism uh that they're also but they're they're definitely involving
00:15:22.960more spirituality into this but he says that this is kind of the the precursor to the true
00:15:28.520second religiousness where we start to see the resurgence of like old forms of religion so like
00:15:35.320real christianity you know they can't do it exactly right we'll get into that in a little
00:15:39.580bit i guess here but the point being is this this moment of transition from kind of the materialist
00:15:44.800you know narrow elite cults then leading into perhaps a revival of at least attempts to revive
00:15:53.660those classic spiritual understandings i think that might be where we're at he was at kind of
00:15:58.740the beginning of that we're at the end of that stage and then perhaps after that follows more
00:16:05.180the focus on the traditional because i am seeing more and more people look away from those elite
00:16:11.180cults uh those fashionable understandings like woke i think woke you can obviously see like
00:16:16.780echoes of a bastardized christianity it's clearly a christian heresy at some level uh but we're
00:16:22.940starting to see that i think transition into real looks at returning or real attempts to returning
00:16:29.320to christianity though as we both know from reading spangler that itself is going to be a
00:16:33.900much harder task yeah i would also say um climate change has had uh sort of echoes of this as well
00:16:42.060and i also that it's it's they they tend to be typically faustian what i mean is they'll have
00:16:49.760they'll be um coded encoded with the traits of faustian civilization which is this sort of
00:16:56.960universal striving towards the infinite and an endless motion particularly in machines
00:17:03.800and so if you look at something like uh climate change it essentially it takes the world as one
00:17:11.100who or like in the earlier era you could say it was like an organism in fact they did do that
00:17:17.760this climate change of the 1970s with the gaia model and all of that was the world the world as
00:17:23.880one giant organism interconnected but the more recent sort of carbon reduction schemes it's much
00:17:31.560more mechanistic and technocratic and it essentially looks at the world no longer as one
00:17:38.100giant organism but one giant machine which is also this kind of transition from something more rooted
00:17:45.740more organic to something more mechanistic and industrial and rational and when you look at it
00:17:53.120like that you and you bring in that kind of faustian element you can see that the the weather
00:17:58.900changing climate patterns is then it becomes something to believe in but you you get that
00:18:07.080transition you get that change from the world as an interconnected machine which we can tamper with
00:18:15.180and we can reduce carbon emissions and we can have windmills and solar power in order to change the
00:18:21.460weather itself we we can have a so there's there's kind of no bounds on the ambition there but then
00:18:27.600you see that actual science seems to take a background uh go into the background and you get
00:18:34.540this kind of apocalyptic weird scenario about the end of days you think of Greta Thunberg at the
00:18:41.380United Nations which is I mean just the idea of the United Nations is is a western construct
00:18:47.200from our civilization and not another one as well.
00:18:51.160And so you can kind of lump all of these things in.
00:18:54.980And then when you get the AI stuff, to get back to the main gist of it,
00:19:00.900it's this kind of failure of rationalism where people will begin to view
00:19:06.180the world more like medieval peasants, especially the Fellaheen.
00:19:12.180But you can't undo the previous sort of journey of history
00:19:16.800And so I remember Mark Andreessen, when he was talking about the grand future of AI, and he was saying the future, in the future, the masses, their world picture will more resemble the world inhabited by medieval peasants, because they won't understand the world around them.
00:19:40.460they'll see things that they just can't understand and i've got to say like that describes me
00:19:46.520perfectly when i'm talking on the phone and i get an advert on the television which is related to
00:19:53.100what i'm talking on the phone you you and it's like how is that even possible and it's because
00:19:59.140i don't understand the technology i'm i'm i'm a total technophobe and so i this isn't sort of me
00:20:06.440looking down on the on the silly plebs i'm one of them like i i kind of just throw my hands up and
00:20:12.440admit i'm part of the fella in and so eventually the the world functions in a way which you just
00:20:19.480can't possibly comprehend and so this is where you that leads into new superstitions uh under
00:20:28.600kind of just throwing your hands up and moving away from it all and have it in a world which
00:20:34.520which is more like a world where a cat would put a curse on you
00:20:38.880or there was a goblin behind a tree or this kind of thing
00:20:41.740because you can no longer process it and make sense of it.
00:20:45.760Yeah, that's important because he talks about this desire
00:20:49.640to resublimate the reason to these spiritual connections.
00:20:55.260But as you say, the science still exists.
00:20:57.320So he kind of talks about how you used to have chemistry
00:21:00.620and physics and mathematics and they were separate,
00:21:03.360But then they kind of start subjugating themselves to each other because everything is interconnected and they have influence on each other.
00:21:09.460And it creates this like larger network and everything has to like fit together.
00:21:13.500And then finally, once this becomes far too complicated for the average person and you go through this like approach to second religiousness, the desire becomes to like kind of still have that knowledge somewhere, still recognize that you've made those scientific advancements, but to bring them in line with kind of this new spiritual focus.
00:21:31.700And again, I think that's why you start seeing more and more Silicon Valley guys discussing AI in very spiritual terms, because we're getting to the edge of how we can unify these things and speak about them intelligently.
00:21:45.600As you say, you know, there was a moment, you know, I love The Ancient City by Festel de Colange because it really changes your brain.
00:21:54.580It rewires your brain because you have seen the world your entire life discussed as a rational thing.
00:22:02.880And, of course, we understand how the processes work.
00:22:08.680And then you slowly realize that actually if anyone you knew had to make electricity or even in many cases repair a car or a computer, you know, the joke now is that millennials are the only people who can, you know, actually fix computers because the boomers are too old and the zoomers never learned, you know, in between like the magic box just works when they touch it.
00:22:30.740And so like there's a sweet spot of people who can actually work on these things.
00:22:35.000But as all everything around you becomes too complicated to actually explain through technology, technological understanding, you start to realize that you've been faking it like most of your technological explanations for how the world work are just as religious as any religious understanding.
00:22:51.780When you look at the behaviors in the ancient city of the ancient Greeks or the Romans, their entire world view is undergirded by the spiritual understanding that metaphysics dominates their life.
00:23:04.180And everything has an explanation in this rubric in the same way that everything we do has a scientific explanation.
00:23:10.100And while you might look at some of those spiritual ones and say, well, those are silly, once you actually start evaluating the scientific explanations, the rational explanations for how we run our world, they don't make sense either.
00:23:20.640And they become less and less likely to make sense as the world becomes more complex.
00:23:25.220So you're right to say that ultimately what Spangler sees is that we kind of abandon this explanation form altogether, which is interesting because, you know, I had Nick Land and Alexander Dugan on my show having a discussion.
00:23:38.880And these men both see us approaching kind of this moment, this possible singularity, this possible postmodern kind of bottleneck through which our civilization must pass.
00:23:50.000And for Land, this is a moment of true Faustian transformation. Like we can do this Nietzschean trick to break the cycle of history and escape into the stars as like non-human entities that are manifestations of technological understandings.
00:24:06.980And for Dugan, this is a moment where the technological understanding kind of collapses into itself and spirituality reenters the conversation. But both men, despite having like very different views about where humanity should or could go in this moment, we're both excited to see spirituality reenter into the conversation because it's a clear sign that something fundamental has shifted in our political understanding.
00:24:34.020And the fact that people are running around and talking about demons and these kind of things in normal political conversation shows that we are in a radically different era.
00:24:44.120You know, that's something that would have gotten the most religious right person of the 1980s laughed out of the room.
00:24:49.380And now it's something that a guy like Tucker Carlson will talk about when he's talking about politics.
00:24:54.260And that is just a fundamental shift in the attempt to rationalize everything and moves us back towards that more mystical, spiritual, peasant style understanding.
00:25:04.020yeah i tend towards the view that there's gonna there is just to go back on the the schism that
00:25:09.780i saw earlier is that you will see people i don't think we'll disappear into space i think it's going
00:25:15.220to be there may be a few elites will but i think it's going to be disappearing into ai uh more and
00:25:21.220more which again is like infinite but then you're also going to have the people who try and go back
00:25:27.220to the land now in spenglar the metropolis is constantly making demands on the the kind of the
00:25:33.700people of the land well i mean just a sort of minor way would be the way all their children
00:25:39.220are expected to go into these these meat grinder cities where they won't have children they live
00:25:45.380in apartment blocks and it's all pretty depressing but i think more and more what we see and i wrote
00:25:53.480an article a few years ago asking if the west was an elephant on stilts is that a bit like with the
00:25:59.920climate change you can have uh all these grand abstract ideas you can have like faust the
00:26:07.800infinite knowledge you can unlock and learn everything but there is like material constraints
00:26:15.080which are going to put a block on some of these things and and when i wrote the the elephant on
00:26:20.180stilts essay i was basically looking at these you have all of these high ideas but the internet
00:26:26.780functions for example the connection between me and you it all comes down to just a few cables
00:26:33.340dangling over rocks in in the atlantic basically it's it's very it's all very fragile i mean this
00:26:40.800is very topical for what's going on in the world around us today which we don't talk about because
00:26:47.000that's all everybody's talking about but you see all of a sudden there's these uh there is these
00:26:52.560material constraints on what you can do and so much so like as you mentioned earlier that people
00:26:59.760just forget about this stuff like people people forget that the reason we have so many people on
00:27:06.260earth is because fertilizer certain kinds of gas that turn into fertilizer which goes on to create
00:27:14.060huge amounts of food all of which is unnatural and very precarious when you look at these supply
00:27:21.160chains um or or just general connections in terms of the internet and so i think you you will see
00:27:28.680that schism but i tend towards the kind of wandering around with goats in the ruins side of
00:27:35.480it and that is the people who will refine a traditional christianity that is the people
00:27:42.280who will we really sort of go back to churches i would actually it's already happening to to
00:27:49.160to a certain degree but the difference with the the the second religious than the first
00:27:56.760is that in springtime it comes it has a kind of spring sap and vigor to it um and it's a kind of
00:28:06.020revealing of the world in a spiritual light whereas in the second religiousness i think
00:28:11.640it's more of an escape i think i think it's more of a wearily opening the church door and saying
00:28:19.840i've had enough i've had enough of the world around whereas in the past it wouldn't be that
00:28:24.800way at all you know i was watching a gardening program uh there's a british gardener called
00:28:31.000monty don and he was uh he went to japan it was like a special and he went to the zen buddhist
00:28:39.440gardens anywhere one which had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years it was very old
00:28:44.880and it's hard um the japanese don't go in for grass very much but they cultivate moss
00:28:51.520and it looks beautiful you have these sort of lawns of moss which they carefully manicure
00:28:57.600and it would have like one cherry tree or a bonsai tree in the middle of it and the idea was to create
00:29:03.680this emptiness this empty space where you could meditate and just you know find a kind of your
00:29:10.760spiritual zen if you like um and now then he went to tokyo like in in modern time just a few years
00:29:18.300ago and on top of the the skyscrapers in tokyo they had recreated this to an extent but this time
00:29:26.280it would have a rock in the middle and it would be surrounded by uh these fine tiny little gravel
00:29:32.860pellets and then they would sort of rake it in such a way that it would look like the waves and
00:29:38.700and the point that i'm making is that you you have the original sort of flourish which is connected
00:29:44.640to the land uh and is sort of unconsciously spiritual but then you've got this in the city
00:29:52.680they return to it they try to recreate that form again but as as almost like a coping mechanism
00:29:58.760with the modern world because japan has had a long and troubled history and this this to me i
00:30:04.340was watching it and i was thinking this is like the secondary literature it's a kind of perfect
00:30:08.320little encapsulation of it and how how the form actually goes well and this is what really got me
00:30:14.600thinking about this again and why i wanted to talk to you about it is it's you look at the
00:30:19.860rise of someone like jordan peterson and that's very clearly a man who's attempting to approach
00:30:24.520spiritual truth but through this like very rationalistic uh you know academic dry understanding
00:30:31.840of an eternal thing and then you get people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who talk about how they're becoming
00:30:38.980Christian despite having been like one of the main forces in new atheism but when you ask about kind
00:30:45.140of why they're doing it the answer is not I truly believe in the saving power of Jesus Christ and
00:30:50.980what he has done in my life and what he can do in the lives of my family or my children the answer
00:30:56.520is well it's clear that this is where our civilization comes from and it's clear that we
00:31:01.860need something like this and i'm noticing this explanation more and more especially as people
00:31:07.160go back to catholicism or orthodoxy or anglicanism they're not going first and foremost because
00:31:15.760they feel a deep spiritual draw or need it becomes something that they recognize as a fundamental to
00:31:24.080their civilization that their civilization has lost in some way you even hear guys like Richard
00:31:28.840Dawkins who obviously still isn't declaring himself a Christian but says I'm a cultural Christian
00:31:33.500even if I'm an atheist because like I recognize that this is where my culture comes from and I'd
00:31:38.680rather hear church carols than the Islamic call to prayer even though he doesn't understand that
00:31:43.640the cut flowers can't possibly drive away like actual hot religion and so you have this uh
00:31:50.180especially in the cities i feel like the urbanites especially embracing this like tactical return to
00:31:56.820christianity a lot of people are in especially america are moving to catholicism because it
00:32:02.060infers some kind of status if you're in you know certain elite circles uh you know that that's the
00:32:08.060religion that you go to if you want to have you know a network or that kind of thing so it it
00:32:13.260kind of creates this moment where yes people are returning to religion uh but as you say
00:32:18.940out in the hinterlands it's perhaps a weariness that returns them to that religion as where
00:32:24.560in the urban centers in the in this in the uh you know metropolitan uh existence it seems to be this
00:32:31.780desire to regain something functional about like a more rationalistic human approach rather than a
00:32:39.540recognition of a deep spiritual moving vital need to plug back into what animates your society
00:32:47.000yeah and especially in the um out in the hinterlands as you say i think that there's
00:32:54.060still some flickers of like an actual genuine faith and what comes with that in a time of such
00:33:01.700chronic atomization as that we live in it is actually community yeah that's become such a
00:33:08.500it's sort of tainted word these days but you get this you get this idea well i'm not going to be
00:33:14.920alone there um and i can it isn't just that you kind of go to the church and then you're you're
00:33:21.420kind of bored and you're tired as you see it because you're going through the motions it's
00:33:26.540a function but that the people that you meet there are going to be kind of of a similar mindset as
00:33:32.460yourself and you can go for a few beers on on on a night time with some of the men and so you end up
00:33:40.240reconnecting and i think that comes with it as well i'm speaking a little bit personally here
00:33:45.620actually um which i mentioned on the blog the other day that there's this sense that if i need
00:33:53.040something somebody's there and as time gets harder and harder uh that would become more acute and so
00:34:00.620i think what that results in is a more um not like a more more investment in the church until
00:34:11.360eventually you just kind of imbibed and it's not this well i need to save civilization uh you know
00:34:19.020because the muslims are going to take over or everybody's degenerate but it's it's more personal
00:34:24.920thing and i think it would come through that absolutely now another interesting aspect that
00:34:31.460you hinted at earlier is the way that the second religiousness interacts with caesarism obviously
00:34:37.500we know that caesarism is a critical part of the cycle uh for spangler uh that it kind of breaks
00:34:45.120the gridlock of the bureaucratic sclerotic institutions inside of the civilization it
00:34:51.580it reaches for a vital moment and unifies behind kind of this one figure. And obviously,
00:34:58.560I think a lot of people are looking at perhaps Bukele or others as possible examples of a wave
00:35:05.380of Caesarism that could be entering into Western civilization. I think a lot of people looked
00:35:10.080at Trump initially as a possible Caesar, a precursor to Caesar. It's become very clear
00:35:15.440that at best he would be uh perhaps a gracchi uh to to a eventual uh approach of caesar uh but
00:35:23.060for the second religiousness and the way that this interacts is that spengler points out that
00:35:28.560after you get the caesarism in rome or in china you start to get these imperial cults and that
00:35:35.220becomes kind of where you know after the period of caesarism it starts to form these imperial cults
00:35:40.820And they but they eventually kind of get reformed back into a a facsimile of the old religion.
00:35:50.040And so what you get is this kind of synchronistic collapse of kind of the different religious motives happening happening simultaneously after the, you know, kind of Caesarean moment.
00:36:03.960And that's what creates this kind of post-imperial cult that's kind of an amalgamation of the different successful spiritual traditions that are kind of moving through the zeitgeist of the moment.
00:36:15.820And you could definitely see how that would occur if you have some aspect of like a hero worship with somebody who kind of brings the society together and becomes that catalyst along with remnants of Christianity and perhaps like in America, something like Mormonism or some other related religious practices that are floating around but haven't completely congealed.
00:36:41.840Maybe you bring in some of that AI, you know, Silicon Valley religion. Maybe you bring in some of that climate religion, you know, all these different spiritual aspects and quasi spiritual aspects kind of fuse together inside a shell of like kind of the old religion and the Caesarism.
00:37:00.840and it kind of becomes this new uh way that people kind of reach towards but obviously it's
00:37:07.320like a very uh twisted uh and and and strange version of uh the original religion that kind
00:37:13.680of founded everything yeah i mean i think one which i would just say as well would be this
00:37:20.660the con what what's baked into this is distrust of institutions and then that gives rise to these
00:37:27.200these conspiracy theories and the reason why i bring that up again is because you get something
00:37:31.300which is almost sort of gnostic in its way where it's kind of like we we are these like little
00:37:39.080ants that are running around and there's these higher powers which we can't comprehend
00:37:42.960and for some reason i think that's definitely a factor in in the hinterland kind of thinking
00:37:50.060about it there's people are looking at events in the world now and already beginning to formulate
00:40:17.060You know, I don't want to get into the law, but when you dig into the law, you realize that they've got all of these truths are not true, but they carry on regardless.
00:40:26.980And I think it's interesting because of all the everything which is coming, which will come in the second religiousness, will be, as you say, these cobbled together bits and pieces.
00:40:38.180And so you can kind of unironically enjoy something like Warhammer 40K and you can feel that it's getting at something deeper.
00:40:47.060than other sort of popular franchises.
00:40:50.520And that comes forth in the world of metamodernism
00:40:54.080because it's actually after postmodern.
00:40:57.160It's after the endlessly cynical Machiavellians
00:41:01.480when you just need something to believe in.
00:46:37.500Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra works as hard as you do.
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00:46:45.880A completely different way of imbibing reality.
00:46:52.640It's horrifying to think of, to be honest.
00:46:55.800And what comes out of that would be a kind of a religiousness of sorts,
00:47:01.360because it wouldn't be rooted in any, even in terms of identity,
00:47:05.420it wouldn't be a sort of 90s identity or a millennial identity or the 80s it would be
00:47:12.720an amalgamation of everything but then also what's current and so what comes out of that in terms of
00:47:19.360some kind of metaphysical being just sounds horrifying like it's i cannot this is the this
00:47:27.080is the bad outcome yeah well this this is the bad outcome of not being able to detach ourselves this
00:47:35.360to me is the ruin the road to complete civilization or ruin and it's actually the people of the land
00:47:43.440uh who've got the best chance yeah and this is where it gets interesting because of course
00:47:49.440Nick Land is drawing from uh Deleuze and Guattari who are post-modern leftist philosophers for kind
00:47:57.200of this understanding of the flattening of the world and this this you know understanding that
00:48:02.920can strike out in different places in different directions constantly because it doesn't have
00:48:07.320any kind of hard center and for us that's terrifying because we believe in like a
00:48:13.240transcendent truth a transcendent understanding of a form that does you know belong to the world
00:48:19.600and in which we should exist but for a lot of these guys the idea is to transcend that to
00:48:25.260escape that this is the ultimate faustian goal this is the ultimate uh you know again like
00:48:30.000Nietzschean escape of the human into something new it transitions into something new and better
00:48:36.180but for those of us who recognize humanity as something worth preserving we don't see it that
00:48:41.740way we see it as oh actually this is we don't that's the worst possible outcome what we want
00:48:47.040is this collapse back into the human which is more what Dugan is looking for and that that's
00:48:54.380why I wanted to get them in the same room that's why I found them interacting so fascinating because
00:48:58.800they both recognize i think the same thing we recognize here that that we're talking about
00:49:03.920and they both want like radically different outcomes from this moment uh but it it really
00:49:09.900does does depend on how you view uh the human subject if you think that that is ultimately
00:49:15.100something worth preserving or if there is something about humanity that can ultimately
00:49:20.260give birth to something greater and far uh more uh interesting to to pursue uh then perhaps you'll
00:49:26.660side with the idea that creating this kind of messy human existence leaning towards a entirely
00:49:33.300non-human existence is ultimately something that is worth aiming towards but that said before we
00:49:39.220get we're gonna run out of time and we got some super chat so i don't want to run over but before
00:49:44.700we go when we were off the air you mentioned the fact that spangler uh believed that islam is not
00:49:52.000actually in uh this like protea this like spring moment but is itself actually going through the
00:49:59.400second religiousness and you said this would tie in to some of the things going in in iran i don't
00:50:03.640want to make this a current events episode but that's such an important observation and so timely
00:50:08.380in this moment i thought it might be worth talking about this because ultimately uh we we are seeing
00:50:14.700in some ways people saying well the islamic world is becoming less religious like they're
00:50:19.640modernizing so quickly and becoming secular and material so quickly and it's actually people like
00:50:25.780pete hegseth that are perhaps becoming more religious or more animated by a religious language
00:50:31.280so i wanted you to just kind of explore that real quick yeah it's it's it's really important that
00:50:36.980as far as the decline of the west is concerned the only real civilization which is well as of
00:50:44.980spengler writing it and still uh just is is western civilization the others have already
00:50:51.680gone through their cycle so in this case it would be the chinese and the muslim and the indian as
00:50:58.160well they've all already gone through their arcs and they they are all deep into winter and so
00:51:05.480people will say for so for example as you say like there's this kind of thing about islam's
00:51:11.920taking over everywhere they are they are deep into their the winter they are deep into their
00:51:18.060second religiousness of islam and it does actually kind of map on because you know they they did
00:51:25.120actually have a proud culture you'll notice that islam did produce its own unique architecture
00:51:30.960many books uh mathematics and and leftists never tire of telling us how much we did mathematics
00:51:37.540so and to be honest the same of the chinese but uh and the indians and so they've all gone through
00:51:45.580their cycles and just to sort of on on islam well what we see is that they are actually deep into
00:51:52.800the winter of their civilization because islam has kind of calcified uh and and become something
00:51:58.680kind of sterile uh if you like it's it's just this kind of rehashing of centuries ago vigor
00:52:07.240uh but but it's still kind of functional it's still in this sort of zombified form that's how
00:52:13.360spangler would see it and that would also include iran but you could also say the same for the
00:52:18.340for the chinese now this seems kind of strange because you know they've got these wonderful
00:52:24.440skyscrapers they've got a booming economy they're industrializing um but the thing is these are all
00:52:31.620faustian forms these aren't actually they all had their own spirit um and so they're all in the
00:52:39.800winter of civilization now the what's interesting here is that when you connect that back to the
00:52:46.260internet and this kind of flattening of time that happens which what the zoomers are in
00:52:52.380the thing about the second religiousness uh or uh i think i saw a glance in the chat
00:52:59.660what could be a new spring would be where it is genuinely universal where the the chaos in the
00:53:08.660world today again i would say this is a absolutely pessimistic uh outlook but it could genuinely be
00:53:16.680that if the internet remains as it is and everybody is looking at iphones like it doesn't matter if
00:53:22.780you're chinese or you're an arab or you're a brazilian everybody is basically the same because
00:53:28.680they all spend their time looking at jumbled up media and they're all looking at their iPhones
00:53:33.880all of the time it's all it's a world of screens then what you could actually see um in the in the
00:53:40.340future the distant future when this whole thing plays out is this sort of rekindling uh a new
00:53:48.600brew mixing which where you would have like an actual human identity to a degree because of the
00:53:56.700connectivity of the internet and artificial intelligence again for me that's that's a
00:54:01.560it's a really bleak uh sort of assessment or bleak look at the future but it is possible it
00:54:09.440definitely is possible but yeah we it's western civilization which is now in its winter and
00:54:17.040heading towards the second religions but these other places have gone and you know i know spangler
00:54:22.260can be very bleak but one of the things that i'll point out was that when rome went down and had a
00:54:30.020long period of chaos people sort of still walked along the beach holding hands watching the sunset
00:54:36.500they they people still tended to their gardens and this kind of thing what horrifies me about
00:54:42.660the trajectory of the west with the internet ai and basically transhumanism because that's what
00:54:50.180it would be that the civilization of the future could be this transhuman interconnectivity um
00:54:56.760but basically i've lost my train of thought there but that that's the the optimistic outlook for me
00:55:05.460anyway is is where you actually do get a back to the land rather than the transhuman
00:55:11.300sort of broth of the future being brewed yeah you know in a strange way we're we're almost
00:55:17.620rooting for cyclical history here because it's better than the other outcomes as bleak as that
00:55:23.660might that might be the blackest of any black pills i've ever dealt on this channel but yeah
00:55:28.480civilizational collapse might be better than the alternative um but that that is you know kind of
00:55:34.040the part of this delusian understanding of uh de-territorialization and re-territorialization
00:55:41.480Is the idea that, you know, especially capital is creating this scenario where these things that were in the spiritual, they were highly coded ethnically and civilizationally.
00:55:53.960They were embedded inside cultures and human understandings.
00:55:59.900They start to get separated out as capital recognizes that it can turn these into profit centers.
00:56:08.520and for them that's a that's a positive process for marx this is a positive process because it
00:56:13.640breaks down the barriers between civilizations uh you actually have to go through the capitalistic
00:56:18.740phase before you get to communism that's you know the whole point is that it accelerates through
00:56:24.420the capitalist moment and then into uh this kind of communist understanding but you have to go
00:56:30.200through that period of deterritorialization and re-territorialization to do that but as we are
00:56:35.420pointing out that makes you less and less human because you're re-territorializing these things
00:56:40.320into uh you know the into the marketplace into this global understanding this uh you know
00:56:45.960non-civilizational understanding this hybridization of all the cultures and all the peoples into this
00:56:52.140one thing and yes that can like in a way transcend the limitations of humanity but it also opens us
00:56:58.540up to all these horrible things as you you pointed out there and so in many ways what we're really
00:57:03.660hoping is that we can re-territorialize things into civilizations once again we could make these
00:57:10.140things human and that is that is the dugan moment that is the other side of uh you know the
00:57:15.920singularity where instead of the faustian escape or the you know grand homogenization of humanity
00:57:21.460and transcending into these other identities instead we're allowed to break back down we're
00:57:27.320allowed to return back to the land we're allowed to re-territorialize things into the frame of the
00:57:32.880human once again and so I think that's what makes all of this so interesting no matter if you want
00:57:38.640to approach it from Spangler or from Deleuze or from Land or from Dugan there are so many things
00:57:44.620overlapping so many processes we can recognize in the world that are kind of acting on us today
00:57:50.440and each one of these thinkers gives us a different way to kind of glimpse behind the
00:57:55.740curtain and understand what might be happening to us but as Spangler you know I think correctly
00:58:00.460points out the scribe only comes at the end of the civilization that that's that's when you get
00:58:05.100the full explanation it's not until the civilization it's it's not the scribe who explains what's going
00:58:10.720to happen predicts it uh drives it it's the scribe that comes after the great men of action the the
00:58:15.840vitality is gone they're the ones that ultimately write the record of how things uh have have been
00:58:21.100uh but they're they're not revealing anything they're only uh kind of stenographers at the end
00:58:25.980of the decline yeah yeah exactly um yeah i don't have much much to add i think that's
00:58:33.920it sums up perfectly in all its depressing glory to be honest well i will just preempt a super
00:58:41.100chat that's coming in because it ties into what we were just saying well let's let's do you want
00:58:46.000to just run through the the super chats and then that way we can uh answer those questions in order
00:58:49.620okay all right well let's move over to the questions of the people here actually before
00:58:55.580we do that Morgoth can you tell people where to find your stuff so I don't forget um I'm I'm quite
00:59:01.300busy on Substack I do one or two articles and podcasts and and sometimes it's long voice notes
00:59:07.340on Substack I've still got a YouTube channel which is gathering a bit of dust because I just prefer
00:59:12.280Substack so that's where I am all right let's head over here we've got liturgical sooner says
00:59:19.500question what sign does Spangler point to as evidence of a new or different culture
00:59:24.200soul forming i know the only uh he only saw the russian uh beside the besides the west
00:59:30.700but what indicates the first stirrings of a new soul ps love both y'all stuff well i think you
00:59:36.340largely address that but is there any more you want to add to the idea of emerging cultures
00:59:41.500yeah this is this is what i was going to get into and it's it's the the beginning of the culture
00:59:46.920will not be um or of the civilization or the culture rather would not be conscious of itself
00:59:52.620so it would people would behave and act and believe in certain things but it wouldn't be
00:59:59.860because that's a kind of expectation of the civilization it wouldn't be within the context
01:00:05.920of a civilization and so why is sort of connect back to what we were just talking about about the
01:00:12.080ultimate kind of ai transhuman world identity of the future is that it wouldn't be conscious of
01:00:19.520itself it would be a mode of being first and foremost and this is why it's it's actually
01:00:24.800genuinely horrifying because if you look at uh wars going on around the world doesn't matter
01:00:30.880which one what you'll notice is that everybody's watching clips on an iphone so the form that
01:00:37.340connects them even though you've got obviously these vicious wars being waged there's something
01:00:43.280more fundamental which is connecting all humanity together and eventually it may be where the
01:00:49.160differences what they're fighting over in the world become less important over time because
01:00:54.320they're all connected through this thing because you would phase out material reality whether it
01:01:00.160was a border dispute or some oil somewhere or whatever an island which is disputed what what
01:01:08.260would what would come to pass and you see it with these ai lego things you know iran makes ai lego
01:01:15.940propaganda what you've come to pass is that there's something more sort of deeper foundations
01:01:21.740connecting people which actual globalism didn't have actual globalism just thought you could do
01:01:29.120that by raising living standards and sort of streamlining the supply chains but there could
01:01:35.260be something more fundamental to that but it wouldn't be conscious of itself at first so this
01:01:40.060is the kind of thing in the past it would be in german forests or on the beaches of of england
01:01:46.560or something but this could be the stirrings of of what comes next interesting interesting all
01:01:52.800right let's see here uh freelancer says uh supreme court seems posed to strike down trump's birth
01:02:00.040right citizenship executive order per breaking uh 9-1-1 damn ome uh damn amy conan barrett uh
01:02:07.820truly a sign of judgment to have a woman in authority. Uh, I mean, if you have been listening
01:02:13.640to those arguments, especially coming out of Ketanji Brown Jackson, uh, it is embarrassing.
01:02:20.120I'm embarrassed to be ruled by these people. Um, I'll get more, I'm sure into this ruling probably
01:02:26.420on Friday, how it breaks. Uh, but yeah, let's just say that the, the, the current arguments are, um,
01:02:32.000not not a place to be to be super optimistic about uh liturgical also says uh for what it's
01:02:40.620worth i firmly believe i lack the faustian spirit but i also don't think i fit the description of
01:02:46.560the falheen i i've read some stuff speculating about a new soul born in rural parts of north
01:02:53.460america possible what do you think about that any like synthesis between the two is there any
01:03:00.780halfway is there anything different that could be born or are these the hard well the faustian
01:03:06.420spirit is is sort of the the central drive of the the civilization writ large and the the fellaheen
01:03:13.820is just a particular type of people when what what appears towards the end of all civilizations
01:03:19.240and so in sort of um america i absolutely yes i definitely agree with that there could be a kind
01:03:28.160of people break because you've got the space and you've got the land um there's there's a there's
01:03:33.740more than enough room to just kind of screw and i mean that's squirreling away is actually an
01:03:40.260american thing that that's so there could yes i think that's absolutely a possibility that you
01:03:45.380could get uh and the new stirrings of something in america somewhere deep in the in the midwest
01:03:52.120or somewhere you know uh it just kind of popped in my head and since it's self-serving because
01:03:57.520i'm a southerner i'll go ahead and put that out there uh but in a way the the the southern united
01:04:03.560states existed much in the form that um spangler talked about when he was talking about cultures
01:04:11.180that have constantly been refreshed you know repressed during their metamorphosis uh that
01:04:16.240kind of gets i forget his exact wording but they get kind of like stuck in the state because they've
01:04:21.100been under the influence of other cultures for too long perhaps there is a a post uh american
01:04:27.840south that you know post united states south that rises once it is no longer kind of under the
01:04:34.200oppressive influence of uh you know the yankee north that has uh shaped our our and and stunted
01:04:39.560our growth as a separate culture this entire time yeah he describes russia uh finally breaking its
01:04:46.280way through the permafrost of what faustian civilization to express which is interesting
01:04:51.460when you look at the world today actually indeed so my hope is that this also exists for my
01:04:57.220beloved uh south in the united states that we well you know once we've uh been allowed to escape
01:05:04.120from uh the the influence of these other uh civilizations we can uh rise on our own here
01:05:09.980treadle says uh so is post-modern pascal's wage i.e the demonic is clearly real i'm siding with
01:05:18.240the opposite as a path to christianity a phenomenon of the second religiousness yeah largely i think
01:05:24.060that's right i mean to be more specific the argument from evil has been something that has
01:05:29.520been part of christianity for a long time but what you've seen very specifically the meme you're
01:05:33.420talking about is the idea that okay i don't really believe in christianity but since all of my enemies
01:05:39.680are like evil worshiping satan you know dedicated to pedophilia mutilating children then i'm just
01:05:47.580on the other side of whatever that is and i think that is very much a phenomenon of the second
01:05:51.660religiousness yeah liturgical also says the oceans are boundaries the walls that protect the core
01:06:00.320land of north america behind two sets of mountains north america is a giant valley place yes and
01:06:05.700again that's probably what gives us the opportunity to see a different type of soul reborn inside it
01:06:11.080uh you know as morga said just due to the the amount of separation in the vast land that we
01:06:16.060have available to us something i find interesting uh just a quick point is the old meme where you
01:06:23.240had like european uh forests and it's all like cute little gnomes and dwarves and hobbits and
01:06:31.420And then when you see North American forests and it's these horrible cryptid things, the idea, the sort of the mythology of the cryptids, I find fascinating.
01:06:41.500And I think I think that could linger that that's the that's the kind of sort of esoteric and mythological broth that new things form in.
01:06:51.880It's very dark, but that that is that is precisely the medieval mindset.
01:06:56.740I mean, and America has always been hunted in this way.
01:06:58.680like this is always how we have approached our wilderness to the point where in the south to this
01:07:04.480day where not everybody says it out loud but it's very common and the more rural you get the more
01:07:11.260people will say it out loud the idea that you know you you have like basically skin walkers in the
01:07:16.760woods like people you know like creatures that will mimic uh human language and draw you in
01:07:22.660with calls uh you're a wounded child or a scared woman uh these are things that are pretty
01:07:28.580persistent uh beliefs uh in the south uh and and in these rural areas uh so yeah i think there is
01:07:35.000a fascinating uh parallel there and wild speaker says 40k is real and nick land is a proto uh
01:07:43.040mechanic mechanicus uh imperial cults technology we don't understand crusaders i've i've seen uh
01:07:49.960this before uh yeah i i think uh it's a a fascinating way to look at the world uh certainly
01:07:56.460uh 40k uh what's what i think it was uh bennett had that uh that tweet of uh you know we're 40k
01:08:04.980is real and we're all just deciding uh you know which faction uh we're a part of uh that that's
01:08:10.720something that seems to manifest itself more and more every day all right guys well we're gonna go
01:08:17.160ahead, excuse me, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up, but I want to thank Morgoth for coming
01:08:23.480on. It's a fascinating time speaking with him about Spangler as always. In fact, there is a
01:08:29.740playlist of my videos on Spangler, many of them being conversations between myself and Morgoth.
01:08:36.560So if you enjoyed, oh, excuse me, I need some tea.
01:08:40.500just getting over a cold here uh but uh if you enjoyed this conversation you'd like to hear more
01:08:48.780about uh spangler then you can head to that playlist if it's your first time on youtube
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