The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 19, 2024


Re-Enchanting the World ｜ 2⧸19⧸24


Episode Stats

Length

56 minutes

Words per Minute

186.7947

Word Count

10,544

Sentence Count

654

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

22


Summary

In this episode, Oren talks about the concept of disenchantment and why we need to understand this concept if we want to win the culture war. He also talks about Starship Troopers and why it s important to understand how the world is looking to re-enchant itself.


Transcript

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00:00:30.600 Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining me today.
00:00:33.220 I am Oren McIntyre.
00:00:35.800 So we look at the world around us today, and there's a lot of arguments going on.
00:00:41.160 There's a lot of debate.
00:00:42.340 The right is constantly trying to outwit the left, trying to bring the facts and the logic,
00:00:47.680 go ahead and defeat the ridiculous feelings of the left and show them that the science is on our side,
00:00:53.560 the rationale is on our side.
00:00:55.180 I want to talk today a little bit about why that might not be the best approach.
00:01:00.100 Not to say that the facts don't matter.
00:01:01.600 Not to say that science isn't real or true.
00:01:04.420 But understanding that there's a different kind of battle going on.
00:01:07.540 Something that is far more spiritual.
00:01:09.480 Something that is occurring because the world is looking to re-enchant itself.
00:01:13.520 I want to explain a little bit about what that means and why we should think about that as we approach politics,
00:01:19.520 the culture war, these different ideas.
00:01:21.820 I also want to get into a little bit of a fun discussion about Starship Troopers.
00:01:26.340 It's been kicking around on the internet recently, especially on Twitter,
00:01:30.120 and I think it reveals something very interesting about the left.
00:01:33.020 They always seem to fall into this kind of predictable pattern.
00:01:36.600 And I want to talk about that when it comes to talking about that 90s movie.
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00:03:10.200 Alright, so like I said, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the idea of disenchantment
00:03:15.440 and re-enchantment and why we need to understand this concept if we want to understand the type
00:03:20.600 of dialogue that's happening, the debates, the battles, the ongoing culture war that's
00:03:25.800 happening right now, why we need to understand this concept if we want to better kind of
00:03:31.500 execute our plan, if we want to be able to win people over, if we want to be effective
00:03:35.380 in the discourse or in kind of the back and forth today.
00:03:40.620 So I was on Twitter and as you often see there, someone was making the argument that children
00:03:47.540 can't choose their gender, they can't choose whether or not they want to go through some
00:03:51.540 kind of gender reassignment surgery or what it actually is, which is just the mutilation
00:03:55.940 of children.
00:03:56.740 They can't decide whether they want to do that or not for the same reason that a child can't
00:04:01.060 decide whether or not they want a tattoo.
00:04:03.640 And this is just very logical.
00:04:05.380 We understand, you know, to this day that we restrict children from making certain life
00:04:10.020 altering decisions because they don't have the ability to go ahead and rationally assess
00:04:16.320 the different outcomes, whether or not they're going to regret this in the long term, these
00:04:20.240 kind of things.
00:04:20.680 And if we can make that kind of decision with a tattoo, then obviously we should probably
00:04:25.260 be able to make that kind of decision for a child when it comes to something like a permanent
00:04:30.640 scarring or, you know, attempting to suspend puberty with puberty blockers, which is not harmless.
00:04:36.960 It does serious damage.
00:04:38.140 You can't just halt a critical process in human development and expect there to be no negative
00:04:43.380 outcomes.
00:04:44.040 And that seems like a really rational argument, right?
00:04:46.860 There's no guff against the person making that argument.
00:04:50.360 They're drawing on a very rational comparison.
00:04:54.000 These things make sense.
00:04:55.600 There's nothing wrong necessarily with the argument that they're trying to make.
00:04:59.700 However, my point to this person when I was trying to explain what was going on is that
00:05:05.800 this is not the issue that's being addressed here.
00:05:08.840 The decision to go ahead and put an eight-year-old through some kind of suspended puberty blockers
00:05:16.740 to prevent any changes, the decision to go ahead and surgically alter a 12-year-old's
00:05:21.480 body in a way that is horrific and would be understood as terrible, monstrous child abuse
00:05:27.140 in any other age, a horrific punishment for your enemies or something.
00:05:32.400 To go ahead and put them through that process, that was never a rational choice.
00:05:37.420 A lot of this stuff gets wrapped up in a bunch of pseudoscience.
00:05:41.660 People run studies.
00:05:42.840 A lot of people who are talking about it are doctors or professors.
00:05:46.140 And because it comes in this wrapping of science, we tend to address it as if there's a real
00:05:52.120 rational argument behind this, as if someone has reasoned their way into this position.
00:05:56.620 But of course, they haven't really reasoned their way into the position in the way that
00:06:00.300 we mean.
00:06:01.140 There's a reason that a lot of evolutionary biologists who could easily understand that
00:06:06.280 humans only had two sexes suddenly can't seem to be able to define biological sex.
00:06:13.860 And it's not because they all just got really stupid or they all just forgot the scientific
00:06:18.800 knowledge that they had in their brain.
00:06:20.980 It's that people are fundamentally narrative creatures.
00:06:24.800 They're spiritual creatures.
00:06:26.580 We are not primarily rational creatures.
00:06:29.520 We can do a lot of things with our rational faculties.
00:06:33.160 We can do a lot of very valuable things that have led to many great innovations and changes
00:06:37.680 and positive changes in some ways, but terrible and horrific negative changes in other ways.
00:06:43.860 We can use those rational faculties to do all kinds of things, but they are not our primary
00:06:48.400 mode of understanding the world.
00:06:51.240 And when conservatives get caught up in a purely rational debate about these things, they
00:06:56.940 often wonder why they end up losing.
00:06:58.720 They wonder, how am I engaging in saying something so very obvious that anyone who has studied even
00:07:06.180 the most basic things about human anatomy or biology would understand?
00:07:10.280 And how could this not win the argument?
00:07:13.100 And they don't understand that they're not having an argument about facts.
00:07:16.380 So you're not engaged in some kind of rational scientific discourse.
00:07:20.200 And this is really befuddling for a lot of conservatives because they thought this was how this got done.
00:07:25.720 A lot of conservatives look at the history of the last 70, 80 years of the culture war,
00:07:32.760 and they see defeat after defeat after defeat for the right.
00:07:36.400 And the story that has been told to them, the one that has kind of permeated our media,
00:07:42.800 and it's been regurgitated in our classrooms and put in textbooks and novels and all these things,
00:07:49.680 is that the reason the right lost is that the left had better arguments.
00:07:53.980 They were the rational ones.
00:07:55.720 They were the ones with science on their side.
00:07:59.020 They were the ones taking learning, and they had the intellectuals,
00:08:03.360 and they were the ones who were bringing the force of reason and all these things
00:08:07.200 to bear on these old, mystical, religious, traditional arguments,
00:08:13.640 and that those were losing because of that scientific win for the left,
00:08:20.280 that the left was constantly bringing the force of logic and reason and science to bear on all these.
00:08:26.560 And so the right started to say, well, that's the mode I need to argue in, right?
00:08:31.620 I need to go ahead and bring those same weapons to bear.
00:08:34.740 I need to go ahead and get as good at that game of rational discussion and debate.
00:08:40.600 I need to bring my science, my logic, my statistics, all these things to bear.
00:08:46.040 And so you kind of saw this, especially a lot of people have pointed it out,
00:08:49.740 you know, they kind of got under their height under maybe like the Reagan era,
00:08:53.360 where there's some really smart people, you know, in the Reagan administration,
00:08:58.280 and they're bringing all of their economic arguments,
00:09:00.600 and they're bringing all their rational stuff.
00:09:02.380 They got all the think tanks.
00:09:03.480 They're building this huge intellectual case.
00:09:06.460 And what we've discovered is actually,
00:09:08.680 once the right assembled all of the intellectual framework that the left has,
00:09:13.320 and don't get me wrong, the left still owns a lot of the intellectual apparatus.
00:09:17.460 Obviously, they own the university system.
00:09:20.120 They own a lot of the things that would allow you to go ahead and bring weight
00:09:24.280 and have the kind of credentials that people listen to.
00:09:28.260 But the right believed that if they went ahead and accumulated this kind of infrastructure as well,
00:09:33.640 they would be able to go ahead and refute the left.
00:09:35.920 They would bring the same tools, and they would start winning these arguments.
00:09:39.200 And what we kind of discovered, actually, is then we just created this stalemate, right?
00:09:43.060 What happened is not that everyone looked at the superior arguments of the right,
00:09:47.020 or they looked at all the different data that had been accumulated,
00:09:51.060 the papers that had been written, and the books, and all of this that had been brought to the table.
00:09:55.900 Instead, what we ended up with is this intellectual standstill,
00:09:58.940 where every time you get into any kind of discourse,
00:10:01.300 it's just one side breaking out studies that agree with them,
00:10:04.120 and the other side breaking out studies that agree with them.
00:10:06.700 And nobody actually ends up changing their mind.
00:10:09.540 And the fact that the right went ahead and brought a bunch of new studies
00:10:13.200 and brought the rational arguments,
00:10:15.340 and Ben Shapiro can speak really fast and make a college student look silly,
00:10:20.120 none of that actually changed what most of the left believe.
00:10:23.300 Now, there are some people who do change their minds from this.
00:10:26.360 I don't want to make it sound like no one has ever heard a rational argument
00:10:29.400 and then changed their mind.
00:10:30.480 That's not true.
00:10:31.240 There are many people who have done that.
00:10:33.000 But overall, this does not move the masses.
00:10:35.180 This does not even move many elites.
00:10:37.800 Many of the people who we think should be very attuned to rational arguments
00:10:42.600 often actually continue to just keep kind of their tribal loyalties,
00:10:47.660 their loyalties to their own side, their own political team.
00:10:52.060 None of this actually works on them.
00:10:54.040 And we get very confused as to kind of why this happened.
00:10:57.540 And so I want to explain a little bit about kind of disenchantment
00:11:00.960 and why this hasn't worked quite the way that we think it would.
00:11:05.560 So when people talk about disenchantment,
00:11:08.880 they're usually making a reference to kind of maybe Max Weber's idea
00:11:12.860 of the fact that we are disenchanting the world,
00:11:15.840 that many of the things,
00:11:17.220 that the processes that were once hidden and mysterious,
00:11:19.920 they were tied to the mystical,
00:11:21.780 they were best explained through a religious understanding,
00:11:25.220 having a theological frame with which to view things,
00:11:27.980 certainly an appeal to metaphysics in the vast majority of situations
00:11:31.360 that we were going through.
00:11:32.900 And we were kind of systematizing every process where,
00:11:36.000 you know,
00:11:36.100 the enlightenment and hyper-rationalization,
00:11:38.680 we're bringing the tools of the scientific method to bear on everything,
00:11:42.560 not just on natural processes,
00:11:44.760 but also on things like psychology and sociology.
00:11:48.500 And many of the things that had been the domain of the spiritual,
00:11:51.860 those things were being translated into this much more secular
00:11:56.940 and hyper-rational understanding of things.
00:11:59.880 And this was disenchanting the world.
00:12:01.900 This was taking a lot of things that had been mediated
00:12:04.760 by forces that were outside of the purely rational,
00:12:09.060 and it was trying to bring everything inside of this sphere.
00:12:12.620 And this process, you know, has a lot of upsides.
00:12:16.460 There's a reason that a lot of people got very excited about it.
00:12:19.620 So the fixation with a rationalistic lens can bring many benefits.
00:12:25.780 It allows us to do all kinds of impressive things scientifically,
00:12:29.820 of course, make a lot of advancements, medicines,
00:12:32.480 all kinds of medical treatments.
00:12:34.640 You know, we build taller buildings, you know, faster jets.
00:12:37.980 All these things are possible.
00:12:39.620 Of course, it also brings about horrific wars.
00:12:42.260 It brings about horrific weapons.
00:12:44.000 You know, the ability to destroy the earth many times over.
00:12:46.500 We usually pretend that technology is just this unmitigated good,
00:12:50.700 that it never creates any kind of problems.
00:12:53.560 But of course, that's not true at all.
00:12:55.180 It can be disastrous for civilizations to develop technology
00:12:58.640 just as much as it can be for them to fall behind
00:13:01.040 in the development of technology.
00:13:02.580 It's a sword that definitely swings both ways.
00:13:06.180 However, there are a lot of things that happen
00:13:09.260 beyond just the scientific realm, obviously,
00:13:11.320 as we go ahead and disenchant the world,
00:13:13.380 and we turned everything into this kind of quantifiable thing.
00:13:17.160 We can move every bit of our interactions into the rational.
00:13:21.340 We can go ahead and systematize processes,
00:13:24.080 not just in the scientific realm, but in the social realm,
00:13:27.040 especially the economic realm.
00:13:28.600 This becomes a huge deal.
00:13:30.260 You're able to go ahead and mass produce things,
00:13:32.580 mass consumption, the ability to go ahead
00:13:35.060 and make all kinds of vast advancements
00:13:38.460 when it comes to this sphere of economics.
00:13:42.520 And so this has all kinds of really good things.
00:13:45.080 However, there's a guy, Paul Vanderclay.
00:13:48.160 He's been on my show multiple times.
00:13:51.020 You should check out his channel if you haven't.
00:13:53.100 But Paul Vanderclay has a really good analogy.
00:13:56.780 I don't know if he picked this up from someone else
00:13:58.780 or if it's original to him.
00:14:00.060 But he talks about how modernity created this amazing explosion,
00:14:04.060 this disenchantment, by closing an eye,
00:14:06.160 by putting a hand over one eye and going ahead
00:14:09.180 and creating this hyper-rational lens.
00:14:12.480 When we're looking through a lens,
00:14:13.740 when we're looking through a microscope or a telescope,
00:14:16.360 we're getting to see something that we otherwise wouldn't see.
00:14:19.760 We're seeing an amazing faraway world
00:14:21.800 or something that's very small and close up.
00:14:24.460 We can get to do all that because we closed one eye,
00:14:27.860 because we went ahead and created this very particular way
00:14:32.660 of seeing the world.
00:14:33.620 However, while that's amazing and allows us
00:14:36.160 to do all kinds of very cool things,
00:14:38.660 it doesn't actually give us a full picture of the world
00:14:42.280 because the real world does need to be seen with both eyes.
00:14:45.560 And we've spent so much time specializing,
00:14:48.260 having everyone stare at one thing, right?
00:14:50.660 We're a world now where everyone's value
00:14:54.060 is based on their ability to specialize.
00:14:56.660 Oh, I'm a doctor.
00:14:57.940 I'm a lawyer.
00:14:58.760 I'm a politician.
00:15:00.240 I'm a teacher.
00:15:01.320 I'm a police officer.
00:15:03.180 Whatever it is, you need to get hyper good at that one thing.
00:15:06.300 Usually like it's your ability to get very specialized in that field.
00:15:09.680 And because everyone spends their whole life becoming specialized in one field,
00:15:13.920 they tend to think that field is the most important thing that could ever exist.
00:15:18.360 It's the most important thing that you could ever do.
00:15:20.820 And we tend to see the entire world through that one lens.
00:15:24.820 And this disenchantment and this obsession with putting ourselves up to this hyper rational lens
00:15:31.000 and forcing the world to kind of fit under this one particular way of viewing things
00:15:36.120 has, again, created all kinds of amazing things.
00:15:39.540 However, it's also something that limits our ability to truly understand what we are
00:15:45.020 and who we are as humans in a world that is, frankly, spiritual as much as it is physical.
00:15:52.240 That the real world is actually not a place of completely just super secular, super rational,
00:15:59.740 you know, just, you know, you're just blood and bone and skin and that's it.
00:16:04.340 That's not actually the way that the world works.
00:16:06.860 It's very helpful to focus on that aspect of the world when you need to do something like
00:16:11.960 open heart surgery, or if you need to figure out, you know, the best way to create a model
00:16:16.420 to launch a rocket, that's a good time to go ahead and strip the world down into its particular
00:16:23.280 material essence in that way and hyper focus on that.
00:16:26.900 But it's not a good way to actually exist as people.
00:16:30.260 And so when we go ahead and we focus on just that particular aspect of society,
00:16:35.940 it traps us in a way, it locks us in place.
00:16:39.720 And the truth is that we're starting to see this break apart.
00:16:44.100 We're seeing that we have stretched the hyper rational frame to its limits.
00:16:49.880 We've gotten all kinds of amazing things out of it.
00:16:52.380 Many people have a hard time imagining a world where we don't do only this, where we don't
00:16:56.100 spend all of our time only focusing on this one thing and becoming this particular expert
00:17:00.520 and closing our eye and only living our entire life staring through this lens.
00:17:05.100 A lot of people have a hard time understanding how we could do anything else because look
00:17:07.800 at all the amazing things around us and what that outlook has created, what this disenchanted
00:17:13.300 outlook has created.
00:17:14.420 However, we're not meant to live this way.
00:17:16.840 And we're starting to see the limits of what the rational process can actually produce.
00:17:21.680 We're starting to see that, you know, human civilizations are kind of fraying at the edges
00:17:27.800 when they obsess about this.
00:17:29.560 We don't have the ability to weave the social fabric that holds people together anymore.
00:17:34.080 We don't have the ability to form families.
00:17:35.860 We don't have the ability to, you know, to reproduce ourselves.
00:17:38.740 We don't have the ability to share a moral vision and work together for a common good.
00:17:44.560 All these things are coming apart because we've hyper focused into the rational.
00:17:48.280 We've completely disenchanted ourselves to the point where we can't imagine a reason why
00:17:52.620 we would ever care about future generations or, you know, sacrifice something of ourselves
00:17:58.140 for, you know, for any kind of greater good or understand why we would go ahead and give
00:18:03.820 up certain economic or technological advancements because it's actually more important to like
00:18:09.280 look at the person across from you at the table and understand them and the way that they
00:18:14.060 fit into the world.
00:18:15.600 And then all of that isn't necessarily just a purely scientific assessment or a completely
00:18:20.040 material assessment of needs and wants and desires.
00:18:24.000 But it's actually something that's far more than that.
00:18:26.760 It's far more spiritual.
00:18:27.720 It's something that really exists on a metaphysical plane.
00:18:30.420 And if we're not willing to take the time out of our lives to go ahead and interact with
00:18:34.960 that part of our existence, we become really fragile as people.
00:18:39.700 We become emotionally sick.
00:18:40.940 We become spiritually sick.
00:18:42.600 We become unable to dream, unable to grow, unable to become more than, you know, just kind
00:18:48.400 of the small bug man that only cares about their petty hobbies and these kind of things.
00:18:53.460 And so we're starting to see kind of the edge of this.
00:18:56.480 And what's happening is people are starting to walk away from rationality.
00:19:02.460 Now, again, conservatives thought that rationality was going to be like this amazing tool and
00:19:08.340 because they watched the left use it to defeat them over and over again.
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00:19:41.500 And so they're very surprised to show up to like this battle of wokeness with a bunch of
00:19:46.100 rationale, a bunch of, you know, great arguments and scientific facts and suddenly start losing
00:19:52.400 because this is all the weapons that the left used to disenchant the world that they were
00:19:57.160 still holding on to.
00:19:57.940 The right was still holding on to the last few bits of enchantment.
00:20:00.900 They're still holding on to Christianity.
00:20:03.180 They were still holding on to a vision of a particular culture in America and an identity.
00:20:07.700 They were holding on to family.
00:20:10.060 They were holding on to those last little essential bits of enchantment that were kind
00:20:14.420 of keeping civilization together.
00:20:15.980 And the left used all these rational, you know, all these scientific arguments to make
00:20:21.320 that look silly, make that look stupid.
00:20:23.320 You know, some of these weren't even actually very good at that.
00:20:26.280 But the point was they they they they cloaked themselves in the in the veneer of hyper rational
00:20:31.920 argument, even if they weren't actually doing that.
00:20:34.640 Very few of the new atheists were any good at arguing against actual philosophical points
00:20:41.280 in Christianity or anything.
00:20:43.280 They didn't really ever engage within very, you know, thoughtful arguments.
00:20:47.800 They just went ahead and got the lowest hanging fruit and did some laughing and eye rolling.
00:20:54.100 You know, that that was pretty much the the back and forth when it came to demystifying
00:20:58.700 the world, disenchanting the world of its last little bits was was just the left kind of
00:21:03.100 bringing not really anything very rational, but something cloaked in the idea of rationalism.
00:21:09.300 However, what we're seeing is that corner is kind of turning.
00:21:12.540 So Oswald Spangler actually predicted this.
00:21:16.260 He predicted that the West would eventually walk away from its hyper rational nature, that
00:21:21.880 eventually people would get tired.
00:21:23.340 He actually specifically said science would go away, that we would see the West abandoned.
00:21:28.540 It's kind of it's the fever pitch pursuit of science, the way that it fervently sought
00:21:36.220 scientific knowledge, that we would walk away from that because people would get exhausted
00:21:40.720 of having their world entirely predictable.
00:21:43.300 People don't want to live very predictable lives.
00:21:47.120 They don't want every aspect of the world defined.
00:21:49.620 Actually, we don't as much as we've we've become obsessed with the idea of knowing everything
00:21:54.520 and predicting everything and being able to manage every minute detail of existence and
00:21:59.420 control for every variable as much as our kind of managerial elite want to do that.
00:22:03.800 We've become obsessed with the idea that this is the best way to live life.
00:22:07.240 It's actually not healthy for humans.
00:22:09.240 It's not the way people want to live lives.
00:22:11.100 People don't want to live these lives of of carefully managed, you know, procedure that
00:22:17.820 they don't want to sit there in quiet desperation, hoping to find, you know, that they're truly
00:22:22.820 special somewhere.
00:22:23.720 They want to have lives that are enchanted.
00:22:26.840 They want to have lives that where they don't know everything.
00:22:29.540 They don't know where how everything's going to turn out.
00:22:31.820 They don't know how everything's going to resolve that where everything isn't planned.
00:22:35.820 They want to have lives that are surprising and magical and spiritual in nature.
00:22:40.700 And he predicted that eventually we would just get tired of doing this and our greatest
00:22:45.400 minds would simply walk away from science because science isn't this like thing where
00:22:50.640 you just discover it and exists in perpetuity.
00:22:52.680 But it's actually something that has to be constantly practiced and it has to be invested
00:22:58.040 in heavily by your culture.
00:23:00.580 And if you don't do that, then it's going to fall away.
00:23:03.280 You can discover things scientifically.
00:23:06.300 But then if you're if your culture isn't interested in maintaining that knowledge, I mean, look
00:23:10.580 at the fall of the Roman Empire.
00:23:12.040 You know, there's always the classic example, you know, but all of these times throughout
00:23:15.840 history, Bronze Age collapse, where technologies were lost, you know, they were lost for hundreds
00:23:21.260 of years and maybe thousand years in some cases because there simply was no way the civilization
00:23:27.620 was unable to perpetuate the importance of that.
00:23:31.840 They were unable to perpetuate the culture.
00:23:34.100 They were unable to keep up the high IQ people, the interest, the level of fervor that was
00:23:41.380 necessary to continue to move that along and continue to keep that technology.
00:23:47.320 And so we see this on a regular basis.
00:23:50.080 You know, this has happened over and over again.
00:23:52.260 We're not immune to this.
00:23:53.580 And so we're kind of going through this transitional period where we're actually moving, even though
00:23:58.800 we still we still use the language of science and scientism.
00:24:03.200 We still use the language of disenchantment.
00:24:05.480 We're actually shifting to a period of reenchantment where people actually want things to be reenchanted.
00:24:11.720 And this is freaking some people out, understandably.
00:24:15.020 And so I'm going to talk more about that in a second, like the groups that are being freaked
00:24:19.160 out by this interest in reenchantment and kind of the way that logic and reason are kind
00:24:24.800 of actually losing some of these battles.
00:24:26.780 And they're very confused by that.
00:24:28.160 But before we do, guys, let me tell you about your moral need, your moral duty to go ahead
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00:25:43.800 All right.
00:25:44.420 So like I said, we're going through this period of re-enchantment.
00:25:47.960 We're shifting away from this idea that everything's going to be hyper-rational.
00:25:51.300 Now, to be clear, we still use that language, right?
00:25:54.420 You'll still, again, they cloak all of this, you know, gender transition, the rainbow jihad.
00:25:59.880 All of this is cloaked in the language of science.
00:26:03.320 We still see them trying to perpetuate that, you know, the idea that this is what all the
00:26:07.240 experts say and this is how all the rational people understand things.
00:26:11.600 Even though they're still using that language because that language still has the currency
00:26:15.320 of the day.
00:26:16.420 That's still the way that we justify things.
00:26:18.860 We still justify whether or not you should be, you know, you should be in charge on your
00:26:23.020 credentials, whether or not you should have a high paying job, a powerful job, whether
00:26:26.580 or not you should have all these positions of power based on what, you know, college you
00:26:30.920 went to, those kinds of things.
00:26:32.340 So those arguments still hold sway from authority, but they don't actually use those tools anymore.
00:26:39.600 They're, even though we're cloaking this in some kind of scientism, the truth is that
00:26:43.380 these are very spiritual arguments, these are spiritual movements that are being deployed.
00:26:48.880 And that shift is scaring a lot of people.
00:26:51.720 This is particularly scaring kind of that, what used to be called the IDW crowd, that intellectual
00:26:57.280 dark web, the Weinsteins, and I guess Jordan Peterson is not really part of that anymore,
00:27:03.240 but, you know, the Barry Weisses and these kind of people, they're panicking.
00:27:06.780 You see this from a lot of scientists who are very invested in a secular view of the
00:27:13.640 world because they're really confused.
00:27:15.980 They thought that we would just have eternal progress, that, you know, once we had gotten
00:27:19.740 rid of the religious right, we'd gotten rid of all those Christians, then we would enter
00:27:24.000 the utopia of our rationalistic age and we wouldn't have to deal with these backwards
00:27:29.560 people anymore.
00:27:30.640 And they're just finding that this religion stuff keeps popping up.
00:27:33.940 And, you know, the idea now that wokeness is a religion is very common.
00:27:38.080 This is something that is now everywhere.
00:27:41.400 This is something that you'll see the kind of the classical liberal crowd, say, on a regular
00:27:48.080 basis.
00:27:48.560 And they think that the problem, of course, is just that now leftism is a religion and
00:27:53.840 religion is still the enemy.
00:27:55.340 It's just a new religion popped up.
00:27:57.240 They don't think about the fact that actually this is probably keeps popping up because it's
00:28:01.220 a true fact of humanity.
00:28:02.660 It's an eternal quantity that's that's real, that there's a there's a reality that will
00:28:08.700 continue to assert itself that is spiritual in nature.
00:28:12.160 And if you cleanse the Christian one, you're just going to get another version of that.
00:28:16.540 But they don't understand that.
00:28:18.020 They think that that means that there's just another backwater thing that they have to go
00:28:21.780 ahead and tamp down before they can once again return to the 90s and all the rationality
00:28:26.660 that that's going to defeat all these backwards religious people.
00:28:31.700 But but they're very scared at this moment.
00:28:35.260 They're panicking at this moment because they thought they had kind of gotten rid of the
00:28:39.540 final resistance to their thousand year scientific rule.
00:28:42.640 And they're realizing, actually, now all these people who we thought were on our team, all
00:28:46.980 the people on the left are actually they're the ones who are now bringing this kind of
00:28:51.240 argumentation.
00:28:52.300 And their position is one that is, you know, the perpetuated because of their ability to
00:28:58.780 manipulate this data.
00:28:59.840 And if this data loses its primacy, if, you know, if the appeal to managerial expertise
00:29:05.480 and scientific expertise loses its primacy, well, this class of people starts becoming
00:29:10.980 irrelevant.
00:29:11.740 This is why you saw guys like Sam Harris very literally tell you that they said, you know,
00:29:15.920 I don't care if there's a rational argument for Donald Trump.
00:29:19.000 I don't care if rationally you can show me that Joe Biden is more dangerous, all this stuff.
00:29:24.100 I'm going to get rid of Donald Trump because and we need that we, you know, we can go ahead
00:29:28.440 and lie about Donald Trump.
00:29:29.680 We can smear Donald Trump.
00:29:30.980 We need to go ahead and de-platform him for forget all that free speech and argument stuff.
00:29:34.980 I didn't really mean that we can go ahead and turn all of these weapons against Donald
00:29:38.280 Trump.
00:29:38.560 Why?
00:29:39.000 Well, because he's threatening experts.
00:29:41.400 He's threatening my class and my class being in charge is the most important thing.
00:29:46.780 And so we need to go ahead and crush these people.
00:29:49.480 We can throw all those principles in the garbage.
00:29:51.280 We never really met those.
00:29:52.520 We only we were only using the to justify our power.
00:29:55.560 And as soon as our power is threatened, actually, we can flip all of those on a dime.
00:29:59.340 Just, you know, that guy's the enemy.
00:30:01.180 These people are friends and we want our friends of power and we want to defeat our enemies.
00:30:05.400 And so a lot of these guys are freaking out because their arguments aren't working the
00:30:09.520 way that they should.
00:30:10.660 They thought that they they had kind of reached the apex.
00:30:13.780 The rational mountaintop had been we've got to the top of it and it was over and they had
00:30:19.300 won.
00:30:19.740 And actually, they're finding out that that's not the case.
00:30:22.160 And so what we're seeing is that the world is indeed going to be re-enchanted.
00:30:27.480 We're seeing some of it now.
00:30:29.120 You know, I was talking to Jonathan Peugeot about this.
00:30:32.000 You can check out that episode.
00:30:33.100 A lot of people really like that.
00:30:34.520 But we talked about the fact that the world is being re-enchanted, whether we want it to
00:30:39.180 be or not.
00:30:39.900 The strong gods, as our arena would say, are returning.
00:30:44.360 And there's not a question of whether or not that's going to happen because humanity
00:30:48.640 simply cannot continue to live this way.
00:30:50.680 We live too much of our life with one eye closed.
00:30:53.580 We live too much of our life staring through one lens and hoping to force these results
00:30:59.460 through these hyper-rationalistic processes.
00:31:01.780 But that's over.
00:31:02.380 That's done.
00:31:02.900 We can't continue this way.
00:31:04.940 Civilizations are crumbling as they continue to try to push this.
00:31:08.520 Peoples are falling apart.
00:31:09.680 They're not able to perpetuate themselves.
00:31:11.140 They're not able to reproduce.
00:31:12.320 They're not able to pass on their traditions or their identities because they've become too
00:31:18.600 rational.
00:31:19.400 And so we're just we're shredding everything.
00:31:21.740 We're shredding.
00:31:23.480 All this hyper-rational identity is just destroying itself.
00:31:27.520 And this is not the way that humans were meant to live.
00:31:30.080 And it's not the way they're going to continue to live.
00:31:32.040 And so whether we like it or not, the spiritual is returning.
00:31:35.020 Whether you like it or not, we are being re-enchanted.
00:31:38.300 And it's starting with the worst things first.
00:31:40.920 Right.
00:31:41.080 They were seeing this horrific attempt to re-enchant through the wokeness.
00:31:45.020 Right.
00:31:45.200 The terrible re-enchantment of wokeness is really what we're noticing now.
00:31:50.500 And what a lot of people are doing is they're trying to fight it with the old weapons.
00:31:55.080 Right.
00:31:55.480 Because, again, that's how the left defeated the religious right.
00:31:58.340 They brought the idea that they were the secular ones.
00:32:00.860 They were the scientific ones.
00:32:02.260 They were the rational ones.
00:32:03.440 They were the ones with the learned credentials.
00:32:05.420 And they were going to bring their studies.
00:32:06.780 And they were going to bring their statistics.
00:32:08.620 And they were going to show how silly these Christians were.
00:32:11.520 And, you know, they pulled apart the last little bit of enchantment.
00:32:15.320 And so the right is thinking, well, I'll just do the same thing.
00:32:17.240 I'll just battle against these, what are ultimately religious arguments from the left with my own rational arguments.
00:32:24.060 And just like the left did previously to the Christian right.
00:32:27.680 And I will be victorious.
00:32:29.240 But you're using the wrong weapons.
00:32:30.820 Because that period is over and done.
00:32:33.480 You're behind the curve.
00:32:34.500 You can't just ape what the left.
00:32:36.780 Did 20 years ago.
00:32:38.140 And win.
00:32:38.600 Because you're in a fundamentally different time.
00:32:40.720 Society is moving into a different phase.
00:32:42.920 Where they're seeking re-enchantment.
00:32:45.300 And so if we want to win, we need to stop fighting a war of rationale.
00:32:50.480 Though, to be clear, like, obviously, we're still going to have rational arguments.
00:32:54.720 Obviously, we're still going to have statistics.
00:32:56.440 Like, these things don't disappear.
00:32:58.140 I'm not arguing against science.
00:32:59.520 I'm not arguing against reason.
00:33:01.100 Obviously, I'm making reasoned arguments all the time.
00:33:05.420 The point is, this will not be the primary thing which persuades people.
00:33:10.480 We're in a spiritual battle, as my buddy Dave the distributist is fond of saying.
00:33:14.880 This is a battle of the spiritual.
00:33:18.960 And this is simply not going to be fought on the purely rational battlefield.
00:33:22.840 And so when we look at these arguments, we have to stop addressing them in a purely factual manner.
00:33:28.840 Not, again, that we don't need to have facts.
00:33:30.860 But, I mean, really, guys, if you need to explain that a man is a man, is a woman, and there are only two sexes, and you're having scientists argue against that, I think it's time to recognize that you're not having an argument about science.
00:33:46.180 That's not really what the argument is about.
00:33:48.060 You've ever had an argument with a significant other, and you ever realize that the thing you're arguing about is not actually the thing that you started with, but it's an entirely different thing?
00:33:57.840 Same thing happening here, okay?
00:33:59.160 You're having a whole different disagreement.
00:34:01.860 And that disagreement is far more spiritual in nature.
00:34:04.220 And so what you need is really in this race is to have a better way to re-enchant the world.
00:34:11.080 The good news is that wokeness is a terrible way to re-enchant the world.
00:34:16.060 It is weak.
00:34:16.720 It is ugly.
00:34:17.860 It is gross.
00:34:19.300 It's divisive.
00:34:20.400 It has no, even though it has a little bit of fervor to give people some meaning to their life, at the end, it's very hollow.
00:34:28.220 It's only surface level.
00:34:30.060 It will fall apart.
00:34:31.420 People cannot be sustained on this.
00:34:33.300 Culture cannot be sustained on this.
00:34:35.140 And so it's something that's relatively easy to offer an alternative to as long as you have one that is truly beautiful.
00:34:42.420 And this is what the right has to its advantage is that we are, the left is predicated, is kind of, the entire leftist coalition is built on basically denying the good and the beautiful and the true.
00:34:54.620 They need to level everything.
00:34:56.520 They need to destroy hierarchy.
00:34:58.000 They need to destroy nature.
00:34:59.040 They need to destroy beauty because all of these things lock into right-wing patterns, and they need those things to be destroyed.
00:35:07.020 And so they are arguing against them.
00:35:08.660 That's the entire project of the left.
00:35:10.500 You know, the spiritual core of communism is, I don't care if I have to live a worse life as long as I get to punish the people who otherwise would have probably ruled over me.
00:35:22.300 That really is the spiritual core of communism, you know, kill the king, kill the capitalist, and replace it all with this horrific gray level, you know, perfectly leveled, homogenized mass.
00:35:36.980 Like, that really is the core of it.
00:35:38.800 And so this is what the left is selling.
00:35:40.420 And so they can't really give you the true and the beautiful and the good.
00:35:44.180 And so the right has the ability to re-enchant the world in a far more meaningful way.
00:35:48.900 And I know that's kind of, I understand that that isn't in and of itself an entire plan, right?
00:35:55.660 That's not a super fleshed out way to do this because I'll be honest, I don't know exactly how to do this either.
00:36:01.760 We're all working on how to do this.
00:36:03.900 If we had this answer, we'd already have it in play.
00:36:06.980 I think a big part of this does involve Christianity.
00:36:09.760 I think we do need to return to a spiritual tradition that is fulfilling, that can actually bind your societies together, that you can actually become a whole person by pursuing, that can give you truth and beauty and identity in a meaningful way.
00:36:26.280 I think that's going to be a part of it.
00:36:28.000 I think that's a clear part of it, especially in America where Protestant Christianity in particular has always been core to the identity of the United States and the thing that has kind of given its social cohesion and moved its society in a particular direction with a clear moral vision.
00:36:44.020 I think that's going to be a big part of it.
00:36:45.960 But it's not all of it, right?
00:36:47.460 Because the right has to do things aesthetically that are going to change things.
00:36:51.640 We have to make all kinds of changes that we are not currently in a position to do.
00:36:57.220 We're working on it.
00:36:58.240 I think there are different people in different areas who are making advances.
00:37:01.740 I think there is a change in the notion of what needs to be done and how to pursue it.
00:37:06.840 But it is important when we look at the discourse.
00:37:10.500 The main point of this is just to say that when we look at the back and forth, don't just look at the scientific.
00:37:17.320 Don't just look at the rational.
00:37:18.340 Don't just think that by making a particular argument and showing the intellectual inconsistencies and incompatibility of different leftist views,
00:37:27.220 that you're going to get a win.
00:37:28.760 Understand that you're in a spiritual battle and think about, and this might be hard because so few people are religious today.
00:37:33.940 This is one of the big problems.
00:37:35.280 We are so impoverished when it comes to spiritual reality.
00:37:39.560 Most people don't know what it is to have a religious experience.
00:37:42.100 They don't know what it is to communicate at that level.
00:37:45.040 Well, how would you even win a spiritual war?
00:37:46.720 Most people don't know because they don't even know they're in one.
00:37:48.980 They don't even know that they exist.
00:37:50.480 They have a hard time seeing the world around them in that way.
00:37:53.320 And so that shift, that fundamental shift of perspective is necessary.
00:37:57.000 Some of us who have been religious or more organically religious our whole lives, maybe we have a leg up on that.
00:38:03.200 But it's something that all of us are struggling in because we're all impacted by this kind of secular modernity.
00:38:09.140 We all are kind of scarred by the disenchantment of the world.
00:38:11.800 Even those of us who are religious are still impacted by it.
00:38:14.460 And so to re-enchant that, we're going to have to go through a process that I don't think many of us are really prepared for.
00:38:20.060 I think many people, even many religious people, are scared about because they don't know anything could happen.
00:38:25.260 When the strong gods come back, all bets could be off, and we have to be ready for that.
00:38:30.340 But I think it's important, again, when we have these discussions with many people on the left where we're trying to win people over,
00:38:38.280 we need to remember, again, that this is happening primarily in a spiritual realm.
00:38:42.380 And we need to shift our perspective because if we're just trying to bring the facts and the logic of the reason, I think we're going to lose this.
00:38:48.720 And this kind of dovetails into my second thing I wanted to touch on real quick today, which was the discourse around Starship Troopers.
00:38:56.180 So one of the things that's kind of a cyclical debate that breaks out online is the movie Starship Troopers.
00:39:04.280 Many of you have probably seen it.
00:39:05.680 It was from the 90s.
00:39:06.880 It was made when I was a kid.
00:39:08.120 So it's pretty old at this point because now I'm old.
00:39:10.440 And so Starship Troopers is a movie that is taken from a Heinlein novel, a Robert Heinlein novel.
00:39:20.420 And famously, the director who created Starship Troopers was attempting to do a parody of it.
00:39:27.720 He was Paul Vanderhoeven is the guy who did like Robocop and Total Recall and stuff.
00:39:33.960 And he read some of the book.
00:39:37.200 He was signed on to do the movie and he read some of the book and he just gave up on it.
00:39:40.640 He hated it, but he still wanted, you know, had to do the movie.
00:39:44.140 And so he decided to turn this whole thing into a satire.
00:39:47.020 And so what happens often when you kind of have this debate is, you know, pops up and the leftists start pointing out how ridiculous the right is for enjoying certain aspects of the movie.
00:39:58.980 Oh, you're a sucker.
00:40:00.220 The whole movie is propaganda.
00:40:01.380 It's made to look like fascistic propaganda.
00:40:04.420 It's a parody of your beliefs and what you care about.
00:40:07.620 And you're a sucker for, you know, for finding any part of it entertaining or any part of it inspiring.
00:40:13.380 Now, to be clear, there's a big difference between, again, the book and the movie.
00:40:17.640 Paul should have probably read a little more of the book.
00:40:19.980 He would have realized that actually the book's not fascist at all.
00:40:22.640 Maybe he wouldn't.
00:40:23.420 Maybe he's just that narrow.
00:40:24.940 But Heinle was not explaining a fascistic society.
00:40:28.040 It's not even necessarily a traditional society in many ways.
00:40:32.100 Men and women serve together.
00:40:33.900 The nation is or the human alliances is multi-ethnic.
00:40:39.540 It's, you know, in many ways, a very progressive view of kind of what would be a society.
00:40:46.620 And Heinle's point was simply in this book that mass democracy had failed humanity, that people didn't have a skin in the game.
00:40:56.200 They weren't willing to sacrifice.
00:40:57.320 And that people had tried to use social engineering to alter humanity.
00:41:05.520 They had, well, a lot of what we're doing now was kind of what he was saying in the book.
00:41:10.520 And that, you know, that the military had kind of stepped in and they had gotten rid of the social engineers, the managerial class who had attempted to manipulate humanity and made it weak and then thrown society into disarray.
00:41:24.120 And instead, they had tied the democratic process directly to service.
00:41:29.040 You had to be a military service member to actually influence society.
00:41:33.640 You have to be willing to show that you would go ahead and sacrifice on behalf of the body politic to, you know, to have a say in what was going on.
00:41:43.160 And, you know, the left looks at this and they say, oh, that's fascist.
00:41:46.840 That's a military-run society.
00:41:48.940 But that's not the case.
00:41:49.960 It's not the military-run society.
00:41:51.760 It's simply that you have to show your willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, being willing to put your life on the line for society before you have a say on what the society is going to do.
00:42:02.360 And this is some radical idea.
00:42:04.860 This is literally how most societies work.
00:42:07.660 Warrior castes have often been the leading class, the only effective political class in many societies.
00:42:13.160 And even in the case of, like, the Roman Republic, where we would look at some level of democracy or many of the Greek city-states, for you to have any say, for you to have a vote, you had to be a military-age male.
00:42:25.960 You had to be somebody who would have been called upon, you know, to defend the city-state.
00:42:33.600 Your participation in civic life was bound up with your willingness to go ahead and defend the nation.
00:42:40.480 It wasn't some crazy idea.
00:42:42.280 That was at the heart of what many people would say of these founding democracies, was the idea that, you know, the Roman army was made up of guys who had to be able to afford their own equipment.
00:42:53.600 If you weren't somebody who was able to go ahead and, you know, buy your own equipment and defend your country, well, then you couldn't really involve yourself in leadership because that was a critical way that you showed that you were able to go ahead and put the needs of society above others.
00:43:09.420 And that made you worthy of being able to then have input into the democratic process.
00:43:14.020 So even if you believed in ancient democracy, it was often tied directly to exactly the same thing that Heinlein was tying it to.
00:43:22.300 But the left can't imagine a world where this exists.
00:43:24.940 Mass democracy is, of course, their goal because, again, they want to – the egalitarian blob must destroy everything.
00:43:31.100 And the best way to do that is to give every single person, whether it can contribute to society or not, whether it'd be willing to defend the society or not, a voice.
00:43:39.260 And so the idea that this could be restricted is just, you know, an anathema to them.
00:43:45.560 And so what happens in this discourse – it's always very funny.
00:43:48.400 What happens in this discourse is that leftists will always, again, point out, you know, that Vanderhoeven made this movie with the express purpose of making fun of kind of the right-wing impulse.
00:43:59.900 So the idea – the very idea that you would have a society that is completely defended by those – or completely run by those that would defend it, you know, he's there to mock this, right?
00:44:10.140 And they say, oh, well, you can't see that this is making fun of you.
00:44:13.260 You can't see that this is propaganda.
00:44:15.600 And, you know, the response is, well, yeah, of course.
00:44:18.780 But the people who are doing these things are still heroic and they're still beautiful.
00:44:23.380 Like, you know, Vanderhoeven, again, because he wanted to kind of give it the propaganda feel, he only went ahead and cast very beautiful people, famously.
00:44:32.700 He didn't really care much about their acting.
00:44:34.600 You can tell by some of the performances.
00:44:36.940 He cared more about, you know, the fact that they would look like they stepped off a propaganda poster.
00:44:42.560 And when you look at societies like this and you see, you know, young people who are passionate about having a civic duty and protecting their society and wanting to lead through an example of putting themselves in harm's way while also, you know, being young and being beautiful, all these things, these are naturally good qualities.
00:45:04.640 Now, to be clear, like, not everybody who's good is beautiful.
00:45:07.500 It's not that that's not one to one the same thing.
00:45:10.240 But obviously, these are good things to aspire to.
00:45:12.860 It's good to aspire to these things and to understand them as goods in and of themselves.
00:45:17.340 And doing so will often lead you to better results.
00:45:21.800 Right.
00:45:22.400 And so the fact that this impulse still inspires people, that people still watch that movie, and even though it's supposed to code as satire, people still look at it.
00:45:32.140 The left gets very angry at this.
00:45:33.600 They accuse people of not having media literacy.
00:45:35.780 Media literacy is I'm smart.
00:45:38.740 Someone told me what opinions I'm supposed to have.
00:45:40.640 And because the director intended something to look a particular way, that's the only way it can look.
00:45:45.300 Now, of course, the entire point of the leftist project is to deconstruct everything every other author ever said.
00:45:51.220 Right.
00:45:51.360 Like, this is what leftists love to do, to take a reading of all these classic novels and all this classic literature and deconstruct it and say, well, actually, even though the author might admit this thing,
00:46:03.180 and they're trying to uplift tradition or beauty or Christianity or something, really, there's a subversive reading.
00:46:08.820 And what the author said doesn't matter.
00:46:10.540 We call this literally the death of the author.
00:46:12.640 The idea that you can go ahead and infer or you can go ahead and have all these different readings with these different lenses.
00:46:19.180 And so you don't have to actually care about what the author says or what they intended.
00:46:22.880 However, this is the one piece of media where what the author intended has to be the only way to view this.
00:46:29.020 Right.
00:46:29.300 And so what they end up doing, because they're so they're they're so compelled to, like, try to make the chuds look stupid.
00:46:36.160 Right.
00:46:36.440 Their whole thing is like, we have to make the people who would like the characters in this movie, who would like a society like the one of Starship Troopers.
00:46:43.520 We have to make them look like idiots.
00:46:45.200 And so if they're pro the humans, if they're pro the beautiful people, if they're pro, you know, Doogie Howser in, you know, some mid-century German garb, then we have to be pro the bugs.
00:46:57.380 Right.
00:46:57.840 We have to be pro the literal, the murderous, ugly, hive, you know, mindless killing machines like we're on their side.
00:47:06.480 Right.
00:47:06.720 That's the amazing thing that they kind of do to themselves.
00:47:09.820 And so I just always find this hilarious because we go through this cycle over and over again where it's so important for them to kind of feel like they're more clever than than than, you know, the middle Americans who might just enjoy this as an action movie that they need to they need to go ahead and spiritually identify with horrific, ugly things that are trying to murder humanity.
00:47:32.920 And I think it really just, again, speaks to a lot of what we just we just talked about when we were talking about the disenchantment and reenchantment of the world, that this is what the left does.
00:47:41.920 This is who they are.
00:47:43.260 And this is so deep down in the core of their being that they will identify with the evil villains of pretty much anything, as long as they think that it's going to go ahead and punish or embarrass the other side.
00:47:57.480 Right. And so I just I just always think that this is very valuable.
00:48:01.800 I'm always glad when this discussion comes up because it really reveals the left for what they are.
00:48:07.540 Yeah, we get it. It's a satire. Right.
00:48:09.360 We understand that there are many things that the left does when they're attempting to do a satire of right being views or values that accidentally look based.
00:48:17.920 Right. This is this has its own genre inside the entire conservative commentary sphere where they look at different movies and are like, actually, this is accidentally based.
00:48:26.700 It's accidentally showing something very cool or very true.
00:48:30.680 Although the villain here ends up being correct because they're trying to demonize values that actually do work and are eternal truths.
00:48:38.920 And these things keep coming through no matter what you do.
00:48:42.000 This is kind of its own again, its own like a closet industry inside right wing content is just pointing this kind of thing out.
00:48:50.140 So it's not like that we don't get it.
00:48:52.300 It's not that we don't understand.
00:48:53.660 It's just that it doesn't matter because even when you try to throw all these cartoonish things on top of the people in Starship Troopers,
00:49:00.700 even if you dress them up in SS uniforms, even if you go ahead and try to scream, oh, look, it's a fascist.
00:49:07.460 It's not. It's not.
00:49:08.940 And it's clear that actually what's being portrayed here is actually just a much more functional society.
00:49:13.840 Like the society in Starship Troopers is actually just in much better shape than the one we live in.
00:49:19.040 Everything is clean. Everyone works together.
00:49:21.200 Everyone has a purpose.
00:49:22.620 Everything isn't run by people who hate the society.
00:49:25.660 It's run by people who actually have a stake in the society.
00:49:28.780 And it's hard not to look at the world crumbling around us and say, man, this looks like a way better way to do things.
00:49:36.160 Why is this satire?
00:49:37.620 Because you dress people up in the bad guy uniforms.
00:49:40.660 That's the whole reason that we're supposed to hate this.
00:49:43.040 Because in every other way, it kind of actually seems like it's working much better.
00:49:47.480 Is it perfect? No.
00:49:49.040 Does that mean that the world is utopia? No.
00:49:52.700 But it seems to be working better than what we have now.
00:49:55.640 So you might want to be careful by calling it fascist because you might just encourage people to think that, you know, maybe that works much better than the kind of thing you're throwing around here.
00:50:05.320 Again, Heinlein's book has none of this.
00:50:06.940 This is all injected by Verhoeven because, again, he wants to be very clever.
00:50:14.020 He wants to make the satire.
00:50:15.920 You know, Heinlein's book is, again, something very different.
00:50:19.380 In fact, they change a lot of things in the book, including the main character, who is himself supposed to be Filipino.
00:50:26.020 And so Van Der Hoeven actually makes the cast less diverse so that he can go ahead and get his point across, which is very interesting.
00:50:36.040 But big difference here.
00:50:38.000 But like I said, just very funny.
00:50:39.380 I think it's always entertaining when this discourse comes back around because the left always feel the obsessive need to go ahead and identify with hideous bug creatures.
00:50:48.460 And literally making the bug man meme a real.
00:50:52.060 And that's pretty amazing.
00:50:54.340 Creeper Weirdo says.
00:50:55.960 Oh, sorry.
00:50:56.900 Yeah.
00:50:57.300 Moving to the moving to the questions of the people, guys.
00:51:01.140 Creeper Weirdo says the YouTube channel Magnum Mirror has some videos about this.
00:51:06.720 One is why George R.R.
00:51:08.440 Martin will never finish his book.
00:51:10.540 It's because they're cynically written and deconstructed.
00:51:14.760 Well, yeah, actually, I think Dave the distributist did that video.
00:51:17.460 I'm not sure which YouTube channel you're talking about.
00:51:20.980 But Dave the distributist did a video with the same, basically the same premise is that there's no way for Martin to go ahead and finish the Fire and Ice saga, the Game of Thrones saga, because the entire thing is kind of based on this very cynical outlook.
00:51:37.320 There's no way to satisfactorily tie things up.
00:51:40.840 That's why the show was always doomed to have a terrible ending, because what would a good ending look like in that universe?
00:51:47.900 It doesn't work.
00:51:49.020 And so I think I don't know about the channel you're talking about.
00:51:51.740 Maybe they have picked up on a similar strain.
00:51:53.880 But I do think that that's true for sure.
00:51:57.920 Creeper Weirdo says, again, did you see AA's video on putting the woke away?
00:52:01.420 It's time for a debate stream, maybe.
00:52:03.480 Yeah, I saw the video.
00:52:04.640 It was very unconvincing.
00:52:06.920 I understand he's got to hype it up.
00:52:08.660 That's OK.
00:52:09.680 He's like, well, let me play some different commercials.
00:52:12.260 And things aren't quite as bad as they were.
00:52:14.460 Again, the point was never that these things would not come in waves.
00:52:20.360 The point is that the woke will continue to be with us.
00:52:23.380 They will be shoved in our face.
00:52:25.340 Again, I find it funny.
00:52:27.160 He made this video about how the woke is being put away right after he had just made a video about how Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was relabeling the entire subway system in London with all these woke propaganda names.
00:52:43.520 So the woke's being put away.
00:52:45.160 But also, here's my video just before that, explaining actually that the woke is still here and actually it's being forced on everything.
00:52:52.200 I don't really understand how those two things can jive, but I'm still confident in my ability to secure a cigar from AA.
00:53:00.060 I'm pretty sure that the woke will stay right where it is.
00:53:03.640 Creeper Weirdo says, have you tried peace talks with the bugs?
00:53:06.820 Yes, that is absolutely the plan of the left.
00:53:10.920 Peace and My Time with the Bugs is certainly what they're looking for.
00:53:16.760 Joff here says, are you familiar with St. John Strickland's argument from his book's podcast that, or sorry, Friar, not St.
00:53:24.440 John Strickland's argument from his book's podcast that Western culture went wrong in the shift from a culture of paradise to culture of utopia prior to schism.
00:53:34.220 I can't say that I have.
00:53:35.600 That's interesting.
00:53:36.620 I'd be interested to see kind of how that's approached.
00:53:41.180 I mean, I can just guess from the verbiage there that we shifted to the idea that we needed to go ahead and become a utopia, but I'd have to look more into that.
00:53:53.700 Joshua Beebe says, a person should be required to be the instrument of force before you can direct it with a vote.
00:54:01.740 You do not ask of others what you cannot do for yourself.
00:54:05.280 That is leadership.
00:54:06.120 Yeah, and that's kind of the entire point, right, is when, you know, of course we can go ahead and get people to support leaders who will go for endless wars because you don't have to fight them, right?
00:54:15.620 The military is something you, the United States military is now a completely mercenary force.
00:54:21.000 No one is being drafted into it, and most of the people who are part of the military are part of, like, these generational military families who are sectioned off in bases far away from the rest of society.
00:54:33.800 They rarely interact.
00:54:34.820 You know, you knew everyone either had fought in World War II or had lost a brother or a father or someone that they care deeply about.
00:54:43.560 Same thing with Vietnam.
00:54:44.980 Wars used to be a civilizational cost.
00:54:47.420 Now that's not the case.
00:54:48.860 And so it's very easy to convince people to go ahead and vote for people who are going to continuously deploy the military, use it, because they're not ever going to have to pay the cost for it.
00:54:58.800 I think that that is just the argument being made in Starship Troopers.
00:55:02.060 I think that they are certainly the argument being made by Heinlein, even if it's not entirely the argument that's being portrayed by Vanderhoeven in the movie.
00:55:10.240 But, yeah, I think that that is exactly right.
00:55:12.340 And then Trey50Daniel says, what's funny is that this whole discussion kicked off because a popular game, Helldivers 2, that is like Starship Troopers, the game, the lefty gamers were mad that gamers like right-wing aesthetics.
00:55:29.980 Yeah, and so often the case, right, a piece of entertainment that was supposed to, is not supposed to be enjoyed because it sends the wrong message.
00:55:39.160 You're not allowed, we were told that we're supposed to just let people like things unless those things are right-wing and all of a sudden you're not allowed to like those.
00:55:46.240 I didn't realize that that was the reason that the discussion had gotten back in circulation.
00:55:51.360 It kind of escaped the video game world and became much wider than that.
00:55:55.120 But that is interesting. Thanks for letting me know.
00:55:57.820 All right, guys, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:55:59.520 But as always, thank you for coming by.
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00:56:23.760 Thanks for watching, guys, and as always, I'll talk to you next time.