The Auron MacIntyre Show - Return of the Strong Gods ｜ 1⧸19⧸24

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00:00:30.120 Hey, everybody. How's it going?

00:00:31.560 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.240 My name is Oren McIntyre.

00:00:36.280 So, before we dive into the stream today, I just want to let you know,

00:00:40.400 my book, my first book, is coming out here in a little bit,

00:00:44.800 and it's already available for pre-order.

00:00:47.980 The response has been amazing.

00:00:49.640 I just posted about it yesterday,

00:00:51.400 and it's already sitting in number one on one of the Amazon hot new books lists.

00:00:58.140 So, the response has been wild.

00:01:00.920 I know a number of you guys have been watching this channel since it had just a few hundred subs.

00:01:06.900 I recognize so many of you who have been supporting my work, reading my work over at my sub stack on the Total State.

00:01:13.680 When I was working on the different book chapters and everything there, it's been a long road.

00:01:18.620 This has been an amazing ride.

00:01:21.620 I can't even really explain how all this happened, but it's been incredible.

00:01:28.240 And the support that the audience has given me, the support that you guys have given me,

00:01:33.780 the way you come by, you interact, you're super chatting, you're talking in the comments while we live stream and everything.

00:01:40.700 All the different people I've interviewed, all the different people who have helped me along the way.

00:01:44.580 It's just been an incredible journey, and I'm just blown away by the opportunity,

00:01:50.880 the fact that I get to do this for a living now.

00:01:54.160 It's wild.

00:01:55.740 And so, I just want to say thank you first to everybody who's just been in the audience,

00:02:01.580 who's been supporting me, who's been along for this ride.

00:02:04.180 It's been incredible.

00:02:05.820 And I also want to say just thank you to everybody who's already pre-ordered this book.

00:02:11.460 It's amazing.

00:02:12.640 And I just wanted to say it's out now for pre-order.

00:02:16.500 I've got a link down below in the description if you want to go ahead and do so.

00:02:20.200 It's going to be a little while that everything's going to print now.

00:02:23.440 But final copies are in.

00:02:25.660 All the gears are in motion.

00:02:28.180 So, if you want to do that, the link to do that is down below.

00:02:31.580 But I just appreciate your support, and it's been amazing.

00:02:35.860 So, that said, I'm not here today to talk about my book.

00:02:40.520 I'm here to talk to you guys about another book that I read this year.

00:02:45.480 It was on my suggested reading list for 2023.

00:02:49.800 I do one of these suggested reading lists at the end of every year to give you an idea of

00:02:54.260 kind of what I've been looking at, what's been impacting my thought, the way that I've

00:02:58.780 looked at the world, and suggest some things that you might want to check out if you want

00:03:02.360 to understand where some of my insights have been coming from.

00:03:06.020 And one book that I read was The Return of the Strong Gods by a guy named R.R.

00:03:16.540 Reno.

00:03:17.000 He's an author, and he's the editor over at First Things Magazine.

00:03:21.040 Many of you guys are probably familiar with First Things.

00:03:24.100 It's a famous Catholic publication.

00:03:27.700 They do a lot of interesting work.

00:03:29.260 They have a lot of interesting writers on there.

00:03:31.240 Yes, there's traditional Catholics, but they also have even anons like Lomaz, who wrote

00:03:36.040 an amazing piece about the Longhouse over there.

00:03:38.340 Got a lot of people worked up.

00:03:39.660 They couldn't believe that a Catholic magazine had run that piece, but it was a very good

00:03:43.800 piece, and Lomaz is a very thoughtful guy.

00:03:46.560 And so, I'm glad to see that they are willing to branch out and publish interesting people

00:03:52.400 on that website.

00:03:54.180 But R.R.

00:03:54.720 Reno is the manager or the editor over there, and he wrote this book, Return of the Strong

00:04:01.800 Gods.

00:04:02.340 And it's a very interesting book.

00:04:03.800 It goes some very interesting places.

00:04:06.420 I don't think it gives a satisfying conclusion.

00:04:09.000 We'll talk about that as we talk about the book, but it sets a really powerful frame that

00:04:14.060 I think is worth thinking about as we look at the year ahead, because I think if there's

00:04:19.860 one thing that's going to be true about the year ahead, it's that we're going to see the

00:04:25.340 return of the strong gods.

00:04:27.200 The beginning of that has already been set in motion, and I think that those forces are

00:04:32.260 going to become more and more powerful in our world, in our culture, in our politics,

00:04:39.640 everything around us.

00:04:40.780 So, I want to talk about this book because I think it has some good insights.

00:04:43.940 It has maybe some unsatisfying conclusions, and I want to talk about those and how we

00:04:51.080 can look at those differently.

00:04:53.080 So, looking at the return of the strong gods, what's he talking about?

00:04:58.440 Well, Reno starts the book talking about the post-war consensus, post-World War II consensus.

00:05:05.520 And he says, after this time of strong men, totalitarian governing bodies, there is this

00:05:13.300 response, especially among Western liberal democracies, to try to avoid anything that could

00:05:20.160 return us to the kind of mid-century German mindset.

00:05:25.340 We didn't want to be in a place where authoritarian regimes would rise up.

00:05:29.500 Now, this is interesting because, of course, the Soviet Union was one of these regimes, and

00:05:34.220 it gave birth to many other communist dictatorships inside its sphere of control.

00:05:40.180 But particularly in the West, we were looking to avoid a return to this kind of leadership.

00:05:47.220 And so, in order to do that, we saw our leaders invest pretty heavily in the ideas of the open

00:05:53.580 society, Karl Popper's open society.

00:05:56.440 We needed to get rid of hard boundaries, grounded identities, the kind of things that gave us

00:06:06.860 an idea of transcendent truth, that it stirred men's passions and men's loyalties, the kinds

00:06:12.960 of things that build authority and hierarchies.

00:06:15.900 This is the kind of stuff that they were worried about.

00:06:19.540 And so, they wanted to make sure that we could kind of banish those feelings.

00:06:23.320 We could put them in the closet.

00:06:24.700 We could avoid any connections that would drive people in this manner.

00:06:31.140 There's a real hesitancy to embrace any of those.

00:06:35.120 In fact, it wasn't just a hesitancy.

00:06:36.940 It was a specific effort to try to dissolve those kind of things, to put the strong gods

00:06:43.700 in a closet, and to usher in weaker tides that would allow us to operate and trade and have

00:06:52.400 a multicultural society, have an open society where anyone could be involved, anyone could

00:06:59.520 kind of plug themselves in.

00:07:01.400 Nothing that drew any hard lines, any hard boundaries.

00:07:05.100 And so, we saw the ushering in of these weak gods, these kind of loose ideologies that

00:07:11.500 were meant to bind people together in a way that still allowed society to function, but

00:07:17.180 didn't create anything that was too exclusionary.

00:07:20.760 And so, we see the ideas, again, of people like Karl Popper, and we also see a lot of stuff

00:07:26.160 from guys like Adorno with the authoritarian personality.

00:07:30.140 And the entire theme of the authoritarian personality is basically like authority, having any kind

00:07:36.040 of hierarchy, any kind of traditional connections to things like, say, Christianity or family

00:07:42.120 or community.

00:07:43.660 That's all.

00:07:44.500 Those are all terrible.

00:07:45.640 Those are bad authoritarian tendencies.

00:07:48.600 And so, instead, we have to dissolve those kinds of things.

00:07:52.820 And he spends a good amount of time, Reno does, on kind of explaining the,

00:08:00.140 the open society, probably too much time.

00:08:03.040 The book kind of repeats itself a good bit.

00:08:05.660 He takes a look at it from many different angles.

00:08:08.880 That's useful.

00:08:10.320 There's a lot of value in that because it's probably a phenomenon that's not talked about

00:08:14.820 enough in our society and in our history, even in the conservative or right-wing community.

00:08:21.700 But it's something that definitely took place.

00:08:24.920 However, he sits on that subject for perhaps too long.

00:08:28.760 Maybe because moving on would mean addressing some things that are uncomfortable.

00:08:33.280 We'll talk about that in a second.

00:08:34.820 But he doesn't just attack the left on this.

00:08:37.960 He doesn't just look on the leftist version of this.

00:08:40.560 He also looks at kind of the libertarian right or right-wing kind of conservative version of this.

00:08:47.300 He takes aim at people like Friedrich Hayek and kind of the need to use economics as the way to introduce weak gods.

00:08:57.540 You know, economics will kind of define everything.

00:08:59.660 That's what will bind us together.

00:09:01.400 You know, these loose, contractual, consensual relationships.

00:09:05.900 This, guys, is why libertarianism is wrong.

00:09:08.640 Me and Dave Smith had to go through this last time.

00:09:11.420 I still don't think Dave is convinced, but we'll get him there, that these purely consensual relationships are insufficient to bind a community together.

00:09:22.200 These non-chosen bonds are actually the kinds of things that truly create civilization, whether we like them or not.

00:09:28.480 That's a scary thing for a lot of people to say, but it is the truth.

00:09:32.320 But this was kind of the focus on this from the right.

00:09:35.660 He also talks about Bill Buckley and the problems of Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd and kind of why this version of conservatism, which, again, banished many of those old forms of right-wing thought and ushered in much more of this liberal conservatism and that this was kind of going to be the way forward.

00:09:56.520 We don't want any of this collectivism, right?

00:09:58.800 You hear that from a lot of people today.

00:10:00.680 It's all about individualism versus collectivism.

00:10:04.360 That's not correct.

00:10:05.640 If you're a right-wing individualist, then you might need to think a little more about the right-wing tradition.

00:10:11.200 You might need to read something that was printed before the post-war consensus, before 1945, to get a better understanding of historical, conservative, or traditional thought.

00:10:22.380 Because if that's your understanding of it, then you're probably not well-versed in what kind of came before that moment.

00:10:30.560 So he looks at both left and right and says there was a birth of both of these ideologies, an ideological commitment rather than commitment to older things, stronger gods.

00:10:45.900 We have these weaker gods that came in and attempted to kind of hold society together.

00:10:52.340 And I think this is really interesting because I don't know if he knows this.

00:10:57.220 I mean, Reno seems a relatively well-read guy, so maybe he's read Carl Schmitt.

00:11:01.720 Maybe he hasn't.

00:11:02.940 But if he has it, he should because his arguments mirror a lot of what Carl Schmitt says in concept of the political when he talks about the fact that the left, that liberalism in general, rather not just the left, but also what we think of as classical liberalism today, has attempted to put the friend-enemy distinction in the closet.

00:11:23.940 He talks about it much more in the political sense.

00:11:27.340 Reno talks about it more in the metaphysical and spiritual sense.

00:11:31.080 They're both right.

00:11:32.480 They're both talking about the same phenomenon, that modernity, that especially the liberalism that emerges out of the Enlightenment, is attempting to put away these key aspects of conflict, of identity, of loyalty, of authority, of hierarchy, of meaning and belonging.

00:11:53.020 He wants to put them all away and just kind of reduce us to this bare minimum version of morality and identity that allows us to have maximum openness, which means we can have maximum market transactions.

00:12:07.080 We can have the best kind of trade.

00:12:10.680 We can, you know, we can, this is where multiculturalism comes from, is this ability to no longer be bound to what are these concentric circles of identity that every person used to sit into.

00:12:23.680 Again, I recently had Jonathan Pajot on, and he talks a lot about, and he talked about in our discussion, those nested identities that really are supposed to make us all up, and how desperately the modern world has attempted to shred those in an attempt to remove all conflict.

00:12:42.000 Because as Reno acknowledges, and Schmitt acknowledges, and Pajot acknowledges, and all the classical liberals and progressives who are worried about these identities acknowledge, rightly, is that these identities are the core of conflict.

00:12:56.440 The truth is that these identities do create conflict, and they do create violence.

00:13:03.620 That is just a truth.

00:13:05.340 Because when you no longer have the ability to pretend that you can kind of resolve these identities, you can resolve these metaphysical questions through kind of shared conversation, then often we get these clashes of civilizations.

00:13:21.440 I'm going to talk about that, too, in a second.

00:13:23.680 That's something that I've also been reading a lot about with Sam Huntington.

00:13:27.960 So Reno says that, you know, he's worried about these.

00:13:32.660 So this is kind of where Reno, I think, falls a little short.

00:13:36.040 He acknowledges, okay, that these strong gods are coming back.

00:13:40.520 And he says, look, there's nothing we can do about the strong gods returning.

00:13:45.480 He specifically mentions nationalism and populism.

00:13:48.880 This is kind of his attempt to explain the rise of Donald Trump and the sweeping, you know, nationalism that's coming through many of these countries.

00:13:57.100 We see the election of stronger leaders in many of these areas.

00:14:02.140 We see things like Brexit coming through.

00:14:04.160 Some of them fail to launch.

00:14:05.980 I mean, Trump in many ways failed to launch certain aspects of American nationalism returning.

00:14:11.260 However, he says these things are not going away.

00:14:13.840 And our leaders have worked very hard to keep them in the closet.

00:14:17.180 They worked very hard to suppress them.

00:14:19.380 We've used all kinds of mean names for the kind of people who would acknowledge any of these strong gods.

00:14:25.900 But whether we like it or not, the strong gods are coming back.

00:14:29.320 And so for Reno, he says, look, I don't like this because I kind of believe in the Enlightenment.

00:14:34.940 I believe in liberalism.

00:14:36.640 I kind of want to hold on to many of these aspects of classical liberalism.

00:14:39.980 But these are coming back whether we like it or not.

00:14:42.600 And so we need to think about what that means.

00:14:46.740 I acknowledge, I appreciate him at least being honest about that aspect of reality.

00:14:52.720 Because that is hard enough in itself to kind of agree with, right?

00:14:57.220 That for someone who's dedicated to many of these ideas and understands how dangerous it is to touch any of these wires.

00:15:02.880 I mean, you can feel that these wires are live, just talking about these things, just acknowledging these things, thinking about them.

00:15:10.040 You know that these are dangerous subjects, right?

00:15:12.960 And so he acknowledges the fact that, look, these things are coming back.

00:15:16.260 And so if we don't talk about them, if we don't acknowledge these forces, if the attempts of our leaders to suppress them are going to fail and their attempts are going to be ugly and they're ultimately going to fail.

00:15:30.300 And if no one who has a positive vision for what to do with these metaphysical truths, these transcendent and powerful forces, if no one who has a positive vision harnesses these and guides them in a positive direction, they will come in terrible and ugly forms.

00:15:53.140 And they will do terrible and ugly things.

00:15:56.500 And I think he's right about that.

00:15:58.220 I think that is something that the right needs to think a lot about.

00:16:02.740 I know we're never going to get the Republicans to deal with this.

00:16:05.500 I know the GOP is never going to deal with this.

00:16:07.660 But it's something that those of us who are on the right and attempting to form something new need to think about.

00:16:14.240 Because if we don't think about it now, we don't talk about it now, then when it does bubble up, when it does become true, it will become true in the hands of people who have terrible designs for it.

00:16:25.280 And so it's very important to think about what the return of the strong gods mean for us in the near future.

00:16:33.600 Now, again, for Reno, this is kind of a scary thing.

00:16:39.920 And he does what I think a lot of these Catholic writers do.

00:16:44.080 And I'm not trying to bag on Catholic writers because at least they're trying to address some of this stuff.

00:16:47.840 You don't see a lot of evangelical writers trying to address that, though that's not as true now.

00:16:52.580 You see kind of the Christian nationalism movement attempting to address these things.

00:16:57.720 So credit to them.

00:16:58.580 I have my own problems with some of that strategy.

00:17:01.340 But but it is at least a group of people who are taking this problem seriously.

00:17:06.020 They recognize that, you know, that these forces are returning and we can kind of deal with that or not.

00:17:14.720 But if we don't, then then it's going to be handed over to bad people.

00:17:18.340 So if we can focus it and channel it into something like Christianity, that's important.

00:17:24.200 And that is ultimately kind of where Reno goes.

00:17:26.860 He says, you know, we need to return to virtue and we need to return to the church.

00:17:31.140 And these are the things that are going to kind of bind us together.

00:17:34.100 And those things are true. 0.97

00:17:35.280 I agree with that stuff.

00:17:36.560 But it's very clearly avoiding the most dangerous parts of this topic.

00:17:41.700 It's definitely it's definitely a half measure at best at looking about kind of what this means.

00:17:49.860 So like I hinted at, I also want to compare this to another book that I have been reading a lot recently, which is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations.

00:18:00.600 Now, many of you probably already know this, but for those who don't, Samuel Huntington was a professor, I think it was at Harvard, but he was the teacher of many critical people, including Francis Fukuyama, who had kind of the end of history idea.

00:18:18.360 So he wrote the book about the end of history, the essay, and then the book.

00:18:20.960 And same thing, Sam Huntington wrote an essay of Clash of Civilization, which became a book.

00:18:24.960 And these are like two competing novels for Francis Fukuyama was kind of betting on the kind of neoliberal vision that, you know, liberal democracy was going to conquer the world.

00:18:38.620 Capitalism is going to conquer the world.

00:18:40.640 This is the end of history because we've answered all of the political questions.

00:18:44.440 We've answered all the economic questions, all the serious questions about how to organize society and understand social organization have already been answered.

00:18:53.680 And so history is over.

00:18:55.360 And from there, it's just kind of making some tweaks and figuring some things out.

00:19:00.540 Fukuyama apparently had a less cartoonish version of this in the original book.

00:19:04.840 I've only read the updates to it, and apparently he's only become more cartoonish.

00:19:09.020 He's kind of everything.

00:19:10.040 Francis Fukuyama feels a lot like Marx or Engels.

00:19:14.200 You know, it's one of those guys where I'm told, oh, well, no, they don't really, you know, their arguments are much more nuanced.

00:19:20.000 You've got to just read the text and someone, you know, will show me quotes of those people and I'll read them and I'll say, no, that's kind of exactly what I expected.

00:19:28.220 That's pretty much exactly what I believed.

00:19:30.840 And Fukuyama is one of those people.

00:19:32.180 Every time someone tells me, no, he's far more nuanced.

00:19:34.900 There's much more to it than I read his stuff.

00:19:37.460 And I'm like, not so much, actually.

00:19:40.200 But anyway, the point is, Fukuyama had this idea of the end of history.

00:19:46.640 And the end of history was, again, the idea that we had solved all of these problems.

00:19:51.700 We had arrived at all the logical conclusions when it comes to experimenting with human organization.

00:19:57.380 Liberal, Western liberal democracy was going to reign supreme.

00:20:00.560 Capitalism was going to reign supreme.

00:20:02.160 You know, the kind of global hegemonic empire that was built on top of those things is going to continue to kind of reign in perpetuity.

00:20:11.420 And it's really about working about the kinks here. 0.93

00:20:14.180 Samuel Huntsman thought something very different.

00:20:16.660 He said, actually, what we're looking at, and he wrote this, you know, again, to his credit, and he wrote this in 1995.

00:20:23.680 Really very close to the fall of the Soviet Union, only a few years after.

00:20:30.040 We don't think about that much anymore.

00:20:31.520 But it's a sea change in the way that you understand international relations.

00:20:36.120 And this became, this kind of became the way that he saw what the post-Cold War world was going to look like.

00:20:45.420 And he said, a lot of people, you know, are doing the Francis Fukuyama thing.

00:20:48.480 They think, oh, well, the United States has won, and capitalism now reigns supreme, and democracy reigns supreme.

00:20:54.380 But he says, actually, what we're going to see is a shift away from the Western liberal model.

00:21:00.020 We're actually going to see a shift away from Western liberal democracy.

00:21:04.320 And instead, we're going to see people revert back to civilizational blocks.

00:21:10.060 So rather than have this one, this bipolar world turn into this unipolar, hegemonic, America-controlled kind of global state,

00:21:21.020 instead, we're going to see a return to these civilizational blocks.

00:21:24.580 Now, it looked like for a long time, Francis Fukuyama was going to be right.

00:21:29.040 It looked like he was in the lead there, right?

00:21:30.960 Kind of the global American empire reigns supreme, and it didn't seem like anyone could kind of destroy this juggernaut.

00:21:38.100 However, as we've seen over the last few years, actually, that may not be the case.

00:21:43.120 And it's looking more and more like Huntington was right.

00:21:46.620 And what we saw was just kind of a decade or two of momentum off the victory over the Soviet Union

00:21:53.080 that would eventually lead to this global American empire's decline.

00:21:58.040 And as the decline occurs, we start to see those civilizational blocks arise.

00:22:03.120 Now, for Huntington, the important part of this was really before it looked like modernization and westernization had to be the same thing.

00:22:15.280 In order for a state to move out of the third world and into the first world, for it to kind of modernize it all, 0.77

00:22:22.140 it had to bring in all of these aspects of Americanism and Western identity.

00:22:27.120 Western identity, it had to homogenize, it had to do all that globalization.

00:22:32.940 However, he saw the cracks starting to form in that even back in 1995.

00:22:37.160 And he said, yes, while many, many of these states are superficially tying themselves to the global American empire,

00:22:44.640 you can start to see their desire to modernize, but make their modernization different from America,

00:22:51.740 to find a way to kind of bring themselves into the current paradigm technologically.

00:22:57.860 And, you know, with all the social advancements in certain areas, but still retain their identity, their culture,

00:23:05.920 and specifically, in his mind, religion.

00:23:08.420 For Huntington, religion is the core.

00:23:11.000 And that doesn't mean he doesn't acknowledge that, you know, race, ethnos, language, you know, geography,

00:23:17.420 all of these things are key to the formation of identity and nation states.

00:23:21.500 However, he acknowledges that perhaps the nation state is not going to be the primary thing that's going to define the geopolitical landscape.

00:23:32.760 But these collections, the nation state might be too small.

00:23:36.400 We're going to have these civilizational blocks and that a nation state will sit at the center of it.

00:23:41.180 You might have one or two lead nation states inside the civilizational block,

00:23:45.540 but their kind of sphere of influence will be more along religious lines.

00:23:50.740 That will be the thing that kind of allows the maximal social organization across national borders,

00:23:57.680 but is still smaller than a global control of an area.

00:24:02.520 And so he looks at things like kind of the Western block, the Orthodox block, the Muslim block, the cynic, kind of the Chinese block. 0.66

00:24:12.320 And so like all of these different blocks that are built around kind of religious and cultural identities rather than having kind of this end of history model.

00:24:23.380 And during this, he says, okay, the really important thing to understand is that we are going to see the disillusion of these kind of purely ideological identities.

00:24:37.860 You know, he said basically in the Cold War area, we have the communist dictator model, right?

00:24:50.820 We kind of had that, the Soviet Union model, that ideology, and then we had the capitalist democratic model.

00:25:00.160 And those economic ideologies replaced what had been for a very long time the more traditional forms of identity that had existed for human beings.

00:25:11.880 We did not align human organization along purely ideological lines until very recently.

00:25:21.220 And once those two major powers kind of stopped being these two poles in geopolitics, stopping these two poles in international relations,

00:25:31.500 it opened up the opportunity for older identities to emerge.

00:25:34.820 You could still have certain capitalist frameworks or democratic frameworks.

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00:25:55.580 Forget it.

00:25:56.140 She complained about her sunburn the whole trip.

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00:26:05.360 Deal so good, everyone approves.

00:26:07.960 Only at HomeSense.

00:26:09.920 But you would see the emergence of different identities, and those would start to change those frameworks in a very particular way.

00:26:17.080 And we can see that, of course, with like the communist adoption of many parts of the market economy or the way that, you know,

00:26:23.840 something like Hungary has adopted a far less liberal democratic model, even though it's probably holding on to many of kind of the more capitalist aspects of certain things.

00:26:35.300 There's also, you know, they're not afraid of certain social controls.

00:26:38.260 And so we're seeing a more hybrid versions of this, and they're focused on what most nations used to be focused on, what peoples and social organizations used to be focused on, which was the betterment of the people under them.

00:26:53.200 Rather than saying, our identity is ideological, we are capitalism, or we are democracy, or we are communism, or we are authoritarianism.

00:27:03.240 And instead, they said, okay, well, here's a group of people, and here's kind of the way that they live their lives.

00:27:09.180 What's best for them?

00:27:10.560 You know, what works for them?

00:27:11.900 And let's be frank, what benefits their leaders, right?

00:27:14.440 The elites tied to them are the ones who are really making those decisions.

00:27:19.420 And so Huntington expected a fracturing along these civilizational lines.

00:27:25.180 And he said, the question of who are we is going to be the most important question.

00:27:30.400 Who are we, right?

00:27:31.780 He said, the civilizations that are ready to answer that question are the ones that are kind of going to succeed, are going to be able to move forward into the next century.

00:27:43.900 And so, who are we becomes a really important question.

00:27:49.300 Now, my buddies Daryl Cooper and Lafayette Lee released a very interesting dialogue on I Am 1776 yesterday.

00:27:58.540 And the piece was talking about American ethnogenesis.

00:28:01.520 And the fact that America had failed at ethnogenesis multiple times, though it had approached that at several moments until key things like kind of the Hart-Celler Act broke it back apart.

00:28:16.380 And they kind of addressed the topic of whether or not America could kind of get into this again, could once again attempt to forge an ethnos.

00:28:28.400 Now, people get really weird around that word because most people don't have any understanding of its, you know, historical significance.

00:28:37.360 People just think in kind of crude racial terms at the moment, which is not particularly helpful.

00:28:44.480 Not that those things don't have a certain level of salience, unfortunately, especially in our current society.

00:28:50.860 But, you know, they don't understand kind of what an ethnogenesis would mean for the United States.

00:28:58.960 The United States took many different European ethnos, excuse me, during its time and was working to forge them into one particular American version of that.

00:29:12.400 And succeeded and succeeded in some ways, but maybe not in others.

00:29:18.040 Part of the problem was probably that America grew too quickly, just territorially.

00:29:22.580 And so there was never one way of life that bound the country together for very long.

00:29:28.760 That's an issue that we might get into.

00:29:31.120 I'm going to have Daryl Cooper on next week.

00:29:33.460 He's been on the show before he's coming back next week.

00:29:36.560 And we're going to talk about that some along with some very other interesting topics.

00:29:41.680 So I'm going to get kind of more into that.

00:29:44.100 But this is definitely what we talk about when we're talking about the return of the strong gods, because America needs to have something that allows it to understand itself.

00:29:54.660 The American people do.

00:29:56.220 I mean, part of that is simply stopping the flow of new people.

00:29:58.960 You can't become one people until you stop the flow of new people.

00:30:03.940 That's something that America just has to do.

00:30:05.760 But another part of it might just be the size of America.

00:30:08.280 And this might be something that occurs regionally.

00:30:11.140 It might be America as a civilizational block is better formed out of many culturally Christian sub-ethnos that kind of form inside an America that breaks itself in some certain ways. 0.89

00:30:26.460 You know, a more extreme version of federalism.

00:30:28.600 I'm not sure how that's going to work out.

00:30:30.500 But again, we might get into that with Daryl next week.

00:30:33.140 The point here is to say that these strong gods are very difficult.

00:30:39.920 You know, they are tumultuous for a reason.

00:30:42.560 People were scared of them for a reason, rightly so, because they are the things that move men's passions and animate them to kind of give of themselves.

00:30:52.380 And this is kind of the reason that you look at the American military and they can't get anyone to recruit anymore because they've gotten rid of all the strong gods, right?

00:31:01.180 We kind of coasted by on a certain level of general patriotism for a long time.

00:31:06.920 But the American government, the regime has made it very clear that it's not a big fan of many of the people who traditionally signed up for the military.

00:31:16.200 A lot of the guys from Texas and Appalachia who made up the kind of front line, the combat readiness of the United States are no longer welcome.

00:31:24.700 And they can't get those guys to come back after kind of ripping that mask off and showing their face.

00:31:28.640 And that's a real problem, right?

00:31:30.140 You need those strong gods or what's left of those strong gods.

00:31:33.280 We had them on life support originally when it came to try to kind of keep the American military going.

00:31:41.020 But it's not working anymore, right?

00:31:42.660 And this is going to be more and more of a problem for the regime that's terrified of these forces, but simultaneously needs them.

00:31:50.480 But it doesn't understand that it needs them.

00:31:52.400 It's still so scared.

00:31:53.500 It knows it needs some aspect of what they used to produce, but it doesn't know how to get them anymore.

00:31:58.820 The lions are gone.

00:32:00.160 They've driven the lions away.

00:32:01.660 The lions are no longer willing to protect the foxes and their empire anymore.

00:32:07.080 And they don't know how to get them back because they fundamentally don't understand lions.

00:32:10.840 They can't think like lions.

00:32:12.240 In fact, they are repulsed by the very existence of lions, even though they know to some level they need them.

00:32:17.940 They just want to be able to say, go arrest that guy or go fight that war.

00:32:21.320 And they just want to be able to do that in perpetuity.

00:32:23.760 And they never want to think about what those people need, what's good for them.

00:32:27.160 In fact, they want to spit on them and they want to spurn them for a very long time.

00:32:33.320 And so this is an issue that's not going away.

00:32:36.720 It's not getting any less important.

00:32:39.040 And like I said, we're going to talk a little more, a little bit more about it next week with Daryl Cooper.

00:32:45.500 But I just wanted to bring these ideas forward because I think, like I said, R.R. Reno, while the book does not really take us to solutions.

00:32:55.980 Again, I feel like books like his and Patrick Deneen's newest one, Regime Change, both of them have a similar problem in that their frames address serious problems and they bring important insights.

00:33:08.780 But they're not willing to really look at anything that is a significant change.

00:33:13.920 There's no real change in any of these books.

00:33:16.600 There's no real attempt to address the strong gods return in any of these books.

00:33:20.520 It's simply acknowledgment that these forces are kind of sitting at the edge of what's going on, of the popular consciousness right now, and that they will reenter at some point.

00:33:31.440 And really, they're books that are just acknowledgments that we're just not going to talk about them, I fear.

00:33:37.180 This is, again, the problem of a civilization that is terrified of truth, is so dedicated to the removal of truth that it can't discuss anything of value because that means those things will simply reenter the public consciousness with no readiness, with no preparation, with no understanding.

00:33:59.820 And when those forces are truly unleashed, things will get wild.

00:34:04.680 Now, I understand why the left can't interact with these things, because the left's entire existence, I mean, the entire program of the left at this point is destroying every aspect of the strong gods, right?

00:34:14.860 The gods must be so weak, the forces that compel men, that give people their identity, must be so weak that you can change it at a moment's notice.

00:34:24.140 You can go from a man to a woman, you know, you can dye your hair and get a haircut and become polyamorous and kind of completely divest yourself from any strong ties, any real notion of who you are and what you should fight for and what you should be constrained by.

00:34:42.280 And what has a call to be, you know, to make you kind of compel you to certain behaviors.

00:34:49.260 Now, what's interesting, and Reno points this out, and he's right to do so, is that even though the left have worked really hard to create these weak gods, of course, they still have gods, right?

00:34:58.480 They're still tied to these forces.

00:35:00.880 And guys, obviously, Christ is king, you know, understand the metaphor here.

00:35:04.600 But these, you know, these different forces still exist for the left, and they still demand kind of sacrifice on their behalf.

00:35:15.620 And so while the left has attempted to make these gods weak, in many ways, they still made themselves subject to them and completely with a great lack of awareness on kind of what's happening there.

00:35:27.860 And so I guess I want to wrap this up by saying, we're going to need to talk about this stuff.

00:35:35.140 This stuff matters.

00:35:36.360 The return of the strong gods is happening.

00:35:39.220 And the right needs a story on this.

00:35:42.280 And it needs a story that is multifaceted.

00:35:45.180 I know many people have attempted to address this, and I don't have a perfect answer for this yet.

00:35:50.200 I'm working on it for sure.

00:35:52.500 This is something I think a lot about.

00:35:53.860 But it's very clear that the people who have attempted to address on the right have done it in a very coarse and blunt way.

00:36:01.540 And in many ways, that's because they had to, I guess.

00:36:05.020 There wasn't a lot of other option.

00:36:07.040 But I think there needs to be more to this.

00:36:10.420 The nested reality of authority and hierarchy and identity and these other forces that are going to reenter,

00:36:18.420 that we have to understand them at multiple levels, as I think Peugeot was talking about.

00:36:23.040 And we have to get more sophisticated in that understanding as we do so.

00:36:27.540 Because if you just use them for like kind of as coarse, blunt instrument in politics, I think then we just look like leftists.

00:36:34.880 Right.

00:36:35.400 And not because, oh, the leftists do identity politics.

00:36:39.200 Not that.

00:36:40.020 But we have this kind of low resolution and cheap understanding of it.

00:36:46.540 And the forces that we're talking about are things that are higher and more powerful.

00:36:53.080 And we should be treating them with that reverence and understanding.

00:36:56.460 And we should be putting them beyond the political in the way that makes them actually civilization sustaining.

00:37:04.520 That gives them true vitality.

00:37:06.680 The reason these things are powerful is because they are eternal.

00:37:09.860 Because they are transcendent.

00:37:12.760 Because they grant us access to the chain of being and something that is outside of ourselves.

00:37:19.540 And if we just use them as kind of blunt political instruments, then we don't do ourselves justice.

00:37:27.580 And I think ultimately we fail in the project of building something that makes us worthy of guiding civilization in a better direction.

00:37:38.180 All right, guys.

00:37:38.740 So that's kind of what I had to say about that.

00:37:40.700 But, again, if you want to go ahead and check out R.R. Reno's book, I do recommend it, even though, like I said, it does come up short a little bit.

00:37:49.880 It was on my recommended reading list.

00:37:51.600 And I certainly recommend Samuel Humphrey's Clash of Civilizations.

00:37:56.640 It's always interesting when you read two books really close to each other and you find kind of that shared overlap, lapping language and understanding of a problem.

00:38:04.880 Even though they were written several decades apart, I always find that interesting.

00:38:09.640 I think that that gives you a look at things from different angles.

00:38:13.720 Again, if you kind of read this in tandem also with Carl Schmitt, you get the metaphysical and the political next to each other, which I think is a really interesting way to view this.

00:38:25.100 All right.

00:38:25.320 I'm going to switch over to the questions of the people here real quick.

00:38:28.160 I've got Adam E. who says, congrats on the book launch.

00:38:35.000 Can't wait to read it.

00:38:36.100 Again, thank you, guys.

00:38:37.080 I really appreciate it.

00:38:38.220 It's been so wild.

00:38:40.920 And I did not imagine just a few years ago being in this position.

00:38:47.440 So having this level of support and everything is just amazing.

00:38:51.760 And I can't thank you guys enough.

00:38:53.120 I wouldn't have been able to do this without you.

00:38:55.760 And I have the best audience.

00:38:57.740 That's there's really all I can say about that.

00:39:00.600 Torin McCabe says, is asking, what does democracy mean existing in your opponent's frame?

00:39:06.320 Like saying Democrats are the real racists.

00:39:09.320 Another possible frame, different democracies for different people.

00:39:12.960 I understand what you say here.

00:39:14.560 Torin is pointing to the fact that I ask, what does democracy mean in this sentence?

00:39:19.380 That's something I post on Twitter.

00:39:21.180 To be fair, I post like, what does this thing mean?

00:39:24.540 Any specific words when it's obvious?

00:39:26.280 What I'm pointing out when I point that out to people is actually I'm actually attempting to break that frame because what I'm trying to say is obviously the word we're using here has lost all meaning.

00:39:36.940 It has become a magical word.

00:39:38.780 And so I want you to think about what that word is being filled with.

00:39:43.560 That word has become a shibboleth.

00:39:45.340 It's been imbued with certain meaning.

00:39:47.600 What meaning is that?

00:39:49.200 Right.

00:39:49.440 I'm certainly not asking people to think more about democracy or to support democracy.

00:39:55.040 And I'm not sure that different democracies for different peoples really communicates that democracy is not a universal solution.

00:40:05.520 That's actually kind of the point here.

00:40:07.020 History is not over.

00:40:08.480 Right.

00:40:08.780 These questions are still ongoing.

00:40:11.300 Different peoples have different social organizations and forms of government for a reason.

00:40:15.720 I agree with Joseph de Maester about this, that there is a correct form of government, but it is for each people.

00:40:22.720 That's a question that's specific to the people, not to humanity as a whole.

00:40:27.040 And so the question is really just there to mainly break people out of this frame of thinking that democracy is this universal good and this universal word that applies to everyone and instead make it clear that different people actually do want different ways of organizing.

00:40:44.420 And it's OK to ask that question.

00:40:46.960 But thank you for that.

00:40:50.520 Perspicacious Heretic says, to keep a coherent society, do we need an external common enemy like the USSR?

00:40:56.360 It has to unify around or is a positive vision of your own culture enough?

00:41:00.840 And the answer is both.

00:41:03.060 You do.

00:41:04.440 So the concept of the political, you know, the point of the friend enemy distinction is the ability to declare that which is outside other, that which the body politic can be unified against.

00:41:18.840 And so every civilization, whether we like it or not, does need an external common enemy.

00:41:27.320 That's something that people aren't going to like to hear, but tough.

00:41:30.000 We're not here to tell people what they want to hear.

00:41:31.960 We're just going to tell them the truth.

00:41:33.440 And so I think that's true.

00:41:34.380 That doesn't mean you need to go out and manufacture one.

00:41:36.660 I think if we were more honest and understood our situation a little more, we would find plenty.

00:41:44.340 We don't have a dearth of enemies.

00:41:46.940 That's not really the issue.

00:41:49.860 That said, you also need a positive vision.

00:41:52.120 You need to understand who you are to understand who even opposes that.

00:41:56.680 And so you need to have a positive vision, a moral vision that unifies you towards a common good.

00:42:03.520 You cannot practice virtue.

00:42:04.860 You cannot become more virtuous until you have a shared language and understanding of what is best inside your community and what that community is and how you can work towards the betterment of it.

00:42:15.280 And so that will naturally bring you to conclude that certain kind of external common enemies exist.

00:42:24.200 But I think you first need a vision of who you are.

00:42:27.300 I don't think that a common enemy is enough.

00:42:29.900 And if you have any doubt about that, look at the right now.

00:42:33.020 Right.

00:42:33.280 I think we know we have a common enemy.

00:42:35.220 If nothing else, I mean, we may have different degrees of how much they're the enemy.

00:42:39.580 But I think, you know, the conservative or right as it stands now is really just a collection of people who don't like the left.

00:42:47.380 And that's not enough to actually create a community.

00:42:49.820 We've seen that multiple times.

00:42:51.960 And so I think that you do need a more substantive version of that if you're going to stand together and have a coherent society.

00:42:59.940 But the answer is you certainly need both if, you know, you're going to have one.

00:43:03.600 But I think that the former will arise very easily, especially after you have the latter.

00:43:13.820 Templer, sorry, I know there's some way to pronounce that and I'll get it wrong probably forever.

00:43:18.700 But he says, personally, I think that I think connecting the atomized sensitive young man to their heritage,

00:43:24.640 even so far as to look at the pagan gods as real, really ancestor kings whose blood is yours and whose deeds are yours to repeat is a route.

00:43:33.920 I mean, you certainly need to connect people to their history, to their shared values, the shared traditions, folkways, understandings.

00:43:42.100 Religion, of course, is critical to that.

00:43:44.760 It's probably the most critical portion of that.

00:43:47.540 Again, if you want to understand that, I would encourage people to read The Ancient City.

00:43:52.320 It's an amazing book for a lot of reasons.

00:43:54.980 But explaining this is one of them.

00:43:56.840 Does that mean we need to connect ourselves to pagan gods? 0.90

00:43:59.040 No, I don't think so.

00:44:00.300 For most people, Christianity is the history that has bound people together.

00:44:05.060 I know there's a desire in certain corners to say, well, that's where everything went off the rails.

00:44:10.940 Guys, Christianity has been the dominant religion of most of your societies for at least 1,500 years.

00:44:16.740 And so everything that you like about your society, everything about your shared identity is founded inside of it.

00:44:22.580 It's not perfect.

00:44:23.540 Nothing is.

00:44:24.240 You know, paganism failed for, you know, for certain reasons.

00:44:27.700 It gave way to certain things.

00:44:29.260 Christianity has failure points. 0.95

00:44:31.120 It has the areas in which it is weak.

00:44:33.920 It gives birth to certain things.

00:44:35.520 And progressivism is absolutely one of them.

00:44:38.040 But as I think, you know, Spengler correctly pointed out, each civilization has its atheistic mirror to its religion.

00:44:45.240 And he did not exempt pagan religions from this. 0.99

00:44:48.940 He said that they enter into these phases just as regularly as Christianity does.

00:44:53.640 I think it's easy to stare at the current Christian version of that and say, therefore, Christianity is bad or wrong or the problem.

00:45:01.120 But no, that's just it's inverse reflection to your society.

00:45:05.380 I think you've misdiagnosed the problem with your society.

00:45:07.680 If you feel like Christianity is the problem with your society, I think you don't understand cyclical history properly.

00:45:13.720 And I would just encourage you to think on that some more.

00:45:17.220 However, it is certainly true that there are stories from pagan societies or, you know, from ancient societies that are in ways part of our heritage.

00:45:28.400 And there is a lot of value looking at them, understanding that they're not valuable because they're pagan necessarily, but their value because they're part of our heritage.

00:45:35.180 And if that does, you know, if that is part of your tradition, that does draw you towards virtue, that's good.

00:45:42.120 But remember that religion and virtue are lived thing.

00:45:47.560 And unless you're in a community where you can practice these things, they don't that they don't really persist.

00:45:55.160 And so it's nice if you manage to get together and like have that by yourself or something.

00:46:01.280 But but you're not really in a situation where you can build that and turn it into something that you can pass on without that community.

00:46:10.420 And so I would encourage you to find that in your most recent traditions, if possible.

00:46:17.180 So that doesn't mean that there isn't, of course, powerful figures from our past that can inform that as well.

00:46:24.720 Let's see here.

00:46:26.320 Follows up with Christ is still king and the foundation to build on.

00:46:30.660 Of course.

00:46:31.360 Yes, sir.

00:46:31.820 Absolutely correct.

00:46:33.420 Again, there's nothing wrong with looking to those ancient stories.

00:46:37.880 I mean, there's still incredible power to be to be found in them.

00:46:43.020 Those archetypes are real for a reason.

00:46:45.060 They echo through time for a reason.

00:46:47.560 They do touch on the eternal and they're they're recognized for a reason.

00:46:53.260 But but of course, I think Christ is more the fulfillment of those things.

00:46:57.240 And so I think that's important.

00:46:59.720 RCW here says, well, you're great.

00:47:01.180 Well, thank you, man.

00:47:01.900 I very much appreciate it.

00:47:03.520 I'm glad you're around and joined the show.

00:47:05.560 And I really appreciate your guys support.

00:47:08.640 Trey 50 Daniel says, in essence, this can be summed up.

00:47:11.780 You must have a fully formed positive vision of your past, present and future that will benefit a people.

00:47:16.700 Correct?

00:47:17.200 Yes.

00:47:17.900 Yes.

00:47:18.240 Though I would say these are, of course, ongoing projects.

00:47:21.600 Right.

00:47:22.140 It's not just we build this.

00:47:24.280 You know, we build this identity.

00:47:25.700 We build this fully formed positive vision, past, present and future.

00:47:29.400 And then all of this stuff falls into place.

00:47:32.660 I don't think it's that that's the causal flow.

00:47:36.680 We have to start.

00:47:37.920 We have to start thinking about ways of being right.

00:47:41.320 We have to start understanding that our epistemology cannot simply be reason.

00:47:46.920 It cannot simply we cannot simply plan everything out in advance.

00:47:51.980 We can't simply quantify everything and chart it out in the way it would go and then and then follow that plan.

00:47:59.660 Instead, we have to understand that our knowledge, our traditions, these things will be built in the way that we live our lives, in our ways of being.

00:48:08.500 And we have to find more meaningful ways of being.

00:48:10.980 I know that sounds kind of woo woo, but the point is here that there is just a lot of truth to the fact that that there is knowledge and history and tradition wrapped up in the way that you live life.

00:48:27.140 And so these things will arise because we think about them and we reason about them and we we talk about them and share about them.

00:48:33.160 But they'll also be true because we live them out in patterns and those patterns build on each other and they build our identities and they build our traditions and they connect us to the transcendent.

00:48:45.340 And once that kind of right ordered being is created, then I think a lot of the stuff flows far more easily.

00:48:52.820 The problem right now is we are so disaffected.

00:48:56.540 We're so modern.

00:48:57.500 We're so atomized that we don't we can't even think about how this stuff could happen.

00:49:03.700 And that's why LARPing is so important.

00:49:06.960 OK, people who tell you, oh, that's LARPing, that's fake.

00:49:09.720 You're garbage.

00:49:11.420 These people are wrong.

00:49:12.600 Garbage.

00:49:13.540 Do it.

00:49:14.460 Go out and do it.

00:49:16.460 Meet the people.

00:49:17.820 Make friends.

00:49:19.100 Build community.

00:49:20.500 Serve people. 0.95

00:49:21.760 Work out.

00:49:23.220 Practice virtue.

00:49:25.200 Praise God.

00:49:25.960 OK, do these things.

00:49:28.440 Do them.

00:49:29.260 Even if you don't mean them, even if it feels weird, even if it feels disingenuous, do them.

00:49:36.000 Do the things.

00:49:37.700 Take the steps.

00:49:39.360 Be that person.

00:49:40.900 OK, you have to be that person before those things are real.

00:49:46.040 It's not that they're real.

00:49:47.200 It's not that they're fake.

00:49:48.100 It's not that they're a lie.

00:49:49.080 It's simply that you're so cut off from what those things could be that your rational brain

00:49:55.040 cannot address them.

00:49:56.320 Well, guess what?

00:49:57.180 It's never going to start if you don't start.

00:50:00.160 So take the steps, guys.

00:50:01.840 Take the steps.

00:50:02.600 That's the most important advice I can give you.

00:50:06.420 You got you got to you got to clean up your room.

00:50:09.440 Jordan Peterson's right about that.

00:50:11.360 Once you start doing those things, once you start living those truths, they will become

00:50:15.820 more real to you.

00:50:16.860 And that sounds like garbage until you do it.

00:50:19.320 And then you realize it's absolutely correct.

00:50:23.060 All right, guys, I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up here.

00:50:25.660 Thank you, everyone, for coming by.

00:50:27.720 It's been great talking to you.

00:50:29.260 Appreciate the audience so much.

00:50:30.900 Again, if you'd like to join and kind of kind of preorder the book, the link to do that

00:50:36.340 is down below in the description.

00:50:38.640 If you'd like to go ahead and subscribe to this channel, make sure that you go ahead and

00:50:43.340 click the subscribe button.

00:50:44.620 And please make sure you click on the notifications, guys.

00:50:46.880 Again, when to go live, if you don't have the notifications on, you don't know.

00:50:49.920 And then you miss the hangout and you don't know that it's fun to listen to these later

00:50:53.780 on.

00:50:54.220 But it's more fun to be part of the conversation.

00:50:56.320 Now, of course, if you'd like to listen to these broadcasts as podcasts, you can go ahead

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00:51:03.280 And when you do, leave the rating, leave the review, give it that five star, guys.

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00:51:10.500 Really appreciate it.

00:51:11.800 Thank you, everybody, once more for coming by and for all the support.

00:51:15.200 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 19, 2024

Return of the Strong Gods ｜ 1⧸19⧸24

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