The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Elements of Civilizational Collapse ｜ Guest： Rudyard Lynch ｜ 11⧸17⧸25

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.040 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.740 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

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00:01:08.160 All right, guys, we obviously have had about a year since my guest was here last.

00:01:15.200 And he made some really important predictions, ones that I think have probably altered somewhat since the events that have occurred, especially around Charlie Kirk and everything that came after his assassination.

00:01:28.020 So I wanted to have him back on to discuss how he thinks our situation has changed.

00:01:34.100 Roger Lynch, thank you so much for coming on, man.

00:01:35.800 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:37.800 It's a real pleasure.

00:01:39.880 Absolutely.

00:01:40.460 Like I said, you're somebody who spends a lot of time, got a very popular YouTube channel discussing how civilizations work and how they come apart.

00:01:48.060 And you're famous for specifically the topic of how they might come apart in a violent conflict.

00:01:53.500 So I wanted to see if you think we're any closer to that, any further away.

00:01:57.280 Have these intervening events changed your mind as to where the country is going?

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00:03:05.320 All right, guys, before we get started, also just want to let you know this is pre-recorded, so we won't be able to answer Super Chats today.

00:03:11.080 Sorry about that.

00:03:12.000 So, Richard, last time you were on, you made a prediction that if Trump was elected, we would see as many as 1,000 political assassinations before May.

00:03:23.400 I think you said you had something writing on that.

00:03:25.580 You may have had to pay that out.

00:03:27.040 But interestingly, while we didn't get the magnitude of what you were talking about, the political assassination we got almost feels like 1,000.

00:03:35.880 It feels like it was incredibly critical, especially to the integrity of the conservative movement as we kind of see the aftermath spinning out from what happened with Charlie Kirk's death.

00:03:47.600 So I guess my first question would be, why do you think we didn't get the level of violence you expected?

00:03:54.340 But why was the violence we got so important?

00:03:57.320 I was demonstratively incorrect, and I'll start with that, and I don't feel bad about that, though.

00:04:06.080 In retrospect, when I look back on it, I think I was making a reasonable calculation.

00:04:11.400 I just turned out to be wrong because I've been trying to figure out what really went wrong, where in the last year it's been quite strange,

00:04:22.600 where it's as if the global system keeps fraying and the elites are making the decision they'd rather have complete social breakdown

00:04:33.440 than try to stop the process to hold more of the pie, if that makes sense,

00:04:39.160 where I think we've seen a progressive breakdown of the society in the last year,

00:04:45.000 and we've seen the mainstream right-wing elites or the boomer cons not really being willing to take a stand here,

00:04:54.520 and also just the centripetal entropy of the system is stopping changes.

00:05:01.060 And it's strange that I go on a lot of these podcasts, and a year is a long time in the Internet's world,

00:05:07.680 but in the grand scheme of history, a year is absolutely nothing.

00:05:11.140 And so because my background's in history, if this happens five years late, that will be a short period of time.

00:05:19.500 But I do still believe the things I said earlier, and I think what's going to happen is the system will inevitably break,

00:05:28.300 and every year we forestall it, the amount of unsolved issues piles up and up.

00:05:34.980 Yeah, I agree that a lot of the things you were pointing to are issues that have simply not been resolved.

00:05:43.980 And if they're not resolved, the pressure must build.

00:05:47.080 So simply because it didn't blow up today doesn't mean it won't.

00:05:50.840 You know, the jack-in-the-box will eventually pop, right?

00:05:53.300 If you guess the wrong crank turn at which it comes out of the box, okay, you were wrong about that.

00:05:59.240 But the truth is eventually the crank will hit the spot where it comes out of the box.

00:06:04.380 And so I think anytime you're making predictions, as you say, especially ones that are based on historical analysis,

00:06:10.660 the tighter you make those predictions, the tighter the timeline is, the harder it is to nail it down.

00:06:15.960 The trends are more observable over time.

00:06:18.660 And interestingly enough, I did not expect the amount of violence you did,

00:06:22.460 but I certainly expected more violence than we got initially, right? 0.98

00:06:25.900 You know, I looked at all of these people saying Trump is a fascist, Trump is Hitler. 0.91

00:06:29.280 This is the rise of the Third Reich. 0.94

00:06:31.080 We have to stop it now.

00:06:32.200 Our democracy is under attack.

00:06:35.620 And I thought, okay, they can't walk this rhetoric back, right?

00:06:38.680 And we already know that the left is violent.

00:06:40.240 We've already seen the summer of love.

00:06:42.720 You know, we know what they're capable of.

00:06:45.300 So if Trump comes back and all this rhetoric is behind his return,

00:06:48.620 clearly they'll have to take some level of action.

00:06:51.840 What was interesting is initially they kind of seemed just blown away, right?

00:06:55.640 Like the left just kind of fell over.

00:06:57.840 They were in turmoil.

00:06:58.920 They had said all the right words.

00:07:00.780 They had made, you know, Trump a scary bad man.

00:07:04.300 But still, they couldn't figure out what to do about the fact that that rhetoric had failed.

00:07:10.680 But it turns out after a few months, especially of Trump winning,

00:07:14.240 getting these different accomplishments, getting the ice raids,

00:07:17.080 and all of a sudden, you know, these kind of things start playing out.

00:07:19.980 Now we start to see the violent left come out.

00:07:22.680 It took a few months of them cooking and kind of, I guess,

00:07:25.300 the stew of Trump's accomplishments to end up in this scenario where they were willing to take action.

00:07:30.960 And it was less organized action on the top-down, you know, Democratic Party,

00:07:36.340 official organs of the left, you know, on that basis.

00:07:41.240 And more, it was kind of this wildcat terrorism, you know, affiliated with ideologies and Antifa,

00:07:48.980 but not getting any direct contact with the leftist elites.

00:07:54.060 So in a way, I think we did see the level of violence I kind of eventually expected,

00:07:59.980 but there was this interesting delay mechanism that had to occur.

00:08:03.760 What do you think about the kind of the time it took for the left to spool up

00:08:06.840 and start to fight back in a violent fashion?

00:08:09.040 I agree with you there.

00:08:11.220 I was surprised at how long it took.

00:08:14.040 And I also assume they dispute this election,

00:08:16.180 where this election was closer than a lot of people think.

00:08:19.840 And maybe if it was a little bit closer,

00:08:22.660 the left would have disputed it because the last two elections were.

00:08:26.720 One of the trends people on the right don't spot that they probably should

00:08:30.480 is the left has seen a severing on a generational basis,

00:08:35.100 where the Zoomer leftists have lost trust with the CNN, NBC leftists, the DNC leftists.

00:08:43.640 And so the Zoomer leftists are getting their news from TikTok, which has no factual basis.

00:08:48.480 And it's crazy to see the rhetoric as well, where

00:08:50.940 last winter there was a social media trend called Cute Winter Boots.

00:08:55.660 And it was saying how you needed to buy Cute Winter Boots to launch terrorism.

00:09:01.420 And this is just the most feminine call for violence ever. 0.96

00:09:04.620 But you also saw the burning of Tesla stations.

00:09:09.600 There was the map of all the Tesla owners so you could hurt and vandalize them.

00:09:13.740 So this was going on.

00:09:16.560 And I go through periodic sort of intellectual obsessions.

00:09:21.160 I have three or four a year.

00:09:22.680 And one of my recent ones has been Nietzsche's Age of the Last Men.

00:09:26.940 And that's the only narrative I can really use to explain why this situation is

00:09:32.760 operating in the way it is.

00:09:35.280 And I could articulate that more if you'd like.

00:09:37.680 But I think it also matters that the average age is 40.

00:09:41.720 I think a population whose average age is 40, and that's historically unprecedented, will 0.99

00:09:48.040 take longer to go to violence than one where the average age is 25, like a pre-industrial

00:09:55.520 society.

00:09:57.000 No, and you're far from the first person to point that out.

00:10:00.020 And I think that's correct, that ultimately having a older and unfit society means you're

00:10:06.540 less likely to get violence.

00:10:07.900 Young men at 20 with nothing to lose are usually a revolutionary cohort.

00:10:13.340 Like they're the ones who go into foxholes.

00:10:15.100 They're the ones that do terrorism. 0.84

00:10:16.580 Whatever kinetic action is going to occur, it's going to come from, you know, young men 1.00

00:10:21.140 being angry at 20 years old and not thinking that they have a future, which we're going

00:10:24.660 to get to here in a minute.

00:10:25.820 Don't worry.

00:10:26.280 Um, but I do think it's interesting also, uh, that, uh, sorry, I lost, you had the, the

00:10:33.380 40 year old, what was your original point as well?

00:10:35.420 I had age of the last man.

00:10:37.220 Do you want me to explain that?

00:10:38.680 Sure.

00:10:39.140 Yeah, we can go into, I actually done an episode on this as well, but it's good to, to refresh,

00:10:43.600 uh, our audience.

00:10:45.060 Yeah.

00:10:45.260 Can you talk a little bit about, uh, what we would now call the bug man, but, uh, what

00:10:49.200 Nietzsche called the last man, the, the man who, for whom little pleasures and, uh, you

00:10:54.000 know, are the real thing that, uh, makes life worth living for Nietzsche's last man was a

00:10:58.920 concept from the late 19th century, and he's one of the authors who's incredibly prophetic.

00:11:05.160 Um, I put him in a similar category to Gustave Lebon, who I think you, you'd really love as

00:11:09.720 a writer, but, um, Nietzsche was a 19th century thinker and he predicted that by the time of the

00:11:17.100 early 21st century, where he said it would take out two centuries to work through this

00:11:21.620 and no one would really understand his teachings before the year 2000 is that the Western world

00:11:28.860 would be consumed by a society that would put envy, complacency, and mediocrity as the

00:11:34.160 ultimate moral goods.

00:11:35.740 And this would destroy sort of the human soul so that the West would be committing suicide

00:11:41.120 where it'd be too weak to live or procreate or survive.

00:11:45.780 And this would create the greatest civilizational crisis in Western history that, uh, he thought

00:11:51.460 would ultimately be defeated.

00:11:53.200 And he sees the age of the last men as sort of transitory time period, not an actual end

00:11:59.400 point of Western civilization, which is good.

00:12:02.100 Um, all of the historic authors who predict this current crisis say, we're going to get

00:12:06.840 through it.

00:12:07.400 At least the ones who are willing to see beyond just, we will have this crisis to what will

00:12:13.400 its consequences be.

00:12:15.140 And, um, well, I can't unsee the last men because I'm constantly comparing this society

00:12:22.120 to historic societies and weird thing about modernity versus pre-modern is there are differences.

00:12:28.580 There's more continuities from the world 2000 years ago to today than almost any modern people

00:12:34.480 think, but there are differences in modern and pre-modern societies.

00:12:38.260 And one of the ones I kept spotting was just the staggering absence of masculinity and leadership

00:12:45.000 today.

00:12:46.280 And, um, if people ask me, Rudyard, why do you think the system's still going to fall?

00:12:50.720 It's because this is a system which has designed itself to be utterly inflexible through bureaucracy

00:12:56.200 with no place for masculine leadership.

00:12:59.360 And it's already barreling towards failure and it is removed all of the mechanisms to redirect.

00:13:05.220 Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth there, you know, that again, one of the stunning things,

00:13:13.160 and, and this is, this is what me think, what, how I, you know, can tell we really are in

00:13:17.660 the age of, of last men here is, uh, there seems to be nothing that will trigger a violent

00:13:23.820 response.

00:13:24.320 Yeah.

00:13:24.680 Like something, nothing seems radical enough, right? 1.00

00:13:27.120 Like someone can steal your kids from you and chop their genitals off. 1.00

00:13:30.520 And there's just no, there seems to be no line and that's stunning. 0.99

00:13:35.460 I mean, again, that's what Nietzsche would have predicted, right?

00:13:37.540 Like it's, it's any kind of conflict is too much.

00:13:40.140 Anything that disrupts your ability to have the, the, the little creature comforts is too

00:13:44.680 much that this is how kind of the, the bug man, the last man lives and dies.

00:13:49.320 And there's nothing worth fighting or dying for.

00:13:51.960 There's nothing worth agitating, uh, you know, nothing worth going out and fighting for to

00:13:56.780 prove a point.

00:13:57.980 And you can tell this because again, so many of these Western nations, no matter how tyrannical

00:14:04.500 their governments get, there's just no, they're there.

00:14:08.080 You'll get a few riots in, uh, in England.

00:14:11.180 You might get one in Ireland.

00:14:12.840 You might get January 6th in America, but ultimately, and Curtis Yarvin has pointed this

00:14:18.000 out in a funny way, the way he frames it is Americans simply aren't virtuous enough to

00:14:21.820 have a revolution anymore.

00:14:22.940 We, we don't, we don't have, you know, the, that quality in us anymore.

00:14:27.200 And he basically plans for that.

00:14:29.120 This is kind of one of the things I don't like about Curtis, even though I think he's

00:14:31.780 probably right in at some level, uh, you know, he, he, his solutions are all based on

00:14:36.640 the idea that we will never have a population capable of that level of violence, that level

00:14:41.620 of vigor, that level of animating spirit again.

00:14:44.500 And while of course I'm not hoping for violence, anybody who looks at history knows there at some

00:14:51.120 point you have, there has to be a line that doesn't get crossed, right?

00:14:53.780 Like there, there has to be something that triggers your desire to defend yourself against

00:14:59.100 existential threats.

00:15:00.340 Uh, and it just seems, especially when you look at what happened with Charlie Kirk, the

00:15:04.320 first thing that everybody ran out and didn't says, nobody react, nobody react, nobody react.

00:15:09.020 Now, in a sense, I get that, right?

00:15:11.400 Like, again, I don't want vigilante violence, but at some level there, you know, there is a healthy

00:15:17.620 level of anger and reaction that would come with something like that.

00:15:21.360 But the, not only could the right not summon any kind of energy on that level, instead of

00:15:27.160 even turning their guns figuratively, turning their governmental power on the left and destroying

00:15:32.580 like left-wing, uh, terrorist organizations, they, they just made a circular firing squad and

00:15:38.260 started sniping at their own conservatives.

00:15:41.420 Yeah.

00:15:41.960 There's a lot of really interesting threads to pull out.

00:15:44.320 I'll, I'll pick a few, but that's a, a rich topic.

00:15:47.720 Um, one of which is Nietzsche said the age of the last man could be brought down by a

00:15:54.420 hundred capable men because the age would produce such weakness and such indecision that it's

00:16:00.840 profoundly weak.

00:16:02.120 And I want to emphasize that.

00:16:03.480 And I'm not black pilled because I spend a lot of time in sort of conservative youth circles.

00:16:09.400 And I think there is genuinely a tremendous amount of capability and willpower there that

00:16:15.500 is being wasted.

00:16:17.140 Um, and, um, when I look at the right, I, I, I just made, um, uh, I just made a video analyzing

00:16:24.380 my thoughts in the woke, right?

00:16:25.600 I know I'm a few months behind it, but inside it, I sort of talk about the anthropology of

00:16:29.440 the modern right.

00:16:30.280 And I give you a few good shout outs in there too.

00:16:32.800 Um, but, um, one of the things I say is that you have ethnic conservatives, book conservatives

00:16:39.040 and internet conservatives.

00:16:40.340 Did you get into conservatism from, um, reading books from the internet or are you from like

00:16:49.280 a conservative hometown where it's a culture you grew up in?

00:16:51.940 And these are wildly different where the internet conservatives have sort of captured the movement

00:16:58.540 online and the internet conservatives have these weird incentive structures where they're

00:17:03.320 always self predating off each other because the contentious stuff is what gets big online.

00:17:09.560 I would, I, this doesn't really fit, but the institutional conservatives, you could classify

00:17:15.020 them as book conservatives.

00:17:15.980 A lot of them are very academic and coastal and they don't have a relation to red America.

00:17:20.660 And then the ethnic conservatives can't get into the positions of power because I think 0.89

00:17:26.200 there is the capability to stop this tyranny.

00:17:29.420 It's just all of the mechanisms of power in our society are bureaucracies and bureaucracies

00:17:36.060 are naturally feed into the left.

00:17:39.900 And so you have to make a leadership structure that's non bureaucratic that could deplace the

00:17:46.720 bureaucracies so we don't end up playing the left's game.

00:17:49.900 And I think that's actually really possible and really sort of powerful because if you

00:17:56.600 make a non bureaucratic leadership structure, it will utterly consume the bureaucracies by

00:18:02.120 just being more competent and more capable.

00:18:06.240 I agree a hundred percent.

00:18:08.080 This is literally a huge part of my argument, which I'm sure you're aware of, but I literally

00:18:12.320 was just making this pitch to some rather important people.

00:18:15.380 And this is critical.

00:18:17.820 We have to address the structural issue here that that the system we are pushing is inherently

00:18:24.400 going to keep us left wing.

00:18:26.180 We can't avoid anything else.

00:18:28.400 So I think that is just so important.

00:18:30.220 And it's extremely difficult because a lot of people can only you totally understand it.

00:18:35.500 But this recency bias, right?

00:18:36.700 Like the way the world works now is the only way the world can work.

00:18:40.080 Like there's just no other time or place we can do this or we've moved beyond the ability

00:18:45.760 to have any other way that we could organize our societies.

00:18:48.220 And so therefore, we're just stuck with Leviathan and you just got to learn how to pilot Leviathan.

00:18:53.360 And there are a lot of people I like who truly believe this.

00:18:56.260 So like it's just based Leviathan.

00:18:57.760 That's all.

00:18:58.100 I mean, ultimately, that's kind of what Sam Francis came to at the end of his, even though

00:19:03.200 he understood how and why this mechanism drives us.

00:19:06.460 He's like, but there's just no way to avoid this.

00:19:08.160 So we've got to figure out how to how to drive this.

00:19:10.780 But I'm 100% with you that because of the way we have structured our institutions, it

00:19:16.180 will select for leftists.

00:19:18.660 It will select for a particular type of manager leader who will have this very hyper feminized 0.99

00:19:25.060 leadership style, will have this really agreeable, dissipated, you know, really psychoanalyzed

00:19:31.400 way to address all of these things, heavily therapeutic society.

00:19:34.560 And until we break out of that, we will just be manufacturing the last man. 0.98

00:19:39.300 We will create C.S.

00:19:40.340 Lewis's men without chess.

00:19:41.600 We're a man without chess factory at this point because the way we structured society.

00:19:45.720 And if you don't change that incentive structure and who gets selected and put into positions

00:19:50.220 of power, then you can't get a circulation of elites that would actually change where we're

00:19:54.700 going.

00:19:55.320 I made a system called Fluffy and Fluffy is a leadership structure where you have three tiers

00:20:02.000 leaders and you basically have competition inside an organization of people who rise to leadership

00:20:08.460 and then their employees choose which leader they want to follow.

00:20:15.200 And so you have internalized competition inside an organization between these private leadership.

00:20:20.120 And so you have competition from the top that leaders who are not effective get axed by the

00:20:26.920 system or they or they they get axed by the system.

00:20:37.340 And you also have competition from below that if you're not productive enough, you get pruned

00:20:42.300 from the system.

00:20:42.980 And so this is based off sort of earlier leadership systems that are non bureaucratic because the

00:20:49.900 thing bureaucracy is missing is leadership and leadership is the ability of the conscious

00:20:54.540 mind to go through something and clean it out.

00:20:58.600 And the reason our society feels so broken is we've totally removed leadership.

00:21:03.260 So staggeringly irrational things occur because it's just unconscious.

00:21:07.680 Yeah, everything is is a call center tree, right?

00:21:12.320 If you've ever experienced when you're when you're calling someone or if you've even worked

00:21:16.160 in a call center, you know, they're they're not actually looking to solve your problem.

00:21:19.660 They're running through a list of solutions that have been set up for them.

00:21:24.780 They have outsourced their entire thinking apparatus.

00:21:27.120 They are in every way, shape or form thinking as a computer.

00:21:31.320 Here is my input.

00:21:32.820 When I get this input, then I give this output.

00:21:35.040 And there is no actual way to work through any problems.

00:21:39.600 You're never really addressing the issue.

00:21:42.580 And that means that if there was not someone ahead of you who laid out the way in which

00:21:46.580 this had to be approached, then you kind of fail.

00:21:49.080 And the problem is that leadership in our society is specifically punished because we are so litigious

00:21:55.080 that any the first thing anyone does when they enter into a managerial structure is basically

00:22:00.120 try to avoid any responsibility.

00:22:02.540 And the way you avoid responsibility is to bring in other managers who are saying you're

00:22:06.340 doing the right thing.

00:22:07.420 So you bring in consultants or you use standard operating procedures or best practices.

00:22:12.460 And then if something goes wrong and your manager, you can say, it's not my fault.

00:22:16.140 I brought in McKinsey.

00:22:17.360 I brought in whoever I, you know, I use the structure.

00:22:20.480 I use, you know, and those things are irrefutable.

00:22:24.280 And so, therefore, you are kind of absolved of any actual liability for mistakes that you

00:22:30.860 make.

00:22:31.900 But this, as important as recognizing that structure is, it does make us ask questions

00:22:40.560 about what happened after Charlie Kirk's death.

00:22:43.200 Because, again, I guess we understand, you know, you have the last men and they're just

00:22:48.660 they're not going to rise to violence or anything against, you know, what happened with Charlie

00:22:52.740 Kirk.

00:22:53.460 But why the breakdown in the conservative movement itself?

00:22:57.160 Why was that the response?

00:22:58.760 Why are we still seeing at this stage different factions of the right using this as an opportunity

00:23:04.200 to snipe at each other rather than go after the left?

00:23:07.140 Charlie Kirk was a real wake-up call where...

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00:23:43.520 Where I sort of knew the internet was that bad because I hear these reverberations too.

00:23:49.280 I also see how bloodthirsty the audience is.

00:23:51.960 But Charlie Kirk really showed that where even moderate leftists,

00:23:57.160 they were okay with it or they openly defended it. 0.57

00:24:05.260 And that makes you see the world very differently than at least half of this nation openly wants you dead.

00:24:13.060 And it's been depressing to look at the last year of the right because sort of the strategic deck we had

00:24:20.400 with this last election was pretty good.

00:24:22.720 Trump had MAGA, you had Elon bringing in the tech guys, and you had the – then you had also the RFK disenchanted Democrats.

00:24:35.580 The problem is that the boomer cons are still fundamentally blue-pilled.

00:24:40.920 They cannot imagine a world where the left does not dominate society because they've lived in that their entire lives.

00:24:48.720 And so when Petal came to the middle, the boomer cons were too complacent and decadent to do anything. 0.99

00:24:55.220 And the issue with the internet right is it's just acidic.

00:25:00.560 And it's kind of disgusting to watch where you look at the Groypers. 1.00

00:25:04.380 And the Groypers have been such an issue for any conservative coalition building because they attack any policies that would work. 1.00

00:25:11.520 They're straw men for the least popular defensible positions, and they're sort of an acid to coalition building.

00:25:19.220 So you have the decadent boomer cons, and you have a lot of acidic internet conservatism.

00:25:25.480 And then you have a total lack of mechanisms of power.

00:25:34.220 And mechanisms of power is a concept I have from – there's a four-volume political history of – history of political power.

00:25:40.800 And a mechanism of power is do we have a consistent institution that allows you to operate over fields over time?

00:25:57.620 I mean, I explain that poorly, but what I tell people is the number one thing that a wealthy patron could do for the conservative movement is just to pay for young, smart conservatives to not starve, that they're not dependent on the leftist managerial system because there's millions of paid Democrats and about 10,000 paid Republicans.

00:26:16.980 And what that means is that if you're a paid Democrat, your entire life is pushing this, and so they amass a significant amount of cultural power.

00:26:26.020 And what we realized was the rights lack of leadership institutions and mechanisms of power meant that even though we had a really good hand with control of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, you didn't have the ability to really enforce change on a long-term basis.

00:26:50.300 So, we just found out that Crooks, the attempted assassin of Donald Trump, was big into, like, furry, online, deviant art stuff.

00:27:07.360 We used they, them, trans pronouns. 0.81

00:27:10.020 Of course, we also know Tyler Robinson was in this furry, gay relationship, trans relationship.

00:27:16.300 And, of course, we've had two churches shot up by trans shooters in the last year.

00:27:26.200 And so, we have this scenario where it's very obvious that there is a pipeline of leftist violence occurring here.

00:27:33.840 To some extent, the Trump administration has acknowledged that.

00:27:37.380 The good news is they just named Antifa a foreign terrorist group so they can expand the amount of power to go after them, chase down these mechanisms that kind of fund and feed into this.

00:27:48.420 But ultimately, this is a sickness of the soul.

00:27:51.220 Like, it's very clear that these, yes, these men are being radicalized by online leftist propaganda.

00:27:57.800 And that process is being intentionally funded by, I think, larger forces.

00:28:03.640 But we also have a truly spiritual issue.

00:28:07.320 And the fact that, you know, these guys, many people have called them the tranissaries of, you know, kind of the system now.

00:28:14.860 These are, you know, the violent assassins, you know, kind of castrated by their trans obsession and then sit out in the world to do violence on behalf of the regime. 0.64

00:28:25.580 This kind of really effective process of turning these people into kind of violent agents of the left.

00:28:33.760 Do you see the left ever recognizing the danger of that?

00:28:39.200 And is there any way, will simply ending Antifa funding these kind of things, will that ultimately dissuade that?

00:28:46.400 Or is this just the result?

00:28:48.700 Are these the last men that have just gone completely the other direction where they don't sublimate themselves to the system?

00:28:55.080 And they would just rather spin out and just kill everyone who they've been told is to blame for where they are as last men rather than just, you know, kind of fade into the background and get their little pleasures.

00:29:06.180 In the in the longhouse cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islanders, they all most as far as I can tell, and the anthropology is not very good.

00:29:15.940 And they all practice headhunting because in the longhouse cultures where the den mother watches all the young men, some young men go crazy and take the pickled heads of their enemies. 0.55

00:29:27.360 And so I see it as a sort of similar phenomena where or in the ancient Sibeli cult that worshiped the devouring mother goddess of ancient Middle East and Turkey and whatever. 0.97

00:29:41.120 Um, the priests of Sibeli would crush their own testicles for the mother goddess. 0.91

00:29:45.260 And so I see it as sort of an archetypal similarity that once you worship the castrating mother goddess, you have, you end up with these weird sort of degenerate, uh, satanic priests. 0.98

00:29:58.120 Interesting. Yeah, no, I could definitely, I could definitely see how that would build.

00:30:02.440 Yeah, you, you kind of have this scenario where the only system that's presented to them is this orientation on the hyper feminine on the longhouse.

00:30:10.140 And so, you know, rather than even exist inside of it, they don't know how to fight back against it.

00:30:15.060 So they just kind of self immolate as a offering to, uh, to this goddess.

00:30:19.560 That is an interesting way to look at it.

00:30:21.700 And I think probably has some serious truth in it.

00:30:24.720 Well, one of the things that is, or did you have more say on that one?

00:30:27.820 There's something I'll throw in there as well.

00:30:29.640 And I, I was considering bringing this up, but I was waiting till you would, but, um,

00:30:34.800 the modern frame is so broken from historic norms that people don't even know what they're looking at.

00:30:44.100 And I find Christians are basically the only demographic that has their own distinct moral access that they can morally judge the society because Christians are the only people in, in modern America by and large is a demographic who have some remnants of a pre-modern worldview. 0.94

00:31:01.280 And Christianity has its own moral compass and access that exists independent from the society because the society's moral access is basically everything's permissible as long as you don't physically hurt someone.

00:31:15.240 And, um, what that leaves out is that we are staggeringly immoral through not doing things.

00:31:22.880 There's the morality of not doing things.

00:31:25.200 And there's the morality of doing things.

00:31:27.420 And, um, we're a society where letting your entire people die is the moral thing to do.

00:31:34.480 And from an earlier moral frame, that's staggeringly immoral.

00:31:38.520 Same thing as selling your soul to the machine, a variety of things, but people can't really see outside of our bubble, um, because they're so taken in by it.

00:31:52.280 You know, I'm glad you just mentioned that because of course, you know, a lot of things that people will talk about when it comes to the genius of the American system and those kinds of things is that we have negative rights, right?

00:32:03.480 These are things that the government must not do to you and, but, but positive rights are the problem, right?

00:32:08.560 Duties that the government has, those are issues and things we try to avoid.

00:32:13.600 And in a way that makes sense, but at the same time, it also, I think makes people miss what virtue is about, because as you point out, virtue is about action, not lack of action.

00:32:24.700 Like, yeah, emotional continents and these kinds of things are about not spurging out and screaming and, or, you know, doing whatever, but there's also affirmative goods, things, you roles, you must fill in order to reach your telos, to achieve virtue in your role.

00:32:40.020 And so when you live in a society where all of the values are about what you shouldn't do and just negation and just that, you know, you have those negative rights, but rarely encodes an affirmative, uh, you know, we need to take this action, this role, this virtue forward.

00:32:59.620 Then, yeah, you do kind of create this scenario, this particularly liberal scenario, uh, where, yeah, you don't have any kind of transcendent tie to ground you in history and to other people who lived in what would be a more classic virtue ethics type, uh, centered society.

00:33:18.940 And so you lose that frame. So there's nothing, which I think is why even in amongst Christianity, and I say this as an evangelical, we are getting a lot more people who are looking for, you know, pre-modern Christianity.

00:33:32.360 They're looking for, uh, you know, Catholicism or even more really, I think, orthodoxy because of its mysticism.

00:33:39.780 And these, these are kind of the less, uh, they're, they're less touched by modernity in a way, though I would argue Catholicism is currently facing quite an issue with that as well.

00:33:50.360 Uh, but, but we can kind of tell that that's ultimately what people are yearning for, even in, even inside the Protestant world, it's more people looking at like reformed Protestant Christianity,

00:34:01.380 as opposed to kind of like mega church evangelicalism, because no matter what strain you're looking at, they're all kind of trying to find that Christianity that does have that transcendent tie and that historical tie and is not completely corrupted by kind of modernity and its processes.

00:34:18.400 I think something was really lost in the switch from pre-modern to modern Christianity with trying to make Christianity into a rational ethical code rather than a spiritual path.

00:34:30.020 Because I read this book from this Russian world war one era author, and he said, the thing you have to understand about Christianity is it's actually about God and it's actually about the spiritual element.

00:34:41.360 And he explained, he explained it to that lens.

00:34:43.480 And I thought, wait, that makes sense.

00:34:46.100 And it totally reprograms all of the modernist ideals in the topic between, uh, the, so the reason that in the pre-modern world that you could have Christian societies that had relentless class oppression.

00:35:00.000 And had colonies and had colonies and that stuff is they hadn't mentally tried to convert Christianity into a secular moral code.

00:35:07.120 They just saw it as a religion.

00:35:08.680 And the issue that, um, people are sort of mentally wrapping their minds around is modernity actively basically beats people from their, from the cradle onwards to not think in mythic terms.

00:35:24.660 And so you're having people whose neurology wasn't trained for this, trying to grasp for a basic human biological need that's been denied to their entire society.

00:35:35.300 And so they're sort of like grappling around.

00:35:37.280 And so as an example, I know a lot of people who are into Greek Orthodoxy who are normal American, uh, they're not ethnically Orthodox people.

00:35:46.040 And it's because Greek Orthodoxy has this sort of thing they're trying to reach to a greater degree than the Western churches.

00:35:53.260 But the Greek Orthodox church was not the church of St. Augustine where people would see a relic and then just start spasming with sort of divine ecstasy.

00:36:02.900 That's something you can read about in earlier societies, but is very rare today.

00:36:07.160 Yeah, no, I, I, I like the, uh, very specific, you know, that it's about God, not about a moral code.

00:36:14.420 You, you can really feel the, you know, Immanuel Kant and his consequences have been a disaster.

00:36:19.380 Uh, uh, you know, that, the, the need to try to turn everything into a categorical imperative.

00:36:24.320 There's some objective system where that's what really Christianity is valuable as is this rational system of ethical codes rather than, you know, being a real religion tied to the metaphysical truth.

00:36:35.100 Um, and that, and that is of course, as you point out why people are, are especially looking at Orthodoxy because it does allow for that mysticism that has been driven out of, of most Western Christianity.

00:36:46.600 Another issue that you and I talked about previously that is recirculated back into the news has been the ability of young men to start families and have houses.

00:36:57.740 And Donald Trump famously talked about the 50 year mortgage here recently, uh, which had a lot of people, including conservatives, uh, pretty upset.

00:37:07.340 Now, at some level, you understand what he's trying to do.

00:37:10.000 Well, if I get the payment long enough, they can afford the, or if I get the, the, the loan long enough, the payment will go down enough to be affordable.

00:37:17.360 And then people can own houses, but obviously if you are looking at this from anything, but like a purely financial metric, you realize that this is a disastrous way to live, you know, being tied to this debt for basically your entire life.

00:37:30.000 And if you've got a house at 30, probably dying before you actually pay off the house, uh, some people have said, you know, this is basically like neo-feudalism.

00:37:38.900 Uh, what do you think about this approach?

00:37:41.860 Is there any saving the housing market?

00:37:44.260 Is there any way beyond, beyond the 50 year old year mortgage we could actually fix this problem?

00:37:49.600 I mean, I've made my own suggestions, but it seems bizarre to me that this is the one the Trump administration went to and not more mass deportations, not, you know, keeping corporations from buying up.

00:37:59.680 Residential housing.

00:38:00.740 Why, why, why this particular solution?

00:38:03.440 So there's a series of sort of different crystallizing events going on here that no one has words for.

00:38:10.320 And so that's, it's going to be difficult to articulate.

00:38:13.360 One of which is that the economy is almost entirely artificial.

00:38:17.160 It's really a wonder that the economy has made it this far and the housing markets have, because almost any metric you'd look at besides total GDP or the stock market has collapsed precipitously.

00:38:28.300 Um, and the reasoning is the government can just print infinite money and it's, the entire global order is a shared bluff.

00:38:35.780 We just haven't called it yet.

00:38:37.460 Um, and so they've, they're maintaining the bluff.

00:38:40.520 And so you have these weird outsized effects like the 50 year loan.

00:38:44.720 And another thing as well is I think, and this is something I only realized in the last few months, most people today's identity is purely based off social status.

00:38:53.880 And so they need to get the house.

00:38:56.900 They need to go into the dating game. 0.97

00:38:59.280 They need to work extra hours because that's their identity and they don't have another reset button.

00:39:04.920 And so you see these sort of status spirals get out of control because there's no reset button and, um, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's not a good situation.

00:39:19.460 And I, I, I, I don't think this can last another year because next year, the interest on our debt is going to be more than defense and Medicare combined.

00:39:30.620 Yeah, it's one of those things where it, you know, this is, this is one of those problems where, uh, you know, the, the libertarians are right, but they don't understand the implications of their own being right.

00:39:44.240 So you're, you're absolutely correct that the, you know, the, the debt, uh, financing, our whole economy is fake, you know, inflated money, uh, markets are completely artificial at this point.

00:39:54.980 These are all things that are absolutely true.

00:39:57.320 And so, you know, kind of the libertarian ideas, well, we just kind of cut these things back and everything kind of right itself, but honestly, you can't cut these things back without basically having an armed revolution, right?

00:40:08.380 Like where the system is.

00:40:09.600 So our problems are increasingly regime complete, right? 0.94

00:40:13.160 Like every aspect of them is woven into every other aspect, holding up this kind of Fugazi that we're all, uh, pretending is, is, is a real system that we should follow.

00:40:23.660 So, and, you know, Oswald Spangler, of course, of course, talks about this in his cycles of civilizations.

00:40:28.520 You know, this is the time of money power.

00:40:30.340 This is the time of oligarchy.

00:40:31.840 This is the time where, uh, people are trapped in these extended abstract, uh, decisions.

00:40:39.220 Your, your late civilizational phase is one in which the animating spirit is gone.

00:40:43.580 And the only thing left is those like rigid moral systems that we talked about instead of the, you know, the animating religion itself.

00:40:50.660 And his solution, the one he believes is, is inevitable is, you know, the great man of history, the Caesar, the, the, the, the, the conqueror that breaks through the money power situation.

00:41:03.220 And the more you look at things, it's hard to deny that that doesn't there seem, because if you look, for instance, Elon Musk just went back on his H1B force again.

00:41:13.280 This is a guy who has talked about how demographics are destiny and, and you can't let mass immigration take over Europe and all these things.

00:41:21.020 But for some reason, every time it's, it's time to solve a problem, the solution is more managerialism, more H1Bs, more placement migration.

00:41:30.460 But he, it's like, he, he knows there's a problem to his own solutions, but he can't think of any other type of solution because that's just the way a man who has made his living and been, you know, rose to power in that way.

00:41:45.020 That's the only way he can address issues and problems.

00:41:48.260 Do you think that ultimately we have to break out of this frame?

00:41:51.620 Will, is that the only way forward?

00:41:53.580 Is there any way to step off of this road or find another solution to this problem?

00:41:59.480 I think Sam Francis covered this well, um, and with Leviathan and his enemies, he said the end point of the Leviathan would be Caesarism.

00:42:07.480 Um, and I, I agree, Amori de Riancourt is a similar author who wrote a book comparing this cycle to the fall of the Roman Republic in the fifties.

00:42:15.880 And he said the same thing.

00:42:17.340 Um, it's, there's a staggering absence of imagination today.

00:42:22.540 Um, and I think that's because imagination is sort of, it's dependent on a kind of connection to the spiritual and the divine that we've utterly suppressed.

00:42:33.900 And I say that in a more sort of broad sense than the way in Abrahamic culture would.

00:42:38.900 If you go to ancient Greece or India, there's these ideas, these sort of like different types of consciousness, consciousness you pull from, but in modernity, we've shut ourselves off from anything that's not very material.

00:42:49.180 So that makes creativity nigh impossible.

00:42:51.600 And so it's really staggering that we are a civilization, which is very obviously dying and we can't even imagine not dying because this is entirely self-enforced a century ago.

00:43:04.720 The West dominated the world. 0.71

00:43:06.300 It was the greatest civilization ever.

00:43:08.620 And it lost due to its lack of any sort of, um, I don't even know what word to use, but we, we, we, we did this to ourselves and we lack so little imagination.

00:43:24.040 We can't even imagine a world where we don't die.

00:43:27.020 So there's this sense of inevitability to this, to a profoundly non-inevitable thing.

00:43:32.460 And this is one of the parts I find most deeply frustrating that all of this was utterly self-enforced that this was, if we look for what caused this failure of Western civilization, yes, you could say there was Soviet infiltration.

00:43:48.600 You could say there are certain interest groups, but fundamentally this was brought on us by us.

00:43:56.720 Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

00:43:58.840 I mean, is there, is it, uh, some level, the hyperstition problem where the more we speak about it, the more we make it inevitable, we summon it into existence.

00:44:07.100 What we're, we're the perennialists, right?

00:44:09.480 That simply civilizations must move through this life cycle.

00:44:12.820 And that's, even though there's no obvious external cause as to why we should be arriving at this point, we've kind of just hit the internal trigger, you know, in, in the same way that every plant eventually dies and, you know, wilts and dies.

00:44:25.100 Like it was, was this truly inevitable?

00:44:27.660 Are we summoning it now?

00:44:28.680 Is there a way to turn this around?

00:44:30.140 As you say, if it, if it is actually imminently avoidable or have we set ourselves too dark, far down this path, whether it's our fault or not, is there just no turning back at this point?

00:44:40.180 I made a quote saying, um, you're going to die anyway, so it's better to die rich than poor.

00:44:44.580 And, uh, what I mean by that is that all life forms die, humans die, nations die.

00:44:51.720 Um, but, uh, you, you can do more stuff before you die and that's largely good.

00:44:57.280 Uh, and, um, you look at these historic cycles with a 250 year cycle for empires rising and falling start of the British empire was 1750 and was 1950.

00:45:07.540 The Arabs started under Mohammed in 650.

00:45:10.000 They died a little after 900.

00:45:13.000 The Spanish empire started in 1500 and ended in the late 1700s.

00:45:18.060 So it's a fairly consistent theme.

00:45:19.520 And you look back at the founders who clearly knew that American democracy and their regime would fail at some point.

00:45:27.600 They dropped a lot of veiled symbols.

00:45:29.780 They made a lot of references to classical authors who definitely knew this stuff.

00:45:33.320 And so the founders knew that they were operating sort of in time and this wouldn't last forever.

00:45:39.960 And they were complete geniuses at structuring the American Republic in a decentralized way so that at the time of the revolution, we could have split up into a series of independent countries.

00:45:54.260 Pennsylvania and Virginia could have had 50 years of wars over the West, but they didn't because the founders were able to fuse the country together.

00:46:02.700 And so rather than fighting each other and fizzling out in the great plains, the Americans made it to Afghanistan and Japan and Somalia and became the de facto, um, rulers of most of Europe. 0.66

00:46:15.700 And that's very impressive, but it's interesting how the natural order has its own aims and it uses your best advantages against you.

00:46:25.380 And it's really stark because I'm Gen Z, so I'm pretty young, but, uh, I've seen this happen to me in my real life where two thousands, we were such a staggeringly arrogant and self-satisfied society.

00:46:40.420 But then all of our advantages were turned against us, our huge systems, our interconnected global, um, trade networks, the urbanization, all of those things were turned against us.

00:46:54.400 So now we have a society where the urban populations are the ones who can't procreate the cities were our great pride and advantage before, but that very same thing was turned against us.

00:47:06.860 So we're next year will be 250 years since the American revolution.

00:47:12.120 We had the full cycle, but because we were so rich and successful, the natural order turned our best advantage against us.

00:47:20.400 So we still hit the 250 years and that's both confusing and sort of warped, but it also fits with just what you know about history.

00:47:31.740 Right.

00:47:32.460 Yeah.

00:47:32.920 And it's also, again, what Spangler predicted that, that is, you know, the, the cities, you know, the, in order for the people to, to be reanimated, to, to become vigorous, to become metaphysically connected again, they have to return to the land.

00:47:46.520 The cities are, are kind of the, in the, you know, for Spangler, the cities are where the civilization dies.

00:47:52.040 It dies in the cities.

00:47:53.160 It's born in the, in the land.

00:47:55.240 Uh, and so, uh, I guess if you look in, in those cycles, it's not particularly surprising ultimately that, that advantage while powerful kind of inevitably seems to draw us towards, uh, an end that we're seeing now.

00:48:08.520 Well, uh, I think we've provided a lot of hope, a lot of white pills here today.

00:48:13.560 I think we've told everybody, uh, the best they can, uh, maybe we should do, we should do the classic move there.

00:48:19.640 I know you kind of spoke on it and I agree with this as well. 0.98

00:48:21.960 You know, you should die with your boots on, right? 0.98

00:48:23.640 Like if everything's going to die eventually.

00:48:25.860 And so the key is to be the greatest, to be, uh, you know, to, to achieve the most, uh, to be the most virtuous in the time that you have to spend.

00:48:34.080 And so, you know, whether, whether you think the United States is doomed or not, uh, you as an individual should be going out and achieving the most you can and living the best life you can.

00:48:44.160 But do you have, do you have any hope?

00:48:45.640 Do you have any upsides?

00:48:46.580 Do you have any positive things to lend to, uh, people watching today that you might see on the horizon?

00:48:51.460 I'm glad I offered white pills because I gave black ones last time, but that's just sort of the arc.

00:48:56.280 You have to black pill them first and white pill them later.

00:48:58.840 But, um, one of my mom's quotes was, um, life is like riding a horse and it's your duty to die in the saddle.

00:49:05.080 Um, and it's, uh, any bad situation, you can sort of turn to your favor where you look at a figure like St. Augustine who grew up and came of age during the fall of Rome.

00:49:23.260 Um, even in North Africa, there were the Vandal barbarians who were tearing up, uh, the region and he wrote the city of God as a way to create a continuity with the fall of Rome because the collapse of the society created this huge spiritual void. 0.77

00:49:41.560 So that's the worst possible condition.

00:49:44.140 St. Augustine did something with it.

00:49:46.720 Um, or you look at a figure like Winston Churchill, who was at the death throes of the British empire.

00:49:52.320 And he still rose to be one of the great statesmen of that century.

00:49:56.460 And so even in bad situations, you can find a way to make it work out for you or for your small group of people.

00:50:06.240 Absolutely.

00:50:06.940 And this is why I think so many people are pushing localism, pushing the idea of scaling down community, finding the people that you can work with and together build a future, uh, you know, whether any times that might may come. 0.59

00:50:20.220 And so this is, there is no excuse to not be doing that, sitting around and waiting for Donald Trump or JD Vance or someone else to save you is a fool's error.

00:50:30.480 And maybe, maybe they will, maybe our great man of history will come in and save us all.

00:50:34.340 And won't that be amazing.

00:50:35.760 But until then, uh, you have to cultivate a situation which you can win, your family can win, your community can win.

00:50:41.760 And that is definitely where you should be, uh, putting your effort.

00:50:44.800 All right, guys, like I said, uh, we are not live today.

00:50:47.100 So unfortunately we'll not be able to go to the questions of the people.

00:50:50.940 However, can you let people know where to find all of your great work?

00:50:54.480 Um, you can watch my YouTube channels.

00:50:57.020 What if all test in history one Oh two, they're both for free on YouTube and thank you so much for having me.

00:51:03.160 Of course.

00:51:03.820 Thanks for coming by.

00:51:04.640 All right, guys.

00:51:05.560 Uh, if it's your first time on YouTube, make sure you subscribe, make sure you click the bell notification.

00:51:10.120 So, you know, when we go live, if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the or Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:51:16.920 And if you do leave a rating or review, it helps with the algorithm magic.

00:51:20.320 Thank you everybody for watching.

00:51:21.300 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 17, 2025

The Elements of Civilizational Collapse ｜ Guest： Rudyard Lynch ｜ 11⧸17⧸25

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