In this episode, we look at the legacy of Curtis Yarvin's Unqualified Reservations and the impact it has had on the right-wing thought space, and the reactions from other thinkers, media figures and all kinds of other people who have now interacted with Curtis' work.
00:23:07.780The prevailing ideology that all of our institutions sort of operated within the framework of.
00:23:14.060And he was just kind of describing that.
00:23:16.780Whereas now, it can't really be considered ideology as much as like direct political propaganda.
00:23:25.400And the ideology is in service to the state, clearly.
00:23:28.960Um, so I, I guess it could be a chicken or egg situation that we can debate, which came first, the ideology or, or the state propaganda, uh, who follows what.
00:23:40.320So I have my opinions on that, but in terms of how it relates to Yarvin and the cathedral, um, if this is something different, it is what the cathedral evolved into, which is very much in line with the way Yarvin describes how progressivism works.
00:23:58.480Because he talks in the open letter that, um, and this is, this is a controversial statement too, so we can couch this, but just to kind of make my point, um, in the open letter, he talks about how religion, particular Protestant, American Protestant religion sort of evolves into secular liberalism and secular progressivism.
00:24:21.480Um, and I kind of see the evolution of the cathedral in, in, in similar terms that it went from this sort of like ideological framework to just open, you know, manipulative propaganda.
00:24:34.660And with the case of Ricky Vaughn, it's, it's, it could even, it's like pure Soviet, you know, censorship and pure, pure, uh, so I, I, I wonder though, or, and if, if your opinion on it coincides with what I'm saying, excuse me.
00:24:51.780I'm getting over a cold here, guys, if you can bear with me.
00:24:56.300I think that, um, one of the things, and we'll get more into kind of Nick Land's contribution here in a second, but one of the things Nick Land said about the cathedral is the only reason we can see it is that it's dying, right?
00:25:08.340If you have a mind control device, um, then you shouldn't be able to kind of see the strings.
00:25:13.420You shouldn't be able to see that the puppets are, are being moved.
00:25:16.780And the fact that now we can kind of see these things means that something has degraded, something in the cathedral is failing, uh, it's getting worse at what it's doing.
00:25:29.520And so I think there's a lot of truth that, uh, the cathedral worked more the way Yarvin was talking about originally and has now kind of degenerated even further to the point where now it's, it's becoming increasingly obvious.
00:25:44.440And that's, that's a failing of the cathedral, not, uh, not a failing, I think of necessarily Yarvin's understanding of what happened there.
00:25:52.980Sometimes there are points and Yarvin just does this on a regular basis where he gets a little too extreme with kind of pushing a certain aspect.
00:25:59.640And he has just come out and repeatedly said, like, there's no collusion.
00:26:05.640It's like, well, yeah, actually, obviously there is.
00:26:07.880Like, and so I think he, I think while he set up a really excellent framework for understanding how this kind of decentralized, these decentralized nodes influence each other, I think he did probably step a little too far with kind of how much he pushed there.
00:26:21.700There was no overt collusion because that kind of left him then open to the obvious point that at some point these people will talk to each other and they will coordinate something, especially as they get worse of this and they need to actually directly coordinate rather than just kind of pick up on each other's understandings.
00:26:36.660And so that kind of leaves him open to that criticism.
00:26:39.860But Lomis, what do you think about the idea of the cathedral in 2023?
00:26:43.920Okay, just for the sake of making this conversation interesting, I'm going to take a slightly different view here, I guess.
00:26:50.320Or at least maybe try to add a bit of like a different analysis to it.
00:26:55.740So, okay, so the cathedral, Curtis says, is the instantiation of the type of society we live in, which is between on the one hand, like Karl Popper's open society version of, you know, free information flow where truth wins out always over everything.
00:27:14.540It's this very sort of scientific way of thinking about not just like epistemology on the other side, we have tightly controlled, like a type one society, this tightly controlled information apparatus, like a Soviet style information apparatus.
00:27:30.540And what Curtis is saying is the cathedral is somewhere in the middle, it's a consensus society that arrives at truth through what he calls spontaneous coordination, okay, between these various nodes of the cathedral, between, you know, universities primarily and the media.
00:27:55.160And so the question like we're asking is, okay, well, just how explicit is this coordination, just how planned is it versus how spontaneous it is.
00:28:06.020And so that's, I think we all agree that we're somewhere in the middle here.
00:28:09.800And what we're trying to negotiate with this conversation and what I hear both Astral and you saying is that we've really gone much further towards this type one controlled information society, where there's this top down sort of directive for what is and isn't considered truth.
00:28:31.000And so that these epistemic authorities have a kind of explicit informal role in controlling information flow.
00:28:42.480Um, and, and, and that sort of tracks with what I observe, but on the other hand, one thing in the Twitter files that you saw below the like headline is that there really was this, like, at least ostensible negotiation within the bureaucracies of both Twitter.
00:29:02.680And the government agencies working with Twitter, to figure out like what they can and cannot say and what they can and cannot publish and what's the right thing to do here in terms of like dictating control.
00:29:17.460And we really never did see, I mean, I hate to sort of, uh, come to the defense of like Yoel Roth or whoever, but we never really did see like that smoking gun that says, we are going to say this, this is our message that we're going to deliver to the American people.
00:29:35.620It had that effect, but the way it was negotiated, how those decisions came about allowed for all of these different people within this, these bureaucratic structures to have plausible deniability and tell themselves that they were coming to these, these decisions through like some good faith effort to balance the demands of the first amendment with like public health.
00:30:01.100And, um, and, um, um, what we, what we see instead is not this sort of straightforward, top-down expression of information, but the selection of personnel where you can guarantee that the people who are within these bureaucracies are all going to land on the exact same place when it comes to these important decisions.
00:30:26.220And, and, and so what I see rather than, I don't think Curtis is wrong about the cathedral, but what it underplays is how the personnel of the cathedral is selected in and just how carefully and precise that selection mechanism has become probably over the last 10 years.
00:30:48.100And so the only people who are left in the cathedral are people who you can guarantee where the incentives are aligned just right, that the effect is the exact same as if we were living in one of these tightly controlled societies, but they have this again, plausible deniability.
00:31:08.100They can tell themselves this story and present a story to the public, even through the Twitter files that no, we were actually, uh, negotiating these decisions in good faith and there was disagreement and we were all making compromises and doing the best we could under, you know, difficult circumstances.
00:31:26.100Uh, if I may, yeah. So this is how I understand, like, uh, the neo-reactionary take on these things. This is how, this is the neo-reactionary framework for understanding these things. And of course it's not wrong. I mean, I basically consider myself a neo-reactionary and I agree with everything Lomez is saying, uh, spandrels bio-Leninism for me is like the perfect way to understand this where, where you, as the institutions drift further left, the, the personnel that make up the institution
00:31:56.100uh, drift further and further into bio-Leninism, uh, or further and further into just open freakishness. Um, so Yul Roth. Now here, right here's the crossover from where I sort of diverge from the standard neo-reactionary understanding of this. So, so Yul Roth wasn't just gay. He went to MIT, which is a well-known, uh, institution funded, according to Noam Chomsky himself, 90%
00:32:26.100by the military, 90% by the Pentagon, where he learned, uh, how to like, and he also studied at some of the Kennedy school, which I think is at Yale or it's at Harvard. And what he did at these places was, uh, learn how to like game the algorithm or learn how to like, uh, implement, you know, what we call web 2.0. And it's how the algorithm sort of directs people to things they want it to go to.
00:32:53.680And as Elon Musk revealed, uh, this was done, uh, Yul Roth. I don't even know how much of this I can say on this show. Yul Roth's PhD was all about directing children to pornography online.
00:33:07.680So this looks very manufactured to me. Um, he's coming from these elite institutions, but this is still within the framework of the cathedral.
00:33:17.680But then when you see some of these emails coming from the CIA, like, or the FBI, excuse me, asking for people's IP addresses and home addresses and asking for, uh, excuse me, people leaving the FBI to go work at Twitter as employees.
00:33:33.680Um, it looks a little bit more heavy handed than that. And I know that Yarvin has made claims that it's, this, this is also the, uh, manufacturing consent argument, which, which Yarvin references in unqualified reservations, which is that it's like, um, they land on personnel who are going to all land or excuse me, they hire personnel who are going to all land on the same conclusion, which is true.
00:33:58.000But we know, I remember Edward Snowden, uh, shared, retweeted this, this, I think it was a dateline or maybe, uh, you know, uh, frontline, one of those, uh, news institutions, uh, interview with a CIA agent who was talking about how they would manipulate, uh, stories in the press about the Vietnam war, how they would like leak certain things on purpose to make it look like troop movements were happening in certain ways when they actually weren't.
00:34:24.820So even, you know, back when Chomsky was writing manufactured consent in the seventies, it was known that intelligence agencies were working with the media and helping to manipulate the media on purpose.
00:34:36.680So I do think that we're kind of on uncharted territory in a certain way. And that maybe, uh, although I appreciate Mo Bug, I'm a, I'm a huge Mo Bugian. Like, I do think he gets a little bit of this. He doesn't go hard enough in my opinion on some of this.
00:34:52.360Um, yeah, let me jump in real quick. I just want to respond to that real quick. So Astral, I, my view is that that version of events, that narrative of why and how Yoel Roth is selected into this position is a bit sort of conspiratorial.
00:35:10.340Uh, I think instead what we're seeing is this rather than Yoel Roth being this sort of like Machiavellian actor who learns how to manipulate the algo, you know, to advance like his own status or something.
00:35:26.080It's the, it's the, it's the bureaucracy. It's the bureaucracy algo selecting for Yoel Roth and people like him, which is, uh, high IQ people who are competent. I know we hate to give these people any credit, but they're like smart and competent at certain tasks and at certain things.
00:35:47.200And what they're, what they're competent at, and what they're selected for. And this is something that Mo Bug talks about with the cathedral. What is the cathedral's goal? Is it to arrive at truth? No.
00:36:00.480It's this iterative process of creating an epistemology that reinforces its own power and importantly, its own existence. And so what Yoel Roth is really good at is not truth seeking or not even necessarily acting out to, uh, create some like specific political agenda.
00:36:28.800Although I think he probably has a specific political agenda. His primary value is that he's really good at doing things that will allow the institutions he's a part of to continue to survive, regardless of how antithetical to sort of truth or any baseline morality, uh, those survival strategies are.
00:36:51.540Well, to be clear, I don't disagree with that. And I, I think, um, this is why, this is why I like to talk about Neo reaction and mold bug kind of, I can't really talk about it without bringing in land as Oren has done a couple of times and spandrel, because my understanding of all this is that it's all kind of together.
00:37:12.460And I do think the bio-Leninism perspective accounts for, uh, what Lomas just laid out, which, which I don't necessarily disagree with. I hope it's clear.
00:37:21.840Yeah. I think the, the intensity of the Leninism, uh, is what, uh, then produces the kind of the, uh, the self-selection process that Lomas is talking about there. So I don't, I don't think that it's, uh, it's really a disagreement that much as a kind of a, simply a shift in, in perspective there.
00:37:40.460Uh, but that said, uh, let's go ahead and look at a few of the other ideas, uh, from you are and, uh, how some of them have aged.
00:37:49.740So one of the ones that, uh, people talk about a lot is the, the, the, uh, connection between kind of Protestantism and universalism in turning into then this progressivism and the kind of the descent there, uh, of those.
00:38:06.760Uh, a lot of people get angry about this. They say, you can't tie these things together or, you know, uh, there, there's, uh, an issue with that.
00:38:15.420I think a lot of people misunderstand what Yarvin is saying in this. Um, I think a lot of people look at this and they say, this is a, uh, critique of a very particular type of Christianity and saying it would inevitably lead here.
00:38:29.820I have another take on this and I think it's the one that kind of Yarvin has, has pointed out later too, which is that this is kind of a Spanglerian, um, uh, inevitability that, uh, you know, Spangler said that each, uh, each civilization is going to spawn
00:38:47.320versions of atheism that are connected to, you know, their, their original kind of metaphysical animating spirit. So like the Romans end up with Stoicism or whatever, and that's kind of their version of it.
00:39:00.020And he says that, you know, so, uh, for, you know, uh, the Western man, you get this kind of very scientific, uh, atheism that is like all of the stuff of Christianity, uh, but without any of the Christianity, all of that is stripped away.
00:39:14.420And so it's not Yarvin, who's the first one to kind of make this connection. And I think that Yarvin's right that, um, you know, the, there is a connection there between these two forces that they share, uh, similar, uh, descent, though. I don't believe, you know, as a Protestant Christian that like this inevitably has to become progressivism or that, uh, you know, but, but I think it's just every,
00:39:39.080every, every civilization produces its mere image in it, in kind of its end phase. And that's what we see with progressivism. And that's what Yarvin is kind of identifying when he ties it to kind of the descent of, uh, of, uh, Protestant Christianity. But what do you guys think? How does, how is this take aged from Yarvin?
00:39:59.620Uh, Lomas, you want to pick that one up first?
00:40:01.880Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, this is the, this is like the basis for the third part of this,
00:40:09.080this book, which is how Dawkins got pwned, which is a, you know, I don't know about a 90 page, uh, sort of short book on the subject of what at the time, you know, was just called political correctness or social justice. Um, but what we might call now wokeism and this idea that wokeism is a religion, uh, is something that obviously many people have been saying,
00:40:39.080now for quite a while for quite a while for about as long as wokeism has been in the public spotlight. Um, and what Curtis is doing in this book is taking that metaphor literally.
00:40:51.080And so the question is, what is the theological basis for this thing called wokeism or social justice or simply progressivism? And, you know, this gets back to an argument that Curtis makes elsewhere. Um, it's sort of an ongoing theme in all of his writing, which is that the predominant ideology of, uh,
00:41:21.080is a kind of, is a kind of wig history, this sort of linear, uh, progressive history, which, you know, presumes that the future is going to necessarily definitionally be better than the past, that change is good. And because change happens in the future, all change is necessarily positive change.
00:41:42.080Well, you can see how adhering to a sort of wig history version of, of, uh, uh, society would require a certain amount of faith and a certain amount of sort of moral and theological malleability in what you believe.
00:42:01.080And so what Curtis is simply doing in my view in making this argument about Protestantism is trying to trace the theological history of this back to sort of the New England Puritans who came over and how that evolved.
00:42:20.080Like in Curtis's view, like in Curtis's view, it's a straight line from New England Puritanism of, of, you know, 200 years ago, 300 years ago to where we are now.
00:42:33.200And frankly, I don't have the historical or sort of theological chops to, um, have much of my own sort of say on the matter.
00:42:42.580But when you read what Curtis has identified as his like key piece of evidence, uh, for this theory, which is this article called American Malvern, which he repeats over and over from time magazine, which was born out of, um, the theologian and historian, Arnold Toynbee, who was himself, uh, influenced a great deal by Spangler and Spangler's view of like cyclical histories.
00:43:09.160And, and, and, and, and precisely what you were just saying, Orin, and how these civilizations devolve over time into these sort of secular versions of themselves.
00:43:20.020Toynbee was saying our only sort of way out of this is a kind of like universal church.
00:43:25.920You know, that was Toynbee's big idea, which, um, requires like all of these sort of cathedral apparatuses, like this NGO apparatus.
00:43:34.920And what amounts to this kind of, uh, American military adventurism, this sort of, uh, global human, humanitarianism that we see now as the consequence of that, which is really like the, the, the force, the, uh, the physical force, the, the hard power behind woke ism.
00:43:58.380Um, is this sort of foreign policy that arises out of the concepts presented by Toynbee and the implications of this idea of the universal church.
00:44:10.720This could be, or, and as you mentioned before about, about mold bug and writing, like you hit on this interesting idea and then there's this tendency to like over expand the implications of it and like start to see it everywhere.
00:44:24.280And that may be the case here, but just again, like my view about this is as a provocation as, as something to make us reconsider history and the, in the sort of trajectory of American ideology and American civil religion and how the sort of theological substrate of American life has devolved.
00:44:46.280Uh, whether it's Protestantism specifically or something else has devolved in this kind of woke secular humanism is pretty convincing and either way, something worth thinking about.
00:45:03.180Uh, yeah, I mean, I just think it's real. I think it's, he's correct. I think mold bug is correct. There are other factors at play. Uh, one of the things, and I have to assume both of you guys agree with me on this.
00:45:15.920A lot of the criticism you see of mold bug is very clear that the critics haven't read him. It's very clear. And he addresses, I mean, he's not perfect. I, I obviously dive, you know, divulge, uh, um, I, I obviously, uh, disagree with him on a couple of things here and there, but this one, I, I accept wholesale.
00:45:37.740Um, so if you, if you go back to like the pre 19, uh, 20th century in, in America, like before all the immigrants came over from, from Europe, because communism, the thing people, the refutation people have against mold bug is that the things he, he attributes to like Anglo and Germanic Protestantism are actually, uh, foreign and introduced by like European and Russian communism, Bolshevism.
00:46:04.680And it came here in the 1910s and the 1920s and ramped up to FDRs. Uh, and, and he talks about FDRs cabinet and FDRs entire staff, which like people talk about how many communists were in FDR staff.
00:46:19.580And they use that as like proof that mold bug is wrong, but he talks about it in the open letter. Uh, and, and he, he talks about McCarthy and how McCarthy was like, correct about how many communists were in the, in the government and stuff.
00:46:32.160Right. So he doesn't obfuscate that or deny it.
00:46:35.520They even go so far as to call America a communist country after.
00:46:39.780Yeah. Uh, which, uh, essay was that where he's, I forgot that.
00:46:43.400Yeah. I don't remember right off the top of my head, but I know he does it several times.
00:46:46.460Yeah, he does. Exactly. Right. So what I wanted to say real quick is that if you go and look at like Quakerism, that's one of the main ones that mold bug says kind of like evolved into progressivism and wokeism.
00:47:00.580And he says, he says right in the, in the open letter that like, if something, if you don't, if you can look back in history at something that existed and there's no point in which it, you see it die, it means it's not dead. It means it's still around.
00:47:14.580So, and so he says like all of these like, uh, Protestant American religious groups, like who are they now? Well, they're the progressives.
00:47:23.560Um, and the Unitarians is another one too. Uh, but anyway, so if you go back to the 19th century, uh, some of the tenants of Quakerism are like, uh, instead of punishing prisoners, you're reforming prisoners.
00:47:37.060So you don't, you don't lock them up in prison to, to sequester them away from society or to punish them. You do it to reform them because everybody, you know, that they consider that a fundamentally Christian belief that people, people can be, you know, uh, reformed from their, their, their ways of error.
00:47:53.080Uh, passivism, uh, passivism was all the way through there. There were passivists and all the wars in the 19th century, uh, 18th century, excuse me.
00:48:03.100Um, what was the other one? Suffrages, uh, universal suffrage and women's rights and feminism. You know, these are all things that communism endorses, but these were, these were all things that existed before, you know, the foreign infusion of communism came over here.
00:48:17.580Uh, that was in like the 1800s. I recently read the book, um, not hunger by a Newt Hampson. Um, uh, the growth of the soil, the growth of the soil. And it's, it's about, uh, it's about abortion reform in Norway in the 1900s and feminism and the, and the way that like the, the modernization of that country was like tearing apart, you know, the traditional ways of, of society.
00:48:42.660And I just remember reading that book thinking like, okay, Norway was having all of these problems in like the 1890s and the 1900s.
00:48:50.660And people are accusing mold bug of like obfuscating that the fact that communism calls all this stuff in the West. When right here, uh, you're seeing like the very same problems that we're talking about in this, in this country.
00:49:06.460And in a previous century that didn't even have like the, the immigration issues that we had in the earliest 20th century. So clearly there's something to it. Um, and that, you know, you could give a million other examples.
00:49:18.020So something that you've mentioned astral, and I agree with you a hundred percent is that it's, uh, kind of important, especially if you want to understand the wider kind of neo reactionary thought to look at the way that mold bug and Nick land interact.
00:49:35.520Now I know mold bug has said many times that he's never read land. He doesn't like to read people who have responded to his work. So he has, he hasn't interacted with it, but this interaction is really essential.
00:49:45.500It's kind of a mold bug is kind of John Rawls of this sphere in the sense that like everybody who wrote after mold bug was reacting in one way or another to mold bug.
00:49:56.780And so you have, you, you can understand mold bug on his own. And I encourage people who, you know, if they're too daunted by like a larger, like having to chase down every single blog that ever commented on them, you can just read unqualified reservations.
00:50:10.320You can just read the unqualified reservations book and you'll still get a coherent kind of understanding what's happening there.
00:50:16.760But if you really want to expand and understand what's going on, then Nick land is really essential. Many people again, reacted to mold bug and in valuable ways, but Nick land, especially, you know, with the dark enlightenment, which is just entirely, uh, his reaction.
00:50:32.320And then later on in something like Xeno systems where he kind of adds back in his own acceleration ism is really foundational to kind of the other side, I think of the Neo reaction, uh, kind of, uh, sphere and the kind of all the thought that developed around it.
00:50:52.620Yeah, I agree. I can't, uh, the reason I say I can't read mold bug, uh, decoupled from land is because I read land first. Um, well, technically I read mold bug first because I tried to read the open letter, but I didn't, it didn't really make sense to me at the time.
00:51:11.180Um, so I've been reading them back and forth for the last three years. And my understanding of the whole near reactionary perspective is, is those two are wrapped up together and spandrel as well.
00:51:24.240But what I want to say, and I don't want to get too abstract here. So I'll try to make it concise. Um, I understand history. My perspective on history is certainly informed by Spengler, um, and many others, but, but Spengler kind of has this morphology of culture and this morphology of, of history in which he basically says that like history follows like a certain structure more or less.
00:51:53.640And he has the, the phases you, you had a really good episode on Spengler with, um, the Prudentialist, one of the best explanations of Spengler I've ever heard.
00:52:02.340But to make a long story short, um, he's got like the, the, what is it? The spring, summer, autumn, and winter phases of a culture's life cycle. Right. And once you hit the winter phase, it's kind of over and it's, it's reached its final form and it will never like evolve into something more and it's done.
00:52:21.520So the question we have to ask is like, if you believe in this, this cultural cycle or this historical cycle, where are we in the cycle? Um, and he, Spengler's got this idea. It's much more complicated than this, but for our purposes, he's got this idea that you transfer, you transition from the culture phase to the civilization phase.
00:52:41.840And that's basically like the culture phase is basically spring and summer where the culture is like flourishing. And then the civilization phase is when it's, uh, autumn and winter, when it's kind of ossified and it's sort of like winding down.
00:52:57.260And it's, it's kind of running out of cultural steam. And a lot of thinkers think that we are in the transition phase right now from culture to, uh, civilization. And this is a lot of the talk about the Caesar figure. The Caesar figure comes right at that transition.
00:53:13.260Uh, a really simple way to think about this is Rome going from, uh, going from, uh, the, the Republic to the empire, you know, with the Caesars, uh, they initiate the civilization phase.
00:53:27.300Accelerationism, as I understand it is basically the idea that you, you, you understand that you, that we are subject, we are subjected to these cycles and accelerationism.
00:53:39.260Accelerationism, uh, and Nick land is famous for saying, right. Acceleration is happening, whether you like it or not.
00:53:45.260And I understand mold bug is an accelerationist. I don't, I don't know how he would feel about me saying that, but, but that's kind of what I see the clear pill as the clear pill is kind of like, uh, we're going to go through these cultural phases, whether you like it or not.
00:54:00.220And some things are going to happen that you don't like, you can't get upset about it. You can't care about it.
00:54:05.260And the way he characterizes the clear pill is like, you can't be emotionally tied up with like a certain narrative because it might not come to the conclusion that you want it to come to.
00:54:15.140So when he talks about this, like tech monarch CEO, it's sort of like his version, in my opinion, this is how I read it anyway, of, of the Caesar figure.
00:54:24.820So when I say that I'm like a neo reactionary accelerationist, what I mean is that we're going through these cycles. Another way to call it is the cycle of regimes. Uh, I think Aristotle is the one who characterized it that way.
00:54:38.660Um, as we transition from democracy to oligarchy and then oligarchy will eventually, uh, transition into tyranny.
00:54:49.560Um, the, the democratic processes are the political processes are going to be more and more like further removed from us.
00:54:59.620The people that are going to be more and more taken out of our hands and they're going to be more and more concentrated in these like large figures or these large bodies like the democratic party or the GOP or, uh, these individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
00:55:14.780So for me to read Neo reaction and mold bug talking about this, like tech future, right. And he's got some of it right in here. He talks about like virtual reality prisons and, and boards of directors with like, you know, uh, heavily encrypted code so that they can make their decisions for government.
00:55:32.300So as we move to this, like authoritarianism, or however you want to call it accelerationism and the clear pill to me means that we accept that we're going through this process and we have to basically, uh, do what we can to like make the transition as, as painless as possible for as many people as possible.
00:55:55.840Um, and I could go on because this is, these are totally the terms in which I understand mold bug, but I want to let one of you guys come into, to pick it up and I don't, maybe you disagree or see it, see it the same way. I'm not sure.
00:56:07.740Well, I think what land does that is so valuable, um, particularly in the dark enlightenment is he expands in really important ways on a lot of the ideas that mold bug touches on and puts them in terms that I think are really clarifying.
00:56:24.160So that's one of his incredibly valuable, valuable contributions, contributions.
00:56:28.780And part of that is land's similar interests.
00:56:32.100Like you said, there's, there's already this kind of tech futurist, um, you know, CEO, monarch, uh, you know, uh, strain in, uh, in mold bug, you know, patchwork and everything.
00:56:44.580But I think what land is particularly interested in is kind of the end of the political, uh, and what exists beyond the end of the political, uh, as where someone like,
00:56:54.160Dugan looks at this as kind of the ability of the political to reemerge, I think both mold bug and land are looking to kind of remove the political from, from, from the kind of the general reach of the people at all.
00:57:06.920And for land, it seems, I, I, I also kind of look at it with a little bit of Spangler there, you know, uh, for, for land, it's the ability to escape.
00:57:17.500I think perhaps the civilizational cycles altogether, kind of the, you know, the, the interesting thing about, uh, Spangler is, you know, the, his idea that the Faustian man is always reaching beyond is always trying to kind of push things and expand things into spaces that never existed before.
00:57:33.680And so the question is, can, like, Faustian man escape the civilizational cycle?
00:57:39.680Can he do what no other great, uh, high culture has done before?
00:57:44.440And I think in some ways, accelerationism is the attempt to do so by, uh, by kind of removing the, some of the, uh, civilizational forces that would otherwise kind of tie you to this cycle.
00:57:57.660Now for land, this means, and can he, cause he comes at this from kind of, uh, his, his kind of old Marxist background is, is that capital is just de-territorializing everything, every bond, every, uh, thing that makes us traditional, everything that used to kind of hold these cultures and civilizations together.
00:58:17.320And by doing so, it kind of, uh, possibly achieves, uh, escape velocity from everything that kind of makes us human and the need for, you know, the political and these other, uh, kind of institutions to continue to interact.
00:58:30.580Uh, so there, I mean, there's, there's lots of places we couldn't, you know, you can't spend the whole, uh, stream talking about land's interaction, but they are all very fascinating and well worth, uh, reading these two thinkers in tandem if you have the opportunity.
00:58:44.340Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to, um, hog the mic on Nick land, but you are, uh, you are, um, speaking right to my, uh, my sci-fi nerd proclivities here.
00:58:56.560Um, but yeah, for anybody who wants to look deeper into it, uh, Xeno systems is certainly where you want to go among, among others, but that's the most direct one.
00:59:05.960Oren, can I use your platform real quick to speak directly to Nick land and the op chance that he's listening by all means?
00:59:12.280Okay. Nick, um, or Mr. Land, however you prefer the, uh, called, uh, I've been trying to get ahold of you.
00:59:18.500I would love to publish, uh, Xeno systems, uh, given the relevance to you are and everything else we are doing.
00:59:25.940So please respond to my DMS or there's some other way to get ahold of you.
00:59:30.880Maybe, uh, someone listening can get ahold of Nick, uh, Mr. Land.
00:59:34.760We would love to publish his book, uh, given the overlap here.
00:59:38.640Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's an invaluable resource guys. Um, you know, like I said, I think
00:59:44.040dark enlightenment is probably the first place you should go. Cause it's just a direct reaction
00:59:48.280to you are. So if you've read unqualified reservations, then dark enlightenment, but you
00:59:54.300absolutely should then continue on to Xeno systems. Oh, the nice thing about Xeno systems is most of the
00:59:59.860entries are like a page. Uh, so they, they are really thoughtful, but they are not over long.
01:00:06.220It's something you can land can at times become very difficult to process. You can, you can write a
01:00:12.500very, uh, way that obscures a lot, but the Xeno systems while being complicated are at least
01:00:17.320bite-sized enough where you can kind of go over them multiple times and better understand them.
01:00:23.840Yeah. Well, so mold book puts a lot of like super tech ideas in his writing. Uh, he had the one,
01:00:33.300I think it was called fascism and communism today. It came out last year. And he talks about like, uh,
01:00:40.420he talks about like the, the, the CEO having like, uh, uh, an encrypted code that he can be like,
01:00:48.720he doesn't know the code to it, a key, excuse me, and not a code, a key.
01:00:54.040And he like, can't get anything past the board without using this key. And if they don't like
01:00:59.300the way he's ruling, um, they take the key away from him and they pick a new person and it gets,
01:01:05.200it gets really complicated. But my point is that, uh, Nick land like picks this stuff up and he's got
01:01:10.980this whole like futuristic AI Skynet. He's always talking about Skynet, like taking over. And I,
01:01:17.960you know, I don't know how realistic some of this stuff is. I don't know how realistic all this stuff
01:01:21.880is. You know, are we going to get a Caesar? I don't know. Is it how, how much energy and how much
01:01:26.700intellectual capital should we really put in to the idea that Skynet's going to take over or that,
01:01:32.080um, that there's going to be a tech CEO someday ruling the country? You know, I don't know,
01:01:37.400but these guys make pretty strong arguments. Can I ask that question? Like how realistic
01:01:41.880do you think some of this stuff is? Uh, is that fair to ask?
01:01:46.040Yeah. Well, I think, uh, I think the Caesarism thing's kind of an inevitable, inevitable. I think,
01:01:50.920I think the cycle there will happen. Some people disagree with me about that, but
01:01:54.740I think that part's, uh, kind of inevitable. It won't be direct. Like no one's going to name
01:01:59.840anybody King. Um, but it, it'll be the transition in the way that you get, you know, uh, you know,
01:02:06.080Augustus, uh, uh, you know, uh, taking power. No, no one calls him emperor, but everyone understands,
01:02:12.740uh, that he's accumulated the, you know, the Senate still exists. We kind of go through the motions in
01:02:18.020some way, but, but everyone kind of knows that the, the first citizen is the one in charge,
01:02:22.380uh, when it comes to AI, uh, you know, land's whole point is that about accelerationism is like
01:02:29.460you said, it's happening whether you want it to or not. And the decision space to do things about it
01:02:34.900is collapsing because the cycle is accelerating itself. There's fewer and fewer interactions with
01:02:42.460humanity as kind of each part of the system, uh, ends up kind of auto generating a tighter feedback
01:02:49.160loop. And so for land, you know, there might not even be the, it doesn't really matter how much you
01:02:55.080put into it. You'll, you'll never be able to pursue AI safety or any of these things anyway,
01:02:59.140and it'll merge on its own. Uh, but that, that's a, that's obviously more controversial, uh, conclusion
01:03:04.080of his. Yeah. I think, um, to the previous point about like a Caesar, I have the same view as
01:03:10.580you do or, and, and the model that Curtis always points to, and I think is the most likely, the
01:03:17.140most plausible is a sort of new FDR where an executive comes in and through sort of the force
01:03:27.940of his rhetoric and by seizing on these various levers, uh, within the, uh, DC bureaucracy,
01:03:39.740all power is refocused and consolidated to the executive. And then these other branches of
01:03:45.780government, you know, there's all sorts of ways that this might happen through like court packing
01:03:50.540or whatever. Um, these, these other branches become these kinds of like impotent, you know,
01:03:58.740uh, it's just pro forma sort of proceduralism without any real power. They're just operating in
01:04:05.460accordance with, uh, with the executive's, um, interest in agenda. And, and that seems,
01:04:11.580I mean, uh, I, I agree that that seems almost inevitable that we're heading in that direction.
01:04:17.720And, um, yeah, I saw the other day, someone had mentioned, I think it was, uh, my friend,
01:04:24.220uh, Peachy Keenan had mentioned, you know, there was a video of Gavin Newsom doing something or other
01:04:30.500in California. And as much as I hate to say it, it seems as equally plausible that it's a blue Caesar
01:04:39.260in the form of Gavin Newsom as it is a red one. But in either case, that seems the direction we're
01:04:47.020headed. Um, you know, I, I, I'm just going to go off in a brief tangent here. One thing that I found
01:04:53.440with unqualified reservations, you know, Curtis does put forward a prescription for how to, um,
01:05:02.760eradicate and basically liquidate the cathedral and install like this executive that's going to
01:05:10.020like take over the sort of corporate restructuring he calls, you know, he sticks with this corporate
01:05:14.060metaphor throughout the book. And, um, this was always kind of vague. It was like, you know,
01:05:20.220and I don't know, maybe land has a better and clearer answer for how this is supposed to happen.
01:05:25.320But, you know, one day we're just going to, there's going to be tanks in Harvard yard.
01:05:28.640And then we snap our fingers and we have like benevolent dictator Lee Kwan-yoo or something,
01:05:35.440uh, leading the U S for the, you know, our glorious future or whatever. And I, I haven't really
01:05:44.040come to terms yet or seen the mechanism by which that happens. And I think actually Curtis to some
01:05:51.940extent in this book sort of punts on that question. I mean, he proposes like a few possibilities for
01:05:58.080this to happen, but one thing, whether it's with land and Skynet stuff or all this AI, it seems to me
01:06:05.240a bit of sort of wishful thinking. There are like steps in this process that I don't think any of us
01:06:10.320have quite figured out yet. How do we actually, uh, pull off what amounts to a coup? Okay. I mean,
01:06:18.900I, I mean that, uh, in the least sort of violent sense of the term, but at what point and how do you,
01:06:29.760uh, move on from this broken down system into some new machine, you know, you take all the parts and
01:06:37.440you move to some new machine that is now being operated by this, what Curtis calls receiver or
01:06:43.840this executive. And I don't yet really see the mechanisms for that. And one curious thing about
01:06:50.400you are in Curtis's new intro that he wrote for this book is he basically warns readers, uh, we're
01:06:58.200nowhere near that point yet. We're not there. And it could be a long time off. I mean, this could be a
01:07:04.140sort of generational project pushing us in that direction. And I think that's largely what our
01:07:10.360political work is, is sort of how do we imagine or get to a place where we can, you know, uh, defang
01:07:20.960the cathedral and basically liquidate whatever you want to call it, liquidate the sort of this,
01:07:26.360this sort of bureaucratic regime that is ruling over us. I think that's the major, uh, sort of
01:07:32.160ideological task before us. Well, so Yarvin, I think does punt or he's a little bit oblique
01:07:40.180sometimes because I don't, I, I, I, I mean, I don't know, but I think he doesn't want to get
01:07:45.500too specific because the more specific you get, the more wrong you'll be in the future.
01:07:50.500But one of the ways he addresses this is he talks about, uh, in Rome, like all these big,
01:07:56.900powerful Caesar like figures. And, you know, remember the slide into the fall of the Republic
01:08:02.400and the rise of the empire took something like 120 years. I think most people date it to like
01:08:08.420the beginning to the Gracchi brother murders, which were something like a hundred years before
01:08:12.400Caesar, 120 years before Caesar. And then there was a long, slow process and the big figures along
01:08:19.720the way, Marius Sulla, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, they all addressed big problems that the state had
01:08:29.400that the, that the state couldn't handle on their own. Uh, Marius reformed the military. Uh, Sulla
01:08:35.880took care of, uh, of, uh, uh, uh, King who was a wayward, uh, you know, King of the, who was,
01:08:43.380I can't remember his name now, but he genocided like 80,000 Romans. And, uh, he was basically
01:08:48.720like taking money from the state and then doing things like killing Romans in his country and
01:08:53.320nobody was doing anything about it. And Sulla finally took care of him. Pompey cleaned up the,
01:08:57.520uh, the, the pirates in the Mediterranean. Crassus was took care of, he was like a fireman.
01:09:02.740He took care of the, the rampant fires that were devastating the city of Rome. Um, he became a
01:09:08.180landlord, a wealthy landlord. And then of course, Julius Caesar was the first guy to go into, uh,
01:09:14.020uh, England where there were wealthy tin mines and Rome had known about this for a long, long time.
01:09:20.000And they were never able to go up there. And he, he conquered Gaul and went up there and
01:09:23.220got them access there. The point being, and, and these are all examples that Yarvin uses.
01:09:28.220The point being that the state had all these goals, uh, and they had all these problems and
01:09:33.660they couldn't achieve their goals and they couldn't fix these problems. And these like charismatic,
01:09:37.800wealthy, strong men came along and fixed them all. And by doing that, they, they amassed like
01:09:44.240huge amounts of influence and power to themselves. And they eventually took the state over. And if
01:09:50.120you remember, uh, Sulla took the state over and became a consul for life and he abdicated at the
01:09:56.760end. I mean, arguably Sulla could have like started a dynasty right then and there. So I think this is
01:10:03.840the way by which, uh, uh, mold bug thinks these types of things are going to happen. And two
01:10:08.900examples that I like to use is, well, well, mold bug uses one of these examples, which is that, uh,
01:10:13.840when they tried to roll out Obamacare, uh, they, they couldn't, the state couldn't make the website
01:10:19.400work. It didn't work at all. So last minute they brought in a private contractor. Um, and then on
01:10:24.660think about like Eric Prince's Blackwater, uh, how much work they did at Dyncore and other, uh, uh,
01:10:30.840uh, I almost called them mercenaries. I guess we could just call them mercenaries. Private armies,
01:10:35.600uh, we're in Iraq. I mean, they're the ones who got like most of the stuff done, right. Or,
01:10:40.900or a lot of the stuff done for us because they weren't beholden to like the bureaucracy.
01:10:45.620That's the whole key here. That's the whole key. Pompey wasn't beholden to the bureaucracy.
01:10:50.660Sulla wasn't beholden to the bureaucracy. They just did whatever they wanted to do.
01:10:54.140And if you look at somebody like Elon Musk, and I know he's the go-to guy, um, but you know,
01:10:58.960I'm kind of becoming more and more flagrant about my like endorsement of him as like the
01:11:03.500person to watch right now because of his, he bought Twitter. I mean, he took Twitter away
01:11:09.360from the state. He, he took away their propaganda tool. And, uh, one of the things the state used
01:11:14.560to do, and this will be my last example, but I hope I make the picture clear here, like
01:11:18.280how this transition happens. And Yarvin does call it a coup. He does use that word. Um,
01:11:24.660the state used to, to, to operate the space program. The state used to go to space that
01:11:30.180used to be like one of the main, uh, things that we use to like put us together as a nation.
01:11:37.660And as a people like looking to this, like shared destiny or the shared project, we were all
01:11:42.920working together to like put a man on the moon, like all of America got behind that. And that's
01:11:47.960gone now. And the state like over time has just been putting less and less and less money into the
01:11:52.920space program. And that knocks out like, uh, one of our, like our goals as a people to strive
01:11:58.200towards. And here's Elon Musk, like coming along and like taking up the mantle and taking up the
01:12:04.740project. And he's stated this as like one of his main goals in life. Like this is one of the things
01:12:09.680he, his entire project is working towards. So he, he exists as a figure. Oh, and think about another
01:12:16.980good example is he, he put Neuralink in, uh, Ukraine. So there he is like helping communications
01:12:23.460up and run this one guy, this one independent capitalist businessman, uh, putting the
01:12:30.440communications infrastructure in place that the state was unable to do so that they could
01:12:35.020perpetrate their war in Ukraine. Uh, so yeah, no, I think, uh, I think you're right that that's
01:12:41.140kind of how mold bug lays that down. And, uh, funny enough, uh, Elon Musk was, uh, was replying
01:12:47.600to Alex Kashuta today. So, uh, you know, he, he might be, uh, more familiar with our sphere than
01:12:52.780people might realize, but, um, I think a lot of, one of the big, uh, another one of the big
01:12:59.260criticisms that mold bug always got was that he leaned too hard on collapse, that there was just
01:13:04.100kind of this magical collapse that would happen and then kind of things would move forward. But I think
01:13:09.040you're right that he, he lays it out a little more particularly. And, you know, he often makes
01:13:13.440the connection between like the fall of the Soviet union, right? He just says, look, at some point
01:13:18.040people are still going through the motions because it's the only system they know. And there's really
01:13:22.860nothing to like receive the system after it collapses. So they're still doing it. But then
01:13:27.640like at some point they realize that like, no one cares about this anymore. And it's just completely
01:13:32.200an apparatus of power and no one's invested in it and it's not producing anything anymore.
01:13:36.080And people just kind of wake up and say, maybe we don't do this anymore and we do something else.
01:13:41.240Uh, he's a little too tidy in that. That's not exactly how the Soviet union fell, but, uh, but he
01:13:47.000does make, uh, he does make the point that, you know, the things, the transition between the
01:13:51.320governments or the transition to the governmental form doesn't need to be some kind of violent
01:13:55.340revolution or some kind of big smash, some kind of massive, uh, you know, uh, show force or anything
01:14:01.900that these things people will peacefully, uh, or willingly transition to these new forms when they
01:14:07.640realize the old forms are kind of just rotten to the core and are fading away on their own.
01:14:12.980And, uh, he has, he has seemed to have elongated his timeline on that. As both of you have kind of
01:14:18.780pointed out, he has kind of pushed that down the road and said, no, we could be stuck in this kind
01:14:23.100of degrading, uh, form for a long time before that transitions. Uh, but that was in the UR days,
01:14:28.940something that he went to repeatedly. Yeah. Well, one thing I'd like to point out, and I'm, I'm not
01:14:33.680really sure what the counter argument to this is, if there even is one, but people like to talk about
01:14:38.400collapse, maybe because collapse is like exciting, you know, the meme, nothing ever happens and people
01:14:43.820just want something to happen. But the way I understand it, like the Roman Republic didn't
01:14:50.900collapse. It's not like it, it's not like it like decayed so much that it collapsed and Caesar like
01:14:56.760reigned over the ruins. He just like replaced it. You know what I mean? And, uh, you know,
01:15:02.720they were in a much worse state than we are because you have to remember this hundred year period I was
01:15:07.700talking about was, uh, endless, endless civil wars. I mean, Marius and Sulla fought a war against each
01:15:14.020other. Um, uh, uh, uh, Augustus and, um, Mark Anthony fought a war against each or a huge battle against
01:15:21.880each other anyway. And the Roman Republic never collapsed, even though they call it a collapse,
01:15:28.000it didn't actually fall. People weren't like liquidated. Uh, the city wasn't burned.
01:15:34.020It just was, everything was just replaced by, by Augustus. So I don't think we need to see that
01:15:39.420happen at all. If it, and you kind of already said this on, but if, if the CEO, CEO monarch takes
01:15:45.200over in America, the Senate and the Congress could still be intact. Not only could the Senate and
01:15:50.380Congress still be intact, they could still meet with the same regularity. The Roman Senate met
01:15:55.240all the way to the end of the empire, uh, and, and debated things as if they had power, but you
01:16:01.020know, it just, it basically turned into emperor worship, but, uh, they never, the Senate was never
01:16:06.240dissolved as far as I know. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think, uh, that's a good perspective
01:16:12.640to people have when they're kind of demanding some kind of immediate explanation to how, you know,
01:16:18.340you'll get this, this really quick transition. Uh, but that said, we are already running long
01:16:23.420and the super chats are stacking up, but we can't in, we can't go to the super chats without
01:16:28.600at least touching on gray mirror and kind of the wider expansion of mold bug. So we won't spend too
01:16:35.260long on it, but I'm hoping each one of you will kind of talk a little bit about post you are
01:16:41.440Yarvin. What do we think about the legacy of, uh, what do we think about the legacy of, uh,
01:16:51.540unqualified reservations? What do we think about gray mayor? And it's in kind of Yarvin once he
01:16:56.660started writing his own name. And what do we think about the fact that Yarvin is now making contact
01:17:01.460with kind of major political players, you know, uh, people like, uh, you know, Tucker Carlson,
01:17:07.340he shows up on the Tucker Carlson show. Uh, he writes for things like Claremont. He, uh,
01:17:12.640obviously had some level of contact with Blake masters and others, Peter Thiel. What do we think
01:17:17.460about that legacy? I can jump in here. Um, I, I don't know any of this, uh, for sure. I mean,
01:17:25.340I've talked to Curtis a little bit about this, but, um, my impression of you are versus gray mirror
01:17:33.940is that gray mirror has like a different audience. There's a different sort of rhetorical goal that
01:17:42.060Curtis is trying to accomplish with you are. And one thing we just got done discussing is how,
01:17:48.420since you are, was written, I think Curtis's mind has changed about a couple of things. One is
01:17:54.800the immediacy of this possibility of collapse. Uh, that timeline, as you said, or, and has been
01:18:01.980extended and I've heard him speak on this subject. And he, in fact, thinks we're nowhere near collapse
01:18:08.060that this machinery can just kind of keep on chugging, uh, aimlessly across the sort of power
01:18:17.080landscape for a long time. Um, so there's no, uh, possibility of imminent coup or imminent, uh, regime
01:18:28.340change. Um, what I think you are is doing or what gray mirror is doing then is it's a, uh, persuasion
01:18:38.580campaign. Curtis is sort of proselytizing to, I think what he thinks are possibly open-minded
01:18:46.260progressives. I think that's his intended audience. People that he thinks might be, uh, persuaded with the
01:18:54.800right kinds of arguments and the right kind of approach to abandon what he identifies as a kind of
01:19:02.840faith-based, uh, belief in the prevailing consensus ideology, this prevailing sort of default liberal
01:19:13.360ideology that, uh, holds up this, you know, concept, however degraded of democracy as its sort of primary
01:19:24.160virtue and primary organizing principle. And he's just, I think, trying to demonstrate to these
01:19:31.440progressives who may be frustrated or disappointed with this or that direction that the country and,
01:19:40.500uh, sort of the West generally, uh, with the leadership of America is headed and at least lead
01:19:49.520them to the possibility that there's some other way of organizing ourselves without being as direct,
01:19:56.200uh, as he was with you are and potentially scaring off that audience. And so what I think has happened
01:20:03.720is that some of us on the right who previously knew Curtis as Menchus Moldbug think that his message is
01:20:11.220sort of diluted or has been neutered in some way, or that he's gone soft or, you know, he's refusing to
01:20:18.840say certain things that he would have said 10 years ago. And that's true, but there may be an intention
01:20:26.000behind that, I think, which is that, uh, you have to meet people where they're at. And if your goal
01:20:32.160is to meet these fence sitting progressives, then you're going to have to drop some of that harsher
01:20:38.900language, uh, just as a matter of, um, being sort of rhetorically practical. And so that's how I view
01:20:46.560the wisdom of that approach, whether it can be effective, whether you can actually convince any
01:20:52.500of these people, whether you can actually convince Noah Smith, for example, to, or Matt Iglesias or
01:20:58.300whatever, to, um, sort of abandon this default liberalism. I sort of doubt, I don't know that
01:21:06.980that's possible. Maybe you convince though, Noah Smith and Matt Iglesias is readers or the gen,
01:21:12.920the gen Z, you know, version of Matt Iglesias or Noah Smith who hasn't yet graduated into their
01:21:20.300sinecure in the cathedral. And maybe we can push them in our direction. So that's, that's what I
01:21:26.680think the UR project is about. Yeah, I think that's, that's mostly right. Um, uh, again, people can have
01:21:35.640mixed feelings on the, uh, on the possibility of converting those people, but I think that is the
01:21:41.600wider project. I think Curtis has always been a little too sure about the need of kind of blue
01:21:46.820states and their elites to handle everything. Sorry about the beeping guys. My, uh, my power has gone
01:21:52.120out, so I'm on battery backup here. So hopefully, uh, that'll all hold and be fine, but you'll get some,
01:21:57.440uh, get some nice beeping in the background otherwise. Uh, but however you feel about the
01:22:02.020veracity of that project, I think that is Curtis's, uh, kind of, kind of aim with Grey Mirror. And
01:22:07.600obviously the fact that he is now speaking to a much wider audience means to some extent it has
01:22:12.180worked. But what do you think Astral? Uh, first of all, thanks for, for sticking to it, uh, with your,
01:22:17.400with your power out, man. We appreciate that. But, uh, I, I agree with both you guys. I would,
01:22:22.200excuse me, you know, I think we would be remiss if we don't mention the dark elves and the Hobbit.
01:22:27.600That's everybody's favorite terminology that he uses, right? Sorry. The way I see Grey Mirror,
01:22:35.700especially lately, is he's really trying to push like the whole art right thing. He's really trying
01:22:41.680to, I mean, he's been like touring the country. He's been doing podcast tours. He's been going to
01:22:46.820parties. He's been doing meetups. He just put a, uh, thing on his blog about meeting people in New
01:22:53.800York city this weekend or this week. So he's really trying to make this happen. He's really
01:22:58.580trying to get the culture thing going. And I got, I got a mute for a second. I'm sorry. I still got
01:23:03.840this cold. Yeah, no problem. Uh, as soon as Astral gets back, we'll jump into the, uh, the super
01:23:13.780chats here, guys, we're going to get through as many of them as we can. Like I said, I am on a
01:23:17.640battery backup here, so I don't want to push my luck too long. So sorry. We'd normally would,
01:23:22.900uh, commit more time to answering these, but we're going to try to move through them as quickly as
01:23:26.880possible. Sorry, Astral, you were saying, no, no, I'm sorry about that guys. I just wanted to say
01:23:30.980that the passage press and the passage prize and the publishing of you are is part of that wider
01:23:35.840project. I see of like trying to like influence the culture by creating art, by making, you know,
01:23:42.140he he's got this parallel institutions ideas, what some people think is silly. I don't think it's
01:23:47.540silly at all. I think if there's going to be a replacement of the regime, it's going to be
01:23:52.240things like this, like artists and thinkers and shows like yours and companies like passage press.
01:24:02.100Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump into our super chats here real quick. We've got,
01:24:07.540uh, Moby seven. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks for all your great work. Well, absolutely. I appreciate
01:24:12.680it. Thanks for watching guys. Uh, we'll hear for $2, three Kings. Yep. I'm glad to have both these
01:24:19.860gentlemen on definitely, uh, check out all of their work as well. Well, make sure that you're
01:24:25.540checking out Astral's podcast and you're checking out everything that comes out of passage prize and
01:24:31.060Lomas here. Uh, we've got, uh, Nate for five Canadian great show. Orin. Thank you. Really
01:24:36.900appreciate it, man. Uh, we've got, uh, Justin Palmer here for $10 or in rocks. Keep up the great work.
01:24:42.500All three of you. We're going to win. Absolutely. Everybody's going to make it. Don't worry. Let's
01:24:48.200see. Uh, we've got one, uh, Pronomi and Chomsky here for 999. Yarvin has argued that Protestantism
01:24:55.560evolved into liberalism to get around separation of church and state. Is it, uh, pseudo scientifically
01:25:01.420to talk about the evolution is separate from biology. Yeah. Again, he does this a lot, especially
01:25:07.120in how Dawkins got pwned, which again is in the unqualified reservation volume one, how Dawkins
01:25:12.620got pwned is one of my favorite essays by Yarvin. I think it's very insightful. He explains that idea
01:25:19.340multiple times. He explains it in the open letter and such, but I think that how Dawkins got pwned is
01:25:24.500the best iteration of that. Uh, there is obviously some stretching of the biological metaphor when you
01:25:30.900talk about evolution in this way, but I do think it is a very valuable way to understand kind of some
01:25:37.020of that interaction. And I think it is, even if everything isn't one-to-one, even if there are
01:25:42.900some leaps in logic, that kind of thing, uh, as I think, uh, both Lomez and, uh, Astral have said,
01:25:50.060there's a lot of value in that narrative, uh, at least understanding some of the ideas behind it and
01:25:55.540the development behind it. So I do think even if it doesn't hit all the best points, it is valuable.
01:26:01.280Um, Ronald McDougats, $25. Thank you very much, sir. Uh, Reese Bangler, uh, Volkmar Weiss's book on
01:26:09.840population cycles shows eugenic cultures select for intelligence, hard work, order, and genes create
01:26:15.880prosperity. Uh, uh, competition elites to redistribute surplus, uh, uh, commences and
01:26:22.840civilization is destroyed. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's certainly big parts of that also in land as
01:26:29.060well. And also the consequences of kind of, you know, uh, what happens with IQ shredders when,
01:26:34.640uh, the population ends up selecting to, to kind of lose a lot of its, uh, useful IQ and funnel it
01:26:42.920into interactions that don't actually further kind of the good of civilizations, uh, or the
01:26:47.900continuation of civilizations. So that's important as well. Uh, will for 499 buy based brands. Yes,
01:26:55.880absolutely. It's really important guys. When you get opportunities to support people like passage
01:27:01.820press to do what you can. Uh, so whenever you have an opportunity to kind of, uh, do what you can to
01:27:07.860contribute and help out our friends, it is well worth your time. Um, let's see Ronald again for $20.
01:27:16.980Thank you again. Very generous, sir. What do you, what do you all think of urine's, uh, definition of
01:27:21.640left and right? My opinion, right-wing is about making defined groups stronger against external
01:27:26.060enemies. Christian as a nation state, both right-wing conception, but Trotsky internationalism,
01:27:32.640neocons cannot be right wing. Uh, well, obviously, uh, Yarvin's understanding of right-wing heavily
01:27:39.640involves pronomian ideas and, uh, uh, extra P versus entropy. Uh, he has a whole idea of the left as
01:27:47.460entropy, which is another big, uh, a big part of neoreactionary thought, but, uh, guys, what do
01:27:53.920you think about Yarvin's definition of left and right and how they've held up kind of over this,
01:27:58.900uh, intervening period? Yeah, I'll jump in there. Yeah. I mean, um, in short, Curtis defines like the
01:28:05.600right reactionary as valuing order, stability, security, and, you know, progressivism is, uh,
01:28:13.900preferencing change and change as like an inherent good. Uh, again, that like ties back to their wig
01:28:21.520history view of things that all change is definitionally good because change happens in
01:28:26.780the future and the future is better than the past. I think that's mostly right. It's, it's fine enough
01:28:32.260as like, uh, uh, a model for following, uh, into more complex arguments about how we sort of situate
01:28:43.240ourselves and organize ourselves along these dimensions. It's not complete, but like, um,
01:28:49.720you know, as I think it's good enough for government work. And so when we're thinking about what really
01:28:56.440matters in politics, it's not really these dimensions of right and left, but friend and
01:29:02.540enemy. And I think Curtis gets to that. And I think we're at the stage now where friend and enemy is all
01:29:08.320that matters. It's, uh, and so this idea of order instability versus change or entropy, um, I think is
01:29:20.020good enough. All right. So we've got, uh, uh, cynical skeptic here. What do accelerationists think
01:29:29.400of Christianity? Will it be, uh, be the point, uh, disorder, right? Should rally to, uh, rally to
01:29:36.780considering it is, it's sorry, guys, I'm reading fast. You're trying to get through everything.
01:29:41.660Uh, it's endless philosophizing that got us here, uh, got us into this mess. Are we missing something?
01:29:46.680Yeah. To be clear, like, while I think there are a lot, there's a lot of land that is very valuable
01:29:52.800and I think he's right on a number of things, uh, kind of his embrace of accelerationism and kind of
01:29:59.920what comes after has always been concerning to me. That's something that, uh, the, the existence that
01:30:05.240land kind of looks at seems pretty bad though. I think land's point would be our existence right now
01:30:09.280is pretty bad. Uh, and it might be the only way of escaping it's further degeneration. Uh, but I think
01:30:14.560other, uh, other solutions are necessary. I don't think, uh, that the ones he he's pointing to,
01:30:21.180uh, do create a good future for humanity. Um, and I, being a Christian simply can't, you know,
01:30:29.700the, that is a central part of, uh, my identity and the identity that I would want perpetuated
01:30:36.600into the future. So I couldn't, you couldn't persuade me to abandon it either way. Uh, whether,
01:30:42.320whether it's tactically sound or not would, would not really be a consideration, uh, for me. Uh,
01:30:47.940so I would certainly think it has to be an essential part of, uh, of kind of where we would
01:30:54.000rally. And I would agree with you that, uh, while I do love philosophy, I do love political theory,
01:30:59.160uh, at some point your movement has to be about much more than that, which is, I think a lot of
01:31:04.620what people are trying to do now. Uh, sorry, go ahead. If I could just jump in, I wanted to just
01:31:10.520add that I think kind of a central tenant of acceleration ism is the breakdown of morality.
01:31:17.900And if traditional morality has broken down the idea with acceleration ism is it's like,
01:31:23.320it's not going to go back to what it was before. So some people want to preserve or conserve
01:31:28.300traditional morality. I'm one of those people. I'm a pretty traditional person. Uh, my morals are
01:31:34.680pretty standard Christian morals, but, um, I'm also realistic. That's how, that's how I see like
01:31:41.260acceleration ism is being realistic about the future. And I do think that like the, the, the,
01:31:49.180the, the whole Nietzschean thing about like the institutional, uh, uh, source of power and ordering
01:31:55.980of society that the church once provided is, is gone for us now. And that, uh, what we're seeing
01:32:01.440is just the long, slow degeneration and breakdown of morals, excuse me. Uh, so I think it's really
01:32:10.400realistic of acceleration ism not to, to, to have like a need for morality. I'm not saying we don't
01:32:18.360need morality. Of course we do, but I don't think the philosophy of acceleration ism needs to integrate
01:32:24.560morality into it because it's inherently baked into the concept that, uh, traditional morals are
01:32:29.760breaking down. That's why we're in the position that we're in. Uh, and of course they have nothing
01:32:34.720to do with like a, an AR future. Why, why is the AI Skynet going to care about that? It's, it's totally
01:32:40.000irrelevant to them. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I found Alexander Dugan's work kind of
01:32:45.360interesting here. He's, he's not right on everything. I have major disagreements with him on certain
01:32:50.200stuff, but he also seems to have approached some of the problems of acceleration ism as well. He
01:32:55.080seems to have followed a different path, some of the same conclusions about what's going on that land
01:33:00.840reached. And, but he comes to them with instead like the ability to have a rebirth of certain parts
01:33:07.400of things like mysticism and traditional morality that can exist in modernity, uh, that can't survive
01:33:13.320kind of the idea of the death of God. And so, uh, I I'm, I'm interested in the fact that there are other
01:33:19.000people who have reached similar conclusions, uh, to kind of where we're at, but have a different
01:33:23.720view of where we might go with that. So, uh, that's something I'm exploring, but, uh, but I won't
01:33:29.480disagree with you that land has very challenging questions for anybody who wants to pursue that
01:33:33.800project. He thinks Christian morality holds back the potential of technology. All right. And we got one
01:33:42.600more here wrestling with Wormwood for 499. Uh, glad, God bless, uh, you all. Thanks for all you do keep
01:33:50.280posting gentlemen. Well, thank you very much guys. I really appreciate a lot of positive messages there.
01:33:54.760A lot of encouragement really appreciate all you guys do. Uh, you know, uh, audience of this channel
01:33:59.960has obviously made all of this possible. So many of you kind of came on board as I was explaining a bunch
01:34:05.880of Curtis Yarvin, mentions mole bug and his work. So I know that's why many people kind of eventually
01:34:11.720ended up joining this channel. And so it's great to kind of talk with two guys. So I think do great
01:34:17.160work and kind of look at the legacy of you are, but obviously my battery backups are beeping at me.
01:34:21.800So I don't know how long we have left, uh, Lomas, uh, once you let people know where they can find your
01:34:28.120stuff, if there's anything exciting coming up and then ask after him, astral, you go ahead and then
01:34:32.680we'll get out of here. Thanks, Oren. Uh, once again, uh, honored to be on the show. Really
01:34:37.640enjoyed this discussion. Um, if you're interested in buying the UR book, which of course I encourage
01:34:42.280everyone to do, you can do so at passage.press. It's just passage.press. We have a bookstore there
01:34:49.000where that is as of now, cause we've sold out of our other books, the only book on sale.
01:34:53.480Our next book in the pipeline is going to be a Steve Saylor book. Um, that hasn't been formally
01:34:59.880announced yet, but we're working on that. That'll be available probably in the fall.
01:35:03.720And then we'll have, uh, the passage prize to book, um, we are working on, and that should
01:35:09.000be available in the summer. So please follow the passage press account, uh, Twitter account
01:35:14.840at passage.press. Um, and I'll be, uh, providing updates there. Um, yeah, thanks again, Oren.
01:35:24.200All right, Astral, and where should everybody find your work?
01:35:26.040Thanks, man. Yeah. I'm on astroflight.substack.com. It's where I have a podcast. You can also find it
01:35:31.920astroflightpodcast on, um, Spotify and iTunes and follow me on Twitter. My at is Thulian revenant.
01:35:42.640Um, and, uh, I, I host Twitter spaces quite frequently and we have a group chat, a passage
01:35:48.360press group chat where we're discussing unqualified reservations. It filled up within three days.
01:35:52.900And, uh, I actually wanted to, to come on your show. I'm really, really honored to do this
01:35:57.680as a way to kick off the discussion of mold bug. So if you tune into my Twitter page, I'm going to
01:36:03.420try to have, uh, one Twitter space a week with members from the group chat reading group discussing
01:36:09.520unqualified reservations and hopefully all the way through all of passage presses publications. We do
01:36:15.300that. So we're going to have, uh, winners from last year's passage prize on a Twitter space,
01:36:19.940discussing their work from last year in the run-up to the publication of passage prize two.
01:36:24.960And we're going to have the winners from the second passage prize, uh, come on and discuss. So
01:36:28.960we want to keep this going, you know, in perpetuity, as long as, um, you know, passage presses is publishing
01:36:34.480books. Excellent. So make sure you check out all of those spaces, guys, make sure that you check out
01:36:41.320everything that passage press is putting out. If you haven't subscribed yet, you know, join the podcast,
01:36:47.340everything else, make sure you do so. And we really appreciate everyone coming on. And I really
01:36:53.640appreciate the fact that my batteries held out till the end of the show. So thanks for coming by guys.
01:36:58.080And as always, we'll talk to you next time.