The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Nation-State Is Failing ｜ 10⧸26⧸26

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Oren McIntyre.

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00:01:19.300 today. All right, guys. So today I want to talk to you about the concept of the nation-state.

00:01:28.780 Now, a lot of people today are talking about nationalism. Is nationalism good? Is nationalism

00:01:33.420 bad? Is it evil? Is it the personification of the collective will of a people necessary to keep

00:01:39.660 things going? These are all the discussions that we are having, but I think there's a deeper

00:01:44.080 question about the nature of the nation state itself. One of the big problems we have, of course,

00:01:50.040 is that our conception of what a state is, what a nation is, is so limited. It's so modern. We

00:01:56.680 don't really think about how ancient peoples or any other people ultimately thought about

00:02:01.800 themselves collectively. We can only think in the kind of very rigid categories that we've created

00:02:07.000 for ourselves when we talk about the nation. So today I want to unpack first, what is a nation?

00:02:12.760 What is a state? At one point, do they overlap? At one point, do they separate? And if they have separated, how do we then deal with nationalism? What does nationalism mean once the state has completely separated itself from the interests of a nation? What if we can't even define a nation anymore? What does that mean for us then if we want to pursue nationalism?

00:02:33.180 I think these are all critical questions. And while we try to address these higher order things, if we don't have that foundation, we don't have the historical context and we don't have shared language and definitions for what we're approaching, then we just end up talking past each other, which I think is a lot of what we're seeing now.

00:02:49.660 A lot of the frustration that we're ultimately seeing is the fact that so many people are married to definitions that they think are permanent and total and hard to find and historically accurate, when in reality, they're very modern, they're very transient, and they could easily change under your feet while you're trying to have this debate.

00:03:08.420 So I think we should dive into this. So obviously most people, when you're looking at anthropology, you're looking at how humans develop societies, how they developed over time. A lot of people start with the family. Makes perfect sense.

00:03:25.120 the smallest unit that you can reduce a functional human kind of institution to is the family no

00:03:32.540 person is a total individual none of us just sprang out of the ground unless you're adam or eve

00:03:38.020 originally created by god there is not a situation where you just came from nowhere you have a

00:03:44.560 heritage you have a legacy you're tied biologically culturally traditionally most often religiously

00:03:50.400 to a distinct set of people and the most immediate unit by which we can

00:03:54.400 gauge that is the family. Now obviously families themselves are not very good at

00:03:58.740 surviving on their own. As Aristotle pointed out

00:04:02.420 man is a political animal and ultimately anyone who

00:04:06.460 is surviving alone is either an animal or a

00:04:10.500 god. The people themselves must exist in social

00:04:14.580 groups in order to survive. We are at some level pack

00:04:18.440 animals. And so we start to see that transition from the family to the tribe. A tribe is basically

00:04:26.780 just extended families, ultimately, right? Tribes, clans. These are collections of different families

00:04:33.120 that have usually genetic heritage that are coming together. They are continuing that shared

00:04:39.380 existence. And this means that they can have a force multiplier for the number of people. You

00:04:45.240 can start to get some level of specialization some people hunt some people gather some people

00:04:49.460 protect this tribe some people uh you know sow and reap we can start to see that the complexity

00:04:55.020 of the society the redundancy of the society builds up uh this creates a much more stable

00:05:00.960 structure than a single family trying to live alone uh you're going to be much less likely to

00:05:06.040 be overwhelmed uh physically by other peoples if you are traveling in a tribe as opposed to an

00:05:11.600 individual or family, you're going to have a lot of advantages due to the number of people involved.

00:05:17.580 The scale matters and it helps significantly with the protection and livelihood of the people

00:05:23.300 involved. Now, from tribes, we start to see the formation of what we would call city-states.

00:05:30.800 City-states were the kind of maximum viable social organization in their time. It's where

00:05:38.320 these tribes stop roaming nomadically. They stop constantly moving from place to place,

00:05:43.700 and they start to formally sit down and build a structure. They start to build walls to protect

00:05:49.240 themselves. They set down infrastructure. You start to see the settling, the planting of crops,

00:05:55.680 irrigation, these things that allow you to permanently stay in one place. Now, you still

00:05:59.840 have to choose your place wisely. This is why many city-states were, of course, built near rivers or

00:06:05.160 at the head of a delta or some other place where the land was going to be fertile. You were going

00:06:09.940 to have access to easy transversal. Hopefully it was defensible in some way. And so the tribe

00:06:16.560 grows into the city-state. And the city-state is still related in a way, but much less so

00:06:22.500 than the tribe. You end up in a scenario where everyone is not immediate relatives of each

00:06:28.240 other. Now, often they're distant, distant cousins, that kind of thing. But the core nature of the

00:06:36.040 social organization changes to one in which not everyone is directly related, but they're still

00:06:42.040 very closely tied. They can feel those bonds of heritage and tradition and lineage. There's

00:06:48.620 obviously still a lot of very shared culture. Their ways are understood inherently. They don't

00:06:56.440 have to usually be taught because there's so much of the culture going on. Now, there is some

00:07:01.920 difficulty in this transition. This is the first part where we move to something that might break

00:07:06.500 down what was there before. So a lot of people will think of these states as ethnostates, and

00:07:13.240 that makes sense. In a way, that's true. The people who are in the city-state are of the same ethnos

00:07:19.320 at some level. However, a lot of people, if we want to get kind of pedantic about the language,

00:07:24.800 we'll say that this is actually a koine which is uh what that which is in common in the greek and

00:07:30.000 so the difference between ethnos and a koine would be that the koine is the joining of two ethnos

00:07:36.120 it's the first time that the level of your society gets so complex that you're going to have to blend

00:07:41.520 at some level multiple peoples now they're still going to be very close together they're usually

00:07:47.380 going to be worshiping the same gods they're going to speak the same language they're going

00:07:51.080 have very similar heritages. In fact, in most cases, there's still be a lot of genetic connection

00:07:56.180 between these peoples. However, they might be two or more actually distinct groups inside the Koine

00:08:04.460 that can create this city-state, that create this larger manifestation. Now, if you look at the work

00:08:12.100 of someone like Faustel de Colange in the ancient city, he talks about how the creation of the

00:08:17.520 formal city, the first state as such, requires the destruction of previous loyalties. So even at the

00:08:26.460 city-state level, we're already starting to see that the creation of scale, a larger state, requires

00:08:32.780 the destruction of previous understandings. As where in the tribal phase, you would never see

00:08:39.980 anyone transgress the leadership of the patriarchs, of the tribe, the people, the djinns, the people

00:08:45.340 who ultimately made those decisions happened inside the tribe.

00:08:49.700 If you had a question of dispute, you went to the tribe leader first.

00:08:54.480 If you had any kind of issue that was entirely internal to the tribe,

00:08:58.560 you would never think to take it outside of the tribe.

00:09:02.100 Now, once you get to a city-state level, obviously you can no longer do exactly that.

00:09:06.460 The tribe is still powerful.

00:09:08.820 As Colange lays out, you still see the patriarchs of the djinns

00:09:13.300 can control a large amount of what happens in a place like Rome. But ultimately, there is now a

00:09:19.440 higher authority, a state authority that stands apart from the individual tribes, the individual

00:09:26.100 gens, the individual ethnos, and says, I am above this. I am an overcoat, if you've paid attention

00:09:33.100 to some of my other work. And so now there is this authority that moves beyond just the ethnos

00:09:39.260 itself. We would still think of this as an ethno state in every sense. In fact, we would think of

00:09:43.420 it as almost a higher ethno state, but we have to remember how different this is, right? So

00:09:49.820 for instance, today, most people think of Greece as a Greek as an ethnos and Greece as the state

00:09:57.180 that governs the ethnos of the Greek. However, before, especially in ancient Greek, you had a

00:10:03.520 scenario where most of these Greek city-states did not see themselves as the same. They understood

00:10:09.900 themselves as part of the Hellenic world in some way. However, they were very much at odds,

00:10:15.800 constantly at war, obviously. We know about these different battles between the Spartans and the

00:10:21.580 Athenians, between the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. This is what the Trojan War is all about. And so

00:10:28.140 there is this constant battle. They don't see themselves as one unified people. They know they

00:10:33.760 share more than say they share with barbarians outside of Greece, but they do not see a collective

00:10:39.840 Greek identity as an ethnos in the way that we do today. Now that changes when they face opposition

00:10:47.280 from the Persians. Once the Persians start attacking the Greeks as such, the Greeks start

00:10:53.780 to see themselves as a collective identity they realize that there are larger forces out there

00:10:58.980 and whatever their squabbles might be being ruled by someone in greece is better than being ruled

00:11:05.020 by a foreigner even if previously you thought that other greek city-states weren't the same as you

00:11:11.080 and so we see this big difference now this is where we start to see the viability of the city-state

00:11:18.300 breakdown? Because it simply cannot scale, right? We start to see that these different city-states

00:11:26.580 seek to form empires. They may not formally go out to do that, or maybe they do, but ultimately

00:11:33.080 that is kind of the destination, the gradient along which they are being dragged. And so you

00:11:38.520 have this moment where you see things like the Peloponnesian War, where both the Spartans and

00:11:44.960 the Athenians are kind of creating multi-city state empires that go to war with against each

00:11:50.460 other. We think, of course, of then the hardening of Greece into a consolidated identity once they

00:11:57.120 have to face the Persian Empire. And of course, the most classic example of this is going to be

00:12:03.180 the Romans who started as a dedicated city state, but over time became an empire to the point

00:12:08.440 where you didn't even need

00:12:10.620 the city of Rome

00:12:12.140 to be Roman. You had a moment where

00:12:14.340 Roman identity was actually

00:12:16.540 more concentrated in

00:12:18.140 the east of the empire than it

00:12:20.380 was with the original city of Rome

00:12:22.340 and so the city-state for which the empire

00:12:24.420 was originally

00:12:25.040 designed ultimately didn't

00:12:28.480 end up mattering. You didn't even need

00:12:30.480 to be from Rome to be a Roman emperor

00:12:32.520 and this really changed the nature

00:12:34.420 of the state. So we can see

00:12:36.160 this slow transition

00:12:37.900 from tribe to city-state, from city-state to empire,

00:12:42.520 and the way that at each level we're breaking down

00:12:45.840 what the state and the nation are, right?

00:12:49.360 When we had the tribes,

00:12:51.180 we didn't even have what we would recognize perhaps as a nation.

00:12:54.160 It was ethnos in its most pure form.

00:12:56.140 Once we get to the city-state,

00:12:57.320 we can see probably the most distinctive version of a nation

00:13:00.160 and a state overlapping.

00:13:02.260 The state is the nation and the nation is the state.

00:13:04.940 They are one and the same.

00:13:05.860 the power of the state only really extends to the city. The people who are part of the state are

00:13:12.000 only those who are part of the city, and the city is only full of a single nation. And so you have

00:13:18.140 that moment where nation and state are one. This is probably the most clear example of an ancient

00:13:24.600 nation state. But the problem is that the ancient nation state was not sufficient, that we saw that

00:13:29.800 the inevitable destination of these nation-states, these city-states, was empire. Now, once the Roman

00:13:36.720 Empire falls, we end up in a very different situation. We end up in a situation where there

00:13:42.620 is no real central authority like there has been for so many centuries. The world had been defined

00:13:50.020 by the Roman Empire. All of these peoples did not know how to rule themselves. They did not know how

00:13:56.480 to be their own thing they had all either been directly under the rule of the roman empire or

00:14:02.380 had had their individual sovereignty suppressed by the roman empire and so when the roman empire

00:14:08.880 falls you have many different reactions but for most places there really is a scenario where no

00:14:15.620 person is in a strong position to take control of what's happening there is no central authority to

00:14:21.960 assume the duties of the state as they had existed previously and so now we go and devolve back down

00:14:29.860 into a very different scenario it's once again very tribal we see the tribal identities start

00:14:36.800 to re-emerge again and from these tribes we see warlords rise and these warlords become capable

00:14:42.760 of not just protecting their area their people their ethnos or their nation they start to become

00:14:49.160 capable of protecting other areas around them or enforcing control of those areas sometimes it's

00:14:55.740 not voluntary many times it's not voluntary and so we start to see this feudal system emerge where

00:15:02.120 barons take control barons and counts take control of different areas of their feudal the feudal

00:15:09.340 kingdom they have these fiefdoms that they control they provide protection and they have local rule

00:15:14.820 over theirs but then there's also starts to develop this superstructure of the kingdom right

00:15:20.420 and so the king is above the warlords he's above the uh barons barons and counts but he still

00:15:26.580 doesn't have that central state apparatus he still doesn't have that central control and so

00:15:32.660 everything is still very much bound to the individual tribes the individual ethnos the

00:15:39.020 individual nations and peoples inside that kingdom. The king might technically rule several

00:15:45.360 different nations, several different peoples, but ultimately he doesn't really have full state

00:15:50.760 control of those areas. Most of that sovereignty is still left at that local level. So this creates

00:15:58.200 an interesting scenario where we have some semblance of a state, but it's incredibly weak.

00:16:05.340 And, you know, a lot. So a lot of people when you're having this discussion will talk about, for instance, Tolkien, J.R. Tolkien, writer of the Lord of the Rings, and how he would say, well, I, you know, I like I like the idea of anarchy.

00:16:22.540 And they think he means like straight up, no government, no rules, nothing, you know, like some anarchists throwing bombs in the late 1800s. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about this scenario. Many libertarians call this medieval anarchy, where you do have authority.

00:16:40.800 It's not like there is no protection. It's not like there is no provider of the monopoly on violence, but it's so distributed. The power is so federalized and spread out that ultimately you can't actually enforce everything in every little area. And so there's very little of a formal state as it usually is conceived in the modern day.

00:17:04.660 so that's where our feudal situation takes us now over time obviously we know that the battle

00:17:12.600 becomes between the nobles and the king we can see this over and over again every king

00:17:21.540 very naturally as power always wants to do starts to try to centralize the power they want to get

00:17:26.880 rid of the nobles they don't want that intermediate layer between them and the people they want to

00:17:32.220 take those feudal states and turn them into one central state. They want one strong kind of

00:17:40.380 imperial sovereign over all of these different peoples. That's what the king ultimately wants

00:17:46.400 to do. And so we can see this back and forth from the Magna Carta is obviously an attempt to restrict

00:17:51.680 the consolidation of the power of the king, that kind of thing. But over time, kings become more

00:17:56.980 and more powerful they accrue enough surplus from the lands that they are ruling they diminish the

00:18:04.380 power of these individuals who are their you know their barons and their counts and everything over

00:18:10.340 time and ultimately you start to build this scenario where the kings are are building up

00:18:15.160 bureaucracies they're building up redundant systems they're centralizing authority they

00:18:19.720 start to build armies that are overwhelming that wouldn't necessarily be able to be opposed

00:18:24.880 by the barons and the counts and we start to see a consolidation and a move towards absolute

00:18:30.940 monarchy you'll notice that when people talk about absolute monarchy all the absolute monarchs

00:18:37.060 tend to occur in like the 16 and 1700s right like it move we see the shift to absolute monarchy and

00:18:43.860 that's because uh early kings were not as powerful as we often you know pretend they are we we usually

00:18:49.760 have this fictitious notion that kings were just these god emperors who you know just you know

00:18:55.760 snapped their fingers and someone was killed instantly and people did whatever they wanted

00:18:59.360 and they had total control of everything and that's just not true they had to constantly

00:19:04.900 you know ask for help from their barons from their nobles and many times they would say no you know

00:19:12.960 and ultimately the king would be restrained by the fact that he was not in total control of the kingdom

00:19:19.760 but obviously kings don't like that they work very hard to ultimately move transition their

00:19:27.600 kingdoms to this scenario where they are going to have more centralized control now a big shift

00:19:33.440 occurs in 1648 this is usually where many people see the birth of the modern nation state now i

00:19:41.080 know 1648 seems like really long time ago and of course for us it is but in the grand scheme of

00:19:47.960 human organization. 1648 is not that long ago. Most of human history has been lived up to this

00:19:54.840 point without the idea of strong centralized states under a specific nation. It simply did

00:20:01.360 not exist. We had points where the nation was more powerful. We had moments where the state

00:20:06.400 was more powerful. But really, outside of that city-state moment where the city and the state

00:20:11.540 were one, that wasn't how the world worked. But in 1648, after the Thirty Years' War, we had the

00:20:18.840 Peace of West Velia. Obviously, there's a lot of history there, but the long and the short of it

00:20:24.280 is that the Holy Roman Empire was looking at a situation where it needed to cede a certain level

00:20:31.680 of authority and control to the German princes that ruled the individual nations, the kingdoms,

00:20:37.440 the smaller peoples inside of those areas and so there was this idea that the local sovereign

00:20:44.880 would have uh well sovereignty the the local ruler would have sovereignty they would be able to

00:20:51.060 declare you know obviously in this case religion was a big part of this the protestant reformation

00:20:56.040 everything happened there so the prince was going to be whatever the prince was whatever his religion

00:21:00.160 was was going to be uh the religion of the peoples you couldn't go and uh constantly switch between

00:21:06.140 them. It didn't matter if a new emperor came along. They didn't get to go in and declare that

00:21:11.640 actually we're getting rid of all of these Catholics or getting rid of all these Protestants

00:21:15.260 and you all have to be the other thing. No, now the authority was being devolved down to the

00:21:19.280 individual nations and the rulers of those nations, the rulers of those peoples. That was kind of the

00:21:24.580 Westvalian idea. And this is where we start to see the idea of the nation state. Now the individual

00:21:30.060 prince, the individual kingdom, the individual nations and its rulers, they make their own

00:21:34.520 decisions. So we're stepping back away from that moment of kind of total monarchy, of absolute

00:21:40.780 monarchy, of empire being able to dictate everything about what's going on, and instead we're

00:21:47.300 transitioning back to this moment where authority has relocated itself into the nation as we

00:21:53.580 understand it. So if we look at the next big transition, we have to look at World War I.

00:22:00.620 Now, World War I obviously is known for its brutal combat, for the different international alliances that drew all of these people in.

00:22:10.900 But one way to understand World War I is really the end of monarchy.

00:22:15.740 World War I exposed serious problems with monarchical government structures, mainly that they were having difficulty, once again, scaling.

00:22:25.480 The Industrial Revolution had occurred, and if you didn't have the ability to centralize control of production and consumption and all of these propaganda, standing armies, if you did not have the ability to wield a mass state that was centralized with its power, you simply couldn't get it done.

00:22:44.020 And despite what people say about monarchy and its absolute nature, it turned out that monarchies were not very good at mobilizing entire regions, super states, huge amounts of people.

00:22:55.060 It turned out that actually the idea that you were being ruled by the will of the people was much more conducive to building larger states than monarchies.

00:23:02.640 And you'll see this in Bertrand de Juvenal's book on power. Or, of course, you have Hans Hermann Hoppe when he talks about this in Democracy, the God that Failed, that actually popular sovereignty and democracy are much better systems for growing the government than monarchy is.

00:23:19.620 Again, despite what conservatives will tell you, what Republicans will tell you, what basic often kind of American rhetoric will tell you, when we look at history, actually democracies are not very good at restricting government power.

00:23:35.300 They are, in fact, very bad at restricting government power. They are enablers of the growth of government. And so more democracy, more popular sovereignty, more rule of the people actually leads to more government, not the other way around.

00:23:48.340 So if you want to grow the state, build a democracy, don't build a monarchy.

00:23:54.780 And so Woodrow Wilson, at the end of World War I, kind of sees this dissolution of monarchies.

00:24:01.500 You have a lot of these empires breaking up, a lot of these monarchies falling apart, and even the ones that stay together, they shift to a parliamentary system.

00:24:09.760 And so what you have at this moment is a time where you can kind of reorganize the world.

00:24:14.600 And that's what Woodrow Wilson wants to do.

00:24:16.420 He, of course, starts the League of Nations that would kind of fail, but one day come back as the U.N.

00:24:21.520 And Woodrow Wilson, you know, despite being a leftist, saw this as a moment to establish ethnostates.

00:24:29.840 Every people should have self-determination.

00:24:32.740 No longer should one group get dragged into a war or have, you know, their right to self-determination challenged by some wide monarchical figure, some empire.

00:24:44.080 we need to break all these nations all these peoples out of these imperial or monarchical

00:24:49.820 structures and we need to turn them into the modern nation state so the the state and the

00:24:55.540 people are one every ethnos should get its own state so when when people talk to you about ethno

00:25:02.060 states as if this is some weird crazy thing that like only the third reich came up with that's

00:25:09.100 just not true. Not only not true, it's wildly ahistorical. Ethnostates were common early in

00:25:17.560 human history, and they were reasserted under guys like Woodrow Wilson. And so the very idea

00:25:24.520 of a nation as a state, that they are the same thing, comes from an ethnostate. That's how they

00:25:31.920 were designed was they were designed to give every ethnos every nation every people their own

00:25:39.220 government so that they could be self-determining so that they would not be subject to a king or an

00:25:44.100 emperor somewhere that they would be able to make the decisions for themselves and so we see the

00:25:50.040 creation of the ethno states but there's only already a problem right because we already talked

00:25:55.840 about how in order to just go from the tribes to the city-state, in order to form a cohesive

00:26:02.840 koine, you had to kind of destroy some of those aspects of the ethnos.

00:26:07.520 You already had to destroy some of those tribal ethnic understandings to form a larger

00:26:12.720 cooperative group.

00:26:14.020 And this is always the sacrifice that is made for scale.

00:26:17.360 Humans are particular.

00:26:19.020 And humans like to do things the way that they inherently feel they should be done.

00:26:25.840 This is a shared culture.

00:26:27.260 This is a shared ethnos.

00:26:28.860 This is a shared tradition.

00:26:30.260 This is a shared heritage.

00:26:32.460 We understand it implicitly.

00:26:34.240 It doesn't need to be explained to us because we do it naturally.

00:26:38.460 And so every time we have to increase scale, we have to break down some level of that.

00:26:42.700 Now, that's not always a bad thing, right?

00:26:44.240 Like, actually, it does probably make sense.

00:26:46.660 If your family is doing something really weird all by itself, it's probably good that there

00:26:50.760 is a larger tribe that forces you to like not do that anymore and behave in a way that makes you

00:26:56.760 more able to cooperate with other people around you this is not to say that particularity is

00:27:01.540 always good or that that level of human particularity and friction is always conducive

00:27:07.140 to civilization at some level it has to be broken down you can't let every single family or every

00:27:12.840 single tribe just do their thing that doesn't actually work out you'll be destroyed by people

00:27:17.360 who organize at a higher level however you're already sacrificing a decent amount of that when

00:27:23.260 you go from the ethnos to the koine when you go from the tribe to the city state now imagine what

00:27:30.020 it takes to take an entire set you know set of of cities an entire group of many different cities

00:27:37.080 and regions and turn them into one state right the idea that they're all going to be under the

00:27:43.460 same state you're probably going in order to make a ethnos that actually exists under that state

00:27:49.360 you're probably going to need to break down what most people thought of as ethnos in the first

00:27:53.020 place and that's exactly what happened one of the things that people do after world war one is kind

00:27:57.800 of mock you know the the different western powers for breaking up the world the way they did oh of

00:28:04.740 course this group can't get along with this group of course you can't just dump all these people in

00:28:08.260 iraq or iran or whatever and call it a day of course you can't just create mandate palestine

00:28:13.260 and expect all these people to live next to each other entirely fair but if you're trying to turn

00:28:18.120 the world into these you know different sets of of uh ethno states well then you're going to have

00:28:24.220 to do some of that you're going to have to break up peoples you're going to have to draw awkward

00:28:27.320 lines you're going to try to have to force people to live together who otherwise perhaps would have

00:28:31.760 been at odds previously it's not organic so for instance if you went in and just try to force all

00:28:38.580 of the greek people to work together before they had that crucible of being under uh you know kind

00:28:44.140 of that persian assault they would have probably been highly resistant they would have saw themselves

00:28:48.300 as very very different people after that shared understanding of a persian enemy all of a sudden

00:28:55.460 those barriers don't seem as important anymore the survival of your group seems more important

00:29:00.600 and even if you're going to be ruled by a guy who you were at war with a few years ago at least

00:29:05.600 he'll be greek at least he'll speak greek at least he'll share the same gods with you at least he'll

00:29:10.260 understand your civilization even if it was because you guys were fighting a few years ago the persians

00:29:15.480 aren't going to do any of that and so you create that shared ethnos in a more organic way yes it's

00:29:21.640 an external force but the thing was not artificially imposed on you as a system an ideology it was

00:29:27.320 response to an outgroup factor that you could not otherwise control when you had uh world war one

00:29:34.420 the end of World War One and Woodrow Wilson and the nation states, that was not what happened

00:29:39.260 there. All of a sudden, you needed to create a new global order. That's really what they wanted

00:29:45.000 to do with the League of Nations, right? They want to get rid of the old order, you know,

00:29:49.140 death to monarchies, death to empires. We are new, modern, progressive people, and we're going to

00:29:54.760 create this new system, and it's going to be based on nation states. And that means that if we're

00:30:00.060 going to be able to interact with you well you're going to need to have a nation state we can't

00:30:06.480 interact with tribes because we don't recognize tribes and we don't want to interact with empires

00:30:10.580 anymore or kingdoms anymore because we think that monarchies are outdated and oppressive so we want

00:30:16.460 everyone to be in this uh this kind of ethno state in these individual nation states and that's the

00:30:22.780 only way that we're going to interact with you the only problem is again not all of these in fact

00:30:28.160 many of these are not organic. They are forced onto people in order to create a unit that now

00:30:33.940 could be metabolized by the new global order. And you can see a lot of this problem with say

00:30:42.020 the Middle East, right? Like one of the things about Islam that Christopher Caldwell, or not

00:30:46.660 Christopher Caldwell, sorry, that Samuel Huntington talks about in his work is that these Arab

00:30:54.560 empire or these arab civilizations these muslim civilizations that aren't arab they tend to be

00:31:00.520 extremely tribal they tend to be uh really focused at the tribal level and they don't have

00:31:07.440 anything between the tribe and then like a full-on caliphate so you have like tribe tribal

00:31:13.340 governance tribal leadership and then you go all the way up to islamic empire and they don't really

00:31:19.760 understand this intermediate form of a state that is larger than the tribe but is smaller than the

00:31:26.160 empire it just doesn't make any sense to them it doesn't work in their brain and so when you try

00:31:31.320 to impose it onto them it doesn't make any sense and so when you see a lot of people you'll hear

00:31:37.140 this argument a lot when it comes to perhaps Israel they'll often say well all of these Arab

00:31:42.180 states around us in fact they just issued a statement like this that a lot of people got

00:31:46.800 very angry about. They say all these people around us, they've never had real nation states.

00:31:53.280 They've never existed as real legitimate nation states. And in a lot of ways, that's true.

00:32:01.440 In a lot of ways, that's true. But ultimately, the problem with saying that is you are imposing

00:32:06.560 an understanding of social organization that simply does not exist for them. And you're saying

00:32:11.200 that the legitimacy of their existence depends on them fitting into that frame.

00:32:15.280 Now, ultimately, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. So if the people who prefer the world arranged in ethno states or in nation states demand that of Arabs and they don't do it, well, then they might fall behind and they might lose standing in the international community and they might not be able to establish their authority over regions that they may have lived in and have claimed to for thousands of years.

00:32:38.260 but like ultimately they do not really control because they do not have that current nation

00:32:44.320 state understanding you can feel however you want about that you could say oh well that's

00:32:48.260 that's wrong of the west to impose it on them or you could say oh well these backwards people can't

00:32:52.040 just get with the times and figure it out either way however you feel about it that it is legitimate

00:32:56.540 to point out that this is a true failure of the system to map on to their civilization they

00:33:02.140 they ultimately cannot understand this transitory uh you know kind of governing body that sits

00:33:10.040 between the uh or intermediate governing body that sits between the tribe and the empire and so this

00:33:16.340 creates a huge problem now in a way this also creates empires by other means because now you

00:33:23.240 start to see the uh creation of uh kind of a an american empire especially after world war ii

00:33:30.960 that is not necessarily based on conquest the united states had had a flirtation uh with direct

00:33:37.240 conquest uh it had a moment of uh imperial nature when it came to the spanish war and these kind of

00:33:43.920 things picking up cuba picking up uh the philippines those kind of possessions ultimately

00:33:49.560 fall under their control but americans kind of quickly sour on that so in world war ii they

00:33:55.660 kind of effectively conquer the world. They become the only military apparatus outside of

00:34:02.540 the Soviet Union that can really kind of impose its will on the globe. And so it starts to create

00:34:09.540 these institutions, right? Like the United Nations, like the World Bank, IMF, you start to have

00:34:17.440 these international bodies. And if you're not a nation state, you don't get to play in those,

00:34:23.800 right you don't know nobody gets loaned money from uh the imf uh if they're still a tribe

00:34:30.040 uh you you don't really get to play the same game as a explicit empire if you want to join

00:34:36.160 these international organizations as you would if you were a nation state and so what america wants

00:34:42.420 is nation states and democracies and part of that is because you know they legitimately believe that

00:34:46.940 this is the right way to organize the world but also because uh that's how you gain power and

00:34:51.760 influence. I talk about this in my book, The Total State. One of the reasons that America

00:34:55.940 wanted democracy everywhere, all of a sudden liberal democracy was the only acceptable form

00:35:01.160 of governance, is that the tools to build a democracy were already kind of tied into this

00:35:06.660 global network that the United States was building out. And so if you wanted to have control of

00:35:13.620 democracy, well, you need bureaucracies. Where are you going to educate your bureaucrats in the

00:35:17.620 United States. If you want to have a democracy, you're going to need control of the media so that

00:35:22.700 you can manipulate the votes of your people, which is absolutely what elections are. And so

00:35:27.720 if you're going to maintain power, you're going to need control of media. Where are you going to

00:35:30.200 get a media? Where are you going to understand media control apparatus? The United States.

00:35:33.880 If you want to have a nation state like this, a liberal democracy, you're going to need a high

00:35:38.500 degree of trade, a high degree of interconnectivity with the global market. How do you do that? Well,

00:35:44.680 you plug into the United States and its wider network. And so all of these things kind of

00:35:49.920 feedback into this idea that we need to be organized under nation states. But slowly and

00:35:55.500 surely, we start to recognize that this isn't just the building of a world of equal partners.

00:36:03.100 This is basically an empire of nation states who are all effectively bowing down to one or two

00:36:09.940 actors. So obviously the United States is not the only power doing this. The USSR at the time

00:36:18.500 is trying to create their own empire. They're, you know, they bring half the world under their

00:36:24.140 control, basically. Of course, we hear about the Iron Curtain and the separation during the Cold

00:36:28.700 War. And so you have these two rival ideologies. And again, as Samuel Huntington talks about in

00:36:34.800 Clash of Civilizations, all of a sudden, even though we technically broke everyone into

00:36:39.440 nation states or more accurately ethno states what really starts to happen is that even though

00:36:45.060 technically everybody has their own country in reality everybody has to either kind of side with

00:36:51.080 the soviets or the uh the americans there is no real in between you're either in what's often

00:36:57.220 called the first world or the second world the americans or the russians everybody else is third

00:37:02.280 world right if you're not a valuable contributing member of either uh you know the american empire

00:37:07.200 or the soviet empire then you just don't matter you're a third world and even then uh the soviets

00:37:12.520 and the americans are battling for control of many of those third world countries even though

00:37:19.100 they're not supposed to be as irrelevant anyway so uh you have this disillusion of identities

00:37:26.000 into really these two ideological camps you're either capitalist or or a communist you're either

00:37:31.900 a westerner or aligned with western powers or you are a communist soviet you know uh affiliate

00:37:39.260 and so when the soviet union comes apart again as huntington talks about in clash of civilizations

00:37:46.340 you enter into a really interesting scenario because all of a sudden uh this this ideological

00:37:52.700 binary of empire falls apart these ideological empires are no longer relevant uh communism has

00:38:01.300 failed uh china maintains communist uh language but really moves to a a fascist government to be

00:38:09.280 frank they move to a a state that is adopted capitalism but turns it entirely to their end

00:38:14.620 still has a large amount of authoritarian control over its people all those things and it turns out

00:38:19.600 to actually be a far more uh effective version of communism it turns out that fascism is uh actually

00:38:25.340 the most effective form of uh this type of rule and so we have a scenario where the ideological

00:38:30.940 empires have come apart and all of these nations have to make decisions now uh you you were forced

00:38:36.520 to either be in the american camp or the soviet camp the entire time but now that that binary is

00:38:41.740 broken many nations find themselves no longer wanting to be under the american hegemony remember

00:38:47.700 this is the old the old showdown between samuel huntington and his student francis fukuyama

00:38:52.260 fukuyama fukuyama uh predicts in the end of history that look the the the capitalist managerial

00:38:58.680 nation state is the winner uh the soviet union has fallen that ideology has failed the only way

00:39:04.660 to rule your country is under this liberal democratic uh nation state following capitalist

00:39:10.580 structures and international orders uh that's the only way that any nation's going to exist

00:39:15.100 history is over uh and that that's going to be the predominant uh idea going forward bukiyama

00:39:21.240 technically is more nuanced in his presentation of that idea though eventually he just goes to

00:39:27.640 the cartoon if you ever read uh liberalism and its discontents uh hukiyama becomes the very meme

00:39:33.720 that people uh claim that he wasn't in his first book but ultimately that's that's the transition

00:39:38.840 that occurs and so a lot of these uh countries decide they don't want to be at the end of history

00:39:43.680 they don't want to just fall in because they know that being in the liberal democratic capitalist

00:39:49.280 order means being under american and larger western hegemony and they don't want to do that

00:39:54.120 They want their own sovereignty.

00:39:55.200 So they start coming up with kind of their own versions of some form of capitalism, but

00:40:01.600 also ways to hedge their bets, ways to separate them from the Americans, don't plug into their

00:40:08.740 media, don't plug into their financial systems, don't plug into their economic systems, don't

00:40:13.560 plug into their cultural output, lots of different ways that they can ultimately try to rule

00:40:19.880 themselves, right?

00:40:21.520 And so we end up in this scenario where there's this mad scramble at the end of the fall of the Soviet Union to see who is going to stay under American control, the wider Western global hegemony, and who is going to be able to separate themselves and try to rule as a separate nation.

00:40:36.320 But there's some problems here, right?

00:40:38.280 So the first thing is that a lot of nation states simply could not take care of themselves.

00:40:44.420 A lot of nation states were failures, and that's because nations were ruled previously for a reason.

00:40:52.020 There's a reason that nations were conquered, that they could not defend themselves, that they did not have the will to manage themselves.

00:40:57.320 In fact, in many situations, nations, peoples, would lobby to become part of functional empires.

00:41:03.480 You know, the Roman Empire grew through conquest, to be sure, but many people joined the Roman Empire because they wanted to.

00:41:09.440 Many nations realized they could not govern themselves or could not protect themselves and they needed someone like the Roman Empire to back them up. So they voluntarily joined in. And there's a lot of cases where ultimately nations are simply not capable of self-government. I mean, you look at the end of colonialism and what that has done to many places. Is the Congo better off now that the Belgians are gone?

00:41:30.960 i mean maybe they're you know not terrible things are being done to the congolese because of the

00:41:37.980 belgians but they're doing it to themselves and in many ways much worse than any of the you know

00:41:43.780 belgians could have done the same when you look at something like uh you know rhodesia that became

00:41:49.220 zimbabwe once they kicked out all the white farmers all of a sudden they went from the

00:41:53.520 breadbasket of uh of africa to a nation that could not feed itself we look at a place like south

00:42:00.160 africa which you know apartheid probably not a great system at some level but ultimately this

00:42:06.120 was a nation that was functionally first world they had a space program they had nuclear weapons

00:42:11.520 and now it's a nation where you know they're increasingly incapable of internal security

00:42:16.760 where infrastructure is breaking down where they're having economic issues because basically

00:42:22.700 the you know native population well it's not even native population but the history of south africa

00:42:26.840 is too complicated to cover here. I've talked with Ernst Van Zael, Conscious Caracal, about this

00:42:31.460 in several places. So you can go look at those if you want a deeper dive on South Africa. My point

00:42:36.380 being is that we're seeing that a lot of different peoples actually can't govern themselves. They

00:42:41.840 don't have the ability to be sovereign over their own nation. Now you could say, well, that makes

00:42:46.000 them weak or that makes them bad people or whatever. It's up to you to decide. The point is, the

00:42:51.160 reality is that they can't do that. And so maybe it's benevolent to rule those people and give them

00:42:56.800 a civilization themselves could not build. Maybe it's oppression. Again, all in how you want to

00:43:01.940 phrase it, I suppose. The point is, ultimately, this is the reality. And no matter how much we

00:43:07.460 scream about the holy nature of nation states, it seems very clear that we can't actually divide

00:43:13.060 the entire world and nation states because most nations can't rule themselves. They were ruled

00:43:17.820 by other people for a reason. And when you take away all these artificial globalist NGOs and

00:43:24.680 organizations and everything else that props these nations up they're going to end up falling

00:43:29.400 under the control of an empire because that's the kind of the more natural order of the world the

00:43:34.860 world is more unnaturally ordered to empire than it is nation states and we see this over and over

00:43:39.460 again all right so as we see these uh conflicts with you know kind of the viability of smaller

00:43:51.100 nation states, we start to see the emergence of these imperial forces once again. But the imperial

00:43:57.240 forces are interesting for a couple different reasons. As we said, Rome, when it became an

00:44:03.140 empire, slowly moved away from the city of Rome mattering at all. At first, the city of Rome was

00:44:08.880 obviously the only thing in the Roman Empire. It was the central reason for its existence.

00:44:14.780 Everything that the empire did was to enrich Rome, to better its people, to build the fortress

00:44:20.640 and glory of the roman people and the ones that lived specifically in the city of rome in fact

00:44:26.740 the italians had to fight several wars against the romans to get roman citizenship the roman said no

00:44:33.720 we want to stay a city state we only want the city and the people we want the city and the nation to

00:44:38.280 be the same thing italians you might be close to us but an italian and a roman are not the same

00:44:43.240 thing you are not one of us you do not have citizenship and so you actually saw rome go to

00:44:48.860 war with the rest of the italian people several times until they eventually said okay fine fine

00:44:54.440 we'll extend roman citizenship we'll extend the idea of our nation outside of its natural city

00:44:59.840 state borders to include the italians and then they added more they added more and they added

00:45:05.620 more until caracalla basically gives everyone roman citizenship if you haven't happened to

00:45:10.760 be anywhere inside the roman empire and at that point you've already shifted the focus of the

00:45:15.920 empire you see you know everything move eastern the eastern provinces are more profitable you

00:45:20.740 start to see roman generals and then roman emperors uh you know be a rise to power without

00:45:28.000 being roman at one point you start to have emperors who never even set foot in the city of

00:45:32.820 rome the roman empire starts as a structure built entirely for the benefit of the nation

00:45:39.380 of the people of Rome. And just a few hundred years later, you're now in a scenario where

00:45:46.000 literally the Roman emperor isn't from Rome, has never seen Rome, and will never go to Rome

00:45:50.960 because Rome is irrelevant to the Roman empire. That means that the state and the nation

00:45:56.520 officially have separated. That the people of Rome, for whom originally the empire was created,

00:46:03.220 the state itself was created no longer even relevant to that state the state is its own

00:46:09.700 entity i'll be i'm writing a book on that now uh but uh the point is that that separation

00:46:16.320 is huge and that's what's happened to us now right we have created a scenario where

00:46:22.300 when americans talk about america they really think about the american empire

00:46:27.000 they don't think about the nation as a people and this is a huge problem with the nation state

00:46:35.280 it encourages people to to lose that ethnic identity to lose that identity of a people in

00:46:42.680 a nation and instead embrace their identity as only that of the state an american is someone

00:46:49.840 who is under control of the state if you're under the american state you are an american

00:46:57.020 and that's increasingly the definition right subject to the jurisdiction thereof came in

00:47:04.580 the 14th amendment which is a huge disaster creates birthright citizenship everything else

00:47:09.880 we're dealing now but it also creates this question of like okay who is an american right

00:47:15.320 and we don't know the answer to that because we've destroyed the idea of america as a people

00:47:19.480 as a nation and the only thing we have left is the idea of america as a set of systems of

00:47:24.300 institutions of a state and wherever that state goes wherever its power is exercised well you're

00:47:33.240 part of it then and we can see this play out the logic especially with liberal democracy

00:47:37.440 this is why the democrats say look if you're in america you know you should just have a vote

00:47:42.540 or often you know sometimes we'll even hear people say well if you are in any way influenced

00:47:46.660 by america if you are basically a satrapy or a satellite of america you should be able to vote

00:47:51.400 because popular sovereignty is what gives the american regime its power and if america has

00:47:56.440 gone from being a nation and a people to simply being an empire in a state an ideology that you

00:48:01.480 could just slap onto anybody anywhere well then that starts to make a lot of sense why wouldn't

00:48:06.120 some guy in you know i don't know a south american country ultimately be able to vote in the american

00:48:11.440 election because america functionally controls their country they're under the control of the

00:48:16.380 american state the american empire even if they don't live inside the geographical borders of the

00:48:21.860 contiguous 48 states it doesn't matter right like that that you're still you're still basically an

00:48:27.800 american by the idea that if you're governed by a state you are part of that state and so i think

00:48:33.480 the problem is that at the core of the nation-state idea there there are some fallacies one it's the

00:48:40.480 idea that uh a homogenous well homogenous is the wrong word a unified state can be created out of

00:48:48.660 multiple ethnosis that we can then treat as a single ethnos right like so that we can destroy

00:48:54.620 all these sub ethnos and create the koin a that forms uh the you know kind of the larger state

00:49:00.840 apparatus at a scale that allows it to compete with others so that's a problem in and of itself

00:49:05.680 the next problem is that the nation state doesn't scale enough we realize that you know we tried to

00:49:13.580 make the nation bigger than the city so that it could compete with larger entities but it can

00:49:18.620 just never get large enough to outscale these like global empires so if you're you know if we try to

00:49:23.500 break every nation into its like own state you're never going to compete with the people who are

00:49:28.380 doing you know the china thing or whatever where they just have this massive landmass these last

00:49:32.980 massive amounts of consumers and producers the whole thing it just doesn't work another problem

00:49:39.160 is that nation states do not do well when you start to try to uh you know kind of separate

00:49:46.100 these ideas that over time the idea of the nation state breaks down because the state needs to scale

00:49:52.820 beyond the nation in order to compete with other states the state takes on its own life it takes

00:49:58.320 on its own desires its own will it leaves the nation behind and when it does that it doesn't

00:50:04.240 just abandon the people for its own well-being that would be bad enough but literally destroys

00:50:10.740 the ability of the people to understand themselves as a people say what you want about monarchies

00:50:15.260 and empires they tend to maintain the ethnicity of the people who they were ruling the individual

00:50:21.840 nations inside of them were distinct and they were usually allowed with you know some latitude

00:50:26.580 obviously there were some that were much more harsh than others but most successful empires

00:50:30.780 allowed regional ruling they allowed often in many cases for the kings the historical kings

00:50:36.980 of those areas to stay in place as long as they kind of uh you know kicked money up and troops up

00:50:43.020 to the larger empire and they followed some basic rules inside their own domain but they understood

00:50:49.080 that you you still did not erase the people erase the nation by falling under the empire

00:50:54.380 in the nation state idea if you're not part of that state anymore then you're not part of the

00:51:00.360 nation the nation the state are one and so if the state outgrows you or becomes something different

00:51:06.440 then you lose your identity as a nation because in in the empire you would have been allowed to

00:51:12.100 keep your your heritage your language your culture your religion your beliefs your tribal ways

00:51:17.900 in the in the nation state it has to be dissolved and once you've dissolved that

00:51:23.360 then when if the state becomes something different if the state becomes an empire if it leaves

00:51:27.800 uh the good of the nation behind there's nothing left we can't recognize ourselves as a people

00:51:32.180 anymore because we had to erode everything that made us a people in order to become that larger

00:51:37.020 entity so i'm not sure that a global understanding of nations works uh yuram hazoni has written

00:51:44.840 written books like uh the virtue of nationalism where he says kind of basically everyone should

00:51:48.840 get a nation state and look in theory i like that idea where there's a reason i've never signed on

00:51:56.900 to the nat con statement of principles and one of the reasons i never stood uh signed on to the nat

00:52:01.920 con statement of principles is i don't think they're viable long term the idea of returning

00:52:06.460 to this wilsonian you know league of nations where every single ethnos has its own nation

00:52:12.060 nationalism rules over everybody i don't think that works it doesn't work because of the nature

00:52:17.880 of scale it doesn't work because of the separation between state and nation that is occurring inside

00:52:23.860 nation states and it doesn't work because ultimately there are nations there are peoples

00:52:27.960 who cannot govern themselves and they they need an imperial overlord they need people to run their

00:52:33.500 country for them or they simply cannot exist again you can call me whatever you want for saying that

00:52:38.060 but you know the facts are on the table so sorry still getting over a little bit of a cold there

00:52:44.140 but the facts are on the table so ultimately you either address them or you don't now this isn't

00:52:50.660 all bad I'm not saying that nation states are impossible actually we're seeing something that

00:52:55.280 might make nation states possible again and that is technology as you can see with the asymmetrical

00:53:01.940 battle between Iran and the United States even though obviously the United States is you know

00:53:06.500 totally militarily dominant in many ways, you are seeing a much smaller state ultimately be able to

00:53:12.560 stand up and at least cause a lot of problems for a larger state because, you know, they just need

00:53:18.440 a couple different drone swarms to hit critical infrastructure of this kind of large behemoth of

00:53:24.900 a military. And it kind of slows things down and makes things difficult and makes it politically

00:53:29.540 untenable or economically untenable for them to win. And that's only going to accelerate.

00:53:33.760 we're going to keep seeing these disruptive technological factors

00:53:37.060 AI is going to be a huge one of these

00:53:39.860 ultimately AI might make it more viable

00:53:42.260 for a smaller state that otherwise could not scale up

00:53:45.360 to make up for those large bureaucratic

00:53:48.060 creations that in theory produce all this efficiency

00:53:51.800 but those are getting slower

00:53:53.820 they're degrading, they're getting worse

00:53:56.320 and so what if AI could just do their job better

00:53:58.780 and that way now we don't need a giant country

00:54:02.640 a giant empire, to wield that same advantage. Perhaps we can start getting that asymmetrical

00:54:08.540 advantage at a lower rate. And so we create a scenario where perhaps city-states become

00:54:14.280 possible again, where the level of advantage for scale in these massive empires is no longer the

00:54:20.360 same. Now, I have my doubts about that. I do think that there's a possibility that, one,

00:54:24.940 AI and technology just make the superior states more superior. The AI ultimately benefits larger

00:54:32.120 states more than smaller states, and they don't get that same advantage. The other problem is that

00:54:36.300 I'm not sure that AI infrastructure is tenable long-term. AI costs an incredible amount of money,

00:54:43.020 an incredible amount of power, an incredible amount of investment. You need intelligent people

00:54:47.740 to create all these things. And so very few countries are really going to be able to create

00:54:53.740 superior AIs. And so you have this moment where actually they might just have the advantage over

00:55:00.320 every other small country that's trying to compete along that area and if something happens to the

00:55:05.520 infrastructure if you're a small nation that's entirely reliant on ai to compete with all these

00:55:10.460 others if you're a city state and everybody else is kind of just using overwhelming manpower well

00:55:15.460 what happens when they you know come in and rip the servers down right like what happens when they

00:55:18.980 just do the russian thing and send millions and millions and waves and waves of people not caring

00:55:23.580 who dies because ultimately as long as they take down your one ai server you were able to put up

00:55:29.120 your couple data centers that you were running your entire country on and they collapse what

00:55:33.620 happens then right we're kind of seeing that with russia right now so for instance russia one of the

00:55:39.260 ways they avoided america being able to punish them as much as they thought they could is they've

00:55:44.540 centralized so much of their internet activity on their own like private data centers and servers

00:55:49.700 so russia has a lot of their internal functions uh brought off the wider like cloud and data

00:55:56.340 centers internationally and they've you know kind of centralized it all in russia smart move because

00:56:01.300 it keeps them from being hit by like this global control that america and the western world

00:56:05.820 obviously uh exerts however now that ukraine is sending a lot of drones into russia they're

00:56:12.140 hitting these data centers and because all the data centers were kind of built in the same place

00:56:16.240 because they had to be they're concentrating the same area you're getting a lot of damage to russian

00:56:20.300 infrastructure technologically uh just because it was so concentrated and that seems like a problem

00:56:26.140 that a lot of city states are going to have if they would try to do this because there's you know

00:56:29.840 the whole point of the city state is it's small and so you're either very subject to an international

00:56:34.660 order that can completely manipulate you or you try to build a separate uh technology base but

00:56:40.740 ultimately become very uh you know easy to disrupt through just normal kinetic means just putting

00:56:46.820 waves and waves of troops at you in a way that you can't deal with and then they just collapse

00:56:51.540 or technological infrastructure so i don't immediately have a like solution to this problem

00:56:57.000 i wish i did uh i've offered a few of them but i'm giving you the counter arguments for them

00:57:01.700 for a reason because i think that they're not the most robust and i don't want to like mislead you

00:57:06.220 and say oh don't worry the nation state will be just fine now that said i think it still matters

00:57:11.660 that you argue for nationalism but not as like this unified world-spanning ideology i think

00:57:19.200 this is actually a problem with yoram hozoni's vision uh he thinks of nation states as like

00:57:24.860 yeah he's like i want a nation state for israel so i'm just gonna say everybody else should get

00:57:29.660 a nation state too fair better than we've heard from many israelis but i'm not sure if that system

00:57:34.900 works either because i don't think you can impose the nation state vision on everybody

00:57:38.740 and if you can't impose the nation state vision on everybody then you're right back where you

00:57:43.440 started where the nation state is going to get outscaled outcompeted and that's a lot of israel's

00:57:47.740 facing. No matter how technologically advanced Israel becomes, 9 million people are never going

00:57:52.940 to be able to take Iran on toe to toe. They're always going to be dependent on someone like the

00:57:57.200 U.S. to do the work for them because 9 million people are just never going to beat 100 million

00:58:01.940 people no matter how technologically advanced you are. That's just not how it works. So we have this

00:58:07.460 problem. Well, I shouldn't say never. Obviously, you can think of the conquistadors, but you

00:58:12.140 understand like the technological gap has to be vast vast vast for that to actually work so uh

00:58:19.400 we're kind of in this moment where everyone is pushing for nationalism again i think rightly so

00:58:23.420 however you're going to run up into these problems that perhaps the nation state is not for everybody

00:58:27.800 maybe nation states should exist but only certain nation states ultimately will exist and be

00:58:32.660 sovereign and maybe that's a more realistic way to look at the world but the old world war one

00:58:38.280 woodrow wilson understanding of the nation state that's dead and gone it's not going to make it

00:58:43.060 into the next century and we need to understand that all right guys take a look at the questions

00:58:50.860 of the people here real quick grab some coffee here bobby bob the nabob says do you see a future

00:59:01.760 where global diaspora tribes compete and the physical location becomes less relevant we see

00:59:07.580 clashes between hindus and sikhs in canada oh yeah that's already happening like that's literally

00:59:12.840 already happening so that that's not just happening in canada that's happening in the

00:59:16.080 united states it's happening in places like minnesota where you see uh different somali

00:59:20.780 tribes competing for control of minnesota that the mayor has to play somali tribes off each other

00:59:25.880 so that he can win and stay in control uh this is already definitely happening or

00:59:31.020 if you want to see this on a more domestic scale uh think about how hispanics have been driving

00:59:37.320 black people out of their neighborhoods for decades right like these these places that

00:59:43.480 were traditionally black are increasingly uh hispanic and the blacks are being pushed out of

00:59:49.960 what has been their home for many generations so yeah i think that we're we're already seeing that

00:59:55.540 and we'll continue to see it uh go ahead and accelerate uh spice your follow-up from bobby

01:00:02.980 bob uh do you think that the same thing will happen to the european diasporas as we become

01:00:07.120 minorities in our homelands uh entirely possible right like what what is uh what are the south

01:00:14.780 port riots versus you know kind of the the the muslim rape gangs if not ethnic warfare inside of

01:00:21.800 of the uk right so yeah i think that's entirely possible uh let's be really clear like unless

01:00:28.740 okay i'm gonna say the spiciest thing here today uh unless the europeans are prepared

01:00:34.260 for a full-on reconquista this is the future right like unless the europeans are entirely dedicated

01:00:41.780 to deporting these people remigrating these people to wherever they're supposed to be

01:00:47.480 and really removing almost all foreigners from their lands this is their future uh and i don't

01:00:55.380 say that with any relish i i hope that you know european brothers and sisters will wake up and

01:01:00.520 you know, take control of their countries and save themselves from much worse situations down

01:01:04.780 the road by taking action now. But unless there's a Reconquista, this is the future of Europe.

01:01:13.680 Mani Yud says, I'm struggling with wrapping my mind around living in history and how to act

01:01:18.300 in that mindset of it. What does it mean to live historically? Excellent question. Excellent

01:01:23.100 question. What it means to live historically is to live in the way that human beings lived

01:01:29.400 before modernity in the idea that uh you have a continuity a history that is tied to your

01:01:38.580 heritage but it's also tied to your your language your traditions your folkways um and that you are

01:01:46.600 connected to each generation and you have a duty to it you're not an atomized individual you're not

01:01:52.740 uh this this widget that gets moved around you're not fungible uh but you're also not entirely

01:01:57.780 irresponsible right like one of the things that ties you to living historically is you have deep

01:02:03.460 deep responsibilities uh paul vanderclay occasionally has just brilliant insights

01:02:09.260 and one of the things that he said to me was nobody wants community everybody thinks they

01:02:14.600 want community but nobody wants to pay the price and that hit me that struck me like real deep

01:02:19.460 because he's absolutely correct most modern people think they want community but the minute that a

01:02:27.300 communal obligation is enforced on them, they buck as individuals and demand their freedom

01:02:31.940 instead. There's a reason the modernity worked. People didn't like having 18 hours of their day

01:02:38.680 dictated by their work and their church and their family and their community, all the responsibilities

01:02:43.940 that were tied to that. Being in a real community, living historically, means you probably don't have

01:02:49.720 time to binge, you know, 10 episodes on Netflix. Living historically probably means that you don't

01:02:55.760 have time to play that 100 hour RPG video game. Living historically means that your extra money

01:03:04.940 doesn't go to vacations to Europe or to cruises. Living historically means you owe the past and

01:03:13.580 the future something. One of my favorite quotes, and I'm going to butcher it now, I should have it

01:03:18.340 all memorized, but I don't, comes from Cicero. And to paraphrase, Cicero says, you know, what is the

01:03:24.800 purpose of a man if he cannot oh sorry i'll start from the beginning uh to remain uh to remain

01:03:31.600 ignorant of what became for before you what became you know what was history to remain ignorant of

01:03:36.400 that leaves you as a child you're always a child because what is the purpose of a man if he does

01:03:42.780 not weave himself into the tapestry of his ancestors and what he means there is like if

01:03:48.560 you are not familiar with the accomplishments and the feats and the traditions and the folkways and

01:03:53.760 the stories and everything else that makes your people a people, then you're going to be a child

01:03:58.900 forever because you don't understand the world around you. And because the purpose of a person

01:04:03.100 who's living historically is to weave themselves into that tapestry, to become part of that story,

01:04:09.320 a great chain of being, as it has often been called. And so if you're going to live historically,

01:04:13.860 you need to be tied to those forces. And that means you're going to spend a lot more time

01:04:18.560 like caring for people being directly involved conversing with people hearing their problems

01:04:25.020 solving them taking on leadership roles than you are you know watching football or playing video

01:04:31.980 games or you're scrolling TikTok or anything else so when we're talking about living historically

01:04:37.960 you have to be rooted and that can be very difficult because a lot of people are so

01:04:42.680 deracinated that they don't know where to start you know my buddy Carl Benjamin talks about this

01:04:47.240 with his atheism he doesn't like being an atheist he loves christianity he sees it as valuable but

01:04:52.660 he just doesn't he's so modern he's so deracinated from any experience with the spiritual he has a

01:04:58.960 hard time even beginning with that tradition but you know what i love about carl is that his kids

01:05:06.580 want to be christian and so carl is going to church it's not what he wants to do it's not

01:05:13.380 what he wants to spend his time on.

01:05:16.040 But Carl cares enough about his family

01:05:18.220 and about his community

01:05:19.200 and about his country and his people

01:05:20.720 that he's willing to live historically,

01:05:23.500 to give up that time,

01:05:25.580 to give up that moment

01:05:27.100 that he could play video games or whatever.

01:05:31.300 And instead, he's willing to connect his children

01:05:33.540 to a past that he can't even connect to.

01:05:36.640 And so even if you have difficulty living historically,

01:05:39.680 even if you struggle with that,

01:05:43.380 But making those sacrifices, taking those steps of faith, I think is critical.

01:05:47.900 And especially if you have kids, if you have a family, the effort becomes even more important.

01:05:53.300 And if you don't have a family, well, you know, connecting and living historically is a good way to find somebody who's interested in that.

01:05:59.840 Because if you're a guy who's leading, if you're a guy who's active, if you're a guy who's social, if you're a guy who cares about serious things like religion and heritage in a way that other people don't,

01:06:10.360 that's going to be attractive to the type of woman who's looking to have some kids and carry

01:06:14.240 that stuff on. So, you know, difficult situation. I'm not saying it's easy for anybody,

01:06:19.780 but ultimately, if you're asking my advice, that would be it. Do your best to connect to that

01:06:25.820 history. Weave yourself into that tapestry. And even if you're faking it at first, well,

01:06:31.080 it turns out LARPing is what you do before the thing becomes real. So fake it and then you'll

01:06:35.640 make it. All right, guys, going to be wrapping this up. Want to say thank you to everybody for

01:06:41.260 coming by. Always great to talk to you. If it's your first time on this channel, you need to click

01:06:45.840 subscribe, the bell, notifications, all that stuff. So you know when we go live, if you want to get

01:06:49.560 these broadcasts as podcasts, you can subscribe to the Orr McIntyre show on your favorite podcast

01:06:53.040 platform. When you do leave a rating or review, it really helps you the algorithm magic. If you

01:06:57.740 want to get my book, The Total State, which talks about a lot of this, you can pick it up on

01:07:01.040 amazon it's on you know digital book it's on audiobook it's in print in both hardback and

01:07:06.600 paperback so go go nuts whatever edition you're looking for you can get it and i'm also starting

01:07:11.780 to write on this in my series on post-human politics i'm going to be leading up to how

01:07:16.180 the state becomes its own entity that kind of acts entirely separate from the people uh so if

01:07:23.100 you want to check that out i've written a couple of pieces in that series on my sub stack and i've

01:07:27.340 recording these videos you'll find a playlist under post human politics on the channel thanks

01:07:31.580 for watching guys and as always i'll talk to you next time

The Auron MacIntyre Show - October 26, 2026

The Nation-State Is Failing ｜ 10⧸26⧸26

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