The Auron MacIntyre Show - The National Question and the Destruction of Identity ｜ 5⧸12⧸25

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00:00:30.620 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.220 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.900 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:36.800 There's been this back and forth about the look right term and this stuff.

00:00:41.140 I already did a few episodes on that.

00:00:43.040 You guys are probably familiar with the conflict at this point.

00:00:46.560 I don't want to rehash the drama on here because ultimately I think I've said my piece

00:00:51.560 and it's just be better if everybody kind of moved on and forgot about the guys who are throwing this term around.

00:00:56.820 That said, there has been some interesting discussion centered here, not just on the term which is vacuous and obviously a political weapon,

00:01:05.900 but the people who are pushing it have revealed some of the goals that they have, some of the thought process behind what they're doing.

00:01:14.800 One of the things that happened is that James Lindsay and Colin Wright here, who is one of the other kind of new atheist, radical centrist guys who's trying to push the term and force the term,

00:01:27.240 is that both of them have identified nationalism as a problem.

00:01:31.600 In fact, James Lindsay said that national conservatism is the final boss of the woke right.

00:01:38.380 So what are these guys doing attacking nationalism?

00:01:41.720 Why is that so important to them?

00:01:44.460 Well, Colin revealed in some of his discussions, I think some interesting thought process as to why they're going after nationalism in general.

00:01:54.960 He was having a back and forth with my buddy Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, who's been on the show very many times.

00:02:02.680 He runs the Lotus Eaters.

00:02:04.640 And Carl was asking him a pretty reasonable question.

00:02:08.100 Colin was saying we have to get rid of tribalism.

00:02:10.380 We have to get rid of the idea that people care more about the people they're related to or the people next to them or the people that they share a culture or tradition with.

00:02:19.800 We have to destroy that idea.

00:02:21.840 And Carl Benjamin says, OK, but like, how are we actually going to de-tribalize these communities?

00:02:29.620 How are we going to get rid of the fact that people have a natural tendency to prefer other people like them?

00:02:35.960 That sounds like it would be pretty involved.

00:02:39.180 And Colin went into a kind of diatribe about how important it was that we get rid of this.

00:02:45.180 We're never going to get rid of it entirely, but that we have this large social shaming campaign about the idea that you would have any loyalty or understanding that you are connected to people who share things in common.

00:02:59.400 And I think that's interesting because Stalin, Joseph Stalin of the USSR, also had some interesting things to say about the need to get rid of tribalism and ultimately nationalism for the ascent of communism.

00:03:15.680 Now, I'd like to be clear at the outset, I'm not calling Colin or James Lindsay communists.

00:03:21.280 They're just liberals, which are is an inevitable step on the road to communism, but is not itself definitively Marxist.

00:03:28.840 That said, there's often an overlap in the goals of these two ideologies.

00:03:33.260 And I don't think oftentimes the classical liberal, and I'm saying that ironically because neither Colin Wright nor James Lindsay are approaching classical liberals.

00:03:44.000 If they spoke to any classical liberal in the 1700s, that person would probably throw them off the boat they were sitting on, right?

00:03:52.180 Like these are not that, you know, John Locke said that an atheist should not be trusted, should not be allowed in public, should not have public influence, should not be allowed to to hold a public office because they cannot be trusted, which would make guys like James Lindsay and Colin Wright immediately disqualified from hanging out from with the father of classical liberalism.

00:04:11.560 That said, people who have adopted that moniker often don't realize the level of social engineering they're actually advocating for.

00:04:19.560 And so I wanted to take a look today, what did Stalin actually say about nations?

00:04:24.920 He wrote an essay in, I believe it was 1913, called Marxism and the National Question.

00:04:31.820 And obviously we're against Marxism here, so we're going to be critical of it.

00:04:35.940 But I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast with some of the demands being made by guys like James Lindsay and Colin Wright.

00:04:43.680 Because ultimately, while these guys might not have the same exact ideology, what they are interested in is scale.

00:04:52.400 They want to be able to operate the empire at scale.

00:04:56.800 And both the liberals and the communists recognize that to do that, they must get rid of local, tribal, and national identities.

00:05:06.160 And so I'm going to dive into that essay today and see what Stalin had to say and why it bears a not-so-passing resemblance to some of the demands now being made by the ye olde classical liberals.

00:05:19.220 But before we get into that, guys, let's talk about today's sponsor.

00:05:23.160 This episode of The Oren McIntyre Show is proudly sponsored by Consumers Research.

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00:06:16.020 All right, so like I said, we're going to take a brief look at what Joseph Stalin had to say about the idea of nationalism and kind of the issue that he is taking with it.

00:06:29.780 Now, you have to understand that this was written prior to Stalin taking power.

00:06:35.680 Again, I believe this essay was written in, yeah, 1913.

00:06:38.580 Now, it becomes rather significant because obviously Stalin will take control later on of the Soviet Union, and when he does, the way that the Soviet Union approaches nationality is very much altered, right?

00:06:55.300 Beforehand, they had kind of recognized ethnic minorities, whether or not that there was a need for recognition of different national identities and whether there should be some kind of centralization around that as to how they organize the USSR.

00:07:11.600 But that kind of went away with Stalin.

00:07:15.320 Stalin had a different vision for how the USSR should approach the nationalist question.

00:07:22.140 And like I said, what this reveals is something that's true about Marxism, but is also true about any ideology that is looking to universalize, anyone who is looking to scale up civilization rather significantly.

00:07:36.420 We've talked about this in different ways and from different angles a number of times, but when you are seeking to manage a large group of people, you have to break down the things that make them individualistic, the things that make them unable to cooperate with the system as it exists now.

00:07:55.580 And so you have a scenario where if you want to centralize power, you have to get rid of things like tribal identities or national identities.

00:08:05.320 Now, there might be some situations in which you want to break down some of the smaller identities.

00:08:12.120 There might be some justification for it.

00:08:14.180 Maybe we can make an argument.

00:08:15.740 But ultimately, we need to understand that this is a critical part of the process.

00:08:20.040 And that's why we see it in any society that is attempting to centralize power, is attempting to manage more and more people through its central bureaucratic process.

00:08:29.180 Now, the interesting thing in this particular essay is that at this point, at least, Stalin does recognize that there is going to have to be some level of regional autonomy inside this collective communist empire, basically, right?

00:08:45.260 This federation of communist republics.

00:08:48.360 And so he recognizes that you can't just do everything from the capital the whole time.

00:08:54.700 You will have to allow different areas to have some level of individual autonomy.

00:09:01.720 However, he's worried about the way the autonomy will be characterized.

00:09:06.380 He's worried that if people are allowed to continue to see themselves as nations and are allowed to understand themselves as organized by nations, they will not be as easy to control as we'll look into this.

00:09:20.120 Obviously, we're not going to be reading this whole essay.

00:09:24.320 It takes like two hours, I think, to get through out loud.

00:09:27.520 So I'm just going to be picking a few quotes from it so we can get a general idea of where Stalin was going with this.

00:09:36.200 But ultimately, I think it is helpful because it helps us to grasp kind of the mechanism that is being deployed in this scenario.

00:09:45.620 So if we look early on, I'll just read the first few lines here.

00:09:48.720 So he's saying that there was an ideological,

00:10:18.720 unity, but as soon as that ideological unity broke, as long as there was no longer this kind of ideological future that you could focus on, people reverted back to national identity.

00:10:32.300 Their first reflexive loyalty was to their nationality.

00:10:36.440 And this is something that Stalin and communists don't like.

00:10:39.540 They don't like that you're falling away from the class struggle.

00:10:42.500 You're falling away from the ideological center that instead you're reverting back to your classic loyalties as a person of a particular nation.

00:10:51.380 And so he's saying, OK, how do how do we deal with these problems?

00:10:54.760 At the same time, a profound upheaval was taking place in the economic life of the country.

00:10:58.800 The year 1905 had not been in vain.

00:11:02.840 One more blow had been struck at the survival of serfdom in the countryside, the series of good harvests, which succeeded the famine years and the industrial boom, which followed further the progress of capitalism.

00:11:14.620 Class differentiation in the countryside, the growth of towns, the development of trade and means of communication all took a big stride forward.

00:11:21.840 This applied particularly to the border regions, and it could not but hasten the process of economic consolidation of nationalities of Russia.

00:11:30.320 They were bound to be stirred into movement.

00:11:32.960 So many people don't recognize this because they're not really familiar with more of what kind of Marx taught.

00:11:39.100 But for Marx, capitalism was a critical step in the process towards communism.

00:11:44.980 It wasn't just a competition between capitalism and communism.

00:11:48.680 Marx understood capitalism as necessary because ultimately Marx wanted this economic consolidation and unification so that the communists could take over the structure and flip it towards their socialist ends.

00:12:04.020 And so he's actually fine with capitalism up to the point where it breaks down what he thinks are the barriers to communism.

00:12:11.660 And what are some of the barriers to communism that he's identifying here?

00:12:15.040 Well, national identity, people living in the countryside instead of living in cities.

00:12:20.700 These are behaviors that make it difficult for communists to take over.

00:12:24.940 If you look at pretty much every communist movement, it tends to be pushed by the city centers.

00:12:31.280 It tends to be pushed by alienated workers inside of factories, right?

00:12:35.960 Not by farmers.

00:12:37.680 Farmers tend to be more conservative.

00:12:39.320 In fact, farmers have a nasty habit of being pro the king.

00:12:43.160 You know, if you look at something like the French Revolution, it's the it's the Parisians that are the ones that are pushing the French Revolution.

00:12:50.840 It's the it's the farmers who are still loyal to the monarchy out in the sticks.

00:12:55.580 They're the problem.

00:12:56.700 And so Marx sees capitalism as this tool to break down these like particular feudal loyalties, these different national regional identities, these tribal identities, and instead to forge a nation.

00:13:09.900 Now, he's not against that forging.

00:13:11.820 He just thinks then it needs to become communist.

00:13:14.280 So the national project to him is a necessary step in the breakdown of things that will be barriers to communism.

00:13:21.900 But they are not themselves where he wants to see everything in.

00:13:26.040 The constitutional regime established at the time also acted in the same direction of awakening the nationalities.

00:13:33.000 The spread of newspapers and literature generally, a general freedom of the press and cultural institutions, and increase the number of national theaters and so and so forth, all unquestionably helped to strengthen national sentiment.

00:13:45.280 The Duma, its elected campaign, if you don't know, that's like a kind of like a parliament for for Russia, with its election campaign and political groups have fresh opportunities for greater activity of the nation and provided a new and wide area of their mobilization.

00:14:01.120 So again, he's looking at all of these different factors and saying, this is how you're going to get the destruction of these particular regional identities, and it's going to drive people towards this national identity.

00:14:13.580 And he identifies nationalism as the same thing as capitalism, like capitalism is part of the nationalistic process or nationalism is part of a capitalistic project.

00:14:25.960 And so these things kind of run together, and so he sees both of them as a necessary step.

00:14:31.300 He's not against the fact that they break down the identities he also wants to break down.

00:14:35.720 However, he sees them as a transitional thing, not a goal, not a place you want to get stuck.

00:14:41.900 Obviously, that's why he ends up being very hostile to both capitalism and nationalism at the end.

00:14:47.660 We're going to talk a little more about why, like what he thought about this process, why he opposed it, and why ultimately he was so emphatic about breaking down national identity.

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00:16:02.360 All right, so again, he goes into all these different possible nationalistic movements from Zionism, the Poles, the Tartars, Armenians, Georgians, all these different peoples that might have possible nationalistic ambitions.

00:16:18.480 And he says the wave of nationalism swept onwards with increasing force threatening to engulf the mass of the workers.

00:16:25.180 And the more the movement for emancipation declined, the more plentiful nationalism pushed forth its bosom.

00:16:32.320 So we have this class consciousness, but this nationalism keeps getting in the way of it.

00:16:37.060 It's a boundary to this class consciousness. 0.97

00:16:40.620 People keep reverting back to these stupid national identities instead of forging themselves into these worker collectives across this international coalition. 0.96

00:16:49.560 At this time, at this difficult time, social democracy had a high mission to resist nationalism and to protect the masses from the general epidemic. 0.92

00:17:00.160 For social democracy and social democracy alone could do this by countering nationalism with a tried weapon of internationalism with the unity and indivisibility of class struggle.

00:17:12.100 So he sees nationalism as this very serious barrier, an epidemic, he calls it, for the masses accepting social democracy and ultimately communism.

00:17:25.160 And so there has to be a way to fight back against the nationalism that is being pushed.

00:17:30.520 And he says, obviously, we need an international solution, right?

00:17:34.180 The key is to keep things international, not national.

00:17:37.780 And how do we create international unity?

00:17:40.160 How do we move beyond the national identity class struggle, right?

00:17:43.760 That's how we're going to actually bind these people together.

00:17:48.040 The more powerful the wave of nationalism is and the louder had to be the call of social democracy for fraternity, unity among the proletariats of the nationalities of Russia.

00:17:59.540 And this connection particularly, and in this connection, particular firmness was demanded of the social democrats of the border regions who came into direct contact with the nationalist movements.

00:18:12.060 So, again, here we see that it is evident that a serious and comprehensive discussion of the national question be required.

00:18:21.940 Consistent social democrats must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism no matter what quarter it proceeds, no matter from what quarter it proceeds.

00:18:32.600 So, again, nationalism is the enemy.

00:18:35.960 Nationalism, as some might say, is the final boss of what the communists are trying to do.

00:18:42.300 They must destroy nationalism.

00:18:44.440 They must destroy regional identities, tribal identities. 0.99

00:18:48.740 These things must be ended if communism is to prevail.

00:18:52.980 Now, like I said, this is a long essay.

00:18:55.180 Anyway, you can go through and read it.

00:18:57.440 It has some interesting observations, but, of course, overall, it is communist in nature, and so, therefore, it is not the best.

00:19:07.780 It is not giving you good information in a lot of these areas or good theory or understanding.

00:19:12.720 However, it is interesting.

00:19:14.620 As Stalin attempts to define the nation in this first section here, he talks about kind of what a nation might be.

00:19:23.800 And he doesn't like the kind of ethnographic category.

00:19:28.780 He doesn't like the idea that a nation is a people entirely disembodied.

00:19:33.320 He actually says you basically do have to share a landmass together.

00:19:36.880 So, for instance, he routinely rejects Jews as a unified nation because he says, look, there's Jews in Russia.

00:19:44.120 There's Jews in America.

00:19:45.040 There's Jews in all these caucus countries in the Middle East.

00:19:47.800 They don't even speak the same language, much less share a geographic region.

00:19:51.620 So, how can they be one nation, one people?

00:19:55.020 So, he kind of rejects that because they don't share a similar background or at least they don't share a common language.

00:20:01.580 Language is a big deal for Stalin.

00:20:04.700 But he says it's more than just the language.

00:20:06.480 He says you also need to share a physical space.

00:20:09.380 So, the physical space is not an option.

00:20:14.580 Like, you have to have a historic interaction over many generations in order to create this identity of a nation.

00:20:23.040 He also says, not surprisingly, as a communist, that you need a shared economic zone.

00:20:29.080 Like, you need a shared economic interest.

00:20:31.040 If you don't have one shared economic identity or interaction, then you are just not going to forge the bonds that create community.

00:20:41.540 And then finally, and interestingly, for a materialist like Stalin, he ends up talking about the national character.

00:20:48.420 He says it's the psychological disposition or the national spirit.

00:20:53.260 He comes up with kind of like all of these euphemisms to try to avoid.

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00:21:28.460 Identifying that there is something of a national spirit to people, right?

00:21:35.260 A zeitgeist, if you would.

00:21:37.300 But there's a shared cultural Dasein.

00:21:40.020 Again, he would not use that language, but he's recognizing the phenomenon.

00:21:43.160 He kind of settles on culture.

00:21:45.080 It gets reflected in culture.

00:21:47.240 And culture shows this, like, shared psychology, the shared understanding that people have.

00:21:53.100 But it's surprisingly abstract language for a materialist.

00:21:58.520 He's kind of recognized, even though those are kind of his core beliefs, he can't move beyond the fact that there seems to be this emergent, shared understanding that a people have, that a nation has, that gives it particularities.

00:22:13.180 And one of the things he attacks over and over again, one of the things that he really does not like, is particularities.

00:22:20.720 That communism needs to destroy the particularities that different tribes and nations have. 0.55

00:22:27.160 Because those are barriers to the consolidation of communist power.

00:22:31.520 And so for Stalin, the existence of nations and the existence of subgroups, like tribes within nations, is a barrier to the application of communist identity.

00:22:42.420 And so it has some pretty serious limitations on the way that you can operate the country if it allows us to stay in place.

00:22:51.040 And so this is why I wanted to point to kind of Colin Wright's assertion that we need to have this, like, intense detribalization and him maybe not understanding the level of social engineering that he's demanding.

00:23:05.340 Or if he does understand the level of social engineering he's demanding, why he thinks that's okay.

00:23:11.540 You know, when you're talking about the top-down elimination of people's natural instincts, you need to be doing that for a pretty good reason, right?

00:23:19.560 Like, we recognize that people steal, that people do all kinds of things that naturally that aren't great.

00:23:27.620 They kill, they steal, they cheat, they do all these kind of things that we don't like.

00:23:31.920 And so it's not like there aren't laws to correct those behaviors.

00:23:36.300 But at the same time, we recognize that there are limitations to human nature and what you can change.

00:23:43.000 And that you have to be careful about destroying natural systems lest you find out that they were undergirding some critical aspect of society, that they actually create a support system that you didn't understand.

00:23:57.260 And the communists are famous for doing this, right?

00:23:59.960 They destroy everything from religion, to the nation, to the tribe, all the way down to the family. 0.94

00:24:06.580 They want parents and children to be more loyal to the party than they are to each other.

00:24:12.160 They want to make sure that you are so unparticular, that you are so universally loyal to your class and its struggle,

00:24:19.540 rather than to any natural, biological, or spiritual tie that you might have to family or tribe or nation,

00:24:27.580 that they are willing to destroy everything all the way down to the family.

00:24:31.120 And so there's a large propaganda campaign, a massive top-down manipulation of social engineering

00:24:37.500 in an attempt to break those bonds, get rid of those national, tribal, and even familial loyalties and particularities.

00:24:46.580 Because when you have a preference for your own nation or your own tribe or your own family,

00:24:54.180 then you aren't going to follow all the communistic dictates.

00:24:57.540 You're not going to go for all this equity.

00:24:59.620 You're not going to go for this completely uniform distribution that never occurs anyway because communism is a lie.

00:25:06.160 But you need to break down those loyalties because if you don't, you can't operate the system at scale.

00:25:11.640 You can't force the artificial ideology that you want down onto people.

00:25:16.160 And so it's critical that you break down every one of the loyalties all the way from the family up to the tribe, up to the nation, right?

00:25:24.240 Now, tribe is a difficult thing at the moment, right?

00:25:28.480 We have a difficult conception of this because at the same time in the United States,

00:25:33.540 we're attempting to keep the national identity, right?

00:25:39.060 And we also want to keep the family identity.

00:25:42.440 But we have a problem with the intermediate identities, right?

00:25:46.440 And a lot of people in America, including apparently guys like James and Colin, have a problem with national identities as well.

00:25:53.080 Nationalism is a problem.

00:25:54.000 However, you know, in the United States, at least on the right, on the actual right, you know, actual people who are trying to conserve the country in some meaningful sense, we recognize that nationalism is actually good.

00:26:07.680 We want to be America first.

00:26:08.960 We want to serve the people of this nation.

00:26:11.300 We don't want any kind of international identity.

00:26:15.180 We don't want some kind of unified governance at a global level.

00:26:18.680 We reject globalism.

00:26:19.780 We do care enough about our nation to create a level of particularity that exists at the national level.

00:26:25.240 At the same time, we also want a level of particularity that exists at the familial level, because what we've recognized is that this destruction of identity and this destruction of community is also leading to destruction of families.

00:26:40.900 Families are breaking apart.

00:26:42.340 They're breaking down.

00:26:43.260 People are getting divorced.

00:26:45.140 They're destroying families.

00:26:46.580 People aren't marrying in the first place. 0.98

00:26:48.400 They're treating their families as something that's transient.

00:26:51.220 People are like, oh, I'll go build my own family.

00:26:53.600 I don't need to be loyal to my blood family.

00:26:55.880 That's not as important.

00:26:56.880 Those kind of things.

00:26:57.840 When you create surrogacy and this kind of stuff where people are literally purchasing children from others, like you're breaking down the basic of what makes a family strong and necessary.

00:27:09.260 And so a lot of people are recognizing that the loss of identity at the familial level is a huge problem.

00:27:15.240 The thing that we're having trouble with is this intermediate level of identity, right?

00:27:20.060 How do you deal with the fact that you, at least on the right, you know, people who I think are ultimately correct about human nature, want to preserve a national identity?

00:27:28.760 And you want a familial identity that's robust, but you also have this middle layer that you could call tribe or community, right?

00:27:38.860 Those are different, but not so different.

00:27:42.880 You know, tribe tends to be people who are related together.

00:27:46.160 And extended community is really just the tribes that have interrelated, right?

00:27:51.900 They're people who have intermarried.

00:27:53.340 It's different tribes that have worked together and they've forged an identity that is not entirely tribal.

00:27:58.820 It's no longer completely trapped in that kind of original ground of ethnos, but is not itself be moved beyond to like a more national identity, right?

00:28:10.100 This is what Stalin would have said is almost a futile understanding, right?

00:28:14.020 And so in the United States, we're having a little bit of trouble with that because if you look at, say, de Tocqueville, right?

00:28:20.740 You look at Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America.

00:28:23.480 He recognizes that America entering in to these voluntary associations, these intermediate institutions, somewhere between the family and the wider nation is really the key to America's continued existence.

00:28:39.540 He says, this is what's going to make America, America, actually, funny enough, a lot of people who, who, you know, bring up de Tocqueville in this reference, don't bring up the fact that in that chapter, he says that America's individualism is itself a little bit of a problem.

00:28:53.420 And that what will solve this problem, which will, what will create this, this layer of identity somewhere between the family and the nation are these associations, these voluntarily voluntary associations.

00:29:05.500 But the key is that those associations are voluntary and they tend to be drawn into some kind of tribalistic line.

00:29:13.960 You know, you have these voluntary associations of churches or voluntary associations of civic clubs, and they tend to come, people coming from a background of a particular religious community or a particular, you know, geographical area, people with the shared heritage, they tend to have some kind of binding artifact like this.

00:29:34.620 Now, many of them move and adopt multiples of this, right?

00:29:38.420 There's, there's multiple tribes allowed into this religious association.

00:29:42.320 There's multiple groups that are allowed into this civic organization, but it is certainly not a nationalistic identity, right?

00:29:50.580 This is their, the kind of the in-between step as your identity scales up.

00:29:56.160 And these are natural and positive and organic creations.

00:30:00.420 They do a good job of standing between the national identity's desire to dissolve the region, but also allow for something to move beyond just the most basic familial and basic tribal identity.

00:30:14.100 Now, the question we want to ask ourselves, and I think a question that's probably difficult and thorny, but needs to be addressed, is kind of what you want, what level of organization you want to be available in your country.

00:30:29.120 Because as we're going to see here, the last part is, of this essay is, you know, the national question in Russia.

00:30:35.220 And he asks, what are we going to do about this, right?

00:30:37.840 Like he goes, he goes through this whole essay.

00:30:39.820 And again, forgive me for not reading the whole thing.

00:30:41.860 It's very long.

00:30:43.120 Oh, not very long, but it's too long for, for, to read through the whole stream.

00:30:46.640 But he talks about the, you know, what is a nation and how is it constituted?

00:30:51.300 And there's a lot of background there that's interesting, but thoroughly academic and nerdy.

00:30:55.560 And I don't want you to, you know, to, you know, to glaze your eyes, to glaze over as I read through all of the ethnic dynamics of Russia in the 1900s.

00:31:03.740 That said, we in the United States need to start thinking about like what we're comfortable with when it comes to identity and how we want to organize.

00:31:13.660 Because we need to recognize that originally the United States itself was something of a collection of nations, right?

00:31:21.020 We call them states.

00:31:22.400 And these 13 states were 13 individual places where people had cultural particularities, where oftentimes entire tribes, key families, aristocratic families would have large swaths of power.

00:31:37.320 They have definitive cultures.

00:31:39.420 And for a very long time in the American system, we had a federal system that allowed these different peoples in these different states to operate under one unified federal government, but still have a large degree of autonomy to where they could express their individual understanding.

00:31:59.360 You know, many of these places had state churches.

00:32:01.840 Maryland was originally Catholic, right?

00:32:04.240 They had definitive communities with particularities that the region had to deal with.

00:32:10.620 And they were still able to participate in the wider United States for the most part, but they were allowed to keep that level of familial, tribal, communal, and then state autonomy before kicking it up to the federal government.

00:32:25.900 That's how we understood this question in America.

00:32:28.180 For Stalin, this is terrible.

00:32:30.120 He hates this idea, right?

00:32:31.440 He says, because again, he recognizes that you can't centralize everything, but he says that having a national autonomy is just like a backwards program of nationalism.

00:32:42.880 That, like, if you allow people to be, even if they're under the communist government as a general rule, if you allow them to maintain national loyalty and national identity in the classical sense, then they will always ultimately defer to that loyalty before they defer to their communist loyalty.

00:33:03.360 And so this will serve as a barrier to communism.

00:33:07.060 And so he says this is a very bad thing that we need to go ahead and get rid of, right?

00:33:11.140 And so this is a very similar sentiment to the one we're seeing from some of our disgruntled liberal friends, right?

00:33:18.060 Like, we need to destroy the loyalty, all intermediate loyalties. 0.87

00:33:24.020 Like, you may be allowed to keep the family.

00:33:25.780 Like, they seem to be kind of okay with that.

00:33:27.360 They recognize that they can't go directly after the family.

00:33:30.560 But anything else, up to and including loyalty to the nation, is the final boss, as they've said.

00:33:36.940 And so why do they need to destroy it?

00:33:39.680 Why do they share this goal with the communists?

00:33:41.600 Because, again, I don't think that they're communists, but I think that there is a lesson we need to understand about power and its consolidation and what is necessary and what level of social engineering is being demanded by people who are ultimately pushing that understanding of human nature.

00:33:59.100 So, like I said, in the United States, we had a little bit of a solution to this problem, mainly because of the federalism and the level of regional autonomy that we were allowing.

00:34:09.680 We weren't enforcing an ideological belief on every single person in every single nation, and in this case, every single state.

00:34:18.020 And so we didn't need a large program of social engineering to force everyone to follow this.

00:34:23.800 We didn't need to centralize power to the level that the communists obviously were planning to do.

00:34:28.380 We didn't need to enforce ideological control onto every region.

00:34:32.680 We didn't need to destroy tribal or communal or state loyalties.

00:34:36.880 In fact, state loyalties continued to be a big deal up until the Civil War, where guys like Robert E. Lee, who were obviously, he was offered the command of the Union Army.

00:34:48.640 He was somebody who's the greatest general available at that time.

00:34:52.260 But his loyalty was to his state, to his people, to his tribe, before it was to the nation.

00:34:59.020 And this is where I think you see some differentiation, right?

00:35:03.040 Because for many people, especially modern liberals, that's a very bad thing.

00:35:08.560 The fact that Robert E. Lee was more loyal to a subsidiary level of identity below the unified universal nation, that itself is a problem.

00:35:19.900 And that's just nationalism, right?

00:35:21.440 That's just on the nationalistic level.

00:35:23.420 But the Civil War, make no mistake, is ultimately the final war for American nationalism.

00:35:29.940 And once it's resolved, the kind of inevitable move of America was going to be towards the victory of this unified kind of imperial nationalism over the regional federalism that had been a huge part of the American identity previously.

00:35:46.560 And so what we have to look at now in the United States is what level of subsidiary identities are we comfortable with?

00:35:57.600 What's optimal?

00:35:58.520 Because I want to be clear, there are downsides to hardcore tribalism.

00:36:02.860 Like there are very big downsides to intense tribalism.

00:36:07.160 If you've ever watched Lawrence of Arabia, that movie is about many things.

00:36:12.180 But one of the things it's about is the fact that the Arab tribes simply cannot work together, right? 1.00

00:36:17.320 They don't have this idea of kind of the larger institutions that sit between the tribe and kind of the caliphate.

00:36:27.540 For in a lot of Islamic political structure, like you either have the large Islamic empire and then you have tribes.

00:36:34.820 And the idea of like the nation state in between doesn't really stick, which is why it was so easy for like Britain and these other countries to kind of carve up the Middle East when they took control of these mandates is because ultimately there wasn't really a lot of national identity as in our modern understanding among many of the Middle Eastern peoples.

00:36:57.760 And so you have this scenario where you have these these massive states that are drawn up by the British.

00:37:03.040 And in some sense, is it because they don't understand the culture of Arabs at the time?

00:37:08.220 Sure. Yes.

00:37:08.860 But also it's because kind of the Middle East itself, that Islamic culture just did not have identity that was available to them that created organization at that level.

00:37:19.500 And so if you watch Lawrence of Arabia and kind of the story about the British and, you know, the war between them and the tribes of of the Middle East at the time, one of the problems that T. Lawrence really runs into, T. Lawrence rather runs into on a regular basis is that he can't get the tribes to work together.

00:37:37.220 That ultimately they might unify for like one of the these like strikes against the British.

00:37:43.440 Right. But ultimately they can't organize in a way that would allow them to stay together and stay as a significant political force to strike about back against this unified British empire.

00:37:55.780 And so because the Muslim tribes have such a serious problem with coordination, they're too tribal, they're so tribal that they can't cooperate, they end up failing. 1.00

00:38:05.720 Right. And if you've ever listened, you know, there's a guy, Ed Dutton, I've been on his channel and I'm pretty sure I've had him on this channel as well.

00:38:12.040 But Ed Dutton has this theory that one of the evolutionary advantages of Christianity was the fact that it allowed for higher levels of cooperation between peoples.

00:38:22.840 And so you could have these wider European empires that that that operated because it allowed for like different levels of identity.

00:38:31.240 People could have a familial identity. They could have a tribal identity.

00:38:35.280 They could have a kind of like a state identity and then they could have like a wider identity of Christendom.

00:38:40.640 And those things didn't have to be in conflict.

00:38:43.420 There was a level of cooperation that was allowed across these barriers that normally were pretty big deals for human organization.

00:38:51.560 And that's what allowed a large amount of European countries to kind of win the race, as it were, not that they didn't worry against each other.

00:38:59.220 They often did, but not to the degree they were able to cooperate, coordinate, trade, create alliances to a higher degree because of that level of cooperation.

00:39:09.420 So there is a level of tribalism that we want to avoid because it makes it impossible for us to function at certain levels of organization.

00:39:18.860 And it makes it hard for us to compete with others that are able to cooperate.

00:39:23.860 Right. So there's a downside to over tribalization.

00:39:26.680 That said, there is also clearly now we're discovering the other end of this problem.

00:39:32.180 Right. Because it's not just a one sided problem.

00:39:34.380 There is too much tribalization. Right.

00:39:37.020 But there also seems to be at some level not enough.

00:39:40.620 You can reach a point where if you have completely lost your particularity, you've completely lost your identity.

00:39:47.220 You've completely lost your ability to prefer your nation and its people and their well-being to others.

00:39:53.360 Then all of a sudden you become one of these universalist leftists.

00:39:56.660 Right. You can't say no to mass immigration.

00:39:59.640 You don't know how to say, actually, we should care about the well-being of America before we care about the well-being of Ukraine or Israel or Zimbabwe or any other nation.

00:40:08.800 You don't have the ability to isolate the well-being of your people and say, this is going to be a priority.

00:40:16.560 And so there's a balance somewhere. Right.

00:40:19.500 There's a we recognize that there are two sides of this that can be not ideal.

00:40:24.980 Right. We can have over tribalization where it makes any kind of cooperation impossible. 0.89

00:40:30.660 And it reduces the scale of civilization to the point where you aren't able to compete with those who are operating at a higher scale of civilization.

00:40:37.340 However, if you go to the open-ended model, the open society model, where we're all going to be a global government and we're going to have the Star Trek future and we're going to have this gay race communism that's international and doesn't care about your identities in any serious or traditional way, that creates this open-ended suicidal culture. 0.99

00:40:58.960 Which is why James Burnham said liberalism is ultimately the ideology of Western suicide, because it erodes the ability of the people to prefer itself to others.

00:41:11.500 And that's ultimately what, unfortunately, I think many of the disgruntled liberals don't understand about their own ideology.

00:41:18.720 They aren't communists. They don't agree with the communists on certain points.

00:41:22.840 In fact, in some cases, they can make entire careers about preaching against the dangers of communism.

00:41:28.640 However, their ideology is a stepping stone. It is a stop on that ride.

00:41:34.380 Now, we can have a debate as to whether or not liberalism inevitably leads to communism.

00:41:38.340 I think that's its own discussion. But the point is, they share these features, right?

00:41:42.540 They need to break down these identities at some level.

00:41:44.960 And so, unfortunately, whether they recognize it or not, the nationalist is the natural enemy of the liberal.

00:41:53.540 And the liberal is the enemy of the nationalist.

00:41:55.720 Because they recognize nationalism as a danger to their project of deracination of people.

00:42:02.440 To breaking down those barriers that allow for higher levels of organization.

00:42:06.140 And as the United States became more ideological and as the United States needed to compete with other states that are organized at a high level of complexity, at a ideological level of uniformity, we created more and more organizations and institutions and legal apparatuses to control the ideology of the American people.

00:42:28.380 To wear away their particularities, their willingness to operate in tribes or communities or even states, right?

00:42:35.100 We needed to destroy state rights because, you know, you even turn this around.

00:42:39.660 Talk to a liberal and talk to him about the state rights.

00:42:41.980 And often they'll say like, oh, a state's right to do what, right?

00:42:45.920 Because they're implying slavery or Jim Crow.

00:42:48.260 Because you're not allowed to have that regional autonomy to make decisions.

00:42:51.760 You have to be forced by the state to go in and change the way that you behave.

00:42:56.880 Now, maybe you think that's good.

00:42:57.960 Maybe you think that's bad.

00:42:58.900 I certainly don't like slavery.

00:43:00.100 But ultimately, that is still a unification of identity, a unification of ideology under, or rather identity under ideology by the state.

00:43:10.220 And the way it does that is to destroy the particularity, to destroy the regional understanding and its autonomy because they recognize the danger that this holds.

00:43:19.140 And that's ultimately what Solon says here at the end of the national question.

00:43:23.020 He says, hey, you know, the national autonomy does not solve this problem.

00:43:27.900 We want regional autonomy instead.

00:43:30.400 He says that right here.

00:43:31.300 We want the only correct solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crucialized units as Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, the caucuses, et cetera.

00:43:40.120 He wants to get rid of the classical understanding of national identity.

00:43:44.460 And he says he wants these regions to be governed as like basically economic zones, right?

00:43:49.500 They don't have particular identities.

00:43:52.380 And later on, remember, Stalin would support like the deportation of ethnic minorities to create to avoid the type of conflicts he was worried about.

00:44:03.440 He would talk about the need to rucify everybody and make sure that they destroyed any of their regional identity and instead had some kind of shared Russian identity in many cases.

00:44:16.480 He supported some pretty harsh treatment of people in order to advance this project, ultimately, of kind of this we need to get rid of these regions as being any kind of classic national identity, tribal identity, anything like that, any kind of ethnic identity.

00:44:35.860 And instead, we just kind of want zones or regions that we operate, right?

00:44:41.040 And he says the only cure for this is the organization on the basis of internationalism, right?

00:44:47.960 This is the key to unite locally the workers of all nationalities of Russia, Russians into a single integrative collective body to unite these collective bodies into a single party.

00:44:59.740 This is the task, right?

00:45:00.920 This is what he sees.

00:45:02.080 And he says there is no middle course.

00:45:04.420 We must, you know, these principles must triumph.

00:45:08.540 We cannot compromise.

00:45:10.740 We cannot allow the continuation of these particular national identities. 0.76

00:45:15.660 They need to be dissolved so that we can have this unified ideological identity across all of the different sections of this vast Soviet empire. 0.59

00:45:24.420 And so the thing you need to recognize, kind of the point of this at the end, is whether it be liberals against nationalism or communists against nationalism, they may not have the exact same end goals.

00:45:36.740 But they need the same process.

00:45:38.820 Because if you want to operate government systems at scale, you must get rid of particularity.

00:45:45.100 Particularity is your enemy when you want to operate large systems.

00:45:49.160 And so federalism, states' rights, separate identities for separate groups inside of the United States, these are all things that must be annihilated.

00:45:58.540 They must be annihilated if you were to have one rule across all of them, right?

00:46:03.260 You can't have a state operating as if, you know, Florida has a significantly different identity than California or New York. 0.95

00:46:10.260 Florida needs to conform to California and New York, which therefore dictates the entire nation's identity. 0.53

00:46:15.380 That is what needs to happen.

00:46:17.680 And when you have that outlook, when you are basically you are ideologically opposed to federalism, then you are ideologically opposed to, I think, ultimately the spirit of the United States.

00:46:29.300 Because the spirit of the United States is not the elimination of peoples.

00:46:33.920 It's not the elimination of identities.

00:46:36.140 It's not the cleansing.

00:46:37.740 It's not the ethnic cleansing of Americans until you generate this one homogenous bunch that you get to use, you know, through the Civil Rights Act or whatever, that you get to dictate ideology to.

00:46:49.600 It's the idea that people can live and work in this federated system and still find common ground and identity as Americans while caring for their communities, their families, right?

00:47:02.520 That's what matters.

00:47:03.580 Stalin specifically talks about the need in this essay to destroy national institutions that create those intermediate institutions between the family and the ideological state.

00:47:16.980 And if we're fair, that has also been the project of America for the last 50 at least years, right? 0.73

00:47:23.800 It is destroying, you know, the fraternal organizations, the churches, the community organizations, the groups that once were the backbone, the ones that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized as the most critical part of the American identity.

00:47:38.660 We have decided to break those down and say, no, every institution must be open to everyone.

00:47:44.600 Every institution must be universal.

00:47:46.920 Every institution must align with the ideology of the state.

00:47:50.480 And so in that, we have followed Joseph Stalin's national question prescriptions. 0.54

00:47:57.800 And this is the kind of stuff that unfortunately, one of the disgruntled liberals want to continue because they see identity as something to be destroyed.

00:48:06.580 I think instead we need to recognize that that understanding is what created the opening for wokeness in the first place.

00:48:13.520 The type of identity politics, the gross, coarse, completely racial politics that were created by wokeness are themselves bad. 0.87

00:48:23.420 I think that's pretty easy for everyone to recognize.

00:48:26.220 But the answer is not the entire elimination of identity.

00:48:29.340 The answer is a cultivation of healthy identity.

00:48:33.200 Because the only thing that's going to push back against this ideological creation of artificial identity is real, healthy, organic, human understandings of well-being.

00:48:42.280 And that comes from our friends, our families, our communities.

00:48:45.400 Some people might even call it a tribe from time to time.

00:48:48.340 But these things all build on each other.

00:48:50.460 And as Jonathan Peugeot was saying on Twitter, and I think this is a really good insight,

00:48:54.380 the key to bad identity is not the elimination of identity.

00:48:57.160 The key to beating bad identity is creating a properly ordered subsidiarity of identities.

00:49:03.980 I am an American.

00:49:05.620 Yes.

00:49:06.080 I am also a Floridian.

00:49:07.780 I belong to a specific family and a specific religion, a specific sect of Protestantism.

00:49:13.300 I belong to an extended family that moves well beyond my immediate nuclear family.

00:49:20.040 And I have loyalties to them and priorities to them.

00:49:23.320 But I also recognize that that larger tribe is integrated into community, one in which I also hold loyalties to and I have duties to.

00:49:33.340 If we can create these natural layers of identity, not only do they make us happier people,

00:49:40.020 but they also insulate us from ideological corruption, the kind that I think both Marxists and, frankly, the current crop of liberals are trying to push down on people.

00:49:50.940 So I just wanted to explore that, guys.

00:49:53.180 I thought it was an interesting contrast between kind of what Stalin wrote about here,

00:49:59.060 what is being pushed in the American mainstream as an answer,

00:50:02.380 and what I think is ultimately the better answer to both, that we need to be looking at these things as identity as something that is layered,

00:50:11.840 multifaceted, not something that is to be heightened to the point of hyper-tribalism and making it impossible to cooperate,

00:50:18.820 but also cannot be eliminated in some kind of top-down social engineering project.

00:50:24.520 And I think that while I'm not trying to be the carefully nuanced fence-sitter bro,

00:50:29.420 I do genuinely think that that is the way to proceed forward.

00:50:32.760 I think that is an understanding that fits in a Christian framework,

00:50:38.320 an understanding that fits in a framework of American tradition with the federal system

00:50:43.360 and the recognition of regional autonomy that we have here.

00:50:47.420 And I think ultimately this is probably the way that we should address this,

00:50:52.000 rejecting both the communist project and definitions,

00:50:55.620 but also the modern liberal ones as well,

00:50:58.660 as I think both of them are ones that ultimately, as James Burnham points out,

00:51:02.860 brings us to Western suicide. 0.64

00:51:05.060 All right, guys, we've got a few questions over here from the people,

00:51:07.840 so I'll bring that up real quick.

00:51:13.960 Alex says,

00:51:15.180 Oren, when will you convert to Catholicism?

00:51:18.520 I've been asked this many times, and my answer is always the same.

00:51:21.740 I am Southern Baptist for the most Catholic reason imaginable,

00:51:25.340 because my father is Southern Baptist and his father before him and his father before him.

00:51:29.940 These are my people.

00:51:30.740 This is my community.

00:51:32.100 And so this is where my loyalty lies.

00:51:34.860 That said, I wish only the best to my favorite Catholic brothers and sisters.

00:51:39.440 I hope the new Pope's a good Pope.

00:51:41.020 I'm glad that I don't have to worry too much about what he thinks.

00:51:44.500 Let's see here.

00:51:47.660 Alexandra says, 0.84

00:51:48.520 Similar questions always appear in context of dictators.

00:51:51.480 So do you think Lindsey, Wright, et cetera, believe everything they say about race and culture?

00:51:56.860 Or are these just words in pursuit of influence?

00:52:01.000 I think Colin Wright probably believes most of what he says.

00:52:04.900 James is, I think, a little more cagey in his propaganda and his navigation of that.

00:52:12.880 I think he's even inadvertently admitted to that several times online and in tweets that people share.

00:52:18.520 That said, again, I don't want to make this episode about them.

00:52:21.460 This was more about the issue.

00:52:22.880 Again, the idea of nationalism, whether it should be your ultimate enemy.

00:52:27.680 If you're pursuing nationalism as your ultimate enemy, what are you doing?

00:52:32.020 The fact that guys like Lindsey, Wright, seem to think that pursuing nationalism will lead to dictatorships is a little bit telling on themselves.

00:52:39.660 But perspicacious heretic says, I assume elites will use some level of social engineering in this in this sometimes is this sometimes a necessity?

00:52:50.020 And if so, what forms and how much is acceptable?

00:52:53.280 It seems to me that they need to be a gentle guiding force.

00:52:56.040 Yeah.

00:52:56.420 So this is tricky, right?

00:52:58.320 When is it social engineering and when is it just having a positive influence on the culture?

00:53:02.260 And if we're operating at scale, aren't we going to have to have some level of uniformity that's going to feel like social engineering?

00:53:08.640 And the answer is yes, all of these things are true.

00:53:11.220 So previously, states just didn't have ideological apparatuses that allowed them to do what we do today.

00:53:18.360 They didn't have mass communication.

00:53:20.300 They didn't have Hollywood.

00:53:21.620 They didn't have the Internet.

00:53:22.900 They didn't have the things that allowed you to push propaganda on a regular basis.

00:53:25.560 So you could have ideological conformity, but it had to be at like really small scales, right?

00:53:30.360 Everybody went to the same temple.

00:53:32.460 Everybody went to the same cathedral that allowed a certain level of cultural uniformity.

00:53:37.200 Now, you could say that social engineering, but I think that's a more organic and scaled down understanding of actually just cultural creation.

00:53:45.620 When it becomes social engineering, I think, is when you attempt to do very inhuman things to people at a mass scale.

00:53:52.960 Now, is that necessary at the scale that we now operate society?

00:53:57.760 Unfortunately, I think it is.

00:53:59.440 And so does it mean we're always going to be engaging at it on some level?

00:54:03.600 Yes, unfortunately, that's going to be true.

00:54:05.960 I think part of this is rethinking how we understand operation at scale.

00:54:10.180 Can we return to a version of federalism that allows our country to operate and compete,

00:54:16.020 but does not mean that the central government constantly gets to dictate ideologically what people will believe and how they live their lives?

00:54:22.200 I am hopeful that we are heading that direction.

00:54:25.340 I think actually the benefits of scale are breaking down, and so therefore the benefits of mass social engineering are starting to break down.

00:54:31.840 That said, there is always going to be some interaction with the elites, and they are always going to shape culture to some degree.

00:54:38.480 And so if you would like to call that social engineering, then yes, you're correct that that will always exist at some level.

00:54:43.180 But I think the level we have it at right now is very unhelpful.

00:54:46.180 And as you point out, gentle guiding force is definitely the way to go.

00:54:50.820 Tiny Stupid Demon says, I'm confident that under the correct circumstances, James and Colin will quickly pivot to classical liberalism in one country.

00:54:59.760 Oh, okay, so I guess like nationalism, so renaming nationalism. 0.93

00:55:05.600 I see what you're saying there.

00:55:06.400 Okay, I hope so.

00:55:07.900 I hope so.

00:55:08.620 Ultimately, I think that would be good.

00:55:10.500 I think that their current need to attack organic identities, especially national identities, is really bad.

00:55:18.580 I think that that's not a good way to organize the conservative movement or the right.

00:55:23.960 And so I hope ultimately they recognize this.

00:55:26.220 James Coffey says, Lindsay's false premise.

00:55:30.960 One, Oren Tucker believed that there is no truth, just power.

00:55:33.900 Isn't God's ultimate power slash truth?

00:55:38.200 Candace slash Tucker believed if a topic is taboo, it equals truth.

00:55:43.840 Oren's comments re-free speech.

00:55:48.460 So I'm trying to grasp some of that.

00:55:51.440 I mean, the first one is certainly true.

00:55:52.860 He acts as if guys he's named, like myself and Tucker, are just like horribly, you know, say there's no truth, only power.

00:56:01.580 I've explained, obviously, that's not the case.

00:56:03.600 I just said here, obviously, that there's quite a bit of unescapable truth about human nature.

00:56:08.480 So obviously that's false.

00:56:10.400 I can't really speak to whether Candace or Tucker believe that every topic which is taboo is true.

00:56:15.840 I don't think that's true of Tucker.

00:56:17.360 I can't say that I watch a ton of Candace Owens, so I just don't know.

00:56:21.940 I do know she embraces some stuff like the moon landing's fake or, you know, and stuff like that, which I just don't agree with.

00:56:28.600 But the third one with Oren's comments, re-free speech, I'm not exactly sure what that one means, unfortunately.

00:56:35.380 Sorry about that.

00:56:37.640 Matt Grittier says, great show as always.

00:56:39.700 Well, thank you very much, Matt.

00:56:40.620 Definitely appreciate it.

00:56:41.480 Appreciate you guys making the show possible today.

00:56:43.560 Alex says, Oren, isn't the rebellion against the church the downfall of the West?

00:56:50.240 Well, I don't know.

00:56:51.240 How's Europe doing, I guess?

00:56:53.740 Right?

00:56:55.440 I don't think that the Protestant Americas is ultimately a rebellion against the church because I believe Protestant America is part of the church.

00:57:05.620 If you just mean against Catholicism, again, I would point out that the most Catholic countries in the world aren't necessarily always doing the best right now.

00:57:15.540 But that said, you know, I wish once again the best for my Christians and brothers and sisters, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.

00:57:24.340 Alex again says, thanks as always for the great educational content.

00:57:26.980 Absolutely, man.

00:57:27.500 Appreciate it.

00:57:28.100 And he says, let's make the Dave Green versus James Lindsay debate happen.

00:57:33.120 I would, of course, love to see that.

00:57:35.000 Dave has a level of patience that is perhaps superhuman, perhaps too patient for Dave Green.

00:57:42.420 That said, he's a fantastic guy, very thoughtful, has pretty much roundly destroyed every single person from that camp he has been in a conversation with.

00:57:52.760 Not because he's hostile or, you know, just brings a great rhetorical force, but simply because he's right and thoughtful.

00:58:00.200 And so I'm sure he would be just as effective in a discussion with James Lindsay as with the other interlocutors he's had.

00:58:08.340 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

00:58:10.700 Once again, thank you, everybody, for watching.

00:58:12.760 It's been great talking to you.

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00:58:41.000 Thank you, everybody, for watching, and as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 12, 2025

The National Question and the Destruction of Identity ｜ 5⧸12⧸25

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