The Auron MacIntyre Show - The National Soul ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸17⧸23

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

00:00:31.660 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.100 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:36.860 So as you know on the show, of course we do some news of the day.

00:00:41.520 We do follow events, but we also like to dive deep into theory.

00:00:45.940 We like to look at the principles behind what is happening,

00:00:50.200 understand some of the ideas that shape and form the political experience.

00:00:55.020 And so we've been diving into the works of Joseph DeMaestro,

00:00:58.440 one of the most based political theorists of all time.

00:01:01.600 And we've been looking at his work study on sovereignty,

00:01:04.420 so we can better understand the idea of power, where it comes from, how it's wielded,

00:01:09.860 how nations are formed, all of these really critical things.

00:01:13.360 And joining me to continue that series today is The Prudentialist.

00:01:17.120 Thanks for coming on, man.

00:01:17.840 Thanks for having me back, Oren.

00:01:19.260 Always a pleasure.

00:01:20.680 Absolutely.

00:01:21.420 So this is our third part of the stream.

00:01:24.640 Of course, there's a playlist if you want to check out the previous ones,

00:01:27.440 but we'll be talking about relevant topics.

00:01:29.580 You don't have to go back and watch those before you watch these to enjoy this one.

00:01:34.540 All right.

00:01:34.780 So we are diving back into study on sovereignty.

00:01:38.060 We're looking at chapter 10 of the first book.

00:01:40.520 The work is, it's basically a long essay divided into what he calls two books,

00:01:44.840 but I think it's like 70 pages total, really, for this whole thing.

00:01:48.880 So we're moving into chapter 10, and he's talking here about the national soul.

00:01:54.520 And what he talks about here is kind of what allows people to form their identities,

00:02:01.460 what allows people to have a solid relationship to each other,

00:02:06.140 an understanding of kind of right relationship with the way the nation should be,

00:02:11.860 with the way they should act.

00:02:13.400 And he says a really important thing about this is, yet again,

00:02:16.840 it's something he hits on over and over again in study on sovereignty,

00:02:20.420 is the importance of these things being set in stone before someone enters into the political,

00:02:28.000 understanding what is right, what is wrong, what is the goal of man,

00:02:32.240 what is the good life, what is your relationship to the vine,

00:02:35.120 what are your duties to your family.

00:02:37.220 These are things that should not be individually pulled apart, assessed, reasoned out.

00:02:43.160 He said these things can't be done that way.

00:02:45.620 Instead, they must be informed by what he calls prejudices,

00:02:49.980 which is, I think, a really important word that we'll get into here in a second.

00:02:53.520 But he says, really, from the cradle, you have to be surrounded by dogmas.

00:02:57.780 I'll just read a little bit here because it's pretty good.

00:02:59.660 He says, human reason left to its own resources is completely incapable,

00:03:03.840 not only of creating, but also conserving any religious or political association,

00:03:09.820 because it can only give rise to disputes.

00:03:12.120 And because he conduct himself well, man needs belief, not problems.

00:03:16.940 His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas.

00:03:19.580 And when his reason awakes, all of his opinions should be given,

00:03:23.060 at least all these relating to his conduct.

00:03:25.820 Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices.

00:03:28.720 Let us not take this word in a bad part.

00:03:30.800 It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word,

00:03:36.280 any opinion adopted without examination.

00:03:39.320 Now, these kinds of opinions are essential to man.

00:03:41.700 They are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires.

00:03:46.760 Without them, there can be neither religion, morality, nor government.

00:03:51.780 There should be a state religion, just as there should be a state political system.

00:03:55.740 Or rather, religion and political dogmas mingled and merged together should together form a general

00:04:01.500 or national mind sufficiently strong to repress the aberrations of the individual reason,

00:04:07.360 which is, of its nature, the moral enemy of any association, whatever,

00:04:11.560 because it gives birth only to divergent opinions.

00:04:15.220 All right, Prudentialists, this is basically the opposite of everything that we hear today, right?

00:04:19.280 That, you know, that you're going to have these opinions.

00:04:22.620 The world is not formed a priori.

00:04:24.760 You do not, you know, sit in the original position or the state of nature and create who you are

00:04:29.840 and what your values are, choosing each and every individual part of this.

00:04:33.300 Instead, he says, when your reason awakens, you should already be surrounded by these prejudices,

00:04:39.820 these inbuilt understandings of the world.

00:04:42.460 And of course, if we think about that, it's true, right?

00:04:44.900 We can't reason from nothing, but that's not really how we're taught to approach the world today.

00:04:50.560 Yeah, we're always taught to approach that you have to take things in a vacuum.

00:04:54.300 You have to approach things as if the past doesn't matter at all and look at the present problem

00:04:59.580 and how to address it.

00:05:00.720 And if you are going to look at the past, you have to address it in sort of a progressive historiography.

00:05:05.720 I mean, the left really does understand what De Maistre is saying here.

00:05:09.940 There is a state religion.

00:05:11.140 There is a sort of state set of dogmas and principles.

00:05:13.640 It is leftism that is what you are raised in.

00:05:17.160 And unfortunately, and De Maistre will get into this later,

00:05:19.840 the form of leftism that's been unleashed in both this country and other parts of the West

00:05:23.700 has been a tiger that has just been eating up every man, woman, and child that can find itself in.

00:05:28.800 But you have to be raised with faith.

00:05:30.680 You have to be raised with a national character and association.

00:05:34.340 This is building off of what De Maistre has said earlier,

00:05:37.020 that you need to have homogeneity and beliefs and peoples

00:05:40.060 lest you weaken the very character of that group.

00:05:42.880 And you're right.

00:05:44.160 That's so critical.

00:05:44.900 The left understands this, right?

00:05:46.760 They are not scared of propaganda.

00:05:49.240 They are not scared of understanding that they need to control the organs of state information,

00:05:54.280 education, these things.

00:05:55.420 And we'll talk about that more.

00:05:56.520 He gets into that in depth here, education.

00:05:58.800 But they understand the importance of that because they need to establish those dogmas.

00:06:02.900 They need to be well-seated.

00:06:04.680 I'm going to read another section of this really quickly.

00:06:06.940 Likewise, if each man makes himself the judge of the principles of government,

00:06:11.480 you will see immediately the rise of civil anarchy or the annihilation of political sovereignty.

00:06:16.500 Government is a true religion.

00:06:17.960 It has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests.

00:06:20.560 To submit to its individual discussion is to destroy it.

00:06:23.520 It has life only through the national mind.

00:06:25.540 That is to say, political faith, which is a creed.

00:06:28.080 Many primary, man's primary need is that his nascent reason should be curbed under a double yoke.

00:06:36.620 It should be frustrated and it should lose itself in the national mind.

00:06:39.720 So it changes its individual existence for another communal existence.

00:06:43.720 Just as a river flows into the ocean, really exists in massive water, but without name and distinct reality.

00:06:50.280 So again, something that a lot of people, I think, would probably be shocked to hear.

00:06:54.320 Everybody says, look, every government is going to have this religious aspect.

00:07:00.100 You're going to have the priests of the religion.

00:07:02.660 You're going to have these mysteries.

00:07:04.580 You're going to have these dogmas.

00:07:05.840 And of course, that's true when we talk about the American civic religion.

00:07:10.800 People will call it that very freely often.

00:07:13.440 They're talking about teaching, here's the Declaration of Independence.

00:07:18.540 Here's the Constitution.

00:07:19.900 Here's the Bill of Rights.

00:07:20.900 Here are all these critical documents that weave us together, that set our principles, that define us.

00:07:27.360 Even many people who claim that America is a creedal nation, what they're saying is America is a religion.

00:07:33.980 When people say America is a creedal nation, what they're really saying is America at its core is a religion you can adopt.

00:07:41.360 And just like if you could become a Christian by adopting Christian principles or you become a Muslim by adopting Islamic dogmas, these different parts of the faith will be critical.

00:07:53.600 And whether we like that relationship, whether we feel comfortable as post-enlightened humans with that relationship with government, it is going to exist either way.

00:08:01.820 Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:03.760 I mean, this is why you will hear people from sort of centrist types where they'll just be like, well, America can be anything, you know, like it's it's guns, beer and freedom.

00:08:11.960 And I mean, if that's your creed, that's an incredibly weak creed that can be changed as long as, you know, the appropriate kind of goods or treats and goodies are dealt out to the people.

00:08:20.520 But I mean, also in there, you see Joseph de Maistre's rather strong Catholic anti-reformation character come out here because you can he he's applied this principle before when it comes to say sola scriptura.

00:08:32.160 Like if every man is the interpreter of doctrine and dogma, the same issues that we saw between the Reformation and the split between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholics, the same thing is going to happen with the emergence of democracy.

00:08:42.860 If everyone can determine what the creed is, you unleash national anarchy, you unleash the very terror that happened in France.

00:08:49.880 And so you're seeing a very high church, hard line.

00:08:53.040 You know, it's basically race, religion, divinity.

00:08:55.680 These are the things that make it people.

00:08:57.100 And the moment we start debating what is actually those things, we set ourselves up for an identity crisis that leads to violence and leads to the dissolution of the people.

00:09:07.940 Absolutely.

00:09:08.720 That's that's certainly what he is looking at here.

00:09:11.340 This is this is, again, why I think it's so important to look at works like this, because they come from an older time, an older place, a space where people are thinking in a very different way, but a way that was very common for hundreds of thousands of years.

00:09:26.260 And so today people often have not interacted with just kind of a blunt explanation of this kind of thought.

00:09:33.340 And even if you're somebody who disagrees with some of these things, it's still really critical to put yourself outside of, again, books that were just written in the last century or so.

00:09:41.380 You really need to put yourself in touch with people who are coming from an entirely different frame, one that is a far longer lineage than perhaps the one that you're currently interacting with.

00:09:52.720 All right.

00:09:53.020 So his next chapter is going to be on public education.

00:09:56.880 But before we dive into publication, public education, let's hear from our sponsors at ISI.

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00:11:27.780 All right, now, Chapter 11 is a little strange.

00:11:31.580 It feels kind of oddly inserted in here at first, because all of a sudden, and it's not even in this reader, because I guess the editor felt like it was irrelevant.

00:11:39.800 But I think there is one critical thing about Chapter 11, which is that, yeah, he spends a lot of time breaking down the cost of basically public education.

00:11:49.360 He says, look, you know, this new French Republic, they want to have this public education for everybody.

00:11:55.080 And he starts listing all the costs that are going to be involved, the buildings and the teachers and just everything that's going to be involved in this.

00:12:03.900 And he comes to the conclusion, basically, that it's going to be enormously expensive.

00:12:07.480 And, of course, we know that's true, right, that public education is incredibly expensive.

00:12:13.700 In fact, not only is it incredibly expensive, it just becomes a boondoggle, becomes a place for regime apparatchiks to get jobs as it becomes a patronage network.

00:12:21.520 It doesn't actually do a great job.

00:12:24.500 And that's the second thing that he predicts, that the public education will not do a good job, that even though it will be enormously expensive, enormously time consuming, it will be this massive bureaucracy that it's going to fail.

00:12:36.600 The only thing that he and this is the rail or the rare demastra L here, like the one thing that he he fails at is he predicts that it will do such a bad job that it'll just collapse because everyone will just take their kids out of it.

00:12:49.400 And they'll just take care. He's like, who would leave their children in this failed system?

00:12:53.600 What kind of insane person would continue to return children to this this kind of doomed project?

00:13:00.380 Obviously, people are going to watch this. They're going to see how expensive it is.

00:13:03.280 They're going to see it as a failure. They're going to pull their kids out.

00:13:05.680 They're going to take care of themselves. And then all of a sudden, you know, it'll it'll just fall apart under the thing.

00:13:10.840 Of course, we know that's exactly not what happened once people had the duty of kind of caring for their children, educating them removed from them.

00:13:18.180 And they just went along with it. They didn't actually take action for the most part to to remove their children from that experience.

00:13:26.040 Yeah. And I mean, this sounds very like it's out of the blue when you're reading this.

00:13:29.480 But I think the last paragraph in Chapter 10 actually gives you a really great transition in here.

00:13:34.000 Can you the insignificant man? You know, he's very much a great man theorist.

00:13:37.920 He's very much a believer that there are people that are meant to serve and that are not meant to be in any places of power.

00:13:43.060 And those people can't ensure future generations will have that dogma.

00:13:47.080 Anyone that has looked at public schooling in America will know that if you have a white child, that they're going to be raised to think that their entire ancestry in the founding of this country was anathema to progress.

00:13:57.160 It was evil. It was anti white racist. And so, yeah, you can't preserve the national solar character through public education. 0.88

00:14:03.360 And in the book, which I have the Empyrean Press copy in front of me, you know, he gives us this great breakdown of how many millions of francs it's going to cost.

00:14:11.180 And the only way that they can do that, he points out, is, is that it's going to be selling off the churches.

00:14:17.220 It's going to be making sure that we take any money from tithing out of the churches, the presbyteries, the priests can't have anything.

00:14:24.380 You know, these schoolhouses, you know, it's mainly going to be young men and women, 15 or 16 years of age that are teaching it.

00:14:31.040 So even less qualified people than what we have today and even younger people than would be educating them.

00:14:36.360 And then additionally, like professors and such are not are going to be making more money than the average person outside in the in the rural areas.

00:14:44.520 But in the cities, even then, they can't afford it.

00:14:46.460 So you're witnessing sort of a very similar breakdown to what we've seen in the United States and other parts with mass public education.

00:14:53.680 Religion becomes secularized. It becomes defunded by the people.

00:14:57.520 They don't have enough to give to the state. The state robs the churches.

00:15:00.420 And additionally, you begin to witness that the uneducated people are now sort of slaves to this system, as Oren was just talking about here, that, oh, now we're going to see people be dependent on this public education system, not just the kids, but the teachers.

00:15:16.760 And they're going to have the ability to influence generation after generation.

00:15:20.040 And unfortunately, the maestro was a little too optimistic and hoping that this would all collapse under itself, because even if it does collapse under itself, you know, the federal government, the Department of Education and the state government so quick to bail you out.

00:15:33.940 Yeah, this this it was very it was very optimistic of him to assume that parents would just never stand for this, that they could not imagine a moment where parents would simply abandon that particular duty to their children.

00:15:49.100 And then this is something where I think Bertrand de Juvenal, of course, does great work talking about why, you know, totalitarian states states must collapse every every kind of duty to each other, break down every bond, remove every barrier.

00:16:06.360 You know, they have to remove these these different spheres of influence.

00:16:09.080 I think De Maestro was a little too optimistic, but optimistic about the continued resilience of those barriers, those bonds, those those spheres of influence to ward off some of the worst aspects of the state.

00:16:21.920 But but but but that said, it is still, like I said, even for even for all the kind of mind numbing figures he runs down for a while in that chapter, it does make some really important points about kind of the nature of public education, which is critical to kind of this this post enlightenment project that he is largely criticizing.

00:16:42.080 Absolutely.

00:16:42.480 So our next chapter is chapter 12, and this one is him revisiting in many ways, the philosophy will destroy your nation kind of deal that he did in previous chapters.

00:16:56.840 He talks this time not just about Rousseau, but he talks about Voltaire.

00:17:00.940 He says Voltaire destroyed religion and Rousseau destroyed government.

00:17:05.780 And the two worked to undermine each other simultaneously.

00:17:09.960 Again, he's very big about this link.

00:17:12.480 It's again, very much the opposite in many ways of kind of how we are taught to think about this through kind of the the American separation of church and state post enlightenment lens.

00:17:23.780 He very much sees these things as critical.

00:17:26.500 They're woven together.

00:17:27.500 They will always interact with each other.

00:17:29.360 They will always inform each other.

00:17:30.800 And the corruption of one is inevitably the corruption of the other.

00:17:34.940 And so he says that these two enlightenment forces both looked to pull apart what we knew.

00:17:41.580 They destroyed the kind of healthy dogmas and prejudices of both faith and government, you know, kind of splaying both open to human reason and inevitably deconstructing both.

00:17:54.680 So he again, this is why I think it's so important to read people like the maestro, because he's writing right after the enlightenment occurs right as it's occurring and these things are spooling up.

00:18:04.360 We're sitting at the end of this thing, watching the kind of the bones get picked clean of both kind of right religion and right government, wondering how all the stuff got deconstructed.

00:18:15.460 I mean, he was calling this shot, you know, back in the 1790s.

00:18:19.600 Yeah.

00:18:20.040 And one of the important things out of this chapter, I mean, we've joked that he's coming after, you know, for Internet parlance, he's coming after the theory cells out there in the world.

00:18:28.320 But he points out that the sort of tag team of Voltaire and Rousseau, at least in the eyes of de Maestro and respects to the French people, is that once you have, you know, entertained the inattentive eyes, sort of the popular masses of the world, and you give them this philosophy, but you also try and approach it from reason.

00:18:46.460 And you're beginning to take away those national characters and those dogmas that the French people were raised with.

00:18:52.800 I mean, he writes here that, let's say here, if one asks these men what they have done, they will speak to you of their influence on opinion.

00:19:00.440 They will tell you that they have destroyed prejudices and especially fanaticism, for that that is their great world.

00:19:06.020 They will celebrate in magnificent terms the kind of magistracy that Voltaire exercised over his century during a long career, but those words, prejudice and fanaticism.

00:19:15.760 And the final analysis signify the belief of several nations.

00:19:19.360 Voltaire has chased this belief out of a host of heads.

00:19:21.740 That is to say, he has destroyed it, and this is precisely what I am saying.

00:19:25.600 And so when we take out what makes French people French, like what is the French character?

00:19:30.420 If we've taken out their ability to be fanatic about their population, about their country, about their monarchy, about their god, you have a large collection of people that are easily able to be ruled over a new political formula.

00:19:42.740 One where it doesn't really matter what it means to be French or what it means to be English.

00:19:48.460 It just means that I can have a lesser creed, a lesser fanaticism, and I can get more excited about guns, beer, and freedom than I am any sort of traditional idea of a nation or a people.

00:19:59.460 And he really makes a clear point that once you get rid of long established institutions that instill tradition, whether that be the Catholic Church, whether that be the monarchy, whether that be French customs that are traditionally located in, say, your part of the country, whether that be outside Paris or in Brittany or Normandy or wherever.

00:20:18.620 However, once that's gone, it's very hard to get back, and it becomes basically destroyed inside the soul of the people, and that they will be entertained by a philosophy that's very easy to poke holes into, and that there's nothing after that.

00:20:33.780 Well, once the philosophy's gone, what do you have?

00:20:35.940 Well, you just double down.

00:20:37.580 And to DeMeister, that implicates that really the national soul has been corrupted, corroded, and destroyed.

00:20:44.420 Yeah, and if you're somebody who's, yeah, I'm a materialist, the spiritual death of a country, that's not real.

00:20:51.360 This metaphysical mumbo-jumbo doesn't really matter.

00:20:54.480 I mean, just think about, you know, the United States withdrawing from Afghanistan, right?

00:20:58.780 Like, if we're at, perhaps, the point at which there is the most disparity ever in human history between a first world, you know, nation, hegemonic army of the United States, and a bunch of guys who, like, herd goats somewhere in Afghanistan.

00:21:19.340 And if the goat herders can make the American army lead, what's the difference? 1.00

00:21:25.200 It's not, you know, tactics.

00:21:27.480 It's not money.

00:21:29.040 It's not firepower technology.

00:21:31.720 It's none of those things, right?

00:21:32.780 It's will.

00:21:33.520 It's belief.

00:21:34.220 It's fanaticism.

00:21:36.100 The guy who wants it more wins it, right?

00:21:39.420 You have a lot of people right now, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but since it's relevant, we'll touch it real quick.

00:21:44.940 A lot of people right now are blown away by the fact that many Palestinians are willing to trade everything, including their children, for the elimination of their enemies and say, oh, this is barbaric.

00:21:58.140 Oh, this is, and sure, it is.

00:22:00.200 And guess what?

00:22:01.360 It also means fanaticism has an incredible power all its own.

00:22:06.500 It can destroy all kinds of modern things that we don't believe should be assailable by, you know, by kind of these old antiquated beliefs.

00:22:17.900 But the strong gods come back, and you got to understand that these things are real, and they have a really serious impact on your society.

00:22:26.600 Yeah, I mean, the same thing can be applied to any issue that you're kind of seeing in America.

00:22:30.960 It's about will.

00:22:33.000 I mean, is there a will to overcome sort of anti-natalist rhetoric?

00:22:36.700 Is there a will to overcome the vibrant, you know, anti-white racism or the anti-Christian attitudes in your country?

00:22:43.300 Those guys are, like Oren said, they're willing to die for it.

00:22:47.000 And the question, I think, has become for a lot of people, well, what are you willing to sacrifice other than maybe getting in an account banned?

00:22:53.000 And then when we see people who do sacrifice things, like those who get debanged or those who get canceled, we act as if, oh, they're dead.

00:22:59.880 Oh, well, so be it.

00:23:00.840 Bye-bye.

00:23:01.700 And, you know, that's the destruction of soul.

00:23:04.060 That's the destruction of fanaticism and our destruction of prejudice.

00:23:07.820 And not in the prejudice of, like, oh, I hate this group of people.

00:23:10.600 Prejudice in the ability to discern, no, this is bad for my country.

00:23:14.160 This is bad for my people.

00:23:15.260 This is bad for my children.

00:23:16.340 And de Maistre is in the, you know, ground zero, watching his country be torn apart by liberal fanaticism, a philosophy that is so weak that has only destroyed most of the Western world at a lot of its foundations.

00:23:28.240 And instead, you know, he points out that the same thing Edmund Burke pointed out with the French Revolution.

00:23:33.300 Who are you to change the rights of those who have yet to be born? 1.00

00:23:36.460 And he has enough judgment and prejudice to say, no, this is not good for the country.

00:23:40.840 And the same thing, I think, can apply to what's going on overseas.

00:23:43.220 And the same thing that we should also take a look at here in America with our own cultural battles is, you know, words are one thing.

00:23:50.260 But, you know, we do have to protest.

00:23:51.540 We do have to do things like that.

00:23:52.680 Because if not, you know, we're as empty in our philosophy as the liberals that he's criticizing here.

00:23:59.400 There's another passage here I want to read real quick because I think it's very important.

00:24:03.380 Wherever the individual reason dominates, there can be nothing great.

00:24:07.200 For everything great rests on belief.

00:24:08.980 And the clash of individual opinion left to themselves produces only skepticism, which is destructive of everything.

00:24:16.500 General and individual morality, religion, laws, revered customs, useful prejudices.

00:24:21.920 Nothing is left standing.

00:24:23.180 Everything falls before it.

00:24:24.700 It is the universal solvent.

00:24:26.960 Or as our, you know, previous episode we did, Nick Land put it succinctly.

00:24:32.100 Every disagreement is an opportunity to rule, right?

00:24:35.300 This is kind of the original understanding of this, is that the constant division, the constant need to reassess, question, you know, break down, it destroys all of these binding agents.

00:24:49.860 All of these things that make people who they are at their core, these axioms that define a society and a people, they all get eaten alive.

00:24:58.780 It dissolves every one of these things.

00:25:00.760 At the end, you're left hollowed out because you've questioned every single thing.

00:25:06.040 The idea that you should question everything was always a terrible maxim.

00:25:10.320 And it's the one that can bring a ruin to a nation.

00:25:13.940 Yeah, and I think he kind of brings it up here really just perfect.

00:25:17.060 He says, a pen friendly to religion when it addresses reproaches to philosophy is suspicious to a great number of readers who persist in seeing fanaticism wherever they do not see incredulity or indifference.

00:25:29.920 And so, I mean, it's a really important thing here when we see people that will rail on.

00:25:34.640 And I mean, we've seen this from Buckley to the National Review guys that will say, oh, we stand to thwart, you know, the cliff of history yelling stop.

00:25:42.000 Well, you know, what is that to many people other than indifference?

00:25:45.220 You're trying to reproach philosophy from a way that these philosophers can't understand anymore.

00:25:50.700 They can't understand the importance of having your religion, your dogmas, your prejudices.

00:25:56.260 They've adopted something completely different.

00:25:57.740 So all that they see is the indifferent whinings of someone who already lost.

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00:26:19.580 He also brings in here the critical relationship between patriotism and religion, saying that you cannot have patriotism without religion.

00:26:30.500 Once the religion is gone, the patriotism will inevitably go with it.

00:26:35.860 That these things are twin pillars that interact with each other, that hold a nation aloft.

00:26:41.640 And that once you tear out kind of that spiritual binding agent of religion, the patriotism will become hollow.

00:26:50.600 It will become eaten out.

00:26:52.000 And eventually it will simply fall away.

00:26:53.560 I mean, we see that today ever so clearly.

00:26:56.560 I mean, what is the national religion of the state of the United States?

00:27:00.120 It is progressivism and it is leftism.

00:27:02.160 Any old religion or any old patriotism of, you know, whether it be you going to a Baptist church and, you know, loving your country and raising the flag at half-staff every Veterans Day on November 11th.

00:27:12.460 To them, you're, you're a heretic and it will wither away and they will destroy you for it because that old belief, that old religion has been replaced by a suicidal ideation that is, you know, progressive political philosophy.

00:27:28.020 I'm trying to find it here because it's not my reader.

00:27:30.360 There's a great line about, or no, you had the quote.

00:27:34.460 I think you had it marked down where he talks about how the loss of these things.

00:27:38.900 Yes, it was a bloodier age, but it was also an age of oracles.

00:27:42.020 It was an age of, you know, things being revivified.

00:27:45.800 It's not up here, so I can't read it real quick.

00:27:48.040 Yeah, but no, I mean, here we go.

00:27:50.680 To the extent that this power, let's see.

00:27:53.600 Yeah.

00:27:55.700 Yeah, okay.

00:27:56.480 But as soon as the idea of divinity is the principle of human action, this action is fruitful, creative, and invincible.

00:28:01.980 An unknown force makes itself felt on all sides, animating, warming, vivifying all.

00:28:06.740 With whatever errors, whatever crimes, ignorance, and human corruption have defiled this august idea, it nonetheless retains its incredible influence.

00:28:15.240 Amid massacres, men multiply, the nations display dizzying vigor.

00:28:19.620 In former times, Rousseau said, Greece flourished amid the cruelest wars.

00:28:23.460 Blood flowed there, and the whole country was covered with men. 0.99

00:28:26.060 Without a doubt, but it was a time of century of wonders and oracles, a century of faith, after the manner of men of this time, that is to say, the century of exalted patriotism.

00:28:35.520 When one has said to the great being that he exists, one has not yet said anything.

00:28:39.440 It must be said that he is existence.

00:28:41.980 But he, being one, has only one now completely filled forever.

00:28:46.520 A drop of this immeasurable ocean of existence seems to detach itself and fall upon a man who speaks and acts in the name of the deity.

00:28:53.580 His action astonishes and gives idea to creation.

00:28:56.400 The centuries pass by, and his work remains.

00:28:59.160 All among men that is great, good, agreeable, true, and enduring comes from existence, the source of all existences.

00:29:05.420 So, I mean, even if things were bloody in the past, we still remember Socrates.

00:29:10.000 We still remember Plato.

00:29:10.880 We still remember the Spartans of Thermopylae.

00:29:12.820 We still remember who was there at the Battle of Marathon.

00:29:15.140 And we still remember even the wars inside of Italy and the succession of the fights between Italian states.

00:29:21.680 The times were bloody, but great works had been made.

00:29:24.380 And once you abandon all that and you abandon the drive to create something because you believe in it to a point that you're willing to fight for it,

00:29:32.140 you become an indifferent philosopher and you become someone without fanaticism, without belief.

00:29:37.560 And to quote the line from the movie Troyes, like, that is why no one will remember your name.

00:29:41.900 And that's a really damning indictment from De Maestra.

00:29:45.140 It really is.

00:29:46.580 And it's especially echoing to, I think, people of the modern day.

00:29:50.940 Because, again, I think what people, when things like what happens in the Middle East or whenever conflict breaks out anywhere at this point,

00:29:59.160 the first reaction of pretty much every modern nation, every wealthy kind of comfortable nation is,

00:30:06.620 how could anyone actually fight for something they believe in?

00:30:09.780 You know, that's something that is really difficult.

00:30:12.080 You know, I used to teach and I would talk to students.

00:30:16.220 And the current generation cannot grasp someone fighting for somebody else besides themselves.

00:30:23.300 Like, they can understand why you would need to maybe fight to defend yourself or maybe your family.

00:30:28.140 But the idea that you would defend a nation, defend, you know, the honor of something, you know, that's, you know, fight for the glory of something.

00:30:35.860 That's just completely foreign because, you know, we've become so soft in these ways.

00:30:41.800 And, you know, myself included, you know, not throwing shade on anyone else without myself.

00:30:47.620 It's something, it's an idea that it's very difficult for a lot of people to grasp.

00:30:51.580 But it has been the driver of greatness throughout history.

00:30:54.800 It has been a critical aspect of what animates great civilizations.

00:30:59.340 And the lack of it really can show you the road to civilizational death,

00:31:04.600 which is what he's warning about when he's constantly harping on philosophy,

00:31:07.960 is that this is the road to civilizational death.

00:31:10.060 It will drive out and it will kill all these things that allow a civilization to fight for its own survival.

00:31:15.820 Yeah, I mean, it cannot be stressed enough that once you've lost that animating drive,

00:31:22.380 something that is pre-eternal or divine, you know, what is it more than maybe a rearguard action

00:31:29.360 to just keep your own self afloat?

00:31:31.320 And that's it.

00:31:32.180 And I mean, these, and sometimes it may sound like we're just spewing out empty words

00:31:36.360 or that we're just, you know, doing this for entertainment or infotainment.

00:31:39.420 But at the end of the day, the question is an indictment, not just on the people DeMeister's criticizing,

00:31:44.680 but it's an indictment really into a lot of the West.

00:31:47.400 I mean, what a lot of people get up and about with the sort of Nietzscheanism thing,

00:31:50.960 and I apologize for the sort of slight tirade here,

00:31:53.500 but it's kind of important to recognize that when Nietzsche says that God is dead,

00:31:57.320 it's an indictment that the animating force behind the West that, you know,

00:32:01.180 grasping for the divine had been killed off by our own reason and by our own logic.

00:32:06.460 And it's a really good indictment of how we've sort of lost ourselves to these philosophies.

00:32:10.860 And we're giving ourselves a way to rot away nihilistically.

00:32:14.840 And whether you agree with Nietzsche's answer to that,

00:32:17.460 or you want to go to something different,

00:32:19.560 it does indicate to a lot of us what DeMeister is saying here,

00:32:22.340 that you need that desire for glory.

00:32:25.620 You need that belief that makes you willing to go above and beyond.

00:32:31.000 And whether that comes at a cost, it may be determined by you or someone else,

00:32:35.500 but you need to have that belief system, whatever it may be.

00:32:39.040 Yeah, I think Nietzsche's, you know, he was saying,

00:32:42.400 hey, you know, look at the blood on our hands.

00:32:44.140 We have to become worthy of this murder.

00:32:46.100 We have to find a way forward without it.

00:32:47.760 And the question of could men do that seems to be the answer was absolutely not.

00:32:52.320 And so the only thing to do is then to look back to that which had animated before.

00:32:59.600 All right.

00:32:59.860 So 13 is relatively short.

00:33:03.320 He, again, he once again returns to the dangers of philosophy and lone reason.

00:33:07.960 I think the main takeaways from this one are that he talks about how philosophers are usually weak men

00:33:14.760 who can't implement their own ideas.

00:33:16.620 He spends a decent amount talking about how none of these people who come up with these grand,

00:33:22.860 grandiose ideas almost ever actually have the ability to be men of action,

00:33:28.580 to take those ideas and implement them.

00:33:30.980 This is another criticism you'll see in people like Oswald Spangler.

00:33:35.780 But he does say that these ideas do still have importance,

00:33:40.160 even though the people who come up with them don't have the ability to carry them out.

00:33:44.600 They don't have the wherewithal to wield the power and make the decisions to come make them out.

00:33:49.580 He says once those are out, once those ideas are out in society,

00:33:54.100 they can destroy the social order.

00:33:55.920 There are contagions that are let loose and that universal acid can't eat through everything.

00:34:01.820 So we kind of get a Warhammer 40K-esque,

00:34:04.720 there are dangerous ideas that need to be suppressed kind of approach here.

00:34:09.580 Because he says, look, even if these weak men sit in their towers and they come up with these things

00:34:16.240 and then they die alone in their chambers,

00:34:19.400 their ideas can still go out and destroy the world.

00:34:21.900 And I think as we look at the last few hundred years of pure ideology,

00:34:26.960 we can see that that is very true and very easily something that can manifest in the words of somebody like Karl Marx.

00:34:34.400 Yeah. Info hazards are real kids.

00:34:36.680 And I mean, he has this great line here at the very end of this chapter.

00:34:40.920 When he says, when citing someone who had been executed from, by the national convention,

00:34:46.680 you know, when he was dealing with the terrors of the revolution,

00:34:50.780 he says, I can be treated as I treated others.

00:34:52.560 When men met with principle, I led by myself and is above all the principles,

00:34:55.740 Rousseau, that have killed me.

00:34:57.400 And he was right.

00:34:58.140 The tiger who tears does what he must.

00:35:00.300 The real culprit is the one who unmuzzles him and sets him upon society.

00:35:03.880 Do not think that you were absolved by your effect eternities of Marat or Roussebier.

00:35:08.740 Listen to truth.

00:35:09.600 Wherever you are, wherever you are unfortunate to believe you,

00:35:12.820 there will be such monsters.

00:35:14.280 For every society contains scoundrels who are waiting to tear it apart,

00:35:17.600 to be rid of restraint of the laws.

00:35:19.560 But without you, Marat and Roussebier would have done no harm

00:35:23.140 because they would have been held back by the restraint you have broken.

00:35:26.440 And it's sort of just an indictment to regular people,

00:35:28.720 but also those in power that, listen,

00:35:30.700 you give these people as much power as much as that you follow them.

00:35:33.320 Sort of a warning about demagoguery, as usual,

00:35:36.480 with these sort of dangerous progressive ideals.

00:35:39.520 This is that, you know, if you buy into the power and you unrestrain

00:35:42.840 and you let crazy academics talk about decolonialization

00:35:46.980 or the problems and the epidemic of whiteness, 0.99

00:35:50.120 eventually that tiger will come and eat you and your children.

00:35:53.040 And we are just as much to blame as the academic scholars that let them in.

00:35:57.560 I mean, we talk about academic freedom for conservatives,

00:36:00.260 but we must remember that, you know who the first people were talking about academic freedom?

00:36:04.460 It was communists in the 1950s wanting to teach in colleges.

00:36:08.480 And so, you know, it's how the tables have turned in that instance.

00:36:11.820 And we've unleashed terrible evils by not letting these people be restrained or arrested.

00:36:17.820 Yeah, and I did a episode on this last week that got a little bit of traction here about decolonization

00:36:25.500 and that terminology and how it's been allowed to be used by BLM and critical race theory

00:36:32.080 and academia even since the 60s.

00:36:34.300 This has been part of the radical leftist movement for a long time.

00:36:36.960 And it took the BLM Chicago branch posting, you know, this Palestinian support meme

00:36:45.800 and marching for decolonization for people to finally put this together.

00:36:50.560 That what decolonization always meant was actually horrific violence against civilian target.

00:36:55.460 It was always about your destruction.

00:36:57.520 They had to see it play out in a foreign country to understand its real meaning.

00:37:01.260 But, yeah, you should have never allowed people to push this idea, to advance this idea,

00:37:06.180 to talk like this and gain power inside your system with this.

00:37:10.280 Because, of course, that's what that always meant.

00:37:13.220 And so that's something that people, they don't believe, they can't really understand

00:37:17.980 until, I guess, it comes to true fruition and they really see those beliefs acted out

00:37:24.520 and they can finally understand the implications of these ideas that had been percolating

00:37:29.180 in our elite institutions for a very long time.

00:37:33.340 All right.

00:37:34.140 So book two is the part of the study on sovereignty.

00:37:38.680 And this is kind of the meat and potatoes.

00:37:42.320 Book one was really him talking about what makes a nation, why, you know, you need religion,

00:37:48.440 why you need folkways, why you need this common identity, ripping into this idea that you can

00:37:54.580 just have this state of nature or this original position.

00:37:58.160 You can have this artificial construct of a nation.

00:38:01.640 He was tearing all that down.

00:38:03.420 But now we're actually getting into a study on sovereignty.

00:38:06.220 Now we're actually going to talk about what sovereignty is.

00:38:08.460 He's going to go into the different forms of government in this part.

00:38:11.000 We're probably only going to get through the first chapter of this book and then clean the

00:38:14.560 rest up in our next part of the series.

00:38:17.060 But I wanted to go ahead and get to this today.

00:38:18.920 So I'm just going to start reading from the beginning here because he actually lays out

00:38:22.280 the definition of sovereignty here at the beginning.

00:38:26.120 Every species of sovereignty is absolute of its nature.

00:38:29.340 However, the powers are organized whether they are vested in one pair of hands or divided.

00:38:34.880 In the last analysis, it will always be an absolute power which is able to commit evil

00:38:39.660 with impunity, which is thus from this point of view despotic and the full force of the term

00:38:46.540 and against which there is no defense other than rebellion.

00:38:50.480 Whatever sovereign powers are divided, the conflict of these different powers can be

00:38:55.060 looked on as the deliberation of one of a single sovereign whose reason weighs up the pros and

00:39:00.320 cons.

00:39:01.000 But once a decision has been made, the situation is the same in both cases and will of any sovereign

00:39:07.360 whatever is always invincible.

00:39:10.180 However, sovereignty is defined and vested.

00:39:12.660 There's always one unviolable and it is always one unviolable and absolute.

00:39:18.840 Take, for example, the English government, the kind of political trinity which makes up

00:39:22.780 which makes it up does not stop sovereignty from being one there as elsewhere.

00:39:29.660 The powers balance each other.

00:39:31.140 But once they are in agreement there, there is then only one will which cannot be thwarted

00:39:37.220 by any other legal will.

00:39:38.880 And Blackstone was right to claim that the English king and parliament together can do

00:39:43.480 anything.

00:39:44.720 So this is where a lot of guys that are very popular today, a lot of guys that I have talked

00:39:51.160 about, that Prudentiost have talked about, get a very important set of ideas.

00:39:56.720 Curtis Yarvin, Menchus Mulbug, is famous for the idea that sovereignty cannot, that sovereignty

00:40:03.500 is always conserved, that whenever you think you have divided sovereignty, whenever you

00:40:08.920 think you have restrained sovereignty, whatever you have put in charge of that division, whatever

00:40:13.180 you have put in charge of that restraint, whatever is restraining sovereignty, that is actually

00:40:17.260 what is sovereign.

00:40:18.200 There is never this situation where you can truly restrain the force of that power.

00:40:24.160 And this is also where, you know, Carl Schmitt draws from this when he says that the sovereign

00:40:27.820 is he who decides on the exception.

00:40:30.420 Yes, you know, as Demaestra says here, you can't technically divide power.

00:40:34.700 You can't technically attempt to restrain power.

00:40:37.380 But at some point, there will be somebody who can unify that power.

00:40:41.800 And once that power is unified through whatever the process, whatever the decision is, then

00:40:47.320 that force is made.

00:40:48.560 And that is the true sovereign.

00:40:49.780 That is the force that is without restraint.

00:40:52.260 That is the absolute power that will be brought and will make decisions and will not be held

00:40:57.300 back once it's set in motion.

00:41:00.140 Yeah, I mean, this is where so much of Carl Schmitt gets his writings from that, you know,

00:41:05.360 even when we try to divide or have a division of powers, as was discussed about by a lot of

00:41:11.280 French writers at the time, Brousseau, of course, being one of them, you know, this was the

00:41:15.400 concept that, you know, we thought this is the way that we can contain sort of these despotic

00:41:20.040 overreaches.

00:41:21.060 But in fact, it does no such thing.

00:41:23.400 I mean, this is what he writes here.

00:41:26.320 Demaestra says, you know, the famous division of powers, which is so agitated French heads,

00:41:29.960 does not really exist in the French Constitution of 1791.

00:41:33.840 In order for there to have been a real division of powers, the king would have had to have been

00:41:37.360 invested with a power capable of balancing that of the assembly and even of the judging

00:41:41.940 of the representatives in certain cases so he could judge others.

00:41:45.200 But the king lacked this power so that all the labors of the legislators only succeeded

00:41:49.140 in creating a single power without counterweights, that is to say, tyranny, if one makes liberty

00:41:54.340 to consist in the division of powers.

00:41:56.300 It was all very much worth tormenting Europe, perhaps spending four million men crushing 1.00

00:42:00.620 a nation under the weight of all possible misfortunes and then defiling it with crimes

00:42:05.100 unknown to hell. 0.65

00:42:07.260 I mean, he's calling out the idea that, hey, this division of powers things is worse than

00:42:11.740 anything that the devil could come up with.

00:42:13.920 But, you know, if there's no way to keep Congress in check, if there's no way to keep the National

00:42:17.960 Assembly a check, then there really is only one sovereign.

00:42:21.440 And it's in a crowd of people that have no real way to check on them.

00:42:26.020 And I mean, we see this problem exist today in Congress to where, well, who really decides

00:42:30.800 our exceptions today?

00:42:31.940 And it always kind of becomes the mask, the mystery cult of powers, Curtis Yarvin writes,

00:42:36.160 because, you know, we have on paper how our representatives are supposed to act.

00:42:40.480 And I think I've said this before, but I mean, if you want the most honest five minutes of

00:42:45.220 a congressman saying anything, go look up former Senator Ben Sasse's statements during

00:42:51.140 the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, because he'll tell you straight up Congress doesn't do its

00:42:54.640 power.

00:42:55.300 It's advocated its responsibility to federal bureaucracies and federal agencies of three

00:42:59.900 letter, you know, alphabet soup in the executive branch.

00:43:02.420 We write laws that just simply say department heads and secretaries get to do this.

00:43:07.000 And so when the American people get mad, Congress can't do anything about it because they can't

00:43:11.800 fire those people or they don't have the will to fire them.

00:43:14.600 So the Supreme Court becomes the only place where Americans have politics left.

00:43:18.460 It's the politics of last resort.

00:43:20.720 And anytime there's a last resort or there's a desire to find out what the exception to the

00:43:24.900 rule is, a lot of our sovereignty goes to nine unelected judges in America's Supreme

00:43:30.480 Court.

00:43:31.180 And DeMeistre is simply writing that the division of powers, it's a great concept on paper,

00:43:35.220 doesn't work in practice, doesn't exist in the French constitution of 1791.

00:43:39.840 And as we clearly see today in America, the division of powers we have today, there's

00:43:44.160 no real way to counterbalance the other ones because you don't see Congress voting to depose

00:43:49.020 judges and impeach them at will.

00:43:51.760 I mean, we have, we didn't get rid of Ginsburg anytime she was there. 0.99

00:43:54.280 We didn't get rid of any ones in the federal circuit courts that made it easy for big corporations 0.74

00:43:58.840 like Purdue and the Sackler family to get off scot-free despite killing thousands of people

00:44:03.540 with opioids.

00:44:05.220 So no, we don't really have a division of powers.

00:44:07.700 And sovereignty resides in those that can determine not just the exception, as Schmidt would say,

00:44:12.660 but to ensure that the people who get away with it keep getting away with it.

00:44:17.100 Yeah.

00:44:17.620 And he specifically says, you know, that the sovereign cannot be judged, that anything that

00:44:23.060 judges the sovereign is the actual sovereign.

00:44:25.160 And he also says that, you know, the, the power is, is really held by those that exercise

00:44:31.100 it.

00:44:31.500 So he's once again, attacking this idea of a truly representative government, popular

00:44:37.740 sovereignty, where you're going to, you're going to have the people are in charge.

00:44:41.580 He says, once you've handed that power oval over to these representatives, once you've handed

00:44:46.140 this power over to this ruling class, if they're the ones exercising the power, then they're the

00:44:50.840 ones that effectively have the power.

00:44:52.300 You can say you have popular sovereignty, you can say the crowd of the people have the

00:44:56.460 power, but they're only exercising that power.

00:44:58.440 Basically, if they're the mob directly taking it out on somebody, if they're, if they're handing

00:45:03.400 that power symbolically over to a group of people, and they're never as individuals, you

00:45:08.800 know, actively asserting that power, then they don't have it.

00:45:11.840 And, and that, that's kind of, again, the key of decisionism, it's, it's who's actually

00:45:15.940 making the decision, who's actually exercising power.

00:45:18.360 And this is another reason that kind of the classical conservative, small government only

00:45:24.400 at any cost kind of approach has also failed in many ways when it comes to the American

00:45:31.120 government, because that, that, that dedication to, we don't exercise power.

00:45:35.100 The only thing we do is restrain power.

00:45:36.840 We try to restrain it when our enemy's in charge.

00:45:38.680 And then when we're in charge, we don't exercise it.

00:45:40.940 Well, that means that only one side ever grows their power.

00:45:43.220 And the person, people who actually exercise power are the actual sovereigns, you getting

00:45:47.580 voted in, but deciding to never exercise power is basically you abdicating sovereignty.

00:45:52.140 And this is really, really critical guys.

00:45:54.860 If you, if you want to get down to like one of the core revelations of whatever you want

00:46:00.260 to call it, reactionary philosophy, NRX, uh, Italian elite theory, whatever it is, the critical

00:46:06.620 thing is that we are never ruled by a system.

00:46:12.040 We are never ruled by, there is no rule of law.

00:46:15.760 There is no rule of constitutions.

00:46:17.940 There are only ever rule of people.

00:46:20.360 And if the people are worthy of those things, then you will flourish.

00:46:24.440 And if the people are not worthy of those things, you will falter.

00:46:27.960 Laws do not enforce themselves.

00:46:30.000 Constitutions do not make peoples like paper documents, rules, systems, you know, ideologies,

00:46:36.620 they cannot in and of themselves, maintain a civilization and create justice.

00:46:41.980 Those things can only ever be done by people.

00:46:45.880 And while that's really scary for us, because we're taught that that's dangerous power in

00:46:50.900 the hands of individuals is dangerous and it needs to be dispersed.

00:46:53.900 It needs to be spread out.

00:46:54.860 We don't want to see it.

00:46:55.580 We want to pretend it's not happening, but it always happens.

00:46:58.840 It's the only question is, are the people in charge good or are the people in charge bad?

00:47:03.120 It's never a question of, will people have been in charge of you?

00:47:05.300 Will be ruled.

00:47:07.200 So if you will be ruled, if there will be a sovereign, we might as well know who they

00:47:12.340 are and have the, and, and if they're doing a good job and that that's really a critical

00:47:17.340 thing to understand.

00:47:18.600 I mean, this is why a lot of the early writings in unqualified reservations.

00:47:22.740 That's why Yarvin would call himself a formalist.

00:47:25.320 He's just like, put power out there, name it, at least make this better than the sort of

00:47:30.900 mystery and how we understand things.

00:47:32.660 That's why he kind of wants to have it easier to just identify who's in charge and who isn't.

00:47:37.480 As for de Maistre, you know, he, he talks about the aspects of sovereignty and he says,

00:47:42.500 you know, too many details on this particular topic would be uncalled for here.

00:47:45.460 Suffices for us to know that sovereignty is necessarily one and necessarily absolute.

00:47:50.420 The great problem then is not to prevent the sovereign from willingly, invincibly, which

00:47:55.040 implies contradiction, but to prevent him from acting unjustly.

00:47:58.540 The Roman jurisconsults would have been much criticized for having that the prince is above

00:48:02.700 the laws, but it would have been more charitable toward them to observe that they meant only

00:48:07.420 civil laws or more precisely the formalities established for different civil acts.

00:48:12.280 But even if they had meant the prince could violate moral laws with impunity, that is to

00:48:15.920 say, without being able to be judged, they would only have advanced a truth, no doubt sad,

00:48:20.260 but incontestable.

00:48:21.680 While I may be forced to agree that we have the right to massacre Nero, I would never admit

00:48:25.940 that we have the right to judge him for the law where we would never admit that the right

00:48:29.820 to, um, or he would never be judged to be made either by him or another, which would imply

00:48:34.900 either a law made sovereign against himself or a sovereign above the sovereign, two suppositions

00:48:38.980 equally inadmissible.

00:48:40.440 I mean, this goes back again to the aspects of culture, dogmas, religion that, you know,

00:48:46.180 who are we to judge the king? 0.99

00:48:47.840 But I mean, if he does something wrong, yeah, we can kill him. 0.99

00:48:50.500 That's perfectly fine. 0.98

00:48:51.500 But I can't judge the man.

00:48:53.320 He is sovereign.

00:48:54.080 He is above me.

00:48:55.020 He is, um, whether in aristocratic societies, there's always been sort of a landed gentry 0.98

00:49:00.620 class that is going to be above those and are the ones that are successful, whether

00:49:04.340 by divine right of kings, by hereditary monarchy or birthright, he can't violate moral laws.

00:49:11.360 And that's why morality is so important to hold on to, that religious fanaticism, these

00:49:15.640 public dogmas and prejudices.

00:49:17.260 And that once you get rid of those things, as we've just spent the last hour talking

00:49:21.120 about, once you get rid of that, once we have philosophy, once we have indifference,

00:49:25.040 once we have no willpower to actually rise up and defend anything, then you can be abused 0.54

00:49:29.800 by anybody, unjust kings, unjust sovereigns, really crappy congressmen that make millions

00:49:35.580 of dollars a year off defense contracts while advocating to let millions of more people 0.91

00:49:40.320 in who have no right being in this country. 1.00

00:49:42.360 That's how we get here.

00:49:44.740 Um, and yeah, he kind of gets a little, uh, spicy, little fat posty, you know, like, 0.99

00:49:48.900 yeah, we, we, we can't judge Nero, but we can kill him. 0.99

00:49:51.720 Yeah. 0.65

00:49:51.980 I actually, it's, it's a totally different world than what we have now.

00:49:56.140 The sovereignty is just a whole different.

00:49:59.000 It's so alien to us that yeah.

00:50:00.880 Nero can fiddle while Rome burns and we can't judge him for that.

00:50:04.080 But you know, if he violates the divine right of, of Jupiter or Mars, then all bets are

00:50:08.940 off.

00:50:09.240 Yeah, I had that same passage written down as a, as a key one, because it, it's a really,

00:50:14.480 like you said, it's a really different understanding.

00:50:16.360 And I think, uh, in many ways, a more honest understanding, like you said, Curtis Yarvin

00:50:20.400 focuses a lot on formalism.

00:50:21.900 Let's at least know who this guy is, even if he's doing a terrible God or terrible job.

00:50:27.520 Uh, if he, if he is doing that and we know who it is, then the consequences can be clear.

00:50:33.440 Even then we know what's going on.

00:50:35.320 So, so, and Demestria is, is agreeing here, right?

00:50:37.900 He says, look, Nero, we know who the emperor is.

00:50:40.820 It's Nero.

00:50:42.040 Yes.

00:50:42.220 He has all the power, but if he's crazy and he's doing a terrible job and everybody knows 0.93

00:50:48.180 he's doing a terrible job, then maybe we just get rid of them. 0.94

00:50:51.280 Right.

00:50:51.580 And like, and, and like it's, it's this off and on switch that people are uncomfortable

00:50:55.600 with, right?

00:50:56.500 As post enlightenment, modern people, we want every decision to be dispersed.

00:51:02.640 We want everything to be orderly.

00:51:04.720 We want it to go through a procedure.

00:51:06.280 We want to interview rules and regulations.

00:51:08.160 I want to check the constitutional article for that.

00:51:11.280 And what, what, you know, what, what are the rules of order in the, in the Congress that

00:51:15.480 we need to go through to remove this is like, no, like either he's an absolute sovereign

00:51:19.700 or he's dead meat, right?

00:51:21.320 Those are your two options like that.

00:51:22.900 You flip the switch.

00:51:23.820 Either this guy is, he's got the power, he wields it, he solves the problem, or he does

00:51:28.420 such a terrible job that we all understand that he needs to be removed.

00:51:31.260 But at no point does that remove the office or its sovereignty, right?

00:51:35.720 Like, like the people can be sovereign in the moment in which it removes the ruler, but

00:51:41.160 then it seeds that sovereignty back over to a new ruler, right?

00:51:44.920 And this is something that has happened, of course, throughout history.

00:51:47.960 There isn't, there is an accountability mechanism in monarchy.

00:51:51.320 Uh, it's because you're the one guy and if something goes wrong, everybody knows who

00:51:55.820 to go for, right?

00:51:56.660 There's no, there's no confusion about who sent the troops or, you know, who put you

00:52:00.580 in jail or who, who made the nation poor, who got you into the disastrous war, uh, who

00:52:05.760 opened your borders to, you know, to invaders.

00:52:08.000 Like none of those things is confusing.

00:52:10.160 You know who to blame.

00:52:11.500 And so, and so he's saying, this is a return to this.

00:52:13.860 And this is also why he says, again, like it's not about removing the sovereignty.

00:52:18.560 The sovereignty can't be removed.

00:52:19.840 There will always be someone who ultimately unifies that power into a decision.

00:52:25.560 The only thing you can do is find out whether or not that person is moral.

00:52:29.640 Find out whether or not justice is being done in that instance.

00:52:32.820 You can never remove the decision, which again, as modern people, something very, very uncomfortable

00:52:37.300 for us.

00:52:38.040 We want those decisions dispersed.

00:52:39.780 We want that, we want that, uh, you know, responsibility spread out.

00:52:42.860 We don't want to think that there's ever an existential crisis, ever a reason to have, you know,

00:52:47.080 to have to act there, there should only ever be procedures and careful deliberation, but

00:52:51.600 the minister is really pushing back against that notion saying, no, this is always the

00:52:55.380 relationship between the ruled and the rulers.

00:52:57.320 Yeah.

00:52:58.500 And I think this is a really important thing to hold on to.

00:53:01.420 And this goes back to his criticism of the sort of separation of powers or the ability

00:53:05.240 that we can have one branch of government hold against another.

00:53:08.140 Every time that we bureaucratize or we say, oh, this is a check against that.

00:53:11.740 It's very much like the old story of how do we get rid of like a rat infestation?

00:53:15.520 Oh, well, we'll, we'll just get a bunch of snakes. 1.00

00:53:17.260 They'll eat the rats. 0.91

00:53:17.920 Well, then how do we take care of the snakes?

00:53:19.240 So we'll bring in like a bunch of, uh, any other sort of, uh, animal to go in.

00:53:23.420 We'll bring in a bunch of badgers to do that. 0.99

00:53:24.700 Well, how do we get rid of the badgers?

00:53:25.760 We'll get, we'll put in owls and just, it escalates until you have so much bureaucracy,

00:53:29.320 so many animals, you don't know what you're doing.

00:53:31.240 And for us, that, that, that's a key question.

00:53:33.680 We say, oh, the president's in charge.

00:53:36.380 He's not in charge because, well, especially this president with Joe Biden.

00:53:39.940 But I mean, you have a laundry list of executives and secretaries and joint chiefs of staff.

00:53:45.920 I mean, was, was Donald Trump sovereign when Mark Milley and other members of the joint

00:53:51.620 chiefs of staff lied to him about the American military's presence in Syria or what their

00:53:57.680 policy was towards Iran.

00:53:59.580 That means that the president as sort of the chief executive officer of, in charge of the

00:54:04.560 military was being lied to by his own government.

00:54:07.440 That's treason last I checked in my book.

00:54:09.540 And so now you're in a position where, yeah, we have all these sort of ways to bureaucratize

00:54:14.440 and diffuse it and to separate it out.

00:54:15.920 Well, then all that's done is it's made it impossible to tell us who sovereignty is and

00:54:20.460 where sovereignty lies and who's in charge, because now there's not just one guy I have

00:54:25.200 to take care of.

00:54:25.800 There's not one Nero, but potentially thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Neros that

00:54:31.400 one would have to get rid of.

00:54:32.960 And someone argued that that means, yes, that means the continuity of government.

00:54:36.480 But what good is the continuity of government if all those thousands of Neros are just bringing 1.00

00:54:42.160 in more people to dilute my vote and that want to trans my children and want to make

00:54:48.300 sure that America is not guns, beer and freedom or, you know, Lewis and Clark and Johnny Appleseed,

00:54:53.880 but, you know, something like Lizzo and something worse.

00:54:57.540 Like we have movies now to Americanize the new populations about flaming hot Cheetos and 0.56

00:55:02.660 Air Jordans.

00:55:03.620 That's the creedal nation that progressives want.

00:55:06.600 And it becomes harder and harder to determine, well, who do I need to get rid of or replace

00:55:10.480 here in order to not have this happen?

00:55:13.020 And these are the things that DeMeistra is writing about, you know, nigh, you know, 200

00:55:17.060 years ago to warn us, oh, things are really bad.

00:55:22.200 Yeah, if you want to understand the American political system in 30 seconds, think about

00:55:26.860 the fact that Mark Milley lied to the elected president of the United States about military

00:55:33.500 action, ignored his orders.

00:55:36.280 Mark Milley is still in power.

00:55:37.980 Donald Trump is facing criminal charges.

00:55:40.200 Yep.

00:55:40.480 If you want to understand the flow of power in America, you want to understand where sovereignty

00:55:47.600 lies in America, there you go in one quick and easy example.

00:55:52.600 All right, let's go ahead and go over to our questions of the people.

00:55:55.920 But before we do that, Mr.

00:55:57.660 Prudentialist, is there anything people should be looking for from your end?

00:56:01.060 Yeah, absolutely.

00:56:01.840 I had a great talk with a gentleman named illegitimate scholar, Samuel Urban.

00:56:05.460 He's a fan of the show.

00:56:06.680 He's a cultural anthropologist.

00:56:07.920 So we had a good conversation yesterday on cultural anthropology, how it's dominated by

00:56:12.520 the left and how do we understand history and people and how to, you know, look at where

00:56:17.420 the world is going.

00:56:18.680 And then tomorrow, as always, just find me on Substack, theprudentialist.substack.com.

00:56:23.100 I've got a lengthy article coming out soon on Marshall McLuhan in war.

00:56:27.520 And then last but not least, I have my review of Saurabh Amari's book, Tyranny Inc., coming

00:56:33.720 out in the Mars Review of Books, which you can purchase in just three days.

00:56:37.560 So be sure to keep an eye out for that.

00:56:40.180 Excellent.

00:56:40.440 Excellent.

00:56:40.740 Make sure that you're checking out the Prudentialist's work.

00:56:43.180 All right.

00:56:43.540 So to the questions of the people, we've got Florida Henry here for five dollars.

00:56:48.680 Can you think of any institution not under the leftist tiger?

00:56:56.660 No.

00:56:58.060 So so when when Curtis Yarvin wrote Unqualified Reservations back in 2007, 2008, he talked about

00:57:07.020 Red America or Red Empire and Blue Empire.

00:57:09.180 And he said, you know, Blue Empire owns things like the State Department and the university

00:57:13.500 system.

00:57:14.000 And he said, basically, Red Empire is like the military and a few businesses.

00:57:18.300 Right.

00:57:18.880 Like that was pretty much Red Empire. 0.83

00:57:21.020 And at this point, you know, in the 20 or so years, almost since he wrote that, those

00:57:28.600 things have all been captured.

00:57:29.720 There really is almost no institution that even wields its power pretending to be in the

00:57:38.240 interest of Red America.

00:57:39.380 I guess technically the Republican Party at least makes noises about being, you know,

00:57:45.700 for Red America.

00:57:46.920 But of course, I think we can pretty much all see that that's all that is outside of maybe

00:57:52.080 a few individuals.

00:57:54.660 The Republican Party is deeply interested in the approval of places like The New York Times

00:58:00.740 and completely uninterested in, say, you know, the well-being of someone in Alabama.

00:58:05.360 And so I cannot really think of a major institution that you could say is really right wing.

00:58:13.380 I mean, some some some outliers, but nothing that wields real power in the United States.

00:58:19.140 Yeah.

00:58:19.760 I mean, this is why the the conquest three laws are so important to understand.

00:58:24.180 And it also kind of they're kind of a really great way to indicate maybe hereditary monarchy

00:58:28.640 is not all that bad, because when you know, we're conservative about the things we know the

00:58:32.940 most. And we tend to be very likely, you know, any right wing institution that isn't explicitly

00:58:39.700 right wing will inevitably become left wing.

00:58:42.260 And that, you know, any organization that does bad things, just assume it's being ran by a 0.98

00:58:47.000 cabal of your enemies.

00:58:48.280 And that's a big thing.

00:58:49.620 Number two, especially, it's really important that any institution explicitly right wing,

00:58:52.960 you know, it will inevitably become left wing over time.

00:58:55.960 And the same thing with like right wing institutions is that if you give things up to a board or

00:59:01.780 if you don't, you know, make sure that you have a trusted successor, things can go in a

00:59:05.920 radically different direction.

00:59:06.900 I mean, the Ford Foundation is an excellent example of that after, you know, the original

00:59:10.900 founder of the Ford Foundation died, you know, the board, you know, took over rather than

00:59:15.140 his sons.

00:59:15.760 And it's led to all sorts of progressive causes being funded.

00:59:18.040 And so, you know, when you see institutions or talks about parallel institutions being

00:59:23.100 made by the right, you know, I sincerely hope and pray that people like Nate Fisher at New

00:59:28.080 Founding or those at IM1776 or whatever Chris Ruffo was doing, you better have good successors

00:59:33.640 in charge.

00:59:34.280 Because if not, these will turn into the same milquetoast center right, center left institutions

00:59:40.020 that they're railing against right now.

00:59:42.300 But at the current moment, I don't, I can't think of anyone outside of some sole proprietorships

00:59:46.480 that aren't under leftist control.

00:59:48.800 Yeah, sorry, no, no white pills on that front there, Florida Henry, but thank you for your

00:59:53.180 donation.

00:59:55.360 Blael Bradley for Five Canadian.

00:59:58.540 Thank you very much.

00:59:59.380 Appreciate that.

01:00:01.860 All right, guys, I think that's everything for today.

01:00:05.660 Thank you for coming by.

01:00:06.940 I think we've got one more of these to go ahead and finish out.

01:00:11.160 So it'll be a four part series on Joseph Demestrian and his study on sovereignty.

01:00:15.100 Thank you so much for joining us.

01:00:16.600 Like I said, if you'd like to catch the previous two to kind of fill in some of the gaps, you

01:00:21.220 can find those in a playlist on the YouTube channel or check it out on the podcast.

01:00:26.100 And of course, if you would like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to go ahead

01:00:29.920 and subscribe to the Roman McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:00:33.500 When you do ratings, reviews, those things really help out with the algorithm, guys.

01:00:37.980 Very much appreciate it.

01:00:39.420 Thank you once again to the Prudentialist for coming on.

01:00:41.660 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - October 17, 2023

The National Soul ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸17⧸23

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