The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Nature of Sovereignty ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸2⧸23

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

00:00:31.520 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.160 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.580 So, on this show, of course, we love to do the hot takes.

00:00:41.400 We do talk about the topics of the day.

00:00:43.920 Sometimes you've got to get into the nitty-gritty and what is going on in the country.

00:00:49.060 But we also like to take the long view.

00:00:51.000 We like to zoom out a little bit and go for a deep dive on things that are a little more eternal.

00:00:57.120 Things that are evergreen.

00:00:58.720 Principles, political theory.

00:01:00.580 That's going to matter over the long term and not just be about whatever Trump indictments coming down the turnpike or whatever Joe Biden's scandal happens to be popping up in the news.

00:01:11.540 And so today I wanted to go ahead and get into the works of Joseph DeMestre with you guys.

00:01:15.960 But before we do that, let me introduce you to my friend and co-host here today, The Prudentialist.

00:01:22.020 Thank you, sir, for coming back on.

00:01:23.800 Thanks for having me on, Oren.

00:01:24.840 Always a pleasure.

00:01:26.340 Absolutely.

00:01:27.220 So the work of Joseph DeMestre is something that I think is really important.

00:01:32.380 It's somebody who is often breezed over a lot of times when we talk about political theories.

00:01:37.320 He's not somebody I ever heard of when I was studying political theory in college, which was a shame because he does great work.

00:01:45.140 He's somebody who was writing in kind of the shadow of the Enlightenment.

00:01:50.980 He's right after the revolution in France.

00:01:54.620 He's writing in that period.

00:01:56.440 He's writing very often in response to Rousseau, which we'll see in the material that we're getting to here.

00:02:01.740 And he really is a counter-Enlightenment thinker is what many people would call the original reactionary.

00:02:08.020 You know, him and Thomas Carlyle are often cited as some of the original reactionaries.

00:02:11.260 One reason that people often don't get into Joseph DeMestre is that so much of his work was kind of updated and secularized by people like Carl Schmitt.

00:02:22.880 Carl Schmitt's very effective, very to the point.

00:02:25.740 So it's often easier to just cite him.

00:02:27.480 But I think DeMestre is worth going back to, both because I think he does get into things that are very important that Schmitt does not cover.

00:02:35.560 And also, as Christians, as believers, he does bring a theological bent.

00:02:40.280 You know, he does not strip out the theological content behind many of his arguments.

00:02:45.860 And I think that's really important because today, even many Christians feel like the only arguments they can ever make are secular.

00:02:51.760 The only reasoning they can ever present is a completely secular argument.

00:02:55.740 And DeMestre really comes from a period where Christian arguments are assumed to be completely rational, completely fundamental, completely within the intellectual tradition.

00:03:07.040 And so he makes no, you know, he's not hesitating when he brings those arguments to the table.

00:03:11.300 He makes no apologies for kind of the way that he approaches those issues.

00:03:14.680 And so that's why I find much of his philosophy refreshing, because he's bringing a perspective that we don't normally see.

00:03:22.160 Yeah, absolutely. It's really important to understand that Carl Schmitt cites so much of Joseph DeMestre's work in the concept of the political, as well as in sections of the crisis of parliamentary democracy.

00:03:34.740 Like, without DeMestre, you don't get some of the best sort of Schmitt bangers that are out there.

00:03:39.300 And, you know, we talk about, you know, Schmitt, or we talk about some of the more modern reactionary thinkers.

00:03:44.600 But there was a time, like you said, where it was it was Christianity first in your argumentation.

00:03:49.220 And so if you want to know where people like Carlisle or where Schmitt got some of their ideas from, you need to go to DeMestre.

00:03:55.420 You need to go to Sir Robert Filmer in Patriarcha.

00:03:57.960 These more Christian and theologically oriented defense of, you know, kingship, the divine right of kings and the Christian ideal of monarchy and sovereignty.

00:04:08.580 And it's a great time that we get to discuss this today.

00:04:12.000 Absolutely. I've spoken on his on his work on the Constitution pretty often, but I haven't gotten into this work.

00:04:20.020 But I think it is very important. It's not very long. So people want to read it for themselves.

00:04:24.400 It's not a whole book. It's a long essay.

00:04:27.220 You know, so but it's not impossible to get through.

00:04:30.520 So if it's something that you want to explore on your own, that is available to you.

00:04:33.320 But I want to work through here. It is longer than we're going to be able to get through today.

00:04:37.700 But, you know, I've worked through these works with with people like Alexander Dugan and Nick Land.

00:04:43.620 And so many people enjoyed those series.

00:04:45.880 I wanted to go ahead and do a series with DeMestre here.

00:04:48.540 And so this is going to be the first episode of what I'm sure will be multiple different episodes going over this kind of long essay and breaking it apart.

00:04:57.740 Now, just a little bit of background. Joseph DeMestre is somebody who, while he had a lot of ties to France, and this is why he's so often referencing France, he actually was always a subject of the kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia.

00:05:12.760 He worked. He was a member of the Senate there, I believe.

00:05:15.340 And then he was a Russian ambassador and then he was an officer at court.

00:05:18.780 And so he was constantly involved in government there.

00:05:22.360 That is something that he was always a part of alongside with his writings.

00:05:26.860 But that's why he eventually ends up writing things like the St. Petersburg dialogues, because he's kind of had those experiences over time.

00:05:34.340 So just just a little context in there. He's writing in the late 1700s, early 1800s.

00:05:39.820 You know, the American Revolution is still relatively young.

00:05:42.660 They're not sure how this whole thing is going to shake out.

00:05:44.940 The French Revolution is a disaster. 0.66

00:05:46.720 And so that's kind of the context for people that he's writing in when he's talking about this.

00:05:52.360 But that said, let's go ahead and read a little bit of study on sovereignty.

00:05:56.160 And we'll just stop and kind of fill in, react on some of these as we continue.

00:06:01.080 All right. So.

00:06:02.980 Chapter one, sovereignty of the people.

00:06:05.860 It said that the people are sovereign, but over whom?

00:06:09.180 Over themselves, apparently.

00:06:10.720 The people are thus subject.

00:06:12.780 There is surely something equivocal, if not erroneous here, for the people which command are not the people which obey.

00:06:20.300 It is enough, then, to put the general proposition, the people are sovereign, to feel that it needs an exegesis.

00:06:28.180 So he's going to go here and just go directly to basically like a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment, right?

00:06:35.340 That the popular sovereignty, sovereignty is coming from the people.

00:06:39.220 It's the collectivity of the people who are going to kind of rule over things.

00:06:42.980 And he immediately says there's a logical contradiction here.

00:06:45.440 Again, something that for many Americans is going to is going to be a little jarring.

00:06:49.920 But he says, look, how can you be the ruled and the rulers simultaneously?

00:06:54.520 That doesn't make any sense.

00:06:55.980 So we need to break this down further.

00:06:57.820 If we're going to understand what is trying to be said here.

00:07:00.400 Yeah, absolutely.

00:07:02.360 And this is where we're going to begin to see that Christian theology get placed into here.

00:07:07.580 Is that, you know, if someone is to be sovereign, then this must come from something that's divinely ordained.

00:07:12.960 And you're going to see a lot of that Robert Filmer Patriarcha Institute there.

00:07:16.800 And both in this essay, but through the following chapters, that really the first king is the father, is the family man, the one that rules over the family.

00:07:25.200 And if you, you know, give the rights and sovereignty to other people, you've you've abdicated your own ability to rule.

00:07:32.640 And I think, again, that's something for a lot of people to kind of grasp here, because so many times words like sovereignty just sit around and they don't they're not tied to anything that they're not really explained.

00:07:43.480 We just kind of throw them out there, but we don't actually link them to the practice of this kind of thing.

00:07:48.840 And that's what Demestra is most certainly going to lay out here.

00:07:51.760 This exegesis will not be long in coming, at least in the French system.

00:07:56.660 The people, it will be said, exercise their sovereignty by means of their representatives.

00:08:00.740 This begins to make sense.

00:08:02.200 The people are sovereign, which cannot exercise sovereignty.

00:08:06.380 So to clarify for people who aren't really familiar, the sovereignty means having complete power.

00:08:13.220 It's having complete power, complete authority over something.

00:08:16.640 So if the people are sovereign.

00:08:19.660 But they then delegate that to someone else and they can never themselves exercise it.

00:08:26.020 Then he's saying, OK, so these people are sovereign, but they never actually get to exercise any sovereignty.

00:08:32.080 They're supposed to have this total control.

00:08:34.020 But the first thing you do when you ask people what how the sovereignty actually looks is, oh, well, actually, they pass this total control to someone else.

00:08:41.460 And those are the people who exercise it.

00:08:43.220 And if you're not exercising sovereignty, then you're not sovereign.

00:08:46.700 That's kind of the most basic understanding of this.

00:08:50.180 It seems kind of obvious, but it's something that we pretty much obscure routinely in the American system.

00:08:55.640 Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:58.520 And I mean, it's sort of interesting when you think about some of the zanier sides of American politics.

00:09:04.220 I mean, there's the whole sovereign citizens thing where they just reject all laws, all totality of the Constitution, the federal government, etc., that they're sovereign over themselves, which is sort of this embodiment of that Enlightenment ideal that Rousseau talks about, that the people are sovereign, that they can rule over themselves and be an orderly people.

00:09:21.840 And de Maistre is like, no, sovereignty is about power.

00:09:25.140 It's about who has the authority to make other people obey.

00:09:28.760 And so, you know, for the sovereign citizen types, there would, you know, de Maistre would call them barbarians.

00:09:34.480 They aren't ruled by anybody.

00:09:36.180 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:38.080 There has been much heated discussion on whether sovereignty comes from God or from men.

00:09:42.600 But I do not know if anyone has noticed that both propositions can be true.

00:09:46.540 It's certainly true in an inferior and crude sense that sovereignty is based on human consent.

00:09:52.580 For if any people decided suddenly not to obey, sovereignty would disappear.

00:09:57.200 It's impossible to imagine the establishment of sovereignty without imagining a people with which consents to obey.

00:10:04.380 If then the opponents of the divine origin of sovereignty want to claim only this, they are right, that it would be quite useless to dispute it.

00:10:13.300 Since God has not thought it appropriate to use supernatural agents in the establishment of states, it is certain that all developments have come from about through human agencies.

00:10:25.180 But saying that sovereignty does not derive from God because he has made use of men to establishment is like saying that he is not the creator of men because we all have fathers and a mother.

00:10:36.640 So he's saying here, you know, there's this argument, you know, is does the power of a king, does the power of a sovereign come from God?

00:10:44.000 Or is it something that's completely derived from man?

00:10:46.900 Right.

00:10:47.080 Is it something that's completely a social creation?

00:10:49.260 And his answer is both.

00:10:51.400 He says it's pretty obvious at first that there has to be some level of human source for this because we're not just ruled over by supernatural agents.

00:11:01.220 This isn't the Garden of Eden where we just have a direct relationship with a divine ruler or even kind of a, you know, children of Israel situation where the nation and the Hebrew nation is being guided by like a pillar of fire, you know, in smoke.

00:11:16.200 Right.

00:11:16.320 Like that we don't have that one to one connection.

00:11:19.140 And so because of that, there is always going to be some truth to the fact that humans have instituted, you know, this institution.

00:11:28.620 But simply because humans have been used to create this institution does not mean that God is not involved in its creation.

00:11:37.240 Yeah, absolutely.

00:11:38.240 Let's carry on.

00:11:40.280 Let's see here.

00:11:41.280 Every theist would no doubt agree that whoever breaks the laws sets his face against the divine will and renders himself guilty before God, although he's breaking only human ordinances for his God who has made man sociable.

00:11:54.680 And since he has willed society, he has willed also the sovereignty and laws without which there would be no society.

00:12:02.120 Thus, laws come from God in the sense that he wills that there should be laws and that they should be obeyed.

00:12:08.560 Yet these laws come also from men in in that they are made by men in the same way, sovereignty comes from God, since he is the author of all things except evil and is in particular the author of society, which would not exist without sovereignty.

00:12:26.020 However, the same sovereignty comes also from men in a certain sense, that it is that is to say, insofar as particular forms of government are established and declared by human consent, the partisans of divine authority cannot therefore deny that humans will that that the human will play some part in the establishment of governments and their opponents cannot in their turn deny that God is preeminently the author of the same governments.

00:12:54.680 It appears then that the two propositions that sovereignty comes from God and sovereignty comes from men are not absolutely contradictory any more than the other two laws come from God and laws come from men.

00:13:08.300 So he's saying it's basically an argument of the natural order here, right?

00:13:12.400 We see that routinely societies emerge in this way that God has ordered humans to live in this way.

00:13:21.760 And because he routinely orders humans to live in this way, there is a certain duty to obey a sovereign who is over these, that you are required to obey these laws and that to to simply oppose them just because you want to oppose the sovereign.

00:13:37.320 And there can well, you know, we'll get there. There will be justifiable reason to oppose laws here.

00:13:41.940 He's not just saying that there's never any reason to oppose the law, but in general, that the laws, if justly established, should be obeyed due to this being set under an authority by God.

00:13:55.080 And of course, this is just straight out of the Bible. This is just straight out of the New Testament.

00:13:59.700 So this shouldn't be anything crazy here. But he says, of course, that's going to that's going to change because there isn't one type of authority set by God.

00:14:09.000 There isn't one type of government. So the different governments will be reflective of different peoples, different traditions.

00:14:14.440 But still, that doesn't mean that God was not involved in their creation.

00:14:18.800 Yeah, he makes it very clear to almost as if the same question that you hear a lot in discussions over the argumentation for God, that a created thing implies a creator.

00:14:29.560 And he outlines that clearly here and the Catholic reactionary tradition that he's kind of coming from in this instance that, you know, yeah, men have created things, but men are also created by a higher power and that the laws that we have are accretions or additions to the laws of the Lord.

00:14:45.180 It's kind of interesting to see him make this claim that there are laws that come from God and laws that come from men, because in the English tradition in patriarchy, Robert Filmer is very much saying, well, there's a really big difference.

00:14:56.800 There are commands from God, which we cannot break. And if we do, we face punishment, whereas there are laws by men that we can follow and obey.

00:15:06.220 And they are different, whereas here, you know, he's equating them to be rather similar or non-contradictory.

00:15:11.560 It's an interesting difference of opinion.

00:15:13.580 And to be clear, as we go through this, this is not just 100 percent of endorsement that everything that that that Demaester says is correct.

00:15:23.280 But the main point of this is to explore a a body of political theory that I think is very valuable, has a still has a lot of relevance today.

00:15:33.800 And most importantly, brings us in contact with a tradition that is so often forgotten by people is so people are so often not aware of another way of thought.

00:15:43.980 If you don't read any books before that were written before 1900, guys, you're just losing out on understanding the world in a way that is just critical.

00:15:52.000 All right. So the second chapter here again, these chapters are extremely short.

00:15:56.680 They're like a page, you know, usually or two at most.

00:15:59.540 So we will be able to get through a couple of them today.

00:16:02.300 But chapter to hear origin of society is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

00:16:11.000 The mysteries that surround him on all sides are not sufficient for him.

00:16:15.320 He still rejects clear ideas and reduces everything to a problem by some inexplicable twist of pride, which he may which make which makes him regarded as below him to believe what everyone else believes.

00:16:27.140 Man, there's just old school dunking on midwits midwits right here, right?

00:16:31.500 Just like you're just constructing a bunch of jargon so that you can sound smart.

00:16:35.700 This is really easy.

00:16:36.880 You should just be listening to Grug.

00:16:38.500 He's on one end of the bell curve.

00:16:40.200 You know, the genius is on the other build in the bell curve.

00:16:43.420 You sitting there with your pronouncements, your complicated jargon. 1.00

00:16:46.540 You're sitting in the middle looking like an idiot. 1.00

00:16:48.260 So, for example, there have long been disputes on the origin of society and and in places of quite simple solutions that naturally present themselves to the mind. 0.99

00:17:00.280 All sorts of metaphysical theories have been put forward to support airy hypotheses rejected by common sense and experience.

00:17:08.980 If the causes of origins of society are posed as a problem, it is obviously assumed that there was a human era before society.

00:17:17.280 But this is precisely what needs to be proved.

00:17:20.340 Doubtless, it will not be denied that the earth is a whole intended for man's inhabitation or habitation.

00:17:26.940 Now, as the multiplication of man is part of creator's intent, it follows that the nature of man is to be united in great societies over the whole surface of the globe.

00:17:36.420 For the nature of being is to exist as the creator has willed it.

00:17:40.520 And this will will is made perfectly plain in those facts.

00:17:44.600 The isolated man, therefore, by no is no means the man of nature.

00:17:49.140 When a handful of men are scattered across vast territories, humanity was not what it has become.

00:17:55.680 At that time, there are only families and these scattered families, either individually or by their subsequent union, were nothing but embryonic peoples.

00:18:03.560 So right here, he's going directly at, again, what is a very common enlightenment construct of the state of nature, right?

00:18:12.280 It's this idea that there before civilizations, every man was for himself and, you know, by himself isolated.

00:18:21.180 Everyone's an isolated, atomized individual.

00:18:23.700 And only after we've entered into these social contracts or whatever, can we actually then begin the work of society. 0.99

00:18:32.040 It says, no, that's garbage. 0.55

00:18:33.580 Like, that's not how any of this works. 0.99

00:18:36.020 People were made for society.

00:18:38.140 We live in a society, you know, like.

00:18:40.860 Wait for that name to drop.

00:18:42.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:42.960 People were made to live, you know, in continuous contact with each other.

00:18:47.960 Social organizations are a natural, emergent part of the kind of the natural order.

00:18:54.500 And so the idea that we can create this artificial, abstract, you know, state of nature and then plan of all of our philosophy or order all of our society and the construction of our constitutions and governments starting from this makes no sense.

00:19:11.040 There's no actual reflection of reality.

00:19:14.300 Yeah, and he's going to go into it in these next couple of paragraphs to highlight that the man in a state of nature that we should base our societies upon this is absolutely ridiculous, that we have no – to base ourselves as if we were perfect, enlightened, rational beings that could effectively govern over ourselves and manage just fine without, you know, the authority of a king or a singular sovereign, it's not going to happen.

00:19:41.720 And he says it quite clearly as embryonic peoples.

00:19:44.780 We were infants.

00:19:46.180 We were not anything that was developed.

00:19:47.940 You can't base your idea of how human society should operate as everyone was out for themselves.

00:19:53.920 We can do just fine in order.

00:19:56.000 Because if anyone looks to the past or even looks to the stories of antiquity in the Bible or in other, you know, non-Christian texts that, no, actually, you know, man before kings and society and authority was rather brutal and short and bloody.

00:20:09.240 It's very interesting, too, that this kind of failure, this artificial construct with which you want to explain society, that air only compounds itself later on in liberalism.

00:20:23.720 We see it at the beginning here in the state of nature.

00:20:26.400 But this only gets worse because I don't know how many of you are familiar, but John Rawls is basically like the new touchstone for liberalism.

00:20:34.200 He's the updated touchstone for liberalism.

00:20:36.640 And John Rawls has this idea of the original position where basically you just assume that everybody exists behind this veil of ignorance and nobody knows what's going to happen in society and nobody knows where they're going to be.

00:20:49.300 And from that, we can just kind of construct the perfect equal society, you know, assuming that we don't know anything about ourselves.

00:20:56.180 And that is just a just a compound of the air that Demestri is identifying early on in the Enlightenment.

00:21:03.040 He's saying this is already a problem. Right.

00:21:05.380 And so we're going to see this this metastasize and become even more abstract and more ridiculous.

00:21:11.880 The truth is people are grounded in tradition. People are grounded in these connections.

00:21:17.900 The only way we perceive the world is through this great chain of being we are a part of and to try to cut ourselves away from that, to assume that we existed in some kind of proto civilization from which we can then construct these ideas or these institutions is a is a fallacy.

00:21:38.040 And there is no human who exists in this way and trying to create this completely deracinated human, this completely cut off human who then will logically just build these things up from the bottom and agree to all this stuff.

00:21:51.540 That is a failure from the start.

00:21:53.880 So he's identifying an era that will continue deep into the liberal tradition as a live well is live in a well today in current philosophy.

00:22:04.580 And so long after the formation of the Great Societies, some small desert tribes still shows us the spectacle of humanity in its infancy. 0.97

00:22:14.720 There are still infant nations that are not yet what they are to become.

00:22:18.400 What would what would one think of a naturalist who said that man is an animal 30 to 45 inches high without strength of or intelligence and giving voice only in articulate cries?

00:22:32.180 Yet this naturalist in sketching man's physical and moral nature in terms of an infant's characteristic would be no more ridiculous than the philosopher who seeks the political nature of the same being in the rudimentary society.

00:22:46.740 Every question about the nature of man must be resolved by his history.

00:22:51.780 Excuse me.

00:22:52.180 The philosopher who wants to show us a priori reasoning what man must be does not deserve an audience.

00:23:00.660 He is substituting expediency for experience and his own decisions for the creator's will.

00:23:07.820 That's such a critical paragraph there, guys.

00:23:10.560 That's that's so important.

00:23:11.680 So he makes the point that that that Prudentialist was alluding to there.

00:23:15.640 Right. That, yeah, we can look at these tribes, we can look at these nomadic tribes or these uncontacted peoples, and we can see some aspect of human development.

00:23:26.160 Right. We yes, that is a proto society in some ways.

00:23:31.100 But he says, if you were if you want to define humanity only by that, then you're if you're looking at society demanding or defining it only by that, then that's like defining what a human is by only looking at a child.

00:23:43.620 And that makes no sense to explain what a human being is.

00:23:47.260 You must look at the entirety of the human experience.

00:23:50.660 You must look at how it looks at every level of its development and then explain it in its totality.

00:23:56.400 And when you do this with societies, when you try to explain societies as only this this infant thing that then we can play with or meddle with or draw lines around, then you remove it from its history, its connections, its traditions, its identifying features.

00:24:12.120 And he gets down here and he says, you know, if you have a philosopher who wants to just a priority, a priority, you know, before everything, just come out and say, this is how we should be creating that.

00:24:22.920 He's just smuggling in his own preference.

00:24:24.720 He's just bringing in his own emotions, his own preferences, his own biases.

00:24:29.880 And he's saying, I want these things to exist instead of looking at the natural emergent properties that come from the creator's will, what God actually placed into society, what he's made emergent and consistent across societies.

00:24:43.840 I want to replace that with my own preferences.

00:24:47.400 And so I'm going to smuggle them in by saying they're part of some infant, you know, that they can be determined at some infancy in society rather than looking at the totality of the thing.

00:24:56.960 Yeah.

00:24:57.160 Demeistra's dunking on new atheists 200 years before Dawkins wrote anything.

00:25:02.260 Take that neck beard.

00:25:03.480 It's, it's coming, he's coming for you from, from 200 years away.

00:25:06.960 Yep.

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00:25:38.540 All right.

00:25:39.660 Uh, let's see here.

00:25:41.140 Uh, every question about the nature of man must be resolved by history.

00:25:45.460 The philosopher who wants to show us, uh, by, or, sorry, picked up a little late there.

00:25:51.060 Let me assume that someone manages, let me assume that someone manages to prove that an American savage, sorry guys, it's written in, yeah, it's written in the early 1800s.

00:26:00.820 What do you want from me?

00:26:01.620 Is happier and less vicious, uh, than a civilized man.

00:26:05.480 Could it be concluded from this that the latter is a, is a degraded being, or if you like, further from nature than the former?

00:26:14.440 Not at all.

00:26:15.440 This is just like saying that the nature of the individual man is to remain a child because at the age he is free from vices and misfortunes that will beset him in his maturity.

00:26:26.060 His, uh, history continually shows us men joined together in more or less numerous societies ruled by different sovereignties.

00:26:35.420 Once they have, uh, multiplied beyond a certain point that cannot exist in another fashion.

00:26:41.060 So he's just, again, dunking directly on Rousseau here.

00:26:43.960 He's like, take that noble savage, savage myth, right?

00:26:46.620 He's like, look, you can look at people living in a less complicated way in a, in a, in an earlier version of civilization.

00:26:55.840 But that, again, does that, that does not make them closer to nature or closer to actual, the emergence of human nature because they're not dealing with the complexity and the modes of being that will arise.

00:27:08.000 Anyways, once people have multiplied, once you reach a certain level of societal complexity, he says, again, you have to look at this in the totality.

00:27:16.240 You have to say, once people move from one way of being to another, because they've reached a certain level of complexity, they've reached a certain level of civilization.

00:27:25.620 It's very unlikely that they're going to go back.

00:27:27.880 They're not just going to fall back into these rhythms that existed before that, which to be fair is something that we as reactionary people sometimes should probably think about people who are often labeled reactionary that you, that you will just fall back into patterns of life or rhythms of life that existed for before a certain level of social complexity.

00:27:47.640 He says, you, you can't just turn, you can't just return back to, you know, this, this prior level of, uh, social organization.

00:27:55.440 And so when you look at these things, you, again, cannot evaluate, uh, the way a society should be just from its lowest level, its earliest level of organization that is not in itself reflective of human nature.

00:28:08.100 Yeah.

00:28:08.620 I mean, John Michael Greer points out in Retrotopia, like you can't force a technological regression.

00:28:14.220 And unless like bearing an apocalypse, you know, force majeure, the second coming happens, you're not going to see a reversion to lower standards of social complexity.

00:28:25.720 I mean, that's why we have that whole apocalyptic fiction genre, because we're curious how that would happen.

00:28:30.480 How do we regress back?

00:28:31.900 But in reality, that doesn't happen.

00:28:33.800 And so to sort of base our society of the, you know, concept of the noble savage, or that individuals from less developed societies can somehow fit right in, in more developed ones, you know, as they claim with immigration so often, that it's not going to work.

00:28:48.040 It's not going to happen.

00:28:49.000 You can't, you know, rapidly force someone to become more complex in the same way you can't rapidly force people to assume that they're not going to be any different than how they were, say, before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

00:29:01.980 Yeah. And obviously, societies collapse, guys, like, obviously, we all know that, you know, Roman Empire collapses and people lose, you know, especially in the in the West, lose a lot of technology, those kind of things.

00:29:15.320 You're not saying that society can't regress, but what he's saying is that there will be a certain type of life that if you have a certain level of complexity, you can't maintain that level of complexity and still go back to that life.

00:29:28.300 The two things can't coexist.

00:29:30.260 Like, yes, like civilization could fall.

00:29:31.900 People can live in the ruins.

00:29:33.420 You know, people people can Mad Max it at some point.

00:29:35.720 But even if you Mad Max it, there's still a car, right?

00:29:38.560 Like, you're still hunting for gas to fill the engine.

00:29:40.920 So, yeah, like, you know, yes, in some ways society has obviously regressed, but many of those changes to what humanity knows or does or will do remain permanent.

00:29:51.880 Some of that technological aspect will be in, you know, an indelible, leave its indelible mark on humanity.

00:29:58.360 And that's kind of what we're getting at there.

00:30:00.520 Rousseau and all the thinkers.

00:30:30.520 Of his stamp, imagine or try to imagine a people in the state of nature.

00:30:35.180 This is their expression.

00:30:36.700 Deliberating formally on the advantages and disadvantages of the social state and finally deciding to pass from one to the other.

00:30:44.400 There is not a grain of common sense in this.

00:30:46.960 What were these men like before they were before the National Convention in which they finally decided to find themselves a sovereign?

00:30:54.880 Apparently, they lived without laws and government.

00:30:57.300 But for how long?

00:30:58.800 So, or I'll just read one more bit here.

00:31:02.180 It's a basic mistake to represent the social state as an optional state based on human consent, on deliberation and on original contact.

00:31:12.520 Something which is an impossibility.

00:31:15.220 To talk of a state of nature in the opposition to the social state is to talk nonsense voluntarily.

00:31:21.580 The word nature is one of those general terms which, like all abstract terms, are open to abuse.

00:31:28.300 In its most extensive sense, the word really signifies only the totality of all the laws, power, and springs of action that make up the world and the particular nature of such and such a being in the totality of all the qualities which make it what is and without which it would be some other thing that could no longer fulfill the intentions of its creator.

00:31:56.040 Thus, the combination of all the parts which make up a machine intended to tell the time forms the nature or the essence of the watch.

00:32:06.480 And the nature or essence of the balance wheel is to have such and such a form, dimensions, and position.

00:32:13.680 Otherwise, it would no longer be able to be a balance wheel and could not fulfill its functions.

00:32:20.480 The nature of a viper is to crawl, to have scaly skin, hollow and movable things which exude poison venom.

00:32:27.560 And the nature of man is to be a cognitive, religious, and sociable animal.

00:32:32.220 All the experience teaches us this, and to my knowledge, nothing has contradicted this experience.

00:32:40.420 If someone wants to prove that the nature of the viper is to have wings and a voice and a sweet voice, that of a beaver is to live alone on the top of the highest mountain, it is up to him to prove it.

00:32:50.760 In the meantime, we will believe what must be and what has always been.

00:32:55.820 So, again, he's attacking this idea that you can just find some initial state of nature, some starting point.

00:33:04.740 And from that starting point, you can then say, all right, guys, we're drawing up all the rules.

00:33:09.640 We're creating all the laws.

00:33:11.480 Everyone's going to sign this contract, and we're all going to consent to it.

00:33:14.700 And we're going to, like, enter into this social contract.

00:33:17.200 And we'll have all created it voluntarily, kind of from nothing.

00:33:22.600 He says, no, you are already plugged in to a way of life when governments come to be, right?

00:33:29.340 When those governments emerge, you are already living in a tradition.

00:33:32.780 You already have an idea of how life should be.

00:33:35.280 You're already religious.

00:33:36.740 You're already associated.

00:33:38.200 You've already been in the society.

00:33:41.200 And those governments come to reflect those things, not the other way around.

00:33:45.120 You don't design the society with the government, and then it just falls in line because you wrote it down on a piece of paper.

00:33:52.460 Instead, you exist as a human, just like all animals exist in their own way.

00:33:57.920 And your existence as a human includes the fact that you can think, that you are religious, that you are social in parts of families and communities.

00:34:07.120 And that will then be reflected in the kind of government that emerges when you formalize it down the road.

00:34:13.160 Yeah, notice how he points out very easily the contradiction of the state of nature with those that are wanting to advance the national convention, these rights of man, sort of the constitutionalism that we also have here in America, is that you aren't liberating yourselves from anything.

00:34:31.480 If anything, you're trying to liberate yourselves from human nature, which is to be ruled over, to be sociable, to be religious, and to participate in the complex society that you are in.

00:34:43.580 And trying to liberate yourself or force a kind of proto-apocalypse from, say, getting out of monarchy into democracy where every person is a sovereign, all that you are trying to do is to divorce yourself from the very nature that man is.

00:34:59.340 You are divorcing yourself from the very state of nature that Rousseau and other Enlightenment liberals up to John Rawls, you know, of the more contemporary fame, think so.

00:35:08.020 And if anything, as he points out, it's up to you to prove it.

00:35:10.900 And history has, I think, illustrated that it has not worked out so well.

00:35:14.220 Yeah, that shifting of the burden of proof there, saying, like, look, this is obviously the emergent order.

00:35:20.100 This is obviously where, so if you're going to bring some other idea, you've got to prove that this is what man is supposed to be.

00:35:26.200 You can't just come in here and say, well, I hit the reset button, state of nature, you know, the veil of ignorance, you know, original position.

00:35:35.060 Like, no, you can't just create these philosophical constructs to reset humanity.

00:35:39.680 The nature and the history of peoples is what's going to determine their social order, unless you have some other way to prove otherwise.

00:35:49.020 So that's what he's going to go with.

00:35:51.420 The social order, Rousseau says, is a sacred right, which is the basis of all others.

00:35:56.620 Yet this right does not come from nature.

00:35:59.120 It is therefore founded on convention.

00:36:03.540 What is nature?

00:36:04.560 What is right?

00:36:05.560 And how is an order a right?

00:36:07.000 But let us leave these difficult difficulties.

00:36:10.100 Such questions are endless with a man who misuses every term and defines none.

00:36:15.540 I like, again, dunking on Rousseau here.

00:36:18.280 It reminds me of our friend David Distributus and his magical words, right?

00:36:23.780 This is kind of the original attack on magical words, full of emotion and full of political energy, but devoid of any actual rational content.

00:36:34.640 One has the right, at least, to ask him to prove the big assertion that the social order does not come from nature.

00:36:42.320 I must, he says himself, establish that I have what I have just advanced.

00:36:47.340 This is indeed what should be done.

00:36:49.860 But the way in which he goes about it is truly curious.

00:36:52.500 He spends three chapters in proving, but the social order does not derive from family, society, or from the force, or from slavery, chapters 2, 3, and 4, and concludes, chapter 5, that we must always go back to a first convention.

00:37:10.400 This method of proof is very useful.

00:37:12.880 It lacked only the majestic formula of geometers, which must be proved.

00:37:18.740 It is also curious that Rousseau has not even tried to prove that one thing that was necessary, or the one thing that is necessary to prove, for it is the social order derives from nature.

00:37:33.700 There is no social compact.

00:37:35.820 Before examining, he says, the act by which a people choose a king, it would be as well to examine the act by which a people is a people.

00:37:47.100 For this act being necessary, previous to the others, is the true foundation of society.

00:37:52.960 This same Rousseau also elsewhere, it is, he is again quoting here, it is the inner, it is the inner habit of philosophers to deny what is and to explain what is not.

00:38:07.240 Let us on our side add that it is the inner habit of Rousseau to mock the philosopher without suspecting that he is also a philosopher in all the forces he gave to the word.

00:38:20.700 So, for example, the social contract denies from the beginning to end the nature of man, which is in order to explain the social compact, which does not exist.

00:38:30.220 This is how one reasons when one separates man from divinity.

00:38:36.760 Rather than tiring oneself out in the search for error, it would take little effort to turn one's eye to the source of all creation, but so simple, sure, and consoling a method of philosophizing is not to the taste of writers of this unhappy age whose true illness and his aversion to good sense.

00:38:57.460 So, he is just saying here, basically, if he wants to derive this idea, if he wants to create this idea of the social contract, he basically just has to completely divorce himself from nature and divinity.

00:39:11.160 And by doing so, he basically just opens himself up to all of these criticisms that he is throwing at other people.

00:39:18.320 Really just, again, going at Rousseau on a regular basis, you will see plenty of this throughout Demaestra.

00:39:24.160 Yeah, and I think it's really important to highlight this section here.

00:39:29.600 Not only is he sort of just casually bashing Rousseau as just the philosophers of the age that don't understand where these things come from, in this instance, divine creation or what is divinely ordained.

00:39:41.620 Rousseau is making the claim that he's outlining here that society in our sort of state of nature, when we look at how man is as an animal,

00:39:49.340 not just sort of this higher being or this sort of not being among the dumb beast, as it says in scripture, that man, you know, we can just come together and we can find ourselves and form consensus.

00:40:00.940 That first convention, as he's sort of been advocating for a more democratic, a less sort of monarchic sense of order.

00:40:07.680 And that this is the way in which man can become a social creature.

00:40:11.500 Whereas for, you know, Demaestra here, he's outlining a very important thing that even if you took out the creation, the creator aspect of this, you know, as a social animal that we are born as, that we are going to be, even when we were, you know, barbaric, you know, without just roaming tribes and so on.

00:40:28.600 Man was an aggressive animal. It established order and hierarchy on its own, on a basis of strength, on a basis of power.

00:40:37.060 And those things, of course, lead to rulers, kings, sovereigns, those who rule over those that can order the others.

00:40:43.460 For Demaestra and for any Christian, this is kind of divinely ordained.

00:40:47.820 Like, you know, this is where he and Sir Robert Filmer talk about this all the time, that like God has ordained kingship.

00:40:53.000 God has ordained a ruler over, you know, an ordained patriarchy, hence the Filmer's work being called Patriarcha. 0.50

00:41:00.100 And so to say that, like, that doesn't exist in nature, you know, is not only false, but it just philosophizes about what are we and what are we not, and no actual definitions provided.

00:41:10.280 Whereas Demaestra is simply going back to scripture, common sense, and the entire history of mankind to recognize that, no, we are built this way, and our creator has built us this way.

00:41:20.980 And all that Rousseau is advocating for is to divorce us from the very nature he says we're actually based on.

00:41:27.620 So he's sort of just poking one hole by, you know, one hole after another, that this concept of, you know, the state of nature of man requiring consent, requiring the populist vote, requiring conventions, is not true at all throughout the history of man and the history of the Christian religion.

00:41:43.540 And really interestingly, you know, this touches on something that I believe you and I have streamed on before, which is that disagreement creates the opportunity to rule, right?

00:41:52.220 So he's saying, look, if you're a person who looks at the world around you, if you just look at the order that is emergent, things that we have known from our traditions, from our Christian traditions, from just the observable world around us, then you already understand that this is kind of part of what society is.

00:42:10.280 And because there's no debate there, then there's no opportunity for this guy to kind of generate energy.

00:42:16.580 But if these people can come in and they can say, well, what if that wasn't the case, right?

00:42:21.000 Like, what if we can cut these ties to divinity?

00:42:24.080 What if we can cut these ties to the idea of a natural order?

00:42:28.440 What if we can tie this to something else or, you know, something that is pre this or abstract?

00:42:33.820 Then we can remake the rules ourselves, right?

00:42:36.620 We can create this disagreement.

00:42:38.360 We can generate this ability.

00:42:39.940 And so it's just this beginning, you know, of deconstruction.

00:42:43.800 It's this beginning of leftism as deconstruction coming in, tearing apart what was already understood, already known.

00:42:50.200 Demestri says, look, this is already simple.

00:42:51.840 Like, you're making this way more complicated than it needs to be just so you can, you know, create the world that you want to create in opposition to the divine order, which is, again, just the most fundamentally human thing that one can do.

00:43:05.440 Might it not be said that man, this property of divinity, was cast on this birth by a blind cause and that he could be either this way, this or that, and that it is a consequence of his choice that he is what he is.

00:43:22.840 Surely God intended some sort of end in creating man.

00:43:26.140 The question can thus be reduced to whether man has become a political animal, as Aristotle put it, through or against the divine will.

00:43:35.440 Although this question stated explicitly is a real sign of folly, it is nevertheless put indirectly in a host of writings, and fairly often the authors even decide that the latter is the case.

00:43:49.740 The word nature has been given, has given rise to a multitude of errors.

00:43:54.480 Let me repeat that the nature of any being is the sum of the qualities attributed to it by the creator.

00:44:01.360 With immeasurable profundity, Burke said that art is man's nature.

00:44:06.740 This is beyond doubt.

00:44:08.220 Man, with all his affections, all his knowledge, and all of his art, is the true natural man.

00:44:15.260 And the weaver's cloth is as natural as spider's web.

00:44:20.020 Man's natural state is therefore to be what he is today, and what he has always been.

00:44:25.880 That is to say, sociable.

00:44:28.000 All human records attest to this truth.

00:44:31.120 So he's entering in, and he's introducing the Aristotelian idea of Telos, right?

00:44:36.060 Man has an end.

00:44:37.520 He exists for a reason.

00:44:39.460 There's a purpose for him, and that is his right way to exist.

00:44:43.000 And also, that man is a political animal, and so that his interactions with people, his positions in society, his duties, his responsibilities, his privileges therein are all tied into what man should be.

00:44:58.240 He is not sitting alone somewhere as an independent, rational being, determining all the things that society will be, how it will be laid out, how human nature will proceed from there.

00:45:09.700 No, instead, he is created with a purpose, he's created, set inside these social circles, and those will draw him naturally towards where he should be.

00:45:21.040 And if you're trying to separate him from that, if you're trying to separate, and you're trying to say, oh, no, it's only natural man outside of society, pre-society, the state of nature, that's the only way we can only understand that.

00:45:32.000 No, the human is traveling through, societies are traveling through, and that these things that society creates, these complex things, you know, he uses the illustration of the weaver's cloth here.

00:45:44.660 They are just as natural as a spider's web, because what man makes, his art, his creations in society, that is part of his nature as well.

00:45:53.200 Yeah, absolutely. And to claim that, you know, we're not social, political animals, and somehow the fact that we are is against God's will, as DeMeister argues here, is the very folly that Rousseau and other Enlightenment liberals think that it is.

00:46:08.380 All right, guys, I was going to try to squeeze in chapter three here, but I don't know if we're going to have time.

00:46:15.300 Let me say, well, no, chapter three is really short. We'll do that.

00:46:17.120 Yeah, we can do that. I was thinking that one was another two pages. All right, so we'll get this one done real quick, and then we'll go to the super chats.

00:46:23.440 All right, so chapter three, sovereignty in general. If sovereignty is not anterior to the people, at least these two ideas are collateral,

00:46:34.340 since a sovereign is necessary to make a people. It is as impossible to imagine a human society, a people, without a sovereign, as a hive and bees without a queen.

00:46:47.380 For by virtue of the eternal laws of nature, a swarm of bees exists in this way, or it does not exist at all. Society and sovereignty are thus born together.

00:46:58.500 It is impossible to separate these two ideas. Imagine an isolated man.

00:47:03.240 There is no question of laws or government, since he is not a whole man, and society does not exist.

00:47:09.400 Put this man in contact with his fellow man from this moment, you suppose, a sovereign.

00:47:17.300 The first man was a king over his children. Every isolated family was governed in the same way.

00:47:26.460 Once these families joined, a sovereignty was needed, and the sovereign made a people for them by giving them laws, since society only exists through the sovereign.

00:47:38.880 Everyone knows the famous line, the first king was a fortunate soldier.

00:47:44.580 This is perhaps one of the falsest claims that has ever been made.

00:47:47.740 Quite the opposite could be said. The first soldier was paid by a king.

00:47:52.360 There was a people, some sort of civilization, and a sovereign as soon as men came into contact.

00:47:59.540 The word people is a relative term that has no meaning divorced from the idea of sovereignty.

00:48:06.320 The idea of a people involves that of an aggregation around a common center.

00:48:11.380 And without sovereignty, there could be no political unity or cohesion.

00:48:16.160 So this is short, but there's a lot packed in here that I think is really important.

00:48:19.960 I think it also, interestingly, answers some things that are debated often in the online right, some causalities here.

00:48:28.660 So the first thing he lays out here is the idea that a people would not exist without a sovereign.

00:48:36.880 And this is, again, the opposite of what we usually think about, especially in the American tradition, right?

00:48:43.440 The people elevate a ruler.

00:48:45.340 The people choose the ruler.

00:48:47.100 So the people pre-exist.

00:48:49.360 And then the ruler is then kind of selected from them.

00:48:54.500 He's saying that these things that even if the ruler does not pre-exist society, it has to exist simultaneously.

00:49:00.620 These things have to have to be created simultaneously because what would a people be?

00:49:07.060 How would they even operate without something leading them?

00:49:09.940 How would any social coordination ever emerge if there was a leader?

00:49:14.360 And he brings in this idea that, you know, even a family in isolation, the father serves as the first sovereign, right?

00:49:21.520 He's the organizer of the original kind of, you know, political body, which is the smallest one, the unit of the family.

00:49:29.540 And then once those come together, once multifamilies come together and they form a clan or a tribe or, you know, a city state, that's going, you're then going to get that sovereign emerging off of the kind of that natural hierarchy.

00:49:43.580 Yeah, this is really, it's short, but this is probably one of the most important sections here to say that there has always been at the root of all things with society, a sovereign, whether it be the father or whether it be a collection here.

00:49:56.980 And this is where you also get the notion of a people, a nation state, a, you know, a collection of what we might call the Germans or the French and so on and so forth.

00:50:06.680 It comes from people coming together and acknowledging that they submit to a sovereign authority.

00:50:13.220 And without that sovereign authority, peoples do not exist.

00:50:16.740 And the more fractionalized or tribal you break it down, you know, they still have sovereigns then, which are the fathers, which are family units and so on and so forth.

00:50:25.580 If the first king was a fortunate soldier, he points out that that's false, because even then the first king is the father.

00:50:31.740 And if we wanted to go with peoples, you could say the first peoples were ruled by a fortunate father or the one to be either, you know, consented to be the king or the one by the force of the sword to do so.

00:50:43.500 You know, civilization has always been around, you know, and the first form of civilization has always been family.

00:50:49.160 So, so I think that's interesting because a debate that arises pretty often with many people kind of in the online right or the dissident right spheres is this debate between whether it's the it's the throne or the altar, right?

00:51:05.060 The sword or the altar that kind of creates, you know, civilization.

00:51:10.600 Oftentimes, you have people like like David distributist who says, you know, no, you need to have, you know, the theological, you need to have the religion.

00:51:20.100 You need to have the authority of the king before you get civilization.

00:51:23.900 And then you get people more on maybe like the academic agent side or the BAP sphere who say, no, it's the war band that is the beginning of society.

00:51:34.260 It's not until the war band, you know, can can cut society out of a piece of wilderness and fight off everybody else and conquer that society can emerge. 0.84

00:51:43.200 And interestingly here, you know, you kind of bring about that.

00:51:46.180 Well, no, even, you know, those those that war band has to come from somewhere, right?

00:51:50.460 That they have to at the very least, it emerged from families and in those families, there were proto king.

00:51:56.680 There were there was a patriarchy that preexisted this.

00:52:00.180 And so the idea that, you know, again, the focus will be like, oh, well, do you do you need, you know, rough and ready men or do you need fathers?

00:52:09.600 You know, is it is it is it should people focus on on being lone warriors or should they focus on being family, good, upstanding Christian family man?

00:52:18.100 And the answer is those things aren't really separable in many ways, right?

00:52:22.520 Like these things are both critical to civilization and they are far more intertwined than we try to make them when we try to focus on one particular aspect of the other about what creates society, what lets it emerge.

00:52:40.340 Yeah, absolutely. I think that they're not the whole sort of Koryos war band go settle and conquer the wastelands or the barbarians is not a mutually exclusive thing from you need fathers, you need a society, you need families.

00:52:54.940 Because even in those sort of and I'm sure someone in the comments or chat will call me out in case I do get it wrong.

00:53:00.500 But like I said, I'm not an anthropologist. But, you know, even those war bands, they came from, you know, they were excess men.

00:53:06.520 They were men that couldn't either find wives there or, you know, there were just there are the rest were taken.

00:53:11.920 And but they were given commands, you know, either to go out or to set on their own thing and become those side sort of sovereigns over new territory to find wives, to find women and do so.

00:53:22.700 Even in that sort of what might be constituted as a barbarian sense, there's still sovereignty.

00:53:27.680 They recognize that there's nothing here for us. You know, we know that there is sacred tradition.

00:53:32.220 We can go out, conquer and explore and become kings ourselves.

00:53:35.980 And I mean, they are sons that wish to become fathers. They are sons that wish to conquer and rule over that first king just becomes the son of a father who or even a prince that wishes to become king in the form of fatherhood or to conquer and lay waste to somewhere else.

00:53:52.560 At the same time, those guys end up becoming fathers, raising, you know, sons that will most likely do the same if they don't find a wife within that society.

00:54:00.300 You need to have people that can do both.

00:54:02.620 I mean, this is there's sort of this tweet that says, if you ever feel like there's your life is without purpose, it says that, you know, it was meant that you were meant to die in a war somewhere.

00:54:10.740 And I think that that's sort of crass. But I think that there's the semblance that not everyone is to be wed.

00:54:16.440 Not everyone is going to have children, but other people can establish sovereignty through you.

00:54:21.240 We are meant to be subjects to somewhere else.

00:54:23.400 And that sort of thinking that DeMeister is getting at here is the really uncomfortable notion that you get from a lot of liberals and a lot of John Rawlsian egalitarian types, because it supposes hierarchy.

00:54:36.860 And more importantly, and it's where it gets really uncomfortable for liberals, is that hierarchy is natural and it has always been around with us.

00:54:43.380 And the more and more we try to divorce ourselves from hierarchy, the more and more you get anarcho-tyranny, the more and more you get the idea that certain people who just commit more crimes are somehow magical.

00:54:54.620 And this is the way it's always been. And that's a good thing.

00:54:57.360 And it doesn't recognize that maybe there is hierarchy that you actually need law and order.

00:55:02.140 You need a sort of warrior, you know, cast of people to enforce that order and to acknowledge some sort of sovereign, whether that be a king or, of course, you know, the divine will.

00:55:13.100 And I know we're not going to get into it, but for Joseph DeMeister, the idea that that divine will and the king were separate, not true at all.

00:55:20.000 They've always been intertwined throughout antiquity.

00:55:21.920 Yeah, we'll have to stop here for today, but we most will most certainly continue this series.

00:55:28.080 This just gives you kind of the basics of what sovereignty, where does it come from, you know, the origins, those things.

00:55:35.000 But we will definitely dive deeper into this as we continue working our way through this essay.

00:55:40.240 But we do have limited time, so we'll stop with the third chapter today.

00:55:44.660 Let's go over to our super chats real quick, real quick.

00:55:48.100 Creeper Weirdo for $2, Anti-Enlightenment with Oren and the Frogman.

00:55:54.000 Yep, here we are doing our best.

00:55:57.040 Let's see.

00:55:58.760 Tex-Mex here for $2.

00:56:00.860 Love my king, love my god, simple as the classics.

00:56:05.320 Let's see.

00:56:07.140 Tex-Mex here again.

00:56:08.780 He's always here with the Carlism.

00:56:10.220 Yeah, Tex-Mex here for $10.

00:56:11.940 Carlism has an understanding of the concrete man of tradition versus the abstract man of modernity.

00:56:18.840 Carlism also has a notion of historical and traditional continuity, which they have some PDFs on these topics.

00:56:26.300 Yes, like I said, I know you're connected to some descent of that movement, but I am unfamiliar with his current modern incarnation.

00:56:35.000 But certainly interesting to know more.

00:56:38.180 Ronald McNuggets here for $10.

00:56:40.780 Schmidt's sovereign is dormant in regular times, but rises when normalcy verges on exception.

00:56:47.860 The more established an order, the less sovereign authority intervenes in normal times.

00:56:53.700 Yes, this is, of course, true.

00:56:55.520 I mean, in many ways.

00:56:58.280 Schmidt is focused on constitutional order.

00:57:00.540 And so he's talking about the times in which the exception would arise to that constitutional order.

00:57:06.800 If you don't have things that are, you know, driving you to those moments, then things can continue to operate inside the bounds of the prescribed constitution.

00:57:16.240 Though for Schmidt, those things pop up far more often than kind of the modern person usually thinks.

00:57:21.680 Yeah, and this is why de Meister doesn't talk about it.

00:57:24.060 But in the later chapters, this is why he's so emphatic on religion, because the more established an order, the less likely the king has to intervene.

00:57:31.760 Well, for de Meister, what helps establish the sovereign, you know, not the sovereign, but what helps establish that social order and the more it's normalized is a highly religious and virtuous people.

00:57:41.660 And that's the same sort of thing that John Adams and Benjamin Franklin talked about at the beginning of the American Republic, that this can only be kept by religious and virtuous people.

00:57:49.880 And the more that you, you know, veer away from divinity, the more that you veer away from God, the more likely you are to be prideful, virtuous, philosophizing, the things that, you know, de Meister has been sort of dunking Rousseau on with.

00:58:02.700 That's what creates this disorder.

00:58:04.720 And Schmidt highlights that that's a problem, especially in parliamentary democracy.

00:58:08.640 It also happens here in America, which causes the sovereign to emerge during those, you know, states of emergency or states of exception.

00:58:14.640 And this is why you can't read Schmidt without reading de Meister.

00:58:18.260 And this is something that I also got in trouble for explaining, you know, when I was explaining the state of exception, you know, people took issue.

00:58:26.580 They're like, oh, yeah, I said, oh, well, of course, this, you know, the sovereign can and will violate rights in the state of exception.

00:58:33.740 And people are like, well, no, of course they can't.

00:58:36.120 Their rights, their natural rights.

00:58:37.680 I said rights really loud.

00:58:39.600 And so you can't violate them.

00:58:41.080 And I'm like, guys, if you don't have a tradition that avoids the exception whenever possible, and even when the exception is invoked, still binds the sovereign by the shared values of that tradition that exists deeply in society, then that's when these things break down.

00:58:59.560 So, like, right now, our government is constantly ruling in a state of exception because all of our traditions have broken down.

00:59:06.780 All of our shared values have broken down.

00:59:09.640 And so the government constantly violates them because why wouldn't it?

00:59:13.040 It can, and so it will.

00:59:14.740 The only thing that binds the government is not like because I wrote natural rights down on a piece of paper or I have enough, you know, enough separation of powers or branches of government.

00:59:24.520 That's enough rules and regulations exist to, you know, to make a neutral, you know, bureaucracy.

00:59:30.740 That is not what controls government power.

00:59:33.860 What controls government power is a tradition and a distributed authority amongst the people and other social institutions that bind the actions of the government because there's simply no way that the people will continue to grant their consent to people who are constantly ruling in a state of exception that violates those traditions.

00:59:53.260 That is what binds sovereignty, not your ability to scream, but my second amendment.

00:59:59.280 Okay.

00:59:59.820 And so when we talk about this stuff, it's really critical to understand that it is that religious tradition.

01:00:05.820 It is that moral tradition, that cultural tradition.

01:00:08.600 That is what's going to limit the excesses of a sovereign invoking the state of exception.

01:00:14.740 Not you, not you quoting different chunks of the constitution.

01:00:19.480 Absolutely. 0.68

01:00:20.040 Uh, creeper weirdo again here for $2.

01:00:23.760 Oh, that reminds me.

01:00:25.100 When are you guys going to talk about AI art?

01:00:27.640 Uh, you know, I feel like I've touched on it a few times, uh, but obviously, uh, uh, Prudentialist and geo would be the, the, the best pair for that.

01:00:37.000 They've got, uh, their podcast together, the, uh, Gulag Archipelago.

01:00:40.820 I'm sure geo has many thoughts on, uh, on AI art.

01:00:44.700 So if, if you're looking for that opinion, that's probably the place.

01:00:47.260 Yeah, maybe, maybe geo and I'll talk about it.

01:00:49.420 We're, we're live every Thursday at two 15 PM Eastern.

01:00:52.360 So maybe we'll touch on it soon.

01:00:53.900 There you go.

01:00:54.560 See, we can spend those super chats into show opportunities.

01:00:56.960 Don't worry.

01:00:57.280 We got this down.

01:00:58.200 All right.

01:00:58.580 Uh, uh, glow in the dark here for $10.

01:01:01.220 Genghis Khan, the peak of power by the sword, still believe the heavens blessed him to conquer.

01:01:06.340 The Romans sought out a God's favor sword and priest exists together.

01:01:10.520 Like a person has a heart and a brain.

01:01:13.320 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:01:14.780 Totally, man.

01:01:15.440 Uh, it's so, and, and to be fair.

01:01:18.820 All right.

01:01:19.160 So here's, here's the trap.

01:01:20.940 Here's the trap of Machiavellian political analysis along with every other bit of modernity

01:01:26.040 is the desire to, if we can just close one eye, right?

01:01:30.900 If we can just close our eye and focus on one thing and we can maximize that thing, then

01:01:38.200 we will understand it.

01:01:39.540 We can examine it.

01:01:40.340 We can manipulate it and we can extract all the value from it.

01:01:43.620 And that works, right?

01:01:45.160 Like there's a reason that the enlightenment has, has worked to in many ways because it

01:01:51.460 has allowed us to say, there's only the material or there's only this.

01:01:55.960 And there is only that.

01:01:56.840 And therefore we can just focus on that and that will produce the best result.

01:02:00.900 But when you do that, there is a cost.

01:02:03.360 And when you separate the wholeness of human being, human experience from its different

01:02:09.320 aspects, you will, there, you will always pay a cost.

01:02:13.000 You may get a benefit, but the cost will come due.

01:02:16.240 And so I think it's really tempting for some of us to say, oh, well, it's just the religion.

01:02:22.020 It's just the culture.

01:02:24.100 It's just the people.

01:02:25.980 It's just the military aspect.

01:02:28.380 It's just the sword.

01:02:29.240 But it's never just any of those.

01:02:31.780 It's all of those things in their totality that create a political reality, create society.

01:02:37.820 And when you try to divorce any part of this, like you're saying glow in the dark, you're

01:02:41.680 always going to get a very serious error.

01:02:43.580 Yeah, this is why throughout the history, like he mentions in the super chat, I mean, even

01:02:48.460 if you read the Iliad or the Odyssey and everything that comes with these great, you know, Greek

01:02:53.700 tragedies and epics, that there has always been seeking the favor of the divine.

01:02:58.640 And without that, you know, then they're most likely doomed to fail or they've fallen out

01:03:02.400 of favor for their deeds, both in Christian and pre-Christian traditions.

01:03:06.320 And even today, when people say that like the wokeness is a religion, those people are 0.94

01:03:11.820 seeking some aspect of the divine, although in material and earthly things, which is foolish 0.98

01:03:16.860 and suicidal. 0.99

01:03:18.180 They're far more, you know, suicidal and millenarian than any sort of Christian or anything like 0.99

01:03:24.240 that, in the sense that these people are elevating these egalitarian aspects as a religion. 0.90

01:03:30.020 They're elevating, you know, groups of people that hate their guts to be their gods, to have

01:03:35.340 mercy on them.

01:03:36.140 And the history of all of those sort of, you know, ethnic conflicts always lead to someone

01:03:40.580 getting, you know, killed, usually en masse.

01:03:43.100 And we see this all the time, whether it's in the radio, we see this now where, you know,

01:03:47.380 the whole Dianne Feinstein thing is a really good example of this, is that that seat was open

01:03:51.300 for election.

01:03:51.880 There was hoping that, you know, Schiff would somehow win the primary and be the, you know,

01:03:56.380 easy democratic shoe in to go for it.

01:03:58.940 And well, she passed away.

01:04:00.380 And what happens with Gavin Newsom?

01:04:01.960 He's asked the question, sort of the religion of the day, like, are you going to have a black

01:04:05.780 woman on in the Senate? 1.00

01:04:06.840 And so someone who doesn't even live in the state of California is appointed to do so

01:04:10.840 because this sort of divine favor of, you know, political progressivism in America demands

01:04:17.040 that you have to do this to curry favor with their religion.

01:04:20.120 And if not, you're out of power.

01:04:21.880 And we see this all the time.

01:04:23.380 And even today in the most, you know, inverted, divorced from Christianity, divorced from any 1.00

01:04:28.960 true semblance of the divine, they still have to imitate it because it's the actual natural

01:04:34.040 state of man that de Maistre has talked about in these chapters and in the rest of his study

01:04:38.280 on sovereignty.

01:04:39.660 Absolutely.

01:04:40.340 Yeah, no, that's a great point.

01:04:41.560 And I echoed something similar in my last piece last week.

01:04:45.700 Just the reason I think, and this is not, you know, people, I wrote this, people have

01:04:50.380 said, oh, you think the woke is going away?

01:04:52.020 It's like, no, no, no.

01:04:52.820 You misunderstand.

01:04:53.380 I'm not saying that the woke is some easily discarded political theory that will just be

01:05:01.000 or political, you know, convenience that will be swept into the broom closet the minute that

01:05:05.720 it performs poorly.

01:05:07.020 It is a critical part of the construct of what we're facing.

01:05:13.200 It is the religion.

01:05:14.880 It is the soul.

01:05:16.220 As Prudentialist is saying, it is a necessary form, no matter how perverted, it is still critical

01:05:23.340 to the political theology of the day.

01:05:25.560 And you cannot discard it for that reason.

01:05:27.900 However, as Prudentialist pointed out, it is a funhouse mirror, right?

01:05:32.320 It is an aversion of the natural order.

01:05:34.400 It is brittle and ugly, and it will break because it has to, because it is not under

01:05:41.140 the divine order.

01:05:41.800 And anything fighting against that eventually will lose.

01:05:45.240 And so I do think that that, you know, eventually falls apart, not because the woke is being put

01:05:50.180 away, but because true believers will push it to its breaking point.

01:05:54.460 And because it's not the true and the good and the beautiful, it will eventually fall because

01:06:00.540 it cannot sustain the human soul.

01:06:02.720 It can't sustain a high society in perpetuity.

01:06:07.040 All right, David Tavares here.

01:06:10.680 I believe that is Euros.

01:06:12.520 Thank you very much, sir.

01:06:14.180 Why positions like this one are not mainstream today?

01:06:18.140 Thank you for your work.

01:06:19.220 Well, thank you, man.

01:06:19.880 We appreciate it.

01:06:20.680 I mean, I think they're not mainstream, again, for the reasons that both Prudentialist and

01:06:26.120 I have kind of put out here, because those in power today do not want people to connect

01:06:32.980 to this tradition.

01:06:34.060 They do not want people to understand these truths about society.

01:06:37.920 Their maintenance of power relies on that.

01:06:40.620 And let's be honest, I mean, a lot of the opposition, quote unquote, is really invested

01:06:46.900 in their own version of that kind of completely divorced, you know, completely unconnected to

01:06:53.320 tradition notion of humanity and how you can order society.

01:06:57.220 They're just looking at the last version of that.

01:06:59.660 And so, unfortunately, even those that oppose it are often reaching for completely hollow

01:07:05.100 ideas and not some of the stuff that's more duplily rooted, which is the tradition that

01:07:09.040 de Maestria is in contact with.

01:07:10.600 Yeah, and what de Maestria is highlighting with Rousseau and what you see with all sort

01:07:15.360 of iterations from sort of egalitarian liberalism is a resentment towards the natural order,

01:07:22.260 a resentment towards the fact that man has always been a sort of patriarchal, the first

01:07:27.040 king, his father.

01:07:28.720 Even you see this with Roman tradition, you know, pater, you know, familia, you know, that

01:07:32.940 fatherly fidelity to the father and families and kings and traditions.

01:07:37.840 And that resentment today has been mainly brought on by a divorce from religion, as we've talked

01:07:43.600 about earlier today, with the sovereign, you know, being more active, because we're not

01:07:47.740 a religious or virtuous people.

01:07:49.700 You know, the same problem happens when we saw it with, you know, the Russian Revolution.

01:07:54.200 There were those that wished to upend and to, you know, end Christianity as sort of the sovereign 0.98

01:07:58.280 rule.

01:07:59.020 This is why the Bolsheviks killed some 37,000 members of clergy and monastics.

01:08:02.960 You see this in America, where we've divorced ourselves so far from God.

01:08:06.460 We're no longer allowed to pray in schools without getting sued or even invoke his name

01:08:10.880 when we wish to pray before a public meeting.

01:08:13.300 And in doing so, there's no order that we can recognize that's higher than ourselves.

01:08:16.980 And we lose track of those traditions.

01:08:19.660 And in doing so, it's every man for himself.

01:08:22.580 And we want to kill each other if someone wants to have a different opinion than we do.

01:08:27.020 And De Maistre, much like other reactionary writers, is a Cassandra figure.

01:08:31.660 He's a Cassandra prototype in a lot of ways, that here are these predictions of what is

01:08:36.020 to come true, but no one will listen to me.

01:08:38.320 And we now live in the fruits of what these egalitarians and progressives and liberals have

01:08:43.500 sown.

01:08:44.700 Well, well said, well said.

01:08:46.540 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up there.

01:08:49.020 But like I said, we will surely come back to this essay and continue.

01:08:54.420 I'm sorry there.

01:08:56.260 We'll surely come back to this essay and finish or probably not finish next time for sure.

01:09:01.520 But but continue to work our way through the thought of Joseph De Maistre.

01:09:05.380 Thank you, everybody, so much for coming by.

01:09:08.220 Prudentialist, I know you shilled a little bit, but is there anything else that people

01:09:11.500 should be looking for?

01:09:13.060 Is there an article coming out, a piece coming out, a video, anything people should be checking

01:09:16.840 out before we go?

01:09:17.980 Well, absolutely.

01:09:18.600 As always, Oren, thank you for coming on.

01:09:20.060 You can find me on YouTube as The Prudentialist.

01:09:21.760 I'm on Twitter at Mr. Prudentialist.

01:09:23.400 I'm also on Substack as well.

01:09:25.660 But the biggest thing that I'm currently working on right now, and it should hopefully be out

01:09:29.400 later this week, is going to be a look at how migration, immigration and demographics

01:09:35.660 are used by nation states as a weapon of war.

01:09:38.140 So be sure to find me at theprudentialist.substack.com.

01:09:42.100 Excellent.

01:09:42.800 And also, guys, I've got some good news.

01:09:45.160 The book, The Total State, is at the publisher.

01:09:47.680 It's going through its first stage of editing right now.

01:09:50.420 We've got a preliminary cover and everything.

01:09:53.400 I'll give you some more details when I know we should be going to print probably in January

01:10:00.860 here.

01:10:01.560 But there's quite a bit of lag time.

01:10:03.560 So I can't give any hard dates at the moment.

01:10:05.880 I just say that because I've had a number of people recently asking, popping in, saying,

01:10:10.220 hey, where's that book?

01:10:11.100 I heard about the book.

01:10:11.780 When's it coming?

01:10:12.380 I didn't get to read some of that, and I want to catch up with it.

01:10:15.500 So I'll let you know that is still coming.

01:10:16.980 Don't worry.

01:10:17.600 It's in the pipeline.

01:10:18.500 It's just, you know, it takes a little bit to turn those things around.

01:10:21.380 But I will let you guys know as soon as I have more information on the total state when

01:10:25.800 you can do pre-orders and that kind of thing.

01:10:27.740 That said, of course, if it's your first time on the channel, please go ahead and subscribe.

01:10:33.220 And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, please make sure that you subscribe

01:10:36.920 to the Orr McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:10:39.640 When you do leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm.

01:10:43.260 All right, guys, thank you once again for coming by.

01:10:45.720 Thanks to the Prudentialist.

01:10:46.820 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - October 02, 2023

The Nature of Sovereignty ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸2⧸23

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