Joseph DeMestre is one of the most important thinkers in American history. He was a counter-Enlightenment thinker and counter-modernist in the early 20th century, and is widely regarded as one of America s most influential thinkers. In this episode, we discuss his ideas and how they apply to the modern world.
00:01:00.580That'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.
00:01:11.540And so today I wanted to go ahead and get into the works of Joseph DeMestre with you guys.
00:01:15.960But before we do that, let me introduce you to my friend and co-host here today, The Prudentialist.
00:01:56.440He's writing very often in response to Rousseau, which we'll see in the material that we're getting to here.
00:02:01.740And he really is a counter-Enlightenment thinker is what many people would call the original reactionary.
00:02:08.020You know, him and Thomas Carlyle are often cited as some of the original reactionaries.
00:02:11.260One 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.
00:02:22.880Carl Schmitt's very effective, very to the point.
00:02:25.740So it's often easier to just cite him.
00:02:27.480But 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.
00:02:35.560And also, as Christians, as believers, he does bring a theological bent.
00:02:40.280You know, he does not strip out the theological content behind many of his arguments.
00:02:45.860And I think that's really important because today, even many Christians feel like the only arguments they can ever make are secular.
00:02:51.760The only reasoning they can ever present is a completely secular argument.
00:02:55.740And DeMestre really comes from a period where Christian arguments are assumed to be completely rational, completely fundamental, completely within the intellectual tradition.
00:03:07.040And so he makes no, you know, he's not hesitating when he brings those arguments to the table.
00:03:11.300He makes no apologies for kind of the way that he approaches those issues.
00:03:14.680And so that's why I find much of his philosophy refreshing, because he's bringing a perspective that we don't normally see.
00:03:22.160Yeah, 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.
00:03:34.740Like, without DeMestre, you don't get some of the best sort of Schmitt bangers that are out there.
00:03:39.300And, you know, we talk about, you know, Schmitt, or we talk about some of the more modern reactionary thinkers.
00:03:44.600But there was a time, like you said, where it was it was Christianity first in your argumentation.
00:03:49.220And 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.
00:03:55.420You need to go to Sir Robert Filmer in Patriarcha.
00:03:57.960These more Christian and theologically oriented defense of, you know, kingship, the divine right of kings and the Christian ideal of monarchy and sovereignty.
00:04:08.580And it's a great time that we get to discuss this today.
00:04:12.000Absolutely. I've spoken on his on his work on the Constitution pretty often, but I haven't gotten into this work.
00:04:20.020But I think it is very important. It's not very long. So people want to read it for themselves.
00:04:24.400It's not a whole book. It's a long essay.
00:04:27.220You know, so but it's not impossible to get through.
00:04:30.520So if it's something that you want to explore on your own, that is available to you.
00:04:33.320But I want to work through here. It is longer than we're going to be able to get through today.
00:04:37.700But, you know, I've worked through these works with with people like Alexander Dugan and Nick Land.
00:04:43.620And so many people enjoyed those series.
00:04:45.880I wanted to go ahead and do a series with DeMestre here.
00:04:48.540And 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.
00:04:57.740Now, 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.
00:05:12.760He worked. He was a member of the Senate there, I believe.
00:05:15.340And then he was a Russian ambassador and then he was an officer at court.
00:05:18.780And so he was constantly involved in government there.
00:05:22.360That is something that he was always a part of alongside with his writings.
00:05:26.860But that's why he eventually ends up writing things like the St. Petersburg dialogues, because he's kind of had those experiences over time.
00:05:34.340So just just a little context in there. He's writing in the late 1700s, early 1800s.
00:05:39.820You know, the American Revolution is still relatively young.
00:05:42.660They're not sure how this whole thing is going to shake out.
00:07:02.360And this is where we're going to begin to see that Christian theology get placed into here.
00:07:07.580Is that, you know, if someone is to be sovereign, then this must come from something that's divinely ordained.
00:07:12.960And you're going to see a lot of that Robert Filmer Patriarcha Institute there.
00:07:16.800And 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.
00:07:25.200And if you, you know, give the rights and sovereignty to other people, you've you've abdicated your own ability to rule.
00:07:32.640And 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.
00:07:43.480We just kind of throw them out there, but we don't actually link them to the practice of this kind of thing.
00:07:48.840And that's what Demestra is most certainly going to lay out here.
00:07:51.760This exegesis will not be long in coming, at least in the French system.
00:07:56.660The people, it will be said, exercise their sovereignty by means of their representatives.
00:08:19.660But they then delegate that to someone else and they can never themselves exercise it.
00:08:26.020Then he's saying, OK, so these people are sovereign, but they never actually get to exercise any sovereignty.
00:08:32.080They're supposed to have this total control.
00:08:34.020But 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.
00:08:41.460And those are the people who exercise it.
00:08:43.220And if you're not exercising sovereignty, then you're not sovereign.
00:08:46.700That's kind of the most basic understanding of this.
00:08:50.180It seems kind of obvious, but it's something that we pretty much obscure routinely in the American system.
00:08:58.520And I mean, it's sort of interesting when you think about some of the zanier sides of American politics.
00:09:04.220I 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.
00:09:21.840And de Maistre is like, no, sovereignty is about power.
00:09:25.140It's about who has the authority to make other people obey.
00:09:28.760And so, you know, for the sovereign citizen types, there would, you know, de Maistre would call them barbarians.
00:09:38.080There has been much heated discussion on whether sovereignty comes from God or from men.
00:09:42.600But I do not know if anyone has noticed that both propositions can be true.
00:09:46.540It's certainly true in an inferior and crude sense that sovereignty is based on human consent.
00:09:52.580For if any people decided suddenly not to obey, sovereignty would disappear.
00:09:57.200It's impossible to imagine the establishment of sovereignty without imagining a people with which consents to obey.
00:10:04.380If 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.
00:10:13.300Since 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.
00:10:25.180But 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.
00:10:36.640So 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?
00:10:44.000Or is it something that's completely derived from man?
00:10:51.400He 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.
00:11:01.220This 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.
00:11:41.280Every 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.
00:11:54.680And since he has willed society, he has willed also the sovereignty and laws without which there would be no society.
00:12:02.120Thus, laws come from God in the sense that he wills that there should be laws and that they should be obeyed.
00:12:08.560Yet 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.
00:12:26.020However, 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.
00:12:54.680It 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.
00:13:08.300So he's saying it's basically an argument of the natural order here, right?
00:13:12.400We see that routinely societies emerge in this way that God has ordered humans to live in this way.
00:13:21.760And 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.
00:13:37.320And there can well, you know, we'll get there. There will be justifiable reason to oppose laws here.
00:13:41.940He'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.
00:13:55.080And of course, this is just straight out of the Bible. This is just straight out of the New Testament.
00:13:59.700So 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.
00:14:09.000There isn't one type of government. So the different governments will be reflective of different peoples, different traditions.
00:14:14.440But still, that doesn't mean that God was not involved in their creation.
00:14:18.800Yeah, 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.
00:14:29.560And 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.
00:14:45.180It'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.
00:14:56.800There 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.
00:15:06.220And they are different, whereas here, you know, he's equating them to be rather similar or non-contradictory.
00:15:11.560It's an interesting difference of opinion.
00:15:13.580And 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.
00:15:23.280But 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.
00:15:33.800And 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.
00:15:43.980If 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.
00:15:52.000All right. So the second chapter here again, these chapters are extremely short.
00:15:56.680They're like a page, you know, usually or two at most.
00:15:59.540So we will be able to get through a couple of them today.
00:16:02.300But chapter to hear origin of society is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.
00:16:11.000The mysteries that surround him on all sides are not sufficient for him.
00:16:15.320He 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.
00:16:27.140Man, there's just old school dunking on midwits midwits right here, right?
00:16:31.500Just like you're just constructing a bunch of jargon so that you can sound smart.
00:16:40.200You know, the genius is on the other build in the bell curve.
00:16:43.420You sitting there with your pronouncements, your complicated jargon.
00:16:46.540You're sitting in the middle looking like an idiot.
00:16:48.260So, 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.
00:17:00.280All sorts of metaphysical theories have been put forward to support airy hypotheses rejected by common sense and experience.
00:17:08.980If the causes of origins of society are posed as a problem, it is obviously assumed that there was a human era before society.
00:17:17.280But this is precisely what needs to be proved.
00:17:20.340Doubtless, it will not be denied that the earth is a whole intended for man's inhabitation or habitation.
00:17:26.940Now, 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.
00:17:36.420For the nature of being is to exist as the creator has willed it.
00:17:40.520And this will will is made perfectly plain in those facts.
00:17:44.600The isolated man, therefore, by no is no means the man of nature.
00:17:49.140When a handful of men are scattered across vast territories, humanity was not what it has become.
00:17:55.680At that time, there are only families and these scattered families, either individually or by their subsequent union, were nothing but embryonic peoples.
00:18:03.560So right here, he's going directly at, again, what is a very common enlightenment construct of the state of nature, right?
00:18:12.280It's this idea that there before civilizations, every man was for himself and, you know, by himself isolated.
00:18:21.180Everyone's an isolated, atomized individual.
00:18:23.700And only after we've entered into these social contracts or whatever, can we actually then begin the work of society.
00:18:42.960People were made to live, you know, in continuous contact with each other.
00:18:47.960Social organizations are a natural, emergent part of the kind of the natural order.
00:18:54.500And 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.
00:19:11.040There's no actual reflection of reality.
00:19:14.300Yeah, 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.
00:19:41.720And he says it quite clearly as embryonic peoples.
00:19:56.000Because 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.
00:20:09.240It'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.
00:20:23.720We see it at the beginning here in the state of nature.
00:20:26.400But 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.
00:20:34.200He's the updated touchstone for liberalism.
00:20:36.640And 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.
00:20:49.300And from that, we can just kind of construct the perfect equal society, you know, assuming that we don't know anything about ourselves.
00:20:56.180And that is just a just a compound of the air that Demestri is identifying early on in the Enlightenment.
00:21:03.040He's saying this is already a problem. Right.
00:21:05.380And so we're going to see this this metastasize and become even more abstract and more ridiculous.
00:21:11.880The truth is people are grounded in tradition. People are grounded in these connections.
00:21:17.900The 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.
00:21:38.040And 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.
00:21:53.880So 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.
00:22:04.580And so long after the formation of the Great Societies, some small desert tribes still shows us the spectacle of humanity in its infancy.
00:22:14.720There are still infant nations that are not yet what they are to become.
00:22:18.400What 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?
00:22:32.180Yet 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.
00:22:46.740Every question about the nature of man must be resolved by his history.
00:23:11.680So he makes the point that that that Prudentialist was alluding to there.
00:23:15.640Right. 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.
00:23:26.160Right. We yes, that is a proto society in some ways.
00:23:31.100But 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.
00:23:43.620And that makes no sense to explain what a human being is.
00:23:47.260You must look at the entirety of the human experience.
00:23:50.660You must look at how it looks at every level of its development and then explain it in its totality.
00:23:56.400And 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.
00:24:12.120And 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.
00:24:22.920He's just smuggling in his own preference.
00:24:24.720He's just bringing in his own emotions, his own preferences, his own biases.
00:24:29.880And 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.
00:24:43.840I want to replace that with my own preferences.
00:24:47.400And 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.
00:25:41.140Uh, every question about the nature of man must be resolved by history.
00:25:45.460The philosopher who wants to show us, uh, by, or, sorry, picked up a little late there.
00:25:51.060Let 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.
00:26:15.440This 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.
00:26:26.060His, uh, history continually shows us men joined together in more or less numerous societies ruled by different sovereignties.
00:26:35.420Once they have, uh, multiplied beyond a certain point that cannot exist in another fashion.
00:26:41.060So he's just, again, dunking directly on Rousseau here.
00:26:43.960He's like, take that noble savage, savage myth, right?
00:26:46.620He's like, look, you can look at people living in a less complicated way in a, in a, in an earlier version of civilization.
00:26:55.840But 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.
00:27:08.000Anyways, 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.
00:27:16.240You 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.
00:27:25.620It's very unlikely that they're going to go back.
00:27:27.880They'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.
00:27:47.640He says, you, you can't just turn, you can't just return back to, you know, this, this prior level of, uh, social organization.
00:27:55.440And 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.
00:28:08.620I mean, John Michael Greer points out in Retrotopia, like you can't force a technological regression.
00:28:14.220And 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.
00:28:25.720I mean, that's why we have that whole apocalyptic fiction genre, because we're curious how that would happen.
00:28:33.800And 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.
00:28:49.000You 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.
00:29:01.980Yeah. 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.
00:29:15.320You'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.
00:29:33.420You know, people people can Mad Max it at some point.
00:29:35.720But even if you Mad Max it, there's still a car, right?
00:29:38.560Like, you're still hunting for gas to fill the engine.
00:29:40.920So, 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.
00:29:51.880Some of that technological aspect will be in, you know, an indelible, leave its indelible mark on humanity.
00:29:58.360And that's kind of what we're getting at there.
00:31:15.220To talk of a state of nature in the opposition to the social state is to talk nonsense voluntarily.
00:31:21.580The word nature is one of those general terms which, like all abstract terms, are open to abuse.
00:31:28.300In 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.
00:31:56.040Thus, 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.
00:32:06.480And the nature or essence of the balance wheel is to have such and such a form, dimensions, and position.
00:32:13.680Otherwise, it would no longer be able to be a balance wheel and could not fulfill its functions.
00:32:20.480The nature of a viper is to crawl, to have scaly skin, hollow and movable things which exude poison venom.
00:32:27.560And the nature of man is to be a cognitive, religious, and sociable animal.
00:32:32.220All the experience teaches us this, and to my knowledge, nothing has contradicted this experience.
00:32:40.420If 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.
00:32:50.760In the meantime, we will believe what must be and what has always been.
00:32:55.820So, again, he's attacking this idea that you can just find some initial state of nature, some starting point.
00:33:04.740And from that starting point, you can then say, all right, guys, we're drawing up all the rules.
00:33:41.200And those governments come to reflect those things, not the other way around.
00:33:45.120You 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.
00:33:52.460Instead, you exist as a human, just like all animals exist in their own way.
00:33:57.920And 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.
00:34:07.120And that will then be reflected in the kind of government that emerges when you formalize it down the road.
00:34:13.160Yeah, 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.
00:34:31.480If 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.
00:34:43.580And 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.
00:34:59.340You 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.
00:35:08.020And if anything, as he points out, it's up to you to prove it.
00:35:10.900And history has, I think, illustrated that it has not worked out so well.
00:35:14.220Yeah, that shifting of the burden of proof there, saying, like, look, this is obviously the emergent order.
00:35:20.100This 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.
00:35:26.200You 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.
00:35:35.060Like, no, you can't just create these philosophical constructs to reset humanity.
00:35:39.680The nature and the history of peoples is what's going to determine their social order, unless you have some other way to prove otherwise.
00:36:07.000But let us leave these difficult difficulties.
00:36:10.100Such questions are endless with a man who misuses every term and defines none.
00:36:15.540I like, again, dunking on Rousseau here.
00:36:18.280It reminds me of our friend David Distributus and his magical words, right?
00:36:23.780This is kind of the original attack on magical words, full of emotion and full of political energy, but devoid of any actual rational content.
00:36:34.640One has the right, at least, to ask him to prove the big assertion that the social order does not come from nature.
00:36:42.320I must, he says himself, establish that I have what I have just advanced.
00:36:49.860But the way in which he goes about it is truly curious.
00:36:52.500He 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.
00:37:12.880It lacked only the majestic formula of geometers, which must be proved.
00:37:18.740It 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.
00:37:35.820Before 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.
00:37:47.100For this act being necessary, previous to the others, is the true foundation of society.
00:37:52.960This 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.
00:38:07.240Let 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.
00:38:20.700So, 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.
00:38:30.220This is how one reasons when one separates man from divinity.
00:38:36.760Rather 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.
00:38:57.460So, 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.
00:39:11.160And by doing so, he basically just opens himself up to all of these criticisms that he is throwing at other people.
00:39:18.320Really just, again, going at Rousseau on a regular basis, you will see plenty of this throughout Demaestra.
00:39:24.160Yeah, and I think it's really important to highlight this section here.
00:39:29.600Not 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.
00:39:41.620Rousseau 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,
00:39:49.340not 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.
00:40:00.940That first convention, as he's sort of been advocating for a more democratic, a less sort of monarchic sense of order.
00:40:07.680And that this is the way in which man can become a social creature.
00:40:11.500Whereas 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.
00:40:28.600Man was an aggressive animal. It established order and hierarchy on its own, on a basis of strength, on a basis of power.
00:40:37.060And those things, of course, lead to rulers, kings, sovereigns, those who rule over those that can order the others.
00:40:43.460For Demaestra and for any Christian, this is kind of divinely ordained.
00:40:47.820Like, you know, this is where he and Sir Robert Filmer talk about this all the time, that like God has ordained kingship.
00:40:53.000God has ordained a ruler over, you know, an ordained patriarchy, hence the Filmer's work being called Patriarcha.
00:41:00.100And 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.
00:41:10.280Whereas 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.
00:41:20.980And all that Rousseau is advocating for is to divorce us from the very nature he says we're actually based on.
00:41:27.620So 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.
00:41:43.540And 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?
00:41:52.220So 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.
00:42:10.280And because there's no debate there, then there's no opportunity for this guy to kind of generate energy.
00:42:16.580But if these people can come in and they can say, well, what if that wasn't the case, right?
00:42:21.000Like, what if we can cut these ties to divinity?
00:42:24.080What if we can cut these ties to the idea of a natural order?
00:42:28.440What if we can tie this to something else or, you know, something that is pre this or abstract?
00:42:33.820Then we can remake the rules ourselves, right?
00:42:39.940And so it's just this beginning, you know, of deconstruction.
00:42:43.800It's this beginning of leftism as deconstruction coming in, tearing apart what was already understood, already known.
00:42:50.200Demestri says, look, this is already simple.
00:42:51.840Like, 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.
00:43:05.440Might 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.
00:43:22.840Surely God intended some sort of end in creating man.
00:43:26.140The question can thus be reduced to whether man has become a political animal, as Aristotle put it, through or against the divine will.
00:43:35.440Although 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.
00:43:49.740The word nature has been given, has given rise to a multitude of errors.
00:43:54.480Let me repeat that the nature of any being is the sum of the qualities attributed to it by the creator.
00:44:01.360With immeasurable profundity, Burke said that art is man's nature.
00:44:39.460There's a purpose for him, and that is his right way to exist.
00:44:43.000And 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.
00:44:58.240He 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.
00:45:09.700No, 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.
00:45:21.040And 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.
00:45:32.000No, 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.
00:45:44.660They 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.
00:45:53.200Yeah, 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.
00:46:08.380All 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.
00:46:15.300Let me say, well, no, chapter three is really short. We'll do that.
00:46:17.120Yeah, 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.
00:46:23.440All right, so chapter three, sovereignty in general. If sovereignty is not anterior to the people, at least these two ideas are collateral,
00:46:34.340since 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.
00:46:47.380For 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.
00:46:58.500It is impossible to separate these two ideas. Imagine an isolated man.
00:47:03.240There is no question of laws or government, since he is not a whole man, and society does not exist.
00:47:09.400Put this man in contact with his fellow man from this moment, you suppose, a sovereign.
00:47:17.300The first man was a king over his children. Every isolated family was governed in the same way.
00:47:26.460Once 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.
00:47:38.880Everyone knows the famous line, the first king was a fortunate soldier.
00:47:44.580This is perhaps one of the falsest claims that has ever been made.
00:47:47.740Quite the opposite could be said. The first soldier was paid by a king.
00:47:52.360There was a people, some sort of civilization, and a sovereign as soon as men came into contact.
00:47:59.540The word people is a relative term that has no meaning divorced from the idea of sovereignty.
00:48:06.320The idea of a people involves that of an aggregation around a common center.
00:48:11.380And without sovereignty, there could be no political unity or cohesion.
00:48:16.160So this is short, but there's a lot packed in here that I think is really important.
00:48:19.960I think it also, interestingly, answers some things that are debated often in the online right, some causalities here.
00:48:28.660So the first thing he lays out here is the idea that a people would not exist without a sovereign.
00:48:36.880And this is, again, the opposite of what we usually think about, especially in the American tradition, right?
00:48:49.360And then the ruler is then kind of selected from them.
00:48:54.500He's saying that these things that even if the ruler does not pre-exist society, it has to exist simultaneously.
00:49:00.620These things have to have to be created simultaneously because what would a people be?
00:49:07.060How would they even operate without something leading them?
00:49:09.940How would any social coordination ever emerge if there was a leader?
00:49:14.360And he brings in this idea that, you know, even a family in isolation, the father serves as the first sovereign, right?
00:49:21.520He's the organizer of the original kind of, you know, political body, which is the smallest one, the unit of the family.
00:49:29.540And 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.
00:49:43.580Yeah, 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.
00:49:56.980And 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.
00:50:06.680It comes from people coming together and acknowledging that they submit to a sovereign authority.
00:50:13.220And without that sovereign authority, peoples do not exist.
00:50:16.740And 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.
00:50:25.580If the first king was a fortunate soldier, he points out that that's false, because even then the first king is the father.
00:50:31.740And 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.
00:50:43.500You know, civilization has always been around, you know, and the first form of civilization has always been family.
00:50:49.160So, 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?
00:51:05.060The sword or the altar that kind of creates, you know, civilization.
00:51:10.600Oftentimes, 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.
00:51:20.100You need to have the authority of the king before you get civilization.
00:51:23.900And 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.
00:51:34.260It'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.
00:51:43.200And interestingly here, you know, you kind of bring about that.
00:51:46.180Well, no, even, you know, those those that war band has to come from somewhere, right?
00:51:50.460That they have to at the very least, it emerged from families and in those families, there were proto king.
00:51:56.680There were there was a patriarchy that preexisted this.
00:52:00.180And 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?
00:52:09.600You 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?
00:52:18.100And the answer is those things aren't really separable in many ways, right?
00:52:22.520Like 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.
00:52:40.340Yeah, 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.
00:52:54.940Because 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.
00:53:00.500But like I said, I'm not an anthropologist. But, you know, even those war bands, they came from, you know, they were excess men.
00:53:06.520They were men that couldn't either find wives there or, you know, there were just there are the rest were taken.
00:53:11.920And 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.
00:53:22.700Even in that sort of what might be constituted as a barbarian sense, there's still sovereignty.
00:53:27.680They recognize that there's nothing here for us. You know, we know that there is sacred tradition.
00:53:32.220We can go out, conquer and explore and become kings ourselves.
00:53:35.980And 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.
00:53:52.560At 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.
00:54:00.300You need to have people that can do both.
00:54:02.620I 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.
00:54:10.740And I think that that's sort of crass. But I think that there's the semblance that not everyone is to be wed.
00:54:16.440Not everyone is going to have children, but other people can establish sovereignty through you.
00:54:21.240We are meant to be subjects to somewhere else.
00:54:23.400And 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.
00:54:36.860And 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.
00:54:43.380And 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.
00:54:54.620And this is the way it's always been. And that's a good thing.
00:54:57.360And it doesn't recognize that maybe there is hierarchy that you actually need law and order.
00:55:02.140You 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.
00:55:13.100And 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.
00:55:20.000They've always been intertwined throughout antiquity.
00:55:21.920Yeah, we'll have to stop here for today, but we most will most certainly continue this series.
00:55:28.080This just gives you kind of the basics of what sovereignty, where does it come from, you know, the origins, those things.
00:55:35.000But we will definitely dive deeper into this as we continue working our way through this essay.
00:55:40.240But we do have limited time, so we'll stop with the third chapter today.
00:55:44.660Let's go over to our super chats real quick, real quick.
00:55:48.100Creeper Weirdo for $2, Anti-Enlightenment with Oren and the Frogman.
00:56:58.280Schmidt is focused on constitutional order.
00:57:00.540And so he's talking about the times in which the exception would arise to that constitutional order.
00:57:06.800If 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.
00:57:16.240Though for Schmidt, those things pop up far more often than kind of the modern person usually thinks.
00:57:21.680Yeah, and this is why de Meister doesn't talk about it.
00:57:24.060But 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.
00:57:31.760Well, 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.
00:57:41.660And 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.
00:57:49.880And 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.
00:58:04.720And Schmidt highlights that that's a problem, especially in parliamentary democracy.
00:58:08.640It also happens here in America, which causes the sovereign to emerge during those, you know, states of emergency or states of exception.
00:58:14.640And this is why you can't read Schmidt without reading de Meister.
00:58:18.260And 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.
00:58:26.580They'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.
00:58:33.740And people are like, well, no, of course they can't.
00:58:41.080And 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.
00:58:59.560So, like, right now, our government is constantly ruling in a state of exception because all of our traditions have broken down.
00:59:06.780All of our shared values have broken down.
00:59:09.640And so the government constantly violates them because why wouldn't it?
00:59:14.740The 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.
00:59:24.520That's enough rules and regulations exist to, you know, to make a neutral, you know, bureaucracy.
00:59:30.740That is not what controls government power.
00:59:33.860What 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.
00:59:53.260That is what binds sovereignty, not your ability to scream, but my second amendment.
01:00:25.100When are you guys going to talk about AI art?
01:00:27.640Uh, 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.
01:00:37.000They've got, uh, their podcast together, the, uh, Gulag Archipelago.
01:00:40.820I'm sure geo has many thoughts on, uh, on AI art.
01:00:44.700So if, if you're looking for that opinion, that's probably the place.
01:00:47.260Yeah, maybe, maybe geo and I'll talk about it.
01:00:49.420We're, we're live every Thursday at two 15 PM Eastern.