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00:01:21.200All right, guys. Well, we have been reading through John Glubb's essay about the fate of empires. And this week, we're going to be picking up in the section where he discusses religion and he discusses the welfare state. Both of these are critical aspects of how a empire becomes decadent and tends to come apart. So we'll go ahead and get the text up here on the screen and get started.
00:01:45.760joining me as always for these readings is our great friend news fist thank you so much for
00:01:51.520coming back man always a pleasure uh i mean we are approaching the end of the globe um i mean
00:01:58.000this is a really really crucial part the welfare state has been the bane of empires
00:02:01.740for thousands thousands of years so yeah i agree and obviously the fact that uh you know now uh
00:02:10.060You know, my friend Morgoth always says that at this point, the UK is basically a the NHS with a country attached, you know, and increasingly, obviously, with the rise of Zorah Mamdani and everybody else, the United States is heading right towards the same fate.
00:02:26.340Everybody can do the math when it comes to Social Security, and they know that it's going to be insolvent in a decade and a half or so.
00:02:33.120And so ultimately, we're all facing this, you know, some of us a little earlier than others, perhaps, but critical.
00:02:38.860And of course, I'm not the smallest government guy in the world, as conservatives go. I do think that the government has a role. But I think we can both agree that ultimately a state that props up the existence of its people wholesale is always going to put them into a very bad place.
00:02:54.000but that said let's go to oh sorry the the uk at the moment captures more than 50 percent of the0.75
00:03:00.500entire income of the country uh at the height of the soviet union under stalin even it only managed
00:03:06.660to capture 30 percent um so it's more you know it's more appropriate to talk about the uk as a
00:03:11.800government uh with like some stuff wrapped around it and i think this is the process by which this
00:03:17.800happens all right let's get to the text here we're on uh number 25 political ideology today we attach
00:03:27.260immense importance to the ideology of our internal politics the press public media in the usa and
00:03:33.900britain poor incessant scorn on any country uh country the political institutions of which differ
00:03:40.640in any manner from our own idea of democracy it is therefore interesting to note that the life
00:03:46.060expectancy of great nations does not appear to be in any way affected by the nature of its
00:03:50.580institutions past empires show almost every possible variation of political system but all
00:03:55.980go through the same procedure from the age of pioneers through conquest commerce affluence to
00:04:02.060decline and collapse all right so i talk about this a lot i think it's really important the
00:04:08.100fact that we are ignoring the condition of our countries for political ideology is really
00:04:14.340dangerous. The fact that we think that we can just kind of engineer through ideas in and of
00:04:19.560themselves, the perfect society, one that will last in perpetuity, I think is very dangerous.
00:04:24.800I will say, I think Glove might overstate his case here some. We've already looked at his
00:04:29.220examples of empires, and we said that some of those were kind of shaky, especially depending
00:04:33.660on how you begin and end the Roman Empire and whether you count the Byzantine Empire as part
00:04:38.140of that. And I think even if you look at the Byzantine Empire by itself, it goes on for longer
00:04:42.120than 250 years so i think there is something to the idea that some systems are more reliable than
00:04:48.460others but i do think he's right that ultimately there whether no matter how you have set up your
00:04:54.260system set up your institutions no matter how you have uh kind of rearranged your political ideology
00:04:59.580there are trends and forces that are inevitable inside civilizations and larger empires and if
00:05:05.600you ignore those uh to say that well we figured it out because we brought together like the best
00:05:10.500constitution or the best you know you're kind of deluding yourself about the issues your
00:05:15.600civilization is actually facing yeah and glob does not uh really get into monetary debasement
00:05:22.480either which i i think is a very very crucial mechanism that can also be applied to like
00:05:27.740many empires yeah you've mentioned that repeatedly and and i think that the just the evidence from
00:05:33.100someone like say diocletian who didn't know anything about inflation but did exactly what
00:05:37.380you're talking about just naturally kind of shows us that even when people didn't understand
00:05:41.440monetary theory they still always went into exactly that cycle you're talking about so
00:05:46.160whether you understand the ideology or not whether you have the abstract knowledge or not
00:05:49.360you do fall subject to exactly the kind of forces that you're highlighting you can you can see very
00:05:53.660easily how this happens okay right like an empire grows big sooner or later they need you know money
00:06:00.340for like a works project or like there's a war or somebody gets like an ego and they're like you
00:06:07.100know emperor we're out of money and the emperor is like what do you mean we're out of money and
00:06:12.200and of course they they think that well i mean because they've been operating under this idea
00:06:16.760that money it's it's just money right if we had more coins right we could do more stuff instead
00:06:22.420of realizing that money is just sort of you know a representation of stuff even when like you know
00:06:28.340people talk about going back to gold and silver but there are also some empires that collapsed
00:06:32.800after they discovered great quantities of gold or silver and debased the monetary supply in that way
00:06:39.120right like gold and silver itself became much more common which lowered the value of every single
00:06:43.540gold and silver coin it's like this sort of just this idea if we've got more money we've got more
00:06:48.760stuff and but it always gets taken too far um so funny enough in american history that sorry i
00:06:55.580know we're trying to move on but this is too relevant so in american history there's a really
00:07:00.400interesting example of this. So everyone thinks of inflationary spending as something that the
00:07:04.780rich want to do. And in today's economy, it is. However, in the late 1800s in the United States,
00:07:10.540it was actually the poor farmers who were pushing for a debased currency because they were heavily
00:07:15.780leveraged into their farms. They had all taken out massive loans with the bank. And so actually
00:07:21.220the bi-medalists, the people who wanted to introduce silver as well as gold into the
00:07:26.500standard because it would ultimately allow for inflation the creation of more uh currency and
00:07:32.300most importantly uh inflate away their debts and so actually the populist candidates were the one
00:07:37.400pushing for inflation into inflationary uh economics uh and it was the uh rich who were
00:07:43.700pushing back against it that only flipped uh when the rich figured out that they could go into deep
00:07:48.740leverage debt to generate that volume uh in american history so it's it really is more about
00:07:54.560who sees the advantage of inflating their way out of debt uh more than it is necessarily uh even
00:08:01.640actually like the rich or the poor the ruling class or uh you know anyone else well it also
00:08:07.320depends who gets the money first um yes you know about the cantillon effect yes i presume right so
00:08:12.840you know for the listeners the cantillon effect is when money is created whoever gets the money
00:08:18.220first gets to use that money to buy stuff at the price that everything is at currently and then as
00:08:23.820the money gets spent into the economy the price of the thing rises because you know it's it's being
00:08:28.420bought and then you know as it as it sort of filters out the first sort of three people that
00:08:34.380get the money transfer they get an incredible advantage the last three or more people uh it
00:08:40.000they get screwed essentially so it's it's also about who gets the money first and then and then
00:08:46.420there is the lie that we're told well it's not really a lie but it's it's a fudge okay the idea
00:08:51.600behind inflation or modern economies are based on this idea is that as the economy grows you want
00:08:56.880to keep the amount of money sort of in line with the amount of growth you don't want a fixed amount
00:09:02.560of money and the amount of stuff in the economy like growing then you get like deflation the
00:09:06.720problem is that you can never accurately gauge how much everything's going to grow number one
00:09:11.120and number two there are all these perverse incentives particularly of government because
00:09:14.940you can print money and get around taxes right like why go to the bother of like taxing everyone
00:09:19.620if you can just print the money at source it's still a tax but particularly before electronic
00:09:24.980money right taxation you'd have to actually go to people's farms and you know with rifles and be
00:09:30.340like give us some of your grain and people would hide the grain it'd be like a hole to do just
00:09:35.380making the money itself right like at source it was like far far easier so you you get this sort
00:09:41.280of like devil's bargain where it always seems to wind up that a government winds up printing more0.96
00:09:46.140money than the actual economy expands right 100 all right so you want to get us the mamaluk empire
00:09:52.520there the 26 the mamaluk empire the empire of the mamalukes of egypt provides a case in point for
00:10:00.940it was one of the most exotic ever to be recorded in history uh glob of course was a an arab he was
00:10:07.160not an arab but he he studied uh arab arabia a lot he was an arab scholar uh it is also exceptional
00:10:15.000in that it began on one fixed day and ended on another leaving no doubt of its precise duration
00:10:19.820which was 267 years in the first part of the 13th century egypt and syria were ruled by the
00:10:27.640abayid sultans the descendants of the family of saladin their army consisted of mamelukes
00:10:33.920slaves imported as boys from the steppes and trained as professional soldiers on 1st of may
00:16:18.760The Abbasid Calus of Baghdad declare that God had appointed them
00:16:24.980to rule mankind until the day of judgment.
00:16:27.780Seventy years ago, many people in Britain believed
00:16:30.300that the empire would endure forever.0.67
00:16:33.260Although Hitler failed to achieve his objectives,0.91
00:16:36.060he declared that germany would rule the world for a thousand years that sentiment uh that
00:16:41.360sentiments like these could be publicly expressed without evoking derision shows that in all ages
00:16:47.440the regular rise and fall of great nations has passed uh unperceived the simplest statistics
00:16:53.560prove the steady rotation of our nation after another at regular intervals the belief that
00:16:59.060their that their nation would rule the world forever naturally encouraged the citizens of
00:17:03.920the leading nation of any period to attribute their uh preeminence to hereditary virtues
00:17:10.120they carried in their blood they believed qualities which constitute them as a race of
00:17:15.500supermen an illusion which inclined them to the employment of cheap foreign labor or slaves to
00:17:20.920perform menial tasks and engage in foreign mercenaries to fight their battles or to sail0.69
00:17:25.400their ships these poor these poor peoples were only too happy to migrate to the wealthy cities0.99
00:17:30.880of the empire and thereby, as we have seen, to adulterate the close-knit homogeneous character0.96
00:17:37.300of the conquering race. The latter unconsciously assume that they would always be the leaders of
00:17:42.880mankind, relax their energies, and spend an increasing part of their time in leisure,
00:17:48.480amusement, or sport. In recent years, the idea has spread widely in the West that progress
00:17:54.700will be automatic without effort, that everyone will continue to grow richer and richer,
00:17:59.400and that every year will show a rise in the standard of living we have not drawn from history
00:18:04.440the obvious conclusion that material success is the result of courage endurance and hard work
00:18:10.260a conclusion nevertheless obvious for the history of the meteoric rise of our ancestors this uh this
00:18:17.480self-assurance of our own superiority seems to go hand in hand with the luxury uh resulting from
00:18:23.880wealth and in undermining the character of the dominant race so again you know the examples as
00:18:30.840he lays out here are numerous you can think of you know the rome as the eternal city or the sun0.77
00:18:35.580never sets on the british empire germany declaring their thousand year right and now even today in
00:18:41.160america i have a lot of people who i keep warning about where they're at and they say could never
00:18:46.580happen to us entirely different age entirely different situation you know we have we're not
00:18:51.820going to fall prey to any of these forces we can ignore this we're going to be dominant forever
00:18:55.960there's simply no other power to take up our place but of course as glove points out that's
00:19:00.640not what happens it's not about great powers defeating great powers i mean that does happen
00:19:04.260but it's not the core mechanism by which these civilizations rotate i think it makes the really
00:19:10.060good point here that a lot of these people due to their superiority believe that they can bring
00:19:14.760in slaves or in the case of america now debt servants and say oh well because we are so
00:19:20.500superior to the people we're bringing in we never have to worry about this or in the case of america
00:19:25.360we're so superior that everyone we bring in will assimilate to our way of being they're all going0.96
00:19:29.460to recognize that our way of life is the way to do things and so it doesn't matter how many fours0.92
00:19:33.380we bring in because they'll be americans in one generation will they'll touch the magic dirt0.85
00:19:37.320they'll get all the principles downloaded into their brain from the constitution and we'll be
00:19:41.300great and over and over again we see that this falls into the same pattern of decadence and
00:19:46.280decline as the population refuses to do the work of building the empire actually fighting its
00:19:51.280battles again america right now we can see that we're importing people to you know pick the crops
00:19:56.580and drive the trucks and run the gas stations but increasingly now those people are coding the
00:20:02.160computers they're running the larger businesses they're running the tech companies that all
00:20:06.540americans wanted to run and so we thought ourselves superior enough to bring in as many
00:20:11.000as we wanted to do those menial tasks and now they are starting to dominate those areas also0.95
00:20:17.000if you check out most american military units you'll find gonzalez to be the most common name
00:20:23.420among them once again the roman romans brought in plenty of goths and other germanic peoples
00:20:29.320to fight their battles for them and this spelled the doom of rome just as it will in america i'm
00:20:35.240sorry i love people serving in military but once gonzalez becomes the average name of the guy in
00:20:40.780the military well you're not really seeing americans fighting for america anymore oh or you
00:20:46.340could have the what you have in in uh the uk and other countries in in europe where um you have a
00:20:53.140large muslim population and the government is totally cagey about even enlisting them into the
00:20:57.820army and giving them weapons because you know nobody knows like what will happen well everyone1.00
00:21:02.300knows what will happen like quite frankly the government just doesn't want to admit that you
00:21:05.040know they they have a loyalty to their own culture and their own religion i think this uh i mean this
00:21:12.940is a very interesting observation by uh club i mean i i must take issue with his uh use of the
00:21:18.720word race there i mean are the americans even a race are the english even a race i mean it kind
00:21:25.020of says something actually that we have moved from this sort of conception where both the english and
00:21:29.320the americans are clearly a race to the now modern conception of uh you know oh you know
00:21:34.760are americans even a race anymore no one would have disputed this in in glob's time you know
00:21:40.380and you could say i think this is sort of part of the great fraying of that he's that he's talking
00:21:45.560about right where in order to i guess have the same i mean this is basically the weak view of
00:21:51.740history is what we're talking about here okay the idea that as the future progresses everything will
00:21:56.960just get better and better and we can't you know possibly regress uh backwards and so you know
00:22:03.440whatever we do for like more you know progressiveness and more universal suffrage and
00:22:07.420more and more and more and more it can only it can only be good um yeah it doesn't seem to be
00:22:12.900working out well and it's you know it's a true travesty i mean there's so much about obviously
00:22:20.740uh how the rise of nazi germany just destroyed the ability of us to think in any kind of
00:22:26.360classical understandings of identity or even just basic reality, the terms of ethnos and race and
00:22:32.860nation were all the same. These were the same words throughout most of history. Some people
00:22:38.420would use race as a more macro category for a collection of nations. Sometimes people would
00:22:43.520say, no, it's the Greek race. It's the Roman race. But these were all interchangeable. The idea of
00:22:49.140ethno-nationalism, well, that was just nationalism. That's what nationalism meant. It meant a collection
00:22:53.960of the nation the ethnos and so the idea that these are in any way separate is something that
00:22:59.780is brought about by basically the scientific extraction of race the idea that we can boil
00:23:06.280everything down to genetics which by the way was something that perennial traditionalists like
00:23:10.580evola and spangler were very much against they actually decried the fact that race had been
00:23:16.400turned to something about blood strictly or biology not that those things didn't matter but
00:23:21.140trying to reduce the reality of race to just like the number of things on someone's dna
00:23:27.280is just not true like race is a mixture of all kinds of things one of them is hereditary
00:23:32.260but one of them is you know culture one of them is religion folkways all the things that you get
00:23:38.020from just being baked into existing as a people for hundreds if not thousands of years and no
00:23:44.240matter what you do no matter what you say yes these things do you know manifest at some level
00:23:49.260biology but the rest of them are not and trying to just reduce this down or try to split it apart
00:23:55.160i think is an absolute travesty and it just makes it very difficult for people to understand
00:23:59.800these more classical conceptions of history yeah but when you do that right when you make it about
00:24:05.300all the things that you are talking about it becomes so confused as to make it impossible
00:24:11.700to define the edge of and as soon as you can not define the edge of anything the natural
00:24:17.060uh inclination is to expand it out further and further and further and you get immigrant
00:24:21.020populations and then sooner or later you know it comes undone unfortunately you know i don't know
00:24:26.900how you square the circle on that honestly so i'm actually going to disagree with you a little bit
00:24:31.220about that i think that actually the obsession the modern obsession with hard categories is what
00:24:37.900creates this exact scenario uh you know it used to be in more classical conceptions that we had
00:24:45.480kind of a hard center but fuzzier boundaries when it came to identities even when it came
00:24:50.680to nations you know the idea that there was just this hard line on a map and that's where
00:24:55.500the country ended or the nation ended was completely incorrect right like people bled
00:25:00.460over borders you know germans could be spread over many different areas and not just some
00:25:06.540country named germany right and so it's actually i think the desire to put everything into these
00:25:12.720highly modern scientific categories that actually creates this issue so for instance this is where
00:25:19.020america like this is where conservatives always made this mistake what is a woman right you ask
00:25:24.220that question well we all know the answer like we all know it when we see it we know a woman when we
00:25:29.640see one but when people are asked what is a woman they'll say things like well it's someone with
00:25:34.840the ability to birth a child okay well the first thing a leftist is going to say is okay well what
00:25:40.200about women who can't have children okay well it's women it's people who have ovaries well what
00:25:45.780about women who have had a hysterectomy right like by by trying to make these hard distinctions
00:25:50.960you actually i think often deconstruct real identity as where if you simply take this
00:25:57.300holistically and say look we all know what a woman is we all know the traits we can list some
00:26:01.600of the traits but then we're never going to totally define everything a woman is but we all
00:26:06.420can see and understand it right just the analytical breakdown is actually unhelpful in some ways of
00:26:12.900creating the distinction i'm not saying that the uh the phenomenon you're talking about also doesn't
00:26:18.380happen i'm just saying i i think that actually in some ways it's the modern obsession with hard
00:26:23.760boundaries of identity that can often lead to many of the problems that we're trying to address
00:26:27.720right but that is a terrible way to make policy right you cannot have a government um make a
00:26:34.880policy oh you know who is an american everybody knows what an american is right or have in front
00:26:40.800of the supreme court to answer a question right what is an american oh everybody knows that's not
00:26:45.100how governments work that's not how policies work right the the job of a government really
00:26:49.900is to draw a line somewhere right no matter like you know where that where that line is that's
00:26:57.300you know so i mean yes um you know there are always going to be like fuzzy edge cases but
00:27:02.080if the government itself is weak or refuses to draw a line some kind of line at some point then
00:27:09.600everything begins to delinquiesce it's it's it's one thing to say uh you know that uh you know
00:27:17.320everyone knows an american when they they see one right but if are you going to start issuing
00:27:22.540passports on that basis you know no i i agree with you that there is a necessary legal definition
00:27:28.780and really what it should be is the hardest line definition with which then people again play with
00:27:35.560the boundaries of in certain edge cases as opposed to well we just make it as broad as possible the
00:27:41.340law right like that's that's exactly the wrong model so we definitely agree on that um okay let's
00:27:47.080do the next one right ah yes 28 the welfare state the bane of empires you know i kind of like wonder
00:27:55.440like which which is worse for the state of empire the welfare state or or invasion when the welfare
00:28:01.460state was first introduced in britain it was hailed as a new high watermark in the history of
00:28:07.040human development indeed it was everyone in britain was huffing their own excretions and very
00:28:14.500very very pleased with themselves it was the post-war sort of deal history however seems to
00:28:21.060suggests that the age of decline of a great nation is often a period which shows a tendency
00:28:25.700to philanthropy and to sympathy for other races this phase may not be contradictory to the feeling
00:28:33.280described in the previous paragraph that the dominant race has the right to rule the world
00:28:37.640for the citizens of the great nation enjoy the role of lady bountiful as long as it retains its
00:28:44.000status of leadership the imperial people are glad to be generous even if slightly condescending or
00:28:50.900in the case of the british extremely condescending the rights of citizenship are generously bestowed
00:28:57.080upon every race even those formerly subject and the equality of mankind is proclaimed
00:29:02.980the roman empire passed through this phase when equal citizenship was thrown open to all peoples
00:29:08.380such provincials even becoming senators and emperors the arab empire of baghdad was equally0.61
00:29:15.240perhaps even more generous during the age of conquests purebred arabs had constituted a ruling
00:29:21.160class but in the 9th century the empire was completely cosmopolitan state assistance to
00:29:27.100the young and the poor was equally generous university students received government grants
00:29:31.980to cover their expenses while they were receiving higher education the state likewise offered free
00:29:37.260medical treatment to the poor the first free public hospital was opened in baghdad in the reign of
00:29:43.200harun al-rashid 786 to 809 and under his son mamun free public hospitals sprang up all over
00:29:50.820the arab world from spain to what is now pakistan the impression that it will always be automatically
00:29:57.560rich causes the declining empire to spend lavishly on its own benevolence until such time as the0.68
00:30:04.460economy collapses the universities are closed and the hospitals fall into ruin hmm it may perhaps
00:30:12.560being correct to picture the welfare state as the high watermark of human attainment it may merely
00:30:18.200prove to be one more regular milestone in the life story of an aging and decrepit empire brutal
00:30:25.340brutal yeah i mean it's easy for an american to look at the uk and say hey man isn't this just
00:30:32.000obvious and prescient but uh ultimately we're we're just you know maybe 25 years behind you in
00:30:37.920on on this uh on this path there's there's virtually no space i do love that he points
00:30:42.940out that the a conflict between seeing yourself as superior and extending the benefits to everyone
00:30:48.580is these are not these are not in conflict at all actually it is often that superiority that
00:30:53.780idea that no matter what we're going to be on top and we can just open this up to anybody and
00:30:57.540everybody um that idea is something that uh is is often bred in by the idea of superiority
00:31:04.300And of course, once you start locking yourself into that kind of death spiral, well, then you need to bring more and more people in to bolster these. We're seeing this with the UK. We're seeing this in the United States. Oh, we're not having enough children. We have to bring all these foreigners and to boost up those numbers and keep the whole Ponzi scheme going. And that's the only way that the entire system can survive to the point where now, I think in the case of both of our countries, we're looking at kind of suicide packs with our welfare states.
00:31:32.060We both know, respectively, the UK and the United States, that our welfare states will end us, that we do not have solutions to this problem, that the stats do not work out, that the actuary tables do not work in our favor, and that eventually we will just burn our civilizations down trying to sustain these welfare states.
00:31:53.280But of course, we still won't stop because it's too late. The political incentives have already been baked in. The foreigners are already here. And as he points out, this, again, is not just a function of like modern Anglo liberalism.
00:32:06.920You can look to the Roman Empire and Caracalla and his attempts to expand citizenship to basically the entire empire and how that failed to solve the problem or how the expansion after, you know, kind of the wars with the Italians of that did not fix any of the problems with Rome when it came to citizenship.
00:32:25.180so this is again a lot of people like to blame this on modern uh you know ideologies and or
00:32:31.620liberalism it's the openness you know often hear this it's the openness of christianity
00:32:35.520that makes this happen that's why it occurs because christians are too compassionate
00:32:39.440and no this this is a pattern that as globe says shows itself in all of these situations
00:32:45.060throughout history this is just the current explanation and manifestation of it's the
00:32:49.840current justification not something unique to america or the uk or to the anglos or to
00:32:54.900christianity or even to liberalism yeah i mean it's interesting as well because i do not imagine
00:33:00.240that the abayid uh empire had universal suffrage uh by any means uh so you know because this is the
00:33:06.420this is the common explanation given in in current year or you know one or one of them right the
00:33:10.920problem is is universal suffrage um but there you know it even if groups do not have suffrage um
00:33:19.920large amounts of sort of organized poor can always be a problem right like whether it's the the
00:33:25.660charioteer teams you you're like it's it's not just i think you wind up with this sort of um
00:33:32.840i mean you know i i guess class would have marx would have called it a sort of class warfare i
00:33:38.220guess in a sense like and it might be that these uh these sort of uh welfare initiatives are
00:33:45.160originally intended to sort of put the lid on you know class warfare which you know of course
00:33:50.660has been a thing like in way way way before marx where like you know you you have the the upper
00:33:55.460crust and you have the poor and you have the military in between or you know have your society
00:34:00.260is is organized um i don't know i mean this is this is quite i mean again right what if club is
00:34:10.100right what if a nation is is just essentially a macro organism basically right what what if all
00:34:16.680of these sort of biological um allegories are in fact correct and and what's really happening is
00:34:23.140that the your civilization stopped working out and started going to mcdonald's every day and
00:34:27.680sitting around and playing video games is like oh every everything's fine and being like you know
00:34:31.940listen i'm the best civilization there ever was i don't need to go to the gym and then some other
00:34:37.180sort of you know more vibrant young scrappy civilization comes along and nicks all your stuff
00:34:43.360you know again uh i i firmly believe that that is actually just the case that the the kind of the
00:34:49.620the morphological life cycle of civilizations is a very real thing uh and i think glub is again
00:34:55.980hitting on things that you know other proponents of secular uh cyclical history uh like oswald
00:35:04.240spangler did and i think that's why this essay is so good because it's kind of a very con uh
00:35:09.560relatively compact even though it's taking us like five or six episodes to get through
00:35:13.320it's a relatively compact uh understanding as compared to i guess like 1300 pages of spangler
00:35:18.940yeah but this would be a lot less fun to listen to if it was just us reading the thing without
00:35:23.420the commentary in very true yeah we're adding quite a bit of time right yeah absolutely all
00:35:29.240All right. Religion. Historians of periods of decadence often refer to a decline in religion.
00:35:35.020But if we extend our investigation over a period covering the Assyrians to our own times, we have to interpret religion in a very broad sense.
00:35:44.120Some such definition as the human feeling that there is something, some invisible power apart from the material objects which controls human life and the natural world.
00:35:53.400We're probably too narrow and contemptuous in our interpretation of idol worship.
00:35:57.060The people of ancient civilizations were sensible as we are and could scarcely have been so foolish as to worship sticks and stones fashioned by their own hands.
00:36:05.680Their idol was for them merely a symbol, a representation of unknown spiritual reality, which controlled the lives of men and demanded human obedience in moral precepts.
00:36:15.060precepts. We all know only too well the minor differences in human visualization of spirit
00:36:20.700frequently became the ostensible reasons for human wars in which both sides claim to be fighting for
00:36:27.580the true God. But the asserted narrowness of human conception should not bind us to the fact that
00:36:32.740very often both sides believe that their campaigns to have a moral background. Genghis Khan, one of
00:36:38.120the most brutal of all conquerors, claimed that God had delegated him the duty to exterminate
00:36:42.880the decadent races of the civilized world thus the age of conquest often had some kind of religious
00:36:48.580atmosphere which implied heroic self-sacrifice for the cause but the spirit of dedication has
00:36:54.840slowly eroded in the age of commerce by the action of money people make money for themselves not for
00:37:00.200their country thus a period of affluence gradually dissolves the spirit of service which had caused
00:37:05.660the rise of the imperial races in due course selfishness permeated the community and the
00:37:10.920coherence of which was weakened until uh disintegration was threatened then as we have
00:37:16.420seen came the period of pessimism which uh the accompanying spirit of frivolity and sensual
00:37:21.700indulgence byproduct of despair it was inevitable at such time that men should look back yearingly
00:37:27.700to the days of religion when the spirit of self-sacrifice was still strong enough to make
00:37:32.480men ready to give and to serve rather than to snatch but while despair might permeate the
00:37:37.900greater greater part of the nation others achieve a real a new realization of the fact that only
00:37:43.380readiness for self-sacrifice could enable a community to survive some of the greatest saints
00:37:48.540in history lived in times of national decadence raising the banner of duty and service against
00:37:52.720the flood of depravity and despair in this manner in the height of vice and frivolity the seeds of
00:37:57.640religious revival are quietly sown after perhaps the several generations or even centuries of0.67
00:38:03.720suffering the impoverished nation has been purged of its selfishness and love of money religion0.97
00:38:08.520regains its sway over new eras set in it's good for me but i have but i have been afflicted said
00:38:14.720the psalmist that i might uh learn by statutes so interesting here i mean glub seems to be largely
00:38:21.480uh dismissive of kind of particular uh ideas of religion he's kind of giving you this universalist
00:38:29.020well we all know there's something beyond us and you know even the ancients when they were
00:38:33.420worshiping sticks and stones we're actually worshiping uh the true divine and so you know
00:38:38.480we don't have to get bogged down in the fact that you know these different systems rival each other
00:38:43.500but ultimately what we can say is that when people are dedicated to religion they do seem willing to
00:38:48.720sacrifice to kind of make these big magnanimous gestures that help the civilization and spur
00:38:55.000forward when it comes to the age of expansion they feel that that sense of duty uh to go out
00:39:00.520there and conquer in the name of their beliefs and spread their beliefs and ultimately it's kind
00:39:04.980of the death of that the the age of commerce bringing in the money people working for themselves
00:39:10.500that degrades that religion again whether you feel any given religion is worth you know kind of
00:39:15.360perpetuating or not the important thing is that it kind of revivifies the spirit when some people
00:39:21.200recognize that selfishness has overtaken everything and this can create the seeds for
00:39:26.200religious revival now obviously i'm going to disagree with glub on the idea that kind of
00:39:31.060everybody has the same piece of an elephant when it comes to religion uh or that there is no superior
00:39:36.180inferior religious uh expressions here i don't think that's true and i think that bears itself
00:39:41.000out in different instances but of course he is right that this is kind of the animating spirit
00:39:45.620and again we'll see this in guys like spangler i think spangler probably has a better grasp on
00:39:50.100the religion i like that spangler kind of explains not just decadence but this kind of
00:39:55.560second, um, form of the religion that comes, you have the original religion and then you have like
00:40:00.680a mere atheist version of the religion. So like socialism is the atheist version of Christianity,
00:40:05.600uh, or you have stoicism being the atheist version of, uh, the Roman pantheon. Uh, and so, uh, you
00:40:12.120know, and this eventually then leads us to what he calls the second religiousness, uh, though for
00:40:17.420Spengler, he sees that as the death of, uh, civilizations and not, uh, the, this opportunity
00:40:23.480for rebirth so some interesting parallels but also some interesting differences between
00:40:28.180glubb and spangler here i think also um to a large extent intellectualism is very very bad
00:40:34.360for religion um because it's it sort of comes about that um everything about religion must
00:40:42.180make sense you you see a lot of this in christianity for example like you know enlightenment
00:40:46.980stuff like that ah you know it's like you know uh attempts to explain the mind of god and all
00:40:52.380this kind of other stuff and not enough people just being like you know what are you what are
00:40:56.380you doing but you can see how it how it happens because intellectualism produces things like
00:41:01.940technology um greater supply of food uh you know immigration not irrigation all these kinds of like
00:41:10.720things and it's only a short hop skip and a jump to being like well you know what if we were to
00:41:15.380sit around and sort of uh you know theorize about uh the mind of god well obviously he likes us
00:41:21.320because you know we are we now rule the world right so therefore and you know i guess through
00:41:26.000a sense of sort of anthropomorphization maybe like you know people start imagining that uh
00:41:31.000you know god is like their you know their civilization i think it's it's intellectualism
00:41:36.220that just begins to again fray at the edges of it um i don't know i think there's there's something
00:41:42.980deeper but also religion has a has a sort of big part to play uh when people are suffering
00:41:50.420as well and once decadence sets in it becomes more of a sort of you know a duty sort of like
00:41:56.120oh yes you know you go to church on sunday but you know i don't really i'm not really into that
00:42:00.020i'm too busy making money uh and all that kind of other stuff um right well we can we can see
00:42:06.560obviously something someone like saint augustine uh you know as the vandal sack uh the roman empire
00:42:11.960uh and the city of god and the kind of the uh you know the the way in which uh christianity
00:42:17.540becomes this this critical thing to kind of usher in the continuance of some of those civilizations,
00:42:23.720even if Rome itself is falling. And let's also not forget that in pretty much up until Islam0.98
00:42:30.840and Christianity, religion was almost entirely tribal. It was contained within the ethnos. The
00:42:37.420God was the God of your city or your people, not some universal God. And so the introduction
00:42:43.400introduction of those two monotheistic religions obviously not so much judaism as it also sees god
00:42:49.540as a tribal god uh but uh you know the the introduction of those two systems i think does
00:42:54.920change some of the religious dynamics that glove is describing here he doesn't quite factor that
00:42:59.100in but obviously it's a very short you know overview there he's not really digging in super
00:43:03.840deep there yeah you can you can do a whole podcast just on that um okay 30 new combinations
00:43:11.420that sounds like a good name for a podcast we have traced the rise of an obscure race to fame
00:43:16.720through these stages of conquest commercialism affluence and intellectualism to disintegration
00:43:21.960decadence and despair we suggested that the dominant race at any given time in parts its
00:43:27.340leading characteristics to the world around it being in due course succeeded by another empire
00:43:32.920by this mean means we speculated many successive races succeeded succeeded one another as
00:43:40.640superpowers and in turn bequeathed their peculiar qualities to mankind at large but the objection
00:43:46.680may here be raised that someday the time will come when all the races of the world will in turn have
00:43:52.300enjoyed their period of domination and have collapsed again in decadence when the whole
00:43:57.060human race has reached the stage of decadence where will new energetic conquering races be found
00:44:02.580the answer is at first partially obscured by our modern habit of dividing the human race
00:44:07.840into nations which we seem to regard as watertight compartments an era responsible for
00:44:13.180innumerable misunderstandings in earlier times warlike nomadic nations invaded the territories
00:44:19.000of decadent peoples and settled there in due course they intermarried with the local population
00:44:24.380and a new race resulted though it sometimes retained an old name the barbarian invasions
00:44:30.500of the roman empire probably provide the best the best example known today in the west others were
00:44:36.280the arab conquests of spain north africa and persia the turkish conquests of the ottoman empire
00:44:41.180or even the norman conquest of england in all such cases the conquered countries were originally
00:44:46.960fully inhabited and the invaders were armies which ultimately settled down and married and produced
00:44:52.620new races in our times there are few nomadic conquerors left in the world who could invade
00:44:58.700more settled countries bringing their tents and flocks with them but ease of travel has resulted
00:45:03.920in an equal or probably even greater intermixture of populations the extreme bitterness of modern
00:45:10.100internal political struggles produces a constant flow of migrants from their native countries to
00:45:14.720others where the social institutions suit them better the vicissitudes of trade and business
00:45:20.740similarly result in many persons moving to other countries at first intending to return
00:45:25.660but ultimately settle down settling down in their new countries the population of britain has been
00:45:31.320constantly changing particularly in the last 60 years if you can see it now owing to the influx
00:45:36.680of immigrants from europe asia and africa and the exit of british citizens to the dominions and the
00:45:42.400united states the latter is of course the most obvious example of the constant rise of new
00:45:47.380nations and of the transformation of the ethnic content of old nations through this modern
00:45:52.700nomadism so glob is just sort of i guess prefiguring a lot of the arguments that uh
00:45:59.960that we are trying to deal with today is it isn't a is it a matter of essence or is it a matter of
00:46:05.120degree or like a bit of both i guess yep and i think um you know he doesn't he doesn't seem to
00:46:13.520pass a extreme amount of judgment here on this process he simply explains that it's going to
00:46:20.740happen that it's inevitable that yes you don't have the conquering hordes of barbarians that0.88
00:46:25.660you used to have nomadic step people sweeping in and completely changing the culture but instead1.00
00:46:30.660we're seeing you know the introduction of uh kind of the you know the aircraft and uh reliable sea
00:46:37.300transportation means that you're just going to have uh large amounts of people from foreign places
00:46:41.900flooding into britain or the united states and and changing the admixture of the country right
00:46:46.740and so uh he he predicts that this could produce different peoples uh i think that the you know
00:46:53.800So I don't know how that works for the United States because the problem for the United States is just geography. We have so many concentrations of foreigners coming in and living in very different parts of the country. And so depending on what part of the country you're looking at, you would get a very, very different admixture.0.53
00:47:12.340You know, Minnesota is going to be full of Somalians. Texas is going to be full of Mexicans. You know, those are not going to produce. They're going to produce very different races if they ended up mixing with the American stock and not producing one unified new version of the American people.0.76
00:47:28.220so uh i'm not sure exactly where to take this other than say yes it is a process that's ongoing
00:47:33.540and does seem to have a fair degree of difficulty of being stopped but i don't know if there's a
00:47:39.300particular conclusion we can draw out of glub's predictions here even though they tend to be true
00:47:44.000glub is also glossing over a lot of uh expulsions pogroms um and ethnic warfare in in this i mean
00:47:54.440what he sort of he doesn't seem to sort of point out that there is also the possibility uh that
00:48:00.040there is um serious internal civil strife and and this kind of like stuff he seems to take the you
00:48:06.420know i guess the the sort of the view of kalergi that it is like inevitable that everyone will
00:48:10.860intermix and you know continually create um new races and i you know glub seems to basically be
00:48:18.040saying that once every race as he defines it has had a shot at being an empire uh new races must
00:48:26.720form in order to also have a shot at uh being an empire that's not necessarily true like you could
00:48:32.480you could have a you know a race uh of the chinese would be a very very good example right like i
00:48:37.480mean although they aren't really sort of expansionist you could say that for a while
00:48:41.320they had you know civilization and things weren't really bad and then you know come back and i i
00:48:47.320don't know um i don't know i mean this this raises a very very interesting question right is internal
00:48:54.160civil strife of this kind um revitalizing for an empire or is it its its death or does it depend
00:49:02.240on the empire could an empire draw uh strength from internal strife and sort of revivify itself
00:49:09.880by like saying like no this this is who we are right by whatever metric or rubric they they
00:49:14.960measure that you know and say like you know well these these people are not us and then you get
00:49:19.240like a second wind i don't know well and you're very right to say that uh you know whether we0.95
00:49:25.500like it or not the fact is that ethnic cleansing is one of the most common reasons for warfare0.91
00:49:31.020throughout history right driving out foreign peoples from lands that you want to occupy0.98
00:49:36.020has never been a pretty business but it's you know very common and heck it's ongoing today
00:49:42.160uh we could probably come up with some some a few examples top of mind uh and so the idea that this
00:49:48.220process is just over and people will never inevitably mix and inevitably create these
00:49:52.320races i think you're right that that's it obviously does happen you know the glub is
00:49:57.260is observing something that does occur uh but i think the idea of inevitability or that this is
00:50:03.480just always the case is always what's gonna that's as you say ignoring a good amount of history
00:50:07.900including just uh you know current day modern examples i guess i guess everything looks
00:50:14.540inevitable from the time that you're in right like because if you if you if everyone could predict
00:50:20.400a trend in the future then nothing unusual surprising would ever happen right like you
00:50:25.800know you look you look back in history and everyone's like oh yes we can absolutely take
00:50:29.840it for granted that you know this thing will continue then it didn't work out that way well
00:50:33.480if if everyone realized it wouldn't work out that way then they would have a different assumption
00:50:37.620which would lead them to different actions which would probably like hold of the outcome you know
00:50:40.860again sort of shades of june actually like you know very much uh all right the decadence of a
00:50:47.340system it is one of the uh it is of interest to note that the decadence is the disintegration of
00:50:53.320a system not of its individual members the habits of the members of the community have been corrupted
00:50:59.220by the enjoyment of too much money and too much power for too long a period the result has been
00:51:04.600in the framework of their national life to make them selfish and idle. The community of selfish
00:51:09.920and idle people declines. Internal quarrels develop in the division of the dwindling wealth
00:51:14.780and pessimism follows which some of them endeavor to drown in sensually or drown in sensuality or
00:51:22.740frivolity. In their own surrounding they are unable to redirect their thoughts and their energies
00:51:28.720into new channels. But when individual members of such a society immigrate into entirely new
00:51:34.800surroundings, they do not remain conspicuously decadent and pessimistic or immoral among the
00:51:40.400inhabitants of their new homeland. Once they enable to break away from their old channels of
00:51:45.500thought thereafter a short period of readjustment, they become normal citizens of their adopted
00:51:51.000countries. Some of them in the second and third generation may attain preeminence and leadership
00:51:55.700in their new communities this seems to prove that decline of any nation does not undermine the
00:52:00.360energies or the basic character of the members nor does the decadence of a member of such nations
00:52:05.140permanently impoverish the human race decadence is both mental and moral uh detour deterioration
00:52:12.060produced by the slow decline of the community from which its members cannot escape as long as
00:52:16.920they remain in the old surrounding but transport elsewhere they soon discard their decadent way
00:52:22.100of thought and prove themselves equal to the citizens of their adopted country so there's
00:52:27.200an interesting assertion by glub that the decadence is not one of the people itself yes they've been
00:52:32.940imbibing kind of this lifestyle for too long and it's worn on their character and their virtue
00:52:37.520but once you take them out of that environment and you put them back into something that is
00:52:43.800difficult and dangerous they suddenly become stalwart members and of course we could think
00:52:48.560of america and australia as you know how much how much of the british citizenry suddenly became
00:52:54.760very heroic and very virtuous as soon as they got outside of the uk you know whether they're
00:53:00.560administering india or africa or whether they're conquering uh you know the the outback of australia
00:53:07.820or the wilderness of america once you took these citizens out of those systems they suddenly became
00:53:13.640capable of things that were amazing feats that they previously would not have probably0.55
00:53:17.820undergone in their own environment and all i can think of here is uh bronze age pervert
00:53:22.600in his uh um questionable comments about uh you know how monkeys behave in captivity right like
00:53:28.140ultimately uh it is that it is the confining nature of the cage that turns these animals
00:53:34.920docile once they uh have the opportunity to once again expand and uh you know kind of
00:53:40.580exert control over their space they become something different uh and so i do think it
00:53:45.620is an interesting thing to say actually if you simply you know broke these people out of these
00:53:50.040systems they would be able to return back to uh kind of that that virtuous and adventurous self
00:53:56.060yeah well as i mean this this is uh this is the thing he's he's clearly talking about america
00:54:01.380and and australia and the frontier countries right and england being the sort of the decadent
00:54:06.240uh thing um i i think it's it's freedom really right you know one of the things i like most
00:54:13.400about america even though of course like america is is quite advanced along the way they you know
00:54:18.100you still have more freedom than um you know people in the eu generally speaking um freedom
00:54:24.260not like not only sort of gives you freedom of action but also responsibility um just think
00:54:30.400about the the fact that everyone you know practically in in the eu canada uh australia
00:54:36.160they've all been disarmed okay so like you know you're not allowed guns now people focus on the
00:54:42.760you know the the actual you know the the carrying of the firearm but there's a much deeper
00:54:47.220psychological effect to this right that you as the citizen you are not allowed to provide security
00:54:54.180for yourself you are now like entirely dependent on the state right something happens you you you
00:55:02.000call up the state and if the state decides that you are worthy of protection then maybe it'll come
00:55:06.460along right hopefully you know after like whatever has happened has happened and maybe protect you
00:55:12.600but more likely they will wag their finger at you and say like, oh, well, you shouldn't have
00:55:16.120protected yourself. Like maybe, you know, you're going to go to jail now. This is a terrible
00:55:20.400psychological effect to, to inflict on people. And is, is in my opinion, one of the things that
00:55:26.080would drive people to decadence and frivolity. There is in such a system, there is no real room
00:55:34.060for growth. There is no real room for movement. There is no real reason for a room for responsibility.
00:55:40.700And indeed, as we see in these sort of societies, the state steps in to stop the consequences from affecting its favored client groups as well.
00:55:53.300So on the one hand, it sort of offers this devil's bargain, right?
00:55:56.780Like you will not be able to protect yourself, but we will also protect you from the consequences of not being able to protect yourself.1.00
00:56:03.540So you may get stabbed up by a highly diverse migrant imported to be a doctor or engineer.1.00
00:56:10.700But you will get free health care.1.00
00:56:13.820It seems, I mean, is it any wonder why this leads to decline?
00:56:19.240Well, this is also a symptom of complexity, right?
00:56:22.620When you have a highly complex nation, when you have an empire that's complex,
00:56:29.460you need everyone to serve their purpose.
00:56:31.820You need everyone to be on the track, doing the same thing, uniform.
00:56:37.820There's nothing new that needs to be uncovered. You know how the system is run and what it's going to produce. And so the only option for people is to kind of get on the track and go where the system is going to take them.
00:56:50.400that is more reliable and perhaps produces superior outcomes at some level.
00:56:57.180But eventually, as you're saying here, and as Glob is saying,
00:57:00.440this wears on the quality of the people,
00:57:02.360people who cannot make those determinations for themselves,
00:57:04.820who rely entirely on systems to guide their life, define their life,
00:57:08.640tell them where they're going to go, tell them what's going to be successful.
00:57:11.440They lose that agency that defines human value.