The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies is finally out everywhere, and it's an honor to celebrate it with all of you. In this episode, I talk a little bit about the process of writing the book, the people who helped make it happen, and answer questions from the audience.
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00:03:45.280All right, guys. So let's go ahead and dive into a little bit of, I guess, the history of the book and really this channel and everything I'm doing now.
00:03:56.420So I know many of you have been here from the beginning, but obviously we've added a lot of people since then.
00:04:03.180So it's always exciting to see people in the chat.
00:04:05.540It's one of the nice things about the live stream format, the way that this channel has always been structured.
00:04:10.120I've always done kind of the video essays and I've had the interviews, but I've also always had live streams with you guys.
00:04:17.360We've always seen different people showing up, asking questions, commenting, talking with each other.
00:04:23.420I've actually even had the honor of meeting many of you in person when I've gone to events like the Skilled Things event
00:04:30.260and I've got the Old Glory Club event coming up here in a month or so.
00:04:35.900And so it's been really great to see people who have been there since the beginning and have been plugged in and are excited, been rooting on everything that's happening.
00:04:51.340I've had a much wider audience since that began.
00:04:54.560So people might not be familiar with, I guess, kind of where this started and how this kicked off.
00:04:59.700And that really is the story of the book.
00:05:01.740In many ways, the total state is the story of my political journey.
00:05:06.380Like a lot of people who probably are listening to this right now, I started as kind of just a normal talk radio conservative.
00:05:16.000I was always interested in politics as a kid.
00:05:17.880You know, my parents weren't super political, but I was I got a hold of a radio when I was like 10 or 11, started listening to to the actual radio.
00:07:22.240I didn't engage in a lot of lawbreaking, but did a lot of reporting on crime as well.
00:07:28.000And during that time, I got to see kind of the way that many of these news stories were created and shaped.
00:07:34.340And that really changed the way that I understood politics because I saw that people could just lie or completely manipulate the perception that the public had in any given situation about political happenings.
00:07:47.620And that would completely shift the conversation, the discussion, the frame of the way that you wrote about an event, the way that you presented the facts, even though you might even share most of the facts.
00:07:58.320You didn't completely lie or make up some of that would completely change the outcome and the way that people perceive things.
00:08:03.880And I saw the way that Donald Trump was treated by the media.
00:08:06.700And I hadn't really cared very much about Donald Trump one way or another up to that point.
00:08:11.020But when you notice that everyone around you is kind of constantly trying to get this guy, well, not fired because he's elected, he's the president, but they're constantly trying to get him removed from office.
00:08:22.640They're constantly trying to tell falsehoods about him.
00:08:25.940They're always casting him a bad light.
00:08:27.940They're going out of their way to tell terrible stories about him, often which are completely unfounded.
00:08:33.460They're willing to risk their credibility, which I thought was the entire point of the media, right?
00:08:44.320But, you know, the idea that they would completely throw their credibility out the window just to hurt this, you know, one guy who didn't seem all that important to me in the long run was very confusing.
00:08:54.520And then everything happened with 2020.
00:09:08.380And it didn't seem like the restrictions on government, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all that stuff I had learned about had had a significant control or impact on that.
00:09:19.980And when I started this channel, it was really just for me to kind of work through the things that I had learned about because I was also a teacher.
00:12:03.700But Curtis, while, of course, he's brilliant and well worth your time to read, really the most valuable part of Curtis is his ability to pull all these other guys you've never heard of together.
00:12:15.080And so, you know, whether it starts with James Burnham and his collection of the Machiavellians, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert McKells, these are all critical figures and understanding, I think, the school of political theory.
00:12:29.120That I talk about in the total state, but also other thinkers that maybe aren't just in the, you know, in kind of the Machiavellians, just in that Italian elite theory school.
00:12:38.760Of course, you learn about guys like Bertrand Juvenal, learn about guys like Joseph de Maestra, learn about guys like Carl Schmitt, who I think really help us understand the political situation that we're in.
00:12:53.460And so as I was doing these book reports, basically, right, I was just reading these books, trying to understand them.
00:13:01.300I ran into guys like Oswald Spangler, just a lot of guys.
00:13:04.440And I even revisited some people who were critical to my thought before, Oswald McIntyre, C.S. Lewis, a lot of these guys, I had read them, I had understood some of what they were talking about at the time.
00:13:18.020But I went ahead and revisited them in the light of many of the things that I was learning about our power and political systems and our cultural problems.
00:13:27.220And there are even much deeper insights that I didn't understand when I first went through at the time.
00:13:32.620And so as I was doing all these different book reports and trying to understand what was going on, I went ahead and, you know, I went ahead and put these videos online, started inviting different people in to have discussions, mainly because I just wanted to talk to them.
00:13:47.800It was just an exciting opportunity to speak to, like, Endeavor or Charlemagne or Dave or all these other people who I'd always wanted to talk to.
00:13:56.520I was very interested in kind of understanding the ideas that they were exploring.
00:14:01.340And as I did this, you know, I didn't have any intention to write a book, but my wife kept saying, hey, all those ideas you're talking about, you know, all those things that you talk about in your videos, you should really turn them into a book because I wasn't writing articles at this time.
00:14:14.820You know, now I write weekly articles for The Blaze, and you can see many of my ideas develop there, many of the things I talk about there.
00:14:22.020But at the time, I was not really writing except for just the things I was talking about in the video.
00:14:27.460And so I went ahead and started weaving them together, really at the time, just writing down a lot of what I had said in the videos, but maybe adding some more, making some more in-depth analysis, upping the level of scholarship a little bit to make sure that I was understanding things correctly.
00:14:45.400And as I did this, I slowly started to see that there was really a through line in all of this.
00:14:52.100It wasn't just analyzing power, though that's very helpful, and it's a key part of the book.
00:14:56.440I certainly spent a lot of time in the book explaining how we should understand power, how it gets applied in the United States.
00:15:03.460So that is certainly in the book for sure.
00:15:05.620The core of it is Italian elite theory and its understanding of power.
00:15:10.860But I understood that there was a wider world at play here.
00:15:15.240There was a through line in what had developed.
00:15:18.000It wasn't just that we needed to understand that, you know, the media and academia and all of these other things are working with unelected parts of the state and that democracy doesn't necessarily actually restrict those things.
00:15:32.340But I started to understand from Bertrand de Juvenal and others, the metaphysics of power actually meant that the state was always growing.
00:15:39.600It was always seeking decentralized power.
00:15:41.380And the way that it did that was to break down the bonds of society, to break down the things that held society together in an organic way, the family, the church, the tribe, the wider community, merchant guilds, all these things that exist in a healthy and organic natural society had to be broken down so the state could go ahead and centralize power.
00:16:03.800And these large bureaucratic structures that James Burnham talks about in the managerial revolution seek to do exactly that.
00:16:12.040And so the total state is really expanding on this idea.
00:16:14.980I mean, more and more people are starting to understand the idea of the deep state, which is very important.
00:16:22.240The conservatives are starting to understand that this unelected bureaucracy is a critical part of the power structure.
00:16:29.800It's not just, oh, I elected the president and he works with the congressman I elected and they all get together and they make laws and that's how my government works.
00:16:39.340No, actually, those laws have to be applied by bureaucracies and the way that they do that, the ideology that they have and the interests that they have actually impacts the way that all of this works.
00:16:48.640And increasingly very little amount of the actual business of government involves the making of the laws and the following of the laws and more and more is taken out of control of, you know, kind of these elected representatives and handed over to this deep state apparatus.
00:17:09.800It's that the structures of these bureaucracies are not unique to the United States government or the federal branch, but actually they apply to everything.
00:17:27.820They apply to every single thing in our society.
00:17:30.920And the structure and organization of society, the way that we have had to alter our society in order to scale up human organization has really changed who we are and the way that power works, the way the government works, and the direction our society is going.
00:17:45.940And so in addition to an analysis of power, the total state is also the explanation of the development of these large managerial bureaucracies, the managerial class that operates them, the desire of the managerial class to change human nature in the way that we order ourselves and understand ourselves, the way that it dehumanizes us.
00:18:06.860It programs us to work in a specific coordinated fashion with the managerial structures that it creates and why it needs to ultimately globalize those structures, why it's obsessed with tearing down national identities, the identities of people, dissolving those differences and turning us all into one homogenized managerial gray goo.
00:18:28.540And those are all things that I think are critical to understanding.
00:18:31.520So the power matters, the analysis matters, but I think it's also critical to understand the structure behind it, the incentives behind it, the way that it orders our society, and very importantly, why I don't think it's sustainable long term, why I think it will come apart, it has to come apart, we're already seeing it come apart, and what to do after that.
00:18:52.480And so that's kind of the main structure and the story that emerged in the book as I started.
00:19:00.040And I want to go ahead and thank a lot of people who were involved in this.
00:19:05.280Of course, I've already mentioned that Dave the Distributist, Charlemagne, Clossington, Anamnesis, though I don't think he still has a YouTube channel anymore.
00:19:16.120But these were all people who were critical to me understanding at the beginning, this kind of near-actionary and Italian elite theory set of ideas that were kind of the beginning of my journey on this.
00:19:30.140Of course, I'm very grateful to Academic Agent, who, in addition to sharing some of those understandings and ideas, also somebody who championed my work very early on, had me on his program, was constantly promoting me on Twitter when he had no reason to do so, and it was no benefit to him.
00:19:48.760You know, there's a lot of guys like Michael Malice or Paul Joseph Watson, Bronze Age Pervert.
00:19:55.840There are a lot of guys who had much larger accounts than me on Twitter and started sharing my stuff when I didn't have very many followers.
00:20:04.800Alex Kishuda was another person who was really championing my work on Twitter when not a lot of people knew who I was or cared.
00:20:11.840And, you know, obviously, I don't always agree with every one of these guys on everything, you know, but the fact that they were willing to go ahead and share out my stuff and thought that, you know, my insights were worthwhile and share me with their audience was, of course, a huge deal.
00:20:27.480I also had a lot of people who invited me on their shows and took a chance on me when I was literally just an icon on a page.
00:20:34.640You know, when TimCast had me on, my face had never been on anything.
00:20:38.960I was just a piece of art that my wife had drawn, you know, so that I could have something up when I was talking.
00:20:45.980And so it was very wild to have them invite me on just out of nowhere.
00:20:50.880Same thing with Tipping Point, when OAN had me on there, Kara invited me on and I was, she was willing to have me on with just my internet avatar.
00:21:02.320I was just a thumbnail on a full-blown news program, which is pretty funny.
00:21:07.880That was before Tucker was doing any of this.
00:21:10.140Of course, Tucker Carlson retweeted me, or I should say not retweeted me, but actually read my tweet on Fox News.
00:21:18.800I had a lot of people like Michael Knowles and Steve Dace who invited me on to their show when, you know, they're, again, no reason to have me on.
00:23:32.560So, you know, the book is finally here.
00:23:34.380The, you know, the long march, it took, I guess you could say it's one of those things where, in some ways, it took many years because I was writing these video essays way back.
00:23:45.240And much of the book is drawn from the video essays.
00:23:47.860So, you know, you might have heard some of this if you watched the channel because some of it made it in there.
00:23:54.180But, of course, it's also been refined and fleshed out and brought together into a full book.
00:23:59.060And so there's a lot of changes there as well.
00:24:02.140But, you know, so you could say that it started years ago when the channel started.
00:24:05.940But in some ways, really, the crunch and the grind of getting the book out has really been in the last year or so.
00:24:40.920It's also very weird to edit your own stuff.
00:24:42.840Let me tell you, if you write a book, the worst part is reading your own book like 30 times over and over and over and over and over and over again.
00:24:51.400You read it and what you're writing and you hate it and you delete a bunch of it and you write it again and then you write it again and then you write it again.
00:24:58.960And then you finally publish it like on your sub stack or something and then you edit it again and you edit it again and you add it into a book.
00:25:07.340And then when it's a book, you have to read it again and again.
00:25:12.120And it could be it could be torturous.
00:25:14.560But, you know, when the when the when the volume finally arrives and it's a real thing that people can hold in their hand and you feel like you kind of collected all of these things you learned and explain them in a way that hopefully helps people to grasp what's going on in kind of our current our current time, our current year.
00:26:40.800I'm just going to start with the Super Chats for ease.
00:26:44.100But if you can do me a favor, if you're asking a non-Super Chat question, can you put an at or in?
00:26:50.360Can you can you tag me in it so I know it's a question to me because it's hard to pick out the questions from the things that people are just saying back and forth to each other.
00:26:58.540So I do see some people asking questions, but it's hard to track down which ones are for me and which ones are just you guys talking back and forth to each other in chat unless you give me that at so I know what's going on there.
00:27:11.500So I'll start with Super Chats and then I'll try to get through people who are directly sending questions that way.
00:27:31.460You know, the biggest problem I have right now is I have too many friends who are really good at making content.
00:27:38.300And I'm just buried in all kinds of good content.
00:27:42.180There are a lot of really thoughtful people who I get to talk to on a regular basis.
00:27:45.400Many of them I have the privilege of calling friends and they put out just these fantastic books and essays and podcasts and I just can't get through all of it.
00:27:54.000And I'm still trying to go back and read like I know I need to reread a bunch of stuff.
00:27:57.760I need to reread Vilfredo Pareto to make sure I understand it better.
00:30:25.460I read a lot of stuff through audiobooks.
00:30:27.780So something I do very often is I will listen to something in an audiobook that even though I have the physical copy of it, and then I will go back and make notes through the physical copy.
00:31:03.660I do a lot of audiobooks because I was in the car or working out or mowing the lawn.
00:31:08.180And that really helps me get through a large amount of things that I want to read.
00:31:12.560But I always keep the physical book around if I can, if they exist, so that I'm able to reference things because, you know, you'll be going through it and you'll hear part of an idea.
00:31:20.880Maybe you'll rewind back to that, but you still want to be able to read it and see it.
00:31:24.560So maybe it's worth both of them to you.
00:31:26.020But if not, you can wait for the audiobook.
00:31:27.520A lot of people have asked me about it.
00:31:29.140I do know that there will be an audiobook.
00:31:30.940The way that it works is that they commission an audiobook, and the book has reached a level of sales already where it looks like that's going to happen.
00:34:55.240I ended up adding a chapter to the book on Cthulhu and the total state, talking about conquest laws and the shift of organizations over time.
00:35:03.460I think that was a really key chapter.
00:35:04.920I'm glad they suggested adding to it so editors can be good.
00:35:19.740I, I can say I wrote the book, obviously, like I typed the words on, on, on the page.
00:35:25.240However, in many ways, I felt like the, the narrative was kind of being assembled by the thing I was reading and I just had to get it out.
00:35:32.880Which I now understand as I talk to other people who've written books, they, that's a pretty common thing, but it's not something I understood at the time.
00:35:39.860I started writing again as a reporter and I really only wrote, you know, 500 to a thousand words at any given time.
00:35:47.580That's one of the reasons I'm good at tweeting is because I kind of perfected boiling things down, right?
00:35:53.220That, that, that the essence of things, that's why journalists are good at Twitter.
00:35:56.320That's why all journalists are, are Twitter junkies because it rewards their skill set with a large amount of dopamine.
00:36:03.140Uh, but it doesn't lend itself to larger books.
00:36:06.200And so I had to learn to expand things and do larger narratives, weave them together.
00:36:11.960Uh, and that's still a skill in many ways that I'm learning, but it's something that allowed me to kind of, uh, see this book tape, take shape on its own.
00:36:20.180I did the individual book reports, but then they kind of assembled themselves in a way, as I kind of realized the, the things that were connecting all of these different points in my journey.
00:36:31.820And really then it was just a matter of me, you know, just typing the words that put it together rather than, than trying to assemble.
00:36:37.880I didn't, my point being is like, I didn't sit down with an outline.
00:36:40.620I'm like, here are the 10 things that I need to say in my book, the total state.
00:37:24.400So he will, or sorry, the, the last skilled things event, uh, that was in Tennessee.
00:37:28.300So if, if you, uh, come to the OGC event, and this is true, of course, for anybody, I've had a lot of people ask about, uh, signing books.
00:37:35.920Uh, if you would like me to sign a copy, uh, I will be bringing copies to sell at the OGC event, and I will be signing any of the copies that I sell.
00:37:44.800Or if you already have your copy, I'm happy to sign it there.
00:37:47.580Uh, I've had people ask about, uh, like selling just individual signed copies.
00:37:52.180I have talked about, uh, how to do that with a few different people.
00:37:56.920I'm not sure if we're going to get that in place for this book, but I will keep people updated.
00:38:02.040But I will most certainly, I'll be at the OGC event.
00:38:04.860Uh, I will be at the ISI event in August, and I might be at NatCon as well in July.
00:38:12.960Uh, so that'd be like Delaware, Washington, D.C., and, uh, and, uh, Tennessee.
00:38:18.640Uh, so all East Coast, I guess, but if you're near any of those and you want to attend, I'm more than happy to, to sign there.
00:38:26.500Uh, still wild that that's something anyone wants me to do, uh, but I'm happy to do it.
00:39:01.780It's already before me in, in a lot of ways.
00:39:04.420My book is just a summarization of a lot of these works that, you know, people knew existed out in the ether somewhere, but a lot, no one had really pulled together and, and kind of updated and formalized the connection between them.
00:39:17.620And so I just got to read a lot of really interesting guys and understand the world around me better and, you know, what was happening in politics better and then tell people about it.
00:39:27.780And so, uh, that, that really is, it, it feels fast because it was fast because in many ways, a lot of this groundwork was already late.
00:39:36.620And so I'm, I'm very aware of the fact that I am, I'm very lucky to be in this position in this moment, uh, and, and just, you know, be the beneficiary of, uh, a lot of stuff, a lot smarter people have, have gone over, but I'm happy to take my part at least in, in being able to kind of carry that torch, pick that up and, and, you know, go that direction.
00:39:57.040Uh, Costas 1983 says, just picked up a digital copy.
00:40:03.060I'll start reading it after the stream.
00:40:09.000So if you would prefer to read it in, uh, you know, in electronic form rather than in the, uh, hardback form, of course, you can go ahead and get it in the digital, the, the audio book, like I said, coming eventually, not out yet.
00:40:23.140Uh, not, hasn't been done yet, but you can choose whether you want to do print or digital.
00:40:27.840You do have that option at the moment.
00:40:46.800I really appreciate you picking, uh, picking up the book.
00:40:49.340Of course, when it comes to whether there's value in Karl Marx's critique.
00:40:53.140Uh, obviously, I think that Karl Marx is recognizing a real phenomenon.
00:40:58.960Uh, I think that his understanding about the way that the world has shifted, the way that economic production had shifted and the impact that it would have on people, uh, has some validity to it.
00:41:13.840In a lot of ways, though, he's really, and people don't think of it this way, but it is the case.
00:41:17.840He's really just a disciple of Adam Smith.
00:41:20.180If you look and read, uh, you know, a lot of people don't bother to read the wealth of nations or, you know, uh, his book on moral sentiments.
00:41:27.080And, uh, in a lot of ways, they don't understand that really economics and the, the, the understanding of what was happening in the world.
00:41:33.800That was Adam's, uh, that, that was really, um, that was really him just understanding a phenomenon that was already underway.
00:42:13.280He understands this as the only force in the world.
00:42:16.200He makes kind of material production and economics.
00:42:19.060And it's, this is always the danger guys is trying to make it the grand unifying theory.
00:42:23.020If you can just understand this, and this of course leads him to horrible conclusions about, you know, uh, the, the revolutions, the proletariat will engage in that actually don't work.
00:42:33.400Uh, his theories end up being disastrous.
00:42:35.480His, his theories of, you know, the labor theory of value and, and, uh, and all these things is not, is incorrect.
00:42:42.460He has to rewrite it himself multiple times.
00:42:44.960Uh, his understanding of how this will impact politics ends up being wrong.
00:42:48.800Turns out late capitalism doesn't collapse into, uh, you know, kind of the socialist utopia that he was hoping for, the communism that he was hoping for.
00:42:57.760In fact, the only states that end up adopting his theories are ones that don't even go through the capitalistic process.
00:43:04.560So in many ways, Marxism is a disaster, uh, but he does have some critical insights and there have been Marxists who have taken those insights and expanded them in useful ways.
00:43:14.880Uh, I think the fact that Nick land and others, uh, who eventually became important right-wing thinkers were Marxists beforehand, guys like James Burnham.
00:43:24.680I think that there is some value in understanding some of the critical points made there.
00:43:29.580Uh, but the difference is really understanding that the, the, the, the problem of dissolving traditional societies is one that Marx just says we should accelerate through instead of understanding that this is a fundamental or break from the kind of the organic life that, that people really should have.
00:43:46.620And that's actually the biggest problem.
00:43:47.980Um, let's see, uh, Matt Bell says, I'm a big AA fan for God's sake.
00:44:15.640Uh, you know, I, like I said, I usually get, you know, books in multiple formats, uh, you know, when I'm trying to listen and read as well.
00:44:56.060A lot of times I, you know, people will call me a black pillar.
00:44:59.120You know, I'm, I'm super negative on things.
00:45:01.700And I always try to explain, uh, that's not the case.
00:45:04.820Uh, I think that, um, you know, that God is good, uh, that Christ is King, that ultimately, uh, we have hope, uh, for tomorrow because of that.
00:45:14.800I think that we can live good and productive and meaningful and happy lives, even as the world around us is having difficulty.
00:45:22.580Uh, look, at least what, if, if you believe in the cyclical view of history, if you think that all people go through civilizational cycles and all civilizations eventually fall, then you have to recognize that like at least a fourth of humanity or maybe a half, if you want to include like the rise up at the beginning of civilizations live in like extremely difficult times.
00:45:45.820Uh, and look, like people still have meaningful lives in half of history.
00:45:57.700You can't just write off half of history and be like, well, things are materially difficult or, you know, we having to go through something that's, that's hard.
00:46:04.560And so therefore no one can be happy and no one can be healthy and no one can enjoy life and no one can build anything meaningful.
00:46:12.480And so, uh, you know, even though a lot of times I'm talking about why certain systems don't work or why we need to recognize that certain things are coming apart.
00:46:27.180You can't fix the problem until you understand the problem, but the purpose of understanding the problem is not to sit at the bottom and be like, oh, this is terrible.
00:47:16.460Again, just lots of people who have supported throughout.
00:47:19.820And it's it's fun to watch so many people win together.
00:47:23.420Of course, I have a lot of friends in the content creating sphere.
00:47:26.860Now, I see a lot of people who, you know, are getting big breaks, getting opportunities and not all of them in media and content creation.
00:47:34.740Often, you know, they'll find other things that they always wanted to do that they get the opportunity to do because of, you know, a little bit of what they started doing.
00:47:43.040But it's just that that winning together of community.
00:47:46.000I see that one of the exciting things about the kind of get together last year in Tennessee was how many organizations have been started, how many groups have been started, how many how much on the ground change had already occurred in just a year.
00:48:02.760And I hadn't even been at the first one.
00:48:04.320So I was just seeing it all secondhand.
00:48:06.180It'll be even more exciting to go to the Old Glory Club meeting this year and really observe that.
00:48:12.500And so it's nice to see everyone winning together.
00:53:28.500I'm going to be on, like I said, Dinesh D'Souza's podcast, Eric Metaxas, already did a few in our own sphere.
00:53:37.820Might be some bigger ones coming as soon as I hear about those guys.
00:53:41.540If there's any of the really big ones, I will give you a heads up as soon as I know about them.
00:53:46.900But at the moment, those are the ones that I have lined up.
00:53:51.800The whole machine has just started to kick in gear.
00:53:54.200These things kind of, you know, you do your first batch and then they kind of invite you to the next one and the next one and the next one.
00:54:01.780So I imagine you'll have to deal with a couple months of me probably going on and on about this.
00:54:44.420Of course, if it's your first time on the channel somehow on this one celebration stream, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe.
00:54:51.340You know, turn on the notification bells and everything so that you can watch these streams with a go live.
00:54:56.720Of course, if you're the audio book guy and you want to make sure that you can listen while you're mowing the lawn or lifting or whatever, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show podcast.