The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Tyranny of ‘Just’ ｜ Guest： J Burden ｜ 1⧸3⧸24

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00:00:30.540 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.160 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.960 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.200 So, a lot of us have probably seen the way that the left constantly and relentlessly attacks the meaning behind things.

00:00:46.140 The magic behind things.

00:00:48.080 The ability of the individual to make a difference and to matter in the world.

00:00:52.560 And I think that Jay Burden wrote a good piece here recently talking about the tyranny of just.

00:01:00.180 When we say it's just this thing.

00:01:01.760 When you're just this guy.

00:01:03.320 The way that it impacts people and the way that they're motivated.

00:01:06.420 And the way that we can kind of move beyond this, you know, kind of the way that the left makes us small in these different situations.

00:01:15.540 So, I wanted to invite Jay Burden on.

00:01:17.540 He's got a great show.

00:01:18.540 He's got a great sub stack.

00:01:19.800 Jay, thanks for coming on, man.

00:01:20.760 Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Aaron.

00:01:22.860 I'm happy to be here.

00:01:24.740 So, can you explain a little bit for people who maybe have not caught the piece what you're talking about with the tyranny of just?

00:01:31.480 Yeah.

00:01:31.980 So, as I kind of launch into in the article, I, in general, I hate talking about mass shootings.

00:01:39.100 I think it's kind of gross.

00:01:40.060 There's this race to score political points based on, you know, the kind of biographical details of everyone involved.

00:01:46.140 So, in general, I just avoid them almost without exception.

00:01:52.240 But there was a shooting a few months back and there was a kind of a pretty generic progressive tweet going around by this woman basically saying, like, you know, this proves that essentially the idea of the good guy with a gun is a fallacy.

00:02:10.520 Like, you could never do anything to stop evil.

00:02:13.000 You're just a normal guy.

00:02:14.160 And that phrase, you're just a normal guy, kind of stuck in my mind because one of the issues that I talk about often in my work is the necessity of hero worship, the necessity of modeling yourself on men greater than you are.

00:02:32.880 And so, that phrase, just, you know, the idea that, you know, because you can be classified as a normal guy, right, that thereby means that you could never be anything greater than that.

00:02:43.480 And so, I don't mean to take this into kind of like a Tony Robbins style, like motivational speech, but there is something to the fact where it's like in kind of continually reminding people that they're, you know, they're kind of venial, they're normal, there's nothing special about them.

00:02:59.020 Well, that's essentially what they will become.

00:03:02.660 And I think that, you know, and I didn't mention this in the piece itself, you know, but this is something that Lewis, who is mentioned, just not this work, talks about in The Abolition of Man, right?

00:03:14.560 Where he basically says that, you know, in negating the ability to make value judgments, saying that everything is the same, you know, categorizing everything as just this kind of like basic mechanistic piece, you really do take the ability for transcendent or heroic action out of the equation.

00:03:30.700 And so, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:03:34.140 Obviously, there's a lot to go in there.

00:03:35.380 That's just kind of a broad overview.

00:03:37.280 But that's sort of the idea I wanted to get at, which is the kind of oversimplification and categorization of that word just, I guess.

00:03:48.200 Yeah, I think it's really critical, and you referenced Lewis several times, and I think it's important because one of the reasons that Lewis feels so prescient today, one of the reasons he's so relevant at this point, when there are more complex or more subtle authors, is that Lewis continually hits in multiple works.

00:04:09.180 He does this in Until We Have Faces, he does this in The Hideous Strength, he does this in Abolition of Man, he does this in Pilgrim's Regress, which you referenced.

00:04:18.760 In all of these works, he's constantly looking at the way that the modern world, especially academia, attempts to demystify everything, to disenchant everything.

00:04:31.060 The key is to break everything down to its constituents, its constituent point of components and strip everything of its deeper meaning.

00:04:40.780 And by getting rid of that connection to the transcendent, the left has done a lot of work, right?

00:04:45.740 They've been able to advance a lot of evil things by stripping them of kind of the moral weight that they once bore when they were kind of more enchanted.

00:04:57.760 But now that they're stripped down to their constituent parts, when they become more secularized, when we've lost the language of the divine and transcendent, all of these kind of evil things are able to be advanced.

00:05:08.320 And he talks about that in places like – I'll just forget all the names of the books now.

00:05:16.040 But he talks about the way that these different university professors have to go through this process, how they drill out of each student their understanding of the good, the beautiful, and the true, their connection to kind of these more raw emotions.

00:05:30.560 And instead, they teach them and train them to constantly be critical of these things, to dismiss these ideas.

00:05:38.840 And this is what really robs people of their everyday heroism.

00:05:43.500 No, definitely.

00:05:44.840 So the kind of primary example I lift from Lewis is a part in Pilgrim's Regress.

00:05:51.840 So for those who aren't familiar, because it's more obscure relative to some of his other work, Pilgrim's Regress was the first thing he wrote after he converted.

00:06:01.120 So C.S. Lewis had a, shall we say, tumultuous early life, to put it mildly.

00:06:06.300 You know, he had a number of affairs.

00:06:08.260 He did not act particularly well.

00:06:10.880 And then he had a conversion kind of midway through life.

00:06:12.940 And so he retold, using the prism of Bunyan's, not Paul Bunyan's, excuse me, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, kind of the story by which he returned to tradition and became a Christian.

00:06:27.000 And there's a moment in this, in this kind of like long, you know, narrative allegory, where much like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, our main character in C.S. Lewis's version, John, is taken captive by a giant.

00:06:44.140 This is a moment that happened in both narratives.

00:06:46.260 But in the C.S. Lewis version of the story, this giant is called the spirit of the age.

00:06:51.520 It's essentially a stand-in for Freud.

00:06:53.100 And the power that this giant has that sort of freezes our main character in place is he can make you look transparent.

00:07:00.100 He can basically gaze at you, and you'll be able to see what's under your skin.

00:07:03.920 You'll see your blood pumping, your muscles moving.

00:07:06.740 And John is disgusted by this.

00:07:07.980 He's like, oh, this is all I am.

00:07:09.140 You know, I'm just meat.

00:07:10.220 And that reminded me of a meme you may have heard from kind of the Reddit Rick and Morty atheist types.

00:07:15.160 You know, like, oh, you're just a, you know, you're just a meat computer riding around in a robot suit, something like that.

00:07:21.160 You know, which is, again, that phrase, just.

00:07:23.100 And the idea is, oh, you are simply an amalgamation of biological components.

00:07:27.440 And Lewis's point is, well, there's a certain perspective from which that's true.

00:07:31.280 You know, I mean, you are a biological creature.

00:07:33.900 If those biological components stop working, you will cease to exist.

00:07:38.260 But that's not all you are.

00:07:39.760 And so in Lewis's story, thankfully, you know, for the sake of the protagonist, the spirit of the age is defeated by reason.

00:07:46.440 Essentially, he realizes that's not true.

00:07:48.520 But that same thing, whether it's Freud explicitly or that same mechanism of kind of classification, demystification, is kind of rampant in our society.

00:07:58.840 Like, so one of the other men that I cite in this, and he's one of my favorite authors, is Thomas Carlyle.

00:08:03.920 So Thomas Carlyle was one of the seminal Victorian writers.

00:08:07.660 He's a bestseller.

00:08:09.500 Dickens loved him.

00:08:10.600 He's kind of fallen out of fashion, especially after the Great War, and only slightly started to come back into popular relevance.

00:08:18.340 But he has this book called Heroes and Hero Worship, and it's been a while since I've gone through it, so I can't remember all of the examples he goes through.

00:08:24.600 But essentially, his thesis is that hero worship is synonymous with civilization.

00:08:31.600 That's what makes your culture and makes your civilization.

00:08:34.400 And so he goes through a series of great men.

00:08:37.760 This is also very much tied to the great man thesis of history, if you've ever heard that.

00:08:42.840 And he goes through their lives and basically says, like, okay, these are the different archetypes.

00:08:46.380 So he goes through someone like Luther, and he says, well, Luther is the archetype of a priest.

00:08:51.580 You know, or Cromwell is sort of this, like, warlord.

00:08:54.060 Yeah, I think he does Muhammad as well.

00:08:56.280 And his point with this is not necessarily that they are, like, good guys, you know, who you'd want to grab a beer with.

00:09:02.220 But he's saying, like, these are great men.

00:09:03.780 You know, there is something to be emulated.

00:09:05.760 And if you look back even a generation or two, this is something that our forefathers understood.

00:09:10.540 Like, if you look at the founding fathers, they were very clearly trying to emulate the best parts of the classical tradition.

00:09:17.640 You know, Lee, for example, was very interested in Napoleon, very interested in Alexander.

00:09:24.280 And so he was able to emulate certain things about those great men.

00:09:27.880 But this, the same classification that looks at you as a kind of mere biological construct applies that same kind of, like, social acid to the heroes of the past.

00:09:39.620 So very prominently, you know, we've all kind of watched the, I guess, hopefully all of us haven't watched, but we have seen the dialogue, I'll put it that way, around the Napoleon movie.

00:09:48.100 Right. And as if you're aware, effectively, they made Napoleon an incel, you know, basically saying, like, he's just this angry, short little man who who couldn't get any from his wife.

00:09:58.700 And so he conquered the world.

00:10:00.600 And like, don't get me wrong, from my limited understanding, Josephine and Napoleon had, shall we say, an unorthodox relationship.

00:10:07.800 But to reduce him to that, I mean, it's like asking, well, how did Genghis Khan treat his mother?

00:10:12.960 You know, it's like that completely negates the importance of the man.

00:10:16.280 Right. The only interesting thing about a man could be the way in which he has a relationship with a woman.

00:10:21.680 A hundred percent.

00:10:22.380 The only value.

00:10:23.560 Exactly. And bigger than that, it's attacking a broader cultural narrative of Napoleon as, you know, the consummate general.

00:10:30.580 Napoleon as this kind of world conqueror.

00:10:32.880 And it's one of those things that, you know, like many things, is kind of built into your brain by Moderna.

00:10:39.000 So you mentioned the Lewis passage and what he's going through in the Intro to Abolition of Man is a children's textbook, right?

00:10:48.100 This is a primer for grade school children.

00:10:51.140 And it's using that same mechanism of classification and demystification to examine poetry and basically say, like, oh, that's this is just XYZ literary device.

00:11:00.640 You know, it's florid prose, something like that.

00:11:02.780 And in doing that, it is taking away the kind of transcendent significance of that.

00:11:08.360 And I mean, I've certainly learned that in school, even though I had better schooling than many.

00:11:13.880 But that same premise of, oh, I know what that is.

00:11:17.080 So it is just, you know, a member of a category is insidious.

00:11:21.920 And it's something that if we want to create a culture, if we want to create a sincere culture that has a true attachment to, you know, our forefathers, we can't do that.

00:11:32.400 You know, we can't just throw away things because they belong to the same category.

00:11:36.220 We can't allow that demystification.

00:11:39.040 And I realize it's sort of difficult to engineer that backwards, you know, to regain sincerity.

00:11:45.080 But I think it's a vital, it's something vital that must be done.

00:11:49.940 Well, and I think that's what makes, you know, Lewis such an interesting case study because he was the man for which that happened, right?

00:11:55.900 He is a man, you know, again, so many of his books, Till We Have Faces, the fox character, the tutor is the one that demystifies the world for the main character.

00:12:06.200 And that ruins her because she cannot accept the acts of the gods.

00:12:09.980 She cannot understand a relationship with a divine because, you know, this has all been destroyed beforehand for her.

00:12:17.320 And again, that theme is just recurring over and over again.

00:12:20.800 That's what makes this, you know, that hideous strength kind of the dystopian novel of our times because Lewis truly understood what the small death of kind of this academic attack on the transcendent would do to humanity.

00:12:36.360 And but he's also the guy who overcame it.

00:12:38.720 He's a man who was he was a man of letters.

00:12:41.620 He was, you know, secular.

00:12:44.120 He was brought up without, you know, without really having an attachment to this stuff.

00:12:48.660 And he overcame that idea.

00:12:50.200 His book, Surprised by Joy, is kind of is his non-fictional account of kind of finding that again.

00:12:57.060 And I think that's so interesting because, of course, you can't talk about Lewis without talking about Chesterton because G.K. Chesterton influenced him a lot.

00:13:05.760 And one of my favorite passages from G.K. Chesterton is his man who rediscovers England.

00:13:12.280 You know, he goes around the world looking for this thing, you know, searches far and wide to the reaches of the jungles and as far as you can go.

00:13:19.360 And immediately he and finally, after going all around the globe, he stumbles upon this wonderful land that's enchanting and he feels entirely connected to it.

00:13:28.560 It's got everything he was ever searching for, all the things he thought he was missing.

00:13:32.360 And he finds out it was where he started.

00:13:34.220 You know, it was the place where he began.

00:13:36.080 And he rediscovers the England from which he came, but he can only recognize it after having gone through this process that helped him to appreciate all of the things that were inside of that.

00:13:46.140 And so I think you're right that it's really critical for us to find our way back to this place of connecting with transcendence.

00:13:54.000 I recommended actually Heroes on Heroes and Hero Worship in my video that I released yesterday because it was the first time I read it last year from from Carlisle.

00:14:06.000 And it is really critical.

00:14:08.560 We are so intimidated.

00:14:10.180 We're so in many ways we feel ashamed.

00:14:12.680 We've been made to feel like it's low class or silly to connect to these things anymore, to feel the greatness of these figures and to feel the need to emulate them.

00:14:22.720 And it's somehow beneath us or somehow somehow foolhardy.

00:14:27.180 But but I think getting rid of that particular ick factor when it comes to approaching things is really critical, because if you cannot, like you said, and as Carlisle says, you cannot embrace your heroes.

00:14:38.180 If you cannot if you cannot follow in their footsteps, then you can certainly never create any greater culture or greater movement.

00:14:46.400 No, definitely.

00:14:47.060 And I like that phrase you used, you know, kind of make it seem embarrassing.

00:14:51.360 Because that's one of the things that you'll you'll notice about our current regime is very often the carrots and stick they use are not their status based.

00:14:59.780 Right.

00:15:00.260 Our elites are foxes, not lions, by which I mean they tend to do things indirectly.

00:15:05.340 They tend to do them by a social pressure.

00:15:07.400 And so one of the other things I examined, which is, well, how do kind of modern day progressives deal with heroes?

00:15:14.680 So we've already talked about the deliberate undermining of men like Napoleon.

00:15:19.300 Obviously, you know, the American founding fathers are literally being erased.

00:15:24.660 But also, well, how do they write their own heroes?

00:15:29.120 And there are kind of two versions of that, which is one, there's the and I hate talking about kind of like more like modern franchise properties, but it's kind of the best example to hit.

00:15:40.040 So on one example, you have the kind of like Captain Marvel types, you know, the like I'm a girl boss.

00:15:46.500 You know, I don't need no man. 0.99

00:15:48.540 I'm going to punch the dude at the bar who cat calls me, you know, essentially just this kind of like like horrifying amalgamation of like 80s strong man. 0.95

00:15:59.480 Like paste it on to like a, you know, a 110 pound aging Hollywood starlet. 1.00

00:16:06.160 And on the other hand, you have the way that they handle kind of more normative heroes.

00:16:10.120 And you see this in the Marvel movies very well, which is that there's this constant bit joke, you know, where, you know, the camera pans up, they kind of strike a heroic pose.

00:16:20.220 And then someone makes a joke like, oh, that was awkward.

00:16:22.900 You know, everyone has a chuckle.

00:16:24.200 And ingrained in that, other than just kind of being a cheap gag, is the idea that that heroism is silly. 0.90

00:16:29.540 It's embarrassing.

00:16:30.560 It's not real.

00:16:31.180 And, again, that idea that this kind of like low cynicism of, well, I am bad and embarrassing, you know, I do things that are unadmirable.

00:16:42.460 So, therefore, everyone else must have it too.

00:16:44.400 No one can ever get above that is really damaging.

00:16:47.560 And I don't just mean damaging in kind of like a psychic or a spiritual sense, although certainly that.

00:16:51.620 But we see the consequences, you know, kind of writ large in culture.

00:16:56.180 So, again, I realize the irony of saying I don't like talking about school shootings, then mentioning multiple of them.

00:17:01.680 But take an event like you've all did, right, where there are armed men who have a situation where that is your job.

00:17:08.260 You are supposed to do that.

00:17:10.260 And they stand outside.

00:17:11.380 They don't do anything.

00:17:12.180 They let people die.

00:17:13.900 And I'm not going to say necessarily, you know, if they had read, you know, one more passage of Carlisle, they all would have, you know, ran in there like Rambo. 0.94

00:17:20.100 But what I am saying is that this creates a decay in national morals and, I guess, like national psychic health, right?

00:17:28.080 Kind of a goofy language, but it's what we're going with.

00:17:30.500 And so you see this kind of situation where, you know, the best lack conviction, the pick quote, you know, the best lack any support.

00:17:40.140 You know, I've met like, you know, the guy in the subway who's being charged for essentially, you know, trying to restrain a violent felony.

00:17:47.660 You have Kyle Rittenhouse, who the entire weight of the U.S. deep state just tried to demolish.

00:17:54.260 You know, these men who do things that are right, do things that are brave, you know, take actions that are kind of above and beyond what they were required to do.

00:18:01.180 Well, we destroy those people.

00:18:02.820 You know, we have to completely ruin their lives.

00:18:04.960 And on the other end, it's like, well, okay, like, yeah, sure, some of the guys at Yuvaldi probably lost their job.

00:18:08.860 But like, are any of them facing the kind of prison time those, you know, that Rittenhouse and the other guy were?

00:18:14.120 Like, no.

00:18:14.780 And so it is really a problem.

00:18:17.740 And I think that as we look around at American culture and kind of see this decay, see this kind of lack of energy, it's downstream of the inability to basically make kind of confident value judgments.

00:18:30.920 And I think a lot of this initially starts through humor, you know, kind of making a joke at the expense of, you know, kind of an older version of culture.

00:18:39.520 And don't get me wrong, like, I make plenty of jokes, like, if you've ever followed me on Twitter, you know, I'm not a particularly serious person.

00:18:45.080 But at the same time, that's kind of corrosive.

00:18:48.020 You see this very, perhaps most cleanly in a lot of British comedy.

00:18:51.960 You know, you look at things like, you know, Monty Python, John Cleese, who I think, don't get me wrong, very funny.

00:18:56.100 But they are making fun of a previous existing social order. 0.97

00:19:00.920 You know, like the guys in bowler hats are inherently ridiculous. 0.85

00:19:04.440 And now John Cleese laments that that culture doesn't exist. 0.91

00:19:07.300 He goes on and gives interviews about what happened.

00:19:10.400 Why isn't London a British city?

00:19:11.840 Like, well, because you destroyed what it meant.

00:19:14.640 Exactly.

00:19:15.320 And this is why these kind of things matter.

00:19:17.760 You know, this is the strata of culture, the thing that allows it to propagate going forward.

00:19:23.040 And so when it comes to that phrase, just, you know, it is really the social asset that eats away at it.

00:19:28.640 And so one of the things that I kind of continually harp on in my writing and in my content is basically, look, like the progressive left hates you.

00:19:38.580 You know, and from a certain perspective, they know what they're doing.

00:19:40.540 They are demolishing your cultural and intellectual heritage.

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00:20:00.160 And once you've accepted that premise, it begs the question, well, why do you listen to them?

00:20:04.660 You know, you understand that they hate you.

00:20:06.300 They're your enemies.

00:20:06.880 Like, why do you look to them for, you know, moral acceptance and moral guidance?

00:20:11.460 And so when it comes to men like, you know, Jefferson or Lee, who, don't get me wrong, from a certain perspective, have morally compromising things about them.

00:20:19.900 But that's not why they're relevant.

00:20:22.100 No one's like, you know why I like Jefferson? 0.94

00:20:24.100 Because he may or may not have had sex with a slave. 0.61

00:20:26.760 Like, no one says that. 0.94

00:20:27.740 It doesn't matter.

00:20:28.580 I mean, it does from a certain moral perspective.

00:20:30.620 But the idea of reducing, you know, our kind of intellectual heritage, our great men, the people who we ought to be emulating to kind of their worst personal foibles is, it's suicidal.

00:20:42.420 There's a really dangerous impulse in conservatives, in particular, the need to have somebody perfect before you can praise anything about them.

00:20:55.520 If there's one failure, if there's one flaw, even if there's many failures or many flaws, you can't recognize anything about that person.

00:21:02.620 Everything that they did is undone.

00:21:05.080 And because the left dictate the level of focus that we provide to pretty much anything, because they control, they have the mind control machine.

00:21:13.340 They have the media.

00:21:14.360 They can they can zoom in and zoom out and maintain the hold or completely flush something away in a moment's notice.

00:21:21.780 And because they have the ability to do that, they can just focus on something until the flaw finally shows.

00:21:26.840 And so you've got guys like Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, who you mentioned.

00:21:30.960 And of course, you know, Penny is just destroyed.

00:21:33.840 It's not even given.

00:21:34.980 They don't even need to find a flaw. 0.97

00:21:36.520 He's just it's a white guy stopping a black guy. 0.92

00:21:39.480 And so therefore, it's racism. 0.65

00:21:40.860 And then that's that's all there is to it.

00:21:43.060 But in the Kyle Rittenhouse case where they, you know, they try to destroy him legally, but he manages to escape.

00:21:48.700 Eventually, if you focus on Rittenhouse long enough, you get the cringy videos and the weird interviews and the statements.

00:21:54.900 And, you know, it's just a guy.

00:21:56.460 It's a kid.

00:21:57.020 You know, it's a guy who is barely out of his teens and has no clue how to comport himself in a kind of massive fame situation.

00:22:06.500 And he's going to make mistakes.

00:22:08.560 And any of the mistakes he made suddenly mean you have to disown him.

00:22:12.300 You have to it's either defend every single aspect of him or nothing at all.

00:22:16.780 And, you know, I wish Trump wasn't the guy the right had to learn this lesson on.

00:22:23.140 Like, Trump isn't that great a guy, actually.

00:22:25.500 But if they're going to learn it on anybody, it should be Trump.

00:22:28.040 And you can kind of see this, you know, not to rag on the people.

00:22:31.700 But you can see this in the people, the never Trump, but still, you know, maybe like DeSantis guys or something.

00:22:39.260 Again, you can like DeSantis and that's justified.

00:22:42.480 That's not what I'm saying here.

00:22:43.660 But what I'm saying is there's a certain kind of guy who needs a certain level of regime approval and simply cannot support Trump no matter what.

00:22:52.820 But I think a number of people, the right, finally learned the lesson that they're just going to destroy whoever we put in front of you anyway.

00:23:00.040 And so you might as well celebrate the things you like about someone.

00:23:03.660 But I think you're right that this is a huge problem that the right simply has this obsession with, oh, well, if there is one thing somewhere in a person's past or even several things,

00:23:14.640 then we must forget every great act because a person is not their greatest act.

00:23:19.100 They're their smart.

00:23:19.840 They're their smallest foible.

00:23:21.280 And that's a formula that's just going to destroy your culture every time.

00:23:27.580 Well, definitely.

00:23:28.660 And it's something that is not applied evenly either.

00:23:33.740 I don't want to get into the whole, well, the libtards aren't fair argument, because to be honest, they're too powerful to care. 1.00

00:23:41.620 It doesn't matter.

00:23:42.600 Right.

00:23:42.680 But if you look at progressive saints like George Floyd, for instance, there are a lot of things to find objectionable.

00:23:49.600 But he can become sainted.

00:23:51.540 You know, he can become this kind of icon of progressive civic religion.

00:23:55.080 And that washes away any of the negative things that he may or may not have done earlier in life, allegedly, of course.

00:24:04.580 And so that kind of begs the question of, well, why do they do this?

00:24:07.740 You know, why do they seek to denigrate kind of traditional heroes?

00:24:11.520 So some of that, I think, is just pure power politics.

00:24:14.520 Right.

00:24:14.880 Which is, well, I'm in charge.

00:24:15.980 And so all my friends are cool and all the people you like are lame.

00:24:19.540 So we're going to get rid of them.

00:24:20.600 Like, that's part of it.

00:24:21.380 You know, just kind of a playground stuff.

00:24:22.860 But there's another thing.

00:24:23.800 And I bring up Yukio Mishima in this as well for Sun and Steel.

00:24:27.460 So Yukio Mishima is, to put it mildly, an odd guy.

00:24:30.660 He was sort of this Japanese super fascist.

00:24:34.720 He wrote a lot of plays and poetry, acted in a few movies.

00:24:38.860 I like his fiction quite a bit.

00:24:40.680 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is truly disconcerting.

00:24:44.660 He has a very odd perspective on things.

00:24:46.180 But his most famous book is probably Sun and Steel, which is sort of this, like, vitalist text before vitalism, if that makes sense.

00:24:54.340 But he writes on hero worship as well.

00:24:57.340 And his point is basically, like, to kind of paraphrase it, you know, you never see a guy with a six-pack dissing hero worship. 0.93

00:25:04.920 You know, it's offensively, it's ugly nerds. 1.00

00:25:06.760 It's revenge of the nerds, essentially.

00:25:09.320 You know, it's people who are mad that they are not transcendent or do have any kind of, like, transcendent virtue.

00:25:15.460 And so they pick apart at it.

00:25:17.100 That's certainly, I think, a part of the issue at hand.

00:25:20.320 But another part of it, and I don't mean to take this in a way that is overly misogynistic, but there's a difference between how men and women write and consume narrative.

00:25:36.360 So the Lego company did a very interesting study, which basically they were wondering why.

00:25:41.340 Okay, like, we make Legos.

00:25:42.440 They're incredibly popular.

00:25:43.560 And we have all these branded tie-ins.

00:25:45.400 But any time we try to kind of push a branded tie-in to girls, it doesn't succeed.

00:25:51.480 Now, why is that?

00:25:52.660 And so what they did is they basically did a massive study into how male and female children play.

00:26:00.100 And what they found is that if you gave a bunch of boys a room full of toys, they'd find something like Batman.

00:26:06.380 And they're like, all right, I'm Batman.

00:26:08.180 So I do the thing that Batman does.

00:26:09.860 You know, I'm rich.

00:26:11.380 I fight criminals.

00:26:12.600 I have cool cars.

00:26:13.580 That's what I am.

00:26:14.420 I become that thing.

00:26:15.860 Whereas they found with female children, and obviously these are all averages.

00:26:19.260 I'm not saying that you as a woman or a man have to do this.

00:26:22.060 But what they found is that they made Batman part of what they were.

00:26:26.740 So like, okay, Batman is now me.

00:26:28.440 And he has the categories that I have.

00:26:31.420 And so what you see in media that is kind of more masculinized or more feminized is that the logic kind of goes, well, okay, you know, sometimes I am upset.

00:26:41.600 I do bad things.

00:26:43.040 You know, I sit on the couch and eat ice cream.

00:26:45.640 So that way my characters do that too, because they're just like me.

00:26:48.580 It's kind of an over-feminized, toxic feminine, if we can use that phrase version of it. 1.00

00:26:53.120 When the other end, the kind of hyper-masculine is like, oh, it's Conan the Barbarian.

00:26:56.800 You know, I'm going to be this cool guy with muscles and a sword who all the women like.

00:27:01.260 And okay, like maybe, like Howard is a cool guy, but he's not quite that cool.

00:27:05.700 You know, it's aspirational.

00:27:06.860 And so that's part of it as well, is that as we see the kind of power balance between the sexes shift, the relationship to narrative is going to shift as well.

00:27:15.460 So I think that's part of it.

00:27:16.820 Am I on anything there, Oren, or am I just ranting into the mic?

00:27:19.580 No, I think that's very true.

00:27:22.420 And it's interesting that it is difficult for the regime to kind of, like you said, find an aspirational hero that isn't incredibly deeply flawed, like criminally so.

00:27:39.200 It always seems to have to be George Floyd.

00:27:41.800 And I wonder how much of that is connected to the fact that they, you know, they need to have somebody who kind of the disgruntled hordes can see themselves reflected.

00:27:53.780 You know, you can't have kind of bright, shining cities on a hill when everything around you is rotting away and you're in a situation where you need to feel like the person in front of you on the screen could be you or you could be that person or you could take on aspects of that.

00:28:10.420 And so, you know, there's always this need to search for, I don't know, increasingly degenerate people to hold up, increasingly unimpressive people to hold up as heroes, because you can't really bear the idea that there would be someone that could hold you to a particular ideal.

00:28:34.860 You have to have someone who you could be without making any additional effort, which I guess, I mean, not to, you know, we don't have to contemporize this if you don't want to, but I guess that could bring us to the events with Harvard and Claudine Gay here.

00:28:48.940 You know, just the destruction of any credibility that one of the most important institutions in the United States could have by, you know, just defending a president who clearly did not have the necessary abilities to do just very basic scholarship in a very unimpressive area.

00:29:12.180 And that's really as much as they could elevate somebody. This is the kind of person they had to go to bat to defend.

00:29:17.380 Well, certainly. And that sort of brings up a relevant question, right, which is when we use these terms like right and left, you know, progressive conservative reactionary, what are we actually talking about?

00:29:30.880 And I think that as Americans, we kind of have this default assumption that has to do with economics, right, that right wingers want freedom, free markets, left wingers want government control.

00:29:40.620 And if you actually look at the history of thought, that kind of breaks down relatively quickly, right?

00:29:45.080 Like, is Bismarck a left wing figure because he had a welfare state?

00:29:48.740 You know, there's another prominent German leader who had a welfare state who is not particularly left wing either.

00:29:54.920 But the kind of reactionary answer to that is the answer is basically hierarchy.

00:30:00.420 The right wing believes in hierarchy. The left wing believes in equality.

00:30:04.420 And when you talk about a hero, that is by definition someone who is in a level of hierarchy above you.

00:30:09.880 You know, I want to – that person is better than me.

00:30:13.000 You know, you're kind of channeling something outside of yourself.

00:30:15.220 Whereas once you can kind of use this kind of social leveling to bring everyone down, you don't have to deal with that anymore.

00:30:22.920 And when you look at a person like Claudine Gay, I'll put it mildly. 0.91

00:30:27.760 You know, I'm by no means a Harvard academic, but I have written more than 11 things in my life and none of those have had plagiarism.

00:30:34.960 You know, and if that's the only barrier to get a $900,000 salary a year, you know, I'd like my back pay, please.

00:30:41.100 And so it's one of those things where, again, right, these – the creep of egalitarianism, you know, that, you know, you see in extreme in communism, but also kind of in a lot of liberal thought, it does produce bad results.

00:30:57.400 You know, this isn't just a philosophical problem.

00:30:59.620 You know, this isn't just one of those things where it's like, oh, the crazy college kids are pulling down a statue or, you know, through paint a portrait.

00:31:06.200 You know, it creates real civilizational problems. 0.98

00:31:09.160 And obviously the Claudine Gay thing is kind of funny, one, because her name is gay, but also because it's very clearly clownish. 0.96

00:31:15.200 You know, this is the – supposedly the best university in America, some say in the world, and it's being manned by someone who is, to put it mildly, out of their depth. 0.94

00:31:23.820 But at the same time, it's like, well, wait a minute.

00:31:26.860 This is supposed to be the best America – the best university in the best, most powerful country in the world, and it's being run by incompetence.

00:31:35.780 And that's a bad thing.

00:31:36.820 And that's why this kind of radical egalitarianism is genuinely a problem.

00:31:41.620 You know, it's a big – it's a big factor behind the competence crisis, as many other people have put it.

00:31:46.620 Yeah, no, I mean, it is only going to get worse, obviously, because the left is unable to, like you said, embrace any kind of hierarchy.

00:31:59.820 And that means that they're continuously going to select for political ideology, and they're going to continue to drive a competency crisis.

00:32:07.520 I don't – I think at this – I think we're at the point where, you know, a lot of people panic about this, and it's bad.

00:32:14.700 Don't get me wrong.

00:32:15.360 Like, obviously, your institution's failing is generally bad for your country.

00:32:19.020 But at this point, I think that those institutions have to die.

00:32:22.580 Like, I don't want – I don't want Harvard to be fixed.

00:32:26.660 I don't think there is fixing Harvard.

00:32:28.860 I want these institutions to crash and burn and be replaced by something that's separate and greater.

00:32:35.080 But I think that that takes a right wing that can elevate people, that can reach for the transcendent, that is comfortable with creating a hierarchy.

00:32:47.500 And I guess the question that you have to ask yourself then is, how do you guard against this?

00:32:51.240 I saw – I know we were talking a little about this before we got on.

00:32:55.320 And I know you didn't see the whole stream, but Dave the Distributist and Carl Benjamin had an episode recently where they talked a little bit about your essay.

00:33:06.240 And Carl was asking Dave, like, okay, who do we make statues to, right?

00:33:11.220 And then Dave was having trouble.

00:33:12.520 He's like, well, we could do this, but this person has this problem, and then there's this person.

00:33:17.860 But, well, they don't quite measure up in all these ways.

00:33:20.960 And Carl's just like, no, terrible, wrong, you know.

00:33:23.940 Like, you're doing the just.

00:33:26.220 You know, they're just this person.

00:33:28.180 They only achieve this.

00:33:29.440 They only achieve that.

00:33:31.260 And so I think, you know, the question we have to ask ourselves is, how do we make the mentality shift to protect ourselves against this disenchantment, this belittlement that the left brings against us?

00:33:42.620 Because it's constant and relentless, and this point, it's beaten into us so much that it reflects it. 0.94

00:33:47.820 We feel somehow, again, you know, small or we're uncomplex, we're simpletons, we're fools, we're bumpkins.

00:33:58.580 If we would worship something higher, if we were to put something in a hierarchy, if we were to admit that despite flaws or, you know, personal foibles, 0.69

00:34:08.000 someone's great achievements are indeed great and worthy of honor and worthy of emulation,

00:34:14.400 how do we break through that in a modern era?

00:34:16.420 Because I think that's the thing that's really going to allow people to, once again, because once you see that, like, I think it's infectious.

00:34:23.980 Once you see people who unironically invest themselves in that spirit, I think that's the kind of thing, that vitality that people, that elusive vitality people talk about is not just fitness or whatever, though that's all part of it, and you should be investing in that.

00:34:41.180 But it's more the willingness to embrace, without any kind of irony and without any kind of hesitation, a heroic way of being, a desire to kind of pursue this and not feel ashamed about your willingness to kind of elevate something to that point and pursue it.

00:35:02.660 No, certainly. And I didn't think I'd be citing Lewis this much, but in mere Christianity, Lewis kind of attacks the problem of LARPing, right?

00:35:14.020 Which is basically, he's like, he was a midlife convert. It wasn't something that came naturally to him.

00:35:19.720 Like, how do you go about doing something like that? And how do you do it in a real way?

00:35:24.560 And what he basically says is you kind of just have to muscle through the LARP.

00:35:27.360 Like, it's going to be LARPing at first. You're going to be playing pretend.

00:35:29.960 But if you look at the way children become something, you know, children become adults, well, they do it by mimicking adults.

00:35:37.280 You know, so like when you're a kid, you know, you play shop, you play house or whatever.

00:35:40.160 And then, you know, obviously kind of through gaming that out, eventually it becomes real behavior.

00:35:44.640 And obviously that's embarrassing and uncomfortable to do as an adult, right?

00:35:48.480 Like, it would be nice to live in a culture where you could just simply be.

00:35:53.240 The problem is we don't really have that option.

00:35:55.020 You know, like, I would love to live in such a society. That's not the one we've been given.

00:35:59.040 So you sort of have to LARP it. You kind of have to go about it.

00:36:04.560 Now, I am perhaps not the person for white pills on this.

00:36:09.220 You know, I'm a big cyclical history guy.

00:36:14.220 And I think there's a certain part of it that we're not getting out of.

00:36:16.880 You know, we kind of have to take our lumps as a generation.

00:36:19.980 I really like what academic agent has to say on this when he calls, you know, Gen Z, my generation, the children of the ashes.

00:36:25.220 It's, you know, essentially like we are part of that winter of civilization.

00:36:29.780 Now, that doesn't mean, you know, it's all over.

00:36:31.540 That's the nice part about cyclical history is that the hook comes back around for you.

00:36:35.020 But at the same time, I do think that there is this kind of tyranny of self-awareness, tyranny of self-awareness, which is actually where I got the title for my essay.

00:36:46.140 It's this idea that once you become aware of it, you know, once you realize what you're doing, you do lose a little bit of the magic.

00:36:53.480 Now, the nice thing about that is, and if I've talked to several of my friends like, you know, John Slaughter, who are in a similar position to Lewis.

00:37:00.740 They are people who did not grow up in faith, did not grow up attached to tradition, but came back to it as adults.

00:37:06.720 And what they said is, it's still a little put on for me.

00:37:11.260 You know, I am someone who made this change midway through my life.

00:37:14.600 But he says, look at my sons.

00:37:16.180 He has two sons.

00:37:16.840 And he's like, they, it's real for them.

00:37:20.160 And so it's something that it may never be the same, you know, as a convert, we're using obviously the religious example, but, you know, someone who comes back to tradition.

00:37:30.040 But you can sort of break that pattern of, let's just use the phrase generational sin.

00:37:35.460 You know, you can become kind of the first data point in a positive direction.

00:37:38.940 And obviously, you know, that isn't, that isn't the, you know, the most glamorous thing to do with your life.

00:37:45.760 But again, we're in a situation where we are rebuilding a culture.

00:37:49.200 You know, we have, we've had three generations of this kind of cultural decay at the very least.

00:37:55.020 You know, this kind of classification, demystification that I talk about.

00:37:58.460 And that does damage.

00:37:59.500 And that requires rebuilding.

00:38:00.820 And, you know, if you've ever done any work with your hands in your life, you're aware of the fact that it takes a lot of work to undo entropy.

00:38:08.500 It takes a lot of work to repair something, to kind of build something back up.

00:38:12.480 And this was a generational process to destroy.

00:38:14.920 And I'm quite confident it will be a generational process to repair if it is repairable.

00:38:19.900 And I know you said, you know, I don't want Harvard fixed.

00:38:22.380 I completely agree with you.

00:38:23.760 And one of the things that I think we'll see in this, and you see this already in media, like the Stepford Wives or anything that deals with the past, is this idea that, you know, don't believe your lying eyes.

00:38:34.580 It's always been this bad.

00:38:36.120 And I think that, you know, these two kind of things coalesce together, which is as this, as the kind of like general broader culture, as the kind of progressive civic religion, excuse me, gets worse, they're kind of like flailing is going to increase because they can't be shown up.

00:38:53.900 And so I guess that those two things kind of tie together there.

00:38:58.100 Yeah, a couple threads to pull out there.

00:39:00.560 I think it's really important what you're talking about, you know, there's a certain amount of cyclical history that we're stuck in.

00:39:07.760 That's kind of what it means.

00:39:09.480 And, you know, we, even though it's a terrible truth, you're Gen Z, I'm a millennial.

00:39:16.580 I'm actually on the, I'm closer to Gen X than millennial, but I'm, so I'm a lot older than you.

00:39:23.460 But, you know, but we're both on the downslope of culture and it, it really sucks to realize it, but you're going to have to pay the bill for the people who came before you.

00:39:36.560 And there's just no way to escape that.

00:39:38.760 You may not have made these mistakes.

00:39:40.540 You may have been born into this world, but, but prior generations did not do the work.

00:39:46.600 And that means that now you have to, you have to pay the cost for that.

00:39:51.280 And so you might never, as you pointed out, completely be free of the cynicism, completely be free of the self-awareness.

00:39:58.280 But if you want a generation that will be, you have to start now.

00:40:01.320 And so that means you have to be the generation that plants trees you're not going to sit under because you, yeah, you may not be the one that is completely free of the cynicism, that is completely free of the self-awareness, that is completely invested in the heroic and the hierarchical and the transcendent.

00:40:18.160 But by LARPing it, as you say, by taking those steps, the necessary steps to go through the motions, you begin to embody, you know, we'll quote C.S. Lewis one more time at this point, because why not?

00:40:29.760 You know, I, I, I may not love my neighbor, but I find that if I take the actions of loving my neighbor over and over again, slowly but surely, I find that I do love him.

00:40:40.720 You know, this is the, you know, to paraphrase Lewis on kind of going through this process, you, you LARP it until you make it, you fake it until you make it.

00:40:48.160 And so even if you can't completely cross that barrier by embodying the spirit of the heroic and connecting with the transcendent, even in a way that is awkward and confused and, and somewhat inorganic at times, you bring yourself.

00:41:06.240 And more importantly, in the next generation, one step closer to that sincerity, which I think is absolutely critical and, oh, sorry, go ahead.

00:41:16.240 Oh no, not at all.

00:41:16.940 Finish your thought there.

00:41:18.580 I was just, I was just saying, like, I, I think it's really important for people not to get hung up on the, well, I don't, but I'm not sure if I completely believe it or I'm not completely invested in it, or if it feels completely organic, that's okay.

00:41:30.500 Like take the time to, to go through the motion, make it real, put it into the world.

00:41:36.200 And more importantly, put it into your, your family, your community, because if you're not doing that, if you're not the one who's willing to do that, then it's an, it's one more generation that is going to be deprived of the ability to truly interact and interface.

00:41:51.120 So let's just complete the triumvirate and mention the third most significant Christian writer of the 20th century, Tolkien.

00:42:01.660 Right. And my favorite part of the Lord of the Rings is the scouring of the Shire, right? 0.97

00:42:07.800 And it's, it's vital to understanding the story more broadly.

00:42:10.720 And what you have happened is basically, you know, the hobbits have, you know, the, the ring has been destroyed.

00:42:14.860 They come back to, they come back to the Shire, which is sort of this kind of pastoral picture of rural England.

00:42:23.300 And they find that in their absence, you know, that this band of thugs has kind of taken control of it.

00:42:30.800 And, you know, there, there's a lot of very kind of vivid pictures of factories being set up, you know, knock down the hedges, knock down the villages.

00:42:38.320 And it's obviously kind of a, a stand-in for the way that modernity has destroyed a lot of kind of picturesque parts of English life.

00:42:48.040 And so our heroes come back and they stop it. Don't get me wrong.

00:42:51.180 But there's a couple of interesting things about it, which is one, things are built back, but they're not the same.

00:42:57.100 You know, and they mentioned that there is genuine loss in that.

00:42:59.180 There are things that do not make it through the filter, but also the same thing happens for the, for the hobbits who fought against it.

00:43:07.840 They're different. They can't ever go back to what they were.

00:43:11.140 And so I think that it's one of the hard things about being on the right and being connected to, at one hand, we have this foot in tradition.

00:43:18.200 You know, we like our ancestors more than the rest of culture does, but we're also tainted by modernity.

00:43:23.560 You know, there's no, there's no way around that.

00:43:25.440 And I think that, you know, in, within that kind of like benevolent LARP we've, we've talked about, there kind of has to be a little bit of self-awareness that

00:43:34.060 there's still that kind of, there's a boomer inside of you, you know, no matter how deeply buried.

00:43:40.920 And so I think that, you know, you talk about that, that kind of like, you know, building a culture for the next generation where that's absent.

00:43:47.260 I think that has to be the goal because, you know, and maybe I'm overly pessimistic.

00:43:51.480 Like, don't get me wrong.

00:43:52.700 Like, look at my avatar.

00:43:53.640 I'm a, you know, a Calvinist Christian.

00:43:55.320 It kind of comes with the territory, but I look at my generation and I, to be honest, I don't know if we're Caesar.

00:44:03.580 You know, I don't know if there's a base zoomer out there who's going to fix the empire.

00:44:07.340 I could be wrong.

00:44:08.280 I'd love to be wrong, but I do think that, you know, this kind of cultural degradation we talk about, you know, like you said, you have to pay the piper.

00:44:15.540 And don't get me wrong, that's not actually a terrible thing.

00:44:21.100 You know, what we were doing as a culture was not sustainable.

00:44:24.940 You know, the practices that, you know, our parents and our grandparents engaged in, and don't get me wrong, I love both those generations.

00:44:32.360 You know, I love my parents.

00:44:33.120 I love my grandparents, but they were burning down seed corn.

00:44:36.960 You know, they were taking that kind of generational wealth, obviously, but also the culture that kind of raised them and basically, you know, lighting it to keep themselves warm.

00:44:46.020 And so, you know, in all of this, right, maybe I've gotten a little bit off topic, but when it's kind of like, what is our path forward?

00:44:53.540 You know, it really is, you know, that process of building a new culture.

00:44:56.700 And so, as Carl said, you know, when it comes to, you know, maybe men you would build statues of.

00:45:01.160 I mean, I can think of a couple, you know, maybe we could have a statue of, you know, Bowden and Sam Francis and, you know, all those guys, you know, Burnham that we really, you know, like and appreciate is kind of like online nerds who like to read books.

00:45:14.100 But I think that with all of those, you know, we will have to realize that these were flawed men.

00:45:19.860 You know, these men did have problems in the same way that we do, but you don't celebrate them for that.

00:45:25.580 You celebrate them for the great contributions that they've made.

00:45:27.620 And that's the way that you kind of build a fully sincere, unironic culture, I guess.

00:45:33.080 Yeah, you've got to get away from being apologetic about these things, you know, which doesn't mean that you need to embrace the negative aspects of, you know, heroic figures.

00:45:43.340 It doesn't mean that you need to venerate the flaws, but it means you need to be unapologetic about the veneration of the good and not willing to step away, not willing to back down, not willing to wilt in front of those who would bring, you know, point out the flaws, point out the issues and pretend like that brings down the whole man, that that destroys the entire archetype.

00:46:06.660 Because if you're willing to, if you're going to let people do that, then you're just always going to be bowing to them.

00:46:12.800 You're always going to be in this, you know, on the back foot.

00:46:15.800 You're always going to be in this reaction instead of trying to figure out how to forge ahead.

00:46:21.400 And so I think that rebuilding that culture by rebuild, you know, as you say, going through the LARP until it's real, but also being willing to say, OK, but this is something there is something about this person.

00:46:34.300 I want to emulate and that does not mean I'm going to emulate every negative aspect of them, but I'm not backing away from embracing that.

00:46:44.120 I'm not going to say that Kyle Rittenhouse is just some guy in any other in any other reality.

00:46:51.200 Kyle Rittenhouse is awarded a, you know, a small fiefdom and his, you know, his choice of eligible maidens for marriage.

00:46:58.740 You know, that's the kind of heroic act that makes you someone worthy of respect, you know, not in connection to anything else you do because it's so impactful.

00:47:12.280 There's a there's a veterans poem and I can't remember all of it, but there was always a line that struck me.

00:47:18.040 And it always talked about how, you know, some some veteran at the end of the bar who's washed out and, you know, doesn't doesn't have anyone and is embarrassing in certain aspects.

00:47:31.380 But none of that matters, because at some point he saved an entire platoon of people.

00:47:37.280 And so he's better than ninety nine percent of the people around who who would judge him and see him as as less because in the cosmic scales, he's done something so heroic that that the rest of this is is really immaterial.

00:47:50.380 And I think that's important to remember, because left is going to tear these things down.

00:47:56.660 They are going to assault these things. There are so many aspects.

00:47:59.700 Anything that's good or virtuous is something the left can find a foible in.

00:48:03.980 And if you're not willing to stand and you're not willing to be unapologetic about the heroic acts of people that you want to emulate, then I don't think you can really take those steps forward.

00:48:13.300 Well, certainly. And, you know, when we talk about things like irony and sarcasm, you know, and I think that that's something kind of endemic to the last three generations.

00:48:24.540 Gen X, obviously, we kind of renowned for their cynicism.

00:48:27.340 You know, millennials had their own brand.

00:48:28.740 And then Zoomers have been described as terminally poisoned by irony, which I think is a pretty accurate statement. 1.00

00:48:36.500 And obviously some some part of that is an understandable reaction to the fact that we live in a very absurd society.

00:48:41.760 You know, this is essentially the we turned the Emperor's New Clothes into a very large social experiment.

00:48:48.220 And guess what, bud? You're living in it.

00:48:50.500 And so part of that is an understandable defense mechanism.

00:48:52.940 And don't get me wrong, like a lot of the gains that the radical right wing has made in the past 15 years has been due to the fact that it's funny.

00:49:01.140 You know, it was fun to post Pepe memes.

00:49:03.380 You know, it was fun to, you know, make fun of essentially like stuck up progressives.

00:49:09.260 Don't get me wrong. It's very important. It's not my point.

00:49:11.760 But every once in a while, if you've been on the Internet long enough, you see someone who is truly subsumed by irony, you know, where it's just like everything exists in kind of pure reaction.

00:49:22.640 Everything is a joke. Nothing is sincerely done.

00:49:24.620 And, you know, you mentioned that reactionary tendency of the right way.

00:49:28.620 And I think that they're sort of linked in a way, which is that if you're always moving in kind of moving in a way that you define yourself negative, you know, like, oh, I'm making fun of this, you know, or oh, I'm opposing that.

00:49:42.060 You sort of become this like bizarre, malformed creature.

00:49:47.280 And without the ability to basically just say, you know, and like you said, like confidently, just like this is right, this is wrong, you know, this is a good man.

00:49:56.560 You sort of can't replicate as a culture, you know, you can't pass anything forward.

00:50:01.660 And so I think that it's a important kind of like outer limit there, you know, like maybe don't go that far, guys, I guess.

00:50:08.320 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and pivot to the questions of the people.

00:50:13.400 But before we do, Mr. Burden, can you tell everyone where to find your great work?

00:50:17.580 Yeah, sure.

00:50:17.980 So you can find the Jay Burden show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts.

00:50:22.440 It's two times a week, hourly or hour long interview show.

00:50:25.880 I've got Bog Beef, who was recently on your show on tonight.

00:50:29.340 I also have a sub stack.

00:50:30.180 It's also just the Jay Burden show.

00:50:32.160 I'm pretty easy to find.

00:50:33.220 And if you want to find me on someone else's channel, my interview with Alex Kishuda just dropped today.

00:50:39.760 It was recorded seven months ago.

00:50:41.580 I don't remember what I've said, but people have told me that it was good.

00:50:44.760 So I'm going to recommend that here.

00:50:46.680 It's always exciting when you do a interview and it's all along for a long time.

00:50:51.880 You're like, man, I hope I sounded smart on that one.

00:50:54.080 That's well, definitely.

00:50:55.960 Like I got a message from one of my friends, Arthur Dane, who's a poster.

00:51:00.240 He's like, oh, I really like any rattled off.

00:51:02.240 And I was like, did I say that?

00:51:04.260 I mean, that sounds like something I would say.

00:51:05.580 I have no memory whatsoever.

00:51:08.440 But yeah.

00:51:09.060 Glad that sounded okay at the time.

00:51:10.760 Yeah.

00:51:10.940 Yeah, exactly.

00:51:11.740 I can very much relate to that.

00:51:13.280 All right, guys, let's go ahead and look at what you had to say.

00:51:17.160 Andrew Giller, thank you very much.

00:51:18.780 It's been noted that people educated between the two wars were highly high quality thinkers.

00:51:25.180 Examples would be C.S. Lewis, Jacques Hughes Barzin, and Milton Friedman.

00:51:30.360 And why was that the case?

00:51:33.020 Well, I think that's certainly there's certainly truth to that, though.

00:51:37.720 I think many people could also say that's also where some of your worst influences come from.

00:51:42.520 But it is certainly a generation that had some high quality thinkers.

00:51:48.160 World War I obviously calls a large segment of the population, especially in Europe.

00:51:55.720 And so I guess those coming back have to take things pretty seriously.

00:52:00.640 It's a very different world that they enter into, a disenchanted world, of course, for many.

00:52:08.180 And the different reactions that you get to that, I think, end up showing you something deep inside the man.

00:52:13.700 You have guys like Tolkien.

00:52:15.400 You have guys like Lewis.

00:52:17.000 But you also have those that come completely unmoored from reality or those that embrace silly socialist movements and those kind of things.

00:52:25.760 And so I think that your mileage will vary.

00:52:29.660 I don't know if you can just say all of them were high quality thinkers, but we certainly get some very high quality thinkers out of that generation.

00:52:36.080 Well, I think it also can't be it can't be denied that anyone educated before the Department of Education was founded had a massive, massive advantage.

00:52:45.320 I'll be honest, the quality of American education at large has been precipitously declining for the last 70 years.

00:52:53.840 And obviously, you know, the the interwar period is before that started, but it certainly is a relevant factor.

00:53:02.120 Yeah, there's something that people need to understand about education.

00:53:04.920 It's like food in a cafeteria.

00:53:07.140 The more thing more people you have to prepare something for, the worse it gets.

00:53:11.580 And so the more general you have to make something, the lower quality it becomes.

00:53:17.400 So, yeah, today you might have a higher percentage of people who are literate, but literate means barely able to type something into their cell phone as where, you know, maybe in 1912, you would have had guys who were very illiterate, very unable to know certain things, unlettered in certain areas.

00:53:37.760 But the people who were educated were had to be fluent in Latin and things like this, because that was just what it meant to have an education at all.

00:53:45.560 And so when, you know, as is so often the case, things just kind of settle at room temperature.

00:53:50.560 And so when you're trying to educate the masses, you get mass education and even your highest level thinkers are many are like, you know, standard deviations below what came before because the resources are spread so thin.

00:54:07.260 And the, you know, the generalized homogenized education is so poor that the heights are just unattainable for most.

00:54:15.900 Well, certainly.

00:54:16.440 And I have absolutely no idea who was the president of Harvard in 1924, but I am 100% sure he was smarter than Claudine Gay.

00:54:25.200 Were it to be a rock, you would still be correct.

00:54:27.600 Yeah, that's not a particularly bold prediction.

00:54:29.560 You know, I feel like the math's on my side there.

00:54:31.960 But yeah.

00:54:33.640 Safe bet, to be sure.

00:54:35.120 You should put a cigar on it.

00:54:36.180 A creeper weirdo here says in a stream where Dave, the distributist and Carl Benjamin Sargon asked what the right wingers deserve a stat or what right wingers deserve a statue.

00:54:47.300 I said Fred Rogers and Dave was surprised, but I really mean it.

00:54:50.560 He believed in things that matter.

00:54:52.780 I mean, it's an interesting choice.

00:54:54.400 So Fred Rogers is somebody who it's interesting because he's a good man.

00:55:00.900 But he embodies some of the softer qualities.

00:55:03.160 And that doesn't mean that's necessarily a bad thing.

00:55:05.760 He's certainly a good emotional role model for a number of people who need that kind of help.

00:55:12.020 But it does feel a little, I don't know, it does feel a little leftist to choose Fred Rogers.

00:55:17.820 I don't know.

00:55:18.060 What do you think about that?

00:55:19.920 Unfortunately, I don't get the reference there.

00:55:22.140 I am.

00:55:22.800 Oh, Mr. Rogers.

00:55:23.840 Oh, yes, of course.

00:55:25.160 Of course.

00:55:25.540 If you go into the reading on that, Mr. Rogers is quite blue-pilled on certain issues.

00:55:38.340 If you go back to it, there were certain decisions made on that show that they've talked about that were very nakedly political.

00:55:45.800 And so don't get me wrong.

00:55:48.260 I understand the point being made.

00:55:50.460 But if anyone needs a statue, I think it's Dale Gribble.

00:55:55.720 There you go.

00:55:58.940 Excellent.

00:55:59.720 All right.

00:56:01.600 Adam Ann says,

00:56:02.980 I mean, yes, it's kind of the story of many different professionals, academics.

00:56:24.560 It doesn't really take very long if you start pushing against kind of their comfort zone, where you find that they're not super invested in the topic that they ostensibly are experts in and are dedicated their lives to.

00:56:40.440 Really, Twitter is for dunking on academics and politicians.

00:56:45.120 And so I've had endless hours of fun prodding, like, professional philosophers and then getting them to kind of come to the conclusion that they can't really be bothered defending their position.

00:56:57.360 Well, certainly.

00:56:58.200 And, you know, people make fun of our mutual friend, Dave, the distributist, all the time for engaging in pointless debates.

00:57:04.140 But every once in a while, he'll get, like, a real honest-to-God intellectual, quote-unquote, on his show.

00:57:11.240 Or he'll get them on Twitter to basically say, like, okay, like, you're allegedly an expert on the right wing.

00:57:16.160 I think it was Scott McBaddis.

00:57:17.120 I can't remember the guy's name.

00:57:18.960 Yeah.

00:57:19.460 I was going to say that.

00:57:20.380 Basically, he's like, all right, you're an expert.

00:57:23.260 Defend this.

00:57:24.180 And then it's just hand-waving.

00:57:25.800 It's absolutely embarrassing.

00:57:28.040 I mean, that goes back to the decline in the quality of American education, you know, the rise of egalitarianism, because our elites are not impressive people anymore.

00:57:36.600 And, you know, this guy, Adam Ann, is right.

00:57:38.400 Like, very quickly, you realize that they're effectively, you know, despite their kind of, like, specialized status, they're just bureaucrats.

00:57:45.360 You know, they're collecting a paycheck to enforce regime narrative.

00:57:48.920 Yeah, Dave deserves full credit for, like, exposing Matt McManus, I guess.

00:57:53.340 And, like, he certainly did a great job of just, you know, showing him to be a completely hollow suit.

00:57:59.160 But at some point, it's just like, all right, man, I don't know if I can watch you beat that dead horse for another, like, six months.

00:58:04.880 Like, I don't, like, like, it's dead.

00:58:08.100 It's very dead.

00:58:08.820 It's so dead, it's glue.

00:58:10.720 Like, at some point, this becomes obscene.

00:58:13.340 But he certainly did a good job of it.

00:58:15.740 Well, I'll put it this way.

00:58:16.760 You know, Dave is one of my kind of, like, most foremost intellectual influences that's kind of still currently around.

00:58:23.220 But sometimes he doesn't know to let something go.

00:58:31.700 I mean, he's been being, like, we've been making fun of him for reacting to BreadTube videos for, what, four years now?

00:58:39.660 Yeah.

00:58:40.060 So, yeah, I know what you mean there.

00:58:42.560 Yeah, no, it was interesting.

00:58:43.500 I had a, you know, I had a discussion with Peter Boghossian over on Break the Rules.

00:58:49.760 And that was interesting.

00:58:51.240 I was looking forward to it.

00:58:52.180 And I was kind of, you know, I'm getting there.

00:58:53.620 I'm ready.

00:58:54.480 I'm reading up.

00:58:55.460 I'm prepared to kind of slay this classical liberal idol and finally kind of put this thing, you know, to bed.

00:59:02.100 And then Boghossian and kind of the new atheist and classically liberal crowd.

00:59:08.300 And I'm expecting a lot of resistance.

00:59:09.820 And it was very surreal because Boghossian basically spent the entire hour just being, like, so what's your objection there? 1.00

00:59:18.020 And I'm, like, well, you know, and he's, like, yeah, I think I largely believe that now.

00:59:23.160 That was the entire conversation.

00:59:24.860 It was an hour of me just being, like, well, this aspect of liberalism doesn't work.

00:59:28.320 And he's, like, yeah, it seems like that seems to be the case.

00:59:30.740 And I'm, like, well, this aspect doesn't work.

00:59:32.460 Yeah, I feel like that's probably the situation now.

00:59:35.060 Well, okay, I did not expect to walk into nothing but just kind of, you know, demure agreement.

00:59:43.620 But here we are.

00:59:44.740 I mean, I guess that's technically a successful debate, even if it's not great listening, right?

00:59:48.900 Yeah, for sure.

00:59:49.700 I mean, you know, obviously, you know, what are you going to do if your interlocutor is just going to spend an hour telling you, yeah, that's basically correct?

00:59:57.660 I mean, what is there to complain about?

00:59:59.400 But it was definitely not what I was expecting.

01:00:01.720 Well, and that's sort of an interesting thing as well, is that I think a lot of right-wingers don't realize that they know their enemies' opinions much better than our enemies know ours.

01:00:12.280 Yes.

01:00:12.440 And you'll see this anytime you interact with, like, progressive types, is that once they kind of, like, hear you make one, you know, kind of, like, dissenting opinion, they'll kind of, like, throw back at you this kind of, like, odd straw man caricature of, like, racist Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

01:00:30.520 You know, where it's like, oh, then you must want X, Y, and Z.

01:00:34.600 And it's like, no, not at all.

01:00:36.040 And if you can kind of step out of that, not only can you actually get to a productive dialogue by, and obviously, you have to be careful with this, with only certain people.

01:00:44.020 But you can get to interesting places by basically, you know, showing someone a critique they're not used to.

01:00:52.100 I'll put it that way.

01:00:53.540 Yeah, I think that's very true.

01:00:55.000 A lot of people don't understand the leftist does not have a theory of mind for you.

01:00:58.400 Like, they are completely unfamiliar with your goals, with your understanding of the world, with your arguments.

01:01:04.460 And you'd be surprised how quickly that, you know, they can kind of turn on a dime once you kind of get them into that mode.

01:01:13.980 Let's see.

01:01:14.760 Florida Henry here says, with the near complete collapse of the nuclear family, extended family, and community, could this be the last cycle?

01:01:22.980 No, because remember, guys, like, what's the, you know, what's the story about how Rome starts, right?

01:01:29.040 They need a bunch of wives, and so they do. 1.00

01:01:31.100 They go and capture them from the next city over.

01:01:35.360 Like, civilization gets a lot rarer than this.

01:01:38.660 Like, I understand, you know, when you grew up in a time where you kind of saw this idealized 1950s lifestyle,

01:01:48.500 and you understood that there were, you know, kind of, there's more to life than things that you were handed to,

01:01:57.160 and that certain aspects of society are kind of on the downward slope.

01:02:01.460 It can be easy to just say, well, this is as bad as things have gotten.

01:02:04.800 Oh, it's not even close.

01:02:06.820 Which could be a black pill, you know.

01:02:08.540 You could say, oh, well, things could get a lot worse, and they can.

01:02:10.980 But the white pill is that things have been much, much, much, much worse.

01:02:15.160 And civilization has continued.

01:02:17.460 Something new.

01:02:18.460 There has been rebirth.

01:02:19.800 So you are not on the last cycle.

01:02:21.540 Oh, excuse me.

01:02:22.320 Sorry, I got over a year there.

01:02:23.360 No problem.

01:02:23.660 You're 100% right.

01:02:24.920 And I think that also, and I don't mean to get into a theological discussion,

01:02:29.040 but you see some of this with, like, rapture and end time stuff.

01:02:31.720 It's this idea that, you know, I am, I or my culture is the most important thing to ever happen to human history.

01:02:40.360 And I hate to say it is probably not true.

01:02:43.260 Like, the world still goes on if America stops being in charge of everything.

01:02:49.420 Like, I hate to break it to you.

01:02:50.700 American boomer eschatology is a wild drug, man.

01:02:54.220 It is a wild drug.

01:02:54.880 It really is.

01:02:55.720 And I don't want to just, like, beat up on anyone's beliefs.

01:02:58.060 But America can go away, and you will be fine.

01:03:02.720 I'm not saying that will happen, but that is a distinct possibility.

01:03:05.480 You know, America can go away, and the world will be still spin on its axis.

01:03:11.200 And so I think that there is this, and it's a natural human reaction, right?

01:03:15.400 It's this idea that, well, I am me, therefore I am the most important thing ever.

01:03:20.020 But I think it's good to check that instinct.

01:03:23.820 And I think that the good thing about, you know, the idea of cyclical history,

01:03:27.060 which you see in the Old Testament, you see in the classical tradition,

01:03:31.640 is this idea that, yeah, okay, well, you may be on the downside,

01:03:34.800 but something else will come in its place.

01:03:37.520 It's not the end.

01:03:38.320 You know, this isn't the, you know, this isn't the Battle of Armageddon.

01:03:43.000 I think that is true.

01:03:44.300 All right.

01:03:44.580 Cooper Weirdo says, did you guys just, he's just a normie con me, really?

01:03:49.080 Yeah, that's right.

01:03:50.060 We've submitted to the tyranny of just when it comes to Fred Rogers.

01:03:54.900 I'm sorry, Cooper Weirdo.

01:03:56.560 We will erect a statue to his outside shoes and his outside sweater.

01:04:01.980 I think those are the most heroic sweater and shoe combos that Mr. Rogers had.

01:04:08.220 And you are right that we should not just characterize them as a normie.

01:04:14.460 Cooper Weirdo also says, we need to take the right wing seriously.

01:04:17.760 Deal.

01:04:18.040 Cribble gets a statue.

01:04:20.200 Look, I am, I never claimed to be consistent.

01:04:25.180 I just claimed to have written one article.

01:04:26.860 So, uh, you, you got me there.

01:04:29.060 I'll be honest.

01:04:31.260 He's, it's brought, he painted you in a corner with nothing but facts and reason.

01:04:35.800 Yeah.

01:04:36.240 I mean, well, you are the best part about, uh, being a, a, a postmodern zoomer is that,

01:04:41.180 well, guess what?

01:04:41.640 My feelings don't care about your facts.

01:04:43.360 So I'm wrong, but still confidently wrong.

01:04:47.440 And that's, that's really what the heroic is all about at the end.

01:04:51.200 All right, guys.

01:04:52.060 Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up, but thank you so much for coming by guys.

01:04:57.140 It's been a lot of fun.

01:04:58.200 Thanks once again to Jay Burden.

01:05:00.020 Please make sure that you go ahead and check out his show and his sub stack.

01:05:04.280 Really appreciate everyone coming by for the discussion.

01:05:06.320 And as always, I will talk to you guys next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 03, 2024

The Tyranny of ‘Just’ ｜ Guest： J Burden ｜ 1⧸3⧸24

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