In this episode, Aaron sits down with Jay Burden to discuss his new piece, "The Tyranny of Just." Jay is a brilliant writer, philosopher, and political philosopher who has been a long-time friend of mine and someone who I've always looked up to. He's a brilliant thinker, and I think you'll agree that he's one of the most thoughtful and thoughtful people I've ever met. In this episode we talk about how the left's obsession with the meaning behind things and the ability of the individual to make a difference and to matter in the world is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:01:40.060There's this race to score political points based on, you know, the kind of biographical details of everyone involved.
00:01:46.140So, in general, I just avoid them almost without exception.
00:01:52.240But 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.
00:02:10.520Like, you could never do anything to stop evil.
00:02:14.160And 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.
00:02:32.880And 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.
00:02:43.480And 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.
00:02:59.020Well, that's essentially what they will become.
00:03:02.660And 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?
00:03:14.560Where 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.
00:03:30.700And so, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:03:34.140Obviously, there's a lot to go in there.
00:03:37.280But 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.
00:03:48.200Yeah, 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.
00:04:09.180He 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.
00:04:18.760In all of these works, he's constantly looking at the way that the modern world, especially academia, attempts to demystify everything, to disenchant everything.
00:04:31.060The key is to break everything down to its constituents, its constituent point of components and strip everything of its deeper meaning.
00:04:40.780And by getting rid of that connection to the transcendent, the left has done a lot of work, right?
00:04:45.740They'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.
00:04:57.760But 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.
00:05:08.320And he talks about that in places like – I'll just forget all the names of the books now.
00:05:16.040But 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.
00:05:30.560And instead, they teach them and train them to constantly be critical of these things, to dismiss these ideas.
00:05:38.840And this is what really robs people of their everyday heroism.
00:05:44.840So the kind of primary example I lift from Lewis is a part in Pilgrim's Regress.
00:05:51.840So 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.
00:06:01.120So C.S. Lewis had a, shall we say, tumultuous early life, to put it mildly.
00:06:10.880And then he had a conversion kind of midway through life.
00:06:12.940And 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.
00:06:27.000And 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.
00:06:44.140This is a moment that happened in both narratives.
00:06:46.260But in the C.S. Lewis version of the story, this giant is called the spirit of the age.
00:06:51.520It's essentially a stand-in for Freud.
00:06:53.100And the power that this giant has that sort of freezes our main character in place is he can make you look transparent.
00:07:00.100He can basically gaze at you, and you'll be able to see what's under your skin.
00:07:03.920You'll see your blood pumping, your muscles moving.
00:07:39.760And so in Lewis's story, thankfully, you know, for the sake of the protagonist, the spirit of the age is defeated by reason.
00:07:46.440Essentially, he realizes that's not true.
00:07:48.520But that same thing, whether it's Freud explicitly or that same mechanism of kind of classification, demystification, is kind of rampant in our society.
00:07:58.840Like, so one of the other men that I cite in this, and he's one of my favorite authors, is Thomas Carlyle.
00:08:03.920So Thomas Carlyle was one of the seminal Victorian writers.
00:08:10.600He's kind of fallen out of fashion, especially after the Great War, and only slightly started to come back into popular relevance.
00:08:18.340But 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.
00:08:24.600But essentially, his thesis is that hero worship is synonymous with civilization.
00:08:31.600That's what makes your culture and makes your civilization.
00:08:34.400And so he goes through a series of great men.
00:08:37.760This is also very much tied to the great man thesis of history, if you've ever heard that.
00:08:42.840And he goes through their lives and basically says, like, okay, these are the different archetypes.
00:08:46.380So he goes through someone like Luther, and he says, well, Luther is the archetype of a priest.
00:08:51.580You know, or Cromwell is sort of this, like, warlord.
00:08:54.060Yeah, I think he does Muhammad as well.
00:08:56.280And his point with this is not necessarily that they are, like, good guys, you know, who you'd want to grab a beer with.
00:09:02.220But he's saying, like, these are great men.
00:09:03.780You know, there is something to be emulated.
00:09:05.760And if you look back even a generation or two, this is something that our forefathers understood.
00:09:10.540Like, if you look at the founding fathers, they were very clearly trying to emulate the best parts of the classical tradition.
00:09:17.640You know, Lee, for example, was very interested in Napoleon, very interested in Alexander.
00:09:24.280And so he was able to emulate certain things about those great men.
00:09:27.880But 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.
00:09:39.620So 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.
00:09:48.100Right. 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.
00:10:23.560Exactly. And bigger than that, it's attacking a broader cultural narrative of Napoleon as, you know, the consummate general.
00:10:30.580Napoleon as this kind of world conqueror.
00:10:32.880And it's one of those things that, you know, like many things, is kind of built into your brain by Moderna.
00:10:39.000So you mentioned the Lewis passage and what he's going through in the Intro to Abolition of Man is a children's textbook, right?
00:10:48.100This is a primer for grade school children.
00:10:51.140And 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.
00:11:00.640You know, it's florid prose, something like that.
00:11:02.780And in doing that, it is taking away the kind of transcendent significance of that.
00:11:08.360And I mean, I've certainly learned that in school, even though I had better schooling than many.
00:11:13.880But that same premise of, oh, I know what that is.
00:11:17.080So it is just, you know, a member of a category is insidious.
00:11:21.920And 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.
00:11:32.400You know, we can't just throw away things because they belong to the same category.
00:11:39.040And I realize it's sort of difficult to engineer that backwards, you know, to regain sincerity.
00:11:45.080But I think it's a vital, it's something vital that must be done.
00:11:49.940Well, 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?
00:11:55.900He 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.
00:12:06.200And that ruins her because she cannot accept the acts of the gods.
00:12:09.980She cannot understand a relationship with a divine because, you know, this has all been destroyed beforehand for her.
00:12:17.320And again, that theme is just recurring over and over again.
00:12:20.800That'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.
00:12:36.360And but he's also the guy who overcame it.
00:12:38.720He's a man who was he was a man of letters.
00:12:50.200His book, Surprised by Joy, is kind of is his non-fictional account of kind of finding that again.
00:12:57.060And 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.
00:13:05.760And one of my favorite passages from G.K. Chesterton is his man who rediscovers England.
00:13:12.280You 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.
00:13:19.360And 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.
00:13:28.560It's got everything he was ever searching for, all the things he thought he was missing.
00:13:32.360And he finds out it was where he started.
00:13:34.220You know, it was the place where he began.
00:13:36.080And 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.
00:13:46.140And 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.
00:13:54.000I 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.
00:14:10.180We're so in many ways we feel ashamed.
00:14:12.680We'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.
00:14:22.720And it's somehow beneath us or somehow somehow foolhardy.
00:14:27.180But 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.
00:14:38.180If you cannot if you cannot follow in their footsteps, then you can certainly never create any greater culture or greater movement.
00:14:47.060And I like that phrase you used, you know, kind of make it seem embarrassing.
00:14:51.360Because 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.
00:15:00.260Our elites are foxes, not lions, by which I mean they tend to do things indirectly.
00:15:05.340They tend to do them by a social pressure.
00:15:07.400And so one of the other things I examined, which is, well, how do kind of modern day progressives deal with heroes?
00:15:14.680So we've already talked about the deliberate undermining of men like Napoleon.
00:15:19.300Obviously, you know, the American founding fathers are literally being erased.
00:15:24.660But also, well, how do they write their own heroes?
00:15:29.120And 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.
00:15:40.040So on one example, you have the kind of like Captain Marvel types, you know, the like I'm a girl boss.
00:15:48.540I'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.
00:15:59.480Like paste it on to like a, you know, a 110 pound aging Hollywood starlet.
00:16:06.160And on the other hand, you have the way that they handle kind of more normative heroes.
00:16:10.120And 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.
00:16:20.220And then someone makes a joke like, oh, that was awkward.
00:17:13.900And 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.
00:17:20.100But what I am saying is that this creates a decay in national morals and, I guess, like national psychic health, right?
00:17:28.080Kind of a goofy language, but it's what we're going with.
00:17:30.500And so you see this kind of situation where, you know, the best lack conviction, the pick quote, you know, the best lack any support.
00:17:40.140You 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.
00:17:47.660You have Kyle Rittenhouse, who the entire weight of the U.S. deep state just tried to demolish.
00:17:54.260You 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.
00:18:17.740And 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.
00:18:30.920And 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.
00:18:39.520And 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.
00:18:45.080But at the same time, that's kind of corrosive.
00:18:48.020You see this very, perhaps most cleanly in a lot of British comedy.
00:18:51.960You know, you look at things like, you know, Monty Python, John Cleese, who I think, don't get me wrong, very funny.
00:18:56.100But they are making fun of a previous existing social order.
00:19:00.920You know, like the guys in bowler hats are inherently ridiculous.
00:19:04.440And now John Cleese laments that that culture doesn't exist.
00:19:07.300He goes on and gives interviews about what happened.
00:19:15.320And this is why these kind of things matter.
00:19:17.760You know, this is the strata of culture, the thing that allows it to propagate going forward.
00:19:23.040And so when it comes to that phrase, just, you know, it is really the social asset that eats away at it.
00:19:28.640And 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.
00:19:38.580You know, and from a certain perspective, they know what they're doing.
00:19:40.540They are demolishing your cultural and intellectual heritage.
00:19:44.520Get unlimited grocery delivery with PC Express Pass.
00:20:06.880Like, why do you look to them for, you know, moral acceptance and moral guidance?
00:20:11.460And 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.
00:20:28.580I mean, it does from a certain moral perspective.
00:20:30.620But 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.
00:20:42.420There's a really dangerous impulse in conservatives, in particular, the need to have somebody perfect before you can praise anything about them.
00:20:55.520If 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.
00:21:05.080And because the left dictate the level of focus that we provide to pretty much anything, because they control, they have the mind control machine.
00:22:43.660But 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.
00:22:52.820But 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.
00:23:00.040And so you might as well celebrate the things you like about someone.
00:23:03.660But 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,
00:23:14.640then we must forget every great act because a person is not their greatest act.
00:25:17.100That's certainly, I think, a part of the issue at hand.
00:25:20.320But 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.
00:25:36.360So the Lego company did a very interesting study, which basically they were wondering why.
00:26:28.440And he has the categories that I have.
00:26:31.420And 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.
00:27:06.860And 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.
00:27:22.420And 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.
00:27:39.200It always seems to have to be George Floyd.
00:27:41.800And 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.
00:27:53.780You 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.
00:28:10.420And 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.
00:28:34.860You 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.
00:28:48.940You 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.
00:29:12.180And that's really as much as they could elevate somebody. This is the kind of person they had to go to bat to defend.
00:29:17.380Well, 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?
00:29:30.880And 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.
00:29:40.620And if you actually look at the history of thought, that kind of breaks down relatively quickly, right?
00:29:45.080Like, is Bismarck a left wing figure because he had a welfare state?
00:29:48.740You know, there's another prominent German leader who had a welfare state who is not particularly left wing either.
00:29:54.920But the kind of reactionary answer to that is the answer is basically hierarchy.
00:30:00.420The right wing believes in hierarchy. The left wing believes in equality.
00:30:04.420And when you talk about a hero, that is by definition someone who is in a level of hierarchy above you.
00:30:09.880You know, I want to – that person is better than me.
00:30:13.000You know, you're kind of channeling something outside of yourself.
00:30:15.220Whereas once you can kind of use this kind of social leveling to bring everyone down, you don't have to deal with that anymore.
00:30:22.920And when you look at a person like Claudine Gay, I'll put it mildly.
00:30:27.760You 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.
00:30:34.960You 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.
00:30:41.100And 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.
00:30:57.400You know, this isn't just a philosophical problem.
00:30:59.620You 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.
00:31:06.200You know, it creates real civilizational problems.
00:31:09.160And obviously the Claudine Gay thing is kind of funny, one, because her name is gay, but also because it's very clearly clownish.
00:31:15.200You 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.
00:31:23.820But at the same time, it's like, well, wait a minute.
00:31:26.860This 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.
00:31:36.820And that's why this kind of radical egalitarianism is genuinely a problem.
00:31:41.620You know, it's a big – it's a big factor behind the competence crisis, as many other people have put it.
00:31:46.620Yeah, 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.
00:31:59.820And that means that they're continuously going to select for political ideology, and they're going to continue to drive a competency crisis.
00:32:07.520I 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.
00:32:15.360Like, obviously, your institution's failing is generally bad for your country.
00:32:19.020But at this point, I think that those institutions have to die.
00:32:22.580Like, I don't want – I don't want Harvard to be fixed.
00:32:26.660I don't think there is fixing Harvard.
00:32:28.860I want these institutions to crash and burn and be replaced by something that's separate and greater.
00:32:35.080But 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.
00:32:47.500And I guess the question that you have to ask yourself then is, how do you guard against this?
00:32:51.240I saw – I know we were talking a little about this before we got on.
00:32:55.320And 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.
00:33:06.240And Carl was asking Dave, like, okay, who do we make statues to, right?
00:33:31.260And 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?
00:33:42.620Because it's constant and relentless, and this point, it's beaten into us so much that it reflects it.
00:33:47.820We feel somehow, again, you know, small or we're uncomplex, we're simpletons, we're fools, we're bumpkins.
00:33:58.580If 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,
00:34:08.000someone's great achievements are indeed great and worthy of honor and worthy of emulation,
00:34:14.400how do we break through that in a modern era?
00:34:16.420Because 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.
00:34:23.980Once 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.
00:34:41.180But 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.
00:35:02.660No, 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?
00:35:14.020Which is basically, he's like, he was a midlife convert. It wasn't something that came naturally to him.
00:35:19.720Like, how do you go about doing something like that? And how do you do it in a real way?
00:35:24.560And what he basically says is you kind of just have to muscle through the LARP.
00:35:27.360Like, it's going to be LARPing at first. You're going to be playing pretend.
00:35:29.960But if you look at the way children become something, you know, children become adults, well, they do it by mimicking adults.
00:35:37.280You know, so like when you're a kid, you know, you play shop, you play house or whatever.
00:35:40.160And then, you know, obviously kind of through gaming that out, eventually it becomes real behavior.
00:35:44.640And obviously that's embarrassing and uncomfortable to do as an adult, right?
00:35:48.480Like, it would be nice to live in a culture where you could just simply be.
00:35:53.240The problem is we don't really have that option.
00:35:55.020You know, like, I would love to live in such a society. That's not the one we've been given.
00:35:59.040So you sort of have to LARP it. You kind of have to go about it.
00:36:04.560Now, I am perhaps not the person for white pills on this.
00:36:09.220You know, I'm a big cyclical history guy.
00:36:14.220And I think there's a certain part of it that we're not getting out of.
00:36:16.880You know, we kind of have to take our lumps as a generation.
00:36:19.980I really like what academic agent has to say on this when he calls, you know, Gen Z, my generation, the children of the ashes.
00:36:25.220It's, you know, essentially like we are part of that winter of civilization.
00:36:29.780Now, that doesn't mean, you know, it's all over.
00:36:31.540That's the nice part about cyclical history is that the hook comes back around for you.
00:36:35.020But 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.
00:36:46.140It'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.
00:36:53.480Now, 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.
00:37:00.740They are people who did not grow up in faith, did not grow up attached to tradition, but came back to it as adults.
00:37:06.720And what they said is, it's still a little put on for me.
00:37:11.260You know, I am someone who made this change midway through my life.
00:37:16.840And he's like, they, it's real for them.
00:37:20.160And 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.
00:37:30.040But you can sort of break that pattern of, let's just use the phrase generational sin.
00:37:35.460You know, you can become kind of the first data point in a positive direction.
00:37:38.940And obviously, you know, that isn't, that isn't the, you know, the most glamorous thing to do with your life.
00:37:45.760But again, we're in a situation where we are rebuilding a culture.
00:37:49.200You know, we have, we've had three generations of this kind of cultural decay at the very least.
00:37:55.020You know, this kind of classification, demystification that I talk about.
00:38:00.820And, 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.
00:38:08.500It takes a lot of work to repair something, to kind of build something back up.
00:38:12.480And this was a generational process to destroy.
00:38:14.920And I'm quite confident it will be a generational process to repair if it is repairable.
00:38:19.900And I know you said, you know, I don't want Harvard fixed.
00:38:23.760And 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.
00:38:36.120And 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.
00:38:53.900And so I guess that those two things kind of tie together there.
00:38:58.100Yeah, a couple threads to pull out there.
00:39:00.560I 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.
00:39:09.480And, you know, we, even though it's a terrible truth, you're Gen Z, I'm a millennial.
00:39:16.580I'm actually on the, I'm closer to Gen X than millennial, but I'm, so I'm a lot older than you.
00:39:23.460But, 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.
00:39:36.560And there's just no way to escape that.
00:39:40.540You may have been born into this world, but, but prior generations did not do the work.
00:39:46.600And that means that now you have to, you have to pay the cost for that.
00:39:51.280And so you might never, as you pointed out, completely be free of the cynicism, completely be free of the self-awareness.
00:39:58.280But if you want a generation that will be, you have to start now.
00:40:01.320And 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.
00:40:18.160But 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?
00:40:29.760You 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.
00:40:40.720You 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.
00:40:48.160And 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.
00:41:06.240And more importantly, in the next generation, one step closer to that sincerity, which I think is absolutely critical and, oh, sorry, go ahead.
00:41:18.580I 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.
00:41:30.500Like take the time to, to go through the motion, make it real, put it into the world.
00:41:36.200And 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.
00:41:51.120So let's just complete the triumvirate and mention the third most significant Christian writer of the 20th century, Tolkien.
00:42:01.660Right. And my favorite part of the Lord of the Rings is the scouring of the Shire, right?
00:42:07.800And it's, it's vital to understanding the story more broadly.
00:42:10.720And what you have happened is basically, you know, the hobbits have, you know, the, the ring has been destroyed.
00:42:14.860They come back to, they come back to the Shire, which is sort of this kind of pastoral picture of rural England.
00:42:23.300And they find that in their absence, you know, that this band of thugs has kind of taken control of it.
00:42:30.800And, 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.
00:42:38.320And 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.
00:42:48.040And so our heroes come back and they stop it. Don't get me wrong.
00:42:51.180But there's a couple of interesting things about it, which is one, things are built back, but they're not the same.
00:42:57.100You know, and they mentioned that there is genuine loss in that.
00:42:59.180There 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.
00:43:07.840They're different. They can't ever go back to what they were.
00:43:11.140And 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.
00:43:18.200You know, we like our ancestors more than the rest of culture does, but we're also tainted by modernity.
00:43:23.560You know, there's no, there's no way around that.
00:43:25.440And 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
00:43:34.060there's still that kind of, there's a boomer inside of you, you know, no matter how deeply buried.
00:43:40.920And 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.
00:43:47.260I think that has to be the goal because, you know, and maybe I'm overly pessimistic.
00:44:08.280I'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.
00:44:15.540And don't get me wrong, that's not actually a terrible thing.
00:44:21.100You know, what we were doing as a culture was not sustainable.
00:44:24.940You know, the practices that, you know, our parents and our grandparents engaged in, and don't get me wrong, I love both those generations.
00:44:33.120I love my grandparents, but they were burning down seed corn.
00:44:36.960You 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.
00:44:46.020And 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?
00:44:53.540You know, it really is, you know, that process of building a new culture.
00:44:56.700And so, as Carl said, you know, when it comes to, you know, maybe men you would build statues of.
00:45:01.160I 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.
00:45:14.100But I think that with all of those, you know, we will have to realize that these were flawed men.
00:45:19.860You know, these men did have problems in the same way that we do, but you don't celebrate them for that.
00:45:25.580You celebrate them for the great contributions that they've made.
00:45:27.620And that's the way that you kind of build a fully sincere, unironic culture, I guess.
00:45:33.080Yeah, 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.
00:45:43.340It 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.
00:46:06.660Because 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.
00:46:12.800You're always going to be in this, you know, on the back foot.
00:46:15.800You're always going to be in this reaction instead of trying to figure out how to forge ahead.
00:46:21.400And 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.
00:46:34.300I 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.
00:46:44.120I'm not going to say that Kyle Rittenhouse is just some guy in any other in any other reality.
00:46:51.200Kyle Rittenhouse is awarded a, you know, a small fiefdom and his, you know, his choice of eligible maidens for marriage.
00:46:58.740You 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.
00:47:12.280There's a there's a veterans poem and I can't remember all of it, but there was always a line that struck me.
00:47:18.040And 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.
00:47:31.380But none of that matters, because at some point he saved an entire platoon of people.
00:47:37.280And 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.
00:47:50.380And I think that's important to remember, because left is going to tear these things down.
00:47:56.660They are going to assault these things. There are so many aspects.
00:47:59.700Anything that's good or virtuous is something the left can find a foible in.
00:48:03.980And 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.
00:48:13.300Well, 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.
00:48:24.540Gen X, obviously, we kind of renowned for their cynicism.
00:48:27.340You know, millennials had their own brand.
00:48:28.740And then Zoomers have been described as terminally poisoned by irony, which I think is a pretty accurate statement.
00:48:36.500And obviously some some part of that is an understandable reaction to the fact that we live in a very absurd society.
00:48:41.760You know, this is essentially the we turned the Emperor's New Clothes into a very large social experiment.
00:48:48.220And guess what, bud? You're living in it.
00:48:50.500And so part of that is an understandable defense mechanism.
00:48:52.940And 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.
00:49:01.140You know, it was fun to post Pepe memes.
00:49:03.380You know, it was fun to, you know, make fun of essentially like stuck up progressives.
00:49:09.260Don't get me wrong. It's very important. It's not my point.
00:49:11.760But 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.
00:49:22.640Everything is a joke. Nothing is sincerely done.
00:49:24.620And, you know, you mentioned that reactionary tendency of the right way.
00:49:28.620And 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.
00:49:42.060You sort of become this like bizarre, malformed creature.
00:49:47.280And 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.
00:49:56.560You sort of can't replicate as a culture, you know, you can't pass anything forward.
00:50:01.660And 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.
00:50:08.320All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and pivot to the questions of the people.
00:50:13.400But before we do, Mr. Burden, can you tell everyone where to find your great work?
00:52:17.000But you also have those that come completely unmoored from reality or those that embrace silly socialist movements and those kind of things.
00:52:25.760And so I think that your mileage will vary.
00:52:29.660I 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.
00:52:36.080Well, 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.
00:52:45.320I'll be honest, the quality of American education at large has been precipitously declining for the last 70 years.
00:52:53.840And obviously, you know, the the interwar period is before that started, but it certainly is a relevant factor.
00:53:02.120Yeah, there's something that people need to understand about education.
00:53:07.140The more thing more people you have to prepare something for, the worse it gets.
00:53:11.580And so the more general you have to make something, the lower quality it becomes.
00:53:17.400So, 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.
00:53:37.760But 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.
00:53:45.560And so when, you know, as is so often the case, things just kind of settle at room temperature.
00:53:50.560And 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.
00:54:07.260And the, you know, the generalized homogenized education is so poor that the heights are just unattainable for most.
00:54:36.180A 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.
00:54:47.300I said Fred Rogers and Dave was surprised, but I really mean it.
00:56:02.980I mean, yes, it's kind of the story of many different professionals, academics.
00:56:24.560It 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.
00:56:40.440Really, Twitter is for dunking on academics and politicians.
00:56:45.120And 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.
00:57:28.040I 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.
00:57:36.600And, you know, this guy, Adam Ann, is right.
00:57:38.400Like, very quickly, you realize that they're effectively, you know, despite their kind of, like, specialized status, they're just bureaucrats.
00:57:45.360You know, they're collecting a paycheck to enforce regime narrative.
00:57:48.920Yeah, Dave deserves full credit for, like, exposing Matt McManus, I guess.
00:57:53.340And, like, he certainly did a great job of just, you know, showing him to be a completely hollow suit.
00:57:59.160But 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.
00:59:49.700I 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?
00:59:57.660I mean, what is there to complain about?
00:59:59.400But it was definitely not what I was expecting.
01:00:01.720Well, 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.
01:00:12.440And 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.
01:00:30.520You know, where it's like, oh, then you must want X, Y, and Z.
01:00:36.040And 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.
01:00:44.020But you can get to interesting places by basically, you know, showing someone a critique they're not used to.
01:01:14.760Florida Henry here says, with the near complete collapse of the nuclear family, extended family, and community, could this be the last cycle?
01:01:22.980No, because remember, guys, like, what's the, you know, what's the story about how Rome starts, right?
01:01:29.040They need a bunch of wives, and so they do.
01:01:31.100They go and capture them from the next city over.
01:01:35.360Like, civilization gets a lot rarer than this.
01:01:38.660Like, I understand, you know, when you grew up in a time where you kind of saw this idealized 1950s lifestyle,
01:01:48.500and you understood that there were, you know, kind of, there's more to life than things that you were handed to,
01:01:57.160and that certain aspects of society are kind of on the downward slope.
01:02:01.460It can be easy to just say, well, this is as bad as things have gotten.