The Auron MacIntyre Show - What Forges a Nation ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸11⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.520 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:32.920 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.500 So, we've been starting this deep dive into the thought of Joseph Demacri,

00:00:42.800 somebody who I think is very important, who definitely had an influence on me,

00:00:46.720 and has not really gotten enough love.

00:00:49.140 So we are diving in to his essay on the nature of sovereignty.

00:00:55.940 We started that with an episode last week, and we're going to be continuing here today.

00:01:01.360 Joining me for this is The Prudentialist.

00:01:04.140 Thanks for coming on, man.

00:01:05.240 Thanks for having me again on, Oren.

00:01:06.660 Always a pleasure.

00:01:08.060 Absolutely.

00:01:08.760 Now, we started by reading this whole thing last time,

00:01:12.260 but it quickly became apparent that we are not going to be able to make it through in a timely manner if we keep doing that.

00:01:18.000 So switching up the format a little bit here, we've got our notes together,

00:01:21.180 and we're just going to be talking through the different chapters.

00:01:24.100 I'll still have them up on the screen.

00:01:25.220 We'll still read certain things off from it, but that's where we're going to be going.

00:01:29.940 So, this section, the part we're going to be focusing on here, is mainly about what makes a nation,

00:01:38.940 what creates a nation of people.

00:01:42.800 You know, Demestra has an idea very different from what a lot of modern people who are influenced by the Enlightenment believe.

00:01:50.760 A lot of people in the Enlightenment think that it is the will of the people who get together,

00:01:56.480 and they reason together, they lay out the ideas, and that is what forges a nation once everyone has agreed to it.

00:02:04.300 We have this state of nature, but then we enter into a social contract.

00:02:09.340 And last time, we kind of read through where Demestra picks that apart.

00:02:13.100 He says, that's not what mankind is like.

00:02:16.040 You're never in this neutral place or this kind of savage place where there is no civilization.

00:02:21.400 There is always some ember of social construction that's going to lead us into what we make next.

00:02:29.860 So, he's already kind of debunked this idea of the state of nature and the social contract.

00:02:35.460 And now, we're going to move into what he believes actually creates a nation.

00:02:40.080 Now, beginning here, he talks about chapter four.

00:02:42.700 He talks about the particular sovereignties and nations.

00:02:45.740 And he starts by giving us this analogy of a country as basically a child.

00:02:51.920 He uses this, like, it goes through the phases of human aging,

00:02:56.540 much in the way that Spangler gives a morphological kind of presence to civilizations,

00:03:02.180 how they grow like a plant and eventually, you know, bloom and then die.

00:03:06.280 He's giving us the idea of the nation as a child that grows up.

00:03:10.360 But he says, in a very real sense, nations have fathers.

00:03:14.440 And he says, what's really important to the beginning of a nation is a common identity

00:03:21.200 and a common morality, especially a common religion, right?

00:03:24.860 This common shared moral understanding of the world is going to be really key.

00:03:31.180 And that's going to be the foundation an infant nation is placed upon.

00:03:35.640 Yeah, we're going to see in this section, the sort of total breakdown that if you make

00:03:41.380 your paper or if you make a country based off some ideas on a sheet of paper, very quickly

00:03:45.840 can that sheet of paper be torn up and rebuilt for any other purposes?

00:03:49.220 And you lose any definition of your of your paper nation very quickly.

00:03:54.280 And he comes right at multicultural, multiculturalism, you know, right away.

00:03:59.420 He says, look, you need a again, that shared vision, that shared understanding.

00:04:05.180 This comes through language.

00:04:06.600 That's something that he mentions.

00:04:07.880 You need you need the shared language.

00:04:09.740 And that language arises from the shared traditions, the shared background, this same

00:04:14.820 understanding of the world and the way that we should look at it through a moral lens.

00:04:19.780 And he says, you can on occasion, you can get these hybrid nations where maybe you add

00:04:25.000 one nation and another together and they could become stronger.

00:04:28.520 They could be become weaker.

00:04:29.780 But there is a there is a scenario where we kind of bind these two together and they are

00:04:35.880 successful.

00:04:36.540 But he warns that if you have a multiplicity of different cultures, a multiplicity of different

00:04:42.280 backgrounds, moral visions, ideas about the way the world should work, then when you try

00:04:48.820 to bring those together, you're never really going to get this this the synthesis that people

00:04:54.420 are hoping for.

00:04:55.080 Instead, you're just going to get one assimilating all the others.

00:04:59.100 Now, for many people, that's a that's a good thing, right?

00:05:02.340 They think of assimilation.

00:05:03.480 We want immigrants to assimilate. 0.90

00:05:05.040 But he says, you need to be clear what that means.

00:05:06.620 That means the destruction of that identity, right?

00:05:09.800 So if you're going to get a real assimilation, it's going to be the destruction of all the 1.00

00:05:13.640 other identities into one.

00:05:15.960 That's the only the only way that the nation will be successful.

00:05:18.820 And so that's something to to consider when you're looking at multiculturalism.

00:05:23.460 Once you introduce that element, inevitably, there's going to have to be the destruction

00:05:27.440 of all those other cultures in a sense that in, you know, kind of creation of one homogenous

00:05:33.280 culture or the nation is just not going to work.

00:05:36.360 Yeah, we're going to see this as he references the Italian states and the situations that come

00:05:42.000 from losing, say, more papal authority over more national identities that are going to

00:05:46.360 arise.

00:05:46.960 And I mean, we we see this and he's not he's not the first man to come up with this.

00:05:51.040 We see this idea arise and Plato's the Republic about how, you know, the more of a polyglot

00:05:57.060 sort of your nation becomes an economic zone, then the word nation doesn't really apply to

00:06:01.620 you.

00:06:02.960 That's right.

00:06:03.580 And, you know, the next thing that he talks about here is why it's important to understand

00:06:07.980 that institutions cannot be universal.

00:06:12.280 Laws cannot be universal.

00:06:14.460 Governments cannot be universal.

00:06:16.400 He says that these things have to mold themselves to the character of the people.

00:06:22.040 And so that's something that's really important because I think a debate a lot of people get

00:06:25.920 into, you know, even people like us often who are interested in political theory, you know,

00:06:31.780 is what is the best form of government?

00:06:34.140 What is the superior form of government?

00:06:35.900 If we could engineer government and then apply it to everybody, what would be that best government?

00:06:42.760 And he says that's a really dangerous thing to do because governments are not something

00:06:47.420 to simply be foisted upon people.

00:06:49.460 It's not that you set up the right institutions, you balance everything perfectly, and then you

00:06:54.920 can deliver that to, you know, to each person, each group of people across the world, and

00:07:00.700 they will be governed in the best possible way.

00:07:03.520 He says, no, these things have to be altered.

00:07:07.140 They have to be changed.

00:07:08.640 They have to be suited each different group of people.

00:07:11.900 And if you try to force that onto people, it's going to go poorly, which is, I think,

00:07:15.500 something that people are more and more realizing, you know, when we talk about democracy and

00:07:20.480 everybody has democracies.

00:07:22.500 George Bush's, you know, vision was democracies all over the world.

00:07:25.780 We have to force this onto everybody.

00:07:27.600 He says, no, that's not how it works.

00:07:30.080 Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, these things are not universal.

00:07:34.000 And each one of these has to be altered if it's going to fit with the people it's actually

00:07:39.800 working for.

00:07:40.480 Yeah, and you're going to see this in this section and throughout the, you know, chapters

00:07:45.360 that we cover that, you know, some countries may find democracy just inhospitable.

00:07:50.340 Others will find it to be welcoming and vice versa.

00:07:53.120 You know, there's not a one size fits all government for any type of people.

00:07:56.860 I mean, you see this, especially in the recent quagmires in the Middle East, whether in our

00:08:01.680 invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, famously, both Rand and Ron Paul had said it was a very

00:08:07.000 foolish idea that we thought we could invade Iraq and somehow topple Saddam Hussein and

00:08:11.600 turn the Iraqi government into the next generation of Thomas Jefferson. 0.98

00:08:15.300 It's just not going to happen.

00:08:17.340 And these particularities exist and to which de Maistre argues, of course, and from the

00:08:21.860 biblical sense that, you know, peoples are apportioned, their lines are easily defined

00:08:26.460 and drawn, and that trying to make this a grand universal project of democracy and human rights,

00:08:32.440 even inside the French National Assembly that he's criticizing, is not possible.

00:08:36.760 And to make that model applicable in sort of this expansionist nature, which we saw during

00:08:41.400 the French Revolution with their wars, didn't work out.

00:08:44.600 And even to this day, it's a failed project.

00:08:46.680 I mean, this is why I think when we define universalism or progressivism or the woke, you

00:08:51.860 know, it's a it's a systematizing form of homogeneity.

00:08:55.120 And whenever you homogenize something, you destroy everything that was unique, a cultural

00:08:59.940 identity and ethnic identity.

00:09:01.320 It all gets washed away into blue jeans, McDonald's and TikTok and PC videos.

00:09:07.080 Yeah, and I think that's a really important thing.

00:09:09.160 I've talked about this.

00:09:10.300 I wrote a piece on why the woke isn't going away.

00:09:13.740 And I think a big reason as to why it isn't going away is it is that homogenizing force

00:09:18.200 that you're talking about.

00:09:19.400 It is that thing that erodes all other identities, all other peoples, and then allows kind of our 0.99

00:09:25.300 current regime to think that it's going to run like a global empire.

00:09:28.900 And so he's saying that this is kind of doomed to fail from the beginning because you cannot

00:09:34.220 universally apply these things.

00:09:36.260 And in any attempt to do so becomes this kind of thin gruel, right?

00:09:39.940 Like, we can all feel that about wokeness and its ruling ideology.

00:09:43.920 I think it's pretty obvious to many people that it shares the nature of a religion.

00:09:49.380 And he says that is something that you need to bind people together is a religion is a 0.79

00:09:53.300 shared moral view.

00:09:54.200 But it's really thin.

00:09:55.400 It's really it's it's falls apart under any kind of stress.

00:09:59.400 But I want to read this section real quick.

00:10:01.160 We're not going to read everything.

00:10:02.020 But I do want to read the section real quick because I do think it's particularly good.

00:10:04.480 He says the general objects, the general objects of every good institution must be modified

00:10:10.380 in each country by the relationship relationships that spring as much from the local situation

00:10:16.940 as from the character of the inhabitants is on the basis of these relationships that each

00:10:21.920 people should be assigned a particular institutional system, which is best not perhaps itself, but

00:10:27.600 for the state for which it is intended.

00:10:29.980 There's only one good government for a particular state, yet not only can different governments

00:10:36.020 be suitable for different peoples, they can also be suitable for the same people at different

00:10:40.560 times since a thousand events can change their inner inner relationships of the people.

00:10:46.560 That's really critical.

00:10:48.080 OK, I think that's really important here because what he's saying is, first, he's not saying it's

00:10:53.740 all just relative, right?

00:10:55.100 You could just pick whatever you govern.

00:10:56.680 He says, no, there is only one correct government, but it is only the one that is correct for

00:11:02.660 that specific people.

00:11:03.800 So it's not relativism.

00:11:05.400 It's not, oh, you can just pick whatever government you want.

00:11:07.600 That's fine.

00:11:08.260 It's that there is a particular government that is correct, but it is always only suitable

00:11:13.300 for that particular people.

00:11:15.080 And really importantly, that government does not stay eternally correct.

00:11:20.100 It is not that form of government is not always the form of government that should always

00:11:25.160 govern those people over a thousand years or so, you know, so like people will change

00:11:29.900 the needs of the people change.

00:11:31.460 The character of the people will change.

00:11:33.340 And eventually the form of government that was the correct form, you know, hundreds of

00:11:37.960 years ago may no longer be the form.

00:11:40.960 And so he says the important thing is to remember that it's about the people, right?

00:11:45.380 And what is good for the people and what is necessary for the governments of people, not

00:11:49.520 strict adherence to one form of superior government for everybody for all time.

00:11:55.340 And so I think it's really important because if you look at something like the Roman, you

00:11:59.360 know, empire obviously is going to be the thing that everybody goes to with this.

00:12:03.300 But, you know, Rome went from being a king, you know, they had kings and then it was a

00:12:08.180 republic and then it went back to being kind of a monarchy or an extended one under the

00:12:14.860 emperor.

00:12:15.340 And so it went through phases.

00:12:17.220 There were the people were of a different character.

00:12:19.460 They needed different leadership styles.

00:12:21.240 And that meant that the government of the nation changed along with the people.

00:12:26.400 And he's saying that is a normal thing that's not unique to Rome.

00:12:29.600 It's not unique to that period of history, but it's something you should expect over time.

00:12:33.540 Yeah, and we're going to see this, I mean, even in our own country, this is where you

00:12:38.520 get sort of Yarvin's idea that like the French republics, we've had our own versions of it.

00:12:43.100 The characters and nations of the people will change based on its needs, based on our technology,

00:12:47.860 how we interact with one another.

00:12:49.660 That also applies to immigration.

00:12:51.160 That's the same thing that we opened up with there at the beginning, is that even if you

00:12:54.920 homogenize the American character or any nation's character will change and so will your

00:12:58.980 government.

00:12:59.320 There has always been a great deal of discussion on the best form of government without consideration

00:13:05.480 of the fact that each one can be the best in some instances and the worst in others.

00:13:10.480 Therefore, it should not be said that every form of government is appropriate to every

00:13:14.420 country.

00:13:14.900 For example, liberty, since it will not grow under every climate, is not open to every

00:13:21.180 nation.

00:13:21.820 Also very important, right?

00:13:24.200 Again, when we talk about delivering democracy and liberty to everybody, every human heart,

00:13:28.240 you know, yearns to be free, he says, not really, actually.

00:13:32.080 That's not true.

00:13:33.740 Not every nation is for this.

00:13:36.020 And you know who else said that?

00:13:37.380 The founding fathers, right?

00:13:39.100 The Constitution is for a particular people who are virtuous, who are religious, who follow

00:13:44.620 the Ten Commandments.

00:13:45.700 They're biblical.

00:13:46.080 You know, it is that liberty comes after you have the virtue that establishes the ability

00:13:54.020 of self-rule, right?

00:13:55.020 It's not the liberty that creates the virtue.

00:13:58.180 It's the virtue that creates liberty.

00:13:59.720 And if you don't have that, then maybe liberty isn't something that would actually benefit

00:14:03.900 your nation.

00:14:04.860 A drug addict, freedom does not help a drug addict, right?

00:14:07.980 Like that does not help to have infinite money and the option to do whatever you want.

00:14:12.600 If you're a heroin addict, that's going to destroy you, right?

00:14:15.680 And that's what he's saying here.

00:14:17.580 The more one thinks about this principle laid down by Montesquieu, the more one feels its force.

00:14:22.420 The more it is contested, the more strongly it is established by new proofs.

00:14:27.720 Thus, the absolute question, what is the best form of government, is as insoluble as

00:14:34.180 it is indefinite.

00:14:35.640 Or to put it another way, it is as many correct solutions as there are possible combinations

00:14:40.860 in the relative and absolute positions of nations.

00:14:44.000 So again, the key here is that while there is a correct answer to what is the best form

00:14:50.460 of government, the question is always for whom, right?

00:14:54.160 It's for which group of people, for which nation.

00:14:56.900 It is not a universalizable thing.

00:14:59.020 It is not something that you can just put together in a lab and force on to everybody.

00:15:03.520 It is something that is very particular to the people.

00:15:06.420 He also says here that this means that the social contract is a chimera because these different

00:15:11.980 peoples are not going to create this out of whole cloth.

00:15:16.320 They're not just going to come together and decide, oh, let's sign a compact that creates

00:15:21.040 the best form of government.

00:15:22.800 This is something, and again, we talked about this in the first episode, that he is very explicit

00:15:27.880 about the importance of divine intervention, divine providence, and the way that that is going

00:15:35.040 to influence a people.

00:15:36.720 People are created in a particular way.

00:15:40.100 They have a specific character that comes from God, and that is where these things are

00:15:44.700 going to flow from.

00:15:47.040 Yeah, I think it's a good time to move on down.

00:15:49.540 All right.

00:15:50.280 So I don't know how deep you want to get into five.

00:15:52.640 This is basically him dunking on Rousseau for not understanding how legislature works.

00:15:58.720 I don't have a ton here other than just like Rousseau is wrong about legislatures, and he

00:16:03.740 doesn't understand kind of why they're important.

00:16:07.080 You know, he talks, he says, he says, it's interesting.

00:16:09.480 The one thing that I think is interesting, because he says this also in six, it's in five

00:16:12.820 and six.

00:16:13.280 They're basically the same, the same chapter.

00:16:15.340 And he says, Rousseau talks about the importance of the legislature speaking with the voice of

00:16:22.960 God.

00:16:23.380 Right.

00:16:23.700 But, but he doesn't understand that he means that in just kind of flowery language as

00:16:28.960 where Demacia is like, no, seriously, that's where law comes from. 1.00

00:16:32.260 If your legislature is not communicating the will of God, then it's not doing its job.

00:16:37.500 Again, something that would rankle a lot of, you know, our more atheistic or classically

00:16:43.280 liberal friends in some ways.

00:16:45.920 But he's very direct about this is, you know, that that is truly what is the job of a legislature

00:16:52.040 is or a legislator is, is to effectively transmit the things that are important to the people

00:16:59.200 that have been put on their heart by by the divine.

00:17:02.260 Yeah, no, I was going through my chapter, the section of mine, mine's from the Imperium

00:17:07.720 Press version.

00:17:08.520 But my only notes that I had from here was just that, you know, whenever we give up power,

00:17:14.000 when kings give up power to make laws or to legislate it, they're actually, it's an

00:17:18.400 abdication of power.

00:17:19.560 And he says that these are, you know, banal truths everyone knows, which are absolutely

00:17:23.840 foreign to Rousseau that he wishes to prove.

00:17:26.620 But, you know, then referencing Lycurgus, like when he gave laws to his country, it

00:17:30.260 became by the abdication of the throne.

00:17:32.520 And these words obviously signify that a legislator being the king, abdicated kingship the moment

00:17:38.180 he wished to give laws to his country and put himself in a position to do so.

00:17:41.560 Um, and I think that, you know, he's, he's pointing out that, uh, Moses and biblically

00:17:46.660 speaking is one of the most, is the most famous legislator of all of these things are based

00:17:50.840 on divine power.

00:17:52.160 But, you know, when you wish to become a legislature, it is an abdication of monarchical or more

00:17:58.080 centralized authority rather than just a collection of legislators trying to do so.

00:18:03.720 And because not every man can be a king, the idea that we can give power to everybody and

00:18:09.320 that they can govern themselves as we made, we sort of made fun of this last time in the

00:18:13.780 last episode where, oh, all of a sudden, you know, if we let everyone in this nation of

00:18:17.880 France, you know, get the chance to live forever, they can be sovereign over their country like

00:18:22.060 once every like, you know, 84 years or something.

00:18:25.220 That's of course not going to happen.

00:18:26.900 And this is the same thing he points out here.

00:18:28.900 Not every man is born a king.

00:18:30.280 Not everyone has that divine backing, that divine right of kings that we've seen.

00:18:35.200 And so the idea that anyone can become a legislature through the will of the masses is laughable.

00:18:40.360 And Rousseau thinks that this is just a magical idea that can work.

00:18:44.020 This is how we get our Fettermans and our Dr. Oz's running for Congress and things like that.

00:18:50.140 And, you know, he points this out at multiple places, but here for sure is how much of the

00:18:56.760 enlightenment is the deconstruction of things that already work or already exist and breaking

00:19:03.240 them apart and thinking that's clever, right?

00:19:05.540 So, like, if we just break off the function, this function of the government and we isolate

00:19:10.160 it or we change it just in this way, we reconstruct it on our own, you know, in our own mind, that

00:19:16.600 makes us very clever.

00:19:17.600 That makes us very novel.

00:19:18.780 That makes us revolutionary.

00:19:20.200 It's like, no, you're just taking something that already existed that naturally emerged and

00:19:24.400 you're just making it worse, right?

00:19:25.900 And that, so that, that's kind of his, his case here, I think.

00:19:29.720 And again, he makes that in multiple places, including here.

00:19:33.060 Yeah.

00:19:34.960 You know, I think he says it right there.

00:19:36.600 If he means to prove that a sovereign cannot truly be a legislator in the strongest sense

00:19:40.460 of a term and give truly constituent laws to the people by creating or perfecting their

00:19:44.520 constitutional system, I appeal to the whole history of the world.

00:19:47.880 Yeah.

00:19:48.680 Demastra doing the, the, the, the first, like, a gesturing to the room on fire meme.

00:19:53.980 Like, yeah, like, obviously this is the case.

00:19:56.800 Look at history.

00:19:57.400 And, you know, that's really important too.

00:19:59.240 We're going to bring this up in the next section, but he has repeated appeal to history.

00:20:03.740 And, and he says how important it is to the Enlightenment figures to basically dislodge

00:20:09.800 man from history, right?

00:20:11.440 To, to deracinate him, to uproot him, to, to take it, to pluck him out of what we know 0.99

00:20:17.720 to be true, what history says about him and instead create this, you know, this savage,

00:20:24.280 this, this guy out in the state of nature, or as we talked about the, the John Rawls in

00:20:29.200 the original position, this is always the trick that the Enlightenment wants to do, that liberalism

00:20:33.500 wants to do is take humans out of this river of history, remove them from the great chain

00:20:39.300 of being and say, no, we can just create, put them in a sterile environment.

00:20:43.280 And once we've done that, then we can just reimagine man as we want to.

00:20:48.320 And he says, you know, no, you, you just look at history and you can see that the thing that

00:20:52.680 you're saying doesn't work, but you keep appealing to, you know, to some original position or some,

00:20:58.640 some thing outside of human history so that you can construct this thing that just obviously

00:21:04.140 would be true, untrue if you looked at history itself.

00:21:06.740 Yeah. I mean, a really good way to look at that would be trying to rearrange all the

00:21:12.080 puzzle pieces. So all the pieces still match, but you're not getting the picture that's

00:21:16.460 on the box that is representative of history. Instead, you get this ugly collage of just

00:21:21.720 puzzle pieces and pictures that are out of place. And that's trying to reconstitute man

00:21:26.120 and a blank slate in a way that is opposite of nature and from history. And you get an ugly

00:21:32.240 collage rather than the painting that makes the civilization work.

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00:22:06.740 So in our next chapter here, he wants to talk about who founds a civilization. And so he starts

00:22:13.940 by saying that civilizations are not a human work. Again, Demaestra does not shy away from his belief

00:22:21.780 in God and the logic that should flow from it. He's very comfortable sitting inside that theological

00:22:28.920 tradition. And he says, look, we cannot create civilizations. Men do not just create them a

00:22:35.940 priori. They don't just make them before anything. And that means that civilizations are birthed by a set

00:22:43.780 of ideas, by a set of traditions. They are, they emerge from the character of the people. And that

00:22:50.320 character is often set by a leader. He says nations literally have fathers. They literally have people

00:22:57.180 who bring them into being and that that character is going to be indelibly stamped onto the people

00:23:04.360 going forward. He's really, in many ways, he's embracing that great man of history idea. Like,

00:23:09.760 like, he says that these, these, uh, natures, you know, the, these, uh, uh, kind of, uh,

00:23:18.760 these seeds of a people can sit dormant for years, you know, decades, centuries before a great man

00:23:26.920 comes by and germinates, you know, brings them into being. And so they can sit there and you can have

00:23:32.460 this, this thing percolating, uh, you know, the, the, this kind of identity or this, this worldview,

00:23:37.700 uh, you know, kind of coalescing, but it's not until a great man coming, comes and kind of forges

00:23:44.380 that and births the nation into being that we really see this come forward. Yeah. And I think

00:23:49.920 a really great example in this chapter, uh, comes later down when he's talking about Kings and he's

00:23:55.720 talking about the nation of governments, uh, can you, about the differences between them? He's referring

00:24:00.120 to Alfred Henry II and Edward I of England. Uh, and he says here in fine, uh, nations are, as nations

00:24:06.900 are born literally are so governments born with them. When we say a people has given itself a

00:24:11.240 government, it is to say as if we have given a character and a color. If we know sometimes how

00:24:15.240 not how to distinguish the foundations of a government in its infancy and no way does it

00:24:19.460 follow that they do not exist. See these two embryos. Can your eyes see the difference between

00:24:24.100 them? Yet one is Achilles and the other is Thercetes. Let us not take the developments for

00:24:29.340 creations. And so if you, if you know your stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, you'll know

00:24:33.460 that Thercetes is this bow legged sort of, uh, ill fit man who criticizes, uh, Agamemnon

00:24:39.920 out of turn. And he's just pointing out like, listen, you know, you can have ugly people and

00:24:44.600 ugly governments telling you to be ruled by spiteful mutants, or you can recognize that 1.00

00:24:48.920 great men help engender the birth of great people and great countries, and they have to

00:24:54.120 go outward and do so. And I mean, referencing, uh, King Alfred's a fantastic example, you know,

00:24:59.020 fighting against Vikings and other sea peoples and the Danes and making sure that England as, 0.88

00:25:05.180 you know, what becomes the sort of Anglo-Saxon country is birthed out of his own conquest and

00:25:10.280 his own will to do so, preserving its ecclesiology, preserving its traditions, getting a more formalized

00:25:16.140 understanding of where it comes from, because these people are willing to emerge and help sound,

00:25:20.480 you know, sound out and what that government is going to be. And if you don't have those great men,

00:25:25.040 and if you don't have people that are willing to take the reins when necessary, uh, nations will

00:25:29.200 fall apart very quickly and you will be ruled by the spiteful and the wicked. Yeah. And he also says

00:25:34.680 that, you know, like you're saying, Kings are critical here for him. And he says that even

00:25:39.340 republics are birthed first by Kings. And he says that these Kings lay down fundamental laws that create

00:25:46.740 the character of the people. And it's hard not to, to see that even in the birth of something like

00:25:52.040 the United States, obviously, uh, the United States is stamped with a very British character

00:25:57.140 from the beginning. It has those deep roots that are tied to the British crown. And even though

00:26:01.640 its identity is in throwing off the British crown, it's first president, you know, basically acts as

00:26:09.060 in a monarchical way and indelibly stamps himself onto the character. Washington has a deep impact on

00:26:16.860 kind of the identity and character of the people. And we see that it's always the imperial

00:26:22.580 presidencies of the United States that kind of remake its image, right? It's guys like Lincoln,

00:26:28.380 it's guys like FDR, it's guys who have this, this ability to kind of redefine who the people are and

00:26:34.500 what their norms are going to be, what their expectations are going to be that can, that can

00:26:38.220 forge them into one, you know, moral vision. Those are the people who often have the biggest impact

00:26:44.180 in the biggest change on the way that the nation is going in the direction. And so even people who

00:26:49.680 don't think of as official Kings, that, that kingly presence that, uh, you know, that, that 1.00

00:26:54.860 powerful executive presidents, uh, president presence is still what changes things even inside

00:27:00.520 a Republic. And so he says that these are really important to, to kind of establish the way that

00:27:06.500 people are going to go. And that's really where the constitution is birthed. And this is where he gets

00:27:11.660 into this and I've, I've done videos on this before, because he talks about this in, in another

00:27:15.300 work that's really important, which is the generative principles of, of kind of, uh, constitutions.

00:27:20.720 But this is kind of a, a small condensed version of that, that he does, uh, in this chapter.

00:27:26.280 And he really talks about how, uh, men never create a constitution. That's the, they always 0.94

00:27:33.040 come in after the fact to kind of reinforce what already exists inside the nation. And he says,

00:27:39.520 one of the reasons that's so important. And I think this is, this is really key is that

00:27:43.480 men never respect anything that they construct, right? They, they, you can never truly respect

00:27:51.040 something that you feel you completely created a thin air that you completely, uh, generated.

00:27:56.860 And we might say, Oh, well, but Orrin, like, that's what happened with the constitution of the

00:28:02.280 United States. It's like, well, think about that though. We don't, there are certain parts of the

00:28:06.180 constitution that we know we're not allowed to touch because the founding fathers made them,

00:28:10.920 right? The Kings made them, they, they spoke those words into existence. And so those things are

00:28:15.900 inviolable. So we might think about whether or not we can, you know, change certain laws,

00:28:20.660 but we're not getting rid of the first amendment, right? Because that's something that's like

00:28:23.820 core to the identity that's laid down. We feel that's beyond the touch of the nation. If we tinkered

00:28:29.460 with that, that would fundamentally change what the nation was. And so he says, it's really important

00:28:35.060 that we, that, that we view government that way, because if we see it as just a creation

00:28:40.100 only of ourselves, then we'll be tempted to tinker with it. We'll be tempted to tear it apart.

00:28:45.660 Pure reason will destroy it. And then, uh, you know, we, and we can kind of see that with a left

00:28:50.800 now, right? It's like, this is all just malleable. This is all just something that we can change in

00:28:54.340 moment's notice. So he's warning against that tendency that if we don't see the government as

00:28:59.020 something that is in some way divinely established, that is in some way linked to, uh,

00:29:04.600 the divine, then we will eventually destroy ourselves by tinkering with the fundamentals

00:29:09.640 of our nation and who we are. Yeah. Like on screen, that last paragraph here going into the

00:29:15.540 next, you know, no, no important, truly constitutional reform establishes anything new.

00:29:19.760 Like you said, like, well, we, even when we founded this country, what are they building off

00:29:25.040 of? They're building off of the Republics in Switzerland. They're building off the Republic of

00:29:29.160 Rome and the democratic institutions of Greece. Like they're recognizing that things came before

00:29:33.960 them that there is sort of this lineage that they themselves are not birthing anything truly

00:29:38.800 new or created. They're just trying to, again, make it work for the particularities of their

00:29:44.060 people and their region. Um, and so even in American history, you kind of see the recognition

00:29:49.160 of Demaistra's, you know, uh, central points about how governments are meant for particularities.

00:29:55.020 They're meant for a particular people. And again, they're nothing particularly new because

00:29:59.380 they're looking towards ancient historical and divine axioms that have worked in the past,

00:30:06.160 such as Rome or Greece or in Switzerland. Yeah. And I think it's also important to realize

00:30:12.120 that this is where then somebody with a little more modern, somebody like Carl Schmidt starts

00:30:18.060 to pull when he is looking at things like political theology, right? That, that we will always

00:30:24.060 echo our relationship with divine in our government, that that will always be the way. And, and that's

00:30:30.660 again, very uncomfortable. I think for a lot of people, a lot of Americans, a lot of, a lot of

00:30:34.780 modern people, liberals, even conservatives to think about things that way. But he says, this is just an

00:30:40.780 unavoidable part of human nature. You will see this, that this is, this is how your government is going to

00:30:47.620 be formed. It is going to be reflective of that relationship because if it isn't reflective, you're going to tear

00:30:52.760 yourself apart. Right. And again, he talks about this multiple times, the danger of pure human reason

00:30:57.900 that, that not having it constrained by a vision, by a moral vision that is connected to your

00:31:06.860 understanding of metaphysics to morality, to the divine, that is always going to be very dangerous.

00:31:13.680 That's always going to just take your country apart. And it's, I think this one, one last thing here

00:31:18.820 before we move on is where he's talking about how it is too easy for a nation to mistake its real interest

00:31:24.700 to chase them desperately after what cannot be suitable for it. And at the same time, reject what is best

00:31:29.260 for it. As we all know how harmful the errors in this field are, this is what made Tacitus say it is with his

00:31:34.420 simple profundity, it's much better for people to accept a sovereign than to seek him. And we see this a lot,

00:31:39.680 I think in sort of conservative media circles about say like Caesarism, or what stage of civilization are we in,

00:31:46.400 in sort of that Spenglarian sense that, well, what are the nation's interests right now? And would a king

00:31:51.720 solve them? Or can we look towards other parts of the world to do so? And when we do that, we often

00:31:57.700 sometimes can miss the forest for the trees looking for particular issues. And sometimes it is best to

00:32:04.680 accept a sovereign when they come rather than to seek one out. Because when we seek one out, well,

00:32:09.800 oftentimes we'll be squabbling and over what's the perfect solution when the enemy is already inside the

00:32:15.620 gates and sacking and pillaging the place. And I think sometimes it's best to acknowledge that we

00:32:20.920 might have to work with what we have rather than this mythical political prester John out somewhere

00:32:26.820 in the world. We also see here in this chapter that he, you know, he, he rejects the idea that there

00:32:33.180 can't be improvements. He's not saying, you know, he says, you know, he's going to meet that expected

00:32:38.580 criticism here. He says, I, I, by no means intend to deny the possibility of political improvement through a

00:32:47.740 brought about by a few wise men. I might as well deny the power of moral and physical education to improve a

00:32:53.920 men's morality and physique. But this truth confirms rather than shakes my general argument by proving that human

00:33:00.620 power can create nothing and that everything depends on the original aptitudes of nations and of individuals. So he's not

00:33:07.740 saying, you know, he's saying, look, we can use rationality. We can improve things. We can better

00:33:14.940 things through our, you know, through education, through learning, through the ideas of wise men.

00:33:20.780 However, that is still dependent on what was already there. That, that, that is an, it is an improvement in

00:33:26.640 the sense that is already working with what existed is not creating it out of whole cloth. It's not

00:33:32.420 engineering it from the bottom up. And that's something that's really important because the left is always

00:33:36.820 about that social engineering. Again, it's the idea that we can just break away from all common bonds.

00:33:42.980 We can break away from all duties. We can break away from our roots. We can, we can completely remove

00:33:48.480 something, put it in some sterile place and then create it and make it what we want. And he's just

00:33:53.400 rejecting that idea. He's saying, look, of course we can improve ourselves. Of course we can improve our

00:33:58.880 government, but it's always in reference to what came before. It's always in reference to what already

00:34:04.640 exists. And he also makes another point that, uh, you know, elite theorists will be happy to see

00:34:09.280 the massive men play no part in political events. They even, uh, they even respect government only

00:34:15.540 because it is not their work. They're feeling, this feeling is written indelibly on their hearts.

00:34:21.120 They submit to sovereignty because they feel that it is something sacred that they can neither create

00:34:25.980 nor destroy. If through corruption and treacherous suggestion, they reach the point of a facing it

00:34:31.120 in themselves, this preserving sentiment. If they have the misfortune to think that they are called

00:34:36.660 as a body to reform the state, everything is lost. Uh, this is why even in free straits is,

00:34:42.900 is extremely important for rulers to be separated from the mass of the people by that personal respect,

00:34:49.760 which stems from birth and wealth. For if opinion does not put a barrier between, uh, itself and

00:34:57.340 authority, its power is not outside its scope. If the governed, uh, many can think themselves the

00:35:03.620 equals of the governing few government will collapse. So again, very, very important for

00:35:09.720 Demaistra that there is a separation of understanding between the ruled and the rulers that there is a

00:35:16.640 understanding that what is happening there with the government is not something that the people can

00:35:21.080 just dismantle at any moment. Uh, because if they can do that, if they think that they can change that,

00:35:26.300 if they do not believe that this is something that was kind of installed by something divine in some

00:35:31.720 way, then they will tear it apart. And you know, that that's kind of his prediction there. And of

00:35:37.120 course he points to the French revolution as is evident. All right. So our next chapter here is

00:35:45.720 eight. And, uh, we were joking about this one, uh, before we got started here, this is the death of

00:35:51.320 theory cells. He calls for the, for the end of philosophy. Um, or I shouldn't be that dramatic.

00:35:57.160 People might not know I'm joking, but yeah, probably. Uh, but what he's saying here is that,

00:36:03.200 uh, he does, he does directly call philosophy a scourge. I mean, I guess I could just read it here.

00:36:08.740 Uh, the more human reason trusts in itself and tries to rely on its own resources, the more absurd it is.

00:36:15.460 And the more it reveals its lack of power. This is why the world's greatest scourge has always been

00:36:20.940 in every age, what is called philosophy or philosophy is nothing, but the human reason

00:36:26.140 acting alone. And the human reason reduced to its own resources is nothing, but a brute whose power

00:36:32.320 is restricted, uh, to destroying. So again, uh, you know, he's very skeptical of the idea that just

00:36:39.860 reason completely unmoored from any tradition, from history, from knowledge of the divine

00:36:46.160 can bring about good. He says, in fact, this is, this is the thing that destroys nations

00:36:51.620 on a regular basis. Yeah. If you want to scroll down to our contemporaries, uh, I think it's in

00:36:58.460 the next page. And I think that there, yeah, these two paragraphs here are really important. Um,

00:37:04.620 our contemporaries will believe it as they will, but posterity will have no doubt that the most insane

00:37:08.760 of men were those who gathered around the table and said, we will separate the French people from

00:37:13.160 their ancient constitution and give them another, this one or that one. It does not matter. Although

00:37:17.640 this folly is common to all parties who have desolated France, yet the Jacobins spring first 0.99

00:37:22.360 to mind as the destroyers rather than builders and leave in the imagination, a certain impression

00:37:26.800 of grandeur resulting from the immensity of their successes. Uh, so even though it's like that

00:37:31.640 SpongeBob meme, I guess, like we did it, Patrick, we saved the city. Like, you know, we, we,

00:37:35.760 we did it Jacobins. We saved France and you've killed thousands and you've got us into bloody 0.98

00:37:40.400 war. But as he's pointing out and what DeMeister is discussing is, is that these dilutions of

00:37:45.780 grandeur, these, these passions and sort of the Christian sense of pride and that we can

00:37:50.180 do these things, the spiritual pre-lest, uh, instead what we've done as he points out in

00:37:55.000 that second, uh, paragraph, uh, but the men who appeared on the scenes of the constitutional

00:37:59.220 assembly really thought themselves legislators quite serious, seriously, invisibly that they

00:38:03.700 could rule the France and to give it a political constitution. And he calls them bedlems of the 1.00

00:38:08.520 world. And so these men spring only with the ideas of feebleness, ignorance, and disappointment. 0.91

00:38:13.160 No feeling of admiration or terror equals this kind of angry pity inspired by this constituent

00:38:18.520 bedlam. The palm of villainy belongs right to the Jacobins, but posterity will unanimously 1.00

00:38:23.100 award the constitutionalists that of folly. Um, so the idea that you can somehow separate

00:38:28.500 man from his natural condition, man from the order that had been there, the Ancien regime,

00:38:33.900 uh, was done so by people who thought that they could do it better and that pride got the better

00:38:39.380 of them. And instead France would, uh, dive into a reign of terror. Thousands would die and it would 0.59

00:38:45.840 be, I'll be on a constitutional system where it's on its, uh, what fifth, uh, iteration of its

00:38:50.560 republic now, um, where rioting is a dime a dozen. It's sort of a French right at this point 0.80

00:38:55.040 since the revolution. But even in America, we think that we can divide ourselves from

00:38:59.500 the idea that no, everyone can come in here. Just think about how great the food will be,

00:39:03.600 or that we can separate man from his idea that he wishes to care about his country first and his

00:39:09.180 neighbors and the law. And instead, no, we're going to care about faraway conflicts. We're going to

00:39:14.240 rebuild the laws to ensure that you don't get a say in those matters. And in turn, uh, I think

00:39:20.520 posterity will judge us just as harshly as the Jacobins have been judged by history.

00:39:24.240 I wish that, uh, unfortunately this edition is just a reader. It doesn't have everything. Uh,

00:39:30.180 the, I was also working from the Imperium press, uh, edition when I was actually taking notes and

00:39:35.140 it's sad because it had a great, he had a great line in here. That was just brutal as a religion 1.00

00:39:39.560 crushing out the poison of reason. Uh, he talks about this here. Uh, you, we can read this part at

00:39:45.940 least. Uh, he says this is, uh, the legislators have all felt that human reason could not stand alone

00:39:51.580 and that no purely human institution could last. This is why they have, so to speak, interlaced

00:39:56.700 politics and religion. So the human weakness strengthened by a supernatural support could be

00:40:02.440 overcome. So again, he's, uh, he, he says is very explicitly in this passage that politics and

00:40:09.320 religion will always intersect and that they must always intersect, that they must undergird each other 0.99

00:40:14.980 because there will never be a politics completely freed from this. And if you do try to completely

00:40:20.200 free it from this, then he says in what he calls the poison of human reason will, uh, will kind of,

00:40:27.020 uh, seep in also, uh, in this chapter, he says, a lot of people will warn you about the abuse of this.

00:40:33.860 And he says it is abused like the, that, that, that the marriage of, uh, religion and state power

00:40:41.260 is abused. And that is something to watch out for. However, he says, just because it's abused,

00:40:46.400 doesn't mean it's something that you can completely eliminate. He says that things are abused usually

00:40:52.660 because they're actually originally something that's right and good. The reason we call it an abuse

00:40:57.300 is that we recognize that there is a right and good use for it, that there should be, there is a

00:41:03.960 paradigm for which this works and to not do it in that way is an abuse of it. So if you're, you have

00:41:10.840 good fatherly authority, but then you use that to, you know, take advantage of your child or, you know,

00:41:16.420 harm them in some way, that's an abuse. That doesn't mean the fatherly power was bad. It just means that

00:41:22.540 you have abused it. And that's, that's a corruption of what it is. And he says, just because, uh,

00:41:26.980 the relationship between church and state can be abused does not mean that it should then be

00:41:32.520 eliminated. Instead, you should be guarding against that abuse and you should be setting

00:41:37.120 the relationship back into its right place. Yeah. And I don't know if this reader version

00:41:41.920 you have or in covers it, but on that point of religion and political institutions, you know,

00:41:46.900 it's, it's far from perfect and enduring, um, as far as any union of politics and religion are perfect,

00:41:52.140 but this is, I thought it was really important to what we're kind of seeing here in America and with

00:41:55.880 the discussion over churches. Um, he references, of course, that Lycurgus just distinguished himself

00:42:00.920 on this fundamental point. He would always seek the oracles for their aid, that everything that

00:42:05.640 his laws were from religious precepts, that divinity intervened, so to speak, um, on councils,

00:42:11.260 treaties, war, and the admiration of justice. So when Lysander wished to destroy kingship at Sparta,

00:42:16.660 he first tried to corrupt the priests who gave the oracles because he knew that the Spartans did not

00:42:21.860 undertake anything important without consulting them. And I mean, we see this all the time now

00:42:26.840 about, I guess the, uh, Ryan Turnipseed calls the difference between free and state churches here

00:42:31.000 in America. Like, uh, a state church would be like those old, you know, early American New England

00:42:36.260 style Episcopal churches that have, you know, BLM fists and gay pride flags outside of their old stone 0.86

00:42:42.920 walls and wooden doors. Whereas free churches still have the opportunity to preach the actual gospel and to

00:42:48.760 preach the actual truths of religion. But knowing that the state and knowing that the regime can

00:42:53.920 corrupt the priesthood, can corrupt the nature of religion, then that's how you get those obscure, 0.89

00:43:00.240 obese, you know, uh, Lutherans in Germany that are saying, oh, God is queer or whatever.

00:43:05.280 And this is how you can corrupt the values of a people and corrupt their traditions. Because if they

00:43:10.260 first see all of their ideas to be originally religious precepts, as in America, we certainly did at the

00:43:16.020 beginning of the founding of this country. If you corrupt that, then you can easily find your way

00:43:20.760 to depose of a king, depose of a people and depose of a government. So anytime that religion is 0.84

00:43:26.500 targeted, whether by atheists or those antithetical to your own beliefs, they're not just trying to

00:43:32.420 depose your religion, they're trying to depose your way of life. And it's really interesting. Again, 0.93

00:43:37.620 most people, of course, think that separation of church and state is critical because it protects

00:43:43.160 the institutions from each other. But I think what we've seen is now so many, you know, especially

00:43:50.360 these mainline Protestant churches, but this is also seeping into everything, sadly, you know,

00:43:56.340 Catholicism, all these different branches, that the values of the state start to become the values of

00:44:04.960 the church no matter what, right? The church will mold itself to authority, even if we believe

00:44:10.900 with our, the words of our mouth, that these things are separate and they can be, they can remain

00:44:16.460 separate and that they can be different things and that protects them. What we see with our actions,

00:44:21.380 what people, what humans actually do is look at the state religion and then they adopt it even inside

00:44:28.720 their own religion, their own churches, which is why I always make that tweet. Progressivism will

00:44:33.360 hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy because this, because the religion was not 1.00

00:44:40.120 allowed to exist in the state in theory, but no state can ever be completely irreligious. There are

00:44:47.340 no neutral institutions. And so it created a religion, it adopted a religion because that is the natural

00:44:54.560 state of, well, I shouldn't say natural state of states, that's confusing, but that is the natural thing

00:45:00.040 that states do. They will have a religion. You will have a relationship with the metaphysical. You will have

00:45:05.580 a moral vision. That is what forges a people as Demastra says. And without that, people are nothing.

00:45:11.720 So a state will have a shared moral vision. It must in order to operate. And so it, because it was not

00:45:17.740 allowed to have a Christian religion, it forged a new one. And once it forged that one, it didn't stay 0.73

00:45:23.760 separate from the other Christian religion. It didn't stay separate from these religions that had been 0.91

00:45:29.720 locked out. Instead, those religions started to follow the state one. The Christian religion 0.95

00:45:35.700 started to follow them. And that's why we have these woke priests. That's why we have this stuff

00:45:39.140 because they are adopting the beliefs of power as people always will. And that's really uncomfortable

00:45:45.940 for a lot of people. They want to think, okay, no, you know, the, the, the masses are, are gonna,

00:45:50.920 the people are, there's popular sovereignty and they're going to be able to make their own decisions,

00:45:55.040 but that's not what happens. And so that's why it matters what your state is, is doing. That's why

00:46:00.380 it matters what your elites believe in, because the people will always follow even your religion,

00:46:05.280 even the things that are supposed to be separate, that are supposed to be connected to the divine,

00:46:08.360 to the divine. If the state is doing something different, if it's worshiping something different,

00:46:13.320 that will trickle down. That inevitably will visit itself on the people. And those religions that 0.97

00:46:19.000 should have stayed separate, that should have stayed loyal to God. Instead, we'll, we'll worship the

00:46:24.220 religion of the state. That's going to happen. So the only question is what will be the religion

00:46:28.540 of the state? Yeah. And this is why when they advocate for separation of church and state,

00:46:33.340 they're just simply advocating for the destruction of what made a people a people. And I think that how

00:46:39.680 he finishes that chapter before we get to chapter nine, real quick, I only wish to show that human

00:46:44.080 reason or what is called philosophy is as useless for the happiness of states as for that of

00:46:48.720 individuals. All great institutions, moreover, have their origin and their conservation elsewhere. And that

00:46:53.580 the human reason is mingled with these only to pervert and destroy them. So, I mean, this is how you can

00:46:59.240 get rationalists advocating for, you know, killing your pets in order to solve a carbon crisis or something

00:47:05.240 like that. I mean, any time that you wish to adhere to pure reason alone or rationalism, uh, and you

00:47:11.680 divorce yourself from, you know, moral precepts, whether they're divinely oriented or they've just been around

00:47:17.500 because they've been around for forever. Uh, that's when you first start to reason,

00:47:21.840 Hey, maybe I could just kill the whole thing right here. And right now it's, it's like arguing with

00:47:26.420 yourself. Hey, let's go get behind the wheel after having a couple of, you know, sliders and eight

00:47:30.940 balls and go nuts. You know, it's just, it's a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, have you ever met a

00:47:36.320 happy philosopher? No, no. Right. Maybe Nick, maybe Nick Lamp. Uh, you know, uh, okay. But, but I think

00:47:44.260 he's a little too weird into that religious stuff, but who knows? He may temper it enough with the,

00:47:49.680 yeah, with, with, with obscure Anglo-Protestantism to, to, to, to, to not completely fall down that

00:47:56.040 hole. But yeah, I think, I think this is something we all know, uh, you know, that we see kind of acted

00:48:02.120 out in real life, but again, it's just something that we've cut ourselves off from because we kind

00:48:06.780 of worship, uh, intelligence and reason. And we, we, we elevated above a relationship with the divine,

00:48:13.260 which, uh, he is definitely pointing to as a huge mistake here. All right. So finally, uh, you know,

00:48:19.120 he decides to mix it up a little bit. Most of the time he's dunking on Rousseau. Uh, but in this chapter,

00:48:25.040 he decides to dunk on Thomas Paine and he says, uh, you know, that he's, he's wrong about

00:48:31.840 the order of operations. Again, this is a consistent point he makes and a critical one.

00:48:37.580 There's a reason he makes it over and over again in different ways, because it's really important.

00:48:41.360 The idea that the, you know, constitution is established, the laws are established.

00:48:47.680 And once you have like an agreement of men, the total population gets together and they understand

00:48:53.520 what's going on then. And only then do we actually get a nation. And he says, no, that's like

00:48:59.460 the exact opposite of what really happens. You know, instead we have a people, we have, uh, a leader,

00:49:07.260 we have the divine and those things are what then get reflected eventually into a constitution.

00:49:13.460 He warns about writing down too many laws, uh, saying that the, the constitution that has to

00:49:19.200 constantly justify itself, that has to constantly, uh, you know, uh, come up with new ways, uh, to secure

00:49:26.880 liberty or right, uh, is in trouble. That's the sign of weakness. And I think we can see that in

00:49:32.380 America. We're obsessed, you know, with writing down things. Oh, we need a law that says you can't

00:49:37.040 teach children about, you know, being a different gender at age eight. Um, you shouldn't need a law,

00:49:42.820 uh, that, that should just be so clear and so self-evident that if you, you know, ever made the

00:49:49.020 mistake of trying to do that, uh, you know, uh, some dads could fix that problem real quick.

00:49:53.800 You know, like that, that, that, that's kind of, you know, that, that, that thing should

00:49:57.300 be so deeply written into the human art, into the, the character of the people that no one

00:50:03.040 needs to say that out loud because no one even would even start to do that. And so he says,

00:50:07.380 the more that people kind of try to plan out a civilization by writing more things down,

00:50:11.520 the more they try to secure rights and, and, and privileges and things in writing, uh, the

00:50:16.620 worse it gets like the, the, the weaker your civilization is. And very interestingly, I like this too.

00:50:21.300 He, he says that the tower of Babel is, you know, is kind of the, the first attempt to plan out a

00:50:27.160 civilization from the beginning, to draw it up together and build it on your own. Uh, and he

00:50:32.060 kind of points out that of course, God does not take kindly to this. Yeah. My, my favorite bit in

00:50:36.780 this little essay and subject is he says that the most perfect constitution that was ever made for a

00:50:41.700 people was that of Sparta and they never left us a line of public law to record or to, to translate.

00:50:47.580 So, I mean, if you already know what you're doing and then this goes back again to the, the just

00:50:52.040 previous chapter, if you try to reason and plan out everything that we're, we're going to have a law

00:50:56.600 for this, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. Then all that you're doing, like Oren and I

00:51:00.940 have talked about before, you're just doing that thing that Nick Land has talked about, that if you

00:51:05.640 set a law here, that means you've defined where and when you can argue to get more power from it.

00:51:12.000 This is why Carl Schmitt builds so heavily off of Joseph de Meister, because once a law is written,

00:51:17.140 then you can decide what the state of exception is. And then you can find out who's sovereign

00:51:20.700 very quickly and who can turn that law around. I mean, take a, I mean, not to, there's plenty of

00:51:26.180 reasons to criticize Ron DeSantis for things, I guess on his campaign trail, but like the law that he

00:51:30.620 had signed into effect about stopping sexual education or whatever, up until, uh, the fourth grade,

00:51:36.040 I think is what it was. Yeah, you can, yeah, you can, yeah. So what? Eight years. So your third

00:51:43.060 grade and under is safe, but as soon as they're like eight or nine years old, then you can perverse

00:51:47.520 them with transgender stuff. Like it tells you how weak it can be to just plan things out. If you were 1.00

00:51:53.020 sovereign, the government would be like, none of this crap. And if you do it, we're going to throw 0.99

00:51:56.800 you in jail. But again, once we start planning things out, trying to do laws, trying to find ways to

00:52:02.000 govern where the exception is going to be, um, this is how the task can never be carried through.

00:52:07.820 And the problem that you're trying to address will only run rampant. And this is really interesting.

00:52:13.520 This is very important because this enters into the debate that has happened on my channel. I've

00:52:17.640 had both Curtis Yarvin and Chris Rufo on, not at the same time. Maybe I can, I can make that magic

00:52:23.000 happen at some point. Uh, that, that would be quite a, quite an exciting time. Uh, but they, you know,

00:52:29.100 they have very different ideas of kind of how this works, how you change culture, how you change

00:52:35.980 law. And, uh, Demaster is taking much more of a Curtis Yarvin approach here, right? So Yarvin would

00:52:42.580 say passing laws like small ball that you can't actually enforce doesn't matter. Like that doesn't

00:52:50.740 actually do things. What you want is a complete shift in the way that people understand and think

00:52:56.340 about a subject. You want to make one, uh, set of ideas, uh, old and uncool and passe. And you want

00:53:03.840 to make another set of ideas hip and interesting and influential. And that's his approach. The, the,

00:53:10.920 the Rufo approach is we, we take substantial policy and law victories, something that we can plant a

00:53:19.960 flag down and say, we passed a law and this is here. And so for Rufo, you know, getting the, the,

00:53:25.120 you know, DeSantis laws pass our victories because even if they're weak, it shows that you can get

00:53:30.220 something done. It creates a model. It moves the ball forward. It's about a game of inches,

00:53:34.380 right? And Demaster is saying, that's not really how this works, right? Like we, what, if you have

00:53:40.800 to write all this down, if you have to pass the DeSantis law, that means the regime is weak. You are

00:53:45.360 showing your weakness when you do that. And so, uh, what you really want is a cultural force that is so

00:53:52.100 powerful, uh, that, that is never done. Like you said, uh, you know, the, the Spartan,

00:53:56.780 they never have to write it down because it's written into the hearts of their children. You

00:54:00.460 know, that's how, that's how he phrases that, which I think is really important. They didn't

00:54:03.920 bother to write it down on a piece of paper because they, they spent all of their time

00:54:07.900 writing it onto the hearts of their children. And so, uh, you know, I think it'd be very interesting

00:54:13.440 because another part of this, maybe I could get a academic agent on for, for this too. Uh,

00:54:18.180 at some point is, you know, he, you know, he is always saying, you know, culture is downstream

00:54:22.140 from law. Right. And so, uh, very interesting in this sense, uh, if he thinks that the small

00:54:28.760 laws matter or if it's only the big laws matter, I think, I think there's a lot of very interesting

00:54:34.040 questions about political theory, the flow of power, the flow of ideas and what actually

00:54:40.060 changes a nation and then the direction of a government, uh, kind of wrapped up all in this

00:54:46.580 discussion. Yeah. And there's a section in this chapter that I find is really important when we

00:54:52.120 talk about like the separation of powers or even, uh, when we see dueling narratives, he says, you

00:54:58.100 know, uh, he's referring to Rome and the Roman Republic about the, the powers of the people and

00:55:02.960 the Senate. And this was the nature of the Roman constitution. But he says when sovereignty is shared

00:55:08.480 between two powers, the balancing of these two powers is necessarily a combat. If you introduce a

00:55:14.300 third power with the necessary strength, it will immediately establish a tranquil equilibrium by

00:55:18.660 gently inclining sometimes one side over the other. This could not, could take place in Rome by the

00:55:23.360 very nature of these things. It was always the alternating jolts of the two powers that it

00:55:26.920 maintained. And the whole of Roman history presents the spectacle of these two vigorous athletes who

00:55:32.100 grapple, who roll, and by turn, victor or vanquished. Um, but returning of course to England and also

00:55:37.600 Thomas Paine's concept, like the, the sovereignty even now in America with the court system, like where

00:55:43.660 you're ruled by judicial fiat. They give one side to the other. And this is why a lot of Congress and

00:55:49.640 a lot of special interest groups, your, your power is between unelected bureaucrats on one hand and on 0.99

00:55:55.600 the other, the Supreme court. If you want the most honest five minutes of an American Senator saying

00:56:01.240 anything, go look up Senator Ben Sasse's remarks during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. He will tell you

00:56:06.980 very clearly that Congress doesn't do its job. It will write laws that will only be carried out by

00:56:12.320 unelected bureaucrats. And when people get upset, they go to the place for their only relief in this 0.81

00:56:17.140 country, which is the Supreme court. And even then the Supreme court has no power because it has to

00:56:22.000 fight two things at once its own internal squabbles about, you know, dealing with what's holy, i.e.,

00:56:28.620 you know, precedent. Um, we just talked about earlier today in this episode, but secondly, it also has to

00:56:35.100 deal with the people. And we saw that even more vibrantly when it came to the Dobbs decision about

00:56:39.760 abortion. Those were people threatening to kill those people. There was a guy that broke into Brett

00:56:44.240 Kavanaugh's house. I mean, this is, this illustrates the weaknesses of our own system.

00:56:49.840 The white house actually encouraged people to break the law and, and, and go and protest on the grounds of

00:56:57.660 these bills, houses, intimidate them. So yeah, that's very, very clear. Uh, and you know, he, he talks about

00:57:03.600 also, you know, the Roman Republic like that. There's just, there was never this, there's no

00:57:09.000 writing down about the importance of dividing powers that was manifested by those, by the, the

00:57:16.440 institutions of the Senate and the tribune and things emerging from a natural division, you know?

00:57:22.260 And so there's no need on paper to kind of justify those, those divisions because they emerge naturally.

00:57:29.720 And he says, and you know, this natural emergence is important. He defends, for instance, the English

00:57:35.780 constitution saying, well, it's important that it's not a written constitution because the rights

00:57:41.220 that are now, uh, enshrined have emerged over time. They've, they've grown from, uh, the character

00:57:48.400 of the people and its interactions with the nobility and its beliefs and who they are, you know, and, and

00:57:53.380 what the moral vision should be. And that's what gives it its resilience in his, in his mind is

00:57:59.100 specifically that it has been created over time, that it is part of the history of the people.

00:58:04.340 De Maester would very much be against this idea of like originalism that just sits around and like

00:58:10.080 you write the document and then it just means what it means forever. He would very much be of the

00:58:15.100 understanding that, you know, constitutions can and will and must change as time goes by. And that's

00:58:21.860 important because if you, if you delude yourself into believing that constitutions are just written

00:58:27.000 down and then they're there in perpetuity, then you will not understand why these things are

00:58:31.940 changing under your feet. And I think that's a lot of what has happened to conservatives.

00:58:35.060 They're pointing to the rules and saying, the rules are written down. I can see them.

00:58:39.220 These are the rules. And it's like, great, but no one has played the game that way for a hundred or

00:58:44.100 more years. So a good example of that would just to be ask conservatives, how well is originalism or

00:58:50.980 textualism holding up? That school of thought has not done as much as I think it is important

00:58:56.280 to consider things like the 14th amendment. Cause I mean, if we contextualize it, what does it say?

00:59:00.920 Well, those things are about newly freed slaves in the aftermath of the war of 1861. Great. What

00:59:06.760 does it have to do with gay marriage? Fantastic argument on paper, but if you don't have the force

00:59:10.980 to back that up and you don't have the cultural will to power to maintain that that is only applying

00:59:15.620 to this, then yeah, it can be definitely used for, for gay marriage or for, you know, transgender

00:59:21.140 stuff that's being subsidized by the state because it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th

00:59:26.020 amendment, which had nothing to do with those things. But because these things are written down,

00:59:30.640 because we point to the rules rather than actually pointing to the culture that we're supposed to be

00:59:35.600 maintaining. Um, you see a lot of conservative loss after loss after loss, but they point to the

00:59:41.680 rules like they've, like they've done some great point. And this is why Sam Francis called so many

00:59:45.980 of these things, beautiful losers. Yeah, that's a really good point. It, you know, conservatives 0.97

00:59:50.600 pointing to the rules instead of pointing to the culture that gives birth to them. Yeah, that,

00:59:55.760 that is, I think really critical. Uh, just so often the, we, we are echoing a set of platitudes

01:00:04.120 about how the country is supposed to be run instead of looking at the culture, having that context of

01:00:11.260 history, having that, uh, you know, what was going on at the time and why those things matter and

01:00:17.820 bringing that argument forward, bringing that logic forward and keeping that fresh in the minds of

01:00:23.420 people rather than just, well, we, we recited the rules and therefore kind of civilization will

01:00:28.060 continue. All right, guys, just keep pointing to the laws. It'll all work out. Right. This is

01:00:34.280 hypocrisy. Um, so, so, uh, we've got some super chats stacking up. We'll go ahead and pivot over

01:00:41.480 to the questions of the people here, but before we do that, Mr. Prudentialist, what should people

01:00:46.180 go for your great work? Is there anything that they should be looking for? Yeah. So, uh, I'll be

01:00:50.380 having a new video premiere tomorrow. It'll be taking a look at the subject of, uh, Marshall McLuhan and

01:00:56.560 how we look towards the East now as, as a culture. And what does that really mean when we say we're

01:01:01.220 orientalizing? Uh, that'll be out tomorrow morning, hopefully at 10 AM central time, but you can find

01:01:07.860 me on find my friends.net slash the Prudentialist. I'm on Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Odyssey, Rumble,

01:01:13.000 um, really anywhere you can find me, just go to find my friends.net and you'll see my name there.

01:01:16.900 Look for the frog. Excellent. All right, let's go over here. Uh, first question.

01:01:24.280 Davos are for five hours. Take my patronage and keep up the great work gents. Well, thank you very much, 1.00

01:01:28.560 man. Definitely appreciate that. Uh, we've got, uh, Lyle Bradley, uh, Bradley here for 15 Canadian,

01:01:36.540 uh, just a donation. Thank you very much. Really appreciate that, man. Uh, Cooper weirdo here for

01:01:41.880 $5. So you're saying he could, uh, have predicted anti-nationalism. I guess I'm in awe of human

01:01:47.340 intellect and stupidity. Just wow. Uh, yeah, again, one of the things I like about Demaestra is that he 1.00

01:01:53.660 predicts a large amount of what we see here. Uh, he, he was writing very close, of course, to, uh,

01:02:00.040 the enlightenment, uh, French and American revolutions and, and all that going on. And, uh,

01:02:04.660 he sees a lot of the threads that would eventually lead us to where we are now. So it really lends him

01:02:09.840 a lot of credibility, calls his shots a couple hundred years in advance. Uh, then that, uh,

01:02:14.820 definitely shows you that he understood, uh, can, you could really cut to the importance of the argument.

01:02:19.660 Uh, George W. Hajduk for 499. Our religion and law is the tradition of our ancestors and is written

01:02:27.760 in the hearts of our people. Chief Seattle. I mean, yep, this is, this is something that pretty

01:02:33.640 much every civilization knew until we made a concerted effort to forget it. And that's

01:02:39.140 exactly what Demaestra says over and over again, right? Rousseau is specifically ignoring obvious

01:02:44.600 things that everyone has known for a very long time. So he can try to reconstruct society

01:02:49.640 in his own way. That's constantly Demaestra's, uh, kind of criticism of, uh, Rousseau and the rest

01:02:55.940 of the enlightenment project. And, uh, you know, this is not, none, none of this stuff should be

01:03:00.980 new. None of this should be, uh, groundbreaking, but we have just ignored it for so long. We've

01:03:06.240 kind of been sitting in the enlightenment stew for so long that we do have to go back and we do

01:03:10.200 have to explain these things. We do have to rediscover these things, uh, because, uh, we simply

01:03:14.400 did not grow up hearing them. I know I didn't, you know, and so it's really important to go back

01:03:18.140 and look at this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this kind of highlights the exact thing that

01:03:21.980 Demaestra's saying, like every person's traditions and their laws are going to be particular to a

01:03:26.480 group of people. But the one thing that is universal is, is that laws and traditions are,

01:03:31.200 you know, they're universal in respects to the fact that every group of people has them written

01:03:36.300 on their hearts. And if we don't have them written on our hearts and we write them on paper,

01:03:39.960 well then things fall apart very quickly. Yeah. And so this is, you know, just, just, uh,

01:03:45.420 I'm just going to go on an aside for a second. A lot of people, when you start talking about this

01:03:49.240 stuff, uh, and traditions and, and, and why these things kind of change from group to group

01:03:54.040 and people to people, they start saying, oh, this is moral relativism, right? This is all moral

01:03:57.880 relativism. You're just saying that all of these are equal and all of these are, there, there is no

01:04:02.640 right answer. And that, that is not what this is saying. Like Demaestra said, there is a right answer.

01:04:07.780 There is a truth. There is an absolute correct answer. However, God has made people different.

01:04:13.120 He's made nations different. And so that answer differs from nation to nation. It is not,

01:04:18.220 it is not relative into respect that there is just no truth. There is no absolute truth.

01:04:23.800 However, that is contextual to each nation and each people. And the God has written that on the hearts

01:04:30.020 of those people. So that is universally true. Like Prudentialist is saying that that continually

01:04:35.160 manifests and those truths are real, uh, but that they do adjust themselves, the institutions

01:04:40.700 and their manifestations do change depending on how they are being practiced. Again,

01:04:46.500 Christianity is true. Christ is King. However, the practice of Christianity does change from nation

01:04:53.040 to nation. It significantly alters itself to the character of the nation. That doesn't mean

01:04:57.540 that Christianity stops being true for that nation. It simply means that the way it is practiced,

01:05:02.040 the way that that truth is practiced and manifests itself will be dependent on the people who are

01:05:07.120 practicing. I mean, you'll just see the difference between like French, you know, exhibition of their

01:05:12.520 form of Catholicism versus German or even Russian versus Greek forms of orthodoxy. That's how it works

01:05:18.260 in regards to how it changes the people. And this is why the discussion over immigration is so important.

01:05:22.880 It's why people talk about it as a civilizational issue. They'll say, oh, well, you know, a lot of these

01:05:27.140 people coming from South of the border, you know, they have family values like we do. It'll all be fine.

01:05:31.280 But when their ideas of values and traditions are either a antithetical to yours or be so foreign 0.97

01:05:37.260 and alienated from anything that is a part of the American tradition, then what laws or traditions

01:05:42.120 will exist out of this? It goes very back to the beginning of what we said that homogenization means

01:05:47.280 the destruction of one or both peoples in their entirety. And this is why these issues are so

01:05:52.880 important, because if the laws and traditions or things that you believe to be sacred and true

01:05:57.040 matter to you, then all of a sudden those things can be erased overnight very quickly because people

01:06:02.940 think, oh, well, they'll just be like us. All right. And shop rat 2067 for $4.99. The only example

01:06:11.060 of the state of nature I can think of is when you first spawn into a Minecraft world. Yes, state of

01:06:16.720 nature, but in Minecraft. Make sure you always add in Minecraft when you're thinking about the state

01:06:22.160 of nature and what you might do there. Let's see. Oh, we got one. We got a couple more here.

01:06:28.960 Let's see. Crooper weirdo here for $2. So A is A, but culture is important. Yeah. Again,

01:06:37.380 there's this there's this misunderstanding that just because the way that these things manifest in

01:06:44.320 different cultures changes and you have to understand them in those contexts that you're not

01:06:49.620 declaring. Therefore, everything is completely relative and there is no there is no absolute

01:06:53.660 truth that that's no buddy, especially someone like Joseph Demastra would have told you there is

01:06:59.240 no absolute truth. None of these people who understood that cultures and people are different

01:07:04.900 and that their their governments and their laws and these things will manifest differently because of

01:07:10.440 their difference. None of those people would have told you there is no absolute truth.

01:07:14.700 They would have 100 percent told you that there's divine truth. In fact, that's all Demastra does

01:07:18.680 to tell you there is divine truth. There is one true God. There is his truth and his truth is

01:07:23.640 written onto the hearts of these people and it manifests as that, you know, they express it like

01:07:29.080 that. That's what he's trying to say. And I mean, if you want a better example of that from Demastra,

01:07:33.320 go read his essays on consideration on France and go read chapter five of the French Revolution

01:07:39.160 considered to be anti-religious in character, a digression on Christianity. Like if you want an example

01:07:44.180 of what he means, I would highly recommend that you you read that essay because he's like, oh, wow,

01:07:49.180 all of these progressives are a bunch of anti-Christian atheists that want to divide religion

01:07:54.020 from the hearts of man that are the French character.

01:07:57.360 Always has been.

01:07:58.700 Yep.

01:07:59.180 All right. Let's see.

01:08:00.820 You tis four, three, two, one for $1.99. The shedding of blood forges a nation. And that is,

01:08:07.080 of course, true. And Demastra being the most metal of all philosophers makes that very clear

01:08:12.840 elsewhere in his work. You know, he has the famous passage. The executioner is the cornerstone

01:08:18.540 of civilization. He talks about the importance of the sword, the ability to wield the sword.

01:08:25.580 He is definitely a guy who believes in both throne and altar, to be sure. So that's something that does

01:08:33.420 not go beyond him at all. But he's talking here about the shared, again, what binds the nation

01:08:41.900 together. So obviously, the sword is something that's going to be necessary to carve out the nation,

01:08:48.600 to protect the nation. He says that in many places in his work. But here he's focused on what binds

01:08:55.320 the identity and the character of the nation. And here he's talking about that shared moral vision,

01:09:00.680 those religious principles, that background, those traditions, those characters that are

01:09:06.200 written into the hearts of the people. That's what he's focusing on.

01:09:10.040 Yeah, it's like the bell curve meme. Both ends of the bell curve will say swords, and the guys in the

01:09:14.400 middle are complaining about laws and human nature. And Demastra is definitely at the right end of the 0.85

01:09:20.320 bell curve there.

01:09:21.180 Yeah, yeah, 100%. Again, this is why Schmidt's decisionism comes from him. Again, I think it's

01:09:29.720 so important to have that context of Demastra as you then go forward to study some of these other

01:09:35.060 rioters, because you really understand that connective tissue, where those ideas flowed from.

01:09:39.940 And again, I really appreciate that Demastra never shies away from grounding his reason and his logic,

01:09:45.780 his structures in the metaphysical, in its relationship with the divine, the divine in the

01:09:50.760 truth of God's existence, and how he has created man. Those are all inseparable for him from an

01:09:57.820 explanation of nations, sovereignty, governments, all that stuff. You can't talk about one without

01:10:02.660 the other. And so I think that that's really critical.

01:10:05.980 Absolutely.

01:10:07.100 All right, guys. Well, I think we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. As always,

01:10:10.580 pleasure talking with the Prudentialist. Make sure you're checking out his work.

01:10:14.440 If you would like to go ahead and get these broadcasts as podcasts, please make sure that

01:10:19.600 you go ahead and subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform. And of

01:10:23.760 course, if this is your first time coming by the stream, coming by the channel, please go ahead

01:10:28.620 and subscribe. Thanks for coming by, guys. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - October 11, 2023

What Forges a Nation ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 10⧸11⧸23

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