The Roman Empire was famous for running on breads and circuses. The bread and the circus were critical to distracting the population from what was going on. When the population was able to be governed as a republic, it was full of virtuous people who made the society work. But as the rulers became more despotic, the quality of the people evolved over time, making sure that people were fed and people were entertained. So they didn t look around them and say, hey, what happened to that republic? And why aren t things running as well?
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00:00:30.000Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Oren McIntyre.
00:00:36.260The Roman Empire was famous for running on breads and circuses.
00:00:42.460The bread and the circus were critical to distracting the population from what was going on.
00:00:48.260When the population was able to be governed as a republic, it was full of virtuous people.
00:00:53.520People who were expected to provide for their own meals and cultivate virtue through different aspects of literature and song and all these other arts, all these other pursuits, intellectual, climbing the ladder politically, besting others in warfare or training yourself to become a peak physical specimen.
00:01:15.580These are the ways that you were expected to pass your time.
00:01:20.160Even in the Roman Republic, there were plenty of people who were ultimately lazy or didn't get the job done.
00:01:25.840But there was a critical mass of virtuous people who made the society work.
00:01:30.420But as the rulers became more despotic and as the quality of the people just went ahead and evolved over time, it was clear that emperors needed to supplement what used to be the critical aspects of society, making sure that people were fed and people were entertained.
00:01:49.480So they didn't look around them and say, hey, what happened to that republic, by the way, and why aren't things running as well?
00:01:55.940You had to distract them and you had to keep them fed.
00:01:58.920This is a classic example of how a society deteriorates.
00:02:03.300And this is why the fall of Rome is one of the most famous references everyone makes when they look at historical cycles or the way that different civilizations live and then go on to die.
00:02:14.200Well, I won't be the first one to do this, not exactly a revelation here, but we're going through our own bread and circuses situation.
00:02:23.800We have a large amount of people who no longer know how to really manage their own lives.
00:02:29.480They don't know how to provide for themselves.
00:02:31.540They certainly don't have the self-discipline to pursue virtuous activities in any of their leisure time.
00:02:37.280And so really what our society ends up doing is packing a lot of our free moments with these circuses.
00:02:46.140I'm not going to talk so much about the bread today, though that's absolutely a huge aspect.
00:02:50.920It's probably worth its own episode or a few about the way that the food we eat or the welfare programs that often provided
00:02:59.000or the supplementary nature of these different corporate relationships with the government and how they work together
00:03:08.900to make sure to kind of produce the lowest quality common denominator slop when it comes to food.
00:03:14.900But that's going to be someone else's discussion or a discussion for another day.
00:03:18.600Today, I want to focus on the entertainment aspect, the circuses.
00:03:22.360What has happened to our entertainment?
00:07:41.900It's not like Star Trek is for geniuses or anything.
00:07:44.860You're not some highly intelligent person for having watched Star Trek.
00:07:49.000Many, many idiots over the years have.
00:07:50.800But I will say that, like, out of the regular sci-fi shows that showed up on TV or in pop culture, it was more intelligent than perhaps some of your space dramas, that kind of thing.
00:08:04.800That doesn't make it superior in every aspect.
00:08:07.000There's plenty of ways in which a more, you know, swashbuckling style of sci-fi, I think, is engaging.
00:08:15.140However, Star Trek built this reputation for, you know, at least trying to get some of the hard science right, trying to tackle complex issues.
00:08:24.300You know, the stuff that sci-fi is often famous for when it's not in full-blown fantasy Star Wars mode.
00:08:31.020And so this is something that I thought was very interesting when I was young.
00:08:34.540Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, and you'll be exactly right to point this out, but, Oren, Star Trek was always, like, commie nonsense.
00:08:43.340It was always this humanist propaganda.
00:08:46.700The Starfleet is just the UN in space.
00:08:49.500And, you know, we get rid of scarcity.
00:08:52.760And all of a sudden, you know, everyone becomes somehow elevated.
00:08:55.960We no longer have conflict because, you know, the replicator makes all the stuff, and we've seized the means of production, and we don't have to worry about material scarcity anymore so we can have this sci-fi communist utopia.
00:09:08.460Again, you're right about that, of course.
00:09:10.700And a lot of the Star Trek episodes and the social issues they addressed were all incredibly progressive messaging.
00:09:18.820It was a lot of, you know, racism is bad, and war is bad, and religion is for the ignorant, and all the dumb Reddit stuff you expect from a lot of sci-fi.
00:09:30.160So even though this might have been a slightly more complex show in some ways, again, it's just pushing a really cringy message.
00:09:37.940So in some ways, not a lot has changed, but in other ways, everything has changed.
00:09:42.840Because as subversive as those messages were, a young me didn't pick up on them because the quality of the writing and the quality of the storytelling was compelling, right?
00:09:54.420Like, yeah, the messages were bad, but at least the people crafting them had some level of competence.
00:10:06.700They knew how to weave plot lines together.
00:10:08.720These things were compelling at some level, even if ultimately that was kind of a problem, because it was allowing me and many, many other people to fall for and kind of unwittingly imbibe this indoctrination of a worldview that was antithetical to my own.
00:10:29.360And my mom, who is a lovely person, an amazing Christian, would probably have never let me listen to those messages in any other format, right?
00:10:38.720But because it was shrouded in the layers of the science fiction, I watched a lot more of this humanist propaganda than I probably would have in any other scenario.
00:10:49.260And this is kind of what I'm actually getting at, right?
00:10:51.740Because there are entire massive channels, way more successful than this one.
00:10:56.740And all they do is talk about the collapse of entertainment from video games to music to movies to television.
00:11:17.240But it is kind of a content mill, right?
00:11:18.860They spend all day talking about how every one of these things has broken down.
00:11:23.200We get long, complicated video essays about how Call of Duty has fallen, or we're never going to get another Bioshock, or why is it that movies keep doing this over again?
00:11:35.400Why is the Star Wars franchise coming apart?
00:11:37.840How has feminism worked its way into all these things?
00:11:41.500Why has metal become so formulaic, and why is it this music of rebellion now preaching social messages?
00:11:48.700And again, I'm not trying to decry the value of that content.
00:11:54.680I find many of these things to be thoughtful and often compelling.
00:11:58.660But they are kind of stuck in a particular rut because the thing that you feel over and over again is people are just demanding better propaganda, right?
00:12:08.500I think of something like the NFL or other sports leagues.
00:12:12.800A lot of people, of course, spend their entire weekend on the couch watching sports, and they felt okay doing that because in general it was pro-American, and you stood up, you sang the national anthem, you honored the veterans.
00:12:29.040There was a certain amount of kind of just wholesomeness that felt like even though this probably shouldn't be spending this much time on watching this dumb game, you know, and again, there's nothing wrong with watching some sports.
00:12:43.600I enjoy watching sports to some degree, though it's harder and harder to do that.
00:12:47.300I really don't spend very much time on it at all anymore, but it's one of those things where there is this reflex of like, ah, the sports ball idiots.
00:12:58.120Watching sports has always been some aspect of society's.
00:13:01.980However, the fact that it has just been, you know, injected with this incredible wokeness, and now it's every player talking about BLM and how they support, you know, the struggle against ice or whatever.
00:13:14.740However, it's just insufferable, and it's harder and harder for people to watch, and when people complain, hey, why is my video game bad?
00:13:26.440Why is the writing in my television show bad?
00:13:29.980In one sense, they do have a real point.
00:13:33.160Like, the cultural output we have matters.
00:13:35.920The messages being pushed through the zeitgeist matter.
00:13:38.680I'm one of the first people who will tell you that it matters quite a bit what the elites are trying to manipulate people into believing.
00:13:46.000So it's obviously bad when people are trying to use television or movies to brainwash kids into becoming trans.
00:13:52.460It's bad when, you know, they're pushing sports betting or these other things that are deleterious to society.
00:13:59.520Like, so I'm not saying don't pay attention to the messages here or that all of this stuff going to crap is, you know, just an unalloyed good.
00:14:11.140We can look at the entertainment produced and see those cultural markers and recognize that ultimately there is something negative going on.
00:14:20.680However, when we demand a return to what we think of as higher quality entertainment, you know, where are those great movies?
00:15:00.700There are legitimate cultural outputs.
00:15:03.280And of the ones we've been talking about, movies, video games, sports leagues, all these things, I think the movie is probably the truest artistic form available out of all these things.
00:15:14.260Though not every movie is artistic and there can be artistic movies and video games and television shows and all these things.
00:15:21.660But I do think that if we're going to talk about one cultural form that, you know, along with a novel probably should reflect the complexity of your society and display some deeper level of artistic ability, the movie would be the one.
00:15:37.920However, ultimately, it's still just asking, I think, on many levels for a better version of the slop, especially when we're talking about Marvel movies and all that.
00:15:48.140Why can't we just go back to the good Marvel movies?
00:15:50.460Why can't we just go back to, you know, the good Star Trek or whatever, right?
00:15:54.300And the issue is all these channels, all these thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of pop culture analysis, they're all really just demanding a return to better circuses.
00:16:08.680I want to go back to when the circuses weren't gay, right?
00:16:13.000And this is important because, you know, I've talked about the nature of Gamergate before.
00:16:19.540If you're not familiar with the Gamergate phenomenon, you can watch my videos that go into further detail on this.
00:16:27.140But the relevant part of this is that a big part of Gamergate was people recognizing that there was too much of wokeness, of social justice, of the leftist agenda being injected into video games.
00:16:42.540They were often telling a story, and that story had values, and they tended to be more progressive than not.
00:16:49.880But just the blunt instrument, the relentless stream of just ham-fisted forcing of trans characters and gay storylines and quibbling about social justice issues, the treatment of women, and why don't we have all this stuff constantly injected into the video game.
00:17:08.300That made a lot of people who were deeply stuck in, I think, the cycle of pop culture consumption stop and think, right?
00:18:12.320I was never as bad as a lot of my peers when it came to MMOs, but card games, I was obsessed with strategic board games and card games.
00:18:22.780And I'm someone who always had a mind that needed to be working on things.
00:18:27.980I need to be figuring out systems and breaking systems and excelling at going through and understanding them, things that I think are actually quite useful today.
00:18:36.940And while I'm glad to some extent I honed those abilities, the original application of those abilities was very poor.
00:18:44.080We've always used things like games to train people to do real-world tasks, right?
00:18:49.540Like most of the original Olympic sports, archery and throwing the shot put and races and wrestling and these kind of things, they were all based in combative sports.
00:19:02.220They were all very practical instantiations of what you should be doing as someone training to be a useful member of society.
00:19:10.360They were emulating things we wanted people to understand.
00:19:14.080Chess, obviously, a famous way to train people to think strategically, right?
00:19:18.580So there's nothing wrong with mimicking and training for these useful skills through game.
00:19:50.580However, there is a big difference between learning to play chess and enjoying chess, playing a couple games of chess, maybe even in a day,
00:19:58.880and spending 8 to 12 hours on a video game, which is what a lot of people did with things like MMOs.
00:20:05.780They devoted large amounts of their life to it.
00:20:08.420And again, I'm someone who certainly poured a large amount of my need to understand systems and exercise strategy and my mind through what are mostly useless pursuits.
00:20:22.920Like, it's really cool that I'm very good, I guess, at Magic the Gathering, but it doesn't have a lot of practical application day to day.
00:20:31.400It's not a threat to the regime in any real sense.
00:20:34.560And that's why, in many ways, these things became popular, right?
00:20:38.440Because who are the biggest threat to any given tyrannical regime?
00:20:43.180Well, it's young men with a lot of free time, right?
00:20:46.820Like, that's the most dangerous thing to any order is a bunch of men who don't feel like they're useful and they don't fit in and they have a lot of time and they're not finding a way to utilize their skills and kind of actualize their potential, you know, assert their will and the power process.
00:21:06.440Like, these are all critical aspects of being a human being, but especially being a man.
00:21:12.240And these are all the things that the society fears once it becomes decadent and corrupt, right?
00:21:17.360Like, if you are tyrannical or despotic or just a degenerate leader, you don't want men of quality.
00:21:24.820You don't want people who are becoming virtuous, who are exercising, who are learning things, who are building these skills.
00:21:34.160You don't want people who are skilled in combat.
00:21:36.720You don't want people who are tactically sound.
00:21:39.260You don't want people who are ambitious and politically or rhetorically skilled.
00:21:43.500You don't want that stuff showing up on a regular basis.
00:21:46.760It's really going to mess with your ability to control society because when your society becomes decadent, when you're the kind of ruler who rules over a decadent society, you're really banking your systems of control on the fact that the people won't do this stuff, that they aren't capable of building these skills.
00:22:03.540And you work to make sure that they don't.
00:22:05.900And we see this echoed in many different works.
00:22:09.040We could think about C.S. Lewis and Men Without Chess ripping out the organ and demanding the function.
00:22:14.560Or we could think about R.R. Reno's book, Return of the Strong Gods, talking about how we had a global order that wanted to avoid the rise of Hitler or any other strong man after World War II.
00:22:26.520And so we needed to strip out nationalism and patriotism and religion and masculine vigor because these are the things that threatened to create, well, great men.
00:22:36.020And great men can do great things and they can also do terrible things.
00:22:40.380So better to just get rid of the ability to have great men and just let everything be managed by systems.
00:22:46.000But for that, we need weak, subdued people, just like Rome did.
00:22:50.660And so you need to give them the bread and the circuses.
00:22:53.800You need to get out there and have effective pathways to capture that ambition, especially that male ambition.
00:23:00.660Make sure that they don't have that hunger, don't have that fire.
00:23:04.080Are you sure you have to go out and prove yourself in battle?
00:23:08.680I mean, you can practice, you know, going through the process of progression, building up skills, conquering and dominating other guys, working together with men in a shared task, but without actually having to, you know, build any of the real life skills.
00:23:23.360In fact, ensuring that you don't build those real life skills because you're pouring all of your time into the video game.
00:23:30.460You know, you don't have to worry about the guy who's sitting on the couch, obsessed with football, working on his sports betting, figuring out his fantasy football league.
00:23:38.360That guy's probably not going to, you know, lead his church.
00:23:42.160He's probably not going to go out there and organize people in his community.
00:23:45.720He's not going to be politically active.
00:23:51.120He might see something on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and then, you know, base his opinion off that.
00:23:56.420And that's kind of what you're looking for.
00:23:57.660You don't want the guy who's getting involved in his community who's making a difference.
00:24:01.360Every one of these surrogate activities is there to pull away your ability to have any real confidence, any real virtue, any real ability to become a threat to the regime, to the wider order as it is.
00:24:17.200And so in this way, competent pop culture is a problem because it's good at what it does.
00:24:35.500I'm still a creature of modernity like everybody else.
00:24:38.680I might recognize these issues, but it doesn't mean I'm somehow entirely immune to them.
00:24:44.280However, the thing that happened to me and that happened to lots of people, especially, again, young men, was kind of the Gamergate phenomenon.
00:24:52.980Because all of a sudden we look down on it and realize, wait, my bread and circuses are all gay.
00:24:59.620It's all full of trans, you know, propaganda, homosexual messaging, feminism, anti-capitalism, you know, anti-Western.
00:25:10.060It's all complaining about racism and this stuff.
00:25:30.400It's so bad that now I go back and I watch television shows that I thought were better and I recognize how deeply subversive they were, how deep the messaging goes.
00:25:40.760And that while that was more carefully hidden, the fact that this new blunt instrument has been introduced in more modern times through the whole social justice woke thing means that retroactively, I can look back and see how just completely subversive the propaganda was even early on.
00:25:58.920And so, like many, I looked at this Gamergate phenomenon and look, not all aspects of it were positive.
00:26:06.180Some people had some bad behavior on the Gamergate side as well, but it really was a large awakening of people.
00:26:13.980Now, you wouldn't think that this would become political, right?
00:26:16.620I've made this joke a lot that Gamergate was the origin of the Trump movement.
00:26:20.600But in many ways, it's not a joke because it was the first time in a long time that suddenly a group of people who were kind of the natural leadership of America, the people who should be moving into the next generation.
00:26:36.120They should be taking over positions of political power, positions of cultural authority, family leaders, church leaders, leaders of corporations and organizations, people who were going to be leading political movements.
00:26:49.200All of a sudden, those people who had had all of that energy sucked up into the slop, into the propaganda, into the circuses.
00:26:57.940They looked around and said, my circuses are terrible and I don't want to do this anymore.
00:27:05.540Again, this is why there are these massive YouTube channels that continue to make a lot of money and get a lot of views by critiquing culture.
00:27:15.520But I think over time, even those have petered out, like even the constant complaint cycle on woke culture is starting to peter out.
00:27:24.980Like, I think it's becoming clear, unfortunately, to many people that we're just not getting the good video games back.
00:27:31.680We're not getting the good movies back.
00:27:32.920We're not getting the good television shows back.
00:27:34.960We can talk about, you know, go woke, go broke, but that just doesn't happen.
00:27:40.160These people continue to make money or even when they don't, they don't care.
00:27:43.240Think about how many garbage movies Disney has made in the last few years, chock full of highly offensive social justice messaging that keep flopping at the box office and they keep making them.
00:44:27.160You build a Rolodex of people who trust you and you trust.
00:44:30.300If something hits the fan, if there's a disaster, you know who to call.
00:44:35.340And that's something most people in the United States just don't have anymore.
00:44:38.720So I guess to wrap this up, guys, I know it's really frustrating to watch these cultural icons come apart and to go through this humiliation ritual.
00:44:50.660But as frustrating as it might be to watch your favorite property, your favorite game, your favorite show, your favorite series, to watch that stuff come apart, your favorite sports league.
00:46:37.840It's going to go back in your corporate boardrooms as soon as the leaders don't feel like they have the Trump administration breathing down their neck.
00:46:45.160If serious changes aren't made like this stuff is going to return.
00:46:49.600And so that said, hopefully the impact of that is to drive people to more productive pursuits.
00:46:59.300Weirdy Curb says propaganda is only bad when it's pushing wickedness.
00:47:02.920I think the outcry is more for a demand of decency and entertainment than chimping for circuses.
00:47:27.740It's literature that literally defined the archetypes of heroic nature for many critical civilizations.
00:47:35.220But ultimately, the fact that that is what people filled their time with produced more virtue because it was, I guess, propaganda in a sense.
00:47:43.460But propaganda that elevated heroism and sacrifice and, you know, critical things, bravery.
00:47:50.520And so, yes, I agree that ultimately we're always going to have entertainment and we want that entertainment to be wholesome and to encourage good behavior.
00:47:58.300I'm just saying there is a there is a point at which the propaganda is good at what it's doing and very dangerous because it's so good people don't notice.
00:48:08.740So when it's wicked propaganda and it's competent with wicked propaganda, that's in many ways the worst moment.
00:48:15.620And it's what a lot of people are craving.
00:48:17.380They just want to go back to the competent wicked propaganda.
00:48:21.020They're not looking to go read the Iliad.
00:48:26.080Bram Zwingle says, all I wanted to to all I wanted was to hang out and play video games with my friends.
00:48:31.960But now I'm a decade into a culture war.
00:48:39.020And that's why I said I think Gamergate did wake up a large amount of people, guys who otherwise would have been completely disconnected, would have been completely checked out.
00:48:46.920But they just couldn't stop themselves.
00:48:49.400The woke guys didn't understand the function of their propaganda.
00:48:52.880They thought that the whole that they just had this lock on the zeitgeist forever.
00:48:57.000And so they could do whatever they want with it.
00:48:59.640They remember because they didn't build the system in the first place.
00:49:02.640But the actual reason they're doing what they're doing was to keep people satiated, to keep them from going out there and doing important things.
00:49:09.040And so now you have the situation where guys who just wanted to go home, just want to play video games.
00:49:13.940Just give me a little bit of that Soma, a little bit of that drug to calm me down and make me go out the next day.
00:49:22.360And now they have to think about, OK, I guess I have to care about politics.
00:49:26.120I guess I have to care about the community.
00:49:28.160I guess I have to care about the world around me, because if I don't, these people are not going to leave me alone.
00:49:32.800And as we know, the side that wants to win always beat the side that wants to be left alone.
00:49:39.320Sherry Coat Nixon says, anti-ice stuff is woke by its very foundation.
00:49:43.500Yes, that is, of course, entirely true.
00:49:46.200Weir E. Curb again says, I guess my point is there's going to be propaganda, good or bad.
00:49:50.100More people are demanding good propaganda and entertainment, which I think is positive.
00:49:53.860Yeah, like I said, you know, man, I really I understand what you're saying, but I think that asking for better versions of stuff that was already entirely corrupted is a problem.
00:50:04.000I think you're right that there ultimately there are going to be movies.
00:50:06.500Right. And we do want those movies to ask things of us, to elevate the human spirit, to inspire people.
00:50:19.800Right. Those things, those things are the problem.
00:50:22.720Latrita Bidet, IRS enforcer, says, how about a crowdfunded AI hardware device that intercepts the HDMI stream and de-woke-ifies your Netflix in real time?
00:50:39.820So if you're not in obsessive evangelical Christian communities, you might not know this.
00:50:45.580But there used to be an entire service.
00:50:51.100And of course, you know, you watch movies on TV and they edit stuff out.
00:50:54.520Right. So you watch Die Hard on there and you're like, oh, they're saying some things that I don't think were actually in the original movie.
00:51:01.000They've pulled out some scenes, that kind of thing.
00:51:02.940So we're all familiar with the idea of editing movies.
00:51:05.380But there used to be this entire service where parents would send videotapes in of like movies that are popular in the zeitgeist, Disney movies or, you know, popular action movies, that kind of thing.
00:51:18.160And the Christian service would edit things out that they didn't like.
00:51:22.560So they'd edit out stuff that was, you know, referencing homosexuality or was too sexual or violent or whatever.
00:51:29.120And then they would send the tape back.
00:51:31.460So there are kids out there in these communities who have watched these movies over and over and over again and didn't know they contained like absolutely degenerate stuff or devastating stuff or sexual stuff.
00:51:45.140Like they've never seen the real movie.
00:51:47.200And then they see it in real life and they're like, what's going on?
00:51:50.140Right. And so that would be the same thing.
00:51:51.960Right. Except it would just go directly.
00:51:53.280You don't have to mail the videotape in instead of, you know, getting rid of all the stuff that might offend, I guess, Christian sensibilities.
00:52:00.060It would offend non-woke sensibilities.
00:52:02.700But I do think that's a hilarious idea.
00:52:06.200Cooper Weirdo says, not sure how much this fits in with the topic, but could you bring someone to talk on about the Avatar movie?
00:52:12.760They're so irrelevant yet also succeed.
00:52:16.060You know, man, the only problem with that is I don't know anything about them.
00:52:19.540I mean, I remember the first Avatar movie coming out and I watched it because it was, you know, this amazing 3D experience.
00:52:26.280And truly, it was a technological innovation at the time.
00:52:29.6003D movies, they kept trying to make them happen in Hollywood and they always sucked.