Why Democrats Are Losing with Men | Guest: The Distributist | 10⧸21⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per Minute
168.55942
Summary
Dave The Distributor joins Jemele to discuss why the Kamala Harris campaign is having a hard time reaching out to men and why they need to do something about it. Plus, a new campaign video from The Kamala Campaign.
Transcript
00:00:12.480
to that anniversary trip you took to Saint-Tropez
00:00:40.140
about a great deal that The Blaze is running right now.
00:00:45.160
the second presidential debate really, you know,
00:00:58.960
without a single fact check while President Trump
00:01:12.020
that what we really have is a media-controlled state.
00:01:36.600
Blaze Media is committed to delivering the truth
00:02:04.800
Use the promo code Oren40 to get that discount.
00:02:11.800
one of our favorite guys, Dave the Distributist.
00:02:43.620
But ultimately, the reason I wanted to have Dave on
00:26:10.580
Those collective interests can much more easily
00:26:17.520
because their complaints and grievances against
00:26:24.180
They want a government that is, in presentation
00:26:33.240
They don't want to have some level of GDP growth or
00:26:37.020
some percentage of taxation or something that is
00:26:40.300
more, something that would come out of the Cato
00:26:42.280
Institute and a line goes up here, line goes down
00:26:46.640
And I think that's sort of the key to coming up
00:26:55.540
problem really lies more on the Democratic side.
00:27:01.460
blackpiller, but I actually think that Kamala is
00:27:04.180
still the odds on favor to win and not least of
00:27:09.480
fortification, as the young people put it, that, that
00:27:19.580
having to do with losing men is, is so much a panic
00:27:22.740
about having a 5% probability drop in, in winning the
00:27:29.700
I think the panic is coming from their realization of
00:27:33.860
the reality of what their coalition is going to look like
00:27:43.500
It's huge because Elon Musk is very obviously a ruling
00:27:48.920
class person, an elite person who has many men and many very
00:27:53.720
prominent and powerful men who would like to model their
00:27:59.000
Him being an explicit supporter of Trump opens up an entire
00:28:04.420
Even if we lose in 2024, it allows them to exist in a way that
00:28:09.240
shows people how things could be run that are, that don't fall
00:28:13.120
under the purview of the expert consensus, effectively rule
00:28:17.660
by the Democratic Party and its allies and its ideology.
00:28:21.520
This combined with the fact that the current ruling class has,
00:28:27.440
again, no organic male support, makes it really, really unstable.
00:28:31.500
And this commercial that we just watched shows that they have no
00:28:36.620
theory of mind for male voters or any kind of, they have no theory
00:28:45.740
The ability of people to imagine what their opponents are thinking,
00:28:49.940
at least when it goes from blue to red, at least as it goes from
00:28:53.260
progressive liberal to conservative, is functionally nothing.
00:28:57.200
This is the problem also with the Trump derangement syndrome people, too.
00:29:04.760
If you're a Substacker like myself, you'll realize quite quickly that the
00:29:09.120
most successful bloggers on Substack are all in this genre that we might
00:29:15.620
They write in histrionic ways about the phenomenon of Trump.
00:29:19.780
But you can read, they publish every day, like, just reams of this stuff.
00:29:25.620
But no matter how much they talk about Trump, they never try to think like an
00:29:33.040
And the reason why they don't think, try to think like an actual Trump
00:29:37.080
supporter is that they can't think like an actual Trump supporter.
00:29:42.180
Something fundamentally about their coalition and the nature of their coalition
00:29:46.200
demands that they not have this avenue to their own empathy.
00:29:58.280
So when we look at this dynamic and, you know, the theory of mind issue is,
00:30:06.040
you know, I think in many ways simply, you know, the conservatives live in a,
00:30:10.640
their right wingers live in a left wing world, right?
00:30:13.540
They have to, you have to understand at least to some degree how the left
00:30:17.740
operates, because if you don't, you'll just lose your job, right?
00:30:20.460
Like, even if you don't agree with the regime, you have to be able to navigate
00:30:23.720
social situations in which you can speak the regime's language, at least to a
00:30:27.760
certain extent, because if you don't, you're going to get blown away, right?
00:30:31.240
Like, that's why job sites, you know, are much more right wing construction sites
00:30:36.940
are much more right wing than, you know, any given office job.
00:30:40.440
Because the guys there are people who generally are like so unable to play the
00:30:45.880
game that they just opt into a profession where they don't have to, right?
00:30:52.640
But for people who want to move closer to the ruling elite, who want to move into
00:30:56.780
these information systems jobs, these other jobs that are often considered more
00:31:01.080
influential or higher status, they have to be able to play this game.
00:31:04.800
So I think, you know, that, that, you know, there's lots of, there's, we could go deeper
00:31:10.760
But I think that in and of itself is an, is often enough as a right winger, you have to
00:31:16.160
be able to understand at least to some degree, the left, the left do not have to do that.
00:31:20.280
They can live in entire worlds where they, their job, their social relationships are no
00:31:25.060
way dependent in understanding a right wing world worldview.
00:31:28.100
And this only gets worse when we talk about masculinity, because I think it's a good point
00:31:34.540
I actually just wrote a piece that'll be coming out soon about, you know, the people who are
00:31:38.840
concerned about space travel being coded right wing, right?
00:31:42.060
There's a lot of people after this last successful SpaceX launch saying what has happened that now
00:31:48.380
it seems like the Republicans and JD Vance and Elon Musk, they control the impetus to explore
00:31:55.000
space and the, you know, this, and it's like, well, yes, of course, because you've
00:31:58.080
turned everything about this, uh, basically illegal, like everything about what Elon Musk
00:32:04.520
is doing right now, stripping out the bureaucracy, not appealing to experts, you know, building
00:32:09.320
something about, you know, building on competence.
00:32:11.380
Like these are all things that you have demonized.
00:32:13.780
These are all masculine behaviors that you feel, uh, are, are danger to your regime, to
00:32:20.620
And so he represents in a very real way, uh, kind of this struggle, this different way to,
00:32:25.100
to present society, to organize society, to, to frame social ambition that just clashes horribly
00:32:32.540
And I think that paralyzes them in many ways because they, they recognize that even domains
00:32:38.980
that were often understood as, you know, the start, the, the, the sci-fi progressive Star
00:32:43.380
Trek utopia, like even, you know, the, the desire to go into the stars and discover these
00:32:47.560
things and conquer certain aspects as a society, these are now unavailable to them because of
00:32:52.640
the way they've organized their coalition and the way they frame, uh, how they feel like
00:32:59.660
It is quite strange because part, part of it is, as you put it, these things have been
00:33:04.820
illegalized, which is means they've been soft illegalized.
00:33:08.420
They've been disincentivized through how the system is set up.
00:33:13.540
It's not incorrect in a broader sense to say that they have been semi-illegalized, but the
00:33:20.280
the great mystery in all of this is that there is nothing functionally or objectively or in
00:33:29.280
the abstract that is forcing them to make these errors.
00:33:35.280
If you were an alien sitting in the position of a Kamala Harris or our ruling class, they
00:33:48.900
Like I said, if you had a costume director, which is a, this is a blue state profession,
00:33:55.480
Someone who does costuming and period analysis.
00:34:01.460
Usually they're, they're always horrible shit libs.
00:34:05.000
If you had them study in the abstract, a culture, and that culture was red state America, they could
00:34:13.660
have watched that commercial and picked out, like we just did 10, 15 things that weren't period
00:34:20.320
appropriate for representing red state American men or masculine American men, just by watching
00:34:31.700
These unforced errors are being created by certain qualities of how our ruling class sees the world
00:34:39.740
in certain blind spots that have emerged necessarily from their coalition.
00:34:44.500
And there, there are certain, there are certain ways about how they have to talk about things
00:34:49.940
and see the world necessary to internally maintaining their coalition that are blinding them to this,
00:34:57.220
that are making it impossible for them to reach out and become the party of space travel.
00:35:05.500
This is not something that they couldn't do, you know, and, and, and NASA is 100% DEI compliant.
00:35:12.260
It, it, it's a, it's an extension of the government.
00:35:14.620
It has been for decades and decades and decades.
00:35:17.180
And it's not just because Elon Musk is a little bit ahead of them in the space race.
00:35:21.260
They own all of the hardware, they have all the scientists, they have all of the engineering
00:35:28.800
There's no way that they could not make the imagistics of space travel part of their coalition,
00:35:34.320
but they can't linguistically, they can't spiritually.
00:35:39.840
This is one of the dimensions of politics that is very hard to express formally about why they're
00:35:45.560
making these errors and why they can't actually see the world in this, in this critical way that,
00:35:51.880
that would essentially solidify their walk on power if they were to do it properly.
00:35:58.560
So going deeper into the male female divide in politics, not just in this particular election
00:36:03.920
cycle, but as you pointed out, this is a much deeper, you know, social sickness that we're
00:36:10.280
One of the things that I, one of the ways I've kind of conceived this or thought about
00:36:15.260
this is as the ability of our society to kind of cooperate falls apart, the two genders in
00:36:23.780
particular are running into these different political cul-de-sacs because the race is kind
00:36:30.040
of, how can I exist as the most atomized human being?
00:36:34.960
And for the female, the government fills this role as much as possible.
00:36:39.640
And for the male technology fills this role as much as possible for the male, it is technology
00:36:48.480
And for the woman, it is government that is allowing her to obsolesce the man.
00:36:53.060
There's a certain moral symmetry about the problems with men or women, you know, like the
00:36:58.680
problems of women on social media kind of broadly mirror the problems of men with pornography.
00:37:04.760
And if I were a pastor or a life coach who's talking to a group of young people, I would
00:37:11.780
be encouraged to emphasize the fundamental symmetry of the male sphere and the female sphere
00:37:20.320
I have been struck kind of in an opposite dimension with just the fundamental asymmetry of these two
00:37:27.840
groups now they behave to our current political moment.
00:37:31.960
Men, when they were hit with modernity, at least in the absence of political action that
00:37:38.300
only now seems to be kind of starting up, their reaction to being hit with the heart and
00:37:47.880
Women's response to being hit with the heart and modernity is to politically coalition together
00:37:55.420
There was an article by Scott Greer, I believe, about why there will never be a coalition of
00:38:06.960
There will absolutely be a coalition of unmarried women, and this coalition will be an incredibly
00:38:12.560
powerful coalition going into the future for the Democratic Party.
00:38:16.440
It probably will dominate the Democratic Party.
00:38:18.640
And they will probably bleed Muslims, black men, a variety of other Asian ethnicities, certainly
00:38:26.680
Asian men, but they will always have this core group of unmarried progressive women because
00:38:33.540
they're the most organized section of that coalition.
00:38:38.840
Fundamentally, men and women are not conceptualizing politics the same way, or they're not conceptualizing
00:38:45.040
the problems of modernity in the same way, which is why you have part of this divergence.
00:38:50.760
And that's also why I think the character of these two groups is so different.
00:38:56.920
And I think that the key to getting out of this mess is to understand that these two groups
00:39:07.520
They're experiencing the same core problem of modernity, of resource excess, of an overbearing
00:39:13.940
central state, and of a decline in the religious and moral perspectives that used to organize
00:39:20.100
humanity's activities in a much more healthy way.
00:39:23.880
So the core problem is the same, but the sociological way that they're reacting to that
00:39:31.460
And I think ultimately the solution to men and women behaving in these bad ways is going
00:39:38.500
So I don't think there's going to be a collective way where you tell people, you tell women to
00:39:44.980
stop using OnlyFans and men to stop using Pornhub, and then we put the genie back in the bottle.
00:39:51.260
There has to be a fundamental change in how these two sexes interact with politics at a basic
00:39:59.560
And I believe that this change will have to begin with men, which is unfortunately quite
00:40:06.360
tragic because they're the sex that is absolutely less organized and less politically aligned
00:40:14.220
Neither of us are massive fans of democracy, so I might be loading a softball for you here,
00:40:24.540
I mean, you have a situation where, you know, I always think of that Nick Land passage in
00:40:30.620
The Dark Enlightenment where he explains, you know, the dialectic and the way in which it
00:40:34.940
has to, you know, it has to polarize everything.
00:40:38.160
It has to, you know, turn everything into this adversarial content.
00:40:46.440
And so eventually, you know, it tears through everything.
00:40:51.400
It destroys, you know, a general understanding of nation, but inevitably it has to work itself
00:40:55.760
all the way down to the, you know, the family, the core unit of society.
00:41:01.480
Eventually, you have to politicize the male and female relationships themselves because
00:41:05.780
that's the only place that, you know, political energy is even left.
00:41:09.940
It's the only, it's one of the last things you can kind of break apart and create that
00:41:13.540
political dynamism and create that need for the state, that need for government resolution,
00:41:17.740
that antagonism that allows for the democratic process to generate the, you know, kind of
00:41:24.660
Or is this, or is that maybe putting too much on the system?
00:41:27.960
That is absolutely what's going on at a fundamental level.
00:41:31.440
I mean, it's, I don't know if it's exactly so much like the democratic process.
00:41:37.040
I mean, we, we have a republic just like we did the fact that it, it's more Jacksonian
00:41:42.700
and less as the founders imagined, or the fact that it's post new deal and is sort of
00:41:52.800
It's, it's the vector of how the fundamental decline is, is reaching out to us.
00:41:58.200
I think, I think that Nick Land really had hit the nail on the head with the whole dialectic
00:42:04.820
There, there's a certain way of handling conversations and handling discussions of, about how power
00:42:12.540
is, is, is allocated for which the teenage girl of the teenage girl way of viewing the
00:42:21.420
The mean girl way of viewing the world where it's all about being 100%, yeah, 100% public,
00:42:34.400
100% exclusive, but at the same time, consensus building.
00:42:39.020
So you want to get your consensus together and solidify it so that there's absolutely
00:42:44.220
no discussion inside the group, but at the same time you ostracize everyone else and, and
00:42:50.440
twist their wrist to get them to go along with the party line.
00:42:53.460
That is the optimal way to play a game where people have zero ownership over the future,
00:42:59.600
but 100% of, 100% incentive, I should say, to capture the political process through the
00:43:07.140
use of voice rather than choice, which is exactly what the 20th century model of Republican
00:43:14.180
So this is 100% a consequence of what, what Land discusses when he talks about the dialectic
00:43:21.300
always going towards the left and always going towards maximum disintegration.
00:43:26.360
I think what kind of, what we didn't foresee is just how, how radically that would be divided
00:43:33.580
And I think that this is because that sort of perspective on politics is naturally how women
00:43:43.360
Now, a lot of the things we were talking about with this commercial, right, you know, what
00:43:46.800
was the first thing that you notice about the commercial is a lot of, a lot of what the
00:43:51.120
men are saying sound like, they sound kind of like what the complaints a wife would have
00:44:01.480
You're, you're not doing your fair share of chores.
00:44:05.320
These are all kind of, these are all kind of complaints that naturally emerge that aren't
00:44:12.900
They're personal complaints about your relationships inside a preexisting system.
00:44:17.620
And now they're being brought to bear on the level of real politics when we decide who's
00:44:22.620
going to actually own power within the system and how we're going to organize ourselves collectively
00:44:28.220
so that our society isn't completely destroyed in the next 100 years.
00:44:32.500
And, and, and these kind of, these kind of complaints, these kind of ways of not to put
00:44:39.960
too much, not to put too fine a point on these, these ways of whining, they're optimized for
00:44:45.200
seizing attention, especially optimized for seizing attention.
00:44:48.920
If you happen to be female, they are absolutely the worst way to approach politics in a serious
00:44:55.580
way at a high level, which is what's supposedly going on when we enter into an election season.
00:45:04.700
I, again, I think the only way that this ends is that it completely fails and is completely
00:45:11.480
The problem with the symmetrical perspective that you hear from a lot of conservative
00:45:15.780
Christians is the idea is, well, you know, since both men and women are fundamentally
00:45:24.640
And I think both men and women are fundamentally kind of co-owners of this problem.
00:45:29.120
If we were to be, if we were to be assigning blame for this, because they are both 5% responsible
00:45:38.000
They are therefore 50% responsible for the solution.
00:45:43.600
The solution is, is that this kind of bitchy mean girl way of doing politics has to 100% die.
00:45:50.760
And it has to be 100% replaced by a more classic or more real or more masculine way of doing
00:45:59.240
politics that I don't think it's exactly represented by Trump or Elon Musk, but it's represented
00:46:05.480
by the people who are thinking about, okay, so how is the human race actually going to survive
00:46:16.740
Vance is weird or your dad doesn't like asking for directions or the fact that the way we divided
00:46:22.840
up the household chores isn't fair, those, it's not that those are bad political ideas.
00:46:30.520
It's the fact that they're not political ideas.
00:46:33.220
These are not actually real political questions that we as a collective are asking ourselves going
00:46:39.380
forward, these, these are ways of complaining about life that are designed to maximally appeal
00:46:46.320
inside some kind of artificial conversation we're having with ourselves.
00:46:51.220
And as, uh, as the famous arch reactionary right-wing extremist that sometimes even creeps
00:46:57.760
me out once said, Richard Hanania, female tears win in the marketplace of ideas.
00:47:03.660
You know, that is really important, not, not the fed post here, but let's just, you know,
00:47:12.300
Part of this is the absence of violence, right?
00:47:14.700
Like that, that there's a massive part of this, you can embrace the style of politics only
00:47:20.760
when you have built a system in which there is no, you believe there is no true existential
00:47:26.600
conflict where you think ultimately, uh, none of this costs anything.
00:47:31.180
There are no real consequences, nothing comes to blows that's when this type of politics
00:47:36.960
You can be the mean girl until someone comes by and, you know, says no and throws you
00:47:42.820
And that, and that's the, that's the problem is we have a system now where that is the
00:47:50.160
This is not to say that there needs to be any form of political violence, but it is to
00:47:53.640
say that when all the, you know, all the questions of, you know, we're not being invaded, you
00:47:58.580
don't have to fight off local, you know, roving barbarians.
00:48:02.360
You don't have to, you know, deal with kind of the day to day realities of physical conflict,
00:48:09.180
conflict, and kind of existential crisis that were just part of human existence, even civilized
00:48:16.240
And that leads us into a situation where we feel like the only mode of kind of navigation
00:48:21.720
is this kind of hyper-feminized marketplace of ideas in which, you know, that it really
00:48:27.160
is just the person who can make the snappiest argument and possibly cry gets the, you know,
00:48:32.160
Yeah, I, I do, I do fundamentally agree with that.
00:48:35.820
And when we could kind of get into an argument about Spenglarian history and the need for
00:48:41.700
violence at some kind of vital level, but to kind of actually, I mean, I think, I do think
00:48:47.400
that this perspective, though, does kind of cripple the conversation, because I think
00:48:53.560
that Nick Land had another essay, another insight from the same essay that we're both
00:48:58.780
referencing, I believe, which is The Dark Enlightenment, although he mentioned this several
00:49:04.740
It's, it is, in some sense, the existence of violence, in the sense that, you know, violence
00:49:11.780
is, is, is the ultimate arbiter and violence is real, the, the other more useful way to
00:49:25.000
So the, the, when we talk about real politics, real politics is a competition over resources.
00:49:31.860
And if we were in a state, Hobbesian state of nature, the decisions we made about how we
00:49:36.600
accumulated those resources would have immediate consequences.
00:49:39.960
I make a bad decision, and immediately it comes back to me in the fact that I either get
00:49:48.020
Inside civilization, society organizes these feedback loops in certain short ways.
00:49:58.540
You make a bad business decision, and immediately you get a consequence.
00:50:04.180
You make a bad argument, and immediately you get consequences from the judge.
00:50:08.480
Local government is another one of these ways, right?
00:50:11.460
Because local governments are fundamentally resource limited, any poor decision at the
00:50:19.120
This creates a corrective mechanism that is not necessarily Hobbes' bellum, ominous, contra
00:50:24.960
ominous, the war of all against all, but simulates that inside a civilized order.
00:50:29.400
What you see in the Landian perspective is all of these short feedback loop systems being
00:50:35.700
built into one giant feedback loop system, such that no one person making a decision inside
00:50:42.000
the system ever sees the consequences or ever can react to a real consequence in reality.
00:50:48.500
That is what leads to these mean girl games being optimal.
00:50:52.620
Mean girl games are not optimal in a real business environment.
00:50:55.900
Mean girl games, however, are optimal in an HR department that is a subsection of a business
00:51:02.860
that has a total monopoly, because the impact and the cost that that HR department has will
00:51:09.020
be absorbed into the profit bottom line of a giant company, which, of course, will never
00:51:14.400
Now, over time, glacially, that will cause the company to collapse.
00:51:18.340
But no decision maker in that system has a feedback loop that's fast enough to feed them
00:51:24.720
back that consequence of their negative actions.
00:51:29.040
So I don't think that, you know, it is absolutely true that violence would solve this problem,
00:51:46.460
Because it's not necessarily violence that solves the problem.
00:51:49.540
Nuclear war wouldn't solve this problem, because nuclear war's feedback loop is too large.
00:51:54.520
By the time you get the negative consequence of nuclear war, you're already dead.
00:51:58.780
The problem is, is that most common ways of experiencing violence are quick feedback loops.
00:52:07.380
You, pardon again, the French, you fuck around, you find out.
00:52:13.840
And violence throughout human history has typically been a short feedback loop, because it needed
00:52:23.160
If you were some master of the universe that could redesign human society to fix this problem,
00:52:28.800
you would not necessarily need to reintroduce violence, but you would absolutely need to reintroduce
00:52:34.460
some form of consequences for actions such that a political action in one direction
00:52:40.600
was immediately, immediately came in contact with its consequences for the resources
00:52:53.720
I think the problem we're dealing with right now is not how we can bring about the Spenglarian
00:52:59.000
end of civilizations where we redescend into Hobbes' war of all against all.
00:53:05.940
The question for right-wingers is how can we create systems that have tight feedback loops
00:53:11.020
such that responsible, and I'm not going to say male leadership, but masculine politics emerges
00:53:17.780
from that dynamic, and I'm not trying to be misogynistic, but all real politics are masculine
00:53:24.260
politics, and to the extent that women do real politics, like Elizabeth I or Catherine
00:53:32.380
of Medici there, or Cleopatra, they are acting in a masculine role, which is why oftentimes
00:53:39.720
And that tight feedback loop, not violence, is the necessary component.
00:53:44.700
So, I was going to try not to get to redo my Spenglar speech, because, you know, I always
00:53:53.000
fall into it when I discuss this topic, but you brought them up too many times, and now
00:53:59.700
But, you know, ultimately, the question, as you point out here, is this something that
00:54:10.440
Or is this ultimately something a civilization can turn around?
00:54:15.820
Because, you know, Spenglar doesn't just say that we collapse into the Hobbesian state
00:54:23.880
We enter into this period in the civilizational winter where men and women no longer feel the
00:54:31.260
need to perpetuate their society, no longer fill those roles, naturally, of mother and patriarch.
00:54:37.580
They don't, you know, they look for companionship, they look for pleasure, they look for diversion,
00:54:43.160
they look, you know, they disappear inside unreal spaces, and they simply lose this kind
00:54:48.740
of metaphysical animating spirit that drives a civilization towards perpetuating itself.
00:54:53.900
And the question ultimately is, you know, we can look at this, you know, there are a lot
00:54:58.480
of people have pointed out, our mutual friend Kevin Dolan has put a lot of thought into this
00:55:02.500
when it comes to kind of his pronatalism conference.
00:55:06.460
But one of the things he's pointed out repeatedly is a lot of people are like, oh, well, it's,
00:55:09.800
you know, civilizational solutions, you know, you make sure you have enough, you know, child
00:55:16.080
care, or you make sure that people can afford a home or whatever.
00:55:19.660
And ultimately, that solves the problem, you know, that kind of puts us back on track.
00:55:24.640
And he's pointed out repeatedly that, you know, guys like, you know, Octavian implemented
00:55:30.600
these strategies to no real avail inside the Roman Empire and other civilizations that are
00:55:38.100
So the question is, you know, can we fix this on a societal level?
00:55:42.680
Or is this really just something that, you know, it's one on one, you do the best you can
00:55:48.600
And then, you know, when your civilization emerges on the other side, or whatever comes next
00:55:52.700
comes through, that's actually what changes things.
00:55:58.400
Or is this ultimately just a cycle we're going to go through?
00:56:01.200
And we have to address this on an individual level?
00:56:04.080
Oh, I could do like four podcasts on that question.
00:56:10.040
Yeah, I mean, so, so, look, I mean, I'm currently reading Julius Evola's Pagan Imperialism,
00:56:18.540
And the problem is, is that I disagree with Evola a lot.
00:56:20.660
And it's very hard to disagree with Evola or Spengler, because when you disagree with
00:56:24.680
them historically, you know for a fact that they've read all of these primary sources
00:56:30.960
They're a product of a way more thorough education system than you are.
00:56:34.800
So when you correct them, in fact, you always get this sense of vertigo.
00:56:38.020
But I do believe that, you know, Spengler suffers from a little bit of autism.
00:56:43.520
He sees the system collapsing and then assumes that everyone inside the system is simultaneously
00:56:56.100
I'm not saying that as a historian of Spengler's magnitude or literacy in multiple languages.
00:57:04.240
I'm saying that as an experiencer of civilization.
00:57:06.720
What happens inside civilizations is that little microcosms are growing and dying inside the
00:57:15.180
civilizations using their own tiny feedback loops all the time, just like reality itself
00:57:21.700
is a soup of various different chemical reactions going on in different levels.
00:57:26.440
So the entire civilization could be collapsing.
00:57:29.500
But there'll be microcosmic societies bubbling up, coming up with their solutions.
00:57:35.040
And some of those solutions will be the seedbed of new societies and new alternative solutions.
00:57:42.500
Now, all this is not to indicate that we should be retreating into some kind of Rod Dreher-Benedict
00:57:49.820
But the solutions that emerge from this period will be microcosmic solutions.
00:57:55.760
They will not be – I can't rule out the fact that Elon Musk won't take control of the
00:58:03.500
thing and try to implement some of these solutions at a grand scale.
00:58:06.900
But I suspect that a lot of these solutions on the micro scale will be implemented first
00:58:15.840
So this kind of extreme pessimism that you see in Spengler where he's telling you that you're
00:58:21.300
the Roman soldier waiting at his post, you know, Vesuvius explodes in Pompeii, that is
00:58:28.120
never the experience of living through these times.
00:58:34.900
You know, you can definitely see that attitude in a person like Boethius or St. Augustine,
00:58:40.100
who's very aware that they're in a declining empire.
00:58:43.120
For anyone else who's concerned with actually building the society around them, I really don't
00:58:49.120
think that the society is inhabited by this pessimism, even well-educated people.
00:58:54.100
So I really don't think that adopting this mode of pessimism, even being aware of the
00:59:01.180
fact that we are at the end point of this larger system kind of collapsing, is a very
00:59:07.860
For the women in question in particular, and this is something that Kevin Dolan has talked
00:59:12.100
about, it's also something that my friend Johan Kurtz from the Becoming Noble, or I can't
00:59:18.340
remember if it's being or becoming noble, Substack writes a lot about.
00:59:22.000
And that is, you know, one failure of the women in question is the failure of modern society.
00:59:28.380
Another failure of the women in question can be seen very readily in the right wing.
00:59:32.420
And I'm not talking about the conservatives, I'm talking about our side of the right wing.
00:59:36.820
It is very difficult to know what role women can take inside the kind of alternative mode
00:59:45.420
of politics that we talk about and experience from day to day.
00:59:49.260
It's very, very hard to integrate the female perspective into that environment.
00:59:55.420
And it's very difficult to figure out what roles we should be offering to women.
01:00:00.580
The role certainly cannot be, go be a housewife and don't do anything else.
01:00:06.860
But it also can be, let's reorganize our politics around who's mean and who's seen, or who's seen
01:00:13.840
as mean and creepy and a loser in this week versus who is seen as a highly agentic, high
01:00:21.980
We can't have this sort of longhouse, mean girl style thinking either.
01:00:25.860
And so the reason why I mentioned Johan Kurtz is that he correctly focuses the question
01:00:31.680
on the issue of pronatalism and encouraging people to settle down and have families is
01:00:37.980
a question of status and a question of reliability.
01:00:42.520
The person who will be able to solve the problem of unmarried women or of even married women occupying
01:00:49.680
a non-progressive, non-long-housed space, if you want to use the Lomas Bap term.
01:00:55.860
That the key to pioneering this will be to come up with an alternative way that women
01:01:02.040
can achieve status and achieve a certain amount of power and security for themselves by not
01:01:12.760
By being this kind of person inside the community who does these things, you will be seen as
01:01:19.400
You will be seen as someone who's a good person.
01:01:21.520
You will be seen as somebody who's a great person by your family, by your community, and
01:01:30.040
Now, so far, I think we've only seen this inside certain religious communities.
01:01:35.920
But it's interesting, I think, as a thought experiment, and Johan Kurtz explores this, a
01:01:42.680
It's interesting to think about in the abstract how an alternative female competition, a status
01:01:49.340
would work inside a mode that is not the mode of the mainstream, that it's not in the mode
01:01:56.000
of how we structure politics at the highest level around, again, who's popular, who's
01:02:02.620
creepy, who's being mean, or who is the person who is properly complying with the best practices.
01:02:09.440
That's something that I think is a very fruitful avenue for thinking and developing political
01:02:14.960
theory and developing political practice in the future.
01:02:19.640
Well, as you said, Dave, we could do about four podcasts on this subject, but we're going
01:02:26.420
So as we head out, we won't be doing any super chats.
01:02:30.100
But obviously, we're pre-recorded, so we can't do that this time.
01:02:33.760
Appreciate anybody who's sending those, but we can't read them out here.
01:02:37.280
But can you tell people where to find your work?
01:02:42.120
So I have a sub-stack called Letters from Fiddler's Green.
01:02:46.700
I guess it's a sub-stack bestseller, but it's medium-sized.
01:02:51.460
And then I have a YouTube channel called The Distributist, where I do a bi-monthly podcast,
01:02:58.680
more or less, and which hosts a lot of my old video essays from the pre-COVID times,
01:03:04.500
mainly, and occasionally, I do a video essay on YouTube as well.
01:03:08.780
So those are the two places that most people can find me.
01:03:11.460
Or if you're interested in community building, please look into the Basket Weaving Project,
01:03:22.080
I need the return of the regular Distributist video essay.
01:03:25.340
He's a genius in the free-form, you know, stream of thought podcast thing.
01:03:36.620
So you need the audience that's going to free you to make these things,
01:03:42.080
You know, for you, Aaron, I'm going to try to do a video essay.
01:03:53.100
But, of course, make sure you're following Distributist.
01:03:55.500
And if it's your first time on this channel, make sure you subscribe.
01:03:58.960
Click the bell, notifications, everything, so you know when the channel goes live.
01:04:02.840
If you would like to get these broadcasts as podcasts,
01:04:05.020
you need to subscribe to The Aaron McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.