The NXR Podcast - May 17, 2025


THE CONFERENCE - Elite Theory & The New Christian Right - Auron MacIntyre - Session 5


Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

170.85626

Word count

9,613

Sentence count

481

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

20

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Pastor Joel talks about the importance of political theory and how it can help us understand how power actually works in the United States. He also talks about how elite theory can be used to understand how the government works.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform.
00:00:03.800 I get it. It's annoying. Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
00:00:07.540 When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm
00:00:12.040 so that our podcast shows up on more people's newsfeeds.
00:00:16.280 You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
00:00:21.860 We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
00:00:30.000 Hey guys, thanks for having me. I'm relatively new to the Reformed Christian
00:00:36.620 world. A lot of you guys have walked up and asked me about all the people I'm
00:00:40.340 aligned with and all the people I probably know, and I usually don't,
00:00:43.400 because I'm still very new to this. So there's a lot of people with a lot of
00:00:47.640 theological knowledge in this room, and don't worry I'm not gonna embarrass
00:00:51.280 myself by trying to hang with any of them. What I do know about is political
00:00:55.600 theory. And so what Joel asked me to discuss today is the school that I tend to specialize in
00:01:01.960 on my show, Elite Theory. So if this is incredibly boring, I'm sorry, and you can blame Joel because
00:01:07.080 he's the one who came up with the topic. So I don't know about you guys, but I grew up in the
00:01:12.120 Southern Baptist Church. And as a Southern Baptist, my dad was in the Air Force. We traveled all the
00:01:18.720 time. We moved every year or two. So I had a very transient childhood, never set down roots, never
00:01:24.380 had friends for more than a few years. You know, it can be kind of isolating, but the one thing
00:01:28.820 that was always there for me was the Southern Baptist Church. Obviously, we were moving all the
00:01:33.800 time, so it's a different church, but you know, the Southern Baptist hymnal was there, and that
00:01:37.640 was kind of the sense of identity that I had as we moved from place to place, and if you grew up as
00:01:42.360 a Southern Baptist, you know that Southern Baptists believe that the Bible is the holiest document
00:01:47.920 available. But just below it is the Constitution. Like, it's right there. Like, God probably, like,
00:01:55.480 as soon as he got done inspiring the Bible, he's like, and now the U.S. Constitution. And so it's
00:02:00.100 a very serious, it almost takes on a religious form for some of us. You know, we value it very
00:02:06.820 highly. And so when something like that is a big part of your life, obviously it has a big impact
00:02:13.480 on your worldview.
00:02:14.980 And like most of you, I grew up listening to conservative talk radio
00:02:19.800 and learning about the different separation of powers
00:02:23.600 and the checks and balances and all of the different amendments
00:02:27.200 that were going to protect my rights.
00:02:28.740 You know, government really couldn't become tyrannical as long
00:02:32.060 as we obeyed the Constitution.
00:02:34.420 And then COVID happened.
00:02:38.580 And all of a sudden, the churches were closed, but strip clubs
00:02:43.240 and liquor stores were open. And you couldn't go to the funeral of a loved one, but if you
00:02:50.400 were a Democrat, you were allowed to riot in the streets and burn things down. And I
00:02:55.040 was very confused, because I had been assured that we had checks and balances, that we had
00:03:00.500 constitutional rights. And when tyranny came, those things would stop the government from
00:03:06.580 taking away my God-given freedoms. And it didn't. And that was very confusing to me,
00:03:13.500 as I'm sure it was to many of you. And so I needed to go on a journey. I needed to understand
00:03:19.060 what was happening. Why did this occur? Why didn't the Constitution stop this tyranny?
00:03:25.220 Did we fail the Constitution? Did the Constitution fail us? What's going on? And so I feel like
00:03:31.280 elite theory, political realism, sometimes it's called Machiavellian political theory,
00:03:36.780 helps us to understand this situation.
00:03:39.220 It gives us a frame to better grasp what we went through, how power actually works in
00:03:44.120 the United States. 0.56
00:03:45.060 And the reason that's so important is if you are a new movement, the new Christian right,
00:03:51.240 you want to think about how power works.
00:03:54.000 We're not just interested in being in a scenario where, of course, we need to be the salt,
00:03:59.560 we need to be the light, but we also want to look around and say, how do we protect our families?
00:04:04.320 How do we protect our churches? How do we make sure that we can worship? How do we make sure
00:04:08.080 that the government just doesn't come in and shut everything down again? And to better understand
00:04:12.440 that, we need to understand how power actually works. We can't just have a narrative, a story
00:04:18.020 about how our power works. We need to see the mechanisms that underlie it. And so I'm hoping
00:04:22.720 that that's what elite theory does for you guys today. So I'm going to give you a little bit of
00:04:28.660 elite theory 101. And the first thing that we need to understand to familiarize ourselves with some of
00:04:34.460 the basics of politics in power is that in elite theory the idea is that always and everywhere the
00:04:41.640 organized minority rules the disorganized majority. I'm going to say that one more time because it's
00:04:47.580 really important. The organized minority always rules the disorganized majority. And if you think
00:04:55.840 that sounds weird. You just have to think about this conference, right? Joel knows what's going
00:05:01.880 on. He and his staff have organized this. If you would like to know what we're doing next, don't
00:05:06.600 ask me. I didn't organize it. Don't ask him. Don't ask her. They don't know, right? It's the people
00:05:12.960 who, the small number of people who took the time and the effort to organize this are in charge.
00:05:19.160 They are organized and they are leading us. And if you think about anything in your life,
00:05:23.380 this is true. But for some reason, when we talk about this in government, this makes people
00:05:28.480 uneasy. But actually, it should just be obvious. And we understand that ultimately, it is this
00:05:34.760 organized minority, and here I don't mean a minority group as in a racial minority or sexual
00:05:39.760 minority or the things you hear on TV when people are talking about American politics.
00:05:43.540 I literally just mean a smaller group of people who ultimately end up running the things that
00:05:48.980 we experience. Now, in the United States, we tend to shy away from the idea of an elite class, right?
00:05:56.680 We define ourselves by the fact that we threw off the chains of oppression. We don't have monarchs.
00:06:01.760 We don't have an aristocracy. However, that doesn't mean that we don't end up with a ruling
00:06:07.940 elite because that organized minority that ends up running something will always end up becoming
00:06:15.240 a ruling class. They will share the same interests, they will share the same social
00:06:20.080 experiences, and they will try to retain power. Now, in the United States, we elect our ruling
00:06:26.900 class, right? We have this process that we go through, we vote for these people, and that's how
00:06:33.260 they take power. So we do understand, ultimately, that each one of us doesn't have the power
00:06:38.760 to rule, but we do think of ourselves as having popular sovereignty because we vote for the people
00:06:45.760 who then go on to take action on our behalf. And this is how we see our ruling class.
00:06:53.140 Now, the thing about our ruling class that you want to think about is that all ruling classes
00:06:58.060 need a story about why they're in charge. If you ever have read Plato's Republic,
00:07:03.820 or you might have just heard the phrase, a noble lie, right?
00:07:07.600 And the noble lie is a story in the Plato's Republic
00:07:11.120 that the ruling elite tell the people so they can justify their power.
00:07:17.320 However, in elite theory, we think there's more going on there.
00:07:20.700 We have what we call a political formula.
00:07:23.580 And a political formula is something that you,
00:07:25.980 it's not just a lie that you tell people to get them to listen to you,
00:07:29.740 to let you be in charge.
00:07:32.200 The political formula is something that both the rulers and the ruled believe simultaneously.
00:07:39.860 Because ultimately, we are narrative creatures, right?
00:07:43.660 Think about this.
00:07:44.500 Jordan Peterson has become famous.
00:07:46.640 You can talk about other things that he's become famous for.
00:07:49.520 But one of the things that he became famous for was telling us that we're not always hyper-rational creatures.
00:07:54.820 Instead, we need to hear stories about why we're in the place we are and why we're doing the things that we're doing.
00:08:01.540 And so, as people who are following leaders, we need a political formula that tells us why they are in charge.
00:08:09.180 But the rulers themselves also need a story about why they are in charge.
00:08:14.520 They need to believe that they have the right to rule.
00:08:17.360 Now, don't get me wrong, there are cynical actors, and we can think about people who are just dictators, who just rule through raw force, and that'll work for a while.
00:08:25.540 But eventually, really, truly tyrannical rule always breaks down.
00:08:30.060 So we actually need a story that tells us both the people in charge and the people who are being led why we are in the situation we're in.
00:08:40.760 And in the United States, we know that our political formula, again, is popular sovereignty.
00:08:47.420 The people tell the leaders what to do, and the leaders carry that out.
00:08:51.880 We don't have the monarchical formula, right?
00:08:54.260 We don't think, oh, the king has been in charge, his dad's dad was in charge, and so he's going to inherit the kingdom, and that gives him the right.
00:09:01.720 We don't have the dictatorship, the law of force. 0.88
00:09:06.440 We don't have the truly theocratic understanding where, like, the mullahs are in charge.
00:09:11.960 Instead, we have popular sovereignty.
00:09:14.800 However, here's the thing about ruling elites.
00:09:17.120 They really don't like it when they lose power.
00:09:21.100 So if you're in a ruling class, are you really going to let the average person tell you to leave office, to give up power?
00:09:30.260 That doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:09:32.120 So what do you do in a situation like that?
00:09:34.520 What do you do when you're in the ruling class and you want to stay in power, but you have a system where the people get to decide if you stay in power?
00:09:44.340 How do you make sure that you continue to rule?
00:09:47.960 And it turns out the answer is, if your legitimating mechanism for being in power is popular opinion,
00:09:55.960 then you need to control popular opinion.
00:10:00.080 You need to make sure that the people see the world the way you want them to see it,
00:10:04.820 so that they understand the things the way that you want them to understand them,
00:10:08.900 so that eventually they vote the way that you want them to vote.
00:10:12.920 And so what we see is that our ruling elite in the United States have been able to close off the ability to move them out, to push them out of power by manufacturing public opinion in the United States.
00:10:27.120 And if you think I'm just being a conspiracy theorist and that doesn't make sense, let me throw something out for you.
00:10:33.720 Congress usually has an approval rating of about 10 to 15 percent.
00:10:38.740 It has an incumbency rating of roughly 90 percent.
00:10:42.920 If democracy works the way it's been explained to you, how are people that are 10% popular
00:10:49.200 stay in power 90% of the time? That doesn't make any sense at all. And yet, that's exactly
00:10:56.560 how our system works. And so we need to understand first and foremost that the ruling class is real
00:11:03.140 and that their power comes from this cultural form of controlling what we see, what we think,
00:11:10.280 and what we believe. Now, that might have sounded crazy 10 years ago, but we all went through COVID.
00:11:17.520 So we know that's pretty obvious, actually. What I'm saying now is probably less revelatory to you
00:11:22.980 than it would have been just five years ago. Because now you've seen the entire system move
00:11:28.740 and turn and change on a dime to tell you what to believe and what to think medically, legally,
00:11:34.760 historically, socially, spiritually. You've seen these different organizations betray your trust
00:11:41.500 and coordinate together, right? The media, academia, you look at the scientific organizations involved
00:11:48.200 in things like the pandemic, NGOs, they all work together and they all seem to be telling you that
00:11:54.240 you should believe things that aren't actually happening in real life. In fact, at this point,
00:11:58.480 it's become famous, right? You've seen those clips of all the different news anchors saying the same
00:12:03.080 things simultaneously, right? They're all getting the same message. Now, in some cases, there are
00:12:08.800 actual talking points, but in many cases, they're simply sharing a similar class interest. They know
00:12:15.700 what it takes to stay in charge, and they want you to continue to believe the things that are
00:12:20.640 required to keep them in charge. And so one of the things that elite theory wants us to do is think
00:12:26.260 about how the information that we consume is being controlled.
00:12:30.540 Social media, the television, everything that comes through the radio,
00:12:34.840 everything that we see through our academic organizations,
00:12:38.220 all of this helps to ensure that the people in charge stay in charge
00:12:42.060 and that the opinions that get expressed through the electoral process
00:12:46.100 stay within the lines, what many people call the Overton window.
00:12:51.500 So the next thing I think we need to understand
00:12:54.020 about how we ended up in this situation, how our ruling elites started to circumvent some of the
00:13:00.600 Constitution through this manipulation of political opinion, is to understand a little bit of how the
00:13:07.420 ruling class operates, how they think. So if you look at our current government form, many of you
00:13:14.980 would look at what happened during COVID and say, you know what, that looks pretty tyrannical.
00:13:20.540 However, that can confuse some people because they think about tyranny and they think about
00:13:26.000 the gulags. They think about jackboots. They think about people being taken on trains to
00:13:30.920 concentration camps. These are the things that we think about. Direct violence. That's tyranny,
00:13:36.980 right? Except maybe not. When we look at what happened with COVID, when we look at what just
00:13:41.840 happens with having the wrong political opinions in the United States, there are all these ways
00:13:46.640 in which we are controlled without violence.
00:13:50.660 Sure, you're not going to the gulag, but you can't get a job.
00:13:55.040 Yeah, no one's coming with a truncheon and beating you over the head, probably,
00:13:58.740 unless you were at January 6th.
00:14:00.740 But they will make sure that you can't get a home loan,
00:14:04.820 that no one will talk to you, that your friends will disown you,
00:14:07.560 that the media will harass you.
00:14:09.940 And so what we have is a much softer tyranny,
00:14:12.800 not something that comes with the jackboots and the violence and the force,
00:14:16.380 though that does come, don't forget that the populist protests in places like Canada and the
00:14:23.020 UK and the United States were eventually put down with force. But what we see more often is that our
00:14:28.640 current ruling elites prefer this softer form of tyranny. Well, why is that? Why don't they just
00:14:35.280 use the force that we think of when we think of tyranny? There's a key political theorist called
00:14:42.540 Vilfredo Pareto in elite theory, and Vilfredo Pareto had this sociological idea of residues
00:14:48.720 that persist through different cultures, and they continue to show their forms, and that's
00:14:53.400 all really boring and complicated. However, the thing that we want to focus on are the
00:14:58.040 two residues, the two types of people, the two forms of elites that we usually see in
00:15:04.360 a ruling class. And Vilfredo Pareto called these the type one residues and the type two
00:15:10.280 residues, but we're going to simplify that by calling them the lions and the foxes. Now,
00:15:17.460 Pareto said that the lions are the ruling elites that are strong, brave. They are the people who
00:15:25.500 are courageous and patriotic. They are the ones who like to operate in a more traditional,
00:15:33.080 straightforward manner. They tend to have a martial character. These are people who serve
00:15:37.620 in the military, or run your police department, are firefighters.
00:15:42.280 They're the type of people who care about family and tradition, persistence of identity.
00:15:48.480 These are your lion leaders.
00:15:50.800 And at the beginning of every civilization, lions tend to be in charge, because you need
00:15:56.300 to have people who will go in and keep order in your civilization.
00:15:59.420 You need people who will defend your borders, who maybe need to expand your borders, who
00:16:04.620 can cut a path into the wilderness and settle the land. And so you need these strong type of
00:16:10.900 leaders early on when your civilization is constantly under threat. However, there's another
00:16:18.080 type that tends to show up in the ruling elite, the foxes. The foxes are quick. They're clever.
00:16:25.820 They are good at combining ideas. They tend to make up new systems. They tend to explore new
00:16:32.320 ways to do things. They're not really tied to identity. They tend to be less focused on
00:16:39.340 maintaining tradition. They tend to be better at coming up with new ideas and new ways to do
00:16:44.800 things. And you tend to see the foxes dominate later on in civilizations when things have become
00:16:54.020 more complex. You're no longer constantly under the threat of physical violence. And what you
00:16:58.960 really need to do is have these very complicated solutions to different logistical problems that
00:17:06.280 arise as your civilization becomes more complex. Now, what Pareto said is that ultimately what you
00:17:14.960 want is a mixture of the two, right? You don't want too much of the lions and too much of the
00:17:20.340 foxes. You want what he called a circulation of elites, a healthy ability to bring in new blood
00:17:27.060 and new talent and new ideas, and that allows your society to shift.
00:17:31.080 You can have more lions when you need them, and then you can have more foxes when you
00:17:34.700 need them, but you never want to get overburdened with, say, foxes, because if you do, they tend
00:17:41.180 to be really interested in all these new ideas and new solutions and new ways to remake the
00:17:46.340 world and remake people, but they tend to forget critical things like, oh, yeah, we're
00:17:51.520 actually serving a particular people, a particular idea, a particular way of doing things.
00:17:56.620 They don't carry very much of that persistence and tradition and understanding forward.
00:18:02.400 And Pareto said that at the end of most civilizations, as they get more and more complex,
00:18:07.900 you usually see a lot of foxes end up at the top.
00:18:13.200 And if they start selecting and they only want the type of people who are foxes,
00:18:18.200 if you're ruling elites say, you know what, we're scared of the lions, actually,
00:18:21.800 because the lions, they hold us back from trying out all these new experiments
00:18:26.700 and all these new ways that we want to do things.
00:18:28.740 They're so attached to their old ways. 1.00
00:18:30.580 I think Barack Obama said, you know, keep clinging to their stupid guns and Bibles. 1.00
00:18:35.840 If you have people like that, they could come in and disrupt all those cool things, 1.00
00:18:40.760 all those neat new things that the foxes are doing.
00:18:43.380 And so what you see at the end of many civilizations
00:18:45.680 is that the foxes start concentrating at the top,
00:18:49.100 and the civilization gets very soft and very weak and loses its identity. It loses its reason for
00:18:56.760 being because it forgets who it is. It's lost its true identity because it no longer focuses on
00:19:03.280 persisting for the sake of what built your society in the first place. And when that happens, we end
00:19:10.400 up very much in the system that we have now, where we have large organizations filled with foxes,
00:19:17.260 right? We're basically ruled by nothing but foxes at this point. Even your military, your top
00:19:22.420 generals tend to talk more like business CEOs giving TED Talks than they do actual leaders of
00:19:29.040 men who go into battle. And so we see that even in the places where lions should dominate, we are
00:19:35.380 full of foxes. And that creates a scenario where your society becomes very uncomfortable with the
00:19:41.760 use of force, but it also becomes very uncomfortable with identity and leadership. And so what they
00:19:48.740 do is they use a lot of soft tactics to manipulate people. And this is why we see the rise of this
00:19:56.340 information manipulation system as the way to control politics in the United States. Because
00:20:03.200 what we have selected for in our elite class is not statesmanship. It's not the ability to lead.
00:20:09.160 when's the last time you put a general in the White House? It's not the ability to do these
00:20:13.580 classic lion tasks. Instead, what we see is information manipulators, people who are always 0.54
00:20:21.560 looking for consensus, always looking to warp the way that we understand the world, rather than
00:20:27.800 trying to lead us with any kind of example. That's one of the reasons that I think Trump is ultimately
00:20:33.520 someone who shook a lot of what the average person in the ruling elite believes should be going on.
00:20:39.620 Not because I think he's a full-on lion, but because I think he played a lion to some extent,
00:20:44.920 and we have had such a lack of lions, such a lack of leadership of that style in our elite class
00:20:51.640 for so long that that terrified our ruling elite. And I think that's why you see them overreact to
00:20:58.560 Trump. I think that's why you saw them persecute Trump. I think that's why you saw them try to put
00:21:03.000 him in jail, I think that's why you saw them ultimately try to kill him. Not because Trump
00:21:08.200 is the next, you know, orange Hitler or something, but because ultimately Trump represents a style
00:21:14.360 of leadership that threatens our current elite. And so if we're going to be effective in that
00:21:21.820 kind of environment, we need to understand how these foxes came to power, but we also need to
00:21:28.040 understand why the Constitution did not stop them from manipulating the system that we love.
00:21:36.060 And so we need to ask ourselves the question, did the Constitution not work? Is there something
00:21:42.240 wrong with the Constitution? Or is there something we don't understand about the Constitution? And my
00:21:48.160 answer is the last one. I don't think it's that the Constitution failed. I think it's that we
00:21:54.420 failed to understand. We lost connection with the tradition as to why our Constitution was
00:22:00.260 supposed to defend our rights. A lot of us like to talk about our God-given rights, and of course
00:22:06.160 we should. We are all believers in Christ, and we all understand ultimately that the way that we
00:22:11.640 are created and the order we were created for should allot us certain freedoms inside our
00:22:17.980 society. However, it's not enough to just assert these things. A lot of you guys probably, you know,
00:22:24.940 I used to teach high school history and civics, and so I taught this many times over, that we have
00:22:30.760 the checks and the balances, we have the separation of powers, and many times we need that conversation
00:22:36.180 you get kind of the schoolhouse rock version of the Constitution, right? Where, well, because our
00:22:41.660 founders were really smart people, they set up this system with three branches, and the three branches
00:22:46.180 all kind of hold each other back and so the constitution becomes this kind of novel political
00:22:51.660 technology that we came up with that would end tyranny and yeah we got to watch out because the
00:22:56.960 democrats might get a little wily but for the most part the constitution is just kind of going to
00:23:02.000 hold everything in place and this is why so many conservatives became so complacent because
00:23:07.600 ultimately we kind of believe that the constitution would do the work for us we just kind of had to
00:23:12.660 go sit and grill somewhere and then enjoy the freedoms and liberties that our founders had
00:23:17.200 secured through the Constitution. But the thing is that the founders never believed that the
00:23:22.920 Constitution by itself would guarantee your freedom. The paper the Constitution is written on
00:23:28.700 is not magic. It's just paper. What made it powerful is the people behind it, the traditions
00:23:36.020 behind it, the beliefs behind it. One of the guys that informed the founders and the way that
00:23:42.540 they understood political constitutions. One of the guys that inspired the guys who wrote the
00:23:47.380 constitution was a political theorist called Baron de Montesquieu. And Baron de Montesquieu was
00:23:52.820 actually a big fan of the British system of government because it divided the power into
00:23:58.680 branches. And those different branches had a specific role in society. You see, the branches
00:24:05.960 weren't just there because three is some magical number that stops the government from taking
00:24:10.780 control of you. Oh, well, if the government's divided into three branches, then you're just
00:24:14.760 free. No, that's not how it works. Three, five, seven branches, that's not what's important
00:24:20.160 about the branches of government. For Baron de Montesquieu, the reason that the Constitution
00:24:26.680 should work, the reason that the division of powers and the checks and balances should work,
00:24:31.660 is that ultimately, the different branches of government, especially in the British system,
00:24:36.300 were represented by different spheres of social authority inside that society. So you had the
00:24:43.620 king, and you had the nobles, and they derived their power in one way, but you also had the
00:24:48.960 church, and it was a powerful social force, but it derived its power in a very different way than
00:24:53.780 the king and the nobles did. And then you had families, you had the peasants, you had the
00:24:59.620 merchants. You had all these other different focuses of society as to where they were loyal
00:25:06.960 and where they had power. And really importantly, each one of those different social spheres
00:25:13.520 derived their power from a different source. You see, ultimately, as much as we try to be
00:25:21.060 proper individuals, we are all dependent on something. Every one of us is going to be
00:25:27.820 dependent on someone somewhere. And as you probably know, if you're a parent, dependence
00:25:34.760 means authority. Ultimately, you derive authority because the people who are dependent on you
00:25:40.320 can't choose to do something else. And so when you have these different spheres that people are
00:25:46.280 dependent on, each sphere can only demand so much because you can have the government and it can say,
00:25:55.500 oh, well, I want you to do this, but the church has God's authority. And so I'm going to listen
00:26:00.700 to the church because God's authority is more important in my life in that area. And if I don't
00:26:05.060 listen to the church, then if my family gets sick or if I don't, you know, I don't have a way to pay
00:26:11.420 for something, there's no social safety net for me because the government just wasn't big enough
00:26:15.080 to take care of people at that time. Or if I have some kind of problem in my family, I can't just do
00:26:22.380 what the government demands of me because ultimately I need my family. The government
00:26:26.900 cannot take the place of my family and do the same things that my family does. I'm dependent on
00:26:32.980 each one of these spheres. I'm dependent on them in different ways. And so each branch of government
00:26:38.180 was supposed to represent a different sphere of society, their different social powers that push
00:26:43.360 back against each other. You can actually see this in our founding documents if you look at the
00:26:48.840 Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton and Federalist 51, said that ambition checks ambition.
00:26:55.320 He didn't believe that it was the words on paper that ultimately stopped your government from being
00:26:59.460 tyrannical. It was the different social forces who each wanted their own power. Power always wants
00:27:05.300 to expand. But because the different social forces were constantly pushing back against each other,
00:27:09.520 the ambition was checking the ambition, they could never have complete control. However,
00:27:15.280 we've got a little bit of a problem on that front. Because guess what? Our governments got bigger
00:27:20.880 and more powerful and richer. They developed the ability to tax you and take a bunch of your money
00:27:27.460 and build giant institutions and funnel that money other places. And as they started to do that,
00:27:33.080 they recognized that they could start taking over different things that people in society just
00:27:37.940 didn't want to do. So today, if you don't want to, you don't have to educate your children.
00:27:43.460 The government will do that for you.
00:27:45.940 And you don't have to take care of your ailing parents.
00:27:48.860 There's a program for that.
00:27:51.040 And you don't have to take care of your destitute niece
00:27:53.560 who embarrassed herself by making some bad life choices
00:27:56.540 because ultimately, there's welfare.
00:28:00.100 And so really, if people don't want to,
00:28:03.260 they can avoid many of the responsibilities
00:28:05.240 that used to demand a very large amount
00:28:07.400 of our time and energy in life.
00:28:10.260 And that sounds really good at first.
00:28:13.460 Man, I don't have to spend all of my free time educating my children or trying to earn
00:28:18.400 extra money so I can take care of that destitute niece or spend all of my time caring for ailing
00:28:23.360 parents.
00:28:24.360 That frees up so much more time to watch Marvel movies and Netflix and whatever, right?
00:28:29.420 However, every time that we do that, even though we feel freer because we have more
00:28:34.700 time and maybe more money we feel like, ultimately we are also giving up power.
00:28:41.800 We are giving up our ability to be separate from the government because ultimately we
00:28:46.200 are becoming dependent on the different aspects of government.
00:28:48.820 Now, you guys have probably heard this before as just an argument in general for like less
00:28:52.900 government spending and that kind of thing, smaller government in general.
00:28:56.560 However, what we probably didn't recognize is that while this process was going on, it
00:29:01.520 was also stripping out the ability of our constitution to push back.
00:29:06.560 Because if we're dependent on the government in every area, if the government is the one
00:29:11.160 that decides whether we can have a job or whether we can get a home loan or whether we can send our
00:29:16.800 kids to school or whether we can worship at church, if the government is able to make all
00:29:21.500 of these decisions because it has taken all of that responsibility, then when the government
00:29:26.700 wants to go ahead and control something, there are no fire breaks. There is nothing between us
00:29:32.500 and the power of the state. All of those social spheres that we're supposed to push back on our
00:29:37.880 behalf are gone. And so those constitutional rights that are written in our founding documents,
00:29:46.820 they're great, but if you don't have an organized institution that you can rely on, if you don't
00:29:54.460 have family, if you don't have a church, if you don't have local community, if you don't have
00:29:59.120 these different spheres that are going to push back in these kinds of moments, then you're
00:30:04.860 isolated and alone. And if you have any question as to whether or not that's true, just look at
00:30:09.620 who's able to stand up during COVID. It wasn't the libertarians. It wasn't any of the people
00:30:17.080 who've been espousing the smallest government. It was religious people. Almost all of the 0.99
00:30:22.780 biggest pushback during COVID was people who continued to ignore what the government was
00:30:28.200 telling them to do because they had a faith community that would stand next to them. And
00:30:32.460 they knew that there was something that they answered to that was more powerful than the
00:30:35.900 government. And ultimately, this is what animates a constitution. Because at the end of the
00:30:41.720 day, a constitution is only a piece of paper unless it's animated by a way of being, a
00:30:47.760 tradition, a belief. And this is why conservatives love to quote John Adams when he said that
00:30:56.100 our constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and it doesn't work for
00:31:00.060 any other, because Adams is simply recognizing the truth, that our constitution is founded on
00:31:06.540 God's truth, that we are animated by our Christian tradition, that as Anglo-Protestants who settled
00:31:13.340 this country and the descendants who eventually, some people, you know, went ahead and assimilated,
00:31:18.000 some people were from founding stock, but ultimately it was that shared belief in Christ
00:31:24.040 and the truth of Christianity and the freedoms and traditions that were tied to it that drove
00:31:29.960 the Constitution and let it restrict what the government could do. And the minute that that
00:31:35.420 was gone, the minute that that dissolved, then ultimately we just became the kind of people
00:31:39.760 could easily be manipulated by television or by social media or by a hit in our bank account.
00:31:46.480 Again, how many people are terrified right now because of what's going on with just a little
00:31:51.360 bit of disruption in the economy? And when you control the media, when you control these avenues
00:31:55.820 of information, it's very easy to terrify people. Again, COVID provides an excellent example of how
00:32:01.900 easy it is when you aren't grounded, when you're not going to church on a regular basis, when you're
00:32:06.180 not out in your community. It's very easy to mislead people. The people who were most resistant
00:32:11.440 to COVID are the people who had the most contact with reality. The people who were easiest to
00:32:17.860 manipulate were the urbanites sitting in their apartments on their laptops doing their email
00:32:22.680 jobs while they watched Netflix and ordered things on Uber Eats. They never went outside,
00:32:27.200 they never saw what was going on, and so therefore it was very easy to manufacture reality for them.
00:32:33.260 It's only these organic social spheres grounded in tradition, grounded in belief, grounded in
00:32:39.980 things like family that ultimately allow us to avoid the manipulation that the foxes can bring
00:32:46.720 when they are in control of information. So the next thing I think that we need to understand
00:32:52.260 is the rise of managerialism because the foxes gained power through manipulation of information,
00:33:01.240 but also because the scale at which our civilization began to operate. So if you
00:33:07.760 think about the 1930s and the 1940s, you might think about the clash of big ideologies, right?
00:33:16.440 You think about fascism and communism and liberal democracy.
00:33:21.080 These things would define those decades and those after,
00:33:25.200 and obviously we would see these come to a head in World War II.
00:33:29.300 And the big thing to understand is that while there are obviously some radical differences
00:33:33.440 between communism and fascism and liberal democracy,
00:33:38.540 ultimately they all share the desire to centralize production and consumption
00:33:46.340 and to control through propaganda.
00:33:49.980 Sorry to ruin anyone here, but if you're a big fan of FDR, 0.83
00:33:53.380 he agreed, at least on this, with Stalin and Hitler. 0.84
00:33:56.940 He was just as excited about being able to centralize control 0.69
00:34:01.680 of the US economy and the education system
00:34:05.680 and the way in which information is distributed
00:34:08.120 inside of our nation.
00:34:10.220 And so what we see is that even though, again,
00:34:12.840 there are very big differences, don't get me wrong,
00:34:15.020 I would rather live under liberal democracy than the other two systems.
00:34:19.520 But when we look at those other systems, we recognize that ultimately all of these systems,
00:34:24.980 despite their differences, have the same goal.
00:34:27.760 And that's after the Industrial Revolution, after the beginning of the information revolution
00:34:33.500 or the communications revolution with mass communication,
00:34:36.600 ultimately they were all looking to do the same thing,
00:34:39.140 which was turn over the efficiency and power of the state by unifying all of that into one central planning situation.
00:34:49.060 The way that they did this was to organize things into complex bureaucratic organizations.
00:34:56.540 Complex bureaucratic organizations have a magical power, almost.
00:35:01.540 They have the ability to yield a high amount of efficiency.
00:35:05.480 And because they are so powerful, we have seen most of our society start to organize itself
00:35:11.240 into these type of institutions. It used to be, again, that your church ran very differently from
00:35:18.060 a government, which ran very differently from a business. But now, what do you hear from people
00:35:22.600 all the time? I want my government to run just like a business. Sadly, for many churches, they
00:35:28.140 often run just like a business. Think about how many mega churches are run by pastors who, once
00:35:33.620 again, sound like they're just kind of running a TED talk. If you put them next to a CEO and you
00:35:38.480 switched out Jesus a few times, you probably wouldn't even notice the difference. And so we
00:35:43.380 see that this type of structure, the way that we organize society has changed very radically.
00:35:49.620 The idea that you have the local church parish or, you know, the local organization that has
00:35:55.800 its own ad hoc rules just doesn't exist anymore. Everything has to fall into this managerial
00:36:01.600 mindset. And guess which of the two political personalities between the foxes and lions is best
00:36:09.220 at operating inside a complex bureaucratic structure? It's the foxes, right? They're the
00:36:15.040 ones who are best equipped at handling this information, handling complex systems, coming up
00:36:20.960 with new ideas. And so as these bureaucratic structures came to dominate every part of our
00:36:26.840 civilization, every aspect of our society, they became more in charge. And this just moves across
00:36:33.200 every domain. The managerial mindset has taken over everything. It has taken over our churches,
00:36:39.880 it's taken over our businesses, it's taken over our government. I mean, just think about things
00:36:44.580 like dating, which used to be done through family connections or maybe just meeting someone in your
00:36:49.580 community. Now it all takes place online through a corporation in many cases. That's how much this
00:36:56.180 mindset has come to dominate, even our romantic lives are often dominated by these large bureaucratic
00:37:02.240 forces. And the thing to remember that was so important about the different social spheres
00:37:08.280 is that they all demanded different power in different ways. The church operated in a
00:37:14.800 fundamentally different way than the king, who operated in a fundamentally different way
00:37:19.500 from the merchant. But once it all became the same thing, once all of our society became organized by
00:37:25.540 the same structure, once again, there was nothing to stop power when it started running
00:37:31.340 through our society. There are very few breaks left to actually stop power from demanding
00:37:37.340 more and more of us at every opportunity. Now, in order to make these large bureaucratic
00:37:44.320 organizations, every manager needs a few things. They need to have reliable and repeatable
00:37:51.780 managerial formulas that will allow them to extract value. And the best way to do that is
00:37:58.080 to make sure that every process is dictated beforehand and everyone follows procedure.
00:38:03.020 If any of you have ever worked in a large bureaucratic organization, and due to the fact
00:38:07.160 that so many of them now dominate our society, you are all very familiar with this fact.
00:38:12.140 You are not allowed to make decisions. You are not allowed to have autonomy. You are not allowed
00:38:17.020 to practice discernment, especially if you're using, I don't know, say Christian values.
00:38:22.060 Instead, everything runs through a managerial checklist. And that is what we need to understand
00:38:27.980 is that ultimately, this homogenization of different peoples and different beliefs had to
00:38:34.520 occur. All of these different dynamics could not exist inside the United States if we wanted these
00:38:41.340 large bureaucratic organizations to function. And that's why education and transportation and
00:38:47.140 banking and energy and everything else had to be brought under unified control. Yes, it made us
00:38:53.000 more efficient. Yes, it made us wealthier. In some cases, it even gave us technological
00:38:58.240 advancements that we're grateful for. But ultimately, it wore away the particularities
00:39:03.100 that made us individuals. But more importantly, it wore away the particularities that made us
00:39:08.260 communities. And without the communities, we could no longer form the social organizations
00:39:14.360 necessary to push back against this system. But this phenomenon does not just occur inside the
00:39:21.840 country. Managerial elite gain more and more power by bringing more and more resources under their
00:39:28.340 control. The wider they can spread their net, the bigger the bureaucratic organization gets,
00:39:33.200 the more powerful it becomes. And so our corporations and our governments and our
00:39:38.680 different non-government organizations, they weren't satisfied with just homogenizing our
00:39:43.500 culture here. They needed to do it globally. And this is why you see the spread and the push to
00:39:49.380 globalization. It's not just that our ruling elites hate our country, but they do. It's also
00:39:55.280 that they recognize that if they can break down what makes you American, and they can break down
00:40:00.300 what makes an Englishman an Englishman, 0.98
00:40:02.140 and if they can break down what makes an Indian
00:40:04.460 in the subcontinent an Indian,
00:40:06.720 that ultimately they can bring all of these different,
00:40:10.560 disparate people under the same unified control.
00:40:14.240 And this is why you see commercials for Starbucks 0.98
00:40:18.280 in India pushing transgenderism. 0.58
00:40:20.860 It's not just some weird quirk. 1.00
00:40:22.600 That's actually a real mechanical way
00:40:26.500 to expand the power of the people
00:40:28.820 who currently run our country.
00:40:30.300 This is why so many of our global elites are terrified, once again, that someone like Trump might try to return to a more national understanding of power.
00:40:41.900 One that focuses on America and its traditions and its people.
00:40:45.920 Because they have built this giant system, right?
00:40:48.560 And it's all these different organizations, the European Union, NAFTA, all of these different NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organization.
00:40:59.560 All of these are responsible for trying to break down the constituent governments and bring them together under the same managerial rubric.
00:41:08.380 We saw this in COVID. Again, we see this all over the place.
00:41:12.360 And they are really, really angry with the different populist movements in these nations that are trying to return sovereignty back to a more local level,
00:41:21.800 which is why we see the different courts across the world currently trying
00:41:25.960 to push out populist candidates like in France with Le Pen or Bolsonaro in Brazil
00:41:32.380 or in Romania where they overturn the justices there, overturn the right-wing candidate
00:41:37.200 or even the United States, of course, where they try to push Donald Trump off the ticket, 0.75
00:41:41.840 put him in jail and eventually shoot him.
00:41:44.000 Because they recognize that a return to a more national understanding, 0.99
00:41:48.420 a particular understanding is a very fundamental threat
00:41:52.820 to the way that they maintain power.
00:41:56.080 So, if this is how our elite works,
00:41:59.260 if this is how we understand power,
00:42:01.820 if we now have a realistic understanding of the way
00:42:05.360 in which the people in charge were able to get around the Constitution,
00:42:10.620 subvert the Constitution, and the way in which we were not able
00:42:14.480 to reassert our rights because we were missing those opposing
00:42:18.220 social spheres in that particular community that allows us to ultimately animate the Constitution
00:42:23.980 and push back against these ruling elites, what do we do? What do we do with that information?
00:42:30.580 If you're the new Christian right, how does that change the way that you approach and you look 0.94
00:42:35.100 at how you should go about living your lives and running your movement? First, and this one is 0.72
00:42:41.900 not exactly controversial, this one's not a revelation for any of you in this room,
00:42:46.320 but it's just true, so it's worth saying, first, we have to build strong families and communities
00:42:52.880 of faith. There's simply nothing more important. We have to rearrange our priorities, and that's
00:43:00.460 why it's great to see so many businesses back here supporting what's going on, because ultimately
00:43:05.780 they recognize that while they are certainly trying to provide services and make money,
00:43:10.620 that is not the most important thing in their lives, because if they don't invest in the
00:43:15.320 generations that will ultimately follow them, then there will be nothing to leave to their children.
00:43:21.080 There will be nothing for them to continue their legacy. We cannot have opposing social spheres
00:43:26.380 unless we have the most basic building blocks of society. Until we have strong families that can
00:43:32.720 stand against what is happening, until we have strong churches and communities that rely on
00:43:38.180 each other and put each other first and are able to depend on each other, then ultimately we will
00:43:44.760 always be giving our power over to the state. The only way to cultivate virtue, the only way to
00:43:50.600 understand ourselves as Christian people set apart and able to practice our freedoms and
00:43:56.620 our traditions is to understand them in communities. It's good to have a certain
00:44:01.680 sense of individualism, but we should never let that individualism override our understanding
00:44:06.480 that our duty is to our families and our communities of faith. It's not enough. You
00:44:12.520 cannot stand alone. You have to stand together if you're going to push back against what I call
00:44:17.960 the total state. The next thing that we need to recognize, and this one is very important and
00:44:23.300 became, again, very evident during COVID, is that there are no neutral institutions. It simply does
00:44:30.120 not exist. We ought to think that there are. That allows us to not have to worry about differences.
00:44:35.840 As has been mentioned many times at this conference already, there are multiple Muslim
00:44:39.940 towns that are now being proposed inside of Texas. If they have to live one way and you want to live 1.00
00:44:46.720 another, the only way you can both exist under the same system is if you believe that the government 0.97
00:44:52.340 is a neutral arbiter that can somehow mediate the differences between a radical Muslim town
00:45:00.540 and a believing Christian population. But guess what? There isn't one. The government is never 0.73
00:45:08.540 neutral. The government is never without a belief system. When we see what happened in COVID,
00:45:14.840 we had so many people who had sent their children to government schools or had relied on medical
00:45:19.860 systems that they believed were run in an objective way. Of course, it's scientific, right?
00:45:27.020 Doctors are not going to radically change their understanding of biology just because some crazy 1.00
00:45:33.780 purple-haired feminist tells them to on a college campus. Except yes, they are. That's exactly what 1.00
00:45:39.480 they'll do. And not only will they do that, they will chop up your kid to prove their point.
00:45:45.220 They'll take your kid from you and force that to happen. So these institutions are not neutral.
00:45:52.160 And this brings up what I hear is apparently a controversial subject. It was never controversial
00:45:56.060 to me, but that's because I'm new to this community, I suppose, is the idea that you need
00:46:02.000 cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity is going to inform the institutions in your society.
00:46:09.540 Your institutions will never be neutral. They will hold some kind of value. They will base
00:46:15.540 their decisions on some kind of ultimate truth, or at least what they believe to be an ultimate
00:46:21.140 truth. And so if they're not animated by a Christian belief, they will be animated by 0.68
00:46:26.960 something else. If you're in the UK, it's probably Islam. But if you're in the United States, it's 0.99
00:46:32.260 probably secular humanism, or what many people called wokeness. And that's why so many people
00:46:37.600 properly recognize that what the left was doing was creating a new religion. Because there is no
00:46:43.800 religiously neutral society. As many people have said, it's not whether, it's which. We will have
00:46:51.840 a dominant culture. We will have a dominant belief. We will have a dominant religion.
00:46:55.720 and it will permeate every institution in our society, no matter how objective or neutral you
00:47:02.160 might think that society should ultimately be. And so we have to recognize that those institutions
00:47:07.860 must be Christian. They must be under Christian control. If you are not willing to take them, 1.00
00:47:15.320 someone else will, and then they will use them to take your children. So there is no ability to
00:47:22.580 simply pretend like these things will be neutral and they will not get involved in your life. You
00:47:27.640 will not be alone. The team that wants to win will always beat the team that wants to be left alone.
00:47:35.320 And that is a very difficult thing to hear, because many of us just want to be left alone, man.
00:47:41.240 We just want to grill. We just want to raise our families. We just want to go to church on Sunday.
00:47:46.380 But guess what? That's not why your ancestors fought, and that's not why your ancestors died.
00:47:52.580 they didn't just sit at home. They didn't just grill. They knew that ultimately life is a
00:47:59.720 struggle and you have to fight every day in order to have a better future for your family, in order
00:48:06.060 to continue your belief in your way of life. And so this means that we have to get serious
00:48:13.140 about training elites. It is very popular in these circles to say, college is a waste of time,
00:48:21.100 go into the trades. And you know what? That's good advice most of the time. For a lot of people,
00:48:27.840 going to college and wasting a ton of money so you can become like an accountant,
00:48:31.660 it just was never necessary, right? You didn't go to college to have been an accountant 50 years
00:48:36.400 ago. You became like an apprentice somewhere. You didn't need a degree to do absolutely everything
00:48:40.320 in society. At this point, you need a college degree to become a manager at a convenience store
00:48:47.100 half the time. That's just not necessary. But ultimately, we do have to recognize that while
00:48:53.120 I love plumbers, we probably can't take over the institutions of the United States just with
00:48:58.680 plumbers. We're going to need leaders. We're going to need lawyers. We're going to need people who
00:49:04.120 can write legislation. We're going to need people who can run businesses. We're going to need people
00:49:08.860 who can operate in these circles, which means we need to cultivate leadership. We need to be
00:49:15.860 looking for especially young men. It's been said, again, many times at this conference already,
00:49:22.400 the way in which young men in our society, particularly white men, have been shut out
00:49:28.120 of many of these institutions. It's not just some kind of speculation. We literally had Supreme
00:49:33.260 Court cases about it, that this was so prevalent that people are being entirely pushed out.
00:49:39.740 And when you push these promising leaders out of your society, out of your institutions,
00:49:44.780 you also push them out of your leadership class, which is exactly what Vilfredo Pareto predicted
00:49:49.820 when he wrote about the circulation of elites and the lions and the foxes.
00:49:53.800 He predicted exactly the behavior we are seeing now, and he predicted it over 100 years ago.
00:49:59.100 This is not new. This is a mechanical way in which power operates. And so if we want to change the
00:50:05.820 culture, we have to cultivate elites. We cannot shrink away from leadership, and we cannot shrink
00:50:10.580 away from investing in young people that will lead the next generation. So we need this. The next
00:50:17.160 thing we have to do is we need to build alternative institutions. It would be great if we can take
00:50:24.540 over the institutions that are already there. And if you can do that, you should. You should take
00:50:30.240 the power when you can, where you can. But ultimately, many of these will be very resistant
00:50:35.320 to the plan. They already did this. The left did the long march through the institutions. They know
00:50:40.600 how this game is played. And there's no way that most of them are going to let you play it.
00:50:45.020 So if we want to cultivate elites and we can't get every one of them into an elite institution,
00:50:49.920 we got to start building them ourselves. And that means sacrifice. It means that we might not have
00:50:55.860 the same amount of free time and the same amount of free money. We might have to invest. Guess what?
00:51:02.300 Conservatives, I love, I love so much, but so many times they're immediately and business-minded.
00:51:09.380 They want to see an immediate return on profit.
00:51:11.960 I spent this amount of money, I immediately want to see a bill passed.
00:51:15.320 I spent this amount of money, I immediately want to see a law changed.
00:51:18.680 I immediately want to see some big change.
00:51:21.320 But the left doesn't do this.
00:51:23.120 The left buys entire media organizations that just lose money all the time.
00:51:28.020 You look at so many of these and you're like,
00:51:29.500 there's got to be like 10 people that actually subscribe to some of these papers.
00:51:32.760 How do they stay afloat?
00:51:33.860 And the reason is the left will just buy culturally influential institutions
00:51:38.160 because they know cultural influence is worth way more than money.
00:51:43.280 That the ability to manipulate public opinion and control
00:51:46.860 who becomes an elite in society is just far more valuable than raw dollars.
00:51:52.600 And so we have to be willing to cultivate this talent
00:51:55.920 and build the institutions that will allow us to continue to survive
00:51:59.380 and more importantly thrive and work our way back in to the halls of power,
00:52:04.820 but that can only happen if we are willing to sacrifice and dead arcade ourselves to that task.
00:52:10.120 So we need to encourage the young men that will become leaders
00:52:13.340 and we need to have the institutions that will educate and support them.
00:52:17.180 We need to make sure that every time someone has a slip-up somewhere
00:52:21.120 or every time they have a controversial opinion
00:52:23.500 or they have an opinion that was just normal 20 years ago
00:52:26.860 but has suddenly become forbidden,
00:52:28.720 that we do not blow these people up,
00:52:30.500 that we do not abandon them,
00:52:32.080 that we do not send them away,
00:52:33.720 that we do not destroy them on social media,
00:52:35.560 that we do not throw them out and shame their careers.
00:52:37.920 We should never, ever bow to the standards of the left.
00:52:42.920 We should never cancel our own people for the left.
00:52:48.300 Yes, we should have standards.
00:52:53.500 We should have standards.
00:52:59.020 I am not saying that we should not have standards,
00:53:01.100 but they should be our standards,
00:53:03.300 which means they should be Christ's standards.
00:53:06.520 We follow him.
00:53:07.840 He is king.
00:53:08.920 Not the left, not social media, not the reporters,
00:53:12.460 not the universities, not even the businessmen, none of it.
00:53:16.160 Christ is king.
00:53:17.380 And so if we are held accountable,
00:53:19.340 and we should be held accountable,
00:53:21.700 then we should be accountable to him and not to what the left believes. So when we are holding
00:53:28.900 each other accountable, we should do it in private. We should have structures that allow us to correct
00:53:35.160 young men who might be making mistakes, might be going too far, might be saying things or doing
00:53:39.560 things they shouldn't be doing. But we can do that internally in a way that disciples them rather
00:53:45.140 than leaves them out in the cold for our enemies who hate and want to destroy us. And let me tell
00:53:50.480 you this, guys. God told you to love your enemies. He did not say you would not have enemies.
00:53:55.700 We need to remember that there are people out here who want to destroy what is being built
00:54:00.800 because they have invested a lot in breaking down the traditions and culture that you believe in.
00:54:06.900 And they're not just going to let you walk in and take it. As we've already seen, they will try to
00:54:11.900 shoot you if you do. So that's something that we need to remember. The last thing I want to leave
00:54:18.360 you with is this. We need to avoid the managerial mindset. And again, this is very tempting.
00:54:25.480 It's so easy for us to just drop into the language. Best practices. Hey, we all need to
00:54:30.600 standardize this. We all need to evaluate our performance reviews, these kind of things.
00:54:35.480 We immediately fall into this hyper-business bureaucratic language and understanding.
00:54:41.480 And it works our way into every aspect of our lives, our organizations, our churches,
00:54:46.380 even our families are often treated in this kind of transactional way. And when we are building
00:54:53.480 things, we need to understand that we are looking for something more organic, more traditional.
00:54:59.340 We need to find ways to devolve power and create more confederal structures instead of centralizing
00:55:05.900 and turning everything into a business. We need to recognize that a church is fundamentally
00:55:10.980 different than a business, that a family is fundamentally different than a business,
00:55:16.240 and we need to do things that profit our churches and our families before they profit
00:55:21.080 our pocketbooks. We have to recognize that we should organize, or we should create these
00:55:27.580 organizations in a way in which they resist the pull of the social forces that we have now. And
00:55:33.140 that's easier said than done, because again, we are so used to aligning ourselves in that way.
00:55:39.400 But simply there is nothing we can do unless we first recognize how much the manipulation of
00:55:46.360 information, the way that we are drawn together into the bureaucratic organizations, defines many
00:55:51.580 of the ways that we understand what's going on. The only thing that is ever going to allow us
00:55:56.500 to return to a state where we can reinstitute the American tradition is to first understand that we
00:56:02.420 have to revive these spheres. We need the elites, but we also need the families, we need the
00:56:07.900 churches. We need the structures that are going to continue to allow us to perpetuate our tradition
00:56:13.320 and our beliefs. Thank you so much, guys.